http://www.mollyivins.com/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=2067
A Conversation with Bill Moyers
The text of Moyers’ speech at the Observer’s September 30 Austin fundraiser
by Bill Moyers
[excerpt]
[snip]
.. . . The headline above that essay read: “Caste and Righteousness.” A
startling headline that, consistent with The Texas Observer’s penchant for
describing political reality here, fits even today. For Texas is run by the
rich and the righteous, and the result is a state of piracy and piety that
puts the medieval papacy to shame.
There was your governor a few weeks ago, surrounded by cheering God-folk in
Fort Worth, holding a pep rally in behalf of punishing people on account of
sex. Who was the main speaker? None other than the Reverend Rod Parsley of
Ohio. Look out for Reverend Parsley. He heads a $40 million a year
televangelist ministry based in Columbus with access worldwide to 400 TV
stations and cable affiliates. Although he describes himself as neither
Republican nor Democrat but a “Christo-crat” – a gladiator for God marching
against “the very hordes of hell in our society” – he nonetheless shows up
with so many Republicans in Washington and elsewhere that he has been
publicly described as the Republican Party’s “spiritual advisor.”
And what does he advise them? He tells them “the god of Islam and the god
of Christianity are not the same being.” He tells them that “the separation
of church and state is a lie perpetrated on Americans – especially on
believers in Jesus Christ.” But his main message is the scapegoating of gay
people – a message so full of lies, distortions, and loathing that you
cannot help but think of the 1930s when the powerful and the pious in
Germany demonized Jews and homosexuals in order to arouse and manipulate
public passions. In 1938 Himmler even organized a special section of the
Gestapo to deal with homosexuality and abortion and on October 11 of that
year he declared in a speech: “Germany’s forebears knew what to do with
homosexuals. They drowned them in bags.” You know Governor Perry can’t even
imagine such horrors, much less condone such horrors, but you want to grab
him by the lapels and shake him and tell him that preaching hate is the
first spark to the kindling of evil.
The governor’s pal Rod Parsley is a master of mass psychology. He sees the
church as a sleeping giant that has the ability and the anointing from God
to transform America. And the giant is stirring. At a rally in July
Reverend Parsley worked the crowd into a lather as he proclaimed: “Let the
Revolution begin!” And the congregation responded: “Let the Revolution
begin.”
This is the man your governor wanted to help him make a television
commercial. The governor seems right at home with people like this. He had
them to Austin earlier this month for a “Pastors’ Policy Briefing”
sponsored by the Texas Restoration Project. Pay attention to this outfit;
there’s an Ohio Restoration Project and a Pennsylvania Restoration Party
and I suspect by the next election there will be restoration projects in
every state of the union. Their goal is to sign up “Patriot Pastors” who
will call on their congregations to vote the Lord’s will on Election Day.
Aided and abetted, no doubt, by a little loose change from Karl Rove’s
faith-based slush fund!
By the way, one of the speakers at that “Pastors’ Policy Briefing” here in
Austin was Ohio’s secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, who oversaw the
election process in Ohio last year when a surge of conservative Christian
voters narrowly carried Bush to victory there. Blackwell has modestly
acknowledged that “God wanted him as secretary of state in 2004” because it
was such a critical election. Now he’s the divinely designated candidate
for governor in 2006. Wouldn’t you like to know what he and Governor Perry
talked about at that Pastor’s briefing? Unfortunately, you can’t find out,
because the praying and the preaching were closed to the press and public,
as befits the stealth salvation they are plotting for you. You can be
confident that they agree on God being an American, but it’s possible they
may have disagreed over whether the Lord’s primary voting residence is Ohio
or Texas.
Neither will you find out who put up the estimated half-a-million dollars
to pay for that politically religious rally here in Austin. It’s a secret,
too. Two of your noted Texas oligarchs were spotted there – James
Leininger and Bo Pilgrim – and they may have dropped something into the
offering plate. But it’s not known where the half million shekels came from
to bring the good brethren to town where clearly they dined on more than a
few loaves and fishes. God only knows who picked up the tab. But between
you and me, I suspect She’s got a surprise in store for these holy
warriors. America is not yet a theocracy but Texas almost is and the
Republican Party already is, and I suspect God just might be ***** at
the presumption that GOP now stands for God’s Own Party.
Here’s the point: the classicist William Arrowsmith once described in these
pages the “worst of Texas attitudes” – “the rock-bottom conviction,
expressed in stone throughout the state and in the hearts of politicians,
that what counts is always and only wealth, that everything is for sale and
can be bought.” Including, now, the Rock of Ages.
The phenomenon of our time is how the religious, political, and corporate
right, under the cloak of ‘moral values,’ has forged a mighty coalition for
the looting of America. With one hand they stretch upward for the pearly
gates, and with the other they reach down and behind your back to pick your
pocket or your purse.
Their appointed poster boy is George W. Bush. Everything he knows, he
learned here in Texas. Unfortunately. I don’t mean this as a knock on your
schools. What I mean is that the system here is rigged to assure the
political progeny needed to perpetuate itself with minimum interference
from the nuisances of liberal democracy. You remember liberal democracy:
the rule of law, the protection of individual and minority rights, checks
and balances against arbitrary power, an independent press, and the
separation of church and state. But George W. Bush was nurtured by a
dynasty of patronage and privilege that mocks those values, a system that
owes its perpetuation to a permanent fix. the Observer got it right some
years ago: “The men who run the Lone Star State, through a tacit but
powerful interlocking directorate of politicians and corporation
executives, are perpetrating and perpetuating a monstrous deception on the
public” – namely, the illusion of self-government.
The crowd that came to Washington from Texas arrived like atheists at the
Vatican – they don’t believe in government – except as the means for
aggrandizing their autonomy, wealth, and privilege.
Bill Moyers What we’re seeing today has been forty years in the making. No
sooner had Barry Goldwater gone down to a crushing defeat in 1964 that the
Radical Right of the Republican Party resolved that the election would not
be the end of the campaign but the beginning of a movement. For four
decades they honed their slogans into a mantra: military strength, limited
government, no taxes, individual responsibility, and faith in God. Forty
years later they exercise a monopoly over Washington – the White House, the
Congress, the regulatory agencies, and (soon) the judiciary. And they have
muzzled the mainstream media that should have been the watchdog over
one-party rule.
But look at what they have delivered: reckless tax cuts, a relentless
assault on social services, monumental debt, pre-emptive war, an exhausted
military, booming corporate welfare, and pervasive corruption. The face of
modern conservatism – the embodiment of the Grand Old Party of Abraham
Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Taft, and Dwight Eisenhower – is the
face of Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist. They
came to lead a revolution and stayed to run a racket. They don’t believe in
government except as it enriches them.
Much has been made of the President’s bumbling response to Hurricane
Katrina. First he joked about the fun he had as a frat boy in New Orleans.
When a reporter pressed him on what had gone wrong after the hurricane
struck, he indignantly asked: “Who says something went wrong?” His manner
would have surprised no one who read the profile of Governor Bush in 1999
by a conservative journalist who reported how Bush had made fun of Karla
Fay Tucker’s appeals to be spared the death penalty. The journalist – a
conservative, remember – wrote that Bush mocked and dismissed the woman,
like him a born-again Christian, as he depicted her begging him, “Please
don’t kill me!” But she had not said that. Bush made it up. An indifference
to other people’s reality remains the mark of the system of privilege and
patronage that is Texas politics.
Nor did the stumbling and fumbling tell us much that we did not already
know about the team assembled by George W. Bush. This is the crowd that
was asleep at the switch in the months leading up to 9/11 when the
intelligence traffic crackled with warning [look it up in the official
commission report]. It’s the same crowd that made a mess of the occupation
of Iraq. Who can forget that after Baghdad’s libraries and museums were
sacked, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Stuff happens.’
What the hurricane exposed is what the progressive advocate Robert
Borrosage calls the “catastrophic conservatism” of the long right-wing
crusade to denigrate government, ‘starve the beast,’ scorn its purposes and
malign its officials.
[end excerpt]
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Posting and reading from alt.politics.usa.constitution OR alt.education
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads [Virginia] SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members, there are members from
all over the U.S. and a couple from overseas as well]
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.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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