Robertson: Ladies and gentlemen I don’t want to get weird on this so please take it for what it’s worth. But it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power, it has been the symbol of our great nation, we look at that monument and say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it, there’s a crack in it and it’s closed up. Is that a sign from the Lord? Is that something that has significance or is it just result of an earthquake? You judge, but I just want to bring that to your attention. It seems to me symbolic. When Jesus was crucified and when he died the curtain in the Temple was rent from top to bottom and there was a tear and it was extremely symbolic, is this symbolic? You judge.
I was at work when this story shot out across the Intertubes, so I wasn't able to see the video. The transcript alone had me kind of amazed: damn, she's uninformed. But the video itself is what's so incredible:
When the law students are laughing, she thinks they are laughing with her, not at her. She thought she made a point! And sadly, I think I know which one.
Religious fundamentalists just don't believe in separation of church and state. You can't make them. They won't hear it. They'll teach the opposite. If you look at guys like Robertson or Falwell and the like and things they have said and written, they go out of their way to disregard anything extraneous any of the Founding Fathers ever said about "separation of church and state", and just concentrate on how that phrase itself isn't in the Constitution. They don't bother to work with the very first line in the First Amendment--sometimes referred to as the establishment clause, which has historically been the basis for court rulings regarding the rejection of prayer in public schools and more recently and germane, the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision, which established that ID basically was religion, not science, and had no place in our schools.
As far as many fundamentalists are concerned, such rulings must mean "activist judges". And it isn't sheer ignorance--some of the people who hold this view are folks like former judge Roy Moore, of the Ten Commandments display fame, who seems to reject the First Amendment about as easily as he unwittingly rejected the First Commandment when he made a great big graven image of the Decalogue into the centerpiece of his life. (He's headed to Iowa to try and get some judges unseated for their surprising decision that equal rights for all means just that with respect to marriage equality. He's loonier than a tree full of gaviidae. Which aren't even likely to hang out in trees, which is saying something.)
And she doesn't know what the scientific meaning of "theory" is, and I'm not giving anyone the satisfaction of Wikipedia copy-pasta-ing it, except to say "Dear Christine, there is a 'theory of gravity', too, but you wouldn't jump out a window on the off-chance it's bollocks, would you?" But that's another point of common ignorance. She is not alone in not understanding what a theory is, anymore than she's alone in not understanding the Constitution or history, or the birds and the bees and.....
I know that there are subgeniuses from, say, Regent or Liberty University populating places of some influence in government right now, no better intellectually equipped than Christine O'Donnell, that probably were appointed under the Bush Administration and burrowed in, who we just don't know about and who go along their mentally misshapen way because they have simply never been exposed as totally stupid because they never ran for office before. Or they have run for office and got re-elected because their constituents couldn't tell they were damn-near illiterate regarding the issues (Louie Gohmert! Michele Bachmann!)
It's a big deal to me. It's the same kind of stupid that ruins the climate change debate, too. It affects damn near everything. Give Dick Cheney or David Addington a pop quiz on what "separation of powers" actually means. See what happens; the Bagram-ization of Gitmo, the Gitmo-ization of Abu Ghraib? A relationship to written law as irrelevant and due process as peculiar? A secrecy and a devotion to executive privilege that borders on the occult?
Yeah--this isn't about just "Oh wacky Christine O'Donnell, she doesn't know stuff!"
This pervasiveness of ignorance, and the celebration of it, actually worries me more than Christine O'Donnell does. I'm re-filling my damn drink.
"Wall of life" I think has to do with preventing the separation of woman and unwanted pregnancy and "sanctity of marriage" of course, means that joyless thing a man and a woman do to have babies that aren't bastards. Also "fast and pray" means "no refreshments, entertain yourself." (Great--a bunch of hungry busybodies talking to themselves.)
If you go to The Call website, you can check out Lou Engels' several CD's on the subject of fasting and prayer. It goes a little like this--you don't eat. You talk to God. Repeat until it works for you. Call me a bit skeptical.
It's only fair to point out the Huckabee may be a contender for the 2012 GOP presidential contest.
Just supposing that the problem with Haiti didn't have anything to do with colonialism, slavery, racism, corporate opportunism, IMF loans, deforestation, political upheaval, and a series of hurricanes followed by a big, freaking earthquake, well yeah--um, Satan....that's a plausible reason for all the ....
Well, no. That's stupid.
It's stupid because if you look at history, you can see how the poverty is a human tragedy. And if some uppity white Christian bigot has an issue with voudon or dark-skinned island people, that is just ignorant. These are resilient people who have had to eat a lot of crap, and right now they are going through a fuck of a lot. Their country isn't evil. It could have been a lush island paradise, but the users and the people abusers and the takers and the money-makers got in.
Oh, Focus on the Family, if you're feeling the evil--well, maybe predator-Christians would know. So sorry the Haitians don't have much to give right now in exchange for the FOTF interest but their desperation and their souls--but if you kick them while they are down....maybe you can feel better about your smug, comfortable form of Christianity. The kind where kicking people where they are down, or weaker or smaller, is just SOP. They deserve their problems through some hang-up you never knew about. You are just better folks than them.
You have things. They need things. And your God probably ordained it.
Feel good about it? Hopeful that they will find your version of God after some care-package? Will stop being all needy and foreign?
I still entirely approve of FOTF giving anything they can. Tents, food, money, wet-wipes--since clean water is scarce. Just not their sense of superiority and better-people pity. The Haitians have God--the island is very Catholic, for instance. They need material things to live. And what they have is being materially-disadvantaged--it's not evil. But it is evil to think your brother should live that way.
So, a lot of people are donating to great organizations like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, which are both providing useful medical and rescue help with the crisis in Haiti from the tragic earthquake. Other people are also finding ways to help, like Faith Comes By Hearing.
Leave it to Christians to take advantage of those in need. While people from all over the world are sending money and aid to the people of Haiti to help them recover from the earthquake, one Christian group seeks to take advantage of Haitian situation to teach them about Jesus.
A group called “Faith Comes From Hearing” is sending 600 solar-powered audio Bibles to be distributed to the Haitian people. Each one of the devices can play the Bible in 414 different languages to insure that no matter what poor country you live in you too will have a chance to be converted. The device is called “The Proclaim” and it is “just a taste of the technology that God is using to spread His Word throughout the world,” according to the website.
The website also states that, “This could be the generation to bow before our Lord and offer Him the inheritance of the nations.” That seems to be exactly what the people of Haiti are in need of as their lives and homes have been shattered and friends and family members are dying. Food and medical supplies might be important, but that crap is useless in the afterlife apparently.
This could be the generation that decides that people who want to take advantage of a tragedy to pimp their particular god need a swift kick in the hind-quarters. I'm not really sure that while someone is kind of homeless and hungry and recovering from probably some kind of trauma, they really need to sit and hear the Gospel in a bunch of different languages quite as much as they need to hear where their next meal is coming from, and whether they'll get enough antibiotics to make sure they totally kill the bugs their open wound might get, and maybe get communications to whatever far-flung family they might have to see if they're still alive. And if they need company. And stuff like that.
Room on whatever plane takes those digibibles is totally room not spent on antibiotics, water or food. Also filed under: Things that aren't helping.
