Religious Right Watch

Why the Christian right is so excited about 2014 - Salon.com

The Christian Right, which is the GOP’s most reliable and agitated voting bloc, is obsessed with the courts, and the Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit is the nation’s second most important judicial body, which is why Republicans “gave the game away when all but a few of them opposed Obama’s three most recent appointments.”

Now that Democrats were forced into limiting the filibuster, the Christian Right has its incentive to mobilize for 2014. A simple majority control of the Senate gives it an opportunity to pack the courts with judges straight out of the Justice Scalia mold, who once said that separation of church and state would come under scrutiny under a Supreme Court with a Scalia majority. If the Christian Right sweeps Republicans to control the Senate in next year’s midterms, the anti-secularists will take a big step forward toward their stated ideological goals.

via www.salon.com

Tony Campolo on "Love the sinner but hate the sin."

From Upworthy.com:

Here, [Tony Campolo, evangelical pastor and author] shares the story of a late-night phone call from a mom about a deeply theological question ... and the reason she's asking breaks his heart. At 0:49, he shares the story. At 3:42, he talks about the thing that always forces us to think differently. And at 4:19, he rebuts perhaps one of the most commonly used refrains about homosexuality in church.

Hat-tip to Pastor Robert E. Shore-Goss of MCC in the Valley, North Hollywood, CA.

Video: Ted Cruz Anointed by Antigay, Pro-Religious War Pastors | Bruce Wilson

Over the last few years the religious right, rumored to be in decline, has receded from American secular consciousness. But amidst the current government shutdown, some of the more astute political analysts on the left, such BillMoyers.com producer Joshua Holland and the The Nation's Lee Fang are beginning to point out that, respectively, 1) today's Republican Party has, by objective measures, become truly radicalized and, 2) the main force behind the current government shutdown is the religious (and largely Christian) right.

Click through for the rest of the article via www.huffingtonpost.com.

Below is Bruce Wilson's video of Sentors Ted Cruz and Rand Paul being blessed, by conservative evangelical clergy, with protection against opposition. The blessing didn't seem focused on the senators doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their god.

 

Christian Conservatives, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio at Values Voter Summit

Make no mistake. The religious right's influence on the Republican Party is strong.

It was the Values Voter summit this week (Oct. 11-13), and Jon Ward on Huff Post gives a sense of the Values Voter confab shenanigans:

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas presided over a pep rally, telling the crowd at the Values Voter Summit that President Barack Obama fears them and that conservative believers can turn back the tide of liberalism. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky expounded at length about the threat to Christianity and the West from radical Islam. And Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida pledged fealty to Jesus Christ and the American dream, while making sure never to mention immigration reform.

Right Wing Watch gives a who's who list for the Value Voter Summit 2013.

Here's a full list of speakers.

Jonathan Martin on The New York Times' Caucus blog reports that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) met this week with religious right leaders. An excerpt:

A group of longtime Christian conservative activists are holding a private meeting Thursday in Washington to hear informal presentations from two of the most talked-about potential Republican presidential candidates: Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

“This is not a fundraiser, nor an endorsement of U.S. Senator Rand Paul or U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, just a great opportunity for you to get to know them and discuss your ideas and views with them and hear of their lives, faith, and respective vision for our nation,” wrote Robert Fischer, a South Dakota-based conservative organizer, in an emailed invitation to dozens of evangelical Christian leaders.

The gathering is being held in conjunction with the Family Research Council’s Values Voters conference, an annual gathering of Christian conservatives in Washington, but it is not an official part of that event. Rather, it is being staged by a loosely-organized group of Republican leaders that call themselves “Conservatives of Faith.”

The hosts include Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, the former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, the conservative talk show host Janet Parshall and Richard Viguerie, the direct mail pioneer, along with a handful of others from the conservative movement. Mr. Fischer is the group’s chief organizer.

via thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com

Can you be a Republican who supports the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of a civil marriage contract being extended equally to same-sex couples?

Yes, but it sucks (or words to that effect), says Meghan McCain.

Even supposedly moderately-conservative Gov. Cris Christie of majority-Democratic New Jersey feels it's necessary to kowtow to the religious right by supporting discrimination against gay couples (via bad jurisprudence).

But take note: Christie blew off the Values Voter Summit this year.

Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images via the Dallas Morning News.

 

Blog For Darwin: Popular Science ends reader comments; says practice is bad for science - Yahoo News

In a surprising move, the website for Popular Science announced they are no longer allowing reader comments on their articles. And in a potentially even more controversial move, the site’s online content director boldly explains the decision was reached because of their belief that reader’s comments are actually bad for science.

“A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics,” writes Suzanne LaBarre. “Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to ‘debate’ on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”

via news.yahoo.com

via www.blogfordarwin.com

Meet the American Religious Right Figures Thrilled by Russia's Brutal Anti-Gay Laws | Alternet

Russia has become a dangerous place for dissent. Its ex-KGB president, Vladimir Putin, has accomplished what Republicans in America only dream of: he's built an electoral majority by appealing to the most religious and conservative elements of society, including by courting the alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church. With his victories, he's becoming increasingly autocratic, dispensing with even the pretense of democracy.

Besides his notorious sidestepping of term-limit laws, he's presided over show-trial prosecutions of political opponents and reformers on flimsy or trumped-up charges. He's brought down the wrath of the state against artists who mock religion. He's looked the other way as crusading journalists have been brutally beaten and murdered, and his government may have been directly involved in at least one such killing. In the classic tactic of dictators everywhere, he's diverting attention from his own authoritarianism by painting a marginalized minority as a powerful and sinister enemy corrupting society from within. In this case, the invented enemy is Russia's LGBT community.

via Adam Lee's article at www.alternet.org

A sampling:

Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the American Family Association (AFA): Russia's anti-gay law doesn't go far enough.

Linda Harvey, founder of Mission: America: Christians should pray for the Russian laws to continue; "they are protecting kids."

Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute: plans to travel there to meet with government officials to offer his support.

And this profoundly disappointing stance from the International Olympic Committee: "the IOC announced that all protests and political statements by athletes ould be forbidden at the [2014 winter] Olympics [in Russia], thus making it clear whose side it's on."

Also by Adam Lee, "American Fundamentalists Applaud Russian Eliminationism."

Defending Science Education in TX #StandUp4Science with Texas Freedom Network (TFN)

Texas Conservatives Demand Science Textbooks Incorporate 'Creation Science Based On Biblical Principles'.... Brian Tashmanof PFAW's project Right Wing Watch reports that: 

Creationists advising the Texas Education Agency, the state’s board of education, are no longer even trying to hide the fact that they want to insert pseudo-scientific material grounded in religious beliefs into public school science textbooks. Terrence Stutz of the Dallas Morning News reports that evolution detractors appointed to the review boards are urging the textbook publishers to ignore the Supreme Court (along with science) and push Creationism, or be rejected.

See also The Dallas Morning News article, "Religious conservatives on Texas textbook review panels criticize proposed science books".

A response to this religious-right ploy comes from the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) and its Stand Up for Science Education campaign (the hashtag is #standup4science). TFN explains:

Stand Up for Science is an ongoing TFN campaign uniting parents, educators, scientists and businesspeople in support of sound science education and responsible medical research in Texas. This multi-issue campaign focuses primarily on the issue of teaching evolution and climate change in public school science classes and defending stem cell research in Texas.

You can join our campaign by signing our Stand Up for Science petition. TFN will send e-mail updates to help you know when and how to take action on crucial public policy decisions involving science.

The TFN is live-blogging the hearing; the NCSE is live-tweeting #StandUp4Science also -- check it out.

(Image from TFN's #StandUp4Science Tumblr page.)

San Antonio passes non-discrimination ordinance | San Diego Gay and Lesbian News

The City Council, over stiff opposition by conservative Republicans and Religious Right ministers, voted today to approve a fully inclusive non-discrimination ordinance.

The ordinance adds sexual orientation and gender identity protections into city ordinances governing city employment, contracting, housing and public accommodations. The City Council passed the updates by a 8-3 vote, and despite an ugly smear campaign mounted by anti-LGBT activists that included harmful propaganda directed particularly at transgender San Antonians.

via sdgln.com

Why is religious pandering so prevalent? - Salon.com

The Obama administration recently filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing that it is constitutional to conduct explicitly Christian and official prayers at town council meetings.

In a remarkable book titled “The God Strategy,” David Domke and Kevin Coe describe how the infusion of religion into politics surged since the Reagan presidency. While prior presidents regularly made references to God, Reagan made them almost systematically. For instance, Lyndon Johnson invoked God in 61 percent of his national addresses, compared to 26 percent for Richard Nixon and 25 percent for Jimmy Carter. But Reagan did so 96 percent of the time. His successors carried on: Bush I (91 percent), Clinton (93 percent), and Bush II (95 percent). (The study was completed before Obama’s presidency.) Reagan was the first president to start emphasizing “God bless America,” an expression that all his successors adopted. This chauvinistic slogan had only been used once, by Nixon, in a national presidential speech before Reagan.

Obama has also resorted to the God strategy, such as by mentioning God five times in his first inauguration speech. “God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny,” he proclaimed. “Let it be said [that] with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.” The inescapable suggestion was that God supported Obama’s inauguration.

via www.salon.com

Image: AP/Carolyn Kaster/Reuters/Jim Young/Ritu Manoj Jethani via Shutterstock/Salon

The Religious Left

It's baffling and regretful that the recent attention online about the Religious Left has insufficiently mentioned the prescient Dispatches from the Religious Left written four years ago and now more relevant than any time since its publication.

Note The Atlantic's article, "The Rise of the Christian Left in America" and Prospect's article "Moral Monday's and the South's New Liberal Gospel".

Frederick Clarkson:

There is currently a lot of noise in the media about how a Religious Left is rising. But there is also little evidence that such a movement is being organized. A few years ago, a faux Religious Left was manufactured Inside the Beltway. The product didn't sell well, and here we are. But some people who thought that an authentic Religious Left might be a good idea got together and published a book of essays about what it might be like and how to get there. 

 Visit the feed for Dispatches From the Religious Left on Facebook for posts with links to other articles about the religious progressives.

Creationism 3.0: Meet Intelligent Design’s Huckster | Science | Religion Dispatches

There's a temptation to review each new book that makes the case for intelligent design by publishing a laundry list of every fact, experiment, subtheory, and interpretation that the author gets wrong. I'll spare you that exercise, partly because it's been done elsewhere, by scientists, and partly because Stephen Meyer, the author of Darwin's Doubt, is not your typical creationist hack. 

Instead, Meyer, who holds a PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, is that odd hybrid: the philosopher-huckster. His arguments are, for the most part, precise, his research is extensive, and many of his points echo those made by leading biologists. Like many other proponents of intelligent design, he's not committed to defending the details of Genesis. He accepts that the world is old, and that evolution does happen—at least in a limited way. As a result, he not only sounds like a scientist, but for much of the book he almost acts like one. 

All of which is to say that a laundry list of errors doesn't get to the meat of Darwin's Doubt. Meyer is the finest kind of huckster: he doesn't tell lies, he merely rearranges truths. Darwin's Doubt is a toxic blend of hasty conclusions, cracked arguments, and terminological confusions. It's also, for those who are keeping count, a New York Times bestseller. More plausible than the arguments of 6,000-year-old-earthers, and much slicker than the earlier, bumbling efforts of intelligent design-ers, creationism 3.0 has arrived. 

via www.religiondispatches.org

It's remarkable that William Paley's "watchmaker" argument, formulated before Darwin published Origin of Species and which concludes that natural processes suggest there's a designer behind them, endures so strongly. The fact is that a designer is not required to explain the origin of species.  As zoologist Richard Dawkins noted, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design...." The universe has its elegant qualities but also its messy ones. There is much about the universe that is harsh, parasitic, inelegant, wasteful, and cruel according to human perception.

Sure, an intelligent designer is one way to explain some of the evidence we see in the fossil record. You can make that case. It just won't be science. Science, after all, isn't a random game of accumulating evidence. It's a very particular method for organizing specific kinds of observations. And when it comes to history, science relies on patterns of cause and effect staying constant across time and space—and not the sudden interpolation of otherwise scientifically unobservable beings. To say otherwise is to ask science to be something it's not. At this point, Meyer could acknowledge that he has strayed beyond the boundaries of the field. Instead, he tries to stretch those boundaries in order to meet what must be, one can only conclude, personal or political needs.

Religious Right Seeks New Catholic-Protestant Unity

The message of Frederick Clarkson's article "Christian Right Seeks Renewal in Deepening Catholic-Protestant Alliance," for Political Research Associates, has garnered additional online comment. (See Religious Right Watch's early post.)

Paul Rosenberg of Crooks and Liars notes that Clarkson argues that although seemingly on the defensive,

leading conservative Catholics (including Church leadership) and evangelical Protestants have just in the last few years become more politically unified than ever before in their history, and this newly-achieved unity — something never really seen before — needs to be viewed as potentially deeply threatening.

Clarckson calls attention to “We Stand in Solidarity to Defend Marriage and the Family and Society Founded Upon Them” a statement from a group of 250 Christian Right leaders, issued after the DOMA decision....

From Rob Boston over at Americans United's blog, Wall of Seperation: 

Ultra-conservative lawmakers aligned with the Tea Party hold sway in more than 20 states, and they are passing a wave of regressive anti-abortion bills. At the same time, we’re seeing a constant barrage of legislative assaults on public education through vouchers and other schemes as well as various proposals designed to undermine church-state separation.

Clarkson...points to the Manhattan Declaration, a document released in 2010 by an alliance of prominent Religious Right figures and ultra-conservative Catholic leaders. I attended the press conference when the document was unveiled. I recall being struck by its openly theocratic overtones. It looked like an attempt to drag the world back to the Dark Ages.
.....
One of the engineers of the Manhattan Declaration was Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton who is known for his extreme opposition to gay rights and his insistence that same-sex unions violate “natural law.”... George’s fans hail him as a brilliant thinker. He’s well connected politically and was recently named the chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

This Week in God - The Maddow Blog

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), talking to a religious right audience, made a spirited case against marriage equality. "On marriage there is no issue in which we need to be more on our knees because the momentum is with the opponents of traditional marriage. We're facing an assault on marriage." He scolded "unelected judges" who think "we know better" on marriage, and urged pastors to "to speak to your congregations and to mobilize the people, and mobilize them more than anything to pray."

via maddowblog.msnbc.com

Christian Right Seeks Renewal in Deepening Catholic-Protestant Alliance | Political Research Associates

Frederick Clarkson, a senior fellow at Political Research Associates (PRA), has written an important, insightful, and almost certainly prophetic look at the strengthening alliance between Roman Catholic and Protestant elements of the religious right.

As PRA summarizes:

Despite recent losses in the culture war, the Christian Right is forging a path forward by rallying around a few key issues: antichoice, opposition to marriage equality, and the defense of “religious liberty.” These themes—set forth in the influential Manhattan Declaration in 2009—have proved powerful enough to unify conservative Catholics and Protestants against their common enemies.

From Clarkson's article:

Given the Christian Right’s recent defeats in the realm of marriage equality, it might seem that its power is diminishing and that the so-called culture wars are receding. But “We Stand in Solidarity” is one of many indications that its resolve has deepened rather than dissipated in the face of recent political setbacks. This dynamic, multifaceted movement—one of the most powerful in U.S. history—aims to become a renewed, vigorous force in American public life, and it continues to evolve even while maintaining its views on core issues.

Notably, the movement is being shaped and sustained by a political alliance between evangelicals and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Though it was unthinkable as recently as a decade ago, this developing evangelical-Catholic alliance is key to understanding the Christian Right’s plan for regrouping in the near term—and ultimately reclaiming the future.

via www.politicalresearch.org

Christian Group Obtains 33K+ Signatures Asking CNN To Stop Hosting ‘Anti-Gay’ Tony Perkins | Mediaite

A Christian group has obtained more than 33,000 signatures for a petition demanding that CNN cease putting Family Research Council chief Tony Perkins on its airwaves with his “anti-gay” views.

The group, Faithful America, describes itself as a “community dedicated to reclaiming Christianity from the religious right,” refusing to “sit by quietly while Jesus’ message of good news is hijacked to serve a hateful political agenda.” As such, one of their causes is to put an end to the cable news outlet’s use of Perkins as a “voice for Christian causes.”

“Even as church bells rang out to celebrate a victory for equality,” the petition reads, “CNN once again turned to a hate-group leader to speak on behalf of America’s Christians. Tony Perkins doesn’t speak for us, and CNN needs to stop giving him a platform to spread anti-gay hate.”

via www.mediaite.com