Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the ministries of Bible Belt televangelists in the 1970s-80s. But these fortunes would never have materialized without a secular weapon from the North–a Massachusetts marketing outfit begun by a group of twenty-something Harvard business school grads called Epsilon Data Management. Falwell began using the company in 1976; he was the first televangelist to sign up. When his contributions exploded, other preachers like Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard contracted with Epsilon and made a pile, too.
Before Epsilon, Oral Roberts used punch tape-driven Friden Flexo-writers. Billy Graham handwrote every homespun fundraising appeal himself. "You could see the buckwheat flying off the paper," recalls Gaylord Briley, one of the top religious fundraisers of the era. In a few years Epsilon was doing work for 7 of the top 10 televangelists in America.
Two threads joined together in the 1970s to produce the political machine we now know as the religious right. In the early 1970s, the feds began challenging the tax exemption of many fundamentalist schools over their race segregation policies. I’ve blogged about that previously Here…
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.
The second thread is the advent of computerized direct marketing. Richard Viguerie was a pioneer in its use for the republican party. Viguerie had more then a mailing list. His genius was in applying computerized database analysis techniques to it, tracking the giving patterns of the names in his database. He paired that with a ruthless analysis of which marketing campaigns worked, and which did not. Viguerie, a right wing extremist, wasn’t interested in informing the republican base so much as in pushing their buttons so they would open their wallets and go to the polls. And he got results. With his database and direct mailing technique, Viguerie almost single-handedly turned around the fortunes of the Republicans after Watergate.
Remember, this was a time before the Internet, before the widespread use of cable TV and the appearance of 24 hour cable news, before even talk radio as we know it today, with its national audiences and personalities. Viguerie showed the republicans how they could bypass the news media of that day, and not only get their their message out on their own terms, but do it below the radar of the popular culture. His mail appeals were Targeted. The message was tailored and precise, and didn’t have to appear in any newspaper or television ad where the rest of the country could see it too.
Falwell saw the success of Viguerie’s technique, and revamped his own direct mailing effort…
Computerized database marketing turned the late 1970s into an era known as the golden age of direct mail prospecting. Direct mail was still an almost clandestine medium. The content of such correspondence was rarely exposed to media scrutiny. Falwell crafted his letters with theological abandon, hitting his mortal enemies with blunt force. Epsilon led Falwell to discover that the secret to steady income is consistency; getting lots of donors to give a little, but regularly. Epsilon also taught Falwell that most donor lists contain "compulsive contributors"–usually amounting to four percent of the list, says Briley.
These twin threads of course, have a common root. Money. It was all about the money. That is why there is a religious right today. And that is why they’ve made common cause with the corporate world, the world of Caesar, the world of mammon, that they once disdained. When Carter went after their tax exemptions, they found had a lot in common with those kings of business after all.
And how do you push the rube’s buttons enough so they’ll give you money, over and over and over again? Well…here’s one way…
Besides Epsilon, Falwell had the formidable talent of Jerry Huntsinger. Then 45, he was a former minister who lived on a farm near Richmond who had been taking advertising concepts from the for-profit world and applying them to nonprofit religious ventures. Huntsinger brought a novelist’s touch to direct mail. He considered every fundraising letter a first cousin to the short story. "A short story has a problem that seems insurmountable, a sympathetic character that is a victim of the problem, complications and obstacles, but finally, a resolution." He advised his clients that emergency appeals work best because they give donors a feeling of "excitement at coming to the rescue."
Huntsinger was also a master at fine tuning the mechanics: the color of the envelope, the position of the address window, which paragraphs to indent, which sentences to underline. He knew how to lure a reader’s eye just to where he wanted.
Huntsinger encouraged Falwell to focus on wedge issues in his mailings, excoriating the feminist movement and attacking homosexual rights, often equating both with the dangers of communism. As one letter stated: "Dear Friend: Homosexuals are on the march in this country. Homosexuals do not reproduce, they recruit, and many of them are after my children and your children….This is one major reason why we must keep "The Old Time Gospel Hour" alive…So don’t delay. Let me hear from you immediately. I will be anxiously awaiting your reply."
The sense of impending doom the letter conveyed fit perfectly with Huntsinger’s operating credo. It turned a pitch into a storyline (gays on the the march) with sympathetic characters (children) under threat from sex offenders (gay pedophiles). It was an emergency appeal that sought to panic his audience into coming to the rescue.
The Forbes excerpt ends on the note that the gay bashing appeals actually raised very little money. Given the history of the religious right’s move into politics, I don’t believe it. Before Anita Bryant showed them that waving the gay menace at people could practically stampede them to the polls, the Falwells and the Robertsons actually did very little gay bashing. But on the day Falwell stood by her side in front of reporters and declared that "a homosexual will kill you, soon as look at you", he knew she was on to something.
Falwell and his kind didn’t create the climate of fear and contempt toward gay people. But in the 1970s they began to whip it into a frenzy. For money. Never mind all that love your neighbor as yourself crap. The harder you push their buttons, the more they open their wallets. And the best button of all was the Homosexuals Are On The March And They Want Your Children button. It worked. The money came rolling in. For Falwell. For Robertson. For Dobson. And for all the other crusaders for Christ. The money came rolling in.
You may think it was aliens from another planet who came out of that UFO and abducted you in order to perform hideous experiments on your body. But in fact it was the demonic minions of Satan, disguised as aliens, and sent to earth to test your Christian faith. No, really…
Former Apollo 14 astronaut, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, has recently made it public knowledge that aliens exist and that NASA officials have had contact with them. Dr. Mitchell says that there has been a sixty-year cover-up by our government of the existence and reality of aliens.
No doubt, all this will be used to support evolution and discredit the Bible. The fact remains, however, that science has shown that only micro-evolution (variations within a biological kind such as varieties of dogs, cats, horses, cows, etc.) is possible but not macro-evolution (variation across biological kinds or from simpler kinds to more complex ones). The reader is encouraged to read the author’s article ‘The Natural Limits of Evolution’ at www.religionscience.com. Mathematical probability alone has shown that it is not rational, logical, or scientific to believe that life could originate by chance.
Alien beings cannot wait millions of years to evolve complex and necessary organs for survival anymore than species on earth. Imagine a species waiting millions of years for reproductive organs to evolve so that it can finally reproduce!
Then, how do we explain aliens if they are for real? The Bible teaches that Satan and his demons (the fallen angels) can take on take all sorts of shapes and perform all sorts of miracles in order to deceive mankind. In fact, some who have been claimed to be abducted by aliens say that these aliens have told them things that undermine the truth of the Christian Scriptures and the Person and work of Jesus Christ.
This is not say that God cannot create life on other planets, but the point being made here is that the supposed alien contacts popularly mentioned are not actual alien beings at all but the work of dark supernatural forces.
Thus Spake The Conservative Voice. And lest you think this guy is just another babbling street corner nutcase, I’m telling you he’s got credentials…
The author, Babu G. Ranganatha, has his B.A. degree with concentrations in theology and biology from Bob Jones University, and has been recognized for his writings on religion and science in the 24th edition of Marquis Who’s Who In The East.
That’s Bob with a ‘B’ Jones University my man. They don’t hand out diplomas to just any old crank who walks in the door let me tell you. I mean…imagine, just imagine, a species waiting millions of years for reproductive organs to evolve so that it can finally reproduce. Just…imagine.
So now I’ve seen UFO conspiracy theory, Creationism, Darbyist fundamentalism, and right wing conservatism all rolled into one. Who needs drugs when you’ve got reality?
Paul Cameron’s Real Gift To The Anti-Gay Industrial Complex
Every time someone mindlessly parrots the notion that gay people have shorter lifespans then heterosexuals, the religious right gives a nod of thanks to Paul Cameron. Ever since the Reagan years, Cameron has been chugging out a torrent of bogus research aimed at demonizing gay people in the public mind. Where Falwell, Dobson and Robertson waved the bible at gay people, and social conservatives waved family values, Cameron became a fountainhead, a one-stop shopping center for anti-gay junk science. From his often used claim that gay people have shorter lifespans, to his claim that lesbians are more likely to be involved in car accidents, Cameron gave their cheapshit hatreds a gloss of dispassionate science.
Cameron was eventually thrown out of the American Psychological Association for distorting the work of other legitimate researchers. But to the anti-gay right, which builds museums to creationism and attacks the teaching of science in schools, real science was always the enemy. Cameron is gold coin to them. But in recent years, as more and more of mainstream America learns what a charlatan Cameron is, they’ve had to take more care not to put Cameron’s name in their pamphlets. Some years ago, William Mr. Book Of Virtues Bennett got caught parroting Cameron’s lifespan claim he had to backtrack. First he claimed someone else had said it too, but when it turned out that person had cited Cameron too, Bennett mumbled something about not trusting that figure anymore and went back to his favorite casino. I’ve heard though, that lately Mr. Book Of Virtues has been citing it again.
But in the end, Cameron’s biggest contribution to the Kultur Krieg may well be not his bogus statistics, but his method. Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin, has uncovered a new scam by the Family Research Council in their fight to repeal California’s same sex marriage law, that has the trademark Cameron technique but apparently was entirely a homegrown effort.
They cite the "Dutch Study" Stanley Kurtz bastardized some years ago for their claim that gay relationships don’t last very long and are never monogamous. Burroway did a wonderful job some time back of debunking this, and all I’ll say about that now is that when you look at the data from a study that excludes monogamous couples, don’t be surprised when you don’t see any monogamy in the data.
But it’s the follow-up claim that’s interesting here. FRC is claiming that same sex couples are inherently more violent, more prone to domestic abuse…
The third point the brochure is built on is this:
Intimate partner violence: homosexual and lesbian couples experience by far the highest levels of intimate partner violence compared with married couples as well as cohabiting heterosexual couples. Lesbians, for example, suffer a much higher level of violence than do married women
They base this claim on the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Violence Against Women Survey (PDF: 62 pages/1,475 KB) If you want to see how they construct this particular distortion, I encourage you to download the report yourself and we’ll go through it step by step. Believe me, it’s worth it because this is a classic example.
It is. You should go read Jim’s entire debunking of it to get the whole stinking rotten smell of it. But I’ll give you the executive summary here. Basically, they took the data for individual victims of domestic violence who were in, or had ever been in, same sex relationships and compared that to the data for victims in opposite sex relationships. But much of the violence against people who were in same sex relationships was committed by an opposite sex partner. In the case of the men who were or had been in a same sex relationship, almost half of the incidents were attacks on them by wives, former wives or girlfriends. In the case of the women who had been or were in same sex relationships, as I read the figures, about three out of four incidents were attacks on them by husbands or boyfriends.
Dig it. The FRC took incidents of straight on gay violence, and included them in its total figure for gay domestic violence. In point of fact, if you look at the data for Couples, as opposed to individuals, what you find is that a gay man is statistically safer living with a male partner, then a heterosexual woman is living with a male partner.
This is what passes for traditional values over at the Family Research Council. If there is a devil in Hell below, then he is smiling proudly at the runt at FRC who came up with that one. And Paul Cameron is probably smiling proudly too. He taught them how.
The Air Force’s top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules’ carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.
Production of the first capsule — consisting of two sealed rooms that can fit into the fuselage of a large military aircraft — has already begun.
Air Force officials say the government needs the new capsules to ensure that leaders can talk, work and rest comfortably in the air. But the top brass’s preoccupation with creating new luxury in wartime has alienated lower-ranking Air Force officers familiar with the effort, as well as congressional staff members and a nonprofit group that calls the program a waste of money.
Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be "aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule," with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.
The effort has been slowed, however, by congressional resistance to using counterterrorism funds for the project and by lengthy internal deliberations about a series of demands for modifications by Air Force generals. One request was that the color of the leather for the seats and seat belts in the mobile pallets be changed from brown to Air Force blue and that seat pockets be added; another was that the color of the table’s wood be darkened.
These are the guys who are massively against letting gays serve in their military. Because…you know…that would damage moral and stuff…
Heller. Yes. I know this bothers some of my friends but I completely agree with yesterday’s supreme court decision regarding D.C.’s gun ban. But this kind of rhetoric, from McCain’s campaign, really bothers me…
Today’s decision is a landmark victory for Second Amendment freedom in the United States…
Blah…blah…blah… Here’s the part I mean…
Unlike Senator Obama, who refused to join me in signing a bipartisan amicus brief, I was pleased to express my support and call for the ruling issued today. Today’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller makes clear that other municipalities like Chicago that have banned handguns have infringed on the constitutional rights of Americans. Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right – sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.
But…see…this is what bothers me…this elevating of guns to the status of religious objects. They aren’t. If there is any fundamental right here at all it’s the right to self preservation, and even that isn’t sacred or else you’d have to condemn soldiers, policemen, firemen, and anyone and everyone who ever sacrificed their own lives for others. The sacred thing here, if anything, is life itself. And even that isn’t always a black and white thing.
I know…I know… McCain is just pushing buttons. But it’s this kind of thing that has dragged the conversation about morality in this country down into the gutter. It cheapens both the concept of the sacred, and the thing you are trying to superficially attach it to. Guns aren’t sacred objects. They’re useful tools and the government has no business banning them outright, not even for the simple reason that people have a right to defend themselves, but more specifically because while government may be our protector in many ways, it is not our nanny and we are not its children.
It’s entirely proper and reasonable for government to take a roll in keeping deadly weapons out of the hands of anyone likely to commit crimes of violence. It’s completely reasonable for government to regulate the kinds of firearms people can own, and how and when they can bear them in public. That’s different from taking the position that no individual citizen can own a gun period, because then you’re saying that the people have no right to self defense. That completely changes the relationship between citizens and their government, in just the same way that censorship and morality laws do. And let’s face it…outright gun bans aren’t public safety laws, they’re morality laws.
Which…let it be said…all the brave second amendment warriors out there in the NRA and other gun groups really don’t give a crap about, unless it involves their Sacred Guns. On the SLOG Blog the other day in a thread about Heller, a commenter pointedly pointed out that Bush has ripped up habeas corpus and the gun groups kept silent. He went on a wiretapping rampage and the gun groups kept silent. And don’t get me started on the fact that so many second amendment warriors are raving homophobic bigots who hated to see the sodomy laws overturned and who are probably campaigning right now to see same sex marriage banned everywhere. All their fine and noble rhetoric about freedom and liberty and patriotism is just so much bullshit.
When you get right down to it, the second amendment warriors have been responsible for more erosion of our civil liberties and more damage to our constitution then anything the Brady Campaign could ever have done. So to all the cheering second amendment warriors out there right now I would just like to say Shut Your Fucking Pie-Hole! Please. If Scalia had written instead that gun bans are a legitimate expression of the moral values of the voters in a community, just what the fuck would you have said to that? That majorities don’t have the right to impose their moral values on everyone else? Especially when their doing that puts other people’s families at risk? Please. Just…shut up.
It’s not “marriage” – some magical status granted by the government – that serves to make people “healthier, happier and wealthier.” It’s the behavior associated with the marital ideal that brings benefits to couples and their children. That behavior doesn’t require official sanction – any more than official sanction guarantees such behavior.
Medved goes on to make the standard anti-gay case that only opposite sex couples have that magic combination of male and female attributes that make a marriage both stable, and beneficial for children. But then he goes on to take that to its logical conclusion…
Consider some of the high profile heterosexual couples who have refused to get married. I don’t endorse the politics of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, but given their long-standing and apparently stable commitment, I don’t think their kids have suffered because they never legalized their relationship.
By the same token, I don’t believe that the children of Rosie O’Donnell and her partner will be able to make up for the lack of a father’s love through a change of bureaucratic policy in California or any other state.
Medved’s column is pretty much a simple rehashing of hoary anti-gay and more specifically, anti-male stereotypes. Gay men can’t control their sex drives because they are men. Well…yes…Lesbian couples are more stable because they’re both female, but children need both a mother and a father, so their unions are bad for children too. Never mind that there is not one iota of science behind any of this, let alone tradition. Consider for a moment, how big the straight jacket is that female sexuality is bound inside in male dominated societies. It isn’t male sexuality that’s being kept under a tight lid in a culture where boys can sew their wild oats, but girls are sluts if they do the same. Never mind all that. Just look at where this delivers Medved. He is now arguing, in all seriousness, that it is heterosexuality, not marriage, that provides for both stability and a better environment for children. Heterosexuals are actually so good at it, that marriage is completely unnecessary for them. This is seriously his argument.
We have been told, over and over again, that allowing homosexual couples to marry will make marriage itself worthless. And now along comes Michael Medved to argue that it is in fact heterosexuality, by its very nature, that renders marriage worthless. Sweet. Can we stop blaming gay people for the horrible state of marriage in this country now? Please?
As Grant Cogswell pointed out in his feature piece last week, there once was a man called Anton LaVey, and Anton LaVey, whilst he lived, tried really, really hard to be The Evilest Man Who Ever Was. Mostly he was just bald and vaguely douche-bag-ish: Like a martini-sipping Fu-Manchu in a priest suit who looked like he had to crap a walrus. But still. He tried really, really hard.
Indeed, Anton wanted to be evil, seriously evil, so he did the only evil thing an evil person in his evil position could do: He poured himself a stiff drink, sat down, and thought really really hard about, well, evil.
…
His conclusions and the crux of his Satanic philosophy ran thusly: We humans are, in every sense, rotten, rude, paranoid, and less than fresh. People are wicked and untrustworthy animals. All so-called “virtues” and “good deeds” are self-delusive ego-kicks, hip, hip, hooray. That’s the whole thing in a devilicious nutshell.
Sound familiar? Well…yeah actually. Ryan points us to a Colbert interview of George Will, who obligingly goes on just as he’s done for decades now about the difference between liberals and conservatives…
That’s right. Straight from the horsey mouth of the “leading pundit of conservatism in the nation”: The difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals are fools who believe in the goodness of human nature and the basic equality of all people. Like in the, uh, Declaration of Independence and junk. (And, if you’ll pardon the expression, “The Bible”.) They believe misguidedly that “something straight” can be made out of the “crooked timber” that is humanity. Man is clearly rotten and selfish by design. There can be no myth of equality…um….it only translates to “mediocrity”, and…uh…Satan? Is that you? It’s me, George Will.
Of course you could argue that conservatives would strongly disagree with LaVey that this broken human nature means we should just go ahead and give in to our basest nature. On the contrary, we need a strong government based on strong moral values to keep our base nature in check. Well…actually…Your base nature. You. The common folk. The rich and powerful are another story. What Reagan and Bush have made pretty clear is that They get to indulge their every selfish greedy, crooked, broken desire to their heart’s content. After all…they’re on top. And isn’t that pure LaVey after all?
1. Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth. Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke!
2. Blessed are the powerful, for they shall be reverenced among men. Cursed are the feeble, for they shall inherit the yoke!
3. Blessed are the bold, for they shall be masters of the world. Cursed are the righteously humble, for they shall be trodden under cloven hoofs!
4. Blessed are the victorious, for victory is the basis of right. Cursed are the vanquished, for they shall remain vassals forever!
5. Blessed are the iron handed, for the unfit shall flee before them. Cursed are the poor in spirit, for they shall be spat upon!
-Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible, The Book Of Satan, Chapter 5.
…and so on. Yes, I have a copy…bought back in the early 70s just out of shear curiosity. It never dawned on me until now to really look at how closely this guy’s ideas map to Ayn Rand’s and the greed is good conservative movement she spawned. And if you think Rand would have been outraged at being compared to the likes of LaVey, you’re probably right. She often claimed that her philosophy regarded predators as parasites, whereas the truly selfish man did not simply take from the weak, but rather created his own wealth. But Rand was hardly averse to stealing outright from the weak. In point of fact, she really did believe that was the prerogative of the powerful…
On the 125th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, Ayn Rand — who surely would have approved of its fearless pronouncements on inequality — died at the age of 77. The right-wing cult philosopher and high priestess of tedium somehow managed to sell millions of copies of her nearly unreadable novels from the 1950s onward, including paperweights such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. On 6 March 1974, following a speech to the Army cadets at West Point, Rand was asked about the dispossession of American Indian land. In short, she approved of the idea.
They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using . . . . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.
Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth. Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke! When they talk to you about morality, and Christian values, laugh in their face. They don’t want to get government off your back, so much as get it out of the way so they can put a leash around your neck and a brand on your forehead and call you their own. They are less Christ, then LaVey.
We are not devils. We are not angels. We are not destroyers, we are not creators. We are not lords nor are we peasants. We are human. We are all of these. There is no dark, there is no light, there is simply what we are. The abyss isn’t our destiny any more then heaven is. But the path to oblivion is paved with lies. We neither sustain ourselves nor make a future possible by throwing ourselves into the arms of gurus who tell us we are something that we are not. Ask the shades that walk the battlegrounds on this poor earth, where we killed each other by the thousands to appease the bottomless greed of the few and their hatred of everything fine and noble a human being can be. Blessed are they who question, for they will wear no chains.
Therefore, the ruling to impose homosexual "marriages" upon California was tyrannical, unconstitutional, and immoral. Like many state legislatures that refused to accept the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision saying slaves were property not persons, Californians must not accept the California Supreme Court’s edict that marriage is no longer only for a man and a woman.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the right invoke Dred Scott. They’ve done it routinely over abortion too. They’re calling for massive resistance to the courts and claiming as moral justification the ruling upholding the legality of slavery.
Ever see them invoke Plessy v. Ferguson? No? Me either.
Good catch by Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin. Gary Glenn, President of Michigan klavern of the American Family Association, waves the Homosexual Menace scarecrow over at Peter LaBarbra’s Americans For Truth. Beware the gays! Beware the Gays! Beware the Gays! Glenn is warning us about the Homosexual Menace. Can you spot the problem with this passage about the Homosexual Menace…?
Michigan’s largest homosexual activist group says once marriage is legally redefined to include homosexual couples, business owners and even news media outlets who refuse to recognize such marriages should be jailed or sued and “publicly slapped,” a Jewish and openly bisexual columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News reported Monday.
They call them Freudian slips. And hey…wasn’t Freud a Jew too…
When Vito J. Fossella Jr., the soon-to-be boy congressman, stood beside the young girls of a cheerleading squad at the Excelsior Grand catering hall in 1997, it seemed a particularly vivid version of Staten Island pageantry. Mr. Fossella — 32 and with Al Pacino looks — was on his way to becoming the sole Republican in New York City’s Congressional delegation at a spirited party billed as an evening of “pasta and politics.”
George H. W. Bush and Senator Bob Dole were there that night, strolling past the steaming trays of ziti and charging donors $1,000 each to pose for pictures. Sonny Bono was on his way from California to stump with them the next day. Mr. Fossella, the man of the hour, raised his hands, quieted the crowd, then launched into a rousing speech on cutting taxes and championing school choice.
…
Mr. Fossella, victorious with 62 percent of the vote, was so intent on getting to Congress that, according to The Staten Island Advance, he flew to Washington from Newark carrying the morning papers proclaiming his own victory only 10 hours after it was announced.
Once there, he established himself as a reliable member of his party. He voted to impeach President Clinton, followed President Bush’s war policies in Iraq, voted to eliminate financing for Planned Parenthood and supported a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.
And yet many of his Democratic colleagues did not regard Mr. Fossella as an ideological warrior…
Vito Fossella built a career as a staunch "family values" pol, polishing his image in his predominantly Catholic district with a string of anti-gay votes.
He even shuns his gay sister, Victoria Fossella, refusing to go to family events if she and her partner attend, a source close to the family said.
…
As congressman, Fossella voted to prohibit any funding for joint adoptions by gay couples.
He has voted for the Marriage Protection Amendment, a federal prohibition on gay marriage.
He also demanded housing funds be held back from San Francisco unless it repealed its domestic partnership law.
Nice family republican values kinda guy wouldn’t you say?
Oh yes…definitely…
In the nine days since the 43-year-old Mr. Fossella, who has served five terms in Congress, was arrested and charged after running a red light in Alexandria, Va., things have gone from not-so-good to pretty bad, with only a slender thread still staving off the worst.
Within days of his admitting that he was on his way to visit “some friends in Virginia” when he was stopped by the police, the New York tabloids began raising questions about the woman who came to retrieve him from custody, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel named Laura Fay. Then, on Thursday, he released a clipped statement from his office, saying that he had fathered a daughter, now 3, in an extramarital affair with Ms. Fay.
Democratic and Republican Congressional officials are reportedly looking into Fossella’s mysterious and expensive trip to France in 2003 with his mistress, Laura Fay.
It was called a fact-finding mission to La Hague’s nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, according to the Daily News.
However, the Staten Island Republican was the only lawmaker authorized to go. And according to one committee member, it may have been less about nuclear power and more about fueling his relationship with the Air Force legislative liaison officer, the retired colonel who subsequently bore the congressman’s love child.
Should Fosella repay taxpayers for his travel expenses if investigators find he mixed pleasure with business?
Listen for the right wing ‘phobes who bellyached about Tammy Baldwin’s domestic partner being allowed to fly with her, to blast Fossella for flying with his mistress to France on the government’s dime in, 3… 2… 1… Never.
If you have time to manage you’re neighbor’s personal lives it probably means you aren’t paying enough attention to your own. Well adjusted heterosexuals don’t seek validation by trashing the lives of their gay neighbors. When you see someone going on a crusade against homosexuality it’s probably because the stench of their own intimate lives has become too terrifying for them to contemplate. Nobody goes looking for scapegoats if they don’t need any.
If homosexual marriages or civil unions are the equivalent of traditional marriages, you can’t discriminate. If you do, at the very least you put your government benefits at risk.
This is the same rationale that was used by the Supreme Court in 1983 to uphold stripping Bob Jones University of its tax-exempt status due to its racial policies.
That it was. Gosh it’s so uncanny how racists and homophobes look so much alike isn’t it? You’d almost think they were cut from the same cloth or something…
And in the end, it all comes down to money, not theology. What motivated the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells and James Dobsons of America to pour their poison into American politics for the past several decades wasn’t abortion, and it wasn’t gay rights, and it wasn’t even racism, it was loosing their tax-exemptions.
The anti-gay religious right is mounting Yet Another protest against the Day Of Silence, itself a protest against anti-gay violence in schools. First it was the misnamed Day Of Truth. Now it’s the Golden Rule Day. Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin writes about the competing religious right activity, and sums it up pretty thoroughly here…
More than a year ago, I attended a Love Won Out conference in Phoenix put on jointly by Exodus International and Focus On the Family. That’s where I heard Focus’s Mike Haley address anti-LGBT violence in a Q&A session:
I think, too, we also have to be just as quick to also stand up when we do see the gay and lesbian community being come against as the Body of Christ. We need to be the first to speak out to say that what happened to Matthew Shepard was a terrible incident and should never happen again. And that we within the Body of Christ are wanting to protect that community and put our money where our mouth is…
That was a real “Wow!” moment for me. I thought finally, someone gets it. I can’t tell you how encouraged I was to hear Mike Haley say that. It was an ultimate Golden Rule moment. And I can’t begin to describe how disappointed I’ve been since then.
One year later, Lawrence King was killed in cold blood on February 12 in front of his teachers and classmates. Since then, conservative Christians leaders have celebrated seventy-three consecutive Days of Silence.
Emphasis mine. You should go read the whole thing. Day of Silence? How about seventy-three Days of Silence after a 15 year old gay boy was shot in the head.
That says it all. Can we please stop talking about their "sincerely held religious beliefs" now? This isn’t about faith. This isn’t about how much they love God. It’s about how much they hate us.
Slog reader Price makes a good point about the FLDS saga—DNA tests to determine whose kids are whose are underway—in Eldorado, Texas. These polygamists have been all over cable news and the front pages of American newspapers for weeks now. Says Price…
WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?
Where’s the outrage from the “marriage should be between one man and one woman” crowd about this nonsense in Eldorado? You’d think they would be up in arms about this. Aren’t these people DESTROYING all marraige for normal straight couples
When I was in South Carolina before that state’s primary for Real Time with Bill Maher, I asked a religious conservative—a supporter of Mike Huckabee—who was the bigger sinner: a gay man married to one man or a polygamist married to a hundred women. He didn’t even hesitate: the gay man. You hear very little from the one-man-and-one-woman shriekers for the same reason you heard so little from them during the decades straight people spent redefining marriage for themselves. After straight people redefined marriage to a point that it no longer made any logical sense to exclude same-sex couples from the institution’s rights and responsibilities, suddenly marriage had to be defended from the gays. Activists that want to “save marriage” have never been motivated by what they’re for (one man and one woman) but what they’re against (gay sex, love, desire, etc.).
This has been another edition of What Dan Savage Said. Can we stop talking about the sincerely held religious beliefs of the anti-gay opposition now?
So I’m reading this story about some Italian jackass former football general manager bloviating about gays in football…
Moggi: Gays Should Be Banned From Football
The 70-year-old was widely regarded as the best transfer guru in Serie A before he received a five-year ban from football in the summer of 2006 for his alleged role in the Calciopoli scandal.
Despite being out of the game Moggi still regularly has his say on current affairs, and he has had some controversial things to say about homosexuals.
“I don’t know if footballers are against gays in the team, I certainly am,” he stated.
“I can quietly confirm that, in the clubs where I have been, I have never had them, never.
“I would never have wanted a homosexual player. Even today I wouldn’t buy one. Supposing I were to make a mistake and I found one of them, he would be the first to go.
“I am a little old-fashioned. But I know the football world and its insides. You cannot live within it as a gay. A homosexual cannot be a footballer.
“In calcio there are no homosexuals, neither between players nor among directors. It’s not racism, its fact. Football has a particular environment; you get naked in the dressing room.
“I have no gay friends. I go out with other people. But I have to say that homosexuals are very intelligent people, they have the capacity to see things differently.”
Former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi has again stated that he was the only person to defend the club before, during and after the Calciopoli crisis.
Moggi was one of Calcio’s shrewdest transfer gurus up until the Calciopoli crisis in the summer of 2006.
The 70-year-old received a five-year ban from football for his alleged role in the scandal, meaning that he cannot return until 2011, by which time he will be 74.
Moggi has always maintained that Calciopoli was a conspiracy, involving Inter Milan, as well as other important figures.
“I looked to defend a business that, in practice, had no parents. Gianni and Umberto Agnelli died and Juventus were left without a father or a mother,” he explained.
“We didn’t have the funds because shareholders weren’t putting money into the club and we didn’t have the television on our side. We were a step behind the others.
“RAI was of Roma and we won’t speak of who Sky and Mediaset belong to. We had to make do with what we had and look strong even if we weren’t.”
Moggi has always been painted as something of a shady and mysterious figure, but he says this is an unfair assessment. “I was arrogant, but it is not a crime,” he said.
No…but fixing football games is, isn’t it? Here’s the Wiki entry on what they’re referring to in that article as the "Calciopoli crisis"…
The 2006 Italian football scandal (Italian more common names: Calciopoli or Moggiopoli, sometimes referred to as Calciocaos) involved alleged match fixing in Italy’s top professional football leagues, Serie A and Serie B. The scandal was uncovered in May 2006 by Italian police, implicating league champions Juventus, and other major teams including A.C. Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio, and Reggina when a number of telephone interceptions showed a thick network of relations between team managers and referee organisations. Juventus were the champions of Serie A at the time. The teams have been accused of rigging games by selecting favourable referees.
…
The scandal first came to light as a consequence of investigations of Naples prosecutors on the Italian football agency GEA world. Transcripts of recorded telephone conversations published in Italian newspapers suggested that during the 2004-05 season, Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi had conversations with several officials of Italian football to influence referee appointment. The name Calciopoli is a pun on Tangentopoli, [rough English translation:Bribesville], a corruption-based attitude starting in the early 80s and ending with the Mani Pulite investigation in the early 90s, led by, among others, Antonio di Pietro. Another very common name for Calciopoli is Moggiopoli after the name of Luciano Moggi. Also Calciogate, a pun on Watergate, is used. Calcio means football in Italian.
So here’s a guy babbling about how gays should be banned from football, who has himself been banned from the game for fixing games. How…unsurprising. I doubt he was cheating for money so much as to stand in the winner’s circle as though he’d actually earned his place there and not cheated his way to it. That’s exactly how bigots go through life. A genuine crook will, when caught, take some smirking pride in putting one over on you. A bigot will deny how they tilted the scales and fixed the game to the very end, insisting that they’re perfectly honorable and respectable people and endlessly pass the blame for the damage they do onto someone else. It’s not about having the trophy, it’s about knowing deep down inside what a runt you are and bitterly resenting anyone and everyone who can achieve that which you cannot, and fixing the game as a way of revenge.
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