On February 14, Scott Air Force Base in Illinois will be holding its annual National Prayer Breakfast. The guest speaker this year will be Esther Jungreis, a Holocaust survivor who founded the international Hineni movement in 1973 to discourage intermarriage and Jewish participation in cults, according to the Jewish Women’s Archive.
In her speeches and writings, Jungreis throws around the name Hitler and the word Holocaust more than Glenn Beck — not in the expected context of her being a Holocaust survivor talking about the actual Hitler and actual Holocaust, but to make comparisons to things that are not the actual Hitler or the actual Holocaust. One of the most controversial examples of this is her equating interracial marriage between Jews and non-Jews to the Holocaust, with statements like this:
“It’s a question of understanding that Hitler’s aim was to annihilate our people, and intermarriage is also a form of annihilation, which is sometimes even more deadly than the Holocaust.”
That statement was made when Jungreis was in Canada in 2007 to deliver a lecture titled “The Holocaust and the Final Solution to Intermarriage.”
Jungreis even includes marriages in which the non-Jewish partner converts to Judaism in what she calls a “spiritual Holocaust,” saying:
“Conversions are usually a sham, you know, in name only. It’s easy come, easy go, and there’s no commitment behind it. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just to accommodate someone in the family.”
After making these statements, Jungreis was criticized by two prominent Orthodox rabbis in Ottawa, one for her use of the word Holocaust to refer to anything other than the actual Holocaust, and another for her claim that conversions to Judaism are a sham.
Jungreis is a very prolific speaker, appearing in venues ranging from Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum in 1973 to the Republican National Convention in 2004. She also speaks regularly at military bases, which, on February 14, will include Scott Air Force Base.
In addition to hosting such a controversial speaker for this Prayer Breakfast, the commander of the 375th Air Mobility Wing, Col. Michael Hornitschek, has blatantly ignored the September 2011 Memorandum on Maintaining Government Neutrality Regarding Religion from Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz, which said that all invitations for religious events must come from the Chaplain Corps and not the command structure.
The invitation the Scott Air Force Base Prayer Breakfast begins:
The Commander, 375th Air Mobility Wing
cordially invites you to attend the
National Prayer Breakfast
featuring guest speaker
Mrs. Esther Jungreis
Now, we here at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) have received many complaints that Gen. Schwartz’s memorandum is being ignored, and that nothing is being done to enforce it. But maybe this particular violation at Scott Air Force Base will get the general’s attention. Why? Well, not just because Col. Hornitschek is disregarding his religious neutrality edict, but because rumor has it that Gen. Scwartz, a Jew, married a non-Jew, which would make he himself part of Esther Jungreis’s so-called Holocaust!
Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1909
Crossposted on Tikkun Daily.
Children have been told horror stories for as long as storytelling has existed. Should a child become traumatized hearing a story like Hansel and Gretel, where the witch plans to throw the children into the oven to make a nice meal, parents can tell the child not to worry, “That’s just a fairy tale. Things like that don’t really happen.” But they do.
As a child, I grew up with images of Nazi ovens incinerating Jews. Scenes of little children and old women, naked, emaciated, being marched into “showers” were part of a diet of pornography that didn’t contain a XXX rating and were therefore deemed not only acceptable, but required viewing for Jewish children in the post WWII holocaust world. Never forget, never again… At least three generations of Jews carry that real trauma with them, whether they were directly involved in the holocaust, as my father was, or they were shielded from directly witnessing and experiencing the horrors by being continents away, or awaiting birth to a family of people who in some way carried and shared what German theologian Dorothee Soelle once referred to as “the stench of the ovens” which she felt could not be erased by time alone.
With that stench in our family’s nostrels and their children’s nightmares, children my age also watched a fledgling nation being born literally out of the smoldering ashes, surrounded, we were told, by people equally committed to completing the job the Nazis had started, only this time “pushing the Jews into the sea” rather than into the ovens. And while some might dismiss the “Arab” capability of or even the actual will to eradicate Israel, the Jewish bodies continued to pile up before our eyes. As an adolescent I remember the terror of the 1972 Olympics hostage crisis, and the horrible wailing that made me run away from my best friend’s house in tears after his mother heard on the news that the Jewish/Israeli athletes had been slaughtered.
The Hansel and Gretel fable, I’m told, is sometimes used by (abusive) parents to warn their children about the dangers of straying too far from home and getting lost (you might run into a witch who will throw you into an oven). The Holocaust and acts of terror against Jews/Israelis are used to warn Jews never to stray from the narrative of Israel as the last and only hope of the Jewish people to avoid the ovens again. Never try to look at things through the witch’s eyes and never try to see things through the Palestinian’s eyes. Yet Palestinians have suffered trauma and their stories also need to be told. The stench of burning Palestinian villages, the wreckage of Palestinian homes, the uprooting of centuries-old orchards, watching land that they’d tilled for decades or centuries being taken from them, becoming a people without a home, burying thousands of dead and caring for the tens of thousands of wounded… that stench can not be erased merely by time or by ignoring history.
As an adult I’ve learned many of these Palestinian stories, and they’ve horrified me. The image of a Palestinian father clutching his young son and trying to shield the child’s body from Israeli Defense Force bullets, only to be covered in the child’s blood moments later, caused me to raise my voice in protest against the Israeli government, and when I did, some in my family reacted with a fury I had never seen before. Yes, I had also seen a Palestinian man excitedly waving his own blood-stained hands out a window after he and other Palestinians had murdered an IDF soldier. Yes, I knew that two Israeli children who had skipped school had been lured into a cave and murdered. Yes, I knew that at the time going out for pizza in Tel Aviv could mean sudden death for an entire Israeli family. Blood had stained many hands before, during, and after the birth of Israel. But to hear people I loved and respected say “All of these Arabs………..” (fill in the blank) as though any group of hundreds of thousands of people could all be lumped together, made my head spin. Something was wrong if my friends and family were branding giant groups of people with one stamp, saying that we could never make peace with “them.”
My going to Afghanistan as part of an interfaith peace delegation after September 11th was the final straw for some of my kin. We brought together people who had lost loved ones on September 11th with Afghans who had lost loved ones in the coalition campaign against the Taliban. It was an amazing experience of shared grief and a commitment by Afghans and Americans, victims of terrible violence, to work together for a more peaceful tomorrow. Yet my simple act of compassion, listening to and sharing the stories of both sides of a tragic time, was viewed as treasonous by some.
How could these people, who had raised me to be a compassionate human being, ignore the slaughter of innocents and respond so irrationally (in my view) to the idea that one way to bring about peace is through dialogue and engagement?
Trauma can cause people to behave irrationally and I understand trauma all too well. I’m a survivor of extreme abuse at the hands of a trusted person who had access to me when I was a child. When my parents became aware of the abuse, they stepped in to stop it, but they never even considered dealing with the impact of the abuse after it ended. They just thought what was in the past was in the past.
Hansel and Gretel, the Holocaust, the Nakba (how Palestinians think of the birth of Israel and their disempowerment as a ‘catasrophe’) and child abuse… what do all of these things have in common? Trauma. And, going back to Dorothee Soelle, time alone can not erase the stench. People who have been traumatized don’t respond to things the same way as people who have not experienced severe trauma. “What’s done is done and what’s in the past is in the past” are not sentiments that are useful until and unless the trauma is recognized and dealt with in some way. Most WWII survivors never dealt with the trauma they experienced, and it is only recently that the concepts of trauma and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) have entered mainstream consciousness.
So where is all this going and why am I sharing all of this? Hansel and Gretel popped into my head as soon as I started reading Rabbi Michael Lerner’s new book Embracing Israel/Palestine. Rabbi Lerner approaches the conflict and a possible and positive outcome starting with a PTSD perspective. He provides an historic narrative of all the peoples now fighting over that tiny sliver of land known as Israel/Palestine. Their many stories combine to provide a powerful and, to my mind, unbiased chronicle of the traumas suffered by all of the people involved in the current conflict (including American Jews like my family and friends). Rabbi Lerner is uniquely qualified to bring all of this together in this groundbreaking book, with his passion and expertise in the field of psychotherapy, his family background, his time spent in Israel/Palestine, and decades of being the editor-in-chief of Tikkun Magazine. By showing the trauma suffered by so many people whose lives and history inextricably intertwine in the Middle East and across the world, Rabbi Lerner opens the door to a unique opportunity to see each other as flawed and damaged humans who can move from trauma to healing to peace. Yet despite our common threads of trauma, some will still refuse to accept their common humanity.
Can the trauma of Jewish holocaust survivors who watched their families marched off to slaughter by Nazis be compared to the trauma of a Palestinian family who had to demolish their own home at IDF gunpoint? Can the trauma of a Jewish-American soldier who guarded butchers during their Dachau war crime trials be compared to the trauma of a Palestinian mother who watched her infant die because the ambulance carrying her child wasn’t allowed to cross a checkpoint? Does comparing different forms of suffering do any good at all? Or, can we simply accept that suffering IS suffering and the best thing we can do is learn to hear each other’s pain and work to embrace each other and finally heal the wounds? The alternative is an endless cycle of violence and that hasn’t been working out too well for any of us.
As our dear friends Len and Libby Traubman (who among other amazing work have been part of a Jewish/Palestinian Living Room Dialogue group for decades) have taught us, the difference between an enemy and a friend is a story. The shortest distance between two people is a story. Only by truly listening to the stories of all the people involved in this conflict can we begin to understand the trauma they’ve suffered and be part of the healing necessary to bring an end to the destruction. And, we must be open to hearing the stories from the other person’s or people’s perspectives.
And, once we understand each other’s stories, and work on healing and embracing each other, we can imagine a future in which we live together, or at least near each other, in peace. Byron Bland, a good friend and expert on reconciliation who helped bring about peace between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, has taught that peace is only possible when both sides can envision a future in which the other is present. That future may not offer each side anything near what the people think is “fair” or even “just,” but it is a future in which they can visualize the other… not just on the other side of giant walls, but nearby and in some way part of everyday life. Before that is possible, though, each side’s trauma has to be recognized and those who have been traumatized need strong assurance that there will be structures in place to protect them and their children from further harm. The witch’s house in the forest with her smoldering oven can not be banished by pats on the head and a few melodic rounds of kumbaya. That’s why the rest of Michael Lerner’s book is equally important as the storytelling. He lays out a realistic proposal for how Palestinians and Israelis can live as neighbors.
Is it a good book? Yes. Will it make people angry? Yes. Some “pro-Israel” people will bash it as being naive and a danger to the very future of Israel. Vandals attacked Rabbi Lerner’s house in December, pasting stickers saying that “Palestine is an Arab Fantasy.” Some on the “Pro-Palestinian” side will say that Rabbi Lerner’s proposal doesn’t go far enough for the Palestinians, and that leaving Israel as a “Jewish State” is wrong. Hmmm…. people on polar opposite sides of this issue don’t like what Rabbi Lerner has to say. Must be something pretty good in there!
I once showed my father a map of Israel/Palestine which showed the current situation on the ground for Palestinians, with Israeli settlements creating swiss cheese out of what could be a Palestinian nation. I showed him how Palestinians had to go through checkpoints to get from their house to their farmland. He looked at the swiss cheese map for several minutes, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen this before. Is this real?” My father’s only perspectives on Israel came from the media, AIPAC, our Jewish family, his one short trip to Israel, and probably most importantly, his memories of Dachau. Yet just by seeing this map, and trusting that I was showing him something real, he broke through his own carefully constructed wall and allowed himself to question the Israeli government’s policies. (Click here to view the full map.)
One of the reasons I think people get so viscerally angry about a book like Embracing Israel/Palestine is that it threatens to break through the protective barriers we as trauma victims/survivors have built up and we’re terrified, somewhat rightfully, of what might be on the other side.
When Desmond Tutu (a man who understands trauma) says “please read this book” I take that advice to heart. This is an astonishingly powerful witness to the past and a stunningly clear road map for the future. There can be peace in Israel/Palestine and this book may be a key tool to help us advocate for that peace. We’re honored to have Rabbi Michael Lerner coming to our shop for a reading and discussion of this book on January 31st 2012 at 7:00pm. If you’re in the vicinity of San Mateo, come and hear for yourself, ask questions, share your own stories, and be part of the healing that could finally help to erase some of the stench of hundreds, even thousands of years of trauma.
If you’re anywhere else, click here to find out more about the book and when Rabbi Lerner might be in a bookstore or community center or synagogue near you!
(Full Disclosure – My company, Reach And Teach, manages web operations for Tikkun. This article is cross-posted from our own web site.)
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Written by Pamela Merritt for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
A task force in North Carolina recently ruled that survivors of that state’s eugenics program should be paid $50,000 each in financial compensation. Eugenics is often defined as the science of “improving” a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of “desirable” heritable characteristics. The practice of eugenics was not limited to Nazi Germany nor is it a well kept secret that’s been waiting to be discovered by organizations opposed to reproductive justice.
In America, state governments set up eugenics boards that determined the reproductive future of thousands. I grew up listening to my maternal Grandmother, a Mississippi native, warn against trusting doctors and passing along lessons she learned from other poor women of color who went into a hospital to give birth only to later find out that they were given a Mississippi Appendectomy without their consent. The horrific legacy of these state eugenics boards is one of the reasons why I embrace the reproductive justice framework advocating for the right to have children, not have children, and to parent children in safe and healthy environments.
From the early 1900s up until the 1970’s, over 30 states had formal eugenics programs. These programs enforced compulsory sterilization of individuals deemed to be “unfit” and “promiscuous.” States sterilized people that were disabled, poor, people of color, and immigrants. North Carolina had a particularly aggressive program that was alone in allowing social workers to select people for sterilization based on IQ tests.
What happens in Arizona doesn’t stay in Arizona.
As Tea Party state education chief John Huppenthal retreats into his office after an embarrassing national media tour on Arizona’s extremist Ethnic Studies crackdown, and Tucson Unified School District administrators continue their slide into a public relations disaster over banishing Mexican American Studies curricula and books, a remarkably diverse array of librarians, educators, writers, civil rights activists and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is mounting a series of national actions to call attention to educational and civil rights violations and to support local Tucson efforts.
On January 24th, the American Library Association issued a condemnation of Arizona’s “suppression of open inquiry and free expression caused by closure of ethnic and cultural studies programs on the basis of partisan or doctrinal disapproval,” and the Tucson school district’s “restriction of access to educational materials associated with ethnic and cultural studies programs.” The national library association, with active chapters across the country, also called on the state to support a new bill to repeal the Ethnic Studies ban.
As a follow up to their extraordinary request to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and the Department of Education this week for a federal investigation of civil rights violations by the state of Arizona, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is urging constituents to change their profile picture on Facebook and Twitter to a special logo — “You Can’t Ban Books, You Can’t Ban History” — on Thursday, January 26, 2012.
On February 1st, teachers and schools around the country have been encouraged by Rethinking Schools, whose nationally acclaimed textbook Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years was confiscated and banished from Tucson schools, to follow the suggestion of former Tucson Mexican American Studies literature teacher Curtis Acosta for a “national day of solidarity where teachers would teach our curriculum all over the nation.”
Along with special forums planned across the country, from California to New York, a network of educators in Georgia is sponsoring a “Teach-in” in Atlanta on Saturday, Feb. 4th.
The event is framed as a “Teach-in,” where we can inform the community about what’s happening, work together to fight censorship and racism in schools, and make plans for future social justice activism. Groups will include:
(1) curricular action, in which participants create lesson plans and activities for PK-12 students on issues of censorship, critical pedagogy, and/or Mexican American history;
(2) censored books dialogue, in which participants learn about the books that were banned and the theories contained within them; and
(3) legislative overview, in which participants discuss legal implications of the ban in Arizona and around the country.
Finally, the group will come back together to plan action steps that can be taken in higher education, PK-12 schools, and communities in Georgia and around the country.
Several national petitions are also being circulated, including a change.org petition by former Mexican American Studies teacher Norma Gonzales, who has called on the Tucson school district to “immediately remove these books from their ‘district storage facility’ and make them available in each school’s library. Knowledge cannot be boxed off and carried away from students who want to learn!”
In a stunning revelation last week, a review of the TUSD library catalog found that there are less than 2 or 3 copies of some of the banished texts in libraries serving more than 60,000 students.
Presente.org, the national Latino and human rights organization, is also heading up a petition drive to “tell Superintendent Pedicone and the school board to reverse the ban and reinstate the Mexican American Studies program.”
In one of the most creative actions to take on Arizona’s removal of books and texts, Texas author and literary organizer extraordinaire Tony Diaz is assembling a caravan of renowned authors and librotraficantes to deliver banished books to Arizona students in March.
Here’s Diaz’s kick-off video:
There are no explicit references to God or Christianity in the U.S. Constitution, the foundational document for American government.
But in advance of the 2012 election, a well-funded voter registration initiative called Champion The Vote, which seeks to register 5 million conservative Christian “biblical values” voters in advance of the 2012 election, is distributing a 2-hour video, “One Nation Under God“, that claims key concepts in the United States Constitution are based on scriptures from books in the Old Testament of the Bible, including Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
Starring in the video? – Newt Gingrich, the only 2012 presidential election candidate featured in One Nation Under God. The Gingrich footage in the video was taken last October, while media attention was still fixated on now-withdrawn candidate Rick Perry, then touted as the alleged conservative evangelical favorite.
[below: excerpts from Champion The Vote's "One Nation Under God" video]
Introduction
In 2009, as with Sarah Palin four years before, a major leader in C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation blessed and anointed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Three years after her blessing, Palin was contending for the position of Vice President. Two and a half years after his, Gingrich seeks the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Much of the current mainstream media coverage has overlooked Newt Gingrich’s long partnership with the religious right and his numerous alliances with major new factions and leaders in the movement, as well as the many reasons why conservative evangelical voters may be turning to Gingrich as a favorite candidate in the upcoming election.
This article explores one aspect of that relationship, Gingrich’s dedicated promotion of a falsified, revisionist historical narrative that claims the United States was founded as an expressly Christian nation: fake history.
On October 20-21, 2011, Gingrich spoke before hundreds of gathered Florida pastors at a secretive, closed-to-the-media meeting held in an Orlando hotel, at which the former House Speaker told (link to video from Gingrich speech) the clergy that “half of what is taught in American colleges and universities is false” and that “the academic left… is determined to propagandize our children.”
Rick Perry, the other presidential candidate to address the Orlando pastors gathering, gave a speech by telescreen. Footage of Perry’s speech was not included in One Nation Under God. But footage of former Vice Chair of the Texas GOP and close Gingrich ally David Barton, another major speaker at the October Orlando pastors event, was featured in the video.
In his talk Barton, who claimed (link to video from Barton speech) that ideas expressed in the Constitution came from scriptures in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and other books of the Old Testament, told his audience,
“Strikingly, if you look through that document, it is amazing how many Biblical clauses appear in Constitutional clauses. Biblical verses and phrases – you’ll find them throughout – so many concepts, the founding fathers pointed to bible verses as the source of those concepts.”
Barton’s speech was accompanied by Powerpoint slides showing the pairing of important clauses in the Constitution with their alleged sources in scripture from the Bible’s books of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezra, Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
The Book of Leviticus prescribes stoning as a capital punishment for a range of transgressions including blasphemy and cursing, witchcraft, homosexuality, and adultery – a crime to which Newt Gingrich has himself confessed, in a March 2007 radio show appearance with Focus on The Family founder James Dobson.
Unlike Barton, mainstream historians do not credit the Bible as having been a direct source of conceptual inspiration for the Constitution.
David Barton, who serves as a co-Director of the Gingrich-founded Renewing American Leadership 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to “preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage”, also informed pastors at the Orlando gathering that the authors of the Constitution “gave us the First Amendment, not because it guarantees separation of church and state – there’s no such thing”.
Among Barton’s other claims was the statement that “more than half the guys who signed the Declaration [of Independence] were ministry trained guys”. Only four of the signers Barton cites went to school to study theology, and only two went on to become ministers.
In his speech at the Orlando event, Gingrich declared,
“half of what is taught in American colleges and universities is false, it is a lie and I think we ought to take it head on… I’m talking about the academic left, which dominates American history, dominates American social studies, and is determined to propagandize our children with values and ideas alien to the American tradition and alien to American civilization.”
One of the centerpieces of the Gingrich plan to combat the alleged threat is a document to be found at www.newt.org, a draft of a proposed “Presidential Commission on Religious Freedom” that Gingrich promises to create if elected president, to help beat back the purported secularist and atheist assault on religious speech.
On page 8, Gingrich’s draft document showcases a quote often incorrectly attributed to Patrick Henry, “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!”
According to Americans United For the Separation of Church and State researcher Rob Boston, the Patrick Henry quote cited in Gingrich’s draft was one of nine quotes incorrectly attributed to America’s Founding Fathers that Barton featured in his 1989 book The Myth of Separation, to demonstrate their Christian faith and supposed intent to establish a Christian nation. Barton now identifies the quotes as “unconfirmed”.
Gingrich has pledged to seek Barton’s advice during his 2012 presidential campaign.
David Barton has been publicly identified by author Chris Rodda as a “liar for Jesus” and was recently the subject of an extensive report from the liberal nonprofit People For The American Way, which lambastes Barton for “sloppy scholarship” and outlines his notable political positions – that include a claim the environment is self-regulating because of “divine provenance” and an assertion Jesus was opposed to the minimum wage.
Founding Father misquotes promoted by David Barton have been recited on the floor of the U.S. Senate and have appeared on the printed program of the National Prayer Breakfast, and Barton’s interpretation of church-state separation has also found its way into civics textbooks used by the national Junior ROTC program.
In 2007, a poll conducted by the Center For First Amendment studies revealed that 65% of Americans believe the founders intended America to be a Christian nation, and 55% thought the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation as well.
Newt and the Religious Right
While some commentators have missed Newt Gingrich’s ties, the reality is that the Former Speaker of the House, who led the stealth Republican takeover of the House and Senate in the 1994 election, has been a strong partisan of the religious right for decades.
Newt has not always cloaked himself in Christian piety and nationalism. In an interview for a 1984 profile of Gingrich published in Mother Jones magazine, Lee Howell, Gingrich’s former press secretary and speechwriter, recalled,
“In 1974 I wrote this speech for his opening night kick-off. I come from a Southern Protestant background, and Southern Protestants quote the Bible. Newt had me take out all the references to God, because he was not very religious–and isn’t very religious. He went to church in order to get a nap on Sunday morning. He became a beacon because of who he was, not what he believed. He did not like us to use God in his speeches; he didn’t want people to think he was using God, because he said that would be hypocritical. He said, ‘I’m not a very strong believer.’”
But following the 1979 launch of the Moral Majority, and other subsequent efforts to mobilize the evangelical right as a political force, Newt found God–as a political tool at least.
In 1985 Gingrich, as described in a story from the Institute From First Amendment Studies, gave a keynote speech at the Reverend Tim LaHaye’s Washington DC “How To Win An Election” conference, held by LaHaye’s American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV) – along with seminal architects of the American religious right political movement such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, D. James Kennedy, and Paul Weyrich. The conference featured the slogan “Serve the Lord by running for public office”, emphasized that Christians have a “Biblical mandate” to become involved in politics.
[below: flyer for 1985 ACTV "How To Win An Election" conference]
The politicized evangelical right has come a long way over the past two and a half decades. Democratic strategist Rob Stein recently told liberal donors, according to the Los Angeles Times, “The Christian activist right is the largest, best-organized and, I believe, the most powerful force in American politics today.” Emphasized Stein, “No other political group comes even close.”
Now in his 50s, David Barton is one of a younger generation of Christian right leaders coming to the forefront as the older generation of leaders retires and dies off. Named one of the “25 most influential evangelists” in America by Time Magazine in 2005, Barton has launched an entire cottage industry of books and videos purporting to demonstrate America’s Christian heritage and, since the late 1980’s, has been on an almost perpetual tour of the United States–speaking in churches and other venues to promote his factually challenged interpretation of American history.
Used as textbooks widely across the growing Christian homeschooling movement, at private Christian schools, and at some of the nation’s biggest and most influential evangelical universities, Barton’s books claim the United States was founded as an expressly Christian nation, present church-state separation as a myth, and paint America’s founding fathers as pious forerunners of contemporary conservative evangelical leadership.
During his speech to the Orlando pastors, Barton told his audience,
“Now, after you get the Constitution done, you got the first congress, now you need a Bill of Rights. And so we come back with the Bill of Rights – those first ten amendments to the Constitution… they gave us the First Amendment, not because it guarantees separation of church and state – there’s no such thing – it guarantees the free exercise of religion. They weren’t trying to secularize the public square. They wanted to make sure that you could include God in those areas… Now, we don’t teach that much in history anymore, but the documents are really clear.”
Echoing Barton’s claims during his Orlando speech, Gingrich fulminated,
“It is a lie to teach American history as though this is a secular nation in which God did not reappear, again and again and again for every generation…
Frankly, we should be very direct about this fight. I, for one, am tired of the long trend towards a secular, atheist system of thought dominating our colleges, dominating our media.”
The Orlando gathering was organized by David Barton and California pastor David Lane, who began staging pastor meetings in California and Texas during the 1990s. Dubbed a “Pastor’s Policy Briefing”, it was one in a long line of similar events held over the last decade sponsored by ad-hoc state efforts called “renewal projects” aimed at politically mobilizing pastors and increasing conservative evangelical voter turnout.
Barton’s Christian nationalist history revisionism is typically the centerpiece of such pastors briefings, and at a March 24th and 25th, 2011 Pastor’s Policy Briefing also sponsored by Champion the Vote and organized by Lane, Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee introduced David Barton by quipping that he wished every American citizen could be forcibly indoctrinated with Barton’s history, at gunpoint if necessary.
These briefings also feature politically polarizing themes – such as the need to oppose same-sex marriage and end legalized abortion, and combat an alleged secular assault on Christianity. The latter is often couched within a wider narrative structure that depicts evangelical Christians as unwilling combatants in a war against liberals and Democratic politicians, unnamed humanists, atheists and secularists, and militant Islam.
In a late 2010 fundraising letter for Newt Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership (ReAL) nonprofit, Mike Huckabee, the conservative evangelical insurgent favorite against John McCain in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, warned recipients of terrible, looming threats against America and its people:
“Should we be surprised that – after 50 years of driving God from our schools, our history and our public lives – America is facing some of the most devastating crises we have ever faced…
…an economy (driven by socialist schemes) on the brink of collapse, the threat of violent death by radical Islamic terrorists that grows every day, crime, abortions and drug use more rampant than ever?”
[...]
“If you fully believe as Newt Gingrich and I do, that the Founding Fathers fully intended for expressions of religious belief to be incorporated into American life, then I ask you to join in the fight to defend our values.
The stakes are immense; imagine a crippled, socialist, bleak, anti-God America. Is this the nation we want to bequeath to our children, or will you stand with me and Newt Gingrich and fight to preserve America as that “shining city on a hill, one nation, under God?”
Any support you can send to ReAL today is tax-deductible.
And as a personal “thank you” for your gift of $35 or more today, I will send you a copy of Newt’s wonderful book
Rediscovering God in America. ”
Why do Huckabee, Gingrich, Barton, and other leaders on the Christian right promote such ideas? As author and journalist Frederick Clarkson explained, in a 2007 Public Eye Magazine analysis, History is Powerful – Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters,
The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America’s supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept.
…The contest for control of the narrative of American history is well underway.
Newt Gingrich’s alliance with David Barton goes back at least as far as the mid 1990s. In an October 5, 1995 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Gingrich praised Barton’s book “The Myth of Separation” as “most useful” and “wonderful” and, as Speaker of the House, collaborated with Barton in a failed attempt to pass an amendment that would have allowed teachers and school officials to lead prayer in public schools.
The prayer amendment was part of a wider effort, the Christian Coalition’s “Contract with the American Family” which was launched at a May 18, 1995 press conference by Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed, with Newt Gingrich at his side.
Besides allowing mandatory prayer in schools, the “Contract With The American Family” included a list of objectives, many of which would later pop up over a decade later on the agenda of the Tea Party movement – abolishing the Department of Education, creating school vouchers to fund religious schools, defunding Planned Parenthood and banning late-term abortions, tax deductions for stay-at-home mothers, terminating Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment For the Arts, and the legal services corporation, which provides lawyers for the poor, and restricting pornography.
Gingrich supported the ten-point plan, stating that it represented “key values that matter most to Americans.”
Gingrich’s ties to Barton, and to Barton’s falsified history oeuvre, have only grown over time.
Leading up to the 2004 election, the Republican National Committee hired David Barton for a national speaking tour to get evangelical voters to the polls for George W. Bush. California megachurch pastor Rob McCoy recalls a 2004 Orlando, Florida, event stating, “I had the privilege to hear from speakers like Mike Huckabee, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Congressman Bob McCewen, and historian David Barton… there was so much information I felt at times like I was drinking from a fire hydrant and couldn’t absorb it all.”
Since 2004, Gingrich and Barton have appeared together with increasing frequency at such “pastors events”, and by 2006 Gingrich had made Barton’s revisionist Christian nationalist history narrative his own, and even turned into a side business, co-managed by Gingrich’s current wife Callista – launched with the 2006 publication of Newt Gingrich’s book Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History, which recapitulates David Barton’s “walking tours” of Washington D.C. that showcase Christian symbolism and language expressed on capital buildings and monuments.
Gingrich’s book also reiterates Barton’s misleading and inaccurate claims that Thomas Jefferson promoted the use of government funds to evangelize Indian tribes and recommended the use of the Bible as a text in the District of Columbia school system.
Written by Danielle Zielinski for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
With the anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Jan. 22, the words “pro-choice” seem to be everywhere. You’ll hear them in impassioned speeches, and see them on colorful posters, on blogs and in tweets. And when you do, you’ll probably think of abortion.
That’s understandable. And undeniably, the right to choose an abortion is something that must be protected. A woman chooses abortion for the most intimate, personal reasons, and no one else is qualified to make that choice.
But abortion is far from the only choice a woman makes about her reproductive health. And if you really think about it, why wait to defend those reproductive health choices until she is at the door of an abortion clinic?
True freedom of choice — about sex, and if and when to have children — starts way before then.
Written by the IPPFWHR for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
January 22nd marked the 39th anniversary of one of the most significant legal decisions of the 20th century, Roe v. Wade. This landmark ruling from the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion and changed the course of history for women in this country. Yet women in Latin America and the Caribbean continue to struggle for this basic reproductive right.
According to a report released by the Guttmacher Institute this week, 95 percent of abortions in Latin America are unsafe. In places where abortion is illegal, women often turn to inadequately trained practitioners who employ unsafe techniques or attempt to self-induce abortion using dangerous methods. In Latin America and the Caribbean, nearly one million women are hospitalized each year because of complications from unsafe abortion, and the World Health Organization estimates that one in eight maternal deaths in the region result from unsafe abortion. Poor and rural women are disproportionately affected.
Fear of legal consequences, social stigma, high cost, and lack of access to trained health professionals are major barriers to obtaining safe abortions.
Written by On The Issues Magazine for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Originally written by Aram A. Schvey for On The Issues Magazine.
What’s chutzpah? Until December 2011, I would have deferred to the classic definition in Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish: chutzpah is a man who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court as a lonely orphan. But at the end of the year, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) introduced a bill to teach the world the real meaning of chutzpah: the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011.”
The bill’s sanctimonious name belies its content: the bill invokes a feminist icon while attacking women’s reproductive rights, and a civil-rights hero while requiring doctors to engage in racial profiling of their clients.
This bill would make it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion which a patient seeks “based on” the sex or race of the fetus or parent. Representative Franks claims his intention is to protect women who belong to communities of color and immigrant communities. In light of Franks’s voting record of consistently opposing legislation to combat sex- and race-based discrimination, that’s a tough sell. But, of course, Franks isn’t really interested in eliminating sex- or race-based discrimination. Rather, he is interested in eliminating abortion — a fact that’s made even more obvious by knowing that Franks has sponsored or supported every major piece of anti-choice legislation this Congress.
Franks is cynically cloaking himself in the garb of feminism and racial equality in an effort to chip away at Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
What’s happening to academia in Florida demands national attention. Billionaires Charles and David Koch are infringing on intellectual freedom and independence in colleges and universities. It’s an old fashioned quid pro quo where the Koch brothers get allied professors who’ll preach Ayn Rand, supply side economic policies and the values of the 19th century Guilded Age to students and the college gets some funding.
Every year, thousands of individuals move through the Koch-supported classes, lectures and fields of study, which in their totality amount to an ideological assembly line bought and paid for by the Koch brothers. There are Koch-funded agreements at more than 150 American colleges and universities.
“The Koch brothers have paid tens of millions of dollars to get their point of view instilled in classrooms, amongst faculty members and in students,” said Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University Professors. “Programs they start tend to be one point of view only.”
The Koch brothers’ business has annual revenue that are about 200 times the size ($100 billion) in one year than the entirety of Florida State University’s endowment ($423 million). At a time when governors like Florida Gov. Rick Scott are slashing spending on education, colleges and universities are virtually forced into restrictive and ideological funding agreements with questionable sources to meet students’ demands. Instead, they’re meeting the Koch brothers needs and the students are paying the intellectual price.
Enter the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which has given more than $14.39 million in grants to universities like Florida State, Auburn, Clemson, West Virginia and Utah State. All five campuses are in financial agreements with Koch-supported groups requiring the university to hire candidates who adhere to defined ideological guidelines. In some cases, the Koch-supported groups recommend candidates to the faculty or have sway over the college’s hiring committee.
Conflicts of interest of this magnitude cannot be ignored, and Florida State students and professors didn’t swallow the Koch agreement willingly. There was an uproar on campus when the Koch brothers began infringing on academic freedom.
A campaign to organize the campus against the Koch brothers and wealthy so-called “philanthropists” who seek to use their wealth to influence academia is under way. Student leaders are fanning out across Tallahassee to organize against the Koch brothers and their ilk who would infringe on academic independence if given the chance. If the students are successful, they’ll have earned enough support to take action against the Koch brothers’ influence.
Their work deserves national exposed. We can do our part if we all tweet @ Ed Schultz and ask expose the Koch brothers’ psycho talk.
I invite you to join the conversation at our Koch Brothers Exposed page on Facebook.
By Karen Charman, WhoWhatWhy.com
After the catastrophic trifecta of the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan last March—what the Japanese are referring to as their 3/11—you would think the Japanese government would be doing everything in its power to contain the disaster. You would be wrong—dead wrong.
Instead of collecting, isolating, and guarding the millions of tons of radioactive rubble that resulted from the chain reaction of the 9.0 earthquake, the subsequent 45- to 50-foot wall of water that swamped the plant and disabled the cooling systems for the reactors, and the ensuing meltdowns, Japanese Environment Minister Goshi Hosono says that the entire country must share Fukushima’s plight by accepting debris from the disaster.
The tsunami left an estimated 20 million tons of wreckage on the land, much of which—now ten months after the start of the disaster—is festering in stinking pilesthroughout the stricken region. (Up to 20 million more tons of rubble from the disaster—estimated to cover an area approximately the size of California—is also circulating in the Pacific.) The enormous volume of waste is much more than the disaster areas can handle. So, in an apparent attempt to return this region to some semblance of normal life, the plan is to spread out the waste to as many communities across the country as will take it.
At the end of September, Tokyo signed an agreement to accept 500,000 metric tons of rubble from Iwate Prefecture, one of eight prefectures designated for cleanup under a new nuclear decontamination law passed on January 1. The law allows for much of the radioactively contaminated rubble to be incinerated, a practice that has been underway at least since the end of June.
But the sheer amount of radioactive rubble is proving difficult to process. The municipal government of Kashiwa, in Chiba Prefecture to the west and south of Tokyo, recently shut down one of its main incinerators, because it can’t store any more than the 200 metric tons of radioactive ash it already has that is too contaminated to bury in a landfill.
According to the California-based Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN), burning Fukushima’s radioactive rubble is the worst possible way to deal with the problem. That’s because incinerating it releases much more radioactivity into the air, not only magnifying the contamination all over Japan but also sending it up into the jet stream. Once in the jet stream, the radioactive particles travel across the Northern Hemisphere, coming back down to earth with rain, snow, or other precipitation. Five days after the Fukushima meltdowns began, radioactive fallout from the disasterreached the West Coast of the United States. Approximately a week later, Fukushima fallout was measured as far away as France.
In October, the journal Nature reported that the Japanese government’s initial estimates of radiation from Fukushima were substantially less than what Scandinavian researchers calculated from a global network of radiation monitoring stations that the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization uses to detect nuclear weapons tests.
Radiation used to be a word that evoked serious concern in a lot of people. However, the nuclear industry and its supporters have done a masterful job in allaying public fears about it. They do this in significant part by relying on outdated and highly questionable data collected on Japanese atom bomb survivors, while at the same time ignoring and dismissing inconvenient but much more relevant evidence that shows the actual harmful effects of radiation exposure from nuclear accidents. Author Gayle Greene explains this well in a recent article here. In their attempt to win the public over to their viewpoint, nuclear proponents even trot out the dubious theory ofradiation hormesis, which says that low doses of radiation are actually good for you, because they stimulate an immune response. Well, so does something that causes an allergic reaction. But I digress…
What Radiation Is
A great help to nuclear proponents is the fact that nuclear physics is complicated, and most people don’t understand even its most basic concepts. The blanket term “radiation” is used to describe all manner of radioactive contamination—as if it’s just one thing—when, in fact, there are different kinds, some much more damaging than others. It also matters exactly what is being exposed to radiation—i.e., exposure outside the body or inside it—and how long the exposure goes on.
In a nutshell, radioactive elements, also known as radioisotopes or radionuclides, are unstable atoms. They seek stability by giving off particles and energy—ionizing radiation—until the radioisotope becomes stable. This process occurs within the nucleus of the radioisotope, and the shedding of these particles and energy is commonly referred to as ‘‘nuclear disintegration.’’ Nuclear radiation expert Rosalie Bertell describes the release of energy in each disintegration as ‘‘an explosion on the microscopic level.”
This process is known as the “decay chain,” and during their decay, most radioactive elements morph into yet other radioactive elements on their journey to becoming lighter, stable atoms at the end of the chain. Some of the morphed-into elements are much more dangerous than the original radioisotope, and the decay chain can take a very long time. This is the reason that radioactive contamination can last so long.
To further complicate the issue, different radioisotopes give off different kinds of radiation—alpha, beta, gamma, X ray, or neutron emissions—all of which behave differently. Alpha emitters, such as plutonium and radon, are intensely ionizing but don’t penetrate very far and generally can’t get through the dead layers of cells covering skin. But when they are inhaled from the air or ingested from radiation-contaminated food or water, they emit high-energy particles that can do serious damage to the cells of sensitive internal soft tissues and organs. The lighter, faster-moving beta particles can penetrate far more deeply than alpha particles, though sheets of metal and heavy clothing can block them. Beta particles are also very dangerous when inhaled or ingested. Strontium-90 and tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, are both beta emitters. Gamma radiation is a form of electromagnetic energy like X rays, and it passes through clothing and skin straight into the body. A one-inch shield of either lead or iron, or eight inches of concrete are needed to stop gamma rays, examples of which include cobalt-60 and cesium-137—one of the radionuclides of most concern in the Fukushima fallout. Aside from use in medical diagnostics, X rays are also produced in nuclear fission, and their effects are similar to gamma radiation. Neutron emissions are the most penetrating of all types of radiation and require a shield of several feet of water or concrete to contain them.
The behavior of radioisotopes out in the environment also varies depending on what they encounter. They can combine with one another or with stable chemicals to form molecules that may or may not dissolve in water. They can combine with solids, liquids, or gases at ordinary temperature and pressure. They may be able to enter into biochemical reactions, or they may be biologically inert.
In her book No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, Bertell notes that if they enter the body either through air, food, water, or an open wound, “They may remain near the place of entry into the body or travel in the bloodstream or lymph fluid. They can be incorporated into the tissue or bone. They may remain in the body for minutes or hours or a lifetime.” To illustrate how different radioisotopes behave, she points out that: “Plutonium is biologically and chemically attracted to bone as is the naturally occurring radioactive chemical radium. However, plutonium clumps on the surface of bone, delivering a concentrated dose of alpha radiation to surrounding cells, whereas radium diffuses homogeneously in bone and thus has a lesser localized cell damage effect. This makes plutonium, because of the concentration, much more biologically toxic than a comparable amount of radium.”
Specific health effects from internal radiation exposure correlate with where radioisotopes land in the body. Bertell explains: “For example, radionuclides lodged in the bones can damage bone marrow and cause bone cancers or leukemia, while radionuclides lodged in the lungs can cause respiratory diseases. Generalized whole body exposure to radiation can be expressed as a stress related to a person’s hereditary medical weakness. Individual breakdown usually occurs at our weakest point.” In other words, the impact of radiation exposure also depends very much on each individual’s level of health and genetic make-up.
Fukushima’s Unending Fallout
Fetuses in utero, infants, and young children—all of whom have quickly dividing cells—as well as the elderly and people with compromised immune systems are most vulnerable to radiation exposure. “Official” sources like the Environmental Protection Agency and the UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Air Monitoring Station consistently downplay the health effects of the fallout. In fact, the EPA was so confident that Fukushima fallout would not be a problem for U.S. citizens that it stopped its specific monitoring of fallout from Fukushima less than two months after the meltdowns began.
But neglecting to monitor the fallout will not make it go away. In fact, another enormous problem with radioactive contamination is that it bioaccumulates in the environment, which means it concentrates as it moves up the food chain. (Think of mercury in fish.) Because many radionuclides are so long-lived, this can be a problem for a very long time. For example, the U.K. is only now considering lifting restrictions on the remaining 334 sheep farms in Wales that are still prohibited from selling any meat because of contamination from the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986.
In this video, FFAN member Kimberly Roberson points out that the first disaster at Fukushima Daiichi following the earthquake and tsunami was accidental: “However, by burning the millions of tons of radioactive rubble, it’s going to provide a brand new humanitarian crisis.” She observes that this crisis—“transgenerational DNA damage that’s passed well into the future”—is additional and intentional, and that everything possible must be done to stop it.
Roberson’s point is well taken. However, the desperate yearning among the Japanese to get past this disaster combined with the uncharted territory of dealing with a triple-whammy catastrophe of this magnitude—earthquake, tsunami, and three nuclear meltdowns—seems to be clouding their vision. The truth is, a nuclear disaster offers no easy or good choices. But some, like vaporizing the radionuclides throughout the atmosphere, will unnecessarily prolong the danger to the people and environment of Japan and spread the pain far and wide.
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