When U.S. military leaders announced that openly gay men and women would be permitted to service in the armed forces, Religious Right leaders went ballistic.

They asserted that the move would destroy military cohesion and leave our fighting force less able to do the job. Of course, that didn't actually happen. One year after the change, military leaders reported that the new policy was working out fine.

Strategies used by the Church to cover up its worldwide sexual abuse scandal included: the Vatican's refusal to cooperate with civil authorities; officially sanctioned priest shifting; the destruction of evidence; punishing whistle-blowers and rewarding enablers; and, blaming the victims.

Last week, the eyes of the world were on Pope Benedict XVI - who apparently expects to be known as Pope Emeritus - as he left the Vatican by helicopter to spend the final hours of what many would characterize as his scandal-dogged papacy, at the papal summer retreat. According to The New York Times, "Onlookers in St. Peter's Square cheered, church bells rang and Romans stood on rooftops to wave flags as he flew by."

To the thousands of survivors of the Roman Catholic Church's worldwide sexual abuse scandals, however, there was little to cheer about.

Bruce Gourley, Executive Director of the Baptist History & Heritage Society, maintains a helpful web site, Church/State Separation, A Historical Primer.   He writes:  

America's historical commitment to freedom...  has taken an unexpected turn in modern America. In short, the closing decades of the twentieth century to the present have witnessed an intense effort, spearheaded by many conservative and fundamentalist Christians, to discard our nation's heritage of church state separation in favor of government favoritism of certain expressions of faith, and hence a curtailing of religious freedom for all.

Constructed upon phony history, this theocratic-leaning quest makes a mockery of America's religious heritage and endangers the very foundations of American government and freedom.

Merrie Olde England wonders whether they have a "U.S. style Religious Right."  The considered answer of Theos, a think tank focusing on religion and society is kinda, sorta, but not really.  But intriguingly, it quotes a 2012 report by the think tank Demos about something that will make some dedicated American secularist heads explode:  

...Faithful Citizens, which argued that British people of faith are, "more likely to hold progressive political values on a number of important political and economic questions at the heart of twenty-first-century policy."  While acknowledging that correlation does not necessarily indicate causation, the report also went on to argue that, "our findings also confirm prior research and contradict the common assumption that religious citizens are more inclined towards conservative causes than non-religious citizens."

In other news:  Warren Throckmorton, the conservative debunker of David Barton, caught the traveling salesman of Christian nationalist bunk telling tall tales in Big Sky Country. After debates in the Louisiana and Montana legislatures over teaching creationism in the public schools, Barbara Forrest is wondering which state has "sillier" state legislators. Bill Moyers interviewed Zack Kopplin, a student responsible for the Louisiana debate over a bill seeking to repeal public school instruction in creationism. Moyers reports Kopplin is dedicated to "fighting the creep of creationist curricula into public school science classes and publicly funded vouchers that end up supporting creationist instruction."

You could say that this has been the winter of David Barton's discontent.

Barton, a Texas-based pseudo-historian who for years has made a living telling gullible Religious Right audiences that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation and church-state separation is a myth, has run into quite a streak of trouble lately.

Have you ever found yourself in disagreement with the political positions of the Catholic bishops? If so, you're anti-Catholic.

Has it ever occurred to you that the church hierarchy didn't handle the pedophilia scandal very well, and have you voiced that opinion? You're anti-Catholic.

The wedding of Bible and bullets might seem a strange couple, but its image has gained momentum in the Religious Right.  Texas Conservative politicians have a long history with the NRA which appears to be the most favorable alliance politicians are linked to.  Some are taking the relationship to guns to a new level.  There are some who state the Second Amendment allows them to hunt.  Others line up behind the Amendment saying it provides protection from criminals.  A third group even declares it will be necessary to be protected from the Federal Government.

As The Right Turns is a new more or less weekly feature in which I will offer a few observations about the comings and goings of the Religious Right. It will usually appear on the weekends. -- FC

If your taste runs to rightwing windbaggery in 140 characters or less, Rick Warren's Twitter feed is hard to beat.  

@RickWarren: Liberal theology cannot sustain a local congregation. It kills churches. In fact, it only survives due to tenured academics.

@RickWarren: Liberal theology has never created any university. It just sucks the life out of those that were started by Bible believers

Over at Eyes Right, the blog of Political Research Associates, I have posted an update on the continuing adventures of Rev. Samuel Rodriguez.  For all the talk about the agenda of the Lamb of God (as distinct from the smelly old donkey and elephant duo) there is still no mistaking that Rodriguez, even on his signature issue, immigration -- is still a Religious Right Republican.

Last year, yet another leader of the Founding Generation of the Religious Right, passed on.  Unfortunately, most of the media missed the breadth and depth of the significance of the life of Sun Myung Moon. I tried to fill-in some of the blanks at the time, but there is much more to be done. Still, we get occasional glimpses of his global reach and ambitions. One of these is the story of a travel journalist who journeyed through a Paraguayan jungle to reach the remote place where Moon had sent some of his followers to create a Garden of Eden. This story, which was published in Outside magazine, provides an unusual portal into some of the goings-on in the post-Moon empire. It also is a scenic route reminder that there is still so much more of the story to tell.

On Saturday, I received a letter from my old acquaintance Ralph Reed.

Reed, you might recall, ran TV preacher Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition throughout the 1990s. After leaving the group, he started a political consulting firm that became mired in the Jack Abramoff casino lobbying scandal. He also tried unsuccessfully to launch a political career and even wrote some political potboilers.

In the summer of 2011 several journalists and bloggers wrote about the obvious dominionist views, history and involvements of several major Republican politicians -- notably Religious Right favorite, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.  Dominionism (generally the idea that Christians of the correct sort, should dominate all aspects of society, including in politics and government) has been the main ideological engine of the Christian Right for decades, and continues to be more the case rather than less.  We should not have been surprised when the journalists and bloggers who had been writing about these things were the subject of a high profile smear campaign -- some of us by name, others of us by implication.

This profoundly animating, theocratic ideology cuts both ways for the Religious Right and aligned politicians. Dominionism has benefited the movement -- which aspires at once to religious transcendence, cultural control and political power.  But it is also controversial, even within evangelicalism, and rightly concerns people who believe in such basic civic values as respect for constitutional democracy, religious pluralism and separation of church and state -- not to mention reproductive rights and LGTB civil rights.

I mention this because denial about dominionism -- which in its way is as preposterous and pernicious as denial about climate change -- and the accompanying smear campaign, may very well repeat itself.  Major Republican figures like Rick Perry and Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS), each have significant dominionist entanglements that may very well work both for and against them going into 2016. And they are probably not the only ones.  

Since Pope Benedict announced his resignation  only one of the potential successors  (Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi) offers hope for a more moderate papacy. So while conservatives are unlikely to be disappointed, prominent American Catholic neo-con Michael Novak is rooting for Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York.  Indeed, if Novak's one man dream team were to ascend to the Chair of Saint Peter, neo-conservatives like Novak would have the ability influence world events beyond their wildest dreams.  

Religious Right groups spend a lot of time beating on church-state separation. TV preacher Pat Robertson once called that constitutional principle "a lie of the left" and said it comes from the old Soviet Constitution.

Not to be outdone, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association asserted that Adolf Hitler invented church-state separation.