Booman’s Saturday post Wanker of the Day: Jennifer Rubin contained the following sentences.
Maybe we should wage a war on them? [Racist, fundamentalist Christians] It wouldn’t be that expensive.
Now you’re getting closer to the target, Booman. Racist, fundamentalist everybodys should have war waged upon them. We’re in an evolutionary endgame here. Taliban types, conservative U.S. fundamentalists and their Tea Party/RatPublican brethren…let’s take ’em all out before they blow up the world in the midst of their last-stand act.
But…wait a minute!!! Who’s gonna lead the charge?
The U.S. military?
UH oh!!!
Hmmmm…
Read on for more.
And here lies the real crux of our problem.
A great deal of our military leadership and much of our so-called “conservative” right are themselves fundamentalists. They are a vast, nuclear-armed Christian Taliban. And who arms them? The non-fundamentalist section of our PermaGov…the corporations, whose only real god is short-term, quarterly profit.
(Read ’em and weep.)
Christian fundamentalist bigotry reigns at US Air Force Academy
By Patrick Martin
30 April 2005
Evangelical Christians among the officers and cadets at the US Air Force Academy have created an atmosphere of systematic intolerance towards Jewish and non-religious students, according to reports by minority students and investigations by off-campus groups concerned about the rise of fundamentalist bigotry.
On April 19, academy officials revealed that 55 complaints against religious harassment by Christian fundamentalists have been filed in the last four years, including “saying bad things about persons of other religions or proselytizing in inappropriate places,” a spokesman said.
In response to the complaints, the academy has created a program called RSVP, for Respecting the Spiritual Values of all People, which consists of a 50-minute class that all 4,300 cadets are required to attend. Similar sensitivity sessions will be held for the 9,000 staff and employees of the academy.According to an account published in the Los Angeles Times, Mikey Weinstein, a graduate of the academy and lawyer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who is Jewish, was outraged by the religious bigotry expressed against his son Curtis when he entered the academy. His son was called a “filthy Jew,” among other slurs.
“When I visited my son,” he told the Times, “he told me he wanted us to go off base because he had something to tell me. He said, `They are calling me a … Jew and that I am responsible for killing Christ.’ My son told me that he was going to hit the next one who called him something.”
“When I was at the academy, there wasn’t this institutional notion that if you didn’t accept Christ you would burn eternally in hell,” he added. “This is not a Jew-Christian thing, it’s an evangelical versus everyone else thing. I am calling for congressional oversight and for the academy to stop trivializing the problem by calling it non-systemic. If they can’t fix it and Congress won’t fix it, the next thing to do is go to the federal court and file a lawsuit alleging a violation of the Constitution and civil rights.”
`Who Teacheth My Hands To War’ – Christian Fundamentalism in the American Military
By astranavigo
Published: February 19, 2010
When I was first acquainted with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, I was tempted to dismiss it as one of several fringe-groups, placing blame on the Right, just as Rightist fringe-groups routinely do the same to the Left. However, fifteen minutes of research gave me pause.
That pause was wrapped up in the efforts of one man; the president of the Foundation, Michael (Mikey) Weinstein.
He entered the U.S. Air Force Academy – and graduated (no mean feat). He’s an attorney – who worked in the White House as assistant general counsel to Ronald Reagan. He knows the Constitution. These are credentials which only come to a select few, and only by hard work. This is the reason his current calling is so compelling. Mikey isn’t a man who takes pot-shots at the government from the safety of a computer screen – he’s earned both the respect of the nation, as well as the street-cred to turn around and challenge its government and its military.
Mikey Weinstein is an engaging man. In his presence, you’re aware of an energy that’s at once focused and committed; a practical idealist whose passion is tempered by a goal, and balanced by a good-natured humor (as evidenced by his Air Force Academy nickname, which stuck with him through the years).
While Mikey had his first encounter with Fundamentalist Christianity when he was in the Air Force Academy himself, it was the experience of his son, Curtis, at that same institution which galvanized his effort. Curtis had been called a `fucking Jew’ and a `Christ killer’. While the emotions were several, and on several levels, Weinstein was mainly angry and embarrassed – angry at what had been done, and embarrassed at what his beloved Academy had become.
He began by doing what he’d always done before a big case or a big project – lots of hard-nosed research.
What he determined through this process was that the Academies at West Point and Annapolis were also full of Fundamentalist Evangelicals who didn’t see it as a violation of their oath to proselytize their version of Christianity on anyone who wasn’t a `believer’. Hundreds of interviews later, he determined that the problem of `God’-over-country is pervasive to the very highest ranks in all branches of America’s military, and that the majority of these officers and senior enlisted personnel are not just Fundamentalist, but subscribe to both Dominionism and Reconstructionism.
At first blush, this all sounds like loony-bin talk. Mikey’s continued research – which brought him face to face with the highest levels of America’s military leadership – provides incontrovertible proof that America is as close as it’s ever been to an outright coup, sponsored by the military and supported by a large and growing subset of American Fundamentalist Christians, who believe that it’s not only their right, but their duty, to `take America back’ for their God.
The problem is so pervasive in America’s military that today, 50% of the chaplaincy appointments in America’s military are held by Dominionist/Reconstructionist Christians. The group Christian Embassy has embedded itself deep in the Pentagon – so deep that Mikey calls it the “Pentecostalgon.”
Dominionism and Reconstructionism
This subset of Christianity holds its roots in the belief that the United States is a `Christian nation’, founded by and for Christians, and that it is the duty of every `good’ American Christian to create a new America which subordinates civil/secular law and the Constitution to the `laws of God’ – particularly, conservative Christian understanding of Biblical law.
In their worldview, the Dominionists and Reconstructionists seek a `reconstruction’ of American law and society in keeping with their views of conservatively-interpreted Christianity -and it’s a simple process:
- Control the education of America’s youth, and you have the future.
- Control America’s courts, and you control not only its legal processes, but its government.
- Control the military, and you control the country.
In other words – a theocracy.
“We have a fanatical `religiosity’; in this case it’s known as `fundamentalist/dominionist Christianity’, mixed in with totally misguided patriotism. Throw in a dash of actual weapons of mass destruction; throw in completely unfettered access due to the draconian specter of military command influence, and then add another swatch of total abrogation of the sacred oath to defend, protect, support and serve the Constitution of the United States – and what you have is a national security threat which is so serious in magnitude that almost no one can believe that it’s there, unless they’re complicit.”
Not much more to say.
So it goes here in The United States of Omertica.
Watch.
AG
P.S. If y’can’t join ’em…beat ’em!
But…how?
That is the question of the decade.
How?
They control the armed forces and the money. And the media, too.
Uh oh!!!
How?
Damned if I know.
Maybe we’ll just have to wait until their own hubris brings the whole house of cards down.
If so, I have a suspicion that we won’t have to wait long.
Maybe only a week or two.
Watch.
I am pleased to introduce General Buck Turgidson’s near relative, Senator John Flaccidson.
If he cain’t do it, nobody can!
Watch.
