Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Jeffrey Feldman, picking-up on my report on how Ann Coulter, speaking before a major religious right conference, (D. James Kennedy's annual Reclaiming American for Christ event) described the murder of abortion providers as "a procedure with a rifle," did some research the speakers bureau that reps Coulter.

Fresh off a week of insulting a Presidential candidate with a word typically shouted by skinheads before they beat people to death with shovels, Coulter appealed to the inner hate killer in all her audience members with this $25,000-$50,000-per-speech gem:

Those few abortionists were shot, or, depending on your point of view, had a procedure with a rifle performed on them. I'm not justifying it, but I do understand how it happened.... The number of deaths attributed to Roe v. Wade about 40 million aborted babies and seven abortion clinic workers; 40 million to seven is also a pretty good measure of how the political debate is going.

And that, folks, is why she gets the big bucks. When Ann can deliver hard-hitting lines justifying the murder of doctors to a room full of anti-abortion activists, you'd have to be a fool to waste your money on swag bags and bumper stickers. Give all the cash to Ann. If you want your members to get off their duffs, grab a revolver, and head down to the local women's clinic--Ms. Murder Motivator is the way to go.
"I'm not justifying it," she says. "But I do understand how it happened."

And we all understand what she means by that ("...wink...wink...thanks for the check..see you at sentencing...").

More than just a role model for America's children, Ann Coulter is the backbone of the thriving motivational speaker business in this country.

He thinks her agency and others represented by it - need to hear from people.

... in the long term--the task is to make the space for violent hate speech in politics so small that it becomes a tiny, distant nuisance.

Blog for Our Future

Bill Scher, writing on the eve of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) observed that rather than Democrats and liberals having a religion problem, it seems that conservatives and Republicans have a "secular problem" on their hands.

Democrats crushed Republicans among secular voters, broadly defined as those who attend church seldom (favoring Democrats 60% to 38%) or never (67% to 30%). Republicans retained strong support among those who attend church more than weekly. But among those who only go weekly -- the larger portion of the religious vote -- the Republican lead shrunk from 15 points to 7.

In short, Republicans failed to be competitive among secular voters, while Democrats were at least competitive among regular churchgoers. And since the secular vote is roughly equal to the regular churchgoing vote, according to the last several national election exit polls, that means Republicans and their conservative base have a far bigger secular problem than their rivals have a religion problem.

This is important as opponents of the religious right think-through strategy. Rather than pandering to conservative evangelicals, and abandoning or not talking about reproductive rights for women, and gay and lesbian civil rights; and separation of church and state -- the way some in the Democratic Party have advocated -- there are certainly politically productive ways of reaching out to both religious and non-religious voters without having to abandon core values.  

Street Prophets

Pastordan has a long, (but not longwinded) discussion of how to approach issues of religion and politics in the Democratic Party in general and zeros in on answering an aspect of the joint GOP/religious right narrative:  

The GOP depends on a simple narrative to keep its conservative Christian base in orbit: liberals hate faith, and they hate "people of faith." If it should come out that Democrats and Republicans actually look pretty similar in terms of religious representation  the narrative collapses. At that point, the vaunted "What's Wrong With Kansas?" hypothesis might kick in, and Republicans could lose "values voters" who begin to realize that their economic interests aren't being represented. It's quite a bit more complex than that, of course, but still. Losing control of the religion narrative could put a nasty little dent in the GOP machine.

You might expect, then, that I'd argue the "Dems should be friendlier to people of faith" line. But I actually disagree with that almost completely.

For one thing, it only reinforces a negative stereotype. Even if I believed that Democrats were hostile to people of faith, which I don't, I wouldn't talk about it in public. Why give a cheap shot free publicity?

Truth is, we have many wonderful religious people in the party. We should celebrate them and their presence with us. Though I make no endorsement of him, Obama is a good model. His faith is important to him, and so he talks about it. Jonathan Edwards' religion, by contrast, isn't front-and-center in the same way, and so he doesn't talk about it as much. That's great too. (Hillary, typically, is sincere and dedicated and absolutely hopeless at conveying that in anything resembling genuineness. That's bad.)

More important than the candidates, though, we need to push forward the experiences and beliefs of the average people. We need more pastors on television, fewer hacks with transparent agendas. (Not me. I'm ugly as a troll and twice as stupid.) Better yet, we need average, rank-and-file Democrats talking about their faith, their families, and their communities. A brief documentary interviewing delegates to Dem conventions around the country would do the trick marvelously. However we do it, we need to push our own very simple message: Democrats aren't so scary. They're people just like you.

For that reason, we need to push the flip side of the equation. Who else is not heard in the conversation on religion? Correct: atheists and secular folk.

Slacktivist

Fred Clark (no relation) dissects a column by Michael Medved. I think this is an excellent example of how extraordinarily weak the religious right's argument really is - properly evaluated and responded to.

Michael Medved, writing at TownHall.com, says that "liberals ... hate the Ten Commandments."

He reaches this conclusion because civil libertarian groups like the ACLU and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty believe that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

These groups oppose the establishment of any official state religion. Medved seizes on a particular instance of this opposition and pretends that it is based on the particular content of the religious establishment, rather than on the general constitutional principle.

This is a rather bizarre conclusion. It's possible that Medved is simply being deliberately obtuse -- that he's lying to score political points. It's also possible that he thinks his non-sequitur reasoning makes sense, but it would be uncharitable to presume he's that stupid.

Jesus General

Satirist Gen. JC Christian, Patriot sends-up the president of AIPAC, who featured televangelist John Hagee at a major meeting in Washington, DC.

DefCon

Clark debunks a religious right talking point on stem cell research:

One of the religious right's central talking points when they take to the airwaves in opposition of embryonic stem cell research is that adult stem cells hold as much promise for cures as their pluripotent counterpart.

From Focus on the Family:

As research with adult stem cells progresses, scientists are learning that these cells may be almost as versatile as embryonic ones and capable of converting into various cell types for healing the body--without destroying innocent human life.

Unfortunately for the religious right, this isn't true. And now a key report they used to support this notion has been exposed as flawed

A scientific panel says a 2002 study that suggested adult stem cells might be as useful as embryonic ones was flawed and its conclusions may be wrong, a finding that raises questions about the promise of a less controversial source for stem cells.

The research by Catherine Verfaillie at the University of Minnesota concluded that adult stem cells taken from the bone marrow of mice could grow into an array of biological tissues, including brain, heart, lung and liver.
So far only embryonic stem cells, which are commonly retrieved by destroying embryos at an early stage of development, are known to hold such regenerative promise. Many scientists believe they might one day be used to treat certain diseases and other conditions

Talk to Action

Frank Coccozelli asks:  

Have you noticed that when real examples of anti-Catholicism show up, Bill Donohue makes himself scarce, especially when they are perpetrated by the Religious Right? Donohue bills himself as a defender of Catholicism against bigotry. But history has shown him to be more of a GOP and conservative movement hack making mountains out of molehills for the gain of his political allies, but offering little defense of Catholics and Catholicism against ancient bigotries when they come from his Protestant allies in the Religious Right.

Take prominent televangelist John Hagee; Christian Zionist  and periodic Catholic basher. Hagee campaigns for an Israeli state that will provoke an end-of-times conflict; one in which he believes the great majority of the Jews he claims to hold dear, wind up in perdition. That is bad enough, but as Bruce Wilson has pointed out, Hagee blames the Jews for the Holocaust.  And while he is at it, he also blames the Catholic Church. Let's underscore that Hagee is not a marginal or obscure figure. He heads a prominent "pro-Israel" lobby,  and politicians, most recently, GOP presidential contender, John McCain, courted his support.

Chris Rodda takes a look at the web site of the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools and unravels an amazing series of historical distortions. What she learns takes her down a trail of historical distortions in the service of Christian nationalism -- which she handily refutes.

Not surprisingly, I found a bit of historical revisionism on their "Founding Fathers" page, including the following about Thomas Jefferson.

"I have always said, and will always say, that studious perusal of the sacred volume will make us better citizens." Thomas Jefferson
and
While President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was elected the first president of the Washington, D.C. public school board, which used the Bible as a reading text in the classroom.

This same quote and lie appeared in [Christian historical revisionist] David Barton's 1988 book The Myth of Separation, but were removed in his current book, Original Intent, in which he refined many of the lies found in his earlier book. The above Jefferson quote is now listed on Barton's own website as "unconfirmed," yet it appears on the website of the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools, an organization whose advisory board includes...ummmm...David Barton.

Beam me up! I'm trapped on a planet influenced by the John Birch Society and Christian Reconstructionism.

John Dorhauer has been challenging the efforts of relgious rightists to distrupt and divide congregations in the mainline United Church of Christ.  He has been writing about it at Talk to Action for more than a year, and he has a book coming out. He now reports, the opposition is running scared:

When we first started telling this story, it was a bit of a hard sell. But the more we publish, print, and preach the larger the audience grows. And the larger the audience grows, the more obvious it becomes to all that what is happening, and what they are experiencing, in their local churches is not isolated. Patterns that have been named and identified are recognized and affirmed by many.... we are hitting pretty close to the mark, and have become a serious threat to a couple of organizations that have been functioning under the radar for far too long.

Moiv exposes the unholy alliance between Christian rightists and Democrats against medical privacy in Texas.

Molly Ivins once called Texas the national laboratory for bad government . To cite only one example, laws regulating abortion just don't come much worse than ours.

There is a growing trend for politicians to dodge this powder keg issue by mouthing innocuous-sounding platitudes about "reducing the number of abortions." But with a Christian right-approved Democratic initiative as political cover, two Republican state legislators are leading a full-on charge, mounted for battle on a Trojan donkey.

Should they succeed, the confidentiality of personal information, and medical privacy as we know it, will become a thing of the past for women in Texas.