The Rise of Christian Nationalism

An intriguing BuzzFlash Interview with Michelle Goldberg, author of, “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism” reveals some of the fundamentalist views currently plaguing our society.

Source: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20902

Christian nationalism inside America's mega-churches

BuzzFlash interview: Michelle Goldberg | Published: 06.02.2006

BuzzFlash: In his remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Stephen Colbert said, "Though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior." How would you take that quotation and apply it to Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism?

Michelle Goldberg: As always, reality keeps sneaking up behind Stephen Colbert’s satire. The Christian nationalists, which is a term that I use to describe people from various denominations, but who believe that the United States needs to be remade as a specifically Christian nation, includes most of the leadership of the religious right's huge swaths of the Republican Party. The vast majority of these people will say that everyone has a right to practice their own religion. But they’ll say, as long as they recognize that this is a Christian nation. You can do what you want as long as you know your place.

There’s one quote in this book that was really, really telling about this. The Congress was going to have the first-ever Hindu priest give an invocation. The Family Research Council issued a really angry statement, which says: "While it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, that liberty was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our nation’s heritage. Our founders expected that Christianity and no other religion would receive support from the government, as long as that support did not violate people's consciences and their right to worship. They would have found utterly incredible the idea that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference." That’s from the Family Research Council, which is a spin-off of Focus on the Family.

BuzzFlash: Dobson’s group.

Michelle Goldberg: Right. This is Tony Perkins' group now.

BuzzFlash: I listen to that statement and I think, one, it’s a historically inaccurate one. The debates over the Constitution clearly indicated that the intention was to separate church and state, and there were even those who felt very strongly that if any church became involved in the state, it would corrupt the church and not necessarily the other way around. Second of all, the statement just doesn’t make any sense. The Constitution said we could support a religion, but only Christianity? Where does the Constitution say any of this?

Michelle Goldberg: The Virginia religious liberty statute was written by Jefferson and is widely seen as the basis for the First Amendment. As Jefferson wrote in his autobiography, some had wanted to put an amendment into that statute saying that Jesus Christ was a source of religious liberty. Jefferson said, "It was rejected by the great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination." So where do they get this from? Part of what I seek to do in my book is show that this is not just a political movement, but an entire parallel reality. It has its own revisionist history, including its own revisionist American history. There are volumes upon volumes that essentially rewrite the history of America, cherry picking various quotes and taking things out of context to try to show that the founders intended to create an Evangelical Christian America, and that separation of church and state is something that they never intended, and indeed would have been appalled by.

One of the crucial figures in spreading this kind of Christian revisionist history is a figure named David Barton, who’s actually the Vice Chairman of the Texas Republican Party, which I think shows you how much this ideology, which has departed so far from rationality or scholarship, is rooted and intertwined now with the Republican Party.

BuzzFlash: I have an issue that I’ve brought up before with the books we’ve carried about the attempt to turn America into a theocracy. A rather small item appeared in the paper, and we posted it on BuzzFlash, having to do with Antonin Scalia. He is a proponent of theocracy. He’s an Opus Dei Catholic, which is very close to the Evangelical movement, and when he was speaking at a synagogue in Alabama last year, he told the members of the synagogue that they shouldn’t fear a Christian nation because Jews have always been safe in a Christian nation. I’m thinking, how can this man be "brilliant" when Adolph Hitler ran what he very much celebrated as a Christian nation?

Michelle Goldberg: Hitler’s relationship to Christianity is complicated because he also had all this kind of pagan, Arian mythology. But, absolutely yes, it’s a preposterous statement. The entire history of Europe bears that out. But at the same time, even if you said, okay, if America’s a Christian nation, they won’t persecute you, I would say that that is still not good enough. You know, prior to the creation of Israel, Jews were by and large safe in Muslim countries. They kind of had their place, and it was understood that they weren’t weren’t quite citizens, but they were protected. So I would say that being a tolerated, protected minority whose rights are granted at the pleasure of the majority is a very different thing than being a full and equal citizen.

BuzzFlash: To carry that a bit further, Scalia himself says that he’s a strict constructionist – only what’s in the Constitution. Where in the Constitution does it say that this is a Christian country?

Michelle Goldberg: The Constitution was very consciously the only founding national document that does not mention God. There’s an excellent book that looks at this, called The Godless Constitution. That wasn’t an oversight. It was a remarkable thing for the time, and it shows the Enlightenment values of the founders. One of the things that some of the Christian nationalists have tried to do is to say that, in the end of the Constitution, when it says “in the year of our Lord,” that that was an attempt to give it the imprimatur of Christianity.

BuzzFlash: You mean merely the dating of it, basically?

Michelle Goldberg: Right. It kind of reminds you of another Stephen Colbert routine, when he’s talking to an atheist, and he’s saying, well, what about the money – "in God we trust" - don’t use money.

BuzzFlash: One more question, because it just flabbergasts me that he is on the Supreme Court. Everyone says, oh, I may disagree with him, but he’s just so brilliant and scholarly. So it’s not in the Constitution, yet he says he’s a strict constructionist. Where in the world does he get this? Is he just a liar?

Michelle Goldberg: Obviously, I can’t speak for Antonin Scalia. I will say that there is a very conservative school of Constitutional interpretation which is actually adhered to, I think, by a lot of Bush’s judicial appointees, which essentially holds the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to the states. They’ll say what is to stop each state from declaring themselves to be a Christian state? I don’t know where Scalia falls on that. But there is on the right this kind of radically circumscribed understanding of First Amendment freedoms that I think would shock a lot of people. Most people take for granted the fact that your rights are protected on the local level as well as the national level.

BuzzFlash: It’s what people like Ashcroft and Scalia bring to the Constitution. It ’s just not in there that the Constitution is a divinely given document. But they believe, because democracy is such a gift, that it must be divinely inspired. Therefore, since God is Christian, it must be a Christian document. That is why Ashcroft says Jesus is our king in America. And Scalia and Bush are in the same camp, even though there is nothing in the document that signifies that, and the founders explicitly excluded God from the Constitution and made the decision to keep church and state separate for a variety of reasons.

We talked with Stephanie Hendricks a little bit about dominionism. Can you explain  what that term means?

Michelle Goldberg: Let me start by explaining Christian reconstructionism, because dominionism flows from that. Christian reconstructionism is a very small sect that actually has a quite different eschatology than most Evangelical Protestants. Most Evangelical Protestants in America are what is called pre-millennial dispensationalists , which basically means that they believe that the rapture and Armageddon will come, that Christ will return to earth, and then there will be a thousand years of peace.

The post-millennialists believe that they first have to build the kingdom of Christ on earth, and it has to rule for a thousand years, and then Christ will return. They’re much more activist because there’s much more of a role for humans to play in bringing about the Second Coming. Their philosophy of government is very, very harsh. It’s the closest that anyone comes to envisioning a real Taliban-style theocracy – the execution of homosexuals, the execution of women who are unchaste before marriage. But they’re a minority.

Their political philosophy, dominionism, basically holds that God gave the saints dominion over all aspects of life and creation, and that Christians need to retake their proper place and control every aspect of human society. That’s become very, very influential, and it’s something that’s spread to a number of thinkers. Some of the most influential are probably Tim LaHaye and James Dobson. Tim LaHaye is pretty explicitly a dominionist. With James Dobson, it’s implicit in much of what he writes. It’s basically an idea that’s central to a lot of what Pat Robertson has done in building the Christian Coalition. It’s central to a lot of these reformation projects, like the Ohio Restoration Project. They’re basically saying we need Evangelical Christians to take over every aspect of the state political machinery. This idea has kind of filtered down – it’s a part of Christian reconstructionism that has become popularized.

The post-millennialists are trying to facilitate the arrival of Christ. But for the most part, pre-millennialism has bred a certain kind of passivity. If you really believe that we’re in the end times and the rapture is imminent, then really all you need to kind of do is sit back.

What’s happened is that, through people like LaHaye, pre-millennialism in the 1980s was really politicized. The ideal is that you might only have a generation or two more, but during those generations, we have to make this a godly country. It’s part of your responsibility as Christians to spread the gospel and spread righteousness.

BuzzFlash: Kind of clean house before the Second Coming.

Michelle Goldberg: Exactly.

BuzzFlash: Okay, now let’s look at a specific advocacy/think-tank that’s facilitating this. Can you explain the significance of the Seattle based Center for Science and Culture? It’s played a very pivotal role in the development of this euphemism for creationism, "intelligent design."

Michelle Goldberg: The Center for Science and Culture is housed within the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Seattle. It’s funded in part by Howard Ahmanson, who actually is a Christian reconstructionist. We said before that most people weren’t, but he actually is a pretty forthright theocrat. And the Center for Science and Culture takes creationism and tries to legitimize it in scientific terms, and make it sound as if it’s really just a competing scientific theory. It hires people with a lot of impressive degrees, although, in many cases, they got the degrees specifically with the idea of using them to discredit Darwinism for religious reasons. It’ll put someone forward like Jonathan Wells, who has a Ph.D. from Berkeley, and yet here he is, defending intelligent design. So they’ve given a lot of thought to packaging intelligent design to make it seem like legitimate science. And they’ve given a lot of thought to how to try to infiltrate their ideas into the culture.

One of the most interesting and clearest statements of their intentions comes from a leaked document called "The Wedge Strategy."  It’s a 1999 fund-raising proposal that shows very, very clearly that they want to use intelligent design as a way to replace the foundations of modern Western thought. They say they want to do away with "the materialistic conception of reality." That would be replaced with a supernatural conception of reality. In the scientific method, you observe things. You test things. You build on knowledge. When something is discredited, you move on. You find other hypotheses. This is how most of us understand reality. It’s why, when people found dinosaur bones or discovered carbon dating, they said, oh, the Biblical account must be wrong. Or at least it must be symbolic or metaphorical. It’s clearly not scientifically correct.

What they would essentially say is that you have to start with the Biblical account as the foundation of truth, and if you find something in the world that contradicts that, then there’s something wrong with your findings basically. You’re either seeing it wrong, or you’re interpreting it wrong. Basically, how do you know what truth is? You have to start with the word of God. This would mean a huge revolution in the very structure of our thought and our society.

BuzzFlash: As Mark Crispin Miller has said, they don’t want to take us back just to before the revolution. They want to take us back to before the Enlightenment.

Michelle Goldberg: One thing that is important to realize is that, if you read the words of, say, televangelist D. James Kennedy, who’s very influential, his books very specifically attack the Enlightenment. Not only does he attack the Enlightenment, he attacks the Renaissance. They see this battle between the Renaissance and the Reformation, and they believe that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are corrupted by the influence of the paganism of the ancients. They reject all classical knowledge and see, as opposed to that, a reformation as the closest thing to the kind of society they would like to create - either a kind of theocracy, such as in the Calvinist theocracy in Geneva, or the Puritan theocracy in the colonies.

BuzzFlash: I just want to make an observation about what you described as creationism/intelligent design. It reminds me of the political parallel about fixing the facts - when going into the war with Iraq. In other words, you find contradictory facts. You somehow make them fit into the game plan, no matter what.

Michelle Goldberg: I kind of show in my book that the reason this debate is important is because it’s part of a more general contempt for the truth and contempt for empirical reality.

I describe the movement as proto-totalitarian, not totalitarian. I don’t think that we’re anywhere close to the kind of horrors that we’ve seen in other countries in the 20th Century. But I think some tendencies are at least nascent in this movement.

One of the things Hannah Arendt talks about is the way totalitarian movements construct an entire parallel reality, and then insist that that reality be substituted for the actual reality. You see this with everything from what’s going on in the science class, to the construction of foreign policy, to the promotion of abstinence education to the kind of fictitious numbers that are given for the Bush tax cuts. It’s something quite new in American politics – this idea almost of radical relativism – the idea that truth is determined by the person who has the power to impose it.

BuzzFlash: And to quote our friend again, Stephen Colbert, about Bush’s low poll numbers. He said Bush, "my hero," doesn’t need to worry about this because these poll numbers merely reflect reality. And, as we all know, reality has a liberal bias. And one of Colbert's opening schticks was about, "I feel it in my gut. I only do what I feel in my gut. There’s a lot of nerve endings there, they tell me." The facts don’t matter. All that matters is what’s in his gut. If he believed that Christ is leading him or God is talking to him, empirical facts don’t matter. And they don’t matter to some of  the people he appoints to scientific committees or boards.

Michelle Goldberg: You essentially have this idea that truth has to be balanced with falsehood.

BuzzFlash: Yes, that’s certainly true. You bring up the interesting and rather distasteful case of David Hager, who opposed the morning-after pill and persuaded the FDA to overrule a majority recommendation to make the pill available over the counter. Then it turned out that his former wife told a reporter for The Nation that he was – what shall I say?

Michelle Goldberg: Well, that he had been raping her.

BuzzFlash: And he quietly resigned from his position.

Michelle Goldberg: He resigned, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that there are a lot of figures like him within the federal health bureaucracy. It’s not as if he resigned and now all is right. He’s an example in terms of his approach to science and evidence, and his desire to impose what is often called a Christian world view on the country. There are a lot of people who have the same backgrounds that are in the federal bureaucracy. I think it’s often very hard for people who don’t do this for a living, or pay attention to politics, to understand the influence that somebody who’s relatively obscure, on a relatively obscure subcommittee, can have on their actual day-to-day lives.

BuzzFlash: A person we haven’t really discussed a lot before, is Marvin Olasky, a former Jew who became a convert and is a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. What is his role in the rise of Christian nationalism?

Michelle Goldberg: I’m not sure whether he actually identifies himself as a Christian reconstructionist, but he’s very close to Christian reconstructionism. Basically, Marvin Olasky is like David Barton – a kind of revisionist historian. According to his revisionist history, the welfare state and the end of church-based charity have led to a decline in America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase "compassionate conservatism." That’s a phrase that comes from the title of one of Marvin Olasky’s books that George W. Bush actually read the introduction to. And Olasky was an advisor on Bush’s first Presidential campaign. He definitely influenced not just Bush’s thinking, but the thinking of a lot of the Republican Party.

BuzzFlash: Olasky was Jewish and a Marxist at one point, and then found Jesus. He ended up as sort of Bush’s Billy Graham. As you say, Olasky is the godfather of many of his ideas, particularly the phrase "compassionate conservatism" and the whole faith-based approach that Bush has adopted.

Michelle Goldberg: I’m not sure if he is still close to Bush. He was clearly the impetus behind the creation of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, which is something that’s gotten billions of dollars. But he’s not a Bush advisor any more. He’s now the editor of an Evangelical magazine, The World. He’s still very influential in that world, but I don’t know what his relationship to Bush is.

BuzzFlash: Let me ask you about the growth of the mega-church. What is that phenomenon? I read about churches getting bigger and bigger in size.

Michelle Goldberg: It’s not just that they’re getting bigger and bigger in size. They’re also getting bigger and bigger in function. A lot of these churches look more like suburban megaplexes or shopping malls than any traditional idea of what a church looked like. They’re these massive suburban structures that encompass not just these amphitheatre-type chapels, but also day care, gyms, coffee shops, dinner places. They tend to sprout up in these very new suburbs and exurbs that have virtually no organic community or public space, and where you have the situation where the people who live there aren’t usually from there.

A lot of these places didn’t even exist ten or fifteen years ago. You have all of these people who don’t have roots, and don’t have any kind of community, and the church comes, and it’s this instant social world. It’s there to provide everything that you need. Certainly that could be a positive thing for people. Clearly they are incredibly welcoming. You go in there and sometimes you almost feel like you’re being love- bombed. But the thing is, often these megachurches also are giving people a very specific and detailed political ideology. When there’s nothing else challenging that, it takes hold all the more. If there’s nothing to contradict them, you have people living in an almost total parallel reality.

Under the IRS rules, churches aren’t allowed to campaign for a Republican candidate. But they are allowed to campaign for ostensibly non-partisan issues like a gay marriage amendment. And so, through the use of things like the gay marriage amendment, these churches can basically be enlisted as massive auxiliaries of the Republican get-out-the-vote machine. In 2004 in Ohio, they just moved the phone banks and voter registration into the megachurches. I remember there were stories in 2004 that liberals and progressive Democrats felt pretty confident because they were out on the streets, and they weren’t seeing the Republican get-out-the-vote machine. That’s because a lot of it was taking place in the churches.

BuzzFlash: A good example of this in the 2004 election is the activity of the current Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, Ken Blackwell, who championed the anti-gay marriage amendment in Ohio. There were questions about the propriety of that. He was and still is Secretary of State. But as you say, that was a de facto get-out-the-Republican-vote drive.

Michelle Goldberg: Yes. Before the election, I went to the megachurches. There was lots of dancing, lots of lights, and then this incredibly impassioned sermon. They were all about you need to form a mighty army and march on the ballot box, and everything was about the homosexuals, and the decadence and depravity, and they’re coming for your children. It would just go on and on and on, but it was all entirely political.

BuzzFlash: From what you just described, they have an entertainment component to them.

Michelle Goldberg: Absolutely. The music sounds much more like soft rock – it’s not hymns. It’s kind of soft rock, but with "baby" replaced by "Jesus." And big screens, and these kind of psychedelic swirling patterns all over the place – it’s a really impressive light show.

BuzzFlash: When you were covering the court case on intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania – which was eventually defeated – did you find these people amiable, nice, pleasant?

Michelle Goldberg: Sure. But my experiences of most people everywhere on a one-on-one basis are amiable, and kind. Having reported a little bit in the Middle East – it’s useful to realize that somebody’s ideology can be violently opposed to you, and they might support politics that would actually lead to your destruction. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have you over for lunch and be a totally gracious host. So on a one-on-one basis, I met people all the time who were charming and generous.

So they’re good people. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t support policies that would make this country unlivable, or that would destroy everything that people like me value in this country. It doesn’t mean that when they’re in groups and being fired up, and being told that homosexuals and secularists and atheists and feminists are a menace to their family – that they’re not capable of getting caught up in that kind of hysteria. That was something I saw as well. People, totally sweet on a one-to-one basis, but in the megachurch cheering about we’re going to defeat the homosexuals. And you see the gay people in the areas, where these anti-gay measures were used to get out their vote, and what they’re feeling is real terror. They’re looking around and thinking, these are my neighbors. They’ve always been nice to me. We’ve always smiled at each other. Who are these people?

BuzzFlash: For many years, progressives and cosmopolitan people, contemporary post-Enlightenment people, saw America as this great country and society that seemed to be moving forward. Maybe there were people of different ideological stripes, the Archie Bunkers, the middle America Nixon saw, and there might be some morality differences. But as you write in the Preface to your book, we really have two different societies now. We have this alternative reality and then we have like contemporary America that’s like contemporary Europe in many ways. It’s part of the modern world. Then we have a parallel society in America which is really, in its religious extremism, not that different than Islamic fundamentalists. They both reject contemporary society and resent contemporary morality. They both reject the Enlightenment. What happened?

Michelle Goldberg: My feeling is that they were always there – they just weren’t organized. There have always been fundamentalists in America, although I think this kind of Evangelical upsurge is something different. But the fundamentalists that were there kind of withdrew after the Scopes monkey trial, where they felt that they were humiliated. So they organized their parallel society in a way that made it easy for people on the Coast or in the cities to completely overlook it. Then, starting in the late seventies, with the creation of the Moral Majority, going into the Christian Coalition, and now into this much more dispersed Christian nationalist movement, they’ve just gotten much, much more organized, while Democrats and the left have become completely disorganized. Increasingly, people are no longer part of any civic or trade organizations. The unions fell apart and the megachurches bloomed. It’s been abetted by population shifts and redistricting, which really electorally disempowered people in big cities, which tend to be located in the most progressive states. Redistricting has kind of crowded urbanites together into single districts and spread out conservatives more so that they have vastly more electoral power. That’s part of it.

Another part of it is just existential. I think a lot of people feel despair or find modern life meaningless. Somebody said to me at one of these school board meetings, if evolution is true, then life has no meaning. If God hasn’t put you on this earth for a purpose, and if He doesn’t love you and think you’re special – if you’re just a product of random chance, some people see that as intolerable meaninglessness.

BuzzFlash: Has technology contributed to this?

Michelle Goldberg: Technology has had two roles, I think. On the one hand, it undermines the sense of traditional community. A lot of the people that I talk to seem to have this incredible nostalgia for their towns. They’re just living in these kind of suburban nodes. So there’s a sense of something profound that has been lost, and they feel kind of adrift. Then the megachurch fills that need that nobody else is filling. That’s part of it.

Technology has also allowed for the creation of this entire parallel media. It used to be that most people got pretty much the same news. People had access to pretty much the same entertainment. Technology has allowed this completely fictitious world to become an all-encompassing bubble.

BuzzFlash: Thank you, Michelle. It’s a wonderful book.

Michelle Goldberg: Thank you so much.

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Life and Liberty for All Who Believe

It scares me, the religious movement. It scares me because there are so many people that follow its cause, blindly. There are millions of insecure human beings that feel safe by the propaganda offered by the radical movement.

These are the same people that teach intolerance and inequality. All this can easily be seen in an old video available for watching through www.theocracywatch.org. I just saw an old video, "Life and Liberty for All Who Believe" in Real Video or Windows Media Video.

The video displays such concepts:

• Preaching politics from the pulpit.
• Their goal of Christianizing America.
• Opposition of nuclear arms control in the name of religion.
• Claims that Social Security is inconstant with the Bible.
• Their attempt to make their views, the law of the land.
• Campaigns against schoolbooks that mention women’s rights.
• Demonizing equality between a man in a woman in marriage.
• Support for Capital punishment.
• Criminalizing Homosexuality with death penalty.
• Claims that laws against child abuse are not compatible with the Bible.
• Claims that public education is the single most dangerous force in a child’s life.
• The radical right says, “Children shouldn’t have opinions, shouldn’t be taught how to think, but what to think”
• Lobbying against the mention of slavery, poverty, evolution, even computers.
• Book burning in the name of Jesus

Anti-gay Marriage Amendment

David Walsh writes a great piece on the latest attempts by the religious right to add discrimination to the US Constitution.

Source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/gay-j09.shtml

Republicans' anti-gay marriage amendment: a cynical and reactionary maneuver

David Walsh | Published: 06.09.2006

The attempt to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, which failed in the US Senate on Wednesday, was an exercise in political cynicism and reaction organized by the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress. It was aimed at shoring up political support for the Republicans within the party’s ‘base,’ i.e., the most backward elements of the American population.

In the end, the move to cut off debate in the Senate and bring the measure to a final vote, which required a two-thirds majority to pass, fell 11 votes short of the 60 needed. The outcome, give or take a vote or two, was a foregone conclusion.

The decision to bring the amendment before the Senate shows that the Bush administration hopes to alleviate its current political woes and avert a Republican debacle in the November mid-term elections by playing on the insecurity and prejudices of one section of the population at the expense of the basic rights of another.

Even sections of the American media acknowledged the anti-gay measure was a sop to social layers whose support for the current administration has cooled. Polls indicate declining support for Bush both among moderate Republicans (from 81 to 56 percent since December 2004) and conservatives (from 93 to 78 percent).

The New York Times spelled out the political calculations rather bluntly: “There are multiple reasons why Congress is taking up the issues now. The legislative calendar is relatively thin. The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, who controls the Senate’s schedule, has been trying to convince social conservatives that he is one of them in advance of a potential presidential bid. And while the leadership wants election-year votes on social issues, they do not want them too close to November in case they backfire.”

The arguments of the right-wing Christian elements are largely delusional. In their version of things, homosexuals, by asking for equal treatment, are waging war on America’s ‘traditional family values,’ with the help of the ‘liberal media’ and ‘activist judges.’

“We have been left with no other choice for the defense of marriage than an amendment to the US Constitution,” declared Tony Perkins, president of the ultra-right Family Research Council, at a recent press conference. “This is not about gay marriage, it is an assault on traditional marriage,” claimed Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr., chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, an organization of black clergy, at the same event. “Gays are aggressive, gays declared war, gays are attacking traditional marriage, and we’re saying stop it now.”

The debate over the gay marriage measure also served to divert attention, at least for a few days, from the mounting crisis of the Bush administration in both domestic and foreign policy. The White House and the congressional Republican leadership welcomed a chance to change the subject from US atrocities in Iraq and the deteriorating condition of the American economy.

While the issue was brought before the Senate as a transparent political maneuver, the campaign for an anti-gay marriage amendment is itself deeply anti-democratic.

The amendment would add the following language to the Constitution: “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.”

If this were implemented, it would alter the Constitution in an unprecedented manner to restrict, not expand, the rights of American citizens. A specific group, gay men and women, would be singled out for discriminatory treatment, in violation of the constitutional principle of “equal protection of the laws.”

The “legal incidents thereof” language is intended, moreover, to bar not only same-sex marriages, but also civil unions, which might give gay couples equivalent rights to married heterosexuals in such areas as child custody and adoption, property distribution and healthcare benefits. According to one account, the amendment would strip gay married citizens of access to more than 1,138 federal rights, protections, and responsibilities automatically granted to married heterosexual couples.

The Constitution provides absolutely no basis for defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. That is a religious definition. As one of the anti-gay bigots, the Rev. William Owens, founder of the Coalition of African-American Pastors, explained recently: “Our position is based on Scripture, not political parties or persuasion or opposition.” The enshrinement of such a religious attitude in the Constitution would be a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.”

The effort to prohibit same-sex marriages goes hand in hand with campaigns to enshrine school prayer in the Constitution, promote the public display of the Ten Commandments and similar measures which target the separation of church and state, a bulwark of democratic rights. These are part of a larger, ongoing effort to eviscerate the Bill of Rights.

While Republican leaders like Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas have ignorantly denied that the separation of church and state was a principle of the framers of the Constitution, the more brazen of the religious fanatics openly call for a repudiation of the Constitution’s secular and humanist underpinnings. One of them, according to a sympathetic commentator, “points a finger at the framers of the Constitution of the United States, who self-consciously broke with 1000 + years of Western heritage by not referring to the Trinity and to Christ as King. This was the hole in the dike... through which modern secularism has poured.”

The goal of these types, with the open or tacit encouragement of the leadership of the Republican Party, is to transform the US into a theocratic state, in which the principles of the 13th century would prevail.

Such views run counter to the democratic instincts and history of the American people. This is not to deny that, under conditions of growing economic insecurity for tens of millions and the political confusion that prevails in the US, appeals to ‘traditional values’ and the need to prevent the ‘moral ruin of the nation’ have had their impact. The Democratic Party, including its liberal wing, has shown itself unwilling and unable to seriously oppose such reactionary appeals.

Nonetheless, the clear trend is for increased popular tolerance about sexual orientation. While 58 percent of the population opposes gay marriage, according to recent polls, only 42 percent supports a constitutional amendment prohibiting it.

As columnist Margaret Carlson notes: “Every year millions of people watch “Will & Grace” and Ellen DeGeneres with no effect on their morals, and slowly make friends with the gay couple who moved in next door. For every homophobe who passes on, a young person grows up comfortable with the lesbians at work fussing over bridesmaids and wedding cakes. And then they register to vote.

“In 1977, a third of Americans opposed equal employment rights for homosexuals. That’s down to 9 percent. On gays in the military, that explosive precursor to gay marriage that almost derailed the infant Clinton administration, the Pew Research Center finds that by 2-to-1 people now believe gays should serve openly.”

According to Pew, opposition to gay marriage has dropped from 65 percent to 51 percent in 2006. One commentator (religioustolerance.org) observes, “The most recent three surveys show a fairly constant trend towards greater acceptance of same-sex marriage [SSM]. By extrapolating the data forwards in time, one might predict that equal numbers of American adults will support and oppose SSM by February of 2007. After that, one might predict that more adults will support than oppose SSM.”

The Bush administration and Republicans like Frist are openly seeking to deprive a considerable portion of the American population of its basic rights. The Urban Institute estimates the gay and lesbian population at 5 percent of the total US population over 18 years old, or some 10.5 million people. It calculates that some 3.1 million gay or lesbian people are living in “committed relationships in the same residence.”

The US is a massively complex and diverse society of nearly 300 million people whose demographics have undergone a dramatic transformation. The attempt by the Christian right to squeeze the American population into some largely mythical ‘traditional’ framework is as reactionary as it is doomed.

A few statistics will suffice. Some 11 million people are currently living with an unmarried partner, a figure that is probably an undercount. Forty-one percent of American women ages 15-44 have “cohabited” (lived with an unmarried different-sex partner) at some point, 33 percent of all births are to unmarried women, and the number of unmarried couples living together increased 72 percent between 1990 and 2000—that number has increased tenfold since 1960.

As of 2000, the most typical household in the US was an individual living alone. Twenty-seven million American households consisted of one person, compared to 25 million with a husband, wife and child. Only a quarter of households in the US now conform to the “traditional family” notion, a married couple and their children.

The average American now spends the majority of his or her life unmarried. In 2000, 44 percent of US adults were single, compared to 36 percent in 1970. There are 100 million single and unmarried adults in the US (some living alone, some living with partners, families, roommates, etc.).

In any event, the professions of concern for ‘family values’ and the sanctity of marriage on the part of the American political and media establishment are utterly hypocritical. The social policies of both parties are making life intolerable for millions, tearing families and marriages apart, guaranteeing increases in divorce or separation, domestic violence and child abuse.

In many cases in the US, partners—married or unmarried, same- or opposite sex—hardly see one another, as millions are forced to worked longer and longer hours, often in two or three jobs, simply to make ends meet. The absence of affordable daycare, the high cost of medical insurance (entirely out of the reach of some 50 million people), increasing attacks on reproductive rights, the slashing of social programs for working class women and families, the soaring cost of housing—this is the actual program, as opposed to the fantasized version offered up by campaign advertisements, that the Republicans and Democrats alike carry out on behalf of America’s families.

The social fabric of the country is being torn apart primarily so that a disproportionate share of society’s wealth will continue to flow to the 0.1 percent of the population that has enriched itself beyond imagination over the past several decades.

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Religious Double Standards

The double standard set by some Christian groups in this country and around the world is extremely hypocritical. It seems that the moment a certain group gains some momentum of power over politics it immediately starts to set a double standard in hopes their power will protect them from their own immoralities.

Take for example:

"The theme of a PG-rated film may itself call for parental guidance," the MPAA says of its rating system. "There may be some profanity in these films. There may be some violence or brief nudity. ... The PG rating, suggesting parental guidance, is thus an alert for examination of a film by parents before deciding on its viewing by their children. Obviously such a line is difficult to draw."

"It is kind of interesting that faith has joined that list of deadly sins that the MPAA board wants to warn parents to worry about," film spokesman Kris Fuhr told the Scripps Howard News Service.

Fuhr noted the association "decided that the movie was heavily laden with messages from one religion and that this might offend people from other religions. It's important that they used the word 'proselytizing' when they talked about giving this movie a PG."

...

The plot includes numerous prayers being answered, a medical miracle, and a mystic who delivers a message from God.

I simply can’t believe some Christians are offended by the PG rating. They think their perspective is so perfectly moral that they can’t think straight.

The PG rating for the film is already sparking discussion on Internet messageboards. Among the postings:

·  "This is just another example of trying to 'ghetto-ize' Christians. No other group is treated as such. Whoever is on that board needs to hear that this is not going to be tolerated unless the religious beliefs of every other group – including New Age, atheist, Wiccan, etc., are treated the same way. How sad that we have descended to this. Make no mistake, this is a very disturbing sign of a sick and potentially dangerous culture."

·  "It is demonizing Christians and that is no different from the demonizing that was going on in Germany before the Holocaust. First, there is the laughing at, then the demonizing, then blaming and finally, punishment that everyone accepts as normal and good. Sit and allow this to happen and that is the road we are going down."

·  "Nowadays, a PG movie means it's family friendly! Heck, 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' is PG. No one complains about its PG rating when the family's Greek Orthodox religion is explicitly shown. So why should people complain that 'Facing the Giants' is PG? It might get people to take it seriously. If it had a G rating, people might be likely to think it's a cute little kid's movie."

·  "I think it kind of makes sense. Look at it this way. If a movie is based on proselytizing atheism and promoting atheism, wouldn't you like it to have a PG rating? As a parent, you don't want children taught ideas that you don't feel are appropriate. If a movie is pushing the idea that God doesn't exist, even if it is the cleanest movie in the world, many Christian parents would want to guide their children regarding that film. The same might be said about Muslim or Buddhist families not wanting their children to have instruction that they do not agree with."

·  "I'd like to see the rating system really be put to serious use if movies about the Bible are going to come out. I, for one, would not want to go to a G-rated movie based on Scripture and then have to watch as actresses playing Lot's daughters get busy with their dad. That is an NR [Not Rated] movie if there ever was one."

Source: http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50556

Religious Right, Happier on the Land

Perry Mann writes an interesting piece that really captures the possible connection between the values of the Religious Right and rural country life.

Most people have heard the term “Middle America”, the area’s of the country, mostly in the center of the continental 48 states where family and conservative values are strong. Perry helped me to understand why Middle America has those tendencies.

Source: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/060605-mann-comment.html

The Religious Right Would be Happier on the Land

Perry Mann | Published: 06.05.2006

The Religious Ultra-Right members claim that they are oppressed by secular humanists, which constitute just fourteen percent of the population. They further claim that this country is going to hell on a sled slicked by the sins of that fourteen percent. They really would, I suspect, like to eliminate all secular humanists in the manner that Torquemada eliminated thousands of them and other apostates during the Inquisition.

But this is not the Fourteenth Century. So to alleviate the frustration of their not being able to eliminate humanists in the manner of that century, I suggest, in view of their concern over the sins of humanism--- namely, abortion and divorce; abolition of prayer in schools; toleration of same-sex marriage; teaching sexual education and evolution; advocating contraception, stem-cell research and euthanasia; violating the sanctity of the Sabbath and committing with cavalier nonchalance most of the deadly sins---that they leave the cities, where most of them and everyone else in this country live, and return to the land where few of the sins that they abhor flourish now or have flourished or, if committed, done so covertly and less often---owing more to constricting circumstances than to innate virtue. The faithful need to be reminded of the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Thomas Jefferson, a deist, that is, one who believed that a First Cause created the world and all that is in it, set it in motion and then retired, and one who believed not in the divinity of Jesus --- envisioned for America a land where everyone owned a piece of it and thus would never be unemployed and could with work and sweat provide a living for his family and enjoy the fruits of his labor. And since independent of everyone but his neighbors and nature, he could vote his conscience and knowledge and thus help maintain a democracy. But Jefferson’s utopian dream died with the advent and monumental growth of the cities where now 90 percent or more of this nation’s citizens reside. In fact, cities are where one half of the world’s inhabitants reside, or to put it more accurately, where most of the one half of them barely exists---rather than resides.

The city is man’s response to his eviction from Eden and the penalty for his disobedience, to wit: The earning of his bread by the sweat of his brow. There were those evicted who in the heat of day in the field, or in frustration after an unsuccessful hunt, decided that there was a better way to earn their bread, to wit: To figure a way to acquire, without sweat, a portion of bread and meat of those who produced or caught it. Thus, from that dream of a scheme grew a crossroads into a metropolis, where nothing happens that is not a repeat of the getting a bit of someone’s bread, or whatever he has, without sweat or, at least, attempting to do so. The name of the scheme was capitalism.

Capitalism is a game of competition instead of cooperation. It produces enormous wealth for the predatory type and produces crumbs for the cooperative type. Wealth corrupts and great wealth corrupts greatly. The city’s wealth corrupts the wealthy, who have it, and corrupts the proletarians, who have too little of it. The city’s wealth corrupts all within its jurisdiction. The hinterland is poor relative to the city and poorness on the land is less corruptive. Never was there a rich saint. Poverty is a prerequisite to sainthood. Christ was aware of the corruptibility of riches. A rich man had the obstacle, he taught, of threading himself through the eye of needle to enter the Kingdom.

So in view of all of the above, I suggest to the Religious Ultra-Right that the members thereof migrant from the city and take up quarters on the land, where they can escape the modern trends that disgust them and infuriate them and where they can live free of all the sinful life-styles of the urban types.

I can attest to the virtue of those who lived on the land, even though their virtue was probably more the result of a lack of time, money and opportunity to live other than virtuously. I know that on the land the righteous will be relatively free of the sins of humanism; for I lived there and I know the culture of it. If the righteous would return to it and thus to the culture of a century or more ago, they would be more at home than, say, at Las Vegas. Infinitely so.

There would be no abortion because every child would be wanted and needed. There would be no idleness for anyone for the Devil to exploit---thus drugs and alcohol would be absent---because everyone would be always employed, would become tired, know rest and sound sleep, from the time he or she could walk and talk until he or she died. There would be no divorce because the cost of one and the disruption of the family enterprise would be such that everyone involve would become a beggar in months. There would be no promiscuity because there would be no time or energy or opportunity for such an excursion into the short-lived bliss and the long-lived remorse of an affair.

There would be no need for sexual education or contraception because unprotected sex would be sanctioned as necessary to produce children, the sine qua non of rural existence. Prayer would be needed, even if sterile, and used extensively because one on the land is naked before nature with only neighbors as insurance. Homosexuality would be a non-issue because if one did not wish to or could not produce children, he would be pitied not scorned. Euthanasia would also be a non-issue because the aged would remain in their homes and die attended tenderly by loved ones. Violating the Sabbath would be unheard of, because the occasion of going to church would be the social event of the week. Evolution wouldn’t even be defined in their dictionaries.

There would be no radio, TV or internet to seduce; no telephone, daily paper, art museum or symphony hall to capture attention and divert one from his duties. Music would be the birds and the wind; art would be all that nature has created; news would be the signs of the weather; communications would be with oneself mostly and confidants; and the outside world would intrude only when some city slicker arrived hawking an elixir that cured everything from warts to fallen arches. Wars and talk of wars would never break the peace except when a youth would have to go to serve the nation and, if sent to Paris, would never return to the farm.

But the routine of living on the land---planting, cultivating, harvesting, preserving, procreating; celebrating birth, marriage and grandchildren; enjoying the satisfaction of the day’s work and the day itself; watching the sun from up to down, the night from darkness to dawn, and the seasons from summer to spring; with sweet air to breathe, clean water to drink, rain to refresh; no trash to bag, no taxes to pay, and the coming of the end of life with a confident feeling of having lived it as nature, and perhaps God, would have wanted one to live it ---would be the rewards and the happiness of returning.

Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville and Huntington News Network. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton. The portrait accompanying this column is by Robert Shetterley from his book “Americans Who Tell The Truth.”

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Modern Sexuality

Just last week I was telling a co-worker at work that the mentality of mankind must change overtime when it comes to the childbearing. Even with widespread birth control women are having children everywhere, whether they want them or not. I myself was not a planned pregnancy. Thankfully my parent’s were able to wed and were financially stable to raise my brother and I well.

Not everyone is as fortunate as my brother and I. Some children are born into poverty stricken situations with parents that are not prepared emotionally or financially for the task of raising a child. I believe we all should make more of an effort to only have children when we want them.

Germany is leading the way in a more progressive outlook in sex. They are having sex without the kids. The LATimes has written an interesting Opinion piece on the subject. Of course religious fundamentalists are freaking out. It is unthinkable for adults to have sex for reasons outside of reproduction.

Sex is essential, kids aren't, LATimes Opinion

Unity08

I don’t see anything wrong with the values the democratic party holds. However, in an attempt to be objective, I must say I don’t know too much about the democratic party. I’ve only become politically aware over the last year or so and no one can accuse the democratic party of being heard.

They are practically non-existent. The primary criticism I hear from democrats and progressives is that the democrats have no message, they have stance besides not having a voice right now. I think that is a valid assessment of the democratic party.

I think they can easily stand up, but they have no voice, not having the majority, so all they would do is get smeared, make themselves look worse.

All that said I was loosing hope for US democracies future until I found out about Unity08 and organization that will bring a whole new political party to the arena. This brings so much hope!

It's not politics as usual…

Unity08 is a diverse group of Americans who believe that neither of today’s parties reflects the aspirations, concerns or will of the majority of Americans. Both parties have polarized and alienated voters. Both are unduly influenced by single-issue groups. Both are excessively dominated by money.

There is a better way…

Unity08 is committed to presenting a third presidential ticket and platform – one that addresses the issues and challenges of the 21st Century – to the American voters in 2008.

We will not waste time pointing fingers. Instead, we will focus on how America can find common ground on critical issues – to give the overlooked moderate majority a voice and a choice in 2008.

www.unity08.com