Boo hoo, Fox News is reporting a new wave of disastrous economic news: the churches are going bankrupt and closing up shop. Future headlines I’m also looking forward to: “Meth lab economy collapses!” “Pedophile rings go out of business!” “Homeopathy peddlers file chapter 11, citing high cost of raw materials!”
Robert Bentley must have been feeling some political heat. After openly announcing his sectarian bias in a MLK Day speech, Bentley has offered a not-pology.
If anyone from other religions felt disenfranchised by the language, I want to say I am sorry. I am sorry if I offended anyone in any way.
Jebus, but I hate that poor excuse for an apology. It happens all the time; someone says something stupid and wrong, and instead of saying, “I was wrong, I’m sorry and will try to change,” they say, “I’m sorry you were offended by my remarks” — suddenly, the problem lies not in the error of the speaker but in the sensitivity of the listener.
That’s not an apology. It’s a transparent attempt to twist the blame to fall on everyone else but the person who made the mistake.
Even that’s too generous: this wasn’t a mistake. Bentley was honestly and intentionally expressing his views, as he has said, “speaking as an evangelical Christian to fellow Baptists.” The man sincerely believes that his fellow superstitious louts are his special brothers and sisters who he has been elected to serve, and the riff-raff who don’t go to his church are of lesser consideration.
That’s what he needed to apologize for, and correct. He doesn’t need to apologize for people finding offense in his stupidity and bias.
He especially doesn’t need to apologize for that because pandering to a smug majority is what got him elected in the first place.
It’s the 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010, from the Buffalo Beast. It’s epically brutal.
The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has moved on a little bit from the 1950s — he made a speech on Martin Luther King Day in which he declared himself colorblind and the governor of all the people of Alabama. How nice! But then, unfortunately, he had to ruin it by making a few exceptions.
But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.
Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.
Gosh. I guess Christians in Alabama are just extra-special people. The rest of us — Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, animists, whatever — not so much.
Isn’t it just amazing that the governor of a secular state would stand up and unabashedly make a speech declaring a specific religious group as having a privileged status with him?
Jackie Trebesh and her daughter attended a Catholic church presided over by “Reverend” John Kelly. One weekend she was surprised when they were both denied communion. She was in for a further surprise: when she left the church, she was pursued by a Santa Rosa County deputy, pulled over, and given a warning for trespassing, at the request of the priest.
What do you think her crime was?
According to Trebesh, she learned the reason she was denied communion was because someone at the church had seen the daughter dispose of the host, as it is called, improperly in the church parking lot.
“The matter of disposing of the Eucharist in an inappropriate way is a serious matter to us,” Peggy Dekeyser, the communications officer for the diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee said in confirming Trebesh’s theory.
Trebesh said the only thing she could think of that Kelly or anyone else might have seen her daughter do was “spit out a piece of gum in the parking lot.”
It’s fine that crazy Catholics want to enforce their crazy doctrines within the scope of the church; if crazy John Kelly wants to refuse to do his crazy mumbo-jumbo for anyone, that should be his right. But what’s really disturbing here is the county deputy using his official status to administer punishment outside the church.
I don’t care what the priest believes or does, but that deputy needs to be fired.
I’m seeing a lot of email complaining about my response to the Giffords shooting. Here’s just a representative sampling.
You saw fit to use our pain to win political points. Here is my question to you – What if the killer was not a conservative? At least one report describes him as left-wing. His posted video does show any clear political affiliation, and his reading list was from across the spectrum. The local tea party group has denounced the killings, and leaders from across our state have spoken in one voice.
As someone who usually enjoys reading your blog, I was a little dismayed to read your “wild guess” that the Arizona shooter is a teabagger who listens to a lot of AM radio in your post “We have our own barbarian subculture”. I do not think it fair or helpful to immediately link a tragedy with one’s political opponents based on a “wild guess”.
And here’s what I think.
Madness.
What we have here is an attempted assassination of a politician by an insane crank at a political event, in a state where the political discourse has been an unrelenting howl of eliminationist rhetoric and characterization of anyone to the left of Genghis Khan as a traitor and enemy of the state…and now, when six (including a nine year old girl) lie dead and another fourteen are wounded, now suddenly we’re concerned that it is rude and politicizing a tragedy to point out that the right wing has produced a toxic atmosphere that pollutes our politics with hatred and the rhetoric of violence?
Screw that. Now is the time to politicize the hell out of this situation. The people who are complaining are a mix of lefty marshmallows whose first reaction to the fulfillment of right-wing fantasies by a lunatic is to drop to their knees and beg forgiveness for thinking ill of people who paint bullseyes on their political opponents, and right wing cowards who are racing to their usual tactic of attacking their critics to shame them into silence. This is NOT the time to back down and suddenly find it embarrassing to point out that right-wing pundits make a living as professional goads to insanity.
I have to point out this cartoon by Mike Stanfill. It’s perfect.
Now look at the first few comments there. It’s people complaining that the cartoon is in bad taste! Good grief, have you people ever actually listened to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage or looked at Sarah Palin’s campaign strategy? I say again, madness.
Stanfill has also collected a short list of brief comments — and I agree with every one of them.
If a Detroit Muslim put a map on the web with crosshairs on 20 pols, then 1 of them got shot, where would he be sitting right now? Just asking. – Michael Moore
A physician cannot treat an illness s/he willfully refuses to diagnose. Violent political rhetoric is not fault of “both sides.” – Tom Tomorrow
Inspiring that our media pundits are so quick to reach for “everyone’s to blame” when no conservative events have been terrorized by gunmen. – Jeffrey Feldman
Weird: rightwingers say movies, video games affect behavior — but real world violent rhetoric from leaders & radio talkers have NO impact! – Tom Tomorrow
Jared Lougnner: drug arrests, too crazy for Army or for college or anything else, but getting a legal gun? No problem. – Tom Tomorrow
I find it abhorrent that Sarah Palin would stoke the coals of extremism with dangerous messaging, then delete it when something bad happens. – Jason Pollock
Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t pull the trigger. But then, neither did Charles Manson. – auntbeast
Christina Taylor Green was Born on September 11, 2001, and killed today by terrorist fuckheads in Arizona. Irony much? – geeksofdoom
Sarah Palin rummages online frantically erasing her rabble-rousing Tweets like a Stalinist trimming non-persons out of photos. – Roger Ebert
I’ll say this, if your first instinct after hearing about a tragedy is to scrub yr websites, you have a problem as a political movement. – digby56
CNN’s Dana Bash says “this could be a wake-up call.” THIS … ? The whole Tea Party, carrying guns to rallies WASN’T?? – hololio2
Teaparty asses have been asking for this to happen, and how they’re pissed off that we’re calling them out on it. – TLW3
STOP SAYING”BOTH PARTIES”!! The Left has not been advocating Violence. @CNN assholes. – YatPundit
Do not sit there cowering, trying to make excuses for teabaggers and violent morons. This is supposed to be the part where you stand up, look at the shouters on the other side, and tell them, “This is wrong, and this is the harm you bring to our country.” Instead, I see a rush to postures of submission.
An Arizona Democrat, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, has been shot and possibly killed by an assassin armed with an automatic weapon. Her offices had earlier been targeted for vandalism for her support of health care reform.
Isn’t it amazing that health care reform has become such a polarizing issue, and that the people who are raging the loudest are those who would benefit the most?
I’ll take a wild guess here. The scumbag who committed this crime has been caught; I’ll bet he’ll turn out to be a Teabagger who listens to a lot of AM talk radio.
Holy crap. This was Sarah Palin’s idea of a clever campaign earlier this year: she had select Democrats, including Gabrielle Giffords, targeted with a gunsight symbol.
What a vile creature. Perhaps she ought to consider not inciting the deranged assholes who follow her.
And that’s not all.
(via Firedoglake)
Senator Grassley launched an investigation into the finances of religious organizations, after reports of abuses — you know the sorts of things that are common, like obscene salaries to ministers, active politicizing from the pulpit, etc. The Grassley report has been released, with a dull thud.
According to the review, many of the ministries operate multiple non-profits, with the leaders drawing some form of compensation from each of them.
“The number and types of entities, including private airports and aircraft leasing companies, raises concerns about the use of the church’s tax-exempt status to avoid taxation. However, given the four churches’ refusal to provide tax information, we are unable to determine whether and the extent to which they are reporting and paying taxes on income earned in those entities,” the review states.
Notice…six were investigated, but only two cooperated. The investigators declined to submit subpoenas to get to the heart of the potential scofflaws. Their final conclusion: these megachurches ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong. They make one big recommendation: maybe we should change our laws to allow church electioneering.
Big investigation. Scamming churches allowed to decline to participate. No wrong-doing found. Only significant conclusion is to increase the politicization of religion.
I think we were had. Grassley wasn’t digging into malfeasance, he was throwing up a smokescreen to cover efforts to give further benefits to churches.
The Mount Soledad Easter Cross has a long and contentious legal history. It’s a 43-foot-tall concrete cross standing on public land, initially erected by Christians, and used as the focus of Christian religious ceremonies, and is clearly intended and used for a sectarian religious purpose. It is clearly a violation of the separation of church and state to use public land to promote a specific religion, yet a federal judge ruled that “the memorial at Mount Soledad, including its Latin cross, communicates the primarily nonreligious messages of military service, death and sacrifice,” and decided it was constitutional. I suspect that judge was not an atheist, a Moslem, or a Sikh; it takes some twisted logic to decide that a prominent religious symbol is not actually a religious symbol.
That’s been settled for now. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a humongous cross erected to celebrate Easter actually is a religious symbol, despite all the dishonest subterfuge by Christians who were emulating St Peter. I recommend that, after reading the ruling, they open their bibles and turn to Mark 14:66-72. The denial isn’t usually considered a high mark of Peter’s service.
They might consider that before filing for yet another appeal, as we all know they will.
I’m on Bradley Manning’s list of ‘likes’ on Facebook. There you go, now the CIA probably has a thin little dossier on me for that.
But it’s OK — I like Bradley Manning, too, and am appalled at the torture he’s receiving at the hand of our free democratic government which respects the liberty of the individual.
