[from Reuters, hat tip Jesus General]

A new poll shows support for the war in Iraq is slipping among white evangelical Protestants, previously a key pillar of support for President George W. Bush's conduct of the conflict.

The poll is the latest bad domestic news for Bush and the Republicans about Iraq with just 12 days to go to congressional elections in which the Democrats are widely expected to capture control of the House of Representatives.

Conducted by the PEW Research Center, it found that 58 percent of white evangelical Protestants surveyed felt the United States made the right decision in using force in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, below the 71 percent in a previous poll in September. READ IT ALL

Image from Annoy.com

This article is essential. Via TruthOut [Thanks John]:

Congress's Shameful Retreat From American Values
By Garrison Keillor

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you. Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an "enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter. If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of "crimes against the state" and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned.

The Senate also decided it's up to the president to decide whether it's OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators. This is now purely a bureaucratic matter: The plenipotentiary stamps the file "enemy combatants" and throws the poor schnooks into prison and at his leisure he tries them by any sort of kangaroo court he wishes to assemble and they have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal. This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by President Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.

It's good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 - Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright - and you won't find more than 10 votes for it.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: Mark their names and mark them well.

Continue reading "Garrison Keillor: Walkie-Talkie Methodists & The Legalization Of Torture" »

The fabulous Randall Balmer, go read his book now, sounds off on our morally bankrupt rendition program and the war in Iraq: [From the Philadelphia Inquirer]

Where is the "moral majority" when we need it? [...] On the defining moral issues of our day, the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's use of torture against those it has designated as "enemy combatants," these "voices of morality" are strangely silent. [...] Christian theologians through the centuries have developed criteria for determining whether or not armed conflict is justified. For instance, is it a defensive war? Have all alternatives been exhausted? Is the use of military force roughly proportional to the provocation? Does military intervention stand a reasonable chance of success? Have measures been taken to protect civilians? I've yet to be convinced that the invasion of Iraq meets any of these criteria.

Similarly, the religious right has been silent on the matter of torture, conducted either by American personnel in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay or by proxy in places like Egypt and Syria under a cynical policy known as "extraordinary rendition."

Several months ago, I canvassed eight prominent religious right organizations, including the Moral Majority Coalition, Falwell's group, for their views on torture. My query was straightforward: Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization's position on the use of torture. These are groups that have detailed position papers on everything, including stem-cell research and same-sex unions, yet only two answered my query. Both of them defended the Bush administration's policies on torture. No organization associated with the religious right has yet, to my knowledge, summoned the will to issue a statement of unequivocal opposition to the use of torture.

These are people who claim to be "pro-life" and who profess to hear a "fetal scream." Yet they turn a deaf ear to the very real screams of fully formed human beings who are tortured in our name.

The religious right's indifference toward the ethical issues surrounding war and torture is hardly befitting those who designate themselves the moral arbiters of our society. If my fellow evangelicals aspire to be the conscience of America, they had better liberate themselves from their captivity to the Republican Party and to the morally bankrupt policies of the Bush administration.

From the AP

The head of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention says an overwhelming majority of Baptists still support President Bush and his handling of the Iraq war. In an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, Richard Land said that exit polls showed about 84 percent of Southern Baptists voted for Bush in 2004. The Iraq war hasn't significantly eroded that support, he said, despite recent polls that show Republicans losing ground with moderate evangelicals...

"It would be foolish to say anybody's pleased," Land said. "I don't think the president's pleased with the progress of the war. Clearly, he would have wished things would have gone better. So do I."

But, Land added: "I still think Iraq is one of the more noble things we've done. We went there to try to restore freedom and to bring freedom to the Middle East." ...

"I don't think there's any question that the vast majority of Southern Baptists still strongly support this president and his policies," Land said.

From The United Methodist Church

United Methodist Church leaders helped launch a week of protest and civil disobedience against the war in Iraq by signing a declaration of peace in the capital, urging President Bush to pull US troops out of the country.

The Declaration of Peace, signed on 21 September 2006, is described as a call for nonviolent action to end the war in Iraq. The Washington DC event was one of 350 staged nationwide to promote the peace initiative.

More than 500 groups, almost half of them faith organizations, are involved in the declaration of peace effort, which recently retired Bishop Susan Morrison said includes "acts of moral witness to seek a new course for our country."

Continue reading "Bush's Own Church Has Called For The Withdrawal Of Troops From Iraq" »

Anthony Perkins, who incidentally is no relation to the knife-slashing lunatic played by Anthony Perkins in Psycho

From Tony Perkins' daily newsletter at the Family Research Council:

A better journalist wrote this in The Washington Post: "If Americans do not fight, the terrorists will attack America again. And we now know such attacks can kill many thousands of Americans. The American pacifists, therefore, are on the side of future mass murderers of Americans. They are objectively pro terrorist. There is no way out of this reasoning. No honest person can pretend that the groups that attacked America will, if let alone, not attack again. Nor can any honest person say that this attack is not at least as likely to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people. Not to fight in this instance is to let the attackers live to attack and murder again; to be a pacifist in this instance is to accept and, in practice, support this outcome." Those are the words of Michael Kelly, prize-winning author, editor, and columnist. He died on the road to Baghdad in 2003. Let's honor his memory, by heeding his warning.

Evidently, Jesus prefers kicking ass to diplomacy. The Family Research Council is Focus on the Family's main lobby on Capitol Hill. [Hat tip Jesus Politics]

Mark Tooley: Nutjob of the Month

Despite a recent outcry against torture by evangelical leaders such as Jim Wallis, Mark Tooley of the influential Institute on Religion and Democracy says evangelicals are wrong to endorse a recent anti-torture statement. From Agape Press:

A conservative Christian leader says the organization known as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture isn't saying anything about torture in places like North Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia -- but instead is focusing its ire upon the U.S. and the Bush administration.

... Tooley says he has reviewed the declaration issued by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and has noted the document does not say anything about torture in places where it really occurs. That causes him to question the group's motive.

"If this group were genuinely interested in torture, of course they would be addressing those regimes that actively and deliberately do practice torture rather than focusing exclusively on the United States," he comments. He says he detects a "double standard" in the campaign against torture. "[It] is primarily a creation of the religious left and whose interest is not so much in torture, per se, but about opposing U.S. foreign policy."

Aren't Christians supposed to set a good moral example for everybody else? And furthermore, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture was signed by dozens of card-carrying right-wingers, such as Rick Warren and Ted Haggard. Tool-y makes it sound like the document was drafted by Ted Kennedy and Al Gore in a pot haze after attending a James Taylor concert. Mark Tooley, you win our nutjob of the month award.

Related: June's Nutjob of the Month, Reginald Finger