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“Limited Voucher Proposal”: To Republicans, Religion Means “Conservative Christian”

So the ongoing fiasco of Bobby Jindal’s “let the parents decide” voucher program in Louisiana is finally beginning to get some national media attention, for the simple reason that its logic is carrying it in directions that horrify its strongest proponents and intended beneficiaries. Via Amy Sullivan at TNR, we read this amusing story from the Livingston Parish News:

Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Watson, says she had no idea that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s overhaul of the state’s educational system might mean taxpayer support of Muslim schools. “I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools,” the District 64 Representative said Monday.

“I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school,” Hodges said.

Hodges mistakenly assumed that “religious” meant “Christian.”

Seems a Muslim school applied to receive voucher-backed students. It hasn’t been approved so far—guess that rigorous “vetting” process utilized by the Louisiana Department of Education finally kicked in—but the awful specter has been raised, and will be difficult to banish, at least in the imagination of lawmakers like Valerie Hodges:

We need to insure that it does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools. There are a thousand Muslim schools that have sprung up recently. I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.

So down plunges the Pelican State into the political and constitutional thicket of how to shovel money to conservative evangelical schools without looking too closely at what they are teaching, while at the same time keeping away schools that conservative evangelicals hate and fear. Having implicitly embraced the idea that not only Muslims, but liberal Protestant Christians like Barack Obama, aren’t actually religious, Republicans can’t complain too much when “the base” can’t understand why such distinctions can’t be written into the law.

Good luck with that, Governor Jindal—and you, too, Mitt Romney, with your own no-strings voucher proposal.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 6, 2012

July 8, 2012 Posted by | Education | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Humanity Hanging In The Balance”: Healthcare And Justice Scalia’s Broken Moral Compass

The Supreme Court’s highly anticipated ruling on Obama’s healthcare reforms could come any day now. Whatever the verdict, expect much ado about the hotly debated role of broccoli in healthcare and arcane explanations of the Commerce Clause that is at the center of the legal case against the individual mandate. But buried deep in hearings filled with legalese and judicial sparring was a short exchange that illuminates an American ideal that truly hangs in the balance with this decision—the idea that in a civilized society, we do not sit idly by and watch our neighbors die.

The specific back-and-forth in question occurred on the third day of the hearings between Justice Antonin Scalia and Solicitor General Donald Verilli, the administration official charged with defending the law in court. It went like this:

GENERAL VERRILLI: No. It’s because you’re going—in the health care market, you’re going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social norms that allow—that—to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don’t obligate yourself to that. Why—you know?

GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I can’t imagine that that—that the Commerce Clause would —would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.

JUSTICE SCALIA: You—you could do it.

If you are not a frequent watcher of the Court and therefore not fluent in the cadences of judicial banter, this short, seemingly banal interchange in an exhaustive debate may not have even registered. The “deeply embedded social norm” that Verilli refers to—in fact seems confused that he has to explain to Justice Scalia—is the norm that dictates that people will step in to aid others who are ailing or in danger of death.

Scalia’s statement that “you could do it [defy these norms]” eerily evoked the appalling moment at the September 2011 Republican presidential debate when the audience wildly applauded Wolf Blitzer’s stunned probing of whether candidate Ron Paul would allow a 30-year-old uninsured man in a healthcare emergency to die. “Yes!” shouted unashamed audience members, turning a presidential debate into something reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum. When Justice Scalia argued against the social norms that Verilli was presuming sacrosanct, he was essentially saying, “Let him die!”

While we’ve grown to expect this kind of mob mentality from a radical right wing whipped up in a Tea Party frenzy, this bizarre display of indifference from a Supreme Court Justice breaks new ground in an evolving culture that seems to prize resistance to any and all government over the compassion that is the essence of civilized society. The right screams often and loudly that President Obama has declared war on the Judeo-Christian underpinnings they hold as American as apple pie. But in fact, it is Justice Scalia, from his exalted perch, who appears intent on vacating the Golden Rule and undermining the parable of the Good Samaritan, both core to Christian theology.

Dahlia Lithwick hit the proverbial nail on the head in her description of Justice Scalia when she wrote in Slate in 2003:

Scalia doesn’t come into oral argument all secretive and sphinxlike, feigning indecision on the nuances of the case before him. He comes in like a medieval knight, girded for battle. He knows what the law is. He knows what the opinion should say. And he uses the hour allocated for argument to bludgeon his brethren into agreement.

Scalia, ever the showman, joked during the March hearings that having to read the entire healthcare law in order to rule on it would amount to cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited by the Constitution. At the same time, he displayed an egregious ignorance regarding which provisions in the bill actually passed. And on the final morning of arguments, Scalia laid his cards on the table when he argued that stripping out the individual mandate would cause the whole law to topple.

The mandate, more descriptively titled the “free-rider clause,” fines uninsured individuals who expect taxpayer-supported emergency services to cover calamities that befall them. It is also the component of the reform that allows insurance companies to affordably cover those with pre-existing conditions. Cutting the mandate, Scalia mused, cuts the heart out of the entire reform and would almost certainly kick the whole matter back to a gridlocked Congress, while millions of lives hang in the balance.

A recent Pew poll shows that approximately 83 percent of Americans are affiliated with an organized faith, be it a form of Christianity, Judaism, Muslim, Hinduism or Buddhism. A whopping 78.4 percent of us fall somewhere in the Christian camp. Yet, it is core Christian values that are currently on trial at the Supreme Court.

Perhaps this emotional dissonance is what drives a new poll from the New York Times that shows that only 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing. Once a venerated institution that seemed immune to the partisan squabbles of the other branches of government, the Court has consistently displayed its corporate and right-wing allegiances in decisions that span from 2000’s Bush v Gore when it picked our president and irrevocably altered the course of history (Scalia later told Americans to “get over it!” when asked about the decision) to the 2009 Citizens United decision, the impact of which is being felt acutely this election season. Now, 75 percent of Americans say that the Justices’ political preferences motivate their decision making on the bench.

When healthcare reform passed in 2010, the United States ranked dead last among similar countries in a study comparing cost and quality of healthcare. America consistently spends twice as much for lesser care than its industrialized allies. While the Affordable Care Act left some of the best solutions on the table, it offers real hope to the one in four American adults that go without healthcare each year due to job transitions or other circumstances. So many of our neighbors live in terror that a single unexpected calamity will drive their family into bankruptcy spurred by emergency medical bills. Now, when the verdict comes in, those fellow Americans can add a new fear to their list: that a Conservative Catholic Supreme Court Justice will lead the charge to let them die.

By: Ilyse Hogue, The Nation, June 18, 2012

June 22, 2012 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Health Reform | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Keeping The Family Name In Our Faces Forever”: The Palin’s Are Our Punishment Forever

There was good news and bad news for Sarah Palin in the self-consciously ridiculous Public Policy Polling survey of Iowans for their preferences in the 2016 presidential contest (I mean, Caucus campaigning starts pretty damn early, but not this early!). On the one hand, she has an impressive 70/17 favorable/unfavorable rating among Iowa Republicans. On the other hand, only 10% of them chose her as their 2016 presidential favorite, tied for fourth with Jeb Bush.

But there’s fresh evidence that Palin’s real motive in life, other than continuing to pose as the ultimate pain-free martyr, is to keep the family name in our faces for, well, as long as any of us live. And it’s on that depressing note that I observe in terror that Bristol Palin is back in the news as a political blogger.

Yes, on the day after the president’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage, Alaska’s best known sexual abstinence advocate/unwed mother is lighting up conservative browsers everywhere with an attack on Obama for paying attention to his daughters’ opinions.

If you have your blood pressure under control, you can read the whole mess, but her train of logic seems to be that everybody gets all alarmed by the possibility that Christian women might submit to their husbands if they run for public office, and here’s The One submitting to his daughters, and everybody thinks that’s just fine!

I got angry enough about Bristol’s planted axiom that only conservative Republican women like Michele Bachmann (and presumably Bristol’s own mother) are “Christians” that I barely made it to the second howler. Not that she is listening, but someone really ought to inform her that people wondered about Bachmann submitting to her husband because she was repeatedly on record saying that’s exactly what she did, as a matter of Divine Law. Lots of Dominionist-influenced Christian Nationalists say and think that, you betcha! The questions did not come out of the blue.

While they are at it, Ms. Palin’s interlocuters might want to explain to her that when discussing same-sex marriage as something of a generational issue, it was rather natural for Obama to mention the views of immediate family members from a younger generation! I mean, they are right there at the White House; he didn’t have to hire a pollster or anything!

To be clear, I am not mocking Bristol Palin when I offer these responses. She has the last laugh on me, and on all of us. Like her mother, she has a knack of luring people who know better into paying attention to her rants. In my defense, I’ll say that some of Sarah Palin’s most casual, fact-free rants have wound up in national GOP talking points, leading millions of anxious seniors to believe that the President of the United States wants to have them euthanized. It’s sometimes best to get a head start on Palin-generated nonsense, or in this case, on the next generation of Palins.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 10, 2012

May 11, 2012 Posted by | Politics | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Christian Apocalyptic Conservatism”: It’s Barack vs The Bible, Or Is It?

While the flap over Rush Limbaugh’s latest in a long line of offensive and hateful commentary continues on, other figures with (arguably) more longevity and influence continue their assault on Barack Obama and what they see as the decline of Christian America. To wit: the Texas intellectual entrepreneur David Barton, who provides the footnotes for the “war on religion” thesis that currently has captivated the right.

Most recently, Barton’s post, “America’s Most Biblically-Hostile President,” details a theme that has become known to the public largely through the Gingrich/Santorum bloc: that Barack Obama has led the most actively anti-Christian administration in American history. This is a talking point with a lot of traction across the airwaves and blogosphere of the right.

Given Obama’s frequent Christian testimony—explicit enough to make most founding fathers uncomfortable with its public expression of private matters—how can this view be so widely held?

Is it because, like Thomas Jefferson, Obama has been sitting in his office, snipping away with his scissors and cutting out the relatively few passages of the Bible that he has deemed worthy of inclusion in his own expurgated text of trustworthy Gospel sayings? Is it because, like Andrew Jackson, he has opened the White House doors to the huddled masses, yearning to sip some “cider” with the POTUS and his crew? Is it because, like Abraham Lincoln, he avoids any explicit mention of Jesus, and confesses that the ways of the Almighty are unknowable to humans?

No, of course not. Rather, it boils down to this: because Chuck Norris, Franklin Graham, and the American Family Association (whose biblically-based policy toward employees has been detailed by Sarah Posner) say so. And because David Barton has 47 footnotes that say so. Yes, it’s true: Bibles being burned by the military; the president allowing for the funding of stem-cell research; the denigration of Christianity and the “preferentialism” towards Islam; the Air Force Academy (in my home city of Colorado Springs) forced to pay to “add a Stonehenge-like worship center for pagans, druids, witches, and Wiccans”; the celebration of Iftar and conscious shunning of National Prayer Day at the White House; and on and on.

If you think this issue hasn’t caught fire with the base, just check out the screens of hatefully acidic commentary when Messiah College History Professor John Fea’s piece on Obama as the “most explicitly Christian President in U.S. History” found its way onto The Blaze. John Fea’s auto-da-fé came not only in the comments section, but in nasty emails, phone calls, and demands for his firing from Messiah College. As he discovered, the culture wars are real, and practiced even on those (like Fea) who largely have been critical of Obama’s actual implementation of his promises about faith-based policies.

More important than these blogosphere wars, however, is understanding something deeper about these screeds about Obama as the anti-Christian force behind the homosexual/Islamic/secularist/socialist/radical agenda.

The “deep history” behind the latest round of Christian right polemics can be followed back through a long tradition of worries about the decline of a Christian America. Ultimately, these can be traced back to the founding of the Republic. More directly, they emerge from the rise of Christian apocalyptic conservatism from the early twentieth century forward. Matthew Sutton details a similar assault on the FDR administration, one with numerous parallels to the contemporary campaign against Obama, in “Was FDR the AntiChrist,” a Journal of American History article whose findings are distilled in this New York Times piece. These themes carried forward into the “suburban warriors” who empowered the rise of the Goldwater right in Cold-War California, and then to what came to be called the “New Christian Right” of the 1970s and 1980s. Communism disappeared from the enemies list after 1989 (except for older Christian right stalwart David Noebel, who keeps even that faith while leading the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade even into his retirement), but Islam, an economic “New World Order,” the “gay agenda,” the always-present secular humanists and feminists, and numerous other threats arose to take its place.

A Religion of Fear

Perhaps this is because we always need a “Party of Fear,” whether it comes in the form of Federalists dubious of democracy in the New Republic, or nativists fearing the influence of “new immigrants” in the 1850s (or the 2000s), or contemporary commentators suspicious of Obama’s foreign, Islamic, or radical roots. Even from his grave, hack journalist Andrew Breitbart continues to taste that fear, and spread the hate. And a “religion of fear” serves a multitude of purposes for its followers, both titillating and politically energizing. Fear is fun—and fear is mobilizing.

Unlike Barton, Breitbart claimed no particular Christian credential, instead reveling in the joys of political mudslinging. Barton, by contrast, has recently appeared in works with respected Christian historians, and exercises a quiet and long-lasting influence through his congressional connections, his intellectual one-stop-shop for all things Christian Nation, and his role as unofficial (and official) vetter of history textbooks. Like a one-man think tank, he steamrollers opponents with position papers, textbooks, blog posts, talking head appearances, and footnotes. In his work on the Christian origins of the United States, at least he has a modicum of evidence to produce, given the Christian proclivities of certain of the founders. In the war against Obama, however, Chuck Norris and Franklin Graham have to stand in the stead of Patrick Henry or Parson Weems.

Thus, for the anti-Obama agonists, the president’s overtly Christian testifying, praying with Billy Graham, championing of C. S. Lewis, and quoting of the Old Testament in major public speeches simply shield the fact that the enemy always comes clothed in righteousness—and that the Great Deceiver is among us.

David Barton summarizes it most succinctly: “Many of these actions are literally unprecedented—this is the first time they have happened in four centuries of American history. The hostility of President Obama toward Biblical faith and values is without equal from any previous American president.” Roll over, Thomas Jefferson.

 

By: Paul Harvey, Opinion, Religious Dispatches, March 9, 2012

March 12, 2012 Posted by | Religion, Right Wing | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Right’s Rules For Politicizing Prayer

Remember how right-wing leaders were outraged –OUTRAGED! – when President Obama supposedly politicized the National Prayer breakfast by talking about how his Christian faith influenced his approach to issues like progressive taxation? Such complaints from the likes of Ralph Reed – whose career has been devoted to politicizing faith – were clearly pushing the hypocrisy meter to its limits. As Kyle noted yesterday, Religious Right folks have been celebrating the prayer breakfast speech by Eric Metaxas, a biographer of the Hitler-resisting pastor Dietrich Bonhoffer, because Mataxas made a comparison between the Holocaust and legal abortion, suggesting that supporters of reproductive choice were modern-day Nazis – and certainly not Christians.

This morning a “special bulletin” from the dominionist Oak Initiative republished a National Review column from a few weeks ago that we hadn’t noticed at the time. The column by conservative author and producer Mark Joseph is one long extended gloat about just how political – and how anti-Obama – Metaxas’s keynote was. Joseph delights in Metaxas using the prayer breakfast to send “a series of heat-seeking missiles” in the president’s direction:

If the organizers of the national prayer breakfast ever want a sitting president to attend their event again, they need to expect that any leader in his right mind is going to ask — no, demand — that he be allowed to see a copy of the keynote address that is traditionally given immediately before the president’s.

That’s how devastating was the speech given by a little known historical biographer named Eric Metaxas, whose clever wit and punchy humor barely disguised a series of heat-seeking missiles that were sent, intentionally or not, in the commander-in-chief’s direction….

Joseph belittles Obama’s speaking of his faith, and giddily cites Metaxas, suggesting that Obama’s references to scripture were actually demonic.

Standing no more than five feet from Obama whose binder had a speech chock full of quotes from the Good Book, Metaxas said of Jesus:

“When he was tempted in the desert, who was the one throwing Bible verses at him? Satan. That is a perfect picture of dead religion. Using the words of God to do the opposite of what God does. It’s grotesque when you think about it. It’s demonic.”

“Keep in mind that when someone says ‘I am a Christian’ it may mean absolutely nothing,” Metaxas added for good measure, in case anybody missed his point.

Joseph also mocks Obama for discussing how other religions share with Christians the values contained in the Golden Rule: “Translation: Christianity is great and so are the other major religions, which essentially teach the same stuff.” In contrast, Joseph celebrates Metaxas for insisting on the uniqueness and centrality of Jesus and suggesting that those who support women’s access to abortion live apart from God and Jesus.

So, to recap the ground rules for the National Prayer Breakfast: President Obama talking about the values he as a Christian shares with those of other faiths, and how he understands Christian teaching about the responsibilities of those who have had good fortune = bad. Religious Right speaker insisting on the superiority of Christianity, and calling those who disagree with him demonic Nazis = good.

Something to keep in mind next year.

 

By: Peter Montgomery, People For The American Way, Right Wing Watch, March 2, 2012

March 5, 2012 Posted by | Religion, Right Wing | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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