MORE repulsive anti-Christian propaganda from focus on the family cabal. This thanksgiving message doesn't reflect the teachings of Jesus Christ, and this kind of rhetoric turns more away from Christianity than it attracts. I am truly thankful to God for all my blessings; my family, friends, home, job, health, for His grace and love and providing for me and His protection. And I am thankful that I was raised to believe in a God of love and forgiveness and salvation. I am thankful that I was raised to believe in a God who teaches us to be compassionate and empathetic and to be responsible for providing for the least among us, for those in need. So thank you God for all my blessings, and please bless us all as we gather together, including the people of focus on the family. This from Daily Kos.....
Steveningen
Ugh. Where to even begin with this one. The odious Focus on the
Family has released a video designed to teach you how to explain the
truth behind Thanksgiving to the kiddies. It is so rife with
distortions, fabrications, omissions, persecution complex, and
anti-government bias that it is a hideous thing of beauty.
http://youtu.be/TdaVAxlyIak
Hi. I'm Stuart Shepard, This is Stoplight.
About now, children are bringing home Pilgrim hats and turkeys made
out of construction paper. And maybe making lists of things they are
thankful for. But, it's up to us to make sure they understand the full
context of what happened back around 1620.
We are the Pilgrims.
They were not called "the Pilgrims" back when this whole thing
started. England would not allow these Christians to live out their
faith they wanted to. They were told to fall in line with the
government's view of religion. If not, they could be taken to court,
fined or even imprisoned.
We are the Pilgrims.
So, some of them packed up and moved to Holland. Now thing were
generally better there. But then they watched as the culture began to
draw their children away from the Christian faith they were learning at
home.
We are the Pilgrims.
So, then they booked that trip on the Mayflower. A cargo ship. Not
really designed for passengers. Think of it as a floating
tractor-trailer being tossed about by a stormy ocean. It was spartan, it
was rough, but it eventually got them here to the New World.
We are the Pilgrims.
They signed the Mayflower Compact saying they were united in this
undertaking for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian
faith. Its simple framing of democracy would inform the U.S.
Constitution more than 150 years later.
We are the Pilgrims.
They learned about human behavior: That if the colony took what each
one produced and shared it with everyone else, well it brought out the
very worst in human beings. The colony only succeeded once it allowed
each family to have their own property and enjoy the benefits of their
own labor.
We are the Pilgrims.
So--after having government trample on their God given rights--after
seeing their children wooed away by a decadent culture, after a
treacherous ocean voyage, a harsh winter, after learning how imperfect
human beings function as a group--after all that--they held a feast to
celebrate. And they thanked God for His Providence.
We are the Pilgrims.
It was only after Christian faith was turned into action, and after
it was applied to real life troubles, and after they endured hardship
while giving thanks--that they became known as "The Pilgrims."
We--are--the Pilgrims.
Even those with a rudimentary historical understanding of Thanksgiving
would somehow remember to include the Indians at the first Thanksgiving
table. But I suppose that is just too much for today's xenophobic,
immigration-hatin' modern Pilgrim. Best just not to mention them and
give over that time to further drive home all that persecuting,
government intrusion and fear into your children's soft little heads.
Among all the tripe to be found in this video is this doozy that sits at the very heart of the religious right.
They signed the Mayflower Compact saying they were united in
this undertaking for the Glory of God and the advancement of the
Christian faith. Its simple framing of democracy would inform the U.S. Constitution more than 150 years later.
Here they have taken the notion that it was our Founding Fathers who
intended our Constitution to be divinely inspired and are now crediting
the wacked-out Pilgrims for our Constitution that clearly states there
shall be no separation of Church and State. Or something.
The stupid, it burns.
So, when you find yourself at your own Thanksgiving table on
Thursday, please remember to give a little moment of thanks that Stuart
Shepard isn't sitting over there at your kid's table giving your little
ones a history lesson.
Update: Thanks to
Dave in Northridge for sharing this link:
The Puritans and the Puritans who settled Massachusetts, 1620-1630.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/25/1258296/-Focus-on-the-Family-serves-up-a-rancid-turkey-in-time-for-Thanksgiving?detail=email
Mon Feb 20, 2012 at 12:34 PM PST
I teach this class on Monday afternoon, and it's not meeting this
week because of Presidents' Day, so I'm staying in the Seventeenth
Century for this diary. It's inspired by a discussion question I ask all
my students as part of the online activities attached to the course:
Ask most Americans why Europeans migrated to North America
during the colonial era, and most of them will answer “for religious
freedom.” By extension, most American consider colonial Massachusetts –
the union of two colonies settled for religious reasons--to represent
colonial America as a whole, which ignores colonial Virginia. To what
extent are these impressions accurate? Be as specific as possible in
your response.
We covered Virginia last week, so now it's time to consider the two
colonies that compose Massachusetts, particularly the fact that the
first group of settlers have managed to escape the abuse that the second
group of settlers pretty much asked for. So follow me below the great
orange Satan's magic sign for a discussion of the separatist Puritans we
know as the Pilgrims and the mainstream Puritans we know as, well, the
Puritans.
First, we have to deal with the term "Puritan." It may not even be
useful any more: like many other historical terms, it was attached to
the people who are described by it by their opponents, especially those
on the Royalist side in the English Civil War (1642–1651) who attached
it firmly to the idea of intolerance. Naturally, there's an extensive
historiographical trail on this, and where it's leading is to the phrase
"hot Protestant"
(interesting monograph if you want to know more about the term and the
argument). Anyhow, here's the image that history has lodged in our
minds:
(
Deacon Samuel Chapin, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1883-1886, Metropolitan Museum of Art)
But I digress. Let's concede that the two groups of religious
migrants to Massachusetts were Calvinist Protestants who wanted to see
the Church of England reformed. The fact that we use different terms to
refer to the groups shows that there are issues. So to assess the
reputation question, let's look at the first group -- separatist
Puritans who had already migrated from England to the Netherlands in
order to practice their religion without interference. When these
people began to worry that their children would forget they were
English, they petitioned the Plymouth Company to settle in the upper
portion of their holdings, and were granted permission to send 40 people
to "New England". Because everyone was aware of what had gone wrong at
Jamestown and to ensure a secure return on their investment, the London
sponsors insisted they travel with 64 “strangers” -- non-Puritan
craftsmen, farmers and laborers --who would share in building the
colony.
The 104 travelers boarded the
Mayflower September 18 1620
and arrived on Cape Cod (where Provincetown is today), well north of the
Virginia Company’s holdings. While they waited, they wrote the
Mayflower Compact. You will hear that this was British North America's
first constitution, and it was, but what it did was to give the
individual householders (who had to be accepted church members) control
over most civic and religious matters and thus guarantee their authority
over the “strangers.” After several weeks, they found a site on the
coast, and landed in December, which meant a New England winter, and
about half of the Mayflower settlers didn't make it to the next spring.
These people had help that the settlers in Jamestown didn't have. If
you went to school in New England, you'll be familiar with Indians
named Squanto and Samoset. You probably won't know HOW they were able
to help the Plymouth Colony Puritans unless you have a good imagination.
We know about Squanto (properly called "Tisquantum") because he was
captured by English traders (in fact, by an associate of John Smith in
1614, was carried to England, and returned to Massachusetts 1619 after
jumping off an English ship. Because he could interpret for his tribe,
the Wampanoags, the Indians and the Puritans concluded a treaty that
survived into the 1670s.
And about the first Thanksgiving. Well, no, because the holiday we
now celebrate was dreamed up by a VERY influential woman, Sarah Josepha
Hale, the editor of the major women's magazine of the 19th Century,
Godey's Lady's Book.
Mrs. Hale began to lobby the presidents for such a day in 1846. She
struck out with Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and
James Buchanan, but Abraham Lincoln agreed with her, and the holiday was
celebrated in 1863. Still, especially in New England people dress up
as Pilgrims in late November, and political cartoons depict Pilgrims as
well to make all sorts of points. I thought I'd change the cartoon
every year, but Jeff Parker of
Florida Today came up with one in 2006 that was SO good I'm keeping it in the deck until something even better and more topical appears.
(Jeff Parker,
Florida Today, November 1, 2006)
Plymouth Colony suffered internal dissension, but the most famous
dissent was the Merry Mount settlement (near present day Wollaston).
This was apparently a secular community, where the settlers drank to
excess with the Indians, including Indian women. The last straw for
Plymouth came when the inhabitants set up an 8-foot tall maypole, which
the governor saw as a blatant demonstration of paganism. Thomas Morton,
the head of the community, was arrested and deported in 1628; once back
in England, he published an anti-Puritan tract (the three-volume
New England Canaan)
in 1637 that ridiculed and condemned the rigidity of the Plymouth
colonists. Nathanael Hawthorne wrote a story about this, included in
Twice-Told Tales, called "The Maypole of Merry Mount", and here's an illustration:
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882)
So paganism. Not as bad as the other Puritans, mainstream Puritans
who had stayed in England, 14,000 of whom arrived (along with 10,000
"strangers") between 1630 and 1640 to settle the Massachusetts Bay
Colony, Connecticut, New Haven, New Hampshire, and (not intentionally on
their part) Rhode Island. This settlement, especially Boston, was
intended to serve as example to a sinful world, but migration had three
significant limits: 1) MOST English Puritans stayed in England; 2) New
England emigrants represented no more than 30% all English who came to
British North America during 1630s, and, 3) the Puritans who stayed in
England saw this migration as hindering their efforts for religious
reform at home.
We know what this settlement did to establish the country we live in
today: Remarkable literacy, commitment to the education of children and
Puritan ministers (Harvard College was founded in 1636), and the first
printing press in British North America. We also know that religious
liberty in Puritan New England wasn’t what we think of when we say
religious liberty. The migration that John Winthrop led in 1630 had
consisted of a group of wealthy merchants who converted their charter to
a self-governing colony thousands of miles from the king and the
bishops of the Church of England. At the very least, they hoped it
would be a refuge from the divine punishments the separatists expected
to be incurred by the wicked English nation. Church membership, which
was synonymous with citizenship, was limited to “visible saints,” those
who could publicly and persuasively recount a conversion experience;
only full members who were male could govern the church, and it was
because of this that they worked hard to keep dissenters out of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. Yes, Roger Williams was banished in 1636, and
Anne Hutchinson in 1638, but this wasn't the worst thing these people
did in the way of intolerance.
So I give you two cases in which people who disagreed with the
Puritan leadership actually died at the hands of the Puritans: the
Pequot War, and a 1658 law that prohibited Quakers from traveling to the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. The narrative concerning the Pequot War is
derived from a remarkable book:
Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates (2008)
which is an absolute must read. First, the mainstream Puritans
imagined, as is evident from their Great Seal, that they were on a
mission -- nay, invited on a mission -- to help the natives of New
England:
(in effect 1629-1686, 1689-1692)
Vowell points out that William McKinley imagined the same thing about
the Philippines and the George W. Bush administration imagined the same
thing about Iraq. Anyhow, the settlers of Connecticut, attracted by
bigger land grants, followed their minister, Rev. Thomas Hooker (
no, the term doesn't even come from the name of a person)
to the banks of the Connecticut River to found the city of Hartford.
The Pequot Indians, who were attempting to control the trade on the
lower Connecticut River and had already made an alliance with the
Massachusetts Bay colony (in 1635, to make sure the Pequot didn't keep
trading with the Dutch), balked at the incursion, and this led to war.
I'll just skip to the event that ended the war here. On May 25, 1637,
in league with the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, the Connecticut
forces encircled the settlement where Sassacus, the Pequot sachem, had
his headquarters, and started a battle. I'll let Vowell tell you what
happened next:
[Captain John] Mason [one of the commanders of the
Connecticut militia] is hit with arrows and Underhill's hip is grazed,
Mason is faced, on a smaller scale, with the same problem Harry Truman
would have when he was forced to ponder the logistics of invading Japan
in 1945 . . . The Puritan commander, in a smaller, grubbier, lower-tech
way, arrives at the same conclusion as Truman when he ordered the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mason says "We must burn them." And
they do.
In Mason's account of the war, he observes that as many as seven hundred
people, women and children included, were "utterly destroyed" --
meaning burned alive in their homes.
Again, here's Vowell, on Mason:
[Mason] praises the Lord for "burning them up in the fire of
his wrath, and dunging the ground with their flesh. It is the Lord's
doings, and it is marvelous in our eyes!" That might be the creepiest
exclamation point in American literature. No, wait -- it's this one:
"Thus did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead
bodies!"
The remaining Pequots are hunted down by the Mohegans and the
Narragansetts who decapitate some of them and send their severed heads
to the English. Boston sells others into slavery in Bermuda. The colony
proclaims a day of thanksgiving June 15, 1637 "for the victory obtained
against the Pequot." That's a BIG difference from Plymouth and its
peaceful relations with the Wampanoags.
There's a punchline to this. The remnants of the Pequot tribe have a
major hotel and casino, the Foxwoods Resort, operating in Ledyard,
Connecticut on the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation. A way to
separate the descendents of the Puritans from their money.
But, as they say, there's more. The Puritans continued to be dismayed
by people who promoted alternate forms of Protestantism, and John
Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, denounced “lawlessness of liberty
of conscience” as an invitation to heresy and anarchy, and eventually to
divine anger and punishment. No Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists or
Quakers were welcome; they were given liberty to keep away from
Connecticut and Massachusetts, and if they did arrive, they were tried,
convicted and exiled as Anne Hutchinson had been. In 1658,
Massachusetts passed an especially strict set of anti-Quaker laws that
decreed any Quaker found in Massachusetts would be sentenced to
banishment upon pain of death. After three Quaker missionaries –
Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson, and Mary Dyer, who had been a
strong supporter of Anne Hutchinson -- were indeed
put to death
in 1660, the Quakers made an extra effort to publicize their
mistreatment. In 1959, Massachusetts put up a statue of Mary Dyer in
front of the State House, in Boston:
Killing people for dissenting religious beliefs appears to be why
later historians tried to wall off the Plymouth Colony from the rest of
the Puritans who settled New England. It's understandable.
So that's the settlement of some of Southern New England by people
who believed in religious freedom for themselves, but not for other
people. Next time, stuff you should know about Benjamin Franklin, who's
even more important in world history and the economic history of the
United States than you might have imagined.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/20/1066372/-US-to-1865-What-s-Bugging-Me-The-Puritans-and-the-Puritans-who-settled-Massachusetts-1620-1630
LIA
TARACHANSKY, PRODUCER: On Sunday, December 1, hundreds protested in
Toronto, Canada. The demonstrators gathered in freezing weather outside
the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, where thousands attended the JNF
honoring dinner for Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister.~~~PROTESTER:
We're here because we know that just behind these walls, Stephen Harper
is supporting Israeli policies. And what we want Stephen Harper to know
is that Palestine will be free! So Harper, Harper, you will see!
Palestine will be free! Harper, Harper, you will see!CROWD: Palestine will be free!~~~TARACHANSKY:
The mega fundraising event, organized by the Jewish National Fund,
attracted Canadian public officials and major donors to Israel and the
JNF. David Koschitzky, the chair of the Centre for Israel and the Jewish
Affairs, said this was an opportunity to thank the prime minister for
his steadfast friendship and support over the years. A recorded message by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was screened at the dinner.BENJAMIN
NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: You've chosen wisely. Stephen Harper
has proved to be a real leader. And a real leader doesn't follow the
herd. A real leader doesn't go by existing fashions. That's not to lead.
That's to follow. But Stephen leads. And he has stood up for Israel and
he's stood up for the truth time and time again.TARACHANSKY:
At the luxurious dinner, where tables cost as high as $100,000, the JNF
announced a bird sanctuary in northern Israel will be built and named
after Stephen Harper. In return, Harper performed his own surprise for the crowd.STEPHEN HARPER, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER (SINGING): Hey Jude, don't make it bad.TARACHANSKY:
Harper has been one of the most fervent supporters of Israel. Under his
leadership, military and financial ties with Israel tightened. His
administration stood behind Israel on all diplomatic fronts as well. In
the UN, Canada was one of only nine countries who stood against 138
others, when it refused to support the symbolic upgrade of the
Palestinian Authority to the status of an observer state. More recently,
Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird announced Canada will not lift its
sanctions on Iran, despite last week's Geneva agreements. The
Jewish National Fund, or the JNF, is a registered charity in Canada
known mostly for planting trees in Israel. While it positions itself as a
green organization, it was started over 100 years ago for the purpose
of purchasing land in historic Palestine for Jewish settlement. The JNF
has played a vital role in Israeli politics, in the distribution of land
after the state was created, and, as some claim, in the erasure of
Palestinian history from its landscape.NOGA KADMON,
HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): The JNF has existed many
years, even before the state, and has a part in the erasing of the
[destroyed Palestinian] villages. It started, physically, when leaders
in the JNF supported and tried to convince the government to demolish
villages and erase their remains, and continued when the JNF planted
groves, also on those village ruins, to hide the remains that survived.TARACHANSKY: Noga Kadmon is a historian and the author of the renowned book Erased from Space and Consciousness,
where she carefully documents the first years of the Israeli state
following the 1948 War, during which two-thirds of the Palestinians were
made refugees.KADMON: Planting trees in Israel has many
ramifications beyond greening and creating shaded spots. And in each
place we must look at the history and what was there before and what the
grove covers up and what it prevents, such as development for the
people who live nearby or who owned the lands until [the destruction].
Of course, sometimes the JNF plants a grove and it benefits everyone,
but in many places JNF plants groves on destroyed Arab villages or next
to existing villages, thereby preventing their expansion.TARACHANSKY:
Protests against the JNF have led to a worldwide movement in recent
years. In Israel, activists in a group calling itself the New JNF handed
out flyers in central Tel Aviv last week. The group's name is a parody
and has no links to the actual organization. The activists claimed this
New JNF has learned its lesson, and even decided to change his position,
admitting its forests cover up some of the hundreds of villages
destroyed in '48.TEXT ON SCREEN: Look for us under the forests! The New JNF is online and on Facebook.MEMBER OF THE NEW JNF (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): We are the New JNF. That's our new logo. People
have never known the names. They know the new, Zionist names of these
forests, but not what's underneath them. So the New JNF is here to
educate people about them.TARACHANSKY: The fliers the
activists gave out in Tel Aviv include a link to a fake blog, where Rafi
Shtendel, claiming to be the chairperson of the New JNF, writes about
the role the company has played in the erasure and destruction of
Palestinian history. The author's name is but a slight alteration of the
JNF's actual chairperson, Efi Stenzler. On this fake blog, Rafi writes:
"Sixty-five years ago there was an entire culture here that we have
destroyed to establish a Jewish State, whose ruins are covered by KKL
[JNF] forests." In the blog, Rafi documents several places where through
signage and afforestation the JNF erased local Palestinian and Muslim
history. On the real JNF's website, a different kind of
letter, by its real chairperson, tells another story. Here Efi Stenzler
writes, "Over the years, we have developed thousands of projects that
have changed the face of the country. KKL-JNF forests are vital to
Israel's landscape and environment." In its mandate, the JNF writes
simply that its work is aimed at "the benefit of the Jewish people" and
not all the citizens of Israel. But receiving millions of dunams of
state lands give it the status of a semi-governmental body. Even
today, JNF forests are being used to dispossess the indigenous Bedouin
in the Negev Desert, as the The Real News has documented in recent
years. It is after this dispossession that the dinner in Toronto was
named. Despite The The Real News's repeated attempts to solicit a response, the JNF refused to comment. Speaking to The Jerusalem Post,
the organizers of Sunday's dinner called the protest an attempt to
delegitimize Israel, saying the JNF and its supporters all over the
world will continue to strengthen the state of Israel with all of its
strength and will act fearlessly to reinforce it. Simultaneously,
Stephen Harper announced he will visit Israel in January. For The Real News, I'm Lia Tarachansky in Tel Aviv.
