December (Web-only) 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

Durham's county manager is a conservative Christian? Off with his head! Mike Ruffin, the new county manager for Durham, North Carolina, also runs Devotions.com, a Web site featuring his weekly commentaries "to help Christians who struggle with everyday living." This week, Independent Weekly, a local alternative paper, ran an "expose" on Ruffin's site and views. Among the terrible findings? Ruffin says he puts "God first in my life, my family second, and my job third." (How horrible for the citizens of Durham!) He believes "there isn't a better place for a Christian to put his faith into practice than politics." (But what about the Constitution, which clearly bans believers from public office!) He also once wrote that "evolution is politically correct thinking and creationism is not." And—worst of all for the manager in a city voted one of the most gay-friendly in America by Out magazine and one of the "most enlightened towns" by Utne Reader—he has called his readers to "reach out to the homosexual, just like we reach out to the adulterer, the alcoholic, or the drug addict." The horror! The horror! Upon being asked by the Independent Weekly about his views, Ruffin immediately took them off his Web site. He swears that he's "not a fundamentalist" and "not here to push my personal beliefs on anyone." "I'm just trying to live a decent life, and my faith gives me the strength to do that," he tells The News & Observer. "My faith is a very personal matter. I'm not an evangelist." The county board says they were concerned enough about his views to question him very carefully on them and to call county officials where he used to work to see if he ever let his views known there. "They told us that had never been an issue," says MaryAnn ...