Frank Schaeffer's Blog, page 6

Newt Gingrich the Republicans and the Loony Religious Fringe

Every single one of the sops Newt Gingrich and the other Republican candidates are throwing the far right have been scripted for them by generations of so-called Reconstructionist "thinkers", Roman Catholic ideologues and Christian Zionists that have been pushing the religious community -- and America -- steadily in the direction of overthrowing democracy and replacing it with some version of an Americanized theocracy.

I'll look at Gingrich here but what I say below could be said of every Republican candidate this year.

Newt

Newt Gingrich has been making a series of outrageous statements in ascending rhetorical volume as a means to throw the religious right scraps of validation that he is "one of us." What Gingrich has done is to sign on to the extremist Dominionist/Roman Catholic agenda. Since I used to be a leader and the son of a leader on the Religious Right (in the 1970s and 80s) what Gingrich is saying invokes a bad case of déjà vu for me

What he's really doing is sending signals to 3 overlapping constituencies that now control the Republican Party: The "Pro-Israel" Lobby; The Reconstructionist/Dominionist Lobby and The Conservative Roman Catholic Lobby. We'll look at these groups' and their influence one at a time.

The Gingrich Context

Wanting to outdo the rest of the Republican field on support for the hardliners in the State of Israel Gingrich told America that the Palestinian people are really a fiction an "invented people", illegitimate and don't actually exist.

Not wanting to let the far right down on his purity when it comes to abortion politics Gingrich corrected himself on when "life begins" and got his "position" in line with the American Roman Catholic bishops and declared that when he said it "begins" with the implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterine wall what he really meant was that it begins with fertilization, thus putting himself squarely in the corner with the extremist bishops who would like to lump the pill in with abortion as a means that " destroys a life."

And when it comes to the rule of law Gingrich advocates the arrest of judges that rule against "Christian values."

So much for the separation of powers let alone the separation of church and state. And now Gingrich wants to further expand protection for religion and its meddling in politics saying that as president he'd roll back, examine and generally bulk up the rights of believers - rather the rights of far right believers -- to flout the law when it comes to gay rights, abortion, stem cell research and so on.

The "Pro-Israel" Lobby

Re Gingrich's support for the State of Israel, call this the Gingrich/Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye Left Behind "foreign policy" based on the series of sixteen novels that represents everything that is most deranged about religion.

The evangelical/fundamentalists--and hence, from the early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the Religious Right as it informed U.S. policy through the the dominant Republican Party--are in the grip of an apocalyptic Rapture cult centered on revenge and vindication. This End Times death wish is built on a literalist interpretation of the book of Revelation.

The Left Behind series is really just recycled evangelical/fundamentalist profit taking from scraps of "prophecy" left over from an earlier commercial effort to mine the vein of fearsome End Times gold. A book called The Late Great Planet Earth was the 1970s incarnation of this nonsense.

It was written by Hal Lindsey, a "writer" who dropped by my evangelical leader parents' ministry of L'Abri several times. Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth interpreted Revelation for a generation of paranoid evangelicals who were terrified of the Soviet Union and communism and were convinced that the existence of the modern State of Israel was the sign that Jesus was on the way in our lifetimes, as Lindsey claimed. According to Lindsey, Revelation was "speaking" about the Soviet Union and imminent nuclear attacks between the Soviet Union and the United States. When Mikhail Gorbachev became president of the U.S.S.R., Planet Earth groupies claimed Gorbachev was the Antichrist, citing the references in Revelation to the "mark of the beast" as proof because Gorbachev had a birthmark on his forehead!

According to Jenkins and LaHaye, who have taken over the Hal Lindsey franchise of apocalypse-for-fun-and-profit and expanded it into a vast industry, the "chosen" will soon be airlifted to safety. And all this "fulfillment" of prophecy depends on Israel "reclaiming" (stealing) all the land of Samaria and Judea, in other words the West Bank.

The focus on the "signs" leading up to this hoped-for aeronautical excursion is understandably no longer the defunct U.S.S.R. but the ripped-from-the-headlines gift that keeps on giving: the Middle East.

The truth is that when it comes to pandering to powerful religious/ethnic "blocs" in the US the biggest game in town is the across the board bowing to the white Evangelical "base" of the Republican Party. That's the bloc of voters that adds up to real numbers, as high as a third of the American voting population. And that bloc is pro-Israel because they take the Bible literally! And that in turn is why these folks send their sons and daughters to die for endless wars to make the Middle East "safe" for Jesus, i.e., getting rid of Saddam Hussein for bogus reasons.

When it comes to the State of Israel, it's the Christian Zionists who have driven American foreign policy over a cliff. Christian Zionists continuously jeopardize our future by putting the promotion of harebrained interpretations of biblical "prophecy" ahead of the well being of both Israel and the US.

To the Christian Zionists "defending Israel" is just a handy pretext for indulging their obsession: egging on, even "helping" the fulfillment of "biblical prophecies" about the "return of Christ." But their worst sin isn't just embracing dumb "theology" but that they have enabled a nefarious group of extremist Zionists in America -- the so-celled neoconservatives -- to irreparably harm America and contribute to the needless killing of our men and women in uniform worldwide.

To the neoconservatives "defending Israel" is just a handy pretext for upholding the myth of "American exceptionalism" for profit and nationalistic "glory," of the kind that was supposed to have gone out of fashion when hubris and stupidity got half the young male population of Europe killed in World War One.

America needlessly went to war in Iraq because neoconservative war mongers -- who laugh at the "those rubes" as they think of earnest Evangelical Christian Zionists, and whose own sons and daughters seem notably absent from our armed services -- used the religious passion and dedication of conservative Evangelicals to provide political means and cover for the neoconservatives' commitment to America's military dominance of the world. In other words the Evangelicals provided the votes to put foolish war mongers like George W Bush in power. And now Gingrich wants their votes.


The Reconstructionist/Dominionist Lobby

Gingrich's "view" of the law was developed by the Reconstructionists. Nothing better illustrates the how and why of the Christian-conservative shift to the extreme Right - its sense of victimhood combined with its fearful hatred of the (Muslim, gay, or pro-choice) "Other" -- than the rise of the so-called Reconstructionist movement.

Reconstructionists seek to apply the full scope of the Biblical Law to modern America and to the world.

To put it bluntly, Reconstructionists want to replace the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with their interpretation of the Bible. That includes executing people for being gay.

The Reconstructionist worldview has its origins in ancient Israel/Palestine, when vengeful and ignorant tribal lore was written down by frightened men (the nastier authors of the Bible) trying to defend their prerogatives to bully women and their rival tribes. In its modern American incarnation, which began in the 1960s and became widespread in the 1970s, Reconstructionism was propagated by people I knew personally and worked with closely when I was both a Jesus Victim and Jesus Predator. I describe my journey out of this movement in my book Sex, Mom and God.

The leaders of the Reconstructionist movement include the late Rousas Rushdoony (Calvinist theologian, father of modern-era Christian Reconstructionism, patron saint to gold-hoarding Federal Reserve-haters, and creator of the modern Evangelical home-school movement), his son-in-law Gary North (an economist, gold-buff, publisher and leading conspiracy theorist), and David Chilton (ultra-Calvinist pastor and author.)

Reconstructionism, also called Theonomy, seeks to reconstruct "our fallen society." Its worldview is best represented by the publications of the Chalcedon Foundation, which has been classified as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

According to the Chalcedon Foundation website, the mission of the movement is to apply "the whole Word of God" to all aspects of human life: "It is not only our duty as individuals, families and churches to be Christian, but it is also the duty of the state, the school, the arts and sciences, law, economics, and every other sphere to be under Christ the King. Nothing is exempt from His dominion. We must live by His Word, not our own."

Until Rushdoony, founder and late president of the Chalcedon Foundation, began writing in the 1960s, most American fundamentalists (including my evangelical leader parents) didn't try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment, homosexuality, and divorce to the United States. Even the most conservative Evangelicals said they were "New-Testament Christians." In other words, they believed that after the coming of Jesus, the harsher bits of the Bible had been (at least to some extent) transformed by the "New Covenant" of Jesus' "Law of Love."

By contrast, the leaders of the Reconstructionism Movement believe that Old- Testament teachings--on everything from capital punishment for gays to child spanking/beating--are still valid, because they are the inerrant Word and will of God, and therefore should be enforced.

George Grant (Calvinist author, publisher and pastor and former friend of mine) was one of the early leaders of the Reconstructionist movement. He wrote The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action, in which he called on Christians to recognize their

"[H]oly responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ - to have dominion in the civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness... It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after: World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel." Or as Reconstructionist/Calvinist theologian David Chilton explained, "The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics." But it was my old friend, the short, stocky bearded gnome-like Armenian-American Rousas Rushdoony who, in 1973, most thoroughly laid out the Far Right/Religious Right agenda in his book The Institutes of Biblical Law.

Most Christian theologians argue that the New-Testament Law of Love transforms the Old-Testament Law of Retribution. Not Rushdoony's son-in-law Gary North, who apparently channels both Ayn Rand and Attila the Hun when reading his Bible. North has seriously argued that in the Sermon on the Mount the commandments about love are, "recommendations for the ethical conduct of a captive people."

North says that when Jesus commands us to agree with adversaries quickly, to go the second mile, to turn the other cheek, He is really doing nothing more than telling us how to survive captivity at the hands of unbelieving rulers while we - Jews under the pagan Romans then, American Christians under the wicked U.S. Federal Government now -- are not in power. Once we take over the government and the "unbelieving ruler" is overthrown, then Jesus' ethics no longer applies. Once we take over, according to North, the Christian should no longer go the second mile to love others as he loves himself, let alone turn the other cheek to those who hurt him.

Once Christians are in charge, according to North we, "should either bust him in the chops or haul him before the magistrate, and possibly both." North says, and I quote (no kidding), "It is only in a period of civil impotence that Christians are under the rule to 'resist not evil '." In other words, I suppose the "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" part of the Lord's Prayer no longer applies, once we've got "the power, the glory and the kingdom"--at least until Jesus comes back.

How far would the Reconstructionists go? For North, the death penalty (preferably by stoning people to death) should be part of our law. "The question eventually must be raised," he writes in a book on economics and the Ten Commandments. "Is it a criminal offence to take the name of the Lord in vain? When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime (Exodus. 21:17). The son or daughter is under the lawful jurisdiction of the family. The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death. Clearly, cursing God (blasphemy) is a comparable crime, and is therefore a capital crime (Leviticus. 24:16)."


The Conservative Roman Catholic Bomb Throwers Lobby

Non-Evangelicals with political agendas 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. For instance, conservative Roman Catholic Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George was an antiabortion, anti- Obama, anti-gay-rights, and anti-stem-cell-research "profamily" activist, and he found ways to effectively carry on the Reconstructionist agenda while truthfully denying any formal connection to people like Rushdoony.

George has advised many of the key players in the Gingrich Roman-Catholic-Purity team.

George's brainchild: the "Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience" is the script Gingrich is following when he talks about overthrowing the rule of law in favor of religious "rights."

This was published in 2009 as an anti-Obama manifesto, and many Evangelical leaders signed on. George may not have been following Rushdoony or have ever read his work, but the Evangelicals who signed on to George's agenda would never have done so if not for the influence of Reconstructionism on American Evangelicals decades before.

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 act . . . nor 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, Glenn Beck, New Gingrich, 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."

George is now advising the Roman Catholic bishops and through them, Newt Gingrich. He's also been in direct contact with Gingrich.

George's "Manhattan Declaration" was 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.

Conclusion

It was the Reconstructionists who, along with several less extreme activists like my father, created the climate in which the likes of Gingrich-as-Far-Right-Roman-Catholic-convert, George, Colson, and Beck have been taken seriously by many Evangelicals. Without the work of the Reconstructionists, the next generation of religious activists (trying to use the courts, politics, and/or civil disobedience to impose their narrow theology on the majority of Americans) would have been relegated to some lonely street corner where they could gather to howl at the moon. Instead, the twenty-first century's theocrats (though they'd never so identify themselves) enjoyed the backing of Fox News, were tolerated at places like Princeton University, and could be found running most Evangelical organizations.

George's, North's, and Gingrich's idea of the "rule of law" is that it must be subject to a biblical mandate, in other words to what Gingrich's bishops tell him will "sell" to their faithful and their evangelical fellow-traveler religious extremists. This is the constituency that Gingrich is now appealing to, with the direct help from his Roman Catholic advisers and his Reconstructionist and Dominionist friends. And then there is the cherry on the cake: in return for espousing their theocratic anti-democracy views Gingrich will be forgiven his multitude of divorces and a lifetime of adultery.

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.

Hitchens and Jesus

Christopher Hitchens is dead. There will be people who think that as a famous atheist Hitchens was an enemy of not just religion in general but of his own cultural tradition of Christianity. In fact they will think that with his passing a threat to religion and faith has passed away no doubt to receive his "reward" of eternal damnation and the biggest surprise of his life, now extended for eternity by a God who doesn't like disbelievers and has a long memory.

Meanwhile another actor in the debate between religion and atheism - also dead - is on a fast track to canonization by the Roman Catholic Church for sainthood. Pope John Paul II is the "good Christian" that in the mind of millions of believers stood as a bulwark against the tide of official Soviet atheism at one time and also stood against another threat: the growing irrelevance of all fundamentalist religious beliefs in the age of science.

In simplest terms in the minds of the pious it would be that Hitchens was "bad" and Pope John Paul was "good." The idea might apply not just to personal morality but to the notion that Hitchens and his ilk (the other so-called New Atheists) have somehow damaged faith in general and faith in Christianity in particular while the pope and other Christian leaders, say the evangelist Billy Graham etc., have done their best to strengthen the faith of millions while guarding the reputation of Christianity and thereby defending Jesus himself.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. All the raging of today's atheist apologists combined are but a flea bite compared to the fatal blow that Christianity has been dealt by its own leadership in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

John Paul II presided over the era in which the Roman Catholic Church became known mostly for being the largest and best protected pedophile ring in the world while - simultaneously -- attacking gays, women who demanded reproductive rights and scientists doing stem cell research etc., etc., as "immoral." And Billy Graham presided over an era of American evangelical expansion at the very time when the word "Christianity" in America became synonymous with far right social causes and above all the capitalist pro-corporatism that smacked more of Ayn Rand than Jesus.

Put it this way: Hitchens and company attacked the idea of the supernatural as bogus. (Disclosure: I "answered" Hitchens rather harshly in one of my books on religion and before that we'd "talked" a bit via email and one or two phone calls.) Their attacks were frontal and honest. Religious people - and I am one and will be in church this Sunday - had nothing to fear from the atheists' honest critique. Conversely the leadership of Christianity has utterly corrupted the Christian witness from within.

The death of the Christian witness (especially here in America) has been brought about by two fatal wounds: First, the conflation the teachings of Ayn Rand with the teachings of Christ. Call this the American version of Jesus-wants-us-to-be-anti-government-regulation-of-business and to be anti-health-care-for-all Tea Party-type "Christianity."

Second: John Paul II's real place in history is that of a pope that protected his institution rather than his flock. (I describe this in some detail in my book Sex, Mom and God.)While boys and girls were being abused by bishops and priests around the globe he looked the other way, covered up for them and did all he could to "contain" the scandal, a scandal that is still unfolding.

Billy Graham and his many evangelical clones that are now running mega churches and other Religious-Industrial Complex money making empires, have done their best to turn salvation into a process of voting for Republicans and thus corporatist leaders intent on protecting the "rights" of billionaires rather than the people. Billy Graham's son Franklin, now running the Billy Graham organisation is a corporate shill and supporter of far right "pro-business" causes.

So the sins of the evangelical and Roman Catholic "Christian" leadership are the same: The Roman Catholics have sacrificed their own children to the sexual greed of pedophiles out to protect their institution and the Evangelicals have sacrificed the poor to the greed of their corporate masters to protect American businesses.

And both profound and filthy betrayals have been done to protect institutions instead of people. Both betrayals have also been accompanied by levels of hypocrisy - the "family values" "pro-life" talk by people who condone pedophiles and no health care for actual families - that would make any decent atheist blush.

Result for the "Christian" witness?

On the one hand thousands of pedophile priests and bishops have been and are now free to abuse.

On the other hand Wall Street has been and is free to abuse.

So rest in peace Christopher Hitchens. At least you tried to tell the truth as you understood it and didn't live a lie. You didn't bugger little children and you didn't look the other way while the 1 percent stole the 99 percent's money. And unlike the recent popes and the evangelical leadership if there is a judgment day you'll be fine. You only disbelieved. You did not betray the "least of these."

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest 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

Frank Schaeffer on C-Span Book TV on "Sex, mom and God" and the Dangerous Religious Right

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Who Should the Evangelicals Hate Most?

Frank Schaeffer

New York Times best-selling author

GET UPDATES FROM FRANK SCHAEFFER Like496The Great Evangelical Disaster of 2012Posted: 12/ 7/11 02:21 PM ETReactImportant
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Speaking as a former evangelical anti-abortion leader, I note that if it boils down to a choice between the Mormon or the adulterer for the Republicans in 2012, the Evangelicals who drive the Religious Right will climb the walls. Do they vote for a heretic or a lying philanderer?

As Ross Douthat writes in "The Tempting of the Christian Right":

More than any other Republican constituency, religious conservatives have good reasons to be wary of Newt Gingrich... As Speaker of the House, he undercut their claim to the moral high ground by carrying on an extramarital affair even as his party was impeaching Bill Clinton for lying under oath about adultery.

...
Now his path to the nomination depends on this conversion paying off... The real issue for religious conservatives isn't whether they can trust Gingrich. It's whether they can afford to be associated with him. Conservative Christianity in America, both evangelical and Catholic, faces a looming demographic challenge: A rising generation that is more unchurched than any before it, more liberal on issues like gay marriage, and allergic to the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Pat Robertson-Jerry Falwell era...

Rallying around Newt Gingrich, effectively making him the face of Christian conservatism in this Republican primary season, would ratify all of these impressions. It isn't just that he's a master of selective moral outrage whose newfound piety has been turned to consistently partisan ends. It's that his personal history -- not only the two divorces, but also the repeated affairs and the way he behaved during the dissolution of his marriages -- makes him the most compromised champion imaginable for a movement that's laboring to keep lifelong heterosexual monogamy on a legal and cultural pedestal...

His candidacy isn't a test of religious conservatives' willingness to be good, forgiving Christians. It's a test of their ability to see their cause through outsiders' eyes, and to recognize what anointing a thrice-married adulterer as the champion of "family values" would say to the skeptical, the unconverted and above all to the young.

And then there is Mitt Romney.

He is a Mormon.

As John W. Kennedy noted for evangelical mainstream magazine Christianity Today, though some evangelicals concede that Mormons are good neighbors, the theological chasm is wide. Mormons profoundly distance themselves from orthodox Christianity in that they:

Do not interpret canonical Scripture as being solely the Old Testament and New Testament. They add the Book of Mormon and founder Joseph Smith's other works, The Pearl of Great Price and Doctrine and Covenants.Do not believe in the Trinity. Mormons believe God the Father and God the Son have fleshly bodies and that the Holy Ghost is a spirit man.Teach that God was once a finite being who achieved his exalted rank by "progressing."Based on supernatural visitations in the 1820s, Smith believed he was called to restore the true Christian church that had been lost 16 centuries earlier. According to this great apostasy, God told Smith that all churches -- with specific reference to Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians -- were wrong, and to join none.

"On every major doctrine, the fundamental teachings of evangelical Christianity and Mormon doctrine are diametrically opposed," says Norman Geisler, dean of Southern Evangelical Seminary.

If you think that in their hearts any evangelicals can vote comfortably for what they'd call a heretic or worse, think again.

And so the great evangelical disaster of 2012 is on the way.

And here's the supreme irony: the man the evangelicals who have hijacked the Republican Party hate most -- President Obama -- is a faithful married man, good father and professing Christian who has described his born-again experience in detail.

But he's "liberal," black and perhaps "not born in America," or a "Muslim," or "communist," or "the Antichrist," or something else pretty terrible: actually Christ-like in his compassion for the poor!

This is considered a great sin by evangelicals now that most of them are actually followers of Ayn Rand, not Jesus.

So the evangelicals will be voting for either Romney or Gingrich holding their noses. This bodes badly for the Republicans.

In fact some evangelicals may even be forced to sit out the election and/or just deny it's happening at all just as they already deny global warming.

Maybe they will take to a hilltop and await the Return Of Christ and/or the return of Sarah Palin, whichever comes first.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest 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

I'll Be on Book-TV Twice Re Sex, Mom and God

Monday, December 5, 2011 Advanced Search TV SCHEDULEBOOK FAIRSPODCASTSYOUTUBEVIDEO LIBRARYALERTBOOK TV SERIES/TOPICSC-SPAN WEBSITESTV Schedule for December 10th – December 12thOpen Print Version November 19th - November 21st November 24th - November 28th December 3rd - December 5th This Weekend on Book TV Saturday, December 10th 8am (ET)
Approx. 55 min.
"Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy"
Bill Clinton 9am (ET)
Approx. 3 hr.
In Depth: David Brooks 12pm (ET)
Approx. 1 hr.
2011 Year in Books
Sarah Weinman 1pm (ET)
Approx. 55 min.
"December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World"
Craig Shirley 2:15pm (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 2 min.
"Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year"
Charles Flood 3:30pm (ET)
Approx. 52 min.
"Patriot Acts: What Americans Must Do to Save the Republic"
Catherine Crier 4:30pm (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 18 min.
"Worm: The first Digital World War"
Mark Bowden 6pm (ET)
Approx. 57 min.
Encore Booknotes: David Denby "Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World"
David Denby 7pm (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 12 min.
"Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America"
Melissa Harris-Perry 8:15pm (ET)
Approx. 44 min.
"Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942"
Ian Toll 9pm (ET)
Approx. 55 min.
"December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World"
Craig Shirley 10pm (ET)
Approx. 55 min.
After Words: Niall Ferguson, "Civilization: The West and the Rest," hosted by Susan Jacoby 11pm (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 32 min.
"The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World"
John Carlos; Dave ZirinSunday, December 11th 12:45am (ET)
Approx. 35 min.
"Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America's Border"
Gov. Jan Brewer 1:30am (ET)
Approx. 58 min.
"Sex, Mom, & God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics - and How I learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway"
Frank Schaeffer 2:30am (ET)
Approx. 52 min.
"No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington"
Condoleezza Rice 3:30am (ET)
Approx. 38 min.
"Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam"
Noam Chomsky; Fred Wilcox 4:15am (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 17 min.
"An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine"
Howard Markel 5:30am (ET)
Approx. 1 hr.
2011 Year in Books
Sarah Weinman 6:45am (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 24 min.
50th Anniversary of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22"
Christopher Buckley; Robert Gottlieb; Mike Nichols 8:15am (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 2 min.
2011 Paolucci/Bagehot Book Award Dinner: Pauline Maier, "Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788"
Pauline Maier 9:15am (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 7 min.
"Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President"
Ron Suskind 10:30am (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 11 min.
"A Governor's Story: The Fight for Jobs and America's Economic Future"
Jennifer Granholm 12pm (ET)
Approx. 59 min.
After Words: Max Hastings, "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945," hosted by Toby Harnden, Daily Telegraph of London 1pm (ET)
Approx. 12 min.
University of Maryland Interviews: Kristina Miler, "Constituency Representation in Congress: The View from Capitol Hill"
Kristina Miler 1:12pm (ET)
Approx. 10 min.
University of Maryland Interviews: Jon Sumida, "Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to 'On War'"
Jon Sumida 1:22pm (ET)
Approx. 29 min.
University of Maryland Interviews: Philip Joyce, "The Congressional Budget Office: Honest Numbers, Power, and Policymaking"
Philip Joyce 1:51pm (ET)
Approx. 10 min.
University of Maryland Interviews: Carol Graham, "The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being"
Carol Graham 2:15pm (ET)
Approx. 48 min.
"Growing a Better America"
Chuck Leavell 3pm (ET)
Approx. 53 min.
"War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality"
Deepak Chopra; Leonard Mlodinow 4pm (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 32 min.
"The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World"
John Carlos; Dave Zirin 6pm (ET)
Approx. 44 min.
"Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942"
Ian Toll 6:45pm (ET)
Approx. 1 hr.
2011 Year in Books
Sarah Weinman 7:45pm (ET)
Approx. 1 hr. 18 min.
"Worm: The first Digital World War"
Mark Bowden 9pm (ET)
Approx. 55 min.
After Words: Niall Ferguson, "Civilization: The West and the Rest," hosted by Susan Jacoby 10pm (ET)
Approx. 58 min.
"Sex, Mom, & God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics - and How I learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway"
Frank Schaeffer 11pm (ET)
Approx. 52 min.
"Patriot Acts: What Americans Must Do to Save the Republic"
Catherine Crier

My NPR Interview on the Religious Right

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(Courtesy of Frank Schaeffer)

In 'Sex, Mom, and God,' Schaeffer critiques the right-wing Christian establishment that his family helped found.

Author and filmmaker Frank Schaeffer is a vocal critic of the Christian right. The son of Francis Schaeffer, an influential religious leader who helped infuse evangelism into modern politics, Frank observed conservative Christianity from the inside and witnessed its ascent in American politics.

Frank talks to Worldview about his newest bookSex, 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, which argues that today's religious right is "mired in perpetual sexual dysfunction" and, as a result, is lashing out at the rest of society.

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Hartmann: Everything U Know is Wrong - Beating babies in ...

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Frank Schaeffer, author, "Crazy for God" joins Thom Hartmann. Did you know that there's a disturbing connection between child abuse and Christian fundamentalism?

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Add this to the seemingly endless list of atrocities committed in the name of a god.

tjwdraws 6 minutes ago

If it weren't for that kind of abuse, we wouldn't have any soldiers to displace their childhood rage onto whoever Uncle Sam tells them to kill.

roell29 6 hours ago

There is a big difference between beating and spanking. You don't tell me what to do and I won't tell you. My ex taught my kids to hate me after he stole them away and that's the kind of brainwashing crap happening in our nation today. People have moved totally away from GOD. People have individual ways about everything but the issue of discipline can be life-saving especially when its dangerous.

Licmycat 6 hours ago

I'm a little confused. Is this video about child abuse or about some monotheistic child abuse? Do atheists and polytheists not abuse their children also? I think you are painting an unfair picture of monotheism. Allow me to elaborate... If I made a video about monetary crime and I gave countless examples of Jews who were caught in the act, would I be painting an unfair picture of Jews in general? Yes. It would be unfair and I could justifiably be called an anti-Semite. How is this any different?

asalamulekum 7 hours agoView all Comments »0:32

"Christians" Killing Children For Jesus

November 8, 2011
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Frank Schaeffer

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The convergence of two news stories should be a wakeup call to alert us to the fact that there is a brutal movement in America that legitimizes child abuse in the name of God. One story involves a judge whipping his daughter with a belt on a YouTube clip that has gone viral. The other involves books by Evangelical leaders on child rearing that advocate spanking, even beating.

But what many people don't seem to realize is that in the Evangelical alternative universe of the home school movement, tightly knit church communities and the cult following of a number of bigtime leaders and authors, physical punishment of children has been glorified for years.

As a story in the New York Times illustrates -- "Preaching Virtue of Spanking, Even as Deaths Fuel Debate" -- a famous Evangelical author and his co-author wife, Michael and Debi Pearl, are being tied to several deaths of children killed by parents alleged to be using the Pearls' "methods" advocated in their book To Train Up a Child.

And according to ABC News, a prominent Texas judge who was filmed beating his disabled daughter with a belt and cursing at her said he was merely disciplining his child and did nothing wrong. He may or may not have read the Pearls book but his "methods" and "I-was-just-disciplining" reaction to his outing as an abuser should make us all ask ourselves about just what some "experts" on child raising are not only telling people to do TO children but the routine abuse they have legitimized in far right "conservative" and Evangelical circles.

"No, in my mind I haven't done anything wrong other than discipline my child," Judge William Adams told KZTV Wednesday after the YouTube video went viral on the internet.

Hillary Adams, the daughter who is seen being beaten in the video, secretly recorded the beating and uploaded it to YouTube Oct. 27. "I just wanted somebody to see it and tell me, 'no, Hillary this wasn't right and I'm glad you were able to grow up and move on past this' and 'no, your Dad wasn't right,'" Hillary Adams said told ABC News' Chris Cuomo.

If Hillary wants someone to tell her what her father did wasn't right she will look in vain to the Evangelical Religious Right. It is some of the most respected Evangelical discipline gurus that have made beating children not just "respectable" in conservative religious circles but even turning it into an "I'm just disciplining my child" godly activity.

In 1977 James Dobson, founder of the "Focus on the Family" religious empire and radio program, wrote a book called Dare To Discipline whose purpose was to get parents to beat their children.

Beating was the way God "wants" mothers and fathers to "discipline" children from toddlerhood on.

Perhaps Dobson wrote his perverted, sadistic book because he was beaten as a child and was damaged as he then damaged millions of others through his "ministry" later.

In his book Dobson glorified a sadomasochistic/spiritual ritual of "discipline." He said he wanted to stop a "liberal" trend in America that was moving away from the godly thrashing of infants. He wanted to help "restore" America to God and the good old days of child hitting. This fit in well with God as Retributioner-in-Chief that evangelicals endorse.

Dobson isn't alone. Evangelical "family values" guru Bill Gothard, with a following of millions, also has tought "discipline." As reported by The Cincinnati Beacon, Matthew Murray, the young shooter who killed a bunch of churchgoers in 2007, had been raised according to the teachings of evangelist Bill Gothard.

"I remember the beatings and the fighting and yelling and insane rules and all the Bill Gothard rules and then trancing out," he wrote Dec. 1 under the monicker "nghtmrchld26" on a Web forum for former Pentecostal Christians.

Bill Gothard is the founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles in Illinois, which promotes a Christian home "education" program. As quoted in the Beacon article Murray said "I remember how it was like every day was Mission Impossible trying to keep the rules or not get caught and just . . . survive every single (expletive) day."

It was no coincidence that the judge was mercilessly beating a young girl. Women must submit to men according to Evangelicals. And nothing is worse than a "rebellious" woman!

Keeping women down is a Dobson theme along with child beating. So James Dobson also endorsed and helped the "Silver Ring" movement begin wherein fathers make their daughters pledge chastity to them in a ritual known as "purity balls" that mimic proms, only with dad as the "boyfriend" standing in for Jesus. And if the daughter won't submit, well, there's always that handy belt.

Dobson extols his view of child beating in The Strong Willed Child. (Living Books 1992) He makes a parallel between beating children and beating dogs:

[Our dog] Siggie is a member of our family and we love him dearly. And despite his anarchistic nature, I have finally taught him to obey a few simple commands. However, we had some classic battles before he reluctantly yielded to my authority. The greatest confrontation occurred a few years ago when I had been in Miami for a three-day conference. I returned to observe that Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone. But I didn't realize until later that evening just how strongly he felt about his new position as Captain. At eleven o'clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed. On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. You see, he was in the bathroom, seated comfortably on the furry lid of the toilet seat. That is his favorite spot in the house, because it allows him to bask in the warmth of a nearby electric heater. . .

When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie's way of saying. 'Get lost!'

I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me 'reason' with Mr. Freud.

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!

But this is not a book about the discipline of dogs; there is an important moral to my story that is highly relevant to the world of children. JUST AS SURELY AS A DOG WILL OCCASIONALLY CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF HIS LEADERS, SO WILL A LITTLE CHILD -- ONLY MORE SO." (Emphasis Dobson's)

[I]t is possible to create a fussy, demanding baby by rushing to pick him up every time he utters a whimper or sigh. Infants are fully capable of learning to manipulate their parents through a process called reinforcement, whereby any behavior that produces a pleasant result will tend to recur. Thus, a healthy baby can keep his mother hopping around his nursery twelve hours a day (or night) by simply forcing air past his sandpaper larynx.

Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of 'original sin' which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster." (p 87)

In cheerfully telling about beating Siggie -- a story that should have put Dobson in prison for animal cruelty -- Dobson is telling his readers to similarly beat their children -- something he's advocated as "spanking" until a child collapses in tears into a parent's arms.

And Dobson is mild compared to the popular Evangelical authors Michel and Debi Pearl. In their bookTo Train Up a Child (1994) they advocate beating babies.

In the book they recommend "switching" a 7-month-old on the bare bottom or leg 7 to 8 times for getting angry. (p74) If the baby is still angry to do it again until he gives in to the pain. The "switch" for an under 1 year old they recommend is from a willow tree and/or a 12 inch RULER!

And the real scandal is not just the sick author's ideas but that the leadership of the evangelical world from Billy Graham to the editors of Christianity Today magazine or the mega church pastors like Rick Warren, have not called for the banishment of abusers like the Pearls, Dobson or Gothard. These people remain in good standing.

And in the Pearl's case this is after actual criminal complaints have been brought against some parents who have killed their children and who have been following the "methods" in the To Train Up a Childbook. And this disgusting book can nevertheless be found in thousands of "respectable" Evangelical bookstores. Here's what the evangelicals approve by their silence and complicity, as noted in theExaminer and many other media sources:

A California couple has been charged with murder and torture after their discipline methods caused the death of one of their children and critical injuries for another.

Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz of Paradise, California, are accused of murdering their 7-year-old adopted daughter during a "discipline session." The couple is also charged with the torture of their 11-year-old adopted daughter and cruelty to a child for signs of bruising discovered on their 10-year-old biological son.

The parents allegedly used a 15 inch length of plastic tubing used for plumbing to beat the children, a practice recommended in the book "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl of "No Greater Joy Ministries."

The same plumbing supply tools were linked to a North Carolina child's death in 2006, when a devotee of the Pearls accidentally killed her 4-year-old son by suffocating him in tightly wrapped blankets.

Police later found out about the Pearls' recommendations to beat children with this type of plumbing supply tubing from a Salon Magazine article, "Spare the quarter-inch plumbing supply line, spoil the child."

Mr. Pearl, who has no degree or training in child development, writes in his book that he and his wife used "the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules" -- namely, "switches."

On their web site, the Pearls write that "switching" or giving "licks" with a plumbing supply line is a "real attention getter."

And it is not just individuals who are abused. Whole "Christian" organizations are alleged to be abusing children methodically. According to a report by Channel 13 WTHR Indianapolis (and many other media sources over the years),:

At first glance, the Bill Gothard-founded and run Indianapolis Training Center looks like an ordinary conference hotel. But some say there are dark secrets inside. "They're not here to play," Mark Cavanaugh, an ITC staffer tells a mother on hidden-camera video. 'They're here because they've been disobedient, they've been disrespectful.'

He's talking about young offenders who are sent to the center by the Marion County Juvenile Court. Critics of the program here, however, have another view. "This is sort of a shadow world where these kids almost disappear," said John Krull, executive director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. On theGothard web site the pitch for the centers says that they were founded by Gothard because:

At the age of 15, Bill Gothard noticed some of his high school classmates making unwise decisions. Realizing that they would have to live with the consequences of these decisions, he was motivated to dedicate his life to helping young people make wise choices.

The WTHR report goes on to detail how they help these young people make "wise choices":

But Eyewitness News has learned of disturbing allegations about the center, including routine corporal punishment - sometimes without parental consent - and solitary confinement that can last for months. And just last week, Child Protective Services began investigating the center. That investigation involves Teresa Landis, whose 10-year-old daughter spent nearly a year at the center - sent there, according to Judge Payne, after she attacked a teacher and a school bus driver. What happened next outrages her family and critics of the ITC. The girl allegedly was confined in a so-called "quiet room" for five days at a time; restrained by teenage "leaders" who would sit on her; and hit with a wooden paddle 14 times. At least once, the family contends, she was prevented from going to the bathroom and then forced to sit in her own urine.

Dobson, the Pearls and Gothard all have big followings in Rick Perry's hang-em'-high "Christian" Texas where the daughter-beating judge presides over court when not beating a child. And Texas is where Evangelical leader Gary North is based as he writes and preaches his Reconstructionist/Dominionist theology about applying literal Old Testament law -- including the execution of "incorrigible youths" as mandated by the Bible. (This is something I describe fully in my book Sex, Mom and God.) So even Dobson is "mild" by comparison to the Reconstructionists that did so much to influence the far right "Christian" politics the likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

Here is how Evangelical "man of God" Dobson describes how to beat a child using his own as a guide.

He writes:

"The day I learned the importance of staying out of reach shines like a neon light in my mind. I made the costly mistake of sassing her when I was about four feet away. I knew I had crossed the line and wondered what she would do about it. It didn't take long to find out. Mom wheeled around to grab something with which to express her displeasure, and her hand landed on a girdle.

Those were the days when a girdle was lined with rivets and mysterious panels. She drew back and swung the abominable garment in my direction, and I can still hear it whistling through the air. The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles, wrapping themselves around my midsection. She gave me an entire thrashing with one blow! But from that day forward, I measured my words carefully when addressing my mother. I never spoke disrespectfully to her again, even when she was seventy-five years old. (p. 23-24, The New Dare To Discipline)

Dobson likes being recognized by the powerful Republican elite (not to mention the far right "1%"). He was W. Bush's chief religious "adviser" among other things. Check out all the pictures of Dobson with leaders displayed on his website. And prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq Dobson appeared as a guest on CNN's Larry King Live to make a case for the invasion. In 2007 Dobson served as a Bush propagandist up to the point that he wanted Richard Cizek, then vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, fired for saying that global warming was real in contradiction to the Bush anti-science Religious Right policies.

So when you see a belt wielded on a defenseless young "rebellious" disabled woman, think of Dobson, the Pearls, Gothard and all the Religious Right leaders and all those good God-fearing folks who want to "Bring America back to God."

That video of a weeping child begging for mercy is what our country will look like if the Religious right ever gets their way. Just check out the "child rearing" sections of your local "Christian" bookstore. And if that's how they think God wants them to treat their children just imagine how gays, liberals and anyone else of the "Other" will do in their theocracy.

Meanwhile the Evangelical leaders who embrace Dobson, the Pearls and Gothard -- in other words the people trying to stop humane gay couples from marrying and adopting and caring for otherwise unwanted foster kids -- will continue to tell the rest of us how to live "moral" lives while thousands upon thousands of American children are beaten in the name of Jesus.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest 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.

This Blogger's Books from 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
by Frank Schaeffer 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
by Frank Schaeffer

Follow Frank Schaeffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer

My Latest on Gays, Sex and God (the Movie)

November 3, 2011
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Frank Schaeffer

New York Times best-selling author

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Disclaimer -- A Personal Context

Before continuing this shamelessly rave review let me note that my praise of Ms. Jaye's work notwithstanding I've never met her or anyone featured in her films. (Jaye Bird Productions is a family company consisting of Cassie Jaye, her cinematographer mother and producer sister and I've never met any of them.) But while there is no personal connection between us we're "connected" in another way.

My background is relevant to my appreciating Ms. Jaye's films. As the director of some 30 hours of documentaries and 4 forgettable Hollywood features (in the 1970s and 80s) I bring a filmmaker's perspective to Ms. Jaye's movie work. And my childhood and youth also prepared me to appreciate her in depth documenting of the American culture wars as they relate to sex, religion and politics. Like Ms. Jaye, I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian. I even became a leader in the antiabortion Religious Right in the 70s and 80s. I long ago changed my mind about politics and religion but the lessons learned about right wing sexually obsessed politics masquerading as religion stayed with me. I "get" these movies.

Back to the Movie

Ms. Jaye's soon-to-be-released second movie -- The Right to Love: An American Family is a portrait of a good and loving family. It's apt for these times in this country where we've forgotten what fidelity and responsibility look like. More Evangelicals than any other social group get divorced so they might pay special attention to this film and learn something about how to have good marriages if, that is, they can get past the fact that this family is also a gay-parent household.

The movie follows the journey of a legally married California practicing Christian gay couple with two adopted children. It opens with the two fathers driving to a demonstration protesting the repeal of same sex marriage in California by the Prop 8 victory. The next scene shows one of these fathers with tears in his eyes holding his young daughter and looking at a sea of despondent people. Two older women clutching each other in despair are crying, "What is this, what is this?" as others chant "shame on you!"

The imagery cuts to "Yes on Prop 8" signs and news programs' as they chart the close Prop 8 vote results the night of the 2008 election. We hear the story of how that anti-gay "victory" was engineered by the Roman Catholic, Evangelical and Mormon bigots of the Religious Right who now dominate the Republican Party. When fighting for Prop 8 they somehow found the time to attack gay "sin" perhaps while taking time off from fighting lawsuits related to the pedophilia rings of Roman Catholic priestsand/or hiding the sexual/financial malfeasance of many (most?) evangelical leaders and/or trying to cover up their recent Mormon bigamist/racist/murderous "family values" past. Other than that...

Living With a Gay Couple and Their Family

By tracking the life of one gay-headed household the documentary examines the context of theMarriage Equality debate that swirls around all gay families in the USA as they struggle to fight for a slice of the American Dream as legally protected citizens. It also turns conventional wisdom about where religion stands on these issues on its head because the couple featured in the movie is made up of 2 devout Christians. Many have found hope through watching the Leffew's family's videos-- including the hope religious gay people discover in the Leffew's deep religious commitment.

Gay Bigots?

...Which brings up an interesting point: The film's trailer posted on YouTube has been buzzing among the Leffew's fans and bloggers and in an odd turn some LGBTQ bloggers are turning against the project. These attacks are due to a simple family grace recorded in the movie that's no more than a prayer made by the fathers at the breakfast table before sending the kids to school. This "controversial" scene was included in the trailer. And apparently some members of the LGBTQ community don't like this.

One subscriber left this comment, "Many among us consider Gay Christians traitors to our community" and another called them "superstitious twits." Stung by this feedback from what I'm guessing are some not terribly bright wannabe Richard Dawkins clones, Bryan Leffew went on his YouTube channel to express his and his husband's frustration with the hypocrisy of this discrimination against them within their own community-- for holding onto their faith.

News From Religious America

I have advice for those (hopefully few) people in the LGBTQ community taking potshots at the Leffews' for their religion: Check out where you're living.

Good luck with writing off all religious people -- LGBTQ believers or otherwise -- and then trying to win elections in this very religious nation. In case you haven't noticed America is disabled with Far Right religious delusions of all kinds. But America is also full of reasonable religious people including many LGBTQ religious people. Who do you think those priests in many denominations are who are risking their careers to perform gay weddings? Why do you think I get threats from religious people? They fear people like me -- religious persons who are also tolerant and progressive -- far more than they fear Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher. Insiders like me might just convince their children to change their minds about gay rights amongst other things.

Unless moderate religious people (including many African-Americans who have been voting against gay marriage because of their religious beliefs) can be won over to the gay civil rights movement - including the younger and more reasonable Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, etc., -- you can kiss the long-term future of not just gay marriage's legality but even of our democracy, goodbye.

Theocracy Anyone?

The Religious Right's takeover of the Republican Party (which sadly my family and I had so much to do with) illustrates that in America we're perpetually on the threshold of an attempt by some people to impose a theocracy. This is well illustrated in Daddy I Do by the absurd fact that the government has been paying for the fundamentalists to indoctrinate young people through the "abstinence only" programs like "Silver Ring" even though compared to comprehensive sex education these religious programs have been proven failures in preventing teen pregnancy.

And the only way to stop our slide to theocracy -- not to mention the defeat of gay marriage initiatives -- is to convince a new generation of religious people -- including the children of Evangelicals -- to change not just their minds but their gut reactions and their hearts when it comes to how they think about gay people.

One Quibble

I do have a quibble with The Right to Love or I should say with some of the choices made by the stars. I'm allergic to using one's children as props as some of the Leffew's YouTube material used in the movie smacks of them doing. I base this view on my childhood experiences of being groomed to take up a cause and "volunteered" into my parent's ministry from toddlerhood on.

But that's a detail. And the stakes are very high, so high we're talking about a YouTube ministry to gay young people to help them survive the hate of the "Christian" community. So I think that the YouTube use of the Leffew's children may be okay up to a point. But it seems to me that a line gets crossed in some of the footage showing the kids being taken to noisy protests and by them being included in just about every single YouTube clip. Take it from me; someday these kids will be writing memoirs of their own...

The Two-Men-Kissing Test

The Right to Love might just change some minds. It didn't change my mind -- I was already pro-gay marriage -- but it did help heal my reactionary gut reaction to the "other." When I mention gut reactions I'm not talking about rationally held views but the emotional response level where we all really live; call it the gut-check test when seeing two men kissing.

It's on that deeper level that The Right to Love spoke to me so powerfully. In my books including my latest -- Sex, Mom and God -- I support the right of gays to marry and have supported it loudly earning myself hate mail from religious extremists who regard me as a traitor to my Evangelical roots. What I needed to change wasn't my official beliefs but the non-rational cancer of prejudice inculcated into me by the Bronze Age biblical mythology I was raised on.

The Right to Love was like a powerful dose of chemotherapy applied to a heretofore recalcitrant spiritual tumor. As I watched the film I also "watched" my Bible-based tumor of gut reaction about the "other" shrink

Put it this way: by the last male-on-male kiss in the movie I wasn't just rooting for the two married family men doing the tender kissing but didn't care that they were "same-sex" because I now identified with them as "same-as-me." I was happy for them to have found the same love, sex and joy I've experienced in my own 41-year marriage. I was also happy for their 2 lovely children because in them I saw my 3 beloved children and 4 grandchildren.

Conclusion

There are deservedly high expectations for The Right To Love: An American Family. The LGBTQ community's self-interest in having a positive message play widely about the inner dynamics of a lovely gay marriage is served by this movie. But a portrait of a good marriage is something that should interest everyone who cares about the future of America. So I hope the film reaches more than one segment of the population.

Film festivals should screen The Right To Love. It deserves a large worldwide audience as do the two caring fathers and their two lovely children glowing at the heart of this wonderful film.

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.

This Blogger's Books from 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
by Frank Schaeffer 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
by Frank Schaeffer

Follow Frank Schaeffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer

At Last Something Sensible (and a Great Piece of Writing) About the Killing of Quaddafi

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORDictators Get the Deaths They DeserveBy SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIOREPublished: October 26, 2011RECOMMENDTWITTERLINKEDINCOMMENTS (51)E-MAILPRINTREPRINTSSHARE [image error]

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"ALL political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure," wrote Enoch Powell, the controversial but often perspicacious British politician, "because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." But the political lives of tyrants play out human affairs with a special intensity: the death of a democratic leader long after his retirement is a private matter, but the death of a tyrant is always a political act that reflects the character of his power. If a tyrant dies peacefully in bed in the full resplendence of his rule, his death is a theater of that power; if a tyrant is executed while crying for mercy in the dust, then that, too, is a reflection of the nature of a fallen regime and the reaction of an oppressed people.

This was never truer than in the death, last week, of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. The only difference between his death and those of so many other tyrants across history was that it was filmed with mobile phones, a facility unavailable to contemporaries of, say, the Roman emperor Caligula.

Despite brandished phones and pistols, there was something Biblical in the wild scene, as elemental as the deaths of King Ahab ("the dogs licked up his blood") and Queen Jezebel (thrown off a palace balcony). It was certainly not as terrible as the death of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus I, who was beaten and dismembered, his hair and teeth pulled out by the mob, his handsome face burned with boiling water. In modern times, it was more frenzied than the semi-formal execution, in 1989, of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, but not as terrible as the ghastly lynching, in 1958, of the innocent King Faisal II of Iraq (age 23) and his hated uncle, who were supposedly impaled and dismembered, their heads used as soccer balls. In 1996, the pro-Soviet former president of Afghanistan, Najibullah, was castrated, dragged through the streets and hanged.

Western leaders and intellectuals find Colonel Qaddafi's lynching distasteful — Bernard-Henri Lévy worried it would "pollute the essential morality of an insurrection" — yet there are sound political reasons for the public culling of the self-proclaimed king of kings. Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes. As Churchill put it, "dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount."

Only death can end both the spell to bewitch and the prerogative to dominate — and sometimes, not even death can snuff out power. "The terror inspired by Caligula's reign," wrote Suetonius, "could be judged by the sequel." Romans were so terrified of the emperor that it was not enough to assassinate him. They wanted to see him dead: fearing it was a trick and lacking cellphone footage, they had to be convinced. The mile-long line of Libyans who were keen to see Colonel Qaddafi's cadaver in its shop-refrigerator-tomb would understand this perfectly.

When Catherine the Great overthrew her husband, Peter III, in 1762, she knew that if anything happened to him, she would be blamed. Yet her entourage, led by her lover, Grigory Orlov, realized that as long as he lived, he remained the legitimate autocrat: they strangled him. His body was displayed to prove that he was dead, but nonetheless, Peter III impostors tormented Catherine for the rest of her life. Henry IV experienced similar troubles after the death of Richard II; a host of pretenders haunted the usurper.

But such comebacks may be history: the cellphone videos, which show Colonel Qaddafi being beaten, and later, the bullet holes in his dead body, rob his last followers of the mystique necessary to lead an insurgency in his name, charged with all the excitement of a (Saddam Hussein-style) heroic leader on the run. His preposterously exuberant cult of personality was surely shattered by the spectacle of his pathetic demolition.

Sometimes the killing of tyrants is specially designed to echo the leader's vices. Shajar al-Durr, an Egyptian sultan's widow who became (uniquely in Muslim history) a sultan in her own right, was notorious for her extravagance. When she murdered her new husband in 1257, his concubines beat her to death with her own clogs — both a sign of Arab contempt and the medieval equivalent of death by stiletto. It was said that Edward II, notorious for homosexual relationships with his favorites, was killed with a red-hot poker. The upside-down suspension of the dead Mussolini with his mistress in a town square signaled the end of his pretensions to Caesarian heroism and Casanovan machismo.

For someone who so thrived in the age of television, an impresario of many a circus of public violence, Colonel Qaddafi faced an entirely fitting end. When he asked his frenzied killers, who had known no other ruler in their lives, "Do you not know the difference between right and wrong?" he had already taught them the answer. We may call this auto-tyrannicide. The manically terrifying but ruthlessly brilliant Mamluk sultan Baibars I, was more literally a victim: according to some accounts, he regularly poisoned his guests until, in 1277, he absentmindedly downed a glass of poisoned fermented camel's milk himself. During the Crusades, the Atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo (in today's Iraq and part of Syria), Zangi, who liked to castrate the children of enemies, and possibly his boy lovers as well, was supposedly stabbed in his bed by one of those humiliated eunuchs. When Stalin suffered a stroke in 1953, he had recently arrested dozens of doctors for treason. He lay in his own urine for more than 12 hours before his henchmen dared to call a doctor. He was not murdered — like Colonel Qaddafi, he was the author of his own destruction.

There is no greater achievement for the tyrant — short of immortality — than to die in his own bed. He must control the time, place and consequence of death. This is possible with a gradual illness. "Now Herod's sickness greatly increased upon him ... God's judgment upon him for his sins," wrote Josephus about the king of Judea. "His entrails had ulcers ... an aqueous and transparent liquor had settled itself around his feet and the bottom of his belly. His genitals were rotting and gave birth to worms." Yet the suppurating Herod managed to kill one rebellious son and arrange the succession of three more before succumbing.

Unlike monarchs, who pass power to their heirs at the moment of death to ensure the survival of the regime, tyrants must simply survive as long as possible. Hence inhumane struggles by indefatigable doctors to keep ailing dictators — Chairman Mao, Leonid I. Brezhnev, Marshal Tito, General Franco — alive. Only the ingenious North Koreans have solved this problem by declaring Kim Il-sung immortal, perpetual president.

The courtiers of modern tyrants have sought to avoid the inconvenience of death by creating new hereditary monarchies. Outside the Arab world, the Kims of North Korea, Kadyrovs of Chechnya, Kabilas of Congo and Aliyevs of Azerbaijan all achieved this dictator's dream. Few in the Arab world have done the same. Hafez al-Assad of Syria, who ruled from 1970, died in his bed in 2000, passing the presidency to his son Bashar. Colonel Qaddafi, Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Hussein all dreamed of it. But the spoiled heirs of such hereditary tyrannies usually lack the talent of their fathers.

ALL tyrannies are virtuoso displays over many years of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control. Tyrants are the greatest of all actor-managers — omnipotent impresarios. They will last only as long as prestige, prosperity and a vestige of justice are maintained. Uninhibited bloodletting can also work — as Bashar al-Assad and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have demonstrated — until luck eventually runs out in the shape of treason, outside interference or a tsunami of rebellion like the Arab Spring. It is hard to imagine that there would be anything but giblets left if those two now fell into the hands of their people.

If a tyrant cannot die in his own bed, the best he can do is try to stage manage his downfall, because such characters find it unthinkable to exist without ruling. Colonel Qaddafi, like many others, was so narcissistic that he first denied the fact of the revolution before embracing his own reckless, heroic role, the drama of the last stand: "I have set my life upon a cast," says Shakespeare's Richard III, "and I will stand the hazard of the die." Colonel Qaddafi could have saved his family and thousands of lives by retiring to a villa and later facing the International Criminal Court. Yet the narcissist envisages his downfall only as a mise-en-scène featuring his followers, family and country, consumed in his bonfire of egomaniacal nihilism. Colonel Qaddafi must have planned to die in battle like Richard III and Macbeth, or to kill himself. Yet this monstrous poseur totally bungled his own death.

The master class in the death of tyrants was given by Hitler who, even as Russian legions fought their way into Berlin, kept control long enough to plan and execute his testament, marriage and suicide: control to the end in a kerosene-fueled garden Götterdämmerung. But not even he achieved the brilliant dignity of the death of Charles I, denounced as a "man of blood" by his Puritan tormentors, whose grace before execution set a standard that Colonel Qaddafi could only dream of: "I am a martyr of the people," he said before facing the ax. "I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world."

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of "Jerusalem: The Biography."

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 27, 2011, on page A31 of the New York edition with the headline: Dictators Get The Deaths They Deserve.COMMENTS (51)E-MAILPRINTREPRINTS [image error]

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