Public opinion on Question 1 in Maine, which would reject the state's law allowing same sex couples to marry, is knotted up two weeks before election day. 48% of voters in the state support it and 48% oppose it.
With most voters' minds made up the election is not really about persuasion at this point but turnout. Even a small difference in the ability of supporters and opponents of the referendum to get their folks out to the polls could tip the scales with the issue this close.
PPP says it can't get any closer. It was an automated (robodial) poll, so I guess it's to be expected that their numbers would be different from the live callpolls' results. We can argue over whose method produces more accurate results, but ultimately all the polls point to a close race. No matter what, we have our work cut out for us.
A federal judge has ruled that a history teacher at a Southern California public high school violated the First Amendment when he called creationism "superstitious nonsense" in a classroom lecture. The judge, James Selna, issued the ruling after a 16-month legal battle between a student, Chad Farnan, and his former teacher, James Corbett. Mr. Farnan's lawsuit said Mr. Corbett had made more than 20 statements that were disparaging to Christians and their beliefs. The judge found that Mr. Corbett's reference to creationism as "religious, superstitious nonsense" violated the First Amendment's establishment clause. Courts have interpreted the clause as prohibiting government employees from displaying religious hostility.
So a public school teacher is in violation of the first amendment by speaking disparagingly against a religious belief? Really?
Here's the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I guess someone can interpret that to mean that a teacher speaking in a classroom is establishing a religion or prohibiting its exercise by disparaging one, (or maybe because that comes first in the clause such an interpretation supercedes the very clear provision against abridging the freedom of speech) but it sure looks like a stretch to me. In fact, it seems like a ruling that could only be made in bizarroworld.
Bizarroworld, indeed. But that's really just par for the course.
The main reason why the Religious Right became powerful is not what most people may think. Some would undoubtedly point to the powerful communications media.
Others might identify charismatic leaders, the development of"wedge issues," or even changes in evangelical theology in the latter part of the twentieth century that supported, and even demanded, political action. All of these and more, especially taken together, were important factors. But the main reason for the Religious Right's rise to power has been its capacity for political action, particularly electoral politics.
Given my own repeated writing about the one-sided Gramscian "culture war"/"war of position" it's no wonder that I have a lot in common with him. But it's my hunch that I'm not the only one who does. His own welcoming diary begins on the flip.
On the plus side for McCain, just about everyone agreed that putting an anti-abortion mother-of-five on the ticket would delight the evangelical Christians who were so crucial to George Bush's re-election.
Although the "pro-family" interest groups applauded McCain's choice, I had a hunch that Palin wouldn't be unanimously embraced by the evangelical rank and file.
I lurk and occasionally comment at a few "mommy blogs" written by religious conservatives. Checking in on some popular sites in the evangelical Christian blogosphere over the weekend, I did find some commentaries that praised Palin for her views and for continuing a pregnancy while carrying a child with Down syndrome.
However, if you join me after the jump, you'll see that plenty of evangelicals are far from "fired up and ready to go" for this Republican ticket.
My series, "Shadow Elites And Religion" was interrupted after its first two installments (Part 1, Part 2), mostly because I'd built up such a head of steam that I wanted to do a lot more digging for the third installment, focused on John McCain and his ties to two Word of Faith ministers--John Hagee and Rod Parsley. All sorts of other stuff intruded, and, well, the hiatus continues.
But meanwhile, Sarah Posner, Word of Faith expert extraordinaire, has posted an excellent piece over at Huffington Post--"McCain's Pastor Problem", while Gary Kamiya chimes in at Salon with "Psycho Christians and the media", and there's even signs of catchup with my second installment, "Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 2: Sun Myung Moon", as noted in a frontpage post at DKos, "Moonshadows ", by DarkSyde, which focuses on recent attention to the connections between Moon and Bush Sr.--connections that I didn't delve into in my post, because I wanted to focus on the deep structural connections, but that are quite considerable in themselves.
Darkside highlights this piece at the Houston Chronicle, and John Gorenfeld's book, Bad Moon Rising.
I'll be writing more this weekend, but one thing worth highlighting now is the thinness of the McCain defense--"He's not my pastor, so it's not my fault."
In 1995, Jerry Falwell was on the brink of financial ruin, $73 million in debt, when he was saved by the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon. The transaction was hidden from sight, as Moon and Falwell used a pair of Virginia businessmen as cut-outs.
Moon has been a major player on the right since at least 1982, when he established the Washington Times, which he has subsidized to the tune of $3 billion over the years, according to investigative journalist Robert Parry, who was the leading journalist uncovering the Iran/Contra affair in the 1980s, and who has an extensive series on Moon at his website, Consortiumnews.com.
Until the emergence of Fox News in the late 1990s, the Washington Timeswas unquestionably the leading national news/propaganda organ of the right, and thus none of the movement higher-ups questioned him or his organization. (Even today, it remains a vital hub of the rightwing noise machine.) But Moon's theology and practices were so clearly heretical that appearances required significantly soft-peddling his enduring role and influence. It's impossible to fully grasp the hypocrisy and projection involved in rightwing politics without a consideration of the role of Sun Myung Moon.
For example, Moon claims to be the Second Coming--but he also claims to be better than Jesus, saying that Jesus failed in his mission, because he didn't procreat. Moon, in contrast, has been married three times, had various affairs, and numerous children. He has never disclosed where his money comes from, but Parry cites substantial evidence that much of it comes from underworld figures in Asia and Latin America. He served 18 months for filing false tax returns and conspiracy in the early 1980s.
It's very clear that his organization functions as an authoritarian cult, and Moon is deeply hostile to the United States. He also has clearly visible ties to Bush Sr. So, naturally--based on the principle I'm writing about here-- the money he funnelled to Falwell helped Falwell to project all these negatives onto a shadow liberal elite. And so he did, devoting enormous amounts of attention to peddling The Clinton Chronicles, a pseudo-documentary film that attempted to paint President Clinton as the mastermind of a vast criminal enterprise.
Falwell not only peddled the film on his TV program, he appeared in it, and later admitted he had no idea if any of it was true. Apparently, the commandment against bearing false witness didn't make it into Falwell's Bible.
This is the flip side of the manufactured hate-fest directed at Jeremiah Wright. Figures like Moon and Falwell break every Commandment in the Book, but are regarded as revered pillars of the conservative establishment. The more they sin, the more they have to savagely attack someone else. On the flip, we'll look at just a few of the things Sun Mung Moon has done that no liberal could possibly get away with.
It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group.
In that diary, I talked about the conservatives' creation of the truest form of shadow elite-the non-existent "Bavarian Illuminati" who had been disbanded a decade prior to the French Revolution they were accused of master-minding. In this diary set, I want to talk about shadow elites and religion-a topic which necessarily evokes a much earlier point in time, peg some further observation look much farther back in time, to the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337), the first Christian Roman Emperor.
The changes that took place in Christianity as a result gave rise to or intensified contradictions that are with us still, as a pacifistic religion of the downtrodden and peripheral was transformed into an imperial religion. Although tremendous intellect was devoted over the ages to attempting to perfect this transformation, it was, at bottom, an impossible task. This partly explains the distinctive nature of America's Black Church, since its practitioners are in the same position as the early Christians and their Hebrew forbearers-a fact which Black Christians seemed to have grasped almost immediately, though it seems to have entirely escaped the understanding of their slavemasters.
White Christians, OTOH, are all too vulnerable to sliding into Crusade mode, as this new release from Brave New Films-highlighting John McCain's excessive praise for holy war enthusiast Rod Parsley--reminds us:
[More on Parsley below the fold]
In the heat of a presidential campaign, it is perhaps understandable that Reverend Jeremiah Wright should be castigated for causing trouble for Barack Obama, yet, whatever one thinks of his actions, he does have a point: He is acting out a traditional Christian role, and he is correct when he claims to be articulating Biblical principles. He seems a cantankerous outsider, and so he is. So were all the Hebrew prophets, so was John the Baptist, and so, too, was Jesus, as were his followers for generations, up until the time of Constantine.
In contrast, the Christian elite, from at least Constantine onward, has struggled with the contradictions of its own existence, and often, in doing so, has resorted to projecting its own contradictions, its own hypocrisy, its own confusion onto others, including, of course, its shadow elites, and rival religious traditions.
In this diary set, I want to focus on a four main contradictions underlying imperialist Christianity, as a cultural mainstream, and the religious right as it has specifically articulated itself since the 1970s....
The good thing about being a political scientist in New Jersey is that there is always plenty of work. Having our state elections in odd years guarantees that election season starts about the time the counting of votes stops. I'm not saying it makes for a better or more efficient government, but it makes for busier poli sci folks.
This year's election held a big suprise. It wasn't in the State Assembly (where it looks like Dems lost between one and three seats but retained control) or State Senate (they picked up one seat), though. It was in defeating two of the ballot questions - the first time since 1990 a ballot measure was defeated. But the fate of two questions gives me an opportunity to get a rough measure of the dedicated religious right in New Jersey. Click on through to the other side.
An Alabama minister who died in June of "accidental mechanical asphyxia" was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report.
