Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)
Ed Brayton is a participant in the Center for Independent Media New Journalism Program. However, all of the statements, opinions, policies, and views expressed on this site are solely Ed Brayton's. This web site is not a production of the Center, and the Center does not support or endorse any of the contents on this site.
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Nick Gillespie of Reason, who attended the Beck rally and interviewed many of the attendees, responds to Hitchens' take on the racial element of the event and the larger Tea Party movement in general. He seems to agree with my take on it, that race is just one of the many possible manifestations of a broader atmosphere of fear and insecurity.
Hitchens is right that Christians - or even believers more generally - do feel endangered, as if religion is less in the public square than ever. This is empirically wrong: As Cathy Young noted back in 2004, it's secularism that is conspicuously missing from contemporary politics. The attendees that I and my Reason.tv colleagues spoke to at Saturday's rally were emphatic that any sort of faith (most pointedly included Islam in their list) was a mitzvah (sorry) and that secularism or atheism, which they saw as running the field, was a bad thing. "We've got to turn back to God," various people said with a lot of feeling but not a helluva lot of clarity.
This sort of ecumenicism is a massive shift from 30 or so years ago, when evangelicals routinely accused Catholics of belonging to the World's Greatest Cult. There are some echoes of this in attacks on Beck's Mormonism from Christian believers, but overall, it was a real Kumbaya crowd when it came to the Beck rally.
The last few weeks have brought several apparently unrelated news stories that add up to something quite important. First we had the brouhaha over Ann Coulter speaking to a gay Republican group at a conference that is also sponsored by conservative bigwig Grover Norquist and some major GOP funders. Then there was the entirely unsurprising announcement by former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman that he's gay.
Sam Stein of the Huffington Post points out that this is just the beginning. The Republican party is seeing a sizable shift in support for gay rights among the people that really matter -- the big donors.
The more clear it becomes that the bigots are going to lose in their attempts to stop equality for gays (just as they lost in previous eras over equality for blacks, women and others), the more ridiculous their rhetoric becomes. This column at the Worldnutdaily by Don Feder is a classic example, made all the more amusing by the fact that he's trying to convince his fellow wingnuts on the issue.
Memo to conservative defeatists: Surrender on gay marriage is surrender on marriage - which is surrender on the family and, ultimately, surrender on civilization.
Drinking milk leads to smoking pot which leads to doing crack which leads to nuclear war! (Kinda reminds me of some old high school debate arguments)
I've written before about a legal challenged to a religious released-time program in schools in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Now that program is being scrapped in favor of an after school program. That may well moot the case, but it's still a victory. I think all released-time religious programs should be scrapped, but some of them are protected by the Supreme Court's Zorach decision. The one in Ft. Wayne appeared to violate even that ruling because the program took place on school property.
Christopher Hitchens may be dying of cancer but he has lost neither his gifts for observation nor his caustic wit. In his latest Slate column he takes a look at Glenn Beck's rally on the 47th anniversary of MLK's most luminous moment. He frames it first in terms of race:
One crucial element of the American subconscious is about to become salient and explicit and highly volatile. It is the realization that white America is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority. This awareness already exists in places like New York and Texas and California, and there have even been projections of the time(s) at which it will occur and when different nonwhite populations will collectively outnumber the former white majority. But it also exerts a strong subliminal effect in states like Alaska that have an overwhelming white preponderance.
Until recently, the tendency has been to think of this rather than to speak of it--or to speak of it very delicately, lest the hard-won ideal of diversity be imperiled. But nobody with any feeling for the zeitgeist can avoid noticing the symptoms of white unease and the additionally uneasy forms that its expression is beginning to take.
Worldnutdaily founder Joseph Farah's little hissy fit over Ann Coulter giving a speech to a gay Republican group has grown into a full blown temper tantrum.
The Republicans and "conservatives" are now lining up to support GOProud's "Homocon" event in New York next month - now that Ann Coulter has accepted the keynote speaker role.
Venture capitalist, libertarian and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel will host a Homocon party at his home in New York.
Sponsors for the Homocon event now include:
* Conservative Political Action Conference director Lisa DePasquale;
* Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who sits on GOProud's board;
* John Hawkins of Right Wing News;
* Fox News contributor Margaret Hoover;
* Craig Engle, former general counsel to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Jeff Sharlet, who has a new book coming out soon about The Family, was on Fresh Air on NPR last week talking about some of his findings about this group and their work in Uganda on the kill-the-gays bill. Jeff spent a lot of time in Uganda researching for this book and what he found is very disturbing, particularly about David Bahati, the sponsor of the bill and the Family's leader in that country:
We've learned a great deal about the liberal mindset that thinks a Christmas creche on a courthouse lawn, or a cross on a desolate Mojave hilltop, is a grave affront to the "separation of church and state" yet the building of a mosque/islamic community center/target beacon on land made available for development by the 9/11 terror attacks is a testimony to our tolerance.
And we've learned that clueless dolts like streiff can't figure out the difference between religious symbols paid for by the government and put on government property (and the Establishment Clause problems this can create) and property owned by a private organization that want to put up a religious building on it in full compliance with all local zoning regulations (and the obvious Free Exercise problems created by trying to get the government to stop it).
Remember John de Nugent, the neo-Nazi white supremacist so beloved by Kyle Bristow and his merry band of idiots? Well he's got his knickers in a twist over some of us making fun of Bristow and his forthcoming book on the "Solutrean hypothesis" that White Europeans were the first to populate the Americas and they were killed off by the Indians (Siberians, really) who got here later.
Remember the Indianapolis cop who ran into three motorcycles that were parked, killing two people and critically injuring another while drunk on duty? The charges have been dropped against him for a rather convenient reason. Balko reports:
Prosecutors initially filed a host of DWI-related charges against Bisard. But on August 19, Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi announced he had no choice but to drop the most serious charges because Bisard's blood had been drawn by an uncertified lab tech. And because none of Brisard's fellow officers apparently noticed his intoxication at the scene of the accident, there was no admissible evidence that Brisard was drunk when he caused the crash.
Filling up your car up with gas is a mundane chore. You drive up pop open the tank and screw off the top. But at one gas station, you get a surprise message when you swipe your credit card.
"One nation under God and if you don't like it, you can leave." The bold digital statement has been there for a year.
Two weeks ago, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued a very important ruling saying that police could not secretly hide a GPS device on your car to track your movements. Now the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled the opposite way. That means the Supreme Court will likely hear an appeal -- and how they'll rule scares the hell out of me.
In this case, DEA agents attached a GPS device to the Jeep of a suspect without a warrant, which then showed that he made many trips out into the desert, one piece of evidence in his conviction. But one of the judges, a strongly pro-Bill of Rights judge, dissented.
Yet another instance where someone is arrested -- and convicted -- for ailing to obey a clearly illegal order from a police officer. The officer from Salisbury, North Carolina pulls someone over on a residential street. Many in the neighborhood come out on their front porches to observe what is going on, but one of them has a cell phone camera and is recording what is going on.
The officer tells her -- and only her, not the others standing on their porches -- to go inside the house. She does not follow that order and the officer arrests here for obstructing a police officer. And a judge convicted her of the offense. Here's what the actual statute says:
"We have two competing world views here and there is no way that we can reach across the aisle -- one is going to have to win," Fleming said. "We are either going to go down the socialist road and become like western Europe and create, I guess really a godless society, an atheist society. Or we're going to continue down the other pathway where we believe in freedom of speech, individual liberties and that we remain a Christian nation. So we're going to have to win that battle, we're going to have to solve that argument before we can once again reach across and work together on things."
Oh yes, because the world supplies so many examples of officially Christian nations with freedom of speech and individual liberties.
From Gary North, in a 1982 article called The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right:
So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.
The premise of Glenn Beck's rally was "restoring America's honor." So these folks went around asking those who attended when exactly America lost its honor.
Here's my answer: America hasn't lost anything. We are today what we have always been, a nation of people that proclaims a set of very audacious ideals to the rest of the world and only sometimes lives up to them. It isn't any worse today than it was in years past; in fact, it's better -- but only because the forces of progress won previous battles for liberty and equality.
David Frum nails Mitt Romney's problem winning over the public:
Romney has had many fewer abrupt changes of mind than, say, Newt Gingrich, who (you may recall) used to be an environmentalist, among other things. Yet Newt escapes the flip-flopper charge, because whatever view he is expressing at the moment, he expresses ferociously. There's an old Hollywood saying, "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made." Romney's problem is that he cannot fake sincerity. When he panders, people always suspect he knows better - and they blame him for it.
Exactly right. No matter what he says, Romney always comes across as totally insincere, as a used car salesman giving you a pitch.
Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
