September 28, 2008
Last week, we heard from Rev. Howard Bess:
“Things got very intense around here in the ’90s — the culture war was very hot here,” Bess said. “The evangelicals were trying to take over the valley. They took over the school board, the community hospital board, even the local electric utility. And Sarah Palin was in the direct center of all these culture battles, along with the churches she belonged to.” …
This week, a longtime Wasilla resident tells an uncomfortably familiar story to Michelle Goldberg (author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism) in The Nation:
Pat O’Hara, a journalist who served on the Wasilla school board for twelve years, remembers how the religious right made her feel like a stranger in her own community. …
It wasn’t until the 1990s that local churches like the Wasilla Assembly of God, which Palin grew up attending, became aggressively political. A few years before Palin became mayor, a group of preachers confronted the school board with questions about social issues that had never before surfaced in local politics, according to O’Hara, who wrote first for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman and then for the Anchorage Daily News. “They started asking me, ‘Would you allow a homosexual to teach in schools?’ and ‘Do you favor abortion?’” she said. “At the time, I didn’t know what was coming. I said, ‘This is not a school board issue. We have overcrowding. We have funding problems.’” The last time O’Hara ran, conservative pastors mounted an effort to defeat her, saying she favored hiring homosexuals, but they failed. Nevertheless, in 1996, feeling increasingly alienated in a place she’d lived for twenty-five years, she quit the school board and moved to more liberal Anchorage.
“The whole community changed,” she said. “It became extremely rigid and intolerant, and you can see that in every election since.” Palin, said O’Hara, “represents the worst of those values. She feels that because she’s a member of the right church, she’s chosen by God to inflict her values on everyone.”
With her vice presidential nomination, Sarah Palin has become the ultimate religious-right success story. Ever since the Christian Coalition was formed using the infrastructure of Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential run, the movement has focused on building power from the ground up, turning conservative churches into little political machines. …
She has not always governed as a zealot; in fact, she’s a bit of a cipher, with scant record of speeches or writings on social issues or foreign policy. Nevertheless, several people who’ve dealt with her say that those concerned about church-state separation should be chilled by the idea of a Palin presidency. …
Palin’s nomination, and the energy she has injected into the GOP, show that, once again, reports of the death of the Christian right have been greatly exaggerated. …
Palin — who opposes gay rights, believes abortion should be banned even in cases of rape and incest, and supports the teaching of creationism — wasn’t known as a leader in Alaska’s religious right, but she clearly had ties to it, and to some of the more extreme fundamentalists in the United States. …
[Curt Menard, mayor of Mat-Su Borough (which includes Wasilla)] and his wife, Republican State Senate candidate Linda Menard — the former director of the Miss Wasilla pageant — have known Palin since she was in third grade. … They clearly adore Palin, and when Curt Menard describes her connections to the religious right, he doesn’t intend to be critical.
Echoing Pat O’Hara’s account, he recalled that the area had been solidly Democratic until the rise of politicized right-wing religion. …
When Palin ran for governor in 2006, Christian conservatives mobilized to help elect her — the Alaska Family Council, a group that formed that year and is loosely affiliated with Focus on the Family, distributed a voter guide showing Palin’s alignment with its ideology. …
Like McCain, Palin appears to believe that the United States is a Christian nation. As governor, she signed a resolution declaring October 21-27 Christian Heritage Week in Alaska, in order to remind Alaskans of “the role Christianity has played in our rich heritage.” Written in the mode of some right-wing revisionist historians, it describes the nation’s founders — including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — as “Christians of caliber and integrity who did not hesitate to express their faith.”
The conviction that America is a Christian nation could be especially worrisome when coupled with the kind of apocalyptic beliefs espoused by the Wasilla Assembly of God, since the combination suggests a profoundly messianic foreign policy. …
Much more at the link to send a “ninety-mile-an-hour Alaska north wind” down your spine.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
Filed under:
Christianity,
Creationism,
Focus on the Family/James Dobson,
Homophobia,
John McCain,
Radical Religious Right,
Republicans,
Sarah Palin,
Women
September 20, 2008
I strongly encourage you to click the link and read the article in full. And then make sure everyone you know understands what kind of dangerous, loose-screw Armageddonite Sarah Palin really is.
Anyone who does understand, and still wants her one heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world, is as insane as she is.
Or perhaps so blinded by racism, they’d vote for a David Duke-Fred Phelps ticket to avoid voting for an African-American.
Anyway, read. And be very afraid.
The pastor who clashed with Palin
The Wasilla Assembly of God, the evangelical church where Sarah Palin came of age, was still charged with excitement on Sunday over Palin’s sudden ascendance. …
It confirmed, they said, that God was making use of Wasilla. “She will take our message to the world!” …
That is what scares the Rev. Howard Bess. A retired American Baptist minister who pastors a small congregation in nearby Palmer, Wasilla’s twin town in Alaska’s Matanuska Valley, Bess has been tangling with Palin and her fellow evangelical activists ever since she was a Wasilla City Council member in the 1990s. Recently, Bess again found himself in the spotlight with Palin, when it was reported that his 1995 book, “Pastor, I Am Gay,” was among those Palin tried to have removed from the Wasilla Public Library when she was mayor. …
“She scares me,” said Bess. “She’s Jerry Falwell with a pretty face. At this point, people in this country don’t grasp what this person is all about. The key to understanding Sarah Palin is understanding her radical theology.” …
“Things got very intense around here in the ’90s — the culture war was very hot here,” Bess said. “The evangelicals were trying to take over the valley. They took over the school board, the community hospital board, even the local electric utility. And Sarah Palin was in the direct center of all these culture battles, along with the churches she belonged to.” …
Conservative ministers [in the Mat-Su Valley] targeted [Bess’ book], and the only bookstore in the valley that dared to stock it — Shalom Christian Books and Gifts — soon dropped it after the owner was barraged with angry phone calls. The Frontiersman, the local newspaper that ran a column by Bess for seven years, fired him and ran a vicious cartoon that suggested even drooling child molesters would be welcomed by Bess’ church. …
In 1996, evangelical churches mounted a vigorous campaign to take over the local hospital’s community board and ban abortion from the valley. … [P]assions ran so hot that local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside Dr. Lemagie’s office … [A]mong the protesters trying to disrupt the physician’s practice that day was Sarah Palin.
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. …
“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”
Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.’”
Bess is unnerved by the prospect of Palin — a woman whose mind is given to dogmatic certitude — standing one step away from the Oval Office. “It’s truly frightening that someone like Sarah has risen to the national level,” Bess said. “Like all religious fundamentalists — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil. Their mind-set is that you do not do business with evil — you destroy it. …
“Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That’s trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It’s her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she’s ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. …
Posted by: Sapphocrat
Filed under:
Creationism,
Election 2008,
Homophobia,
John McCain,
Radical Religious Right,
Republicans,
Sarah Palin,
Women
September 3, 2008
So fast and so furious that it’s impossible to blog everything, or even one thing, in depth. And, believe me, there is nothing I’d like to do more right now than hit every single Palin story out there. But there are only 24 hours in a day, so I’ll contribute what I can to the truth effort by simply pointing out each new story as I find it, in the hope that folks with greater resources can put it all into perspective.
I’ll make just two remarks for now:
1. If somebody tells you “Family is off-limits,” you remind them that Palin brought her family into this.
2. I never thought I’d end up enjoying this election cycle 1/1000th as much as I am right now. I feel like I’m discovering George W. Bush all over again — only this time, the chucklehead in question isn’t going to hijack my country for the next four years.
With that, here are my Sarah Palin Bookmarks of the Moment, with many more to come:
Rank inexperience:
Choice stuns state politicians
“She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?” — Alaska State Senate President Lyda Green (R-Wasilla)
Anchorage Daily News, August 29, 2008
Palin On Iraq
“Palin: I’ve been so focused on state government, I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.”
Andrew Sullivan, August 29, 2008
Scholars question Palin credentials
David Mark, Fred Barbash, Politico, August 30, 2008
Vice in Go-Go Boots?
Maureen Dowd, August 31, 2008
Osmosis
“Sarah Palin learned foreign policy by osmosis? Really?”
Obsidian Wings, September 2, 2008
Impulse, Meet Experience
George F. Will, September 3, 2008
Palin traveled abroad rarely
“Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin got her first passport in 2006 and has visited just four countries, and she had little involvement in her state’s cross-border issues, raising questions about her supporters’ assertions that Alaska’s proximity to Russia has given her unique experience on foreign affairs. …”
Bryan Bender and Sasha Issenberg, Boston Globe, September 3, 2008
Anti-gay to the extreme, of course:
Palin no friend to gays and lesbians
The Real Spiel, August 31, 2008
Palin’s brand of crazy Christianity (yep, she believes in creationism and “ex-gay therapy”):
Sarah Palin on faith, life and creation
Michael Paulson, Boston Globe, August 29, 2008
Palin and Her Pastors: “Those that die without Christ have a horrible, horrible surprise”
Ken Silverstein and Sebastian Jones, Harper’s, August 30, 2008
Palin’s Church May Have Shaped Controversial Worldview
Nico Pitney and Sam Stein, HuffPo, September 2, 2008
Mayor Palin: A Rough Record
Nathan Thornburgh, Time, September 2, 2008
The Palin Church Video
Domenico Montanaro, MSNBC, September 2, 2008
Todd Palin, the Alaskan Independence Party, and secession:
Palin And The Alaska Independence Party
Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic, September 1, 2008
Members of ‘Fringe’ Alaskan Independence Party Say Palin Was a Member in 90s; McCain Camp and Alaska Division of Elections Deny Charge
Jake Tapper, ABC News, September 1, 2008
Todd Palin, Longtime Former AIP Member
Jake Tapper, ABC News, September 2, 2008
Palin Backed Alaska Independence and Called Shallow By Woman Claiming To Be the Real Miss Congeniality
Ron Chusid, Liberal Values, September 2, 2008
Todd Palin’s DUI:
Palin’s husband has DWI arrest
CNN, September 1, 2008
Todd Palin’s DUI
ABC News, September 1, 2008
Troopergate:
City of Kenai’s letter to woman accusing Chuck Kopp of sexual harassment (PDF)
October 10, 2005
Kopp to release personnel file
Anchorage Daily News, July 18, 2008
AK Gov. Says Staffer Pressed for Trooper’s Firing
Kate Klonick, TPM Muckracker, August 13, 2008
Investigators Are Looking at Governor About Firing
Michael Luo, New York Times, August 29, 2008
Monegan to Palin: ‘Ma’am, I Need to Keep You at Arm’s Length’
Washington Post, August 30, 2008
Sarah Palin poses ‘Troopergate’ risk to John McCain’s US election bid
Philip Sherwell and Tim Shipman, Telegraph, September 1, 2008
New Emails Suggest Holes in Palin’s Trooper-Gate Story
Zachary Roth, TPM Muckraker, September 3, 2008
Palin E-Mails Show Intense Interest in Trooper’s Penalty
James V. Grimaldi and Karl Vick, Washington Post, September 4, 2008
Polar bears can f—k off and die (literally), because they get in the way of oil drilling:
Bearing Up
Sarah Palin, January 5, 2008
Palin Fought Polar Bear Protections
Justin Rood, ABC News, August 31, 2008
Ted “Intertubes” Stevens, Bridge to Nowhere, and Alaska-style politics:
Vetting Sarah Palin: Irl Stambaugh, Walt Monegan and Cronyism
(She almost got recalled as the mayor of Wasilla for firing city officials who didn’t support her)
Hat Thief, August 29, 2008
Palin’s husband allegedly got advisor fired for dating the wrong woman
The People’s Forum, August 29, 2008
Palin Repeatedly Professed Desire To Renew Federal Funding For ‘Bridge To Nowhere’
ThinkProgress, August 30, 2008
Palin Was a Director of Embattled Sen. Stevens’s 527 Group
Matthew Mosk, Washington Post, September 1, 2008
Palin backed ‘bridge to nowhere’ in 2006
Ken Dilanian, USA Today, September 2, 2008
“Abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing,” book-banning, and earmarks McCain wouldn’t approve of:
As mayor, Palin brought culture wars to town
New York Times via News & Observer, September 3, 2008
Sarah Palin, Israel, and Jews for Jesus:
Palin on Israel
Ben Smith, Politico, August 29, 2008
Jewish voters may be wary of Palin
WFAA.com, September 2, 2008
Palin Meets with AIPAC
Matthew E. Berger, MSNBC, September 2, 2008
Palin’s baby’s baby and Palin’s baby’s baby daddy:
Palin’s teen daughter is pregnant
CNN, September 1, 2008
The Bristol Stomp
“Jake Tapper asks: ‘What would the response be if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and his wife Michelle had a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter?’ I can answer that. Mona Charen, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin would sprout bat wings and fangs and start divebombing, Peggy Noonan would issue a pained sigh that would ruffle nun’s robes from here to Hoboken, Laura Ingraham and Bill Bennett would engage in a finger-wagging contest to condemn our loose licentious liberal culture, and Jennifer Rubin at Commentary’s Contentions would crash into the wall doing cartwheels. …”
James Wolcott, Vanity Fair, September 1, 2008
Sarah Palin’s future son-in-law says he’s an Alaska ‘redneck’
“Here’s part of his entry before it was made private: ‘I’m a f—kin’ redneck who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes. But I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some s—t and just f—kin’ chillin’ I guess. Ya f—k with me I’ll kick ass.” Status: “In a relationship.” Children: “I don’t want kids.”
Luisa Yanez, McClatchy, September 3, 2008
To know Sarah Palin is to not want her one heartbeat away from the presidency:
Alaska Pipeline
Deb Peterson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 30, 2008
Miscellaneous Sarah Palin lunacy:
Sarah Palin, Buchananite
Christopher Hayes, The Nation, August 29, 2008
The Palin Meltdown in Slo-Mo
Greg Sargent, TPM Election Central, September 1, 2008
Finally…
Is Track Palin the 16-year-old vandal in this story? Rumor has it…
Bus vandals charged
Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, December 5, 2005
Why did Track Palin spend “most of his senior year in high school” in Portage, Michigan?
Palin’s oldest son has Michigan tie
Chris Christoff, Detroit Free Press, August 29, 2008
Posted by: Sapphocrat
Filed under:
"Ex-Gays",
Creationism,
Election 2008,
Homophobia,
John McCain,
Radical Religious Right,
Random Stupidity,
Republicans,
Sarah Palin,
United States
August 8, 2008
Because you certainly couldn’t have been serious — or sober — when you wrote this:*
Porn Star for Obama
By Ben Stein
…Now, this is perfect. First of all, Paris Hilton was a total nobody party girl in West Hollywood until she and her boyfriend made AND then “someone” SOLD a hard core video of Paris Hilton having sex. So basically, she got her start as a porn star. And she’s being trotted out by the media barons to smear John McCain, as brave and patriotic a man as lives in this nation.
Stein, you do have a way of twisting the facts. McCain “trotted out” Hilton, and Hilton responded to McCain. And I don’t blame her for one second.
This little tramp, who isn’t even close to being pretty, is belittling a man who spent six years in brutal captivity for defending his country.
Paris, get this: in modern day America, we don’t mock people because of things they have done that are unavoidable and not in any way blameworthy. We don’t make fun of blacks for being black. We don’t make fun of women for having breasts. We don’t make fun of old people for being old. This is uncool from any source.
Whereas you, Stein, write, oh-so-bitchily, that Paris Hilton “isn’t even close to being pretty,” and in the very next sentence lecture her about mocking the physical characteristics of others. What a hypocrite.
And what a lie. In modern-day America, it’s still open mocking season on gay people, all year ’round. (Of course, you would think being gay is “blameworthy,” wouldn’t you, Stein?)
It is downright disgusting coming from a porn star — and not a very good porn star at that (yes, I have seen the tape). …
Oh, really, now? I haven’t seen the tape, Stein — porn isn’t my thing. But seeing as how you make yourself out to be an expert on what constitutes “a very good porn star,” it sounds like you’ve watched plenty of porn in order to be able to make that judgment.
Looks like you just set yourself up to be mocked, mercilessly, for something “blameworthy” you did (or do). Last I heard, porn consumption is quite the sin among you far-right creationist types.
What. A. Hypocrite.
And what a jerk for making me defend both Paris Hilton and Barack Obama in the same post.
* In a nutsack nutshell: McCain released an attack ad on Barack Obama, comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Hilton, understandably, didn’t take too kindly to being used as a McCain shill, and release her own video in response. This is what Ben Stein is complaining about.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
Filed under:
Barack Obama,
Celebrities,
Creationism,
Election 2008,
John McCain,
Radical Religious Right,
Random Stupidity,
Republicans
September 22, 2007
Praise Jesus, it’s the collapse of evangelical Christian rule in America. Rejoice!
. . .
Do you know this clenched and panicky group? Of course you do. They’re the throngs of megachurch lemmings Karl Rove masterfully manipulated and rallied and whored to Bush’s very narrow advantage in two elections.
They’re the ones who’ve made all the headlines and influenced all sorts of laws and national policy changes lo, this past half-decade concerning everything from stem cell research to gay marriage to evolution, sanitized school textbooks to failed abstinence programs to RU-486 restrictions to silly anti-science rhetoric, the ones who gasped in horror at a woman’s bare nipple and made a disgusting mockery of Terri Schiavo and actually applauded when John Ashcroft spent $8,000 of taxpayer money 
to throw some heavy drapery over the shamefully exposed breasts of the bronze (female) Spirit of Justice statue in the Hall of Justice. And so on.
. . .
Apparently, Bush’s GOP has let them down. They have not been content with BushCo’s anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-sex, pro-abstinence, anti-women, anti-science, pro-war, God-hates-Islam stance, nor have they been content with having their trembling hands around the throat of the preceding Republican Congress for half a decade and clearly they have been insufficiently humiliated by the happy slew of right-wing preachers and politicians who’ve been revealed as meth-loving, restroom-lurking, boy-fetishizing gay hypocrites.
According to the new plan, any current GOP candidate who now wants the valuable evangelical vote will have to prove himself not merely guided by conformist religious zealotry in all things (Hi, Mitt!), but will have to prove his unflappable support for the GOP stance in key issues across the evangelical board, primarily regarding the Big Duo: abortion rights and gay rights. Or, more specifically, the total annihilation of both.
Do you see? This is exactly why we can now rejoice. Because this is the delightful thing about the fundamentalist worldview (and, for that matter just about any strict religious worldview you can name), the thing that absolutely and forever guarantees its frequent and eventual downfall: It can never be sated.
. . .
And why? Because the fundamentalist mind-set is not so much a firm and rational set of beliefs based on thoughtful interpretation of strict Biblical screed as it is, well, a paranoid wallowing in fear. Fear of the Other, fear of change, of progress, of the new and different and young and the sexual and the truly spiritual. And as we all know from almost seven years of Bush, fear knows no reason. It knows no stability. Fear is simply insatiable, voracious, and about as un-Godlike as Jesus with a machine gun. …
Much more — and, as always, well worth the full read
Discuss this story
Posted by: Sapphocrat
Filed under:
Christianity,
Creationism,
Education/Schools,
George W. Bush,
Homophobia,
Karl Rove,
Marriage Equality,
Mitt Romney,
Radical Religious Right,
Republicans,
Women
