Frank Schaeffer's Blog, page 2

Why Do They Hate Us?The real war on women is in the Middl...

Why Do They Hate Us?The real war on women is in the Middle East. (First published by Foreign Policy magazine)BY MONA ELTAHAWY | MAY/JUNE 2012In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved by sex with her husband that as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spider web she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she too climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her." Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer -- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer -- and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers, she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes.SHARE:Share on twitterTwitter More...In a crisp three-and-a-half pages, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex, death, and religion, a bulldozer that crushes denial and defensiveness to get at the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East. There is no sugarcoating it. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired, post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as this Arab woman so powerfully says.Yes: They hate us. It must be said. Some may ask why I'm bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn't everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I'm not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system -- one that treats half of humanity like animals -- must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many "Western" countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women.But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing -- or divorce either.Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, might be eons apart when it comes to GDP, but only four places separate them on the index, with the kingdom at 131 and Yemen coming in at 135 out of 135 countries. Morocco, often touted for its "progressive" family law (a 2005 report by Western "experts" called it "an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern society"), ranks 129; according to Morocco's Ministry of Justice, 41,098 girls under age 18 were married there in 2010.It's easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 55 percent of women are illiterate, 79 percent do not participate in the labor force, and just one woman serves in the 301-person parliament. Horrific news reports about 12-year-old girls dying in childbirth do little to stem the tide of child marriage there. Instead, demonstrations in support of child marriage outstrip those against it, fueled by clerical declarations that opponents of state-sanctioned pedophilia are apostates because the Prophet Mohammed, according to them, married his second wife, Aisha, when she was a child.But at least Yemeni women can drive. It surely hasn't ended their litany of problems, but it symbolizes freedom -- and nowhere does such symbolism resonate more than in Saudi Arabia, where child marriage is also practiced and women are perpetually minors regardless of their age or education. Saudi women far outnumber their male counterparts on university campuses but are reduced to watching men far less qualified control every aspect of their lives.Yes, Saudi Arabia, the country where a gang-rape survivor was sentenced to jail for agreeing to get into a car with an unrelated male and needed a royal pardon; Saudi Arabia, where a woman who broke the ban on driving was sentenced to 10 lashes and again needed a royal pardon; Saudi Arabia, where women still can't vote or run in elections, yet it's considered "progress" that a royal decree promised to enfranchise them for almost completely symbolic local elections in -- wait for it -- 2015. So bad is it for women in Saudi Arabia that those tiny paternalistic pats on their backs are greeted with delight as the monarch behind them, King Abdullah, is hailed as a "reformer"  -- even by those who ought to know better, such as  Newsweek , which in 2010 named the king one of the top 11 most respected world leaders. You want to know how bad it is? The "reformer's" answer to the revolutions popping up across the region was to numb his people with still more government handouts -- especially for the Salafi zealots from whom the Saudi royal family inhales legitimacy. King Abdullah is 87. Just wait until you see the next in line, Prince Nayef, a man straight out of the Middle Ages. His misogyny and zealotry make King Abdullah look like Susan B. Anthony.SO WHY DO THEY HATE US? Sex, or more precisely hymens, explains much."Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently. "But they all seem to. It doesn't matter what country they're in or what religion they claim. They want to control women." (And yet Clinton represents an administration that openly supports many of those misogynistic despots.) Attempts to control by such regimes often stem from the suspicion that without it, a woman is just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability. Observe Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular cleric and longtime conservative TV host on Al Jazeera who developed a stunning penchant for the Arab Spring revolutions -- once they were under way, that is -- undoubtedly understanding that they would eliminate the tyrants who long tormented and oppressed both him and the Muslim Brotherhood movement from which he springs.I could find you a host of crackpots sounding off on Woman the Insatiable Temptress, but I'm staying mainstream with Qaradawi, who commands a huge audience on and off the satellite channels. Although he says female genital mutilation (which he calls "circumcision," a common euphemism that tries to put the practice on a par with male circumcision) is not "obligatory," you will also find this priceless observation in one of his books: "I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world. Anyone who thinks that circumcision is the best way to protect his daughters should do it," he wrote, adding, "The moderate opinion is in favor of practicing circumcision to reduce temptation." So even among "moderates," girls' genitals are cut to ensure their desire is nipped in the bud -- pun fully intended. Qaradawi has since issued a fatwa against female genital mutilation, but it comes as no surprise that when Egypt banned the practice in 2008, some Muslim Brotherhood legislators opposed the law. And some still do -- including a prominent female parliamentarian, Azza al-Garf.Yet it's the men who can't control themselves on the streets, where from Morocco to Yemen, sexual harassment is endemic and it's for the men's sake that so many women are encouraged to cover up. Cairo has a women-only subway car to protect us from wandering hands and worse; countless Saudi malls are for families only, barring single men from entry unless they produce a requisite female to accompany them.We often hear how the Middle East's failing economies have left many men unable to marry, and some even use that to explain rising levels of sexual harassment on the streets. In a 2008 survey by theEgyptian Center for Women's Rights, more than 80 percent of Egyptian women said they'd experienced sexual harassment and more than 60 percent of men admitted to harassing women. Yet we never hear how a later marriage age affects women. Do women have sex drives or not? Apparently, the Arab jury is still out on the basics of human biology.Enter that call to prayer and the sublimation through religion that Rifaat so brilliantly introduces in her story. Just as regime-appointed clerics lull the poor across the region with promises of justice -- and nubile virgins -- in the next world rather than a reckoning with the corruption and nepotism of the dictator in this life, so women are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming to have God firmly on their side.I turn again to Saudi Arabia, and not just because when I encountered the country at age 15 I was traumatized into feminism -- there's no other way to describe it -- but because the kingdom is unabashed in its worship of a misogynistic God and never suffers any consequences for it, thanks to its double-whammy advantage of having oil and being home to Islam's two holiest places, Mecca and Medina.Then -- the 1980s and 1990s -- as now, clerics on Saudi TV were obsessed with women and their orifices, especially what came out of them. I'll never forget hearing that if a baby boy urinated on you, you could go ahead and pray in the same clothes, yet if a baby girl peed on you, you had to change. What on Earth in the girl's urine made you impure? I wondered.Hatred of women.How much does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in Mecca in 2002, after "morality police" barred them from fleeing the burning building -- and kept firefighters from rescuing them -- because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And nothing happened. No one was put on trial. Parents were silenced. The only concession to the horror was that girls' education was quietly taken away by then-Crown Prince Abdullah from the Salafi zealots, who have nonetheless managed to retain their vise-like grip on the kingdom's education system writ large.This, however, is no mere Saudi phenomenon, no hateful curiosity in the rich, isolated desert. The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region -- now more than ever.In Kuwait, where for years Islamists fought women's enfranchisement, they hounded the four women who finally made it into parliament, demanding that the two who didn't cover their hair wear hijabs. When the Kuwaiti parliament was dissolved this past December, an Islamist parliamentarian demanded the new house -- devoid of a single female legislator -- discuss his proposed "decent attire" law.In Tunisia, long considered the closest thing to a beacon of tolerance in the region, women took a deep breath last fall after the Islamist Ennahda party won the largest share of votes in the country's Constituent Assembly. Party leaders vowed to respect Tunisia's 1956 Personal Status Code, which declared "the principle of equality between men and women" as citizens and banned polygamy. But female university professors and students have complained since then of assaults and intimidation by Islamists for not wearing hijabs, while many women's rights activists wonder how talk of Islamic law will affect the actual law they will live under in post-revolution Tunisia.In Libya, the first thing the head of the interim government, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, promised to do was to lift the late Libyan tyrant's restrictions on polygamy. Lest you think of Muammar al-Qaddafi as a feminist of any kind, remember that under his rule girls and women who survived sexual assaults or were suspected of "moral crimes" were dumped into "social rehabilitation centers," effective prisons from which they could not leave unless a man agreed to marry them or their families took them back.Then there's Egypt, where less than a month after President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, the military junta that replaced him, ostensibly to "protect the revolution," inadvertently reminded us of the two revolutions we women need. After it cleared Tahrir Square of protesters, the military detained dozens of male and female activists. Tyrants oppress, beat, and torture all. We know. But these officers reserved "virginity tests" for female activists: rape disguised as a medical doctor inserting his fingers into their vaginal opening in search of hymens. (The doctor was sued and eventually acquitted in March.)What hope can there be for women in the new Egyptian parliament, dominated as it is by men stuck in the seventh century? A quarter of those parliamentary seats are now held by Salafis, who believe that mimicking the original ways of the Prophet Mohammed is an appropriate prescription for modern life. Last fall, when fielding female candidates, Egypt's Salafi Nour Party ran a flower in place of each woman's face. Women are not to be seen or heard -- even their voices are a temptation -- so there they are in the Egyptian parliament, covered from head to toe in black and never uttering a word.And we're in the middle of a revolution in Egypt! It's a revolution in which women have died, been beaten, shot at, and sexually assaulted fighting alongside men to rid our country of that uppercase Patriarch -- Mubarak -- yet so many lowercase patriarchs still oppress us. The Muslim Brotherhood, with almost half the total seats in our new revolutionary parliament, does not believe women (or Christians for that matter) can be president. The woman who heads the "women's committee" of the Brotherhood's political party said recently that women should not march or protest because it's more "dignified" to let their husbands and brothers demonstrate for them.The hatred of women goes deep in Egyptian society. Those of us who have marched and protested have had to navigate a minefield of sexual assaults by both the regime and its lackeys, and, sadly, at times by our fellow revolutionaries. On the November day I was sexually assaulted on Mohamed Mahmoud Street near Tahrir Square, by at least four Egyptian riot police, I was first groped by a man in the square itself. While we are eager to expose assaults by the regime, when we're violated by our fellow civilians we immediately assume they're agents of the regime or thugs because we don't want to taint the revolution.SO WHAT IS TO BE DONE?First we stop pretending. Call out the hate for what it is. Resist cultural relativism and know that even in countries undergoing revolutions and uprisings, women will remain the cheapest bargaining chips. You -- the outside world -- will be told that it's our "culture" and "religion" to do X, Y, or Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman. The Arab uprisings may have been sparked by an Arab man -- Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in desperation -- but they will be finished by Arab women.Amina Filali -- the 16-year-old Moroccan girl who drank poison after she was forced to marry, and beaten by, her rapist -- is our Bouazizi. Salwa el-Husseini, the first Egyptian woman to speak out against the "virginity tests"; Samira Ibrahim, the first one to sue; and Rasha Abdel Rahman, who testified alongside her -- they are our Bouazizis. We must not wait for them to die to become so. Manal al-Sharif, who spent nine days in jail for breaking her country's ban on women driving, is Saudi Arabia's Bouazizi. She is a one-woman revolutionary force who pushes against an ocean of misogyny.Our political revolutions will not succeed unless they are accompanied by revolutions of thought -- social, sexual, and cultural revolutions that topple the Mubaraks in our minds as well as our bedrooms."Do you know why they subjected us to virginity tests?" Ibrahim asked me soon after we'd spent hours marching together to mark International Women's Day in Cairo on March 8. "They want to silence us; they want to chase women back home. But we're not going anywhere."We are more than our headscarves and our hymens. Listen to those of us fighting. Amplify the voices of the region and poke the hatred in its eye. There was a time when being an Islamist was the most vulnerable political position in Egypt and Tunisia. Understand that now it very well might be Woman. As it always has been.

Colson: An Evangelical Homophobic Anti-Woman Leader Passes On

Evangelical Christianity lost one of its most beloved and bigoted homophobic and misogynistic voices with the death of Charles W. “Chuck” Colson, a Watergate felon who converted to “evangelicalism” but never lost his taste for dirty political tricks against opponents.

Colson was a vocal far right leader who tried to fill my late father’s religious right leadership (Francis Schaeffer) shoes by borrowing material from his books, even repeating one of Dad’s book titles as if he (Colson) was writing a sequel.

Colson had his “books” ghost written by Harold Fickett and other writers, some of whom like Fickett (who I worked with closely many years ago) used to complain to me almost daily about what an egomaniac Colson was to work for and how he did all he could to hide the fact that his work was written by others while rarely sharing credit.

Colson teamed up with far right Roman Catholic activist Professor Robert George of Princeton to launch the dirty tricks campaign to brand President Obama as “anti-religious” with Colson’s and George’s “Manhattan Declaration.” This was a trap they set for the administration that finally paid off when they talked a number of bishops into branding Obama as anti-religious because he wanted women to have access to contraception even if they worked for Roman Catholic controlled institutions.

Colson worked closely with various right wing Roman Catholic bishops to launch the current Republican Party war on women and gays in the name of “religious freedom” having become one of the chief practitioners of the evangelical/far right myths of victimhood at the hands of left wing media, colleges etc., etc. Colson was also a key figure in organizing the Prop 8 anti-gay marriage California iniatives. Colson was a key figure in calling the depriving of women of insurance coverage for contraception a religious “civil liberties” issue and provided evangelical cover for the Roman Catholic bishops’ misogynist bigotry.

In 1974 Colson entered a plea of guilty to Watergate-related charges. He entered Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Alabama in 1974 as a new Christian who had just “discovered Jesus” just in time to turn his new found faith into a second act as an evangelical guru. He made his reputation by being one of the meanest political operatives in American history on record for fabricating lies for his master Richard Nixon-- behavior he reverted to when helping the Roman Catholic far right bishops launch their anti-gay and anti-women attacks.

Colson emerged from prison with a new mission to use his newfound evangelical “born-again” platform to help prisoners. For a time he seemed to have actually changed course and worked for prison reform and prisoner care. Then (very much like his good friend Franklyn Graham) he reverted to type and began to fight in the far right holy war against the Democratic Party, women, gays and progressive causes.

Colson re-launched his Nixon-style bid for far right leadership in the political arena with conservative Roman Catholics in two documents called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The evangelical-Catholic declaration of unity against gays, women and the “pro-abortion” Democratic Party was a direct rip off of my father books “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” and “How Should We them Live?” Colson somewhat too cutely called his ghost written imitation, “How Now Shall We Live?” (Unlike Colson my father wrote his own books and was not a homophobe or anti woman. Dad was pro-gay and pro-women and thought Roman Catholics were just plain nuts re contraception.)

In 2009, Colson was a principal writer with Robert George of the Manhattan Declaration, which called on far right evangelicals, Mormons  and Catholics to defeat President Obama in 2012, albeit without mentioning Obama by name under the “non-political” guise of  the “sanctity of human life,” issues and “traditional marriage” and “religious freedom.” These calls for a “return to biblical law” (or the Catholic version so-called “Natural Law”) have long since been the bishops’ and evangelical right’s code words for gay and women bashing.

More than half a million Fox News watchers signed the Manhattan Declaration after it was first signed by a virtual Who’s Who of evangelical leaders in the anti-gay, anti-women crusade. Collaborating with other Christian leaders, Colson aimed to launch other grassroots movements around “moral and ethical issues of great concern” in other words he returned to being Nixon’s hatchet man again at the end of his life showing greater loyalty to far right Republican Politics than to the gospel.

Colson worked closely with members of a far right "religious liberty" group -- the Becket Fund -- led by the ultra conservative Roman Catholic William P. Mumma (a Wall Street banker) working closely with the Roman Catholic bishops to sue the government in order to force women to forgo contraception if they happen to work for Catholic run corporations.

The view they were defending was summed up by the leading Catholic philosopher of the 20th century and Vatican favorite, Elizabeth Anscombe in her anti-contraception essay "Contraception and Chastity," where she wrote:  "If you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition. It's this that makes the division between straightforward fornication or adultery and the wickedness of the sins against nature and of contraceptive intercourse. Hence contraceptive intercourse within marriage is a graver offence against chastity than is straightforward fornication or adultery." (G. E. M. Anscombe, "Contraception and Chastity," London: Catholic Truth Society, 1975


Most Roman Catholics would not sign on to such weird extremism. But "most Roman Catholics" are not in charge of their church today.

And most Americans will not thank the Roman Catholic activists suing our government to force us to adopt Anscombe's view of contraception even in the name of "religious liberty." Liberty as defined here as the "right" of the Roman Catholic Church to deny progress in women's rights. The suit will mean that any time the social issues might have faded away the Roman Catholic church's attack on women will remain "news."

The far right ideologues who want to turn depriving women of contraceptives into a "religious liberty" issue are counting on trying to get their "case" before at least 4 Supreme Court Justices that have a right wing Catholic worldview --Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas. This fact alone will make millions of women vote for reelecting the President just to make sure he has the chance to appoint another one or two moderate pro-women justices.

Bluntly put, between the Becket Fund/Wall Street  suit, the Pope weighing in and the American bishops anti-Obama activity ramping up with Colson to try and defeat Obama in 2012, the Roman Catholic leaders seemed anxious to declare holy war on the Democratic Party. And Colson was their willing Protestant facilitator, helping to craft the mirror image of the racist policy Nixon used to turn Southern Democrats into Republican voters, only this time the tactic was to use “family values” to get white members of the underclass to vote for corporate America.

Colson’s and George's trap for the president, the "Manhattan Declaration," was instantly signed by more than 250 American "mainstream" (mostly Evangelical) conservative religious leaders. They joined to "affirm support for traditional marriage" and to advocate civil disobedience against laws contradicting the signers' religious beliefs about marriage and/or the "life issues." The drafting committee included Evangelical far right leader Charles Colson. In fact, in close contact with operatives like Karl Rove, this whole group began to pump their followers up for the battle to come for the 2012 elections.

It is not coincidence that Colson was assigned by these extremists to be the point man for the anti-Obama crusade. He put his name on a piece crafted by the Robert George group when it came to the bogus "Obama is anti-religious" charge.

To ramp the case up Colson teamed up with a Catholic bishop and wrote (or had George write for them) in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after the "story" (a trumped up fabricated story at that) about Obama's "anti-religious" stance broke. Then throwing red meat to the faithful, Chuck Colson wrote in an open letter to his fellow believers on Wednesday (Feb. 8) where he compared the administration birth control mandates to policies enacted in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.

In the WSJ op-ed Colson and the Catholic bishop blew their cover, they cited their own creation as proof that they had grassroots support when of course (like the Tea Party) they had had their "issue" created top down. they write:

At this critical moment, Americans of every faith, as guardians of their own freedom, must, in the words of the First Amendment, "petition the government for the redress of grievances." That's why over the past two years more than 500,000 people have signed the "Manhattan Declaration" in defense of religious liberty. They believe, as do we, that under no circumstances should people of faith violate their consciences and discard their most cherished religious beliefs in order to comply with a gravely unjust law.

It was a neat trick in the mold of the Nixon “method” Write a declaration, get 250 leaders to sign it then use Fox News etc to promote it "grass roots" then come back and use the fact that it's been signed off on by the pro-life movement as "proof" that the president is out of step with religious freedom! It was the sort of dirty trick Colson was master of. As the New York Times noted:

“Few played political hardball more fiercely than Mr. Colson. When a deluded janitor from Milwaukee shot Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama on the presidential campaign trail in Maryland in May 1972, Nixon asked about the suspect’s politics. Mr. Colson replied, “Well, he’s going to be a left-winger by the time we get through.” He proposed a political frame-up: planting leftist pamphlets in the would-be killer’s apartment. “Good,” the president said, as recorded on a White House tape. “Keep at that.”
Mr. Colson hired E. Howard Hunt, a veteran covert operator for the Central Intelligence Agency, to spy on the president’s opponents. Their plots became part of the cascade of high crimes and misdemeanors known as the Watergate affair.”

There are a number of leading American extremist "conservative" Roman Catholics, like Professor George, who are part of a strange, informal, anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion alliance that Santorum has drawn his ideas from. One such far right Roman Catholic ideologue wrote a book calling on Christians to join Muslims in a jihad against the secular West.

In Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War (Ignatius Press, 1996) my old friend Peter Kreeft called for "ecumenical Jihad." Kreeft's was not a plea for blowing people up. He was calling for winning elections and, failing that, for undermining the election results when they are judged "wrong" by religious people.

Kreeft called for an alliance of fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims, to prosecute a culture war against what he called the "demoniacal Western cultural elite." The book was (tellingly) dedicated to several key far right leaders: e.g., Chuck Colson, Michael Medved and (of course) the reactionary's reactionary, Richard John Neuhaus.

The late Roman Catholic convert priest Richard John Neuhaus and I often talked when Neuhaus was starting his far right First Things journal. I contributed several articles to some of the early issues of First Things. (This was before I left the religious right, the Republican Party and my evangelical background.)

According to what Neuhaus told me back then First Things was supposed to be the pro-life/Catholic version of the Norman Podhoretz's Commentary magazine.  Podhoretz who, at first, was friendly with Neuhaus broke with him over Neuhaus's extremist anti-abortion -- and extremist anti-American - views. This was after Neuhaus started openly describing the U.S. government as an illegitimate "regime." As the Washington Post noted:

Father Neuhaus played a central role in forging an alliance between evangelical Protestants and Catholics and in bringing conservative Christians into the Republican conservative coalition in the 1980s and 1990s. During that same period, he began an institute and published a journal, First Things,  that reflected his interests in religion and public policy. Mary Ann Glendon, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, said Father Neuhaus was a guiding force in the creation of faith-based initiatives -- private religious groups given government funding to carry out social policy -- that have become identified with President Bush's White House. Father Neuhaus set the groundwork for the idea in two books, To Empower People written with Peter Berger, and Christian Faith and Public Policy (both 1977).

As I Alexander F. Remington noted in the Washington Post on January 9, 2009, in 2005, Time magazine named Father Neuhaus one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals in America.

"Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed," Father Neuhaus once wrote. It was a stance that was at times too rigid for many conservatives. After President Bill Clinton vetoed in 1996 a ban on a procedure critics call partial-birth abortion, Father Neuhaus said, "We are at a point at which millions of conscientious American citizens are reflecting upon whether this is a legitimate regime." That same year, he sponsored a symposium on "The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics."

Colson and Neuhaus were the moving force behind the "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" initiative/manifesto which called for a (non-violent) holy war against secularism. And that "initiative" took the Far Right Reconstructionist ideas of Rushdoony, dropped the most inflammatory rhetoric, and made them "mainstream," thus moving the so-called mainstream Evangelical enterprise to the far (anti-government) right.

The groups Kreeft, Colson and Neuhaus had in mind to "bring together" were alienated Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews and conservative Roman Catholics, wallowing in their sense of victimhood, to which Kreeft added Muslims. Of course the ultra-conservative Kreeft and extremist Neuhaus were against contraception and equated it with abortion. Thus the logic of their argument was that of my fathers' too: the United States Government was enabling murder, was disparaged as a "regime" that needed to be overthrown.

These neo-conservative/Roman Catholic "intellectuals" helped set the stage for the anti-contraception Quiverfull Movement and for the Patriarchy Movement, giving a gloss of intellectual respectability and aid and comfort to what were nothing more than oppressive ideas rooted in an anti-Constitutional theocratic far right wish list for changes that were supposed to roll back the parts of the democratic processes - say Roe v. Wade, women's rights and gay rights -- that far right Catholics and Protestants didn't approve of.

Few men have done more to trade (betray?) the gospel of love for the gospel of empowering corporate America and greed through the misuse of the so-called culture war issues to get lower middle class whites to vote against their own economic interests in the name of "family values.” Wherever Nixon is today he must be welcoming a true son of far right dirty politics to eternity with a “Job well done.”



Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is  Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

My (satirical-but-all-too-true?) Version of the Bishop's anti-Obama "Statement."

What follows is not the 12 page original “Statement on Religious Liberty” by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. But here's my (satirical-but-all-too-true?) version of the bishop's anti-Obama "statement."

We are Catholics who are using politics masquerading as religion to forward our agenda. We are also Americans when it suits our political purposes as laid out for us by a number of influential (mostly unknown) far right Republican Party activists we the American Bishops look to for guidance on how to remain relevant even after we presided over a worldwide pedophilia ring.

These activists who guide and manipulate us were inspired by the late Richard John Neuhaus (a convert to far right papist Catholicism who equated America with Hitler’s Germany because of legal abortion), and today we are led by Professor Robert George of Princeton University (and former John McCain advisor and anti-Obama Republican activist who accused President Obama of being in favor of infanticide) who has picked up where Neuhaus left off.

Robert George came up with something called the Manhattan Declaration that was co-authored with far right evangelical activist Charles Colson that called for civil disobedience against the government but more specifically against President Obama, someone Professor George has been working to defeat and discredit from the time he worked for McCain.

To be far right Tea Party Catholic and American should mean not having to choose between celibacy and child molestation on the one hand and making sweeping political “moral” pronouncements written for us by Professor Robert George and other Republican Party far right evangelical-style activists on the other hand. Our allegiances to both making political statements as a means to destroy the first black American president and also to cover up a decades-long war on innocent children are distinct, but they need not be contradictory, and should instead be complementary. That is the teaching of our Catholic faith, which obliges us to work together with fellow Republican Party and Tea Party citizens for the common good of all who wish to defeat President Obama in the next election by whatever means, including making the unfounded charge of his being “against religion.”

Pope Benedict XVI recently spoke about his worry that the power of the Church in the United States to oppress women, children and gays is being sadly weakened. He worries that we'll get kicked out of here just as the people of Ireland finally got sick of us there. He called the bishops’ right to do one thing yet say another  the “most cherished of American freedoms”—and indeed it is.

Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms: the freedom for women to be baby-making vessels following the glorious tradition of the Church that sat back and denounced condoms and thus condemned millions to death from AIDS.

Religious Liberty Under Attack—Concrete Examples, Consider the following:

HHS mandate for contraception has been met with our vigorous and united opposition. We demand that women must have plenty of children to turn over to our tender care and nurturing. In an unprecedented way, the federal government will force religious institutions to abide by the laws of the land as regards women’s rights. This is unacceptable.

Discrimination against Catholic humanitarian services

Notwithstanding years of excellent performance by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services in administering contract services for human trafficking, the federal government changed its contract specifications to require us to provide or refer for contraceptive services in violation of Catholic teaching. Religious institutions should not be disqualified from a government contract based on religious belief no matter how crazy that belief is.

Religious Liberty Is More Than Freedom of Worship

Religious liberty is not only about our ability to go to Mass on Sunday or pray the Rosary at home with our dozens of children. It is also about whether we can make our contribution to the common good of the Republican Party, the Tea Party and the Koch brothers' takeover of America via the Supreme Court without having to compromise our faith in Ayn Rand, who was crucified, raised and ascended that American corporations might be saved by us.

Without religious liberty properly understood, all Republicans will suffer, deprived of the essential contribution in education, health care, civil rights, and social services that Fox News-watching Americans make every day to keep America ignorant of science and progress.

What is at stake is whether America will continue to have a free, creative, and robust civil society where rich and connected white men rule women and minorities -- or whether the state alone will determine who has rights. All far right and religious right Republicans make their contribution to our common life, and they do not need the permission of the President Obama and his death panels to have access to children to molest, women to bully and gay people to discriminate against.

So this is not just a Catholic issue. This is not a Jewish issue. This is not an Orthodox, Mormon, or Muslim issue. It is an issue that binds together every American reactionary misogynist homophobic right winger that hates our not-born-here Muslim, communist, socialist, infanticide-loving “president.”

It is a sobering thing to contemplate our government enacting an unjust law to protect women that makes us bishops subject to the law rather than to our Bronze Age mythology. In the face of an unjust law that deprives WE THE BISHPOPS of the RIGHT to deprive women, children and gay Americans of their civil liberties an accommodation is not to be sought.

We the Bishops know that by raising a possibility of civil disobedience we can grab a headline or two make religious liberty a campaign issue and thereby do our bit to get a Republican Mormon elected while holding our noses because of course not long ago we would have had him burned at the stake.

The Lord Jesus came to liberate us from the dominion of sin and so he put Us Bishops in charge of women and gay people and children. We ask nothing less than that the Constitution and laws of the United States, which recognize our right to operate an anti-democratic institution within a democracy, be respected.

Finally to our brother bishops, let us exhort each other with fraternal charity to be bold, clear, and insistent in denying that we have been part of a cover-up of crimes against children, women, minorities and gay people by warning against threats to the rights of us bishops to boss the American's around (including those "Catholics" who no longer obey us) who work in the multiform-billion dollar institutions we control. Let us attempt to be the “conscience of the state,” to use Rev. King’s words against the first black American president.

In the aftermath of the decision on contraceptive mandates, many others who hate President Obama spoke out forcefully sensing that "religious liberty" is a good and useful smokescreen to defeat that man with.

A Fortnight for Freedom

We suggest that the fourteen days from June 21—the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More and the Vigil of the Upcoming Republican National Convention—to July 4, Independence Day, be dedicated to this “fortnight for freedom to get rid of Obama by any means”—a great hymn of prayer for our country.

We invite you to join us in an urgent prayer for religious liberty by which we mean the defeat of President Obama, no matter what.


Frank Schaeffer is a writer, speaker, political activist and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

Politics Masquerading as Religion -- the Bishop's anti-Obama "Statement"

What follows is not the 12 page original “Statement on Religious Liberty” by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. But here's my (satirical-but-all-too-true?) version of the bishop's anti-Obama "statement."

We are Catholics who are using politics masquerading as religion to forward our agenda. We are also Americans when it suits our political purposes as laid out for us by a number of influential (mostly unknown) far right Republican Party activists we the American Bishops look to for guidance on how to remain relevant even after we presided over a worldwide pedophilia ring.

These activists who guide and manipulate us were inspired by the late Richard John Neuhaus (a convert to far right papist Catholicism who equated America with Hitler’s Germany because of legal abortion), and today we are led by Professor Robert George of Princeton University (and former John McCain advisor and anti-Obama Republican activist who accused President Obama of being in favor of infanticide) who has picked up where Neuhaus left off.

Robert George came up with something called the Manhattan Declaration that was co-authored with the late far right evangelical activist Charles Colson that called for civil disobedience against the government but more specifically against President Obama, someone Professor Gorge has been working to defeat and discredit from the time he worked for McCain.

To be far right Tea Party Catholic and American should mean not having to choose between celibacy and child molestation on the one hand and making sweeping political “moral” pronouncements written for us by Professor Robert George and other Republican Party far right evangelical-style activists on the other hand. Our allegiances to both making political statements as a means to destroy the first black American president and also to cover up a decades-long war on innocent children are distinct, but they need not be contradictory, and should instead be complementary. That is the teaching of our Catholic faith, which obliges us to work together with fellow Republican Party and Tea Party citizens for the common good of all who wish to defeat President Obama in the next election by whatever means, including making the unfounded charge of his being “against religion.”

Pope Benedict XVI recently spoke about his worry that the power of the Church in the United States to oppress women, children and gays is being sadly weakened. He worries that we'll get kicked out of here just as the people of Ireland finally got sick of us there. He called the bishops’ right to do one thing yet say another  the “most cherished of American freedoms”—and indeed it is.

Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms: the freedom for women to be baby-making vessels following the glorious tradition of the Church that sat back and denounced condoms and thus condemned millions to death from AIDS.

Religious Liberty Under Attack—Concrete Examples, Consider the following:

HHS mandate for contraception has been met with our vigorous and united opposition. We demand that women must have plenty of children to turn over to our tender care and nurturing. In an unprecedented way, the federal government will force religious institutions to abide by the laws of the land as regards women’s rights. This is unacceptable.

Discrimination against Catholic humanitarian services

Notwithstanding years of excellent performance by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services in administering contract services for human trafficking, the federal government changed its contract specifications to require us to provide or refer for contraceptive services in violation of Catholic teaching. Religious institutions should not be disqualified from a government contract based on religious belief no matter how crazy that belief is.

Religious Liberty Is More Than Freedom of Worship

Religious liberty is not only about our ability to go to Mass on Sunday or pray the Rosary at home with our dozens of children. It is also about whether we can make our contribution to the common good of the Republican Party, the Tea Party and the Koch brothers' takeover of America via the Supreme Court without having to compromise our faith in Ayn Rand, who was crucified, raised and ascended that American corporations might be saved by us.

Without religious liberty properly understood, all Republicans will suffer, deprived of the essential contribution in education, health care, civil rights, and social services that Fox News-watching Americans make every day to keep America ignorant of science and progress.

What is at stake is whether America will continue to have a free, creative, and robust civil society where rich and connected white men rule women and minorities -- or whether the state alone will determine who has rights. All far right and religious right Republicans make their contribution to our common life, and they do not need the permission of the President Obama and his death panels to have access to children to molest, women to bully and gay people to discriminate against.

So this is not just a Catholic issue. This is not a Jewish issue. This is not an Orthodox, Mormon, or Muslim issue. It is an issue that binds together every American reactionary misogynist homophobic right winger that hates our not-born-here Muslim, communist, socialist, infanticide-loving “president.”

It is a sobering thing to contemplate our government enacting an unjust law to protect women that makes us bishops subject to the law rather than to our Bronze Age mythology. In the face of an unjust law that deprives WE THE BISHPOPS of the RIGHT to deprive women, children and gay Americans of their civil liberties an accommodation is not to be sought.

We the Bishops know that by raising a possibility of civil disobedience we can grab a headline or two make religious liberty a campaign issue and thereby do our bit to get a Republican Mormon elected while holding our noses because of course not long ago we would have had him burned at the stake.

The Lord Jesus came to liberate us from the dominion of sin and so he put Us Bishops in charge of women and gay people and children. We ask nothing less than that the Constitution and laws of the United States, which recognize our right to operate an anti-democratic institution within a democracy, be respected.

Finally to our brother bishops, let us exhort each other with fraternal charity to be bold, clear, and insistent in denying that we have been part of a cover-up of crimes against children, women, minorities and gay people by warning against threats to the rights of WE BISHOPS to boss the Americans around (including those "Catholics" who no longer obey us) who work in the multiform-billion dollar institutions we control. Let us attempt to be the “conscience of the state,” to use Rev. King’s words against the first black American president.

In the aftermath of the decision on contraceptive mandates, many others who hate President Obama spoke out forcefully sensing that "religious liberty" is a good and useful smokescreen to defeat that man with.

A Fortnight for Freedom

We suggest that the fourteen days from June 21—the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More and the Vigil of the Upcoming Republican National Convention—to July 4, Independence Day, be dedicated to this “fortnight for freedom to get rid of Obama by any means”—a great hymn of prayer for our country.

We invite you to join us in an urgent prayer for religious liberty by which we mean the defeat of President Obama, no matter what.


Frank Schaeffer is a writer, speaker, political activist and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

Top 50 Things Accomplished by President Barack Obama

 Washington Monthly / By Paul Glastris and Ryan Cooper and Siyu Hu


A look back at Obama's first term.
April 4, 2012  |    


1. Passed Health Care Reform: After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America's long-term fiscal problems.

2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.

3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide "living wills" to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers' money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.

4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.

5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year.

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry: In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases.

8. Recapitalized Banks: In the midst of financial crisis, approved controversial Treasury Department plan to lure private capital into the country's largest banks via "stress tests" of their balance sheets and a public-private fund to buy their "toxic" assets. Got banks back on their feet at essentially zero cost to the government.

9. Repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell": Ended 1990s-era restriction and formalized new policy allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military for the first time.

10. Toppled Moammar Gaddafi: In March 2011, joined a coalition of European and Arab governments in military action, including air power and naval blockade, against Gaddafi regime to defend Libyan civilians and support rebel troops. Gaddafi's forty-two-year rule ended when the dictator was overthrown and killed by rebels on October 20, 2011. No American lives were lost.

11. Told Mubarak to Go: On February 1, 2011, publicly called on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to accept reform or step down, thus weakening the dictator's position and putting America on the right side of the Arab Spring. Mubarak ended thirty-year rule when overthrown on February 11.

12. Reversed Bush Torture Policies: Two days after taking office, nullified Bush-era rulings that had allowed detainees in U.S. custody to undergo certain "enhanced" interrogation techniques considered inhumane under the Geneva Conventions. Also released the secret Bush legal rulings supporting the use of these techniques.

13. Improved America's Image Abroad: With new policies, diplomacy, and rhetoric, reversed a sharp decline in world opinion toward the U.S. (and the corresponding loss of "soft power") during the Bush years. From 2008 to 2011, favorable opinion toward the United States rose in ten of fifteen countries surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, with an average increase of 26 percent.

14. Kicked Banks Out of Federal Student Loan Program, Expanded Pell Grant Spending: As part of the 2010 health care reform bill, signed measure ending the wasteful decades-old practice of subsidizing banks to provide college loans. Starting July 2010 all students began getting their federal student loans directly from the federal government. Treasury will save $67 billion over ten years, $36 billion of which will go to expanding Pell Grants to lower-income students.

15. Created Race to the Top: With funds from stimulus, started $4.35 billion program of competitive grants to encourage and reward states for education reform.

16. Boosted Fuel Efficiency Standards: Released new fuel efficiency standards in 2011 that will nearly double the fuel economy for cars and trucks by 2025.

17. Coordinated International Response to Financial Crisis: To keep world economy out of recession in 2009 and 2010, helped secure from G-20 nations more than $500 billion for the IMF to provide lines of credit and other support to emerging market countries, which kept them liquid and avoided crises with their currencies.

18. Passed Mini Stimuli: To help families hurt by the recession and spur the economy as stimulus spending declined, signed series of measures (July 22, 2010; December 17, 2010; December 23, 2011) to extend unemployment insurance and cut payroll taxes.

19. Began Asia "Pivot": In 2011, reoriented American military and diplomatic priorities and focus from the Middle East and Europe to the Asian-Pacific region. Executed multipronged strategy of positively engaging China while reasserting U.S. leadership in the region by increasing American military presence and crafting new commercial, diplomatic, and military alliances with neighboring countries made uncomfortable by recent Chinese behavior.

20. Increased Support for Veterans: With so many soldiers coming home from Iraq and Iran with serious physical and mental health problems, yet facing long waits for services, increased 2010 Department of Veterans Affairs budget by 16 percent and 2011 budget by 10 percent. Also signed new GI bill offering $78 billion in tuition assistance over a decade, and provided multiple tax credits to encourage businesses to hire veterans.

21. Tightened Sanctions on Iran: In effort to deter Iran's nuclear program, signed Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (2010) to punish firms and individuals who aid Iran's petroleum sector. In late 2011 and early 2012, coordinated with other major Western powers to impose sanctions aimed at Iran's banks and with Japan, South Korea, and China to shift their oil purchases away from Iran.

22. Created Conditions to Begin Closing Dirtiest Power Plants: New EPA restrictions on mercury and toxic pollution, issued in December 2011, likely to lead to the closing of between sixty-eight and 231 of the nation's oldest and dirtiest coal-fired power plants. Estimated cost to utilities: at least $11 billion by 2016. Estimated health benefits: $59 billion to $140 billion. Will also significantly reduce carbon emissions and, with other regulations, comprises what's been called Obama's "stealth climate policy."

23. Passed Credit Card Reforms: Signed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (2009), which prohibits credit card companies from raising rates without advance notification, mandates a grace period on interest rate increases, and strictly limits overdraft and other fees.

24. Eliminated Catch-22 in Pay Equality Laws: Signed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, giving women who are paid less than men for the same work the right to sue their employers after they find out about the discrimination, even if that discrimination happened years ago. Under previous law, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the statute of limitations on such suits ran out 180 days after the alleged discrimination occurred, even if the victims never knew about it.

25. Protected Two Liberal Seats on the U.S. Supreme Court: Nominated and obtained confirmation for Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and third woman to serve, in 2009; and Elena Kagan, the fourth woman to serve, in 2010. They replaced David Souter and John Paul Stevens, respectively.

26. Improved Food Safety System: In 2011, signed FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which boosts the Food and Drug Administration's budget by $1.4 billion and expands its regulatory responsibilities to include increasing number of food inspections, issuing direct food recalls, and reviewing the current food safety practices of countries importing products into America.

27. Achieved New START Treaty: Signed with Russia (2010) and won ratification in Congress (2011) of treaty that limits each country to 1,550 strategic warheads (down from 2,200) and 700 launchers (down from more than 1,400), and reestablished and strengthened a monitoring and transparency program that had lapsed in 2009, through which each country can monitor the other.

28. Expanded National Service: Signed Serve America Act in 2009, which authorized a tripling of the size of AmeriCorps. Program grew 13 percent to 85,000 members across the country by 2012, when new House GOP majority refused to appropriate more funds for further expansion.

29. Expanded Wilderness and Watershed Protection: Signed Omnibus Public Lands Management Act (2009), which designated more than 2 million acres as wilderness, created thousands of miles of recreational and historic trails, and protected more than 1,000 miles of rivers.

30. Gave the FDA Power to Regulate Tobacco: Signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (2009). Nine years in the making and long resisted by the tobacco industry, the law mandates that tobacco manufacturers disclose all ingredients, obtain FDA approval for new tobacco products, and expand the size and prominence of cigarette warning labels, and bans the sale of misleadingly labeled "light" cigarette brands and tobacco sponsorship of entertainment events.

31. Pushed Federal Agencies to Be Green Leaders: Issued executive order in 2009 requiring all federal agencies to make plans to soften their environmental impacts by 2020. Goals include 30 percent reduction in fleet gasoline use, 26 percent boost in water efficiency, and sustainability requirements for 95 percent of all federal contracts. Because federal government is the country's single biggest purchaser of goods and services, likely to have ripple effects throughout the economy for years to come.

32. Passed Fair Sentencing Act: Signed 2010 legislation that reduces sentencing disparity between crack versus powder cocaine possessionfrom100 to1 to 18 to1.

33. Trimmed and Reoriented Missile Defense: Cut the Reagan-era "Star Wars" missile defense budget, saving $1.4 billion in 2010, and canceled plans to station antiballistic missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic in favor of sea-based defense plan focused on Iran and North Korea.

34. Began Post-Post-9/11 Military Builddown: After winning agreement from congressional Republicans and Democrats in summer 2011 budget deal to reduce projected defense spending by $450 billion, proposed new DoD budget this year with cuts of that size and a new national defense strategy that would shrink ground forces from 570,000 to 490,000 over the next ten years while increasing programs in intelligence gathering and cyberwarfare.

35. Let Space Shuttle Die and Killed Planned Moon Mission: Allowed the expensive ($1 billion per launch), badly designed, dangerous shuttle program to make its final launch on July 8, 2011. Cut off funding for even more bloated and problem-plagued Bush-era Constellation program to build moon base in favor of support for private-sector low-earth orbit ventures, research on new rocket technologies for long-distance manned flight missions, and unmanned space exploration, including the largest interplanetary rover ever launched, which will investigate Mars's potential to support life.

36. Invested Heavily in Renewable Technology: As part of the 2009 stimulus, invested $90 billion, more than any previous administration, in research on smart grids, energy efficiency, electric cars, renewable electricity generation, cleaner coal, and biofuels.

37. Crafting Next-Generation School Tests: Devoted $330 million in stimulus money to pay two consortia of states and universities to create competing versions of new K-12 student performance tests based on latest psychometric research. New tests could transform the learning environment in vast majority of public school classrooms beginning in 2014.

38. Cracked Down on Bad For-Profit Colleges: In effort to fight predatory practices of some for-profit colleges, Department of Education issued "gainful employment" regulations in 2011 cutting off commercially focused schools from federal student aid funding if more than 35 percent of former students aren't paying off their loans and/or if the average former student spends more than 12 percent of his or her total earnings servicing student loans.

39. Improved School Nutrition: In coordination with Michelle Obama, signed Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010 mandating $4.5 billion spending boost and higher nutritional and health standards for school lunches. New rules based on the law, released in January, double the amount of fruits and vegetables and require only whole grains in food served to students.

40. Expanded Hate Crimes Protections: Signed Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009), which expands existing hate crime protections to include crimes based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender, or disability, in addition to race, color, religion, or national origin.

41. Avoided Scandal: As of November 2011, served longer than any president in decades without a scandal, as measured by the appearance of the word "scandal" (or lack thereof) on the front page of the Washington Post.

42. Brokered Agreement for Speedy Compensation to Victims of Gulf Oil Spill: Though lacking statutory power to compel British Petroleum to act, used moral authority of his office to convince oil company to agree in 2010 to a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; $6.5 billion already paid out without lawsuits. By comparison, it took nearly two decades for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez Alaska oil spill case to receive $1.3 billion.

43. Created Recovery.gov: Web site run by independent board of inspectors general looking for fraud and abuse in stimulus spending, provides public with detailed information on every contract funded by $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Thanks partly to this transparency, board has uncovered very little fraud, and Web site has become national model: "The stimulus has done more to promote transparency at almost all levels of government than any piece of legislation in recent memory," reports Governing magazine.

44. Pushed Broadband Coverage: Proposed and obtained in 2011 Federal Communications Commission approval for a shift of $8 billion in subsidies away from landlines and toward broadband Internet for lower-income rural families.

45. Expanded Health Coverage for Children: Signed 2009 Children's Health Insurance Authorization Act, which allows the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to cover health care for 4 million more children, paid for by a tax increase on tobacco products.

46. Recognized the Dangers of Carbon Dioxide: In 2009, EPA declared carbon dioxide a pollutant, allowing the agency to regulate its production.

47. Expanded Stem Cell Research: In 2009, eliminated the Bush-era restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, which shows promise in treating spinal injuries, among many other areas.

48. Provided Payment to Wronged Minority Farmers: In 2009, signed Claims Resolution Act, which provided $4.6 billion in funding for a legal settlement with black and Native American farmers who the government cheated out of loans and natural resource royalties in years past.

49. Helped South Sudan Declare Independence: Helped South Sudan Declare Independence: Appointed two envoys to Sudan and personally attended a special UN meeting on the area. Through U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, helped negotiate a peaceful split in 2011.

50. Killed the F-22: In 2009, ended further purchases of Lockheed Martin single-seat, twin-engine, fighter aircraft, which cost $358 million apiece. Though the military had 187 built, the plane has never flown a single combat mission. Eliminating it saved $4 billion.

Paul Glastris, Ryan Cooper, and Siyu Hu collaborated on this article. Glastris is the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. Cooper and Hu are interns at the magazine.

Maddow On the War on Women

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Andrew Sullivan Responds to My Re-Posting His Article On Christianity

Andrew Sullivan posted this note from a reader and his reply on the Daily Dish A reader writes:

I was just glancing over at former Christianist now Greek Orthodox Frank Schaeffer's blog and saw that he was applauding your essay. He's posted it along with this note:"Once in a while I read something that "says" what I believe and at the same time clarifies that belief and makes it better than it was. Here is one such article. I share it here as my Lenten meditation. "

I also went into the comment section and one reader made a book suggestion. The reader was suggesting the novel "Chasing Francis" by Ian M. Cron. It's the story of a megachurch pastor who has a crisis of faith which leads to a visit to his uncle who is a Franciscan priest in Italy and a pilgrimage to know St. Francis and thereby his own faith. Money quote, as you would say:"When I left here, I wasn't sure what a Christian looked like anymore. My idea of what it meant to follow Jesus had run out of gas. I started feeling less like a pastor and more like a salesman of a consumerized Jesus I didn't believe in. Learning about Francis helped me fall in love with Jesus again - and with the church again, too."

That's an uncanny passage, but its resonance reminds me that we are often less alone than we thnk in the world. I have to say that writing that piece and having it out there has made me feel very depleted, even empty, and depressed. It's been such a glorious week of early Spring here in Washington and I have been struggling to put a face on.The worldliness of Washington which I imbibe daily, hourly can weigh on the soul after a while. And I have rarely felt it so acutely as I have these past few weeks. Maybe it's the news: our deadlocked, nasty polity; the total intractability of the Middle East; the backlashes that sting and the campaigns that drain. But all I want is Francis and through him Jesus.This Lent has been, well, Lent for me. Forgive me the indulgence of showing that someone out there gets what I am fallibly trying to express. I just needed it.http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/

Why I Go To Church

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Someone Finally Said What I Believe (Better Than I Could)

Once in a while I read something that "says" what I believe and at the same time clarifies that belief and makes it better than it was. Here is one such article. I share it here as my Lenten meditation. 


By Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Beast)

If you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History inWashington, D.C., you'll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was a mere 27 years old. Painstakingly removing those passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15). What did he edit out? He told us: "We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus." He removed what he felt were the "misconceptions" of Jesus' followers, "expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves." And it wasn't hard for him. He described the difference between the real Jesus and the evangelists' embellishments as "diamonds" in a "dunghill," glittering as "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man." Yes, he was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure.

When we think of Jefferson as the great architect of the separation of church and state, this, perhaps, was what he meant by "church": the purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity, purged of the agendas of those who had sought to use Jesus to advance their own power decades and centuries after Jesus' death. If Jefferson's greatest political legacy was the Declaration of Independence, this pure, precious moral teaching was his religious legacy. "I am a real Christian," Jefferson insisted against the fundamentalists and clerics of his time. "That is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus."

What were those doctrines? Not the supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms, reformations, and counterreformations. Jesus' doctrines were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus' teaching. That's why, in his final apolitical act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on the cross and forgave them, and loved them.

Politicized Faith

Whether or not you believe, as I do, in Jesus' divinity and resurrection—and in the importance of celebrating both on Easter Sunday—Jefferson's point is crucially important. Because it was Jesus' point. What does it matter how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do not live as these doctrines demand? What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself? If we return to what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be—rather than the unknowable intricacies of what we believe he was—he actually emerges more powerfully and more purely.

And more intensely relevant to our times. Jefferson's vision of a simpler, purer, apolitical Christianity couldn't be further from the 21st-century American reality. We inhabit a polity now saturated with religion. On one side, the Republican base is made up of evangelical Protestants who believe that religion must consume and influence every aspect of public life. On the other side, the last Democratic primary had candidates profess their faith in public forums, and more recentlyPresident Obama appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast, invoking Jesus to defend his plan for universal health care. The crisis of Christianity is perhaps best captured in the new meaning of the word "secular." It once meant belief in separating the spheres of faith and politics; it now means, for many, simply atheism. The ability to be faithful in a religious space and reasonable in a political one has atrophied before our eyes.

Organized Religion in Decline

Meanwhile, organized religion itself is in trouble. The Catholic Church's hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But in the last decade, whatever shred of moral authority that remained has evaporated. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up, an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children. I don't know what greater indictment of a church's authority there can be—except the refusal, even now, of the entire leadership to face their responsibility and resign. Instead, they obsess about others' sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays for birth control in health insurance. Inequality, poverty, even the torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues attract far less of their public attention.

For their part, the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. Evangelical Protestantism has stepped into the vacuum, but it has serious defects of its own. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores in his unsparing new book,Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, many suburban evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity, which teaches that living a Christian life will make you successful and rich. Others defend a rigid biblical literalism, adamantly wishing away a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus' ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory. Still others insist that the earth is merely 6,000 years old—something we now know by the light of reason and science is simply untrue. And what group of Americans have pollsters found to be most supportive of torturing terror suspects? Evangelical Christians. Something has gone very wrong. These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear before an amorphous "other." This version of Christianity could not contrast more strongly with Jesus' constant refrain: "Be not afraid." It would make Jefferson shudder.

It would also, one imagines, baffle Jesus of Nazareth. The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either Jefferson's or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers, anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant.

The Crisis of Our Time


All of which is to say something so obvious it is almost taboo: Christianity itself is in crisis. It seems no accident to me that so many Christians now embrace materialist self-help rather than ascetic self-denial—or that most Catholics, even regular churchgoers, have tuned out the hierarchy in embarrassment or disgust. Given this crisis, it is no surprise that the fastest-growing segment of belief among the young is atheism, which has leapt in popularity in the new millennium. Nor is it a shock that so many have turned away from organized Christianity and toward "spirituality," co-opting or adapting the practices of meditation or yoga, or wandering as lapsed Catholics in an inquisitive spiritual desert. The thirst for God is still there. How could it not be, when the profoundest human questions—Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue speck of a planet? What happens to us after death?—remain as pressing and mysterious as they've always been?

That's why polls show a huge majority of Americans still believing in a Higher Power. But the need for new questioning—of Christian institutions as well as ideas and priorities—is as real as the crisis is deep.

Back to Jesus

Where to start? Jefferson's act of cutting out those parts of the Bible that offended his moral and scientific imagination is one approach. But another can be found in the life of a well-to-do son of a fabric trader in 12th-century Italy who went off to fight a war with a neighboring city, saw his friends killed in battle in front of him, lived a year as a prisoner of war, and then experienced a clarifying vision that changed the world. In Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, Augustine Thompson cuts through the legends and apocryphal prayers to describe Saint Francis as he truly lived. Gone are the fashionable stories of an erstwhile hippie, communing with flowers and animals. Instead we have this typical young secular figure who suddenly found peace in service to those he previously shrank from: lepers, whose sores and lesions he tended to and whose company he sought—as much as for himself as for them.

The religious order that goes by his name began quite simply with a couple of friends who were captured by the sheer spiritual intensity of how Francis lived. His inspiration was even purer than Jefferson's. He did not cut out passages of the Gospels to render them more reasonable than they appear to the modern mind. He simply opened the Gospels at random—as was often the custom at the time—and found three passages. They told him to "sell what you have and give to the poor," to "take nothing for your journey," not even a second tunic, and to "deny himself" and follow the path of Jesus. That was it. So Francis renounced his inheritance, becoming homeless and earning food by manual labor. When that wouldn't feed him, he begged, just for food—with the indignity of begging part of his spiritual humbling.

Francis insisted on living utterly without power over others. As stories of his strangeness and holiness spread, more joined him and he faced a real dilemma: how to lead a group of men, and also some women, in an organization. Suddenly, faith met politics. And it tormented, wracked, and almost killed him. He had to be last, not first. He wanted to be always the "lesser brother," not the founder of an order. And so he would often go on pilgrimages and ask others to run things. Or he would sit at the feet of his brothers at communal meetings and if an issue could not be resolved without his say-so, he would whisper in the leader's ear.

A Vision of Holiness

As Jesus was without politics, so was Francis. As Jesus fled from crowds, so did Francis—often to bare shacks in woodlands, to pray and be with God and nature. It's critical to recall that he did not do this in rebellion against orthodoxy or even church authority. He obeyed orders from bishops and even the pope himself. His main obsession wasn't nature, which came to sublime fruition in his final "Canticle of the Sun," but the cleanliness of the cloths, chalices, and ornaments surrounding the holy eucharist.

His revulsion at even the hint of comfort or wealth could be extreme. As he lay dying and was offered a pillow to rest on, he slept through the night only to wake the next day in a rage, hitting the monk who had given him the pillow and recoiling in disgust at his own weakness in accepting its balm. One of his few commands was that his brothers never ride a horse; they had to walk or ride a donkey. What inspired his fellow Christians to rebuild and reform the church in his day was simply his own example of humility, service, and sanctity.

A modern person would see such a man as crazy, and there were many at the time who thought so too. He sang sermons in the streets, sometimes just miming them. He suffered intense bouts of doubt, self-loathing, and depression. He had visions. You could have diagnosed his postwar conversion as an outgrowth of posttraumatic-stress disorder. Or you can simply observe what those around him testified to: something special, unique, mysterious, holy. To reduce one's life to essentials, to ask merely for daily bread, forgiveness of others, and denial of self is, in many ways, a form of madness. It is also a form of liberation. It lets go of complexity and focuses on simplicity. Francis did not found an order designed to think or control. He insisted on the simplicity of manual labor, prayer, and the sacraments. That was enough for him.

Learning How to Live

It wouldn't be enough for most of us. And yet, there can be wisdom in the acceptance of mystery. I've pondered the Incarnation my whole life. I've read theology and history. I think I grasp what it means to be both God and human—but I don't think my understanding is any richer than my Irish grandmother's. Barely literate, she would lose herself in the rosary at mass. In her simplicity, beneath her veil in front of a cascade of flickering candles, she seemed to know God more deeply than I, with all my education and privilege, ever will.
This doesn't imply, as some claim, the privatization of faith, or its relegation to a subordinate sphere. There are times when great injustices—slavery, imperialism, totalitarianism, segregation—require spiritual mobilization and public witness. But from Gandhi to King, the greatest examples of these movements renounce power as well. They embrace nonviolence as a moral example, and that paradox changes the world more than politics or violence ever can or will. When politics is necessary, as it is, the kind of Christianity I am describing seeks always to translate religious truths into reasoned, secular arguments that can appeal to those of other faiths and none at all. But it also means, at times, renouncing Caesar in favor of the Christ to whom Jefferson, Francis, my grandmother, and countless generations of believers have selflessly devoted themselves.

The saints, after all, became known as saints not because of their success in fighting political battles, or winning a few news cycles, or funding an anti-abortion super PAC. They were saints purely and simply because of the way they lived. And this, of course, was Jefferson's deeply American insight: "No man can conform his faith to the dictates of another. The life and essence of religion consists in the internal persuasion or belief of the mind."

Jefferson feared that the alternative to a Christianity founded on "internal persuasion" was a revival of the brutal, bloody wars of religion that America was founded to escape. And what he grasped in his sacrilegious mutilation of a sacred text was the core simplicity of Jesus' message of renunciation. He believed that stripped of the doctrines of the Incarnation, Resurrection, and the various miracles, the message of Jesus was the deepest miracle. And that it was radically simple. It was explained in stories, parables, and metaphors—not theological doctrines of immense complexity. It was proven by his willingness to submit himself to an unjustified execution. The cross itself was not the point; nor was the intense physical suffering he endured. The point was how he conducted himself through it all—calm, loving, accepting, radically surrendering even the basic control of his own body and telling us that this was what it means to truly transcend our world and be with God. Jesus, like Francis, was a homeless person, as were his closest followers. He possessed nothing—and thereby everything.

Christianity Resurrected

I have no concrete idea how Christianity will wrestle free of its current crisis, of its distractions and temptations, and above all its enmeshment with the things of this world. But I do know it won't happen by even more furious denunciations of others, by focusing on politics rather than prayer, by concerning ourselves with the sex lives and heretical thoughts of others rather than with the constant struggle to liberate ourselves from what keeps us from God. What Jefferson saw in Jesus of Nazareth was utterly compatible with reason and with the future; what Saint Francis trusted in was the simple, terrifying love of God for Creation itself. That never ends.

This Christianity comes not from the head or the gut, but from the soul. It is as meek as it is quietly liberating. It does not seize the moment; it lets it be. It doesn't seek worldly recognition, or success, and it flees from power and wealth. It is the religion of unachievement. And it is not afraid. In the anxious, crammed lives of our modern twittering souls, in the materialist obsessions we cling to for security in recession, in a world where sectarian extremism threatens to unleash mass destruction, this sheer Christianity, seeking truth without the expectation of resolution, simply living each day doing what we can to fulfill God's will, is more vital than ever. It may, in fact, be the only spiritual transformation that can in the end transcend the nagging emptiness of our late-capitalist lives, or the cult of distracting contemporaneity, or the threat of apocalyptic war where Jesus once walked. You see attempts to find this everywhere—from experimental spirituality to resurgent fundamentalism. Something inside is telling us we need radical spiritual change.

But the essence of this change has been with us, and defining our own civilization, for two millennia. And one day soon, when politics and doctrine and pride recede, it will rise again.

Three Cheers For Our "Inevitable" Decline!

When I was on the road as a religious right sidekick to my evangelist father (Francis Schaeffer) in the 1970s and 80s Dad and I did what all religious right leaders did back then: We predicted social breakdown and doom unless America "returned to God."
I'm long since out of the Back-to-the-Bible business and have written books like Crazy For God explaining why I got out. But little has changed. Today religious leaders from the Roman Catholic bishops to the evangelicals not to mention many a Republican running for office are still pitching the old God or Doom "choice." 
Our somewhat gleeful pitch went something like this: "With the loss of Christian absolutes our formerly Christian nation turned away from God so social chaos will engulf our country. With the sexual revolution we see family breakdown, the rise of gay 'rights' and the rise of family-destroying feminism. The result will be increased crime, a collapsing economy and the loss of our place in the world."
I could quote literally thousands of silly evangelical right wing religious leaders (including me!) making this sort of prediction. Here is the typical doom mantra as expressed by one of my late father's followers and most avid imitators, evangelical guru Os Guinness: from his book No God but God/Breaking With the Idols of Our Age:

"The American republic is nearing the climax of a generation-long crisis of cultural authority that calls into question it's very character and strength. The problem is not simply 'out there' – in either such obvious problems as drugs and crime or such common explanations as the influence of family breakdown, moral relativism, secularism, neo-paganism, and the New Age Movement. Nor is the crisis of cultural authority simply a matter of the 'culture wars'…. Instead, American beliefs, ideals and tradition - civic as well as religious – are losing their compelling power to shape and restrain lives in both the private and public spheres."

We would point to crime rates in New York City in the late 1970s as "proof" of what was about to happen to the whole country. And we'd point out that it was no wonder New York was such a dangerous place given that it was so secularized. Our thinking was that only a conservative lifestyle what we called "family values" could produce social stability. We attributed the very rule of law to our white middle class Protestant values.
So 30 years-plus down the historical road how did our certainties about decline and doom work out?
Well, following our logic there must have been a fundamentalist revival and reformation in New York City! How else could we have explained the huge drop in crime? And since US productivity has steadily increased at the same time as divorce rates went up and gays came out of the closet these divorced and gay Americans all must have secretly accepted Jesus!
Otherwise how could the Godless "they" have become the most productive, crime free and peaceful Americans in history?
In fact the very opposite of the social breakdown we predicted has happened. Those Godless abortion-loving, philandering, divorced gay New Yorkers and other Americans in most urban areas are experiencing the lowest crime rates in almost half a century. And when they go to work it is as part of the most productive generation in American history. And this is at the very time evangelicals are losing their influence over the country. (They backed Rick Santorum and that's not working out too well not to mention that their own young people are leaving their churches in droves and are mostly as pro-gay rights as most other Americans.)
And if anyone is crazy enough to attack us our mighty unparalleled military -- full of gays and women – can exact terrible retribution around the globe.
Moreover the greatest creative leap forward in human history since the Renaissance   – the invention of the internet and everything that goes with it – is the creation of post-hippie Godless America.
Sure we have big problems, but here's the point: Not one of our actual problems has anything to do with what we said would happen. In fact the opposite is true. Our problems relate directly to the activities of often conservative religious people and their ideas. Global warming, the fact that Jim Crow is alive and well in our new American apartheid system directed against our mostly incarcerated black male population, the war on women by Roman Catholic bishops and Republican evangelicals… these things come from the heart of the conservative ethos.
It is the Jewish/Christian belief in the exploitation of nature that has led to global warming. It is the race-baiting conservatives using the Bible as their guide that has kept racism alive here. It is the evangelical/Roman Catholic belief that the misogynistic Bible is literally true that has kept the anti-woman agenda alive and the gay bashing going.
Our most pressing problems can be fairly laid at the door of conservative favorites from corporate American capitalist greed, to right wing think tanks and political leaders and the neo conservatives who have done so much to abuse our military and reduce our international prestige by goading us into one useless war after another. And meanwhile corporations and billionaires have been freed to wreak havoc on our political system by a Republican conservative Supreme Court. 
America has yet to "turn back to the Bible." The decline (as Guinness put it) where "American beliefs, ideals and tradition - civic as well as religious – are losing their compelling power to shape and restrain lives in both the private and public spheres" continues.
And we're doing just fine. Three cheers for our "decline!"


Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy For God. He is on an extended speaking tour and may be contacted to book him for speaking engagements at Frankschaeffer.com