Radical Civility

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

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.

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Check out the Project for the Old American Century

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.

Cross-posted from The Ohio Twenty-first. If you’d like to comment, please do so there.

A number of bloggers have been doing an excellent job of uncovering the nakedly partisan agenda of “The Path to 9/11,” but Oricinus does it as well as I’ve seen it. Here are the relevant posts:

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Cross-posted from my Daily Kos diary:

Aggh! A few days ago I saw some items in Daily Kos warning that “The Road to 9/11″ was pre-election propaganda for the Right. But poking around the Internet, I saw other stories that suggested the film was mostly just dramatic and absorbing and neither liberal nor conservative in orientation. Michael Medved has convinced me of the error of my ways.

This evening I happened to be listening to a Christian Right AM radio station [WRFD, AM 880]. In ten minutes’ time I heard Medved deliver two plugs for “The Road to 9/11.” The second time I caught most of it on my digital recorder. Here’s the transcript:

… The truth is that terrorist strikes against America began long before 2001, and a superb upcoming mini-series on ABC-TV, “The Path to 9/11,” makes that point unforgettably clear. The five-hour dramatization begins with the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, highlighting eight years of confusion and passivity in the Clinton administration, while Bin Laden and colleagues intensified their anti-American jihad. As early as 1983 Hezbollah had killed 241 Americans in Beirut, and even four years before that, the embassy hostage crisis in Iran highlighted the new threat from Islamic extremism. Terrorism was hardly a response to the war in Iraq but that war was part of our response to a long series of atrocities reaching back more than twenty-five years. I’m Michael Medved.

That really tore it with me. Next up was Hugh Hewitt interviewing the film’s producer and one of its principal actors. Overtly, Hewitt made it sound like the film was just plain great drama, and the producer made it sound as if it was faithfully based on the 9/11 Commission Report. But taking the picture as it has now emerged — the selective pre-screenings, Richard Clarke’s assertion that at least one key scene is 180 degrees around from what actually occurred, and the smoking gun of the Medved plug, I’ve not only written ABC to protest, I’m not going to watch ABC again if they air this crap. From one of many comments in response:

Howie Kurtz has written a pretty damning article about the film’s brouhaha for tomorrow’s edition (especially considering that it’s coming from Howie!). This is becoming a big PR disaster for ABC/Disney. One juicy bit:

Top officials of the Clinton administration have launched a preemptive strike against an ABC-TV “docudrama,” slated to air Sunday and Monday, that they say includes made-up scenes depicting them as undermining attempts to kill Osama bin Laden.

Former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright called one scene involving her “false and defamatory.” Former national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger said the film “flagrantly misrepresents my personal actions.” And former White House aide Bruce R. Lindsey, who now heads the William J. Clinton Foundation, said: “It is unconscionable to mislead the American public about one of the most horrendous tragedies our country has ever known.”

Word is, the other networks are starting to jump ABC as well. Any publicity is good publicity? Not always, and I hope ABC gets it with both barrels.

If you would like to comment, please visit The Ohio Twenty-first.

Cross-posted from The Ohio Twenty-first. If you’d like to comment, please do so on that site.

Poking around the blogosphere I stumbled upon BobGeiger.com, a Flappy Bird in the TTLB whose blog is graphics intensive and really a lot of fun to look at. I particularly liked his Yellow Dog Democrat logo, which I have appropriated for my sidebar just because I like dogs and it’s so damn cute. If you click the dog, it’ll take you to CafePress.com, where Geiger is selling a line of T-shirts, coffee cups, bumper stickers, etc., all based upon this theme:

Our goal is to provide you with merchandise that you can use to send a message to Republicans, conservatives and the Religious Right:

No prisoners…
No compromise…

No more reaching across the damn aisle!

There are plenty of Republicans who feel the same way, especially the Christian Right, which regards itself as engaged in an all-out war against powers and principalities that are dragging our uniquely blessed nation straight to H - E - double toothpicks.

In other words, you’ve got a political environment where neither side regards the other in terms of a legitimate, loyal opposition. I don’t think we’re there yet, but we’re moving in the direction of the 1790s, when the concept of a loyal opposition did not yet exist.

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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.

Permalink to this diary

Cross-posted from The Ohio Twenty-first. If you’d like to comment, please do so on that site.

It’s an amazing fact of life, when you get down to it, how little most of us know about the people who represent us or aspire to represent us. During the hours I spent yesterday updating this blog to get it into campaign fighting trim, I knew maybe two-thirds of the people who are standing for the offices I’ll be voting for come November, and I did that well only because I knew the incumbents.

The single most startling discovery I made is that Bob Shamansky is running to become the next Congressman from the 12th District, which happens to be my district now that I’ve moved from Clintonville, which was in the 15th District, long dominated by two formidable Republicans, first Chalmers P. Wylie and now Deborah Pryce. During the time I lived in Clintonville (1996-2003), the chance of unseating Pryce was pretty much zilch. Things weren’t a lot better in the 12th District, where the hard-charging John Kasich had been Congressman since first winning election in 1982.

Kasich gained the office by defeating Bob Shamansky, 88,335 votes to 82,753. (A Libertarian candidate, Russell A, Lewis, received 3,939 votes, most of which would otherwise have gone to Kasich.) [See this link for 12th District election results.]

Shamansky had been in office only two years, having handily beaten 12-term Republican Samuel L. Devine, known in some quarters as “the Abominable No-Man” because of his penchant for voting against everything that might disturb the status quo. The 1980 vote was 108,690 for Shamansky and 98,110 for Devine: an impressive performance, particularly in a district that has been gerrymandered to favor Republican candidates for as long as I can recall. I can only guess why Shamansky lost after only a single term, despite the advantage of incumbency. The demographics of the district probably hurt, especially in an off-year election, and Shamansky was unfortunate to have to square off with perhaps the best natural politician to come out of central Ohio in, well, forever.

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