political life in a torture state

[solarbird]

Governor Huckabee, a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President, says God is directly responsible for his improving poll numbers. Not in the sense of, "by playing to the theocrats, I'm gaining their support," but in the sense of "divine intervention." Yes, really. Explicitly.

Mitt Romney's big "Mormons are Okay, Dammit" speech to the fundamentalists included a couple of slams at nonbelievers, so people went asking, "what about nonbelievers?" A spokesman for the Mitt Romney campaign is thus far refusing to say whether Romney sees any positive role in America for atheists and other non-believers, after Election Central inquired about the topic yesterday.

More locally, Livejournal has removed some interests from searchability - you can't search for them at all. They aren't blocked in Russian (even in translation) so this isn't SUP in action, this is 6A in action. And found via zarq, early early Livejournal staffer insomnia - back when it was all volunteer - has a lengthy set of thoughts on the sale. He's not happy.

Comments

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Wie interessant, doch. Might well pay to keep an eye on this as it unfolds.

What is best current alternative course of action --
abort | retry | fail | backup?

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

I wonder when "Livejournal Bullshit" will become unsearchable?

[hubbit.livejournal.com]

The thing about Romney is, none of us really know how he personally would classify a "nonbeliever". And while as an Orthodox Jew I am sensitive to the religions of others and do not like to beat people over the head with their religion, dammit, he's beating all of US over the head with HIS, so I'm gonna.

LDS has many many theological beliefs that fall well outside the normative realm of run-of-the-mill Christian belief. When Romney mentions non-believers, my question is whether he lumps those who do not subscribe to the LDS faith, a faith which openly calls non-members "Gentiles". Including Jews, which slightly amuses me. The idea of our nation being led by an outspoken member of a religion that practices proxy baptisms (thus claiming everyone from George Washington to Moses as Mormons because they were baptized into the LDS church through a proxy), and uses other flaky means to increase their Heavenly Muscle, still strikes me as being odd enough to most Americans that he doesn't stand that much of a chance. You'd be surprise how many rural Bible-Belters are suspicious of Mormons.

Huckabee looks, speaks, and seems to think so similar to Jerry Falwell of thirty years ago that it's like watching a ghost. He *is* someone for whom I can see the Bible Belt voting, and that's enough for me to worry. Not for myself - Baptists have an interesting affinity for Jews, probably because we present their greatest challenge - but I can hardly picture any religious-right presidency embracing tolerace for athiests.

Remember, it was not that long ago that Pat Robertson was running for President on a platform of "Everyone is going to Hell except for me".

(On a completely different topic, remember when Presidents just quietly went to church and didn't use their religion as a bludgeon against their fellow Americans? The only President I can even remotely remember invoking his own religion before this election was Jimmy Carter - and that only so he could comfortably inflict more guilt upon himself for lusting after women in his heart, a confession he made, ironically, to a magazine whose entire career has been making men lust after women. :) )

[solarbird]

Hum, well, kinda, sure, but not really. I mean, we know this'll be a matter of "Jehovah vs. everybody else." Jews and Christians actively count, anyone else who is actively of some faith will get some lip service but face active discrimination (with some declaration of false godhood and all that, so not real, so doesn't count, particularly locally and in some cases regionally), with agnostics and atheists down at the bottom, actively not-real-citizens.

Also, Baptists like Jews (sorta) because they need Israel around for the Rapture. It's convenient.

On a completely different topic, remember when Presidents just quietly went to church and didn't use their religion as a bludgeon against their fellow Americans?
No. I'm a dyke. My entire adult life has been spent fighting fundamentalist attempts to pass or uphold laws actively against me, laws requiring schools to teach that I'm a diseased pervert, laws restricting my right to be a legal person, to hold employment, to have equal right to contract and other equal treatment under the law, and so on. There may have been a time that what you describe was actually the case, but it's before my time. For me, Christianity - particularly evangelical Christianity - is all but entirely a political movement that wants me wiped off the face of the earth.

[hubbit.livejournal.com]

There may have been a time that what you describe was actually the case, but it's before my time.

Well, I'm in my 40s but mostly remember people like Johnson, Nixon, and Ford more or less quietly going about their business. Carter is the first president whose religious life was more or less in the public face every day that I remember (indeed, it was during the Carter years that seemingly every celebrity had to proclaim themselves a "born-again Christian"), but Reagan is the first that I remember actually pandering to fundies, and that was very nearly 30 years ago.

Bloomington, Indiana, where I grew up, was a vocal part of the Gay Rights (not even Pride, RIGHTS) movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and when the first openly gay bar opened up around 1977, you should have seen the fundy mouths froth. Within ten years most of them noticed the lack of fire and brimstone decimation in town, and got over themselves. Our liberal Democratic city administration, along with an equally liberal college campus, worked hard to remove legal restrictions and prejudices on a local level just as the beginnings of restrictions were formulating on a national level.

BTW, in Illinois the idiotic restrictions you describe are illegal; indeed, here in Chicago the GLBT community is actively sought out and even targeted as a market demographic. This despite the fact that Illinois has a DOMA law banning same-sex marriages. (Myself, I'm an oddball; when this stupidity of every state rushing to legally define marriage as a man and a woman started up, I was very vocal against it, because this is going to be Prohibition Jr. Leave marriage alone and undefined, and in 20 years you won't find yourselves having to pass legislation to undo all those definitions of marriage. In a country that still claims separation of Church and State. Hah.)

[mathmuffin.livejournal.com]

Mike Huckabee's statement (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/12/god-wants-me-as.html) can be interpreted on two levels. First, crediting his upswing in the polls to God is humble. Huckabee doesn't even credit his own merit for this miracle; instead, he credits the prayers of his supporters. Second, he is claiming that God is on his side. Not only is that the best of all endorsements for the evangelical vote, but as the Bible says in Romans 8:31, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" This form of all-confident humility is a win-win answer to the evangelical Christians.

Politically, it means that Mike Huckabee has undeniably declared himself as the Bible Belt candidate. So if he makes any promises to conservative-minded Christians, he will try his hardest to fulfill those promises in office.

Nevertheless, I find it hilarious that he literally declared that his surge in the polls "defies all explanation."

While Mike Huckabee's answer at a rally used language from the Bible, Mitt Romney's speech on religion (http://www.mittromney.com/News/Speeches/Faith_In_America) used language from Civics class. Though he does have one paragraph, out of forty, that criticized secularism, he is carefully not declaring himself the Bible Belt candidate, the Christian candidate, nor the Mormon candidate. He is declaring that he is a pro-religion candidate who happens to be Mormon.

I guess most people who read solarbird's blog worry how much "pro-religion" means anti-liberal, anti-secular, and anti-gay. Is Romney going to fight the Culture War? The commentators latched onto that one paragraph with fighting words in it. That's because a good fight makes news.

Mitt Romney focuses on religious liberty with the words of American colonial freethinkers from 230 and 370 years ago. Back then, religious liberty mean being able to pick your own flavor of Christianity. Romney means more than that by religious liberty, because he wants religious freedom for the Jews and Muslims too. But is he gung-ho about freedom for the atheists? He doesn't say. Perhaps he does not want to lay all his cards down on the table yet. So my best guess is that he is not joining the Culture War at this time, but hopes for the support of the Christian ultra-conservatives nonetheless.

I got a laugh out of Mitt Romney's speech, too. In praising the variety of American faiths, he said he admired "the confident independence of the Lutherans." I've been a Lutheran all my life, and I didn't understand what he meant at first. Politicians phrase matters so politely. It's another way of saying brick-wall stubbornness.