What good is knowledge, if no one has access to it?  That was the underlying question in Troy, Michigan where Tea Party activists sought to thwart a small tax increase to keep the award winning library open. This was the third effort, and the anti-tax crowd was well organized.

But the people who wanted to save the library had an idea.

[image, right: Alabama KKK lynching of Michael Donald, 1981]

"the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross... In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians." - from Bob Jones University Press American history textbook

This 2012-2013 school year, thanks to a bill pushed through by governor Bobby Jindal, thousands of students in Louisiana will receive state voucher money, transferred from public school funding, to attend private religious schools, some of which teach from a Christian curriculum that suggests the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution and states that the alleged creature, which has never been demonstrated to even exist, has been tracked by submarine and is probably a plesiosaur. The curriculum also claims that a Japanese fishing boat caught a dinosaur.  

Note: this is the first in a series that will examine the major role that leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation - whose American apostles and prophets have been in the forefront of fighting LGBT rights in the United States - have played in the mounting antigay crusade in Uganda.

[image, below right: Julius Oyet describes plan to take control of the "Seven Mountains" of society]

"it is not Uganda that is putting a death penalty on homosexuals, it is God and his word." --- Bishop Julius Oyet, head pastor over Ugandan Health Minister Christine Ondoa, 2010 Kampala, Uganda rally

While Ugandan MP David Bahati, Ugandan religious leaders Martin Ssempa and Stephen Langa, and American evangelist Scott Lively have been identified in U.S. and international media, and in a lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court, as helping to drive Uganda's mounting antigay crusade, and as playing roles in the draconian Anti Homosexuality Bill looming before Uganda's parliament since October 14, 2009, the role of Ugandan Bishop Julius Oyet - a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation with extensive ties to its U.S. apostles, has so far received astonishingly little scrutiny.  

When you've had it with "reality shows" and sitcoms with loud laugh tracks, public television is a welcome refuge. Where else can you see "Sesame Street," a nature documentary and a wry British comedy all in one day?

Public television, because it is funded in part by the American taxpayer, has always been a target for the Religious Right. Leaders of that theocratic movement vacillate between trying to abolish public television and laboring to take it over.

North Dakota is the kind of state that often doesn't get a lot of attention. But yesterday, voters there did something great, and they should take a minute to pat themselves on the back. The rest of America should thank them, too.

Voters faced a sweeping "religious freedom" amendment on the primary ballot. Americans United had concerns that this dangerous amendment might pass in a conservative, largely rural state. We joined forces with other groups in the state to educate voters, but we braced for the worst.

Colonel V. Doner begins his new book "Christian Jihad: Neo-Fundamentalists and the Polarization of America," with a startling confession: "In November 1963, as the public address system at a high school in Orange County, California, solemnly announced the assassination of President john F. Kennedy, a fifteen-year-old boy shot from his seat, stunning his classmates with his spontaneous outburst that JFK was not assassinated, `He was executed for treason,' he claimed, referring to his `soft on communism' policies. This youngster, already well trained in a Christian worldview that allowed for no gray areas or nuances in diplomacy, knew one thing: JFK was a liberal, and liberals were clearly betraying God, America, and all of Western civilization."

That youngster, Colonel V. Doner ("Colonel" is his name, not a military rank), had fired his first open shot across the bow.

Doner, who describes himself as once being a "rock star" of the Christian Right, and who was a frequent spokesperson for the movement on numerous "talking head" programs, maintains that he has now given up the "culture wars," and wants to promote "civil dialogue."

Students will be taught that humans and dinosaurs walked on earth together, and this instruction will be paid for with public funds.  How do we know this?

Some Louisiana students receiving publicly funded vouchers and attending private schools in 2012-2013 will be taught from educational media promoting young earth creationism, global warming denial, history that is not factual, and bigotry toward Catholicism, Mormonism, other Protestants, and non-Christian religions.  This is predictable because some of the schools that are on the approved list to receive voucher students use curriculum from  A Beka Books, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education (ACE). Public funding of the teaching of creationism is already happening in Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states with "private school choice" programs.  The following 8-minute video provides a window into what these students are being taught. [Graphic above right is title of a chapter on creationism from an A Beka Science textbook.]

I can't be at Netroots Nation this year, and I find myself thinking about things decidedly not netroots.  These thoughts are certainly not mutually exclusive, after all, here I am writing about them online.  But today I am considering how my thinking in recent years has been deeply informed by the many wonderful essays I had the honor of compiling and editing into an an anthology a few years ago. The book helped to give focus to, and to surface some useful debates, before and after publication. So I am not surprised when recent events, writings or conversations remind me of some of the valuable lessons I found in relating to some of the powerful essays in the book.

As I got into it, I realized that publishing the book was in itself an organizing project -- one that I think continues to have many implications for how to think about and respond to the Religious Right.  

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez has had a remarkable career. The talented, charismatic preacher has been much sought after by both Democratic Party and Republican leaders. He is on the boards of leading evangelical institutions, including the National Association of Evangelicals, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and Christianity Today magazine. He has been the subject of uncritical profiles in major media and he is sometimes invited to the White House.  

His involvement in the New Apostolic Reformation and related controversies has been much discussed here at Talk to Action.  

But this post is about something else.

If improving the quality of education is the goal, Louisiana is headed in the wrong direction.

Louisiana's new school voucher program will provide public education dollars to students from low and middle-income families to use for full tuition at a list of approved private schools. This program will include about 5100 students in the 2012 -2013 school year, but will dramatically expand in 2013 -2014.  The list of 120 schools and number of available slots at each is posted on the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) website. According to local press, the schools have been approved through a phone call with the LDOE and without site visits. Some lack basic facilities and are using homeschooling DVDs for instruction.  The curriculum at some of the private schools includes A Beka Books and other programs that teach Creationism and global warming denial, as well as demeaning Catholicism, Mormonism, other Christian sects, and non-Christian religions.

This is a story about fraud. It is a story about Christians deceiving Christians. It is not, as you might expect, a story about a conservative Christian pastor or ministry bilking its followers. Rather, it is about liberal Christian non-profit organizations falling prey to a silver-tongued, well-credentialed man who didn't deliver on his promises. It is a tale about a man whose past included jail time for previous fraudulent financial projects.

It's not as huge a story as the saga Bernard Madoff. It doesn't involve either the amounts of money Madoff dealt with, or his mostly upper crust clientele. National media hasn't covered this story. Nevertheless, in the world of struggling non-profit liberal-oriented Christian organizations, Rev. Steven E. Clapp's transgressions have had an enormous impact. This story ends tragically, for everyone involved.

When Timothy Dolan was elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2010, Frank Cocozzelli wrote that this was an indication that "They are going to escalate the culture wars at the expense of economic justice."

The Dolan-led Bishops and their allies on the Religious Right have certainly lived up to that prediction, even as it is worth underscoring that they had been moving in that direction for some time.  This is important context for what I am going to say here.   But this is not about that.