HF Fanatics

Media coverage of environmental regulators makes them look like dispassionate scientists. But too often they are dangerous religious fanatics.

Years ago, when ranchers and farmers told me that our government’s environmental regulatory agencies had been captured by fanatics so hostile to the idea of private property that they’d use the endangered-species law to drive just about every landowner off his land, I thought they were overwrought. Then I learned the story of the lynx.

Friends, there comes a time for all rich, high-profile conservative Christian organizations — whether they be Focus on the Family, American Family Association or the Lord’s own place of worship, Landover Baptist Church — when they must listen carefully to the One Voice they always ultimately turn to for guidance in times of trouble. I am, of course, talking about expensive secular public relations consultants. And each of the focus groups we have marshaled (except for one full of yapping camel-jockeys in Islamabad) has been telling us we need to disassociate ourselves from a word we love and hold dear — “fundamentalist.”