Miscellanea Agnostica

… or maybe I should title this post “War on Christmas 2009, part 3.” I could also title it, “Fox News Brazenly Lies.”

There will be no holiday displays in the Washington state capitol this year. No Christmas tree, no menorah, nothing … at least, according to Fox News, which at the moment is alone in reporting this:

Washington State Bans Holiday Displays Inside Capitol

The new rules — set to take effect Dec. 1 — came after repeated protests from The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Washington-based atheist group, over holiday décor inside Capitol campus buildings in Olympia.

The nativity crèche and the menorah are no longer welcome inside the Washington state Capitol after Gov. Chris Gregoire banned non-government displays, including religious ones, from inside the building.

Wow! Sounds pretty draconian, doesn’t it? The Washington state government has bent itself wholly to the will of one of those vile “atheist groups.” Right?

Well, no. Fox goes on to explain this isn’t quite what they just said it was (emphasis mine):

The rules, which were officially signed into order by Washington’s Department of General Administration on Oct. 30, still allow the annual state-sponsored holiday tree inside the Capitol rotunda.

In case you didn’t catch the importance of this, I will repeat it: Contrary to the content of the headline and lede of this story, there will still be a Christmas tree in the capitol rotunda in Olympia.

That’s right, folks … this means Fox News lied, and was brazen enough about their lie, to include the evidence of their lie in the body of their story! But to add to the brazenness of this lie, the story picks up again at the presumption that there will be no holiday displays in the capitol, as though the sentence I just quoted had not been there:

“The state government caved to a select few Scrooges or atheists, where 95 percent of U.S. citizens celebrate Christmas,” said Ron Wesselius, a resident of Olympia, Wash., who has previously displayed his nativity scene inside the Capitol and who challenged the state in court over the new rules.

Let me help you a little, Mr Wesselius: the “95% of citizens” in Washington state, actually have their state Christmas tree! Why are you denying this?

When I said I assumed I’d have several “war on Christmas” blog entries in 2009, I hadn’t expected to have three of them already before the end of November! This promises to be a contentious holiday season, folks. They’re even weaving lies in order to propagate their “war.” How very nice — and Christian — of them to do so. This also places the staff of Fox News in my “lying liars for Jesus” club.

The Almighty has decided to grace this planet with his glorious likeness … on, of all things, a clothes iron belonging to a Methuen, Massachusetts woman. The Boston Globe has the story:

Until this week, Mary Jo Coady had never given her iron a second thought. Then she saw a likeness of Jesus staring back from its not-quite stainless steel bottom.

Startled, Coady called in her daughters, both of them college students, and they saw what she saw. Then she took a picture and posted it on her private Facebook page, giving friends and relatives the same test. Everyone saw Jesus, she said.

“So I said, ‘OK, I’m not crazy,’ ’’ recalled Coady, a 44-year-old who works as a secretary in a medical office. After a challenging couple of years in which she let her Catholic faith wane, Coady found that the image had given her a spiritual boost. So she chose to share it with some others.

For the record I don’t think Ms Coady is “crazy.” I think she is interpreting the appearance of a blob of something on the bottom of her clothes iron as being the face of Jesus. That isn’t insanity or “craziness”; rather, it’s pareidolia, a known psychological phenomenon to which everyone is subject, at one time or another, and which has nothing to do with mental illness, intellect, or anything else of that kind.

For the record, here is a picture of the image in question on her iron:

AP Photo/The Eagle-Tribune, Grant Morris

Having acquired this image — however one believes it arrived there — Ms Coady certainly wasted no time exploiting her Warholian “15 minutes” of fame:

Coady first saw the image Nov. 22. She told The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence about it and was featured in yesterday’s paper; the Associated Press picked up on it, and by that afternoon a picture of Coady’s iron had appeared on more than 200 news websites. It generated dozens of anonymous comments, and the jeering tone of many of them caught her by surprise.

For all that, however, Ms Coady is kind enough to claim not to be making demands on others:

Coady is not trying to persuade others to see Jesus where she does.

But this seems a little disingenuous to me: If trumpeting this “discovery” to the local newspaper — and being interviewed by every media outlet in Massachusetts — isn’t “trying to persuade others,” I don’t know what is!

At least she’s in good company, because not far away from here in Rhode Island, earlier this year, the Virgin Mary made an appearance in the knots on a piece of wood, and about a year ago the Virgin Mary put in an appearance in a fogged-up window in a hospital in Springfield, MA.

I blogged a couple times already on a report by an investigative commission in Ireland on the abuse of children in the care of the Roman Catholic Church (such as orphanages and schools) which had been released in May. That report focused mainly on the operations of facilities, which had been mostly in the care of religious orders such as the Christian Brothers. A subsequent report, released a few days ago, delves deeper into the Church hierarchy’s cover-up, and the complicity not only of the religious orders but of the Dublin archdiocese, as well as government officials, police, etc. The New York Times reports on these additional revelations:

Report Says Irish Bishops and Police Hid Abuse

The Roman Catholic Church and the police in Ireland systematically colluded in covering up decades of child sex abuse by priests in Dublin, according to a scathing report released Thursday.

The cover-ups spanned the tenures of four Dublin archbishops and continued through to the mid-1990s and beyond, even after the church was beginning to admit to its failings and had professed that it was confronting abuse by its priests.

But rather than helping the victims, the church was concerned only with “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets,” said the 700-page report, prepared by a group appointed by the Irish government and called the Commission of Investigation Into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin.

The abuse — and the cover-up — were extensive, pervasive, and multi-generational. The Church’s reaction? I’ll relay what the Times reported (emphasis mine):

In a statement, the current archbishop, Diarmuid Martin, acknowledged the “revolting story” of abuses that the report detailed, saying, “No words of apology will ever be sufficient.” He added, “The report highlights devastating failings of the past.”

Note his Excellency’s specific mention of “the past.” It’s all “water under the bridge” for the Archbishop, it seems. How nice — and Christian of him to slough off any responsibility. What a way to uphold a higher standard of morality.

It wasn’t just the Roman Catholic hierarchy that allowed this to happen, though … many others colluded with the Church and were complicit in the abuse:

The report said the Irish police allowed the church to act with impunity and often referred abuse complaints back to the archdiocese for internal investigations.

The police said Thursday that they regretted their failure to act. “Because of acts or omissions, individuals who sought assistance did not always receive the level of response or protection which any citizen in trouble is entitled to expect,” Ireland’s police commissioner, Fachtna Murphy, said, adding he was “deeply sorry.”

It’s interesting how so many people are willing to apologize … but they’re only doing so after the fact, and essentially they plan never actually to truly do anything to express their remorse, or prevent such things ever from happening again. The government promised prosecutions, as the Times explains:

The Irish government vowed to make amends to the victims. The justice minister, Dermot Ahern, promised that “the persons who committed these dreadful crimes — no matter when they happened — will continue to be pursued.”

The problem, however, is that, as a result of a 2004 lawsuit by the aforementioned Christian Brothers, Irish courts caved in to the Church and have prevented the Commission from releasing the names of the abusers. Because of that, prosecutions will be next to impossible.

P.S. I assume that the fact that the New York Times reported on this, will only further convince Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, that the Times is “anti-Catholic.” He seems to believe the R.C. Church should be insulated from having its misdeeds reported publicly … and that the misdeeds of other churches and religions somehow grant the Catholic Church permission to misbehave. I guess these ideas, too, are part of the Catholic Church’s high moral standards … although most of us know better.

The (hoaxed) story of poor Rom Houben is one I’ve blogged about twice already. I’ve also blogged on various other journalistic failures in the past. While I’m not a journalist myself, and am no “media critic,” as a skeptic, I find the conduct of the mass media over the last few years rather galling. The trend is not a new one, it began as long ago as a couple of decades, and may even date all the way back to the aftermath of the Watergate scandal (for reasons I’ll try to address later). Essentially several things have happened to journalism and the mass media. The following are now very common … but also very bad … tropes of journalism:

1. Press-release journalism: This is seen most often in reports on medical “discoveries,” but it happens in most sciences, technologies, and even sometimes in political reporting. In this trope, some person or group issues a press release; the contents of the release are then propagated verbatim, or close to it, by various outlets. In some cases, an expert is found to comment on the story, but overall it’s just the press release itself and it’s reported unskeptically. There is little or no “news” in stories like this. Mostly they’re just efforts to sell a book, get some attention, or angle for more research funding.

2. Conclusion-based reporting: This is the trope in which the event or thing being reported is not actually the story … the story, instead, is some conclusion that the reporter has reached, about it. An example of this trope in the last few months has been stories along the lines of, “Is Obama’s presidency finished?” This is a conclusion that was drawn from things like having to retool his war effort and his failure, to date, to get healthcare reform passed. Well, I’ve got news for people … Obama’s term is not over. It won’t be for over 3 more years. Reporting on him as though he’s “finished” is not only factually incorrect, it’s absolutely unhelpful. I don’t need to know that some reporter or pundit thinks Obama is “finished.” I do, however, need to know — as an American — the status of his policy initiatives, whatever those may be. Those important facts are clouded by the conclusions being made about them. It doesn’t help and only obfuscates the truth.

3. Emotion-centered reporting: These are reports in which a token person affected by it is selected as an exemplar, and made to seem typical of it; and this, in turn, is used to make the basic story seem more or less important than it truly is. A recent example are reports about the protocol for mammograms being altered. Many stories interviewed women who had breast cancer, or their survivors, to see how they “feel” about the proposed changes. Unfortunately, while people’s feelings are real, they are not facts, and have nothing to do with this as a medical story. Sure, it sounds compelling to hear someone say she’s upset because her breast cancer might not have been detected under the new protocol, but that person’s feelings have nothing to do with the proposed change. As with #2, all this does is obfuscate the facts.

4. The token skeptic: This is a common trope found in “documentaries” about strange phenomena (e.g. UFOs), but is increasingly found in relation to some of the above (especially #1). In this trope, there’s a story about something novel or controversial or both. It includes remarks by some skeptic. Those remarks are invariably closer to the end of the story than its beginning, and the skeptic’s view is presented as a “minority” view, so that the original intended conclusion of the story, as the reporter wrote it, is actually reinforced rather than refuted by the skeptic’s presence. In political reporting, this trope appears in “talking head” shows, where “alternating views” are offered … but are presented in such a way that the “skeptical” or contradictory view is actually undermined.

5. “Trend” reporting: This is one of those wherein the error of the trope almost speaks for itself. It shows up a lot in technology reporting, but can be anywhere. A good example of this are all the stories that have run in the last year or so which — basically — say nothing more than “People are using Twitter!” Sorry, but this kind of thing is just not news. Twitter going down for a day is news, to those who use it, and only for that day … but the trend of using Twitter itself, is not. The same goes for all the political-world reporting, over the past few weeks, which basically say, “Sarah Palin has a book coming out!” Again, this is not really useful news. Sure, report on it once the book is released … but continuing, over a period of a few weeks, to interview people over what they think of Palin and/or her book, is not news. It just isn’t.

6. Rumor reporting: Gossip journalism has been around for a long time, and in some cases it can generate genuine news. But these days it’s reached pandemic proportions and has become a world unto itself, to the point where reporting on the rumors themselves is considered news. “Who leaked X?” with attendant speculation as to why X was leaked, get propagated endlessly … without anyone even bothering to find out how true X is and without admitting that not all the facts are in.

7. Celebrity news: Need I really point out that the doings of celebrities really is not news at all? That celebrities have their own PR apparati that continually manipulate the media into reporting what they want reported, meaning the “celebrity press” is really just a collection of mindless robots spewing celebrity-generated pablum that isn’t really news and that no one needs to know about?

8. Economic reporting: The plain truth about any kind of reporting on the economy, is that no one — not even the best economist in the world — truly understands the economy. So what reporters do is come up with “angles” to report on, about the economy; little snippets and glimpses of pieces of it, which are digestible and understandable to the reporters and readers. The problem is that these little bits do not necessarily represent the economy as a whole. This leads to the stories we’ve been treated to for most of this year, which alternate between, “The recession is over!” and “The recession continues!” None of this helps anyone. No useful information is conveyed. We all remain just as stymied as we were before, by the seesawing stories that tell us wildly-different things. It really needs to stop … now.

9. Press-conference journalism: This is related to #1, press-release journalism, but can be many times worse. In this, someone holds a press conference, says something, and the claims are reported as such. Very little else is looked into, and no other information is offered. This shows up often in reporting on criminal justice. For example, a police department briefs reporters on some crime. The (often minuscule) amount of information provided, is what gets reported. No questions are asked of anyone, except the police spokesman. Very few facts about the crime/event are looked into. Time was, when a crime happened, reporters would be all over it, interviewing witnesses, friends, relatives of the accused and/or victim(s), and so on. This no longer happens. Whatever the police release publicly is what we learn. There is no additional investigation by reporters. (On the flip side, defense attorneys sometimes have press conferences, and likewise their claims get reported, but the nature of those claims is also never investigated by journalists.)

These and other tropes are as uninformative as you can get. Facts get buried among all the obfuscation and failures to question or investigate. As media outlets pare down, this will only get worse, not better, so it doesn’t look as though this will improve any time soon.

As for the impetus for all of these changes … the Watergate scandal showed journalists that the “meta-news” — i.e the “backstory” and presumption about news events — could in many ways carry more weight than the news itself. In the case of Watergate specifically, the facts of the case were rather dry and sometimes a bit subtle. The story itself came in a slow dribble, with some pieces of the puzzle appearing as disconnected enigmas that only later, and in not-very-obvious ways, connected to the rest of it. In terms of the facts of the scandal as they were strictly reported, Watergate did not seem all that remarkable … not back in the middle of 1972 when those facts had started to be collected.

The real impact of Watergate only came in the question of, “What would make the President and his White House staff do all of these things?” This is not a question that was directly answered by the players involved … either they were dishonest about it or chose not to explain since they were told not to or were under investigation/indictment themselves. Moreover, a lot of drama played out as the Watergate scandal was revealed. What were the players going to say in the Congressional hearings? Would they keep obfuscating or would they spill the beans? What would the next major revelation be? Who might actually finger the President? There were some dramatic developments, e.g. the revelation by Alexander Butterfield of a recording system in the Oval Office, and that was followed by the drama of the White House reaction to demands for the tapes.

In these and other ways, the “meta-story” of Watergate, became the story of Watergate. And that “meta-story” was so powerful that it toppled a sitting U.S. president.

Also perhaps coincidentally, 1972 happened to be the year the Summer Olympics were held in Munich. These Olympic games were remembered for two features: First and most obviously, the Munich Massacre (in which Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists); and second, Russian gymnast Olga Korbut became an international media sensation, remembered for a dramatic failure (and later crying jag) during an overall competition, but for making a comeback later and winning other medals. The drama about the Olympics, and about its athletes, eclipsed the sporting events themselves.

Ever since then, journalists have tried to exploit the “dramatic” meta-news in everything else they write. Reporters routinely play up the drama, the emotion, the “backstory,” of pretty much everything. Facts? Hmmph. Too dry to bother with.

While Watergate taught us many things, including that powerful people could be powerfully corrupt, and that our leaders cannot and should not be trusted, this lesson — that the drama that buzzed around the events being reported (what I call “meta-news”) was more important than the “real” news — is not one that journalists ought to have taken away from it. But they did. And we’re all the more ignorant of our own world, because of it.

The other aspects of journalism’s failures … mainly in “press-conference journalism” … comes from the fact that there are just not enough reporters on staff at most outlets to do all the investigative work they used to. With the economy as it is and corporate media ownership being what is, we can expect “lazy journalism” to continue for the forseeable future.

Voices continue to weigh in on the hypercredulous reporting of the case of Rom Houben (which I blogged about already). Among them:

• Respectful Insolence blog
• Neurologica blog
• Pharyngula blog
• Boing Boing
• Science-Based Medicine

Yet the mass media have, with only a few exceptions (such as Psychology Today) refused to offer any meaningful skepticism about this story. They continue to be nearly as credulous as they were at the beginning.

Note to journalists: It’s long past time to come clean on this. Admit you were swindled, explain how it happened, show what you plan to do to prevent being swindled again, and fercryinoutloud, stop propagating this hoax! The only place to keep reporting this story, is on Failblog … because that’s what this is, a catastrophic journalistic failure.

A quick update on my blog entry from September about the death of US Census worker Bill Sparkman, as reported by the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader:

A part-time U.S. Census worker found dead near a secluded Clay County cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a murder, authorities have concluded.

Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, apparently was trying to preserve payments under life insurance policies he had taken out, one as recently as May, which paid benefits if he died as a result of murder or accident, but not suicide or natural causes, police said.

This story mentions the furor that erupted at the time Sparkman had been found:

Police believe he staged the details to try to make it appear he was murdered because he was a federal employee.

He succeeded in some quarters.

In addition to causing a firestorm of media coverage, the bizarre details led to widespread speculation on the Internet, including that someone angry at the federal government attacked Sparkman as he gathered census information door to door.

All those who claimed Sparkman had been bumped off by Michele Bachmann-inspired Right-wing Obama-hating socialist-hunting ACORN-fearing “militia types,” turn out to have been wrong.

By now you must have heard the story of Rom Houben, the poor man injured some 23 years ago, who — it turns out — was misdiagnosed all those years as being in a vegetative state, but who in fact was wide awake but simply unable to communicate. The Associated Press, CBS News, the (UK) Telegraph, NPR, CNN, and even Al Jazeera — among thousands of mass media outlets — have all reported this amazing story. How could it have happened, people have have been asking? How could the doctors have been so stupid or inattentive? How did they miss this? The talking heads have pontificated endlessly on how and why no one ever bothered to review poor Mr Houben’s condition or reassess his status.

There’s only one problem with all of this. The story, it turns out, may be fraudulent.

That’s right … this story which has transfixed the world for the last couple of days … may be a hoax.

To parrot the question being asked of Mr Houben’s doctors … “How could this happen? How could thousands of media outlets have been swindled?” Well, Wired magazine explains this astonishing story:

The statements of a Belgian man believed to be in a coma for 23 years, but recently discovered to be conscious, are poignant, but experts say they may not be his words at all.

Rom Houben’s account of his ordeal, repeated in scores of news stories since appearing Saturday in Der Spiegel, appears to be delivered with assistance from an aide who helps guide his finger to letters on a flat computer keyboard. Called “facilitated communication,” that technique has been widely discredited, and is not considered scientifically valid. …

Facilitated communication came to prominence in the late 1970s after an Australian teacher reportedly used it to communicate with 12 children rendered speechless by cerebral palsy and other disorders. …

Researchers said that facilitators were unconsciously or consciously guiding patients’ hands. Multiple professional organizations, including the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and the American Academy of Pediatrics, say that facilitated communication is not credible.

It was James “the Amazing” Randi who first raised the specter of fraud in this story, and who is quoted in the Wired piece:

“I believe that he is sentient. They’ve shown that with MRI scans,” said James Randi, a prominent skeptic who during the 1990s investigated the use of facilitated communication for autistic children. But in the video, “You see this woman who’s not only holding his hand, but what she’s doing is directing his fingers and looking directly at the keyboard. She’s pressing down on the keyboard, pressing messages for him. He has nothing to do with it.”

According to Randi, facilitated communication could only be considered credible if the facilitator didn’t look at the keyboard or screen while supporting Houben’s hand, and helped him type messages in response to questions she had not heard, thus ensuring that Houben’s responses are entirely his own.

Randi is absolutely correct when he said, “This cruel farce has to stop!” Now that the cat is out of the bag, as it were, it’s time for all those thousands of media outlets who picked up and parroted this story, to retract it, admit the account they reported was fraudulent (not that they were being fraudulent, but rather that the people who fed them the story had presented them a lie), and explain how they allowed themselves to be swindled.

This is a case of disingenuous “facilitated communication,” nothing more. And it’s time for the mass media to stop propagating it … immediately.

This story has even become political fodder for the Religious Right, especially those who still remember the Terri Schiavo case and who sanctimoniously refuse to let go of it. It’s even being used to whine and complain and fume about “Obamacare,” even though neither Barack Obama nor “socialized medicine” had the slightest thing to do with this hoax.

Curiously, I suspect the mass media do not, in fact, have the integrity or fortitude it would take to admit this was a hoax, take back these reports, and explain how they were deceived. Then again, they might surprise me. At least one talking head at MSNBC is expressing doubts. Let’s hope more media figures do the same.

Hat tip: The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

I indicated in my blog entry on this matter a week ago, that I expected additional installments on “the War on Christmas 2009″ … and here you are, yet more bellyaching from religionists over the holiday whose history and nature they do not even understand themselves — yet nevertheless they are furious over. The latest mêlée involves the Gap’s “Happy Dowhateveryouwannukah” campaign. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a column condemning this (to me) amusing send-up of the annual sanctimonious rancor:

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those paranoid religious folks who believes that there is an organized effort to take the Christ out of Christmas orchestrated by a clandestine cabal of secular humanist movie moguls, feminists and vegetarians who plot their nefarious attack on family values …

I am no proponent of the alleged “War on Christmas.” …

But this year’s Gap “holiday” ad campaign just rubs me the wrong way.

In its effort, I would surmise, to be inclusive and inoffensive, the Gap has made the mortal advertising (and cultural) error of being twee. Not to mention spiritually facile.

Coumnist Cathleen Falsani continues not to get the humorous point of the campaign. In fact — and contrary to her original position that she’s no “warrior for Christmas” — she proceeds to spell out reasons why Christmas is oh-so-much-more-important than every other winter-solstice-time holiday:

Christmas celebrates the miraculous birth of a savior come to redeem the world. Hannukah, while also commemorating a miracle (a one-day supply of oil for a lamp in the temple lasted eight days) and the victory of the Jewish rebellion over the Hellenistic rulers of Jerusalem, it is a minor holiday, not to be compared to the High Holidays of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur or the major festivals, Sukkot and Passover.

Kwanzaa is a nonreligious festival, begun in 1966 and celebrated nearly exclusively in the United States, which celebrates African-American culture and values. Winter Solstice marks the shortest day of the year and the longest night of the year and is for many pagans and neo-pagans the symbolic and spiritual rebirth of the year.

While each of these holidays, for lack of a more universally applicable term, is significant to different groups of believers (and nonbelievers, for that matter) they are not spiritual equivalents.

Her argument, then, amounts to something like this: Christmas, to Christians, means much more to them, than Hannukah does to Jews, or Kwanzaa to African-Americans, or the Solstice does to Neopagans/New Agers/Whatever … so this means that all those other people need to shut up, go away, and let those Christians abscond with the solstice-time, because they have subjectively and unilaterally determined that their need to celebrate Christmas exclusively, trumps everyone else.

I concede that Falsani does, near the end of her screed, point out that the chief army of the Forces of Christmas, the American Family Association, is factually incorrect in its claims about this Gap campaign — but at the same time she feels the need to add to her sniveling whine:

The “Dowhateveryouwannukah” spots have made me think twice about where I’ll purchase any last-minute stocking stuffers this year. But not for the same reason as that of the perennial saber-rattling “pro-family” organization the American Family Association, which, it brags, has been for 32 years “on the frontlines of the American culture war.”

Earlier this month the association called for a two-month boycott of the Gap because of its “censorship of the word ‘Christmas’ ” in its ads.

Oops!

The Gap ad campaign (which began running a few days after the association’s clarion call for a boycott) says “Christmas” repeatedly, and that’s precisely my problem with it. The use of the word “Christmas” — and “Hannukah,” “Kwanzaa” and “Solstice” for that matter — is so flippant and false that the cheerbots might as well be shouting “Go Hippopotamus!” instead of “Go Christmas!”

Let me help you out a little, Ms Falsani; despite your claim to be no “Christmas warrior,” you do in fact have too much sanctimonious outrage to see the basic truth here, which is that the Gap’s “Dowhateveryouwannukah” is … (drumroll please!) … a joke. Yes, a joke. If you cannot accept that, it’s because you’re too wound up in it to understand the humor.

And in that case, Ms Falsani, the loss is yours — not mine, and not the Gap’s.

P.S. to Ms Falsani: Your observation that Hannukah doesn’t compare in scope within Judaism to the “High Holidays,” just makes it all the more remarkable that you do not, yourself, seem to know that Christmas just happens not to be the most important Christian holiday. That distinction goes to Easter! (What religion columnist in the US would fail to know that?)

Mark Sanford, the moralistic crusading governor of South Carolina who this summer skipped his state — in fact, he skipped the country! — in order to visit with his Argentine mistress, may finally have to face the consequences of his sneaky behavior. I’ve already blogged about this sniveling, contemptible character — whose backers have claimed that everyone else in the universe but him was responsible for what he did — and even went so far as to compare himself with the Biblical hero King David. But at long last he faces a number of specific ethics charges, as reported by the New York Times:

Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina will face formal ethics charges on 37 counts of using his office for personal financial gain, according to a list of allegations issued by the state ethics commission on Monday.

The charges on the list include spending state money on business-class plane tickets, instead of flying coach; using state aircraft to attend political and personal events, like the birthday party of a campaign contributor; and using his campaign fund for non-campaign expenses like a ticket to President Obama’s inauguration.

The idiot triggered this ethics probe, as well as a separate impeachment investigation in the SC legislature, by conspicuously disappearing this summer:

A separate impeachment resolution has been filed in the state legislature, but the ethics commission and the legislative action so far have dealt with different accusations. The ethics commission reviewed charges of misuse of public resources, while the impeachment resolution deals with the governor’s secret trip to Argentina in June to visit a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

A legislative committee will take up the impeachment resolution on Tuesday.

It turns out that Sanford has flown high, on SC tax dollars, for a very long time … although only a few times while making booty-calls to his mistress:

The 17-page document released Monday, which is similar to an indictment, lists 18 occasions when Mr. Sanford flew business class or first class when, it alleges, “no exigencies existed to justify an upgrade from coach,” as required by state law. All but two were international flights, but in one instance Mr. Sanford flew first class from Columbia, S.C., to nearby Atlanta.

That’s just the start of it, of course. By contrast to his own behavior, Sanford has acted the role of a conscientious steward of public money, going so far as to fight off federal stimulus money offered his state, earlier this year (as reported at the time by The State):

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford on Wednesday became the first governor to reject some of his state’s share of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus money, spurning $700 million that he said would harm his state’s residents in the long run. …

Sanford turned down the federal money despite new data showing that his state’s unemployment rate had risen to 10.4 percent, the second highest in the country.

“We don’t think it’s a good idea to spend money that you don’t have,” Sanford said in Columbia.

Yeah yeah, governor, as though anyone believes you … because at the same time you were professing to protect the wallets of South Carolinians, you were upgrading from coach to first- and business-class, on their dimes. How nice — and hypocritical — of you.

Roman Catholic bishops in the US have become more militant than ever, over the last several years. (My own guess is that this is a push-back campaign in the wake of the pedophilia scandal.) At any rate, they have become more strident, sanctimonious, and intolerant. The recent healthcare-reform debate has particularly aroused the bishops’ ire. But in the midst of their having dictated legislation to suit their whims, word comes that they have — for several years — been using their positions as spiritual leaders to attempt to control the country politically.

This revelation is a product of the tension between the Kennedy family and the Roman Catholic Church to which they belong. CNN reports on this most recent development:

Rhode Island’s top Roman Catholic leader has asked Rep. Patrick Kennedy to stop taking Communion over his support for abortion rights, the diocese said Sunday.

In a statement issued Sunday, Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin said he told Kennedy in February 2007 that it would be “inappropriate” for him to continue receiving the fundamental Catholic sacrament, “and I now ask respectfully that you refrain from doing so.”

The really sad part about this debacle is that Patrick’s uncle, John F. Kennedy, was the first Catholic elected president in the US, in part because he thoroughly disavowed that his Catholic allegiances would turn him into a puppet of the Pope (which had, during the 1960 campaign, been an accusation leveled at him by Protestants). In his famous “religion speech” that year, the eventual President Kennedy had said:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote. …

I’m curious to know exactly how things have changed so much over the nearly 50 years since then. For the past few decades, Protestant ministers have been telling people whom to vote for; and now, the Catholic bishops have started delivering marching orders to their own members, including those in Congress.

For the last several years, Roman Catholic bishops in the US have pretty much taken marching orders from the Religious Right, which ironically is mostly Protestant evangelical and fundamentalist in nature. At least, that’s what I’ve been saying. And people have occasionally called me a fool for doing so. “The Protestants and Catholics hate each other!” I’ve been told. “The Protestants tried to derail John F. Kennedy’s campaign, claiming his election would put the Pope in the White House!”

It is true that Protestants and Catholics have been at odds since the Reformation, and even fought each other in Ireland through much of the 20th century. That the Catholic Church and the various Protestant sects are rivals, is incontrovertible.

Nevertheless, I have never doubted that the mostly-Protestant Religious Right and the Catholic bishops have been allied at least since the late 1990s — and finally some proof of this alliance has emerged. The New York Times reports on this now-overt alliance:

Christian Leaders Unite on Political Issues

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

“We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence,” it says.

The manifesto, to be released on Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, is an effort to rejuvenate the political alliance of conservative Catholics and evangelicals that dominated the religious debate during the administration of President George W. Bush. The signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America. …

The document says, “We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other antilife act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent.”

Of course, they’re tilting at windmills, because no one is currently talking about forcing any church or sect to marry gays if they don’t believe in allowing it. (In my home state of Connecticut, where gay marriage is allowed, the state Supreme Court stated clearly that this was not Constitutionally permissible.) There are also no efforts underway, and none even on the horizon, which would force (say) Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. There is also no plan to force euthanasia on anyone — anywhere — whether it be in a religious hospital or any other setting.

This document, then, and the alliance it enshrines, is based on a delusion.

That’s right, a delusion. Pure and simple.

At any rate, I’m not happy to report that my presumed alliance between the Catholic bishops and the Protestants of the Religious Right — along with the Orthodox Church, to boot — has finally been confirmed … but it is.

I blogged early this year about disgraced evangelical pastor Ted Haggard’s then-new effort to rehabilitate his reputation, step behind a lectern again, and thump his Bible once more. He has continued this effort, and recently led a prayer group in his home in Colorado Springs. Along with that (of course) he made himself available for media interviews. In the course of one such interview, Haggard told a whopping, demonstrable lie. KMGH-7 TV in Denver has the story:

“I was always well aware of my own personal struggles, but my desire was to be more Godly,” said Haggard. “I was never a religious right, hateful, anti-gay guy — secretly running off, except right at the end. I’d say right at the end, before the crisis. That did develop a little bit stronger.”

There are many ways to show this to be a lie … i.e. that he was, in fact, always “right” and “anti-gay.” But one example is the following quotation by him, during an interview in late 2005 with Christianity Today:

“The biblical argument could be made, but not in this particular case. In Washington, D.C., our argument has to be the fact that the greatest benefit to society and to our culture and to the children of our nation would be to instill in our Constitution that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. It would be devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization for us to say that homosexual unions or lesbian unions or any alteration of that has the moral equivalence of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.

This is assuredly both “right” and “anti-gay.” And note, he was saying it not merely as a “Biblical” principle, but because that’s what he genuinely believed to be in the best interest of children and civilization.

Welcome, pastor Teddy, to my lying liars for Jesus club.