My own Congressman, U.S. Rep. Joseph R. Pitts, was all set to talk to a church group this weekend, but some godless liberals shamed him out of it.

Pitts was scheduled to speak Saturday at the conference in Ephrata, a pretty little town near here, sponsored by the Immanuel Free Reformed Church and the National Reform Association. In case you're not familiar with them, these are the people who want to make the Bible the law of the land in the United States.

As usual with such folks, they claim to be restoring America to its foundation. As though the Founders really meant to write Leviticus but through some horrible mental lapse wrote the Constitution instead. (Imagine their chagrin. Madison: "Hey, where's the part about killing all the homos?" Randolph: "I thought you were going to write it." Madison: "I thought you were going to write it.")

One of the organizers is the Rev. William Einwechter, who in 1999 wrote an essay titled "Stoning Disobedient Children" which poses the question: "Contempt of parental authority is the death of family, law and order. The question then is: Who or what should die? The rebel, or family and society?" He still defends that point. "This is what is in the Bible," he told an AP reporter this week. "To attack that is to attack Christians, to attack Jews, and it is its own sense of discrimination."

Another star of the conference calls the execution of abortion providers "a long term goal" and has written that "the law that requires the death penalty for homosexual acts effectively drives the perversion of homosexuality underground, back in the closet."

Out of all the possible things to object to, one might note, it was the stoning that seemed to get to the Congressman. "Congressman Pitts doesn't believe in stoning anybody," Pitts' spokesman said. Given his strong anti-drug stance, I'm not surprised Pitts doesn't want to see children get stoned. But I'm left with the impression that the rest of the conference agenda was OK with him.

This is the same congressman, by the way, who reacted to the court ruling that struck down the forced recitation of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance by calling the judges "loony left-wing types. His definition of loony is a bit off from mine.

In fact, if it hadn't been for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Pitts probably would have been in Ephrata on Saturday, with the rest of the kooks. In a Nov. 12 letter, the watchdog group's executive director, Barry Lynn, urged Pitts to cancel his appearance, calling the National Reform Association "so extreme they would make the mullahs in Iran blush."

I've been endorsing anyone to beat Pitts since the mid-'80s, when he was a state representative and I was an editorial writer in West Chester. I became a registered Republican the year he sought nomination to the congressional seat, just so I could support for one of his rivals in the primary. This last election I cast my first vote for a Green Party candidate, only because no other sane person was running against Pitts.

My shame over being associated with him is slightly mitigated by knowing that Lynn is a graduate of the same college where I got my degree.