Let's connect the dots folks. We know the neoconservative White House cabal is tied in to some wildly insane people, but it's hard to keep the map of crazy people straight. My last diary we traced the hate from the top of the GOP to overtly racist hate groups. Along those lines, we'll now trace the White House to a wacky scientist.
Let's connect the dots folks. We know the neoconservative White House cabal is tied in to some wildly insane people, but it's hard to keep the map of crazy people straight.
My last diary we traced the hate from the top of the GOP to overtly racist hate groups. Along those lines, we'll now trace the White House to a wacky scientist.
We start with a cult leader from Ohio who doubles as a Republican rainmaker. He is a televangelist by name of Rev. Rod Parsley. He is dapper, slick, and very successful. He is a man of God. If God is money.
Recently he has been accused of using his church status to promote political candidates (jeepers)....
30 mininsters from 9 mainline Christian denominations, along with two Rabbis, signed a petition and complaint against Rev. Parsley charging that he has improperly used his church for partisan purposes.
The grievance claims that the Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church and the Rev. Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church improperly used their churches and affiliated entities -- the Center for Moral Clarity, Ohio Restoration Project and Reformation Ohio -- for partisan politics, including supporting the Republican gubernatorial candidacy of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. - The Columbus Dispatch, 1/26/06
Well, that's a hefty claim. Can this pastor really be more than a street soldier for the cause?
Owing to the breadth of his appeal (black, white, young, old) Parsley has been embraced by the GOP leadership and the right-wing punditocracy as a representative of "moral values" -- from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (who had Parsley and Jackson at his side when he hosted a news conference in support of the judicial nomination of Janice Rogers Brown), to Texas Governor Rick Perry (who had Parsley, along with Perkins and American Family Association President Don Wildmon, on hand when he hosted his controversial Sunday bill-signing ceremony at a Christian school, where Parsley called gay sex "a veritable breeding ground of disease"), to Ann Coulter (who helped him launch his book tour), to National Association of Evangelicals President Ted Haggard (who has called Parsley "a bold, dynamic man of faith who's committed to doing the right thing no matter what"), to Bush himself (who included Parsley on a conference call to religious leaders shortly after the announcement of John Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court). - American Prospect, 11/05.
You know a pastor is in touch with God when he can issue Mastercards with his own impression.
Though Rev. Parsely may be a cult leader who peddles legislative bigotry and commercialized faux-Christianity to the blind sheep of Ohio and beyond, he isn't the end of the wacky line. There is another level for us to go.
Consider this quote he made during the celebration of Texas Governor Rick Perry's signing of an anti-gay bill:
Parsley heaped praise on Gov. Perry for "protecting the children of Texas from the gay agenda." Then he rattled off a series of shocking statistics: "Gay sex is a veritable breeding ground for disease," he said. "Only 1% of the homosexual population in America will die of old age. The average life expectancy for a homosexual in the United States of America is 43 years of age. A lesbian can only expect to live to be 45 years of age. Homosexuals represent 2% of the population, yet today they're carrying 60% of the known cases of syphilis." - Southern Poverty Law Center
Those are some pretty scary statistics the Reverand offered while standing next to a GOP elected official - thus proving no degrees of separation between mainstream Republicans and cult leaders. Where did he get those statistics?
From an even wackier guy, Dr. Paul Cameron, Director of the thoroughly discredited Family Research Council.
Religious right action groups including Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition promote Cameron's statistics on their Web sites. The Christian Communications Network, a public relations firm run by anti-abortion zealot Gary McCullough -- media adviser to Operation Rescue and the parents of Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube removal sparked a major controversy -- publicizes Cameron's findings to religious newspapers and helps distribute tens of thousands of his heavily footnoted pamphlets to church congregations. - SPLC Intelligence Report
To illustrate why I say Dr. Cameron has been discredited, check out the letter he received from the American Psycological Association here. It appears as though the good doctor abridged their ethical standards in addition to providing ridiculous psuedo-science to every anti-gay cause in America.
If Rev. Parsley, in concert with Governor Perry, can dispurse the inaccurate statistics of Dr. Paul Cameron, it must not be known how off base Cameron is - right? It must be new information.
Not really. In fact, it has been on the record since 1985 when a judge in the Baker v. Wade case stated the following:
(i) his sworn statement that "homosexuals are approximately 43 times more apt
to commit crimes than is the general population" is a total distortion of the
Kinsey data upon which he relies--which, as is obvious to anyone who reads the
report, concerns data from a non-representative sample of delinquent homosexuals
(and Dr. Cameron compares this group to college and non-college heterosexuals);
(ii) his sworn statement that "homosexuals abuse children at a proportionately greater incident than do heterosexuals" is based upon the same distorted data--and, the Court notes, is directly contrary to other evidence presented at trial besides the testimony of Dr. Simon and Dr. Marmour. (553 F. Supp. 1121 at 1130 n.18.) n30 - Baker v. Wade
The fact that Dr. Cameron was known to be a non-scientist zealot should have severed his tie to the mainstream Right's intelligentsia, but it didn't.
When columnist Pat Buchanan wrote about AIDS and gay death in March 1993, he cited a study by Cameron. When columnist Don Feder wrote about gay servicemen and child molestation in July 1993, he also cited Cameron. - Mark E. Pietrzyk, New Republic
After that....
William Bennett, Chuck Colson, and others continue to repeat Cameron's conclusion that the life expectancy for gay men is 43 years, a statistic based on his reading of obituaries in gay newspapers. (Cameron's statistic was effectively demolishedin online magazine Slate) Bennett's trumpeting of this statistic last year on ABC's This Week and in the Weekly Standard was picked up by National Review and continues to circulate as the kind of "truth" that the Religious Right wants to tell - Spero News
Ok, so now we know the wacky scientist, let's trace him to the White House.
The easy way to do it is to say Rev. Rod Parsley spreads Cameron's phony studies next to Bush's former Lt. Governor. Or, you could point out that Parsley is a direct operative for Kenneth Blackwell, the GOP's answer to Barack Obama in Ohio.
Or, you could point out:
In 1992, Cameron joined a fight against a proposed gay rights law in Colorado. Gale A. Norton, who was then Colorado's attorney general and who is now the secretary of the Interior in the Bush administration, defended a voter-approved measure that prohibited extending civil rights laws to gays. Norton's office paid Cameron $15,000 as a consultant on the case, although his testimony was never used. - Boston.com
Or, last but least, you might point out...
WASHINGTON -- President Bush had a ready answer when asked in January for his view of adoption by same-sex couples: ''Studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman," the president said.
Bush's assertion raised eyebrows among specialists. The American Academy of Pediatrics, composed of leaders in the field, had found no meaningful difference between children raised by same-sex and heterosexual couples, based on a 2002 report written largely by a Boston pediatrician, Dr. Ellen C. Perrin.
But Bush's statement was celebrated at a tiny think tank called the Family Research Institute, where the founder, Dr. Paul Cameron, believes Bush was referring to studies he has published in academic journals that are critical of gays and lesbians as parents. - Boston Globe
And there you have it.
Zero degrees of separation between the nuttiest of people and the nuttiest of White House administrations.