A few weeks after liberals threw a fit that Rush Limbaugh would call Sandra Fluke a "prostitute," on Thursday night's Rachel Maddow show, she welcomed on a liberal minister who bizarrely claimed Rick Santorum had committed a "prostitution of the church" by having a political rally in Louisiana with the Rev. Dennis Terry.
Rev. Welton Gaddy of the liberal Interfaith Alliance proclaimed "It`s a prostitution of the church. It`s a manipulation of religion....And I resent anybody trying to make the altar of a church a stump from which they can give a political speech." Liberals never give political speeches in churches? They're saying this...on the Al Sharpton Network? Don't think Maddow didn't adore this. On their website, the summary for the whole segment was "Rev. Gaddy: Santorum tactic 'a prostitution of the church.'"
We've also noticed Rev. Gaddy found it a distasteful "manipulation of religion" that Brit Hume would recommend Christianity to Tiger Woods on Fox News. Gaddy gave Maddow exactly what she wanted, some anti-Santorum venom:
GADDY: I don't like it. It's a prostitution of the church. It's a manipulation of religion. People have to keep in mind, when you`re running for the president of the United States, whether you`re Rick Santorum or President Obama, you have one goal, and that`s to win the election. And you just know that anything that`s done in that campaign is a subsidiary strategy for getting to the White House...
And I resent anybody trying to make the altar of a church a stump from which they can give a political speech. They want to go church, they ought to go to church just like everybody else does. And worship and then get out and do their politics.
Those clever quipsters at the Maddow show gave the segment a New Orleans pun: "Pew Dat?" Maddow played a long clip of Rev. Dennis Terry introducing Santorum and saying that we should be able to preach about Jesus in America, and if you don't like it, then get out -- which they interpreted as asking all the non-Christians to leave the country. Maddow suggested it was embarrassing that Santorum stood and applauded at the end -- as the entire crowd did, and that Santorum explained he did not endorse any suggestion that Americans of other faiths should self-deport. But Maddow and Gaddy wanted to cast Santorum as a scary man who would end freedom of religion in America:
MADDOW: Does that non-Christian should get out of America rant sound as radical to you as a Baptist minister as it sounds to me?
GADDY: Yes, it angers me and it hurts me. When I read the words, at first I laughed and then I thought I can`t laugh at this.
Rachel, if that introduction, that man gave me the feeling that he is the war on religion. Because what he was talking about was being anti- American and anti-religious if he did not to the Bible and didn`t conform to the Constitution. We are not a nation that kicks people out because of disagreement. I mean, that`s what the art of politics in this nation has always been about. And I so sick of these people talking about a war on religion. It embarrasses.
They don`t know what they are talking about. What`s called a war on religion today that was epitomized in his introduction, nobody has told him he can`t talk about God. Nobody has told him he can`t talk about Jesus. And if his theology is one that government can throw God out of the nation, that`s a stronger theology that I`ve got. I don`t know you get rid of God anywhere, according to my belief in God.
It is ludicrous, what`s happened is people who lived so long, with an assumed establishment of religion, Judeo Christian tradition mainly Christian more than Judeo are now having to play by the same rules that everybody else does, and they`re saying that`s prosecution. In one day, they`re going to have to apologize to people in Afghanistan and Iraq and in places like that who really know what it`s like to be prosecuted for their faith. These people are not persecuted.
MADDOW: What do you think that Republican politicians, conservative politicians are selling at the political level when they talked about prosecution, when they talked about war on religion, when they tell Christians that Christians are victimized in America by virtue of being Christians?
GADDY: Well, they are trying to scare them for one thing because they know that if you get people scared, they`re going to say what can we do to change this ands they`re going to say, say follow us. Just do what we say and we`ll get it done for you.
Newt Gingrich knows better. But you know what, and you may disagree with this. I appreciate the fact that Santorum has been honest. I think he`s told us some of the scariest things that I`ve ever heard about religious freedom. It`s made me probably fearful than any presidential candidate ever has. But he`s been honest with us. He`s told us what he will do with that office. And I appreciate that fact.
So, we can either endorse that or not endorse it. But know this -- if you go with this Republican path of war on religion, taking back this country for God, all of those kinds of things, you`re going to see religious freedom minimize if not done away with altogether, you`re going to see a different America."
