For many young Americans, the Westboro Baptist Church has become the face of extreme antigay hatred from the religious right ; Mike Bickle's Kansas City-based International House of Prayer, with its smooth pop-rock driven exterior, would seem almost the antithesis of Westboro Baptist. But today, Friday April 27th, 2012, IHOP is slated, according to a news release from ChristianNewsWire, to publicly screen a movie-length video featuring a Ugandan religious leader, Julius Peter Oyet, who has stated that "even animals are wiser than homosexuals." and has openly called for practicing homosexuals to be hunted down and imprisoned or even executed.

A more realistic reading of the recent Christianity Today headline "Will Evangelicals Vote for a Mormon Candidate?" might be, "Do Bears Shit in the Woods?" It's hard to imagine that such a politically savvy Christian magazine thought that it was posing anything other than a rhetorical question with its headline.

In any case, the answer to that question is the same answer it has been for quite some time; Christian conservative evangelicals (especially white men) appear duty bound to vote for Republican Party presidential candidates.

And this year, after Cain fumbled, Perry mumbled, Gingrich tumbled, and Santorum crumbled, Mitt Romney, despite faring poorly among evangelical voters in many primaries (particularly the early southern ones), will undoubtedly wind up receiving the vast majority of evangelical votes.

The bogus narrative of the Religious Right -- that there is a humanist or secular humanist or secularist "religion" bent on taking over America has already been one of the features of this election season.  We have heard about it from Rick Santorum and from Mitt Romney.  And of course, we have written extensively about this bogus narrative and its variants here at Talk to Action over the years, including a discussion of Mitt Romney's recent declaration:  "I think there is in this country a war on religion. I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism."

Happily, historian Rick Perlstein, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, has an excellent take on the matter.  

[image, right: Invisible Children CEO Ben Keesey, on White House nationally televised human rights panel]

On Monday, as part of a policy initiative spearheaded by an address President Barack  Obama gave at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the White House live-streamed video of several panel discussions on human rights, one of which featured Invisible Children CEO Ben Keesey.

This weekend, Americans will rally all over the country to speak out against what is being called the "War on Women." Much of this "war" springs from fundamentalist Christian groups and the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which are determined to control the reproductive lives of Americans.

Naturally, this hits women the hardest. They are the ones who get pregnant, after all.

I recall first learning of James Robison at a Christian revival meeting in Muskogee, Oklahoma.  It was reported that some felt James was the next Billy Graham. He was on track to speak to more people than Graham ever would.  

The Tom White child sex abuse scandal is going national.  A widely published Associated Press story has spread the news that White, age 64, the longtime executive director of the international Christian Right organization Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), apparently committed suicide last week as police investigated the alleged molestation of a ten year old girl.

I detailed the basics of the story and the implications for the wider Religious Right in a post here at Talk to Action on Sunday.

How far is the school privatization juggernaut willing to go to disguise and promote their agenda?  The Betsy DeVos-led American Federation for Children, through its PA affiliate Students First and its funding recipients, is financing the campaign of an openly gay, African American, Muslim woman for State Representative (188th District - West Philadelphia) in Pennsylvania's Democratic primary.

The movement that claims that it is about defending and/or restoring the sacredness and primacy of the nuclear family far too often fails its own central value.  It also too often fails to come clean about the ways in which its own culture enables pedophiles and take appropriate action. It further notably fails in holding perpetrators accountable.

Given this movement's concern about the integrity of the family as among the highest of values, we would reasonably expect that it would hold itself to very high standards. But the simple truth is that that has not happened.

In a recent sermon, Bishop Daniel Jenky of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, managed to embarrass himself and the Church by engaging in some of the most incendiary acts of false equivalence by any religious leader in recent years.

The primate of Peoria distinguished himself by equating non-dogmatic Catholics with Judas Iscariot, and President Obama's policies with those of Hitler and Stalin.

The Broadway tune goes "Love Makes the World Go 'Round." For the Christian Right, "Controversial ads make the cash registers sing."
Less than two months after launching its pathetically unsuccessful campaign to get the retailer JC Penney to dump Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson, the American Family Association's OneMillionMoms is attacking Urban Outfitters for its April catalog featuring an image of two young women kissing.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "The company's president and CEO, Richard Hayne, is a known conservative and he donated over $13,000 to the Rick Santorum campaign." Hayne also donated $10,000 to Republican Meg Whitman's failed California gubernatorial run.

Inquiring minds want to know: Why would an conservative Christian group that calls itself OneMillionMoms and has only 40,000 members, be taken seriously?

Sunday is Earth Day, a time when a lot of us will be thinking about how we can better care for our planet to ensure it remains habitable for future generations.

Well, not all of us. Some people will be thinking about how the Bible says it's all right to pretty much do whatever we want with the Earth and not worry about a thing.

"A-1 Self Storage was one of the original donors who helped the founders of Invisible Children travel to Uganda and make the documentary Invisible Children: The Rough Cut which led to the creation of Invisible Children, Inc the 510 C 3 non-profit organization... The contributions of A-1 Self Storage have been crucial to the growth and success of Invisible Children"

-- quote from current Invisible Children web page, crediting the Caster family business A1 Self Storage with providing crucial funding that launched Invisible Children. The Caster family was one of the biggest donors funding California's Proposition 8 and has just been exposed as one of the biggest funders, in 2008, of the virulently anti-LGBT rights National Organization For Marriage.

Today, Friday the 20th, two national human rights efforts will hold awareness events in American schools. One, the Gay, Straight, and Lesbian Education Network (GLSEN) will hold its annual Day Of Silence, to raise awareness about anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools.

The other effort, Invisible Children, is also holding an event today, called "Cover The Night". While IC, behind the KONY 2012 viral video, states that it is pro-LGBT rights, the organization has extensive ties to the hard, antigay politicized evangelical right; in fact, Invisible Children's own website states that the organization was started with "crucial" seed money from one of the top funders of both California's anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8 and the anti-gay rights group the National Organization For Marriage.

Invisible Children has an extensive history of funding and promotion by anti-gay rights entities, summarized in this article.

The annual Day of Silence,initiated in 1996, has been observed in schools across the nation in an effort to protest the bullying and harassment of gay and lesbian students. Since 2000, the annual event has been sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight  Education Network (GLSEN), and since 2005 Religious Right organizations have sponsored very visible and widely-criticized efforts to counter this event.  This year the Day of Silence is competing with a different type of event - Invisible Children's week of activities closing with "Cover the Night," also on April 20.

In early March, Invisible Children burst onto the world stage with its KONY 2012 video promoting its "Stop Kony" campaign. The video focused on Joseph Kony, the Uganda warlord and leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, a guerrilla group with a long and violent history that includes turning kidnapped children into child soldiers.

The KONY 2012 video went mega-viral; surpassing 100 million views in six days and breaking previous records set by Susan Boyle's April 2009 appearance on the television program "Britain's Got Talent," which hit that mark in 9 days, and Lady Gaga's Bad Romance video, which took 18 days to surpass 100 million views.

Not long after the organization became a social media phenomenon, its co-founder Jason Russell was captured on video running naked along a busy San Diego street, cursing and ranting about the devil. That video also went viral.

While the video, and Russell's mental breakdown, have been extensively reported on, Invisible Children's broad connections to the Religious Right have not received much media attention.