WASHINGTON (Reuters) - House Republican Whip Tom DeLay said on Thursday a small elite of opinion-makers was waging a "cultural coup d'etat" on the country's fundamental values and called on Americans to wage a faith-based counter-attack.
DeLay, the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives and a magnet for Democratic outrage over his outspokenly conservative views, said in a speech at the National Press Club that the re-establishment of religion as society's "first institution" was crucial to renewing cultural values.
[a4a: Religion as the keystone of morality -- does history bear this up? Only if you ignore it, I guess. Looks like DeLay wants to launch a new Crusade.]
"The American people are trying to resist a cultural coup d'etat -- a revolution launched by a privileged few who are determined to discredit and, ultimately, replace core American traditions," said DeLay, a fierce critic of the Clinton administration whose aggressiveness earned him the nickname "the Hammer."
Echoing former Vice President Spiro Agnew's famous reference to "nattering nabobs of negativism," DeLay said a "fashionable elite" from the media, academic, legal and art worlds were waging a "guerrilla assault ... on our nation's founding principles."
"They are selling what one historian calls the morality of the cool," the Texan said. "The morality of the cool teaches that flag-burning and nude dancing are protected speech, but prayer before a football game is not."
[a4a: Separation of Church and State. Has "the Hammer" forgotten that notion? Seems like he wants union of Church and State. Perhaps he should move to Iran?]
This cultural elite has shown a disdain for religious faith by depicting religious conservatives as hypocritical totalitarians or uneducated buffoons, he said, and promoting a new intolerance that has purged religion from the public schools.
[a4a: Religion has no place in schools. And religious conservatives are hypocritical buffoons. Nobody forced Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, and others to be the way they are! They did it all by themselves, with God as their copilot, no doubt. They're all hypocrites, lest you forget the idea that one can't serve God and Mammon both -- seems they've forgotten that, these Christian tycoons.]
He cited public surveys showing that huge majorities of Americans said they believed in God and went to churches or synagogues, but much smaller minorities of media members and entertainers did so.
The so-called "culture wars" were not wars at all, he said, because most Americans did not consider issues of family and faith to be in dispute. But he called on Americans to step up their resistance to the degradation of moral values.
[a4a: However, most Americans don't want to see the Church and the State welded together, ala the Christian fundamentalists -- one nation under God? Whose God? Their God, of course -- perhaps they'll make re-education camps for all the heretics and infidels they uncover. What a cultural elitist this fellow is!]
"We must transform our resistance into an aggressive counter-attack," DeLay said.
A House Democratic leader said DeLay's comments showed he was leading Republicans into an "ugly, mean-spirited, partisan cultural war."
[a4a: Go to it, DeLay -- you will lose.]
"DeLay's message -- give Republicans the political power to impose a narrow cultural and world view upon all Americans -- is as brazen as it is frightening," said Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, chairman of the House Democratic caucus.
DeLay, a key force in the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said he expected the November election of a Republican president and an expanded Republican majority in Congress. That new team would begin trying to rectify "two decades of confusing court decisions governing religion in our schools."
[a4a: No doubt DeLay and his Council for National Policy buddies and the Religious Right want to eliminate the "confusion" and just make all public schools religious institutions.]
He suggested Congress use its spending power to attach two religious non-discrimination items to federal funding -- allowing vouchers for attendance at religious-based private schools and ensuring states and school districts do not prohibit private, voluntary prayer.
"It's time to put our politics to work to renew our culture, to defeat the mounting effort to expel all religious belief from public life," he said.
[a4a: Separation of Church and State -- seems DeLay is troubled by that, and wants to eliminate that separation, and make God the nation's co-pilot; or perhaps outright pilot. He did call it the "first institution".]
DeLay, the focus of a Democratic lawsuit on Wednesday that targeted his fund-raising, said in response to an audience question that he would continue his fund-raising work as long as it was legal. Groups on the left used the same methods and laws to raise funds for their causes, he said.
[a4a: "on the left" -- what left? The Democrats? Hah! Left of what?]
"I'm not for unilateral disarmament," he said.
[a4a: The Bible is, though, Tom. Why don't you turn the other cheek? What a hypocritical buffoon!]
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