by Stanley Rogouski
When Christian Fundamentalist
preacher James Dobson was given permission to hold an anti-gay hate rally at
Safeco Field in Seattle in May of 2004, most citizens were shocked. Seattle
is generally considered to be a liberal, gay-friendly city, and the spectacle
of hordes of Bible waiving, hate-filled Christian fascists is not something
most tourists who come to ride to the top of the Space Needle or watch salmon
being tossed at Pikes Market expect or indeed want to see. Nevertheless, Safeco
Field is owned by King County and anybody with the money can rent it.
A protest against Dobson was
quickly mobilized by the city’s gay community and the Seattle Police were
fairly hands-off about stopping the protesters from mixing with Dobson’s
anti-gay Legions of the Lord. So it was relatively easy, once the rally began,
just to walk inside and listen to the head of Focus on the Family spew his
predictable venom against gays, liberals,
feminists, and just about
anybody else who doesn’t subscribe to his restrictive regimen of Christian
Fundamentalism. The sight of drag queens and out-lesbians taunting Dobson’s
curiously macho-muscular, red shirted and allegedly straight security thugs was
amusing, to say the least.
Less so was the political
nature of the gathering. A well-known conservative Seattle Voter registration pamphlets were
handed out and passed down the aisles (something of a novelty at Safeco). Young
Republicans circulated campaign literature for George R. Nethercutt, the
dumb-as-a-stump Washington State congressman running for the Senate against Patti
Murray and who is best known for his statements trivializing the deaths of
Americans in Iraq. ‘What’s going on in Iraq is more important than the deaths of a couple of
American soldiers a day.’ So much for “pro-life” sentiments among the
righteous right-wingers radio station displayed a banner behind Dobson. Rush
Limbaugh’s drug-distorted visage glared out at the assembled from center
field.
Anyway, I stayed inside
Safeco for about a half hour, which was more than enough, and then walked down
to Royal
Brougham Way.
I was about to head back to the U-District when one of the Christian fascists,
a young man in his late 20s, approached me and explained that the rally wasn’t
political or anti-gay. It was merely a gathering to honor ‘traditional
marriage’. Why is he talking to me, I thought, until I realized that my
professional looking Nikon D2H had probably fooled him into thinking I was a
member of the press. I asked him to go on. ‘Any voter registration pamphlets’ I
asked. ‘No,’ he said. Aha, I thought; he thinks I haven’t been inside. ‘Any
campaign literature?’ No, he said. ‘This is not a political event. These
protesters are just being unreasonable. I want to have a reasonable discussion
with them and they just want to shout at me.’
In other words, he lied out
of his ass (expertly disguised as his face, of course).
Intrigued, I decided to see
if I could repeat the experience, so I spent another hour strolling around
Safeco talking to Christian fascists, asking them if there was anything
‘political’ about the rally and every one of them had the same line. Oh no. It
wasn’t political. It was a rally to honor ‘traditional marriage’. It wasn’t a
rally against gays. It was about ‘love’.
It began to sound scripted.
It reminded me of just how much damage Rush Limbaugh has done to the discourse,
how calculatingly the conservatives are loaded up with the talking points of
the day and then dispatched to the talk shows and Op Ed pages.
But why were these
‘Christians’ lying out of their asses so predictably and so little apparent
guilt, and with so many identical smiles?
Is there some tenet in the Christian Fascist canon that commands them to
lie to save out souls? Were sinners like myself not worthy of the truth?
Fast forward to Dover,
PA in 2005.
In October of 2004, the local
school board of Dover had tried to insert ‘intelligent design’ into the
scientific curriculum of the high-school. The voters, wisely, slapped them down
and voted them out of office. Pat Robertson, predictably, weighed in with a
warning that God would punish the people of Dover for their decision not to allow thinly veiled
creationism into their classrooms. A 1987 Supreme Court ruling had already
clearly stated that states cannot be allowed to force schools to teach
creationism alongside evolution. So, you have to wonder sometimes why the
Christian fascists think it’s worth their time to hammer at this issue again
and again.
In this case it was. The
Christian fascists were decisively and dramatically smacked down by Judge John
E. Jones.
Jones, no secularist, no
Seattle gay activist, but a churchgoing Lutheran, a Republican appointee from a
conservative district in central Pennsylvania, cited the ‘breathtaking inanity’
of the Dover school board’s attempts to shoehorn ‘Intelligent Design’ into
science classes and clearly stated what most of us already know; That
‘Intelligent Design’ is a sham, a thinly veiled attempt to bring back
creationism (with which it is, in effect, synonymous) and the Bible where it
doesn’t belong.
The judge explained that
while evolution obviously contains gaps and mysteries, it’s still a scientific
theory that can be proven or disproved by scientific method when new facts come
along. ‘Intelligent Design’, by contrast “violates the centuries-old
ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural
causation”; it relies on “flawed and illogical” arguments; and
its attacks on evolution “have been refuted by the scientific
community.”
But what really struck me
about Jones’ ruling is that he noticed exactly what I did in Seattle the year before. Christian Fascists are shameless,
effortless liars. And in his written decision, he said so. “It is ironic,’
he said, ‘that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly
touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover
their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”