The second part of Jim Naughton’s series about the influence of right wing billionaires in mainstream American protestant churches, Following The Money is online now, here.
The Dromantine Retreat and Conference Center , a 19th Italianate mansion sits in stony isolation on a hilltop outside Newry , Northern Ireland . The center is home to a Catholic seminary, but it played host to a distinctively Protestant drama in February 2005. For five days, the Primates of the Anglican Communion assembled in its meagerly-furnished meeting rooms to determine whether the 77-million member body could be preserved despite bitter disagreements over homosexuality.
For the previous 15 months, the leaders of several conservative Episcopal organizations had been working secretly with their allies among the primates to remove the Episcopal Church from the Communion for consecrating a gay man with a male partner as bishop and permitting the blessing of same-sex relationships. Failing that, they aimed to establish a parallel American province for Episcopalians who differed with their Church on the nature of same-sex relationships.
At the Dromantine conference, the Americans and their international allies collaborated with an unprecedented openness, in an attempt to force Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to take a harder line against the Episcopal Church.
Among the primates who backed this effort were Peter Akinola of Nigeria , Henry Orombi of Uganda and Gregory Venables of Argentina . Working with them were the leaders of the American Anglican Council, the Anglican Communion Network, the Ekklesia Society and the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
Those groups, backed by five politically conservative U.S. foundations, and Howard F. Ahmanson, a benefactor of numerous conservative ballot initiatives, candidates and think tanks, had been cultivating relationships with evangelical leaders in the developing world since the mid-1990s. But at Dromantine, the Americans’ role as the principal strategists for the movement against their church came into focus.
The impending schism in the Anglican church is by no means a grass roots movement powered by disagreements over scripture. It is fueled and funded by a handful of American right wing billionaires who are also the source of most of the money funding the American culture wars for the past two decades. The Washington Blade this week, has a short article on how one of their front groups, the Institute on Religion & Democracy, has been stepping up its attacks on the gay community since the end of the cold war:
“There is a growing awareness that IRD and groups affiliated with them have been having an increasingly disruptive effect on our churches,” John H. Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, told the Blade. “In some cases, groups that have affinity with IRD provide instruction to churches seeking to leave the United Council of Churches.”
IRD’s critics point to the group’s leadership and funding sources as proof it intends to use gay issues to divide congregations.
Follow the money
IRD’s financial backers include conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Foundation; the Carthage Foundation; the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation; and the Randolph Foundation, according to Media Transparency, a research group that investigates conservative groups.
Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. has also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to IRD, according to a report by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington authored by Jim Naughton, communications director for the diocese. Ahmanson has also contributed hundreds of thousands to groups opposing gay marriage and pushing anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, according to the report.
By way of dozens and dozens of front groups and propaganda mills, this small circle of right wing billionaires have utterly poisoned American politics. The extent of their political influence has only come to light through the persistent work of a few small progressive watchdog groups. The extent of their reach into the religious lives of Americans is still being documented. For all the damage they’ve done to the political dialog in America, the damage they’ve done to the spiritual lives of the American people may, in the end, be far more profound.
Via Pam’s House Blend…the implosion at Patrick (you know…that guy who said, "give me liberty or give me death"…) Henry College continues…
Nearly a third of the faculty members at a small evangelical Christian college in Virginia are reportedly leaving the school following disputes with its president over theology and academic freedom.
Christianity Today reports that five full-time faculty members have announced they will not be returning to Patrick Henry College in Purcellville next year. Nine professors have left in the past year, as well as four senior executives in the past 18 months. The departing professors accuse outgoing PHC president Michael Farris of squelching academic freedom on campus and disparaging Calvinist theology.
According to the school’s statement of doctrinal neutrality, Patrick Henry College "welcomes all people who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" and "does not take sides on certain doctrinal matters that often separate … believers." The statement reads: "The College itself is neutral on the doctrinal distinctives which go beyond the points covered in our Statement of Faith and are outside the mission of the College."
This is really starting to remind me of H.L. Mencken’s saying how theology is an attempt to explain the unknowable, in the terms of the not worth knowing. But then again it’s not the theology that’s the issue here. This is a fight between two irreconcilable views of what constitutes knowledge. Not truth…knowledge.
Think of it as the difference between sitting like a couch potato in front of your TV set, passively receiving information, verses looking through a pile of books in your local library for the answer to some question you have. The TV tells us everything it thinks we need to know. We don’t get to ask it questions, we just trust and receive. It takes a little sweat sometimes to find what you’re looking for at a library. You have to work for it. The answers don’t just jump off the shelves into your lap. And sometimes the books contradict one another, and you have to judge between them. On the one hand you have those who believe that knowledge is something that is revealed to us. On the other, those who believe knowledge is something that is searched for and discovered. Knowledge as something that is given to us, and which we should regard as a gift, verses knowledge as something we have worked to uncover, and must treat with care, because we are fallible. We do not have the perfect God’s eye view.
Once upon a time, Baptists generally found the latter view more agreeable. The Truth is out there…but we all have to find our way to it ourselves, and take a measure of humility with us along the way.
Well…not anymore…
Farris, a Baptist minister, has publicly expressed views that have shocked some professors and students. "He said St. Augustine was in hell," said Root. "I heard it with my own ears." Other professors and students said Farris has repeatedly disparaged Calvinist theology.
"There is a sense that you face antagonism as someone who is theologically Reformed," said Bates, who sparred with Farris over a speech he was planning to deliver at the college’s annual Faith and Reason Lecture, and again over the use of Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology textbook. According to Bates, Farris considered it "too Reformed."
"We are put in a hard position," said Bates. "We’re told this is an open dialogue, but if you engage in open dialogue, you’re in trouble. It’s infuriating because you’re an academic and want to engage in ideas."
Bates said that at a meeting with Farris, "He told me that a person of the Reformed position to which I hold cannot in good conscience sign the statement of faith. When I responded that I failed to see the discrepancy between the two, he replied, ‘I define the statement of faith.’"
I define the statement of faith… Okay. Well I guess we know who the source of all knowledge and truth Really is now…
The preacher stopped at least, and there arose out the darkness a woman with her hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so quickly we couldn’t hear what she said, but soon her voice rose resonantly and we could follow her. She was denouncing the reading of books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared, had come to her cabin and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused to touch it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true, then everything in it was already in the Bible. If it was false, then reading it would imperil the soul. This syllogism from the Caliph Omar complete, she sat down. There followed a hymn, led by a somewhat fat brother wearing silver-rimmed country spectacles. It droned on for half a dozen stanzas, and then the first speaker resumed the floor. He argued that the gift of tongues was real and that education was a snare. Once his children could read the Bible, he said, they had enough. Beyond lay only infidelity and damnation.
-H.L. Mencken – The Hills Of Zion
Fair warning: I’m going to relate some of my own spiritual beliefs here. Your mileage may vary.
In May of the year 2006, in the nation that once put men on the moon, three college professors resigned their posts after being taken to task for telling their students that there is more that they need to know about life, then what written is in the bible…
Professors To Leave Patrick Henry
Mar 23, 2006 — A public debate at Patrick Henry College about whether the Bible is the only source of truth preceded the decisions by three professors and an instructor last week to tell school administration they would not return for another year.
Assistant Professor of Classics David C. Noe, Assistant Professor of History and Literature J. Kevin Culberson, Chairman of the Department of Government Robert Stacey and Instructor of Government Erik S. Root, all submitted letters indicating they would not return after the current school year, according to sources from the Purcellville college. Patrick Henry founder and President Michael Farris said the departures followed an “exchange of ideas” and a critique of an article Culberson and Noe wrote in the student newspaper The Source.
“Shortly after the responding article was published these people indicated they weren’t going to come back next year,” Farris said.
The article in question, titled “The Role of General Revelation in Education,” argues that sources outside of the Bible are needed for Christians to lead happy and productive lives.
“Christians may be inclined to accept this proposition when it comes to things like carpentry and the law,” the article states. “After all the Bible does not tell us how to fix a door jam or file a brief in appellate court. They are less inclined or sometimes refuse to accept this when it comes to matters of ethics and the nature of the soul. But while it is true that the Bible contains all we need to know for reconciliation with God, it does not include all the information we need to live happy and productive lives.”
Patrick Henry College’s Statement of Christian Philosophy states “God is the source of all truth, be it spiritual, moral, philosophical, or scientific. … Christian faith and genuine learning cannot be separated; neither is our Christian faith a mere addendum to the liberal learning process. Instead, our Christian faith precedes and informs all that we at Patrick Henry College study, teach and learn.”
In response to the article in The Source, Raymond Bouchoc, the college’s chaplain, sent a campus-wide e-mail that dissects Culberson and Noe’s article point-by-point. Bouchoc’s response stated that it was endorsed by Farris. The lengthy response cites numerous “harmful implications” of Culberson’s and Noe’s column.
One of those “harmful implications” rebuts Culberson and Noe’s position that the Bible does not include all information needed for happy, productive lives.
“God, by means of His common grace, has provided mankind with the ability to understand and harness the operations of creation for his own benefit and prosperity,” Bouchoc’s response states. “While it is true that the particulars of ‘all things’ are not spelled out explicitly in Scripture, it is, nevertheless, sufficient in that it provides the universal guiding principles for all of life, leaving nothing within creation that is not addressed.”
The school’s mission statement doesn’t mince words. It states: “God is the source of all truth, be it spiritual, moral, philosophical, or scientific. … Christian faith and genuine learning cannot be separated; neither is our Christian faith a mere addendum to the liberal learning process. Instead, our Christian faith precedes and informs all that we at Patrick Henry College study, teach and learn.”
God is the source of all truth… Okay…fine. If God is that which created all that is, all that was, and all that will ever be, then God must be the source of everything we will ever know. But confining your understanding of God to the pages of the bible is worse then Newton’s image of himself: as a boy playing on the beach, now and then finding a prettier shell or pebble then usual, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered all around him. It is listening to someone else who claims they were at the beach, telling you all about it, and then telling you that what they just said is all you need to know about it.
Take a stroll down any favorite beach one day. Reach down into the sand and scoop up a few grains. If God is that which created all that is, all that was, and all that will ever be, then there in your hand is the Testament of God. Right there. Blake said it best at the beginning of his Auguries of Innocence
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
Little grains of sand glinting the palm of your hand. The sunlight that makes them sparkle. It is the handwriting of God. Anyone can write a bible. Anyone can sit at their word processor, crank out several hundred pages of holy writ in a few breathless hours of drunken inspiration, pound the pavement waving and screaming it in the face of every passing stranger they meet, and Get Followers. You know it’s true. L. Ron Hubbard proved it in our lifetimes. But only God can make a grain of sand out of nothing. When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.
I can appreciate the insecurities and the fear that animate the fundamentalist. Better to read about God second hand, and from a congenial source, then stand at the edge of everything you know, everything you’ve ever hoped, all your fears, all your dreams, all your deep secret conceits, look God in the face and ask it a question. Because you might get an answer. Why no pope Urban…actually the earth isn’t the center of the universe…and neither are you… It can take your breath away with its beauty. It can scare the steaming shit out of you. But it is not those of us who are willing to let nature speak for itself that are elevating men over God.
“I’ve been told there are things I cannot teach,” Root said. “There are things I cannot ask.” At most any liberal arts college, political science students study Thomas Hobbes and his State of Nature, in which the lack of government causes chaos and an ugly, every-man-for-himself state.
To illustrate this point, Root gave his class a fictional example of the State of Nature, in which two people were stranded on a lifeboat that would only be able to save the life of one person. What would ensue? In Hobbes’ State of Nature, the result would likely not be pretty. This example, Stacey said, was perceived as an example of postmodern deconstruction and used to break down morality. So Root’s lifeboat example was gone.
But there were other instances that rubbed Noe, Root and Stacey the wrong way. A work of literature, which chronicles the birth of Hinduism, was banned. A text, used to teach the Theology Sequence, which had been chosen by various instructors, was pulled from the shelves unless another, balancing view was added to the curriculum.
“We don’t know from day to day, what is going to be accepted or what is not going to be accepted,” Root said. “It’s a moving target.”
That “moving target” has had an impact on discussion, the professors say.
“Students are afraid to raise questions or criticize the school,” Noe said.
The Zeroth Commandment: Thou shalt not ask questions.
Stephen Noon, the gay press secretary to British Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor was apparently fired three years ago. So that makes the story old news…right?
The row is embarrassing for the Archbishop because, although Mr Noon was dismissed in 2003, details have emerged only days after Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor wrote in a letter to The Times: "The Church has consistently spoken out against any discrimination against homosexual persons, and will continue to do so." He was writing to counter suggestions that the deeply held Catholic faith of Ruth Kelly might be at odds with her new role as Equality Minister.
[Emphasis Mine…] Ruth Kelly is the Opus Dei operative Tony Blair has, for some godforsaken reason, decided to install in his cabinet as…get this…Equality Minister. Not bad eh? Sorta like making Al Capone Minister of Banks.
It’s important to remember the distinction here isn’t that she’s a Catholic, but that she’s Opus Dei. There is no way on God’s green earth that a member of Opus Dei is going to work for gay and lesbian equality. The opposition apparently tried to pin her down about the sinfulness of homosexuality last week, but that’s the wrong question to be asking her…
Ruth Kelly, the staunchly Catholic minister for equality, angered gay rights campaigners yesterday when she refused to say whether she regarded homosexuality as sinful.
Miss Kelly, who was given the job of promoting equality and fighting discrimination by Tony Blair in last week’s ministerial reshuffle, ducked the question twice in an interview on the BBC’s Radio Five Live.
Opposition politicians leapt on her evasive answers saying her appointment – she is also a member of the conservative sect Opus Dei which is hostile to homosexuality – raised serious questions about Mr Blair’s commitment to equality.
Asked by presenter Nicky Campbell if she thought homosexuality was a sin Miss Kelly said she was "not going to get into these questions".
When he pushed her a second time she said it was not right for ministers to make "moral judgments".
She insisted she was committed to equality and against discrimination of all kinds but would not be drawn on whether homosexual practices were acceptable.
There are many people of good conscience in this world, who understand that democracies have to treat all their citizens equally, without regard to their religious beliefs, even if what they do, the religions they practice, the lives they live, go against their own personal religious beliefs. Rest assured, none of these folks belong to Opus Dei.
You need to ask someone like Kelly what they think equality and discrimination Mean, as applied to the rights of homosexual people. And you have to be precise, and you have to keep asking that question repeatedly until you get a precise answer back. And it won’t be easy because an Opus Dei member will know by heart all the right weasel words to say and make you think that she means one thing, when in reality she means something completely different. It wasn’t that long ago here in America, that some people believed racial equality meant separate but equal, and being against discrimination meant treating all white people equally, and all black people equally, but not treating black people as the equals of white people.
When Ruth Kelly says she is for equality for homosexuals and against discrimination, without a doubt she does not mean that you treat homosexuals as the equals of heterosexuals, or treat same sex couples as the equal of opposite sex couples. She means, you treat all homosexuals equally…as God intended homosexuals should be treated, and not give preferences toward some homosexuals over other homosexuals. But you don’t treat them as the equals of heterosexuals because they aren’t. So treating them as equals would be silly. As Rick Santorum once said, it would be like treating marriages the same as man on dog relationships. Mercy and justice dictate that you treat all homosexuals equally, but not as the equals of heterosexuals.
It’s what they believe, but don’t expect them to say so until after they’ve gotten power. In the struggle for the moral soul of the human race, honesty is only a conditional virtue.
Do I sound a tad too cynical? Well…I’ve been in this fight since the early 1970s, and I know just how these people think, and how willing they are to look you in the eye and lie through their teeth in service to their gutter crawling prejudices. Case in point, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, who rushed to assure everyone regarding Ruth Kelly’s religious beliefs, that the Catholic church "has consistently spoken out against any discrimination against homosexual persons, and will continue to do so", three years after he’d personally fired a man from his staff simply because that man was a homosexual.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has reportedly fired his top aide after discovering the man is gay.
The Mail reports that Stephen Noon’s sexuality was discovered when his long-term partner visited him at his office.
"His partner came to the office at the end of the day and was introduced to the Cardinal," a friend of the couple tells The Mail.
"Shortly afterwards the Church made it clear that his sexuality was incompatible with the job he had to do. Since he was the spokesperson for the Cardinal, Murphy-O’Connor clearly felt he had to act because homosexual acts are regarded by the Church as a sin," the friend was quoted as saying.
You know Murphy…I’ll just bet I could encapsulate your very existance inside a fairly small DOS Batch file…
Even among those who claim to "love the sinner and hate the sin", this is bedrock. I’ve had bigots tell me to my face that gay lovers don’t love as wholly, or as purely, as heterosexual lovers do. When Senator Rick Santorum compared same sex marriage to a man wanting to marry his dog, he spoke for the many, who believe literally that same sex lovers exist on the same plain as fucking animals. We don’t love, we don’t honor, we don’t care. We don’t feel any higher human emotions, no great joy or awe in a lover’s embrace. All we feel is mindless senseless lust for something that only happens to be another human being. This is the passion behind the fight against same sex marriage rights of Any sort, civil unions or otherwise. To even suggest that gay couples be given any legal status other then perhaps a criminal one, is to literally place their own marriages on the same par as bestiality. They think homosexuals are less then human, and nothing shows it better then their contempt, their utter denial, that gay lovers actually love.
The current pope (the Cardinal formally known as Ratzinger), launched another broadside against homosexual people last week, by way of attacking Italy’s new left of center government. Calling same sex love "weak", Ratzinger warned that he would use all the power of the Vatican if Italy gave same sex couples any rights that heterosexuals are bound to respect.
It seems in the Catholic church lately, gays are the new Jews. Or at any rate, the hate that can dare speak it’s name sixty years after the Holocaust. And it’s having its effect. Attacks on homosexuals, particularly in non-industrial nations with a strong Catholic presence, are becoming more common, and much more violent. In the Caribbean, in central America, in Africa, and even in Brazil, violence against homosexuals is on the rise and it is killing people.
And yet in the face of all the hatred and violence organized religion can incite, gay people still take their lover’s hand in theirs and say "I love you". If they had clue one what it means to actually love someone, Ratzinger and his henchmen would get on their knees and beg God nonstop for the rest of their miserable lives to know a love that strong, even if only for a day.
(Click to see the larger version on the Cartoon Page)
The essential charter of the jihad movement – its "Mein Kampf" – is Sayyid Qutb’s "Milestones" (1964). Before Qutb toured the United States, between 1948 and 1950, he was best known as an Egyptian novelist, poet, and critic. After his time here, he became famous as an Islamic ideologue and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Cairo-based think tank and home of theocratic revolution. He achieved martyrdom in 1966, when he was executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser. His book lives on. It can be found, in whole or in part, on many of the Internet sites created by Muslim students.
…
Qutb didn’t join the Muslim Brotherhood until 1952 – three years after the assassination of the movement’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, and two years after Qutb’s spell of expatriation in the United States. Firsthand experience of Western jahiliyyah seems to have transformed Qutb from a devout but orthodox believer into the architect of worldwide jihad. His American writing (fragments of it were translated and published by John Calvert last year in the journal Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations) shows him as a lonely naïf, adrift in a world of lewd temptations. Although Qutb was forty-two when he sailed from Alexandria for New York in 1948 (the Farouk regime was paying him to study American education methods), his voice sounds painfully young. On the voyage out, a "drunken, semi-naked" woman showed up at the door to his cabin, an American government agent, dispatched by Langley expressly to corrupt him – or so he told his Egyptian biographer years later. Qutb’s sense of extreme moral precariousness comes to the fore in every encounter. Few men past the age of forty can ever have felt their immortal souls to be in such danger at a church hop as Qutb did when he attended one in Greeley, Colorado. The pastor, doubling as disk jockey, lowered the lights to impart "a romantic, dreamy effect," and put on a record of "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" (presumably the Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban version, from the soundtrack of the 1949 hit movie "Neptune’s Daughter"). "The dancing intensified…The hall swarmed with legs…Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love." We’re in the psychodrama of temptation here – the language tumescent with arousal, even as it affects a tone of detachment and disdain.
You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom…You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.
The English writer Daniel Defoe is best remembered today for creating the ultimate escapist fantasy, "Robinson Crusoe," but in 1727 he sent the British public into a scandalous fit with the publication of a nonfiction work called "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom." After apparently being asked to tone down the title for a subsequent edition, Defoe came up with a new one — "A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed" — that only put a finer point on things. The book wasn’t a tease, however. It was a moralizing lecture. After the wanton years that followed the restoration of the monarchy, a time when both theaters and brothels multiplied, social conservatism rooted itself in the English bosom. Self-appointed Christian morality police roamed the land, bent on restricting not only homosexuality and prostitution but also what went on between husbands and wives.
It was this latter subject that Defoe chose to address. The sex act and sexual desire should not be separated from reproduction, he and others warned, else "a man may, in effect, make a whore of his own wife."…One prime objective of England’s Christian warriors in the 1720’s was to stamp out what Defoe called "the diabolical practice of attempting to prevent childbearing by physical preparations."
The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground…
–Contra-Contraception by Russell Shorto, in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 7, 2006
You should go read Contra-Contraception, if only to disabuse yourself of any notion that the religious right’s war on abortion has anything whatsoever to do with being pro-life. It was never about being pro-life. It was always about being anti-sex. Ayn Rand said often that the totalitarians of the world were united against one thing and that one thing was the human mind. Like a lot of her philosophical sermonizing it’s close, but not quite on target. What they’re united against is the Self, and you never see it more clearly, then in their furious condemnations of sex for its own sake. If there is anything, any one point, you can get all the tinpot dictators of the world to agree on, secular communist, fundamentalist theocrat, or cult-of-personality strongman, it’s that nobody should ever be allowed to have, as Tristero puts it, "the ecstatic, transgressive, transcendent, life-affirming, overwhelmingly selfish and also ego-obliterating ecstasy that is sex" without their permission.
It’s all about control, and much, much more then control of your body. Never mind the politics of abortion and who owns your body. The fight is over ownership of your inner self. Does your spiritual and emotional life belong to you, or some nebulous outside agency that may be god, or may be society, but is always in the final analysis someone who says they speak for god, says they speak for society.
Humans are fallen creatures, so the rhetoric goes, and we cannot be trusted to manage our own intimate affairs without making a mess of things. So we must be guided in the paths of righteousness…apparently by other fallen humans who somehow just happen to be less fallen then everyone else. Rand had a great line about that in Atlas Shrugged:
You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: That you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others – that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omipotent ruler…
Kinda…doesn’t make sense when you think about it. But that’s exactly what they’re saying to the rest of us. It’s a fallen world…present company excepted.
R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled "Can Christians Use Birth Control?" he wrote: "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous…
State legislatures are debating dozens of bills surrounding emergency contraception, or the "morning-after pill": whether pharmacists have the right to refuse to fill orders; whether it should be made available over the counter; whether Catholic hospitals may decline to provide it to rape victims. To the dismay of many public-health officials, and following the will of conservative Christian organizations, the Bush administration has steadily moved the federal family-planning program in the direction of an abstinence-only-until-marriage program…
Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex…
It was just a tad over forty years ago, that states could outlaw the sale of contraceptives, even to married couples, never mind the fornicating heathens. If you think the American taliban considers promiscuity in the same way the rest of us do, think again. The war on sex goes right into the bedroom of married couples too. They think they have the god given right to tell even that fundamental god ordained unit of society, husband and wife, how and when to have sex, and more importantly…why. Just because you’re a married heterosexual that doesn’t mean you get to enjoy sex either. You have sex to make babies and for no other reason. Not to nurture the intimate bond between a couple, and especially not for its own simple joyful pleasure. Taking pleasure in physical intimacy, let alone emotional and spiritual intimacy, is immoral, because it is selfish. And selfishness is sinful and wrong because next thing you know, they’ll stop obeying us.
I am not a Randian. In my early twenties I was enthralled by her books and at 52 it embarrasses me now to go back and read them. Rand was not an artist. She was a pamphleteer. A very, Very verbose pamphleteer. But she had a profound insight into what morality is, and also into the totalitarian mindset and this passage from The Fountainhead I think is relevant here.
Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. By Instinct. There’s a special kind of insidious hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators…The independent man kills them – because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know.
There it is. And it isn’t envy, it is fear. The fear of those of us who can cope with the world as it is. We of the "reality based community". Yes, sometimes we are afraid too. Sometimes this poor world frightens us with its cruelty and meanness. We witness our proudest achievements turned into machineries of death. We watch appalled as greed destroys what we’d hoped to build. Yet still we try, slowly, painfully, sometimes at great personal cost, to see at the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, because we know we must. And that is why they hate us. Not for our sins. But for our courage.
The past several decades have seen fantastic technological achievements in science and technology. What was once power that only a handful of large corporations and big governments could house in vast computer rooms, now rests on desktops in homes all over the world. Music plays from devices that clip to our belts and which have more computational power in them then the computers that worked on the atomic bomb in the 1940s. Information about nearly anything one would want to know in the form of text, images, video, is literally at our fingertips. Our spacecraft explore the solar system and beam images of distant planets back to us at the speed of light. Our telescopes reach out and gather light from near the dawn of time. It can be utterly overwhelming. As Carl Sagan said it at the end of his novel Contact, for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only though love. It should surprise no one then, that in our time religious fundamentalism shouts a terrible noise of death and destruction back at civilization, back at love.
They fear the world because they cannot cope. They fear us because we can, and they hate us for our courage. So they must control us. So they must enslave us. And the only way to completely enslave a person is from within. Take away from a person all the awe and joy, all the wonder and exuberance of life, and the emptiness you’ve left inside of them might be yours to fill. That is why there is a war on sex, a war on human intimacy, a war, ultimately, on love.
(Washington) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has bowed to pressure from a Republican congressman to include two abstinence-only proponents to a federal panel on STDs, bypassing the scientific approval process according to a published report.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind) the chair of the House subcommittee on drug policy accused the CDC of including only opponents of abstinence programs on the panel to be held Tuesday at the National STD Prevention Conference in Jacksonville, Fla.
In e-mail to Health and Human Services officials, obtained by the Inquirer, Souder’s office asked whether the CDC was "clear about the controversial nature of this session and its obvious anti-abstinence objective."
"It was clear that there was not a scintilla of something positive about the abstinence education method," Michelle Gress, an aide to Souder told the paper.
Critics of congressional interference at the CDC said they were concerned that scientific studies on sexual behavior would not be made public if they conflicted with the administration’s pro abstinence stand.
Jonathan Zenilman, president of the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association and conference organizer said that the two pro-abstinence people added to the panel are not scientists.
"These people aren’t scientists; they haven’t written anything," he told the Inquirer. "The only reason they’re here is because of political pressure from the administration."
To make room for the abstinence proponents the CDC dropped two researchers from the panel – one a Penn State scientist who had prepared a discussion paper on how abstinence programs were tied to rising STD rates.
Emphasis mine. I have a follow-up post in the works about the republican war on sex, since the Sunday Times conveniently did an article about it. But for now just note that it does not matter whether or not it abstinence programs meet any scientific objective. They meet a political one. The lack of any scientific credentials on the part of the abstinence proponents is actually a plus. It means they can’t be suspected of having any loyalty to the evidence.
Many teens taking virginity pledges renege on them and others take them after having had intercourse, according to a study released Tuesday by the Harvard School of Public Health.
Researcher Janet Rosenbaum studied the responses of 13,568 participants, ages 12 to 18, from a 1995 national survey and compared them with a follow-up study a year later.
She found that 52% of adolescents who made the pledge not to have sex until marriage in the 1995 survey denied making such a vow a year later.
Dig it. They not only broke the pledge, they denied ever even making it. It’s real easy to make that kind of pledge early in adolescence, when the hormones haven’t quite gotten up to temperature, and real hard to keep it later on. Ask me how I know.
But that’s not to say that these virginity pledges don’t benefit anyone…
The federal government is spending $178 million in the 2006 fiscal year for abstinence education, the council said.
Any guesses as to how much of that money goes to "faith based" institutions? Republican friendly faith based institutions?
The mistake of course, is assuming that the goal of abstinence education is specifically to stop people from having sex. In the grand scheme of things it is, surely. But what abstinence education does is deprive people, teens specifically but not exclusively, of the knowledge they need to avoid getting pregnant or getting sexually transmitted disease. Like a room full of carbon monoxide gas, which doesn’t so much suffocate as prevent the blood from being able to absorb oxygen, abstinence education exists to prevent education, so to make the sex lives of teens and adults more dangerous.
If the goal to be achieved is, as the abstinence proponents claim, to prevent kids from engaging in behavior that can be dangerous to their health, to their very lives, then they need look no further then the experience of the Netherlands, whose comprehensive sex education is light years beyond the kind of frankness the religious right would ever tolerate here in the United States…and yet their rates of teenage pregnancies and STDs are among the lowest in the world. There’s your answer: Teach kids the facts about sex and human sexuality. But that’s not the question. The religious and political right aren’t trying to keep kids and adults safe, they’re trying to keep them from having sex. They’re trying to keep them from having sex, by making it more dangerous for them to have it. Even if that means killing some of them. Especially if that means killing some of them…
Deaths from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer – but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.
The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.
In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favor vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.
"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.
A license to have sex… Pay attention to that. The problem with the vaccine, according to the Family Research Council, isn’t that it doesn’t work, but that it does. In fact, it appears to be 100 percent effective in protecting women from the human papilloma virus, which is the primary cause of cervical cancer in the United States…a cancer that strikes more than 10,000 women in the U.S. each year, and kills over 3,700. Take that shadow of death away from people and, according to the religious right, you have given them a license to have sex.
And that’s why science is unwelcome on a CDC panel on sexually transmitted diseases. Science and medicine cure disease and make pregnancy a matter of choice, and that gives us permission to have sex, and only the man behind the pulpit can give us permission to have sex. Got that? In a nation where the mullahs cannot legally stone to death people who have sex without their permission, pregnancy and disease are all they have left to hope for. And make no mistake, hope they do.
There are two subtle misconceptions about the rise of the neo fascist right in America. The first is that it amounts to a new and unholy alliance between big business and the religious right. The second is that the religious right has largely been responsible for giving that rise its energy. Both these beliefs have somewhat more then a germ of truth to them. But there is a power, even behind the religious right, and it isn’t exactly a godly one. The religious right can generate huge quantities of fire and brimstone, smoke and noise. But the fuel for the fire is money, and the major organizations of the religious right can barely meet their own expenses, much less fund a vast network of think tanks, publications, and grassroots political action committees that cannot support themselves. Big American corporations routinely give to political parties and bribe politicians and communities in various ways, but it does not itself fund the vast right wing infrastructure that has come to dominate, and profoundly distort, American politics.
The dragging of the American political dialogue into the gutter has been largely done by a small circle of right wing billionaires. Working quietly behind the scenes, their wealth funds an astonishing array of institutions and groups, from the very large to the very small. Through their foundations, and their occasional direct contributions, they have injected their wealth, and their political viewpoints, into everything from the major right wing propaganda mills masquerading as think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, to newspapers and magazines, to religious and conservative campus clubs and newspapers, and small ersatz community grassroots organizations, many of which seem to suddenly pop up out of nowhere whenever local governments begin enacting progressive legislation, particularly regarding gay rights.
This small circle of billionaires have utterly poisoned the political dialogue in America. But their ambitions are not confined to this nation alone. Their poison now works its way into the veins of many nations abroad as well. Canada. South America. Africa.
And for decades now, subtly and at times in complete secrecy, they have been distorting the dialogue of the mainstream protestant denominations. Through funding of small and otherwise obscure right wing clerical groups, they actively seek to establish their beliefs regarding faith and religion, as they have sought to establish their political beliefs, through the shear power of their billions.
Much of which, unsurprisingly when you think about it, is inherited wealth.
In the current issue of the newsletter of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington D.C., Jim Naughton has begun a multi-part series tracking this money, and its influence, in the Anglican church. I urge everyone to read it, even if you are not an Anglican, because it looks to shine a much needed light on how this group of billionaires not only operates, but who they are, and where they are determined to take this world. What they are doing to this one denomination, which was known for its religious and political moderation until they started injecting their money into it, they are doing to other churches as well. And what they are doing to religious life in America, is pretty much what they have done to our political life.
When the General Convention of the Episcopal Church meets next month in Columbus, Ohio, a small network of theologically conservative organizations will be on hand to warn deputies that they must repent of their liberal attitudes on homosexuality or face serious consequences. The groups represent a small minority of church members, but relationships with wealthy American donors and powerful African bishops have made them key players in the fight for the future of the Anglican Communion.
Millions of dollars contributed by a handful of donors have allowed a small network of theologically conservative individuals and organizations to mount a global campaign that has destabilized the Episcopal Church and may break up the Anglican Communion.
The donors include five secular foundations that have contributed heavily to politically conservative advocacy groups, publications and think tanks, and one individual, savings and loan heir Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., who has given millions of dollars to conservative causes and candidates.
Contributions from Ahmanson and the Bradley, Coors, Olin, Scaife and Smith-Richardson family foundations have frequently accounted for more than half of the operating budgets of the American Anglican Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, according to an examination of forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service and an analysis of statements made by both donors and recipients.
(Emphisis mine). Remember these names if you have not heard of them before. These same names keep popping up over and over again, whenever anyone tries to track where the money is coming from, that funds various right wing groups. Scafie. Olin. Bradley. Coors. Smith-Richardson.
Since the 1970s, charitable foundations established by families with politically conservative views have donated billions of dollars to what the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, has called "an extraordinary effort to reshape politics and public policy priorities at the national, state and local level."
Five foundations are of special note for the magnitude of their donations to political and religious organizations. They are: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; the Adolph Coors Foundation; the John M. Olin Foundation, which ceased operations last year; the Smith-Richardson Trust and the Scaife Family Foundations. Much of the foundations’ largesse supports institutions and individuals active in public policy, including think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute and individuals such as William Bennett, Charles Murray ( The Bell Curve ) and Dinesh D’Souza ( The End of Racism ).
However, the foundations’ activities also extend into the nation’s churches-particularly its mainline Protestant churches. The foundations have provided millions of dollars to the IRD 2 which, in a fundraising appeal in 2000, said it sought to "restructure the permanent governing structure" of "theologically flawed" Protestant denominations and to "discredit and diminish the Religious Left’s influence."
The IRD was established in 1981 by neo-conservative intellectuals hoping to counter the liberal public policy agendas of the National and World Councils of Christian Churches.
How they operate…
In one well-publicized instance in the 1980s, Diane Knippers, then an IRD staff member, and later its president, distributed information critical of the Nicaraguan Council of Protestant Churches (Consejo de Iglesias Pro-Alianza Denominacional, or CEPAD), a disaster relief organization founded after the devastating 1972 earthquake and sponsored by the mainline American Baptist Church.
CEPAD ran a network of medical clinics for the poor, as well as a successful literacy campaign, according to Fred Clark, an editor of Prism , the magazine of Evangelicals for Social Action. "That literacy work had won the admiration and support of Nicaragua ‘s president, Daniel Ortega, and his Sandinista regime. Ortega’s praise of CEPAD gave Knippers what she saw as an opening," Clark wrote in a 2003 account.
Although the evangelical churches did not support the Sandinistas, Clark wrote, "Knippers portrayed CEPAD — and therefore the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society — as ‘guilty’ by association. She wrote of CEPAD as a communist front, part of a supposed Soviet beachhead in Nicaragua . No one in this country paid much attention, but the contras did. CEPAD’s clinics became targets for their paramilitary terrorists."
The ensuing controversy was followed closely by mainstream evangelical publications such as Christianity Today . In the end, Clark writes, "CEPAD was vindicated and IRD suffered a devastating embarrassment. They were, rightly, perceived as an unreliable source of information – closed-minded ideologues who were willing to attack others on the basis of irresponsibly flimsy evidence."
Still, Knippers, who died in 2005, and the institute remained a favorite of conservative foundations. Since 1985, the IRD has received 72 grants worth more than $4,679,000 from the Bradley, Coors, Olin, Scaife and Smith-Richardson family foundations.
Ahmanson…
Ahmanson also helps sustain organizations in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that support removing the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada from the Anglican Communion unless they change their policies regarding same-sex relationships.
The full extent of his contributions cannot be determined because most are made through his private foundation, Fieldstead and Company, whose records are not open to public scrutiny. And neither the AAC nor the IRD discloses the names of its most significant contributors or the amounts of their donations.
As a result, Anglicans have no full accounting of how much money is being spent, and for what purposes, in the struggle for control of their Communion.
Naughton devotes most of the rest of his first part to Ahmanson. That’s a good start. You need to pay particular attention to Ahmanson…
Previously, Ahmanson was a disciple of the Rev. Rousas John Rushdoony, the father of Christian Reconstructionism. Rushdoony died in 2001 with the Ahmansons at his bedside. He advocated basing the American legal system on biblical laws, including stoning adulterers and homosexuals.
Unlike most mainstream protestant churches in America, Christian Reconstuctionists believe that the second coming of Christ won’t happen until After Christ’s kingdom has been established on the earth. They regard it as their duty to God to establish biblical fundamentalist theocracy around the world, so the second coming can happen. Think the Taliban, but with America’s military might and nuclear arsenal. The believe that non-believers can have no civil rights, cannot serve in government or the military, and must be ritually put to death if they violate biblical law…
Ahmanson, who suffers from Tourrette’s syndrome, rarely grants interviews with the media, but he and his wife cooperated with the Register on a five-part profile that appeared in August 2004."I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony seemed to think–and I’m not sure about this–that a godly society would stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned," Ahmanson was quoted as saying. "I no longer consider that essential."
"It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things," he added. "But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity."
Perhaps he’d also find it "a little hard to say" if it was inherently immoral to kill people running medical clinics, and teaching the poor to read in South America too.
This is where the money is coming from, to fund the destabilization of the Anglican church. Be certain that this same money is also actively funding right wing theocrats in every American denomination today. Never mind the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons of the pulpits…this is why religious life in America has become smaller, meaner, more venomous then ever. It is also why America and the American dream of liberty and justice for all is more in danger now, then it has ever been. The money that destabilizes the Anglican church, is also actively working to destabilize America.
Ahmanson emerged as a political force in his home state of California in the early 1990s. Research conducted for The Los Angeles Times found that he and his wife had contributed $3.9 million to Republican candidates in state and local races and $82,750 in federal races between 1991 and 1995. They also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to ballot initiatives that banned gay marriage and affirmative action.Campaign finance records indicate that the couple continues to contribute heavily to Republican candidates nationwide.
Ahmanson is a member of the secretive Council for National Policy, an elite group of politically conservative national leaders who meet several times a year to coordinate their efforts on a common agenda. According to a New York Times report, the dates and locations of the group’s meetings are kept secret, as is its membership. Participants in the group’s discussions promise not to reveal their content. Members in recent years have included Gary Bauer, Tom DeLay, James Dobson, Bob Jones, III, of Bob Jones University, Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series, Grover Norquist, Oliver North, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly.
Ahmanson also supports several think tanks. He was a major benefactor and former board member of Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation. He also contributes heavily to the Discovery Institute, the intellectual flagship of the Intelligent Design movement, and the George C. Marshall Institute, which disputes research indicating that human activity contributes to global warming.
One more thing about Ahmanson you need to know…
Increasingly, investigative writers seeking an explanation have looked to Diebold’s history for clues. The electronic voting industry is dominated by only a few corporations – Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold and ES&S combined count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box electronic votes.
In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS)…
…
The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the original money for the Council on National Policy.
In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by the company he served as chairman and maintained a financial investment. In both the 1996 and 2002 elections, Hagel’s ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his winning votes. Due to the contracting out of services, confidentiality agreements between the State of Nebraska and the company kept this matter out of the public eye. Hagel’s first election victory was described as a “stunning upset” by one Nebraska newspaper.
Once again…You Must Read Jim Naughton’s article. Go. As he posts the rest of his series I will link to it. It is not only his church, but this nation, that desperately needs this kind of reporting about the activities of these billionaires, and how many sock puppets they own, because those sock puppets are everywhere.
Over the past three decades, conservatives have painstakingly cultivated the public persona of an aggrieved outsider class, bereft of the money and media influence they claim liberals enjoy. Their well-rehearsed routine consists of the repetition of a series of catchphrases designed to snare votes by using wedge social issues to create class divisions, while their own campaigns are funded by a class of wealthy, corporate donors who keep their think tanks flush with lucre. But this bait and switch is hardly a secret, and the donor class continues to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at conservative think tanks in order to shore up the right wing’s advantage in both organization and message discipline. Since the early 1970s, countless conservative foundations have sprung up to quietly influence American public policy by identifying, training, and churning out conservative journalists, thinkers, and pundits – many of whom now hold positions of power in the media.
Remember these names: Scafie. Olin. Bradley. Coors. Smith-Richardson. Carthage. Koch. Lambe. Earhart. DeVos. Ahmanson. By way of a huge array of foundations and front organizations, it is their money that has turned America from a land of freedom and promise, into the land of George Bush republicans and religious right hate mongers. That money is also working very diligently, to turn the Christ who said "Love thy neighbor" into one who says "Kill the stranger, because might makes right."
Shallow understanding from people of good will, is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
-Martin Luther King Jr.
Jason Johnson, the gay college student expelled from The University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, has been allowed to return to class and finish the school year, under an agreement hammered out by his, and the school’s lawyers. I’m actually surprised. I’d thought the school would dig in its theological heels and insist on its absolute right to remove filthy sodomites from its sacred grounds. In exchange Jason agrees not to sue the school, but I’m puzzled as to how much leverage the threat of a lawsuit against a Southern Baptist school in the Bible Belt could have been. In any case, they’re not going to lie on his transcripts that he failed the semester anymore. Whether or not they treat him fairly in the classroom remains to be seen.
From the Lexington Herald-Leader comes this column from Paul Prather. I wish I could like it…he says a few things I completely agree with…
• I believe private religious schools should have the right to make whatever rules they want (short of mandates to torture or behead heathens), in keeping with the tenets of their faith…
• If you can’t obey a school’s code of conduct, common sense dictates that you might not want to enroll there.
• On the other hand, the same principle holds true for the school itself. If the University of the Cumberlands hopes to earn accreditation from a secular agency, it must be prepared to abide by that group’s secular standards. You can’t have it both ways.
That’s pretty much where I am generally, and I’d go on to add that if you want to discriminate against a portion of the citizenry at minimum you can’t expect them to support you with their tax dollars. Prather goes on to comment on the hypocrisy of singling out gay students for violations of sexual conduct rules, saying that in his own experience on Christian campuses, the straight kids could be just as sexually active as the kids on the secular campuses, if at least a tad more reserved about expressing it openly. But then he goes on to assert that Johnson’s problem was that he called attention to himself, and from there his column goes down a familiar path…
Thus, Johnson’s main mistake wasn’t simply being gay. It was calling undue attention to his orientation. Christian colleges might have been the originators of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell philosophy.
It is a fact that Johnson posted pictures of himself and his boyfriend on his MySpace profile, but nowhere have I seen it said that he was being open about his sexual orientation at school. What I’ve always heard to date is that someone informed on him to the school administration, and they went looking for his MySpace profile and then confronted him with it. In other words, Johnson didn’t tell the school, the school Asked. That’s not Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…that’s stay in the closet if you know what’s good for you. If heterosexuals understand nothing else about their homosexual neighbors, they need to understand this: Those days are over.
There are a lot of us, far too many in my opinion, who are still perfectly willing to be closeted on a situational basis, but none of us but the desperate self loathing are willing to live our entire lives inside the closet anymore. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not turning your back on God or having a lack of moral values or defiant homosexual militancy. It’s something else, something that the Prather’s of the world just don’t seem to get. And yet it’s so simple, or would be, if only you can see the people for the homosexuals. Prather, in trying his best, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he’s actually trying, misses it completely.
If a straight student had, say, posted photos of himself and his girlfriend in flagrante delicto on the Internet, he also would have been expelled.
In flagrante delicto. It means "Caught in the act." Johnson didn’t post pictures of him and his boyfriend having sex on his MySpace profile. But you could tell at a glance those photos were of two teenagers in love. Look at that for a second. Prather is using a phrase that generally is taken to mean getting caught having sex (the act) to describe photos of two gay teenagers in love. And he goes on in that manner for the rest of the column, trying his best to be sensible and compassionate, and failing miserably because he cannot see the people for the homosexuals…
Homosexual activities and extramarital heterosexual sex indeed are contrary to biblical and historical Christian standards. Yet, they’re about equally as errant as pride, gluttony, stinginess, temper tantrums, disrespect for parents and lying.
One question raised by the Johnson case is this: How should Christian groups react to sexual misconduct? All religious organizations are made up of human beings who, in my observation, tend to fail miserably a fair amount of the time.
Sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct.
Maybe Christian administrators should consider reacting the way Jesus did. I never can think about an incident such as Johnson’s without remembering the time Jesus was confronted with a woman who had been caught "in the very act" of adultery and was about to be stoned for it…
Adultery. The Very Act.
Jesus said, "Let the one who is himself without sin throw the first rock." That ended the stoning. Then he addressed the woman. "Neither do I condemn you," he said. "Go your way. From now on, sin no more."
What a beautiful response…
Beautiful perhaps, when made to someone who had cheated on their spouse. But it is unmitigated ugliness to say this to a gay teenager about his first love. Johnson is not married (never mind for now, that homosexuals can only Be married in one state of the union). He is not having an affair with another married person. And considering Johnson’s religiosity, it would not surprise me in the least to hear they aren’t even having sex yet. We don’t all jump right into the sack on the first date. So at worst you can only call Johnson’s "sin" fornication, not adultery, and there is no evidence even for that. But notice the mental leap here, from images of two young men in love, to adultery, and even more grotesquely, to forgiveness for adultery. No. From Johnson’s MySpace profile, his sin can only be one thing: being a homosexual in love. And there’s what’s missing from all of Paul Prather’s compassion and understanding: any sense whatsoever that homosexuals love, and that they are punished simply for being in love.
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… This is the bedrock of anti-gay prejudice, the one irreducible premise through which everything else about homosexuals is understood. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Never mind the raving haters of the world like Fred Phelps…if you want to understand how otherwise decent people can casually rip the lives of their gay and lesbian neighbors apart with no thought or care for the human misery and wreckage they leave behind, there’s why. They can do it, confidant in the knowledge that our feelings for our mates are shallow imitations of the real feelings heterosexuals feel for theirs. Heterosexuals feel love and contentment and fulfillment in their spouses, but homosexuals can only feel a pale imitation of that. "Playing house" as the homophobic science fiction writer Orson Scott Card once put it. Heterosexuals feel deep and profound grief at the loss of a spouse, but homosexuals can only try to mimic grief at best. So we cannot rip apart everything in their lives they ever held dear, because they don’t really hold those things dear…not the way we do. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
It’s how anti gay prejudice becomes it’s own unstoppable machine, grinding up the lives of innocent people while others who fancy themselves decent and compassionate and thoughtful citizens look sadly on, as though watching the fate of dogs that have to be put down because they’re so sick. Oh how…unfortunate…for them… If you think that the only wrong done to Jason Johnson was being expelled from his school, you’re missing the graver injury done to his person, and right at the very core of his being. To see it, all you have to do is be able to see the person for the homosexual. Let me try to explain to the Prathers of the world how horrible that "beautiful response" actually is.
Picture the first time you fell in love. Picture that amazed, wonderful feeling. One day, life just seemed more wonderful, more intense, more amazing then you’d ever dreamed it could be. The sun shone a little brighter on everything around you then it did before. The stars seemed to shine more intensely. Everything old seemed new again. Life was beautiful. It was worth living no matter how hard or desperate it got. Everything that ever happened to you was worth it, because it brought you to that moment, and that person. Everything that ever Could happen to you from then on was worth it, so long as a certain person was there, so long as you could see them smile. Because whenever they smiled, you smiled.
I remember it well. When I was a teenager I used to listen to all the pop culture love songs of the sixties and early seventies on my radio, and never really understood what they were about, until I fell in love myself, with a male classmate. I remember hearing this song on my radio one day, I’d heard it countless times before and I didn’t like it at all because it was it was slow, it had no beat, it was just some gooey sugary love song and whenever one of those came on I would reach for the tuning knob and try to find something else I could rock to, and this time when it came on I sat and listened, and began to cry…because I knew exactly how the person who wrote it felt…because it said it all about what I was feeling then…
Today I feel like pleasing you more than before
Today I know what I want to do but I don’t know what for
To be living for you is all I want to do
To be loving you it’ll all be there when my dreams come true
Today you’ll make me say that I somehow have changed
Today you’ll look into my eyes, I’m just not the same
To be anymore than all I am would be a lie
I’m so full of love I could burst apart and start to cry
Today everything you want, I swear it all will come true
Today I realize how much I’m in love with you
-Jefferson Airplane, Today
Homosexuals mate to their own sex. That we do doesn’t take from us any of the higher emotions heterosexuals are capable of expressing to their mates, or of their unions. We love. We honor. We cherish. Til death do us part. We are capable of great sacrifice for the honor of our love. We are capable of great joy in that love. Our unions are as life affirming to us as yours are to you. The only difference between us is that we mate to our own sex. You can’t take the homosexuality out of a homosexual, otherwise the snake oil salesmen of the ex-gay ministries would have thousands of happy heterosexuals to show as proof, instead of one paid staff member after another who proudly proclaims their heterosexuality only to get caught in a gay bar months or years later. We are what we are.
You can make us ashamed of ourselves. You can make us hate ourselves. You can make us terrified of the slightest shred of sexual arousal. But you can’t make us heterosexuals because we aren’t. What you Can do, is take all the higher aspects of love and devotion away from us. All the romance. All the poetry. All the honor and devotion. All the awe and all the joy and all the wonder. You can take that from us. You can drain our lives of every last drop of it. But when you do we are still homosexuals, and all you have done is leave us empty human shells with sexual needs that won’t go away.
And that’s exactly what you do, every time you tell a gay kid that his feelings for his first love are sin. You convince him of it, and you literally leave him with nothing left in his life but mindless loveless lust. That’s what you’re calling beautiful.
I’m not going to argue theology with anyone. If you’ve got yourself locked into a relentless fundamentalist religiosity that insists that every last comma and period in the King James bible Must be literally true or you’re not a faithful Christian, then I guess the universe really was created in six days and is about six thousand years old and women suffer the pains of childbirth for the sin of Eve. And if that’s what you believe then all I have to say to you is: Get the fuck off my back!
I’m not going to argue about whether or not we have a choice. That argument is over and done with for everyone except bigots and religious fanatics for whom no science could ever be enough to change their minds.
Here’s what I have to say about the case of Jason Johnson and forgiveness of sin: it doesn’t matter if you don’t mean to hurt anyone, if you won’t stop hurting them! And one other thing, which was said more eloquently by another man, dealing in his own blunt way with another mindless human prejudice that was, and still is, tearing away at innocent people’s lives…
If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches,
that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress.
Progress is healing the wound…
-El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X)
Forgiveness. The biggest problem I have with Christianity, the reason I could never go back to it, is forgiveness. Christ would tell me I have to forgive. I know that. I just can’t. But maybe if I saw a serious start in this country at healing the wound I could try.
You may have already heard the story of Jason Johnson, a gay student who was expelled from the fundamentalist University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky. You may have heard this university claims the right to treat any of its students like less then dog shit because…hey…they’re a private institution and they don’t have to answer to any of those damn secular civil rights and equal opportunity laws. You may have heard further that the University of the Cumberlands is slated to get a sweetheart 11 million dollars of Kentucky tax payer money from the state assembly this year…it’s status as a private institution willing to discriminate against any citizen of Kentucky it damn well pleases to notwithstanding. God says it’s okay to steal money from the heathens.
What you may not have also heard, and which attracted my attention just a few moments ago while reading this article about the incident, is that the University of the Cumberlands is apparently also quite willing to lie through their teeth about Jason’s school record…
The summer after his freshman year, he came out to his parents and returned to campus as an openly gay man.
"I just knew that I couldn’t go back to hiding again. I wanted to be out," said Johnson, adding that he never experienced harassment or conflict because of his sexual orientation. "Being gay is part of who I am, but not the totality of who I am."
Johnson posted messages about his boyfriend and being gay on his profile at MySpace. com, and school administrators eventually saw the Web site; Johnson doesn’t know how they found it. They confronted him last week with a printout of the site, an order to leave the school and failing grades for a semester that probably would have ended with honors.
The university did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.
(Emphasis mine) Okay…it’s one thing to say that an openly gay student doesn’t conform to your school’s religious teachings. It’s one thing to expel that student. But it’s quite another to claim in his transcripts to any other school he might want to attend, that he failed classes which in fact he was doing quite well in, but which in fact you did not permit him to finish. No…you mark the semester as incomplete, and if you’re ashamed to go into detail about why this particular student didn’t complete the semester you let it go at that. But you don’t say he failed, because he didn’t. He wasn’t allowed to finish.
The word for what University of the Cumberlands is doing here….is lie. The word for people who do that sort of thing…is liars. But the word from the pulpits in America now, is that it’s okay to lie through your teeth about homosexuals, and god won’t mind.
When The Bird And The Bird Book Disagree, Believe The Bird
Okay…it’s getting just plain medieval deep in the heart of Texas. Bill Nye, The Science Guy, was giving a presentation at McLennan Community College in Waco, and some people walked out after he told them that a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:16 just doesn’t square with the facts…
And God made two great lights: A greater light to rule the day, and a less light to rule the night, and he made the stars also. -Tyndale’s Old Testament
Well…okay… As poetry it kinda works, but it isn’t right. The sun is a star, and a fairly common type of star at that. And the moon shines in the sun’s light (and also a bit of reflected earth light too from time to time, so we get light from it that’s been doubly reflected), not its own. The moon is not a light, anymore then the mountaintops that reflect the last light of the day as the sun goes down are lights. It’s the moon…a pretty amazing object in its own right, but it is not a light. And the sun is a star too…little different from most of the other stars whose light we see at night. But the person who wrote those lines could not have known any of that and you can see their intent well enough. God made all the things which shine down upon us from the heavens above…the sun which gives us the day, and the moon which shines brightly in the night and also all the stars that shine in the night…
Fine. I can dig it. I’ve spent many a night gazing up in rapture at the creator’s work. This is a beautiful amazing universe we live in. Depending on how expansive your view of God is (or how willing you are to admit you really don’t know crap about what God is, other then it’s that which created the cosmos), science and religion don’t really have much to argue about in Genesis 1:16. But some people just don’t want to hear it…
The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”
He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light,” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light.
A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence.
“We believe in a God!” exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.
Fine, but you don’t seem very willing to embrace that which God hath wrought are you? What the hell were you doing in a science lecture lady? See…this is what’s a tad scary about this story. This fundamentalist woman took her children to a science lecture expecting to hear nothing that contradicted her religious conceits. So what have they been teaching in science classes in Texas for the past generation or two?
They’re remembering the death of pope John Paul this week, and in couple more it’ll be the ascendancy of pope Ratzinger. So since my weekly cartoon is late again (I did another sleep clinic at Hopkins which really mucked up my weekend…), I’ll try and bribe you with a re-run:
Calling same-sex unions "pseudo-matrimony" the pope said: "The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man."
Although was his first public comment on same-sex marriage since becoming Pope, Benedict had long history of attacking same-sex unions.
As Cardinal Ratzinger he was the Vatican’s most outspoken opponent of gay marriage.
He was the author of the a 2003 Vatican directive to priests around the world calling for a proactive stand to stop governments from legalizing same-sex marriage and for a repeal of those those already on the books that give rights, including adoption, to gay couples. (story)
In just a year Ratzinger took John-Paul’s various assaults on the humanity of homosexual people, removed the paternalistic veneer from them, and turned it all into a relentless machine. And now worldwide, violence toward homosexuals is on the rise. Imagine that. You’d think the Catholic church would know better then to go down this path again…
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
-James Carroll, "Constantine’s Sword"
…but hate takes away all reason. In another year people will be marveling at how Ratzinger managed to make the climate for gays and lesbians even worse then he already had. And that hostile climate will in turn, kill more innocent people.
That far-right Catholic web site that theocrat Richard Neuhaus leaned on for his claim that 50 or 60 percent of children raised by male homosexuals turn out to be homosexual or bisexual, and suffer many times the norm in incidence of child sexual abuse, has taken its own a peek at Michael Calace’s "Rape Of The Soul. Unaccountably, they seem somewhat appalled…
"The Rape of the Soul" is a fear-mongering, small-minded, and pathetically smutty polemic about art and the Roman Catholic Church. Presented as a documentary by filmmaker and self-described devout Catholic Michael A. Calace, the film seeks to discredit "predatory artists" from da Vinci and Botticelli to anonymous designers of contemporary greeting cards.
Ooooh. Self described devout Catholic is it? But look on the bright side. He doesn’t described himself as a recovering Catholic. Or an Ex-Catholic.
Kinda gets your goat when people read all kinds of filth into even the simplest expressions of beauty and joy in your world, let alone satanic influences, does it? Kinda pisses you off when people ascribe sinister motives to even the smallest commonplaces of your everyday life does it? "Predatory artists", did they say? Why…how unfair…how terribly, terribly unfair it must seem. But what Calace does he does out of love for the church…not hate. I’m sure many who are Catholic may view exposing the disordered subliminal sex messages and satanism in everything from Catholic art to Catholic children’s song books as a personal attack but it is not…any more then saying cancer or a closer parallel perhaps, alcoholism is a disorder.
Or…not. After Andrew Sullivan posted about the gutter Neuhaus gets his facts on homosexuality from, the gutter replied that Paul Cameron is being smeared by the "gay lobby", Neuhaus only said it was a claim, Cameron isn’t his only source, and in any case homosexuals just don’t want to address the fact that they are "psychologically malformed". But it would "keep trying to find ways to say so in as charitable manner as possible." Or at any rate, as charitable a manner as possible while spitting in people’s faces and simultaneously twisting a knife in their heart. And you best believe charity like that doesn’t come along every day.
Now if I were to call homosexual pedophilia an affective disorder and an activist from NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) accused me of bigotry most people would see that this was clearly an attempt to change the subject from a discussion of the issue at hand. However, in part, because the MSM has conditioned us to think of SSA as an alternative life style it is not so clear that the same logical fallacy is at play in discussing the “gay” issue.
Charity starts with the standard issue comparison of homosexuals to pedophiles. "SSA" in case you’re wondering, is Same Sex Attraction, "MSM" is Main Stream Media, and "gay" is always in quotes because it’s always better to invent acronyms that dehumanize people, then allow them to speak for themselves. Charity. I wonder if Calace invented any good acronyms for all the penises and satanism he found in Catholic art? And in children’s song books no less…
Now if I were to call homosexual pedophilia an affective disorder and an activist from NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) accused me of bigotry most people would see that this was clearly an attempt to change the subject from a discussion of the issue at hand. However, in part, because the MSM has conditioned us to think of Catholicism as an alternative life style it is not so clear that the same logical fallacy is at play in discussing the “left-footers” issue.
Yeah…something like that. With lots of references to how they put pictures of cocks into school children’s books. And remember, it’s a devout Catholic saying so.
Or perhaps my own charity is a tad lacking. But I tried…I swear I tried…and it’s just too goddamn hard to extend the benefit of good faith to the braying jackass who wrote this, right before he compared gay people to child molesters:
The response to the statements that ’same sex attraction is a disorder’ is never an argument for why it is clearly a part of human nature (I suppose because there is none). Rather, the responses include the accusations of bigotry, “homophobia” (I’ve never figured this out, is that the fear of sameness or the fear of human beings???)…
Get me started… You know David, you’re right. You’re Absolutely Right. The word "phobia" means "an intense, abnormal, or illogical fear of a specified thing". It doesn’t mean "hate". It doesn’t mean "avoidance". It doesn’t mean "prejudiced". You’re Absolutely Right David. The word "phobia" does not have that meaning. But The Suffix Can!Look Up The Motherfucking Suffix!
Tell your chemistry teacher that the word "hydrophobe" is something you can’t figure out (Is that fearful water? How can water be afraid?). Then tell your biology teacher that "photosynthesis" is something you can’t figure out, because plants don’t synthesize light, they synthesize sugars. It’ll be fun.
Many who are personally affected by SSA might see this as a personal attack. It is not. In fact, the very reason for this series is to show why calling SSA a disorder cannot be viewed as a personal attack any more than is saying cancer, or a closer parallel perhaps, alcoholism is a disorder. Let me know what you think…
What I think: Jack Chick is worse then you deserve. "Rape of the Soul" on the other hand, is about right. Charity.
The Church says it has ‘rules’ that preclude the gay placements. What has not appeared anywhere is a reasoned case that such placements are bad for the children, and it is the interest of the children that must come first. (For a critical survey of the studies and arguments relative to placing children with homosexual couples, see cosmos-liturgy-sex.) The claim that 50 or 60 percent of children reared by male homosexuals turn out to be homosexual or bisexual doesn’t cut any ice in some quarters. So what’s wrong with being homosexual or bisexual? And, if the incidence of sexual abuse of children in such settings is many times the norm, well, isn’t it time we reconsider the legitimacy of intergenerational love?
Sweet. The reason Pope Benedict is waging jihad on gay households isn’t because he’s a raving medieval lunatic, but out of alarm and concern for the welfare of children at the hands of predatory homosexuals. Only…just where is he getting his facts here? Sullivan does a little digging, and comes up with a familiar name…
So where does Neuhaus get his inflammatory claims? The only link Neuhaus provides is to a far-right Catholic website which in turn relies on a separate review published by Pat Robertson’s "Regent University" of 36 studies of gay parenting. 35 of the 36 "concluded that children from same-sex parents were not adversely affected," which is what the consensus largely is. One study alone provided the statistics Neuhaus relies on. That study is by our old friend, Paul Cameron…
Bingo. It almost always comes back to Cameron. But now they’ve nested his lies three layers deep…a right wing Catholic website, to a review by Pat Roberston’s Regent University to Cameron.
Why doesn’t Neuhaus simply say he’s relying on Paul Cameron for his facts about the dangers homosexuals represent to children? Well…isn’t that obvious? What’s interesting is that Cameron has become so toxic to the right, that they have to bury his name even deeper now. When William Bennett was arguing that homosexuals only live an average of 46 years, he only had to bury Cameron’s name one level deep, referring simply to another study that, as it turned out, cited Cameron for the figure. Now they’re burying his name three levels deep. They’ll be burying it three hundred layers deep one of these days, and it still won’t occur to them to just fucking stop spreading his lies.
What ninth commandment? I repeat, what ninth commandment?
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