Tag: religious right

Lake of Fire, director Tony Kaye's epic documentary about the politics of abortion in the U.S. opened today in Manhattan -- and the reviews and interviews are spitting out of the media machines fast and furious.

This is the beginning of what may turn out to be a transformative conversation about the politics of abortion. Kaye has approached this project in his own way, spending $6 million of his own money to do it. What will happen from here, is anyone's guess.

What I can say with certainty, is that the way that antiabortionism is but one (albeit critical) part of comprehensive religious right world views -- is on vivid display in this film.

Links and exerpts from New York magazine, The New York Times, Bloomberg news, The New York Sun and The Newark Star-Ledger, on the flip.

from Talk to Action

As Rick Santorum, Hillary Clinton, Sam Brownback and Barack Obama packed to attend Jim Wallis' Pentecost 2006, some wondered about Wallis' true agenda.

The source of Wallis' appeal is his apparent moderation, both political and theological. His argument is compelling in its simplicity: An overriding commitment to social justice is more basic to Christianity than the issues championed by Christian fundamentalists. But to prevail he must avoid seeming too militantly progressive. "The country is not hungry, I don't think, for a religious left to counter the religious right," Wallis [said]. "The country is hungry for a moral center."

Before his elevation as an "evangelical progressive" celebrity, together with a Who's Who of the Religious Right -- Gary Bauer, Charles Colson, James Dobson, Robert George, William Kristol, Beverly LaHaye, Richard Land, Bernard Nathanson, Frank Pavone and Ralph Reed -- Jim Wallis signed a lengthy document that said plenty about his moral center, culminating in a call for a constitutional amendment to criminalize abortion entirely.

And to this day, Wallis has yet to repudiate a word of it.

NOTE: Originally posted at DailyKos.com

Let's face it: the Vatican is responsible for a lot of misery in the Third World because of its refusal to permit contraception. The dirty little secret no one wants to face is that here in America, where most Catholics do use birth control and don't want Roe overturned according to these  statistics , the fundamentalist Protestants are hand in glove with conservative Catholics of the Bill O'Donahue sort to ban both abortion and hormonal birth control and comprehensive sex education.  And they have a strong anti-woman agend

Perennial GOP presidential candidate Alan Keyes has announced that he is running again -- and will appear next week at the Values Voters Summit that the GOP front-runners have declined to attend.  Keyes, who has a long history of bringing religious rightists to their feet with cheers, applause and shouted amens, will add more than racial color to the all white GOP primary line-up.  While Keyes never captures the votes that one might expect given the emotional responses he elicits, he brings fire to the field at a time when there is considerable speculation as to whether the once mighty values voters are losing interest in the GOP.

from Talk to Action

Like both James Dobson and Tony Perkins' pro-war Family Research Council prayer team, Conservative Woman is hell on both Islamist plots and abortion - but what happens when their twin "Christian" crusades collide?

What is happening is exactly what anyone should have expected. Pregnant Iraqi women and their babies are dying in unprecedented numbers - and women who fear adding to that horrendous death toll with their own lives and those of their children are taking what they see as a lesser gamble by seeking out illegal and unsafe abortions.

The War on Terror is making us all safer, one tiny terrorist at a time.

It's August here in Georgia, and the temperature has been o 100+ for the last couple of weeks, so I don't need a whole  heckuva lot to make me cranky.  CNN tipped the balance with Mike Galanos' new series of reports on Prime News about controversial topics like swinging and exorcism.  The one that did it for me was a  report on "religious exemption" for health care professionals which allow  them to refuse to perform or participate in  certain procedures (like abortion or removing a feeding tube or dispensing Plan B to rape victims) or to care for patients whose lifestyle they disapprove of for religious or moral reasons.  

from Talk to Action

Equipped to Serve is a popular training resource for crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) or, as they call themselves among themselves, "pregnancy center ministries." The first of the "Seven Fundamentals" at Equipped to Serve begins as follows.

"Truth is a very different thing from fact. ... Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion."

Maybe that explains why the "truth" presented by CPCs strays so very far from the facts.