image, right: Pastor David Lane, screenshot from Right Wing Watch video

"Where are the champions of Christ to save the nation from the pagan onslaught imposing homosexual marriage, homosexual scouts, 60 million babies done to death by abortion and red ink as far as the eye can see on America? Who will wage war for the Soul of America and trust the living God to deliver the pagan gods into our hands and restore America to her Judeo-Christian heritage and re-establish a Christian culture?

... You ask, "What is our goal?" To wage war to restore America to our Judeo-Christian heritage with all of our might and strength that God will give us. You ask, "What is our aim?" One word only: victory..." - Pastor David Lane, 2013 World Net Daily op-ed titled "Wage War To Restore a Christian America".

Like the monarch in Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale, The Emperor's New Clothes, the theocratic ambitions of the organizers of the big Christian Right rally in Baton Rouge last weekend, are more than a little obvious.

In my preview of the event, I noted that it was in some ways a reprise of the giant prayer rally organized by many of the same people for many of the same reasons in Houston in 2011.  

The 2011 event served as the de facto launch of Gov. Rick Perry's ill fated campaign for president, and turned out some 30,000 people. The Baton Rouge event, according to local press accounts, rallied only three or four thousand to the cause. The Baton Rogue prayer rally was as political as the 2011 event. This time, the candidates and the turnout were different.

When I obtained a post from a private email listserv of gun control advocates, I wasn't sure what to do with it. Then I heard that an intense discussion had broken out and that it was spilling out onto social media, and spreading like a western wildfire. Prochoice gun safety advocates were not happy about the promotion of an anti-abortion leader by Everytown for Gun Safety, the national organization founded by billionaire Republican Michael Bloomberg.

It all started when Kirsten Moore, Director of Partnerships at Everytown posted an op-ed to a private listserv of gun control advocates.  That was not unusual, but the op-ed was authored by anti-abortion militant Rob Schenck who linked gun safety with the anti-abortion cause in a hair raising fashion and not too subtly invoking 9/11 and the twin towers:

"Twin terrors - Abortion, gunfire"

There is a big Christian Right rally in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Saturday, January 24th. The event, called The Response, is intended to, among other things, recharge the batteries of the Christian Right going into the next election season and to encourage conservative Christian clergy to run for office.

I have published a short primer about the event, at Political Research Associates.  Here is an excerpt:

The David Pakman Show recently rebroadcast this "Classic Interview"  with Rachel Tabachnick in which they discuss her groundbreaking work on the New Apostolic Reformation, Dominion Theology, and the connection with Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX). It was originally broadcast on December 19, 2011.

In which I discuss Religious Freedom Day on the David Pakman Show. I said, among other things, "The idea of religious freedom was one of the most progressive and revolutionary ideas in a revolutionary age:  The Age of Enlightenment."

As is the annual custom, Mr. Obama issued the the Presidential Proclamation for Religious Freedom Day, 2015. I have republished the whole thing after the jump, but I wanted to highlight one part that I think gets at the heart of the matter (before he wanders off into how religious freedom figures into national security.)

The First Amendment prohibits the Government from establishing religion. It protects the right of every person to practice their faith how they choose, to change their faith, or to practice no faith at all, and to do so free from persecution and fear.

 

The part about changing your mind is crucial. We tend to think of orthodoxies when it comes to religion, but in fact, even many of the most conservative members of any given religious body, often thinks dynamically about what they believe and why, even if it is not always convenient to discuss it with others. (If this were not so, there would not be so many schisms.)  The freedom to believe as we will, means the right to change our minds.

Today is Religious Freedom Day!

And there are ways to participate on social media on this, the most important national Day that most of us have never heard of.

If this is new to you, here is the short of what you need to know:  

Religious Freedom Day was enacted by Congress in 1991, and been commemorated by presidential proclamation annually since 1992. And not much else happens. But this year, as you'll see below, more than a dozen organizations recently decided to seize the Day -- to begin to reassert the true meaning of religious freedom and to more aggressively challenge the distortions issued by the Christian Right.

"Silencing Dissent: How Biased Civil Rights Policies Stifle Dialogue on Israel" is a new article in Tikkun Magazine, (January 2015) by Chip Berlet and Maria Planansky.

Here are  the top paragraphs:

Outrage over Israeli policies toward Palestinians has continued to swell the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). In response, critics of BDS are spreading rhetoric that is corroding support for civil liberties, civil rights, and free expression of ideas in the United States.

Controversies over U.S. policies in the Middle East are not new, but the current stance of some institutions claiming to speak for the U.S. Jewish community, combined with biased federal policies targeting anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses, raises the specter of not just blacklists and political witch hunts but de facto government censorship.

Here are the Recommendations from the Report "Constructing Campus Conflict: Antisemitism and Islamophobia on U.S. College Campuses, 2007-2011: published by Political Research Associates, 2014

Recommendations

Work To Reduce Interpersonal Islamophobia and Antisemitism on Campus

Create settings where students of Muslim, Jewish, Christian and other faiths can create bonds based on personal stories, specifically around religious and cultural rather than political concerns. This is the strategy being used by Eboo Patel at Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), and by the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions at the University of Wisconsin (LISAR).

Create frameworks for shared inquiry in and out of the classroom, where existing perspectives can be interrogated with more nuance and sensitivity.

What did Jefferson and 18th century evangelicals have in common?  If you guessed separation of church and state, you can go to the head of the class.  Historian John Ragosta's class anyway.

Ragosta, an expert on Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, is also an advocate for wider celebration of Religious Freedom Day -- the national day designated by Congress in 1991 to commemorate the enactment of one of the most important advances in human and civil rights in the history of Western civilization. Given its significance, it is strange that about all that happens is that president issues an annual Proclamation.  But as we have in past years at Talk to Action, we will join the president (and many others soon to be announced) including bloggers at Daily Kos celebrating Religious Freedom Day.

 

This piece originally appeared as an op-ed at LGBTQ Nation.

Something remarkable happened in the run up to the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Hobby Lobby vs. Burwell. A movement was born. A potentially historic movement that does not yet know its name -- but which may yet bring the light of hope to a darkening political landscape.