The Uganda New Vision reports the latest on David Bahati, the MP behind the proposed draconian "Anti-Homosexuality Bill"; he was among attendees at a recent prayer meeting for parliamentarians, after which (emphasis added)

...eight MPs were selected to be in the servant leadership team for Parliament for three years.

They included Ruth Tuma, Alice Alaso, Beatrice Lagada, Moses Ntahobari, Capt. Grace Kyomugisha, Benson Obua, David Bahati and the East African legislative assembly MP, Maj. Gen Mugisha Muntu.

The prayer meeting was run by Dr. Fred Hartley, president of the College of Prayer International. This organisation is based in the USA (Georgia) and has numerous campuses around the world.

From Warren Throckmorton's blog:

STATEMENT FROM PASTOR RICK & KAY WARREN REGARDING ACTIVITIES OF MARTIN SSEMPA IN UGANDA

Martin Ssempa does not represent me, my wife Kay, Saddleback Church, nor the Global PEACE Plan strategy. In 2007, we completely severed contact with Mr. Ssempa  when we learned that his views and actions were in serious conflict with our own. Our role, and the role of the PEACE Plan, whether in Uganda or any other country, is always pastoral and never political. We vigorously oppose anything that hinders the goals of the PEACE Plan: Promoting reconciliation, Equipping ethical leaders, Assisting the poor, Caring for the sick, and Educating the next generation.

Throckmorton is himself a conservative Christian, but he has been forthright in his opposition to the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill under consideration in Uganda and backed by religious leaders such as Ssempa. In a recent article published in the Uganda Independent, Throckmorton noted the story from John's Gospel of the woman taken in adultery:

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family (FOF), is not a happy camper these days.

 "What is happening in Washington right now is my greatest nightmare," Dobson said during a recent radio broadcast. He opined that everything he has worked on for 25 years is "coming apart.... It's unbelievable what's taking place."  

Special Focus:  Christian Zionism

Following are a list of articles on Christian Zionism that have been posted on Talk2action.org over a period of several years along with other supplementary material.  The articles are listed in chronological order starting with the most recent.

Christian Zionism has been defined as support for the state of Israel by Christians based on biblical beliefs.  However, in the context of these articles, the term Christian Zionist is limited to those activists who view Israel and Jews through the paradigm of their biblical prophecy narratives and are working to move the hands of the prophetic clock.  The following articles document the paradoxical narrative of Christian Zionism and the activism of leaders and organizations including John Hagee and his Christians United for Israel. [see full story for links to articles]

On Tuesday November 3rd, voters in Maine can either vote yes or no on "Question One," a potential people's veto of recently enacted legislation a recent bill that established the right of homosexual couples to marry.

While the Bishop of Portland, Richard J. Malone, has weighed in heavily with his opposition to marriage equality, he is not the only Catholic making his voice heard on the ballot measure. Many other Pine State Catholics are speaking out for marriage equality and just as importantly, in defense of maintaining a pluralistic American society.

Hagee's controversial sermons are again an issue in the aftermath of Elie Wiesel's appearance at Hagee's church.  This was further escalated after Max Blumenthal commented on Hagee at the recent J Street conference.  I attended the conference and was present when Blumenthal spoke at a blogger's session, which was not part of the official programming.  Ron Kampeas, writing at JTA, as well as others, appear to be confused about the sermon and publicity that led to rejection of Hagee's endorsement by John McCain. The assumption that there were two different sermons, given on different dates, allowed Hagee to avoid more controversy about his less than totally truthful apology to ADL's Abraham Foxman.  There are equally important issues about this and other Hagee sermons that are worth revisiting, including the incomplete coverage of Hagee's anti-Catholic conspiracy theories. Hagee's "Mystery Babylon" conspiracy theory targets Catholics but, coincidentally, is a conspiracy theory that is also used by white supremacist to target Jews.

First, the sermon quote widely publicized during the presidential elections was from a 2005 sermon.

As The Economist's Democracy In America blog notes , support for Israel doesn't preclude anti-Semitism:

Bigotry comes in many forms, and can easily be set aside for the right reasons. Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Ku Klux Klan, for instance: they both wanted to keep their respective races pure. Loving racial or theological purity is both easy and juvenile; it is a rejection of the world as is in favour of a perfect world that can never be.

Marcus Garvey wanted to resettle New World blacks in a "homeland" in Africa. Christian Zionists think God wills it that all Jews on Earth move "back" to Israel. The Economist's citation, of the strange alliance between Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan, resonates well with a thought experiment I've recently sketched out...

The Christian Broadcasting Network has caved in to scoffers and mockers and scrubbed a blog post which explained the dangers of Halloween - specifically, that "most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches", and that this is a time of "sex with demons" and "rape and molestation of adults, children and babies", among much else.

The post was by Kimberly Daniels and taken from Charisma magazine, although much of the skeptical reaction has been at the expense of CBN's president, Pat Robertson. Regarding Halloween as demonic is common among Charismatic and neo-Pentecostal churches (and Evangelicals in general are not very keen on the celebration), and it is no surprise to read that she has links with C. Peter Wagner. It is interesting, though, to see elements of conspiracy theory, harking back to do the debunked "Satanic panics" of the 1980s.

We here at Political Research Associates are calling on Pastor Rick Warren to denounce a bill now being debated in Uganda that criminalizes homosexuality. Why? Because despite the nice things he is now saying about gays here in the United States, to his friends in Africa he is promoting the nasty homophobia of our homegrown culture wars.

Blue Dog Democrats in Congress played a "magnificent" role in blocking health care reform during the Clinton administration. And, under the "courageous" and "smart" leadership of House Pro-Life Caucus leader, Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, with the support and prayers of Republicans categorically opposed to the Democratic Party's health care reform effort, the Blue Dogs may be able to do it again.

That's what Stupak's caucus co-chair Chris Smith (R-NJ) told the audience at a "townhall" panel event on Friday September 18th at the Family Research Council Action's Washington DC 2009 Values Voter Summit [see attached video and transcript]. Another Republican at the event, Tom Price (R-GA), suggested that lockstep GOP opposition to health care reform affords the Blue Dogs "an opportunity to show some backbone" and "stand up to their leadership to say 'no more will we allow this travesty to go on.'"

In an October 29 op-ed for The Hill, Stupak protests, "[r]ecent news articles have reported that I am trying to "kill" healthcare reform, but that couldn't be further from the truth."  In his Hill op-ed, Bart Stupak writes, "[o]ur healthcare system is broken and I believe reform is necessary." As usual, the devil is in the details.

Earlier this month I criticized some offensive comments about health-care reform made by Richard Land, the top lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

Land, speaking to the Christian Coalition of Florida during a Sept. 26 banquet, blasted President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, remarking, "I want to put it to you bluntly. What they are attempting to do in health care, particularly in treating the elderly, is not something like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did. Let's remember, the first 10,000 victims of the Holocaust were not Jews, they were mentally handicapped German children who were gassed and burned in ovens because they were considered to have...lives unworthy of life."

Dear Mr. Wiesel,

Your years of tireless campaigning for human rights and against anti-Semitism have earned our deepest respect. For this reason we have written the following letter in hope that you will reconsider your support of events sponsored by John Hagee's Christians United for Israel. We realize that the outward show of support for Jews and Israel, on display at Hagee's CUFI events, can be very enticing but there is another aspect of Christian Zionism which we believe runs strongly counter to Jewish and Israeli interests.

On October 7, 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of a seven-foot cross currently standing in the Mojave National Preserve in San Bernardino County, California. Erected by veterans of the First World War in 1934, the religious symbol has become a significant bone of contention in the ongoing effort to define the proper separation of church and state. But beyond the basic issues of constitutionality, the occasion has provided a fresh platform for two members of the Catholic Right -- Bill Donohue and Associate Justice U.S. Supreme Court Antonin Scalia to spew some extraordinary, and extraordinarily revealing, expressions of religious supremacy.

This is Part Three in a series of articles on why we need J Street, and a new perspective on the meaning of "pro-Israel."  Link to [Part One] and [Part Two.]

Worldwide Biblical Zionists (WBZ) is a project of World Likud and its evangelical arm, World Evangelical Zionists.  It was developed to aid Christian Zionists who wish to make aliyah (move to Israel) with the stated goal of providing assistance for housing, employment, legal services, and pre-military training. To the right is a graphic of the planned Strategic Biblical Zionist Center.

This is Part Two in a series about the dangers of Christian Zionism, and why organizations like J Street are badly needed to provide a different vision of what it means to be pro-Israel. See Part One here.

There are numerous reasons why the relationship with Christian Zionists "impairs Israel's interests," to borrow a recent comment directed at J Street by the Israeli Embassy. Ambassador Michael Oren is apparently snubbing J Street's upcoming first national conference although he spoke at John Hagee's Christian's United for Israel conference in July.  This is my list of the top ten reasons, based on years of research, why it is John Hagee and Christian Zionist activists who should be viewed as impairing Israel's interests, not moderate and liberal American Jews.  For brevity I have limited examples, quotes, and references for which I have large amounts of supporting documentation.

I recently wrote here and at Daily Kos about the important, but often underappreciated differences between demonization and incivility in our political culture, (with particular regard to the way that the excesses of the Religious Right are often buried under a mound of false equivalence with elements of the left.)  At the time, I had in my the back of my mind my soon to be published interview with David Neiwert, author of the recent book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.  The interview is now posted over at the webzine, Religion Dispatches.  

What follows, is my introduction to our interview:

My recent trek through the Ozark Mountians wound me through a meandering road that opened up to one of the largest entertainment regions in the country. A city on a hill, a new Jerusalem, the nation's prime Christian resort, Eureka Springs, Arkansas. There was a marathon of hotels, cabins and lodges, more than any place I had ever visited. This city, mow famous for The Great Passion Play, was at one time a remote backwoods pocket of poverty with less than a hundred residents. The famous Gerald L. K. Smith saw the potential here and erected a thirty foot statue known as Jesus of the Ozarks. He began work on starting an outdoor play about the final days of Christ. This led to the mega industry built around the play and established by its own presence Eureka Springs as a top vacation spot.

Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., is apparently rejecting the invitation by J Street for their upcoming conference.  It should be shocking that the ambassador would reject the invitation to speak to a conference of American Jews coming together in support of Israel, particularly since he was quite willing to speak to John Hagee's Christians United for Israel this past July, a few months after being named as ambassador.   Oren's excuse for snubbing J Street is that the organization could "impair Israeli interests."

[Graphic, above, is from a donor request webpage for Maoz Israel, a Messianic ministry in Israel that includes a Messianic congregation, Hebrew publishing center for charismatic books, and a charitable arm, istandwithisrael.com, that accesses Jews through the donation of millions of dollars of goods.  It is endorsed by John Hagee and other CUFI directors who claim not to proselytize. ]

Back in June, when it was reported on the Time Magazine website that the Obama family had chosen the chapel at Camp David as their home church, I wrote a quick post about Navy chaplain Lt. Carey Cash, the chaplain at Camp David. Although the White House had denied the Time story by the time I finished writing my post, I made no changes to what I had written, with the exception of adding a disclaimer that the White House had denied the Time report that the Camp David chapel had been chosen by the Obamas as their home church. As the Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), my concerns regarding what I had discovered about Lt. Cash, a military chaplain who had said of the efforts to Christianize the U.S. military, "First we get the military, then we get the nation," were the same whether he was the president's official pastor or not.

Over the past few years, my Talk to Action colleagues and I have written a great deal about the way that various Washington insiders, among others, have adopted many of the ideas, framing and even the phrasings of the Religious Right. We also confronted such consultantocratic notions that we should not talk about such historic progressive and Democratic Party interests as reproductive rights, LGTB civil rights and separation of church and state so that they could make alliances with alleged moderate evangelicals and Catholics -- some of whom turned out to be not very moderate at all.  The culture war was over, or about to be, or oughtta be, so it was claimed.

But many of us knew better

When I was in college, we could always tell when the relentless western Pennsylvania winter was finally losing its grip by two key events: A roving evangelist would appear on campus and scream at women he thought were immodestly attired, and the Gideons would stand outside the cafeteria and pass out copies of the New Testament.

I didn't mind taking one. After all, I was an adult and it was my choice. But in looking it over, I noticed one thing: The first few pages emphasized the passage John 3:16. Many fundamentalists see this verse as the key to becoming "born again."

Religion Dispatches:  Peter Laarman discusses how common groundism has been moving the discussion deep into the Religious Right zone.

Bilgrimage:  Theologian William D. Lindsey discusses how Catholic antiabortion activists are out to derail health are reform.

The American Prospect:  Sarah Posner wonders what baloney Dan Gilgoff is consuming that makes him think president Obama should worry about what the Religious Right thinks about his policies on abortion.

Religion Dispatches:  Dan Schultz (aka pastordan) wants to see some facts to support common grounder claims that Democrats are somehow overreaching on abortion rights. (Wouldn't want to undermine that pander to the Religious Right that has been going on for so long now would we?)

David Gushee, a conservative evangelical professor of Christian Ethics, and darling of those who profess to seek common ground on abortion, recently published an op-ed in USA Today that reveals some of the serious problems with common groundism.

We'll get to those problems momentarily. But first I want to point out that Gushee ends in a way that one wishes he had begun.  

"I dare to think that it's still not too late to be the kind of nation in which differences are debated honestly, the votes are cast, the decisions are made and we move forward together as one people. I would like to see Christians contribute to that kind of society, rather than to the demonization that undermines it at its foundations."

 

Unfortunately, most of what precedes this encouraging conclusion, does not lead us in that productive direction. In fact, it functions as a defacto apologia for the worst elements of the Religious Right.

There has long been a Mormon dimension to the Religious Right which has been little discussed and not well understood.  Whether fortunately or unfortunately, the rise of Glenn Beck has begun to change that. Indeed, in the run up to the publication of a book on Beck, his Mormon-informed far Religious Rightism is starting to get noticed.

There are two new and useful articles out about this this week that wonder aloud about the role not just of Beck, but of Mormonism, (at least certain strains of Mormonism) in the future of American conservatism. (Exceprts on the flip).

Mitt Romney had a hard time navigating popular distrust of his Mormon faith as well as the overt anti-Mormonism of conservative Christians he needed to win over in the GOP primaries. He went so far as to give a speech early in the primary season intended to take the issue of his Mormonism head on. It probably helped him but, by all indications, not nearly enough.

I understand that people have different views on the issue health-care reform.

My family and I rely on my health-care plan, and I want to make sure it's there for us. At the same time, I can't accept the fact that so many millions of my fellow citizens are without coverage. I don't see those two concerns as irreconcilable.

Every Friday night on his HBO series Real Time With Bill Maher Bill Maher helps out the very folks he abhors - the Religious Right and movement conservatism. He does it by mocking people of faith whom he generically paints as delusional.

Much of the discussion about abortion and public policy in Washington this past year has been dominated by those who advocate for, or say that they have found, "common ground" on abortion.  While this approach and its results have been in considerable dispute, particularly as prochoice progressive religious voices have been largely marginalized during this period, I am pleased to report that prochoice religious progressives have found their collective voice and are seeking to get heard -- the Gatekeepers of the various Conventional Wisdoms be damned.

This is significant in part because, popular misconceptions aside, vast numbers of American religious individuals and major institutions are and have been prochoice for decades. Listed in the Open Letter to Religious Leaders on Abortion as Moral Decision (below) are some of the major American religious insitutions that are officially prochoice as well as other data indicating the magnitude of religious prochoice sentiment. It is also significant, because too often, religious identity in general and Christian identity in particular, has been equated with antiabortionism, and allowed to be defined by the Religious Right. This is now, and has always been false; and allowing the Religious Right and antiabortionism to define the breadth and depth of the religious views on this and related matters has been an error of historic proportions.

Banned Books Week is the annual celebration of the freedom to read, sponsored primarily by the American Library Association. I think it is one of our very best, and perhaps least appreciated events that we embrace as a culture.  This year, it is being celebrated September 26−October 3, 2009. This year, the ALA has, among other things, posted an interactive map of incidents of book censorship around the country; and the interactive map , and action ideas, and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression has a cool organizing handbook and downloadable graphics.  

Banned Books Week always generates lots of press, (See for example The Christian Science Monitor.)

It is usually the case that the Religious Right is the source of most incidents of censorship and attempted censorship, and their reasons usually have something to do with hot button issues of the culture wars (that certain Beltway Insiders assure us are over, or just about to be.)

A new survey about religion in America has the Religious Right all worked up.

Researchers at Trinity College in Hartford noted a sharp rise in the number of Americans who, when asked to state their religious preference, replied "none." According to some polls, this bloc of Americans now accounts for about 15 percent, and Trinity researchers say it may rise to 20 percent by 2030.

As described in a story at Wired Magazine, an enterprising team from the Geography Department at Kansas State University has created a series of United States maps that purport to show incidence of the seven deadly sins mentioned in the Bible: greed, envy, wrath, sloth, gluttony, lust, and pride. Now, there are some methodological questions in terms of what proxy data the team chose as representing incidence of deadly sins. For example, the proxy data for "sloth" are "Expenditures on art, entertainment, and recreation compared with employment." And, do STD rates really correlate with lust ? But the maps are certainly intriguing.