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Tribal Warfare in America
A 30-year-old book by a progressive journalist finds that the passions of reformers can sometimes betray a contempt for the common sense of ordinary people. Sound familiar?

In the fall of 1974, in Kanawha County, W. Va., Christian fundamentalists enraged at the imposition of "blasphemous" textbooks in the public schools demolished a wing of a school board building with fifteen sticks of dynamite. When the board insisted on keeping the books in the curriculum, homes were bombed and school buses shot at. "Jesus Wouldn't Have Read Them," read one of the slogans of a movement whose leader, a preacher, would soon face charges of conspiracy to bomb two elementary schools.

Into this whirlwind stepped Paul Cowan, a shaggy-haired, bespectacled, left-wing New York Jew, trying to make sense of why he felt sympathy for the side that was laying the dynamite....

...The people responsible for the textbooks were bureaucrats who wrote blithely of pedagogy's power to "induce changes ... in the behavior of the 'culturally lost' of Appalachia," and identified teachers as state-designated "change agents" and schools as "the experimental center, and the core of this design." Nowadays the arrogance of this formulation is as grating to us as a chalkboard screech. Not then. It was an era when the language of universally applicable liberal enlightenment flew trippingly off cosmopolitan tongues. Which was why it came as such a shock when the "culturally lost" proved to have ideas of their own – that their culture had inherent dignity and value, and that textbooks suggesting that Christian revelation was on a par with Greek myth were, as protesters put it, "moral genocide."

It took a keen eye and an open mind to recognize that the cosmopolitans were pursuing a form of class warfare. Cowan noticed how urban and suburban professionals in Kanawha County – "Hillers," in local parlance – spoke nervously in private of how familiarity with names like Mailer and Baldwin would get their precious darlings into Harvard and keep them out of West Virginia Tech. The Hillers weren't about to risk having their upward climb impeded by the "Creekers," poor residents in the hollows who wanted "to protest corruption," as one suburbanite told Cowan, but didn't "even know how to spell that word." But some Creekers were motivated by similar dreams of upward mobility. Their version of it was just incompatible with the Hillers' impositions – like the kid who told Cowan "he wanted to go to West Virginia Tech, to be an engineer," and he felt he needed "a good basic education" to do it.

Dynamite wasn't the answer. But neither was a kind of cultural imperialism indifferent to the fact that 81 percent of the district opposed the textbooks. It was, in a word, complicated. Certainly more complicated than the portraits other journalists were creating for sneering consumption back home: death threats, double-barreled shotguns, Onward Christian Soldiers. The futile last stand of yokels against the inevitable march of progress.

It was at a time when, certainly to the left, local cultures were of keenest interest as obstacles federal judges eradicated in order to deliver social justice. But what Paul Cowan understood long before anyone else was that there was a new kind of story to tell about such conflicts: that attempts to "coax people into the melting pot" had costs as well as benefits, and campaigns to replace "our periods with your question marks," as one Creeker put it with aphoristic intelligence, must not simply be imposed by fiat. Cowan understood how "often, people I might once have written off as reactionaries were fighting to preserve their culture and their psychological and physical turf," and that this new argument over the meaning of democracy was defining the next frontier of political conflict itself. That America had tribes, and that sometimes – often – they would come to blows.

We call those fights the "culture wars" now, and we have a more richly variegated vocabulary to describe the Hillers and the Creekers: red state and blue state. Redneck and yuppie. New Class and white working class. "Evangelical" and "liberal." We describe our nation's dueling dreads over such concepts with a casualness that once marked cocktail party chatter about the inevitability of consensus liberalism. Writing in the 1970s, however, Cowan had no such clichés to lean on. He had to figure it out for himself. He did so brilliantly – eyes open, with a courage I can scarcely believe. He traveled all over the country: to Boston during the busing wars; to Forest Hills, Queens, where he was shocked at the racism of immigrant Jews fighting the construction of a low-income housing project; to the southernmost border of the United States, where the sacrifices Mexicans were making to preserve their families looked like anarchy to the Americans patrolling the border with shotguns. Cowan's reporting from these places left him "with a profound respect for the stability of religion, of ceremony, of family life: of customs I'd once regarded as old-fashioned and bourgeois." His travels also found him realizing that "those same longings, translated into political terms, have produced the vicious fights I've witnessed for the past seven years and recorded in this book." His agonized sensitivity to battlefields then barely emergent makes for one of the most remarkable books I have ever read by any journalist....

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Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did
As Shakespeare once wrote, they have their exits and their entries. Between about 1975 and 1990, following the US defeat in Vietnam, military history was extremely popular among the US Armed Forces. After 1991, largely as a result of what many people considered the “stellar” performance of those Forces against Saddam Hussein, it went out of fashion; after all, if we were able to do that well there was not much point in studying the mistakes our predecessors made. Now that comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq have suddenly become very fashionable indeed, history is rushing right back at us. Here, I wish to address the differences and the similarities between the two wars by describing Vietnam as it was experienced by one man, Moshe Dayan....

...Some people claim that the US won the War in Vietnam, to which I can only say that I strongly disagree. Others argue that Vietnam differed from Iraq, saying that it was essentially a conventional war that was lost because the American civilian leadership failed to provide its Armed Forces with proper strategic direction. It is of course true that there are considerable differences between the two. Still, recalling Dayan’s observations, I think there are three main reasons why the similarities are more important.

First, according to Dayan, the most important operational problem the US Forces were facing was intelligence, in other words the inability to distinguish the enemy from either the physical surroundings or the civilian population. Had intelligence been available then their enormous superiority in every kind of military hardware would have enabled them to win the War easily enough. In its absence, most of the blows they delivered – including no fewer than six million tons of bombs dropped – hit empty air. All they did was make the enemy disperse and merge into the civilian population, thus making it even harder to find him. Worst of all, lack of accurate intelligence meant that the Americans kept hitting noncombatants by mistake. They thus drove huge segments of the population straight into the arms of the Viet Cong; nothing is more conducive to hatred than the sight of relatives and friends being killed.

Second, as Dayan saw clearly enough, the campaign for hearts and minds did not work. Many of the figures being published about the progress it was making turned out to be bogus, designed to set the minds of the folks at home at rest. In other cases any progress laboriously made over a period of months was undone in a matter of minutes as the Viet Cong attacked, destroying property and killing “collaborators.” Above all, the idea that the Vietnamese people wanted to become Americanized was an illusion. All the vast majority really wanted was to be left alone and get on with their lives.

The third and most important reason why I think Vietnam is relevant to the situation in Iraq is because the Americans found themselves in the unfortunate position where they were beating down on the weak. To quote Dayan: “any comparison between the two armies… was astonishing. On the one hand there was the American Army, complete with helicopters, an air force, armor, electronic communications, artillery, and mind-boggling riches; to say nothing of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, and equipment of all kinds. On the other there were the [North Vietnamese troops] who had been walking on foot for four months, carrying some artillery rounds on their backs and using a tin spoon to eat a little ground rice from a tin plate.”

That, of course, was precisely the problem. In private life, an adult who keeps beating down on a five year old – even such a one as originally attacked him with a knife – will be perceived as committing a crime; therefore he will lose the support of bystanders and end up by being arrested, tried and convicted. In international life, an armed force that keeps beating down on a weaker opponent will be seen as committing a series of crimes; therefore it will end up by losing the support of its allies, its own people, and its own troops. Depending on the quality of the forces – whether they are draftees or professionals, the effectiveness of the propaganda machine, the nature of the political process, and so on – things may happen quickly or take a long time to mature. However, the outcome is always the same. He (or she) who does not understand this does not understand anything about war; or, indeed, human nature.

In other words, he who fights against the weak – and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed – and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however, advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did. Namely, with the last US troops fleeing the country while hanging on to their helicopters’ skids.

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Free Republic Satire

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Freepers promote the New American Values
The God-fearing patriotic folks at the Free Republic have come to the defense of the heroic Marine who executed the wounded, defenseless man in a Fallujah house of worship. They've identified the real criminal in the affair, the reporter, Kevin Sites.

Can the Pentagon charge Kevin Sites?

Was not the reporter under the duty to hand over this tape to military authorities,under the rules of imbeds? If that's the case then strong measures should be taken against Sites.
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I sincerely hope... But I'd rather the Marines dish out the justice.
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Turn Sites over to the terrorist.
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That tape should have gone to DOD for vetting first!!
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No need for anything overt. Unfortunate things happen in combat zones, and if the reporter fails to hear someone yell "Sniper!!", well, c'est la guerre.
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The US attorney general may be able to charge him with sedition.
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Someone should've deserted him right before sunset in Fallujah, or some such treatment.
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I wish. This guy Sites shouldn't walk away from this unscathed. Red America wants justice.
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If the government won't police the press there will come a day when the people will.
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It better charge Sites, that treasonous bastard!

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Michael Savage is on fire over this issue.
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He's an effin traitor. He is aiding the enemy. He should be tried and killed.
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He sure behaved like a Judas didn't he? He certainly is doing the leg work for our Islamofascist enemies
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Kevin Sites is a traitor. He shouldn't be allowed to get away with this
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The Constitution was written for the common man and for Christian's sense of Justice. Common law represents God's law. American Justice may seem rough and crude to you, but it is based on godly liberties. Sites is in a WAR ZONE. He has aided the enemy. If he cared about what was going he should have ran back to the brass...not to MSNBC. He's either looking for a pulitzer or he's effin traitor. Either way...he's done.

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American Heroes...
I'm feeling sick- literally. I can't get the video Al-Jazeera played out of my head

...What was I supposed to tell them?" He asked, an hour later, after we had sent his two daughters to help their grandmother in the kitchen. "What am I supposed to tell them- 'Yes darling, they killed him- the Americans killed a wounded man; they are occupying our country, killing people and we are sitting here eating, drinking and watching tv'?" He shook his head, "How much more do they have to see? What is left for them to see?"

They killed a wounded man. It's hard to believe. They killed a man who was completely helpless- like he was some sort of diseased animal. I had read the articles and heard the stories of this happening before- wounded civilians being thrown on the side of the road or shot in cold blood- but to see it happening on television is something else- it makes me crazy with anger.

And what will happen now? A criminal investigation against a single Marine who did the shooting? Just like what happened with the Abu Ghraib atrocities? A couple of people will be blamed and the whole thing will be buried under the rubble of idiotic military psychologists, defense analysts, Pentagon officials and spokespeople and it will be forgotten. In the end, all anyone will remember is that a single Marine shot and killed a single Iraqi 'insurgent' and it won't matter anymore.

It's typical American technique- every single atrocity is lost and covered up by blaming a specific person and getting it over with. What people don't understand is that the whole military is infested with these psychopaths. In this last year we've seen murderers, torturers and xenophobes running around in tanks and guns. I don't care what does it: I don't care if it's the tension, the fear, the 'enemy'… it's murder. We are occupied by murderers. We're under the same pressure, as Iraqis, except that we weren't trained for this situation, and yet we're all expected to be benevolent and understanding and, above all, grateful. I'm feeling sick, depressed and frightened. I don't know what to say anymore… they aren't humans and they don't deserve any compassion.

So why is the world so obsessed with beheadings? How is this so very different? The difference is that the people who are doing the beheadings are extremists… the people slaughtering Iraqis- torturing in prisons and shooting wounded prisoners- are "American Heroes". Congratulations, you must be so proud of yourselves today.

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The genius of you Americans is that you never make any clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that leave us scratching our heads wondering if we might possibly have missed something.
-- Gamel Abdel Nasser

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An Open Letter to Jim Wallis and the Sojourners Movement
...I must say that I could not agree more with what you have written – and wish only that you agreed with it, too. Yes, you are speaking about the prisoners at Guantanamo and men like Jose Padilla, who are basically being held incommunicado without being charged with anything. But you are not alone in your denunciations of these acts of government lawlessness; both James Bovard and Jacob Hornberger have written eloquent – and intellectually consistent – articles on this same subject and, unlike what I read in Sojourners, they do so while demonstrating that the all-powerful state is the culprit behind these acts.

There is a real difference between what Bovard and Hornberger write and what you put in Sojourners, however. You may write about the rule of law, but you do not believe it, or, to put it another way, you want rule of law for people like Padilla, but not for the Martha Stewarts of this world.

A few years ago, in the wake of the Enron scandals, you had a field day. The problem, you wrote, was the lack of government regulation, as though the securities industry were a laissez-faire wonderland. You were in your element, since the central theme of Sojourners from day one (including the days when you were in Chicago and called your publication Post-American) has been anti-capitalism. When Janet Jackson bared her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl, you immediately blamed capitalism; when refugees were fleeing Vietnam in the late 1970s, many perishing in the open seas, you blamed capitalism and condemned the refugees for leaving and declared that they were nothing more than "consumerists" who were "in search of a fix." You said those words; I have not put them into your mouth.

You see, I agree with your assessment of what the Bush Administration is doing in Iraq, and with your call for rule of law. However, where were you when the government was passing laws that criminalized free speech (McCain-Feingold) and eviscerated the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments of the U.S. Constitution (Sarbanes-Oxley)? When McCain-Feingold passed, Scott Harshbarger wrote in your publication: "Passage is a triumph of faith in our democracy, our government by the people. We all showed we can win a fight, even against the concentrated power of great wealth."

(By the way, Harshbarger was a prosecutor in Massachusetts and gained fame by his wrongful and malicious prosecutions of people falsely accused of sexually molesting children. Harvey Silverglate, who is a friend of liberty was involved with some of those cases; you may want to contact him to hear what he has to say about Mr. Harshbarger. I can give you his email and his website address if you would like. Mr. Harshbarger apparently does not believe in rule of law, so you can understand why I become suspicious when you give a man like that space in your publication.)

Yes, McCain-Feingold managed to impose the rule of the impervious state over the rule of law, and you treated it as a triumph of theological Truth. And what about your reaction to the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley? Since you claim to champion the rule of law, I would suspect that you would have seen through this as a scheme to destroy rule of law.

Oh, sorry, I was mistaken. In reaction to that law and its anti-Constitutional components, you declared: "Amen to that. Corporate CEOs, no less than everyone else, have a responsibility to the common good, not just to the bottom line." To put it another way, this goes along with your theme (and I must admit you have been consistent) that the law needs to apply one way to the wealthy and another way to the poor. Since you are fond of quoting the Bible, perhaps you should remind your readers of the truths found in Leviticus 19:15. Yes, I know you probably don’t like that verse; it says that one should neither defer to the rich nor the poor, but rather justice should operate on one standard....

...I remember when Jesse Jackson, a U.S. Presidential candidate in 1984, released his tax returns. It seems that in 1983, he and his wife earned about $115,000 of income – and gave $500 to churches and charity. In other words, the Jacksons were not willing to give of themselves in dealing with the needs of others, deferring to the welfare state instead. I make this point because you openly endorsed Jackson that year.

Of course, there is John Kerry. Yes, in the name of Christ, you basically served as a political operative for the Kerry campaign, yet I find it amusing that you were able to find a way to package your radical politics into the candidacy of an extremely wealthy person. It is interesting how you have used your pages to condemn people who started from near nothing and built large business enterprises. Remember your attacks on the founders of Amway? Yes, Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel are wealthy men who also claim to confess Christ; that was unacceptable, you wrote, as the Bible says people should not amass great wealth.

Yet, Kerry lives on millions and millions of dollars that other people earned, being that all of his wealth either comes from inheritance or from his current spouse and ex-wife. He and Mrs. Kerry own five mansions and a personal jet, and live lives of unimaginable luxury. Yet, according to you, he was an advocate for the poor and someone we should emulate. No, you are not a prophet, just a political operative....

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The Pharisees line up to cast their stones at gay partners
This past Tuesday in Jacksonville, the Florida Baptist Convention voted to support a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The Baptists want the Florida Constitution to state that marriage is "the union between a man and a woman and is the God-ordained building block of the family and the bedrock of society."

"The church is the voice of morality," declared the sponsor of this resolution, the Rev. Jay Dennis of Lakeland.

The voice of morality!

I have no quarrel with the Baptists being the voice of morality, even though I was raised a Methodist. (Actually, a Wesleyan - so see, I already know how this whole thing is gonna turn out anyway.)

My only question is:

Why just this morality?

Why just this sin?

Why is this now the moral crisis that deserves to be singled out in our Constitution, the civil law of Caesar, so we can create a lesser class of citizens who don't have the same rights of civil contract?

Could it be because this is an alleged "sin" that only Those Kind of People commit, instead of equally serious sins that Decent People (even Baptists) commit every day?

If we are going to start ranking the "sins," marriage between two gay people who love each other and seek a lifelong commitment doesn't even make the Bible's best-known top-10 list.

Sure, homosexuality is called an "abomination." The Bible says so, not too far from where the Bible also says it's okay to stone your headstrong son to death, and that you'd better stay away from menstruating women.

And yes, the topic of homosexuality really freaked out St. Paul, no question. But so did a lot of stuff.

On the other hand, you know what IS right smack in the Ten Commandments?

Adultery.

Adultery! Now, that's a threat to the institution of marriage. You bet.

Half of heterosexual marriages in our society end in divorce. We heterosexuals are doing a lousy job of "defending" marriage. Adultery is a big part of the reason.

So if we're going to rewrite our Constitution to "protect" marriage from sin because it is the "God-ordained bedrock of society," then I would think that adultery would be a much better target.

The Florida Constitution should be amended to say that there can be no marriage licenses for anyone who has ever had sex outside marriage....

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Culture Warrior: Infiltrating the TNPG
I have a family member, an older cousin, who is a (once-fearsome) born again evangelical in a very over-the-top Southern Baptist Conference connected church who is becoming quietly estranged from the movement. He and his family have had social problems within the church for the last few years over money (he has a bunch of kids, 9/11 wrecked the tourism dollar here for two years solid, and he just doens't have money anymore), and it has been humiliating for them, so the family let me in on the backstories and who was safe to talk to and who wasn't in their church. This past election has turned a part time curiousity into a passionate quest, but I believe its time we started fighting this culture war with weapons and insights gathered on their turf. I know that, to some extent, the left has been in the dark previously, but I am not going to surrender to that darkness, I went and got myself a flashlight and 'went digging', and "they" are all a lot more vulnerable to counterattack that I think we have been aware of....

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Empires as Ages of Religious Ignorance
“God’s blessing is on him [George W. Bush]. It’s the blessing of heaven on the emperor.”
—Pat Robertson, evangelist

Especially now with the U.S. election results, many pundits appear rather taken aback by the increasing evidence of George W. Bush’s “faith-based” presidency—his “true-believer” confidence that if you just “believe,” all things are possible. Those who have this faith believe they can transcend the reality that circumscribes the actions of those who lack such belief.

In his October 17th New York Times article, “Without a Doubt,” Ron Suskind recounts a conversation with a senior Bush adviser in the summer of 2002, who noted that people such as Suskind were “in what we call the reality-based community.” When Suskind attempted a reply, the adviser replied: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. . . . We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This “arrogance of power” is right out of the imperial doctrine of Theodore Roosevelt, which was once called “pure act,” or in a larger sense, the “action principle” of fascism. Clearly, any empire’s administration believes that it is not constrained by the reality of the same “Law” that applies to the rest of society.

But, what is perhaps most significant in the events recounted by Suskind and in the election results is not President Bush’s confident, unquestioning faith that he is “God’s instrument,” but the blind faith of his fundamentalist followers, reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis’s descriptions in Elmer Gantry. As Suskind somewhat differently observes, one might say that George W. Bush went up the hill as a tolerant Methodist, and came down as a puritanical Calvinist.

What is less understood is that all of the great empires in history have been characterized by a decline of reason and an increase in super-naturalist faith, combined with a belief in the empire with the emperor holding God’s “mandate” on earth.

There are only three ultimate sources upon which derivative values such as “equality” can be based: supernatural law, natural law and statist, positive law. Empires tend to combine all of the three so that the emperor’s legitimacy flows from God, nature, and his position as head of State. The intertwining of religion and nationalism in the State is indeed a very powerful one.

Today’s unflinching, fundamentalist Christian support for the war in Iraq and U.S. global interventionism (regardless of the facts) was foretold earlier by anti-rational evangelical attempts to control textbooks, deny evolutionary principles, and block scientific research—sure early signs of the rise of a new “Age of Empire.” The most famous book-burning incidentally was not pro-war Lynn Cheney’s recent effort, or even Adolf Hitler’s in 1933, but rather that of the great Ch’in Emperor, Shih Wang-ti (a central figure in the recent film, Hero) of imperial China in 221 B.C.

In Rome, before it was co-opted by the State, early Christianity was in many ways a tax revolt against the Roman Empire’s increasing taxation burdens, ineptitude, and brutality. But instead of fighting taxes directly, which would have been quite fatal, the Christians (in keeping with Jesus’s teachings of the Golden Rule and peace) sought to evade the Roman taxes by steering clear of the State and taking care of their own and others. For example, by 150 A.D. in the City of Rome, Christians, and not the State, were taking care of 1,500 widows and orphans, and if you were captured or kidnapped by barbarians (much as in Iraq today) your only hope of ransom was if you were a Christian.

However, by the 4th century the growing strength of many diverse Christian groups (aided by their assimilation of older religious ideas from the East) and the decline of the Roman Empire had made it clear to the Roman State under Constantine that its survival would require formally merging with and centralizing Christianity. (Charles Freeman’s recent book, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason details the way in which this took place.)

There had already been a rise of mysticism in the Greek Empire phase of classical civilization, led by Pythagoras against Ionian empiricism, and later this same irrational process was repeated in Rome. What was left of Roman “science” declined as “faith” rose to be preserved and carried to the West later by Islamic civilization.

And as Western Civilization emerged out of the ruins of the western part of the Roman Empire, we evolved to America on the periphery of the European core—pragmatic, Calvinist, fundamentalist (certainly not showing much influence of such natural-law thinkers as Thomas Aquinas), with America believing itself an exception to history (a messianic vision often shared by the periphery).

Given that historical context, American writers began to talk as early as 1828 of some U.S. leaders as Caesars. While the Founders sought to separate the State and religion, we never quite had a theocracy, but rather an “Erastian”-type state in New England (reminiscent of the theocratic doctrines adopted in Geneva from the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus, 1524-1583), where formal governmental leaders were heavily influenced by religious ones. And so, with the growing corrupt, corporate-state empire based in America today, religionists have put themselves forward as one of the key corporate entities in that structure, and the fundamentalists have found their man in George W. Bush....

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Harassment complaints aimed at pastor
LeCLAIRE, Iowa — The pastor who got the attention of his community and the police when he posted a graphic anti-abortion sign in his yard now faces harassment complaints from two church members who say he hounded them for supporting a presidential candidate different than his.

The women accuse the Rev. Tim Groves, pastor of New Life Community Church in LeClaire, of repeatedly harassing them by telephone and in visits to their homes because they supported John Kerry and say they are distraught over feeling forced to leave the church they love.

“I pounded a nail in the first church here in town,” Helen Talbot, 80, said Tuesday as she sat surrounded by portraits of Jesus on her living room wall. “I was 6 years old and my uncle held me up on the scaffold so I could pound a nail.

“I read my Bible every day,” she said. “Now my pastor has called me a liar for telling what he did.”

In the past week, Groves has told Talbot and Clarice Mizer, 73, that they violated church policy by taking their complaints to police rather than trying to resolve them at church....

...Talbot said her relationship with the pastor has been strained in recent months, but it boiled over after a church deacon came to her house and told her to remove Kerry campaign signs from her yard. She said Groves followed up with a phone call, telling her she is not a Christian if she supports Democrats.

She said the calls from Groves continued while she was in a Davenport hospital for surgery.

Mizer said she has had similar run-ins with the pastor.

“He was continually calling me and telling me that if I was standing before God I would be condemned for voting for Kerry,” she said. “He called him (U.S. Sen Kerry, D-Mass.) a murderer.

“I asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t do it.”...

...Arrowood said state church leaders in Des Moines also are aware of problems in LeClaire and expressed concern over language in a letter sent to church members last month in which Groves referred to a meeting with the devil.

“It was Wednesday night, October 6th, that the Devil appeared to me in my living room and clearly spoke to me as you would speak to a neighbor,” he wrote in the six-page letter.

“Now I know we live in a milk toast society where we’re suppose to tolerate everybody else and we Christians are suppose to be these compassionate do-gooders who never squawk or squeak and certainly don’t get involved in any area of life except for church life,” he wrote. “Well, news flash, church, that’s a LIE from the DEVIL.”

Arrowood categorized the message as “very unusual” and said he is reading more of Groves’ writings.

Meanwhile, Talbot and Mizer said they have suffered emotionally and physically from the stress of the fallout at their beloved church.

Mizer said she worries about what will happen next.

“I’ve got to get my Life Alert key to my apartment back from the pastor,” she said. “I’ll have to ask the police to help me because he won’t like that.

“He knows I’m not a well person and when he yells at me it upsets me no end.”...

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Presbyterian Church threatened over Israel
The Presbyterian Church USA stepped up security at its headquarters and its churches after receiving a letter threatening arson attacks because of its policies in the Middle East.

The letter, received Nov. 10 at the church's Louisville headquarters, threatened to set churches on fire while people were inside in retaliation for "anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes," said Jerry Van Marter, director of the Presbyterian news service.

The letter had no return address, but it was postmarked from Queens, N.Y., Van Marter said. The letter gave a Nov. 15 deadline for the church to reverse its Middle East policies, he said.

In June, the church's General Assembly decided to begin selective divestment from corporations doing business in or with Israel.

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Video shows Marine killing wounded Iraqi
FALLUJAH, Iraq — The U.S. military is investigating the killing of a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque during combat operations here, the Defense Department told NBC News on Monday....

...Sites was present when a lieutenant from one of the units asked a Marine what had happened inside the mosque. The Marine replied that there were people inside.

“Did you shoot them?” the lieutenant asked.

“Roger that, sir,” the second Marine replied.

“Were they armed?” the lieutenant asked.

The second Marine shrugged in reply....

...One of the Marines noticed that one of the severely wounded men was still breathing. He did not appear to be armed, Sites said.

The Marine could be heard insisting: “He’s f---ing faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s f---ing dead.” Sites then watched as the Marine raised his rifle and fired into the man’s head from point-blank range.

“Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said....

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MORE DIVORCE IN RED STATES
New York Times News Service
Nov. 14, 2004
Kentucky and Bible Belt among highest of all
By Pam Belluck

BOSTON - If blue states care less about moral values, why are divorce rates
so low in the bluest of the blue states? It's a question that intrigues
conservatives, as much as it emboldens liberals.

As researchers have noted, the areas of the country where divorce rates are
highest are also often the areas where many conservative Christians live.

Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas, for example, voted overwhelmingly for
constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage. But they had three of
the highest divorce rates in 2003, according to figures from the Census
Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics.

The lowest divorce rates are largely in the blue states: the Northeast and
the upper Midwest. And the state with the lowest divorce rate was
Massachusetts, home to John Kerry, the Kennedys and same-sex marriage.

In 2003, the rate in Massachusetts was 5.7 divorces per 1,000 married
people, compared with 10.8 in Kentucky, 11.1 in Mississippi and 12.7 in
Arkansas.

"Some people are saying, 'The Bible Belt is so pro-marriage, but gee, they
have the highest divorce rates in the country,'" said Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers
University. "And there's a lot of worry in the red states about the high
rate of divorce."

The Barna Group, a California organization that studies evangelical
Christian trends, has produced two studies about divorce that found that
born-again Christians were just as likely to divorce as those who are not
born-again Christians.

One of the reports, a survey of 7,043 people in 2001, said that: "Residents
of the Northeast and West are commonly noted for their more liberal leanings
in politics and lifestyle. However, the region of the nation in which
divorce was least likely was the Northeast."

The other study, published two months ago, said that even though the
Northeast probably had a higher rate of couples living together rather than
marrying, the divorce rate would be essentially similar even if the
cohabiting couples got hitched. And it said that "relatively few divorced
Christians experienced their divorce before accepting Christ as their
savior."

George Barna, the head of the organization, said that "a lot of really nice
Christian people try to shoot down the research by saying 'Oh, they got
divorced and then they became born again.' That's just not true."

What accounts for the nation's divorce dichotomy is the subject of much
speculation.

Some people, like Bridget Maher, an analyst on marriage and family issues at
the conservative Family Research Council, attribute it almost entirely to
the religions in the different regions. "The Northeast and Midwest have high
populations of Catholics and Lutherans and they have lower divorce rates
than other Christians," she said.

Others, like Patrick F. Fagan, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation,
say it has nothing to do with differences between faiths.

"People who worship frequently, no matter what their faith, tend to divorce
much, much, much less," said Fagan, making an argument that might suggest
that Northeasterners are more devout than other people. "All this talk about
this faith, that faith, born again, not born again, to me is irrelevant."

Many experts find the explanation to be more multidimensional, tying high
divorce rates to factors like younger age of marriage, less education and
lower socioeconomic status.

"The higher the educational level, higher the occupational level, higher the
income, the less likely you are to divorce," said William V. D'Antonio, a
sociologist at the Catholic University of America, noting that Massachusetts
has the highest rate of high school and college completion. "Kids who drop
out of high school and get married very quickly suffer from the strains of
not being emotionally mature and not having the income to help weather the
difficulties of marriage."

Whitehead, who lives in Amherst, Mass., said that New England is a region
that has "more stability" than other regions. "People stay here, their
families stay here, and there's more social and family support for people, a
more communal versus individualistic culture in New England compared to the
cowboy states."

She said religion may underscore those regional differences.

"In states with lots of evangelicals, the more individualistic Protestant
religious faiths may actually also encourage more go-it-alone attitudes than
communal ones," Whitehead said. And these are also states where the culture
encourages sexual abstinence before marriage, she said.

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Bush, God and the Election
...Just as important in Bush's success is his approach to foreign policy since the attacks of September 11. Under the mantle of a "war on terrorism," the president and his administration have converged a religious fundamentalist worldview with a political agenda. It is a modern form of political fundamentalism--that is, the adaptation of a self-proclaimed conservative Christian rectitude, via sophisticated strategic communications, into political policy. This fusion of religion and politics has offered comfort to a nation gripped by anxiety about terrorism and the U.S. position in the world.

The administration's political fundamentalism is evident in a striking change in White House rhetoric. Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing, favor, and guidance; this president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world. Put simply, Bush's language suggests that he speaks not only of God and to God, but also for God. Among modern presidents, only Ronald Reagan has spoken in a similar manner--and he did so far less frequently than has Bush....

...Over the past three years, however, the administration's religious-cum-political outlook has transformed Bush's "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" policy to "Either you are with us, or you are against God." To the great detriment of American democracy and the global public, this suggestion sounds remarkably similar to that of the terrorists we are fighting.

Further, it is clear that a good number of Americans--including many of religious faith--and billions of global citizens are leery of this president's fusion of politics and religion. To cite just one example, more than 200 U.S. evangelical leaders in October signed a petition that condemns the administration's convergence of God and nation in constructing a "theology of war."

Unfortunately it is likely that the president, who spoke after his re-election about his newly earned "political capital," is not listening. As a result, we will continue to face this frightening prospect: two leaders of powerful forces, both claiming assuredly that they are performing God's will, acting so as to annihilate the other.

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Ashcroft to Judges: Stop "Second-Guessing" Bush
In his first remarks since his resignation was announced Tuesday, Ashcroft forcefully denounced what he called "a profoundly disturbing trend" among some judges to interfere in the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society.

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The people…have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.
-- T.E. Lawrence, The Sunday Times, August 1920

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Presbyterian Church receives arson threat over Middle East policies
LOUISVILLE, Ky. Presbyterian Churches in the U-S have been put on high alert.
This after a letter received at the church's Louisville, Kentucky, headquarters
threatened arson attacks because of the church's policies toward the Middle
East.

A church spokesman says the letter threatened to set churches on fire while
people were inside in retaliation for "anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes."

The spokesman says the letter had no return address, but was postmarked Queens,
New York.

The church's General Assembly decided in June to begin the process of selective
divestment from corporations supporting the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the
West Bank....

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What do police departments really do?
... Read Stephen Davies' excellent research on "The Private Provision of Police During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in the 2002 book "The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society." What professor Davies reveals is that modern government police forces were set up -- largely in a delayed response to the French Revolution -- to do "social policing" of the urban working class, wading into the slums on behalf of the ruling elite, inventing new "crimes" for which they could threaten the residents with arrest, thus breaking up any incipient movement toward social revolution before it could bloom.

The creation of government police forces thus did not and does not diminish crime rates, and was never expected to. In fact, the professor finds it generally increases reported crime rates. This makes sense if we stop to think what modern police forces actually do.

Let us suppose that, magically, there were no police. You are sitting at home of an evening, quietly reading a book. Next door, behind his own locked doors, your 21-year-old neighbor, who inherited some handguns from his grandfather, is spending time with his 16- or 17-year-old sweetheart, whose family is happy to know she intends to marry him and bear his children as soon as she graduates high school. At the moment, the two of them are consuming some of the marijuana they grow in their back yard.

If you knew this, would you leap to your feet and race downtown, pounding on the door of the sleeping magistrate, insisting he swear out a warrant so you can rush back to your neighborhood, break into your neighbor's home and arrest him?

Of course not. He's hurting no one.

But now let us return to a present era in which we maintain large, professional police forces. Earlier this day, unbeknownst to you or your neighbor, officers busted one of your neighbor's friends for driving a car with an out-of-date registration. (Oh, the horror.) Searching the car without a warrant, the "officers" found marijuana. Bargaining to stay out of jail, the young man tells the officers he got it from your neighbor.

As we speak, do you suppose Officer Friendly and Officer Brown are down at the station house, playing cards and waiting to see if anyone will call in any armed robberies tonight?

Of course not. Clad in full SWAT gear, with machine pistols and bulletproof vests, they are currently lurking in your neighbor's bushes, trying to peek in his windows. Before dawn they will break down his front door with a battering ram, drag him out half-naked and in handcuffs and proceed to send him to prison for decades for 1) possessions of unregistered handguns without a license; 2) "manufacturing for purposes of sale a deadly narcotic," that is to say, his backyard marijuana; and 3) "statutory rape" of his fiancee, regardless of whether or not their planned union has the blessing of her family.

The reported "crime rate" in your neighborhood just skyrocketed. Is this because your neighbor has hurt anyone, or has been caught doing anything that normal people have not been doing for thousands of years?

Of course not. Our great-grandparents would be astonished to learn that such "crimes" are even on the books.

The only thing that has changed is that our land is now occupied by large, professional, overlapping paramilitary "police forces" that have to keep busy, ginning up manufactured "crime waves" and filling the prisons (we now have the highest incarceration rate in the world -- and many of those inmates have never hurt anyone), in order to justify their ever-burgeoning budgets.

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Our Vanished Values
... For make no mistake, this is the election in which American Christianity destroyed itself. Today the church is no longer a religion but a tacky political lobby, with an obsessive concentration on a minuscule number of social topics so irrelevant to questions of governance that they barely constitute political issues at all. These are the points of contention tied into what are blurrily referred to as "moral values," though they have almost nothing to do with the larger moral question of how one lives one's life, and everything to do with the fundamentally un-Christian and un-American idea of forcing others to live the way you believe they should. The displacement of faith involved is eerie, almost psychotic: Here are people willing to vote against their own well-being and their own children's future, just so they can compel someone else's daughter to bear an unwanted child and deprive someone else's son of the right to file a joint income tax return with his male partner.

If this isn't Christianity-and it isn't-still less is it in any respect like democracy. The whole meaning of America was predicated by the founding fathers on the right of citizens to practice their own faith and conduct their lives as they saw fit; to interfere actively in others' lives, on the basis of "moral values" about which there is no agreement, is the most radical repudiation of constitutional values in our electoral history, reducing the word conservative to absurdity. Today the Republican Party is not the right wing of anything; it is a band of violent radical reactionaries preaching medieval totalitarian bigotry. And Christianity as currently preached and practiced in Middle America is virtually Satan, by the standards of anyone who strives to follow the teachings of Jesus. Having degraded themselves to the level of political lobbies, most Christian churches should certainly be compelled to register as lobbyists and pay taxes.

Our bogus Christians' desire to totalitarianize, ironically, is the mirror image of the thing they most fear, which was the other great paradoxical source of Bush's victory: bogus Islam. If it is only in the last four decades that American Christianity has steadily thrown up walls of hostility against the complex and disturbing changes of contemporary life, Islam has had nine or 10 centuries of practice at shutting out social change. The incursion of modern technology, though, and of windfalls from the Western world's craving for Middle Eastern oil, were beginning to alter the pattern of centuries for the better: There is today a small but emphatic body of educated Muslims desiring to be both modern and moderate.

The chief obstacle to their achieving this goal has been-bitter, bitter irony-our Republican administrations, which have had the persistent habit of arming Islamic extremists and totalitarians, then turning around and waging new mini-Crusades against them. Bush's repulsive attempt to redouble his father's mistakes in Iraq, as a diversion from his failure to capture Osama bin Laden, has made this hideous situation irreparably worse, with new outrages and new devastations almost every day. If the hopes for a reasonable Islam, decisively repudiating the "Islamo-fascists" whose main interest in life seems to be videotaping the decapitation of foreigners, have dwindled rapidly, it's Bush's Christianized view of world affairs that has made them do so. Christians who believe, as many Bush voters undoubtedly do, that all Muslims are terrorists by definition should take the beam out of their own eye before criticizing the mote in the mosque next door.

Fear and prejudice, Bush's twin allies, go hand in hand with the refusal to think, something that has always been part of American politics: The Republican Party actually had its origins, in the 1840s, as a faction of the anti-immigrant, fundamentalist Know-Nothing movement. A century and a half have only upped the ante: We live in a country as flooded with information as it is with conflicting viewpoints and contrasting ways of life. To understand the mistaken half of our electorate, we have to begin with the realization that this flood of data can itself be a source of fear....