"PATRIOT PASTORS"

A chilling term but it shows what we are up against - a demented attempt to meld Church and State for the benefit of single-party rule.

Christian conservatives fight filibusters

BY WAYNE SLATER

The Dallas Morning News
Posted on Tue, May. 17, 2005

DALLAS - (KRT) - Kelly Shackelford is no stranger to matters of politics and faith, so picking a fight over the filibuster seemed only natural.

With a showdown looming in the Senate this week, Shackelford and a national network of grass-roots Christian conservatives are working furiously - some publicly, some behind the scenes - to win confirmation of the president's judicial nominees.

"You can pick an issue that our supporters really care about, and it's all going to be affected by what kind of judges we have," said Shackelford, who heads the Plano, Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute.

Under attack, he said, are "religious freedom, the misuse of the concept of separation of church and state, marriage and life."

"We're e-mailing, conference-calling and everything we can," said Rick Scarborough, a Baptist pastor from Lufkin, Texas, who heads the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration.

Scarborough said he has enlisted several thousand Christian ministers for his Patriot Pastor network.

"We're lost enormous ground in this country morally as a result of the acts of judges," he said. "We as Christian conservatives have concluded that the warfare right now is more in the courts than at the ballot box."

The fight over federal judges has led to an unprecedented show of coordination among conservative groups.

"I've got a list of over 50 groups who've signed on to work on confirmations," said David Barton, founder of the Texas-based group WallBuilders, which has challenged the separation of religion from public life. "The networking that's occurring now wasn't occurring five, 10 years ago."

Gary Marx, who heads a Virginia-based confederation of about 75 groups, said his members have tapped a network of 675,000 grass-roots conservatives in six states for a pressure campaign on potentially wayward Republicans.

In Ohio, the Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church said at a gathering of 1,000 Patriot Pastors last week that the issues underscoring the filibuster fight transcend partisan politics.

"We're not Democrats. We're not Republicans. We're Christocrats," he declared.

Dobson told his Focus on the Family radio audience that if the Democrats prevail in the fight over judges, "the things that we believe in are gone."

Shackelford said Friday that it is not an overstatement to say the pending Senate vote over filibustering judges is among the most important decisions in decades.