With the right wing flailing as it sees its power quickly slipping down the electoral drain, it's become open season for attacks on liberals. As with secular politics, so it is with religious affairs. Our old friend Bill Donohue recently lashed out at Catholics in Alliance For The Common Good, pointing to support they've received from George Soros' Open Society Institute as evidence of some evil Catholic-hating librul agenda. Or something.

Except it turns out that Soros has supported many other Catholic-hating organizations like Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services, among others. As Chris Korzen of Catholics United points out those groups are official wings of the Catholic church, which means that by Donohue's logic, the Catholic church hates itself. We always suspected as much, but it's nice to have our theory confirmed by a right-wing nut job.

Donohue has never been one for modesty, much less shame. So it's only fitting that his response to being called out as an idiot boils down to I'm made out of rubber, you're made out of glue... Note to Bill: citing the moral authority of Charles Chaput is hardly a way to convince undecided minds. Everybody knows he's the only bigger nutter in the Catholic church than yourself. You might as well cite Larry, Curly and Moe.

Meanwhile, David Miller of Citizens for Community Values recently lashed out at the UCC during an interview on CNN:

SNOW (voice-over): They were crucial in electing George Bush in 2004. Evangelicals in Ohio turned out in mass to support a ballot initiative opposing same sex marriage. This time around, there's no such measure. So what's the draw? Since federal law prohibits endorsements from the pulpit, one activist group addressing the Bethel Baptist Temple took aim at Barack Obama's former church without naming the candidate.

DAVID MILLER, CITIZEN FOR COMMUNITY VALUES: The United Church of Christ, this is the Christian denomination that has 1.2 million members that was made famous this year by Reverend Jeremiah Wright provides a clear illustration of a non-biblical Christian group.

SNOW: Non-biblical David Miller says because the United Church of Christ supports gay marriages.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The bottom line to interpret from that, you're really saying don't vote for Barack Obama

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Anybody can interpret that the way they want to.

"Unidentified female and male" here being CNN's Mary Snow and Miller. As Chuck Currie points out, Miller is accusing the UCC of being objectively pro-perversion. If Barack Obama wins, white-hating Jeremiah Wright will teach leather bondage in elementary schools!

You laugh, but that's only a step away from what Focus on the Family is predicting. Writing back from the perspective of 2012, they report:

Once left-leaning Justices took over the Supreme Court, Focus reports, gay marriage and abortion were mandated, the Boy Scouts were forced to disband, Christian schools were shut down and homeschoolers fled the country, religious speech was drastically curtailed and conservative radio was forced off the air, the Pledge of Allegiance was ruled unconstitutional, guns were taken away, pornography was rampant, taxes had sky-rocketed, Christian publishers had all gone out of business, Bush adminstration officials were targeted and imprisoned, and terrorists were constantly unleashing attacks on American soil.

This is the fault of evangelicals who decided to take a chance on that suspect Islamodemcommiefascist Obama. At least they're not blaming the UCC.

To review, then, God-fearing Americans are on the precipice of being wiped out by Jews, San Francisco values, tax-and-spend liberals, and black helicopters that will come to take away all the guns. And they wonder why we think they're losing it.

The crowds are up considerably at the Palanca Food Pantry these days.  They’ve been growing ever bigger for above a year now and there is no end in sight.  Experience teaches that our attendance is a leading indicator, economically speaking.  It also teaches that funding will be even more difficult than usual to come by and at precisely the time it is most needed.

Most of the influx comes from persons temporarily employed doing menial or semi-skilled labor associated with housing construction sites.  As often as not, they are actually employed under the table by small contractors who serve the industry (or do home repairs or landscaping), and, therefore, do not qualify for unemployment benefits.  They are the first to be let go when business slows.

Just now, a new group has been added to the ranks of the homeless....

Promoted by PD. Plug plug plug.

Well, maybe not literally. But it could not be more appropriate that my current book is coming out in he middle of Banned Books Week.  

While we do not discuss book banning in Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America -- we do discuss matters that might rile the Sarah Palins of America -- not because we are trying to, but because some of the content just seems likely to make certain adults want to prevent other adults from getting their hands on it -- or even see it on the library shelf.

[Adapted from Talk to Action]

Everybody's got their favorite theories, and I'll look at a few in the coming days. But for the moment, I'm sticking with my idea that McCain caved to the Religious Right:

For weeks, advisers close to the campaign said, Mr. McCain had wanted to name as his running mate his good friend Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat turned independent. But by the end of last weekend, the outrage from Christian conservatives over the possibility that Mr. McCain would fill out the Republican ticket with Mr. Lieberman, a supporter of abortion rights, had become too intense to be ignored.

With time running out, and after a long meeting with his inner circle in Phoenix, Mr. McCain finally picked up the phone last Sunday and reached Ms. Palin at the Alaska State Fair. Although the campaign’s polling on Mr. McCain’s potential running mates was inconclusive on the selection of Ms. Palin — virtually no one had heard of her, a McCain adviser said — the governor, who opposes abortion, had glowing reviews from influential social conservatives.

Poor guy. He has so little control over his own party that he can't even choose his biggest booster as running mate without getting flack.

Somebody suggested the other day that Ralph Reed was instrumental in hammering on McCain to select Palin. I haven't seen any confirmation of that, and I had thought Reed was pretty out-of-the-loop these days. But  Reed's been raising money for McCain, and it sounds like something he'd say:

There is still much work to do for McCain to win conservative hearts and minds. I talked to two nationally prominent social conservative leaders over the weekend who told me that right now they do not plan to vote for McCain. In Louisiana on Saturday, Mike Huckabee won self-identified evangelical voters 57-33 percent and won very conservative primary voters 55-32 percent. Remarkably, this is after McCain had achieved the status of the presumptive GOP nominee, suggesting deep and latent ambivalence among conservative and faith-based voters.

What can McCain do? First, he should choose a running mate with strong conservative credentials, both on social issues and economic issues. Then he should adopt a conservative platform at the convention, and run a general election campaign that sounds conservative themes on taxes, terrorism, and values. If he does those things, he should be able to unite the party. If not, it will be difficult to rally the grassroots and win a highly competitive, close race in November."

Indeed, Reed was tickled pink with Palin's selection.

That's all a side issue, really. The more important question is what the Religious Right hopes to get out of Palin. Doug Wead isn't always the most reliable Evangelical observer, but I think he had a point a while back:

Evangelicals welcomed John McCain’s meeting with Billy Graham today, but more importantly, recent appointments, such as Pam Pryor as senior advisor at the RNC, is sending their morale soaring.

After feeling like they had been hung out to dry, with the dumping of Pastors John Hagee and Rod Parsley, evangelicals are feeling a little better about John McCain.  His meeting today with Billy Graham came just in time.  In fact, if my e-mail bag is any indication, for the last ten days some evangelical leaders have been feeling downright warm and fuzzy about the Republican nominee and primarily because of his willingness to use born again Christian staffers at the RNC and in his campaign.

This was a quota and a patronage hire. The Religious Right wanted to have one of their own as close to the top of the ticket as they could. And in that it's September and the McCain campaign has no freaking ground game to speak of, they weren't exactly in a position to refuse.

Which leaves only the question of why Palin over Pawlenty? The Times has perhaps the best answer: Palin fit McCain's "self image" better than Pawlenty.

In other words, yes, as with most things with McCain, it all boils down to the candidate's ego and his campaign's weakness. Oh, well.

I smelled this one coming from a mile away. Well, not that McCain would name Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate - I wasn't expecting that any more than anybody else was.

But after all this time, McCain is still trying to shore up his base in the Religious Right. They've been bullying him for months now, rumbling that they'd abandon him in droves if he picked wrong on the Veep.

By which of course they meant they'd divorce him if he selected somebody who was pro-choice. That's why Liebermann didn't get it, even as checkered as his record is. It's why Tom Ridge didn't get it. Mittens got passed over for being insufficiently "doctrinally correct," of course. I don't know why they didn't go with Pawlenty. Maybe the optics of having the GOP convention in a state whose governor did nothing while the infrastructure literally collapsed didn't work out?

Anyway, John McCain is nothing if not a craven fool willing to sell out his principles at the first chance he gets. The Ralph Reed wing of the Republican party got its dream candidate. Gov. Palin once said:

I am pro-life and I believe that marriage should only be between and man and a woman. I am opposed to any expansion of gambling in Alaska.

Isn't that great? She's even opposed to gambling, just like Ralph was. Given her own ethical issues, you have to wonder if her opposition is as firm as Reed's was.

Palin is not just pro-life, she's a hardline anti-abortion activist opposed to stem-cell research, physician-assisted suicide, even exceptions for rape and incest in abortion laws. How far out there is she? Far enough to be beloved by people like crazy-ass nurse and Obama hater Jill Stanek, who praised Palin today.

More you want? Richard Land praised her too, as did Tony Perkins.

She's virulently opposed to any form of equality for gays and lesbians, even when that opposition priced out at $900,000 more for Alaska taxpayers than accepting it would have cost them.

She's a creationist.

Oh yeah: Palin hates polar bears, too.

She is, in short, a faithful member of the social conservative whackjob movement. You couldn't have pleased them better with a Starry-Eyed Bride Doll.

McCain, of course, Mr. Maverick himself, couldn't afford to blow it with them. Without the conservative Evangelicals, he wouldn't have a campaign to speak of. So he made the logical - though a bit surprising - decision to pass up years of experience and insight to knuckle under and give the nod to a right-wing Christian authoritarian who's about two steps away from being indicted for abuse of power in the state she governed.

If that isn't a metaphor for McCain's campaign as a whole, I don't know what is.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked with Sean Hannity at WGST in Atlanta. After hearing that Jim Adkisson, the man who took a gun to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee and killed two people, had Sean's book among his collection of conservative political books, I decided it was time to contact my old colleague.

I wrote an open letter to Sean that has been posted over at Religion Dispatches. I hope you'll take a look and give me your thoughts.

http://religiondispatches.org/Gui/Co...

As usual, I'm out of pocket when the big story comes along. Fortunately, this story doesn't require much commentary:

Conservative Christian leader James Dobson has softened his stance against Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, saying he could reverse his position and endorse the Arizona senator despite serious misgivings.

“I never thought I would hear myself saying this,” Dobson said in a radio broadcast to air Monday. “… While I am not endorsing Senator John McCain, the possibility is there that I might.” … In an advance copy provided to The Associated Press, Dobson said that while neither candidate is consistent with his views, McCain’s positions are closer by a wide margin.

“There’s nothing dishonorable in a person rethinking his or her positions, especially in a constantly changing political context,” Dobson said in a statement to the AP. “Barack Obama contradicts and threatens everything I believe about the institution of the family and what is best for the nation. His radical positions on life, marriage and national security force me to reevaluate the candidacy of our only other choice, John McCain.”

First he said he wouldn't endorse McCain on a bet or a dare, now he says he just might.

As Steve Benen says, the strangest thing about Dobson's reversal might be that he'll get absolutely nothing out of it. But then, as I've said before, Dobson is a friggin' idiot who wouldn't know how to use his influence to get himself out of a speeding ticket.

He likes to think of himself as a principled man fiercely committed to advancing "family values," but he measures progress by the deference paid to him and his organization. Which means that he's really just a prideful bigot, and an increasingly irrelevant one at that.

There is no way for Dobson to come out of November more influential than he went in. Which doesn't mean that the battle for reproductive rights and equality for gays and lesbians is won; far from it. It just means that this particular idiot is losing his stranglehold on our political system, one miscue at a time.

And it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

I am trying to reframe the whole "Bible and homosexuality" issue and I have written the following article. I would love some feedback on this argument and how to refine it. I look forward to your comments!

"Nothing in regard to controversial matters ha(s) ever been settled by the Bible." –William Lloyd Garrison

Gays and lesbians will never "win" the argument over what the Bible says or does not say about homosexuality. The good news is: we don't have to.

It will not be arguments over the Bible that will ultimately secure the civil rights of gays and lesbians. Sure, those arguments are being made and they can be loud and raucous, but the Bible is not the "other side" of the issue of homosexuality. Just like in the days of slavery, it has been made out to be the "other side" of the issue because those who oppose homosexuality can seem to find a vast ammunition dump of verses to use in the battle over gay and lesbian rights. They load their Bibles and use them to shoot down any arguments against biblical authority on this subject.

Nobody could have predicted...oh screw it, everybody knew reactionary Evangelicals would suck it up and back the GOP nominee, whoever he might be:

More than 90 evangelical leaders representing millions of conservative Christians met in Denver on Tuesday to lament the condition of the religious conservative movement and to conclude they should get behind Sen. John McCain even if they didn’t like everything about him as a candidate.
         
“The alternative is so bad we must support John McCain,” said Phyllis Schlafly, founder and president of Eagle Forum, adding that the leaders should have held a strategy meeting in 2001 when it was clear Vice President Dick Cheney wouldn’t run for president instead of waiting until four months before the 2008 election.

Meant to write on this the other day. Now it seems like an appropriate follow-up to yesterday's story on Dobson's "confused theology". The Jewish Daily Forward:

As the presidential candidates prepare to compete for religious voters this November, some preachers on the Christian right are vowing to test longstanding tax rules that inhibit politicking from the pulpit.

The Alliance Defense Fund — a legal outfit launched by James Dobson and other prominent conservatives in the mid-1990s — has recruited 50 pastors to deliver sermons in September that will include direct endorsements of political candidates. Although churches and other religious groups, like all not-for-profits, are required by law to eschew partisanship in exchange for their tax-exempt status, ADF’S Pulpit Initiative advances a premise yet to be fully tested in the courts: that religious leaders speaking from the pulpit should benefit from special speech protections.

“The only thing that should be dictating to pastors what they can and cannot say is the Bible, not the Internal Revenue Service,” said Gus Booth, a Minnesota pastor who has endorsed Republican Senator John McCain from his pulpit. The idea that church and politics don’t mix, he told the Forward, “hasn’t actually always been that way.”

Dear Dr. Daddy Dobson:

I want to thank you most sincerely for your comments on Barack Obama's "confused theology":

Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, "a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application."

"Folks haven't been reading their Bibles," Obama said.

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus' teachings in the New Testament.

"I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology," Dobson said.

"... He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."

You, sir, have proved beyond a doubt that you are a doddering old tool, completely and irredeemably unfit for the game of politics.

You have been had. Punked. Owned. Fooled into showing yourself for the hateful ignoramus you are. Josh Dubois will now walk you around on a leash for the rest of the campaign.

Had you chosen to greet the Obama campaign's overture with even a modicum of goodwill, with even the tiniest sliver of cautious, skeptical optimism or curiosity, you would have owned the frame. You could have said with a straight face that Obama needed your stamp of approval to connect with "values voters." You would have been able to say, plausibly, that Democrats were reaching out to conservative Evangelicals and that you welcomed their attempt to bridge the gap on issue X, Y, or Z, thereby at least attempting to paint Obama into a corner. You would have to been able to position yourself in your favorite role of kingmaker with a whole new party.

But because you an irascible asshole, you chose to spit in their eye instead, and for that I thank you.

You took the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

Because were you not such a bigoted, ignorant, miserable twit, you would have understood that Jesus said exactly nothing about abortion or homosexuality while your friends and colleagues have had plenty to say about Leviticus. Furthermore, you would have understood that without the Levitical code, there would be no objection to homosexuality in the Bible. It's all built off the priestly code, and if one part of that code can be said to no longer apply, then all of it is provisional.

You also would have understood Obama's point, you flatulent creep: that scripture is challenging in many ways, not just in the ways that a bunch of patriarchal crypto-fascists in Colorado Springs deem acceptable.

For all this, I am deeply grateful. Every time you open your mouth, you demonstrate your lack of understanding of the religion you claim to uphold, and in doing so, you erode a little more of your authority. Thank you for that.

But thank you most of all for spurning the Obama campaign's overture to you, and most violently at that. Because you have absolved them of their supposed duty to reach out to people just like you. Every time you open your stupid gob to complain about the campaign between now and November, Obama's people will say, "Well, we tried."

That means they no longer have to waste money on voters they never would have gotten anyway, and they get to position themselves as the voice of reasonable moderation.

Dr. Daddy, I don't know if you play chess, but one of the primary rules of that game is: control the center. What you have done is to cede the center by letting your bishop get pawned.

Check and mate, and thank you very much,

Pastor Dan

Sarah Posner has good stuff as always in this week's installment of the FundamentaList (even if I did have to tease her about goofing the name of my alma mater).

See in particular her explanation of why the SBC - and hence the broader Evangelical movement - never got behind Mike Huckabee. Hint: church politics, like those of the academy, make presidential campaigns look like pikers when it comes to matters like bloodthirstiness and nursing grudges across decades. Ain't no such thing as "bygones" in these circles.

Posner picks up on another interesting story: Obama's recent meeting with a broad swath of religious leaders, including some very conservative fellows. (I wasn't invited.)

For a supposedly secret meeting, there sure has been a lot leaking out about it. For example, we know that there was a bit of unhappiness among more liberal types at the domination of the usual topics.

But this gets at why Obama took the meeting in the first place:

McCain will end up being the default candidate of the religious right, but Obama sees a clear opening to peel away the votes of more moderate and liberal evangelicals. Polling shows he's made some headway beyond John Kerry's share of that same demographic in 2004, but it's not an overwhelming shift (up seven points among centrist evangelicals and nine among modernist evangelicals from Kerry's share in May 2004, according to the recent Calvin College Henry Institute on Religion and Public Life). The numbers in Obama's favor are not accompanied by shifts to Democratic party affiliation though; evangelical defectors from the GOP are largely becoming independents.

When Obama met with about thirty Christian leaders behind closed doors in Chicago last week, it was another clear sign that he's bending over backwards to diffuse both the rumors he is a Muslim and the perception, post-Jeremiah Wright, that he's some sort of radical anti-white Christian unfit to hold public office. Although the meeting was off the record (a disturbing development from the candidate who claims to value transparency), some participants divulged a few details.

The Obama campaign doesn't expect to peel off large numbers of Evangelicals, I believe. They certainly don't believe they're going to win the hard-core "family values" voters, who are as partisan a bunch as you'll ever meet.

So why meet with the religious leaders who represent those voters? Basically, to convince them that Obama is not the Devil incarnate. Wish he'd try that on the AP.

This is the same technique used by Common Good Strategies in Ted Strickland's campaign in Ohio and Robert Casey's in Pennsylvania. A good deal of the political animus of the Religious Right toward Democrats is driven by the perception that they're not given due attention. So when a Democratic candidate takes the battle to their turf - Strickland advertised on Christian radio, Casey made appearances at conservative forums - it earns them some grudging respect.

That, in turn, helps to keep the candidate's negatives down. And if they're lucky, it prevents the Religious Right patriarchs from mobilizing against them full-force. Both of those factors will be important in this campaign. McCain's only hope is to drag Obama through the mud and turn out conservative Evangelicals in places like Virginia and Ohio.

He is so screwed.