What Christie Said (A Must Read)

I have been wondering how I feel about Obama's pick of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration, some of you have been witnesses to what seems like anger in me and have pointed it out, I have also been trying very hard to deny it, to say that I'm upset, that I'm disappointed of people whom I have believed to be for equality, but are not, or rather, they make exceptions for people like me or others.

Christie is right when she says that there are so many issues and struggles, yes, she is right there is so much that I'm involved in where there are many allies and much more to do, I don't want to jeopardize that

And yet....

I hope you read the Diary and join me in spirit this Christmas, another one in which I'll be pondering and wondering about so many christians having a jolly good time and doing 'good works' during these days, such as wishing everyone to have a merry Christmas, or feeding some hungry people, or giving some present to poor children, so as to quiet what has been in their hearts and for their deeds of the past year and to justify what they will do, or not, in the next.

While the above are worthy causes and I celebrate their doing them, It is the hypocrisy that gets me, their selectiveness (sic) on what the Bible says and how they apply it.

You may read the Diary, or not, it really doesn't matter - these few words are not really for all of you and should be taken as they apply, or as the saying goes 'if the shoe fits', and they are also for me, as a reminder that I need to do one of the things Jesus of Nazareth did the most, which was to criticize the hypocrites, because he didn't have more contempt for others as he did for those, he also had a very apt description for them "Like Sepulchers, white on the inside and empty inside"

Yes, I am hurt and angry but in any event, may your heart be filled with kindness throughout the year and I also wish for you and your loved ones, health, love, happiness and prosperity.

Lastly, while I can forgive, forget I can't.

Aurora

SOURCE: Lavender Newswire

Posted by: Sapphocrat

December 23, 2008

What Christie Said (Must Read)

This is one of the best Kos diaries I have ever read. Excerpting won’t do it justice, so I’ll give you just enough to compel you to read the whole thing:

It’s not Obama I’m mad at;
it’s way too many of you

. . .

I have not been one of the “OMG Obama is betraying us” crowd. …

But when I heard Warren had been invited to pray at Obama’s inauguration, I felt sick to my stomach. I cried. It wasn’t a judgment; it wasn’t an intellectual assessment; it wasn’t a political strategy. It was just genuine pain.

But it was nothing — NOTHING — compared to what I felt when I started reading diaries here on Daily Kos, full of smug, ignorant pontification on how we need to not be SO ANGRY or SO HURT, and lumping us in with the “What Obama is doing wrong” crowd, and ignoring that our response to the Warren invitation is a completely separate phenomenon.

Let me explain something very carefully, for those who don’t know: none of what’s going on in the fight for LGBT rights is part of a strategy, as should be apparent by our lack of a cohesive movement and any viable leaders. It’s a true grassroots uprising among people who got a taste of freedom and decided we wanted more. We were no longer willing to settle for a long, slow, state by state battle, for death by a thousand cuts, for an extended period of second class citizenship.

I’ve lived through a lot of watershed moments in this movement, including the assassination of Harvey Milk and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and the rise of ACT-UP. I know like I know my name that this is another one.

Whether it’s “strategic” or not, whether it’s what our “leaders” think we should do or not, it’s pretty clear that real actual LGBT people are done with the closet. We’re seeing things in a new way. We’re no longer willing to settle for simply not getting beaten to death, for being able to live in our constricted safe zones without fear of baseball bats to the head and getting fired.

It’s not okay anymore to have to decode when and where we can be out, who can and can’t be trusted to really know us. We’re done with glancing around the restaurant or the street before taking our partner’s hand if we’re not in a gay bar or walking down Castro St. Done with paying for living fearlessly with broken bones or even death.

But to people outside of this struggle, I think that sea-change is invisible. Many of you really have no idea what just happened or what it’s done to us, both good and bad. It’s outside your circle of perception.

So I can understand that our anger must be kind of scary to some of you. It looks like it’s way out of proportion to what you think happened. And it’s not like us, really, even if our movement was born at a riot.

So in the interest of building bridges, which apparently many of you are really big on, I’ll share a secret: my anger is scaring me, too. I haven’t summoned it, cultivated it, or even welcomed it. It’s just there, like the bricks and bottles thrown at Stonewall. It’s real like that.

At first I thought the fact that many of you had no idea what’s going on for us was our fault. We must not have been telling you our stories. …

So we wrote diary after diary explaining what it’s really like to grow up queer in America — to often find no safe harbor even in our own families, who throw us out, or in our churches, which call us sinners, or in our schools, which fail to keep us safe or even alive, or in the army, which uses Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as a license to rape female soldiers and cleanse the ranks.

We told you about how many of us are haunted by things that happened to us — like when I had my head smashed into a car windshield for being so utterly uppity as to use the ATM while lesbian — or to others — like Jennifer Gale, who last week died of the cold on the streets of Austin because the only shelter in town, run by the Salvation Army, wouldn’t let a transgendered woman stay under its roof.

We thought you knew, but in case you didn’t, we told you how our youth are being tortured, isolated, and abused in religious centers that claim to be able to change them into straight people — places people like Warren advocate and even run.

But I saw that to far too many of you, knowing our stories made no difference at all. There's just something about the fight of LGBT people for our civil rights that makes a whole lot of you here feel uncomfortable.

You keep saying things like, "Just because someone is against gay marriage doesn't mean they're a homophobe or a bigot," even though there are no non-bigoted, non-homophobic reasons to oppose marriage equality.

You say that equality for LGBT citizens is an "issue" that needs to take its place on the list of progressive causes, and not a fundamental civil right that is the very foundation and bedrock of our entire constitutional system: equality under the law.

You say we're too angry and it's not an effective strategy, completely missing that we're not strategizing; we're really this angry -- even me, a 49 year old lesbian who lives in San Francisco and has a good job. I'm so furious I often can't sleep, can't eat, and sometimes I shake with rage.

You keep telling us we need to reach out and build bridges to the religious right. Do you really think there is any point at all in telling us we need to reach out to homophobes and bigots, to the people who run the churches that abuse our youth and shove us out the doors, that have brainwashed our parents into rejecting us, that tell us they "love" us while they knife us in the hearts with their laws?

Why don't you tell them to reach out to us? We're the ones who have been wronged and harmed, disenfranchised, electro-shocked, had our kids taken away in ugly custody battles, lost our homes when our partner died, been thrown out of the hospital rooms of our lovers, had wills overturned and benefits denied. We're the ones who had our equality thrown up for a popular vote, and whose rights are denied us in the constitutions of 29 states. Telling us to reach out to them is like saying battered women need to reach out to their abusers, or children to the priest who molested them.

You lecture us not to hold this against Obama, but newsflash: at least for me, MORE....

Permalink | 1745 comments |

If you read no other essay this week, read the rest of this one. Trust me — it is more than worth it

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities."

"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic."

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
-- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Any law which violates the indefeasible rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.
Maximilien Robespierre

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
Mahatma Gandhi

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.
Lord Acton

The Purpose Driven Life Takers (Part 1)

By jhutson Mon May 29, 2006 at 07:58:55 PM EST

Left Behind: Eternal Forces: Installments of Jonathan Hutson's Talk To Action expose series on the "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" video game have been viewed by over a quarter of a million people and the controversy over the game the series provoked has lately erupted into mass consumer protest. Talk To Action features a dedicated site section featuring our more than 35 original articles covering the controversial "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" video game that has provoked a boycott by a coalition of religious groups and a letter writing campaign urging Walmart to stop selling the game.

For inquiries on Talk To Action member media appearances about the game : talk2action_media_contact@earthlink.net

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.

The game, slated for release by October 2006 in advance of the Christmas shopping rush, has been previewed at video game exhibitions, and reviewed by major newspapers and magazines. But until now, no fan or critic has pointed out the controversial game's connection to Mr. Warren or his dominionist agenda.

topic: Religious Militarism

Time magazine has described Mr. Warren as one of the nation's most influential Evangelical Christian leaders. He describes himself as a "stealth evangelist" and describes his training programs as "a stealth movement, that's flying beneath the radar, that's changing literally hundreds, even thousands of churches around the world." He claims that he has sold tens of millions of copies of The Purpose Driven Life by developing a worldwide network of pastors.

The international director of Mr. Warren's Purpose Driven Church, Mark Carver, is a former investment banker who serves on the Advisory Board of the corporation created in October 2001 to develop and market this game. The creators plan to market their game using the same network marketing techniques that Mr. Warren used to turn The Purpose Driven Life into a commercial success. For example, they plan to distribute their merchandise through pastoral networks, especially mega-churches.

[Update: Mark Carver, a top aide to Mr. Warren, resigned as an adviser to Left Behind Games on June 5, 2006, and asked that the game developer remove the Purpose Driven Ministries name brand from its web site. These abrupt moves came in response to pressure from Talk to Action, as reported in the third essay in this series, "Revelation and Resignation (Part 3)". Here is a screen shot from the Left Behind Games site taken before June 5, showing Mr. Carver's name and invoking the name brand of Purpose Driven Church, which the site describes in some detail. -- JH]

This game immerses children in present-day New York City -- 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).

Is this paramilitary mission simulator for children anything other than prejudice and bigotry using religion as an organizing tool to get people in a violent frame of mind? The dialogue includes people saying, "Praise the Lord," as they blow infidels away.

The designers intend this game to become the first dominionist warrior game to break through in the popular culture due to its violent scenarios and realistic graphics, lighting, and sound effects. Its creators expect it to earn a rating of T for Teen. How violent is that? That's the rating shared by Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory, a top selling game in which high-tech gadgets and high-powered weapons - frag grenades, shotguns, assault rifles, and submachine guns -- are used to terminate enemies with extreme prejudice. [Nota bene: While some versions of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory have been rated M for Mature, Amazon.com offers a version rated T for Teen, which invites players to "Go into battle with futuristic weapons and high-tech gadgets used by real-life spies," and "Strike without mercy." -- JH]

Could such a violent, dominionist Christian video game really break through to the popular culture? Well, it is based on a series of books that have already set sales records - the blockbuster Left Behind series of 14 novels by writer Jerry B. Jenkins and his visionary collaborator, retired Southern Baptist minister Tim LaHaye. "We hope teenagers like the game," Mr. LaHaye told the Los Angeles Times. "Our real goal is to have no one left behind."

The game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, is based on scenes from the first four novels in the series. The game was developed by a publicly-traded company called Left Behind Games, according to SEC records. The developers obtained the license from Tyndale House, the Christian publisher of Left Behind.

Tyndale also publishes Bringing Up Boys and The Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, PhD. Mr. Dobson has advised parents to monitor the amount of time children spend playing video games and "avoid the violent ones altogether." But he has not yet stated his views on whether there should be an exception for video games that role play gunplay in the name of Christ, or of the AntiChrist.

Tyndale's licensing of the project infuriated one of its authors, Jack Thompson, a conservative Christian attorney and outspoken critic of video game violence, who told the Los Angeles Times that he severed ties with his publisher in a dispute over "Left Behind: Eternal Forces."

"It's absurd," said the video critic. "You can be the Christians blowing away the infidels, and if that doesn't hit your hot button, you can be the Antichrist blowing away all the Christians."

The firm's CEO is relying on network marketing through pastoral networks as a key part of his business plan, according to a report in the March 6, 2006, issue of Newsweek Magazine:

Left Behind Games CEO Troy Lyndon, whose company went public in February, says the game's Christian themes will grab the audience that didn't mind gore in "The Passion of the Christ." "We've thought through how the Christian right and the liberal left will slam us," says Lyndon. "But megachurches are very likely to embrace this game." Though it will be marketed directly to congregations, Forces will also have a secular ad campaign in gaming magazines.

As part of its marketing pitch, Left Behind Games hypes the realism with which it portrays the neighborhoods of New York City. There is, for the most part, a remarkable verisimilitude except for one detail - all of the ambulances have 911 painted on their roofs. In the reality-based world, most ambulances have a red cross on top. Yet the game designers make prominent use of these 911 ambulances to evoke the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The historical context of 911 is invoked as if to say, We are living in the End Times, and Muslims are among the kinds of infidels whom you should fear, whom you should be prepared to kill for your cause.

For game enthusiasts, there is also a multi-player mode, in which you can go online and battle to take territory from other players. If you happen to blow away a neutral party - and collateral damage is inevitable in the End of Days - then you will lose "Spirit Points". But you can power back up with merely a brief timeout for prayer, or by converting one of New York's terror-stricken citizens.

In this way, the game resembles a send-up of Christian-themed video games by "The Simpsons." "Billy Graham's Bible Blaster," is a first-person shooter game in which you fire Bibles at club-carrying heathens to convert them into card-carrying Republicans. (Hint: after you finish reading this blog piece - and eating all your vegetables -- visit the Simpson's official web site and open file drawer F-H, then click on the character of Evangelical Christian kid Rod Flanders to play the game.)

Time has dubbed Mr. Warren "America's minister." But Mr. Warren says that his agenda stretches far beyond America, and far beyond traditional ministry. He sees himself as the CEO of a global marketing enterprise, and as the Commander in Chief of a stealth army of one billion Christian foot soldiers.

On the 25th Anniversary of his Saddleback Church on April 17, 2005, Mr. Warren filled the Angels baseball stadium in Anaheim, California, with tens of thousands of his flock. Mr. Warren signaled his belief that we are now approaching the End of Days by opening with a rock band, which played the Jimi Hendrix drug anthem Purple Haze. As the band jammed, Mr. Warren sang the lyrics:

Purple haze all in my eyes
Don't know if it's day or night
You got me blowin', blowin' my mind
Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?

The Director of the Peace Corps, Gaddi Vasquez, read a message of support from President George W. Bush. Then Mr. Warren called on his flock to support a $40 million capital campaign to expand missionary training facilities at Saddleback's 120-acre campus in Lake Forest, California. He pledged participants to achieve a purpose-driven ministry overseas. His dominionist theology is apparent in this ministry. A key aspect of dominionist thought is a conviction that the Scripture gives the church a mandate to take dominion over this world socially and culturally before the return of Jesus Christ. Mr. Warren's global plan is a strategy to realize a dominionist vision of churches, states, and corporations forming partnerships to bring about a new world order to make way for Christ's return by establishing a literal, physical kingdom of God on earth. In order to build this earthly kingdom, Mr. Warren plans marketplace ministries - business ventures with a veneer of missionary compassion that slip into a country in order to transform it systematically through the governmental, corporate, and social sectors. And that is why Mr. Warren calls himself a "stealth evangelist" - because he wishes to cloak his dominionist agenda, which is the establishment of an earthly kingdom that reflects his skewed vision of Christianity.

According to Mr. Warren, the establishment of this earthly kingdom requires "foot soldiers." As part of his plan, Mr. Warren said he would encourage laypeople to "adopt" needy villages overseas in order to plant churches, expand business opportunities, educate children, influence governments, and overthrow corrupt political leaders, whom he described as "little Saddams." Mr. Warren said his purpose is to enlist "one billion foot soldiers for the Kingdom of God" in the developing world. And the stadium crowd roared its approval.

Celebrants included Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, a tiny east African country that lost hundreds of thousands of people when it suffered genocide in 1994. Catholic and Protestant clergy have been convicted in connection with that genocide. Yet Mr. Kagame announced that he would allow Mr. Warren to turn his country into the first purpose driven nation. The following month, 16 Rwandan religious leaders arrived in Orange County to begin religious training at Saddleback Church. Mr. Warren has said that his global initiative was developed "underground" and in "stealth". Presumably, this was done with the assistance of Mr. Carver, who directs the Purpose Driven Church in all its activities outside North America.

Yet through an unexpected turn of events in Georgia, the spotlight was turned on Mr. Warren's stealthy strategy in March 2005, when Ashley Smith read a passage from The Purpose Driven Life to the Atlanta courthouse killing suspect, Brian Nichols. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Nichols freed his hostage and surrendered to police. The entire world suddenly wanted to hear from Mr. Warren, who was busy planting the seeds of a Christian theocracy with his "foot soldiers" in Rwanda.

On March 22, 2005, CNN's Larry King interviewed Mr. Warren about the Atlanta courthouse shooting and hostage taking. A caller asked, "Can you explain the sudden thirst or craving that people seem to have for religion?

Mr. Warren replied:

"[T]here are really two stories going on in our culture right now. There is the story of things are getting more worse [sic] in some ways. We're seeing the increase in violence. We're seeing terrorism. We've seen these recent shootings. We're seeing the coarsening of our society, that has disgusted a lot of people. And there is people [sic] -- some people are more materialistic than ever.

But at the same time, there's another story going on in America, that I think is a spiritual awakening that is brewing. And that is a desire and hunger to know God. I don't always think it's always a desire and hunger for church. But there is a desire and hunger to know God.

So according to Mr. Warren, the worst of American culture is reflected in examples of violence, terrorism, shootings, and the coarsening of our society, that turn people away in disgust. And in addition, "some people are more materialistic than ever."

If violence, coarseness, and materialism are serious social problems, then what purpose is served by exploiting a global pastoral network to mass market a game about mass killing, whether in the name of Christ or the AntiChrist?

On the one hand, this video game is anti-American, because it endorses roving death squads engaged in faith-based violence without any regard for Constitutional law. On the other hand, the video game is anti-Christian, because it argues that the Kingdom of God can be advanced by using the methods and tools of the kingdoms of this world, namely guns and bombs.

The Scriptures say, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6) The Scriptures do not say, "Train up a child in the way he should blow away the people of God as well as infidels: and when he is old enough, he will go out and do some killing."

As Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then my servants would fight that I might not be handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here" (Gospel According to John 18:36). As Paul said, "Though we walk in flesh, we do not make war in accordance with the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly." (2 Corinthians 10:3-4a).

The dominionist Christians pushing this violent video game are modeling neither Christian charity nor patriotism. Both Christians and patriots should oppose them.

MORE...

UPDATE

Endorsement by Association

LINKS TO MORE POSTS

The Purpose Driven Life Takers (Part 1)

Violent Video Marketed Through Mega-Churches (Part 2)

Revelation and Resignation (Part 3)

Christian Cadre's Layman: 'A Whopper of Being Wrong' (Part 4)

Apocalypse, Now a Lawsuit (Part 5)

Who's Watching the Boys? (Part 6)

Conservative Christian Culture Warriors Cut and Run (Part 7)

Bible Publisher Tyndale House Faces Boycott Over Anti-Christian Game (Part 8)