{"id":123,"date":"2007-08-22T15:33:55","date_gmt":"2007-08-22T15:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/news\/2007\/08\/religious-charges-swarm-around.php"},"modified":"2007-08-22T15:33:55","modified_gmt":"2007-08-22T15:33:55","slug":"religious-charges-swarm-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2007\/08\/religious-charges-swarm-around","title":{"rendered":"Religious Charges Swarm Around Louisiana Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jan Moller
\nBATON ROUGE, La. (RNS) A Republican gubernatorial candidate accused Louisiana Democrats of reaching “a new low” with TV ads that accuse him of insulting Protestants, and demanded the ad be taken off the air.
\nDemocratic Party officials continued to defend the spot, as did its two leading candidates for governor, despite cries of outrage from Republican officials about the ads aimed at U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal.
\nCopyright 2007 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.
\nThe commercial began running Monday in the Shreveport, Alexandria and Monroe media markets, which are more heavily Protestant than the southern part of the state. It features an unidentified woman narrator proclaiming that Jindal “insulted thousands of Louisiana Protestants” via articles he wrote in the mid-1990s.
\n“He has referred to Protestant religions as scandalous, depraved, selfish and heretical,” the narrator says. It then directs viewers to a Web site, www.jindalonreligion.com, where links to the articles are found.
\nJindal, who converted to Catholicism as a teen after being raised by Hindu parents, said the commercial is defamatory and misleading and denied that he has ever insulted another branch of the Christian faith.
\n“They’re absolute lies. We’re not talking about an exaggeration,” Jindal said. “They’re completely out of bounds here.”
\nLate Tuesday (Aug. 21), a lawyer hired by Jindal’s campaign sent a letter to north Louisiana TV stations demanding the ad be taken off the air.
\nAccording to the letter, “each claim made in the advertisement distorts Mr. Jindal’s positions with false and grossly distorted statements.”
\nDemocratic Party spokeswoman Julie Vezinot said the commercial is backed up by voluminous documentation.
\n“The writings referenced in the ad are Bobby’s own words and are not taken out of context, as his campaign claims,” Vezinot said. “This is just another example of Bobby’s pattern of telling one side of the story: the one he wants voters to hear.”
\nIn several of the articles linked on the Web site, most of which first appeared in the Catholic magazine New Oxford Review, Jindal describes a spiritual journey that led him to explore various Christian churches and denominations before deciding in his late teens to convert to Catholicism.
\nJindal said that while his religious beliefs have evolved over the years, nothing he wrote in his 20s could be construed as an insult to other faiths.
\n“I’m sure that there are tons of things that I’ve said or wrote that reflect an immature mind,” he said. “(But) nothing I’ve said or written could be mis-characterized” the way it’s portrayed in the campaign commercial.
\nCopyright 2007 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jan Moller BATON ROUGE, La. (RNS) A Republican gubernatorial candidate accused Louisiana Democrats of reaching “a new low” with TV ads that accuse him of insulting Protestants, and demanded the ad be taken off the air. Democratic Party officials continued to defend the spot, as did its two leading candidates for governor, despite cries…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nReligious Charges Swarm Around Louisiana Campaign<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2007\/08\/religious-charges-swarm-around\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Religious Charges Swarm Around Louisiana Campaign\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Jan Moller BATON ROUGE, La. (RNS) A Republican gubernatorial candidate accused Louisiana Democrats of reaching “a new low” with TV ads that accuse him of insulting Protestants, and demanded the ad be taken off the air. 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(RNS) A Republican gubernatorial candidate accused Louisiana Democrats of reaching “a new low” with TV ads that accuse him of insulting Protestants, and demanded the ad be taken off the air. 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A New Yorker by birth but a Floridian by tenure, Nicole graduated from Florida A&M University with a B.S. in Public Relations and a minor in Sociology. She moved to NY to pursue a career in journalism which started at In Style magazine. There she learned the ropes of magazine reporting, researching, and writing\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand became exponentially more stylish. But what seemed like a deep interest in fashion and entertainment would soon be revealed as merely the vehicle that moved her closer to discovering her purpose, writing and covering matters of the Christian faith. While in her purpose-driven vehicle she can be found traveling between Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens for life, work and worship, respectively. 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