Brownback has stated that he will not hire openly gay people. The pious prig is thinking about a presidential run in 2008.

Rolling Stone has a profile of one of the darlings of the fringe Right, the proudly anti-gay Senator from Kansas Sam Brownback. The piece, by Jeff Sharlet, is entitled God’s Senator — Who would Jesus vote for? You get a good feel for this wingnut — he’s the real dangerous deal, a true believer, not a lip-service conservative. For Jeebus’s sake, he considers fetuses “citizens.” You can’t get much more batsh*t conservative than that.

Back in 1994, when Brownback came to Congress as a freshman, he was so contemptuous of federal authority that he refused at first to sign the Contract With America, Newt Gingrich’s right-wing manifesto — not because it was too radical but because it was too tame. Republicans shouldn’t just reform big government, Brownback insisted — they should eliminate it. He immediately proposed abolishing the departments of education, energy and commerce. His proposals failed — but they quickly made him one of the right’s rising stars. Two years later, running to the right of Bob Dole’s chosen successor, he was elected to the Senate.

Killer ‘fro: unretouched scan of Sam’s Kansas State University 1977 yearbook.

…Brownback is not part of the GOP leadership, and he doesn’t want to be. He once told a group of businessmen he wanted to be the next Jesse Helms — “Senator No,” who operated as a one-man demolition unit against godlessness, independent of his party. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a man with presidential ambitions of his own, gave Brownback a plum position on the Judiciary Committee, perhaps hoping that Brownback would provide a counterbalance to Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican who threatened to make trouble for Bush’s appointees. Instead, taking a page from Helms, Brownback turned the position into a platform for a high-profile war against gay marriage, porn and abortion. Casting Bush and the Republican leadership as soft and muddled, he regularly turns sleepy hearings into platforms for his vision of America, inviting a parade of angry witnesses to denounce the “homosexual agenda,” “bestiality” and “murder.”

He is running for president because murder is always on his mind: the abortion of what he considers fetal citizens. He speaks often and admiringly of John Brown, the abolitionist who massacred five pro-slavery settlers just north of the farm where Brownback grew up. Brown wanted to free the slaves; Brownback wants to free fetuses. He loves each and every one of them. “Just . . . sacred,” he says.

…The nation’s leading evangelicals have already lined up behind Brownback, a feat in itself. A decade ago, evangelical support for a Catholic would have been unthinkable. Many evangelicals viewed the Pope as the Antichrist and the Roman Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon. But Brownback is the beneficiary of a strategy known as co-belligerency — a united front between conservative Catholics and evangelicals in the culture war. Pat Robertson has tapped the “outstanding senator from Kansas” as his man for president.

This is a long, good article, worth the read. It’s frightening. I have to pull a couple of additional fun facts from the article:

* Brownback’s chief of staff, Robert Wasinger, wrote in a campus magazine funded by the Heritage Foundation, that the “innocent sperm” of gay men are, “forced to swim into feces.”

* Sam is working to defeat a measure that would stiffen penalties for violent attacks on gays and lesbians ,saying the hate-crime bill would lead to the eventual criminalization of Christianity.

* Brownback has received money funneled through Jack Abramoff ($42,000) and blocked a casino that Abramoff’s clients viewed as a competitor.

* On gay marriage, which is legal in Sweden: Sam believes is against “natural law” and has been made by “social engineering” into an outer ring of hell. “You’ll know ’em by their fruits.”

* Sam struggles to square that homosexuality may not be sanctioned by the Bible, but slavery is — and that he believes Good Book is never wrong. His logic: “the Bible views slavery as a ‘person-to-person relationship,’ something to be worked out beyond the intrusion of government. But he quickly abandons the argument; calling slavery a personal choice, after all, is awkward for a man who often compares slavery to abortion.”

Bring him on for 2008, GOP!

Come to think of it, Sammy would definitely back the pregnant woman who contended the (citizen) fetus inside her womb allowed her to use the HOV lane on the highway (see my earlier post, My fetus is my co-pilot).

UPDATE: Human Rights Campaign fired off a letter to Brownback about his “fruits” comment.

Hat tip, Nate from The Anti-Sam Brownback Blog.