News of Note

Stupid Is As Stupid Does For The Religious Right

Steve Shives

"I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over non religion." -- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

It's hard to know where to begin to start in cataloging the elected officials and judges who by their own words and actions belie their true allegiance to something other than our Constitution -- an allegiance that supersedes any oaths of office they have taken. The seeds of their allegiance to a power greater than the Constitution ...

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

The Big Lie: The National Prayer Breakfast (Part 2 of 2)

by Rymer Bruiring Flickr/creative commons

"At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, President George H.W. Bush praised [Family leader] Doug Coe for what he described as 'quiet diplomacy, I wouldn't say secret diplomacy.' Bush was apparently ignorant of one of the nation's oldest laws, the Logan Act which forbids private citizens to do just that lest foreign policy slip out of democratic control."

[The Family cult is . . . ] "Dismissed as 'civil religion' by observers who know it only by the National Prayer Breakfast's annual broadcast on C-Span, the Family's long-term project of a worldwide government under ...

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

The Big Lie: The Annual National Prayer Breakfast (Part 1 of 2)

by Brett Flickr/creative commons

[Following the Breakfast itself] some stay on for days of seminars organized around Christ's messages for particular industries . . . for executives in oil, defense, insurance, and banking. -- from The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (2009) by Jeff Sharlet (emphasis mine) Oh, the National Prayer Breakfast (NPB), are you ready for my exposé? Readers, did you know that the NPB is not a government sponsored event nor has it ever been in its 70+-year history? Did you know the rogue diplomacy practiced there has long been the bane of the U.S. Justice Department? And, although it ...

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

Vote Out The Religious Right

Screen shot from video below

Al Capone didn't go to prison for murder, extortion, or bootlegging. He was sent away for not paying taxes. Likewise, we have at hand a way to eradicate the political religious right, get them out of our government, based on a too-long-ignored paper trail of their ethical and financial misconduct. We just have to be willing to get up and do it. During this month-long series on the religious right, I have exposed the large and secretive christianist cult that drives members of the religious right's science-denying, constitution-free, punishing laws and judicial decisions. It's called The Family (aka The Fellowship) and ...

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

The Miseducation of the Religious Right

by Kevin Dooley Flickr/creative commons

A vivid memory of mine is the night about 10+ years ago when Dan Massey and I concluded that mixed-up Republicans out there were no longer making any attempt to hide their misanthropic adventurism. They were just saying whatever was on the top of their minds and hearts, not caring whether it made any sense, and worse, whether or not it fully disclosed to anyone paying attention their general dislike, utter disregard, and hate for humankind. We predicted (dreamt) that this trend would lead swiftly to their final undoing, and that seems to be happening. What began as Nixon's Southern ...

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

More Thoughts on July 4 (Part 2 of 2)

by Kevin Bond Flickr/creative commons

Yesterday, Allen Clifton published, You Can't Be Republican and a Patriot, very well enunciating many of the things I have tackled in my month-long series on the dangers of the religious right, including my post earlier today, especially for July 4. It is worth a full read. Republicans think they’re the real “patriots,” but they’re really not. Clifton is not talking about GOP voters because conservatives, the religious right, consider these people as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). He asks how "Republicans (especially tea party Republicans) consider themselves patriots?" They have a general disdain for every liberal in the country. ...

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

Thoughts on July 4 (Part 1 of 2)

by Benjamin Lehman Flickr/creative commons

Independence Day has always been a mixture of emotions for me. While I believe that America may be the world's best hope for universal human rights and peace, its antecedent history is permanently marred, always with an asterisk, because of the geneocide that wiped out 90% of First Peoples and an economy based on slavery, the repercussions of which are damning us to this day. When I was young, I coped with this dissonance by focusing on individual independence: that it should be a day when we each reflect our own liberation from ideas that restrain and diminish our own selves. ...

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

Watch: Jeff Sharlet on The Family, the Huge, Secret Cult Driving the Religious Right

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"American power worldwide, unfettered capitalism, no unions, no programs to help poor people, all with this idea that godly, powerful, rich men should get as many resources as possible personally and they should just privately help everyone else." (Rachel Maddow's impression of The Family after reading one of Jeff Sharlet's definitive, investigative books on the organization, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (2009) and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy (2011) Jeff Sharlet. This continues our month-long series on the The Family (aka Read More›

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

Religious Freedom vs Religious Liberty (Part 2 or 2)

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It's important, now more than ever, for progressives to understand the wide divide separating two distinct concepts: religious freedom and religious liberty. The religious right have become the champions of religious libertarianism because of the association of the word, liberty, with release from captivity and the bondage of sin. Intentionally, their use of the words, religious liberty, has nothing whatsoever to do with religious freedom, or how or why it was incorporated into our founding documents. The religious right's point of view is best understood by what is driving it: the political and religious philosophy of Read More›

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

Religious Freedom vs Religious Liberty (Part 1 of 2)

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty." And, "Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." (Thomas Jefferson)

"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." (John Adams)

"Religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together." (James Madison)

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave making, and monopolize power and profit." (Thomas ...

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