Religion

If….

Religion, Wingnuts
Published on 2 Comments on If….

Everywhere you turn you step in more puddles of fundy meltdown.

This time it’s a Liberty University student who took homemade napalm bombs to Jerry Falwell’s funeral, the better to burn to death the Phelps family and everyone else there besides. Here’s Daddy Phelps in his glory days, desecrating murder victim Matthew Shepard’s funeral:

The Phelpses (aka Westboro Baptist Church), practice is to picket funerals, telling the mourners that god hates them and the deceased and they are all going to hell. They have their own church, composed almost entirely of their own family living in a massive enclosed compound out in the sticks – it’s a tax-advantageous, family-based minicult.

They are so out there they consider Falwell liberal; Louis Theroux says the Phelpses are the ‘most extreme people he has ever met’.

Now I can see why someone wouldn’t want a funeral disrupted by Phelpses – but napalm? Seems a little excessive. Maybe this student had some muddled idea in his head about wreaking righteous hellfire. Like PZ Myers says in his post , wow, great students that Liberty U is producing. Not.

But then I look at the guest list at that Falwell funeral and I can’t help feeling a certain wistfulness. All that bloated hypocrisy and political hubris might’ve gone in one go…

But no, that way madness, wingnuttery and Phelpsism lie.

UPDATE: Digby has a sock-it-to-me post on the US media’s deliberate ignorance of potential rightwing fundy terrorists like this.

It’s a phenomenon that’s also happening in Europe. They have a narrative, they’re going to stick with it and the facts are being fixed around the policy again.

“I Am My Child’s Mom”

Culture, Internet, Media, Parenting, Religion, Torture, War on Terror, Wingnuts, Women
Published on 53 Comments on “I Am My Child’s Mom”

Or, ‘Raising Hell, The Dr Laura Way”.

It seems Dr Laura Schlessinger, scourge of the morally lax parent, may herself have raised a sociopath. Oh, how I love the smell of hung petards in the morning….

First a little backstory, for non-Usanians like me who may not be that familiar with ‘Dr Laura’, the bizarro-Oprah of talk radio. Dr Laura Schlessinger is a rightwing radio ‘therapist’, wannabe tv star and self-help book author, whose fans absolutely lap up her harsh strictures on sexuality, relationships and child-rearing.

Her show’s syndicated on Clear Channel radio US-wide; Clear Channel, part-owned by Mormon presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital (which has all kinds of interesting connections with some decidedly neofascist types) has a history of manufacturing and broadcasting far-right reactionary radio ‘personalities’.

So far, so usual for the US rightwing media machine and its creatures.- but Dr Laura is special. First off she’s a doctor, of sorts; even though it’s a Phd. in physiology not pychology it authenticates her very subjective advice as somehow quasi-medical and so iher personal emotional hangups’re adopted as sound principles by her rightwing supporters, some of whom are so loyal to her personally that they describe themselves as ‘Dr Laura’s Army’.

Dr Laura fits the Clear Channel mould perfectly; she’s a cruel homophobe and a hypocrite with a shady past (by her own stated standards) who preaches to others what she does not practice herself. She’s a vicious piece of work with it, as I’ve discovered the more I’ve read:

Even more shocking was her treatment of a Connecticut eighth-grader for an award-wining essay on free speech on the Internet. Attacking the girl by name, she maliciously asserted: “If she was my daughter, I’d probably put her up for adoption. . . .When she makes her marriage vows, and her husband has sex with someone else, let’s see if she thinks that this philosophy works. She also suggested that the girl be “sacrificed,” Inca style!

Someone who could treat a child that way should never be allowed near one in a therapeutic or a parental sense, IMHO. Who knows how many children’s lives she’s affected with her self-interested, twisted ideas? Well, one at least has been severely affected according to this report, and having found out what unpleasant child-rearing ideas his mother has it comes as no surprise – in fact it almost seems inevitable.

Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page
Site contained violent, sex-oriented images one official called ‘repulsive’
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 05/19/2007 12:15:45 AM MDT

The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called “repulsive.”

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura. Broadcast locally on 570 KNRS, “Family Values Talk Radio,” the former family counselor spends three hours daily taking calls and offering advice on morals, ethics and values. She broadcast a show from Fort Douglas, in Salt Lake City, last week.

[…]

“Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”

Dr. Laura’s publicity people and the US Army are now trying to suggest that this site was created by mysterious ‘enemies’ engaged in ‘information warfare’. Uh, huh, right, yeah, because Al-Qaeda or the Mahdi army have got nothing better to do than to fuck around creating fake MySpace pages about the batshit crazy sons of psychotic wingnut radio personalities.

After the Salt Lake City Tribune published this report ‘Dr Laura’s Army’ leapt to her defence in the papers’ pages, bombarding it with oddly similar emails, the overall tone of which was ‘don’t blame her for the decisions her child makes’. Bollocks to that, she doesn’t get off that easy – particularly since a major part of her schtick appears to be telling parents that they are indeed responsible for their child’s behaviour. Her catchphrase is even “I am my kid’s mom,”, FFS.

Dr Laura was once asked a very pertinent question a while back about the kind of behaviour her own son is apparently exhibiting , by CNN’s Larry King:

KING: And then how do you explain those where you had parents that drifted and the kid turned out terrific, and other places where the parents did all the things you said to do and he turns into a serial killer and everyone on the block is shocked?

SCHLESSINGER: When we take the fringe of the bell curve of exceptions and try to make them speak for the rule we’re not being fair. We’re taking extremes to try to get away from a truth that we know morally, intuitively we know what we need to do. I think human beings — I mean, from the time we’re born we have the ability to be selfish, we have the ability to be selfless. But I think small creatures are basically selfish, and we always have to strive against our selfishness every day in every way.

Shorter Dr Laura – “I don’t know what makes psychos. Ask me another”.

But she did know the answer all along.

Laura Schlessinger’s appearance in Utah last week included a visit with Army families at Fort Douglas. In an interview with The Tribune, she said, “We raised our son to be a warrior.”

Now see, there’s the problem right there. This is the kind of ‘warrior’ he became under Dr Laura’s tender care – at least according to what may admittedly beunreliable sources, ie someone who says they were at at school with Schlessinger Jr.:

I was in school with Derek in fourth and fifth grade. He was a sadistic bully then. He was a terribly unhappy kid who boasted about all the money his mom made and threatened, bullied, and beat up younger kids.If a teacher tried to discipline him or in any way thwart him he would threaten that his mom would get them fired and would sue them. I don’t know if she could but I know it scared a lot of teachers I don’t know a kid in school who was sorry to see him go when his mom put him in private school. We used to call him Malfoy because he reminded us of the character from Harry Potter. I wouldn’t be amazed by anything the guy is assused of, up to homicide. He is a nasty piece of work.
May 19th, 2007 at 19:09:49
From: KEN KORNFELD

Now, Schlessinger Jr. has been serving in special forces, and there might be those who’ll say PTSD! but that’s a copout. Special Forces are the soldiers who did this. This typifies what’s on young Deryk’s MySpace page:

In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child’s mother pleads for her son’s life.

No doubt Dr Laura herself will be one of those who scream “PTSD!” too, supporting her little ‘warrior’ and his pyschotic tendencies to the end. But there’s no evading her responsibility: as she’s said herself –

SCHLESSINGER: …men are born of women, they are trained by women, they date marry that are trained by women, they marry women they are trained by women. A lot of what women get from men is their own doing, and that’s why I wrote this book because we primarily have the control in the relationships of the quality of the relationships.

How does that petard feel, Dr Laura? A little uncomfortable, perhaps?

On Second Thoughts…

bigotry, Religion, US politics, Wingnuts
Published on

Maybe it would’ve been better for Jerry Falwell not to have died just yet, just as the fascistic theocracy he tried to create starts falling apart (but let’s not get too optimistic, there’s nearly 2 years to go yet). It would’ve been wholly satisfying to have seen him get his just deserts in life, publicly disgraced and shamed for the misery he caused by his ‘religion’ and his lust for power. But no, he escaped.

Damn. That’s the trouble with atheism. There’s no afterlife to wish torment on someone in.

It almost tempts me to become Christian for an hour just for the purpose. There’s a lot of hellfire and torment you can pray for in an hour, as Falwell himself proved.

UPDATE: Huh. There’s a surprise. Fellow-fundies are rushing to disassociate themselves from Falwell already.

Wonder what goodies he had on them all when he was alive?

Xenu v Beeb, via YouTube

Internet, Manufacturing consent, Media, Religion
Published on

The Observer reports (yes, I will read other papers today, I promise) that the Scientologists are using Youtube in their continuing campaign against the nosy, critical media, this time against a BBC Panorama reporter, John Sweeney:

John Sweeney has apologised for the outburst against a scientologist which was filmed and then put on the video-sharing website YouTube, prompting criticism of the corporation. The BBC held an internal inquiry but said Sweeney had not breached any guidelines.

The incident is one of the first examples of ‘video ambushing’, where organisations being investigated turn the camera on the film makers. The Church of Scientology, whose members include the Hollywood stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta, shadowed the Panorama team in America with its own camera crew. It has made a ‘counter documentary’, attacking Sweeney’s methods, and distributed 100,000 DVDs to MPs, civil servants, religious groups, media organisations and business leaders.

Sweeney’s a complete dumbass for losing his temper, that’s clear – but the carefully edited clip’s a Scientology hit-piece pure and simple, a preemptive smear. This is the video they put out:

That looks really bad doesn’t it?

Panorama has responded by posting a YouTube clip of its own in which leading scientologist Tom Davis, a friend of Cruise and son of the film actress Anne Archer, also a scientologist, is seen losing his temper at Sweeney’s use of the words ‘sinister cult’ and storming away mid-interview with the reporter in hot pursuit. In a separate clash Archer, an Oscar nominee for her role as Michael Douglas’s wife in Fatal Attraction, is understood to have snapped when Sweeney asked if she could have been brainwashed. The Church has withdrawn consent for the BBC to use the footage and Panorama is being hastily re-edited for broadcast tomorrow, but will still include the Sweeney outburst.

[…]

Here’s the corresponding BBC YouTube clip. Personally I think Sweeney was quite restrained with that asshole and I doubt I’m alone in thinking it.

Here’s what John Sweeney himself has to say:

While making our BBC Panorama film “Scientology and Me” I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a “bigot” by star Scientologists, brain-washed – that is how it felt to me – in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.

Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law’s house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.

[…]

As often in life, I snapped over something completely different and quite trivial.

Top Scientologist Tommy “Don’t mention the word cult” Davis had been goading me all week, and on the seventh day I fell into his elephant trap. He shouted at me and I shouted back, louder.

If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe.

I apologised almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it to my boss, my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss’s boss, the Director-General of the BBC.

[…]

Although this appears on the surface to be about journalistic professionalism, or the lack of it, it’s really about whether one of the richest, most influential and reputedly most controlling untaxed pyramid schemes in the world, which has a special position and privileges because of its legal status as a church, can control what a public broadcaster in another country says about it.

The ‘church’ can call on oodles of Hollywood advice from its members. To counteract the documentary in advance they’ve written their own imaginary screenplay, in which the big, bad, communist, no atheist, bully BBC beats up poor the ikkle ‘freedom of religion’ enthusiasts. Oh the poor, persecuted loves, how they suffer for their faith, with no way to defend themselves! Well not quite, if you believe their former members:

[…]

Three days later, Bowers says, a Scientology official named Philip Jepsen paid her a visit. “He comes with two people in uniforms–very intimidating–and he asks me about Tom Cruise,” Bowers recalls. “It became obvious he knew everything I had told ‘Goldman.’ He grilled me for two hours. At the end, he handed me a Declare.”

The charges listed in Bowers’s “Suppressive Person Declare”–essentially an order of excommunication–included “writing anti-Scientology letters to the press or giving anti-Scientology or anti-Scientologist data to the press” and “engaging in malicious rumour-mongering to destroy the authority or repute of higher officers or the leading names of Scientology.” The Declare meant that, in general, no one in Scientology should speak to her again, including members of her family. It was followed by “Disconnect” letters from her sons and ex-husband.

[…]

Sounds like they have the self-defence part pretty well sewn up internally, now if only they could exert the same control over non-members…

Scientology’s use of what’s percieved as a ‘samizdat’ medium like YouTube to give their narrative credibility is a new and interesting twist in the development of online discourse and public media. But I’m definitely going to watch the BBC Panorama documentary tonight, where I might not have before, and I suspect many others will too now – so have the attempted Scientology media psyops actually backfired on them?