Religious Right Watch

Merry Christmas

(Christmas Eve Solemn Mass, reading of the Gospel, Church of Saint Mary the Virgin (Episcopal), Times Square, New York, New York, photographer and year of photo unknown.)

Indiana newspapers decry antievolution bill | NCSE

And Matthew Tully, writing in the Indianapolis Star (December 8, 2012), remarked, "Less than a year after Kruse and others in the state Senate failed to push an embarrassment of a bill through the legislature that would have allowed the teaching of creationism in science classes, the Auburn Republican is at it again. ... It's a silly idea at a time when seriousness is needed in the General Assembly. It's a distraction when the legislature should be focused on core education issues. It's a reminder that ideology far too often gets in the way of tackling important issues under the Statehouse dome. And it's an attempt to walk through the back door a bill that — thanks to sensible lawmakers, outraged voters and the courts — can't make it through the front."

via ncse.com

A GOP science-denier is back at it in Indiana. Students in science class should be able to demand evidence for evolution?

Ah. I see.

Funny how this proposed legislation doesn't apply to history students demanding evidence for Bunker Hill, too. After all, do you *know* anyone who *actually saw* the battle happen? Surely paintings, diaries, newspaper clippings, and a battlefield memorial aren't evidence in the same way that geology, fossils, and genetics aren't evidence for evolution. Bunker Hill is a lie propagated by God-hating historians!

Marriage Inequality, On The Rocks - by Frederick Clarkson

Opponents of same-sex marriage had won 32 state referendums in a row, but their winning streak came to a screeching halt on Election Day, 2012. Voters in Maine, Maryland, and Washington state added to the number of states where marriage equality is now the law, increasing the total to nine states and the District of Columbia. In Minnesota, a referendum that would have amended the state constitution to exclude same-sex marriages failed.

via www.talk2action.org

Image: click the above Wikipedia image (Dec. 6, 2012) to enlarge it.

Supreme Court allows new challenge to Obama health care law | The Ticket - Yahoo! News

The court decided on Monday that Liberty University, an evangelical institution in Virginia, must get a second hearing from a lower court of its challenge to the health care law's birth control mandate and its provision that all large employers provide insurance to employees or pay a fine.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the case last year, saying the university couldn't challenge the employer or birth control mandates before they went into effect. The university argues that providing employees and students with health insurance that covers contraceptives violates its religious freedom under the First Amendment, and that employers cannot be compelled to provide health insurance.

via news.yahoo.com

On the DNC Cutting Ties with Rev. Samuel Rodriguez

Frederick Clarkson put Rev. Samuel Rodriguez in perspective:

There was a time when Rev. Samuel Rodriguez was one of the darlings Inside the Beltway. He was one of the new moderate evangelicals who were said to be displacing the bad old Christian Right; ringing-in the end of the culture wars; and inaugurating a shining new era of common ground.

But it was not to be.

Much of what was touted as moderation, was not.  The epitome of this was Rick Warren, who was cast as the new Billy Graham.  But as it turned out, he was a Christian Right Republican partisan; an anti-gay marriage leader, who later lied about it on Larry King Live; a creationist; held to extreme Austrian school economic views; and was supportive of anti-gay legislation in Africa, until he was exposed and forced into changing his position.  

And so on.

And then there was Rev. Samuel Rodriguez.  

Read the article at www.talk2action.org

The end doesn't justify the means....

''The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn't justify the means, and I think he was right." - Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale

Carter:

Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.

And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviors, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.

- Yale Divinity School's Reflections: Who Are We? American Values Revisited, Fall - 2012

via www.gorevidalpages.com

''The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn't justify the means, and I think he was right." - Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale

Carter:

Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.

And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviors, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.

- Yale Divinity School's Reflections: Who Are We? American Values Revisited, Fall - 2012

The Religious Right After 2012

It is striking how, despite blaming the party for ignoring their pleas against Romney, many leaders and activists on the Christian right fundamentally identify themselves with the GOP. The social-conservative project now, as much as ever, lives and dies on the fate of Republicans at the polls. Just as much of the conservative commentariat has begun calling for the party to put on a PR campaign for Latino voters, often referring to them as “natural Republicans,” conservative Christians have begun speaking of Hispanic-Americans as social conservatives who just don’t know it yet. Social conservatives believe the GOP will need them to reach out to socially conservative minority voters, a project that will both shore up the Christian right’s place in the party and bring in new bodies to vote for its agenda.

If the religious right has not reconsidered its symbiotic relationship with Republicans, it also remains convinced that its message maintains a broad appeal to the American electorate. There is a blatant contradiction here: they acknowledge a seismic cultural shift is shaking the ground beneath their coalition, but seem to believe this deep structural change can be addressed with little more than a recalibrated message.

via www.thedailybeast.com

Christian Conservatives Will Recalibrate to Sway Voters

The death of the Religious Right has been proclaimed countless times in the last twenty-odd years by countless commentators. Each time, the Religious Right has proved profoundly resilient. The movement adapted, retooled, and re-engaged.

Laurie Goodman's welcome article in The New York Times nonetheless seems uninformed by this point; however, the article's main point, that the Religious Right failed to sway voters in 2012, while arguably overstated, brings into focus that nearly all the preliminary analysis of the election strongly points to a greater turnout among voters who, at least for now, hold a more secular view of good governance and who in absolute numbers and as a percentage of eligible American voters are growing.

“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

Conservative Christian leaders said that they would intensify their efforts to make their case, but were just beginning to discuss how to proceed. “We’re not going away, we just need to recalibrate,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president and chief executive of The Family Leader, an evangelical organization in Iowa.

via www.nytimes.com

In mutual funds as in politics (as in life), past performance does not guarantee future results. The Latino-black-under 30 coalition that helped then-Senator Obama win in 2008 failed in 2010 to turnout impressively, thereby allowing Religious Right candidates to enter Congress and state legislatures in large numbers.

In Iowa, for example, the state's House of Representative switched from bearly blue to overwhelmingly red. In the same election, Iowa voters were successfully convinced by the Religious Right to dismiss more than 100 years of precedent and use judicial retention by popular vote (judges are initially appointed in Iowa, then retained by popular vote) to eject judges from the state's supreme court bench not for the primary reasons borne in mind by the originators of retention laws--judge's corruption or the inability to perform duties--but for the reason of simply disagreeing with a particular ruling; yes, only one ruling, and an unanimous one at that, but a ruling that the state cannot prohibit same-sex couples from being married.

In 2010, the Religious Right and Tea Party movements, which hugely overlap, used their ascendant power to curtail women's health options and resources, introduce measures to make voting more complicated--like new ID impediments and reductions in early voting opportunities--and gerrymandered districts to an extent that will in many states benefit Republican candidates almost exclusively and for years to come.

Corporatist and billionaire big bucks also did and can continue to further the Religious Right. Even considering that 2012's tsunami of corporate and billionaire post-Citizens United money did not as decisively affect the presidential race as much as progressives feared, money from those sources given to down-ballot races was much more successful, and the more down-ballot the Republican candidate, the more likely he or she is to represent not only Tea Party economic views but Religious Right views. For one example, see Matthew Fleischer's article, "Proposition 32's Anti-Gay Warriors" on billionaire and corporatist money merging with Religious Right views relative to a statewide ballot measure.

Has the electorate really changed so much in just two years that the Religious Right can be suddenly deemed profoundly or irrepairably weakened? This website thinks that's unlikely. Will the electorate have changed so much in four years that the Religious Right cannot be similarly successful in 2014 compared to its 2010 rampage? Time will tell.

It's Global Warming, Stupid - Businessweek. (And it comes with a cost)

Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us—and they’re right—that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.

via www.businessweek.com

If you've followed the decades-long innanity of science-deniers who target the Theory of Evolution (yes, all of geology, biology, and genetics is wrong--magic, indeed), you'll not be surprised that science-deniers exploit scientific complexity, nor that they often exploit and sometimes simply misinterpretent or misunderstand the role of disagreements within the scientific community, disagreements that quite often exist within the context of overarching, fundemental scientific consensus.

Back to the cost perspective given in the graphic (click on the above) designed by Jennifer Daniel: The number of U.S. natural disasters costing more than $1bn was 46 in 1980-1995 and 90 from 1996-2012. (Inflation plays a very small role in that increase.)

Yet, an October 2012 Pew Research Center poll

found that two-thirds of Americans say there is solid evidence the earth is getting warmer. That’s down 10 points since 2006. Among Republicans, more than half say it’s either not a serious problem or not a problem at all."

The graphic by Jennifer Daniel doesn't include a cost estimate (it's yet to to determined) for this year's U.S. drought, which was the worst in a generation.

Also from the article:

On Aug. 30, [Romney] belittled his opponent’s vow to arrest climate change, made during the 2008 presidential campaign. “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” Romney told the Republican National Convention in storm-tossed Tampa. “My promise is to help you and your family.” Two months later, in the wake of Sandy, submerged families in New Jersey and New York urgently needed some help dealing with that rising-ocean stuff.

Yes, it's global warming, stupid, and it comes with a cost--one that in the future could grow worse than need be if science-deniers' influence continues to rise. 

via isebrand.com

Graham Says Election Will Lead to America's Destruction

Leaving a birthday party for his father, evangelist Billy Graham, Franklin Graham said that Tuesday's election results sent America further down a "path of destruction," WCNC reports.

In particular, Graham was referring to the re-election of President Obama, a man he has accused of "waving his fist before God" by supporting abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

He added: "I want to warn America: God is coming around. He will judge sin, and it won't be pretty."

via politicalwire.com

Five Religious Right Myths Exposed in Election Defeat | Right Wing Watch

Five Religious Right Myths Exposed in Election Defeat

Find out what they are at www.rightwingwatch.org

Great write-up by RWW.

Charlie Fuqua, Arkansas Legislative Candidate, Endorses Death Penalty For Rebellious Children In Book

Charlie Fuqua, the Republican candidate for the Arkansas House of Representatives who called for expelling Muslims from the United States in his book, also wrote in support for instituting the death penalty for "rebellious children."

In "God's Law," Fuqua's 2012 book, the candidate wrote that while parents love their children, a process could be set up to allow for the institution of the death penalty for "rebellious children," according to the Arkansas Times. Fuqua, who is anti-abortion, points out that the course of action involved in sentencing a child to death is described in the Bible and would involve judicial approval. While it is unlikely that many parents would seek to have their children killed by the government, Fuqua wrote, such power would serve as a way to stop rebellious children.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Thank you to the RRW follower who sent the message regarding this story.

Stay tuned for Mr. Fuqua's next book, All I Know is What I Learned From the Hebrew Scriptures and Never Making It Past the Bronze Age When Playing Sid Meier's Civilization.

Rape Gaffes Highlight Growing Influence of Religious Right in the GOP

The new, "improved" three-column Republican Rape Advisory Chart.

via www.talk2action.org

Joyner: Obama Helping to Merge Christianity and Islam

Rick Joyner has been pushing fears that Christianity and Islam may merge into a religion known as “Chrislam,” and is now trying to make it an election issue. According to Joyner, Obama is a leader of Liberation Theology; an “anti-America” movement that he believes promotes “racism” and acts as “a bridge between Christianity and Islam, which would lead Christians to Islam.” The pastor also warned that the political left is under the control of a “deep darkness” promoting “anti-God and anti-biblical positions,” and said evangelicals must prevent the “country’s slide into the abyss of moral and financial destruction.”

He also pushed the myth that Obama gave “Muslims an exemption from the healthcare law.” As FactCheck.org notes: “we can say with certainty that no Muslim group, and indeed no non-Christian group, has ever qualified for an exemption under the statute used to define exempt religious groups in the health care law.”

via www.rightwingwatch.org

The Evolution of the Religiously Unaffiliated Vote, 1980-2008

The religiously unaffiliated, or the “Nones,” are the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, now comprising about one-fifth (19%) of the adult population. Their growth is also evident at the ballot box, where unaffiliated voters now account for a significant slice of the electorate. The unaffiliated vote share in presidential elections more than doubled from 5% in 1980 to 12% in 2008. Currently, PRRI’s 2012 American Values Survey estimates that 16% of likely voters are religiously unaffiliated.

An exploration of the unaffiliated vote since 1980s shows two interesting features: first, the Democratic advantage among this group is not a recent phenomenon but stretches back at least as far as 1984, and second, that unaffiliated voters display unusually robust support for third-party and independent candidates.

via publicreligion.org