Seven years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a national laboratory for government reforms. But the process through which those experiments have been carried out rarely has been transparent or democratic. The results have been divisive, pitting new residents against those who grew up here, rich against poor, and white against Black.
Education, housing, criminal justice, health care, urban planning, even our media; systemic changes have touched every aspect life in New Orleans, often creating a template used in other cities. A few examples:
– In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, more than 7,500 employees in city’s public school system were fired, despite the protection of union membership and a contract. Thousands of young teachers, many affiliated with programs like Teach For America, filled the empty slots. As charters took over from traditional public schools, the city became what then-superintendent Paul Vallas called the first 100% free market public school system in the US. A judge recently found that the mass firings were illegal, but any resolution will likely be tied up in appeals for years. (more…)
Texas Republicans received a second straight setback today when a three-judge federal panel blocked the state’s voter ID law because the state had failed to demonstrate that the law was not prejudicial to minorities. Earlier this week, a federal court tossed out a Republican-inspired redistricting plan for largely the same reason.
You can’t blame the GOP for trying. With Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by 12 percentage points among women voters, ninety points among African and Americans and forty points among Hispanics, Republicans are running scared. As Lindsey Graham told a Washington Post reporter this week, “The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
What’s the solution. Either you court minority voters or you reach out to “angry white guys” by bragging that if the women, blacks and Mexicans hate us, we must be right.
Of course, you could do both at the same time. The Republican Convention in Tampa has featured its fair share of minority speakers, but a series of racial incidents have marred the proceedings. Convention delegates aren’t just overwhelmingly white, no serious attempt has been made to address issues minority voters care about: job creation, unemployment, immigration reform, health care and racial profiling.
All the evidence suggests that the GOP strategy, to the extent there is one, has been to double down on their efforts to tap into white male resentment, minimize the number of minority voters who make it to the polls, and generating redistricting maps that give Republican candidates a leg up.
The GOP’s barrage of racially coded messages has attracted media attention. In a celebrated incident, Chris Matthews of MSNBC accused RNC chairman Reince Priebus of covering for the covert racism at work in the 2012 election. Matthews’ assault was so intense (see below) that Priebus called him “a jerk”. Matthews was being a jerk. But he was also sincerely pissed off, which was kind of refreshing.
It is interesting to watch Tom Brokaw try to calm the waters by suggesting that politicians on both sides of the ideological divide should dial back the rhetoric. That is no doubt true, but it avoided the issue at hand. Brokaw couldn’t address the race-baiting question for fear it would blow his hard-won reputation for impartiality. Chris Matthews doesn’t win a lot of style points, but I appreciate his passion.
The ill-famed Willie Horton ad in 1988 was effective largely because it didn’t initially appear to be racial. Support for George H.W. Bush plummeted when the thinly disguised racial manipulation in Horton ad was decoded. Suddenly the racial motivation was obvious to any objective observer. You will not be surprised to learn that the creator of the Horton ad, Larry McCarthy, has been hired by a pro-Romney super-PAC to inject racially coded messages into Republican attack ads.
Are voter ID laws racially motivated? Republicans insist they are simply trying to bring integrity to the process. According to the article in the Washington Post,
Republican lawmakers have argued that the voter ID law is needed to clean up voter rolls, which they say are filled with the names of illegal immigrants, ineligible felons and the deceased. Texas, they argue, is asking for no more identification than people need to board an airplane, get a library card or enter many government buildings.
It is possible that the names of illegal immigrants and ineligible felons appear on the voter rolls, but the chances of folks in either category jobbing the system are remote. Felons and the undocumented have a lot to lose and little to gain from casting an illegal vote. Republicans have no evidence that voter fraud is widespread (all the evidence points in the other direction), but they know voter ID laws suppress the minority vote and, if you’re with the White team, that can only be good.
HBO’s new Aaron Sorkin series The Newsroom has conservative bloggers beside themselves. In the clip below, fictional news anchor Bill McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, launches into an extended rant in which he compares the Tea Party to the Taliban. Both groups, McAvoy suggests, trade in “Ideological purity, compromise as weakness, a fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism, denying science, unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, a hostile fear of progress.”
Here’s the entire clip:
No thanks. The Tea Party is a mishmash of often contradictory complaints and enthusiasms. Many, perhaps most, Tea Party folk merely tolerate the brand of fundamentalist obscurantism The Newsroom excoriates. A lot of Americans enlist in the Tea Party because they are pro-business but anti-Wall Street. The bailout of the financial “industry” had more to do with growing the Tea Party than religion fanaticism. In fact, if Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party people were ever able to sit down for a beer they would agree on a lot of things.
I see Sorkin’s screed as an attempt to define a sensible political middle occupied by moderate Republicans and centrist Democrats. In the middle of McAvoy’s rant, this middle ground is identified as true Republicanism, but the speech has generally been denounced by Republicans and hailed by Democrats. According to McAvoy, real Republicans believe in “a prohibitive military” and “common sense government”. They believe there are “social programs enacted in the last half century that work, but there are way too many costing way too much that don’t.”
Moreover, real Republicans believe in free market capitalism, and law and order.
In other words, we’re talking about Reagan Republicans shorn of the small government libertarians and evangelical theocrats . . . in short, the people known today as Democrats.
It is not accidental that most Democrats have no problem with Sorkin-McAvoy’s “real Republicanism” while the real real Republicans hate it. Reagan style Republicanism is the new political middle; the turf currently defended by politicians like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Politicians to the right and the left of this safe middle ground, Sorkin implies, should be thrown under the bus. The real Republicans should come over to the blue side and the Tea Party and progressive Democrats can just go to hell.
Yet it is precisely this combination of global military imperialism and unrestricted free market bubble building that has brought our economy to its knees.
Ron Paul libertarians say we can’t afford to be the world’s policeman, and they are dead right. We currently spend more on our military than all the other children of earth combined.
International corporations get fat shipping American manufacturing jobs to the Third World while feeding off one speculative bubble after another. The anti-Wall street wing of the Tea Party calls this madness, and they are right. Ross Perot said much the same thing back in the Bill Clinton era and, come to think of it, he was right too. You really can hear that “giant sucking sound”.
The “centrist” politics of Sorkin’s Will McAvoy is a creation of the Wall Street gamblers that drove us into a deep recession. These people feed American militarism, anti-immigrant sentiment and the demons of mass incarceration because they hope to grow fat off the private contracts associated with such ungodly madness. Over half the military personnel in Afghanistan at the moment are private contractors. The war on drugs and the war on migrants is fueling a private prison boom of spectacular proportions.
Here’s the sad truth. You can’t get elected to either the Senate or the US presidency (or survive in much of the academic and religious world) without kissing the ring of Wall Street and what Eisenhower, had he survived into the twenty-first century, would be calling the military-prison-industrial complex. The folks pulling the puppet strings are the real masters of America. Unrestrained militarism and capitalism abide genuine democracy. Sorkin’s “common sense government” exists at the pleasure of men (and a smattering of women) who control the wealth of America while producing little of value.
We get nowhere demonizing the radicals on the conservative and liberal fringes of American society. These people are confused about a lot of things, but most of them are honest. Fundamentalists have wandered into an intellectual cul de sac, but American evangelicalism, for all its weird excesses, remains the beating heart of American spirituality. Casting conservative religionists into the outer darkness isn’t American, it isn’t Christian, and it isn’t wise. We need these people and, though they scarcely realize it, they need us.
I am not suggesting, as frustrated radicals often do, that there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats or that elections are meaningless. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will not pursue the same policy goals if elected. But whoever comes out on top in November (this year and in the foreseeable future) must convince Wall Street and the military establishment that they are dependable guarantors of the status quo. So long as this is the case, politicians cannot treat what ails us.
When I say that Ayn Rand was a wanna be Antichrist who inspired The Satanist Bible, I am not suggesting that Paul Ryan, a huge Ayn Rand fan, shares that distinction. Ryan is struggling to be a good Catholic Christian and a devotee of a woman who turned the teaching of Jesus on its head.
Fortunately, a long list of conservative politicians and Christians has no illusions about Ayn Rand. The late Charles Colson, shortly before his death, made a last ditch attempt to warn fellow conservatives that Ayn Rand and Jesus are antithetical. “Atlas shrugged,” Colson said, “and so should you.”
Colson wasn’t alone.
In a biting article in First Things, a conservative Christian journal founded by Richard John Neuhaus, Joe Carter addressed the link between the Satanism of Anton LeVey (the author of The Satanic Bible) and Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy.
. . . to be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn’t seem to understand what she was saying.
Many conservatives admire Rand because she was anti-collectivist. But that is like admiring Stalin because he opposed Nazism. Stalin was against the Nazis because he wanted to make the world safe for Communism. Likewise, Rand stands against collectivism because she wants the freedom to abolish Judeo-Christian morality. Conservative Christians who embrace her as the “enemy-of-my-enemy” seem to forget that she considered us the enemy.
Even if this were not the case, though, what would warrant the current influence of her thought within the conservative movement? Rand was a third-rate writer who was too arrogant to recognize her own ignorance (she believed she was the third greatest philosopher in history, behind only Aristotle and Aquinas). She misunderstood almost every concept she engaged with—from capitalism to freedom—and wrote nothing that had not been treated before by better thinkers. We don’t need her any more than we need LeVay.
Few conservatives will fall completely under Rand’s diabolic sway. But we are sustaining a climate in which not a few gullible souls believe she is worth taking seriously. Are we willing to be held responsible for pushing them to adopt an anti-Christian worldview? If so, perhaps instead of recommending Atlas Shrugged, we should simply hand out copies of The Satanic Bible. If they’re going to align with a satanic cult, they might as well join the one that has the better holidays.
Faux historian David Barton wasn’t publicly unmasked until conservative Christian scholars, embarrassed by being associated with blatant lies and distortions, went into full revolt. I am hoping the same dynamic plays out in connection with Paul Ryan’s boyish infatuation with a woman who hated his Jesus with the darkest passion.
This debate transcends partisanship. The big problem is that Ayn Rand’s Antichrist philosophy drives a business culture where, by design, only the strong survive. Unless you argue that Christian ethics have nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus, or that the teaching of Jesus should be dissociated from business ethics, this is a problem. Paul Ryan like Ayn Rand because, like most American politicians, red and blue, he shares her take-no-prisoners, profit-driven outlook. The only people exempted from this survival of the fittest social Darwinism are your family of origin, your spouse and your children. Everyone else is on their own.
That is the philosophy of Antichrist.
If you find it hard to believe that Ayn Rand was (a) the inspiration for popular Satanism, or (b) philosophically opposed to the empathy and compassion of Jesus, you should peruse this extensive list of telling quotations compiled by Bruce Wilson of Talk to Action. You will notice that virtually every Rand critic quoted is a card carrying conservative.
But before you scroll down the list, check out this video Bruce Wilson put together:
Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan (to Kim Klein of the Washington Post, 1970), as cited on page 2 of Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, by Jesper Aagaard Peterson (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009)
“Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.”
Congressman Paul Ryan, 2009 official Ryan For Congress video ad.
Mike Wallace: “You are out to destroy almost every edifice of the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government regulated capitalism, our rule by majority will. Other reviews have said you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?”
Ayn Rand: “Yes. I am the creator of a new code of morality.”
Mike Wallace 1959 CBS interview with Ayn Rand
“Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, is an acknowledged source for some of the Satanic philosophy as outlined in The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey… Satanism has far more in common with Objectivism than with any other religion or philosophy. Objectivists endorse reason, selfishness, greed and atheism. Objectivism sees Christianity, Islam and Judaism as anti-human and evil. The writings of Ayn Rand are inspiring and powerful.”
from the essay Satanism and Objectivism, republished on the website of the Church of Satan
“My great friend, the late Bill Buckley – one of his greatest contributions to modern conservatism was his effort to purge it of cranks and crypto-cultists and for Buckley, Ayn Rand and her followers certainly fit that description… [Ayn Rand’s] patently anti-Christian ideas seem to be gaining steam… powerful committee chairmen on Capital Hill make their staffers read her tracts.”
former Nixon Administration member Charles Colson, May 2011 installment of his “Two Minute Warning” video series, titled Atlas Shrugged and So Should You
“I just want to speak to you a little bit about Ayn Rand and what she meant to me in my life and [in] the fight we’re engaged here in Congress. I grew up on Ayn Rand, that’s what I tell people..you know everybody does their soul-searching, and trying to find out who they are and what they believe, and you learn about yourself.
I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged.”
U.S. Congressional Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), 2005 keynote speech in honor of Ayn Rand’s birthday, held by the Atlas Society.
“As for his ‘religion,’ he called it ‘just Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and rituals added’ ”
Bill Ellis, quoting Anton LaVey on the intellectual source of his form of satanism, from page 180, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions and The Media (2000, the University Press of Kentucky)
“To imply or state that the Church of Satan was the first to clearly state the Satanic ethic is to ignore the continuing impact of Ayn Rand…
To illustrate this historical precedent, let us examine the Nine Satanic Statements [from The Satanic Bible] in view of the Rand work Atlas Shrugged. In Galt’s speech (pages #936-993) is the written source of most of the philosophical ideas expressed in the Satanic Bible… Note that the sequential order of these Atlas Shrugged quotations parallels the order of the Nine Satanic Statements.”
Essay by George C. Smith, “The Hidden Source of the Satanic Philosophy”, republished in The Satanic Bible (link to PDF file of Anton LaVey’s book)
“[T]he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism…
…you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand.
It’s so important that we go back to our roots to look at Ayn Rand’s vision, her writings, to see what our girding, under-grounding [sic] principles are. I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech (at Bill Taggart’s wedding) on money when I think about monetary policy. And then I go to the 64-page John Galt speech”
Paul Ryan, 2005 speech to the Atlas Society
“What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.”
Ayn Rand, 1964 interview with Playboy magazine
“Today you’re supposed apologize to every naked savage anywhere on the globe because you are more prosperous.”
Ayn Rand, 1980 interview with Tom Snyder
“1. Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth – Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke!
2. Blessed are the powerful, for they shall be reverenced among men – Cursed are the feeble, for they shall be blotted out!
3. Blessed are the bold, for they shall be masters of the world – Cursed are the righteously humble, for they shall be trodden under cloven hoofs!”
from The Book of Satan, part V, in The Satanic Bible
“I am not attacking Rand for the overlap of her views with LaVey’s; I am saying that, at their core, they are the same philosophy. LaVey was able to recognize what many conservatives fail to see: Rand’s doctrines are satanic…
“[P]erhaps instead of recommending Atlas Shrugged, we should simply hand out copies of The Satanic Bible. If they’re going to align with a satanic cult, they might as well join the one that has the better holidays.”
from The Fountainhead of Satanism, by Joe Carter, published June 8, 2011 in the Neoconservative Catholic-affiliated monthly journal First Things
“[I]f a man smite thee on one cheek, SMASH him on the other!” — Anton LaVey, from The Satanic Bible (Section III, paragraph 7)
“It’s hard for me to imagine a worldview more antithetical to Christianity – also difficult to imagine a more juvenile one”
the late Charles Colson, May 2011 installment of his “Two Minute Warning” video series.
“Rand’s novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible…
If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence.
Michael Gerson, Former Assistant to the President for Policy and Strategic Planning, and Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Speechwriting, under President George W. Bush, April 21, 2011 column in The Washington Post, Ayn Rand’s adult-onset adolescence
“I read Atlas Shrugged recently and respected its support for innovators… I also was amazed at the viciousness of Rand’s view of Christianity, leading up to its conclusion, where the book’s hero traces in the air the Sign of the Dollar, a replacement for the Sign of the Cross…
[…]
And this, sadly, is the book that a budget expert I admire, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., recommends–apparently without caveat–and tells his staffers to read. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., is also a Rand fan…
…Ryan and others, if they want support from Christians, cannot merely react to the left’s criticism with a shrug: They should show what in Rand they agree with and what they spurn. The GOP’s big tent should include both libertarians and Christians, but not anti-Christians.”
Marvin Olasky, intellectual father of “compassionate conservatism”, July 16, 2011, Take a stand against Rand, published in World Magazine
“I am afraid that Chairman Ryan’s budget reflects the values of his favorite philosopher Ayn Rand rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ. Survival of the fittest may be OK for social Darwinists but not for followers of the gospel of compassion and love.”
Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese, as quoted April 24, 2012 in the Washington Times
“There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
John Rogers, screenwriter and comic
“I hope you picked it [Atlas Shrugged] up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail.”
Fred Clark’s Slacktivist blog is aimed at recovering evangelicals; particularly ex-devotees of the commercially marketed Christianity that hit its stride in the early years of the Reagan revolution.
I always know when Fred links to one of my blog posts, the usual number of hits increases by a factor of five. Slacktivist posts regularly garner hundreds of comments. Few mainstream website generate that kind of interest.
There are three reasons for Fred Clark’s success. First, he writes extremely well. Second, his work is carefully researched and edited, he approaches blogging like a full-time job). Finally, there are a whole lot of recovering evangelicals out there.
Some of these folks remain in the big-tent evangelical camp but are looking for authentic alternatives to a narrow and increasingly irrational tribalism. Fred Clark also ministers to a large cadre of atheists and secularists who grew up addicted to with-God-on-our-side religion.
When you grow up born again you never really get over it. A certain subset of the atheist-agnostic community appreciates Fred Clark’s blog even though he remains a committed Christian. He has deep insight into a slice of their experience that genuine secularists can never understand. The Slacktivist is a form of therapy, an opportunity to work through painful memories and thorny issues.
In a recent post, Clark uses a music video from the 1980s to examine the toxic world of “evangelical tribalism”, the “us-against-them” mindset that has characterized commercial Christianity for the past quarter century. The video features Carman, a smooth-talking white rapper who always reminded me of the post-Vegas Wayne Newton and Petra, a Christian 80s band that transformed the power chords and vocal hooks of early metal music (think softcore AC/DC) into a highly marketable form of “Christian contemporary” entertainment.
Here’s the video version of “Our Turn Now”
And here’s Clark’s summary of the contents:
The lyrics begin by lamenting the 1962 Supreme Court decision ending state-sponsored establishment prayers in public schools. Carman, rapping like MC Neil Diamond, offers a litany of post-hoc argumentation, blaming everything he considers bad on the court’s ruling. He calls it “religious apartheid.”
“It’s our turn now” proclaims the chorus — a rallying cry for the tribal rule of sectarian religion. And everyone else, everything outside the tribe, is on the side of the “devil.”
I was introduced to Carman by a member of the ecumenical (nominally American Baptist) congregation I pastored in the early 80s. The young man who played the song for me (assuming I’d be thrilled) was in his early 20s, a highly intelligent high school band teacher.
The basic idea was that Jesus and Satan are starring in a WWF-style Smack Down main event. Satan (like every good wrestling heel from that era) enters the ring full of strutting, ranting bravado, but after the Savior gives him the thrashing of his life, Satan’s bold baritone devolves into a whining, emasculated falsetto.
Carman ended the song, as I recall, with an oblique reference to the book of Revelation. Message: our side wins.
The message of “Our Turn Now” is much the same. In professional wrestling, “the face” (or crowd favorite) gets slapped, kicked, gouged and mangled for a good twenty minutes before he shakes off the cobwebs and turns the tables to the appreciative roar of the crowd. “It’s our turn now.” Carman’s message never transcended the crass world of wrasslin’ melodrama.
But who, in this us-against-them world, is “us” and who is “them”? In Our Turn Now, the heels, the bad guys, the spawn of Satan, were the justices of the Supreme Court who tossed God out of the classroom, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, liberal “Christians” (who generally supported the court’s decision), secularists, atheists like Marilyn Murray O’Hair, secularists of every stripe; in short, everyone who is not a card-carrying, washed in the blood evangelical Christian.
As Clark suggests, the mindset was binary, Manichean, darkness and light . They took the reins of government and did their worst; well, now it’s our turn now. Soon evangelical Christians who love Jesus and Carman in equal measure will control Congress and the White House. Godly laws will be passed. The glory of Jehovah God will return to the classroom, drugs and sexual promiscuity will be abolished by statute, and national righteousness will be restored.
If you pay careful attention to the Carman video (yes, I know that means having to watch it twice–suck it up, this is important) you will note that although all the primary performers are as white as heavy metal, all kinds of black kids are shaking it to the music, witnessing to white kids, and giving their ultra hip stamp of approval to the ascendancy of Christian America.
In other words, when we talk about “us” we’re not just talking about white people.
Why then, are nine out of ten registered Republicans, by a recent estimate, non-Hispanic whites?
At the 2008 Republican Convention, 92% of the delegates were white while it sometimes appeared that half the folks on stage were people of color. Why are white people so much more excited about Carman’s vision of Christian America than the non-white minority?
Because the “us” celebrated in the video were really the folks who were humiliated by the 1960s–white, primarily southern, evangelicals.
The marketing magic behind Carman was the linking of popular culture (heavy metal rock, professional wrestling, Ramboesque violence) with Southern Baptist piety. In the 1950s, Elvis was Satan; by 1980 he has joined the choir triumphal. Young people were free to celebrate the values of the American entertainment machine as long as they were down with a Jesus who palled around with marines, corporate moguls, chamber of commerce presidents and was comfortable in the smoke filled rooms of the Grand Old Party.
Rock and roll, pro wrestling, and romantic violence got a pass because the Right needed a really big army to fight liberalism, particularly the brand of liberalism shaped by the civil rights movement. In the South and the great American heartland, white evangelicals had grown accustomed to being in control, calling the shots and dictating moral standards. Suddenly, and quite without warning, white evangelicals were being pilloried as nasty Jim Crow racists determined to deprive the Negroes of their civil and constitutional rights.
Evangelicals still haven’t recovered from the shock. In the South, evangelicals (with Southern Baptists leading the way) climbed out onto the segregation limb until the civil rights movement, to the surprise of everyone, sawed it off.
The routine popular association of conservative religion and blatant racism was deeply humiliating. By the mid-1970s it was no longer possible to defend the old Jim Crow system, but white hot racial resentment was creating rich opportunities for a resurgence of some kind.
The key was to rebrand the 1960s. The big issues weren’t civil rights and Vietnam, the new argument went, it was all about two Supreme Court decisions: driving God out of the schools (1962) and Roe v. Wade (1973). These two liberal decisions, the argument went, paved the way for violence in the streets, the drug culture, sexual promiscuity, perversion and every other evil imaginable.
But it’s Our Turn Now.
Why have African Americans and Hispanics been reluctant to jump on the bandwagon? Because it’s too awkward. The GOP is the unofficial Party of White and the Christian Right, though officially Neapolitan, is vanilla clear through. Check out the crowd at the next Romney rally and see if you can find any people of color in the crowd. If you got $5 for every one you couldn’t gain admission to a ticket to a $100 a plate fundraiser.
This didn’t happen overnight. In 1973, most prominent southern evangelicals were big supporters of the separation of church and state and evangelical views on abortion tracked national opinion. The big opportunity was raging white resentment, but neither leading evangelicals nor GOP strategists couldn’t admit as much.
Abortion was, and remains, a legitimate moral issue, but a particularly thorny one. As the current tug-of-war between supporters and detractors of Todd (“shut that thing down”) Akin suggests, banning abortion for rape and incest survivors is about as popular as back alley abortions. Hence, most Americans are unwilling to go all the way with the pro-life movement.
This is precisely why true believers, as defined by opinion leaders within the Religious Right, can tolerate no compassionate exceptions to pro-life orthodoxy. Go down that road very far and pretty soon most Democrats will be agreeing with you. The goal has never been to make abortion safe, legal and rare. From a culture war perspective, the more abortions the better. The tragic statistics feed an effective wedge issue.
The goal was to get rank and file evangelicals (mad as hell about being branded as racists but lukewarm on abortion) to stop talking race and start screaming about abortion, abortionists and the horrors of the sexual revolution.
At the same time, the Religious Right launched a campaign to convince southern preachers that the separation of church and state was a liberal abomination.
W.A. Criswell was pastor of First Baptist Church Dallas, in its heyday the largest congregation in Protestant America. In 1960, Criswell used traditional southern support for the separation of church and state to argue that John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic who was sure to take his marching orders from the Vatican, was unworthy to be president:
It is written in our country’s constitution that church and state must be, in this nation, forever separate and free. In the very nature of the case, there can be no proper union of church and state.
But in 1980, with the nuptials between Southern Baptists and Reagan’s GOP a done deal, Criswell opined thus:
I believe this notion of the separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel’s imagination.
How do we account for this amazing transformation? Criswell got the memo.
By 2012 David Barton was arguing that Thomas Jefferson, the father of church-state separation, was an orthodox evangelical who dreamed of Christian theocracy. Only when a holy host of conservative historians cried foul did Barton’s publisher pull the Jefferson book. Not surprisingly, Barton’s good buddy Glenn Beck has agreed to publish the Jefferson manuscript.
As the Barton episode demonstrates, it has become painfully difficult for thinking conservatives to stick with the Religious Right or the GOP. For the moment, few malcontents will leap into the reluctant arms of either the Democrats or liberal Christianity.
When Bill Clinton threw the unions under the bus in the 1990s he knew they would stay loyal. “Where would they go?” he asked. The same applies to conservative evangelicals who can’t abide the irrational excesses of their coreligionists. They will stay with the GOP and the Christian Right because they have nowhere else to go.
The culture war has advanced to the point where the tiny strip of middle ground separating conservatives from liberals has become a barbed wire infested minefield. The corporate interests that funded Carman and Petra like it that way. So long as the American melodrama is conceived as a pay-per-view Smackdown between Christ and Antichrist nobody has the luxury of genuine thought. As the secular left screams in protest (“You can’t do that! You can’t believe that! You can’t say that!”) the easier it becomes for the Christian Right to define itself as a tiny island of godliness in a vast Satanic sea.
After telling a hometown audience that he and his wife were born in local hospitals he added, “nobody has ever asked to see my birth certificate.”
This wasn’t an inadvertent slip; it was a carefully considered attempt to ingratiate himself with people who think Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who pals around with terrorists. Writing in Mother Jones, Adam Serwer put it this way:
This is a necessary device for a Republican politician who wants to rile up the base without seeming like a lunatic, because the belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States is still held by nearly half of self-identified Republicans even after the very public release of the president’s birth certificate. Birtherism remains the most frank and widespread evidence of racial animus among some of the president’s critics. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes inThe Atlantic this month, the birthers, strapped in their waxen wings, aim for nothing less than the sun: “If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.”
And here’s the beauty of it all. If a leftist or a representative of the lamestream media accuses you of questioning the authenticity of the president’s birth certificate you can issue a simple denial. I didn’t mean nothing by it. I was just telling the crowd where I was born.
If they press the issue, you tell them that you have never questioned the president’s Born in the USA claim.
Will journalists accept this explanation?
Not necessarily. Moderate reporters, fearful of having the L-word branded into their foreheads, may give the Republican presidential candidate a pass. They will ask the question, “Did he just make a birther joke?” But they won’t commit to an answer.
Conservatives, not wishing to discredit a still-useful birther movement, will try to shift the discussion to more “substantial” matters, like the deficit.
Nothing is more substantial than character. By pandering to the ignorance and bigotry of the most fearful segment of the electorate, Governor Romney has raised the character issue.
There is a simple reason why no one has ever questioned Governor Romney’s birth certificate–he’s a white Republican male.
If Romney was a black Democrat (hard to picture, I know) he would be derided on the Right as a Mexican national who wears funny underwear and worships a guy with magic glasses.
Everyone is vulnerable to urban legends and racist myths if people are inclined to invent and propagate them . . . except those of the Caucasian persuasion.
Several years ago it was reported that a document was circulated without identifying its source, and people were asked what they thought of it. Many thought that it was anti-American propaganda, probably circulated by Communists. The document in question was the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
I don’t know of any survey or poll concerning the American Civil Liberties Union, but if one were taken my guess is that the ACLU would not fare terribly well in public opinion for much the same reason that the Bill of Rights was suspect in the minds of a considerable percentage of those involved in the aforementioned informal survey. The Bill of Rights provides protection for people who might otherwise be subject to a harsh majority. The ACLU seeks to apply the Bill of Rights to all residents within our borders, popular or not.
The ACLU defends religious liberty. The ACLU has defended the right to freedom of expression of the very unpopular—justly unpopular in my opinion—Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS. In a case that began in Plano, Texas in 2003, the ACLU defended the right of an elementary school student to distribute candy canes with a religious message on them. More recently, in 2011, the ACLU defended the rights of school children, again in Plano, to wear rosaries or other clothing with a religious message. The ACLU vigorously opposes, on the grounds of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, government sponsored prayer in public schools.
The ACLU has defended other unpopular causes, probably most notable the right of the Ku Klux Klan to peaceably assemble.
My first personal involvement with the ACLU came in 2000 when Will Harrell, then Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas, called me regarding my take on the Tulia Drug Sting. I described my take on events and what I had learned of the activities of the undercover agent. Will Harrell’s response: “We’re gonna get that [expletive deleted]. Excuse the language, Rev.”
In subsequent months and years, I developed camaraderie with Will. Patricia and I made numerous trips to Austin working with ACLU of Texas people in lobbying for a bill to require more than just the testimony of a single witness to convict someone of a crime. We were amazed that we could actually go in representatives’ and senators’ offices. Rarely could we speak with a representative or a senator, but we were always cordially received by the staff person associated with our particular concern. With our cooperation the ACLU of Texas began quoting the Bible in some of its brochures! “A single witness shall not suffice to convict a person of any crime or wrongdoing. Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a charge be sustained” (Deuteronomy 19:15). Both Jesus (Matthew 18:16), and Paul (2 Corinthians 13:1) alluded to the passage from Deuteronomy. One representative that I did get to talk to in person was what I would call a “law n’ order” person. She was also one who wore her religion on her sleeve, had a Bible visibly on her desk, and was fond of quoting it. She was in legislative session, but a staff person told her that a minister would like to speak with her. I was surprised that she came out of session to meet me. I told her that I hoped for her support on the bill to require more than a single witness, and cited the Bible verses above. She said, “Oh that was for those days. Things are different now.” Of course things are different now! But she was very selective in where she acknowledged the difference. She is a situation ethicist without knowing it! She did not support the bill.
I had opportunity to appear at a legislative hearing on the bill. I cited the above verses and commented, “Moses, Jesus, and Paul: seems like pretty good company to me.”
The police union had an army of paid lobbyists opposing the bill, but an amended version, exempting police officers but including so-called confidential informants did pass and was signed into law by the governor. That “Tulia bill” as it was called was influential in the overturning of the Dallas sheetrock scandal in which confidential informants turned in gypsum powder representing it as powder cocaine.
I subsequently became a member of the governing board of ACLU of Texas. I first filled a vacancy created by the retirement of a board member before his term had expired, and then was elected to a full four year term. I had a very good relationship with Jews, agnostics, secularists, Christians, and some Muslims on the board. I was known as “the Rev.” On one occasion Will Harrell was going through some troubling times, and readily accepted my offer to pray with him. The chairman of the board, a practicing Jew, came into the room where we were, saw that I was praying with him, and quietly left.
The quarterly travel to board meetings, usually in Austin but sometimes in other cities, became just too difficult for me, and I resigned my position on the board near the end of my elected four year term. The meeting where I tendered my resignation was in El Paso. When we had completed an afternoon session, we visited the fence. I saw children come running to the fence, hoping someone would slip a dollar or whatever between the chain link mesh. Then that evening we dined at a sumptuous restaurant within little more than shouting distance from the fence. I was conscience stricken by our opulence contrasted with the poverty no more than a few hundred yards from where we dined. At our session the next morning, I was given a few minutes to say farewell and took the opportunity to reflect on Biblical justice which is a part of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Do I agree with every position that the ACLU takes? Do I agree with every sentence in either the Republican or Democratic Party platforms? Do I agree with every position of the United Methodist Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, or any other religious organization?
This post is part of Dr. Kiker’s life story which is currently appearing in weekly installments in a Tulia paper.
Lubbock County Judge Tom Head wasn’t looking for national publicity when he set up an interview with the local Fox affiliate. Head just wanted to plug a 1.7% tax increase that would fund an expansion of the sheriff’s department and put more money at the disposal of the DA’s office.
But Tom Head is now famous, for the moment at least. Perhaps the County Judge thought the voters needed a really good reason to open their wallets. How about this scenario. There’s a good chance that Barack Obama will get himself elected (God forbid), and if that happens we’re gonna have as an old time insurrection, right here in Lubbock County. And Obama, he’s not gonna like that so he’s just likely to call in UN troops, an army of foreign occupation, and force his will on the good people of Lubbock County at gunpoint. And if that happens, I’m gonna stand boldly in front of those UN personnel carriers and say, “You ain’t comin’ in here!
I am paraphrasing. You can find Mr. Head’s exact words here (and in several thousand other places). His paranoid screed went viral.
Lubbock attorney Rod Hobson (who helped shut down the ill-famed Tulia drug bust) was so impressed by the judge’s rhetoric that he hung a UN flag outside his office. “When I saw the story I thought, once again, Lubbock is going to be the laughingstock of the entire nation,” Hobson told a local TV station. “What makes it so sad is he is our elected county judge, who is in charge of a multimillion-dollar budget. That is scary. It’s like the light’s on, but no one is home. … I’d just like to think he’s off his meds.”
A few days ago, Fort Worth columnist Bud Kennedy expressed his relief that Missouri’s Todd Akin was deflecting attention from notorious Texas weirdos. This morning he admitted that the prurient interest of America has returned to the Lone Star State. To put things in perspective, Kennedy offers a little background on Mr. Head.
Folks, please understand. In Texas, we don’t choose our county judges or commissioners based on any qualifications besides who’s good at dominoes.
In the orchard of targets for TV joke writers, Texas county officials are low-hanging fruit.
Head, 63, is an administrator with only a psychology degree. He worked first in law enforcement as a Texas Tech University campus officer and city marshal, then as an elected county justice of the peace.
He moved up to county judge in 1999 and led his own mini-rebellion against Obama in 2009, posting literature and cartoons mocking him on a hallway bulletin board before commissioners removed them.
One of the posters showed jail book-in photos of nine arrestees in Obama T-shirts. Seven were African-American.
Asked to explain himself to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Head boldly shared his Christian witness:
I cannot divorce my theology and my philosophy from my office. I’m pro-life, I’m pro-gun rights and if you’re gonna vote for me and if you’re not for gun rights, then you probably don’t want me in office.
In other words, this isn’t a story about a single Loony-Tunes (check out his tie in the picture above) judge in West Texas–the voters of Lubbock County like this guy.
But wait a minute here, what possible connection could there be between Mr. Head’s “theology” and his paranoid take on Obama and the United Nations?
The judge is likely referring to Agenda 21, an uncontroversial fluff-document signed by 178 world leaders, including President George H.W. Bush, in 1992. The idea was to encourage the efficient marshaling of scant natural resources in times of famine and natural disaster. Or that’s what we originally thought. Listen to Glenn Beck’s dispassionate take on Agenda 21:
Those pushing … government control on a global level have mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight, and then just dismissing it as a joke. Once [internationalists] put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it, we will not be able to survive.
Under Agenda 21, these activists argue, the expansive American way of life, in which everyone can aspire to the dream of owning a house with a big yard and two cars in the driveway, will be replaced by one in which increasing numbers are crammed into urbanized “pack ’em and stack ’em” apartment complexes, and forced to use mass transportation and live according to a collectivist ethos. Once the UN’s radical utopia is achieved, gun ownership will be forbidden and the UN will raise an army intent on terrorizing the populace in the name of social order and equality, sustainability and smart growth — all words that anti-Agenda 21 activists believe signal the true intent of the UN’s plan.
The tattered remnants of the John Birch Society are all over this stuff, which would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that Tim LaHaye, author of bestselling “Left Behind” series, is a proud JBS stalwart. LaHaye and co-author Jerry Jenkins sprinkled Agenda 21 paranoia throughout their end times thrillers. I distinctly recall sitting in a well-attended Sunday School class in Tulia, Texas (70 miles north of Lubbock) in which Mr. LaHaye’s eschatology was embraced as the gospel truth.
But this isn’t just about West Texas. Texas is riddled with Anti-UN nuttiness. Ted Cruz, the man expected to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison as Texas Senator, is mad as hell about the imminent UN destruction of American sovereignty. In the mind of Ted Cruz, the Antichrist is George Soros, but the general thrust mirror’s the views of Beck. Cruz recently printed this rant on his personal blog:
Agenda 21 attempts to abolish “unsustainable” environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind. Everyone wants clean water and clean air, but Agenda 21 dehumanizes individuals by removing the very thing that has defined Americans since the beginning—our freedom.
Cruz is particularly concerned that the UN plans to abolish the game of golf.
All of which explains how a simple-minded Texas judge could see opposition to a US president and an innocuous (and largely meaningless) UN document as theological issues. When the saints of God are raptured to heaven and the Antichrist (known as Nicolae Carpathia to Left Behind enthusiasts) comes to power, United Nations troops will spring to his assistance.
How do we explain this craziness? Or maybe it isn’t crazy. When the majority of people in a given locale (say, Lubbock, Texas) share a common delusion maybe it’s the unbelievers who are crazy. Who gets to define normal?
Tom Head’s fears about Barack Obama reflect the deep dread many Americans feel about the future. Where are we heading? What is happening to America? What’s it all about, Alfie?
How else do we explain the Tea Party’s undimmed enthusiasm for free market fundamentalism? After the financial industry lied and swindled the world to the brink of financial catastrophe, how can anyone believe in the natural goodness of unregulated markets?
Because it’s all we have. If the free market won’t save us, who will? If the free market won’t save us, the glory that was America disappears. It’s Ichabod time!
How do we explain why a great nation like the United States of America has a crumbling infrastructure and can’t pay its bills when the folks in collectivist dystopias like Canada, Norway and South Korea seem to be faring so much better?
We could blame the fact that we spend more on defense than all the other nations of earth combined. We could point to our bloated prison system. We could acknowledge that America is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a consortium of international corporations.
But that doesn’t sit right somehow.
How much better to believe that America has been hijacked by ultra-liberal socialist big-spenders like Barack Obama who give their true loyalty to Allah and/or a One World dictatorship. That way, we simply turn the reins over to pro-business folks like Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz and an unregulated market will gradually drag us back to prosperity.
As things presently stand, Mitt Romney can count on 60% of the white vote, 33% of the Latino vote and 0% of the African American vote.
Not 5% . . . 0%. There may be a few thousand black Republicans nationwide willing to pull the lever for the white guy, but there aren’t enough of them to constitute a single percentage point.
I would have thought that a small but measurable contingent of black voters would be with the Republican candidate. He is the pro-life, anti-gay rights candidate, after all, and black evangelicals have a reputation for being pro-life and anti-gay rights.
And what about the small sliver of the black electorate wealthy enough to be helped by Republican fiscal policy? What’s with those guys?
According to the Washington Post, Republican candidates like George W. Bush and Bob Dole captured just over 10% of the black vote. Hardly a stellar performance, but an improvement on an absolute electoral vacuum.
The lack of Latino enthusiasm for Mitt Romney is understandable. A harsh anti-immigrant stance lay at the heart of Romney’s primary season strategy and the new Republican Party platform shifts to the right of their standard bearer.
Romney made a point of attending the NAACP conference in July where he claimed to be the candidate who would do the most for African Americans.
No one was fooled.
When the Republican candidate used his NAACP address to flay “Obamacare” it was obvious that the folks assembled before him weren’t his real audience. Romney’s cynical handlers were hoping that the sight of their man being booed and heckled, however politely, by a room of black opinion leaders would help his standing with the white electorate.
And we’re not talking about the conservative white voters who wouldn’t vote for Obama if you held a gun to their heads. The message was aimed at white swing voters; the folks on the fence.
This level of cynicism has characterized Republican political algebra since the notorious Southern Strategy was cobbled together in the late 1960s. Racial resentment runs so deep in America that a solid majority of white voters can be manipulated by a thinly-veiled racial pitch.
You can’t be too gross about it, of course, no one outside a few counties in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia wants to be accused of overt, “I love the Nigra, in his place” bigotry. But whenever Romney contrasts Obama’s entitlement nation with the personal responsibility America dear to the hearts of Republicans he’s fishing in the slough of racial resentment.
When white voters think welfare, they think black, and Romney’s handlers know it. The bogus complaint that Obama has scaled back work requirements in the welfare-to-work system doesn’t have to be true. To most white swing voters, sending out checks no-questions-asked is just the sort of thing a black president would do for his kind.
This is called “dog whistle” politics, the theory being that only conservative whites can hear the high-pitched whine of racial resentment. Although, from a Republican perspective, it hardly matters, the ears of African Americans have become highly attuned to dog whistle politics over the years, and for good reason. If you’re black, that ear-splitting siren always spells trouble.
This year the squeal is so loud and persistent that zero percent of African American voters fail to hear it. It’s white moderates, the kind who generally vote for Democrats, who remain deaf to the whistle, and so long as that’s true the Southern Strategy marches on.
Just when it appeared that Paul Ryan’s infatuation with Ayn Rand might be garnering the attention it deserves, Todd Akin made his “legitimate rape” remark. Suddenly the Republican National Committee was desperate to get Akin off the stage so he won’t ruin next week’s big show in Tampa.
But the Rand-Ryan connection may soon be staging a comeback. People like Paul Ryan didn’t learn to love the free market by reading hard core economists like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises or even Milton Friedman; they read novels like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Stories are far more captivating than stats and pie charts. In the relatively repressed 1950s, Ayn Rand was often a young person’s first brush with the pornographic imagination. (more…)
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
When I say that Ayn Rand was a wanna be Antichrist who inspired The Satanist Bible, I am not suggesting that Paul Ryan, a huge Ayn Rand fan, shares that distinction. Ryan is struggling to be a good Catholic Christian and a devotee of a woman who turned the teaching of Jesus on its head.
By Alan Bean
Mitt Romney 
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice 