Some times what looks like a Conspiracy is a Conspiracy …

A lot of discussions here over the last three months–as well as blog posts–have been centered around what seems to be a concerted effort in Congress and Statehouses around the country to restrict women’s right to abortion, attack collective bargaining rights, and disable environmental protection laws and agencies.  This has come behind a similar set of laws aimed at restricting the rights of the GLBT community, immigrants,  and religious minorities.  A flurry of laws supposedly demonstrating state and federal interest in restricting constitutional rights all look and sound mighty familiar.

Bostonboomer and I have been trying to figure out which set of right wing “institutes” have been manufacturing these attacks, laws, and lies. We figured it was an unholy reliance of christian religious extremists and corporate interests like the Koch Brothers.  Neither of us had really dug into it yet, however.    Thankfully, People for the American Way has saved us some research in one of these areas. There’s an excellent internet monograph up called ‘The ‘Green Dragon’ Slayers: How the Religious Right and the Corporate Right are Joining Forces to Fight Environmental Protection. You can read it online or as a down-loadable and printable pdf .

 One of the things that I find most confusing is why the religious right would want to harm “god’s creation”?  I’d understood that some fundamental christians had actually taken up the call to protect the earth.  However, that old testament verse that gets interpreted as “you’re on top of the world, it’s a gift to you, now go use it like you see fit” still seems to get the shaking and the rolling going among those whose erections depend on feeling godlike and wealthy.  PFAW says it’s basically “dominion theology”.  So, what is this toxic brand of superstition?

In the last decade, as evangelical Christian leaders increasingly became involved in conservation, “creation care” and taking action against global climate change, the alarms went up in corporate America  that many traditional members of the conservative coalition were becoming advocates  for environmental protection. To counter the rise of the faith-based environmentalist Evangelical Climate Initiative, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance emerged. The ISA, propped up by business interests including  Exxon Mobil, has peddled misleading and false claims to make the case that climate change is a myth. In 2007, the ISA was renamed the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and became more belligerent and zealous in its anti-environmental activities.

The Cornwall Alliance is led by E. Calvin Beisner, who believes that since God granted humans “dominion” over the earth, humans have a right to exploit all natural resources. As Randall Balmer writes in Thy Kingdom Come, Beisner “asserts that God has placed all of nature at the disposal of humanity.” Balmer quotes Beisner’s own summary of his dominion theology: “All of our acquisitive activities should be undertaken with the purpose of extending godly rule, or dominion.” As Balmer notes, “the combination of dominion theology from the Religious Right and the wise use ideology of corporate and business interests has created a powerful coalition to oppose environmental protection.”

According to a report by Think Progress, the Cornwall Alliance is a front group for the shadowy James Partnership. Both the James Partnership and the Cornwall Alliance are closely linked to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), an anti-environmental group that is “funded by at least $542,000 from ExxonMobil, $60,500 from Chevron, and $1,280,000 from Scaife family foundations, which are rooted in wealth from Gulf Oil and steel interests.” CFACT is also part of a climate change denialist network funded by the ExxonMobil-financed Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Beisner is a CFACT board member and an “adjunct fellow” of the Acton Institute, which is primarily funded by groups like ExxonMobil, the Scaife foundations and the Koch brothers. Beisner is also an adviser to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which is financed by the oil-backed Earthart Foundation, the Koch brothers, and ExxonMobil.

In fact, Beisner is not a scientist and has no scientific credentials. Despite claiming to be an authority on energy and environmental issues, he received his Ph.D. in Scottish History.

In 2009, Beisner’s Cornwall Alliance cosponsored a climate change denial conference led by the Heartland Institute, a pro-corporate group funded by Exxon Mobil, the Koch Family Foundations, and the Scaife foundations. Other organizations funded by energy corporations that cosponsored the conference include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, and Americans for Prosperity.

The Cornwall Alliance has been enormously successful in recruiting Religious Right leaders to promote its anti-environmental cause. In 1999, the group started recruiting prominent Religious Right figures to sign the “Cornwall Declaration,” a document that attacks environmentalists, saying they “deify nature or oppose human dominion over creation” and promote “erroneous theological and anthropological positions.” Among its signatories were Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Chuck Colson of the Colson Center, D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for America, Daniel Lapin of Towards Tradition, and Frank Pavone of Priests for Life. The president of CFACT called himself “a driving force” behind the declaration.

You can see it’s the same old interlocking directorates of hate and intolerance.  They even have drafted a new “evangelical declaration of global warming that says “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming” and maintains that “reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures.”   Yes, they believe in religous hokum pokum above the overwhelming evidence for evolution and climate change.  Science holds no sway compared to something contrived by the Nicene Council to Romanize the known world in the 3rd century which was basically a conglomerate of all the superstitions of the day.  Yes, Constantine locked the priests up of every local cult and told them they could not come out until they had invented a “Roman” religion and that’s exactly what they did.  We’re still suffering from that grand kidnapping to this day.  They’re working hard on painting conservation and environmental protection as “anti-Christian” too.

In 2007, Jerry Falwell warned that environmental action was “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” away from evangelism and religious faith, and a year later James Dobson and Gary Bauer slammed Rev. Richard Cizik, a principal evangelical supporter of environmental protection, and his allies for “using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”

The Cornwall Alliance has coordinated with Religious Right leaders to accuse Christians who believe in environmental protection not only of attempting to divide the faith community, but of promoting a dangerous anti-religious and anti-Christian agenda. The group calls the environmentalist movement “The Green Dragon” and earlier this year produced a star-studded documentary to help slay it.

The Cornwall Alliance’s documentary, “Resisting the Green Dragon,”  includes appearances by a who’s who of Religious Right leaders: Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association; Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America; David Barton of WallBuilders; Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association and Patrick Henry College; radio show host Janet Parshall; and anti-gay activist Bishop Harry Jackson.

In heartfelt interviews for the documentary, these activists claim that the environmental movement (The Green Dragon) is promoting an anti-religious agenda:  Parshall derides the Green Dragon’s “lust for political power” and “spiritual deception,” and calls the environmental movement “deadly to the Gospel of Jesus Christ”; Fischer labels it a “threat to the Christian faith”; Perkins claims that environmentalists are “pointing people away from God and into humanism” and support “an unbiblical view”;  Beisner says “the green movement threatens liberty”; and Farris warns that environmentalists are “scaring little children to achieve [their] political ends.” Barton adds a summary of the dominion theology: “Mankind is the apex of creation; He placed it over the planet, over the environment.”

Anyway, I’m not going to print out the entire 8 pages of the pdf here although I will beg you to to read it.  Like I said, it’s the cast of usual cretins who’ve found a new cause célèbre and source of the kind of green they worship.  Why can’t we just declare all these folks public enemies or terrorists or something worse and stuff them altogether with bibles in orange jumpsuits at Guantanamo?  Oh, and just think, all those oil and gas companies get to deduct all those contributions to these nutty groups from their revenues.  It’s one of the reasons that they don’t pay much in taxes.  Think about that next time you fill up at anything affiliated with Exxon Mobil or better  yet, go fill up some place else.

So many of them, so few lions …