Tarnished “conservative” icons
Perhaps you will have read the press release about Tony Perkins having been “disinvited” to prayer luncheon for military families. There is nothing like martyrdom to create sympathy for a person or group.
Indeed, groups like Perkins’ Family Research Council seem to be doing a lot of good, certainly more good than evil, one would assume.
But good and evil deeds have priority levels. If you make a strong statement that supports the don’t ask don’t tell policy (as opposed to encouraging open homosexuality in the military), then you will garner the sympathy of most conservatives – a low priority action with minor ripple effects but a good deed nonetheless.
Yet, what if you make such a courageous statement but at the same time support a presidential candidate who has been known to support un-Christian policies like same-sex marriage, abortion and pro-homosexual teaching in the schools? That is a higher-priority action than making a simple statement because now you are enabling a presidential candidate with an unsound record, who, if elected by your followers on the strength of your endorsement, can do a lot of serious damage on a wide scale – damage that cannot be undone simply by making a statement in support of “family values.” Talk is cheap. “Progressive” culture change, enabled by wolves in sheep’s clothing, is dear.
As we have shown previously at Laigle’s Forum, Tony Perkins refers to Mitt Romney as “pro-family” even though he knows that Mitt had a decidedly anti-family administration as MA governor, supporting same-sex marriage by unconstitutionally issuing an order to his JPs to perform same-sex marriages, signing into law a government health care plan that included a $50 abortion, and enabling public schools to teach the doctrine that homosexuality is an essentially normal and safe lifestyle, and even to encourage students to try it.
But perhaps Mitt’s critics are uncharitable, you say. After all, like the Apostle Paul, he claims to have had a spiritual epiphany and to have promised to “go and sin no more.” How touching.
But what do you suppose would have become of the fledgling Christian religion if the Apostle Paul had been found to have stoned Christians after his road-to-Damascus epiphany?
Well, that is tantamount to what Mitt’s critics, credible ones like Gregg Jackson, once a prominent leader of the Christian conservative movement and author of the best selling “Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies” and prominent conservative and former prominent CNP (Council on National Policy) insider Steve Baldwin, claim Mitt Romney did while governor.
More significantly, as Steve Baldwin maintains in the following article, the transgressions of Toney Perkins were a symptom of a much wider-spread capitulation to evil in exchange for worldly gain. A symptom of the almost-total collapse of the “pro-family” movement in America.
He ought to know.
Don Hank
Inside the CNP
By Steve Baldwin
I was with CNP (Council on National Policy) for nine years. My goal was to transform CNP into a group that truly represented real grass-roots conservatives. And there are some good people still in CNP today, many of whom I recruited. But the group remains dominated by leaders from the Reagan era who long ago became comfy with their nice salaries and benefits and haven’t been warriors in decades. And, yes, many of them have sold out their principles. I’ve come to the conclusion that this group of phony leaders have actually set the movement back light years. Indeed, by claiming in all their direct mail pieces how well their groups were allegedly doing, most grass-roots conservatives mistakenly assumed their battles were being fought by well-funded groups inside the beltway. The reality was that our leadership rotted out from within many years ago and that, in fact, we have been losing our battles inside the beltway far more often than the grass-roots realized. Indeed, there are very few leaders inside the beltway I would trust today.
Around 2004 I started to observe how the Romney machine gradually began to buy out many groups and leaders associated with CNP and the more I dug, the uglier it got. I then started to speak out against the Romney propaganda machine and how his five PACs and foundations were spreading money around the movement like Santa Claus throwing out candy at a Christmas Day parade. I don’t think I knew it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end for me as CNP’s executive director. I used my position to confront leaders regarding their support for Romney. I confronted Bopp, Perkins, National Review writers, Human Events writers, Dobson, Minnery, Norquist and dozens of other key leaders who had bought into this notion that Romney was a conservative superstar and something akin to Ronald Reagan.
After a year or two of exposing Romney’s liberal background, I begun to pick up serious enemies on the CNP board and by late 2008, the Romney partisans who dominate the CNP board trumped up a few phony reasons to force me out. I can’t prove without a doubt that it was the Romney issue that did me in, but I think it was. It was a real eye opener for me because it dawned on me that over time many leaders whom I used to respect were in fact using the Romney campaign to increase their power. I had also discovered a lot of dirty little secrets that I think my board members would have preferred for me to keep my mouth shut about. Such as how the Heritage Foundation took $35,000 in contributions from Romney’s PAC and then promptly started to promote his socialized health care plan — which later became a model for ObamaCare.
It was also shocking to find many so called pro-family leaders within FRC and Focus on the Family promoting Romney as if they were unaware that Romney had unilaterally signed an executive order creating homosexual marriage in his home state. Indeed, many of our national pro-family leaders sat by silently when Romney did this, even looking the other way when his administration gave a “parent of the year” award to a homosexual couple and pretending not to notice the rabid, hard left homosexual judges Governor Romney appointed to the bench. Then, these very same “leaders” promoted Romney a few years later as a “pro-family superstar” and as someone the entire movement should get behind.
Essentially, Romney was the catalyst for the successful implementation of two policies– socialized health care and homosexual marriage — that are now threatening to destroy what’s left of America’s Christian and Constitutional Heritage. But our movement’s leadership sat there and watched it happen and then, when Romney became a presidential candidate, they all pretended not to know anything about his background and tried to make him the movement’s candidate for president. It was a stunning coup. It just blew me away.
The expose you wrote with Paine regarding Romney’s sell out on homosexual marriage certainly did jolt me but I had already known by then how incredibly liberal Romney was. While Governor of Massachusetts, Romney had actually sent a delegation from his Department of Education to California to testify before the state legislature (where I had served for six years) about how Massachusetts is the model nationwide for “gay-friendly” curricula and pro-homosexual events at its public schools. They were urging legislators in California to adopt similar legislation. Romney was apparently quite proud of this and this was only five years ago.
The other discovery that shook my faith in our leadership was the financial links I found between Romney, National Review and Human Events (surprise! both publicly endorsed him) and then while documenting financial transactions between HE and Romney, I discovered that the publisher of Human Events was not only a homosexual but his FEC disclosures showed he was pouring his profits into Democrat and homosexual PACS. When I started sending out emails about that, the you-know-hat hit the fan. I had taken too many shots at the powers to be and it was apparently determined by the movement gods on Mt. Olympus somewhere that I could no longer hold a position in the center of the conservative movement.
And so, the official decree went out: BALDWIN MUST BE PURGED FROM THE MOVEMENT ASAP! And I was. And I’m glad, because I now realize that what many people assume was a real conservative leadership in DC, was a fact in group of power mongers that cared more about money and power than actually conserving America’s constitutional heritage.
