Let's start with an analogy, or perhaps a fable :

Imagine you suspect your business rivals of illegal, conspiratorial activities aimed at ruining your company. So, you drop everything to purchase a telescope, listening dish, and other various devices. Your rivals are discrete and even with all your technology you can only discern a fuzzy pattern - punctuated by occasional areas of sharp focus that quite clearly point to some sort of malfeasance.

These intermittent incriminating patches keep your attention and you sleuth on, day after day, living off sandwiches and cold pizza, sleeping in your car - as trash builds up and all other aspects of your life are neglected.

One day, you take a break from your diligent surveillance - and, you seem so near, you've almost caught them! - to go across the street for some food and coffee only to return and discover your car has been towed away by a repo man. You'd forgotten to keep  up the car payments. So, you take a bus home : thieves have broken in and stolen everything of value. You go to your place of business only to find that your employees have all quit. Of course : you'd forgotten to pay them.

In the end, your business rivals didn't do you in - what did was your obsession with what they were up to, to the exclusion of everything.

Your rivals, meanwhile, did have some real conspiratorial schemes -indeed. But, the biggest of those concerned the fact they were quite aware that you'd fallen into the obsession of trying to monitor their every move. They were in fact quite worried that your business could have steamrollered the opposition - hence the schemes. But, the biggest scheme they pulled off was to hold your attention - while you obsessively scrutinized them from afar.

That case can be overstated, certainly, but it gets at a certain core truth : to the extent we expend energy worried about and scrutinizing our foes we will fail to organize, build, and expand our own base of power.

Knowledge of one's foe is essential, of course, and there is a balance to be found.  

This press release from the Institute on Religion and Democracy caught my attention (June 14, 2006):

On Saturday evening, June 17, 2006, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship will present Reverend Naim Ateek, founder and director of the Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, with its John Nevin Sayre Award.  The award will be bestowed during the meeting of the Episcopal General Convention in Columbus, Ohio.  But the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, DC questions the appropriateness of presenting an award meant to signify the recipient's dedication to "peace and justice" to this Palestinian theologian whose organization demonizes Israel to promote the Palestinian cause.

Cross-posted, with illustrations, at Biblical America Resistance Front (barf.org)

Strong title? Perhaps. But that's the kind of feeling I come away with when I read Talk to Action or much of what is written about Christianity in America today.

Why? If there's a root cause for my visceral, negative response to some of what I read, it probably comes from the fact that I don't identify with any particular institution or tradition. No, this is about saving my own skin.

"The federal estate tax had its origins in war." So begins Paul Krugman in his op-ed piece for Friday's New York Times.  Krugman quotes Tom DeLay on war and taxes:

"Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes," declared Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, in 2003.

An effort to completely  repeal  the estate tax narrowly failed in the U.S. Senate last week. Krugman writes:

"Theodore Roosevelt ... called for an inheritance tax in 1906: "The man of great wealth," said T.R., "owes a peculiar obligation to the state."

The inheritance and other taxes need to be understood as a dominionist issue.

Awareness of the sad subject of religiously motivated child abuse within the dominionist community--in a series I began writing on here at Talk2Action with the story Death by Chastening Rod and which is now being reported on by the likes of Salon Magazine--is now going international.

The Guardian Unlimited, a British newspaper which has reported on dominionism in past, has an article in regards to religiously motivated child abuse that brings a unique perspective.

In another instance of what has been an unusual streak of Good News for folks fighting for freedom and against dominionism, news outlets are reporting that Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore has lost his bid for becoming the Republican candidate in Alabama's gubernatorial election.

More backgrounder on this below.

The U.S. Senate voted 49 to 48 this morning to defeat the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment. Seven Republican senators--including two from New Hampshire who supported a similar measure in 2004--broke ranks to vote against the amendment. Two sorry Democrats, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, supported the measure.

As the Campaign to Defend the Constitution notes:

This is the third time that religious extremists have pushed this Amendment to a vote in Congress. While once again the measure failed, the religious right is committed to continuing their campaign to violate the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.

Furthermore, the Federal Marriage Amendment is only one piece of their larger agenda. Their successful efforts to stop stem cell research, force bible classes into our public schools, and attack our children's science education leave no doubt that the religious right is on the warpath.

Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and other Christian right leaders immediately released statements vowing to continute the fight. "We and millions of other conservatives are committed to doing what it takes, for as long as it takes, to see that the great institution of marriage is protected from renegade judges," said Dobson. Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, blamed the Senate instead, calling it "grossly out of step with the American people." Christian right leaders like to point to the voting tallies in the 20 states that have passed gay marriage bans as proof that homophobia represents the will of the people; but of course these total bans mostly passed in sparsely populated red states and only represent the will of a few.

Mark Morford is the sometimes hyperbolic, but never boring Cultural editor of SF Gate. He publishes his own op-ed about the pulse of the culture from a decidedly liberal West Coast point of view. His thwacks at the Christian Right are the stuff of legend.

Well, he's been to our site. And- he's read the series of articles about that "Left Behind" game.

Go and read what he has to say. Here's a sample:

Are you a true believer? Do you just know deep down in your black Wal-Mart socks that every word of the Bible is the absolute literal truth and nothing dare be doubted and anyone who thinks that God is merely an ambisexual omniblissful bloom of moist divine nondenominational honeydew melon should be strung up by their small intestine and beaten with sticks sharpened by Mel Gibson's teeth?

Do you feel, furthermore, that human cretins like, say, gays and Jews and Wiccans and all those hippie weirdos with their iPods and low-cut jeans and easy laughter are a plague upon this fine and holy land?

Do you think that contemptible books like "The Da Vinci Code" are not only blasphemy, but that you should probably go out into the street right now and behead a few lambs and perhaps mow down some Taoists with a Gatling gun just to deflect its horrible notions of the sacredness of the feminine divine? You do?

Praise Jesus! Your video game has arrived.

Behold, blessed children, the new and upcoming "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" video game, based on the freakishly best-selling series of apocalyptic trash-lit books. It's an ultraviolent, hilariously inept, wondrously accurate portrayal of what every true right-wing Christian fundamentalist really fantasizes about after they've had one too many pink wine spritzers and have logged a few hours in the gay chat rooms and have sufficiently indoctrinated their happily numb kids with tales of vile homos and scary "progressive" liberals who want to buy them candy and tattoo their sacrums and feed them organic hot dogs.

Like I said, lots of hyberbole, but it does nail it.

(Repost--originally misposted this in the wrong section.)

I've written several articles on one of the increasinglypromoted trends in "faith based" programs--specifically, the use of mandatory "faith based" programs like Charles Colson's "InnerChange" and the like as a condition of parole or even as a court-ordered therapy in some cases.

It is in fact not an exaggeration to term this sort of "faith based" program--which targets not just criminals but the homeless and some of our most vulnerable members of society (including "at risk" youth) as literal faith based coercion of the worst sort (in that people are told they will starve, or lose their children, or be imprisoned, or not be allowed out of prison or will be punished in prison unless they participate).

And in a recent lawsuit against Charles Colson's "faith based coercion" promoters involving the funding of Prison Fellowship Ministries by the state of Iowa--the US District Court serving southern Iowa agrees that it is faith-based coercion and that tax funding of these groups is unconstitutional.

The latest issue of the NY Review of Books has a review of a new book by Daniel C. Dennett:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19090

The reviewer made some remarks that set me to thinking about the demographics of congregations. The issue explained below.

"With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."--Bailey Smith, a founding father of Robertson's Christian Coalition, once told 15,000 people at a Religious Roundtable briefing in Dallas, June 26, 1994

note : Alaskan Musk-Oxen, depicted in picture, are small, gentle creatures with very soft fur and I am certainly not recommending that they be stunned by large tomes of collected hate-speech. Musk-oxen should be viewed, from a respectful distance, through binoculars and otherwise left alone.

"The people who have come into (our) institutions (today) are primarily termites. They are into destroying institutions that have been built by Christians, whether it is universities, governments, our own traditions, that we have.... The termites are in charge now, and that is not the way it ought to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation." - Pat Robertson, to New Yorker Magazine, 1986

This morning I woke up to a nice example - of what I would classify as hate-speech - from President George W. Bush : "Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening this good influence on society" - George W. Bush, as reported by 365Gay. Bush's statement is hateful not in the abstract, but in context: it codes for a welter of bogus Christian right claims that same sex marriage causes some sort of harm to traditional ( one man, one woman ) marriage, and Christian right hate speech, and eliminationist rhetoric, directed against gays over the course of the last three or more decades has been more ferocious than hateful rhetoric deployed against other societal groups. The intensity of the animus was recently noted in a speech by Rabbie Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism:

"We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933 one of the first things that he did was ban gay organizations," Yoffie said. "Yes, we can disagree about gay marriage. But there is no excuse for hateful rhetoric that fuels the hellfires of anti-gay bigotry."

Focus on the Family argues that since "homosexuals" aren't flocking to taking advantage of the marriage rights they already have, they don't really need or want them anyway. This same-gender-married bi woman has a few things to say about that.