religious right watch

"Paleontologists brought to tears, laughter by Creation Museum"

From the article:

"It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?" said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.

"Like Sunday school with statues... this is a special brand of religion here. I don't think even most mainstream Christians would believe in this interpretation of Earth's history."
.....

Daryl Domning, professor of anatomy at Howard University, held his chin and shook his head at several points during the tour.

"This bothers me as a scientist and as a Christian, because it's just as much a distortion and misrepresentation of Christianity as it is of science," he said.

Ralph Reed Redux?

From Rob Boston on Talk To Action:

[Ralph] Reed is returning to what he knows best: running a Religious Right group. U.S. News blogger Dan Gilgoff has the scoop. Reed has formed a new organization he calls the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

"This is not your daddy's Christian Coalition," Reed boasted in an interview with Gilgoff. "It's got to be more brown, more black, more female, and younger. It's critical that we open the door wide and let them know if they share our values and believe in the principles of faith and marriage and family, they're welcome."

Abortion & Apocalypse

Chip Berlet, taking a look at "Abortion, Apocalypse, and 'Killing for Life,'" writes:

Those of us who have tracked clinic violence over the past two decades have long known of the militant anti-abortion subculture that ebbs and flows with the political moment. There are two factors that are central to this movement. One is that many of them believe in a vast conspiracy to destroy the country and defame God led by liberal secular humanists and other subversive swine.... The other is the role of aggressive apocalyptic belief among certain Christians on the Political Right. These folks read the Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins "Left Behind" series of novels as if it were a roadmap to future history. More than 70 million sold.

On Talk To Action, follow Bruce Wilson's posts about the June 4-5 live broadcast of Rediscovering God in America, which will feature among others leading Republican politicians and anti-gay and Christian martyrdom activist Lou Engle.

(Image: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Viktor Vasnetsov, 1887; click to enlarge).

Multiple right wing movements influence violent anti-abortionists

Chip Berlet:

Scott Roeder, suspected in the slaying of Dr. George Tiller, and John C. Salvi III, who in 1994 killed two health workers and injured several others in a Boston anti-abortion rampage, share a connection to the right-wing Patriot movement--a collection of groups and individuals with one foot in the anti-tax movement and another in organized White Supremacy.

Read more.

(Image: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1497–98; click to enlarge)

More exposure of Dept. of Defense grotesque Christianism

Chris Rodda of the Military Religion Freedom Foundation (MRFF) applauds the fact that GQ has helped further expose "Donald Rumsfeld's Bible verse riddled Worldwide Intelligence Update cover sheets," which, as accurately expressed by GQ, "represented a mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery," and that "had become routine."

If is unfortunate, however, that GQ also positions their coverage as revelatory. In fact, the MRFF has been monitoring such Christianist excesses in the military for years.

Rodda also notes that:

Jeff Sharlet's eye opening article, "Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military," in the May issue of Harper's Magazine, clearly sparked a sudden interest in a battle that MRFF has been fighting for years....

You can listen to this audio file of The Leonard Lopate Show's broadcast featuring a segment of Jeff Sharlet discussing his article.

Chris Rodda provides a list of links to her articles of the past several months about "our military's 'holy war....'"

Randy Forbes Reintroduces His Religious Heritage Week Reso

From Chris Rodda vis Huffington Post:

H. Res. 397, introduced on May 4 [is] "America's Spiritual Heritage Week," but [Rep. Forbes' (R-VA)] list of historical distortions, misrepresentations, and lies has not changed. Therefore, my debunking of his historical hogwash, used last year to stop H. Res. 888, isn't changing either.

Read Rodda's great rebuttals.

Torture

Noted without comment: "Survey: Support for terror suspect torture differs among the faithful"

From the article:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
.....
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified.

Right-wing Catholics vs. Obama

From Joan Walsh, Salon.com, "Right-wing Catholics vs. Obama"

[T]he growing movement to stop Obama's visit [to the University of Notre Dame] isn't your ho-hum sort of Catholic League media dust-up.... It's part of a well-funded lobbying effort by a group of right-wing Catholics to run liberal Catholics, and dissenting doctrine, out of the church, and to recruit the remainder of the faithful for the GOP. As the L.A. Times' Tim Rutten reports, it's been organized by the Cardinal Newman Society....
.....
According to Tim Rutten, 73 percent of Notre Dame students -- and 97 percent of its seniors -- support the Obama invitation.

Rodda exposes David Barton's falsehoods

Chris Rodda, Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, exposes some of the falsehoods popular with Christian nationalist history revisionist, David Barton. He is:

a former vice-chair of the Texas Republican Party who was used by the GOP in recent elections to travel the country stumping for their "family values" candidates, and is very well connected with the far right members of Congress. In 2005, was named one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America by Time Magazine. But, outside of evangelical Christian circles, and those of us who fight the religious right, few people know who he is.
.....
Barton's pals in Congress, who regularly appear on his radio show to push their far right agenda, include Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Randy Forbes (R-VA, Mike Pence (R-IN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Joe Pitts (R-PA), Trent Franks (R-AZ).

The Quiverfull movement

Salon.com features Kathryn Joyce's article on the Quiverfull movement, "All God's Children." The summary of the article reads, "The Quiverfull movement saddles women with a life of submission and near-constant pregnancies. One mother explains how she embraced the extreme Christian lifestyle -- and why she left."

The article explains:

Unlike TV's "Big Love" polygamists or traditionally large Catholic and Mormon families, the Quiverfull conviction does not follow from any official church doctrine. It's a cross-denominational movement among evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants who have adopted some Catholic arguments against contraception and who have spread their ideas through the booming conservative homeschooling community.

The article references the new blog No Longer Quivering, which describes women's experiences exiting the movement.