Via Digs, Addie Stan reports from the annual Reclaiming America for Christ Conference, where Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, said:
Noting that the call to prayer is “broadcast” five times a day while “Christians have a hard time getting a manger scene put up one time a year,” Perkins asked, “How is it that in our nation where Muslims account for about 6 million of the 300 million living in this country, and Christians comprise 100 million, that Muslims can control the public policy and we cannot? I suggest to you that it is because Christians have become apathetic to our role in shaping the policy in our nation, and it could have deadly consequences, not only for the unborn, but for the living as well.”
That's genuinely scary rhetoric, not least because it illuminates a persecution complex so profound, so distorting, that the speaker can only have the most tenuous connection to the reality any of us inhabit. And Perkins isn't some lone nut who somehow wrested a microphone. The Family Research Council is a multimillion lobbying organization stated by James Dobson, and Perkins has turned it, and himself, into serious players. They were the primary sponsors behind Justice Sunday, which reached 61 million homes, and Perkins was the behind-the-scenes advisor to Tom DeLay and Bill Frist during the Schiavo saga. And even with that, even as he's whispered in the ear of Speakers and Senate majority leaders, he thinks, or is willing to say, that Muslims control the nation's policy agenda, and Christians are locked outside, pleadingly looking in. All the better for fundraising, I guess.
