HAGGARD AND DRAWN (and Quartered) HYP! HYP! HYPOCRISY!

[Another old post from the soon to disappear Lion and Pen web site is this originally posted November 3, 2006]

I now offer for your delectation one Pastor Ted Haggard. Kind, smiling, Pastor Ted of the New Life Church adjacent to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Pastor Ted who is a graduate of (where else?) Oral Roberts University founded by a man who made his fortune as a televangelist and tent show huckster pulling chicken livers from suffering rubes and claiming that god had just allowed him to draw out their cancers. Pastor Ted who believes, "The Holy Bible, and only the Bible, is the authoritative Word of God. It alone is the final authority for determining all doctrinal truths. In its original writing, the Bible is inspired, infallible and inerrant." He also believes that, "we don't have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity, it's written in the Bible." Pastor Ted who was, until today, President of the National Association of Evangelicals and claims to have an identity of views with our Fearless Leader, Dubya, as well as having a long association with that pillar of traditional values, James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Yes, kind, smiling Pastor Ted, quick to condemn same-sex marriage and homosexuality seems to have been living in a world with a slight disconnect from our own...I mean apart from the half-assed fundamentalist world (forgive the tautology).

You see that one of the things that kept Pastor Ted smiling was his 3-year affair with a male prostitute from whom he also bought crystal meth. Now, we have to allow that Pastor Ted claims not to have used the crystal meth (only his teeth and brain cells know for sure!) but then he surely must still have it, mustn't he? Isn't that a lot like not inhaling? Or was he just doing an errand for his buddy, Dubya?

I do want to be clear here. If kind, smiling Pastor Ted is gay, I wish him well. It may have some ill effects on his wife and 5 children, but accepting his own sexual identity is generally a good thing. But pardon me while I roll on the floor and hold my sides that are about to split with laughter. Kind, smiling Pastor Ted hasn't much to dispute with his fellow fundamentalist hatemonger, Fred Phelps, when it comes to homosexuality. That he's been getting "massages" from a male "masseur" for the past 3 years just goes off the scale on the hypocrisy meter. This one is even more fun that watching Fox News make Mark Foley a Democrat! And, I'm sure that the fun is only starting as there are bound to be rousing statements from other icons of the cynical exploitation of religion and its unquestioning followers like Dobson, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, Chuck Colson and the rest of the "Jesus is a Nazi too" crowd.

The gag may be waving the flag
That began with a mystical hand
Hip hooray!
The American way
The world is a stage,
The stage is a world of entertainment - Howard Dietz (Arthur Schwartz - composer)

Oh, how I love it!

Rights at the Wrong Time: Bad timing from the California Supreme Court

First, though it's going to seem a bit hollow, I have long supported gay rights. I've had gay and lesbian friends since I was in high school more than 40 years ago. All the hoopla over rights for blacks, women, gays, etc. in fact is something of a continuing shock to me because it seems to me obvious that we all should have those "unalienable rights" of which Thomas Jefferson wrote. We are all human beings (though I have doubts about Dick and Lynn Cheney, Pat and Bay Buchanan and am quite sure that Ann Coulter is not) and by virtue of that fact we all inherently have those rights regardless of our color, ethnicity or whom we love. That said, I am more than a little ambivalent about the decision of the California Supreme Court today (May 15, 2008) declaring California laws banning same-sex marriages illegal.

I would, however, have no ambivalence whatever had this same decision come down on, say, November 10, 2008. The Supreme Court's decision is obviously and unquestionably correct. But this decision in our largest and most populous state is only going to electrify the bigots and loonies during an election campaign. The effect is likely to be that we will spend more time talking about same-sex marriage than we will about the criminally prosecuted war in Iraq or the decimation of the American economy by the neo-fascist ideologues of the Republican Party.

This past Tuesday we were treated to interviews with older white voters in West Virginia making clear that their bigotries had survived unchanged since the 1950s. They offered a raft of false excuses and outright racist statements for rejecting Barack Obama's candidacy. Their bigotries reveal the dark, noisome depths of American ignorance, fear and hatred that the Republican Party has mined so effectively for the last 60 plus years. The Republican prescription for winning elections has been to fragment and intimidate the electorate. They exploit the fears of black and white, young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight bringing those ephemeral and foolish issues to the fore so that we never have to consider why the United States alone amongst the industrial nations of the world deny our citizens health care, adequate housing and decent pensions.

Ultimately the California Supreme Court's decision was long overdue. It was correct. The dissent that would have it that the decision violates the separation of powers is, prima facie, absurd and an abdication of judicial responsibility. If it is not for the Supreme Court to rule on the Constitutionality of a law, what is the Supreme Court for? I am glad that my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters now can legally marry in California as well as Massachusetts. Still, had I had my druthers I would have allowed the injustice to continue for another 6 months so that we could have a presidential election without scum from Focus on the Family and other bigots energized by this decision. I'm not proud of that position but I must own it mine.

Praise the Lord! I

So homosexuality is "against god's law." Evolution contradicts the "inerrant word of god." Science, we are told must take a back seat to revelation. It's claptrap and is actually acknowledged to be claptrap. Fundamentalists don't dispute the cosmology that science gave us: a solar centric universe. They don't dispute the speed of light or the existence of electricity or of the atom. But Fundamentalists do dispute the things they wish to dispute.

A lot of air time and forests of paper and rivers of ink have been devoted to noting this idiocy, but there's very little discussion of why revelation needs to reign over empiricism. Perhaps one way of getting at that problem is in asking why it is so important to publicly support such nonsense for people who don't actually believe it themselves?

I think that the attack on science is identical in origin and purpose to the attack on "the media." For 40 years at least the right-wing has been attacking the amorphous, indistinct strawman "the media." Of course what goes unsaid most of the time is the modifier "the Liberal media." The right-wing fanatics found it expedient to convince a large segment of the public that the information they receive through newspapers, radio and television is biased and, therefore, untrustworthy. It's rather like the old joke about the wife whose husband catches her in bed with another man. The punch line is, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your eyes?" The first step in getting people to believe something other than their actual experience is to convince them that what they are seeing is a lie.

We should note that the media outlets most ideologically skewed, Rupert Murdock's newspapers and Fox News, and Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, present themselves as "fair and balanced" though they are anything but. Meanwhile probably the most fair and balanced media outlet, Public Broadcasting, is vilified and under constant attack. The term "the media" may be shorthand for any reporting that displeases the right-wing fanatics but, in the minds of those fanatics, it never includes the media outlets spouting their bias and outright lies.

Yet there's a weakness in the narrow focus on "the media." The weakness is that sometimes something happens that is so outrageous that claiming that it's a construction of "media bias" just won't wash. In those cases, even some of the fanatics themselves are forced to accept the truth of what they see or hear. The senses are a powerful contradictor of ideology.

So how does a fanatic convince people that even their senses can't be trusted? Well there is a way...Praise the Lord!

God is the ultimate paradigm for contradicting one's senses. If you can get people to believe in god, you can get them to believe in any absurdity. The "big imaginary friend in the sky" not only doesn't require sensory confirmation, god continues to be a delusion for millions world-wide specifically because there is no sensory confirmation for its existence. Further, since almost no one actually reads the Bible as a book very few have any sense of what it actually says. The majority of those who do read the Bible do so in a controlled environment of belief. They read passages seeing the book only as a fragmentary work. The basic assumption is that it is the word of that mythical Judeo-Christian god and the reading consists only of interpretation within the context of belief. In fact, the discussion tends to be about which of several interpretations that differ from one another very little is actually the "correct" interpretation and those discussions are usually guided by someone with a particular viewpoint. Thus, even the secondary, indirect experience of god is limited and perverted.

Enter religion. Fundamentalist religion's entire existence is based on the false premise that the Bible is the "revealed truth and inerrant word of god." Even more absurdly, most of the Christian fundamentalists overcome by their shallow religiosity insist that the "inerrant" text is the King James Bible. That gives rise to the satire that holds that if god hadn't wanted Moses and Jesus to speak Jacobean English he wouldn't have revealed himself in those words. So a lovely but a corrupt translation made somewhere between 1,600 and 5,000 years after the alleged events described is the sole source of "truth" and "inerrant."

Still the alleged inerrance of the Bible is only the starting point. You see, if the Bible is "inerrant" then Darwinian evolution and all subsequent modifications of that hypothesis must be errors. If the prevailing view of how life evolved, the age of the earth and the development of species over time are in error, then all science and all knowledge derived from scientific examination must also be wrong. If that is true then all empirical observations of anything from social behavior to nuclear physics must be wrong.

True enough that the right-wing fanatics won't go quite that far. After all, they are funded by corporations and individuals whose very lucrative livelihood would be threatened if we were to question nuclear physics, the solar centric planetary system, and even the chemistry that goes into the increasing number of drugs that we take. They won't even go whole hog on evolution. Where evolution can be directly observed, as in laboratory mice, insects and other animals, they claim that all of nature may evolve along Darwinian lines but human beings, alone in all the universe, are the exception. By stomping on empirical science via evolution the right-wing fanatics achieve the goal of establishing that not only can we not believe our media, we can't even believe our senses. Confusion and doubt result and into that state of disorientation comes a "preacher" - he or she may be a purveyor of religiose or political ideology - who offers soothing, simple reassurances, bumper-sticker length ideas and the promise that this person who's been disoriented, confused and frustrated can know the ultimate truth if only he or she will surrender all thought to the direction of the "preacher".

And we accept all this madness simply because in America the right-wing fanatics have changed "Sieg Heil!" to "Praise the Lord!"

Give Me Those Old Time Family Values...First Reprise

Ah, yes! Larry Craig of Idaho. The poster child for the "I'm not gay, but what are you doing after you finish in that stall?" movement.

Neither he nor Ted Haggard are gay, pretty much in the same sense that neither Truman Capote nor Liberace were gay, except that they were "bachelors".

Let's get something out of the way here. There is nothing wrong with being in love with someone of the same sex. It's not my style, but I must say that when I run into gay couples, whether male or female, who clearly care for one another my first reaction is that they are lucky and I wish that I had a relationship as wonderful.

But there is definitely something wrong with vicious hypocrisy. There is something definitely wrong with the kind of hypocrisy that allows Larry Craig to support the discriminatory Federal Marriage Amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage and to support a filibuster of Federal legislation to declare gay bashing a hate crime and yet to have credible reports that he's been cruising for gay sex since college and throughout most of his career in Washington.

One of the red herrings that right-wing fanatics constantly toss at those who oppose them is that their opponents are "self-hating". Taken in the context of Larry Craig's gay bashing, that sounds a lot like what's called "projection" in psychiatry, doesn't it?