TalkingPointsMemo has a slideshow of exhibitors booths from the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit. If you want to see pictures of the featured speakers at the event, check any newspaper or turn on the TV news — with every major Republican candidate for president showing up to speak and to court the conservative evangelical voting bloc represented by this “summit” it was pretty big news.
I just want to point out again that the Family Research Council is not a clever parody devised by liberals looking for a strawman to attack. And the Values Voter Summit was not organized by liberal writers from Religion Dispatches and Talk2Action in order to set a crafty trap to lure fringe figures of the religious right into making a spectacle.
Nor were all those leading Republicans tricked into attending the event, courting the votes of this crowd, due to some liberal conspiracy to portray them as science-denying, Rapture-awaiting, gay-hating extremists. They elected to attend this event and did their best to portray themselves as science-denying, Rapture-awaiting, gay-hating extremists.
The Family Research Council organized the event, as it does every election cycle. And the Republican candidates rushed to attend, as they do every election cycle. This isn’t something liberal bloggers invented or exaggerated. It’s real. There are pictures. And all of the goofiness and extremism is supplied, voluntarily, by the candidates and religious-right organizations themselves.
The Values Voter Summit likes to portray itself as representative of all of American evangelicalism.
That is not true, and when they make that false claim, they should be called out on it. Evangelicals who disagree with the politics, science and stunted ethical views of the Values Voter Summit are right to protest that they do not represent all or even a majority of us.
But for folks like Jim Wallis, Mark Pinsky and Jim Ball to say that these so-called “Values Voters” are not part of American evangelicalism is just as ridiculously dishonest as the FRC’s claim that they comprise the whole of it. To say that this bloc of voters on the religious right is insignificant or marginal or a mere fringe in American evangelicalism is just as dishonest as their claim to be the only group of any significance. To say that they are No True Scotsman evangelicals is just as dishonest as their claim to be the Only True Scotsman among evangelicals.
They’re here. They’re influential. And they’re dangerously wrong. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
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