Religious Right Leaders
stcynic | June 8, 2006While we're talking about anti-gay bigotry and the religious right, how about this oldie but goodie from Pat Robertson. Last summer, he declared that gays are responsible for no-fault divorce and abortions:
ROBERTSON: I had interviewed a lady who was a sociologist who says "I am a lesbian," but she described homosexuality in this term, she said, "They are self-absorbed narcissists." I want you to put that down -- self-absorbed narcissists who are willing to destroy any institution so long as they can have affirmation of their lifestyle. You go back to the various laws that took away the…
stcynic | June 7, 2006Roy Moore was thrashed in the Republican primary for governor of Alabama, as expected. With 97% of the precincts reporting, Bob Riley was leading 67-33. Here's my favorite quote, from an MSNBC article:
Riley said voters saw state government has changed while he has been in office. "People appreciated the difference in the level of corruption we had in the past and the corruption we don't have today," he said. His challenger, Moore, said: "God's will has been done."
If I were you, Roy, I'd be a little pissed off about this. I mean, you stood up for the Big Guy for years, and it's his will that…
stcynic | May 30, 2006The Wall Street Journal has an interview with former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore that contains some predictably absurd statements. Like this one:
Roy Moore makes no apologies. "I'm not trying to dodge or get away from my past," he tells me over lunch at a Montgomery seafood restaurant. "I think what we stand for in this state is exactly what our motto is: 'We dare defend our rights.' And Alabamians have always dared defend our rights, whether it be Martin Luther King, or what I did, or the beginning of the Civil War. We dare defend our rights."
Wow. It takes some serious chutzpah to…
stcynic | May 29, 2006The Washington Post has a report on religious right poster boy Ralph Reed and his misuse of religion in the service of making himself right. This will surprise no one:
In August 1999, political organizer Ralph Reed's firm sent out a mailer to Alabama conservative Christians asking them to call then-Rep. Bob Riley (R-Ala.) and tell him to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws...
"The radical left, the Big Labor Union Bosses, and Bill Clinton want to pass a law preventing Chinese from coming…
stcynic | May 24, 2006So I'm flipping channels and I come across Rod Parsley's Breakthrough program. I've talked about Parsley before and some of the astonishingly stupid things he's said. But this one may take the cake. He was - naturally - begging for money and making outlandish promises of what would happen if his credulous followers would just "sow their seed of faith". I've heard all sorts of sales pitches for that, but this one I'd never heard before - he was promising them "supernatural protection from deception".
Specifically, he said that God would bless them with three things. He would make sure they…
stcynic | May 23, 2006Via Radley Balko, here's an amusing tidbit about Pat Robertson, God's own personal carnival barker, from his own CBN webpage:
Did you know that Pat Robertson can leg-press 2000 pounds! How does he do it?
Where does Pat find the time and energy to host a daily, national TV show, head a world-wide ministry, develop visionary scholars, while traveling the globe as a statesman?
One of Pat's secrets to keeping his energy high and his vitality soaring is his age-defying protein shake. Pat developed a delicious, refreshing shake, filled with energy-producing nutrients.
And if you believe that, I've…
stcynic | May 15, 2006This cracks me up. I regularly look at the Agape Press website for ideas on things I might wanna write about involving church and state or ID. But I had to laugh when I read this (scroll to the bottom):
One expert says Islam's worldview is making massive inroads in Europe and could do the same in America. Randall Terry, who has spent a couple of years in intensive study of Islamic history, believes that religion's violent worldview is more misunderstood than people realize. While most of Islam's followers personally "would never cut someone's head off," Terry says, "most Muslims don't even…
stcynic | May 12, 2006I know, I know. Saying that Pat Robertson said something stupid is like saying President Bush mangled a word or Paris Hilton is on a magazine cover - you could write that headline pretty much every day. But since it involves a group I support, I thought I'd report it anyway. On the 700 Club, Robertson trotted out the tried and true false line about separation of church and state being a communist idea. And he claimed that Americans United had been taken over by communists. It's like the man is an AI robot who just suddenly reverted to his pre-1989 programming. He also trotted out a lie he has…
stcynic | April 10, 2006The Washington Post had an article today about the shrinking influence, membership and budget of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson's political wing that at one point controlled more than half of the state Republican party committees in the nation.
The once-mighty Christian Coalition, founded 17 years ago by the Rev. Pat Robertson as the political fundraising and lobbying engine of the Christian right, is more than $2 million in debt, beset by creditors' lawsuits and struggling to hold on to some of its state chapters.
In March, one of its most effective chapters, the Christian Coalition…
stcynic | April 10, 2006Elizabeth Castelli, a religious historian, has an article at The Revealer analyzing the recent War on Christians conference in Washington DC.
stcynic | April 6, 2006So I'm flipping the channels and I come across the 700 Club and Pat Robertson is talking about how there's too much sex on television and saying this is why our teenagers are having sex (right, because we never would have thought about sex as teenagers without watching Melrose Place). He referred to some anonymous TV executive he allegedly heard once say that sex on TV was planned because it brought in young viewers and advertisers liked young viewers.
Then he mentioned that the rate of teen pregnancy in the US was higher than any other industrialized nation, in some case two or three times…
stcynic | March 31, 2006I've written a couple times about the "War on Christians" conference held in DC earlier this week, but some others have much more comprehensive reports on the subject. Michelle Goldberg, the terrific writer for Salon, has a full report on that site. She includes this little gem:
Taking the stage before the 200 or so adoring activists in the banquet hall, DeLay ran with the end-times theme. "We have been chosen to live as Christians at a time when our culture is being poisoned and our world is being threatened, at a time when sides are being chosen and the future of man hangs in the balance,"…
stcynic | March 15, 2006From the Department of Ridiculous Hyperbole comes this statement from Richard Thompson of the Thomas More Law Center:
Behind its legal actions is the belief by its president and chief counsel Richard Thompson that Christianity is under siege from all quarters, but especially from the federal courts, the American Civil Liberties Union, and what Thompson calls the "homosexual lobby."
The ACLU and the courts are "basically cleansing America of religion and particularly Christianity," Thompson says. "It's almost like a genocide. It's a sophisticated genocide."
Well of course. The US is a nation…
stcynic | March 9, 2006As reported yesterday, three college students have been arrested for setting fire to 9 churches in Alabama (and possibly a 10th), and one of the students ridiculously claimed that their crimes were a "joke" that "got out of hand". I thought it would be hard to top that idiotic statement, but religious right leader Rick Scarborough is giving it a hell of a try. This is from the text of an email he sent to his followers today:
The War on Christianity Rages Like...
An Alabama Church Fire
Today is the day that America called burning nine churches a college "prank."
There were three arrests…
stcynic | March 2, 2006I've mentioned before the ReligionLaw listserv, run by Eugene Volokh of the VC (that's Volokh Conspiracy, not Vietcong). It's an interesting group to keep up with, especially when there are court cases involving the first amendment's religion clauses. The list is mostly law professors and public interest attorneys, with a range from ACLU state directors to attorneys from Pat Robertson's ACLJ. And there are a few random kooks as well, including the aforementioned Larry Darby, whose obnoxious holocaust denial finally got him removed from the list.
Another major kook on the list is John Lofton,…
stcynic | January 16, 2006The Washington Post has a good article about the many connections between Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, and Jack Abramoff. Reed took millions from gambling interests, funnelled through Abramoff, to mobilize Christian opposition to new casinos, everyone knew that. They've been close friends for 25 years, it turns out. The golden boy of the religious right may be going down in flames.
stcynic | January 13, 2006By the way, it almost goes without saying, but Pat Robertson is really, really sorry about something he said. Again. After spending several days having his underlings defend his idiotic comments about Ariel Sharon being struck down by God, and therefore losing his financial stake in the Israeli Disney World, he's really sorry. You know, like he was when he called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. And when he agreed with Jerry Falwell in blaming gays and liberals for 9/11.
stcynic | January 13, 2006I've written before about Rod Parsley, a TV preacher I started watching long before he became such a powerful figure in the religious right. I've written about watching his show one night and seeing him say the following mind-numbing statement:
How do I know that the Bible is the word of God? Because it's the only book that claims to be the word of God. So I don't need the Koran...I don't need the book of Mormon...."
The camera panned over the gathered throng as they shouted "amen, brother" at this stupendously idiotic statement he had just made, all of them apparently blissfully immune to…
stcynic | November 2, 2005Tony Mauro has written a pretty devestating expose` on Jay Sekulow, director of Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). It's pretty much what has come to be expected from people who build their career around TV evangelism. I'll post some long excerpts below the fold.
But there is another side to Jay Sekulow, one that, until now, has been obscured from the public. It is the Jay Sekulow who, through the ACLJ and a string of interconnected nonprofit and for-profit entities, has built a financial empire that generates millions of dollars a year and supports a lavish lifestyle…
stcynic | August 24, 200510 hours ago, Pat Robertson claimed that his call for assassinating Hugo Chavez was taken out of context and misinterpreted:
Wait a minute, I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should, quote, "take him out," and "take him out" can be a number of things including kidnapping. There are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP, but that happens all the time.
Now it appears that Robertson himself misinterpreted that misinterpretation and, by golly, he did say that Chavez should be assassinated. Oh, and he's really…