New York Times Columnist Pooh-Poohs His Own Story

The conference, titled “Preparing This Generation to Capture the Future,” was organized by the Powder Springs, Georgia-based American Vision, a Christian Reconstructionist think tank and publishing house founded in 1978 and headed by Gary DeMar. The event was sponsored, which is to say, bankrolled by such major organizations as the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal strategy organization which was created by top evangelical broadcasters including James Dobson (Focus on the Family political honcho Tom Minnery is on the board ; Liberty University School of Law (where Newt Gingrich recent gave the commencement address), Home School Legal Defense Association, Summit Ministries and World magazine, edited by former Bush adviser Marvin Olasky. Time was, when leaders of the religious right, including the Falwell empire, were afraid to too publicly associate with Reconstructionists like American Vision honcho Gary DeMar and Gary North. But apparently, the days of worrying about associating with overt advocates of Biblical theocracy are over.

Jeremy Leaming reported in Church & State magazine:

The event was promoted heavily by the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, and it was held in a facility owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination and a religious body closely aligned with the Bush administration.

For his part, Gary North writes at LewRockwell.com that when Oppenheimer got him on the line at his unlisted phone number, he refused to talk to him. North was concerned about the risks of “selective quotation.”

I choose not to give interviews, except on rare occasions…

If he has some published quotations from me, he can cite them. They are public. They are for citing. But the “phone interview” game I will not tolerate. I would have no record of what I said. The reader has no way to be sure I said it. The writer will not run the article by me to make sure that I approve.

He said he would say I refused to talk. Fair enough. I surely did.

He had to invade my privacy to get even that much out of me. He has the ethics of a telemarketer, but without the respect for sales.

The Times is slowly going bankrupt. Print media are dying. The Times is flailing around, desperately trying to find a revenue model that will work. It won’t find it.

I can’t speak to the relative fortunes of the Times’ business model. And in fairness, Oppenheimer by addressing it at all, has flagged as an important matter the role of Christian Reconstructionism and how it relates to the wider politics and economics of the Religious Right and of the Tea Party — even though his journalism got shaky with a little too much ‘on the one hand, but on the other hand’, hesitancy.

[Crossposted from Talk to Action]

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