Todd Starnes

Todd Starnes of Fox News has dedicated himself to finding cases of Christians facing persecution. Starnes recently reported that the military is deliberately blocking access to a Baptist website and may court-martial Christian soldiers, and alleged that a school in New York is forcing girls to kiss one another. However, these three incidents were all completely false.

On Sunday, Starnes filed another report on how a high school track team in Texas “was disqualified from competing in the state championships because one of the runners made a gesture thanking God after he crossed the finish line.”

“Derrick Hayes, the anchor of the Columbus High School 4×100 relay team had just crossed the finish line when he raised his finger to the sky,” Starnes writes, “thanking the Lord for winning the race that would send them to the state finals.

His article was based on the claims of the athlete’s father, and other outlets picked up the story as well.

Gov. Rick Perry wrote a letter to the University Interscholastic League demanding an investigation:

According to press reports, the student's father, K.C. Hayes, has been widely quoted as saying the student was pointing to the heavens to thank God.

In his letter, Perry said he would “not tolerate the suppression of religious freedom anywhere.”

“It is unconscionable that a student athlete could be punished for an expression of religious faith or that an act of faith could disqualify an athlete in a UIL competition,” Perry said.

He urged the UIL to “investigate this incident thoroughly and take whatever action is necessary to ensure protection of religious freedom and expression at UIL competitions.”

As the Texas Freedom Network has pointed out, Religious Right groups such as the Liberty Institute and Liberty Counsel both jumped on the story, as did Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Attorney General Greg Abbott.

But much like the student who was supposedly given detention for praying in school when he was actually disciplined for fighting, the Texas athlete wasn’t waving his finger to thank God and he wasn’t even disqualified for the gesture he made at the finish line.

The student was actually disqualified for inappropriate behavior towards the referee, and he and his dad now admit that the incident had nothing to do with religious expression.

According to the UIL press release:

Over the course of the investigation, the UIL interviewed several eyewitnesses and reviewed video of the race. Additionally, the UIL spoke to the involved parties. The UIL has concluded the investigation and has found no evidence to suggest that the disqualification took place as a result of the student-athlete expressing religious beliefs. The basis for the disqualification was due to the student-athlete behaving disrespectfully, in the opinion of the local meet referee.

Based on the UIL’s investigation, the student athlete raised his hand and gestured forward at the conclusion of the 4x100-meter relay. The meet official approached the student-athlete in an effort to warn him of a possible disqualification should that behavior continue. In the opinion of the official, the student reacted disrespectfully. Based on his reaction, the student-athlete was subsequently disqualified. Any decision to disqualify a student-athlete at any track meet must be upheld by the head meet referee. The meet official and the meet referee conferred, and the disqualification was upheld on-site. At no point during the discussions surrounding the disqualification at the meet was the issue of religious expression raised by any parties.

The UIL’s investigation also revealed that all coaches involved were notified prior to the regional meet that any gestures in violation of the National Federation of State High School Associations track and field rule against unsporting behavior would be grounds for disqualification. Coaches were instructed to discuss this with their student-athletes prior to all races.

To assist the UIL in its investigation, the student-athlete’s parents submitted a letter stating that their son’s religious freedoms were not violated. “In looking back at the conclusion of the 4x100 race, we realize that Derrick could have handled the win in a different manner,” KC and Stacey Hayes said in the letter. “It was not our intention to force the issue that our son’s religious freedom was violated. Nor do we feel that way now. After discussing this with our son, we have come to the conclusion that his religious rights were not violated.”

The student-athlete who was disqualified also submitted a letter during the investigation stating: “Although I am very thankful for all God has given me and blessed me with, on Saturday, April 27, 2013 at the Regional Track Meet in Kingsville, TX, my actions upon winning the 4x100 relay were strictly the thrill of victory. With this being said, I do not feel my religious rights or freedoms were violated.”

In his daily radio bulletin, Todd Starnes of Fox News said he is “beginning to wonder if the Obama administration thinks the moral high ground is having a bomb explode in the middle of Times Square” following the decision to read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda Rights. Tsarnaev was questioned for sixteen hours before a magistrate judge read him his Miranda Rights once law enforcement officials determined there was no imminent danger to public safety.

According to Starnes, that decision showed that the Obama administration was not concerned with trying “to get information that might stop the attack” that Tsarnaev brothers planned for Times Square.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation waited more than 48 hours before telling New York City police that the Boston marathon bombers had picked the Big Apple as their next target. That decision put lives at unnecessary risk because we have no idea who else might have been involved in the attack. That’s because the Justice Department pulled the plug on the interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he clammed up when they read him his Miranda Rights. I’m beginning to wonder if the Obama administration thinks the moral high ground is having a bomb explode in the middle of Times Square rather than interrogate a terrorist to get information that might stop the attack. And why did the FBI ignore warnings that the Tsarnaev brothers were radical Muslims? I think the FBI stands for the Federal Bureau of Incompetence.

The Religious Right went into a frenzy this week over charges that the military was deliberately blocking access to SBC.net, the official website of the Southern Baptist Convention’s, as part of an anti-Christian ploy.

“What we are seeing here, I want to be very clear here, we are seeing under the Obama administration a Christian cleansing underway in the United States military,” Fox News' Starnes maintained.

David Limbaugh accused the military of acting like a “thought police” who “selectively suppress[es] First Amendment freedoms” that “our armed forces are charged to protect,” and the SBC’s top ethicist Richard Land said it was an “outrageous” move and the person who blocked the website “needs to be fired.”

The American Family Association called the incident an example of the military’s “hostility towards faith and religious freedom” and its spokesman Bryan Fischer claimed it was part of an Islamist-secularist conspiracy to classify the entire denomination as a “hate group that spews nothing but ‘hostile content.’”

SBC.net was in fact blocked, but not as a result of anti-Christian bias, but because of malware on the SBC’s website.

Don’t just take our word for it, the Baptist Press, the news arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, reported that “the military's software filters detected malware at SBC.net and blocked the website.” Due to malware, not the content of the website, SBC.net was considered “hostile content.”

But don’t hold your breath for Land or Fischer to retract their inflammatory claims.

A military official says malware was to blame for the Southern Baptist Convention's website being blocked on some military bases.

Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a Defense Department spokesman, said the military's software filters detected malware at SBC.net and blocked the website. The malware since has been removed off the website, and the denomination's website unblocked, he said.

"The Department of Defense is not intentionally blocking access to this site," Pickart told The Tennessean in an email. "The Department of Defense strongly supports the religious rights of service members, to include their ability to access religious websites like that of the SBC."

…

Chris Chapman, the SBC Executive Committee's director of information systems, said SBC.net -- like the websites of many other organizations -- is a target for hackers. He also said the military's filters are at an "optimum level" in blocking content, not simply "recognizing invading viruses" but also blocking anything that possibly could be harmful.

…

"The recent situation impeding access to our website for some was aggravated by a misunderstanding of a term familiar to those in the information technology field. That term is 'hostile content.' To technical administrators, it simply means some sort of vulnerability or virus. It might not even be an actively harmful element, but simply an exploitable or potentially exploitable condition. We now live in an age where defending against or removing 'hostile content' is a daily undertaking, especially for any organization that maintains multiple Internet servers.

Fox News “culture war” correspondent Todd Starnes chatted with Buster Wilson of the American Family Association yesterday about an email that a lieutenant colonel in Kentucky reportedly sent to a handful of subordinates encouraging them to stand up to anti-gay organizations. This obviously irked the AFA since they are on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-gay hate groups.

Starnes asserted that if a military family subscribes to an AFA publication, the Pentagon “would be obligated at that point to monitor that family for suspicious activity.”

Wilson asked Starnes if individuals in the White House or the Pentagon who are “anti-pro-family groups, anti-Christian groups” were behind the emails.

“It appears that this administration is trying to secularize the United States military,” Starnes warned. Wilson added that the Obama administration is “dissing Christianity, traditional conservatism and what’s really American.”

Later, Starnes agreed with Wilson’s claim that the “liberally-controlled government” will use the power of the state to suppress hate groups.

Wilson: At what point does the liberally-controlled government start to say, you know what this hate group needs to be quieted, they need to be quiet, we need to shut them up, they are doing what they do because of what they say and what they say is dangerous. It’s the old shouting fire in the theatre thing, they need to be quiet.

Starnes: Once you start saying something long enough people start believing it and I suspect we’re on that trajectory. At this stage in the game I think Jerry Boykin from FRC says that it is time for Americans to stand up and it is time to start fighting back by contacting your lawmakers, contacting your representatives in Washington, not just on the phone but in person saying ‘this has to stop.’

Earlier in the program, Wilson used Melissa Harris-Perry’s commentary on the collective responsibility of raising children to warn that America is in decline. He said that he now understands why “they think that they have the right to teach them about homosexual sex and it’s okay to have feelings for someone of the same-sex in kindergarten.”

Wilson: I never thought I’d see the day when we would be talking about openly from once respected news brands like NBC saying that you don’t own your own children. I just got to tell you sometimes it breaks my heart and sometimes my wife and I will just be talking about this and we’ll just tear up, we’re like, what is going on in this country? You honestly are going to try to sell me the idea that my kids don’t belong to me, they belong to you and everybody else? No wonder they think that they have the right to teach them about homosexual sex and it’s okay to have feelings for someone of the same-sex in kindergarten, no wonder they think that because it’s their kids and that’s what they believe.

Fox News commentator Todd Starnes joined Sandy Rios on American Family Radio yesterday to discuss the marriage equality cases being argued at the Supreme Court this week. The two took a grim view of the proceedings: Starnes lamented that opponents of gay rights have become “second-class” citizens and Rios warned that a Supreme Court marriage equality victory would lead to “tremendous punishment” for anti-gay activists.

“We are in for persecution like we have never seen,” she said, to which Starnes replied, “Well, it’s already started.”

Starnes: People are, people are very concerned about, about culture and about values and where things are going in this country. What concerns me, though, Sandy, is the vitriol coming from those who support gay marriage. You know, I’m the kind of person that is more than happy to sit down and talk and debate and listen to what people have to say. I may not agree with it, but at least, you know, it’s their right to have their opinion under our Constitution.

And yet, there seems to be this opinion on the other side that says, you know what, you and I don’t deserve the same rights. You know, it’s as if we’re second-class citizens now because we support the traditional, Biblical definition of marriage, or perhaps we are pro-life, and that means we’re somehow second-class citizens who don’t deserve to be in the public marketplace of ideas.

Rios: Absolutely. In fact, it’ll be worse than that. You know there’s going to be punishment. There will be tremendous punishment. If gay marriage is embraced by the country, if the Supreme Court goes south this week in its hearings, we are in for – of course, we’re not going to hear about it until June – but we are in for persecution like we have never seen it.

Starnes: Well, it’s already started.
 

The "War on Christmas" season is over, but the Religious Right's campaign to portray Christianity under attack in America continues.  You might be surprised which organization the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins is slamming as hostile to Christianity -- it's that notoriously radical group, the Daughters of the American Revolution.  Perkins' attack on the DAR makes it clear just how narrowly the Religious Right views the role of religion in our society -- and how they twist thoughtful efforts to promote respectful, inclusive religious language into an assault on Christians and Christianity.

In this week's Washington Update, Perkins promotes a breathless report from Fox News' Todd Starnes, which recycles complaints about 2011 changes the DAR made to its Ritual and Missal in order to make its prayers more inclusive of non-Christians who might be members of the group or participants at its events.  Starnes reported, incorrectly, that the DAR had directed members to refrain from praying in the name of Christ. Here's Perkins:

For the organization, which was established in 1890, this signals a dramatic change in the strong Judeo-Christian roots of the DAR. After all, this is a service group meant to perpetuate the memory of the American Revolution and the values for which we fought. Like it or not, those values and our nation's identity were rooted in the Christian tradition. And while society may have changed over the years, the intentions of our founders--to build a godly nation--has not.

Note Perkins' odd use of "Judeo-Christian" to complain about changes that removed prayers in the name of Jesus Christ (the materials are still full of hymns and prayers to God). The "Judeo" in Perkins' "Judeo-Christian" is a fig leaf the Religious Right uses to mask the fact that they are promoting the notion of a Christian nation.

The DAR's President General Merry Ann T. Wright, herself a Christian, addressed false charges that the group's revisions rendered organizational documents godless months ago in a series of blog posts. Here's part of what she had to say last April:

The Executive Officers believe that the new Ritual and Missal can be used by members of any faith, substituting words as they wish, changing the prayers to suit the needs of the meeting in which they are being used. At our Executive meetings, knowing that we are all Christian, we pray in the Name of Jesus. When those are present whose faith is unknown, we pray in God’s name. However, we all recognize that when Christians pray in God’s name we are, indeed, praying in Christ’s name because the Christian faith believes in the Trinity of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We also understand that our Jewish members know God as Jehovah or Yahweh, Muslim members use the name Allah for God and there are those whose spirituality may have a still different higher power or none at all.

We have in no way mandated that one must or must not use the name of Jesus Christ in the prayers. In our DAR rituals, prayers are included. Most of the prayers begin with “Our Father” or “Almighty God” and end “in Your Holy Name.” Christ’s prayer, known as The Lord’s Prayer, the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, Easter and Passover prayers and prayers for other religious observances are included.

The Ritual and Missal is a guide and may be adapted to reflect the composition and thoughts of whoever is using it. There is always the option of writing other prayers or not using prayers at all. Our primary concern was to show our faithful love and respect to all who belong to DAR whatever their faith might be. We believe the current Ritual and Missal shows that respect and inclusiveness.

How does Tony Perkins respond to the DAR's goal of respect and inclusiveness? "This is blatant historical revisionism, and it's driven by the environment of hostility this administration has created toward every kind of Christian expression." Sure, Tony.

Fox News’s Todd Starnes is sick and tired of ‘South Park’ and Hollywood getting a free pass. The Fox News commentator participated in the Values Voter Summit panel on “Religious Hostility in America” over the weekend.

We have the seen the administration come out and say, "we condemn anyone who denigrates religious faith." And they come out in regards to this anti-Muslim film.

 

Well, that's well and good, but my question is, when has the administration condemned the anti-Christian films that are coming out of Hollywood? Where are the federal investigations into shows like ‘South Park,’ which has denigrated all faiths?

 

Where is the outrage when people of the Christian faith are subjected to this humiliation that is coming out of Hollywood?