Ed Humes’ Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America’s Soul is now out in paperback and californiaauthors.com is holding a drawing to celebrate. Two lucky winners will get an autographed copy of Humes’ critically acclaimed book on the Dover, PA creationism case. Visit CaliforniaAuthors.com for details. Drawing ends on Friday, February 22.

The Washington Post review called it “gripping.” From the WP:

In 2004, when the Dover, Penn., school board voted to require biology classes to use a supplemental textbook that promoted the theory of intelligent design rather than evolution, the conflict that erupted was about far more than semantics. As Edward Humes describes in this lively and thoughtful book, Dover — like Dayton, Tenn., during the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” — became a proving ground for clashing beliefs about the origins of life and constitutional questions about the separation of church and state.

Learn more about Monkey Girl at edwardhumes.com or at the DYD bookstore.

Big bull evangelical James Dobson tells the rabid-right-o-sphere that he’d rather not vote than to vote for John McCain. In a statement released to the Laura Ingraham show, Dobson says:

But what a sad and melancholy decision this is for me and many other conservatives. Should John McCain capture the nomination as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime. I certainly can’t vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama based on their virulently anti-family policy positions. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life.

Dobson cites McCain’s devilish record on stem cell research, his position on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and his foul mouthed ways as reasons for his decision. Read more and hear Ingraham read the statement at Talking Points Memo.

When South Korea’s president-elect was mayor of Seoul, he said the city was a holy place governed by God. He’s been associated with Korean evangelicals who pray at their monster rallies for the destruction of all Buddhist temples in Korea. The mega-church he attends is chock full of other government officials. Read more at the Asia Times.

God in the White House — a new book from religious historian, episcopal priest and editor-at-large of Chrisitanity Today, Randall Balmer — explores the history and the consequences of the “religionization” of the presidency from John F Kennedy through George W. Bush. From an excerpt offered at npr.org:

… [E]xamples suggest that the quest for moral rectitude in presidential candidates may be chimerical. The candidates’ declarations of faith over the past several decades provide a fairly poor indicator of how they govern. Even the record of the two redeemer presidents of the past half century, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, is mixed. Carter actually sought to govern according to his moral lights and in fidelity to the principles of decency, honor, and fair play that he articulated on the campaign trail; the American voters resoundingly repudiated him when he ran for a second term.

Bush sought the presidency on a platform of morality and Christian virtues. Yet his policies in the first decade of the twenty-first century reflected those values only dimly, if at all. Perhaps it’s time to shift our attention away from the candidates and toward the electorate. What is it we expect from our presidents? Do we look for charisma and political skills, experience in foreign and domestic policy, and administrative competence? Or do we demand that candidates for the White House pass some sort of catechetical test? It’s not an either-or proposition, of course, but the record of the last four decades of the twentieth century suggests that we’ve moved toward the latter and away from the former.

But at what cost?…

Read the complete excerpt, “Cheap Grace: Piety and the Presidency” at npr.org.

Randall Balmer is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.

CNN: American Academy of Religion is noodling the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Politico: Dean says Jews can go to heaven.

Newsweek: No communion or Presidency for Giuliani say Catholic Bishops.

Mitt Romeny — whose religion accounts for just 2 percent of the US population — says there will be no Muslims in his cabinet, according to an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, because “based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified.” Read more at the CSM.

Of course now that he’s being called on it, Romney is in full denial mode. But talkingpointsmemo’s Josh Marshall explains it all to us (4 mins 30 secs):

Bill Keller tells his followers Romney’s Mormonism will cause Americans to end up in hell, says Salon. Here’s an excerpt:

A vote for Romney is a vote for Satan,” Keller declared in his daily e-mail devotional last May. His reasoning went like this: Romney’s election would serve as a giant advertisement for a competing religion, Mormonism, which Keller and others believe has falsely portrayed itself as another form of Christianity in an effort to find converts. “He would influence people to seek out the Mormon faith,” Keller predicted of a Romney presidency. “They would get sucked into those lies and they would eventually die and go to hell.”

Read more. [thx boingboing and Val]

Also: Orrin Hatch urges Romney to give the “Mormon Speech,” says god-o-meter.

More pandering trouble for Obama. From Earl Offari Hutchinson at the Huffington Post:

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama ripped a page straight from the Bush campaign playbook with his announced upcoming three date barnstorm tour through South Carolina with notorious gay basher, gospel singer Donnie McClurkin. The Grammy winning black gospel singer’s last effort on the political scene was his song and shill for Bush’s reelection at the Republican National Convention in 2004. Obama has hitched his string to McClurkin’s high flying gay bash kite in part out of religious belief (he purports to be somewhat of an evangelical), in bigger part because he’s falling further and further behind Hillary Clinton with the black vote in South Carolina and everywhere else, and in the biggest part of all because he hopes that what worked for Bush’s reelection will work for him.

Read more here.

The well-conceived Politifact.com calls Mike Huckabee on his claim that a majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were “clergy.” In fact, only one of 56 was a clergyman. From Politifact: “We’d like to give Huckabee every benefit of the doubt, but even if you consider former clergymen among the signers the best you could come up with is four. Out of 56. That’s not “most,” that’s Pants-on-Fire wrong.” Read more.

BTW: Politifact is a cool and useful site from the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, dedicated to a factual analysis of presidential candidates’ statements and ads. Learn more about it and its nifty truth-o-meter here and check it often. [Thanks Val and TPM]

The FRC Christian Right Summit Straw Poll Results as reported by the AP. The question: Which is the following candidates for president would you be most likely to vote for?

From the Associated Press:

“There are many who will seek our support,” he [Mr. Huckabee] said. “But let me say it’s important that people sing from their hearts and don’t merely lip-sync the lyrics of our songs.

The language of Zion is a mother tongue and not merely a recently acquired second language.”

And I thought the Republicans were the ones who wanted English to be the official language of the United States.

From the New York Times comes this quote from Mitt Romney’s speech to right-wing Christian activists at the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Summit”:

I want to make sure my attorney general defends the free exercise of religion in this country. The effort to establish an anti-religion in America, the anti-religion of secularism, has got to come to an end. We are a nation under God, and we do place our trust in Him.”

And P.S. Showing good old Christian Right-Wing political values, the Romney campaign is urging supporters to stack the “Values Summit” straw poll. Read the story at the Baltimore Sun.

P.P.S. The odious Bob Jones III, chancellor of the odious fundamentalist Bob Jones University — yes that’s the BJ-U that’s infamous for its anti-Catholic rhetoric and ban on interracial dating — says Romney is the man for the job. Read more at the god-o-meter.

This weekend’s Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Summit” promises to be a real wince-o-matic source of telling quotes. Friday’s best/worst comes from Fred Thompson:

People ask me, ‘What would you do in the first 100 days in office?’ I don’t really know. But I’ve said to my wife that I know what I’d do in the first hour: Go into the [oval] office and pray for the wisdom to know what the right thing to do was.” [thanks god-o-meter]

It seems to me that in this one quote he pretty much sums up all the reasons not to vote for him: He doesn’t “really know” what it is he will do as president and he’s going to ask Zeus for an answer. Scary.

Also interesting: When Wolf Blitzer asks FRC prez Tony Perkins if Mormonism is a Christian religion, he replied: “Well, I mean clearly it’s different than the Christian faith. It is not a brand of evangelicalism, it is not a brand of the Christian faith. It is a different faith altogether.”

Take them to court. From the The Christian Science Monitor covering the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and its primary cause — shining light on and stopping Dominionist Christian proselytization in the armed forces:

At Speicher base in Iraq, US Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.

Months earlier, Hall charges, he had been publicly berated by a staff sergeant for not agreeing to join in a Thanksgiving Day prayer.

On Sept. 17, the soldier and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed suit against Army Maj. Freddy Welborn and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, charging violations of Hall’s constitutional rights, including being forced to submit to a religious test to qualify as a soldier.

Read more at CSM.

Dan Rather covers the same subject on his hd.net show. Click here to see the show at hd.net.

Click here to see nonbelieving soldier Jeremy Hall’s court filing.