Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News reports that Rick Perry is heading to a weekend retreat to meet with a group of Religious Right leaders and donors:
When Rick Perry heads this weekend to Jim Leininger's ranch for a confab of Christian conservatives, he'll be on hallowed ground. Leininger has long been one of Perry's financial angels. He's been a leading proponent of school vouchers. And he's given large sums to Perry campaigns over the years. In some quarters, he's seen as saving Perry's political career with a last-minute infusion of $1.1 million to fuel Perry's 1998 victory as lieutenant governor.
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Perry is scheduled to attend and to talk politics with leading evangelical leaders including retired judge Paul Pressler, a Southern Baptist leader, Christian historian David Barton, East Texas evangelist Rick Scarborough and others who supported Perry's Christian prayer rally in Houston. The event isn't about fundraising, but about motivating true believers.
Leininger has been called "God's Sugar Daddy" due to his willingness to dump large sums of money onto right-wing groups and candidates that share and promote his views.
David Barton is already well-known to readers of this blog – he's the Religious Right's favorite pseudo-historian who thinks that Jesus supports employment discrimination and opposes and the minimum wage, that the Founding Father's were against the teaching of evolution and that gay sex ought to be regulated by the federal government.
And Rick Scarborough is a self-proclaimed "Christocrat" who believes that it is his duty to "mix church and state God's way" in order to stop the country's "slide further into Communism/Socialism [and] sexual anarchy led by sodomites" and who stated, just a few months ago, that AIDS is God's judgment for engaging in an immoral act:
We can now add these activists to the ever-growing list of extremist Religious Right activists with whom Rick Perry is associating himself.
