Climate change

• Simon Maloy: What, exactly, does Bill Donohue add to the "conversation"?
• If you are a veteran who is concerned about climate change, you are a traitor.
• Glenn Beck.  'Nuff said.
• Orly Taitz. 'Nuff said.
• Chris Good: How Kevin Jennings Survived.
• Good As You listened to Regina Griggs on Wallbuilders Radio so you don't have to.
• The National Organization for Marrige gets behind Harry Jackson's DC rally.
• Steve Benen: Coburn Reaches Out To Those He Loathes.
• Sen. David Vitter really doesn't want to comment on the Louisiana justice of the peace who refuses to marry an interracial couple.  But he eventually relented (Vitter that is, not the justice of the peace.)

• David Weigel discovers the source of the Birthers' forged Kenyan birth certificate.
• Linda Harvey did not like Joe.My.God's take on her statement on the shooting in Tel Aviv, but JMG insists that her "words spoke for themselves and I stand by my original post."
• Christy Hardin Smith asks if the NRA is backtracking on its opposition to Sonia Sotomayor by saying it doesn't know how heavily it will weigh the vote on her nomination in its scorecard.
• Good As You: Concerned Women for America says gays are no different than thieves and alcoholics.
• Talking Points Memo: Bonner and Associates was working on behalf of the coal industry when it sent forged letters -- purporting to come from local Hispanic and black groups -- to a member of Congress, urging him to oppose the recent climate change bill. Also, Rep. Ed Markey wants some answers from the company.

Back in 2006, the Christian Coalition made news when its new president, Joel Hunter, resigned before even official taking office due to the organization's unwillingness to consider broadening its agenda beyond gays and abortion to include things like poverty and climate change:

The Central Florida pastor recently tapped to lead the Christian Coalition of America resigned his position in a dispute about conservative philosophy -- more than a month before he was to fully assume his post, he said Wednesday.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, of Longwood's Northland, A Church Distributed, said he quit as president-elect of the group founded by evangelist Pat Robertson because he realized he would be unable to broaden the organization's agenda beyond opposing abortion and gay marriage.

He hoped to include issues such as easing poverty and saving the environment.

"These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," Hunter said.

The resignation took place Tuesday during an organization board meeting. Hunter said he was not asked to leave.

"They pretty much said, 'These issues are fine, but they're not our issues; that's not our base,' " Hunter said of his conversation with the group's leadership.

A statement issued by the coalition said Hunter resigned because of "differences in philosophy and vision." The board accepted his decision "unanimously," it states.

As Hunter explained at the time, his "attempt to broaden the agenda just didn't work. I thought maybe it would. They said they wanted to go into some of these other issues, but when it came time to do it, they were afraid of alienating their base."

Which makes this recent development all the more confusing:

To environmentalists, it must have seemed a sight as rare as an ivory-billed woodpecker nesting in a chainsaw factory: Roberta Combs addressing the annual gathering of the National Wildlife Federation?

Let's rephrase that: The president of the Christian Coalition, a staunch ally of right-wing Republicans, has befriended one of the country's most venerable environmental groups.

In a later phone interview with Pittsburgh City Paper, Combs confirmed it was her first public talk ever to an environmental group. And it happened right here in Pittsburgh, the latest development in a burgeoning partnership between Combs and NWF President Larry Schweiger.

"I feel at home here, with you guys, the National Wildlife Federation," Combs told some 250 staffers and volunteers from across the nation, at their May 1 gathering at Downtown's Omni William Penn.

Schweiger, a Pittsburgh native, told the audience that he and Combs have been quietly working Washington, D.C., together for some time. As a result, he said, "We're getting into places we've never gotten into before" -- like the offices of some Republican politicians.

The NWF has more than 4 million members and supporters. The Christian Coalition claims some 2 million supporters, a substantial pool of potential new allies in the fight against global warming and other ills.

For Combs, the chief motivator is energy policy. She said the alliance with the NWF dovetails with the Coalition's own America's Path to Progress initiative, which calls for ending our reliance on foreign oil to improve national security as well as to combat climate change. The urgency of those goals helped her see past a longstanding partisan divide.

"This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democratic issue," said Combs, standing at the podium with her grandson Logan. "This is a family-values issue."

Energy efficiency and renewable energy, she added, are "the kind of progress that upholds our Christian values."

For the last several years, the Christian Coalition has been rather irrelevant, having all but lost every bit of the influence it once wielded within the Religious Right political power-structure.  And I suspect that this sort of heretical behavior will only serve to further lessen what little relevance it might still have had within the movement. 

After all, the Religious Right does not look kindly on those in its camp who try to make climate change part of the agenda, regardless of their motivation.

It is no secret that Religious Right leaders have had it out for Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals for some time now, starting back in 2007 when they tried to get him fired for branching out into the global warming debate because they feared it was undermining the focus on their traditional anti-choice, anti-gay agenda. 

He certainly didn’t make any friends before the election when he blasted John McCain for selling out to the Religious Right … and now he has even fewer friends among the old-guard right-wing leaders thanks to this recent interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” where he all but admitted that he voted for Barack Obama, said that Dick Armey had good reasons for calling people like James Dobson bullies and thugs, predicted that climate change is going to become an issue on which evangelicals become increasingly active, pledged to work with the Obama administration to find ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies in this country, and admitted that his opposition to marriage equality is “shifting”

GROSS: Let me ask you; you say that you really identify with the concerns and priorities of younger evangelical voters and one of those priorities is uh—it’s more of an acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage. A couple of years ago when you were on our show I asked you if you were changing your mind on that and two years ago you said that you were still opposed to gay marriage. But now as you identify more and more with the younger voters and their priorities, have you changed on gay marriage?  

CIZIK:  I’m shifting; I have to admit. In other words, I would be willing to say I believe in civil unions. I don’t officially support redefining marriage, from its traditional definition, I don’t think. WE have this tension going on in our movement between what is church-building and what is nation-building, and I lean in this spectrum at times, maybe we should concentrate on building our values in our own movement. WE have become so absorbed in the question of gay rights and the rest, we fail to understand the challenges and threats to marriage itself—heterosexual marriage. Maybe we need to re-evaluate this and look at it a little differently.

Not surprisingly, his statements have generated controversy in evangelical circles, forcing the NAE’s president to assure its board that the organization’s priorities remain the same:

The president of the National Association of Evangelicals reassured the organization’s Board of Directors as well as media outlets this past week that the group remains fully committed to its long-held stance on abortion, marriage and other biblical values after several controversial statements were made by the group’s vice president.

In a letter to the NAE’s Board of Directors, the Rev. Leith Anderson said that the wording of the Rev. Richard Cizik, NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs, during a recent interview with NPR (National Public Radio) “did not appropriately reflect the positions of the National Association of Evangelicals and its constituents.”

“Our NAE stand on marriage, abortion and other biblical values is long, clear and unchanged,” Anderson wrote in the letter to the directors, a portion of which he forwarded to several news agencies including The Christian Post, on Saturday.

He added, “Richard has strongly assured to me of his own support and agreement with our NAE values and positions. This was not understood by listeners from what he said.”

Tony Perkins, for one, isn’t buying it, saying that Cizik “left the reservation a long time ago” and wanting to know why he is still employed by the NAE:

How else can you explain enthusiastic support for what will probably be the nation's most pro-abortion, anti-family president in our nation's 232 year history?

The question, however, remains. If Cizik does not speak for the NAE, as the Rev. Anderson has said, why is he on Capitol Hill representing NAE and claiming to speak for Evangelicals? Is it possible for a human being to come with a disclaimer?

The Institute on Religion and Democracy wants to know the same thing:

"Is Richard Cizik representing typical members of the Assemblies of God, the Salvation Army, or the Presbyterian Church in America, along with millions of other evangelicals, when he suggests, even momentarily, support for liberal issues like civil unions? If not, then why is he NAE's chief spokesman? Should not that spokesman consistently espouse traditional evangelical beliefs?"

As do representatives of Concerned Women for America:

Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America, said, “Mr. Cizik claimed that his views are five years ahead of his constituency, but these views are not anywhere close to Biblical orthodoxy, traditional Christian theology nor the bulk of Evangelicals who ground their faith in the Bible. Perhaps this is why he espouses them in forums to which most of his supposed 'constituency' do not listen.”

Janice Shaw Crouse, Director and Senior Fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, said, “The NAE consists of 45,000 churches, 50 denominations and 30 million constituents. I cannot believe that they are happy to have a spokesperson, who supposedly represents them, expressing views that are contrary to Biblical authority and contradict theological orthodoxy. I think, perhaps, my dear friend Rich has been inside the Beltway for too long and has swallowed too much of the NPR and Vogue Magazine Kool-Aid.”

One has to wonder just how many more times Cizik can get away with repudiating and alienating the traditional Religious Right movement and its agenda before the powers-that-be at the NAE finally succumb to the pressure and fire him.

One of the things I find most entertaining about the Religious Right is their vehement opposition to any effort to broaden the so-called “evangelical agenda” to include anything beyond the Right’s core anti-gay, anti-abortion agenda and their constant attempts to justify their rigidly narrow focus.  

Starting back in 2006 after the GOP got thumped in the mid-term elections and the media stopped talking about “values voters” and began to write about the emergence of a “new evangelical” movement, right-wing leaders were telling anyone who would listen that religious efforts to help the poor or protect the environment were all well and good but were just way less important than opposing gays and abortion:

"It's not a question of the poor not being important or that meeting their needs is not important," said Paul Hetrick, a spokesman for Focus on the Family, Dobson's influential, Colorado-based Christian organization. "But whether or not a baby is killed in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, that is less important than help for the poor? We would respectfully disagree with that."

When Rev. Joel Hunter was tapped to take over the Christian Coalition, he ended up leaving his position before he even began because they wanted to have

nothing to do

with his efforts to broaden the Religious Right’s agenda and then, in 2007, when the National Association of Evangelicals’ Richard Cizik stared working on issue of climate change, right-wing leaders including James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Don Wildmon, Gary Bauer, and Rick Scarborough demanded that he be

fired and his efforts shut down

because they were afraid that it would end up undermining their old-school agenda:

More importantly, we have observed that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.

But what angers the Right even more than that is Democratic efforts to reach out to religious communities and voters.  The Religious Right has always hated and attacked such efforts, regularly accusing Democrats of “hijacking” faith to promote an ungodly agenda because, you guessed it, it takes away from their own efforts to use religion to bolster their own narrow agenda:

Tom McClusky, vice president of government affairs for the Family Research Council, an influential conservative lobbying group, said he objects to the Democrats' approach. He said it is morally problematic to equate poverty issues, as serious as they are, with abortion.

"It's not that, as Christians or as people, we shouldn't be helping out those who need it," he said. "But when it comes right down to it, if you're never born, you're not going to be poor. If you're not born, you're not going to be afflicted with illnesses. They're trying to say there's some sort of equivalency when it comes to these issues. I personally think that's wrong."

Can’t argue with that, I guess.  You can’t be poor or sick if you were never born, and so FRC is committed to making sure that you are born so that you can then be poor and get sick, at which point … well, you are on your own because those aren’t thing that they really care about.

Richard Cizik, Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, has not been particularly popular with the leaders of the Religious Right in recent years.

For instance, last year James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Gary Bayer and other tried to get him fired from his job at NAE because they feared that his efforts to get evangelicals to care about issues like global warming would undermine their own narrow anti-gay, anti-abortion agenda. 

And then, earlier this year, when NAE tried to host a dialogue between Christian and Muslim leaders, the Right again reacted badly, calling it a “sellout” and accused those who participated of “betraying the Christian faith."

And considering that, at the moment, the Right is busy fawning over John McCain and his decision to name Sarah Palin as his running mate, it is probably safe to assume that Cizik’s already low popularity among Religious Right political powerbrokers is not going to be increasing any time soon:

Richard Cizik is one of the country’s most powerful and outspoken Christian evangelical leaders. He happens to be a Republican, and he has known the GOP’s presidential nominee for many years. “I thought John McCain was a principled person,” Cizik says. “But John McCain has backed off, not just on climate change but on torture and a sensible tax policy — in other words, he’s not the John McCain of 2000. … He seems to be waffling on issue after issue.

“It’s not illogical for someone to conclude that John McCain is going to be more like George Bush than John McCain is going to be like John McCain in 2000.”

…

“It is pretty obvious that the Palin nomination plays to identity politics and cultural war issues,” says Cizik. “Her selection is more than an acknowledgment that evangelicals are an important part of the Republican base, and everyone knows that John McCain is not that exciting to religious conservatives.”

Palin, Cizik says, has certainly excited the Republican base, and picking her was certainly a deft, if cynical, political move by McCain — at least in the short term. However, in the longer view, his running mate may do just as much to energize the opposition and prove a turn-off to independents.

“Not everyone in the evangelical movement is fawning over Sarah Palin,” Cizik says … “He’s playing that card, and many of us thought he didn’t need to do it — it just polarizes the country,” Cizik says. “The irony of it is that John McCain can’t speak with an evangelical voice of faith — let’s face it, it’s just not his thing — so I guess the substitute is this other [Palin]. I guess that’s pretty cynical, but maybe his actions are cynical.

“The consequences of going to identity and culture-war politics is that experience is denigrated, authority is questioned and ignorance is strength,” Cizik says.

Back during the heyday of Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign, the candidate was being hailed as a “new breed” of evangelical, one who cared about issues like poverty and the environment in addition to traditional right-wing opposition to gays and abortion.  As we have noted before, one of the key mis-perceptions about this so-called new movement is that its purported concern about issues beyond the standard Religious Right agenda does not mean that they are any more moderate on the core anti-gay, anti-abortion agenda that has driven the movement for the last several decades. 

Heading into his faith forum over the weekend, Rick Warren was poised to emerge as the poster boy for this “new evangelical” movement – as Time Magazine put it:

A shift away from "sin issues" — like abortion and gay marriage — is reflected in Warren's approach to his coming sit-downs with the candidates. He says he is more interested in questions that he feels are "uniting," such as "poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and human rights," and still more in civics-class topics like the candidates' understanding of the role of the Constitution. There will be no "Christian religion test," Warren insists. "I want what's good for everybody, not just what's good for me. Who's the best for the nation right now?"

In his “Washington Update,” Tony Perkins expresses his frustration that “Congress returned to work--not on judges, marriage, or the war supplemental bill--but on changing the weather” and outlines his strong opposition to the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill: “The bill's 500 pages are a complicated mess of distorted science, pork projects, and a tax-and-trade solution that will send U.S. jobs overseas and result in the most massive expansion of the federal government since the New Deal.” Perkins is particularly stunned that lawmakers are concerned with the “inconclusive” evidence of global warming rather than what’s really going to make the country melt: “If anything is heating up, it's marriage. This Congress is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the real crises facing this nation as they refuse to intervene.”

It seems as if the Right is finally realizing that they are losing the battle over the issue of the environment and have decided, rather than to change their tune, to instead adopt a posture of appearing to care about global warming and climate issues in order to push their own agendas.

For instance, a few weeks ago we wrote about the American Environmental Coalition, a group founded by right-wing stalwarts like Pat Robertson, Paul Weyrich, and Gary Bauer which was created to “bring balance to the debate” about climate change by essentially denying the existence of global warming and fighting against efforts to address it.

Right off the bat, they found a champion in militant global-warming skeptic Sen. Jim Inhofe … but apparently one phony right-wing environmental group just wasn’t getting the job done and now Inhofe is back with another:

Christian leaders have joined with pastors and legislators to put forth a new initiative on caring for the environment. Today marks the launch of www.WeGetIt.org, a website offering visitors the opportunity to sign up and be a part of an historic movement.

The reaction to climate change has reached deep into prevailing culture. Knee-jerk reactions with good intentions can harm more than help. The recent increase in the cost of food is one example of the consequence of diverting crops such as corn to the production of ethanol as a fuel source. The impact that steep corn price increases have had on food distribution to third-world countries has been profoundly negative. Keeping in mind this difficult lesson, the "We Get It" coalition offers recommendations by which we can honor and care for the environment along with the poor.

The "We Get It" campaign coalition includes Senator James Inhofe, Cornwall Alliance, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Wallbuilders. Janet Parshall, Joel Belz of World Magazine, Acton Institute and Dr. Richard Land have also joined this monumental movement.

That’ll fly, because when one thinks of those protecting the environment and assisting third-world countries, one automatically thinks of the tireless efforts historically put forth by the likes of the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, and Wallbuilders.

The effort appears to be designed to try and piggyback off of Al Gore's "We Can Solve It" campaign, with the notable exception that their position is that “our stewardship of creation must be based on Biblical principles” and the demand that any efforts to protect the environment must be guided by “principles of His Word to care for the poor and tend His creation.”   As the video on their website explains, efforts to protect the environment and fight global warming will only end up making food more expensive and less available, which will ultimately hurt the poor in places like Africa and cause children to go hungry.  As they see it, “contrary to popular belief, the science is not settled on whether the Earth’s recent, slightly warming was caused by man or nature.

If you didn’t know better, you might initially mistake this video for a plea for donations to help those suffering around the world, at least until right-wing icon Janet Parshall shows up and explains that “it won’t cost you a dime” because what will really help those in need is “faithful environmental stewardship” and a right-wing pledge to “rally together on behalf of our neighbors in poor and developing countries, to speak up for them and protect them from the effects of well-meaning, but flawed policies."

FRC's Tony Perkins says they are trying to show that you can be "green without being gullible," which is a distinct change from his earlier view that believers should welcome the consequences of climate change as a sign of the End Times.