Does “Sunlight” have the power to cure the “RaptureRight Cancer” in America?
4 April 2007 by Naomi
Do you really believe that the RaptureRight gets its money from contribution plates? Many people do!
Well, you’d be wrong. There is a hidden spiderweb of corporations and foundations that not only support the activities you CAN see–but also the activities you CAN’T! And, boy! is there a shitload of money in the shadows!
Going Courtin’: Religious Right Fat Cats Bankroll Alliance Defense Fund’s Legal Crusade
Americans United has been tracking the activities of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) since the group’s inception in 1993.
Founded by TV preachers and other extreme right-wingers to push the Religious Right’s agenda in the courts, the ADF was spawned by James Dobson, D. James Kennedy and Donald Wildmon, among others. Originally, the group was conceived as a funding pool. The ADF would collect money and dole it out to Religious Right litigators like Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice. [Lest we forget: the 150 attorneys in the Gonzalez' Dept.of Justice, all graduates of Robertson's Regent University Law School, where they do teach bible study--but they don't have classes on Ethics!]
A few years ago, ADF officials got hungry for some of that courtroom action themselves and began litigating cases directly. It has since become the 800-pound gorilla of the Religious Right legal scene, bringing in $21 million in donations last year.
It can be difficult to get the media to pay attention to a group like the ADF. Despite its huge budget and frequent courtroom activity, the organization is far from being a household name. In June of 2004, I wrote an overview of the ADF for Church & State (which included information about the ADF’s ties to the extreme Christian Reconstructionist movement), and The New Yorker ran a piece about the organization in March of 2005.
Thankfully, other media outlets are taking a hard look at the ADF and its radical agenda. An excellent piece by Sarah Posner in The Washington Spectator (”Army Of God: The Legal Muscle Leading the Fight to End the Separation of Church and State”) is a worth a look.
Posner does some digging and uncovers where the ADF gets much of its money. Not surprisingly, she unearths a bevy of far-right fat cats writing big checks.
“Some of the major donors include the Covenant Foundation, financed by the ‘Granddaddy’ of the Texas Christian Right, business mogul James Leininger; various members of the Amway-Prince Automotive empire, including the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, whose vice president, Erik Prince (Edgar and Elsa’s son, and brother of Betsy DeVos, wife of the Amway magnate, right-wing financier, and unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate Richard DeVos), [Erik Prince] founded the Blackwater USA military-security firm; and the Bolthouse Foundation, which is underwritten chiefly with profits from Bolthouse Farms, a family-run California company whose products are often seen at organic markets and Whole Foods. Bolthouse requires recipients of its grants to pledge adherence to a statement of faith that includes the declaration that ‘man was created by a direct act of God in His image, not from previously existing creatures’ and a belief in ‘the everlasting blessedness of the saved and the everlasting punishment of the lost.’”
I urge you to read the rest of “Goin’ Courtin’…” (first linked), and to follow the other links. As atheists, we must know who are the enemies of our First Amendment rights to NOT practice religion.
More importantly, these people are subversives; they seek to remake America into a chrisitanist theocratic state, with the Ten Suggestions as the “law of the land”. They will abolish public schools, destroy science and deny birth control, re-institute second-class status for women and Blacks, and execute homosexuals.
I call them Traitors! Do you agree with me or do you that doubt their aim is so pernicious and has metastasized so thoroughly?
UPDATE: A correction is necessary. The 150 attorneys from Pat Robertson’s Regent University are in the Bush administration (including the White House, all cabinet-level agencies and in sub-agencies), not just, as I implied, in the Department of Justice. I apologize for the error. (See Regent University: About us. It’s one of the stats they advertise proudly; Monica Goodling, One of 150 Pat Robertson Cadres in the Bush Administration; (Monica Goodling, DoJ liaison between Gonzalez and the White House, resigned late Friday; she had previously dragged her little Prada-clad feet about appearing before a Senate committee, promising that she would be pleading her Fifth Amendment rights to remain silent. Hopefully, she is still called to testify, despite her hasty departure from DoJ…)
5 April 2007, on 1:04 am
They are not a Freedom loving people. They are nothing more than thugs and criminals disguising themselves as god loving Xians. The Blackwate rap is the worst. In the late 80’s and early 90’s we called those militarized groups Militias. I am happy to know the companies involved so that I can refrain from buying a piece of slavery.
5 April 2007, on 2:27 am
They are determined to have their “divine right of kings.” One would have thought that history would have shown them that these theocratic concepts are barbaric, ruthless and anti-freedom.
Nevertheless, they seem determined to pursue the same route as their ancestors.
5 April 2007, on 4:36 am
That scum remind me of this scum I watched on TV last night; if you follow the link, make sure you watch the clips about ‘The Most Hated Family In America’. These people (the Phelps family) make Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot and Idi Amin seem like ‘good guys’ (to paraphrase a recent religio-apologist on another thread).
A true abomination. And the brain-washing they were giving to their kids was real child-abuse. Anyone who teaches a 7 year-old little girl to say that niggers, jewboys, fags, fag-enablers (that’s anyone who doesn’t want to exterminate homosexuals), should be killed should be restrained by the authorities.
5 April 2007, on 4:52 am
The phelps family would be considered to be perpetrating hate speech here. But I am not sure that this is the way to solve it. Perhaps it is better when people say what they think and in the process they appall people.
5 April 2007, on 9:22 am
Something about the Phelps family confuses me, though. My parents hate these people and think they are crazy and dangerous. My parents who have called people ‘nigger’ around me as a kid plenty of times. My parents who are openly against homosexuals (though my mom’s porn collection would beg to differ…not that I was supposed to know about that). They’ve loosened up a little since I was in high school, but not enough to justify their hatred of the Phelps family. They are very “red blooded American” patriotic w/requisite flag on house and they support President Bush with blinders on. Can someone clarify for me why they hate these people so who obviously reflect my parents views? I’ve always thought that my mother is not as ultra-conservative as she’d like my dad to think. Any psychological insight into this would be helpful.
As for the real topic of this post, when I read this I thought of all of the pastors endorsing candidates during sermons. Our newspaper runs a story before each election as to which churches support which candidate. Are the churches getting any monetary compensation for such endorsements? Nah, surely not. Sheesh. I know there are laws regarding this, but at the moment, I really do need to get back to work. They’ve done an excellent job patiently planning out the demise of this country. What’s going to happen when they win, when it is a completely xian country? Which protestant cult will be allowed supreme power of the United States. Maybe THAT’S the beginning of the end, WWIII, Apoxyclypse (ha ha, love Mad Max).
5 April 2007, on 12:35 pm
Where can I find documentation that the 150 attorneys are all graduates of Regent U?
I could use that in my upcoming book.
Thanks
5 April 2007, on 1:45 pm
Time and again, I am confronted with Christians who try to say, “Well, I’m nice, and the Christians I know are nice, so you’ve got it wrong about Christians.” Bullshit. Where is the “moderate” or “liberal” Christian response to this sort of thing? At best, they don’t know, which is sort of like living in Stalin’s Russia and not being aware of the gulags, if you ask me. They’re not really hiding it, and someone is giving the ADF over twenty million a year to pursue cases, and train judges and the like. But they never seem to go after their these fundie Christians. They do spend a lot of time giving apologia for their religion, rather than doing the hard work of getting these people out of their religion! Of destroying the mechanisms of their manipulation! Day after day, year after year, they sit in congregations with rightist fundamentalists and do nothing but then have the arrogance to criticize atheist and humanist critiques of their religion, while offering endless (generally ridiculous) apologia for their faith.
5 April 2007, on 2:10 pm
I’m scared now…somebody hold me?
To stop this, like Chris said above, it truly won’t take just the atheists fighting, moderate and liberal christians and other religions need to fight to take back some control of their fringe crazies. Because we all know if they win and succeed at a religious theocracy then not only will be the bad people, but so will the jews, muslims, catholics, etc. They only want “their kind” of christians around.
5 April 2007, on 4:17 pm
Bean
What your mother is doing is called projection. Your mother probably isn’t even aware she is doing it. It is common in christians because their religious upbringing seperates them from their instinctual side. While her instincts tell her, what the Phelps are doing is wrong, she doesn’t see that her religious beliefs are exactly the same as the phelps. A good book about how projection works is “Meeting the Shadow’.
http://www.amazon.com/Meeting-Shadow-New-Consciousness-Reader/dp/087477618X
http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/zweig.html
I hope these help in your quest to understand your mother a little better.
Amy
5 April 2007, on 4:21 pm
Naomi
Have you been watching the conspiracy channel too? lol (JK)
I completely agree with you a 110% and you have every right and should be very wary about ADF!!!
5 April 2007, on 4:32 pm
From the Regent U. web site they state that they have 150 Regent U. grads in the Bush administration.
http://www.regent.edu/general/about_us/facts.cfm
Also Max Blumenthal has an article at Huffington post about this as well.
6 April 2007, on 2:09 am
Yeah…what corrupt, dangerously pathological, lying fuckheads these hypocritical, cosmological idiots are.
]
There’s too much to really comment on, without wasting a lot of valuable energy.
What!…”Less is More”? I dunno!
[Or, am I just too lazy?...Of COURSE I'm being rhetorical!...SHEESH...
Oh, Shut up, Naomi! Say what?
One particular type of tactic, mentioned by Posner, stands out in my mind, highlighting how fucked up the Fundie god notion is. Why would anyone with any rational brains continue to worship such a viscious, unjust, and psychopathic god notion.
[From the Posner 'diggings' regarding the "Bolthouse Foundation"...Note my Caps!]
“Bolthouse requires recipients of its grants to pledge adherence to a statement of faith that includes the declaration that ‘man was created by a direct act of God in His image, not from previously existing creatures’ and a belief in ‘THE EVERLASTING BLESSEDNESS OF THE SAVED AND THE EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT OF THE LOST.”
It’s, of course, a topic we’ve, more than once, commented on…
It’s coitenly one of those contradictory and viscious religious notions that led ME to being an atheist!…
Free will?…MY ASS!…As demonstrated in that recent “God Simulator”…anyone with any compassion and modicum of brains could be a better ‘god’ than the supremely selfish and psychotic, brutal tyrant of the major Western Religions. AARGH!
For those who may have missed that ‘trip’, here’s the direct link:
http://www.jraxis.com/atheism/simulator/
6 April 2007, on 3:31 pm
How many people are aware of the fact that, without public announcement, and under the “news radar” our government is using our tax dollars for a mercenary army called “Blackwater”? Allegedly, “Blackwater USA” a private military contractor and security consulting firm in North Carolina was co-founded by former Navy Seal, Erik Prince, a “billionaire right-wing fundamentalist Christian from a powerful Michigan Republican family and a major Republican campaign contributor and confidant of the Bush administration.
The company consists of army, maritime, armored vehicles, paratroopers, air force and large training facilities. They are being paid big bucks for their service as this administration’s private mercenary army. Apparently “Blackwater” has up to 20,000 of these mercenaries in Iraq including some who are nationals from other countries. They are paid much more than our GI’s who they may fight side by side with, surely a cause of low moral. They have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. Prince suggests that his company is likened to a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, he says in an act as contemptuous as it is disingenuous: take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution.
For those of us old enough to remember the mercenary armies of the past, the ” Blackshirts ” of Benito Mussolini and later Hitler, as a military tool of their Fascist movement, this is an ominous reminder of the events that followed. In comparison the appearance of these “Blackwater” paramilitary. mercenary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, unaccountable to any legitimate authority, may be an omen of the future. At the very least it should be a grim reminder that unrestrained exercise of power being freely used generally comes back on us one day and will bite where it hurts.
6 April 2007, on 5:24 pm
[Lest we forget: the 150 attorneys in the Gonzalez’ Dept.of Justice, all graduates of Robertson’s Regent University Law School, where they do teach bible study–but they don’t have classes on Ethics!]
A source for this, please. It’s not in the AU article. Thanks
6 April 2007, on 7:55 pm
Catherine: Sorry for not sourcing that. Here are three sources–
Regent University: About us. It’s one of the stats they advertise proudly.
Monica Goodling, One of 150 Pat Robertson Cadres in the Bush Administration
(Monica Goodling, DoJ liaison between Gonzalez and the White House, resigned late Friday; she had previously dragged her little Prada-clad feet about appearing before a Senate committee, promising that she would be pleading her Fifth Amendment rights to remain silent. Hopefully, she is still called to testify, despite her hasty departure from DoJ…)
17 July 2007, on 7:55 am
[...] I say he’s a cog in a much bigger wheel bag-man for the theocratic movement. And is involved in sedition with many christian zealots, including Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Gary North, Gary DeMar, both Mr.&Mrs. Tim LaHaye, Don Wildmon and many, many others. I’m not alone; it’s what the Blog Against Theocracy is about and why Talk to Action and TheocracyWatch stay vigilant. Contrary to what FixedNews says about us, it isn’t “tinfoil hat” lunacy at all. [...]