More Insanity and Lies from US Christian Extremists

The new year seems to have instilled a new level of craziness in our homegrown Christian Extremists.  Think that all that stuff you see over in under-developed nations couldn’t be brought over here?  Think it’s only radical Islam that wants to stick women in an Iron Age world?  Well, think again. Watch the video and be appalled.

Anti-Choice Fanatic Lila Rose says that  ‘Abortions Should Be Done in the Public Square’.

We’ll get back to Lila in La La Land in a bit.

First,some people have nothing better to do than to biblecheck the President’s knowledge on the “The Bible.” If it wasn’t embarrassing enough to have to watch the President of the world’s oldest pluralistic society make a speech so he can prove he’s not a “Muslim”, Fox Nation has to choose which version of the Bible he’s supposed to use to pledge allegiance.  Evidently, the only true Bible for Fox Nation is the King James version which has been shown to have severe translation and other problems.

Obama was  quoting from the New International Version, while Fox Nation was pointing to the King James Version to “debunk” him.

This would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

Most likely, they won’t bother to correct their story, and their goal will be accomplished: the readers that trust them will remember the time Obama “misquoted” the Bible, some more people will question the authenticity of Obama’s faith, and the smear machine will move on.

Exactly what is the point of having the President of our entire nation disenfranchise many of us through a “national prayer breakfast” any way?

While the president thankfully steers clear of “Christian nation” rhetoric there was simply too much of Obama the Christian yesterday.

Come to think of it, the National Prayer Breakfast often has this effect on politicians. Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, sprinkled so many references to the gospels at the 48th National Prayer Breakfast in 2000 that he made George W. Bush look like a desk officer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Obama may earnestly believe that Republican Senator Tom Coburn is his “brother in Christ.” But such a sentiment sounds odd coming from a president who once reminded his Turkish hosts that ours is not “a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation,” but “a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”

Such a nation, one would hope, would be led by a person who understands that this type of rhetoric can be deeply troubling to those who don’t believe in Christ. Just as it may offend those Christians who believe that Christ’s teachings tend to become distorted when they are mouthed by the worldly powers that be.

This comes after learning the politically significant and influential “Family” has caused Uganda to create laws that murder its GLBT citizens. David Kato was forced to return to a country that is leading a reign of terror on its GLBT minorities in a manner directly traceable to the narrow beliefs and traditions of extremist Christians in the US.  The Family makes the Muslim Brotherhood look tame by comparison.

In early 2010, as policy adviser to the UK’s all-party group on HIV and AIDS, I organised Mugisha’s visit to the Westminster parliament to meet the then foreign office minister and openly gay legislator, Chris Bryant. It was, for Mugisha, a vision of what politics could be like.

“At this moment [in Uganda] it would be political suicide for a [member of parliament] to come out and support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people,” he marvelled.

Six months later, back in Uganda, the national newspaper, Rolling Stone (unrelated to the US magazine of the same name), splashed a story across its front page, outing Uganda’s “top one hundred homos”. The piece gave names and addresses of gay men – amongst them Mugisha and Kato, whose faces were pictured in the paper. On the front page a banner read, “Hang them!”

The lives of both men were in danger but instead of hiding, they fought back. Kato successfully took the newspaper to court winning the paltry sum of 1.5 million Ugandan shillings (650 US dollars) for invasion of privacy and a permanent injunction preventing Rolling Stone from running a similar story again.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for Uganda to swiftly investigate the murder of  Kato.  This call was reiterated just recently by President Obama.  The Senate should investigate the role of US religious extremists in the murder.

“The Family”–also known as “the Fellowship”– is a powerful and covert sect of American Christian evangelical politicians and ministers who seek a decidedly anti-gay extreme Christian agenda both at home and abroad, and through its words put this hammer in the hands of all potentially intolerant Ugandans.

Enabled by President Lt. Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Musevani and his wife Janet Kataha, Ugandan parlimentarian David Bahati, (who in 2009 said, “Homosexuality it is not a human right,”) last year introduced a “kill the gays” bill which remains under active consideration. All are believed to be members of Ugandas’ Christian right wing “Family,” according to Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, a tour de force exposé of “The Fellowship,” published in 2008.

Sharlet has appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, as well as on National Public Radio to discuss the shadowy “Family” sect that has included well-known evangelical minister Rick Warren, who delivered the invocational prayer at President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, much to the chagrin of LGBT activists.

Sharlet has authored a second book on the Family, entitled C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, considered a deeper exploration of related sex scandals of Family-backed Republican politicians in Washington, D.C. It provides additional revelations about The Family’s role in the Ugandan government’s anti-gay reactions, which have brought rebukes from the Ugandan Supreme Court, but have also elicited a refusal by Rick Warren to condemn the Ugandan ”kill the gays” proposed legislation, along with a dubious claim that Warren had “nothing to do” with the anti-gay bill.

New York Times best-selling author Frank Schaeffer writes in “Evangelicals Implicated When Ugandan Gay Rights Activist Was Beaten to Death,” that the ”story of the Ugandan legislation to kill gays for being gay was intertwined with the Family and also with representatives of the wider “respectable” American Evangelical community. According to many pressreports, the genesis of the antihomosexual Ugandan bill may be traced to a three-day seminar in Kampala in March 2009 called “Exposing the Truth Behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda.” This seminar was led by Evangelical leader and hero to the Religious Right Scott Lively. He is best known for his Holocaust revisionist book  The Pink Swastika, which claims homosexuals founded the Nazi party and were responsible for death camp atrocities.”

“According to sources who attended the conference (and who were later widely quoted in the press), Lively told his Kampala audience, “I know more about this [homosexuality] than almost anyone in the world. The gay movement is an evil institution. The goal of the gay movement is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.” The results of the seminar were dramatic. “The community has become very hostile now,” Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, said in an interview. “We have to watch our backs very much more than before because the community thinks if the Ugandan government is not passing the law, they will deal with [gay] people on their own.”

They’re busy here too.  Some Iowans are on a crusade against GLBT families. Just when you think it’s safe to be a human in a developed nation, religious extremists bring out their burning crosses and witch hunts all over again.

Fox News via Bill Reilly has also been pushing Lila Rose’s heavily edited and misleading film showing that Planned Parenthood “provides advice to sex traffickers of minority youth”.  This is the latest right wing attempt to ensnare nonprofits serving the poor with lies and heavily edited video tape.   This tape is unbelievably being shown on FOX News as a credible source. New Jersey Governor Christie has promised to veto funding for Planned Parenthood now based on this highly edited and misleading document.

When the anti-abortion rights propagandists at Live Action began releasing their Planned Parenthood smear videos earlier this week, we explained that their claim that Planned Parenthood was covering-up “child sex trafficking” was clearly a lie.

That’s because way back on January 18, Planned Parenthood’s president wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder about the incidents and requested an FBI investigation into the possibility that “an individual or individuals are engaged in activities that violate several federal criminal statutes relating to sex trafficking involving minors.”

So Planned Parenthood obviously wasn’t covering up anything; they were fulfilling their obligation to keep children safe.

We also warned that media should be skeptical about the heavily edited video footage released by Live Action.

As it turns out, we were right to raise concerns.

Yesterday, Live Action released a video that it claimed showed a Richmond, Virginia, Planned Parenthood’s supposed “willingness to aid and abet sexual exploitation of minors.”

This comes on top of the attempt by Speaker of the House John Boehner and  U.S. House of Representatives to redefine rape to further remove access to abortions by poor and disabled women. Here’s that and some more news on Men with Minds stuck in the Middle Ages from young women’s website The Frisky.

Leave it to Kristen Schaal at “The Daily Show” to give the best assessment of Republicans’ attempts to redefine rape in the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. “Rape with benefits” and “rape-ish” are sooo becoming part of my vocabulary. Thankfully, the phrase “forcible rape” has been cut from the bill. [The Daily What via The Daily Show, Washington Post]

Former Oklahoma State Senator Herb Rozell suggested a pregnant woman who was nominated to the State Board of Education would be “worthless” because she would give birth during the legislative session and be totally obsessed with diapers or something. Rozell has been condemned by OK’s Governor Mary Fallin and other lawmakers, including two who said, “In this day and age, to have that type of attitude about a woman’s ability to serve is offensive, discriminatory and just wrong.” [Tulsa Beacon]

Here’s some interesting analysis on HR#3 and how the language got dropped by the CSM.  Thankfully, the GOP backed down.  Here’s some of the remaining horrors of the bill that our Democratic President shouldn’t sign if passed.

“I would caution against saying this is a victory, because the other provisions in H.R. 3 are so bad,” says Ted Miller, communications director for NARAL Pro-Choice America.

In addition to banning federal funding for abortion, the bill would eliminate tax breaks for health insurance premiums on policies that cover abortion-related expenses. It would also prevent women from paying for an abortion out of a health savings account.

A separate piece of legislation, H.R. 358 – the Protect Life Act, sponsored by Rep. Joe Pitts (R) of Pennsylvania – also seeks to bar use of federal funds for abortion under the new health-care law but is less far-reaching than Congressman Smith’s bill. Still, abortion-rights advocates are equally concerned about its provisions. On Wednesday, NARAL Pro-Choice America highlighted a new version of Congressman Pitts’ bill that they said would allow hospitals to refuse to provide an abortion to a pregnant woman even if her life was in danger.

In the last Congress, Pitts and former Rep. Bart Stupak (D) of Michigan succeeded in inserting a ban on federal funding for abortion in the House version of health reform legislation, but it was not included in the final version signed by President Obama. The day after the bill-signing, Mr. Obama signed an executive order aimed at ensuring the new law would maintain a ban on federal funding of abortions.

However, there are Democratic co-sponsors of that bill.  Micheal Whitney at FDL has a good run down of which Dems we should work actively against.  The DCCC invested $3.3 million dollars getting these jerks re-elected.

A look at the DCCC’s contributions to and on behalf of the 10 Democratic co-sponsors of HR3 show the committee spent a whopping $3,379,322.85 to keep these members in office – in 2010 alone. The list includes: Dan Boren [OK-2], Jerry Costello [IL-12], Mark Critz [PA-12], Joe Donnelly [IN-2], Daniel Lipinski [IL-3], Collin Peterson [MN-7], Nick Rahall [WV-3], Mike Ross [AR-4], and Heath Shuler [NC-11]. And God knows how many Blue Dogs that lost in 2010 and who were supported by the DCCC would have co-sponsored this bill.

Madamab has a Feminist Friday post up called ‘Feminist Friday: “Jekyll” and Hyde’ that thoroughly covers the depths of horror displayed in this bill.   Then, try this one on for size from an article from our neighbors to the north.  The “culture of life” clearly does not extend to living breathing children in many extremist sects.

Water torture of babies is one way some members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day instil fear of authority, a former member testified Wednesday.

“It’s quite common,” Carolyn Blackmore Jessop told the constitutional reference case to determine whether Canada’s polygamy law is valid.

“They spank the baby and when it cries, they hold the baby face up under the tap with running water. When they stop crying, they spank it again and the cycle is repeated until they are exhausted.”

It’s typically done by fathers and it’s called “breaking in.”

Jessop, who is from Arizona, testified about the practice during her testimony in B.C. Supreme Court.

Outside the courthouse, Jessop said water torture is common enough that there doesn’t seem any shame attached to the practice.

In her cousin’s baby book, there’s a handwritten note by her mother noting that when her daughter was 18 months old, she was becoming quite a handful and, as a result, was being held under the tap on a regular basis.

In court, Jessop said water torture was one of the reasons that she gave for gaining sole custody of her children after she left the group in 2003. She said her ex-husband, Merril Jessop, used it on “a lot” of his 54 children including her own.

“Merril was very abusive,” she said.

Think Europe is safer?  Well, try this cute one from LGF: Catholic Church Issues Guide on How to Convert Witches from the UK.

According to a new booklet from the Catholic Truth Society — the U.K. publishers for the Holy See — the faithful can convert Wiccans by following a few simple steps. The pamphlet, titled “Wicca and Witchcraft: Understanding the Dangers,” suggests that Catholics spark up conversations with these unbelievers about shared concerns such as the environment, The Telegraph reports.

And if you bump into a witch in a bar or coffee shop, the book adds, it’s important to recognize that “Wiccans are on a genuine spiritual quest,” providing “the starting point for dialog that may lead to their conversion.”

Why we continue to worry about religious extremists abroad when there are serious threats to our freedoms from religious extremists here in our own country continues to amaze me.   One bomb can only kill so many people.  Removal of religious freedoms and promotion of severe propaganda as fact by the media is a for more clear and present danger.  Why are we worried about Egyptian politics when we clearly have people in our own country who want to defy the U.S. Constitution and place us in an extremist Christian theocracy?