HENNINGER: This is a footnote to our gay marriage discussion: A woman in India last week married a snake. I would like to ask the proponents of gay marriage–which violates, after all, traditions going back through all of human history–to now absolutely, positively guarantee that the next movement is not going to be allowing people to marry their pet horse, dog or cat. And you know What? Given the "anything goes" culture we live in, I don’t think they can deliver that guarantee.
Well you’d think that if people could marry snakes, Henninger would be delighted to know it, since that would mean he’d finally be able to marry an equal. But…look at this. This isn’t a babbling street lunatic, it’s the fucking editor of the editorial page of the goddamned Wall Street Journal. What drooling moron gave that man a job?
Ironically enough (and you need a high tolerance for irony in this struggle), these are usually the same kook pew bigots who complain that the black civil rights movement has been co-opted by the homos. Fine. If that movement is not responsible for ours, then ours is not responsible for whoever comes next. You judge each movement on the merits of its claims to justice, not on the merits of every possible other case.
Villagers welcomed the wedding in the belief it would bring good fortune and laid on a feast for the big day.
Snakes and particularly the King Cobra are venerated in India as religious symbols worn by Lord Shiva, the god of destruction.
Das, from a lower caste, converted to the animal-loving vegetarian Vaishnav sect whose local elders gave her permission to marry the cobra, the world’s largest venomous snake that can grow up to five metres.
"I am happy," said her mother Dyuti Bhoi, who has two other daughters and two sons to marry off.
"Bimbala was ill," Bhoi told local OTV channel. "We had no money to treat her. Then she started offering milk to the snake … she was cured. That made her fall in love."
Das has moved into a hut built close to the ant hill since the wedding.
Earlier this year, a tribal girl was married off to a dog on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar.
If this story proves anything it’s that for sure marriage means different things to different people in different cultures. Note the association of the snake with their deity. If you want to talk about traditions going back through all of human history, there aren’t any much older then associating animals with deities and using them in one way or another to express religious veneration. Yes that seems very odd to the modern western sensibility, but we’re not exactly free of all that earth god essentialism ourselves. Considering that Henninger is probably part of one of the many mainstream American religious sects that practice a symbolic form of ritual cannibalism (this is my body…), I don’t think he should sniff too loudly at the religious practices of others. And what is this redemption by the blood thing (the blood of the lamb as they like to say), if not an echo to a distant past that was chock full of dead sacrificial animals…and humans? In my theological moods, I like to think this is why we’re warned against idolatry: by venerating the physical, we loose sight of the spiritual. But the fact is that we in the west are not so far away from that tribal earth god past as we might like to believe. A little more respect for other cultures, walking their own walk from the human past into the human future, wouldn’t kill us.
Marriage to animals is not our way in the west. Marriage as a union of two adult human beings is. To love honor and cherish. In sickness and in health. For richer or for poorer. ‘Til death do us part. That is our way. Same sex marriage changes that not one iota.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Barbie? A lesbian? Well, that’s the message on a T-shirt worn by a middle school student in Queens. And now the girl’s mother is suing the city of New York over what happened after her daughter showed up for class. Glen Thompson of affiliate station WPIX fills us in.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GLEN THOMPSON, WPIX CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): 14-year-old Nicky Young shows off the "Barbie is a lesbian" t-shirt that got her in hot water at Middle School 210 in Ozone Park, Queens. Nicky, who is openly gay, says the school’s principal also took offense at her gay pride beads.
NICKY YOUNG, MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT: I went to school with a t- shirt that said "Barbie is a lesbian," and they held me in a room for two hours and they said, it’s not appropriate to wear, I should take it off and I didn’t have any other clothing. So I told them, I’m not going to take it off.
THOMPSON: After being held in the principal’s office, Nicky’s mother had to come get her after she was suspended for refusing to take off the shirt.
YOUNG: Everybody should be treated equally, and I think that I was treated differently because of my sexual orientation, and I don’t think it was fair and what they did was kind of rude, and to me it was childish.
THOMPSON: Nicky says she was only goofing on Mattel’s widely popular Barbie doll and didn’t mean to offend anyone. Her lawsuit against the school system claims she had a right to wear the t-shirt. The Department of Education isn’t commenting.
DAN PEREZ, ATTORNEY: The First Amendment doesn’t stop at the school house door, and students have the right generally to wear a variety of clothing that contains social and political commentary, as well as engage in symbolic speech.
THOMPSON (on camera): Nicky’s lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount in monetary damages and an injunction preventing the school system from suspending her if she ever wears the t-shirt again. I’m Glen Thompson, for the WB11 News at 10.
(END VIDEOTAPE) PHILLIPS: School and city representatives have declined to comment on this, but Natalie Young’s attorney, Dan Perez, is talking, and in Washington, attorney Jack Burkman has agreed to look at this from the school district’s point of view. Gentlemen, thanks for being with me.
Good afternoon. Dan, let’s start with you. Mom — I’m looking at the charges here. Mom is saying that her daughter suffered emotional and psychological injury, but she seems very confident about being gay, coming out and saying that she’s gay and addressing all the cameras and the press.
PEREZ: She does. She is a very self-assured young lady. She came out when she was 12 years old. In fact, lots of people are comfortable with who they are from a sexual orientation standpoint far earlier than that. Lots of straight people come out and realize that they like girls if they’re a guy or they like boys that they’re a girl by the time they’re 12, so there’s nothing — there’s nothing about that that’s particularly remarkable.
PHILLIPS: Jack, what do you think? Does Dan have a case here?
JACK BURKMAN, ATTORNEY: No, he doesn’t and he knows it. It’s a entirely frivolous suit, Kyra. The thing with this, this law is well settled. There have been 70 or 80 cases over the years. The Supreme Court has ruled on it. All the circuits have ruled on it. You know, there’ve been cases with girls in the see-through t-shirts and the halter tops and the hair and the jewelry. Schools have fairly broad discretion to enforce the kind of values they want. If people don’t like that, the way you change that is to vote out the school directors. If you think gays are being discriminated against, vote out your school directors, vote out your congressman.
But look, schools from a family values perspective, that’s the legal — I think what the school district is doing is morally right. We shouldn’t have an atmosphere where gay values are encouraged in schools. I think it’s wrong. I think for too many years particularly up there in that area we’ve had a culture where there is a difference between, I don’t support discrimination against homosexuals, certainly not, but at the same time, schools should not create an atmosphere and allow an atmosphere to flourish where gay values will be encouraged.
PHILLIPS: So you’re saying family values — Jack, are you saying that family values means that being gay is wrong, it’s not good family values?
BURKMAN: It’s not that it’s being wrong. There’s a fine line between tolerating and encouraging. If you let this kind of behavior go, Kyra, what happens is more and more children — you know, for years in this country, let’s face it, the media has overstated the number of gays. You have a left-wing culture in schools that begins in grade school, goes to high school, goes to college, and children are told that being gay is OK and they’re almost pushed in that direction. And I think this is an example where a school district wants to put its foot down, and do the right thing, but again, you don’t have to take my word for it. If the public up there doesn’t like that, vote out those school directors. A lawsuit is not the way to handle this.
It’s getting so that a couple nice young girls can’t drive up to DC for the Pride parade without getting openly propositioned by Republican Strategists who give them their real names and business cards these days. Take, for example, the MySpace blog of one such lady, whose sordid tale is reprinted (as a warning to the well-endowed) below:
The initial proposition:
afterward, we got a snazzy hotel room at the mayflower downtown. on the way over there, this really hot business man in a pinstriped suit walked past me, said hello, and doubled back. he asked me my name and introduced himself (jack burkman, government relations strategies), asked where i went to school, etc, gave me his card, and asked me to call him. i later texted him and never could get rid of him again. he thought he talked to me on the phone several times, but he never did. i always made kat or kristin be me. he told kristin about how he really enjoyed my outfit (TITS GALORE) and that i was beautiful, etc. by the end of the night (5 am or so), he was offering to pay for our room and give us a thousand dollars if two of us would fuck him. oh, jack burkman. his card is my DC souvenir.
Wonkette has a photo of the card he gave them up, here. Nice guy. You can’t be an out and proud lesbian in school, but if you’ll give the man a good time he’ll slip you a k-note.
GOP Campaign Manager Guilty of Corruption of Minors
ABC News’ Andrew Katz and Fiore Mastroianni contributed to this report.
A man convicted of "corruption of minors" after being accused of having sex with two teenage girls is working as the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Congress in Arizona, according to documents obtained by ABC News.
Steve Aiken, a former Quakertown, Pa. police officer and self-proclaimed reverend, was convicted of two counts of corruption of a minor stemming from his 1995 sexual relationships with two teenage girls. He served almost two-and-a-half months at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility.
Aiken is listed as campaign manager for Randy Graf, a Republican in a five-way primary for the Congressional seat in Arizona’s 8th district.
Aiken told ABC News he had been "falsely accused and convicted" of the two misdemeanor counts.
Aiken says the candidate, Graf, was fully aware of the conviction when he was hired as campaign manager.
"What he did was no more serious than providing a teenager with beer," Graf told ABC News. "I believe Steve when he says he was falsely accused."
The "corruption of minor" violations in Pennsylvania did not require Aiken to register as a sex offender.
Since his conviction, Aiken also has worked as a spokesperson for the Traditional Values Coalition, a Washington lobby group that represents over 43,000 churches. A spokesman for the Coalition would only say, "He is no longer with us."
The self-proclaimed reverend met the underage teens in Pennsylvania through YouthQuest, a Christian counseling agency.
According to testimony by the victim, reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Aiken "came into her room while she was asleep, undressed her and began to rub her breasts."
Aiken reportedly forced himself on the girl about 15 times in the course of four months, according to the Inquirer.
Aiken says the girls "made up the charges" because he had kicked them out of the YouthQuest program.
According to the Allentown Morning Call, at his sentencing hearing in June 1996, Aiken said, "Steve Aiken’s days of helping kids are over."
In addition to his political activities, Aiken also hosts a weekly radio program on KVOI in Tucson. Aiken’s website includes a "help wanted" page seeking high school or college students to work as volunteer interns on the radio program.
On the show he espouses American traditional values and the abolition of "hate crimes" punishments.
Values. Morals. And remember, same sex marriage is an attack on the family.
WASHINGTON — For nearly a decade, Allen Raymond stood at the top ranks of Republican Party power.
He served as chief of staff to a cochairman of the Republican National Committee, supervised Republican contests in mid-Atlantic states for the RNC, and was a top official in publisher Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign. He went on to earn $350,000 a year running a Republican policy group as well as a GOP phone-bank business.
But most recently, Raymond has been in prison. And for that, he blames himself, but also says he was part of a Republican political culture that emphasizes hardball tactics and polarizing voters.
Raymond, 39, has just finished serving a three-month sentence for jamming Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the 2002 US Senate race. The incident led to one of the biggest political scandals in the state’s history, the convictions of Raymond and two top Republican officials, and a Democratic lawsuit that seeks to determine whether the White House played any role. The race was won by Senator John E. Sununu , the Republican.
In his first interview about the case, Raymond said he doesn’t know anything that would suggest the White House was involved in the plan to tie up Democrats’ phone lines and thereby block their get-out-the-vote effort. But he said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race.
"A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people," he said. "I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters. You always want to polarize somebody."
I’m a uniter, not a divider… Remember that? You know how you can tell that George Bush is lying? His mouth is moving. America is today so bitterly divided against itself, because the republicans want it that way. It wins them elections. Garrison Keillor was right when he said that they are republicans first, and Americans second. They want power, and they don’t care what they have to destroy in order to get and keep it. Our constitution …
Blackwell’s dual roles draw fire
Candidate is also top elections official
Columbus — Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s dual roles as Republican nominee for governor and the man responsible for ensuring a fair and impartial election in November have subjected him to an avalanche of criticism this week.
Pilloried by voter-registration groups for drafting new rules that they say are intended to suppress the poor-, black- and Democratic vote, Blackwell also is being threatened with a lawsuit for Ohio’s failure to enforce the national "motor voter" law.
Viewing the battle from afar, the New York Times weighed in Wednesday with a lead edit orial titled "Block the Vote, Ohio Remix." The Times labeled Ohio’s election system "corrupt" and called for Blackwell to relinquish all duties pertaining to this fall’s election.
That’s not going to happen, Carlo LoParo, Blackwell’s spokesman, angrily replied. He ripped the Times and said Democrats and left-leaning voter-registration groups were hypocrites…
…Blackwell’s latest ploy is couched in an extremely narrow interpretation of House Bill 3, a recently passed election reform measure. The bill, championed by Republican legislative leaders and signed into law by Gov. Bob Taft, purportedly is designed to eradicate vote fraud.
But Blackwell is using the new law to draft highly restrictive voter registration rules that tightly govern the work of groups engaged in mass registration drives. Registrars could be subject to felony prosecution for violations.
Most disturbing to many election activists is Blackwell’s insistence that completed registration forms be returned by the registrar directly to a county board of elections – and not to any of the legitimate organizations, like public libraries and the League of Women Voters, that regularly encourage voter registration.
Blackwell must stop acting in ways that leave the clear impression that he is trying to drive down voter turnout in the fall. Otherwise, he runs the risk of this newspaper and others joining the growing chorus of those calling for him either to step aside as secretary of state, or to hand over election-related duties to someone who will act in the best interest of all Ohioans.
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in ”tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ”conspiracy theories,”(1) and The New York Times declared that ”there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.”(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America’s voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ”We didn’t have one election for president in 2004,” says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ”We didn’t have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.”
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio’s Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
”It was terrible,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ”People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct — it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I’m terribly disheartened.”
You’re terribly disheartened are you? Well that’s why the republicans are getting away with it. You should be livid. Until democrats start acting like they give a good goddamn that this democracy survives long enough to pass down the promise of liberty and justice for all to the next generation, until they get blood in the face angry enough to fight the republicans for the fate of America, the republicans will do what they damn well please whether its legal or not, because they can, and we will loose our democracy. Blackwell fixed Ohio for Bush, why shouldn’t he fix it for himself too? Who says he can’t?
Exgays huddled in the massive ghettos of Anytown, USA had better beware. The trains are rolling in. The furnaces have been tested and the ex-ex-gay, –XXtroopers– have their marching orders via the supreme commander of anti-exgay forces in America, Herr Wayne Besen.
…and so on and so forth. D.L.’s a tad pissed that Wayne has stepped up to the plate and created Truth Wins Out, to counter Love Won Out’s lies with some hard facts about the damage conversion therapy causes, and the political motivations of the leaders of the ex-gay movement. With Truth Wins Out we’ll finally have an organization dedicated 100 percent to confronting ex-gay groups and their between the lines political message, that gay people don’t need rights, because gay people either don’t, or should not exist in the first place. This is a good thing, and something the religious right cannot be happy about. They’ve had a virtual free pass to lie through their teeth in the debate about conversion therapy in the popular media for decades now. It seems now that those days are over, and if painting little Hitler mustaches on pictures of Wayne Besen, who is Jewish, is the best that louts like D.L. can do, then they have to know at some level that they’ve lost the fight.
The problem I’ve always had with Goodwin’s Law is that it stifles discussion about fascism in an age when fascism is on the rise. But D.L. makes a good case for it all the same, and you almost feel sorry for him. Reading his post was like watching a raving street lunatic walking around buck naked and babbling to everyone about the aliens in his microwave oven. You just want to scream for someone, anyone, to please give the goddamned nutcase a bathrobe and a ride to his shrink. Seriously. Just because everyone can expose themselves to the whole goddamned world in their blogs, that doesn’t mean everyone should.
This is good:
Wayne Besen’s Final solution (WBFS) Truth Wins Out (TWO) is for all accounts exgaywatch with shark teeth. Along with a 10 point plan to expose, root out and if possible imprison former homosexuals and supporters, Besen seems to have finally found the trigger to his uncontrollable desire to rid the world of exgays.
…root out and if possible imprison former homosexuals and supporters… That’s really rich, coming from someone allied with a political movement whose leadership has repeatedly called for the reestablishment of sodomy laws. But what really makes D.L.’s histrionics about trains and furnaces and prisons so pathetic, is that the bedrock theory of the ex-gay movement is that homosexuals should not exist. The very fact of our existence is proof that there is something wrong within us, and something wrong with the society we live in. If there’s any eliminationist thinking going on around here, it’s being preached from the pulpits of the religious right. And as for final solutions, the religious right already has theirs. They call it the Second Coming:
Addressing the group from the very spot where the conflict is to take place, Frazier turns to Revelation 19, which describes Christ going into battle. "It thrills my heart every time that I read these words," he says, then begins to read: "’And I saw heaven standing open.… And there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire.’"
Frazier pauses to explain the text. "This doesn’t sound like compassionate Jesus," he says. "This doesn’t sound like the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. This is the Warrior King. He judges and makes war."
Frazier returns to the Scripture: "He has a name written on him that no one but he himself knows. He is dressed in a robe that is dipped in blood and his name is the word of God."
This is the moment the Rapturists eagerly await. The magnitude of death and destruction will make the Holocaust seem trivial. The battle finally begins.
Those who remain on earth are the unsaved, the left behind—many of them dissolute followers of the Antichrist, who is massing his army against Christ. Accompanying Christ into battle are the armies of heaven, riding white horses and dressed in fine linen.
"This is all of us," Frazier says.
Frazier points out that Christ does not need high-tech weaponry for this conflict. "’Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword,’ not a bunch of missiles and rockets," he says.
Once Christ joins the battle, both the Antichrist and the False Prophet are quickly captured and cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Huge numbers of the Antichrist’s supporters are slain.
Meanwhile, an angel exhorts Christ, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap." And so, Christ, sickle in hand, gathers "the vine of the earth."
Then, according to Revelation, "the earth was reaped." These four simple words signify the end of the world as we know it.
Grapes that are "fully ripe"—billions of people who have reached maturity but still reject the grace of God—are now cast "into the great winepress of the wrath of God." Here we have the origin of the phrase "the grapes of wrath." In an extraordinarily merciless and brutal act of justice, Christ crushes the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Revelation says, blood flows out "of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs."
With its highly figurative language, Revelation is subject to profoundly differing interpretations. Nevertheless, LaHaye’s followers insist on its literal truth and accuracy, and they have gone to great lengths to calculate exactly what this passage of Revelation means.
As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" he asks. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."
We’ve done the math… How much raw, bleeding seething hatred do you have to have in your heart for your neighbors, when you can raptly, joyfully, eagerly imagine literally billions of them being crushed to death by Jesus Christ in a massive wine press, and calculate exactly how many of them have to go through it in order for their blood to fill the Jezreel valley to a depth of four and a half feet, the height of a horse’s bridle?
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.
Left Behind Games" has stated, on its website its hopes of getting a "suitable for ages 13 and up" or "suitable for ages 6 and up" rating for "Left Behind: Eternal Forces". Here’s a screen capture:
This game immerses children in present-day New York City — 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian.
Let it be said the game makers also give you the option of fighting on the side of the Antichrist, when you’ve had your fill of slaying heathens. By that time you could forgive a kid if they’re wondering if there’s any goddamned difference between being on the side of Christ the Savior, verses Satan the Despiser. Well…there is the fine linen.
Love God with all your heart, and love thy neighbor as thyself…and pass the ammunition! It’s not Wayne Besen who D.L. Foster and his kind have put the Hitler mustache on. It’s Jesus Christ.
In January of 2005, I came out to my parents as being gay. After an initial positive and supporting reaction they began to change their minds…I was sent to several different counselors, the last of which worked for a fundamentalist Christian church. This “counselor” informed me that I was not Gay, in fact, he said no one was really Gay…and anyone who claimed to be gay was living a lie. This pastor recommended to my parents that I be sent to Love In Action’s REFUGE program for teens.
On June 6, 2005 I left Jackson, Missouri at five o’clock in the morning to make the long trip to Memphis, Tennessee. The first things I saw at the Love in Action campus were the protesters. I spent the entire summer between my junior and senior year of highschool in Memphis, against my will, at Refuge, where I underwent many forms of “therapy” that were supposed to turn me away from being gay. These so-called “therapies” included group activities where one person was singled out and made to be ashamed of very personal occurrences in their lives. I had to participate in this activity many times. Other “therapies” included isolation, where you wouldn’t be allowed to communicate—we were not even allowed to make eye contact, with any of the other participants; making the women wear skirts and makeup to help them become more feminine; and making the men play sports in an attempt to help them become more masculine.
These are just a couple of examples of the type of “program” they use to turn people straight. Though while I was there, it just seemed to make people more depressed and self-loathing than they already were. I, myself, went through several of these depressive periods. After enduring this time in Memphis I returned home, unchanged.
My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was.This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.
Fortunately I am now living with a wonderful, and supportive family who are very empathetic toward my situation. They have taken me in, and made me their son-in-spirit. Now that I am in a much-improved situation, I feel that I need to speak-out against the things that I went through. Parents should not be able to force their children to attend any type of program like the one I went to. When a child comes out to their parents as gay, lesbian, or bisexual they need the love and support of their parents. They don’t need to be made to feel that there is something wrong with them, something that needs to be fixed.
That’s the gist of it, but Lance gave Morgan a more detailed account later, and as they allowed me to photograph the interview process, I was able to hear it and it just breaks your heart. Keep this kid’s experience in mind as you read this statement on LIA’s newly updated Refuge website:
God has admonished us to respect our parents. God has given them to us as vessels of His choosing to bring us into His world. Whether or not our parents are worthy of respect.
In other words, if your parents are beating the living crap out of you, then God must want them to do that. That is the kind of thing John Smid is pounding into the heads and hearts of gay teenagers at Love In Action, and time and again I have heard from survivors that the emotional effect of it is devistating. I was able to talk with Lance for a while after the interview and he’s a decent and thoughtful guy and there are parents all over this country who would gladly have given him all the love he’d ever want. But instead of healing the wounds in the families of gay teens, Smid is taking his several thousand dollar fee and making a toxic ruin of their emotional lives, and cutting scars in the hearts of teens they’ll be dealing with for years, if not for their entire lives.
I’m on the road back home today. I’ll post more photos from the protests when I get back, and settled in.
I never thought I’d find myself applauding an essay on abstinence. Most essays you read on the subject start from a strongly negative view of sex itself. But then that’s because most essays you read on the subject come from religious right sources, and the religious right considers joy anathema. You should be ashamed, ashamed of your body, of your feelings, of your deepest inner self. Otherwise, why would you want to let them take control of your body, your feelings, your deepest inner self? Most essays on abstinence start from the premise that there is something evil about sex, and especially if you’re gay, something evil about you. When people speak of abstinence and gay people, what they’re really talking about is lifetime celibacy, lifetime shame.
This generation views 16 to 17 hours of television each week and sees on average 14,000 sexual scenes and references each year. That’s more than 38 references every day.
INTERNET
This generation spends three hours a day online and is the first to grow up with point-and-click pornography. Almost 90 percent of teens have viewed pornography online at one of the 300,000 adult websites, most while doing homework.
MUSIC
More than 25 percent of teen-targeted radio segments contain sexual content; 42 percent of the top selling CDs contain sexual content.
Well no duh. Human beings are sexual creatures (its how we reproduce), and at a certain time in our lives (scientists call it ‘puberty’), sex starts becoming a pressing interest for us. So much, so goddamned obvious. Ask me if I’m happy about the commercialization of sex. Ask me if I think sex is being treated in this culture with the respect it deserves. But it’s not like any of the above are things you wouldn’t expect from human beings. The presence of sex in popular culture is as unsurprising a thing as the presence of weapons and violence. Note however, that you don’t hear a peep from Battle Cry about how frequently teens encounter violent images in popular culture. That’s probably because Battle Cry is itself dealing in violent imagery. It’s okay to imagine yourself as a warrior slaying thousands of your neighbors in blood strewn battle for all that is righteous and holy, but imagining yourself as a lover, laying down with someone and taking them into your arms and driving each other into fits of joyful sexual ecstasy is evil, and you need to have your mind washed out with soap. Jesus didn’t say love thy neighbor, he said to make war on them.
But if Battle Cry is a teen website, the teens writing for it are doing so with adults looking over their shoulders, and feeding them the words. Contrast it with a recent essay I found on Mogenic, a site for gay teens, about abstinence. It’s by a gay teen, and it’s titled, A Virgin, and Proud of it…
…gays have traditionally felt the need to identify themselves as separate from the mainstream. We have created our own subculture, and every subculture needs its own doctrines to follow. We tend to throw out religious teachings—especially Christian teachings—without fully considering their worth. We create our own beliefs, and often we choose beliefs that directly oppose those espoused who have adopted a dislike for homosexuality—like Christians, say. In doing so, we drop many things that perhaps Christianity got right. An example of this is abstinence.
The other problem in gay society is that we don’t have a point to define as the moment when abstinence should end. Abstinence traditionally means waiting until marriage to have sex. As long as gay marriage remains illegal, we don’t have that magical marker in the sky that shows us when, if we decide to abstain from sex, we can stop abstaining. Those of us who choose to remain abstinent, therefore, must forge our own definitions, such as “Once I’m in a meaningful, loving relationship, then I’ll have sex.” But there’s no sure indicator as to when that occurs, and it is easy for us to begin to have sex without infringing upon our morals.
I, personally, am a proud virgin. And by virgin, I mean Virgin, with a capital “V”. Unless you consider masturbation a means to end virginity, I am about as close to 100% virgin as they come. I intend to remain this way until I find myself in the aforementioned “meaningful, loving relationship.” It’s not that I do not find myself attracted to the idea of no-strings-attached sex. In fact, I fairly often fantasize about it. But I cannot imagine myself actually going through with such an act. There are several reasons why I believe abstinence to be the best way to go…
Okay, he gets many things completely wrong in this essay, like when he says "the sexual abandon of gays is legendary". Yeah it’s legendary…as in urban myth legendary. There’s a lot of claptrap talked about gay men and sex, most of it pushed by religious right propaganda machines using studies they’ve either distorted or produced themselves to arrive at the conclusions they were after, namely that gay people are dirty twisted sexual perverts who have sex compulsively and never experience anything like love. This kid buys into a lot of that myth, but so so a lot of us, even many of those of us who should be old enough to know better. Never mind.
And…personally…I strongly doubt that abstinence before marriage is a good idea. I think after you’ve made a vow is the wrong time to find out you’re not sexually compatible. Again…never mind.
What was so heartwarming, so thrilling, about reading that gay teen’s essay, was the self confidant conviction running throughout, that he was entitled as a human being to experience sex in a context of pride, dignity, and self worth.
That’s it. That’s the golden heart of it. Right there. You give that to kids, and it won’t matter what the popular culture says at them. They’ll take from it what they need, what validates their lives, and ignore what does not. Look at the example of the Netherlands, where sex education is frank and comprehensive, and prostitution is legal, and yet they have among the lowest of teen STD and pregnancy rates. Pride matters. And for so many years, my own teen years included, pride was such a scarce commodity for gay teens. I have seen the cost firsthand, of the absence of pride. I have experienced it. And that is why, to this day, I still fight for it.
I never thought I’d find myself applauding an essay on abstinence. And there I was, seeing to my delight, the difference, the profound life affirming difference, between an abstinence discussion based on shame, and one based on self worth. So many kids, so many gay kids especially, never get to have that discussion, because the adults talking to them aren’t really concerned about whether or not they have sex. They’re concerned that they might wake up one day, and realize that to be a human being, is not a dirty thing.
Kids start believing that, and it won’t matter what the religious right says to them, never mind pop culture. And that is exactly why the religious right does not want them to have pride, dignity, and a sense of self worth. They must be ashamed of themselves. Ashamed of what they are: sexual beings. Ashamed, ultimately, to be human.
I’ll be protesting in front of Love In Action here in Memphis tomorrow. Already I’ve heard from some of its supporters, posting on the QAC comment boards, how homosexuals have given themselves up to their base sexual urges, over a holy god. No. We have embraced life. And we are angry at those who would take away from teens, their pride, their dignity, and their self worth, in the name of the creator that gave them life.
I see John Smid finally covered up that bare sign in front of his hollow church…
This is perfect. Almost too good. If you can’t quite make it out, that’s the god-forsaken Love In Action logo under the LOVE IN ACTION verbiage. It’s a pink triangle with a heart superimposed on it. Here it is:
Now I’ve no idea what exactly was on Smid’s mind when he settled on this as his logo, I suspect he thinks he’s somehow slyly co-opting the pink triangle symbol, but whatever was in his foreground thoughts, this is the gutter of his subconscious speaking and it’s almost better then the vacant whitewash that was on the sign previously.
The pink triangle is not a symbol of gay liberation. That would be the Lambda if you’re my generation, or nowadays, the rainbow flag. When gay people display the pink triangle, we do it as an act of defiance against the hate that sent thousands of homosexuals to the death camps, or we do it as a remembrance of those who died, and those who survived. We are emphatically not embracing the status the Nazis imposed on homosexuals, that of a dangerous sub human perversion that it was better to exterminate for the good of society.
Recall that the triangle symbols the Nazis used in the concentration camps to identify classes of inmates, were derived from the shape of traffic hazard signs widely in use throughout Germany at the time. The colored triangles were put onto human beings to identify them, literally, as though they were some kind of hazardous biological waste. That is the meaning of the pink triangle. John Smid’s drawing a little heart over it is akin to putting a smiley face on a swastika.
Well…I couldn’t have said it better myself. The bedrock premise of homosexual conversion therapy is that homosexuals should not exist. Couched under layer after layer of "love the sinner, hate the sin" bullshit, the bottom line for them is that this world would be a much better place if there were no homosexuals. And here comes John Smid, to make it all plain as day that what they want to do to us, they mean in love. Honest…we don’t hate you…we love you… And to prove it, he’s taken the death camp symbol for homosexuality and put a fuzzy little heart over it.
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.
BLACK JACK, Mo. – The city council has rejected a measure allowing unmarried couples with multiple children to live together, and the mayor said those who fall into that category could soon face eviction.
Olivia Shelltrack and Fondrey Loving were denied an occupancy permit after moving into a home in this St. Louis suburb because they have three children and are not married.
The town’s planning and zoning commission proposed a change in the law, but the measure was rejected Tuesday by the city council in a 5-3 vote.
"I’m just shocked," Shelltrack said. "I really thought this would all be over, and we could go on with our lives."
Olivia Shelltrack finally has her dream home. Her family moved into the five-bedroom, three-bath frame house in Black Jack last month. But now she fears she and her fiance face uprooting their children because of a city ordinance that says her household fails to meet Black Jack’s definition of a family.
Shelltrack and Fondray Loving, her boyfriend of 13 years, were denied an occupancy permit because of an ordinance forbidding three or more individuals from living together if they are not related by "blood, marriage or adoption." The couple have three children, ages 8, 10 and 15, although Loving is not the biological father of the oldest child.
…
The couple appealed the denial of an occupancy permit last week at a hearing before Black Jack’s board of adjustment. Shelltrack said board members asked her and Loving personal questions about their relationship, their children and their previous home in Minneapolis, from where they moved, for nearly an hour. Then the board denied the couple’s appeal. The case now goes before Black Jack’s municipal court.
At the hearing, Shelltrack said, one board of adjustment member, Norma Mitchell, even pointed at her and asked, "I don’t understand why you as a woman didn’t exercise your right to marry that man," before being hushed by another board member.
Mitchell refused to comment. She referred all calls to Black Jack Mayor Norman McCourt, who defended the ordinance.
"This is about the definition of family, not if they’re married or not," he said. "It’s what cities do to maintain the housing and to hold down overcrowding."
"This is about the definition of family, not if they’re married or not…" Gotta love it. From the book of Doubletalk, chapter 4 verse 12: Thou shalt be married, in order to be a family…however whether or not you are married has nothing to do with it… We thought you were speaking in tongues there for a while brother McCourt, but it turns out you were just talking out of both sides of your mouth.
This is what the religious right wants to turn America into…a place where they can dictate not only who is and is not a family, but where we can and cannot live, and what property we can and cannot hold, based on how well our lives conform to their religious dictates. If you think it’s only same sex couples, only same sex households, that are at risk of being literally thrown off their own property for religious crimes in the United States, think again. You’re on their plate too, your children, your home, your life, it all belongs to them as far as they are concerned. And you can bet your ass that there are people in that town who are nodding their heads approvingly right now, right this instant, and thinking that if the fornicators are arrested, the city can give their kids away to a decent, properly married couple…
Shelltrack, 31, could appeal Black Jack’s decision to the St. Louis County Circuit Court, but she said that would involve legal fees that she and Loving can’t afford because of the money they poured into buying their home.
She said, however, the couple has filed a complaint with the U.S. Housing and Urban Department.
That would be the Bush Housing and Urban Department. Try not to laugh too hard. And if that irony wasn’t enough, from the photos I’m seeing of the couple, it appears that Shelltrack is white and her boyfriend, Fondrey Loving, is black. Loving verses Missouri anyone? And you thought times had changed…
WASHINGTON — American oil companies stand to gain in competing for access to oil reserves in Libya by the restoration of normal diplomatic relations and the removal of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime from a U.S. list of terrorism sponsors.
Oh…ya think? Right…they’ve got some of that black stuff under their territory too, don’t they…
On May 6, 2002 United States Under Secretary of State John R. Bolton (now U.N. Ambassador) gave a speech entitled "Beyond the Axis of Evil." In it he added three more nations to be grouped with the already mentioned "rogue states": Libya, Syria, and Cuba. The criteria for membership in this group were: "state sponsors of terrorism that are pursuing or who have the potential to pursue weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or have the capability to do so in violation of their treaty obligations." The speech was widely reported as an expansion of the original Axis of Evil.
From Rogue State to valued trading partner in four years. If only the cold war had been so short…
Assuming Congress does not disapprove of Libya’s removal from the State Department’s terror list in the 45 days allowed for review, "the oil companies will send whatever they want to send for their operations," Lichtenbaum, an international lawyer with Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, said in an interview.
Another control being lifted, he said, was one imposed by energy legislation enacted last summer. It barred shipment abroad of devices that could be part of a nuclear program that companies like Halliburton normally use to explore for oil.
"That potentially was going to shut down U.S. companies’ ability to explore for oil," he said.
So Halliburton couldn’t get their equipment in, eh? Good thing Libya’s going to be taken off the terror list. We wouldn’t want our big defense contractors to be sending devices that could be part of a nuclear program over to terrorist states now would we? What’s the price of gasoline again…?
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.
A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
But…but…Bush said they were only going after terrorists. And he wouldn’t lie to us. Look at all the weapons of mass destruction we found in Iraq…just like he said we would…
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."
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