May 21, 2007 | 3:18 pm

Anti-Darwinist is national school board shoo-in

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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There is one person running for president-elect of the National Association of State Boards of Education, the NY Times reports—a member of the Kansas school board who supported efforts to not teach evolution.

The candidate is Kenneth R. Willard, a Kansas Republican who voted with the conservative majority in 2005 when the school board changed the state’s science standards to allow inclusion of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. Voters later replaced that majority, but Mr. Willard, an insurance executive from Hutchinson, retained his seat. If he becomes president-elect of the national group, he will take office in January 2009.

The group, based in Washington, is a nonprofit organization of state school boards whose Web site (www.nasbe.org) says it “works to strengthen state leadership in educational policymaking.”

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“We don’t set curriculum standards or anything like that,” Mr. Willard said of the national organization, adding that it handled issues like advising state boards on how to deal with governance concerns or influxes of immigrant students or ways to raise academic achievement among members of disadvantaged groups.

He said, though, that he personally thought students should be taught about challenges to the theory of evolution, like intelligent design. And while he said he had not heard of a possible challenge to his candidacy, Mr. Willard added that he was not surprised by it.

“Some people are mindless about their attacks on anyone questioning anything Darwin might have said,” Mr. Willard said.

 

As I’ve written before, plenty of scientists—though not the majority—see no conflict between evolution and the creation of life by God above.

May 21, 2007 | 9:15 am

Larry Flynt: Godspeed, Falwell

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“The porn king and the preacher,” a sketch drawing of Larry Flynt sitting in bed, staring at a nudie mag with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, thumbing through the Bible, by his side—that was the cover of yesterday’s Opinion section in the LA Times. The cover opinion piece was a first person appreciation of Falwell, who died Tuesday, and it was far more interesting than the other Falwell stories I’ve mentioned here.

Falwell and Flynt were for years pitted in an incredibly ugly freedom-of-speech battle. Flynt had been a whipping boy for Falwell’s preaching, and Hustler’s hero decided to fight back. His magazine ran a spoof in which Jerry Falwell was purportedly describing his “first time”—in an outhouse with his mom, “drunk off our God-fearing asses.”

The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Flynt won. It remains a critical free-speech case taught in universities and law schools.

THE FIRST TIME the Rev. Jerry Falwell put his hands on me, I was stunned. Not only had we been archenemies for 15 years, his beliefs and mine traveling in different solar systems, and not only had he sued me for $50 million (a case I lost repeatedly yet eventually won in the Supreme Court), but now he was hugging me in front of millions on the Larry King show.

It was 1997.

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In the years that followed and up until his death, he’d come to see me every time he was in California. We’d have interesting philosophical conversations. We’d exchange personal Christmas cards. He’d show me pictures of his grandchildren. I was with him in Florida once when he complained about his health and his weight, so I suggested that he go on a diet that had worked for me. I faxed a copy to his wife when I got back home.

The truth is, the reverend and I had a lot in common. He was from Virginia, and I was from Kentucky. His father had been a bootlegger, and I had been one too in my 20s before I went into the Navy. We steered our conversations away from politics, but religion was within bounds. He wanted to save me and was determined to get me out of “the business.”

My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.

He was definitely selling brimstone religion and would do anything to add another member to his mailing list. But in the end, I knew what he was selling, and he knew what I was selling, and we found a way to communicate.

I always kicked his ass about his crazy ideas and the things he said. Every time I’d call him, I’d get put right through, and he’d let me berate him about his views. When he was getting blasted for his ridiculous homophobic comments after he wrote his “Tinky Winky” article cautioning parents that the purple Teletubby character was in fact gay, I called him in Florida and yelled at him to “leave the Tinky Winkies alone.”

When he referred to Ellen Degeneres in print as Ellen “Degenerate,” I called him and said, “What are you doing? You don’t need to poison the whole lake with your venom.” I could hear him mumbling out of the side of his mouth, “These lesbians just drive me crazy.” I’m sure I never changed his mind about anything, just as he never changed mine.

I’ll never admire him for his views or his opinions. To this day, I’m not sure if his television embrace was meant to mend fences, to show himself to the public as a generous and forgiving preacher or merely to make me uneasy, but the ultimate result was one I never expected and was just as shocking a turn to me as was winning that famous Supreme Court case: We became friends.

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May 21, 2007 | 8:50 am

Jimmy Carter gets cold feet

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Former President Jimmy Carter was just on NBC’s “Today” for an exclusive interview responding to his comments Friday that the Bush administration is “the worst in history.”

Not surprisingly, and entirely unconvincingly, the former peanut farmer backed away from his damning comments about the former oil man. Speaking with Meredith Viera, Carter said his comments were “careless” and claimed that when he said “worst in history,” he was only comparing Bush to Nixon and only on the issues of foreign policy.

Plenty of notable scholars—and The Donald—have shown far more chutzpah when talking about George W. Bush.

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May 20, 2007 | 3:34 pm

Gingrich to Liberty grads: beware ‘radical secularism’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Delivering the commencement at the conservative university founded by fundamentalist Christian Jerry Falwell only four days after the reverend’s death, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich encouraged the young graduates to confront “the growing culture of radical secularism” with Christian values. From AP:

‘‘A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot profess the truths on which it was founded,’’ Gingrich said.

‘‘We are told that our public schools can no longer invoke the creator, nor proclaim the natural law nor profess the God-given quality of human rights.

                                                                                                        ‘‘In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms.”

Read the entire speech at Liberty University here. The Virginian-Pilot offered a bit more color about the mood on campus following the death of Falwell, a man who though more conservative and confrontational than most evangelical Christians helped galvanize the community’s political power.

(The photo is from conspiracyworld.com)

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May 20, 2007 | 10:23 am

Muslim run-down at UC Irvine

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Just when it seems religious tension at UC Irvine can’t get any higher ...

Last week, the Muslim Student Union held a series of rallies centered around the theme “Israel: Apartheid Resurrected,” and on Monday night, Yasser Ahmed claims he was followed by an unmarked sedan as he drove a moving truck from a parking lot to UCI’s Free Speech Zone. From the LA Times:

Ahmed, 21, said he got out of the truck, walked to the car and asked the driver why he was following him. The driver did not respond, Ahmed said, and he tried to snap a photo of the license plate with his cellphone camera. At that point, Ahmed said, the car nudged him with its front bumper and he got out of the way. He was not injured.

The man behind the wheel drove off but was stopped almost immediately by a campus police officer, who had responded to cries for help from Ahmed and other students. The driver identified himself as an FBI agent “who was doing surveillance,” Henisey said.

On Friday, Ahmed, an economics major and lifelong Orange County resident, said he was still reeling.

“He didn’t open his window and didn’t let me know who he was. He never said anything,” Ahmed said. “All he had to say was that he was FBI or law enforcement and this wouldn’t have happened. I was frightened. He pushed me with the car, which had tinted windows and then tried to drive away. What’s one supposed to think?”

The incident, which is under investigation, comes a year after an FBI agent was quoted telling a Newport Beach business group that the bureau was “monitoring” Muslims at UCI and USC.

In other anti-Israel campus news: This morning at UCLA, “a diverse group of Southern California activists, both       secular and from all religions, and including Arabs and       Israelis” will host an event called Israel, Zionism and Apartheid.

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May 19, 2007 | 10:38 am

Carter: Bush ‘worst in history’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Former President Carter had those and other choice words to say of President Bush in an interview Friday with Bible Belt Blogger Frank Lockwood. The story and some audio excerpts are online.

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including [those of] George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me,” Carter said.

The 39th president said that during Bush’s two terms in office, he has radically departed from every other U.S. president.

“We have a new policy now on war,” Carter said. “We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered. But that’s been a radical departure from all previous administration policies.”

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“Individual churches and religious seminaries and other strictly religious organizations have their own lobbyists now in Washington to make sure they get their share of taxpayers’ funds. And, as you know, the policy from the White House has been to allocate funds to religious institutions, even those that channel those funds exclusively to their own particular group of believers in a particular religion. Those things in my opinion are quite disturbing,” Carter said.

“As a traditional Baptist, I’ve always believed in separation of church and state and honored that premise when I was president, and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one.”

Carter is, of course, no hero to the Jewish community.

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May 18, 2007 | 11:02 pm

Tony Blair going Catholic

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

And not in the universal sense. Indeed, when the prime minister of the nation that created Anglicism leaves Downing Street next month, The Times of London is reporting he will cleave to the Roman Catholic Church and, by expectation, the pope.

Interesting, because Tony Blair was President Bush’s best buddy in the Western World during the past six years, and Britain was the only nation of any previous military stature in the Coalition of the Willing. The war in Iraq obliterated Bush’s popularity, yes, but also Blair‘s and his Labour Party. But now Blair reportedly plans to join the Catholic Church. The late Pope John Paul II vehemently opposed the war, which he said “threatens humanity.”

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May 18, 2007 | 10:33 am

The ‘Original Jew’ dead

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

God is dead.

Well, not The God, but the black supremacist leader Yahweh Ben Yahweh, which in my limited Hebrew translates, “God, son of God.”

The 71-year-old self-proclaimed “Original Jew” had tried a number of fringe religious groups before starting his own, the Nation of Yahweh. Among those who call themselves Black Hebrews, Yahweh, born Hulon Mitchell Jr., believed today’s Jews to be impostor Israelites.

From The Washington Post, via the LA Times:

From the beginning, however, Yahweh’s group was associated with an intimidating style that often crossed into violence and murder. He railed against “white devils” and proclaimed himself the messiah: “All who receive me shall be saved from immorality and death.”

Still, he managed to cultivate an image as a well-meaning, if eccentric, community builder. Yahweh helped clean up blighted neighborhoods and, at least among his followers, restored a sense of order to a crumbling social structure. Children studied Hebrew and recited the names of chemical elements.

He spoke to crowds of thousands around the country and received the blessings of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In 1987, the Miami Urban League gave Yahweh its highest humanitarian award, and its president pronounced him “an inspiration to the entire community.”

In 1992, two years after the Miami mayor declared Oct. 7 Yahweh Ben Yahweh Day, the religious leader began a nine-year prison stint for conspiracy to commit murder.

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May 18, 2007 | 9:57 am

Jesuits to pay $16 million for dirty hands

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Jesuit order has agreed to a payout of $16 million to the families of nine children allegedly molested by Father Mark Falvey, who died 31 years ago. Via the LA Times:

“One of his victims, an 8-year-old girl, tried to commit suicide,” said the lawyer for the victims, Raymond P. Boucher.

“This guy brought a lifetime of misery to a group of young children. They’ll never get over it,” Boucher said.

Though the Archdiocese of L.A. was not involved in this settlement, the news two days after L.A.‘s Cardinal Roger Mahony announced clergy-abuse lawsuits may force the largest Catholic archdiocese in the country to sell its headquarters and other buildings.

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May 17, 2007 | 2:19 pm

Final Falwell: On Islam

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Council on American-Islamic Relations blasts a daily news letter, and at the top of each letter is the “Hadith of the Day.” Well, Bruce Tomaso of the Dallas Morning News noticed Tuesday’s message seemed a little too poignant for coincidence. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who after 9/11 called Islam’s Prophet Muhammad a terrorist, had just died, and Tuesday’s letter didn’t mention Falwell. But the hadith seemed to:

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “Do not speak ill of the dead, (for) they have seen the result of (their past deeds).”

—Fiqh-us-Sunnah, Volume 4, Number 76

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May 17, 2007 | 12:19 pm

Falwell for Israel

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

That’s what Zev Chafets had to say about the late Rev. Jerry in an op-ed that read like an appreciation in yesterday’s LA Times:

He believed that God had a plan for the United States and that its enemies were evil. He referred to Muslim radicals as “barbarians” and advocated taking out Iran’s nuclear capacity by force. “Bush is probably too weak politically to do it,” he told me over barbecue one afternoon. “It will be up to Israel. And we’ll be at the White House, cheering.”

Falwell’s Zionism was by no means inevitable. Before him, evangelicals reluctantly acknowledged that the Jews were God’s chosen people, but many didn’t quite agree with the choice. Falwell embraced the Jews of Israel (who appreciated his friendship) just as he embraced American Jews (who, by and large, spurned it). He could be acerbic about Jewish leaders — he called Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League a “damn fool” and pointedly told me that the comment was on the record — but he never let Jewish hostility shake his philo-Semitism. American Jews who now take evangelical friendship for granted need to know that it is, to a large extent, a grant from Jerry Falwell.

During Israel’s war with Hezbollah last summer, Chafets, who is Jewish, wrote a piece titled “I Want Falwell in My Foxhole,” in which he discussed evangelical support for Israel and stated, “I’d rather be in a bomb shelter—or a foxhole—with Jerry Falwell than with Jerry Seinfeld.”

(Round-up of Falwell’s choicest quotes on Jewlicious.)

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May 16, 2007 | 9:28 pm

Another anti-Semitic incident in Sherman Oaks

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A reportedly anti-Semitic letter documenting the origin of the word Jew was received today by the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in Sherman Oaks—as if that JCC didn’t have a big enough problem. It’s being investigated as a “hate incident” because no threat was made, authorities said.

Two weeks ago, employees of Councilman Jack Weiss arrived at his Sherman Oaks district office to find three swastikas and an incoherent rant—containing such pleasantry as “We’ll have a homoerotic cop feeling up your Jewish ass in no time!!!”— epoxied to their office doors. Adonis Irwin was arrested and has been charged with three felony counts.

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