Phony Values, Ignorance and Bigotry vs. Men of Genuine Principles
 

March 20 2006
Counterbias.com
MEL SEESHOLTZ
 

The Republican Party and their most avid supporters, the leaders of the Christian Right, claim to speak for “values voters,” but they are increasingly being exposed as hypocrites and crooks severely out-of-step with the voters they claim to represent. So in order to engineer new support they’re once again playing the “God wants” and “homophobia” cards at a “Values Voters Summit” to be held this September in Washington, D.C.

The event is being orchestrated by Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council, the same group that sponsored Justice Sunday, Justice Sunday II and Justice Sunday III. Aside from Perkins, summit attendees will hear from Sean Hannity, George Allen, Michelle Malkin, Gary Bauer, Zell Miller, John Boehner, Peggy Noonan, Sam Brownback, Pat Buchanan, Rick Santorum, and Bill Frist, Don Wildmon of the American Family Association and Tom Minnery, vice president for public policy at Focus on the Family, as well as from Focus on the Family’s founder Dr. James Dobson. More about Wildmon and the AFA and Dobson’s FOF a bit later…

Another featured speaker is Charles Wendell “Chuck” Colson, President Nixon’s chief counsel who once said, “I’d walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.” He didn’t have to do that, instead he authored the 1971 memo listing Nixon’s major political opponents, later known as “Nixon’s Enemies List.” Colson was a major player in the Watergate scandal and served seven months of a one-to-three year sentence at the Maxwell Correctional Facility in Alabama where, apparently, he “found God.” He subsequently founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries and become an outspoken proponent of all things ultra-right and opponent of all things “gay.”

Playing the “anti-gay card” seems to be at the top of the agenda for the Values Voters Summit, as one spokesman made clear:

Mark Creech with the Christian Action League is frustrated that values voters are not seeing their issues being addressed by Congress. One absence has them particularly irked. “I can’t think of another issue more important, or that Congress would be more able to pass, perhaps, then a Federal Marriage Amendment. They need to get cracking.”

After once again revving up the hellfire of homophobia to advance its theocratic agenda, no doubt the Values Voters Summit will turn its attention to disemboweling science.

In his February 24, 2006 article “Rebuking the ‘Clergy Letter Project,’” Rev. Mark H. Creech harshly criticized the 10,200+ clergy who “signed a letter stating they rejected a literal interpretation of the creation story.” The “Clergy Letter Project” argues that “the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist.” As Rev. Creech noted, “the purpose of the letter is to urge school board members to reject such teachings as Scientific Creationism and Intelligent Design and ‘preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.’”

But that’s not what Creech and other biblical literalists with a political and social agenda want:

to doubt a literal interpretation of the creation account is to undermine everything taught in the Bible. In Exploring Genesis, John Philips argues that to abandon the creation account as “unfactual and unreliable, as mere mythology, as a doctored-up copy of the Babylonian creation epic, as totally unacceptable to modern science” is to surrender to Satan. Philips adds, “If the Holy Spirit cannot be trusted when He tells of creation, how can He be trusted when He tells of salvation. If what He says about earth in Genesis 1 can be questioned, then what He says about heaven in Revelation 22 can be questioned. If the Holy Spirit cannot be trusted in Genesis 1, how can he be trusted in John 3:16?” [italics added]

Accepting reality and acknowledging science constitute a “surrender to Satan”? How much more irrational, how much more medieval can you get? And just for the record, only Christians take John 3:16 literally.

But the big name, the headliner at the Values Voter Summit will be none other than George W. Bush, the “values voters’ president” who supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to legalize discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans and who promotes homelessness for children by supporting a ban on same-sex couples adopting them. He also works behind the scenes to further discriminate against gays and lesbians. But he certainly doesn’t have any problem hanging out with a porn star.

A World Net Daily article brought us up-to-date on Bush and his porn star: “Mary Carey [real name, Mary Ellen Cook], the buxom, XXX movie star who caused an uproar last year for dining with President Bush and her pornographer, apparently still has a hunger for the nation’s capital.” She again dined with values-president Bush on March 16, 2006 at the United to Victory event. The $2,500-per-plate dinner was expected to raise $7.5 million for Republican candidates in the congressional midterm elections in November.

Mary Carey also had lunch on the Ides of March 2006 “at a related event … where Bush adviser Karl Rove was the guest speaker.” The multi-talented porn star “says she’s taking part at the invitation of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is organizing the events.”

As WND reported,

The NRCC [National Republican Congressional Committee] is the same group that accepted $5,000 from Carey and her pornographer, Mark Kulkis of Kick A-- Pictures, and allowed the pair to take part at the 2005 Flag Day Dinner.

 

Asked by WND last year about the propriety of the Republican Party collecting $5,000 from a pornographer and the example such an appearance set for the moral climate of the nation, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said: “I think you need to direct those questions to the committee itself.”

 

When WND contacted the NRCC about the Flag Day event, Forti said, “They’ve paid their money. No matter what they do, the money is going to go to help elect Republicans to the House.” [link added]

So much for Bush’s and the Republican Party’s real “values.”

The far-right’s “values” were also given clear voice in Don Laigle’s March 9, 2006 article:

I was BORN to be a homophobe, I am proud of it and I am COMING OUT!

Oh Lord, it feels so good to get that off my chest.

Oh, no, that’s not ALL I have to say on the subject, not by a longshot.

Mr. Laigle continued his “proud to be a bigot” rant and invited other bigots to join him: “It’s ok to come out now and be all you can be. I invite you to stand with me, unafraid.” But Laigle need not form a new bigotry-based, homophobic organization. There’s already one custom-made for him and his kind. It’s called the Klu Klux Klan.

But Mr. Laigle might also want to join Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is calling on his followers to kill gays. But if Iraq is too far for Laigle to travel, he can head to Ohio and work for Merrill Keiser Jr., a candidate for the U.S. Senate who “wants to make homosexual behavior a capital crime punishable by the death penalty.” No doubt Laigle, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and Mr. Keiser would call that “moral justice.”

And speaking of “moral justice,” according to a March 15, 2006 Associated Press article, “Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia railed against the era of the ‘judge-moralist,’ saying judges are no better qualified than ‘Joe Sixpack’ to decide moral questions such as abortion and gay marriage” [link added].

Having said that, Scalia then went on to be a “judge-moralist” and decry “his own court’s recent overturning of a state anti-sodomy law [Lawrence v. Texas].” Scalia was certainly playing “judge-moralist” in his dissent of that decision when he wrote “Most Americans do not want persons who are openly engaged in homosexual conduct as partners in their businesses, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.”

And what would blatant homophobia be without a mention of Don Wildmon and his American Family Association – and the other eighteen anti-gay groups – that have begun a boycott of Ford Motor Company for its egregious sins of supporting equality and advertising in gay-related publications. Not surprisingly, Rev. Don Wildmon is a member of the theocratic, ultra-conservative star-chamber known as The Council for National Policy.

Wildmon wants to economically spank any company that treats its gay and lesbian employees equally. Another member of The Council for National Policy, Christian child psychologist Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family – an organization that does everything it can to hurt families headed by same-sex parents – advocated the same punishment for “misbehaving” children: “The spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn’t hurt, the child won’t be motivated to avoid the consequence the next time. ‘Be sure the child gets the message,’ Dr. Dobson says…”

Perhaps Mr. Bush, who claims to read the Bible and pray daily, should remember Dr. Dobson’s advice when he hangs out with Mary Carey, someone the Christian Right would undoubtedly call a “misbehaving” Christian, despite that fact that she says “I read the Bible and pray every night”:

“I’m really excited to be going back to Washington D.C. to see the president again,” said Carey. “Everyone thinks that politicians are stuffy, but we all had a great time last year, and I had fun signing a lot of autographs. Wait till they see that I have lost 20 pounds since the last time they saw me. Watch out Mr. President!”

Whether or not Mr. Bush noticed the weight loss is unknown, but apparently some GOPers did and remembered that John Melllencamp song, as World Net daily reported on March 17, 2006:

Triple-X porn star Mary Carey, who last night dined for the second year in a row with Republican bigwigs at a fund-raiser featuring President Bush, says some drunken GOP activists “hit on her” at such events. …

 

Asked how the Republicans treat her personally, she replied: “Well, the women were kind of snobby with me on the phone. They were like, ‘I understand that Mary Carey wants to attend the dinner.’ But, the guys in the NRCC are very, very nice. I signed autographs for the Secret Service last time I was there. I’ve gotten hit on by lots of drunk Republicans.”

 

She declined to provide names.

But American politics does offer a man of genuine principles: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. A life-long Catholic, Mayor Newsom “cancelled a trip to Rome for the installation of the city’s former Archbishop as a cardinal reportedly after learning the Church is considering a ban on gay adoption in San Francisco. … He was to have attended the ceremony elevating Archbishop William Levada to cardinal and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

The renamed “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” was formerly headed by “God’s Rottweiler” Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. What’s in a name? For centuries the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was known as The Holy Office of the Inquisition. Despite the name change its function remains the same, as do the anti-gay views of Joseph Alois Ratzinger.

Mayor Newsom cancelled his trip when he learned that the San Francisco archdiocese – like the Boston archdiocese – was considering a change in its policies to bar gays and lesbians from adopting children. “The idea, the principle that two loving parents of the same sex can’t be great parents and that this church is now going to start attacking gay adoptions in this country and around the world was,” in the mayor’s words, “wrong-headed.” He’s correct. The scandal-ridden Catholic church has sunk to a new low: using children to promote their campaign of hate and degradation against homosexuals.

Mayor Newsom is known for standing up for the American principle of equality for all citizens. In 2004 he ordered San Francisco County to issue a marriage license to all citizens requesting one, no matter what their sexual orientation was. He did so in opposition to the faith-based bigotry on which the Republican Party and Christian Right thrive.

By the way, the first same-sex San Francisco couple married was Phyllis Lyon, 79, and Del Martin, 83. They had been together 51 years. But the Christian Right couldn’t bear the thought of them being happily and legally married, so they sued and were jubilant when the marriage was nullified. What kind of “vales” are those?

They’re the same kind that preaches “morality” while courting a porn star. They’re the same kind that wants knowledge and science to begin and end with the Bible. They’re the same kind America’s premier homophobe Lou Sheldon – and crusader against internet gambling – exhibited when his Traditional Values Coalition accepted “at least $25,000 from an Abramoff client, eLottery – an online lottery company.” They’re the same kind Wildmon and the other so-called “pro-family” zealots exhibit when they crusade against certain Americans and their families.

Those “values” are called “hypocrisy,” “ignorance,” “bigotry” and “hate,” in their purest forms.

For all those biblical literalists and “born-again” evangelicals who want to regress society into its darkest, most bigoted past, another man of genuine principles, Rev. John Shelby Spong, offered the best advice:

We don’t need to be “born again,” we need to grow up! But religion encourages childishness by proclaiming there is a super parent in the sky ready and willing to take care of us. … We flatter the God in worship (listen to the words of our hymns: ‘How great thou art!’ for example). … That is why I have argued that “theism” as a definition of God has got to go. That does not mean that there is no God, no holiness, and no “otherness.” It does mean that the old definitions do not work any longer.

He further clarified in an answer to a newsletter reader’s question about his advocacy of a spirituality – as opposed to “religious dogma” – that embraces all rather than a few. Rev. John Shelby Spong gave an answer that must be repeated as often as possible until the message sinks in:

I simply try to combine two things. First, my identity as a Christian who finds Jesus a doorway into the transcendence and wonder of God and second, my citizenship in the 21st century which means that I cannot think as a 1st century Christian, the time in which the Bible was written; a 4th century Christian, the time in which the creeds were formed; a 13th century Christian, the time in which current liturgies took shape or a 16th century Christian, the time in which the Reformation occurred. I must be a 21st century Christian. That means I have to force my Christian faith into the thought forms dictated by the 21st century. In the process much of the traditional understanding of Christianity, shaped as it was by the mindset of the 1st Century must inevitably be sacrificed as no longer either relevant or possible. … The tendency of religious institutions is to suppress all change. This will be the death knell of the Christian faith.

In this, Rev. Spong echoed arguments made by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. in his article “Thou shalt not quote the Bible selectively,” and those made by Slavoj Zizek in his March 12, 2006 New York Times editorial “Defenders of the Faith” that called into question the motives of religious fundamentalists and cited one of the architects of The Enlightenment:

Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God’s will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. … When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God’s favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.
 

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