Gays ‘Make God Want to Vomit’: Meet Santorum’s Honorary Florida Chairman
A great article by Adam Weinstein who normally covers the nat’l securty beat for Mother Jones magazine. Please punch out to read the whole thing.
While the network news shows spend this Sunday marveling over Newtmentum in South Carolina, Rick Santorum will quietly make his first stop in Florida, site of the next primary on January 31. He’ll be dropping in to see the honorary chairman of his state campaign—a Bush-connected Islamophobic pastor who says gays “make God want to vomit.”
Santorum, the other conservative darling in the Republican presidential race, plans to speak from the pulpit at the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach on Sunday morning. It might seem a strange stop for a white Catholic Republican from the Northeast: While the ocean-facing side of Pompano is affluent and conservative, WWC literally sits on the wrong side of the tracks in the Collier City neighborhood—a poor, tight-knit African American district that swung strongly for Barack Obama in 2008. But WWC is different: It’s run by the Rev. O’Neal Dozier, a firebrand social conservative who’s tried to turn this depressed community red, and has been rewarded handsomely by Republican politicians for his efforts.
Dozier opened his church in 1985 and immediately began preaching a different kind of gospel. “We teach and preach on the cultural issues,” he says in a recent video. “We also teach and preach on the war on terror. We teach and preach on the dangers of Islam and Islamic fascism here.” He says he was heavily influenced by the work of the Rev. D. James Kennedy, a founding father of the Christian right who started the annual Reclaiming America for Christ political conference at his church complex just down the street in Fort Lauderdale.
