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 Thursday July 15th Fran Luck interviewed Abby Scher and me about right-wing “feminism.” I wrote about it after our talk, and I just wanted you to know that you can hear us at http://archive.wbai.org. Just scroll down the page until you come to the “Joy of Resistance” on Thursday July 15 at 11:00am (the listing is in reverse chronological order). The first half of the show concerns current news about women around the world, and the interview begins at 31:17 (i.e. 31 minutes and 17 seconds into the program). Hope you enjoy it.

NWP members picket the White House in 1917. The banner reads, "Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty."

This morning I had the pleasure of talking with Fran Luck on WBAI-FM , a Pacifica affiliate in NYC. Fran hosts the “Joy of Resistance,” a show that covers “the ongoing and world-wide struggle for the full liberation of women–as it continues to unfold dynamically in every country and culture on the planet.” She had read my original post about Sarah Palin and wanted to interview me about the parallels I saw between Palin’s “feminism” and the Nazi militants, about whom I wrote part of my dissertation. It was a great conversation.

I’m a conversation junkie. Nothing gets my mind going like talking with a knowledgeable person. That’s part of the reason I love Tikkun Daily. I interact with smart, informed folks who are just as interested as I am in the topics I write about.

Fran’s interest in my post was piqued by the fact that a group of women calling themselves “feminist” existed during the Third Reich. She brought Abby Scher into our discussion, because Abby has been researching women on the American Right for quite a while and edits “The Public Eye,” a quarterly publication that tracks right-wing movements.

I’ve been organizing two Starhawk workshops here in Madison, so that’s why I haven’t been blogging recently. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that I hope to include an interview with her on this site in about two weeks. Who knows whether she’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, permaculture, the WTO, Wicca, or all of the above. She’s a multifaceted person, and the interveiw may be wide-ranging.

In other pagan news, many of you know that the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs had a problem with religious bigotry about five years back. Evangelical Christian cadets harassed other cadets who didn’t share their faith. There were anti-semitic slurs. And one of the chaplains claimed she was fired for criticizing the proselytizing that was going on. Even the Yale Divinity School issued a report on religious intolerance at the academy.

After much work to correct these problems, there seems to be greater openness in Colorado. In a few weeks, Earth-centered religions– including Wicca, Neopaganism, and Druidism — will dedicate their own worship space. This sacred site will increase the collection of worship areas at the academy that already includes Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist chapels. As opposed to the other indoor areas, the pagan site is a lovely stone circle on the top of nearby hill overlooking the academy. It was created by moving some large boulders that originally sat near the Visitor Center. Here’s what it looks like:

I guess I would have missed it altogether. I never watch the Super Bowl. I never watch TV. I don’t subject myself to its violence and idiocy. I get my information by reading, whether on the internet (more and more) or through print media.

But I’m on the NARAL list, so now I know that CBS is going to subject 100 million viewers to an ad from Focus on Family during the Super Bowl. Supposedly CBS has an advocacy ad policy, but when it comes to “the family,” they don’t seem to be abiding by it. If you don’t know about Focus on Family, they’re a right-wing, anti-choice, anti-birth-control, anti-sex-education, anti-gay organization. They’re against pretty much everything I stand for.

The only thing that made me smile about all of this is the following Youtube video from the Raging Grannies:

If you want to sign a petition protesting the Focus on Family ad, you can go to NARAL.

[WARNING! DO NOT TRY TO LINK TO CONSERVAPEDIA FROM DAILY KOS, HUFFINGTON POST OR THIS DIARY...A BLOCK MIGHT GO UP...maybe its a coincidence, maybe not, but I can't access the site from this computer anymore after linking. I will type out the address so you can cut and paste into the toolbar...]

Remember Phyllis Schlafly, the Queen of conservative religious “feminism” from the late 60s through the 80s? Well she’s got a son (Andy, BSE, JD, ABCDEFG), who is funnier than David Letterman. Except the poor guy is trying to be serious.

In 2006, Andy burst onto the scene with Conservapedia, a right wing version of wikipedia minus its “liberal, anti-Christian bias,” (not to mention all structural defects that encourage “liberal” biases such as fact-checking, offering proof, etc.).

About six months ago, Andy drew international attention to Conservapedia, when he challenged Dr. Richard Lenski’s groundbreaking study of the evolution of e coli bacteria.

Lenski found, after 20 years of painstaking research, that one descendent generation of his original e coli colony mutated, enabling it to feed off of a citrate solution, where as other descendant strains did not. Shlafly did not like the assumption that e coli evolves. He fired off a letter, artfully combining breathtaking arrogance with ignorance to Lenski demanding that the scientist produce his data.

Lenski responded to Schlafly by politely suggesting he actually read the article as it included the data. Undeterred, Schlafly actually posted a second equally idiotic letter and was decimated by a decidedly less polite, but extremely funny Lenski response. The entire dialogue can be found here.

Subject: Body Of The Goddess

Dear Friends,

Today is Vijaya Dashami, the Day of Victory that completes the 9-day Hindu Navaratri celebration of the Goddess in all her aspects and manifestations. In mythology, Vijaya Dashami marks the final triumph of the Goddess, after nine days of battle, over the demon Mahishasur. It also marks the start of the harvest season, and invokes the Divine Mother as all the powers of fertility and the life-giving gifts of the earth.

I stand firmly, fiercely, and unequivocally against the global rise of Hindu fundamentalism, and its appropriation of Hindu traditions for its fascist agenda. And at the same time, I reclaim my Hindu spiritual and cultural heritage as a feminist scholar, radical activist, and artist.

Here’s a poem that Shailja sent to illustrate her opposition to Hindu fundamentalism:

I am left speechless by Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) response to a sobbing woman, begging for help because her insurance company will not pay for a feeding tube for her brain-injured husband.

Coburn instructs her to call his office, blames her situation on her neighbors, and then lectures that it is not appropriate for “the government” to intervene in her health care. (Hat Tip Jeffrey Feldman).

I have several questions for the Senator:

1. You are a Christian and you align yourself with the Christian Right. Did your version of the Greek Scriptures not include the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it redacted, leaving out all mentions of service to the the needy and the poor?
   
   

Perhaps disappointed that death panels failed to frighten the tar and feathers out of the average American, the right wing appears to have settled on a new meme to undercut healthcare reform: the CDC will force males to undergo circumcision.

Loosely based on a CDC report to be presented at an AIDS prevention gathering in Atlanta, Fox News, Reason Online, and The Drudge Report report that the CDC is considering forced circumcision of all males to prevent the spread of HIV.

David Harsanyi, a Denver Post columnist and author of Nanny State wrote:

My spouse Mark and I watched Doubt last night. We both found it quite thought-provoking. Not because it concerned clerical pedophilia, but because it made us think about how we judge situations and people.

As many of you know, the movie takes place in a Catholic middle school in the Bronx during the fall and winter of 1964. The main characters are a new, progressive priest in the school (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the conservative Mother Superior, who has run the school for many years (played by Meryl Streep). The dialogue is extremely stylized and the acting so fantastic that the movie really got under my skin. I found myself rooting for the priest, hoping against hope that he hadn’t had sex with any of his students. This was an unlikely stance for me, since I’ve been actively involved in the movement against predatory sexuality.

Part of the reason for my feelings was Meryl Streep’s acting. She presented Sister Aloysius as a stern, unforgiving disciplinarian with no compassion and little give-and-take. We first see her striking and/or scaring some of her charges as they attend mass. Her lips, often puckered in disgust or condemnation, make a beautiful middle-aged actress look like an ugly, withered, old woman. We meet a person who has given up on life and lives by the limiting and limited rules she has inherited in a top-down organization, the Catholic Church. She’s a walking stereotype of the “Right Hand of God.”

As I said yesterday, Wicca (my religion) may take an integrated view of death as a part of life, but I was raised here in the old U.S. of A. And that means that death can be just as hard for me to face as the next American.

If we look at contemporary American culture, it’s clear that we’re a death-denying society. Death is one of our final taboos. For secularists in the US, death no longer has metaphysical implications. It is the end of life and as such has a physical finality that even in the near past would have been hard to imagine. And for the devout, death seems to be writ large for other reasons. A recent study indicates that they feel bound to remain alive as long as they can, something we can see in the struggle among members of Terri Schiavo’s family.

I’m doubly lucky this week that my friend Be Scofield, who interned a while back at Tikkun, is now at Starr King seminary and invited me to hear Rev. Wright on Tuesday and Chris Hedges today.

I hadn’t realized that the former war correspondent and current hard-hitting opponent of both the Religious Right (or the heretical Christian Fascists as he would prefer that we think of them) and the New Atheists, one of the stars of the spiritual progressive world, had himself gone to seminary (Harvard Divinity School).

His talk to the seminarians today was alarming, about:

• the lack of literacy and critical thought in America
• the primacy of the image (TV and advertising) that works its manipulative emotional way with us however critical we are of it
• the nature of corporate “reverse totalitarianism” (in which ideology is subservient to profitmaking, unlike other totalitarian or theocratic states)
• and the likelihood that this round of stimulus will create a financial bubble that will burst and leave us in much deeper trouble, prey to pseudo-Christian fascist demagogues who will have a field day due to the bankruptcy of liberalism.

Much of this sounded convincing to me, and he had wise words about what to do about it. Our question should never be “How can we elect good people?” but always “How can we limit the damage done by mediocrities in power?” This to me is the essence of democracy, from Magna Carta onwards. Noone ever bothered to organize democracy, with all the conflict that entails, to deal with good rulers, only with mediocre and bad ones.

But I started to get confused when Hedges said, approvingly, that Dan Berrigan (the famous radical Catholic priest) had not been interested in the Obama/McCain election struggle last year because, Berrigan said, quoting his brother Phil, “If voting was that effective it would be illegal.” Hedges went into a riff about how the 60s Left failed because it was secular and therefore was seduced by power. It takes a religious Left to hold onto the ethical core. It’s not our job to attain power, he said, our loyalty is to another Power. He quoted Paul Tillich to the effect that all institutions are demonic.

This was too much for me. Hedges had already spoken approvingly of habeas corpus, slavery abolition and something he called “functioning democracy.” But history teaches us that those were achieved by the exercise of power, by people who thought it worth acquiring power in order to hold the mediocrities in power to account. To say that institutions, which are ubiquitous in human society, are demonic, is too close to saying human beings are demonic, for me. There is a power dimension to everything we do, every penny we spend, every speech we give to students, every relationship in our lives: if we can’t have a theology or psychology of the good use of power, then we are lost as a social species.

He said at one point that there could never be a moral institution in the same sense that there could be a moral individual. That rang purity warning bells in my head. I don’t think there can ever be an entirely moral institution OR individual: we are humans–clever, conscious, selfish, cooperative animals–neither perfect nor perfectible. Nonetheless some individuals are kinder than others, and some institutions are more accountable than others. Hedges talked a lot about kindness at the start, but this emphasis on some kind of purity of moral individuality that is spoiled by trying to gain power, that to me is all about purity and has nothing to do with kindness. Purity and kindness can and often are opposites, enemies.

I fear that his speech could be taken to be so apocalyptically doom laden about America, about our world, about all our institutions and about the very concept of trying to gain power to promote a kinder world, that kind-hearted idealists would wonder why on earth it would be worth taking part in public life, except to make symbolic stands that preserve their purity. That was not how habeas corpus, slavery abolition or functioning democracies were created, nor any of a thousand reforms that make life in some countries and institutions better than life in others.

So I was thoroughly confused. Did I misunderstand him? I’ll send him this blog, and ask for clarification.

“What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful.”

You can rely on Ursula le Guin. Her work ties the personal with the political as engagingly as any I know and way better than most. The quote is from The Telling, a novel from 2000 that I’m just catching up on. I found the opening pages hard work, confusing in the way science fiction sometimes is, when the author thinks they can drop you right into another world and time without enough clues. But the book becomes straightforward and wonderful.

A fiercely repressive religious right has taken over Earth. A young Earth woman who has suffered deeply from it finds herself representing the equivalent of the UN on a planet where the repressive takeover comes from the other side: from a scientific secular fundamentalism, that represses a holistic religious culture.

The portrait of this displaced culture is beautifully done: it is religion without any notion of the supernatural. It is seen by the modernisers as anti-modern only because it acquires its truths slowly, conservatively: given time, truth, and honest communication, it will grow and incorporate what is good about the new while learning what is not good about it, but all in a nondogmatic way. This culture is called the Telling, because it goes forward by telling stories, which are often ambiguous, yielding their truth in the way of parables, not in the way of creeds. Just like a le Guin novel.

The point is well made: the kind of repression we secular moderns associate with religion can be accomplished just as horrifically by people trying to be secular and modern like us; while the social benefits of religion can be developed by people without creeds or even beliefs.

“Tell him that belief is the wound that knowledge heals,” says one of the old culture’s teachers.