Do not play with hellfire!
You may not know who Wiley Drake is, so first let’s send you over to the FFFF post celebrating his recent visit to the Fullerton City Council meeting to see how he is received:
(by Jan Flory’s Dog on May 19, 2012)
Not much you can add to that.
Jebus! Blood, frogs, gnats, flies, disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness…
(by Abel Salazar on May 19, 2012)
Amen, brother!!!
(by Fullerton Lover on May 19, 2012)
This is a guy that greets and hugs and cares for the homeless like lost relatives.
He’s definitely not afraid to speak his heart and doesn’t really care what you think of him afterwords.
God bless Wiley Drake.
(by Erin on May 19, 2012)
Pastor Drake is a true Warrior!
(by One for the books on May 19, 2012)
Yep, he’s a good guy!!
(by JP on May 19, 2012)
I love this guy. Crazy as all hell, but he’s cool.
(by Wrong Guy on May 19, 2012)
If THAT message to the city council and FPD doesn’t stick, it’s time for an Exorcism…
(by truthseeker on May 19, 2012)
Where are all the other pastors in this city? They apparently are far too concerned with managing their 501c3, their portfolios and expanding their client base. Wiley Drake doesnt need a 25 million dollar parking structure, or 35 million dollar new campus. He only needs the guts that God gave him, the heart for the homeless that he has wide open and a tattered old Bible. Revelation 21:8 puts the cowards first in line for the lake of fire. I guess all these other hireling coward preachers in our town never learned that in seminary.
(by JustUs on May 19, 2012)
Most of them probably don’t even believe in God. How could they by the way they behave? My guess is that they were laughing internally at Wiley’s little sermon. Face it. The Fullerton city government must be full of pagans. You would think the city employees would want to wash their hands of their scofflaw colleagues by having their own little protest and calling for the ouster of the scrofflaws. Do you hear anyone in Fullerton city government complaining about the cops? I don’t. Silence is complicity. Don’t ever forget that.
(by Rain on May 19, 2012)
This man, Wiley Drake has been a really good guy for a long time, active in our larger community. His actions and his words have always been very tough to live up to or to ignore (in my small experience or knowledge of them).
We are a fortunate city indeed. There are many excellent people living and/or working here.
All right! I think that we can tentatively conclude that the FFFF crowd loves them some Wiley Drake!
This post, put up by Tony Bushala himself unless he lent out his “admin” handle, fails to note some very basic things about Wiley Drake — the Fred “Westboro Baptist Church” Phelps of Southern California. He’s famous enough to have a detailed Wikipedia page (where you’ll find links to original articles on these points), so let’s start there:
#1 — He’s good on homeless issues.
I’ll grant him that. Of course, to eat the food you have to stay for the sermon — and the sermon is where this captive audience may experience a problem. Imagine being homeless and gay, and being told by society that if you want to eat you’re going to have to listen to the man described below.
#2 — He’s a bigot who hates homosexuality with the heat of a thousand Santorums.
Drake wrote the resolution at the Southern Baptist Covention in 1996 calling for a boycott of the Walt Disney Corporation over its decision to “promote homosexuality over family values,” by granting health benefits to gay and lesbian partners of employees. At that time, Drake described homosexuality as “abnormal, biologically unhealthy, as well as contrary to Bible teachings.” Drake later protested an unofficial “Gay Day” celebration held at Disneyland in 1998.
He also campaigned against the appointment of a gay man, former University of Chicago dean James Hormel, as ambassador to Luxembourg. “We need to speak out and say we do not want an avowed homosexual to represent the U.S,” Drake said in 1997.
#3 — He prayed for the death of people who tried to hold him accountable for flouting tax laws.
In early 2008, Drake, the pastor for the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, was a vocal supporter of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign. He sent out a letter personally endorsing Huckabee. Because the letter was on church stationery, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began investigating Drake for possibly endorsing a political candidate as a church leader; such electioneering by churches is forbidden as a condition for churches’ tax-exempt status.
Drake’s possible violation of federal tax law was reported to the IRS by an advocacy group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU). Drake called on supporters use imprecatory prayer to pray for the punishment and even deaths of certain AU members, drawing controversy.
In May 2008, Drake announced that he had been cleared of any wrongdoing by the IRS.
#4 — He celebrated the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller
Drake was widely criticized for his response to the murder of abortion provider George Tiller on May 31, 2009. Drake stated on his Crusade Radio Program, “I am glad George Tiller is dead.” He called Tiller “a brutal, murdering monster” and said he is “grateful to God” that the physician was killed. He also said, “This man, George Tiller, was far greater in his atrocities than Adolf Hitler.” Religion journalist Cary McMullen has written that, in the wake of Tiller’s death, Drake “has gone from being outspoken to being dangerously outspoken, perhaps criminally so.
#5 — He has publicly prayed for the death of President Barack Obama
On The Alan Colmes Show on June 2, 2009, Drake stated that he is engaging in imprecatory prayer, praying for God to kill President Barack Obama, who he claimed needed to “turn his life around.” In 2008 he was party to a lawsuit in federal court, Captain Pamela Barnett v. Barack Hussein Obama, which claimed that Barack Obama was not an American citizen and therefore ineligible to be President of the United States. Also in 2008 he said that God would punish Rick Warren for agreeing to give the benedictionat the inauguration of Obama, who he called an “evil illegal alien”. …
In response to Drake’s comments about Obama, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Sing Oldham stated: “Mr. Drake does not represent Southern Baptist actions, resolutions, or positions in his interpretation and application of imprecatory prayers. …Any comments made by Wiley Drake on this subject represent his personal views, not those of the Convention.”
For some reason, his Wikipedia page stops at 2009 — but I haven’t.
#6 — He’s a freaking leader of the “birther” movement
Wiley Drake has joined with uber-nutso birther and Senatorial candiate Orly Taitz to bring meritless lawsuits for the courts to declare that the President was not born in the U.S.
#7 — He just got arrested for refusing to leave the White House area
If you want the details, head over to the OC Weekly website, where they even smack the pastor with a bit of Jesus’ own words.
#8 — Not even the conservative Southern Baptist Convention can stand him.
Drake is a former vice president of the SBC who ran unsuccessfully for president of the SBC this year (receiving just 4 percent in a two-person race). He has been controversial in recent years for hisleadership in the so-called “birther” movement; Drake called Obama an “evil illegal alien.” Most infamously, Drake prayed for the death of President Obama if he does not “turn to God.” In 2008, he called for prayer to end the lives of leaders of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Perhaps as a response, the SBC passed a “civil public discourse” resolution that specifically objected to the “calling for prayers for the deaths of public officials.”
Yes, his own religious denomination had to explain to Wiley Drake that this was wrong.
There’s more, but I’ll stop there. There are two lessons I’ll draw from the fawning over Wiley Drake in the FFFF story.
The first problem I have with Drake is that he wants to enlist God — and thus God’s followers — in terrorism.
If Wiley Drake were praying silently in his room for God to kill Obama and no one knew he was doing it, then I wouldn’t care. His speaking to God would be his business — and God’s listening and responding would be God’s business.
If you whip people up into a frenzy and give them someone to hate, the chances is that some idiot or bastard is going to do something violent and terrible — and if people are afraid to participate in politics (or medicine) for fear that someone will do something violent or terrible to them, then our policies suffer as well. Drake’s view of God is as an entity that can be called upon to punish people with death for their political views. He wants to get his way in politics because he wants people to be afraid that God will strike them down. If prospective violence from God were the only problem, this would be disturbing but not all that dangerous. The problem is that followers get whipped up to consider themselves instruments of God and to do God’s bidding — as they did with Dr. George Tiller. And then Drake tells them, once they’ve committed murder, that they’ve done what God wants.
This is essentially the same thing for which we condemn the extremists in Al Qaeda and Hamas (and their counterparts in other religions.) “Kill this person who I tell you God wants you to kill and ye shall receive thy reward in Heaven.” The difference between Wiley Drake and a murderous cleric is that Drake does not arrange for people to have weapons; he just exhorts them in general that God wants someone to do this on their own. (Technically, he might say that he’s just calling for God to give someone a heart attack, but he knows damned well that some sad sack with a screw loose might take this as imploring him to fulfill God’s wishes. It’s the use of terror for political gain — and you don’t try to reason with or rationalize it, you condemn it.
There are good reasons why, in the interests of free speech, we can’t draw the line to make Drake directly liable for the murder of George Tiller in this way — even if he spent every day muttering out loud the equivalent of Henry II’s “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”, which led to the death of Thomas Becket. I appreciate that the law can’t do anything to Wiley Drake for blowing hot air on the tinder that may lead to a forest fire of political violence. I’m not asking for the law to intercede. I am asking for people to condemn it so that anyone listening to Wiley Drake knows that the rest of us are horrified by it — just as the Southern Baptist Conference itself was horrified by it.
At the very least, I am asking for people to have the decency NOT to embrace Wiley Drake in the terms that we see in comments to this article on FFFF. (Maybe people have been ignorant of his past — but surely someone there ought to have Googled him before now.) And that brings us to the second problem.
The embrace of Wiley Drake on FFFF shows the problem with single-issue politics.
I know, the FFFF creed is actually three issues, “justice for Kelly Thomas”; undoing the “illegal water tax”; and stopping public unions and doing something, though it’s not clear what, about public pensions. But without the Kelly Thomas killing there would be no successful recall, so even though I suspect that both Tony and his recall candidates care a lot more about public pensions, their power comes from their involvement with the criticism of the FPD — in which Drake has joined them.
That’s fine; despite the above, I don’t see Drake as a pure villain. Whatever the reason for his embrace of rights for the homeless, he’s basically on the right side of this issue. But should the man be celebrated, as opposed to merely acknowledged, for that? Hell no. The sort of celebration of Wiley Drake that I note above suggests either ignorance of his history, or agreement with it — or the opinion that nothing else but this single issue matters.
When you find yourself effusively praising someone with the track record of Wiley Drake, it’s time to search your own soul. I would not mind interviewing him, as Vern recently did, and acknowledging what he has done right — but failing to challenge him on his bigotry and imprecatory prayer is flat our wrong.
If FFFF won’t condemn him for his positions, I hope that other candidates will. You’ve read my doing so right here. Who will stand with me, against him, and risk people the target of a death prayer — or worse?
That you have to wonder whether doing so is safe tells you right there much of what is wrong with it.
How come you never link to my articles? I broke the news here, not long ago, of his Presidential run. (I know him from when we were both trying to help a mother get her kids back from CPS – he HATES CPS.)
http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2012/03/buena-park-birther-rev-wiley-drake-running-for-president/
I was going to put in a link there at the end where I mentioned your interview of him, but it was 4:15 a.m. by the time I finished this so instead I decided to drag myself to bed and collapse for a few hours. I didn’t expect you up by 7:30 a.m., man!
Sunday morning, man! I’m at work!
How I met Wiley – this mother who was trying to get her kids back – in retrospect, it’s probably just as well she didn’t – Wiley had been helping her fight CPS, and she reached out to me for help as well as the County’s premiere blogger…
Wiley came over and we sat on the front porch, and he said, “You gotta know something about me, Nelson, I’m an old-school fire-and-brimstone, homophobic Southern Baptist preacher.”
And I said, “Well you better know I’m a gay-loving agnostic socialist.” And he said, “Well okay then, let’s get to work!”
Every now and then in the ensuing months I’d say, “Still praying for people’s deaths, pastor?” He’s crazy as hell, but it’s hard to hate him once you know him.
I try not to hate people. I can imagine working on a given project with just about anyone. But I would never make the sorts of comments you read above about someone who is in essence either intentionally or recklessly working to rile people up enough to the point where they might kill someone “in the name of God” as a way of inflicting terror on the population.
It’s not the praying for death itself that bothers, it’s the doing so openly so that it becomes solicitation for violence.
I agree with you, Greg. That Vern is a super forgiving and tolerant guy is definitely virtuous, and it’s great he can find the humor in Wiley’s antics, but Wiley is a complete nutball and God only knows what goofiness his vitriol spawns in the kooks who believe in him. And as an aside, I’m very glad to see the editor’s change of heart about the CPS’ actions in that particular case because CPS absolutely did the right thing.
*Sacred Cows, Buddists, Nutso’s, Don’t Dance on Saturday, 73 Virgins, Southern Babtists, Chiristian Science, Scientologists, Mormons, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Wright, Methodists, Catholics, Protestants of all stripes, Quakers, Pennsylvania Dutch, Church of the Silver Surfer…….hey, they are all God’s Children. They all are trying their best to stand well in the light of a all powerful Supreme being. What little or great good they do is appreciated. Always has and always will. Look at all those Pilgrims busy burning people at the stake. Was that the Pilgrims? One of them…someone put people in stocks and beat their butts bloody…..in the name of God. The reality is that Wiley is doing his best to feed his family, keep a roof over his head and maintain a few good deeds at the days and years progress. God bless him and all of them.
Oh, gosh darn it! For a minute there I thought you were bringing out a new verse to “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
The reality is Wiley is riling people up towards extreme political violence against — and every person who cares about our society should condemn it. You don’t need to do that to feed your family and keep a roof over your head.
Dr. D., You don’t need to agree with Rev. Wiley….or despise him. Society needs to find a moral and ethical balance that says: Charismatic Figures are fine….but they are almost never alway right. They are just folks. Wiley can rile up whoever he wants. The folks that follow will have to be responsible enough for their actions….not to blame it on the times, the philosophy or the rhetoric. That is why they say: even a broken clock is right twice a day. Arguing point by point or simply throwing out the entire thought process is up to the individual who wants to follow ….the leader. Jim Jones, Koresh, even Father Divine….who believed that the allmighty dollar was the true God.
Who are the folks that follow the so-called false prophets? Who knows. Even these false bastions of morality offer those without guidance….something to follow. When they come a cropper of the law…….too bad….that was their choice and the reason why they can not fault others for any of their course of action.
Geez, is there ANY obnoxious attitude or action that you’d be willing to condemn?
Yes, running for office against one of his friends is considered contemptible.
*Now now friends and neighbors …just feeling quite neighborly and unfazed by those out there wiling to scream mice in a crowded church.
Save yourselves for the big guys that are really dangerous. How about Karl Rove? This guy is contemptible! How about Sean Hannity? This guy is pretty duplicitous! How about a wide majority of sleezy media muffins that know how to accuse everyone but haven’t got any answers except those allowed by Grover Norquist and Karl Rove.
Even our pal Dick Morris and Dennis Miller cannot tolerate the obnoxious lies their ministers want shouted in the Media Theatre. God bless them at least.
No, no ….you have plenty of blaggards out there. Just start shooting your darts at the major targets rather than the occasional week-end biker in leathers!
There is a quote from a play by Yeats that I think is especially relevant here: “..his character was isolated by a single deed”. First, as applied to Rev. Wiley, while he may occasionally say things people want to hear about homelessness or morality, his demagoguery and appeal to man’s basest fears and hatreds speaks volumes.
Second, while its easy to dismiss Wiley for what and who he is, what does the FFFF’s leadership’s willingness to use him as a resource say about they’re character? In typical fashion, I’m sure they’ll say they’re not responsible for someone who chooses to speak in front of the Council. But they can’t ignore his history of spewing hatred and twisting the Bible for his own purposes.
At exactly what point would FFFF’s leader’s say “Enough. We support the recall and [our version of] reform, but there are certain lines we will not cross just to get our way.” Or, to them, to ends always justify the means?
*Nioclib1 – we certainly have sympathy for your position. Sometimes the despicable attach themselves to worthy endeavors and it is sometimes hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Our advice: Just keep it simple: Do you support the recall? Yes or No? Do you have a preference for any of the candidates running to replace the Recalled folks? Yes or No? Do you support a national search for a new Fullerton Police Chief? Yes or No? OK, now that you have answered your own questions..don’t worry who supports your position…..just worry about those that don’t!
But hey…maybe we could be wrong!
Ron and Anna–I agree with you, at least in theory. But if you associate with people who throw mud long enough, some of it is bound to wind up on you. There’s an old saying that fanatics always eat their own. If the recall succeeds, (and I think it will on at least two of the Council members), who’s going to be the judge that the new Council, whoever may be on it, is moving fast enough or is ideologically pure enough for them? History has a lot to teach us about turning over government to ideologues: the French Revolution, England under Cromwell, right up to modern radial Islamic states. That may seem like hyperbole when we’re talking about a local election in a mid-sized suburban city, but the principle still holds true.
*nioclib1 – Having grown up a bit in Fullerton, we can tell you that moving that community to anything without the De Molay, The Rainbow Girls or the Masons and
Shriners……is truly amazing. We believe that setting the ship of state correctly through the Recall process and some fundamental reforms….will yeild a far better community than you have now. That was the prime reason we were upset with SQS wanting to run for Assembly. She needed to show leadership and work with Bruce Whitaker to stabilize the community at large and bring back belief in the system.
Recalls are certainly not without their negative possible outcomes, but when the current group in power is frozen in a timewarp…..you have to do something.
I grew up in and around Fullerton as well, and I’m painfully familiar with its politics. I guess my question is how one defines “reform”. I define it as a change for the better for the community as a whole. What I see from the FFFF is a set of ideology-based positions targeted at thier chosen enemies. What good will it do to do a national search for a new police chief if, as at least one FFFF-backed candidate has said, we should dismantle the police department and contract with the county? What good would it do if they push ahead their scheme to declare bankruptcy just to break the city’s employee agreements? No professional chief with an ounce of integrity would apply. The FFFF’s “we have to destroy it to save it” mentality is both self-serving and dangerous.
noclib1 – If the new folks want to go BK and pretend they are Scott Walker…..they better come out with that plan in advance of the election. If they don’t…..there may
be another Recall effort following the first one.
Everyone complains about Arnold….but that was a necessary Recall. Davis had let
Enron bury our State and no matter what happened after that….it was a good Recall in our opinion. If your new folks get it figured out……well,.sometimes you just have to hope! It will be very important for the citizens of Fullerton to stay engaged in the process AFTER the RECALL……to make sure those feet stay on the hot coals long enough to do the right things.
Wiley Drake is a psychopath at the very least. He has schizophrenic tendencies. His bible study person Will Ruffin is just as crazy and dangerous as Drake. They should both be institutionalized.