http://www.cjrdaily.org/archives/001727.asp
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001010563

Martin, the new head of the Federal Communications Commission, has recently appointed Penny Nance as advisor.

Nance is associated with a fair number of dominionist groups, including:

• Concerned Women for America


• Center for Reclaiming America (which is a blatantly Christian Reconstructionist group)


• "Kids First Coalition" (a dominionist group that also specialises in "stealth evangelism" and targets teenage moms)

Very interestingly, all of the groups she has worked for have pushed senators to ban peer-to-peer applications using dominionist arguments (not the "oh my god they're violating copyright" arguments, rather, "oh my god they could be trading KIDDIE PORN").

It's actually bad enough that very nearly 100 percent of complaints to the FCC on "indecency" in radio and television are from a single dominionist group, the Parent's Television Council.

(Yes, I feel safe in calling PTC dominionist. Two major funders are the DeVos Foundation (the bankroll foundation set up by the founders of Amway specifically for dominionist causes) and Castle Rock Foundation (one of *several* groups set up by the Coors family to bankroll dominionists); the previous article and http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=62 also have further info on dominionist links with PTC. The parent group of PTC, Media Research Council, is also known to be linked to dominionist groups and has pretty much stated they won't be happy unless ALL networks are essentially turned to PAX TV fare.)

The scary thing is, we are likely now to have someone on the boards of the FCC even *friendlier* to their complaint...

UPDATE 10/25/05:

It appears that--per this FCC release--Penny Nance may be operating as the public relations folks for the division of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau specifically dealing with obscene/indecent broadcast. Especially considering Penny Nance's known history of working for dominionist pro-censorship groups this is especially disturbing.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Today's Talk To Action details the growing opposition to the upcoming "Justice Sunday II" and the overt sabre rattling of the religious supremacists:

Next weekend we will be treated to yet another rally for religious supremacism, Justice Sunday II, organized by the Family Research Council. Like the first Justice Sunday, the event will be broadcast to churches and Christian Rightist groups in hopes of whipping up support for some of president Bush's controversial judicial nominations. And as before, the rally claims that anyone who doesn't support these nominees is an opponent of "people of faith."

Meanwhile, a coalition of religious leaders who affirm the importance of separating church and state will be hosting events across the country and speaking out in the media. Among these will be Rev. Bob Edgar, president of the National Council of Churches, Dr. Susan Thistlewaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary, and Rev. Carlton W. Veazey, President, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

According to a general press release today:

"Different groups' plans include a tele-conference Thursday with religious leaders, "Justice Everyday" events around the country and a counter-rally in Nashville preceding the Justice Sunday service on August 14th. That prayer service is being used as a platform for injecting right-wing religious views
into the upcoming Supreme Court nomination battle. Rep. Tom DeLay headlines a list of speakers intent on breaking down the wall between church and state and undermining the independence of the federal judiciary.

Though all groups are not participating in all events, they are united in their support for the careful balance struck in the First Amendment, supporting the free exercise of religion and preventing its imposition on the American people. In events throughout the week and in media appearances.

More links and details are available at Talk To Action.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

ozarque has an excellent blog where she touches upon many interesting things, mostly about linguistics and language. Her recent Religious Language post has some observations about the Religious Supremacists:

When I used the phrase "imminent threat to humankind" I was not thinking of the beliefs the group in question holds about abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage, gun rights, inclusive language, or the Patriot Act. Not at all. Whatever my own positions about those beliefs may be, they weren't what was in my head.

My concern is with that element of the Christian Religious Right whose unifying metaphor -- the metaphor that serves as a filter for their perceptions -- is this one: "This present time is the End Times." That worldview carries with it some or all of the following set of beliefs...

1. Every word of the Bible, including the prophecies in Revelation, is literally true.

2. There's no need to conserve any of the Earth's resources. We human beings have only a very short time left, and there's more than enough of everything to last that long.

3. War in the Middle East is a good thing and must be supported, because it moves us forward toward the Second Coming and the Rapture. The Second Coming can't happen until all of the "Holy Land" belongs to the Jews as God promised, so that a new temple can be built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem -- and war in the Middle East is the only way to get to that point and see those prophecies fulfilled.

4. There's no need to be concerned about the various catastrophes all around us -- the tsunamis and famines and plagues and floods and droughts and genocide and civil wars and insurgencies and all the rest -- because all of that is just part of the troubles predicted in the Bible for the End Times. All these horrors are just signs that we're coming to the end of this wicked present world now and moving closer at last to the arrival of the Kingdom of God.

Those four ideas, which I can hear all around me both on and off the Internet, are the ones that I had in mind when I said I saw "an imminent threat to humankind." They're not rare ideas now, and they're not the ideas of some band of ragged poverty-stricken demented outsiders wandering the streets with signs that order us to repent. These ideas are at the very top of the food chain now, part of the belief system of the most powerful people among us. I do find that a threat, and I see no way to turn it around except by persuasion. As a number of you have said in your comments, it can't be turned around by force. That, it seems to me, leaves only surrender or persuasion. Surrender doesn't strike me as rational.

I think that she sums up quite neatly what it is that also discomfits me about this religious trend. It isn't their beliefs as much as it is what they're doing with them. How do you reason with someone who believes that Jesus is a'comin', and we don't need this old world much longer? How do you deal with people who believe that double-crossing another faith will get them a fast track to heaven? The "End Times" stuff has been around for as long as Revelation has been, but it has become a virulent new meme in today's world. It is a meme which needs to be dealt with head on, and soon. They believe that they can force the hand of God, and are trying to make it happen. Is there a way that this energy can be redirected to a less volitile and dangerous end? How can we change our language and change the world?

"Imminent threat to humankind" is strong language, but language that needs to be taken seriously if we want to keep our planet intact.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY tully_monster)

How To Tell How Gay Your Gay Son Is. Because we all need a little bit of humor in a dark, dark world.

On a more serious note, if you didn't delve any deeper into SpongeDob's website, check out The Homosexual Campaign Against Children. Or maybe not. Now I'm kind of sorry I did. Ewwwwww.

This kind of made me do a double take:

1. Mary Eberstadt in The Weekly Standard (January 1, 2001): “The defense of adult-child — more accurately, man-boy sex — is now out in the open. Moreover, it is on parade in a number of places — therapeutic, literary, and academic circles; mainstream publishing houses and journals and magazines and bookstores — where the mere appearance of such ideas would until recently have been not only unthinkable, but in many cases, subject to prosecution.… If the sexual abuse of minors isn’t wrong, then nothing is.”

uh. WHAT?

2. The motto of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is: “Sex before eight or else it’s too late.” While most homosexual publications haven’t endorsed NAMBLA, they also haven’t condemned it.

It's also possible that most "homosexual publications" don't spend any time even thinking about NAMBLA. Um, most people don't, unless they're fundamentalists obsessed with the putative "gay agenda." Why the obsession with this stuff?

Scuse me while I go wash my brain out with Lysol. Ewwww.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY yinepuhotep)

The good folks at tompaine.com have posted an interesting column on the Family Research Council and its "Justice Sunday" event this coming Sunday.

From the column:

It has become fashionable to say that the court is demonstrating hostility toward faith when it prevents the government from promoting faith for us. But those who make this argument are either ignorant of or willfully blind to the rationales expressed in Supreme Court precedent in this area. The court traditionally has refused to promote or to interfere with religion not because it is anti-religious, but because it wants to leave people free to make choices in matters of faith and to ensure that religious people and organizations may worship as they see fit, rather than as the government sees fit. Further, anyone who suggests that the court has scrubbed religion from the public square is inexplicably missing the rich religious landscape all around us—a landscape that has thrived in the midst of the Supreme Court’s so-called “hostility” toward religion.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ellid)

Here's an article from the July 31, 2005, edition of the Boston Globe. It neatly and completely exposes the so-called "science" behind the evangelical insistence that gay parenting is bad for children:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/07/31/beliefs_drive_research_agenda_of_new_think_tanks?mode=PF

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian/ (if this is a repeat, my apologies in advance)

Very good article in regards to the apocalyptic variants of dominionism (as practiced by "Christian Zionists" and dominionists into the whole "deliverance ministry/spiritual warfare" theology).

Also, some backgrounder:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalist (dispensationalism, one of the more common lines of thought in dominionism--that essentially God gives specific "missions" or "dispensations"; the dominionists into the "third wave"/"deliverance ministry"/"spiritual warfare" type theology, like AoG, even go so far as to say that the dominionist movement *itself* is part of a Grand Dispensation to "win America for Christ" and "claim dominion over the territorial demons" across the country (and again, this isn't restricted to America--dominionist political parties exist in Australia and Canada); this Wikipedia article is especially good in describing this particular bit of dogma in relation to dominionist movements)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reconstructionism (Your typical article on Christian Reconstructionism, but of note as the Wikipedia article is one of the very few I've seen that mentions *premillenial* (aka Rapture-then-Tribulation-then-Millenium) Christian Reconstructionists; most info I've seen on the subject seems to assume all Reconstructionists are *postmillenial* (Millenium-then-Tribulation-then-Rapture). The AoG is hard dominionist and in some instances is bordering on outright Christian Reconstructionist but is premillenarian (their particular flavour of dominionism is couched in "third wave"/"deliverance ministry"/"spiritual warfare" trappings that teach that *everything* outside the church is literally crawling with demons and that they must, in essence, exorcise the planet to save as many souls as possible before Jesus comes back), so whilst it is different than the traditional Rushdoony flavours of Christian Reconstructionism it *is* largely similar in practice.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Now_theology explains how "premillenarian" Christian Reconstructionism/"Avengelical" thought and dispensationalism mesh in pentecostal dominionist groups like the one I walked away from.