The safety is off.

"[T]he use of a term associated with real evils like genocide to defend oneself in the face of catty punditry shows a startling degree of narcissism--even for Palin."

Pro-gun Sarah Palin shoot herself in the foot with her "blood libel" comment.  Jews across the political spectrum are NOT happy.

What's the Matter with Kansas?

My dear Kansas has such nasty problems, between the immigrant-hating Kobach, the town-destorying tornados, and--well--it's pretty miserable politics. But sometimes the Crazy, when it gets really crazy, almost makes it worthwhile.

Case in point, the gay-, America-, everything-hating Westborro Baptist Church, most famous for demonstrating with non-sequitur signs at the funerals for dead US soldiers. You remember these guys, right? These people are so odious, so thoroughly beyond the pale of any semblance of theological coherence, that they actually manage to be funny sometimes. When your theology centers around hating gay people and condemning everyone everywhere that they are going to hell, it's pretty hard not to seem self-satirical.

And this brings me to the cultural artifact of the week: the granddaughter of the Church's founder/cult leader is apparently a gifted videographer. And the WBC seems to think that the best way to spread their enlightened message is through parody videos. Really the headline of this blogpost at Kansas City's Pitch Weekly speaks for itself: "Westboro Baptist Church has dropped another Lady Gaga joint, yo."

It's hard to imagine that the WBC spends its time with this kind of stuff. Really, it's just odd.

Via my man in the thick of it all, J. Barry.

And while I'm on the topic, there's a great documentary about the WBC, which you can watch online here.

Open Up

On a tip from Crooks and Liars, I checked out this Democracy Now! interview with Max Blumenthal in which he discusses his book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. He says an interesting thing in this interview; in a discussion about Frank Schaeffer, an important figure in his genealogy of the religious right, he reports the following:

And his son says, you know, “My father would have been so upset to see what the Christian right and the Republican Party has become today. He despised the homophobia of the movement.”

And what Frank Schaeffer told me, which is most interesting, is that “This movement, we were like oncologists. We needed a crisis to keep occurring in American society in order for us to stay in business.” And that’s what we’re seeing with the healthcare debate, too. I mean, we’re seeing a movement that’s terrified that the government will start to be able to solve people’s crises, because they survive and thrive on manipulating people’s personal crises.

I found this really interesting, and it reminded me of something that my friend Nathan said to me the other night. Blumenthal's argument, in part, is that the religious right's M.O. is to oppose any and all efforts by the government to solve the problems of everyday people for the simple and cynical reason that by doing so, the government infringes on its territory--religion's capacity to serve as the crutch for any and all personal problems, no matter the size. This is an interesting hypothesis that potentially enables us to understand why the health care "debate" has taken the form it has.

But as Nathan, Anne and I were discussing health care, town halls, and the absolute weirdness of the right's characterization of Obama as an Orwellian overlord, Nathan made an interesting comment that I think better explains for me, at least at a topical level, the off-the-wall paranoia of recent conservative descriptions of Obama. In Nathan's view, the right promulgates a view of Obama as a dictator because it serves a psychological function; the Democractic dictator is the fantasy of the Republican party and the far right generally. Republicans would rather have a Hitlerian Democrat in power than a moderate one because such a situation allows the party to frame all political questions in terms of crisis. In other words, in addition to an ideology in which personal responsibility falls within the ken of a religious community, the right also thrives on the politics of enmity. Think of it this way: without a clear and present enemy like bin Laden or Saddam Hussein to rally around, the right has invented a new enemy. It's not a coincidence that the Right has tried each and every label on Obama. If they can't win an election against a "Muslim," maybe they should reach further back into the past and label him a socialist (not to mention a racist). Maybe that will work.

Maybe. The point here is not that this strategy doesn't work--in fact, it has worked well recently--but that by painting Obama as a 21st century Mao indoctrinating school children along party lines, the Right is in its element: he's not a citizen, Americorp is indoctrination, Obama is inflating the census count of minorities to redraw congressional districts, he introduced swine flu to the country, they're building death camps in the southwest, the legislation is going to result in rationing. On and on and on. These are just examples that I pulled off of the top of my head; they by no means represent a complete list of the crimes that the Right fantasizes about Obama committing. By creating this monster, the Right gets to relive the past; it's spring of 2003 again. And the reason for doing this is simple: the only way to win this fight is for the Right to change the subject. Never mind the crisis of health care; this is a constitutional crisis that strikes to the heart of American values.

Or so the logic goes. But buyer beware: that feeling of self-congratulatory righteous indignation that the Right is cultivating--it's is a placebo.

Christly Couture

Sweet Jesus: abstinence pants!

Yes, I said "abstinence pants." Kmart in-house designer Piper & Blue has jazzed up this year's summer collection with a pair of sweatpants for teen girls that say "True Love Waits" in your choice of colored bubble letters. No, there is no corresponding set for boys.

Via Mother Jones, and the devilish lady herself, KDS.

Straight Talk

A little straight talk about Christianity. Via Cynical-C.

Pleasures of Mass Destruction

You would think the pope would have better things to do than hyperbolize about the congruence between the mass death of Armageddon and two boys kissing. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that stodgy old bastard doesn't have anything to do but be alone with his thoughts.

Pope Says Abortion, Gay Marriage Are 'Obstacles' to World Peace

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Nuclear arms proliferation, environmental pollution and economic inequality are threats to world peace -- but so are abortion, birth control and same-sex marriage, Pope Benedict XVI said in a statement released by the Vatican Tuesday (Dec. 11).

Via Pandagon. Full link here.

The Rushdie Affair -- Are We Still Having This Conversation?

Sadly, yes, the conversation goes on. It has been a 18 years since Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to execute those involved in the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It's been another 9 years since the Iranian government publicly declared that it would not carry out the death sentence against Rushdie. And then, ten days ago, England awarded Rushdie knighthood, and tempers flared again, when Pakistan remonstrated against the act and the Islamabad Traders' Association offered a reward of 10 million Pakistani rupees for Rushdie's beheading.

Now, I've never really understood what all the fuss was about. I chalk this up to two factors: 1) I am not Muslim, 2) I had no context for understanding the fuss when I read the book five years ago. But recently I started to think about the standard Western response to Pakistani anger -- the argument that holds that the book should exist on the grounds of free speech alone. And I am starting to wonder how true that is. Should it exist? I ask this question as a big Rushdie fan and someone who still doesn't quite understand how and why it has garnered the vitriol it has.

I think the only way to make this question meaningful for Westerners is to try to move it into a different domain, one where it might have a more comparable resonance. It does not, in my opinion, have any traction as a parallel to question whether an anti-Judeo Christian novel would provoke such anger. Obviously, it wouldn't, since insults to traditionally Western faiths are not dealt with in the same way as they are in Islam. Perhaps a better parallel, one which would provoke comparable anger in the United States, would be a novel about race. Would a powerfully written, best selling neo-nazi novel--one that wins the highest awards and whose author is publicly congratulated at the highest levels--be a more apt comparison? Is The Satanic Verses hate speech? Is it the rough equivalent of, say, The Turner Diaries?

Readers over at Al Jazeera English are talking about whether England should revoke Rushdie's knighthood. I offer this link not because I think England should necessarily take back the honor, but because the variety of responses offered by readers serves as a powerful insight into what that book actually means, and why, 18 years after the famous fatwa was issued, we're still talking about Rushdie.

More Atheism. Alright!

In addition to the slew of new books that challenge the neo-religiosity of America, we can add The Atheist's Bible by Joan Konner. It appears from this excellent review that it is in all seriousness a Proverbs-esque collection of aphorisms, including the following:

Aristotle: "men create the gods after their own images"

Schopenhauer: "Religions are like glow-worms. They need darkness in order to shine."

Santayana: "Fear first created the gods."

What a book like this offers, as the review notes, is that it has the kind of check out lane appeal that could make it a big seller. But beyond this, a book like this excells insofar as it is not an argument. The debate about belief is a doomed debate because by its very nature must rely on non-empirical information, and Konner's book doesn't try to say that religion is bogus or the biggest source of violence in history, or anything like that. Instead, it attempts to build no case where no case can be built. Fragments often have the uncanny ability to communicate more than can be stated in the most well-reasoned and articulate discourses. As Wyndham Lewis wrote about Virginia Woolf in Men Without Art, "We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition."

Christopher Hitchens

I am not going to pretend that I love Christopher Hitchens. For one, he was just plain WRONG about Iraq--odiously so. However, he is an articulate dude, and he got some good punches in when Falwell died. It's worth checking out:

Here he is talking with Anderson Cooper:


And with Sean Hannity (this one is worth watching to the end):

How religious are we?

There's a spate of new books out about the new (?) American dispensation for religion and its ever-growing, ever-nefarious influence on our lives. Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great.

Over at The Nation, Ronald Aronson is thinking about what these books mean in the grand scheme of the American political and religious landscape. What these books signify, among other things, is that Americans are not happy with the new political and cultural paradigm that is being foisted on it from above. But if Americans are not happy with it, then why is it happening? I can count on a single hand the number of truly pious religious zealots that I know, and yet it seems as if their influence is huge, and getting bigger. Is it simply that I, in my ivory tower, don't interact with the pious masses? Or is, perhaps, that the entire face of the Christian Right is exaggerated?

That is, essentially, what I have always believed. Aronson makes a good point here. He argues that surveys how religious Americans are are tainted by the "'social desirability effect,' in which respondents are reluctant to give an unpopular answer in a society in which being religious is the norm." It's a good point, and one that I think really ought to be taken seriously. After all, how religious are Bill O'Reily and Sean Hannity? Or, for that matter, the contenders for the presidency? Are they not all pandering--performing their religiosity? Who among the talking heads and arbiters of culture has not suddenly found Jesus in the last couple of years?

Aronson musters some really compelling stats by looking both at surveys and analyzing the (bad) ways in which they are conducted. According to him, as many as 1 in 4 Americans does not believe in God.

Consider the following:

- a recent Harris American poll shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not avow belief in God. (<-- booya!)

- Twenty-four percent say that President Bush talks too much about his religious faith and prayer

- 28 percent deny that the United States is a Christian nation.

- 49 percent believe that Christian conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious values on the country."

Say what you will about the quality, tone, and efficacy of the new group of anti-religious books on the market, they mean something, and we do well to weigh that.