Harry Jackson

The decision in the Proposition 8 trial is expected soon and backers of Prop 8 are expecting to lose, which is why they have already filed papers seeking a stay on the decision as they appeal it to the Ninth Circuit.

And Bishop Harry Jackson has already released a statement voicing his outrage about it via a series of Twitter posts:

Prop 8 Decision Threatens Core Civil Right to Vote for Marriage -This is a travesty of justice. The majority of Californians - and two-thirds of black voters in California - have just had their core civil right to vote for marriage stripped from them by an openly gay federal judge who has misread history and the Constitution to impose his San Francisco views on the American people.

The implicit comparison Judge Walker made between racism and marriage is particularly offensive to me and to all of us who remember the reality of Jim Crow.

It is not bigotry it is biology that discriminates between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples. To make a marriage requires a husband and a wife because these unions are necessary to make new life and connect children to their mother and father.

Judge Walker’s slur will not stand the test of time and history. We demand that Congress and the Supreme Court act to protect all Americans’ right to vote for marriage.

The National Organization for Marriage and allies like Bishop Harry Jackson have been looking for some way to overturn marriage equality legislation that became law in the District earlier this year with overwhelming support from the city’s elected leadership. But NOM and Jackson haven’t been doing so well. On the legal front, they were handed one more major defeat this week. The DC Court of appeals rejected their claim that the Board of Elections and Ethics was wrong to prevent an anti-marriage initiative from going before voters, which the BOEE ruled would violate the city’s Human Rights Act. 

One final bit of news: Something else big has just been birthed here in this country, the D.C. Values PAC. Bishop Jackson's heroic leadership has lead to something no one has ever seen before: a coalition of black Democrats leaders and white suburban Christian Republicans to help elect pro-marriage and pro-life black Democrats in the District of Columbia. 

On Monday I was at Georgia Brown's in D.C. in a room that was 80 percent African-American leaders, including two local commissioners and a candidate for the D.C. City Council. God is making amazing things happen. Old barriers are breaking down, new ideas are springing up--and you are the ones making all of this possible.

When I received email alerts yesterday from Wallbuilders, Renewing American Leadership, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition announcing that their respective leaders - David Barton, Jim Garlow, and Ralph Reed - were all going to appear on Glenn Beck last night, I knew something remarkable was going on.

As it turned out, these men with also joined by several other Religious Right leaders, including NOM's Robert George and John Hagee (John Hagee!?):

The discussion went pretty much as you would expect it would when a bunch of Religious Right leaders who are convinced that America was, is, and ought to always be a Christian nation team up with a far-right conspiracy nut ... so it is not really worth covering.

Instead, I want to use this to further explore something I mentioned last week in my "The Religious Right and Six Degrees of Dominionism" post: though not every person who shares a stage with a controversial figure can be said to share that figure's views, those who either invite such figures to participate in their events or else themselves agree to appear at events hosted by such figures are offering, on some level, their validation of such views. 

In the case of last night's Beck program, it would be unfair to say that Robert George shares the radical views of John Hagee just because they shared the stage; but it is fair to say that Beck does, at least in part, or else he would never have invited Hagee on to participate in this panel.  By the same token, by appearing on Beck's program, George is signaling that he is entirely comfortable using that venue as an outlet through which he is eager to share his own views with an audience who shares Beck's views.

Which brings me to my main point: two of the men featured on Beck's program last night also appeared at Convergence 09:

Perhaps you recall our posts about Convergence 2010, where Janet Porter prayed for control over the media and Cindy Jacobs discussed her personal interactions with Jesus and conducted faith healings and Harry Jackson was declared to be a "modern day Martin Luther King" and Jim Garlow explained how he brought in Lou Engle to lead spiritual warriors in fasting and prayer to pass Proposition 8.

Well, Convergence 09 also featured Jacobs, Jackson, and Garlow plus several other prophetic intercessors like Dutch Sheets, Chuck Pierce, and Seven Mountains leader Lance Wallnau ... as well as David Barton.

According to the schedule, Barton spoke for three hours, but unfortunately I have not been able to find any video of his speech ... but he clearly was there:

And I did manage to track down this email announcement from Generals International announcing the conference - note especially the militant language and central role that spiritual warfare was to play in the event:

Mike and I would like to invite you to gather together with us and intercessors from across the world to raise up a prayer army to both awaken and reform this nation.

One does not have to be prophetic to realize that we are at one of the most serious junctures of history our nation has ever known. Some are even suggesting that the United States as it stands is in the balance. Critical times require us as intercessors and believers in the Lord Jesus Christ to rally for troop training. We need a new generation of Generals to arise and war for the soul of our nation!

With this in mind, we know that we cannot pray the way we have in the past season. We need new prayers for a new day. Every army has to come aside for training and equipping. They need to learn how to work with spiritual intelligence and use their weapons of warfare.

We have often said that if we want to see what we have never seen, we have to do what we have never done. This also means that if we want to see this nation not lose her destiny, then we are going to have to fight to ensure that we become the city set on a hill our forebearers fought for!

With this passion in our hearts, we are calling you to come and prepare for battle in what we are calling Convergence ‘09: Raise Up An Army! We have brought together one of the finest teams of equippers we could find to help us mobilize to change the nation, including David Barton, Dutch Sheets, Lance Wallnau, Chuck Pierce, Harry Jackson, Jim Garlow, Cheryl Sacks, Jim Hennesy, Klaus Kuehn, Mike Jacobs and Cindy Jacobs.

Again, I have been uable to find any of the video from the conference, but I did find these "action shots" of Jacobs performing some sort of faith healing on stage:

Now, I will admit that I have been following Barton's work closely for quite some time now and have never heard him talk about Dominionism or the Seven Mountains Mandate.  But I also had no idea that he associated with Dominionists like Jacobs and company either. 

Barton is currently traveling the East Coast with Jim Garlow on their Next Great Awakening Tour and Garlow clearly has deep ties to Jacobs and Engle and Seven Mountains theology.

As I have said, there is a danger in playing "six degrees" with some of these connections ... but it is also completely fair to point out these connections, especially since they seem to be playing a bigger and bigger role within the "mainstream" of the Religious Right as a movement.

Earlier this month, representatives of the Secular Student Alliance were invited, for the first time, to attend a meeting hosted by the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

According to SSA, the meeting focused on "connecting the higher education sector to broader national service priorities and creating spaces on campus to foster interfaith and community service" ... and Bishop Harry Jackson is outraged that atheists were included, seeing it as proof that President Obama and his administration hate Christians: 

Bishop Harry Jackson with the Fellowship of International Churches tells OneNewsNow he believes the White House is trying to expand the tent of faith to include atheists and non-religious people as a way to discredit Bible-believing evangelicals.

"I think we're being set up -- for people of living faith who believe in a born-again experience who follow the Bible -- to be seen as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who need to come into the 21st century," Jackson said.

He argued that, in the 20 years that President Obama sat under the preaching of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama was exposed to a worldview that included aberrant ideas. For example, Wright likened the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan, said the U.S. had brought the 9/11 terrorist attacks on itself, and insisted that the U.S. government had invented HIV as a way to kill minorities.

"Then it stands to reason that you would not see anything wrong in including all these kinds of folks [atheists] in your religious program," Bishop Jackson said, "and you kind of feel like this is what America really is like and this is what the faith community should be like because this is the world you as a president had experienced in your pre-presidential days."

The White House, he believes, has bought into the concept that America is no longer a Christian nation.

The meeting sought to create a "dialogue on interfaith and community service with University Presidents, faculty, Chaplains, foundations, religious and community leaders and other key partners" and included "more than 120 leading scholars, academics, university presidents, chaplains, foundations, and student service organizations [who] attended the convening from institutions across the country [and] reflected the diversity of views and backgrounds across the country with Presidents of evangelical and Catholic colleges, Muslim and Buddhist chaplains, Hindu and Jewish student organizations and representatives from secular service groups as well."

Two of the 120 in attendance were representatives of Secular Student Alliance ... so obviously, the entire meeting was just an effort by the White House "to discredit Bible-believing evangelicals."

• PFAW: People For, CREDO, Brave New Foundation Deliver Petitions Demanding Unbiased Textbooks.
• DCist: Harry Jackson Jumps Into D.C. Election Fray.
• Media Matters: Newsmax confirms bid for Newsweek, claims magazine would "objectively report the news" under its ownership.
• Amie Newman: Sarah Palin's Great Feminist Magic Trick.
• Wonk Room: O’Reilly Compares Gay People To Al Qaeda, Suggests Gay Ad Will Turn Off Straight People.
• Steve Benen: Fiorina Dismisses Global Warming as "The Weather".
• Andrew Sullivan: The Catholic Hierarchy: Firing Gays Should Not Be Illegal.
• Finally, be sure to read David Weigel's fascinating interview with Alexander Zaitchik, author of the new book "Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance."

We are not supposed to have religious tests for public office in the United States, but apparently reverse religious test are okay.  How else do you explain Harry Jackson declaring that Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court must be defeated specifically because she is not a Protestant, claiming that a Court made up only of Catholics and Jews is fundamentally unable to "create an atmosphere for true justice": 

The nomination of Elena Kagan for Supreme Court should outrage evangelical Protestants. The reason is not simply her legal perspective, her lack of judicial experience, or her personal view of faith and religious liberties. Devout Christians of all denominations and races are in danger of experiencing what blacks in the late 1960s and early 1970s called “institutional racism” or “institutional discrimination.” Blacks of that era saw that there was a pervasive attitude that prevented black achievement among the national leadership, who ran many of our nation’s most influential institutions. Civil rights laws had been enacted but the effect of those laws was nullified by the personal prejudices of high-ranking gatekeepers - everyone from judges to CEOs, policeman to professors, and other individuals who exercised personal power over our lives.

Many evangelicals and other Protestants felt like they woke up and discovered they were suddenly deemed the “bad guys” by many segments of our society. The cultural swing by a militant anti-faith minority is certainly not Elena Kagan or President Obama’s fault. Nonetheless, the composition of America’s highest court will determine our national spirit, values, and destiny. Therefore, the faith of the prospective judicial candidate matters.

...

Although Catholics are well represented on the Supreme Court, there will likely be important cases that will need the insight of unbiased evangelicals to create an atmosphere for true justice. Failure of the faith community to engage in the world of politics and processes like the selection of judges could hurt the Christian community decades from now.

Protestants must take action today! We should return to the foundations that have made the US great. Further, we must not just act on behalf of our needs, alone. We must lead the country back to the safety of its guiding principles. At the same time, despite our personal views, we must act on behalf of the entire American family – religious and secular alike. Further, we must continue to encourage religious diversity and even atheists to remain true to their beliefs as it relates to the political process. The repression of minority points of view is un-American and petty.

Therefore, let your senators know that you want them to stand up for the rights of the American faith community. Specifically, your senators must be urged to stand against the appointment of Elena Kagan. A failure to act at this critical juncture will be tantamount to surrendering to the enemies of faith and personal freedom.

I was looking forward to getting back to my home in northeast Washington, D.C. after a few hours among the prayer warriors at the May Day 2010 rally -- only to find tucked into my front door a flyer from the National Organization for Marriage attacking local elected officials who supported D.C.'s new marriage equality law.

The flyer focuses on the bogus "right to vote" message that NOM has been pushing since it became clear that efforts by NOM and Bishop Harry Jackson to prevent DC Council passage of marriage equality legislation were doomed to failure.

It will be interesting to see whether and how NOM reports this spending to DC campaign authorities. Because unlike a lot of NOM's anti-marriage-equality messaging, this flyer is making a direct electoral appeal, urging voters to vote against Mayor Adrian Fenty, Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, and councilmembers who supported equality.
 

Just the other day we noted that Dr. George O. Wood, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, asked that his name be removed from Sojourners' "Covenant for Civility" which was created in order to try and establish a more civil discourse on controversial issues of the day among "Christian pastors and leaders with diverse theological and political beliefs."

It seems that Wood, under pressure from freelance writer and conservative Christian blogger John Lanagan, had his name removed rather than pledge to be civil with perceived heretics who don't share his views on issues like abortion and gay marriage.

And now it looks like Lanagan has gotten Bishop Harry Jackson to withdraw his name from the Covenant as well:

In the second prominent defection from the Jim Wallis engineered Covenant for Civility, Bishop Harry Jackson has asked for his name to be stricken from the document.

Jackson now joins Assemblies of God General Superintendent George O. Wood in taking this stand. “I don’t want to be in covenant with those who support homosexual marriage,” said Jackson.

Like AOG General Superintendent George O. Wood, Jackson was introduced to the document by the National Association of Evangelicals, and never told about the pro-abortion, pro-homosexual signers.

The document, while presented as a call to civility, actually presents those who sign as members of the Body of Christ.

Jackson said that he would be calling Dr. Wood to let the Assemblies of God leader know that he, too, was pulling out.

The entire point of the covenant is not that those who sign agree on contentious issues, but rather that they merely pledge to be civil and respectful when disagreeing on those issues.

But apparently Jackson is simply unwilling to even try to be civil with those who support marriage equality.

Good to know.

Back in the summer of 2008, we produced a series of posts about an effort called "Stop the War on the Poor" that was led by Harry Jackson and Niger Innis, claiming to be a campaign to claim that "extreme environmentalists" who oppose increased domestic oil drilling are enemies of the poor.

In essence, the group's message was that high energy prices disproportionately impact the poor and that domestic oil drilling was solution to keeping energy prices low. Not surprisingly, the effort was heavily supported by pro-drilling and other energy business interests. 

Now Jackson and Innis are back with a similar message, but with a new group called the Affordable Power Alliance:

The mission of the Alliance is heart a humanitarian one. Thousands of Americans become sick and die each year because high energy costs that prevent them from adequately heating or cooling their homes; buying the medicines they need; and practicing better health prevention measures. Millions more lose opportunities to better themselves and their families because rising energy costs eat away at a large portion of their disposable income.

That is why we consider public policies that raise energy costs to be dangerous and immoral -– especially given that higher energy prices hit middle-income families the working poor the hardest.

Last week, Jackson and Innis took their pro-drilling energy front-group message to a Tea Party in Colorado:

Last Wednesday on “tax day,” I had the privilege of attending my first Tea Party event. Standing on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol building in Denver, I addressed several thousand people concerning the impact of wrong-headed energy policies on all Americans – especially the minority community ... Scores of people thanked Mr. Innis and I for both the information we shared and our presence at the rally.

They recognized that the findings of a new report on the economic and employment impact of current CO2 restrictions endorsed by the EPA will be detrimental to all Americans. The study I am referencing estimates that the US GDP will be reduced by at least $500 billion over the next two decades by this one factor alone. This translates into the loss millions of jobs over the next 10 years. Third, there will also be a significant reduction in the average household income but it will regressively affect poor and lower middle class families the most.

Jackson's "findings" come out of this study prepared for his Affordable Energy Alliance by an organization called Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI) which "provides economic, financial, energy, and environmental research services and litigation support to clients in private industry."

And who might some of those private industry clients be, you ask:

American Electric Power Company
Bruce Power, LP
Chesapeake Energy
Commonwealth Edison
Energy Corporation of America
Energy Resources International, Inc.
ExxonMobil
Ontario Power Generation, Inc.
Peabody Energy
The Southern Company
Washington Gas Company
World Oil Magazine

So MISI produced a report on behalf of the Affordable Energy Alliance finding that carbon dioxide restrictions and other environmental regulations would be detrimental to the nation's poor. 

Presumably, the fact that MISI also just so happens to provide research and litigation services to several energy companies is purely coincidental.