{"id":13349,"date":"2007-10-24T14:15:08","date_gmt":"2007-10-24T18:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13349.html"},"modified":"2007-10-24T14:15:08","modified_gmt":"2007-10-24T18:15:08","slug":"baptist-leader-to-gop-this-is-not-a-bluff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/baptist-leader-to-gop-this-is-not-a-bluff\/","title":{"rendered":"Baptist leader to GOP: ‘This is not a bluff’"},"content":{"rendered":"

As part of my ongoing effort to convince people that the religious right really isn’t bluffing, and that the Dobson crowd really will break with the Republican Party if Rudy Giuliani is the GOP’s presidential nominee, consider this Newsweek interview<\/a> with Richard Land, a leading evangelical who serves as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.<\/p>\n

NEWSWEEK: So we wanted to ask you, first of all, about the third party idea and whether it’s serious. A number of people are suggesting it is just a threat.<\/p>\n

LAND: My intuition [is that] this is not a bluff. If Giuliani is the nominee, there will be a third party. There are things that Giuliani could do to help mitigate the damage. But I have been in too many discussions over the last 15 years where evangelical leaders have said, “The one thing we will never allow to happen is for the Republican Party to take us for granted the way the Democrat [sic<\/i>] Party too often takes the African-American community for granted.” This is not a bluff.<\/p>\n

NEWSWEEK: So what you are saying, as a bottom line, is that you would be prepared to help Hillary [Clinton] get elected if Giuliani were in the race?<\/p>\n

LAND: Well, I personally wouldn’t be saying that\u2026 It’s just [that] I’m not willing or able to violate my moral conscience. It would be like asking an African-American to choose between Strom Thurmond and George Wallace or asking Abe Lincoln to vote for a pro-slavery candidate. I personally can’t do it. I am not going to criticize those who choose the lesser-of-two-evils option. [But] I can’t do it, and my guess is somewhere between 25 percent and a third of our people won’t do it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s worth noting that as religious right players go, Land is very much an insider-y, establishment kind of guy. And to hear him tell it, the religious right really will bolt if Giuliani gets the nod.<\/p>\n

As for the numbers, there’s data to suggest Land is probably about right. A new LAT\/Bloomberg poll<\/a>, released this morning, found that Giuliani is still the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, but “about one-third of GOP voters said they would consider supporting a third-party candidate in the general election if the party nominee supported abortion and gay rights.”<\/p>\n

As for the religious right’s alternative, anti-Giuliani candidate, that remains up in the air.
\n
\nAfter the Values Voter Summit this past weekend, a bunch of the movement’s leaders sat down for another chat<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A meeting of some 60 top Christian conservative leaders on Sunday after a two-day Values Voter Summit ended with members of the group on their knees praying to God on behalf of the country.<\/p>\n

But it is the discussion in the room for the two hours beforehand that is the subject of intense speculation…. There was general agreement in the room that the summit had at least helped narrow the field of “acceptable” candidates, Mr. Jackson said. That list appears to include Mr. Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Fred D. Thompson.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One trend to keep an eye on is whether there’s a division between the leadership and the rank-and-file religious right activist base. Especially at the weekend’s gathering, the members seemed to be headed to Mike Huckabee, while the big-shots were coalescing around Mitt Romney. It remains to be seen if a) the foot soldiers will follow orders from Dobson & Co.; and b) whether the division will weaken the religious right vote and make it easier for Giuliani to win without evangelicals.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of my ongoing effort to convince people that the religious right really isn’t bluffing, and that the Dobson crowd really will break with the Republican Party if Rudy Giuliani is the GOP’s presidential nominee, consider this Newsweek interview with Richard Land, a leading evangelical who serves as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}