Last year, Billy Graham's organization held a Christian-themed concert at Fort Bragg, "Rock the Fort." The base's brass promised that similar support would be provided to non-Christian events in the future. However, it looks like that promise wasn't kept. A secular-themed concert is now off because, according to its organizer, Fort Bragg officials didn't give it nearly the support that Rock the Fort received.
Sgt. Justin Griffith said Thursday that the Rock Beyond Belief concert, scheduled for April 2, will not get the same funding and support as the Rock the Fort concert - sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association - did in September.
Military leaders have said they were not favoring Christians and would provide similar support to other groups.
"It's obviously not an offer of a similar level of support at all," Griffith said. "It's kind of heartbreaking because we were so close."
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has already announced it will sue, citing a raft of administrative roadblocks. The biggest one was that base officials wanted to move Rock Beyond Belief to one of two tiny theaters, rather than the base's parade field.
Last night I watched Austan Goolsbee look into the camera with a doe-eyed look of shock as he talked about the Tea Party’s plan to strip state and federal budgets for education. He called it short-sighted and surprising.
Seriously? For starters, they told us that this was what they were going to do, so how surprising can it be? And it is not short-sighted; it is part of a long-term plan to de-equalize our society. To bastardize a quote from the Clinton campaigns: it is about the equality, dummy.
We have often discussed the consequences of the politics of labeling and demonization from a number of different angles. Among many posts by a number of us, we have discussed for example the demonization of gay people in Uganda by American Religious Right leaders; the rise of imprecatory prayer; problems of vague, ineffectual pleas for civility, and the conflation of demonization with incivility.
That's why it is worth considering the latest escalation of eliminationist rhetoric by Rush Limbaugh. What he said is not the worst I have heard about on rightwing talk radio, or from Religious Right figures. But his audience is huge and what he said may be a bellwether.
I first heard about it in a diary at Daily Kos which reported that Rush Limbaugh had described "leftists" and President Obama as "cockroaches" during a recent show. The diarist went on to remind us that in the run-up to the Rwandan genocide in the 90s, "cockroaches" was the favored term of Rwandan radio provocateurs.
While the use of the term is more than coincidental, the analogy to Rwanda remains remote. Limbaugh et al are not yet pounding out eliminationist themes in proportion to the Rwandan media of the 90s. (Here is the clip.) And no one is, as far as we know, openly arming themselves with machetes or other weapons for mass killings. When making comparisons of this sort, it is important to consider the differences as well as the similarities in order to arrive at a proportional understanding of the situation.
Popular and journalistic ignorance about fundamentalists/Pentecostals/Charismatics/new-Apostolics isn't just a big frustration of those of us who aim to expose the threat of dominionism. It can also harm the fundamentalists/Pentecostals/Charismatics/new-Apostolics themselves, at least in locales where they aren't dominant, especially if they also happen to be non-white.
Today I ran into what looks to me like a possible example of someone being wrongly charged with a serious crime (arson) due to police and media misunderstanding of the person's religious practices. I don't yet know for sure, but I think it's worth sharing my observations so far.
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