What is truth? Can you spot the real from the nicely packaged fake? Could you walk into a shop in some quaint little village in some far-away land, and know whether the friendly man behind the counter is offering to sell you an authentic Rolex or just trying to pass off a slick looking facsimile that won’t keep time worth a damn to a naive tourist? Just how good a judge are you of Authenticity anyway?
Calling him "just plain wrong," Bishop William Murphy has blasted Gov. David A. Paterson for ordering state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions.
…
Murphy wrote, "I fail to understand how" a homosexual union "can be called marriage. … No matter how much some may wish to apply the term ‘marriage,’ it does not fit because it fails the test of truth and authenticity."
Authentic:
In response, diocesan spokesman Sean Dolan said Murphy "is not imposing his will. He is exercising his responsibility as the shepherd of this diocese to teach the faith.
"That said," he added, "the message should not be misconstrued as an attack on the human dignity of homosexual people. The church teaches that we must treat homosexuals with dignity and love, as we would all God’s children."
Their love is fake. But ours is real. Easy payments too.
Gambian President Yahya Jammeh says he will “cut off the head” of any homosexual caught in his country.
Addressing supporters at the end of his meet the farmers tour here Sunday, Jammeh also ordered any hotel or motel housing homosexuals to close down, adding that owners of such facilities would also be in trouble.
He said the Gambia was a country of believers, indicating that no sinful and immoral act as homosexual would be tolerated in the country.
He warned all homosexuals in the country to leave, noting that a legislation “stricter than those in Iran ” concerning the vice would be introduced soon.
I have a question: Where are all the love the sinner, hate the sin faithful here? Last week the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of giving same-sex couples access to marriage and Pope Ratzinger was Instantly out of the gate with a statement condemining same-sex marriage. So were the usual suspects in the protestant religious right. All the while piously declaring that they were not acting out of any sort of hatred towards homosexuals. Yet here’s a head of state declaring that he will cut off the head of any homosexual caught in his country and the silence from the erstaz followers of Christ is deafening.
Let me hazard a guess as to why: the thought of loving same-sex couples being allowed to marry disturbs them more then the thought of thousands of homosexuals being butchered by a madman. They don’t hate us, they just want us gone. It isn’t hate to believe that everything would be fine if there just weren’t any homosexuals. It’s…love…
Moral Judgements Are Easy When God Is Always On Your Side
On Box Turtle Bulletin I had a very brief argument with someone named David who could not believe that a fundamentalist crackpot once told me on Usenet that the Golden Rule gave him the right to harass gay people. David assured me that he had argued with them over on BeliefNet over the course of many years and never once encountered such an argument and asked me to provide him with an example. Which I did after a very quick scan of my Usenet archives.
The fundamentalist’s argument went something like this: "If I was engaging in self destructive behavior I would want someone to rescue me from it, even if I fought it at the time because I would thank them later." David assured me that such a stupid argument was "easily refuted". And yes, it is. But if fundamentalists were willing to listen to reason and logic we wouldn’t still be arguing over evolution in this country, let alone the human status of gay people. That David could find it "easy" to refute a fundamentalist about anything made me wonder how often David every really argued with any.
I was thinking about that reading This Story over at the New York Times about an atheist soldier who is currently suing the department of defense over violations of his religious freedom by officers and other soldiers. This follows years of horror stories of military personnel being subjected to forced proselytizing by evangelicals in the ranks. Not all of the victims, as the Times story notes, are atheists. In fact most of them are other Christians who were deemed to be not Christian enough for their tormentors…
In an e-mail statement, Bill Carr, the Defense Department’s deputy under secretary for military personnel policy, said he “saw near universal compliance with the department’s policy.”
But Mikey Weinstein, a retired Air Force judge advocate general and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said the official statistics masked the great number of those who do not report violations for fear of retribution. Since the Air Force Academy scandal began in 2004, Mr. Weinstein said, he has been contacted by more than 5,500 service members and, occasionally, military families about incidents of religious discrimination. He said 96 percent of the complainants were Christians, and the majority of those were Protestants.
Emphasis mine. When faith has degenerated into certainty you have lost all your brakes. You have become God’s own right hand and gods don’t feel shame. Or to put it another way…
After his run-in with Major Welborn, Specialist Hall did not file a complaint with the Army’s Equal Opportunity Office because, he said, he was mistrustful of his superior officers. Instead, he told leaders of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, who put him in touch with Mr. Weinstein. In November 2007, Specialist Hall was sent home early from Iraq after being repeatedly threatened by other soldiers. “I caution you that although your ‘legal’ issues are yours and yours alone, I have heard many people disagree with you, and this may be a cause for some of the perceived threats,” wrote Sgt. Maj. Kevin Nolan in Specialist Hall’s counseling for his departure.
Though with a different unit now at Fort Riley, Specialist Hall said the backlash had continued. He has a no-contact order with a sergeant who, without provocation, threatened to “bust him in the mouth.” Another sergeant allegedly told Specialist Hall that as an atheist, he was not entitled to religious freedom because he had no religion.
Emphasis mine. This is the mindset by which the Golden Rule becomes a license to do whatever you damn well please to your neighbor. This is the mindset by which putting a knife into the hopes and dreams of gay people becomes a form of love. There is no reasoning with this. It’s not that God is on their side, it’s that God is the face in the mirror. Good is whatever you decide it is. Evil is other people.
However, You’ll Never Walk Away From What You Did To So Many Innocent Hearts. Never.
John Smid has resigned from Love In Action. In the spirit of wishing someone the best as they move on to new endeavors, I’d like to repost the following…
"I would rather you commit suicide than have you leave Love In Action wanting to return to the gay lifestyle. In a physical death you could still have a spiritual resurrection; whereas, returning to homosexuality you are yielding yourself to a spiritual death from which there is no recovery."
-The Final Indoctrination from John Smid, Director, Love In Action
Judgment Day is every day John. Have a nice rest of your life.
Via Pam’s House Blend… Right Wing Watch has this video up on McCain’s new buddy, Ron Parsley, whom I’ve done a political cartoon about previously…
“This so-called hate crimes legislation would preferred status to people based on entirely on who they choose as a sexual partner. What if they change their mind the next night!”
“Why is marriage under attack?!…Why is the family coming under such brutal attack from the forces of darkness…”
“I will lift my voice against THE AGENDA of America’s tortured and angry homosexual population…”
“In essence the Supreme Court of the United States on June 26, 2003, legalized the perverted act of sodomy. And we said nothing…”
“This is not about homosexual rights or lesbian rights…this is about THE DESTRUCTION of the VERY COVENANT (organ music rises up in the background as he waves his finger desperately) They are seeking to “redefine” marriage. In other words, they are intending to PERVERT God’s original intention!”
Parsley, an Ohio megachurch pulpit thumper once shouted out at the “War on Christians” conference in 2006, “A spiritual invasion is taking place! Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! Lock and load!” When these righteous men of god, these men of high moral values speak of war, people listen. And here’s the blood payoff…
The mistake when these people rail against hate crime laws, is to take the rhetoric at face value. They’re babbling that those laws will restrict their ability to preach lock and load sermons from the pulpit, but it’s not the loss of their the first amendment rights they’re worried about. When Parsley shouts “lock and load” he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s calling for blood on the streets. If his useful tools, the young male thugs he’s counting on strike fear into the hearts of gay people, suddenly find themselves being held accountable for their actions, then they might think twice and Parsley’s work, and that of his fellow hate mongers will all be in vain. They’re not worried about being silenced. They’re worried that their words won’t have the desired effect anymore, that the bloodshed will stop. A fearful homosexual, is a good homosexual. A dead homosexual, is an even better one.
Last summer the Mayor of Ft. Lauderdale, Jim Naugle, went on an anti-gay rampage, first accusing the gay community of rampant use of the public bathrooms at the beaches for sex. This despite his own police chief saying to the press that there was no such problem. Naugle called for special toilet stalls to be installed at the beaches with doors that would fly open after a few minutes, theoretically to discourage their use for sex. As the controversy grew, Naugle became more deranged in his attacks on the gay community.
I could cite a lot of newspaper articles for this, but I thought I’d show you this, from Peter LaBarbera’s Americans For Truth About Homosexuality. It pretty well captures the…flavor…of the atmosphere Naugle relentlessly worked to create (and which let it be said, LaBarbera constantly works to create…)…
TAKE ACTION: Watch yesterday’s Sun-Sentinel video of Ft. Lauderdale MayorJim Naugle’s press conference in which he apologizes for not doing more to stop homosexual “sex” in the city’s public and beach restrooms. Naugle also opposes housing a homosexual library collection containing hard-core pornographic items in a public library. E-mail Mayor Naugle at mayorjames@aol.com, and thank him for refusing to be intimidated by a vocal fringe and the liberal media. And contact the Ft. Lauderdale city commissioners and urge them to support the Mayor’s push to protect children and uphold decency.
A note on the Naugle story: will the day ever come when LEADERS of the proud “gay” lobby apologize for their community’s own excesses — e.g., tolerating or encouraging men to commit anonymous sodomies with other men in public restrooms, parks, and bathhouses (sex clubs)?
Kudos to Mayor Naugle. I almost fell off my seat watching this video. Finally, a public servant with the courage to stand up to the homosexual militants and their fellow travelers in the media. Imagine: a big-city mayor tries to stop gross perversions from occurring in public places — and the pro-”gay” lobby says HE is the problem and is embarrassing the city! — Peter LaBarbera
Fort Lauderdale mayor issues apology, but not to gay community
FORT LAUDERDALE — Mayor Jim Naugle issued a public apology on the steps of City Hall Tuesday afternoon, but it wasn’t the apology the gay community was looking for.
Naugle apologized for underestimating the problem of men having sex with each other in public restrooms, and urged people to call police to complain when they come upon it. He also said Broward County leads the nation in the incidence of new AIDS cases involving men having sex with men, and questioned whether the county tourism office should be welcoming them here.
Naugle alerted the media that he was holding a news conference that would include “an apology.”
Gay activists and others have been calling for a public apology form the mayor, and for his resignation, since the South Florida Sun-Sentinel published Naugle’s comments earlier this month about gays. In article about a proposed self-cleaning, automatic toilet the city was going to buy for the beach, Naugle said an added benefit would be that it would deter men from using it for “homosexual activity,” which he said was a problem in public restrooms.
Naugle, you may recall, capped his performance with a news conference of several anti-gay black ministers from the area, who spoke of fighting a war, and of cleansing Ft. Lauderdale of sin. One of them even came to the news conference, dressed in military fatigues…
People said blood would be spilled because of climate of hate Naugle was creating. People tried to get him to at least tone it down. Instead he gleefully fanned the flames. Well…looks like Naugle, and all those black ministers who came to support him, who came to declare they were fighting a war, got the blood they were calling for…
(Ft. Lauderdale) Today, Equality Florida and the coalition Transgender Equality Rights Initiatives (TERI) expressed outrage over the murder of Simmie Williams Jr., a gay 17 year-old who was gunned down this past weekend on a street corner in Broward County. Police are investigating the murder as a possible hate crime based on the words witnesses say were exchanged before the shooting.
…
A memorial is being planned for 4:30PM Thursday, February 27th at the 1000 block of Sistrunk Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale where the murder occurred. A town hall meeting will follow at 6:30 at the Gay & Lesbian Community Center of South Florida 1717 N. Andrews Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, FL to discuss the issue of hate crimes in Florida.
Meet the enemy in the splended little war of the black ministers of Ft. Lauderdale … The kid who had to die for Mayor Naugle’s fifteen minutes of fame…
“We can be horrified, but we cannot be surprised,” said Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida. “Just 10 days ago, 15 year-old Lawrence King was gunned down in California.
Ah yes…Lawrence King. Let us avert our gaze now, toward the west coast…and the pulpit of the Antioch Bible Church…
Personally, I have no problem with the effort to make church work better for men or challenging men to step up and do something with their lives. I do have a problem with it when it means, as it sometimes does, putting down women or insisting women play only secondary roles in church or family. And I have a big problem with the guy emphasis when it relies on making gay men objects of derision and ridicule.
Such appears to be the case in remarks made by Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland. Hutcherson has gotten headlines for his efforts to pressure Microsoft on gay issues. He has a right to his views — views he supports with texts from Scripture. Reasonable people can disagree over whether gay marriage is a good idea.
But Hutcherson goes beyond reasonable, at least to judge by the report of Seattle psychologist Valerie Tarico. Tarico, a former staffer at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, was raised in a fundamentalist church. In recent months, she has made it her business to attend services at many of the large, conservative churches in the Seattle area, including Hutcherson’s, to see what’s going on.
On a Sunday when Tarico was present, Hutcherson was preaching on gender roles. During his sermon, Hutcherson stated, "God hates soft men" and "God hates effeminate men." Hutcherson went on to say, "If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end."
"That was a joke," Hutcherson said Friday, when I asked him about the comment. But it’s not really funny, is it?
Trust me…they all laughed when he told it. Every single self-righteous man and woman of god in those pews. And you can tell that Hutcherson was only joking by their laughter. If they’d seen him actually doing it to some poor man who had politely held a door open for him, they wouldn’t have laughed. They’d have applauded.
A 14-year-old Jehovah’s Witness sick with leukemia has the right to refuse a blood transfusion, even though doing so might kill him, a judge ruled today.
Skagit County Superior Court Judge John Meyer denied a motion by the state to force Dennis Lindberg, of Mount Vernon, to have a blood transfusion. The judge said the eighth-grader knows "he’s basically giving himself a death sentence."
Doctors diagnosed the boy with leukemia on Nov. 6 and began treating him with chemotherapy at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, but stopped a week ago because his blood count was too low, the Skagit Valley Herald reported. The boy refused the transfusion on religious grounds.
However, his birth parents, who do not have custody and flew from Idaho to be at the hearing, believe their son should have the transfusion and suggested he has been unduly influenced by his legal guardian, his aunt, who is also a Jehovah’s Witness.
Several friends of Lindberg and of his parents attended today’s hearing, and some ran out crying when the judge announced his decision.
"Dennis does present himself as a very mature man. But he really is just a child trying to please the adults around him," said Jan Curry, whose daughter, Morgan, is his friend.
On Tuesday, Lindberg’s doctor told the judge that the boy’s blood was hypoxic, or deficient in oxygen, and that he would not be surprised if the boy died overnight.
Well hold the surprise then, because that’s exactly what happened. The boy is dead.
So…let me get this straight… According to the religious right, a 14 year old can’t consent to sex…but they can consent to suicide. As long as they’re doing it for God. Well praise the Lord.
Strange How Emotionally…Empty…The Fundamentalist Reality Is…
Fred Clark has, for I think the past year or so if not longer, been doing a running, chapter by chapter review of the first book in the apocalyptic fundamentalist hit book series, Left Behind. If you haven’t checked in on it yet you should, because while it may seem that taking a serious, critical look at Left Behind is like shooting fish in a barrel, Fred not only brings to it his editorial knowledge (he works for a local newspaper where he lives), he also brings to bear his own sincere and deeply held Baptist faith (he’s a Baptist in the sense that I once, in a world long ago and far, far away, thought of the word…), and with it a humanity utterly absent from the scribblings of LaHaye and Jenkins. It must be a painful chore, but after so long his readers can tell Fred’s committed to it, because it’s important to him that people see what the likes of LaHaye and Jenkins have done to his faith, and are doing, still, to their followers.
I bring it up, because this week’s episode finds Fred, once again, pounding on the one, overreaching flaw in the series, the thing that taints every word of it from the get-go. And you see that flaw in how strangely indifferent the characters of the novels are, to the sudden disappearance of millions of people…
Buck Williams and Steve Plank have been watching the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11 on CNN. They don’t wear sackcloth and they don’t shoot fire out of their mouths, but two guys who tried to kill them tripped, fell over and died, then one of them claimed to be the Messiah before they both settled back into chanting that Jesus was the Messiah. CNN’s Dan Bennett, bored already with the chanting, signs off, promising to record anything else that happens and to report on it after the fact.
Marge and a few others on the staff had drifted into Steve’s office during the telecast. "If that doesn’t beat all," one said. "What a couple of kooks."
If you ever met someone, in real life, who talked like the characters in Left Behind, it would become a story you told for the rest of your life. "No, for real," you would say to your friends, who had heard this story a dozen times, but still enjoyed it while half-doubting that it really could have happened. "It was six years ago, at the airport, and the guy actually said, ‘If that doesn’t beat all, what a couple of kooks,’ just like that. And then he said something about ‘coming on like gangbusters.’ …"
But it’s not that they don’t talk like real people talk…it’s that they’re missing something that real people, mostly, have…
Buck decides to stick up for the kooks:
"… What a couple of kooks."
"Which two?" Buck said. "You can’t say the preachers, whoever they are, didn’t warn ’em."
Actually, you can say they didn’t "warn ’em" because they didn’t warn ’em. Instead, they started out with a lethal little object lesson — kill the first two and the others will get the idea. It was only after killing those two that they informed the rest of the crowd that this is what would happen to anyone who tried to harm them. That’s a rather vivid warning, but it came a little late for those first two dead guys.
The authors have gotten confused here. They have read Revelation 11:5, which says of the witnesses that "anyone who wants to harm them must die." That warning seems to be what they have in mind when they have Buck weirdly assert that the preachers "warned" their attackers that they would be devoured by flame and/or trip and die. But the authors seem to forget that Buck and Dan Bennett and, most importantly, the two trip-and-die guys, have not read Revelation 11:5 and thus were not privy to this warning.
The central conceit of the Left Behind books, is that it’s a future history according to the Dispensational Millenialism theology of it’s authors. Events in the book of Revelations, taken at literal face value by crackpot fundamentalists, begin happening throughout the world, and are witnessed by the central characters in the book…a group of sinners who were "left behind" after the rapture.
There’s a problem here…and it runs throughout the book.
"What’s going on over there," someone else asked.
"All I know," Buck said, "is that things happen there that no one can explain."
Two weeks ago, Buck’s co-workers would have been impressed by that comment. A year before, you’ll recall, Buck had been "over there," in Israel, when the Ruso-Ethiopian Air Force launched a full-scale, doomsday nuclear assault, concentrating its entire arsenal on that tiny country. And no one was killed. No one was even hurt. And Buck was right in the middle of it, watching this According to Hoyle miracle unfold before his eyes. Buck had seen something happen "that no one can explain." Two weeks ago, that made him special.
But that was two weeks ago. He’s not special anymore.
Last Monday, a third of the planet vanished faster than you can blink, without a trace, without an explanation. The entire world has seen something "that no one can explain." There are no more children anymore and no one knows how or why or what happened. Compared to The Event, even Buck’s bona fide nuclear miracle seems a little less impressive. Compared to the confounding, incomprehensible, world-altering Event, a couple of guys tripping and dying scarcely registers on anyone’s personal list of unexplainable happenings.
Look at this. Really look at it. LaHaye and Jenkins are writing about events that have happened after what must be the greatest calamity that the human race has ever faced. Not only have millions of adults suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, but so has every single child. There are no children anymore! To everyone left alive after such a cataclysmic event, it would have to seem as if the world had suddenly ended. There is no future left for humanity. This is it. Finito. Done. End of story.
And yet the characters drawn by LaHaye and Jenkins seem utterly indifferent to that. They just go on about their lives.
There’s a reason for that…
"If that doesn’t beat all …" No, you moron, it doesn’t. Every child on the face of the earth simultaneously vanishing and no one knowing why beats all. With prejudice. All has been beaten, decisively, and all won’t be coming back for Round 2.
The next thing Buck says is, "I’ve got to get to JFK." In the context, I at first took this to mean that he had decided to fly to Israel to check out these preachers for himself. (Buck likes to fly all over the world investigating stories. Someday weeks from now, if he finds time, he may even write something about one of them.) But what he meant was that he had to get to JFK to meet a flight attendant he spoke with once, briefly, for a few minutes, so that he can take her to meet the president of Romania in his hotel.
As he leaves for the airport, Buck doesn’t give a second thought to any of the things that no one can explain. He’s not thinking about the witnesses and the trip-and-die guys. He’s not thinking about The Event, or about the international criminal conspiracy whose secrets he has promised not to reveal, or about his betrayal of his slain friend Dirk, or his likely complicity in the suspicious death of rival reporter Eric Miller, or about how he’s well on his way to missing his second consecutive weekly deadline. He is thinking, instead, of the promotion he has just been offered:
Buck knew Steve was right. He was going to have to accept the promotion just to protect himself from other pretenders. He didn’t want to be obsessed with it all day. Buck was glad for the diversion of seeing Hattie Durham. His only question now was whether he would recognize her. They had met under most traumatic circumstances.
In his article for Vanity Fair, American Rapture, Craig Unger tells of walking with a group of the faithful, led by their prophet LaHaye, to the very place where the longed for battle of Armageddon will occur…
On a scorching afternoon in May, Tim LaHaye, the 79-year-old co-author of the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic thrillers, leads several dozen of his acolytes up a long, winding path to a hilltop in the ancient fortress city of Megiddo, Israel. LaHaye is not a household name in the secular world, but in the parallel universe of evangelical Christians he is the ultimate cultural icon. The author or co-author of more than 75 books, LaHaye in 2001 was named the most influential American evangelical leader of the past 25 years by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. With more than 63 million copies of his "Left Behind" novels sold, he is one of the best-selling authors in all of American history. Here, a group of about 90 evangelical Christians who embrace the astonishing theology he espouses have joined him in the Holy Land for the "Walking Where Jesus Walked" tour.
Megiddo, the site of about 20 different civilizations over the last 10,000 years, is among the first stops on our pilgrimage, and, given that LaHaye’s specialty is the apocalypse, it is also one of the most important. Alexander the Great, Saladin, Napoleon, and other renowned warriors all fought great battles here. But if Megiddo is to go down in history as the greatest battlefield on earth, its real test is yet to come. According to the book of Revelation, the hill of Megiddo – better known as Armageddon – will be the site of a cataclysmic battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.
To get a good look at the battlefields of the apocalypse, we take shelter under a makeshift lean-to at the top of the hill. Wearing a floppy hat to protect him from the blazing Israeli sun, LaHaye yields to his colleague Gary Frazier, the tour organizer and founder of the Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc., to explain what will happen during the Final Days.
Like they’ve seen it in their dreams, a thousand times…
Once Christ joins the battle, both the Antichrist and the False Prophet are quickly captured and cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Huge numbers of the Antichrist’s supporters are slain.
Meanwhile, an angel exhorts Christ, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap." And so, Christ, sickle in hand, gathers "the vine of the earth."
Then, according to Revelation, "the earth was reaped." These four simple words signify the end of the world as we know it.
Grapes that are "fully ripe"- billions of people who have reached maturity but still reject the grace of God – are now cast "into the great winepress of the wrath of God." Here we have the origin of the phrase "the grapes of wrath." In an extraordinarily merciless and brutal act of justice, Christ crushes the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Revelation says, blood flows out "of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs."
With its highly figurative language, Revelation is subject to profoundly differing interpretations. Nevertheless, LaHaye’s followers insist on its literal truth and accuracy, and they have gone to great lengths to calculate exactly what this passage of Revelation means.
As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" he asks. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."
We’ve done the math… Read that again. "We’ve done the math." What kind of person goes to the trouble to calculate to the corpse, exactly how many human beings have to be crushed like grapes at the hand of the man who once said that to love God, and your neighbor as yourself, was the greatest commandment. I recall reading after the last book in the series was published, that someone asked LaHaye how hard it would be for God’s Chosen to go on living after having witnessed almost four fifths or more of the human race cast into hell for eternity…many of whom must have been family and dear friends…
Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again
-Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Glorious Appearing
…and LaHaye averred that God would probably, in kindness, erase the memory of it from everyone’s mind. But why would God have to, if the faithful are all as empty inside as LaHaye. Without a doubt LaHaye could go on living just fine after having watched all the heathens, all the intellectuals, all his betters, everyone he’s despised all his life for being more gloriously human then he could ever hope to become, cast into fire for eternity by a loving God. He’s the kind who, if he was a good Party Member in the Germany of the 1930s and 40s, he’d have shoveled Jews into the ovens and gone home to kiss his wife, tuck his children into bed, and listen to a little Bach before turning in for the night. All of them could. That’s why they’re fundamentalists. They have no inner compass for managing human relationships. No instinctive sense of sympathy and decency. They need rules. But even more, they need someone to blame for that inner void that keeps nagging at them, keeps reminding them of everything fine and noble and decent a human being can be, that they are not. They need scapegoats. They need someone to hate, so they don’t have to hate themselves.
This is why the characters in LaHaye and Jenkins novel can walk around in a world where all the children have suddenly vanished and worry about their job promotions. They act like they’re oblivious, because their creators are oblivious. But they know down to the corpse how many bodies it takes to fill the valley of Armageddon with blood up to a horse’s bridle.
The Fine Art Of Inciting Violence While Preaching Decency
Of course you knew that it isn’t only gay folk that the mayor of Fort Lauderdale is contemptuous of…
"Atheists and Criminal Lobbying Union" regarding the meaning of the acronym ACLU.
New Times, October 26, 2000
"I’m supposed to subsidize some schlock sitting on the sofa and drinking a beer, who won’t work more than 40 hours a week?" (On a proposed affordable housing ordinance)
Sun-Sentinel, May 20, 2006
Regarding a proposal to reduce greenhouse gases, calling it "hate-America stuff" concocted by "a bunch of scientists meeting in Paris who’ve had too much wine.”
Sun-Sentinel May 9, 2007
“The Scum-Sentinel is an advertising tabloid newsblog. They hire reporters and they make them churn out stories without making them get into anything in depth. They do that to feign a resemblance to a real newspaper so that they can sell advertising. And the Sentinel tries to lecture me about affordable housing? I tell people that the day I take advice from a company that has vagrants selling their products in the middle of the street, we’re all in trouble."
New Times, April 21, 2006
“I think a strong rope and a stiff tree would be better than wasting all that electricity.”
New Times (Broward Palm Beach Edition), October 26, 2000
As they say, scratch a homophobe and you find a rat’s nest of assorted other prejudices and cheap bar stool conceits. And given his steady and sure record of flipping the middle finger to his critics, I sorta figured he’d make some aggressive asshole comeback to the county commissioners act last week, of voting him off the tourism board. What I didn’t expect was that he’d surround himself with men dressed in paramilitary uniform, calling for a cleansing of sin from Fort Lauderdale…
Anti-gay Mayor Jim "250K robo-potty" Naugle has so polarized matters in Fort Lauderdale that press conferences and demonstrations are getting tense, according to Jeff Black of UNITE Fort Lauderdale, which is sponsoring a Faith Press Conference today, will feature speakers from many denominations and religions to discuss unity, inclusiveness, and acceptance.
Inclusiveness was not on the agenda on Tuesday as members of homophobic black churches, stood with Mayor Naugle at City Hall preaching they are going to take back the city, removing the sin and sinners. Religious men — in paramilitary gear — were also standing aside the mayor bleating that "the depth of sexual sin in Broward County necessitates an old-fashioned spiritual revival." From Jeff’s email to me:
They escorted me from the front door to the elevator when I entered the building today for this press conference, and stood ‘post’ at the elevator lobby. The video is frightening, worse was I was standing in the room with these people and worried what was going to happened next.
An initial check into who or what the Koinonia Worship Center is, turned up only a MySpace page…
I tried to find out information on the group but was only able to find a MySpace profile which included an audio track. The audio track is of a military leader talking to a subordinate and explaining how they are in the battle to take back what they have lost for the black man while in the background you hear gun fire and battle sounds.
What I’m hearing on this page is scary. "Special OPS (operations) Units" of the church. References to "Exercising Spiritual Authority"?
Nice. Until today I thought Naugle was just another homophobic barstool buffoon. But no…he’s a thug; a grown man with a schoolyard bully’s sense of justice and the moral scruples of your average drug syndicate gangster. Watching that video, there is no mistaking what he’s doing in it for what it is. Bracketed by men in paramilitary uniform calling for spiritual warfare, saying they will "take back the land" and that "God hates the act of homosexuality" and telling the mayor "we will fight with you", James Naugle stood in the mayor’s office and made a threat. He said to the Gay community, and to any heterosexuals who might be thinking of standing in solidarity with us, get off my back faggots…or you’ll be sorry.
We gay folk have friends among the heterosexuals. Never doubt that. Never, never, never. And because they are beautiful people…decent…good hearted…good people…they don’t really understand what it is we’re all facing. They just don’t…
When I saw Angels in America, I thought the closeted gay Mormon character was a little too heavy handed, but in retrospect I’ve come to realize that Tony Kushner understood something about the world that I did not.
Yeah. He does. Yeah…it looks a tad heavy-handed… But no…it isn’t…
Via Box Turtle Bulletin. The man who went to a Houston Texas gay bar looking for a homosexual to kill, and killed 46-year-old Kenneth Cummings Jr., believes with all his heart that he did the right thing. Well of course he does…
A Cypress man charged in the death of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant said Saturday that he was doing God’s work when he went to a Montrose-area bar last month, hunting for a gay man to kill.
"I believe I’m Elijah, called by God to be a prophet," said 26-year-old Terry Mark Mangum, charged with murder June 11. " … I believe with all my heart that I was doing the right thing."
Interviewed in the Brazoria County Jail Saturday morning, Mangum said he feels no remorse for killing 46-year-old Kenneth Cummings Jr., whom relatives described as a "loving" son who never forgot a holiday and a devoted uncle who had set up college funds for his niece and nephew. He worked at Southwest for 24 years.
Mangum, who described himself as "definitely not a homosexual," said God called on him to "carry out a code of retribution" by killing a gay man because "sexual perversion" is the "worst sin."
Mangum believed Cummings to be gay.
"I planned on sending him to hell," he said.
Cummings disappeared June 4. His charred remains were found June 16, buried on a 50-acre ranch near San Antonio owned by Mangum’s 90-year-old grandfather.
Hey, John Smid…I got your considerate and transparent dialogue right here…
My gay friends are also friends with my family. And they’re glad that we have a healthy heterosexual relationship and a healthy relationship with our kids. But they want to be respected too—their rights, their relationships—and not be scapegoated for things that have nothing to do with them.
I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don’t think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can’t overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it’s not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can’t vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think.
Yes, it’s bullshit. But it brings in the bucks. Gay rights wasn’t even a blip on the radar of the religious right until Anita Bryant showed them that it made the fundies come out to the polls in droves, and open their wallets wide to anyone who said they would smite the queers for Jesus. And as long as it keeps making them money, they’ll keep right on waving the gay bogeyman, no matter how obvious it is to everyone that even they aren’t swallowing the bullshit they’re spreading about homosexuals. The fundies have no conscience, and the con artists who are praying on them have no shame.
‘Twas ever thus in the business of hate mongering. I could feel sorry for the little old granny ladies who throw their social security checks at these con men…except for this knife in my heart, and in so many others’, with their names on it. Kinda like those little brass name plates you sometimes see on the backs of pews. Remember, every small tithe of $500, allows us to buy enough stones to properly execute one homosexual in accordance with biblical teachings. These stones are hand polished in our Christian owned and operated factory in Ecuador, and every one has a copy of The Lord’s Prayer hand engraved on it. For an extra $500, we’ll add the personal dedication of your choice (30 characters or less…remember spaces count the same as letters). Give one as a gift. Use it to remember a dearly departed loved one…
Max Blumenthal writing for The Nation has an article up about the career of Jerry Falwell that is must reading while the republican candidates for president are busy singing his praises. Most folks know the man’s recent history all too well…
In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven." Members of these churches, Falwell added, are "brute beasts." Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell’s denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.
Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life…
…but it’s his beginnings that the republicans who are calling him a saint now, would probably like us all to utterly forget. Point of fact, the religious right itself has been busy rewriting that part of their history for the past couple decades. For generations after the trouncing fundamentalism got during the Scopes trial, fundamentalists held themselves apart from the secular world. Falwell himself said that "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners", though at the time he was hurling that one at Martin Luther King Jr. But it was the sensibility of the breed for generations.
They would all have us all believe now, that it was largely Roe v. Wade that brought fundamentalists into politics. It wasn’t.
Falwell started his career like a lot of them did, preaching segregation…
Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell’s jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."
As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."
In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…
In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
Dig it. It wasn’t abortion. It wasn’t militant homosexuality. It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism. It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools. It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy. It was their tax exemption. It was money.
Seen in that light, a lot of things fit nearly into place. Their exaltation of the profit motive over helping the needy, their outright contempt for the poor, like spitting in the face of the man who said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter heaven, their private jets, their mansions, their palace like mega churches, their weighty investment portfolios. And that stunningly blind eye all these righteous men of God have been turning to the massive corruption of the Bush administration. They’re not hypocrites after all. It was about money right from the beginning. It’s still about money.
Sometimes, It’s The Things That Surprise Them That Are The Most Telling
Andrew Sullivan apparently missed out on a wee little bit of gay American history, as he had to go look it up…
The same people who have been telling me for years that Jerry Falwell is an anachronistic irrelevance are now singing his praises as a pivotal figure in American politics and culture. Presumably that’s why all the Republican candidates had to bow the knee at the moment of his passing. Dean Barnett recommends this reminiscence by Al Mohler. Money quote:
As a 16-year-old boy, I was in the crowd at the convention center in Miami Beach when Dr. Falwell joined singer Anita Bryant in holding a rally to involve Christians in the struggle against a gay rights ordinance adopted by Dade County. I had never heard of Jerry Falwell until that night – and after that experience I would never forget him.
Er…Wiki?? I don’t think there’s a gay American who was past puberty and self aware at the time who would fucking need to look thAT one up. Yes, Andrew, that was the Dade County non-discrimination ordinance she waged an all-out war on. Yes, all it did was protect us from being fired, simply for being gay. And yes, she based a large portion of her campaign on calling gay people pedophiles. She fucking named her campaign Save Our Children after all, didn’t she.
And that rally that Albert "Let’s Exterminate Homosexuality In The Womb" Mohler says he’ll never forget? I suppose there are a lot of people who won’t forget it. I saw some of the news footage of Falwell and Bryant standing together at the podium. I remember vividly Falwell looking solemnly at the gathered reporters and saying "A homosexual will kill you, as soon as look at you."
Just a few years after Falwell and Bryant were standing together at the podium with Falwell telling everyone what a bunch of blood thirsty killers gay people are, Ronald Reagan was courting him in his presidential campaign. The elephant has made gay bashing one of its primary vote getting tools ever since. I guess if you’d actually lived through that part of our history Andrew, you’d know why so many of us feel nothing but contempt for the republican party. Lame and cowardly as the democrats often are, they’re haven’t been busily inciting fear and hate toward us for the past few decades, simply to win elections. How many gay people have died Andrew, because of the climate of hate the republicans have actively stoked in this country? How many gay kids sent off to ex-gay camps? How many kids growing being hated by their peers, growing up hating themselves?
Yes…it’s the party of torture now, isn’t it? But you had to know this day was coming Andrew, when they threw innocent lovers to the wolves back in the 1980s, because it won them elections. Lovers, Andrew. Not terrorists. Not murderers. Not jihadists. Lovers. Because it won them elections. A race to the bottom is always won by the people who are already there.
I see a lot of chattering around the blogs, more amongst the gay bloggers then the religious right might have credited, telling gay people that we shouldn’t rejoice in Falwell’s death. Fine. I’m not rejoicing. But if I’m sorry about anything, it’s that he had his chance to try and right the wrongs he so eagerly inflicted on this poor world, and on gay people, and he let it sail off into the sunset. Obviously I’m in no mood to forgive now. Atrios said, One hopes he finds that his God is a more forgiving being than he believed. But that’s what they all think. Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. In his cups I’m sure Falwell always figured that God would forgive him. So he didn’t have to care about the damage he caused.
I have to admit, writing about Falwell’s death poses an awkward challenge for me. When I worked at Americans United for Separation of Church and State for several years, I read Falwell’s materials, I listened to his speeches, I watched his interviews, and got a real sense for who this man was and what he devoted his life to.
In literally every instance, I was repelled and appalled. But is it not callous to bash a man just hours after his death?
I have another idea — I’ll document Jerry Falwell’s professional life and let his record speak for itself.
Great Idea! I’m going to steal most of his post…because in the midst of all the polite sermonizing over Falwell’s coffin, this needs to be said nonetheless…
March 1980: Falwell tells an Anchorage rally about a conversation with President Carter at the White House. Commenting on a January breakfast meeting, Falwell claimed to have asked Carter why he had “practicing homosexuals” on the senior staff at the White House. According to Falwell, Carter replied, “Well, I am president of all the American people, and I believe I should represent everyone.” When others who attended the White House event insisted that the exchange never happened, Falwell responded that his account “was not intended to be a verbatim report,” but rather an “honest portrayal” of Carter’s position.
August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”
July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.
October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.
February 1988: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a $200,000 jury award to Falwell for “emotional distress” he suffered because of a Hustler magazine parody. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, usually a Falwell favorite, wrote the unanimous opinion in Hustler v. Falwell, ruling that the First Amendment protects free speech.
February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.
March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”
1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour” to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,” Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.”
November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.
April 1998: Confronted on national television with a controversial quote from America Can Be Saved!, a published collection of his sermons, Falwell denies having written the book or had anything to do with it. In the 1979 work, Falwell wrote, “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” Despite Falwell’s denial, Sword of the Lord Publishing, which produced the book, confirms that Falwell wrote it.
January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”
February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.
September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
November 2005: Falwell spearheads campaign to resist “war on Christmas.”
February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.
Father Charles Coughlin he wasn’t…but only because Coughlin didn’t have TV to vent his spleen on. Bad enough Falwell poisoned the American political dialog. Worse, he turned neighbor against neighbor. And worse still, he poisoned the relationship between parents and their gay children. But what is unforgivable is the war he waged on the human heart. He poisoned the deepest, most intimate reaches of the hearts of decent loving people against themselves, deliberately, out of pure unthinking arrogance that quickly turned into venom the moment the sacred purity of his motives were questioned. And afterwords, many gay people never loved wholeheartedly again.
Let God forgive him then, if that’s what will satisfy the Cosmic All. Passing judgment on a soul is not part of my job description anyway, though Falwell and his ilk think often enough that it’s theirs. I cannot forgive the Man. I just can’t. It is not within my power. Some things are unforgivable. Taking the possibility of love away from people is one of those things. Leaving a more barren and angry world in your wake is one of those things. I would strongly suspect doing all that in the name of the man who said Love Your Neighbor, is also one of those things. But that man had a much greater capacity to forgive then I do.
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Mayor Naugle is pictured above to the direct left of President Bush (he is facing the camera). At left, homosexual activists’ 
