I found this hidden within an article on Trent Lott putting another foot in his mouth.
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Anger Over Campaign's Call
Two religious watchdog groups cried foul yesterday over an e-mail from a Bush reelection staffer looking for churches and synagogues to serve as hubs for campaign activity in Pennsylvania.
"The Bush-Cheney '04 national headquarters in Virginia has asked us to identify 1600 'Friendly Congregations' in Pennsylvania where voters friendly to President Bush might gather on a regular basis," the e-mail said. "In each of these friendly congregations, we would like to identify a volunteer coordinator who can help distribute general information to other supporters."
The e-mail was forwarded to news organizations by the Interfaith Alliance and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, called it an effort to build "a church-based political machine" and said it could endanger the congregations' tax-exempt status, because IRS rules forbid churches from endorsing candidates or engaging in partisan campaigns.
Campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said, "This e-mail is being sent to individual Bush supporters asking them to organize other volunteers within their faith community, and people of faith have as much right to participate in the political process as any other Americans."
Thursday, June 03, 2004
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2 comments:
This kind of faith comes with certainty (utter certainty that they are right, god loves them, etc) .. surely, people of faith have every right to participate in politics. Could I not even have a meeting to discuss the issues that affect the church? Can we not even agree, perhaps, that Bush is pro-church, like say, pro Israel. And if funds to your church are cut, is that not an issue?
Could the churches lose tax exempt status: hardly a chance and none at all when Bush is re-elected.
However, now is THE time to stop that nonsense.
What really got me was just how burried the story was. It was the last three paragraphs of a story with a very different headline. People who study newspaper reading know that 1) most people read only the healine (that is why there are headline editors and why the headline can often leave you thinking far differently about the event versus the content.) and 2) most people do not finish an article. For each paragraph you lose a certain percentage of you readers.
So this piece eing tacked on to the end of another, completel different article leaves one to wonder what the motivations are...
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