Update, August 18, 2013: Arthur G. Robinson, who was running for U.S. Congress when I originally published this story on September 18, 2012, has just been appointed chairman of the Oregon State Republican Party. Here are my other articles on Art Robinson:
Dump Nuclear Waste at Sea, Proposed Oregon GOP Congressional Candidate
Oregon GOP Congressional Candidate Sells Racist Book Suggesting Africans Are Like Retarded Children
GOP Congressional Candidate Friends With "Execution By Stoning" Advocate
Republican Proposed "Sprinkling" Radioactive Waste on America

"the negroes on a well-ordered estate, under kind masters, were probably a happier class of people than the laborers upon any estate in Europe." -- from George Alfred Henty's book With Lee in Virginia, currently printed, sold, and promoted by Republican Arthur B. Robinson's Robinson Books.

Art Robinson is campaigning to represent Oregon's 4th Congressional District in Congress

Improbably, the smackingly racist writing of 19th Century British author George Alfred Henty -- whose boys adventure novels had kind words for slavery, described Africans as having the intelligence of ten-year old children, and featured a comedic description of a slave being tortured with red hot irons (see quotes, below) -- may become an issue this year in an Oregon congressional race.

[Note: this is a long report. But you can get the essential gist by simply reading the four quotes, below, plus the first two introductory paragraphs. That's 410 words more than you've just read.]

Digby discusses how threats drove an abortion provider out of Wichita, but a federal judge ruled that these were not "true threats" under the law. Digby observes that rights gained can be easily lost.  In this case, access to abortion care in the face of massive, sustained antiabortion campaigning by the Religious Right.

The Grio  Kimberley McLeod discusses how Rev. Bernice King, (youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., fan of Samuel Rodriguez, and a former elder in the mega church of the serially scandalous  and notoriously dominionist Eddie Long) says that because some of her friends are gay, her opposition to LGTBQ civil rights cannot be based on homophobia.

The Guardian  Charlotte Higgins reports:  

Christians in Britain and the US who claim that they are persecuted should "grow up" and not exaggerate what amounts to feeling "mildly uncomfortable", according to Rowan Williams, who last year stepped down as archbishop of Canterbury after an often turbulent decade.

"When you've had any contact with real persecuted minorities you learn to use the word very chastely," he said. "Persecution is not being made to feel mildly uncomfortable. 'For goodness sake, grow up,' I want to say."

True persecution was "systematic brutality and often murderous hostility that means that every morning you wonder if you and your children are going to live through the day". He cited the experience of a woman he met in India "who had seen her husband butchered by a mob".

Christian Nationalism, the idea that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, and that this heritage has somehow been stolen and must be restored, is central to the ideology of the Christian Right.  Even though the claim is based on bogus history and wishful thinking, it remains a powerful narrative.  The recent controversies surrounding Christian nationalist author David Barton's book The Jefferson Lies not withstanding, a recent survey by the First Amendment Center (a program of the Freedom Forum) suggests just how powerful the Christian Nation narrative may be.

Coming soon from Oxygen, the network that brings you "Bad Girls Club," "My Shopping Addiction," "Jersey Couture," and "Dance Your A** Off," is "Preachers of L.A.," and it might be the hottest new reality show to air this fall. Judging from the trailer, the show could just as well have been called "Preachers Driving Big Cars & Living in Big Houses," or "Pimped-out Preachers of La La Land."

"Preachers of L.A." is generating a huge amount of buzz. Since the program was announced, the Oxygen trailer has been viewed more than 475,000 times, its Facebook page has over 27,000 likes, and it has more than 950 Twitter followers, and garnered more than 13 million hits on Google.

It is also causing some in the evangelical community to express grave concerns about the show.

Is Cory Booker's church fair game for discussion in an election?  When the senior pastor endorses Booker in a video released by his senate campaign, I would say yes.  David Jefferson, Jr., senior pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Newark, endorsed Cory Booker's candidacy in a video released by his senate campaign in early August as part of the "Voices for Cory" series.  The evangelistic outreach pastor at Metropolitan Baptist is Apostle Bernard Wilks, who has led and organized municipal events, and is head of Transformation Newark. Wilks has called for the return of the city  to Puritan Newark's guidelines allowing only "Christian believers" to vote or hold leadership roles in the city. The significance of this is not just it's shock value, but in understanding the symbiosis of the school privatization and extreme "free marketers" funding Booker, and the Religious Right leaders who redirect the frustration and anger of those most impacted by our current economic structure. For more on the role of Wilks' Transformation Newark see a previous article. Video after break.

When Rick Perry's presidential campaign imploded, the public quickly lost interest in the unfamiliar and exotic modern-day apostles behind his Houston pre-campaign kickoff prayer rally.  But the apostles relentless efforts continue, including in the city they now claim as a model for their efforts - Cory Booker's Newark - and into the Democratic Party. The warning signs have been all but ignored by Democrats who view the election of Obama as evidence that the Right has no way to appeal to African American and Latino communities.

In the early days of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed advocated stealth Christian Right candidates run in GOP primaries against moderates for offices at all levels, and to also conceal their true agenda in general elections against Democrats.

The creeping religious rightism in the Democratic Party has taken many forms over the years, and the list is long. But we need look no farther than the pandering to and promotion of false moderates like Rick Warren and Samuel Rodriguez, and the adoption by some of the ideas and even the phrasings of the Religious Right on such things as "secularism" and "abortion reduction") to get a sense that there is an underlying trend to which these are more the rule than the exceptions.  In the past few years, we have also seen stealth Religious Right candidates in the Democratic Party, for example in Hawaii and Jacksonville, Florida. Most recently, stealth Christian Rightist Max Myers is currently running as a progressive for the Democratic nomination for governor of Pennsylvania.

Now veteran journalist Susie Madrack, writing at Crooks & Liars has an important discussion of the rightwing involvements -- including the Religious Right -- of Newark mayor and leading contender for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate from New Jersey, Cory Booker.  Excerpts below.

Exactly one year ago today, on August 9, 2012, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson took the virtually unprecedented action of pulling one of its books from publication due to the book's many inaccuracies. That book, of course, was David Barton's The Jefferson Lies.

There were several factors that presumably contributed to Thomas Nelson's decision to take the drastic action of pulling Barton's book from the shelves. One of these factors was that the criticism of The Jefferson Lies was coming from a different source than the usual Barton critics. Shortly after the book was released, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, both professors at a Christian college, published a rebuttal of Barton's book titled Getting Jefferson Right. Throckmorton and Coulter's book contained little new material, with most of the lies it debunked having previously been debunked by both myself and others, but there was one big difference. Throckmorton and Coulter are evangelical Christians. So is John Fea, an associate professor of history and department chair at Messiah College, who also heavily criticized Barton's book. The criticism coming from Christian as well as secularist writers made it difficult for anyone to use the usual excuse that Barton's critics are just a bunch of anti-Christian secularists trying to obliterate the "truth" about America's Christian history.

Way back in the 1630s, the leaders of Puritan Massachusetts got the bright idea that every adult in the colony should be required to swear a loyalty oath to the governor that ended with the phrase "So help me God."

The iconoclastic Puritan preacher Roger Williams was not impressed.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, accused in the Boston Marathon bombings, collected publications from the extreme right in the United States, reports the BBC. Such writings contain conspiracy theories linking the U.S. government and Israeli agents in global plots for world domination that include suppressing Islam.

According to Alan Cullison of the Wall Street Journal, Tamerlan had a subscription to the American Free Press. An anti-Semitic stew of conspiracy allegations is a main feature of the American Free Press newspaper and other similar publications. Reporters for the American Free Press have worked in a loose coalition of other conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites organized globally in the Voltaire Network.

In light of the claims emanating from from Washington, DC that there is a Religious Left rising and may overcome the Religious Right, I am reminded that it was not so long ago that religious progressives were being told to shut-up about matters of sexual justice. I wrote the post below in 2009 and am reprising it today because it is remarkable how things change. In the previous few years a faux Religious Left had been manufactured Inside the Beltway. The product didn't sell well -- and here we are. But those of us who thought that an authentic Religious Left might be a good thing, published a book of essays about what it might be like and how to get there. The book was deliberately inclusive. No one would be left behind -- not women seeking reproductive justice. Not LGTBQ people seeking marriage equality. Not those of us, both religious and non-religious, who support the values of religious pluralism and separation of church and state. Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America provided a platform to discuss these things. This led to some interesting debate. It could be that Dispatches was a little too far ahead of the curve, and that the time for this book is now.-- FC

Over the past few years, my Talk to Action colleagues and I have written a great deal about the way that various Washington insiders, among others, have adopted many of the ideas, framing and even the phrasings of the Religious Right. We also confronted such consultantocratic notions that we should not talk about such historic progressive and Democratic Party interests as reproductive rights, LGTB civil rights and separation of church and state so that they could make alliances with alleged moderate evangelicals and Catholics -- some of whom turned out to be not very moderate at all.  The culture war was over, or about to be, or oughtta be, so it was claimed.

But many of us knew better.

Catholic Right activist Thomas E. Woods, Jr., was upset when I described him as a neo-Confederate. But his ongoing involvement with neo-Confederate organizations as well as the ideas expressed in his writing earned him that descriptor. It is one which will undoubtedly be fairly applied until such time as he publicly disassociates himself from neo-Confederate groups and publicly changes his mind about the value of neo-Confederate ideas.

This post is the second of three brief replies to Woods's critique of my series. In this piece I will focus on how he avoids responsibility for his own views.