South DaCola gives us two good reasons to root against Republican insider Paul TenHaken in the Sioux Falls mayoral runoff. First, his church is using his candidacy as an opportunity to challenge the separation of church and state… or maybe just to pay TenHaken back for his big donation to the church in 2016:
As you can see, Paul’s charity organization, TenFold (Dutch Mafia) gave a substantial amount of money in 2016 to his church. Of course at that time, he hadn’t announced he was running for mayor, even though there was rumors about it. FULL IRS DOC: Church-IRS-2016 [Scott Ehrisman, “Is It OK for a Church to Endorse Paul TenHaken for Mayor?” South DaCola, 2018.04.15]
Money or not, it’s not o.k. for a church to endorse a political candidate. A church’s first obligation is to the entire congregation, not to the political aspirations of one member of the congregation. To endorse a candidate, to put a church’s name behind a candidate’s campaign, is to unnecessarily alienate members of the church who support the candidate’s opponents.
Second, TenHaken has the explicit backing of his friends in the Minnehaha County Republican Party, who are putting their name behind explicit attack e-mails against TenHaken’s opponent, Jolene Loetscher, accusing the businesswoman of “seeking a liberal social and anti-business agenda”:
I would agree, there is STARK differences. But Loetscher is anything but anti-business, and certainly NOT a socialist. The statement in itself if almost laughable. Anybody who had 8 jobs to work themselves through college, graduating TOP of her class is hardly a socialist, if anything that is the true definition of someone who supports free enterprise [Scott Ehrisman, “Minnehaha County Republicans Already Trying to Smear Loetscher’s Business Experience,” South DaCola, 2018.04.15].
Maybe Loetscher should hope the SDGOP chairman himself, Dan Lederman, intervenes in the Sioux Falls mayoral race. The state party chairman invested heavily in Watertown mayor Steve Thorson’s reëlection bid, and Watertown voters rejected that partisan intrusion and picked female challenger Sarah Caron instead. Go ahead, Republicans: keep talking up TenHaken….
The GOP helped Greg Jamison in 2014, when he ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Mike Huether, and that sure helped, didn’t it? ;-)
There is a reason why Sioux Falls mayoral races are non partisan, but sadly the Minnehaha County Republican Party apparently just does not get it….
No. The members of the church and the clergy and every other person involved ought to have political opinions and participate in political discussions and educate themselves. BUT, not as part of church services, nor as a church. Never.