[lit-ideas] Re: When Unspeakable Evil Just Isn't Enough....
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2005 14:46:14 EDT
_http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042205B.shtml_
(http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042205B.shtml)
<< Frist Draws Criticism from Some Church Leaders
By David D. Kirkpatrick and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
The New York Times
Friday 22 April 2005
Washington - As the Senate battle over judicial confirmations became
increasingly entwined with religious themes, officials of several major
Protestant
denominations on Thursday accused the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, of
violating the principles of his own Presbyterian church and urged him to
drop out of a Sunday telecast that depicts Democrats as "against people of
faith."
Dr. Frist's participation has rekindled a debate over the role of religion
in public life that may be complicating his efforts to overcome the Democrats'
use of the filibuster, a parliamentary tactic used by Congressional
minorities, to block President Bush's judicial nominees.
Dr. Frist has threatened to change the Senate rules to eliminate judicial
filibusters, and in response Democrats have threatened a virtual shutdown of
the Senate. A confrontation had been expected as early as next week, but it
now
appears that the showdown may be delayed.
Religious groups, including the National Council of Churches and the
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, plan to conduct a conference call
with
journalists on Friday to criticize Senator Frist's participation in the
telecast. The program is sponsored by Christian conservative organizations
that want
to build support for Dr. Frist's filibuster proposal.
Among those scheduled to speak in the conference call is the Rev. Clifton
Kirkpatrick, a top official of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in which Dr.
Frist is an active member.
"One of the hallmarks of our denomination is that we are an ecumenical
church," Mr. Kirkpatrick said in an interview on Thursday. He also said,
"Elected
officials should not be portraying public policies as being for or against
people of faith."
A spokesman for Dr. Frist said his remarks, which are not yet available,
would be consistent with previous statements about fair treatment for judicial
nominees. "I would hope that he would read Dr. Frist's remarks," the
spokesman, Bob Stevenson, said of Mr. Kirkpatrick.
Mr. Stevenson added that the timing of the confrontation on filibusters was
not related to the criticisms that have been raised about the telecast,
saying Dr. Frist still planned to propose a compromise to the Democrats.
Still, the Senate moved closer to a showdown on Thursday, when the Senate
Judiciary Committee, voting along party lines, approved two nominees, Janice
Rogers Brown and Priscilla R. Owen, who were blocked by a filibuster in the
last Congress and are expected to be blocked again. Republican strategists
consider the nominees - two women, one of whom is black - favorable choices
for a
filibuster fight.
There were signs, though, that Dr. Frist was planning to postpone the
confrontation for at least another two weeks, when the Senate returns from a
spring
recess.
Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said Dr. Frist had told him he
would like to take up a transportation measure next week, an indication that
he
did not expect a filibuster fight before the Congressional recess. Polls,
meanwhile, suggest a lack of public support for ending the filibuster. A
recent
survey conducted for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found that 50
percent of those polled believed that the Senate should retain the filibusters
for judicial nominations, while 40 percent were against and 10 percent
undecided.
The theme of the telecast, which is called Justice Sunday and will be
broadcast to churches and Christian radio and television networks, is "The
Filibuster Against People of Faith." Its sponsors argue that by blocking
judicial
nominees who oppose abortion rights on religious and moral grounds, Democrats
are effectively discriminating against those nominees.
Dr. Frist has agreed to provide a four-minute videotaped statement for the
event. Democrats are calling his participation evidence of Republican
extremism.
"We're going to allow the majority leader to invoke faith to rewrite Senate
rules, to put substandard, extremist judges on the bench?" Senator John
Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential nominee, said
Thursday
on the Senate floor. Mr. Kerry added, "It's not up to us to tell any one of
our colleagues what to believe as a matter of faith."
Christian conservatives have also accused Senator John Salazar of Colorado,
a Roman Catholic, of tolerating anti-Catholicism from his fellow Democrats
who oppose nominees who follow the church's teachings on abortions.
On Thursday, Mr. Salazar responded by issuing a statement taking to task one
of the telecast's speakers, Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, for deprecating the
Catholic
faith. It quoted Mr. Mohler as saying "the Roman church is a false church and
it teaches a false gospel" and "the pope himself holds a false and
unbiblical office."
Dr. Mohler called Mr. Salazar's statement "absolutely ridiculous," saying it
was hardly news that evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics "differ on
many key theological issues." He said he supported a Catholic nominee the
Democrats had opposed.
In the past two weeks, religious leaders on both sides of the judicial
battle have plunged into the debate. The United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops is distributing millions of postcards around the country for
parishioners
to send their senators asking them not to insist that nominees uphold
abortion rights. Evangelical Protestant groups like Focus on the Family have
been
portraying the confirmation debates as a fight over public expression of
religion and respect for traditionalist values.
Now the liberal group People for the American Way is buying advertisements
and distributing church program inserts that attack Senator Frist for invoking
religious faith in what it says is a partisan context. The National Council
of Churches is asking members to organize news conferences denouncing Dr.
Frist.
The criticism of the telecast underscores the delicate task facing Dr.
Frist, who is laying the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign in
2008,
as he courts the evangelical Protestant groups and other religious
traditionalists that formed the bedrock of President Bush's winning coalition.
With his
patrician bearing and background in the relatively liberal Presbyterian
Church, Dr. Frist, a Harvard-trained transplant surgeon, does not fit in as
naturally with Christian conservatives as President Bush.
Dr. Frist's overtures to Christian conservatives have drawn the ire of the
more liberal hierarchies of other religious groups, including the officials of
his own denomination. Dr. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National
Council of Churches and a former Democratic congressman, said he had sought to
include Mr. Kirkpatrick, of the Presbyterian Church, in the conference call
both
because Dr. Frist is Presbyterian and because of the church's emphasis on
ecumenicalism.
"To say that some group of Christians has a monopoly on the ear of God is
especially an outrage to Presbyterians," Mr. Edgar said.
Mr. Kirkpatrick said Dr. Frist's participation in the telecast undermined
"the historical commitment in our nation and our church to an understanding of
the First Amendment that elected officials should not be portraying public
policies as being for or against people of faith."
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the
telecast, said those who were offended did not have to watch the telecast.
"There are millions of other Americans who see a connection between the
filibuster and judicial activism," Mr. Perkins said. "And when we talk about
judicial activism, we are talking about issues that people faith care about
deeply." >>
========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Re: When Unspeakable
Evil Just Isn't Enough.... Date: 4/24/05 12:43:52 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: _andreas@xxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx) To:
_lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on:
Read the current issue of Harper's Weekly. There are two long articles about
the
mega-churches and the Evangelical radio broadcaster networks. It discusses
their political
ambitions, their violent homophobia, and their anti-semitism.
These are not fringe cults anymore; James Dobson of the National Religious
Broadcasters
(NRB) (1,600 radio and TV stations, 141 million listeners) and Ted Haggard
("Pastor Ted") of
the National Association of Evangelicals (NEA) (45,000 churches, 30 million
people) have
enormous political power in the Republican Party and they are using it.
Start paying attention to "Dominionists" (based on a line in the Old
Testament: they shall
have dominion over the earth). The evangelicals are now calling themselves
Dominionist. They
intend to take control over the USA and get rid of secular law, humanists,
the "Homosexual
Agenda", feminists, and activist judges. The Schiavo case was an example of
their disregard
for the courts.
What's remarkable is that Dominionists see themselves as under attack and
they must strike
back.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7235393?pageid=rs.Home&pagereg
ion=single7&rnd=1114363953988&has-player=true&version=6.0.11.847
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
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