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Texas GOP Congressional Race Devolves Into Full-Fledged Anti-Gay Hatefest

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Attack Ad Calls The New Civil Rights Movement Part of ‘Radical Gay Lobby’

A Republican congressional candidate in West Texas is airing a TV ad accusing one of his opponents of secretly being a “gay rights advocate” because he participated in military LGBT Pride runs while serving as a base Air Force commander.

Earlier this month, we told you how retired Col. Michael Bob Starr, a GOP candidate in Congressional District 19, had come under fire for participating in the runs while leading the 7th Bomb Wing at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene.

RELATED: Congressional Candidate, Decorated Officer Attacked For Participating In Air Force Gay Pride Run

Oil field worker Jason Corley, one of eight candidates in the race to replace right-wing Rep. Randy Neugebauer, accused Starr — a decorated officer — of promoting “social engineering” in the military by participating in the runs sponsored by Dyess AFB’s Pride Alliance in 2014 and 2015, following the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Now, Lubbock Mayor Glen Robertson — another candidate in the race — has taken the attack a step further with a TV ad alleging that Starr is somehow supported by “the radical gay lobby.”

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“Michael Bob Starr says he’s a conservative values candidate, but Starr supported, promoted and participated in gay Pride events, wore rainbow-colored gay Pride clothing and is being called a gay-rights activist,” the ad’s narrator states. “And liberal gay rights organizations are supporting Starr, the same radical groups who want men to be able to use women’s bathrooms. Michael Bob Starr, supported by the radical gay lobby, wrong for West Texas.”

Interestingly, Robertson himself could be accused of supporting gay rights, given that he once told The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that he would be open to the possibility of an LGBT nondiscrimination ordinance:

“If anybody brought that issue forward, I’d be open-minded and look at it,” Robertson said. 

The allegations in Robertson’s ad are based on articles by Breitbart Texas’ Brandon Darby, an FBI informant who somehow believes that because LGBT news outlets including this one have covered the anti-gay attacks against Starr, they are supporting him:

In another strange twist, one group, The New Civil Rights Movement (NCRM), which calls itself a “broadly cited media organization delivering news and opinion dedicated to the wide interests of the progressive and LGBT communities,” found itself defending and advocating for a candidate who, only days prior, attempted to convince his fellow West Texans that he was actually the anti-gay agenda candidate.

Although we certainly appreciate the free publicity, Darby’s premise is way off. He’s effectively arguing that any news outlet that covers a political candidate supports that candidate. In other words, by reporting on Bob Starr – or Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump, or Marco Rubio – any news outlet, including NCRM, supports those candidates, which is obviously false. 

But this is not particularly surprising from Darby, reportedly a one-time radical “leftist” who infamously became an FBI informant, ratting out two of his fellow activists and sending them to prison.

RELATED: Air Force Colonel Calls GOP Primary Opponent A ‘Coward’ For Anti-Gay Attack

Besides, from a gay rights standpoint, Starr’s response to the attacks has been almost as bad as the attacks themselves, and he certainly wouldn’t merit the support of any LGBT group, let alone a radical one:

“Glen knows that I’ve never been a gay rights advocate,“ Starr responded. “I believe, and have always believed, that homosexual behavior is immoral. I do not support same-sex marriage. I believe the definition of marriage is older than the law or any government, and is defined as a holy union between a man and a woman. I already made this clear when these reports first surfaced.

“I am the only candidate with firsthand knowledge of what the liberals have done to the military with their social experimentation,” Starr stated. “Military policy should be based on one thing and one thing alone – how could we be more effective in protecting our nation and our national security interests.”

Watch Robertson’s ad here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XUpWufp2Mc 

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Carville Says There’s Only ‘One Thing’ Trump Is Thinking About on His China Trip

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Democratic strategist and political commentator James Carville is blasting what he says is the “one thing” President Donald Trump is thinking about on his trip to China, and it has nothing to do with diplomacy, the U.S. economy, or the war in Iran.

Carville told Al Hunt on their Politicon podcast that it was “really interesting” that all the people he took to China were essentially the people who were in the “first three rows” from his inaugural address. He “put them on Air Force One, and he took Eric — who handles the business end of his business.”

“You’re going to watch a grift and graft over there, like you can’t imagine,” Carville continued. “That’s all this trip is about, and I got news for you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack, or whoever you are out there, he doesn’t give a s—— about you, your future, your finances, your retirement, your anything.”

“He just cares about making all the money he can as fast as he can, and people [who] don’t realize that are just, just woefully stupid.”

Hunt reminded Carville that earlier this week Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

“Oh, you don’t, Donald,” Hunt responded. “Well, you know something? I think a lot of Americans think about their financial situation, and I’m sure those billionaire oligarchs you’re traveling with don’t, but a lot of voters do, and, uh, you’re gonna pay, you’re gonna pay a price.”

Carville added that Trump also said that he doesn’t even think of Iran.

“I think there’s only one thing that he’s thinking about in his trip to China. And that is a big grift,” Carville said. “Look at who he’s taking with him.”

Carville said there would be “economic exchanges” and “investment opportunities” during the China trip.

“You can see, this is where this is going,” he continued. “They just buy him off. He does not care.”

“He doesn’t care if he, as long as he can go there and make as much money, as fast as he can make it, that’s all what he cares about.”

READ MORE: ‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

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Christian Content Creator Fighting Sin Is Teaching Others How to Eat Biblically: NYT

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27-year-old Michigan-raised Kayla Bundy is a Christian content creator who turned to the Bible for ways to eat healthy — but her lifestyle is also part of a “higher calling,” The New York Times reports, explaining that she is “a biblical eater, someone who consumes mostly foods mentioned in the Bible.”

“Sin entered into the world through food,” Bundy told the Times, “and Satan doesn’t stop there. Food, for me, is really like a weapon of how I can fight back.”

According to the Times, a “diet inspired by the Bible has found new audiences online in the Make America Healthy Again era.”

Bundy, who has over 500,000 followers on TikTok, and has been eating biblically for eight years, “claims that her diet ‘fixed’ her skin, her hair and her depression, and she sells coaching sessions to help others with their diets,” The Times reports. She “is open about not having nutrition credentials, but she sells a $28 digital guide to biblical superfoods, as well as coaching sessions that start around $700 for a month, she said.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

She buys raw milk, eats sardines and authentic sourdough bread without commercial yeast, and tries to cook with locally sourced foods.

“I had never really thought to look to the Bible for a recipe book,” said Bundy, who now lives in Bali. Cutting out refined sugar made her feel good, and she started “studying scripture from that lens of noticing what they are eating.”

32-year old Georgia stay-at-home mom Annalies Xaviera “posts biblical eating tips,” and “said her Facebook following had jumped from scant thousands to over 300,000 in just a few weeks this spring. She sells a digital cookbook.”

“The Bible says that God appreciates and celebrates small steps of obedience,” Xaviera told the Times.

“When you’re in a craving,” she said, “have you ever thought to stop and pray?”

READ MORE: ‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

 

Image via Shutterstock

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‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

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The Trump White House is hosting an unprecedented Christian prayer festival Sunday on the National Mall — a nine-hour event that a Trump advisor describes as “rededicating the country to God.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson are all expected to appear.

The funding for “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” comes in part from taxpayer dollars earmarked for America’s 250th birthday celebration, organizers say, according to The Washington Post.

The speakers are almost all Christian, and expected to largely be evangelical Protestant leaders and members of the Trump administration, “many of whom have embraced the message that America’s founders wanted the country to be explicitly Christian,” the Post reports. The event will have a “focus on American identity as aligned with a specific slice of conservative Protestantism.”

Pastor Paula White-Cain, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office who delivered the invocation at President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, said the Jubilee “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.”

“This is really truly rededicating the country to God,” she added.

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

According to The Guardian, the invited speakers include those who experts have been “characterized as Christian nationalist or extremist.”

Among them, a pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic,” the Guardian says, along with “a rabbi who has defended the use of torture,” and “a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.”

Scholars have deemed the event unprecedented in the modern era.

“I’m unaware of anything like this, with this involvement of senior government officials, on this scale, trying to paint this false picture of the United States as a quote unquote Christian nation,” Amanda Tyler told the Post. Tyler is executive director of BJC, a Baptist group that promotes religious liberty through church-state separation. “Trump’s rhetoric in the past 18 months is how he’s ‘going to make America Christian again,’ that it’s his job to push religion. This is all part of that piece.”

Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse told the Post, “There’s a difference between saying America is a nation with many Christians in it and that America is a nation dedicated to Christianity and defined by it.”

“Those are very different things,” he said.

Kruse also noted that the only rules about religion that the framers of the Constitution wrote “were ones that keep religion at arm’s length. No establishment, no limits on free exercise, no religious test for office.”

But the Trump White House defended the event, its focus, and its list of speakers.

Brittany Baldwin, executive director of the White House’s 250 Task Force, in an April webinar, said: “We worked very hard with the faith leaders we trust … to ensure that we hear their concerns and we have the right focus for our community of believers, across the country. So I think if you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way.”

Paula White-Cain went even further, saying that the jubilee would not include leaders “praying to all these different Gods.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Using a Secret Super PAC to Pour $1 Million Into Democratic Primaries

 

Image via Reuters 

 

 

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