For once, I actually find some interesting comments at Dakota War College. In his ongoing effort to avoid discussing the disaster in the White House caused by his Republican President, Pat Powers has been giving ink to the turmoil at the head of South Dakota’s Talibanification squad. Family Heritage Alliance has apparently driven its exec Dale Bartscher to resign and seek “new career opportunities.” FHA apparently sought to reshuffle its leadership positions and offered Bartscher a demotion to “Director of Community Relations” while increasing the duties of FHA deputies Ed Randazzo, John Dennis, and Norman Woods. Powers brands an FHA e-mail to members explaining the leadership change as “damage control.”
Among the anonymi in the comment section, Troy Jones offers these observations about FHA’s strange abandonment of what outwardly seemed to be Bartscher’s effective management of the organization:
1). Any reader of the email can see they proposed a demotion. Not taking a demotion isn’t an expression of egoism.
2). Most people I know worth a whit do not take demotions but move on. If they are truly surprised, they are naive. If they are just saying they are surprised, they are not being honest which is not a good first move, especially for a faith based group.
3). The whole “inefficiency and inequity” discussion is bizarre. And when read in context of #1 and #2 above, it really can take one to making an unflattering conclusion of what has occurred.
Whether one agreed or not with FHA, FHA pricked everyone’s conscience by forcing us to ask one three-part questions: am I doing the right thing, for the right reason and in the right way so it glorifies my Lord.
Reading this doesn’t give me much confidence FHA will cause me to ask or think too much about anything [Troy Jones, comment, under Pat Powers, “Family Heritage Alliance Feels They Have Some ‘Splainin to Do After Dale Bartscher Departure,” Dakota War College, 2017.05.18].
FHA’s newly promoted Ed Randazzo responds after midnight:
Call it damage control, if you wish, Pat. Director of Communications John Dennis and I penned the e-mail of earlier today to provide more detail regarding the reorganization of Family Heritage Alliance/FHA Action.
We celebrate the faithful loyal service of Dale Bartscher. We are grateful for the time, energy, effort and skills of the man the Boards of Directors chose to lead in the infancy of this ministry. The sheer enormity of time given, time away from family, the hours, the miles, the e-mails, the phone calls, the study, the planning, the execution, the relationships cultivated and more forged the foundation for this remarkable ministry.
It is incredible but also unsustainable.
Do you think the Boards of Directors so naive and out of touch that they don’t realize that public face that Dale provided was a great part of what moved our agenda forward in Pierre? Do you think that might have been a factor in making several attempts to retain him?
The decision to leave was Dale’s. We can all speculate about his motives. But we are not engaging in damage control, we are simply offering the truth.
We now move forward not with fear or doubt but with excitement and trust. Soon we will have a Director of Community Relations and the team will move forward to advance our King’s agenda [Ed Randazzo, comment, DWC, 2017.05.19].
FHA gets enormous, incredible effort from its exec and asks him to do less? Hmm… if Bartscher was willing to keep making that effort, I don’t see how that effort was “unsustainable.”
But hey, FHA, don’t let me stand in the way of your management decisions. We all know how having many cooks makes better broth.
Yes, you would think that the Republican press release blog would be in non-stop bragging mode now that they have a president of their party and control of congress. But not a word is ever said there about their own party’s president. It’s the strangest thing. It’s like they can’t find even one good thing to say about Trump. Not even one good thing, so they pretend he doesn’t exist.
Rorschach, devout Ronald Reagan worshipers follow his 11th Commandment to a tee.
If you haven’t read it, Al Franken pens a good visualization of how the FHA works in “Supply Side Jesus”: http://imgur.com/gallery/bCqRp
I like the link, crossgrain. Captures the prosperity gospel pretty well.
“God wants you to buy me a $50 million jet.” Creflo Dollar
“I saw a 900 foot Jesus who said he will call me home if you don’t send me X million dollars by x date.” Oral Roberts.
“Ooh. I like it like that.” Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart.
Good find crossgrain. Reminds me a bit of “Life of Brian” – muchas gracias!
Mr. Randazzo – Do you think starting sentences with Do you think has about run it’s course of pop sentence structure?
Just some anti-gay organization, not of that much importance. I’m assuming in anti-gay So Dakota they must have some clout, Cory?
Earth to Troy Jones- Fewer than one in four Americans (24%) now believe the Bible is “the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word,” similar to the 26% who view it as “a book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.” This is the first time in Gallup’s four-decade trend that biblical literalism has not surpassed biblical skepticism.
Ed Randazzo laid out what appears to be “our King’s agenda” in his May 18, 2017 RC Journal editorial. They are “pro” many things and “anti” many other things, but the part I found interesting includes”
One problem with this statement, however, is one of the “lord’s” commands to Moses in the book of Numbers. Moses is told by the “lord” that when a husband suspects his wife of infidelity he is to take his wife to a priest. The priest is then directed to prepare “bitter water that brings a curse” from holy water and dirt from the floor of the tabernacle. The woman must take an oath and drink the bitter water. If she has been unfaithful the bitter water will cause her to miscarry her fetus (at a fairly late stage in development, given the “swollen belly” in the passages) and become forever sterile.
It must be disconcerting to Bible believing anti-choice folks like Ed to discover that the “lord” of the Bible not only fails to condemn abortion as wrong, but apparently requires unfaithful married women to have forced abortions. It is one thing to have folks stone a woman to death for her adultery (which apparently is okay with anti-choice folks), but quite another to make her drink an abortifacient.
Numbers 5:11-31 (NIV) describes this so-called “Test for an Unfaithful Wife” and “the law of jealousy.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+5%3A11-31
Jenny, yes, FHA seems to have lots of influence. They certainly have lots of presence, with Dale and multiple lobbyists in Pierre to testify on every culture-war bill and keep legislators in the proper Taliban frame of mind. They also host lots of events, especially in Rapid City, keeping up their public presence and recruiting supporters who want to talk about Jesus instead of real practical policy.
FHA’s focus seems to be much more on getting into heaven and lording their moral superiority over the rest of us than on dealing with the far more numerous practical needs of governing a state.