One of the strategies used by attack agents, spin doctors, and manipulators of reality is to take your organization's weaknesses and project them onto those who dare to use them against you.

This is irony at its most deleterious - accusing your accuser of those things, which, if brought into the light of day, would bring discredit and ruin upon your own organization.

Consider the positions of the Institute On Religion and Democracy Concerning : Global Warming and the Environment, Same Sex Marriage, the Middle East, War and Peace, reproductive rights. And, consider how much the IRD's voice gets projected in mainstream media. Now, consider these groups whose interests the IRD attacks: Environmental Groups, Women's Rights Groups, Reproductive Rights Groups, Peace Groups, LGBT Rights Groups ; The interests of all five of those political blocs are being effectively attacked by a single Washington DC agency and yet there never has either a public or a private ( to the best of my knowledge ) conversation among representatives of those groups, and Mainline Protestant and progressive Catholic groups, about how to work together, to oppose the effort of the IRD and its allies, and to advance common goals. Am I wrong on that ? I hope I am and fear I'm not.

You wouldn't know it to read the mainstream media, (or to listen to those who wring their hands over the alleged efforts by as yet unnamed secularists to drive also unnamed people of faith from public life) that the rightist Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), the inside the beltway, neoconservative agency has waged a war of attrition against the historic mainline protestant churches in the U.S. You wouldn't know about the ways the agency and its satellite groups have spent millions of dollars to destablize and even dismember these churches like they were a third world country whose government was disliked by the United States. You wouldn't know that the group has been bankrolled by the leading strategic funders of the conservative movement and the religious right such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson, and cheer-led by The Washington Times newspaper, which is owned, controlled and bankrolled by the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

So when there is news about the IRD, the slant on the story can be most peculiar. Today was no exception.

Yesterday, seven Virginia Episcopal churches including two of the largest and wealthiest in the American Episcopal Communion voted to break away and, as a New York Times story written prior to the vote put it, "report to the powerful archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality who supports legislation in his country that would make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant." Jim Naughton, former Washington Post and NYT reporter and author of a study on how covert right wing agencies are undermining the Episcopal Church, noted "this no longer seems to be a debate about the proper role of gay and lesbians Christians in the Church, but about the moral legitimacy of rolling back human rights for minorities" ; in fact, the Virginia Episcopal Churches had voted to put themselves under an Archbishop, Peter Akinola, who supports Nigerian anti-gay legislation even more extreme than the pre-WW2 anti-gay laws of Hitler's Nazi Party, including the notorious 1935 revisions to Paragraph 175, that preceded the Gay Holocaust ( see Nazi Persecution Of Homosexuals 1933 To 1945 from the US Holocaust Museum, and the extensive Wikipedia entry on the subject. )

(The Catholic Right: Twelfth in a Series)

Thomas Monaghan wants to transform our society.  Part of how he is going about it, as I reported in the last installment of this series that, the Dominos Pizza King is using his vast wealth to try to transform the basis of American Jurisprudence from the principles of the Enlightenment to one based upon an ultra-Orthodox Catholic vision of natural law principles.

On June 6, 1970 the Society for a Christian Commonwealth, which published Triumph, and the "Sons of Thunder" under the leadership of (Frederick "Fritz") Wilhelmsen and (L . Brent) Bozell, conducted "the Action for Life," which was probably the first anti-abortion demonstration in the United States. Fritz, students from the University of Dallas, and others appeared on the scene dressed like Spanish Carlists, or requetes, with red berets, khaki shirts with Sacred Heart patches, and rosaries around their necks. Wilhelmsen, brandishing a twelve-inch crucifix, read from Matthew 25 and the Book of Revelation, warning America that it must someday face God and receive judgment for the killing of its children.

                                               Donald J. D'Elia, Citizen of Rome

Let us return to where we began:

"The great tragedy of Spain was that in the nineteenth century the working masses apostatized from the Church, as Pope Plus X once remarked.  And, it is well to remember, it was poverty, destitution and injustice which made them apostatize. They got to hate the Church because they hated the friends of the Church, who exploited them and whom the Church did nothing to rebuke or correct.  The words of Pope Leo XIII 45 years ago went unheeded and his great encyclical Rerum Novarum was neglected.

The lesson of all this for us is that we should meet the evil of Communism not merely by denouncing it, and not at all by stigmatizing as communistic all fundamental reforms.  We must attack the main causes of Communism.  Among these are poverty, insecurity and inequitable distribution of wealth and income.  Failure to remove these evils will do more to strengthen Communism than all the propaganda and all the "boring-in" methods of the organized Communist movement."

                             Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., 1936

As you read this, the House Republican Study Committee is working on a piece of legislation that will thrill the dominionists. Move over feds and make room for the churches to govern!

Part II of series on dominionism and the role of the federal government

GOP congressional leaders may bring to a vote within weeks a proposal that could literally wipe out any federal program that protects public health or the environment--or for that matter civil rights, poverty programs, auto safety, education, affordable housing, Head Start, workplace safety or any other activity targeted by anti-regulatory forces. Here's the full article.

How did we end up in such a house-cleaning frenzy?  No surprise. The Texas GOP Platform has been calling for a serious spring cleaning for years. Such an ax-job lies at the foundation of dominionism. The role of the federal government may not be the sexiest topic, but we'd better pay attention. The federal government is reduced to a few basic functions, and the churches take over the rest.

There has never been just one civil rights movement; there have been numerous movements: for Jews and other religious minorities, for blacks, for women, for Japanese-Americans after World War II, and for gays since approximately the 1950s.

Nevertheless, it has become a mantra among the religious right that certain groups are "hijacking" the one solitary civil rights movement. Meanwhile, in the small universe of web sites that advertise the existence of "former homosexuals," there are many exgay sites that join the religious right in promoting antigay discrimination -- but few sites that offer sound, clinically proven advice to people who strive to overcome or moderate unwanted sexual attractions and behaviors.

The year-old exgay web site WeAreThinking.com is marketed via Wikipedia as "Ex Gay Political PAC, Focused on Ex Gay Civil Rights." But WeAreThinking has no declared owners, operators, or sponsors, no specific entity to accept responsibilty for its content. In short, the public is not intended to know the identity of "We" in the site name "We Are Thinking."

Here's another irony: The site does not propose an exgay civil rights movement; it undermines existing civil-rights movements.

[ editor : Talk To Action guest contributor Mike Airhart is the editor of Ex Gay Watch ]

Perhaps I'm too busy to look.  Maybe I'm in denial, like so many other people.  I have four kids and (until recently) two careers, so I have a better excuse than others.  But I try to pay attention, and what I've seen disturbs me.

Until very recently our little corner of the United Methodist Church has seemed to escape the kind of divisive politics other Christian denominations and organizations within the UMC have encountered.  I am largely unfamiliar with the aggressive tactics others have seen in the church over the past few years.  I had never heard of a church takeover until I presented my film, "Theologians Under Hitler," to the Georgia chapter of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship last November.  At the breakfast gathering a pastor from Dalton, Georgia was describing the process used by a group that, over a period of several years, effectively gained power in that church and replaced the moderate pastor with a fundamentalist.

I was astounded.

The new video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces contains some of the most vile anti-religious, anti-Catholic bigotry marketed as entertainment for young adults.

William Donohue and his organization, The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, claim to speak against acts of anti-Catholic bigotry. Yet, neither Donohue nor his League for Religious and Civil Rights has uttered anything even remotely resembling a protest. Apparently his desire to speak out against injustice has its limits.  

One would think that the Catholic League would be extremely upset about a video game that is set in post-Rapture New York City, where Roman Catholics are among those "left behind," described as non-believers and must choose to either become born again Christians or perish at gunpoint....

In late February, 2006, John Bryson Chane, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post. In it, he revealed to the WaPo's readership one of the many awful consequences that decades of conflict have brought to the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality. Just days before, one of Chane's fellow bishops in the Anglican Communion, the Primate of All Nigeria and leader of the Anglican Communion's largest Province, Archbishop Peter Akinola, endorsed legislation that would ban most basic civil rights for gay and lesbian Nigerians, and enforce that ban with a 5 year prison sentence.

The Anglican Communion is in crisis mode, struggling to salvage a broad though loosely affiliated organization from self-destruction under the pull of two strong forces. On the one hand, northern Anglicans in the US, Canada, and the UK are committed to a liberal stand on homosexuality, and to a Gospel of Inclusion (i.e., "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You"). On the other hand, the Provinces of the Global South, along with splinter organizations in the North (see the American Anglican  Council, or AAC, and the Anglican Communion Network, or Network) are "orthodox" on the issue of homosexuality, and consider their purpose to be far more evangelical than that of the Episcopal Church, USA (ECUSA), or of other Northern Anglicans. The Provinces of the Global South claim moral authority because of their great and increasing numbers, while parish registries in ECUSA and elsewhere are stable or in decline.

[Image of Archbishop Peter Akinola, left, and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, right -- photo credit Jim Rosenthal/Anglican World]