I still do do a fair number of longer essays about aspects of the religious right and what to do about it; but lately I have also wanted to highlight notable items from the news and the blogosphere that might otherwise get lost amidst the schadenfreude du jour, among other diversions.
Lake of Fire, Tony Kaye's megadocumentary on the politics of abortion in the U.S. opens on October 3rd. (Sneak preview in Ft. Worth on September 30th.)
A fresh early review states:
While Lake of Fire examines its subject matter from various angles-some more flattering to pro-lifers, some more satisfying to pro-choicers-Kaye's desire for level-headedness puts him in the latter's camp. Beginning with a quick point-counterpoint summation of both sides' stances and then segueing into examinations of news and human-interest stories as well as the complicated philosophical questions they beget, Kaye uses deft juxtapositions in presenting a battleground where logical, inquiring liberal thought clashes at every turn with rigid Christian fundamentalism. Outside one of many clinics where sidewalk skirmishes between activists have become commonplace, the director discovers a pro-life man who sincerely argues that capital punishment should be doled out to not only abortionists, but also to anyone who dares blaspheme. At a home for unwed pregnant mothers, he unearths Father Westin, who spits and screams about satanic doctors' everyday practice of barbequing fetuses.
Here are two, somewhat similar reviews from when Lake of Fire previewed at the Toronto film festival last year: Variety and The Miami Herald.
When judges make rulings that don't sit well with the religious right -- like Judge Greer in the case of Terri Schiavo and Eileen O'Neill, a former Texas judge who in 1993 held Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry and other anti-abortion activists in contempt for violating an order directing them to quit harassing several Houston-area doctors, sometimes terror campaigns ensue.
O'Neill said she "pretty much ... became the anti-Christ" after issuing an order preventing anti-abortion activists from harassing doctors. Her home address also was posted on Operation Rescue's Web site and both her office and cell phones were flooded with "hate messages."
O'Neill said she was placed under 24-hour police protection too, but found out "only much later ... that there had been certain kinds of death threats against me."
Randall Balmer, blogging over at The Washington Post writes:
When I was researching "Thy Kingdom Come," I sat in on a gathering of conservative religious leaders as they were strategizing how to take control of mainline Protestant denominations. [That group was the IRD's Association for Church Renewal]. They were confident that the current struggle over the ordination of openly gay clergy and the ecclesiastical blessing same-sex unions would provide them the leverage they needed to wrest control of these denominations. For a day and a half in that Holiday Inn conference room, I heard almost nothing other than talk about sex.
Finally, toward the end of the gathering, I asked if I could pose a question. How many people in the room, I asked, had a theological objection to the ordination of women? One person out of twenty (an Episcopal woman!) raised her hand. I suggested that if this meeting had been taking place twenty or thirty years earlier they would be quoting the Bible in opposition to the ordination of women.
They were still a bit confused about my line of inquiry; I was trying to get at the historical contingency of our approaches to scripture. I guess what worries me about a gathering like this, I continued, is that if we had been meeting sixty years earlier or a hundred and sixty years earlier, when the issues of the day were, respectively, slavery and segregation, would I be sitting in this room quoting scripture to justify my support for slavery and segregation?
Long silence. "Well, this is different," someone finally said.
Okay, I responded, how is it different?
Another long silence. "It’s just different."
After another pause, the moderator suggested that we move on to the next report.
Jim Jewell, head of the Evangelical Climate Initiative makes a good point:
Over last year and a half, an increasing number of evangelical leaders have pronounced their concern about global warming, had the audacity to frame the argument in moral terms, and called for action to protect future generations. This new development has the nation's Democratic strategists rubbing their hands in anticipation and Republicans looking for liberal activists behind the every new expression of evangelical environmentalism...
But the message is different than the political parties and pundits are suggesting. Certainly the new evangelicals are more difficult to figure out, enthuse, and mobilize than the Republican Party has come to expect. But it's a mistake for the Democratic Party to assume that evangelicals who are looking through new lenses, including green ones, are drifting to the left and are ready to abandon the issues that have kept them in the Republican fold.
[Crossposted from Talk to Action]