NEWS STORY: Democrats’ New Religious Outreach Director Quits Under Fire

c. 2004 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ After less than two weeks on the job, the Democratic Party’s first-ever director of religious outreach resigned on Wednesday (Aug. 4) after her public positions came under fire. The Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson said it was “no longer possible for me to do my job effectively” after the […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ After less than two weeks on the job, the Democratic Party’s first-ever director of religious outreach resigned on Wednesday (Aug. 4) after her public positions came under fire.

The Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson said it was “no longer possible for me to do my job effectively” after the New York-based Catholic League issued three blistering press releases attacking her positions.


“As of today I am resigning my position as the director of religious outreach because it is no longer possible for me to do my job effectively,” Peterson said in a statement to Religion News Service.

“I continue to believe, as do leading faith leaders across this country, that John Kerry should be the next president of the United States and that John Kerry’s values of opportunity, family and responsibility are America’s values.”

Peterson, who was hired by the Democratic National Committee on July 23, is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). She is also the former director of the Clergy Leadership Network, a fledgling platform for liberal clergy who opposed President Bush.

Reached Wednesday, she said she could not comment further on her resignation.

Calls to the Democratic National Committee, which had tried to ignore the controversy generated by the Catholic League, were not immediately returned.

The Catholic League blasted Peterson for a “friend of the court” brief she signed with 31 other clergy members that supported removing “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. He also criticized left-leaning positions on taxes and gay marriage taken by the Clergy Leadership Network.

“And this is the person the Democrats want to dispatch to meet the heads of religious organizations? Are they out of their minds? Would they hire a gay basher to reach out to homosexuals?” asked the league’s president, Bill Donohue, in a press release on Monday.

Donohue was also successful in muzzling Mara Vanderslice, who was hired to do religious outreach for the Kerry campaign. Donohue criticized Vanderslice as a “far left-wing activist who has spoken at rallies held by the notoriously anti-Catholic group, ACT UP.”


“Kerry needs to bring in a big broom and clean house,” Donohue said on Monday. He was unavailable for further comment.

Peterson was hired by the DNC to help mobilize “progressive” people of faith for Kerry and help shape public policy issues such as poverty, health care and the environment in religious and moral terms. One of her first duties was to hold a “People of Faith for Kerry” luncheon during last week’s Democratic convention in Boston.

“We plan to go all over the nation,” she told the PBS show, “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” last week. “We plan to have a religious Web page on the DNC site and to let people of faith be heard. To let them know that their voice can say, `We think the federal budget is a moral document. We think that there are issues in this campaign that have a theological underpinning.”’

DEA/JL END ECKSTROM

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