red fuzzy jesus

Ding Dong

The death of Jerry Falwell created an exercise in mature sensitivity for many activists this week.  While some had to be pleased with the news of his passing, public acknowledgments of it on the part of his enemies remained staid and polite.  On Good As You, the site’s author said “demonization just doesn’t agree with us” and that he and his partner “genuinely wished [Falwell] well.”  On Fallwell.com, a site devoted to the single mission of countering Jerry Falwell, they expressed sympathy to Falwell’s family and said,  “…there is no satisfaction in hearing of his passing. It was his homophobic bigotry and intolerance that we wanted to die, not him personally.

But one columnist in particular was not so sensitive and grown up about it. Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times unapologetically saw his death as a good thing. It isn’t that anyone dying is something to celebrate unless you’re a member of the Westboro Baptist Church.  It’s that Jerry Falwell devoted his career to victimizing every group not in the exactly-like-Falwell circle of the Vin diagram.  He was a leader in the most divisive political movement in America since the civil war.  And he found a new outlet for the losers of the civil rights movement bitter and bloated on sour grapes. 

Falwell was a pioneer of the religious right movement.  Where did that movement originate?  In a piece celebrating the life of Falwell, CNN’s summarized Falwell’s mission as “reclaiming America for God.”   (So much for the myth of a liberally biased mainstream media.)  Jerry’s decision to form a political movement for this “reclamation” came in the early 70s.  Now what could have happened just prior to the 70s that “reclaiming America” could be code for?  All those Southerners and like-minded racists that opposed the civil rights movement in the 60s did not just accept defeat and march to the funeral home.  They looked at the changes in America and the advancement in equality and swore then to more venomously and more stealthily attack liberalism. 

But they didn’t just attack minorities. They really attacked religious liberty.  Of the many inspirations for forming the Moral Majority, Falwell cited “kicking God out of public schools.”  What he meant by that, of course, was the Supreme Court’s decision against requiring kids in New York to recite a very specific sectarian prayer.  According to Falwell and those that think like him this amounted to outlawing religion.  But to many this represented the ability to worship as you choose.  Having the government dictate how and when you pray and what you say to God was not very Christian or American.  But for Falwell, that was the centerpiece for his advocacy; preventing people from believing what they want and practicing those beliefs.  And he worked to coerce every facet of government in the enforcement of his narrow beliefs.  For that reason, Falwell’s career should be seen as so much more than merely anti-Gay. 

Jerry Falwell gained a lot of criticism, attention, and much craved money from attacking gay people during the latter years of his life.  And most of the fair-minded eulogies in the press have focused heavily on that aspect of his career.  But it is important to remember that gay people were not the only targets of Jerry Falwell.  Although absent from news coverage since the mid-term elections, Falwell’s “sermons” and activism had largely switched focus to illegal immigrants and Muslims.  Having pounded on the gay fear button for over a decade, he was beginning to see diminishing returns in the amount of news appearances and donations it garnered him.  So he changed up the target to other unpopular groups to revive his appeal to the more base and banal characteristics of human sheep. 

What makes Falsani’s article so moving is her willingness to admit a sense of relief when she learned of his death.  She labels this emotion, “Ding dong the witch is dead.”  In it she describes feeling like a taunted child who no longer will be bullied by that man.  But Falsani isn’t gay.  Nor is she Muslim or Jewish or black.  She’s a Christian woman who experienced the most vitriolic attacks from Falwell and in many ways felt the impact of his bigotry most severely. 

Of all the targets-de-jour Jerry has served up over the years as agents of social collapse no one has suffered more than true, Bible-believing Christians.  Jerry Falwell was a pioneer in a larger movement to seize on the organization and communal obedience of Southern churches and reorganize them into political machines.  In two books, Jimmy Carter, America’s Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher president, describes with horror having to stand and watch his denomination change in the 60s and 70s.  What once was a place of spiritual orthodoxy was taken over in the church hierarchy by political operatives.  Gradually, Christianity was redefined for many as a political party concerned with electoral gains.  Only that which could be taken out of context and reinterpreted for immediate political gain was allowed to remain of the red-letter words of Jesus. 

This isn’t to say that Christianity was always a force of truth and justice throughout the world before it became politicized by the anti-civil-rights crowd.  People in every religion have committed atrocities in the name of every religion.  But religion in America for so long was something sacred.  Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out a century earlier that religion had been such a driving force in America because of its importance to individual lives as opposed to its coalescence by a political party. 

In 2007 Falsani feels relieved to no longer be bullied by Jerry Falwell because his death represents the death of one more person with a checklist of political positions one must sign off on before they feel comfortable in a house of worship. 

Of all the harm Falwell did to this minority or that minority, his greatest victims were Christians.  Because of him and the religious right movement, Christianity in modern America has a guilty association.  Those that value Science or education or the arts in the slightest are reluctant to self-identity as Christians because that identity has been co-opted by something decidedly not Christian.  Those that have a personal relationship with God may be loath to admit it lest they be misunderstood as affiliated with those political thugs. 

It may be overly optimistic but I really think the influence and efficacy of the religious right is on the decline.  They are dually an asset and liability in Republican politics today that it is difficult to predict what effect – if any – they will have on the 2008 elections.  They still run the party.  But how long can a party be run by a group of crazy relatives most prefer to hide in the attic?  On one hand McCain made a pilgrimage to Liberty University to make amends with those he once called “agents of intolerance.”  On the other, McCain is skipping Falwell’s funeral.      

Like many of the activists groups, I will not say I was jubilant about the death of anyone.  However, the religious right movement is graying.  Dobson, Robertson, Wildmon, and Sheldon are very advanced in years.  They are going to pass away and, hopefully, much of their ideology now appealing to the senior set will fall into history too.   The younger, kinder Rick Warren and Co. are more than happy to stand up and say, hey, we’re Christians too.  And by the way, Jesus actually said…

Jerry Falwell’s legacy is not based on anti-gay activism.  That may be getting a lot of attention in the press but gay civil rights are advancing speedily in spite of Falwell and his colleagues.  If Falwell’s career was judged on his ability to alter the course or speed of equality for gays then he would be measured a colossal failure and barely worth a footnote on the evening news.  Falwell’s great success was a modern redefinition of Christianity in America.  He could not prevent gays from marrying but excelled at unifying Christian iconography and slick political advocacy.  His fortune was really made by supplanted God as the entity deciding who is good and bad, Christian and heathen.  And his most brutalized targets were those he ran from the church and those he prevented from considering attendance. 

Falsani is probably spot-on in her expression of “ding dong the witch is dead.”  And what we need now is a Glenda the Good Witch to appear and say come out, come out wherever you are.  It’s safe you black, Jewish, Muslim, women, atheist, liberal, gay, and yes, Christian munchkins.  It may not be.  Falwell was only one in a whole mafia of “ministers.”  But it is a little safer to be whatever type of munchkin you are in a post-Falwell world and that, sensitive or not, is worthy of celebration. 

The Grandma Dillusion

Two bills have been introduced in Congress lately that mark significant progress in human dignity.  The first is a modification to hate crimes laws to include gender, sexual orientation, and disability status.  The second would make it illegal to fire employees based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation.  I know I tend to be a bit liberal but when I first heard about these two bills a few months ago I was surprised they weren’t already law.  I thought for sure it was illegal, or at least sue-able, to fire someone for being gay.  And I could have sworn women were already covered by hate crimes laws.  I was wrong.  The debate on the floor of the house before the passing of the hate crimes modifications was perfunctory, predictable, and hardly dramatic.  The bill is a shoe-in to make it to the Senate.    This does not echo the debate among interest groups.  There are some people out there that still believe you should lose your job for not following their religious orthodoxy.  And there are some out there who equate hate crimes protections for women, gays, and handicapped people to us becoming a Stalinist regime.  Guess who?

It is difficult to list, much less counter, all the insane and inane arguments against these bills floating among the “pro-family” crowd.  It is so tedious a task.  It certainly can’t be done in one article so I will try through a series to dissipate the dense fog that exists in these people’s minds.  Fortunately for the first category of ridiculous rhetoric there is a large degree of repetition.  That first argument against hate crimes laws being expanded to cover gay people is the argument I call the Grandma Dillusion. 

This insidious piece of “reasoning” uses a transparent manipulative tactic: take something that instills disgust in your followers and juxtapose it against something that engenders fondness.  For example, compare grandmothers to gay men and surely no red-blooded good Christian would support giving legal protections to the latter if it meant jeopardizing the former. 

A few examples of this are as follows:

Matt Barbar, one of the more spiteful men at Concerned “Women” for America explains hate crimes by saying, “All things being equal, this means that if your 5-foot-2-inch grandmother were attacked in her home and a 6-foot-4-inch homosexual linebacker who likes to wear lipstick and high-heels were attacked by the same assailant, the "gay" linebacker would be treated as more valuable to society, and the crime would officially be considered more egregious.”

Originality at CWFA is not a priority as Shari Rendall of the same group later writes, “A grandmother walking down the street should have at least as much protection under the law as someone who is leaving a “gay” bar.”

In discussing Conyers, one of the original sponsors of the bill, Janet Folger explains, “And he must hate…grandma. And I think it's a crime. You see, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee just introduced the "Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act" which would not only restrict our speech and remove equal justice, but it would give senior citizens (and the rest of us) less protection than homosexual activists.  So, if you're going to mug someone, better make sure it's grandma (unless she's become a lesbian) – because if the guy whose money you steal happens to be a homosexual, you're looking at a triple sentence. Go after grandma, and it's one-third off! Hey, why don't we save everyone a lot of time and just hand out "Conyers' Coupons for Criminals!"  She even has cute little coupons to encourage violence against grandma.

Monica Boyer of Illinois Voice for the Family explains hate crimes laws by saying it would “[make] it a worse crime to assault a gay man walking out of a bar than attacking a grandma walking down the street.

Another former Concerned “Woman” for America, Robert Knight, warns of the dangers of hate crimes laws by saying, “Equal protection means your grandma and your friend who lives as a homosexual have the same rights when they walk down the street. Under a hate crimes law, someone who mugs your grandmother will not be prosecuted as vigorously as someone who commits the same crime against a homosexual. This says to criminals: ‘Mug Grandma; It’s less risky.’ Hate crimes laws aren’t about justice; they are about favoritism and special rights.”  He repeats himself here in the Baptist Press.   

A stellar piece of journalism from the “Christian” "news" source Agape Press reads, "So if your grandmother is mugged… it won't be a big deal, and the law enforcement authorities may have to put more of their revenues toward the mugging, say, of a homosexual guy walking down the street.”

On their website, the Campaign for California Families asserts, “If John Doe randomly picked a lesbian and killed her because he hates everyone with a homosexual orientation, he would be given a stiffer penalty than if he killed his grandmother because he hated her. That is, the lesbian would be valued more than the grandmother.”
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_hat11.htm

Never one to be left off the crazy train, the American Family Association argues, “Under this radical bill, an assault against a homosexual man in his 30’s leaving a gay bar would carry a stronger punishment than the same crime against a grandmother leaving the grocery store.”

And one of the frequent AFA contributors, AKA Shelly the Republican, makes it clear by saying, “Let me just make this clear – you will spend more time in jail for killing a gay who tried to have sex with you then some crackhead who beats a little old grandmother’s head in for the pocket change in her purse.”

There are literally dozens more examples of this.  No one in the religious right is concerned with coming up with an original argument against hate crimes, much less a serious one. 

Anyone with a bit of education can smell the rhetorical rat in these claims.  Of course it won’t be less illegal to kill grandma or anyone else under the proposed expansion of hate crimes laws.  The religious right argues against “hate crimes laws” as if they’re a new concept that hasn’t existed for decades.

The original hate crimes laws were introduced over 40 years ago during the height of the civil rights movement.  The same Southern Baptist religious conservative crowd that viciously opposed the original hate crimes laws in the 60s is the same crowd that opposes their expansion now.  The church groups and geographical location of the opposition has not changed – only the targets. 

The four original categories were race, nationality, ethnicity, and religion.  The first three are somewhat redundant but the fourth is enlightening.  For more than four decades members of the religious right, and any other faith, have been protected by hate crimes laws.  And yet it has never been less of a crime to beat an atheist grandma over the head than a Jewish one – no matter what they say. 

The idea of hate crimes law is not to elevate categories of people over others.  They are designed to address the layers in complex crimes.  The original introduction of hate crimes laws came after a series of church burnings and bombings in the South.  The idea is that if someone comes to your backyard and burns down your garden shed and no one is hurt the crime is simple arson.  However, if someone comes to your church and burns it to the ground and no one is hurt it’s more than just simple arson.  The burning of a church sends a message to all followers of that religion within a particular community.  It implicitly threatens them with violence simply because of the faith they choose to practice.  So, in the instance of a church burning, there’s the crime of arson coupled with the independent offense of threatening a larger community.

It is not that poor gardening grandmas are valued less under the law than churchgoers.  It is a recognition that more than a simple act of violence has occurred when considering the symbolism of burning a church.  It is the same with ethnically owned businesses.  If you smash the glass at Belk and steal some watches you have committed theft.  It is a serious crime that is prosecuted.  However, if you smash the window of a Muslim bakery and spray paint racial epitaphs all over the walls you have done more than just breaking and entering.  You have used that crime to send a message to all Muslims in the community not to do business in your neighborhood.  There is an additional layer of criminality when one considers the threatening message.

Adding gays, women, and people with disabilities to hate crimes laws follows a similar logic.  If someone mugs someone for cash it’s a mugging.  However, if some thug is targeting men who leave gay bars for violence then that crime is sending a message to all gay men.  It tells them they shouldn’t get together – that they should live in the shadows or face getting beaten over the head.  There’s an additional crime present in that threat.

I know that Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, etc. do not directly advocate violence against gay people.  That’s not to say they don’t contribute to it with their constant fire-and-brimstone message about gays and feminists destroying all of society.  But, they don’t outwardly advocate it to their followers.  They do, however, benefit greatly from it.  As long as misguided males use gay people as their personal punching bags there will be all the more reason to remain in the closet.  It’s not gay bars the religious right fears gays assembling in.  It’s HRC meetings. 

If you can keep gay people closeted with any method of fear then you can slow their political progress.  The religious right’s first priority is political power and this continues to be threatened by their opponents.  If it is now a federal crime to threaten the greater community with violence, their silly radio shows will never be enough to derail the latest wave of the civil rights movement. 

So, rather than arguing why hate crimes shouldn’t exist for anyone in the first place they rely on frightening fabrications about your grandma being killed.  Religion is a choice.  You may be born into a religious family but you willfully choose to adopt that faith as your own and you also choose the way you practice it.  It is not an immutable trait as evidenced by the frequent religious conversions and general wandering agnosticism so common today.  If that lifestyle choice deserves special protection under hate crimes laws then surely the arguably less chosen, less mutable identity trait of sexual orientation deserves equal protection. 

The religious right has no sound argument against expanding hate crimes laws.  The best they can do is scare followers.  Fear is a powerful motivator in politics.  But, fortunately, so are facts. While fear is effective it is also fleeting.  Facts, however, are more sustainable as a political tool and a better predictor of ultimate success.   

Rage Against the Kids

[Warning: Spoilers Abound]

Friday night I was there with friends to see the opening night of 28 Weeks Later.  Growing up I was never particularly a fan of zombie flicks or horror films in general.  But friends in recent years have changed that and now I’m quite the enthusiast.  In addition to those friends something else has helped changed my mind.  28 Days Later and its sequel promise to transcend if not change all together the horror genre.  The original 28 Weeks did escape many of the trappings of horror movies including the low brow clichés of the Friday the 13ths of my youth – so much so that it has lead to numerous annoying discussions of whether 28 Days is, in fact, a horror film.  Even in reviews I have noticed writers having some difficulty categorizing this film with some calling it a horror movie, others just a zombie movie, and many opting for the more generic “thriller.” 

And thrill it did.  Like the recent Dawn of the Dead, the best scene in 28 Weeks might be its opening.  At amusement parks the thing that kills me is not the big drop on a roller coaster.  It’s that slow ratcheting sound as the coaster is pulled up the first big hill.  Weeks does this well.  The movie opens during the time of the first film when Britain is decimated and the few remaining survivors are barricaded in farmhouses sustaining on canned food and candlelight.  The peaceful dinner and tense conversation of this opening is tortuously long because you know what’s coming; a zombie attack.  And when it comes it doesn’t disappoint. 

The herds of people with the “rage” virus appear on the horizon and make waste of the flimsy wooden barriers over the windows and doors.  They tear through these protections so easily one wonders why the people in the house bothered erecting them.  And the nice elderly couple, the sweet young girlfriend, the gruff young male friend, and the too-cute little boy are predictably torn to shreds.  The only person who gets away is the loving husband and father who chooses to abandon his wife rather than throw himself in front of the zombies in a vain attempt to slow their rampage. 

What Weeks assumes, heavily, is that everyone who sees it has seen the original.  It’s a safe enough assumption.  The target audience for the first is the same as the second and that variety of movie fan tends to be a pretty dedicated bunch.  But I was with someone who had not seen the first and listened as she whispered a lot of questions to her boyfriend.  Weeks makes no effort to inform viewers of what is going on with these zombie people.  It has a quick text at the beginning that indicates a timeline but does not explain how these people and Great Britain got the way they are in the movie.  This is contradicted by a throw away comment about the virus not being able to jump species when everyone remembers humans got it from lab monkeys in the first place. 

This is unfortunate because 28 Days and Weeks offer the most plausible cause of zombieism to date.  Rather than some meteorite hitting the earth, a virus develops that makes people into zombies.  It is perfectly biologically plausible that there might someday be a communicable virus that completely over stimulates adrenaline while totally suppressing logic creating “people” that are nothing but instruments of pure obsessive wrath.  We get from the doctor in the film that the “others” have a rage virus but where it came from and why Britain has all but disappeared is just taken for granted in the sequel and not really addressed.

A good test of a movie like this is how affected I am afterward.  On the way home in the subway an express A train pulled in at the same time an express 2 train arrived upstairs.  This lead to large crowds of people rushing en masse to catch their corresponding trains.  And seeing two thick groups of people rushing up and down the staircase respectively made me really uneasy.  There was no danger, of course, just a large number of people trying to catch their fast trains.  But having just seen Weeks I really didn’t enjoy being in the middle of it. 

When I visited London for the first time a few years ago I had cheerful English imagery of the Queen and red busses in mind.  Having seen V for Vendetta, Children of Men, and 28 Days in the past year my more recent trip to the city on the Thames had a creepier uneasiness.  I don’t think Weeks is going to help that much either. 

Going back to transcending the genre though, horror films (or thrillers) are sustained through series of bad choices.  In order for the mayhem to continue someone has to do something stupid like run upstairs when they could slip out the backdoor or break away from the group in the woods when you know it would be safer to stick together.  Weeks manages to avoid a lot of that syndrome.  I found myself considering what I would do in similar situations and it didn’t always differ too much from the characters.  Sure, people make stupid mistakes.  The kids in the film set off the conflict by exploring greater London when they should know better.  But, for the most part, people react the way one would if hell was breaking loose around them.

They go down into a dark, zombie-infested subway, which is a stupid choice but makes sense because they’re trying to escape opaque clouds of poison gas and a helicopter.  (The opaqueness of the clouds is another issue.)  The only really unbelievable part that takes you out of the movie is the omnipresence of the zombie dad.  As the kids run and drive all over London trying to escape ragers and American troops ordered to kill anything that moves, zombie dad keeps popping up.  He’s in the building, the street, the park, the subway.  It helps to forward the silly family storyline I guess but it just seems ridiculous that these kids keep encountering dear old dad at every turn instead of any of the thousands of zombies that could come around the corner.  This is made all the more screwy when you consider zombie dad has survived sniper fire, poison gas, and firebombing in order to keep running into to his poor kids leaving one friend to make the hilarious comment, “Man, this guy really hates his kids.” 

Another funny but disjointing moment came when the kids go down in the pitch-black subway.  The doctor directs them through the night scope on her gun.  But, no matter how hard I tried I cannot disassociate night vision from sex tapes.  As the teenage daughter looks back at the night scope in rapt terror I half expected Rick Salomon’s large wang to appear screen left.  I can’t be the only person with this hangup. [Sidenote: The girl playing the teenage daughter is named Imogen Poots!  That is either the best or worst showbiz name ever.] 

All and all Weeks delivers on excitement and a passable, believable plot.  I don’t look for flawless narratives when I go to this type of movie.  I understand that I have to suspend my disbelief a little more and not get hung up on holes or cheesiness too much.  It’s not as raw as it’s predecessor but one assumes that a sequel to a surprise hit is going to have a larger budget and more blockbustery feel.  It doesn’t fail to satisfy my lust for over the top movie violence or blood splattering and it has more than ample tension building and jumpy payoffs.  And the music is surprisingly enjoyable.  It was a fun ride but not life changing.  Like my students, this movie succeeded in passing my expectations but only because I’ve learned to preset those expectations to little and low.