Via David Corn at Mother Jones, Alaska Republican Senate candidate (and tea party favorite and free press abuser) Joe Miller had on his campaign payroll one Terry Moffitt, a radical Christian conservative activist from North Carolina. Campaign disclosures say nothing about what kind of “consulting services” the Miller campaign paid Moffitt $2,500 for, and nobody was telling Corn, who details Moffitt’s extreme anti-gay views, and his lambasting of Republicans who were insufficiently anti-gay.
Miller might well have hired Moffitt for his homophobic expertise, but there’s other activism that Moffitt and his Family Policy Network have been involved in: opposition to Islam. In 2002, Moffitt, along with others represented by the American Family Association’s legal eagles sued the University of North Carolina over its inclusion of Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, on a summer reading list for incoming freshmen. Carl Ernst, professor of Islamic Studies at UNC, in explaining why he advised selection of the book, said, “This book presents the Koran the way it is studied by beginners who approach it.” Of the inclusion of the book as summer reading, the school’s Chancellor, added, “thousands of Carolina students are better prepared to enter this University, they are better citizens for it.”
Ah, but being better informed citizens was actually anathema for Moffitt and his genius friends who apparently saw this as a threat to Christianity. At the time, Moffitt told the PBS program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly that the assignment of this academic text constituted proselytizing and “I don’t think that Islam is a religion of peace.”
Did Miller — who has called unemployment benefits and federal minimum wage laws unconstitutional and claims to be a constitutional purist — pay Moffitt for his constitutional, uh, expertise? In the lawsuit against UNC, Moffitt and his co-plaintiffs alleged that the assignment of the Sells text violated both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment — charging that UNC, a public institution, was not only unconstitutionally promoting Islam by assigning the text but inhibiting non-Muslims’ practice of their own religions. Both claims were dismissed in 2004.
