Setting The Record Straight
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051118/setting_the_record_straight.php
[excerpt]
Setting The Record Straight
Bill Moyers
November 18, 2005
Consider the scene just a few weeks ago when your Gov. Perry, surrounded by
cheering God-folk, showed up at a pep rally in Fort Worth for yet another
cleverly staged bashing of gay people, contrived to keep the pious signed
on for the culture war so they won't know they are losing the class war
waged against them in Austin by the governor and his rich corporate
patrons. The main speaker was none other than the Rev. Rod Parsley of Ohio.
Keep your eyes on Rev. Parsley. He is the new incarnation of Pat Robertson
and Jerry Falwell, that devout duo who channeled Elmer Gantry into a new
political religion driven by an obsession to punish people on account of
sex. Parsley runs a multimillion-dollar-a-year televangelism ministry
based in Columbus, Ohio, with access worldwide to 400 TV stations and cable
affiliates. 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." But he shows up with so many Republicans that he has
been publicly described as the party's "spiritual advisor."
The "advice" he offers is the same old stuff peddled by Robertson and
Falwell in their own rise to the top of the dung heap of religious bigotry
and bile. Parsley demonizes other faiths ("The god of Islam and the god of
Christianity are not the same being") and rouses the partisan faithful to
fever pitch by tossing them the red meat of radical disinformation: "The
church in America is under oppression." "The separation of church and state
is a lie perpetrated on Americans—especially on believers in Jesus Christ."
So intense is his scapegoating of gays that one 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. Watching the
two of them together, you have to wonder if Gov. Perry and Rev. Parsley
have ever read a history book detailing how Heinrich Himmler organized a
special section of the Gestapo to deal with homosexuality and abortion,
exhorting his country to remember that "Germany's forebears knew what to do
with homosexuals. They drowned them in bags." You want to believe the
governor and the preacher are surely ignorant of such horrors, horrors you
know they would never condone, but you want to grab them by the lapels and
shake them and tell them their loathing of other people is the kindling of
evil.
Ohio newspapers report that Parsley has launched Reformation Ohio to bring
"spiritual revival and moral reformation" to the Buckeye state by using
pastors and their churches to register at least 400,000 new voters
motivated by "Bible-based values." It's a familiar agenda: deny women
freedom of conscience in the difficult personal choices affecting
pregnancy, discriminate against gay people who seek the commitments of
marriage, outlaw stem-cell research no matter the lives it might save, and
overturn a provision in the U.S. tax code that prohibits non-profit
churches from endorsing political candidates. (At one recent rally, Parsley
and former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller delivered "fiery speeches" as more than
1,200 pastors were handed thousands of mail-in petitions to spread among
their congregations urging the Senate quickly to confirm John Roberts to
the Supreme Court.)
Rev. Parsley is a master of mass psychology. He sees the church as a
sleeping giant with the ability and the anointing from God to transform
America. At a rally in July he proclaimed: "Let the Revolution begin!" And
the congregation answered: "Let the Revolution begin."
So what was it that brought Rev. Parsley to Austin recently to meet with
Gov. Perry? Both showed up for a "Pastors' Policy Briefing" sponsored by
the Texas Restoration Project (not to be confused with Reformation Ohio,
unless you think of kissin' cousins). Once again the aim is to sign up
"Patriot Pastors" who will call on their congregations to vote the Lord's
will on Election Day. Also present in Austin was Ohio's secretary of
state, Ken Blackwell. You will remember him as the overseer of the election
process in Ohio last year when a surge of conservative Christian voters
narrowly carried Bush to victory there. Yes, the same Ken Blackwell who had
modestly acknowledged that "God wanted him as secretary of state in 2004"
because it was such a critical election. Now, apparently, he has been
divinely designated for higher office. One wonders what Blackwell, Perry
and Parsley were really talking about when they got down on their knees
here in Austin. We will never know, because the praying and preaching and
politicking were closed to the press, as befits the stealth salvation they
are plotting for Texas.
Who paid to bring preachers from all over the state to town for this
politically religious camp meeting? That, too, is a big secret. Two Texas
oligarchs were spotted at the closed-door sessions—James Leininger and Bo
Pilgrim— and they may have dropped something into the offering plate. But
no one will say who put up the half million shekels it cost to bring the
brethren to town and provide for them more than a few loaves and fishes.
Some years ago the classicist scholar, William Arrowsmith, writing in The
Texas Observer, described 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 Faith of Our Fathers, the
Old Time Religion, the Rock of Ages. Right-wing religion provides the
political and corporate forces running America a cloak of "moral values"
with which to camouflage the plunder of America. It is the Texas machine
duplicated many times over. For, as The Texas Observer once put it, "The
men who run the Lone Star State, through a tacit but powerful interlocking
directorate of politicians and corporation executives [joined now by
preachers] are perpetrating and perpetuating a monstrous deception on the
public" —namely, the illusion of self-government.
Everything President George W. Bush knows, he learned here, as the product
of a system 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, the separation of church and state. As
governor, Bush was nurtured by the peculiar Texas blend of piety and
privilege that mocks those values. With the election of 2000, he and his
cohorts arrived in Washington like atheists taking over the Vatican; they
had come to run a government they don't believe in.
The results have been disastrous: reckless tax cuts, a relentless assault
on social services, monumental debt, pre-emptive war, an exhausted
military, booming corporate welfare and corruption so deep and pervasive it
has touched every facet of American government.
[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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