A 16-year-old girl has asked to have her pro-bono lawyer removed from her case after she was the only minor child not returned to the FLDS last month. The lawyer says FLDS Spokesman and “enforcer” Willie Jessop has intimidated her client. The nastiness in the name of God goes on forever.

“It’s dangerous for our children to even know your philosophy exists!” With Dems like these, who needs Iran? Seriously, I’m with Zorn: if this had been a Jew or Christian sitting in that chair and an elected rep harshed on their brand of faith? We’d never hear the end of it. But atheists are fair game, because we hurt children, or something.

Nice to see so many supporting comments at the original post, too. We’re legion, a true silenced but growing population and the fundies should fear us. Because they do our work for us, and make belief look bad all on their own.

AL gets letters:

A friend writes from Tehran:

Here the political weather is terrible. You might know that the parliamentary election is near and the reformist nearly are not allowed to be involved. About 80 per cent of reformist candidates has been labeled as unqualified by the Government. Mr Khatami and Rafsanjani had a meeting with the Supreme Leader but it had no fruit. We are waiting for much worse days.

The Iranian film festival has been just finished with no movie by great directors of the country. All movies were about Islam, religious rites and Imams. Good for Ahmadinejad!

I love my country but i really hate it. That’s iranian life. Always dealing with dilemmas.

To which I’d like to respond:  Read more 

Just because they’re my favorite people today, let’s review how much the Saudi government sucks. At least she didn’t turn him into a newt.

In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.

Human Rights Watch said that Ms Falih had exhausted all her chances of appealing against her death sentence and she could only now be saved if King Abdullah intervened.  Read more 

Well, Jonah Loadpants has yet another person to whom he needs to explain his very serious book…

Chris Hedges, reporter, 2002 Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges explores the rise of the Christian right in America, drawing parallels with the rise of fascism in Europe prior to the Second World War. How does the vision of the United States as a Christian nation relate to our Bill of Rights? Why does Hedges identify the increasing political power of Christian fundamentalism as a war against America?

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

Watch The Google Video Here

More Like This At The WGBH Forum Network. (Lambert, you’ll really like this link.)  Read more 

Josh at TPM has got a new Christianist Dog Whistle catch from Hucklebee’s campaign, and I think he’s underplaying it. It sounds simple to the point of simplistic (like a lot of Hucky’s stuff) but it is a deep and foul pit indeed once you dig into it.

The word is “Vertical.” Josh has a screen shot with the quote “I think the country is looking for somebody who is vertical, who is thinking, Let’s take America up and not down.”

So what is a “vertical thinker” anyway? Horizontal brings to mind Fred Thompson, but resist that thought and think in terms of society, and communities, and how we organize ourselves and agree to follow certain rules: i.e., government.

The short? “Vertical” means that rules—which is to say laws—come down from God Above, and all we can, and should, and must do is obey them. “Horizontal” thinking by contrast is what us old time freethinkers thought was the social contract, agreements, the coming together of people to agree, one person one vote, on what the laws would be.

Not in Huck’s world.  Read more 

Via Scholars and Rogues comes this disturbing little blerb that seems almost drugged to calmness in this discussion of what will could happen in the event of an emergency that ’requires’ martial law:

But gun confiscation is exactly what happened during the state of emergency following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, along with forced relocation. U.S. Troops also arrived, something far easier to do now, thanks to last year’s elimination of the 1878 Posse Comitatus act, which had forbid regular U.S. Army troops from policing on American soil.

If martial law were enacted here at home, like depicted in the movie “The Siege”, easing public fears and quelling dissent would be critical. And that’s exactly what the ’Clergy Response Team’ helped accomplish in the wake of Katrina.

Dr. Durell Tuberville serves as chaplain for the Shreveport Fire Department and the Caddo Sheriff’s Office. Tuberville said of the clergy team’s mission, “the primary thing that we say to anybody is, ’let’s cooperate and get this thing over with and then we’ll settle the differences once the crisis is over.’”  Read more 

Army Times:

By John Milburn - The Associated Press
Posted : Wednesday Sep 19, 2007 9:59:44 EDT
FORT RILEY, Kan. — An Army soldier who unsuccessfully tried to hold a meeting for atheists and other non-Christians is suing Defense Secretary Robert Gates and an Army major, saying his right to religious freedom was violated.

The lawsuit filed Monday in federal court alleges a pattern of practices that discriminate against non-Christians in the military.

According to the filing, Spc. Jeremy Hall received permission to distribute flyers around his base in Iraq for a meeting of atheists and non-Christians. When he tried to convene the meeting, Hall said, Maj. Paul Welborne stepped in, threatening to file military charges against Hall and block his re-enlistment.  Read more 

Today’s WaPo, Dana Millbank Dept. (with snippage):

Let us pray that, on next year’s National Day of Prayer, there is better attendance at the “Bible Reading Marathon” on the West Front of the Capitol…

Organizers put out 600 folding chairs on the lawn — the spot where presidents are inaugurated — and set up a huge stage with powerful amplifiers. But at 9:30 a.m. yesterday, not one of the 600 seats was occupied. By 11 a.m., as a woman read a passage from Revelations, attendance had grown — to four people. …

Where was everybody?

“This isn’t that kind of event,” explained Jeff Gannon, spokesman for the host, the International Bible Reading Association. Gannon, actually a pseudonym for James Guckert,  Read more 

When I was a student, I took an argumentative writing class, and one of the essays I wrote had to do with this subject. Now it may surprise you, but I argued in favor of it.

House Bill 1287 by State Representative Warren Chisum, a Pampa Republican and chair of the powerful House Committee on Appropriations, would fix this problem, they said, by requiring every Texas public high school to offer courses on the history and literature of the Bible as an elective.  Read more 

This book collects yet another classic series of posts by MJS.

Well, I’ll give them credit- they are learning. We’re all talking about religion this month, and I’d like to hear what people are saying about this sort of “attack plan.” The video is slick, and if you flit around the rest of the site, it’s rather hard to avoid feeling like all those little red targeting dots aren’t really meant for you.

Let’s not kid ourselves, ok? You moderate folks can spend all day arguing about who is “closer to Christ” and all that good stuff, but there is only one thing that I need to know in this frontline of the culture war: they want to kill me.  Read more 

…strangling last king with last entrails of last priest, etc.

A Washington, D.C., watchdog group is filing a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service against television evangelist Mac Hammond’s Brooklyn Park mega-church based on documents obtained by Minnesota Monitor that purport the pastor arranged several lucrative deals with the church.
These documents allege Hammond bought a plane from the Living Word Christian Center and then leased it and another plane back to the church for almost $900,000 a year and obtained loans –- some of them unsecured –- for $1.9 million.  Read more 

Seriously:

“This is a true festival, women will run and vote for parliament for the first time,” candidate Khaledah al-Khadher, a 48-year-old doctor and mother of eight, told Reuters on Sunday.  Read more