New 'Crusader' Assault Rifle Engraved With A Cross And Bible Verse

If one needs any more proof of how insane and dangerous some on the far right are to the rest of society, look no further than a new "Crusader" assault rifle being marketed to the evangelical crowd that comes engraved with a cross and Bible verse.  With he professional Christian crowd whipping up the hysteria of the ignorant and pushing the Christian persecution meme, one can only wonder how long it will be until guns like this are used against "the enemy."  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at this latest frightening batshitery.  Here are highlights:

Florida gunmaker, Spike’s Tactical in Apopka, Florida, introduced a new assault rifle this week that is every evangelical NRA member's wet dream. The $1,395 AR-15 is engraved with with a Bible verse:

"Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle."

On the other side of the weapon is a Christian cross and the word "Crusader," the name of the rifle.

Ben Thomas, a former Navy SEAL and spokesman for Spike's, said the bible verse is meant to insure no Muslim will ever use that weapon.

“When you make a rifle, you have to understand that it could be used for ill deeds if it got in the wrong hands,” Thomas warned.

Mr. Thomas said the Crusader, which went on sale this week, was not meant to be racist. He fended off the question with the demur:

"We didn't say no Muslims."

 These people constitute a clear and present danger!

The Truth About the 2016 Presidential Race

My college classmate Larry Sabato has co-authored a piece in Politico that looks at the circus that is the 2016 presidential nomination contest, especially on the GOP side of the fray.  On the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton remains the most likely winner barring a disaster on the e-mail front, which is yet another self-made Clinton problem.  On the GOP side, it remains a free for all with The Donald dominating even though his winning of the nomination remains a long shot. Despite all the uncertainty, the piece suggests that there are factors to keep an eye on.  Here are article highlights:

Still, the real factors that will decide the contest in 2016 are starting to come into view. As the media’s focus on the horserace intensifies, and they obsess over minor gaffes and meaningless slights, here are eight factors you should keep in mind as you size up the state of the race.

#1. Will a recession doom the Democrats?

A good or even great economy doesn’t guarantee success for the incumbent president’s party—see Al Gore in 2000—but a bad one just might guarantee failure, like John McCain in 2008. That’s not to suggest that the nominees don’t matter—both parties could end up making strong or poor choices—but if there a recession over the next year the Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House could dwindle.

#2. Obama looms over the race.

In the polling era, no major-party nominee has won a third term for his party when the White House incumbent has been below 50 percent. At the moment, President Obama is around roughly 45 percent approval and slightly over 50 percent disapproval in both the RealClearPolitics and HuffPost Pollster averages. No one knows whether Obama will go up, down or stay the same in the 14 months ahead, but to win the Democratic presidential nominee will need Obama either to add a few points of popularity or stimulate disproportionate turnout among those who approve of his performance. It may also be that in this partisan era, voters are more willing to affirm the party of a president whose performance in office they find lacking because they just dislike the other party so much.

#3. Don’t Count Bernie Sanders out in the early states.

Sanders could beat Hillary Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The most recent polls in those states have found Sanders in his most competitive position yet. The Vermont senator is strongest in the Granite State, where successive polls have shown him leading. In the Hawkeye State, the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg survey, run by well-regarded Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, showed Clinton ahead of Sanders just 37 percent to 30 percent, though her leads are larger in other polls.

Aside from threatening in the first two states, the intensity of the crowds attending Sanders’ appearances could translate into electoral victories in several caucuses.

#4. But Clinton remains a strong favorite for the nomination.

Now for the reality check. For better or worse, the Democratic Party has placed an early bet on Hillary. In all the traditional ways—endorsements, money, media coverage—she has lapped her opposition. With respect to her announced opponents, Clinton hasn’t drawn especially potent rivals. (Compare her to Jeb Bush, who intimidated no one and drew 16 competitors on the GOP side despite having the ultimate establishment name and oodles of cash.)

Consider this: As long as the email mess doesn’t sink her, Clinton could lose both heavily white Iowa and New Hampshire, and still have a fairly unobstructed path to the nomination because of her mighty position with women and minorities. This is true even if Vice President Joe Biden enters the race. . . . beating Hillary in 2016 would be much tougher than it was last time.

#5. Most of what has happened so far won't matter.

A few weeks ago CNN produced a list of “jaw-dropping moments” from the 2016 campaign. It included several Trumpisms and items such as Hillary Clinton saying that she and her husband were “dead broke” after leaving the White House. It’s a reasonable and entertaining collection of anecdotes, but we don’t see them having any effect on the election.

The one exception might be Jeb Bush’s repeated stumbles over whether he would have gone to war in Iraq. Bush’s difficulty with the most predictable question he could get is part of a larger problem: His campaign performance been weak so far, and it might be hurting him in his quest to lock up the support of party poohbahs . . .

#6. Keep an eye on endorsements.

As The Party Decides has famously and compellingly argued, endorsements from party regulars, particularly sitting members of Congress and governors, are useful indicators of a candidate’s relative strength or weakness in a nomination fight. So who is winning the endorsement race?

On the Democratic side, the story is pretty straightforward: Hillary Clinton is dominating.

The Republican endorsement picture is far fuzzier. Jeb Bush has earned the most support from GOP eminences, winning 22 endorsements—which is still quite meager.

#7. Trump is still unlikely to be the nominee.

We’re not disputing that Donald Trump is the clear polling frontrunner on the GOP side, or that he has struck a chord with millions of voters unimpressed with politicians that “talk rather than do.” Two other candidates who’ve never held elected office, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, are also attracting large shares of support.

However, the Trump candidacy has all the markings of an early bubble that will eventually burst. We’re betting that most Republicans will return to traditional politicians as the election season rolls on.

#8. The 2016 election will be unique.

With a couple of leading legacy candidates, it’s natural for observers to make connections between 2016 and previous presidential elections. Should Clinton and Bush emerge as the major-party nominees, there’ll be comparisons galore to the last race between those famous names in 1992 (or to the 1988 contest that Bush’s father won, and the 2000 and 2004 contests that produced Jeb’s brother’s presidency).

It’s already obvious that Hillary isn’t Bill, despite the fact that scandal seems to shadow them both. Hillary Clinton appears to be more policy-oriented and organized than her husband, but she can’t begin to match his natural political gifts. As for the Bushes, they all have mixed but mainly successful electoral records. However, inspiring rhetoric didn’t get any of them elected, and early impressions suggest Jeb Bush may be the least exciting speaker of the three. Moreover, Bush has a tougher path to victory than his family predecessors, much of that due to his brother’s controversial and unpopular White House record.

Do I Sound Gay? At the Naro Theater on September 9, 2015 at 7:30PM

The following is a cross-post of my August, 2015, column in VEER Magazine that reviews this film - the owner of the Naro Theater graciously allowed me an advance viewing - and  the issues it addresses.  If you have not seen the film and live locally, try to make it to the showing on this coming Wednesday evening.  I will be one of the panelists.  Here's the column:

Growing up, especially during one’s teen years can be difficult for many of us.  But growing up gay and often striving to fool both one’s self and everyone else about one’s sexual orientation takes matters to a whole new realm.  Particularly, if one feels an added urgency to hide one’s true self in order to survive in hostile social and/or family settings. The situation is complicated at best.  Based on my own experience, one might be best described the situation as a mix of (i) knowing deep down in one’s heart what the truth really is yet (ii) trying desperately to convince the world and one’s self that one’s secretly known truth is not in fact real.  Side effect of these mental contortions include being hypersensitive about how one acts, looks and god forbid, talks and sounds to others.   Some gays never leave this struggle behind them.

In his new documentary “Do I Sound Gay,” which will be playing at the NARO Theater on Colley Avenue in the Ghent area of Norfolk on September 9, 2015, documentarian David Thorpe looks at the origins of the so-called “gay voice’ – if there is, indeed such a thing – and the impact it and/or the fear of “sounding gay” inflicts on many in the LBGT community.  I had the privilege of previewing the film and found it to both humorous at times and at other times disturbing given some of the violence against gays featured in the film. The film is definitely thought provoking and should be viewed by both members of the LGBT community and members of the straight community.  Indeed, I would argue that it should perhaps be required viewing for anti-gay church goers who might be forced to reflect for a moment and face the inhumanity they display towards gays and others who are different from themselves.

In the course of the film, which is in documentary format, Thorpe looks at his own childhood and upbringing in Columbia, South Carolina, his escape to college and eventual move to New York City.  He also interviews his friends, speech pathologists, linguists and LBGT celebrities like Dan Savage, David Sedaris, Tim Gunn, Don Lemon and Margaret Cho.  As the movie reveals, there is in actuality no such thing as the “gay voice” per se, but rather merely differences in pronunciation, tone, and the stress of vowels and certain consonants.  The result is traits that some might describe as “feminine” or “intellectual.”   Some theories are that one’s voice can be influenced by who one spent the most time with and/or identified with growing up, and other factors.

However, as the movie makes clear, these characteristics that make up the supposed “gay voice” very often cross sexual orientation lines.  Indeed, studies that have asked participants to guess an individual’s sexual orientation based on their voice have found that participants are wrong at least 40% of the time.  Males with high voices can be 100% straight while deep voiced gays can “pass as straight” even though they are 100% gay.  The take away is that voices, like looks can be very deceiving.

But sadly, these truths don’t help those of us who have struggled (or currently struggle) to live with the stigma that can attach to being gay. This stigma can translate into violence as was experienced by a fifteen year old high school student featured in the film or “comedy” routines that make gays the butt of their jokes.  Columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage states that he believes that many gay men, having been bullied in school for being gay and, therefore, try to eliminate any traits — manners of speech, of gait, of dress, etc.  — that might potentially betray them.  Based on my own experience in the closet, I believe that Savage is likely on to something.

But the anti-gay stigma can be even more pervasive and subtle than acts of violence or “jokes.” One movie historian interviewed in the film even makes the case that in movies for decades the presumably gay characters often were the villains or the ridiculous “pansy.”  He further notes that often the gay characters were either killed or were killers.  In short, growing up, many of us received continual societal messages that being gay was not a good thing even without factoring the religious disapproval that so many gays continue to face even with same sex marriage now being legal.

While all of this toxicity towards gays has given gays, both those “in the closet” and those long “out of the closet” reason to dread of the “gay voice” and other traits that might give their secret away are painstakingly avoided, it has also fostered something else: internalized homophobia. By internalized homophobia I mean the inability to fully accept one’s self as gay and let go of all the negative messages one has received over one’s life time.  And a stigma against sounding or acting gay exists even with some members of the LGBT community.  If you don’t believe those interviewed in the film, go to any gay dating site and you will quickly see men advertising themselves as “straight acting” as if acting gay is something to be avoided.

Internalized homophobia and fear of “sounding gay” are all part and parcel with trying to live up to a perceived stereotype of how straight men and women act and talk.  The effort to maintain this role can be non-stop except perhaps when one is alone.  It is exhausting to say the least.  Eventually, many of us simply give up and belatedly accept ourselves for the most part for who we are.  Many never do.

How do we end the stigma?  Thankfully, many in the Millennial generation seem to be increasingly ignoring the anti-gay messaging coming from conservative religious denomination, right wing politicians and other anti-gay dog whistle messages.  For the rest of us, something that President Obama said to a gathering of young African leaders at a Presidential Summit earlier this month focuses on the solution:  we must cultivate the ability to see others as equal human beings despite their differences in skin color and/or sexual orientation.   Specifically, Obama told the audience:

“The same, by the way, is true for sexual orientation,” . . . I spoke about this in Africa, and everybody is like, oh, oh, we don’t want to hear that. But the truth of the matter is, is that if you’re treating people differently just because of who they love and who they are, then there’s a connection between that mindset and the mindset that led to racism, and the mindset that leads to ethnic conflict. It means that you’re not able to see somebody else as a human being.”

Whether or not one “sounds gay” should not matter.  We are all unique individuals and we should be judged, as eloquently stated by Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream . . .” speech,   based on the content of our characters and our talents.  Sexual orientation, skin color and national origin and other factors used all too often to fan division should not matter.

More Sunday Male Beauty

Olympic diver Chris Mears

Religious Extremist Rally for Davis

click image to enlarge

UPDATED: As blogger friend Joe Jervis reports, the group rallying in support of Kim Davis not surprisingly included a rabid white supremacist.  Highlights from Joe's post:

Yesterday notorious white supremacist Michael Peroutka spoke at the rally outside the jail holding Kim Davis. Peroutka is a former leader of the League Of The South, which recently “celebrated” the 150th anniversary of the assassination of “tyrant” Abraham Lincoln. 
 
The SPLC calls Peroutka “an avid Southern secessionist and radical Christian Reconstructionist.” According to Wikipedia, Christian Reconstructionists call for overthrowing the US government and replacing it with a “biblical theocracy.” The new Christian theocracy would then reinstate Mosaic penal laws under which “the list of crimes which carried a death sentence would include homosexuality, adultery [KIM DAVIS!], incest, lying about one’s virginity, bestiality, witchcraft, idolatry or apostasy, public blasphemy, false prophesying, kidnapping, rape, and bearing false witness in a capital case.”

As I have said, this folk are pushing treason.

ORIGINAL POST: The image above pretty sums up the mindset of the extreme Christofascists who rallied in support for jailed law breaker Kim Davis.  To say that they hold the religious freedom of others in contempt is an understatement.  Even more frightening is that at least half of the Republican presidential nominee candidates are actively prostituting themselves to these people.  The Lexington Courier-Journal has more on the gathering of those who ultimately seek to subvert the U.S. Constitution - which once upon a time was called treason .  Here are highlights:

Hundreds of people gathered outside the Carter County Detention Center on Saturday and prayed for jailed Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who was locked up just a few hundred feet away.

"She won't bow, I promise you," her husband, Joe Davis, told the crowd while dressed in overalls and a camouflage ball cap. He said he talked to her the morning she was put in jail and the two of them decided not to give in.  "I'm just an old, dumb, country hillbilly, but I know God," he said.

People came from as far as Wisconsin and North Carolina to attend.  "This is as grass roots as it gets," he said.

Some speakers took a more prayerful tone while others got political — one ordained minister and insurance agent from Morehead told the crowd that it needs to send Gov. Steve Beshear, who he blames for Davis' jailing, by voting against his son, Andy, who is running for attorney general.

"Make sure we hold Beshear responsible for his inaction," Randy Smith exhorted the crowd.

Smith also attacked Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway, who is running for governor, accusing him of violating the law when he did not appeal the original judicial ruling striking down the state's gay marriage ban — and Beshear for letting him.

The crowd and the speakers didn't have kind words for Bunning, either.   One man held a sign that said "Judge Bunning is an abomination."

Flip Benham, an evangelist from North Carolina, praised Bunning's father, former U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning, as a staunch conservative but ended his kind words there.  "His son is working against the will of God," said Benham, who carried a white cap with the name "Jesus" on it. "He's being used by the devil to park Kim here."

These people are clearly crazy.  The only question is that of when some will resort to violence as they fight against modernity itself and anything that threatens the fantasy world in which they live.  

Jailing Kim Davis is a Win for Religious Liberty

As the far right continues to throw conniption fits and spread lies about the myth of Christian persecution in the wake of the jailing of renegade county clerk, a piece in Patheos makes the case that Davis' jailing is in fact a win for religious liberty.  Why?  Because it makes it clear that government officials do not have the right to force their religious beliefs on other citizens.  Sadly, it's a concept beyond the grasp of the Virginia GOP and much of the national Republican Party.  As the piece notes, if the four times married Davis cannot in good conscience issue marriage licenses to same sex couples, she has an easy remedy: resign.  Here are highlights:

It finally happened. On the morning of September 3, 2015, Federal Marshals placed Kim Davis, the
Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to LGBTQ couples, under arrest for contempt of court. Davis had been refusing to issue licenses in her county for weeks, arguing that she shouldn’t be forced to issue licenses to same-sex couples because it violated her Christian faith.

As soon as the news of Davis’s arrest broke, conservative Christians began referring to Davis as a “martyr”, claiming that her arrest crossed the line into persecution because of her Christian faith.

As an evangelical myself, I want to suggest a different perspective than the one many of my other brothers and sisters have been offering. I believe that Kim Davis’s arrest is neither persecution or an impingement on her religious liberties. In fact, I believe her arrest actually strengthens religious liberty nation wide.

Religious Liberty is a concept that is based on the First Amendment of the Constitution which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”  . . . While religious institutions are guaranteed protections against any government regulation or involvement in their religious life, the government is also protected from religious institutions attempt to garner political power over the nation. What this means is that anyone who functions as an agent of the state must remain religiously neutral, providing equal service, treatment, and rights to all people of all religious, ethical, social, and cultural backgrounds.

Kim Davis posed a great threat to the religious liberties of our nation by refusing to carry out her duties as an agent of the state, issuing marriage licenses to all couples, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity. Davis forced her Christian faith on the people of Rowan County, and violated their right to be able to receive equal treatment from the government, regardless of their sexuality, race, religion, or values.

Davis has no right imposing her religious, moral, or political beliefs on any person in her county. Instead, as an agent of the state, she should either do her job neutrally or quit.

The fact that Kim Davis was taken to jail instead of fined is a question of major controversy. Many people believe that this action is too extreme. She should have been fined, many will argue. However, when we consider that Kim Davis has raised thousands of dollars on Indiegogo and has the backing of many extreme right-winged religious and political organizations, it becomes clear that fining her would have done virtually nothing.  

It is not uncommon, in contempt of court cases, for a judge to order jail time. Therefore, Kim’s situation is actually not unique. It’s not extreme. It’s actually quite common. And her imprisonment serves as a warning to those in power who seek to impose their religious beliefs on their constituency. It’s a violation of the foundational principles of our country, and there will be legal consequences.

[T]he reality is that Kim Davis is not being persecuted for her faith, she is reaping the consequences of refusing to do her job as an agent of the state. Davis is welcome to hold her beliefs as tightly as she would like, but when she is at work, she needs to do her job. If her job violates her conscience, then she should quit, because imposing her beliefs on the people of Rowan County is not an option. It’s a violation of one of the highest and most sacred American values: Religious Liberty.  

Very well said!

Birthers, "Trumpists" and the Potential Split of the GOP

As often noted on this blog, some years back, the so-called GOP establishment, including George W. Bush and Karl Rove made the short term political calculation to welcome Christofascists and by extension white supremacists into the Republican Party.  Before that time the religious extremists were typically not voted onto local city and county committees which tended to be controlled by moderates and establishment types.  During my last years on the City Committee for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach I saw this change and witnessed a coup whereby the moderate chairwoman was forced out by early forces of the Christofacists/Tea Party with the help of power hungry opportunists.  It's been a steady downward spiral since that time, both locally and nationally.  Now, that short term opportunism is on the brink of splitting the GOP unless the party sells it soul wholly to the forces of religious extremism and white supremacy.  A column in the Washington Post looks at what is happening:

The story line around Donald Trump’s “rise” has got the narrative wrong. It mistakes the man for the movement. While we do need to reckon with what Trump himself means for U.S. politics, we need to reckon even more urgently with what can now be called the “Trumpists,” a solidly right-wing ethno-nationalist voting bloc that has been growing since the mid-1990s.

What points to this story? The numbers capturing the ebb and flow in the belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim and the crisis over the president’s birth certificate. Those are the ones to watch.

Even after the release of the [Obama's long form] birth certificate, 23 percent of Republicans continued to hold the view that Obama was born overseas. These, I suggest, are your Trump voters. 

Recent polling has in fact confirmed that Trump, a particularly prominent “birther” in 2010 and 2011, is tapping into this constituency. According to Public Policy Polling, 66 percent of his supporters believe Obama is Muslim and 61 percent think he was not born in the United States. 

The Trumpists are our equivalent of Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) and France’s National Front, both anti-immigrant, nationalist parties. . . . The critical difference between our nationalist faction and the European ones is that their parliamentary systems register them as “parties,” whereas our two-party model makes it harder to see that what we’re confronting truly is the rise of a new party. Provided, that is, the Republicans don’t sell their souls.

If the Republicans can hang on to the convictions that make them the party of Lincoln, we ought to see the party split. For the good of the country, we should hope for it.

Two larger shifts in our sociopolitical landscape provide the framework necessary for understanding the Trumpists.

First, there is the dramatic movement of the United States toward becoming a majority-minority country, where no ethnic group is in the majority. . . . It is unsurprising that our clear movement in this direction should provoke resistance from those whose well-being, status and self-esteem are connected to historical privileges of “whiteness.”

Second, there is the Internet. Digital communications technologies have plainly enabled geographically dispersed people with niche interests to find one another and form communities.  . . . the first uses of the Internet to build political solidarity among those with fringe political interests emerged on the right. The Drudge Report started in 1994 and Free Republic in 1996.

The real story, then, is not about this or that candidate but about precisely how the realignment of U.S. public opinion away from the two major political parties will shake out and about who or what the major parties will sell down the river while trying to save themselves as the “big tents” they need to be to win elections. And the burning question inside this story is whether our two-party system can survive the digital era. Or, perhaps better, how to ensure that it doesn’t so that we can save our center-right party, the Republicans, for the center.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Evengelical Propaganda - the "Museum of the Bible"

While Syrian children are dying while fleeing civil war and religious extremism, American evangelicals - in particular, the founders of Hobby Lobby - are squandering millions of dollars building a massive propaganda vehicle in Washington, D.C., just a short way south of the National Mall.  For me, it's a symbol of the misplace values of the "godly folk" whose only real agenda is to force their childish beliefs on all of us whether we like it or not.  For these folks, the Gospel message of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless doesn't exist.  Instead, the engage in conduct that makes the Pharisees of the Bible sound upright and the height of morality.  The Washington Post looks at this travesty being built in the nation's capital.  Here are excerpts:

To many in the scholarly community, the museum seems like an oversize piece of evangelical claptrap. Some academics and curators also worry about the origins of its collection — the more than 40,000 biblical artifacts were amassed in a remarkably short time by Hobby Lobby President Steve Green.

Why did Green want to turn his private collection into a museum? A number of academics have questioned his family’s motives. “I don’t expect the Bible Museum to be anything other than a tax-deductible kitsch attempt at spreading Christian fundamentalist propaganda,” archaeologist Dorothy King said. In an interview with NPR, Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University, questioned the location of the museum, two blocks south of the Mall, where it might overlook periodic rallies opposing abortion or same-sex marriage, offering brick-and-mortar moral support to conservative causes. Sarah Posner concurred, writing in Talking Points Memo: “The museum will be a living, breathing testament to how American evangelicalism can at once claim it is under siege from secularists, the LGBT rights movement, or feminism — yet also boast of acquiring a prime private perch, strategically located at the nation’s epicenter of law and politics.”  

There also have been questions about what approach to the Bible the museum will take. Green has promoted a public school curriculum based on the Bible as a factual historical text. Another ideological red flag: Museum President Cary Summers consulted for the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which teaches creationism as fact, with didactic material showing dinosaurs and humans living side by side on a 6,000-year-old planet Earth. The Summers link has prompted unflattering comparisons of the two museums.

The Green family’s initial public line on the Museum of the Bible seemed to confirm some of the concerns. The museum’s 501(c)(3) filing in 2011 declared that its mission would be “to bring to life the living Word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.”

Beyond the possible motives for the Museum of the Bible, some scholars question the collection itself. Green began spending heavily on it in 2009. He had amassed more than 30,000 items by June 2010 and has added 10,000 more since.

That 40,000 number, however, is suspicious to Roberta Mazza, a leading scholar and professor at University of Manchester in Britain. The UNESCO convention controls the export of antiquities and makes it bureaucratically difficult to legally sell abroad objects that were excavated after 1970. Mazza wonders how Green managed to collect so much “in such a brief period of time and in the context, in theory, of a strictly regulated antiquities market?” 

Heightening their skepticism, Mazza and other scholars identified one item in the Green Collection — a Coptic papyrus fragment with lines from Galatians 2 — that was once advertised on eBay by a seller who was later banned from the site for allegedly selling looted antiquities.

Apparently mindful of skeptics, the Greens hired David Trobisch, a prominent liberal academic, to head its collection.  If Trobisch doesn't sell his soul for money, then the museum will document that there is no "official version" of the Bible and that the text was re-written at will over the centuries after first being authored by ignorant goat and sheep herders in the case of the Old Testament.  If done right, the museum would show that the Bible is anything but the "inerrant word of god."  I suspect, however, that this is not the Greens' agenda to tell the truth.  Propaganda is the real goal, in my view.

Syrian Refugees - The Moral Failure of the World

There is plenty of blame to go around in terms of who is responsible for the plight and needless deaths of Syrian refugees fleeing civil war and/or religious extremism in the form of ISIS.   That blame extends to world leaders - especially those of the Gulf nations - and to other religious leaders of other faiths.  Here in America, conservative Christians have spent - and continue to spend - millions of dollars to deprive LGBT Americans while pushing a form of religious extremism not far different than that of ISIS except for the level of violence and willingness to commit murder to further one's religious agenda (something Christians did with a vengeance in past eras).  As a column in the New York Times much of the moral bankruptcy in the west is a refusal to have empathy for those who have a different skin color, hold a different faith, and have different customs.  

In my own case, my grandmother's ancestors were French Arcadians who settled in New Orleans after being thrown out of Canada by the British. My father's parents left Austria-Hungry on the eve of World War I.  Other ancestors  fled Ireland during the hard years of the Potato Famine and its aftermath.  Other than Native Americans, every one of us traces our ancestry back to either immigrants or refugees.  How often we forget that but for a fluke of birth, we could be among the refugees now trying to find refuge in Europe and elsewhere.  This is a reality the lunatics of the GOP base and Tea Party ignore.

Here are highlights from the Times column:

WATCHING the horrific images of Syrian refugees struggling toward safety — or in the case of Aylan Kurdi, 3, drowning on that journey — I think of other refugees. Albert Einstein. Madeleine Albright. The Dalai Lama.

And my dad.

In the aftermath of World War II, my father swam the Danube River to flee Romania and become part of a tide of refugees that nobody much cared about. Fortunately, a family in Portland, Ore., sponsored his way to the United States, making this column possible.

If you don’t see yourself or your family members in those images of today’s refugees, you need an empathy transplant.

Aylan’s death reflected a systematic failure of world leadership, from Arab capitals to European ones, from Moscow to Washington. This failure occurred at three levels:

■ The Syrian civil war has dragged on for four years now, taking almost 200,000 lives, without serious efforts to stop the bombings. Creating a safe zone would at least allow Syrians to remain in the country.

■ As millions of Syrian refugees swamped surrounding countries, the world shrugged. United Nations aid requests for Syrian refugees are only 41 percent funded, and the World Food Program was recently forced to slash its food allocation for refugees in Lebanon to just $13.50 per person a month. Half of Syrian refugee children are unable to go to school. So of course loving parents strike out for Europe.

■ Driven by xenophobia and demagogy, some Europeans have done their best to stigmatize refugees and hamper their journeys.

António Guterres, the head of the U.N. refugee agency, said the crisis was in part “a failure of leadership worldwide.”

“This is not a massive invasion,” he said, noting that about 4,000 people are arriving daily in a continent with more than half a billion inhabitants. “This is manageable, if there is political commitment and will.”

We all know that the world failed refugees in the run-up to World War II. The U.S. refused to allow Jewish refugees to disembark from a ship, the St. Louis, that had reached Miami. The ship returned to Europe, and some passengers died in the Holocaust.

Aylan, who had relatives in Canada who wanted to give him a home, found no port. He died on our watch.

Bravo in particular to Icelanders, who on Facebook have been volunteering to pay for the flights of Syrian refugees and then put them up in their homes. Thousands of Icelanders have backed this effort, under the slogan “Just because it isn’t happening here doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

Then there are the Persian Gulf countries. Amnesty International reports that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates haven’t accepted a single Syrian refugee (although they have allowed Syrians to stay without formal refugee status). Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s bombings of Yemen have only added to the global refugee crisis.

We Americans may be tempted to pat ourselves on the back. But the U.S. has accepted only about 1,500 Syrian refugees since the war began

There has been a vigorous public debate about whether the photo of Aylan’s drowned body should be shown by news organizations. But the real atrocity isn’t the photo but the death itself — and our ongoing moral failure to save the lives of children like Aylan.