Coathangers at Dawn, a blog devoted to reporting on the upcoming referendum on the South Dakota abortion ban, summarizes a report by The Guardian newspaper, on antiabortion leader Leslee Unruh.

The Guardian also reports that Vote Yes IS being used as a staging grounds for the anti-abortion picketing going on around town. Is there any doubt left that the angry protestors, the graphic signs and billboard vehicles are part of their strategy?

"Unruh is based at an industrial shed near the airport in Sioux Falls. This is where the protesters gather before they set out for the Planned Parenthood clinic, with their stark posters reading: "I regret my abortion.""

This statement Unruh made to the Guardian should make the entire state take notice. Not only does she admit that Vote Yes is currently losing the campaign but admits that she will continue to jam her agenda down the state's throat next year too. It's time to stop these extremists in their tracks.

"Unruh knows the stakes are high, and she acknowledges that her opponents may have the edge. But that does not deter her. If the ban is defeated, she says, she will march right back to the state legislature in January and start over again. "It will never be over," she insists."

NJDC  

Seth D summarizes a Detroit newpaper columnist's analysis of the spending habits of Christian Right strategic philanthropist Dick DeVos, who is also running for governor this year.

Dickerson wisely suggests that if you want to know what DeVos really cares about, just follow the money: besides his candidacy, where has he committed his substantial fortune?  
   

What is unique (or at least unusual) about DeVos is his combination of business acumen and religious zeal[...]For more than a decade, DeVos and his wife and the tax-exempt foundation they control have funneled millions of dollars to conservative Christian groups that seek to promote school prayer, public assistance for religious education, the criminalization of abortion and the prohibition of embryonic stem cell research, among other causes.

People for the American Way -- Right Wing Watch

Ezra reports that

While an upcoming U.S. museum tour featuring "Lucy," the 3 million-year-old remains of a human ancestor, is generating controversy over whether to move the fragile artifacts, creationists see a controversy of a different sort: so-called "anti-creationist hype." From the American Family Association's AgapePress:  Creationists ... are predicting that Lucy's tour will be much more about promoting the theory of evolution than about expanding real scientific knowledge.

Don Byrd discusses how All Saints Episcopal Church, the liberal Pasadena, California church that is currently in a legal skirmish with the IRS over politicking from the pulpit opposes the religious right's bill in Congress that would remove restrictions on church politicking and allow churches to make donations to candidates.

Free speech lines must be clearly drawn and respected, but even All Saints seems to recognize that the ban on tax-exempt political endorsement is a good thing, and a necessary protection for the separation of church and state.

Chuck Currie reports

the Republican Party aligned-Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD).... spends a lot of time attacking mainline church leaders and "liberals" but now they have also turned their guns on conservative evangelical leaders who have broken from the White House over the state of the environment.  IRD and their allies are so close to George W. Bush they routinely confuse his policies for the Gospel.

JoeConn debunks the Christian nationalists.

The Religious Right's "Christian nation" brigades are on the march again.

According to The Virginian-Pilot, Pat Robertson and other evangelical leaders in Virginia are planning a big prayer service next spring to mark the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown colony. Noting that English settlers raised a cross at Cape Henry when they landed in 1607, Robertson and Company hope to use that historical footnote to make a political point today.

"We want to reaffirm our Christian roots -- we are a Christian country," said John Blanchard, coordinator for the event that has been dubbed The Assembly 2007. "They did come ashore dragging a cross."

Blanchard insists that Christian character of Jamestown is clear. He cites the colony's chaplain and its founding charter, which calls for the spread of Christianity.

"We were started as a Christian nation," Blanchard told The Virginian-Pilot, "and I feel it's God's purpose we stay a Christian nation."

...did, indeed, demand that the prospective American colony "provide that the true word, and service of God and Christian faith be preached." But the charter added that the "true word" must be "according to the doctrine, rights, and religion now professed and established within our realme of England."

In other words, Jamestown was to be a bastion of the Anglican Church, the established faith of England. [and]. Governor Thomas Dale in 1612 mandated "Lawes Divine, Moral and Martial" that decreed the death penalty for those who "speak impiously of the Trinity...or against the known articles of the Christian faith."

Those who cursed would have a bodkin "thrust through the tongue," and all immigrants to the new land were to report to the Anglican minister for "examination in the faith." Those who refused facing a daily whipping "until he makes acknowledgement."

Dale's rules were so draconian that they were abrogated on appeal to London, but the colony's leaders busily carried out other acts of religious intolerance over subsequent decades. Puritan clergy were banished, Quakers were fined, imprisoned and banished and Catholics were disqualified from public office. Those who objected to infant baptism were subjected to penalties....

So Blanchard, Robertson and the other non-Anglican "dissenters" are, in fact, getting ready to celebrate a centuries-old religious establishment that would have fined, whipped, imprisoned or banished them - or maybe put them to death. Individuals of their religious stripe were persecuted minorities then; today they are politically powerful and they seek to persecute others who fail their religious test.