Ted Cruz is partnering with the American Renewal Project, the right-wing organization led by Christian Nation extremist David Lane, for what the Washington Post describes as “an ambitious 50-state campaign to end taxpayer support for Planned Parenthood.”
Lane won’t be the only radical activist organizing this campaign:
More than 100,000 pastors received e-mail invitations over the weekend to participate in conference calls with Cruz on Tuesday in which they will learn details of the plan to mobilize churchgoers in every congressional district beginning Aug. 30. The requests were sent on the heels of the Texas Republican’s “Rally for Religious Liberty,” which drew 2,500 people to a Des Moines ballroom Friday.
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The Tuesday conference calls with pastors will begin with a message from Cruz, who will be followed on the call by Doug Stringer, a pastor who works with American Renewal and Response USA to plan statewide prayer rallies at the request of conservative governors such as [Bobby] Jindal and [Rick] Perry.
Stringer is a self-proclaimed apostle who has said that the September 11 attacks were divine retribution against America for abortion and homosexuality.
“The Response” prayer rallies Stringer organized for Jindal and Perry featured prayer guides similarly blaming Hurricane Katrina and deadly tornadoes on abortion rights and gay marriage.
As Peter mentioned earlier, Cruz has had no problem aligning himself with the most extreme of Religious Right activists, and has even borrowed their rhetoric verbatim:
Cruz has been positioning himself as the champion of religious liberty and defender of the conservative Christians he says are the targets of a “jihad” by gay-rights activists and an “atheist Taliban.” On Friday night he held a “Rally for Religious Liberty” in Iowa highlighting victims of “religious persecution” — in other words, business owners who have refused to provide wedding-related services to same-sex couples and gotten into trouble for violating anti-discrimination laws.
