McCain Makes Nice With “Agents Of Intolerance”

He did so by addressing the ultra-secret, radical, Council for National Policy, the group founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye.

Sourcewatch has the LaHaye dossier including, among other things:

• In 1970, LaHaye created the notorious anti-evolution Institute for Creation Research (along with creationist Henry Miller) at the Christian Heritage College It was spun off as an independent think tank in 1981.
• In 1979, LaHaye co-founded the Moral Majority along with fellow conservative pastor Jerry Falwell.

Think Progress profiles the group, remembering some of its golden oldies:

-LaHaye once said that Catholicism is a “false religion” and called popes “antichrists.”

-(Free Congress founder Paul) Weyrich has claimed that CNP is a group of “radicals working to overturn the present power structure in this country.”

– A speaker received a standing ovation at one CNP meeting when he suggested that AIDS was a sign from God that homosexuality was an “abomination.”

Here’s some of the group’s history thanks to Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

Alongside figures like LaHaye and leaders of the anti-abortion movement, the nascent CNP also included Joseph Coors, the wealthy beer magnate; Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt, two billionaire investors and energy company executives known for their advocacy of right-wing causes, and William Cies, another wealthy businessman.

Interestingly, the Hunts, Cies and LaHaye all were affiliated with the John Birch Society, the conspiracy-obsessed anti-communist group founded in 1959. LaHaye had lectured and conducted training seminars frequently for the Society during the 1960s and ’70s a time when the group was known for its campaign against the civil rights movement.

Back in 2000, when McCain was the straight talk express-riding maverick, he was critical of the very groups he now has to appease:

Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.