Brutally Honest

Paul Greenberg: "The war on religion"

A must read:

Mark Pryor, the junior senator from Arkansas, may not make the news very often, but when he does say something newsworthy, it's a doozy.

The other day, he strongly objected to those religious fanatics (fa-nat-ic - anyone who disagrees with you strongly) who have been campaigning against the never-ending filibuster that is denying the president's judicial nominees a straight up-or-down vote in the United States Senate.

Mark Pryor wasn't so much challenging these folks' political views but their daring to express them. It's unbecoming, you see, for church people to participate in the low rough-and-tumble of politics. Their tactics, he says, could "make the followers of Jesus Christ just another special interest group."

So shut up, he explained.

It's all enough to bring back memories of the good ol' bad old days in these Southern latitudes. Back in the Furious Fifties, those defending the political status quo relied heavily on the filibuster, too, and they, too, objected to preachers sticking their noses into politics and getting folks all riled up.

Back then, it was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (talk about mixing politics and religion!) that was causing all the trouble, and stirring folks up for no good reason.

Religion may be a fine, stained-glass thing in its purely ornamental place, but actually to take a stand on religious conviction and fight for it, whether it's picketing a lunch counter or driving the money-changers from the Temple, well, then you've gone from preachin' to meddlin' - and become a special interest, to use Mark Pryor's damning description.

"We do need to think about the tone that we as Christians are setting," Sen. Pryor said in a conference call with some reporters from Arkansas, "and think about the examples we are setting."

Note the senator's reference to "we as Christians" - he's not above speaking for Christians in general when it suits his purposes. Which is the charge he levels against those preachers opposed to the filibuster.

The senator's objections to religion in politics seem limited to the Religious Right. Has he ever had a bad word for those religious groups that have joined him in trying to save the filibuster? I have yet to hear him go after the Interfaith Alliance, which just held a teleconference to attack the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate.

Apparently it's only some church groups that Senator Pryor wants to censor.

Greenberg nails the hypocrisy so prevalent within the ranks of the Religious Left.  That's not to say that the Right is pristine.  They aren't.  But it always amazes me how the Right is tagged as the greatest threat to democracy while the Religious Left are free to mix their faith and politics and those concerned with separation of church and state remain silent.

Greenberg's entire article is worthy but I especially liked his conclusion:

Sen. Pryor has every right to disagree with those whose religious convictions lead them to different conclusions. It's a free country, which means the political brawl is open to all comers. But the senator has no right to keep some Americans from voicing their honest convictions.

The most dismaying thing about Mark Pryor's remarks is that he wasn't arguing the substance of the political issue at hand - the filibuster against the president's judicial nominees - but that some folks, namely Christians, shouldn't be expressing their views. Or at least that they should censor their words to please him.

How strange. To borrow a line Mark Twain uttered when he ran across an equally strange notion: It's not anti-American, it's not un-American, it's French.

Touché mon ami.

UPDATE:  Stanley Kurtz has related thoughts:

There’s a real venom on the Left against conservative Christians.

Harper’s May cover stories about “The Christian Right’s War On America,” frightened me, although not the way Harper’s meant them to. I fear these stories could mark the beginning of a systematic campaign of hatred directed at traditional Christians. Whether this is what Harper’s intends, I cannot say. But regardless of the intention, the effect seems clear.arper’s Magazine

The phrase “campaign of hatred” is a strong one, and I worry about amplifying an already dangerous dynamic of recrimination on both sides of the culture wars. I don’t doubt that conservatives, Christian and otherwise, are sometimes guilty of rhetorical excess. Yet despite what we’ve been told, the most extreme political rhetoric of our day is being directed against traditional Christians by the left.

...

Meanwhile, as Harper’s levels vicious attacks on conservative Christians, the California assembly has passed a bill designed to prevent politicians from using “anti-gay rhetoric” in their political campaigns. Opposition to same-sex marriage itself is considered by many to be “anti-gay.” So has public opposition to same-sex marriage been legislatively banned? As a secular American, I don’t personally see homosexuality as sinful. Like many Americans, I welcome the increased social tolerance for homosexuality we’ve seen since the 1950s. Yet it’s outrageous to ban political speech by Christians who do sincerely understand homosexuality to be a sin.

...

Traditional Christians are openly excoriated in the mainstream press as evil, fascist, segregationist bigots. Their political speech is placed under legislative threat. Their institutions of higher education are attacked and destroyed. Naturally, America’s traditional Christians are fighting back. They’ve turned to the political process in hopes of securing for themselves a space in which to exist. Weary of being the butt of hatred by those who proclaim tolerance, conservative Christians are complaining, with justice, about the all-too-successful attempts to exclude them from society.

Great stuff... heady stuff... scary stuff...

I've been on the receiving end of many a smear by leftists who consider themselves to be compassionate, loving, and tolerant individuals.  Kurtz and Greenberg are writing of that which I've experienced first hand.

The lesson here is to be wary of those who decry intolerance and hypocrisy while practicing both.

Air America Skit - typifying the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic Party

Have you heard about this?

Government officials are reviewing a skit which aired on the network Monday evening -- a skit featuring an apparent gunshot warning to the president!

The announcer: "A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked]."

The audio production at the center of the controversy aired during opening minutes of The Randi Rhodes Show.

"What is with all the killing?" Rhodes said, laughing, after the clip aired.

You probably have not heard about it since Air America's ratings are so abysmal and the Main Stream Media has been largely silent, something they weren't a scant few years ago:

Ten years ago, on April 24, 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing still echoing in the news, President Clinton denounced "promoters of paranoia" on the "airwaves." Peter Jennings relayed: "Clinton did not say so specifically but he clearly had the words of many ultra-conservative talk radio hosts in mind. All you have to do is listen to some of them to hear how they react to those with whom they do not agree." The network newscasters demonized talk radio as "democracy run amok." Tom Brokaw said Clinton appeared to aim at "talk radio programs that cater to the far right of the political spectrum" and that talk had "achieved a machine gun reputation in recent years." Who's betting they'll ignore Randi Rhodes tonight?

I think that's a pretty solid bet.

You?

Do you flurgle?

Tony's little Isaac does.

And I do after Mexican...

... file that under TMI...

Heh.

Bolton related quotables

Roscoe brings us this doozy:

"It is not the usual thing for an aggrieved official to assume an effete drama-queen pose and pine about whether he still has the strength to carry on."

But this one's even better:

“Doctors say that going without food and water in the last weeks of life is not traumatic [other than the fact that it kills you! But I suppose “trauma” is what you experience when John Bolton puts his hands on his hips and glares at you], and that the body is equipped to adjust to such conditions [yeah, by dying].”

And so the feminization of the culture, which is what the Bolton drama is evidence for, continues...

... with bells on (cute little bells with frills)...

"One nation, under your belief system"

This I find to be... disturbing:

DENVER -- The students in Vincent Pulciani's seventh-grade class were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance this week when they heard the voice over the intercom say something they'd never heard before, at least not during the Pledge.

Instead of "one nation, under God," the voice said, "one nation, under your belief system."

...

Margo Lucero, the eighth-grade guidance counselor at the school, substituted the phrase "under your belief system" as she led the recitation of the Pledge on Wednesday.

...

Meanwhile, Jefferson County School District spokesman Rick Kaufman was engaged in damage control, describing Miss Lucero's decision to rewrite the Pledge as "inappropriate" and stressing that she had acted independently, without consulting the district or other school officials.

Yet another moonbat, doing what moonbats tend to do... 

... I want to give these people the benefit of the doubt, I want to believe that they have good intentions...

... but they make it so impossible...

"Thanks Marine for taking the fight to the bad guys"

Received in email from someone working with Cadence International:

“They are so damn young! I was going to the gym tonight (really just a huge tent with weights and treadmills), and we had heard that one of the MEUs (Marine Expeditionary Units) that had come out of service in the ‘triangle’ was redeploying (leaving country). We saw their convoy roll in to the Kuwait Naval Base as the desert sun was setting.

“I have never seen anything like this. Trucks and Humvees that looked like they had just come through a shredder. Their equipment was full of shrapnel blast holes and missing entire major pieces that you could tell had been blasted by IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). These kids looked bad, too! I mean, sunken eyes, thin as rails, and that 1,000-yard stare they talk about after direct combat. Made me pretty damned embarrassed to be a ‘rear-area warrior.’ All people could do was stop in their tracks and stare . . . and feel like me . . . like I wanted to bow my head in reverence. A Marine captain stationed with me was standing next to me, also headed to the gym. He said: ‘Part of 1st Brigade Combat Team, 8th Marines, sir. Took the heaviest losses of any unit up north as part of Task Force Danger, sir.’

“As the convoy rolled up, all of us watching just slowly crept toward these kids as they dismounted the Hummers and 5-tons. Of course, we were all shiny and clean compared with these warriors. These kids looked like they had just crawled from Iraq. I had my security badge and ID around my neck and started to help them unload some of their duffel bags. A crusty gunny came up to me and said, ‘Sir, you don’t have to do that.’ ‘Gunny . . . yes I do.’

“They all looked like they were in high school or younger!! All held themselves sharply and confidently, despite the extreme fatigue you could tell they had endured. ‘You guys out of the triangle?’ I asked. ‘Yes, sir. Fourteen months, and twice into the grinder, sir. Both fights for Fallujah.’

“All I could do was throw my arm around their shoulders and say, ‘Thanks, Marine, for taking the fight to the bad guys . . . we love you, man.’

“I looked at these young kids, not one of them complaining or showing signs of anything but focus and good humor. ‘Sir, they got ice cream at the DFAC, sir? I haven’t had real ice cream since we got here.’

“They continued to unload . . . and after I had done my handshakes and shoulder hugs, the captain and I looked at each other. . . . They want ice cream, we’ll get them ice cream.

“You see, a squid (Navy) 0-5 (commander) and a focused Marine 0-3 (captain) can get just about anything, even if the mess is closed. Needless to say, we raided the closed DFAC (mess tent), much to the chagrin of one very pissed-off mess sergeant, and grabbed boxes of ice-cream sandwiches, as many as we could carry, and hustled back to the convoy. I felt like Santa Claus.

“ ‘Thank you, sir,’ again and again from each trooper as we tossed up the bars to the guys in the trucks. ‘Son, what the hell are you thanking me for? I can’t thank you enough.’

“They are so damn young. . . . I will sleep well knowing they are watching my back tonight.”

Our men and women continue to serve a righteous cause, we can't forget them or their service.

What liberal media?

So... ... You think the BBC is an objective branch of the MSM, do you? (you know who you are):

The BBC was last night plunged into a damaging general election row after it admitted equipping three hecklers with microphones and sending them into a campaign meeting addressed by Michael Howard, the Conservative leader.

The Tories have made an official protest after the hecklers, who were given the microphones by producers, were caught at a party event in the North West last week. Guy Black, the party's head of communications, wrote in a letter to Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news, that the hecklers began shouting slogans that were "distracting and clearly hostile to the Conservative Party".

These included "Michael Howard is a liar", "You can't trust the Tories" and "You can only trust Tony Blair".

Who you can't trust is the BBC... but some of us knew that already...

Cold Fury: The Man Who Won’t Be Pope

Mike, over at Cold Fury, brings us this moving piece:

Hans Grapje was raised in a Catholic orphanage in The Hague and, as a young man, aspired to become a priest, but was drafted into the Army during WWII and spent two years co-piloting B17s until his aircraft was shot down in 1943 and he lost his left arm. Captain Grapje spent the rest of the war as a chaplain, giving spiritual aid to soldiers, both Allied and enemy.

After the war, he became a priest, serving as a missionary in Africa, piloting his own plane (in spite of his handicap) to villages across the continent. In 1997, Father Grapje was serving in Zimbabwe when an explosion in a silver mine caused a cave-in. Grapje went down into the mine to administer last rights to those too severely injured to move. Another shaft collapsed, and he was buried for three days, suffering multiple injuries, including the loss of his right eye. The high silver content in the mine’s air gave him purpura, a life-long condition characterized by purplish skin blotches.

Grapje is now a cardinal, having devoted his life to the service of God as a scholar, mentor and holy man. However, commentators and analysts completely discounted him in the recent conclave.

The Church is simply not ready for a one-eyed, one-armed, flying purple Papal leader.

Apologies to all Catholics everywhere, especially family members...

... one of Mike's commenters said it best:

SOMEbody’s gonna go to hell for that one…

Heh...

Slow Down

Moments after finding out that my oldest son is a brand new owner of his first speeding ticket, I read Gerard's 'I'm back after my hiatus' essay that contains pertinent wisdom:

It's true that to find the deeper rewards of the Pacific Coast Highway you have to crawl through endless renditions of our modern malaise laid out as the strip malls and neighborhoods of low degree in that part of the passage -- the fried food joints, the store-front fortune tellers, the endless quick shot bars and bad to mediocre restaurants, drive-through churches -- but in the end the Highway emerges in Santa Monica, gives way to the long beaches and headlands of Malibu, sweeps out of the city completely and leads to highlands and sea cliffs and finally to the Sur. You'd never get there if you took the fast and easy freeway to the east. It is true that you might get to someplace else, some other clot of cities, quicker. But then you'd just find yourself in another variation of Los Angeles. It would be as if you never left, since, in truth, you had not.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you take your time with a journey, you have a much better chance of finding, again, that the journey itself is the destination and not some distant city or goal; that if you can accept that you need to pass through the uglier parts of the landscape to get to the highlands and the vistas, they will in time appear again. But if you try to take the fast route, the route that leads around all the clutter and slash of our disposable culture, you will in the end have seen little and understood less, you will be traveling on the bland Highway 5s that always run into the dark end of nowhere special.

This morning, having come back from a very long journey, it seems clearer than usual to me that our recent ability to achieve speed in transit has infected us with the idea that all transitions in life need to be done at speed. After which, we complain that there seem to be far too many wrecks and breakdowns on these highways of our lives. We complain that there is always too much traffic around us and all we can do is hunker down in our own steel shell and drive with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake, boxed in by a flying wedge of semis hauling things we don't need to houses that are not quite homes, and tailgated by our own impatience to get there on time only to discover it is not really where we needed to be at all.

There's much more, all of it worthy, of a slow, lazy read.

Welcome back Gerard, you were missed.  I'm off now to spend time with my loved ones, hoping to focus on "being" and "becoming" rather than on what lies ahead.

Thanks for the reminder.

Elitist faith - rooted in the me, the now, in nothingness

I left Catholicism as a youngster.

Simply quit going to church once I was of an age that allowed me to do so. 

It was an action borne largely of ignorance with a touch of rebellion and apathy mixed in. 

In many ways I've regretted the decision especially given my most recent state of sprituality, one I liken to being adrift, one I've chronicled here and touched on there.

I pray hard however that I might never find myself as cynically unanchored as this:

By the time the plume of white smoke appeared and the bells of St. Peter's pealed on Tuesday afternoon, a wholly unrealistic hopefulness had descended on the secular salons of New York. It felt a bit like the afternoon of the exit polls last November when Democrats believed Sen. John Kerry was about to become the 44th president of the United States. There was an irrational feeling that someone who would proclaim the truth of spiritual liberty over fundamentalism would fling open the doors to the balcony and emerge from behind those theatrical scarlet curtains -- some youthful cardinal we hadn't even heard of yet, some charismatic dark horse whom the joyful crowds, so many of them young, would immediately recognize as their own. The suspense was killing.

Until -- Oh no! Cardinal Ratzinger! His very name was ominous, a cross between Ratso Rizzo and William Zanzinger. His election was like the sharp rap of a ruler across the knuckles by a punitive nun. It was as if you expected Barack Obama and got Bob Dole. The more that cardinals and Vatican watchers lined up on "Larry King Live" to say what a friendly, conciliatory guy he really is (the most appealing detail that emerged the next day was that he looked "a little forlorn" as he entered the Room of Tears to change into his papal vestments), the more he seemed to emerge as a 19th-century throwback, stridently opposed to liberalism, doubt, internal argument within the church. And the Bavarian background doesn't help. As one of Larry's callers who identified himself as an amateur historian of the Holocaust put it, "Couldn't we have let this generation of Germans pass into history?"

Tina Brown's rant against the new pope (and people of traditional and orthodox faith) is a testament to what has clearly become the religion of the elite.  Her juxtaposed references to John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and Tom Delay speak volumes to what has become the fundamentalism of the left. 

Thank God for someone like The Anchoress, who has quickly become not just another Catholic apologist (who makes much sense) but a go to daily read on the Brutally Honest blogroll:

There is a lot going on in this column - an admission that for the folks on the left the papal election meant nothing more than yet another political defeat. Just as they had deluded themselves on election day (a day on which Kerry’s own pollster predicted a loss by 3% points) to believe that a man who had never actually led the presidential race, who had offered neither real ideas or real military documentation, was definitely going to win the White House back for them, they had decided to believe that somehow the “winner” of the papal elections would be “some youthful cardinal we hadn’t even heard of yet, some charismatic dark horse whom the joyful crowds, so many of them young, would immediately recognize as their own.”

Well…actually…NEWSFLASH, TINA…the man who emerged from the balcony was recognised, quite joyously, by the very youthful crowd in St. Peter’s Square, as “one of their own.” Those young adults, after boisterous cheering, began their first elated chant: Ben-e-dict-o, Ben-e-dict-o.

They get it, the young Catholics. And you and your friends, who seem not to understand what was truly taking place in the Sistine Chapel, or what the papacy means, or what - for that matter - Christianity means, do not. To you, it’s all a great big Church of NO that won’t let you just do what you want and pet you and say, “why, how clever and wonderful you are, dear, here, have a cookie! But not two! Mustn’t get fat now, because otherwise no one will ever love you or think you are a good person…be like the Italians! They are not fat!”

I am a little puzzled as to why, exactly, you and your friends feel this poisonous need to go rather overboard in your bigoted nose-wrinkling. I mean, yes, I DO understand to a point. You and your whole generation have had a difficult time moving from childhood of “gimmee what I want…” to the adulthood of “take what you need…”

How you must have truly hated to hear Cardinal Ratzinger, a day before he became Benedict XVI utter those terribly divisive words: We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14)

No. You could not have liked hearing that, beholden as you are to the age in all of its furious fashion and requirement to conformity. So, I DO understand, to a point, why you need to do the “sniff and giggle, mock those unsophisticated Christians” thing. It’s hard to break those habits from high school.

But, you know, you do have your own church, so I don’t really know why you have to be so concerned about anyone else’s. You have what Flip Wilson used to call “The Church of What’s Happening NOW.” The Church of Me First. The Church of Cackling Condescension, The Church of Blithe Nobility.

There's more to be read and I urge all my readers to go here now and read the rest.  Then contemplate in a serious manner, as I need to do, what Church it is that you belong to.

At this writing, I firmly believe I'm part of the catholic church (with a little "c"), the wider body of Christ, firmly believing that absent God's grace and love found only in Jesus Christ, I am lost.

Completely.

But I also think that I must guard against the cynicism I've felt in the past toward both the catholic and the Catholic church less I find myself suckered into the religion of the left, the religion whose church The Anchoress so aptly describes as "'The Church of What’s Happening NOW.' The Church of Me First. The Church of Cackling Condescension, The Church of Blithe Nobility".

Although it's true that I'm bothered by the fact that I cannot partake of communion with my family of Catholics, and though I'm bothered by this notion that the pope can be seen as infallible, and though there might be other items and articles of faith that Catholics practice that give me heartburn, I am reminded that what I've felt toward the Catholic church, in some ways I now feel toward the Protestant church.

I've become too focused on what ails the broken body of Christ.  I've too often found fault with her.  And I've failed in many ways to see that I'm as much part of the problem.

I don't think it's too far to move from where I am now to where Tina Brown and her ilk are today.

And that my friend is a frightening thing. 

Pray for me and those like me.  Would ya?