Crude But Effective
I’m sure that US advisers counseled trumped-up impeachment or a bought-and-paid-for recall, but the Iraqis had no use for our “democratic” methods for removing the mayor of Baghdad from power. They just deposed him. Very efficient. Tom DeLay took notes.
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Playing For Time
Kevin wonders why the White House appears to be bobbling the Roberts nomination citing this article in the Washington Post this morning:
Thrown on the defensive by recent revelations about Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.’s legal work, White House aides are delaying the release of tens of thousands of documents from the Reagan administration to give themselves time to find any new surprises before they are turned into political ammunition by Democrats.
[…]
While the White House plays catch-up in studying Roberts’s past, it is facing complaints from some of its conservative supporters about what they feel has been a stumbling campaign for the nominee.
Sean Rushton, director of the conservative Committee for Justice, said in the days after the nomination “there was a drop-off of message and focus.”
I think this is mostly kabuki. There had always been concern that Roberts was being nominated too early — a clearly political decision to take the heat off of the Plame investigation:
… a conservative icon in Washington is worried because the White House rejected his advice regarding the timing of its announcement of Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court. Free Congress Foundation founder and president Paul Weyrich says opposition groups will now have a month to rally their forces and voice their opinions on Roberts before hearings begin in late August.
“I pleaded with the White House not to make the appointment until the end of August because if it is made now, and Congress then goes out of session, you will have all the left-wing groups screaming about the appointee,” Weyrich says. That vocal opposition has already begun.
According to Weyrich, the White House response to his request was lukewarm. “You know, it was just a ‘thanks for your input’ type of thing,” he recalls. “I’m not sure they really comprehend what will happen to their nominee if the nominee’s good.”
Weyrich voices concern that the month-long interval before hearings begin will give those opposed to Roberts time to build their objections to a fever pitch. He says that happened once before to another Supreme Court nominee — Robert Bork.
They knew there was going to be time to sully Roberts which is why they have “just decided now” to thoroughly review all these documents before they can release them.
I don’t deny that there is probably some disarray at the White House. They have been off their game for a while. But I think they probably decided they could draw out the fact-finding enough through the month of August to make nominating him early worthwhile. It’s risky for them. Who knows what could seep out? But they are now in precarious enough waters that they have to take some political risks.
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Guerilla Blogging
For all of you who might be interested, check out this fascinating study on the progressive blogosphere written by Chris Bowers of MYDD and Matt Stoller of Blogging of the President.
They highlight the fact that local political blogging seems to be one area in which the conservatives are outpacing the progressives — which Bowers further expounded upon just the other day when he learned that an allegedly nonpartisan local Pennsylvania newsblog was actually a GOP front.
The local angle and the GOP front angle are connected. I’m not just being paranoid. There is evidence in plain sight that they have done this — the Thune bloggers are a perfect example — and that they are actively training people to do it:
From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia–based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided “Gannon” with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates “Internet Activist Schools” designed to teach conservatives how to engage in “guerilla Internet activism.”
Indeed, Krempasky could be found teaching this Internet activism course one recent February weekend to about 30 young conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. “He advocated that people write from their experience — and not necessarily as conservatives,” a Democratic consultant who attended the seminar incognito told me. For example, Krempasky told “a conservative firefighter” that he should write about firefighting because that would be of interest to readers. Using that angle, he could build an audience. And if push ever came to shove, he could respond to an online dogfight from the unassailable position of being a firefighter — and not as just another conservative ideologue. Krempasky then offered to help all the attendees set up their own blogs. “We’re definitely in serious trouble,” said the Democratic attendee.
I know that Krempasky is a big hero among some in the lefty blogosphere because of his bipartisan work with the FCC. I’m sure he is a great guy. He even linked positively to me once.
But he was trained by one of the master ratfuckers of all time — Morton Blackwell. “Guerilla internet activism” is high-tech ratfucking. I’m just saying.
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General Misconduct
I sure hope that General Geoffrey D. Miller isn’t putting his penis where it shouldn’t be. You can get in in real trouble for that kind of behavior.
[General] Byrnes, reached by telephone at his home yesterday, declined to comment. His defense attorney, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said the allegation against Byrnes involves an affair with a private citizen. Byrnes has been separated from his wife since May 2004; their divorce was finalized on Monday, coincidentally the same day he was relieved of command, Robertson said.
“The allegation against him does not involve a relationship with anyone within the military or even the federal government,” Robertson said, emphasizing that the allegations do not involve more than one relationship. “It does not involve anyone on active duty or a civilian in the Department of Defense.”
[…]
The Army has been hurt over the past year by detainee-abuse cases and has been accused of not going after top officers allegedly involved in such abuse. Army officials said relieving Byrnes was meant to show the public that the service takes issues of integrity seriously.
I guess Rush Limbaugh isn’t the only one who considers hauling a naked prisoner around on a dog leash to be a form consensual sex.
It should be noted that Geoffrey Miller didn’t actually fuck anyone personally, that we know of. He only created the torture and sexual humiliation regimes at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and lied to congress.
Naturally, he was promoted.
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Misdirection
In an effort to find out how we can win back the independent rural and red state Bush voter, Democracy Corps did some focus groups (pdf). They found that while there was deep dissatisfaction with the country’s direction, they still blame Democrats because Democrats are immoral. Or something like that.
I’m pressed for time today so I won’t be able to post much, but I do recommend that you read this report and contemplate the fact that it appears that the only way for Democrats to win these voters is to adopt fundamentalist religious views or wait for the Republicans to destroy the economy so thoroughly that they turn to the Democrats by default as they did in 1932. It’s quite obvious that nothing short of that is going to convince them to vote for us. These people cannot vote for us because we don’t share their moral and religious values — which if you believe the statistics on domestic violence, divorce, children born out of wedlock and and any number of other indicators of personal sexual morality — are totally incoherent, self-serving, and entirely without any practical basis.
They don’t care about issues — indeed, they think that moral values are the issues. Republicans are for (the right kind of) Christians therefore they are better at defending the nation and the economy. It’s a simple formula that doesn’t require much investigation and is validated and emphasized constantly by the predominant political influences in rural red states: churches and talk radio. (Re-read this most insightful article by Christopher Hayes from last year to more fully understand the fact that these people don’t even know what political issues are.)
Particularly among non-college voters, cultural issues not only superceded other priorities, they served as a proxy for many voters on those other issues. With most voters expressing little understanding of the differences between Democrats and Republicans or the relative merits of their positions on economic policy, health care, retirement security, and other issues, they felt it safe to assume that if a candidate was ‘right’ on cultural issues – i.e. opposed to abortion, but most importantly opposed to gay marriage and vocal about defending the role of faith and traditional Judeo-Christian values in public life – that candidate would naturally also come closest to their views on these other issues.
Here they are in their own words. (Or if you don’t like covers, just tune in to Fox or Rush Limbaugh for the original version.)
We should be able to put a manger in the city market. I believe that we are Christian and we should be able to put a manger there. They’re giving everybody else rights. But it’s the Christian that we’re not allowed to give. Everybody else can get what they want to.Look what’s on our money. ‘In God We Trust’ That’s right. No Ten Commandments in the court house and stuff. And no pledge of allegiance to the flag. We’re in America. (Little Rock, older noncollege women)
You know, in God we were built, our country was built on God’s principals. And if we’re to maintain that we need to maintain God’s laws along with it. It says it right on the coins. Yeah, you can’t pull that apart. And they’re trying to pull it apart; you know the separation of church and state. And Republicans tend to stay away from that and allow these things. It’s the Democrats that are pulling us away from having Ten Commandments in places. (Appleton, younger noncollege women)
My big thing is the moral issues that they stand for. Or the immoral. They’re for the abortion and the gay movements, and individuality, and do what you feel instead of the way it should be. (Appleton, younger non-college women)
It appears to me in the last few years the Democrats have been. I view them as more anti-religious, almost opposing any kind of religion or propagate religion, like what happened in Colorado Springs a few weeks ago. (Denver, younger college men)
I still think that the Democrats are too politically correct. They don’t want to step on anybody’s toes. Whatever you’ve done, you had the right to do it. (Louisville, older non-college men)
I would like to believe that they represent the interests of working people and the middle class but they don’t. Not anymore. I don’t think they do. They’re just out for their own personal gain themselves, the ones that are there. (Denver, older college women)
Their leaders always seem very weak and unprepared. I am never confident in a Democrat that comes up that he can handle the political issues that come up. Especially internationally or anything. I have just not been impressed at all with their capabilities. (Appleton, younger non-college women)
I think that they’re in complete disarray and there’s just no forward momentum to the Democratic Party right now. There’s a total lack of leadership. (Louisville, older non-college men)
I’m proud to be an American because of the way this country was founded. And they stand up for this nation’s Christian heritage. There’s no question that – I believe this with all my heart – that this country is blessed the way it has been for all these years because of the way it was founded. And God’s looked on us favorably. And I think Republicans have that at heart, most of them do. And it shows in the moral stance they take. Because you hear all the time that there are no absolutes, but there truly is, and I think that they recognize that and try to push that through in their agenda. (Little Rock, younger non-college men)
They seem kind of weak to me. Weaker on terrorism. They seem like they would be more eager to hold out the olive branch instead of recognizing the fact that this is my enemy. We need to defend ourselves. (Denver, older college women)
Quit criticizing so much and have a little bit more of your own direction. Whether it’s right or wrong, pick a direction and go…Be on the offense instead of thedefense. (Appleton, older non-college men)
The Democrats have opposed these efforts? Well, where is their great idea for protecting jobs? Where is their great idea for lowering health costs? They don’t have it. (Appleton, younger non-college women)
They want to point out the issues that go wrong that the Republicans are making. And yet, they don’t really have a solution of their own…That’s why they don’tever win now. (Little Rock, older non-college women)
The report concludes:
These findings are not surprising in the context of recent electoral trends, with Democrats making slow but steady gains among college-educated voters over the past decade while increasing percentages of non-college voters support Republicans, contrary to their own economic self-interest. We believe most Democrats share certain core beliefs about civil rights, opposition to government restrictions on individual liberties, and separation of church and state that are inviolable, and we would not in any way advocate that Democrats change these beliefs or seek to obscure them in an effort to reverse recent losses among rural and red state voters. At the same time, Democrats must recognize the dynamics behind these trends and find a strategic framework that combines these core beliefs with an aggressive ‘change’ agenda that taps into broad dissatisfaction with the current leadership in Washington.
Good luck threading that needle.
I am interested in any work people have done on the Paul Hackett campaign in which he apparently won the rural voters while losing in the more affluent exurbs. Something about him was able to transcend the christian right influence with the country folk. I suspect it was style, which when you think about it is the one thing that might just be able to pull some of these people away from their preacher proxy model. They have, after all, already demonstrated that they are entirely hueristic decisionmakers who are discontented with the direction the country is going but can’t rationally put that together with who is in charge. Hackett looks and sounds like a mans man who wasn’t “weak” — the constant refrain. (Good work Rush.) Maybe that’s all it really takes.
One final note: The GOP courting of conservative evangelicals began back in the 70’s. It was no an accident of fate. They knew that it was an untapped source of conservative non-voters who could easily be mobilized by their churches. It is a political machine.
The Republicans are not fucking around here. They are building an impermeable, corrupt political machine made up of cronies, employees and hangers-on the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 19th century. They are court-packing, gerrymandering, impeaching and recalling — not to mention electronically stuffing ballot boxes and throwing disputed elections to their handpicked Supreme Court judges. They control the DC lobbying process and own a rather large piece of the media landscape. They are not building their “permanent majority” through a civil, democratic process.
Trying to court their most borg-like constituency is really beside the point.
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Journalistic Performance Art
Via Americablog, I read from CJR that Michael Wolff has an article in Vanity Fair that *gasp* questions the propriety of the major news organizations withholding important information from the public for their own purposes:
Michael Wolff deals with the Rove/Plame/Miller fracas in this month’s Vanity Fair (the article isn’t available online). Wolff manages to find a unique approach to the issue, positing the thesis that the New York Times and Time magazine are complicit in the cover-up of the fudging of intelligence in the prelude to war in Iraq — in that they knew Rove was the source of the Plame leak intended to discredit Joe Wilson after he called the administration to account. “Not only did highly placed members of the media and the vaunted news organizations they worked for know it, not only did they sit on what will not improbably be among the biggest stories of the Bush years, they helped cover it up. You could even plausibly say that these organizations became part of a conspiracy — they entered into an understanding that, as a quid pro quo for certain information, they would refuse to provide evidence about a crime possibly having been committed by the president’s closest confidant.”
To Wolff’s mind, newspaper and magazine editors need to ask themselves an elementary question: “To whom do you owe your greatest allegiance: sources or readers?”
As Wolff sees it, by throwing their hand in with anonymous sources up to no good, instead of with readers, several distinguished media outlets let themselves become tongue-tied and thereby muffed an incendiary story that was in the palms of their hands.
“… [T]he greatest news organizations in the land had a story about a potential crime that reached as close as you can get to the president himself and they punted, they swallowed it, they self-dealt” — all to protect a dubious source.
It’s a novel take, but an intriguing one.
I don’t think it’s so novel. Many of us among the unwashed masses continue to scratch our heads in wonder as we watch guys like Tim Russert engage in this weird kabuki where he grills others about information pertaining to issues in which he is intimately involved — and never mentions that fact. James Carville goes on Imus and pontificates about all the rumors he’s hearing about the case and nobody asks him about his wife — who is part of the story and was called to the grand jury. Bob Novak snaps at his press interlocutor, “how do you know if I’ve been called to the grand jury or not?” His questioner, of course, doesn’t bother to follow up with the logical question, “Have you?”
I didn’t know what Walter Pincus knew until he wrote an obscure piece for the Neiman Foundation. Meanwhile I’ve been reading his stories for two years as he quotes “people who’ve been briefed on the case” and tells it as he’s phoning it in from Mt Olympus.
The NY Times rails against Karl Rove for not holding a press conference to tell what he knows while their reporter has never written a word about the same story — an act of non-journalism for which she’s in jail because she refuses to reveal her sources. Apparently, the NY Times feels that Judith Miller, a professional journalist, has no obligation to tell the public what she knows. Her only obligation, apparently, is to protect her source(s).
The media have become performance artists. And apparently they don’t even see how surreal this whole thing looks to those of us who aren’t involved. They all know a hell of a lot more about the story than they have revealed. And none of them (excepting perhaps Novak) have any personal legal liability stemming from the Fitzgerald investigation. They are simply protecting powerful government sources or each other or God knows what — and in doing that they have failed spectacularly to do the job they are supposed to do. Nobody is saying that they have to reveal who their sources are, which is what the reporter’s privilege provides. But is it too much to ask that they at least stop pretending that they aren’t part of the story? Or better yet, is it too much to ask that they just tell the public what they know?
This is a huge scandal, as Wolff says, that may reach as high as the president. Half the press corps know details that they haven’t written about. Yet, modern journalistic standards seem to indicate that if bodily fluids had been exchanged instead of classified information we would have gotten to the bottom of this a long time ago.
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Special Friends
So, that multi-millionaire asshole Tom Noe stole $10,000 from the disabled workers of Ohio to give to that multi-millionare movie star asshole Arnold Schwarzenneger — who only agreed to return the money after a big stink was made about it. (He’s hurting, you see. He had to cancel his lucrative 8 million dollar “supplement” payoff.) I guess it was hurting his image as a guy who would work against the “special interests.” Which he has done — except he thinks that firefighters and nurses are the miscreants. Crooked coin dealers are just “good friends.”
This is getting ridiculous. Are we so inured to their graft and corruption that we can’t make political hay out of the fact that the entire Republican party is nothing but a bunch of crooked greedheads? Jesus. They’ve had total power for less than five years and they’re bleeding the country dry.
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Making Homos
Sadly No! posted this fascinating little note yesterday about our favorite dauchsie beater, James Dobson:
James Dobson’s Focus on the Family has posted this delightful series of articles on how to instill your children with the proper “gender identification.” The first piece is called “Is my child becoming a homosexual?” and it basically says that if your child exhibits “gender confusion,” there’s a good chance that he’ll turn into a fruit
It features a full rundown of symptoms, like “is different” and “likes to play with girls” that are clear signs of impending homoism. It says that if your little boy shows any of these strange and freakish behaviors you should seek professional help. And to head off any problems, dads should take action themselves:
Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.
Well, that depends on if his dad is Gary Bauer, but that’s another story. (And anyway, everybody knows that real men pound square pegs into round holes and tell the hole they should just lay back and enjoy it.)
Frankly, as astonishingly simpleminded as “Dr” Dobson’s understanding of human sexuality is (not to mention the pain and heartache his cruel advice is going to wreak on the poor kids — both gay and straight — who have the bad luck to be born into these families) there is a silver lining. These mindbendingly ignorant, primitive sperm donors will be blamed among the faithful for their children being gay.
Apparently these people believe that a boy becomes gay if his dad fails to drag him into the shower to show him his big penis…
wow
Update: For some more dog pounding FOTF fun, check out these movie reviews on the American Street. Fr’ instance:
March of the Penguins
The movie doesn’t credit our Creator with the masterpiece of nature known as the emperor penguin.
*sigh*
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Hard-Wired
Mithras asks the perennial question” “Where are all the funny conservative bloggers?” It is one that has plagued philosophers and sit-com writers alike since the dawn of blogging (lo those many years ago.)
I am afraid that the answer is one that people may not want to hear or even think about. You see, it’s not a matter of choice. From the time they were small children they knew that they weren’t funny — and more importantly, they knew that they didn’t even know what funny was. These people were born that way. No matter how hard they try they are unable to be what society deems “normal.”
And science has backed up this finding, which should lay to rest once and for all the canard that being entirely without a sense of humor beyond the most puerile schoolyard taunting is a matter of “preference.” It’s the way they are hard-wired.
An investigation by Simone Shamay-Tsoory and colleagues shows that the ability to understand sarcasm depends on a carefully orchestrated sequence of complex cognitive skills in specific parts of the brain.
Dr Shamay-Tsoory, a psychologist at the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa and the University of Haifa, said: “Sarcasm is related to our ability to understand other people’s mental state. It’s not just a linguistic form, it’s also related to social cognition.”
The research revealed that areas of the brain that decipher sarcasm and irony also process language, recognise emotions and help us understand social cues.
“Understanding other people’s state of mind and emotions is related to our ability to understand sarcasm,” she said.
[…]
The study showed that people with damage in the prefrontal lobe struggled to pick out sarcasm. The others, including people with similar damage to other parts of the brain, were able to correctly place the sharp-tongued words into context.
The prefrontal lobe is known to be involved in pragmatic language processes and complex social cognition. The ventromedial section is linked to personality and social behaviour.
Dr Shamay-Tsoory said the loss of the volunteers’ ability to understand irony was a subtle consequence of their brain damage, which produced behaviour similar to that seen in people with autism
“They are still able to hold and understand a conversation. Their problem is to understand when people talk in indirect speech and use irony, idioms and metaphors because they take each sentence literally. They just understand the sentence as it is and can’t see if your true meaning is the opposite of your literal meaning.”
As an example, consider this famous satirical mifire by Dinesh D’Souza:
… the Democrats could become the party of moral degeneracy. In recent years the Democrats have not embraced moral degeneracy outright. They have contented themselves with hiding behind the slogan of “liberty.” If accused of encouraging pornography, the Democrats have said, “No, we are for liberty of expression.” Charged with supporting abortion-on-demand, the Democrats insist, “No, we are the party that gives women freedom over their own bodies.” Caught distributing sex kits and homosexual instruction manuals to young people, the Democrats protest, “We are merely attempting to give people autonomy and freedom of choice.”
But what is the need for this coyness? The Democrats should stop hiding behind “freedom of choice” and become blatant advocates for divorce, illegitimacy, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, and pornography. Indeed the Democrats could become the Party of the Seven Deadly Sins. The political advantage of this approach is that the Seven Deadly Sins are immensely popular. Imagine the political opportunities if all vices were associated with the Democratic party!
Yes, right now President Bush and the Republicans are riding high. But just wait until 2004, when the party of fighting terrorism, promoting economic growth, and fostering traditional moral values, meets its match in a party that stands for anti-Americanism, economic plunder, and moral degeneracy.
More to be pitied than censured, I’d say. It is insensitive to mock people for their inability to understand or be able to define irony, whether in the form of satire or sarcasm. It’s simply a matter of higher brain function. They can’t help it.
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Establishment Claws
The Carpetbagger Report points to a case that shows the dangers this modern pluralistic country is facing as it begins to legally enshrine religion into public life:
In Pleasant Grove, Utah, for example, a Ten Commandments memorial, donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1971, sits in a secluded area of city property that is intended to honor the city’s heritage. Pleasant Grove is now facing litigation about the display, not from civil libertarians, but from another religious group that wants equal treatment.
People will pooh-pooh this case as they did an earlier one involving Wicca, in which a practitioner sued for the right to give the invocation for the legislature and was denied because her religion wasn’t part of the Judeo-Christian tradition:
The Fourth Circuit upheld the decision of a county legislature which sought to ban certain religions from giving an opening invocation:
The 4th Circuit ruled Chesterfield County’s Board of Supervisors did not show impermissible motive in refusing to permit a pantheistic invocation by a Wiccan because its list of clergy who registered to conduct invocations covers a wide spectrum of Judeo-Christian denominations. Simpson v. Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, No. 04-1045 (April 14). Chesterfield County is in the Richmond suburbs.
“The Judeo-Christian tradition is, after all, not a single faith but an umbrella covering many faiths,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the opinion.
Ok. So, as long as the Judeo-Christian tradition is fully represented then everything is ok, right? Not exactly. Guess what’s starting to happen:
A religious watchdog group went on the attack Monday against a Bible study course taught in hundreds of schools in Texas and across the country, saying it pushes students toward conservative Protestant viewpoints and violates religious freedom.
The Texas Freedom Network, which includes clergy of several faiths, said the course offered by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is full of errors and dubious research that promote a fundamentalist Christian view.
The council dismissed the Texas Freedom Network as a “far left” extremist organization trying to stifle academic review of a historical text. Elizabeth Ridenour, president of the Bible class group, accused the network of censorship.
“They are actually quite fearful of academic freedom, and of local schools deciding for themselves what elective courses to offer their citizens,” Ms. Ridenour says in a statement on the council’s Web site.
Network President Kathy Miller said her group looked at the course after the Odessa school board voted in April to offer a Bible class. The network asked Mark A. Chancey, a professor and biblical scholar at Southern Methodist University, to review the council’s curriculum. He was not paid for his work, Ms. Miller said.
Dr. Chancey’s review found that the Bible is characterized as inspired by God, discussions of science are based on the claims of biblical creationists, Jesus is referred to as fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, and archaeological findings are erroneously used to support claims of the Bible’s historical accuracy. He said the course suggests that the Bible, instead of the Constitution, be considered the nation’s founding document.
All of those points may be acceptable to some religions, but not to others, Dr. Chancey said.
[…]
“No public school student should have to have a particular religious belief forced upon them,” said the Rev. Ragan Courtney, pastor of The Sanctuary, a Baptist congregation in Austin.
Surprise, surprise. There is disagreement even within the “Judeo-Christian” tradition — a fact which anyone who took 10th grade world history would already know. And some quite ugly problems promise to re-surface as more and more tax dollars are being funnelled to religious programs that are allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion:
A Christian adoption agency that receives money from Choose Life license plate fees said it does not place children with Roman Catholic couples because their religion conflicts with the agency’s “Statement of Faith.”
Bethany Christian Services stated the policy in a letter to a Jackson couple this month, and another Mississippi couple said they were rejected for the same reason last year.
“It has been our understanding that Catholicism does not agree with our Statement of Faith,” Bethany’s state director Karen Stewart wrote. “Our practice to not accept applications from Catholics was an effort to be good stewards of an adoptive applicant’s time, money and emotional energy.”
[…]
The agency’s Web site says all Bethany staff and adoptive applicants personally agree with the faith statement, which describes belief in the Christian Church and the Scripture. It does not refer to any specific branches of Christianity.
[…]
Sandy Steadman said she was hurt and disappointed that Bethany received funds from the Choose Life car license plates. “I know of a lot of Catholics who get those tags,” she said.
She added: “If it’s OK to accept our money, it should be OK to open your home to us as a family.”
You do not have to be a genius to see that even though this country is majority Christian, there is always plenty of room for religious strife among the pious. The founders understood this very well being that they were the decendents of religious refugees from a country that had been fighting these sectrian battles for centuries.
They understood that democracy cannot properly operate when government establishes religion and that religion cannot freely operate when the government endorses one belief over another. Religion and government exist in their own equally important spheres. One of the ways the US came to deal with this ia a practical manner has been this: churches didn’t pay taxes and in return they didn’t expect the government to proselytise for them. All churches were on their own to promote their creeds however they wanted — except through the government. That way, we didn’t ask people to pay for religious belief they didn’t endorse and we didn’t create conditions whereby one religion could be seen to have preference over another.
The rules were always relaxed in terms of certain non-doctrinal traditions like holidays, which heavily favored the majority Christians (who could at least all agree that the big Christian holidays were shared among them all.) And we long practiced a sort of cultural protestant Deism that didn’t presume any specific political agenda. Socially, of course, we were horribly bigoted toward Catholics, Jews and anybody else who didn’t accept whatever the prevailing local sects decreed, but the federal government held to sort of phony distance that at least allowed the long progressive struggle to create a truly tolerant religious environment to endure. And it finally prevailed. Huzzah.
Sadly (or maybe inevitably) just at the moment when this country seemed to have found its way to a real tolerance of different religious beliefs, where there was more varied religion per square mile than virtually anywhere else in the western world, we’ve decided to force the government to get involved in pushing certain beliefs because they are majoritarian. I guess we’re overdue to take a little walk through the 17th century and experience some of that good old fashioned, traditional religious hatred.
People think “what’s the harm in putting up the 10 commandments on a courthouse?” Who cares? Truly, not a whole lot of people do. But as you can see by the the various legal challenges being mounted on behalf of minority religions and the stirrings of sectarian confrontation among Christian faiths, it would have been better if the government had just made it clear from the beginning that it can’t take sides. People would understand that, even most majority Christians.
The government should stay out of it, period. Let everybody believe what they will in perfect freedom. But it should be on private property funded by private money. The principle isn’t all that tough. Sadly, it appears that we are now going to have to painfully illustrate step by step, through court cases and endless fighting for who knows how long, why it is better for religion for the government to stay out of its sphere. (The battle for secularism for its own sake has been lost for the time being.) I guess we just have to relearn these lessons over and over again.
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