Does this tornado look gay?<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fadilfb/2146255462/sizes/z/in/photostream/">Fadil Basymeleh</a>/Flickr
Earlier this week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced his leadership team for the “Presidency 5” straw poll in Florida, scheduled for October. Although most of the other major candidates have decided to skip the event, Perry is hoping a strong showing there will give him a boost ahead of the state’s important early primary. So what’s his strategy for voter outreach? It looks a lot like The Response, the prayer and fasting festival he organized in August at a football stadium in Houston.
Take, for instance, his new co-chair: Pam Olsen, founder of the Tallahassee House of Prayer (dubbed the “prayer lady” in her home state for reasons that should be self-evident) and a leading anti-abortion activist in the state. As Right Wing Watch notes, though, Olsen also believes that gay marriage, and its increasing acceptance among American Christians, is causing destructive natural disasters across the country. Here’s what she said back in July:
God is shaking. If anybody looks at the news and has just seen what’s been happening recently with the floods, the fires, the tornadoes, God is shaking. Yeah I think you have God shaking, sure you have the Enemy shaking, you have both and I don’t want to say oh that’s the judgment of God or that’s the Enemy. But the reality is God is judging us, and I think it’s going to get worse.
It’s somewhat unclear why Texas, whose governor supports criminalizing gay sex, would be punished with raging wildfires for having too high a tolerance for gay rights. But Olsen’s view is wholly consistent with Perry’s other allies on the religious right. The Response, you’ll recall, featured a number of controversial pastors who believed that, among other things, 9/11 was God’s way of punishing America for tolerating homosexuality and the blackbirds that died suddenly in Arkansas last winter were a harbinger of the End Times.