More hate from those hate-filled DailyKos haters (Wisconsin edition)

by folkbum

Just in case Bill O'Reilly hasn't yet convinced you that the Daily Kos is bevy of foul, putrid, Bush-hating filth, the New York Times brings you the story of one prominent hatemonger in Campbellsport, Wisconsin:

The brick church, more than a century old, stands at the junction of two county roads tracing the glacial hills of southeastern Wisconsin. In the field across the way, the summer corn stretches eight feet from root to tassel. This being a Sunday morning, the Rev. Daniel Schultz greets the faithful on the front steps as they arrive for 9 a.m. worship at the Salem United Church of Christ. Pastor Dan, as he prefers to be known, is the only man in the congregation wearing a coat and tie.

Over the next hour, he leads the 70 worshipers in a round of "Happy Birthday" for Jim Maul, a longtime member. He invites a half-dozen children to the pulpit, where he crouches among them to teach them to recite "The Lord's Prayer." In the part of the service designated for "sharing joys and concerns," he listens as people rise in the pews to tell of a relative's surgery, a brother's recovery from a liver transplant.

Here is ministry at its most venerable, ministry at its most tender and intimate and finely grained. And it comes from a minister with a strikingly unlikely double-life, one part as the small-town preacher in a socially conservative spot of the Midwest, the other as an abrasive and confrontational voice of the religious left in the blogosphere.

Exactly one week after Mr. Schultz presided over Sunday worship at his home church here, he gave a sermon in the vast arena of the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago. Instead of the farmers, factory workers and tradesmen who typify his regular congregation, the audience for his denunciation of the Iraq war consisted of the self-proclaimed "netroots" attending Yearly Kos, the annual political and media convention organized by the Daily Kos Web site. [. . .]

"Over all, we're a fairly conservative congregation, but everybody loves him," said Denise Goetsch, a member of the church's governing board. "Whatever people's personal politics are, they're here because they believe in God. And Dan's been good at making friends with pretty much anybody."

Mr. Schultz's sermon here the week before Yearly Kos offered a prime example of how. Drawing on a passage from I Corinthians, Mr. Schultz preached for social justice while speaking directly to his humble church and its obscure home.

It's so horrible, isn't it? When will someone finally shut that site down?