Howdy,
My wife, Lynna, and I attended the Katy Tea Party today. For a rural county event, it was well attended. I’m not good at estimating crowd sizes but will guess around a thousand. The Katy Tea Party organization was pretty aggressive at getting an accurate head count (they counted the number of people driving in and did a registration) so hopefully they will publish the real number on their web site, http://katytea.com, soon.
Being a libertarian, I was a little surprised that the Tea Party was not a fiscal conservative event. Instead it was a religious right event, with all the evangelical violence propaganda. This preference for using violence to solve problems such as immigration, abortion, and foreign policy are what drove me away from the Republican party (along with their talk the talk, but don’t bother walking the walk hypocrisy). I really wished the Tea Party would have concentrated on old time fiscal conservatism versus the neo con, holier than thou flavour.
We arrived a little late so missed the first few speakers. A Lt. Colonel was speaking about flying P-38s in WWII, but the PA system’s volume was a little too low. The MC’s corrected the volume, then talked about the RagingElephant organization, which sounds like a “vote religious right” organization.
Next we listened to the excellent Kevin Black, who I’ll admit is one of my favourite local country western singers.
Next up was another Lt. Colonel from the Katy VFW. Besides having trouble reading his speech, his message was a mixture of traditional values mixed with it’s good to use violence to spread American/Christian beliefs all delivered as a sermon.
The best speaker was a lady of Egyptian ancestry whose main message was we need to fight for our freedoms because they are worthy ones. I don’t recall her quoting the bible.
Finally the MC’s got on their pulpit to deliver a call to arms sermon, quiet literally, complete with biblical references.
We finished the event listening to Kevin Black, among the few who stayed to the end.
Unfortunately the fireworks were cancelled, our guess is a burn ban, which was probably smart considering how dry the adjacent fields looked.
Overall, the event was mixed. The call to elect principled fiscal conservatives is good, the need to hold public servants accountable is good, and the call to get the grass roots involved is good. The call for using violence is major bad, but expected from christians.
In Liberty,
Roy
4 July 2009
