Max Blumenthal

Adam and Steve?

Conflicted Conserservative in Crisis of the week — no, of the the day (they churn these characters out faster than anyone can keep track of):

In a video shown at a new museum purporting to demonstrate how God created the universe, actor Eric Linden portrays Adam breathing life’s first breath.

A jaunt around the Internet shows Linden posing alongside a drag queen on an explicit Web site he owned called Bedroom Acrobat, the Associated Press reports. The Web site allows its network of members to post explicit stories and photos, AP reports.

The Surgeon General Nominee on “Anal Eroticism”

Surgeon General nominee Dr. James Holsinger sounds like a CCC (Conflicted Conservative in Crisis) to me. Richard Kim reports:

Titled Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality, Holsinger’s religious tract-cum-scientific paper is a fascinating window into the perverse imagination of homophobia. In essence, Holsinger argues that male-female “reproductive systems are fully complementary” because “anatomically the vagina is designed to receive the penis.” The remainder of his paper is a graphic account of the “delicate” rectum which is “incapable” of “protection” if “objects that are large, sharp, or pointed are REPLACEed” into it. From there Holsinger continues to discuss what he imagines are the pains (and pleasures?) of anal sex, from “fist fornication” and “sphincter injuries” to “lacerations,” “perforations” and “deaths seen in connection with anal eroticism.”

Hedges on Hitchens

Chris Hedges reviews Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great”:

This book refuses to deal with the nuances of religious thought. It ignores the great moral and ethical struggle by theologians and religious leaders such as Paul Tillich or Karl Barth to root religion in contemporary society. It never confronts the anguish faced by those who recognise the impulses we carry within us for evil as well as good. Hitchens, unequipped to deal with other expressions of religious belief, tries vainly to argue against their authenticity. He writes of Dr Martin Luther King that “in no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian”. He disparages the faith of Abraham Lincoln and assures us that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor put to death by the Nazis for resistance, was the product of a religious belief that had “mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism”.

This is a cheap way to avoid the harder task of exploring the varieties of religious experience, of examining the motivations and beliefs of those who strive to live what even Hitchens would have to concede is the moral life. Hitchens is so determined to demonise religion that he would have us believe that self-professed religious leaders such as King or Bonhoeffer were not really religious. The sophistry of this attempt mirrors the sophistry of those he does attack, those who misuse the Bible to persecute homosexuals, Muslims, women, artists, intellectuals and those they brand with the curse “secular humanist”.

Anyone who has read King’s “Strength to Love” or given serious attention to his speeches — not just “I Have A Dream” — knows how preposterous Hitchens’ assertion of his “nebulous humanism” is. In several speeches, made mostly before black audiences, King explains how scripture and the teachings of Jesus are foundational, and how they supercede the influence that philosophers like Hegel and Marx, whom he studied in seminary, had on his thinking. King makes this particularly clear when he discusses how he managed to soldier on despite a flurry of death threats phoned in to his wife, Coretta, one night. I recommend listening to “A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.” It is available on ITunes and contains over 8 hours of evidence that Hitchens doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Another salient point about Hitchens’ book, which I don’t think has been made enough, is that he willfully refuses to criticize George W. Bush, despite his overt fundamentalist religiosity and his use of it to justify his wars. Maybe Hitchens’ latest was simply a ploy to change the uncomfortable subject of his full-throated support for Bush’s great wars for civilization.

Focusing on the Family (Minus Mom)

Dobson’s top henchman Tom Minnery has admitted that the purpose of the so-called partial birth abortion ban which Focus on the Family backed was to force doctors to perform more dangerous, potentially fatal, procedures:

Doctors adopted the late-term procedure “out of convenience,” Minnery added. “The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling.”

Cover Your Ears, Flanders

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is fucking pissed:

“If we can’t restrict the use of the words ‘fuck’ and ’shit’ during
prime time, Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever
they want.”

Trouble on Giuliani’s Right

Rudy Giuliani has a dark world view. He seems to relish continuing the warfare and grinding conflict of the Bush era. Last week he attacked Hillary Clinton for supposedly wanting “to go back to the 1990’s.” What a terrible prospect. I’m sure most Americans would loath returning to all that peace and prosperity.

Of course, there are some Americans who considered the 1990’s a dark age. They generally hover around the Christian right, the National Rifle Association and other far-right outfits. No matter how hard Giuliani tries to impress his worldview upon the Republican base, it seems to reject him with increasing intensity.

Not only has James Dobson warned that Giuliani’s nomination would mean the withdrawal of his support from the GOP, conservative uber-operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic Paul Weyrich is in opposition to Giuliani. Here is a flyer that is being distributed at Weyrich’s Wednesday group meetings, where top conservative activists gather and plot strategy each week:

“If the Republican Party nominates Rudy Giuliani as its candidate for either president or vice president, I will personally work to defeat the GOP ticket in 2008… Rudy Giuliani is wrong on all of the social issues, is wrong on the Second Amendment, and is pretty much a blank slate on all other issues of importance to conservatives…If the Republican Party nominates him, it is saying to the American people that it has lost all purpose except the raw political desire to hold power. It will be time to put the GOP out of its misery.”

Weyrich isn’t the only Catholic right figure actively working to sink Giuliani’s nomination. Tom Edsall reports that a Michigan-based group called the Conservative Declaration with ties to the remnants of the Christian Coalition and former supporters of Pat Buchanan’s maverick campaigns has sent out the following letter to its supporters, and is rapidly gaining signatories:

“Rudy Giuliani is an unacceptable Republican nominee for President of the United States. He is pro-abortion, pro-partial birth abortion, pro-registration of handguns, and pro-homosexual rights. He is the most liberal Republican candidate for President in our nation’s history.”

When I heard the words Catholic, right-wing, and Michigan, I immediately thought of Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s Pizza magnate who has funded key sectors of the anti-abortion movement, from Operation Rescue to Human Life International. Monaghan is also behind Ave Maria University and an entire town in Florida that he wants to administer according to Vatican strictures (no contraceptives allowed inside city limits, for example).

The point is not only that Giuliani has earned some very extreme enemies, it is that these are powerful enemies as well. As I wrote last year, the Catholic right is an essential component of the Republican base and can’t be ignored.