(Via Donklephant) American Baptist Press has this interesting article on a Baptist pastor running for office:
Pastor and politician Kerry Horn has been called an agent of Satan. He has faced country farmers trembling with rage. And his faith has been questioned by members of his own congregation. And that’s just the reaction of his “Christian” constituents.[...]
Horn’s situation is interesting, to say the least. Horn, 48, is running for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives in the fall 2006 election. The fact he also is pastor of First Baptist Church of Covington, Texas, makes potential voters perk up their ears. The fact he is running as a Democrat in the deeply Republican region leaves some voters confused and others downright distressed.
After Horn’s announcement that he’d run on a Democratic ticket, he said, several locals at a community meeting got worried — and mad. One burly fellow couldn’t see any reason why a self-respecting Baptist pastor would ever associate with Democrats, let alone join the party. “I thought he was going to hit me,” Horn said.[...]
[T]he race between Horn and Pitts is shaping up as a David-versus-Goliath clash, with Horn playing David against a party he used to promote. No matter, Horn said. Back then, he considered himself a “Rockefeller Republican,” in a time when “a conservative Democrat was more conservative than a Republican.”
“When I was there, we took great pride in our independence,” Horn said. “Washington didn’t call the shots. We took great pride in our ability to pull together for the good of Texas.”
Horn said he eventually left Austin in 1990, when he could no longer “emotionally support the issues.”
“The attitude then became very negative,” Horn said. “The Moral Majority was neither moral nor a majority. No political party can claim moral superiority over the other as long as it’s made up of the same fallen people.”[...]
More challenging, at least in the minds of some critics, is how Horn reconciles his position as a pastor with some parts of the Democratic platform traditionally shunned by Baptists, such as abortion rights. Horn said he is not bound to all parts of the national Democratic agenda.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “I’ve learned that I care more about people than I do about catering to powerbrokers. As a pastor, I try to make sure the opportunity for the choice of abortion to be moot; I preach that sex outside of the bonds of marriage is wrong, no matter if you’re gay or straight.”[...]
He has little patience for Christians whose political opinions are focused on certain hot-button moral issues. “Here you get enraged about abortion and homosexual action, but you wink and nod at adultery,” Horn said. “Don’t give me this holier-than-thou business when you dismiss other sins.”
While I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that I disagree with the guy on certain social issues, this seems like the kind of politician I could respect. It’s quite a bit easier to accept the leadership of someone whom you disagree with when they’re at least not a hypocrite.