I've Got Your Convictions Right Here

I heard Mike Huckabee the other day say that what Barack Obama needs to do is to show convictions and stay true to his core beliefs, like Jesse Helms. Since those core beliefs involved him being an unapologetic racist, I thought it was slightly inappropriate. But if Huckabee wants to rephrase that, I actually do have a model for courage and conviction, and it's L.F. Eason III.

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff.

The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.

"Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week," Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his "doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice" and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Here's a guy that gave up everything he had and everything he'd ever known out of the principle of calling bigotry by its name. Seeing that Sen. Obama today capitulated on the Constitutional right of persons to be safe and secure in their homes, I'd say he could learn a lesson from this man. So could Mike Huckabee. Alternatively, he could do what conservatives have been doing for decades and call the black guy a Commie. The problem with that, of course, is that Eason is white.

It Isn't Campaign Season Without Subtle Religious Bigotry

John McCain's 95 year-old mother decided to pre-empt any whisper campaigns against her son this time around by starting one of her own:

John McCain's 95-year-old mother, in a swipe at her son's rival Mitt Romney, said Friday that Mormons were to blame for the scandal that rocked the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

During an appearance on MSNBC, Roberta McCain laid out why her son, John, deserves to win the Republican presidential nomination. But in evaluating McCain's primary rivals, she criticized Romney's Mormon faith and his time in Salt Lake City.

"As far as the Salt Lake City thing, he's a Mormon and the Mormons of Salt Lake City had caused that scandal. And to clean that up, again, it's not a subject," Roberta McCain said.
John McCain quickly stepped in: "The views of my mothers are not necessarily the views of mine."

"Well, that's my view and you asked me," Roberta answered.

Honestly, I had forgotten that the Mitt-led 2002 Olympics were marred by organizers bribing IOC officials with hookers and the like. But apparently Mrs. McCain hasn't, and she's keen to blame "them Mormons and their magic underwear." It was one of those moments that could only come from someone who remembers a time of separate drinking fountains, and maybe not with regret.

Campaigns that are close frequently become nasty. This one's a nailbiter and there are a lot of big egos and reputations on the line. The claws will be permanently deployed for the next few months.

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.

The Disease of Racial Bigotry

Lou Dobbs was called out in the New York Times for flat-out making up statistics about undocumented immigrants being responsible for an increase in leprosy, and accepting the "research" of white supremacists as truth, and the only thing shocking about this is that it doesn't happen more often. By the way, Dobbs gave a weaselly and self-serving answer to this criticism.

But when asked about this on Scarborough Country, Pat Buchanan agreed with the discredited Dobbs, and went even further, blaming the case of the man with the extreme strain of tuberculosis on... yep, on immigration.

BUCHANAN: Well, this is a serious problem because he‘s got what‘s called multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, Joe. Something like 60 percent of them die. It costs $200,000 to $1.2 million to treat folk with this. But let me tell you, it underscores a larger problem. TB is back in the United States primarily because of mass illegal immigration, folks who have got poor hygiene, poor health services in their country, walk across the border. Many of them don‘t know they got it. Out in Prince William County in Virginia, in my book, it‘s got a 188 percent increase in TB. Immigrant kids are 100 times as likely as an American kid to be carrying tuberculosis.

SCARBOROUGH: Now, Pat, let me stop you right there, and let me ask you this question...

BUCHANAN: Sure.

SCARBOROUGH: ... because Lou Dobbs has gotten in trouble talking about leprosy and all these other issues.

BUCHANAN: He‘s right about leprosy! I can give you the numbers!

Of course, this is a very familiar line of argument, the idea that immigrants are somehow dirty and diseased, that they are polluting white culture, that they breed like animals and create sickness. David Neiwart discussed this a couple years ago.

All this has a familiar ring to students of American history. The very same kind of associations -- equating immigrants with pestilence -- were part and parcel of previous nativist outbreaks in the United States, particularly those in which the targets were Asians. Here's an excerpt from Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer's The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1991, University of Illinois Press), pp. 37-38:
In addition to the stench, filth, crowding, and general dilapidation with which Chinatown was accused of afflicting the community, another serious charge was made that the Chinese were introducing foreign diseases among the whites. For instance, it was claimed by both civil and medical authorities that Chinese men and women were afflicted with venereal disease to an uncommon degree. The Chinese prostitutes were accused of luring young boys into their houses and of infecting them with the disease. A medical journal charged that the blood stream of the Anglo-Saxon population was being poisoned through the American men who, "by thousands nightly," visited these resorts. A cause of rather frequent concern to the officials were outbreaks of smallpox. The Chinese were suspected as the source of the disease, since cases appeared among them while they were still on shipboard. They were condemned especially for not reporting their cases of the disease. "It [Chinatown] is almost invariably the seed-bed of smallpox, whence the scourge is sent abroad into the city.

The most exciting charge under this head, however, was that the Chinese were introducing leprosy into California. The very strangeness of the disease made this charge all the more ominous. It was claimed that wherever Chinese coolies had gone leprosy had developed, and that purchasers of Chinese goods were likely to contract the disease. Dr. Charles C. O'Donnell, a politically minded physician, discovered a case in a Chinese warehouse, placed him in an express wagon and drove through the streets, haranguing the crowds on the street corners concerning the dangers to which the community was being exposed. The contention of some physicians that it was not real leprosy but rather a "sporadic case of elephantitis" did not help matters a great deal. During a period of less than ten years the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco arranged for the deportation of forty-eight cases [...]

There is no small irony in all this, of course. Because racial bigotry is like a virus, too. Given the proper iteration -- especially by disguising itself as part of the discourse over the "war on terror" -- it can quickly spread from the fringes into the mainstream. Of course, it always takes special transmitters, modern-day Typhoid Marys, to do it.

It serves the fearmongers on the far right well to blame increases in disease on the dirty immigrants. Not on a broken health care system that cannot serve the poor, not on the increase in chemical agents in our food. No, it's those filthy wetbacks that get all dirty by rolling in the mud and swimming across the Rio Grande. This is a classic technique to scare Americans, going back centuries. It's not provable, any more than any statistics are about immigrants forced to live in the shadows (they don't willingly show up for a lot of polls). And to his credit, Joe Scarborough asked Buchanan for documentation of his crazy claims, to which Buchanan simply blustered and shouted. But the fact that it's not provable HELPS the propagandists who want to find scapegoats for the nation's ills. It's not possible to verify these charges, but it's also not possible to not verify them.

Buchanan, Dobbs, and the others who try to scare Americans by intimating that they and their children can get sick and die if more immigrants are allowed in the country are simply following a common script. Demonizing the other means that you don't have to engage with the issue. You can just refer to the problem in the way you would refer to a bug that must be stamped out. This is the language of white supremacism, and it will lead to more hate crimes, as people take action on this kind of ugly rhetoric.