The Los Angeles Times this morning has an interesting piece on a group of young people who have committed themselves to fulltime prayer for our nation, even moving into a communal house in the style of the House of Acts movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s.

But rather than simply report on the movement, the Times took the cynical approach, suggesting that these youth, in praying 24/7 for the passage of California’s marriage protection amendment, are using “prayer in the service of politics.”

The reporter found a handy lesbian minister to massage this angle. Calling herself “a person of prayer,” Rev. Susan Russell said that she does not see prayer as “a weapon to be used to influence the political process.”

We call this “ventriloquist journalism,” in the vernacular of the field.

Meanwhile, let us remember that it was the left, not the right, that made marriage a political issue. That happened when gay and leftwing California lawmakers began trying to legislate away the ancient, universally recognized definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Californians responded with Prop 22, voting to preserve the traditional definition of marriage by a margin of nearly two to one.

Then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom used his own political power to foist homosexual marriage on the people of California, in defiance of the will of all the people (not just Christians.)

Now that California Christians are praying in response to political action forced by the left, they are painted as using prayer as a political “weapon?” Fourteen days before the election?

Ironic? Amnesiac? Dare I ask, political? You decide.

The Times reporter then fuzzes the facts in this section of the story:

After the state Supreme Court ruled in May to allow same-sex marriage, evangelical leaders in California, working with their counterparts in the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, began organizing to pass Proposition 8.

They launched a fundraising organization, which has raked in so many contributions that the most recent campaign finance filing crashed the secretary of state’s computer.

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that the Times reporter here fails to cite actual fundraising numbers. This is possibly because the No on 8 folks have raised 10 times the cash, presumably crashing entire servers. Finally, the reporter brings it on home in the service of cynical secularism:

But [Prop 8 organizers] also wanted a spiritual component to their campaign. Central to that is the 40-day fast, leading into what organizers hope will be a huge rally Nov. 1 at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium. There, Engle will lead 12 hours of prayer for the passage of Proposition 8.

Sorry, but Christian practices such as prayer and fasting are not a mere “spiritual component” of the Prop 8 campaign. While the Gavin Newsoms and Sheila James Kuehls of the world believe government is sovereign over the consciences of the American people, evangelicals (…and, oh yeah, the Framers of the Constitution) believe the people’s conscience is sovereign over government, and that God is sovereign over all.

As citizens, some very savvy California Christians (not just evangelicals) deftly mobilized the initiative process to fight back in a political war they did not initiate — and did so with record-breaking efficiency.

Prayer is not some kind of after-market add-on. It is the underpinning of the entire process, one of those pesky “deeply held religious beliefs” protected by the U.S. Constitution, but disdained by the left when employed in a political war of its own design.