THEOCRACY WATCH!!! Texas Gov signs anti-gay, anti-choice legislation in church
- Thread starter Irvine511
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Angela Harlem
Jesus Online
I think anitram means abstinence wont eventuate.
And on a sidenote, I think adoption is a much more difficult decision for many women than abortion is.
And on a sidenote, I think adoption is a much more difficult decision for many women than abortion is.
Angela Harlem
Jesus Online
Argh, you're both here in the thread. My above (1st) comment was to 80s on anitram's comment. I'll back out now lol.
*edit due to my abhorrent typing and spelling and grammar and english and writing and...
*edit due to my abhorrent typing and spelling and grammar and english and writing and...
Last edited:
80sU2isBest
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2000
- Messages
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anitram said:
Abstinence has ALWAYS worked as a method of birth control, except in the case of the birth of Christ.
As you said yourself, the act of abstinence is effective.
I think what you mean to say that "The teaching of abstinence is not an effective instruction for birth control.
But that's not true. Many people have found the teaching of abstinence to be very effective in influencing them not to have sex. And if they don't have sex, they don't get pregnant, and therefore the teaching of abstinence was very effective.
Look, contrary to what you might think, not every unmarried person out there is having sex. Evidently the teaching of abstinence (in health class or church or wherever) made an impact on them.
Angela Harlem
Jesus Online
echo0001 said:
sorry i cut into line on you......shoulda kept my mouth shut...lol
Haha no mate, I didn't realise the thread was actually active, not your fault. I can now see my horrible typo
I'll go edit it.
A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
But a lot of unmarried people are out there having sex because sex is something that people do. You cannot just teach people not to have sex and expect it to be a cure all 100% effective system because people invariably do engage in that activity. Individuals have a right to it, their sex lives should not be governed by religious traditions and 'moral' norms.
Not every person has a problem with sex outside of marriage because not every person subscribes to beliefs that require that. Given this shouldn't those that have no problem with it be entitled to protections and rights over their own reproductive rights.
Not every person has a problem with sex outside of marriage because not every person subscribes to beliefs that require that. Given this shouldn't those that have no problem with it be entitled to protections and rights over their own reproductive rights.
80sU2isBest said:
Effective for those people.
As for the rest? It's a huge failure.
And judging by the statistics out on sexual activity these days, the rest are your majority.
Do you seriously believe that everyone will be able to practice abstinence? Furthermore, why should they? They may not be religious, or their religion may not dictate abstinence. Why should they have to conform to somebody else's ideas?
OneBadStay
The Fly
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2005
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- 59
Moonlit_Angel said:
Bingo! And that's exactly what one side of this particular social issue is concerned with. Many believe that abortion affects people other than just the mothers.
Moonlit_Angel said:
Your particular opinion on prostitution is not relevant. The point is that there is a legal precedent for telling women that they can and can't do certain things with and to their bodies.
80sU2isBest
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2000
- Messages
- 4,970
anitram said:
Anitram, this has nothing to do with my religious or moral views. I said that abstinence is effective. You said it wasn't. But it is. Whether people want to live a life of abstinence or not is irrelevant. I'm not telling anyone not to have sex. I'm just saying that if you don't want a baby, there is no better way of achieving that goal than by not having sex. Abstinence is the most effective manner of birth control. There is no way of getting around that.
BonosSaint
Rock n' Roll Doggie
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2004
- Messages
- 3,566
Agreed. Abstinence is 100% effective as birth control. But teaching only abstinence and not alternatives for those who will be sexually active is not only impractical, it borders on delusional.
BonosSaint said:
And that was my point. I said the ACT of abstinence was 100% effective, but the idea you can have the majority embracing it? Completely deluded, and not only that, absolutely irresponsible.
Teaching abstinence and expecting it to work across the board?
Absolute lunacy, and the equivalent of burying your head in the sand.
martha
Blue Crack Supplier
I see I didn't miss much here.
martha
Blue Crack Supplier
80sU2isBest said:
Yes, you. You're the one who's on about how women shouldn't be allowed to make these decisions on their own. You seem to think that it's not between a woman and her doctor.
And you're deciding that her life should be in danger before she's allowed to make the decision. What level of proof will you require? Would you even trust some of these suspicious doctors?
What about those awful physicans at Planned Parenthood? Or will the women only be allowed to go to "approved" doctors who agree with you about the level of danger to her life?
martha
Blue Crack Supplier
80sU2isBest said:
Life must be so great when things are this easy. Not having to deal with the pregnant children, not having to think about the children these children are having, thinking that "they can put the babies up for adoption, can't they?" solves the problem.
Not understanding the social conditions that lead to teen pregnancy in the first place, thinking that just telling these darn kids not to do it will magically turn off their libidos.
Golly, what a great world. Are the dishes made of candy there, too?
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
With all due respect, people are not victims of their libidos.
If you set no expectations, people will do as they please.
If you set no expectations, people will do as they please.
OP
OP
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
nbcrusader said:
and if people fail, as they inevitably do, what then?
how many lives must we ruin?
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Irvine511 said:
Kill one to "save" the other?
Real life has real consequences.
OP
OP
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
nbcrusader said:
you're assuming that we're killing, firstly.
i take a very practical approach -- i have no idea where life begins or ends, nor do i feel qualified to make a judgement as to whether a fetus is the equal of a living, breathing 14 year old girl who was raped by her father or mother's boyfriend or happened to simply make a very bad decision and didn't know how to protect herself because her school district has abstinence-only sex education.
therefore, i leave the choice in her hands. it's between her and her Maker.
what would really ruin lives would be a return to the world of back-alley abortions where scared young girls get butchered.
Scarletwine
New Yorker
Another inroad by the theocracy.
The New Blacklist
By Doug Ireland, LA Weekly. Posted June 13, 2005.
The Christian right has launched a series of boycotts and pressure campaigns aimed at corporate America -- and at its sponsorship of entertainment, programs and activities they don't like.
Spurred on by a biblical injunction evangelicals call "The Great Commission," and emboldened by George W. Bush's re-election, which is perceived as a "mandate from God," the Christian right has launched a series of boycotts and pressure campaigns aimed at corporate America -- and at its sponsorship of entertainment, programs and activities they don't like.
And it's working. Just three weeks ago, the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association (AFA) announced it was ending its boycott of corporate giant Procter & Gamble -- maker of household staples like Tide and Crest -- for being pro-gay. Why? Because the AFA's boycott (which the organization says enlisted 400,000 families) had succeeded in getting P&G to pull its millions of dollars in advertising from TV shows like "Will & Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
P&G also ended its advertising in gay magazines and on gay Web sites. And a P&G executive who had been given a leave of absence to work on a successful Cincinnati, Ohio, referendum that repealed a ban on any measures protecting gays from discrimination was shown the door.
"We cannot say they are 100 percent clean, and we ask our supporters to let us know if they discover P&G again being involved in pushing the homosexual lifestyle," growls the AFA's statement of victory over the corporate behemoth, "but judging by all that we found in our research, it appears that our concerns have been addressed." The Wall Street Journal reported on May 11 that "P&G officials won't talk publicly about the boycott. But privately, they acknowledge the [Christer] groups turned out to be larger, better funded, better organized, and more sophisticated than the company had imagined."
But the P&G cave-in to the Christian right is only the tip of the iceberg. In just the past year and a half, AFA protests and boycotts -- or even the simple threat of boycotts -- have been enough to make a host of American companies pull their ads from TV shows the Christian right considers pro-gay or salacious. "Desperate Housewives" has lost ads from Safeway, Tyson Foods, Liberty Mutual, Kohl's, Alberto Culver, Leapfrog and Lowe's after the AFA's One Million Dads campaign targeted the show's sponsors. "Life as We Know It" got the same AFA treatment -- and lost ads from McCormick, Lenscrafters, Radio Shack, Papa John's International, Chattem and Sharpie.
And it's not just programs on the broadcast networks and their local affiliates that are feeling the heat from the Christian right. When the AFA targeted Comedy Central's "South Park," the popular cartoon satire saw ads on the show pulled by Foot Locker, Geico, Finish Line and Best Buy.
Nissan, Goodyear and Castrol stopped running ads on "The Shield" after AFA complaints. Sonic Drive-In pulled its ad support from "The Shield" after a single email request from AFA's Rev. Wildmon. S.C. Johnson and Hasbro ordered their ads taken off "He's a Lady" when it got the AFA treatment. And the list goes on ..... Call it a new, 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not advertise" if the religious primitives smell sin.
Just two weeks ago, the AFA undertook a new letter-writing campaign aimed at Kraft Foods (makers of Oreo cookies, Maxwell House coffee, Ritz Crackers and the like) for supporting the "radical homosexual agenda."
Kraft's crime? It's a corporate sponsor of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago. Founded in 1980 by Dr. Tom Waddell -- a 1968 Olympic decathlete -- these Gay Games VII will bring gay athletes from all over the world to the Windy City for a complete catalog of Olympic-style competitions. The honorary chairman of the Chicago Gay Games? The city's mayor, Richard Daley, who declared that he is "committed to the success of the 2006 Gay Games because it is an expression of international goodwill and a celebration of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, which are important to Chicago."
But, following the AFA's lead, another conservative Christian group -- the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) -- has asked its members to take on Kraft and five other Illinois companies that are sponsoring what it calls the "Homosexuality Games." Proclaimed the IFI: "By allowing their corporate logos to be used to promote the 'Gay Games,' Kraft, Harris Bank and other sponsoring companies are celebrating wrong and destructive behaviors, and showing their disdain for the majority of Americans who favor traditional morality and marriage."
Here's a nice touch: The IFI's Web site features a statue of Abraham Lincoln, who some historians now credibly say was gay or bisexual. Will Kraft stand up to the pressure? The company's answer to this protest campaign is, for the moment, yes -- but for how long?
All across the country, the Christian right and its allies in the culture wars are mobilizing -- sometimes spurred on from the top by the AFA, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and similar national groups, but with increasing frequency local pressure campaigns and boycott threats are self-starters. They target everything from local broadcast outlets and local cable operators to libraries, bookstores, playhouses, cinemas and magazine outlets.
"The Christian right is incredibly mobilized," says Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 30-year-old alliance of 50 nonprofit groups. Bertin says, "There's been an explosion of local book and arts censorship -- a lot of activity by an emboldened grassroots, who think they won the last election on moral grounds. They barely need to threaten a boycott to get those they target to back down -- hey, nobody had to threaten to boycott PBS to get them to back off Postcards From Buster." Bertin affirms that "This new threat from below as well as above has already achieved a widespread chill" on creative and entertainment arts throughout the country.
A good example of successful up-from-below pressure in making corporate America bend the knee to the Christian right: the Microsoft Corp. Earlier this year, under pressure from a local protest led by Ken Hutcherson -- a conservative National Football League linebacker turned preacher -- Microsoft made a decision to stay neutral in the fight over legislation in Washington's state Legislature banning discrimination in employment against same-sexers, although many other companies headquartered in the state took positions in favor of the bill. But after an avalanche of counterprotests to Microsoft about their cave-in to Hutcherson, from their own employees (many of whom are gay), gay groups and the blogosphere, Microsoft reversed itself and supported the anti-discrimination bill. Too late: Two weeks earlier, the bill had been defeated by just one vote in the state Senate. Now, Microsoft is being targeted by a new, national conservative Christian protest campaign for having flip-flopped again.
Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, calls the new offensive a drive toward "theocratic oligopoly. The drumbeat of religious fascism has never been as troubling as it is now in this country," adding that "e-mails to the FCC are more worrisome to me than boycotts" in terms of their chilling effect.
Even The New York Times is feeling the chill. At the beginning of May, an internal committee of 19 Times editors and reporters, who'd been asked how to improve the paper's "credibility" with a wider swath of America, came up with a key recommendation: Deliberalize the paper's news columns, especially through more coverage on religion from a sympathetic point of view.
The committee's report, "Preserving Our Readers' Trust," added that "the overall tone of our coverage of gay marriage, as one example, approaches cheerleading. By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter -- gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone else -- we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in many corners of American social, cultural, and religious life."
Oh, "disturbing" to whom? Why, to the Christian right, of course -- whose email complaint campaigns against the Times are legion: It's the paper the fundamentalists love to hate. So why is the Times -- one of the few newspapers in the latest available study of circulation released earlier this year to significantly increase circulation rather than lose it -- feeling the need to kowtow to the religious opponents of gay marriage? The paper's willingness to do so is about as frightening a testimony to creeping theocracy as one could imagine.
Is the new conservative Christian anti-gay and anti-sex crusade a back-to-the-future nightmare? Remember your history: In the 1950s, the anti-Communist owners of a small chain of supermarkets in upstate New York started threatening the TV and radio networks with boycotts of sponsors' products if they employed any persons listed as supposed Communists or lefties, in a sloppily researched little pamphlet called "Red Channels."
It didn't take long for this small protest to instill fear throughout the broadcast industry, and the result was the Blacklist, a witch-hunt that lasted for years -- even after John Henry Faulk, the blacklisted star CBS-radio host and actor, won his landmark $3.5 million libel suit in 1962 against the blackmailers of AWARE Inc., which -- for a suitable fee -- offered "clearance" services to major media advertisers and radio and television networks, investigating the backgrounds of entertainers for signs of Communist sympathy or affiliation. But Faulk didn't work in national broadcasting for another 13 years, until he landed a spot on the TV series Hee-Haw in 1975. It took that long to end a quarter-century reign of terror in the entertainment industry, 18 years after Senator Joe McCarthy was dead and buried.
Today's Christian right protests are targeting a different kind of subversion. Chip Berlet, senior analyst at the labor-funded Political Research Associates, has spent over 25 years studying the far right and theocratic fundamentalism. He is co-author of "Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort."
Berlet -- who was one of the speakers at a conference last month co-sponsored by the N.Y. Open Center and the City University of New York Graduate Center on "Examining the Real Agenda of the Christian Right" -- says that "What's motivating these people is two things. First, an incredible dread, completely irrational, of a hodgepodge of sexual subversion and social chaos. The response to that fear is genuinely a grassroots response, and it's motivated by fundamentalist Christian doctrines like Triumphalism and Dominionism, which order Christians to take over the secular state and secular institutions. The Christian right frames itself as an oppressed minority battling the secular-humanist liberal homofeminist hordes."
The key to those doctrines is what fundamentalist religious primitives call the Great Commission, which is basically an injunction to convert everyone to Christianity. In the Bible (Matthew 28:19-20), it says, "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you . . ." The fundamentalist interpretations of these and other texts can be found on evangelical Web sites like Thegreatcommission.com, Transferableconcepts.com and Gospelcom.net. They have incredible motivating power for the religious right, and help explain the vehemence of the Christian right's intolerance of the freedom of others to think or act differently.
Says Berlet, "The re-election of Bush was a sort of tipping point for these people, who take it as a mandate from God -- they see that the leadership of America is within their grasp, and when you get closer to your goal, it's very energizing. It reaches a critical mass, in which the evangelicals feel they have permission to push their way into public and cultural policy in every walk and expression of life."
All that, says Berlet, is what is motivating the skein of conservative Christian boycotts, protest campaigns and censorship drives bubbling from the bottom up -- which get added emotional and pressure power from the fund-raising-driven crusades launched by political Christian right organizations like AFA at the national level. The confluence of from-above and from-below is a powerful mix.
There's one big problem: Nobody at the national level is tracking these censorship and pressure campaigns in a systematic way, to quantify them or assess their impact, so that strategies to defeat them can be developed.
"People for the American Way used to track this stuff, but they stopped doing so systematically in 1996. We at Political Research Associates would love to do it," says Berlet, "but we don't have the resources. Groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute or Americans United for Separation of Church and State could easily do this sort of work. But none of us has the money to do it, because nobody wants to give it. There used to be three major journalists writing about this stuff -- Sara Diamond, Russ Belant and Fred Clarkson. But none of them could make a living doing it, and they've all dropped out of the game."
Unless Hollywood, and the entertainment and broadcast industries, all want to live through an epoch of increasing content blackmail and blacklists, the wealthy folks who make a lot of money from those industries better wake up and start funding intensive and systematic research on the Christian right and its censorship crusades against sexual subversion and sin in the creative arts -- or soon it will be too late, and the "theocratic oligopoly" of which Martin Kaplan speaks will be so firmly established it cannot be dislodged
The New Blacklist
By Doug Ireland, LA Weekly. Posted June 13, 2005.
The Christian right has launched a series of boycotts and pressure campaigns aimed at corporate America -- and at its sponsorship of entertainment, programs and activities they don't like.
Spurred on by a biblical injunction evangelicals call "The Great Commission," and emboldened by George W. Bush's re-election, which is perceived as a "mandate from God," the Christian right has launched a series of boycotts and pressure campaigns aimed at corporate America -- and at its sponsorship of entertainment, programs and activities they don't like.
And it's working. Just three weeks ago, the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association (AFA) announced it was ending its boycott of corporate giant Procter & Gamble -- maker of household staples like Tide and Crest -- for being pro-gay. Why? Because the AFA's boycott (which the organization says enlisted 400,000 families) had succeeded in getting P&G to pull its millions of dollars in advertising from TV shows like "Will & Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
P&G also ended its advertising in gay magazines and on gay Web sites. And a P&G executive who had been given a leave of absence to work on a successful Cincinnati, Ohio, referendum that repealed a ban on any measures protecting gays from discrimination was shown the door.
"We cannot say they are 100 percent clean, and we ask our supporters to let us know if they discover P&G again being involved in pushing the homosexual lifestyle," growls the AFA's statement of victory over the corporate behemoth, "but judging by all that we found in our research, it appears that our concerns have been addressed." The Wall Street Journal reported on May 11 that "P&G officials won't talk publicly about the boycott. But privately, they acknowledge the [Christer] groups turned out to be larger, better funded, better organized, and more sophisticated than the company had imagined."
But the P&G cave-in to the Christian right is only the tip of the iceberg. In just the past year and a half, AFA protests and boycotts -- or even the simple threat of boycotts -- have been enough to make a host of American companies pull their ads from TV shows the Christian right considers pro-gay or salacious. "Desperate Housewives" has lost ads from Safeway, Tyson Foods, Liberty Mutual, Kohl's, Alberto Culver, Leapfrog and Lowe's after the AFA's One Million Dads campaign targeted the show's sponsors. "Life as We Know It" got the same AFA treatment -- and lost ads from McCormick, Lenscrafters, Radio Shack, Papa John's International, Chattem and Sharpie.
And it's not just programs on the broadcast networks and their local affiliates that are feeling the heat from the Christian right. When the AFA targeted Comedy Central's "South Park," the popular cartoon satire saw ads on the show pulled by Foot Locker, Geico, Finish Line and Best Buy.
Nissan, Goodyear and Castrol stopped running ads on "The Shield" after AFA complaints. Sonic Drive-In pulled its ad support from "The Shield" after a single email request from AFA's Rev. Wildmon. S.C. Johnson and Hasbro ordered their ads taken off "He's a Lady" when it got the AFA treatment. And the list goes on ..... Call it a new, 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not advertise" if the religious primitives smell sin.
Just two weeks ago, the AFA undertook a new letter-writing campaign aimed at Kraft Foods (makers of Oreo cookies, Maxwell House coffee, Ritz Crackers and the like) for supporting the "radical homosexual agenda."
Kraft's crime? It's a corporate sponsor of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago. Founded in 1980 by Dr. Tom Waddell -- a 1968 Olympic decathlete -- these Gay Games VII will bring gay athletes from all over the world to the Windy City for a complete catalog of Olympic-style competitions. The honorary chairman of the Chicago Gay Games? The city's mayor, Richard Daley, who declared that he is "committed to the success of the 2006 Gay Games because it is an expression of international goodwill and a celebration of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, which are important to Chicago."
But, following the AFA's lead, another conservative Christian group -- the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) -- has asked its members to take on Kraft and five other Illinois companies that are sponsoring what it calls the "Homosexuality Games." Proclaimed the IFI: "By allowing their corporate logos to be used to promote the 'Gay Games,' Kraft, Harris Bank and other sponsoring companies are celebrating wrong and destructive behaviors, and showing their disdain for the majority of Americans who favor traditional morality and marriage."
Here's a nice touch: The IFI's Web site features a statue of Abraham Lincoln, who some historians now credibly say was gay or bisexual. Will Kraft stand up to the pressure? The company's answer to this protest campaign is, for the moment, yes -- but for how long?
All across the country, the Christian right and its allies in the culture wars are mobilizing -- sometimes spurred on from the top by the AFA, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and similar national groups, but with increasing frequency local pressure campaigns and boycott threats are self-starters. They target everything from local broadcast outlets and local cable operators to libraries, bookstores, playhouses, cinemas and magazine outlets.
"The Christian right is incredibly mobilized," says Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 30-year-old alliance of 50 nonprofit groups. Bertin says, "There's been an explosion of local book and arts censorship -- a lot of activity by an emboldened grassroots, who think they won the last election on moral grounds. They barely need to threaten a boycott to get those they target to back down -- hey, nobody had to threaten to boycott PBS to get them to back off Postcards From Buster." Bertin affirms that "This new threat from below as well as above has already achieved a widespread chill" on creative and entertainment arts throughout the country.
A good example of successful up-from-below pressure in making corporate America bend the knee to the Christian right: the Microsoft Corp. Earlier this year, under pressure from a local protest led by Ken Hutcherson -- a conservative National Football League linebacker turned preacher -- Microsoft made a decision to stay neutral in the fight over legislation in Washington's state Legislature banning discrimination in employment against same-sexers, although many other companies headquartered in the state took positions in favor of the bill. But after an avalanche of counterprotests to Microsoft about their cave-in to Hutcherson, from their own employees (many of whom are gay), gay groups and the blogosphere, Microsoft reversed itself and supported the anti-discrimination bill. Too late: Two weeks earlier, the bill had been defeated by just one vote in the state Senate. Now, Microsoft is being targeted by a new, national conservative Christian protest campaign for having flip-flopped again.
Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, calls the new offensive a drive toward "theocratic oligopoly. The drumbeat of religious fascism has never been as troubling as it is now in this country," adding that "e-mails to the FCC are more worrisome to me than boycotts" in terms of their chilling effect.
Even The New York Times is feeling the chill. At the beginning of May, an internal committee of 19 Times editors and reporters, who'd been asked how to improve the paper's "credibility" with a wider swath of America, came up with a key recommendation: Deliberalize the paper's news columns, especially through more coverage on religion from a sympathetic point of view.
The committee's report, "Preserving Our Readers' Trust," added that "the overall tone of our coverage of gay marriage, as one example, approaches cheerleading. By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter -- gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone else -- we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in many corners of American social, cultural, and religious life."
Oh, "disturbing" to whom? Why, to the Christian right, of course -- whose email complaint campaigns against the Times are legion: It's the paper the fundamentalists love to hate. So why is the Times -- one of the few newspapers in the latest available study of circulation released earlier this year to significantly increase circulation rather than lose it -- feeling the need to kowtow to the religious opponents of gay marriage? The paper's willingness to do so is about as frightening a testimony to creeping theocracy as one could imagine.
Is the new conservative Christian anti-gay and anti-sex crusade a back-to-the-future nightmare? Remember your history: In the 1950s, the anti-Communist owners of a small chain of supermarkets in upstate New York started threatening the TV and radio networks with boycotts of sponsors' products if they employed any persons listed as supposed Communists or lefties, in a sloppily researched little pamphlet called "Red Channels."
It didn't take long for this small protest to instill fear throughout the broadcast industry, and the result was the Blacklist, a witch-hunt that lasted for years -- even after John Henry Faulk, the blacklisted star CBS-radio host and actor, won his landmark $3.5 million libel suit in 1962 against the blackmailers of AWARE Inc., which -- for a suitable fee -- offered "clearance" services to major media advertisers and radio and television networks, investigating the backgrounds of entertainers for signs of Communist sympathy or affiliation. But Faulk didn't work in national broadcasting for another 13 years, until he landed a spot on the TV series Hee-Haw in 1975. It took that long to end a quarter-century reign of terror in the entertainment industry, 18 years after Senator Joe McCarthy was dead and buried.
Today's Christian right protests are targeting a different kind of subversion. Chip Berlet, senior analyst at the labor-funded Political Research Associates, has spent over 25 years studying the far right and theocratic fundamentalism. He is co-author of "Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort."
Berlet -- who was one of the speakers at a conference last month co-sponsored by the N.Y. Open Center and the City University of New York Graduate Center on "Examining the Real Agenda of the Christian Right" -- says that "What's motivating these people is two things. First, an incredible dread, completely irrational, of a hodgepodge of sexual subversion and social chaos. The response to that fear is genuinely a grassroots response, and it's motivated by fundamentalist Christian doctrines like Triumphalism and Dominionism, which order Christians to take over the secular state and secular institutions. The Christian right frames itself as an oppressed minority battling the secular-humanist liberal homofeminist hordes."
The key to those doctrines is what fundamentalist religious primitives call the Great Commission, which is basically an injunction to convert everyone to Christianity. In the Bible (Matthew 28:19-20), it says, "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you . . ." The fundamentalist interpretations of these and other texts can be found on evangelical Web sites like Thegreatcommission.com, Transferableconcepts.com and Gospelcom.net. They have incredible motivating power for the religious right, and help explain the vehemence of the Christian right's intolerance of the freedom of others to think or act differently.
Says Berlet, "The re-election of Bush was a sort of tipping point for these people, who take it as a mandate from God -- they see that the leadership of America is within their grasp, and when you get closer to your goal, it's very energizing. It reaches a critical mass, in which the evangelicals feel they have permission to push their way into public and cultural policy in every walk and expression of life."
All that, says Berlet, is what is motivating the skein of conservative Christian boycotts, protest campaigns and censorship drives bubbling from the bottom up -- which get added emotional and pressure power from the fund-raising-driven crusades launched by political Christian right organizations like AFA at the national level. The confluence of from-above and from-below is a powerful mix.
There's one big problem: Nobody at the national level is tracking these censorship and pressure campaigns in a systematic way, to quantify them or assess their impact, so that strategies to defeat them can be developed.
"People for the American Way used to track this stuff, but they stopped doing so systematically in 1996. We at Political Research Associates would love to do it," says Berlet, "but we don't have the resources. Groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute or Americans United for Separation of Church and State could easily do this sort of work. But none of us has the money to do it, because nobody wants to give it. There used to be three major journalists writing about this stuff -- Sara Diamond, Russ Belant and Fred Clarkson. But none of them could make a living doing it, and they've all dropped out of the game."
Unless Hollywood, and the entertainment and broadcast industries, all want to live through an epoch of increasing content blackmail and blacklists, the wealthy folks who make a lot of money from those industries better wake up and start funding intensive and systematic research on the Christian right and its censorship crusades against sexual subversion and sin in the creative arts -- or soon it will be too late, and the "theocratic oligopoly" of which Martin Kaplan speaks will be so firmly established it cannot be dislodged
Moonlit_Angel
Blue Crack Addict
...It's called a remote control, people! Sheesh...
And the real kicker? You know those very same people would be all up in arms if I went out and tried to get rid of, say, religious programming/books that I didn't like.
Angela
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Moonlit_Angel said:
It's called a remote control, people! Sheesh...
And the real kicker? You know those very same people would be all up in arms if I went out and tried to get rid of, say, religious programming/books that I didn't like.
Angela
Boycotts are a staple of political speech. I'm sure you only object to their political stance, not the exercise of their rights.
Golightly Grrl
Refugee
No kidding, Angela.
And don't fuck with my New York Times!
And don't fuck with my New York Times!
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
Irvine511 said:
We've all done this dance before - they are/are not people. I guess is comes down to a guaranteed butchering vs. a threatened butchering.
80sU2isBest
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2000
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martha said:
Martha, you have no idea what my life has been like. You don't know, and yet you presume to think I have no experience with this, and that my life has been a bed of roses.
Let me tell you something; when I was 22, and unmarried, I had a wrong relationship with a girl. She got pregnant, and my son died 8 hours after birth.
So you can keep your condescension.
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indra
ONE love, blood, life
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- 12,689
Moonlit_Angel said:
It's called a remote control, people! Sheesh...
Angela
It's not that they can't turn it off (most, when asked will tell you "oh, I never watch it anyway"), it's that they don't their neighbors (or anyone else) watching it either.
OneBadStay
The Fly
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2005
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martha said:
I see I didn't miss much here.
You've obviously been dodging my posts...
...Can't say I blame you...
OP
OP
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
OneBadStay said:
i can't say i blame her either.
all you had to offer were the same old lines that every other anti-choice/pro-lifer has. we've all heard it a million times, and these debates never seem to go anywhere on FYM. still, always interesting to feel the temperature of the room, especially on a topic that, for me, is a bit abstract.
i have a question:
why is abortion almost a uniquely American source of near-hysteria on both sides of the political spectrum? it seems like much less of an issue in other countries, even in heavily Catholic countries like Italy or Spain. what makes the US different? is there something about responsibility (or perceived responsibility) and shame and moral outrage that gets tied into this issue, along with that dirty dirty thing we call sex, that is somehow uniquely American?
financeguy
ONE love, blood, life
Irvine511 said:
Abortion is also a highly controversial issue in Ireland, and still illegal except in (very) restricted circumstances. I don't know about Italy and Spain but in countries like the Philipines, also heavily Catholic, I understand that it also fairly controversial.
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