It used to be that the mere mention of the National Endowment for the Arts would immediately draw fire from the right. In the 1990s, “Defund the NEA” became a rallying cry that was regularly heard in the halls of Congress. Demonizing the NEA was a fundraising tool that kept giving and giving and giving.
Over the past decade, however, in part because the agency appeared to consciously distance itself from funding controversial art projects, and in part because the Christian Right moved on to other issues (abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration), fighting funding for the NEA was no longer at the top of their agenda.
Concern over how President Barack Obama’s stimulus money is being used is again focusing attention on the NEA. A July 30 Fox News report pointed out that some stimulus money (the Recovery and Reinvestment Act) earmarked for the NEA wound up stimulating an NEA-funded “pornographic” film project, a long-running pansexual performance series, and a dance production featuring naked dancers.
On April 10, 2003, one day after U.S. forces established control over Iraq, a number of Iraqis took to doing, to paraphrase Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “what a free people do”; running amok and looting whatever wasn’t permanently nailed in place. One of the hardest hit targets was Baghdad’s Iraq Museum. When asked about the looting, Rumsfeld—then enjoying matinee idol-type status—made light of the situation, saying: “the images you are seeing on television… it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, ‘My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’”
“Despite the presence of American troops nearby,” Hugh Eakin recently wrote in his review of Lawrence Rothfields’s ‘The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum,’ the looting “lasted three days and resulted in the theft of some 15,000 objects, among them some of the most extraordinary remains of the early history of world civilization.”
In 2005, during the height of internecine violence and resistance to the U.S. occupation, the country’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali a-Sistani, issued a religious decree that said that gay men and lesbians should be “punished, in fact, killed.” He added, “The people should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.” According to the New York Times, “The language has since been removed from his Web site.”
When al-Sistani talks, some Iraqis listen!
In early April, the New York Times reported that “The relative freedom of a newly democratic Iraq and the recent improvement in security have allowed a gay subculture to flourish here. The response has been swift and deadly.”
In the immediate aftermath of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, words came flowing forth from every conceivable direction. The media reported, longtime anti-abortion activists “condemned,” but few apologized for years of hate speech directed at Tiller.
In the hours following the murder of Dr, George Tiller, and the subsequent condemnations from Religious Right leaders, I remembered Jerry Falwell’s notorious post-9/11 remarks, blaming feminists and the ACLU, among others — and the uncomfortable flip-flopping that followed. It was clear that his comments represented what he was thinking. Yet it was also clear, as he tried to backtrack and apologize, that he realized he had monumentally goofed.
I was reminded of those wretched Falwell maneuverings on Monday evening while watching Frank Schaeffer — the son of the late Francis Schaeffer, one of the founding fathers and most revered figures on the Christian Right – point out during his appearance on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show that the condemnations of Tiller’s murder issued by leaders of the Christian Right seemed forced and empty.
Years from now – I won’t venture a guess as to how many but I am fairly certain by that time the names Carrie Prejean and Perez Hilton will be mere footnotes – when the history of the struggle over gay rights and same-sex marriage is written, there will be plenty of heroes/heroines to be honored, and more than enough villains to go around. Maybe villains is too strong a term; how about anti-gay true believers whose beliefs resulted in real harm? For every courageous couple in Iowa or Massachusetts who, against great odds, have pressed on, there are those that have made it their business to stand (metaphorically for now) in the courthouse doorway.
For now, if you’ve been following the battle over same-sex marriage and you don’t know who the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez or Rubén Díaz are, you likely soon will.
Rodriguez, President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), and Diaz, a New York state Senator from the Bronx a Pentecostal pastor in that borough, are two key players leading anti-same-sex marriage forces in New York State.
Last fall, in the heat of the presidential campaign, Jill Stanek’s anti-abortion group, BornAliveTruth.org, launched a major attack on Obama, using a very personal and heart-wrenching TV ad (featuring "abortion survivor" Gianna Jesson). As Christine Bowman notes on Buzzflash, the PR company behind the project was Virginia-based CRC Public Relations , a firm that has now been hired by Conservatives for Patients Rights, a group whose intention is to put the kybosh on the Obama administration’s plans for reforming health care.
Teetering between irascibility and irrelevance, spokespersons for a number of conservative Christian outfits are warning that on Wednesday, April 22, Christians will once again be victimized by perpetrators of the gay agenda, and life—as they know it—will change forever. That is the day that the House Judiciary Committee considers hate crimes legislation that would finally confer on sexual orientation the same legal status as race and religion.
The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (H.R. 1913) that includes sexual orientation, gender identity, gender or disability, will be introduced by the committee chairman, U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the same legislation that passed the House (H.R. 1592) in 2007 by a 237-180 vote.
Pressing the reset button is all the rage these days. Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Steele observed that “’Pressing the reset button’ has become the favorite metaphor of the Obama administration’s policy towards Russia.” Slate headlined an article about Obama’s recalibrated Afghanistan policy, “Pressing the Reset Button on Afghanistan.” Former UN Ambassador John Bolton recently ridiculed the notion of “pressing the reset button” with Russia, calling it a “bumper-sticker slogan” that “is entirely consistent with the new administration’s endless-campaign mindset.” Venezuela president Hugo Chavez recently said that he is “willing to use the reset button” regarding U.S.-Venezuela relations. Conservative billionaire Howard Ahmanson recently pushed el maximo politico reset button by recently switching from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, as is his wont, appears to be pushing every button he sees in the hopes of finding the ever-elusive reset button.
And now Pastor Rick Warren appears to be lunging for that very same button.
On Monday, Warren—in his first TV interview since delivering the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration—told CNN’s Larry King that “During the whole Proposition 8 thing, I never once went to a meeting, never once issued a statement, never—never once even gave an endorsement in the two years Prop. 8 was going.”
The unanimous decision last week by the Iowa Supreme Court allowing same-sex marriage appears to have surprised many same-sex marriage advocates around the country, and no doubt shocked and shook up many Religious Right leaders. A post-ruling joint statement issued by Iowa’s Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and House Speaker Pat Murphy pointed out that the court’s decision is in keeping with that state’s “long history of justice.”
“Iowa has always been a leader in the area of civil rights, read Gronstal and Murphy’s statement:
Newt Gingrich is now a Catholic politician, just in time for Easter, and, perhaps more importantly, in time to weigh in on the commotion over Obama's invitation to Notre Dame.
