The Growing Threat of Right-Wing Christians

[muriel_volestrangler]

Roychoudhuri: Can you give an example?

Goldberg: In the Department of Health and Human Services, the people they hired to formulate sex education policy, at both the national and international level, didn't come from the American Medical Association or the big medical schools. They're coming from places like the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, which is this Christian Nationalist medical group. (The group says it is a "nonprofit scientific, educational organization to confront the global epidemics of non-marital pregnancy.")

One of the earlier stories I did for Salon was on the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) which does family planning, but they don't do abortion, mostly safe childcare and reproductive health through clinics all over the world. Congress had appropriated $35 million to the UNFPA. There's this group called the Population Research Institute -- another one of these parallel institutions. They're radically anti-family planning and claim that population control policies are part of this "one-world conspiracy" to cull the population of the faithful so that the "one-world government" can more easily assert its control. On the website it said that not only is overpopulation a myth, but all the people on Earth could live comfortably in the state of Texas. I did this story in 2002. I still had this naïve idea that this kind of thing would remain marginal.

But what's amazing is that Population Research Institution went on to testify before Congress saying that the UNFPA promotes forced abortions in China. These kinds of accusations start echoing up the ladder to the point where Bush froze the UNFPA funding. This despite the fact that the State Department had already sent a delegation to China to investigate and said there was nothing to these accusations at all.
...
Bush wanted to get the Salvation Army aboard the faith-based initiatives. The Salvation Army then brought in a consultant to Christianize certain divisions. He asked the human resources director at the Salvation Army headquarters, Maureen Schmidt, whether one of the human resource staffers at the social services division, Margaret Geissman, was Jewish, because she had a "Jewish sounding name." Schmidt told him that she wasn't. So then he went to her and said, "I want a list of homosexuals who work there."

http://www.alternet.org/story/38830/

She goes on to define Christian Nationalists, which she thinks are 10-15% of Americans, and the difficulty of discussing this without saying "fascism", because that sounds extreme, although this is a stage towards it.

[unpossibles]

1. good article. thanks for the link. n/t

[havocmom]

2. .

Will be back for this one when I have the time it deserves. Thanks for the link.

[starroute]

3. What's wrong with calling them "Christian fascists"?

It would distinguish them from real Christians -- which is a good thing. It would label them for what they are. And it would explain what the problem is, in a nutshell.

Where's the downside of that?

[The Deacon]

4. I Object to Calling Them Christians At All

"Render unto Caesar" and all that.

[greenman3610]

5. I prefer "Christo-fascists"

but then there's "Christers" and the
perrenial "Snake Handlers".

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. It's easier to call foreigners fascists than people in your town

The Republicans get away with "Islamofascists" when they're talking about people who we mainly see when something violent happens on TV; but when you call someone who goes to a church in your town a Christian fascist, people are liable to say "fascist? Of course not. If they don't have brown shirts and armbands, they can't be fascists. Why, my children used to go to the same school as theirs". It's a big leap in perception required.

[Swamp Rat]

7. It would be easier to teach lobotomised gorillas to solve algebraic

equations using the quadratic formula.

[sakabatou]

8. Why TF is there a "Are you a slacker mom" ad at the bottom?

Seems that google is being... evil.