Blogorama on the religious right is an occasional round-up of signficant posts from around the blogosphere on the religious right and what to do about it.
Jonathan Hutson, writing at Talk to Action, has the latest fallout from the Abramoff scandal that has busted out beyond the Beltway:
The Christian Coalition of Alabama (CCA) is accusing trial lawyers, without any evidence, of funding an anti-Christian agenda through its contributions to judicial candidates. That's a whopper, and CCA knows it. CCA leader John Giles has surely not forgotten that he has criticized trial lawyers in The New York Times for contributing nearly a million dollars to the 2004 campaigns of three conservative Christian candidates for the Alabama Supreme Court. Those candidates advertised that they share the same judicial philosophy as former Alabama Chief Justice Roy S Moore, the "Ten Commandments" judge, who wants to remake America as a Christian nation.
So why is CCA engaged in a baseless smear campaign over judicial contributions? Maybe it's because the agenda that the CCA is pushing these days is not so much a pro-Christian agenda as a pro-corporate agenda. And maybe they're trying to distract conservative Christian voters from the fact that the CCA is embroiled in a scandal over its acceptance of $850,000 in contributions that trace back to one of the Indian tribal clients of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
DefCon has announced another in its series of online
streaming audio chats:
Join us on Friday, April 21st at 2 pm EDT/11 am PDT for our second Book Club chat with advisory board member Isaac Kramnick. Isaac is the author of The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State.
The Godless Constitution is a captivating and definitive analysis of religion's place in our Constitution and ultimately our nation.
I highly recommend Kramnick's book, and plan to listen in. He is a professor of history at Cornell University, and perhaps the leading expert on Article 6 of the Constitution.
Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has an excellent post about what not to do in response to the religious right: He picks up the story
....about the situation at Northern Kentucky University, where an English professor led a group of students in destroying a perfectly legal anti-abortion display on the campus there. The story includes a picture of the professor tearing apart the display's main sign and shows all the crosses broken apart on the ground. The police say they're investigating it as felony theft and vandalism and I think they're absolutely right. It doesn't matter how offensive they found the display and it doesn't matter that the teacher felt "violated" by it. They had no legal right to destroy it and they did over $600 worth of damage to someone else's property and that is against the law. And the school's president, Jim Votruba, really understands what free speech means:
"I am very disappointed that this happened," Votruba said. "At a university, the opposing views should be able to bump up against each other. Responding with pamphlets or speeches would have allowed the power of ideas to compete."
Precisely. The answer to free speech that angers you or offends you is to exercise your own free speech to counter it. If instead you engage in theft and vandalism, you're a felon and an autocrat. And if you do that while claiming to be exercising your free speech, then you're an imbecile and a hypocrite as well.
The weird relationship between Rep.Curt Weldon (R-PA), and Rev.Sun Myung Moon, the octogenarian leader of the Unification Church, and self-proclaimed Messiah and Savior of the World, may become an issue in Weldon's tight reelection campaign, according to Swing State Project. Rev. Moon and his myriad entities have been intergral to the rise of the secular and religious right for decades. Moon's minions also own, control and bankroll, the Washington Times newspaper, which is not only famously right-wing, but famously unprofitable, and would never survive if had to actually compete in the freemarket. It turns out that not only was Rep. Weldon present for the Cornonation of Moon on Capitol Hill, as detailed by journalist John Gorenfeld, but he also pinned a medal in yet another Moonist ceremoney, on Momar Quadaffi! (For background on the theocratic Moon organization, see chapter 3, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.)
Don Byrd at Blog from the Capital, flags a news story about the latest developments in the question of abuse of the non-profit tax status, by Christian right oriented churches and the Ohio Restoration Project:
The IRS has not acted on the complaint against Johnson and Parsley. But IRS Commissioner Mark Everson used a speech at the City Club in Cleveland last month to announce new procedures for churches and other tax-exempt charities engaged in political campaigns, an announcement some believe was intended to send a message to Ohio churches.... Later this month, the Restoration Project will distribute 500,000 copies of its voter guide, noting where politicians stand on abortion and other issues, through CitizenUSA, a conservative paper distributed mainly through churches.
Finally,
Jeremy Leaming at
Wall of Separation summarizes the bleak situation of the once powerful Christian Coalition and provides an important backdrop for the ongoing issue of non-profit tax abuse by the Christian Right:
The Christian Coalition, founded by TV preacher Pat Robertson, is on a continued down-hill slide. As The Washington Post reported ... the group has amassed a mountain of debt and its signature "voter guides" are about to undergo major changes.... The Post reports that the Coalition, now headed by Roberta Combs, is far from its peak of a decade ago. Back then, it had a dozen lobbyists on Capitol Hill and churches nationwide distributed millions of its voter guides. According to the newspaper, the group is now more than $2 million in debt and has only one Washington employee and a dwindling number of state chapters.
Beyond that reality, the Coalition can no longer pressure houses of worship to distribute political propaganda under the guise of voter-education material. As The Post reported, Coalition leaders entered a settlement a year ago with the Internal Revenue Service that allowed the group to regain its 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status. (Its tax status had been yanked by the IRS after the agency concluded its voter guides were far too politically partisan.)
The settlement requires the Coalition to allow candidates for public office to provide lengthier - and therefore more accurate -- answers to the guide's questions.
For years, the Coalition's clearly stacked voter guides would simply state a candidate's position as being in opposition to or support of a host of polarizing public policy issues, such as reproductive rights, same-sex marriage or public displays of religious symbols.
At a fall 2004 conference in Washington, D.C., Combs claimed that in 2000 the Coalition and allied churches distributed 70 million voter guides.
Combs conceded that it was getting harder to get churches to participate, primarily because of the work of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Americans United has repeatedly advised houses of worship that federal tax law requires them to refrain from distributing the Coalition's blatantly partisan guides.