Setting the stage for a collision of religion and politics, Christian ministers from 22 states will use their pulpits Sunday to deliver political sermons or endorse candidates — defying a federal ban on campaigning by nonprofit groups.
The ministers’ advocacy could violate the Internal Revenue Service’s rules against political speech with the purpose of triggering IRS investigations.
That would allow their patron, the conservative legal group Alliance Defense Fund, to challenge the IRS’ rules, a risky strategy that one defense fund attorney acknowledges could cost the churches their tax-exempt status. Congress made it illegal in 1954 for tax-exempt groups to support or oppose political candidates publicly.
“I’m going to talk about the un-biblical stands that Barack Obama takes. Nobody who follows the Bible can vote for him,” said the Rev. Wiley Drake of First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif.
Bring it on. I would love these, and all churches, to lose their IRS tax-free statuses. I never understood why religious organizations had those exemptions in the first place.
Just two weeks ago, Sarah Palin sat in on this sermon:
Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God’s “judgment of unbelief” of Jews who haven’t embraced Christianity.
“Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It’s very real. When [Brickner’s son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can’t miss it.”
Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against attributing Brickner’s views to her.
Like Andrew Sullivan, I can’t wait to watch Sean Hannity eviscerate the man. Er, never mind.
President of the conservative National Clergy Council and Evangelical leader, the Reverend Rob Schenck (pronounced SHANK), who met Sarah Palin when he was a VIP guest at her first appearance with John McCain in Dayton last week said today that her daughter’s pregnancy is “none of our business,” and commended Barack Obama for saying so.
“This is a private family matter. The Palins, especially their teenage daughter, are entitled to privacy on this matter. Anyone who cares about young people will back off and give this young woman the space she needs. Anyone who exploits her for political or commercial gain is disgraceful.”
In response to today’s action, the Christian Defense Coalition and the National Clergy Council issued a national call to “the faith community and people of good will” to travel to Florida to pray and plead for Terri Schiavo’s life.
“A society has sunk to it lowest when it abandons the sick and helpless,” Rev. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council. “Should this prove the end of the line for Terri and her loving family, this will be a deep shame that our country will carry for a terribly long time.”
Schenck was up to his neck in the Schaivo affair, publicly meeting with the lunatic doctor who claimed Schaivo could be rehabiliated (the one who Hannity informed us had won a “Noble Peace Prize In Medicine,”), being arrested for protesting outside the hospice, then publicly questioning the autopsy, claiming that doctors are human and often make mistakes.
Privacy, not really a concept these guys understand, but one they are always demanding when it fits their needs.
A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.
Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC’s review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts – not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.
Otero’s ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the university’s system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero’s rulings to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
This one has it all- California, liberal ivory towers, creationism, poor marginalized Christians, home-schooling, and activist judges. Get ready for the freak out, because you know it is coming.
Might I suggest sending your children to Camp Inquiry:
This is a place where kids can be themselves. We work toward helping youth confront the challenges of living a non-theistic/secular lifestyle in a world dominated by religious belief and pseudoscience. Grounded on the conviction that kids can begin establishing habits of the good and ethical life early on, Camp Inquiry 2008 adopts a three-part focus: The arts and sciences, the skeptical perspective, and ethical character development comprise an integrated approach to this “Age of Discovery.” Campers, counselors, and teachers will address key issues around individual identity, forging trusting relationships, establishing a sense of local and global community, and living with respect for the natural world.
Sounds like a good idea to me. There was actually a story about this on All Things Considered yesterday. Very interesting. Imagine, kids actually being taught to think, question, and learn at camp rather than being taught to simply have faith that things are the way they are because it’s all part of the plan of an omnipotent being.
Of course, the downside to sending your kids here is that, chances are, they’ll never have a shot at becoming President of the United States.
By now most of you have heard about the seemingly neverending saga involving atheist science blogger PZ Meyers and a communion wafer. Apparently some kid failed to eat the wafer as instructed, causing Catholic extremists to go apeshit (including the now-obligatory death threats). To underline the point, Meyers announced long in advance that he would do something VERY VERY BAD to a communion wafer. If, as Meyers surmised, activist Catholics are only a few steps removed from the radical mullahs that we are told to hate with every fiber of our being, then death threats and attempts to disrupt his job and his personal life would follow. To his credit “crunchy con” Rod Dreher saw through the trap (via):
I was thinking last night what the proper Christian response is. If you think about it, P.Z. Myers has done far more to damage himself than anything any of us might do. With his Satanic pride and diabolical act, he has put himself in serious danger of hell—and that’s far worse than any worldly sanction we might (justly) [??—ed.] see applied to him…
But what would he do if the response to his hideous blasphemy is … love? What would he do if Catholics and other Christians, and even sympathetic members of other faiths, turned up en masse on his campus simply to pray quietly for him? What kind of witness would that be to the wider culture? How might that make straight the path to salvation for P.Z. Myers, and many who now admire him? Wouldn’t that be blessing those who persecute you, as Christ commands us to do?...
Let’s provide a counterwitness for what faithful Christianity is capable of. God may work a miracle in that man’s life yet (consider the example of Saul). Let’s not get in the way of the work of redemption in this lost man’s life. As much as we can, let’s answer hate with love…
If Dreher’s advice won the day then I think most would agree that Meyers lost his gambit. In failing to provoke the Christianist hordes Meyers would have looked like an asshole. Fortunately for Meyers’s point Dreher’s resolve didn’t last.
If we’re better than the Islamic menace it’s because we have people like PZ Meyers, not because of insecure dominionists who can’t resist expanding their parochial brief to cover believers and non-believers alike.
Some interesting reading about the Christianisation of the U.S. Military. Army Spc. Jeremy Hall is in the U.S. Army. He is an atheist. He needed a bodyguard to protect him because of that.
In March, Hall filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. In the suit, Hall claims his rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment were violated and suggests that the United States military has become a Christian organization.
“I think it’s utterly and totally wrong. Unconstitutional,” Hall said.
Hall said there is a pattern of discrimination against non-Christians in the military.
Two years ago on Thanksgiving Day, after refusing to pray at his table, Hall said he was told to go sit somewhere else. In another incident, when he was nearly killed during an attack on his Humvee, he said another soldier asked him, “Do you believe in Jesus now?”
Hall isn’t seeking compensation in his lawsuit—just the guarantee of religious freedom in the military. Eventually, Hall was sent home early from Iraq and later returned to Fort Riley in Junction City, Kansas, to complete his tour of duty.
He also said he missed out on promotions because he is an atheist.
“I was told because I can’t put my personal beliefs aside and pray with troops I wouldn’t make a good leader,” Hall said.
You might think this is isolated, but I’ve read a number of stories like this, and it doesn’t surprise me one bit. Don’t have time to comment now, but I’m sure you all will.
Unless a federal court intervenes, South Carolina drivers may soon be able to profess their Christian faith with a state-issued license plate.
The state plans to issue plates featuring a Christian cross and the words “I Believe,” but a group advocating the separation of church and state says that goes too far.
A similar design had been considered by Florida’s lawmakers, but it was rejected there because of concerns over separation of church and state.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which includes Christian, Jewish and Hindu clergy, filed a federal lawsuit last month. The group contends that the plates violate the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against government favoring one religion over another religion or non-religion.
I really, really do not understand this sort of thing. I just don’t get it. Assuming there is a God, and that God is all of the things we hear and read from various Christian texts and other assorted authorities on the matter, am I really supposed to believe that what really concerns an omniscient and omnipotent being is vanity plates?
When President Bush announced his faith-based initiatives program, I was completely against it. Now, Barack Obama wants to expand on it:
The presumed Democratic presidential nominee said he would make it easier for churches and small community groups to win grants and would spend $500 million to help schools and churches run summer reading programs.
Obama delivered his speech at the Eastside Community Ministry in this key battleground state, home to many of the religious voters who backed Bush. With his proposal, the Illinois senator embraced a theme that has been closely associated with Republicans—and one that has drawn scorn from many Democrats and civil liberties groups who believe it infringes church-state separation.
“I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square,” Obama said. “But the fact is, leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups.”
Bristle? How about thinking it’s scary? Here’s why:
There are church organizations who spend a lot of money on activities many people find repugnant (anti-gay, anti-choice, etc) We’re reassured that under these faith-based initiative grants, religious organizations aren’t allowed to spend money on crap like this, right? We’re told it will go toward helping religious organizations fund soup kitchens, clothing programs, and all the good things that I support and think churches should be doing.
Let’s say a particularly repugnant religious organization has a budget of around a million dollars a year. For years, they’ve put 100k of that into fighting against marriage equality and employment protections for gay people. They’re left with 900k for salaries and programs. With faith-based initiative funding from you and me, this organization gets a grant of 50k to operate a shelter and soup kitchen. I have no doubt that most groups would spend that money well, expanding the shelter perhaps, or even offering new programs.
But what about groups like Focus on the Anus Family and the American anti-Family Association? Do you think they’d do that? Well, maybe. My guess thoough is that organizations associate with these groups would use the 50k to supplement their charity work. What does that leave? It leaves them an extra 50k in their budgets for their “other work.”
I know most religious groups do great work. I have my issues with the Salvation Army, for example, but I know that, for the most part, it is a very respectable organization. It’s the one’s that aren’t that I worry about. It’s the ones who spend millions a year on anti-gay, anti-choice lobbying that make me oppose anything like faith-based initiative funding.
Barack Obama is pandering here. I don’t know what else to call it. I just see it as a dangerous move by someone trying to make inroads with a community that’s not going to vote for him anyway.
[Obama] signaled he would not fund church groups that make hiring decisions based on an applicant’s religion and would make sure federal money was not used to proselytize.
Tell me how. When you give a group 50k, and it spends the entire thing on its shelter and food program, how are you going to prove or disprove that that 50k didn’t offset these other, disgusting activities. There’s no way.
“We got 50k from the government! That frees up 50k in our budget for that ballot initiative we need to pass!”
Woo-hoo. I can’t wait to see what else Obama has to offer.
Apparently abstinence-only has turned out to be a miserable failure, but the administration wants to keep funding it anyway:
Programs teaching U.S. schoolchildren to abstain from sex have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins, health groups told Congress on Wednesday.
The Bush administration, however, voiced continuing support for such programs during a hearing before a House of Representatives panel even as many Democrats called for cutting off federal money for so-called abstinence-only instruction.
and while you can read the whole article for yourself, I would be remiss if I did not point out this remark:
Lawmakers cited government statistics showing that one in four U.S. teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and 30 percent of U.S. girls become pregnant before the age of 20.
Republicans said even if some abstinence-only programs do not work, others do, and it would be wrong to end the funding.
Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.
Damned elitists with their facts and figures and numbers and statistics and fancy degrees. What do they know about public health that a regular Joe from Tennessee doesn’t?
By way of introduction, Wayne Dolcefino is Houston’s scoop investigative journalist, sort of our city’s version of Carl Monday. He does also expose city corruption frequently, something for which I think he does deserve credit.
In this particular expose, he confronts the founder of Parkway Christian School, which boasts “a program based on Christian character, morals, values and integrity” on its website. Lavern Jordan is outside a La Quinta hotel, rendezvousing with the mother of a girl who wants to enroll her daughter in the academy.
Jordan: “For the uh, enrollment fee and stuff like that, maybe you and I can do something, you think?”
Mother: “Yeah, what, I mean what, what, you gonna wipe out all the fees?”
Jordan: “All the enrollment fees.”
Mother: “All the enrollment fees?”
Jordan: “Three hundred dollars.”
Mother: “So you gonna wipe everything if me and you get together?”
Jordan: “The enrollment fee, yeah.”
Mother: “Ok.”
Jordan: “If you and I get together.”
Mother: “What you mean? I mean, what?
Jordan: “Excuse me and I don’t mean to be so blunt but I am talking about f———you.”
Mother: “You talking about what?”
Jordan: “F———you.”
Explain to me again why we need private school vouchers to escape the cesspools our centers of public education have become?
The school’s office is closed on Fridays, but a public statement regarding the KTRK story was posted on the school’s site that challenges Dolcefino’s “story” for taking bits out of context and not offering Jordan’s wife an interview.
“Mr. Jordan’s apology for his inappropriate language and his asking for forgiveness, along with his refusal to take part in any further actions with this woman was not aired,” according to the statement, which also distanced the school from LeVern Jordan. “He is no longer affiliated in any way with Parkway Christian School.”
“The Parkway Christian School staff wants to remind you that we are all sinners saved by Grace, and we have forgiven Mr. Jordan for his wrong action,” the statement said.
In retrospect it amazes me just how improbable the modern Republican coalition really was. Cooked up in the mix of interest groups who voted Republican from Reagan through Bush 2 are business cons who absolutely depend on illegal immigration and nativists who will never rest until they end it, you have fiercely anti-Catholic evangelicals and Catholic partisans. Some credit goes to the guy convinced imperialist big-government Trotskyite communists-turned-neoconservatives, Libertarians, panty-sniffing sex crusaders and William F. Buckley to pull the same lever for any meaningful period of time. The job called for some brilliant, evil sick fucks; too bad the GOP ran out of the brilliant kind.
For anyone who thinks that John McCain will bring back the old mojo, I suggest you start drinking now.
Some of us—in my case, a political conservative and evangelical Christian—are getting a queasy feeling when it comes to the presidential campaign of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and much of it has to do with his use of faith in this political campaign.
Many who don’t know Huckabee were initially impressed with him, me included. He comes across as authentic and likable, humorous and self-deprecating. He is an excellent debater and a first-rate speaker. But if you look closely, a disturbing pattern emerges.
In Iowa, Huckabee advertised himself as a “Christian leader.” A few months ago, when speaking to a large gathering of social conservatives in Washington, he told them, “I think it’s important that the language of Zion is a mother tongue and not a recently acquired second language.” When asked to explain his surge in the polls, he answered, “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.”
These people make me want to scream. Where were you when the Bush administration and their allies in Congress were pushing the Schiavo legislation? Where were you for the Just Us Sunday series? Where were you when your shock troops were waging their insipid and idiotic “War on Christmas” bullshit. Where were you when Bush was setting back Stem Cell research a decade? Where were you folks during the hundreds of documented abuses over the past decade? Where were you when every time someone pointed out these abuses, they were smeared as anti-Christian or evil secularists? And so on and so on.
Oh, that is right. You were in the Bush administration. STFU and enjoy your creation, Dr. Frankenstein.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, this ought to please John. Honestly, try to write a narrative piled deeper with schadenfreude than these pitched battles within the religious right over who is and isn’t religious right enough.
On the one hand you have Catholic bigot and permanent victim Bill Donahue throwing down with young Earth creationist and anti-gay bigot Mike Huckabee. Donahue knows full well that the old protestant fundie position, which ranks Catholics somewhere between Jews and yard trimmings, never died so much as it went quiet from political necessity. The coalition held so long as it promoted vaguely Christian leaders like Ronnie and George Dubya who lay the Jesus on much thicker in their politics than in their lives (it matters that neither attended any specific church). But when a guy steps forward who isn’t afraid to wear hard-line sectarianism on his sleeve, Catholics like Donahue know full well their place in that hierarchy.
Then you have multiple-choice Mitt Romney’s battle with himself. Does he support religious tests for political office? It depends on the religious test. When it applies to muslims, you bet he does. Affirmative again when the question is whether America should pick leaders out of the the vaguely pan-Christian “people of faith” category that the religious right encompassed for a while. A guy who puts a tagline like “freedom requires faith!” into character-defining speeches is one rum-and-coke away from glossolalia.
Or anyway, so it would seem until someone brings up the LDS church. Then talking about a candidate’s religion is not just wrong but contemptible (and incidentally, death at the polls).
To sum up, judging Muslims, atheists and vaguely Christian “people of faith” is good. Judging Mormons is very, very bad. As with so many other issues Romney is like one body inhabited by two guys. Or just one of the smarmiest, most opportunistic, sucking character vacuums who ever lived.