Today's New York Times article on Nakoula B. Nakoula, the unrepentant producer of the incendiary Muhammad video, includes further claims by Joseph Nasralla that he was tricked into allowing his Media for Christ facility to be used for  filming. But Nasralla's own Media for Christ projects are no less inflammatory than the video.  At right and below are graphics from 911 Defend our Students, a joint venture of Nasralla's Media for Christ and the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission.  Not only does the flier, like the now-infamous movie, portray Muhammad as a sex-crazed pedophile, but an accompanying graphic in the anti-Muslim flier shows a man in a Sikh - not Muslim - turban.  This is a remarkable mistake for organizations advertised as providing expertise on Islam.

On Dec. 4, 2011, Tyler Alred, an Oklahoma teenager who had been drinking, ran a truck into a tree. His passenger and friend, 16-year-old John Dum, was killed.

That's tragic. I doubt anyone would argue that Alred doesn't deserve to be punished. But an Oklahoma judge's response to the matter has been curious, to say the least: District Judge Mike Norman has sentenced Alred to attend church weekly for the next 10 years.

I thought I'd follow up on this, especially because my Alternet stories now dominate Google searches on the terms 'Billy Graham', 'Mormonism', 'cult'. Reports CNN's "belief" blog, Billy Graham's son Franklin Graham has promised that the Billy Graham Evangelical Association will never again label Mormonism a "cult".

There has been, and no doubt will continue to be, much written about the controversies engulfing Rev. Samuel Rodriguez.  But this is not about all that.  

This is a story about the banal hubris of a public figure, facilitated by the unhinged boosterism of a major periodical (and at least one of its editors) that published unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks against a writer in an apparent effort to intimidate, discredit and ultimately silence him.  "So this person," as Rev. Samuel Rodriguez put it in his Patheos interview, "in my opinion, loses any sort of legitimacy as a commentator on issues of the public sphere."

This is the story of a sliming.

On November 9, 2012, an article by Catholic journalist and author Greg Metzger, Questioning the "Hispanic Karl Rove of evangelicals" -- which noted that Democratic National Committee Faith Outreach head Rev. Derrick Harkins' has been listed (and still is) on the Advisory Board of Rev. Samuel Rodriguez' National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (along with, of all people, apostle and prophet Cindy Jacobs) -- drew a rapid reply from Faith Outreach head Harkins, who expressed "shock" at being listed on the NHCLC board. Harkins issued a public statement, through Metzger, in which the DNC Faith Outreach head claimed that he had not worked with Rodriguez' NHCLC for at least six years.

But Harkins' claim seems to be directly contradicted by a Joint Statement for the House Judiciary Committee, on immigration, that Harkins issued together with NHCLC President Samuel Rodriguez on March 1, 2011. The Joint Statement identified Rodriguez as the NHCLC's President.

Amidst digging into the Democratic Party's faith outreach effort for another piece, I came across a striking pre-2012 election voter preference survey from the Barna Group that forecast Barack Obama's support from evangelical voters could double in the 2012 election as compared to support Obama got from evangelicals in 2008, 11%. What happened ? Well, Obama's support from Catholic and minority evangelicals rose slightly, but his support from white Protestant evangelical and born-again Christians plummeted, from 26% in '08 to 20% in '012. Whoops: especially for the DNC's faith outreach effort.  

Dear Rev. Rodriguez and the leadership of the NHCLC,

On November 9, I published an article on Rev. Rodriguez and the NHCLC. In this article I noted that the Rev. Derrick Harkins, head of Faith Outreach for the Democratic National Committee, is listed and pictured at the NHCLC website as a member of your Advisory Board. Shortly after posting this article I received a public comment from Rev. Harkins, followed up by a personal email from him, both attesting to his shock that he was being publicized as a supporter of the NHCLC.

I'm not really a fan of professional or college sports and don't normally look at the Sports page of the newspaper. But a recent New York Times piece about Liberty University's football program did catch my eye.

The Lynchburg, Va.-based university founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell has an ambitious agenda. As The Times put it, "[T]he plan is for college football - big-time,  always-on-television college football - to do for evangelical Christians in the 21st century what Notre Dame football did for Roman Catholics in the 20th."

There was a time when Rev. Samuel Rodriguez was one of the darlings Inside the Beltway.  He was one of the new moderate evangelicals who were said to be displacing the bad old Christian Right; ringing-in the end of the culture wars; and inaugurating a shining new era of common ground.

But it was not to be.

An article I did that originally ran at my personal blog on  Friday, November 9, detailing the story of Samuel Rodriguez and highlighting the many individuals and institutions that have worked with him, has received a quick and significant reply from the Rev. Derrick Harkins.

In the wake of Mitt Romney's defeat and the historically low support he received from Hispanics it is high time that attention be given not only to Karl Rove, but to "the Hispanic Karl Rove", the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez.

Like a lot of you, I got way too many political calls in the lead-up to the election. In fact, I stopped answering the phone.

I made an exception just days before Nov. 6 when my caller I.D. announced that Ralph Reed was calling. Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition and now head of the Faith & Freedom Coalition (FFC), is a longtime Religious Right hack, and I wanted to hear his spiel. I raced to the phone. (In case you're wondering, I have attended FFC conferences in the past, and that's why I'm on Reed's call list.)