For years, you've attacked the freedom of women to control their own bodies, waged war on gay marriage, and fought to erode one of the most central tenets of our Constitution: the separation between church and state.

You've always claimed the moral high ground, asserting the right to tell people how to live and condemning millions of Americans for actions you deemed immoral. But your high ground is washed away. After years of condemning gambling as a social ill, you're caught knee-deep in pro-gambling campaigns hatched by indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

It's time to stop telling others how to act, and start practicing what you preach.

End your hypocrisy.

Even before DefCon held a press conference to release details about the campaign, the ads had an immediate impact in focusing media attention and forcing responses to questions that had previously been batted away with only silence or angry counter-attacks. Dobson and Focus on the Family are now providing detailed responses in stories than ran in the March 8 editions of The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. Dobson denies that he knowingly benefitted Abramoff's clients. But his organization worked against a proposed Indian casino in Louisiana that also was opposed by one of Abramoff's Indian casino clients.

Our colleague Max Blumenthal, who is a DefCon Advisory Board Member, noted on Talk to Action that mainstream media has up to now expressed little interest, and little energy, in pursuing developments in this major scandal. As a result, Reed, Sheldon, and Dobson have largely gotten away with stonewalling and generalizations, instead of answering detailed questions completely and forthrightly. Blumenthal writes:

While I wrote about this for The Nation and Media Matters, there has been very little mainstream press interest on Dobson's role in Abramoff's schemes. So far, some of the best -- and most adversarial -- reporting on the Abramoff/Reed/Dobson saga is coming from the Christian media, namely from Marvin Olasky's World Magazine.

Dobson's camp has even attacked a reporter from the conservative evangelical World Magazine for daring to pose tough questions.

While Talk to Action has been highlighting religious leaders' involvement in the Abramoff corruption probe, and pointing out connections between Abramoff and dominionist leaders, the mainstream media has largely been asleep. What do we have to do to rouse the media hounds, draw them a picture?

Thankfully, Talk to Action is not alone in sounding the alarm: several investigative journalists have picked up the scent, and help is on the way from DefCon to get their reporting taken seriously and to frame public debate on the hypocrisy of these three religious right leaders.

Maybe, at last, the mainstream media will be spurred from complacency so that the American people will get more detailed answers from religious right leaders about their ties to Abramoff, instead of stonewalling and attacks against those who dare to question them.

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