Christian Conservative Dirty Tricks

You may have heard that over the weekend a group of more than 100 Christian conservatives met to discuss their choices for the Republican presidential nomination. And you may have heard that the group voted to endorse Rick Santorum.

Today some of the attendees say the ballots were rigged.

A civil war is breaking out among evangelical leaders over allegations of a rigged election and ballot stuffing at a Saturday gathering of religious and social conservatives. …

… in back-and-forth emails, Protestant fundamentalist leaders who attended – most of them backing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the anti-Romney candidate — are accusing Catholic participants of conniving to rig the vote.

They said they were conned into leaving after the second ballot on Saturday. They said pro-Santorum participants held a third ballot which Mr. Santorum won with more than 70 percent of the vote — far higher than the nine-vote margin he won on the first ballot.

Steve Benen points out that both Gingrich and Santorum are Catholic (Newt being a convert). Still, it shows us that the Religious Right ain’t the political juggernaut it used to be.

It also shows us that the word “evangelical” is now being stretched to cover conservative Catholics as well as a subset of protestantism, which certainly didn’t use to be the case.

And WWJD? Live in Canada, one suspects.

Texas vs. the First Amendment

Once again demonstrating they don’t know the Bill of Rights from Longhorn Pie, the state of Texas has approved this vanity plate design:

Of course, to be in constitutional compliance Texas would have to offer plates for people who are not Christian. I’m betting a few live in Texas. I’m proposing the following designs:

Of course, actually putting one of the alternative plates on one’s car would no doubt incite some born-again yahoo to slash one’s tires.

To Texas’s credit, it nixed a Confederate flag plate proposed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I understand the Sons are suing.

They Can Do That?

According to the New York Post — not the most reliable source — ConEd is using dirty tricks to evict the Park 51 developer from its section of the old Burlington Coat Factory in lower Manhattan.

The old coat factory occupied what is actually two different properties. Park 51 owns one property and ConEd the other part. The Park 51 developers have been renting ConEd’s part and wants to buy it, and then knock the structures on both properties down to build their Islamic community center. Here’s what the Post says —

But the plan hit a major obstacle in August when Con Ed raised the rent from $2,750 a month, a rate set in 1972, to $47,437 a month, retroactive to July 31, 2008, The Post has learned.

They can do that? They must have found one mother of a loophole in the rental agreement.

When the mosque failed to fork over the $1.7 million, the utility fired off a letter demanding the money by Oct. 4 and threatening to evict.

Park51 principals responded with a lawsuit to stop the increase, calling Con Ed’s rent demands “outrageous.”

That’s just wrong. Somebody got to somebody.

The rented section is the area being used for prayers. The other part is being used for community events, such as a recent photography exhibit.

The Jack Boot of Conservative Correctness

During its coverage of the U.S. Open Golf Tournament, MSNBC left the words “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance and righties went on the warpath.

The sports coverage opened with a brief, and unabashedly patriotic, clip that toggled back and forth between soldiers engaged in a flag-raising ceremony and school children reciting the pledge. After the children recited “one nation” the clip toggled to the flag-raising soldiers, and when it came back to the children it picked up where they said “with liberty and justice for all.”

The words skipped were “under God, indivisible,” which by wingnut logic would suggest NBC is both anti-God and pro-secession.

A normal person wouldn’t read anything into some skipped words, since the action of the film had moved away while the children were reciting. But then there are wingnuts. The network apologized a couple of hours later, but complaining has not stopped.

No one may violate the sacred boundaries of conservative correctness and get away unscathed.

I found it interesting that the various rightie sites still complaining didn’t clarify whether they felt insulted on religious or patriotic grounds. I take it they haven’t thought about it real hard themselves. To them, the pledge is more of a tribal totem than an expression of anything meaningful.

It’s a historical fact that “under God” was not part of the original pledge, which was written in 1892. “Under God” was added in 1952 by President Eisenhower. It’s also historical fact that earlier in the 20th century, Jehovah’s Witnesses endured considerable persecution because they refused to say the pledge, on the grounds that it violated their religious beliefs to say a pledge to any flag.

Some other Christians object to saying the pledge as well, saying it violates what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount:

Mat 5.33-37 “Again, you have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not make false vows, but shall fulfill your vows to the Lord.’ But I say to you, make no oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. Nor shall you make an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil.”

And, of course, atheists have rights, and there are a lot of religions in the world that don’t recognize the God of monotheism. Leaving out the “God” part, or even refusing to say the pledge at all, ought to be a matter of personal conscience. Things are different in Wingnut World, however. The wingnuts may pay lip-service to a God-given right to free speech, but God help you if you try to exercise that right.

For some vivid examples of what’s wrong with America, read the comments at Newsbusters. They seem to think that not saying the pledge as they want it said is an act of treason, and that NBC somehow violated their First Amendment freedom of religion by changing the words of the pledge.

This led me to reflect awhile on the way civilization has allowed even the extremely stupid to survive to adulthood and reproduce, which means advanced human societies are all doomed to self-destruct under the weight of idiocy. Oh, well.

Don’t Blame Jesus or Muhammad for This

By now you’ve heard that violent mobs in Afghanistan have slaughtered several people in retaliation for the burning of a Q’ran by the not reverent Terry Jones of the hilariously misnamed Dove World Outreach Center in Florida.

How disgusted am I? Let me count the ways …

I can’t think of a proper word for randomly slaughtering westerners because of what some whackjob in Florida did to a book. Evil, unjust, barbaric, inexcusable. If we were talking about some Stone Age tribe living in isolation in the Amazon somewhere I might just chalk it up to ignorance, but nobody else gets off the hook for this. If one is educated enough to know that the earth is not flat, one should be able to understand that not all westerners are to blame for the actions of one.

Of course, our native Islamophobes like Pam Geller and Peter King are no less bigoted. Lizard brains, the lot of them.

And once again demonstrating that he doesn’t know the Sermon on the Mount from the Yellow Pages, the not reverend Jones is demanding retribution for the slaughter that his actions touched off. After all kinds of people begged him to not act out and burn a Q’ran because it would set back whatever it is his country is doing in Afghanistan, this jerk burns a Q’ran anyway. It’s beyond disgusting.

At least one rightie blogger — I’m sure there are more — is saying that Jones is not responsible for the massacre. And I understand the argument; rational people don’t kill other, innocent, people, because they share some kind of loose racial or national association with assholes who did something insulting to one’s religion.

At the same time, however, rational people don’t go ahead and pull some stupid publicity stunt after it’s been exhaustively explained to them that the consequences could be genuinely horrific and harmful to their country.

In other words, if we hadn’t already been through this with Jones, it might have been argued that he didn’t realize what the consequences of his acts might be. But he was told.

In America, Jones’s right to burn any book he wants to burn is pretty much absolute. Even if 99.9 percent of his fellow countrypersons want to smack him for what he did, we can’t do it without getting jail time. This may be incomprehensible to many people living in the Middle East, and they don’t seem to be in a mood to listen to explanations. We can only hope there are some cooler heads among the Afghanis, and that the cooler heads may prevail.

But Jones is likely to continue to burn Q’rans as long as he can get attention for doing so. Perhaps the argument could be made that Jones’s stunt amounts to yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, and he could be placed under some restraining order to burn no more Q’rans. That would likely set off more Q’ran burning by other dimwits in protest of the violation of Jones’s rights, however, so even that could backfire.

Sometimes we really are all at the mercy of the stupid and sociopathic among us.

Anyway — I’m no expert in Islam, but my understanding is that the mob violence in Afghanistan really isn’t justified by anything Muhammad taught. And Jones apparently uses the Gospel as toilet paper. So don’t blame Jesus or Muhammad for this. And in the absence of religion, a true fanatic will always find something else to be fanatic about.

See also: “This attack is different.”

Someone at Fox News Needs Bible Lessons

This is too funny.

President Obama misquoted a familiar Bible verse during a faith-based address at the National Prayer Breakfast.

“Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint,” the president said during a speech to several thousand people at the breakfast.

But the actual passage, from Isaiah 40:31, states: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

I guess some people insist on keeping God’s Word in the original Elizabethan English.*

(*Some pinheads think there may be an earlier version —

— obviously, this is some nefarious liberal plot.)

Several commenters have identified the Obama quote as the New International Version, although I don’t think it matches the NIV word for word.

Particularly after the Bill O’Reilly idiocy with the tides and the moon, Steve Benen suggests that Fox News just stay completely away from theology. Oh, but where’s the fun in that?

Update: I’d say someone at Weasel Zippers needs Bible lessons, too.

Today in Religion

Here’s one for the Islamophobes who are perpetually pointing out there are no Christian churches in Mecca — According to the Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem is rocked with controversy over an apparent rumor that a statue of Buddha might be erected in a traffic circle.

Agon Shu, a Japanese Buddhist organization that promotes world peace, was invited by the city of Jerusalem to beautify a traffic circle. But the religious establishment in Israel went ballistic over the possibility that a statue of Buddha or other Buddhist symbolism might be publicly displayed in their country.

Ahead of the Sculpting Committee meeting – scheduled originally for last Sunday but postponed for reasons unrelated to the volatile agenda – councilman and committee member Yossi Deitsch of United Torah Judaism spoke out strongly against allowing “actual idolatry” in the city’s limits. This sentiment received wide resonance in the religious and haredi media.

“There is a Japanese group that wants to place some sort of Buddha statue in the city. This is actual idolatry. We should not have such things,” Deitsch reiterated to The Jerusalem Post late last week regarding the Agon Shu proposal. …

… In a later conversation with the Post, Deitsch explained that he was basing his stance on what the municipality’s art adviser David Suzana had written in a letter about the Agon Shu traffic circle. According to Suzana, the proposed design contained religious and ritualistic Buddhist elements, and the art adviser objected to it on those grounds.

“I cannot agree to have Buddhists arrive to conduct religious ceremonies at the site,” asserted Deitsch, who will be seeing the plans for the first time when the committee convenes.

The architect designing the traffic circle says there is no plan to erect a Buddha. They are planning an “abstract design,” he says.

Apparently it’s OK to display religious symbols, such as a Christian cross, in Jerusalem, but a Buddha statue is too much like a graven image. In fact, generally a Buddha statue is regarded within Buddhism to symbolize enlightenment or some other principle, such as wisdom or compassion, and it not considered to be a god.

Elsewhere — Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute says that

Nearly 6-in-10 Americans affirm American exceptionalism, that God has granted America a special role in human history. Those affirming this view are more likely to support military interventions and to say torture is sometimes justified.

Some people might want to remember that the meek, not the “exceptional,” will inherit the earth.

Also — religious cult turns Air Force cadet into a sheep.

Andy McCarthy: We’re No Better Than They Are

At National Review, Andrew McCarthy proposes a “thought experiment.”

A friend poses the following: Imagine that there really were these fundamentalist Christian terror cells all over the United States, as the Department of Homeland Security imagines. Let’s say a group of five of these terrorists hijacked a plane, flew it to Mecca, and plowed it into the Kaaba.

Now let’s say a group of well-meaning, well-funded Christians — Christians whose full-time job was missionary work — decided that the best way to promote healing would be to pressure the Saudi government to drop its prohibition against permitting non-Muslims into Mecca so that these well-meaning, well-funded Christian missionaries could build a $100 million dollar church and community center a stone’s throw from where the Kaaba used to be — you know, as a bridge-building gesture of interfaith understanding.

What do you suppose President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, the New York Times, and other Ground Zero mosque proponents would say about the insensitive, provocative nature of the proposal?

I can’t speak for anybody but me, but I’d say this is a matter between the Christian missionaries and the Saudis. And it wouldn’t surprise me a whole lot of President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg said the same thing. The State Department might tell the Christian missionaries to not expect to be rescued if they’re taken hostage by jihadists, but that’s about it.

What disturbs me about this analogy, however, is the unspoken assumption that Americans shouldn’t be expected to value religious liberty and tolerance toward Muslims if Saudis don’t value religious liberty and tolerance toward Christians (the Western default religion). Since when do we look to Saudi Arabia as the arbiter of what is virtuous?

What the righties don’t get is that the Cordoba House/Park 51 controversy is not about Islam, but about America. What are our values? What are our principles? What does America stand for? And do we maintain those values and principles through thick and thin, or do we chuck them under the bus whenever something frightens us?

I realize there is much less religious tolerance in most Middle Eastern countries than there is supposed to be in the United States, which is one of the many reasons I’m glad I was born in the United States and not the Middle East. But either we value religious liberty and tolerance, or we don’t. And lately the Right has been saying, we don’t. What we value is paranoia and vindictiveness. If Muslims in the Middle East don’t tolerate us, then we won’t tolerate them. Nyah nyah nyah.

I have this crazy idea that our first responsibility, as citizens, is to respect and maintain the principles outlined in the Constitution and other founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence. We should do this so that our descendants can enjoy the liberties and privileges that our ancestors fought to provide us. And sometimes that might take some courage, keeping one’s head, steering a steady course through the storm, etc.

But today’s conservatives don’t see it that way. For them, “liberty” is just a word they put on their T-shirts. It has no applicable meaning. As soon as the ship of state hits some rough waters, they panic and toss the Bill of Rights overboard.

And all the while babbling about how they hate us for our freedoms. Talk about oblivious.

Going back to the “thought experiment,” in that scenario I doubt that the Christian church/community center could be built in Mecca, because I don’t think the Saudi government would allow it. But New York is not in Saudi Arabia. It’s in the United States. And we’re supposed to be better than that. But I guess Andy McCarthy doesn’t think so.

I have an idea for a thought experiment: let’s try to imagine Andy McCarthy thinking. Or is that more like a science fiction plot?

Be sure to read “Balancing Act for Imam in Muslim Center Furor.” The more I read about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the more sorry I am about the hate campaign being waged against him by the rightie hyenas.

Insanity, Inc.

Some guy named Steven Emerson, who appears to be some kind of freelance antiterrorism expert who makes a living hyping the threat of scary Muslim people, claims to have audio tapes of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf spouting pro-jihadist opinions. No one has heard these tapes but Emerson, but of course a big chunk of the Right Blogosphere is now uncritically repeating Emerson’s claims as facts. The only blogger I’ve found so far who even suspects the claims about what the Imam actually said might be bogus is James Joyner.

My concern is that mainstream news media also will uncritically repeat these claims before anyone has had a chance to fact check. And given the mob mentality gripping most of the nation on the Islamic Center issue, I hope the Imam has a bodyguard, and the NYPD is keeping an eye on the Park Place property before somebody blows it up in the name of fighting terrorism.

On the other hand, there is some indication that some politicians who originally sided with the mob are backing off a bit, possibly sensing the mob is becoming uncontrollable. Even Newt Gingrich and Peter King seem to want to dissociate themselves with organized protests of the Islamic center.

In the case of Gingrich, some of his rhetoric was so over-the-top that Pat Buchanan said he had gone too far. This is a bit like being judged sick and depraved by Charles Manson.

Last summer it was mobs breaking up town hall meetings; this summer it’s mob hysteria over Muslims. Maybe we should just cancel August.

And we knew this would happen:

Some counterterrorism experts say the anti-Muslim sentiment that has saturated the airwaves and blogs in the debate over plans for an Islamic center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan is playing into the hands of extremists by bolstering their claims that the United States is hostile to Islam.

Opposition to the center by prominent politicians and other public figures in the United States has been covered extensively by the news media in Muslim countries. At a time of concern about radicalization of young Muslims in the West, it risks adding new fuel to Al Qaeda’s claim that Islam is under attack by the West and must be defended with violence, some specialists on Islamic militancy say.

“I know people in this debate don’t intend it, but there are consequences for these kinds of remarks,” said Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism for the New America Foundation here.

Ah, but they do intend those consequences. Maybe not consciously, but what the mob wants more than anything else is another big strike on American soil by Islamic terrorists. That would give them license to do what they really want to do, which is to unleash murderous violence against Muslims.

And, of course, that’s what al Qaeda really wants them to do, too.

The Out-of-Towners

[Update: The local NBC affiliate is reporting that the developers of the Islamic Center have told Gov. Paterson they don’t intend to change the location. Good for them.]

Eric Kleefeld documents that opposition to the so-called “ground zero mosque” intensifies the further away one goes from “ground zero.” But we knew that. See also Nate Silver.

I had a let’s-bang-heads-against-the-wall moment this morning when I found an editorial in the Joplin (Missouri) Globe written by some guy who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He wrote of the builders of the Islamic Center: “These folks should not expect a neighborhood welcoming party.”

Excuse me? Where the bleep does somebody who lives in Tulsa Bleeping Oklahoma get off talking about the “neighbohood welcoming party”? Clue, dude: Manhattan ain’t your neighborhood.