Having failed to diminish attraction to the Tea Party movement with racist slander, the mainstream media is now using pejorative Christian characteristics to paint it as 'fundamentalist' and aiming to 'legislate morality.'
-- From "Value Voters And The Tea Party" by Tiffany Stanley, reporter and researcher at The New Republic, posted at NRP.org 9/21/10
Tea Party kingmaker [Senator] Jim DeMint declared [Friday], “You cannot be a true fiscal conservative if you don’t have a culture based on values.”
Of course, the Tea Parties share a lot of common ground with the Christian Right, both politically and religiously. This summer, a Gallup poll found that 8 out of ten self-identified Tea Partiers were also Republican and that there was “significant overlap” between the two groups. Earlier this year, a New York Times/CBS poll found that only 16 percent of Tea Partiers thought gay couples should be allowed to marry, compared to 39 percent of overall respondents. More than half of Tea Partiers (53 percent) disapproved of Roe v. Wade, compared to 34 percent of all respondents. (For more on this, see our own Ed Kilgore on abortion and the Tea Party.) And, of course, the movement’s biggest figureheads — Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin — have a decidedly religious and Republican bent.
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From "Tea Party Values" by Sarah Posner, The Nation 9/21/10
At the annual Values Voter Summit last weekend, Billie Tucker, co-founder of the Jacksonville, Florida–based First Coast Tea Party . . . [said,] "I'm putting God back into the United States of America!"
Although many tea party groups focus on "fiscal" issues over "social" ones like abortion and LGBT rights, the Tea Party movement shares activists, organizers and ideology with the religious right. Many of the attendees at the Values Voter Summit, as well as at the conference of fallen GOP golden boy Ralph Reed's new Faith and Freedom Coalition the previous weekend, are involved in local tea parties.
But the issue isn't just whether or not tea party groups mobilize around particular religious-right issues like abortion or gay marriage. The intersection goes a lot deeper—to the very basis of the Tea Party's claim that government is trampling individual freedoms. Many tea partiers, like religious right activists, find the roots of their thinking on government in the Bible.
. . . the uprising energy of the Tea Party movement is beginning to coalesce with the organizing savvy of the religious right—and putting the force of religious zeal behind the Tea Party's anti-government fanaticism.
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From "Abortion and the Tea Party" by Ed Kilgore, The New Republic 9/16/10
Ignoring abortion as an issue is an inveterate habit of the chattering classes, particularly on the progressive side of the aisle. Few people, other than celebrating right-to-lifers, have noted how much the already slim ranks of pro-choice Republicans were thinned this primary season.
This is a persistent blind spot in political commentary.
We have been told repeatedly that the Tea Party movement is all about economics and fiscal issues . . .
Perhaps because the national media tend to be secular, we are persistently underestimating the role that abortion plays in right-wing politics. Yet it is key to understanding some of the zealous opposition that caused GOP primary voters to overthrow [Delaware's] Mike Castle.
For all the endless and interminable talk about "constitutionalism" on the right, it's rarely acknowledged that lurking in the background is wrath about Roe v. Wade.
More generally, the anger associated with the entire Tea Party movement is, I suspect, traceable among many activists to endless frustration of its desire to end the "genocide" of legalized abortion, to which the GOP "establishment" has given little more than lip service.
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From the Christian conservative point of view: "We are the Tea Party" by John Mark Reynolds, Professor of philosophy for Biola, posted at The Washington Post 9/21/10
The Tea Party crowd will be religious and have traditional values, because most Americans are religious and have traditional values. Small government and strong private morality have always gone together in America.
The Tea Partiers have taken a political Hippocratic Oath: asking government to do no harm to their private lives.
The stale category "religious right" must be retired. America is overwhelmingly religious and most of us don't fit neat ideological categories: especially ones designed for the last political generation.
Americans want to be good, but see an educational system that assaults their values, a graft ridden government, and a toxic popular culture. We know that we are responsible in great part for these problems. We have tolerated cads, crooks or weathercocks if they were cads, crooks or weathercocks in our party.
. . . Our best schools may produce brilliant workers who make nifty products, but they are failing to produce men and women of character.
The Tea Partiers should and will go on ignoring the advice of the nobility that has served us so badly.
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