Is this legal? Churchgoers Get Direction From Bush Campaign

[hot_pastrami]

Excerpt from a Yahoo! News (via Washington Post) news article:

The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has sent a detailed plan of action to religious volunteers across the country asking them to turn over church directories to the campaign, distribute issue guides in their churches and persuade their pastors to hold voter registration drives.

Is this really legal? It seems borderline unethical, at the very least. Christian leaders, and Christians in general, are essentially being religiously blackmailed into supporting the Bush campaign. Maybe it's just the fact that I see religion being used to manipulate people so bloody often, and to such extremes, that this sort of thing just doesn't sit right... Particularly when being used to re-elect someone who I find to be reprehensible.

Of course, I don't think I'd be comfortable with any Bush adversaries doing something like this, either. It smacks of abuse of power, seems unspeakbaly manipulative, and just feels wrong.

[glatt]

I hate Bush.

But I have no problem with this. He's not requiring it in his capacity as a government official. He's asking organizations who probably lean in his direction politically to help drum up support for his campaign. They don't have to comply if they don't want to. It's purely voluntary for the organization.

The individual members of the organization may not want their names shared, but their beef if with the organization, not with Bush.

[Happy Monkey]

It's definately creepy. But any wrongdoing would be on the part of the church if they gave their member list to a campaign. If any tax-exempt organization endorses a particular candidate, they theoretically could lose their status, so the Bush campaign is asking them to risk that. I guess they figure nobody is likely to enforce that rule.