Alison Gardner

No More Right Wing, Just Religious Right

"It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it."

That quote is from 1981, and its prescience comes from an unlikely source: evangelical superstar Billy Graham. No one was or is more embedded in the religious fundamentalist culture, but even he foresaw the coming perversion of religious-based politics. Through this summer, I have been equating the religious right with the GOP because every Republican elected and appointed official has by now been completely co-opted by their science-denying, punishing, and harmful agenda. ...

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in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Meditation on Labor Day

Replica of 1886 union pin via Jim Forest Flickr/creative commons

Thank you Laura Clawson (@LauraClawson) for demonstrating in two simple charts that income inequality is reduced in direct proportion to the rise of worker power and self-determination through unionization. The union density that followed WWII through the 50s caused the only dip in income by the top 10%. This is why unions are considered a threat to corporate power and that is why our corporate-controlled government and courts have worked so hard to diminish unions and the right to organize. Like electric cars and railroads so beneficial to the people at large, unions threaten the ruling oligarchy's fat purse. Progressive activists ...

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in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

White Supremacists Want To Rebrand #BlackLivesMatter

By AllNiteImages Flickr/creative commons

Special thanks to writers Julia Craven (@CurlyCrayy) and Nick Wing (@nickpwing) for 5 Things To Tell Anyone Who Blames Black Lives Matter For Violence Against Cops. Predictably, Fox News has called out the crazies to gaslight the Black Lives Matter movement and rebrand it as a hate group and murder movement. All of us have to do everything in our power to counter this hateful misdirection designed by, made for, and spread by white supremacists. Please read Craven and Wing's whole piece, if you haven't already, because it so well diffuses the myths used by white supremacists ...

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in Campaigns / End Police Bias / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

The Sexual Confusion of the Religious Right

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In connection with our campaign to #VoteOutTheReligiousRight, I wrote The Christian Fundamentalist's Erotic Dream to help pull the sheets off of the perverted sexuality at the root of the religious right's distorted politics, their utter mendacity. In that post, I quoted Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, who sums this up succinctly. "[T]he erotic dream of Amreican fundamentalism is a restoration of a cleansing of impurity, a nation without sin, an empire of the personal as political . . . "Today’s Christian conservatives define themselves as apart from the world, and ...

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in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Scared of Their Own Shadow: The Inherent Paranoia of Anti-Government Militias

If any more proof was needed to show the distortion of the Second Amendment, a listen to this broadcast over the weekend discussing the schisms among the Oath Keepers, following their crazy foray in Ferguson, will do the trick. https://youtu.be/aTZ48xSvASs Militias and those militant about their subjective view of the Second Amendment are by nature anti-government. They presume to elevate their personal paranoia to DefCon4, and pay no attention to the facts on the ground that might interfere with their own narcissism. Just this past weekend, about 3,000 Teapartiers and Oath Keepers rallied to secede from New York state, ...

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in Campaigns / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized / Videos  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Did Ted Cruz Mess With Your Church?

Senator Ted Cruz Flickr/creative commons

Today, we're searching for data on just how many churches openly violated their tax-exempt status yesterday by reading from their pulpits a sermon written and sent to them by Senator Ted Cruz to rally support for a government shutdown to defund *Planned Parenthood. On the left, we are seriously questioning the right of religious organizations to maintain their taxpayer subsidies for preaching hate and discrimination. On the right, we hear protests against churches preaching about and facilitating sanctuary cities protecting undocumented immigrants. But, no matter where you stand, few actions so clearly define the bankruptcy of church-state ...

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in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Will President Obama Miss the Chance to Stand Up for Church-State Separation?

Mosaic by Charis Tsevis Flickr/creative commons

There is a portion of a 2007 presidential memo pertaining to the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that has been interpreted wrongly, distorted, as a safe harbor for legalized discrimination by tax-exempt faith-based organizations receiving federal funding. (This memo comes from the same George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel that brought us the memo making it okay to torture, by the way.) Recently 130 organizations, including American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org), Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (au.org), National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (avp.org), and AFSCME, sent President Obama Read More›

in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Why #AllLivesMatter is a Racial Slur

#BlackLivesMatter is a call to action for every race, every person. Its explosion upon the human consciousness testifies to its organic creation, how it so well captures a critical moment in civilization's crawl upward. It has permanently altered our group consciousness, and that will never change. #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) is conjoined with other moments in time, of course, for example, Hurricane Katrina, which brought about a national tragedy starkly divided along racial lines. The civil rights movement itself is connected to #BlackLivesMatter too. Although the dynamics 50 years ago may be different from the strategies employed now, there is a great deal of common ground yet ...

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in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Satirists as Super Heroes

John Oliver Fair use/educational

It's no surprise there is a petition which has already garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures for Jon Stewart to moderate one of the presidential debates, such as one of the upcoming GOP debates. "Jon Stewart is more than qualified to tackle the moderating job. Mr. Stewart has interviewed 15 heads of state, 22 members of the United States Cabinet, 32 members of the United States Senate, 7 members of the United States House of Representatives, and scores of other political leaders from this country and around the world while establishing himself as the most trusted person in ...

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in Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Media Finally Discovering Dominionism and How It’s Driving the Religious Right

This summer for me began when I decided to turn up the heat up with the goal to #VoteOutTheReligiousRight (complete index here). Though the number of evangelicals has been declining, the influence of the religious right, personified by so many of our politicians past and present, is consuming our government like a flesh-eating disease. As we passively allow church-state separation to crumble, all of us are complicit in bringing about christian sharia in the USA. In order to disqualify the religious right from public service we have to understand Read More›

in Campaigns / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by Alison Gardner 0 comments