Rightwing Canards 101

In 2008, I decided to go from blog lurker, to thread poster, to front-pager.  It has been one strange trip that has been both oddly satisfying and exasperating. I think I popped out of the womb with an opinion and a need to express it.  If my first grade teacher Miss Pearl Jensen of Herbert Hoover elementary school could speak to this, she’d probably say, that child has too much to say and I just felt the need to “shake the toenails off her” all the time.   She used to pick  me up, shake me, and scream that at me. I assume she’d do that again if she met me today.

My mother was always being called to school about me because I was always saying something.  In fourth grade, I refused to say the pledge of allegiance because I saw absolutely no use in it.  I announced in fifth grade, after reading my social studies assignment on eastern religions, that I must be a Buddhist because it’s the first religion I’d read about that didn’t seem less real than ‘The Hobbit’.  I’ve always been in trouble throughout my corporate work life for being ‘verbose’, ‘glib’, and ‘mouthy’.  Thank goodness for academic freedom where I can now get away with it.  So,  I guess you shouldn’t be surprised that I would eventually find a home as a front pager some where.

Since front-paging really doesn’t come with instruction manuals, other than the usual, wow, we like the sound of how you write, knock yourself out here, I’ve had to learn by the hunt and peck method.  I’ve learned which buttons attract what type of nasty comments.  I usually avoid pushing those buttons because frankly, unless it’s really important, I hate doing troll duty.  Some how, there’s just one button I keep pushing.  It is the “I hate your source” so you must be a ______ button.

Look, I’m used to writing scholarly stuff and finance reports.  I recognize that sometimes the people who drive you the craziest can some times come up with a good point and good data.  Other times, the people you really want to support and put forward can come up with some stinkers.  This is a blanket warning to every one who ever reads my stuff.  People that you disagree with can frequently be quotable as more than just examples of wingnuts.  On the other hand, some times people that you disagree with, and get quoted a lot can be very very very wrong and what they say will be printed over and over and over and over.  The only thing I think is completely over the top is taking a comment out of context and creating a moonbat feeding frenzy with it.

With that statement and story, I present to you Michael Tomasky of the Guardian (last time I checked both reliably liberal and credible sources) and ” How they lie: a case study; Did an Obama judicial nominee really express a preference for Allah over Jesus? No, not by a long shot”.  Tomasky basically chases down one of those right wing memes around the web, then exposes that meme as untrue by actually using (gasp) facts  and showing the context.  His gut told him with a title like that,  it was undoubtedly one of those right wing smear jobs, but he didn’t just take it at gut or face value.  He chased down the truth before he pounded out the story.  In other words, he acted like a journalist who writes a blog rather than a blogger that acts out what he supposes is journalism.

From the second I read the sentence, I knew there was something fishy about it. Many years’ experience in reading and then looking into rightwing canards set off the usual alarm bells in my head. So I know how these things work. But even I was shocked after I looked into the truth of the matter.

My daily readings led me to an interview with Newt Gingrich in Christianity Today. The former speaker was asked whether opposition to tax increases was an adequate “uniting message” for his party. Gingrich replied that there had to be more to the party’s story. For instance, he said:

You have Obama nominating Judge Hamilton, who said in her ruling that saying the words Jesus Christ in a prayer is a sign of inappropriate behavior, but saying Allah would be OK. You’ll find most Republican senators voting against a judge who is confused about whether you can say Jesus Christ in a prayer, particularly one who is pro-Muslim being able to say Allah.

That seemed, frankly, ridiculous. I happened to know that the “Hamilton” in question was from Indiana and had a reputation as a moderate-to-liberal jurist. I also happened to know that “her” first name was David, so Gingrich could not get even this basic fact straight (obviously, he assumed, only some sort of Wiccan lesbian could deliver such a ruling!). So I wanted to know more.

I Googled around, and sure enough, a search returned thousands of rabid posts from the wing-o-sphere about this judge who thinks Indianans should be allowed to pray to Allah but not to Jesus. This one apparently set things going. And from there it was off to the races.

Rather than just looking at that first link or check out blogs that agree with him commenting on the same thing, Tomasky went in search of the actual case, the context and the ‘offending’ quote.  He had googled and found hundreds of right wing blogs with opinions about a judge who thinks Indianans should be allowed to pray to Allah but not to Jesus.  (Try it yourself, there’s a helluva lot of them out there and some of them are foaming-at-the-mouth-right wing rabid as well as you may imagine.)

The case in question is  Hinrichs v Bosma and was  decided 30 November 2005.  Here’s the link to where you can read the 60-page decision in pdf form here.   The case is not that unusual these days.  The legislature of Indiana uses ceremonial prayers to open its proceedings.   Also typical, the legislators invite clergy from around the area.  I guess some one counted how many invoked the name of Jesus and complained. The court counted a group of them and found that happened about 29 out of 45  times.  Hinrichs is one of the four Indiana taxpayers filing a complaint that asked for the prayers to be more ecumenical and not favoring one specific religion.

Bosma is the former Speaker of the House who basically turned the original request down and said that clerics could pray any way they wanted to pray and whatever way their community wanted them to pray.  A law suit was filed and Judge David Hamilton got to write the opinion.  I’m not a lawyer, but even given that,  the opinion is fairly readable and the decision approaches the arguments based on the establishment clause in the Bill of Rights. As Tomasky mentions, the most interesting thing about the opinion is that some of the findings are based on a decision from the fourth judicial circuit court which is based in Virginia.  It is widely considered the country’s most conservative court.

Tomasky links the two decisions.

The fourth circuit heard a case called Wynn v Town of Great Falls. The town council opened its meetings with a prayer that regularly mentioned Jesus Christ. The fourth circuit – remember, the country’s most conservative – ruled that Great Falls stood in clear violation of the establishment clause, and that the prayer “promoted one religion over all others”.

Not only did Hamilton rely on the country’s most conservative federal circuit court, he specifically cited an opinion written by one of the most conservative jurists on that court. Judge J Harvie Wilkinson is always on the short list when a US supreme court seat opens up during a Republican presidency. But even Wilkinson wrote, as Hamilton quotes him:

We cannot adopt a view of the tradition of legislative prayer that chops up American citizens on public occasions into representatives of one sect and one sect only, whether Christian, Jewish or Wiccan. In private observances, the faithful surely choose to express the unique aspects of their creeds. But in their civic faith, Americans have reached more broadly. Our civic faith seeks guidance that is not the property of any sect.

That’s a deeply conservative jurist talking, and saying: no Jesus in governmental settings.

So here’s where the lie comes in. Hamilton did indeed rule that Jesus Christ must not be mentioned in legislative prayers. But what did he say about Allah? It practically goes without saying that the decision doesn’t so much as mention Allah. So this is what his wing-nut critics are doing: They’re using the fact that he proscribes mentions of Jesus but does not specifically proscribe mentions of Allah to assert that he thinks mentions of Allah would be perfectly, as it were, kosher.

But in fact, he says exactly the opposite in the decision. Read this paragraph, from page 49:

“The Speaker has also suggested that such an explicit caution about Christian references “would be the first known religious viewpoint discrimination in connection with the Indiana House invocation.” … The criticism is misguided. The decisive point of constitutional law is that a practice of sectarian prayer favouring any particular religion violates the establishment clause.

From the evidence here, it is clear that the letters asking invited clerics to “strive for an ecumenical prayer” have not been sufficient to prevent many Christian speakers from using the prayer opportunity to advance and even to proselytise Christianity. The same strictures will apply to sectarian Jewish or Muslim prayers, for example.

This record, however, shows no efforts by Jewish or Muslim clerics to use the prayer opportunity to advance their particular religions. At this juncture, there is no need to be more specific in the injunction as to what would amount to a sectarian prayer in those traditions.”

The same strictures will apply! In other words, Hamilton wrote that he’d have said precisely the same thing if he’d been petitioned about Yahweh or Allah or any deity. You can see clearly that the wingers have taken the last sentence of this paragraph, yanked it completely out of context, and then taken the extra step (or two or three) of insinuating that of course, this kind of Godless heathen is exactly the sort of nominee you’d expect from a secret Muslim president who can’t produce a birth certificate.

And let’s not leave this subject without noting the revolting racism of the mention of Allah. It wasn’t the possibility of people praying to Buddha that Gingrich and all the others were alarmed by, or Vishnu, or the Shinto God Kami. Only Allah. That millions of decent and patriotic Americans pray to Allah every day doesn’t concern Gingrich and the others in the slightest.

So, this folks, is an authentic right-wing canard. It singles out one religion for scorn over others.  It takes a quote from a situation completely out of context and turns it into something that can only be characterized as a complete, utter lie.  It is now being repeated over and over to ruin someone’s career.  Next time you need a clear example of a nasty right wing meme, well, go bookmark Micheal’s article over on the Guardian and get a startling reminder.

Please Digg!!! and Share!!!