Nashville mayoral candidate David Fox
Until now, the officially nonpartisan mayoral runoff in Nashville, Tennessee, hasn't been particularly ugly, but that all changed Monday. Conservative candidate David Fox had already been
attacking runoff rival Megan Barry as unacceptably liberal on economic matters, but now he's descended to new depths by depicting Barry as an anti-Christian extremist.
Fox's new radio ad aimed at African-American voters begins with the narrator accusing Barry of doing little to help black voters and gets much worse from there:
We might see Megan Barry around election time, but when the election's over, she's gone. So how do Megan and her husband Bruce spend their time since, it's not in the black community? Well, I'll tell you. They're opposing the National Day of Prayer, opposing prayer before high school football games, fighting with Christian faith-based organizations that he called and I quote, 'part of the Jesus-Industrial Complex.' Can you believe that? She doesn't share our values and Megan Barry doesn't deserve our vote.
The "Jesus Industrial-Complex" line comes from a 2010 blog post from
Bruce, not Megan, Barry that
attacked a specific group, the Family Action Council of Tennessee, known by the acronym FACT. Bruce Barry's full quote makes it clear that he's only talking about the religious right, not Christianity in general:
The simpleminded mistake that FACT and other organizations comprising the Jesus-Industrial Complex make is assuming that the absence of the "separation" phrase in the Constitution means that the doctrine of separation has no legal value in our constitutional system.
Megan Barry has also been defending herself from a whisper campaign
going after her faith: She recently accused Fox of pushing a phone banking campaign where callers informed voters that Barry allegedly is an atheist. Fox, who is Jewish, has denied all involvement with the calls, but he obviously isn't shy about directly disparaging Barry on matters of faith. The runoff is Sept. 10.