The Other Paper Cover Story published 09/10/09 “Coach” Dave Daubenmire, the local Christian talk radio host and blogger and the founder of Pass the Salt ministries is equal parts Glenn Beck Libertarianism and Rod Parsley fire-and-brimstone. But believe it or not, Coach is a helluva likable guy. Just ask him. Put aside Dave Daubenmire and his Pass the Salt ministry’s organized campaigns to “save” Gay Pride marchers and his public burning of the Qur`an. Forget the public wake for an aborted fetus in front of Columbus City Hall. Disregard his radio broadcast propagating Birther conspiracies and his Fox News-documented stalking of Congressman Zack Space in the name of killing health care reform. He'd just like you to know that if you joined him for a backyard barbeque and talked a little football, you’d find yourself getting downright chummy with small-town Ohio’s very own mass-media demagogue. “I’m sure part of what Glenn Beck does on the radio is an act—I think part of what I do on the radio is an act,” said Daubenmire. “I believe what I say, but if we were sitting around my picnic table having a hamburger, you’d walk away and you’d like me.” Like him or lump him, one thing seems sure: his stage is growing. Daubenmire has been preaching a born-again in-your-face conservative values gospel for 10 years in Columbus. He’s made it his personal crusade to defend fellow Christians who he believes have been wronged by what he considers to be “God-hating” public institutions, including individuals such as the Mount Vernon teacher accused of burning a cross into a student’s arm. Daubenmire’s own firing from the London schools in Madison County—where he served as the high school’s longtime football coach—came in the wake of a lawsuit resulting from his refusal to stop praying with his players. The school district settled the suit out of court with the ACLU, which cost Daubenmire his position. But the event helped shape his Libertarian views and fortified his resolve to defend what he calls “Christian liberty.” “All that did was alert me to the fact that I saw Christian liberties under attack and began 10 years ago to stand up and defend those principles,” said Daubenmire. Daubenmire founded Minute Men United, a nationwide organization of evangelical men who stage confrontational anti-homosexual actions at LGBT-friendly events with the self-appointed mission (as published in a Minute Men tract) of “uniting and mobilizing God-fearing Americans.” In August 2007, the Dispatch reported on the group’s interruption of LGBT-friendly church services at several Central Ohio churches, including King Avenue United Methodist Church in Columbus. They are a regular presence at Gay Pride parades across the nation. Daubenmire has been active, both in street protests (he spoke at the notorious Operation Save America rally in Downtown Columbus in 2004 that included a viewing of a human fetus in a coffin that the group was transporting to Washington for burial. Event organizers filed city burn permits to incinerate a copy of the Qu`ran, as well as rainbow flags). Daubenmire founded Pass the Salt, a street ministry with an online congregation, in 1999 following the ACLU lawsuit and his dismissal from London City Schools. (He also still stomps the sidelines as coach of the Fairfield Christian Academy football team.) Pass the Salt has performed charitable outreach to the homeless in Columbus and surrounding communities, and performed food and service ministry in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. But lately, Daubenmire’s new-media cultivation of his Christian, Libertarian-minded outrage (he bears no official ties to the Libertarian Party of Ohio) has landed him multiple appearances on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera’s talk show, and, according to his website, Hannity and Colmes, the CBS Evening News, The Edge with Paula Zahn and Scarborough County on MSNBC. Though he has been “living his faith” over the airwaves and in the public square for the past decade, the attention of mass media broadcasters has come largely over the course of the past year, particularly during the past few months of Town Hall mayhem. Daubenmire found his message amplified and presented as mainstream America’s populist outrage against Democratic health care reform after his decision to squat outside Ohio Congressman Zach Space’s Zanesville office recently in an effort to force a debate (but only in front of a camera, apparently). As a result, Daubenmire was interviewed on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” above the banner headline “Ohio HS football coach stages health care reform sit-in.” The Fox News reporter introduced Daubenmire as a “football coach from Ohio” rather than as an evangelical activist or talk radio host. In the Sept. 1 segment, Daubenmire explained his motivation for his sit-in protest was because Space was “hiding from his constituents” on the issue of health care reform. (Daubenmire, seeking a personal interview with the congressman in front of attendant Fox News cameras, missed a public Town Hall-style debate at the Hilliard library on Sept. 3, with Space during his protest campout. During a separate Space-stalking incident, Space offered to meet with Daubenmire and members of Pass the Salt, off camera. Daubenmire declined an off-air meeting on health care reform, according to news reports.) In addition to the Zanesville town hall debate, Space also hosted telephone town hall meetings with his constituents. In a statement to Fox News for the story, Space spokesperson Stuart Chapman said that “Mr. Daubenmire’s tea bagger colleagues (attended the town hall meeting in Zanesville) and talked to the Congressman…clearly, he’s not able to comprehend the reality that’s going on around him.” In true demagogue fashion, Daubenmire took the congressman’s response as an attempt at “character assassination.” Daubenmire’s position on health care, as on most public policy issues, is that the federal government should keep its nose out of it. In his view, health care for the needy is the province of churches and of charities. “The health care issue, maybe that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. All of this increasing government over the last couple of months—it’s frightening people. They’ve seen their 401ks disappear. They’ve seen General Motors become Government Motors. They’ve seen the bailout of banks. There are a lot of things that have people concerned,” Daubenmire said in an interview with The Other Paper this week. “Maybe that’s why I resonate.” Certainly those issues that Daubenmire propagates so effectively in his radio sermons and on his Pass the Salt blog were evident in the panicked responses of anti-health care reformers at a community health care debate in Hilliard last Thursday. The Pro/Con Health Care Debate was hosted by the Community Leaders Forum, an educational non-profit organization that presents weekly lectures in Columbus. The debate’s pro-health care sponsors included the Columbus Free Press, the Humanist Community of Central Ohio and OSU Students for Free Thought. James Castle, president and CEO of the Ohio Hospital Association, spoke in favor of reform. “My staff was kind of concerned when we saw some of the town meetings,” Castle said in opening the roundtable debate. “I just want to make sure we all understand—we are not going to shoot the messenger.” Pass the Salt ministry was among the groups supporting the anti-public health care position during the debate (without Daubenmire)., accorting to event organizer Earl Wordlow. Voicing the cons was Patrick Johnston, an uninsured Zanesville family practitioner, Christian radio host, an active anti-LGBT and Operation Save America activist, and one-time Libertarian candidate for state representative in Ohio’s 94th District. Wearing a Ten Commandments pin on his lapel, Johnston countered his opponent’s Power Point presentation on the whats, wheres, and whys of proposed health care bills with an impassioned speech about the road to perdition, down which government health care must necessarily lead. Johnston and his supporters’ primary concerns with health care reform , as he laid them out, were taxpayer-subsidized reproductive care, specifically abortion, health care “rationing,” health care for illegal immigrants and, naturally, the ever-present threat of Communist infiltration. “Even if it could be proven that universal health care could save lives, it should be rejected…better to be a cigarette smoker in an SUV than die a slave to a government system,” said Dr. Johnston. “A little candy for a little Communism? No thanks.” While audience members, like the gray-haired man wearing a “NObama” T-shirt answered Johnston’s rhetoric with “Amen” and spattered applause, other members grew visibly agitated, some issuing groans and speaking out of turn to question the relevance of his position. Forum moderator and organizer Earl Wordlow said the event served its purpose of educating and giving voice to the concerns of the public, but that finding lectors to present different sides of a contentious issue was a challenging endeavor. “A lot of people who are capable, have the credentials, in a public context (are not willing) to take a position and defend that position,” said Wordlow. Like all events, last week’s pro/con health care debate had the desired effect of humanizing both sides of a contentious issue, perhaps facilitating compromise. “Its’ done for educational value,” said Wordlow. “And in one setting, to see people as human beings and not monsters.” Daubenmire’s perception that public fears, both of corporate America and of the federal government are coming to a head in health care reform, as well as other issues, like the recent uproar over the President’s school address, is sharp and accurate. Never have the waters been so muddy, as he well knows. He attributes the demand from mass media outlets like Fox News for his appearance to two things: “number one, I’m uncompromising, I say what I think. And number two, I think I can articulate it in a way that people understand.” Though Daubenmire sees no compromise in dialogues over crucial public policy issues such as health care reform, reproductive rights or gay marriage, he insists it isn’t because he is without empathy for those he refers to on his website as the “enemies of god.” “I don’t get mad at my opposition because I used to think like them. I was a hell-raising, partying, carousing, howling dog. I’ve lived the sinful side. I know how that makes you think, makes you act,” said Daubenmire, a born-again evangelical who converted from Catholicism at 35. The burden of being disliked, hated even, weighs on him he said comparing himself to the Apostle Paul. “’Do I now become your enemy because I tell the truth?’ That’s how I feel a lot of the time—I just speak the truth and make enemies.” But, as anyone who’s attended a town-hall forum lately can attest, while enemies may make for great cable news, they generally make for lousy public policy dialogue.