North Carolina Democrats: We Are Religious!

From The News & Observer:

The ad features Dean Smith against a Carolina blue sky.

Above his picture, it proclaims in big bold letters: “American Baptist Devout Democrat.”

The ad is part of a new state-wide campaign intended to show that Democrats are religious, too. Devout Democrats, a new political action committee based in Chapel Hill, plans to take out ads in North Carolina newspapers in areas where there are hotly contested races for the U.S. House.

Who better to represent them than the legendary former UNC-Chapel Hill basketball coach -- a household name in North Carolina and the winningest NCAA Division I basketball coach.

In the ad, Smith, a member of Chapel Hill’s Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, states, “I’m a lifelong Baptist and vote for Democrats. One reason? Democrats are serious about alleviating poverty.”

His quote is followed by a passage from the Gospel of Matthew extolling the virtues of caring for the poor.

Smith declined to comment.

The Devout Democrats group plans to run the ad in the western part of the state where Democrat Heath Shuler is running ahead of his Republican opponent, incumbent Charles Taylor, for the 11th Congressional District seat.

“The way the Democratic and Republican parties have talked about religion made it seem like the Republican Party is the moral choice,” said Chip Muller, a third-year law student at UNC-CH who is leading the group. “We believe that’s not true.”

The campaign is part of a broader effort on the part of the national Democratic Party to connect with religious voters, many of whom have been alienated from the party because some candidates support same-sex marriage and its platform calls for keeping abortion legal.

Of course, if the Republicans made this sort of appeal to religion, they would be charged with threatening “the Wall of Separation between church and state.” Indeed, charged with pandering.
But it’s apparently fine for the Democrats to do it.

Liberals claim that their policies in areas like welfare and the environment are more “Christian” than those of conservatives. This makes sense if you think that more money spent on welfare has helped the poor (as opposed to creating dependency) and that God absolutely does not want any drilling in ANWR (regardless how large the economic benefits, and how small the environmental damage).

God, to the liberals, lives in San Francisco.

But the simple fact is that liberal Democrats are on the anti-Christian side of the Culture Wars. Forget theology. People who go to church a lot oppose abortion. People who never go to church favor it.

Democrats appoint judges who want to take “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Democratic office holders vote to keep abortion legal, including partial birth abortion. They vote for gay marriage.

So it ultimately doesn’t matter if a few of them are people of deep personal faith. They are on the side of the faithless.