Beyond a few academics, who talks about cultural Marxism anymore? I actually hadn’t heard the term used in contemporary politics, until right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik invoked it in his 1518 page manifesto against Islam and multiculturalism.

So imagine my surprise, when I came across an attack on “cultural Marxism” on the Family Research Council website this morning! The article is titled “Activists’ Game Plan Against Religion, Life, and the Family: The UN, the Courts, and Transnationalist Ideology.” The article begins with an attack on the famous 19^th century work by Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), but focuses mostly on contemporary international law and the right-wing battle against feminism and gay marriage. Although the author doesn’t seem to know what “cultural Marxism” actually is, the invocation of the term is striking, in light of recent events.

In the Christian Bible it says, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything” (Ephesians 5:22-24).

Michele Bachmann says she is a Biblical literalist and claims to be a submissive wife. As documented on the Slate website,

In a speech at a mega-church in the Minneapolis area back in 2006, Michele Bachmann explained her decision to pursue tax law. It wasn’t her choice, exactly. God had already told her to go to law school; God had also told her to marry a fellow named Marcus Bachmann. Now Marcus told her “to go and get a post-doctorate degree in tax law.” This was not a particular desire of Michele’s (“Tax law? I hate taxes!”), but she was certain God was speaking through her husband. “Why should I go and do something like that?” she recalled thinking. “But the Lord says, ‘Be submissive wives; you are to be submissive to your husbands.’”

Bachmann’s speech was captured on video and is available for viewing on YouTube.

The shocking acts committed in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik put right-wing extremism back on the radar of threats we should be concerned about.

One might refer to him as a right-wing Christian terrorist. While I believe that Breivik violated the tenets of Christianity when he engaged in terrorism in Oslo and massacred children at a Labour Party youth camp, he explicitly claims the mantel of Christianity, believing he acts to defend European Christendom from Muslim immigrants and multiculturalism. Thus he is similar to “Islamic” terrorists, who violate the principles of Islam yet explicitly claim to be acting in the name of Islam. If we use the religious label in one case, we should probably use it in both cases.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ought to be monitoring right-wing extremists, but apparently they are not currently doing so. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), right-wing violence is on the rise. As Mark Potok explains in “The Year in Hate & Extremism,”

There was good news on the front page of the New York Times this week. Apparently, “a leading medical advisory panel recommended on Tuesday that all insurers be required to cover contraceptives for women free of charge as one of the several preventive services under the new health care law,” and the Obama administration is “inclined to accept the panel’s advice.” Even better, no Congressional approval is required.

As Senator Barbara Mikulski put it, “We are one step closer to saying goodbye to an era when simply being a woman is treated as a pre-existing condition. We are saying hello to an era where decisions about preventive care and screenings are made by a woman and her doctor, not by an insurance company.”

Affordable contraceptives are sorely needed in the US, where “nearly half of all pregnancies” are unintended, and “about 40 percent of unintended pregnancies” end in abortion. Since women living in poverty are four times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally, there is reason to believe that price is an issue.

Because making contraceptives more accessible should decrease the number of abortions, the Christian Right ought to be rejoicing about this proposed policy. Strangely, however, the Family Research Council (FRC) opposes it. It is not strange that the Catholic Church opposes the measure, since they consider contraceptives immoral, but Protestant Christianity allows for the use of birth control. What gives?

Do feminist organizations have anything to say about the battle over the debt ceiling? If they do, it certainly hasn’t gotten much coverage. It seems that they should, since many of the budget cuts proposed by the Republican Party and the Obama Administration will slash funding for programs that meet human needs (and employ women).

Well, as it turns out, feminist organizations do have something to say about the budget. The National Organization for Women (NOW), for example, makes the following point:

Very soon, members of Congress will reach an agreement on how to reduce the federal deficit. As much as $4 trillion could be cut from the federal budget over the next decade. These cuts will touch upon virtually every program that serves and employs women. Currently, some negotiators are refusing to accept new taxes to raise revenues as part of the package, which could result in deep benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and an array of other critical safety net programs. The economic well-being of women, communities or color, persons with disabilities, low-income earners and their families are at stake.

In response NOW, along with the National Council of Women’s Organizations, is asking our elected officials to “Respect, Protect, Reject” – to make sure “women are respected” in budgetary negotiations, “that programs which disproportionately serve and employ women are protected,” and that “any effort to undercut these programs [is] rejected.”

The good news is that President Obama has the power to end the potentially disastrous battle over raising the debt ceiling! The bad news is that he has yet to act on it.

If Obama could end this crisis, why wouldn’t he? Why would he instead propose taking money out of the economy during a recession by cutting spending and raising taxes? This will only make things worse, which is obvious if you know anything about the basic principles of Keynesian economics.

Again, the President has the power to solve the debt ceiling crisis without capitulating to the Republicans, who seem determined to tank the economy. What am I talking about? Well, according to the Washington Post, the President could simply rule the debt ceiling unconstitutional because Section 4 of the 14^th Amendment says the “validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned.” This tactic has been suggested by “law professors, Democratic senators, and liberal commentators,” such as Katrina vanden Heuvel, as well as by Secretary Geithner as far back as May.

In a well-received Op/Ed piece in the New York Times, Columbia law professor, Katherine M. Franke explains why she considers the New York marriage decision a “mixed blessing.” Why does she say that?

First, Franke is concerned that the decision to allow same-sex couples access to civil marriage in New York will most likely lead to the elimination of domestic partnership status. She sees this as unfortunate because having domestic partnership as an option provides “greater freedom than can be found in the one-size-fits-all rules of marriage.”

Second, Franke does not think people should be “forced” to get married in order to access their partners’ health insurance and other benefits. She believes domestic partnership ought to be an alternative way of accessing benefits for both gays and straights.

Finally, she does not want to “celebrate” the idea of having the state sanction and regulate personal relationships.

A lot of my friends recommended this op/ed piece on Facebook, but I found myself less than convinced by Franke’s claims for a number of reasons. First, while Franke insists that “domestic partnerships and civil unions aren’t a consolation prize made available to lesbian and gay couples because we are barred from legally marrying,” in most cases, that is exactly what they are.

This seems to be the case even in New York City, where Franke resides. According to the City, domestic partnership status is available only to “couples that have a close and committed personal relationship” and who “live together, and have been living together on a continuous basis.” It is not available to anyone who “is married or related by blood in a manner that would bar his or her marriage in New York State.” While it is open to gay and straight couples alike, the status seems to be aimed at those who are living together as if married, rather than alternative domestic configurations.

To give another example, my home state of Delaware just legalized civil unions for same-sex couples precisely because such couples are prohibited from marrying. The new status will provide all the state-level benefits of marriage, but because civil unions have no federal status, none of the federal ones. While I am happy that my relationship will soon have some legal protection in Delaware, I am not happy to be relegated to second-class status. But it was the best we could do politically.

Since I monitor the Christian Right for Tikkun Daily, I had to ask myself this week: What does the Christian Right (CR) think about the recent decision of the New York legislature to allow same-sex couples access to civil marriage? Their websites were actually less focused on this issue than I thought they would be, but those who did comment seemed to offer two major lines of attack.

The first argument, advanced by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), Family Research Council, and others, says the people of New York don’t want gay marriage and so the legislature shouldn’t have legalized it. Since we claim to be a democratic society, this makes sense as an argument. However, this criticism is not actually the principled argument that it at first seems to be because Christian Right spokespeople appeal to the will of the majority only when it serves their purposes.

That is to say, if you look at the arguments against gay marriage made by the Right over time, they change depending on the circumstances. When the courts order marriage equality, the CR says “leave it to the legislature.” When legislatures legalize gay marriage, then the CR demands a referendum.

For example, Maggie Gallagher from NOM, who is now pushing the will of the people argument, previously criticized the Massachusetts Supreme Court for overturning the laws passed by the legislature.

Well what if the people decide they want gay marriage? Would the Christian Right then drop its opposition to marriage equality?

I hate to keep repeating myself, but the issue won’t go away. Torture is morally wrong, and it is clearly prohibited by international and American law. Thus, I find it shocking that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld openly admit to authorizing torture, and that they do so with impunity. And if Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi — who allegedly provided information that helped us locate Osama bin Laden — were prisoners of war, then their torturers committed war crimes.

Now, in the wake of bin Laden’s death, right-wing ideologues are once again defending the use of torture.

In response, opponents of torture are trying to prove that it did not play a positive role in the capture of bin Laden. For example, Eugene Robinson says in today’s Washington Post that “torture wasn’t the key to finding bin Laden.”

Well, it doesn’t matter if it was. Torture is wrong. Period. And it is a crime.

Bin Laden’s capture does not justify torture. Terrorists do not need him in order to operate. I am happy we got him, but sadly it probably doesn’t really matter that much.

I have to admit that I am an angry American. I am angry that the Republican Party has been successful at undercutting the country’s revenue base by giving huge tax reductions to the extremely wealthy and has now seemingly convinced the country that the resulting deficit must be addressed immediately and by systematically destroying government-supported programs aimed at the middle and working classes and the poor. I am furious that President Obama supported the tax give-away and now concedes the need to radically slash social programs, even if he claims to be less draconian. And I am livid that some Democrats are now starting to side with Republicans who want to use the debt ceiling issue to advance their radical budget-cutting agenda.

And of course no one is talking about the cost of the three wars. View the documentary Iraq for Sale if you want more information about the billions of dollars we have poured right into the pockets of the “war profiteers.” It will enrage you. You can stream it on Netflix.

Despite all that negativity, however, I am heartened to find out that the American people do not actually support the political agenda of our self-serving elites. According to Ezra Klein, a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll reveals that 65 percent of Americans oppose the Ryan plan to destroy Medicare as we know it. “And if they’re told that the cost of private insurance for seniors is projected to outpace the cost of Medicare insurance for seniors — which is exactly what CBO projects — more than 80 percent of Americans oppose the plan.” Moreover, 70 percent oppose cutting Medicaid. “The only deficit-reduction option that is popular? Raising taxes on the rich…. In general, the poll shows overwhelming opposition to the main Republican approaches for reducing the deficit — even when they’re posed vaguely. Almost 60 percent of Americans, for instance, want a mix of tax increases and spending cuts in the final deal, while only 36 percent think spending cuts should be deployed on their lonesome.”

I attended my elderly aunt’s funeral in the Deep South last week and met some of my cousins’ children for the first time, which was great. Over dinner one of them, a young man in his 20′s, starting sharing with me about his “walk with Christ.” At first, I was worried, being a progressive Jew by choice and all, which none of them knew. Well they knew about my politics, just not my religious affiliation. It turned out to be a good conversation, and I did end up sharing with him that I am Jewish. At that point we just looked at each other and said “Jesus was Jewish.”

Anyway, in the course of our conversation, he told me that he is involved in a prison ministry. This struck a chord with me because I am very concerned about prisoner abuse, particularly at the hands of the US government. In fact, I’ve posted about it on this very site. I told him about an article I had just read in The Nation, called “Gitmo in the Heartland.” I told him I was particularly upset about the fact that prisoners are often moved away from their families, and the prison will sometimes not even let the families know where their loved ones are. He was unaware of the issues raised in the article, so I said I would send it to him.

Of course, I also asked him if he was familiar with Chuck Colson’s prison ministry, explaining how Colson did time for his role in the Watergate break-in, but found Christ in prison. While Colson is on the Christian Right, his organization is very concerned about the problem of prison rape, another concern of mine. Prison rape is openly acknowledged and commonly joked about. I think it is appalling.

I’m sure my cousin and I would not see eye to eye on many political issues, but the conversation did give me hope that religious people across the political spectrum might be able to work together to stop prisoner abuse — maybe even when the prisoners are Muslim. Too bad nobody is Washington seems to care about it.

I do not consider myself naive, but it still surprises me, in my heart, that the United States of America continues to discriminate against lesbian and gay people and that so many of my fellow Americans are OK with that. In thinking about the issue of same-sex marriage again today, in light of the struggle for marriage equality in Maryland, Delaware, and elsewhere, and the Christian Right’s opposition to that struggle, I would like to make five quick points.

1) The term “marriage” as it is commonly used actually conflates two very different aspects of the conjugal relationship: the spiritual union of two people and the civil contract validated by the state. The political and legal struggle for marriage equality concerns only the latter.

If the Left is ever to rebuild support for a progressive agenda, we need to persuade more folks to support us. Certainly, we should try to mobilize people who are not currently involved politically, but we should also try to find common ground with people currently on the Right who support a populist economic agenda – those who really should not, on the basis of economic self-interest, be voting Republican, the party of corporate oligarchy.

It’s important to note that when I advocate finding common ground with Republican voters, I do not mean moving to the Center. To the contrary, I mean trying to pull working people who currently vote Republican onto the progressive side by actually generating and working for a Left agenda that they would support. To do this we have to get the focus off of abortion and gay marriage and onto policies that help working and middle class people and their families.

My hope for this strategy deepened this morning, as I read the opening passage of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009) by Bethany Moreton:

In 1999, the Pew Research Center announced the appearance of a new force in American politics. The key to electoral success in the new millennium would lie with a voting bloc that Pew called “Populists.” These voters were largely white Southern mothers, conservative Christians trying to care for families while wages stagnated and public services dried up. They staunchly opposed abortion and gay marriage, but overwhelmingly welcomed government guarantees of higher minimum wages and universal access to health coverage. Pollsters quickly assigned Pew’s Populists a more contemporary moniker: The fate of the nation, they asserted, lay in the hands of the Wal-Mart Mom.

The Christan Right organization Concerned Women for America finally posted a new article on its website this week — “Marriage Doesn’t Count; Feds Tabulate Same-Sex Behavior.” While the title might sound alarming to some, to me it seems to be another example of trying to make a controversy out of nothing.

Apparently, Crouse is upset that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) is no longer tracking marriage and divorce rates — “information on age of bride and groom, rates of marriage by previous marital status, remarriage, etc.” Instead, the CDC is researching sexual behavior, sexual attraction, and sexual identity.

For those who are interested, here is how the CDC report summarizes the latest findings of their National Survey of Family Growth:

According to a recent post by the Family Research Council, “the Christian Left is a rising power in American politics, finding allies at all levels of government. Arguably, the movement played an important role in electing Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008.”

In the following video, Dr. Mark Smith of Cedarville University gives a very interesting and informative (albeit long) lecture on the differences between the Christian Right and the Christian Left.

At the end of the talk, Smith offers his own critique of the Christian Left’s call for government intervention to create a more socially just society:

How can anyone oppose Michelle Obama’s campaign to combat the childhood obesity epidemic by educating children about healthy eating and exercise? How can anyone not rejoice about recent changes in USDA policies that will make school lunches healthier? Wouldn’t most people agree that it would be a positive thing to use government subsidies to encourage the production of healthy foods and sustainable agriculture, instead of the opposite?

As Mark Bittman wrote in the New York Times this week:

Agricultural subsidies have helped bring us high-fructose corn syrup, factory farming, fast food, a two-soda-a-day habit and its accompanying obesity, the near-demise of family farms, monoculture and a host of other ills. Yet – like so many government programs – what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward. Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat – like apples and carrots – while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies.

Eating healthier foods and exercising more are hardly controversial goals, yet some people on the far right are trying to politicize these common sense recommendations in order to score political points. Does Mrs. Obama’s contention that people should skip dessert once in a while really deserve Palin’s derision? Since when is trying to educate children about health and nutrition coercive? Should children really be allowed to eat whatever they want? Should any of us choose to indulge in whatever we want anytime we want?

The Washington Post reports that according to a recent survey, “fully half of all whites without college degrees identify as Republicans or are GOP-leaning independents, and 42 percent call themselves conservatives, more than other groups.” How can this be? Why would presumably working class whites support the party of Big Business that favors outsourcing, benefit-cutting, and other policies that immiserate working people? Indeed, it was Republican policies that got us into this economic mess, and the GOP is currently trying to make things worse with their job-killing budget cuts and cold-hearted attempts to shred what little remains of the safety net. Is it time to revive the term “false consciousness”?

According to the article in the Post, “whites without college degrees also are the most apt to blame Washington for the problems, and are exceedingly harsh in their judgment of the Obama administration and its economic policies.” More specifically, the data reveal that 64% of whites without college degrees blame “the government in Washington” for the current economic situation, as compared to 52% of college-educated whites. Among non-college-educated whites, 37% think Obama’s economic program is making the economy worse (compared to 34% of college-educated whites) and 42% think it is having no effect (again compared to 34% of college-educated whites).

While on its face, this seems to bode ill for the possibility of creating a progressive movement, a closer look at the survey data reveals a less demoralizing picture of public opinion. While it’s true that 89% of whites blame “the government in Washington” for “the economic challenges facing this country today” either a lot (60%) or some (29%), 78% blame Wall Street institutions either a lot (48%) or some (30%). So while whites are more negative towards the federal government (89%) than blacks (73%) and Hispanics (71%), whites are also more negative towards Wall Street (78%) than blacks (68%) and Hispanics (64%). This is somewhat heartening for those of us who favor populism.

Is it possible for pro-family conservatives and pro-human progressives to come together to block the job-killing, recession-reviving agenda of pro-corporate Republican elites? A perusal of conservative Christian websites makes me think it might be.

As you may know, every week I monitor as many Christian Right websites as I can find for “Tikkun Daily,” and again this week the websites continue to be dominated by anti-health care, anti-abortion (including attacks on Planned Parenthood), and anti-gay posts.

With all the problems this country is facing — with high unemployment and heartless budget-cutting threatening ordinary Americans, with health costs sky-rocketing and expectations of secure old age dashed, with young men and women dying in a war that has no clear purpose and no end in sight — why would conservative Christians support the Christian Right’s narrow agenda? I can understand the moral imperative for conservatives around abortion, but why the virulent attacks on making health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans and on legal equality that would help gay and lesbian couples and their children? I understand that Christian conservatives think homosexuality is morally wrong; I just don’t understand their obsession with it.

Last week in the House, eight Tea Party Republicans (along with 18 others) joined with 122 Democrats in Congress in refusing to extend the Patriot Act.

Opposition was expressed in particular towards parts of the Patriot Act that would authorize the government to continue to monitor the library records of American citizens, use roving wiretaps during surveillance operations, and spy on non-citizens who are not connected to any identified terrorist group. In an interview on MSNBC, progressive Rep. Dennis Kucinich praised the Tea Party Congressmen who opposed the Patriot Act, saying they are clearly serious about civil liberties and about preventing the government from reaching into people’s private affairs. He hopes to work with Tea Party Caucus members in the future on anti-war initiatives.

What Kucinich failed to mention, however, was that 44 out of 52 members of the Tea Party Caucus actually backed the extension of the Patriot Act, which is stunning, given the libertarian principles professed by the movement. It will be interesting to see what happens when Republicans bring the Patriot Act up for another vote this coming week.

No matter how it all turns out, I think it is refreshing to see at least some Tea Party libertarians stand on principle. The White House, however, was reportedly not happy.

During the interview on MSNBC, Kucinich offered the White House the following advice:

This is about the Constitution. And I think it would behoove the White House to align itself with the Constitution. That’s a very strong position to take…. The people from the Tea Party take the First Amendment seriously — right of free speech, freedom of association. They take the Fourth Amendment very seriously, right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. These are things that the White House would, I think, find even more support, if it chose to align itself with the Constitution of the United States.

Does the “Real Housewives” franchise have anything to tell us about American politics today? I have been pondering this question for a while, but my thoughts began to congeal this morning in a bit of a circuitous way. It all started as I was perusing the Christian Right websites, thinking about what to write for my weekly post covering the Christian Right beat.