Guest Post by Morbo
The competition for Biggest Religious Right Hypocrite just gained a powerful contender.
It’s hard to beat guys like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, but the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) is determined to try. Sheldon’s latest antics were exposed in a lengthy article in The Washington Post recently. Although a few years old, these stunts might just expose him as the biggest kook right sleazoid ever to claim ordination.
Sheldon, best known for his appalling anti-gay rants, has over the years blasted the spread of legalized gambling. Turns out Sheldon in 2000 took money from Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff to scuttle a bill that would have curbed internet-based gambling.
Sheldon did this work in an especially sleazy way: by working to convince conservative Christians that the bill under consideration was actually pro-gambling.
It wasn’t. In fact, the measure would have blocked the spread gambling nationwide by curbing use of the Internet to sell lottery tickets. Several of Sheldon’s Religious Right cohorts backed the bill. Sheldon deserted them because he was paid to do otherwise.
The entire sordid mess is explained in the nearly 5,000-word Post piece. It features a veritable constellation of craven conservative creeps: Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, Rabbi Daniel Lapin. It’s also a scary example of how special-interests have poisoned our political system. Read it and cry for your country.
I want to focus mainly on the antics of Sheldon, who in this affair managed to reach new lows in what some Protestants call “utter depravity.”
In a nutshell, Abramoff had been hired by a company called eLottery. The firm wanted to sell lottery tickets over the internet but found its business plan stymied by a federal law designed to curtail web-based gambling. When another law was proposed in Congress that would have cracked down even more, eLottery really started to panic, realizing it might soon be out of business.
Abramoff enlisted help from Ralph Reed, the money-grubbing former head of the Christian Coalition. He also reached out to Sheldon and Toward Tradition, a conservative Jewish group run by Lapin, a longtime Religious Right boot-licker. Because the new anti-gambling bill contained minor exceptions for jai alai and horse racing, Abramoff decided to try to persuade the Religious Right that the measure would actually expand gambling. He portrayed it as a big gift to the race-track industry.
Enter Sheldon. Abramoff had worked with Sheldon before and called him “Lucky Louie.” In June of 2000, Abramoff asked eLottery to write a check for $25,000 to Sheldon’s TVC. With the money in hand, Sheldon, according to The Post, began “holding news conferences and buttonholing House conservatives to argue against the bill.”
The anti-gambling bill eventually died, and when it did, an Abramoff associate wrote an e-mail about seeing “Lucky Louie” high-fiving lobbyists in the Capitol. There’s an image I didn’t need to see.
Today Sheldon claims he does not remember receiving a check from eLottery. The assertion does not wash, especially in light of the fact that Sheldon has fronted for gambling interests before. Casinos and a racetrack paid TVC $20,000 in 1994 and 1998 to encourage Sheldon to oppose the spread of other forms of gambling because they did not want the competition.
Sheldon’s greed apparently knows no bounds, and in many ways he’s just a clerical collar for sale. In 2003 he took money from pharmaceutical companies eager to block the importation of cheap drugs from Canada. The companies paid Sheldon to whip up hysteria in the conservative Christian community by asserting that the abortion drug RU-486 might be imported. The drug companies didn’t give a fig about RU-486. They were just trying to protect their own turf and their ability to price-gouge drugs. Sheldon was happy to be their patsy.
Remember, this is the guy who thinks he’s better than you. This is the guy who insists that he represents the values and morals of Jesus Christ. This is the guy who claims to operate under a superior moral system. This is the guy who dares to judge everyone else and has the gall to claim that gay people, feminists and secularists are immoral.
One test for determining whether someone’s behavior is fundamentally decent is to ask yourself, “Could I, in all honesty, advise a young person to emulate this person?” In Sheldon’s case, you have to tweak the test a bit. You simply look at Sheldon’s antics and tell the kid, “You want to be an ethical person? Great. See this guy Sheldon? Watch everything he does. Pay careful attention. Take notes. Then do the exact opposite. You’ll be fine.”