Silly Sally, Facts are for Everyone

Sally Kern, a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, says she has been called by God to be a cultural warrior. Kern, a Religious Right favorite known for her strident attacks on gay people and insistence that her version of Christianity is the only true faith….told the Cleveland County Republican Luncheon Club recently that God urged her to run for office.

“I started praying about whether or not the Lord wanted me to run,” Kern said, according to a report in the Norman Transcript. “And the more I prayed, the more I felt He did…And so here I am, and I’m not the typical legislator. The Lord showed me right off the bat that I’m not supposed to be. As a matter of fact, my Lord made it very clear to me that I am a cultural warrior. And you know I tried to say ‘no’ to that, too, ’cause that’s pretty hard. But, anyway, that’s where I am.”

When Religious Right types say “God told me to do this or that,” I immediately get wary. Usually the thing God told them to do is take away someone else’s rights. But in this case, it seems God’s judgment is just plain poor. Why did He tap Kern – a woman who is, I must be kind here, rather ill-informed?

Consider what Kern told her audience: According to the Transcript, she asserted that John Adams, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson believed there was a “true” religion that formed the basis for our country and it was her fundamentalist version of Christianity.

“When we have teachers and professors say to our students that our founding fathers were atheists or deists, how can we answer that when we don’t even know who they were?” Kern asked. “When you study them and read what they had to say, approximately 95 percent of them were Christian, of the Christian religion, professing Jesus Christ as their savior. True freedom comes from knowing God your creator.”

Read more of this at blog.au.org, or read more about Sally Kern at gayagenda.com.