Extreme Evangelicals: Why Isn't Bush Spending All His Time Promoting Hatred and Division?

My heart bleeds. It really does. Well, no, not really. While I appreciate there are still people troubled by the idea of "sanctioning" homosexuality, it strikes me as insincere and an effort to make fear and hate dominate the dialog. Evangelicals have much greater concerns than whether gays can marry.

From Bloomberg with a link provided by the ever-industrious Buzzflash:

Phil Burress, who helped President George W. Bush win the battleground state of Ohio last November by leading the charge among religious groups to pass a gay- marriage ban, isn't pleased with the president's focus on Social Security.

``How come he's not stumping across America defending marriage?'' said Burress, 63, an evangelical Christian and president of Citizens for Community Values in Ohio. ``Marriage is a whole lot more important than Social Security.''

Burress's dissatisfaction illustrates one of the hurdles Bush confronts by putting at the top of his second-term agenda the effort to overhaul the Social Security program and let younger workers invest their payroll taxes in private accounts.

Voters who identify themselves as conservative Christians were a crucial part of the coalition that gave Bush a second term and Republicans a bigger majority in Congress. Some evangelical leaders, though not all, now express dismay with both Bush's priorities and his Social Security proposal, which they say could hurt their predominantly working class constituency.

``We're wising up to the fact that we're very important nine months before an election and we're not very important nine days after that election,'' said Don Wildmon, 67, an ordained minister who is chairman of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Mississippi.

There is ``a lot of disappointment'' among those who voted for Bush expecting him to make his primary focus in a second term a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and other social values issues, Wildmon said.