BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
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Showing posts with label focus on the family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label focus on the family. Show all posts
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Verse of the day
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. - Genesis 8:22
Voice of the day
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. - Robert Frost
Prayer of the day
God of every season, thank you for the steady rhythms of life that remind us—even through change and challenge—it goes on.
Spirit Alive, the CSJ Institute for Faith Inquiry and Education, launches its fifth season with a provocative webinar series focused on AI, the technology revolutionizing our world. Our seven-session webinar, entitled Artificial Intelligence: New Social and Ethical Challenges and Opportunities, will feature presentations by distinguished scholars.
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dr james dobson of focus on the family fame disgraced himself and the whole meaning and purpose of the non partisan National Day of Prayer meeting in Washington on 1 MAI 14. If dr dobson was actually focused on the family he and his organization wouldn't be puppets of the extreme right wing social engineers decimating the American social safety net. He and his organization would condemn rep paul ryan's proposed budget. He and his organization would take on the wealthy and corporate America who control the gop / tea-bagger / third way democratic politicians who are denying families health care by blocking the expansion of Medicaid, and who are cutting SNAP (food stamps), cutting early childhood education, cutting unemployment benefits while we are still in a recession, cutting housing assistance, cutting job training programs, cutting all the social safety net programs that provide much needed aid for the most needy, the least among us, the ones Jesus Christ teaches us to provide for, to care for. While dr dobson thinks he publicly challenged Pres Obama on faith and family values what he actually did was make more of America aware of his own hypocrisy and the questionably Christian agenda of focus on the family. Well done and well said Rep Janice Hahn D CA, we need more people of faith like you in office. From Daily Kos , HuffPost and Roll Call blog 218 ...... Jen Hayden
Rep. Janice Hahn attended the annual non-partisan National Day of Prayer
gathering on Capitol Hill yesterday, expecting a unified, peaceful
event. But after listening to Dr. James Dobson from Focus on the Family
rail against President Obama, repeatedly calling him the "abortion
president", she decided couldn't sit still any longer:
“Before [Obama] was elected, he made it very clear that he
wanted to be the abortion president,” said Dobson, whose remarks were
captured in a video featured on WND.com. “He didn’t make any bones about
it, that this is something that he really going to promote and support.
And he has done that. And in a sense, he is the abortion president.”
Hahn recalled that Dobson prefaced his commentary by saying this was
the first time in all his years participating in the National Day of
Prayer that he had felt compelled to make reference to his own politics,
and she described his speech as a “10- or 15-minute rant against
President Obama.”
After trying to rally support from other people sitting in her row, Hahn said she’d had enough.
“Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “I stood up and
pointed my finger at [Dobson] and said, ‘This is completely
inappropriate for this day,’ and I walked out.”
“Dobson just blew a hole into this idea of being a
nonpartisan National Day of Prayer. It was very disturbing to me … and
really a shame,” Hahn, the co-chair of the weekly congressional prayer
breakfast, added. “James Dobson hijacked the National Day of Prayer --
this nonpartisan, nonpolitical National Day of Prayer -- to promote his
own distorted political agenda.”
Janice Hahn Walks Out Of Event After James Dobson Calls Obama The 'Abortion President'
Posted:
Updated:
Rep. Janice Hahn (D-Calif.) walked out
of the National Day of Prayer event at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday,
saying she was "outraged" after James Dobson, founder of the
conservative Christian advocacy group Focus on the Family, called
President Barack Obama the “abortion president.”
“President Obama,
before he was elected, made it very clear that he wanted to be the
abortion president. He didn’t make any bones about it," Dobson, whose
organization recently won
a temporary injunction against the Affordable Care Act’s employer
contraception mandate, said on Thursday. "This is something that he
really was going to promote and support, and he has done that, and in a
sense he is the abortion president."
In an interview with The
Huffington Post on Thursday, Hahn called the speech deeply
"inappropriate" and a violation of the event's symbol as a nonpartisan
day of unity.
“He goes on about health care and … providing
abortions, and at that point I stood up and I pointed my finger at Dr.
Dobson and I said, ‘This is inappropriate!’ and walked out,” Hahn told
HuffPost.
“Dobson just blew a hole into this idea of being a
nonpartisan National Day of Prayer. It was very disturbing to me … and
really a shame,” Hahn, the co-chair of the weekly congressional prayer
breakfast, added. “James Dobson hijacked the National Day of Prayer --
this nonpartisan, nonpolitical National Day of Prayer -- to promote his
own distorted political agenda.”
Dobson also read from a recent
letter he said he had sent to “250,000 people,” in which he proclaimed
that “The Creator will not hold us guiltless if we turn a deaf ear to
the cries of innocent babies.”
“So come and get me, Mr. President, if you must,” Dobson concluded his letter. “I will not yield to your wicked regulations.”
The
event, sponsored by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), was organized by the
National Day of Prayer Task Force, a conservative evangelical Christian
non-profit, whose chairwoman is James Dobson's wife, Shirley Dobson.
In April, task force vice chairman John Bornschein defended the event against criticism that it was promoting evangelical beliefs, describing the day as a nonsectarian gathering.
"This is not about proselytizing," Bornschein said
in April. "This is purely about prayer and praying for our leadership
and asking for God's wisdom and blessing over our leaders."
Janice Hahn Walks Out of Prayer Gathering to Protest Dobson’s ‘Abortion President’ Remarks
Rep. Janice Hahn just wanted to hear evangelist Billy Graham’s
daughter speak at Thursday’s National Day of Prayer gathering on Capitol
Hill, but she ended up storming out of the room before that portion of
the program could get underway.
The California Democrat said she was appalled by the remarks of Dr.
James Dobson, saying she felt he went against the event’s stated
nonpartisan and apolitical intent by bashing Barack Obama and calling
him the “abortion president.”
“We have this annual, national day of prayer, which is supposed to
bring the whole country together to pray for our nation, and typically
you put politics aside and you come together,” Hahn told CQ Roll Call.
“James Dobson just absolutely violated that, and I really think he did
damage to what we try to do up here in Washington, D.C.”
Dobson, the founder of the conservative
group Focus on the Family and host of the radio talk show “Family Talk,”
told those assembled in the Cannon Caucus Room that Obama’s promotion
of policies forcing taxpayers to fund abortion services was “offensive
to [his] very conscience.”
“Before [Obama] was elected, he made it very clear that he wanted to be the abortion president,” said Dobson, whose remarks were captured in a video featured on WND.com.
“He didn’t make any bones about it, that this is something that he
really going to promote and support. And he has done that. And in a
sense, he is the abortion president.”
Hahn recalled that Dobson prefaced his commentary by saying this was
the first time in all his years participating in the National Day of
Prayer that he had felt compelled to make reference to his own politics,
and she described his speech as a “10- or 15-minute rant against
President Obama.”
After trying to rally support from other people sitting in her row, Hahn said she’d had enough.
“Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “I stood up and
pointed my finger at [Dobson] and said, ‘This is completely
inappropriate for this day,’ and I walked out.”
The National Day of Prayer is typically held on the first Thursday of
May; since its inception every president, regardless of faith or party
affiliation, has issued a proclamation in support of the occasion. A
spokesman for the National Day of Prayer did not immediately respond to a
request for comment regarding Thursday’s incident, but the official website states that it is not a “political event” affiliated with any party, position or religious ideology.
“The National Day of Prayer, as designated by our government, belongs
to all Americans,” the NDP website declares. “It is not sponsored or
owned by any one group. Every American can observe the NDP in his or her
own way.”
The page also includes a disclaimer noting that although NDP Task
Force Chairwoman Shirley Dobson is the wife of James Dobson, the event
is in no way affiliated with Focus on the Family or “Family Talk.”
Dobson left Focus on the Family in 2009.
But for Hahn, James Dobson’s actions struck a painful chord.
“I’m the co-chair of the weekly Congressional Prayer Breakfast,” she
explained. “I was the co-chair this year of the National Prayer
Breakfast. And I work so hard at putting my politics aside every week
and coming together with members of Congress I don’t agree with, but we
find an hour a week where we put politics aside and pray for our
country, and so far, it’s worked. … I was so upset today I felt like
abandoning everything I’ve done to try to be bipartisan.”
Hahn said she has calmed down a bit since then and is considering
bringing up the issue with her colleagues who regularly attend the
weekly prayer breakfasts. “I would hope maybe members of the
Congressional Prayer Breakfast consider writing [Dobson] and tell him
that what he did really goes against what we’ve been trying to do in
weekly in our prayer breakfast,” she said.
She might run into some disagreement with her co-chairman,
conservative Republican Louie Gohmert of Texas, whom Hahn said she
considers a “friend” despite the fact that she considers him her
“political opposite.”
Gohmert told CQ Roll Call in a brief hallway interview on Thursday
afternoon that he was familiar with Dobson’s remarks and Hahn’s
frustration.
“I can understand Janice’s position and as co-chairman of the
National Prayer Breakfast, which every president has attended, we work
really hard to keep politics completely out of that,” Gohmert said.
He said he also felt for Dobson, whose religious beliefs and stance
on abortion are inseparable. “I can also well understand Dr. Dobson’s
frustration because it is their belief that assisting in any way,
including providing funding, for abortion, is a sin. It’s not something
that he should support and so he felt like this was a good time to let
people know what he was going through. So I understand that.”
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.
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.
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
Rep. Janice Hahn attended the annual non-partisan National Day of Prayer
gathering on Capitol Hill yesterday, expecting a unified, peaceful
event. But after listening to Dr. James Dobson from Focus on the Family
rail against President Obama, repeatedly calling him the "abortion
president", she decided couldn't sit still any longer:
Rep. Janice Hahn just wanted to hear evangelist Billy Graham’s
daughter speak at Thursday’s National Day of Prayer gathering on Capitol
Hill, but she ended up storming out of the room before that portion of
the program could get underway.
