This Friday, students all over America will choose to remain quiet in school. They'll be participating in the Day of Silence, an annual event designed to protest the bias and bullying that often silences gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students.

The premise behind the event is simple: Students attend classes but do not speak for the entire day. The Day of Silence isn't sponsored by the schools. It's run by students, often through a Gay-Straight Alliance Club that many schools now have. (Ironically, these clubs exist thanks to a federal law backed by Religious Right groups, which were eager to get Christian clubs into public schools.)

[UPDATE: also see Invisible Children Touts Ties To NOM & Proposition 8 Funders and Invisible Children's "Cover the Night" is April 20 - on LGBT "Day of Silence", by Talk To Action contributor Rachel Tabachnick.]

Since the eruption of Invisible Children's record-breaking KONY 2012 viral video in early March, a considerable body of evidence has emerged which ties the nonprofit, and its leadership, to the American Protestant evangelical right. This is a summary of that evidence - which includes the recent revelation, by LGBT rights group Truth Wins Out, that in 2007 Invisible Children officially applied to be one of the Christian ministries supported by an evangelical right-wing nonprofit called the Barnabas Group.

In early 1916, the First World War was entering its third year. For over two years the German army had been locked in a stalemate with the forces of Britain and France on the Western Front.  The German high command decided on a strategy intended to "bleed France white" by drawing the French Army into a battle of attrition centered on the forts of Verdun.   But in pursuit of this strategy, the Germans almost bled themselves out instead.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and the most powerful leader of the the Catholic Church in the United States -- may be leading his church towards a similar outcome, having adopted a similar strategy towards groups seeking greater accountability for the Catholic hierarchy's handling of pedophile clergy.

Recently a bill reached the desk of Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam that would encourage public school teachers to discuss the alleged "controversy" over evolution and offer them legal protection if they teach creationist concepts.

Haslam indicated that he opposed the so-called "monkey bill," but he refused to veto it. Instead, he allowed it to become law without his signature.

In the trailer for his new documentary "Monumental," TV actor Kirk Cameron has an 'a-ha! 'moment. While visiting Christian historical revisionist David Barton, Cameron exclaims: "So hold on. The United States Congress was commissioning and printing Bibles to be given to all the people because they knew that that's what would produce the character necessary to make America blossom and flourish and thrive."

It doesn't take much for the Christian Right to embrace a narrative of martyrdom. And if you're in showbiz and you've been criticized for anti-gay remarks, the boys in the band - the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, American Values' Gary Bauer, the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer among others - will automatically leap to your defense.

Lights, camera, action! - it's close-up time for Kirk Cameron.

You know that old time dog-whistle you heard the other day -- you know the one -- the one that helps demagogues to name a problem in society, or people who do or say things they don't like, and assign blame?  Well, that was Mitt Romney engaging in a foundational part of his campaign to appeal to the Religious Right voters he needs by denouncing "secularism."  

While this has been part of the narrative of the Religious Right for decades, few of us outside of the Religious Right and those who study and write about it, have much appreciation for how important this is for the pols who engage in it, and for their audiences that are conditioned to hear it in a certain way.  

I wrote an essay about this in 2008 when the dog whistling had gone bipartisan and Mitt Romney had begun his presidential campaign by whistling for the dog while also trying to claim that he supports the separation of church and state. The Democrats who were afflicted at the time, seem to have since come to their senses about the politics of secular baiting.  But it has become a standard part of Romney's act, as it has with Rick Santorum -- and if we listen carefully, we are likely to hear much more of it as the campaign season heats up.

Truth Wins Out has posted audio of Jason Russell telling an audience at a 2005 conference,

"We [Invisible Children] are able to be the Trojan horse going into a secular realm...."

Invisible Children's early funding was from right-wing sources, and their social media blitz radiated from evangelical youth in locations near Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City, and Nobestown, Indiana, not the 20 "cultural influencers" that they advertised.  From early on the organization was coordinating in Africa with The Family (aka The Fellowship), working with one of the largest recipient's of the Fellowship's foundation funding in the world - Cornerstone Development in Uganda.
(Video after the fold.)

Every year around this time the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) issues a memo asserting that public school officials can teach about the religious aspects of Easter in class.

Can public schools actually do this? Yes and no. Like any other discussion of religion in public schools, it all depends on what is being said in the classroom.

"[It] functions invisibly like the mafia... They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have." - Doug Coe

Executive Summary

[UPDATE: For more writing from Talk To Action on the now extensive body of evidence tying Invisible Children to the hard, politicized American evangelical right, see KONY 2012, Invisible Children, and the Religious Right: The Evidence as well as Invisible Children Touts Ties To NOM & Proposition 8 Funders and Invisible Children's "Cover the Night" is April 20 - on LGBT "Day of Silence", by Talk To Action contributor Rachel Tabachnick.]

[note: some readers who are very familiar with what The Family / The Fellowship is may want to skip the executive summary and proceed to the section titled "Invisible Children connections with The Fellowship", which starts at the 1/4 mark. For a short cover of some of the important aspects of this story, see the LGBT rights group Truth Wins Out press release, Invisible Children’s Robust Ties to The Family Suggest Invisible Fundamentalist Agenda.]

It is unlikely that many Americans who watched Invisible Children's record-smashing viral video hit KONY 2012 were aware of IC's evangelical nature (1, 2) or of the nonprofit's early financing from foundations that back the hard Christian right, including one of the biggest funders of the 2008 push for California's anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8.

But Invisible Children, which has branded itself as welcoming cultural, religious, and sexual diversity, also enjoys extensive institutional and social ties to the global evangelical network known as The Fellowship (also known as "The Family") - which has been credited with inspiring and providing "technical support" [see footnote 1] for Uganda's internationally-denounced Anti Homosexuality Bill, also dubbed the "kill the gays" bill.

The Ruth Institute has nothing to do with preserving the memory of baseball's immortal Babe Ruth, nor is it a tribute site to Ruth Wakefield, the inventor of the Tollhouse brand of chocolate chip cookies. Founded by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, the Ruth Institute -- whose tag line reads "One Man. One Woman for Life" -- is a project of the National Organization for Marriage Educational Fund, and a dedicated opponent of same-sex marriage.

It is no wonder then that Morse sprang to the defense of the of the National Organization for Marriage after previously secret strategy memos were released that revealed that NOM was specifically setting out to divide minority communities from the gay community in order to win their support in the battle over same-sex marriage.

"So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government.  Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."  --Gary North

There's been a lot of talk about "religious liberty" in the last few weeks, so I'm reposting segments of a January article with quotes from Christianity and Civilization, a Christian Reconstructionist journal, also published as part of a multi-volume set of booklets.  My original post was part of a series on the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the "Theocratic Libertarianism" promoted by Gary North. In this version of the article I emphasize North's concept of manipulating the doctrine of religious liberty to advance a theocratic agenda, and the reasons why Theocratic Libertarianism is seductive to corporate interests and think tanks that might not otherwise promote a regressive social agenda or partner with theocrats.

The next article in this series will include other authors from this multi-volume set of 1980s Reconstructionist booklets including Rousas Rushdoony, Pat Robertson, Francis Schaeffer, Joseph Morecraft, Larry Pratt, Paul Weyrich, John W. Whitehead, George Grant, Connie Marshner, Tom Rose, and Peter Lillback. Many of these contributors cannot be dismissed as isolated or fringe.

In a recent post I explored the influence of the teachings of  Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer on GOP Presidential contender Rick Santorum. I warned that circumstantial evidence and the candidate's own past statements suggested a strong identification with the secretive, ultra-traditionalist sect, Opus Dei, which Escriva founded.

The Washington Post now confirms much - and a great deal more - of what many of us have suspected all along.