Recently in Religion Category

It takes a wingnut to take someone else’s words, say they mean something completely different from what they are saying and then castigate the person for that twisted, unstated meaning. John McCain, having nothing to offer in public policy (he's a Republican) – other than perpetual war in the Middle East (and who knows where else) and short term, ineffective gimmicks – has been running his campaign on just those sort of distortions about what Barack Obama “is saying” when he is saying nothing of the kind.

But it takes a special kind of evangelical whackjob of a wingnut to attack someone by saying essentially the same thing they are.

Evangelical whackjob James Dobson says that, “[Barack] Obama should not be referencing antiquated dietary codes and passages from the Old Testament that are no longer relevant to the teachings of the New Testament,” in response to Obama saying exactly that:

"Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?" Obama asked in the speech. "Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?"

Dobson’s Focus on the Family spokesman, Tom Minnery, gets it exactly backward when he claims, "Many people have called [Sharpton] a black racist, and [Obama] is somehow equating [Dobson] with that and racial bigotry." Actually, Obama had contrasted not equated Sharpton and Dobson:

"Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?"

Dobson himself claimed that it is "lowest common denominator of morality," and that it is a "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution," for Obama to say:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. It requires their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason."

Dobson can claim that reason, argument and universal values are immoral and pretend that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution doesn’t exist but that makes it pretty hard to argue that the other guy is the one who is nuts.

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]

Willard Milton Romney has a pretty steep hill to climb when he makes that address Thursday on his Mormon religion at the Bush Presidential Library in Texas. Bottom line for Romney: he has to put the Romeny brand on Mormonism and he has to get southern evangelicals to be OK with that.

Highlights from an interview with John Geer, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of a survey assessing bias against Mormonism:

ON THE BIAS AGAINST MORMONISM

• Surveys show that only about half the population knows someone who is a Mormon.
  This is not surprising; only about 2-3% of the population is Mormon. This is a similar concentration to that of Jews. But a far greater percentage of the population knows a Jewish person. The difference is that, whereas Jews are concentrated on the east and west coasts, Mormons are largely concentrated in a few sparsely populated states. And this doesn't even begin to address the cultural crossover that is a result of the high profile Jewish people have traditionally had in the entertainment industry.
  
• Mormons are isolated
  A certain caricature of Mormonism has become ingrained: funny underwear, polygamy, a Bible-knockoff, etc.
  
• As a result, there is a strong bias against Mormonism.
  For example, among southern evangelicals (the key Republican constituency), bias against Mormoms rivals the bias against atheists.

ROMNEY'S CHALLENGE

• Romney needs to first address peoples' caricatures of Mormons.
  Surveys show that people who know Mitt Romney is a Mormon show far less bias [against Mormonism] than those who don't know he's a Mormon. By just being who he is, he's a kind of a role model, a spokesperson in some sense, for the Mormon religion. In other words, he needs to brand Mormonism with the Romney image.

COMPARING KENNEDY AND ROMNEY ON RELIGION

• Kennedy faced a lesser challenge.
  When Kennedy addressed his Catholicism and the biases against that, it was less of a hurdle because almost everybody knew Catholics.
  
• Romney needs to accomplish much more than Kennedy.
  Not everyone knows Mormons; therefore, Romney has to execute a delicate maneuver. He has to first let people know that he is a Mormon -- because people who know is one, have a higher opinion of Mormanism.

  Simultaneously, he he needs to illuminate key tenets of the Mormon religion is some way, e.g., polygamy is illegal, beliefs and policies towards blacks have changed, etc.

  Only by connecting his personal image with that of (a "benign") Mormonism can he then ask for people to be tolerant of a "religious" candidate.

COMPARING KENNEDY AND ROMNEY ON THE POLITICS OF RELIGION

• Kennedy's target audience.
  Kennedy's address to the Baptist ministers was really addressed to Democratic insiders. He knew that by going into the lion's den and addressing a body of Protestant clergymen on the issue of religious tolerance, he was demonstrating (to those with the real power) that he could be a mainstream candidate. Remember: Baptist ministers did not have the political power they have today.
  
• Romney's target audience.
  Flash forward 47 years: Protestant clergy (and lay people) have tremendous power within the Republican party. Romney is appealing to an audience that is powerful, and also very much biased against him.

Of course, this doesn't even begin to address the impact that Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist clergyman, is having on an extremely fluid Republican primary campaign.

• Congratulations to Al Gore. Wow -- an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Nobel all in one year. Not even Liza Minelli did that.

• 
  Why is everyone so upset with Ann Coulter? She's only said what any Christian learns from the time they start Sunday School. And another thing: if she's so heinous why does CNBC (or NBC, or CNN or FNC) put her on the air in the first place? Lastly, isn't it true that you can be a girl and still have a Y chromosome? IJS.

• "Hunh. A resolution condemning genocide. I think you gotta go 'yes' with that one. [If not], what is the right response to historic mass killings? Historic mass flowers?"

• And, speaking on behalf of the entire Armenian community, I would like to say we are thrilled that Aasif Mandvi has been named The Daily Show's Senior Armeniologist.

• I read the Wall Street Journal and I know they loooooove to complain that the richest 10% of Americans already pay 2/3 of all taxes, as though that proves their taxes are too high. What you never hear is what percentage of their total income this tax load represents. When THAT number reaches 30-50% or more (as it does for middle-class families) then we can talk about taxes being too high. Not only that: I say they should be paying 90% or more of all taxes in this country. And if they want to become tax exiles, then good riddance. They weren't real Americans after all, were they?

• George W. Bush can grow up a mean, nasty, coke-snorting drunk but once he accepted Jesus, it wiped the slate clean. Rudy Giuliani can rail against the gun lobby as Mayor of New York, but in a post-9/11world he's in bed with the NRA -- and they're on top. So what now for Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center -- now that he's accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior? Maybe he and Ann Coulter can go on a National Reconciliation Tour.

Forty years ago, George Romney ran for president. He was the governor of my state, Michigan, and was considered to be a moderate (translation: Rockefeller Republican). He was becoming increasingly anti-war. Back then, there wasn't much coverage of the fact that he was a Mormon, although polling was done on the question.

The Gallup Poll in April, 1967, asked, "If your party nominated a generally well qualified man for president and he happened to be a Mormon, would you vote for him?" 75 percent said yes, and 17 percent said no, while the rest either did not know or declined to answer.

That was then, this is now. Mitt Romney, his son, former governor of Massachusetts, is running for president. While he governed as a moderate, he is running as a hard-right conservative. And on the issue of his Mormonism, polling shows that things have, well, changed:

In March of this year, the CBS News/New York Times Poll asked: "Do you think most people would vote for a presidential candidate who is a Mormon, or not?" A majority of 54 percent said voters would not. FOX News in February posed the question, "Do you think the United States is ready to elect . . . a Mormon president or not?" A plurality of 48 percent said no while only 40 percent said yes.

And it's even worse than it sounds: an alarmingly high percentage of white Evangelicals -- the bedrock members of today's Republican base (Rockefeller now being a faded memory) said they would be "less likely" to vote for a Mormon.

Could it be because they don't consider Mormons to be Christians?

The Church of Latter Day Saints gives scriptural authority to the Book of Mormon, not a part of the standard Old or New Testament. Unlike most traditional Christian denominations, Mormons reject the Trinity and the belief that Jesus was the son of God. Finally, Mormons contend that God was once a man.

Is America Are white Evangelicals ready to elect vote for a non-Christian president? Or, more to the point, is America are white Evangelicals ready to elect a member of a religious cult to the Oval Office?

Sounds like Romney will have an uphill climb.

UPDATE: Speaking of Romney, Paul Krugman watched the Republican debate and has this to say:

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday. Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the 'gaffe of the night'? Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

I can't believe this guy could become the next president of the United States:

When asked his favorite novel in an interview shown yesterday on the Fox News Channel, Mitt Romney pointed to “Battlefield Earth,” a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. That book was turned into a film by John Travolta, a Scientologist.

Scientology and Mormonism...Scientology and Mormonism. I can't decide which one is more credible!

By the way, am I the only one who sees a resemblance between Romney and Kronk from The Emperor's New Groove?

(HT to Anna Marie for the title of this post)

by shep

“The base isn't interested in Iraq. The base is for Bush. If Bush said tomorrow, we're leaving in two months, there would be no revolt.”

No great moral imperative. No existential threat from the islamofascistterroristassholes. No moral commitment to the country and peoples we set aflame. Just more innocent souls on the pyre for the pure sake of fealty to The Leader.

And here’s another terrific peek into the mind of the authoritarian follower:

“In retrospect, some of his comments and interaction – that at the time seemed edgy but innocent enough – now seem questionable.”

You see, when Ted Haggard was the authority figure of the New Life Church, and said, “evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group,” and “pulled aside two men from his congregation and asked how often their wives had orgasms,” he seemed “innocent enough.” Once he was demoted and disgraced those same comments “seem questionable,” to those same (now former) followers who previously thought they seemed "innocent."

The need for the authority dictates the positive perception of everything from correct professional conduct to appropriate personal behavior, regardless of what one sees with one’s own eyes. In this case, the exact same behavior is judged differently on different days, only Haggard’s authority had changed.

Think of all of the former Bush supporters, from Paul O’Neill to Matthew Dowd, who were unassailable the day before they turned against the Bush administration’s conduct and savaged the day after. Those people were not unimpeachable originally because the supporters judged that they merited it due to their character and integrity. They were respected or reviled, based soley upon their loyalty to the authority figure.

Different authority; different righteousness. When it comes to their leaders, Republicans are simply incapable of judging ethical behavior.

The Founding Fathers agreed: the best way to keep religion and government strong was to insure that they ran on separate, parallel tracks.

Now, in Michigan, the Republican legislature has forced those tracks to converge and the result is a freaking train wreck:

Michigan's second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

"We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today," Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, "but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."

"Technically," he added, "any time a person engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship, he or she is guilty of CSC I," the most serious sexual assault charge in Michigan's criminal code.

Read the details of this case -- it'll make your hair stand on end.

Without further ado (or waiting til Dec. 31), here are E Pluribus Unum's most-read posts of 2006:

10. Dad Gave Me The Keys (Mark Adams)

Wow, a real blog. How cool is this.

Mark's debut at EPU! Dude -- how cool are you?

9. Ohio Republicans, Offers That Can't Be Refused (Mark Adams)

In France, you can't even get away with taking a Viagra before a silly bike race. If they could prove that the Browns and the Cavaliers were "fixing" point spreads, or the Indians were throwing games, there'd be riots on Euclid Avenue. Push some inconvenient voters in the wrong direction, undermine our very democracy, and it's just business as usual.

8. Movie trailer mash-ups
Where else are you going to see the movie trailer for Brokeback To Future? OK, besides YouTube.com and every other blog and website on the Internets. All I can say is: God bless Google.

7. Marbury vs. Madison
I posted this in April, 2005 and it is still one of the most widely-read things I've ever written. It has bounced around in the top 50 sites (out of 175 thousand) at Google for the eponymous keyword phrase -- and it made a star out of our buddy Wince from Kansas:

Some would say God's Law is most high. Perhaps it is, as defined (for example) in the Bible. But we are not a nation that is governed by the church or the temple. Even if we were, all you have to do is look at the Talmud to understand that there is always more than one opinion about everything.

No, we are not a government ruled by the church. We are a government of the people, for the people and by the people. We follow a document that WE wrote.

Some would hope that God guided us in that ongoing endeavor. But if that is the case, it is also certainly true that God helps those who helps themselves.

It's hard to make your way through the difficult questions Wince, I know. But we all agreed, long ago, that this was a job for the people to do. We don't wait for God to judge these difficult cases for us.

6. What does leadership mean?

I think it was Chris Matthews who said voters respond most favorably to the candidate who can best articulate the following simple message: "Follow me!"

Bush did it better than Kerry and he won. The End.

5. Intelligent Design: “The sky is blue because God wants it that way.”
The title (and the post) is borrowed from Nobel Prize winner Eric Cornell. What more is there to add?

4. Commerce Committee to Vote on Net Neutrality Wednesday
This post contained the names and numbers of the everyone on the Senate Commerce Committee and I urged you to call them and tell them to support the Snowe/Dorgan amendment. Net Neutrality survived -- for now. Stay tuned.

3. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts
Jeez, I didn't even write it. And/But this post ranks #9 out of 480 thousand sites listed on Google. I'm baffled...but endlessly amused (along with, apparently, the rest of the Internets):

A blind man once stepped on Chuck Norris' shoe. Chuck replied, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Chuck Norris!" The mere mention of his name cured this man blindness. Sadly, the first, last, and only thing this man ever saw was a fatal roundhouse kick delivered by Chuck Norris.

2. Foley Scandal: What's up with Rep. Rodney Alexander?
Major hat tip to Miss Julie, who asked the title question thereby inspiring this post, early in the Foley scandal.

And the #1 most widely-read post of the year...

1. Bush-Cheney Escape War Crimes Prosecution
Go ahead, click the link -- you'll notice that this post was "dugg" 854 times so far (and viewed nearly 4 thousand times at Google Video -- with a strange spike in traffic on the day after Christmas). It's Jack Cafferty breathing fire:

Under the War Crimes Act, violations of the Geneva Conventions are felonies, in some cases punishable by death. When the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Convention applied to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, President Bush and his boys were suddenly in big trouble.

I'll say. Senator Bill Frist, Congressman Dennis Hastert and their Republican stooges passed the Military Commission Act of 2006, destroying habeas corpus -- and allowing Bush-Cheney to get away without a scratch. This is a story that historians will be telling for decades to come.

P.S. Sometime soon, I promise to post E Pluribus Unum's Top 10 most widely viewed videos -- including the one of Stephen Colbert showing (and dissing) my ad for congressional candidate, Carol Gay.

• Enter the contest to make Christopher Hitchens laugh!

• Enter another contest to guess the father of Mary Cheney's baby.

• OK, this isn't a contest, per se, but here goes...Attention Rosemary Esmay, Mark Adams and Double-Plus-Ungood:
  1. Grab the book closest to you.
     
  2. Open to page 123, go down to the 4th sentence.
     
  3. Post the text of the following 3 sentences on your blog.
     
  4. Name of the book and the author.
     
  5. Tag three people of your own.
  
  Here's my entry from page 123 of Robert Kennedy: His Life by Evan Thomas:

  The Bay of Pigs was a severe lesson. It taught the president, Bobby Kennedy later said, "that he could not substitute anybody else's judgement for his own." Lacerating himself for blindly following the CIA, the president repeatedly asked, "How could I have been so stupid?" (And, more wryly and ruefully, "Why couldn't this have happened to James Bond?")

• U.S. uses Google for Iran intel? WTF?

• Beware: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals!

• Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Will you miss your connecting flight in Memphis or not?

• President Bush is on a listening tour about Iraq? Why didn't he do this 4 years ago?

• Speaking of Iraq, Simon Rosenberg makes a decent point:

  While so much of our discussion now is about the Iraqis taking more responsibility for their country, in practical terms turning over the reigns of power to the Iraqis means turning over the reigns of power to the region's Shiites. It also almost certainly means the strengthening of Iran, the revival of Al-Qaeda, a potential regional war and oil soaring way beyong $100 a barrel. If this is where we are headed our government better start having a big conversation with its people about the consequences of so many bad and niave decisions by the Republicans in charge of our government these past six years.

  Bush has pushed his latest Iraq address to the American people past Christmas and into 2007. What about the State of the Union? Shouldn't he just address it all then?

• Barack Obama's middle name is (wait for it) Hussein. Will this be a factor in his (projected) candidacy for president?

• Andrew Sullivan placed first in Right Wing News' competition for "Most Annoying Right-of-Center Blog" and second in the competition for "Most Annoying Left-of-Center Blog." Yeah, yeah, we know: he swings both ways. Ha.

• Shouldn't Jack Black and Jack White do a remake of Ebony and Ivory?

(HT to Miss Julie)

• December 4th was the 13th anniversary of the death of Frank Zappa. We could use a guy like him today:

  Zappa: When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view and if that code happens to be very, very right wing almost toward Attila the Hun...

  Lofton: Well then, you are an anarchist. Every form of civil government is based on some kind of morality, Frank.

  Zappa: Morality in terms of behavior - not in terms of theology.

• Speaking of theology, the Dennis Prager story -- wherein he demanded that Rep. Keith Ellison use a Bible (not a Koran) to take his oath of office for the House -- has developed legs. Sorry to mix metaphors, but Prager's attitude is just the tip of the iceberg. Glenn Beck's outrageous insinuation that Ellison is some sort of al-Qaeda operative and the shameful conduct of US Airways in booting six Muslim clergymen off a flight in Minneapolis are all part of the same anti-Muslim hysteria that is becoming more and more common in this country.

• And speaking of what's just under the surface, James Wolcott makes a valuable observation about the relative moral values promoted by right-wingers:

  It is symptomatic of the moral-spiritual-political-human degradation of the right blogosphere that its receptors register more indignation over some fugitive fatuous quote from Gwyneth Paltrow than over the Orwellian torture of a prisoner and American citizen convicted of no crime, Jose Padilla, whose mind has been subjected to finest deprivation techniques American tax money can buy.(james wolcott)

• And speaking of ruthless overkill, Rudy Giuliani is riding high in the polling for '08 presidential candidates largely on the myth that he rescued New York (and the rest of America) on 9/11. But Cintra Wilson reminds us that he's really an authoritarian narcissist -- and we certainly don't need another one of those in the White House.

  His political career may have been defined by his willingness to confront scary bogeymen, but during slower periods when there were no obvious villains around, Giuliani's interpretations of who or what constituted an immediate threat became increasingly bizarre, personal, puritanical and dangerous. Before the planes hit, when he had too much power and not enough to do, Giuliani, like an old soldier who comes home and starts abusing his family in lieu of a real enemy, was pulling a Great Santini on New York, rooting around in our sock drawers with a Maglite, looking for vices to confiscate and sins to punish. By the mid-'90s, Mayor Rudy was abusing authority according to the whims of his own paranoid, hyper-defensive personality disorder in way that would have made Tiberius self-conscious.

• Carl Levin will be running for re-election in '08. And, gosh -- he's 72?? I guess we're all getting old. I remember when Carl Levin was a Detroit City Councilman. IIRC, he went straight from there to the US Senate, which has to be some sort of record. [P.S. He is the longest-serving Senator in Michigan history.]