July 31, 2008
Liberal Christians, I’m not talking to you here. You’re welcome to read along, but if you feel your hackles rising, remember that I’m speaking directly to the Radical Religious Right. Granted, I’m a little irked that you’re not taking them to task as loudly and frequently as we godless heathens do (and if you are, I can’t hear you above the din, so speak up!), but I understand your belief that emulating Jesus means you’re not supposed to judge anyone else. Well, as I just said in a comment (to a post you really should read) on my better half’s blog: Even The Ultimate Pacifist overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the temple.
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They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it: the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.
Fritz Stern
The Politics of Cultural Despair:
A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology
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Dear Gay-Disdaining, Liberal-Loathing, War-Loving, Fox-News-Watching, Republican-Voting Dittohead Christians:
About that Jim Adkisson shooting up the Unitarian church: Seems y’all are having a bit of a struggle with cognitive dissonance lately, and I’m going to set you straight (so to speak).
First, let’s see what you righties have been saying about the tragedy over the past few days. I’ve touched on the initial wrong-o reaction (“An atheist did it! An atheist did it! An evil atheist attacked a Christian church!”) already, here. Of course, you changed your tune as soon as you learned that the shooter was raised in one of your hardcore-fundy, Christian churches; only then did you start crying that Unitarian Universalism isn’t a “real church” — as if you have the right to decide what is a “real church” and what isn’t, and as if that had anything whatsoever to with Adkisson’s actions.
“Now,” muses Fannie, “am I the only one having trouble connecting the dots between how noting this ‘fact’ is in any way relevant to noting that the shooting was heinous?
“But alas, this odd juxtaposition goes along the lines of ‘Now, I don’t condone this killer’s actions, but can I just say that Unitarians are NOT real Christians!’ Okay, neat-o. Like, you just had to throw that passive-aggressive little FYI in there for shits and giggles?”
Lori Heine manages to sort it all out, and then asks the obvious question: “Which is it, dimwits? Is it a hate crime because Christians have been brutalized and murdered, or is it not a crime at all because they weren’t ‘real’ Christians?”
I’ve even seen some of you zero in on the fact that a (gasp!) secular children’s musical was being performed inside a church (never mind that you don’t think TVUU is a “real” church), and on a Sunday, no less…!
Good God, you righties are just scrambling for any reason to escape accountability, aren’t you?
Next, you turned to attacking liberals for pointing out that Adkisson is a soldier in the Culture Wars your leaders invented, and which you perpetuate, that led him to this monstrous act of violence — and, frankly, you lied, to yourselves and to everyone within earshot, to find a little shaky comfort through the most convoluted hoop-jumping ever: You say liberals are happy to see human beings dead or traumatized for life (gee, that sounds familiar), because it gives us the opportunity to demonize you, which, among other things, is completely unfair, since this was an isolated incident of a single, whacked-out right-winger attacking liberals and gays.
First of all, boys and girls, nobody on the left is politicizing it; we’ve been warning you since the rise of your Limbaughs and your Coulters and your Savages that words have consequences — and now we’re saying, “We told you so,” and demanding you face the truth, and do something to stop it, damn it!
As Melissa McEwan put it so succintly, “this shit doesn’t happen in a void.”
And you know it.
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Metaphors of war and sex saturate the readings. [D. James] Kennedy says that the primary task of Christians is to recruit “soldiers in the army of Jesus Christ who are absent without official leave (AWOL).” He speaks of himself and other pastors as generals or admirals and of evangelists as soldiers. And he warns that it is Satan who convinces believers not to take part in the battle.
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You, O Martyrs of the Faith, gnash your teeth and rend your garments as you wail about the shocking displays of homosexual behavior in the streets (uh, yeah, we’re all just having sex on the streets, everywhere) influencing your precious children. You’re terrified that seeing two men holding hands is going to turn little Junior into a flaming fruitcake — which you know, damned well, is nothing but empty fearmongering (and so what if Junior were gay? which he could very well be already, with no “help” from us) — yet you won’t take responsibility for the consequences of the 24/7 hate-a-thon that rains down from your pulpits and from your airwaves. If you didn’t think — know — the power, the influence, you hold over your frightened sheep, you’d shut down your cable stations, cancel your book tours, and go find another way to bilk the gullible.
How is it we queers, just by being who we are and minding our own business, have the power to bring down all of civilization, yet you insist that your deliberate liberal- and gay-bashing has no influence whatsoever on your target audience?
Wayne Besen has you pegged:
What I find hypocritical is that the Religious Right will take any image it deems gay and claim it “promotes homosexuality.” This even extends to fictional characters such as Tinky Winky and Sponge Bob Square Pants. Yet, these same oversensitive preachers refuse to acknowledge that their mean-spirited sermons might lead to violence.
The extreme right fuels anti-gay ugliness, but it is pervasive all around us. …
We live in a society filled with violently homophobic messages and images, yet the perpetrators — both religious and secular — feign innocence and say they can’t imagine how anti-gay hate crimes occur.
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Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission — both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state — especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.
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You, O Most Holy and Self-Righteous Righties, have been screaming nonstop, for decades, about the negative effect of violent movies and TV shows and video games, and heavy metal music, on young people — while glorifying “Christian” gorefests like Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (a.k.a. Good Friday the 13th, a.k.a. The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre), in which the sadomasochistic, pornified depiction of your savior being lashed into bloody, ground hamburger for two hours had you shuddering in orgasmic ecstasy, and remaining conspicuously silent about such “Christian” video games as Left Behind: Eternal Forces (whose end-message — convert or die — appears little different from the Global Islamic Media Front’s Quest for Bush) and Catechumen, and pseudo-religious games as Halo.
According to you, secular video games caused the Columbine massacre, but your kill-the-godless-heathens games couldn’t possibly inspire violence, because, well, gee, they’re Christian!
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“[Left Behind: Eternal Forces] represents faith-based killing. It’s a manual for religious violence that’s being given to children.”
Rev. Tim Simpson
Christian Alliance for Progress
“In the war of good versus evil, based loosely on the biblical book of Revelation, a player tries to recruit others in order to fight the enemy of non-believers. Prayer after killing the opposition will essentially redeem you.”
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This kind of “entertainment” is only a natural outgrowth of a mindset based on four factors:
1. A crevice of utter despair and hopelessness that makes one susceptible to “rescue” by an institution that promises redemption;
2. Group identity that ceases to exist without a clearly defined enemy;
3. Perpetual self-victimization and pride in suffering;
4. Glorification of war-as-religion (i.e., “Christian warriors,” the “battle” for souls).
Next, keep repeating the lie that the United States is a “Christian nation”:
“It is my firm belief,” writes some anonymous believer, echoing the oft-repeated sentiment of the Dobsons and the Robertsons and the Falwells, “that The United States Of America is in fact a Christian nation. By the term ‘a Christian nation’ I do not mean that this is a nations of only Christians or that everything about this nation is Christian. It is a nation specifically created by God to declare Christ to the world. The only other nation created for this purpose is the nation of Israel.”
“I know,” proclaimeth ex-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay earlier this month, “that America was created by God and it was created by God, not for wealth, personal wealth. It wasn’t created by God so that we would have the resources that we now have. It wasn’t even created by God to have the freedom that we have now. America was created by God to spread the Gospel; to spread the word of Jesus Christ and to propagate Christianity. And the reason I know that is because my entire political career is exhibited by that. The Lord walked with me … I came to Christ in the first year in Congress and now I’ve been walking with the Lord [and] he has trained me and showed me why he created this nation: to spread the Gospel.”
Next, morph patriotism into nationalism (”The difference between patriotism and nationalism,” wrote Sydney J. Harris, “is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war”), and now “defending” one’s country against an imagined enemy within is indistinguishable from “defending” the Kingdom of God itself.
Finally, throw into the mix a bunch of media whores who have figured out that capitalizing on this victim-turned-warrior mindset provides a very good living, unleash the whole putrid mess on the malleable brain of a man wrought by despair, and you’ve got all the makings of one Jim David Adkisson.
Still, notes Brave New Films:
The right has already begun and will continue to claim that Adkisson is just a crazy nut, is not really a conservative (or is actually a liberal), that his stated motive of carrying out right-wing ideology means nothing, and that it is “inappropriate” to discuss politics in relation to such a heinous crime. But they are wrong on all counts. While Adkisson’s money problems surely caused him to snap, it was the words of the right’s loudest voices and brightest stars that gave him the justification for his rampage. Some quick Google searches turned up these quotes from prominent right-wingers:
“I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo — every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress.” — Sean Hannity
“To fight only the al-Qaeda scum is to miss the terrorist network operating within our own borders… Who are these traitors? Every rotten radical left-winger in this country, that’s who.” — Michael Savage
“Liberalism is the greatest threat this country faces.” — Rush Limbaugh
“It is not a stretch to say that MoveOn is the new Klan.” — Bill O’Reilly
“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could.” — Glenn Beck
“We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too.” — Ann Coulter
“I don’t see any difference between [Arianna] Huffington and the Nazis.” — Bill O’Reilly
“The Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats. Islamofascists from Ahmadinejad to al-Zawahiri, Oba — Osama bin Laden, whoever, are constantly issuing Democrat talking points.” — Rush Limbaugh
“There are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of ‘em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn’t become the [House] speaker.” — Sean Hannity
Obviously, this merely scratches the surface of what issues daily from the mouths and keyboards of right-wing pundits. …
Let’s just call this what it is: the right wing openly, proudly, loudly, and repeatedly advocates violence against liberals and Democrats. In fact, they are paid millions to do it and are given national platforms to spread their message. You cannot say that liberals and Democrats actively and purposefully want to destroy the United States and equate them with Nazis, Al-Qaeda, and the Ku Klux Klan, then claim that you don’t want them to get hurt.
Now the right will claim that it is the left that is hateful and violent and that the left is “just as bad” or worse. To that I say: Prove It.
“Demagoging has consequences,” writes Myca. “Appealing to hate and bigotry creates more hate and bigotry. It creates riots. It creates vandalism. It creates murder.
“We have a president who campaigned for governor on the promise that in his administration, consensual sex between adult males would be considered a crime. We have an entire political party that sees nothing wrong with the idea that in the year 2008, gay people in most states still aren’t allowed to marry the people they love. We have respected (well, Jonah Goldberg, so maybe not respected, but tolerated) conservative pundits who apparently in all seriousness believe that Adolf Hitler was a liberal.
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“I tell people don’t kill all the liberals.
“Leave enough so we can have two on every campus — living fossils — so we will never forget what these people stood for.”
Rush Limbaugh
Denver Post
December 29, 1995
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“Do I think that they actually believe this? Sometimes, sure. Sometimes not. It doesn’t matter.
“As surely as I lay the Little Rock riots at the feet of Orval Faubus, I lay the assault on this church at the feet of those who have claimed that gay marriage would destroy western civilization and those who equate liberals with Nazis.
“See, it turns out that when you said all that shit … people were listening. Jim D. Adkisson was listening.”
That’s not so hard to understand. It is tough to admit it, I’m sure — but that’s just too bad. You have to face it, and you have to stop the spread of this poison that created the cancer in Jim David Adkisson — or by your silence, and your shirking of responsibility like a scared child, you will only be condoning Adkisson’s actions, and confirming that all conservatives really are like that.
No, not all conservatives are really like that. But this one, this Adkisson, this Frankenstein’s monster of the Far Right movement — he’s yours, righties. You own what he did. You own him. He is your baby.
Now, let’s turn to this blatant lie of yours that the Tennessee church shooting was an isolated incident.
As I wrote two days ago, if there’s ever been an atheist who ran around shooting at Christians, I can’t name him.
But I cannot begin to count the number of religion-”inspired” killers who’ve taken out scads of gay people and liberals — and African-Americans (Sara Whitman can think of no better parallel than the 16th Street Baptist Street Bombing, and neither can I), whether they were liberal or conservative (the AA’s crime being, of course, that they were “different” from the killer[s]).
I’ve already read down a very abbreviated laundry list of killers “inspired” by the words of religious leaders and pop pundits, but some of you righties keep inisting that Adkisson was an isolated lunatic, that “real Christians” and “real conservatives” don’t do such things, that you would never “blame the innocent for the actions of one man” (yes, I’m talking to you, Russ Knight) — and that liberals and queers aren’t targeted one-bazillionth as often as you poor, little persecuted martyrs for Jesus.
Jim Wallis proffers: “While many evangelicals celebrated Cassie Bernall and Rachel Scott as martyrs who died for their Christian convictions at Columbine High School, I wonder if we will extend the same heroism to the victims in Tennessee?”
I doubt it.*
Let me tell you another story. As with the Unitarian tragedy, there was no outcry from conservative Christians — even those these victims were, without a doubt, Christians themselves.
I wrote this post for the now-gone Lavender Liberal Forums in the wake of the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech Massacre:
If all the victims had been gay, nobody would care.
No, I am not being facetious.
I am deeply disturbed by any loss of life. The number of dead doesn’t matter; 2,800-plus dead on 9/11 is no greater a loss than 32 dead at Virginia Tech, which is no greater a loss than even a single, nameless corpse dumped in an alley. The "death rate" is 100% in all cases.
I’ve had some time to react to yesterday’s shootings. I’m in flashback mode, to the 101 California Street massacre, and even all the way back to Charles Whitman. There is no question that my mood is more than somber tonight.
Oddly, I almost, somehow, feel worse that this happened in Virginia. Oh, I hate the Commonwealth of Virginia with a passion that nearly matches the hate the Commonwealth of Virginia has for me. But there’s a difference between hating a government and hating a people. I’ve been to Virginia. I have friends in Virginia. Hell, [X] is in Virginia. And my dear, sweet, dead Scottie was in Virginia — until Virginia killed him.
But I almost feel like… Everybody expects this sort of shit to go down in California — or Texas. We have the greatest number of psychos simply because we have the greatest number of everybody, and everything. We’ll never grow accustomed to our mass murderers (and serial killers), but it always seemed that’s just the way it was. (One thing we are used to — most of us, anyway, even if we do a slow burn over it — is the ridicule we get from the rest of the country. But I always figured that was just another price to pay for living in near-paradise.)
There’s no question I’m grieving for the families of the dead tonight. You pay a big price for being empathic — and I mean empathic to the point that, when somebody tells you their ulcer is bothering them, your solar plexis starts to ache. So I’m feeling like I just lost somebody close to me, regardless of who any of these people were, or how they died. Neither "who" nor "how" seems to matter, outside the sudden-shock factor; dead is dead.
That said, there’s something else that’s troubling me deeply tonight: The sure knowledge that if 32 queers had been massacred yesterday, it would have made the news — but hardly anybody would have given a damn. Not like they’re doing now. You wouldn’t see the outpouring of sympathy, and horror, you are seeing everywhere right now.
How can I say such a thing? Am I playing victim here? Have I descended into the very stereotype of the self-centered queer who doesn’t give a fuck about anything unless it affects me directly?
Those of you who have known me for more than five minutes know better than that.
No, what bothers me so is this: They’re calling it the worst massacre in U.S. history.
It’s not. Unless the fatality count rises to 33, it’s a tie.
And I’ll bet no one reading this can tell me, without some Googling, what yesterday’s death toll ties with.
So I’ll tell you.
In 1973, the New Orleans-based "Mother Church" of the then-fledgling Metropolitan Community Church, without a facility of its own, held regular, Sunday-evening services in an upstairs lounge — a space called, as you might expect, the "Upstairs Lounge" — on the floor above the Jimani Lounge, a French-Quarter bar at 141 Chartres Street.
On the evening of June 24, 1973, the pastor, Rev. William Lawson, had just finished his sermon, when someone entered the building at street level and lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the stairway leading to the Upstairs Lounge. The perp ran off — but not before making sure to shut the street-level door… and padlock it shut.
The flames were contained to the stairwell until someone leaving the MCC service (perhaps just leaving to go home, perhaps alarmed by a noise — no one will ever know) opened the door to the Upstairs Lounge where the church service had just ended.
Do you know what a flash fire is?
Some twenty people escaped via the rooftop — how they did, I don’t know. The rest tried to make it out the second-floor windows, but were trapped; the windows were barred.
Reverend Lawson died that way, his body wedged half-in and half-out of the building, screaming as he burned to death.
It took just 16 minutes — although, I expect that, if those who died in the World Trade Center could talk, they would tell you even 30 seconds is an eternity in hell when faced with burning to death — for the fire to envelope and roast alive the remaining worshippers.
The bitter irony? Yesterday marked the "worst massacre in U.S. history," with 32 people dead at the hands of one assassin.
How many people do you think burned to death that evening in 1973 at the hands of a single assassin?
Thirty-two.
The Virginia Tech massacre was not the worst in U.S. history. It only tied the previous record.
But nobody knows about what happened one sultry summer evening in New Orleans.
What’s worse, I suspect nobody but us gives a goddamn.
Epilogue
Of course, MCC founder Rev. Troy Perry went to NOLA immediately. Every other Christian church in New Orleans — save only two — refused to allow Troy to conduct memorial services for the dead believers.
And all but the same two refused to take in — much less comfort — the 20 or so MCC survivors who desperately needed a place to congregate, and worship together, and search for a reason this happened.
And several (I do not know how many, but "several") families of the dead refused to claim the bodies of their relatives, as "exposure" was a far more horrifying thought than the visual of their "loved ones" burning alive.
That’s how ashamed they were of their filthy, disgusting, faggot sons and brothers, and dyke daughters and sisters.
In the years following the Upstairs Lounge fire, some 17 more MCC churches were set ablaze, including the church in San Francisco (on Guerrero Street, for my neighbors).
The only thought that crosses my mind tonight is:
Why didn’t anyone care then?
Because they weren’t your people, that’s why.
As for the question of who did it — who knows?
You can bet that silver crucifix around your neck it wasn’t somebody who loved his gay neighbors as himself — but the real point is: What happened on Sunday was not an isolated incident. What happened 35 years ago in New Orleans was the worst massacre of gay people in modern times, but it was not an isolated incident. You didn’t know about it because you just don’t care when the victims aren’t your people.
And some of you are downright delighted when we get beaten or murdered.
And you can take the shameful rejection of the bodies — and the survivors — by the “traditional” churches in New Orleans as evidence of just how far your “Christian love” extends.
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Reagan had learned that political activists had reportedly been sending letters and DVDs to troops in Iraq, advancing the theory that the U.S. government had carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. For promoting this unpopular view, the talkshow host advocated that these activists should be killed as “traitors”:
“We ought to find the people who are doing this, take them out and shoot them. Really. You take them out, they are traitors to this country, and shoot them. You have a problem with that? Deal with it. You shoot them. You call them traitors, that’s what they are, and you shoot them dead. I’ll pay for the bullets.”
Even more troubling was the call for violence against a specific individual:
“How about you take Mark Dice out and put him in the middle of a firing range. Tie him to a post, don’t blindfold him, let it rip and have some fun with Mark Dice.”
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No wonder Gene Robinson needs a bodyguard and bulletproof vest.
. . . . .
* Steven Hart also reminds us: “When Susan Smith drowned her little boys in South Carolina, when the halls of Columbine High School ran red with blood and when a vicious freak shot down students on the Virginia Tech campus, the smoke barely had time to clear before Newt Gingrich waddled in front of the nearest television camera to announce that liberalism was the root cause of each horror.”
I certainly remember what Gingrich said at the time of the Smith child murders: “I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. … The only way to change is to vote Republican.”
The highest irony of all was that Susan Smith’s stepfather, Beverly Russell — who carried on a nine-year “consensual” sexual relationship with Smith — was a prominent South Carolina Republican Party leader, and Christian Coalition coordinator.
Further reading:
Right-Wing Pathologies Revealed After Adkisson Shooting at Unitarian Church
John Dolan, AlterNet, July 29, 2008
Why It Matters That O’Reilly’s Book Was in Adkisson’s Home
Jeffrey Feldman, DailyKos, July 30, 2008
Hate speech on display: Lesson we must learn
Anniston Star, July 31, 2008
Our beliefs are empirically correct and true, until someone acts on them
Dymaxion World, July 31, 2008
The Straw Liberal and the Knoxville Church Shootings
The Vanity Press, July 31, 2008
Posted by: Sapphocrat
Filed under:
Hate Crimes,
Hate Speech,
Homophobia,
LGBT History,
Media,
Race/Ethnic Issues,
Radical Religious Right
It’s no different in California — and it’s wrong:
Big money driving Ariz. ballot initiatives
So much for the “citizens” with this year’s batch of citizens initiatives.
For most of the nine initiatives planned for the November ballot, financial backing from individual donors has been scarce. The money has flowed almost exclusively from corporations, political committees and a relative handful of wealthy individuals. …
Initiative representatives counter that the disparity in campaign donations among business interests, political committees and regular Arizonans is nothing new.
But the divide is so pronounced this election cycle that it raises the question of whether Arizona’s direct democracy has become little more than a legislative vehicle for wealthy special interests. …
Bonita Burks had hoped to qualify for the ballot new state restrictions on motorists’ use of mobile phones while driving. But despite a series of high-profile accidents that focused public awareness on the issue, her petition drive stalled long before it collected the 153,000 valid signatures it needed. Some of that she attributes to a lack of campaign funding that forced her to rely on volunteer, rather than paid, signature gatherers.
“It made it difficult,” said Burks, whose Safer Road Arizona campaign reported just $1,050 in total donations. “Although it is a very important issue and I’m very passionate about it, we just didn’t have the dollars to make it happen this year.”
Even with a throng of volunteer signature gatherers, border-security activist Don Goldwater, too, failed to make the ballot with either of his immigration proposals.
“In the history of the state of Arizona, no citizens initiative has ever been done without paid signature gatherers,” Goldwater said. “If you’ve got the bucks, you can get the initiative on the ballot.” …
Stan Barnes isn’t too worried about where the money comes from for his Payday Loan Reform Act. The key is that it’s there. And it’s big.
“We’re not even trying to collect money from Arizonans who are not connected in some way to the payday-lending industry,” said Barnes, a lobbyist representing the campaign. …
I know money is power in this country, but that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Currently in the midst of untangling the vast web of connections among the big-money donors — most of whom are out-of-state special interest groups with deep pockets — behind Proposition 8, California’s anti-marriage initiative, it’s clear to me that as soon as we win this battle, we need to work on stricter regulations regarding ballot initiatives in the initiative-crazy Golden State: who can donate, and how much — as well as additional reporting from 501c(3) organizations which take full advantage of their non-profit status to escape scrutiny.
We also need to make the names of all petition signers public — not for any nefarious means, such as harrassment, but to guard against fraud. It was only after KnowThyNeighbor.org published, online, the names on the 2005 anti-gay marriage petition in Massachusetts did some “signers” learn that they were victims of fraud.*
How many of the million-plus “signers” to the Proposition 8 petition were tricked into thinking they were signing an entirely different petition? How many signatures were forged? We’ll never know, as long as the State of California does not release this information to the public.
Finally, we need to put an end to what can only be called frivolous ballot measures. Did you know that Californians are being forced to vote on the same “parental notification” issue for the third time in two years — after sending the previous two propositions to resounding defeat?
As Proposition 8 itself goes, it will go down in flames — but you can bet that it will resurface in a new form every election cycle, for as long as the Radical Right has the money to keep putting it back on the ballot.
Voter initiatives in California have become a joke — and are in no way voter initiatives; as in Arizona, our “direct democracy” has indeed become nothing more than “a legislative vehicle for wealthy special interests.”
* Just a few examples of Massachusetts voters surprised — and outraged — to find their names on the anti-marriage petition:
Petition signer was misled
Last week my son told me that he’d just seen a list of those who’d signed the anti-gay marriage petition … I was surprised that my name was on the list. My daughter and her girlfriend, of 22 years, married in June of 2004. My family is 100 percent pro gay marriage. … The Web site states that thousands of signers may have been duped into signing, as I was. …
Residents charge petition fraud
Beverly resident Leslie Leathersich never signs petitions as a matter of personal principle, so imagine her surprise when a friend asked why she had signed a petition to change the state Constitution and ban same-sex marriage. … Leathersich joins five other Beverly residents who have filed affidavits saying their signatures were obtained fraudulently on the petition to change the state Constitution and ban same-sex marriage. …
Official denies signing petition
NORTHAMPTON - After a fruitless attempt to locate a petition that supposedly bears his signature supporting a ballot question to bar gay marriage, At-Large City Councilor James M. Dostal said yesterday he will concentrate his efforts on having his name removed from that list. …
Posted by: Sapphocrat
Filed under:
California,
Civil Rights,
Election 2008,
Marriage Equality,
Massachusetts,
Proposition 8
I’m going to do something out of character: post a number of items without comment (don’t faint!), save for a brief explanation to put in context a piece I wrote more than a year ago.
All of the following relates to the mass shooting Sunday at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, the speed (and relish) with which right-wingers jumped to the very wrong conclusion that the shooter was a Christian-hating atheist, and the revelation that the shooter’s real targets were liberals and gay people.
First up: For several days in May of 2007, DemocraticUnderground.com was ablaze over the news of the death of Jerry Falwell. As you might expect, there was some unabashed celebration here and there, but far more expressions of sheer relief, as well as complete ambivalence.
There was an equal (if not greater) number of pleas to stop what was perceived as “grave dancing.” Many such pleas were fraught with hyperbole, and yours truly finally got sick of being told how the only appropriate reaction was faux grief — and if that wasn’t possible, then we should all simply refrain from speaking ill of the dead (or: “If you don’t have anything nice to say…”)
I stayed out of the DU Falwell Wars, until I saw a post titled “Falwell hatred issue: It is about Civility. We need civility in a just society,” which contained this chiding admonition:
If we are going to build a better society, WE MUST HAVE A PLACE FOR CIVILITY. Destructive anger, which is basically what I think we are allowing to get the better of us, is not something that is consistant with making a Just and Progressive society. Destructive anger derails Democracy. It inflates and kills communication. It is human and happens, but it is a root of violence and is not healthy.
My response (which other DUers encouraged me to post in its own thread):
“Destructive anger”
“Destructive anger” is shooting two men to death as they sleep in their bed, and saying the only thing you’re sorry for is that you didn’t inspire more people to emulate you — since, after all, you’re not guilty of a crime, but only of “obeying the laws of the Creator.” (1)
“Destructive anger” is killing three people and injuring 150 more by bombing abortion clinics, lesbian bars, and the Olympics, because Jesus would condone “militant action in defense of the innocent.” (2)
“Destructive anger” is murdering at least 11 people, most of them gay, because “According to the Bible, homosexuals must die because they will never enter the kingdom of God.” (3)
Where do you think people get such ideas? Who do you think “inspires” them?
Preachers who teach that satanism, Nazism, and homosexuality all go together? (4)
Preachers who teach that “God hates fags,” and that God is killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq because America tolerates homosexuals (oh, and by the way, “Thank God for IEDs!”)? (5)
Preachers who teach that killing abortion providers is “justifiable homicide,” and that “sodomy is a graver sin than murder”? (6)
Preachers who teach that gays, lesbians, abortionists and other “sinners” were personally responsible for 9/11? Or that AIDS is not God’s punishment for homosexuals, but “for the society that tolerates homosexuals”? Or who warns that “If we do not act now, homosexuals will own America”? (7)
“Pro-family,” “pro-life” organizations (8) that continue to perpetuate the ravings of a universally-discredited psychologist (9) who advocates castration for all gay men? And tattooing, forced quarantine, and banishment to Molokai for all AIDS patients? And who once opined: “‘Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals”?
Religious leaders who call gay people “objectively disordered” and “intrinsically evil”? (10)
Preachers, syndicated columnists, and TV and radio commentators who insist that there is no such thing as a “hate crime,” and that it is in fact the Christians who are being persecuted… by “the gays”? (11) That “homosexual activists” are doing to “people of faith” the very same thing “Hitler began to build against the Jews”? (12)
The day Ellen DeGeneres brainwashes millions of gay people to into believing that heterosexuals are an immoral, degenerate, biologically-inferior subspecies whose very existence is a threat to the salvation of our souls — and when heterosexuals start losing their jobs, their homes, their civil rights, and their lives because of it — then you can lecture me about “destructive anger.”
Nobody killed Jerry Falwell. But Jerry Falwell killed millions of us — without spilling a single drop of blood on his own hands. His legacy is not one of faith, but of “destructive anger” and death — and it is a legacy which will last long after my bones, and yours, and the bones of your grandchildren, have turned to dust.
Until you understand that, you will never understand why many of us were relieved upon awakening two mornings ago to discover a world we were no longer forced to share with the one man responsible for coalescing such a diverse group of hysterical haters into a vast, indomitable force, for giving them an unassailable excuse for hating us, and for inspiring so many to dominate us, persecute us, beat us, murder us, drive us out of our homes, and attempt to legislate us out of existence.
Until you understand that, you understand nothing about “destructive anger.”
1 ) Benjamin Williams
2 ) Eric Rudolph
3 ) “Railway Killer” Angel Maturino Resendiz
4 ) Pat Robertson
5 ) Fred Phelps
6 ) Fr. David Trosch
7 ) Jerry Falwell
8 ) Family Research Council, American Family Association, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, NARTH, Claremont Institute, Colorado for Family Values, Traditional Values Coalition, and many others
9 ) Dr. Paul Cameron
10 ) Pope Benedict XVI
11 ) Far too many to list
12 ) Rev. Lou Sheldon
With that, I’ll leave you to these writers, all of whom have something important to say. I encourage you to click every link, and read every word.
Who really killed those Unitarians? Was it the preachers who spread hatred and intolerance? The politicians who court and flatter them instead of condemning their hate speech? The media machine that attacks liberals, calls them “traitors” and suggests you speak to them “with a baseball bat”? The economic system that batters people like Jim Adkinson until they snap, then tells them their real enemies are gays and liberals and secular humanists?
If you ask me, it was all of the above.
You killed them, Pat Robertson. You killed them, Pastor Hagee. You killed them, Ann Coulter. You killed them, Dick Morris and Sean Hannity and the rest of you at Fox News.
The shooting began while the children of the church were putting on a musical based on “Annie.” One broad-shouldered church member blocked the bullets from hitting other people, and died. You don’t need to believe in dogma to be a hero. Remember that song from “Annie”? It probably got on your nerves like it got on mine. “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”
The sun coming out. That’s natural. It’s one with the blowing clover and the falling rain. But a man driven insane, then programmed by society to kill people just because they’re loving and tolerant?
This morning I wrote (in “Monster”) that Sean Hannity et al. might bear some share of moral responsibility for the killings in Knoxville. Sadly for everyone concerned, that may be true.
This evening we learn from the Knoxville News that officers entering the home of murder Jim Adkisson “found Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by talk show host Sean Hannity, and The O’Reilly Factor, by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.”
The presence of somebody’s books in a mentally disturbed person’s home does not make them accessories to a killing. But right-wing rhetoric toward liberals and humanists like those who attended the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church has been exceptionally violent for years. Liberal groups are often called “Nazi” or “Nazi-like” by O’Reilly (he even said that about our own Arianna Huffington). Savage says he’d “hang every lawyer” who tried to establish constitutional rights for Guantanamo prisoners, describes Obama as an “Afro-Leninist,” and said the folks at Media Matters were “brownshirts.” He describes Rep. Wexler as a “Nazi” and calls Nancy Pelosi a “Mussolini.”
As for Hannity, he said that “there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of ‘em is making sure Nancy Pelosidoesn’t become the speaker (of the House).” Think about it: “worth fighting and dying for.”
And that’s just a sampler.
Ann Coulter says liberals should be beaten with baseball bats and tried for treason (she’s not clear about the order in which these events are to take place.) Dick Morris says they’re “traitors” who should be decapitated.
I had a friend at Clear Channel (yes, I have a broad group of friends) who described some of these people as “entertainers.” Don’t you get it, guys? You use inflammatory images that equates your fellow Americans with violent enemies of the nation. Then you act surprised when a mentally ill person believes you and kills. You use the language of war and then say you’re not to blame when somebody enlists in your imaginary struggle.
Their next step will be outrage — outrage! — at the idea that they may be morally accountable for this action, the possible fruit of their rhetoric. …
If they found something I wrote in a killer’s home, I’d stop what I was doing and begin some serious self-reflection. I’d write about it, consider my errors, and try to make amends. Wouldn’t you?
“If the Left succeeds in gaining and retaining more power, the well-being of future generations will be at greater peril. I fear (our children) will inherit a nation that is less free and less secure than the nation we inherited from the last generation. It is therefore our job to stop them. Not just debate them, but defeat them.” — Sean Hannity
Dear Sean:
I found these words on page 11 of your book Let Freedom Ring. This book, and similar ones from your conservative colleagues Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage, was found in the home of a man who read those words, internalized those words, and then loaded his shotgun. He took 76 rounds of ammunition with him to a place of worship — a place where he knew he could do his job to stop and defeat some liberals. At the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jim Adkisson, a fan of yours, killed two people, wounded five others, and left an entire congregation and country shaken by his actions. Actions prompted, as he testified in his own written notes, by the ideas contained in your words.
I don’t know if you remember me, Sean, but I worked with you in Atlanta in the early 1990s, right as you got your big break with FOX News. I was an anchor and reporter (under the air name Candace Petersen) at WGST, your last low level stop before hitting the big time. I remember your last night on the air before you left for the big leagues. I approached you in your office, a cramped back room that I’m sure resembles a hovel compared to your FOX digs. I asked if you, during your last show, would tone down your rhetoric against gays and lesbians — stop demonizing our community for just one night. You refused. You explained to me, as if I were a child, that to do so would be to let your audience down. They expected you to go on the air and rant about how liberals, minorities, women and especially gays and lesbians were ruining our country. You simply had to oblige.
Even though you explained it simply, I still didn’t understand. Your Girl Friday — your most trusted assistant on your show was a young lesbian. She admired you, for some strange reason, and you two were close friends, lunching together, spending time together outside of work. You didn’t seem to have a problem with this particular lesbian. She wasn’t the one you kept blaming on the air for the downfall of democracy. No, you had two different lives then — one on the air, where you performed your outraged conservative act and one in real life, where you enjoyed your lesbian friend and seemed like a decent, sane fellow. …
I hope you are not too far gone, your conscience too eaten away with greed, to understand the violent and vile object lesson that Mr. Adkisson has provided for us in Tennessee, because it’s a lesson you need to learn: Our words matter. Our words have power. …
Your book is rife with paragraphs bashing “the Left” — an enigmatic group of “liberals” painted so broadly that your label for them must be capitalized. These are the people to blame if anything goes wrong in the world. Terrorism? “The Left” didn’t hunt down the terrorists before they struck. War? “The Left” didn’t do enough to protect us from our enemies and have opposed our military readiness. Job losses? “The Left” taxed the corporations so much they moved overseas.
In your world, and the world you convinced Adkisson of, “the Left” is the bogeyman under the bed. … You have done this with your words, Sean — words of division, words of hate, words of war, and words of greed. …
Adkisson acted on what the conservative talk radio has been advocating for years.
There is no dissent if you kill the dissenters.
Figuratively, by character assassination, misinformation and outright lies and now…literally. We’ve all heard it. Coulter’s “satire” about murdering liberals, G Gordon Liddys “head shot” show, Limbaugh’s disinformation and veiled threats and invocations of political violence against all those who disagree with him, O Reilly, Savage, the list goes on.
Even on these pages we have “conservatives” who relish violence against any diversity of opinion, in all its forms. We have all read the misogynistic hate and misguided machismo of these posts. One even advocated the “hanging” of Cenk , myself and others who opposed the Iraq war. Other “conservatives” have advocated violence in various forms against, among others, homeless, gays and the poor. Consider this gem of tolerence from conservative “pastor” Jerry Falwell:
But these things speak evil of those things, verse 10 [reading from Jude] which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. Look at the Metropolitan Community Church today, the gay church, almost accepted into the World Council of Churches. Almost, the vote was against them. But they will try again and again until they get in, and the tragedy is that they would get one vote. Because they are spoken of here in Jude as being brute beasts, that is going to the baser lust of the flesh to live immorally, and so Jude describes this as apostasy. But thank God this vile and satanic system will one day be utterly annihilated and there’ll be a celebration in heaven.
I used to electronically converse with a born again Christian who used a retrospective definition of “Christian.” In his view, people who did bad things could never be Christians, because Christians don’t do bad things. That little loop of illogic seems to run deep through right wingers, whether they be Christian or other. So let’s talk about good old Mr. Adkisson, who just went berserk in that Unitarian Universalist (UU) church in Tennessee. …
Let’s talk about the hatred of liberals. And let’s talk about the fact that Mr. Adkisson’s personal library included The O’Reilly Factor, by the one and only Shilll O’Reilly; Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, by Michael (what gay pictures?) Savage; and Let Freedom Ring, by Sean Vannity. And let’s freely acknowledge that Mr. Adkisson appears to have been pretty deeply disturbed, and to have been deeply disturbed long before he ever encountered the literary talents of those three authors.
If you feed a disturbed person a distorted and angry view of a specific group like, oh, let’s say liberals, if you pound away day after day and hour after radio broadcast hour that this group is vermin, slime, devious, destructive of all that is good and pure, that they are, in fact, either destructively insane or the very embodiment of evil, do you not bear some speck of the responsibility for a madman violently attacking this group? Not even a smidgen of responsibility?
The endless portrayal of liberals as the root of all American evil serves the same purpose that portraying Jews in the same light served in Nazi circles. Dehumanize. Desensitize. Rev up the rage then rev it up some more until a good portion of the populace considers this scapegoat to be the source of not only all their own problems, of all the evil in the entire world. …
But you know that The Right is Never Wrong. Just ask them. Better yet, listen to the silence. Think that any of the rabble rousers are going to be up in arms about this demonization of liberals that played a role in directing the insane Mr. Adkisson’s rage in a specific direction, in a specific manner?
Think Fox News is all atwitter with outraged discussion of the fact that Mr. Vannity once said “I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo — every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress.” (6/15/05 Hannity & Colmes). Is the Free Republic world aghast that Mister (I use the term loosely) Savage actually titled his poison-pen tome “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder?” …
No, I’m sure the Always Right will examine themselves thoroughly and pronounce themselves innocent once again.
After all, you don’t have to look too hard on the web to find Christians who are aghast that journalists keep portraying people like Eric Rudolph as “Christians.” As one blogger puts it (emphasis added):
Timothy McVeigh was not a Christian. Neither is Eric Rudolph. No, it is the media and left wing types who do all they can to make you THINK that they are Christians. … Eric Rudolph also rejected the Bible, and freely admitted that his decision to become a terrorist was influenced by anti - God philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche (of the “God is dead” fame)!
Except that Eric Rudolph’s own written statement clearly and unequivocally states:
I was born a Catholic, and with forgiveness I hope to die one.
How is it that the same right-wing nuts that are championing the war on terror, you know the fight against the use of intimidation and violence to promote ignorance, intolerance, and hate, are at the same time filling people so full of ignorance, intolerance and hate that they are inspired to go out and commit violent acts against liberals? Apparently once we murder all the peace loving, gay protecting do-gooders the world will be a safer place for freedom and justice and flag pins for all.
And what about the lefties part of the blame? We have become so complacent in our comfy middle class consumerist lifestyles that we sit by and let this whole thing happen. We have turned acceptance and tolerance mixed with laziness into tacit approval of the preaching of hate and violence.
… This guy wrote in his suicide note exactly what he expected to happen. He planned to wander into this liberal church with a semi-automatic shotgun & 76 rounds, and mow down mamby pamby lefties cowering in their pews until the cops showed up and finished him off. In reality he got three shots off, including one into a man who moved in front of him to shield others, before members of the congregation wrestled him to the floor, disarmed and restrained him until police arrived and took him away.
I can’t even begin to fathom the irony here. This man’s motivation seems to have been frustration over being out of work and having his food stamps expire. Add to that minimal education, questionable mental stability, previous military service, and massive doses of talk radio brain washing. Who the hell does he think fought for social programs such as food stamps in the first place? UUs have been on the forefront of progressive social issues for hundreds of years, including the American Revolution, abolitionism, worker rights, womens suffrage, humane treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill, civil rights, womens rights, pacifism, social welfare, education, and more recently gay rights, immigrant rights, and environmental issues. …
Apparently thats whats really wrong with this country. To much trying to help each other out and being nice to one another. Once we kill off all the limp wristed liberals, life will be much better for armed, mentally unstable, ex-military out of work truck driver/mechanics everywhere. Then maybe we can all go out and tailgate Priuses in our jacked up SUVs, and with any luck we’ll take a few of them out too. …
Free speech is great and all, but why do we allow deranged lunatics to spew hate filled lies in a publicly funded forum? Let them stand in some park and rant on with the rest of the loonies. The last thing we need to do is broadcast it across the country just because it makes someone money (which lets face it is the only reason talk radio exists).
The shooting in Knoxville has made me both sad…and angry. Sad because it is a natural reaction to such a horrific and tragic event. Angry because of the motive of the shooter, and the fact that the media (at least on websites, I have to confess I have not watched TV today) seems eager to bury that motive. The cynic in me believes that if this were an avowed atheist shooting up some fundamentalist megachurch, we’d see wall-to-wall coverage of the “religious hatred” in America, or some such nonsense.
Given that the shooting occurred in a church known for its progressive and tolerant worldview, many of us suspected a shooter with political motivations. We were right. But it is worth noting that the beloved late journalist Molly Ivins had us beat to the story, by a bit over thirteen years.
From her book, Who Let The Dogs In??, on pages 285 and 286 (truncated excerpt, so as not to violate copyright):
A large segment of (Rush) Limbaugh’s audience consists of white males, eighteen to thirty-four years old, without college education. Basically, a guy I know and grew up with named Bubba.
Advance the age a little bit, and you have our shooter. Now, listen as Ivins explains the appeal of Limbaugh and the rest of the angry right (side note: why do we hear endlessly about the angry left in the traditional media, but so little about the angry right?) on Bubba:
Bubba listens to Limbaugh because Limbaugh gives him someone to blame for the fact that Bubba is getting screwed…Because Bubba understands he’s being shafted, even if he doesn’t know why or by whom, he listens to Limbaugh. Limbaugh offers him scapegoats. It’s the “feminazis”. It’s the minorities. It’s the limousine liberals. It’s all these people with all these wacky social programs to help some silly, self-proclaimed bunch of victims.
Sound familiar, given the events of the last two days?
Conservatism used to be an ideology — conservatives believed in getting government off of people’s backs, they believed in fiscal restraint and small central government, they believed we should have a humble foreign policy focused on watching out for ourselves and not trying to rule the world and they detested experiments in social engineering.
In the post-World War II era, it was a widely-loathed ideology and liberalism was dominant. Democrats were proud liberals who wanted to build a more just society and most Republicans were liberals who believed we should do so much more gradually and carefully than their opponents.
Beginning in the middle of the last century, conservatives abandoned any semblance of ideological coherence — when in power, they spend more on pet projects than liberals, are more interventionist in their foreign policy than their liberal counterparts and are all-too-happy to meddle in the most private affairs of the citizenry (think: opposition to birth control; Terri Schiavo). Conservatism gave way to “backlash” conservatism, which is, in practice, little more than an ideology of resentment. Thomas Frank, in a less tragic context, coined the phrase “conservative plenty-plaint” to describe it — a list of grievances, great and small, that are all somehow attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the supposed evils of liberalism.
It was a strategic choice, one that may be attributed to Joe McCarthy or Spiro Agnew or Richard Nixon, and it has consequences. As villifying the left became incredibly lucrative — Rush Limbaugh has a contract worth $400 million, Ann Coulter makes a fortune on her pabulum — the competition became fierce, and the charges against liberalism went further and further over the top.
David Neiwert calls it “eliminationist” rhetoric — putting forth the idea that one’s opponents are not simply in disagreement, do not simply have a different and competing political philosophy, do not just believe that their approach to solving problems is superior but are bent on destroying the country, the culture, even the family unit from within. And, more importantly,
