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Attack dogs
After Foxman's remarks, Feder not only held a press conference with Bill Donahue, president of the ultraconservative Catholic League (Donahue called Foxman's speech a "morally reprehensible" attempt to "demonize Christians," while Feder went further below the belt, denouncing Foxman as "hysterical" and "paranoid"), but he wrote a syndicated column, picked up by many Christian publications, in which he spoke glowingly of Christian right efforts to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings and ban same-sex marriage. Just for good measure, Feder trashed Foxman as a "poster boy for militant secularism" who opposes "Judeo-Christian values." Feder is not alone. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, another friend of the Christian right, piled on. Lapin runs a small group called Toward Tradition that is, along with the Republican Jewish Coalition, one of a tiny roster of Jewish groups that have gained entrée to the Christian right inner circle. "His specialty," writes Hanna Rosin in the Washington Post, "is finding support in the Torah for what turns out to be the current Republican platform: lower taxes, decreased regulation, pro-traditional family policies." In the Feder vein, Lapin announced that Foxman's "intemperate denunciations...threaten to destroy friendships between Jews and Christians." Conservative Jewish columnist Dennis Prager frequently plays defense for the Christian right, too; though he hasn't gone after Foxman this time around, he did write a column recently in which he defended James Dobson for evoking Nazi medical experiments to explain his moral objections to embryonic stem cell research--and attacked Foxman for daring to criticize Dobson for making light of Holocaust atrocities. But Feder's strategy is particularly destructive: he tars anyone who has political disagreements with the Christian right as a hater. Last April, he even founded a new organization, Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation, whose mission statement asserts that "attacks on Christians are motivated by hatred for the values they espouse." At a press conference announcing the organization's launch, Feder said that when senators oppose a judicial nominee committed to overturning Roe v. Wade it's tantamount to calling for the complete disenfranchisement of all believers. Feder's goal is to shut down vital political debate by demonizing anyone who opposes the Christian right agenda as a religious bigot.
Let's face it: the Christian right is a political movement now, not just a religious one. They run state Republican Party committees, they run candidates for office, they put initiatives on state ballots, they lobby, they campaign. It's fair game to criticize their political agenda.
Attack dogs | 8 comments (8 topical, 0 hidden)
Attack dogs | 8 comments (8 topical, 0 hidden)
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