(source)

… this decision sweeps away one of the central fears of opponents of [marriage equality], and so it can also be seen as good news for the politically conservative religious groups who have been in the vanguard of the fight to ensure that GLBT people not be granted equality under the law. The decision proves that their fears are unfounded.

Naturally, what’s the first thing to come out of Sarah Palin’s twitter feed?

Common sense & decency absent as wacko “church” allowed hate msgs spewed@ soldiers’ funerals but we can’t invoke God’s name in public square

I give up. Yes, Sarah, that’s exactly it. Only Phelps gets first amendment protection, no one else. You can tell, because of the eighty or ninety Christians who have been arrested because they dared to utter the name of Jesus outside the local mall.

Could someone explain the first amendment to her again? Speaking slowly and using small words? Maybe hand puppets?

During the WWII, GIs in the Pacific theater sent letters back home carrying stories of a woman they called “Tokyo Rose.” She was the siren of the Pacific, calling out to the lonely American servicemen in a sultry voice, carried by Japanese radio waves. She taunted them, insulted them and foretold their eventual demise.

Despite that, most GI’s seemed to find her more amusing than anything else. While she was part of the Japanese propaganda machine, her broadcasts carried news and music from back in the States. But some of her threats hit home:

Each by was quiet now, lost in his private thoughts. Their confidence must have been shaken when, that night, Tokyo Rose named many of their ships and a number of the marine units. She assured the Americans that while huge ships were needed to transport them to Iwo Jima, the survivors could later fit in a phone booth. (Flags of Our Fathers p.227)

A Rose by Any Other Name…

Pullquote: In fact, there doesn’t seem to have been any one person who went by the name “Tokyo Rose.”

Stories of Tokyo Rose are common in the war correspondence. Yet the attempts to find the woman have gone nowhere. One woman, named Iva Toguri d’Aquino, was eventually convicted. However, this seems to have been a media driven witch hunt rather than a careful investigation.

Toguri was a second generation Japanese-American who got caught visiting an aunt when the war started. She did serve as a “radio girl,” but under the name “Orphan Ann.” Her voice did not match the descriptions of Tokyo Rose. Unfortunately for her, she was the only radio girl to remain an American citizen after the war, making her the only possible guest of honor for an American show trial.

In fact, there doesn’t seem to have been any one person who went by the name “Tokyo Rose.” There were twenty-seven different female broadcasters at some point in the war, but none consistently used the handle of “Tokyo Rose.”

For some reason, the name caught on with the media. The New York Times wrote that “Tokyo Rose” could be picked up in Alaska, which seems unlikely. The US Navy, tongue in check, offered Tokyo Rose a citation for entertaining the troops.

Everything is more confused because most GI’s could not distinguish one accented voice from another, nor tell a Japanese accent from Filipino. Somehow “Tokyo Rose” became the catch-all name for the various female broadcasters, and somehow these various women were blended into one imaginary figure.

Impossible Intelligence

Pullquote: One of the first rules of intelligence gathering is that you don’t reveal the knowledge you’ve gained.

More problematic are the things she supposedly said. Consider the selection from Flags of Our Fathers, in which Tokyo Rose taunts the GI’s by revealing that she knows which ships they’re on. There are a large number of very similar stories in which Tokyo Rose threatens American troops by showing the depth of Japanese intelligence.

These stories are very hard to credit. One of the first rules of intelligence gathering is that you don’t reveal the knowledge you’ve gained. The idea that the Japanese intelligence service would hand information over to the propaganda service to be read out over the airwaves goes against everything we understand about how intelligence work was conducted.

The stories of Tokyo Rose were examined by the Office of Warfare Information (OWI), looking for the how she got her supposed intelligence. In the end, the OWI categorically rejected the stories as urban legends:

There is no Tokyo Rose; the name is strictly a GI invention … Government monitors listening in twenty-four hours a day have never heard the words Tokyo Rose over a Japanese-controlled Far Eastern Radio. (quoted in The Hunt for Tokyo Rose, p, xvii)

History and Memory

Pullquote: Somehow, in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the war, rumors had become reported facts.

Most of the literature focus on Iva Toguri d’Aquino, the poor woman who was jailed for eight years because people believed that she was someone that didn’t exist. As well it should, since the story of someone railroaded into a conviction because people wanted someone to blame has all sorts of contemporary significance.

But what interests me is the way in which memory was constructed. Somehow, in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the war, rumors had become reported facts. The stories told by the GIs were picked up by the media, and Tokyo Rose became a real character to the American public.

Resources: Dafydd Neal Dyar has compiled a tremendous amount of material on this. EarthStation1 has a collection of audio clips by and about Iva Toguri AKA “Orphan Ann”. The “Orphan Ann” Home Page has the biography.

Public Historian Ann Elizabeth Pfau has a chapter in her work Miss Yourlovin: GIs, Gender and Domesticity during World War II analyzing the Tokyo Rose legend, now available online (now that’s taking public history seriously!)

A few years back, George Takei was working on a movie on Tokyo Rose. He mentioned it in an interview back in 2006. Anybody know where that stands?

“The dismembered body of a young albino boy has been found in a river on the Burundi-Tanzania border, reports say. The boy, aged nine, was taken from Makamba province… The dismembered body of a young albino boy has been found in a river on the Burundi-Tanzania border, reports say. The boy, aged nine, was taken from Makamba province.

Just. Ffffffuuuuuuhhhhh….

Over at the Accidental Historian, Geds is starting a series on the Byzantine Empire. Like all good historians, he realizes that to talk about a period of history, he has to go back to well before that period actually began. Back to, say, when the universe cooled enough for protons to form.

Geds splits the difference and goes back to before Constantine, to the appearance of Christianity. In his discussion of religion in the Greco-Roman world, he throws out this:

There was absolutely nothing special about the persecution of Christians.

The Roman authorities saw Christianity as a potentially destabilizing force in exactly the same way it saw criminals and revolutionaries as a destabilizing force. The only reason we’re lead to believe the stories of the Christian martyrs are special is because we have a lot of them.

That reminded me of a quote from a Roman text dated to the early fourth century:

The guilty thief is produced, is interrogated as he deserves; he is tortured, the torturer strikes, his breast is injured, he is hung up … he is beaten with sticks, he is flogged, he runs through the sequence of tortures, and he denies. He is to be punished; he is led to the sword. Then another is produced, innocent, who has a large patronage network with him; well-spoken men are present with him. This one has good fortune; he is absolved. (quoted from The Inheritance of Rome. p.21)

Note the assumptions here. Do you see the casual acceptance of what Chris Wickham calls “judicial violence”? Do you notice the implicit class assumptions?

Does it change your perceptions at all to know that this text was a Greek-Latin primer for school children?

This is the world that early Christianity found itself in.

Bishop Broadhurst, who is the chairman of the Forward in Faith organisation, declined to say whether he would leave the Church of England, because he said he needed time to talk to the priests under his pastoral care.

“My organisation has 1,000 priests and about 8,000 lay people in it. None of those priests are happy,” he said.

“Now people have to decide whether they will knuckle under – if they do, that is not a very happy situation for them or the Church – or whether they’ll go, or whether they’ll just defy it, and I can see that happening with many people.”

Part of me finds it hard to suppress a little soupçon of glee over this; as an atheist it confirms some of my opinions of religion in general so very nicely – particularly that some people simply use religion as a cloak for bigotry and that their bigotry is far more important to them than any faith they might profess. Most of me, however, finds it deeply sad that the laws of my country still permit exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation on religious grounds, effectively allowing organisations like the CofE to remain decades behind the rest of society in their attitudes towards equality and fairness.

Background story from the BBC.
Main story from the BBC.

The Texas Observer has an article about the organization based in Amarillo, Texas, called “Repent Amarillo.” It looks to be a conservative Christian militant group dedicated to harassing and shutting down organizations that the group and its leader, David Grisham, consider sinful. The article focuses on the largely successful attempts to shut down a swingers club.

For the past year, this Bible Belt city of 200,000 has been consumed by a culture clash between Repent Amarillo and their targets, a list that includes everything from gay bars to liberal churches. For the Route 66 swingers, Grisham’s “special forces” have been a near-constant presence. Jobs have been lost, families estranged, assault charges filed and businesses shuttered. So far, no public official has stood up to defend these businesses, which operate legally. To the contrary, Repent Amarillo has managed to turn the city’s own laws and employees into an effective weapon. Amarillo, it turns out, doesn’t have the stomach to stick up for gays, swingers, strippers or even Unitarians. Absent a peacekeeper, the conflict might end up being settled the old-fashioned way, frontier-style. “This will not end until somebody gets hurt, either us or them,” one swinger warns.

[...]

Repent has made it clear that its crusade won’t end with the swingers. Last January, community theater group Avenue 10 was set to open Bent, a play about the persecution of homosexuals during Nazi Germany. The day before opening night, the fire marshal, police and code enforcers showed up, tipped off by a Repent associate, according to Sirc Michaels, co-founder of the theater. Avenue 10 didn’t have the right permit for holding events, and the space was shut down.

What’s next for Repent? They’ve posted a “Warfare Map” on the group’s Web site. The map includes establishments like gay bars, strip clubs and porn shops, but also the Wildcat Bluff Nature Center. Repent believes the 600-acre prairie park’s Walmart-funded “Earth Circle,” used for lectures, is a Mecca for witches and pagans. Also on the list are The 806 coffeehouse (a hangout for artists and counterculture types), the Islamic Center of Amarillo (“Allah is a false god”), and “compromised churches” like Polk Street Methodist (gay-friendly).

“My father was a Baptist minister. I’m a Christian man. I have problems with people who don’t believe in God,” said Edgerton, a former local NAACP president and founder of Southern Heritage 411, an organization that promotes the interests of black southerners.

Indeed, he has such a problem with it Edgerton is threatening to file a lawsuit, claiming Bothwell isn’t qualified to hold office because of his atheism, citing the unconstitutional North Carolina Constitution that “disqualifies officeholders ‘who shall deny the being of Almighty God.’”

Bothwell’s response: “The question of whether or not God exists is not particularly interesting to me, and it’s certainly not relevant to public office.”

There was a time when people like Edgerton were denied office because of the color of their skin. Edgerton is fighting for the same bigotry — denying office to someone because of their religion, or lack there of. It’s shameful.

Hmm, I wonder why I didn’t make many friends?

Thankfully I didn’t attend a church quite as bad as the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainsville, FL which has been sending their students to school with t-shirts that read “ISLAM IS OF THE DEVIL” in large print on back:

More children from the Dove World Outreach Center arrived Tuesday at area public schools with shirts bearing the message “Islam is of the Devil” and were sent home for violation of the school district’s dress code when they declined to change clothes or cover the anti-Muslim statement on their clothing.

What if a Muslim students started wearing shirts that said “Christianity is of the Devil”? Christians would be having conniptions about how they are being persecuted and how they would fear for their poor little fundie kid’s lives. I see now that the school district staff attorney had the same exact thought, which makes me like him already.

On Monday, a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Talbot Elementary was sent home because of the shirt. On Tuesday, two Eastside High students and one Gainesville High student were sent home and a student at Westwood Middle had to change clothes because of the shirt, according to members of the Dove congregation.

Dove Senior Pastor Terry Jones said no local company “had the guts” to print the shirts. Dove member Wayne Sapp said he then ordered the shirts over the Internet from a company that allows individuals to design their own shirts. His daughter, Faith Sapp, 10, was the Talbot Elementary student sent home Monday. She said she was allowed to wear the shirt to school on Tuesday – with the Gospel message on the front visible but the anti-Islam message on the back covered.

Wayne Sapp’s daughter, Emily Sapp, 15, was the student sent home from Gainesville High on Tuesday. Both Faith and Emily Sapp said it was their decision, not that of their parents, to wear the shirts to school in order to promote their Christian beliefs. Emily Sapp said the “Islam is of the Devil” statement was aimed at the religion’s beliefs, not its members….

Jones said that, to him, spreading the church’s message was “even more important than education itself.”

This pastor sent his 10 year old daughter with this shirt on. I think that says all I want to know about him.

Do you think these types of t-shirts should be allowed in public schools?

I don’t.

Marwa Ali El-Sherbini moved to Germany in 2005. In Aug 2008, a man (Alex W.) shouted abuse at Marwa at a public playground, calling her a terrorist and a slut because she was wearing a head scarf. The police arrived and Alex was charged with defamation. During his trial Alex said that “people like her” were not real humans.

Later in an appeal court, Alex W. attacked Marwa and stabbed her at least 16 times. When her husband tried to protect her, the man stabbed the husband 16 times. There were no security personnel there, and when a policeman finally came, he misidentified the attacker and shot Marwa’s husband instead of Alex.

Marwa died at the scene and her husband was critically injured. Marwa was three months pregnant.

Some of the mourners didn’t help the problem with this, though:

“There is no god but God and the Germans are the enemies of God,” chanted the mourners, while others carried banners condemning racism.

It’s a sad tale of religious intolerance and racism. It didn’t get very much attention in the West, but it should have — this kind of behavior is despicable.