Fundamentalism Watch

I'm supposed to tread with the utmost sensitivity when discussing religious issues because of some distorted version of political correctness created by the religious right. Because they want to reserve the ability to cry "you religion-hater" when you simply report on what they've been doing lately. To wit:

A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.

Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.

“It’s a slap in the face. It’s like, ’Oh, we’re sorry he died, but he’s gay so we can’t help you,”’ she said Friday.

And even more to the point, here's a story about a nonprofit reporting on the activities of the church, in this case illegal electioneering, and the church group calling for their deaths:

Last week, (Pastor Wiley S. of the Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park) Drake got out his church letterhead again, and announced his endorsement of Mike Huckabee for the GOP presidential nomination -- an endorsement he repeated on his radio show, just in case anyone missed it. “I announce,” wrote the pastor, “that I am going to personally endorse Mike Huckabee. I ask all of my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters to consider getting behind Mike and helping him all you can. First of all pray and then ask God, what should I do to put feet to my prayers [...]

Americans United for Separation of Church and State struck back quickly. Yesterday, they filed a formal complaint with the IRS, documenting Wiley's actions as a clear breach of tax laws that prevent churches and ministers from endorsing political candidates.

And this is where the story turns strange -- the unique kind of strange you only get to see when you've got SBC theocrats hanging on the ropes.

Wiley's retort to AU was swift, ferocious -- and bizarre. Caught dead to rights, he didn't even try to respond to particulars of AU's IRS complaint. Instead, he immediately launched into the kind of wild-eyed, paranoid magical thinking you'd expect from any embattled cult leader. Which is to say: In a press release issued yesterday, he ordered his flock to petition God, who in turn would avenge this attack by smiting AU's staff with poverty, starvation, scattered familes, and death.

No shit, the guy actually names specific staffers to target through prayer.

We're not supposed to talk about this, we're supposed to "give the church a break," when obviously I'm talking about specific situations of intolerance, bigotry and hatred that don't reflect on every religious man or woman in the country. If we are silent about these things that do matter, we allow these views to fester and grow. And then we wake up and find our military prosyletized:

Actor Stephen Baldwin, the youngest member of the famous Baldwin brothers, is no longer playing Pauly Shore's sidekick in comedy masterpieces like Biodome. He has a much more serious calling these days.

Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among active-duty members of the US military. As an official arm of the Defense Department's America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq. OSU is also scheduled to embark on a "Military Crusade in Iraq" in the near future [...]

"The constitution has been assaulted and brutalized," Mikey Weinstein, former Reagan Administration White House counsel, ex-Air Force judge advocate (JAG), and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me. "Thanks to the influence of extreme Christian fundamentalism, the wall separating church and state is nothing but smoke and debris. And OSU is the IED that exploded the wall separating church and state in the Pentagon and throughout our military." Weinstein continued: "The fact that they would even consider taking their crusade to a Muslim country shows the threat to our national security and to the constitution and everyone that loves it."

Once this got out, the military blocked the mailing of the Left Behind video game. And the point is that without oversight on this perverted strain of fundamentalism, it will continue to move forward until this country stops looking like itself anymore, a country founded on the ideals of freedom of religion, which includes the freedom to worship whoever I want or not at all if I so choose.