Search Results for: Falwell

Last night, at Drinking Liberally, a handful of us liberal bloggers decided a few things: Jerry Falwell was an ass. Billy Graham, however, is not. And I offered this hypothesis: Pat Robertson has his moments of clarity, such as his sudden realization that global warming is happening and his association with George Clooney. Weirder things have happened, folks.

It’s posts like this that make me wish Joel Connelly wrote a “No on Impeachment” column every week, if only to see how few people know what exactly a columnist is.

At Monday’s fund raiser for the Parks levies, the food was amazing. If you’re going to an M’s game, check out King Street Bar and Oven. I recommend the BBQ Chicken pizza.

If you like Seattle and like blogging, you should consider blogging for Friends of Seattle. However, if you don’t like Seattle and like blogging, you should probably leave town, Mr. Sharkansky.

Here’s a clip of Ron Sims doing what no other Seattle pol can do- a kick-ass rally speech. Sims is like the Brett Favre of local politics. No matter which team he’s on, his team wins. I tried to tell him that the new parks levies are going to be gold at the ballot box, but he would have none of it. Even though parks are popular, a good pol doesn’t take anything for granted.

Also…

It’s a girl! Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. You Know Who.

Just read Robert Jamieson’s column in today’s Seattle P-I: “Critics go after the wrong pastor.”

Hmm. I wasn’t aware that us critics were limited to going after only one pastor at a time.

It’s an embarrassment of riches out there with the likes of Mark Driscoll, Ken Hutcherson, Joe Fuiten, Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps, and the inimitably mule-fucking Rev. Neil Horsley routinely making headlines. So many pastors, so little time.

A few years back I shopped around a satirical guest column in which I suggested we could solve our education funding crisis by slaughtering our worst performing students and feeding them to their classmates. The editorial board of one major daily was intrigued, but after a few weeks of mulling it over they eventually rejected my “modest proposal” with the explanation that their readers “lacked the satire gene.”

I was deeply disappointed at the time by what I felt to be a display of editorial cowardice, but in the years hence I have grown to appreciate the editors’ healthy cynicism towards their readers’ own limits. For as I have repeatedly learned during my two and a half years of blogging, some people simply don’t get satire. Ever.

One might think by now that my regular readers would have grown accustomed to my penchant for persiflage, yet many, of both political persuasions, wouldn’t know irony if I dropped the “y” and savagely beat them around the head and face with it. For example, however outrageous or intentionally offensive my attempts at satire may be, accusing a sitting state senator of “fucking pigs” is most definitely not libel, nor is it fair to characterize as “hate speech” a proposed initiative to exempt Christians from our state’s anti-discrimination laws. And when I urged that all extraordinary efforts be used to save a critically ill Rev. Jerry Falwell, no matter how painful or intrusive — to the point of keeping his brain alive in “a jar of nutrient-rich fluid” — well… that was not, as one angry reader conversely described it in an email purportedly copied to the FBI, a “terrorristic [sic] death threat.”

It was a joke.

And as a connoisseur of humor, I would have hoped that it would not be necessary to appreciate a joke in order to at least acknowledge that it exists. But apparently, some people just don’t get satire.

This sad reality was brought home yesterday when General JC Christian of the satirical blog Jesus’ General joined me on 710-KIRO as I was subbing for Dori Monson. This was without a doubt the funniest hour of radio I’ve ever produced, an experience enhanced for the guys in the booth as the lines lit up with angry callers. One would think that when the General started talking about tazering shopkeepers who refused to say “Merry Christmas” and arming fetuses with tiny in utero handguns that nearly everybody would have realized that he was in fact joking. Yet the overwhelming majority of callers chose to take him at face value.

Of course, talk radio callers, just like blog commenters, are a tiny, nonrepresentative segment of the larger audience, so I remain confident that the majority of listeners got the joke. But if not, who cares?

My job as both a radio host and a blogger is to engage the audience, and it doesn’t really matter how I do it. If the audience is laughing, that’s great. If the audience is enraged, that’s okay too. As long as they’re listening to me, they’re listening to the ads, and that after all is KIRO’s business. And oh yeah, as long as they’re listening to me they’ll come away better informed, whether they like it or not… and that after all is my business.

Everybody wants to be liked. But I’ll settle for people just tuning in.

Writing in the Conservative Voice, the Rev. Jerry Falwell makes a “gracious correction” to an article in the Jerusalem Post, that had claimed he had accepted the doctrine of “dual covenant.”

Earlier today, reports began circulating across the globe that I have recently stated that Jews can go to heaven without being converted to Jesus Christ. This is categorically untrue.
[…]
While I am a strong supporter of the State of Israel and dearly love the Jewish people and believe them to be the chosen people of God, I continue to stand on the foundational biblical principle that all people

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So much to blog on, so little time. Worthy subjects are flooding in like the rising water in the streets of New Orleans. So I thought I’d just quickly touch on a couple stories by pointing you towards what’s happening on some other, worthy blogs.

Major levee break inundates New Orleans
Much of my up to the minute meteorological and related disaster information on Hurricane Katrina has been coming from Steve Gregory’s amazingly informative blog on Weather Underground. And the latest reports are truly horrendous: 40,000 to 50,000 people have now sought refuge in the Superdome, where conditions are deteriorating as water rises around them.

80% of New Orleans is totally submerged now, and will likely become 100% submerged tonight. The depth of the water in the BIZ district is around 6-10 inches at this time.

This is a result of 2 MAJOR BREACHES OF THE LEVEE. The first one ,is about 400 feet long, and appears to have given way around 9PM last night. The Corp of Engineers have now said there is also a second breach as well. Within the hour the Pentagon will be taking over the coordination and manpower / machinery to assist in closing the 2 breaches.

Gregory describes the situation as “a ‘slow motion version’ of the worst case scenario.” Fires are burning throughout the city, looting is rampant, and the governor has ordered a total evacuation. Again, if you want to help, the American Red Cross is seeking cash donations.

Rebooting Creationism
On a lighter note, The General has posted a rather amusing letter to Bill and Melinda Gates, asking for the same kind of support in financing his unscientific research as they’ve given to the Discovery Institute’s “intelligent” design media campaign.

One of the biggest problems people have with Noah’s Ark is that even at 300 x 40 x 30 cubits in size, it would be too small to hold that many animals. That’s especially true when dinosaurs are included. My theory is that only a small portion of the animals were actually on the ark at any given time. The others swam, or in the case of non-buoyant animals like tortoises, they windsurfed until it was time for them to be rotated onto the boat.

In order to prove this theory, I’ll need an ark, every living species of animal, mockups of dinosaurs, and Cheetos. That’s going to take a lot of money, but I think you should be able to swing it.

I love The General. (In a manly, heterosexual way, of course.)

Conservative coffee cups
Darryl at Hominid Views has written a letter of his own, this one to Maureen Richardson of Concerned Women for America, a group that has complained to Starbucks of liberal bias in printing quotations on their coffee cups. Darryl suggests adding balance with a few quotes from God-fearing Christians, including these uplifting sentiments from the Rev. Jerry Falwell:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say “you helped [9-11] happen.'”

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[NWPT62]Rather than relaxing with a pot of coffee and a copy of the Sunday Times (the New York Times, not the Seattle Times… the latter wouldn’t last me longer than a thimbleful of joe)… I am seething. Literally seething. Torrents of cartoon steam are shooting out of my ears, as my eyes spin round like an old time slot machine.

(Okay, maybe I’m metaphorically seething, but you get the point.)

Splashed across the front page is a lengthy piece on the driving force behind so-called intelligent design: Seattle’s very own Discovery Institute… which apparently draws the name “Discovery” from its concerted efforts to squash it. That the institute should get well-deserved scrutiny in the NY Times, rather than its home town paper, is another story for another day. But what really pissed me off was the following little tidbit of information about another Seattle area connection to Discovery’s zealous efforts to dumb down the nation’s science curriculum — for in addition to such well known right-wing patrons as Richard Mellon Scaife….

A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman’s $141,000 annual salary…
…
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003.

I do not care that this particular grant pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars the Gates Foundation gives to eminently worthy causes, or that it is supposedly targeted exclusively towards the institute’s Cascadia project on regional transportation. In giving money to Discovery, Bill Gates not only provides financial support, but lends credibility and respectability to an organization whose primary activities are antithetical to the principles of scientific discovery on which Microsoft — and Gates’ unparalleled personal fortune — was built.

Gates would do better to follow the lead of more experienced Seattle area philanthropists, such as Bullitt Foundation director Denis Hayes, who describes Discovery as “the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell,” saying, “I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would fund anything at Discovery today.” Indeed, that the world’s most powerful technologist should provide any support, financial or otherwise, to an organization that describes its goal as “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” in favor of a “broadly theistic understanding of nature,” is absolutely unacceptable.

There is no dispute that Gates is a brilliant man and that his foundation achieves great social good. But as has been proven by Microsoft’s missteps over its flip-flopping support for the gay civil rights measure, HB 1515, both he and his subordinates can make mistakes. And has also been proven by that PR fiasco, the full force of the progressive blogosphere can be successfully applied to convince Gates to correct his errors.

Gates’ support of the Discovery Institute — a vital cog in the right-wing propaganda machine… and an enemy of science — is an outrage and a scandal. And I call on my fellow members of the blogosphere to hammer this issue, and make clear to Gates that the only acceptable remedy is to instruct his foundation to pull its funding immediately.

The US has built its economic and military prowess on our scientific and technological leadership, and if organizations like Discovery are permitted to continue their Talibanization of our once proud educational system, the consequences for the American people and our standard of living will be catastrophic. A generation from now, when the economies of Europe and China are kicking our devoutly unscientific butts, we will have only ourselves to blame. And when the next Microsoft arises not in Silicon Valley or in Redmond, but in Paris or Beijing, it would be sadly ironic if the seeds of our own technological collapse were unwittingly nurtured by Bill Gates himself.

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos… please recommend!]

It’s not often I get to be out in front of Frank Rich on an issue, but as usual, my favorite New York Times columnist, manages to make his point more eloquently and persuasively than I could ever hope to. [“Just How Gay Is the Right?“] Ah well, I suppose that’s why Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for the paper of record, whereas I’m… well… just some blogger.

Rich uses the DVD release of the 1962 political potboiler “Advise and Consent” as a springboard for discussing the right’s war on the judiciary and the violently anti-gay rhetoric that fuels it. The movie focuses on a McCarthy-era confirmation battle, and the gay secret of a conservative Senator from Utah. It depicts the gay-baiters as the real menace.

That message remains on target now. But in the years since, even as it has ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay, unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement. It’s a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-“activist” judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they’re for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that “Advise and Consent” so powerfully extols.

Rich goes on to present a rogues gallery of right-wing notables “whipping up homophobia” including Jerry Falwell’s “Declaration of War” against homosexuality, Pat Robertson’s claim that activist judges are a greater threat than Al Qaeda, and former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore (of Ten Commandments monument fame) who has suggested the state has the power to prohibit homosexual conduct at penalty of death. And of course, Rich points out the irony that I have been somewhat dwelling on recently.

What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war. Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians).” (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995.

But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West’s long, successful political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education. The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy Cohn of “Angels in America” – who describes himself as “a heterosexual man” who has sex “with guys” – Mr. West has said he had “relations with adult men” but doesn’t “characterize” himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy – it’s pathology.

Some of my readers have criticized me for trying to tarnish the image of the far-right Christian movement by focusing on the personal hypocrisy of a few of its leaders, but as Rich points out, this is more than just the ironic tale of a handful of secretly-gay gay-bashers… it is politics, pure and simple.

A likely inspiration for the gay plot line in Drury’s “Advise and Consent” was the real-life story of a Wyoming Democrat, Lester Hunt, who shot himself in his Senate office in 1954 after the Republican Campaign Committee threatened to make an issue of his gay son’s arrest in Lafayette Park on “morals charges.” Those were the dark ages, but it isn’t entirely progress that we now have a wider war on gay people, thinly disguised as a debate over the filibuster, cloaked in religion, and counting among its shock troops politicians as utterly bereft of moral bearings as James West.

People have always hated gays, but anti-gay sentiment is now being politicized, much in the same way the Nazis politicized long standing anti-Jewish sentiment to help secure Hitler’s ambitions in the early 1930’s. So if you think I’ve just been writing about sex or religion or hypocrisy, you’ve missed the point entirely. I’ve been writing about the politics of hate, and warning about the dire consequences to our republic should it be allowed to triumph.

I’d like to add a little levity back into this forum by taking a moment to turn away from the tedious subject of re-recounts, to touch once again upon my eternal torment.. No, I’m not talking about reading the comments on (un)Sound Politics… I’m talking about the widespread belief that upon Christ’s imminent return, I shall be cast wailing and screaming into the pits of Hell.

When I last wrote on this subject a couple weeks back (“Have you heard the good news? I’m going to Hell!“), I generated some thoughtful and not-so-thoughtful criticism, ranging from those who accused me of demonizing Christians, to those who bluntly stated that the “truth hurts,” I am going to Hell.

But the critique to which I gave the most consideration was that I had misinterpreted Revelations. The truth is, I’ve only read the New Testament once, and that was twenty years ago for an Ethno-History class in college. And so I read with great fascination Tim Appelo’s cover story in the current Seattle Weekly: “Is Bush the Antichrist?”

Appelo delves into the history of the Antichrist and modern apocalyptic theology that I was only peripherally aware of. But while Appelo makes it clear that these themes are not part of main stream Christian theology — and Rev. Rich Lang of Seattle’s Trinity United Methodist Church goes so far as to make accusations of “heresy” — it is hard for me to dismiss these “heretics”, knowing that they control the White House.

“The progressive church should bring back–and this sounds so crazy–the word ‘heresy.’ The end times theology and this other thing called Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction–those are heresies.” Lang says not to believe Christian Coalition leader–turned–Whore of Enron–turned Bush/Cheney campaign lieutenant Ralph Reed when he claims the Christian right has no plans to upend the Constitution and impose its religion on civic life. “He’s a liar,” says Lang. “Dominionism is the notion that God has given the dominion, the governance of the world, to the church. And so Christians literally are born to rule, by force if necessary, to bring the Kingdom of God on Earth. I believe that the theology that drives the Bush administration affirms this.” When Falwell preached, “We must take back what is rightfully ours,” his ambitions did not stop at U.S. borders. This is a Church of a Law Unto Itself.

Years ago, after an especially harrowing driving experience in Boston, that involved my (now ex-)wife angrily driving the wrong way up a freeway exit, she turned to me and said, “I put the fear of God into you didn’t I?” To which I shakily replied: “It’s not God I’m afraid of.”

That is also my reaction to those Evangelicals so enraptured with The Rapture, so eager to leave people like me behind to our imminent and eternal damnation. I do not, cannot, will not accept Christ as my savior. If these people so fervently believe that I will be punished for this sin in the next world, how can I expect them to respect my rights as an American in this world?

Dismiss them as wacky cultists, whose time will pass, if you wish. Just remember that 2000 years ago, that’s what my Jewish ancestors probably said about the early Christians.