Blessed is the Lord, our God. He of mercy. He whose arms enfold us all in His love. Amen. OK, so who in here this morning voted for a Democrat? Put down that hymnal and get out of my church this instant!
Quote:http://www.wlos.com/news/news.shtml#story4Religion and Politics Clash
Religion and politics clash over a local church's declaration that Democrats are not welcome.
East Waynesville Baptist asked nine members to leave. Now 40 more have left the church in protest. Former members say Pastor Chan Chandler gave them the ultimatum, saying if they didn't support George Bush, they should resign or repent. The minister declined an interview with News 13. But he did say "the actions were not politically motivated." There are questions about whether the bi-laws were followed when the members were thrown out.
(posted at 7:30am, 5/6/05)
The things people do in the name of God...
Dr. Hager's Family Values
by AYELISH MCGARVEY
[from the May 30, 2005 issue]
Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as the featured speaker at a morning service. He stood in the campus chapel at Asbury College, a small evangelical Christian school nestled among picturesque horse farms in the small town of Wilmore in Kentucky's bluegrass region. Hager is an Asburian nabob; his elderly father is a past president of the college, and Hager himself currently sits on his alma mater's board of trustees. Even the school's administrative building, Hager Hall, bears the family name.
That day, a mostly friendly audience of 1,500 students and faculty packed into the seats in front of him. With the autumn sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, Hager opened his Bible to the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and looked out into the audience. "I want to share with you some information about how...God has called me to stand in the gap," he declared. "Not only for others, but regarding ethical and moral issues in our country."
For Hager, those moral and ethical issues all appear to revolve around sex: In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. Through his six books--which include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's health and relationships--he has established himself as a leading conservative Christian voice on women's health and sexuality.
And because of his warm relationship with the Bush Administration, Hager has had the opportunity to see his ideas influence federal policy. In December 2003 the FDA advisory committee of which he is a member was asked to consider whether emergency contraception, known as Plan B, should be made available over the counter. Over Hager's dissent, the committee voted overwhelmingly to approve the change. But the FDA rejected its recommendation, a highly unusual and controversial decision in which Hager, The Nation has learned, played a key role. Hager's reappointment to the committee, which does not require Congressional approval, is expected this June, but Bush's nomination of Dr. Lester Crawford as FDA director has been bogged down in controversy over the issue of emergency contraception. Crawford was acting director throughout the Plan B debacle, and Senate Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray, are holding up his nomination until the agency revisits its decision about going over the counter with the pill.
When Hager's nomination to the FDA was announced in the fall of 2002, his conservative Christian beliefs drew sharp criticism from Democrats and prochoice groups. David Limbaugh, the lesser light in the Limbaugh family and author of Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging Political War Against Christianity, said the left had subjected Hager to an "anti-Christian litmus test." Hager's valor in the face of this "religious profiling" earned him the praise and lasting support of evangelical Christians, including such luminaries as Charles Colson, Dr. James Dobson and Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham.
Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on in this country," he said gravely. "And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use you."
Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded solemnly in agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis--co-author with Hager of Stress and the Woman's Body, and, more saliently, his former wife of thirty-two years--was enraged. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," she recalled months later, through clenched teeth.
According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible."
Not once during the uproar over Hager's FDA appointment did any reporter solicit the opinion of the woman now known as Linda Davis--she remarried in November 2002 to James Davis, a Methodist minister, and relocated to southern Georgia--on her husband's record, even though she contributed to much of his self-help work in the Christian arena (she remains a religious and political conservative). She intermittently thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of respect for her adult children. It was Hager's sermon at Asbury last October that finally changed her mind. Davis was there to hear her middle son give a vocal performance; she was prepared to hear her ex-husband inveigh against secular liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak about their divorce when he took to the pulpit.
"In early 2002," Hager told the churchgoers that day, "my world fell apart.... After thirty-two years of marriage, I was suddenly alone in a new home that we had built as our dream home. Time spent 'doing God's will' had kept me from spending the time I needed to nourish my marriage." Hager noted with pride that in his darkest hour, Focus on the Family estimated that 50 million people worldwide were praying for him.
Linda Davis quietly fumed in her chair. "He had the gall to stand under the banner of holiness of the Lord and lie, by the sin of omission," she told me. "It's what he didn't say--it's the impression he left."
. . . In tandem with his medical career, Hager has been an aggressive advocate for the political agenda of the Christian right. A member of Focus on the Family's Physician Resource Council and the Christian Medical and Dental Society, Hager assisted the Concerned Women for America in submitting a "Citizen's Petition" to the FDA in August 2002 to halt distribution and marketing of the abortion pill, RU-486. It was this record of conservative activism that ignited a firestorm when the Bush Administration first floated his name for chairman of the FDA's advisory committee in the fall of 2002. In the end, the FDA found a way to dodge the controversy: It issued a stealth announcement of Hager's appointment to the panel (to be one of eleven members, not chairman) on Christmas Eve. Liberals were furious that they weren't able to block his appointment. For many months afterward, an outraged chain letter alerting women to the appointment of a man with religious views "far outside the mainstream" snaked its way around the Internet, lending the whole episode the air of urban legend.
. . . As disturbing as they are on their own, Linda Davis's allegations take on even more gravity in light of Hager's public role as a custodian of women's health. Some may argue that this is just a personal matter between a man and his former wife--a simple case of "he said, she said" with no public implications. That might be so--if there were no allegations of criminal conduct, if the alleged conduct did not bear any relevance to the public responsibilities of the person in question, and if the allegations themselves were not credible and independently corroborated. But given that this case fails all of those tests, the public has a right to call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis's charges before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few women would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their gynecologist, and fewer still would likely be comfortable with the idea of letting one serve as a federal adviser on women's health issues.
(Lest inappropriate analogies be drawn between the Hager accusations and the politics of personal destruction that nearly brought down the presidency of Bill Clinton, it ought to be remembered that President Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky was never alleged to be criminal and did not affect his ability to fulfill his obligations to the nation. This, of course, did not stop the religious right from calling for his head. "The topic of private vs. public behavior has emerged as perhaps the central moral issue raised by Bill Clinton's 'improper relationship,'" wrote evangelist and Hager ally Franklin Graham at the time. "But the God of the Bible says that what one does in private does matter. There needs to be no clash between personal conduct and public appearance.")
Hager's FDA assignment is an object lesson in the potential influence of a single appointment to a federal advisory committee that in turn affects thousands, even millions, of lives. Witness the behind-the-scenes machinations that set the stage for the FDA's ruling against Plan B, a decision that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called a "dark stain on the reputation of an evidence-based agency like the FDA."
On December 16, 2003, twenty-seven of the FDA's advisers on women's health and nonprescription drugs gathered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to evaluate the safety and efficacy of emergency contraception for over-the-counter use. (The Plan B pill, which drastically reduces the risk of pregnancy when used within seventy-two hours after intercourse, has long been available by prescription only; its advocates say its greater availability could significantly reduce the nation's abortion rate.) After a long day of highly technical deliberation, the advisers voted 23 to 4 to drop the prescription-only status of emergency contraception. "I've been on this committee...for almost four years, and I would take this to be the safest product that we have seen brought before us," announced Dr. Julie Johnson, a professor at the University of Florida's Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine.
But on May 6, 2004, the FDA rejected the advice of its own experts and refused to approve the sale of Plan B over the counter. In his letter to Barr Laboratories, Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, claimed that Barr had not provided adequate data showing just how young adolescent women would actually use the drug.
That issue was never voted on by the committee. It was, however, broached by Hager at the meeting; he mentioned his concern for these "younger adolescents" several times.
In his private practice back in Kentucky, Hager doesn't prescribe emergency contraception, because he believes it is an abortifacient, and, not surprisingly, his was one of the four votes against widening its availability. But rather than voice his ethical opposition to the product, Hager emphasized his concern about adolescents, which other committee members have since called a "political fig leaf." According to Dr. James Trussell, who voted in favor of Plan B, the FDA had at hand six studies examining whether teens as young as 15 would increase their "risky" behavior if they knew they had a backup emergency contraceptive--and none of the studies showed any evidence for that contention.
In his sermon at Asbury College last fall, Hager proudly recounted his role in the Plan B decision. "After two days of hearings," he said, "the committees voted to approve this over-the-counter sale by 23 to 4. I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA.... Now the opinion I wrote was not from an evangelical Christian perspective.... But I argued it from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and He used it through this minority report to influence the decision." [Emphasis added.]
None of the four panel members I spoke with for this article were aware of Hager's "minority opinion." An FDA spokeswoman told me that "the FDA did not ask for a minority opinion from this advisory committee," though she was unable to say whether any individual within the agency had requested such a document from Hager. This past January the FDA missed a deadline to respond to a new application from Barr Laboratories, and any forward motion on making Plan B more widely available has completely stalled.
Meanwhile, David Hager's stock has been rising among conservatives. Though his term on the FDA panel is set to expire on June 30, observers on both sides of the political divide anticipate his reappointment. In March I spoke with Janice Shaw Crouse, executive director and senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the research arm of Concerned Women for America. She is one of Hager's staunchest advocates in Washington (some credit her with engineering his FDA appointment); Crouse sits alongside Hager on Asbury College's board of trustees. In May, when informed of the allegations against him, she declined to revise her earlier statement. "I would not be at all surprised to see Dr. Hager elevated to a higher position or to another very influential position when it comes to women's care," she told me. "Because he has shown that he does care about women regardless of...the [religious] issues that people want to try to raise.... When people try to discredit him, he continues on. He hasn't caved in, and he hasn't waffled. He has been a gentleman. He is a person of character and integrity, and I think people admire that."
Just How Gay Is the Right?
By FRANK RICH
THE screen's first official gay bar," as it was labeled by the film historian Vito Russo, appeared in the 1962 political potboiler "Advise and Consent." Its most prominent visitor was a conservative United States senator.
As sheer coincidence would have it, Otto Preminger's adaptation of Allen Drury's best seller about a brutal confirmation fight was released on a sparkling new DVD last week just as the John Bolton nomination was coming to its committee vote. Like Hollywood's other riveting political movie of 1962, "The Manchurian Candidate," "Advise and Consent" is fallout from the McCarthy era: the controversial nominee for secretary of state (Henry Fonda, who else?) is a stand-in for Alger Hiss. But it may be in even less need of a remake: the intervening four decades have cast this film in a highly contemporary light.
By all rights "Advise and Consent" should be terribly dated. The cold war is now so over that the American and Russian presidents are bonding in Red Square. The film's Kennedy-era ambience - both a J.F.K. brother-in-law (Peter Lawford) and former lover (Gene Tierney) are in the cast - seems as retro as the Hula-Hoop. But when the pivotal gay plot twist kicks in, "Advise and Consent" taps into unfinished business that roils the capital as much, if not more, today than it did then. In 2005, homosexuality is no longer the love that dare not speak its name (the word is never mentioned in the movie), but as Washington fights its nuclear war over the judiciary, it is the ticking time bomb within the conservative movement that no one can defuse.
In "Advise and Consent," the handsome young senator with a gay secret (Don Murray) is from Utah - a striking antecedent of the closeted conservative Mormon lawyer in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." For a public official to be identified as gay in the Washington of the 50's and 60's meant not only career suicide but also potentially actual suicide. Yet Drury, a staunchly anti-Communist conservative of his time, regarded the character as sympathetic, not a villain. The senator's gay affair, he wrote, was "purely personal and harmed no one else." As the historian David K. Johnson observes in "The Lavender Scare," his 2004 account of Washington's anti-gay witch hunts during the cold war era, it's the gay-baiters in Drury's novel who "are the unprincipled menace to the country, using every available tool for partisan advantage." Preminger's movie takes the same stand (though the preposterously stereotyped gay bar scene is the film's own invention).
That message remains on target now. But in the years since, even as it has ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay, unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement. It's a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-"activist" judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they're for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that "Advise and Consent" so powerfully extols.
Today's judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn't homosexuality per se that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the courts. That's a sham. These people have been attacking gay people since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, characterizes the religious right's anti-gay campaign as a 30-year war, dating back to the late 1970's, when the Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant championed the overturning of an anti-discrimination law protecting gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla., and the Rev. Jerry Falwell's newly formed Moral Majority issued a "Declaration of War" against homosexuality. A quarter-century later these views remained so unreconstructed that Mr. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson would go so far as to pin the 9/11 attacks in part on gay men and lesbians - a charge they later withdrew but that Mr. Robertson repositioned just two weeks ago. In response to a question from George Stephanopoulos, he said he now believes that activist judges are a more serious threat than Al Qaeda.
Their cronies are no different. As The Washington Post reported, Rick Scarborough, the Texas preacher and Tom DeLay acolyte whose "Patriot Pastor" network is a leading player in the judiciary battle, first became active in politics in 1992, when he helped oust a local high-school principal for the crime of presiding over an AIDS-awareness assembly. The American Family Association, whose leader, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, is a Scarborough ally, had been whipping up homophobia long before anyone suspected SpongeBob SquarePants of being a stalking horse (or at least a stalking sea sponge) for same-sex marriage. So-called research available on the Wildmon Web site for years - and still there as of last week - asserts that 17 percent of gay men "report eating and/or rubbing themselves with the feces of their partners" and 15 percent "report sex with animals."
Which judges do these people admire? Their patron saint is the former Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore, best known for his activism in displaying the Ten Commandments; in a ruling against a lesbian mother in a custody case, Mr. Moore deemed homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature" and suggested that the state had the power to prohibit homosexual "conduct" with penalties including "confinement and even execution." Another hero is William H. Pryor Jr., the former Alabama attorney general whose nomination to the federal bench was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. A Pryor brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Texas anti-sodomy law argued that decriminalized gay sex would lead to legalized necrophilia, bestiality and child pornography. It was Justice Anthony Kennedy's eloquent dismissal of such vitriol in his 2003 majority opinion striking down the Texas statute that has since made him the right's No. 1 judicial piñata.
What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war. Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, "Our nation's moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians)." (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995.
But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West's long, successful political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education. The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy Cohn of "Angels in America" - who describes himself as "a heterosexual man" who has sex "with guys" - Mr. West has said he had "relations with adult men" but doesn't "characterize" himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy - it's pathology.
ALLEN Drury might not have known what to make of Mr. West or of another odd tic in the 30-year war, the recurrent emergence of gay-baiting ideologues with openly gay children (Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Alan Keyes). According to Mr. Johnson's fresh scholarship in "The Lavender Scare," a likely inspiration for the gay plot line in Drury's "Advise and Consent" was the real-life story of a Wyoming Democrat, Lester Hunt, who shot himself in his Senate office in 1954 after the Republican Campaign Committee threatened to make an issue of his gay son's arrest in Lafayette Park on "morals charges." Those were the dark ages, but it isn't entirely progress that we now have a wider war on gay people, thinly disguised as a debate over the filibuster, cloaked in religion, and counting among its shock troops politicians as utterly bereft of moral bearings as James West. Check out the good old days in "Advise and Consent," not to mention Charles Laughton's valedictory performance as a Bible Belt senator who ultimately puts patriotism over partisanship, and weep.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you and we will execute you."
The Forerunner: How many members does OR have?
Terry: We don't have members. But we do have tens of thousands of people in sympathy with us. Within the last 14 days the most prominent voices in evangelical Christianity have stepped forward in support of us. Dr. James Dobson, Dr. James Kennedy, Dr. Jerry Falwell and "The 700 Club" have stepped forward in support.
RANDALL TERRY UNIVERSE
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Quote:The Susan B. Anthony List is a 501 (c)(4) not-for-profit membership organization with a connected political action committee (SBA List Candidate Fund).
Our mission is unique and fills a large void. Our ultimate goal is to end abortion in this country. Critical to this goal is getting more women active in the political and legislative arena. We need both women candidates, as well as grassroots activists speaking out against abortion. That is why we have designed a five-point mission:
The Susan B. Anthony List:
Trains pro-life activists and candidates in the fundamentals of running a successful grassroots or political campaign.
Advocates the passage of pro-life legislation in Congress.
Works to dispel the myths about abortion.
Educates women voters on the importance of voting.
Works to increase the percentage of pro-life women in Congress (through our Candidate Fund). The Candidate Fund assists pro-life women candidates and works to defeat proabortion women candidates and incumbents.
The Susan B. Anthony List is a 501 (c)(4) not-for-profit membership organization with a connected political action committee (SBA List Candidate Fund).
Our mission is unique and fills a large void. Our ultimate goal is to end abortion in this country. Critical to this goal is getting more women active in the political and legislative arena. We need both women candidates, as well as grassroots activists speaking out against abortion. That is why we have designed a five-point mission:
The Susan B. Anthony List:
Trains pro-life activists and candidates in the fundamentals of running a successful grassroots or political campaign.
Advocates the passage of pro-life legislation in Congress.
Works to dispel the myths about abortion.
Educates women voters on the importance of voting.
Works to increase the percentage of pro-life women in Congress (through our Candidate Fund). The Candidate Fund assists pro-life women candidates and works to defeat proabortion women candidates and incumbents.)
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Church & Scaife
Secular Conservative Philanthropies waging unethical campaign to take over United Methodist Church
by Andrew J. Weaver and Nicole Seibert
for Mediatransparency.org
POSTED AUGUST 2, 2004 --
The United Methodist and other mainline Protestant churches are the targets of a continuing, orchestrated attack by determined right-wing ideologues who use CIA-style propaganda methods to sow dissention and distrust, all in pursuit of a radical political agenda.
The leader of this attack is an organization called the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a pseudo-religious think-tank that carries out the goals of its secular funders that are opposed to the churches' historic social witness.
The IRD works in concert with other self-styled "renewal" groups like Good News and the Confessing Movement. IRD answers only to its own self-perpetuating board of directors, most of whom are embedded in the secular political right (Howell, 1995).
In the January/February 2004 issue of Zion's Herald, we published a special report on the activities of the IRD. We documented how it is primarily funded by right-wing secular foundations. We showed the interlocking relationships between IRD, Good News and the Confessing Movement, and demonstrated how the latter amplify the nonsense eminating from IRD by publishing its distortions and falsehoods about UMC leaders and programs (Howell, 2003). IRD's underlying strategy is to delegitimize existing church leadership in the eyes of their own members, and to thereby cause schism in the church (Swomley, 1989).
These three so-called "renewal" groups repeatedly seek to justify their attacks by claiming that a decline in membership in our church and other mainline denominations is the fault of "liberals" who involved the church in social action, and that they are needed to repair the damage (IRD, 2001a; Tooley, 2003; Case, 2003).
The problem with this assertion, which is used ad nauseam by all three groups, is that it is simply not true. Social-scientific evidence shows that the decline in membership in mainline churches over the past 70 years and the growth of conservative churches is the direct consequence of conservative church members having more children. According to several leading experts in the sociology of religion, who published their findings in the American Journal of Sociology, "switching from mainline to conservative denominations ... explains none of the decline of mainline denominations" (Hout, Greely, and Wilde, 2001).
IRD directors are on the boards and actively involved in other ultra-conservative groups including the Project for the New American Century, Institute on Religion and Public Life, National Taxpayers Union, Concerned Women for America, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and American Enterprise Institute.
The IRD board members operate and have access to conservative publications and media such as First Things, Good News, Christianity Today, Washington Times, The Weekly Standard and Fox News. IRD also has the same group of benefactors that regularly contribute to radical-right causes such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the California billionaire Howard Ahmanson and the Sarah Scaife Foundation (Blumenthal, 2004; Cooperman, 2003; Howell, 1995).
A major portion of IRD's funding, from its inception, has come from right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Since its founding in 1982, the IRD has received more than $1.9 million from the Scaife foundations, including an initial startup grant of $200,000 (Howell, 2003; Media Transparency, 2003). In the early years of operation, 89 percent of the funds came from conservative foundations (The Public Eye, 1989) and most of its money continues to come from similar sources (Howell, 2003).
In the early 1970s Scaife was recruited as a front man and bankroller for the CIA's London-based "news service", Forum World Features (Conason and Lyons, 2000). At Forum, Scaife sponsored and directed what his long-time CIA friend who recruited him, Frank Barnett, calls "political warfare." Barnett wrote:
"Political warfare in short, is warfare--not public relations. It is one part persuasion and two parts deception.... The aim of political warfare...is to discredit, displace, and neutralize an opponent, to destroy a competing ideology, and to reduce the adherents to political impotence. It is to make one's own values prevail by working the levers of power, as well as by using persuasion." (Barnett, 1961).
Forum's covert activities were eventually exposed by the press and in Congressional investigations into the CIA (Conason and Lyons, 2000). A whistle-blowing British army intelligence officer told how Forum had assisted in right-wing "dirty tricks" operations including spreading "smear stories" about Prime Minister Harold Wilson and a dozen other prominent Labor members of Parliament in an effort to elect a Conservative government. Managing the finances for Scaife was Robert Gene Gately, a CIA officer who later headed the CIA station in Bangkok (Conason and Lyons, 2000).
Scaife has carried his political warfare campaign into the present day. His instrument of dissemination is no longer a foreign news service, now it is propaganda "think tanks" like IRD.
According to California-based investigative reporter Matt Smith,
"IRD and its allies' use of right-wing nonreligious foundation money to smear liberal church leaders through mailings, articles in IRD-aligned publications, press releases, and stories in secular newspapers and magazines has more in common with a CIA Third World destabilization campaign than ordinary civilized debate." (Smith, 2004)
Although only six of the 23 IRD board members are affiliated with the UMC, the UMC is the primary target of this undermining operation. IRD focuses its principal expenditures and most of its efforts on The United Methodist Church. Between 1999-2002 it spent $1,451,509 (almost half of its total program expenditures) on "monitoring" and attacking the UMC's activities, leadership and public policy statements (GuideStar, 2003).
IRD was founded 23 years ago by three key leaders of the radical-right neoconservative movement that now dominates the George W. Bush administration, namely Roman Catholics Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak and the unchurched Penn Kemble (Clarkson, 1997).
Neuhaus acknowledged that the IRD had a specific "political agenda" from the beginning -- Central America and opposition to liberation theology were top concerns (Lernoux, 1989). Kemble was a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal working as an agent between Oliver North and U.S. financial backers of the Nicaraguan Contras (Goshko, 1989; Massing, 1989). A House of Representatives investigation of Kemble's activities during the Iran-Contra Affair revealed that IRD worked with the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean. It was a special office supervised by the National Security Council, which produced propaganda supporting Reagan's Central America policies. (House Foreign Affairs Committee, 1988).
Kemble was quoted in newspapers at the time as saying that "liberal leaders of America's mainline Protestant churches had frustrated the CIA's efforts to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government" (Smith, 2004). Novak was one of the directors of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund, an endowment started in 1985 by the Unification Church-owned Washington Times to provide financial support for the Nicaraguan Contras (Isikoff, 1985).
In its early years, IRD worked intimately with the Reagan White House, providing papers, speeches and even co-sponsored a conference with the State Department assailing the theological integrity of Catholic clergy ministering and living among impoverished peasants in Central America (Public Eye, 1989; Hyer, 1985). It routinely challenged the patriotism of any Christians who did not share its aggressive interventionist goals.
IRD also vigorously defended the moral authority of the Reagan administration's brutal policies in the region which was fueled by money and weapons secretly funneled to right-wing death squads and later exposed in the Iran-Contra hearings (Diamond, 1989; Hyer, 1985). IRD assailed mainline Protestant leaders who showed support for the Nicaraguan government while trying to tie the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches to the "terrorists" who were often Catholic priests and laity trying to organize the poverty stricken peasants of Central America (Diamond, 1989).
The death toll during the Reagan presidency was staggering -- with more than 200,000 political killings in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua alone (D'Escoto, 2004). Following the lead of the Reagan White House, IRD christened the military forces that carried out the violence, including the documented murder of hundreds of Catholic priests and nuns, as "freedom fighters" (Lernoux, 1991). Ronald Reagan described the Contra "death squads" in Nicaragua as "the moral equal of our founding fathers." The links between IRD and the first-term Reagan administration earned the IRD the moniker of "the official seminary of the White House" (Lernoux, 1989).
By the end of the 1980s IRD needed a new raison d'être. Its primary target became three mainstream Protestant churches, the very ones that had given it the most resistance in the years it attacked progressive forces in Central America. The United Methodists, Episcopalians and Presbyterians replaced the Nicaraguans, El Salvadorians and Guatemalans.
Allied with so-called "renewal" groups like Good News and its wealthy patrons, IRD set its sights on orchestrating a hostile takeover of the UMC and other mainline churches (Howell, 2003). The institute's Reforming America's Churches Project aims to "restructure the permanent governing structure" of "theologically flawed" mainline churches like the UMC in order to "discredit and diminish the Religious Left's influence" (IRD, 2001a). To do so it systematically spreads misleading and inflammatory charges against organizations and leaders, as well as employing the propaganda method of "wedge issues" like abortion and homosexuality, to cause distraction and division (Howell, 2003; Lomperis, 2004).
At the same time IRD continued to promote the radical right foreign and domestic policy agendas of the neoconservative movement that gave it birth. Its mission has closely tracked the neoconservative agenda over the past two decades - moving from militant anticommunism to post-cold war American global domination to radical anti-taxation for the rich and destruction of the meager social safety-net for the poor and middle-class (Tooley, 2001a; IRD, 2001a).
IRD routinely attacks the patriotism and theological integrity of any United Methodist leaders who do not share its blatant jingoism and Biblical fundamentalism (Howell, 2003; Lomperis, 2004). When several respected bishops and other leaders in the UMC questioned the wisdom of the preemptive invasion of Iraq, IRD published a hate-filled commentary accusing them of "worship at the altar of the United Nations," giving "aid and comfort" to our enemies, and having "hatred for President Bush and for America itself" (Berg, 2003).
In November of 2001, IRD featured an editorial entitled "Methodism and Patriotism" (Tooley, 2001b). In the commentary Mark Tooley, executive director of IRD's United Methodist monitoring program, a former CIA analyst and a board member of Good News, questioned the loyalty and patriotism of a host of UMC leaders in the of wake of September 11. He wrote:
"I have had the opportunity to observe not only the bishops' meeting, but also directors' meetings of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and the Board of Global Ministries . The visual contrast between these meetings and the scene around the rest of the country was striking. Everywhere else I have seen the American flag proudly flying from houses, bridges, and cars. But at all of the national United Methodist meetings I attended this fall, involving several hundred denominational leaders, I saw only one individual who displayed a flag." (Tooley, 2001b).
He went on:
"The blindness and ingratitude of our United Methodist officials when it comes to our country should cause us sorrow they cannot really enjoy our church any more than they enjoy our country, because inwardly they feel superior to most of its members. Meanwhile, we ordinary members of the church can savor the gifts, including the gift of country." (Tooley, 2001b)
Notice the twisted argumentation here. Tooley claims that our duly elected and consecrated United Methodist bishops are secretly disdainful elites who do not care for either their church or nation and are not to be trusted by church members. (Forget the fact that many bishops and other leaders are combat veterans or have had family members who have been killed or wounded in war.) Again, IRD's propaganda patterns are more akin to techniques CIA operatives used during the Reagan years to destabilize leaders in Third World nations than civil discourse in the Christian church.
In addition, IRD lacks journalistic ethics. According to respected Bishop Kenneth L. Carder of Mississippi, who was spuriously named in "Methodism and Patriotism" as one who was not properly respectful of God or country, Tooley acted without ethics in his interactions with the bishop. Tooley contacted Bishop Carder, asking him if he wished to respond to IRD's attack prior to publication. Before Bishop Carder could respond, Tooley published it. According to Bishop Carder, Tooley had no intention of being fair or balanced in his article, nor did he have the intention of giving the bishop a chance to refute the false claims (Carder, 2004). The bishop said:
"I challenged Mark Tooley's tactics as a violation of basic Christian discipleship and invited him to enter a confidential mutual covenant to hold one another accountable for our discipleship and faithfulness to the Wesleyan tradition. I shared with him that his article and the tactics used violated the stated purpose of the IRD as 'protecting faith and freedom.' He refused to enter such a covenant." (Carder, 2004).
In October of 2002, IRD along with other denominational so-called "renewal" groups convened in Indianapolis for the "Confessing the Faith National Conference." It was heralded by James Heidinger, president of Good News, and Thomas Oden the chair of the Board of Directors of IRD, who declared it "the first-ever gathering of Evangelical, Confessing and Renewing Christians in the Mainline Churches of North America" (Confessing The Faith National Conference, 2002). Oden and the president of IRD, Diane Knippers, were keynote speakers, along with key leaders of the Confessing Movement, Maxie Dunnam and chair of the board William Hinson.
The conference was attended by Kevin Jones, an Episcopal businessman and award-winning religious news reporter. (Jones, 2004) Jones wrote a stinging report about the conference that ought to be read by everyone concerned about the right-wing attack on mainline churches (Jones, 2002). He found that he could obtain tapes recordings of all the conference sessions except the political strategy gatherings which he attended. The strategy sessions laid out clandestine and devious tactics for gaining power within the mainline denominations.
Jones discovered in these sessions a dedicated group whose proposed methods lacked basic scruples. The group discussed strategies of deception and deceitfulness to employ in their hostile takeover bids. Seminaries and Sunday schools were listed as priority targets (Jones, 2002). They were advised to present themselves as a "winsome witness" that is "a soft and friendly face to the public," but fight "tooth and nail on an issue." There was absolutely no talk of splitting or leaving the church. "They are convinced they are right and are willing to work long and hard to reclaim what they think is theirs." He found out that the threat of a split from the churches "is a scam" (Jones, 2002).
Jones wrote:
"When they use the language of splitting or schism, they want to scare their target and ours, the 'Movable Middle.' Like a lot of political speech it's not what they say, but the effect of what they say that we should look at. If they raise the fear of a split it could freeze the 'Movable Middle...'" (Jones, 2002)
One tactic they advised was to "divert focus from issues important to progressives." The issue of Sudanese Christian human rights was explicitly recommended as a diversionary device. "Sudan serves two purposes," Jones was cynically told at the conference: "It diverts attention away from Palestine and Israel and allows them to make common cause with progressives on a human rights issue." Their goal is to place "progressives into internally conflicted positions" (Jones, 2002). Who could possibly be against human rights for persecuted Christians in the Sudan?
IRD touts its "Religious Liberty Program" as central to its mission and especially its advocacy for Sudanese Christians. It states in its IRS declarations that it "monitors and reports on religious liberty issues worldwide," and since 1999 has indicated a "focus on persecution in Sudan" (GuideStar, 2003). On its website it makes impassioned plies for the Sudanese Christians who face the real horrors of slavery, mass murder and starvation. IRD indicates in its IRS report that it spent over 3.5 million dollars ($3,586,783) between 1999 and 2002. During that same period, IRD gave a grand total of $20,640 in grants to the persecuted Sudanese (GuideStar, 2003). That is less than $6,000 of each million it spent. Compare that to the $78,000 it paid in 1999 alone to Univision, a telemarketing company in Canada, to solicit new donors (GuideStar, 2003). Some priority. Some compassion.
Despite the fact that IRD gives a pittance of its resources in direct aid to the Sudanese people, it makes its professed concern media visible. In February of 2000 IRD announced in Christianity Today that it was organizing ongoing protests against the Clinton Administration's policy in Sudan at the gates of the State Department. Faith McDonnell, director of the Religious Liberty Program and the Church Alliance for a New Sudan at IRD, said she was "looking for church groups willing to participate, including, in each, a person prepared to be arrested" (Strode, 2000). The call for protest and civil disobedience is as American as apple pie and to speak up for persecuted people is a worthy, even noble calling.
The only problem is that when respected leaders in the UMC and NCC exercise the same citizen's right of dissent, they are roundly castigated by IRD (Tooley, 2002). When courageous Christians, including UMC bishops, protested the "shock and awe" invasions of the Bush administration, IRD labeled the dissenters "politically correct" interlopers practicing "convenient pacifism" (Knippers, 2003). IRD says fellow Christians only reduce serious debates to "superficial, even deceptive slogans and arguments" while showing "embarrassing naiveté" as they "spout pacifist-sounding slogans" (Knippers, 2003; Wisdom, 2003).
IRD directs Christians to trust the country's military and political leaders rather than to question them. "Church leaders are wrong to speak on matters about which they lack the information and competence," wrote Wisdom, "... in the case of war against Iraq, those grave decisions must finally be made by government and military leaders within their spheres of competence and authority" (Wisdom, 2003). IRD tells the church to actively protest government policy in the Sudan, but when it come to questions of war and peace we should simply trust and obey government officials (Wisdom, 2003).
Diane Knippers, president of IRD, actually tries to make the bizarre argument that "theologians and clerics" should not enter the debate about questions of war and peace (Knippers, 2003). Is she saying that the Rev. John Wesley was out of bounds when he repeatedly spoke out against war and excessive military spending in the 18th century (Stone, 2001)? John Wesley who abhorred the cruelty and self-indulgence of war and vehemently objected when his government used the method of war to resolve its conflicts wrote:
"But, whatever be the cause, let us calmly and impartially consider the thing itself. Here are forty thousand men gathered together on this plain. What are they going to do? See, there are thirty or forty thousand more at a little distance. And these are going to shoot them through the head or body, to stab them, or split their skulls, and send most of their souls into everlasting fire, as fast as they possibly can. Why so? What harm have they done to them? O none at all! They do not so much as know them. But a man, who is King of France, has a quarrel with another man, who is King of England. So these Frenchmen are to kill as many of these Englishmen as they can, to prove the King of France is in the right. Now, what an argument is this! What a method of proof! What an amazing way of deciding controversies! What must mankind be, before such a thing as war could ever be known or thought of upon earth? How shocking, how inconceivable a want must there have been of common understanding, as well as common humanity, before any two Governors, or any two nations in the universe, could once think of such a method of decision? If, then, all nations, Pagan, Mahometan, and Christian, do, in fact, make this their last resort, what farther proof do we need of the utter degeneracy of all nations from the plainest principles of reason and virtue?" (Wesley, 1757).
More importantly, Jesus Christ in the Gospels, which IRD appears to want to ignore, emphatically oppose retaliation and affirms love for the enemy. To one of his disciples, who tried to prevent him from being arrested by using a sword, Jesus said, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Mt. 26:52). Knowing the effects of the vicious cycle of violence, Jesus refused to use force to stop violence. Instead, he showed us the surest way to an authentic triumph over violence: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God" (Mt. 5:9).
The theologian Schubert M. Ogden recently wrote in personal correspondence in reference to "some of those who are leaders in the conservative forces within the UMC (as well as some of their colleagues in other denominations and confessions)." "Their pride and arrogance are only too evident from their carelessness in the means they're willing to employ and in their lack of charity toward those whom they treat, not as brothers and sisters in Christ, or even as fellow-members of God's original, all-inclusive covenant, but simply as enemies to be outmaneuvered and overcome." (Ogden, 2004).
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Andrew Weaver, M.Th., Ph.D., is a United Methodist pastor and research psychologist. He has co-authored eight books including, Counseling Troubled Older Adults (Abingdon, 1997), Counseling Troubled Teens and Their Families (Abingdon, 1999). Reflections on Marriage and Spiritual Growth (Abingdon, 2003) and Counseling Survivors of Traumatic Events (Abingdon, 2003).
Nicole Seibert, B. A., is a United Methodist and an instructor of sociology at Alfred State College in upstate New York. She researches a variety of topics including right-wing politics, women's labor issues, NGOs and globalization.
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To keep them coming back, Lakewood offers free financial counseling, low-cost bulk food, even a "fidelity group" for men with "sexual addictions." Demand is brisk for the self-help sessions. Angie Mosqueda, 34, who was brought up a Catholic, says she and her husband, Mark, first went to Lakewood in 2000 when they were on the brink of a divorce. Mark even threw her out of the house after she confessed to infidelity. But over time, Lakewood counselors "really helped us to forgive one another and start all over again," she says.
Disney Look
Osteen's flourishing Lakewood enterprise brought in $55 million in contributions last year, four times the 1999 amount, church officials say. Flush with success, Osteen is laying out $90 million to transform the massive Compaq Center in downtown Houston -- former home of the NBA's Houston Rockets -- into a church that will seat 16,000, complete with a high-tech stage for his TV shows and Sunday School for 5,000 children. After it opens in July, he predicts weekend attendance will rocket to 100,000. Says Osteen: "Other churches have not kept up, and they lose people by not changing with the times."
Pastor Joel is one of a new generation of evangelical entrepreneurs transforming their branch of Protestantism into one of the fastest-growing and most influential religious groups in America. Their runaway success is modeled unabashedly on business. They borrow tools ranging from niche marketing to MBA hiring to lift their share of U.S. churchgoers. Like Osteen, many evangelical pastors focus intently on a huge potential market -- the millions of Americans who have drifted away from mainline Protestant denominations or simply never joined a church in the first place.
Two minutes! That was a quick read for such a long article!
