#1245: Dave Welch

Dave Welch is an extremist pastor, committed theocrat, and founder and executive director of the U.S. Pastor’s Council (it is unclear to what extent it qualifies as a “group”). For some reason (in fact not very surprisingly) he has also been given the opportunity to write occasional columns for the WND, an opportunity he has used for instance to provide massive “evidence” that Obama is really an atheist, meaning that Welch disagrees with him on political issues (interestingly on the same day as that column appeared another columnist, Pat Boone, claimed to have irrefutable evidence that Obama was a Muslim. That’s WND for you.) The incident also sums up Welch’s approach to politics – any policy he disagrees with violates the Constitution and is despotism and an attack on him freedom, and shows that the people who agrees with it (and thus disagree with him) are evil.

Welch has accordingly accused President Obama of being an “enemy” of Christianity and the United States, arguing that pastors who acknowledge President Obama’s Christian faith are “much like the clergy of Hitlerian Germany and the ‘Positive Christianity’ that represented complete acquiescence to and control by the Nazi state.” In 2010 he called Obama, Pelosi and Reid “the Fourth Reich.” And seems to think that the assertion counted as an argument.

When Rick Perry announced his 2011 prayer rally, Welch was quick to insist that the event be limited to Christians only (in the name of religious freedom, of course), characterizing the alternative as a “polytheistic approach and […] interfaith event that requires Christians to squelch the mention of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Nor does he fancy gay rights. Gay people, according to Welch, constitute a “morally depraved special interest group,” and he was one of the wingnuts who warned of a “gay takeover” of Houston’s City Hall if the openly gay Annise Parker were elected mayor in 2009. That she was, in fact, elected (a sign of America’s “Cancer of the Soul”) he later used as evidence for the claim that Houston is a “sin-sick city.” Allowing gays to serve openly in the military is, furthermore, treason, and in 2010 Welch called a federal judge a “domestic enemy” for ruling that DADT was unconstitutional, concluding that “[w]e give Muslim radicals free reign, prosecute Marines and SEALs for doing their job, suppress religious expression – if it happens to be Christian – and now give destructive sexual behavior a promotion.” Welch seems rather unaware that Muslim radicals actually agree with him regarding gay equality, but his mind apparently has a hard time processing the fact that “I don’t like liberals” and “I don’t like Muslims” do not entail “liberals = Muslims”. To see how bad it would be to repeal DADT we should apparently look at what radical gay activists have done to our school children. And the polls suggesting that military members do not feel threatened by the homosexuals they know about, are duly dismissed with “I have yet to talk to a member of the military who agrees with that assessment,” for which there may be explanations that are consistent with the accuracy of said polls.

He has, on the other hand, praised Tim LaHaye as “one of the greatest pastors of all time.” Indeed, Welch seems to stand by the claims of fraudulent “ex-terrorist” Kamal Saleem, despite the fact that the ex-terrorist status of the latter is obviously spurious, even inviting him to Texas to give his testimony of how Jesus saved him from being a terrorist.

Welch is also a staunch creationist, claiming that clergy who accept the science of evolution are “no more a Christian than the chimpanzees from which he or she claims to have evolved.” And for Dave Welch, everything fits nicely into a single picture: “The direct linkage between Marx and Darwin is indisputable,” and “[a]s that jihad progressed through the 1900s, the assaults on free markets, private property and traditional morality were completed by Alfred Kinsey as he helped launch the sexual revolution of the ’60s …,” leading inevitably to “[t]he militant commitment of the Marxist/Democratic Party of 2011 America to radical sexual diversity,” which “is at its core driven by a hate for God’s created order,” at which time Obama claimed to be “‘evolving’ in his views on the definition of marriage.” In other words, “here is the trail of tears: Darwin to Marx to Kinsey to Obama.” Yes, Welch’s powers of reasoning are … unusual. Here he chimes in on the work on the Texas Board of Education, advocating theocracy in the process. “The reality,” says Welch (using terms he apparently doesn’t understand) “is that our struggle against spiritual, moral, cultural and political decline,” exemplified by the anti-Christian First Amendment, and the teaching of evolution and ban on mandatory prayers in public schools, “is simply the latest chapter in the war begun when Lucifer rebelled against God.”

Diagnosis: Completely insance Taliban theocrat, engaged in a zealous and Orwellian fight against all the things he professes to support, such as liberty, freedom of religion and common decency.