Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Pastordan discusses John McCain's denial that he is pandering to the religious right. Following reports of McCain's private meeting with religious broadcasters in Orlando, Pastordan writes:  

They certainly seem to think he was there to court and pander to them.

Right Wing Watch

Ezra reports:  that the relgious right is trying to coopt the forthcoming movie about antislavery activist William Wilberforce:  

Today marks the theatrical release of "Amazing Grace," a film about leading British abolitionist William Wilberforce, whose efforts in Parliament led to Britain's ban on slavery and the slave trade 200 years ago. The company that produced the movie has launched a campaign, called "The Amazing Change" to raise awareness of modern-day slavery and human trafficking and to promote groups that fight against them, and religious groups from the National Association of Evangelicals to Sojourners have endorsed the movie and its anti-slavery message. The concern over human trafficking extends to many groups and activists normally focused on right-wing wedge issues, like Concerned Women for America, [and] the Heritage Foundation. Others, however - like Sam Brownback - seek to latch their own agenda to the coat-tails of the movie.

Brownback, struggling for recognition as a viable presidential candidate, has tried to link his candidacy to Wilberforce by linking the historical figure not just to Brownback's work on trafficking and Darfur, but also to abortion and gay marriage, issues more politically marketable to the religious-right base he hopes to motivate: "If William Wilberforce were alive today, I believe he would be passionately fighting for the dignity of every human life everywhere, without regard to race, wealth, or status. He would also feel compelled to take up the vital cause of renewing the family and the culture," the senator said in his announcement.

Wall of Separation

Jeremy Leaming refutes efforts to dragoon George Washington into the ranks of the religious right.  "While he was not a church-state visionary like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison," Leaming notes, "he was no theocrat." In answer to the historical revisionists of the religious write he quotes from Washington's famous letter to Touro Snyagogue which gave us the famous phrase:  "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."

In 1790, Washington responded to a letter from a Rhode Island congregation, Touro Synagogue, that had expressed gratitude for the nation's commitment to religious freedom.

Washington's answer contained a resounding affirmation of that principle.

"The Citizens of the United States of America," he said, "have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

Washington continued, "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

"

The Daily Kos

Kimberly discusses Mitt Romney, Thomas Paine, and her Mormon aunt:  

Quoting from Thomas Paine's, The Age or Reason:

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."

Source: The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine

I don't pretend to understand the Lord, or his fondest admirers for that matter. But I do understand how Thomas Paine's brand of Reason contributed to the framework of the Constitution of the United States of America. I comprehend how it protects both my aunt and myself, even if she doesn't.

Kagro X reports that John McCain's South Carolina campaign co-chair, Dr. Henry Jordan  wants to display the Ten Commandements in the public schools. Anticipating the inevitable objections he said at a state board of education meeting:

"Screw the Buddhists and kill the Muslims... And put that in the minutes," he added.

The remarks... were expunged from the written minutes, but were recorded on tape. The (Columbia) State obtained the tape under the Freedom of Information Act.

Frameshop

Jeffrey Feldman discusses the religious right and the GOP's current strategy of attacking anyone and everyone and especially Democratic presidential candidates as being anti-religion or antiChristian in a post titled: "God Gap" Getting Grisly

Republicans are undergoing a massive revival of faith--not faith in God, but in the advice of overpaid Republican consultants who are again telling their clients to attack Democrats as "anti-religious."

The reason is likely more than the old canard about church attendance as an "indicator" of voter affiliation (e.g., the more you attend church, the more you vote Republican). Instead, a new statistic has emerged from the 2006 election data that seems to be guiding the smear tactics of the Republicans: a majority of Americans with strong religious beliefs now view themselves as the victims of discrimination.

So, even as Democrats made some gains amongst religious voters in the last round of elections, authoritarian conservatives continue to gain ground by convincing huge Americans that religion is under attack. ... A full reframing of the "anti-religion" issue requires that Democrats take proactive steps to speak out collectively whenever the right-wing smear machine lashes out at Democrats with false charges of bigotry against people of faith.

Progress, liberal and conservative Democrats alike must all see that a true majority party recognizes that every attempt to brand an individual candidate as "anti-religious" is an attack against the political system itself. And so we must all work in unison to respond.

Talk to Action

Ed Brayton  analyzes the latest outrageous act of religious discrimination by the religious rightists in the military, and provides some context:

...there is a long history of the military discriminating against Wiccans. In the late 90s, when a news report revealed that there was a Wiccan group operating on military bases in Texas, holding rituals - you know, just like Christians do - the religious right nearly lost their minds over it.

Then-Congressman Bob Barr tried to attach an amendment to a military appropriations bill banning all Wiccans from practicing their religion in the military. Paul Weyrich, quite possibly the single most powerful man in the religious right...  actually started a campaign urging Christians to boycott joining the military until they banned Wiccans from joining. But this I'd never seen before. It seems our current president joined in:

When a Texas newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, reported in 1999 that a circle of Wiccans was meeting regularly at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, then-Gov. George W. Bush told ABC's "Good Morning America": "I don't think witchcraft is a religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this and decide against it."

Chip Berlet unearths some of the foundational intellectual relationships betweem modern religious rightists and libertarian Republicans.  

Following the trail of how "Free Market" libertarianism intersected with conservative versions of Calvinist Christianity leads us to aggressive forms of Dominionism and theocratic forms such as Christian Reconstructionism; and how they influenced the Republican Party economic and social welfare policies beginning in the 1980s.

Among the many contributors to the Libertarian Freeman magazine in the 1960s and 1970s were Rousas J. Rushdoony and Gary North, both of whom would go on to become the founding intellectuals of the theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement....

Dominionism as a tendency within Christian evangelicalism developed in a synergistic way with the unregulated Free Market ideology promoted by conservatives after WWII and the Republican Party since the Reagan Revolution starting in 1980. Both tendencies share some of the same historic and intellectual roots, which can be traced by exploring back issues of the Freeman. It should be no surprise, then, that what on the surface seems like an unlikely alliance within the Republican Party--economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals--actually has many points of convergence.

Chris Rodda unpacks and illuminates a seemingly small point of history and shows how Catholic right activst Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, televangelist D. James Kennedy and  Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights among others, use revisionist history to advance the political agenda of the wider religious right.

...even in cases where a story is basically true, they manage to turn it into a lie by adding lies to it. More often than not, the lies are added to make Thomas Jefferson the center of the story. Church services being held in the Capitol building is a good example of this. Church services actually were held in the Capitol building, and Jefferson really was known to attend them. This true story, however, isn't good enough, so various lies and exaggerations are added to it to make Jefferson more involved. One of the most popular of these is that Jefferson "insisted the Marine band be there at government expense," as Novak puts it. In a similar version of the same lie, D. James Kennedy, in his book What If America Were A Christian Nation Again?, even comes up with a reason for Jefferson ordering the Marine band to play at these services - he wasn't pleased with the music.

Kathryn Joyce reports on some of the implications of a new, affirmative strategy being employed by the religious right.

"...on Feb. 15, a pair of culture-warring lawyers from the conservative Southern California law firm, Ackerman, Cowles & Lindsley, began arguing a case before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of two Christian women employed by the City of Oakland, Regina Rederford and Robin Christy, claiming that, if a current decision against these women is not overturned, "the phrase `natural family, marriage and family values' -- words that implicate the sincerely held religious beliefs of millions of Americans - [will be legally ruled] as "hate-speech." ...

For the past several years, "the natural family" has increasingly been the term of choice for religious right groups seeking to differentiate heterosexual, nuclear, patriarchal families. It's their term of "positive identification": a more cultured way to oppose Heather's two mommies than to condemn "the homosexual lifestyle" with pulpit-slamming vitriol....

"The Natural Family Manifesto co-written by Allan Carlson of the Howard Center, and Paul Mero of the conservative Utah think-tank, the Sutherland Institute, is perhaps the most comprehensive elucidation of the "natural family": a manifesto modeled on Marx's that strives to set the positive, affirmative vision for a movement that has so long defined itself in opposition to other sets of society, be they gays, feminists, secularists, or liberals.

Bartholomew notes that English and African media are reporting on the ways that American "evangelicals" have been covertly organzing and financing -- arguably manipulating -- African Anglican leaders against the mainline American Episcopal Church.  

The latest edition of the BBC World Service's Reporting Religion discusses the recent meeting of Anglican Primates in Tanzania, which ended with a commiqué giving the American Episcopal Church seven months to "clarify" its position on same-sex blessings or to face being kicked out of the global Anglican communion. Journalist Stephen Bates (at 7mins 27seconds) describes the role of American evangelical organisations in supporting conservative figures such as Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola:

They've been subsidising and paying for an awful lot of activities and an awful lot of air-flights for African archbishops and bishops like Akinola over the last decade or more. In the Lambeth conference in 1998 they had a pretty sophisticated American-organised lobbying operation that succeeded in making homosexuality a key issue in the Anglican church which it never had been before, and since then at international conferences the Americans do things like paying for mobile phones for developing world Archbishops who don't have them of their own, so that they can keep in touch and make sure they're on message as it were.

And certainly in the last week in the Dar Es Salaam primates' meeting similar things were going on. The developing world bishops met to discuss strategy and tactics for two days before the meeting even started. And I have to say this is a very unusual thing because primates' meetings have traditionally been social, theological, Bible-study type occasions. They've not been politicised meetings at all until the past few years and this one I think was the most-politicised yet.

Anti-Liberalism, whether from the Left or Right maintains this paternalistic desire to tell us what constitutes the truth on faith issues. It is a specific faction's desire to impose the formula for salvation upon all. And in a fit of providing misinformation, even an economic liberal such as Wallis mistakenly interprets Enlightenment principles as hostilely atheistic.

This does not square with Wallis's previously stated opposition to a theocratic nation. Perhaps Wallis did not think his thoughts through to their logical conclusion. Or perhaps it is an unspoken but unjustified fear that by following the Enlightenment principle of religious tolerance to its natural end that faith itself will eventually be discarded.