Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has been indicted by a grand jury on two charges of abuse of power for threatening to veto a bill to fund an anti-corruption task force if the district attorney in charge of it was not removed from power. There was a third charge, but the grand jury forgot what it was. Oops.
There are few things more amusing to me than when a televangelist con man gets all fired up and lets loose with the big rhetorical guns to coax a bit more cash out of the pockets of his followers. This post from James Robison is about equal parts nonsense, fearmongering and false bravado as he declares himself an eternal warrior who will never back down in the face of the oppression he imagines himself to be suffering. And he’s just beside himself about how badly he’s being treated:
As expected, the Christian right is beside themselves with joy over the Hobby Lobby ruling. While I’m sure they would have preferred a much broader ruling, they got the result they wanted and some of them are saying some really dumb things about it. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that one of them is Erick Erickson.
Bryan Fischer took a call from an equally bigoted and ridiculous caller on his radio show, a military veteran who thinks America is no longer worth protecting because — gasp! — we’re actually starting to treat gay people like human beings with equal rights. Naturally, Fischer agreed with him.
Katherine Stewart has an op-ed column in the New York Times about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Greece v Galloway in which she identifies the Christian right’s long-term strategy with that and similar cases. I think her analysis is accurate, if a bit incomplete.
Ali Rizvi, who I believe was raised Muslim and is now an atheist, has an article in the Huffington Post denying that there is such a thing as Islamophobia. I don’t think he makes the case. He does make the case that the term is sometimes misapplied, however, as in this example from the beginning of the article:
The American Family Association is so focused on scaring its followers (that is how you bring the money in, after all) with harrowing tales of little girls raped by trans* people in public bathrooms that they’re lying about a Washington, DC law that applies only to single-occupant bathrooms.
Let’s check in with how Bryan Fischer’s Lion of Christianity is doing in creating what Scott Lively calls a “model pro-family society” is doing on that freedom thing. Turns out, not so well. They’re now arresting people for not holding up protest signs.
When Todd Starnes isn’t making up fake persecution stories in the present day, he’s predicting future tales of martyrdom. He told Bryan Fischer that “we are going to see, within our lifetime, an attempt to outlaw or criminalize parts of the Bible or even perhaps pulling out parts of the Bible that have to deal with those issues.”
Deranged bigot Scott Lively went on Bryan Fischer’s radio show and slobbered all over Russian authoritarian strongman Vladimir Putin, saying he was going to reestablish the Tsarist system (as if that would be a good thing) and return Christian values to the “Marxist” United States.
Sen. Ted Cruz has tried mightily to pander to the Christian right on one issue after another, but a speech he gave at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday might be a problem in that regard. Cruz strongly criticized Russian strongman Vladimir Putin for his “increasingly autocratic” ways and also slammed the Obama administration for not standing up for human rights in Russia. Right Wing Watch points out the obvious conflict:
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In