Miscellanea Agnostica

Yes, you read that headline correctly. This is not a joke. It’s deadly serious. The reactionary, Religious Right-led Texas Board of Education has just ordered Thomas Jefferson, one of the most important of the Founding Fathers, from the Texas social-studies curriculum. The Texas Freedom Network has been at the proceedings and reported on this live, as it happened (WebCite cached article):

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

TFN has even more to say on this:

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

9:51 – Dunbar’s amendment striking Jefferson passed with the votes of the board’s far-right members and board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas.

This is just unbe-fucking-lievable. Have these people no shame? They’re so desperate to promote their religionism in Texas schools that they have written out mention of “the Enlightenment” and of Thomas Jefferson, in favor of Thomas Aquinas!

Hat tip: Religion Dispatches.

OK, so perhaps this is not news, in predominantly-fundamentalist thinking, majority-Mormon Utah. But a law was passed there, and signed by the state’s governor, which effectively pushes the state backward in time, closer to the Dark Ages than it had been previously. The New York Times reports on this development (WebCite cached article):

The origins of Utah State House Bill 12 lie in an act of dark and desperate violence.

Last May in a small town in eastern Utah, a 17-year-old girl, seven months pregnant, paid a man she had just met $150 to beat her up in hopes of inducing a miscarriage that would resolve her crisis. He obliged, taking her to a basement and kicking her repeatedly in the stomach.

The fetus survived the assault and was born in August. The attacker went to jail. And the girl, whose name was never released because she was under age, became the center of a legal debate — and the piece of legislation now awaiting the governor’s signature or veto. The bill would formally criminalize what she did, that is, to seek an illegal abortion.

This law effectively raises the possibility that any woman who has a miscarriage, might be prosecuted:

“Prosecutors have a lot of discretion, and miscarriage is a sad but common event in connection with pregnancy,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group for birth control and abortion rights. “This bill would cast suspicion, potentially, on every single miscarriage.”

Almost any kind of activity might be deemed sufficiently “negligent” or risky, to justify prosecuting a woman who miscarries … even if she did not intend for the miscarriage to occur, and even if she had no reservations about her pregnancy.

The effort here, as usual, is not to protect the unborn, as the law’s proponents claim. It is, instead, to reduce women of childbearing age to second-class citizens, whose legal rights, freedom and even their lives are compromised by the fact that they might become pregnant and thus have their actions limited by law or be prosecuted for doing nearly anything. Christians — especially of the Religious Right and Roman Catholic varieties — do not view women as “equal persons,” and laws such as this are their intended means of getting the inequality they worship enshrined in the US legal system, which otherwise affords women civil-rights protections (such as equality before the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment among other places).

It’s often joked that the Religious Right and its various constituent groups are a “Christian Taliban,” effectively no different from their Afghani counterparts of the same name, except for 1) Their religion (Christianity instead of Islam); and 2) Their existence as a militia within a lawless country. Well, in Amarillo Texas, that latter difference no longer exists. There truly is a Christian Taliban-style militia at work there … and woe to anyone they deem “unworthy.”

Note: I’m posting this in spite of the fact that I am still not 100% sure this story is genuine. It reads too much like something from The Onion for me to be totally confident in it. Nevertheless, it’s getting some play on the Internet, and the more I hear about it, the more certain this story seems to be.

The Texas Observer reports on the the group known as “Repent Amarillo” and its activities (WebCite cached article), beginning with the protest they staged at a “swingers’ club”:

… [I]magine the swingers’ surprise when they arrived at their New Year’s Eve bash to find two dozen protesters, local media in tow, holding signs and singing songs. This was a most unwelcome coming-out party.

Some protesters, mostly young men in their teens and early 20s, wore black hoodies and military fatigues. The men, Amarillo would soon learn, were foot soldiers of Repent Amarillo, a new, militant evangelical group that advertises itself as “the Special Forces of spiritual warfare.” Their leader, David Grisham, a security guard at nuclear-bomb facility Pantex who moonlights as a pastor, explained the action. “We’re here to shine the light on this darkness,” Grisham told the Amarillo Globe-News. “I don’t think Amarillo knew about this place. This is adultery. This is wrong. There’s no telling how many venereal diseases get spread, how many abortions.” The goal, Grisham says, was not just to save the swingers’ souls, but to shut the club down.

Local Amarillo authorities have — effectively — granted this group their blessing, and will not intervene:

For the past year, this Bible Belt city of 200,000 has been consumed by a culture clash between Repent Amarillo and their targets, a list that includes everything from gay bars to liberal churches. For the Route 66 swingers, Grisham’s “special forces” have been a near-constant presence. Jobs have been lost, families estranged, assault charges filed and businesses shuttered. So far, no public official has stood up to defend these businesses, which operate legally. To the contrary, Repent Amarillo has managed to turn the city’s own laws and employees into an effective weapon. Amarillo, it turns out, doesn’t have the stomach to stick up for gays, swingers, strippers or even Unitarians. Absent a peacekeeper, the conflict might end up being settled the old-fashioned way, frontier-style. “This will not end until somebody gets hurt, either us or them,” one swinger warns.

The lax enforcement is seen in how differently local law enforcement, and Texas state troopers, handled one event:

It’s debatable whether all of Repent’s actions are legal. In January, six Repent members showed up at a weekend swingers party at the private home of Cristal Robinson, Route 66’s attorney. During the party, Robinson says the group trespassed on her property and tried to block cars from entering the driveway. She called the police. Sheriff’s deputies showed up, followed not long after by a state trooper.

The two law-enforcement groups apparently had different ideas about how to handle Repent, according to a Potter County incident report. The state trooper took photographs of the Repent vehicles and filled out suspicious activity cards, which go to the state’s intelligence center. The deputies, on the other hand, dismissed Robinson’s account and left Repent to carry on.

Repent Amarillo is not backing down and is not limiting its attacks to just swingers’ clubs:

What’s next for Repent? They’ve posted a “Warfare Map” on the group’s Web site. The map includes establishments like gay bars, strip clubs and porn shops, but also the Wildcat Bluff Nature Center. Repent believes the 600-acre prairie park’s Walmart-funded “Earth Circle,” used for lectures, is a Mecca for witches and pagans. Also on the list are The 806 coffeehouse (a hangout for artists and counterculture types), the Islamic Center of Amarillo (“Allah is a false god”), and “compromised churches” like Polk Street Methodist (gay-friendly).

It is fairly easy for a group like this to operate in Texas, where county sheriffs are effectively sovereign princelings who have the power to permit people they like to operate with impunity, and who can also destroy people they dislike. So long as the sheriff of Potter county (in which Amarillo lies) chooses not to stop Repent Amarillo, they will continue their militant activities, and will ruin more lives.

I’m curious to see how truly committed these people at Repent Amarillo are, to their cause. Would they be willing to engage in this behavior in some other region where they don’t have the protection of local law enforcement? My guess is that they have neither the courage nor integrity to do so.

Hat tip: Unreasonable Faith blog.

Lots of people remain fuzzy on the “separation of church and state” thing in the US. By “lots of people,” I mean — of course — religionists who wish to use the government to promote their religion and who consider SOCAS to be a violation of their religious freedom. (To them, “religious freedom” means the power and authority to force everyone to follow their religion; if they are ever prevented from doing that, they see it as a reduction of their “religious freedom.”) The Hartford Courant reports on a Connecticut case which reached the US Supreme Court (WebCite cached article):

U.S. Supreme Court Won’t Change Order to Remove Religious Materials

The U.S. Supreme Court has let stand an appellate ruling last summer that settled a dispute in Manchester involving government and religion.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ordered a small, church-operated post office in Manchester to clear its postal counter of religious materials such as prayer cards and a collection box supporting an outreach mission among the poor. The ruling was limited to the small, storefront post office on Main Street operated, under contract with the United States Postal Service, by the Full Gospel Interdenominational Church. …

The Main Street post office in Manchester is a Contract Postal Unit, one of 5,000 mostly small operations around the country in which the postal service contracts with private parties to sell postal products, rent post office boxes and collect mail. There are contract offices in private homes, gas stations, groceries, seminaries and hardware stores. Several are operated by faith-base [sic] organizations, the appellate court said.

What fierce religionists — who want to use government to promote their religion — don’t realize is that religious liberty overall is fostered, rather than hindered, by government remaining neutral, where religion is concerned. They don’t really care about anyone’s religious liberty but their own.

I’m not sure what it is, exactly, about the Pledge of Allegiance that turns people’s brains into mush and sends grown adults into raging fits of childishness. But it does. An example of this phenomenon is that of a Maryland child who dared not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her classroom. The Washington Post reports on this stupid and juvenile event (WebCite cached article):

The mother of a 13-year-old Montgomery County middle school student is demanding an apology from a teacher who had school police escort the youngster from a classroom for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Yes, folks … as unbelievable as it sounds, a child failing to say the Pledge was sufficiently horrific to invoke police intervention! The Post goes on:

The incident began on a Wednesday in late January, when the girl did not stand for the pledge. Her teacher yelled at her, demanded that she stand and then sent her to the office for her defiance, Quereshi said. The school system confirmed the sequence of events.

The next morning, the girl again refused to stand for the pledge. This time, the teacher called two school police officers to the classroom to escort the girl to the office. …

The unidentified student was mocked by other children in her class and has been too traumatized to return to Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, according to Ajmel Quereshi, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland who is representing the family.

A school spokesman said Tuesday that the teacher’s actions were a clear violation of the school’s regulations, which are based on state law. The teacher, who also has not been identified by either side, will have to apologize to the student, spokesman Dana Tofig said.

An apology is not forthcoming, however, because the school will not allow one to be offered except on its own terms:

Quereshi said that as of Tuesday afternoon, no one from the school had contacted the girl or her family to resolve the issue. The teen’s mother tried to schedule a meeting with school officials but was told they would not meet with her if she wanted to bring a lawyer, Quereshi said.

While many Americans believe that reciting the Pledge is mandatory in schools, the truth is, that it is not. The Post article explains this:

The [United States] Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that students cannot be forced to salute the flag. Maryland law explicitly allows any student or teacher to be excused from participating in the pledge, according to the ACLU.

This is reflected in the school district’s own policy:

The Montgomery school system’s student handbook contains a section about “Patriotic Exercises” that reads: “You cannot be required to say a pledge, sing an anthem, or take part in patriotic exercises. No one will be permitted to intentionally embarrass you if you choose not to participate.”

So no, this child did not have to say the Pledge, nor even stand while others said it, nor anything of the sort. She could not be chastised for it, and other students cannot ridicule her for it, either. Nonetheless, at least one teacher, and perhaps some administrators, and school police officers believed otherwise. The Supreme Court case in question, by the way, is West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). No American — not even school children! — can ever be compelled to profess loyalty or salute a flag or anything else of that sort. It’s not permissible.

Of course, lots of people (mostly religionists) get all up in arms about the Pledge, because — since 1954 — it has contained two words they prize above anything else: “Under God.” Thus, for them, the Pledge is intertwined with their religious beliefs, and this means that anyone’s refusal to say it, is a serious and real threat to them. (Because to a religionist, a threat to their beliefs is inseparable from, and thus equivalent to, a threat to their person.) There was a famous case of atheist Michael Newdow suing in federal court to get these two words removed from it … which was unsuccessful because he was found not to have standing to sue for this. The rage that was spewed in his direction over this suit was palpable.

The problem with the Pledge, however, is not in those two words “Under God.” The problem with it is that it is a “pledge of allegiance” and is therefore inherently un-American.

Allow me to explain: The concept of “allegiance” is basically a medieval and feudal one; the word itself comes from “liege,” which was the duty of a serf to his lord (or “liege-lord,” i.e. the “lord” to whom the serf owes his “liege”). Oaths of allegiance were sworn by serfs to their lords, and were solemn promises of payment and service, and the saying of such an oath was the foundation of whatever rights the serf had, as a serf.

However, Americans are not serfs who owe service to any lord. We are, instead, citizens of a representative republic. Moreover, our status as citizens is not predicated upon saying an oath of allegiance, but on the Constitution and the rule of law. No citizen of a constitutional representative republic owes “allegiance” to anyone or anything … ever. Not to the country, not to the president, not to the flag, not to anyone.

Thus, forcing school children, or anyone else, to say the Pledge of Allegiance is a throwback to the European Middle Ages and the feudal order of that time. It is not appropriate for any citizen of the United States — young, old, or in-between — to have to pledge their allegiance to anything, in order to have their rights as citizens. (Some oaths are required by various offices that one may take; the President, for example, must take a Constitutionally-mandated oath. But that’s a different matter.) The sooner we jettison the Pledge of Allegiance to the dustbin of history … on the grounds of it being an inappropriate anachronism, not based on whether or not it’s religious … the better off the US will be. We are not serfs, and should never be made to act like serfs. Ever.

Hat tip: Friendly Atheist blog.

Birth defects, handicaps and disabilities are — according to the apparently-religionist Virginia Delegate (legislator) Robert G. Marshall — caused by mothers having had prior abortions. The Washington Post reports on his primeval, Old Testament-style thinking (WebCite cached article):

Virginia Del. Robert G. Marshall apologized Monday to people with disabilities for remarks suggesting that women who have abortions risk having later children with birth defects as a punishment from God.

Marshall (R-Prince William) made the comment Thursday at a news conference calling for an end to state funding to Planned Parenthood. …

“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion who have handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the firstborn of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” Marshall said.

“In the Old Testament, the firstborn of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord,” he added. “There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest — and with the knowledge that they have in faith, it’s been verified by a study from Virginia Commonwealth University — first abortions, of a first pregnancy, are much more damaging than later abortions.”

While it may seem Marshall’s point was scientifically supported, in fact, it was not:

The VCU study he referred to was published in 2008 in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health and suggested that there is a higher risk of premature birth and low birth weight in children born to women who have had an abortion.

The study did not say anything about “handicaps.” It mentioned only low birth weight and premature birth. Thus, this study’s content actually had nothing to do with Marshall’s claim.

Marshall has been veering away from these remarks since he said them, as the Post explains (cached):

Marshall, appearing shaken by criticism gone viral, said his remarks had been shortened in some news reports and twisted out of context. …

“No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion. I have devoted a generation of work to defending disabled and unwanted children, and have always maintained that they are special blessings to their parents. Nevertheless, I regret any misimpression my poorly chosen words may have created as to my deep commitment to fighting for these vulnerable children and their families.”

Delegate, your words were in no way “taken out of context.” What you stated was that “handicaps” in subsequent children were a consequence of having had an abortion previously. Those are your words. The “context” does not change the meaning of those words. What the “context” also does not change is that the study you cited as support for your view, did not actually support it.

Thus, Delegate, your complaint that you “were taken out of context,” and the fact that you claimed scientific support that you did not really have, makes you a double “lying liar for Jesus.” Welcome to that club.

Hat tip: Religion Dispatches (which does a good job of explaining the errors in Marshall’s theology).

In response to events at CPAC, the conference of conservatives that ended a few days ago, I’ve written, in response, “My Non-Believer’s Manifesto.” I invite one and all — religious, non-religious, and in-between — to read it.

I admit it is a challenging statement, and this is by design, for reasons I explain there. Some of you might even consider it incendiary or extreme.

But whatever you think of it, clearly American non-believers no longer have any choice to but to start asking hard questions of religionists, who believe they are entitled to run the country and even to dictate what everyone within in it says and thinks. There doesn’t seem to be any more room for debate or negotiation, because religionists in the U.S. will never engage in either … not genuinely, anyway.

In any event, my thanks to one and all for having a look at it.

Religiofascism … particularly Christian religiofascism, or Christofascism … is alive and well in the Lone Star state. The Texas Board of Education recently reviewed curriculum guidelines, with an eye toward turning public school social-studies classrooms into proselytization venues. The New York Times Magazine provides a lengthy explanation of the process and what lay behind it: (WebCite cached article):

Following the appeals from the public, the members of what is the most influential state board of education in the country, and one of the most politically conservative, submitted their own proposed changes to the new social-studies curriculum guidelines, whose adoption was the subject of all the attention — guidelines that will affect students around the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for the next 10 years. Gail Lowe — who publishes a twice-a-week newspaper when she is not grappling with divisive education issues — is the official chairwoman, but the meeting was dominated by another member. Don McLeroy, a small, vigorous man with a shiny pate and bristling mustache, proposed amendment after amendment on social issues to the document that teams of professional educators had drawn up over 12 months, in what would have to be described as a single-handed display of archconservative political strong-arming. …

The cultural roots of the Texas showdown may be said to date to the late 1980s, when, in the wake of his failed presidential effort, the Rev. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition partly on the logic that conservative Christians should focus their energies at the grass-roots level. One strategy was to put candidates forward for state and local school-board elections — Robertson’s protégé, Ralph Reed, once said, “I would rather have a thousand school-board members than one president and no school-board members” — and Texas was a beachhead. Since the election of two Christian conservatives in 2006, there are now seven on the Texas state board who are quite open about the fact that they vote in concert to advance a Christian agenda. “They do vote as a bloc,” Pat Hardy, a board member who considers herself a conservative Republican but who stands apart from the Christian faction, told me. “They work consciously to pull one more vote in with them on an issue so they’ll have a majority.” …

These folks quite frankly admit their agenda, which is to fashion a specifically Christian government, some time in the future, by turning today’s children into tomorrow’s militant political soldiers for Jesus:

The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

A lot of their reasoning is predicated on faulty logic, of course:

For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals. “There are two basic facts about man,” he said. “He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge thing.”

It’s also “a huge thing” to me, too. The truth about the Founders is that they did, in fact, want religion and state to be severed from one another. The author of the First Amendment, James Madison, said so, rather clearly and unambiguously. Don’t just take my word for that … read it for yourself, from his own pen (WebCite cached version).

The Christofascists’ reasoning is also based on more than a little paranoia and conspiratorial thinking:

The idea behind standing up to experts is that the scientific establishment has been withholding information from the public that would show flaws in the theory of evolution and that it is guilty of what McLeroy called an “intentional neglect of other scientific possibilities.” Similarly, the Christian bloc’s notion this year to bring Christianity into the coverage of American history is not, from their perspective, revisionism but rather an uncovering of truths that have been suppressed. “I don’t know that what we’re doing is redefining the role of religion in America,” says Gail Lowe, who became chairwoman of the board after McLeroy was ousted and who is one of the seven conservative Christians. “Many of us recognize that Judeo-Christian principles were the basis of our country and that many of our founding documents had a basis in Scripture. As we try to promote a better understanding of the Constitution, federalism, the separation of the branches of government, the basic rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, I think it will become evident to students that the founders had a religious motivation.”

There is much more to this New York Times Magazine article, which includes tracking out the history of the notion of “separation of church and state.” Sadly, the article leaves out the contribution of Roger Williams, Baptist minister and founder of the Rhode Island colony, which was established with religious freedom as its core. The Founding Fathers a century after him, certainly knew about him and had been influenced by his ideas. The Times adopts and relays the inaccurate claim that the phrase “separation of church and state” originated in Thomas Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists. The truth is that Williams had come up with the phrase over a century before Jefferson. One can debate whether or not Jefferson knew about it particular, but there’s no doubt he knew about Williams’s ideas and career.

In spite of this and other flaws, though, I invite you all to read the Times Magazine article in full. It does accurately relate the duplicity, dishonesty, and the subtle manipulation of the Christofascists in Texas who are trying to raise a new generation of soldiers for Jesus who will — they hope — establish a new Christian theocracy in the United States.

P.S. I contributed an article to Freethoughtpedia some time ago, which goes over the pros and cons of the issue of whether or not the U.S. was founded as “a Christian nation.” Please have a look.

Hat tip: Skeptics & Heretics forum on Delphi Forums.

Update: Religion Dispatches explores in greater detail the relationship between this particular movement and the larger national “intelligent design” movement.

Yes, indeed, this is what the Religious Right in the U.S. would do … if it could. (And it’s been trying, for a long time.) The USA Today Faith & Reason blog documents this desire on the part of several R.R. organizations (WebCite cached article):

Some folks are worried about President Obama munching toast at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast with friends of Ugandan homophobe David Bahati. But while the prayer event held the headlines, leaders of the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, made news, too.

They wouldn’t go as far as Uganda’s kill-the-gays bill pushed by Bahati. They would just outlaw homosexuality, like shooting up illegal drugs, here in the USA, according to Tobin Grant’s weekly roundup of the latest from Christian activist groups, for Christianity Today.

I’ll leave the list of quotations by multiple R.R. groups and leaders to blogger Cathy Lynn Grossman. The bottom line is that these outfits are still for real, they are still activist, they are proud of what they say and believe, they are still radical in what they want — which is for everyone to live according to their own subjective, metaphysical beliefs — and they are not giving up or going away, any time soon.

Hat tip: Skeptics & Heretics forum (at Delphi Forums)

The “Birther” delusion I’ve blogged about a couple times already, apparently has not died, even though it’s been as thoroughly debunked as anything can be. The occasion of the “Tea Party Convention” — a loose collection of paranoiacs, anarchists, and assorted other falling-off-the-cliff Rightists — has kicked up the (non-existent) controversy over President Obama’s birth. The Los Angeles Times Top of the Ticket blog reports on the persistence of this delusion (WebCite cached article):

Joseph Farah, to cheers at Tea Party Convention, again questions location of Obama’s birth

If the National Tea Party Convention hoped to keep its focus on political organizing and its message on limited government, it has had little success so far.

Capping the first full day of the meeting, right-wing instigator Joseph Farah spent much of his dinner speech questioning whether President Obama was born in Hawaii and casting doubt on whether the president was legitimately elected.

“The media, the politicians … all say, no, it’s all been settled. I say, if it’s been settled show us the birth certificate. Simple,” Farah’s said, as his remarks were cheered by the roughly 600 activists gathered in Nashville for the event.

If you don’t know who Joseph Farah is, consider yourself fortunate. You haven’t missed much, except for Farah’s insane religiofascist gibbering.

Farah runs WorldNetDaily.com, a conservative tabloid, book publisher and tireless critic of the administration [WebCite cached version]. He dismissed those who say he is obsessed with the birth certificate issue saying, “I admit it, I’m obsessed with the Constitution.”

But Mr Farah, if you were truly “obsessed with the Constitution,” you would know that it says absolutely nothing whatsoever about birth certificates. Not one blasted thing! Farah, being a dutiful Religious Rightist, inserted a religious angle into his drivel:

Farah said he believed establishing lineage was important for leaders, using Jesus’ genealogical ties to King David as an example.

Mr Farah, if you know so much about the Bible, then surely you must know that the two genealogies of Jesus that are provided in the gospels, conflict with one another (cached article)! The truth about Jesus is that no one knows if he even existed; and even if he did, his genealogy is utterly unknown.

In any event, the matter of Obama’s birth has been settled. FactCheck has gone over the matter with a fine-tooth comb and has not found any problem with Obama’s citizenship (cached article). (For those who don’t like FactCheck, here’s Politifact’s article on the subject, along with a cached version.) The “birthers” who demand an “original” birth certificate in order to demonstrate Obama’s citizenship — and who say that only an “original” birth certificate will suffice — are legally incorrect. In some jurisdictions, it is not possible for a person ever to get an “original” birth certificate … it is the property of the recording agency, not the person, so the person cannot give it to anyone. If the “birthers” are to be believed, anyone born in such a place is automatically and forever barred from becoming president. This is, of course, totally asinine and childish. But then, “birthers” are not known for being bright or mature, so it’s to be expected, I guess.