God News From Minnesota

Perhaps missed in all the rapturous news of the end-that-wasn't, was this story of some more Heartland religious crazie:

A controversial anti-gay preacher questioned President Obama's Christianity Friday morning, when he delivered the morning prayer on the Minnesota House floor.

"I know this is a non-denominational prayer in this chamber and it's not about the Baptists and it's not about the Catholics alone or the Lutherans or the Wesleyans," Bradlee Dean said, sporting a track suit and long ponytail, "or the Presbyterians, the evangelicals or any other denomination, but rather the head of the denomination and his name is Jesus. As every President up until 2008 has acknowledged. And we pray it. In Jesus' name."

The Minnesota Independent reports:

Minnesota House Republicans invited anti-gay preacher Bradlee Dean of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide to give the morning prayer. The prayer was so offensive to many legislators that House leadership brought in the chaplain to redo the prayer.

Here's the prayer:


If you listen, the good Reverend wasn't questioning President Obama's Christianity as much as he was using the date of Obama's election to reassert the wingnut meme that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. An equally crazie idea, of course.

But what makes Dean so controversial? Let's take a look.

Dean runs an organization called You Can Run But You Can't Hide that describes itself as:

To reshape America by re-directing the current and future generations both morally and spiritually through education, media, and the Judeo-Christian values found in our U.S. Constitution.

And he spins the reaction to his prayer on his blog:

Apparently someone was angry about my prayer because I invoked the name of Jesus. Before I knew it, instead of the media reporting on it as me standing up for our future generations, all of the sudden I became an anti-gay divisive pastor, when all I did was simply say a prayer encouraging all of us to honor our veterans, uphold the Constitution, and not forget the principles of our forefathers, upon which this nation is established.

Go listen to the prayer, that's not exactly what he did. He made the odd point that EVERY President up to Obama has declared America to be a Christian Nation. Really? Even Bill Clinton?

An interesting point of his blog post, however, comes when he dutifully trots out the opening prayer to the First Continental Congress in 1774 dutifully pointing out how religious it was:

O Lord our Heavenly Father, high and mighty King of kings, and Lord of lords, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers on earth and reignest with power supreme and uncontrolled over all the Kingdoms, Empires and Governments; look down in mercy, we beseech Thee...

Blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda and so on. I wonder if the good Reverend would be surprised to learn that the invoker of that first prayer, one Reverend Jacob Duché, a few years later advocated to General Washington that he surrender to the British. After that he abandoned America and fled to Britain. In Pennsylvania, he was tried and convicted of Treason and his property was confiscated. Yea, he left that part out.

But let's get back to Reverend Dean. This is from the Minnesota Independent:

“Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America,” Dean said on YCR’s May 15 radio show on AM 1280 the Patriot. “This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.”

“If America won’t enforce the laws, God will raise up a foreign enemy to do just that,” Dean continued. “That is what you are seeing in America.”

“The bottom line is this… they [homosexuals] play the victim when they are, in fact, the predator,” Dean said, before going on to make a claim that has no basis in fact: “On average, they molest 117 people before they’re found out. How many kids have been destroyed, how many adults have been destroyed because of crimes against nature?”

Proves, yet again, that Hitchens was right when he said that you can get away with saying anything as long as you have the word "Reverend" shoved in front of your name.

How was the Rapture for you?