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FOX ATTACKS: Going after Obama

The FOX VIRUS...

Even Chris Wallace gets disgusted by it...

Just for context on the M.O. of Rupert Murdock's corporate news philosophy, The Investigators meet The Buzzsaw...

No, of course we're not surprised. I'm sure they originally prepared for an all-out assault on Hillary Clinton, but they retrenched, retooled, and sent their minions out after Barack Obama instead. And let's face it: The GOP is going to continue this steady drumbeat of sleaze from now through the election, supposedly at arm's length via their "remote operative," Roger Ailes, at the FOX News Division.

Our job is to recognize it, name it, talk about it, share it. Human beings, like many living things, are quorum sensors (bacteria do it chemically; we do it psychologically). So it isn't just the quality of the signals we receive from our environments that matter -- the number of signals of certain types that we receive quite literally count toward shaping our image of reality.

Ailes, Rove and others on the Right understood this many years ago.

Which is why I say: Share these videos. Embed them. E-mail them. Every time you use the power of human relationships and social networking to spread this exposure of media sleaze you are acting as an antidote to the sickening virus FOX keeps deliberately injecting into our culture. We have to become D.I.Y. media antibodies in defense of our society. We must inoculate ourselves against bullshit. When you show a thing that attempts to be secret, you remove some of its power.

To clarify: I have no quarrel with anyone who opposes Obama for policy reasons. Don't like his ideas about Iraq, or social security, or economics, or taxation? Fine. I disagree, but I respect reasonable disagreement.

But if you think that Obama is a Muslim, or a black racist, or a shadowy figure who secretly hates America? Conversation over.  You've just defined yourself out of  relevancy. My suggestion? Take another look at why you believe what you believe, and then rejoin the rest of us in our imperfect lurching toward a better future.

Hat tips: Janet, Revere at Effect Measure, MoveOn.org, Robert Greenwald.

For the record: In their own words

Received this a.m. via my subscription to Christian Newswire: 

Rev. Wright is Wrong - Conservative Media are Wimps 

MEDIA ADVISORY, March 21 /Christian Newswire/ -- Barack Obama has pulled the race card (which effectively brings to an end all meaningful conversation) while FOX News and conservative talk radio have proved once again that "conservatism" is pretend salt. Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, et. al., cannot see, nor do they dare to portray, the cataclysmic "change" that Barack Obama is espousing. It is a shift from one God and standard of Law to another. It is a shift from the God of the Bible and our Founding Fathers to the false god of Rev. Wright. Rev. Wright serves the god of his own hate-filled, bigoted imagination and calls it "Jesus." Yet our conservative friends dare not call this blasphemy treason. They have yet to call Wright for the apostate he is.

Wright is preaching "a different gospel" (2 Corinthians 11: 3-4). The Apostle Paul tells us in Galatians 1:6- 7, "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to 'a different gospel' which is really no gospel at all..." Rev. Wright is wrong about the Jesus of the Bible!

Pastor Jeremiah Wright's church is apostate as are all the United Churches of Christ (UCC) in America. Long ago this institution abandoned its rich Christian heritage and responsibility to stand upon the Word of God. It now follows the god of, "...everyone does that which is right in his own eyes." Abortion, Homosexuality, Islam, and every false religion are welcome in Trinity United Church of Christ. It's one Commandment is, "Don't judge me!" Biblical Christianity is, however, not allowed.

We should not therefore be surprised that Barak Obama will defend his pastor when he (his pastor) is exposed to the light of the true Gospel of Christ. We should furthermore not be surprised when FOX News can't seem to get it right about Rev Wright. Rev. Wright is no more a Christian than he is a poached egg.

We are indeed heading for change with Barak Obama. Oprah is helping us to get there. For the first time in its history, the United States of America may elect a President who does not acknowledge the Jesus of Scripture as the Savior of the world. Barak Obama and black liberation theology (a mixture of Islam, false Christianity, and any other religion that opposes true biblical Christianity) is not Christianity, and those of us who know better (real salt) need to say so.

We could not give our Lord Jesus a better gift on this Good Friday than to just say so!

Rev. Flip Benham, Director, Operation Save America/Operation Rescue

For comments by Rev. Flip Benham 980-722- 4920

www.operationsaveamerica.org

Christian Newswire

Got it? Treason.

I don't assume for a moment that this is what most white Americans, or most Christians, believe. But sometimes it's good to see the opposition unfiltered beyond what they choose to present to the world. Because if these people are against us, I feel pretty good.

 

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...

Nail Hard Catholicism

For my money, one of the worst aspects of being Catholic is the feeling of drudgery with which ritualized spirituality often appears to be approached.  While I know some of you might think it’s the politics of Catholicism that would be difficult, I’ve always found my struggles with those politics to lead to some of my most important spiritual insights.  So, no, it’s not the politics, and it’s not the ritual itself (which I like); it’s the way every song is sung as an offbeat dirge, the way every prayer is said as if one is communicating the contents of a phone book. 

I’ve always wished something could be done about this aspect of the Catholic “approach;” I’ve often wondered what changes would work, at least for me.   The only “different” approaches I’ve experienced have felt either downright ridiculous (e.g., the folk masses of the early 70s), or too much on that side of “magical” spirituality (e.g., the charismatic Catholic movement) for my comfort.

While acknowledging that spirituality should and can be practiced in multiple ways, and while acknowledging that such practice can be a matter of taste rather than substance, I’ve always wanted to see a Catholicism with a raging sense of excitement and a voluminous muscularity, for lack of a better word.  As I’ve noted before, I’m Catholic because I was born with it, and I like the way it forces me to struggle.  Nonetheless, being a rather loud and boisterous personality, I’ve never seen why I had to struggle with the style as well as the politics.  It is this combination of my commitment to Catholicism with my desire for a different style of worship that made me so interested in the new HBO documentary on the Hard as Nails ministry.

Jesus: The First Libertarian?

Got this one this morning from the folks at Christian Newswire:

The Lord Jesus Christ The First, True Libertarian

I'm kinda ready for 2007 to end.

What God Wants

After keeping up with all of our “appointment television” in the fall, my Bonnie and I are generally ready to take a break in the Spring and Summer.  However, as avid readers of EW, we generally try to pick up one or two shows that come with high recommendations, hoping to find something we like enough to watch each week.  In addition to our rather lengthy Sunday nights on HBO, we’ve picked up a few new shows—TNT’s Saving Grace—starring Holly Hunter and FX’s Glenn Close vehicle Damages.  The viewing of our first week with each show was positive enough to guarantee that we’ll be back again. 

Here, I’d like to focus on Saving Grace and some of the questions it raises about God, and what God wants.  The show is just barely on this side of schizophrenic—it almost feels like you’re watching two different shows, each starring the same characters. On the one hand, we have a fast paced and gritty narrative with Holly Hunter starring as a single, hard drinking, hard partying cop, who seems connected emotionally only to her nephew, whose mother died in the Oklahoma City bombing (Note: The show is set in Oklahoma City, and they’re doing some interesting work with the locale). Hunt is having an affair with her partner, a hard drinking married cop whose wife evidently kicks him out routinely.  The pacing and soundtrack are beautifully textured.  You move with the characters; you want to drink with them. And dance.  When Holly Hunter’s Grace takes a swig of Jack and chases it with a bottle of Bud, you want to be there--whether you drink or not.  Talk about effective product placement.

The Pleasures of Struggle

In the past several weeks, I have twice been involved in conversations with “church attending” friends. Both of these conversations took the same turn—a turn I’ve become very familiar with and a turn that leaves me feeling slightly irritated.  In both cases, I’ve held my tongue because I wasn’t sure that my irritation was warranted, and I wanted to process the ways in which these conversations may work as an indictment of my behavior. 

So, here’s how the conversation goes:  Somehow, the topic of spirituality or worship or church attendance will arise.  Either before or after I observe that I attend Mass on a regular basis, my partner in conversation says something akin to this: “Oh, I’ve joined a fill-in-the-blank-liberal church because they believe in all the same things that I believe in” (e.g., gay marriage, reproductive choice, female clergy).  It may be because I am Catholic and have beliefs which tend to run counter to standard Catholicim (and I am hence being defensive), but there’s something about this response that bothers me. It’s not that I think people shouldn’t be able to join any church for any reason—hell, of course, they should be able to believe whatever they wish and join or not join any group of their desire—it’s more that I don’t like the fact that the position my friends take assumes that it is morally superior to choose a church based on one’s politics.  Let me restate:  choose or don’t choose your form of worship based on your politics, but don’t act like its an obviously better moral position to make your choice on that basis; don’t make an assumption that would posit my own attendance at Mass as a morally inferior position, because I would argue that my position, while no better, is both spiritually and politically useful.

When more is less in discussing religion

After nine years, the Department of Veterans Affairs today agreed to include the pentagram on its list of approved religious symbols for veteran gravestones: http://www.cem.va.gov/cem/hm/hmemb.asp

Make no mistake:  I'm thrilled at this development.  While I'm not so much into the conspiracy theories some Wiccans have accepted in explaining the delay, I certainly do believe that it is time for the symbol to be included in the list, especially considering that atheists and humanists already have their own approved symbols as well as several groups less known and less numerous in this country than Wiccans.

At the end of the AP article reporting on this event, however, is the following explanation:

Wicca is a nature-based religion based on respect for the earth, nature and the cycle of the seasons. Variations of the pentacle not accepted by Wiccans have been used in horror movies as a sign of the devil.

Wiccans constantly complain about being compared with Satanism, yet at the same time these sorts of explanations and/or disclaimers continue to compare the two groups - even if in the negative - when no comparison is called for.  The last sentence doesn't even make a lot of sense... perhaps especially to someone not very familiar with Wicca or uses of pentagrams.  Dictionaries generally consider pentacle and pentagram to be synonymous.  A pentagram is a five-pointed geometric shape.  By that definition, not accepting a pentagram makes as much sense as not accepting a rectangle; something either is rectangular or it isn't.  Which also begs the question of how one can vary a pentagram.  Put a happy face in the center of it, I suppose.

Kurt Vonnegut: And so on.

Now I'm thoroughly depressed, and it's only 8 a.m.

Day 3: Normativity

When my son was in elementary school he came home one day and mentioned that he'd told the teacher that I was Jewish. His reasoning: He knew I wasn't a Christian, and the only possible alternative was that I must be Jewish. Because what else is there?

Well, I'm not Jewish, and I can't call myself a Christian because Christian belief requires that one accept that Christ died on the cross and rose from the dead. I don't reject the possibility, but I don't have the faith required to say, honestly, that I believe that essential concept. I think it's proper to let a religion define its rules for membership, and regardless of my feelings about Jesus and the church's other teachings, I don't meet the Easter resurrection standard. 

This brings me, finally, to the last thing I want to write about on this three-day church-state binge: The mechanisms that make one thing "normal" and other things deviant.

The American Taliban

I understand why Xarker mentioned the American Taliban page in his most recent post about the dangers of theocracy in this nation.  There are many quotes in there from people openly and frankly calling for the country to be ruled by Biblical law and deny citizenship no non-Christians, which is a position that I find, quite frankly, un-American.   And for those who continue to insist that this is what the Founding Fathers fully intended, consider this:  There have been Jews in this country since well before the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, and the Founding Fathers knew it.  The reason we have one of the largest Jewish populations in the world is because this is one of very few countries that have always afforded full rights and citizenship to Jews.  Get over yourselves.

But the American Taliban page goes well beyond supporters of theocracy.  Quite a few of the quotes are entirely about the evils of homosexuality.  Many of the quotes don't even expressly call for it to be illegal - we might presume that these people would support such a legislative move, but argument by implication is a lousy way to offer evidence.    Yes, I totally disagree with people who call homosexuality immoral, but what does it say about us when we start associating people with the Taliban just because they take a position that we disagree with?  Doesn't that at least flirt with un-Americanness as well?

Day 2: Theocracy and secularism

It has been noted by critics of the separation of church and state blogswarm that  the leftie rhetoric on this matter tosses around the word "theocracy" in an overheated fashion. Where are the American Christians who call for theocracy? they ask.

I can give you examples of Christians who are rather explicit about their theocratic goals,  but to do so misses the larger point: when it comes to political power, Americans are always wise to fear the law of unintended consequence. In other words, one need not explicitly seek an overt theocracy to create such a monster, just as one need not seek a police state to bring one into being.

History teaches us that mere human frailty is often enough to do the job, since these low states of being are easy to achieve. Just stop striving for something higher and eventually society will slide back into the miseries from which our nation's founders sought to extricate us. 

Bloggers for separation of church and state

For the next three days, I'm going to participate in a blogswarm on behalf of the concept of separation of church and state, a most American concept in which we can take great pride and solace.

Not everyone sees this loosely organized effort this way, of course. To them, this is an anti-religious act masquerading as something neutral. A wolf in sheep's clothing.

So let me begin with two statements, one personal, the other political.

Personal: Whatever my thoughts about  spirituality -- and they are both  numerous and often unresolved -- those thoughts are too important to me to leave to the whims of legislators.

Political: Should you feel compelled on this, the most holy weekend of the Christian calendar, to express your religious beliefs, then please do so. Express them passionately, profoundly and publicly. Pray and preach and witness. Do it in your homes and churches, yes, but also on street corners, in public parks and -- with whatever permits your municipality requires, so as not to land you in jail -- from the steps of the nearest courthouse.

Should your religious convictions compel you to speak out against the separation of church and state, do that, too. And if anyone tries to limit your First Amendment right to that public expression of conscience, then please let me know about it, so that I can offer my support for your cause.

But whatever you do, please don't confuse this message:

It is not the public expression of religion that we fear, but the state expression of religion.  By protecting the rights of the few -- be they pagan, Muslim, Taoist or Pastafarian -- we secure the liberties of the many, and the peaceful co-existence of our people.

Here endeth the lesson.

Unexpected Experiments in Religion

I've been teaching a college course on American Religion for a year now.  The students I have this semester are very engaging, and I have several who are clearly well-versed in their own traditions.  This I consider a decided plus because the other students can learn first hand about other people's beliefs and because I certainly cannot cover every belief with the same depth of knowledge.

We talk about damn near everything in that class, both the light side and dark side of religions.  Last week the main topic was Islam, and a couple of my online students (students can take the class either in a classroom or online) admitted rather shamefacedly that 9/11 was one of the things they associate with Islam.  I repeated this story to the classroom class this week with the message there's nothing wrong with associating the two events so long as you see there is more to Islam than 9/11.  The terrorists, no matter how small of a minority they represent, most definitely had religious motivations and most definitely wrap their ideals in religious language and, thus, 9/11 is most definitely associated with Islam.  No one objected.  I had no expectations that they would.

The main topic for this week was Satanism, cults, and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.  I teach it as an example of how religion can fuel hysteria and the power of certain ideas such as Satan.  For example, accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) led to a backhoe being brought in to dig up a schoolyard to find the underground Satanic ritual chamber, even though every single supposed child victim pointed to a different place on a map as to where the entrance supposedly was.  In the end it was concluded that not only was there no chamber, there were no Satanists and no actual abuse: just a lot of overly protective parents and counselors feeding images into the minds of their impressionable seven year olds. 

We discussed other common things denounced as "Satanic" such as Dungeons & Dragons and, more recently, Harry Potter.  A whole lot was written in the 80s about the "overt" Satanic connections to D&D, most of which is not merely opinionated but flat out factually wrong.  One author, for example, complained that any game that included a spell called Slow Poison must be evil for teaching players it's ok to not merely poison people, but to do it slowly and excruciatingly.  Set aside, for the moment, that if the game had such a spell the writers might have designed it for the bad guys.  The fact is that Slow Poison was used to slow a poison down so that the party had time to cure the poison before it killed its victim.  It's a healing spell.  Another author claims that D&D creator Gary Gygax admitted in an interview that he asked local Satanists about their magical chants so he could make the books more realistic... even though D&D has never included chants for its spells.  The way you cast a fireball is to say "I am casting a fireball" and then rolling a handful of dice.

And people believed these stories:  lots of people.  People who had never read a D&D  book denounced them on the word of others who had also clearly never actually read a book.  The backlash was so bad that demons and devils were entirely removed from the game's 2nd edition and renamed for the 3rd edition, and Slow Poison has now become Delay Poison. 

One student objected that I was singling out Christianity.  Another objected to what I was implying about the religion.

Church sign

There's a Baptist church near where we live that we pass all the time.  The sign up this week announces their "Last Supper Reenactment."

And the first thing that popped into my head was "This can only end in tragedy."

Heads-up: church/state blogswarm

Xark-friend Blue Gal e-mailed this afternoon to alert us to an upcoming blogswarm event she's organizing with Leo of Neural Gourmet from April 6 to April 8 on behalf of separation of church and state. Take it away, Leo:

The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism, abortion rights, etc., it's all good. Separation of church and state impacts so many issues and is essential.

I'm in, and consider yourselves invited to participate as well. If you're blogging elsewhere and want to join in, leave us a link in comments or send me an e-mail and we'll be sure to point people your way.

For resources, try First Freedom First, a joint project Americans United for Separation of Church and State and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation.

Just a note: I'm happy to see that our old friends from the Unitarian Universalist Church are backing the First Freedom First project. Go Ewe-Ewes!

Reminder of why this matters:

"The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned." 
--William Rehnquist, former chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

An alternative religion