Irony, Oh Irony

Kenya is exporting religious leadership to the United States. Considering the complex history of European colonialism on the Continent and slavery and racism in our country, it's ironic and indicative how far folks will go to defeat the scary homosexual agenda:

William Atwood and William Murdoch are among a growing number of conservative U.S. clerics pledging allegiance to African bishops who take a tough line against homosexuality.

"As a bishop ... you are to maintain the Church's discipline, guard her faith and promote her mission in the world," Nzimbi told them during a service at Nairobi's All Saints Cathedral attended by hundreds of worshippers.

Atwood and Murdoch will be in charge of 30 congregations in the United States who have asked for leadership from Kenya.

At the service, they vowed to "serve the international interests of the Anglican Church of Kenya, to serve clergy and congregations in North America under the Kenyan jurisdiction."

The 77 million-strong Anglican Communion has been divided since the Episcopal Church, its 2.4 million member U.S. branch, consecrated Gene Robinson as Anglicanism's first openly gay bishop four years ago.

My how far we have come. How enlightened we are! 140 years ago it was still legal to buy and sell a black man in this country. 50 years ago, a black man still couldn't vote in many states.....now some will take guidance and leadership from an African Bishop rather than evolve and grow into acceptance that God loves all of His children. Even the gay ones.

Added to the Blogroll

Baptists for Brownback.....priceless.

The Best Defense is A Good Offense

During tonight's Democratic Debate, Hillary Clinton was asked, if elected to two terms as president, how she would feel about a Clinton or Bush serving 28 straight years in the White House, Sen. Clinton replied, “I think it is a problem that Bush was elected in 2000. I actually thought somebody else was elected in that election,” in an obvious reference to Al Gore who won the popular vote in 2000, but lost in the electoral college to George W. Bush. The answer was interrupted by a flurry of applause from the audience.

She then added, “I am running on my own merits, but I am very proud of my husband’s record as president of the United States,” which was also a good applause line.

The only way to turn a defensive position into offense is to keep advancing.

Is There No End to The Wickedness of This Administration

From the NYTimes:

Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations

Sounds more like communist USSR, doesn't it?
Lies, deceit, equivocation, incompetence, denial of basic human rights? And they believe themselves to be Christian? They might want to read the prophet Amos....

An Abomination....Absolutely

Three people were arrested for interrupting the guest chaplain's prayer to open the Senate. They found it to be an abomination that a Hindu Chaplain offered the beginning invocation.

The only abomination is that these fundamentalists were allowed to ruin Rajan Zed's day. Can anyone say American Taliban? (watch the debacle here).

Honestly, how many times do we have to explain to these zealots that we are a nation founded not on "christian" principles but on the premise that we have freedom from a state Church; we have freedom to worship the God of our choosing; and that choice of which God to worship is between no one but us and our God? Chaplain Zed's prayer is exactly the kind of tolerance our Founding Fathers had in mind.

Oh and while I'm at it, I really think Jesus is embarrassed by you jerkballs. Have a bit of common courtesy--for Christ's sake.

SCOTUS Sums Up This Entire Administration

SCOTUS struck another blow to the separation of Church and State, finding, in the case of Hein vs. Freedom From Religion Foundation, that taxpayers lack standing to challenge expenditures and activities of President Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The court ruled 5-4 (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas) with the Majority Opinion being written by Justice Alito.

It's not surprising, but it's certainly disappointing. In the dissenting opinion, Justice Souter wrote (I assume) without irony

I see no basis for this distinction in either logic or precedent....

Ironically, this can be said for 99.75% of all decisions made by this mad administration.

More reaction and analysis:
Law.com
WaPo

Quote of the Day

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
---Steven Weinberg

I don't agree. Evil people use religion to try to convince others that the evil things that they are doing are good things.
Afterall, they are doing these things because God has spoken to them. How could that be evil?

I'm In; I'm Out; I'm In; I'm Out

Two weeks ago, the Christian Civic League announced that they were turning their attentions to something other than sex:

The League's Board of Director's decided recently to make defeating this gambling expansion referendum its top priority until November. This is the first time since 1994 that this Christian ministry has allowed her deep concerns over sexual morality to drop from its top priority ranking.

Seemed like a reasonable redirection of focus--gambling's something most folks can agree to hate, especially in Maine. Neon lights and the ding-ping of the slots just doesn't reinforce the state motto. And besides, most folks in Maine are getting tired of the CCL's constant bleating about the "homosexual agenda"and its non-existent threat to "family values" so they stopped listening to the daily bleat. Like the neighbors say, "Live Free or Die".

How quickly good intentions are abandoned. Less than two weeks later, Mike Heath and his League are back on the sex band wagon. Today's press release about a state other than Maine (the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) declares

And the truth is that homosexuality is perverse, deviant and disgusting sexual behavior that isn't a topic of discussion in polite and civil societies. If people want to do it in the privacy of their home then shame on them, but I'm not interested in stopping their boorish bedroom antics anymore than I'm interested in hearing about it."

Idunnomike. It sounds like you really are interested in stopping their boorish bedroom antics, even though you said you were going to stop obsessing about "their boorish bedroom antics" . Either that or you're just hateful.

Pam is blogging this, as is Good As You.

Update: I'd be totally remiss not to link to Peter LaBarbera's thoughts on the matter
It's scary that MassResistance, Mike Heath (in his podcast today) and Americans For Truth all place the blame for this loss--their view, not mine--on compromise.
What's that quote?
"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
----Thomas Paine

Faith, Reason and Illogical Thoughts

Yesterday, Sam Brownback contributed an OpEd piece to the New York Times, in which he argued that he was for Science and Evolution. Sort of. Excepting where science creates a conflict with his faith; then faith wins out. Sigh.

More of the same from the Christianists: a position that echoes the current administration's positions (think Global Warming and Birth Control) and that has seemingly little intelligence guiding it.

Today, the Times published eight thoughtful responses to Senator Brownback. As one writer said:

By subjecting scientific observation to a theological litmus test, he drives the very wedge between faith and reason that he purports to avoid.
As a scientist, I would say that God is much more subtle than to force us to close our eyes to what we see in deference to what another may choose to believe is his guiding hand.

Amen, brother.

Slippery Slope

Andrew Sullivan has yet another money post on this administration's 'interrogation methods' in which he points out that the methods used are not new. I'm not going to excerpt it, but I'll leave you with the money quote:

Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own.

Please do read it in its entirety. And remember, Bush and Rumsfeld didn't coin the phrase 'enhanced interrogation'. The Gestapo did.

The Land of the Lost

In addition to The Taft Museum (where you can see Rembrandts and Sargeants), The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and The Behringer-Crawford Museum of Natural History, the greater Cincinnati area adds a new museum to its list of places to visit.

The Creation Museum, conveniently located near the airport and the interstate system, opens its doors today. There, a visitor will see a literal six day creation of the earth, learn that this planet is only 6,000 years old and see dinosaurs co-exist with humans.

In the years since the Freedom Center has opened, this museum dedicated to tolerance education, freedom and (you guessed it) the history of the Underground Railroad, has struggled financially. There are fewer visitors than planned for and the endowment money is less than hoped for.

In this era when three Republican candidates for President (Brownback, Tancredo and Huckabee) don't believe in evolution, I'm guessing the $27 million Creation Museum won't struggle to make money or lack for visitors.

The Christian Post has an excellent, unbiased article that details the inherent challenges presented in the book of Genesis for Fundamental Christians--if you don't believe that the earth is 6,000 years old and you don't believe that God created it in six 24 hour days, then you've undermined Biblical Authority--and for those Christians who believe in evolution.

It's what makes the extreme Christian Right so very scary: their faith leaves no room for doubt, for questions, for debate, for growth. To think that if one does not believe that God created the earth in six 24 hour days, the rest of the Bible is invalidated seems to be the antithesis of faith. Doesn't it take much more faith to view Genesis as a beautifully written book about the incomprehensible power and majesty of God than a book that answers every question about how we all got here?

Or as, as Francis S. Collins asks in the Christian Post article, “Could God actually be threatened by what our puny minds are learning about the beautiful complexity of His creation?"

The article goes on to quote Creation Museum Founder Ken Ham (you might remember him from Alexandra Pelosi's documentary) saying "“Maybe there’s someone out there – but I haven’t met anybody yet – who because we told them to believe the six literal days and believe what the Bible has written, has left Christianity."

Well Ken, I guess I'd best get over to that museum and introduce myself.

Like my granddaddy used to say, "Religion is man made and faith is God made." What is important is knowing the Grace of God through Jesus Christ, not undermining science and causing harm in the name of faith.

In this time, it is very difficult to see Christianity as an instrument of kindness, goodness, generosity and charity, as a religion that practices what Jesus instructed us to practice. My own personal beliefs have been sorely strained by our current Christianist President, his Christianist minions, and the Christian Right-- those who would deny science, who seem to have all the answers, who by their actions indicate that other religions are a threat to their faith, and, who are remarkably intolerant, who seem to have no trouble lying or equivocating, as long as they do it because God has put it in their hearts.

Ken, I count myself as one who has left "Christianity"--but not my faith--due in no small part to the Creationists' denial of science and your efforts to force me to believe a literal interpretation of Genesis.

Schadenfreude

It couldn't happen to a nicer person......
Meanwhile, today on the Hill, Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) was seen making a spectacle of herself when the unlucky lawmaker slipped and fell in what we’re told was vomit, in a bathroom in Cannon. (Some nice female dealing with the repercussions of Jason Roe’s going away party by chance?) “She made THE biggest scene in the hallway,” says a staffer who escaped the, um, regurgitation. “It’s literally all down her back.”

There's a reason she's called Mean Jean and it's not just because she called John Murtha a coward....

Is Dobson Really Losing His Power?

The Economist seems to think so.....

The problem is that Mr Dobson is not all that good at politics. He
displays all the characteristic weaknesses of evangelical
politicos—overreaching hopelessly and then blaming failure on want of
political courage. He was the prime force behind both the fight to keep
Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube in place and the push for a gay-marriage
ban. But a majority of evangelicals disapproved of the first and a
large number of his fellow social conservatives warned, rightly, that
the second was a waste of effort.





I myself, think rumors of the Religious Right's declining power are wishful thinking and grossly overstated.

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The Face of This War

Anytime you hear a war apoligist say that only 2,000 A-mur-i-can lives have been sacrificed in this war against terror, remember this face. 70,000 Iraqi civilians and 184,000 wounded American patriots must be counted. And before we count them, we must give them health care and the help that they deserve.
More here.

Where's the Outrage?

Via Michelle Malkin:

Ann Coulter just finished her riff on Al Gore, tossed out some cute jokes ("You can understand why Hollywood is concerned about global warming. You know what heat does to plastic."), and ended with a cheap one-liner about John Edwards being a "faggot." (Paraphrasing) She said she would refrain from commenting on Edwards because "if you say faggot, you have to go to rehab."

C'mon Michelle, the best you can do is report that you didn't giggle? Where's your righteous indignation? Where's your moral outrage? Where's the HotAir editorial on declining civility caused by liberal values? I guess if she'd been commenting on Obama and substituted the n word, you wouldn't have giggled about that, either.
Oh yea, I forgot. Being black is genetic. Being gay is a choice:

This is what liberals do, hijack and invert the language so that certain views are simply unacceptable and must not be voiced. However, what they can’t do is argue the fact homosexuality is abnormal. Further, for males it is very unhealthy, and as far as societal value, that behavior has zero. But since they can’t argue these facts they must silence you by labeling words “hate speech” and making dissenters from their views as the abnormal ones when in reality the opposite is true.

My bad. Thank god folks like you and The Ace are protecting us from the decline in Family Values and Civility.

This Is Wrong On So Many Levels

While James Dobson and Rick Santorum and others on the Christian Right are so very, very busy defending "family values" from the "sodomites" and Darwinists, the administration that they support (and were once a part of--sorry about that resounding defeat in the last election, Rick) has overseen the slide of the welfare of our children to the lowest of the 21 rich countries surveyed by UNICEF.

While the Christian Right obsesses about the attack on Christian values (as evidenced by Mary Cheney's pregnancy), a 12-year old Maryland boy dies of a toothache. The bacteria from the abcess in his tooth invaded his brain. After almost $250,000 in emergency hospital care, Deamonte Driver passed away on Sunday. His death could have been avoided by an $80.00 tooth pulling.

Dr. Dobson, wouldn't some of the $137,848,520 (2004 Focus on the Family revenue) that your ministry makes each year be better spent helping the poor and destitute in our country? Or is Leviticus 18:22 more important than Jesus teaching ("Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.")?

It's time to take back our country and our values from the so-called Christians and show the rest of the world what Jesus really meant.