god hates your stupid climate
In this post, the role of God will be played by Christopher Walken as he appeared in 'Batman Returns.'
NYT:
Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.
The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association’s vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.
The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement’s agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.
“We have observed,” the letter says, “that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”
Those issues, the signers say, are a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote “the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.”
The letter, dated Thursday, is signed by leaders like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, once a Republican presidential candidate and now president of Coalitions for America; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, a longtime political strategist who is chairman of American Values.
They acknowledge in the letter that none of their groups belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, a broad coalition that represents 30 million Christians in hundreds of denominations, organizations and academic institutions. But, they say, if Mr. Cizik “cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals,” he should be encouraged to resign.
The nut of this story's been that evangelical Christian leaders are torn over backing an ostensibly "modern" issue - global warming, and the overwhelming support it has across the scientific community - but there has been little if any press around how evangelical Christians themselves perceive the issue.
A major poll conducted by the Pew Charitable Trust back in '04 showed solid consensus among American religious groups for strong environmental protections, and in another Pew study, this one done in 2007, only the most conservative respondents surveyed were befuddled by the issue of global warming.
Cizik and (at one time) Haggard, Weyrich and Bauer: these people are gatekeepers for a great many evangelical Christian voters; as Dobson and Haggard were apparently at odds at one time, it's possible this little fracas is more about which camp retains that gatekeeper role in a post-Bush landscape than who's ultimately right or wrong about global warming. Which, of course, amounts to fiddling while Colorado Springs burns.
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