Chester County Democratic Committee

Alarming excerpts from “Rachel Maddow Interview with Former Evangelist Frank Schaeffer: Christian Right Is ‘Trolling for Assassins,’” AlterNet, November 19, 2009.

“It‘s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of the 57 states is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the third world and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.”

— Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus, in the Washington Times

“…I feel like it‘s true—we‘re the young girls saying, ‘No, no, help me’ and the government is Roland Polanski.”

— Glenn Beck on health reform

“…there‘s going to be a tea party on taxes and it‘s going to get nasty. Nancy Pelosi is going to be bobbing up and down in the Boston Harbor.”

— Bill O’ Reilly

“Pray for President Obama, Psalm 109, verse eight” (= “Let his days be few; and let another take his office…. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow”)

— quote circulating in right-wing circles, on bumper stickers, mouse pads….

Comment by Frank Schaeffer (son of right-wing evangelist Francis Schaeffer):

… you have a ramping up of biblical language—language from the antiabortion movement, for instance, death panels and this sort of thing. And what it‘s coalescing into is branding Obama as Hitler, as they‘ve already called him, as something foreign to our shores. We‘re reminded of that. He‘s born in Kenya—as brown, as black, above all, as not us. He is Sarah Palin‘s not a real American.

But now, it turns out, that he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel, unjust rulers, to which all these biblical illusions are directed who should be slaughtered, if not by God, then by just men.

So, there‘s a direct parallel here with Timothy McVeigh‘s t-shirt on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing in which he said that the tree of liberty had to be watered occasionally by the blood of tyrants. And that quote, we saw again at a meeting at which Obama was present being carried on a placard by someone carrying a loaded weapon.

What we‘re looking at right now is two things going on. We see the evangelical groups that I talk about in my new book, “Patience with God,” enthralled by an apocalyptic vision that I go into in some detail there. They represent the millions of people who have turned the “Left Behind” series into best sellers. Most of them are not crazy, they‘re just deluded.

But there is a crazy fringe to whom all these little messages that have been pouring out of FOX News, now on a bumper sticker, talking about doing away with Obama, asking God to kill him.

Really, this is trolling for assassins. And this is serious business.

It‘s un-American. It‘s unpatriotic.

And it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far right, have coalesced into a group that truly want American revolution. And if it turns out to be blood in the streets and death, so be it. This is not funny stuff anymore. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe….

… this is the American version of the Taliban. The Taliban quotes the Quran and al Qaeda quotes certain verses in the Quran, in and out of context, calling for jihad and bloody war and the curse of Allah on infidels.

This is the Old Testament biblical equivalent of calling for “Holy War.” Now, most Americans will just see the bumper sticker and smile and think that it‘s facetious. Unfortunately, there are 22 million Americans or so who just call themselves super-conservative evangelicals. Of this, a small minority might be violent, but the general atmosphere here is really getting heated….

…It‘s just not a question of who‘s doing it. The bigger question is: Where are the people speaking out against these things? I don‘t hear those voices raised in the evangelical fundamentalist community. And until I do, I—and my opinion is, they are culpable….

read the whole interview here