September 20, 2008

“The key to understanding Sarah Palin is understanding her radical theology.”

I strongly encourage you to click the link and read the article in full. And then make sure everyone you know understands what kind of dangerous, loose-screw Armageddonite Sarah Palin really is.

Anyone who does understand, and still wants her one heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world, is as insane as she is.

Or perhaps so blinded by racism, they’d vote for a David Duke-Fred Phelps ticket to avoid voting for an African-American.

Anyway, read. And be very afraid.

The pastor who clashed with Palin

The Wasilla Assembly of God, the evangelical church where Sarah Palin came of age, was still charged with excitement on Sunday over Palin’s sudden ascendance. …

It confirmed, they said, that God was making use of Wasilla. “She will take our message to the world!” …

That is what scares the Rev. Howard Bess. A retired American Baptist minister who pastors a small congregation in nearby Palmer, Wasilla’s twin town in Alaska’s Matanuska Valley, Bess has been tangling with Palin and her fellow evangelical activists ever since she was a Wasilla City Council member in the 1990s. Recently, Bess again found himself in the spotlight with Palin, when it was reported that his 1995 book, “Pastor, I Am Gay,” was among those Palin tried to have removed from the Wasilla Public Library when she was mayor. …

“She scares me,” said Bess. “She’s Jerry Falwell with a pretty face. At this point, people in this country don’t grasp what this person is all about. The key to understanding Sarah Palin is understanding her radical theology.” …

“Things got very intense around here in the ’90s — the culture war was very hot here,” Bess said. “The evangelicals were trying to take over the valley. They took over the school board, the community hospital board, even the local electric utility. And Sarah Palin was in the direct center of all these culture battles, along with the churches she belonged to.” …

Conservative ministers [in the Mat-Su Valley] targeted [Bess’ book], and the only bookstore in the valley that dared to stock it — Shalom Christian Books and Gifts — soon dropped it after the owner was barraged with angry phone calls. The Frontiersman, the local newspaper that ran a column by Bess for seven years, fired him and ran a vicious cartoon that suggested even drooling child molesters would be welcomed by Bess’ church. …

In 1996, evangelical churches mounted a vigorous campaign to take over the local hospital’s community board and ban abortion from the valley. … [P]assions ran so hot that local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside Dr. Lemagie’s office … [A]mong the protesters trying to disrupt the physician’s practice that day was Sarah Palin.

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. …

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.’”

Bess is unnerved by the prospect of Palin — a woman whose mind is given to dogmatic certitude — standing one step away from the Oval Office. “It’s truly frightening that someone like Sarah has risen to the national level,” Bess said. “Like all religious fundamentalists — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil. Their mind-set is that you do not do business with evil — you destroy it. …

“Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That’s trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It’s her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she’s ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. …