As a Christian, I agree with everything Harris said – and we must stop being afraid to tell people the truth.

“If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin,” she said. “Whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong.”

Do you find that shocking? I don’t. I find it commendable that a politician of Harris’ stature is saying what she is saying. Notice the L.A. Times calls her chances against incumbent Bill Nelson a “longshot.” Do you really think so? Why do you think a paper on the other side of the country is so threatened by Harris. It isn’t because she is going to lose the race to Nelson, it’s because she alone has the best chance to win. Notice how the L.A. Times manages to portray a candidate with a 16-point advantage over her nearest competitor as some kind of loser. The race is tomorrow – but it’s far from over, according to the L.A. Times. ~Joseph Farah

As I said last week, when the media and Harris’ opponents were piling on with the mandatory accusations of prejudice, intolerance and anti-Semitism (natch), the hysteria and frenzy about Harris’ remarks were a mess and were rooted in a very weird need to purge people who make ‘unacceptable’ statements that has reached the point of fanaticism in this country.  It is the two-minute hate aimed at people who allegedly hate or disrespect others, and it is an appalling feature of modern American life.  The LA Times is joining in, because Harris is on the ropes and nobody with any sense of political self-preservation will go near her radioactive and imploding campaign.  But then Harris’ remarks were just as big a mess, even if you can interpret them in a favourable way (as I tried to do, getting myself labeled as a defender of Harris, which was not really my intention). 

Even worse were her lame attempts to run away from those remarks–the same ones that Farah holds up as proof of Harris’ political nerve and guts–when it became clear that right-thinking people didn’t say such things.  Of course, a savvier politician with her finger on the pulse of the political and media classes would have already known not to say these things.  But then a savvy politician doesn’t have four campaign managers in one year and a sane person doesn’t routinely claim that she is the new Esther. 

There were some things that she said, if interpreted in a very favourable light, that I could agree with, but on the whole it was the sort of sloppy rhetoric that makes evangelical politicians easy targets for ridicule when they claim that Moses is the source of our rule of law or that non-Christian legislators automatically “legislate sin.”  A lot of very strong conservatives who are Christian and very committed to the defense of Christianity’s role in public life can only wince when they hear such confounded nonsense.  If this is the “mainstream of evangelical thought,” that doesn’t say much for evangelical thought.  That Joseph Farah agrees with it in its entirety only serves to confirm that it really is crazy.