The abject transparency of Faytene

DAMMIT JANET! - which is, according to this, a filthy-speaking and vulgar blogsite - has been watching the self-aggrandizing antics of Faytene Kryskow Grasseschi for awhile now.

Bene Diction Blogs On has a co-blogger who dedicates himself to the scrutiny of the minutia of Faytene's MASSIVE dramatics evangelical outpourings.

DJ! is more interested in how she manipulates folks and profitably manages her career to The Greater Good of Faytene. At an event entitled "Forgiven" two years ago, which was ostensibly organized by Former Cree chief Kenny Blacksmith to ‘accept’ the apology PMSHithead made in the House of Commons to Canada’s Aboriginal people, but orchestrated by the same deep pockets that financially supported the Harper Regime©™ rise to power, I noted:

A lot of money was on display, in the state-of-the-art television recording and broadcasting installations. Before the religious pageant started, Faytene Kryskow sauntered through our seating area, in not-kewl hoi polloi territory. Apparently the group sitting in the seats below us had not been given the VIP status they deserved.

David Mainse established the nation's first Christian television show, Crossroads, in 1963. In 1977 he launched 100 Huntley Street, now Canada's longest-running Christian TV program.

As Faytene led Mainse and the dozen or so people in his entourage to reserved seats close to the stage, she apologized for the oversight, blurting out that the Aboriginal volunteers involved in the organization of the event "did not know who the important people were".

Oh really, Faytene? Shouldn't Jesus be the Most Important One to know?

Snort.

Warning! Progressive Blogburst Ahead!

On April 26th CON MP Stephen Woodworth brings his dog-and-pony show to Parliament.

Motion 312 is a private member's initiative.

Substantial House of Commons financial, material and human resources are supporting Woodworth's exploratory shot at dismantling Canadian women's hard-won reproductive and procreative rights.

Here is an overview of two groups and their resources gathered to fight Woodworth's attempt to recriminalize abortion.

Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada - Coalition pour le droit à l'avortement Canada

Radical Handmaids

Starting today, all bloggers who support a woman's right to choose can and should blog fiercely about this CONservative, regressive attack on women's right to choose.

Tell a personal story about a family member who died from an illegal kitchen-table abortion.

Use your wits, your intelligence, your verve to expose Wankworth's motion for what it is: not only anti-choice but against religious freedom.

The right to government - in policies and practices that doesn't favour one religious belief system - is implicit in the Charter of rights.

Re-criminalizing a medical intervention will enforce the ideological dogma of fundamentalist religions, in particular those of the Vatican Taliban.

My parents grew up in the period of La grande noirceur, an unholy alliance of political and religious authorities. It seems to me that the Harper Regime is morphing into le Duplessis Nouveau.

Well fuck that, we're not going to let that MASSIVE obliteration of women's rights happen again. No christofascist sharia in Canada.

ADDED by fh: This is what we have to look forward to. @rWeEqualYet turned today's drivel and pap into MP Stephen Woodworth's Sunday Sermon on Twitter.

And also: petitions for the MPs - very important. Read fh, here.

*Christians* threaten 16 year-old schoolgirl with violence.

The facts about her challenge to US Christofascism:

Jessica Ahlquist, a student at Cranston High School West, sued the city of Cranston and its school committee in April 2011 to remove the banner, which dates back to 1963.

As an atheist, Ahlquist said the mural made her feel excluded and ostracized. She accused the school of violating the Establishment Clause of the Constitution's First Amendment, which prevents the government from promoting one religion over another.

From here:

“A Christian Catholic prayer may bring comfort to the majority of students in my school,” said a confident and composed Ahlquist, who sat surrounded by her father, two lawyers, the ACLU Executive Director Steve Brown, a reverend and a rabbi. “But it sends a different message to the large population of students of other faith or in my case, none. I firmly believe that it should not be on display in a public school.”

More here.

Last week, a judge who evaluated the legal arguments of both parties ordered the banner removed.

Go to hell. Go directly to hell.

According to this recent Gallup poll,

About one-third of the American adult population believes the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word. This percentage is slightly lower than several decades ago. The majority of those Americans who don't believe that the Bible is literally true believe that it is the inspired word of God but that not everything it in should be taken literally. About one in five Americans believe the Bible is an ancient book of "fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man." [...]

Some denominations hold the belief in a literal Bible as a hallmark of their faith. The statement of "Faith and Mission" of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, states that: " The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God's revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. ..."

Nice - and profitable - scam you've got going there, Pastor Steven Anderson.

In trash news, Caribou Barbie Junior Miss - Bristol Palin - takes on Margaret Cho by snarking about KD Lang and Indigo Girls. The whole WTF? 411 here.

“Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

That statement comes from Don Schmierer, an evangelist anti-gay militant who now claims that he and his fellow US fundamentalist crusaders were "duped" by Ugandan officials who invited them to express their views last year. Their teachings about “curing” homosexuality - which have been widely discredited in the US, were presented in Kampala over three days to audiences of thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers, politicians and legislators.

The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, [...] and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior. One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.

Donor countries, including the United States, are demanding that Uganda’s government drop the proposed law, saying it violates human rights, though Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity (who previously tried to ban miniskirts) recently said, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.”

The Ugandan government, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, is now indicating that it will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals. [...]

The three Americans who spoke at the conference [...] are now trying to distance themselves from the bill. “I feel duped,” Mr. Schmierer said, arguing that he had been invited to speak on “parenting skills” for families with gay children. He acknowledged telling audiences how homosexuals could be converted into heterosexuals, but he said he had no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality.

“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he said. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.” Mr. Lively and Mr. Brundidge have made similar remarks in interviews or statements issued by their organizations. But the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.

From here. Scott Lively "was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh" - what the hell did he expect his hateful, biased, screed would produce? A "nuclear bomb" is not an instrument of peace - some might call it religious terrorism.

The discourse these three homophobic hatemongers gave was an incitement to violence against gay men, lesbians and transgendered people. And now they claim no responsibility for the response their privileged audience members had, and the actions they took.

Remember, these theocrats have an agenda, and in spite of their lying protestations to the contrary, they are positioning themselves to influence legislation and elected officials in Canada also.

The sacred and the sacrilegious.

Karen Armstrong seems to be detested, derided and deplored by a wide range of rightwing religious zealots. That in itself makes her a person of interest to DJ!'s humble scribes and bloggers.

Armstrong wrote in her Xmas opinion piece for the LATimes:

Unconcerned about historical accuracy, therefore, Matthew and Luke tell entirely different stories. Placed at the beginning of their Gospels, the infancy narratives act as a preface, giving the reader a foretaste of how each evangelist understood Jesus' mission. [...]

The Gospels paint a picture that is very different from the cozy stable scene on the Christmas cards. They speak of deprivation and displacement. The Messiah himself is an outsider. There is no room in the inn, so Mary has to give birth in the 1st-century equivalent of an urban alleyway. As victims of Herod's tyranny, the Holy Family become refugees; other innocents are slaughtered. [...]

For Luke, the pregnant Mary becomes a prophetess, proclaiming a new order in which the lowly will be exalted and the mighty pulled down from their thrones. [...] For the faithful and nonbelievers, for Christmas celebrators and skeptics, this is how to answer the question of what the season means: Religion has often been used to endorse an iniquitous status quo. But the Christmas story is a salutary reminder that faith has also encouraged radical visions for a more compassionate world.

As you can imagine, Armstrong's ecumenical perspective does not sit well with theocrats and islamophobic christofascists. This review is typical of her detractors. I was curious about her Charter for Compassion and so checked it out.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

The power of this document lies of course, with those who are able to put its principles into practice. Easier said than done, when facing down shrieeekkking religious zealots, all spewing hatred in the name of their deity.

Why KAIROS matters.

L'union fait la force. Together we stand, divided we fall.

Alliance-busting is one of many Rovian tactics that the ReformaTories have developed to undermine their opponents and to pre-empt legitimate criticism of Stevie Spiteful and his bullies' way of doing business.

The Con's biggest and most recent target is KAIROS, a compassionate alliance of Canadian religious organizations who work together to bring peace to parts of the world ravaged by conflicts, through a number of humanitarian projects.

In November, KAIROS was told in a desultory way by Minister Oda that its CIDA funding had been cut.

Then two other ReformaTory attack parrots, Toews and Kenney piled on the justifications to justify their government's savage coup bas.

From here:

The speech of Jason Kenney in Jerusalem December 16, tagging peace and development group KAIROS as anti-Semitic and bragging about de-funding it, was so grotesque that it must have left many in the established Jewish community feeling slightly ill. Can they really be comfortable with the accusation that an organization composed of Canada’s major Christian churches are Jew-haters?

Are they willing to let KAIROS lose its projects in the suffering nations of the global south because, though it believes in Israel’s right to peace and security, it also thinks Palestinians have rights too? [...]

After 35 years of CIDA funding, KAIROS will lose $7 million project money ending its support for the peace process in Sudan, for victims of violence in Indonesia and the rights of women in warring Colombia.

Kenney now claims his remarks were misunderstood. I think that he “mis-spoke” by expressing these views publicly, in a venue where his comments were recorded. But it wasn’t accidental. There’s a pattern there, and a tightly scripted, repressive trajecTory being charted by the rightwing socon theocrats in the PMO.

There are many progressive bloggers who have been researching, writing about this grievous assault on KAIROS and making strong points about the Con nature of such pernicious and loathsome political tactics: Scott Tribe, bigcitylib and Dennis Gruending, to name a few. We have to keep blogging about this, and to stand in solidarity with peace-loving organizations today, December 25th and every day of the year.

Two models of church-based international development.

Dennis Gruending has researched and written about the lobbying efforts that neocon fundamentalist religious organizations have directed against progressive and ecumenical groups in Canada and in particular, those working in international development.

Kairos, for example, and earlier this year Peace and Development. The fear, the anger and the hatred that religious rightwingnuts of all christofascist tendencies have directed towards their humanitarian work is quite savage.

There's been much speculation about what motivated Stevie Spiteful and his merry band of Harpocrites to cut CIDA funding to KAIROS.

The most obvious and clear reason would be its role in facilitating discussion about the Alberta tar sands.

But I think there's another reason. In November, the PMO issued a statement condemning the blood-thirsty homophobic laws the Ugandan parliament may ratify. This was consistent with previous statements he made that his government would not reverse Canadian laws that recognize equal rights for gay men and lesbians with respect to marriage.

So the Con/reformaTory "base" is seething with discontent and malevolence because its fundamentalist religious initiatives are not receiving the government support they claim as their due for electing Harper to power. And it's not a stretch to imagine the model of international network building these rightwing religious fundamentalists would emulate.

Thus Stevie Spiteful's only recourse, in order to appease those hostile grassroots astro-turf christofascist groups is a grand and dramatic gesture - ergo, a MASSIVE slash & burn cut to Kairos' funding.

As a bonus, he reaps the benefits of re-directing that money towards his own narcissistic the PMO public relations needs or any other purpose.

Unlikely - some would say unholy - alliances.

Matt Frei has an interesting perspective about an unlikely ally in the environmental movement's efforts to halt global warming.

The evangelical movement is split between those conservative Christians who suspect that climate change is an evil secular plot, concocted by the devil, Al Gore and "the global government crowd" [...] and those who passionately believe that good Christians need to be good custodians of the planet.

Two years ago I went to Liberty University in Virginia, the home of the late Jerry Falwell and asked a lecture room full of students if they believed in the threat of global warming. Not a single hand went up.

I travelled up the road to the Eastern Mennonite College at Harrisonburg and asked a similar number of Christian students the same question. Almost every hand shot up.

Frei observes that the possibility of calm, rational scientific-fact-based discussion regarding climate change has been sabotaged by the "poison of partisan politics and the culture wars".

In the past, ecological activists have made strategic alliances with groups who do not share any common political ground, identifying particular goals such as the protection of wetlands threatened by urban sprawl and working with Ducks Unlimited, for example.

It will be interesting to see how sane conservative christians who are not christofascists, teabaggers or other types of rightwing zealots navigate the divide.

The teabaggers are coming just in time for Xmas.

And you thought it was safe to disregard the tragically studip? Bwahahahaha! they're ba-a-a-ack!

From here:

Tea Party Patriots — the right-wing organizers controlled by FreedomWorks — sent an urgent call to action today, asking supporters to come to Washington December 15th to “storm Senate offices” in order to “play out the role of patients waiting for treatment in government controlled medical facilities.” The e-mail says organizers plan to “stay there until they force us to leave,” and incites supporters to “flex our muscle” and “hold the line in our fight against the government takeover of health care” ...

Any moment now, a TPP (pronounced teapeepee) leader will declare that the "government takeover of healthcare" (which is called healthcare reform by sane people) is a manifestation of the War On Christmas.

W.O.C.kers' vigilence regarding the phenomenon claimed to be yet another form of discrimination against and/or persecution of Christians is constant and never-ending. Focus on the Family has foot-soldiers marching in shopping malls all over the US, scrutinizing the wording in flyers and reporting what evidence they find.

Balbulican wrote a trenchant blogpost: "The REAL War on Christmas – Found At Last!" where he observes even christofascists are jumping on the retailing bandwagon. In the comment section he says:

About 95% of the “War On Christmas” stories you read have to do with vendors who are now promoting their products and services by encouraging EVERYONE who’s got a holiday with a gift-giving tradition to come and spend money. That’s as capitalist, as entrepreneurial, as private sector as you can get.

At the risk of provoking yet another round of shrieeekkking from fundamentalist religious zealots, this may be an appropriate moment to quote someone who had a powerful approach to creating Peace on earth and goodwill for all living creatures.

Mohandas Gandhi: "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it's not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time."

Cashing in on Stupak

So, what is at stake for the Christian Taliban in the attack on women's rights in the USian healthcare debate?

According to Wendy Norris at RH Reality Check, plenty.

What the Stupak-Pitts amendment does for the Catholic health care system is omit a competitive advantage secular and other religiously-affiliated hospitals without doctrinal restrictions can use to simultaneously market their services to both the expected influx of newly insured patients and the outpatient medical professionals who will treat them.

By restricting insurance coverage of women's reproductive health care, the competitive barriers faced by Catholic institutions will be eliminated — provided the amendment is not stripped out of the final bill that emerges from House-Senate health care reform conference committee. Which is why pro-choice advocates should expect nothing short of a full-frontal attack by the Vatican on conservative Senators.

Get a load of these numbers:

One in six patients are cared for in 624 Catholic hospitals scattered throughout the U.S. in 2006, according to the Catholic Health Association. The church also operates more than 800 post-acute care, senior living and skilled nursing centers across the nation. All told, $84.6 billion was spent on Catholic church-affiliated care.

But Catlick healthcare is restricted by misogyny faith in what services it can provide.

Add those restrictions and compound it with two simple facts: 73 percent of the now uninsured are of reproductive age and the leading cause of death among people aged 15-44 is accidents.

In essence, the people most likely to benefit from the proposed public option and insurance exchange will undoubtedly be seeking the type of care Catholic hospitals refuse to provide as a matter of religious principle. And these prospective patients are young and will conceivably need care for many decades to come.

For the business arm of the Catholic church it's a theological and economic two-fer.

Sniffing panties/punishing sluts PLUS raking in the dough. I'd call it not just a two-fer but a religio-cash-gasm.

Another inappropriate and violent testerical FAIL.

In his blogpost today, C.C. draws our attention to what can happen in the US when you mix ignorance, testosterone enhancement and islamophobia, Dear idiot wankers: This is YOUR fault. From here:

Marine reservist Jasen Bruce was getting clothes out of the trunk of his car Monday evening when a bearded man in a robe approached him. That man, a Greek Orthodox priest named Father Alexios Marakis, speaks little English and was lost, police said. He wanted directions.

What the priest got instead, police say, was a tire iron to the head. Then he was chased for three blocks and pinned to the ground — as the Marine kept a 911 operator on the phone, saying he had captured a terrorist.

Police say Bruce offered several reasons to explain his actions: The man tried to rob him. The man grabbed Bruce's crotch and made an overt sexual advance in perfect English. The man yelled "Allahu Akbar," Arabic for "God is great," the same words some witnesses said the Fort Hood shooting suspect uttered last week.

"That's what they tell you right before they blow you up," police say Bruce told them. Bruce ended up in jail, accused of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. He was released Tuesday on $7,500 bail.

Marakis ended up at the hospital with stitches. He told the police he didn't want to press charges, espousing biblical forgiveness.

But Tuesday, Bruce wasn't saying sorry.

Marakis forgave Bruce, even though his assailant never apologized or expressed contrition. Now that is true christianity, unlike the ideologically-fuelled hate that various rightwing nutters, fundamentalist religious zealots and christofascists like Pat Robertson are shrieeeking.

We think that police should press charges against Bruce nonetheless. That man is a ticking time bomb and a threat to the public although it's likely his next victim will be his wife. We wonder what excuses to justify his violence he'll invent then.

O! Say can you hear that choking shrieking Right?

The mellifluous stylings of Pat Robertson, no less.

"The noose has tightened around the necks of Christians to keep them from speaking out on certain moral issues. And it all was embodied in something called the Hate crimes bill that President Obama said was a major victory for America. I’m not sure if America was the beneficiary. [...] We have voted into office a group of people who are opposed to many of the fundamental Christian beliefs of our nation."

Yesterday on the Christian Broadcasting Network, televangelist Pat Robertson aired a segment slamming President Obama for signing the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law. Extending hate crimes protection to the gay and transgendered community, Robertson argued, was a targeted attack on homophobic Christians like himself.

From here.

eh. Some of those comments are funny - unless you suffer from a religious zealotry sociopathy or the related fundamentalist persecution disorder.

If the noose fits ...

Fake Pregnancy Centres Create Fake Orphans

We admit it. Here at DAMMIT JANET! and back at Birth Pangs, we've been a tad obsessed with Crisis Pregnancy Centers/Centres.

We -- OK, who am I trying to kid? it's mostly moi -- blog regularly about the lying and deception and manipulation these Christofascists perpetrate on vulnerable women. (And of course, just to blow our own horn a little, we did have a helluva good time helping persuade the Ottawa Senators to pull financial support from one of the lying-liar outfits.)

But it seems there is a whole other ugly side to these fakers, even though I did blog once about a crisis pregnancy centre in Ireland that was convicted of running an illegal adoption agency.

So, I should not have been surprised to read today that 'Christian Organizations Shame and Coerce Women Into Giving Up Their Children'. It's a longish article by Kathryn Joyce, author of 'Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement'.

Using good old shame and guilt, they pressure single pregnant women into giving up their children to 'good' Christian families. And with their usual disregard for truthiness, they lie to women about the terms of 'open' adoption. Women think they'll be able to see their children only to find out, oopsie, no, you can't honey.

Pregnant women are housed with 'shepherding' families, isolated from friends and family who may offer other advice.

After delivery, women are rushed into surrenders. Taken to states with shorter 'change one's mind' periods. Paperwork is delayed until the 'change one's mind' period is just about up.

And such shenanigans go back a ways:

In 1984 Leslee Unruh, founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, established a CPC in South Dakota called the Alpha Center. The first center had opened in 1967, but in 1984 Unruh's CPC was still a relatively new idea. In 1987 the state attorney's office investigated complaints that Unruh had offered young women money to carry their pregnancies to term and then relinquish their babies for adoption.

"There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children," then-state attorney Tim Wilka told the Argus Leader, that the governor asked him to take the case. The Alpha Center pleaded no contest to five counts of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices; nineteen other charges were dropped, including four felonies. But where Unruh left off, many CPCs and antiabortion groups have taken up in her place.

(Read more about Leslee Unruh in an article by Amanda Robb, niece of murdered abortion provider Dr Bernard Slepian.)

In a sadly ironic twist, the crap works best on religious, anti-choice women.

Religious women may be particularly susceptible to CPC coercion, argues Mari Gallion, a 39-year-old Alaska mother who founded the support group SinglePregnancy.com after a CPC unsuccessfully pressured her to relinquish her child ten years ago. Gallion, who has worked with nearly 3,000 women with unplanned pregnancies, calls CPCs "adoption rings" with a multistep agenda: evangelizing; discovering and exploiting women's insecurities about age, finances or parenting; then hard-selling adoption, portraying parenting as a selfish, immature choice. "The women who are easier to coerce in these situations are those who subscribe to conservative Christian views," says Gallion. "They'll come in and be told that, You've done wrong, but God will forgive you if you do the right thing."

Mirah Riben, vice president of communications for the birth mother group Origins-USA [which calls itself 'The voice of mothers who lost children to adoption'], as well as author of The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry, says that many mothers struggle for decades with the fallout of "a brainwashing process" that persuades them to choose adoption and often deny for years--or until their adoptions become closed--that they were pressured into it. "I see a lot of justification among the young mothers. If their adoption is remaining open, they need to be compliant, good birth mothers and toe the line. They can't afford to be angry or bitter, because if they are, the door will close and they won't see the kid."

. . . .

There were nineteen lawsuits against CPCs between 1983 and 1996, but coercive practices persist. Joe Soll, a psychotherapist and adoption reform activist, says that CPCs "funnel people to adoption agencies who put them in maternity homes," where ambivalent mothers are subjected to moralistic and financial pressure: warned that if they don't give up their babies, they'll have to pay for their spot at the home, and given conflicted legal counsel from agency-retained lawyers. Watchdog group Crisis Pregnancy Center Watch described an Indiana woman misled into delaying an abortion past her state's legal window and subsequently pressured into adoption.

As they say, go read the whole thing, though if you want to check out the other links, you'll have to do it from here since I put them in.

BONUS: The first commenter, Amy Adoptee, has a blog. Go read, especially this one.

Vicious, Vindictive Vultures

You remember the Vulture Culture, don't you?

Here is deBeauxOs's definition of it:

It's a loose alliance of fetus fetishists, religious fundamentalists, neocon rightwing authoritarians and women-haters that have come together in one MASSIVE shriek-fest for the purpose of re-criminalizing abortion. Some of them engineered last year's fiasco, The Pill Kills! campaign.

They're at it again. LifeShite sights a kill:

The director of the pro-life group Citizens for a Pro-Life Society (CPLS) is calling on pro-lifers across America to respectfully urge Cardinal Sean O'Malley of the Boston Archdiocese not to allow the passing of notorious pro-abortion advocate Sen. Ted Kennedy to be honored with a public Catholic funeral.

And other vultures begin to circle.

Vicious, vindictive, and absolutely despicable. And sooooo christian.

ADDED: If you'd like to counter the fetus fetishists' cruel campaign, I'll save you from a visit to those odious sites. Here is the contact info for Cardinal O'Malley.

phone: 617 782-2544
email: sdiago@rcab.org

Don't like the term Christofascism?

Go complain to David Frum, Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, Kate MacMillan and the dredges of the rightwing neocon pundit wannabeez.

They popularized the term Islamofascism, used it feverishly and created a conceptual meme that fits the trash talk spewed by fundamentalist religious christian ideologues who use similar violent rhetoric and tactics.

A flood of comments and emails followed the publication of Antonia Zerbisias' Doctor's killing is domestic terrorism . Only 50 or so - the coherent and rational ones - have been published; the rejected ones are likely exemplars of the usual shrieeeking, vile trash talk.

Go read the column and leave a comment - a quiet, sane and well-informed counterpoint to the predictable accusations that this is more proof that christians are being perseeecuted!!!