That's how Bush press flack (formerly Fox News talking head) Tony Snow began his segment of the 2006 Values Voter Summit, the last major theocrat conference to be held before the '06 elections, which took place at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 22-24.

Gee; d'ya s'pose Tony would bring similar greetings if AVN asked him to speak at its Expo in January? Maybe not ...

But Snow wasn't the first speaker on the summit's afternoon agenda that Friday. That honor went to the three members of a panel, "Hollywood In The Heartland," which included author Don Feder ("A Jewish Conservative Looks At Pagan America"); Dr. Ted Baehr, publisher of the (Catholic) Movie Guide; and Rev. Tommy Tenney, whose movie One Night With The King – no, it's not porn; it's the biblical story of Esther who, according to the movie's publicist, "saves the Jewish nation from annihilation at the hands of its arch enemy while winning the heart of the fiercely handsome King Xerxes," which is scheduled to be released in mid-October.

Feder, who got to speak first because he had to be home before the start of Rosh Hashonah that evening, said he could sum up his talk in just a few words: "If you're a Christian, Hollywood hates you."  

"When I say 'hate,' ladies and gentlemen," he continued, "I'm not talking about vague contempt or mild disdain. I mean Hollywood hates you, the way Hamas hates Jews, the way George Clooney hates George W. Bush."

Of course, some might see a difference between Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization that was elected to run Israel's West Bank and Gaza Strip, and George Clooney, the star of Syriana and Good Night And Good Luck – but not this crowd.

Feder went on to cite a couple of recent instances of alleged anti-Christian bias – Rosie O'Donnell comparing "radical Islamists" to "radical Christians"; the fact that the dictatorship in V For Vendetta is composed of "not Muslims... not Marxists, but Christians" – and claimed that "Christians are regularly portrayed as fanatical, hypocritical, stupid, cowardly, avaricious, lustful, sadistic and/or buffoonish in a long line of feature films." Of course, so are Jews, Muslims, rednecks, cops, anti-war protesters and at least a dozen other identifiable subgroups ... but Feder was on a roll.

"What's more interesting than how Hollywood hates Christians is why Hollywood hates Christians," he continued. "It hates you, views you as the enemy, because you stand in the way of the Hollywood Left achieving all of its cherished agenda."

So ... all Christians are right-wingers? Good to know! (Of course, some in AVN's audience and elsewhere might dispute that ... but certainly no one at this convention!)

Yup; "Hollywood's religion – and it is a religion – is diametrically opposed to the Judeo-Christian ethic," Feder stated. "Hollywood's worldview contains the following doctrines: Sexual liberation; the glorification of premarital sex including adolescent experimentation; adultery; promiscuity; homosexuality; the sexualization of children – in other words, Hollywood wants all of us to live the way they live... Don't worry about tomorrow; your goal should be to maximize pleasure now."

See! There's not so much difference between Hollywood and the adult industry after all! Hell, any day now, they'll all be lining up to join the Free Speech Coalition!

Yup; any day now ...

Any ... day ... now ...

"The next tenet of Hollywood's religion: Radical secularism," Feder continued. "The belief that religious expression is dangerous and should be purged from our public lives; that the so-called mixing of politics and religion leads to a theocracy like Iran."  

That'll be by 2012, some figure, though optimists who aren't as familiar with people like yourself, Don, have put it at 2016.

But every preacher needs a big finish, and Don had one:  

"And finally, the normalization of homosexuality – the dogma that people are born homosexual or heterosexual and are absolutely unable to change; that all voluntary sexual activity is equally good, and that homosexual liaisons should be afforded the same recognition and respect as heterosexual marriage – and that to question this dogma is to condone violence against gays."  

See? And you thought he'd never get around to the purpose of the summit: Fanning the fear of same-sex marriage to drive fundamentalists to the polls in November to elect Republicans.

Tenney then spoke briefly about his movie, which features Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif and John Rhys-Davies in minor roles, showed a clip, and warned of Hollywood that, "Any battlefield we abandon, we lose by default."

No worries there; 20th Century Fox has inaugurated its FoxFaith division, which should do for feature films what Fox News has done for news programming. (Insert frowny face here.)

"Every week, more people go to church in the United States than go to movies," noted Dr. Ted Baehr. Trouble is, according to Baehr's own statistics, kids are spending more time with movies that with church, and as anyone here could tell you, that's a bad thing.

But there's hope:

"Hollywood loves money," Baehr revealed, "and they know where the money is, is in moral and Christian films, and moral films and Christian films do better throughout the world, not just in the United States. As a result of our statistical analysis, since 1991, there are many more moral films being made and there are many more Christian films... Hollywood is looking to survive, and is going through a freefall right now... Hollywood is just like the Soviet Union on the eve of collapse... Don't let them bamboozle you. Don't become a sheeple. Stand for the truth. You can make a difference and take every thought captive in Hollywood for Jesus Christ."

This, of course, was greeted with thunderous applause... but not quite as thunderous as when Tony Snow took the stage shortly afterwards.

"September 11, 2001, people in the United States who may not always have thought in terms of matters of faith or family, were reminded in one swift and horrible morning that evil exists in this world," Snow claimed. "One of the other things we learned about September 11, 2001 is that some of the evil people around the world have decided that Public Enemy #1 is the United States of America, in part because we are a nation bound by faith."

Hmmm... wasn't it Sam Harris who noted, in his book, "The End of Faith," that most wars over the past several centuries have been caused by clashes of religious faith? Good to know that Snow's president is keeping up with tradition!  

Snow also revealed that his president isn't someone who thinks much about the future.

"George W. Bush is not a man who's going to sit around thinking about his legacy," Snow assured. "He thinks about the job he has to do right now... He doesn't give a rip about polls."

Indeed!

Sen. George Allen also stopped by, repeating the homilies he's used for several weeks on his reelection campaign trail – he's for less taxation, for more healthcare and energy independence – and he assured the audience that, "Preserving our foundational values, ladies and gentlemen, is very important." He reserved the last part of his talk, however, for another bugaboo of religious conservatives: "Activist" judges.

"Where our values are under attack so often are from these unelected, appointed-for-life federal judges who ignore the values and the will of the people," he intoned.

Um, George? That's why they're unelected: So they won't be influenced by the whims of the electorate (aka Boobus Americanus) and can concentrate instead on upholding the law as given by the Constitution. It's called "checks and balances"; you may have heard of it.

But no; George has a problem with the Ninth Circuit upholding the lawsuit about taking "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance; with courts requiring the Boy Scouts not to discriminate against gays if they want to meet in public buildings; with judges striking down the late-term abortion laws; with the Supreme Court's abridgement of the Fifth Amendment's "taking" clause. (Actually, he's right about that last one.)

"My friends, this is why we need more men and women on the Supreme Court of the United States like John Roberts and Sam Alito," he announced. "They're to apply the law, not invent the law, and we must have judges who stop legislating from the bench... I firmly believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman."

Cue the thunderous applause.

A "political pundits" panel followed, featuring Kellyanne Conway, a fairly well-known right-wing pollster, and Charlie Cook, editor and publisher of The Cook Political Report, and moderated by Terry Jeffrey, the editor-in-chief of Human Events, the country's best-known reactionary magazine.  

Cook, the least ideological panelist, spent his minutes essentially explaining why the Democrats are likely to gain several congressional seats in the upcoming election – "It's a challenging environment for Republicans," as he put it, noting that the war in Iraq is "70% of the problem" – leaving it to Conway to attempt to soften the blow.  

"For 2006, Charlie's absolute right: The numbers are unbelievably poor for the party in power; nobody should be able to spin that for you," Conway said. "Does that end up being fatal to the prospects of the Republicans holding onto majorities in both houses? Not necessarily... But the people do know that 'conservative' is a more palatable word that 'Republican,' but 'liberal' is a less palatable word than 'Democrat,' so you often see it [in the media] being 'Republican and Democrat' instead of 'conservative and liberal.'"

Next up were two attorney generals, one former, Mark Earley of Virginia, and one current, Phill Kline of Kansas. Earley was apparently chosen because his organization, Prison Fellowship, was sued by Americans United (the good one) for having used tax money for evangelism in prisons in Iowa (they're appealing their loss), but it was Kline who really delivered what the crowd wanted.

"America ... stands for the recognition of the value of human dignity," Kline preached. "It is found in our nation's founding document that we hold these truths – not cultural preferences; not the tides of the times or whatever the proclivities of a people are – these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. The divine promise of America is that our government, with all its power, will not just be there for the powerful, but it will answer the call of the most vulnerable and the most innocent, especially when their fundamental rights are at risk."

Of course, that doesn't include gays, but it apparently also doesn't include minors who have sex, since Kline is currently in court trying to open kids' medical records on the basis that any minor female who can be shown to have had sex must have been raped.

"The ACLU is arguing that it violates the constitutional right of the privacy of a child for us to be able to obtain the medical evidence to take the child's rapist to court and prosecute them for child rape," he said. "As we stand here today, the ACLU is making the argument that a child has the inherent constitutional right to choose an adult sexual partner, and that state statutory rape laws are an unconstitutional violation of that child's privacy."

Um, Phill? You're from Kansas. Kids can legally marry at 15 in Kansas – and that only because the state found it couldn't prosecute a 14-year-old from Nebraska who'd skipped out of the family home to marry her 22-year-old boyfriend in Kansas, so the legislature decided it was time to set an actual "age of consent."  

Of course, what he's actually after are the records of minors' abortions, as a pretext for shutting down women's clinics. Federal law, y'see, prohibits federal funds – in this case, $227 million – from being granted to institutions that fail to report child rape, and what better evidence is there of a minor's rape than a pregnancy?

In case anyone had any doubts that the Values Voter Summit was a religious event, the next speaker was Bishop Wellington Boone, an Atlanta-based preacher with a major online presence. He's semi-famous for, among other things, having written an article titled, "The Rape of the Civil Rights Movement," subtitled, "How Sodomites Are Using Civil Rights Rhetoric To Advance Their Preference For Sexual Perversion."

"Gays have no right to redefine marriage or to pressure politicians to redefine it according to a definition that is contrary to God and His Word and the opposite of centuries of American jurisprudence," the article reads in part.

And Boone was in fine form here.

"I'm offended about the so-called gays, which you know is a misnomer, trying to get on the bandwagon of civil rights," he said. "You know that that should be an offense to every black person everywhere as though that that whole issue of gay so-called rights is the same issue as the civil rights that relates to black Americans... I'd hate to be in slavery for several hundred years and then having a war to be fought for the sake of the freedom, and then by 1877, going to an 1877 compromise, be thrown back into segregation, Jim Crow laws and a Voting Rights Act as late as 1965 – now you tell me that a gay has a right to get in on some of that?! Get outta here!"  

Boone also claimed to be quoting from several "founding documents," each of which had some religious test for holding office – and all of which would have been voided by the U.S. Constitution once it was ratified.

The day's penultimate event was a panel titled, "What Feminist Majority? American Women And The Values Agenda" – a panel which, of course, would not have existed but for women protesting and asserting themselves in all walks of life over the past 30 or so years, just so the three females on this panel could tell them how worthless their struggle had been.

"People are always telling women what they should want, especially the media," claimed panelist Myrna Blyth, former editor-in-chief of Ladies Home Journal. "And what happened over the years? Instead of seeing choices for women as opportunity, we began to hear in the '80s and '90s and still today that instead of opportunity, women are victimized by their choices... The notion that women are victims, seeing the world victim-first, is a very liberal point of view, and the women in charge of media, the 'spin sisters'... know each other, they agree with each other, and they have the terrible presumption to assume that they reflect the ideas and values of the women of America. Media tends to act, like Diane Feinstein, that they speak for the women of America, and if you're a woman in this country, you have to be a Democrat or liberal."

Of course, the people who are actually telling women that they're victims are the Dr. Lauras of the world, who want women to quit their jobs, stay home, raise babies and shut up.

Following that same line of thought, Citizens for Community Values honcho Jennifer Jarrow, who's pumped out nine (9) children so far, wanted to "take a little snapshot of where we're at after this 30-plus years of empty advocacy from the feminist movement."

"First, let me talk about a story that my niece told me just this year," she began. "She goes to Miami University, and she was talking about a friend of hers, and of course, all of us know that a lot of kids nowadays, they sleep together; they have multiple partners, and this girl had broken up with her boyfriend, and because she was bored, she had a fraternity president hitting on her and calling her up late at night, 'Oh, come on over, you know.' She went over; she had a relationship with him every couple of nights for two weeks, late at night, and then got back with her boyfriend. And then he called one night when the boyfriend was there, and she said, 'You know, I forgot to tell you, I got back with my boyfriend.' He started to scream in the phone to her: 'Did you tell him we did this and we did that and we did this?' And as she's retelling the story to my niece, she stops and she says, 'And at the end, he said, "You're nothing but a cheap whore!"' And then she stopped and she said, 'Oh my gosh, I am a whore!' And the reality hit her, that all she has been doing is sleeping around with boys at college in-between having a boyfriend. That is what we can thank the feminist movement for: Telling our daughters that sex is a plaything outside of marriage."

Hate to break it to you, Jen, but one of the hard-earned lessons of feminism is that women can make many of the same choices about their sexuality that men can – and oddly, you don't brand either of the guys who fucked this woman as a "whore," even though they were just as promiscuous as she was; why is that?

Jarrow also doesn't like women in the military, co-ed dorms or sperm banks – and guess what: They're also "products of the feminist movement"! And don't get her started on gay adoption!

"We have news for Rosie O'Donnell: The ultimate child abuse is placing a child in a gay home, where they have not two parents but two selfish individuals who are in it for their own parenting experience," Jarrow claimed.  

Yeah; "selfish" gays are just lining up to adopt unwanted kids or patronize sperm banks just so they can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars clothing, feeding and educating the little monsters because it's so much fun and/or to have a trophy to show off to their friends! Right!

"I'm representing the single female professional working woman who is also pro-marriage, pro-man and pro-family," began Jennifer Marshall, late of the Family Research Council. "The messages about casual sex have hurt women above all. Sixty-seven percent of young people who have engaged in sexual activity at a young age tell us they regret it, but the number is even higher among young women; it's 77% for young girls who engage in sexual activity early. The rate of depression is three times higher among young women who engage in early sexual activity. So this idea of safe sex really damages women emotionally and also physically, with all the STDs to which young women are prey."

Two-thirds of young people – male and female! – regret fucking??? Get serious! Is there anybody outside of this summit and its supporters who'd believe such horseshit?

Friday's final speaker was L. Brent Bozell, III, head of Media Research Center, one of the main "news" sources for right-wing fundamentalists. They played the music from the NBC Nightly News as he walked in, and he had a few choice things to say about that network – none of them complimentary.

"Let's talk about Madonna," he began. "Some of you may know she's on tour again. She has what she calls her Confessions tour. In her Confessions tour, as some of you know, she begins the concert by appearing on the stage mounted on a cross with a crown of thorns, mimicking, mocking the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It's a worldwide hit, what she's doing. Unfortunately, she's had $400 million worth of ticket sales worldwide. She began her concert, by the way, one half mile from the Vatican, on purpose. NBC – remembering the soundtrack – NBC thinks this is a wonderful idea, and so they've now announced that they're going to do a two-hour special next month with this concert on national television, on your public broadcast airwaves. Now, some people thought, well, maybe this is wrong, and we ought not to be doing something that insults 85% of the American public. Well, NBC executive Kevin Reilly responded; he said, 'Madonna felt that this part of the concert was the cornerstone of the show. We viewed it and we didn't see it as being inappropriate.' Now, in the wake of outpourings of outrage, led by the likes of the American Family Association, the Catholic League and others, NBC now suddenly is rethinking their position. Now they're saying, and this is just as of yesterday, that it is awaiting the delivery of the special, and 'once we see it in its entirety, we can make a final decision.' Which begs the question, how long does it take to make a decision as to whether or not it is or isn't appropriate to mock Jesus Christ? But anyway, they've got to look at it. I do too."

A couple of points: The phrase "public broadcast airwaves" puts one in mind of the public broadcasting system, PBS. In fact, NBC is advertiser supported, and rest assured, if NBC's advertisers find the programming offensive, they won't buy ads during it and NBC will lose money. That's the marketplace in action; something these conservatives are usually in favor of. Secondly, almost all TVs have a little gadget called an "on/off switch" and another little gadget called a "channel selector," and anybody who doesn't want to watch Madonna on her cross with her crown of thorns can employ either of those gadgets to avoid so watching.

Bozell – Keith Olbermann aptly calls him "Bozo the Clown" – was also upset about NBC's purchase of the religiously-oriented Veggie Tales cartoon series for Saturday morning broadcast. What irks Bozell is that NBC, in some misguided attempt at ecumenism, ordered the Bible verses that begin and end each episode snipped, as well as all references to "God" and "the Bible," allegedly for time constraints, but in fact because it didn't want to offend viewers who weren't Christians.

Bozell had a few more gripes – the New York Times' reporting on the Pope's recent slur against Islam; the premier episode of NBC's "Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip," which referred to an anti-Christian comedy skit – but to Bozell, those are only symptoms of the real problem.

"It's easy to say that this is secular moral relativism run amok," Bozell said, referring to the controversy about the Pope, "that this is a media that doesn't believe in transcendent truth; that for them, there are no absolutes; for them, there is no right, there is no wrong, there is no true good and there is no true evil. But I don't think that's altogether true, and it's simply – and I don't mean to suggest that it applies to everyone in the press. They do have a moral code, but it's a rather interesting moral code. They do believe that George Bush is evil. They do despise conservatives. They do have a disdain for Christianity. On the NBC series "Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip," Christianity a couple of weeks ago was defined as 'a psycho-religious cult,' and they have a special disdain for conservative Christians. And then there are, in my case, there are Catholics, and boy are we in their gunsights. But what do we Christians believe? We believe there are truths. We believe there are absolutes. We believe there's right. We believe there's wrong. We believe there's good and we believe there's evil, and therefore, if we do that, we must understand that if we ever want to regain the popular culture, if we want to restore a sense of moral clarity in this troubled world that is in front of us, we have to confront the press. We have to document, we have to expose, we have to confront and we have to control it... I don't understand why some of my conservative brethren have such a hard time understanding this and have such a hard time standing up for simple beliefs and simple truths, because if we can't stand for those beliefs, if we can't take a stand and say to a network, and say to a reporter, 'You will not insult my religion any longer; you will not insult my God any longer,' why do we bother with anything else? What else is important? Tax cuts aren't important; spending isn't important if we can't defend God."  

As expected, that got a big round of applause from the audience – you know, from the same people that you'll find picketing your video store or dance club next weekend.

And to a large extent, that's what this "summit" was all about: "Defending God" by controlling you – and they intend to use the government to do it.

Pretty good first day, eh? Wait'll you read what they were up to on Saturday!

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