Reading such an article as this in the NYTimes just has to make you scratch your head, and also realize to what extent someone there wants to discredit both those supporting the Governor of Wisconsin against the public employee unions and those whom it considers Right Wing Christians. As to the final quote by Julie Ingersoll about Augustine having any relevance here: Augustine was certainly known to many, many influential Christians over the course of more than a thousand years, and openly acknowledged as an influence. So there's a parallel here with….Gary North? The fact that she uses that argument itself should make one wonder about her ability to see connections rightly and argue without bias.
As someone who has a lot of sympathy for North’s views, I found the article to be a mass of assumptions. I guess you don’t have to demonstrate why views are crazy or nutty, you just assert that they are and the readers of the NY Times give you a pass. The intellectual laziness of the establishment is daily on display.
I homeschool and have never heard of “Christian economics.” And I think the only thing I would want to download would be from Thomas Sowell or Walter E Williams.
It’s truly odd that the article works from the headline “Voice of Gary North Heard in Antiunion Movement” to the admission toward the end, “The deeper one looks into the obsessions of Mr. North … the harder it is to spot his influence in Wisconsin.” It begins with an assertion that it not only fails to prove but ends up disavowing. Wouldn’t it have been more honest to kill the story when it proved to be untrue?
It appears to be a regurgitation of this blog post:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/julieingersoll/4279/is_wisconsin_union-busting_religiously_sanctioned/
With some comments from a Professor and an attempt to interview Dr. North that failed for good measure.
Is the NYT that hard up for copy? Or if someone shows up with any ol’ dirty stick to beat the religious right dog, they get a free pass? “Shallow” doesn’t even touch this.
I have long been amazed by the interest of mainstream media in the Christian reconstructionists. It certainly can’t be based on the influence of reconstructionism within the church, which is minimal. I think it makes good copy because it can be used to gin up a real nice theocratic scare.
So they found one more guy that nobody has heard of whose beliefs will now be credited to me. Wonderful. As if one had to be a Christian to be opposed to government unions, or support a gold based currency.