Banned Books Week is being celebrated this year from Sept. 21-27.  Yes its time for the annual celebration of the Freedom to Read, sponsored by the American Library Association and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression as well as American Booksellers Association, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of American Publishers, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Freedom to Read Foundation, National Association of College Stores, National Coalition Against Censorship, National Council of Teachers of English, PEN American Center, and Project Censored. It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.  Click here to learn about ways to participate.

National Voter Registration Day is Tuesday, September 23. It is being organized by more than 1,900 groups in a coordinated field, technology and media effort to increase voter registration. Participants include the AFL-CIO, NAACP, National Organization for Women, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Rock the Vote and the YWCA.  See this report on Daily Kos for details and a useful list of ways to participate. For even more info, see this report from Best of the Left.

The Ice Bucket Challenge has been an outstanding success in raising both awareness and research money needed to find a cure for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) . As of September 10, 2014 the ALS Association has raised $111.6 million in Ice Bucket Challenge donations. The wildly popular charity stunt captured the hearts of millions of people last summer bringing together former presidents, movie stars and ordinary citizens in an effort to create a greater awareness necessary to cure a hideous muscle disease. They did it by pouring ice water over themselves and then challenging friends and neighbors to do the same.

[note to readers: this is an excerpt from my first installment in a Twocare.org/Center Against Religious Extremism series that will examine extensive ties - both financial, organizational, and ideological - between the community of philanthropists, evangelical leaders, and Christian organizations that revolve around the event known as The Gathering and evangelical promotion of anti-gay hatred and anti-LGBT rights activism on a global scale, from Uganda to Russia. For Twocare.org's extensive coverage of the World Congress of Families, see here]

Reading Edith Beer's book, The Nazi Officer's Wife, I ran across an interesting account of her fake marriage license.  She married a Nazi officer during World War II in Germany.  She was hiding out in what she called the "U-Boat" scene.  That is, hiding out amidst the enemy and no one knew they were there.  She goes for the license and the Nazi official asks the author several questions about her heritage.  She was asked if any of her parents were Jews.  Next the clerk wanted to know if any grandparents were Jews.  The focus of the authorization of marriage became the background check to see if there was any Jewish blood in the family.

The Neo-Confederate movement has been trying to jump start itself of late.  It has been an especially heady few months for the League of the South, a theocratic, White nationalist group based in Killen, Alabama

Some of its leading members have been running for office in Maryland.  And League president Michael Hill has gone so far as to call for the formation of paramilitary death squads. He now claims that he wasn't doing any such thing, but that if he were, we would just have to find out for ourselves. (We, being liberal "bedwetters.")

Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis for the American Family Association (AFA) is like a demented, right-wing geyser: You can count on him to pop off regularly.

Fischer's latest eruption is quite a doozy. In a Sept. 10 column provocatively titled, "No atheist should be permitted to serve in the U.S. military," Fischer argues that, well, no atheist should be permitted to serve in the U.S. military.

In the Fall of 2011, there was an extraordinary -- and extraordinarily scurrilous -- wave of criticism aimed at those of us who had written about dominionism. Conservative columnists from The Washington Post, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, among others, were deployed against a wide range of journalists, authors, bloggers and liberal Christian ministers and theologians.

That effort apparently stopped after several of us called the smear campaign what it was, and asked Jim Wallis -- who had joined in the frenzy -- to reconsider. He never replied, but the smear campaign stopped. But not before an aide to dominionist leader Peter Wagner, had called on his followers to pray that God "silence" us. Suffice to say it was a contentious and often confusing time.

Contributing to the confusion about dominionism has been the false assertion that that moderate and liberal Christians have been soft on dominionism. People who made that assertion, clearly had not been reading the work of Chip Berlet, who has not only been one of those who defined and popularized the term, but is an active progressive Christian and a contributor to the book I edited, Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. They also clearly just not been reading about dominionism. Indeed, dominionism has been a concern of many Christian thinkers, two of whom authored detailed essays on the subject right here at Talk to Action. Their work is as relevant today as it was when it was written. So I am reposting a piece from September 04, 2011 that highlighted their work. (Some of the links may no longer be live, but there is more than enough here to make it worth the time.) -- FC

Leaders of Religious Right groups are fond of telling us that if we elect more fundamentalist Christians to office, we'll have less corruption. Biblical literalists must be more ethical, right?

That claim is looking a little thin in light of recent events in Virginia. Yesterday, Robert F. McDonnell, the state's former governor, was found guilty on 11 counts related to public corruption, conspiracy and bribery. His wife, Maureen, whom this "family values" politican tried willingly to throw under the bus, was found guilty on nine charges.

Over the weekend, Americans United Senior Litigation Counsel Greg Lipper took part in a panel discussion about the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision at a meeting of the American Political Science Association here in Washington, D.C.

This report by the Christian Post is worth a read. Reporter Napp Nazworth focuses mainly on the comments made by Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Tocqueville associate professor of religion and public life at the University of Notre Dame. Read his comments and be afraid - or simply amused. (Do note that this story gets one thing wrong. It reads as if Lipper compared opposition to birth control to racial segregation. Actually, he compared religious opposition to racial integration to the current religious opposition to LGBT integration.)

I have written a great deal in the past few years about the odd phenomenon of Catholic Neo-Confederatism.  Let's add one more name to the pantheon.

Thomas DiLorenzo is a man of contradictions. He teaches university level economics yet he is best known as an avatar of Neo-Confederatism. He teaches at a Catholic university, but subscribes to economic views that have more in common with the libertarianism of Ayn Rand than anything in Catholic social teaching. He is also a leading loather of Abraham Lincoln and a contemporary advocate of nullification and secession -- two zombie ideas that are being resurrected as a means of religious oppression -- often in the name of religious liberty.

Back in the 1990s, some Religious Right activists in Virginia got the bright idea to begin attacking America's public libraries. The idea was to demonize public libraries in the same way that public schools have been successfully demonized by fundamentalists in some parts of the country.

The effort, dubbed "Family Friendly Libraries," fell flat. Americans simply weren't interested in allowing a bunch of far-right Christian fundamentalists to determine what books they or their children could read.

St. Louis Police Officer Dan Page drew national attention when he shoved CNN's Don Lemon during a broadcast of the protests in Ferguson, and again, just a few days later, when a speech Page gave to the St. Charles/ St. Louis Oath Keepers emerged. That speech revealed his paranoid and conspiratorial worldview, but it wasn't a one-time event. Page has been making the rounds on rightwing radio and podcasts over the last several months, including an interview with Rick Wiles on TruNews, on the John Moore Radio Show, and on Caravan to Midnight with John B. Wells.  While it would be easy to dismiss these interviews as fringe, they represent a worldview that has been mainstreaming with the help of groups like the Oath Keepers, Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), Gun Owners of America (GOA), and the John Birch Society (JBS).

Following is a short video clip of one of the segments, the link to my recent PRA article on Dan Page, and the complete audio/video from the three interviews.