Onward Young Christian Soldiers

A strange and disturbing story out of Lompoc, California, about a "summer camp" for Christian children that reveals a great deal about the direction some fundamentalists take their beliefs:

Christians in combat boots

It's Sunday morning at Trinity Church of the Nazarene and staff member Mark "Gunny" Hestand is on his belly behind a tree, an imitation M-16 in his hands, showing six teen-age boys in fatigues how to ambush an enemy.

Hestand, 43, and a teen-age squad leader have been barking at the "soldiers" who are cranking out pushups and line sprints beside the church.

"You girls are going on a hike tomorrow," shouts squad leader Zach Smith, 15. "How are you girls going to hike tomorrow if you can't do 25 pushups?"

Thirty minutes later, the teens march into the church cafeteria in two single-file lines to the cadent commands of Smith. They gather around a table with Hestand and Bible study leader Tom Gilbert.

"Man has lost his focus on purpose," Gilbert says to the boys, in a lesson taken from the best-selling and controversial Christian book "Wild at Heart," John Eldridge's examination of masculinity.

"Life needs man to be fierce. Aggression is part of the masculine heart," Gilbert says.

The teens are part of "Boot Camp," a youth group that mixes Marine Corps values and combat techniques with Bible study. The concept is the brainchild of Hestand, who started the group in 2001 to encourage youth involvement in the church. As far as he knows, Boot Camp is unique in the Christian world.

One can only hope so. Because these folks practice a peculiarly militaristic brand of Christianity:

Once the 90-minute service commences, the boys gather outside, usually in the church's south parking lot, where for 20 minutes they do physical training like new recruits under the barks and orders of drill sergeants.

"We really get in their face," Hestand said.

The next 20 minutes are dedicated to combat techniques, such as ambushes or guerrilla tactics. The last 45 minutes are spent on Bible study.

Marine recruiter Sgt. Thomas Bustamante swings by once a month - without compensation and on his own time - to instruct the physical training and combat portion of the service. Recruiting isn't part of Bustamante's involvement, Hestand said.

Hestand sees no contradiction in instructing military combat techniques alongside the teachings of Jesus, who often is considered a pacifist because of his doctrine of "turning the other cheek." Neither does it bother Trinity's Pastor Jim Morris, an ex-Marine.

"His turn-the-other-cheek comment was talking about confronting things in life that seem unfair: An opportunity to be gracious rather than combative," Morris said. "Having said that, we're not preparing these guys to go into the military. We're using a military model as a hook."

It would be comforting to think that this worldview is relegated to a small range of fundamentalist thought. And it's true that the camp is unique. It seems, however, that the philosophy behind it actually enjoys broad popularity with many fundamentalists:

This aggressive and combative nature is at the heart of Boot Camp. Hestand and company say that men - particularly Christian men - have become domesticated, boring and divided from their natural instincts of adventure and drive to tackle challenges. The end result is a docile and unhappy man.

The idea that Christian men must be reshaped is straight from Eldridge's "Wild at Heart," which argues that man's wild heart is a mirror of God's and that man's three natural and worthy desires are to: fight a battle, live an adventure and rescue a beauty.

"Wild at Heart" has sold over a million copies since its 2001 release. It has sparked debate, but is used as a manual by many churches and is prominently displayed in Christian bookstores.

Other Christians consider Eldridge a demagogue who shapes God in his own "muscular Christian," outdoorsman image. They say his teachings - which favor movie icons like the character William Wallace of "Braveheart" and bash "Mr. Roger Christians," who hold office jobs and "make decisions at the kitchen table," - are dangerous and heretical concepts.

The Braveheart imagery, incidentally, is also significant. Because the Mel Gibson film (like his most recent release, The Passion), with its gory glorification of violence and self-sacrifice, represents a kind of theme that is appearing more frequently with an aggressively violent brand of Christianity that has many roots in the extremist right.

Max Blumenthal recently had an excellent post exploring this aspect of the Christian right, which he correctly identifies as a "fascist aesthetic." Notably, he cites an instance in which an official from Focus on the Family -- the same folks who have been attacking SpongeBob as a way of undermining the concept of tolerance -- referred to the Braveheart iconography in association with Eldridge's "masculine" form of Christianity:

Jim Chase, an advertising copywriter from La Crescenta, California, has had a replica of the sword actor Mel Gibson used when he played legendary Scottish warrior William Wallace in "Braveheart" hanging above his desk since attending a Wild at Heart retreat with 350 other men last year.

"It is just a reminder that we are in a battle every day. It can be just facing boredom and routine, but it is a battle," Chase said.

"Life isn't just about going to work and sitting in front of a computer and bringing in as much money as you can. We all have a story. God has written a story and we are meant to find out what the story is and live it," Chase said.

Blumenthal correctly points out that Braveheart enjoys icon status with European far-right figures. It also enjoys (I can report from personal experience) an avid audience with the Patriot/militia crowd. See, for instance, the fellow arrested last summer in Erie, Pa., with a massive cache of illegal weapons; the name of the organization he operated locally was the "Braveheart Militia."

Moreover, attacking the "feminization of Christianity" has long been a major theme of the white-supremacist Christian Identity movement. A taped sermon with that title has long been a staple of Peter Peters' Identity catalog. It's also worth noting how Peters views the source of this "feminization":

The Jewish leaders believe they already control America. Recently, one of them stated publicly: "We have castrated Gentile society, through fear and intimidation. It's manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easy to rule. As all geldings are by nature, their thoughts are not concerned with the future, or their posterity, BUT ONLY WITH THE PRESENT and the next meal." What a perfect "word picture of modern American society. It is the attitude of Christians, who don't want to be involved, and allow Jews, to control the school and often the church. We MUST break these fatal bonds, if we are to remain free.

If this trend continues to manifest itself among supposedly mainstream fundamentalists as well, that should be serious cause for concern.

Naked self-promotion

No, really, you don't want to see me naked. Trust me on this.

However, I will stoop to alerting readers that, once again, Orcinus has been honored with multiple nominations in the annual Koufax Awards at Wampum. I normally pay absolutely no attention to most Web awards and their nominees (I was nominated in thiz year's meaningless Weblog awards, too), but the Koufax awards mean something, in no small part because of the quality of the competition, as well as the spirit in which they are overseen by the folks at Wampum.

This year I've been nominated in the following categories: Best Blog by a Non-Professional, Best Single Issue Blog, Best Expert, Best Writing, Best Series, and Best Post.

The Best Series nomination is for "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism," the entire links to which can be found in the upper left margin of the site. (I'm working on a PDF, I promise.)

There are three "Best Post" nominations: for "A liberal war on terror," "Media Revolt: A Manifesto," and "The Political and the Personal," the latter of which is a mistake, since I wrote it in 2003. (In fact, it was a finalist in last year's Best Post competition, and was nudged out, I think, by a stroke of Billmon's brilliant pen.) So please don't vote for it.

I always have mixed feelings about these things. As regular readers know, this isn't really a single-issue blog; on the other hand, I write regularly enough about right-wing extremism (and related areas of hate crimes and domestic terrorism) to make this a close enough approximation. I'm not really an expert (I just play one on TV, is my line); I'm in fact simply a journalist who does a lot of research and groundwork, though this does lend itself to a certain kind of expertise in the fields I specialize in. And I have few illusions about seriously competing for either Best Non-Professional Blog (we all know who's gonna win that) or the one category I'd be most honored to win (namely, Best Writing).

I have decidedly mixed feelings in the Best Series category (which I was honored to win last year). I think "Pseudo Fascism" is overall a stronger, more cohesive essay, than most of what I've written here, and I think it may prove important some day. Still, one of my chief competitors this year is Eric Muller for his (and Greg Robinson's magnificent series of posts debunking Michelle Malkin, to which I linked copiously as well. If I were voting, I'd vote for myself, but you could certainly make the case that Muller is more deserving, since he at least had a discernible real-world impact with his work.

This gets back to my general uneasiness with awards, because they pit apples against oranges sometimes -- or rather, rubies against emeralds.

Still, the Wampum folks run the awards in a real spirit of openness and fairness, the competition is always good-spirited, and I think the left side of the blogosphere is genuinely represented there, so in the end they make a real contribution to the commonweal. Please be sure to click the little "Make a Donation" button at the top of the Wampum home page and chip in for a good cause.

The meaning of revisionism

The conservative victory at the polls in November 2004 has some inevitable consequences. Since so much of what passes as conservative dogma is actually anti-liberalism, the most significant of these consequences is that many of the progressive advances of the past half-century are being challenged and overturned.

This is true of a broad range of domestic policy issues from abortion to the environment to taxation and economic policy to affirmative action to Social Security, not to mention the implementation of an aggressively militaristic foreign policy. But the conservative-movement enterprise extends beyond mere policy, and appears determined to overturn the very way the populace at large thinks and sees itself.

Historical revisionism plays an essential role in achieving this. Thus, Ann Coulter's rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy in Treason was only the first iteration of this trend. (Trent Lott's nostalgia for Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats was an ill-received version of it as well.) It was shortly followed by Michelle Malkin's defense of the Japanese American internment.

Now we have Thomas Woods' right-wing bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which explains why such progressive advances as civil rights for minorities were actually harmful to the nation. Over at Is That Legal?, Eric Muller cuts to the chase by explaining why Woods' extremist background -- he claims to be a co-founder of the secessionist (and white supremacist) League of the South -- is essential to understanding the purpose of this book:

Some will undoubtedly say that it's not fair to call Woods' book into question on the basis primarily of his other writings, and on the basis of the positions of a private organization that he helped found and has assisted. And you know what? If he were a physicist who wrote a book about quarks and string theory, I guess I'd agree that his views (and those of his organization) on politics and race wouldn't really be fair game.

But there is a short, direct line from the rabid anti-statism and wholesale civil rights revisionism of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" to the agenda of the League of the South and its ilk.

This is what we all need to understand about the current spate of historical revisionism: It is occurring in the service of a broader agenda to recast our very understanding of the meaning of our history, and thus the meaning of America itself.

Thus we have the spectacle of the GOP recasting itself as the "party of civil rights," which as Hunter suggests might be laughable -- coming, as it does, from the party of the Southern Strategy -- were it not of a piece with the Newspeak that permeates the conservative march on America.

Sure enough, Virginia Sen. George Allen took the first step in promoting this "new image" for the GOP by joining Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, in sponsoring a resolution apologizing for the Senate's failure to pass anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s and 1930s. (For a little more on the history of that legislation, see the end of this post; for more on the lynching era, see this post.)

There are more than a few problems with this. It is, to begin, with more than a little convenient to be denouncing Southern filibusters at a time when Republicans are hoping to overturn longstanding rules regarding filibusters as a way of attacking Democrats. Moreover, as Kos notes, Allen is not exactly the best person to be apologizing for racially insensitive acts of Congress.

What's especially hypocritical about this, though, is that Republicans are not in any position to regret the fate that befell the anti-lynching laws. After all, this is the same party whose leaders in the House this autumn officially killed the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act -- which, had it passed, would have been the first real federal anti-hate crimes statute. Indeed, this same political leadership was responsible for killing a federal hate-crimes bill on two previous occasions -- first in 1999, then again in 2001.

As I've argued at length, there is a real connection between the anti-lynching laws of the 1920s and the currently proposed federal hate-crimes statutes; the latter are clearly descended from the former, and serve largely the same purpose. Today's Republicans should be every bit as ashamed of their current leadership as they are of those Southern conservatives who blocked the national will back in 1922.

Speaking of hate crimes, over at Pandagon, Jesse has written a couple of posts that cut beautifully to the heart of the matter. He also directs us to a report of a Republican effort in New Hampshire to repeal its hate-crimes law, just as the Missoulian recently suggested.

Revising history also means revising how we understand our nation today; it is only possible to oppose hate crimes statutes by flagrantly ignoring the realities of hate crimes in our history, especially the lynching era, and pretending that those realities are all in the past. Likewise, when Republicans recast their image as pro-civil rights, they are abusing the factual course of history.

If the nation succumbs to the notion that progressive advances of the 20th century have harmed us, and becomes intent on rolling back those advances, we need to be realistic about what kind of path this will lead us down. It is not a bright one.

Is anyone on the Democratic side paying any attention to this? Besides Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that is?

Soft on extremism

I had a post last week at American Street discussing the latest iteration in something that seems to come up a lot lately: the spread of extremism into the mainstream of conservatism (contra the Professor).

The most recent example is colorfully illustrative of the nature of the extremist right -- particularly the way hate-filled beliefs come to permeate the entire worldview of the people who adopt them.

As with a lot of recent cases, this incident involves Republican politicians from the South, whose growing embrace of all kinds of neo-Confederate activism (particularly from the Council of Conservative Citizens) is the most serious form of interaction between the extremist and mainstream right.

Seems that, as predicted, in the wake of the passage of the anti-immigrant Protect Arizona Now initiative, a plan to pass identical legislation in other states is rising to the surface. The most revealing instance of this is in Arkansas, where a fellow named Joe McCutchen of Fort Smith is heading up the statewide Protect Arkansas Now campaign. Seems McCutchen not only has an interesting past, he has the full-fledged and quite public support of leading Republican legislators:

Sens. Jim Holt, R-Springdale, and Denny Altes, R-Fort Smith, on Wednesday filed the proposed Arkansas Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. The measure would require stricter proof of citizenship for voter registration and forbid public assistance for non-citizens unless mandated by the federal government. The bill also requires state and local authorities to report illegal aliens to federal immigration officials.

Holt introduced McCutchen on Friday as the head of Protect Arkansas Now, a lobbying group modeled after Protect Arizona Now, the lobbyists for a similar immigration law in Arizona that passed by referendum last November.

McCutchen denied Southern Poverty Law Center's claims Wednesday that he was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, but acknowledged that he wrote about his campaign to tighten immigration laws in the February 2000 edition of "American Renaissance," identified as a "hate sheet" by the racism watchdog group.

He said he had never heard of "American Renaissance," but recognized his letter to its editor appealing for money for his campaign to help unseat then-U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., who eventually lost the 2000 election and became President Bush's energy secretary.

McCutcheon said "American Renaissance" was one of many publications and organizations on a list of donors to efforts to limit immigration, although his political action committee was essentially self-funded and received only about $5,000 from contributions.

Of course, we can be sure, on his say-so, that those associations were merely accidental and did not reflect on his judgment or beliefs, right? And to listen to the rest of McCutchen's defense, you'd think he was being smeared:

McCutchen also acknowledged participating in a 2001 anti-immigration forum in North Carolina, sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a successor of the old White Citizens Council. In a 2001 CCC publication, McCutchen is identified as a member, but he said Wednesday that the only organizations he's ever belonged to are four Masonic orders and the American Airplane Pilots Association.

McCutchen said that after participating in the 2001 forum with self-described racial separatist Virginia Abernethy, who later became chairwoman of Protect Arizona Now, he decided to break all ties with CCC.

"I decided this wasn't my schtick," he said. "I'm strictly working on an illegal immigration basis, and they're in other areas. I'm strictly looking for the stability of this country and upholding the rule of law."

McCutchen said he resented having to make such a disclaimer, but said he has been careful to point out that people who want to tighten laws against illegal immigration "are not bigots, xenophobes, racists or anti-Semites."

Certainly not. There are many reasonable people seeking immigration reform who are not bigots, xenophobes, racists, or anti-Semites.

On the other hand, people who write letters to the editor like this [from June 2003] certainly are all of the above:

Duped again! Weapons of Mass Delusion. Who orchestrated Bush’s illegal Iraqi war? Official reports indicate that 25 Zionists were the architects. Examination of Bush’s predominately neo-con Jewish/Zionist inner circle reveals all advocate continuing illegal preemptive strikes against Middle-Eastern countries.

A partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Ari Fleischer, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Chertoff, Elliot Abrams, Michael Ladeen, David Wurmser, Lewis Libby and Karl Rove — a combination of dual-citizenships, Israel-Firsters, or offspring of Trotskyists. These men all hold strategic positions in the federal government. Cover for the aforementioned is supplied by Falwell/Robertson fundamentalists.

Jewish media control, i.e. Viacom, CBS, MTV, ABC, Clear Channels, Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros., Sony, Disney, coupled with goodly numbers of Jewish editorialists, print and spoken, guarantees a Jewish/Israeli slant.

Bush and his mostly Jewish neo-cons' war against Iraq was illegal, immoral and resulted in the emasculation of the Constitution. There are no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence that Iraq has harmed U.S. interests, i.e. no Iraqi terrorists. Evidence indicates Bush I was a party to installing Saddam and was formerly a business partner, and U.S. furnished Iraq with start-up material for bacterial warfare.

Bush and his neo-con handlers have vaporized the 14th Amendment, shades of Nazi German differing only in role-reversal. Additionally, Globalist Bush refuses to secure our southern border, and estimates state that in excess of 10,000 illegals are crossing daily. The aforementioned, accompanied by "Homeland Security" and the "Patriot Acts" guarantees a U.S. citizen lock-down! American culture is in a melt-down.

Who benefited? Bush oil, Israel and the military/industrial complex.
The Bush administration is involved in a criminally arrogant disdain for the Founders' formula for a free society.

Joe McCutchen
Fort Smith

So are people who write follow-up letters like this:

On June 5 this paper published my letter stating that the Iraqi war was provoked by Neo-con Zionists. Before the Iraqi war, Bush’s Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, along with Abram Shulsky, Elliot Abrams and Michael Ledeen created for Rumsfeld the Office of Special Plans to circumvent Pentagon Intelligence. They openly call themselves "The Cabal" and have admitted they used "weapons of mass destruction" as a motivational tool for war.

I further stated the central government, banking, media (radio/TV/print) and entertainment are controlled by Jews, which is easily proven.

Two gentlemen writers attacked me with personal smears, choosing not to address the substance of the letter, indicating a lack of knowledge and/or refusal to deal with facts.

Jews were the force that created and have sustained a mass immigration and open-borders policy — a practice that is in the process of destroying Western Culture and is about to create a slave-state. Witness Patriot Acts I and II written by a non-citizen Vietnamese, Viet Dinh employed by John Ashcroft.

Since the passage of the Balfour Agreement, creating the state of Israel, U.S. taxpayers have poured in $3 trillion. Ten million Americans unemployed, and this year alone we have dumped $19 billion into Israel.

American and international Jews own the world monetary system. Would it not be appropriate if they used their own financial resources to subsidize Israel? For example, Bill Gertz, aka Bill Gates.

The Iraqi war was unconstitutional and immoral; the best that can be said of Bush, Ashcroft and their Neo-con Zionists is that their blather is full of factual elasticity.

To survive, America must surmount P.C., revisionism and incendiaries enemies hurl, i.e. racists, anti-Semitic, xenophobe, et. al.

Americans, emerge from your cocoons.

Joe McCutchen
Fort Smith

I especially loved the "Bill Gertz" line. That's a new one.

While self-described "centrists" wring their hands over the "authentic face of the Left," the real face of the Right is coming clearer into focus. And boy, is it ugly.

[Hat tip to Mark Potok.]

Roadside assistance

[Lori Cain / Statesman Journal]

Consider this a sign of the times. It represents not only the natural outcome of a a recent Supreme Court decision, but also the latest iteration of the white supremacist program to rehabilitate itself in the mainstream.

The above sign appears along a road near Salem, Oregon, where county officials recently decided to allow a group calling itself the "American Nazi Party" to take part in its road-cleanup volunteer program:

Several local residents, some of them who live on Sunnyview Road, said they are upset that the county would allow the signs or attach its own name to that of a hate group.

"To me, it just screams hate," said Jacque Bryant of Salem. "It screams doesn't belong here."

Bryant heard about the sign from her grandmother and had a strong emotional reaction to it when she saw it for herself. She hopes enough community outrage will force the county to remove the sign.

Salem resident Mike Navarro, whose mother lives near the area, also was stunned by the sign.

Navarro said that the group has a right to its own opinions but that it's poor judgment for a county to put itself in the position of appearing to endorse a hate group. There should be some level of sensitivity in these kinds of decisions, Navarro said.

"To me, that's kind of cowardly. 'We don't want to get sued,' " Navarro said. "You're probably offending the majority of the people in your county just to pacify the needs of a very select group of people who thrive on hating."

It's worth noting that court rulings in question only outlaw the banning of a group from these programs based on the content of its beliefs. What it doesn't prohibit is limiting participation based on a group's actual ability to perform the cleanup, as well as the likelihood of its participation becoming an attractive nuisance. Both of these avenues are available to Oregon officials.

Both of these issues, as it happens, have arisen in previous cases where the Klan or other extremist groups sought to participate in roadside-cleanup programs. The first was in the mid-1990s in Arkansas, an experiment that ended badly when the Klan failed to ever perform the promised cleanups.

They perhaps had a good reason not to: the stretch of road that they claimed attracted an unusual amount of garbage. It was as though, for some reason, everyone in the county who had noxious waste (ranging from loads of soiled disposable diapers to animal carcasses) to toss from their pickups chose that stretch of road to do it. Guess they wanted to be sure the Klan had plenty of busy work. But it became something of a public health hazard.

Likewise, in Missouri, the Ku Klux Klan's participation in the Adopt-a-Highway program sharply plummeted shortly after they were admitted. It didn't help, of course, that Missouri renamed the highway after Rosa Parks. Nor did it help that, once again, the road attracted inordinate amounts of garbage.

These are issues the Salem officials should stay atop of if they're serious about their civic responsibilities. There's more than one way to deal with haters. Sometimes it just takes being a little creative.

Should we repeal hate-crimes laws?

That's the radical argument proposed last week by my former colleagues at the Missoulian, where I was a staff writer and copy editor from 1985-87.

The paper ran an editorial (its official position) last week proposing abolishing Montana's hate-crime law rather than expanding it to include sexual orientation, gender, and handicap as categories of bias:

Do you suppose someone beaten bloody by a complete stranger feels less victimized than, say, a naturalized citizen who is beaten bloody by a complete stranger?

Neither do we.

Should it be less of a crime to murder a person of color than a white person? Of course not. Then can you explain why, under Montana law, it's a worse crime to murder a person of color than it is to murder some races than it is others? Neither can we.

Don't think the line in the Montana Constitution that guarantees "No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws" means what it says - that we're all equal in the eyes of the law?

So do we.

Montana legislators once again are debating expanding the state's "hate crime" statute. As it now reads, the law allows judges to impose tougher sentences on criminals who victimize people based on race, creed, religion, color and national origin. Now lawmakers are talking about adding gender, disability and sexual orientation to the list of special victims against whom crimes are to be considered worse than the crimes committed against other Montanans.

... All of the offenses covered by the hate-crime statute already are against the law. If that doesn't deter offenders, making them against two laws won't either. This is feel-good legislation that, because it reneges on the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, shouldn't make anyone feel very good.

Here is my response, which I sent today to the paper's editorial page editor and its editor, both of them old friends:

I have to admit I was somewhat astonished to read the Missoulian's attack on hate-crime laws in its Jan. 20 editorial. It wasn't so much that my former colleagues would adopt such a right-wing position; nothing surprises me much anymore in that regard. What astonished me was that they could publish something so rife with misinformation, steeped in a fundamental misunderstanding of how these laws work. From start to finish, this editorial gets it wrong. It was disappointing work, for more than just journalistic reasons.

The editorial essentially argues from two key positions: that it is somehow inappropriate to apply different sentences to crimes with identical outcomes but different motivations; and that hate-crime statutes create protected "classes" of victims who are treated differently than others. Both are simply wrong.

First: The principle of proportionality in sentencing is a fundamental aspect of criminal law. Society has always chosen to punish crimes more or less harshly according to the culpability of the perpetrator, particularly the level of harm he inflicts. This is why, in the case of the death of another person, someone may face charges ranging from first-degree murder to third-degree manslaughter.

Take, for instance, the case of an elderly woman smothered in her sleep. If the perpetrator is her nephew eager to collect on his inheritance, then he is likely to face first-degree murder charges and a possible death penalty. If it is a begrieved husband carrying out the wishes of a dying Alzheimer's victim, then prosecutorial discretion comes into play. Which do you think is more worthy of a harsh sentence?

The principle responsible for the difference here is mens rea, or the state of mind of the accused. Mens rea involves both intent and motive. Harsher sentences traditionally have been assigned to crimes committed with intentions and motivations considered more harmful to society at large.

Now, you may ask, are hate crimes more harmful than the crimes for which, as the editorial points out, there are already laws on the books? Well, ask yourself this: Is a swastika painted on a synagogue the same thing as graffiti scrawled on a downtown wall? Is an assault in which the perpetrators sought out gay or black people to send a "message" the same thing as a bar fight?

Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes? Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes.

The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays -- to which the victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community. The laws against them resemble anti-terrorism laws (which, it must be noted, are also predicated on enhancing the sentence based on the motivation of the perpetrator) in this respect as well.

But this is only one aspect of how different hate crimes are from their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are substantial. Bias crimes are far more likely to be violent than are other crimes. They also may be distinguished by their extraordinary impact on the victim. As bias-crimes expert Frederick Lawrence notes, "Bias-crime victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation."

Finally, bias crimes cause an even broader injury to the general community, both local and national. They create racial distrust and misunderstanding within the immediate communities where they occur, and their occurrence can cast a shadow over an entire community's reputation. (Just ask folks in Jasper, Texas.) Perhaps just as important, they violate basic principles of equality of opportunity and freedom of association by threatening and intimidating targeted segments of society, and widen the not-insignificant racial divide in this country.

Not only are bias crimes substantially different in nature from their parallel crimes, there is no question that they cause substantially greater harm, so a harsher punishment is fully warranted.

Second: Hate-crime statutes are neither written to protect specific classes of persons from assault nor to enhance the charges simply when a person from a "protected class" is the victim of a crime. We don't have laws that create stiffer time if you simply assault a black or a Jew or a gay person. The laws don't even specify races or religions. Such laws would be in clear violation of basic constitutional principles, including the equal-protection clause.

In fact, the actual class status of a victim is almost secondary to the decision whether or to file a hate-crimes charge or not. The primary concern is the motivation of the perpetrator. All of these laws are written to punish people more severely for committing a crime committed with a bias motivation.

Traditionally, all states have included three categories of bias: race, religion, and ethnicity. (In Montana's case, the categories are: "race, creed, religion, color, national origin, or involvement in civil rights or human rights activities.") Some states have included other categories, most notably sexual orientation.

Now, think about what this means: Everyone has a race. Everyone has a creed. Everyone has beliefs about religion. Everyone has an ethnic origin, and for that matter a sexual orientation. As such, the laws are written to protect everyone equally from criminals who select them intentionally because of their racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual identity. There are no "protected classes" or "special victims" per se, only prosecutable motives.

This is why someone who assaults a Sikh under the mistaken belief he is Muslim, or a straight man believing he is gay, may still be charged with a hate crime. It also explains why, if you look at annual FBI statistics for hate crimes, you'll see that nearly a thousand black-on-white hate crimes, and several hundred anti-Christian hate crimes, are reported (and most of them prosecuted) annually. The law is written to protect everyone equally.

Now, the editorial asks an important question: "How are we to prevent hate crimes, then?" But it poses this as a matter of deterrence rather than a matter of proportionality in the law: "All of the offenses covered by the hate-crime statute already are against the law. If that doesn't deter offenders, making them against two laws won't either." The same logic (or lack thereof) could apply to anti-terrorism laws as well.

In reality, deterrence has always been a secondary factor when it comes to determining the worth of a law. There's very little evidence, for instance, that laws against murder have a deterrent effect on would-be killers, either. This does not mean we should not have laws against murder. Indeed, deterrence is often the weakest argument for or against any kind of law that affects punishment.

Rather, there is an expressive value in the law at work here: that is, the law expresses our core community values. We punish murder harshly because, as a society, we wish to express our harshest condemnation for such acts. We punish other violent crimes on a scale that reflects, similarly, the harm they inflict upon the community.

Preventing hate crimes in the end comes down to the community and its recognition of the real harm they inflict, well over and above their parallel crimes. The laws alone, it must be said, are half-measures at best. If a community takes hate crimes seriously, and confronts them in a meaningful fashion that uses the law simply as a starting point -- a line drawn in the sand, as it were -- then it has a chance to make a real difference.

Actually preventing crimes, as always, is hard and often complex work; there are no panaceas when it comes to hate crimes. But a good place to start is understanding the mindset of the people motivated to commit them.

Typically, we're talking about a young male age 16-20 who has both a strong sense of racial identity and a persecution complex, perhaps even an antisocial personality disorder. He is most likely a broadly accepted member of his community (only about 8 percent of all bias crimes are committed by members of so-called hate groups) with some likelihood of previous police contact.

Most are so-called "reactive" offenders: that is, they react against what they perceive as an "invasion" of their community by "outsiders," often spontaneously. What's remarkable about the crimes is their real viciousness, particularly in the case of gay-bashing, in which an overkill of violence is the norm.

But many if not most hate-crime offenders refuse, even after incarceration, to admit that what they did was morally wrong. This is because they believe they are acting on the unspoken wishes of their previously homogeneous community, and thus taking action on a moral plane all their own.

This is why it's important for communities to stand up and be counted when hate crimes occur in their midst. Making public their utter condemnation of such acts sends an important message to the would-be perpetrators: the community does not condone violence to expel outsiders. Using the stiff arm of the law to back that message up is essential, especially when the need is so clear.

Conversely, pretending that a swastika on a synagogue is just another case of vandalism, or treating (especially in law enforcement terms) a "fag bashing" as just another bar fight, sends quite another message, one that in the mind of a hate-crime perpetrator equates with approval. A slap on the wrist is too often seen as a pat on the back; equanimity as forbearance.

The work of preventing hate crimes requires having an involved community that stands up publicly, not just in the law, against them. It entails confronting and publicizing them when they occur; it entails taking them seriously on the part of law enforcement officers and prosecutors; it entails an engaged faith and civic community that works on the grass-roots level to reduce the conditions that encourage hate crimes. These especially involve changing the racial attitudes of young people well before they turn to scapegoating minorities.

All of this requires a similarly engaged and informed, as well as informative, press that also takes hate crimes seriously and helps lead the charge on behalf of its community's long-term self-interest. Unfortunately, the Missoulian seems intent on charging in the other direction.

I have no idea whether they'll run this. Steve Woodruff, the edit-page editor and author of the editorial, tells me they're planning to prioritize local input, which I (as an old edit-page editor myself) well understand. So this may be the only place you read this.

That's a no-no now

Apparently, it's no longer just a matter of bad taste to announce your dislike of President Bush.

In Colorado, a woman was threatened with arrest by a Denver police sergeant for sporting a bumper sticker on her car that read, "Fuck Bush":

About 11 a.m., Shasta Bates, 26, was standing in the shopping center store in the 800 block of South Monaco Parkway when a man walked in and started arguing with her about a bumper sticker on the back of her truck that had "F--- Bush" in white letters on a black background.

"He was saying it was very sick and wrong and you shouldn't be doing that," Bates said. "He was very offended by it. I said, 'You didn't have to take it so personally.' "

The two argued for a few minutes, and then the man walked out of the store and stood behind Bates' truck. A few minutes later, the man flagged down police Sgt. Michael Karasek, who was patrolling the area.

Rocky Mountain News reporter Katie Kerwin McCrimmon, who happened to be at the store at the time, walked up to the two and asked what was going on.

The man pointed the bumper sticker out to McCrimmon, and then Karasek told her that it was illegal because it was profane, McCrimmon said.

Reached late Monday, City Attorney Cole Finnegan said he didn't believe there were any city ordinances against displaying a profane bumper sticker.

Karasek then walked into the store and confronted Bates.

"He said, 'You need to take off those stickers because it's profanity and it's against the law to have profanity on your truck,' " Bates said. "Then he said, 'If you ever show up here again, I'm going to make you take those stickers off and arrest you. Never come back into that area.' "

McCrimmon, who had followed the officer into the store, said Karasek wrote down the woman's license-plate number and then told her: "You take those bumper stickers off or I will come and find you and I will arrest you."

Next they'll be writing tickets for leaving your Kerry/Edwards sticker on your car ...

[Hat tip to Brad Hill and Grand Moff Texan.]

The Nazi next door

I suppose you could file this under Bobo's World (from the Los Angeles Times):

The parent of a high school football player who invited teammates over to his house for weightlifting sessions allegedly tried to recruit the teens into a heavily armed white-supremacist group, Riverside County authorities announced Tuesday.

The parent, Howard Marshall of Winchester, was one of 19 alleged white supremacists arrested in November on suspicion of gun and drug violations, news that stunned school officials and parents in the rural communities near Hemet and Menifee in the southwest part of the county.

... Doyle said the investigation, joined by the FBI, was triggered by an allegation in September that Marshall, 44, had given steroids to his son and at least one other player at Paloma Valley High School in Menifee during the 2003 season.

When authorities searched the homes of Marshall and his step-brother in Menifee, they recovered 90 automatic and semiautomatic rifles and pistols, thousands of rounds of ammunition, body armor and drugs, they said. They also said they found German Nazi war helmets and boots and Nazi flags.

"Sixty years and one day removed from the discovery of Auschwitz, I'm amazed we're still fighting this garbage in our country," sheriff's spokesman Tom Freeman said.

The alleged supremacists met frequently at members' homes and at rural locations in the southwest part of the county, sheriff's officials said. Some of the suspects also were affiliated with nationwide white-supremacist organizations, including Public Enemy Number One, a growing "white power" group in Southern California and in state prisons, authorities said.

I've written previously about the growing presence of white-supremacist and hate-crime activity in Southern California, especially noteworthy because of its serious infiltration into high schools and among young people generally. This is clearly the most serious manifestation of that trend to date.

Evidently, Marshall's activities opened up a whole window into how white supremacists are insinuating themselves in mainstream society, particularly by disguising their intentions and evading immediate detection by the schools:

Marshall had been doing strength training and nutritional work for the football players at Paloma Valley High, authorities said Tuesday. Doyle said high school students had joined white supremacist groups because of Marshall. He said the investigation shows that most of those being recruited ranged from ages 13 to adult.

Any contact Marshall had with students at Paloma Valley High was not done in an "official capacity," Barry Kayrell, spokesman for the Perris Union High School District, said Tuesday afternoon.

"His son played on the (football) team," Kayrell said and, like many parents, Marshall became involved with the team. "Nine times out of 10, that's not a problem."

Last year, the then-head coach of the team, Craig Lind, recommended Marshall as a volunteer "walk-on coach," Kayrell said.

What happened next is somewhat in dispute. School officials say a background check was conducted on Marshall and his criminal history was uncovered.

"A Department of Justice check was done," Kayrell said, and Marshall's connection with the school was "immediately unplugged" in August.

However, Lt. Scott Madden said the Sheriff's Department informed the school that Marshall was a convicted felon and it was then that the district took the appropriate action. Sheriff's officials say the district did not do a criminal screening of Marshall.

When asked if Marshall should, at any time, have been allowed on campus to work with the football team, Kayrell replied: "Absolutely not."

The case also opened up a window into the levels of white supremacist activitiy in the region, much of it associated with violent gangs that originate in the prison system:

Madden said information obtained during the investigation shows that many of those arrested ---- including the Marshalls ---- were actively recruiting at the school and throughout Southwest County for the cental cause of white supremacist groups. He said the investigation revealed at least three such major groups were involved.

Photographs seized during the search warrants and displayed Tuesday show many teens standing near adults, all apparently giving the straight-arm, "Heil Hitler" Nazi salute to the camera.

In one photo, two young girls flanked a man, all three doing the salute while a Nazi flag is displayed on a stage in the background. Madden said he believes the two girls were under the age of 12.

The groups would have rallies and periodically throw parties where they would espouse their white supremacist beliefs, authorities said.

One of the most recent, Madden said, was thrown in an attempt to raise money for either the bail or defense fund for one of the 19 people arrested.

The 19 arrests in fact appear to have been just the tip of the iceberg. To date, a total of 42 people have been arrested as a result of the investigations:

Investigations in Riverside and San Bernardino counties have led to the arrest of 42 people associated with white-supremacist hate groups in recent months, authorities said.

In southwestern Riverside County, several raids over the past four months have led to 18 arrests for various crimes and uncovered a trove of weapons, drugs, body armor, stolen vehicles, hate literature and Nazi propaganda, according to a Riverside County Sheriff's Department news release.

... In San Bernardino County, sheriff's deputies announced Wednesday that, since beginning a joint investigation with the FBI in November 2003, they had arrested 24 people with ties to white-supremacist groups in the High Desert, according to a news release. The arrests, mostly for alleged narcotics and firearms violations, resulted from an investigation of hate groups in the Morongo Basin.

Of those arrested, Thomas Powell, 23, a Desert Hot Springs resident, was later convicted of federal weapons charges and sentenced to 2½ years in federal prison, deputies reported. Brant Hardesty, a 31-year-old Yucca Valley man described by deputies as a hate-group leader, has been sentenced to two years in federal prison on weapons violations.

If nothing else, the investigations have gotten a good deal of ordnance off the streets:

As a result of the searches, police seized more than 75 firearms, many of which had been modified or reported stolen, Madden wrote.

Others were illegal assault weapons.

Authorities also seized more than 15,000 rounds of ammunition, a half-dozen stolen vehicles, several bulletproof vests, methamphetamine, steroids, hallucinogenic mushrooms, a marijuana-cultivation operation, marijuana packaged for sale, and a large amount of white-supremacy propaganda material, Madden wrote.

A majority of those arrested were convicted felons, Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle reported.

But I'm sure this is just an "isolated incident."

Rich, deep, and genuine

Last week's issue of the New Yorker had an excellent piece by Margaret Talbot titled "The Auteur of Anime," on Hayao Miyazaki, the great Japanese anime master.

It's not available online, but there is available an interview with Talbot that recaps some of the highlights of the piece.

I have an immense admiration for Miyazaki's work, especially My Neighbor Totoro (there's a reason my blogroll features a permanent link to Totoro.org) and Spirited Away. The chief draw is what Talbot calls the "great human warmth in his films." He doesn't give many interviews, but generally chooses to let his work speak for him. And much of what attracts me to Miyazaki is the values his work encompass.

The Talbot piece makes that connection even clearer. This anecdote was rather telling:

Several people who know Miyazaki told me that mothers frequently approach him to tell him that their child watches "Totoro" or "Kiki" every day, and he always acts horrified. "Don't do that!" he will say. "Let them see it once a year, at most!" In an essay he wrote in 1987, he was already concerned: "No matter how we may think of ourselves as conscientious, it is true that images such as anime stimulate only the visual and auditory sensations of children, and deprive them of the world they go out to find, touch, and taste."

This sense of the value of the real, and its discovery as a part of coming into the world, pervades Miyazaki's films. It comes through in another anecdote as well, taken from a Japanese documentary about the making of Spirited Away. It shows Miyazaki working with his team of young animators, and discussing with them the importance of incorporating real-life detail into the films. For one sequence, he tells them to think of how a snake falls out of a tree; but none of his young team members has actually seen a snake fall. For another shot, he tells them to think of how an eel resists being gutted; but none of them have seen that, either. Finally, he tells them for another shot to think of how a dog resists being given a pill; but again, the suggestion draws blank looks.

"Any of you ever had a dog?" Miyazaki asks.

"I had a cat," somebody volunteers.

"This is pathetic," Miyazaki says. The documentary shows the chastened staff making a field trip that night to a veterinary hospital, videotaping a golden retriever's gums and teeth, and then returning to the studio to study the video.

When Talbot finally talks with Miyazaki, he says more on this, including a profound dissatisfaction with modern life: "Everything is so thin and shallow and fake." He also said this:

"I'm not jealous of young people," he said. "They're not really free." I asked him what he meant. "They're raised on virtual reality. And it's not like it's any better in the countryside. You go to the country and kids spend more time staring at DVDs than kids do in the city. I have a place in the mountains, and a friend of mine runs a small junio-high school nearby. Out of twenty-seven pupils, he told me, nine do their schoolwork from home! They're too afraid to leave their homes." He went on, "The best thing would be for virtual reality just to disappear. I realize that with our animation we are creating virtual things, too. I keep telling my crew, 'Don't watch animation! You're surrounded by enough virtual things already.' "

In some regards, this sounds almost Luddite in its conservatism, but I think Miyazaki is onto something that has concerned me for some time, and increasingly so now that I am a father.

I remember my grandfather grousing about modern society along similar lines: "People today, they just go down to the store and buy their meat in a package," he would say. "They have no connection to this meat as once having been a living thing. It might as well be something they make in a factory." He too hated the fakeness that pervades modern life.

This isn't just grousing over "modern ways": it's a recognition that our materialism and desire for convenience and entertainment is leading us down a path where we lose our touch with what it is that makes us human.

Moreover, the right-wing "values" crowd is so eager to tout unbridled capitalism that it never seems to take stock of the fact that such an ethos is driving the very loss of values they're decrying. And I think progressives -- who are, at base, humanists -- should be taking stock of the need for the genuine traditional values we're losing in our rush to modernity as well.

Now, I have to confess: There's no way I'll be able to restrict my daughter's viewing Totoro to a single annual event; after all, a stuffed Totoro sits on the foot of her bed (along with a Catbus) to keep all the other monsters away. (I figure once a month should be OK.) But I do intend to make sure she also knows how a snake falls out of a tree, and a dog refuses to eat its pill. That she gets real-life experience to go along with her TV.

Nowadays, that's probably the best we can do. And thanks to Miyazaki, I don't have to worry that all of the values she consumes through the TV are thin, shallow, and fake.

The worm turns

Surprise, surprise.

It turns out conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher was taking government money for propagandizing on behalf of a government program, just like Armstrong Williams.

Best of all was her reaction to getting caught:

"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?" Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.

Perhaps Gallagher can be forgiven her abysmal ignorance of journalistic ethics. After all she, like the vast majority of right-wing pundits who now populate the journalistic landscape, has zero experience in the nuts and bolts of actual reporting.

So we'll be happy to tell Gallagher: Your career as a journalist is over. Or ought to be. Simply because it didn't occur to you to disclose it.

Funny thing about that, though: Back in September, Gallagher seemed to know enough about journalistic ethics to pontificate at length on the subject in the case of Dan Rather:

Journalists don't talk like that. How could Dan know this story was true? Was he there? Did he see it personally? Of course not. Why was he vouching for the story in the language of faith, not like a hard-headed journalist reporting the evidence?

Yes, Maggie knows all about those hard-headed types reporting the facts. The ones she's paid to report.

It's one thing to commit a monumental screw-up, as CBS did in the case of its broadcast of the Killian memos. People should get fired for those, and did.

It's quite another to be taking money from either private or government interests about whom you are writing as a professional, especially without disclosing it. That usually means it's time to look into a new career.

Gallagher's only hope at this point is that we start getting a regular parade of conservative pundits who turn out to have been on the Bush administration payroll. Then they can all point at each other and say, "See! Everybody else does it!" Then they call all close ranks and pronounce each other vindicated.

And ya know, I'd bet someone in the White House is working on that talking point.

Book report

I mentioned awhile back that I was giving a talk at Seattle University on my book, Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America.

The student paper at Seattle U, The Spectator, has a story on that talk online now.

It's a pretty good piece. The reporter, Katie Sauro, gets everything pretty much right. There is a little problem with the headline: This book is definitely not a novel.

Talking treason

So the Washington Times' Tony Blankley thinks Seymour Hersh should be investigated for espionage for revealing that the Bush administration has been conducting secret military missions inside of Iran:

18 United States Code section 794, subsection (b) prohibits anyone "in time of war, with intent that the same shall be communicated to the enemy [from publishing] any information with respect to the movement, numbers, or disposition of any of the Armed Forces ... of the United States... or supposed plans or conduct of any ... military operations ... or any other information relating to the public defense, which might be useful to the enemy ... [this crime is punishable] by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life."

Subsection (a) of that statute prohibits anyone "with ... reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates ... to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life."

I am not an expert on these federal code sections, but a common-sense reading of their language would suggest, at the least, that federal prosecutors should review the information disclosed by Mr. Hersh to determine whether or not his conduct falls within the proscribed conduct of the statute.

Well, if anyone should know about irresponsibly publishing information that can be used by the enemy in a way that directly harms national security interests, it's the Washington Times.

Recall, if you will, that it was the Washington Times that, back in the fall of 1998, published a little tidbit of information that let Osama bin Laden slip through our grasp.

I've mentioned this a couple of times before, most recently here. As I wrote then, this information appears in Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The Age of Sacred Terror:

According to Benjamin and Simon, the turning point when al-Qaeda became America's greatest enemy was not on Sept. 11, 2001, but rather on Aug. 20, 1998 -- the day President Clinton launched missile strikes against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and the Sudan, the latter being a pharmaceutical plant at al-Shifa that was being used to develop chemical weapons. First, there's this, on pp. 260-261:

For a brief moment, the operation appeared to be a qualified success. Al-Shifa was destroyed. Six terrorist camps were hit and about sixty people were killed, many of them Pakistani militants training for action in Kashmir. The Tomahawks missed bin Laden and the other senior al-Qaeda leaders by a couple of hours. This in itself was not a great surprise: no one involved has any illusions about the chances of hitting the target at exactly the right time. The White House recognized that the strike would not stop any attacks that were in the pipeline, but it might forestall the initiation of new operations as the organization's leaders went to ground.

The months that followed, however, were a nightmare. The press picked apart the administration's case for striking al-Shifa, and controversy erupted over whether Clinton was trying to "wag the dog," that is, distract the public from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Washington Times -- the capital's unabashed right-wing newspaper, which consistently has the best sources in the intelligence world and the least compunction about leaking -- ran a story mentioning that bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." Bin Laden stopped using the satellite phone instantly. The al-Qaeda leader was not eager to court the fate of Djokar Dudayev, the Chechen insurgent leader who was killed by a Russian air defense suppression missile that homed in on its target using his satellite phone signal. When bin Laden stopped using the phone and let his aides do the calling, the United States lost its best chance to find him.

Now, I'm not an expert on U.S. Code 18, section 794, either. But it certainly strike me that this behavior also fully constitutes disclosing in a way that it can be read by the enemy "supposed plans or conduct of any ... military operations ... or any other information relating to the public defense, which might be useful to the enemy." Call me old-fashioned, but it sounds like treason to me.

For that matter, where was Tony Blankley when it came to the outing of Valerie Plame as an overseas CIA operative by Robert Novak, acting as a conduit for yet-unknown figures inside the White House? Oh, that's right: back in September 2003, he was busy minimizing it, and predicting the scandal would produce a media feeding frenzy that would blow it completely beyond any proportion:

The second rule is to not underestimate how heinous the media and the public will come to regard small, seemingly insignificant, perfectly justifiable facts. Trivial actions or non-actions by good and decent friends and co-workers will take on the proportions of mortal sins. It will seem ludicrously disproportionate to the conduct in question. But it will happen that way. It always does. Read the memoirs. Talk to the old hands.

The search dogs will find not only the fox for which they are hunting, but other assorted game, which will be publicly presented before the dogs have gone to kennel for the night. In other words, the investigative process will stumble on other embarrassing facts and leak it to the press. Count on it.

Good thing we didn't count on it, because those dogs look like they're still sleeping on the porch. Certainly John Kerry never awoke them. But those noted liberal rags, the Washington Post and the New York Times, have hardly uttered a peep about the case since it first erupted.

Of course, that deeply nursed persecution complex that comes with the conservative brain package these days is part of Blankley's complaint against Sy Hersh, too:

The Washington political class is suffering from a bad case of creeping normalcy. We are getting ever more used to ever more egregious government leaks of military secrets.

Gosh, I wonder why.

The meaning of SpongeBob

Sometimes the religious right caricatures itself in a way that you can't help but laugh a little. Like the earlier claim by Jerry Falwell that Tinky Winky was a Trojan horse, so to speak, for homosexual behavior, the recent brouhaha over SpongeBob Squarepants raised by James Dobson of Focus on the Family seems pretty laughable on its face.

Unfortunately, there's a deadly serious undercurrent to it that no one seems to be noticing.

Maybe that's because Dobson's remarks are being largely played as similar to Falwell's -- an attack on SpongeBob for allegedly engaging in gay behaviors. (Well, there is that hand-holding thing with Patrick, after all.)

But that's not what Dobson said, or continues to say. What he's saying is actually a real cause for concern.

Check out the original remarks:

Addressing members of Congress at the "Values Victory Dinner" in Washington, D.C., Tuesday night, Dobson asked the power brokers, "Does anybody here know SpongeBob?"

Dobson went onto decry a toon-town remake of the 1979 Sister Sledge disco hit, "We Are Family," in which the frolicsome Bikini Bottom dweller appears alongside Barney, Big Bird, Clifford and other fictional stars of children's TV.

The music video, produced by the non-profit We Are Family Foundation, is to be distributed on DVD to 61,000 public and private elementary schools on March 11. Its stated aim is to promote diversity; its stated agenda is to have future March 11s declared National We Are Family Day.

But according to the New York Times' accounting of Dobson's remarks, what's unsaid is that the "We Are Family" project is a "pro-homosexual video."

Dobson based his charge on a "tolerance pledge" found on the We Are Family Foundation Website. The two-paragraph statement seeks "respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own."

"...Their inclusion of the reference to 'sexual identity' within their 'tolerance pledge' is not only unnecessary, but it crosses a moral line," a statement from Focus on the Family says.

Over at Focus on the Family's Website, this argument is made clearer:

Dr. Dobson is concerned that these popular animated personalities are being exploited by an organization that's determined to promote the acceptance of homosexuality among our nation's youth.

It's hard to say exactly which organization he's talking about. If you go over to the We Are Family Foundation -- the immediate object of Dobson's wrath -- it's pretty hard to find anything that even remotely mentions homosexuality. Moreover, if you click on the link to the "Tolerance Pledge" that Dobson says is the source of his allegation, you'll see that the pledge is actually the product of Tolerance.org, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In other words, Dobson appears to be attacking the SPLC by proxy. That should give people a little clearer picture of what we're really talking about here. Dobson isn't just condemning cartoon characters, he's attacking the basic concept of secular tolerance as a democratic cornerstone. That is, he's actively promoting the tolerance of intolerance. There's a simpler word for that: hate.

The form of the argument Dobson and his cohort are making is made clearer in an excellent piece by Bill Berkowitz in Working for Change examining the "SpongeBob controversy":

Lurking beneath an attempt to celebrate diversity amongst young children, Vitagliano has spotted something nefarious: "A short step beneath the surface reveals that one of the differences being celebrated is homosexuality," he writes.

"The [WAFF] website is filled with pro-homosexual materials," Vitagliano charges. "A 'Tolerance Pledge,' for example, created by Tolerance.org, part of the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center, encourages signees to pledge respect for homosexuals and work against 'ignorance, insensitivity and bigotry.'"

Perhaps we should take a step back here. Anyone familiar with the SPLC's work is aware that it is not a specifically "leftist" organization. Its allies, as well as the people who depend upon its work, include not just civil-rights and minority organizations but business and law-enforcement groups, as well as a broad swath of religious interests. Clearly, it is opposed primarily to right-wing extremism; but it counts among its friends and supporters many genuine conservatives.

Moreover, what it combats is hate, in a very specific sense: that is, the violence and fear inflicted upon people who, for whatever reason, are victimized simply for who they are, as an act of terrorism intended to "send a message" of intimidation to all people like them.

We all know about the kinds of people the SPLC works against, because we've all known them since we were little kids ourselves: Bullies. And when they grow up, they become haters.

It's worth remembering that the work of the SPLC's Tolerance.org is aimed primarily at having an effect on people when they are young, before the attitudes that form the basis of so many hate crimes and acts of intolerance become embedded. Nearly the entirety of its work involves providing materials for enhancing curricula and school environments to produce people who are more inclined to tolerate (and indeed celebrate) differences. In many regards, this work is closely associated with the work to prevent school bullying, which should not be a controversial effort.

Indeed, most of its mission should be not only acceptable but embraced by any conservative concerned about the demise of traditional values in our schools, because it actively promotes some of the oldest of these: respect, fair play, fundamental human decency. It focuses on helping educators and communities foster these values among young people.

Fairly typical in this regard is the "Respect Policy" formulated by officials at Mariner High School up the road in Everett, cited by Tolerance.org as a model of its efforts:

"Respect is the cornerstone of all our interactions and behaviors," it begins. "We acknowledge the dignity and worth of one another, and strive never to diminish another by our conduct or our attitudes."

What is happening here, though, is that for some people, "traditional values" are only about respect, fair play, and fundamental human decency for people who are just like themselves. To be fair, this is a "traditional value" of sorts as well, but over our nation's history, it has been responsible for many of our worst atrocities, from slavery to the genocide of Indians to the internment of Japanese Americans.

In this case, religious proscription of homosexuality (scriptural evidence for which is not, incidentally, nearly as abundant as those prohibitions regarding divorce) are being touted as the source of the "traditional values" under attack from the forces of tolerance. This is not terribly surprising. After all, the Scripture has in the past been cited as the source of such "traditional values" as slavery, lynching, and segregation, as well as laws against miscegenation.

In other words, the efforts of secular democratic society to promote its own best interests -- particularly equality of opportunity and participation, enabled by embracing diversity -- have run headlong into an age-old enemy: bigotry wearing the guise of religious belief and claiming the mantle of traditional values.

Of course, if there's anything a bigot hates, it's being identified as a bigot. (That's why the Scripture ruse is so popular.) Thus Donald Wildmon complains (in the Berkowitz piece):

"Most Christians are now aware of what those code words mean," said AFA's chairman Don Wildmon. "If you are a person who accepts the homosexual lifestyle, then you are tolerant," he said. "If you don't, then you are a bigot who is motivated by ignorance and hate."

This is a revealing formulation of the argument, because it is identical in form to the complaints of others who use religious arguments to justify their desire to discriminate freely against members of a minority group. Wildmon's contention is not significantly different than that used by anti-Semites who use Scripture to explain why they hate Jews, or of Christian Identity believers who do likewise to rationalize their bigotry against blacks and other "mud people."

In essence, that argument comes down to the charge that the forces of tolerance are themselves being intolerant of people's legitimate religious beliefs. It is an old argument, made by the likes of Robert Miles and David Duke over the years. The question becomes: Should we tolerate intolerance?

Still, it deserves a fair answer, and there is a simple one: Tolerance and intolerance -- whatever its rationale -- are mutually incompatible. There is no reason why a society that embraces tolerance as an essential value would simultaneously embrace intolerance. Embracing one, by its nature, means rejecting the other.

Now, it's important to understand that tolerance, unlike James Dobson's misapprehension, does not connote promotion. That is, promoting a tolerance of gay and lesbian people no more promotes homosexuality than urging tolerance of blackness or Jews promotes blackness or Judaism. It merely creates the space where they are allowed to participate as full members of society.

That includes, of course, people whose religious beliefs oppose homosexuality, or Judaism, or for that matter nonwhiteness. They're permitted to believe as they see fit. No one is demanding that people's children make friends with gays, if that runs counter to their belief system. What advocates of tolerance insist upon is that their children not beat up on gays and their children, verbally or otherwise, nor actively discriminate against them, just as we insist on the same treatment for Jewish and black children. This shouldn't be too much to ask.

Of course, it's important to recognize and respect people's private religious beliefs. But when those beliefs run counter to the basic mutual respect that makes a democratic society function, then it's incumbent on that society to stand firm. There's no more reason for educators in our schools to "compromise" on tolerance for gays because of individual religious beliefs than for them to do so regarding tolerance for other minorities.

Otherwise, making an exception for one kind of intolerance -- to condone it, for example, in our schools -- simply opens the floodgates for all the other kinds of hatred that are out there making the same kinds of rationalizations. There is, after all, only the thinnest of veneers between one kind of hatred and another. If we go down that road, we begin heading for the morass.

This was driven home the other day on Michael Medved's afternoon talk show on our local right-wing talk shop, KTTH-AM. Medved was discussing the SpongeBob controversy, and defending Dobson (correctly) because much of the ensuing discussion micharacterized what Dobson actually said. However, it didn't seem to occur to Medved that what Dobson actually said was in truth far more troubling than the caricature of it -- that it was an attack not on SpongeBob but on the principles of tolerance and fair play.

That point was made, in a unintentional way, by one of his callers (from, evidently, the Seattle area). The caller accused Medved of not wanting to be upfront about what was really at work in the SpongeBob video -- namely, the secret conspiracy of Talmudic Judaism to destroy Christian America. The caller went on to cite a Portland anti-Semitic preacher named Rev. Ted Pike, whose work has earned plaudits from many other quarters of the white-supremacist universe. Pike's antipathy to hate-crime laws is noteworthy too, since it rests on arguments similar to those raised by Dobson in this case.

Medved dismissed the caller as a conspiracy theorist and moved on. Unfortunately but perhaps predictably, he did not pause to reflect on the similarity of the views of his caller -- whose beef was with Medved, who is Jewish (and thus part of the cover-up, you see), not Dobson -- and those of the people who are attacking Tolerance.org. Because those attacks are not solely against tolerance of gay people but tolerance as a principle.

When you justify one kind of intolerance on religious grounds, you open the field for a regular freak show of haters waiting in line to make the same claims. Medved's caller illustrated this reality rather neatly.

SpongeBob is just a caricature. For Dobson and Co., he's a handy symbol -- not of gays, but the mere concept of tolerating them. And when we no longer have to tolerate gays and lesbians on the basis of religious beliefs, it will only be another half-step before we no longer have to tolerate non-Christians on the basis of religious beliefs. Muslims or Jews: take your pick as to who will be first in line. I'd guess Muslims.

After that, well, there's a long list of People Who Are Not Just Like Us. And an even longer line of haters eager to cross them off.

A little emergency

My 3-year-old daughter Fiona had an appendicitis attack yesterday and had an appendectomy in the early evening. She's recovering well (it wasn't perforated).

I'll be spending most of my time in her hospital room over the next several days. I have no idea whether I'll be able to post, but it may not be easy. So I'll have to ask for everyone's forbearance.

UPDATE: We brought her home this evening [Friday]. She's recovered extremely well, and may even be back in school on Monday. She was their "model patient" on the surgery ward. We're relieved and happy beyond words to have her back home. We'll be spending a quiet weekend at home, so maybe I will get some writing done after all.

Thanks to everyone for your kind thoughts and wishes.

Inaugural prophet

Speaking of the "Christian nation" ...

Listen carefully to President Bush's inauguration speech today. It's nearly certain you'll hear not just the usual effusive references to God and faith, but a distinctive view of the role of religion in politics.

UW communications professor David Domke (whose work I've cited previously) makes an interesting observation about this in an op-ed in the P-I:

No other president since Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 has mentioned God so often in his Inaugurations or State of the Unions. The closest to Bush's average of six references per each of these addresses is Ronald Reagan, who averaged 4.75 in his comparable speeches. Jimmy Carter, considered as pious as they come among U.S. presidents, had only two mentions of God in four addresses. Other also-rans in total God talk were Roosevelt at 1.69 and Lyndon Johnson at 1.50 references per Inaugurals and State of the Unions.

God talk in these addresses is important because in these ritualized occasions any religious language becomes fused with U.S. identity. This is particularly so since the advent of radio and television, which have facilitated presidents' ability to connect with the U.S. public writ large; indeed, Inaugurals and State of the Unions commonly draw large media audiences.

Bush also talks about God differently than most other modern presidents. Presidents since Roosevelt have commonly 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. Among modern presidents, only Reagan has spoken in a similar manner -- and he did so far less frequently than has Bush.

Some of my regular commenters have expressed doubt that religiosity like this (or that voiced by Clarence Thomas or right-wing theocrats) represents anything new or troubling. I think they're being taken in by the window dressing and not listening to what's really being said.

Just the facts, ma'am

I've been buried in copy-editing Strawberry Days, but be sure to check out the nifty job of real journalism that Carla at Preemptive Karma has been producing this week regarding the Washington gubernatorial election, following up on her nice job of fact-checking the right-wing blogosphere last week.

She's mostly been debunking the shaky work at Stefan Sharkansky's Sound Politics, most notably with a post further debunking claims of hanky-panky in the mailing of military ballots, as well as an earlier post with more data on the subject.

Commenting in the thread at the previous post, Stefan responded thus:

I know you're a skeptical journalist. Perhaps if you applied the same skepticism to King County government that you apply to others who question it, we'd all learn something.

Skepticism is healthy, especially for journalists or those who attempt to practice it. What's not healthy is leveling charges of criminal behavior against otherwise respected public officials without any evidence to support those accusations (and I'm talking specifically about charges of fraud here). That's not being skeptical. It's being irresponsible.

Extreme right resonance

You know, it's bad enough when media figures and televangelists spout far-right theocratic propaganda as truth, something that happens nowadays with great regularity. But it's really a pretty dire sign when national and state officials start spouting talking points that originate from the extremist right -- and everyone shrugs.

I'm not just talking about Clarence Thomas, though he obviously is a big part of the equation. It goes beyond that.

The incident this time arises around a swearing-in ceremony for Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker, the protege of Judge Roy Moore, whose campaign to "defend" the Ten Commandments monument he had placed in an Alabama courthouse attracted a bevy of neo-Confederate and other extremist supporters and eventually brought about his removal from the bench.

According to news reports of the ceremony:

Many stood and applauded former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore as he walked to the stage to administer the oath to Parker. Moore's action was ceremonial, since Parker took his formal oath of office Thursday before U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in Washington. Parker said Thomas told him a judge should be evaluated by whether he faithfully upholds his oath to God, not to the people, to the state or to the Constitution.

This is a deeply troubling remark on several levels, all of which indicate it is yet another notch forward for the ongoing stealth campaign to install theocratic rule in America. At least, it indicates that their fundamental tenets are now accepted at the highest levels of government.

Ignatz points out the constitutional problems this position suggests, especially if Justice Thomas indeed holds this view:

But -- if this quote is accurate -- Justice Thomas does not purport to have such a jurisprudential view, but instead he recognizes that there is a difference between a judge's fidelity to God and his or her fidelity to the constitution; that is the meaning of the assertion that you will be evaluated by your performance as to one rather than the other. Which does he choose? I think it fair to assume that a person who says that God will evaluate you on such-and-such, will try to do what he thinks God wants, right? So -- again if this quote is correct -- Justice Thomas has essentially admitted that he will make rulings based not on any view that they are correct as a legal matter, but because they are what God wants.

Beyond the jurisprudential concerns, though, these remarks resonate with an even deeper problem: the spread of extremism into the conservative mainstream, and by extension the corridors of power.

If Justice Thomas indeed endorses such a position -- and it's by no means clear he does -- this is a monumental problem, because it means extremism has taken root at the highest level of federal power. Even if he doesn't, though, it should be noteworthy all in itself that Judge Parker would so clearly endorse such a view.

Of course, it's probably not a surprise. Not only is Parker the protege of Moore, he argued during the just-finished campaign against repealing racist provisions of the state constitution -- a position a majority of the state's voters wound up endorsing.

But Parker is also a Republican in good standing with the national party, and so far no one from the GOP has uttered a peep about these remarks.

The really striking thing about this is that the religious worldview Parker (and supposedly Thomas) wishes to advance, in fact, is a kind of religious right-wing extremism. There is nothing mainstream about this position.

Specifically, Parker's remarks are drawn almost verbatim from a belief system called Theocratic Dominionism, also known as "Christian Reconstruction." These are the people who not only claim that this is a "Christian nation," but that church-state separation is "a myth." More specifically:

Reconstructionism argues that the Bible is to be the governing text for all areas of life--such as government, education, law, and the arts, not merely "social" or "moral" issues like pornography, homosexuality, and abortion. Reconstructionists have formulated a "Biblical world view" and "Biblical principles" by which to examine contemporary matters. Reconstructionist theologian David Chilton succinctly describes this view: "The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God's law."

More broadly, Reconstructionists believe that there are three main areas of governance: family government, church government, and civil government. Under God's covenant, the nuclear family is the basic unit. The husband is the head of the family, and wife and children are "in submission" to him. In turn, the husband "submits" to Jesus and to God's laws as detailed in the Old Testament. The church has its own ecclesiastical structure and governance. Civil government exists to implement God's laws. All three institutions are under Biblical Law, the implementation of which is called "theonomy."

Thomas' supposed exhortation to Parker closely mirrors one by reconstruction founder R.J. Rushdoony:

The law is therefore the law for Christian man and Christian society. Nothing is more deadly or more derelict than the notion that the Christian is at liberty with respect to the kind of law he can have.

Jay Rogers, a noted Reconstruction advocate, spells out the agenda even more clearly:

You may ask, In a biblically reconstructed society: Who will be able to vote? Who will be able to rule? Elections will still be determined by popular vote of the people and legislation will still be voted on by representatives. Communities will have been reconstructed through personal regeneration so that the majority of the electorate will be Christian or will hold to a "Christian philosophy." Therefore, the only people qualified to rule will be professing Christians who will uphold the moral law of God. This may be called a "theonomic representative democracy" or a "theocratic republic."

... We recognize that the only standard for civil law is biblical law. Civil law must has some standard: either it is human autonomy (what man sees as right in his own eyes) or it is biblical law (what God declares to be right in His Word). Again, take your pick!

Some have objected that this would lead to the mass stoning of homosexuals and incorrigible children. Reconstructionists must emphasize that what we want is not strong rule by the federal government in determining these matters, but the freedom for individual Christians, families, churches, and local community governments to rule without interference from a centralized state. We believe that Reconstruction is from the ground up. Mass regeneration must precede Reconstruction. As more are converted to Christ, more individuals become self-governing. This leads to stronger families and churches and the ability of local communities to govern their own affairs. Thus the total numbers of cases of sodomy or of uncontrollable children would grow less and less. The state would rule in fewer and fewer cases.

Other forms of right-wing extremism share similar views about the supremacy of "God's law" (especially in contrast to "man's law"), most notably Christian Identity:

Since Identity followers believe that the Bible commands racial segregation, they interpret racial equality as a violation of God's Law. If Christian ministers advocate racial equality, they are advocating breaking God's Law. Identity and the Christian Republic The creation of a white Christian republic in the United States is a shared goal within the white supremacist movement, from the hard-core neo-Nazis of the Aryan Nations to the many Christian Patriot groups. The Identity movement provides a theological justification for this racism and breach of the constitutionally- mandated separation of church and state. For example, William Potter Gale, an influential Identity leader who died shortly after being indicted for conspiracy to kill IRS agents, wrote:

"The Church is composed of the many-membered body of Jesus Christ. This Republic was founded as a Christian Republic. The government is nothing but an expansion of the Christian church! It was founded by a compact...know as the Articles of Confederation, Perpetual which have their source in the Holy Bible. Since the Constitution was lifted from the Articles of Confederation, the source of the Constitution is the Bible."

For all their religiosity, though, the Reconstructionists are openly willing to embrace deception in order to win their war. Specifically, they advocate (among themselves, at least) using the openness of America's democratic institutions -- specifically, the doctrine of religious liberty -- to bring about a regime that in fact ends religious liberty. This was made explicit by another significant Reconstruction figure, Gary North:

So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

And lest there remain any illusions about their ruthlessness, keep in mind how Jay Rogers explained their end game:

Simply put: either we will have man's law or God's law as a standard for civil legislation. We are not looking for a "voice a the table" nor are we seeking "equal time" with the godless promoters of pornography, abortion, safe-sodomy subsidies, socialism, etc. We want them silenced and punished according to God's Law-Word.

If that sounds fascist to you, it should. Fritz Stern, a famed scholar of European history, recently raised the issue of religion as a key component of fascism in a report from the New York Times' Chris Hedges on an address Stern gave recently at the Leo Baeck Institute:

In his address in November, just after he received a prize presented by the German foreign minister, he told his audience that Hitler saw himself as "the instrument of providence" and fused his "racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity."

"Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he said of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas."

... "There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented," he said. "There was a longing for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although also significant differences."

HE warns of the danger in an open society of "mass manipulation of public opinion, often mixed with mendacity and forms of intimidation." He is a passionate defender of liberalism as "manifested in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the early years of the American republic."

"The radical right and the radical left see liberalism's appeal to reason and tolerance as the denial of their uniform ideology," he said. "Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this."

Somehow, I doubt that Clarence Thomas and Tom Parker were listening.

UPDATE: Atrios has posted the verbatim quote from Parker, and it is considerably different than its garbling by the reporter:

PARKER: "Just moments before I placed my hand on the Holy Scripture, Justice Thomas soberly addressed me and those in attendance. He admonished us to remember that the worth of a justice should be evaluated by one thing, and by one thing alone: whether or not he is faithful to uphold his oath _ an oath which as Justice Thomas pointed out is not to the people; it's not to the state; it's not even to the Constitution, which is one to be supported, but is an oath which is to God Himself."

I agree with Atrios that this largely lets both Parker and Thomas off the hook, since this sentiment is relatively benign. However, I also agree with Atrios as to the continuing relevance of the concern at issue here: Namely, a worldview that exhorts judges to put their religious beliefs before the law -- a worldview with extremist origins -- has been gaining wider acceptance in the right-wing mainstream, including the judiciary.