Fear of the Rainbow Flag: Cynical Scapegoating of Gays in Egypt.

Last week in a post I noted the rising tide of homophobia around the world, including here in America under the regime of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, the latter of whom is a Christofascist himself.   Now a piece in the New York Times looks specifically at the growing anti-LGBT zealotry in Egypt, a country where technically homosexuality isn't illegal, but where thuggish rulers and religious fanatics are scapegoating gays as  (i) a means to distract the populous form the failures of both groups to bring prosperity and freedom to the country, and (ii) a way to fabricate an external enemy - western tolerance - to rally support for leaders who could care less about the best interests of the populace.  Ironically, these are  similar to the tactics Der Trumpenführer is employing to bolster his support among evangelical Christians and outright Christofascists here in America. Stated another way, America's would be strong man is mimicking the tactics of real life strong men.  Here are highlights from the article:

On Oct. 21, militants fired rockets and detonated explosives in the desert southwest of Cairo, killing at least 59 Egyptian police officers and security officials in the worst assault on security forces since 2015. The shocking attack is the latest reminder of the very real threat that armed militants pose to Egypt’s security forces.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seems incapable of quelling this menace. . . . So with such a real and present danger, why would Mr. Sisi’s government, aided by a team of media personalities and religious authorities, spend the past month whipping up a frenzy over another kind of “threat” altogether?

As part of what can best be described as hysterical homophobia, more than 65 people, mostly gay men, have been arrested in the crackdown against L.G.B.T. Egyptians. At least 20 people have received prison sentences, ranging from six months to six years.

This wave of arrests and raids began after gay-pride rainbow flags were flown at a concert by a Lebanese indie-rock band, Mashrou’ Leila, whose lead singer, Hamed Sinno, is openly gay. It was not the first time fans displayed rainbow flags at a Mashrou’ Leila concert, a gay friend who has attended some of the band’s previous concerts in Cairo reminds me. He also reminds me that rainbow flags were flown in Tahrir Square during the 18 days of protest that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Same-sex relationships are not illegal in Egypt, but gay men are arrested under “debauchery” laws. So why now? Why the parade of men “confessing” to being gay and “repenting” on TV talk shows, and the psychiatrists touting “conversion therapy”?

It would be easy to label the crackdown a distraction. There is much that Egyptians need distracting from: disastrous economic austerity policies, the insurgency in Sinai, 60,000 political prisoners.

And it does make for a convenient topic. Egypt’s political parties might disagree on how to remedy any or all of those issues — but homophobia cuts across disagreement. . . . . my friend told me. “Some people think gay people should be stoned, others recommend burning them after stoning, while some sheikhs are saying their hands and legs should be cut on opposite sides of their bodies, and ask in the softest of voices for their imprisonment or deportation.”

But there is more than just distraction at play. A talk-show host who suggested that both terrorism and homosexuality were being used to “ruin our youth” by a nameless external enemy offered perhaps the most honest explanation for this vicious round of homophobia in Egypt: the conflation of a security threat with a “moral” threat.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, increasingly bold expressions of sexual freedom are clearly unsettling regimes accustomed to being guardians not just of “national security” but also of our bodies and sexualities. Mr. Sinno is unapologetically “brown, queer and from a Muslim family” by his own description. . . . . Armed with social media and audacity, more people are questioning taboos around religion and sexuality.

Egypt, of course, is far from alone in its witch hunt. From Chechnya to Azerbaijan and from Tanzania to Indonesia there are similar crackdowns by governments obsessed with policing people’s sexuality. (And let’s not forget that President Sisi’s booster, President Trump, is no friend to L.G.B.T. rights.)

Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike. Mr. Sisi, a former army general who became president after forcing out Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, understands the potency of connecting the catchall “national security” to “inciting debauchery” as a deliberate reminder that the Islamists do not hold the copyright on piety.

On Oct. 19 — a day of global solidarity with L.G.B.T. Egyptians — I saw Mashrou’ Leila in concert in Montreal. That day, a protest had been held outside the Egyptian Consulate there. Some concertgoers flew an Egyptian flag alongside a rainbow flag. Mr. Sinno told the audience that the best way to fight the crackdown in Egypt was to keep up international pressure. He understands the importance of visibility — for safety and for solidarity.

 Human rights around the world used to be a concern for America. Now, under Trump/Pence, not so much.  Indeed, America voted against a United Nations resolution that condemned the death penalty for gays due to their involvement in consenting relationships between adults.  America has indeed fallen and will likely only increase in ugliness under the current misrule. 

Trump Pushes GOP Toward Chaos

For years I have been condemning the Republican Party leadership for allowing the party to be taken over by religious fanatics and racists who were welcomed into the party with open arms originally as the so-called GOP establishment looked solely at short term electoral success and utterly ignored the Frankenstein monster it was creating.  That Frankenstein monster is now fully formed in the person of Donald Trump and those in the party base who cheer on his most outrageous and bigoted rhetoric.  No doubt the leadership of ISIS sees Trump as a gift from Allah that can be used endlessly for promoting the propaganda line that America seeks to wage war against Islam and all Muslims.  Back here in America, the GOP finds itself descending into increasing chaos.  A piece in Fredericksburg.com looks at this chaos.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States is shoving the Republican Party to the edge of chaos, abruptly pitting GOP leaders against their own presidential front-runner and jeopardizing the party’s longtime drive to attract minorities.

Unbowed, Trump fired a searing warning Tuesday via Twitter to fellow Republicans carping about his proposal. A majority of his supporters, he tweeted, “would vote for me if I departed the GOP & ran as an independent.”

The crossfire between Trump and frustrated Republicans became a furious blur the day after the billionaire businessman announced his plan.

Party elders, meanwhile, warned that too much criticism might indeed push him to abandon the GOP and launch a third-party bid that could hand the presidential election to the Democrats.

And Republicans up for re-election in the Senate grew terse in the Capitol hallways as they were asked again and again to respond to Trump’s remarks—a glimpse of their political futures if the former reality show star captures the GOP nomination.

“This is not conservatism,” declared House Speaker Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s top elected leader. “What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for. And more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for.”

In New Hampshire, Republican National Committeeman Steve Duprey called Trump’s idea “abhorrent.” At the same time, he reminded Trump of his Republican loyalty pledge, saying, “I know him to be a man of his word.”

And in Mississippi, RNC member Henry Barbour said Trump’s comments “aren’t worthy of someone who wants to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” He said Trump would be a “disaster politically for the GOP if he won the nomination.”  “It’s embarrassing at best,” Barbour said of Trump’s impact on his party.

Barbour helped author the Republican National Committee’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” after a painful 2012 presidential election that forced party leaders to re-evaluate their strategy in presidential contests to reflect the nation’s demographic shifts. Among other things, the report cited an urgent need for GOP leaders to adopt an inclusive and welcoming tone on issues such as immigration.

While experts widely consider his proposal unconstitutional, Trump’s continued popularity underscores the deep divide between Republican leaders and the party’s conservative base, which holds outsized influence in the presidential nomination process. 

Indeed, Trump’s plan was cheered during a South Carolina rally Monday evening, and vocal supporters across the country defended the Muslim ban as necessary for national security. Polling suggests the sentiment is likely fueled by sharp strain of xenophobia: A new AP-GfK poll found 8 in 10 Republicans think there are too many immigrants coming from the Middle East.

Candidly, I don't know how this self-created monster can be killed without killing the GOP in the process.  The lesson is to never allow religious extremists and white supremacists to become the core of your party base. 

The Ugliness of the Republican Party Base

Not to sound like a broken record, I was a Republican activist for 8 years and held a City Committee seat for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  Back in those days the GOP wasn't pushing for special rights for Christian extremists and did not all but openly embrace white supremacists.  Sadly, those days are gone and today the party base looks like a mixture of a huge KKK rally and a gathering of snake handling Christian nutcases.   Worse yet, no Republican candidate has the will or ability to stand up to this mass insanity.  A piece in The Atlantic focused on Donald Trump's candidacy provides a snap shot of the mindset that is now widespread across the GOP base.  It is not a pretty picture and I again find myself wondering how these people can be so ignorant and blind.  The reality is that these are not nice and decent people even though I suspect most pat themselves on the back daily for being "god fearing Christians."  Here are article excerpts:

They seem so nice, your friends and neighbors. Your fellow Americans.

“In today’s time, if I’m a white person who’s proud to be white, I’m a racist,” says 44-year-old Kevin Stubbs, a land surveyor who shared his Marlboro Reds with an African American T-shirt vender on the way in. “Yet a minority can say that.”

“I do not feel safe,” says his fiancee, Loree Ballenberger, 42. “People are coming in across the border, and we have no idea where they are coming from.” She recently called her congressman to urge him to vote for a bill limiting Syrian refugees.

“I remember seeing Muslims around the world celebrating after 9/11,” says Chip Matthews, a 63-year-old retired carpentry teacher in glasses with tinted lenses. So what if it was the Mideast and not New Jersey? “The basic point, I think, is true,” he says.

“I look at the pictures of those refugees and they all look like able-bodied young men, 18 to 30 years old,” says his wife, Patrice Matthews, a 62-year-old retired school-district worker. Matthews doesn’t see why we have to be the ones to help these people. “It’s their country—they need to take it back,” she says.

I hear versions of the point about able-bodied young men from five different people. I hear, over and over again, that illegal immigration is the biggest problem we face. Almost everyone says their second-choice candidate is Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas; many express a wish that he and Trump would run on the same ticket.

“Just because he thinks illegal immigrants and terrorists should be deported doesn’t make him a racist,” he says. “He’s calling it as it is. You’ll never see CNN do that.”

“I’m against the anchor babies, and I’m against the Muslims,” says Kathy Parker, a tiny former elementary-school teacher with gold hoop earrings. “We can’t have churches in their countries—why should they have mosques in ours? He is the only one with the guts to speak out and say it.”

“We’re just tired of paying for people who don’t deserve to be here,” says Nina Lewis, a blue-eyed 33-year-old former sheriff’s deputy who is going back to school to be a veterinary technician.
They are, it is true, overwhelmingly white people. Do you have a problem with that?

The other night, at a Trump rally in Alabama, a black protester who shouted “Black lives matter!” was surrounded by white men who punched and kicked him. Far from apologizing for this, Trump is gloating about it: “What an obnoxious, terrible guy that was,” he tells the crowd in Myrtle Beach, who turn around and hiss at the press on his cue. In August, two Boston men said Trump inspired their vicious beating of a homeless Mexican immigrant. This week, a group of civil-rights protesters in Minneapolis was fired upon by four white men in masks and camouflage.

The people wave and make faces at the press as they go by. One gray-haired lady in a sweatshirt keeps pointing at her butt and sticking out her tongue at us as she ambles by. She has a savage look on her face.

Something tells me that these crowds are not what one would consider "gay friendly."   Their entire world view seems defined by those they hate: blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, non-Christians, I suspect gays, and a host of others.  Welcome to today's Republican party.

Fox News Panel: Mat Staver, Kim Davis’ Lawyer is "Ridiculously Stupid"

Given the manner in which Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel has brought endless frivolous cases and urged his "clients" to ignore the law and legitimate court rulings, I continue to be amazed how he has avoided disbarment.  Perhaps it's merely another case of the undeserved deference given to religion and those who demand special rights under the cloak of religious belief.  That said, you know Staver's stock even among wingnuts is tanking when a panel of Fox News experts conclude that Staver and his arguments on behalf of four times married Kim Davis, the now jailed Rowan County Clerk, is "ridiculously stupid." It is rare for me to agree with Fox News, but in this case, the Fox News analysis is 100% on target.  Here are highlights via The Raw Story:

A panel of legal experts on Fox News came to the conclusion on Monday that Kim Davis’ attorney, Mat Staver, was “ridiculously stupid” for asserting that the Supreme Court did not have constitutional authority to strike down same-sex marriage bans. 

On Monday’s edition of Happening Now, trial attorney Chip Merlin pointed out that anyone who violates a judge’s order should “expect to be thrown in jail.”

“She can still practice her faith,” Fox News host Gregg Jarrett noted. “Just not on the job in a way that interferes with the legal rights of the citizens she serves. And in fact, the U.S. Supreme Court said so nine years ago.”

“She’s a hypocrite,” criminal defense attorney Sharon Liko agreed. “She’s applying for the job of a martyr. She wants to practice her faith by not issuing marriage licenses. Yet, she will not agree to let the deputy county clerks issue marriage licenses even if it’s okay with their faith.”

“When she took the job she swore to uphold the law,” Jarrett explained. “We rely on government officials to do that. They can’t just pick and choose what laws they like, which ones they don’t. If they were allowed to do that, wouldn’t that lead to chaos, anarchy and so forth?”

“Whether the Supreme Court has constitutional authority?” the Fox News host said. “Article III Section 2 of the Constitution gives the Supreme Court constitutional authority to decide constitutional issues!” 

Jarrett added that Staver’s statement appeared to be “stunningly obtuse.”  “That’s a very polite way of putting it,” Liko replied. “I would say it’s just a ridiculously stupid statement.

This woman has a choice, she can either follow the law — she can do her job — or she can get out.”

It is far past time that Staver was disbarred and his parasitic con artist vehicle be put out of business.  His is an embarrassment to the legal community. 

Is The Tea Party A Religion?

I have espoused the view many times that the Republican Party's descent into insanity began when the far Christian Right - what I call the Christofascists began to infiltrate and take over local city and county committees and caucuses.  At least 15 years ago, it became clear to me that their goal was to force their religious beliefs and social views on all citizens.  While not all members of the Tea Party are Christofascists, some 85% of them identify as "conservative Christian."  This reality means, reason, logic and acceptance of objective reality is anathema to far too many of them. They are in open rebellion against modernity, changing racial demographics and a decline of white privilege that allowed many of them to feel good about themselves.  Andrew Sullivan correctly views the Tea Party as a quasi-religious cult.  Ultimately, it is this religious fanaticism that must be defeated if we are to regain a balanced constitutional government.  Here are excepts:

I believe that you cannot understand the current GOP without also grasping how bewildered so many people are by the dizzying onset of modernity. The 21st Century has brought Islamist war to America, the worst recession since the 1930s, a debt-ridden federal government, a majority-minority future, gay marriage, universal healthcare and legal weed. If you were still seething from the eruption of the 1960s, and thought that Reagan had ended all that, then the resilience of a pluralistic, multi-racial, fast-miscegenating, post-gay America, whose president looks like the future, not the past, you would indeed, at this point, be in a world-class, meshugganah, cultural panic.

When you add in the fact that the American dream stopped working for most working-class folks at some point in the mid 1970s, and when you see the national debt soaring from the Reagan years onward, made much worse by the Bush-Cheney years, and then exploded by the recession Bush bequeathed, you have a combustible mixture. It’s very easy to lump all this together into a paranoid fantasy of an American apocalypse that must somehow be stopped at all cost. In trying to understand the far-right mindset – which accounts for around a quarter of the country – I think you have to zoom out and see all of this in context.

The first black president could, perhaps, clean up some of the mess of his predecessor, but as soon as he moved on an actual substantive change that he wanted and campaigned on, he was deemed illegitimate. Even though that change was, by any standards, a moderate one, catering to private interests, such as drug and insurance companies; even though it had no public option; even though its outline was the same as the GOP’s 2012 nominee’s in Massachusetts, this inching toward a more liberal America was the casus belli. It still is – which is why it looms so large for the Republican right in ways that can easily befuddle the rest of us.

But it is emphatically not the real reason for the revolt. It is the symptom, not the cause. My rule of thumb is pretty simple: whenever you hear a quote about Obamacare, it’s more illuminating to remove the “care” part. And Obama is a symbol of change people cannot understand, are frightened by, and seek refuge from.

That desperate need for certainty and security is what I focused on in my book about all this, The Conservative Soul. What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history
And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.

This is a religion – but a particularly modern, extreme and unthinking fundamentalist religion. And such a form of religion is the antithesis of the mainline Protestantism that once dominated the Republican party as well, to a lesser extent, the Democratic party. 

It also brooks no distinction between religion and politics, seeing them as fused in the same cultural and religious battle. Much of the GOP hails from that new purist, apocalyptic sect right now – and certainly no one else is attacking that kind of religious organization. But it will do to institutional political parties what entrepreneurial fundamentalism does to mainline churches: its appeal to absolute truth, total rectitude and simplicity of worldview instantly trumps tradition, reason, moderation, compromise.

[T]his is not just a cold civil war. It is also a religious war – between fundamentalism and faith, between totalism and tradition, between certainty and reasoned doubt. It may need to burn itself out – with all the social and economic and human damage that entails. Or it can be defeated, as Lincoln reluctantly did to his fanatical enemies, or absorbed and coopted, as Elizabeth I did hers over decades. But it will take time. The question is what will be left of America once it subsides, and how great a cost it will have imposed.

I view the Christofascists and their Tea Party cousins to be a clear and present danger to America.  More citizens need to recognize this reality and these foul forces which are motivated by hate and fear of anyone deemed "other" need to be defeated completely and utterly discredited.

 

Christianist Election Apocalypse

The Christofascists are becoming increasingly hysterical over the prospect that Barack Obama might just eke out a reelection win and thereby  throw a major wrench in their agenda of infusing more of their hate and fear based religious dogma into the nation's laws.  These extremist recognize that Mitt Romney would be a willing tool in implementing their theocratic agenda simply because he would want to avoid a Christianist primary challenge in 2016 were he to be elected next week.  Some of their hysteria might almost be funny were it not for the fact that these religious fanatics are completely serious in their desire to subvert the U. S. Constitution and end all abortion, re-criminalize gays and uphold white Christianist privilege.  A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the hysteria and tactics the enemies of freedom for all citizens are emplying.  Here are some excerpts:

The final stretch of the presidential campaign is bringing out the last-minute scramble for a miracle, whether it be undecided voters in a swing state breaking your candidate’s way or prodding the apathetic to the voting booth on November 6th.

Or, to put a different spin on the phenomenon: we’re now seeing the dumbest of religious appeals, the most craven partisan tactics, a dramatic spike in proof-texting the Bible to score political points, and dire prophecies.

Focus on the Family’s political arm is sending Iowa voters a flyer claiming that President Obama thinks “we’re no longer a Christian nation” (read: we were once a Christian nation but bwwaaahahahahahaha, my evil Islamo-socialist plan has worked!).

Obama is an oppressor of Christianity, in the view of the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who tweeted that “#Obamacare seems aimed squarely at dismantling and/or silencing the family and the Church.”

Billy Graham—or, as many suspect, someone speaking on the 94-year-old evangelist’s behalf—put his name on an advertisement that reads, “I strongly urge you to vote for candidates who support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and woman, protect the sanctity of life, and defend our religious freedoms.”

The Christian Post, the subject of an intense investigation by Christianity Today (which was founded by the elder Graham), was also the venue for a Romney endorsement by Richard Land, who serves as the magazine’s executive editor.

Land, disgraced from his position as the Southern Baptist Convention’s “ethics” guru after admitting to plagiarizing racist rants about the Trayvon Martin case, broke his pledge not to endorse a candidate because “America is at a fork in the road and must choose between a President Barack Obama who wants to remake America in the model of a European welfare state and a Governor Mitt Romney who wants to restore a more economically vibrant and traditionally moral America.”

Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the Birmingham jail, Romney was tormenting boys with long hair at Cranbrook, and his Church was still 15 years away from lifting its ban on black men serving in the priesthood.

Pastor Robert Jeffress, who just a year ago endorsed Rick Perry over Romney in the Republican Primary, and called Mormonism a cult, is now telling pastors in Florida—even though he still thinks Mormonism is a cult—that “It’s time to stand up and push back against all the evil in our country.” He suggested that failing to go out to vote for Romney would be like being a pastor in Germany in the 1930s and failing to try to stop the Holocaust.

Here’s the reality: white evangelicals are an ever-shrinking proportion of the electorate; according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll, they make up 30% of those 65 and older, but just 9% of 18- to 29-year-olds. A recent Pew poll found that now the “nones” make up the same segment of the population (19%) as white evangelicals. And the younger the cohort studied, the more likely that a “none” is an atheist or agnostic. There’s no convincing the evangelical partisans, though.

That the GOP and Romney/Ryan are so beholden to such religious extremists and outright nutcases ought to terrify rational, thinking Americans.   If these people are the ones supporting Mitt Romney and the GOP, there isn't a much stronger argument to be found for voting Democrat and for Obama.

7 Killed in Shooting at Sikh Temple - Continued

UPDATED: CBS News is reporting that the Wisconsin shooter has been identified as Wade Michael Page, who served in the U.S. Army for about six years.  As Joe Jervis at Joe My God notes, the right wing loon sites are becoming fearful that their constant messages of hate and bigotry may yet prove to be connected somehow with Page:

Right wing sites are falling over themselves in fear that a link between the shooter and themselves will be found. After the shooter was identified as former military and a possible white supremacist, Michelle Malkin's Twitchy site deleted a post denouncing "leftists" for linking the shooter to conservatives. Over at Free Republic, a 650+ comments thread variously blamed the shooting on a liberal "false flag" conspiracy and a federal plot to discredit the white race.

This morning CNN is reporting the following on this tragedy that took the lives of six people, plus the gunman:

(CNN) -- The gunman who shot six people to death and wounded three others during a rampage at a Sikh temple in a Milwaukee suburb was an Army veteran who may have been a white supremacist, according to a law enforcement source involved in the investigation.

One comment on the CNN report sums things up well:

Everyday immigrants are under attack by the Republican Party and their supporters. You have FOX News, Michelle Bachmann, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, the Minutemen, the Tea Party, and the list goes on and on.  These people paint them as an invading hoarde of aliens that is destroying America and feed the sick minds of their base. But when this sort of thing happens they scream don't blame us.  Well I do blame the Michelle Bachmans and the Glen Becks of the Republican Party.

In today's GOP, unless one is white, heterosexual and a conservative Christian, you aren't viewed as even fully human.  It's little wonder that some like this shooter resort to the violence that they are subliminally told is the proper course of action.   Racists, white supremacists, religious extremists and the ultra greedy who have no compassion for others now make up the base of the GOP.

Virginia School Division Votes to Remove Ten Commandment Display

Facing a likely loss in federal court, the Giles County School Board voted unanimously yesterday to remove a display of the Ten Commandments that had been part of a display on American government and morality.  For readers not in the know, Giles County is in the far west of Virginia - a region of Virginia still in many ways akin to something out of the old movie "Deliverance" even though that movie was supposedly set in Georgia.  Its a part of the state that not surprisingly has difficulty attracting new and progressive business - a problem not helped by the local religious extremism and rejection of modernity.  I'm sure The Family Foundation's dominatrix like president will be raising Hell with the Virginia GOP about this example of the "persecution of Christians."  Here are highlights from the Virginian Pilot:  

A copy of the Ten Commandments will soon be taken down from a hallway wall at Narrows High School, where it has hung during a year and a half of controversy and litigation.

The Giles County School Board voted unanimously Thursday to replace the commandments with a copy of a page from a history textbook that mentions the Ten Commandments in conjunction with American government and morality.

Giles County residents who have shown up en masse at earlier meetings in support of the commandments display were not in attendance for the vote, and it was unclear how it would play among that segment of the community.

The school board's 5-0 vote, taken with little discussion during a sparsely attended special meeting, comes less than a month after a federal judge raised pointed questions about whether the commandments display violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

A motion approved by the board read: "In light of the recent controversy, and legal proceedings, and the substitution of this Roots of Democracy document in the place of the text of the Ten Commandments, this board will not approve the posting of the text of the Ten Commandments in our schools unless and until the courts provide further clarification of the law in this area."

It was not clear how the vote might affect mediation sessions ordered last month by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Urbanski. Urbanski is presiding over a lawsuit in which a student at Narrows High School asked that the commandments be taken down, saying they amount to a governmental endorsement of religion.

The commandments were first placed in Giles County schools in April 1999 in response to the Columbine school shootings.  In December 2010, they were taken down after a complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.  Facing heat from the community, the school board voted to put the display back up, then took it down again on legal advice.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that similar displays in Kentucky courthouses were unconstitutional, and that posting the Ten Commandments alone in a school violates the First Amendment's mandate that government not endorse religion.

Time and time again the far right in Virginia believes that it can ignore U.S. Supreme Court rulings.  Just maybe they are beginning to get the message that they are not above the law and the Constitution.

Rick Santorum’s - and the GOP's - Religious Fanaticism

Both Maureen Dowd in the New York Times and Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend have great pieces that look at the extremism - or better yet - fanaticism of Rick Santorum. Dowd, in top form, slices and dices Santorum while Pam goes on to look at the growing insanity that seems to be overtaking the Republican Party as a whole - led, of course, by the nutcases that comprise the GOP base. First these excerpts from Maureen Dowd column in which she also gets in some hits against Taliban Bob McDonnell:

Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola. That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah. “Satan has his sights on the United States of America,” the conservative presidential candidate warned in 2008.

Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as he called it four years ago. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America,” . . .

Mullah Rick, who has turned prayer into a career move, told ABC News’s Jake Tapper that he disagreed with the 1965 Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on contraception. And, in October, he insisted that contraception is “not O.K. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Mullah Rick is casting doubt on issues of women’s health and safety that were settled a long time ago. We’re supposed to believe that if he got more power he’d drop his crusade? . . . . He seems to have decided that electoral gold lies in the ruthless exploitation of social and cultural wedge issues. Unlike the Bushes, he has no middle man to pander to prejudices; he turns the knife himself.

In a party always misty for bygone times bristling with ugly inequities, Santorum is successful because he’s not ashamed to admit that he wants to take the country backward.

Virginia’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, touted as a vice-presidential prospect, also wants to drag women back into a cave. This week, public outrage forced the Virginia legislature to pause on its way to passing a creepy bill forcing women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound, which, for early procedures, would require a wand being inserted into the vagina — an invasion that anti-abortion groups hope would shame some women into changing their minds once they saw or heard about traits of the fetus.

As noted, Pam looks at the larger sickness and insanity that plagues the Republican Party. Here are some highlights:

When you blog about the professional anti-LGBT movement, you get used to reading completely batsh*t, sex-obsessed things from Peter LaBarbera, or junk science from hate group leader Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. But in 2012, GOP Clown Car candidate Rick Santorum has ushered in an impressive and visible new era of religious right/junk science/insane statements that suggests the Republican Party either cannot or is unwilling to deal with the basic political realities going on in this nation. It’s not 1900.

I understand this focus on social issues is about distracting low-info voters from the fact that the GOP has done nothing to create jobs; it’s been about bleating the usual mantra of lowering taxes on the wealthy and other crap that helped destroy the economy in the first place. What I was unprepared for was the unbridled desperation of the fundie base to the extent that it’s driving independent voters and especially women to have to go back to arguing about basic matters of contraception, access to the legal right to an abortion, and whether they should even be in the workforce. And the party of anti-government intrusion is MIA.

No one in the GOP, which is loaded with gay Republicans, is willing to say this is ridiculous demonization, in fact, they are letting the Base rile up. If Santorum is the head engineer of the New Republican Crazy Train, he’s got plenty of people in box cars all the way to the caboose.

Take Tanya Ditty, state director for the anti-gay Concerned Women of America of Georgia, who testified yesterday before the subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on House Bill 630 (State Fair Employment Practices Act), which would provide Workplace Protections for LGBT State employees. In her “expert” testimony that surely was seen by the GOP lawmakers, Ditty asked committee members to oppose the bill because she believed it would allow such things as necrophilia, zoophilia and pedophilia.

You might laugh at this and think the woman needs better meds, but how far is she from standard bearer Santorum? After all, the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania is on board with bigoted, barely sane Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, on whether Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen who talks over-the-top discredited birther batsh*t:

[T] hand over the spotlight to Santorum, rather than marginalizing him, shows just how weak the GOP is, and how much fealty it continues to have to fundie dog-whistlers like the Rev. Franklin Graham, who is beyond offensive in insulting the President and the Muslim community with his tasteless bigotry.

Santorum’s bold insistence on publicly defended faith — specifically Judeo-Christian of course — as a legitimate factor in a campaign to serve as President, not Pope is absurd. Personal faith beliefs (or none at all) have no place in our governing, yet this is where the GOP obviously wants to go.

The general public doesn’t want government in their private sexual lives, and the party of alleged small government is silent, allowing the fundamentalists to rule their primary process in a way that is embarrassing. . . . . At this point I’ve only seen the American Taliban influence coddled again and again. I don’t think the GOP can afford to lose the “sheeple” vote, the base of organized churches that get out the vote, do door to door and can be easily manipulated by fear and smear, God and guns, and fear of changes in gender roles or sexuality (without shame).

These two smart women sum up matters well. They both have far more sense and brains that the clearly mentally disturbed Rick Santorum.

Nutcase Lind Harvey Wants Gays Driven from Christianity and Threatens to Sue Wayne Besen

Over the years I have had some interesting e-mail exchanges with some of those in the Christian Right who in my opinion are certifiably crazy. One such Christian Right nutcase was Linda Havey of Mission America. Harvey holds herself as an expert on numerous issues and makes pronouncements on all types of topics. The problem is that Harvey holds no degrees that would qualify her as an expert on any of the topics she rants about, especial anti-gay issues. In an e-mail that I still have, Harvey herself confirmed that her only degree was in marketing. That's right, marketing. Not sociology, not mental health, not medicine, not even theology. Just marketing. Candidly, when I encounter someone as insanely extreme as Harvey, I have to wonder what dark psychological issue or form of mental illness could explain such hate, viciousness and derangement. Right Wing Watch looks at Harvey's latest lunacy. Here are some highlights:

To try to slither around sin is not a novel idea, but to organize a group of folks to proudly renounce the teaching of Scripture is fragrantly defiant. They have bought the idea that there are people who are born to be homosexual or bisexual or in the wrong-sex body, it defies not just the teaching of Scripture but common sense, what kind of a Creator puts someone in the wrong-sex body? Or creates people destined to mate with just the same-sex, never being able to create new life together and always having problems making the anatomy work.

Once you buy into the ‘born that way’ idea then self-delusion is not that far behind. There’s no evidence there are different humans called LGBTQ people, these are sinful behaviors, not in-born identities. . . . . They would be more respectful if they simply walked away from Christianity. But to try and stay and change it is worse than hypocrisy—it’s deception.

With more than sufficient provocation my activist Wayne Besen described Harvey as "The Most Homophobic Woman in America." Wayne went on to state as follows:

Unlike her more sophisticated counterparts, Harvey is a zealot without a filter who appears unable to finesse her fanaticism. She is outright paranoid of an imagined gay menace that in her diseased mind is lurking to corrupt children on every street corner. For example, Harvey's latest screed warns naïve mothers about the threat of openly gay doctors and nurses treating their children.

Harvey is also opposed to openly LGBT schoolteachers and claimed on her website that that, “These teachers then become role models, in-house activists, and possible confidants for students who want to start homosexual behavior. Student molestation becomes a real risk.”

In addition to this bullshit, Harvey also has more or less endorsed Uganada's reintroduced "kill the gays bill." In short, from what I have seen of Harvey's latest anti-gay screeds, Wayne is 100% on point. Nonetheless, Harvey had a "shit fit" and in a tweet - yes, it's amazing she knows how to use tweeter - threatened that she should sue Wayne for defamation. Wayne's response was as follows:

“Bring it on,” says Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “We hope that such a case would be aired on television so we can expose Harvey’s vile words in a court of law and in the court of public opinion. It’s bizarre that Harvey is upset because we quoted her verbatim, which tells me that on some level she is ashamed of her own hateful rhetoric.”

“Linda Harvey’s legal threats are frivolous and if they rested on any shakier legal ground they would be measured by the Richter Scale. I can only surmise her tweets are a pathetic and desperate ploy for attention,” said attorney Norm Kent. “We look forward to her next move and will take appropriate action.”

Some years back I received a similar threat from "ex-gay for pay" Stephen Bennett after I had challenged him on some of the anti-gay lies on his website that relied on "facts" proffered by Paul Cameron which had been previously proven 100% false. When I welcomed a lawsuit where the rules of evidence and discovery rules would have yielded a treasure trove of information against Bennett, Bennett suddenly became conciliatory and the bogus information was removed from Bennett's website.

I hope Wayne keeps up the pressure on Harvey and, if she's stupid enough to sue, it will be most delicious to see her proven to be a liar and fraud in court.

Slim Majority of US Citizens Approve Same-Sex Marriage

In yet another sign that long term the tide of history is on the side of gay marriage equality, a new Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll found that 52% of Americans approve of same sex marriage. Message to Far Right Republicans: if you don't get with it, you are committing long term political suicide. In the interim, we can expect even more unbridled hysteria from the Christianist who are slowly but steadily losing the anti-gay culture war. Fifty eight percent of respondents said same sex couple should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. Tony Perkins and Maggie Gallagher must be wetting themselves over these poll results. Here are brief highlights from Pink News:
*
An Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll has found that a majority of Americans now think the federal government should recognise same-sex marriages. Asked, "Should the federal government give legal recognition to marriages between couples of the same sex, or not?" 52 percent of respondents said "yes," 46 percent said "no" and 2 percent were unsure.
*
The poll also asked, "Should couples of the same sex be entitled to the same government benefits as married couples of the opposite sex, or should the government distinguish between them?" Fifty-eight percent said benefits should be equalized, 38 percent said they should not be, 3 percent were unsure and 1 percent refused to answer the question.
*
"For the second time, a national poll shows that a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry, reflecting the growing momentum of the marriage movement," said Freedom to Marry Executive Director Evan Wolfson. "Echoing the findings of last month's CNN poll, the Associated Press poll shows that those who would deny liberty and equal protection to same-sex couples are now in the minority."

Federal Judge Upholds Dismissal of Counseling Student Who Refused to Counsel Gay Clients

Over the last two days I have commented on the (in my view, frivolous) lawsuit brought in Georgia by Jennifer Keeton, an apparent Christianist Kool-Aid drinker who believes her rights trump all else and who seems Hell bent to become a self-made Christian martyr. Who knows, maybe she's angling for speaking fees before various Uber-Christian group where she can decry the supposed persecution of Christians. Thus, it is ironic that today a federal court in Michigan basically drop kicked Julea Ward, a would be Christian martyr at Eastern Michigan University, who had played the same persecuted victim card now being played by Ms. Keeton. The U.S. District Court in Detroit upheld the university's expulsion of Julea Ward, a student in a high school counseling program, who refused to participate in a course practicum in a university operated clinic where she had to among other things counsel a gay client. What is truly amazing - and indicative of the self-centeredness of such supposed Christians like Ward and Keeton - is that the student who Ward refused to counsel was suicidal. Yet Ward - whose goal, again, was to counsel high school students where she might have done untold damage - refused to do anything to affirm the gay client or address his depression.
*
Apparently, a gay suicide was preferable to Ward than treating the gay student like a human being. As I stated in prior posts, if individuals like Ward and Keeton want to pursue education careers yet refuse to abide by applicable professional ethical rules, they deserve to be expelled. Ward was represented in the lawsuit by the Alliance Defense Fund, a parasitic organization, that uses cases like Ward's and Keeton's to wring money from the ignorant and gullible. Here are highlights from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
*
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against Eastern Michigan University by a student who was kicked out of its graduate program in school counseling last year for refusing, on religious grounds, to affirm homosexual behavior in serving clients.
*
In an order granting summary judgment to the university on Monday, Judge George Caram Steeh of the U.S. District Court in Detroit held that the university's requirement that the student be willing to serve people who are homosexual was reasonable, and did not amount to an infringement of the Christian student's constitutional rights to free speech and free expression of religion.
*
The university "had a right and duty to enforce compliance" with professional ethics rules barring counselors from being intolerant or engaging in discrimination, and no reasonable person could conclude that a counseling program's requirement that students comply with such rules "conveys a message endorsing or disapproving of religion," Judge Steeh wrote.
*
To maintain accreditation through the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs, the program that Ms. Ward was in is required to familiarize its students with the ethics codes set forth by the American Counseling Association and the American School Counselor Association. In refusing to affirm the homosexual behavior of clients, Ms. Ward was accused of violating various provisions of the groups' ethics codes, including prohibitions against discrimination based on sexual orientation and an American Counseling Association rule holding that its members should not demonstrate "an inability to tolerate different points of view."
*
Judge Steeh's ruling held that the policy at issue was not a speech code but "an integral part of the curriculum," and that Ms. Ward's dismissal from the program "was entirely due" to her "refusal to change her behavior," rather than her beliefs.
*
The ruling said that "instead of exploring options that might allow her to counsel homosexuals about their relationships," Ms. Ward "stated that she would not engage in gay-affirming counseling, which she viewed as helping a homosexual client engage in an immoral lifestyle." The ruling said, "Her refusal to attempt learning to counsel all clients within their own value systems is a failure to complete an academic requirement of the program."

*

I hope the Court hearing Keeton's case in Georgia will be equally logical and make it clear that certain careers require adherence to professional codes and that self-centered students who refuse to comply deserve to be expelled. The Christianists' demand for special rights needs to be defeated.

Africa's Anti-gay Laws Are Product of American Religious Exports

Like the Roman Catholic Church, American Christian Right elements are focusing their efforts on Africa where unfortunately lack of education and other social conditions make the population vulnerable to a hate based form of Christianity that is withering in Europe, the USA and educated parts of the world. One of the by-products of this phenomenon is the growing homophobia making itself visible in African nations such as Uganda, Malawi and other countries. The London Times has a piece that looks at this problem and traces the poison back to American Christianist groups that are seeking more fertile ground for their perverted version of Christianity. In my opinion, it borders on being criminal that obvious lunatics like the totally discredited Scott Lively are allowed to sow lies and falsehoods in Africa. Worse yet, such individuals are allowed to pose as "experts" even when associated with known hate organizations. Here are some story highlights:

*
When he arrived at Kampala’s Hotel Triangle for a three-day conference, the Rev Kapya Kaoma knew that he would not like what he heard. The clue was in the event’s title — “Exposing the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda” — and in the line-up of guest speakers arranged by Stephen Langa, head of the Ugandan-based Family Life Network (FLN), and an outspoken advocate for the criminalisation of homosexuality in Uganda.
*
Given top billing at the event hosted by the FLN was Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, an American conservative Christian group from California, and a Holocaust revisionist
*
To Mr Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who is project director of Political Research Associates — a Massachusetts-based progressive think-tank — it was further evidence of how America’s Christian Right has stoked intolerance to homosexuality in Africa.* After a 16-month investigation, during which he interviewed scores of witnesses in Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria, Mr Kaoma concluded that Africa’s anti-gay crackdowns are, at least in part, “made in the USA”.
*
“Through their extensive communications networks in Africa, social welfare projects, Bible schools and educational materials, US religious conservatives warn of the dangers of homosexuals, and present themselves as the true representatives of US evangelicalism,” he wrote in Globalising the Culture Wars: US Conservatives, African Churches and Homophobia, a damning report on the issue.
*
The results are becoming clear. In Malawi, where this week an openly gay couple were sentenced to 14 years in prison with hard labour, and across the continent, gays and lesbians face lives of increasing dread. It is hard to underplay the depth of anti-gay sentiment expressed in Africa.
*
It wasn’t always like this. A decade ago Uganda seemed at the forefront of a liberal renaissance sweeping Africa. Then, Angela, a Ugandan transvestite, led a dance troupe that regularly played to packed audiences. Now she fears for her life. “This is the worst it has ever been; they say we are evil and blame us for everything,” she said.
*
Also on the speakers’ list at the conference were Don Schmierer of Exodus International — an organisation that argues that same-sex attraction can be “cured” — and Caleb Lee Brundidge, a counsellor who claims that he was healed of his homosexuality and promotes others to do the same through “healing seminars”.
*
“Just as the United States and other northern societies routinely dump our outlawed or expired chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and cultural detritus on African and other Third World countries, we now export a political discourse and public policies our own society has discarded as outdated and dangerous,” said Tarso Luis Ramos, executive director of Political Research Associates.
*
“Unless the world moves fast, we should expect a lot of killings of gays, not by state sanction but through mob violence. This will continue unless the international community can start talking about gay and lesbians having human rights that need to be protected and defended.”
*
Meanwhile, policies like DADT and the lack of civil equality for LGBT citizens plays right into the hands of the hate merchants who can point to U.S. laws that fail to protect all citizens.

New Harris Poll Suggests GOP Is Becoming Party of Ignorant Idiots

I come from a family that was principally Republican going back for decades, certainly back into the late 1960's. Nixon caused a break in that trend, but then things gravitated back to the old pattern. Indeed, I recall my dad at political events back when Nelson Rockefeller was Governor of New York. Later I served on the Virginia Beach City Committee for the GOP before the Christianists hijacked the Party. At the time, it seemed that it was a respectable political party and that it for the most part catered to educated and rational people. It also was a party that understood the concept of separation of church and state and that the state and federal constitutions among other things protected minorities from mob majority rule. Not any more. Watching Rachel Maddow last night, she cited some scary data from a new Harris poll that confirms that nowadays to be a Republican one needs to be a self-centered, irrational Kool-Aid drinker. Here is some of the findings:
*
67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
*
57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
*
45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"
*
38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"
*
24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."

*

I can only wonder in what alternate universe these folks live in. Objective facts mean nothing to them. But then again, the GOP has been taken over by far right Christians who believe the earth is only about 6000 years old and that mankind shared the earth with dinosaurs for a period of time. One can only wonder what educated people in foreign countries must think of the lunacy of this large of a portion of the USA's population. Obviously, China and other nations that long to be the next principal powers must see these results as good news. The USA is slowly self-destructing from within and it's not the liberals causing the nation's decline.

When A Child Dies, Religious Faith Should be No Defense

From time to time I have posted about parents who withhold medical treatment from their children based on the parents' wacky religious beliefs. All too often the result is that the child dies and when the parents are brought up on criminal neglect charges they put up a defense of religious freedom to mitigate their sentences. It's ironic because the same crowd that often wants a total ban on abortion - because "all life is precious" - are the same ones who defend this kind of bogus defense to actions that lead to the needless death of another human being. Jonathan Turley has a timely column in the Washington Post that looks at this phenomenon and asks an important question: Why do courts give believers a pass? I'm sorry, but in my view, religious fanaticism should be no defense to actions that are tantamount to deliberate murder. If all citizens - including children - have civil rights, then the courts need to step in an mandate proper medical treatment or, if the child has died because of the parents' actions, punish the parents as murderers. The child is still dead no matter the parents' motivation, and in this day and age, anyone other than a cretin ought to know better than to deliberately allow a child to die rather than seek medical treatment. Moreover, the child had no choice in choosing the religion into which it was born. Here are some column highlights:

*
In the past 25 years, hundreds of children are believed to have died in the United States after faith-healing parents forbade medical attention to end their sickness or protect their lives. When minors die from a lack of parental care, it is usually a matter of criminal neglect and is often tried as murder. However, when parents say the neglect was an article of faith, courts routinely hand down lighter sentences. Faithful neglect has not been used as a criminal defense, but the claim is surprisingly effective in achieving more lenient sentencing, in which judges appear to render less unto Caesar and more unto God.
*
This disparate treatment was evident last month in Wisconsin, a state with an exemption for faith-based neglect under its child abuse laws. Leilani and Dale Neumann were sentenced for allowing their 11-year-old daughter, Madeline Kara Neumann, to die in 2008 from an undiagnosed but treatable form of diabetes. The Neumanns are affiliated with a faith-healing church called Unleavened Bread Ministries and continued to pray with other members while Madeline died. They could have received 25 years in prison. Instead, the court emphasized their religious rationale and gave them each six months in jail (to be served one month a year) and 10 years' probation.
*
Compare the Neumanns' legal treatment with a couple of other recent cases in which children were injured or killed by nonreligious neglect. . . . the parents of Alex Washburn. The 22-month-old died after hitting his head at home in Cross Lanes, W.Va. His parents, Elizabeth Dawn Thornton and Christopher Steven Washburn, said the boy fell a lot and hit his head on the corner of a table and his chin on a toilet. They apologized for not seeking medical help and agreed to terminate their parental rights to their other children, handing over custody to the state. "I wish I did seek medical treatment for my son faster," Washburn told the court. "That will definitely be with me for the rest of my life." The court sentenced both parents to three to 15 years in prison.
*
In a nation founded on the free exercise of religion, the legal system struggles with parents who act both criminally and faithfully in the deaths of their children. . . . While the vast majority of fundamentalist and faith-healing parents avail themselves of a doctor's care when faced with a dire medical condition, some religious parents continue to maintain that belief in God means belief in His power and discretion to heal. They take literally the fact that one of the names of God in the Old Testament, Jehovah-Rapha, means "I am the Lord your Physician," and point to Exodus 15:26, where God says, "I am the Lord that heals you."
*
Some parents go to incredible lengths to prevent doctors from doing God's work. Colleen Hauser of Minnesota gained national attention in May when she went into hiding with her 13-year-old son to avoid a court order that he receive chemotherapy for a Hodgkins lymphoma tumor growing in his chest. She was eventually forced to yield; this month, her son finished his final radiation treatment and his family says his cancer is gone.
*
In Oregon, the Followers of Christ church has been cited for injuries and deaths associated with its faith-healing beliefs for decades. In one 10-year period, estimated Larry Lewman, an Oregon state medical examiner, the church experienced 25 child deaths related to faith-based medical neglect. . . . These cases have thrived in a gray zone left by the Supreme Court decades ago. In 1944, in Prince v. Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "the right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease, or the latter to ill health or death." The court, however, did not expressly forbid the use of faith as a mitigating factor in sentencing -- a matter left to the states. Not only does this use place children at risk, it results in the troubling image of courts favoring religious parents over nonreligious parents in a nation committed to the separation of church and state.
Denying children critical care may be divinely ordained for some parents, but it should not be countenanced by the legal system. Until courts refuse to accept religion as a mitigating factor in sentencing in such cases, children will continue to die, neglected as an article of their parents' faith.
*
Denying children critical care may be divinely ordained for some parents, but it should not be countenanced by the legal system. Until courts refuse to accept religion as a mitigating factor in sentencing in such cases, children will continue to die, neglected as an article of their parents' faith.
*

Once again, religion shows itself to be a force for evil rather than good. God gave man a mind and intellect, yet too many among the religious extremist crowd choose ignorance and mindlessness rather than using the mental abilities God gave them.

Fairfield Priest Ousts Obama Supporter

It looks more and more as if James Dobson, et al, are supplying insanity inducing Kool-Aid to the Roman Catholic Church for consumption by members of the priesthood. While the priest I mentioned yesterday in South Carolina was telling Obama supporters to avoid receiving communion because of their vote for Obama, now in Fairfield, Connecticut, they are physically chasing them from the churches. As I have said before, the Christianists and their allied religious fanatics are a clear and present danger to democracy in the USA. One can only hope that under Obama and the Democrat Congress steps are taken to remove religion from government policy and reverse the insanity that occurred under the Chimperator. Here are some highlights fro CBS5.com:

*

FAIRFIELD (CBS) ― A Fairfield woman is accusing a priest of chasing her out of Sunday services because of her political beliefs. The woman said she was singled out for supporting President-elect Barack Obama.Elizabeth Caster was exited over Obama's election and painted messages in support of Obama on her SUV, which she drove to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church on Sunday. Caster and her little boy were in the front pew Sunday, when she said the priest got on the microphone demanding the driver of the SUV to move it.

*

"He said you cannot park any place here, you have to go. He said you have to go and he said you cannot have a car with an Obama sign parked in there," she said. "I waited to confront the priest," says Joe Caster, Elizabeth's husband. Her husband never caught up with Rev. Sebastian Meyer to ask why, but he's convinced he already knows the answer."It's a combination of race and politics," Caster said.

*

CBS could not find Meyer to get his side of the story on Thursday, but a reporter for the Vacaville Reporter tried on Wednesday, and claimed the priest physically and verbally attacked the reporter. He claims the priest even clawed at his arm to get his notepad. The reporter has since filed a police report and the story ended up on the front page of the newspaper.

*

Meanwhile, rational and sane gays are not welcome in the Catholic priesthood. I expect that until the Church lifts the ban on women and gay clergy, we will see more and more fruitcakes at the pulpit in Catholic churches. (H/T to Bob Felton at Civil Commotion)

More Creepy Mormon Machinations

If the theocratic efforts of the Mormons in pushing Proposition 8 and forcing their extremist views on all Californians wasn't bad enough, this new story from the New York Times takes the creepiness factor to a whole new level and underscores that the Mormons - or at least a goodly percentage of them - have utter disdain for the concept of freedom of (or from) religion embodied in the U.S. Constitution. I find it telling that it's the Mormons and their whacked out religions fanatic allies who seek to undermine the Constitution, not Barack Obama and the Democrats. In fact, if undermining the Constitution is traitorous, then it is they who are traitors. Here are some story highlights on the bizarre practice of "converting" those who have previously died (it's weird and sick, but so then are Mormons):

*

NEW YORK (AP) -- Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

*
Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say they are making changes to their massive genealogical database that will make it more difficult for names of Holocaust victims to be entered for posthumous baptism by proxy, a rite that has been a common Mormon practice for more than a century.

*
But Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, said that is not enough. At a news conference in New York City on Monday, he said the church also must ''implement a mechanism to undo what you have done.'' ''Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable,'' said Michel, whose parents died at Auschwitz. He spoke on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-incited riots against Jews.

*

Baptism by proxy allows faithful Mormons to have their ancestors baptized into the 178-year-old church, which they believe reunites families in the afterlife. Using genealogy records, the church also baptizes people who have died from all over the world and from different religions. Mormons stand in as proxies for the person being baptized and immerse themselves in a baptismal pool.

*

'Michel suggested that posthumous baptisms of Holocaust victims play into the hands of Holocaust deniers. 'They tell me, that my parents' Jewishness has not been altered but ... 100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?'' Michel said Monday.
*

Helen Radkey, who has done contract work for the Holocaust group, said her research suggests that lists of Holocaust victims obtained from camp and government records are being dumped into the database. She said she has seen and recorded a sampling of several thousand entries that indicate baptisms had been conducted for Holocaust victims as recently as July.

*

In May, the Vatican ordered Catholic dioceses worldwide to withhold member registries from Mormons so that Catholics could not be baptized.