In this Issue:

Commentary: Who Will Decide? by Rev. Michael Piazza
H4PJ to Host Candidates Day: Candidates to attend worship at Cathedral of Hope
H4PJ to host screening of “Iraq for Sale” at Cathedral of Hope
Broadcast condemns same-sex marriage: Romney urges evangelical fight
Losing Faith in the President: Critical Book about Religion-Based Effort Is Out

Commentary: Who Will Decide?
by Rev. Michael S. Piazza

It could be argued persuasively that the issue of gay marriage decided the 2004 presidential election. In truth, there are many issues, circumstances and decisions that allowed George Bush’s razor-thin victory over John Kerry. Like the 2000 election in Florida, there was a deliberate and successful effort to suppress the votes of African-Americans. Still, that would not have been sufficient had Karl Rove and company not gotten the issue of same-gender marriage placed on the ballot in Ohio.

Using “gay marriage” as a wedge issue worked to ensure the highest possible turnout of the Republican’s conservative base. That gave Mr. Bush Ohio’s 20 electoral votes, which ultimately gave America:

• Four more years of the same course in Iraq, where recent estimates reveal that more than 600,000 people have died thus far.
• Two new, young, radically conservative Supreme Court Justices.
• A new Congressionally-approved policy that allows the President to designate whomever he wishes as an enemy combatant and have them tortured.
• Four more years to destroy the environment, while we enrich Exxon, Halliburton and Lockheed Martin.

Now it is happening again. The control of the Senate may well be determined in two weeks by the outcome of the election in Tennessee. It is also on the ballot in Virginia. In Tennessee this week, James Dobson and a group of Christian Fundamentalists led a rally to “save the family” from gay marriage. Of course, there is no danger that gay couples will be accorded equal rights in Tennessee or Virginia any time soon; the real issue is turning out voters from the Religious Right to ensure a Republican victory next month. At stake is two more years of appointing conservative judges, continuing our failed policies in Iraq, and avoiding investigation of possible crimes at the highest level.

Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is already using gay marriage as an issue with which to pander to fundamentalist and conservative voters as he gears up to run for President in two years. While the tide of public opinion is turning on this issue, that will take time. We cannot afford to allow an issue of justice and equal rights to be used to manipulate the outcome of elections any longer. We who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender citizens and/or progressive people of faith must launch our own campaign of truth telling. We must:

• Talk to people about how they are being manipulated. Christian evangelical David Kuo’s new book Tempting Faith offers an insider view of just how cynically Karl Rove and the administration have used and manipulated religious conservatives without delivering anything of substance in return.
• Reframe the marriage argument. Remind people that they cannot stop lesbian and gay people from getting married. Churches like the Cathedral of Hope do it all the time. All they can do is discriminate against them.
• Get involved. Even if marriage is not your issue, understand the impact it is having on the political process and be a part of ending the one-sided debate.

Not since ending racial segregation has a civil rights issue been manipulated so skillfully. In this case, fundamentalists even have managed to persuade many African-American clergypersons to oppose equality. Unless we engage the debate now, we will find ourselves on the losing end of yet another national election.

Why don’t you begin to turn the tide by forwarding this email to ten of your friends?

Related Links

Election Information
Tempting Faith on Evangelical Right
YouTube – Olbermann on Tempting Faith

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Hope for Peace & Justice to Host Candidates Day
Politicians to attend morning worship at Cathedral of Hope

Dallas, Texas – October 18, 2006 – Hope for Peace & Justice will host a Candidates Day during the 9 and 11 a.m. morning worship services at Cathedral of Hope on Sunday, October 22, 2006. As of October 16, 21 candidates—including those running for Dallas County Judge, Texas Lieutenant Governor, and United States House of Representatives—have confirmed their attendance. The Cathedral of Hope is located at 5910 Cedar Springs; Dallas, TX 75235. The services are free and open to all.

An invitation was issued to both major parties and to all candidates in various races. Chris Bell’s campaign responded favorably to the invitation and is looking at the calendar. Governor Rick Perry refused the invitation.

“One of the reasons that Cathedral of Hope founded Hope for Peace & Justice was to ensure that the voices of progressive people of faith are heard by politicians and our nation’s leaders,” said Rev. Michael S. Piazza, President of Hope for Peace & Justice. “It is appropriate for these candidates to worship with us and experience the values of our families firsthand.”

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H4PJ to host screening of “Iraq for Sale”
Sunday, October 22 | 6pm | Cathedral of Hope

Robert Greenwald’s latest film, "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers," has just been released, triggering a mix of praise, outrage and grave concern among Americans across all political and cultural boundaries.

On Sunday, Oct. 22, at 6 p.m. Hope for Peace & Justice, the Order of St. Martin’s and the Cathedral of Hope Singles Ministry will host a showing of this film. Refreshments will be offered, and there will be a time of discussion after the film.

“Iraq for Sale” is a tale of unspeakable greed and fraud, misery and betrayal, and brazen waste of public tax dollars for private enrichment. The film reveals in compelling detail the depth of control corporate war profiteers exert over our elected representatives and the danger these alliances have created for soldiers and innocent civilians.

This is a story you won’t hear or read about in America’s mainstream, corporate-sponsored media. It is a story all concerned and compassionate Americans should care about. This is a great opportunity to dialogue and strategize ways that our church can be involved in ending the war and calling forth peace.

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to participate.

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Broadcast condemns same-sex marriage
Romney urges evangelical fight
By Maria Cramer
Originally Published by the Boston Globe

Governor Mitt Romney joined social conservatives and religious leaders at a downtown Boston church this week for a nationwide broadcast that condemned same-sex marriage and called on evangelicals to fight what they see as a threat to Christian beliefs and values.

In a cavernous, gilded room festooned with American flags, speakers described how a ``homosexual agenda" was interfering with the constitutional rights of same-sex marriage opponents to express their dissent and religious freedom.

Romney, a Republican who may run for president in 2008, told several hundred people at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church, ``Every child deserves a mother and a father."

``Today, there are some people who would like to establish a single religion, the religion of secularism," he said to thunderous applause at the event, dubbed ``Liberty Sunday," and which organizers said might have reached close to 80 million people.

On Tremont Street, across from the church, dozens of supporters of same-sex marriage held a candlelight vigil to protest the broadcast.

Many carried signs, some of which read ``No Discrimination in the Constitution" and ``Religious Liberty is not a License for Bigotry."

Amy Lippincott, 22, a third-year student, attended the protest with the Northeastern University Bisexual Lesbian and Gay Association. She called the message that gay rights infringe on religious rights the ``most virulently homophobic thing I've come across in some time."

In a statement, the same-sex marriage defender group MassEquality criticized Romney and the event. ``It's ironic that, adjacent to Boston's Freedom Trail, Mitt Romney is teaming up with the most right-wing voices in the country to demonize and belittle loving couples and families who live in the state he purports to govern," the group said.

Stanley Griffith, president of Greater Boston Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, called Romney's message ``a shabby effort to court the religious right," and emphasized his belief that marriage is a civil union that should be separated from religion. As events inside the temple ended, the protesters marched in a circle outside the door, chanting ``Shameful," and pointing at those streaming out onto the sidewalk.

During the simulcast, images of Boston flickered on a large screen over the stage of the sanctuary. The transmission went out over the Internet and several Christian television and radio networks, allowing Romney to beam his socially conservative views to the kind of voters he might hope to reach across the country.

He had to repeat his speech when a technical glitch caused the link to the simulcast to go down briefly.

Hundreds of churches were tuned into the broadcast, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, which organized the event.

In addition to such high-profile religious speakers as Bishop Wellington Boone of Atlanta, and Bishop Gilbert Thompson, pastor of Jubilee Christian Church in Boston, council leaders brought stories of gay-marriage opponents around the country who said they had been persecuted for expressing their opinions.

David Parker, the Lexington father who divided the school district when he demanded that his son be taken out of classes where homosexuality would be discussed, received a standing ovation after he told the crowd that school officials interfered with his parental rights.

At a press conference hours before the simulcast, Perkins said the stories of Parker and dozens of other similar tales would be featured in a 60-minute DVD called ``Critical Mass," in which Romney calls for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Perkins said.

The DVD and the broadcast, Perkins said at the press conference, are part of increasing efforts to fight the politicians and activists he said are hostile toward socially conservative Christians.

During the simulcast, Perkins encouraged viewers across the nation to purchase the DVD, which also shows Romney describing Massachusetts as the birthplace of ``traditional marriage." Thompson, the pastor at Jubilee, called on the audience to protect marriage between a man and a woman.

``For the sake of future generations, get on board," Thompson said. ``Take a stand against this radical social experiment that seeks to redefine marriage."

But the focus of the fight against gay marriage, he said, should be on Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage was legalized in 2004.

``I want to encourage you to pray for Massachusetts," Perkins told the crowd. ``Pray for this state."

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Losing Faith in the President
Critical Book by Ex-Staffer in Religion-Based Effort Is Out
By Alan Cooperman
Originally Published by the Washington Post

White House officials realized they had a problem, former staffer David Kuo writes in his new book, "Tempting Faith," when they saw how a panel rated the first applications for grants under the "faith-based initiative," President Bush's vaunted effort to help religious charities.

On a scale of 1 to 100, respected national organizations such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America scored in the mid-70s to mid-80s, "while something called Jesus and Friends Ministry from California, a group with little more than a post office box," scored 89 and Pat Robertson's overseas aid organization, Operation Blessing, scored 95, according to Kuo.

"It was obvious that the ratings were a farce," he writes, adding that he and other White House aides feared that if the list became public, "it would show once and for all that the initiative was purely about paying off political friends for their support."

Portions of Kuo's explosive book, which formally went on sale yesterday, were leaked last week by MSNBC. They brought heated denials from White House press secretary Tony Snow and other current and former Bush administration officials.

The book is full of insider anecdotes and details, many of which were not reported by MSNBC, and some of which can be read as defending rather than attacking the Bush White House.

In the case of the grant applications, for example, Kuo says that the ratings obviously favored conservative Christian groups but that the White House "really did have nothing to do with" it. The problem, he asserts, is that the "peer review" panel chosen by the Department of Health and Human Services came from the "faith-based policy world."

"There are, at most, 100 people in think tanks, foundations, major nonprofits and the like who really work on these issues and who support the president. Virtually all of them are very compassionate and dedicated evangelical Christians who tend to be politically conservative," Kuo writes. "They were supposed to review the application in a religiously neutral fashion. . . . But their biases were transparent."

Kuo tells a story about meeting a member of the review panel at a party. He says she giggled as she recalled, "when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero." Kuo says he laughed but, at the same time, was aghast.

"Some in the press would later 'expose' that we in the White House had doled out grants to friends. They were technically wrong," he writes. "We didn't do it. We didn't have to. The White House influence was so great that its will was carried out by other appointees in other departments without thinking."

In addition to being a memoir of his three years in the White House, where Kuo was deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until December 2003, the book is a saga of falling in, and out of, love with conservative Christian politics.

Kuo, 38, recounts that in college, he was a liberal who interned for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). But he got a girlfriend pregnant, and they went together to an abortion clinic. "We regretted it. We were relieved. I knew what we'd done. I had no idea what we'd done," he writes.

Haunted, Kuo became an antiabortion activist. When he moved to Washington to work for the National Right to Life Committee and, later, for the CIA, he began attending First Baptist Church in Alexandria. It was there, he said in an interview yesterday, "that I learned that being a good Christian means being a conservative Republican."

Before the age of 27, Kuo took William J. Bennett as a mentor, wrote speeches for Ralph Reed and Robertson, and was domestic policy adviser to then-Sen. John D. Ashcroft (R-Mo.). In 1998, he joined George W. Bush's campaign for president.

Kuo said he was "dazzled" by Bush's talk of compassion. But in his telling, the administration's actions never matched its rhetoric. During the scramble to win tax cuts, for example, the promise of $8 billion per year for charities was scrapped.

To try to climb up the White House's list of priorities, Kuo said, he and others working in the faith-based office offered to politicize their efforts. The White House political affairs office gave them a map of battleground states in 2002, and they used it to plan conferences to win support for GOP candidates. "Smart politics, bad morals," he said in retrospect.

In 2003, Kuo was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. It is still growing slowly, he said, giving him perhaps five or 10 years to live.

"I feel a pressing spiritual need to say what I think is important," he said. "And I really think that what is important is to be able to warn Christians about politics, that they should not throw so much at politics, because they're being used, and it will not answer the problems, and it corrupts the name of the God we're trying to serve."

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