Scaife-funded blasphemy

I've added the IRD Info Project to the "Testify" links on the right. They offer a closer look at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Scaife-funded right-wing PR tank that poses as a voice of evangelical "renewal" in the mainline Protestant denominations. IRD has a long and ignoble history of dishonesty, all aimed at defunding the mission and ministry of any church group that doesn't follow lockstep after their partisan political agenda. It is a group of bad people doing bad things for money.

The IRD Info Project has produced a documentary (trailer here) detailing the way IRD uses political "wedge issues" to sow divisions in the church.

What really bugs me about this outfit is the way they pass themselves off as some kind of legitimate church or parachurch group, using their political influence to position their partisan, political organization as, instead, some kind of ecclesiastical spokesman. (See, for example, this account of a Senate committee hearing in which IRD's president is strangely allowed to accompany a group of religious leaders as though he were one of their peers.)

This is the same misleading game that Bill Donohue plays when he pretends his "Catholic League" is some kind of official religious voice simply because his partisan attack-dog platform happens to have the word "Catholic" in its name. I look at the works of charlatans like this and just think: Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, people, stop taking the Lord's name in vain.

Comments

[Jeff]

stop taking the Lord's name in vain

Yep. I used to think, like most (I believe), that "taking the Lord's name in vain" was swearing ("Jesus H Note Christ!". Now I've realized in means speaking for the Lord; saying God wants something when there's no reason to believe that He does.

Note: We know that Christ's middle name was Henry. Not only do people call out Jesus H Crist, but the Romans put his middle name on the cross: INRI.

[the opoponax]

i think we should start a liberal think tank called Jesus H Tapdancing Christ. it would get the same consideration in politics and the media as the Catholic League and this stupid IRD thing, right? I mean, it has the words "Jesus" and "Christ" in it, so obviously it's a legitimate religious group. am i right or am i right?

[Bugmaster]

No, it won't work, because the name isn't big enough. "League" is taken, "Majority" is taken, "Crusade" and "Alliance" are also taken... hmmm... I suggest, "The Christian Tapdancing Hegemony". Let's see them top that !

[Jeff]

"The Christian Tapdancing Hegemony" doesn't spell anything fun. How about "The Christian Tapdancing Hegemony Union of Law-Hating Unitarians"?

[Jeff]

or "The Christian Artistic Tapdancing Hegemony Youth"?

[Tonio]

Scaife funded the Arkansas Project which led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I was embarrassed for Hillary when she described the project as a "right-wing conspiracy," but she was absolutely correct about its agenda.

What is Scaife's specific interest in religion with the IRD? My paranoid side suspects him of bankrolling a push toward theocracy, but realistically I think it's more complicated than that.

[toxicfur]

Jeff@8:59, brilliant! Sign me up!

[Brian J.]

The reason Scaife is acting like he's a major Christian leader is that he IS a major Christian leader by the only criteria Christians care about:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

and

HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE

I marvel at your inability or unwillingness to recognize this obvious truth.

[bellatrys]

Tonio, from what I've read - I don't actually know that I know anyone who knows him personally (which is not as strange as it sounds, given that I have a lot of family connections with the conservative Catholic political world) so I can't speak from greater authority than that - Scaife is not just about the money (remember, his family fortune is Union Steel, think war profiteering, strikebreakers and Pinkertons and all those good times in the Good Old Days) but he is also apparently one of the Sincere Traditionalist Catholics, who are scary people who are perfectly civil and nice and cultured and talk in private about imposing theocracies in code, but who really believe that God wants us to go back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition ("The Spanish Inquisition: Not So Bad As The Protestants" is a cottage industry among the NeoTrad academics).

There's a serious lot of admiration for St. Queen Isabella and St. Gen. Franco, which more moderate & lower-ranking members of the movement who just get all romantic and dreamy about the incense and nuns in white dresses and Saving Babies don't notice or just ignore the way you ignore your bigoted relatives' outbursts - yes, tools, but that doesn't make them less dangerous.

The leadership really does believe that a) moneyed landowners are the only fit rulers of the masses, and b) God wants them to take their rightful place and make the world holy for Him.

They've been responsible for supporting the resurgence of Old Moneyed Catholic Aristocratic rule in Nicaragua, frex, and boast of it; they are perfectly willing to work with and use the Fundamentalist Protestants in America, despite the intense bigotry on both sides, considering the Godless Liberal-Pagan-Hedonist-Feminist-Freemasonic Conspiracy to be their common enemy - though if they ever succeeded in bringing about Gilead, you would see a Night of the Long Knives very swiftly thereafter, as former allies fought for sole power.

Scaife was behind the ferociously-heated attacks on Kerry's Catholicism, too, remember. I suspect, however, that there is even more personal aspect to his hostility to Kerry: apart from seeing him as heretical class traitor, there is the aspect of barons jockeying for control of a fiefdom, politically, economically as well as ideologically, between House Scaife and House Heinz, both of Pennsylvania...

[Tonio]

"he is also apparently one of the Sincere Traditionalist Catholics, who are scary people who are perfectly civil and nice and cultured and talk in private about imposing theocracies in code, but who really believe that God wants us to go back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition..."

Bellatrys, thanks for the information. I suspect Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan falls into that category, based on his plan for an all-Catholic town in Florida.

[Geds]

We know that Christ's middle name was Henry. Not only do people call out Jesus H Crist, but the Romans put his middle name on the cross: INRI.

It's "Hallowed," Jeff. Didn't you get the memo? It's an old family name that's mentioned right at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer:

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name..."

[Blackadder]

The H is for "Hallmark," because God cared enough to send the very best.

[Jeff]

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name..."

Dad is "Hallowed", Junior is J Henry Christ, so what's the name of the Holy Spirit? Whiskey?

[Geds]

So wouldn't that make him Jack?

[Lea]

I was always given to understand that the H, given that Jesus had only one human parent, for "Haploid." ;)

[Rozzen]

Hey, I was looking forward to the next line of that spam haiku-poem thingy !

[AMELIA]

Brownie points

[AMELIA]

Brownie points

[TAYLOR]

Shut your cake-hole

[hapax]

Yeah, TAYLOR, because it's a brownie-hole!

[cjmr]

mmmmm, brownies!

(Oh right, if I want some, that would require I bake them.)