Planned Parenthood Gunman Admits Religious Motive

While the couple who waged the attack on the San Bernadino social services office never left clear clues of their motive in the terror attack, Robert Lewis Dear, the gunman at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility more or less confirmed that he is a Christian terrorist - something the talking heads on the right and Republican politicians continue to refuse to admit exists.  More specifically, he exclaimed that he was a "warrior for the babies" - a phrase that correlates with the Christofascist manta that abortion is the murder of babies.  Not, of course, that the same godly folk give a damn for children once that are no longer in the womb as evidenced by their support for GOP policies that throw poor children off of assistance programs and that would deprive poor children of access to health care.  KKTV-11 has details on Dear's confession of sorts.  Here are details:

Family members of UCCS Officer Garrett Swasey and Iraq veteran Ke'arre Stewart were in the courtroom as Dear learned what charges he would face for allegedly killing their loved ones.

Dear made multiple outbursts during the court session--our reporter counted nearly 20--including declaring he was a "warrior for the babies" and accusing his own public defender of wanting to drug him.

Though investigators have not publicly released a motive, Dear heavily eluded to one with frequent references to abortion.  "Protect babies!" he exclaimed once.

"Can you add the babies that had been aborted that day, can you add that to the list?" he yelled another time while lawyers and the judge deliberated whether a list of victims' names should be made public.

Dear claimed his public defender was in cahoots with Planned Parenthood, suggesting that by trying to seal documents, the lawyer was trying to hide what Dear saw inside the building to protect the clinic.

Robert Dear faces 179 counts for allegedly storming a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on a snowy Black Friday afternoon and gunning down 12 people.

Dear is accused of killing three and injuring nine in the shooting rampage. More than 300 people were locked down in the nearby shopping center as the suspect--who police believe was Dear--engaged in a fire fight with officers for four terrifying hours.

Dear and the San Bernadino shooters share one thing in common.  If Republicans want Muslims to have to register, they should similarly require that far right Christians register with authorities so that Christian terrorism can be controlled.

No More Thoughts and Prayers

In my view, two things made the mass shootings in Colorado Springs and San Bernadino possible: (i) religious based hatred and (ii) the ease with which military style weapons can be secured by individuals.   The latter could be addressed with some ease if American politicians had a spine like was done in Australia when over 650,000 weapons were confiscated after a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle killed 35 people and wounded another 28.  Instead of meaning action like this, we get blather about "thoughts and prayers" from politicians who make tawdry whores look virtuous. Making this worse is that most of these politicians claim to be "pro-life" when in fact they support a culture of death and gun violence.  The second causation is more difficult to address because most Americans refuse to acknowledge that the Bible, just like the Koran, can be used to justify almost any kind of violence and evil.  Both books promote evil and the public needs to open their eyes and face this truth.  A column in the New York Times looks at the hypocrisy of bloviating politicians - most Republicans - and the evil influence of religion.  Here are highlights:  

We never had enough time to rationalize, in the uniquely American way, why that middle-aged white man killed a cop, a mother of two and an Iraq war veteran in Colorado Springs, when the latest slaughter of human life intruded. He was — what, pro-life? Screaming something about “baby parts” while he unloaded in a Planned Parenthood clinic?

In Colorado Springs, the man arrested in the killings, Robert L. Dear Jr., fit a profile. Here was another bearded introvert who lived at the edge of modernity, his head stuffed full of hate and half-truths. “He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic,” his ex-wife wrote in a court document. “He is obsessed with the world coming to an end.” And of course, he had a semiautomatic rifle to go with his delusions.

How did this malcontent become a domestic terrorist? We’ll never know for sure if his withdrawal — to a shack in the South, then a trailer in Colorado — led him further down the path to savagery. But we do know that isolation can breed ignorance. And when people with abhorrent views are not challenged, their hatred only hardens.

But what about San Bernardino? A young man and his wife drop off their 6-month-old baby at Grandma’s, and then go mow down a room full of people at a workplace holiday luncheon. . . .

On the surface, the homicidal couple were living the American dream. One, the son of immigrants, with a degree from a California state college, the other, his bride from overseas. Had a good job. But this suburban couple was making pipe bombs and assembling an arsenal to murder people in the country that took them both in, educated one of them, provided him with a good job. The surface life was a mirage.

When we heard the identity of the homicidal couple, Syed Rizwan Farook, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, another explanation immediately came to mind. They’re Muslim. Too much of the most deadly, inexplicable violence in the world today is committed in the name of this religion, and its strain of radical Islam. The shooters are people like Farook, kneeling at prayer in the back of the mosque, kindly and devout. Oh, we never suspected a thing, the imam says. The explanation is tiresome, and increasingly implausible.

We all know the ritual by now. Politicians of one cowardly type will say their “thoughts and prayers” are with you. What garbage. Better to say nothing at all.

And politicians of another cowardly type will refuse to see that hundreds, maybe thousands of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims find justification for mass murder of innocent people in their holy book.

“Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage,” tweeted Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing — again.”

[W]e’ll hope that it doesn’t happen again tomorrow. But it will happen tomorrow — on average, one multiple-victim shooting a day. Every day. It will make sense in the only country where mass killings make sense.

Quote of the Day: The Sickness of the Evangelical Right

A frightening image used to promote this year's Promise Keepers gathering

While the motives of the domestic terrorist who shot up the Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs are still not fully clear, as the Washington Post reports, Robert Lewis Dear made statements to authorities that would indicate that he may have acted based on the false and inflammatory videos released by anti-abortion extremists this past summer.  Here are details:

The gunman suspected of storming a Planned Parenthood clinic and killing a police officer and two others used the phrase “no more baby parts’’ to explain his actions, according to a law enforcement official, a comment likely to further inflame the heated rhetoric surrounding abortion.

The attack on the clinic, allegedly by Robert Lewis Dear Jr., was “definitely politically motivated,’’ said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is still underway. NBC News, which first reported the comment, said that Dear also mentioned President Obama in a range of statements to investigators that left his precise motivation unclear.

As much as politicians and the media refuse to admit the reality, far right evangelical Christians are becoming increasingly dangerous and extreme as they lose their ability to persecute others and the modern world and science prove the falsity of many of their cherished fairy tale beliefs.  Blogger friend Bob Felton sums up the situation well:

By any sane reckoning, the evangelical right has lost the culture war, and lost big. That doesn’t mean that the sickness has run its course, however. The cultural Christians are mostly gone, so there is nobody left in church but the crazies. What is more, frantic for revenue, the preachers give the crazies what they want. So every Sunday morning, all across the country, howling and bellowing pastors are denouncing abortion and preaching sedition. This is no joke; it’s really happening — and happening, incidentally, with a public subsidy in the form of tax protection.

We are nowhere near the end of it. Our godly neighbors, ever more marginalized and out-of-step with a world they are increasingly incompetent to live in, are a lot more dangerous than a few thousand Syrian refugees who want to get away from True Believers.

Sadly, I suspect we can expect increasing violence from the "godly folk" as their fantasy world is increasingly rejected by sane and rational people.  And don't forget the study that found that children raised in deeply religious homes were less generous and less kind than those raised in secular homes.  The myth that religion is a positive influence needs to die once and for all.  Think me harsh?  Check out the tweets gathered here that see the terror attack as a positive.

The Disingenuous Resurrection of Pastor Ted Haggard

I am continually amazed at the efforts of the Christian Right to rehabilitate liars and frauds such as former "ex-gay for pay" Michael Johnston - who Wayne Besen and I exposed as a fraud in August of 2003. The latest attempted resurrection involves Ted "I'm into Male Prostitutes and Drugs" Haggard, formerly the pastor of the mega church, New Life Church, in Colorado Springs. All I can assume is that some of these folks like Haggard are so used to living well of of the snake oil they have peddled for years that they have no other marketable skill. Or at least not one that will support them in the comfortable style in which they are accustomed. Why anyone would want or trust Haggard to be the pastor of a church again is beyond baffling. It's just plain bizarre. But then so is so much of the Christian Right lunacy. The Colorado Springs Independent has a story on Haggard's attempted resurrection back into the pulpit. Here are some highlights:

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Nearly three years after his downfall, Ted Haggard rises again in Colorado Springs. . . . The scandal-plagued pastor fell into an extended depression after he and his family relocated to Phoenix in 2007, following the very public exposure of his liaisons with a male escort and his purchase of methamphetamines. According to the terms of an agreement he signed with his former church, Haggard was not only banished from New Life but also — in a provision more typical of TV westerns and medieval decrees — forbidden from ever returning to the state of Colorado.

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So virtually no one expected to find Haggard and his family back in their comfortable Colorado Springs home, less than a mile from the mega-church that started nearly 25 years ago as a basement gathering of worshippers. Gayle, Ted's wife for the last 30 years, has written a book called Why I Stayed, which is slated for January release by Christian publisher Tyndale House. Ted, meanwhile, has begun speaking at churches around the country and recently posted to the Internet that he's "motivated for the first time in 2.5 years to re-enter full-time ministry."

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Indy: So I understand you met earlier today with some people who want to start a church here in Colorado Springs?

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TH: They're a couple who want to do a church plant amongst the Hispanic community. And so we spoke with them about where we felt the greatest need was for a significant Spanish ministry, which is right there around the Citadel area — that geographical area of the city would be a great place for some more significant Spanish ministry. There is some real good Spanish ministry right now, but based on what I'm seeing on the news and what I'm hearing from the newspaper, they have some significant problems with gangs, and violence and things like that, and sometimes ministry can help that.

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Somehow I think I'd believe the BS lines of a crack whore before I'd believe Haggard. I suspect he and his wife Gayle want back on the gravy train that they enjoyed for so many years. As for why anyone would want him to head up a church, they must be as delusional as Haggard. I guess some people want to be duped and ripped off.

More Tell U.S. They're Gay Partners - Number rose 473% in Colorado Springs from ’90 to ’06

No doubt Christianist hate merchant Daddy Dobson will be blowing a gasket at this news as reported by his home town newspaper, the Colorado Springs Gazette (http://www.gazette.com/articles/sex_30490___article.html/couples_study.html). The gays are multiplying rapidly right in Dobson's own back yard (even faster than the national average). A number of studies have shown that as the Christianists have managed to get anti-gay legislation passed, instead of slinking away and keeping a lower profile, gays have actually done the exact opposite and have become more visible and more outspoken about their relationships. Here are some story highlights:

The number of Colorado Springs same-sex couples reporting their status as “unmarried partners” to the government increased 473 percent from 1990 to last year, according to a study. The trend in Colorado Springs is part of a “gay demographic explosion in some of the country’s most politically and socially conservative regions,” said the study by the Williams Institute, a California-based think tank.

The institute studied how the number of same-sex couples has changed in all states and the 50 largest cities in the country. Nationally, the number of same-sex couples who reported their status to the government increased 437 percent during the same period. “Clearly, more same-sex couples are willing to openly identify themselves as such,” said Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the institute and author of the study. The study relies on surveys conducted in 1990 and every year since 2000 by the U.S. Census Bureau. The surveys don’t ask about sexual orientation, but respondents can identify their relationship as an “unmarried partner” with someone of the same sex. Respondents can choose other words to identify their relationships, such as married partner, roommate or sibling.

Gay people “coming out” probably accounts for most of the increase in same-sex couples, rather than merely an increase in population or an increase in the number of gay people in relationships, Gates said. Colorado Springs’ population increased 32 percent from 1990 to 2006. The increases in gay couples were higher in politically conservative areas, and especially areas where voters approved bans on legal recognition of same-sex relationships, he said.