Patrick Colbeck, the Michigan state senator who, along with state Rep. Mike Shirkey, was the driving force behind Michigan's anti-union "right to work" legislation, appeared on "WallBuilders Live" today where he, and David Barton, attributed the legislation's passage to "divine providence":
I had a great colleague in the state House, state Representative Mike Shirkey has been phenomenal, he's a phenomenal Christian.
We've also got what I call kind of a patchwork quilt that if any one of those patches would have came out of the quilt, this never would have happened. We had folks at the grassroots level, we had union members that were for us, we had business leaders that were for us, we had folks that had been in the political environment for quite some time, we lobbyists helping us. There were people all over the place and, reflecting upon everything that happened, if any one of those pieces - simple little pieces - would have disappeared and we wouldn't have had them, then it never would have passed.
So this is, we believe, knit together with some divine providence and when we pursued it, we pursued it with biblical principles. We had what we called the Philippians 4:8 Strategy that said focus on what's noble, true, excellent, and praiseworthy. Don't go off an do the usual political whack-a-mole when you find somebody who's not a hundred percent agreement with you; you go off and systematically work through them, make the values proposition for them and give them a reason to vote it and not against it.
