New People For American Way Report Highlights Perry’s Relationships With Religious Right, Restoration Project

A report issued by People for the American Way this month spends several pages highlighting Texas Governor Rick Perry’s cozy relationship with the Religious Right. Here are some snippits:

By 2004, Scarborough created his own network of “Patriot Pastors” to lead evangelicals to the polls for the 2004 election, and expanded it to at least 5,000 by the time Texas voters ratified a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in 2005. “One of my goals in life is to give the Republican Party courage,” he told The Washington Post during the debate over the “nuclear option” to push through Bush’s extremist judicial nominees.
At the same time, Scarborough’s Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration worked in Washington to push Bush’s judicial nominees, organizing a conference timed around the death of Terri Schiavo at which DeLay urged the impeachment of judges, and other speakers suggested execution.

In 2005, Houston pastor Rev. Dr. Laurence White took the movement to the next level with the formation of the Texas Restoration Project. White, a mainstay of the Christian persecution circuit who shares Russell Johnson’s penchant for comparing America today to Nazi Germany, spoke at Johnson’s Ohio Restoration Project “Patriot Pastor” events in 2004, and he brought the same model to Texas’ effort to pass a similar anti-gay marriage amendment the next year. The group put together a series of closed-door “pastors’ policy briefings” featuring Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who is running for reelection.
At two of these events in September, 2005, one Texas minister speculated that “God sent Katrina to purify the sins of America,” saying, “That week there was no gambling, no prostitution, no sins in New Orleans. It became one of the purest cities in America during that time.”

Both Rod Parsley and Kenneth Blackwell have spoken at Texas Restoration Project briefings.

Perry has taken full advantage of this fortuitous alliance. Vision America’s web site lists the governor’s endorsement: “One hundred years from now people will ask ‘where did
the great revival of the early 21st Century begin.’ And we’ll tell them it started … with people like Rick Scarborough and [Christian-nation speaker and Texas GOP vice chairman] David Barton.” In mid-2005, the governor held a high-profile, ceremonial signing of a same-sex marriage ban (which voters would officially ratify later that year) and an abortion bill at a church school, flanked by Rod Parsley, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and Laurence White. “We’re so blessed in Texas to have a guy like Laurence White,” Perry told the crowd.
As Perry’s 2006 re-election campaign continues, the connections he developed with the Texas Restoration Project and the campaign for the gay marriage ban will become more crucial to him. As the 2005 anti-gay ballot initiative passed, Perry’s consultants told newspapers that their job was to “recontact people that haven’t voted in the Republican primary but who voted in [the marriage amendment] election” and “communicate with them” about the governor’s race.

White aims to register 300,000 voters, and his group is giving Perry a golden opportunity to speak to closed-door meetings of “Patriot Pastors” who could prove crucial in his reelection campaign.

Three-hundred thousand might seem a bit ambitious, but keep in mind they are doing the voter registration drives in churches. This is not typical GOTV

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