"In theocracy they trust" (updated)

I’m still scrambling to catch up, but I want to make sure you see this Michelle Goldberg article, In Theocracy They Trust. These people are just scary. The “culture of life” appears to advocate judicial assassinations…

What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said, “Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We’re talking about the greatest political figure of the 20th century…He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. ‘No man, no problem.’”

The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated it. “‘No man, no problem.’ This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel.”

As Dana Milbank pointed out on Saturday in the Washington Post, the full Stalin quote is this: “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Milbank suggested that Kennedy would be wise to hire more bodyguards.

Was Vieira calling for assassination? I’m not sure. The conference’s rhetoric, though, certainly suggested that judges deserve to reap the horrors they have been ostensibly sown. The affair finished with a rousing speech by recent Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes, who drew enthusiastic applause when he said, “I believe that in our country today the judiciary is the focus of evil.”

It is a challenge to know how seriously to take this sort of thing. The world inhabited by most of those at the conference seems so at odds with empirical reality that one expects it to collapse around them. With each new lunacy perpetrated by religious fundamentalists, progressives tell each other than any second the pendulum will swing the other way and some equilibrium will return to our national life. They’ve been telling each other that for more than four years. But the influence of religious authoritarianism keeps growing.

…capital punishment for homosexuals, abortion doctors, and women who have sex before marriage (not men, of course)…

One conference speaker was Howard Phillips, the hulking former Nixon staffer who helped midwife the new right. Years ago, Phillips, along with Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, recruited a little-known Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority. Though he was raised Jewish, Phillips is now an evangelical Christian who told me he was profoundly influenced by the late R.J. Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. “Rushdoony had a tremendous impact on my thinking,” Phillips said. As time goes on, he said, Rushdoony’s influence is growing.

Christian Reconstructionism calls for a system that is both radically decentralized, with most government functions devolved to the county level, and socially totalitarian. It calls for the death penalty for homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of “unchastity before marriage,” among other moral crimes. To be fair, Phillips told me that “just because a crime is capital doesn’t mean you must impose the death penalty. It means it’s an option.” Public humiliation, he said, could sometimes be used instead.

…and telling outrageous lies if it will rally the villagers to raise their torches and pitchforks…

The conference attendees took their warfare metaphors seriously. They exist in a parallel reality, with its own history and its own news, and in that reality, the Schiavo case dwarfs the war in Iraq or the budget deficit in its import. The Terri Schiavo story that has so galvanized them isn’t the same one shown on CNN or reported in the New York Times. Rather, it was an act of, as one conference participant called it, state-sponsored terrorism, designed to demonstrate the court’s terrible power to take life at will. The narrative that Gibbs presented on Thursday seemed familiar to his audience, but it was new to me.

To begin with, in his version of the story, Michael Schiavo probably caused his wife’s brain damage by beating or choking her until she was near death.

There were three leading theories about what happened to Terri all those years ago, he said. The first was that she had a heart problem. The second was that she had an eating disorder. There was no evidence, he said, for either of those.

“The third leading theory — and as you can see, the first two seem to be sort of eliminated — is that there was some form of foul play,” he said. “That some sort of strangulation or violence occurred, at the hand of the husband possibly.”

Gibbs offered nothing to substantiate this rather serious claim.

With his wife hospitalized, Gibbs said, “The husband did everything he could to keep people away from Terri, because if television cameras or regular people got in to see her, they would clearly see how alive she was.”

Nor was her condition irreversible. “I firmly believe that for all the depravation and abuse she suffered at the hand of her husband…if she’d have had any therapy she wouldn’t even have needed a feeding tube,” he said.

In Gibbs’ telling, Circuit Court Judge George Greer cavalierly ignored all this overwhelming evidence. Such villainy, he said, is the direct result of a legal system that has tried to cast off God’s dominion.

In other words, they will stop at nothing.

Sleep tight. (Update: But not before you read Father Jake’s more richly sourced post on the spread of theocracy in the US.)

Still here

Long time, no blog! My mother and stepfather were visiting, and it seemed rude to read and process news while they were here from 3/4 of the way across the country, from that state which cannot be named. What a blessed diversion that turned out to be! I recommend short news-reading moratoriums; it clears the head.

I’m catching up, and see that there’s much to chew on (like this interesting business press perspective on Bush’s social security shenanigans), but for now I want to point you to two sobering and important stories about the state of the great apes: ebola is starting to catch up to bushmeat hunting as the most pressing threat to their continued survival. See these two stories on the outbreaks (perhaps you’ve already read that a related virus, Marburg, has broken out in Angola).

"Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?"

That’s the content of a bumpersticker I picked up at the school bookstore, recently. I keep it on my desk and I find myself looking at it a lot this week.

Apologies for the letting the blog lie fallow for so many days. Both the new contributor and I were inundated this week. Things will probably be a little spotty for the coming week, also, but don’t give up on us.

Meanwhile, please, please read Nicholas Kristof’s latest:

President Bush is focusing his program against AIDS in Africa on sexual abstinence and marital fidelity, relegating condoms to a distant third. It’s the kind of well-meaning policy that bubbles up out of a White House prayer meeting but that will mean a lot of unnecessary deaths on the ground in Africa. The stark reality is that what kills young women here is often not promiscuity, but marriage. Indeed, just about the deadliest thing a woman in southern Africa can do is get married.

This is something that too few people understand or believe — most dangerously, this administration. (And, if you will forgive my speaking harshly of the recently deceased, the pope!)

And read Paul Krugman and John Danforth, both dealing - in different ways - with the rise of religious extremism in the US.

And if you didn’t already see it, here’s a summary of a UN-sponsored study - compiling the work of 1300 scientists - which declares that the earth is very nearly beyond repair.

Via Daily Kos, The St. Petersburg Times’ Robert Friedman shows readers his living will. Tacky? Maybe, just a touch… But also funny (in a sad way).

Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here’s what mine says:

* In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn’t be long enough for me.

* I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.

* I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable vigil at my bedside. I’d be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.

* I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.

* I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.

* I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.

* I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.

* I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the Florida Legislature to ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a forum for weeks of politically calculated bloviation.

* I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz friars and all other hangers-on - to start calling me “Bobby,” as if they had known me since childhood.

* I’m not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be nice if Congress passed a “Bobby’s Law” that applied only to me and ignored the medical needs of tens of millions of other Americans without adequate health coverage.

* Even if the “Bobby’s Law” idea doesn’t work out, I want Congress - especially all those self-described conservatives who claim to believe in “less government and more freedom” - to trample on the decisions of doctors, judges and other experts who actually know something about my case. And I want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate that gives them another excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the economy.

* In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case as an opportunity to divert the country’s attention from the mounting political and legal troubles stemming from his slimy misbehavior.

* And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his Harvard medical degree by misrepresenting the details of my case in ways that might give a boost to his 2008 presidential campaign.

* I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition on the basis of a snippet of dated and demeaning videotape that should have remained private.

* Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent vegetative state, I’d want President Bush - the same guy who publicly mocked Karla Faye Tucker when signing off on her death warrant as governor of Texas - to claim he was intervening in my case because it is always best “to err on the side of life.”

* I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at the last moment to take responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad could ever happen to anyone under DCF’s care.

* And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human being on the face of the Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned directives to be disregarded if the governor happens to disagree with them. If he says he knows what’s best for me, I won’t be in any position to argue.

Finally, if you’re going to drop your gas station credit card somewhere… a seminary parking lot is probably your best bet. Some good soul found mine and turned it in to the bookstore. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Since gas station credit cards are merely “swiped” through a machine with absolutely NO identification required, this coulda been ugly. Thanks, whoever you are.

Transitions

pope_slovenia
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

I’ve always liked this very striking image of Pope John Paul II (it’s included in the NYT multimedia biography/obituary, but I found it here). So, so often, I found him completely infuriating (some of the reasons are spelled out pretty well in this article - thanks, B), but it was impossible not to admire his energy, his enjoyment of people, his faith and deep commitment.