Rick Scarborough, pastor and founder of Vision America, has said something that I find, well, disgusting. He declared that America would cease to exist if it becomes more than 30 percent Hispanic:
Nov 24 2008
Arlington Group – Joel's Army on Capitol Hill
Thanks to PJ for pointing us this way as she posted an excellent article on Mike Huckabee’s response to the Religious Right’s response to his candidacy. It puzzled me at the time, and will continue to do so. I might actually have to check his book out. Until then, look what I found:
via Arlington Group – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Arlington Group is a coalition which unites the leaders of almost all of the most prominent Christian Right organizations in the United States.[citation needed] Founded in 2002 principally through the efforts of American Family Association President Donald Wildmon and Free Congress Foundation Chairman Paul Weyrich, the group seeks to establish consensus goals and strategy among its members and translate its combined constituency into an overwhelming force within the Republican Party, particularly at its highest levels. Its membership and purpose overlaps to a high degree with the Council for National Policy; but the group is much more narrowly focused, choosing to emphasize such issues as same-sex marriage, abortion, and confirmation of like-minded federal judges.
The group’s success has been mixed. While widely acknowledged to have the ear of President George W. Bush and his chief political advisor Karl Rove, and while generally successful in its efforts to coordinate the Christian Right, it has also endured noteworthy embarrassments. In early 2005, it threatened to withhold support for the President’s proposed Social Security reforms if Bush did not vigorously support a federal constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. This provoked a firestorm of unwelcome media attention, but failed to produce the group’s desired result (despite the President’s continuing support for both their specific and broader aims). And later, in October 2005, Arlington Group Chairman and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson became the center of a minor scandal after leaking assurances made by Rove to an Arlington Group conference call regarding the pro-life credentials of Supreme Court nominee and White House counsel Harriet Miers. Miers withdrew her nomination later that month, largely due to reservations among conservatives.
Despite these setbacks, the Arlington Group remains one of Washington’s most powerful conservative groups, and the first effective combination of the major religious right organizations.
The idea that their is a conservative group in D.C. that has goals of power is nothing new, but what is new is that they are not operating under a cloud of secrecy. They have stated political aims, passing that of the Gospel.
One of the groups that caught my eye was,
Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration
The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration is a conservative, religious organization formed in early 2005 that runs the website StopActivistJudges.org.
The council is descended from the Dallas Group. It is currently chaired by Rick Scarborough. The council’s executive director is Philip Jauregui, former counsel to Chief Justice Roy Moore. In April 2005, Scarborough was quoted as saying that his group was needed because of, “Activist judges…(whose) distortions of the Constitution have brought us abortion-on-demand, purged religious symbols from public places, made our schools faith-free zones, created a so-called right to homosexual sodomy and threatened ‘one nation under God‘ in the pledge of allegiance. Now, judges seem intent on imposing same-sex marriage by fiat.” [1] According to the group’s website, “Each progressive step down the road to the secularization of America has come not through a referendum of the people, or an act of their elected representatives, but rather at the stroke of a judge’s pen.”[1]
And of course, this is why:
Confronting The Judicial War On Faith
The group’s April 2005 conference, Confronting The Judicial War On Faith, attracted many prominent conservatives. According to the Washington Post, “The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo’s parents; Alabama’s “Ten Commandments” judge, Roy Moore; and [Rep. Tom] DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope’s funeral.” [2] The event brought together lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers with theocrats, adherents of Christian Reconstructionism, a Calvinist doctrine that calls for the biblical law to rule American law. [3]
In a session titled “Remedies to Judicial Tyranny,” a constitutional lawyer named Edwin Vieira discussed United States Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Lawrence vs. Texas, which struck down that state’s anti-sodomy law. Kennedy was accused of relying on “Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principals drawn from foreign law” in his jurisprudence. [3]
According to the group’s website, “April 7-8 proved to be a divine appointment. There was no way of knowing, humanly speaking, how significant that time would be in the life of our Republic”; Schiavo had died and “the federal judiciary, up to and including the United States Supreme Court, also turned a deaf ear to repeated pleas to save Terri.” The group claims that the conference was responsible for creating “a movement… to restore the Constitution to its true meaning and original glory.”
From Rick himself:
“The President must be true to his word. He must keep his faith with the folks who elected him twice. In other words, he must replace Sandra Day O’Connor with a strict constructionist. The president has a God-given opportunity to change the balance on the Supreme Court. On issue after issue—abortion, sodomy, public display of the Ten Commandments—O’Connor has sided with the court’s liberal bloc. Time and again, Justice O’Connor and her colleagues have used the Constitution as an excuse to force weird social experiments on the nation.”
—Rick Scarborough on the 2005 Supreme Court vacancy, July 1, 2005.“Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering [JCCR's 2005 conference] that Kennedy [Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy] should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, ‘upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.’
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his ‘bottom line’ for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. ‘He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: “no man, no problem,”‘ Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is ‘Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.’”
—Dana Milbank, “And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty,” Washington Post, April 9, 2005“As the battle over the Roberts nomination moves to the floor of the Senate, there’s intense speculation about President Bush’s second Supreme Court nominee. Increasingly, pro-faith conservatives are telling the White House to think Brown. Recently confirmed to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals (called the second most powerful court in the land), Janice Rogers Brown is a dream nominee for folks like you and me.”
—Rick Scarborough on the vacancy to the Supreme Court, September 22, 2005“In every event in the life of a nation — as in our personal lives — God is always speaking to us. It is imperative that we hear Him and heed His voice. These thoughts I offer with deep humility. Scriptures teach us that God will not be mocked. The scenes of devastation in New Orleans we’re witnessing on the nightly news show us a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. If that weren’t enough, the chaos that’s sweeping the ravaged city is a sad reminder that when God brings the deluge, the floodgates will open and unimaginable evil will wash over us.”
—Rick Scarborough on Hurricane Katrina, September 2, 2005
From Dr. Bruce Prescott:
Who is Rick Scarborough?
He’s a Dominionist Southern Baptist minister who first emerged as a leader of young pastors who supported the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.In May 1989, when moderate, mainstream Baptists organized a last ditch effort to stop the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, he organized a conference of young pastors to elect fundamentalists. That effort was successful.
In September 1989 he organized a fundamentalist pastor’s conference to precede the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) meeting — a tactic that assisted fundamentalists in taking control over the SBC. That effort was a failure. Texas Baptists defeated the fundamentalist’s candidate and changed their meeting schedule to make it difficult for fundamentalists to hold pre-convention rallies.
In 1990 he became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas. From that pulpit, with help from the fundamentalist leaders of the SBC that he helped elect, he continued to work to takeover the Texas Baptist state Convention. His 1996 book Enough is Enough begins with two full page letters of endorsement. One by Paige Patterson, then the President of Southeastern Baptist Seminary in North Carolina, the other by Jimmy Draper, then President of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board in Tennessee. The book was mailed to the pastors of all the churches in the Baptist General Convention of Texas. That same year he ran against moderate incumbent Charles Wade for the presidency of the BGCT and lost by a 2-1 margin.
While in Pearland he moved from denominational politics to secular politics. He helped elect members of his congregation to the city council and school board, and encouraged church members to fill top local government jobs — including city manager and chief of police. He also worked out a sweetheart deal with the city on the purchase of land for his church to relocate.
In 1994, after a member of his congregation, Republican Steve Stockman, defeated long tenured Democratic Representative Jack Brooks for his seat in Congress, Scarborough credited political action by his church with helping Stockman win the election. Unfortunately for his church, he bragged about it publicly in an article that he wrote for Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Journal. The IRS investigated his church and they nearly lost their tax exemption. At one time pressures were so great at his church that he resigned, but Jerry Falwell wrote a letter to the church asking them to rescind his resignation and the church did.
In 2002 Scarborough resigned the pastorate and began working full time for Vision America – a political organizing ministry he founded with the help of Jerry Falwell. I’ve heard reports from credible sources that he preaches revivals with altar calls to register to vote.
The more we delve into the relationships between the big time ministries, their political ties, and their religious associations, the more we see that they are interconnected.
Finally, from here:
Scarborough, also a pastor and a pro-family activist, said he supported Broden’s stance. He has appeared on Larry King Live, Fox News, CBS Evening News and other radio and television programs. He is also the founder of Vision America.
“The only way Obama would be come president is if Christians do not show up and vote as followers of Christ,” Scarborough said.
Both Broden and Scarborough were critical of Obama’s political stance, especially on abortion. They both spoke about restoring America to its Judeo-Christian values and said to do so, Christians must vote.
“Christians must rise up and take action to get people to vote,” Scarborough said.
