Rick Warren: So NOT the Change We Hoped For

Obama's decision to invite Far Right evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration spits in the upturned, hopeful faces of America's GLBT people and of the women and men who believe that women have the right to control our own bodies.

Warren doesn't sit quietly on the political sidelines. Nor is he a theological moderate. Warren is as virulently hostile to gay men and lesbian women as James Dobson, of Focus on the Family. The difference between them, as People for the American Way president Kathryn Kolbert says, isn't theological. It's just a matter of tone.

This isn’t Obama’s first public liaison with a homo-hater. If you recall, about a year ago, he made a similar alliance when he chose to campaign in South Carolina with outspoken heterosexist and homophobe Donnie McClurkin. That made me furious. This time it’s worse. This makes me question Obama’s heart.

It goes without saying that that these decisions are rank and cynical political calculations. They reflect Obama's capitulation to the worst form of demagoguery, the kind that pits one group of Americans against another, the kind that perpetuates and legitimizes militant ignorance on a vacuous cry of “religious freedom,” the kind that intentionally stimulates the worst of us to daily acts of physical, psychological, spiritual, legal, and verbal violence.

I believe Obama knows that he's taking risks with our wellbeing, but I think, like most straight people, he severely underestimates those risks so that he never has to examine his religion or take responsibility for his role in making GLBT people and women second-class citizens in America.

As an African American active in a quasi-evangelical Christian church, Obama is fully aware that many black Americans are outraged when GLBT people claim that our struggle is a civil rights struggle. He may well share that view.

I don’t understand it so I can’t explain it, but I suspect that it comes from that font of never-ending curses, Pauline and Augustinian Christian theology.

A superstitious hostility to sex is deeply embedded in both Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity, and is nowhere more pronounced than in the Church’s conservative evangelical and fundamentalist sectors. For these believers, thanks to the Bible and the very word “homosexual,” GLBT people exist, by definition, outside the righteous realms of civil rights. The language itself and a pernicious Christian tradition drown our humanity in the stews of other people’s phobic, misogynistic sex panic.

Accepting us as peers in the claim for liberty and justice would mean looking that panic in the eye. Embracing us in common humanity would demand that African American and other Christian conservatives let sex intrude into the holy war on discrimination. That, in turn, would complicate our cherished cultural narrative that links “innocent” to “victim” before the courts of public opinion and of law, and turn a very bright light on the myriad forms of sex and gender violence in American society.

This brings us back to the intrinsic link between sexism and heterosexism, between denying women the right to control our own bodies, and writing GLBT persons out of the book of common humanity. After all, there is no way to define a “gay” or “lesbian” person without the underlying reference to the Patriarchy’s rigid assignment of gender roles. It’s no accident that Warren espouses the views he does. Nor are his views benign.

THIS is why Obama’s decision to elevate Warren, specifically in his role as biblical interpreter and Christian authority, is utterly unacceptable.

In this action, Obama will have symbolically fused Rick Warren’s brand of extreme Christian terrorism to the White House. Whether or not Obama intends it this way, the choice of Warren for this role is a Far Right Christian theocrat’s wet dream come true.

I’m pretty sure that Obama doesn’t see it this way. I believe he means the Rick Warren choice to signal Obama's intent to be President of all the people. I believe that, in his mind, this kind of outreach is essential to set the tone for an administration that has to unite the country in order to succeed in dealing with its numerous threats.

However, if that’s true, it reveals another frightening blind spot on the part of the President-Elect. If true, it comes from a place of sublime heterosexual privilege, a place where it isn't necessary even to see, let alone to understand or empathize with the lives of GLBT Americans even far enough to get our feelings of betrayal over the choice of Warren. And so he doesn't.

We saw a glimpse of this in Christian fundamentalist Rev. Mike Huckabee, recently, who actually said out loud that gay marriage isn’t a civil rights issue because gays "aren’t getting their skulls cracked." Oh, really? This will come as quite a shock to the Real world.

I guess Matthew Shepard didn’t count. I guess the savage slaying of a lesbian couple on the Appalachian Trail didn't count.

Because of heterosexual privilege, Obama, like Huckabee, can manage to believe that any prejudice against gay men and lesbian women – like Proposition 8, for instance – merely amounts to inconveniencing us. Because of heterosexual privilege, the majority of their audiences can agree. If they don’t know about the avalanche of suicides and homicides and bashings and rapes, it’s because they don’t have to know. Though these are reported every day to Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and in the GLBT press, they are rarely reported in the mainstream media. It’s part of the privilege of being a heterosexual not to have to see that, thanks to heterosexual bigotry, being taken for Queer in America can be fatal.

Because of what the Warren selection says about and to women and about GLBT people, Obama needs to rethink this one. It’s so not about being President of all the people in a fractured society.

It’s so not the change we hoped for.

Don't Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. And Then Get Busy.

Thank God Kos is on it. Maybe he has the leverage to help get this into the mainstream media. In any case, it's the responsibility of the Left blogosphere to make this THE issue of this election in the mainstream mind. If you have a blog, get informed and start writing about what's at stake in the coming election.

The Dominionist/Reconstructionist/Extreme Christian Right agenda is not a joke, not an exaggeration, not a made-up horror story, not a myth.

For more than 20 years, I've been following it closely, writing about it, and warning about it.

The hardest challenge has been to persuade sane people to believe it for the simple reasons that (a) it sounds insane, (b) they think the Christian Right is a small, lunatic fringe, and (c) they believe it cannot happen here.

Au contraire. If you're sane, take heed NOW. Fight any inclination to dismiss this as exaggeration. It isn't. It's deadly serious, and it's real, and it could be coming to a White House near you.

The extreme Christianist Far Right movement is huge, enormously wealthly, and extraordinarily powerful. Its followers--in varying degrees of conviction, and with certain theological differences--are in the White House, the Supreme Court, and the US Congress, to say nothing of state governments. The intentions? To remake the United States into an Old Testament theocracy (that means that Old Testament law as fundamentalists interpret them will be the law of the land) and hurry the Second Coming by any means necessary.

Much has been written about this horrifying phenomenon by numerous reputable scholars, biblical scholars, journalists, and former cult members. It's here, it's real, and Sarah Palin is their dream candidate. Visit Kos for an overview focused on Palin's connections.

See the links at the right side of this blog, under Heads Up, for reliable information about America's deadly serious, enormously influential, militant, extremist Christian Right. See also my series on the long march to US Christo-Fascism, starting here.

Do you really want Sarah Palin a heartbeat from Launch Code? If not, what are you willing to do to elect Obama and Biden instead?

Do You Really Want Palin a Heartbeat from Launch Code?

For those like RWR (my faithful if somewhat confused Rightwing Reader) who embrace the fantasy that Palin is "awesome" and simultaneously claim to hate lying, let me recommend this thorough fact-check of her RNC sermon and her actual record. It's awesome and it doesn't lie.

And on this basis alone (there being many others) I would say this to Republicans out there: If you're going to vote for McSame and Palin expecting an honest, conservative, small-government, no spending, no-lobbyists, pro-America administration, my friends, you're going to be had. Again.

For anyone who hopes that McCain will bring some sanity to US foreign policy, let me share this perspective from Ottawa, our neighbor to the north.

Please keep in mind that, now that McCain has put Palin a heartbeat from launch code, this is the Armageddon mentality that you'll be putting into the White House. It's worth the read.

From today's Ottawa Citizen
5 Sep 2008 By: DAN GARDNER

God help us if political pandering to religious zealots with apocalyptic fantasies puts someone who wants the world to end with a finger on the button.

Well, God bless America. And here’s hoping the rest of us get a little of that divine pixie dust because we’ll need it if the American political class continues its descent into flaky, Bible-waving irrationality.

It is a truism that only a devout Christian who prays for miracles, believes that God’s will is done on earth, and gabbles about the wonders of his faith to anyone who will listen can become president of the United States of America and, as Americans like to say, leader of the free world. In today’s America, Thomas Jefferson — the greatest of the Founding Fathers and a man who viewed the supernatural claims of religion as nothing more than primitive superstition — would be utterly unelectable.

But someone who believes that every word of the Bible is literally true, someone who believes all who disagree will be cast into fire to be tortured forever, someone who believes the actions of the United States must be guided by scripture and prophecy, someone who believes the end of the world could come any day now and who hopes and dreams and prays it does — someone like that can be president of the United States of America, commander-in-chief of the mightiest military in human history, and the person on whose judgment the fate of the world most depends.

Oh, and someone like that can have the launch codes. God bless us, indeed. Now, whenever I write one of these little missives about the dangerous malignancy of religion, I hear from decent and rational Christians who say that they personally don’t believe the world is 6,000 years old, or that angels guide footballs into the hands of wide receivers, or that the loving Jesus will return to smite infidels and launch a thousand-year Reich. This is a caricature of my faith, they say. And they are right.

But I am not responsible for that caricature. I am merely describing what tens of millions of Americans — hundreds of millions worldwide — have made of Christianity. It is they who are responsible for embracing and promoting a system of belief that increasingly resembles a primitive, irrational, millennial death cult.

A 2002 CNN/Time poll found that 59 per cent of all Christians and 77 per cent of those described as born-again, fundamentalist or evangelical agreed that the events portrayed in the Book of Revelation would happen at some time in the future. A 1999 Newsweek poll that asked a more specific question — “Will the world end in an Armageddon battle between Jesus Christ and the Antichrist?” — found that almost half of all Christians and three-quarters of evangelicals believe human history was nothing but a round or two of midget wrestling before Jesus puts the smackdown on Satan. (That image of Jesus is actually common in much of devout America: One popular illustration portrays the Son of God as a professional wrestler.)

And what a smackdown it will be.

Jesus returned to the world with “conviction like a flame of fire” in his eyes, write Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in the Left Behind series of Christian novels. The very words of the Lord caused the blood of infidels to boil and “burst through their veins and skin. ... Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated.

Forget the hippy Jesus. This is Jesus as totalitarian maniac. The carnage of the final battle will be so awesome, LaHaye and Jenkins write, that Christians will have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses.”

More than 60 million copies of the Left Behind books have been sold. Although it’s technically fiction, LaHaye is widely respected as a biblical scholar by evangelicals, and the authors insist their books are a literal rendering of the Revelation prophecies that will inevitably come true. And that’s how their audience reads them. “Many people have asked me,” a Christian bookstore owner told the New York Times before the final installment in the series had been published, “do you think they’ll finish the series before Christ comes?’” (Happily, they did.)

All infidels should be nervous about this stuff, but Jews have a more immediate reason to be concerned. The Armageddonists believe a mass conversion of Jews is a critical event in the chronology. Not all will see the light, of course, and Jews who insist on remaining Jewish will be filleted and splayed with the rest of us. But get enough Jews to turn in their menorahs and the End Times are on — which helps explain why so many evangelicals have a creepy interest in all things Jewish.

And that, in turn, leads to scenes like this one: A couple of Sundays ago, David Brickner, the executive director of “Jews for Jesus” — a group that proselytizes among Jews — told Pentecostals at the Wasilla Bible Church that bad things happen to people because God is punishing them.

“Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television,” Brickner said. Just look at the terrorism that plagues Israel. That’s God’s judgment. And Jews will continue to suffer it until they see the light."

As religious flakiness goes, this was modest stuff. It only came to light because, sitting in the pews that Sunday morning, was one Sarah Palin — long-time member of the Wasilla Bible Church, governor of Alaska, and Republican nominee for vice-president of the United States.

But what really makes this incident interesting is that so few Americans found it interesting. No one seems to much care that Ms. Palin belongs to the sort of church that wants to hear from “Jews for Jesus.” And the fact that her church declares the Bible “the inspired, inerrant word of God” — a conclusion presumably shared by the woman who may be the next vice-president — was apparently of no interest at all. Even the revelation that Palin herself had described both the invasion of Iraq and the construction of an oil pipeline as part of “God’s plan” garnered only a fraction of the attention lavished on the irrelevant story of her pregnant daughter and the dazed boyfriend-cum-fiancé who stood on the stage of the Republican convention Wednesday night.

In a sense, it’s understandable. So someone with a good shot at the White House sat quietly and listened to a religious nut spout flaming nonsense. It’s hardly news, at least not in the sense of being novel. Quite literally everyone with a shot at the White House does the same. Routinely.

John McCain — who began his second attempt at the presidential nomination by kissing the ring of Jerry Falwell — attends a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Among its doctrines, the SBC declares the Bible “has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.”

All scripture. No exceptions. God’s sanction for slavery and genocide. The subordination of women? The ringing declaration in Leviticus that all homosexuals must be put to death? The eternal waterboarding that awaits anyone who disagrees? Word for word, it’s all “true and trustworthy.” The demonstrably false description of the universe and its origins in Genesis? Bang on. The technicolour lunacy in the Book of Revelation? More factual than On The Origin of Species.

The SBC is by far the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and, not surprisingly, a whole lot of Americans see things its way. One-third of respondents told Gallup they believe the Bible “is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word.” Almost two thirds said the Bible’s account of Noah’s ark is literally true. The same proportion said it is true that God created the world in six days and Moses parted the Red Sea.

And don’t think this is only a Republican thing. In 2000, it was Al Gore, not George W. Bush, who said he decides policy by asking “what would Jesus do?” and today every leading Democrat is only too happy to blather on about his very special relationship with Jesus. How much is sincere and how much calculation is impossible to say but it is astonishing that Barack Obama agreed to make his first joint appearance with John McCain a few weeks ago at the cavernous Southern Baptist church of Rick Warren — a superstar evangelical whose message is more positive than many of his kind but whose substitution of fantasy for reason is every bit as total.

Or rather, it should be astonishing. But it doesn’t seem that many of us are astonished.

And even fewer are prepared to call these beliefs what they are. Or to do whatever they can to ensure that the most powerful office on the planet is not handed to anyone who eagerly awaits the destruction of that planet.

As certainly as Thomas Jefferson would be unelectable today, he would be disgusted.

Amen.

[Reprinted courtesy of the Ottawa Citizen. Emphases added throughout.]

Cyborg Sarah

Sarah Palin is all over the news, but so far I haven't heard an informed, incisive analysis of what she means in the larger context of national politics.

Sarah Palin no accident. What created her is exactly what makes her viable today. A large and well-funded extreme Right militant Christianist movement begun some thirty years ago is just now watching its true firstborn come onto the international stage.

It isn’t that we haven’t seen Christianists (more or less) before her. We have, but they, mostly hybrids, arrived onto the political scene by stealth rather than invitation. They were a vanguard whose mission was to quietly penetrate the local levels of the Republican Party and secure the national government for a far more radicalized cohort that was, meanwhile, being cultivated in home schools and private Christian academies run by sophisticated and heavily funded evangelical and fundamentalist cults, nurtured on Christian rock, and inspired by Tim LaHaye's Left Behind visions of the Rapture.

We may have seen men and women like Karen Hughes and Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer and Sam Brownback and Kay Bailey Hutchison, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.

It isn’t that Palin herself was specifically selected from infancy to be groomed for the presidency. She wasn’t. However, of millions of seeds cast in the past three decades onto that cold theocratic ground, hers is the one that has blossomed into the most plausible perfect contender for this moment.

What’s important to notice is that she had already percolated far enough up the ranks to be both noticed and to pass the right vetting criteria. That didn't happen in a vaccuum.

What is sought is a campaigner, not a stateswoman. And what was found? Precisely the right counterpart to the Obama/Clinton muse: a very smart, beautiful, young mother simultaneously savvy about but innocent of the system she’s to destroy, simultaneously equal to but no threat to the big boys, simultaneously seductive and PTA, simultaneously Vogue and Revelation, simultaneously church-lady and moose-killer, simultaneously ethnic and white.

It might be a little far-fetched to say that in the Far Right Christianists’ collective unconscious Sarah (note the biblical name) evokes the Madonna, but I do think something of near archetypal force is being prepared for us here and woven into the candidate’s manufactured storyline. This, after all, is Karl Rove’s forte.

What we do not see, and yet must see and see clearly, is that in every hamlet, town, and city in America are dozens or hundreds or thousands of families who have been nurtured for 30 years in the bosom of intensely politicized little congregations, churches like Palin’s Wasilla Assembly of God that serve on a Sunday as a hybrid House of God and local precinct station, ready-made to serve the One God so long as he is a Republican.

What we do not see, and yet must see quickly, are the phalanxes of Christianist soldiers, graduates and soon-to-be graduates of intensely politicized Christianist day schools, home schools, bible colleges, patriot schools, and law colleges—even US military academies and Army bases. Fed a pabulum of King James and NRA, these 20- to 40-somethings have been churned out by the thousands from schools like Liberty and Patrick Henry, schools that were founded explicitly for the purpose of turning this constitutional democracy into a fundamentalist’s idea of a Christian nation.

And it isn’t just these bureaucrats. To them and to the secular right, the white supremacists, and the Freepers, add the minions of Joel’s Army who have sprung from the loins of The Promise Keepers and the wives of Eagle Forum. This is the Far Right. It isn’t their mission to listen to reason or to ponder qualifications for negotiating with the Chinese, Iranians, and North Koreans. Such arguments resonate with us but not with them.

I am saying that what dismiss as home-grown ignorance and naïveté is in fact a tightly orchestrated mindset impervious to anything outside itself, and it is legion.

Remember: We’ve seen a modest Palin prototype before, placed at the Justice Department, no less, to break the law by root out qualified Democrats for state Attorneys General and hire only those Republicans she could personally determine had truly swallowed the Kool Aid and the wafer. Her name is Monica Goodling. Asked whom she served, she answered in truth: “The President.” Unfortunately for the democracy, she was supposed to serve the Constitution.

Note the heights she attained and the mission she effected. Do you think for a second that this Monica Goodling cares whether Sarah has the “experience” necessary to assume the presidency if something happens to George McCain? Not even Sarah cares. Remember: We’re not talking qualifications that we might seek for a stateswoman. That’s the farthest thing from the minds of George McCain, Sarah Palin, and the extreme Right Christianist GOP elite.

It isn’t mere arrogant cluelessness that explains Palin’s acceptance. It’s that Palin has an undisclosed mission and it isn't ours. In a scenario in which her people talk openly of hoping to rush Armageddon, statecraft is the last thing that’s wanted or needed.

From the Matrix-like land of ultra-Right extreme Christianists, Sarah Palin is a cyborg. She looks like one of us and she’s anything but. This is a heads they win/tails we lose game.

Unfortunately, when the faithful are called to defend her, they will. Every attack we make, every point we score will be a call to arms. It is imperative that we rally more of our troops than they, and that ours are more intensely committed than theirs. We've much to do, but we must get it done.

If the Republicans win in November, it’s game over. Enter fascism unleashed. That’s what Sarah Palin is, and that what she means for the US political landscape. Today we see its mere outlines: suppression of political dissent in St. Paul; run-amok Patriot Acts; privatized concentration camps on our soil, targeted and terrorized subgroups, illegal domestic espionage, proposals to dehumanize GLBGT people, video games of conversion at gunpoint, or death; private Christianist armies; a planet subjected to unbridled greed and exploitation; shredding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If McCain wins, Sarah Palin will be his successor, and following Palin are millions more schooled in her school, steeped in her fanatic rage.

Extreme Christianist Views Need Airing

Huckabee's intention to bring the US Constitution in line with the Bible, and his equation of gay marriage with bestiality, are just two of numerous offensive opinions held by this kind of "Christian. It's time for the country to talk openly about the extreme Christian Right and get its agenda right out on the table so that Americans know where they stand and where they'd like to take us.

I put the word "Christian" in quotation marks because one hallmark of fundamentalism, in my experience, is that its believers give far more credence to Old Testament texts than to the of the Bible where Jesus actually comes on the scene.
Specifically, they, like Mel Gibson, are drawn irresistably to blood, punishment, the wrath of God, Hell's fire, and anything to do with sex. It's all of a piece. Your sex, their violence, but not always. Often their violence, always their deep-seated misogyny.

So that's not Christianity. That's Deuteronomism, or Leviticism.

Let me pause right here to say I'm not talking about the Torah. I'm not talking about Jews. I'm not talking about Judaism. I'm talking specifically and only about how a certain tortured group of people, of this and past generations, have found their religion in focusing on the X-rated parts of the Bible, the parts that, if filmed, couldn't be shown to children. Or at least shouldn't be shown to children.

Huckabee is one of them. It was one thing when people like Huckabee kept their religion to themselves. It was tragic, then, because of what they did to their women and their children, and how their perverse interpretations of this world and the next perpetuated generations of damaged people.

I'm not saying it was OK then, but it was less sinister then than it is now.
For the last thirty years or so, a small group of these disturbed extremists has been busily about seizing control of the Republican party in order to impose its views on the nation. It is a measure of their success that the current President is in office and has placed legions of these people in the judiciary and in government office buildings, and that Huckabee is--so far--a viable contender for the White House in 2008.

Consider how this statement of intent to conform the Constitution to the Bible would have played forty years ago. It would have been shunted off into the round file without any "ado" whatsoever. That it is being spoken out loud on the presidential campaign trail is a barometer that shows us just how far Right the nation has tilted.
And that's scary.

I hope that people will stop referring to Huckabee and his ilk as the lunatic fringe. The lunatic part is right enough, but when a Huckabee can campaign for the White House and be taken seriously, he's not fringe. He's mainstream.

Wake up. The people who want to stone adulters and Queers are coming out of the closet, and it's not a pretty picture.