Starting the Year With A Bloody Muckraking Headache: Taking On The Christofascists

Or, How I Had A Good Time In Spite Of All The Bloodshed

OK, so I didn't have a good time. Not really. I spent New Year's Day revisiting some of my old material, my old gripes, my old passions, my old fears. And you know what?

They're still here.

They haven't changed. Oh, in the last three years the main characters have changed somewhat: they've gone from mostly Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to a variety of Christofascists: Mike Huckabee, Ann Coulter, Glen Beck (marginal, but nonetheless a presence hard to avoid), Rod Parsley, Rick Warren, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, Benedict XVI, etc. But widening the field has only pumped up the volume: there are more people bloviating over social issues and politics than ever before and covering/reading about/expounding on them is very acidic to my brain as well as my stomach. And their venues for screeds and harangues have not really changed either: separation of church and state, same-sex marriage, abortion, politics, war, morality, etc., etc. I'm working on a particularly difficult piece right now, - Islamophobia - and as with other subjects, this one is going to create more muckraking (for me), more rhetorical bile (from Christofascists) and more written displeasure (from everyone). It takes on Anti-Semitism, death tolls,, persecution, and religious history (which my detractors will insist is revisionist). It will definitely get responses of "NO!" "Not True!" "Un-American!" "written by an idiot," "inconsequential bile."

...and their point? They want to make sure that everyone knows that they hate me. They read my articles, spurred on by an insulting or titillating title, then spend their time telling me as well as others how wrong I am. Oh, they've been getting more sophisticated: they use spell check ... sometimes. And they've referred to other articles (usually in the op-ed section of their local paper). But they still write in generalities. I'm waiting for the day someone writes something of substance using concrete evidence. Apparantly I'm worth the effort for general outrage but not for researched, substanciated outrage.

I looked back at one article in particular and want to share it. It was written within several weeks of Katrina and it featured, of course, Robertson and Falwell. Their responses to disasters and acts of terrorism are still mimicked by Christofascists today: God's wrath resulting in nature's destruction, economic crises, hard times.

God's Ambulance Chasers

By DAN VOJIR

I've just come from another "beer bust" for Katrina hurricane victims. Given the magnitude of the charity the U.S. has shown for them, this might become a usual pastime for more than several months. The difference with these beer busts is that they are sponsored by gay bars.

What this brings to mind is the point that true compassion knows no "orientation" boundaries, while the doctrines of many churches lead us to believe that food and shelter for the suffering are given a decidedly "Christian" slant. Some fundamentalists, such as Repent America's Michael Marcavage and Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church), are, in fact, enjoying their role as God's Ambulance Chasers: Marcavage offers "prayers" but no help, while Phelps' website has a headline "Thank God For Katrina!"

Other Christian pleas are more indirect in their conditional compassion: Falwell Ministries requests people to "send a special gift to support our volunteer-driven, faith-based response to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina" and touts the work of Southern Baptist Conference, the infamous fundamentalist denomination that reviles homosexuals, feminists and (still) Jews. Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing works in conjunction with FEMA while cloaked with an air of righteousness. It's a sort of poor man's Salvation Army and reminiscent of the lyric from Guys and Dolls: "Halleluiah, place a nickel on the drum, save another drunken bum! Place a nickel on the drum and he'll be saved!"

Even Barbara Bush had an air of sanctimoniousness about Katrina's devastation with her "underprivileged anyway" words of patrician moral wisdom. At another time and place, I believe the quote was actually "Let them eat cake!"

I guess it all comes down to the irony of ironies: legions of queers are much quicker to respond than FEMA or faith-based charities and far less toxic to the conscience.

Chewing Guam: How An Archbishop Terrorizes The Gay Community - Then Spits Out An Apology!

Poor Guam. During most of WWII, it was brutally occupied by the Japanese. After WWII it was derisively called "The parking lot of the Pacific. It's natural beauty has been glossed over in favor of jokes like "chewing Guam." It's a frustrated piece of America's tiny strongholds in the Pacific. It is the furthest American outpost (6500 miles from the west coast). It has no voting power in the U.S. legislature. It has only 175,000 people. And it's GDP is based on tourism.

Now it's only slightly more notable because its Roman Catholic Archbishop, Anthony Sablan Apuron, wrote a "pastoral letter" to the Catholics of Guam telling them that Western Civilization was going to crumble because of gay marriage and that if Bill 185 passed (accepting all civil unions equally, but not defining marriage as between a man and a woman) Guam would be steeped in debauchery and crime in no time. It's the type of letter cobbled together with faulty reasoning that you expect a Christofascist to write. In fact, it's almost text book Christofascist.

But this passage rankled:

"Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. This is why they repress such behavior by death...It may be brutal at times, but any culture that is able to produce wave after wave of suicide bombers...is a culture that at least knows how to value self sacrifice."

Read the entire annotated text HERE in another post.

Within 24 hours, the letter created a firestorm of reactions from as far away as New York and Washington to Andrew Sullivan's column. The archbishop cobbled together one of the most amazingly disingenuous responses every written:

"I (want) to make it clear that persons with same-sex attraction were not the target of my pastoral letter, nor was it meant to condemn anyone in any way. If I have hurt anyone, please forgive me."

That requires a response of a large, no, MASSIVE WTF!!??

The letter is such a damning polemic against to homosexuality that anyone taking it seriously would be prompted to bash or kill the first gay they see (or think they see) so that they could get rid of something impeding God's plan for the human race.

From The Sheffield Forum (UK)

It's also rather telling that whilst he might step back from endorsing suicide bombing as a means of furthering the Vatican's dark age social agenda he doesn't distance himself from Fundamentalists executing homosexuals.

I can see this putting those on the board of the far right persuasion in something of a quandary as whilst this guy might be speaking with admiration of Islamic Fundamentalists on the other he really really hates gays...

And from the blog StarDestroyer.net:

The archbishop of Guam has a major case of fatwa envy.

This man should be called out, replaced, and suffer the consequences of a disgraced prelate. But Pope Benedict will probably show support in a less public way: beckon him to Rome and have him assume a Vatican post. The irony in that will be that Benedict will act in a way to a homophibic Archbishop the way his dioceses have dealt with pedophile priests: smile and sweep them under the rug by shipping them off to another diocese.

Just a thought.