Dear Religious Person: “Are you kidding? What are you talking about? You’re just a person like I am. You are clueless. You have no idea what happens.” August 19th, 2008
[SOURCE: CNN LARRY KING LIVE - Bill Maher Takes Aim at Politics, Religion - Aired August 19, 2008 - 21:00 ET]
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
LARRY KING, HOST (voice-over): Tonight Bill Maher mouths off on politics…BILL MAHER, HOST, HBO’S “REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER”: Politically incorrect. You think maybe?
KING: … the presidency…
MAHER: It’s going to be a good show.
KING: … practically everything else.
MAHER: It worries me that people are running my country who think, who believe in a talking snake.
KING: He’s taking aim at religion, too. Is nothing sacred?
MAHER: I’m talking to America. You know what I’m talking about.
KING: Get ready for outrage and outcry. It’s all fair game for the outspoken Bill Maher.
MAHER: Speak louder!
KING: Right now, on LARRY KING LIVE.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KING: He returns to “Real Time with Bill Maher” on HBO. The new episodes start Friday, August 29, Labor Day weekend. He’ll be appearing at Humphrey’s in San Diego this Sunday. His documentary, “Religulous,” opens in theaters this fall. I got a chance to see it. It’s going to be wild. And we’ll talk about that a little later.
Thanks for coming, Bill. Always good to see you. One of my favorite guests.
MAHER: Thank you. I hate that word, “documentary.” It sounds like they have to put on their thinking caps.
KING: What would you call it?
MAHER: And unscripted comedy. An uproarious comedy.
KING: An uproarious film that’ll have you splitting — anyway. OK, the vice president picks. Apparently it’s right around the corner.
MAHER: Right.
KING: Could be tomorrow. Could be the next day with Obama. What’s your read?
MAHER: I was worried I might get bumped today, actually, Larry. I thought, oh, Obama is going to pick him and then it’s like, “Bill, something happened. Good-bye.”
KING: What’s your read?
MAHER: You know, I’m reading, I guess, the same thing you’re reading, that it’s between three boring white guys again.
KING: He doesn’t need a black guy.
MAHER: Actually if he doubled down on Colin Powell, how wild would that be? I mean, this is the Democrats’ problem. Is that they never do anything bold once they get the nomination. You know, I’m still for Obama, but I have to tell you, he’s trying my patience.
KING: Really?
MAHER: Well, moving to the center on so many issues and just doing what I saw Kerry do, what I saw Al Gore do. I thought he was going to be different. He didn’t have that “I’m going to blow it” look on his face like those two did. But he’s doing sort of the same thing: moving to the center, moving to be a kind of a lighter version of the Republican candidate.
KING: So who do you — who do you handicap? Do you think it’s going to be one of these three boring white guys?
MAHER: I do, but I think that’s, again, the wrong — the wrong sort of strategy. At this point I think they need Hillary Clinton.
KING: Really?
MAHER: Yes. Look, I may change my mind tomorrow. I’ve been thinking this way a long time, but I swear to God. Not just because it’s bold and they need to show bold, but you know what? I think they need the Clinton ruthlessness onboard. I really do.
I’m beginning to think Bill Clinton is still the only guy in that party who really knows how to do this, as far as talking to the American people, making the counter argument to the Republican arguments that, again, Obama just seems to be cozying up to their way of thinking. “Oil drilling? Yes sure. I’m for that. Wiretapping? Like that, too. Religious nut? I can get onboard there.” I’m telling you, I like this guy but…
KING: Why — why was Biden a bad choice? Here’s a guy with world…
MAHER: He’s not a bad choice. KING: … foreign policy experience.
MAHER: He’s not a bad choice, but is he going to excite anybody? Hillary Clinton would excite the base. I keep saying the Democrats have to move toward their base. They have to make the case that there is this other America out there.
KING: You mean technically. Not technically. There’s an unpopular president, the most unpopular president ever.
MAHER: Right.
KING: An unpopular war.
MAHER: Right.
KING: Economic worries. Why isn’t this a done deal?
MAHER: You’d think it would be a no-brainer in a country where…
KING: How much of it is…
MAHER: … torture is legal and marijuana isn’t. You’d think it would be a no-brainer.
KING: How much of it is race?
MAHER: That’s a big factor, much bigger than people think, I believe.
KING: Sad.
MAHER: I think the poll I read recently was 30 percent of white Americans have a positive view of Barack Obama. You know, even if he gets every black person in America to vote for him — and he will, by the way — I don’t know if — that’s just going to cancel out the people who wouldn’t vote for him just because of that one reason.
And of course, the Republican campaign is all about making him different. He’s not like us. He’s from some weird place like, I don’t know, Morocco or something. He doesn’t always wear a flag pin, and he’s got a lippy wife, and his pastor wears an African shirt. You know, this stuff is scary, Larry.
KING: You think McCain is playing to that?
MAHER: Absolutely.
KING: Does McCain disappoint you in doing that?
MAHER: They both have disappointed me, but yes, McCain has been disappointing me steadily since 2000 when I was supporting him.
KING: I remember when you supported him. MAHER: Yes. But you know, that Straight Talk Express has taken a lot of detours, Larry. And the closer he gets to it the more — the more they both do ridiculous things. Once — you know, once Paris and Britney got in the race, that’s when I said, you know, this is another year where I have to march forward, again, without an ideological champion.
I mean, Obama is no — I like him better because he’s younger, he’s cooler, he’s smarter. I do think he’d be a better president. You know, he does nuance, and you saw how well that goes over with the Rick Warren people.
But as far as an ideological champion, do I have one anymore? Do I have one — do I have a candidate who’s — who’s taking the side on the issues that I would want the candidate to take on most issues? No. I’m left with two…
KING: Will — might McCain go bold and pick, say, a Democratic running mate or a pro-choice running mate: Tom Ridge, Joe Lieberman?
MAHER: Well, Joe Lieberman is already a Republican. He’s just a Democrat in name. I don’t think that makes a big difference.
You know, that’s an important pick, because McCain is, you know, another Bush in the sense we’re getting another very detached, anti- intellectual president. There’s a big vacuum when you have a president like that. And so the vice president very often steps into that vacuum, as we saw with Dick Cheney. That could happen with McCain.
I think when you get McCain you get the worst of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Old, forgetful, doddering, anti-intellectual. And into that breach who knows who might step?
And I’m amused that the press thinks — the pundits, you know, he’s going to pick somebody younger. Gee, you think? Who’s available that’s older? Bob Dole, Lauren Bacall and Abel, I think, is the short list.
KING: Boy, you’re really down on this campaign. It’s got you down. Both of them.
MAHER: Well, I’m reading the paper, and how could it not? Is it me? Am I making this stuff up?
KING: What does Bill think of the John Edwards sex scandal? We’ll ask him. It’s still ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAHER: John McCain has to stop starting every sentence of every speech with the words “my friends.” If he’s really my friend, then how come every time we get together I’m the one who has to buy the weed? (END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: We’re back with Bill Maher.
MAHER: That’s ridiculous.
KING: He’s our guest. Before we get to the John Edwards caper, what do you make of the statement by Joe Biden today. He said, quote, “I’m not the guy.”
MAHER: I didn’t hear that. Really? For vice president?
KING: Yes. Does that mean he is the guy?
MAHER: You think it’s reverse psychology?
KING: Yes.
MAHER: Throw him off and make him pick me.
KING: What do you think?
MAHER: I think any time Joe Biden limits a sentence to three words, he’s winning a lot of fans, and he’s trying to prove that he is the guy. I think what he means is he’s not looking for it, but he would take it.
KING: OK. John Edwards. What does one say? I know you liked him very much. Or like him very much.
MAHER: Yes. I still do. He didn’t cheat on me. Although I understand when people say they’re disappointed in the sense that, well, I guess it’s like if you invested in a company and somebody did something to damage the stock. You know, I did send him money. People did send him money. And what if he was the candidate now? What if he had gotten the nomination and this broke? I mean, it would have been a disaster for the Democrats. They’d have to do an Eagleton and get somebody else at the last minute. You know how hard that is to get help at the last minute, Larry.
I — always when somebody is caught cheating, of course it’s never an admirable thing to do, but I still think there’s a giant lack of national perspective on this crime.
KING: Meaning?
MAHER: Meaning, a man is married 31 years, you know, people, not just men, women. I mean, you’re married a long time. You know, you’re desperate for something new. I mean, men like new sex. Women like new shoes. You know, people like new. You can’t stop human nature.
So OK. It’s not an admirable thing to do. The noble thing to do when you’re married is to suck it up and suffer. We all get that. Fine. But it’s a shame that we have to lose a good message from an otherwise good man. He was the guy who had the health care plan that they both copied. His idea that we have two Americas and in one of them he’s single. I mean, but certainly, that’s an important message. And it’s a shame that, you know, his name and all of his work, he’s just a national punchline now.
KING: Are the conventions relevant? Do they mean anything? It’s like going to the Super Bowl and you know the winner. Isn’t it the same thing?
MAHER: Yes, but — but it has morphed into something else which is American people generally don’t pay attention to politics very much, certainly not before this time of the year. I do think they’re often too dumb to be governed.
At least this is a time when the parties can sort of step out and say, “Here’s who we are. Here are our people. Here’s what we’re selling. We packaged it up for you. We’re only going to take an hour of your evening, and you can go right back to Howie Mandel or whatever you’re watching. And it is your country. We are in bad shape. Just take a look at our wares this year. This is our fall line. We’ve got health care. We’ve got this. We’ve got that. These are the people we’re putting up there who we think represent us best.”
You know, there is something to that. To just — you know, people in this country need you to package it and put a bow on it and make a pageant out of it. And I’m sure if they could get them in swimsuits they would, but yes, I do think there is a value to that.
KING: You do?
MAHER: Yes.
KING: OK. It’s no secret that you deal with religion a lot. And you have a new movie coming called “Religulous.” I saw that movie. It’s is really well done. Now, it will offend — I think it will offend the deeply religious people. Those on the border — certainly, agnostics are going to love it. Atheists are going to love it. But there’s a lot of open religious people who would just appreciate it as a very funny movie.
MAHER: Right. You don’t have to agree with it, I think, to laugh.
KING: What — what part — now you mentioned Rick Warren. What part does — what should religion play in our political life?
MAHER: Well, if you ask me, none, or in any part of life, but you know, look who you’re talking to, the guy who made “Religulous.” But certainly in political life it’s had a terribly detrimental effect. I mean, did you see the Rick Warren thing?
KING: Sure. And we had him on last night.
MAHER: Yes, right. And by the way, let me just preface this by saying I’m asking people for perspective. I have it also.
Rick Warren, big improvement over Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. If we have to have a pope of the super Christ-ies, I’d rather it be him. He’s got good ideas about actually, you know — actual helping people.
Because you know, one thing I don’t like about religion is that, you know, ask any of the truly devout. It’s not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It’s mainly about salvation. It’s mainly about getting your butt saved when you die. And that’s why I think they’re less moral than ethicists. But they would…
KING: But Rick is different?
MAHER: He’s better. He’s an improvement. But you know, when he says, as I heard him say before the event, “I’m going to ask the tough questions.” What would those questions be? How tightly do you close your eyes when you insist on believing something that your mind must be telling you can’t be true? OK.
But here’s a good example of why it shouldn’t infect our public policy. The big question that got all the play in the news snippets was asking what should we do about evil? Evil. And…
KING: Is there evil?
MAHER: Is there evil? And what should we do about it? So Obama gives a very nuanced answer, and again this is why I do like this guy. He sort of can’t win for — lose with the winning. I mean, he’s damned if he does and he’s damned if he doesn’t. He gives a nuanced answer, which I like, and he loses the crowd.
He said, “Yes, we should be aware of evil, but we should be humble about evil.” And what he was trying to say, I think, was you know what? It’s easy to sit back in America and go, “Well, we’re the good people. That’s common knowledge. Evil is always over there and never here.”
He was saying you know what? We have a lot of evil right here. Look at the prison system. Look at the justice system. Look how we treat immigrants. We torture people now in America. There’s, you know, rampant sexual harassment of women in the military. There’s a lot of evil that we’re doing. OK. This didn’t go over very well.
Then McCain is asked. What do we do about evil? Two words. Defeat it. Now, of course, to the people in this audience, this goes over great because when they hear evil, they think of something very tangible: the devil. They’re not kidding. They believe in this comic-book figure called the devil who’s going to poke your ass in hell if you’re bad. Heaven, air conditioning. OK.
So, you know, you have to take this into account. These are voters. These are people who think evil is the devil. We can defeat it by the end of my first term. We will defeat evil. And, you know, how are you going to have a country, supposed to be a super power, in this world making the right decisions if this is the kind of thing, thinking that goes into it? It’s like trying to write a song when half the keys are out, you know, the keys on the piano are out of tune.
KING: We’re just getting warmed up with Maher on religion, politics, the election, when LARRY KING LIVE returns.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MAHER: Do you believe in evolution?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know, my — first, I don’t know. Clearly, the scientific community is a little divided on some the specifics of that, and I understand that.
MAHER: I don’t think they are.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, well, I…
MAHER: I think they pretty much agree.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don’t know how it all happened. I mean, I’m certainly willing to…
MAHER: Could it possibly have been Adam and Eve 5,000 years ago with a talking snake in the garden? Could it?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, it could have possibly been that.
MAHER: Come on. This is my problem, because I’m trying — I mean, you’re a senator. You are one of the very few people who are really running this country. It worries me that people are running my country who think, who believe in a talking snake.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, though.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KING: That was funny.
MAHER: And a very nice man.
KING: He is.
MAHER: You know, I hope he’s not…
KING: OK. This — this film, “Religulous,” opens October 3. It will be wide?
MAHER: Oh, yes.
KING: All over?
Here is another clip from the film, “Religulous.” Watch. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
(MUSIC: “Jesus is just all right with me Jesus is just all right oh, yes.)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I left myself on. Testing, one, two. Testing.
All right. How you doing, Bill? God bless you.
MAHER: Hi.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Seen you around.
MAHER: Having no other gods before you, that’s not moral. There’s nothing moral about that. It’s just — it’s just something a jealous god would do.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It does say that our god is a jealous god.
MAHER: But your god is jealous? That seems so un-godlike that God would have such a petty human emotion.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He’s also…
MAHER: I know people who have gotten over jealousy, let alone God.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There’s two sides of the coin. He’s a just god, and he’s also a merciful god.
MAHER: The first five books are about wiping out people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: His ways are higher than ours, Bill.
MAHER: But our shirking (ph) should be higher.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That’s a good point.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KING: You better explain. Where was that? That man was Jesus right?
MAHER: Yes. That was in heaven, Larry.
KING: Where was…
MAHER: We went on location. Believe me, it’s not easy to get in there. Permits. You think the Chinese are…
KING: You especially. I don’t think you have a shot to get in.
MAHER: No. That was Holy Land. That was the amusement park in Florida, in Orlando.
KING: Like Disneyland?
MAHER: Oh, yes. You never heard of Holy Land?
KING: Well, I never — I saw the movie.
MAHER: You’ve got young kids, Larry. You take them down there. They will love it. They’ll see a minor league baseball game. You go to spring training. You go to Holy Land. It will be a fantastic trip.
KING: What do they do in Holy Land?
MAHER: Well, they — well, they have Jesus. They re-enact — we show it in the movie — they re-enact the — I guess, the March of Tears — no, I’m getting that wrong, but you know, where he was carrying the cross and he was beaten by the centurions and then they, you know, crucify him.
KING: They show you all that?
MAHER: They re-enact it with that man. That was Jesus.
KING: And you interviewed him?
MAHER: And I interviewed him, yes.
KING: Did you watch the whole presentation?
MAHER: Oh, yes.
KING: What do you mean?
MAHER: You know, I mean, this is — this is what they believe, and having been to the real Via De La Rosa in Jerusalem and then this re-enactment in America, I was confounded as to which I thought was more commercially crass. It was really a tossup.
KING: Really?
MAHER: Ever been to Via De La Rosa in Jerusalem? It’s really the Via De La Rosa mall. You know, it’s very commercialized, not that that’s the worst part of the whole religious problem.
KING: In this film you take a tour. You go to the Mormon Church. You go to the Vatican. Did anything alter your thinking? Did anything impress you?
MAHER: I was impressed with how hard it is to make a movie, and it altered my thinking about ever wanting to make another one. You know, you just have to get up early in the morning and put on makeup. You know, it’s endless, all day.
KING: A great director.
MAHER: Larry Charles was the right man.
KING: Who directed the…
MAHER: Yes, “Borat.” And I needed someone who understood comedy, because we’re making a comedy. We’re trying to — well, we’re mostly trying to make people laugh, but I also would like to arouse the somewhat, like, 16 percent of people who I call rationalists. They would call them atheists or agnostics in America. It sounds like it’s a small minority, but 16 percent is actually bigger than blacks or Jews or homosexuals or NRA members, or teachers union, Hispanics. If those people stood up and made themselves heard, but they never do.
KING: Do you think it might be more? Do you think there are people who just don’t admit it?
MAHER: Absolutely. You know what they are? They’re a lot of people like me, like I was. We make a point in the movie to show that my evolution toward where I was, where I am now, was gradual. You know, I still had, later in life — I wasn’t a religious person. I definitely didn’t believe in the Jesus story after we quit the Catholic church.
But I did have an idea of some imaginary man who lived in my head who got mad at me if I was bad and who I had to bargain with if I was bad. And I was always being like, “Oh, please, God, get me out of this. Just get me out of this. I promise I will never do this again.”
So, you know, it doesn’t happen overnight. You have to come to it slowly.
KING: I asked Rick Warren if he could vote for — would America vote for an atheist? And he said never, because in his opinion, he could never vote for someone who did not believe in a higher authority than himself or herself.
MAHER: Well, but see, I used to read parts of Rick Warren’s book onstage in my standup act. It produced, I promise you, gales of laughter, because the idea that any person on earth can tell you with such specifics what happens when you die just blows my mind. That somebody on earth, another person, can just say to you, “Oh, yes. And what happens when you get to heaven? Yes. You’ll meet Jesus. He’s wearing a white robe. There’s a little gold piping on the sleeve. And then you go in this room and eat eggs and you watch ‘F Troop’.”
Are you kidding? What are you talking about? You’re just a person like I am. You are clueless. You have no idea what happens.
KING: Don’t you think Rick believes it?
MAHER: Of course he believes it, but how — how ridiculous is that? Like, if I went to the Himalayas to find the holiest of holy men in the world who had all the answers, the guru. And I got to the top of the mountain. I said, “Please, master, can you help me with the ultimate meaning of life?”
He’d say, “Yes. There’s a guy Rick in Long Beach, Rick Warren. Go ask him. He knows exactly what happens when you die.” And, you know, that is my ultimate message. Unless a god told you personally what happens when you die, it all came from another person with no more mental powers than you have, and you don’t know. So just man up and say, “I don’t know.” But they believe.
KING: And belief — belief is a tough thing to counter.
MAHER: Yes. And I understand why it’s a luxury for some people who don’t need it and why a lot of people are less fortunate, and they do need it.
So we’re not trying to point fingers in this movie. I think we do it — we’re laughing all the way through it. I think we’re winking and having a good time, and we’re not trying to be judgmental. But at some point, you know, mankind is going to have to shed this skin if he’s going to move forward. I do have a serious intellectual problem with it.
And on another level it just ticks me off. It’s just the ultimate hustle. It’s just “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” You know, why can’t they, I always ask — I asked Jesus at Holy Land, “Why can’t God just defeat the devil and get rid of evil?”
You know, and it’s the same reason the comic-book character can’t get rid of his nemesis. Then there’s no story. If God gets rid of the devil — and he could, he’s all powerful — well, then there’s no fear. There’s no reason to come to church. There’s no reason to pass the plate. We’re all out of a job. You know, it’s got to go on.
KING: Start dialing. Bill will take your calls.
MAHER: Yes, right.
KING: Ahead on LARRY KING LIVE.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAHER: New rule: President Bush must resist the urge to invade Cuba. Fidel Castro has stepped down and now Cuba is being run by his brother. And the majority of Americans can’t wait until our president steps down and our country is also being run by a brother.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: We’re back with Bill Maher. Tonight’s quick vote, by the way, I like it when Bill Maher takes on politics or religion? Take your pick. Go to CNN.com/LarryKing and cast your quick vote now. Email question from Mike in San Francisco: “I’m always puzzled by undecided voters. I think it’s more appropriate to call a lot of them unhappy with the choices. Do you believe the time is right to move beyond Republicans and Democrats and have a truly multiparty system?”
MAHER: Sure. But it’s probably not going to lap in our lifetime. A multi — you know, every time a third party has tried in this country, it’s absorbed by one of the other two parties. Because we don’t have a parliamentary system. If we had a parliamentary system, that affords many parties. You know, it’s probably a better system, but can you imagine taking on the U.S. Constitution and trying to get away with that?
KING: Let’s take a question from Orlando. Hello.
CALLER: Bill, for years, Evangelicals never cared about pollution and the destruction of our environment. They only cared about making converts. Do you think the Evangelicals’ new found mission to now save the environment is because they realize it’s smart business to appear politically correct?
MAHER: Wow, what a well thought question. She had it ready and she didn’t fumble. Very good. Thank you. That’s one reason why I’m saying Rick Warren is a big improvement, is that he cares about the environment, poor people. He’s actually — has read the New Testament, I think. So there’s a Christ-like, not just a Christian element to him. So, great. If they throw their lot in with saving the Earth, that’s fantastic.
One reason I have always been anti-Evangelical and people who take the Bible literally is because it allows you to be horrible to animals, people, too. Slavery is OK with the Bible, keeping women down, and honor killings and let’s not even go into how bad they are to people. But animals, you know, the Bible says man can have dominion over animals. And also they believe people have a soul, whatever that is, but animals don’t. So do whatever you want with them.
So if they’re getting more on the page of being kind to animals and helping the environment, then sign me up.
KING: Do you believe it?
MAHER: Yes, I do. I don’t doubt their sincerity. I doubt their — you know, I always say it’s a neurological disorder. I doubt that part of their mind that’s walled off. I want to knock down that door. And, you know, I think this movie is going to be that for a lot of people. It’s going to be the anti-”Passion of the Christ.” For all the people who liked that movie, there’s another crowd.
KING: This is the antidote.
MAHER: Right.
KING: Email question from Linda in Nebraska: “what’s your opinion of the so-called stimulus package that Congress passed? Any clue about what or whom it actually stimulated?”
MAHER: I read that the only industry that got a spike was online porn. Seriously, people got their stimulus checks and got to stimulating themselves rather quickly. But I find it sleazy, you know, that the government bribes people. Every time there’s a problem, what did Bush say after 9/11? Go shopping.
KING: McCain attacked that yesterday, at the Rick Warren thing. He attacked that pretty tough on that go shopping idea.
MAHER: He picks his moments to pretend to look tough. And then, of course, we had a war with tax cuts. I mean, no one has ever done that. Even Croissis (ph), I think, raised taxes on the Persians when he had to fight a war. Now we find ourselves in a recession and the answer is here’s 600 dollars. It’s sleazy. Here’s some cash. Do whatever you want with it.
KING: Both parties favored it.
MAHER: Both parties favor almost everything. This is my problem. Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have come down now at least wishy washy on oil drilling. At least they’re not opposing it. Again, where is my champion? Where is the Democrat who would have stood up and said, you know what? Even oil people get it, that offshore drilling is not the answer. It’s not even a short-term answer and it’s not a long-term answer. It’s a lose-lose. And yet two thirds of the people in this country were convinced somehow that this is going to lower our gas prices in the short term and they’re for it.
This is what I mean about being too dumb to be governed. A politician can’t be that much better than the people. The people have to look in the mirror. Yes, the leaders are bad, because the people almost demand it of them.
KING: Do you agree with Lincoln, who said no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people?
MAHER: And he was writing in the ’30s, when people were a lot more intelligence. Imagine what he’d say now. His head would explode.
KING: An email from Lad in New Jersey: “As a former member of the U.S. Air Force, I feel the drinking age should be lowered to 18. If somebody is old enough to fight for their country, he’s old enough to drink. What do you think Bill?”
MAHER: I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’d say 14. No. Sure, I mean, 18, I don’t know. How long ago that I started drinking illegally, but –
KING: You don’t drink anymore. Do you?
MAHER: I drink way less than I used to. But I certainly do have a cocktail.
KING: Pot?
MAHER: Pot?
KING: I do pot in the movie.
MAHER: Larry, we were in Amsterdam. Don’t get me in trouble with the authorities.
KING: It was legal, correct.
MAHER: We were in Amsterdam, where it’s legal. In America, I only smoke it when I’m 12 miles offshore. I have a boat, Larry. I go out there beyond U.S. territorial waters and I light up.
KING: We’ll continue with the Emmy award nominating — how many times have you been nominated?
MAHER: Twenty one.
KING: And never won.
MAHER: You’d think once just by clerical error I would have won.
KING: Right after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAHER: The Crocodile Hunter clan has to leave nature alone. This week, the late Steve Irwin’s younger son was bitten by a Boa Constrictor. Authorities don’t know exactly what went wrong, but they think the accident might have happened when a bunch of idiots let a four-year-old (EXPLETIVE DELETED) around with a giant snake.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: “Real Time With Bill Maher” returns Friday, August 29th. He is appearing at Humphries in San Diego this Sunday, and his film, “Religulous,” will open October 3rd wide across the United States. No matter what you think about religion, you should see this movie. Charlottesville, Virginia, hello.
CALLER: Hi, Bill. I have a question. What do you think when religious people say that men who believe in God are weak minded?
KING: When religious people say that?
CALLER: Yes. They call men weak minded.
KING: Men who don’t believe in god you mean.
CALLER: Yes.
MAHER: I’ve heard it the other way. Jesse Ventura had that great quote, religion is a crutch for week minded people who need strength in numbers. Pretty harsh words from somebody who I think was governor at the time.
KING: He was.
MAHER: I don’t know how it’s more weak minded to be the one who is saying, look, I don’t know what happens when you die. So I’m just going to say I don’t know. That, to me, seems a more honest approach than believing in — KING: Well, in truth, don’t most people think that? Would you gather that they don’t know? Because if they knew, why would they fear it so much?
MAHER: Right.
KING: Why would they not — why would you not — why fear death?
MAHER: You know, I agree. I’ve never been the person who’s been troubled by those big questions. I’ve never been able to answer them and I know I never will. And you just give yourself a headache thinking about them. I mean, if you start thinking about these things, you kind of get down to why is there anything? Try to ponder that one afternoon, if you’re not high. You’ll be, you know –
KING: Why is there anything?
MAHER: Well, like if the universe begins at a certain point, what was before the universe? Nothing. But how can nothing — we can’t contemplate that, because nothing is something. See, there may be answers. I’m not saying that there isn’t something out there. I’m not strictly an atheist. An atheist is certain there’s no god.
KING: That’s a religion.
MAHER: Sort of. You know, people say could it be Jesus? Yes, it could be Jesus. It also could be Furbee (ph) or the lint in my navel. I have a feeling it’s probably not something that smacks of the story that bronze-age men would write down, people who didn’t know what an atom or a germ was, or where the sun went at night, or why their women got pregnant. You know, if the Bible was written by a god who’s beyond time, it wouldn’t be so limited to the morays of that era.
KING: Cape Coral, Florida, hello.
CALLER: Hey, Larry, love the show.
KING: Thank you.
CALLER: Bill, I love your show too. I can’t wait for it to come back, sir.
MAHER: Thank you.
CALLER: I have a question. Do you think McCain will be just as bad or worse than Bush? I’m a first-time voter, and I’m Barack all the way, man.
KING: How do you compare McCain to Bush?
MAHER: OK, dude. It’s hard to say. It’s hard to imagine a president being worse than Bush. But I could see McCain pulling it off. I don’t know. McCain is a real hard one to figure, because he could get into office and revert to the maverick McCain that we used to like. He could. He could say, you know what? I had to do a lot of stuff I didn’t like to get to this spot, which every politician has to do. But now I’m here. You can’t touch me. I’m not going to run again, perhaps. I’m just going to do it my way. And, you know, he is — he can be better on a lot of issues than Bush.
But on issues like Iraq he’s not. He doesn’t get the most fundamental thing about this war, that it is our presence in that country that is the problem. He’s OK with leaving troops in Iraq for a hundred years. He said this. He said, look, we have troops in Germany and Japan and South Korea. Yes, but they’re not Muslim countries. What irks them is just our presence there. As long as we have troops in the heart of the Middle East, there will always be terrorist planners trying to kill us, young, Muslim men who want to kill us for doing that.
So on that level, alone, I can’t say he’s better than Bush.
KING: We’ll be back with more of Bill Maher. Don’t go away.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KING: We’re with Bill Maher and the caller is from Concord, California. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. How are you.
KING: I’m fine. Go ahead.
CALLER: I have a question for Bill. You’ve come across — maybe it’s just the cockiness that you have answer to everything. But you never seem to present anything that you don’t have an answer. It’s just your opinion. I was wondering why.
MAHER: I don’t know what that question means.
KING: He just said he has no idea where the world began or ends.
MAHER: I mean, when I give my opinion, it’s assumed — I think tacitly we understand — I’m not speaking from a position of religious authority. Yes, I sound like I know what I believe. It’s what I believe at the moment. I could be wrong. I’m the first one to say I could be wrong. But, you know, if you don’t sound like you know what you’re talking about, no one’s going to believe you.
And again, if I may get back to the problem with Obama and McCain, you know, McCain looks confident. When he says defeat it, it looks confident. Obama by sidling up on so many issues to the Republican doesn’t look confident. And the American public is clueless. They don’t know who’s right, Obama or McCain. That would involve reading and watching CNN. Please.
So they vote for the person who looks the most confident and if the Democratic candidate is constantly slinking toward the positions of the right winger, they’re going to say to themselves at the end of the day, why vote for the imitation? Why not just vote for the real thing?
KING: Atlanta, hello.
CALLER: Hello, Bill.
MAHER: Hello.
CALLER: I wondering if you knew George Carlin on a personal level. Also, I remember a movie you made back in the ’80s with Brian DePalma, if I’m not mistaken. Was that you?
MAHER: No. No, that was “Body Double.” That’s a guy who did look like me back then.
KING: George Carlin, by the way, is nominated against you for an Emmy.
MAHER: Yes.
KING: Ironic.
MAHER: And I’m doing the — another one I’m bound to lose. I’m doing the Mark Twain Award for him in Washington in November. I’m thrilled.
KING: Are you going to accept it for him?
MAHER: I think a bunch of comics are going to make a presentation. It’s a very prestigious award. This is not just something they offered to him posthumously, like, oh, he’s dead, let’s give him an award. It was bad timing on his part.
KING: You were on the night he died. That was a sad night.
MAHER: We had a good show about it. Did I know him personally? Not that well. I wish I had. But, you know, at the moment in my life when I got to know him and work with him, he was in his ’60s. He was set in his ways. He did his show, he went home. I wish I had met him when he was younger, and we could have got out and had a drink together.
KING: An e-mail question –
MAHER: I was younger and go out and drink more.
KING: Email question from John in Toronto, Ontario: “Bill, you’re very outspoken about staying a bachelor. Has there ever been a woman who made you second guess your choice not to settle down?”
MAHER: On a nightly basis, Larry. But I resist. I have kept my toe out of the trap.
KING: Is there any girl in your background that you said, she might be — could have been?
MAHER: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Stop asking these questions, mom, about when am I going to get married. First of all, I’ve never been against marriage. I always admit that it works for a certain amount — number of people, a certain percentage. And I know people who are very happy and wouldn’t be happy if they weren’t with their partner. So my hat’s off to them.
There’s another bunch of people who I think it doesn’t work for. And the kind of people like me, we’re growing in numbers, just like the no religious people, we’re growing in numbers. People don’t feel the need anymore to conform just for the sake of society.
KING: So you prefer single?
MAHER: I do to this point, but who knows? I just entered my fifties a couple years ago. It’s my experience that every decade you live, you’re kind of a different person or you lead a different life. I led a very different life in my 20s, my 30s, my 40s. I don’t know what my 50s are going to be. It might include that. Please, god, no, I’ll bargain again with you if you get me out of this one.
KING: We’ll be back with more of Bill Maher. We have sad news to pass on tonight. Leroy Moore, the saxophone player and the founding member of the Dave Matthews Bands has died. He was only 66. He was 46, I’m sorry. He was apparently in a TV accident on June 30th in Virginia. He punctured a lung and broke a few ribs. As we understand it, Moore went back to the hospital recently due to complications from those injuries and he died this afternoon.
The band will perform tonight as scheduled at the Staple Center in Los Angeles. We’ll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KING: Bill Maher has said a lot of strange things in a long an illustrious career, but he just told me something during the break that requires a follow up. He said to me, he loves the recession.
MAHER: Larry.
KING: Why?
MAHER: Because I was driving over here and I have driven over here many times. Traffic is light. You know?
KING: Oh, I see.
MAHER: People aren’t out as much. The stores are empty. The businesses are so happy to see you. Have you noticed that? You walk into a restaurant and they’re about to close. My friend, please come in. Just so happy to have anybody’s business. That’s not an attitude that businesses usually have. It goes right away.
KING: Good point. We love the recession. Boston, hello.
CALLER: Hi, Bill. I know you’re an animal protection advocate, as am I. And I know there’s currently a lot of discussion in the animal advocacy community about the potential for change with a new president from the Bush administration, which you know has been disastrous for the environment and the animals that live there. I wanted to know if you could share your opinion on which presidential candidate you think would be best to benefit the animal protection movement in the U.S. going forward.
MAHER: I would have to guess it would be Obama. But this is an issue that’s hardly on the radar of presidential candidates.
KING: Has not come up in a debate.
MAHER: Please, I mean, animals don’t vote. They forgot about poor people, let alone animals. Anyone who doesn’t have a vote, forget about it. Children, why are old people taken care of so well economically in America and children not? Because old people vote. So I don’t know. It’s a host of issues that I wish, again, my champion of the liberal wing would take on, like the drug war and animal rights. But I’m not holding my breath. I’d be happy if they could end the war.
KING: You got to be pleased by T. Boone Pickens. He was on this show for an hour, against oil addiction, in favor of wind power.
MAHER: Right, we’re trying to get him on our show. I would love to talk to him.
KING: I bet he would come.
MAHER: Yes. And that shows you where we are. When an 80-year- old oil man has to show the government the way. You know, this guy gets it. You know, I just — I just — I hate to be despairing. But, again, you know, when I hear two thirds of Americans are for oil drilling, oil drilling which is not going to improve anything at all. Oil companies and oceans never worked out so well before. In fact, the phrase that we have for things not going well together is actually oil and water.
KING: Yes, you’re right. Good point.
MAHER: That’s how much we should know not to do this. But let’s end on a happy note, Larry. Let’s not leave people with –
KING: A great writer, Philip Reilly, told me once in an interview that when you talk to man about generations not yet born, it goes in one ear and out the other. He ain’t thinking about generations not yet born. It’s take care of me now.
MAHER: Yes. But this doesn’t. You know, people don’t seem to be able to make rational decisions. Like I’m — I’m not always on the side that liberals are on. I’m for nuclear power. I think McCain is also. And I know a lot of people hate this. Bill, what about the waste. Yes, nothing is a — not everything can be a win-win situation. There are problems. But we are definitely killing ourselves with fossil fuels.
France has had nuclear power for decades without an accident. And in this country they want to bury it at the bottom of a mountain.
KING: Got to run.
MAHER: Sorry.
KING: Bill Maher, he’s the host of “Real Time With Maher.” That returns August 29th. He will be appearing at Humphries in San Diego this weekend and look forward to that movie, “Religulous.” It opens October 3rd. There’s still time to cast your quick vote. Tonight’s question, I like it when Bill Maher takes on politics or religion. Go to CNN.com/LarryKing and have your say. While you’re there, check out our other features. Sign up for e-mails, text message alerts. We got you covered at CNN.com/LarryKing.
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VIDEOs: Who is Correct? – “Just When You Think the War is Over” August 15th, 2008
Posted in POLITICS, VIDEO(S) | No Comments »
The Pornography of Power: Lust for Empire Has Weakened America July 25th, 2008
By Emily Wilson, AlterNet
Posted on July 25, 2008, Printed on July 25, 2008
Robert Scheer has been a journalist for 30 years, over which time he has interviewed presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, as well as other major political figures. For years a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and now for the San Francisco Chronicle, he’s currently the editor-in-chief at Truthdig.com and represents the left point of view on KCRW’s political radio show “Left, Right and Center.” In addition to print and radio, Scheer has also worked in movies: He played a reporter in Warren Beatty’s “Bullworth” and was a project consultant for Oliver Stone’s “Nixon.”
Scheer is the author of eight books, among them, Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton — And How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush (Akashic Books, 2006). His latest is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. In it, Scheer takes on the United States’ foreign policy, arguing that our military budget, which amounts to more than the rest of the world’s combined, has gotten completely out of control. AlterNet writer Emily Wilson recently sat down with Scheer at a restaurant in San Francisco to hear his views on the federal government, the media’s complicity in war, the rise of the neocons and how even Nixon got some things right.
Emily Wilson: You write in the acknowledgements that you had one book in mind, but your editor wanted you to do this book. Why did he want this book?
Robert Scheer: I had just given a lecture to this libertarian convention. It was called “Ike was Right,” and it reflected some of the evolution of my own thinking. I no longer am enamored of the big federal state, because most of what it does I oppose — particularly once Clinton cut the welfare program. We no longer have a federal program to aid poor people. We don’t have a poverty program. And Clinton, with his Financial Services Modernization Act, managed to give the banks everything they wanted and take away more rights from the state. It used to be that in California we had a limit on interest payments. States had reasonable, populist-inspired controls over corporations. And then there’s the Telecommunications Act. We used to believe communications should be in part locally owned to have diversity and so forth; that’s all gone bye-bye with the Telecommunications Act. So there you go: You have three things the Clinton administration, presumably a progressive administration, did that took away three reasons that I would care about the federal government.
… Now, as my book lays out, six out of ten dollars of the discretionary budget go to the military, and in Congress they’re scrambling over how to use the other four out of ten for the other things we care about. So my concern is, all right, let’s let California keep its money, let’s keep it on a state level — and in my book I even argue that’s what the founders had in mind. I quote George Washington, who’s my great hero in this book: They knew if you got into empire you weren’t going to have representative democracy. Because when you’re on the local level, people can be informed, they can demand the truth, there isn’t classification, there isn’t national security — and when you get to empire and foreign adventures (being) the norm, not the exception, is to be lied to and not to discover the truth for 20, 30, 40 years or whatever. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which Johnson and McNamara said was the basis for expanding the war to North Vietnam, was based on a lie, that they knew to be a lie when they went to the nation and said we were attacked. They knew there was no evidence of an attack. We didn’t learn that for 20 years.
So my feeling before I went to the libertarian convention was … what do I think about the federal government? We needed the federal government when a guy like Roosevelt was our president and we could set some standards of child labor and the right to organize unions, and pay people adequately, and health and safety and so forth. But what the federal government has come to mean is basically an arm of the military industrial complex that favors big business and big agriculture. We’d be better off with the states just keeping their tax dollars and using them to educate their people, and fix their levies, and deal with their subprime mortgage scandals, and all the other things we want money for.
EW: You say the administration used 9/11 as an excuse for this military spending.
RS: Most of the pundits make themselves stupid in the interest of their careers. They devote very little time to looking back at what happened, what are the lessons to be learned, and so forth. I was at one conference at the University of California at Berkeley, sponsored by the journalism school, and they had this one panel titled “Did we get it wrong?” I pointed out: You guys got it wrong, but some of us got it right, and a good chunk of people in the streets around the world got it right. Really, the more interesting question is: “Why did you let yourselves be had in this way? Why were you so easy to co-opt?” And it has to do with fear. It was the trauma of 9/11: You didn’t want to be on the wrong side of it, and the people who own your broadcasting stations and your newspapers were afraid if they lost viewers and readers, they wouldn’t come back. And these cable lunatics of the right, the O’Reillys and Rush Limbaughs, they might be picking up this big fan base and you forgot your obligations under the Constitution to inform the public. And I said: More importantly you didn’t look back at anything. You didn’t look at the history of Iraq; where does Saddam Hussein come from? … You went along with the crap about weapons of mass destruction, but also, you didn’t look carefully at the politics of that area. Didn’t you know that if you invade Iraq, all you’re going to do is strengthen Iran?
The whole fallacy, the lie that most people subscribe to in the media and the elite, is that adults are watching the store. Sensible, solid people are making sensible, solid decisions. They may get it wrong from time to time, but it was not for lack of effort and work and serious discussion of NBC and “Meet the Press.” The fact is, you look at what they’ve been reporting on for most of my adult life since World War II, and it’s mostly gibberish.
EW: But you make it sound in The Pornography of Power like our foreign policy was more sane before this Bush was president, and that people like his father and Nixon were more moderate on defense.
RS: We’ve had a struggle between the realists and the adventurists, as I call them, going back to Nixon’s opening to China. I wrote a Nixon re-evaluation for the L.A. Times in the ’80s. That does not make Nixon a great man. I think he was a war criminal. Once he went and visited China and was making peace with bloody communist dictators like Mao; how in the world could you justify escalating a war to stop the spread of communism? It was absurd. But he did — and millions of Indo-Chinese died as a result. I’m not trying to exonerate Nixon, but in opening to China and in developing detente with the Soviets, he undermined the whole basis of the Cold War. He said, communist is nationalist, not internationalist, and it’s capable of change. And he was right. That’s why the communist governments of Vietnam and China are competing for shelf space at Wal-Mart.
In response to Nixon, you had the development of the neoconservatives. This is where they come from. They were grouped around Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the senator from Washington who was called the “Senator from Boeing.” Richard Perle worked for him, and Paul Wolfowitz, and so forth. These people were very angry with Nixon, and they started all this threat inflation, and fear of the enemy, and so forth — and Nixon was suddenly seen as a pinko or something or weak on defense. That’s where it all starts. And then the Soviet Union did collapse — and not because we invaded, but because the economy sucked.
The neocons used every trick in the book to attack Nixon. All of it was aimed at undermining the detente with the Soviets and the opening to China and bringing us to a much more primitive imperialist position, which they favored. These people are mostly ex-Trotskyists, or there fathers are … and they believe in permanent revolution, only now it’s from the right rather than from the left. But it’s the same notion: You have to make turmoil, you have to break eggs to make an omelet, and they’ve combined that with a Pax Americana mission that Reagan had, that we are the keepers of the flame, we are the sanest, smartest, most wonderful people in the world; everything we do, even when it’s all screwed up, is done for good reasons — and we’re the indispensable agent to human progress. So they become the neocons. They’re not really conservative in any way at all; they’re betraying the conservative tradition of this country as defined by Washington and Eisenhower, and they get us into these incredible adventures.
Well, they were going nowhere fast because the facts were undermining them. The fact was, the world was becoming multipolar; we didn’t have an enemy in sight, and George Bush’s father in 1992 gave a speech that was of historic significance. He said the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is dead, and I’ve ordered my secretary of defense to cut defense spending by 30 percent. And Dick Cheney, who was his secretary of defense, went along.
EW: You write about how McCain launched a Mr. Smith-style crusade against a deal with Boeing and the Air Force. Do you think he would cut the military budget? How about Obama?
RS: I don’t know what McCain or Obama will do when one becomes president. I am quite enthusiastic about Barack Obama. I like his freshness. I like that he can think out loud, and I like that he has been tough in his opposition to the Iraq War. I like his willingness to advance negotiation rather than conquest — as opposed to Hillary, who was talking about obliterating Iran. I mean, what God-given right do we have to obliterate 80 million people? A country that we have screwed around with ever since we overthrew Mohammed Mosaddeq 54 years ago? Obama said he would talk to them. He didn’t say, “I’d give away the store.” He didn’t say, “I’ll endorse anything they do.” He said he would talk to them. And then you have McCain acting the total fool, saying, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” like it’s some kind of game. You know, metal piercing the skins of children — and that’s a game?
So I think Barack Obama has been a good candidate, and I respect his ability to engage young people. So (it’s not that) I don’t think there is a big difference between Obama and McCain. I do.
… I’m very worried about McCain on … a very critical issue, because it really goes to the heart of … the prospect for peace and war. The Democrats scare me a little. Republicans scare me more because I don’t see any Eisenhowers or even Nixons in the ranks of the Republicans. The Republican Party has moved very far right, and people like Nixon would be considered flaming peacenik liberals by today’s standards. After all, Nixon believed in a guaranteed annual income for everyone. Imagine if Clinton had done that instead of wiping out welfare. And Nixon believed in the Environmental Protection Agency. He did many sensible things. He did terrible things in escalating the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, but he broke the whole momentum of the Cold War by opening to China. By today’s standard there are no Republicans like that.
On the other hand, Barack Obama has shown a freshness of approach to a complex world. He doesn’t feel the need to impose values he’s taken from Illinois on everybody in the world. He’s lived out there. So there is something very exciting about Barack Obama. However, I find it unnerving that the Democrats and Republicans at this time both want to expand military spending rather than cut it. I understand all the arguments why you can’t do that as a Democratic candidate and why you have to be strong on defense, but that’s how we get into this madness. And if you listen to the tapes of Lyndon Johnson, he said, I cannot get out of Vietnam because Barry Goldwater will have me for lunch — he will wipe the floor with me.
So that’s the problem with the Democrats. And I think people who support Obama should say they expect him not to get us into wars like Iraq but also to question all this enormous spending on the military, which is making for a more dangerous world.
Emily Wilson is a freelance writer and teaches basic skills at City College of San Francisco.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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Fox News Radio’s Tom Sullivan compares Obama’s speeches to Hitler’s, yet Applebee’s doesn’t have a salad bar? June 14th, 2008
[SOURCE: "Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser E-Mail Alert @ Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 2:18 PM]
E. D. Hill has company
When Fox News anchor E. D. Hill suggested that Barack and Michelle Obama may have engaged in a “terrorist fist jab” at a recent campaign event, condemnation (and mockery) of Hill’s comments was swift, and forced her to offer an on-air quasi-apology.
While Hill’s apology was unusual (though not unprecedented — just a few weeks ago, a Fox analyst apologized for joking about assassinating Obama), her original comments were sadly typical of the media’s treatment of Obama. Since he began running for president, news reports have relentlessly suggested that Obama is different; that he isn’t like you; that he isn’t on your side.
Sometimes, like Hill’s “terrorist fist jab” comment, those suggestions have been obvious, and clearly offensive. Other times, they have been comparatively subtle and seemingly pointless — Chris Matthews’ deep concern with Barack Obama’s decision to order orange juice in a diner and what it says about his ability to connect with “regular people,” for example. But they have two things in common: They portray Obama as weird — un-American, even — and they do so based on little more than the fevered imaginations of some journalists and the vicious lies of right-wing partisans.
Rush Limbaugh says Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden are “on the same page.” Other conservative commentators have suggested an affinity between Obama and Hamas — despite Obama’s denunciations of the organization, and its description of Obama’s policy positions as “hostile to us.” Conservative columnist Mark Steyn has described Michelle Obama as “Kim Jong-Il dressed up with a bit of Oprah Winfrey dressing.”
Michael Savage claims to “doubt” that Obama “would take our side” after a terrorist attack, adding that Obama would “march thousands of us into the hands of the enemy in order to gain what they would think would be a long-term peace. I think that they would gladly take the guns of the American military and turn them first on the American patriot, rather than turning the guns of the American patriot on the enemy within.” Savage also asks, “Why are there no queries being provoked about Saddam Hussein — I mean, Barack Hussein Obama?” Tucker Carlson has compared Obama’s campaign to the Khmer Rouge, the brutal Cambodian regime that led to the deaths of nearly a quarter of that nation’s people.
Washington Post reporter Jonathan Weisman responded to a question referencing the possibility of “Osama blowing up the Sears Tower” by writing, “How about Obama blowing up the Sears Tower! I never liked that building anyway.” Weisman did add, “Just kidding, folks.” Another washingtonpost.com reader later followed up: “Um, did you really just joke about Obama blowing up the Sears Tower, or were you thinking Osama, but wrote Obama? Either way, not funny.”
Weisman wasn’t the first reporter to use the “just kidding” defense after inappropriately and baselessly linking Obama to a controversial figure. CNN commentator Jeff Greenfield (now with CBS) compared Obama’s tendency to wear shirts with open collars to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s preferred style of dress. When criticized by, among others, Columbia Journalism Review, Greenfield claimed he had been kidding, that he meant the commentary as a “patently absurd parody of muddled political thinking” and lashed out at his critics.
But humor (if you can call it that) doesn’t excuse making comments like this — indeed, it makes it more likely that the public will remember and internalize the comparisons, and that the caricatures will take hold.
Media figures also often portray Obama as un-American or unpatriotic. Dick Morris says that “the question that plagues Obama is … Is he pro-American?” and that the presidential election hinges on whether “we believe” Obama is “sort of a sleeper agent who really doesn’t believe in our system.” Investor’s Business Daily asks, “Would Obama put African tribal or family interests ahead of U.S. interests?” On Fox & Friends, host Steve Doocy says Obama has “patriotism problems.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews thinks “it’s a hard thing for someone like Barack Obama” to express a “gut sense of Americanism” and describes Obama as “almost Third World in his sort of presentation.” Jonah Goldberg falsely claims Obama “dodg[es] the word and concept of patriotism.” And countless news reports — not just in the right-wing media — have obsessed over the fact that Obama often does not wear a flag pin (Fox News’ Sean Hannity particularly loves this line of attack — despite the fact that Hannity himself often appears on television without such a pin) or have passed along ridiculous claims about Obama and the Pledge of Allegiance, as CBS News and The Washington Post (among others) have done.
Countless news reports have directly suggested Obama is secretly a Muslim, while others uncritically report the allegation without bothering to make clear that it is false. As is often the case, Michael Savage takes things a bit further, falsely claiming that “we have an unknown stealth candidate who went to a madrassas in Indonesia and, in fact, was a Muslim,” and stating, “We have a right to know if he’s a so-called friendly Muslim or one who aspires to more radical teaching.”
Gratuitously invoking Obama’s middle name — Hussein — is a favorite tactic used by conservative media figures such as Ann Coulter to associate Obama with Saddam Hussein. (Coulter claims that she does it not out of malice but “because I think it’s funny.”) For some, Obama’s actual name isn’t enough: Right-wing radio host Bill Cunningham referred to Obama as “Barack Mohammed Hussein Obama.” (Just a few weeks later, Cunningham was chosen to warm up the crowd at one of Sen. John McCain’s campaign rallies.)
MSNBC’s Matthews has explained the problem with these gratuitous references to Obama’s name:
[E]ven that little seemingly neutral information gets into some older people’s heads, and they go, “We got a problem here.”
[...]
[O]lder people — and I can tell stories in the millions about politicians playing to older voters. They play on the past. They play on fear. They play on confusion. They play on suggestion. You know how it’s done with older voters.
But Matthews himself was the first person — media figure or political operative — to invoke Obama’s middle name in a political context in any news report available in Nexis. Way back in November of 2006, Matthews noted: “You know, it’s interesting that Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein. That will be interesting down the road, won’t it?” And now Matthews says that the mention of Obama’s middle name plays on “fear” and “confusion” and “suggestion” with “older voters.” So why did he introduce the name into the national conversation?
Matthews frequently claims that Obama is not a “regular” person — and that his supporters aren’t “regular people,” either, as I explained last week:
Matthews’ election-night portrayal of Obama as out of touch with “most Americans” was striking in its intensity, but it was not a new theme. MSNBC personnel, particularly Matthews, have been trying out this anti-Obama theme for months. Matthews has attacked Obama for shooting pool (“[I]t’s not what most people play. People with money play pool these days.”) and obsessed over what he claims is Obama’s inability to connect with “regular people” in “a dinette.” And Matthews and David Shuster mocked Obama for the grievous sin of ordering orange juice in a diner.
Matthews has said of Obama, “[T]his gets very ethnic, but the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder.” On another occasion, Matthews suggested that Obama’s lack of bowling prowess “tells you something about the Democratic Party.” Matthews has contrasted “regular people” with “people who come from the African-American community.” He has suggested Obama should pick a Jewish running mate because he “need[s] some ethnic balance.” Matthews has said Obama “seems a little foreign” and that he and Jeremiah Wright are “different faces of the same guy.”
Matthews’ portrayal of Obama as unlike “regular people” is catching on. The New York Times‘ David Brooks recently said Obama wouldn’t seem to “fit in naturally” at an Applebee’s salad bar. (Turns out that, by Brooks’ logic, it is Brooks himself who is out of touch with “regular people”; Applebee’s doesn’t have a salad bar.) And on MSNBC on Tuesday, columnist Margaret Carlson said of Obama: “Don’t you want to say to him, ‘Eat the taco. A funnel cake won’t kill you.’ ” Carlson then asserted that Obama needs to get “a little bit more down with the people.”
Other examples of the media portraying Obama as strange or dangerous abound. Coulter suggests Obama is “a Manchurian candidate.” Fox News Radio’s Tom Sullivan compares Obama’s speeches to Hitler’s. Slate.com teases an article with the line “Why Obama is Like a Serial Killer.” Tucker Carlson says Obama “sounds like a pothead to me” and “seems like kind of a wuss,” while MSNBC colleague Joe Scarborough suggests Obama is not a “real man.”
And the media don’t stop at portraying Obama as abnormal; his supporters have received similar treatment. Brooks, Time‘s Joe Klein, ABC’s Jake Tapper, and other media figures have called Obama supporters “creepy” and “cult-like” and compared them to followers of Charles Manson.
Obviously there is a difference between calling Barack Obama a terrorist or suggesting he might not “take our side” in the event of a terrorist attack and saying his lack of bowling prowess prevents him from understanding and connecting with “regular people.” But both storylines portray Obama as out of the mainstream; they each prime audiences to be more receptive to the other (and the more extreme comments coming from the likes of Michael Savage and Fox News have the pernicious effect of making Chris Matthews’ absurd claims about Obama and “regular people” seem reasonable by comparison) — and neither has any basis in reality. After all, polls show Obama beating McCain, so he must not be doing too badly among “regular people.”
Yesterday, Barack Obama’s campaign unveiled a website dedicated to rebutting false rumors. On MSNBC Live, Andrea Mitchell and Time‘s Jay Carney discussed the need for the new site:
MITCHELL: [Obama] was being asked by reporters about things that are completely unprovable, and the way this stuff circulates, it’s so viral that a reporter asks him a question, it gets picked up, and then that ratifies the rumor, which we’re not even going to be talking about because, you know, there’s no proof about a lot of this stuff. So –
CARNEY: You know, the one, Andrea — there’s one in particular that they talk about where Michelle is alleged in a rumor to have referred to white Americans as whitey in a speech at, of course, the Trinity church, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church. There’s no evidence at all that this is true. This rumor started circulating among conservative bloggers and then was picked up and just repeated as a rumor by Rush Limbaugh, of course, the widely listened-to conservative talk radio host. Now over — driving over to the studio just half an hour ago I heard Rush Limbaugh’s show, and he’s talking about this non-stop, talking about how it’s not — you know, he’s not to blame, he was just reporting a rumor. But of course, he spent half –
MITCHELL: But reporting a rumor, Jay –
CARNEY: But he spent half an hour at least when I was listening to him re-circulating the very rumor without shooting it down, so that’s the effect of these things.
MITCHELL: Well, let’s put it to rest right now. This didn’t happen. It hasn’t happened, it’s not gonna happen. But the Obama campaign has felt concerned enough clearly about all of this –
CARNEY: Exactly.
MITCHELL: — and our own NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows this resistance to him by, you know, white men, with McCain having a 20-point lead in — among white men and still problems with suburban women, which is kind of more understandable coming out of a primary election between him and Hillary Clinton. This is something he’s going to have to fix.
CARNEY: Right. It’s out there and they just have to — the goal of circulating these rumors from Obama opponents is basically to create an atmosphere of doubt about the candidate — about his patriotism, about his background, his religion.
Journalists like Andrea Mitchell and Jay Carney understand that the repetition of baseless rumors “ratifies the rumors,” as Mitchell put it. And they understand the intent behind the rumors — creating “an atmosphere of doubt about the candidate,” as Carney said.
But journalists need to do more than understand the intent and effect of false rumors pushed by the right. They need to understand how their own reporting and commentary have similar effects, regardless of their intent. They need to understand that they have a responsibility that goes beyond being careful not to spread (intentionally or otherwise) these bogus right-wing themes; they also have a responsibility to aggressively report the truth. There is a broad smear campaign being waged against Barack Obama, and it is long past time for the media to expose and debunk those smears, not play into them.
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[SOURCE: The Interfaith Alliance -- E-Mail Alert @ Tue, May 27, 2008 at 2:38 PM]
EXCERPTS:
WHAT’S BEEN WRITTEN THIS WEEK AT THE INTERSECTION OF RELIGION AND POLITICS
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Race for the White House ’08:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~’08 Race Has Got Religion. Is That Good?
Christian Science Monitor – 5/28/08There was Mitt Romney’s speech to try to dispel concerns about his Mormon faith. There was Barack Obama’s denunciation of certain beliefs of his longtime pastor. Last week it was John McCain’s turn to cut himself off from two controversial preachers whose endorsements he had once sought. And throughout the presidential primary season, there have been candidate forums on religious beliefs, plus eager courting of evangelical Christians, Catholics, and other faith groups. Are religion and faith playing an appropriate role – or an inappropriate one – in the 2008 presidential campaign? So far, it’s some of both, say those who’ve been monitoring the campaign. Critics also cite news media that turn faith into mere entertainment or play it for controversy. Some questions asked during televised debates have been helpful, they say, but others have been inappropriate or irrelevant, bordering on religious vetting. the Interfaith Alliance, a religious liberty watchdog, became so concerned it released a video called “Top Ten Moments in the Race for Pastor-in-Chief.” Among the questions it criticized: “What’s the worst sin you’ve committed?” and “Do you believe every word of the Bible?” “Why ask Senator Clinton about ‘feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit’?” complained TIA president Welton Gaddy after the Compassion Forum aired on CNN in April. “Far more useful would be specific questions about how their faith would impact their policy positions.”
McCain Rejects Pastor’s Support
Wall Street Journal – 5/23/08John McCain rejected the endorsement of the Rev. John C. Hagee Thursday after an old sermon was unearthed in which the evangelical pastor seemed to suggest that God had created the Holocaust to drive Jews to Israel. Mr. Hagee, who endorsed the Republican candidate in February, delivered a sermon in the late 1990s in which he appeared to explain how something good could come from a tragic event. “A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says…’They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,’” Mr. Hagee preached. “God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.” The sermon was posted on Talk to Action, a blog critical of the Christian right, and later republished on the Huffington Post Web site. “Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them,” Sen. McCain said Thursday. “I feel I must reject his endorsement.” “As anybody that aspires to the office of the presidency ought to know, fairly or unfairly, they’re going to be judged by the words and actions of their friends as well as their enemies,” said Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance. “It’s irresponsible to let someone align themselves with you” without proper background checks.
Special Edition:
Read more stories featuring the Interfaith Alliance on this topic in:Pastors Pose Problems for McCain and Obama
Associated Press – 5/25/08Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, both seeking to use religion to their advantage in the presidential campaign, have learned painful lessons about the risks of getting too close to religious leaders. Both now realize that sermons given to a narrow audience on Sundays don’t always play as well on the national stage, where context can be a casualty. And McCain’s rejection of endorsements from two evangelical pastors puts into relief the candidate’s problems with that core GOP constituency. McCain, the Republican nominee-in waiting, and Obama, who is closing in on the Democratic nod, both have been slowed by their respective pastor problems. Whether the controversies will play a role in the months ahead remains unclear, but the two candidates face decisions about how clergy fit into their efforts to reach voters informed by faith. Clergy who have seen colleagues go from relative obscurity to infamy in the course of a 24-hour news cycle face similar choices in weighing whether to talk about politics and candidates. “This is the new terrain of religious politics,” said David Domke, a University of Washington communications professor and co-author of “The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.” “Politicians have been getting a pass on this for some time, using support from a minister or pastor for their political advantage and not having to answer for what that pastor has said.” Both candidates have reason to pay attention to the faith factor in their White House bids.
IRS Clears Obama’s Church
Wall Street Journal – 5/22/08The Internal Revenue Service has told the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s denomination, that it didn’t violate tax laws when the presidential candidate addressed 10,000 church members in June. In a letter released by the UCC, the IRS said that the denomination hadn’t engaged in prohibited political activity and retains its nonprofit status. The UCC disclosed an IRS inquiry into Sen. Obama’s appearance earlier this year. IRS spokeswoman Nancy Mathis declined to comment. Charitable groups, including churches, are barred from engaging in political speech if they wish to remain untaxed.
As Obama Heads to Florida, Many of It’s Jews Have Doubts
New York Times – 5/22/08At the Aberdeen Golf and Country Club on Sunday, the fountains were burbling, the man-made lakes were shining, and Shirley Weitz and Ruth Grossman were debating why Jews in this gated neighborhood of airy retirement homes feel so much trepidation about Senator Barack Obama. “The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch. “They’re going to vote for McCain,” she said. Ms. Grossman, 80, agreed with her friend’s conclusion, but not her reasoning. “They’ll pick on the minister thing, they’ll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color,” she said, quietly fingering a coffee cup. Ms. Grossman said she was thinking of voting for Mr. Obama, who is leading in the delegate count for the nomination, as was Ms. Weitz. But Ms. Grossman does not tell the neighbors. “I keep my mouth shut,” she said. On Thursday, Mr. Obama will court Jewish voters with an appearance at a synagogue in Boca Raton, Fla. A longtime Democratic constituency with a consistently high turnout rate, Jews are important to his general election hopes, particularly in New York, which he expects to win; in California and New Jersey, which he must keep out of Republican hands; and, most crucially, here in Florida, where Jews make up around 5 percent of voters.
Religious Right Feeling Left Out in Race
Politico – 5/22/08Christian conservatives who helped elect President Bush are wary of his would-be Republican successor, and now they’re feeling abandoned by Congressional Republicans, too. There are two sources of their unhappiness: Republicans didn’t rise up en masse last week when the California Supreme Court invalidated a ban on same-sex marriage, and the House GOP’s new family agenda focuses on pocketbook issues rather than moral concerns. “In 2004, there was great emphasis on marriage, on value voters,” said Tony Perkins, president of the influential Family Research Council. “And now you see [Republicans] running from those values issues. … By taking a path away from values issues, Republicans will find themselves in the wilderness.” Congressional Republicans insist they haven’t given up the fight against abortion rights and same-sex marriage. At a session with reporters Wednesday, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner said: “We have never walked away from who we are, … [but] we don’t control the agenda. “Certainly, the Democrats have done everything imaginable to avoid some of those issues,” Boehner said. “But that doesn’t mean our commitment to those issues is any less.” Still, a comparison of the House GOP’s 2006 American Values Agenda with its 2008 American Family Agenda shows how the party’s emphasis has changed.
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National News:
~~~~~~~~~~~Interfaith Alliance criticizes Alabama governor’s Plan to Have Churches Manage Prisoner Re-entry
Birmingham News – 5/24/08The Interfaith Alliance, a national religious organization supporting the separation of church and state, on Friday criticized Gov. Bob Riley’s plan to have the state’s churches manage prisoner re-entry programs. The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Washington, D.C.-based organization, said prisoners could be forced to accept proselytizing in order to receive assistance, and that religious discrimination in hiring also may result. “It’s not a legal issue so much as it is a moral issue,” he said. “The government is responsible for the public welfare and should be dealing with this.” Riley on Tuesday asked the state’s churches to come to the aid of newly released prisoners, providing everything from job-search assistance and housing to cash. Riley and program administrators said the state can’t afford to provide the needed assistance for the 11,000 men and women released from the state’s prisons each year. Jeff Emerson, a spokesman for Riley, said Gaddy doesn’t understand the Community Partnership for Recovery and Re-entry program. “It’s not about proselytizing. It’s about a partnership between people who want to help and those who need assistance,” he said. Program administrators have said it does not violate the separation of church and state because it receives no state funding and because any person or organization, not just churches, can participate. But Gaddy, a Baptist minister from Monroe, La., said the lack of state funding means that participating churches are free to proselytize and to discriminate on religious grounds when hiring staffers for re-entry programs. “When the state of Alabama is not willing to provide government-run prisoner re-entry services, it leaves prisoners only one option – to accept proselytizing in exchange for needed services,” he said.
Coming to Grips With Same-Sex Marriage Ruling
Los Angeles Times – 5/20/08Pastor Gregory L. Waybright struggled from the pulpit Sunday to reconcile the laws of God with the laws of man. Though he wanted his church “to be a welcoming and loving house,” he told worshipers at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, the California Supreme Court’s decision last week to legalize gay marriage in California “is a contradiction of what God’s word says.” The 4-3 ruling, which held that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, has prompted conservative and liberal congregations alike to discuss whether gay and lesbian members will be allowed to wed in their churches, synagogues and temples. “These are the kinds of issues every religion has to grapple with,” said James A. Donahue, president of the Graduate Theological Union, a Berkeley-based consortium of theological schools. “How do you factor in the role of contemporary human rights, civil rights, the data about homosexuality” with “core traditions and beliefs?” In recent years, conflicts over homosexuality and the Bible have unsettled many denominations, especially such mainline Protestant churches as Methodists, Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans and Episcopalians. Although the specifics vary, the controversies for all of these faith groups and for Conservative Judaism have revolved broadly around whether to provide official recognition to the unions of same-sex couples and whether to allow openly gay and lesbian clergy.
Bush Apologizes Over US Soldier’s Quran Shooting
Associated Press – 5/21/08President Bush has apologized to Iraq’s prime minister for an American sniper’s shooting of a Quran, and the Iraqi government called on U.S. military commanders to educate their soldiers to respect local religious beliefs. Bush’s spokeswoman said Tuesday that the president apologized during a videoconference Monday with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who told the president that the shooting of Islam’s holy book had disappointed and angered both the Iraqi people and their leaders. “He apologized for that in the sense that he said that we take it very seriously,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said. “We are concerned about the reaction. We wanted them to know that the president knew that this was wrong.” It was the highest level in a string of statements by U.S. officials trying to soothe anger over the shooting incident, particularly among Sunni Arabs who have become key allies in the fight against insurgents. The U.S. military said Sunday that it had disciplined the sniper and removed him from Iraq after he was found to have used Islam’s holy book for target practice May 9 in a predominantly Sunni area west of Baghdad. The book was found two days later by Iraqis on a firing range in Radwaniyah with 14 bullet holes in it and graffiti written on its pages, tribal leaders said.
Probe Biased, Televangelists Say
Washington Post – 5/24/08Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who is investigating six televangelists for alleged lavish spending, is facing growing criticism from prominent conservatives and evangelicals, some of whom question whether Grassley is biased against the Pentecostal televangelists because of his Baptist faith. Many are also concerned that his probe intrudes on the churches’ constitutional right to practice their religion. Kenneth Copeland, a Texas-based televangelist who is a subject of Grassley’s investigation, recently launched a Web site, http://believersstandunited.com, to fight the probe. Copeland said the investigation is “aimed at publicly questioning the religious beliefs of the targeted churches, their ministers, and their members while ignoring televangelists of other denominations.” Copeland’s stance is supported by almost two dozen leaders of conservative secular and religious organizations, who criticized the inquiry in a letter sent this month to the Senate Finance Committee. The letter suggested that the ministries were targeted for sharing “the same branch of evangelicalism.” The letter’s signers, including Paul Weyrich, Moral Majority co-founder; Ken Blackwell, chairman of the Coalition for a Conservative Majority; and Anthony Verdugo of the Christian Family Coalition, said the probe also infringes on churches’ First Amendment rights.
AP Engages Pastors, Parishoners About Racism in US
Associated Press – 5/24/08Jesse McGee points to trophies he won in local marathons. He mentions his work with youth and volunteer school programs. He praises his church’s efforts to deliver scripture lessons to inmates. For more than an hour, the 84-year-old church deacon, who is black, chats about his life, largely ignoring the subject at hand: racism. It isn’t until his wife, Warine, sheepishly shares that their son’s wife is white that McGee offers a confession: He had been uncomfortable with the union for nearly 30 years _ until his Bible study class offered enlightenment. His story represents a snapshot of how America’s racial landscape is navigated daily, often with religion as guidance. The issue of race drew sharp focus as Barack Obama’s contentious split with his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, played out in a national glare. In response, the United Church of Christ and National Council of Churches USA called on 10,000 ministers to initiate a “sacred conversation on race.” “The realities of race have not been addressed adequately,” says the Rev. John Thomas, president of the UCC. “Racism continues to demean and diminish human lives in this country.” To listen in on that conversation, Associated Press reporters across the nation engaged pastors and parishioners about their individual experiences with racism.
Muslim Chaplain Offers American Brand of Islam
NPR – 5/20/08There are about 1,300 chaplains in the U.S. Army, and of those, only five are Muslim. One of them, Maj. Khalid Shabazz, serves at Fort Hood in Texas and is getting ready to retire from his post to study ethics. For three years, Shabazz has been the Muslim chaplain for the 1-227 Aviation Attack Battalion at Fort Hood. He’s a big part of the religious life of the Muslim soldiers on base, and he offers them a very American brand of Islam. His office is full of citations and awards thanking him for his service. But it was a different story when he first discovered Islam as an artilleryman 16 years ago. For Shabazz, it hasn’t always been easy to be a Muslim in the U.S. Army. He wasn’t an officer when he joined the Army. He wasn’t even a Muslim, and his name wasn’t Khalid Shabazz. Once upon a time, a 23-year-old named Michael Barnes enlisted and was studying to become a Lutheran minister. When he changed his name after converting to Islam, not long after he enlisted, the howitzer unit he was serving with at the time went nuts. “All [of a] sudden, it was almost like I switched sides to them,” Shabazz says. “They were hurt because I converted. [They] thought maybe I was joining on to the enemy.” There are anywhere between 6,000 and 15,000 Muslim soldiers in the U.S. military, depending on whom you talk to. No one knows the numbers for sure because some Muslims in the military don’t want to advertise their religion. Shabazz says it’s tough trying to be a good Muslim and a good soldier. He was ready to quit. Then a Christian chaplain pointed him toward a different military career — becoming a Muslim chaplain. He says that when the chaplain presented the idea, it was like “a gift from God.”
A Jihad for Love: Torn by the Contradictions of Being Gay and Muslim
New York Times – 5/21/08Sad to say, “A Jihad for Love” is not a sequel to the pornographic satire “The Raspberry Reich” (2004), in which pseudo-revolutionaries exhort their comely comrades to “join the homosexual intifada!” It is, rather more arduously, a dispatch from the outer limits of marginalization: a documentary on devout Muslims struggling with their homosexuality. Angst is the norm in this heartfelt debut by the filmmaker Parvez Sharma, whose documentary ranges from Johannesburg to Istanbul, from doubt to despair (with a happy detour among the drag queens of India). He does manage to locate a headstrong lesbian in Paris, albeit one whose face, like those of many of the subjects here, has been digitally blurred. “If we are truly Muslims,” runs her contradictory lament, “we have no right to alter his creation.” Mr. Sharma’s film emphasizes testimony over context to such a degree that it feels at first of little use to anyone except gay Muslims who might take comfort in knowing they’re not alone. But the documentary gains depth of feeling as it goes and even develops something of a nail-biting narrative as it follows a clique of Iranian men who flee to central Turkey in hopes of applying for political asylum in Canada.
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Commentary:
~~~~~~~~~~Lifeline for Mainliners
USA Today Op-Ed by Mark PinskyAmerica’s mainline Protestant denominations, which for two centuries dominated the nation’s religious landscape and political discourse, are in a terminal state. Their membership is declining and aging, both precipitously, and they are intractably riven over sexuality. There is little hope for these congregations. Or so the story goes. Some of the problems for mainline invisibility might be self-inflicted. “They best stop complaining and take another look at their methods of communicating and organizing,” says the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, head of the Interfaith Alliance, a religious liberty organization dedicated to protecting faith and freedom. “Mainline congregations do not tend to translate their moral convictions into effective political organization and influential social action with the adeptness and passion that characterize evangelicals moving in lockstep with one another,” says Gaddy, who also hosts a show on the liberal Air America radio network. Leaders and activists of mainline denominations might be heeding Gaddy’s advice. Some are raising their profile by reaching out to find common cause with emerging, moderate evangelical churches on issues such as climate change, genocide in Sudan, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in GENERAL INTEREST, POLITICS | No Comments »
[SOURCE: The Interfaith Alliance -- E-Mail Alert @ Mon, May 12, 2008 at 12:12 PM]
WHAT’S BEEN WRITTEN THIS WEEK AT THE INTERSECTION OF RELIGION AND POLITICS
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EXCERPTS (click title header links, for the full articles):
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Race for the White House ’08
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Republican Evangelical Support Has Peaked: Analyst
Reuters – 5/5/08Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain will almost certainly garner less of the evangelical vote in November than the almost 80 percent that President George W. Bush took in 2004, a former top Bush aide said on Monday. Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and adviser who is now with the Council on Foreign Relations, predicted at a conference on religion and politics in Key West, Florida, that Bush’s 2004 totals among this key voting bloc won’t be matched by the Republican Party for a long time. He pointed among other factors to “a candidate like John McCain who doesn’t have a specifically religious appeal.” By contrast he noted that Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were both more comfortable talking about their faith than McCain, who was raised in a mainline Episcopal tradition but who now attends a Baptist Church in Phoenix. Gerson also noted that “evangelicals experience the same kind of economic concerns” as other Americans as the pain from a housing and credit crisis spreads. Bush had the support of 78 percent of the white evangelical Protestants who cast ballots in the 2004 election by some estimates and about one in four U.S. adults count themselves as evangelical.
Obama’s New Gospel
Newsweek – 5/12/08Tim Roemer is a gifted salesman working a tough territory. For weeks, the former Indiana congressman has been crisscrossing primary states trying to convince Roman Catholic voters that Barack Obama is their man. Just a few months ago, there were plenty of takers. Obama beat Hillary Clinton among Catholics in Louisiana and Virginia and tied her in Wisconsin. But in more recent primaries, Catholics have decisively turned away from him. In Ohio, exit polls showed that 65 percent backed Clinton. In Pennsylvania, Clinton won 70 percent of the Catholic vote. What’s going on here? “The short answer is, I don’t know,” says Roemer, who has spent hours quizzing Catholics at rallies and town-hall meetings. One possibility: Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Roemer says that, like other voters, the Catholics he meets mostly want to talk about what the candidate will do about the economy, gas prices and the mess in Iraq. But Wright comes up often, especially now. Working Indiana voters, Roemer was asked repeatedly about the Chicago preacher. Last Monday, Wright reignited the controversy over his incendiary sermons. He gave two widely televised speeches in which he expanded on some of his more paranoid rants—charging that America brought the September 11 attacks on itself, and saying government scientists may have invented HIV as a weapon to use against minorities. Roemer says voters usually want to know: does Obama believe this stuff?
Catholics Reflect Schism in Democratic Base
Boston Globe – 5/5/08Taking a break from studying for final exams, three dozen Catholic students gathered for a barbecue on a grassy area of an apartment complex near the University of Notre Dame, their cellphones dialed in to a conference call with Victoria Reggie Kennedy, wife of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. She urged them to help turn out the vote in the Indiana Democratic presidential primary tomorrow for Senator Barack Obama, saying the candidate embodies the “Catholic social justice tradition” she was raised to believe in. For about two months, pundits and analysts have been culling exit poll data from recent primaries to contend that Obama has a problem winning support from Catholic voters in his bruising struggle with Senator Hillary Clinton for the party’s nomination. Last week, a group of former national party chairmen who support Clinton drove home that point in a letter to members of the Democratic National Committee, part of a Clinton effort to stop the steady movement of superdelegates to Obama. They wrote that Catholics are part of a Clinton electoral base that includes women, Hispanics, seniors, middle- and low-income Americans, and rural, suburban, and urban voters. They called it “a formidable coalition tailor-made for victory in a November general election.” But for both campaigns, the issue of Catholic voters reflects the reality of a Democratic electorate that has split along lines of class, race, gender, and age.
McCain Pushes Priorities That Resonate on the Right
New York Times – 5/8/08Senator John McCain appealed to religious conservatives on Wednesday with pledges to prosecute sex traffickers, fight Internet child pornography and make religious freedom a priority in American diplomacy. In a speech followed by tough questions from the audience about the war in Iraq and his temper, Mr. McCain said that those issues, particularly the fight against sex trafficking, would be important in his White House. “Most of the victims of human trafficking in the United States and in most other places in the world are the most vulnerable among us, destitute women and children who are sold into bondage as sex slaves,” Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, told a crowd at Oakland University here. Later he added, “We must view this evil form of 21st-century slavery every bit as important as drug trafficking.” Human trafficking, the transport of victims under false pretenses from one nation to another for forced labor or prostitution, has become an important issue to the Christian right. The Central Intelligence Agency estimates that as many as 800,000 people around the world, including 200,000 in the United States, are enslaved each year. In part because of the concerns of the right, President Bush has devoted more money and attention to the issue than his predecessors did. Conservatives, who are distrustful of Mr. McCain on a number of fronts, are pushing him to follow Mr. Bush’s lead.
A New Faith in Politics
Chicago Tribune – 5/6/08At the east end of the giant Wal-Mart parking lot in this northern Indiana town of about 32,000, there’s a metal-roofed building accommodating as many as 20 horse-drawn buggies. People in plain dress—flat black hats, white bonnets—can be seen around town. Goshen is a population center for Mennonites and their religious “cousins,” the Amish. Both are Protestant Christian faiths built on foundations of pacifism and keeping government, politicians and politics at arm’s length. The Amish remain non-voters who believe in the strict separation of church and state. However, some Mennonites, especially younger members such as those on the campus of church-founded Goshen College, are seeing an opportunity now to integrate politics into their lives in a way that furthers rather than diminishes their religion. Emily Miller, for instance, is a 20-year-old sophomore social-work major from Waco, Texas, and—like 60 percent of the nearly 1,000 Goshen students—a Mennonite. Though her dorm room features the book bag and flip-flops you’d expect with any kid away at school, there’s a sign on her door that stands out, considering where and who she is.It says: “Change We Can Believe In,” and in smaller letters: “BarackObama.com.” When a CNN film crew recently asked if there might be a handful of Mennonite students at Goshen willing to talk about being first-time voters, 50 volunteers stepped forward to say whom they supported and why. When students manned registration tables in the student union, more than 300 new voters signed up.
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National News
~~~~~~~~~~~Pastors May Defy IRS Gag Rule
Wall Street Journal – 5/9/08A conservative legal-advocacy group is enlisting ministers to use their pulpits to preach about election candidates this September, defying a tax law that bars churches from engaging in politics. Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz., nonprofit, is hoping at least one sermon will prompt the Internal Revenue Service to investigate, sparking a court battle that could get the tax provision declared unconstitutional. Alliance lawyers represent churches in disputes with the IRS over alleged partisan activity. The action marks the latest attempt by a conservative organization to help clergy harness their congregations to sway elections. The protest is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 28, a little more than a month before the general election, in a year when religious concerns and preachers have been a regular part of the political debate. It also comes as the IRS has increased its investigations of churches accused of engaging in politics. Sen. Barack Obama’s denomination, the United Church of Christ, has said it was under investigation after it allowed the Democratic presidential candidate to address 10,000 church members last year. Last summer, the tax agency said it was reviewing complaints against 44 churches for activities in the 2006 election cycle. Churches found to be in violation can be fined or lose their tax exemptions.
U.S. Evangelicals Call for Step Back From Politics
Reuters – 5/7/08A group of U.S. evangelical leaders called on Wednesday for a pullback from party politics so that followers would not become “useful idiots” exploited for partisan gain. One in four U.S. adults count themselves as evangelical Protestants, giving them serious clout in a country where religion and politics often mix. Conservative evangelicals have become a key support base for the Republican Party. But the movement has had growing pains and the statement issued on Wednesday, called an “Evangelical Manifesto,” is the latest sign of emerging fractures as some activists seek to broaden its agenda beyond hot-button social issues such as opposition to abortion and gay rights. “Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, left as well as right, have made the mistake of politicizing faith,” the manifesto declares. “That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes ‘the regime at prayer,’ Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form,” it said. The manifesto was signed by leading and mostly centrist evangelicals such as Leith Anderson, president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals; Mark Bailey, president of the Dallas Theological Seminary; and evangelical academic and author David Gushee. Many of the more than 70 signatories have been critical in the past of evangelical partisan involvement which was seen as the crucial element behind U.S. President George W. Bush’s re-election victory in 2004. Leading figures on the conservative “Religious Right” such as Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, did not sign the document and his office said he had not been asked to sign it.
Christian Leaders Question D.C. Probe of ‘Prosperity’ Televangelists
Associated Press – 5/7/08Nearly two-dozen conservative Christian leaders have signed a letter to the Senate Finance Committee questioning an investigation into six large ministries that preach a gospel of prosperity. The letter argues that the 6-month-old inquiry sets a dangerous precedent. It also suggests that the ministries were targeted for sharing “the same branch of evangelicalism” and promoting “socially conservative public policy positions such as support for the traditional definition of marriage.” Although the ministries under scrutiny are conservative theologically, they are not at the forefront of the culture wars issues championed by the leaders who are now rallying to their side. The most prominent figures who signed the letter are Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich, American Family Association chairman Don Wildmon and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. “The ministries have been asked to produce financial records and internal documents in what appears to be an exercise in disproving their alleged guilt,” the letter states. The group repeats an argument by some of the targeted ministries – that the investigation falls short of the high bar the Internal Revenue Service has for justifying a church investigation.
Ousted Cal State Fullerton Teacher Revises Oath of Loyalty
Los Angeles Times – 5/9/08A Quaker who lost her appointment as a Cal State Fullerton lecturer after she objected to a state loyalty oath submitted a revised statement of her beliefs Thursday in a bid to win the job back. People For the American Way, a Washington-based civil rights group now representing lecturer Wendy Gonaver, called on the university to reinstate her and adopt a policy protecting the religious freedom of all California State University system employees. “She is willing to sign the oath as long as she can exercise her free-speech rights and note that her views as a Quaker would prevent her from taking up arms,” said Kathryn Kolbert, president of the organization and a constitutional lawyer. “We would like to avoid filing a lawsuit, but we are certainly prepared to do so if we need to.” The loyalty oath was added to the California Constitution in 1952 to drive communists out of public jobs but in recent years it has forced out religious believers such as Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Gonaver was hired to teach classes in American and women’s studies at Fullerton this academic year. But in August, just before classes were to start, she was told of the state requirement that she sign the oath promising to defend the U.S. and California constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” A pacifist, she feared that signing the oath could commit her to bear arms. She said she would sign the pledge if she could submit a statement of her beliefs, a practice allowed at the University of California. But Cal State officials rejected her request, saying the addendum she proposed was illegal.
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Commentary
~~~~~~~~~~The Resilient Religious Right
Op-Ed, USA Today – 5/5/08With the deaths of prominent evangelical pastors Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy last year, funeral bells began tolling for the Religious Right. Political columnist E.J. Dionne wrote Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right, and theologian Jim Wallis offered The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. Even religious and civil liberties attorney John Whitehead, who assisted Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against President Clinton, joined the chorus with an article titled, “The Passing of the Christian Right.” These reports are at the very least premature, and in all likelihood dead wrong. High-profile leaders will come and go, but the strength and commitment of conservative Christians on the front lines of parish life are as strong as ever. In the case of Dionne’s epitaph for the Religious Right, I think he is too quick to conclude that evangelical Christianity has become disentangled from politicians who trumpet opposition to gay marriage and abortion. For instance, John McCain has moved from not supporting a repeal of Roe v. Wade in 1999 to saying today it should be overturned. Why the shift? A clear desire to secure the Republicanbase’s pro-life vote. Wallis writes that “the monologue of the Religious Right is indeed over.” Perhaps it’s no longer a monologue — especially with the emergence of the Religious Left — but it’s still a powerful voting bloc directed more by its moral compass than any political one.
McCain’s Christian Problem
Op-Ed, Washington Post – 5/12/08John McCain, who as the Republican candidate for president has spent the past two months trying to consolidate right-wing support, has a problem of disputed dimensions with a vital component of the conservative coalition: evangelicals. The biggest question is whether Mike Huckabee is part of the problem or the solution for McCain. Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain’s candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as “God’s candidate” for president in 2012. Whether they can be written off as merely a troublesome fringe group depends on Huckabee’s course. Huckabee’s announced support of McCain is unequivocal, and he is regarded in the McCain camp as a friend and ally. Nevertheless, the word is that some evangelicals dispute Huckabee’s support. One experienced, credible activist in Christian politics who would not let his name be used told me that Huckabee, in personal conversation with him, had embraced the concept that an Obama presidency might be what the American people deserve. That fits what has largely been a fringe position among evangelicals: that the pain of an Obama presidency is in keeping with the Bible’s prophecy.
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Sean Hannity is a Democratic superdelegate ? April 25th, 2008
[SOURCE: 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Thursday, April 24]
KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST: If last week, Senator Clinton‘s “Yes, yes, yes” at the Philadelphia debate said, “No, no, no,” in contradicting her argument that Senator Obama cannot win the general election, Tuesday‘s primary in Pennsylvania brought a wealth of evidence showing that Senator Obama might actually have the easier time beating the Republicans in the crucial swing states.
Those are the ones in gold, presuming you have a colored TV by now. A “New York Times” analysis is showing that according to the exit poll from Pennsylvania, the ones that all media organizations share, Senator Obama would draw majorities of support from lower income voters, from less educated voters, even though Senator Clinton beat him in those demographics on Tuesday.
As for her argument that leaving Michigan out of the nominating process would leave that state vulnerable come November, the Democratic Pollster Peter Hart telling the “Times” quote, “It is a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators and many Democratic congressmen. So, it‘s probably going to be a pretty good state for the Democrats in a recession year.”
Mr. Hart adding that Senator Obama could even pick up states that Democrats usually struggle to carry such as Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, even Virginia—Virginia, a red state, not a swing state—all of which he carried in their primaries.
Let‘s turn now to our own Rachel Maddow, the host of the show of the “Rachel Maddow Show” on Air America Radio and one of our MSNBC political analysts.
Rachel, good evening.
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Hi, Keith.
OLBERMANN: This may seem overly simply. What is the Clinton electability argument?
MADDOW: Well, it has two components. There‘s a biographical component and there is a numbers component. The biographical component is that Barack Obama is not as vetted as Hillary Clinton is. And even though, we all can imagine or have nightmares about what kind of slime the Republicans might bring against Hillary Clinton in the fall, it fails in comparison to what they might throw at Barack Obama and how damaging it would be because he‘s inexperienced and facing it. So, that‘s the biographical argument.
The numbers argument is that Hillary Clinton‘s strength in some swing states so far in the primary campaign indicates that she would be stronger against John McCain in those states than Barack Obama would. The two that she usually cites now are Ohio and Pennsylvania. But the implication is that by winning in those states—in those states the Democrats historically have to win in order to get the presidency, Hillary Clinton has shown in the primaries that she would be stronger in the general.
It‘s a simple argument. It doesn‘t necessarily bear out historically. I mean, you can ask Michael Dukakis how he felt in November 1988, looking back and hugging himself thinking how good it was that he won the Pennsylvania primary that year when he came nowhere near winning the state in the general election. But those are essentially been the two arguments she‘s put forward.
OLBERMANN: So, if the superdelegates are party insiders who supposedly know how the system works and they understand real numbers, the things that will be in play in November, the actual voters no longer enough for her to retake the lead in pledged delegates or popular vote from Senator Obama, in that context, who is Senator Clinton actually trying to reach and convince using that‘s electability argument?
MADDOW: I keep wondering that myself. Because, God bless the voters of Indiana and North Carolina and Guam and Puerto Rico and South Dakota and Montana, and everybody who is still up, even if the they were all voting on the same day, even if this was all happening right away, they still could not collectively pick a Democratic nominee. There‘s nothing about what will happen in Indiana that in itself is determinative about what‘s going to happen with this.
The only way this is going to be decided mathematically speaking is by those remaining undeclared, undecided superdelegates. And we honestly – I mean, forget all the spin, forget all the fluff that you‘re hearing all day every day now, we have no idea what grounds those superdelegates are going to choose to make their decisions. Are they going just to be persuaded by how Indiana votes? I don‘t know. They might be persuaded by that, they might be persuaded by a witchy board, they might be persuaded by any of the electability arguments coming from either camp.
But there‘s no reason to think that the superdelegates are going to be persuaded by this. I tend to think that this is more an effort to influence the overall media climate, the overall media discussion of the race to make it seem that there‘s a momentum here that might influence some of these superdelegates. But when it comes right down to it, we don‘t know how they‘ll decide.
OLBERMANN: Well, you mentioned the last topic that I want to bring up, not to do too much navel-gazing because despite what we might imply, the cable networks are not going to decide the nomination, neither the broadcast ones. And we‘re not going to decide the election.
When Terry McAuliffe, as he has, joins Ed Rendell and Senator Clinton in praising FOX News, even if we‘re talking about a total of 500 votes somewhere, how in the hell is that a net plus for his candidate and not a net negative? How?
MADDOW: How is courting Richard Mellon-Scaife a net plus for Democrats rewarding? This people who have done their best to destroy Democratic candidates—I mean, if you just think about the petty stuff that FOX News has done, the fact that the last time they hosted the Democratic presidential campaign, they referred to all the candidates as Democrats candidates. I mean, FOX News exists in part to try to destroy the Democratic Party. If you want to help them do that, that‘s your prerogative, I guess. But you better make a pretty argument for why is that that‘s doing your party a favor.
OLBERMANN: Yes. Unless, Sean Hannity is a Democratic superdelegate, I don‘t think it works.
Rachel Maddow of Air America and MSNBC. Thanks as ever, Rachel.
MADDOW: Thank you, Keith.
OBLERMANN: Horrifying news about this nation‘s heroes. The mental health director of the Veterans Administration lied about how many of them are attempting suicide. He said 780 last year. The number is actually 15 times higher.
And Barry Goldwater on John McCain: New information from his new biographer, John Dean tonight. How the conservative legend went from McCain mentor to sorry he bothered. John Dean joins us ahead.
You‘re watching COUNTDOWN on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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Media Roundup: THIS WEEK: RELIGION AND POLITICS April 14th, 2008
[SOURCE: The Interfaith Alliance]
WHAT’S BEEN WRITTEN THIS WEEK AT THE INTERSECTION OF RELIGION AND POLITICS
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EXCERPTS (click the article headings\titles, in order to go to the full articles):
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Race for the White House ’08
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~For McCain, Little Talk of a Controversial Endorsement
New York Times – 4/8/08When Senator John McCain won the endorsement of the Rev. John C. Hagee in February, his campaign hoped it would shore up his conservative credentials among evangelicals and build enthusiasm among a voting bloc that would be critical for him in November. But since then, Mr. Hagee has been on the defensive over some of his views about Catholics and Jews, and he and Mr. McCain’s campaign have been silent about his endorsement. The controversial endorsement points to Mr. McCain’s tenuous relationship with conservative evangelicals, a group that President Bush courted with tremendous success and that Republicans have come to view as vital to their prospects in many states. The McCain campaign sought Mr. Hagee’s support, Mr. Hagee said in a recent interview. But after the two announced the endorsement at an event on Feb. 27 in San Antonio, Mr. Hagee’s hometown, the campaign has stopped talking about it. A spokeswoman answers questions by referring to a statement Mr. McCain made the day after the endorsement, when it was greeted with a barrage of criticism: “In no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee’s views, which I obviously do not.
Democrats Wrangle Over Words and Beliefs
New York Times – 4/14/08A candidate forum devoted to issues of faith and justice became another flash point for Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton to spar in their intensifying nominating fight, with the candidates exchanging frosty glances Sunday night as their paths briefly crossed on stage. The Democratic contenders addressed the Compassion Forum at Messiah College here, one after the other. Their cold, quick encounter as they traded places on the stage reflected the hostility between them over the past two days as Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly hammered Mr. Obama for remarks he made at a fund-raiser suggesting that some voters turned to religion and guns as consolation for their bitterness about their economic hardship. Nine days before the fiercely contested Pennsylvania primary, the two candidates sought through their appearance at this small Christian college to reassure voters that they shared their values. They also sought to close the so-called God gap that has benefited Republicans over the past several election cycles. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee, chose not to participate.
Firing Barbs, but Looking Like a Saint
New York Times – 4/14/08Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton showed no mercy at the “compassion forum.” Both Mrs. Clinton and Senator Barack Obama gave thoughtful, pious answers to questions about faith and moral values at the CNN event held at Messiah College near Harrisburg, Pa. But Mrs. Clinton, who spoke first, didn’t shrink from also going on the attack. In answer to a question, she decried what she called Mr. Obama’s lack of faith in American values, labeling a description he gave of “bitter” voters in small-town Pennsylvania as “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.” And with a straight face, Mrs. Clinton simultaneously claimed the high ground, saying twice that she would allow Mr. Obama to speak for himself on the matter, noting “he does an excellent job of that.” Later, Mr. Obama proved just as fluent as Mrs. Clinton on the subject of his faith and the role of religion in American society, and he had no difficulty explaining once again why he has remained faithful to his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., despite Mr. Wright’s incendiary sermons. But Mr. Obama had to alternately assure viewers that he is not an alienated, race-obsessed African-American who speaks for the meaner streets and that he is not a Harvard-educated elitist who looks down at Main Street. And that gave Mrs. Clinton the advantage.
Obama’s Religious Rhetoric Puts Faith in Spotlight
NPR – 4/13/08In 2004, the Democrats had a religion problem. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), a committed Catholic, almost never talked about his faith, while George W. Bush spoke about it all the time. Then, one night during the Democratic National Convention, a young U.S. Senate candidate named Barack Obama broke the zone of silence: “The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states,” he called out to the cheering crowd. “Red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too: We worship an awesome God in the blue states.” The crowd roared. It was a remarkable moment for Democrats, who were tired of being cast at the Godless party. “I thought ‘how brilliant’ because that’s a trope from a contemporary Christian song,” recalled Shaun Casey, who teaches Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary. “It’s sung in white evangelical churches, it’s sung in African-American churches — Our God is an awesome God. So if you knew the code, it’s like, ‘This guy is not the typical secular Democrat.’”
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National News
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Kenneth Copeland Ministries Asks for IRS audit
Associated Press – 4/8/08A Christian television ministry targeted by a Senate committee investigation into possible financial wrongdoing has asked the Internal Revenue Service to audit its finances. Attorneys for Kenneth Copeland Ministries sent a letter to the IRS’ Office of Examinations on Monday saying the church was willing to cooperate with a tax inquiry by the agency. Dallas television station KTVT first reported the North Texas-based church’s request for an IRS audit. Leaders of the television ministry contend dozens of questions about expenses, executive compensation and amenities asked by Sen. Charles Grassley are similar to those posed in an IRS church tax inquiry. In the letter, attorneys for the ministry say the appropriate procedure would be for Grassley to obtain the information from the IRS after it conducts an audit of the church. “The church is confident that, upon the conclusion of a 90-day church tax inquiry … the IRS will conclude that it is unnecessary to pursue a church tax examination,” the letter sent to the IRS said. Dallas tax attorney Charles Blau said the church’s strategy could fail if the Senate committee subpoenas the Copeland ministry. “The church is saying this is a First Amendment religious issue and a Senate committee does not have a right to this financial information. I think they’re probably going to loose that argument. There are limits on non-reporting of financial information,” Blau said. Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent letters to six ministries as part of an investigation. Grassley said stories of excessive lifestyles and spending by ministry leaders caused him to wonder if the tax breaks given to churches were being abused.
400 Children Removed From Sect’s Texas Ranch
Washington Post 4/8/08Texas authorities investigating allegations of abuse and the forced marriage of young teenagers to much older men have taken more than 400 children into custody from a remote ranch owned by a polygamist religious sect, authorities said Monday. The children were joined by 133 women, in homemade ankle-length dresses, who departed voluntarily. While investigators questioned them, state police detained the men who live at the Yearning for Zion Ranch, which is affiliated with sect leader Warren Jeffs. He was convicted last year of being an accessory to the rape of a 14-year-old girl. The court-ordered sweep of the 1,700-acre property near Eldorado, Tex., nearly 200 miles northwest of San Antonio, continued into the night Monday, four days into a raid described as the largest single child-welfare operation in state history. “We didn’t know there would be this many [children], and we don’t know how many more there are,” Marleigh Meisner, a Child Protective Services spokeswoman, told the Dallas Morning News. A central goal Monday was finding and identifying the 16-year-old girl who had telephoned authorities late last month to say that she had been abused at the ranch, built by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Tex. Compound Was Considered A ‘Holy Land’
Washington Post – 4/14/08The secretive and insular community established near this West Texas town by a radical offshoot of the Mormon Church is considered by the sect’s members to be a holy shrine populated by its most fervent adherents and is propped up financially by members of the group living in other states, according to law enforcement officials and former members. Interviews with law enforcement authorities and former members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints depict the Yearning for Zion Ranch, which was raided last week by Texas authorities, as an outpost whose adult residents were considered the sect’s elite. They were handpicked by the church’s leader, Warren Jeffs, who was convicted last year in Utah of being an accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her cousin. Jeffs dubbed those chosen for the ranch as the “elect” or “heart’s core,” selected to live in the “holy land,” as he called the compound. The adults were his most loyal followers and the young children were the least “contaminated” by the outside world, former church members say. According to court documents, adherents living at the ranch practiced the most extreme tenets of FLDS doctrine, including forcing girls as young as 13 to “spiritually marry” older men for the purpose of bearing their children.
Q&A About the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints
Dallas Morning News – 4/13/08The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has more than a century of history and a system of beliefs and practices that have long set it apart. Here’s a look at its roots and beliefs: Is the FLDS Mormon? Members say they represent the only true Mormon church – a claim otherwise rejected by people who consider themselves Mormon. As Mormon historian Martha Sontag Bradley of the University of Utah puts it: “The FLDS is as foreign to contemporary Mormons as they are to outsiders.” What is the connection between the FLDS and the mainstream Mormon church – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Both churches trace their origins to Joseph Smith. They believe that in 1823, an angel visited Mr. Smith, son of a farmer in upstate New York, and told him to reboot authentic Christianity, which was lost shortly after the deaths of the original apostles. Where did the FLDS come from? The FLDS, formally incorporated in 1991, is one of the largest splinter groups that rejected new Mormon revelations.
Video: Robertson Named “Worst Person” for Claiming “Islam is Not a Religion”
Media Matters for America – 4/11/08MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann named Pat Robertson the “winner” of his nightly “Worst Person in the World” segment for stating: “I want to say it again, and again, and again: Islam is not a religion, it’s a political system meant on — bent on world domination, not a religion. It masquerades as a religion, but the religion covers a worldwide attempt to exercise power and to subjugate the world into their way of thinking.” Of Robertson’s comments, Olbermann asserted: “Whatever your views about Islam or religion in general, just think about this for a second. This is from a guy heading up a giant corporation devoted to eliminating science from schools, eliminating freedom of choice for women, who himself ran for president, and who said that 9-11 was the result of people not abiding by his political system — I’m sorry, it was the result of people not abiding by his religious beliefs.”
Florida Submits ‘Evolution Academic Freedom Act’ to Senate
Christian Post – 4/10/08The Florida Senate Judiciary Committee voted 7-3 this week to submit the Evolution Academic Freedom Act, which would guarantee the freedom of teachers and students in Florida public schools who challenge theories of Darwinism, for debate in the Senate. Lawmakers felt prompted for the need of an academic freedom bill after the Florida Board of Education voted for the first time in its history to require the teaching of evolution in schools back in February. According to lawmakers, teachers who opposed or were critical of Darwinism felt threatened by administrators and were purposely denied class planning time and other privileges. The new bill, however, would guarantee the freedom of both teachers and students to share their views in the classroom without fears of reprisal. “There are a variety of ways that people in leadership, other class members and teachers and department heads and principals can intimidate teachers from presenting the full range,” said Republican Sen. Ronda Storms, the bill’s sponsor, according to the Palm Beach Post. Opponents of the bill, however, argued that it was unconstitutional and nothing more than a masked agenda for the promotion of religion in schools.
How Would Jesus Choose?
Newsweek – 4/14/08Adam Hamilton does not call himself “pro-choice.” He prefers “pro-life with a heavy heart.” What that means, as he explains in his new book “Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White,” is that he believes abortion should be available and legal, that there are instances in which it might be necessary and that those instances should be very rare. Further, he says, the abortion debate has been too hot for too long, and that, as a Christian minister, his job is to try “to support people no matter what decision they make.” As an evangelical megachurch pastor in Kansas, a man educated at Oral Roberts University, Hamilton speaks carefully, aware that he’s staking out a controversial position. Or maybe not. About a third of white evangelicals say that abortion should sometimes or always be legal, according to the Pew Research Center—a number that hasn’t changed in a decade. In recent election seasons, however, these moderate voices have been drowned out by hard-line shouting on both sides. In the past, an evangelical who might condone abortion in the case of his ailing wife or 14-year-old daughter would never say so in public. Now, the abortion rhetoric has faded somewhat as evangelicals turn their attention to other things: AIDS, the environment, Darfur. In 2004, megapastor Rick Warren announced that abortion was a “nonnegotiable” for evangelical voters. This year, he’s been silent. What’s new, then, is not that a pastor like Hamilton would take a softer approach to abortion, but that he would feel comfortable enough to say so from the pulpit and in print.
Younger Evangelicals Defy the Stereotypes
Philadelphia Inquirer – 4/6/08They are 21st-century born-agains, unorthodox in their orthodoxy, a new generation of evangelical Christians. Lucid, passionate and unpredictable, 41 students in professor Kathy Lee’s political-science class at Eastern University, a Christian school in St. Davids, filled a rollicking hour last week busting stereotypes while debating God and country. Exhibit A: “Being a good Christian hasn’t made George Bush a good president,” said 21-year-old senior Bob Grant, from Haddon Heights. “I want a good president, not necessarily a Christian.” And Exhibit B: “People don’t see that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton profess their Christianity and act their faith by telling us to love each other,” said Chelsea Holden, 19, a sophomore from York, Pa. It was clear that the students, who describe themselves as evangelicals, fully realize that their influence will be felt in this election and future contests. “We’re young, and we see the other side of things,” said Nate Riedy, 18, a freshman also from York. “Eventually, we’ll be shaping evangelical thinking about politics.” There’s evidently a disconnect when it comes to the nation’s perception of evangelicals and the Christian reality.
Backstage With Six Rabbis, Six Imams and No ‘Kumbaya’
New York Times – 4/13/08Marc Schneier, 3 years old and not yet a rabbi, had a knack for getting the attention of adults. The story is told that he liked to wander. One night he was nowhere to be found in the synagogue during Yom Kippur services. His frantic mother searched. His stern father, who was officiating, started the service anyway. When the congregation concluded a prayer, the ark holding the sacred Torah scrolls (about the size of a minivan) was opened. And inside, waving at the congregants with both hands, was the toddler. Last week, Rabbi Schneier, 49, worked on his latest attention-getting venture: a television commercial to promote tolerance between Muslims and Jews. It is set to air in September, during Ramadan, the month in which it is said the Koran was revealed to Muhammad. It will also play in early October, during the Jewish High Holy Days.
Mormon Followers Install a New Leader
Associated Press – 4/5/08Mormons stood by the thousands with upraised hands Saturday, officially installing their first new leader in 13 years. Thomas Monson took over The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in February after the death of Gordon Hinckley, but the faith traditionally calls for a sustaining vote by members in a ceremony known as the solemn assembly. Each church organization took its turn standing when called to cast votes in the packed conference center. The ceremony has been practiced since 1880, when John Taylor was named president of the church. Mormons last held an assembly in April 1995, when Hinckley was named president. He was remembered Saturday by church apostle Russell Nelson, who said all Latter-day Saints felt a deep sense of loss with the 97-year-old Hinckley’s Jan. 27 passing. “However, we have felt our mood shift from grief to gratitude,” Nelson said. “We are very grateful for what we have learned from this great prophet of God.” Monson, 80, is the youngest church president since 1973 and the 16th president of the American-born denomination, which claims 13 million members worldwide. Since the early 20th century, the church has followed a system of apostolic succession in selecting its president. The position passes to the most-senior member of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles, one of its leadership circle.
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Commentary
~~~~~~~~~~Ten Commandments Back in Court
Los Angeles Times Op-Ed – 4/8/08When the Supreme Court ruled 46 years ago that official prayers in public schools violated the 1st Amendment, it infuriated those who claimed that public institutions should reflect the fact that this is “one nation, under God” — the God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, that is. In recent years, however, supporters of religion in the “public square” often have taken a different tack, arguing not that this is a Christian (or Judeo-Christian) nation but that individual believers have a free-speech right to express their religious views on government property. What government may not do, the high court said as long ago as 1947, is “set up a church [or] pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.” Given that precedent, the state of Texas argued a few years ago that a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the state Capitol didn’t violate the 1st Amendment because it was part of a “museum-like setting” that featured other messages. Besides, the “driving purpose” of the display was to symbolize secular law. By a 5-4 vote, the court upheld the display. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear another Ten Commandments-related case. A federal appeals court ruled that Pleasant Grove, Utah, which displays a privately donated Ten Commandments monument at a city park (on a patch of land ceded to a private party), must also make room for the Seven Aphorisms of Summum, the principles of a faith that was founded by a former Mormon and is headquartered in Utah. Thanks in part to the late Charlton Heston, the Ten Commandments are familiar to most Americans; not so the Seven Aphorisms (including No. 2: “As above, so below; as below, so above”). That might change if Summum is allowed to display them in the park, but Robertson’s group is urging the high court to rule that Pleasant Grove can say no — because messages in a public park are government speech, not private speech. Therefore, Pleasant Grove can agree to display the Ten Commandments but reject the Seven Aphorisms, just as it could display a model of the Statue of Liberty but reject a “Statue of Tyranny.” Whether or not this argument convinces the court, it seems to cast aside the contention that religious expression on public property is a matter of individual, not government, expression. As Aphorism No. 3 says: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”
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Editorial
~~~~~~~~Commentary: Democrats Finally Getting Religion on Religion
CNN – 4/10/08Sweet Jesus! What has gotten into the Democratic Party when it comes to issues of faith? This is the second time the top Democratic candidates will deal with issues of faith. On June 4, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien moderated a forum with the Rev. Jim Wallis’ Sojourners Social Justice Ministry as host. That one featured Obama, Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards. These forums should not be casually overlooked and blown off, because they represent a significant shift in attitude from previous Democratic presidential campaigns. Democrats, in the words of Sen. Joseph Biden after the Sojourners forum, acted more like agnostics – other would say atheists – when it came to issues of faith. For nearly 30 years, Republicans successfully used wedge issues like abortion and homosexuality to rally their base to those social causes and elect candidates who were willing to go to the mat when they came up. Their outreach efforts were strong, consistent and they delivered time and time again. And as long as Democrats were willing to ignore the ever-increasing concerns of people who tied their faith with public policy, the GOP would continue to clean up at the ballot box.
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Going Behind Closed Doors in Christian Right Households April 11th, 2008
[SOURCE: Alternet.org]
By Jeremy Adam Smith, Public Eye
Posted on April 11, 2008, Printed on April 11, 2008“Models of idealized family structure lie metaphorically at the heart of our politics,” writes linguist George Lakoff in his 2002 book Moral Politics. “Our beliefs about the family exert a powerful influence over our beliefs about what kind of society we should build.”
Certainly, many Christian Right leaders would agree with him.
People who make it their business to track and fight the Right tend, with good reason, to focus on public, political activity, but the Christian Right sees the private home as a major arena of political struggle and a showcase for the world they want to live in. “These homes are the source of ordered liberty, the fountain of real democracy, the seedbed of virtue,” write long-time activists Allan C. Carlson and Paul T. Mero in their new book, The Natural Family: A Manifesto.
The Natural Family attempts to distill a quarter century of “family values” organizing into a unified vision of social and political change in a bid to rejuvenate their flagging movement. It reflects a decade of international collaborations of Religious Right organizations through the World Congress of Families, organized by Carlson’s Illinois-based think tank The Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society. First held in Prague in 1997, the congresses convene right-wing organizations from around the globe “to affirm that the natural human family is established by the Creator and essential to good society” — and also to fight United Nations family planning initiatives.
As Carlson and Mero frame it, the single-family home — awash with enough sentiment to drown an entire city — might be the closest thing the Christian Right has to an actually existing utopian experiment. Examining these ideas can reveal a great deal about the psychology of the Christian Right as well as the visionary goals its adherents pursue.
But recent research into the daily lives of evangelicals also reveals the degree to which their ideal is vulnerable to social and economic forces that all American parents must confront. I believe Lakoff is correct to argue that the Strict Father conception of parenting — which stresses authoritarian discipline and patriarchal control — is key to understanding Christian Right politics, but his rubric might obscure[JAS1] the ways in which movement ideals are evolving in response to changing social conditions. Even as Christian Right leaders are “talking Right,” as University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox puts it, some of the evangelicals who form the base of their movement are “walking Left” and embracing a more moderate way of political and family life. This creates a fissure in the Christian Right that no manifesto can close.
Villages are for Liberals
The Christian Right and evangelical Christians are not one in the same — “Survey research shows that 70 percent of evangelicals don’t identify with the Religious Right,” reports Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay — but conservative evangelicals have been largely responsible for developing and promoting the anti-gay, anti-feminist “family values” agenda that has powerfully shaped the culture and platform of the Republican Party. The larger conservative evangelical movement is the cultural sea in which the Christian Right swims.
Thus if we want to understand what the ideal Christian Right home looks like, we must turn to the truly staggering amount of childrearing advice conservative evangelical preachers and pundits dispense to followers.
An evangelical home takes the Bible as the basis for all its rules and relations — as opposed to the empirical evidence that shapes mainstream childrearing advice. “I don’t believe the scientific community is the best source of information on proper parenting techniques,” writes Focus on the Family founder James Dobson in The New Dare to Discipline, which has sold millions of copies since the first edition was published in 1971. “The best source of guidance for parents can be found in the wisdom of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which originated with the Creator and has been handed down generation by generation from the time of Christ.”
As a result of this adherence to a holy text that cannot be changed and must be obeyed, the ideal Christian Right home is a place of authoritarian hierarchy. When University of Texas sociologists John P. Bartkowski and Christopher G. Ellison compared dozens of secular parenting books with conservative Protestant parenting manuals, they found that a literal interpretation of the Bible’s childrearing advice contributed directly to a worship of authority in all spheres of life, including the political.
They also found that conservative evangelical parenting gurus disagreed with mainstream counterparts on virtually every issue. According to their study, secular, science-based parenting advice emphasizes personality adjustment, empathy, cooperation, creativity, curiosity, egalitarian relations between parents, nonviolent discipline, and self-direction.
Conservative Protestants, on the other hand, stress a tightly hierarchical family structure and a gendered division of labor, with a breadwinning father at the top of the pyramid and children at the bottom. “Children learn to make wise choices by having wise choices made for them,” writes syndicated columnist and talking head Betsy Hart in her 2006 book It Takes a Parent (as opposed to a village – villages are for liberals!). Needless to say, all right-wing parenting manuals stress obedience — especially for girls and women.
This leads us to the third aspect of a Christian Right home: the subordination of women. “Obedience is the most necessary ingredient to be required from the child,” writes Reverend Jack Hyles, late pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana and author of 49 books and pamphlets. “This is especially true for a girl, for she must be obedient all her life. The boy who is obedient to his mother and father will some day become the head of a home; not so for the girl. Whereas the boy is being trained to be a leader, the girl is being trained to be a follower.” It’s an unashamed, old-fashioned vision of oppression updated in The Natural Family: A Manifesto. “We do believe wholeheartedly in women’s rights,” write Carlson and Mero. “Above all, we believe in rights that recognize women’s unique gifts of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.”
This commitment to inequality is not merely rhetorical: Wilcox found that “evangelical Protestant husbands do an hour less housework per week than other American husbands.” And he notes that “sociologists Jennifer Glass and Jerry Jacobs have shown that women raised in evangelical Protestant families … marry earlier, bear children earlier, and work less [outside the home] than other women in the United States.” Wilcox concludes that “it is true that evangelical Protestantism — but not mainline Protestantism, Reform Judaism, and Roman Catholicism — appears to steer men (and women) toward gender inequality.”
The Christian Right has tried to shape its institutions — prefiguring plans for American society as a whole — to reflect its conception of gender roles. Starting with the Fall 2007 semester, for example, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas introduced a new major in homemaking — available only to women. “We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God’s word for the home and family,” said Seminary President Paige Patterson. “If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed.”
Born to be Bad?
Wilcox also found that evangelical Protestantism “steers fathers in a patriarchal direction when it comes to discipline. Drawing in part on their belief in original sin and on biblical passages that seem to promote a strict approach to discipline — ‘He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him’ (Prov. 13:24) — evangelical Protestant leaders … stress the divine authority of parents and the need for parents to take a firm hand with children.”
And so the fourth characteristic of a Christian Right home is that children are born evil and can become good only through a Godly mixture of love and punishment. “One does not have to teach antisocial behavior to toddlers,” writes right-wing family psychologist John Rosemond in a 2006 column, syndicated in 225 newspapers. “They are by nature violent, deceitful, destructive, rebellious, and prone to sociopathic rages if they do not get their way.”
I wrote to Rosemond in an email and asked him to elaborate. “In my estimation,” he replied, “toddlerhood is a pathological condition that demands ‘cure,’ accomplished through a combination of powerful love and powerful discipline. … The toddler mindset and the sociopathic mindset are one and the same: ‘What I want, I deserve to have; the ends justify the means; and no one has a right to stand in my way.’ This is a reflection of human nature.”
Rosemond invoked the DSM-IV, the diagnostic bible of mental health practitioners, to justify his views and give them the veneer of scientific authority, but later in his response he made it clear that there is only one Bible that guides his parenting advice. “In every passage of Scripture that refers to the discipline (disciple-ing) of children, the central theme is leadership,” he writes. “I am, first and foremost, a believer in and follower of Jesus, The Christ.”
Psychologists I interviewed were horrified by Rosemond’s use of the DSM-IV and his conception of children as mentally ill, which amounts to a translation of the doctrine of original sin, with its framework of damnation and salvation, into contemporary therapeutic terms. The difference is simple: A two-year-old human being is still learning how to deal with and express her feelings, but a true sociopath has no feelings. To treat a toddler like a sociopath is like studying snakes in order to understand koala bears — and then declaring that koala bears are cold-blooded.
In fact, contrary to Rosemond’s views, research has found that human beings exhibit empathic behavior from as early as 18 months. For example, Nancy L. Marshall at Wellesley College found that “when toddlers saw a teddy bear suffer an ‘accident,’ their faces showed distress and concern. They also responded by trying to help or comfort the bear” — a behavior I’ve seen my three-year-old son exhibit many times. There are literally hundreds of empirical studies that echo these results. Based on findings like these, evolutionary psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Marc Hauser argue that moral behavior has evolved to keep selfishness in check and has deep biological roots.
None of the findings indicate that human beings are born saints, only that the capacities for empathy and cooperation are present from the very beginning and can be cultivated — or squashed. Rosemond’s views are, at best, one-sided. At worst, they suggest a deep fear and hatred of children. And among conservative evangelicals, Rosemond is hardly alone. “Your child came into the world with an insatiable faculty for evil,” writes Pastor John MacArthur in his 2000 book, What the Bible Says About Parenting. “Even before birth, your baby’s little heart was already programmed for sin and selfishness.”
A mark on the forehead
Is it harsh to accuse the parenting gurus of the Christian Right of fearing and hating the precious children they’ve worked so hard to protect? It’s no harsher than the punishments they proscribe for wicked children. Let’s say, for example, that your two-year-old insists on getting out of bed after you’ve told him to stay put. “The youngster should be placed in bed and given a speech,” writes Dobson, who launched Focus on the Family as a forum for Christian parenting and is now a major voice in the Republican Party. “Then when [the child's] feet touch the floor, give him one swat on the legs with a switch. Put the switch where he can see it, and promise more if he gets up again.”
But Dobson seems like Dr. Spock when compared to Tennessee Pastor Michael Pearl. “If you want a child who will integrate into the New World Order and wait his turn in line for condoms, a government funded abortion, sexually transmitted disease treatment, psychological evaluation, and a mark on the forehead,” Pearl writes in his 1994 book To Train Up a Child, “then follow the popular guidelines in education, entertainment, and discipline, but if you want a son or daughter of God, you will have to do it God’s way.” Pearl’s interpretation of “God’s way” entails hitting disobedient children with quarter-inch plumbing supply line or PVC pipe — “chastisement instruments” he endorses as excellent expressions of the Lord’s will.
Christian Right ideologues argue that hitting a child with PVC pipe must be motivated by love, but their parenting advice is chillingly consistent with Christian Right voices in favor of using torture in the “war on terrorism.” When evangelical Christian and Barnard College professor of religious history Randall Balmer asked eight Religious Right organizations to provide their positions on the Bush Administration’s use of torture, two responded, the Family Research Council (founded by Dobson) and the Institute on Religion and Democracy. “Both were eager to defend administration policies,” Balmer reported in a 2006 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In this, they were reflecting the will of a wide swathe of their constituency: A 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that only 31 percent of white evangelicals said that torture is never justified, with the rest believing that it is necessary at least some of the time — [JAS2] in contrast, 41 percent of secular Americans agreed that it is never justified. Unsurprisingly, Christian Right groups like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family also actively campaign against laws intended to curb child abuse. “The campaign to end child abuse too often abuses families,” declare the authors of The Natural Family, citing “witch hunts” against misunderstood parents who were probably only trying to protect their kids from the New World Order.
As Lakoff points out in Moral Politics, the Christian Right confuses psychologist Diana Baumrind’s influential idea of authoritative parenting — which sees discipline as supportive, not punitive, and is responsive to children’s needs and thoughts — with separate categories of permissive or neglectful parenting. As an alternative, the Christian Right promotes authoritarian parenting, which denies choices to children and expects them to obey without question — a style that research has shown contributes to lower self-esteem, poorer social skills, and more feelings of depression.
Spare the Metaphor, Spoil the Rod
Evangelical homes must confront the same problems as their nonevangelical counterparts: the erosion of real wages, the rising costs of necessities like health care and education, the ubiquity of electronic media, and the declining rights of workers, to name a few. These forces shape the homes of evangelicals just as surely as they shape the homes of other sectors of society, which explains why, for example, rates of teen sex and divorce are not significantly lower in these homes. In fact, divorce is especially high in Bible Belt states, due at least in part to higher unemployment.
In The Natural Family, Mero and Carlson blame virtually all these fundamentally economic developments on feminism: in their view, it is the “imposition of full gender equality” — not, for example, globalization — that “destroyed family-wage systems.” There’s no empirical evidence for this claim, but that hardly matters: Scapegoating claims like this one serve to mobilize Christian Right constituencies for its social agenda of putting heterosexual men back at the head of family and society, a strategy that has seemed to work in electing conservative politicians. “People have personal standing in a discussion about what a good marriage is and what a bad marriage is,” Republican operative Bill Greener told journalist Brian Mann. “They feel comfortable in that dialogue. It’s about something they understand, a lot more than about trade policy.”
The Natural Family describes a comprehensive range of public policies that flow from making the patriarchal family the basic building block of society. In the authors’ view, families, not government, should care for the sick and the vulnerable, thereby making welfare, universal health care, and Social Security irrelevant and even anti-Christian; mothers should take care of young children instead of federally subsidized daycare providers (or, for that matter, fathers); older children should be educated at home, not public schools; and so on. In this way the Christian Right philosophy of the home roughly converges with antitax, antigovernment sentiment, except when it comes to legally enforcing the movement’s vision of how families should be structured.
But for all its gains in the political realm — which have captured most of the outraged attention of the political Left — the Christian Right continues to lose the culture war. According to Gallup polls, in 1982, only 34 percent of Americans “believed that homosexuality was an acceptable alternative lifestyle.” Last year, 61 percent of those polled by People for the American Way supported at least civil unions for gays. Families are more egalitarian than ever, with more and more men participating in housework and childcare, and with more and more mothers working.
These changing attitudes and practices are reflected in the rhetoric of conservative evangelicals. In The Natural Family, for example, Carlson and Mero must make their argument for inequality within the framework of what they disingenuously call “women’s rights.” John Rosemond must use psychological research to legitimate his fundamentally religious views on childrearing. Even patriarchal ideologues like Dobson and MacArthur call for dads to be “more involved” and “loving” with their families, deploying rhetoric about fathers that only rarely appeared prior to World War II — and which is largely the creation of the secular, scientific culture they deplore.
Thus the changes of the past half century have altered the landscape and rules of discourse in ways that appear to be long lasting. On my parenting blog “Daddy Dialectic,” one evangelical Christian argued against stay-at-home fatherhood: “Men should be out there doing whatever it takes to insure that mom can spend as much time as possible with her family because she is uniquely equipped by God for the role of managing the household and the kids on a daily basis.” But another evangelical responded: “Scripture commands [that men provide for their families], and leaves it at that. It doesn’t specify a paycheck. If my family needs income, and my wife is better suited to earn it, why risk my family’s stability by forcing my way into the workforce?” My own conservative evangelical relatives openly supported my decision to become my son’s primary caregiver.
In an interview for this article, Wilcox urged that we distinguish “between what elite evangelicals [like Dobson] say and what average people are doing.” While elites may rail against the social and economic changes of recent decades, Wilcox told me that “your average evangelical takes all that with a grain of salt.” That’s in part because most evangelical wives work. “Part of that is a class issue,” Wilcox said. “Evangelicals are more working class, than, for example, mainline Protestants, [and] they have less economic flexibility. And so the reality on the ground, with gender issues, is more flexible than some might expect.” As a result, claimed Wilcox, “many evangelicals are walking Left, talking Right.” In other words, the more their behavior compromises with reality, the shriller the rhetoric can be.
Wilcox also found that while evangelical men were more likely to use corporal punishment and less likely to do housework, they were also much less likely to yell at children, which indicates less anger in the home, and evangelical husbands were more likely than other men to be affectionate with their families. For his part, John Rosemond told me that he is ambivalent on corporal punishment. “Unfortunately, the word ‘rod’ as used in Scripture in the context of the discipline of children has been misinterpreted as a concrete object,” he told me. “Careful Biblical exegesis will reveal that it is a metaphor for powerful, compelling leadership that is always conducted with the child’s best interests in mind.” (Of course, evangelicals and religious fundamentalists are not accustomed to thinking about holy texts in the metaphorical way Rosemond suggests.) At the same time, over the past two years, more and more evangelicals have come to oppose the use of torture — this year, the National Association of Evangelicals even came out against the practice, providing a counterweight to the support coming from Christian Right organizations like Focus on the Family.
This is all to say that while Christian Right ideals might seem simple and frightening, the behavior of evangelicals who form the Christian Right social base is complex. Lakoff’s Strict Father model may be useful as a way to link parenting with political beliefs, but it can also obscure the degree to which evangelicals can disagree and evolve — which does happen, though it might not seem that way to outsiders. Certainly, no evangelical or even fundamentalist today lives as Christians did in the centuries right after Christ was crucified — no one, for example, is putting adulterers to death, as the Bible advises (Deuteronomy 22:22 and Leviticus 20:10). Among other practical problems, that would wipe out at least half of the country’s Republican politicians and destroy the spiritual leadership of the evangelical community.[JAS3] Wilcox argued to me that the strength of the evangelical narrative is that it explains why, for example, women still do twice as much housework as men — it’s their God-given inclination. But that can be turned around: The evangelical narrative can’t explain why some men are doing more childcare than in the past — many even claim they want to — or why gay and lesbian families continue to multiply. Instead, the narrative simply declares some human desires as consistent with their version of biblical truth, and others as out of bounds. Given the inadmissibility of empirical evidence, the evangelical narrative can explain only what supports the narrative — and must dismiss the rest.
This creates an unhappy gap between ideal and reality, the place in which average evangelicals must live. And stubbornly adhering to the narrative creates another gap, between their utopian homes and the homes of everyone around them. In the face of social change, individual homes might preserve their purity. But in the end, they will sacrifice their ability to communicate with neighbors — or to win more political power.
Jeremy Adam Smith is senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of Twenty-First-Century Dad: How Stay-at-Home Fathers (and Breadwinning Moms) Are Transforming the American Family, forthcoming from Beacon Press. He is a frequent past contributor to AlterNet, as well as publications like The Nation, Mothering, Utne, and Wired.
© 2008 Public Eye All rights reserved.
View this story online at Alternet.org
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[SOURCE: The Interfaith Alliance]
WHAT’S BEEN WRITTEN THIS WEEK AT THE INTERSECTION OF RELIGION AND POLITICS
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EXCERPTS (please, click article titles\headings\links to view the full articles):
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Special Event: Museum of Jewish Heritage
World-renown artists will perform an eclectic concert of music from around the world highlighting Sephardic, Yiddish, Bosnian, Hebrew, and Greek musical traditions. “Bridge to Peace” is a celebration of both the diversity and commonality of culture.
Wednesday, Apr 09, 2008 7:00 PM EDT
at Museum of Jewish Heritage: Edmond J. Safra Hall~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Race for the White House ’08
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Clinton Pastor Backs Reverend Wright
New York Sun – 4/2/08One of the Democratic presidential candidates has a pastor who opposed both Iraq wars, supports same-sex marriage, opposes the death penalty, and has been a passionate critic of American foreign policy. The clergyman isn’t the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama’s spiritual leader who has become a household name and a campaign issue for his fiery rhetoric, but the Reverend Edward Matthews, a little-known Arkansas preacher who is the closest Senator Clinton has to a pastor of her own. While Mrs. Clinton says she would have quit Rev. Wright’s church, Rev. Matthews expressed sympathy for Rev. Wright in a 35-minute phone interview with The New York Sun. “We preachers get irresponsible,” Rev. Matthews, the former pastor of First United Methodist Church in Little Rock, said yesterday with a laugh. His take on Rev. Wright’s now-infamous exclamation, “God Damn America,” is that many pastors, himself included, say things “that if we had to say it over again we probably wouldn’t say it in the same way.”
Obama Found A Home In His Church
Associated Press – 4/3/08A young Barack Obama was searching for answers, and perhaps a place to belong, when he decided to visit a fast-growing church recommended by friends. What he heard left him in tears. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright preached that day about suffering _ about the seemingly endless problems of the world and of individuals. But he also talked about the importance of hope, the audacity of believing things can be made better. “Hope is what saves us,” Wright said. That message moved Obama to embrace Trinity United Church of Christ, along with its philosophy of translating faith into action. But it’s a side of Wright that has been overshadowed by his inflammatory remarks about everything from race relations to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The furor over Wright’s remarks has provoked the greatest crisis for Obama’s presidential campaign thus far, but Obama has refused to leave Trinity or sever his ties with Wright, saying there is much more to Wright and the church. Asked Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Hardball” if he thought the questions about his relationship with Wright were unfair, Obama said: “I think that’s fair game in the sense that what my former pastor said was offensive. I think that in politics, whether I was white, black, Hispanic or Asian, somebody would be trying to use it against me. I do think that it is important to keep things in perspective.”
McCain Shies Away From Religion Talk
Politico – 4/3/08Traversing the country this week on a tour of places that have shaped his life and informed his values, John McCain spoke in strikingly personal language to introduce himself to the American public. But missing so far is any significant mention of religious faith. In an Oprah Winfrey era in which soul-baring and expressions of faith are the norm for public figures, the presumptive Republican nominee, open and candid about much else, retains a shroud of privacy around his Christianity. Raised Episcopalian, McCain now attends a Baptist megachurch in Phoenix. But he has not been baptized and rarely talks of his faith in anything but the broadest terms or as it relates to how it enabled him to survive 5½ years in captivity as a POW. What drives him — at least outwardly — is precisely what he has been talking about this week: a love of country and sense of duty instilled by a military family with a long legacy of service.
McCain’s Support For School Vouchers
CBN News – 4/1/08John McCain continued his “This is Your Life” tour [last Tuesday] in Alexandria, Virginia, and spoke about the need for school vouchers. See below from his speech: “If a failing school won’t change, it shouldn’t be beyond the reach of students to change their schools. Parents should be able to send their children to the school that best suits their needs just as Cindy and I have been able to do, whether it is a public, private or parochial school. The result will not be the demise of the public school system in America, but competition that will help make public schools accountable and as successful as they should be in a country as great and prosperous as ours.” McCain has been very consistent on this issue. In the Senate he voted FOR a DC federally funded school voucher program. Supporting school vouchers is part of the resume the McCain camp will pitch to Evangelicals to say, “Hey, the guy is in line with your values.”
Jewish Leader Calls Hagee ‘Extremist’
Associated Press – 4/2/08The leader of the largest branch of American Judaism said Wednesday that synagogues in the movement shouldn’t work with the Rev. John Hagee, a Christian Zionist, calling him an “extremist” on Israeli policy who disparages other faiths. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, said Hagee and his group, Christians United For Israel, reject any Israeli land concessions to achieve peace with the Palestinians. Reform Judaism supports creating a Palestinian state; Hagee sees a biblical mandate for the territory so End Times prophecy can be fulfilled. Yoffie also condemned Hagee’s views on Roman Catholicism and Islam. The San Antonio pastor has suggested that Catholic anti-Semitism shaped Adolf Hitler, among other comments. Hagee has vehemently denied he is anti-Catholic and said his remarks have been mischaracterized.
Obama Says Yes, McCain Says No To Faith Compassion Forum
CBN News – 4/4/08The Brody File has confirmed that Barack Obama WILL attend the religious Compassion Forum next Sunday April 13th at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. Hillary Clinton has already confirmed that she’ll be there. John McCain was invited but has declined the invitation. His campaign tells The Brody File: “We have a scheduling conflict.” A source within the McCain camp tells The Brody File that they have a compassion tour of their own scheduled for later this spring where they will continues to do “outreach to people of faith across the country.” We will follow up with details on this tour and bring them to you. As for the Forum, this is a chance for Obama and Clinton to talk about how faith, scripture and public policy all come together. The influential group, “Faith in Public Life” is behind the idea and it’s a great one. Once again, we will see Obama and Clinton on stage talking about their faith and how it informs their views. We won’t see that with McCain since he declined. That’s too bad because the environment will not be threatening at all. Many of these issues are right up his ally and you would think this would be a good way for McCain to reach out to faith voters, many who may be moderate and/or Independents.
Dobson Will ‘Certainly’ Vote In Election ’08
Christian Post – 4/1/08Dr. James Dobson said Sunday that he would vote in November, ending the widespread rumor that he would sit out during this year’s presidential election due to dissatisfaction with the choice of candidates.“Let me just say that I will certainly vote,” the influential conservative leader said on Hannity’s America. “I think we have a God-given responsibility to vote, and there are all of the candidates and the issues down the ballot that we have an obligation to weigh in on and let our voices be heard.” However, Dobson – who founded Focus on the Family but spoke as a private citizen – added that he “has problems” with all three major presidential contenders, especially the Democrats, according to FOTF’s Citzenlink publication. In terms of presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, Dobson has strongly criticized the Arizona senator for what he deemed as anti-family and anti-conservative stances. His criticisms include McCain’s support for embryonic stem-cell research, his “legendary temper,” and frequent use of “foul and obscene language.” “I cannot, and will not, vote for Sen. John McCain, as a matter of conscience,” Dobson had said in February when he announced his endorsement of then-presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. But during Sunday’s interview, he seemed to be reconsidering his stance with McCain, foregoing the fiery words he once aimed at the likely Republican nominee. Yet the issue of McCain’s support for embryonic stem-cell research was again brought up as a point of contention.
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NATIONAL NEWS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Move Over U.S. Religious Right, Here’s The Evangelical Center
Reuters – 4/2/08Move over Religious Right: you’re getting squeezed by the evangelical center. That is one of the central points of a new book by David P. Gushee entitled “The Future of Faith in American Politics”. To Gushee, the evangelical center combines much of the theology of the Religious Right with the social concerns of the left, give it a broad engagement in many of the pressing issues of our day. Gushee does not demonise the Religious Right – which he says is simply exercising its citizenship responsibilities in a free society – but he does critique its entanglement with the Republican Party, its hectoring tone and what he sees as its narrow focus on issues like abortion and gay marriage.
Student Sues Wisconsin School After Getting A Zero For Religious Drawing
Fox News – 4/1/08A Tomah High School student has filed a federal lawsuit alleging his art teacher censored his drawing because it featured a cross and a biblical reference. The lawsuit alleges other students were allowed to draw “demonic” images and asks a judge to declare a class policy prohibiting religion in art unconstitutional. According to the lawsuit, the student’s art teacher asked his class in February to draw landscapes. The student, a senior identified in the lawsuit by the initials A.P., added a cross and the words “John 3:16 A sign of love” in his drawing. His teacher, Julie Millin, asked him to remove the reference to the Bible, saying students were making remarks about it. He refused, and she gave him a zero on the project. Millin showed the student a policy for the class that prohibited any violence, blood, sexual connotations or religious beliefs in artwork. The lawsuit claims Millin told the boy he had signed away his constitutional rights when he signed the policy at the beginning of the semester. The boy tore the policy up in front of Millin, who kicked him out of class. Later that day, assistant principal Cale Jackson told the boy his religious expression infringed on other students’ rights.
With The Commandments, Must City Make Room?
Washington Post – 4/1/08The Supreme Court said yesterday that it will decide whether a city’s decision to place a monument to the Ten Commandments in a public park means it also must make room for the display of other directives purportedly sent from above. In this case, a religious group that operates from a pyramid outside Salt Lake City wants to place what it calls the Seven Aphorisms in a city park, contending that the words are lesser-known instructions that Moses received from God. Pleasant Grove City, Utah, said no. But a federal appellate court has agreed with the religious group Summum — founded in 1975 by its leader, Summum “Corky” Ra — that if a city accepts the Ten Commandments, it opens itself to requests from others and may not discriminate. Unlike the Supreme Court’s most recent cases over government display of the Ten Commandments, the Utah case is a free-speech challenge that does not involve the Constitution’s provision on establishment of religion. It will be heard next term.
Supreme Court To Consider Ten Commandments vs. ‘Seven Aphorisms’
Los Angeles Times – 4/1/08WASHINGTON — If a city allows a monument with the Ten Commandments to be erected in a public park, must it also allow other religions and groups to display monuments of their choosing? The Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up that question in an unusual dispute over the reach of the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech. In the past, the court has said the free-speech rule applies in parks and officials may not discriminate against speakers or groups because of their message. In this context, freedom of speech means a freedom from government restrictions. But last year, the U.S. appeals court in Denver extended this free-speech rule to cover the monuments, statues and displays in a public park. It ruled in favor of a religious group called Summum, which says it wants to erect its “Seven Aphorisms of Summum” next to the Ten Commandments in Pioneer Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Its ruling left the city with an all-or-nothing choice: Allow Summum and others to erect their own displays in the park, or remove the other monuments.
School Returning ‘In God We Trust’ To Gym Wall
Associated Press – 4/2/08A Dallas-area school will put “In God We Trust” back on a gymnasium wall after the U.S. motto was painted over when one parent objected. The motto had been on a wall at B.B. Owen Elementary School in The Colony. District spokesman Dean Tackett said a parent complained about displaying the word “God” in school, so the phrase was painted over. But Tackett said on Tuesday, in response to complaints from other parents about the hasty removal, “In God We Trust” will be re-painted on the wall. KTVT-TV reports some parents wrote the words “In God We Trust” on their children’s T-shirts and backpacks, then sent their students to school. The Texas Education Code says a public school or an institution of higher education may display the U.S. national motto.
From The Altar, A Vow Of Protest
Baltimore Sun – 3/31/08Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton was always vexed by the notion that despite the country’s traditional separation of church and state, Maryland gave her – a religious leader – the power to change people’s legal status by signing their marriage licenses. At the same time, the Reconstructionist rabbi from Baltimore was troubled by the state’s laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. Finally, after contending with her conflicted feelings for years, she decided she had had enough: She told couples she would happily conduct religious wedding ceremonies, but to find someone else to sign their civil documents. The legalization of same-sex marriage in 2004 in Massachusetts – the only state where such unions are legal – was the tipping point for her. “The incongruity of that not being possible here was heightened. It was the last straw. I finally was able to say with clarity: ‘I really cannot do this anymore,’” said Bolton, the rabbi at Congregation Beit Tikvah. Bolton has joined a small but growing band of clergy who have decided that they won’t sign any marriage licenses as agents of the state until it allows gays and lesbians to marry. Some rabbis and ministers in states including Virginia, Minnesota, Michigan and Connecticut have told their congregants that when it comes to weddings they are in the business of religious ceremonies – only – and they have redirected couples to the local courthouse for the paperwork.
U.S. Muslims And Mormons Share Deepening Ties
Los Angeles Times – 4/2/08The Mormon Church has to be among the most outgoing on earth; in recent years its leaders have reached out to, among others, Latinos, Koreans, Catholics and Jews. One of the most enthusiastic responses, however, has come from what some might consider a surprising source: U.S. Muslims. “We are very aware of the history of Mormons as a group that was chastised in America,” says Maher Hathout, a senior advisor to the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. “They can be a good model for any group that feels alienated.” Which perhaps explains an open-mosque day held last fall at the Islamic Center of Irvine. More than half the guests were Mormons. “A Mormon living in an Islamic society would be very comfortable,” said Steve Young, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attending the event. The sentiment is echoed by Muslims. “When I go to a Mormon church I feel at ease,” said Haitham Bundakji, former chairman of the Islamic Society of Orange County. “When I heard the president [of LDS] speak a few years ago, if I’d closed my eyes I’d have thought he was an imam.” Though the relationship has raised eyebrows and provided ammunition for critics of both religions, Mormons and Muslims have deepening ties in the United States.
Senate Probe Of ‘Prosperity Preachers’ Faces Defiance
Associated Press – 3/31/08Another deadline passed Monday in a Senate committee’s investigation into a half-dozen Christian ministries that preach a gospel of prosperity, with one group signaling a new willingness to cooperate, another promising information and two more remaining defiant, a Senate aide said. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa will continue communicating with the two holdouts — Texas televangelist Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar, a Copeland protege from suburban Atlanta — and considers subpoenas a last resort, said Jill Gerber, a Grassley aide. “Sen. Grassley is just taking it one step at a time,” Gerber said. “We’ve received a lot of cooperation so far. If he had decided to pursue subpoenas earlier, he might not be getting the voluntary cooperation he is getting now. Patience is something he’s willing to exercise.” Dollar, however, responded by comparing Grassley’s inquiries into church governance with questioning churchgoers about their prayers and confessions. Dollar’s lawyer, Marcus Owens, asked the Senate Finance Committee “to evaluate, on the record, whether to issue a subpoena to the church.” Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent letters to six Christian ministries in November giving them a month to provide answers about spending on private planes, oceanside mansions, board oversight and involvement in for-profit businesses. The ministries have denied wrongdoing.
Breakaway Episcopal Parishes Win First Case In Property Battle
Christian Post – 4/6/08Eleven congregations that broke away from The Episcopal Church celebrated a court ruling this past week that supported their efforts to keep church properties. Judge Randy I. Bellows of Fairfax County Circuit Court ruled Thursday that the 11 churches could pursue their case under Virginia’s “division statute,” which grants property to departing congregations when there is division within the denomination. Citing hundreds of churches across the country that are involved in disputes within The Episcopal Church, the judge wrote in his opinion letter that evidence of a division within the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, the national body and the global Anglican Communion “is not only compelling, but overwhelming.” “The only way in which this Court could find a ‘division’ not to exist among the pertinent entities in this case is to define the term so narrowly and restrictively as to effectively define the term out of existence,” Bellows wrote in his summary. The judge concluded that the division statute applies in the case of the 11 congregations “walking apart” from the national body.
Mormon Followers Install A New Leader
Associated Press – 4/5/08Mormons stood by the thousands with upraised hands Saturday, officially installing their first new leader in 13 years. Thomas Monson took over The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in February after the death of Gordon Hinckley, but the faith traditionally calls for a sustaining vote by members in a ceremony known as the solemn assembly. Each church organization took its turn standing when called to cast votes in the packed conference center. The ceremony has been practiced since 1880, when John Taylor was named president of the church. Mormons last held an assembly in April 1995, when Hinckley was named president. He was remembered Saturday by church apostle Russell Nelson, who said all Latter-day Saints felt a deep sense of loss with the 97-year-old Hinckley’s Jan. 27 passing. “However, we have felt our mood shift from grief to gratitude,” Nelson said. “We are very grateful for what we have learned from this great prophet of God.”
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