You know, we may have been a bit hasty when we dismissed Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean’s call for the Democratic Party to reach out to evangelical Christians yesterday. After re-reading parts of his speech, we thought it might deserve a bit more extensive treatment. And by "treatment," we mean "mocking."

In his speech, ironically rendered at the Washoe County Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, Dean said there was a "generational change" going on in Christianity that has begun to emphasize social responsibility over social conservatism.

"I haven’t seen gay marriage in the Bible once," Dean said. "But I’ve seen a lot about helping people who are poor and including people and not leaving anybody behind. Those are core values of the Democratic Party and they also are core values of an awful lot of evangelicals."

OK, let us stop him right there.

The problem — well, one of the many problems — of Christian fundamentalists is their selective reading of the Bible. They take a single passage and run with it, decreeing that God hates gays, or that he wants abortion outlawed, or that he simply insists on a balanced budget. Well, Dean does the exact same thing here.

Dean may not have seen it, but it’s undeniable that both the Torah and the letters of St. Paul condemn gayness, or at the very least, gay conduct. "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is an abomination," says Leviticus 18:22. A couple of chapters later, we’re told "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:13).

Perhaps Dean didn’t read Leviticus? But that’s OK; the fundamentalists didn’t read it closely, either, otherwise they’d be recommending capital punishment for sodomy. And adultery. And a bunch of other things, from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Maybe Dean’s more of a New Testament guy? How about the letter of St. Paul to the Romans? In Chapter 1:26-27, Paul laments, "For this cause, God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one towards another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet."

Yeah, we’re thinking God’s not a big fan of gay marriage. But that’s hardly the point.

In denying the proscriptions against gay conduct, but embracing the myriad passages that enjoined the Jews, and later the Christians, to love one another, take care of the poor, and oppressed, and widows, Dean commits the same sin as the fundamentalists. If you’re going to appeal to the Bible for your political ideas, you’ve got to take all of it, or none of it. You can’t simply say that God didn’t mean it when he condemned gays (not to mention adulterers and incorrigible children) to death, but he really did mean it when he said look out for the poor. It’s ridiculous.

We understand Dean’s desire to reach out to more voters, which is why he’s saying nice things about Christians these days after having once denounced the Republican Party as a "white Christian party." In the 2006 elections, he told Washoe County Democrats, "we reached out to folks and will continue to reach out to people who we had written off before, to our detriment. One of those groups of people is evangelical Christians."

Fine, and well and good. But we find it hard to understand how Dean’s "reaching out" includes totally mischaracterizing the Bible. Don’t you think the Christians will see through this little trick, and conclude you only care about their votes, and not their values? Or does Dean really think they are stupid?

He continued to cite the example of Christian author Rick Warren, pastor of a Southern California megachurch who is "setting aside those things that divide us" and doing things "that bring people together — things that really are in the Bible." You know, like fighting poverty, global warming, and the bloodshed in Darfur.

Truth be told, there’s nothing about global warming in the Bible — its authors didn’t even know they lived on a globe. But there’s plenty about bloodshed in there, especially in the historical books of what Christians call the Old Testament, much of it instigated and ordered by God himself.

Clearly, Dean hasn’t read much of the Bible at all. If he did, he’d realize the God depicted therein would be against the murder of innocents in Darfur, but he would be just as against gay marriage. He’d want his creatures to be good stewards of the earth, but he’d also want them to refrain from adultery, on pain of death. And he’d be somewhat irked to find that his servants were "setting aside those things that divide us," assuming those things come from his holy and inspired book, regardless of the crying need to remove the War Party from the White House come 2008.

Dean doesn’t understand this, and clearly doesn’t care to understand it. His goal is not embracing Christians or Christianity, but victory. He lamented that Roman Catholic U.S. Sen. John Kerry mustered but 19 percent of the evangelical vote in 2004, but noted that evangelical ex-President Bill Clinton used to garner 33 percent. "If we get back to 33 percent, we are going to start winning states again like Arkansas and Louisiana and we are on the way to the presidency. There is no reason not to include everybody," he said.

Well, that’s not entirely true. In fact, it would be a fine idea to exclude those who want the Bible to be the basis of our government. There are many reasons for this, but the first and most reasonable is this: The Bible was never supposed to be the basis for any government, ever, and each time it’s been tried, oppression, corruption and misery surely follow. When it comes to forming civil societies, the Enlightenment, human reason and common sense are much better building blocks. Our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution, based squarely on those principles, have proven a stable basis for government for 231 years, next month.

That’s why we didn’t watch that CNN forum recently in which the Democrats talked about faith. We knew we’d never hear one of them tell their cable news interlocuters that his faith was a private matter, between him and God, and moreover, that it didn’t matter. "I’m not running to be your pastor, your priest or your pope," we’d have lusted to hear one of them say. "I’m running to be your president. And whether you worship God or disbelieve in him, it doesn’t matter ultimately, because I will administer the country for the benefit of all our citizens, evangelical, agnostic and atheist alike."

We knew we’d be disappointed, as much as we are with Dean’s remarks, and his lack of historical knowledge, or even irony. Recall that he made his remarks at a dinner named in part for Thomas Jefferson, who co-wrote the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which stipulated the perfectly sensible separation between church and state.

The next time Dean’s at DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C., he should take a stroll down to Jefferson’s memorial. There, inscribed, is this famous quote: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Read it, Howard. Learn it. Live it.

We apologize to you readers for neglecting this very revelatory story from Tuesday’s Las Vegas Sun. In it, we learn that Dr. Raj Chanderraj of the Nevada Heart and Vascular Center wrote a $5,000 check to former Clark County Commissioner Lynette Boggs, just two days after she voted to award a $5 million UMC contract to his practice.

That’s "to Lynette Boggs." Not to her campaign.

[UPDATE: We've since confirmed that the name of Boggs' campaign account -- "Friends for Lynette" -- would not be easily confused with the candidate's name, at the time, "Lynette Boggs McDonald." So writing a check for one when you meant to write it for the other would be almost impossible. Especially if, say, you were a smart person, the kind who might, say, be a heart doctor.]

The money was deposited into Boggs’ personal bank account, and was not accounted for on a campaign finance document filed the following month. And it never appeared in her campaign finance documents, until the existence of the money became public and Boggs filed an amended campaign form in April.

The vote that Boggs cast was somewhat controversial, given that the Nevada Heart Center, which had the UMC contract previously, was bidding $4 million for the work, or $1 million less than Chanderraj’s group.

Now, a cynic might suggest that Boggs’ vote was somehow connected to the donation, what in Latin is dubbed a "quid pro quo." The "quid," a $5 million contract; the "quo," a relatively paltry $5,000, which we cannot help but point out is a mere .001 percent of $5 million. We would never suggest such a connection, of course. But a cynic might.

Why? Because the money was deposited into a personal account, which is a mistake not easily made in politics. Chanderraj attorney Stan Perry tells the Sun his client intended the donation to help Boggs retire debt from her unsuccessful re-election campaign against Susan Brager. But why not make out the check to Boggs’ campaign account then?

And let’s not forget that this was not exactly the first questionable connection that Chanderraj had to the contract vote. Former Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates suddenly discovered (after the vote) that Chanderraj was a potential client of her private custom home-building business. Gates asked for the matter to be reconsidered, which it was, with her abstaining from voting. The result was the same.

So does Nevada Heart Center have a case to ask the commission to re-open the bidding for the UMC job? Ironically, it doesn’t appear so. While Boggs participated (rather passionately) in awarding the contract to Chanderraj’s group in December, she was gone from the commission in early February, when the second vote was held. And since Gates, the only other commissioner whose vote might be impeached by the conflict, specifically abstained the second time around, it appears the ratification was done by commissioners without ties to Chanderraj.

But it sure is interesting, isn’t it?

In a bit of what some might call karma, Boggs is now facing felony charges of allegedly lying on her declaration of candidacy about whether she really lived in her district, and for paying a nanny with campaign funds. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing Aug. 14. Gates, meanwhile, is under investigation for allegedly using her campaign money to enrich family members.