re: #249 LGoPs

I respectfully disagree and ask that over the next four years you reconsider the idea of not voting in the event of a Jindal nomination. I find creationism’s views wrong as well, but there are many other issues, of equal or greater peril that face us. And at some point you have to make a decision as to what the higher priority is. When you’re in a fight with a grizzly bear, you need to focus on the one that’s in your face. The fact that there are other grizzlies over the next hill are of concern of course, but if you don’t kill the one that’s on top of you, dealing with the others becomes an academic exercise at best…you won’t be around to fight them because your face has been ripped off.
By the way - I’m not in any way endorsing Jindal………just offering my humble opinion on how best not to dilute our numbers in an already hostile environment.

Bobby Jindal has so much dirt in his past, he has absolutely no chance of being elected. If the GOP puts him up as the nominee, he will LOSE. Everything the media tried to pin on Sarah Palin, Jindal actually did: he promoted and signed a creationism bill, he took part in an amateur exorcism and claimed it cured a woman of cancer, and possibly worst of all, he hangs out with people on the outer edges of fundamentalist Christianity, and at least one person who has associated with outright neo-Nazis: Bobby Jindal’s Creationism and Alliance with David Barton.

Who is David Barton?

In 1991 Barton addressed the Rocky Mountain Bible Retreat of Pastor Pete Peters’ Scriptures for America, a group that espouses the racist “Christian Identity” theology. Advocates of this bizarre dogma insist that white Anglo-Saxons are the “true” chosen people of the Bible and charge that today’s Jews are usurpers. Aside from being a virulent anti-Semite, Peters has advocated the death penalty for homosexuals. According to the Anti-Defamation League, other speakers at the event included white supremacist leader and 1992 presidential candidate James “Bo” Gritz, a leader of the radical and increasingly violent militia movement, and Malcolm Ross, a Holocaust denier from Canada. In November of that same year, Barton spoke at Kingdom Covenant College in Grants Pass, Oregon, another “Christian Identity” front group with ties to Peters.4

Asked to explain these actions, Barton’s reply amounted to a not very creative “I didn’t know they were Nazis” dodge. In a July 1993 letter, Barton assistant Kit Marshall wrote, “At the time we were contacted by Pete Peters, we had absolutely no idea that he was ‘part of the Nazi movement.’ He contacted us for David to speak for Scriptures for America. The title is quite innocuous. In all the conversations that I personally had with Pete Peters, never once was there a hint that they were part of a Nazi movement. I would also like to point out that simply because David Barton gives a presentation to a group of people does not mean that he endorses all their beliefs.”5 An excuse like that might have washed one time, but it stretches the bounds of credulity to accept that Barton was twice duped by innocuous-sounding extremist organizations.