This is what theocracy looks like

By Steve Bogira

The Republican candidates for president will meet in a mega-church in Iowa Saturday to discuss key issues in the campaign, such as which one of them most opposes gay marriage. The “Thanksgiving Family Forum” is being hosted by sponsors who don’t believe in separation of church and debate.
The event, at the First Federated Church in Des Moines, will be moderated by pollster and Fox News regular Frank Luntz. “It has the potential to be the most important forum of the primary presidential campaign,” Luntz says humbly on the website of the Family Leader, a sponsor of the forum. There will be “no gotcha questions,” he says, but instead “just an authentic discussion among the people who seek to lead this great nation.” He told the Des Moines Register he may ask the candidates, for instance, “What do the words ‘so help me God’ mean to you?”

Given the bigoted views the Family Leader expressed this summer, a better question for the candidates might be, “Why aren’t you sitting this event out?” Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are doing just that. But the rest of the squad—Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum—will be fighting like the devil to win over the faithful.

As host, Luntz will home in on the nation’s major concern, which, according to the Family Leader, is not the economy or foreign affairs but the need for faithful monogamy between God-fearing heterosexuals.

The Family Leader is a Christian group dedicated to the principle “that God is the ultimate leader of the family,” a view it aims to promote not only in churches but also “in the legislature, in the media, in the courtroom, in the public square.” The group’s president and CEO, Bob Vander Plaats, has come up short for Iowa governor three times. But last year he helped lead a successful campaign to dump three of the Iowa supreme court justices whose 2009 ruling had legalized gay marriage. Vander Plaats has tried to persuade the Republican prez candidates to wed themselves to his organization’s views, but so far only two of them have been willing to tie the knot.

On the steps of the Iowa capitol in July, Vander Plaats unveiled the Family Leader’s “Marriage Vow,” which included a “Candidate Vow” that candidates would have to sign if they wanted to be considered for the Family Leader’s blessing.

The Marriage Vow derided the “homosexual behavior” and “sexual promiscuity” that have “debased the currency” of marriage. A footnote pointed to the lack of proof that “homosexual preference or behavior is irresistible as a function of genetic determinism or other forms of fatalism.”

Read more at The Chicago Reader...