The FundamentaList: This week in the religious right

[Joanne98]

This week in the religious right: Conservatives hold up funding to fight global AIDS, anti-Muslim mailings are sent to Jews, and the IRS investigates a prominent Huckabee supporter.

1. Breaking Down the Romney-Huckabee Evangelical Split
Mike Huckabee has made a lot of hay from his class-warfare evangelism, pitting his ordinary Joe image against the "Wall Street Republican" establishment. And for some Huckabee supporters, no one represents the moneyed class of the Republican establishment better than his fallen rival, Mitt Romney.

Randy Brinson, founder of the nonprofit Redeem the Vote and the for-profit Optimum Impact, which maintains a mailing list of tens of millions of evangelicals, told me last week that Romney "fomented" the issue of gay marriage in Massachusetts in order to lay the groundwork for a presidential campaign. (Brinson said Huckabee hired Optimum Impact to help with his campaign.)

Many of the religious-right leaders who either explicitly or implicitly got in line behind Romney, Brinson charged, were snookered into believing that Romney was serving anything but his own presidential aspirations and his business allies' pocketbooks. Brinson said many evangelicals who support Huckabee "are in full revolt, they're ready to go to war with supporters of Romney because they know he is such a fake and he duped conservatives. The reason they're so angry is that he undermined Huckabee's political fortunes." The religious-right leadership that was "co-opted" by Romney, he said, no longer has any credibility with the grassroots.

"If I were McCain," said Brinson, "I'd pick Huckabee as a running mate and go straight to the grassroots." McCain would win "more kudos" that way, said Brinson, than if he tried to cozy up with the religious-right figures who have shunned both him and Huckabee for most of the campaign. Brinson said he told McCain's advisers "not to kiss their rears. It's stupid. It's ridiculous. You gain nothing."

2. Religious-Right Fixation with Abstinence
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fundamentalist_022008