Radical Civility

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.

According to Technorati, yesterday over 2,500 blog posts made mention of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I thought that probably the world could do without one more, but at least one of my readers disagreed, albeit without sufficient guts to offer his name or a valid email address. Of my post on political jui jitsu, he wrote, “This is the best post you could come up with…. typical.”

At first I thought this was merely an attempt to bait me. Then I noticed that preceding the sentence was the notation, “12/7/41.”

Although I can’t slake his thirst for one more remembrance of the day that FDR correctly predicted would live in infamy, I can at least commemorate the day on which FDR asked Congress for a declaration of war. That event occurred sixty-six years ago today.

Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress at 12:30 p.m. His address took six and a half minutes to deliver, after which the Senate and House of Representatives met separately to vote on a joint resolution for war. In the Senate, the resolution passed unanimously. Not so in the House. Majority Leader John W. McCormack (Democrat - Massachusetts), presented the resolution and urged suspension of the rules so that it could be voted upon immediately. Jeannette Rankin (Republican - Montana) instantly objected. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (Democrat - Texas) instantly ruled her out of order.

Minority Leader Joseph W. Martin (Republican - Massachusetts) rose to endorse the resolution in a seven paragraph statement, commencing with the sentence, “Our country is today in the gravest crisis since its establishment as a republic.” Seven more members of congress, including the prominent isolationist Hamilton Fish (Republican - New York), also went on record with statements of support. Throughout the “debate,” Rankin repeatedly tried to gain the floor to register her dissent. Rayburn repeatedly refused to recognize her.

“Sit down, sister,” came a voice from the Democratic side of the aisle.

(Continued)

There’s a brief (3 minutes, 15 seconds) video on the Anderson Cooper 360 web site concerning Pastor Russell Johnson and Fairfield Christian Church. Just as I feared, it includes only a cut from the few seconds in which I showed anger with him because of his treatment of gays and lesbians — and doesn’t even do much of a job establishing the context of my remarks. I’ll be curious to see if this evening’s show (which airs at 10 p.m) has any more of the intervew. I rather doubt it.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Addendum

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

This past Saturday, a CNN news crew interviewed me for a segment of Anderson Cooper 360 to be aired (I’m told) later this week. They were doing a story on Pastor Russell Johnson and his Ohio Restoration Project, a sort of fundamentalist Christian political action committee that played a prominent though unsuccessful role in Ohio’s recent gubernatorial election.

Pastor Johnson and the ORP have come under scruitiny for alleged violations of Internal Revenue Service regulations that prohibit partisan political activity. Johnson is unrepentant. He doesn’t so much argue that his organization did not violate IRS regulations as that attempts to call it to account amount to “bullying” and “intimidation.”

Something of the same casual attitude toward the rules seems to be evident on the part of evangelical Christian officers — some of them colonels and generals — within the armed forces. In a sense, it isn’t surprising: they place God before country, not a bad ordering of priorities. But the question is what they can say and do within the bounds of their profession.

A case in point:

Inquiry Sought Over Evangelical Video
Defense Department Asked to Examine Officers’ Acts Supporting Christian Group

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 11, 2006; Page A03

A military watchdog group is asking the Defense Department to investigate whether seven Army and Air Force officers violated regulations by appearing in uniform in a promotional video for an evangelical Christian organization.

In the video, much of which was filmed inside the Pentagon, four generals and three colonels praise the Christian Embassy, a group that evangelizes among military leaders, politicians and diplomats in Washington. Some of the officers describe their efforts to spread their faith within the military.

Full story

The October 8 forum, Church and State in Ohio Electoral Politics, is now available on streaming video.

Cross-posted from The Ohio Twenty-first

Discussants from both conservative and liberal perspectives squared off Sunday afternoon in a 90-minute forum that, although quite animated throughout and briefly contentious at points, was for the most part a model of civility and substance. I was in the audience and the quality of the exchange left me genuinely impressed.

Full post

An album of photos taken during and after the forum is here.

The forum in streaming video

A patriotic interlude at an evening worship event co-sponsored by the Ohio Restoration Project, September 10, 2006.

I’ve cross-posted this from my “professional” blog, which deals with military history and national security affairs. Its author, LTC Robert Bateman, is a career Army officer who returned in March from a posting in Baghdad and is currently assigned to the Pentagon. It introduces a recent column by the distinguished — and far from liberal — military correspondent, Joe Galloway. Together with Gen. Hal Moore, Galloway co-authored the bestselling We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young, that was later made into the film, We Were Soldiers. I met Galloway a few months before the 2004 presidential election. Although decidedly cool about John Kerry, he said he was going to grit his teeth and vote for Kerry anyway because of the abysmal way the Bush administration had conducted the occupation of Iraq. His detestation of the administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, has only deepened over time. Galloway’s September 20 column excoriates the Bush administration’s recent attempt to rewrite our Geneva Convention obligations so as to permit the torture of detainees.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a sort of half-worship service, half-political rally organized by the Ohio Restoration Project and two other conservative evangelical organizations. I may write about that some other time, but for the present I just want to note that at one point the service involved a polished multimedia salute the the armed forces. I would be willing to bet real money that nobody in the ORP harbors any doubts about the moral rectitude of water-boarding prisoners or the way in which the Bush administration’s explicit embrace of such measures harms the United States and endangers its service personnel. Let Colonel Bateman and Joe Galloway explain:

(Continued)

Excerpt from Bill Moyers, “9/11 and the Sport of God,” Convocation Address at Union Theological Seminary, New York, September 7, 2005.

[W]hat is unique today is that the radical Religious Right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties—the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is—and they are driving American politics. God is being used as a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, and so on.

What’s also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance — their loathing of other people’s beliefs, of America’s secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge — has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power. They use the language of faith to demonize political opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists, ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor. These are the foot soldiers in a political holy war financed by wealthy economic interests and guided by savvy partisan operatives who know that couching political ambition in religious rhetoric can ignite the passion of followers as ferociously as when Constantine painted the sign of Christ on the shields of his soldiers and on the banners of his legions and routed his rivals in Rome. Never mind that the Emperor himself was never baptized into the faith; it served him well enough to make the God worshipped by Christians his most important ally and turn the Sign of Christ into the one imperial symbol most widely recognized and feared from east to west.

Let’s take a brief detour to Ohio and I’ll show you what I am talking about.

(Continued)

Re the now famous letter of complaint to the Internal Revenue Service concerning Reformation Ohio, the Ohio Restoration Project, and their parent organizations, World Harvest Church and Fairfield Christian Church, respectively, I’ve been able to make a copy of the letter with all nineteen appendices included.  Print it off and read it; it’s fascinating to get a more complete picture of what the fuss is about.

Some months ago I provided a link to a PDF copy of the now famous complaint to IRS commissioner Mark W. Everson. At the time, I had access only to the letter of complaint itself; the supporting appendices (nineteen in all) were available only as photocopies.

I had plans to put the appendices in PDF form myself, but for a long time lacked the time, the software, and the technical savvy. But yesterday I located a modestly-priced software program (PDF Producer Professional) that could do the job, though not as well as the sophisticated but pricey Adobe Acrobat. It took a while to figure out the damned thing, but I finally I was able to get Appendix A in PDF format. That’s one down, eighteen to go. Oh joy.

Much of the appendices are news stories concerning Reformation Ohio and/or Ohio Restoration Project events that, according to the IRS complaint, clearly document violations of IRS guidelines for non-profit organizations where partisan political activity is concerned. Many of these were printed off the web, and a number of the news stories may still be accessed on the web. So here’s a link to the March 27 New York Times article that constitutes Appendix A:

Movement in the Pews Tries to Jolt Ohio
By James Dao
The New York Times

Sunday 27 March 2005

The Ohio secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, has the support of the state’s conservative church leaders. (Photo: Greg Sailor / The New York Times)

Columbus, Ohio - Christian conservative leaders from scores of Ohio’s fastest growing churches are mounting a campaign to win control of local government posts and Republican organizations, starting with the 2006 governor’s race.

In a manifesto that is being circulated among church leaders and on the Internet, the group, which is called the Ohio Restoration Project, is planning to mobilize 2,000 evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic leaders in a network of so-called Patriot Pastors to register half a million new voters, enlist activists, train candidates and endorse conservative causes in the next year.

The initial goal is to elect Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a conservative Republican, governor in 2006. The group hopes to build grass-roots organizations in Ohio’s 88 counties and take control of local Republican organizations.

“The establishment of the Ohio Republican Party is out of touch with its base,” said Russell Johnson, the pastor of the Fairfield Christian Church and the principal organizer of the project. “It acts as if it lives in Boston, Mass.”

Pastor Johnson’s challenge to the party establishment could have far-reaching consequences in a state dominated by Republican elected officials but still considered a bellwether in presidential politics. Conservatives in other swing states are watching closely.

“In Ohio, the church is awakening to its historic role as the moral voice in the community,” said Colin A. Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative group based in Pennsylvania that trains ministers in political activism. “Ohio is in the vanguard of that nationally. I very much want Pennsylvania to be with them.”

Full article

Wrote another diary for Daily Kos yesterday. There’s no point in reprinting it because I simply adapted it from my account of the March forum in which Jim Wallis of Sojourners exchanged views with Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church. The only substantial difference was the intro:

The alliance between the Christian Right and GOP has no better exemplar these days than the support of two Ohio megachurches for gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell seems headed for defeat, but that’s his fault — arrogant, unethical opportunist that he is — and not that of the megachurch’s two de facto PACS, Rod Parsley’s Reformation Ohio and the Ohio Restoration Project, chaired by Russell Johnson, senior pastor of Fairfield Christian Church.

Of the two, Parsley is better known, but Johnson, in my view and that of others who’ve encountered him, is the more impressive operator. Whatever his faults, he comes across as a true believer and not an Elmer Gantry type.

Last evening I learned that Johnson has agreed to be our sixth discussant at an upcoming Forum on Church and State in Ohio’s Electoral Politics. I was pleased to hear it, having met Johnson last March after a “town hall meeting” with Jim Wallis. Here’s my account of that episode. I hope it humanizes the conflict between progressive Christians like myself and conservatives like Pastor Johnson.

The Daily Kos diary feature also provides the ability to generate polls. I tried that out as a complement to the diary post itself.

The question was, “Do you consider yourself a faith-based person?”

The possible responses, with the results, were:

Total votes: 39

The poll, while totally unscientific, tracks uncannily with Stanley B. Greenberg’s analysis, in The Two Americas, of the component groups that make up the loyalists within the Republican and Democratic parties. Evangelicals — “The Faithful” — are an important segment of the Republican base, but only one person (2 percent) on the aggressively Democratic Daily Kos self-identified as an evangelical. (And it wasn’t me: I didn’t take the poll.) “Secular Warriors,” as Greenberg terms them, are an equally important segment of the Democratic base, and fully 37 percent of respondents indicated in one fashion or another that they were indifferent or antipathetic toward religion.

UPDATE, September 1, 4:26 p.m. — There are now 231 votes on this poll and the percentages are holding almost exactly as I reported above.

FURTHER UPDATE, September 2, 8:00 p.m. — Here’s what appears to be the final tally:

The diary itself wound up being recommended by 18 “Kossacks,” as Daily Kos aficionados apparently are called. If enough Kossacks recommend me I wind up in the Recommended Diaries section; diaries in that section get a lot of exposure. I gather 18 recommendations isn’t bad for a newbie, but I imagine it’s well short of what it takes to acquire the exalted status of Recommended Diary. Be that as it may, it’s interesting to participate in the Daily Kos experiment.

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