The New York Times' Frank Rich skewers the religious right's James Dobson and gets it right:
But for all this huffing and puffing, Dr Dobson and his stop-Rudy brigade are as politically hypocritical as the Reverend Haggard was sexually hypocritical.
If they really believed uncompromisingly in their issues and principles, they would have long since endorsed either Sam Brownback, the zealous Kansas senator fond of using fetus photos as political props, or Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who spent 15 years as a Baptist preacher, calls abortion a "holocaust" and believes in intelligent design rather than evolution.
But they gave Senator Brownback so little moral and financial support that he folded his candidacy a week ago. And they continue to stop well short of embracing Mr Huckabee, no matter how many rave reviews his affable personality receives on the campaign trail. They shun him because they know he'll lose, and they would rather compromise principle than back a loser.
Read on....
Rich continues:
Backing a loser, they know, would even further diminish their waning Washington status in a post-Rove, post-Bush GOP. The more they shed their illusion of power, the more they imperil their ability to rake in big bucks from their apocalyptic direct-mail campaigns. They must choose mammon over God if they are to maintain the many values rackets that make up their various business empires.
Politics, even among the hallowed, seem to matter more than principle, which is a nice touch on top of all the accumulated hypocrisies the religious right have had to weather lately.
People like Dobson always forget their messiah's best sayings. One of my favorites, which is appropriate here, is:
Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye.( Luke 6:41-42).
And with all those beams in the eyes of people like Dobson and the good Reverend Haggard sure would build one heck of a nice mega-church.
