Hostility

Last week we posted audio of Robert Jeffress, the prominent Rick Perry endorser who introduced the candidate at the Values Voter Summit, condemning the Roman Catholic faith as a “counterfeit religion” that represents “the genius of Satan” in a sermon last year. Jeffress linked the Catholic Church to a Satanic “Babylonian mystery religion” that worshiped a fish god and warned that Catholics will “miss eternal life” because of their religion’s supposed paganism:

Catholicism isn’t the only religion that has encountered hostility from Jeffress: he is best known for calling Mormonism a cult that is “from the pit of Hell.” He has argued that Hindus, Muslims and Jews are also destined for Hell.

Today, right-wing Catholic activist Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights released a statement slamming Jeffress for having “demonized” the Catholic faith. In 2008, Donohue called on John McCain to renounce one of his endorsers, John Hagee, who has a history of anti-Catholic rhetoric and once said that God sent Hitler to be a “hunter” of Jews. While McCain ultimately rejected Hagee’s endorsement, Perry has so far refused to disavow Jeffress:

Last Friday, Rev. Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor who introduced Gov. Rick Perry at the Values Voter Summit, spoke derisively about the Mormon faith of Mitt Romney, making the case that “Mormonism is a cult.” Two days later, he chided Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism as “false religions.”

Last year, Rev. Jeffress said the Roman Catholic Church was the outgrowth of a “corruption” called the “Babylonian mystery.” He continued, “Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion. Isn’t that the genius of Satan?”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue offered these remarks today:

Where did they find this guy? When theological differences are demonized by the faithful of any religion—never mind by a clergyman—it makes a mockery of their own religion. Rev. Jeffress is a poster boy for hatred, not Christianity.

After blaming daycare and public schools for ruining society, Jeffrey Kuhner of the Edmund Burke Institute now has another figure to blame for America’s ills: Martin Luther King, Jr. Reflecting on the recent dedication of the King memorial in Washington, D.C., Kuhner writes in The Washington Times that King’s support for progressive causes was responsible for keeping African Americans bound to the “shackles of affirmative action and the welfare state.” Such claims may be news to Glenn Beck, who claimed that he was going to “reclaim the civil rights movement” and tried to frame himself as the next King. Kuhner writes:

Yet, there was a dark side to King and it should not be ignored. Its effects continue to plague our society. Contrary to popular myth, the Baptist minister was a hypocrite who consistently failed to uphold his professed Christian standards. His rampant adultery and serial, life-long womanizing revolted even some of his closest associates. Large parts of his doctoral dissertation were plagiarized. He had numerous ties with communists and Soviet sympathizers. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew this, which is why he considered King a “fraud.”

…

King’s leftism ultimately betrayed his original civil rights creed. His call for a color-blind society was contradicted by his multicultural progressivism. Affirmative action, racial quotas, government handouts to minorities - these policies directly violate the basic principle of equality under the law. Contemporary Americans are not judged as individuals, but as members of a racial group, gender or ethnicity. This is a perverse inversion of the very kind of racialism prevalent in the Old South. More than 40 years after his death, we are further away from being a genuine meritocracy. Victimology and racial set-asides dominate large swathes of American life, from university admissions and government bureaucracies to big business and construction. The country has slowly Balkanized, splintering along ethnic lines.

King’s socialism also convinced many blacks to adopt welfare liberalism. It transformed them into a permanent Democratic constituency. The results have been disastrous. The nanny state has crippled the black community, undermining self-reliance, entrepreneurship and personal responsibility. It has fostered family breakdown, soaring rates of illegitimacy and trapped millions in a cycle of poverty and urban squalor. King showed blacks the way out from segregation, but he led them to an economic plantation.

The great irony is that more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act than Democrats. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation but to overcome the intense hostility of Southern Democrats he needed - and received - strong GOP congressional support. The party of Lincoln not only freed the slaves, it helped to dismantle Jim Crow. Instead of rewarding Republicans, blacks have largely turned their backs on them and with that, have rejected the self-empowerment and prosperity that comes from free-market capitalism.

King’s legacy has been a double-edged sword: He both liberated and imprisoned black America. As we celebrate his achievements with the new memorial in the nation’s capital, for the sake of future generations, let us remember too how King erred. In order to truly create a society where all citizens rise to the height of their potential, we must discard the shackles of affirmative action and the welfare state.

HT: Media Matters

• Apparently the lawsuit against Gov. Rick Perry's prayer rally is somehow President Obama's fault because "the White House is creating an environment of hostility in America."
• Bryan Fischer continues to defend Michele and Marcus Bachmann.
• Herman Cain continues to lead in the anti-Muslim bigotry primary.
• Obama is just like Hitler says the entirely rational Victoria Jackson.
• Finally, I am just growing so tired of Right hiding their "we are so much better than everyone" views behind the concept of "American exceptionalism."

• PFAW: Goodwin Liu Withdraws Nomination; PFAW Blasts Senate GOP's Smear Campaign.
• Matt Finkelstein @ Political Correction: GOP Freshman Rep. Walsh Attacks American Jews For Not Being "As Pro-Israel As They Should Be."
• Towleroad: TN Governor Claims He's Not in Favor of Discrimination After Signing Bill Voiding LGBT Anti-Discrimination Law.
• Rachel Tabachnick @ Talk To Action: Vouchers/Tax Credits Funding Creationism, Revisionist History, Hostility Toward Other Religions.
• Igor Volsky @ Wonk Room: Pro-Bullying Lobby: Perkins Says School Teaching Gender Acceptance Is ‘Indoctrinating Children’ Into Homosexuality.
• Eric Kleefeld @ TPM: Michele Bachmann Money-Bomb Fizzles.
• Alex Seitz-Wald @ Think Progress: Invoking Hitler, Allen West Accuses Obama Of ‘Conscious, Nefarious, And Malicious Intent’ To Destroy Israel.

Back in March Right Wing Watch reported on the anti-gay group Save California’s intense hostility to a “sexual brainwashing” bill that would include historical LGBT figures from California in the state’s education curriculum. Randy Thomasson, the head of Save California, predicted that SB 48 will produce “the worst school sexual indoctrination ever” and said that “California public schools are no longer safe places for boys and girls morally.” Commenting on the bill today, Thomasson said that SB 48 smacks of “in-your-face sexual indoctrication [sic] of LGBTIQ role models” and is one more reason for parents to take their children out of the public school system completely:

"Life has consequences. This is what parents get with the Democrats," said SaveCalifornia.com President Randy Thomasson. "It's what they get with the teacher unions. It's what they get by believing the lie that people are born 'gay,' when they're not. Or that this is a harmless lifestyle.

"This is what parents get when they place their children in the government school system and say that they have no other options," he continued. "Parents are seeing the tip of the iceberg in SB 48, and they need to wake up to the fact that the public school they went to as a child no longer exists.

"Government schools in California are mandated by more than half a dozens laws already to bring children to think that homosexual, bisexual and transsexual [lifestyles are] good and natural and maybe even for them," he said.

"The battle against this latest in-your-face sexual indoctrication [sic] of LGBTIQ role models is not so much about fighting a mere bill, but about turning on the light for fathers and mothers to realize they need to permanently exit the government system and place their children into the safe havens of church schools or homseschooling," he said.

…

"The social engineers are already having their way with more than six million boys and girls, with or without SB 48," Thomasson said. "That's why we strongly urge loving parents to rescue their children by permanently removing them from government schools."

"We call on Gov. Brown to prepare to veto this bad bill that greatly disturbs parents, confuses kids, and would flush public schools father down the toilet."

Bryan Fischer is back with another history lesson for us all - this one on how the Native Americans deserved to lose control of North America because "the superstition, savagery and sexual immorality" made them "morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil."

You see, there are three ways that control over land is established: settlement, purchase, and conquest.  And in the case of Native Americans, it turns out that they were just like the Canaanites who were so immoral that God decided that "the slop bucket was full, and it was time to empty it out" and so he tasked Israel with being the "custodian to empty the bucket and start over."

And in North America, that task fell to the Europeans ... and Fischer notes that "many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism" because they refuse to embrace Christianity, as demonstrated by the Native American invocation at the Tucson memorial:

The native American tribes at the time of the European settlement and founding of the United States were, virtually without exception, steeped in the basest forms of superstition, had been guilty of savagery in warfare for hundreds of years, and practiced the most debased forms of sexuality.

...

The Lewis and Clark journals record the constant warfare between the nomadic Indian tribes on the frontier, and the implacable hostility of the Sioux Indians in particular.

The journals record the morally abhorrent practice of many native American chiefs, who offered their own wives to the Corps of Discovery for their twisted sexual pleasure. (Regrettably, many members of the Corps, Lewis and Clark excepted, took advantage of these offers and contracted numerous and debilitating sexually transmitted diseases as a result.)

The native American tribes ultimately resisted the appeal of Christian Europeans to leave behind their superstition and occult practices for the light of Christianity and civilization. They in the end resisted every attempt to “Christianize the Savages of the Wilderness,” to use George Washington’s phrase.

They rejected Washington’s direct counsel to the Delaware chiefs in 1779, “You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.”

Thomas Jefferson three times signed legislation appropriating federal tax dollars for the evangelizing of the Native American tribes. It all came to nought, as one tribe after another rejected the offer of spiritual light and advanced civilization.

...

God explained to the nation of Israel that because of the “abomination(s)” of the indigenous Canaanite tribes, the land had become unclean and “vomited out its inhabitants (Lev. 18:25).”

Is this to say the same holds true for native American tribes today? In many respects, the answer is of course no. But in some senses, the answer is yes. Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.

The continued presence of native American superstition was on full display at the memorial service for the victims of the Tucson shooter, when the “invocation” (such as it was) was offered by a native American who sought inspiration from the “Seven Directions,” including “Father Sky” and “Mother Earth,” rather than the God of the Bible.

And just for good measure, Fischer concludes that we have become just immoral as the Native Americans and so it is only a matter of time before God empties the "slop bucket" of America:

Even worse, the reaction will likely obscure the sobering lesson for today. America in 2011 is as guilty of “abominations” as the native American tribes we replaced. We have the blood of 53 million babies on our hands through abortion. We have normalized sexual immorality, adultery, and homosexuality, all horrors in the eyes of God, and are witnessing a surge in incest, pedophilia and even bestiality in our midst.

God warned the ancient nation of Israel not to lapse into the abominable practices of the native peoples “lest the land vomit you out...as it vomited out the nation that was before you” (Lev. 18:28).

Time eventually ran out for the Canaanites, because they filled up the full measure of their iniquity. Time ran out for the native American tribes for the same reason.

The only question that matters today is this one: how much time does America have left to repent of its superstition, its savagery and its sexual immorality before it is too late, before we will have filled up our own slop bucket and will have morally disqualified ourselves from sovereign control of our own land?

North Carolina’s freshman Congresswoman Renee Ellmers, last featured in RWW’s The Ten Scariest Republicans Heading to Congress, refers to herself as a “product of the Tea Party” and even opposes mandating that insurance companies cover matenity care because it is “very costly.” Despite her staunch hostility to the Democrats’ “imperial ruling class attitude” and the “socialistic form of government,” Ellmers has decided to take taxpayer-subsidized health care plan because of the high cost of living in Washington DC. Apparently, the Congresswoman’s $174,000 annual salary isn’t enough to live part-time in the nation’s capital without taxpayer-funded health insurance:

Appearing on a WPTF radio call-in show Monday, Ellmers was asked by a caller whether she intended to participate in "that luxury plan" offered to members of Congress.

Ellmers responded that she signed up for a Blue Cross, Blue Shield federal employees plan, one of the options offered to members of Congress.

"Unfortunately, being here in Washington is very expensive," Ellmers said. "Yes, we do have a salary, and we do have benefits. It costs a lot of money to be here. I've signed on to the private plan, just like so many in America are on. "The benefit is available to me. People need to understand out there, it costs a lot of money to be here in Congress."

Ellmers, a nurse who is married to a physician, makes a congressional salary of $174,000 per year.

While Ellmers believes that residents of Washington DC who don’t have health insurance (and most likely earn less than $174,000) shouldn’t receive any government assistance to receive coverage whatsoever, she is fine with taxpayer-funded health insurance for herself.

Ellmers recently rejected an invitation by President Obama, who she likened to “Louis XIV, the Sun King,” to attend a reception at the White House for all new members of Congress “because she chose not to go.”

The zealous opposition to anti-bullying initiatives in schools from Religious Right groups is based on the premise that such programs are surreptitious ways to “promote homosexuality” or disseminate “homosexual propaganda” in schools. On WallBuildersLive, faux-historian David Barton and co-host Rick Green brought on Brian Camenker of the stringently anti-gay group MassResistance to discuss ways “homosexual activists” are the real bullies and manufactured the whole problem of bullying in the first place. With more scrutiny given to the problem of the pervasive harassment of LGBT students (including the case of one Minnesota teenager who committed suicide last week), right-wing groups and leaders have become even more fanatical in their hostility to anti-bullying programs.

Green and Camenker, who described gay-rights groups as “fascist,” agree that “homosexual activists” invented the problem of bullying and became the bullies themselves:

Camenker: It often takes parents standing up to the homosexual activists and it’s hard to do, but you’re right. This is a very aggressive, fascist type of movement and these guys define the term ‘bullies.’

Green: I think you’re right and the perception I guess and maybe a lot of teachers, principals, superintendents out there have bought into this perception is that they are only the ones being bullied, the homosexual lobby is, so they’re hypersensitive to the other side of it.

Barton later claims that “homosexual indoctrination” is found in the entire public school system and tells parents that they “better get on top of what’s being taught to your kids.”

Barton: There’s a whole lost of this that goes on that parents don’t even hear about but it is going on. All this bullying stuff, as Brian pointed out, it’s not the schools that are doing bullying, it’s the people from outside the schools coming in and saying “oh you got a bullying problem and we need to teach a course for you.” The people living there didn’t see any problem. But it’s these outside agenda-

Green: They’re the very thing they say they’re going in to stop is what they’re doing themselves.

Barton: They generate and start. It goes back to the question Jesus asks, “What’s it profit you to gain the whole world and lose your soul?” The question I gotta ask is, what’s it worth to you to gain everything you want and lose your kids?

Because unless you’re willing to monitor what’s going on in that classroom, I guarantee you they are getting homosexual indoctrination. I don’t care whether you’re in a rural area or not, because this is so much a part of textbooks, so much a part of curricular stuff, so much a part of what goes on with other kids. We see it too often in lawsuits, we hear of accounts like this, and we hear of dozens of other accounts where nothing’s ever done. You better get on top of what’s being taught to your kids.

After calling for politicians and political commentators to tone down violent and hateful political rhetoric, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik is now experiencing himself the force of right-wing hostility and rancor. Dupnik never suggested that the deeply disturbed shooter was directly influenced by political debate, but called into question the use of vicious rhetoric and violent imagery that has become all too commonplace in political discourse today. “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country,” Dupnik said, “is getting to be outrageous.” After facing a preliminary assault yesterday, now Dupnik is facing an all-out barrage from the Right.

Drudge Report is claiming that Dupnik blamed Rush Limbaugh for the attack:

'SHERIFF' BLAMES RUSH LIMBAUGH FOR MASSACRE?

Actually, Dupnik asserted that Limbaugh “attacks people, angers them against government, angers them against elected officials,” but never blamed Limbaugh. Now Limbaugh is responding, saying, “This sheriff out there, Sheriff Dupnik, you know, this guy, he's gotta be very careful. If I were him I wouldn't say another word about this….But the sheriff is out saying that everybody but the kid's responsible for this.” Limbaugh went on to say that “He has taken the occasion of this, a law enforcement officer, to politicize it, to advance his own political agenda, which he claims he doesn't even have.” Limbaugh then implied that the Sheriff may be botching the investigation of the case in order to cover his own failure to stop the shooting:

The shooter did what he did in your community! You're in charge of keeping that community safe, Sheriff. What did you do? Was this the first time you heard about the shooter or did you have knowledge of the shooter before this? I would wager that the sheriff knew of this shooter long before this event, but the sheriff has gone ahead now with these comments, and he's given... He has given the defense a case. My guess is the sheriff wouldn't mind president shooter's acquitted. After all, it's not the shooter's fault! If you carry the sheriff's logic all the way out.

David Limbaugh, Rush’s brother and a conservative commentator, slammed Dupnik for not having “a scintilla of proof to support his slander,” Allahpundit of the popular right-wing blog HotAir called Dupnik “a ludicrous political hack and a disgrace to his office,” and Michelle Malkin dismissed him as a “pro-illegal alien amnesty sheriff.” The Heritage Foundation accused the Sheriff of using “this tragedy for political gain” and the Media Research Center was riled that Tom Brokaw “praised Sheriff Dupnik of Pima County, Ariz. for condemning political vitriol.”

Of course, any time Rush Limbaugh is on the defensive a Republican congressman must get involved. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) told the Associated Press that Dupnik is an “irresponsible” sheriff: “I don’t see any link whatsoever at this point between vitriolic discourse and someone plowing down his fellow citizens. I think frankly it's irresponsible of the sheriff to say that.” Like Limbaugh, Rep. Kingston tried to put the onus on the sheriff: “If the local jurisdiction knew about this guy, there's a question to me of this sheriff who's so quick to condemn vitriolic political discourse ... how come he missed it?”

If you would like to show your support for Sheriff Dupnik, please take a moment to sign a letter of solidarity with him against the increasing smears he is facing from the Right.