Brent Bozell has shown he has no problem using his Media Research Center to advance his personal political agenda — which currently involves attacking CPAC for briefly inviting an atheist group to take part in its annual conservative confab. Now Bozell is using his “news” division, CNSNews.com, to hammer home his animus toward CPAC.
A Feb. 27 CNS article by Barbara Hollingsworth and Michael Chapman features a CPAC board member criticizing the since-rescinded invitation to American Atheists, and trying to get other CPAC board members and sponsors to answer whether CPAC “should insist on an official policy guideline making it clear that groups that are openly hostile to any one of the four major pillars of conservative thought–including traditional values–will not be allowed to participate in future CPACs.” The authors couldn’t be bothered to contact American Atheists for a comment.
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey also did his boss’ bidding with a blog post quoting William Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” and declaring:
There are Americans today, holding themselves up as conservatives, who argue that one can be both an atheist and a conservative. This is absurd.
[…]
There is a God, He made us and all things, and His immutable moral laws apply to all men, in all nations, at all times. These fundamental truths–recognition of which is not confined to any particular religious denomination–were embraced by our Founding Fathers. A social and legal order consistent with these fundamental truths is at the very heart of what modern conservatives seek to conserve.Must the modern Conservative Movement be a classroom in which young Americans can be schooled in how to fight and defeat the forces of atheism so manifestly gaining ground in our society today? Of course.
Jeffrey didn’t mention the CPAC controversy, but he didn’t have to.