Frank Schaeffer's Blog, page 5
February 22, 2012
February 21, 2012
How the Far Right Roman Catholics and Evangelical Taliban Trapped the President
I'm stunned by the fact that the US media doesn't seem to know that the President Obama v. the US Catholic bishops -- AKA "religious freedom" aka "birth control v. women" -- affair is the result of a well laid plan by a few Religious Right Extremists that has succeeded in entrapping the President just as these extremists planned.
The bishops have been led to attack the President by Republican operative/Professor/anti-abortion activist Robert George of Princeton University. He has achieved this through his close association with Charles Colson, evangelical far right leader and Watergate felon.
They laid their deliberate trap for the President by writing something called the Manhattan Declaration, an anti-Obama document (that never mentions the president by name) signed by hundreds of evangelical leaders and the Roman Catholic bishops.
Non-Evangelicals with political agendas like Robert George have cashed in on the Evangelicals' willingness to lend their numbers and influence to one moral crusade after another, or rather I should say, to one political crusade after another masquerading as moral crusades.
Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George and former McCain adviser, is an antiabortion, anti-Obama, anti-gay-rights, and anti-stem-cell-research "profamily" activist, and he has found ways to effectively carry on the loony Reconstructionist/Theonomist (put America "back" on Biblical law aka "natural law) crusade started by some Far right fundamentalists in the 1970s. (I explain who these "Reconstructionists" were in my book Sex, Mom and God)
George's brainchild: the "Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience" was published in 2009 as an anti-Obama manifesto, and many Evangelical leaders signed on. It was written as a direct reaction to the Obama Presidency. It was a trap that launched a fishing expedition to find any issue that might gain traction with which to beat the President in 2012. That could have been gay rights, or stem cell research. It turned out to be contraception.
The "Manhattan Declaration" reads:
"We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life actnor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's."
In case you've never heard of George, he's been a one-man "brain trust" for the Religious Right and the Far Right of the Republican Party as well as for the ultraconservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Here's how the New York Times introduced him to its readers:
"Robert George] has parlayed a 13th-century Catholic philosophy [the natural law theory] into real political influence. Glenn Beck, the Fox News talker and a big George fan, likes to introduce him as "one of the biggest brains in America," or, on one broadcast, "Superman of the Earth." Karl Rove told me he considers George a rising star on the right and a leading voice in persuading President George W. Bush to restrict embryonic stem-cell research.Newt Gingrich called him "an important and growing influence" on the conservative movement, especially on matters like abortion and marriage. "If there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy," the conservative Catholic journal Crisis concluded a few years ago, "its leaders probably meet in George's kitchen."
I met George when we were both on a panel discussion entitled "Campaign '08: Race, Gender, and Religion" at Princeton University. We butted heads over what he'd been mischaracterizing as presidential candidate Obama's "proabortion" position.
At the time we met on that (six-person) panel, George was one of McCain's key advisors and I (a former Republican) was blasting George's man for having sold out to the Religious Right, which McCain had once called "agents of intolerance."
In introducing myself to the Princeton audience, I mentioned that McCain had written a glowing endorsement for one of my several books on military-civilian relations. I also admitted that I'd actively worked for McCain in the 2000 presidential primaries against W. Bush by appearing—at McCain advisor Mark Salter's oft-repeated urgent request—on several religious and other conservative talk shows (for instance, on Ollie North's top-rated talk show) on McCain's behalf. (In those days McCain was being attacked by the likes of Religious Right leader James Dobson for not being "pro-life" enough.)
George's trap for the President, the "Manhattan Declaration" was instantly signed by more than 150 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 Goeorge 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 proff that they had grass roots 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: Write a deceleration, get 150 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!
If there is one thing all Christians should have learned by now, it's that we—of all people—should never, ever cast aspersions on anyone else's sex life. That is especially true for the international pedophile ring otherwise known as the Roman Catholic Church.
When it comes to pointing the finger over sexual "sin," the worldwide Christian community—from the halls of the Vatican and many a Greek, Russian, or Arab Orthodox bishop's palace, to an Evangelical "home church" established in somebody's basement two minutes ago—is in the morally compromised position of a violent habitual rapist criticizing a shoplifter for stealing a candy bar.
We're talking not about "a few bad apples" but about the whole edifice of religion top to bottom. Having the Catholic bishops hold forth on anything to do with sexual morality is like being lectured by the KKK on race relations. An impartial inquiry into child abuse at Roman Catholic institutions in Ireland found that the top Church leaders knew that sexual abuse was endemic in boys and girls institutions. A nine-year government inquiry investigated a sixty-year period when more than 35,000 children were placed in a network of "reformatories," "industrial schools," and "workhouses." The children suffered physical and/or sexual abuse that more than two thousand witnesses confirmed to the commission.
As the BBC has pointed out in many stories, Church authorities in league with government enablers were placing children in these camps until the 1980s. Physical and emotional abuse was a built-in deliberate feature of these "homes" for young men and women. The inquiry proved that child rape defines Irish Catholicism as surely as the sign of the cross once did. The state-ordered investigation into cover-ups by the Dublin Archdiocese revealed that church officials had shielded scores of priests from criminal investigation over several decades and did not report any crimes to the police until the mid-1990s.
This was much the same behavior as happened in the United States: The Church's leaders spent much more time protecting their institution than their flock, let alone children. For instance, an acquaintance of mine in the Boston area, Cardinal Bernard Law, with whom I'd worked on various Massachusetts "pro-life" initiatives and fund-raising efforts, left Boston for Rome "in a hurry" after he was being investigated for enabling child-molesting priests to remain in ministry.
I have a photograph of the two of us (back when Law was a mere archbishop), with Law sitting next to me at the head table at a banquet held by Massachusetts Citizens for Life, where we both spoke. Law was a hand-on-your-forearm political operative. He possessed the sort of smoothness that is achieved only after years of deftly "handling" people in a climb to power. Those sorts of political instincts depend on the practitioner being perceived as a "good guy" and had transformed Law into a glad-handing, remember-everyone's-first-name shell of jovial bonhomie.
After his "fall" Law was whisked off to the Vatican and "reassigned." Then Pope John Paul kept him on as a cardinal!
To plumb the depths of the tortured "reasoning" behind the Roman Catholic version of the anti-contraceptive crusade of ideologues like George are trying to inject into American politics, consider the writing of Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. She's a heroine to today's leading conservative Roman Catholics. She wrote passionately in defense of the papal prohibition of contraception:
"In considering an action, we need always to judge several things about ourselves. First: is the sort of act we contemplate doing something that it's all right to do? Second: are our further or surrounding intentions all right? Third: is the spirit in which we do it all right? Contraceptive intercourse fails on the first count; and to intend such an act is not to intend a marriage act at all, whether or no we're married. An act of ordinary intercourse in marriage at an infertile time, though, is a perfectly ordinary act of married intercourse, and it will be bad, if it is bad, only on the second or third counts.If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here—not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can't be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example.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."
Here is how anti-Obama "prolife" Robert George lauded this insane "argument" in his gushing Anscombe obituary:
"In 1968, when much of the rest of the Catholic intellectual world reacted with shock and anger to Pope Paul VI's reaffirmation of Catholic teaching regarding the immorality of contraception, the Geach-Anscombe family toasted the announcement with champagne. Her defense of the teaching in the essay "Contraception and Chastity" is an all-too-rare example of rigorous philosophical argumentation on matters of sexual ethics. Catholics who demand the liberalization of their Church's teachings have yet to come to terms with Anscombe's arguments."
The antiabortion Republican shock troops led by the likes of extremists like George and Colson have found their "issue" -- so-called Religious liberty, AKA the right to deny women choice and even contraceptives. And if the President tries to do anything about this he's "anti-religious."
Enter Gorge clone and disciple Santorum, and voilà! Welcome to the new American theocracy.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book is 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
February 5, 2012
President Obama Will Be Vindicated
As Ryan Lizza writes in the New Yorker: "Obama didn't remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street."
So when are President Obama's critics, people like Paul Krugman and Mitt Romney, going to offer President Obama an apology? Both have often loudly predicted that he made the economy worse and was putting America on the wrong economic path. Both are being proved wrong by the economic comeback we are in. I mention them not to pick on Krugman, who I respect or even on Romney (who I regard as a vapid twit bought and paid for by corporate interests) but to make a point: President Obama is going to have the last laugh on his critics, no matter what ideological spectrum they hail from.
President Obama is succeeding in spite of the fact that he's been up against a Republican Party willing to destroy the economy in order to destroy him.
As the New Yorker notes:
"Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, 'It's Even Worse Than It Looks,' they write, 'One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.'"
We all know the Right's critique of the President has failed. Rush Limbaugh did not get his wish! But what of the Left? The tone of the criticism of the President on lefty blogs has been persistently negative and none too prescient. According to his critics on the Left President Obama "sold out to Wall Street." He didn't "bring the change he promised," he "is just like the Republicans," etc., etc.
And I'm not even counting the shrillest voices on the Left and Right who have accused President Obama of either/or undermining national security -- by being a "secret terror-codling Muslim" -- or using drones to "murder civilians," because "he is just like the Republicans and part of the corporatist elite."
I happen to be a white 59-year-old former Republican. I happen to be a former religious right leader who came to my senses in the mid 1980s and quit the hate and fear religious right machine. (I explain about why I left the religious right in my book Crazy For God.) I also happen to have been one of the most vocal (and one of the first) Huffington Post bloggers. I was blogging there when we emailed in blogs then were called by the person who posted them. I supported then Senator Obama, just about every week during the Democratic primary season in 08. Back then I had lots of company at HP from the top down. It seemed we were all rooting for Obama.
Not anymore. I still blog at HP and other sites like Alternet but have actually been kicked off several progressive sites for continuing to support the president. (No kidding.)
About 6 months into his presidency lots of bloggers at HP and elsewhere seemed to run out of patience not just with President Obama but with reality itself. President Obama "disappointed" them. I stuck with the President because I believed then, and believe now, that he is smarter, kinder, more reliable and morally superior to his critics let alone to the political alternatives. I also know that the presidency is not as powerful as many people seem to think it is including many liberal commentators who claim to live in a fact-based world. I'm grateful if any president can get anything good done at all.
The Left and Right have united in predicting President Obama's failure and even seeming to root for it, if nothing else to prove they were right. So will the "sky is falling" prophets of doom on the Left and Right -- who have made it a national pastime to predict the "failure" of the Obama presidency -- start to climb down now that all their dire predictions are falling flat re the economy (that Obama did not ruin!) and wars ending (that Obama did not start!)?
The wars are ending and the economy is coming back. Good for the country. Bad for the doom pundits of the Left and Right.
Anyone who thinks Obama didn't "bring change" fast enough is living in a fact-free dreamland. First, they have no to little idea about how limited the president's powers are. Second, they have no idea what this president in particular faced. We'll get the change promised but it will take 2 full terms and it will never live up to the expectations of the utopian groupies of the Left who thought they'd voted for a messiah not a mere president.
So why has change taken "so long"?
Because:
President Obama inherited a far bigger economic and foreign policy mess than anyone predicted....The Republicans obstructed our first black president far more ruthlessly (and with racist overtones) than any (sane) person would have predicted...President Obama's "friends" on the Left were as shortsighted and mean-spirited as his enemies on the Right...And until the Occupy Wall Street Movement came along the President wasn't getting the help he needed from the street to make the unfairness of American life that he's trying to fix into an issue.
The President - thanks to Occupy Wall Street – now controls the debate with the handy phrase of "the 1% v the 99%." Occupy Wall Street did more for moving the country foreword and did more to help President Obama, than all the President's lefty critics combined. Occupy Wall Street is doing what MLK and the civil rights movement did for Johnson: it provided the heat Johnson could then use to move his agenda forward. Obama too now has the wind of change at his back. Sure, I like anyone else wish for more action from the President on many fronts. For instance I wish the President had not been so in love with the idea that we could be moving into a post-partisan world of cooperation. As the New Yorker put it,
"Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics now seem not just naïve but delusional. At this political juncture, there appears to be only one real model of effective governance in Washington: partisan dominance, in which a President with large majorities in Congress can push through an ambitious agenda… Many of Obama's liberal allies have been disillusioned, too. When Steve Jobs last met the President, in February, 2011, he was most annoyed by Obama's pessimism—he seemed to dismiss every idea Jobs proffered. 'The president is very smart,' Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. 'But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done. It infuriates me.' "Yet our political system was designed to be infuriating. As George Edwards notes in his study of Presidents as facilitators, the American system "is too complicated, power too decentralized, and interests too diverse for one person, no matter how extraordinary, to dominate." Obama, like many Presidents, came to office talking like a director. But he ended up governing like a facilitator, which is what the most successful Presidents have always done. Even Lincoln famously admitted, 'I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events controlled me.'"Given my religious right background I'm one of the President's most unlikely fans. Maybe that's because I really know the alternative-- from the inside. I fear the alternative to the President - far right loons of the Tea Party/evangelical religious right ilk -- and have never felt I had the luxury of being an armchair lefty critic demoralizing Obama's supporters because he's the only person who stands between the village idiots and us. Try Romney and the Mormons on for size if you think Obama has been "slow" to embrace gay marriage! Try Gingrich and the "Christian Zionists" if you think we tilted too far to the far right West Bank settlers and Israeli hardliners! Try the Koch brothers' cronies if you think our president is "owned by Wall Street!" I know what the stakes are. I know from the inside just how deranged, corrupt and awful the marriage between Wall Street and the unwashed Tea Party/Religious Right anti-abortion, racist, homophobic and misogynist mob really is. I know that these people will buy elections then try and turn America into a theocracy -- on matters of personal morality -- and into an Ayn Rand libertarian and heartless swamp where the 1% eat the rest of us-- when it comes to the economy. So I've been grateful that a man of integrity, brains and kindness and reasonable moderation (not to mention moderate progressive religious faith) is leading America. I didn't just read about the alternative and "other" side. I was the other side and know what they are capable of. When we hear that jobless numbers are going down faster than expected, that shoppers spent money over the holidays, that economic forecasts are being revised upward, that we are out of Iraq, that bin Laden is dead, that gays can serve in the military, that Wall Street and the banks are now under investigation, that a woman's right to choose is being protected... it's time for a reassessment of the President's critic's. And NO I'm NOT saying that any president is above rebuke when you think he's wrong. But fair rebuke is one thing. The endless drip, drip of mindless "disappointed" negativity that has been the hallmark not just of Fox News but has been found on progressive blogs too, is another thing altogether. Enough already! Or at least have the integrity to admit when you're wrong. The President keeps proving himself smarter than his detractors. More power to him. President Obama will win in 2012. And 4 years later all that will be remembered about his critics is that they were impatient, deluded and wrong. Given what was on his plate when he took office and the fact that we're successfully struggling out of both recession and 2 war -- and succeeding -- President Obama is one of the best of the American presidents already. His second term will consolidate that verdict and bodes greatness as his legacy. 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
February 4, 2012
Proof Psitive: The Tea Party/Religious Right are the Dumbest People in the World
Here's an article that says it all. What do you think? Please add your own horror stories in the "How Stupid Can These People Get?" category in the comment section below. Thanks!
Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot
(From the New York Times)
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.
Many are suspicious of environmental initiatives. Ed Elswick, a county supervisor, voiced criticism at last month's meeting.
They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.
"Down the road, this data will be used against you," warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county's paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.
Local officials say they would dismiss such notions except that the growing and often heated protests are having an effect.
In Maine, the Tea Party-backed Republican governor canceled a project to ease congestion along the Route 1 corridor after protesters complained it was part of the United Nations plot. Similar opposition helped doom a high-speed train line in Florida. And more than a dozen cities, towns and counties, under new pressure, have cut off financing for a program that offers expertise on how to measure and cut carbon emissions.
"It sounds a little on the weird side, but we've found we ignore it at our own peril," said George Homewood, a vice president of the American Planning Association's chapter in Virginia.
The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.
In January, the Republican Party adopted its own resolution against what it called "the destructive and insidious nature" of Agenda 21. And Newt Gingrich took aim at it during a Republican debate in November.
Tom DeWeese, the founder of the American Policy Center, a Warrenton, Va.-based foundation that advocates limited government, says he has been a leader in the opposition to Agenda 21 since 1992. Until a few years ago, he had few followers beyond a handful of farmers and ranchers in rural areas. Now, he is a regular speaker at Tea Party events.
Membership is rising, Mr. DeWeese said, because what he sees as tangible Agenda 21-inspired controls on water and energy use are intruding into everyday life. "People may be acting out at some of these meetings, and I do not condone that. But their elected representatives are not listening and they are frustrated."
Fox News has also helped spread the message. In June, after President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Rural Council to "enhance federal engagement with rural communities," Fox programs linked the order to Agenda 21. A Fox commentator, Eric Bolling, said the council sounded "eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one world order."
The movement has been particularly effective in Tea Party strongholds like Virginia, Florida and Texas, but the police have been called in to contain protests in states including Maryland and California, where opponents are fighting laws passed in recent years to encourage development around public transportation hubs and dense areas in an effort to save money and preserve rural communities.
One group has become a particular target. Iclei — Local Governments for Sustainability USA, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit, sells software and offers advice to communities looking to reduce their carbon footprints. A City Council meeting in Missoula, Mont., in December got out of hand and required police intervention over $1,200 in dues to Iclei.
At a Board of Supervisors meeting in Roanoke in late January, Cher McCoy, a Tea Party member from nearby Lexington, Va., generated sustained applause when she warned: "They get you hooked, and then Agenda 21 takes over. Your rights are stripped one by one."
Echoing other protesters, Ms. McCoy identified smart meters, devices being installed by utility companies to collect information on energy use, as part of the conspiracy. "The real job of smart meters is to spy on you and control you — when you can and cannot use electrical appliances," she said.
Ilana Preuss, vice president of Smart Growth America, a national coalition of nonprofits that supports economic development while conserving open spaces and farmland, said, "The real danger is not that they will get rid of some piece of software from Iclei" but that "people will be too scared to have a conversation about local development. And that is an important conversation to be having."
In some cases, the protests have not been large, but they are powerful because officials are concerned about the Tea Party.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Gingrich has called Agenda 21 an important issue and has said, "I would explicitly repudiate what Obama has done on Agenda 21."
The Republican National Committee resolution, passed without fanfare on Jan. 13, declared, "The United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called 'sustainable development' views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms; all as destructive to the environment."
Jeremy Rabkin, a professor of law at George Mason University specializing in sovereignty issues, said there were "entirely legitimate concerns about international standards that come into American law without formal ratification by the Senate."
But some local officials argue that the programs that protesters see as part of the conspiracy are entirely created by local governments with the express intent of saving money — the central goal of the Tea Party movement.
Planning groups, several of which said they had never heard of Agenda 21 until protesters burst in, are counterorganizing.
Summer Frederick, the project manager for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission in Charlottesville, Va., which withdrew its dues to Iclei and its support from a national mayors' agreement on climate change late last year after a campaign by protesters, now conducts seminars on how to deal with Agenda 21 critics. (Among her tips: remove the podium and microphones, which can make it "very easy for a critic to hijack a meeting.")
Roanoke's Board of Supervisors voted 3 to 2 to renew its Iclei financing after many residents voiced their support.
"The Tea Party people say they want nonpolluted air and clean water and everything we promote and support, but they also say it's a communist movement," said Charlotte Moore, a supervisor who voted yes. "I really don't understand what they want."
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and KATE ZERNIKE
Published: February 3, 2012 New York Times
Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot
(From the New York Times)
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.
Many are suspicious of environmental initiatives. Ed Elswick, a county supervisor, voiced criticism at last month's meeting.
They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.
"Down the road, this data will be used against you," warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county's paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.
Local officials say they would dismiss such notions except that the growing and often heated protests are having an effect.
In Maine, the Tea Party-backed Republican governor canceled a project to ease congestion along the Route 1 corridor after protesters complained it was part of the United Nations plot. Similar opposition helped doom a high-speed train line in Florida. And more than a dozen cities, towns and counties, under new pressure, have cut off financing for a program that offers expertise on how to measure and cut carbon emissions.
"It sounds a little on the weird side, but we've found we ignore it at our own peril," said George Homewood, a vice president of the American Planning Association's chapter in Virginia.
The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.
In January, the Republican Party adopted its own resolution against what it called "the destructive and insidious nature" of Agenda 21. And Newt Gingrich took aim at it during a Republican debate in November.
Tom DeWeese, the founder of the American Policy Center, a Warrenton, Va.-based foundation that advocates limited government, says he has been a leader in the opposition to Agenda 21 since 1992. Until a few years ago, he had few followers beyond a handful of farmers and ranchers in rural areas. Now, he is a regular speaker at Tea Party events.
Membership is rising, Mr. DeWeese said, because what he sees as tangible Agenda 21-inspired controls on water and energy use are intruding into everyday life. "People may be acting out at some of these meetings, and I do not condone that. But their elected representatives are not listening and they are frustrated."
Fox News has also helped spread the message. In June, after President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Rural Council to "enhance federal engagement with rural communities," Fox programs linked the order to Agenda 21. A Fox commentator, Eric Bolling, said the council sounded "eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one world order."
The movement has been particularly effective in Tea Party strongholds like Virginia, Florida and Texas, but the police have been called in to contain protests in states including Maryland and California, where opponents are fighting laws passed in recent years to encourage development around public transportation hubs and dense areas in an effort to save money and preserve rural communities.
One group has become a particular target. Iclei — Local Governments for Sustainability USA, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit, sells software and offers advice to communities looking to reduce their carbon footprints. A City Council meeting in Missoula, Mont., in December got out of hand and required police intervention over $1,200 in dues to Iclei.
At a Board of Supervisors meeting in Roanoke in late January, Cher McCoy, a Tea Party member from nearby Lexington, Va., generated sustained applause when she warned: "They get you hooked, and then Agenda 21 takes over. Your rights are stripped one by one."
Echoing other protesters, Ms. McCoy identified smart meters, devices being installed by utility companies to collect information on energy use, as part of the conspiracy. "The real job of smart meters is to spy on you and control you — when you can and cannot use electrical appliances," she said.
Ilana Preuss, vice president of Smart Growth America, a national coalition of nonprofits that supports economic development while conserving open spaces and farmland, said, "The real danger is not that they will get rid of some piece of software from Iclei" but that "people will be too scared to have a conversation about local development. And that is an important conversation to be having."
In some cases, the protests have not been large, but they are powerful because officials are concerned about the Tea Party.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Gingrich has called Agenda 21 an important issue and has said, "I would explicitly repudiate what Obama has done on Agenda 21."
The Republican National Committee resolution, passed without fanfare on Jan. 13, declared, "The United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called 'sustainable development' views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms; all as destructive to the environment."
Jeremy Rabkin, a professor of law at George Mason University specializing in sovereignty issues, said there were "entirely legitimate concerns about international standards that come into American law without formal ratification by the Senate."
But some local officials argue that the programs that protesters see as part of the conspiracy are entirely created by local governments with the express intent of saving money — the central goal of the Tea Party movement.
Planning groups, several of which said they had never heard of Agenda 21 until protesters burst in, are counterorganizing.
Summer Frederick, the project manager for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission in Charlottesville, Va., which withdrew its dues to Iclei and its support from a national mayors' agreement on climate change late last year after a campaign by protesters, now conducts seminars on how to deal with Agenda 21 critics. (Among her tips: remove the podium and microphones, which can make it "very easy for a critic to hijack a meeting.")
Roanoke's Board of Supervisors voted 3 to 2 to renew its Iclei financing after many residents voiced their support.
"The Tea Party people say they want nonpolluted air and clean water and everything we promote and support, but they also say it's a communist movement," said Charlotte Moore, a supervisor who voted yes. "I really don't understand what they want."
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and KATE ZERNIKE
Published: February 3, 2012 New York Times
January 29, 2012
God's Politics? (Not So Much So Let's Wild Goose in June)
Religion and politics seem to be in a mutual suicide pact worldwide. From the Taliban to Iran from the Republican Party, to the Roman Catholic bishops faith and politics have become interchangeable-- and they are killing each other.
I helped my theologian father, Francis Schaeffer; launch evangelical Christianity into an American political force in the 1970s and 80s. He became one of the fathers of the religious right. My father remains an inspiration to modern conservatives. But these conservatives are now so radically political about their religion that they are actually revolutionaries masquerading as conservatives.
I am now a critic of the movement my father and I helped launch. Its power is corrupting both religion and politics. Exhibit A is the takeover of the Republican Party by fanatics.
Since when did one have to pass what amounts to a religious litmus test to be a Republican? Maybe that is why my old friend congressman Jack Kemp once called me and congratulated me for getting out of the religious right and said. "These people are going to destroy the Republican Party."
Jack was a genuine conservative not a religious fanatic using politics to advance a religious agenda. One could disagree with his economic ideas but still be his friend. That was because he didn't think you were evil if you disagreed with him, only that you were mistaken.
Today as we've seen in the demonization of President Obama by the religious right/Republican Party if you disagree with the "correct" answers to the moral/political tests the right forces on everyone you are considered evil, in fact to use the religious term, you are lost. In fact God hates you.
Thus you are fighting God and God strikes down the unjust in the Bible. Thus politics becomes ruthless. The problem is that God is God and therefore all-knowing (at least that's the idea) but people aren't. So when fallible humans get set to write people off as evil and want to politically strike them down the hubris knows no bounds. Nor does the hard edge ever soften.
Religion needs to be rescued from its political entanglements because religion is about mercy, humility and mystery. In the biblical account an all knowing God may strike down the "unjust" but note: This God is portrayed as all-knowing. No political leaders can make that claim!
So the "model" of biblical God-dispensed retribution is a bad fit for flawed dumb creatures like us!
How do we recapture a spirituality that is not held hostage to the politics of confrontation? It's so politicized; it's so black and white that it's giving religion a bad name.
The modern Republican Party is 100 percent in the grasp of conservative evangelical Christians, far right Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews (the "Israel lobby") and Mormons. Its leading candidates either are part of this religious right, or have to pretend to be. The fact that all these people have to pander to that sensibility is instructive.
My parents founded a community, L'Abri, in Switzerland, in 1955 which became a haven for people engaged in scrutinizing Western civilization from evangelical Christian perspectives. In the 1970s and '80s, my dad Francis Schaeffer and his books, such as "How Should We Then Live?" and "Whatever Happened to the Human Race?" influenced thousands of evangelical Christians, including Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Jack Kemp.
I embraced my parents' fundamentalism, became an activist in promoting it, then gradually came to reject it. But I have not rejected faith. Faith need not be opposed to science, or operate its own set of facts about the world. The confrontations between modernity and reason and faith are not necessary. They only become part of "faith" if faith becomes political and thus stops embracing the concept of doubt. And without doubt -- if nothing else doubt about our own goodness -- faith dies.
But in today's political/religious climate faith and politics have become so interchangeable that Mitt Romney being a Mormon is an "issue" with evangelicals. And Romney has to pretend he believes everything on the social agenda to "fit in." It is a lose-lose situation.
Political litmus tests now have been substituted the gospels and the Sermon on the Mount as the new American conservative Christian creed. And conversely the religious creed of politics these days from no new tax pledges to shutting down family planning clinics is pushed as if it was a matter of faith.
The result is that both religion and politics are debased and destroyed. Political leaders pander to faith issues in a destructive way. And religious leaders have met politics more than half way and no longer concentrate on saving souls, but on taking back America for God.
The debasing of politics that Kemp predicted to me has come true.
The flavor of religion is therefore no longer spiritual but about winning political battles at all costs and this is done even if it means that the name of Jesus s dragged through the mud. This is the ultimate case of taking the Lord's name in vain.
The flavor of politics is no longer about pragmatism and doing what works or is best for the country but about being sufficiently fanatical to satisfy a faith test on the issues.
Religion is merciless because it deals in the currency of ultimate truth. If you disagree you're not just wrong on policy but an evil lost person. When this paradigm translates to politics it leaves no middle ground. It is the same impulse that drives people to kill for God.
On the other hand when the winner-take-all paradigm of politics infects religion the concern for the good of the suffering individual our neighbor goes out the window. We have no neighbors in such a world, just friends and enemies.
Religion loses out because the concept of humility, mercy and justice evaporate. Politics loses because the concept of adaptable pragmatic policy is replaced by holier-than-thou crusades.
We have managed to destroy faith by polluting it with political cynicism and destroy politics by polluting it with merciless religious-style certainty.
The good news is that change is coming. Believe it or not there are religious people by the thousands fighting back to reclaim religion for faith and politics for people.
I'm not the only formerly "certain" religions person now asking tough questions of myself.
For instance take the Wild Goose Festival. Last year 1,300 of us met for the first time in this arts, justice, religion and spirituality gathering and I saw many former right wing religious people now gathered to admit mistakes and find a new way forward.
The response was so positive that Wild Goose will meet again in June and this time 3,500 refugees from religion and politics will gather to compare notes and work for change. What is the change that we'll seek? Put people first and let faith shine and let politics work to help people, not to make them conform to "my way or the highway" ideology. So there is change coming.
Let's remember that, as I say in my book Sex, Mom and God No one ever blew up an abortion clinic or mosque after shouting. "But I could be wrong!"
And no one ever did any good to a country by applying the religious concept of salvation to politics. Certainty kills faith and certainty kills politics too.
We humans are a work in progress. Making do and doing our best is better than thinking we can ever be entirely right about anything.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer 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
I helped my theologian father, Francis Schaeffer; launch evangelical Christianity into an American political force in the 1970s and 80s. He became one of the fathers of the religious right. My father remains an inspiration to modern conservatives. But these conservatives are now so radically political about their religion that they are actually revolutionaries masquerading as conservatives.
I am now a critic of the movement my father and I helped launch. Its power is corrupting both religion and politics. Exhibit A is the takeover of the Republican Party by fanatics.
Since when did one have to pass what amounts to a religious litmus test to be a Republican? Maybe that is why my old friend congressman Jack Kemp once called me and congratulated me for getting out of the religious right and said. "These people are going to destroy the Republican Party."
Jack was a genuine conservative not a religious fanatic using politics to advance a religious agenda. One could disagree with his economic ideas but still be his friend. That was because he didn't think you were evil if you disagreed with him, only that you were mistaken.
Today as we've seen in the demonization of President Obama by the religious right/Republican Party if you disagree with the "correct" answers to the moral/political tests the right forces on everyone you are considered evil, in fact to use the religious term, you are lost. In fact God hates you.
Thus you are fighting God and God strikes down the unjust in the Bible. Thus politics becomes ruthless. The problem is that God is God and therefore all-knowing (at least that's the idea) but people aren't. So when fallible humans get set to write people off as evil and want to politically strike them down the hubris knows no bounds. Nor does the hard edge ever soften.
Religion needs to be rescued from its political entanglements because religion is about mercy, humility and mystery. In the biblical account an all knowing God may strike down the "unjust" but note: This God is portrayed as all-knowing. No political leaders can make that claim!
So the "model" of biblical God-dispensed retribution is a bad fit for flawed dumb creatures like us!
How do we recapture a spirituality that is not held hostage to the politics of confrontation? It's so politicized; it's so black and white that it's giving religion a bad name.
The modern Republican Party is 100 percent in the grasp of conservative evangelical Christians, far right Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews (the "Israel lobby") and Mormons. Its leading candidates either are part of this religious right, or have to pretend to be. The fact that all these people have to pander to that sensibility is instructive.
My parents founded a community, L'Abri, in Switzerland, in 1955 which became a haven for people engaged in scrutinizing Western civilization from evangelical Christian perspectives. In the 1970s and '80s, my dad Francis Schaeffer and his books, such as "How Should We Then Live?" and "Whatever Happened to the Human Race?" influenced thousands of evangelical Christians, including Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Jack Kemp.
I embraced my parents' fundamentalism, became an activist in promoting it, then gradually came to reject it. But I have not rejected faith. Faith need not be opposed to science, or operate its own set of facts about the world. The confrontations between modernity and reason and faith are not necessary. They only become part of "faith" if faith becomes political and thus stops embracing the concept of doubt. And without doubt -- if nothing else doubt about our own goodness -- faith dies.
But in today's political/religious climate faith and politics have become so interchangeable that Mitt Romney being a Mormon is an "issue" with evangelicals. And Romney has to pretend he believes everything on the social agenda to "fit in." It is a lose-lose situation.
Political litmus tests now have been substituted the gospels and the Sermon on the Mount as the new American conservative Christian creed. And conversely the religious creed of politics these days from no new tax pledges to shutting down family planning clinics is pushed as if it was a matter of faith.
The result is that both religion and politics are debased and destroyed. Political leaders pander to faith issues in a destructive way. And religious leaders have met politics more than half way and no longer concentrate on saving souls, but on taking back America for God.
The debasing of politics that Kemp predicted to me has come true.
The flavor of religion is therefore no longer spiritual but about winning political battles at all costs and this is done even if it means that the name of Jesus s dragged through the mud. This is the ultimate case of taking the Lord's name in vain.
The flavor of politics is no longer about pragmatism and doing what works or is best for the country but about being sufficiently fanatical to satisfy a faith test on the issues.
Religion is merciless because it deals in the currency of ultimate truth. If you disagree you're not just wrong on policy but an evil lost person. When this paradigm translates to politics it leaves no middle ground. It is the same impulse that drives people to kill for God.
On the other hand when the winner-take-all paradigm of politics infects religion the concern for the good of the suffering individual our neighbor goes out the window. We have no neighbors in such a world, just friends and enemies.
Religion loses out because the concept of humility, mercy and justice evaporate. Politics loses because the concept of adaptable pragmatic policy is replaced by holier-than-thou crusades.
We have managed to destroy faith by polluting it with political cynicism and destroy politics by polluting it with merciless religious-style certainty.
The good news is that change is coming. Believe it or not there are religious people by the thousands fighting back to reclaim religion for faith and politics for people.
I'm not the only formerly "certain" religions person now asking tough questions of myself.
For instance take the Wild Goose Festival. Last year 1,300 of us met for the first time in this arts, justice, religion and spirituality gathering and I saw many former right wing religious people now gathered to admit mistakes and find a new way forward.
The response was so positive that Wild Goose will meet again in June and this time 3,500 refugees from religion and politics will gather to compare notes and work for change. What is the change that we'll seek? Put people first and let faith shine and let politics work to help people, not to make them conform to "my way or the highway" ideology. So there is change coming.
Let's remember that, as I say in my book Sex, Mom and God No one ever blew up an abortion clinic or mosque after shouting. "But I could be wrong!"
And no one ever did any good to a country by applying the religious concept of salvation to politics. Certainty kills faith and certainty kills politics too.
We humans are a work in progress. Making do and doing our best is better than thinking we can ever be entirely right about anything.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer 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
January 28, 2012
I'll Be Speaking in NYC
News From Underground: "Christianist Infiltration of America's Public Schools"
Start: 02/07/2012 7:00 pm
Mark Crispin Miller will moderate a panel discussion, "Christianist Infiltration of America's Schools", with Katherine Stewart (The Good News Club), Frank Schaeffer (Sex, Mom & God), Jonathan Zimmerman (Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory), and Jeff Sharlet (Sweet Heaven When I Die).
Location:
Mcnalley Book Store
52 Prince St
New York, New York
10012-3309
United States
Calenda
Start: 02/07/2012 7:00 pm
Mark Crispin Miller will moderate a panel discussion, "Christianist Infiltration of America's Schools", with Katherine Stewart (The Good News Club), Frank Schaeffer (Sex, Mom & God), Jonathan Zimmerman (Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory), and Jeff Sharlet (Sweet Heaven When I Die).
Location:
Mcnalley Book Store
52 Prince St
New York, New York
10012-3309
United States
Calenda
My New Talk at Darkwood Brew
Watch my recent talk that streamed live. Here
January 14, 2012
Join Me in Omaha Nebraska
THE CASE FOR SPIRITUALITY
IN THE AGE OF DOUBT:
How Both Atheism and Christian Fundamentalism
Miss the Mark on Faith
FRANK SCHAEFFER
Thursday,
January 26, 2012
7:00 PM
Lecture, Q and A
and Booksigning
$10
suggested donation
in advance or at the door
This presentation is also
available streaming live at
7:00 p.m. CST on
www.darkwoodbrew.org.
Countryside Community Church
8787 Pacific Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68114
This program is part of the
2011-2012 Center for Faith Studies
Annual Lecture Series.
For more information:
countrysideucc.org
centerforfaithstudies.org
Former evangelical Christian political activist Frank Schaeffer takes a long, hard look at fundamentalist atheists as well as religious zealots. Drawing comparisons in their battle for followers in the world today, he is scathing in revealing their blatant commercialism and fear-mongering. Schaeffer speaks from experience, as the child of fundamentalist missionaries, who as an adult became part of the evangelical/fundamentalist political scene until he could stand it no longer.
Schaeffer is now a follower in what he calls the "Church of the Hopeful Uncertainty," worshipping God rather than the Bible itself, and finding great beauty in the music, art and liturgies of the Church. He offers hope for many who seek a more generous and inclusive faith, and who are looking for a
new way to interpret and make meaning of the God-experiences that enrich their lives every day.
IN THE AGE OF DOUBT:
How Both Atheism and Christian Fundamentalism
Miss the Mark on Faith
FRANK SCHAEFFER
Thursday,
January 26, 2012
7:00 PM
Lecture, Q and A
and Booksigning
$10
suggested donation
in advance or at the door
This presentation is also
available streaming live at
7:00 p.m. CST on
www.darkwoodbrew.org.
Countryside Community Church
8787 Pacific Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68114
This program is part of the
2011-2012 Center for Faith Studies
Annual Lecture Series.
For more information:
countrysideucc.org
centerforfaithstudies.org
Former evangelical Christian political activist Frank Schaeffer takes a long, hard look at fundamentalist atheists as well as religious zealots. Drawing comparisons in their battle for followers in the world today, he is scathing in revealing their blatant commercialism and fear-mongering. Schaeffer speaks from experience, as the child of fundamentalist missionaries, who as an adult became part of the evangelical/fundamentalist political scene until he could stand it no longer.
Schaeffer is now a follower in what he calls the "Church of the Hopeful Uncertainty," worshipping God rather than the Bible itself, and finding great beauty in the music, art and liturgies of the Church. He offers hope for many who seek a more generous and inclusive faith, and who are looking for a
new way to interpret and make meaning of the God-experiences that enrich their lives every day.
Join Me in Omaha Nenraska
THE CASE FOR SPIRITUALITY
IN THE AGE OF DOUBT:
How Both Atheism and Christian Fundamentalism
Miss the Mark on Faith
FRANK SCHAEFFER
Thursday,
January 26, 2012
7:00 PM
Lecture, Q and A
and Booksigning
$10
suggested donation
in advance or at the door
This presentation is also
available streaming live at
7:00 p.m. CST on
www.darkwoodbrew.org.
Countryside Community Church
8787 Pacific Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68114
This program is part of the
2011-2012 Center for Faith Studies
Annual Lecture Series.
For more information:
countrysideucc.org
centerforfaithstudies.org
Former evangelical Christian political activist Frank Schaeffer takes a long, hard look at fundamentalist atheists as well as religious zealots. Drawing comparisons in their battle for followers in the world today, he is scathing in revealing their blatant commercialism and fear-mongering. Schaeffer speaks from experience, as the child of fundamentalist missionaries, who as an adult became part of the evangelical/fundamentalist political scene until he could stand it no longer.
Schaeffer is now a follower in what he calls the "Church of the Hopeful Uncertainty," worshipping God rather than the Bible itself, and finding great beauty in the music, art and liturgies of the Church. He offers hope for many who seek a more generous and inclusive faith, and who are looking for a
new way to interpret and make meaning of the God-experiences that enrich their lives every day.
IN THE AGE OF DOUBT:
How Both Atheism and Christian Fundamentalism
Miss the Mark on Faith
FRANK SCHAEFFER
Thursday,
January 26, 2012
7:00 PM
Lecture, Q and A
and Booksigning
$10
suggested donation
in advance or at the door
This presentation is also
available streaming live at
7:00 p.m. CST on
www.darkwoodbrew.org.
Countryside Community Church
8787 Pacific Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68114
This program is part of the
2011-2012 Center for Faith Studies
Annual Lecture Series.
For more information:
countrysideucc.org
centerforfaithstudies.org
Former evangelical Christian political activist Frank Schaeffer takes a long, hard look at fundamentalist atheists as well as religious zealots. Drawing comparisons in their battle for followers in the world today, he is scathing in revealing their blatant commercialism and fear-mongering. Schaeffer speaks from experience, as the child of fundamentalist missionaries, who as an adult became part of the evangelical/fundamentalist political scene until he could stand it no longer.
Schaeffer is now a follower in what he calls the "Church of the Hopeful Uncertainty," worshipping God rather than the Bible itself, and finding great beauty in the music, art and liturgies of the Church. He offers hope for many who seek a more generous and inclusive faith, and who are looking for a
new way to interpret and make meaning of the God-experiences that enrich their lives every day.
Frank Schaeffer's Blog
- Frank Schaeffer's profile
- 143 followers
Frank Schaeffer isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
