Hayes R-NC: Stability in Iraq depends on "spreading the message of Jesus Christ"

madfloridian

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Tue Aug-19-08 11:25 PM
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Hayes R-NC: Stability in Iraq depends on "spreading the message of Jesus Christ"

I had posted yesterday about General William Boykin, who is still on a crusade to save America.

When CNN ran its series �God�s Warriors� last year, one of the people featured prominently was Vision America�s Rick Scarborough. Since then, Scarborough has been struggling mightily to turn his 15 minutes of fame into a full on electoral movement via his �70 Weeks To Save America� campaign.

Despite the various setbacks Scarborough has encountered so far, he continues to plug along with his One Day Crusades and now is bringing in the big guns.

One of the "big guns" is General Boykin, who once said this about a Muslim fighter:

"My God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

Tonight I was doing a news search on Boykin, and I ran across this Huffington Post blog about Congressman Robin Hayes, Republican from NC.

Attention All "Evil-Doers": This Really is a Religious War

Another supporter of Boykin during his trials and tribulations as an evangelical general was Congressman Robin Hayes (R-NC): "I had congressmen calling me to offer private encouragement, including Robin Hayes of North Carolina. 'I'm standing with you, Jerry,' he told me. 'All you need to do is call me.'"

This brings us around to one of the current government officials I had intended to write about before getting sidetracked by Boykin's book.

Speaking at a Rotary Club meeting in his hometown of Concord, North Carolina in December 2006, Congressman Hayes pronounced that stability in Iraq ultimately depended on "spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. ...Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the Savior." Hayes's outrageous remarks, published in the Concord Standard and Mount Pleasant Times, were immediately reported on the blog BlueNC, and the story quickly spread through the blogosphere. A few days later, a spokeswoman for Hayes, although telling the Charlotte Observer she had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the quotes, added, "It's interesting how these bloggers can distort the news." Then, Dale Cline, the editor and publisher of the Concord Standard, who had been at the Rotary Club meeting, appeared on MSNBC, saying that Hayes had told him he was "talking more about spreading Christian principles than spreading Christianity itself," but that Hayes wasn't backpedalling and was probably comfortable with his initial words.

It's a very long post with a lot of things I had not heard. I did learn that a marine was "handing out Bible verse coins to residents of Fallujah -- an incident that required the intervention of a general to mollify the local religious leaders."

I would not have believed how far they had gone with this crusade idea, except we saw it first hand here. We were called unpatriotic by our church, and in 2003 many of our neighbors had look-alike yard signs given out by their churches that read "we support the president, we support the war."