[for more details, see my Huffington Post story Anti-Gay, Anti-Mormon Hate Group Sponsors Reince Priebus' RNC Israel Trip]
Today, Saturday January 31, 2015, the Republican Party officially becomes the party of Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy: the Party of God.
Why ? Well, today roughly 1/3 of the leadership of the Republican National Committee has flown to Israel, on a nine-day all-expenses paid junket paid for and organized by the American Family Association - whose longtime spokesperson Bryan Fischer claims Hitler and top Nazis were gay and that non Christians (e.g. Muslims, Jews, and atheists) should be barred from political office.
Leading the trip is pastor David Lane, who has urged Christians to commit acts of martyrdom to force nonbelievers to either acknowledge Jesus Christ as their ruler or else "begin drinking holy blood". In 2012 Lane stated his refusal to vote for Mitt Romney because Romney is a Mormon who worships a "false god."
Reince Priebus and the RNC are now openly partnering with such people. In PR and marketing terms, it's known as co-branding.
Under the leadership of Reince Priebus, the RNC has now co-branded itself with a group (the AFA) and a pastor (David Lane) that, for their rhetorical and ideological extremity, are as far out on the fringe as the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi Party were in their heydays.
Indeed, the AFA and pastor David Lane target and vilify many of the same societal groups historically targeted by the American Nazi Party and the Klan.
The AFA has been venting its virulently hateful anti-LGBT, nativist, religious supremacist, and arguably racist rhetoric across America’s airwaves for years. Hate speech from the AFA’s nationally syndicated radio show targets a wide range of minorities: LGBT citizens, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native-Americans, Muslim-Americans, Muslims (generally), Mormons, Jews, and more.
Consider how far public acceptance of Christian supremacy has advanced in the American public sphere in less than a decade:
Back in 1999, as Republican 2000 election hopefuls jostled for the GOP presidential nomination, John McCain staked out a bold position on religious right leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who, according to McCain, were "agents of intolerance". McCain's principled stance may have cost him the nomination.
By 2005, McCain had apparently come to the conclusion that he couldn't reach the presidency without help from the "agents of intolerance". Senator McCain worked hard to regain support of those religious right leaders he had lambasted back in '99: first Falwell and Robertson. Those two pointed McCain at the real prize, John Hagee.
In early 2008, McCain held a joint national press conference in which Texas megachuch pastor Hagee endorsed McCain and McCain endorsed Hagee.
In May 2008 I released audio from a sermon Hagee had given in 2005 in which Hagee claimed that God had sent Adolf Hitler to punish Europe's Jews for having the audacity of choosing to live anywhere else but in the historic land of Israel. Hagee depicted Hitler and the Holocaust as a divine curse sent to drive Europe's Jews towards what was then the British protectorate of Palestine.
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann promoted my story, first picked up by Sam Stein of the Huffington Post. From there, it went viral. Soon, John McCain held a press conference renouncing Hagee's political endorsement.
The incident hurt McCain's shaky relationship with the evangelical right and may have even helped influence his decision to pick Sarah Palin, a true believer close to the radical New Apostolic Reformation, as a vice presidential running mate. Palin won the evangelical vote but alienated independent voters, who found her creepy.
The rest is history.
Now, seven years later, the Overton Window has been shoved very far in the direction of Christian supremacy. How far ?
Looking back, I am disturbed to see American mainstream media's apparent tacit acceptance of political alliances very similar to the McCain/Hagee embrace which, less than a decade ago, proved almost fatally toxic. Now, it seems, such alliances wholly lack newsworthiness.
But the elements that drove the explosive McCain/Hagee scandal are all present in the embrace of the American Family Association and pastor David Lane by the Republican National Committee:
Leading up to a presidential election, top Republican figures align themselves with religious right leaders whose virulently hateful, Christian supremacist utterances are a matter of public record, even more so now than in 2008; since my early, solo efforts then, an entire research team from People From The American Way's Right Wing Watch project has been hard at work documenting hate speech and ideologically extreme utterances from a wide spectrum of religious right leadership. Thanks to those ceaseless efforts, many of the necessary facts are now close at hand.
But unlike in 2008, mainstream media appears wholly unimpressed that the national leadership of the Republican Party has chosen to align itself with evangelical leaders who espouse radically hateful, Christian supremacist views.
The GOP's embrace, under Reince Priebus, of Christian leaders who suggest that non-Christians (including atheists, Jews, and Muslims) should be barred from public office does not seem to have moved the "serious" heavyweights - the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, not to mention broadcast media (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and so on) to cover the issue.
Let me make that more plain - the Republican National Committee's embrace of leaders and groups who espouse a radical rejection of Article 6 of the United States Constitution, which bars religious tests or oaths as preconditions for public office, does not seem to merit even a peep from America's most influential media.
What does it mean that Republicans, eager and willing to partner with unabashed Christian supremacists who espouse these sorts of radically anti-democratic positions, have apparently gained top-level control of the Republican Party that in turn controls the U.S. Congress and Senate, and over 2/3 of governorships and state legislatures in America today?
We may soon find out.