Truett, Truett, Graham, Dobson and Huckabee

This is an open letter to Mike Huckabee in regard the recent brouhaha over Chic Fil A. I plan to email this link to Huckabee at Fox News as he tours the state August 3rd two days after his and Billy Graham's national ChicFilA Day August One.
   I plan to eat some Waffle Fries that day in support of Chic Fil A. I sat beside CFA CEO Dan Cathy in religion class at Furman the fall of 71; and I think they do a tremendous amount of good work. Their Character education, Win Shape Scholarship programs. And Marilynne Robinson the Pulitzer prize winner endorses their idea of respecting the Sabbath.
    Truett Cathy; CFA founder and Dan's father, was named for George W. Truett, the greatest Baptist of the first half of the 20th Century. I accepted Jesus as my Saviour at the church in Hayesville, N.C., Truett's birthplace, named for him.
    But Cathy, father and son, have strayed from the legacy of George Truett on church state matters. They are major supporters of James Dobson, according to Aaron Weaver, a Georgia native and PHD candidate at Baylor. As such they fall in the camp of David Barton and the Alliance Defending Freedom--see other blogs at this site. They are outside the best of the Baptist tradition and respect for liberal arts education.
    Jeff Rogers in a collection What Really Matters--Smyth and Helwys-- has spoken eloquently to that legacy. And Truett Cathy should know better from his tenure as a trustee of Mercer University, where on occasion he demonstrated some statesmanship standing against the fundamentalists assault on former Mercer President  Kirby Godsey.
  
     And Graham family friend Ginny Brant, daughter of Nixon's southern strategist Harry Dent--has spoken of her family's adoration of Buck Hatch. Surely the Graham and Cathy and Dent family's could spend a weekend with Buck's son Nathan, the president of Wake Forest University to talk about George Truett, James Dobson and David Barton.
     Sexual politics aside, Truett and Dan are giving too many mixxed signals. They could use a long remedial weekend with Mercer President Underwood, Giberson and Stephens of the book The Anointed; even Rachel Held Evans of Dayton Tn--home of the Scopes Monkey Trial--to discuss her work Evolving in Monkeytown.
     In Many areas CFA has a good track record. But their fog in regard Barton and Dobson needs some defogging. Where do they stand, for instance, in the chaos that is now Shorter College in Rome Georgia--see Save Our Shorter.
   And in Alabama, where Dan and I think his brother Bubba are Samford grads, how do they come down on the debacle Deacon Gov Bentley has created with his dimbulb APTV board appointees.
   Will also be interesting to see how current Samford President Westmoreland, longtime friend of Huckabee navigates the questions raised by Giberson and Stephen, and Evans. Mercer President Underwood's testimony is a matter of record in a 2004 Mother Jones article when Baylor was underfire from outliers of Dobson and Barton, and the likes of Shorter's Nelson Price and the dimbulbs Bama Gov Bentley has placed on the Bama PBS board.
    Chic Fil A has done some great work. But the ghost of George W. Truett is calling on them to do better.