John Hagee’s relationship with presidential candidate John McCain ended after the media attention given to the televangelist’s words on Catholics and Jews, communities Hagee has since tried to reconcile with. We can take McCain at his word that he didn’t intend to align himself with such seeming bigotry against other religions—indeed, it’s far more like McCain sought out Hagee for his views and influence on the Religious Right’s political “culture war.”
In a sermon on “God’s Plan for Wives and Mothers” that aired last week, Hagee outlined the “ideal woman”—along with her antithesis, the “secular humanist” woman:
If the secular humanist of the 21st century took his brush to paint the portrait of the thoroughly modern Millie, it would be with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, smoke twirling out of her nostrils, language that would make a sailor blush—even Rosie O’Donnell. [Laughter]
Her breath would smell like a brewery; a condom in one hand, and the feminist manual in the other, listing the local abortion clinics to snuff out the life that was within her body. Her allegiance is always to her career. Her children are latch-key children who come home and live alone until mother and daddy finally arrive after dark.
Women can render service in many secular fields, but God says her highest and best field, in God’s opinion, is that of being a mother.
