This story is pretty unbelievable ... and I hope the mother/father of this child decide to sue the Grove school board for some _HUGE_ amount of money. I hope they decide to punish the school and its principal in some severe way. PAT]
Teenage boy allegedly removed from school over AIDS rumors
Mother files suit against school district, denies he is HIV-positive
GROVE, Okla. (AP) | Sep 29, 7:39 AM
The mother of a 15-year-old boy has accused the Grove School District of unjustly removing her son from school and spreading rumors that he carries the AIDS virus.
Sheila Dawson, who filed a lawsuit on Sept. 16 in Delaware County District Court, said Wednesday she is leaving the Grand Lake area. Her son now attends school in Missouri and he is not HIV positive, Dawson said.
"I can't even explain the scars it's leaving on my son," Dawson said. "We want to put our children in a place where they are not subjected to this kind of environment."
School Board member Annie Maxson said the student was offered home-schooling or enrollment in the Grove Alternative Academy, which is designed for students who want to continue their education in a nontraditional setting.
"I believe the school has done everything possible to protect the identity of Ms. Dawson's son and we have always had his best interests in mind," Maxson said.
Dawson said her son was not informed of the Alternative Academy. "He was put on homebound status where the school sent a teacher for one to two hours a week to our home," Dawson said.
Maxson said the lawsuit was turned over to the school's attorney, Doug Mann, who was unavailable for comment.
Dawson said the rumors started because school officials "believed there was a possibility my son was involved with a student who has AIDS." Dawson declined comment on whether her son had a relationship with an AIDS infected student.
The lawsuit states the school failed to remove derogatory graffiti written about her son in the speech and drama classroom and the boys' bathroom.
Dawson claims Don Barr, Grove Middle School principal, told her son to clean off the graffiti if he wanted it removed.
The lawsuit says Barr removed the student from the school without due process. According to the lawsuit, he told Dawson to "Exit my office, take your son and don't bring him back," and to the student said, "You are leaving; I told you to get out."
Friday, September 29, 2006
Mel White; Gay Author and Pastor
A man of his words
Gay author and pastor Mel White turns the tables on the religious right
By KATHERINE VOLIN
Friday, September 29, 2006
For years, Mel White worked alongside fundamentalist Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, James Dobson and Pat Robertson. White even helped some of them write books.
Now White, who is gay, has written a book of his own warning against their anti-gay rhetoric and their plan to take over American government.
“I watched fundamentalists start in 1973 and I watched them plan to take over the denominations and to take over the country and in 35 years, they have done it,” White, 66, says in an interview.
White’s own background with fundamentalism is more than just professional. For 35 years, he tried to become “ex-gay,” a story that he documented in his first book, “Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America.”
Finally, he accepted his sexual orientation and with his partner, Gary Nixon, founded Soulforce, a non-profit organization that works to combat religious-based bigotry and oppression.
“Gary and I decided to come out and try to confront [fundamentalist Christian rhetoric],” White says. “To confront it, we had to build a case against it, so we monitored all the heavies for a decade … I happen to be close to the primo people, coincidently. I think God has a sense of humor, doesn’t she?”
IN “RELIGION GONE BAD” White uses documents, tapes of old secret meetings and his own experiences to analyze how some fundamentalist Christians have developed a battle against gays to promote their larger war to take over American government.
In one chapter, he compares the characterization of gays by certain Christian leaders to the characterization of Polish Jews that Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels depicted in his propaganda film, “Der Ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”).
“Their goal for us is to disenfranchise us, deny us our rights and drive us back into our closets or worse,” White says. “The things [Goebbels] said about Jews are exactly the things Christians are saying about us. When you stigmatize and you demonize for so long, what’s going to happen?”
This war against American culture and gays, White argues in his book, has been well crafted and fully planned out by fundamentalist leaders for decades.
White, who still works as a pastor, says that religiously motivated killings of gay people and suicides of gay Christian youth persuaded him to do something.
“I’m constantly being asked to bury kids who killed themselves or who were killed,” White says. “So we have a collection of suicide notes from people who said ‘I accepted my homosexuality until I became a Christian a few months ago, then, learning that you can’t be both gay and Christian, I didn’t know how else to handle this,’ and they kill themselves.”
White and Nixon attend Jerry Falwell’s church every Sunday in Lynchburg, Va., in part so they can keep tabs on Falwell’s message and direction.
“I think people who live in Washington, D.C., for example, have no idea what it’s really like out there,” White says. “We moved to Lynchburg because we didn’t. We lived in Laguna Beach.”
White acknowledges that some people may see him as an alarmist, but he says he sees the problem as real, the threat as imminent.
“I’m trying to say to gay people, ‘You are oppressed. You are second-class citizens in your own country,’” White says. “Because you’re rich enough and because you’re white enough and because you’re male enough or female-enough, you can pass and therefore, you know nothing can happen to you, but I bury the kids who can’t pass.”
Gay author and pastor Mel White turns the tables on the religious right
By KATHERINE VOLIN
Friday, September 29, 2006
For years, Mel White worked alongside fundamentalist Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, James Dobson and Pat Robertson. White even helped some of them write books.
Now White, who is gay, has written a book of his own warning against their anti-gay rhetoric and their plan to take over American government.
“I watched fundamentalists start in 1973 and I watched them plan to take over the denominations and to take over the country and in 35 years, they have done it,” White, 66, says in an interview.
White’s own background with fundamentalism is more than just professional. For 35 years, he tried to become “ex-gay,” a story that he documented in his first book, “Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America.”
Finally, he accepted his sexual orientation and with his partner, Gary Nixon, founded Soulforce, a non-profit organization that works to combat religious-based bigotry and oppression.
“Gary and I decided to come out and try to confront [fundamentalist Christian rhetoric],” White says. “To confront it, we had to build a case against it, so we monitored all the heavies for a decade … I happen to be close to the primo people, coincidently. I think God has a sense of humor, doesn’t she?”
IN “RELIGION GONE BAD” White uses documents, tapes of old secret meetings and his own experiences to analyze how some fundamentalist Christians have developed a battle against gays to promote their larger war to take over American government.
In one chapter, he compares the characterization of gays by certain Christian leaders to the characterization of Polish Jews that Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels depicted in his propaganda film, “Der Ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”).
“Their goal for us is to disenfranchise us, deny us our rights and drive us back into our closets or worse,” White says. “The things [Goebbels] said about Jews are exactly the things Christians are saying about us. When you stigmatize and you demonize for so long, what’s going to happen?”
This war against American culture and gays, White argues in his book, has been well crafted and fully planned out by fundamentalist leaders for decades.
White, who still works as a pastor, says that religiously motivated killings of gay people and suicides of gay Christian youth persuaded him to do something.
“I’m constantly being asked to bury kids who killed themselves or who were killed,” White says. “So we have a collection of suicide notes from people who said ‘I accepted my homosexuality until I became a Christian a few months ago, then, learning that you can’t be both gay and Christian, I didn’t know how else to handle this,’ and they kill themselves.”
White and Nixon attend Jerry Falwell’s church every Sunday in Lynchburg, Va., in part so they can keep tabs on Falwell’s message and direction.
“I think people who live in Washington, D.C., for example, have no idea what it’s really like out there,” White says. “We moved to Lynchburg because we didn’t. We lived in Laguna Beach.”
White acknowledges that some people may see him as an alarmist, but he says he sees the problem as real, the threat as imminent.
“I’m trying to say to gay people, ‘You are oppressed. You are second-class citizens in your own country,’” White says. “Because you’re rich enough and because you’re white enough and because you’re male enough or female-enough, you can pass and therefore, you know nothing can happen to you, but I bury the kids who can’t pass.”
Monday, September 25, 2006
A Bloody War The White House Hopes You Do Not Remember
Today, a blog report from Bob Geiger on his blogspot about the War the GOP hopes you have forgotten when you go to vote in a few weeks. He is hoping you do not forget it, and so do I. PAT
With just six weeks until the 2006 midterm elections, one would never know to look at the media -- or by where the White House or Republican Congress direct their focus -- that the United States is still involved in a bloody war that has continued almost as long as our country's entire involvement in World War II. September 20 marked three years and six months since America invaded Iraq under the pretense of weapons of mass destruction and the imminent threat the Bush administration claimed Saddam Hussein posed to us.
All of that and the contrived links between Iraq and Osama bin Laden have since been proven false and yet no oversight or investigations have been performed by the Republican-led, do-nothing Congress and, to watch the news and the actions of the GOP in Washington, one could easily miss how much American and Iraqi blood is still being shed for nothing.
Almost 2,700 Americans troops have been killed in Iraq and 20,000 have been wounded -- many with limbs missing and life-changing brain injuries -- and Iraqi civilians continue to die at a horrifying clip that I guess, at this point, is just too boring for the American media to cover.
It must be nice for Team Bush to be able to start a war for no reason, be responsible for such hideous, ongoing violence and not be held accountable by Congress or an American press that, amazingly, some idiots still have the nerve to say operates with a liberal bias. Do the American people want to be so numb to all of this that they simply forget our troops are in the middle of a civil war, on a mission that does not have -- nor did it ever have -- a damn thing to do with our national security?
If the corporate media won’t cover it, we in the blog world should and I believe most Americans do care about the horrible losses we continue to sustain.
In the first three weeks of September alone, 44 of our troops have been killed in the Iraq war. That's 44 American families forever changed, wives and husbands who will never again feel the embrace of their spouse and children who will never feel the love of a Mommy or Daddy forever lost.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld don’t want you to know who they are -- but I do. Here's all 44 and the sterile, Defense Department explanation for how they died.
Lance Cpl. Cliff K. Golla, 21, of Charlotte, N.C., died September 1 from wounds received while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Staff Sgt. Angel D. Mercado-Velazquez, 24, died in Yusifiyah, Iraq, on September 1 of injuries suffered from mortar fire during dismounted combat operations.
Sgt. Ralph N. Porras, 36, of Merrill, Mich. died in Yusifiyah, Iraq, on September 2 of injuries suffered from mortar fire during dismounted combat operations.
Pfc. Justin W. Dreese, 21, of Northumberland, Pa. died in Yusifiyah, Iraq, on September 2 of injuries suffered from mortar fire during dismounted combat operations.
Staff Sgt. Eugene H.E. Alex, 32, of Bay City, Mich., died on September 2 in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Landstuhl, Germany, of injuries suffered on Aug 30 in Baghdad, Iraq, when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire.
Lance Cpl. Shane P. Harris, 23, of Las Vegas, N.M., died September 3 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Lance Cpl. Philip A. Johnson, 19, of Hartford, Conn., died September 3 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Sgt. 1st Class Richard J. Henkes II, 32, of Portland Ore., died on September 3 of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Pfc. Nicholas A. Madaras, 19, of Wilton, Conn., died on September 3, in Baqubah, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.
Sgt. Jason L. Merrill, 22, of Mesa, Ariz. died on September 3 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Pfc. Edwin A. Andino II, 23, of Culpeper, Va. died on September 3 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Pvt. Ryan E. Miller, 21, of Gahanna, Ohio, died September 3 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Cpl. Jared M. Shoemaker, 29, of Tulsa, Okla., died September 4 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Lance Cpl. Eric P. Valdepenas, 21, of Seekonk, Mass., died September 4 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Lt. Col. Marshall A. Gutierrez, 41, of New Mexico, died on September 4 in Camp Virginia, Kuwait, from non-combat related injuries.
Sgt. Germaine L. Debro, 33, of Omaha, Neb., died on September 4 in Balad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher G. Walsh, 30, of St. Louis, Mo. died September 4 while his unit was conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Pfc. Hannah L. Gunterman, 20, of Redlands, Calif., died on September 4 in Taji, Iraq, from injuries suffered when she was struck by a vehicle.
Pfc. Jeremy R. Shank, 18, of Jackson, Mo., died on September 6 in Balad, Iraq, of injuries suffered in Hawijah, Iraq, when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during a dismounted security patrol.
Sgt. John A. Carroll, 26, of Ponca City, Okla., died on September 6 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries sustained when he came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire during a dismounted security patrol.
Pfc. Vincent M. Frassetto, 21, of Toms River, N.J., died September 7 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Sgt. Luis A. Montes, 22, of El Centro, Calif., died on September 7 in Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, of injuries suffered on September 1 in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Sgt. David W. Gordon, 23, of Williamsfield, Ohio, died on September 8, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
Pfc. Anthony P. Seig, 19, of Sunman, Ind., died on September 9, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained when he encountered indirect fire from enemy forces while on base.
Cpl. Johnathan L. Benson, 21, of North Branch, Minn., died September 9 from wounds suffered on June 17 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Cpl. Alexander Jordan, 31, of Miami, Fla., died on September 10 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
Spc. Harley D. Andrews, 22, of Weimar, Calif., died on September 11 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
2nd Lt. Emily J.T. Perez, 23, of Texas, died on September 12 of injuries sustained in Al Kifl, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near her HMMWV during combat operations.
Capt. Matthew C. Mattingly, 30, of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, died on September 13 in Mosul, Iraq, when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
Pfc. Jeffrey P. Shaffer, 21, of Harrison, Ark., died of injuries sustained in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on September 13 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle during combat operations.
Sgt. David T. Weir, 23, of Cleveland, Tenn., died on September 14 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered on September 13 when he encountered enemy forces using rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire during combat operations.
Sgt. Jennifer M. Hartman, 21, of New Ringgold, Pa. died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 14 of injuries suffered when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated in the vicinity of a West Baghdad Substation where she was located.
Lance Cpl. Ryan A. Miller, 19, of Pearland, Texas, died September 14 while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Sgt. Aaron A. Smith, 31, of Killeen, Texas died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 14 of injuries suffered when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated in the vicinity of a West Baghdad Substation where he was located.
Spc. Russell M. Makowski, 23, of Union, Mo., died of injuries suffered in Taji, Iraq, on September 14 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.
Sgt. Clint E.Williams, 24, of Kingston, Okla., died on September 14 of injuries suffered in Baghdad, Iraq when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Cpl. Marcus A. Cain, 20, of Crowley, La. died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 14 of injuries suffered when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated in the vicinity of a West Baghdad Substation where he was located.
Petty Officer 2nd Class David S. Roddy, 32, of Aberdeen, Md., died September 16 while his unit was conducting combat operations against enemy forces in the Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Sgt. Adam L. Knox, 21, of Columbus, Ohio, died on September 17 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when his patrol encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
Sgt. David J. Davis, 32, of Mount Airy, Md., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 17, of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Stryker Armored Vehicle during combat operations in Sadr City, Iraq.
Sgt. James R. Worster, 24, of Broadview Heights, Ohio, died from a non-combat related incident on September 18 in Baghdad, Iraq.
Sgt. Christopher M. Zimmerman, 28, of Stephenville, Texas, died September 20 while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Master Sgt. Robb G. Needham, 51, of Vancouver, Wash., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 20, of injuries suffered when his patrol came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
Cpl. Yull Estrada Rodriguez, 21, of Alegre Lajas, Puerto Rico, died September 20 while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Imagine the constant, JonBenet Ramsey-like media coverage that would occur if Al-Qaeda killed 44 Americans by bombing a Burger King in Peoria. And yet the same number of Americans dying for absolutely nothing -- and similar bloodshed guaranteed for next month -- disappears almost entirely from view, garnering less ink and broadcast time than an appearance of Suri Cruise or the box office ranking of 'Jackass Number Two.'
We have an election coming up in six weeks and why these 44 people died, at an average age of 25, is not a "single issue" this campaign season -- it is the only issue.
With just six weeks until the 2006 midterm elections, one would never know to look at the media -- or by where the White House or Republican Congress direct their focus -- that the United States is still involved in a bloody war that has continued almost as long as our country's entire involvement in World War II. September 20 marked three years and six months since America invaded Iraq under the pretense of weapons of mass destruction and the imminent threat the Bush administration claimed Saddam Hussein posed to us.All of that and the contrived links between Iraq and Osama bin Laden have since been proven false and yet no oversight or investigations have been performed by the Republican-led, do-nothing Congress and, to watch the news and the actions of the GOP in Washington, one could easily miss how much American and Iraqi blood is still being shed for nothing.
Almost 2,700 Americans troops have been killed in Iraq and 20,000 have been wounded -- many with limbs missing and life-changing brain injuries -- and Iraqi civilians continue to die at a horrifying clip that I guess, at this point, is just too boring for the American media to cover.
It must be nice for Team Bush to be able to start a war for no reason, be responsible for such hideous, ongoing violence and not be held accountable by Congress or an American press that, amazingly, some idiots still have the nerve to say operates with a liberal bias. Do the American people want to be so numb to all of this that they simply forget our troops are in the middle of a civil war, on a mission that does not have -- nor did it ever have -- a damn thing to do with our national security?
If the corporate media won’t cover it, we in the blog world should and I believe most Americans do care about the horrible losses we continue to sustain.
In the first three weeks of September alone, 44 of our troops have been killed in the Iraq war. That's 44 American families forever changed, wives and husbands who will never again feel the embrace of their spouse and children who will never feel the love of a Mommy or Daddy forever lost.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld don’t want you to know who they are -- but I do. Here's all 44 and the sterile, Defense Department explanation for how they died.
Lance Cpl. Cliff K. Golla, 21, of Charlotte, N.C., died September 1 from wounds received while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.Staff Sgt. Angel D. Mercado-Velazquez, 24, died in Yusifiyah, Iraq, on September 1 of injuries suffered from mortar fire during dismounted combat operations.
Sgt. Ralph N. Porras, 36, of Merrill, Mich. died in Yusifiyah, Iraq, on September 2 of injuries suffered from mortar fire during dismounted combat operations.
Pfc. Justin W. Dreese, 21, of Northumberland, Pa. died in Yusifiyah, Iraq, on September 2 of injuries suffered from mortar fire during dismounted combat operations.
Staff Sgt. Eugene H.E. Alex, 32, of Bay City, Mich., died on September 2 in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Landstuhl, Germany, of injuries suffered on Aug 30 in Baghdad, Iraq, when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire.
Lance Cpl. Shane P. Harris, 23, of Las Vegas, N.M., died September 3 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Lance Cpl. Philip A. Johnson, 19, of Hartford, Conn., died September 3 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Sgt. 1st Class Richard J. Henkes II, 32, of Portland Ore., died on September 3 of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Pfc. Nicholas A. Madaras, 19, of Wilton, Conn., died on September 3, in Baqubah, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.Sgt. Jason L. Merrill, 22, of Mesa, Ariz. died on September 3 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Pfc. Edwin A. Andino II, 23, of Culpeper, Va. died on September 3 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Pvt. Ryan E. Miller, 21, of Gahanna, Ohio, died September 3 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Cpl. Jared M. Shoemaker, 29, of Tulsa, Okla., died September 4 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Lance Cpl. Eric P. Valdepenas, 21, of Seekonk, Mass., died September 4 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Lt. Col. Marshall A. Gutierrez, 41, of New Mexico, died on September 4 in Camp Virginia, Kuwait, from non-combat related injuries.
Sgt. Germaine L. Debro, 33, of Omaha, Neb., died on September 4 in Balad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher G. Walsh, 30, of St. Louis, Mo. died September 4 while his unit was conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Pfc. Hannah L. Gunterman, 20, of Redlands, Calif., died on September 4 in Taji, Iraq, from injuries suffered when she was struck by a vehicle.
Pfc. Jeremy R. Shank, 18, of Jackson, Mo., died on September 6 in Balad, Iraq, of injuries suffered in Hawijah, Iraq, when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during a dismounted security patrol.
Sgt. John A. Carroll, 26, of Ponca City, Okla., died on September 6 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries sustained when he came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire during a dismounted security patrol.
Pfc. Vincent M. Frassetto, 21, of Toms River, N.J., died September 7 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Sgt. Luis A. Montes, 22, of El Centro, Calif., died on September 7 in Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, of injuries suffered on September 1 in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Sgt. David W. Gordon, 23, of Williamsfield, Ohio, died on September 8, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
Pfc. Anthony P. Seig, 19, of Sunman, Ind., died on September 9, in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained when he encountered indirect fire from enemy forces while on base.Cpl. Johnathan L. Benson, 21, of North Branch, Minn., died September 9 from wounds suffered on June 17 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Cpl. Alexander Jordan, 31, of Miami, Fla., died on September 10 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
Spc. Harley D. Andrews, 22, of Weimar, Calif., died on September 11 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.2nd Lt. Emily J.T. Perez, 23, of Texas, died on September 12 of injuries sustained in Al Kifl, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near her HMMWV during combat operations.
Capt. Matthew C. Mattingly, 30, of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, died on September 13 in Mosul, Iraq, when he encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
Pfc. Jeffrey P. Shaffer, 21, of Harrison, Ark., died of injuries sustained in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on September 13 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle during combat operations.
Sgt. David T. Weir, 23, of Cleveland, Tenn., died on September 14 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered on September 13 when he encountered enemy forces using rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire during combat operations.
Sgt. Jennifer M. Hartman, 21, of New Ringgold, Pa. died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 14 of injuries suffered when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated in the vicinity of a West Baghdad Substation where she was located.Lance Cpl. Ryan A. Miller, 19, of Pearland, Texas, died September 14 while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Sgt. Aaron A. Smith, 31, of Killeen, Texas died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 14 of injuries suffered when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated in the vicinity of a West Baghdad Substation where he was located.
Spc. Russell M. Makowski, 23, of Union, Mo., died of injuries suffered in Taji, Iraq, on September 14 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.
Sgt. Clint E.Williams, 24, of Kingston, Okla., died on September 14 of injuries suffered in Baghdad, Iraq when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Cpl. Marcus A. Cain, 20, of Crowley, La. died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 14 of injuries suffered when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated in the vicinity of a West Baghdad Substation where he was located.Petty Officer 2nd Class David S. Roddy, 32, of Aberdeen, Md., died September 16 while his unit was conducting combat operations against enemy forces in the Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Sgt. Adam L. Knox, 21, of Columbus, Ohio, died on September 17 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when his patrol encountered enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
Sgt. David J. Davis, 32, of Mount Airy, Md., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 17, of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Stryker Armored Vehicle during combat operations in Sadr City, Iraq.
Sgt. James R. Worster, 24, of Broadview Heights, Ohio, died from a non-combat related incident on September 18 in Baghdad, Iraq.
Sgt. Christopher M. Zimmerman, 28, of Stephenville, Texas, died September 20 while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Master Sgt. Robb G. Needham, 51, of Vancouver, Wash., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 20, of injuries suffered when his patrol came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.Cpl. Yull Estrada Rodriguez, 21, of Alegre Lajas, Puerto Rico, died September 20 while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Imagine the constant, JonBenet Ramsey-like media coverage that would occur if Al-Qaeda killed 44 Americans by bombing a Burger King in Peoria. And yet the same number of Americans dying for absolutely nothing -- and similar bloodshed guaranteed for next month -- disappears almost entirely from view, garnering less ink and broadcast time than an appearance of Suri Cruise or the box office ranking of 'Jackass Number Two.'
We have an election coming up in six weeks and why these 44 people died, at an average age of 25, is not a "single issue" this campaign season -- it is the only issue.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Betty Bowers Chimes in: What's My Line?
Soon after our President was born with a silver spoon under his nose, there was a program on television called "What's My Line?" (a question now most often heard around Kate Moss's mirrored coffee table). Contrary to what you might imagine from the title, the program, unlike the President, had nothing to do with taking lusty snorts of cocaine. Instead, a panel of otherwise discarded entertainers guessed what an even less well known person "was" by asking him what he actually did.
Such a game, of course, wouldn't fly nowadays, as people are wont simply to announce up front what they are (e.g., "journalist" or "Christian") and grow peevishly snappish when asked for verifiable specifics to support such alleged descriptions. Consequently, our now-grown President can declare himself a "Compassionate Conservative" when he is neither (in the same sense that Jessica Simpson can declare herself a "popular singer"), a "Decider" when he makes no useful decisions, a "War President" when he is incapable of winning one, and a "Protector" when he fails at every turn to provide any protection. (That is, of course, except for the the type of protection the Mafia made famous to the gang at ExxonMobil, et al., who are now rich enough to return the favor by modulating their profits from staggeringly obscene to merely wildly obscene in time for the midterm elections.)
This mislabeling is not limited to our shores. As we saw this week, Muslims are fond of claiming Islam is a religion of peace. Regrettably, it appears to be an analogue of peace that stops well shy of actual peacefulness. Of course, perfunctory hosannas for peace exclaimed though the smoke of just discharged ammo are hardly proprietary to Islam.
Otherwise, America wouldn't have a self-styled "War President" who claims his orders to kill come from a guy who calls Himself the Prince of Peace.
And everyone's disparate heavens help all who call anyone on any of these mendacious labels. Observant people who question President Bush's claims receive death threats from Ann Coulter. And observant Christians who question Islam receive another type of death threat altogether: the variety not uttered solely to provoke some cheap publicity.
This week, the Allah-worshipping crazies are angry at the Mary-worshipping crazies for making the outrageous suggestion that the Allah-worshipping crazies are somehow prone to fits of violence. The only thing surprising about making the observation that Islam is full of violent nutjobs is that the Pope finally said something that happened to be true.
Naturally, to show how wildly inaccurate such a slanderous suggestion is, Muslims, of course, bombed churches, made death threats and killed a nun. Enchanté! And so very self-aware, don't you think?
While I don't disagree with the Pope for connecting the contiguous dots between Islam and violence, he must have been rather relieved that the Muslims didn't think to call him out on his brazen hypocrisy by simply sneering: "People in glass Vaticans shouldn't engage in stonings." After all, it is rather quaint that a Nazi Youth drag queen in Rome thinks that he speaks with even passable moral authority -- or has any historical right to point a bony, bejeweled finger at anyone. This Prada-wearing, chiffon-flouncing flibbertigibbet Pope waves his magic aspergillum from the balcony of an organization that started the violence of the Crusades, the torture of the Inquisition, the indifference of the Holocaust and the molestation of enough children to makes Michael Jackson's and John Mark Karr all atwitter with indolent envy.
Frankly, after the massacres by domestic aircraft at the World Trade Center, followed by the massacres by military aircraft in Iraq, claiming "Middle East Islam is a religion of peace" is as hollow as saying "American Christianity is a religion of peace." As long as people ignore the words of their supposed prophets, they should be honest and admit that they are acting in their own names, not His. As such, since Muslims pay no heed to their own teachings, Islam is a religion of violence -- just as American Christianity is a religion of saber rattling, killing, judging others, slapping the other cheek and getting rich by selling clothes to the poor.
Whatever Allah or Jesus may or may not have said seems wholly incidental at this point in gauging what to expect from someone who claims to be either a Muslim or a Christian. Not to be persnickety, but if you're not being peaceful -- don't claim to be devoted to peace. If you're not following Christ, don't claim to be a Christian. And don't get in a snit if people call you on it. If your religion allows you to indulge in every selfish, feral impulse, your "faith" is simply vanity, not the emulation of divine expectations. Your Allah and your Christ are your WMDs -- just an excuse to follow your fears to your needs.
And that's my line.
Sincerely yours,
Ms. Betty Bowers
Such a game, of course, wouldn't fly nowadays, as people are wont simply to announce up front what they are (e.g., "journalist" or "Christian") and grow peevishly snappish when asked for verifiable specifics to support such alleged descriptions. Consequently, our now-grown President can declare himself a "Compassionate Conservative" when he is neither (in the same sense that Jessica Simpson can declare herself a "popular singer"), a "Decider" when he makes no useful decisions, a "War President" when he is incapable of winning one, and a "Protector" when he fails at every turn to provide any protection. (That is, of course, except for the the type of protection the Mafia made famous to the gang at ExxonMobil, et al., who are now rich enough to return the favor by modulating their profits from staggeringly obscene to merely wildly obscene in time for the midterm elections.)
This mislabeling is not limited to our shores. As we saw this week, Muslims are fond of claiming Islam is a religion of peace. Regrettably, it appears to be an analogue of peace that stops well shy of actual peacefulness. Of course, perfunctory hosannas for peace exclaimed though the smoke of just discharged ammo are hardly proprietary to Islam.
Otherwise, America wouldn't have a self-styled "War President" who claims his orders to kill come from a guy who calls Himself the Prince of Peace.
And everyone's disparate heavens help all who call anyone on any of these mendacious labels. Observant people who question President Bush's claims receive death threats from Ann Coulter. And observant Christians who question Islam receive another type of death threat altogether: the variety not uttered solely to provoke some cheap publicity.
This week, the Allah-worshipping crazies are angry at the Mary-worshipping crazies for making the outrageous suggestion that the Allah-worshipping crazies are somehow prone to fits of violence. The only thing surprising about making the observation that Islam is full of violent nutjobs is that the Pope finally said something that happened to be true.
Naturally, to show how wildly inaccurate such a slanderous suggestion is, Muslims, of course, bombed churches, made death threats and killed a nun. Enchanté! And so very self-aware, don't you think?
While I don't disagree with the Pope for connecting the contiguous dots between Islam and violence, he must have been rather relieved that the Muslims didn't think to call him out on his brazen hypocrisy by simply sneering: "People in glass Vaticans shouldn't engage in stonings." After all, it is rather quaint that a Nazi Youth drag queen in Rome thinks that he speaks with even passable moral authority -- or has any historical right to point a bony, bejeweled finger at anyone. This Prada-wearing, chiffon-flouncing flibbertigibbet Pope waves his magic aspergillum from the balcony of an organization that started the violence of the Crusades, the torture of the Inquisition, the indifference of the Holocaust and the molestation of enough children to makes Michael Jackson's and John Mark Karr all atwitter with indolent envy.
Frankly, after the massacres by domestic aircraft at the World Trade Center, followed by the massacres by military aircraft in Iraq, claiming "Middle East Islam is a religion of peace" is as hollow as saying "American Christianity is a religion of peace." As long as people ignore the words of their supposed prophets, they should be honest and admit that they are acting in their own names, not His. As such, since Muslims pay no heed to their own teachings, Islam is a religion of violence -- just as American Christianity is a religion of saber rattling, killing, judging others, slapping the other cheek and getting rich by selling clothes to the poor.
Whatever Allah or Jesus may or may not have said seems wholly incidental at this point in gauging what to expect from someone who claims to be either a Muslim or a Christian. Not to be persnickety, but if you're not being peaceful -- don't claim to be devoted to peace. If you're not following Christ, don't claim to be a Christian. And don't get in a snit if people call you on it. If your religion allows you to indulge in every selfish, feral impulse, your "faith" is simply vanity, not the emulation of divine expectations. Your Allah and your Christ are your WMDs -- just an excuse to follow your fears to your needs.
And that's my line.
Sincerely yours,
Ms. Betty Bowers
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Group Asks: What Did Jesus Say?
Group asks: What did Jesus say?
Posted by Frank James at 12:17 PM CDT
I went to a press conference yesterday and a church service broke out.
The press conference at the National Press Club was held by the new Red Letter Christians network, Christian communicators who say they want to change how Christians influence the national public policy debate. The Religious Right, with its focus on a narrow set of issues like abortion and gay rights, has dominated the public arena for too long, says the RLC.
But Jesus, whose words in many Bibles are printed in red, hence the new group's name, was concerned about social justice issues like poverty and discrimination that are as neglected on the RR’s agenda as the robbery victim on the Jericho road in Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan, say RLC members.
What would Jesus do? is a line popular among Christians. The RLCs add a new wrinkle, a new way for assessing policy and political candidates: What did Jesus say?
So through a series of what amounted to small sermons, the Christian clergy, activists, scholars and writers who attended yesterday’s event, announced that they wanted to elbow their way into the national pulpit, as it were, to give issues of social justice, global warming, peacemaking etc., an emphasis in policymaking they say is now lacking because the RR largely ignores these other issues.
But the RLC has another reason for being, say its members. To be prophetic, that is, to tell a society what God requires of it even when that’s unpopular, means being independent of party politics.
The RLCs criticized the RR for essentially serving the interests of the Republican Party and vice versa.
The press conference was meant to pre-empt the RR's “Values Voter Summit” to be hosted here Washington later this week by FRC Action, part of the Family Research Council, a conservative group that binds fundamentalist Christianity and Republican politics. Featured speakers at the event include conservative favorites William Bennett and Ann Coulter.
(Considering what Jesus did in the temple when he encountered the moneychangers, it’s interesting to consider what his reaction might be if He were sitting in the audience when Coulter dropped some of her more out-there comments like “I'm getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties” and “I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning.” But I digress.)
“…It’s actually, I would suggest, arrogant to assume that only two issues involve moral values,” said Rev. Jim Wallis, referring to abortion and gay marriage.
Wallis is one of the nation’s leading voices on social justice issues. Head of Sojourners, a progressive Christian group and author of “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It” has been trying to wrest the microphone away from the Religious Right for years.
“And it is hubris to say that only those people with a conservative political position are voting based on values. What should be valued is the broader and deeper question. We want a politics grounded in all of our values and what really appeals to the basic moral concerns of all Americans.”
The RLCs can’t be written off as a bunch of liberal, anything goes, Christians. Wallis has been very public about being pro-life. Rev. Tony Campolo, a well known Christian educator who attended yesterday’s press conference, was very clear about personally opposing gay sex and marriage, what he called “same-sex eroticism.”
So they share some common ground with many people on the Religious Right.
But the contest over whose version of Christianity will win out is going to waged over the differences between the RLCs and the RRs. And by the sound of it, this contest could get pretty heated.
Randall Balmer, a Columbia University professor and expert on American religious history, gave just a sense of the fight that’s brewing.
".. The evangelical faith that nurtured me as a child and that sustains me as an adult has been hijacked by right wing zealots who really have no real understanding of the teachings of Jesus,” he said.
“They have taken the Gospel the Good News of Jesus Christ, something that I consider to be lovely and redemptive, and turned it into something ugly and punitive," he said. "They have cherry picked through the Scriptures wrenching verses out of context and used those verses as a bludgeon against their political enemies.”
Balmer went on to say he has no problem with faith in the public square. His problem was that the RR seemed to view itself as inseparable from the Republican party.
“…There’s a real danger when the faith is identified too closely with anyone political ideology, political party or, in this case in recent years, with a specific administration. Because at that point the faith loses its prophetic power.”
Then Balmer told a story. While he was doing research for a book, he asked eight RR groups for their position on the use of torture. Only two got back to him, saying they agreed with the Bush administration.
“These are people who purport to be pro-life,” he said. “These are people who claim to hear a fetal scream. And yet they’re turning a deaf ear to the very real screams of people who are being tortured in our name. I happen to think that’s morally bankrupt and we need voices speaking out against this sort of travesty.”
Then there was Campolo. “Red Letters Christians are above else a challenge to the Religious Right. We want to challenge them on their own ground,” he said. “They don’t do what has to be done to eliminate abortion as a case in point.
“The Guttmacher Institute recently reported that if you made contraceptives available to lower income women, you could cut the number of abortions in America by 200,000. Add to that this fact, that if you provided medical care for the poor, if you provided daycare for these children who are born, if you provided a raise in the minimum wage, you could cut abortions by another 300k.
“Consequently, there are one million abortions in America. You can cut it by a half a million if you took care of the poor. We challenge the Religious Right that meets at the end of this week to do something about the poor… if they’re rally serious about their pro-life agenda.”
Rev. Romal Tune, an African American who has a community-activism ministry he takes to churches nationwide, accused the RR of being elitist at one point referring to its leadership as “ultraconservative elitist white males.”
He mentioned how his seven-week old cousin was killed by a stray bullet during a drive by shooting two years ago. “The dialogue around gay rights and abortion will do nothing to get guns off the street. It will do nothing to improve legislation and stricter gun laws,” Tune said.
“Rather this conversation will only allow people to hide in their offices or simply cower down behind pulpits rather than stand beside the people who need them most in the inner cities and our rural communities. This is the difference between prophetic ministry and pathetic ministry.”
Alexia Kelley, a founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, said: “We stand for peace. But if there’s a culture war that’s needed, it is a war on greed, on poverty, on materialism and on economic security of the middle-class”
Another speaker, Rev. Robert Michael Franklin Jr., a professor at Emory University and president of the Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta, said that as an African American preacher he could speak to the dangers of a group aligning itself to closely to one party, as African Americans have with Democrats.
“We humbly say to our fellow values voters, be cautious in over identifying with a single party and a narrow set of values,” Franklin said . “In the black church we speak from experience here. Because many of us have too often aligned ourselves, uncritically, with a single party.
“But today we urge black church leaders around the nation and evangelicals not to simply endorse Democrats or Republicans out of blind loyalty but to discern the congruence of their policies with God’s politics.”
To that end, the RLC press kit had in it a voters’ guide. It doesn’t tell voters who to vote for. Instead, it provides a framework for how voters can use Christian values in consistent way to inform their choices.
For instance, it suggests Christians should vote for a consistent ethic of life. That means supporting “common-ground “ policies that would lead to fewer abortions while at the same time voting to end capital punishment.
The RLCs also have a blog, Godspolitics.com. This week, Wallis and Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition head, have a debate on Christian values.
“I want to pledge to you we will not treat our opponents the way the Religious Right has treated those who oppose them," Wallis said. “Our conversation will be open and welcoming and civil. We’re not afraid of dialogue. The Religious Right wins when they control a monologue. They begin to lose when dialogue breaks out. Dialogue has just broken out.”
in Religion and Politics
Posted by Frank James at 12:17 PM CDT
I went to a press conference yesterday and a church service broke out.
The press conference at the National Press Club was held by the new Red Letter Christians network, Christian communicators who say they want to change how Christians influence the national public policy debate. The Religious Right, with its focus on a narrow set of issues like abortion and gay rights, has dominated the public arena for too long, says the RLC.
But Jesus, whose words in many Bibles are printed in red, hence the new group's name, was concerned about social justice issues like poverty and discrimination that are as neglected on the RR’s agenda as the robbery victim on the Jericho road in Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan, say RLC members.
What would Jesus do? is a line popular among Christians. The RLCs add a new wrinkle, a new way for assessing policy and political candidates: What did Jesus say?
So through a series of what amounted to small sermons, the Christian clergy, activists, scholars and writers who attended yesterday’s event, announced that they wanted to elbow their way into the national pulpit, as it were, to give issues of social justice, global warming, peacemaking etc., an emphasis in policymaking they say is now lacking because the RR largely ignores these other issues.
But the RLC has another reason for being, say its members. To be prophetic, that is, to tell a society what God requires of it even when that’s unpopular, means being independent of party politics.
The RLCs criticized the RR for essentially serving the interests of the Republican Party and vice versa.
The press conference was meant to pre-empt the RR's “Values Voter Summit” to be hosted here Washington later this week by FRC Action, part of the Family Research Council, a conservative group that binds fundamentalist Christianity and Republican politics. Featured speakers at the event include conservative favorites William Bennett and Ann Coulter.
(Considering what Jesus did in the temple when he encountered the moneychangers, it’s interesting to consider what his reaction might be if He were sitting in the audience when Coulter dropped some of her more out-there comments like “I'm getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties” and “I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning.” But I digress.)
“…It’s actually, I would suggest, arrogant to assume that only two issues involve moral values,” said Rev. Jim Wallis, referring to abortion and gay marriage.
Wallis is one of the nation’s leading voices on social justice issues. Head of Sojourners, a progressive Christian group and author of “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It” has been trying to wrest the microphone away from the Religious Right for years.
“And it is hubris to say that only those people with a conservative political position are voting based on values. What should be valued is the broader and deeper question. We want a politics grounded in all of our values and what really appeals to the basic moral concerns of all Americans.”
The RLCs can’t be written off as a bunch of liberal, anything goes, Christians. Wallis has been very public about being pro-life. Rev. Tony Campolo, a well known Christian educator who attended yesterday’s press conference, was very clear about personally opposing gay sex and marriage, what he called “same-sex eroticism.”
So they share some common ground with many people on the Religious Right.
But the contest over whose version of Christianity will win out is going to waged over the differences between the RLCs and the RRs. And by the sound of it, this contest could get pretty heated.
Randall Balmer, a Columbia University professor and expert on American religious history, gave just a sense of the fight that’s brewing.
".. The evangelical faith that nurtured me as a child and that sustains me as an adult has been hijacked by right wing zealots who really have no real understanding of the teachings of Jesus,” he said.
“They have taken the Gospel the Good News of Jesus Christ, something that I consider to be lovely and redemptive, and turned it into something ugly and punitive," he said. "They have cherry picked through the Scriptures wrenching verses out of context and used those verses as a bludgeon against their political enemies.”
Balmer went on to say he has no problem with faith in the public square. His problem was that the RR seemed to view itself as inseparable from the Republican party.
“…There’s a real danger when the faith is identified too closely with anyone political ideology, political party or, in this case in recent years, with a specific administration. Because at that point the faith loses its prophetic power.”
Then Balmer told a story. While he was doing research for a book, he asked eight RR groups for their position on the use of torture. Only two got back to him, saying they agreed with the Bush administration.
“These are people who purport to be pro-life,” he said. “These are people who claim to hear a fetal scream. And yet they’re turning a deaf ear to the very real screams of people who are being tortured in our name. I happen to think that’s morally bankrupt and we need voices speaking out against this sort of travesty.”
Then there was Campolo. “Red Letters Christians are above else a challenge to the Religious Right. We want to challenge them on their own ground,” he said. “They don’t do what has to be done to eliminate abortion as a case in point.
“The Guttmacher Institute recently reported that if you made contraceptives available to lower income women, you could cut the number of abortions in America by 200,000. Add to that this fact, that if you provided medical care for the poor, if you provided daycare for these children who are born, if you provided a raise in the minimum wage, you could cut abortions by another 300k.
“Consequently, there are one million abortions in America. You can cut it by a half a million if you took care of the poor. We challenge the Religious Right that meets at the end of this week to do something about the poor… if they’re rally serious about their pro-life agenda.”
Rev. Romal Tune, an African American who has a community-activism ministry he takes to churches nationwide, accused the RR of being elitist at one point referring to its leadership as “ultraconservative elitist white males.”
He mentioned how his seven-week old cousin was killed by a stray bullet during a drive by shooting two years ago. “The dialogue around gay rights and abortion will do nothing to get guns off the street. It will do nothing to improve legislation and stricter gun laws,” Tune said.
“Rather this conversation will only allow people to hide in their offices or simply cower down behind pulpits rather than stand beside the people who need them most in the inner cities and our rural communities. This is the difference between prophetic ministry and pathetic ministry.”
Alexia Kelley, a founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, said: “We stand for peace. But if there’s a culture war that’s needed, it is a war on greed, on poverty, on materialism and on economic security of the middle-class”
Another speaker, Rev. Robert Michael Franklin Jr., a professor at Emory University and president of the Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta, said that as an African American preacher he could speak to the dangers of a group aligning itself to closely to one party, as African Americans have with Democrats.
“We humbly say to our fellow values voters, be cautious in over identifying with a single party and a narrow set of values,” Franklin said . “In the black church we speak from experience here. Because many of us have too often aligned ourselves, uncritically, with a single party.
“But today we urge black church leaders around the nation and evangelicals not to simply endorse Democrats or Republicans out of blind loyalty but to discern the congruence of their policies with God’s politics.”
To that end, the RLC press kit had in it a voters’ guide. It doesn’t tell voters who to vote for. Instead, it provides a framework for how voters can use Christian values in consistent way to inform their choices.
For instance, it suggests Christians should vote for a consistent ethic of life. That means supporting “common-ground “ policies that would lead to fewer abortions while at the same time voting to end capital punishment.
The RLCs also have a blog, Godspolitics.com. This week, Wallis and Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition head, have a debate on Christian values.
“I want to pledge to you we will not treat our opponents the way the Religious Right has treated those who oppose them," Wallis said. “Our conversation will be open and welcoming and civil. We’re not afraid of dialogue. The Religious Right wins when they control a monologue. They begin to lose when dialogue breaks out. Dialogue has just broken out.”
in Religion and Politics
Vacation Bible School These Days, It Sure Has Changed a Lot
Vacation Bible School Has Changed A Lot
My mother sent us to Vacation Bible School. It was a week long, in the middle of summer and, while she is a Christian, I am sure she sent us to have a short break. There were maybe twenty kids in each grade level and the activities were simple. My mom, who is deaf, taught everybody to sign the song, “Jesus Loves Me” and we made Christian themed art out of clay, pipe cleaners and yarn. While I no longer identify with any religion, I have mostly good memories about my VBS experience. It is hard to find fault in lessons of “love thy neighbor.”
But it seems that VBS has changed. I found this article at ABC News online about a documentary, “Jesus Camp” and am more than a little concerned.
Speaking in tongues, weeping for salvation, praying for an end to abortion and worshipping a picture of President Bush — these are some of the activities at Pastor Becky Fischer’s Bible camp in North Dakota, “Kids on Fire,” subject of the provocative new documentary, “Jesus Camp.” “I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Palestine, Pakistan and all those different places,” Fisher said. “Because, excuse me, we have the truth.”
Wow. If Ms. Fischer’s comments aren’t enough to make you scratch your head, maybe the comments of the little ones are.
“A lot of people die for God,” one camper said, “and they’re not afraid.” “We’re kinda being trained to be warriors,” said another, “only in a funner way.”
Nope, this is not the VBS I remember. I am certain that there are still camps where paper plate art is the norm, but camps like “Kids on Fire” in North Dakota have little ones taping their mouths against abortion and speaking out on political issues like gay marriage.
As a libertarian, I generally support parental choice on everything. Watching the video makes me cringe though. Between the clips of kids praying in front of a Bush photograph, Ms. Fischer openly screaming, “this is war” and boys in battle fatigues, I see a generation of kids being trained for a holy war. I have to wonder how well this would go over if the kids were calling on Allah.
I do think people of every political and spiritual inclination need to pay attention to this trend. This is our future and they know it.
One child in “Jesus Camp” goes so far as to say, “We’re a key generation to bringing Jesus back.”
Freedom to worship as one wishes is part of this country’s foundation. I would never speak out against it. Little training camps for children are different. Extremists are a problem no matter the god worshiped. Unless, of course, the worshiped is the god depicted best by macaroni art.
My mother sent us to Vacation Bible School. It was a week long, in the middle of summer and, while she is a Christian, I am sure she sent us to have a short break. There were maybe twenty kids in each grade level and the activities were simple. My mom, who is deaf, taught everybody to sign the song, “Jesus Loves Me” and we made Christian themed art out of clay, pipe cleaners and yarn. While I no longer identify with any religion, I have mostly good memories about my VBS experience. It is hard to find fault in lessons of “love thy neighbor.”
But it seems that VBS has changed. I found this article at ABC News online about a documentary, “Jesus Camp” and am more than a little concerned.
Speaking in tongues, weeping for salvation, praying for an end to abortion and worshipping a picture of President Bush — these are some of the activities at Pastor Becky Fischer’s Bible camp in North Dakota, “Kids on Fire,” subject of the provocative new documentary, “Jesus Camp.” “I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Palestine, Pakistan and all those different places,” Fisher said. “Because, excuse me, we have the truth.”
Wow. If Ms. Fischer’s comments aren’t enough to make you scratch your head, maybe the comments of the little ones are.
“A lot of people die for God,” one camper said, “and they’re not afraid.” “We’re kinda being trained to be warriors,” said another, “only in a funner way.”
Nope, this is not the VBS I remember. I am certain that there are still camps where paper plate art is the norm, but camps like “Kids on Fire” in North Dakota have little ones taping their mouths against abortion and speaking out on political issues like gay marriage.
As a libertarian, I generally support parental choice on everything. Watching the video makes me cringe though. Between the clips of kids praying in front of a Bush photograph, Ms. Fischer openly screaming, “this is war” and boys in battle fatigues, I see a generation of kids being trained for a holy war. I have to wonder how well this would go over if the kids were calling on Allah.
I do think people of every political and spiritual inclination need to pay attention to this trend. This is our future and they know it.
One child in “Jesus Camp” goes so far as to say, “We’re a key generation to bringing Jesus back.”
Freedom to worship as one wishes is part of this country’s foundation. I would never speak out against it. Little training camps for children are different. Extremists are a problem no matter the god worshiped. Unless, of course, the worshiped is the god depicted best by macaroni art.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
A Teenager Says, "I Hate Being Gay"
From the Advocate newspaper, a young reader speaks out about the gay lifestyle ...I hate being gay
This Washington State teen faces a daily battle between the sexual attraction he feels for other men and his religious convictions that tell him being gay is against God’s word.
By Kyle Rice
In late July the Washington State supreme court upheld a law that limits marriage to heterosexual couples. As a gay 19-year-old in Longview, Wash., my delight with that ruling is probably surprising. However, I’m not your average gay person—I'm also a Christian who views living a gay lifestyle as against God's word.
And because of my religious beliefs, I hate the fact that I am gay.
About the time I was 12 years old, it became clear to me that I was sexually attracted to guys. I assumed these feelings would go away as I got older. People choose to be gay, right? I didn’t choose this, so I figured it would pass. But it didn’t. By age 15 I had my first boyfriend.
At about that time I started to attend a Pentecostal church. I began reading the Bible, including its many different and powerful passages condemning homosexual activity. I knew in my heart that being gay was wrong in God’s eyes. I decided to devote myself to living a God-filled life and knew I needed to stop being gay so that I could stop being attracted to guys.
I looked into "ex-gay" ministries and joined such a program offered by a local church. It has taught me that with God’s help I can change my desires. A friend of mine went through another church’s program, and he's changed. He’s now happy and in love with his girlfriend. I pray the same will happen to me someday.
In the meantime I focus on fighting efforts to force the "gay agenda" on those of us who know God does not accept homosexuality. Although I do not condone discrimination, I also do not support gay marriage laws or many of the other issues backed by gay rights groups. I am a proud conservative Republican, and I support political candidates who feel the same way I do.
Many people ask me how I can be gay and also be a Republican and a Pentecostal Christian. My answer is that I am so much more than my sexuality. I don’t vote solely on pet gay issues. My faith and love of God is not guided by one small piece of who I am—a piece of me that I am trying very hard to change.
Being a gay Christian is at times very hard to deal with. Some days I feel as if I’m at war with myself. But I know God would not approve of me acting on my gay feelings, and I have no right to question his directive. I know that in the end I will be happy I lived my life according to God’s standards the best that I could.
That means refusing to accept being gay.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Leaders Say 9-11 Should be Remembered for Extreme Statements
DALLAS -- The anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks should include the memory of statements that blamed gays and lesbians for bringing God's wrath on the nation, a council of gay-friendly Christians said Monday.
Those targeted by such comments are "equally victims, 365 days a year of the kinds of teachings the Christian extremists espouse," said the Rev. Mel White, who spoke at a Dallas news conference in front of a colorful collection of 30 religious stoles representing defrocked or closeted gay clergy.
White, a former ghost writer for the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other fundamentalist leaders, said repeatedly: "It's over, it's over."
"We will not anymore stand silently by while they blame us for the ills of this nation, when we are at the very heart of what this nation represents," he said, amid "Amens" from supporters, including several wearing religious robes and clerical collars.
Although Falwell wasn't named, in 2001 he partly blamed the terror attacks on groups that "tried to secularize America," singling out pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and the American Civil Liberties Union.
"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve," Falwell said after the attacks in an appearance on "The 700 Club", Pat Robertson's religious TV program. He later apologized.
When reached by phone on Monday, a spokeswoman for Falwell had no immediate comment.
Since 2001, religious groups and political leaders have continued attacking gays, according to the group of about 30 faith leaders who called the news conference during a three-day summit in Dallas.
The participants, who said they were meeting in the tradition of the historic church councils, want to spread a message of peace, said Bishop Yvette Flunder, a United Church of Christ minister from San Francisco. Sponsors included The Fellowship, Dignity USA, the Institute for Welcoming Resources and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.
The Dallas council announced no concrete plan of action but said it is "dedicated to reclaiming their faith based on the gospel of inclusion, justice and love."
"Certain religious groups have aggressively sought to define their agenda in the public's mind, through publicity and lobbying, as the Christian agenda," said the Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, a lead organizer and UCC minister. "On the contrary, there is a growing movement of Christian clergy who reject this agenda, for whom bigotry and exclusion have no place in the church."
White, founder of the gay rights group Soulforce, joked in response to a question that even Southern Baptist churches have gay members.
"If all the gay organists quit playing on Sunday morning," he said, "there would be silence in Christendom."
Copyright 2006 Associated Press.
Those targeted by such comments are "equally victims, 365 days a year of the kinds of teachings the Christian extremists espouse," said the Rev. Mel White, who spoke at a Dallas news conference in front of a colorful collection of 30 religious stoles representing defrocked or closeted gay clergy.
White, a former ghost writer for the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other fundamentalist leaders, said repeatedly: "It's over, it's over."
"We will not anymore stand silently by while they blame us for the ills of this nation, when we are at the very heart of what this nation represents," he said, amid "Amens" from supporters, including several wearing religious robes and clerical collars.
Although Falwell wasn't named, in 2001 he partly blamed the terror attacks on groups that "tried to secularize America," singling out pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and the American Civil Liberties Union.
"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve," Falwell said after the attacks in an appearance on "The 700 Club", Pat Robertson's religious TV program. He later apologized.
When reached by phone on Monday, a spokeswoman for Falwell had no immediate comment.
Since 2001, religious groups and political leaders have continued attacking gays, according to the group of about 30 faith leaders who called the news conference during a three-day summit in Dallas.
The participants, who said they were meeting in the tradition of the historic church councils, want to spread a message of peace, said Bishop Yvette Flunder, a United Church of Christ minister from San Francisco. Sponsors included The Fellowship, Dignity USA, the Institute for Welcoming Resources and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.
The Dallas council announced no concrete plan of action but said it is "dedicated to reclaiming their faith based on the gospel of inclusion, justice and love."
"Certain religious groups have aggressively sought to define their agenda in the public's mind, through publicity and lobbying, as the Christian agenda," said the Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, a lead organizer and UCC minister. "On the contrary, there is a growing movement of Christian clergy who reject this agenda, for whom bigotry and exclusion have no place in the church."
White, founder of the gay rights group Soulforce, joked in response to a question that even Southern Baptist churches have gay members.
"If all the gay organists quit playing on Sunday morning," he said, "there would be silence in Christendom."
Copyright 2006 Associated Press.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Testament of the Death Squads: Good Christ, Bad Christ
Testament of the Death Squads
Good Christ, Bad Christ
By GREG GRANDIN
Just a few years ago, with the release of The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson seemed to have done what centuries of religious wars and inquisitions couldn’t: unite Christians, at least conservative Christians. More than two hours of remorseless sadism, of thorns, whips and nails, washed away not just sin but theological quarrels that have defined Christianity since Luther nailed his 95 theses to the gate at Wittenberg Church.
Never mind that Gibson is Catholic. Evangelical Tim LaHaye, the author of the popular Left Behind novels, pronounced the film a “scripturally accurate account of how He really suffered for the sins of the whole world,” even though LaHaye believes Catholics to be little better than pagans who indeed would most likely be “left behind” when the Rapture came. Gibson in fact pulled off something like a modern miracle: he transubstantiated the body and blood of a humane and forgiving Jesus worshiped by less vengeful Christians -- by Catholic Workers, Social Gospel protestants, and even the manor-born Episcopalians who until recently commanded the Republican Party and helped administer the secular welfare state -- into Christ in Pain, a castigated and castigating icon that served as a common reference point for an amalgamated Religious Right. Even politically conservative Jews like David Horowitz and Michael Medved could join in the communion. Horowitz pronounced the film “awesome,” as “close to a religious experience as art can get” and a parable for the cruelties of the twentieth century.
But Gibson’s drunken summer sermon to Malibu police, when in apparent reference to Israel’s attack on Lebanon he accused Jews of starting all the world’s wars, opened an important schism between his brand of medieval Catholicism and the beliefs of many of his fervently pro-Israel evangelical supporters. Gibson is a member of a Catholic sect so conservative that it makes Opus Dei look like a Quaker prayer meeting, one that wants not just to stop history’s clock but turn it back a millennia. His anti-Semitism is straight out of the pages of the Merchant of Venice. Christian Zionists, in contrast, are futurists. As the Third International Christian Zionist Congress put it in 1996, the Jews are the “elect of God, and without the Jewish nation His redemptive purposes for the world will not be completed.” What that purpose entails depends on who you talk to. Hard-core dispensationalists believe that Israel needs to be defended only to be sacrificed at the Final Conflict, when upward of two thirds of Jews will be slaughtered and the rest either converted or eternally damned. The Texas mega-church reverend John Hagee -- the founder of the new Christians United for Israel who blessed Tel Aviv’s bombing of Lebanon as a “miracle of God” -- preaches a gentler version. He concedes, publicly at least, that Jews could be saved without conversion, even as Israel serves as the final “battlefield,” drowned in a “sea of human blood drained from the veins of those who have followed Satan.”
Last month, Hagee and other prominent Christian Zionists were in the news, passionately defending Israel’s right to attack Lebanon. They condemned to impose a ceasefire and exhorting their allies in the Bush administration to escalate the war into Iran. Yet conservative evangelicals have their eyes set on more than Jerusalem; they are key players in the White House’s foreign policy coalition, embracing not just the purpose-driven rhetoric so favored by the Bush administration but also its political and economic agenda.
If Not For America
This past June, Condoleezza Rice attended the Southern Baptist Convention in Greensboro, North Carolina, and delivered the kind of speech US secretaries of states usually reserve for Washington insiders. Addressing 12,000 evangelicals -- a group the Washington Post described as representing the “core of the Bush administration’s political base" -- Rice urged the crowd, despite rising anti-Americanism and despite the bad news coming out of Iraq, not to give in to the temptations of isolationism. “If not for America,” Rice asked the congregation, “who would rally freedom-loving nations to defend liberty and democracy in our world?” That she received no less than seven standing ovations confirms that fundamentalists have come a long way from when Billy James Hargis, leader of the Christian Crusade, declared in 1962 that “the primary threat to the United States is internationalism.”
In fact, conservative evangelicals are America’s true internationalists. Congressional Christians like Virginian Representative Frank Wolf and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback consistently push the US government to deal with global humanitarian issues such as AIDS, sex trafficking, slavery, religious freedom, malaria, and genocide prevention. Bush has seeded USAID with a number of fundamentalists, including Paul Bonicelli, the former academic dean of Virginia’s Patrick Henry College, which is geared toward home-schooled Christians who plan to enter public service. Bonicelli is in charge of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, which dispenses public money to “faith-based” humanitarian organizations, many of them focused on Africa, a central site of conservative missionary work. Lest this involvement in administering the “soft” side of American power corrupt their minds, students at Patrick Henry, which include hundreds who have gone on to work in the Bush administration, including at least one who served in Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority, are required to sign a statement of faith that “Satan exists as a personal, malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom Hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity."
Religious Right militants are also increasing their influence over America’s fire and brimstone. Last year, a moderate chaplain resigned from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs after a Pentagon investigation whitewashed the growing hold Pentecostal preachers have over the institution, where cadets are pressured to accept Jesus or “burn in the fires of hell.” And remember Lieutenant General William Boykin? He was the “prayer warrior” who helped “gitmoize” Abu Ghraib. After revealing that he had inside information that the U.S. would win the War on Terror because the Christian God is bigger than” than Islam’s god and warning that “Satan” plans to “destroy” America “as a Christian army,” Boykin was not removed from office but promoted to the number two slot in charge of intelligence in the Pentagon.
It is not just wrong but dangerously delusional, therefore, to think of America’s Religious Right as fringe anti-modernists, who, if parochial “value” issues such as abortion or gay rights were spun into innocuous language, could be conned into voting for a centrist Democrat with multilateral sympathies who would defend what is left of the New Deal. Its leadership forms a central constituency in a foreign policy establishment that has wedded militarism to a uniquely American form of idealism. In fact, with Iraq proving the neocons to be inept strategists, evangelical internationalists like Hagee, who is happy to believe that the “end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching,” have emerged as the vital force behind Bush’s unrepentant righteous realism. During the recent Israel-Hezbollah war, Bill Kristol, along with potential GOP presidential contenders John McCain and Newt Gingrich, were showing up on news shows hymning from Hagee’s recent best-seller Jerusalem Coming to justify taking the fight to Iran.
A Central American Da Vinci Code
Well before neocons teamed up with the Religious Right to fight radical Islam in what the former believes is WW IV and the latter prays is Armageddon, they honed their fighting skills against another “political religion:” Liberation Theology, Latin America’s Christian socialism which fought against US-backed military juntas and sought to achieve social justice through a redistribution of wealth. Two decades before Gibson’s bloodied and tortured body of Christ became a symbol of a united New Right, the diverse strains of America’s conservative movement came together over the bloodied and tortured bodies of Central Americans.
Starting in the 1960s, conservative evangelical theologians such as John Price and Jerry Falwell interpreted, as did their secular declinists counterparts, defeat in Vietnam as a signal moment of world history in which the US stood at the precipice of collapse. They not only urged their flocks to fight what would become known as the culture wars, the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights, and so forth, but to get more involved in foreign affairs as well. Ronald Reagan’s crusade against the Central American Left--his patronage of the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua and death-squad states in El Salvador and Guatemala--was the first extensive opportunity to do so, an apprenticeship that gave the Religious Right its first real taste of its own power within the Republican Party and drew it closer to other groups within the Reagan Revolution.
In order to bypass public and Congressional opposition, the White House outsourced the “hearts and minds” component of its Central American wars to evangelicals. Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum sent down “Freedom Fighter Friendship Kits” to the Contras, complete with toothpaste, insect repellent, and a bible. Gospel Crusades, Inc, Friends of the Americas, Operation Blessing, World Vision, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and World Medical Relief likewise shipped hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid to the anti-Sandinista rebels and Honduran refugee camps, where they established schools, health clinics, and religious missions. In El Salvador, Harvesting in Spanish, Paralife Ministries, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (affiliated with the Unification Church) and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade broadcast radio programs, handed out bibles, ran schools, established medical and dental clinics, and provided moral education to the soldiers. Pat Robertson used his Christian Broadcasting Network to raise money for Efraín Ríos Montt, the evangelical Christian who presided over the Guatemala’s 1982 genocide, which killed over a hundred thousand Mayan Indians. Most of the Guatemalan relief aid raised by evangelicals in the United States, by groups such as the California-based charismatic Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, went to help the military’s efforts to establish control in the countryside in the wake of its campaign of massacres.
In the United States, right-wing Christians Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly and Oliver North, along with evangelical capitalists such as Amway founder Richard DeVos, founded the Council for National Policy in 1981, which, as the Religious Right’s steering committee in the 1980s, was deeply involved in Reagan’s Central American exploits. Christian businessmen raised money for arms and humanitarian work and funded the myriad organizations that worked closely with the White House to sway public opinion and congressional votes in favor of Reagan’s policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua. As part of Iran-Contra’s extensive support network, they deepened their ties with the international Right, with retired military and black ops personal, mercenaries, arms merchants, right-wing public relations experts, ex-agents of the Iranian Shah’s secret policy, international drug traffickers, the Sultan of Brunei, and anticommunist states such as Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Panama, and Israel. Many of the militarists who executed the Contra war -- John Singlaub, CIA director William Casey, Vernon Walters, and Oliver North -- were themselves members of either Protestant or Catholic ultramontane sects, such as the charismatic Church of the Apostles, Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta. Catholic Casey attended mass daily, and filled his mansion with statues of the Virgin Mary. The Da Vinci Code has nothing on what took place in Central America during the 1980s.
The Economics of Satan
Reagan’s Christian soldiers, however, carried aloft not the banner of the lord of love popularized by Dan Brown but a pitiless avenger. It was largely in opposition to the Christian humanism that motivated Central American revolutionaries and reformers, as well as its supporters in the US, that the New Right elaborated the ethical justification of today’s free-market militarism. Not only was the Central American Left motivated as much by Catholic Liberation Theology as by Marxism, the domestic solidarity movement, much more than the protests against the Vietnam War, was noticeably Christian. Groups such as the Religious Task Force on El Salvador, Ecumenical Program on Central America and the Caribbean, the U.S. Catholic Conference, Witness for Peace, the Quakers, and the National Council of Churches actively mobilized hundreds of thousands of Christians in opposition to Reagan’s policy. It was a shared hostility to this Christian socialism that united mainstream conservative Protestants and pulpit thumping fundamentalists.
Take the Institute on Religion and Democracy for example.
Today, the neoconservative IRD is a key player in the Bush coalition, working hard to discredit liberal religious organizations that oppose Bush’s wars. Two of its theologians -- Michael Novak and Richard Neuhaus -- have provided the White House with key spiritual guidance, theologically defending not just American militarism but the free-market fundamentalism and orgy of wealth accumulation that underwrites that militarism. The IRD, it turns out, was founded in 1981 by intellectuals associated with the American Enterprise Institute and advised by PR firms contracted by the White House. Its mission was to provide “mainstream” religious support for Reagan’s Central American policy, yet it immediately allied with evangelicals like Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson to take on Liberation Theology.
In a series of books and articles challenging the major tenets and proponents of liberation theology, Novak and Neuhaus began to, as Novak put it, “locate a theological grounding for corporate capitalism” by elaborating a set of ideals specific to the free market that they believed complimented the Christian understanding of free will. To those who said that capitalism embodied the worst of acquisitive individualism, Novak, who presented himself as a political liberal, responded with his “theology of the corporation,” which held up the business firm as “an expression of the social nature of humans.” He dedicated much of his work to refuting liberation theology’s insistence that Third World poverty could be blamed on exploitation by the First World, arguing that Latin America’s economic backwardness must be blamed on “cultural” factors.
As did their mainstream coreligionists, fundamentalists formulated their free-market moralism as a quarrel with liberation theology. The founder of Christian Reconstructionism, the influential branch of the evangelical movement that seeks to replace the Constitution with biblical law, Rousas John Rushdoony described liberation theology as the “economics of Satan,” while another preacher labeled a “theology of mass murder” and the “the single most critical problem that Christianity has faced in all of its 2000 year history.” Capitalism, they insisted, was an ethical system, one that corresponds to God’s gift of free will. Man lives in a “fundamentally scarce world,” Christian economist John Cooper argued, not an abundant one only in need of more equitable distribution, as the liberation theologians would have it. The profit motive, rather than being an amoral economic mechanism, is part of a divine plan to discipline fallen man and make him produce. Where Christian humanists contended that people were fundamentally good and that “evil” was a condition of class exploitation, Christian capitalists such as Amway’s Richard DeVos, head of the Christian Freedom Foundation, insisted that evil is found in the heart of man.
Where liberation theology held that humans could fully realize their potential here on earth, fundamentalist economists argued that attempts to distribute wealth and regulate production was based on an incorrect understanding of society -- an understanding that incited disobedience to proper authority and, by highlighting economic inequality, generated guilt, envy, and conflict. God’s Kingdom, they insisted, would not be established by a war between the classes but a struggle between the good and the evil.
As did Novak, evangelicals sought to rebut liberation theology’s critique of the global political economy. Third World poverty, according to evangelical Ronald Nash, has a “cultural, moral, and even religious dimension” that reveals itself in a “lack of respect for any private property,” “lack of initiative,” and “high leisure preference.” Some took this argument to its logical conclusion. Gary North, another influential evangelical economist, insisted that the “Third World’s problems are religious: moral perversity, a long history of demonism, and outright paganism.” “The citizens of the Third World,” he wrote, “ought to feel guilt, to fall on their knees and repent from their Godless, rebellious, socialistic ways. They should feel guilty because they are guilty, both individually and corporately.”
Evangelical Christianity’s elaboration of a theological justification for free-market capitalism, along with its view of a immoral third world, resonated with other ideological currents within the New Right, laying the groundwork for today’s embrace of empire as America’s national purpose. In a universe of free will where good work is rewarded and bad works punished, the fact of American prosperity was a self-evident confirmation of god’s blessing of US power in the world. Third-world misery, in contrast, was proof of “God’s curse.” David Chilton, of the Institute for Christian Economics, a Reconstructionist think tank, wrote that poverty is how “God controls heathen cultures: they must spend so much time surviving that they are unable to exercise ungodly dominion over the earth.”
Novak and Neuhaus would not use such stark terms, yet the sentiment is step removed from their logic. After all, the IRD’s mission statement, written by Neuhaus, anointed America to be the “primary bearer of the democratic possibility in the world today.” Such an opinion nestles comfortably with evangel notions that America is a “redeemer nation” and saturates the president’s foreign policy pronouncements. “America stands as a beacon of light to the world,” Bush said in his Ellis Island address on the first anniversary of 9/11, cribbing from scripture to replace Jesus with America, “and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
The Bringers of Wrath
Not all in the Religious Right who backed Reagan’s Central American wars have followed Bush across the Rubicon. Some, such as Phyllis Schlafly, have remained true to their isolationist faith. Others like evangelical economist Gary North reject the end-time eschatology of the Christian Zionists. But the kind of moralism that many key fundamentalists used to justify the violence visited on Central America in the 1980s easily led to the kind of righteousness that today legitimates cluster bombing of civilians as an option of first resort.
Throughout the 1980s, as its involvement in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala deepened, fundamentalists came to share with Reaganite neocons and militarists a common set of assumptions about the world and America’s role in it. The U.S. had grown dangerously weak, and where neocons called for renewal of political will, evangelicals believed that America’s revival would come about through spiritual rebirth. Their sense of themselves as a persecuted people, engaged in a life and death end-time struggle between the forces of good and evil mapped easily onto the millennialism of anti-communist militarists, particularly those involved in Central America.
Working closely with neoconservative policy intellectuals such as Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, Robert Kagan, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, conservative evangelical theologians established a moral justification for Reagan’s rehabilitation of militarism. They aligned their theology to incorporate elements of both the idealism and the unflinching militarism that led straight to war in Iraq. “Our government,” wrote Falwell in 1980 but sounding a lot like George W. Bush in 2002, “has the right to use its armaments to bring wrath upon those who would do evil by hurting other people.” And not just defensively but preemptively: “we must go on the offensive,” wrote Rus Walton in his 1988 Biblical Solutions to Contemporary Problems: A Handbook.
The violence of counterinsurgent war stoked the fires of fundamentalist Manichaeism, leading Falwell, Robertson, and others to ally with the worst murderers and torturers in Central and Latin America. “For the Christian,” believes Walton, “there can be no neutrality in this battle: 'He that is not with Me is against Me’ (Matthew 12:30).” Robertson described the genocide carried out by Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt as a “miracle” and celebrated Salvador’s Roberto D'Aubuisson, the killer of, along with untold others, Archbishop Oscar Romero, on his Christian Broadcasting Network. In 1984, more than a dozen Christian New Right organizations, including the Moral Majority, presented D'Aubuisson with a plaque honoring his “continuing efforts for freedom.”
Many of the death-squad members were themselves conservative religious ideologues, taking the fight against liberation theology to the trenches. Guatemalan security forces regularly questioned their prisoners about their “views on liberation theology.” Others report being tortured to the singing of hymns and praying. Some evangelicals excused such suffering. ”Killing for the joy of it was wrong,” a Paralife minister from the United States comforted his flock of Salvadoran soldiers, “but killing because it was necessary to fight against an anti-Christ system, communism, was not only right but a duty of every Christian.”
So when Jeane Kirkpatrick remarked that the three US nuns and one lay worker who were raped, mutilated and murdered by Salvadoran security forces in 1980 were “not just nuns, they were political activists," she was being more than cruel. She was signaling her disapproval of a particular kind of peace Christianity. Over the next ten years, as a direct result of US policy, more than three hundred thousand Central Americans, many of them devout Christians, would be killed and tortured, and over a million driven into exile. In a way, the New Right’s crusade in Central America was a preview of the tormented Jesus that premiered two decades later in The Passion of the Christ -- and, despite Gibson’s drunken dissent, is today on world tour in Boykin’s Abu Ghraib and the killing fields of Iraq and now Lebanon.
Greg Grandin, a recent recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, teaches Latin American history at New York University and is the author of a number of books, including most recently Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan). He can be reached at: gjg4@nyu.edu
Good Christ, Bad Christ
By GREG GRANDIN
Just a few years ago, with the release of The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson seemed to have done what centuries of religious wars and inquisitions couldn’t: unite Christians, at least conservative Christians. More than two hours of remorseless sadism, of thorns, whips and nails, washed away not just sin but theological quarrels that have defined Christianity since Luther nailed his 95 theses to the gate at Wittenberg Church.
Never mind that Gibson is Catholic. Evangelical Tim LaHaye, the author of the popular Left Behind novels, pronounced the film a “scripturally accurate account of how He really suffered for the sins of the whole world,” even though LaHaye believes Catholics to be little better than pagans who indeed would most likely be “left behind” when the Rapture came. Gibson in fact pulled off something like a modern miracle: he transubstantiated the body and blood of a humane and forgiving Jesus worshiped by less vengeful Christians -- by Catholic Workers, Social Gospel protestants, and even the manor-born Episcopalians who until recently commanded the Republican Party and helped administer the secular welfare state -- into Christ in Pain, a castigated and castigating icon that served as a common reference point for an amalgamated Religious Right. Even politically conservative Jews like David Horowitz and Michael Medved could join in the communion. Horowitz pronounced the film “awesome,” as “close to a religious experience as art can get” and a parable for the cruelties of the twentieth century.
But Gibson’s drunken summer sermon to Malibu police, when in apparent reference to Israel’s attack on Lebanon he accused Jews of starting all the world’s wars, opened an important schism between his brand of medieval Catholicism and the beliefs of many of his fervently pro-Israel evangelical supporters. Gibson is a member of a Catholic sect so conservative that it makes Opus Dei look like a Quaker prayer meeting, one that wants not just to stop history’s clock but turn it back a millennia. His anti-Semitism is straight out of the pages of the Merchant of Venice. Christian Zionists, in contrast, are futurists. As the Third International Christian Zionist Congress put it in 1996, the Jews are the “elect of God, and without the Jewish nation His redemptive purposes for the world will not be completed.” What that purpose entails depends on who you talk to. Hard-core dispensationalists believe that Israel needs to be defended only to be sacrificed at the Final Conflict, when upward of two thirds of Jews will be slaughtered and the rest either converted or eternally damned. The Texas mega-church reverend John Hagee -- the founder of the new Christians United for Israel who blessed Tel Aviv’s bombing of Lebanon as a “miracle of God” -- preaches a gentler version. He concedes, publicly at least, that Jews could be saved without conversion, even as Israel serves as the final “battlefield,” drowned in a “sea of human blood drained from the veins of those who have followed Satan.”
Last month, Hagee and other prominent Christian Zionists were in the news, passionately defending Israel’s right to attack Lebanon. They condemned to impose a ceasefire and exhorting their allies in the Bush administration to escalate the war into Iran. Yet conservative evangelicals have their eyes set on more than Jerusalem; they are key players in the White House’s foreign policy coalition, embracing not just the purpose-driven rhetoric so favored by the Bush administration but also its political and economic agenda.
If Not For America
This past June, Condoleezza Rice attended the Southern Baptist Convention in Greensboro, North Carolina, and delivered the kind of speech US secretaries of states usually reserve for Washington insiders. Addressing 12,000 evangelicals -- a group the Washington Post described as representing the “core of the Bush administration’s political base" -- Rice urged the crowd, despite rising anti-Americanism and despite the bad news coming out of Iraq, not to give in to the temptations of isolationism. “If not for America,” Rice asked the congregation, “who would rally freedom-loving nations to defend liberty and democracy in our world?” That she received no less than seven standing ovations confirms that fundamentalists have come a long way from when Billy James Hargis, leader of the Christian Crusade, declared in 1962 that “the primary threat to the United States is internationalism.”
In fact, conservative evangelicals are America’s true internationalists. Congressional Christians like Virginian Representative Frank Wolf and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback consistently push the US government to deal with global humanitarian issues such as AIDS, sex trafficking, slavery, religious freedom, malaria, and genocide prevention. Bush has seeded USAID with a number of fundamentalists, including Paul Bonicelli, the former academic dean of Virginia’s Patrick Henry College, which is geared toward home-schooled Christians who plan to enter public service. Bonicelli is in charge of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, which dispenses public money to “faith-based” humanitarian organizations, many of them focused on Africa, a central site of conservative missionary work. Lest this involvement in administering the “soft” side of American power corrupt their minds, students at Patrick Henry, which include hundreds who have gone on to work in the Bush administration, including at least one who served in Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority, are required to sign a statement of faith that “Satan exists as a personal, malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom Hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity."
Religious Right militants are also increasing their influence over America’s fire and brimstone. Last year, a moderate chaplain resigned from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs after a Pentagon investigation whitewashed the growing hold Pentecostal preachers have over the institution, where cadets are pressured to accept Jesus or “burn in the fires of hell.” And remember Lieutenant General William Boykin? He was the “prayer warrior” who helped “gitmoize” Abu Ghraib. After revealing that he had inside information that the U.S. would win the War on Terror because the Christian God is bigger than” than Islam’s god and warning that “Satan” plans to “destroy” America “as a Christian army,” Boykin was not removed from office but promoted to the number two slot in charge of intelligence in the Pentagon.
It is not just wrong but dangerously delusional, therefore, to think of America’s Religious Right as fringe anti-modernists, who, if parochial “value” issues such as abortion or gay rights were spun into innocuous language, could be conned into voting for a centrist Democrat with multilateral sympathies who would defend what is left of the New Deal. Its leadership forms a central constituency in a foreign policy establishment that has wedded militarism to a uniquely American form of idealism. In fact, with Iraq proving the neocons to be inept strategists, evangelical internationalists like Hagee, who is happy to believe that the “end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching,” have emerged as the vital force behind Bush’s unrepentant righteous realism. During the recent Israel-Hezbollah war, Bill Kristol, along with potential GOP presidential contenders John McCain and Newt Gingrich, were showing up on news shows hymning from Hagee’s recent best-seller Jerusalem Coming to justify taking the fight to Iran.
A Central American Da Vinci Code
Well before neocons teamed up with the Religious Right to fight radical Islam in what the former believes is WW IV and the latter prays is Armageddon, they honed their fighting skills against another “political religion:” Liberation Theology, Latin America’s Christian socialism which fought against US-backed military juntas and sought to achieve social justice through a redistribution of wealth. Two decades before Gibson’s bloodied and tortured body of Christ became a symbol of a united New Right, the diverse strains of America’s conservative movement came together over the bloodied and tortured bodies of Central Americans.
Starting in the 1960s, conservative evangelical theologians such as John Price and Jerry Falwell interpreted, as did their secular declinists counterparts, defeat in Vietnam as a signal moment of world history in which the US stood at the precipice of collapse. They not only urged their flocks to fight what would become known as the culture wars, the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights, and so forth, but to get more involved in foreign affairs as well. Ronald Reagan’s crusade against the Central American Left--his patronage of the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua and death-squad states in El Salvador and Guatemala--was the first extensive opportunity to do so, an apprenticeship that gave the Religious Right its first real taste of its own power within the Republican Party and drew it closer to other groups within the Reagan Revolution.
In order to bypass public and Congressional opposition, the White House outsourced the “hearts and minds” component of its Central American wars to evangelicals. Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum sent down “Freedom Fighter Friendship Kits” to the Contras, complete with toothpaste, insect repellent, and a bible. Gospel Crusades, Inc, Friends of the Americas, Operation Blessing, World Vision, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and World Medical Relief likewise shipped hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid to the anti-Sandinista rebels and Honduran refugee camps, where they established schools, health clinics, and religious missions. In El Salvador, Harvesting in Spanish, Paralife Ministries, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (affiliated with the Unification Church) and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade broadcast radio programs, handed out bibles, ran schools, established medical and dental clinics, and provided moral education to the soldiers. Pat Robertson used his Christian Broadcasting Network to raise money for Efraín Ríos Montt, the evangelical Christian who presided over the Guatemala’s 1982 genocide, which killed over a hundred thousand Mayan Indians. Most of the Guatemalan relief aid raised by evangelicals in the United States, by groups such as the California-based charismatic Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, went to help the military’s efforts to establish control in the countryside in the wake of its campaign of massacres.
In the United States, right-wing Christians Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly and Oliver North, along with evangelical capitalists such as Amway founder Richard DeVos, founded the Council for National Policy in 1981, which, as the Religious Right’s steering committee in the 1980s, was deeply involved in Reagan’s Central American exploits. Christian businessmen raised money for arms and humanitarian work and funded the myriad organizations that worked closely with the White House to sway public opinion and congressional votes in favor of Reagan’s policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua. As part of Iran-Contra’s extensive support network, they deepened their ties with the international Right, with retired military and black ops personal, mercenaries, arms merchants, right-wing public relations experts, ex-agents of the Iranian Shah’s secret policy, international drug traffickers, the Sultan of Brunei, and anticommunist states such as Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Panama, and Israel. Many of the militarists who executed the Contra war -- John Singlaub, CIA director William Casey, Vernon Walters, and Oliver North -- were themselves members of either Protestant or Catholic ultramontane sects, such as the charismatic Church of the Apostles, Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta. Catholic Casey attended mass daily, and filled his mansion with statues of the Virgin Mary. The Da Vinci Code has nothing on what took place in Central America during the 1980s.
The Economics of Satan
Reagan’s Christian soldiers, however, carried aloft not the banner of the lord of love popularized by Dan Brown but a pitiless avenger. It was largely in opposition to the Christian humanism that motivated Central American revolutionaries and reformers, as well as its supporters in the US, that the New Right elaborated the ethical justification of today’s free-market militarism. Not only was the Central American Left motivated as much by Catholic Liberation Theology as by Marxism, the domestic solidarity movement, much more than the protests against the Vietnam War, was noticeably Christian. Groups such as the Religious Task Force on El Salvador, Ecumenical Program on Central America and the Caribbean, the U.S. Catholic Conference, Witness for Peace, the Quakers, and the National Council of Churches actively mobilized hundreds of thousands of Christians in opposition to Reagan’s policy. It was a shared hostility to this Christian socialism that united mainstream conservative Protestants and pulpit thumping fundamentalists.
Take the Institute on Religion and Democracy for example.
Today, the neoconservative IRD is a key player in the Bush coalition, working hard to discredit liberal religious organizations that oppose Bush’s wars. Two of its theologians -- Michael Novak and Richard Neuhaus -- have provided the White House with key spiritual guidance, theologically defending not just American militarism but the free-market fundamentalism and orgy of wealth accumulation that underwrites that militarism. The IRD, it turns out, was founded in 1981 by intellectuals associated with the American Enterprise Institute and advised by PR firms contracted by the White House. Its mission was to provide “mainstream” religious support for Reagan’s Central American policy, yet it immediately allied with evangelicals like Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson to take on Liberation Theology.
In a series of books and articles challenging the major tenets and proponents of liberation theology, Novak and Neuhaus began to, as Novak put it, “locate a theological grounding for corporate capitalism” by elaborating a set of ideals specific to the free market that they believed complimented the Christian understanding of free will. To those who said that capitalism embodied the worst of acquisitive individualism, Novak, who presented himself as a political liberal, responded with his “theology of the corporation,” which held up the business firm as “an expression of the social nature of humans.” He dedicated much of his work to refuting liberation theology’s insistence that Third World poverty could be blamed on exploitation by the First World, arguing that Latin America’s economic backwardness must be blamed on “cultural” factors.
As did their mainstream coreligionists, fundamentalists formulated their free-market moralism as a quarrel with liberation theology. The founder of Christian Reconstructionism, the influential branch of the evangelical movement that seeks to replace the Constitution with biblical law, Rousas John Rushdoony described liberation theology as the “economics of Satan,” while another preacher labeled a “theology of mass murder” and the “the single most critical problem that Christianity has faced in all of its 2000 year history.” Capitalism, they insisted, was an ethical system, one that corresponds to God’s gift of free will. Man lives in a “fundamentally scarce world,” Christian economist John Cooper argued, not an abundant one only in need of more equitable distribution, as the liberation theologians would have it. The profit motive, rather than being an amoral economic mechanism, is part of a divine plan to discipline fallen man and make him produce. Where Christian humanists contended that people were fundamentally good and that “evil” was a condition of class exploitation, Christian capitalists such as Amway’s Richard DeVos, head of the Christian Freedom Foundation, insisted that evil is found in the heart of man.
Where liberation theology held that humans could fully realize their potential here on earth, fundamentalist economists argued that attempts to distribute wealth and regulate production was based on an incorrect understanding of society -- an understanding that incited disobedience to proper authority and, by highlighting economic inequality, generated guilt, envy, and conflict. God’s Kingdom, they insisted, would not be established by a war between the classes but a struggle between the good and the evil.
As did Novak, evangelicals sought to rebut liberation theology’s critique of the global political economy. Third World poverty, according to evangelical Ronald Nash, has a “cultural, moral, and even religious dimension” that reveals itself in a “lack of respect for any private property,” “lack of initiative,” and “high leisure preference.” Some took this argument to its logical conclusion. Gary North, another influential evangelical economist, insisted that the “Third World’s problems are religious: moral perversity, a long history of demonism, and outright paganism.” “The citizens of the Third World,” he wrote, “ought to feel guilt, to fall on their knees and repent from their Godless, rebellious, socialistic ways. They should feel guilty because they are guilty, both individually and corporately.”
Evangelical Christianity’s elaboration of a theological justification for free-market capitalism, along with its view of a immoral third world, resonated with other ideological currents within the New Right, laying the groundwork for today’s embrace of empire as America’s national purpose. In a universe of free will where good work is rewarded and bad works punished, the fact of American prosperity was a self-evident confirmation of god’s blessing of US power in the world. Third-world misery, in contrast, was proof of “God’s curse.” David Chilton, of the Institute for Christian Economics, a Reconstructionist think tank, wrote that poverty is how “God controls heathen cultures: they must spend so much time surviving that they are unable to exercise ungodly dominion over the earth.”
Novak and Neuhaus would not use such stark terms, yet the sentiment is step removed from their logic. After all, the IRD’s mission statement, written by Neuhaus, anointed America to be the “primary bearer of the democratic possibility in the world today.” Such an opinion nestles comfortably with evangel notions that America is a “redeemer nation” and saturates the president’s foreign policy pronouncements. “America stands as a beacon of light to the world,” Bush said in his Ellis Island address on the first anniversary of 9/11, cribbing from scripture to replace Jesus with America, “and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
The Bringers of Wrath
Not all in the Religious Right who backed Reagan’s Central American wars have followed Bush across the Rubicon. Some, such as Phyllis Schlafly, have remained true to their isolationist faith. Others like evangelical economist Gary North reject the end-time eschatology of the Christian Zionists. But the kind of moralism that many key fundamentalists used to justify the violence visited on Central America in the 1980s easily led to the kind of righteousness that today legitimates cluster bombing of civilians as an option of first resort.
Throughout the 1980s, as its involvement in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala deepened, fundamentalists came to share with Reaganite neocons and militarists a common set of assumptions about the world and America’s role in it. The U.S. had grown dangerously weak, and where neocons called for renewal of political will, evangelicals believed that America’s revival would come about through spiritual rebirth. Their sense of themselves as a persecuted people, engaged in a life and death end-time struggle between the forces of good and evil mapped easily onto the millennialism of anti-communist militarists, particularly those involved in Central America.
Working closely with neoconservative policy intellectuals such as Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, Robert Kagan, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, conservative evangelical theologians established a moral justification for Reagan’s rehabilitation of militarism. They aligned their theology to incorporate elements of both the idealism and the unflinching militarism that led straight to war in Iraq. “Our government,” wrote Falwell in 1980 but sounding a lot like George W. Bush in 2002, “has the right to use its armaments to bring wrath upon those who would do evil by hurting other people.” And not just defensively but preemptively: “we must go on the offensive,” wrote Rus Walton in his 1988 Biblical Solutions to Contemporary Problems: A Handbook.
The violence of counterinsurgent war stoked the fires of fundamentalist Manichaeism, leading Falwell, Robertson, and others to ally with the worst murderers and torturers in Central and Latin America. “For the Christian,” believes Walton, “there can be no neutrality in this battle: 'He that is not with Me is against Me’ (Matthew 12:30).” Robertson described the genocide carried out by Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt as a “miracle” and celebrated Salvador’s Roberto D'Aubuisson, the killer of, along with untold others, Archbishop Oscar Romero, on his Christian Broadcasting Network. In 1984, more than a dozen Christian New Right organizations, including the Moral Majority, presented D'Aubuisson with a plaque honoring his “continuing efforts for freedom.”
Many of the death-squad members were themselves conservative religious ideologues, taking the fight against liberation theology to the trenches. Guatemalan security forces regularly questioned their prisoners about their “views on liberation theology.” Others report being tortured to the singing of hymns and praying. Some evangelicals excused such suffering. ”Killing for the joy of it was wrong,” a Paralife minister from the United States comforted his flock of Salvadoran soldiers, “but killing because it was necessary to fight against an anti-Christ system, communism, was not only right but a duty of every Christian.”
So when Jeane Kirkpatrick remarked that the three US nuns and one lay worker who were raped, mutilated and murdered by Salvadoran security forces in 1980 were “not just nuns, they were political activists," she was being more than cruel. She was signaling her disapproval of a particular kind of peace Christianity. Over the next ten years, as a direct result of US policy, more than three hundred thousand Central Americans, many of them devout Christians, would be killed and tortured, and over a million driven into exile. In a way, the New Right’s crusade in Central America was a preview of the tormented Jesus that premiered two decades later in The Passion of the Christ -- and, despite Gibson’s drunken dissent, is today on world tour in Boykin’s Abu Ghraib and the killing fields of Iraq and now Lebanon.
Greg Grandin, a recent recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, teaches Latin American history at New York University and is the author of a number of books, including most recently Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan). He can be reached at: gjg4@nyu.edu
Major Gay Terror Threat Avoided by Army Decision
Major Gay Terror Threat Averted
By Katie Halper
The U.S. army recently averted a national security threat when they dismissed nine linguists discovered to be gay. Six of the linguists specialized in Arabic translation, a programmatic gap that the army has been desperately seeking to fill. But General Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff agreed with the decision, saying "Having a gay Arabic translator is a lot more dangerous than having no Arabic translators. Imagine how these anti-American, anti-family individuals might twist language to promote their homosexual agenda.
For example, 'The captain wants to speak with you' could easily be translated as, 'The captain wants to kiss you on the lips.' They could translate 'We like Iraq' into 'We like Iraqi men.' Plus their perverted translations are only one of the many dangers these gays pose. They'd be risking the lives of our troops by going AWOL all the time. Instead of reporting to duty, they'd be designing Burkas in Baghdad, getting pedicures in Fallujah, and antiquing in Baghdad. Before you know it 'An Army of One' would become 'An Army of Cuticle Softener And Lip Gloss.' "
By Katie Halper
The U.S. army recently averted a national security threat when they dismissed nine linguists discovered to be gay. Six of the linguists specialized in Arabic translation, a programmatic gap that the army has been desperately seeking to fill. But General Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff agreed with the decision, saying "Having a gay Arabic translator is a lot more dangerous than having no Arabic translators. Imagine how these anti-American, anti-family individuals might twist language to promote their homosexual agenda.
For example, 'The captain wants to speak with you' could easily be translated as, 'The captain wants to kiss you on the lips.' They could translate 'We like Iraq' into 'We like Iraqi men.' Plus their perverted translations are only one of the many dangers these gays pose. They'd be risking the lives of our troops by going AWOL all the time. Instead of reporting to duty, they'd be designing Burkas in Baghdad, getting pedicures in Fallujah, and antiquing in Baghdad. Before you know it 'An Army of One' would become 'An Army of Cuticle Softener And Lip Gloss.' "
Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold Speaks About 9-11 Fifth Anniversary
Presiding Bishop's message for the fifth anniversary of 9/11.As the fifth anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11 approaches, Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold calls on all people to commit to "a future in which the events of that day will not be repeated." He also upholds the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals as giving the governments of the world a clear and workable plan for addressing "the vast disparity between the wealth of nations ... and the extreme poverty of nearly half of the world's people."
Listen/View his message here or read the full text in English below:
On a brilliantly clear Tuesday morning five years ago the peace and security many of us took for granted were suddenly shattered. Even as the tragic events of September 11, 2001 ended the way we had looked at the world, they challenged us to see ourselves in a new way.
That afternoon, as streams of stunned New Yorkers made their way uptown past the Church Center heading north, and as far away as they could walk from the devastation, I sat at my desk and wrote a word to the church. I said our responsibility was to "engage with all our hearts and minds and strength in God's project of transforming the world into a place of peace – where swords can become plowshares and spears are changed into pruning hooks."
I said that our challenge was to claim our participation in the Risen Christ's work of casting out fear, and proclaiming to all people the peace that the world cannot give.
Now, five difficult years have passed, and our nation and our world are beset by fear and wracked by violence of almost unimaginable proportions. The war in Iraq is well into its third year and a peaceful resolution seems more distant than ever. Over the past two months violence in the Middle East has escalated. A growing divide separates rich from poor, both within this nation and in the nations of the world, a dynamic that breeds further conflict and instability.
We remain threatened – as last month's foiled airline plot reminded us – by a well-organized and unpredictable network of human beings whose goal is to inflict slaughter and destruction.
And, very sadly: religion is being used not to reconcile, but to divide.
I can think of no better way to observe the passage of five years since the horrific events of September 11, 2001 than to commit ourselves, individually, as a church and as a nation to looking for new ways to pursue healing and restoration in the world God so loves. I can think of no better way to honor the memory of those who died on September 11 five years ago than by committing ourselves to working for a future in which the events of that day will not be repeated.
What, specifically, does this mean for the United States today?
I continue to be guided by the words of our House of Bishops in the weeks following 9/11. Challenging us to "wage reconciliation" in the world, the bishops urged us to "bear one another's burdens across the divides of culture, religion, and differing views of the world."
To accomplish this, I believe our nation first must reclaim its historic identity as a champion of peace in the world. At the present moment, this is nowhere more necessary than in the Middle East. Our nation must play the role not just of a superpower but also of a super-servant – willing to work in a sustained and focused way for lasting peace. This means examining our own nation's relationship to the Muslim world as recommended by the 9/11 Commission. It means understanding how the U.S. is perceived abroad. It means and working to foster mutual understanding – within our own nation and between nations – among all who share a common heritage as the children of Abraham.
Second, I believe it is more urgent than ever that the United States address the vast disparity between the wealth of nations such as our own and the extreme poverty of nearly half of the world's people. The United Nations' Millennium Development Goals give to the governments of the world a clear and workable plan for how this can be achieved. I could not be more gratified that the Episcopal Church's recent General Convention identified the Millennium Development Goals as a mission priority. Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and I will soon be releasing a joint pastoral letter on the MDGs that describes how individual Christians can work for United States leadership in the fight against poverty.
Finally, I believe this nation must walk humbly before our God. As the House of Bishops observed in September 2001, such willingness to change course "opens our hearts and gives room to God's compassion as it seeks to bind up, to heal, and to make all things new and whole."
Particularly in working for resolution to the war in Iraq, I pray that hubris not provoke our nation to stay a course that does not appear to be working, and that pride not blind our eyes to alternative strategies. I pray that in the Middle East we will be willing to try – knowing in all humility how great the task – to bring the parties together to find the peace that has so long eluded the suffering people of Israel and Palestine.
Though the challenges facing our world seem even more daunting than they did five years ago, we can place our faith in the power of the Holy Spirit to draw us always into God's work of reconciling the world to himself "by making peace through the blood of the cross." For me, the power of the Cross was never more evident than when I stood at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001. It was the Feast of the Holy Cross, and I had just presided at the Eucharist at the Seaman's Church Institute, which had already begun the task of giving respite to rescue workers and volunteers.
As I was returning from the site of the fallen World Trade Center, I entered a deserted and silent St. Paul's Chapel, an Episcopal Church where George Washington, our nation's first President once prayed.
Though the chapel is just next to Ground Zero, in eerie contrast to the chaos and devastation outside the door, everything was in its place and looked just as it should – except for a fine gray dust which lay everywhere like a blanket. As I stood there, trying to let the experiences and sights of the morning settle within me, I looked toward the altar and my eyes came to rest upon the brass crucifix that hung above it.
Suddenly Jesus' words from the gospel I had just proclaimed at the Eucharist came to me: "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all people – all things – to myself." In that moment I knew with the full force of my being that the tiny brass arms of the crucifix could contain in their embrace all the horror and destruction and grief and rage occasioned by what had happened.
Five years later, I still know the truth of this. In the power of the Cross lies our hope for today, and tomorrow, and our future. For in baptism Christ's work of reconciliation, achieved upon the Cross, becomes our own. It is costly and demanding work. It is work we cannot carry out on our own. Christ at work in us, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, supplies us with his own strength, endurance and love. And it is Christ who makes it possible for us to withstand the forces of pessimism and despair, and to be ministers of reconciliation and instruments of his peace. My brothers and sisters in Christ: in the days ahead may we be such ministers and instruments.
"Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine."
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Do Gays Discriminate Against Straight Men? Should They?
The article Is Straight the New Square? in the September 2006 issue of the men's style mag Details begs the question: Has the straight man become the victim? Has he? I was already on guard before I read the article, especially after hearing of a tragic story about a man shot in the head on the way to the club by a straight teen. Has the straight man really become the victim? I continue to wonder as I recall a gay friend who was fired after being outed at work. He's spent his summer fighting legal battles while the rest of us match our socks and polos. The weeping list of homophobia and violence continues, but Details contributor Simon Dumenco stays strong to his angle: Heterophobia is rampant because "In the new polarization, gay men are portrayed as arbiters of taste and straight men as sort of... clueless."
The article is an offshoot of the recent incidents of heterophobia in gay mecca Provincetown, Mass where numerous straight residents reported being "outed" as supporters of anti-gay marriage legislation and being called "breeders" by gay tourists. However, what began as an exploration of growing tension between straight and glbt people, turned into a simplification of a fashion and "who gets more action" tete a tete.
Simon Dumenco does pay homage to gay hate crimes by reassuring us that "getting called a 'breeder' is in [no] way comparable to the very real violence and civil-rights challenges that gay people in this country face every day." This comment would be appreciated if it weren't the only mention of the impact of homophobia in an otherwise fashion and sex focused article.
So why does Simon Dumenco think straight men suffer? Because heterophobia is making straight men the fashion victims of the world. "There is no shortage of televised indoctrination that implies that gays have got it going on and straight men don't." The feature eventually turns out the lights and heads toward the bedroom. "Even within the bedrooms of their lesser homes, straight guys have to worry that they're just not getting as much."
Should straight men fear heterophobia? Perhaps in Provincetown. But if the victimization of any man (gay or straight) is reduced to which group sets the fashion trends and which has more notches on the head board, then the seriousness and devastation associated with the actual hate, victimization and violence of homophobia and heterophobia gets reduced to a lighthearted "what's the big deal?" Would a man be considered the victim of reverse racism because some minority ethnic groups are perceived as more fashion-forward than others? Would a man be considered a victim of sexism because women struggle to convince us that self-grooming equals self-respect? Of course not, so why would a straight man be a victim of heterophobia because gays are seen as the fashionistas of the world?
"Lighten up!" some might say, "It's just a style article in a style magazine." I'd like nothing more than to be entertained by gay/straight fashion trends, but not under the premise of a very serious subject such as heterophobia. I'm sure 31 year old Salvagio Vonatti would agree as he lays in a coma on life support after his headshot wound. By the way, I wonder if his attack was provoked by what he was wearing.
The article is an offshoot of the recent incidents of heterophobia in gay mecca Provincetown, Mass where numerous straight residents reported being "outed" as supporters of anti-gay marriage legislation and being called "breeders" by gay tourists. However, what began as an exploration of growing tension between straight and glbt people, turned into a simplification of a fashion and "who gets more action" tete a tete.
Simon Dumenco does pay homage to gay hate crimes by reassuring us that "getting called a 'breeder' is in [no] way comparable to the very real violence and civil-rights challenges that gay people in this country face every day." This comment would be appreciated if it weren't the only mention of the impact of homophobia in an otherwise fashion and sex focused article.
So why does Simon Dumenco think straight men suffer? Because heterophobia is making straight men the fashion victims of the world. "There is no shortage of televised indoctrination that implies that gays have got it going on and straight men don't." The feature eventually turns out the lights and heads toward the bedroom. "Even within the bedrooms of their lesser homes, straight guys have to worry that they're just not getting as much."
Should straight men fear heterophobia? Perhaps in Provincetown. But if the victimization of any man (gay or straight) is reduced to which group sets the fashion trends and which has more notches on the head board, then the seriousness and devastation associated with the actual hate, victimization and violence of homophobia and heterophobia gets reduced to a lighthearted "what's the big deal?" Would a man be considered the victim of reverse racism because some minority ethnic groups are perceived as more fashion-forward than others? Would a man be considered a victim of sexism because women struggle to convince us that self-grooming equals self-respect? Of course not, so why would a straight man be a victim of heterophobia because gays are seen as the fashionistas of the world?
"Lighten up!" some might say, "It's just a style article in a style magazine." I'd like nothing more than to be entertained by gay/straight fashion trends, but not under the premise of a very serious subject such as heterophobia. I'm sure 31 year old Salvagio Vonatti would agree as he lays in a coma on life support after his headshot wound. By the way, I wonder if his attack was provoked by what he was wearing.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Schools Ask Students, Are You Gay?
Board survey probes students' sexuality
Grades 9 to 12 asked preference
Helps `normalize various options'
Sep. 2, 2006. 01:00 AM
LOUISE BROWN
EDUCATION REPORTER
Never mind race.
The Toronto District School Board will ask students as young as 14 whether they are straight or gay — or "lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, queer or two-spirited (an aboriginal term)" — as part of a sweeping new census it hopes will help schools better serve all students.
Among more than 55 questions on everything from whether they eat breakfast to who helps them with homework, the voluntary survey will ask children several personal questions, including their race and, for Grades 9 through 12, their sexual orientation.
Students may choose not to answer it, or can check off a box that says "not sure."
"Look, sexual orientation is part of a student's reality; we know students are affected by the extent to which they are accepted by their peers for their sexuality," said Lloyd McKell, the board's executive officer of student and community equity.
"So if we want to be true to the full range of diversity among students, we have to get an understanding of that as well."
Rev. Brent Hawkes of the Metropolitan Community Church, a prominent advocate for gay rights, welcomed the poll if it helps school officials recognize the bullying and harassment many gay students suffer — and helps address the problem.
"It's a really good idea; this sort of survey has proven very useful in the United States in showing how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered students can feel less safe and more likely to be beaten and harassed," said Hawkes.
But parent Margo Cowie, co-chair of the board's Parent Involvement Advisory Committee, says she fears students in the vulnerable teen years may skip the question if they are gay, for fear of word getting out — or may fill it in simply as a joke.
"As a parent, I question the relevance of asking this information — I think what students really want to tell us is whether they have good teachers and what programs they don't want cut," said Cowie, a parent of two high school students.
However, board social worker Harvey Nagelberg says that even posing the question can help students see sexual orientation as an "okay option" to discuss.
"Seeing it included on a survey helps normalize the various options, which is good," he said.
In June, the board gave its 30,000 employees a voluntary survey that also asked for respondents' sexual orientation in a bid to make hiring and promotion practices more fair.
The student survey was sparked by concerns that schools were quicker to expel black students than white under Ontario's new Safe Schools Act. The Ontario Human Rights Commission investigated and urged the board to start tracking suspensions by race. A special task force under education veteran Harold Brathwaite studied the best way to gather touchy personal data, and last winter, amid much debate, the board voted to start the survey this fall.
But it has since grown beyond a mere racial snapshot to a sweeping profile of how its 270,000 students live and learn and how they feel about themselves, their schools and their neighbourhood.
"We're very excited about it; it goes well beyond demographics to tell what you think about life inside and outside school, how they feel about their learning environment, which school activities make them feel unwelcome — and why —and how they rate themselves as students," says McKell.
"It tell us a lot that will help us put programs in place to close the achievement gap that exists with some groups."
The board field-tested the 20-minute written survey with 10 schools in June and will provide a teachers' guide and a brochure and promotional video to explain the purpose of the survey to students and families.
Students in Grades 7 to 12 will be given time in class to fill it out in the week of Nov. 6 to 10 — it will take about 20 minutes, said McKell.
However for students in junior kindergarten through Grade 6, the survey will be sent home at the end of March to be filled out with parents.
Grades 9 to 12 asked preference
Helps `normalize various options'
Sep. 2, 2006. 01:00 AM
LOUISE BROWN
EDUCATION REPORTER
Never mind race.
The Toronto District School Board will ask students as young as 14 whether they are straight or gay — or "lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, queer or two-spirited (an aboriginal term)" — as part of a sweeping new census it hopes will help schools better serve all students.
Among more than 55 questions on everything from whether they eat breakfast to who helps them with homework, the voluntary survey will ask children several personal questions, including their race and, for Grades 9 through 12, their sexual orientation.
Students may choose not to answer it, or can check off a box that says "not sure."
"Look, sexual orientation is part of a student's reality; we know students are affected by the extent to which they are accepted by their peers for their sexuality," said Lloyd McKell, the board's executive officer of student and community equity.
"So if we want to be true to the full range of diversity among students, we have to get an understanding of that as well."
Rev. Brent Hawkes of the Metropolitan Community Church, a prominent advocate for gay rights, welcomed the poll if it helps school officials recognize the bullying and harassment many gay students suffer — and helps address the problem.
"It's a really good idea; this sort of survey has proven very useful in the United States in showing how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered students can feel less safe and more likely to be beaten and harassed," said Hawkes.
But parent Margo Cowie, co-chair of the board's Parent Involvement Advisory Committee, says she fears students in the vulnerable teen years may skip the question if they are gay, for fear of word getting out — or may fill it in simply as a joke.
"As a parent, I question the relevance of asking this information — I think what students really want to tell us is whether they have good teachers and what programs they don't want cut," said Cowie, a parent of two high school students.
However, board social worker Harvey Nagelberg says that even posing the question can help students see sexual orientation as an "okay option" to discuss.
"Seeing it included on a survey helps normalize the various options, which is good," he said.
In June, the board gave its 30,000 employees a voluntary survey that also asked for respondents' sexual orientation in a bid to make hiring and promotion practices more fair.
The student survey was sparked by concerns that schools were quicker to expel black students than white under Ontario's new Safe Schools Act. The Ontario Human Rights Commission investigated and urged the board to start tracking suspensions by race. A special task force under education veteran Harold Brathwaite studied the best way to gather touchy personal data, and last winter, amid much debate, the board voted to start the survey this fall.
But it has since grown beyond a mere racial snapshot to a sweeping profile of how its 270,000 students live and learn and how they feel about themselves, their schools and their neighbourhood.
"We're very excited about it; it goes well beyond demographics to tell what you think about life inside and outside school, how they feel about their learning environment, which school activities make them feel unwelcome — and why —and how they rate themselves as students," says McKell.
"It tell us a lot that will help us put programs in place to close the achievement gap that exists with some groups."
The board field-tested the 20-minute written survey with 10 schools in June and will provide a teachers' guide and a brochure and promotional video to explain the purpose of the survey to students and families.
Students in Grades 7 to 12 will be given time in class to fill it out in the week of Nov. 6 to 10 — it will take about 20 minutes, said McKell.
However for students in junior kindergarten through Grade 6, the survey will be sent home at the end of March to be filled out with parents.
Face to Faith
by Mark Pinsky
American evangelicals are far more diverse than we think. And their politics are equally unpredictable
Mark Pinsky
Saturday September 2, 2006
The Guardian
When not amused, Europeans are mostly baffled by the political ascendancy of American evangelical Christians. It must appear a misplaced, spasmodic peasant rebellion from a distant century: mobs with pitchforks and torches storming the bastions of power and taking over a modern democracy.
Of course, here in the sunbelt suburbs, we understand it is nothing of the sort. Rather, it has been a methodical march, a largely white, middle-class movement, albeit one with rural and small-town roots. I know this for a certainty because for more than a decade I have lived among this strange tribe, writing about them. But I must confess I have learned as much about them outside my professional role, as a neighbour and a parent, as I have on the job. Without the filter of a reporter's notebook, I have come to understand their metaphors and read their body language. Frankly, the perspective I brought to this exercise, a leftwing Jew, raised in a blue, (heavily Democratic) north-eastern state, might not suggest sympathy. But despite this skewed viewpoint I have found much beyond caricature and conventional wisdom.
Chief among this is that there is considerable diversity within the evangelical movement. This extends to a range of issues, something often obscured when Christians must choose between just two candidates, as in 2000 and 2004. Survey after survey reveals that white evangelical Protestants express a spectrum of views on war, the death penalty, stem-cell research, the environment and, to a lesser degree, abortion and gay civil unions.
What I have read in the polls and have observed anecdotally is increasingly reflected just above the grassroots, by some younger, mega-church pastors who are the mandarins of the evangelical movement. The Rev Joel Hunter, of Northland Church in Longwood, Florida, a non-denominational congregation where 12,000 people worship on a weekend, has privately published a manifesto, Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won't Fly With Most Conservative Christians. It is a frank, tough-talking self appraisal: "Christians have this image of just being raving lunatics; and in some respects, it is well-deserved."
Hunter was trained in a Methodist seminary, has authored numerous books and has a national radio ministry. When a group of more progressive evangelical leaders broke ranks with conservative figures over global warming, Hunter was chosen to narrate their television advertising campaign supporting environmentalism - which evangelicals call "creation care".
"For the most part, the religious right has been limited to the Republican party," Hunter writes. "A voice of biblical values cannot be in the pocket of one party. Christians can decide for themselves how God would want them to come down on any issue. There ought to be more than just gay marriage and pro-life issues, because the Bible is concerned with all life. We need to do everything we can to relieve poverty, to heal the sick and protect the earth."
As we approach the November mid-term Congressional elections a major question looms. Did the 2004 election of George Bush, a born again, politically fortunate son, represent the high water mark of evangelical influence in the White House and on America's political system? If so, will this success come at a price? Are Southern swing voters, including evangelicals, tiring of Christian conservatives throwing their weight around?
I wish I could say that, based on my experience, I know the answer, but I don't. Yet in June, the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, elected a more moderately conservative, insurgent candidate as its president. In their diversity, and because of their diversity, American evangelicals can be unpredictable. Stay tuned.
· Mark Pinsky, religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel, is author of A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed (Westminster John Knox Press)
American evangelicals are far more diverse than we think. And their politics are equally unpredictable
Mark Pinsky
Saturday September 2, 2006
The Guardian
When not amused, Europeans are mostly baffled by the political ascendancy of American evangelical Christians. It must appear a misplaced, spasmodic peasant rebellion from a distant century: mobs with pitchforks and torches storming the bastions of power and taking over a modern democracy.
Of course, here in the sunbelt suburbs, we understand it is nothing of the sort. Rather, it has been a methodical march, a largely white, middle-class movement, albeit one with rural and small-town roots. I know this for a certainty because for more than a decade I have lived among this strange tribe, writing about them. But I must confess I have learned as much about them outside my professional role, as a neighbour and a parent, as I have on the job. Without the filter of a reporter's notebook, I have come to understand their metaphors and read their body language. Frankly, the perspective I brought to this exercise, a leftwing Jew, raised in a blue, (heavily Democratic) north-eastern state, might not suggest sympathy. But despite this skewed viewpoint I have found much beyond caricature and conventional wisdom.
Chief among this is that there is considerable diversity within the evangelical movement. This extends to a range of issues, something often obscured when Christians must choose between just two candidates, as in 2000 and 2004. Survey after survey reveals that white evangelical Protestants express a spectrum of views on war, the death penalty, stem-cell research, the environment and, to a lesser degree, abortion and gay civil unions.
What I have read in the polls and have observed anecdotally is increasingly reflected just above the grassroots, by some younger, mega-church pastors who are the mandarins of the evangelical movement. The Rev Joel Hunter, of Northland Church in Longwood, Florida, a non-denominational congregation where 12,000 people worship on a weekend, has privately published a manifesto, Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won't Fly With Most Conservative Christians. It is a frank, tough-talking self appraisal: "Christians have this image of just being raving lunatics; and in some respects, it is well-deserved."
Hunter was trained in a Methodist seminary, has authored numerous books and has a national radio ministry. When a group of more progressive evangelical leaders broke ranks with conservative figures over global warming, Hunter was chosen to narrate their television advertising campaign supporting environmentalism - which evangelicals call "creation care".
"For the most part, the religious right has been limited to the Republican party," Hunter writes. "A voice of biblical values cannot be in the pocket of one party. Christians can decide for themselves how God would want them to come down on any issue. There ought to be more than just gay marriage and pro-life issues, because the Bible is concerned with all life. We need to do everything we can to relieve poverty, to heal the sick and protect the earth."
As we approach the November mid-term Congressional elections a major question looms. Did the 2004 election of George Bush, a born again, politically fortunate son, represent the high water mark of evangelical influence in the White House and on America's political system? If so, will this success come at a price? Are Southern swing voters, including evangelicals, tiring of Christian conservatives throwing their weight around?
I wish I could say that, based on my experience, I know the answer, but I don't. Yet in June, the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, elected a more moderately conservative, insurgent candidate as its president. In their diversity, and because of their diversity, American evangelicals can be unpredictable. Stay tuned.
· Mark Pinsky, religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel, is author of A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed (Westminster John Knox Press)
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