It may not seem possible, but Jimmy Swaggart's son Donnie is making his father look pretty darned good. In the late 1980s, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, one of the most watched and wealthiest televangelists of his era, was involved in one of the Religious Right's most memorable and salacious sex scandals; he was caught with a prostitute in a hotel room located along New Orleans' notoriously sleazy Airport Highway. His tearful apology has become a YouTube classic. Some twenty-seven years later, Pastor Donnie Swaggart is raving about gays and lesbians wanting to behead Christians. Some one needs to find this guy a prostitute!

In 1990, a young Ralph Reed, newly hired by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition to oversee its daily operations, told the Los Angeles Times that, "What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime, we will see a country once again governed by Christians...and Christian values."

A year later, in an interview with Norfolk, Virginia's Virginian-Pilot, Reed talked about the organization's stealth political strategy, a strategy aimed at having Religious Right candidates hide their social agenda, while talking about other issues more attractive to voters, such as lower taxes: "I want to be invisible. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."

In a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Reed, who left the Christian Coalition a few years later to start up his own public relations firm, and was later caught up in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, explained stealth: "It's like guerrilla warfare. If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings. It's better to move quietly, with stealth, under the cover of night."

In the intervening nearly twenty-five years, the Religious Right has used a number of strategies, from Reed's stealth tactics to developing high-powered political organizations and high-profile leaders like the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell, the Christian Coalition's Pat Robertson, and Focus on the Family's James Dobson; from placing a succession of anti-gay and anti-abortion initiatives on state ballots to mobilizing committed conservative grassroots activists.

Meet Dr. Willie Parker. Chances are you've never met anyone like him.

He grew up dirt poor in Birmingham, Alabama; as a teenager he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, and was a "boy preacher in Baptist churches"; he was "the first black student body president of a mostly white high school"; he went to Harvard, became a college professor, and successful obstetrician "who delivered thousands of babies and refused to do abortions."

Dr. Willie Parker had what some might call a second "come to Jesus" moment, deciding "to give up his fancy career to become an abortion provider" -- for the poorest of the poor and the most needy -- at the only surviving abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. These days, he travels a "circuit roughly similar ... to the one traveled by Dr. David Gunn before an anti-abortion fanatic assassinated him in 1993."

Dr. Parker's "name and home address have been published by an antiabortion Web site with the unmistakable intent of terrorizing doctors like him. ...[and] he receives threats that say, 'You've been warned.'"

Christian-themed movies appear to be attracting large audiences these days. While none of the latest crop of religious-themed movies will come close to the box office numbers garnered by Mel Gibson's 2004 film, "The Passion of the Christ" - over $600 million combined domestically and worldwide -- nevertheless, these films are taking church goers out of the pews, and transporting them to local cineplexes across the country. A post-film-watching goal of the producers is to have patrons go home and click on the movie's website and order up a batch of merchandise.

A few years back, Forbes magazine called them "undercover billionaires." Meet Farris and Dan Wilks, who, after selling their fracking business and becoming generous donors to right-wing causes, politicians, and the Republican Party, are no longer "undercover." While claiming that Christians are under attack, the Wilks brothers' are "using the riches that the Lord has blessed" them with and are dedicating themselves to getting the Bible back in schools.

The brothers began by working in their father's masonry business, operating mostly in Oklahoma and Texas. In 1995, the brothers founded their own company called Wilks Masonry. However, they "really hit the big time when they got in on the ground floor with fracking, the controversial natural gas drilling technique that has boomed over the past decade," People for the American Way's Peter Montgomery recently pointed out in a report titled "The Wilks Brothers: Fracking Sugar Daddies For The Far Right."

Not since Oscar hooked up with Felix in Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple" are we seeing such a seemingly unusual pairing. In late June, Pope Francis, a man who has expressed deep concern for the poor, the downtrodden, and issues of social inequality, met with two controversial televangelists who have rarely seemed interested in anything other than building their ministries into huge money-making empires.

Kenneth Copeland and James Robison, two extremely controversial and conservative televangelists and religio-preneurs, met with the Pope at the Vatican "in an effort to work toward tearing down the 'walls of division' between Catholics and Protestants," the Christian News Network recently reported.

The World Congress of Families, an anti-gay Religious Right operation with an international focus, had been planning to hold "World Congress of Families VIII - the Moscow Congress" in Russia in September. According to a WCF Press Release, the conference has been suspended because of the  
"situation in the Ukraine and Crimea (and the resulting U.S. and European sanctions) [which] has raised questions about travel, logistics, and other matters necessary to plan WCF VIII." The "situation" in Ukraine, however, isn't scaring off numerous Religious Right leaders from visiting Ukraine and pitching their wares.

A conservative friend (even after all these years of writing about conservatives and right-wing movements, I still have some conservative friends!) recently asked me why I was writing about the Christian Right burrowing into Ukraine when there are so many other important stories to tell. I told him that, "The purpose is to provide some sort of an early warning so what is happening to LGBT communities in Uganda, Russia, and other countries does not happen in Ukraine. While I am well aware of the toxic attitudes and murderous actions of Radical Islamists towards homosexuals, it is also clear that the mainstream press in this country waited far too long before reporting on the situation in Uganda and the Religious Right's involvement. I am hoping that same situation doesn't play itself out in Ukraine as well.

There is no contesting the fact that high-profile religious right leaders from the United States helped set the table for Uganda's appalling anti-gay laws. Now, emboldened by "victories" in Uganda and the prospect for further discriminatory legislation in other African countries, and Vladimir Putin's anti-gay laws in Russia, some elements of the religious right appear to be setting their sights on Ukraine.

Last summer, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) issued a report titled "Dangerous Liaisons: The American Religious Right & the Criminalization of Homosexuality in Belize." Although the report focused on a dangerous situation for the LGBT community in Belize, Heidi Beirich, the author of the report and director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, offered an overview: "Many ... American religious-right groups know they have lost the battle against LGBT rights in the United States, ... they're now aiding and abetting anti-LGBT forces in countries where anti-gay violence is prevalent. These groups are pouring fuel on an exceedingly volatile fire."

Long before the billionaire Koch Brothers and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson began polluting the American political landscape with obscene amounts of money, decades before the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, years before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth mobilized a platoon of millionaire financiers to put the kibosh on John Kerry's presidential campaign, and before folks like Rex Sinquefield were bound and determined to have their money loom large over the legislative process in the states, there was Richard Mellon Scaife.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Scaife and his family were among the top donors to a myriad of right-wing organizations and causes. Back in the day it didn't take long before researchers following the money behind the conservative movement ran headlong into the Scaife clan.

Cross-posted from The Huffington Post.

White nationalists from the League of the South -- the premier neo-Confederate group -- are hailing the recent Republican primary victory of Maryland's Michael Peroutka -- who won his party's nomination in an Anne Arundel County Council race, as well as a seat on the GOP Central Committee there -- as "a political victory for us."

The race promises to be a bellwether for the kind of theocratic, secessionist politics espoused by Peroutka (the Constitution Party's 2004 presidential candidate), whom a conservative columnist for the Annapolis­-based newspaper, the Capital Gazette, compares to another prominent white nationalist: former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and former Republican Louisiana State Representative David Duke.

Visions of apocalyptic battles are not only taking place in End Times novels, and on theater and television screens these days. Some in what might be considered mainstream right-wing circles also seem to be cranking up the rhetoric and spoiling for such battles at a series of rolling conferences.

In a new piece published by Political Research Associates (PRA), Talk2Action co-founder Frederick Clarkson quotes Republican campaign and conservative movement strategist David Lane, who last year wrote on a conservative website: "If the American experiment with freedom is to end after 237 years, let each of us commit to brawl all the way to the end."

Let's pretend that Americans United for Separation of Church and State hired a former Army general for a top executive position. And let's pretend that it came to light that this man had written a memoir containing sensitive information that compromised the security goals of the United States - a book he hadn't bothered to first vet with the Pentagon, by the way.

How do you think the far right would be reacting? What would they be saying about Americans United?