The more things change the more Dobson remains the same

Declining to pass the crown of Christian Right leadership to Sarah Palin, James Dobson is launching a new radio show, announced on his Facebook page (You aren't the only one there, Sarah).

Unsurprisingly, it is to be called, says the Associated Press, James Dobson on the Family.

Not yet on the air (launches in March, 2010).

Back to the future: He's pumping for money to pay the anticipated bills. Christianity Today writes:

Dobson asks for donations as he estimates operating costs to be at $2 million. “We are in a moral decline of shocking dimensions,” Dobson writes. “I have asked myself how I can sit and watch the world go by without trying to help if I can.”

Counterfactual overstatement = 'the evil one'

Mainstream Baptist dissects Manhattan Declaration's overstatement and distortion. They are not echoes of righteousness, he explains:

In my mind, there's something about Jesus' injunction to "let your yea be yea, and your nay be nay" (Matt. 5:37) that is applicable beyond oath-taking situations and confirms the truth that "anything beyond these is of the evil one." Christians have no business embellishing the truth and twisting it for political purposes and that is what the Manhattan Declaration does from beginning to end.

All driven by the desperation of a Christian Right which feels power slipping through its fingers like sand.

Are they serious?

Sharon Autenrieth at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch agrees the fundamental Manhattan Declaration points, yet sees the ovearching whacko of it. Charles Colson talks of educating young evangelicals about "the three most important issues," and Autenrieth responds:

Really? The “three most important issues”? That’s a bold statement. And what are the issues that are drawing younger evangelicals attention, anyway? Much research shows that young evangelicals are pro-life in similar numbers to their elders. They seem to be more pro-life than senior citizens in the church, as a matter of fact. But get a group of young Christians talking about social issues and you are also likely to hear about climate change and justice issues - human trafficking, militarism, and especially global poverty. Let’s just focus on that last one for the moment. Are the signatories of the Manhattan Declaration confident that preventing civil society from recognizing same-sex marriage is a more central issue for Christians than addressing poverty? Are they serious? Let’s see…in the parable of the sheep and the goats Jesus separated the blessed from the cursed based on how they treated the hungry & thirsty, the sick, the stranger, the naked and the prisoner. If that’s not enough reason to prioritize serving those in need, consider that James 1:27 says that “Religion God your Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

Gingrich hopes the way of the cross leads to White House

Newt Gingrich is on a spiritual journey back to power in the Republican Party and perhaps a run for president.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes about Gingrich's conversion Catholicism, noting that it "says much about the transformation of the Republican Party that even Newt Gingrich is now carrying the cross." Milbank says that even though Gingrich has never been close to the religion right, former speaker "is calculating that everything will get easier for him politically as a religious conservative."

Gingrich was a Southern Baptist, but had previously followed a brand of New Age philosophy, according to Milbank.

"But as his presidential aspirations swelled in recent years, Gingrich took the road to Damascus. He went on James Dobson's radio show to talk about his adultery. He spoke at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. He appeared on GodTV. He converted to Catholicism. He wrote a book, "Rediscovering God in America," and produced two related films. He's at work on a documentary about Pope John Paul II's role in defeating communism."

Matt Bai looked at Gingrich's resurgence in New York Times Magazine.

Bai describes a Republican retreat for congressmen in Virginia earlier this year, where Gingrich was the keynote speaker. Gingrich told inspiring stories from history and sports and even lightheartedly referred to himself as Moses, saying he'd help the GOP cross the Red Sea again only if it stayed on the other side.

Bai notes that Gingrich has "gone to great lengths to placate Christian conservatives."

"The family-values crowd has never completely embraced Newt, probably because he has been married three times, most recently to a former Hill staff member, Callista Bisek. In 2006, though, Gingrich wrote a book called “Rediscovering God in America” — part of a new canon of work he has done reaffirming the role of religion in public life."

Gingrich spoke at a conference in June that shares the book's name, according to a post by Dan Gilgoff in the U.S. News and World Report's God & Country blog.

Gingrich told the conference attendees that the nation's "first great challenge is spiritual."

"This is a country in hunger for another Great Awakening, a wave of belief which has again and again swept this country and fundamentally changed us."

Gingrich is positioning himself to ride that wave.

Religious Right will draw blood tomorrow

Sarah Palin, queen of oogedy-boogedy, recorded a Va. robocall, mostly about herself. She also endorsed the New York 23rd District Conservative Party candidate, turning that race on it's head.

In April conservative columnist Kathleen Parker was mulling the obituary of the Religious Right - the oogedy-boogedy branch of the Republican Party. And tomorrow, very much alive, they're likely to romp here and there.

Progressive Sara Posner writes:

From Virginia to New York to Maine, the religious right is playing a key in tomorrow's off-year elections. The reports of its death were greatly exaggerated.

. . .

Every other election cycle or so, the religious right makes noises that it might have to form a third party of its own. Although the likelihood of success for Christianist third party is nil, this "values voters" grandstanding is not an empty threat. It moves GOP candidates, particularly in the primaries, to the right. They can't win without the Christian right money or ground troops.

She then conducts a tour of races in which the Religious Right has imposed its will, most notably in NY-23 where, win or lose, Sarah Palin & Co. ejected a Republican moderate and put a Conservative Party candidate in the lead.

They're not the same, but the search for a redeeming new name isn't on the minds of the prevailing Religious Right leaders tonight. That doesn't mean they're really back in electoral charge, however. It means they aren't dead.

Did someone seriously think they would be dead? They have long made their political living by manipulating a target audience they know well and they are, of course, still good at it.

Yes, Virginia, there is a thesis

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell has on the strength of his 1989 master's thesis attracted considerable attention to Regent University, his Pat Robertson-founded alma mater. Even piquing the Washington Post to pen an expansive piece about the school.

Since McDonnell's thesis looked with a jaundiced eye on working women, the creation of tax credits for child care, feminism, homosexuality in general and the use of contraception by married couples, Regent students are a little worried about being misunderstood in this perhaps more enlightened era.

Helpfully, WaPo Staff Writer Ian Shapira collected a list of more recent theses, writing:

Student theses archived at Regent's library reveal a generational difference between the school's early years in the 1980s, when it was known as Christian Broadcasting Network University, and its recent history. Early theses have titles such as "The Role of the Press in Disseminating Communist Propaganda as a Foreign Policy Strategy of Totalitarian Governments," and "Homosexuals' American Dream . . . or Nightmare," a study that advocated "Criminalizing Homosexuality -- The First Line of Defense." Thesis titles from the 21st century: "U2's Gospel of Modulation in a Decade of Change" and "Federal Funding for Needle Exchange Programs," which advocated the idea as a way to prevent HIV.

There.

That should clear things up. About Regent. Not about McDonnell. Post-thesis revelation poll numbers showed McDonnell's opponent had moved to within striking range:

Dramatic shifts among independent female voters and Northern Virginians over the past month have propelled Democrat R. Creigh Deeds to within four points of Republican Robert F. McDonnell in the race for Virginia governor, according to a new Washington Post poll.
The change among likely voters -- down from a 15-point margin in mid-August -- coincides with the publication and ensuing controversy surrounding McDonnell's graduate school thesis, in which he writes of his opposition to working women, feminists and gay people.

Sigh. Maybe being a true, red (blue isn't Republican) member of the Christian Right ain't what it used to be. After all, McDonnell has been a good Ralph Reedster, attracting Reed's help and praise in the early days. McDonnell is a political child of Robertson's Christian Coalition and enjoys the group's current support.

But you don't have to use or subscribe to misguided terms like Paliban to see that those alliances and any associated thesis-embalmed views are no longer taint free and cannot be retrospectively disowned.

Catholic Right drifts away from Papal Encyclical toward Protestant Conservatives

Today's NYT piece by David Kirkpatrick led both Grant Gallicho and Mark Silk to note how the Catholic right has put itself at odds with the church's social justice position.

Gallicho, himself Catholic, analyzed the comments of Bishop Nickless of Sioux City. Nickless told the NYT:

Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined ‘best procedures,’ which are equally beyond the influence of most citizens. The proper role of the government is to regulate the private sector, in order to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses.

Gallicho responded:

Government monopoly?
Patient choice?
Does the bishop understand that in several states insurers operate virtual monopolies?
Or that many Americans have no choice when it comes to health insurance? That they take what they can get or else they go broke–or they can’t get it, suffer a catastrophic illness, and break the rest of us?
Are we to believe that the profit motive is better than “bureaucratic standards”?
Is that church teaching too?

Silk summarizes church teaching as recently reflected in Pope Benedict's encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Silk writes:

As I've pointed out here, the pope's encyclical teaches that food, drinkable water, "basic instruction and elementary health care" are all "elementary and basic rights." Sure there's politics and prudential judgment involved in determining the best way to provide people with health care, but so is there in determining the best way to provide people with food and drinkable water and breathable air.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has a Web site where it takes a stand for the broad, generous health care reform which church social policy implies. And against abortion. Which the Christian Right is attempting to use as a wedge issue by arguing there is unequivocal support for abortion in the various health reform proposals.

Carefully sorting abortion out produces equivocal results that do not support towering rhetoric from either side of the health reform debate. Consider the recent work of Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman on that issue.

As a result, Conservative Catholic bishops who are joining the Christian right on that may find themselves at odds with both church policy and reality.

UK 'Tough Love' for NHS & U.S. right

The British have one message for their National Health Service, and another messaged for American conservatives in general and perhaps for the Christian Right drive to stop health reform in this country.

British journalist Claire Rayner wrote for the Guardian about National Health Service problems:

There has been an absolutely astounding response to the report the Patients Association released yesterday, detailing examples of neglect of elderly and vulnerable patients. While I was as ever hopeful that the people who so bravely volunteered to take part in this work would feel it had been worthwhile, the response has been staggering. I was shocked and touched reading the stories of patients' families who have suffered and it seems the rest of the country has been as well.

She outlined a plan of correction and then turned to the awful things being said in the U.S. about the NHS and how "they don't want a similar system of their own:"

Much as I would like to respond to their ill-informed opinions with a crisp "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn what you think," let me instead point out that any intelligent American Republican should be able to see clearly that the anger we are expressing shows just how good the NHS normally is. And exposing the fact that we have a few rotten apples (so rare in the US, according to the self-aggrandising politicians I have heard slagging off our system) and are determined to seek them out and deal with them shows how much we care about our vulnerable, frail, and helpless elders.
I have no doubt that eventually this uproar will lead to the finding and application of the necessary remedies and ensure that future care for them will be what it should be – that is, gentle, dignity-protecting and life-extending as far as possible. If the national anger we are hearing in this country, where we love and value our NHS, doesn't prove to you that we don't have so-called "death panels" nothing will.

British Journalist Frances Beckett writes:

Anton Chaitkin is just the latest rightwing American commentator to claim that Barack Obama's healthcare proposals are Nazi. The history editor of the Executive Intelligence Review called them "a revival of Hitler's euthanasia killing programme".
. . .
That's how much the extreme right and the vested interests like the pharmaceutical companies hate healthcare schemes that give security to the poor. Attlee and Bevan, fortified by a large parliamentary majority and strong public support as well as their own courage and political will, pressed on regardless. It instantly transformed the lives of millions of Britons – not just the poorest, but those on moderate fixed incomes too.

Marjorie Ellis Thompson in a column calling for conservative reform of the NHS writes:

It is sad that the scaremongers appear to be winning the war of words in the US and that they have misrepresented the NHS, using both British patients and doctors who had thought they were appearing in a documentary, not an attack-dog ad.

The British are quite clear about having been misled by American conservatives into appearing in attack ads. The London Daily Mail reports"

Furious Kate Spall and Katie Brickell claim that their views on the NHS have been misrepresented by a free market campaign group opposed to Mr Obama's reforms in a bid to discredit the UK system.
. . .
Ms Spall, whose mother died of kidney cancer while waiting for treatment in the UK, told The Times: "It has been a bit of a nightmare.
"It was a real test of my naivety. I am a very trusting person and for me it has been a big lesson. I feel like I was duped."

British Conservative Party leader David Cameron is also quite clear about his support of the NHS. He rebuked a party member "who went on US television to attack the NHS, dismissing his views as 'eccentric.' " In an email to the members of his own party, Cameron he wrote:

One of the wonderful things about living in this country is that the moment you're injured or fall ill - no matter who you are, where you are from, or how much money you've got - you know that the NHS will look after you.

Yesterday the Religion News Service summarized the Christian Right argument against health reform:

Although an estimated 45 million Americans lack health insurance, federation backers said they support the current system. “There may be problems,” said Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in suburban Maryland and chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, “but it is working.”

As opposed to a system more like the British system which, as Conservative Party leader Cameron explained, covers everyone?

The Religious Right name-change (fail)

Rebranding efforts by the Religious Right have attracted both gentle satire and serious response.

Neither journalistic answer considers doing as those interviewed by Christianity Today asked. That would involve adopting a new term with which to characterize the "Religious Right" -- a new term which is less closely associated with "hard-edge politics and intolerance," as it was put by John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Indeed, Christianity Today reports that those who compose the Religious Right would really like a term which permits them to cobble together a broader alliance:

Organizational leaders like Tony Perkins of Family Research Council want a term that includes other religious groups like Catholics, Jews, and Mormons so that they can see themselves as fighting for the same cause.

Image-preening and alliance-broadening are coalition marketing goals.

They are not reasons for the rest of us to abandon a long used, well-understood and carefully chosen term which has acquired negative connotations as a result of the behavior those to whom it is applied. A name change is in any case just going to move those connotations to a new name, although a change in behavior will eventually erase them.