Whether you like it or not.
After hearing a piece on AirAmericaRadio about Sam Brownback and his affiliation with various religious pacs I remembered an article about him from last month's Rolling Stone Magazine. I hadn't read it at the time, so I went back and found it online. It turned out to be both enlightening and frightening.
I know these days wearing one's faith on the sleeve is quite in vogue for pols, but here's a man who's name appears consistently at the center of anti secular legislature from fighting against gay rights to school vouchers...and pushing for Buxh's tax cuts(?).
Through a "cell" of like minded religious power brokers called a "Values Action Team" he fights the battle
against hate crime legislation as it applies to gays and was the man behind the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act that increased fines after Janet Jackson's breast fell out on national TV a couple years ago.
Since his appointment by Bill Frist to the Senate Judiciary Committee we've seen his work in the fall of Harriet Miers (because she seemed ambiguous on abortion) and the rise of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.
A converted Catholic and member of the controversial and secretive Opus Dei and New Federalists, he believes the GOP is "soft and muddled" and wants to overhaul your government with a Christian ideal of "Jesus plus nothing", a government void of all but the will of Jesus.....as he interprets it to us.
Sam Brownback is a relatively quiet but powerful crusader of the Christian right with aspiration to be your next president. It's admittedly unlikely that will happen, but he's the man who will vet the next Republican candidate with the Christian base. He has the divine power to unleash millions of single issue voters upon the candidate of his choice, ensuring that the party (and your country) remains within his narrowly defined constraints on everything from abortion and gay rights to school prayer. Moderation is not an option.
The story of Sam Brownback is an intriguingly scary look at intolerance, radical religious ideals, and absolute power:
God's Senator
Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback Nobody in this little church just off Times Square in Manhattan thinks of themselves as political. They're spiritual -- actors and athletes and pretty young things who believe that every word of the Bible is inerrant dictation from God. They look down from the balcony of the Morning Star, swaying and smiling at the screen that tells them how to sing along. Nail-pierced hands, a wounded side. This is love, this is love! But on this evening in January, politics and all its worldly machinations have entered their church. Sitting in the darkness of the front row is Sam Brownback, the Republican senator from Kansas. And hunched over on the stage in a red leather chair is an old man named Harald Bredesen, who has come to anoint Brownback as the Christian right's next candidate for president.
Over the last six decades, Bredesen has prayed with so many presidents and prime ministers and kings that he can barely remember their names. He's the spiritual father of Pat Robertson, the man behind the preacher's vast media empire. He was one of three pastors who laid hands on Ronald Reagan in 1970 and heard the Pasadena Prophecy: the moment when God told Reagan that he would one day occupy the White House. And he recently dispatched one of his proteges to remind George W. Bush of the divine will -- and evangelical power -- behind his presidency.
Tonight, Bredesen has come to breathe that power into Brownback's presidential campaign. After little more than a decade in Washington, Brownback has managed to position himself at the very center of the Christian conservative uprising that is transforming American politics. Just six years ago, winning the evangelical vote required only a veneer of bland normalcy, nothing more than George Bush's vague assurance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Now, Brownback seeks something far more radical: not faith-based politics but faith in place of politics. In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.
Bredesen squints through the stage lights at Brownback, sitting straight-backed and attentive. At forty-nine, the senator looks taller than he is. His face is wide and flat, his skin thick like leather, etched by windburn and sun from years of working on his father's farm just outside Parker, Kansas, population 281. You can hear it in his voice: slow, distant but warm; a baritone, spoken out of the left side of his mouth in half-sentences with few hard consonants. It sounds like the voice of someone who has learned how to wait for rain.
"He wants to be president," Bredesen tells the congregation. "He is marvelously qualified to be president." But, he adds, there is something Brownback wants even more: "And that is, on the last day of your earthly life, to be able to say, 'Father, the work you gave me to do, I have accomplished!'" Bredesen, shrunken with age, leans forward and glares at Brownback.
"Is that true?" he demands.
"Yes," Brownback says softly.
"Friends!" The old man's voice is suddenly a trumpet. "Sam . . . says . . . yes!"
The crowd roars. Those occupying the front rows lay hands on the contender.
<continued>
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator
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