LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Today is the highly vaunted "Justice Sunday", where the Dominionists are going to beat the panic drum over the judicial system and scare whole churchloads of people into helping to destroy the checks and balances that have kept the US from falling apart.

I'll be interested in collecting any articles, commentary, eyewitness reports, etc. from folks here- and discussion is also welcome.

Also, next week is the NYC Open Center conference on the Religious Right. I am hoping to see some of you there. Get in touch with me via my Livejournal email (sunfell at live journal dot com) so we can exchange numbers, and arrange to meet. This conference should be very interesting, in the light of the goings-on of late.

Found the first report already:

Los Angeles Times (registration required)

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The Times has an article about the upcoming Crusade film, "Kingdom of Heaven" directed by Ridley Scott. It doesn't cast the Crusaders in a good light, and of course the Religious Right is outraged:

CHRISTIAN conservatives in America are marshalling their forces against Sir Ridley Scott’s forthcoming crusader epic, The Kingdom of Heaven, claiming the film is insulting and unfair.

Scott, 67, received death threats from Muslim fundamentalists during filming in Morocco two years ago when King Mohammed VI, who admired his earlier work, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, lent him troops from the royal bodyguard.

Yet it is Christian hostility that may ultimately prove more damaging at the box office. A spate of hostile reviews that are due to appear in the increasingly influential religious press this week will urge America’s 80m born-again believers to avoid the £100m film. ( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Here's the NYT's opinion piece on the upcoming Justice Sunday simulcast: (thanks to twistedchick)

The fraudulence of "Justice Sunday" begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias," says the flier for tonight's show, "and now it is being used against people of faith." In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the "left's last legislative body," and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for "outrageous" judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

" A group of ministers representing about 17 Baptist churches in the Louisville area and a national Baptist committee that supports separation of church and state yesterday called on a Louisville church to cancel its planned "Justice Sunday" tomorrow.

""We see 'Justice Sunday' as part of a larger effort to link church and state in ways not seen in America since the Puritans were hanging Quakers on Boston Commons and exiling Baptists to Rhode Island," the Rev. Joe Phelps, pastor of Highland Baptist Church, said during a news conference yesterday."

A thoughful post from nehmet

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Nehmet talks about the madness of the theocrats in this post:

I've been feeling bad lately; I do all my blogging at my other journal and rarely post anything at all here (since I can't access LJ at work anymore). Ergo, I think I'll start reposting stuff here when I think it might be of interest. Starting with this, on the subject of "moral relativism:"

An excellent view of this lately overused catchphrase comes from Maxspeak, by way of Swami Uptown:

Moral relativism outside of the Church, like political correctness, is 85 percent myth. Liberals and secularists are full of morals. Wiccans have morals. Trotsky had morals. You might not like what they are, but to claim morals are absent is bigotry. It's saying you've got the wrong religion. From there, someone versed in theology could get into the matter of how the Church or indeed any faith regards alternative religious creeds. From the little I know, the only tolerant ones in this regard are Buddhists.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The New Republic has an article about how fundementalism is splitting the Republican Party.

For conservatives of faith, such pluralism can allow error to flourish--and immorality to become government policy--and therefore must be limited. A conservative of doubt, however, does not regard the existence of such pluralism as a problem. He sees it as an unavoidable fact of modernity, an invitation to lives that are more challenging and autonomous than in more traditional societies. Even when conservatives of doubt disagree with others' moral convictions, they recognize that, in a free, pluralist society, those other views deserve a hearing. So a conservative who believes abortion is always immoral can reconcile herself to a polity in which abortion is still legal, if regulated. Putting government power unequivocally on the side of one view of morality--especially in extremely controversial areas--must always be balanced against the rights and views of citizens who dissent. And, precisely because complete government neutrality may be impossible on these issues, government should tread as lightly as possible. The key in areas of doubt is to do as little harm as possible. Which often means, with respect to government power, doing as little as possible.

Doubt, in other words, means restraint. And restraint of government is the indispensable foundation of human freedom. The modern liberal European state was founded on such doubt. In the seventeenth century, men like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke looked at the consequences of various faiths battling for control of the moralizing state--and they balked. They saw civil war, religious extremism, torture, burnings at the stake, police states, and the Inquisition. They saw polities like Great Britain's ravaged by sectarian squabbles over what the truth is, how it is discovered, and how to impose it on a society as a whole. And they made a fundamental break with ancient and medieval political thought by insisting that government retreat from such areas--that it leave the definition of the good life to private citizens, to churches uncontaminated by government, or to universities that would seek and discuss competing views of the truth.

In the modern world, where disagreement among citizens is even deeper and more diverse than three centuries ago, conservatives of doubt see their tradition as more necessary than ever. As the fusion of religious fundamentalism with politics has destroyed Muslim society and politics, so, these conservatives fear, it threatens Western freedom as well--in subtler, milder, Christian forms. Conservatives of doubt are not necessarily atheists or amoralists. Many are devout Christians who embrace a strong separation of church and state--for the sake of religion as much as politics. Others may be Oakeshottian skeptics, or Randian individualists, or Burkean pragmatists, or libertarian idealists. But they all agree that the only solution to deep social disagreement is not a forced supremacy of a majority or minority, but an attempt to keep government as neutral as possible, power as close to people as possible, and as much economic power in the hands of the private sector as possible.

For such conservatives, divided government is therefore critical. Judicial checks on democratic majorities are as vital as legislative checks on executive abuse. (They are just as queasy removing such parliamentary checks as the filibuster.) The same goes for keeping policy-making as close as possible to states and localities. Why? Because human knowledge is fallible, and those closest to the issues are more likely to get solutions right than people a long way away. The notion that the federal government should actively endorse one religion's perspective on social policy would appall such conservatives. So would the idea that individual states cannot legitimately experiment with policies on which there is no national consensus--such as stem-cell research or marriage rights.