From yesterday's Newsweek interview of Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
NEWSWEEK: So we wanted to ask you, first of all, about the third-party idea and whether it's serious. A number of people are suggesting it's just a threat.
Richard Land: My intuition [is that] this is not a bluff. If Giuliani is the nominee there will be a third party. There are things that Giuliani could do to help mitigate the damage. But I have been in too many discussions over the last 15 years where evangelical leaders have said, "The one thing we will never allow to happen is for the Republican Party to take us for granted the way the Democratic Party too often takes the African-American community for granted."
This is not a bluff.
Whether a new third party will form in the event of a Giuliani nomination, or whether values voters will coalesce around the nominee of an existing minority party, isn't written in stone. But one thing isn't up in the air.
I know the people involved in this discussion; I've known some of them for years. I can't speak for all of them, only the ones I've heard from and the ones I know personally. I can echo what Land said: they're not bluffing.
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