Extra! This Just In (1:10AM PT): The Extension of Warren's Lie

"What I was trying to say..."

Interview with sarah Pullium, Christianity Today, April 8, 2009:

What I was trying to say is, those who obviously opposed my viewpoint on the biblical definition or the historical definition of marriage were trying to turn me into an anti-gay activist. The truth is, Proposition 8 was a two-year campaign in the state, and during those two years, I never said a word about it until the eight days before the election, and then I did make a video for my own people when they asked, "How should we vote on this?" It was a pastor talking to his own people. I've never said anything about it since. I don't know how you take one video newsletter to your own church and turn that into, all of a sudden I'm the poster boy for anti-gay marriage.

Rick, don't you know how it was done? With your knowledge and endorsement:

Associated Baptist Press:

The Yes on Proposition 8 campaign put out a press release announcing Warren's support of the gay marriage ban. Conservative news sites, including the Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Press, reported the story at a time when the main organization supporting Proposition 8 was trying to raise money to purchase additional television ads to fight off a final push by opponents.

Bryan Fischer, executive director of the Idaho Values Alliance, accused Warren of apologizing for his earlier support of one-man, one-woman marriage.

"The minimum the Christian church should expect from its spiritual leaders is clear and unapologetic adherence to this biblical standard, especially from pastors who tell us that the Bible is the 'rule of faith and practice,'" Fischer said

Warren:

The only response that I made was, I wrote an e-mail to all of the gay leaders that I know. I have many friends who are gay leaders whom we've worked with on AIDS campaign on health, poverty, and disease. The guys that I knew, I apologized to them.

So, Rick, who were those people? If they are gay "leaders" they're certainly out and wouldn't be afraid of backing up your story. Where are they?

Rick Warren's Persona Is In Our Hands. One Word: CLAP!

And Clap LOUD!

Pat Robertson does it all the time: lying and addressing topics he knows absolutely nothing about. I've seen him answer one question on tattoos and then the next on the wisdom of investing in baseball cards. So why do preachers pontificate when they rarely know what they're preaching? Is it purely ego? Are they so imbued with self-righteousness that they don't challenge (or at least edit) their own sermons and public ruminations? Or is it plain hubris?

The whole world is buzzing about Rick Warren. People are clamoring for news and commentary. And some people (like me) are fuming. People are disdaining "gotcha" journalism, but it has grown in size many times since we've gotten it out of the box and we can't stuff it back in! Warren's primary sin (right now) is in thinking the American people will unequivocally accept anything he says. This is hubris of the most disastrous kind. Ted Haggard suffered for his hubris as well as others. Televangelists and megachurch pastors will eventually suffer as their supply of old-time-religion congregants dry up.

Even journals like Associated Baptist Press have become skeptical about Warren's use of words:

Pam's House Blend, an influential left-leaning blog that often reports on gay-rights issues, dug up a YouTube video message Warren recorded as an Oct. 23 posting on the Saddleback Church website. In it, Warren urges passage of Proposition 8....The Yes on Proposition 8 campaign put out a press release announcing Warren's support of the gay marriage ban. Conservative news sites, including the Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Press, reported the story at a time when the main organization supporting Proposition 8 was trying to raise money to purchase additional television ads to fight off a final push by opponents.

So EVERYONE knew that Warren was endorsing (he uses the term "campaigning" in his denial) Proposition 8. And Warren MUST have known that people knew. He could have had Baptist Press print a clarification of his words, but he didn't. He trusted that an appearance on a national show would help much more than a restatement in a limited subscription religious magazine (online or not).

Now what? Do we forgive and forget? I wish we could. Maybe later. But right now we have the career of a person whose persona is much larger than our own in our cupped hands. We can either set it down gently as would a small, non-poisonous spider which has just bitten us or we can clap our hands together and promise ourselves never to get bitten again.

Just a thought.

Notes On The Culture War: Watch Out! THIS Is What You're Dealing With!

Yeah, I know that this will be considered "Christian Bashing," but only by the people who do the most bashing (physically as well as spiritually) from the other side. I wish I had the time to turn "Notes" into a full-fledged blog, by I'm already involved in too many things - people included.

Harry Knox, a gay man recently appointed by President Obama to an advisory council which metes out grants to faith-based and community organizations, is, of course, under attack. Because he once called the pope a "discredited leader" on the subject of contraception and that certain passages of the Bible were "not true" concerning homosexuality.

Below is the spin put on the appointment and Knox by ultra-right CNS News* (slogan: "The Right News. Right Now")

(CNSNews.com) – President Obama has named to his faith-based advisory council a self-professed Christian who holds that the New Testament's teaching that homosexual behavior is unnatural and wrong--which is found in St. Paul's letter to the Romans--“is not true."

The appointee, Harry Knox, has also said that Obama's decision to invite the Rev. Rick Warren to say a prayer at the Inauguration "tainted" the ceremony and that Pope Benedict XVI is a "discredited leader."

Harry Knox, a professed gay Christian who is director of the religion and faith program at the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual rights group, was named to President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships on Monday. The advisory council gives federal grants to faith-based organizations.

NOW THE COMMENTS (note that they are directed at Knox or Obama and not necessarily about the article itself):

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! FANANTIC REGRESSIVES AHEAD!

You'd better look within and recognize your sin because for every person you mislead, you WILL answer for! Wake up for goodness sake!

***

Homosexuality is "natural"? How does this twisted moron explain procreation? Were (are) his natural parents both of the same sex? This jerk is almost certainly a huge advocate of the gigantic hoax global warming as well.

***

That kind of twisted thinking will bring us to ruin and, in fact, has already begun to do so.

***

Woman and man are commanded to live chaste (virgin) lives until marriage. Then they may enjoy natural sex together for the remainder of their natural lives. God said it; I believe it!

***

You shouldn't pretend to be any kind of Christian. It would be truthful to declare your true vocation - you are a Sodomite. That would make satan your lord and master. I pray for your conversion, and your boss' too.

***

God punished Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality! - so - that was not about Paul's interpretation or feelings was it? America needs to wake up before it's too late - God CANNOT reward sins - He CANNOT reward laws that have been voted that are against His Word. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

***

Yeah, the so-called President has other things to do than even think about what is right and what is wrong. Consider this: this man thinks that a baby born alive, though an abortion was performed to try to terminate that life, should, and I repeat, should have been left on a shelf in the closet of an abortuary until it died.

*study after study by the Media Research Center, the parent organization of CNSNews.com, clearly demonstrate a liberal bias in many news outlets – bias by commission and bias by omission – that results in a frequent double-standard in editorial decisions on what constitutes 'news.'"

So, are you still ready and willing to deal with these people?

Just a thought.

The Rick Warren Site: Rick Warren Every Day All The Time - 24/7!!

Presenting the lovely and graceful...

WE WILL BE REPORTING ON RICK WARREN UNTIL...

... all the news that's fit to print runs out! (OMG! What am I saying? I'll be sick of him within a week. And the stories may run for months! For Years! Sheesh!)

More to the point: this site has been very very popular with the "What next, Rick Warren?" set. Page loads have picked up enormously! But this site is (he writes, with a guilt-stricken face) not strictly Rick Warren (crash!) This is a site covering (sometimes with roses, most times with manure) religion and politics. So those of you who have come because of Rick Warren - you're very, very welcome.

But please STAY! Please include this site in your rss feeds. You won't regret it (O.K., you might if your a masochistic Christofascist or a right wingnut politician who thinks Sarah Palin is God's gift to America and the Republican party).

And if you like the irreverent take on current affairs, use one of the icons to spread the word. I am also on Twitter and Facebook. So please feel free to connect!

PSSSSST: Easter is coming up and with it the most BLASPHEMOUS, IRREVERENT, SACRILIGIOUS series about Christianity and Entertainment. Starts Easter Sunday, the most blasphemous day of the year!

Thank you! Dan Vojir

Rick Warren's Other Lies: "One Man One Woman For 5000 Years In All Societies!"

Tell It To Solomon and See Him Laugh!

Typical of Rick Warren to latch on to a phrase and milk it for what it's worth (hey, "Whatever It Takes") even if it's not true. Not in the slightest.

"This is one thing, friends, that all politicians tend to agree on. Both Barack Obama and John McCain, I flat-out asked both of them: what is your definition of marriage? And they both said the same thing -- it is the traditional, historic, universal definition of marriage: one man and one woman, for life. And every culture for 5,000 years, and every religion for 5,000 years, has said the definition of marriage is between one man and a woman.

"One man one woman ... and every culture for 5,000 years, and every religion for 5,000 years." First of all, let's get a stupid error out of the way: if Warren believes in creationism as much as he says he does, it's 6000 years, not 5000. Actually - as of this writing - 6012 years, 167 days. Back in the 17th century a Bishop James Ussher calculated the age of the earth by totaling all "begats" from Adam through Christ and beyond. And he was VERY specific: it was October 23, 4004 BCE (AM - Ussher didn't have a Rolex so he couldn't tell us hours, minutes and seconds, but he did know it was sometime in the morning!)

Now let's go on to the more obvious error: "One man one woman." Not "one man, 300 women" or one man, 150 concubines." If Warren is such an inerrantist (he professes to be) he totally negates polygamy. Totally. According to Jewish law and the stories of the Bible, polygamy was legal and, for Israelite leaders, even necessary. Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines.

Now let's get to the "every society in history." Of the 1250 societies studied by various archeological and anthropological entities, only about 400 were heterosexual and/or monogamous. Four were actually polyandrous (women could have more than one man - the guys had to share!)

From wikipedia:

Polygamy may be polygyny (one man having more than one wife at the same time) or polyandry (one woman having more than one husband at the same time) and it has been practiced throughout history in almost all cultures and sanctioned by various religions where necessary to meet population or economic needs.

What about love? Yeah, so what about it. It wasn't until several hundred years ago that love began to be recognized as a basis for marriage. The two didn't "go together like horse and carriage" simply because marriage was looked upon as a legal expedient: dowry and legitimacy of offspring were really the only two reasons for marriage. The ancient Greeks (always the front runners to good breeding), did not even have the same concept of marriage as we have today: a woman was considered more of a "sister" to the husband than a "wife" and taken in as such by the husband's family.

So is Rick Warren openly lying about marriage? Yes. Why? Because he would have had to learn SOMETHING in his 5th rate Baptist College about marriage. Anyway, all he had to do was read the Bible to know that "one man one woman" would have been a joke to ancient societies. With "One man one woman for 5000 years in every culture, every religion", Warren depends heavily on the fact that Americans have always hated history in the classroom and not much of it ever sank in. Yeah, Americans really suck when it comes to knowing history - theirs or anyone else's.

But taking advantage of the historigraphical illiterati is WRONG. Warren knows it. Dobson knows it. Robertson knows it. Parsley knows it. Hagee knows it. Copeland knows it. Even Hinn knows it (but doesn't care - at least not when he's choreographing 20 people to fall down in sequence!).

So every one of Rick Warren's pronouncements should come with a disclaimer:

"All statements subject to fact-checking. Consult your local historian."

FoxNews: Chipping (or Chimping) Away At Their Own Ratings!

Fox Believes in Evolution?
Boy, Will Their Viewer Base Be Pissed!

Fox News always seems to surpass itself when "newsworthy" items present themselves. The "Fair and Balanced" is always at the lowered end of the seesaw, heavy with brilliantly awful commentary ...and not much else. So it is with immense surprise that I noted this article. While Dan Savage invited comments about the article's topic, I latched on to the fact that the premise of it doesn't rest in the fact that primates barter for sex, but that it presents evolution as a fact, if a little misogynistic.

Forwarded from Dan Savage's site with SLOG:

Chimps Exchange Meat for Sex, Study Finds

Wednesday, April 08, 2009
By Clara Moskowitz

The oldest profession isn't restricted to humans. A new study found that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for sex.

By stealthily following a group of about 20 adult chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire's Taï National Park, behavioral ecologists Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany carefully noted which male chimpanzees copulated with which females. The researchers found that she-chimps put out more often for males that shared food with them at least once, compared to stingy males who never offered meat. Apparently, buying dinner is a good way to improve the chances of getting lucky on a date, even if you're a chimp. The primates' food-for-sex barter occurs indirectly, over the course of weeks or months, with males seeming to accrue credit with the ladies by plying them with meat killed on a hunt.

Forget the fact that Fox News is normally prurient about sex (even of the animal kind), but to state the findings of an evolutionary anthropologist! Now THAT'S news!

Has Fox turned completely atheist? Is Rupert Murdoch going senile? If the Southern Baptist Convention gets wind of this, will they boycott Fox News? (Problematic: what, then, would they watch for news?). Will chimpanzees boycott Fox News because it implicates them in prostitution? Will chimpanzee hookers tell their stories on "Fox & Friends"?

Stay tuned!

Warren, Spin, Iowa and Vermont

The Spin Will Make You Dizzy For A Long, Long Time!

Thus did the Iowa court -- as my colleague at the National Organization for Marriage, Brian Brown, said -- "misuse the law to impose an untruth on unwilling Iowans. Same-sex unions are not marriages, and Iowans should not be forced to treat them as such by law."

The Christian Right (aka "social conservatives" or "Christofascists) is scrambling to plaster over the state of Vermont with righteousness.

(TownHall.com, Maggie Gallagher)

The Democratic Party has now thrown its lot against the principles and priorities of the majority of Americans in favor of its richly endowed base of gay supporters. Democrats are the party of gay marriage -- a position opposed by 55 percent of the American people in the latest polls.

But the Vermont same-sex marriage bill was a breakthrough in another way which has received zero attention in the press. For the very first time, a legislature has formally acknowledged that gay marriage poses a serious threat to the religious liberties of Vermonters who disagree with the government's new definition of marriage.

"Richly endowed base" "party of gay marriage" "zero attention in the press" "poses a serious threat to religious liberties" Oh, brother! I have a feeling that the Christians vs Lions debate will be raging for some time. All of the above phrases are patently false, but the "threat to religious liberties" one piece of fiction Christofascists refuse to let go of. (Warning: I don't go for the "social conservatives" label. It's too late and too limp. Christians who scream "religious liberty" yet are totally intolerant of other religions are Christofascists).

Witness Rev. Rick Warren, who on "Larry King Live" this week came very close to recanting his support for Proposition 8. Rick did not quite do so. What he did, instead, is what many good people will do in the face of the massive campaign of intimidation and harassment designed to silence Christians and others of good will who support marriage: He dodged. Rick said, more or less: I am not now and never have been an anti-gay marriage "activist."

Warren also said "I never never endorsed Proposition 8" You can view here what Warren thinks is NOT an endorsement. He has a funny way of viewing things to suit his convenience.

Is Vermont the beginning of a new willingness on the part of the powerful gay-marriage movement to let Christians be Christians? Or is Rick Warren the future of Christians in America?

Letting true and sincere Christians be Christians is one thing. Letting Christians be Christofascist is another. And since Warren lied so boldly and vehemently, I can only hope Rick Warren is not the future of Christians in America.

If he is, God help us!