How Far Right Catholic Fanatics Like Robert Spencer, Manufacture Islamophobic Hoaxes

The far Right, corporatist, religious and political lunatic fringe, has an extensive history of fabricating and manufacturing hoaxes to demonise perceived enemies, or competitors.

Mere reality is insufficient to satiate their lust for unbridled power, sociopathic hatreds and extreme paranoia, so that fantasies and fabrications are routinely manufactured to nourish their pornography of paranoia.

Conspiracism, the manufacture of the ‘demonic other’ and group, cultural ‘scapegoats,’ has persistently played a vital and core role, in far Right propaganda.

The grubby, listed hate preacher, Robert Spencer, adored by neo-Nazis, fascists and Catholic/Christian/Jewish extremists, is an intermediate cog in the larger, manufactured Islamophobia Industry machinery, which has been staple cash cow for far Right religious and politicised extremists, hate mongers and fascists preying and profiteering from real and fabricated cultural tensions.

Whilst innumerable examples could be cited, here’s a recent faux ‘news’ ruse, promulgated by the superstitious, Rightist Catholic fanatical loon, Robert Spencer who deludes that despite his lies, disinformation and deception, he is doing ‘the work of god.’

 

 

Via by Richard Bartholomew

Here’s one I missed from a month ago. From the Daily Caller:

A group of 51 refugees were brutally assaulted outside a night club in Murmansk, Russia, after they groped and molested women at a night club Saturday.

The refugees had previously been ordered to leave Norway for “bad behavior” and tried their luck in Russia. What they didn’t realize when they went out clubbing in Murmansk is that Russians have less tolerance when it comes to sexual assault on local women than other European countries.

…The refugees tried to flee but were quickly captured by the Russians. They then took them out to the street and gave them a beating they will remember. Police arrived to break up the fight but locals report that they threw a few punches at the refugees before arresting 33 of them. Eighteen refugees were in such bad condition they had to be take to the hospital.

As shown above, the story is illustrated with a photograph of a gang of burly men, one of whom has a club, beating up another man, who cowers on the ground.

The source given in the link above is an Italian report from Imola Oggi (without the photo), which in turn cites Fort Russ. The Fort Russ article is in English (“translated by Tom Winter”), and states that it “was prepared from material on social network sites.”

However, it followed an earlier report on the same site (“translated by Ollie Richardson”) which has a somewhat different version of the story:

Several refugees from Arab countries were beaten in the middle of the night of Saturday in the city of Polyarnye Zori (Murmansk oblast), reported a FlashNord source in the law enforcement bodies of the region.

The incident occurred in the nightclub Gandvik.

“According to preliminary data, five refugees were beaten in the entertainment establishment. According to witnesses, they behaved insolently and had been pestering local girls,” — said the Agency’s interlocutor.

“Five”. As opposed to “51”. And no reference to any arrests. But there’s more: the original article from FlashNord can be seen here. It was followed up on the same day with a second article, confirming that there may have been a fight outside the nightclub, but that details could not be confirmed from CCTV and it was all over by the time the police arrived.

So, it looks like there was an incident of some kind – but it is far from clear that it was anything more significant than the kind of fight that tends to occur sometimes near venues where young men have been drinking and are perhaps “on the pull”. Were refugees involved? Was the incident provoked by anti-social behaviour towards female clubbers? Nothing in the report confirms any such details (and I can’t find further evidence elsewhere) – and the story of a mass incident involving dozens of arrests appears to have been a fiction.

The photograph used by the Daily Caller doesn’t make much sense: it shows just one man being attacked, and – somewhat crucially – it was taken in middle of the day. The site either didn’t bother – or forgot – to remove the photo’s metadata caption, which identifies it as actually showing Russian Cossacks assaulting a Ukrainian in Sevastopol in 2014. It was published in its correct context in the media at the time (see below).

Did the Daily Caller intend to deceive? Robert Spencer, always eager to spread stories about how Muslims are depraved, appears to have taken it at face value as evidence, as did other right-leaning sites.

Perhaps it was intended merely to be illustrative – but given that the Daily Caller clearly approves of the outcome in their version of the story, such a photo serves to titillate, and perhaps to exhort.

Have we really reached the point where a photo of a bunch thugs beating someone up is to be celebrated because someone has said that it shows a refugee, and has further assured us that the victim did something anti-social and deserves his fate?

Fascist Australian Christian Lobby’s Call to Suspend Anti-Discrimination Laws

Call to suspend hate laws ‘disgraceful’: Gillian Triggs

Judith Ireland

 

EXCLUSIVE

 Gillian Triggs slams calls to change anti-discrimination laws

Anti-discrimination laws won’t prevent free speech so don’t need to be changed during the same sex marriage debate, says the head of the Human Rights Commission.

 

The Human Rights Commission has rubbished the Australian Christian Lobby’s call for anti-discrimination laws to be suspended during the same-sex marriage plebiscite, describing it as “outrageous” and based on a misunderstanding of the law.

In a separate move, about 40 religious leaders have written to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull urging him to ditch the plebiscite plan altogether, arguing it will damage the standing of religious communities and harm the mental health of gay people.

Responding to the ACL’s push to have anti-discrimination laws “set aside” during the plebiscite campaign to ensure free speech, Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs said it was a “disgraceful way of dealing with the issue”.

Australian Human Rights Commission president Professor Gillian Triggs says of ACL: ‘It’s an outrageous propositon and it’s highly misguided’. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

 

“[They] are saying that we have to stand down or suspend the laws so that you can do what would otherwise be a vilification,” Professor Triggs told Fairfax Media on Tuesday.

“It’s an outrageous proposition and it’s highly misguided.”

Professor Triggs said the ACL’s call for the federal government to “override” anti-discrimination laws, particularly state-based laws, was “based on a failure to understand the way the law works”.

Rev Graham Long, CEO and pastor of The Wayside Chapel is one of around 40 signatories to the letter to Malcolm Turnbull. Photo: Peter Rae

 

She said the right to freedom of religious views was one of the best-protected rights in Australia because it was entrenched in the Constitution, adding there was no federal law against vilification on the basis of sexuality and only Queensland, NSW and the ACT made it unlawful to incite hatred on the basis of sexual orientation.

While Tasmania takes a broader approach, Professor Triggs said there was no rush of findings against free speech in the state.

“It is a very, very high threshold,” she said, countering the ACL argument that current laws would make the “no” camp vulnerable to “the constant threat of quasi and full-blown legal action” during the plebiscite.

Victorian Minister for Equality Martin Foley wrote to Attorney-General George Brandis on Tuesday, outlining his concerns that “weakening anti-discrimination laws will further hurt LGBTI Australians”. Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus also slammed the ACL’s proposal, saying: “If you need to offend in order to convince people, you’ve already lost”.

As debate about the process of a plebiscite continued, representatives of Anglican, Uniting and Baptist churches wrote to Mr Turnbull, calling for Parliament to resolve the issue instead.

The letter warns a plebiscite risks providing a platform for “disparaging LGBTI Australians and their families, leading to increased incidents of anxiety, depression and suicide,” and could “discredit the voice of faith communities more generally on public matters”.

Pastor of Sydney’s Wayside Chapel Graham Long said he was a signatory because the plebiscite would see opposing sides to “dig into their trenches” and “throw bombs”.

“I’m really struggling to see where the wisdom is,” Reverend Long said. “The other idea is we could use our Parliament as a Parliament.”

The letter also expresses concern that the “negative case” in a plebiscite would be put by religious groups and leaders “who claim to speak on behalf of people of faith generally, or religious institutions as a whole”.

Letter organiser, Angus McLeayof Merri Creek Anglican in inner-city Melbourne, said it was a concern that the ACL could be seen to represent all Christians.

“The ACL represent certain, quite conservative viewpoints,” Reverend McLeay said.

“The public, they just hear ‘Christian’ and they don’t necessarily make fine distinctions.”

On Wednesday, the ACL stood by its call for anti-discrimination laws to be set aside.

“None of our arguments vilify or hate and neither should they. The arguments are not the problem. The laws are the problem. In particular, the abuse of the laws and legal processes by activists,” managing director Lyle Shelton said.

“State-based human rights commissions are often weaponised by activists against those with different views.”

Senator Brandis was overseas on Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.

Last week in Senate estimates, he said there had been a “great deal of stakeholder consultation” on the plebiscite process and that he would take a submission to cabinet “in coming months”.

There is no date set yet for the plebiscite, which is due after the federal election if the Coalition wins.

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The Latest Trend In Christianity: Beating Your Wife For Jesus

Credit: politicsplus.org

 

It’s just because their husbands love them, and want them to be perfect for Jesus!

On a pain scale of one to 10, Chelsea ranks the epidural-free birth of her child as a six. Her husband’s spankings? Those are an eight.

First, he uses his hands for “warm-up” slaps. Then comes a combination of tools based on the specific infraction. The wooden spoon is the least severe; for the worst rule-breaking—like texting while driving (“It could kill me,” Chelsea admits) or moving money between accounts without his permission—she’ll be hit with something else: a hairbrush, a paddle, or a leather strap.

But this isn’t domestic abuse, Chelsea says. This is for Jesus.

Chelsea and her husband Clint, who asked that I use only their first names, belong to a small subculture of religious couples who practice “Christian Domestic Discipline,” a lifestyle that calls for a wife to be completely submissive to her husband. Referred to as CDD by its followers, the practice often includes spanking and other types corporal punishments administered by husbands—and ostensibly ordained by God.

While the private nature of the discipline makes it difficult to estimate the number of adherents, activity in several online forums suggests a figure in the low thousands. Devotees call CDD an alternative lifestyle and enthusiastically sing its praises; for critics, it’s nothing but domestic abuse by another name.

Clint was in the room while I talked to Chelsea. They do everything together, including running their blog, Learning DD, which chronicles their exploration of domestic discipline. When Chelsea gets flummoxed by a question, she asks Clint for guidance in a voice so high-pitched that it belies her 28 years: “Honey, how long does the spanking usually last?” (About 5 minutes, Clint says.)

He has left bruises, Chelsea says, but it’s rare, and she attributes them to anemia.

You don’t have to be a Christian to practice domestic discipline, although many of its practitioners say they believe that domestic discipline goes hand in hand with their faith. Specifics of the practice vary by couple, though CDDers all seem to follow a few basic principles. Foremost, that the Bible commands a husband to be the head of the household, and the wife must submit to him, in every way, or face painful chastisement.

When a wife breaks her husband’s rules—rolling her eyes, maybe, or just feeling “meh,” as one blogger put it—that can equal punishments which are often corporal but can also be “corner time”; writing lines (think “I will not disobey my master” 1,000 times); losing a privilege like internet access; or being “humbled” by some sort of nude humiliation. Some practice “maintenance spanking,” wherein good girls are slapped on a schedule to remind them who’s boss; some don’t. Some couples keep the lifestyle from their children; others, like CDD blogger Stormy, don’t. “Not only does he spank me with no questions asked for disrespect or attitude in front of them, but I am also required to make an apology to each of them,” she writes.

The secret history of fascism in Australia

New Guard leader Eric Campbell at a meeting in Sydney 1932

The secret history of fascism in Australia

by Mick Armstrong

New Guard leader Eric Campbell at a meeting in Sydney 1932

 

There is a myth that Australia, with its supposed democratic, egalitarian traditions, has been immune from mass fascist movements. This is far from true.

Fascism as a mass phenomenon is a product of a capitalist system that is in deep social and political crisis. That was the case with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

In 1931-32 there were 130,000 Australians under arms, out of a population of just over 6 million. They trained and drilled with an assortment of fascist or far right paramilitary organisations. These were so-called respectable citizens: solicitors, doctors, dentists, graziers and business owners.

Support for Hitler and Mussolini was widespread in establishment circles.

In 1933, the Melbourne Herald ran a series of articles titled “Why I have become a fascist” by Wilfrid Kent Hughes, a Victorian MP. Kent Hughes came from a well connected Melbourne family. He had been school captain at Melbourne Grammar and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He went on to become deputy premier of Victoria. In the 1950s he was a minister in Menzies’ federal Liberal government.

Menzies, Australia’s longest serving prime minister, was glowing in his praise of Nazi Germany. In 1938, when federal attorney general, he visited the country and enthused about the “really spiritual quality in the willingness of Germans to devote themselves to the service and well being of the state”.

Hitler and Mussolini were viewed as heroes by conservatives because they had crushed the socialist movement and smashed the unions. They had ensured that profits kept rolling in. An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald declared: “Italy was only saved from Red dominance by the heroic remedy of fascism”.

Another typical example comes from 1937. William Mackay, the NSW police commissioner, established the first Police Boys Clubs. They were modelled on the Nazi labour youth battalions, which he admired because they “subordinate the individual to the welfare of the nation”.

Mackay’s fellow police commissioner in Victoria, Thomas Blamey, headed the main far right paramilitary organisation the League of National Security (also known as the White Army). Blamey went on to become a field marshal and commander of the army in World War Two.

1930s crisis

The crisis of the Depression years led to a political and social polarisation along class lines. More than 30 percent unemployment, wage cuts, widespread evictions and mass poverty led masses of workers to question the whole basis of capitalist society.

In NSW, the radical populist Labor premier Jack Lang won an enormous following. To the left of Lang, the Socialisation Units – which were committed to the immediate introduction of socialism – enrolled tens of thousands. The Communist Party also grew.

Ruling class opinion was hysterical about Lang. Lang was no revolutionary, but he was seen as opening the way for all the disloyal elements in society – the Reds, the unemployed and the Irish Catholics. Irish Catholics were the Muslims of the day – they had betrayed the empire during its hour of need during World War One by revolting against Protestant rule.

The New Guard is the best known of the far right groups. It was formed in February 1931 as a breakaway from the much larger and more powerful Old Guard, which had prominent capitalist backers and operated secretly.

The New Guard, with 36,000 members, was an open fascist organisation that physically attacked union, ALP, unemployed and communist meetings. Its leader, Eric Campbell, visited Italy and Germany and established close relations with the fascists there. It was more middle class in character than the Old Guard. Former prime minister John Howard’s father, Lyall, a petrol station owner, was typical.

Every state had its own fascist or far right organisations. In March 1931, the League of National Security staged a trial run at a coup. Its armed militias seized dozens of towns across rural Victoria.

But the height of far right mobilisation was in NSW. The Melbourne Herald declared: “Today in NSW the deliberate process of smashing is going on under our noses. Sovietism and revolution have found their instrument in Lang”.

In April 1932, the New Guard organised a riot outside Sydney’s Central Police Station as a trial run for a coup. It went badly. But just over a month later, on 13 May, Lang was gone.

The Old guard – which had close connections with the police, the armed forces and the security apparatus, and whose leadership read like a who’s who of the Sydney establishment – mobilised to bring his government down. As well as a secret military wing, it had an open front organisation of 130,000 members called the All Australia League.

Under tremendous pressure from the ruling class, state governor Philip Game sacked Lang in a soft coup. An armed fascist revolt was no longer necessary. Soon afterwards, Scullin’s federal Labor government also fell.

Legacy

Capitalist rule had been stabilised without the need for a full blown fascist regime. But the far right and fascist mobilisations had a profound impact on Australian politics, which was pushed well to the right.

The conservative governments that came to power federally and in NSW shared many of the values of the New and Old Guard. Indeed, at least 20 NSW members of parliament were members of the New Guard. There were others from the Old Guard.

The parliamentary arm of the right achieved a lot of what the paramilitary wing desired: democratic rights sharply undermined, major attacks on free speech, a harsh censorship regime, and a crackdown on the left, the unions and the unemployed.

All this ensured that the burden of the Depression was imposed on the working class and that the profits of the banks and big capital were secured.

For large numbers of workers, Depression-level wages and conditions were maintained for many years after the economy began to pick up.

The fascists and their backers had achieved their main goal.

 

Emanations from the Human Butt Polyp Pat Robertson: Gays Will Force Christians To Like Anal Sex And, Eventually, Polyamory And Bestiality

Emanations from the Human Butt Polyp Pat Robertson: Gays Will Force Christians To Like Anal Sex And, Eventually, Polyamory And Bestiality

by Curtis M. Wong

Right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson tackled the recent controversy over Memories Pizza, which became Indiana’s first business to publicly declare that they won’t cater to same-sex weddings in the wake of the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act this week.

“Most gays, if they’re having a wedding, don’t want pizzas — they want cake,” Robertson told “700 Club” viewers, according to Right Wing Watch. “It’s the cake-makers that are having a problem.”

Still, he warned Christian business owners of all types that gay customers will eventually “make you conform to them.”

“You’re gonna say that you like anal sex, you like oral sex, you like bestiality,” he added. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to conform your religious beliefs to the group of some abhorrent thing. It won’t stop at homosexuality.”

Noting that Christian beliefs will “come under assault” until polyamory and polygamy are acceptable, too, Robertson lamented, “It’s a weird world we’re living in.”

The comments aren’t too surprising, particularly given Robertson’s recent history of anti-gay sentiments. In Febuary, he argued that a Washington state judge’s ruling that a florist had discriminated against a gay couple by refusing to provide flowers for their wedding was also indicative of society’s eventual embrace of bestiality.

He asked, “To tell a florist that she’s got to provide flowers for a particular kind of wedding? What if somebody wanted to marry his dog? She’s got to have flowers for that?”

The right’s fear of education: What I learned as a (former) conservative military man

Why are Republicans constantly bashing college these days? I was one of them — and the answer may surprise you

The right’s fear of education: What I learned as a (former) conservative military man

Edwin Lyngar

EnlargeScott Walker, Rick Santorum (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas/AP/Charlie Neibergall/Photo montage by Salon)

My first college experience was failing half my classes at the University of Nevada Las Vegas in 1992.  The highlight was getting a “D” in English 101.  Like many small town kids, I was overwhelmed and underprepared.  I dropped out of UNLV, joined the military and got married.  Being a 20-year-old father and “enlisted” man showed me exactly how not to live, so I started a backward, fumbling and circuitous process of getting my undergraduate degree.  In seven years, I attended four community colleges, a university on a military base and attended military journalism school.  I pieced the whole mess into a bachelor’s degree from Excelsior College, a credit aggregator that caters to military members.

Modern conservative politics push the notion that people who flip switches, burgers or bedpans don’t need “education.”  They instead need “job training.”  In Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s budget, someone crossed out this phrase: “to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society.”  And added this instead: “to meet the state’s workforce needs.”  Walker backed down on the language change when it was exposed, claiming it was a “mistake.”  Really it was just one more tired attack on the idea of education as a public good, one that helps people find fulfillment and meaning.

I value education more than many people, because I struggled so hard to get it.  I had a bad elementary school experience, failed the fifth grade, muddled through high school and dropped out of college.  Teachers were always kind to me, saying things like, “He’s clever, but lazy.”  They were wrong about me, just like when Republicans are always wrong about poor people being lazy or stupid.  When I failed out of college the first time I was working a full-time job far above 40 hours a week, while also going to school.  I was most worried about making a living, and my skill set mirrored that of so many in the working class: Work hard, day in and day out and be grateful.  Educational success has little to do with innate intelligence or “goodness” and almost everything to do with class, upbringing and privilege.

I also viewed education with suspicion bordering on paranoia. I came from a rural mining town in Nevada where I knew mostly blue-collar men who neither needed nor wanted a college education. Listening to adults talk they always had a favorite villain: the person who jumped ahead in line and got a job or promotion, only because he or she had a college degree.

I have my own children now, and I know the limits of parenting.  Children heed your example far more than your advice.  It’s painful to watch your children struggle. It was the same for my conservative family who encouraged me to go college. They weren’t able to offer any meaningful guidance or help, and it was not their fault.  First generation college students, like me, face an impossible climb.  If you add in conservative hostility to education, it gets that much harder.

After getting a bachelor’s at 27, I went back to graduate school to study 18th century British literature at California State Hayward.  I landed a new job in Reno and moved to the University of Nevada, Reno, finishing a master’s in English there.  A few years later, I went back again, this time for a master’s of fine arts in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, a school that emphasizes social justice—for many conservatives, a coded phrase that means “liberal.”  Even as a libertarian attending a liberal college, people went out of their way to be both kind and tolerant to me.  My preconceived notions about the “evil liberals of the ivory tower” looked more ignorant and narrow by the day.

Before college, I voted conservative, hated gay people, loved America and served my country in the armed services.  I’ve changed because of many factors, but I know that college and graduate school made a difference. I met people unlike myself and was forced to defend sometimes ugly political positions.  The Tea Party thrives on blue-collar “common sense” that is composed of a combination of ignorance, superstition and fear. A literate and educated populace is an existential threat to the kind of thoughtless rage that has consumed the right over the past few years.

When I write about how my politics evolved over a lifetime from conservative to liberal, people in the comments section (note: never read Internet comments) like to point out my “liberal arts degrees.”  Even my own friends like to remark on my MFA, usually by asking me to whip them up a “grande cappuccino.”  It’s funny, and I go right along with the joke too.  I understand the reality of trying to earn a living with an arts degree. At the same time, it’s troubling that educational fulfillment has turned into a punch line, even among those who believe in it.

Some people on the right are very educated. Rick Santorum holds an MBA and a JD (with honors, no less), and his vehement hatred of college seems to stem from his kooky take on religion.  Modern politics is drawing bizarre new battle lines between “family values” and a halfway decent education.  American Christians may dislike “Islam,” but they share a lot of opinions with the radical Islamic group “Boko Haram,” a name that itself translates into “education is forbidden.” In our own country, we have a massive and growing group of people who would rather have illiterate children than let their kids learn anything that contradicts their most extreme religious views.

I know many thoughtful, educated and even liberal people who hold deep faith.  Despite my own personal atheism, I accept the authentic religious experiences of others, but I’m troubled by a growing chorus of denial on climate change, evolution and the age of the planet.  Anti-intellectualism may be an American tradition, but when “mainstream” politicians embrace ignorance, education ends up as collateral damage.

“Serious” presidential candidate Scott Walker seems to have a problem with evolution, sounding like an idiot, most recently while in England. Unlike Rick Santorum who is an overeducated hypocrite, Walker lives the life of a true education hater. Asked about not finishing his undergraduate experience (which I’m not necessarily attacking), Walker said, “The reason I went to college, in large part, was not just to get an education for an education’s sake, but to get a job.” For too many politicians, it all comes down to money.

In America, to our everlasting shame, money is the absolute yardstick of goodness. I like money just like anyone, but many other things have brought me as much or more satisfaction: being a father, writing an essay or seeing a new part of the planet.  It’s easy to pick on poetry, humanity or art degrees.

I was able to go back to school in large part because my military service made it affordable. The GI Bill paid for both my master’s degrees. My background and rough start make me an unlikely champion of college education.  I’ve also been socially adjusted for my whole life to feel like a pretentious asshole and a fraud every time I bring it up.  But education makes a difference in people’s lives.

That’s why sensible people need to stand up against the vilification of education. A good start is to support Barack Obama’s free community college initiative. I earned most of the credits for my very first undergraduate degree at community colleges, and those classes kickstarted my interest in school. It’s hard to see how I would have ever overcome my own barriers without the patience of many community college instructors. Obama’s plan to fund community college will not only make our country a better place but will also improve, even slightly, the state of our shared humanity.

And to acknowledge the “other side,” education does help people find good, fulfilling jobs.  Even my “slapped together” bachelor’s degree helped launch me into a career in public relations. The job has more than sustained me and my family, while also allowing me to explore my own outside interests.

Some days I wish I could use my graduate education to find a full-time academic job, but I passed up too many opportunities and wasted too many years fumbling around. Academic jobs and humanities scholarship itself are under assault, just like so many other valuable parts of America. I’m probably a coward, but I also don’t like the idea of leaving my longtime profession to start all over. Besides, there is inherent value to education even if someone isn’t paying you for it. I know my life would be less satisfying without it. For instance, if I had turned my back on education, I could have ended up as an ignorant asshole trying to turn back the very hands of human progress, much like the party to which I once belonged.

You can follow Edwin Lyngar on twitter @Edwin_Lyngar

Rumblings of Theocratic Violence

By Frederick Clarkson

About Frederick Clarkson

Frederick Clarkson is a senior fellow at Political Research Associates. He co-founded the group blog Talk To Action and authored Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.

 

Some Christian Right activists have lost hope that a Christian Nation can be achieved in the United States through the formal political process—including a high-level GOP operative. They are calling for martyrs and thinking about religious war.

“If the American experiment with freedom is to end after 237 years,” wrote Republican campaign strategist David Lane in an essay published on a popular conservative website in 2013, “let each of us commit to brawl all the way to the end.” Quoting Winston Churchill from the darkest days of the German bombing of Britain during World War II, Lane added that “upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization.”¹

Such rhetoric is so common on the farther reaches of the Right that it can be easy to dismiss. But something has changed in recent years. Such disturbing claims are appearing more frequently, more prominently, and in ways that suggest that they are expressions of deeply held beliefs more than provocative political hyperbole.² What’s more, there are powerful indications in the writings of some Christian Right leaders that elements of their movement have lost confidence in the bright political vision of the United States as the once and future Christian nation—and that they are desperately seeking alternatives.

The 59-year-old Lane, who generally keeps a low media profile, epitomizes the trend. Lane has been a key strategist in the conservative movement and a behind-the-scenes power broker and adviser to GOP presidential candidates for two decades.³ His main vehicle has been “Pastors’ Policy Briefings,” in which conservative Christian clergy and their spouses are provided expenses-paid trips to (usually) closed-door, invitation-only conferences. Speakers at these events included top GOP politicians and office holders, as well as Christian Right ideologues such as David Barton and experts in the mechanics of church-based electoral mobilization. During the 2010 mid-term elections, such events were held in six states (Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Iowa). The elections swept unprecedented numbers of Christian conservatives into state legislatures and the Congress, largely under the rubric of the Tea Party, helping catalyze the successful effort to oust three pro-marriage equality justices of the Iowa Supreme Court.⁴

The Iowa Renewal Project, which hosted a briefing in October 2013, is one of several state-level units of the American Renewal Project—which is, in turn, a political development and mobilization project of the Mississippi-based American Family Association. Its most prominent figures are founder Don Wildmon and the abrasive radio host Bryan Fischer. Lane told the Dallas Morning News that the goal of the event, which featured Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and U.S. Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX),⁵ was the same as the others: “the mobilization of pastors and pews to restore America to our Judeo-Christian heritage and re-establish a Christian culture.” Lane said: “We’ve been in 15 states now, largely under the radar, and we’ve had 10,000 pastors plus spouses that we’ve put up overnight and fed three meals. The purpose is to get the pastors—the shepherds in America—to engage the culture through better registration and get out the vote.”⁶

In one sense, little has changed since the methods that have defined the Christian Right were developed in the latter part of the twentieth century. But the heyday of high-profile, mediagenic leaders like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly—and their national organizations—is long gone. Their legacy is a generation of hands-on political operatives who now sustain a more decentralized Christian Right. No one now qualifies as the “leader” of the Christian Right. Instead, a constellation of smaller, electorally focused organizations has emerged, and others have evolved.

Lane’s method turns on the role of clergy in inspiring, sustaining, and expanding the electoral capacity of Christian conservatives. By Lane’s analysis, about half of eligible evangelical voters are either not registered or do not vote—and he believes pastors are the key to changing this, and thereby to sustaining the Christian Right’s strategic capacity for skillful voter mobilization, and exercising outsized political influence en route to dominant political power and governmental authority.⁷ As such, Lane epitomizes the long-haul political vision of the Christian Right. He has promoted Mike Huckabee at similar events since his runs for statewide office in Arkansas in the 1990s, and as a presidential candidate in 2008.⁸ Lane also masterminded the 2011 prayer rally that drew 30,000 people to launch Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s short-lived 2012 campaign for president.

Like many other evangelicals, especially those influenced by the Neocharismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation,⁹ Lane is counting on a revival—another Great Awakening—to sweep Christians of the right sort into positions of power. This would result in the kind of Christian nation that he and his close ally, the historical revisionist (and accused fabulist) David Barton—whose books and interpretations are influential among conservative evangelicals—believe was intended by the nation’s founders. Barton is well known, for example, for his claim that the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state is a “myth,” as well as the variation that the wall is “one directional,” that is, intended only to protect the church from the state.¹⁰ A Bartonesque Christian nationalism is the vision that animates Lane’s work across the election calendar.¹¹

But for all the energy he invests in traditional electoral work, Lane clearly is not convinced that his shining vision of America is likely—or even possible. Hence his doubt-filled essay about the “the American experiment with freedom” possibly ending. The piece, “Wage War to Restore a Christian Nation,” was published on World Net Daily (WND), a leading and influential news site of the farther secular and religious Right. WND quickly removed the essay in June 2013 after bloggers called attention to it,¹² but Lane soon demonstrated that it was not an aberration. He told conservative Iowa radio talk show host Steve Deace the following month that “car bombs in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa” would be merciful punishment from God for legalized abortion and for “homosexuals praying at the Inauguration [of President Obama’s second term].” Without such divine mercy, Lane suggested, America might “get judgment like Nazi Germany.”¹³

Lane’s apparent lack of confidence that the Christian Right’s efforts to establish theocratic governance can succeed by using the tools of democracy epitomizes his belief that martyrdom and elections are not mutually exclusive, and that horrific confrontations lie ahead. Indeed, Lane opened his WND essay with a quote from a leading thinker who does not believe that America can be salvaged via conventional politics: the theologian Peter Leithart, 55, a Christian Reconstructionist (hardline theocrat) who makes even David Barton seem meek and mild by comparison.¹⁴ “Throughout Scripture,” Leithart declared in a passage from his 2012 book Between Babel and Beast, “the only power that can overcome the seemingly invincible omnipotence of a Babel or a Beast is the power of martyrdom, the power of the witness to King Jesus to the point of loss and death.”¹⁵

“You ask,” Lane wrote in his WND essay, elaborating on Leithart’s theme, “‘What is our goal?’ To wage war to restore America to our Judeo-Christian heritage with all of our might and strength that God will give us. You ask, ‘What is our aim?’ One word only: victory, in spite of all intimidation and terror.”

Lane’s essay is a clarion call for a contemporary religious war against the supposedly pagan government of the United States. And his notion of war is not just a metaphor for politics. He even called for a contemporary “Gideon” and a “Rahab the Harlot” to rise to the occasion. Gideon is the Biblical figure who leads an Israelite army in an ethnic cleansing of the Midianites who were both oppressors and worshiped false gods. The story of Rahab turns on how she sheltered two Israelite spies in preparation for the sacking of the city of Jericho by Joshua’s army, resulting in the massacre of everyone but Rahab and her family. One does not invoke Gideon and Rahab in this way if one is simply calling for religious revival, or seeking to advance a legislative agenda.¹⁶

Coming from a top GOP operative, such exhortations to religious war are extraordinary. Lane’s articulation demonstrates an alarming degree of militancy at a high level of American politics. As such, it is a bellwether of an ideological reorganization, or at least reconsideration, now taking place within the Christian Right. It sounds like an expression of the cognitive dissonance experienced by a man whose job is to mobilize political constituencies toward common goals—but who doubts that the enterprise can succeed.

As a result, at least some of the historic culture warriors of the Christian Right seem to be considering an ostensibly unlikely coalition with the Neo-Confederate movement. The coalition would lead their followers in religious and political directions in which violence is as likely as the outcomes are uncertain. It is an unlikely coalition, not necessarily because the Christian Right and most Neo-Confederates differ much on issues, but because Christian nationalism is so fundamentally at odds with the notion of fracturing the nation due to a loss of hope and faith in the role of the United States in God’s plan.

Witness Against America

The accelerating advance of LGBTQ rights, especially marriage equality, has become a flashpoint for the Christian Right’s revolutionary impulses. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor in 2013, Peter Leithart took to the influential blog of the journal First Things (founded by the late Neo-Conservative Catholic thinker Richard John Neuhaus) to declare that the decision “presents American Christians with a call to martyrdom.”¹⁷

In 2013, influential GOP operative David Lane wrote an essay titled “Wage War to Restore a Christian Nation,” a clarion call for a contemporary religious war against the supposedly pagan government of the United States. Lane later told a radio host that car bombs in U.S. cities would be “merciful judgement” from God for the nation’s tolerance of legalized abortion and homosexuality.

Leithart is the former dean of graduate studies at New Saint Andrew’s College, whose founder and eminence grise is Douglas Wilson. (Leithart remains an adjunct fellow at the school, which is based in the university town of Moscow, Idaho.) In 2012, Leithart struck off on his own, founding a small school and related think tank, Trinity House, in Birmingham, AL. It seeks to serve as a center for a new Reformed Protestantism, called Federal Vision, whose leading lights include Neo-Confederate authors Wilson and Steven Wilkins.¹⁸

Together, Wilson and Wilkins have probably done more than anyone to construct the theology now animating much of the Neo-Confederate movement. Wilkins was one of the founders of the League of the South, the leading organization of contemporary Neo-Confederatism.¹⁹ As scholars Edward Sebesta and Euan Hague have written, the League views the Civil War as a “theological war” that continues in contemporary America. The heart of their argument is that the old Confederacy was an orthodox Christian nation fighting for the future against the heretical and tyrannical Union states.  Sebesta and Hague also report that that New York Times best-selling author Thomas E. Woods, a traditionalist Catholic and a founder of the League, has argued that “struggles against liberalism, big government and the New World Order comprise ‘Christendom’s Last Stand.’”²⁰

Wilson and Wilkins are notorious for a booklet they published that claimed that slavery was not so bad. Nick Gier, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Idaho, observes that they made a number of historically inaccurate but ideologically significant claims, notably that, “By the time of the [Civil] War, the leadership of the South was conservative, orthodox, and Christian,” and that the leadership of the North had become “radical and Unitarian.” While the Confederates were righteous, “the abolitionists in the North were “wicked” and “driven by a zealous hatred for the Word of God.”²¹

In his First Things piece , Leithart avoids calling too directly for Christians to risk their lives (perhaps because of the flap over David Lane’s essay). But his call to martyrdom is clear enough. “In Greek, martyria means ‘witness,’ specifically, witness in a court,” he wrote. “At the very least, the decision challenges American Christians to continue to teach Christian sexual ethics without compromise or apology. But Windsor presents a call to martyrdom in a more specific sense. There will be a cost for speaking the truth, a cost in reputation, opportunity, and funds if not in freedoms. [Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia’s reference [in Windsor] to the pagan Roman claim that Christians are ‘enemies of mankind’ was probably not fortuitous.”

“The only America that actually exists,” he continued, “is one in which ‘marriage’ includes same-sex couples and women have a Constitutional right to kill their babies. To be faithful, Christian witness must be witness against America.²²

“If America is to be put in its place—put right,” he concluded (in David Lane’s hair-raising invocation of a passage from Leithart’s book Between Babel and Beast), “Christians must risk martyrdom and force Babel to the crux where it has to decide either to acknowledge Jesus an imperator and the church as God’s imperium or to begin drinking holy blood.”²³

In Between Babel and Beast, Leithart declared that Christians must respond to the heresy of “Americanism,” by which some conflate the nation with Christianity itself. He called for repenting of Americanism and beginning to cultivate “believers who are martyrs in the original sense of ‘witness’ and in the later sense of men and women ready to follow the Lamb all the way to an imperial cross.”²⁴

Significantly, Leithart has also proposed “the end of Protestantism” in a way that suggests a growing affinity for the kind of Catholicism expressed by George Weigel—a U.S. Catholic culture warrior, neoconservative, signer of the Manhattan Declaration, and fellow First Things blogger. Leithart also proposes the related notion of a “Reformational Catholicism,” which foresees a Rome-based Christian unity.²⁵ He envisions this mutual accommodation as a kind of Christian maturity necessary for Christendom not only to survive but to prevail.

Leithart’s make-or-break vision would either end what he describes as anti-Christian tyranny or, failing that, build a new Christian nation—or nations. He is less concerned with the ups and downs of single issues than with the long-term advance of Christendom. This is consistent with the revolutionary visions of an influential Catholic thinker, Father C. John McCloskey, who believes that regional American strongholds of conservative Christianity may be necessary in light of the culture of religious pluralism and the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state.

Ending the Tyrannical Regime

The accelerating advance of LGBTQ rights, especially marriage equality, has become a flashpoint for the Christian Right’s revolutionary impulses. “The only America that actually exists,” Christian theocrat Peter Leithart has written, “is one in which ‘marriage’ includes same-sex couples and women have a Constitutional right to kill their babies. To be faithful, Christian witness must be witness against America.”

McCloskey, a 61-year-old priest in the conservative order Opus Dei, is best known for his role in the religious conversions of Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and various other prominent and influential conservatives, including Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork, economist Lawrence Kudlow, financier Lewis Lehrman, and the late journalist Robert Novak.

McCloskey told columnist Terry Mattingly in July 2013 that “the United States is no longer a Christian country.” Because this is so, he explained, traditionalists will need to cluster in states that are more congenial to their views on such matters as abortion, marriage, parents rights, and homeschooling. “No one in this country has ever really suffered for their faith in any meaningful way,” McCloskey said. “Those days are ending, especially in certain states . . . Among Catholics, we may soon find that many are Americans more than they are Catholics.”²⁶

McCloskey predicted in 2001, and again in 2012, that conservative Catholics and evangelicals would need to band together in a civil war of secession. The “secession of the ‘Culture of Life’ states,” he predicted, would emphasize “the fundamental issues of the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life,” and that the secession would precipitate “a short and bloody civil war” that would break the country into what he calls “the Regional States of America.”²⁷ He repeated this general view in an essay in January 2014, in which he discussed separating from the “tyrannical regime” in Washington, D.C.²⁸ McCloskey, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Faith and Reason Institute, has not said how he thinks this might happen, but he has said that the civil war may be all over by 2030. (Unsurprisingly, McCloskey has favorably reviewed one of the books of the prominent Catholic Neo-Confederate Thomas E. Woods, a founder of the League of the South.²⁹)

McCloskey, like the rest of the Republican-oriented Christian Right, believes that the current electoral strategy of seeking political control of the Red states might sufficiently reduce the number of abortions without having to overturn Roe. But he avers that while people from those states who seek abortions “retain the option of traveling to the nearest blue state,” there is “much hope in this area for at least regional decreases in abortions.”³⁰

Centuries of political and military conflict between Christian factions are being set aside in favor of strategic alliances that target the culture and constitutional structure of religious pluralism—and the supposedly “tyrannical” federal government. It may be more a matter of how, rather than when, the conversation about secession unfolds.

McCloskey finds encouragement in nullificationist activity in the Red states against what he considers “unjust laws” that protect abortion rights and access. He points to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback,³¹ who in 2013 signed legislation that defined life as beginning at conception as part of a bill that severely restricts, but doesn’t ban, abortion.³² Brownback has promoted nullification as a strategy of resistance to what is viewed as federal intrusions on state sovereignty regarding, among other things, gun control.³³

“The red state/blue state dichotomy could—perhaps sooner than we might think—result in states opting to pull out of the union,” McCloskey wrote in January 2014. He wondered about what secession might mean for a superpower such as the United States, and about how the armed forces might react.“[B]ut ultimately,” he concluded, “the protection of innocent life trumps any tyrannical regime.”³⁴ McCloskey has said he hopes that it will not come to the violence he has predicted, but for more than a decade he has openly said that a conflict with what he calls “the atheistic American Herods” is probably inevitable.³⁵

This kind of thinking is not new within the farther reaches of the religious and political Right. The Christian Right theorist and prolific author Gary North, for example, wrote about the long-term revolutionary implications of what he and others were doing. North objected to the 1994 assassination of a Florida abortion provider and his escort by a fellow Christian Reconstructionist, Paul Hill, who had also authored a manifesto in which he called for Christian militias to rise up against the federal government.³⁶ North argued that the assassination was premature and that the foundation for theocratic Christian revolution had not been properly laid. Nevertheless, North felt that something serious was already underway. “For the first time in over 300 years,” he wrote in 1987, “a growing number of Christians are starting to view themselves as an army on the move.  This army will grow.” He concluded: “We are self-consciously firing the first shot.”³⁷

It is not clear that the Christian Right is any more ready to revolt now than it was in 1994 —a period that was marked by a wave of arsons, bombings, and assassinations against abortion providers, as well as the rise of the militia movement. (Post 9/11, these violent movements were largely neutralized by federal law enforcement.) But as the 2009 Manhattan Declaration and other compacts created between Christian conservatives in recent decades have shown, the religious wars that have pitted Christian factions against one another for millennia, politically and militarily, are being resolved in favor of strategic alliances against the culture and constitutional structure of religious pluralism, and against the allegedly “tyrannical” federal government.³⁸ Thus the Catholic/evangelical conversation may be taking a surprising turn.

It may be more a matter of how, rather than when, the conversation about secession unfolds. Some see restoring the Christian nation (which arguably never was) as a hopeless cause. Others hope that a revival-powered wave of Christian nationalism will propel a profound cultural and political transformation. But if such a transformed America is not to be, a coalition with the avatars of Confederate revivalism will become more appealing, and will be well-aligned with McCloskey’s vision of the secession of conservative states.

Theology of Neo-Confederatism

Those who have long lived at the intersections of the Christian Right and the Neo-Confederate movement will find much in common with the culture warring, secessionist, violent visionary sensibilities of Lane and McCloskey, if variations on the theology of Neo-Confederatism gain further traction. Pastor David Whitney, 56, who leads the small Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Pasadena, MD (near Washington, D.C.), may epitomize the trend.

Though not widely known, Whitney is a well-connected figure on the Far Right. He is chaplain of the Maryland chapter of the League of the South and is a signatory of the “Covenant” of the six-year-old Southern National Congress, which openly seeks an “independent republic.”³⁹ He travels the country as the senior instructor at the Institute on the Constitution, which offers theocratic interpretations of U.S. history, and he is a perennial candidate for political office who has run on the Republican and Constitution Party tickets. In 2014 he ran in a Democratic primary for county council.

Like Lane and McCloskey, Whitney is revealing himself to be increasingly revolutionary.⁴⁰ He declared on Independence Day 2010, for example, that if government does not conform to God’s law, “the people have a right to secede” from the “wicked regime in Washington, D.C.” and its “despicable and evil tyranny.” He believes that we therefore may eventually have to make the “same difficult decision which our forebears reached on that hot July day in Philadelphia.”⁴¹

Whitney has become only more overtly militant since then. In February 2011, he threatened secession in testimony before the Judicial Proceedings Committee of the Maryland State Senate. For example, he claimed that passage of marriage-equality legislation would delegitimize the state government, such that state laws should not be obeyed; that the state courts and executive branch have no authority; that taxes should not be paid; and that “we should from this point forward consider it as our Founders considered King George III.” If the legislation passed, he said, “multitudes” would want to secede from the state.⁴² While there is no obvious secessionist uprising seeking to fracture Maryland in the wake of the passage of marriage-equality legislation, that issue is hardly Whitney’s only concern—and his seething sensibility has taken a turn to vigilantism.

In a June 2013 sermon, he justified the murder of abortion providers. In discussing a Christian’s duty to defend life, he said that this included the prevention of “the murder of the unborn” and that “we need to understand that there is such a thing as Biblically justifiable homicide.”⁴³ This places him in a distinct lineage of justification for murder that goes back at least to Paul Hill and was specifically rejected as a legal defense by the Florida courts. Hill had advocated the notion of justifiable homicide for more than a year before he decided to take action himself.⁴⁴

A May 2013 sermon helps to establish the context for Whitney’s notions of extrajudicial killings.  “When you talk to people about God’s Law being restored in America,” he declared, “they say, ‘Awww, you’re some ayatollah. Awww, you want a theocracy.’” He explained that, “Well yes, I want obedience to God’s Law because that is where liberty comes from. Liberty comes from God’s law.  Tyranny comes when God’s law is rejected by a society as it has been rejected in our day.” He went on to say that any law that “contradicts God’s law… is not law at all.”⁴⁵

Consistent with his deeply theocratic bent, Whitney wrote in February 2014 that we should “restrict citizenship” to Christians of the right sort: Christians who—whether voting or serving as jurors, government officials, or “in the Militia”—operate according to “God’s Law.”⁴⁶ In October 2013, he preached that “God’s word is wise in how to structure a human civil government. Because if a human civil government allows a tyrant to control an army, you are going to lose your freedom. It’s only when you, the people, are armed in a militia structure that you can prevent that kind of tyranny from overwhelming the country.”

In a sermon in March 2014, Whitney called for imprecatory prayer against the White House staff (presumably including President Obama), apparently because of the Affordable Care Act. “There are many enemies that we could pray against them that God would do unto them what they are seeking to do unto us,” he told his congregation. “There are those, including those in the White House, through their death panels, who intend to kill us. May God do to them what they intend to do to us.”⁴⁷

Such Words as These

It could be argued that the so-called culture wars have been long on metaphor and relatively short on violence. That would be fair, even when we consider the violence directed against LGBTQ people and the four decades of arsons, bombings, and assassinations directed at abortion providers since Roe. But the protagonists of the story of the various elements of the Christian Right see themselves as playing a different role than that cast by visionaries of perpetual social progress. There are also clear tensions between those who can live with the social changes taking place in the country, those who can’t, and those who do not see the battle as one of single issues, but one of the survival of Christendom—and whether or not Christians are willing to fight for it.

Taken singly, the views of any of the Christian Right leaders described here would not necessarily signal a trend. But taken together, the commonalities of their views take the edge off of their many differences and reveal distinct, overlapping factions of a dynamic movement towards the ideas of nullification and secession—and the possibility of violence and revolution.

One does not have to believe that secession or revolution of any kind would be successful, or that widespread violence is likely anytime soon, to recognize that the political tensions preceding any major matters of nullification, and moves towards secession by any state, would likely beget violence of many kinds. Which is why ignoring Lane, Leithart, McCloskey, Whitney, and their like—or assuming that they are anything less than deadly serious—could be an error of historic significance.

 

¹ David Lane, “Wage War to Restore a Christian Nation,” World Net Daily, June 6, 2013.
² This is also different than, but not necessarily mutually exclusive with, “eliminationist” rhetoric as described in David Neiwert, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, (PoliPointPress, 2009).
³ Grace Wyler, “10 Evangelical Powerbrokers Behind Rick Perry’s Prayer Rally To Save America,” Business Insider, Aug. 5, 2011, www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-masterminds-behind-rick-perrys-prayer-rally-to-save-america-2011-8?op=1.
⁴ Eric Eckholm, “An Iowa Stop in a Broad Effort To Revitalize the Religious Right,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 2011, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806E5DF1E30F930A35757C0A9679D8B63&pagewanted=1; Grace Wyler, “10 Evangelical Powerbrokers Behind Rick Perry’s Prayer Rally To Save America,” Business Insider, Aug. 5, 2011, www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-masterminds-behind-rick-perrys-prayer-rally-to-save-america-2011-8?op=1.
⁵ Bruce Wilson, “Ted Cruz Anointed by Pro-Religious War, Antigay Pastors,” Talk to Action, Oct. 11, 2013, www.talk2action.org/story/2013/10/11/173533/73.
⁶ Wayne Slater, “Ted Cruz headed to Iowa to speak with influential conservative pastors,” Dallas Morning News, June 6, 2013, www.dallasnews.com/news/columnists/wayne-slater/20130606-wayne-slater-ted-cruz-headed-to-iowa-to-speak-with-influential-conservative-pastors.ece; David Brody, “EXCLUSIVE: Evangelical Pastors Ready to Mobilize for 2014 Election, Say ‘America Has Left God,’” The Brody File, CBN, Feb. 25, 2013, http://blogs.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2013/02/25/exclusive-evangelical-pastors-ready-to-mobilize-for-2014-election-say.aspx.
⁷ David Brody (guest host for Glenn Beck), interview with David Lane, “David Lane on Glenn Beck Show,” The Blaze, Dec. 3, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wRBJZF8vKw.
⁸ Huckabee was also featured at the February 2014 Pastors’ Policy Briefing in North Carolina. See Sarah Posner, “The Revival of the Pastors’ Policy Briefings,” Religion Dispatches, Mar. 1, 2011. www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4320/the_revival_of_the_pastors’_policy_briefing.
⁹ Rachel Tabachnick, “Spiritual Warriors with an Antigay Mission: The New Apostolic Reformation,” Public Eye, Mar. 22, 2013, www.politicalresearch.org/2013/03/22/spiritual-warriors-with-an-antigay-mission.
¹⁰ Rob Boston, “Sects, Lies and Videotape:  David Barton’s Distorted History,” Church & State (April 1993). For more on Barton and Christian nationalism, see also, Frederick Clarkson, “History is Powerful:  Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters,” Public Eye, Spring 2007, http://www.politicalresearch.org/2007/03/05/history-is-powerfulwhy-the-christian-right-distorts-history-and-why-it-matters/.
¹¹ David Brody, “Revival in America? Time to Get off the Sidelines!” Christian Broadcasting Network, Aug. 1, 2013, www.cbn.com/cbnnews/politics/2013/July/Time-to-Get-Off-Sidelines-Iowa-Pastors-Say-Yes.
¹² Denise Oliver Velez, “Rand Paul’s outreach coordinator declares ‘holy war’ on us,” Daily Kos, June 16, 2013, www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/16/1214807/-Rand-Paul-s-outreach-coordinator-declares-holy-war-on-us.
¹³ Brian Tashman, “David Lane Predicts Car Bombings in LA, DC and Des Moines over Gay Inauguration Prayers,” Right Wing Watch, July 23, 2013, www.rightwingwatch.org/content/david-lane-predicts-car-bombings-la-dc-and-des-moines-over-gay-inauguration-prayers.
¹⁴ Frederick Clarkson, “Christian Reconstructionism: Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence,” Public Eye (March/June 1994), www.publiceye.org/magazine/v08n1/chrisrec.html.
¹⁵ Lane, “Wage War to Restore a Christian Nation.”
¹⁶ Lane often calls for the rise of Gideons and Rahabs in his published writings, notably in David Lane, “Will a Gideon or the Harlot please stand?” Christian Response Alerts, Oct. 17, 2012, www.christianresponsealerts.com/2012/10/will-a-gideon-or-the-harlot-please-stand.
¹⁷ Peter J. Leithart, “A Call to Martyrdom,” First Things, July 2, 2013, www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2013/07/02/a-call-to-martyrdom.
¹⁸ Leithart’s father, Paul Leithart, is a longtime leader of the John Birch Society, including current membership on the National Council.
¹⁹ Mark Potok,“Doug Wilson’s Religious Empire Expanding in the Northwest:  A religious empire based in Idaho is part of the far-right theological movement fueling neo-Confederate groups,” Intelligence Report (Spring 2004), www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2004/spring/taliban-on-the-palouse; Nick Gier, “Douglas Wilson, Southern Presbyterians, and Neo-Confederates,” Talk to Action, Jan. 11, 2008, www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/11/191549/134.
²⁰ Edward H. Sebesta and Euan Hague, “The U.S. Civil War as a Theological War: Confederate Christian Nationalism and the League of the South,” Canadian Review of American Studies (2002), 270.
²¹ Nick Gier, “Douglas Wilson, Southern Presbyterians, and Neo-Confederates,” Talk to Action, Jan. 11, 2008, www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/11/191549/134.
²² Peter J. Leithart, “A Call to Martyrdom,” First Things, July 2, 2013, www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2013/07/02/a-call-to-martyrdom.
²³ David Lane, “Wage War to Restore a Christian Nation,” World Net Daily, June 6, 2013, citing Peter J. Leithart, Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective (Cascade Books, 2012), 152.
²⁴ Lane, “Wage War to Restore a Christian Nation,” citing Leithart, Between Babel and Beast, xiii.
²⁵ Peter J. Leithart, “The End of Protestantism,” First Things, Nov. 8, 2013, www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/11/the-end-of-protestantism. Interestingly, David Lane organized a private dinner for clergy with Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) so they could hear his story of conversion from Hinduism to “evangelical Catholicism”:  Tom Hamburger, “Bobby Jindal, raised Hindu, uses Christian conversion to woo GOP base for 2016 run,” Washington Post, May 12, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bobby-jindal-raised-hindu-uses-christian-conversion-to-woo-gop-base-for-2016-run/2014/05/12/c446fa34-d989-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html?hpid=z1.
²⁶ Terry Mattingly, “John Paul II and the death of Christian America,” Press-Republican, July 8, 2013, www.pressrepublican.com/0205_columns/x881892943/John-Paul-II-and-the-death-of-Christian-America.
²⁷ C. John McCloskey III, “2030 Revisited,” The Catholic Thing, Mar. 15, 2012, www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/2030-revisited.html; Frederick Clarkson, “God is My Co-Belligerent: Avatar Priests, Hijacked Theologians, and Other Figures of Right-Wing Revolt,” Religion Dispatches, July 23, 2012, www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/6207/god_is_my_co_belligerent__avatar_priests__hijacked_theologians__and_other_figures_of_right_wing_revolt/;  For more on McCloskey, see Frank L. Cocozzelli, “The Politics of Schism in the Catholic Church,” Public Eye, Fall 2009, www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n3/politics-schism-catholic-hurch.html.
²⁸ C. J. McCloskey, “Hope for the Pro-life Movement,” Truth and Charity Forum (2014), www.truthandcharityforum.org/hope-for-the-pro-life-movement. See also Frank Cocozzelli, “Opus Dei Priest’s Secessionist Roadmap to Theocracy,” Talk to Action, Apr. 1, 2014, www.talk2action.org/story/2014/4/1/142834/8120.
²⁹ C. John McCloskey, “Battle for Marriage Heats Up in California,” National Catholic Register, Sept. 4, 2005, www.ncregister.com/site/article/battle_for_marriage_heats_up_in_california.
³⁰ C. J. McCloskey, “Hope for the Gospel of Life in America,” Truth and Charity Forum, June 12, 2013, www.truthandcharityforum.org/hope-for-the-gospel-of-life-in-america.
³¹ C. J. McCloskey, “Hope for the Gospel of Life in America,” Truth and Charity Forum, June 12, 2013, www.truthandcharityforum.org/hope-for-the-gospel-of-life-in-america.
³² Katie McDonough, “Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signs sweeping anti-choice bill into law,” Salon, Apr. 22, 2013, www.salon.com/2013/04/22/kansas_gov_sam_brownback_signs_sweeping_anti_choice_bill_into_law.
³³ Rachel Tabachnick and Frank Cocozzelli, “Nullification, Neo-Confederates, and the Revenge of the Old Right,” Public Eye (Fall 2013), www.politicalresearch.org/2013/11/22/nullification-neo-confederates-and-the-revenge-of-the-old-right.
³⁴ C. J. McCloskey, “Hope for the Pro-life Movement,” Truth and Charity Forum, Jan. 13, 2014, www.truthandcharityforum.org/hope-for-the-pro-life-movement.
³⁵ Quote is from C. J. McCloskey, “The 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Dr. Nathanson the Prophet,” Truth and Charity Forum, Jan. 14, 2013, www.truthandcharityforum.org/the-40th-anniversary-of-roe-v-wade-and-dr-nathanson-the-prophet. Also see C. J. McCloskey, “2030: Looking Backwards,” CatholiCity (May 2000), www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/2030.html.
³⁶ Frederick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Common Courage Press, 1997), 141-142.
³⁷ Gary North, “What Are Biblical Blueprints?” in Gary DeMar, Ruler of the Nations: Biblical Blueprints for Government (Dominion Press, 1987), 270.
³⁸ Frederick Clarkson, “Christian Right Seeks Renewal in Deepening Catholic-Protestant Alliance,” Public Eye (Summer 2013), www.politicalresearch.org/christian-right-seeks-renewal-in-deepening-catholic-protestant-alliance.
³⁹ “The Southern National Covenant,” Southern National Congress, www.southernnationalcongress.org/Southern_National_Covenant.
⁴⁰ Frederick Clarkson, “Two Neo-Confederate Leaders Join Republican & Democratic Parties to Run For Office,” Political Research Associates, Feb. 27, 2014, www.politicalresearch.org/2014/02/27/two-neo-confederate-leaders-join-republican-democratic-parties-to-run-for-office.
⁴¹ Clarkson, “Two Neo-Confederate Leaders Join Republican & Democratic Parties to Run For Office.” The sermon was taken down after PRA exposed it. However, the relevant audio clip of Whitney’s July 4, 2010, sermon survives: see “David Whitney on the God-given right to secede,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn3O0-n5chY.
⁴² David Whitney, “Pastor Whitney testifies before Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee,” American View, Feb. 23, 2011, www.theamericanview.com/pastor-whitney-testifies-before-maryland-senate-judicial-proceedings-committee.
⁴³ Adele M. Stan, “Anti-Choice Proponent of ‘Justifiable Homicide’ Vies for Spot on Democratic Council,” RH Reality Check, Feb. 28, 2014, http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/02/28/anti-choice-proponent-justifiable-homicide-vies-spot-democratic-council. The church has taken down this sermon (and others) since PRA ran the original story, but we have a copy.
⁴⁴ Clarkson, Eternal Hostility.
⁴⁵ David Whitney, “The Price of Liberty,” Sermon, May 5, 2013. Retrieved from http://cornerstone.dnsalias.org:8000/Cornerstone/CEFC.htm The link to this sermon is no longer available, but PRA has the excerpt posted on YouTube. See “David Whitney says if it’s not God’s law, it’s ‘pretend law,’” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAV_Deg7Cfw.
⁴⁶ David Whitney, “Rethinking Citizenship,” Western Journalism Center, Feb. 21, 2014, www.westernjournalism.com/rethinking-citizenship.
⁴⁷ David Whitney, “The American View Sermon Series – March 16, 2014,” Mar. 16, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z_HzA20Z6s

American Christian Taliban Threaten Humane Methodist Pastor

VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked

By Zack Ford

“VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked”

Rev. Frank Schaefer

CREDIT: UMC.org

On Monday, the United Methodist Church convicted Rev. Frank Schaefer on two counts against the Church for officiating his son’s same-sex wedding. On Tuesday, the impaneled jury determined his sentence: Schaefer is suspended for 30 days, and if it at the end of that time he has not renounced his support for marriage equality, he will be defrocked.

Schaefer, however, was unapologetic, refusing the invitation to “repent of your actions”:

SCHAEFER: [The Church] needs to stop judging people based on their sexual orientation. We have to stop the hate speech. We have to stop treating them as second-class Christians. […]

I will never be silent again. This is what I have to do. […]

I have to minister to those who hurt and that’s what I’m doing.

Three of Schaefer’s four children identify as gay.

After his sentence was announced, his supporters began overturning chairs in the courtroom, a reference to the biblical story of Jesus and the moneychangers.

Schaefer’s critics framed his actions as “breaking the rules” and “rebuking” the Church.

Update

Watch Rev. Schaefer’s remarks from after the sentencing, committing himself to being an “outspoken advocate” for the LGBT community. He also added that if a same-sex couple asked him to marry them in the next 30 days, he would do it:

 

Related articles

• VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked (thinkprogress.org)
• VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked (richarddawkins.net)
• VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked (secularnewsdaily.com)
• Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days to Renounce His Gay Children or Be Defrocked (readersupportednews.org)
• Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days to Renounce His Gay Children or Be Defrocked (dailyqueernews.wordpress.com)
• Hero Pastor Given 30 Days to Renounce His Gay Children or Be Defrocked (alternet.org)
• Pastor who performed gay wedding to learn fate (kansascity.com)
• Guilty verdict handed to United Methodist pastor involved in gay marriage trial; sanctions to be announced Tuesday (pennlive.com)
• Pastor expects to be defrocked after suspension (heraldonline.com)

10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week

10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week

Holier than the Pope himself, Palin and Buchanan take Francis to task.

Photo Credit: Jennifer A. Walz/Shutterstock.com 

It’s been a busy week for all manner of charlatans, religious and otherwise.

1. One-woman parade of idiocy, Sarah Palin: The Pope is too liberal; social programs are similar to slavery.

Sarah Palin was on book tour this week, telegenically spewing some of the stupidest nonsense we’ve heard since she announced she could see Russia from her house. We’d like to ignore her, but the fact is she’s hugely popular among a certain segment of the population, and her book about the “war on Christmas,” Good Tidings and Great Joy, is destined for best-sellerdom. Just don’t wish her “Happy holidays!” That is waging war, my friend.

As Christian as she is, though, during an interview with CNN, Palin complained about Pope Francis. She’s taken aback by his liberal attitudes, she says. Taken aback by his unwillingness to go after the LGBT community and atheists, we suppose, and his sympathy for the lonely elderly, and unemployed youth. As Bill Maher said, Palin’s really going to be shook up when she finds out what Jesus said. Be sure to have tranquilizers available when she encounters the Sermon on the Mount.

Palin hopped right on that highly offensive bandwagon of equating the social safety net with slavery. “Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing money from China,” she said. “When that note comes due — and this isn’t racist so try it anyway, this isn’t racist — but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due, right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.”

Insisting that you are not being racist when you’re comparing slavery to something far more benign is always a really convincing way to make people believe that you are in no way racist.

2. Pat Buchanan: The Pope is bordering on moral relativism. The horror!

Pat Buchanan is another conservative who is very upset that the Pope is not willing to use the Catholic Church to bully people anymore. Specifically, he misses license to bully atheists, women who use birth control and have abortions, and gay people. In his refusal to berate or convert atheists, and tell LGBT people that they are going to hell, Pope Francis is bordering on— cue music of dread — moral relativism.

Two of the statements that upset Buchanan the most: Pope Francis describing the attempt to convert people to Christianity as “solemn nonsense,” and saying that Christians should spend less time lecturing people than listening to them to “discover new needs.”

Why, that dastardly Pope Francis even acknowledged that people can be good no matter what their religious belief, or lack thereof. And he committed the cardinal sin (sorry, pun intended) of stressing helping the poor, rather than focusing on distractions like the gay lifestyle. As Buchanan wrote at Townhall on Friday, Pope Francis is leading “the Catholic Church to a stance of non-belligerence, if not neutrality, in the culture war for the soul of the West.”

A non-belligerent church?! What the hell?

3. Pat Robertson: Ask your gay son if he has been molested.

Ever the dispenser of sound parenting advice, 700 Club host, evangelical bigot par excellence Pat Robertson advised a caller to be “understanding” when talking to her gay son. By being “understanding,” he meant asking her son if the reason he is gay is because he was molested. Because that is always how people become gay.

“Is there a biological thing going on or has he been influenced — has a coach molested him?” Robertson asked the viewer who called in.

Either way, of course, the mother must immediately enroll her son in one of those gay conversion therapies; yes, the abusive form of pseudo-counseling that even ultra-conservative New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was forced to acknowledge should be illegal.

(h/t Right Wing Watch)

4. Sandy Rios: Gay-waiter-refused-tip story just a clever ruse to help ENDA.

No doubt you’ll remember the story two weeks ago of the Kansas City waiter who, in lieu of a tip, received a note from his oh-so-considerate Christian customers saying that, despite his superb service, they couldn’t let him share in their riches because they, and god, disapproved of his lifestyle. That story went viral, and even Bill Maher picked up on it, suggesting that if you want to be selfish and cheap, just do it. Don’t claim it’s for the worker’s own good.

Unfortunately, the behavior has spread, with another family refusing a tip this week to a server they assumed was a lesbian. They were even less nice about it, treating her rudely from the start, racking up a sizable bill and gleefully stiffing the hardworker, who happens to be an ex-Marine, out of her gratuity.

But wait, back up, this just in: Sandy Rios of the American Family Association says the first story was a ruse — a hoax staged by the tricky LGBT community to drum up sympathy for ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) to pass in the Senate.

“I smell a rat in this story,” Rios said. “I don’t believe a Christian couple wrote this note, I think it was a ruse because it was the week ENDA was being voted on.”

If only progressives were as willing to engage in dirty tricks and outright deception as ultra-conservatives. If only… hatred was something that was merely stagecraft.

5. Rafael Cruz: Atheism leads to sexual abuse of children.

Ted’s dad. At it again. Downloading his unique combo of spurious lies, bile and nonsense.

This week, speaking at a gathering of a group we must look into joining, OK2A, described on its website as “Oklahoma Premiere Second Amendment advocacy group,” Rafael Cruz said, straight up, that atheism leads to sexual abuse of children.

Here is the logic he laid out to the assembled gun-toting crazies: “If there is nothing, if there is no God, then we are ruled by our instincts.”

Atheism leads to moral anarchy, he said. “Do we know any politicians that have done that?” he asked the crowd.

“Hitler!” answered Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, who, coincidentally, was in the audience.

“Oh, we don’t have to go that far, Larry,” Cruz chummily replied. “Just go to Washington. Just go to the White House.” From there, it’s a short hop to sexual immorality, perversion and sexual abuse, Cruz concluded.

Follow?

6. Faux “Historian” David Barton: True Christian soldiers wouldn’t have PTSD.

Atheism is apparently a problem in the military, too. Because if soldiers were true Christians, they would not feel bad about killing enemies and sometimes non-combatants. They would not come home traumatized and have all these psychological problems.

Christian “historian” David Barton, the one who blamed Typhoon Haiyan on women having legal abortions, celebrated Veteran’s Day by criticizing veterans who feel at all guilty for what they do on the battlefield. If they read their Bible, he and televangelist Kenneth Copeland agreed on Believer’s Voice of Victory, they’d read in Numbers 32 that soldiers “shall return and be guiltless before the Lord” and that means that they wouldn’t have PTSD.

“You don’t take drugs to get rid of it, it doesn’t take psychology; that promise right there will get rid of it,” Copeland said.

When you go to war God’s way, Barton chimed in, “not only are you guiltless for having done that, you’re esteemed.”

So, get it together veterans!

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

7. Rand Paul: Obamafascists are coming for your donuts.

This is truly terrifying. Right-wing libertarian wackadoodle Rand Paul took to the microphone this week to warn Americans that the federal government is targeting donuts. That’s what he said: “They’re coming after your donuts!”

Way to scare people. First, Madam Dictator Michelle Obama tries to get kids to eat more vegetables and exercise; now, the FDA is banning trans fats. Give me obesity or give me death! Or both, as the case may be.

You know who libertarian Paul is not so libertarian about? Gubb’mint employees.

“I say we should line every one of them up. I want to see how skinny or how fat the FDA agents are that are making the rules on this,” he said in his rousing donut hysteria-invoking speech.

Donuts, as Esquire’s Charles Pierce pointed out, don’t need trans fats to be delicious. The two largest donut purveyors, Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts are making pretty tasty round pastries without them.

Credit where due, though: There’s no indication, yet, that Paul’s recent call to arms was plagiarized.

8. Rush Limbaugh makes deranged comments on Obamacare.

There have been a lot of deranged comments on Obamacare this week, including from theNew York Times when it idiotically compared the bumpy rollout of healthcare.gov to Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. Hmmm, website = hurricane. Thousands dead = millions potentially getting health insurance. Yep, that analogy works.

Actually, all kidding aside, it’s monstrous.

While arguably Rush Limbaugh is less influential than the Times, and perhaps a tad more right-wing, he was not to be outdone in the crazy Obamacare hysteria that ran rampant this week. Rush, of course, does not like women, or sluts as he calls them, who use birth control. And Obamacare making it easier for them to do so is one of the healthcare act’s greatest evils in his view. Because he cares so much about millennials and their virtue, Rush took it upon himself to warn them on Wednesday’s show not to fall into this trap. What Obamacare is really advocating is not safer sex, he says—it’s prostitution.

“If you like being promiscuous, you can keep on being promiscuous,” Limbaugh, friend of the young, said. “If you like being a prostitute, then have at it!”

And summing up for emphasis:

“If you like your risky, promiscuous lifestyle, you can keep it. That’s what Obama is promising.”

Wait, that sounds kind of good, Rush. Thanks!

(h/t: Media Matters)

9. Phyllis Schlafly: Calling all border agents—be on the lookout for polygamist Muslims.

In a world that made any sense, conservative mouther-offer Phyllis Schlafly would have long ago faded into irrelevance. Frankly, we had assumed she was dead by now, but she’s alive and kicking, and still getting airtime to broadcast her ignorance.

While the Eagle Forum founder has long been preoccupied with fighting feminism, she also wants to make sure that those really sexist Muslims with multiple wives are not being let into our country. Yes, immigration, the changing complexion of America, and what that means for the welfare rolls is very much on Schlafly’s increasingly enfeebled mind these days.

She expressed these concerns on a radio show called “Crosstalk” the other day, saying:

“I would like to know if our immigration authorities are letting in people who believe in polygamy. Polygamy is against our law. We’ve brought in thousands of Muslims — I want to know if they made them sign a pledge to assure they’re not bringing in a bunch of wives who will now go on our welfare. Nobody can answer that question; I can’t get any answers to that question.”

Luckily, a caller to the show had an answer. He asserted without an iota of doubt that the Obama administration was bringing in 40 to 50 million Muslims and that they will destroy our constitution and implement Sharia law.

On the bright side, Phyllis: feminism and Sharia law do not go well together. Time to make friends with the enemy of your enemy?

10. Louisiana official: Close the libraries so those Mexicans can’t learn English; build a jail instead.

Most immigration hardliners also believe that anyone who comes to this country damn well ought to learn English. No bilingual education, no chance of Americans ever rubbing elbows with people who don’t speak Amurrican.

But Lindel Toups, who sits on the Lafourche Parish City Council, is upset that Mexicans are trying to learn English, and he’d like to divert funding from libraries to a new jail because of that fact. Toups played down the importance of libraries in recent comments to the Tri-Parish TimesandBusiness News, by pointing out that the Spanish-language Biblioteca Hispana section helps Spanish-speakers learn English.

“They’re teaching Mexicans to speak English,” Toups said “Let that son of a bitch go back to Mexico.”

Libraries are apparently a great source of evil. “There’s just so many things they’re doing that I don’t agree with… Them junkies and hippies and food stamps [recipients] and all, they use the library to look at drugs and food stamps [on the Internet]. I see them do it.”

The citizens of Lafourche Parish are voting this week on whether to keep $800,000 in the library system or put it toward the $25 million needed for a new jail. That way, they might be able to avoid an increase in taxes.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Related articles

• 10 worst right-wing statements of the week – donut paranoia edition (salon.com)
• Pope Denounces Buchanan and Palin for Questioning his Agenda (newslo.com)
• 10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week (bandannie.com)
• 10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week (rinf.com)
• Pat Buchanan upset by Pope Francis: He is losing the culture war (rawstory.com)
• Bill Maher: Sarah Palin would prefer the Pope who quit while in office (video) (freakoutnation.com)
• Maher: If Palin thinks the Pope is too liberal, ‘wait until she sees what Jesus has been saying’ (rawstory.com)
• 10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week (alternet.org)

American and Russian Fascists Unite In Theocratic Coitus of Hate

Religious Right Leaders Defend Russia’s Anti-Gay Law    

by Peter Montgomery

As Miranda reported earlier, House Speaker John Boehner’s office stepped in to provide space to the anti-gay Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society for its symposium on what Americans should learn from other countries when it comes to “family policy.” Sen. Mark Kirk, who had originally sponsored the group for a room, withdrew his support last night saying he doesn’t affiliate with groups that discriminate.

The Howard Center’s Allan Carlson, who described himself as a historian by training, saw fascism at work: “The parallel I see here is what happened in Italy, Germany, other lands in the 1920s and 1930s as fascism began to impose its fear-driven grip on debate, on conversation, and on policy-making.”

Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America boasted about having been a speaker at all but one of the World Congress of Families summits – annual events organized by the Howard Center and attended by conservative religious activists from around the world. Crouse acknowledged that “things don’t look so good” to activists watching the advance of same-sex marriage in Europe and the U.S., and public opinion in many countries shifting to “quote LGBT rights.”  But, she said that’s not the whole story, and praised countries that have outlawed gay marriage and other groups of citizens who are “with the help of God” changing the world.

Crouse is particularly excited about what is happening among opponents of marriage equality in France, which she portrays as a “David v. Goliath” battle of plucky pro-family activists fighting the French government and media. She mentioned activists in Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, and Nigeria. She encouraged the small number of attendees to “take heart” and count on the power of truth and faithfulness.

Austin Ruse, the enthusiastically anti-gay head of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, devoted much of his remarks to supporting Russia’s new anti-free-speech and anti-gay propaganda law.  He read from a statement of support from “pro-family groups” defending Russia’s new law. The letter claims that “the Russian law protects the innocence of children and the basic rights of their parents recognized in the international legislation and treaties.”  More from the letter:

With its new law Russia is protecting genuine and universally recognized human rights against artificial and fabricated “values” aggressively imposed in many modern societies….We thus call for respect of the sovereignty of the Russian people and we invite all organizations and people who feel responsible for the protection of the innocence of children and their rights, the natural family and parental rights to stand up for Russia, as well as for Ukraine and Moldova suffering the same pressure due to similar laws.

Ruse, who has been spending time in Russia to prepare for the World Congress of Families 2014 summit, being held in Moscow, said western LGBT rights advocates were guilty of overheated rhetoric and “propaganda” about the status of gays in Russia. He saw gays everywhere in Moscow! They can enjoy themselves “hassle-free” at clubs.  Russians, he said, accept that homosexuality exists, but they believe the political movement to celebrate and regularize it is harmful to children.

Speakers actually seemed envious of Russia in some ways.  Ruse said that with the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, “Christians over there are truly dominant.” In the U.S., though, there is “an increasingly hostile atmosphere toward people with traditional values” and a “vicious totalitarianism that is loose in the land.” And “there’s more trouble coming” with the Employment Non Discrimination Act.  Crouse said American gay-rights activists are “turning into thugs who are destroying freedom of speech, destroying religious liberty.” It’s very “refreshing,” she said, to see that’s not the case in other countries.

Ruse acknowledged that anti-gay violence and thuggery is a problem in Russia. He denounced such violence and said he has urged Russian officials to do more to stop it. But when he was asked whether the conversation about the anti-gay propaganda law and protecting children from gay people might encourage such violence, he said anti-gay violence in Russia has been going on for a long time and didn’t think the new law was to blame. And he said blaming religious conservatives for creating a climate of hate is a tactic of gay-rights groups, a “maneuver to silence people.”

Carlson said he cuts Russia a lot of slack because the country is “trying to put decent moral society back together” after both Communism and some of the “bad things” – like a “libertine approach to sexuality” – that poured into Russia from the west after the fall of Communism.

– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-leaders-defend-russia-s-anti-gay-law#sthash.IM0pOZA3.dpuf

Related articles

• Speaker Boehner Brings Hate-Peddlers to Capitol Hill (hrc.org)
• American Supporters of Russia’s Anti-Gay Laws Come to Capitol Hill to Offer Best Practices of Hate (hrc.org)
• Speaker Boehner Welcomes Homophobic Group To Capitol Hill (thinkprogress.org)
• Speaker Boehner Brings Hate-Peddlers to Capitol Hill (yubanet.com)
• Russia’s Vitaly Milonov: Gay Men Deserve To Be Punched And Kicked (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Boehner gives anti-gay group a hand (msnbc.com)
• Boehner Rescues The Hate Groups (joemygod.blogspot.com)

Priest Condemns Homophobia as Anti-Christ, Religious Right Freaks Out

Religious Right calls priest who condemns homophobia anti-Christ

Last week when Gary Hall, an Episcopalian priest and dean of Washington’s National Cathedral, labeled homophobia “a sin” during a sermon marking the 15th anniversary of the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay man, he raised a storm of howls from the Religious Right… and received plenty of condemnations from them himself.

Jennifer LeClaire, who writes for the conservative Christian magazine Charisma, quotes Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center), as saying “Gary Hall of the National Cathedral is sinning when he claims that opposition to homosexuality is a sin. This is counterfeit Christianity in action—transferring the guilt before God from those who are committing sins (of which homosexuality is one) to those who oppose those sins.” LaBarbera calls this an example of a new heretical ‘sin-affirming Christianity’ that poses a danger of spreading within the evangelical Church. Jennifer LeClaire adds that she thinks LaBarbera is “spot-on” and declares she is shocked by the kind of deception the Very Reverend Hall is perpetrating.

Yesterday (Oct. 22), Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (another hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center) added his two cents worth in the FRC’s Washington Watch Daily Commentary. He compared the Very Rev. Hall to one of the “false prophets” from the biblical Book of Jeremiah: “they encourage those who do evil, and as a result, no one turns from doing evil.”

So what did Gary Hall say that has the Religious Right so upset? Here’s a sample:

“We must now have the courage to take the final step and call homophobia and heterosexism what they are. They are sin. Homophobia is a sin. Heterosexism is a sin. Shaming people for whom they love is a sin. Only when all our churches say that clearly and boldly and courageously will our LGBT youth be free to grow up in a culture that totally embraces them fully as they are.”

“It’s more than tragic—in fact it’s shameful–that faith communities, especially Christian ones, continue to be complicit in putting our children at risk and abetting the attitudes that oppress them, thereby encouraging the aggressors who would subject our children to pain, humiliation, and violence.”

And after same-sex marriages became legal in Washington DC earlier this year, Hall announced that the National Cathedral would begin to perform the wedding ceremonies.

Related articles

• National Cathedral Dean: Homophobia is a Sin (towleroad.com)
• National Cathedral Dean: Homophobia Is A Sin (baltimore.cbslocal.com)
• Is atheism winning the culture war? (richarddawkins.net)
• Secular Spirituality Is Not an Oxymoron (blogs.forward.com)
• European Religious Leaders: ‘Secularism Could be the New Terrorism’ (patheos.com)
• Is atheism winning the culture war? (washingtonpost.com)
• Why Oprah’s Anti-Atheist Bias Hurts So Much (psychologytoday.com)
• Gays Christians Shouldn’t Just Leave the Church; They Should Leave the Faith (patheos.com)
• Poland: Archbishop condemned after blaming victims for child sex abuse (examiner.com)

The Religious Right Is a Fraud — There’s Nothing Christian About Michele Bachmann’s Values

By Elizabeth Stoker  and Matt Bruenig

The Religious Right Is a Fraud — There’s Nothing Christian About Michele Bachmann’s Values

   Last week, the nation’s capital was host to Value Voters 2013 Summit, a three-day political conference for predominantly religious conservatives. Among the smattering of social and economic issues at hand, the overall tenor of the Summit focused on eliminating Obamacare, expanding the tangible presence of Christianity through the public arena and military and preventing the proliferation of easily available birth control and abortion. In speeches, lunches and breakout sessions, American’s Christian Right worked out strategies to bring the values of the federal government in line with their preferred Christian ethical dictates, using democracy as their chief tool.

It isn’t unusual for Christians living in democracies to use the vote to express their ethics, and to shape government to do the same. That the moral and ethical preferences of a given society should inform government is a foundational principle of democracy, after all. And American values voters are far from the first Christians to undertake the project of bringing their government’s policies in line with Christian ethics: European Christian parties have aimed to do the same for decades. But between American Christian voters and their European counterparts, a curious departure opens up: while European Christians generally see the anti-poverty mission of Christianity as worthy of political action, the American Christian Right inexplicably cordons off economics from the realm of Christian influence.

By all means, the American Christian Right is willing to leverage government authority to carry out a variety of Christian ethical projects, especially within the arena of family life. Michele Bachmann would make abortion illegal, and Rick Santorum has stated on multiple occasions that he supports laws against homosexual intercourse. But Christian politicians in the United States curtail their interest in making the gospel actionable when it comes to welfare. While the government should see to the moral uprightness of marriage, sex and family, the Value Voters 2013 Summit was notably bereft of talks on living wages, labor rights or basic incomes.

The notable exclusion of poverty from the Christian agenda would doubtlessly puzzle European Christians, whose support of Christian ethical approaches to family life have always been paired with a deep and vigorous concern for the poor. And, unlike their American counterparts, European Christians haven’t been willing to leave poverty up to individual charity or the market to handle. Quite the contrary: Just as public morality is an arena fit for intervention by a Christian-informed government, so too is welfare. Consider the British Christian People’s Alliance 2010 election manifesto, a document intended to explain the imminently Christian party’s policy goals:

“The Christian Peoples Alliance believes that Britain will return to economic prosperity when government chooses instead to put human relationships in right order. This requires power, income and wealth to be redistributed and for greater equality to be achieved. These are deeply spiritual convictions and reflect a Biblical pattern of priorities…By the end of the next Parliament, the CPA will establish the reduction of inequality as a national target, so that the ratios of the incomes of the top 20 per cent are reduced to no more than five and a half times the incomes of the bottom 20 per cent.”

The CPA election manifesto goes on to explain that their aversion to inequality arises from a uniquely Christian concern for the health of human relationships, which suffer under the weight of massive social inequality. Their position on inequality is hardly an anomaly among European Christian parties. In fact, the European Christian Political Movement (ECPM), a confederation of Christian parties from different European nations operating within the European Union, states very similar goals in its own programme:

“Social justice is a fundamental Biblical teaching and Christian-democrat notion. Social justice demands an equal regard for all. That implies a special concern for the needs of the poor, refugees, those who suffer and the powerless. It requires us to oppose exploitation and deprivation. It requires also that appropriate resources and opportunities are available. In this way, we meet the basic requirements of all and each person is able to take part in the life of the community.”

Toward that end, the European Christian Political Foundation, which is the official think tank of the ECPM, recently commissioned a publication entitled ‘After Capitalism’, which is summarized thus:

“‘After Capitalism’ seeks to rethink the foundations of a market economy and argues that the Bible’s central theme of relationships is the key to rebuilding a system that promotes economic well-being, financial stability and social cohesion.”

It is notable that the multitude of parties that make up the EPCM are not necessarily leftist or wholly liberal parties. They do not generally align themselves with openly socialist parties in their home countries, though their policies toward welfare and equality would likely be branded as such by American Christians. And so the question remains: If European Christians feel the anti-poverty mission of Christianity is as worthy of political action as the ethical values relating to family life, why doesn’t the American Christian Right feel the same?

Economic policy seems a strange place to wall off consideration of Christian ethics, but when it comes to policies that would expand welfare programs or extend particular benefits to the poor, the American Christian Right recoils, and tends to fall back on the rhetoric of personal accountability and individual liberty in matters of charity. But as European Christian parties have shown, limiting economic justice to the arena of charity is a politicalchoice. If the government has a moral role — which the American Christian Right certainly believes it does — then why shouldn’t it participate in the same forms of care individual Christians are obligated to?

No principled reason can be given for the distinction the Christian Right draws between harnessing the state to pursue social objectives and harnessing it to pursue economic objectives. It is a uniquely American distinction as far as Christian politicking goes. What the distinction reveals is that so-called values voters are just a particular flavor of right-wing political culture, one that opts for Christian language and rhetoric when communicating its message. But in that case, it is their freestanding political commitments that inform their Christianity, not the other way around.

The answer to this riddle is therefore not so mysterious. Although nominally interested in harnessing the state to pursue Christian social objectives, the American Christian Right is not detached from the culture it has developed within. Their politics is not one that is Christian in origin; rather, it originates from the same place all other right-wing politics originates, but mobilizes Christian rhetoric and meanings post-hoc to justify its goals.

 

Related articles

• The religious right is a fraud: Nothing Christian about Michele Bachmann’s values (salon.com)
• The Religious Right Is a Fraud — There’s Nothing Christian About Michele Bachmann’s Values (alternet.org)
• Norway’s School (richarddawkins.net)

Religious Right Zealot Blames Gays for North Korea Nuke Threat

Gays blamed for North Korea nuclear threat

 “A few weeks ago, we started listening to Rick Wiles’ “Trunews” radio program because we discovered that he regularly interviews a variety of Religious Right activists that we monitor here.  But since then, we’ve begun listening just because his show – “the only newscast reporting the countdown to the second coming of Jesus Christ” – is also a cavalcade of insanity.

And yesterday’s program was no exception, as Wiles’ grew increasingly worked up about North Korea’s latest threat against the United States, which he blamed on “gay rights fanatics”

Via Right Wing Watch

Fly Lands on Obama, Theist Claims It’s a Sign of the Demonic One!

Does a fly landing on Obama prove he’s demonic?

Posted by: Right Wing Watch

After warning that President Obama may “declare himself as God” during his trip to Israel, TruNewshost Rick Wiles yesterday said that God is sending a plague of locusts to Israel as a “biblical sign” ahead of Obama’s visit.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel is covered with locusts when he arrives in Jerusalem in three weeks,” Wiles said. “How many biblical signs do we need to see to know that this man is evil?”

Wiles also agreed with the claim made by WorldNetDaily that a fly which landed on Obama may be proof that the President is “possessed by a demonic entity” and the return of the “biblical ‘Lord of the Flies,’ or Beelzebub, which is another name for Satan. “Each time I see the flies buzzing around him I think of Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies,” Wiles recounted.

Is it by coincidence that a swarm of locust from Egypt have [sic] moved across the border into Israel today just weeks before Mr. Obama’s arrival in the Holy Land? Tens of millions of locust have attacked Egypt in recent days. A plague of locust was one of the ten plagues that God used to punish Egypt for refusing to allow the Hebrew people to depart, the story is recounted in Jewish homes and synagogues each year at Passover. Passover begins at March 25th; Mr. Obama is scheduled to arrive in Jerusalem on March 20th. In recent months, Mr. Obama has been photographed with flies buzzing around his head or attached to his lip or forehead. Each time I see the flies buzzing around him I think of Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies. According to an ancient non-biblical manuscript supposedly written by King Solomon, Beelzebub claims to cause destruction through tyrants, to cause demons to be worshiped among men, to excite priests to lust, to cause jealousies in cities and murders and to bring forth war on the world. So think about it the next time you see a fly land on Barack Obama’s lip or forehead. I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel is covered with locusts when he arrives in Jerusalem in three weeks. How many biblical signs do we need to see to know that this man is evil?

Urban Legends vs. The Pill: How the Christian Right Uses Propaganda Against Reproductive Rights

Urban Legends vs. The Pill: How the Christian Right Uses Propaganda Against Reproductive Rights

by Amanda Marcotte

Conservative fundamentalist Christian culture has always had a tradition of showing one face to the outside world and one face to each other, and negotiating how much of the latter can inform the former has always been a complex task. It’s only grown more confusing in the age of the internet. On one hand, the internet makes it very easy for people to create their own media bubble, which means conservative Christians can and often do only consume media made with them specifically in mind. On the other hand, the internet means that it’s easier than ever for outsiders to have access to media materials that are intended for Christian right insiders only, which is the bread and butter for websites such as Right Wing Watch.

The result is becoming a problem for the Christian right. Their insular culture encourages ever more bizarre flights of fancy, competitive demonstrations of misogyny, and making up of their own facts—and then all that is transmitted in a way where outsiders can tune in and expose the inner workings of the Christian right to the outside world. Kevin Swanson of Generations Radio is simply the latest person to fall into the trap of speaking to insiders where outsiders can hear. And outsiders are astounded at what Christian right culture looks like on the inside.

Right Wing Watch has started monitoring Swanson, who used to broadcast in multiple radio stations in Colorado but now prefers to reach out over the internet. They claim to have over a million downloads of their program. And while the official outward face of the Christian right claims to oppose reproductive rights because of “life,” the glimpse that Swanson gives of the internal Christian right culture makes it extremely clear that the objection has much more to do with the belief that women should be uneducated, dependent on men, and servile.

Now Swanson’s show got another round of media coverage for his claim that the birth control pill turns a woman’s uterus into a “graveyard” full of “dead babies”.

I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

As our own Robin Marty noted, this is the sort of thing that doesn’t really need comment to refute. Still, as she points out, this is ignorance of biology on the level of believing women don’t poop or something: “[E]ven if somehow there were tiny mini babies stuck in your uterus, they would come out when you menstruate since THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF MENSTRUATION.” Swanson is married to a bona fide uterus-haver, who, having only had five children, clearly did not spend her entire reproductive life pregnant. Which, in turn, means some kind of menstrual product probably came into his home at some point. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think Swanson isn’t actually ignorant of menstruation and probably not ignorant of the fact that zygotes aren’t actually miniature babies.

That’s because what Swanson is doing here is something that’s very typical to intra-Christian right culture, which using a lurid urban legend as the basis of a political argument. All cultures have urban legends, butthe Christian right does tend to traffic in more lurid and more political ones. (Think: Satanic messages in rock songs.) Fred Clark claims, in fact, that Christian right culture is rife with propagandistic urban legends.

These other kinds of urban legends can’t really be considered fiction — they’re more like simple lies. Such stories are not told in the hopes of eliciting delight, but usually in order to create or to foster a sense of aggrieved victimhood and resentment.

Such stories, in other words, are propaganda. They are about sowing division, heightening the antipathy between groups or factions. They are about creating and enforcing and sustaining tribal conflict.

Swanson is clearly doing this: Telling an urban legend of vague “doctors” and “scientists” finding teeny-weeny “dead babies” in the uteruses of women that they’re opening up for some unknown reason. The anti-choice movement basically lives off these urban legends, telling themselves lurid, propagandistic stories about everything from what’s supposedly going on in abortion clinics to a laundry list of claims of all the ills that will befall you if you defy the patriarchal God’s orders and use contraception. This “dead babies” thing is a classic example of this.

Of course, nowadays a lot of these urban legends are being passed off in the mainstream as if they were the same thing as arguments, instead of weird stories that Christian conservatives tell to titillate each other. The “dead babies” weirdness stems from an equally absurd anti-choice urban legend that claims that the birth control pill and emergency contraception work by “killing” fertilized eggs; in reality, they work by suppressing ovulation. This propagandistic urban legend—or what Fred Clark would call a “simple lie”—is used to make their opposition to female-controlled birth control sound less misogynist than it is. This bit of nonsense has, sadly, become part of the basis for attacks on insurance coverage of contraception, even though it makes about as much sense as arguing that there are teeny-weeny baby skeletons lurking in the uteruses of women who’ve used the birth control pill.

Related articles

• WTF Wednesday: Birth control pills embed dead babies in women’s wombs? (velociriot.org)
• Oh, the things you’ll learn about “Science” from the interwebs! (freethoughtblogs.com)
• Swanson: Wombs Of Women On Birth Control ‘Embedded’ With ‘Tiny Fetuses’ (crooksandliars.com)
• Christian Science: Right-Wing Christian Host Claims “Tiny Dead Babies” Embedded in Women’s Wombs (alternet.org)
• On the Pill? Religious Right Nut-Job Claims Tiny Dead Fetuses Litter Graveyard Wombs! (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• On The Pill? Tiny Dead Fetuses Are Eating Your Innards (wonkette.com)

On the Pill? Religious Right Nut-Job Claims Tiny Dead Fetuses Litter Graveyard Wombs!

Swanson: Wombs of Women on Birth Control ‘Embedded’ with ‘Dead Babies’

SUBMITTED BY Miranda Blue

Well, here’s some medical research we hadn’t heard about. Generations Radio host Kevin Swanson, who last week delved memorably into feminist theory, tells us this week that “certain doctors and certain scientists” have researched the wombs of women on the pill and found “there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb…Those wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.”

Swanson must be speaking with the same doctors as former Rep. Todd Akin. Even Kevin Peeples, whom Swanson is interviewing about his anti-contraception documentary Birth Control: How Did We Get Here?, isn’t quite sold on the evidence.

Swanson: I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

Peeples: We’ve actually heard on both sides of that. We’re researching that and want to make sure we speak correctly to that in our second film. But we have medical advice on both sides of the table there, so we want to make sure that we communicate that properly.

Swanson: It would seem, and I realize that people are a little split on what are all the effects of the birth control pill, but it would seem that there’s a tremendous risk in the use of it for the life of children.

Earlier in the interview, Peeples and Swanson discuss how birth control came to be widely used and accepted by many churches. Women, Peeples laments, “desire the men’s role” and are now missing out on “the role God put them in that he laid out in Genesis.” Before World War II, Peeples claims, “abortion, sterilization, eugenics and birth control were all tied together” until “Hitler took the fall for taking it very aggressively and dramatically.”

Peeples: It starts with men and women fighting and not being happy with the role that God put them in that he laid out in Genesis. So whenever you seek to desire, when women seek to desire the men’s role, they lose the part and the idea of what children does, not just for the kingdom and not just does with their family, but does for their gender role.

Swanson: Are you saying that the population control stuff, egalitarian feminism, birth control, abortion, they’re all sort of interrelated?

Peeples: Yeah, it wasn’t until after World War II that they begin to separate them. Abortion, sterilization, eugenics and birth control were all tied together, they were all kind of a package for eugenics and population control. Hitler took the fall for taking it very aggressively and dramatically, and so they said, ‘Hey, let’s kind of take this back, let’s get rid of the negative things and let’s play on Christian liberty, let’s play on freedom, let’s play on people kind of taking this upon themselves to control population rather than forcing it on them. So, again, it’s just another effect of not researching our history to know what happened in the world alongside of the Church.

Related articles

• Right-Wing Nut Claims Birth Control Pills Result In Tiny Dead Babies Littering The Uterus (addictinginfo.org)
• Certain Scientists: Women Who Use Birth Control Are Walking Graveyards (slog.thestranger.com)
• Oh, the things you’ll learn about “Science” from the interwebs! (freethoughtblogs.com)
• From What Planet Do the Right-Wing Nut-Jobs Hail and Can We Deport Them? (nvrdc.wordpress.com)
• On The Pill? Tiny Dead Fetuses Are Eating Your Innards (wonkette.com)
• Christian Science: Right-Wing Christian Host Claims “Tiny Dead Babies” Embedded in Women’s Wombs (alternet.org)

Christian Conservative Magazine WORLD | Abortion Illegal in South Korea, But Abortion Rates are “double the U.S. rate.”

The Christian conservative magazine WORLD notes that while abortion is illegal in South Korea, abortion rates there are “double the U.S. rate.” As we’ve said before, abortion rates tend to be higher in countries where it is criminalized.

Jean Chung/The International Herald Tribune/Redux

SOUTHERN LIVING: A 29-year-old who has decided to keep her baby is seen at the Duri Home, a center for unwed mothers in Seoul.

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Creationists Butt Hurt By 19-Year Young Science Advocate!

How 19-year-old activist Zack Kopplin is making life hell for Louisiana’s creationists

George Dvorsky

For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for teachers to introduce creationist textbooks into the classroom. Outraged, he wrote a research paper about it for a high school English class. Nearly five years later, the 19-year-old Kopplin has become one of the fiercest — and most feared — advocates for education reform in Louisiana. We recently spoke to him to learn more about how he’s making a difference.

Kopplin, who is studying history at Rice University, had good reason to be upset after the passing of the LSEA — an insidious piece of legislation that allows teachers to bring in their own supplemental materials when discussing politically controversial topics like evolution or climate change. Soon after the act was passed, some of his teachers began to not just supplement existing texts, but to rid the classroom of established science books altogether. It was during the process to adopt a new life science textbook in 2010 that creationists barraged Louisiana’s State Board of Education with complaints about the evidence-based science texts. Suddenly, it appeared that they were going to be successful in throwing out science textbooks.

A pivotal moment

“This was a pivotal moment for me,” Kopplin told io9. “I had always been a shy kid and had never spoken out before — I found myself speaking at a meeting of an advisory committee to the State Board of Education and urging them to adopt good science textbooks — and we won.” The LSEA still stood, but at least the science books could stay.

No one was more surprised of his becoming a science advocate than Kopplin himself. In fact, after writing his English paper in 2008 — when he was just 14-years-old — he assumed that someone else would publicly take on the law. But no one did.

“I didn’t expect it to be me,” he said. “By my senior year though, I realized that no one was going to take on the law, so for my high school senior project I decided to get a repeal bill.”

Indeed, it was the ensuing coverage of the science textbook adoption issue that launched Kopplin as an activist. It also gave him the confidence to start the campaign to repeal the LSEA.

Encouraged by Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University — and a staunch critic of intelligent design and the Discovery Institute — Kopplin decided to write a letter that could be signed by Nobel laureate scientists in support of the repeal. To that end, he contacted Sir Harry Kroto, a British chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. Kroto helped him to draft the letter — one that has now been signed by 78 Nobel laureates.

In addition, Kopplin has introduced two bills to repeal the LSEA, both of which have been sponsored by State Senator Karen Carter Peterson. He plans on producing a third bill later this spring. And along with the Nobel laureates, he has the support of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), New Orleans City Council, and many others.

But as the early results of his efforts have shown, it’s not going to be an easy battle.

“We’ve had gains over the last few years,” he says, “But our first attempt to repeal the LSEA was defeated 5-1 in committee, and in our second attempt we lost 2-1.” Kopplin is hoping to get out of committee this year.

He also has his eyes set on vouchers. After an Alternet story came out about a school in the Louisiana voucher program teaching that the Loch Ness Monster was real and disproved evolution, Kopplin looked deeper into the program and found that this wasn’t just one school, but at least 19 other schools, too.

School vouchers, he argues, unconstitutionally fund the teaching of creationism because many of the schools in these programs are private fundamentalist religious schools who are teaching creationism.

“These schools have every right to teach whatever they want — no matter how much I disagree with it — as long as they are fully private,” he says. “But when they take public money through vouchers, these schools need to be accountable to the public in the same way that public schools are and they must abide by the same rules.” Kopplin is hoping for more transparency in these programs so the public can see what is being taught with taxpayers’ money.

Facing opposition

His efforts, needless to say, have not gone unnoticed — particularly by his opponents. He’s been called the Anti-Christ, a stooge of “godless liberal college professors,” and was even accused of causing Hurricane Katrina. Kopplin cooly brushes these incidents aside, saying they’re just silly distractions.

But some of the most aggressive broadsides, he says, have come from state legislators.

“I’m not talking threats or name calling, but they were really something to experience,” he says. [In addition to the video at left, Kopplin provided other examples that can be seen here and here)

“I don’t enjoy upsetting people, but you have to brush the attacks off,” he says. “I know that I’m fighting for a good cause — and I would be neglecting my duty if I stopped my campaign just because I felt uncomfortable about opposition.”

And perhaps not surprisingly, a number of people have refused to take Kopplin seriously on account of his age. “Oh, for sure — there have absolutely been people who have dismissed me because I’m still a kid,” he told us. Some of his opponents have even suggested that his parents are really the ones behind the campaign — an accusation he flatly denies.

“They have their own lives to live, and certainly don’t have time to run a public issue campaign,” he says.

“What disturbs me though, is when other kids are the ones to dismiss me based on age,” he told io9. “They see a 19 year old kid and can’t believe that I can actually go out and change the world. Too many of my peers have this attitude that they need to dress nicely, sit quietly, and wait until we are adults to change things. This attitude must change. My generation needs to speak out for what we believe.”

It’s simply not science

And indeed, Kopplin is a passionate defender of scientific inquiry, and vociferously rejects the notion that creationism and evolution should be taught side-by-side.

“Creationism is not science, and shouldn’t be in a public school science class — it’s that simple,” he says. “Often though, creationists do not, or are unwilling, to recognize this.” Science, he argues, is observable, naturalistic, testable, falsifiable, and expandable — everything that creationism is not.

But what also drives Kopplin is the inherent danger he sees in teaching creationism.

“Creationism confuses students about the nature of science,” he says. “If students don’t understand the scientific method, and are taught that creationism is science, they will not be prepared to do work in genuine fields, especially not the biological sciences. We are hurting the chances of our students having jobs in science, and making discoveries that will change the world.”

He worries that, if Louisiana (and Tennessee, which also has a similar law) insists on teaching students creationism, students will not be the ones discover the cure to AIDS or cancer. “We won’t be the ones to repair our own damaged wetlands and protect ourselves from more hurricanes like Katrina,” he says.

Moreover, he’s also concerned that teaching creationism will harm economic development.

“Just search creationism on Monster Jobs or Career Builder and tell me how many creationist jobs you find,” he asks. Kopplin tells us about how this past Spring, Kevin Carman, the former Dean of LSU’s College School of Science (now the Executive Vice President and Provost for the University of Nevada, Reno) testified in the Louisiana Senate Education Committee about how he had lost researchers and scientists to other states because of the Louisiana Science Education Act.

“But it also violates the separation of church and state,” he says. “Teaching Biblical creationism is promoting one very specific fundamentalist version of Christianity, and violating the rights of every other American citizen who doesn’t subscribe to those beliefs. So it would be stomping on the rights of Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Buddhists, Humanists, Muslims, Hindus, and every other religious group in the country.

These creationists, he argues, would be horrified to see the Vedas being taught in science class. “And they would have every right to be,” he says, “That’s how the separation of church and state works and it’s the foundation of our country.”

Changes needed

Kopplin is also concerned about the future, and how unprepared the United States has become.

“We don’t just deny evolution,” he says, “We are denying climate change and vaccines and other mainstream science. I’m calling for a Second Giant Leap to change the perception of science in the world.”

To that end, Kopplin would like to see $1 trillion of new science funding and an end to denialist science legislation. He wants to see the American public become more aware and better educated about science.

“My generation is going to have to face major challenges to our way of living — and the way to overcome them is through rapid scientific advancement,” he says. “But as as of right now, America has a science problem.”

Images: Baton Rouge Advocate, The Moderate Voice.

Related articles

• Zack Kopplin Speaks About His Anti-Creationism Battles (patheos.com)
• Science class in Louisiana (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• The Orleans Parish School Board in Louisiana Just Voted to Ban Creationism from Their Schools (patheos.com)
• Louisiana education court case highlights Bobby Jindal’s creationism state (guardian.co.uk)
• Good News From Louisiana: New Orleans Bans Creationism (skepticalteacher.wordpress.com)
• How 19-year-old Zack Kopplin is making life hell for Louisiana’s creationists (richarddawkins.net)
• How 19-year-old activist Zack Kopplin is making life hell for Louisiana’s creationists (io9.com)

Hate Group Focus On The Family’s James Dobson Admits He Failed

A demoralized James Dobson admits his defeat

by Steveningen

Maggie Gallagher isn’t the only religious conservative to be feeling a loss of optimism in the new year. In his January newsletter, the hate group Focus on the Family founder, James Dobson comes out and admits that “Nearly everything I have stood for these past 35 years went down to defeat.” What he fails to understand, or more likely admit to, is why. In his newsletter he proceeds to lay the blame for his failures on the doorstep of President Obama, the Democratic Party and the disappointing Judas Iscariots of the Republican party. There is no acknowledgement that in re-electing this President, the country provided a sound repudiation of Dobson’s brand of extremism. It wasn’t any of the factions he cited in his newsletter that brought about his defeat. It was the electorate, who, among other things, has grown weary of the distortions and ugly tactics employed by social conservatism.

Now let me share my heart with you. I’m sure many of you are discouraged in the aftermath of the National Elections, especially in view of the moral and spiritual issues that took such a beating on November 6th. Nearly everything I have stood for these past 35 years went down to defeat.

Dobson then goes on to apportion blame to the Democratic party as a whole, outlining “four shocking components of the Democrats’ 2012 platform.” The lies and distortions he presents as evidence is typical of this man. Let’s examine two of them.

1. Abortion should be legalized through nine months of pregnancy.Imagine full-term, healthy babies across the nation being poisoned or dismembered a few days before normal delivery. What a tragedy!

Yes, what a tragedy, if it had any basis in reality. I was completely nonplussed to learn that one of the Democratic platform plank called for the willy nilly aborting of full-term babies. Of course the Democrats have proposed no such thing, but Dobson doesn’t let facts get in the way of fundraising.

2. Same-sex marriages should be permitted by law in every state in the nation.In May, Barack Obama was pictured on the cover of Newsweek with the caption, “The First Gay President.” His policies for the family were affirmed by liberal voters on November 6th. The Supreme Court recently agreed to consider the same-sex marriage issue. If they rule that it is the law, they will open the door to a redefinition of marriage in every state in the land. The family and the nation will never be the same. Nevertheless, neither Democrat nor Republican Congressmen have uttered a word of concern about it. They are deaf and mute while the very future of this great country hangs in the balance. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) passed by an overwhelming vote a few years ago, but it will be overridden if the Supreme Court issues an adverse ruling. But, who in Congress cares?

Clearly the religious conservative cheese stands alone. Only the brave fundamentalists are standing up for inequality. Ha! If only that were the case. The Republicans in the newly minted 113th Congress have made it a priority to continue defending the federal ban on recognizing gay marriage by approving additional spending on outside counsel. But again, mentioning this fact wouldn’t go a long way in helping him get panic donations.Dobson winds up his screed with this oft-repeated chestnut about the tyranny of our Dictator in Chief.

Well, the election is over and we have a president who often ignores the Constitution and imposes dictatorial powers on the American people.

Of course he provides no citations of how President Obama has ignored the Constitution or how he has exercised one iota of those magical dictatorial powers. The rhetoric is as weak as his political significance. Yes, James Dobson, it is true. Everything you have stood for for 35 years has been going down to defeat. It hasn’t been completely defeated though, and I sense you know it. Why else would you still be making these thinly disguised calls for money if there wasn’t still a dime or two to be eked out from your dwindling base of easily manipulated people. This once fully raging river of cash is slowing down to a trickle and when it has finally dried up, my hope is that you will have too.

Related articles

• Conservative icon James Dobson links Newtown shooting to same sex marriage (rawstory.com)
• Fundamentalists Admit They Prayed for Obama’s Defeat and God Said No (politicususa.com)
• With a Sandwich In His Hand (washingtonmonthly.com)
• James Dobson: The Shooting Happened Because We Allow Abortion and Gay Marriage (patheos.com)
• Focus On The Family Has The Sadz (joemygod.blogspot.com)
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American Taliban Pushes For Mandatory Prayer In Public Schools

State Sen. Dennis Kruse Pushes For Mandatory Recitation Of Lord’s Prayer In Indiana Public Schools

Indiana state Sen. Dennis Kruse proposed legislation that would require public school students to recite the Lord’s Prayer. (Image via Facebook)

A Republican state senator wants Indiana’s public school students to begin each day by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Dennis Kruse, chair of the state Senate’s education committee, has introduced Senate Bill 23, which would allow Indiana’s school districts to require recitation of the prayer, “In order that each student recognize the importance of spiritual development in establishing character and becoming a good citizen.”

The proposal does offer exemptions, including a provision allowing students and parents to opt out of a school’s mandatory prayer. Still, experts and the Indiana Senate legal committee believe the bill to be unconstitutional, the Indianapolis Star reports.

A similar law exists in Florida, but no schools there adopted the measure for fear of hefty legal fees associated with likely litigation, Andrew Seidel, a staff attorney for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, told the Star. A lawsuit against a prayer banner in a Rhode Island school last year, for example, cost the school more than $173,000 in attorney’s fees.

Seidel told the Star he worried requiring prayer in schools would lead to bullying of students who chose not to participate. Still, the Indiana proposal comes as more atheist clubs spring up in high schools across the country, even in more religious states like North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.

Kruse’s history in Indiana education has been filled with controversy. He sponsored a bill last year to allow schools to teach creationism that failed in the state House. He tried again in December by announcing plans to introduce new legislation for what he called “truth in education,” an effort that would allow teachers to question scientific principles, such as evolution.

Related articles

• Constitution Shmonstitution: Indiana Senator wants Lord’s Prayer in public schools (secularnewsdaily.com)
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• Indiana Bill Would Require Lord’s Prayer At Schools (blogs.wsj.com)
• EDITORIAL: Legislation would try to force prayer into public schools (courierpress.com)
• Indiana Introduces Bill To Require Students To Recite The Lord’s Prayer (addictinginfo.org)
• Indiana State Senator Files Bill Requiring Public Schools to Recite the Lord’s Prayer (patheos.com)
• Schools ‘May Require Recitation Of The Lord’s Prayer’ Under Indiana Bill (thinkprogress.org)

God Psychotics: “God Sent The Shooter”

According to the Ultra-conservative, Right Wing Christians from the Westboro Church Group, god ordered the slaughter of innocent children in Connecticut!

A disturbingly poisonous example of how religion destroys the human intellect and natural human sense of empathy.

As we reported recently, the superstitious belief in a god that is easily offended and the slaughter of little children is a frequent theme in the bible.

From the Westboro site:-

“God sent the shooter to Newtown, CT. “Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?” Amos 3:6. He is punishing you for your sins against Him (e.g., fag marriage).”

 

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• Westboro Baptist Church Cult Plans to Protest Connecticut Shooting Funerals (americanlivewire.com)
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Bryan Fischer Is Proof That Fundi Xtian Religion Causes Psychosis

‘Barack the Destroyer’: Bryan Fischer’s Grand Unified Theory of Obama

By Kyle Mantyla

On yesterday’s program, Bryan Fischer responded to a caller who asserted that President Obama is “a very evil man” who wants to turn American into an Islamic state by laying out a wide-ranging theory about how Obama is not a Christian but rather a Muslim sympathizer who believes that the United States is fundamentally racist and evil and must be destroyed.  And that is exactly what Obama is trying to do, Fischer asserted, by entertaining ideas about capping tax deductions on charitable giving for high-income donors  because he wants to wipe out private charity so that people will become dependent on the government.

In fact, when companies lay off workers, Obama rejoices because “he wants to see America and Americans suffer” because “he is Barack the Destroyer; he is out to punish America for our misdeeds, to punish us for our racism, to bring us to our knees, to humble us in the dust so he can rebuild some kind of a socialist utopia on the ruins of what used to be the United States of America”:

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• Fischer: Obama is Intentionally Trying to Keep ‘As Many Americans As Poor As Possible’ (secularnewsdaily.com)
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American Religious Fascists Praise Uganda’s Theocratic Dictatorship

American Religious Fanatics Praise Uganda for Making Homosexuality Illegal

Bad craziness

Posted by Charles Johnson

The far right freakazoids at World Net Daily are praising Uganda’s fanatical Christian fundamentalist president today for making homosexual behavior illegal and for staging a public show of “repentance.”

And American Christian Taliban leaders are pointing at Uganda as a future model for the United States.

Massachusetts pastor and activist Rev. Scott Lively believes Museveni is a model for other national leaders.

‘The Museveni prayer is a model for all Christian leaders in the world. The leaders of the West have declined in proportion to their degree of rejection of God,’ Lively said.

Lively also believes Uganda will rise as a major African power as America continues to decline. He uses Britain as an example.

‘Britain was at its height as a world power when it honored God as the Ugandan president has just done. America’s greatness has similarly diminished as we have shifted from a Christian to a secular-humanist country. But watch now for Uganda to be blessed by God for their desire to be His,’ Lively said. …

Homosexual activist groups have criticized the government of Uganda and Museveni for passing laws criminalizing homosexual behavior. A current bill before the Ugandan Parliament increases the jail sentences for homosexual acts and includes criminal penalties for those who encourage or promote homosexuality. …

Lively said he didn’t agree with the death penalty provision but supports the nation’s strong stance against homosexual behavior.

For another example: American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer is crowing, “It can be done!”

         Bryan Fischer@BryanJFischer

Homosexuality now against the law in Uganda, just as it was for 200 years in the US. It can be done.

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• Uganda will pass anti-homosexuality bill this year, says Speaker (guardian.co.uk)
• Scott Lively: I Support Uganda’s Life Imprisonment Plan For Homosexuals (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Status of Uganda Anti-Gay Bill Unclear; U.S. Religious Right Support Isn’t (religiondispatches.org)
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Redneck Taliban | A Year in Jail for Not Believing in God? How Kentucky is Persecuting Atheists

A Year in Jail for Not Believing in God? How Kentucky is Persecuting Atheists

In Kentucky, a homeland security law requires the state’s citizens to acknowledge the security provided by the Almighty God–or risk 12 months in prison.

The law and its sponsor, state representative Tom Riner, have been the subject of controversy since the law first surfaced in 2006, yet the Kentucky state Supreme Court has refused to review its constitutionality, despite clearly violating the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.

“This is one of the most egregiously and breathtakingly unconstitutional actions by a state legislature that I’ve ever seen,” said Edwin Kagin, the legal director of American Atheists’, a national organization focused defending the civil rights of atheists. American Atheists’ launched a lawsuit against the law in 2008, which won at the Circuit Court level, but was then overturned by the state Court of Appeals.

The law states, “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God as set forth in the public speeches and proclamations of American Presidents, including Abraham Lincoln’s historic March 30, 1863, presidential proclamation urging Americans to pray and fast during one of the most dangerous hours in American history, and the text of President John F. Kennedy’s November 22, 1963, national security speech which concluded: “For as was written long ago: ‘Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.'”

The law requires that plaques celebrating the power of the Almighty God be installed outside the state Homeland Security building–and carries a criminal penalty of up to 12 months in jail if one fails to comply.

The plaque’s inscription begins with the assertion, “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.”

Tom Riner, a Baptist minister and the long-time Democratic state representative, sponsored the law.

“The church-state divide is not a line I see,” Riner told  The New York Times  shortly after the law was first challenged in court. “What I do see is an attempt to separate America from its history of perceiving itself as a nation under God.”

A practicing Baptist minister, Riner is solely devoted to his faith–even when that directly conflicts with his job as state representative. He has often been at the center of unconstitutional and expensive controversies throughout his 26 years in office. In the last ten years, for example, the state has spent more than $160,000 in string of losing court cases against the American Civil Liberties Union over the state’s decision to display the Ten Commandments in public buildings, legislation that Riner sponsored.

Although the Kentucky courts have yet to strike down the law, some judges have been explicit about its unconstitutionality.

“Kentucky’s law is a legislative finding, avowed as factual, that the Commonwealth is not safe absent reliance on Almighty God. Further, (the law) places a duty upon the executive director to publicize the assertion while stressing to the public that dependence upon Almighty God is vital, or necessary, in assuring the safety of the commonwealth,” wrote Judge Ann O’Malley Shake in Court of Appeals’ dissenting opinion.

This rational was in the minority, however, as the Court of Appeals reversed the lower courts’ decision that the law was unconstitutional.

Last week, American Atheists submitted a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to review the law.

Riner, meanwhile, continues to abuse the state representative’s office, turning it into a pulpit for his God-fearing message.

“The safety and security of the state cannot be achieved apart from recognizing our dependence upon God,” Riner recently t old Fox News.

“We believe dependence on God is essential. … What the founding fathers stated and what every president has stated, is their reliance and recognition of Almighty God, that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and activist in New York City.

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Religious Fanatic Slaughters His Family in Moscow

Religious fanatic slaughters his family in Moscow

The Moscow police investigate the triple murder, which was committed in Eastern Birulyovo on the southern outskirts of Moscow in the evening of November 19th.  The crime was committed in less than two weeks after the massacre in the office of a pharmaceutical company. Igor Televinov, 40, who could possibly be a mentally unbalanced religious fanatic, first killed his nine-year-old son, Alexander, and then six-year old daughter, Anna. Afterwards, the man killed his mother when she came back home from a walk. The man stabbed the three victims to death. Apparently, the victims could not show any resistance, Life News said.

After the murder, the man took the time to write a note, in which he asked to sell the apartment and bury the children with this money, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper wrote.

The man wanted to kill himself in the end, but he also had to kill his wife first. When she came home from work, he met her on the doorstep and said that he had already sent his mother and children to heaven. The man offered his wife to follow them: he slashed the woman’s throat and face with the same knife.

The wounded woman somehow managed to escape from the apartment. All covered in blood, she rushed into her neighbor’s, shouting: “Lock the door!” The women called the police and an ambulance. The wounded woman was taken to hospital, her life is out of danger.

Having entered the apartment, where the tragedy occurred, law-enforcement officers, doctors and investigators saw the following picture. The bodies of the two children and their grandmother were lying in pools of blood. All the victims had their throats slit, their hands were folded crosswise on their chests, the little girl and the murderer’s mother had icons and burning candles put in between their fingers. The dead boy had an icing lamp in his hands, Vesti reports.

The man was arrested; he tried to show resistance to police, apparently staying in an inadequate condition. A criminal case was filed into the “murder of two or more persons” and “attempted murder.”

The man was unemployed. He was sick, he began to gain weight and would rarely go out. His wife worked in a barbershop. The woman was spending much of her salary on medications for her husband

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Israel Planned a “Nuclear Armageddon,” New Book Shows

Israel planned a “nuclear Armageddon,” new book shows

Rod Such

The Electronic Intifada

Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country — And Why They Can’t Make Peace by former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Patrick Tyler is an unflinching history of the role of militarism in Israeli society. Tyler previously wrote A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East — from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2009), which examined how US presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush responded to events in the Middle East.

In this new work Tyler narrows his focus to the Israeli establishment. He sums up his thesis in the prologue: “Israel, six decades after its founding, remains a nation in thrall to an original martial impulse, the depth of which has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who are stunted in their capacity to wield or sustain diplomacy as a rival to military strategy, who seem ever on the hair trigger in dealing with their regional rivals, and whose contingency planners embrace worst-case scenarios that often exaggerate complex or ambiguous developments as threats to national existence. They do so, reflexively and instinctively, in order to perpetuate a system of governance where national policy is dominated by the military.”

In Fortress Israel, Tyler mines a trove of US government documents declassified in 2007, many of which were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, where Tyler is a fellow.

These documents, especially those from the administration of Richard Nixon, have received scant attention from the corporate media. Tyler also relies on interviews he conducted with many Israeli leaders, as well as secondary sources — the most prominent of which is The Iron Wall (2000), a book by the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim.

Both The Iron Wall and Fortress Israel demolish key pillars of Israel’s long-standing propaganda effort to portray itself as the perpetual victim of surrounding, hostile Arab nations. They show instead that Israel was the aggressor in nearly all of its military conflicts.

The 1956 Suez Crisis, for example, resulted from a conspiracy hatched by France, Britain, and Israel in which Israel attacked Egyptian forces so that Britain and France could pretend to intervene as “stabilizing” forces and thereby maintain control of the Suez Canal. Similarly, both studies reveal that Israel launched the 1967 war not because it believed Egypt was about to attack but because it saw an unprecedented opportunity to destroy the Egyptian army.

Imperial interests

Tyler’s research demonstrates that the Israeli elites long ago recognized the usefulness of aligning Israel with Western imperialist interests in the Middle East and openly courted the US on that basis. Although the Eisenhower administration forced the withdrawal of Britain, France and Israel from Egypt in 1956, angered that all three countries acted without its support, it soon realized that Israel represented a valuable Cold War ally — especially as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser tilted toward the Soviet Union.

But Tyler argues that whereas the Eisenhower administration acted to restrain Israel “so that it might find accommodation with its neighbors,” the Nixon administration, especially National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, sought to use Israel to achieve US interests in the Cold War.

Drawing on the 2007 documents, Tyler quotes from a 1969 memo to Nixon from Richard Helms, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, saying Israeli aggression against Egypt should be encouraged “since it benefits the West as well as Israel.” A cover note by Kissinger argued that if Nasser were toppled, any successor would lack his “charisma.”

“Hit ‘em hard”

An Israeli bombing campaign against targets deep inside Egypt followed in January 1970. In May that year Nixon told Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban and Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli ambassador to the US, to “let ‘em have it! Hit ‘em as hard as you can!” One of those hits had already included an Egyptian elementary school, killing 47 children.

During this same period, Tyler notes, US officials became aware that Israel was a nuclear weapons power, after years of Israeli denials. Kissinger had just received a CIA estimate that Israel possessed at least ten nuclear weapons. According to a Kissinger memo, Rabin told him there were two reasons for developing the bomb: “’first to deter the Arabs from striking Israel, and second, if deterrence fails and Israel were about to be overrun, to destroy the Arabs in a nuclear Armageddon.’”

Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons — along with the peace accord it subsequently reached with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat — established Israel as a regional superpower, Tyler notes, adding that Israel reluctantly agreed to recognize Palestinian national rights as part of that accord. At the same time, he writes, the Israeli military establishment was determined to remain independent of the great powers and never allow them “to become the arbiters of peace.”

Nakba overlooked

Tyler demonstrates convincingly that the Israeli military often either ignored or overrode civilian authority. Although numerous examples support his thesis that the military is the dominant force in Israeli politics, he provides insufficient evidence to indicate that there were ever any substantive strategic differences between Israel’s civilian and military leaders in relation to the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He overemphasizes the “sabra [native born] culture” within the military as the wellspring of Israeli militarism, failing to note that Israel’s civilian leaders, even though many were not sabras, nevertheless were strategically aligned with Israel’s principal military ambition — to erase Palestine from the map.

But perhaps the book’s most significant failing is that it ignores the Nakba (catastrophe), the systematic ethnic cleansing that led to Israel’s foundation in 1948. This omission tends to frame the narrative as simply an ethnic conflict among nation-states rather than a conflict between a Palestinian national liberation struggle and a racist settler-colonial state.

To his credit, Tyler ultimately does address the core issue — the suppression of Palestinian national rights. He suggests Israel’s military elites may be determined to keep Palestinians permanently subjugated under occupation. However, his one-sided focus on the military obscures the role of Zionist ideology and its grip on both civilian and military elites.

Even the two-state solution favored by “liberal” Zionists anticipates the ongoing second-class status of Palestinians in Israel and the denial of refugees’ right of return. Ultimately, this is why the Israeli elites cannot make peace. Instead of envisioning a peace based on human rights, they can only propose a “peace” based on violence.

Rod Such is a freelance writer and former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He is a member of the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign and Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights.

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Delusional Religious Crazies Claim to Have Stopped Terrorists

Jacobs Claims to have Thwarted Numerous Terrorist Attacks

Submitted by Ariella on Friday, 11/9/2012 1:15 pm

Self-proclaimed “prophets” Mike and Cindy Jacobs of Generals International continued to spew their predictions about terrorism, natural disasters and economic turmoil on their show God Knows. Jacobs—who previously alleged that she helped avert bombings—revealed that she along with other prophets were having dreams in 2011 about a looming terrorist attack, and explains that their visions were confirmed by the events in Benghazi.

Mike Jacobs contended that there were even more terrorist plots, but that they had been thwarted by “the prayer cover that has been placed over the United States by various prayer groups and individuals praying.”

Watch:

1 Not-So-Simple, Pretty Funny Question for the 73% of White Evangelicals Who Will Apparently Be Voting for Romney

By Frank Schaeffer

1 Not-So-Simple, Pretty Funny Question for the 73% of White Evangelicals Who Will Apparently Be Voting for Romney

A question that deserves an answer before election day.

According to polls 73 percent of WHITE evangelicals will be voting for Mitt Romney.

If the polls are correct here’s the question I’d like to ask evangelicals using their own style of language/concerns/theological thinking as applied to their choice:

What’s the explanation for the fact that white American Evangelicals made the allegedly philandering lying ignorant braggart lapsed Roman Catholic Dinesh D’Souza their anti-Obama hero, embrace a pro-choice Mormon bishop who promoted abortion and Planned Parenthood in MA, are working to elect a job-destroying tax-avoiding lying flip-flopping-tell-anyone-anything-they-want-to-hear Swiss bank account collecting draft dodger running with a disciple of the God-hating, Jesus-mocking hater-of-the-poor Ayn Rand, for their presidential candidate and look the other way as a crazed ultra-Zionist many Israeli Jews fear billionaire casino owner who is being investigated for allegedly making billions off the dirtiest Chinese gambling Communist Party-controlled outfit in the world funds the enterprise, at the very same time as Franklin Graham sold his ailing father Billy’s soul and denied core evangelical theology by taking Mormonism off the Billy Graham organization’s list of cults in order to help the Mormon pagan-ritual-performing, Trinity-denying, casino-money-grubbing billionaire-coddling, earth-destroying global-warming denying Mormon bishop win respectability for his dead-Jews-baptizing-polygamy-rooted-reality-denying-interplanetary Masonic lodge-embracing faith in an election against an exemplary modest faithful husband good father compassionate smart black evangelical Christian President whose major accomplishments include saving the economy, ending a war, killing our greatest enemy, giving health care to children and the poor and the “least of these” and who has tried to reduce the number of abortions by helping women escape poverty in a reenactment of the lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan?

Go figure.

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Religious Neanderthal Todd Akin Arrested in 1987 With Radical Anti-Abortion Group

Missouri Caveman Todd Akin Arrested in 1987 With Radical Anti-Abortion Group

Very bad craziness

 Via:-Charles Johnson

It’s easy to laugh at Todd Akin’s ridiculous caveman views, but Akin and the deranged anti-choice fanatics he associates with are really not a laughing matter; they’re deadly serious and willing to break laws: Todd Akin Arrested on May 9, 1987 With Radical Anti-Abortion Group.

We learned from a public records request that Akin was arrested on May 9, 1987 in St. Louis. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch covered the protest and reported the following day that police “arrested 30 anti-abortion protesters” for blocking “the front doors of Reproductive Health Services” while about “50 anti-abortion activists picketed two clinics” in St. Louis County. The Post-Dispatch quoted the spokesman for the protesters, John Ryan, who said the actions “were in honor of Mother’s Day.”

At the time, Ryan was head of the Pro-Life Direct Action League. He and his organization were among those sued by the National Organization for Women in 1986, which sought to “stop what it called a nationwide conspiracy to close abortion clinics.” “We believe there is a reign of terror going on,” said Eleanor Smeal, then president of NOW. She labeled Ryan – who had been “arrested almost 350 times” by then – a “terrorist.”

This is who Akin chose to get involved with in 1987 – and it gets worse. Ryan was pushed out as head of the Pro-Life Direct Action League around September 1987 and replaced by an aggressive, fundamentalist leader, Tim Dreste. Dreste affiliated the group with Randall Terry’s radical Operation Rescue the following summer. This is the same Randall Terry who later said of abortion providers, “When I, or people like me are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we’ll execute you.”

Dreste shared a jail cell with Terry in September 1988 and returned to St. Louis under orders to break with the Catholic-dominated Pro-Life Direct Action League. Just one month later, Akin appeared at an event for Dreste’s new group, Whole Life Ministries.

The Post-Dispatch reported on October 29 that Akin, who was elected days later to public office, “spoke to about 35 anti-abortion activists” planning to block clinic doors the next day. He said, “As far as I am concerned, you are the freedom fighters of America.” “My hat is off to you,” he continued.

The article identified Dreste as director of Whole Life Ministries, “a new anti-abortion group in St. Louis.” “We’re going to tell her we’re not going to allow her to kill her baby,” he said. Dreste made clear that protesters would block the clinic doors and refuse police orders to move. “We will tell (police) we will obey God’s law before we obey man’s law.” Sound familiar?

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The Dumbest Politician On Earth | Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan Claimed Blasphemy is a Crime Against Humanity

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan: Blasphemy is a Crime Against Humanity

_{Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 2011
Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty}

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks that blasphemy should be banned as a crime against humanity. And when he says “blasphemy” he seems to have in mind specifically “whatever offends Muslims.” So basically, absolutely anything can be banned so long as it offends enough Muslims who complain loudly enough.

What Prime Minister Erdogan wants to do is make certain thoughts and beliefs crimes. The only reason he has for this is the fact that certain thoughts and beliefs are offensive to some Muslims. Is that a reasonable foundation to make something a crime, though? Not in any civilized society. So why is Erdogan trying to make Turkey less civilized?

If Muslims have the power to ban some thought or word or belief by claiming offense, can I have that right too? Can I claim that their protests offend me and then have those protests banned? Can I claim that their Qur’an offends me and so have it banned? If not, then this isn’t really about protecting people’s freedom of belief; instead, it’s about protecting religion from being criticized or challenged.

“I am the prime minister of a nation, of which most are Muslims and that has declared anti-semitism a crime against humanity. But the West hasn’t recognized Islamophobia as a crime against humanity — it has encouraged it. [The film director] is saying he did this to provoke the fundamentalists among Muslims. When it is in the form of a provocation, there should be international legal regulations against attacks on what people deem sacred, on religion. As much as it is possible to adopt international regulations, it should be possible to do something in terms of domestic law.”

He further noted, “Freedom of thought and belief ends where the freedom of thought and belief of others start. You can say anything about your thoughts and beliefs, but you will have to stop when you are at the border of others’ freedoms. I was able to include Islamophobia as a hate crime in the final statement of an international meeting in Warsaw.”

Source: Today’s Zaman

Erdogan’s comments here are ambiguous – almost to the point of being incoherent, which may be the point. After all, the less clear you are the harder it is for critics to pin you down on what you are saying. This is important when you’re talking about criminalizing belief and thought.

When he says “You can say anything about your thoughts and beliefs, but you will have to stop when you are at the border of others’ freedoms,” does he mean that you cannot say anything about others’ beliefs, or merely that you cannot say anything critical or negative about others’ beliefs?

His statement “Freedom of thought and belief ends where the freedom of thought and belief of others start” is clearly a reference to the idea that “your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose starts,” but the analogy is strained to say the least. You swinging your fist causes demonstrable harm once it reaches my nose, but what demonstrable harm is created by a belief or a thought?

Of course apologists for censorship and oppression like Erdogan will never even try to demonstrate that thoughts or beliefs cause real harm. Since the goal is simply to protect Islam from critique, all they need to do is show that someone, somewhere is offended. That’s certainly easy enough to do.

What’s significant, though, is the fact that Erdogan thinks that Islam in particular or even religion generally need to be protected at all. It’s significant that he wants to make blasphemy a crime which implies that he thinks his god needs to be protected. This all means that he and like-minded believers all regard their religions as weak and impotent. That’s why the need the police powers of the state for protection.

Via:- Austin Cline

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