Photo: Quist for Congress

Republican congressional candidate Allen Quist’s ideas about education are anything but conventional: a school curriculum he wrote concludes that humans and dinosaurs likely co-existed, uses the Vikings to disprove global warming, and says God is the source of all law. But on Phyllis Schlafly’s radio program this weekend, Quist’s criticisms were reserved for liberals, who, he says, want to rewrite the Constitution “start to finish” and establish a “worldwide education system” that teaches, among other topics, “global warming nonsense.”

Schlafly and Quist, who’s seeking the Republican nomination to face off with U.S. Rep. Tim Walz in the First Congressional District, railed against education standards that include “internationalism” and favorable views of the United Nations. During the hourlong program, the pair blamed liberals for imposing education standards they see as an attempt to undermine the Constitution in the minds of students.

“It’s so disturbing… these bad liberal ideas,” said Schlafly. “About how they want to rewrite the Constitution. Liberals don’t like the Constitution, really. They would like to rewrite it according to their ideology.”

“You are absolutely correct they want to rewrite it from start to finish,” Quist responded. “That’s right.”

(It’s not the first time Quist has targeted liberals. In January, he said that terrorism “is not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals” like President Barack Obama and Tim Walz.)

“We are looking at the globalist agenda in terms of how it is going to run a worldwide education system,” he said. “If the student believes in all the global warming nonsense and the pantheist view of the environment and so on… If the student has swallowed all that left-wing propaganda, they are going to be at an advantage” in standardized testing.

“The tests have been corrupted and the textbooks have been corrupted and we need to get back to a knowledge based pro-American system and we’ve got a lot of work to do to get there,” said Quist.

Quist and his organization, Edwatch, say they have the answer to the left-wing agenda: a curriculum of its own. Quist’s curriculum consists of modules called C-Mods, which are “designed to supplement and/or correct current textbooks.” (Quist’s curriculum experience was sought out last year by Texas State Board of Education chair Don McElroy, who wanted him to be on the state’s panel of experts; the rest of the board rejected Quist’s inclusion.)

In Unit Two of Quist’s curriculum, “Exciting New Discoveries in Ancient History, Archeology, and Geography,” he asks, “Did dinosaurs and people live at the same time, and why do so many recently discovered ancient art works accurately picture dinosaurs?” The answer, according to Quist is: “Substantial evidence is emerging which suggests that peoples [sic] and dinosaurs actually lived at the same time.”

A discussion question for students: “How should we interpret the numerous references in ancient literature to dinosaurs (called “dragons” before 1850 AD), and what are the creatures described in Job chapters 40-41?”

In a section on “Vikings in Greenland,” Quist makes the case that accepted science on global warming is false, using the Viking expeditions as evidence.

The curriculum says that “individual rights to life and liberty were a part of the natural law created by God” and that “Our forefathers recognized that the fundamental human rights, such as life, liberty and property, are not granted by government; they have been granted by God. The role of government, then, is to protect these God-given rights.”

The $350-a-seat ($500 with Glenn Beck) dinner will be on Feb. 4. The conference will include a slew of workshops including one presented by Bachmann: “Fundamentals of a Good Education to Keep Us Free and Strong.”

Among the presentations are Brigitte Gabriel’s “Islamic Infiltration of America’s Educational System,” Rick Santorum’s “How to rid your TV of ALL Sexual programs and advertisements,” and Dr. Jerry Newcomb’s “Endowed by our Creator: The Role of God in America.”

From the registration website (registration required):

WHAT MAKES AMERICA WORK?

GLENN BECK will be our Friday night speaker, and we will travel by bus to the Chaifetz Arena with a box dinner – all this is included in your registration fee! The arena holds 11,000, so this will be quite exciting as GLENN addresses our theme of WHAT MAKES AMERICA WORK!

EPC 21 opens this year with dinner on Thursday, February 4, 2010, at 6:30 p.m. You won’t want to miss our keynote speaker, MICHAEL MEDVED, who is a conservative political commentator, film critic, author, and radio program host of the eighth-most-listened-to talk show in the country.

In addition to the list of speakers previously provided, we have added: DAVID HOROWITZ, author of “Radical Son,” “Rules for Revolution,” and “One Party Classroom.” CONGRESSWOMAN MICHELE BACHMANN, a regular on FOX, “Fundamentals to Keep us Free.” SENATOR RICK SANTORUM, who will connect the dots between Radical Islam and Pro-Abortionists. KAREN ENGLAND, California’s Mandated (no opt-out) Homosexual Lessons. DR. PATRICK FAGAN, Family Research Council, on the Research on Homosexuality and Family. DR. WILLIAM FORSTCHEN, author of “One Second After” and “To Try Men’s Souls” (with Newt Gingrich)

Tickets for the GLENN BECK Rally on Friday have gone on sale to the public through an independent sales office. Since we anticipate an early sellout, Friday seating for EPC attendees will be reserved in the order that the EPC registrations are received. In addition to the opportunity to hear GLENN BECK, there will be a separate reception/dinner before the rally for those who wish to meet him in person.

Allen Quist. Photo: YouTube

Former state legislator Allen Quist has announced his campaign to challenge Rep. Tim Walz in Minnesota’s First Congressional district. A once-outspoken figurehead of the conservative Christian movement, he’s now promising a retooled campaign that will focus more on “Tea Party” issues than on social issues targeted by the religious right. But during the last few months, he had been working closely with some of the religious right’s top leaders as he’s done throughout much of his 27-year political career.

In November, Quist told MinnPost that he his campaign will focus less on concerns like opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion this time around. “[T]he issues that are the top priorities have changed,” said Quist. “Politics is always a moving target.”

Religious right connections

If there’s an effort to put some distance between Quist and religious-right issues, his close and continuing ties to religious right causes and leaders may hinder his progress. The Quist campaign hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment regarding those ties.

“I recommend all information that Eagle Forum publishes, which is superb,” Quist said on Phyllis Schlafly’s radio program on Oct. 17 of this year. Schlafly, known as the grandmother of the religious right, wrote the foreword to Quist’s 2002 book, “Fed Ed: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced.”

In August, Quist appeared on the radio program of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, an anti-gay, anti-pornography group tied to the American Family Association.

As recently as 2003, Quist spoke at a “Ten Commandments Rally” with U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, then a state senator, and Minnesota Family Council president Tim Prichard protesting the unlawfulness of posting religious scriptures on government property.

Currently, he’s a speaker for Lutherans for Life, an anti-abortion group, where his expertise is listed as creationism.

And on Friday, Quist was on James Dobson’s Family News on Focus, sharing the air with a representative of the Minnesota Family Council, discussing marriage and the health reform bill being debated in the U.S. Senate.

Quist’s church, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, holds some controversial views, including the belief that women should be subservient to men. The ELS’ website states that, since 1990, its official teaching includes: “The purpose of the wife’s submitting to her husband and of the woman’s being submissive within the Christian congregation is also to carry out a beautiful plan, viz., the establishment of a marriage that not only lasts but is also a wonderful harmony, and the establishment of an orderly and harmonious fellowship within the congregation.”

Quist caught quite a bit of flak for a similar statement made to the Twin Cities Reader in 1994: “The fact then that traditionally you do have situations where the husband has been recognized as the head of the home is probably a natural thing, probably based in genetics, just like everything else is.”

Christian values in government

Quist was elected to the Minnesota House in 1982 just as the religious right was gaining influence in the Republican party. He told the Washington Post in 1985, “I don’t know how to gauge it, but I can say this: At the last [Republican] convention, the Christian right was able to do virtually anything it wanted to.”

He gained some fame in the late 1980s, as a state legislator, for bold conservative stances. In the 1988 legislative session, he racked up a cumulative 30 hours on the House floor speaking about sex. He railed against what he he saw as the evils of homosexuality and sex education in the schools. He tried to get a counseling center for gays and lesbians at Mankato State University shut down. “He alleged that Mankato State University was encouraging the spread of AIDS by sponsoring a counseling center for gays, comparing it to a center for the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote the Star Tribune’s Dane Smith in 1994.

When that failed, Quist entered an adult bookstore in Mankato looking to see if anyone was engaged in sexual activity in order to have it shut down.

Quist says he takes a literal interpretation of the Bible. He told Smith in 1994 that the Earth was created “over a very short period of time” and that God plays “an active role in intervening in human history.”

He has also written a number of books. In “The Abortion Revolution,” Quist said, “Can there be any doubt that all on-demand abortions are first-degree murder? … Because abortion is a genuine evil (except when used to save the mother’s life), it must be legally restrained.”

“If our nation would return to Christian ethical codes, the abortion revolution would come to an end and many of the other evils mentioned would be largely restrained as well” and “no improper mixing of church and state occurs when Christian ethics are followed by the state,” he wrote.

Quist versus Carlson

In the 1990s, Quist challenged and eventually won the Republican Party’s endorsement for governor over GOP incumbent Arnie Carlson. Quist felt Carlson was be too liberal on religious right issues — particularly gay rights and abortion. Dubbed “Quistian” by the media, he generated headlines cross-country as newspapers touted him as a religious right candidate who stood up to moderation within the Republican party.

Quist told the Star Tribune at the time that among the campaign issues that spurred him to challenge his fellow Republican was, “The teaching of family values in schools, including chastity for unmarried people.”

In 1994, during the height of media attention on Quist, he told CNN, “Religious people are looking for a voice, and without me, they have no voice in Minnesota.”

Quist went after his opponent with an attack mailer in the summer of 1994 saying — incorrectly — that Carlson supports “abortion on demand, even through the ninth month of pregnancy” and that he was “supporting homosexual marriages.”

Landing the GOP endorsement over a sitting Republican governor sparked a media frenzy rivaling those by fellow conservative Christian Michele Bachmann today, including stories in the New York Times and CNN. But it wasn’t enough to unseat Carlson, who trounced Quist in the primary.

Running again

Quist’s statement about retooling his campaign to emphasize Tea Party issues may be a calculated maneuver. But earlier in his career he said politics isn’t his strongest suit. In the 1994 Star Tribune profile on him and his family, Dane Smith reported that legislators who worked with Quist in the capitol said he was “something of a loner in the Legislature, preferring to socialize with lobbyists and activists who opposed abortion rather than with his colleagues. He did little to build the personal contacts and rapport that is crucial to enactment of legislation.”

“He agrees that his character was not well-suited to the back-slapping and tending to the narrow needs of a legislative district,” Smith continued.

Quist agreed with that assessment. “I’m much more at home running for statewide office,” he said. “I was never that interested in parochial issues, in bringing home the bacon.”

Bachmann was hanging out with Schlafly this weekend at the Freedom Center’s “Restoration Weekend.”

Schlafly’s full email to supporters:

Please join me in thanking conservative leader Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) for responding to the call of duty by organizing the courageous “House Call” on Congress!

Dear Friend of Eagle Forum,

I urge you to thank our good friend Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) for courageously calling for a national “House Call” on Congress after liberal House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put ObamaCare on the “fast track” for a vote two weeks ago. The “House Call” rally was a tremendous success, with more than 10,000 Americans traveling from across the nation to the Capitol steps to protest a government take-over of our health care industry.

“This is our liberty and tyranny moment. This is it,” announced Rep. Bachmann on FoxNews Channel’s Hannity as Pelosi’s staff worked behind closed doors on the disastrous 1,900+ page bill prior to the vote.

House Republicans drafted over one hundred amendments to ObamaCare, but the Democrat majority refused to allow any significant public debate or up-or-down floor vote on these common-sense suggestions. Michele certainly had it right when she said, “This is gangster government at its worst!”

Now the Democrats are attacking Congressman Bachmann for her efforts to speak the truth about ObamaCare.

Eagle Forum asks you to take a few moments to contact Congresswoman Bachmann and thank her for her efforts to protect our medical care freedom and for her courage in rallying Americans from all across the nation at such a critical time. We need more Representatives like Michele Bachmann, and right now more than ever, we need to stand with her through all the vicious attacks being directed her way from the Left for daring to protect our freedom from big government.

Here’s a look at some of the personalities Bachmann will hobnob with in St. Louis on Sept. 25 and 26.

Last week, Rick Scarborough of Vision America gave listeners on his radio show a preview or what to expect at the conference.

“There’s always a political component to revival,” he said. “If we fell on our face at that conference and said ‘Oh God, send revival and let it start with me… with the training we receive. Then [we] go back and recruit hundreds of people like us. By next spring, the spring of 2010, we can turn out the infidels, we can help people like Michele Bachmann return to Congress.”

“God does his best work right after a crucifixion,” said Scarborough. He said that Christians felt crucified during this last election especially “with Obama controlling so much of the resources, with him stealing from the American people.”

But Scarborough is not the only outspoken rightwinger at the conference.

Don Feder, communications director of the World Congress of Families, an organization which hosts anti-LBGT events around the world, is listed as an organizer of the conference. He waited two days after the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy before maligning the statesman. “Known as the ‘liberal lion of the Senate,’ Edward M. Kennedy was a fitting symbol for his creed – intellectually flabby, detached from reality, arrogant, self-righteous, hypocritical and, ultimately, useless.”

No stranger to controversy, Feder was lambasted by Latino groups for speaking out against the right of Puerto Ricans to vote for statehood. “But don’t Americans have the same right — the right not to be saddled with an impoverished, crime-ridden island of non-English speakers as our 51st state? It’s hard to imagine a worse candidate for admission to the Union than this Caribbean Dogpatch.”

Sharing the stage with Bachmann will be Janet Porter of the religious right group Faith2Action. Her latest fear is that the Obama administration will force H1N1 vaccinations on citizens, carting off those who refuse to internment camps. She’s made friends within the “birther” movement for her frequent articles calling for an investigation of President Obama because she doesn’t think he’s a citizen.

“The media bought it. The voters bought it. And now some in Congress are resisting the idea of congressional hearings because they believe that Barack Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ has been posted online,” she wrote in WorldNetDaily, a rightwing news service. “What if an imposter from another country ran for the presidency and won? What if the media blocked any news of his birthplace and citizenship?”

WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah is also a rightwing conspiracy theorist whose website encouraged readers to send letters to Obama on his birthday inquiring about his place of birth — all for the low price of $6.95. Farah is an organizer of the event as well.

Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel, also a conference organizer, made headlines when his group threatened to sue a school library for violating the separation of church and state for awarding children who finished Harry Potter novels with a “Hogwarts’ Certificate of Accomplishment.”

“We believe that witchcraft is a religion and the certificate of witchcraft endorsed a particular religion in violation of the First Amendment establishment clause,” Staver said of the threatened lawsuit.

Rounding out the religious right speakers at the conference is octogenarian religious right gadfly Phyllis Schlafly, who has spent the last 30 years fighting the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional amendment that sprang out of the Women’s Suffrage movement in the 1920s to guarantee equal rights under the law regardless of sex.

On the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on social issues in the 20th Century, Schlafly wrote: “Out went the Ten Commandments, in came condoms. Out went the Cross and pictures of Christ, in came drawings of apes pretending to walk like humans. Out went Adam and Eve, in came Heather Has Two Mommies. Out went Easter, in came Earth Day. Out went teachings against homosexuality, in came teachings in favor of homosexuality.”

Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum is reported to have said in 1996, “Many years ago Christian pioneers had to fight savage Indians. Today missionaries of these former cultures are being sent via the public schools to heathenize our children.”

Schlafly is the lead organizer of the conference and shared the stage with Bachmann several times before, including last year at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. In a webinar to supporters two weeks ago, she said, “This is the most important conference we have ever put on. Our country is in greater danger than ever before.”

But changed to what? Is he cozying up to the Republican base, as opposed to Minnesota voters who trend to the center, now that his Senate bid seems to be winding down? Angling for a party job?

Three-hundred-year-old religious right gadfly Phyllis Schlafly organized a “Life of the Party” party on Tuesday for pro-life delegates and politicians. The event was rife with bitter disappointments for the crowd, however. First delegates were met at the door by protesters from Code Pink, who heckled pro-lifers for their support of the war. Then they learned that the gala’s planned headliner, Gov. Sarah Palin, had canceled the night before and was being replaced by right-wing talk radio star Laura Ingraham. Schlafly was not amused.

“I think this is clearly somebody in the McCain campaign who doesn’t understand where the votes are coming from,” Schlafly told ABC News. “They only told me this at 10 o’clock last night and it was a call from somebody down-the-line in the McCain campaign.”

Backed by a Dixieland quartet, Schlafly kicked off the party at 2 pm and was greeted by two protesters who jumped on stage. Undeterred, she carried on with a program that ended with testimonials on behalf of Palin. from Rep. Michele Bachmann (“One thing we know is that with our Founding Father, it has always been cool to be pro-life.”) and religious right leader Gary Bauer, who offered what was perhaps the most ringing Christian endorsement of any out-of-wedlock pregnancy since that of Jesus’ mother: “In the last several days,” he intoned, “Gov. Palin’s family have taught the American people more about what it means to be a faith-based family that believes in the sanctity of life than anything the politicians could do in Washington DC.”

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann: a meeting of the, uh, minds.

Michele Bachmann will be a featured guest at the “The Life of the Party Party,” a reception honoring Alaska Governor Sarah Palin during next week’s Republican National Convention. The event is sponsored by anti-feminist and Bachmann financier Phyllis Schlafly and the Republican National Coalition for Life.

Bachmann will be joined by two of her other pals from the religious right— prominent anti-gay crusader Gary Bauer and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. The Palin soiree is September 2 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Crowne Plaza Hotel downtown St. Paul. Tickets are $95.
Governor Palin has been considered a rising star in the Republican Party. However, a recently developing political scandal could tarnish her political future. She’s been accused of pressuring the state’s public safety commissioner to fire a state trooper who was involved in a messy divorce with Palin’s sister, and then firing the public safety commissioner when he refused to fire the trooper. A legislative investigation has been launched to look into the matter.

Perkins, who was a featured speaker at one of Bachmann’s anti-gay rallies on the state capitol steps in 2005, has been linked= to the white supremacist group Council of Concerned Citizens and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

Like Bachmann, Gary Bauer has made a career out of bashing public education and gays and trying to inject religion into every avenue of public life. He ran for president in 2000 but like so many other moralists on the Christian right, was dogged by rumors of infidelity.

Schlafly, the event’s co-sponsor, has been a heavy contributor to Bachmann’s campaigns through her Eagle Forum PAC–$13,500 since 2005.

The Republican National Coalition for Life gave Bachmann $5,000 in her 2006 campaign.

Minnesota Independent has more on Schlafly, Perkins and Bauer here.

Although Bachmann’s name doesn’t appear on the event’s web page, an RNC delegate from Washington enthusiastically noted it in her blog this month.

Bachmann will also address the RNC September 1, the same day Bush and Cheney take to the podium, and plans to visit the Minnesota State Fair during the convention with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. And in keeping with her perfect record of avoiding public meetings in the 6^th congressional district that she represents, Bachmann is hosting a reception for members of Congress at an undisclosed location in the district.

Karl Bremer can be reached at saintcroix@aol.com