Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Exodus International Launches Campaign In Support Of Anti-Gay Bullying
from Joe My God:
GLSEN's national Day Of Silence is six weeks away, but the "ex-gay" mental cases at Exodus International have already launched their "Day Of Truth" campaign to stop students from being taught that it's wrong to beat up and harass gay kids. According to Exodus, the anti-gay Alliance Defense Fund is standing by with 1200 attorneys to represent anybody that faces opposition from school administrators.
In the past, students who have attempted to exercised their rights to talk about topics related to homosexuality have been censored or, in some cases, punished for their beliefs. It is important that students stand up for their First Amendment right to hear and speak the Truth about human sexuality in order to protect that freedom for future generations. The Day of Truth provides an opportunity to speak the Truth in love and have an honest conversation about homosexuality and at the same time publicly exercise your constitutional right to free speech. Over the past 6 years, we have had over 17,000 participants in the Day of Truth. This year, even more students are expected to take part in the Day of Truth, as news of this vital project continues to spread across the country. The Alliance Defense Fund has more than 1,200 allied attorneys who are available to assist you if you run into complications with school officials or pro-homosexual advocacy groups on your campus.
It's more than a little sad that the same people who were likely brutalized for their homosexuality while in school are now campaigning to support their tormentors.
GLSEN's national Day Of Silence is six weeks away, but the "ex-gay" mental cases at Exodus International have already launched their "Day Of Truth" campaign to stop students from being taught that it's wrong to beat up and harass gay kids. According to Exodus, the anti-gay Alliance Defense Fund is standing by with 1200 attorneys to represent anybody that faces opposition from school administrators.
In the past, students who have attempted to exercised their rights to talk about topics related to homosexuality have been censored or, in some cases, punished for their beliefs. It is important that students stand up for their First Amendment right to hear and speak the Truth about human sexuality in order to protect that freedom for future generations. The Day of Truth provides an opportunity to speak the Truth in love and have an honest conversation about homosexuality and at the same time publicly exercise your constitutional right to free speech. Over the past 6 years, we have had over 17,000 participants in the Day of Truth. This year, even more students are expected to take part in the Day of Truth, as news of this vital project continues to spread across the country. The Alliance Defense Fund has more than 1,200 allied attorneys who are available to assist you if you run into complications with school officials or pro-homosexual advocacy groups on your campus.
It's more than a little sad that the same people who were likely brutalized for their homosexuality while in school are now campaigning to support their tormentors.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Heads Up: Prayer Warriors and Sarah Palin Are Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take Over America
By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet:
Imagine a religious movement that makes geographic maps of where demons reside and claims among its adherents the Republican Party's most recent vice presidential nominee and whose leaders have presided over prayer sessions (one aimed at putting the kibosh on health-care reform) with a host of leading GOP figures.
It's a movement whose followers played a significant role in the battle over Proposition 8, California's anti-same-sex marriage initiative, and Uganda's infamous proposed Anti-Homosexuality Law, more commonly associated with the Family, a religious network of elites drawn from the ranks of business and government throughout the world. But the movement we're imagining encompasses the humble and the elite alike, supporting a network of "prayer warriors” in all 50 states, within the ranks of the U.S. military, and at the far reaches of the globe -- all guided by an entire genre of books, texts, videos and other media.
Imagine that, and you've just dreamed up the New Apostolic Reformation, the largest religious movement you've never heard of.
NAR's videos, according to researcher Rachel Tabachnick, "demonstrate the taking control of communities and nations through large networks of 'prayer warriors' whose spiritual warfare is used to expel and destroy the demons that cause societal ills. Once the territorial demons, witches, and generational curses are removed, the 'born-again' Christians in the videos take control of society."
The movement's notion of "spiritual warfare" has spread from the California suburbs to an East-Coast inner city, and has impacted policy decisions in the developing world. Movement operatives are well-connected enough to have testified before Congress and to have received millions of dollars in government abstinence-only sex-education grants, and bizarre enough to maintain that in its prototype communities, the movement has healed AIDS, purified polluted streams and even grown huge vegetables. Leaders in the NAR movement refer to themselves as "apostles."
In the days leading up to the historic vote on health-care reform in the Senate, Apostle Lou Engle led the Family Research Council's "Prayercast” against health-care reform, a Webcast featuring Republican Senators Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Sam Brownback (Kans.), and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.). Earlier in the year, Engle, who leads the group TheCall, prayed over Newt Gingrich at a Virginia event called Rediscovering God in America. In 2008, Engle, at an event he staged at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, advocated acts of Christian martyrdom to end abortion and same-sex marriage. This "apostle" claims LGBT people are possessed by demons. And Engle is not the only NAR apostle with political connections.
Presidential campaign watchers got their first taste of the New Apostolic Reformation when it was revealed that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, had been prayed over in a laying-on-of-hands by Rev. Thomas Muthee of Kenya, director of the NAR East Africa Spiritual Warfare Network, in a ceremony designed to protect Palin from witches and demons. Muthee, it turns out, is famous in his native land for driving out of town a woman he deemed a witch, a charge that had her neighbors calling for her stoning.
Palin, according to Alaskan Apostle Mary Glazier, became part of her prayer network at the age of 24. Wasilla is no stranger to wandering NAR leaders. Last June, Apostle Lance Wallnau stopped through in the course of his world travels, promoting the movement's Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture campaign at Wasilla Alaska Assembly of God Church -- the very church at which Muthee laid hands on Palin. (The "seven mountains" are the realms of business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, the family and religion.) Other NAR luminaries dropping by Wasilla last year include leading international Apostles Naomi Dowdy and Dutch Sheets.
Apostle Samuel Rodriguez heads an organization of 15 millions Hispanic evangelicals (the Sacramento, Calif.-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference) and was courted by both Democratic and Republican candidates during the 2008 presidential election.
In 2006, former Senator Rick Santorum, R-Penn., who appears to be positioning himself for a run at the presidency, took the stage with Apostle Alistair Petrie at a NAR "Transformation Summit" in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.
The International Transformations Network conferences led by Apostle Ed Silvoso have featured Hawaii's Republican Lt. Gov. James "Duke” Aiona (who is currently running for governor) and Uganda First Lady Janet Museveni. Silvoso has been hosted abroad by heads of state, including Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni and Gloria Arroyo, president of the Philippines.
Apostle Julius Oyet was recognized by the Ugandan Parliament for the draconian anti-gay bill recently introduced in that country, and is a star in one of the movement's Transformation movies. An influential Guatemalan pastor, Apostle Harold Caballeros, made a quixotic run for the presidency of that country in 2007.
Christian publishing magnate Stephen Strang is an apostle, as well as a director for John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, while Apostle Tom Hess hosts the annual Christian Government Leaders Conference in the Israeli Knesset.
Outside the realm of politics, Apostle Jim Ammerman, as head of a pentecostal chaplains' organization, accounts for more than 270 chaplains, including U.S. military and civilian chaplains. "Ammerman is a former military chaplain whose Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches was approved in 1984 by the Department of Defense as an endorsing agency to place chaplains in the United States Military," writes Rachel Tabachnick.
Apostle Bernard Wilks, in conjunction with Apostle Ed Silvoso's International Transformation Network, has assigned a "prayer warrior" to almost every single street in Newark, New Jersey, to pray for "transformation” of the city.
The movement has emerged from the largest single block of Protestant Christianity on the globe -- sometimes called charismatic, neo-charismatic or neo-Pentecostal -- one often overlooked since its adherents do not comprise a single denomination, and often belong to churches characterized as "non-denominational."
Charismatic Christians are born-again believers who have a secondary conversion experience, one they claim gives them supernatural gifts, such as speaking in tongues, casting out demons, faith healing, and other "signs and wonders" they believe will help to evangelize the world in preparation for the end times. Charismatics are typically Protestant, but there is also a movement of charismatic Catholics.
At the top of the New Apostolic Reformation authority structure is Presiding Apostle C. Peter Wagner, a longtime Christian educator (who recently enjoyed a brief blip of fame when he was revealed as the graduate school mentor of Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church in California). Wagner partnered with Ted Haggard, then pastor of the New Life Christian Church in Colorado Springs, to build the initial nerve center of the movement in that town. (Haggard went on to become president of the National Association of Evangelicals, but resigned both that post and pastorship of his megachurch in 2006 when he was famously disgraced by revelations of a gay affair and drug use.)
AlterNet turned to Rachel Tabachnick for insight on the New Apostolic Reformation and its political impact. Tabachnick is a nationally recognized researcher and writer on the religious right and its "end-times" narratives.
Bill Berkowitz: Most people are unaware of the New Apostolic Reformation. Tell us what we should know.
Rachel Tabachnick: Imagine for a moment that a large block of the evangelical world decided to re-organize themselves in a hierarchy somewhat resembling the Roman Catholic Church, with leaders in authority over each nation and region. And additionally imagine that every person -- from the individual congregants to the top leaders -- would have someone to whom they are accountable. It seems unthinkable, but this is exactly what the "apostles" and "prophets" [of the New Apostolic Reformation] are doing.
C. Peter Wagner streamlined the ideology and named it the New Apostolic Reformation. Wagner serves as the presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles (ICA) which includes several hundred apostles across the U.S. and about 40 nations, international training centers and prayer warrior communication networks in all 50 states and worldwide. Those in the top tier of Wagner's network each have apostolic authority over other ministries, sometimes hundreds or even thousands. (See Talk2Action's Resource Directory for the New Apostolic Reformation.)
This is not just a church movement. [Those called] market apostles work in business, finance, communications, media and also lead the Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture mandate. Bruce Wilson [a co-founder of Talk2Action] and I have both written about this campaign encouraging Christians to take dominion over seven spheres of government and society.
Enterprises known as "kingdom businesses" play an important role: A Toronto apostle's ministry includes an oil and gas company; two ICA apostles head Markets Unlocked, a business matchmaking system that connects kingdom business customers and suppliers, and claims exclusive agreements for over a half billion dollars of products and services. Trained intercessors are now paid to pray for businesses, and ICA apostles work closely with the International Christian Chamber of Commerce.
Apostles are also active providing social services, which Wagner describes as a method for accessing government and society. Apostle Doug Stringer, who is a former fitness instructor, is now listed as a policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, and claims to have distributed $30 million of gifts and donations during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He has expanded operations to Fiji, Poland and Southeast Asia.
Wagner teachers that there will soon be a "great transfer of wealth" from the ungodly to the godly and has set up structures in preparation. The Wagner Leadership Institute teaches courses in prophecy as well as foreign currency exchange.
BB: How is the movement structured, and how has it grown so rapidly?
RT: Church growth is the key concept. Other Christian dominionist movements propose austere biblical law but Wagner explained in his 2008 book that he believes rapid growth of the movement will allow Christians to take dominion inside a democratic framework.
Wagner, who will be 80 this year, was a professor of church growth for 30 years at Fuller Theological Seminary, and promoted explosive mega-church growth. He has mainstreamed the concept of cell church structures, a strategy which began in Asia and South America and has resulted in congregations of tens of thousands. Cell churches are organized like a pyramid marketing scheme with small groups, usually with no more than 12, tasked with spinning off new cell groups and growing the church. This also resembles a military structure: Each cell group has a leader and lower level leaders answer to and are accountable to their superiors, on up the chain.
Such "spiritual accountability" schemes used to be called shepherding, but because of bad press and reports of coercive and abusive practices, it has been rebranded as "discipling." Lay people in cell groups perform many of the functions that would normally be carried out by pastors, and pastors become like corporate CEOs. This is how many of today's megachurches function. In his role as a church growth specialist, Wagner was able to repackage radical shepherding and cell structures as mainstream concepts for church growth.
These authoritarian strategies were further sanitized by Wagner's most famous student, Saddleback Church 's Rick Warren. Recently, while commenting about Uganda's proposed draconian anti-gay legislation, Warren denied that Wagner was his dissertation adviser. However, I have a copy of the dissertation which lists Wagner as "mentor,” and also explains Warren's desire to rid churches of voting, boards, and democratic structure. In Wagner's 1999 book Churchquake: How the New Apostolic Reformation is Shaking up the Church as We Know It, Wagner describes this radical re-structuring: "The traditional concept is that the congregation owns the church and that they hire the pastor to do their ministry for them. New apostolic churches, like Rick Warren's, turn this around 180 degrees…”
The New Apostolics are now trying to apply shepherding to entire communities and even nations. Sara Diamond, a pioneer in the field of dominion theology, warned in 1989 that charismatic shepherding was becoming a "masterpiece of political strategy." Some of the very same religious right strategists that Diamond wrote about in 1989 are now apostles in the ICA.
BB: What do the terms 'spiritual mapping' and 'spiritual warfare' mean and how do they function?
RT: Spiritual warfare is not a new concept; it can mean something as benign as a person's internal struggle to resist evil. These days, the New Apostolics have co-opted the term.
During the 1990s, in a frenzied effort to evangelize the world before 2000, Wagner proposed that instead of winning souls one by one, entire geographic areas and "people groups" could be targeted, therefore speeding up the process.
These new strategies include "Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare" and "spiritual mapping," designed to win territory. This is accomplished by doing battle with demons or principalities that they believe cause entire ethnicities, religions, and geographic areas to resist conversion. After expelling the demons, the evangelized population can take "dominion" over local government and culture. Then the community supposedly experiences a foretaste of "God's Kingdom on earth." These mini-utopias are advertised as having reduced poverty, corruption, disease, and even healing the environment. This is the ultimate faith-based initiative: remove the demons and society will be healed.
Spiritual mapping is the reconnaissance mission for spiritual warfare and involves the literal mapping of neighborhoods and cities to determine where the demons are. This includes generational curses, or those things in a city's history that allowed demons to take hold of the entire populis. Spiritual mapping is the ideological foundation for the now popular "prayer walking" and the formation of many city-wide prayer groups.
Wagner, George Otis, Jr., Ed Silvoso, Ted Haggard, John Dawson of Youth With a Mission, and others created an entire genre of books, texts, videos and other media teaching spiritual mapping and strategic level spiritual warfare. Their access to the interdenominational world missions' movement in the 1990s helped them spread these techniques rapidly around the globe.
The Transformations movies produced by Otis, Jr. are promotional "documentaries" showing prototypes of this process in which supernatural transformation of a community takes place including the healing of AIDS, instantaneous purifying of polluted streams, and even growth of huge vegetables. These movies have been shown to millions globally, and Transformations organizations worldwide are attempting to replicate these prototypes in their local communities.
Uganda is featured in several of the series of Transformations movies, which include top political, military and religious leaders. Bruce Wilson's recent video, Transforming Uganda, documents Silvoso's claim that his International Transformation Network is "discipling" every region of Uganda and 14,000 churches across th at country.
It is important to note, however, that this supernatural warfare isn't limited to faraway places and underdeveloped countries. The Transformations ideology originated from Western evangelicals -- witch-hunting and all -- and the prototypes have included cities like Hemet, California. Ugandan Julius Oyet, who starred in one of the Transformations movies is a key figure in the recent proposed draconian anti-gay legislation in that country.
BB: How are these strategies put into practice? Where have they been tried successfully? Where have they failed?
RT: Although many of the claims made in the Transformations movie can be easily disproved, the movement's advancement appears to be partially due to the promotion of the Transformations prototypes.
Supernatural healings of AIDS, spontaneous destruction of property of other belief systems, and even claims that the prayers of the movement have killed other humans are featured in films shown worldwide, including to mainline Protestant churches and renewal groups which have subsequently broken from their parent denominations.
For instance, the Transformations movies claim there have been thousands of cases of miraculous curing of AIDS in Uganda. Conversely, medical leaders are warning that claims of miraculous healing are interfering with the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Since altering their AIDS programs to abstinence-only programming promoted by U.S. evangelicals, Uganda has had an increase, not decrease of new AIDS cases.
To give you an idea of how deeply entrenched the New Apostolics are in this policy consider this example of one of the most celebrated abstinence-only programs in the U.S. Recapturing the Vision and Vessels of Honor are names for abstinence-only programs headed by Jacqueline del Rosario, who testified for renewal of Title V abstinence-based funding in Congressional hearings in 2002. Since 2001, her Miami organizations have been the recipient of $3,147,589 of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant money, and significant sums from other public sources, despite the fact that her organization was one of four in a long-term federally funded study which show ed no measurable results.
Del Rosario was a speaker, along with Wagner and other top apostles, at a conference in January, where she was described as an apostle in the promotional literature. Her relationship with the apostles is not new, however. She incorporated her organizations in the mid 1990s with leading Florida apostle Diane Buker, head of Battle Axe ministries, and Cindy Trimm, described as a "general in the art of strategic warfare." Buker is the author of God's Power to Multiply for Wealth and her Battle Axe Brigade ministry Web site features virulent attacks on Catholicism and other faiths. It certainly makes you question what is being taught in faith-based programming [financed] with millions of our tax dollars.
Another political area in which New Apostolics are deeply entrenched is John Hagee's Christians United for Israel. Hagee is still teaching that the Rapture may happen any moment, but many of his directors and leadership are New Apostolics who teach that they must take "dominion" over the earth, including Israel, before Jesus can return. These include ICA Apostle Stephen Strang who heads the Strang charismatic publishing empire, and regional director Robert Stearns, who publishes another leading New Apostolic journal titled Kairos. Stearns also leads the largest single international Christian Zionist event, which involves 200,000 churches worldwide -- and his ministry has been endorsed by the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
BB: Are there politicians involved with NAR?
RT: The Transformations movies show access to many political figures from Fiji to South America to Africa. Uganda is a prime example and the movies are corroborated in this respect by active participation of political leaders in Transformation organizations.Transformation Hawaii has the full participation of Lt. Governor James “Duke” Aiona, who has spoken at conferences and even written for the movement. Lou Engle, a prophet in Wagner"s inner circle, has recently been on the news leading an anti-health care reform Prayercast with Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann, among others. In May, Engle led another televised event in which he prayed over Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee.
The New Apostolic movement more closely resembles a political campaign than a denomination. PrayforNewark is a citywide prayer project in which every precinct has been mapped out and every street assigned to a volunteer. PrayforNewark is part of Ed Silvoso's International Transformation Network (ITN), the same operation that is "transforming" Uganda, and promoting the belief that homosexuals are possessed by literal demons. Silvoso's ITN is also active in numerous other locations in the U.S. and worldwide.
BB: Where does Sarah Palin fit into all this?
RT: The movement made early inroads in Alaska through an ICA apostle named Mary Glazier, who claims that a 24-year-old Palin joined her spiritual warfare network. These communication networks allow apostles to disseminate new prophecy to their "prayer warriors." During the presidential election this included prophecies about Palin, including one in which Glazier described a vision that Palin would take the "mantle" of leadership after a period of national mourning, apparently following John McCain's demise.
The first Transformation film so impressed pastors in Wasilla, Alaska, that they contacted some of the religious leaders featured in the movie including Thomas Muthee, who was shown driving a witch out of Kiambu, Kenya. Wasilla Assembly of God developed an ongoing relationship with Muthee and a 2005 church video shows him anointing Palin. Unfortunately the press picked up on the witch part of the story, and not the more important fact that Palin has ties to top leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation.
BB: Why should the American people be concerned about the New Apostolic Reformation?
RT: I believe this movement's threat to separation of church and state is greater than some of the more overtly theocratic movements of the religious right. The inclusion of women and all races in leadership roles, and their enthusiastic sponsorship of social services conflicts with a popular notion about religious fundamentalism. Despite their radical strategies, leaders in the movement have been labeled in the press as moderate, including Apostle Samuel Rodriguez -- president of the Sacramento, Calif.-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference -- who has been described as a "new evangelical."
Unsuspecting people are certainly becoming involved in New Apostolic activities without understanding its agenda. For example, the Global Day of Prayer sounds benign but was founded by Graham Power, head of the Africa division of Silvoso's International Transformation Network. Numerous citywide prayer efforts and pastors' networks are under the auspices of Wagner's apostles. Charities, social services, and "reconciliation" events appear to welcome all, but are designed as stealth evangelism to advance the "Kingdom."
In June, Lance Wallnau, an ICA apostle and motivational speaker for the Seven Mountain campaign, spoke on stealth evangelism at Wasilla Assembly of God. In Guatemalan jails, according to Wallnau, New Apostolics teach prisoners a secularized version of "Kingdom" worldview for a full year before making any attempt to convert them to "born-again" Christianity. Wallnau encouraged the congregation to follow this example for infiltrating the seven spheres of society.
Peter Wagner's ideas have spread widely into mainstream of evangelicalism, to little public notice. Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, partnered with Wagner in founding the New Apostolic Reformation and building its early headquarters, the World Prayer Center in Colorado Springs. Despite the fact that Haggard has written books on New Apostolic strategies, his participation in promoting this radical reformation of both church and society is so little known, it could be described as "Haggard's other secret."
Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and movements. Rachel Tabachnick has provided research on the religious right to political campaigns and regularly contributes to Talk2action.org, Political Research Associates' The Public Eye, and the Jewish Daily Forward's Zeek.
Imagine a religious movement that makes geographic maps of where demons reside and claims among its adherents the Republican Party's most recent vice presidential nominee and whose leaders have presided over prayer sessions (one aimed at putting the kibosh on health-care reform) with a host of leading GOP figures.
It's a movement whose followers played a significant role in the battle over Proposition 8, California's anti-same-sex marriage initiative, and Uganda's infamous proposed Anti-Homosexuality Law, more commonly associated with the Family, a religious network of elites drawn from the ranks of business and government throughout the world. But the movement we're imagining encompasses the humble and the elite alike, supporting a network of "prayer warriors” in all 50 states, within the ranks of the U.S. military, and at the far reaches of the globe -- all guided by an entire genre of books, texts, videos and other media.
Imagine that, and you've just dreamed up the New Apostolic Reformation, the largest religious movement you've never heard of.
NAR's videos, according to researcher Rachel Tabachnick, "demonstrate the taking control of communities and nations through large networks of 'prayer warriors' whose spiritual warfare is used to expel and destroy the demons that cause societal ills. Once the territorial demons, witches, and generational curses are removed, the 'born-again' Christians in the videos take control of society."
The movement's notion of "spiritual warfare" has spread from the California suburbs to an East-Coast inner city, and has impacted policy decisions in the developing world. Movement operatives are well-connected enough to have testified before Congress and to have received millions of dollars in government abstinence-only sex-education grants, and bizarre enough to maintain that in its prototype communities, the movement has healed AIDS, purified polluted streams and even grown huge vegetables. Leaders in the NAR movement refer to themselves as "apostles."
In the days leading up to the historic vote on health-care reform in the Senate, Apostle Lou Engle led the Family Research Council's "Prayercast” against health-care reform, a Webcast featuring Republican Senators Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Sam Brownback (Kans.), and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.). Earlier in the year, Engle, who leads the group TheCall, prayed over Newt Gingrich at a Virginia event called Rediscovering God in America. In 2008, Engle, at an event he staged at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, advocated acts of Christian martyrdom to end abortion and same-sex marriage. This "apostle" claims LGBT people are possessed by demons. And Engle is not the only NAR apostle with political connections.
Presidential campaign watchers got their first taste of the New Apostolic Reformation when it was revealed that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, had been prayed over in a laying-on-of-hands by Rev. Thomas Muthee of Kenya, director of the NAR East Africa Spiritual Warfare Network, in a ceremony designed to protect Palin from witches and demons. Muthee, it turns out, is famous in his native land for driving out of town a woman he deemed a witch, a charge that had her neighbors calling for her stoning.
Palin, according to Alaskan Apostle Mary Glazier, became part of her prayer network at the age of 24. Wasilla is no stranger to wandering NAR leaders. Last June, Apostle Lance Wallnau stopped through in the course of his world travels, promoting the movement's Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture campaign at Wasilla Alaska Assembly of God Church -- the very church at which Muthee laid hands on Palin. (The "seven mountains" are the realms of business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, the family and religion.) Other NAR luminaries dropping by Wasilla last year include leading international Apostles Naomi Dowdy and Dutch Sheets.
Apostle Samuel Rodriguez heads an organization of 15 millions Hispanic evangelicals (the Sacramento, Calif.-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference) and was courted by both Democratic and Republican candidates during the 2008 presidential election.
In 2006, former Senator Rick Santorum, R-Penn., who appears to be positioning himself for a run at the presidency, took the stage with Apostle Alistair Petrie at a NAR "Transformation Summit" in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.
The International Transformations Network conferences led by Apostle Ed Silvoso have featured Hawaii's Republican Lt. Gov. James "Duke” Aiona (who is currently running for governor) and Uganda First Lady Janet Museveni. Silvoso has been hosted abroad by heads of state, including Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni and Gloria Arroyo, president of the Philippines.
Apostle Julius Oyet was recognized by the Ugandan Parliament for the draconian anti-gay bill recently introduced in that country, and is a star in one of the movement's Transformation movies. An influential Guatemalan pastor, Apostle Harold Caballeros, made a quixotic run for the presidency of that country in 2007.
Christian publishing magnate Stephen Strang is an apostle, as well as a director for John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, while Apostle Tom Hess hosts the annual Christian Government Leaders Conference in the Israeli Knesset.
Outside the realm of politics, Apostle Jim Ammerman, as head of a pentecostal chaplains' organization, accounts for more than 270 chaplains, including U.S. military and civilian chaplains. "Ammerman is a former military chaplain whose Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches was approved in 1984 by the Department of Defense as an endorsing agency to place chaplains in the United States Military," writes Rachel Tabachnick.
Apostle Bernard Wilks, in conjunction with Apostle Ed Silvoso's International Transformation Network, has assigned a "prayer warrior" to almost every single street in Newark, New Jersey, to pray for "transformation” of the city.
The movement has emerged from the largest single block of Protestant Christianity on the globe -- sometimes called charismatic, neo-charismatic or neo-Pentecostal -- one often overlooked since its adherents do not comprise a single denomination, and often belong to churches characterized as "non-denominational."
Charismatic Christians are born-again believers who have a secondary conversion experience, one they claim gives them supernatural gifts, such as speaking in tongues, casting out demons, faith healing, and other "signs and wonders" they believe will help to evangelize the world in preparation for the end times. Charismatics are typically Protestant, but there is also a movement of charismatic Catholics.
At the top of the New Apostolic Reformation authority structure is Presiding Apostle C. Peter Wagner, a longtime Christian educator (who recently enjoyed a brief blip of fame when he was revealed as the graduate school mentor of Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church in California). Wagner partnered with Ted Haggard, then pastor of the New Life Christian Church in Colorado Springs, to build the initial nerve center of the movement in that town. (Haggard went on to become president of the National Association of Evangelicals, but resigned both that post and pastorship of his megachurch in 2006 when he was famously disgraced by revelations of a gay affair and drug use.)
AlterNet turned to Rachel Tabachnick for insight on the New Apostolic Reformation and its political impact. Tabachnick is a nationally recognized researcher and writer on the religious right and its "end-times" narratives.
Bill Berkowitz: Most people are unaware of the New Apostolic Reformation. Tell us what we should know.
Rachel Tabachnick: Imagine for a moment that a large block of the evangelical world decided to re-organize themselves in a hierarchy somewhat resembling the Roman Catholic Church, with leaders in authority over each nation and region. And additionally imagine that every person -- from the individual congregants to the top leaders -- would have someone to whom they are accountable. It seems unthinkable, but this is exactly what the "apostles" and "prophets" [of the New Apostolic Reformation] are doing.
C. Peter Wagner streamlined the ideology and named it the New Apostolic Reformation. Wagner serves as the presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles (ICA) which includes several hundred apostles across the U.S. and about 40 nations, international training centers and prayer warrior communication networks in all 50 states and worldwide. Those in the top tier of Wagner's network each have apostolic authority over other ministries, sometimes hundreds or even thousands. (See Talk2Action's Resource Directory for the New Apostolic Reformation.)
This is not just a church movement. [Those called] market apostles work in business, finance, communications, media and also lead the Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture mandate. Bruce Wilson [a co-founder of Talk2Action] and I have both written about this campaign encouraging Christians to take dominion over seven spheres of government and society.
Enterprises known as "kingdom businesses" play an important role: A Toronto apostle's ministry includes an oil and gas company; two ICA apostles head Markets Unlocked, a business matchmaking system that connects kingdom business customers and suppliers, and claims exclusive agreements for over a half billion dollars of products and services. Trained intercessors are now paid to pray for businesses, and ICA apostles work closely with the International Christian Chamber of Commerce.
Apostles are also active providing social services, which Wagner describes as a method for accessing government and society. Apostle Doug Stringer, who is a former fitness instructor, is now listed as a policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, and claims to have distributed $30 million of gifts and donations during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He has expanded operations to Fiji, Poland and Southeast Asia.
Wagner teachers that there will soon be a "great transfer of wealth" from the ungodly to the godly and has set up structures in preparation. The Wagner Leadership Institute teaches courses in prophecy as well as foreign currency exchange.
BB: How is the movement structured, and how has it grown so rapidly?
RT: Church growth is the key concept. Other Christian dominionist movements propose austere biblical law but Wagner explained in his 2008 book that he believes rapid growth of the movement will allow Christians to take dominion inside a democratic framework.
Wagner, who will be 80 this year, was a professor of church growth for 30 years at Fuller Theological Seminary, and promoted explosive mega-church growth. He has mainstreamed the concept of cell church structures, a strategy which began in Asia and South America and has resulted in congregations of tens of thousands. Cell churches are organized like a pyramid marketing scheme with small groups, usually with no more than 12, tasked with spinning off new cell groups and growing the church. This also resembles a military structure: Each cell group has a leader and lower level leaders answer to and are accountable to their superiors, on up the chain.
Such "spiritual accountability" schemes used to be called shepherding, but because of bad press and reports of coercive and abusive practices, it has been rebranded as "discipling." Lay people in cell groups perform many of the functions that would normally be carried out by pastors, and pastors become like corporate CEOs. This is how many of today's megachurches function. In his role as a church growth specialist, Wagner was able to repackage radical shepherding and cell structures as mainstream concepts for church growth.
These authoritarian strategies were further sanitized by Wagner's most famous student, Saddleback Church 's Rick Warren. Recently, while commenting about Uganda's proposed draconian anti-gay legislation, Warren denied that Wagner was his dissertation adviser. However, I have a copy of the dissertation which lists Wagner as "mentor,” and also explains Warren's desire to rid churches of voting, boards, and democratic structure. In Wagner's 1999 book Churchquake: How the New Apostolic Reformation is Shaking up the Church as We Know It, Wagner describes this radical re-structuring: "The traditional concept is that the congregation owns the church and that they hire the pastor to do their ministry for them. New apostolic churches, like Rick Warren's, turn this around 180 degrees…”
The New Apostolics are now trying to apply shepherding to entire communities and even nations. Sara Diamond, a pioneer in the field of dominion theology, warned in 1989 that charismatic shepherding was becoming a "masterpiece of political strategy." Some of the very same religious right strategists that Diamond wrote about in 1989 are now apostles in the ICA.
BB: What do the terms 'spiritual mapping' and 'spiritual warfare' mean and how do they function?
RT: Spiritual warfare is not a new concept; it can mean something as benign as a person's internal struggle to resist evil. These days, the New Apostolics have co-opted the term.
During the 1990s, in a frenzied effort to evangelize the world before 2000, Wagner proposed that instead of winning souls one by one, entire geographic areas and "people groups" could be targeted, therefore speeding up the process.
These new strategies include "Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare" and "spiritual mapping," designed to win territory. This is accomplished by doing battle with demons or principalities that they believe cause entire ethnicities, religions, and geographic areas to resist conversion. After expelling the demons, the evangelized population can take "dominion" over local government and culture. Then the community supposedly experiences a foretaste of "God's Kingdom on earth." These mini-utopias are advertised as having reduced poverty, corruption, disease, and even healing the environment. This is the ultimate faith-based initiative: remove the demons and society will be healed.
Spiritual mapping is the reconnaissance mission for spiritual warfare and involves the literal mapping of neighborhoods and cities to determine where the demons are. This includes generational curses, or those things in a city's history that allowed demons to take hold of the entire populis. Spiritual mapping is the ideological foundation for the now popular "prayer walking" and the formation of many city-wide prayer groups.
Wagner, George Otis, Jr., Ed Silvoso, Ted Haggard, John Dawson of Youth With a Mission, and others created an entire genre of books, texts, videos and other media teaching spiritual mapping and strategic level spiritual warfare. Their access to the interdenominational world missions' movement in the 1990s helped them spread these techniques rapidly around the globe.
The Transformations movies produced by Otis, Jr. are promotional "documentaries" showing prototypes of this process in which supernatural transformation of a community takes place including the healing of AIDS, instantaneous purifying of polluted streams, and even growth of huge vegetables. These movies have been shown to millions globally, and Transformations organizations worldwide are attempting to replicate these prototypes in their local communities.
Uganda is featured in several of the series of Transformations movies, which include top political, military and religious leaders. Bruce Wilson's recent video, Transforming Uganda, documents Silvoso's claim that his International Transformation Network is "discipling" every region of Uganda and 14,000 churches across th at country.
It is important to note, however, that this supernatural warfare isn't limited to faraway places and underdeveloped countries. The Transformations ideology originated from Western evangelicals -- witch-hunting and all -- and the prototypes have included cities like Hemet, California. Ugandan Julius Oyet, who starred in one of the Transformations movies is a key figure in the recent proposed draconian anti-gay legislation in that country.
BB: How are these strategies put into practice? Where have they been tried successfully? Where have they failed?
RT: Although many of the claims made in the Transformations movie can be easily disproved, the movement's advancement appears to be partially due to the promotion of the Transformations prototypes.
Supernatural healings of AIDS, spontaneous destruction of property of other belief systems, and even claims that the prayers of the movement have killed other humans are featured in films shown worldwide, including to mainline Protestant churches and renewal groups which have subsequently broken from their parent denominations.
For instance, the Transformations movies claim there have been thousands of cases of miraculous curing of AIDS in Uganda. Conversely, medical leaders are warning that claims of miraculous healing are interfering with the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Since altering their AIDS programs to abstinence-only programming promoted by U.S. evangelicals, Uganda has had an increase, not decrease of new AIDS cases.
To give you an idea of how deeply entrenched the New Apostolics are in this policy consider this example of one of the most celebrated abstinence-only programs in the U.S. Recapturing the Vision and Vessels of Honor are names for abstinence-only programs headed by Jacqueline del Rosario, who testified for renewal of Title V abstinence-based funding in Congressional hearings in 2002. Since 2001, her Miami organizations have been the recipient of $3,147,589 of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant money, and significant sums from other public sources, despite the fact that her organization was one of four in a long-term federally funded study which show ed no measurable results.
Del Rosario was a speaker, along with Wagner and other top apostles, at a conference in January, where she was described as an apostle in the promotional literature. Her relationship with the apostles is not new, however. She incorporated her organizations in the mid 1990s with leading Florida apostle Diane Buker, head of Battle Axe ministries, and Cindy Trimm, described as a "general in the art of strategic warfare." Buker is the author of God's Power to Multiply for Wealth and her Battle Axe Brigade ministry Web site features virulent attacks on Catholicism and other faiths. It certainly makes you question what is being taught in faith-based programming [financed] with millions of our tax dollars.
Another political area in which New Apostolics are deeply entrenched is John Hagee's Christians United for Israel. Hagee is still teaching that the Rapture may happen any moment, but many of his directors and leadership are New Apostolics who teach that they must take "dominion" over the earth, including Israel, before Jesus can return. These include ICA Apostle Stephen Strang who heads the Strang charismatic publishing empire, and regional director Robert Stearns, who publishes another leading New Apostolic journal titled Kairos. Stearns also leads the largest single international Christian Zionist event, which involves 200,000 churches worldwide -- and his ministry has been endorsed by the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
BB: Are there politicians involved with NAR?
RT: The Transformations movies show access to many political figures from Fiji to South America to Africa. Uganda is a prime example and the movies are corroborated in this respect by active participation of political leaders in Transformation organizations.Transformation Hawaii has the full participation of Lt. Governor James “Duke” Aiona, who has spoken at conferences and even written for the movement. Lou Engle, a prophet in Wagner"s inner circle, has recently been on the news leading an anti-health care reform Prayercast with Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann, among others. In May, Engle led another televised event in which he prayed over Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee.
The New Apostolic movement more closely resembles a political campaign than a denomination. PrayforNewark is a citywide prayer project in which every precinct has been mapped out and every street assigned to a volunteer. PrayforNewark is part of Ed Silvoso's International Transformation Network (ITN), the same operation that is "transforming" Uganda, and promoting the belief that homosexuals are possessed by literal demons. Silvoso's ITN is also active in numerous other locations in the U.S. and worldwide.
BB: Where does Sarah Palin fit into all this?
RT: The movement made early inroads in Alaska through an ICA apostle named Mary Glazier, who claims that a 24-year-old Palin joined her spiritual warfare network. These communication networks allow apostles to disseminate new prophecy to their "prayer warriors." During the presidential election this included prophecies about Palin, including one in which Glazier described a vision that Palin would take the "mantle" of leadership after a period of national mourning, apparently following John McCain's demise.
The first Transformation film so impressed pastors in Wasilla, Alaska, that they contacted some of the religious leaders featured in the movie including Thomas Muthee, who was shown driving a witch out of Kiambu, Kenya. Wasilla Assembly of God developed an ongoing relationship with Muthee and a 2005 church video shows him anointing Palin. Unfortunately the press picked up on the witch part of the story, and not the more important fact that Palin has ties to top leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation.
BB: Why should the American people be concerned about the New Apostolic Reformation?
RT: I believe this movement's threat to separation of church and state is greater than some of the more overtly theocratic movements of the religious right. The inclusion of women and all races in leadership roles, and their enthusiastic sponsorship of social services conflicts with a popular notion about religious fundamentalism. Despite their radical strategies, leaders in the movement have been labeled in the press as moderate, including Apostle Samuel Rodriguez -- president of the Sacramento, Calif.-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference -- who has been described as a "new evangelical."
Unsuspecting people are certainly becoming involved in New Apostolic activities without understanding its agenda. For example, the Global Day of Prayer sounds benign but was founded by Graham Power, head of the Africa division of Silvoso's International Transformation Network. Numerous citywide prayer efforts and pastors' networks are under the auspices of Wagner's apostles. Charities, social services, and "reconciliation" events appear to welcome all, but are designed as stealth evangelism to advance the "Kingdom."
In June, Lance Wallnau, an ICA apostle and motivational speaker for the Seven Mountain campaign, spoke on stealth evangelism at Wasilla Assembly of God. In Guatemalan jails, according to Wallnau, New Apostolics teach prisoners a secularized version of "Kingdom" worldview for a full year before making any attempt to convert them to "born-again" Christianity. Wallnau encouraged the congregation to follow this example for infiltrating the seven spheres of society.
Peter Wagner's ideas have spread widely into mainstream of evangelicalism, to little public notice. Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, partnered with Wagner in founding the New Apostolic Reformation and building its early headquarters, the World Prayer Center in Colorado Springs. Despite the fact that Haggard has written books on New Apostolic strategies, his participation in promoting this radical reformation of both church and society is so little known, it could be described as "Haggard's other secret."
Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and movements. Rachel Tabachnick has provided research on the religious right to political campaigns and regularly contributes to Talk2action.org, Political Research Associates' The Public Eye, and the Jewish Daily Forward's Zeek.
Anti-GLBT Zealots Are Everywhere
What you're about to hear is a portion of a jaw-dropping speech delivered by an Oklahoma State Representative at a gathering in her legislative district.
It's very reminiscent of the misleading and hateful rhetoric that one often sees & hears from the likes of Venango County's own American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania and "Christian" radio station WAWN.
This is what they say when they think we're not listening, and unfortunately, even when we are.
It's very reminiscent of the misleading and hateful rhetoric that one often sees & hears from the likes of Venango County's own American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania and "Christian" radio station WAWN.
This is what they say when they think we're not listening, and unfortunately, even when we are.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Who Is Palling Around With Terrorists Now?
The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged
By Frank Rich:
No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.
What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.
Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.
It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.
Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.
Equally significant is Barstow’s finding that most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. (Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.
The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.
The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.
In the days after Stack’s Austin attack, the gradually coalescing Tea Party dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most rapturously received speaker was Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its “progressive-lite” collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore Roosevelt — that would be McCain — and ominously labeled progressivism a cancer that “must be cut out of the system.”
A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”
William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul’s jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck’s anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party’s Congressional leadership. (It surely didn’t help Romney’s straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so — just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office — the heretofore milquetoast former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”
Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”
In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.
In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”
Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.” It’s enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now.
By Frank Rich:
No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.
What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.
Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.
It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.
Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.
Equally significant is Barstow’s finding that most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. (Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.
The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.
The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.
In the days after Stack’s Austin attack, the gradually coalescing Tea Party dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most rapturously received speaker was Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its “progressive-lite” collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore Roosevelt — that would be McCain — and ominously labeled progressivism a cancer that “must be cut out of the system.”
A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”
William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul’s jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck’s anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party’s Congressional leadership. (It surely didn’t help Romney’s straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so — just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office — the heretofore milquetoast former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”
Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”
In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.
In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”
Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.” It’s enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Will The Gay Community Ever Call Out The Religious Right On Their Lies?
By Alvin McEwen:
Recently, I posted two interviews with discredited researcher Paul Cameron conducted by Midweek Politics Radio.
The response to these posts have been, in my view, successful. Many people who weren't aware of Paul Cameron became educated on his lies about the gay community.
But then there was a segment who asked why was I giving Cameron attention. They claimed that any focus on Cameron validated him. They were under the impression that if Cameron was ignored, he would go away.
Unfortunately, this mindset also includes other lies told about the gay community by religious right groups. There seems to be this idea that when so-called traditional values groups tell outright fibs about gay lives, the way we have express our love, or our moral outlook, these claims should either be laughed at or ignored.
But what some in our community fail to understand is that the lies told about the gay community aren't going away and ignoring them doesn't diminish their power. These lies have the power to hurt the gay community if unaddressed.
A perfect example is a recent incident during a Minnesota legislative hearing on marriage equality:
Barb Davis White, a Tea Party activist and Republican candidate for Minnesota's 5th Congressional District, prompted shocked gasps from the packed hearing room when she said, "Rosa Parks did not move to the front of the bus to support sodomy." Her testimony involved accusations that the movement for marriage equality is hijacking the civil rights movement.
"There is no difference between a black person and a white person other than their skin color when there's a tremendous difference between a man and a woman," said White, who was the GOP's endorsed candidate against Rep. Keith Ellison in 2008. "Allowing a black woman and a white man to marry does not change the definition of marriage. However, allowing two men or two women to marry would fundamentally change that definition."
White also garnered some laughs from the audience when she said, "Studies also show that the average homosexual has hundreds of sexual partners in his lifetime... and I repeat hundreds."
"I'm here today to tell you that homosexuality and lesbian behavior is unhealthy," claiming that gays and lesbians have higher rates of STDs than anyone else in the world, including "gay bowel disease," an ailment that does not exist and is often used by religious right figures to paint gay men as diseased.
The sad thing is not the fact that White actually believes this nonsense but her claims, in one form or another, are on a myriad of religious right web pages or have been repeated by their spokespeople as fact.
And the gay community and its leadership as a whole have yet to specifically address these lies with the expediency they deserve.
We as a community tend to forget that many people aren't as knowledgeable about us as they should be. Therefore they are susceptible to any group claiming to stand for "morality" or any speaker claiming to speak for "values, even if their definitions of "morality" and "values" involve unfairly painting the gay community as drooling sex-crazed miscreants from a movie co-directed by George Romero and David Cronenberg.
The question that needs to be asked is not whether gays are deserving of equality but why these so-called moral groups and spokespeople feel the need to deny us that equality through lies.
Gays aren't the ones creating phony medical terms designed to connote the worst images about sexual intercourse,
Gays aren't the ones manipulating the numbers of sexual partners,
and gays aren't the ones who have created a body of junk science based on the ravings of a man who couldn't be believed even if a vial of truth serum was pumped into his veins, i.e. Paul Cameron.
The culprits of these offenses are the so-called Christian groups such as the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, and the Concerned Women for America. The only reason why they have gotten away with it is because the gay community hasn't demanded that they explain their distortions.
And I can't help but to wonder if we are ever going to.
Recently, I posted two interviews with discredited researcher Paul Cameron conducted by Midweek Politics Radio.
The response to these posts have been, in my view, successful. Many people who weren't aware of Paul Cameron became educated on his lies about the gay community.
But then there was a segment who asked why was I giving Cameron attention. They claimed that any focus on Cameron validated him. They were under the impression that if Cameron was ignored, he would go away.
Unfortunately, this mindset also includes other lies told about the gay community by religious right groups. There seems to be this idea that when so-called traditional values groups tell outright fibs about gay lives, the way we have express our love, or our moral outlook, these claims should either be laughed at or ignored.
But what some in our community fail to understand is that the lies told about the gay community aren't going away and ignoring them doesn't diminish their power. These lies have the power to hurt the gay community if unaddressed.
A perfect example is a recent incident during a Minnesota legislative hearing on marriage equality:
Barb Davis White, a Tea Party activist and Republican candidate for Minnesota's 5th Congressional District, prompted shocked gasps from the packed hearing room when she said, "Rosa Parks did not move to the front of the bus to support sodomy." Her testimony involved accusations that the movement for marriage equality is hijacking the civil rights movement.
"There is no difference between a black person and a white person other than their skin color when there's a tremendous difference between a man and a woman," said White, who was the GOP's endorsed candidate against Rep. Keith Ellison in 2008. "Allowing a black woman and a white man to marry does not change the definition of marriage. However, allowing two men or two women to marry would fundamentally change that definition."
White also garnered some laughs from the audience when she said, "Studies also show that the average homosexual has hundreds of sexual partners in his lifetime... and I repeat hundreds."
"I'm here today to tell you that homosexuality and lesbian behavior is unhealthy," claiming that gays and lesbians have higher rates of STDs than anyone else in the world, including "gay bowel disease," an ailment that does not exist and is often used by religious right figures to paint gay men as diseased.
The sad thing is not the fact that White actually believes this nonsense but her claims, in one form or another, are on a myriad of religious right web pages or have been repeated by their spokespeople as fact.
And the gay community and its leadership as a whole have yet to specifically address these lies with the expediency they deserve.
We as a community tend to forget that many people aren't as knowledgeable about us as they should be. Therefore they are susceptible to any group claiming to stand for "morality" or any speaker claiming to speak for "values, even if their definitions of "morality" and "values" involve unfairly painting the gay community as drooling sex-crazed miscreants from a movie co-directed by George Romero and David Cronenberg.
The question that needs to be asked is not whether gays are deserving of equality but why these so-called moral groups and spokespeople feel the need to deny us that equality through lies.
Gays aren't the ones creating phony medical terms designed to connote the worst images about sexual intercourse,
Gays aren't the ones manipulating the numbers of sexual partners,
and gays aren't the ones who have created a body of junk science based on the ravings of a man who couldn't be believed even if a vial of truth serum was pumped into his veins, i.e. Paul Cameron.
The culprits of these offenses are the so-called Christian groups such as the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, and the Concerned Women for America. The only reason why they have gotten away with it is because the gay community hasn't demanded that they explain their distortions.
And I can't help but to wonder if we are ever going to.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Williams Institute Studies Show Widespread Discrimination Against LGBT Employees
Two recent Williams Institute reports document a widespread and persistent pattern of employment discrimination against LGBT people in both private and public employment.
This week, the Chicago-Kent Law Review published a Williams Institute study showing that LGBT people face high rates of discrimination in private employment. The report summarizes studies from the past decade documenting discrimination against LGBT people. These studies include surveys of LGBT individuals’ workplace experiences, wage comparisons between LGB and heterosexual persons, analyses of discrimination complaints filed with government agencies, and testing studies and controlled experiments.
Key findings include:
• 16% to 68% of LGBT people report experiencing employment discrimination;
• 15% to 57% of transgender people also report experiencing employment discrimination;
• In states that currently prohibit sexual orientation discrimination, LGB people file complaints of employment discrimination at similar rates to women and racial minorities; and,
• Transgender people report high rates of unemployment and very low earnings.
Full report, click HERE. Bias in the Workplace: Consistent Evidence of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination 1998-2008, M.V. Lee Badgett, Brad Sears, Holning Lau, and Deborah Ho, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Volume 84, Number 2 (2009)
When combined with the study released by the Williams Institute last fall, Documenting Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in State Employment, Williams Institute research shows that discrimination against LGBT people is pervasive in public and private employment. This 1,500 page report shows a widespread and persistent pattern of unconstitutional discrimination by state governments on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Full report, click HERE.
This week, the Chicago-Kent Law Review published a Williams Institute study showing that LGBT people face high rates of discrimination in private employment. The report summarizes studies from the past decade documenting discrimination against LGBT people. These studies include surveys of LGBT individuals’ workplace experiences, wage comparisons between LGB and heterosexual persons, analyses of discrimination complaints filed with government agencies, and testing studies and controlled experiments.
Key findings include:
• 16% to 68% of LGBT people report experiencing employment discrimination;
• 15% to 57% of transgender people also report experiencing employment discrimination;
• In states that currently prohibit sexual orientation discrimination, LGB people file complaints of employment discrimination at similar rates to women and racial minorities; and,
• Transgender people report high rates of unemployment and very low earnings.
Full report, click HERE. Bias in the Workplace: Consistent Evidence of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination 1998-2008, M.V. Lee Badgett, Brad Sears, Holning Lau, and Deborah Ho, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Volume 84, Number 2 (2009)
When combined with the study released by the Williams Institute last fall, Documenting Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in State Employment, Williams Institute research shows that discrimination against LGBT people is pervasive in public and private employment. This 1,500 page report shows a widespread and persistent pattern of unconstitutional discrimination by state governments on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Full report, click HERE.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Supporters launch campaign for anti-discrimination ordinance
by Keila Szpaller for The Missoulian:
A call for human rights Monday drew whoops and hollers and "Honk 4 Equality" signs in a downtown conference room.
The whoops were in support of an anti-discrimination ordinance - or a pro-human rights law - heading soon to the Missoula City Council. It's one several supporters said is long overdue.
"It could have been 10 years ago we were sitting here endorsing this," said Mark Anderlik, president of the Missoula Area Central Labor Council, before the event kicked off. "Shoulda been."
The proposal, the first of its kind in Montana, offers citywide protection from discrimination for all people, including members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in employment, housing and public accommodations.
During the event, some 60 people filled the Jack Reidy Conference Room outside Council Chambers and more spilled into the hall. One organizer asked people to stand.
"We're trying to make it look like a nice packed house here," the organizer said.
Part of the move involves collecting stories of discrimination as well as petition signatures, said Jamee Greer, organizer with the Montana Human Rights Network, leading the effort. People who have stories or want to gather signatures should contact Forward Montana at 542-8683 (that's 542-VOTE) or the network at (406) 442-5506.
******
The ordinance is rooted in principles already laid out in Montana and in Missoula. A Forward Montana spokesman pointed to the Montana Constitution, which says the dignity of the human being is "inviolable."
And Greer said the city's own charter notes Missoula is "enriched by the diversity and vitality of our people." Businesses such as DirecTV, Wal-Mart and the University of Montana have similar policies of their own, he said.
Councilwoman Stacy Rye, an ordinance sponsor, said she's spent much time rehearsing possible legal scenarios with the city attorney. Despite the core values expressed in the ordinance, people who don't identify themselves by name are posting hateful comments about it online.
"This is not a political issue. This is not a special interests issue," Rye said. "This is a human rights issue."
If it passes, Missoula will be the first city in Montana to protect people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Councilman Dave Strohmaier also is sponsoring the bill. Mayor John Engen spoke out in support at the event, and the ACLU of Montana and Montana Equality Now also are working on the effort, which Greer said will surely ripple across the state.
"When this ordinance passes, it will be the first in Montana, but not the last," he said.
A call for human rights Monday drew whoops and hollers and "Honk 4 Equality" signs in a downtown conference room.
The whoops were in support of an anti-discrimination ordinance - or a pro-human rights law - heading soon to the Missoula City Council. It's one several supporters said is long overdue.
"It could have been 10 years ago we were sitting here endorsing this," said Mark Anderlik, president of the Missoula Area Central Labor Council, before the event kicked off. "Shoulda been."
The proposal, the first of its kind in Montana, offers citywide protection from discrimination for all people, including members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in employment, housing and public accommodations.
During the event, some 60 people filled the Jack Reidy Conference Room outside Council Chambers and more spilled into the hall. One organizer asked people to stand.
"We're trying to make it look like a nice packed house here," the organizer said.
Part of the move involves collecting stories of discrimination as well as petition signatures, said Jamee Greer, organizer with the Montana Human Rights Network, leading the effort. People who have stories or want to gather signatures should contact Forward Montana at 542-8683 (that's 542-VOTE) or the network at (406) 442-5506.
******
The ordinance is rooted in principles already laid out in Montana and in Missoula. A Forward Montana spokesman pointed to the Montana Constitution, which says the dignity of the human being is "inviolable."
And Greer said the city's own charter notes Missoula is "enriched by the diversity and vitality of our people." Businesses such as DirecTV, Wal-Mart and the University of Montana have similar policies of their own, he said.
Councilwoman Stacy Rye, an ordinance sponsor, said she's spent much time rehearsing possible legal scenarios with the city attorney. Despite the core values expressed in the ordinance, people who don't identify themselves by name are posting hateful comments about it online.
"This is not a political issue. This is not a special interests issue," Rye said. "This is a human rights issue."
If it passes, Missoula will be the first city in Montana to protect people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Councilman Dave Strohmaier also is sponsoring the bill. Mayor John Engen spoke out in support at the event, and the ACLU of Montana and Montana Equality Now also are working on the effort, which Greer said will surely ripple across the state.
"When this ordinance passes, it will be the first in Montana, but not the last," he said.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Penna. Court Case -- Unsupported Preconceptions And Prejudices No Longer Apply
PA Court Rethinks View On Gays In Custody Cases
by Marc Levy for the Associated Press:
A Pennsylvania appellate court has rejected a 25-year-old legal precedent and ruled that a parent's homosexual relationship cannot be used against the parent in determining child custody.
The eight-judge Superior Court panel issued its decision last month in a custody battle between a mother and father who were identified only by their initials.
It also reversed the lower court ruling that awarded the father primary custody of their daughter, and granted the appeal of the mother to continue shared custody.
In doing so, the judges said a 1985 Superior Court decision that said a parent must prove that their gay relationship is not detrimental to the child.
That presumption "is based upon unsupported preconceptions and prejudices _ including that the sexual orientation of a parent will have an adverse effect on the child, and that the traditional heterosexual household is superior to that of the household of a parent involved in a same sex relationship," Judge Christine Donohue wrote in the Jan. 21 opinion.
The state Supreme Court also advises against relying on presumptions in deciding child custody cases between the parents, Donohue wrote.
The trial judge _ who was not identified _ had relied, in part, on the 1985 case. In it, the Superior Court rejected a woman's contention that sexual orientation should not be a consideration in a custody determination, Donohue wrote.
A three-member panel, voting 2-1, dismissed the notion that a "homosexual relationship could ever be the equal of the traditional family as a suitable family arrangement, and indicated that it was 'inconceivable' that a child could be exposed to a homosexual relationship 'and not suffer some emotional disturbance, perhaps severe,'" Donohue wrote.
The father is a sergeant in a police department in suburban Harrisburg and the mother is a state police lieutenant, according to the court.
by Marc Levy for the Associated Press:
A Pennsylvania appellate court has rejected a 25-year-old legal precedent and ruled that a parent's homosexual relationship cannot be used against the parent in determining child custody.
The eight-judge Superior Court panel issued its decision last month in a custody battle between a mother and father who were identified only by their initials.
It also reversed the lower court ruling that awarded the father primary custody of their daughter, and granted the appeal of the mother to continue shared custody.
In doing so, the judges said a 1985 Superior Court decision that said a parent must prove that their gay relationship is not detrimental to the child.
That presumption "is based upon unsupported preconceptions and prejudices _ including that the sexual orientation of a parent will have an adverse effect on the child, and that the traditional heterosexual household is superior to that of the household of a parent involved in a same sex relationship," Judge Christine Donohue wrote in the Jan. 21 opinion.
The state Supreme Court also advises against relying on presumptions in deciding child custody cases between the parents, Donohue wrote.
The trial judge _ who was not identified _ had relied, in part, on the 1985 case. In it, the Superior Court rejected a woman's contention that sexual orientation should not be a consideration in a custody determination, Donohue wrote.
A three-member panel, voting 2-1, dismissed the notion that a "homosexual relationship could ever be the equal of the traditional family as a suitable family arrangement, and indicated that it was 'inconceivable' that a child could be exposed to a homosexual relationship 'and not suffer some emotional disturbance, perhaps severe,'" Donohue wrote.
The father is a sergeant in a police department in suburban Harrisburg and the mother is a state police lieutenant, according to the court.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Human Rights
"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
Eleanor Roosevelt
Although she had already won international respect and admiration in her role as First Lady to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt’s work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would become her greatest legacy. She was without doubt, the most influential member of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights.
Unlike most other members of the Commission, Mrs. Roosevelt was neither a scholar nor an expert on international law. Her enthusiasm for her work at the United Nations was rooted in her humanitarian convictions and her steady faith in human dignity and worth. Although she often joked that she was out of place among so many academics and jurists, her intellect and compassion were great assets, and proved to be of crucial importance in the composition of a direct and straightforward Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
With characteristic modesty, Eleanor Roosevelt considered her position on the Commission to be one of ambassador for the common man and woman: "I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me understand something, it would be clear to all other people in the country, and perhaps that will be my real value on this drafting commission!"
The delegates to the Commission on Human Rights elected Eleanor Roosevelt their Chairperson. Like so many individuals throughout the world, the delegates recognized Eleanor Roosevelt’s unparalleled humanitarian convictions. During her tenure in the White House she had assisted her physically disabled husband in political matters, serving as his "eyes and ears," traveling throughout the U.S. to gauge the mood of the people. Through this work, she became widely esteemed as a person who both understood and felt the plight of the common man and woman.
Even prior to her years in the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt was actively engaged in politics and advocacy on the local and national level. She was an astute, accomplished, and intelligent woman, thoroughly familiar with the world of political negotiation. Just as she had served as a liaison of sorts between the President and his constituency, so she acted as a liaison between the Commission and the hopes of humanity. She may have lacked certain factual knowledge, but she had a keen sense of what the average person expected out of life - what men, women and children needed to flourish as individuals.
Her common sense approach, constant optimism and boundless energy were integral to the smooth facilitation of meetings. On any given issue, her colloquial style and good humor were engaged not only to win over the majority of delegates who generally supported a particular U.S. position, but to confound those who opposed it. A New York Times reporter who was present at the Commission meetings wrote of the power Mrs. Roosevelt’s personality had over certain unreasonable diplomats:
The Russians seem to have met their match in Mrs. Roosevelt. The proceedings sometimes turn into a long vitriolic attack on the U.S. when she is not present. These attacks, however, generally denigrate into flurries in the face of her calm and undisturbed but often pointed replies.
If Mrs. Roosevelt made one sort of impression with her familiar style, she made another with her commitment to produce a universally accepted, "living" declaration. She was recognized as a tireless worker, stating triumphantly at one point, "I drive hard and when I get home I will be tired! The men on the Commission will be also!" Many of the delegates found this aspect of her personality less agreeable than her charm. One went so far as to suggest that his own human rights were violated by the length of the meetings!
Envisioning a declaration with enduring principles that would be perpetually recognized by all nations, she was a strong advocate of true universality within the Declaration. She was adamant that different conceptions of human rights be deliberated during the UDHR’s composition:
We wanted as many nations as possible to accept the fact that men, for one reason or another, were born free and equal in dignity and rights, that they were endowed with reason and conscience, and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. The way to do that was to find words that everyone would accept.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal sense of accomplishment with the finished Declaration was unparalleled in her life. Her speech before the General Assembly as she submitted the Declaration for review demonstrates the historical significance she placed upon its adoption:
We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the proclamation in 1789 [of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man], the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the U.S., and the adoption of comparable declarations at different times in other countries...
Eleanor Roosevelt’s concern for humanity made her the driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Her leadership of the Commission on Human Rights led to the composition of a Declaration that has endured as a universally accepted standard of achievement for all nations. As our respect for and understanding of the Universal Declaration has grown, so too has our gratitude and admiration for this modest woman who passionately pursued what she imagined would become a cornerstone in the struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms for everyone - everywhere.
She lived her life in the center of what many would regard the Twentieth Century’s most consequential events, the Great Depression, World War II, the establishment of the United Nations and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She confronted both opportunity and adversity with a sense of optimism and determination. A former Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, once said of Eleanor Roosevelt, "She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness."
Eleanor Roosevelt
Although she had already won international respect and admiration in her role as First Lady to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt’s work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would become her greatest legacy. She was without doubt, the most influential member of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights.
Unlike most other members of the Commission, Mrs. Roosevelt was neither a scholar nor an expert on international law. Her enthusiasm for her work at the United Nations was rooted in her humanitarian convictions and her steady faith in human dignity and worth. Although she often joked that she was out of place among so many academics and jurists, her intellect and compassion were great assets, and proved to be of crucial importance in the composition of a direct and straightforward Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
With characteristic modesty, Eleanor Roosevelt considered her position on the Commission to be one of ambassador for the common man and woman: "I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me understand something, it would be clear to all other people in the country, and perhaps that will be my real value on this drafting commission!"
The delegates to the Commission on Human Rights elected Eleanor Roosevelt their Chairperson. Like so many individuals throughout the world, the delegates recognized Eleanor Roosevelt’s unparalleled humanitarian convictions. During her tenure in the White House she had assisted her physically disabled husband in political matters, serving as his "eyes and ears," traveling throughout the U.S. to gauge the mood of the people. Through this work, she became widely esteemed as a person who both understood and felt the plight of the common man and woman.
Even prior to her years in the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt was actively engaged in politics and advocacy on the local and national level. She was an astute, accomplished, and intelligent woman, thoroughly familiar with the world of political negotiation. Just as she had served as a liaison of sorts between the President and his constituency, so she acted as a liaison between the Commission and the hopes of humanity. She may have lacked certain factual knowledge, but she had a keen sense of what the average person expected out of life - what men, women and children needed to flourish as individuals.
Her common sense approach, constant optimism and boundless energy were integral to the smooth facilitation of meetings. On any given issue, her colloquial style and good humor were engaged not only to win over the majority of delegates who generally supported a particular U.S. position, but to confound those who opposed it. A New York Times reporter who was present at the Commission meetings wrote of the power Mrs. Roosevelt’s personality had over certain unreasonable diplomats:
The Russians seem to have met their match in Mrs. Roosevelt. The proceedings sometimes turn into a long vitriolic attack on the U.S. when she is not present. These attacks, however, generally denigrate into flurries in the face of her calm and undisturbed but often pointed replies.
If Mrs. Roosevelt made one sort of impression with her familiar style, she made another with her commitment to produce a universally accepted, "living" declaration. She was recognized as a tireless worker, stating triumphantly at one point, "I drive hard and when I get home I will be tired! The men on the Commission will be also!" Many of the delegates found this aspect of her personality less agreeable than her charm. One went so far as to suggest that his own human rights were violated by the length of the meetings!
Envisioning a declaration with enduring principles that would be perpetually recognized by all nations, she was a strong advocate of true universality within the Declaration. She was adamant that different conceptions of human rights be deliberated during the UDHR’s composition:
We wanted as many nations as possible to accept the fact that men, for one reason or another, were born free and equal in dignity and rights, that they were endowed with reason and conscience, and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. The way to do that was to find words that everyone would accept.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal sense of accomplishment with the finished Declaration was unparalleled in her life. Her speech before the General Assembly as she submitted the Declaration for review demonstrates the historical significance she placed upon its adoption:
We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the proclamation in 1789 [of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man], the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the U.S., and the adoption of comparable declarations at different times in other countries...
Eleanor Roosevelt’s concern for humanity made her the driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Her leadership of the Commission on Human Rights led to the composition of a Declaration that has endured as a universally accepted standard of achievement for all nations. As our respect for and understanding of the Universal Declaration has grown, so too has our gratitude and admiration for this modest woman who passionately pursued what she imagined would become a cornerstone in the struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms for everyone - everywhere.
She lived her life in the center of what many would regard the Twentieth Century’s most consequential events, the Great Depression, World War II, the establishment of the United Nations and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She confronted both opportunity and adversity with a sense of optimism and determination. A former Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, once said of Eleanor Roosevelt, "She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness."
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Genetics and Proposition 8
Human Sexual Orientation Has Deep Biological Roots
by Dean Hamer & Michael Rosbash for the Los Angeles Times:
February 23, 2010
There was an elephant in the San Francisco courtroom where lawyers contested the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California law that prohibits the marriage of same-sex couples. One key issue should influence every aspect of the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger proceedings yet remained unspoken: What makes people gay? Is it a choice or is it innate?
Most geneticists consider sexual orientation a phenotype -- namely, an observable set of properties that varies among individuals. Although physical phenotypes like height and weight are easier to quantify, behavioral phenotypes are intensely studied in animals and humans. Research from many directions leads to a strong conclusion: Human sexual orientation has deep biological roots.
Moreover, the empirical evidence for the role of genetics in human sexual orientation has been quietly but steadily mounting over the last 15 years. Studies of twins -- the mainstay of quantitative human genetics -- have been conducted on large populations in three countries. The results unambiguously demonstrate that heritability plays a major role in sexual orientation and far outweighs shared environmental factors such as education or parenting.
During the early 1990s, there was an unfortunate flurry of less-than-convincing findings on specific genes and sometimes over-hyped media announcements. Indeed, critics of sexual orientation inheritance are fond of pointing out that there is no single identified "gay gene." However, they fail to mention that the same is true for height, skin color, handedness, frequency of heart disease and many other traits that have a large inherited component but no dominant gene. In other words, sexual orientation is complex, i.e., many genes contribute to the phenotype.
Gay genes appear paradoxical at first blush. From the perspective of natural selection, how could they persist in the population if they lead to fewer offspring? Recent research has uncovered several plausible explanations. For example, one set of studies found that the same inherited factors that favor male homosexuality actually increase the fecundity of female maternal relatives. By balancing the number of offspring, they would contribute to maintaining these genes over the course of evolution. This explanation may not be exclusive but serves to illustrate that the Darwinian problem is not necessarily overwhelming.
There have been other surprises. One is the importance of epigenetics -- changes that alter gene expression without a change in the DNA code of an affected gene. This is evidenced by the lopsided number of maternal versus paternal factors in male sexual orientation and by unusual patterns of DNA modification in mothers of gay men. Epigenetic changes may also explain the finding that a male's probability of being gay is increased by his number of older brothers.
Although these factors are neither genetic in the traditional Mendelian sense nor fully understood, they are still biological and affect phenotype in an involuntary manner. Who chooses his number of older brothers?
All of these findings demand the conclusion that most gay people no more choose their sexual orientation than most heterosexuals. ("Most" is used here to indicate that -- like almost everything biological -- these are statistical data and do not apply uniformly.) This conclusion is also consonant with our memories: Most of us were stunned as unsuspecting adolescents to discover our sexual orientation -- heterosexuals and homosexuals alike.
Biology cannot be avoided in determining whether fundamental rights are protected under the equal protection clause of our Constitution. This is because "immutability" is one of the factors that determine the level of scrutiny applied to possible violations and that determine whether gays are awarded "suspect class" status, which would give them more constitutional protection. Heritability is not necessary for immutability or suspect class status (religion is the usual counter-example), but it should be sufficient; we do not choose our genes, nor can we change them.
The court of public opinion may be the ultimate arbiter, and here there is cause for optimism about what education can achieve. Recent studies in college classrooms show that exposure of students to information on the causes of homosexuality has a direct influence on opinions about gay rights. This fits with polling data showing that people who believe that gays are "born that way" are generally supportive of full equality, whereas those who believe it is "a choice" are opposed.
The importance of education is also underscored by the extent to which a lack of education is problematic. One national survey found that 70% of those who think being gay is a choice favored the re- institution of sodomy laws. This would turn some 15 million Americans into common criminals for simply being who they are. Science education must help people understand that phenotypic variation, including sexual orientation diversity, is an immutable feature of human biology.
Dean Hamer is a molecular biologist who works on human genetics and HIV prevention and is the author of scientific books, including "The Science of Desire." Michael Rosbash is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor at Brandeis University who studies circadian rhythms.
by Dean Hamer & Michael Rosbash for the Los Angeles Times:
February 23, 2010
There was an elephant in the San Francisco courtroom where lawyers contested the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California law that prohibits the marriage of same-sex couples. One key issue should influence every aspect of the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger proceedings yet remained unspoken: What makes people gay? Is it a choice or is it innate?
Most geneticists consider sexual orientation a phenotype -- namely, an observable set of properties that varies among individuals. Although physical phenotypes like height and weight are easier to quantify, behavioral phenotypes are intensely studied in animals and humans. Research from many directions leads to a strong conclusion: Human sexual orientation has deep biological roots.
Moreover, the empirical evidence for the role of genetics in human sexual orientation has been quietly but steadily mounting over the last 15 years. Studies of twins -- the mainstay of quantitative human genetics -- have been conducted on large populations in three countries. The results unambiguously demonstrate that heritability plays a major role in sexual orientation and far outweighs shared environmental factors such as education or parenting.
During the early 1990s, there was an unfortunate flurry of less-than-convincing findings on specific genes and sometimes over-hyped media announcements. Indeed, critics of sexual orientation inheritance are fond of pointing out that there is no single identified "gay gene." However, they fail to mention that the same is true for height, skin color, handedness, frequency of heart disease and many other traits that have a large inherited component but no dominant gene. In other words, sexual orientation is complex, i.e., many genes contribute to the phenotype.
Gay genes appear paradoxical at first blush. From the perspective of natural selection, how could they persist in the population if they lead to fewer offspring? Recent research has uncovered several plausible explanations. For example, one set of studies found that the same inherited factors that favor male homosexuality actually increase the fecundity of female maternal relatives. By balancing the number of offspring, they would contribute to maintaining these genes over the course of evolution. This explanation may not be exclusive but serves to illustrate that the Darwinian problem is not necessarily overwhelming.
There have been other surprises. One is the importance of epigenetics -- changes that alter gene expression without a change in the DNA code of an affected gene. This is evidenced by the lopsided number of maternal versus paternal factors in male sexual orientation and by unusual patterns of DNA modification in mothers of gay men. Epigenetic changes may also explain the finding that a male's probability of being gay is increased by his number of older brothers.
Although these factors are neither genetic in the traditional Mendelian sense nor fully understood, they are still biological and affect phenotype in an involuntary manner. Who chooses his number of older brothers?
All of these findings demand the conclusion that most gay people no more choose their sexual orientation than most heterosexuals. ("Most" is used here to indicate that -- like almost everything biological -- these are statistical data and do not apply uniformly.) This conclusion is also consonant with our memories: Most of us were stunned as unsuspecting adolescents to discover our sexual orientation -- heterosexuals and homosexuals alike.
Biology cannot be avoided in determining whether fundamental rights are protected under the equal protection clause of our Constitution. This is because "immutability" is one of the factors that determine the level of scrutiny applied to possible violations and that determine whether gays are awarded "suspect class" status, which would give them more constitutional protection. Heritability is not necessary for immutability or suspect class status (religion is the usual counter-example), but it should be sufficient; we do not choose our genes, nor can we change them.
The court of public opinion may be the ultimate arbiter, and here there is cause for optimism about what education can achieve. Recent studies in college classrooms show that exposure of students to information on the causes of homosexuality has a direct influence on opinions about gay rights. This fits with polling data showing that people who believe that gays are "born that way" are generally supportive of full equality, whereas those who believe it is "a choice" are opposed.
The importance of education is also underscored by the extent to which a lack of education is problematic. One national survey found that 70% of those who think being gay is a choice favored the re- institution of sodomy laws. This would turn some 15 million Americans into common criminals for simply being who they are. Science education must help people understand that phenotypic variation, including sexual orientation diversity, is an immutable feature of human biology.
Dean Hamer is a molecular biologist who works on human genetics and HIV prevention and is the author of scientific books, including "The Science of Desire." Michael Rosbash is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor at Brandeis University who studies circadian rhythms.
Uniting Communities
from The Western States Center:
The Uniting Communities project focuses on proactively bringing together the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) community and communities of color to address racial justice and LGBTQ equality.
During the past 30 years of ballot measure fights on LGBTQ issues in the region, Western States Center has seen communities of color increasingly targeted by the Far Right. Playing into the stereotype that communities of color are more homophobic than white communities, the Right has tried to divide two communities that have a great deal in common and that have led the social change movement. We believe that mobilizing communities of color to support LGBTQ equality is critical to fighting back these attacks.
In early 2008 Oregon seemed likely to face two anti-gay ballot measures in the November election. Throughout the year, the Uniting Communities project worked with four organizations based in communities of color, immigrant and refugee communities to provide training and technical assistance to address LGBTQ issues. We also brought these groups together to network, strategize and learn from each other's experiences.
While the measures did not make the ballot, the work continued and each organization made significant progress in discussing and addressing homophobia, heterosexism and LGBTQ equality within their organizations and in their communities. The organizations also formed new relationships with LGBTQ rights organizations.
“Uniting Communities reminds us that communities of color and LGBT communities need to work together today and in the future. It helps organizations of color open an intentional conversation grounded in what equity looks like, and what our organizations can do to build a solid foundation for working together towards equality.”
- Tammy Johnson, Applied Research Center
Uniting Communities: The Toolkit
Building off of the work in Oregon, we have compiled a Toolkit with exercises to examine the obvious, and not so obvious, barriers that organizations need to clear to become inclusive of LGBTQ members. The Toolkit also contains 10 case studies that highlight the successes groups across the country have had in breaking new paths towards inclusiveness and culturally specific engagement.
Make no mistake, this is not a one sided conversation. LGBTQ organizations need to have meaningful engagement on issues of racial justice and immigrant rights. A companion toolkit produced by Basic Rights Oregon called Standing Together: Coming Out for Racial Justice contains exercises, how-tos, and case studies of how predominantly white LGBT organizations can become allies to racial justice organizations and campaigns.
The Uniting Communities project focuses on proactively bringing together the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) community and communities of color to address racial justice and LGBTQ equality.
During the past 30 years of ballot measure fights on LGBTQ issues in the region, Western States Center has seen communities of color increasingly targeted by the Far Right. Playing into the stereotype that communities of color are more homophobic than white communities, the Right has tried to divide two communities that have a great deal in common and that have led the social change movement. We believe that mobilizing communities of color to support LGBTQ equality is critical to fighting back these attacks.
In early 2008 Oregon seemed likely to face two anti-gay ballot measures in the November election. Throughout the year, the Uniting Communities project worked with four organizations based in communities of color, immigrant and refugee communities to provide training and technical assistance to address LGBTQ issues. We also brought these groups together to network, strategize and learn from each other's experiences.
While the measures did not make the ballot, the work continued and each organization made significant progress in discussing and addressing homophobia, heterosexism and LGBTQ equality within their organizations and in their communities. The organizations also formed new relationships with LGBTQ rights organizations.
“Uniting Communities reminds us that communities of color and LGBT communities need to work together today and in the future. It helps organizations of color open an intentional conversation grounded in what equity looks like, and what our organizations can do to build a solid foundation for working together towards equality.”
- Tammy Johnson, Applied Research Center
Uniting Communities: The Toolkit
Building off of the work in Oregon, we have compiled a Toolkit with exercises to examine the obvious, and not so obvious, barriers that organizations need to clear to become inclusive of LGBTQ members. The Toolkit also contains 10 case studies that highlight the successes groups across the country have had in breaking new paths towards inclusiveness and culturally specific engagement.
Make no mistake, this is not a one sided conversation. LGBTQ organizations need to have meaningful engagement on issues of racial justice and immigrant rights. A companion toolkit produced by Basic Rights Oregon called Standing Together: Coming Out for Racial Justice contains exercises, how-tos, and case studies of how predominantly white LGBT organizations can become allies to racial justice organizations and campaigns.
Monday, February 22, 2010
National Rural Youth Assembly Call for Nominations
The National Rural Assembly will host a National Rural Youth Assembly on April 22-25, 2010, at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and seeks 50 young adults from rural communities across the country who will gather to discuss the issues they see as critical to their lives and communities.
The National Rural Assembly Steering Committee asks rural organizations and leaders to nominate young people who are interested in rural issues, invested in strengthening and making an impact in their local communities.
The Rural Youth Assembly will engage young people on the key policy areas of the Rural Assembly including the quality of education, stewardship of our natural resources, investment in our communities, and the health of rural people. Youth will represent the diversity of rural America in geographies, race, cultures, genders, incomes and sexual orientations. Criteria for participation HERE.
Join Us
There are thousands of cults in America.
This is the story of one.
Award winning filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, follows four families as they leave an abusive church in South Carolina and realize they have been in a cult. The film documents them as they enter Wellspring, the only accredited, live-in cult treatment facility in the world, where they learn the true extent of the brainwashing they have all experienced. Eventually they return home to bring the Pastor and his wife to justice, and to try to begin to rebuild their damaged lives.
JOIN US presents an intimate look at the inner workings of a cult from both the members and the cult leaders points of view. It is an emotional human portrait that explores the reasons why America is the number one breeding ground for cults in the world, and a chilling reminder that it can happen to anyone.
This is the story of one.
Award winning filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, follows four families as they leave an abusive church in South Carolina and realize they have been in a cult. The film documents them as they enter Wellspring, the only accredited, live-in cult treatment facility in the world, where they learn the true extent of the brainwashing they have all experienced. Eventually they return home to bring the Pastor and his wife to justice, and to try to begin to rebuild their damaged lives.
JOIN US presents an intimate look at the inner workings of a cult from both the members and the cult leaders points of view. It is an emotional human portrait that explores the reasons why America is the number one breeding ground for cults in the world, and a chilling reminder that it can happen to anyone.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Come Out and Win!
An inspirational and effective guide to grassroots LGBT organizing by NGLTF's Sue Hyde
Come Out and Win, will educate, engage, and agitate LGBT and straight activists to become involved in the political movement to win full equality under the law and sexual/gender freedom. Spurring a new generation of activists to positive social action, it not only tells the history of gay liberation but, crucially, offers guidance and practical advice for building organizations and taking concrete action to eradicate homophobia.
From starting a gay-straight alliance in your high school to the most effective way to lobby your state representative face-to-face, Come Out and Win explains how to organize and become politically engaged in a clear and user-friendly manner. Other issues explored include youth organizing, marriage equality, legislative change, public relations, having a voice in the mainstream press, putting on a street demonstration, and political organizing from local to national levels. Grappling with the complexity of grassroots political interactions, Come Out and Win suggests ways for LGBT communities to form coalitions with women’s organizations, communities of color, and faith communities.
Come Out and Win, will educate, engage, and agitate LGBT and straight activists to become involved in the political movement to win full equality under the law and sexual/gender freedom. Spurring a new generation of activists to positive social action, it not only tells the history of gay liberation but, crucially, offers guidance and practical advice for building organizations and taking concrete action to eradicate homophobia.
From starting a gay-straight alliance in your high school to the most effective way to lobby your state representative face-to-face, Come Out and Win explains how to organize and become politically engaged in a clear and user-friendly manner. Other issues explored include youth organizing, marriage equality, legislative change, public relations, having a voice in the mainstream press, putting on a street demonstration, and political organizing from local to national levels. Grappling with the complexity of grassroots political interactions, Come Out and Win suggests ways for LGBT communities to form coalitions with women’s organizations, communities of color, and faith communities.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
A Welcoming Town ...
By KEILA SZPALLER of The Missoulian:
When Douglas finally worked up the moxie to tell his boss he was changing his female body to match his male identity, he figured he'd be out of a job.
"I sort of got the gumption up and was terrified. Absolutely terrified," said Douglas, a Missoula engine mechanic. "I had this job. I expected the worst. I expected at the very worst to be punched in the face and at the least to be fired."
Douglas, 30, still in his probationary period, blurted out the message with zero finesse. The transition, the name change, everything. His boss stared.
"Slower this time," Douglas said. "I'm going to transition. I'm going to take hormones. I'm going to present as male. I feel like a guy. If you have a problem with that, you have to fire me right now. Because this is what I'm going to do."
He said his boss stared some more. Then, the man asked Douglas if he was happy. Douglas said he was. And that settled it for the local business.
"He said, ‘That's all I need to know,' " Douglas said.
That was four years ago, and Douglas said he is lucky to work for such an employer and such a company. But he said many other people who identify as "trans" encounter just the opposite. Employers rescind job offers. Workers fear applying.
And while Douglas considers himself fortunate in his job, he also isn't sharing more than his middle name for this story because he fears retribution for being transgender.
That's one kind of discrimination the Montana Human Rights Network wants to curb with a municipal non-discrimination ordinance advocates believe is a first for a city in Montana. Network organizer Jamee Greer said supporters are collecting signatures and he expects a proposal to come this spring to the Missoula City Council.
"Missoula is a welcoming town," Greer said. "This is a way for us to come together and brand the city and say we don't stand for this kind of intolerance."
***
The ordinance is being drafted. In brief, its aim is to protect people from sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations.
"Right now, if you're discriminated (against) based on your race or religion, the Montana Human Rights Act will offer you legal recourse," Greer said.
It won't if you're discriminated against based on gender identity. The Network, a human rights advocacy and organizing group, has tried unsuccessfully for 20 years to pass such a ban statewide. Now it's taking the plan to cities.
City Council members Stacy Rye and Dave Strohmaier plan to offer up the law in Missoula. Rye said she expects the matter will come to a council committee sometime in March. In the meantime, other organizations are rallying support. The ACLU of Montana, Forward Montana and Montana Equality Now all are working on the effort.
Montana Equality Now co-chair and co-founder John Blake said the political action and education group collected the first 400 signatures on the petition, all on the University of Montana campus. Blake also said the citywide ordinances are true needs and not just olive branches.
"A lot of people are very surprised when we say things like we can get rejected at a hotel room based on perceived sexual orientation," Blake said. "We can get fired from a job based on perceived sexual orientation."
Missoula has a reputation for being a relatively tolerant community, though. Even during a low point in 2002 when a lesbian couple was burned out of their home, Greer said the overwhelming response in support of them seemed to balance out some of the fear that arose. But there's still work to do.
"The great thing is we're not getting a lot of discrimination from LGB," Greer said of people who are lesbian, gay or bisexual. "We are getting a lot of discrimination from trans folks."
***
That's people like Douglas, who said his story is one of success but it's unusual. He declined to name his employer for this story. He said such an ordinance in Missoula would be a stepping stone to more protections for trans people.
"I can guarantee you a majority of employers wouldn't touch that person with a 10-foot pole," Douglas said. "Not because they are personally discriminating against transgendered people, but maybe they're worried (about) how their clients might."
Many times, the matter arises after an employer offers a job to someone who looks, say, male. At that point, the job candidate has to present a driver's license, and it says the candidate is female. The offer vanishes.
The discrimination against transgendered people isn't surprising, said Sarah Warbelow, state legislative director for the Human Rights Campaign. The HRC is a national organization working on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights.
"There's still a lot of fear," Warbelow said. "People are unsure of what to expect."
She said "transgender" is an umbrella term that includes people transitioning from female to male or male to female, but it also includes people who identify as gender queer. That's people who aren't transitioning but identify in a non-gendered way.
While Missoula appears to be at the forefront of such legal protections in Montana, Warbelow said cities have been adopting these ordinances since around the 1980s. The more cities and counties that adopt such policies, the more pressures it puts on states to do the same. That pushes at the national level.
Cities are a good place to start. At home in their communities, she said people see the laws don't have negative consequences.
"The world doesn't come crashing down because you protect people on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation," Warbelow said.
When Douglas finally worked up the moxie to tell his boss he was changing his female body to match his male identity, he figured he'd be out of a job.
"I sort of got the gumption up and was terrified. Absolutely terrified," said Douglas, a Missoula engine mechanic. "I had this job. I expected the worst. I expected at the very worst to be punched in the face and at the least to be fired."
Douglas, 30, still in his probationary period, blurted out the message with zero finesse. The transition, the name change, everything. His boss stared.
"Slower this time," Douglas said. "I'm going to transition. I'm going to take hormones. I'm going to present as male. I feel like a guy. If you have a problem with that, you have to fire me right now. Because this is what I'm going to do."
He said his boss stared some more. Then, the man asked Douglas if he was happy. Douglas said he was. And that settled it for the local business.
"He said, ‘That's all I need to know,' " Douglas said.
That was four years ago, and Douglas said he is lucky to work for such an employer and such a company. But he said many other people who identify as "trans" encounter just the opposite. Employers rescind job offers. Workers fear applying.
And while Douglas considers himself fortunate in his job, he also isn't sharing more than his middle name for this story because he fears retribution for being transgender.
That's one kind of discrimination the Montana Human Rights Network wants to curb with a municipal non-discrimination ordinance advocates believe is a first for a city in Montana. Network organizer Jamee Greer said supporters are collecting signatures and he expects a proposal to come this spring to the Missoula City Council.
"Missoula is a welcoming town," Greer said. "This is a way for us to come together and brand the city and say we don't stand for this kind of intolerance."
***
The ordinance is being drafted. In brief, its aim is to protect people from sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations.
"Right now, if you're discriminated (against) based on your race or religion, the Montana Human Rights Act will offer you legal recourse," Greer said.
It won't if you're discriminated against based on gender identity. The Network, a human rights advocacy and organizing group, has tried unsuccessfully for 20 years to pass such a ban statewide. Now it's taking the plan to cities.
City Council members Stacy Rye and Dave Strohmaier plan to offer up the law in Missoula. Rye said she expects the matter will come to a council committee sometime in March. In the meantime, other organizations are rallying support. The ACLU of Montana, Forward Montana and Montana Equality Now all are working on the effort.
Montana Equality Now co-chair and co-founder John Blake said the political action and education group collected the first 400 signatures on the petition, all on the University of Montana campus. Blake also said the citywide ordinances are true needs and not just olive branches.
"A lot of people are very surprised when we say things like we can get rejected at a hotel room based on perceived sexual orientation," Blake said. "We can get fired from a job based on perceived sexual orientation."
Missoula has a reputation for being a relatively tolerant community, though. Even during a low point in 2002 when a lesbian couple was burned out of their home, Greer said the overwhelming response in support of them seemed to balance out some of the fear that arose. But there's still work to do.
"The great thing is we're not getting a lot of discrimination from LGB," Greer said of people who are lesbian, gay or bisexual. "We are getting a lot of discrimination from trans folks."
***
That's people like Douglas, who said his story is one of success but it's unusual. He declined to name his employer for this story. He said such an ordinance in Missoula would be a stepping stone to more protections for trans people.
"I can guarantee you a majority of employers wouldn't touch that person with a 10-foot pole," Douglas said. "Not because they are personally discriminating against transgendered people, but maybe they're worried (about) how their clients might."
Many times, the matter arises after an employer offers a job to someone who looks, say, male. At that point, the job candidate has to present a driver's license, and it says the candidate is female. The offer vanishes.
The discrimination against transgendered people isn't surprising, said Sarah Warbelow, state legislative director for the Human Rights Campaign. The HRC is a national organization working on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights.
"There's still a lot of fear," Warbelow said. "People are unsure of what to expect."
She said "transgender" is an umbrella term that includes people transitioning from female to male or male to female, but it also includes people who identify as gender queer. That's people who aren't transitioning but identify in a non-gendered way.
While Missoula appears to be at the forefront of such legal protections in Montana, Warbelow said cities have been adopting these ordinances since around the 1980s. The more cities and counties that adopt such policies, the more pressures it puts on states to do the same. That pushes at the national level.
Cities are a good place to start. At home in their communities, she said people see the laws don't have negative consequences.
"The world doesn't come crashing down because you protect people on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation," Warbelow said.
Friday, February 19, 2010
The Fundamentalist World
Fundamentalist Christian “Training” Linked To Child’s Death In California (Thoughts on Extremism)
by Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out:
A fundamentalist Christian couple are accused of murdering their adopted daughter and severely injuring another through a Fundamentalist Christian “parenting method” in California:
OROVILLE — A fundamentalist religious philosophy that espouses corporal punishment to “train” children to be more obedient to their parents and God is now being investigated in connection with the death of a young Paradise girl and serious injuries to her sister.
(…)
Ramsey said he is also exploring a possible connection to a Web site that endorses “biblical discipline” using the same rubber or plastic tube alleged to have been used to whip the two young ridge girls by their adoptive parents.
In court Thursday, a judge granted a two-week postponement before the children’s parents, Kevin Schatz, 46, and Elizabeth Schatz, 42, enter a plea to murder and torture charges that could carry two life terms in prison.
Oy. Here’s the thing. If we were like the anti-gay public mouthpieces we deal with on a daily basis, we would immediately use this as an example of how the Fundamentalist Christian Agenda is dangerous for children. But we are not they. Should we be?
Prosecutors allege the two victims were subjected to “hours” of corporal punishment by their parents on successive days last Thursday and Friday with a quarter-inch-wide length of rubber or plastic tubing, which police reportedly recovered from the parents’ bedroom.
Police allege that the younger girl was being disciplined for mis-pronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson the day before she died.
Wow. But no, we won’t take the dishonest angle Fundamentalist Christian mouthpieces use to smear gay parents, because we are better than they are. And of course, if we did, we’d be missing a larger discussion.
In my experience with Fundamentalists (and I have quite a lot), I find that most of them actually mean well. They may be highly misled as to the facts, on many issues, but most of them feel that they are acting out of love. But this, to me, is an example of how extremist rhetoric, and an extremist worldview, can permeate and percolate throughout a religious community, to the point that certain people take it to an entirely new, entirely violent level. Because though these parents may claim that they were merely adhering to their deeply held religious beliefs, they are sadists. Only sadists would “discipline” their children this way.
The article points out that there is disagreement over corporal punishment in the Fundamentalist Christian world, and I’ll grant that. I don’t personally believe in spanking, but at the same time, I don’t believe that all parents who spank their kids are necessarily scarring them for life either. Normal, well-meaning people of all stripes can have honest disagreements about this sort of thing. But here’s where it gets sketchy: You take two parents who believe in spanking, and then you combine that with an authoritarian worldview where “Father Knows Best” (whether the human father, the version of God the father that the religion sells, etc.) and children are meant to be obedient soldiers to their parents’ orders, and in some cases, you’ll have a recipe for a situation like this one. Among your garden variety Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, the ones who truly are well-meaning, the most extremist elements of the religion won’t manifest. (Yes, they can still hurt people, as the LGBT community well knows, but I’m getting to that.) But there will be certain mentally unstable people, sick people, who take the dogma in its most literal form and run with it.
Think of the difference between conservative Muslims and those who actually strap on bombs and blow themselves up; think of the difference between regular “pro-lifers” and those who pick up a gun and murder abortion providers. And, of course, think of the difference between regular old “pro-family” people who simply want to “protect marriage,” and the disturbed people who end up beating/maiming/killing LGBT people. Do you see what I’m getting at? The common thread is that these are ideologies which lend themselves to this kind of violence, for certain people.
In the aftermath of Prop 8, the Religious Right has been bitching and moaning about supposed “violence” that’s been done to them by the big bad gay community, but the worst thing they’ve come up with is an old lady who got knocked over in a mob of people. Oh, and there was that one time a lady who ran a restaurant lost some customers because they learned that she voted yes. (Boo…hoo?) But there’s a reason that most of their tales of woe and lamentation are sort of boring — because we all know that it’s highly unlikely that the LGBT community is going to start beating or killing Fundamentalists. It’s just not gonna happen!
And why? It’s quite simple. The entire point of coming out is living with integrity; the entire point of fighting for our equality is bringing us up to the same level as everyone else! We’re not seeking to take anything away from anyone. Our motivation isn’t a distaste for anyone else, but rather a love for ourselves and a belief in our inherent dignity. The endgame of the LGBT civil rights movement is displayed proudly on our sleeves, for god’s sake. We simply want to live our lives with the same rights, responsibilities and freedoms as everyone else.
But this is not so in the Fundamentalist world. They want to take away women’s rights to make their own reproductive decisions. They want to take away children’s rights to be educated in actual science, in order to prop up their creation myth. They want to keep LGBT people in the closet (or worse), in order to not disrupt the tenuous grasp the patriarchy still holds in Western society, where the man of the house is elevated above all others. Children free to learn and grow as individuals, women with minds of their own, and all consenting adults living freely and passionately with those that they love? That’s just a bridge too far for them.
I’ve said it a million times, but the elevated place in society held by Fundamentalist Christians is not merited. They have done nothing to earn it. They are not paragons of moral virtue. In fact, they’re no better than the rest of the population. They’re not producing our great thinkers, our great artists, our great writers, or anything else “great.” And they know it. They know the jig is up. They’re watching their young adult children leave their shackles in droves, and they’re looking everywhere but inward for someone to blame. As their influence wanes (slowly — they’re so politically entrenched that it will be a long time before their political influence matches their dwindling numbers), they’re going to turn up the volume on their rhetoric and on their actions.
We’re already seeing this in the LGBT community, as certain Religious Right figures don’t seem all that bothered by the anti-gay legislation in Uganda, while others, like Bryan Fischer and Peter Sprigg of AFA and PFOX are openly calling for the criminalization of homosexuality. We’re seeing this in the aftermath of George Tiller’s assassination, as Randall Terry of Operation Rescue is loath to actually denounce Scott Roeder’s actions, and in fact, lends them rhetorical support every time he opens his mouth in public. We’re seeing this in Texas, as a band of Fundamentalists seek to destroy children’s educational opportunities by intentionally altering their textbooks to reflect a worldview that reflects a fantasy world of their own creation.
And as the rhetoric grows, there will, unfortunately, be more and more people who are pushed to the breaking point of insanity, and they’ll do more and more to hold on to the thread that is their completely debunked worldview. The tough thing is that it’s hard to tell who’s going to snap. It’s hard to tell which Fundamentalist parents will become so overwhelmed by fear and dogma that they literally control their children to death. It’s hard to tell which rejected men will translate their rage against women into a pulled trigger and the death of another abortion provider. It’s hard to tell which frightened, closeted person will try to kill off that which they hate in themselves by killing a gay person. It’s just hard to tell.
But it does represent a teachable moment, because again, I may take some flak for this (and you might be surprised to hear it from me, the resident atheist), but I do believe that the majority of Fundamentalists are well meaning people. And really? The ball’s in their court. They’re not going to listen to us anyway. But to any who might be reading this from that side of the fence, I say only this: You need to weed your backyard. You need to fumigate your rhetoric. And you need to control your own. Because again, over on this side of the fence, we don’t pose any threat to you. Oh, occasionally, little radicals pop up here and there, but the difference between this side and that side is that we marginalize the hell out of our extremists. (Bash Back, I’m looking at you.) But it seems that these days, Fundamentalists marginalize their freaks less and less. And that’s scary, not just for the LGBT community, but for civil society. Religiously-motivated murderers, abusers, rapists, etc. — they don’t exist in a vacuum. They have to be propped up by someone, whether it’s whatever crazy Fundamentalist website that motivated the couple in California, or MassResistance or the American Family Association or Liberty University or whoever. Someone motivates the people who commit these acts of religious violence.
Are you one of those someones?
by Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out:
A fundamentalist Christian couple are accused of murdering their adopted daughter and severely injuring another through a Fundamentalist Christian “parenting method” in California:
OROVILLE — A fundamentalist religious philosophy that espouses corporal punishment to “train” children to be more obedient to their parents and God is now being investigated in connection with the death of a young Paradise girl and serious injuries to her sister.
(…)
Ramsey said he is also exploring a possible connection to a Web site that endorses “biblical discipline” using the same rubber or plastic tube alleged to have been used to whip the two young ridge girls by their adoptive parents.
In court Thursday, a judge granted a two-week postponement before the children’s parents, Kevin Schatz, 46, and Elizabeth Schatz, 42, enter a plea to murder and torture charges that could carry two life terms in prison.
Oy. Here’s the thing. If we were like the anti-gay public mouthpieces we deal with on a daily basis, we would immediately use this as an example of how the Fundamentalist Christian Agenda is dangerous for children. But we are not they. Should we be?
Prosecutors allege the two victims were subjected to “hours” of corporal punishment by their parents on successive days last Thursday and Friday with a quarter-inch-wide length of rubber or plastic tubing, which police reportedly recovered from the parents’ bedroom.
Police allege that the younger girl was being disciplined for mis-pronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson the day before she died.
Wow. But no, we won’t take the dishonest angle Fundamentalist Christian mouthpieces use to smear gay parents, because we are better than they are. And of course, if we did, we’d be missing a larger discussion.
In my experience with Fundamentalists (and I have quite a lot), I find that most of them actually mean well. They may be highly misled as to the facts, on many issues, but most of them feel that they are acting out of love. But this, to me, is an example of how extremist rhetoric, and an extremist worldview, can permeate and percolate throughout a religious community, to the point that certain people take it to an entirely new, entirely violent level. Because though these parents may claim that they were merely adhering to their deeply held religious beliefs, they are sadists. Only sadists would “discipline” their children this way.
The article points out that there is disagreement over corporal punishment in the Fundamentalist Christian world, and I’ll grant that. I don’t personally believe in spanking, but at the same time, I don’t believe that all parents who spank their kids are necessarily scarring them for life either. Normal, well-meaning people of all stripes can have honest disagreements about this sort of thing. But here’s where it gets sketchy: You take two parents who believe in spanking, and then you combine that with an authoritarian worldview where “Father Knows Best” (whether the human father, the version of God the father that the religion sells, etc.) and children are meant to be obedient soldiers to their parents’ orders, and in some cases, you’ll have a recipe for a situation like this one. Among your garden variety Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, the ones who truly are well-meaning, the most extremist elements of the religion won’t manifest. (Yes, they can still hurt people, as the LGBT community well knows, but I’m getting to that.) But there will be certain mentally unstable people, sick people, who take the dogma in its most literal form and run with it.
Think of the difference between conservative Muslims and those who actually strap on bombs and blow themselves up; think of the difference between regular “pro-lifers” and those who pick up a gun and murder abortion providers. And, of course, think of the difference between regular old “pro-family” people who simply want to “protect marriage,” and the disturbed people who end up beating/maiming/killing LGBT people. Do you see what I’m getting at? The common thread is that these are ideologies which lend themselves to this kind of violence, for certain people.
In the aftermath of Prop 8, the Religious Right has been bitching and moaning about supposed “violence” that’s been done to them by the big bad gay community, but the worst thing they’ve come up with is an old lady who got knocked over in a mob of people. Oh, and there was that one time a lady who ran a restaurant lost some customers because they learned that she voted yes. (Boo…hoo?) But there’s a reason that most of their tales of woe and lamentation are sort of boring — because we all know that it’s highly unlikely that the LGBT community is going to start beating or killing Fundamentalists. It’s just not gonna happen!
And why? It’s quite simple. The entire point of coming out is living with integrity; the entire point of fighting for our equality is bringing us up to the same level as everyone else! We’re not seeking to take anything away from anyone. Our motivation isn’t a distaste for anyone else, but rather a love for ourselves and a belief in our inherent dignity. The endgame of the LGBT civil rights movement is displayed proudly on our sleeves, for god’s sake. We simply want to live our lives with the same rights, responsibilities and freedoms as everyone else.
But this is not so in the Fundamentalist world. They want to take away women’s rights to make their own reproductive decisions. They want to take away children’s rights to be educated in actual science, in order to prop up their creation myth. They want to keep LGBT people in the closet (or worse), in order to not disrupt the tenuous grasp the patriarchy still holds in Western society, where the man of the house is elevated above all others. Children free to learn and grow as individuals, women with minds of their own, and all consenting adults living freely and passionately with those that they love? That’s just a bridge too far for them.
I’ve said it a million times, but the elevated place in society held by Fundamentalist Christians is not merited. They have done nothing to earn it. They are not paragons of moral virtue. In fact, they’re no better than the rest of the population. They’re not producing our great thinkers, our great artists, our great writers, or anything else “great.” And they know it. They know the jig is up. They’re watching their young adult children leave their shackles in droves, and they’re looking everywhere but inward for someone to blame. As their influence wanes (slowly — they’re so politically entrenched that it will be a long time before their political influence matches their dwindling numbers), they’re going to turn up the volume on their rhetoric and on their actions.
We’re already seeing this in the LGBT community, as certain Religious Right figures don’t seem all that bothered by the anti-gay legislation in Uganda, while others, like Bryan Fischer and Peter Sprigg of AFA and PFOX are openly calling for the criminalization of homosexuality. We’re seeing this in the aftermath of George Tiller’s assassination, as Randall Terry of Operation Rescue is loath to actually denounce Scott Roeder’s actions, and in fact, lends them rhetorical support every time he opens his mouth in public. We’re seeing this in Texas, as a band of Fundamentalists seek to destroy children’s educational opportunities by intentionally altering their textbooks to reflect a worldview that reflects a fantasy world of their own creation.
And as the rhetoric grows, there will, unfortunately, be more and more people who are pushed to the breaking point of insanity, and they’ll do more and more to hold on to the thread that is their completely debunked worldview. The tough thing is that it’s hard to tell who’s going to snap. It’s hard to tell which Fundamentalist parents will become so overwhelmed by fear and dogma that they literally control their children to death. It’s hard to tell which rejected men will translate their rage against women into a pulled trigger and the death of another abortion provider. It’s hard to tell which frightened, closeted person will try to kill off that which they hate in themselves by killing a gay person. It’s just hard to tell.
But it does represent a teachable moment, because again, I may take some flak for this (and you might be surprised to hear it from me, the resident atheist), but I do believe that the majority of Fundamentalists are well meaning people. And really? The ball’s in their court. They’re not going to listen to us anyway. But to any who might be reading this from that side of the fence, I say only this: You need to weed your backyard. You need to fumigate your rhetoric. And you need to control your own. Because again, over on this side of the fence, we don’t pose any threat to you. Oh, occasionally, little radicals pop up here and there, but the difference between this side and that side is that we marginalize the hell out of our extremists. (Bash Back, I’m looking at you.) But it seems that these days, Fundamentalists marginalize their freaks less and less. And that’s scary, not just for the LGBT community, but for civil society. Religiously-motivated murderers, abusers, rapists, etc. — they don’t exist in a vacuum. They have to be propped up by someone, whether it’s whatever crazy Fundamentalist website that motivated the couple in California, or MassResistance or the American Family Association or Liberty University or whoever. Someone motivates the people who commit these acts of religious violence.
Are you one of those someones?
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