June 25, 2008 | 11:21 pm

James Dobson doesn’t speak for me either

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Follow me on

I consider myself a liberal evangelical Christian, and I’ve said before that Focus on the Family founder James Dobson doesn’t speak for me. I assumed there were many more who shared that sentiment. Indeed there are, coalesced around a new website of anti-Dobson fellow travelers. It’s called, quite fittingly, James Dobson Doesn’t Speak For Me, and here is what it says:

James Dobson doesn’t speak for me.

He doesn’t speak for me when he uses religion as a wedge to divide;

He doesn’t speak for me when he speaks as the final arbiter on the meaning of the Bible;

James Dobson doesn’t speak for me when he uses the beliefs of others as a line of attack;

He doesn’t speak for me when he denigrates his neighbor’s views when they don’t line up with his;

He doesn’t speak for me when he seeks to confine the values of my faith to two or three issues alone;

What does speak for me is David’s psalm celebrating how good and pleasant it is when we come together in unity;

Micah speaks for me in reminding us that the Lord requires us to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with Him;

The prophet Isaiah speaks for me in his call for all to come and reason together and also to seek justice, encourage the oppressed and to defend the cause of the vulnerable;

The book of Nehemiah speaks for me in its example to work with our neighbors, not against them, to restore what was broken in our communities;

The book of Matthew speaks for me in saying to bless those that curse you and pray for those who persecute you;

The words of the apostle Paul speak for me in saying that words spoken and deeds done without love amount to nothing.

The apostle John speaks for me in reminding us of Jesus’ command to love one another. The world will know His disciples by that love.

These words speak for me. But when James Dobson attacks Barack Obama, James Dobson doesn’t speak for me.

Amen.

June 25, 2008 | 3:31 pm

From blood to booze, Baghdad’s coming back

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Not quite. But Newsweek reports that signs of secular life have returned.

The floor-to-ceiling shelves are kept stocked with Johnnie Walker, Chivas Regal and a mysterious clear liquid in bottles plastered with the Hertz logo. Until a few months ago, buyers often had the storekeeper disguise their purchases, pouring their whisky into soft-drink bottles before venturing back to the street. Now the trade is brisk and wide open. It’s fueling Khalaf’s dreams of getting back in the business, maybe even opening a casino—one of those dimly lit rooms where Iraqi men sip drinks while playing cards or backgammon.

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June 25, 2008 | 12:44 pm

Religion has role in presidential election—who knew?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From the Department of Unobservant Reporting, U.S. News & World Report shows just how out of touch they are with this story about religion and the presidential election:

Anybody who thought faith and the values voters wouldn’t play a big role in the next presidential election might be having second thoughts by now.

That is the first sentence, and it’s all I read. And all I will read. Any reporter who thinks I’m so stupid as to not have noticed that religion has been tantamount to both political pandering and liabilities—from Hillary Clinton to Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to John McCain to Barack Obama—well, they really aren’t worth reading.

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June 25, 2008 | 10:13 am

‘The Betrayal of Judas’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Gospel of Judas codex

What happens when a media company with visions of books and TV specials brokers conditional access of an ancient manuscript? Well, if the saga of “The Gospel of Judas” is any indication, it doesn’t end well. And why should it? National Geographic required a ridiculous level of secrecy, which has fueled tension and division in the small academic community since the company announced in 2006 it had acquired the Judas manuscript and handed it over to a few prominent scholars for interpretation.

“The Gospel of Judas” recast Judas as a good guy, Jesus’ favorite disciple. Not a betrayer but close confidant who followed Christ’s order to hand him over to the Romans. The Judas codex was written after Judas’ death and is considered pure fiction, but at least a window into how a Christian sect saw the most notorious turncoat in history. It was good TV and created a cottage industry of for book publishers, but it was based on limited research and, many biblical scholars claimed, sloppy scholarship. The Chronicle of Higher Education digs deep into this story to see what went wrong in “The Betrayal of Judas”:

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June 24, 2008 | 8:39 pm

God arrested for selling cocaine in Tampa

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Well, as you can imagine, the suspected pusher wasn’t the God. He was God Lucky Howard—how do people get these names?—a mortgage broker who was arrested yesterday for allegedly selling cocaine within 1,000 feet of a church, school or public housing. This has got to be an extension of taking the Lord’s name in vain, right?

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June 24, 2008 | 3:31 pm

World Jewish Congress moves to the Capitol

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I reported after the 2006 November election that the number of Jews in Congress had reached an all-time high: 30 members in the House and a whopping 13 in the Senate.

“Jews are just political animals,” said Steven Windmueller, dean of the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

“Politics sort of is the Jewish religion,” he added. “There is just such a passion for being in the game, in the process. Jewish life thrives in societies where democracies work, and that is why there is such a heavy buy-in into the American political process.”

Now, Haaretz‘s Shmuel Rosner writes that Jewish representation could climb even higher this fall.

It is a silly question, I know that. Only fellow obsessive-Jew-counters will understand the temptation to try and predict whether the 2008 Congress will break the record number of Jewish legislators that was established in the 2006 election cycle.

But here we are, doing exactly that.

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June 24, 2008 | 2:04 pm

Call me Scoop

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Gene Weingarten has a satirical column in today’s Washington Post bidding a long-due goodbye to copy editors. (“Because the job requires patience, maturity, intelligence, attention to detail, and an extremely sedentary workday, fat old Jewish ladies have often made good copyeditors.”) It’s pretty funny, and I especially enjoyed his colorful description of reporters from the “His Girl Friday” era (complete film after the jump):

Copyeditors were once an important part of the journalism process, back when journalists weren’t as educated as they are now. Back then, your typical reporter was named ‘Scoop” and he was a semi-literate cigar-smoking, fannie-pinching drunk with bad teeth in a wrinkled suit and a card that said PRESS stuck in the hat-band of his fedora, and they’d generate their stories by bribing sources, pistol-whipping people into talking, eavesdropping from inside closets, etc. A reporter was hired for cheek and muscle, not their writing skill, so you needed an extra layer of editing.

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June 24, 2008 | 12:19 pm

James Dobson and Obama’s fruitcake

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Well, it looks like James Dobson, conservative Christian extraordinaire, is coming around on John McCain. On his pre-recorded Focus on the Family radio program tonight, Dobson will accuse Barack Obama of manipulating the Bible and having a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution. I don’t even know what that means, but thanks for pretending to speak for me, Dr. Dobson.

Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.”

“Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles,” Obama said.

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament.

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.

“... He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

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June 24, 2008 | 11:51 am

Hillary Clinton and Capitol Hill Jesus

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Speaking of “The Family,”, the secret fundamentalist group with a surprising hand in American and foreign politics, the organization is not, I repeat not, limited to Republicans. One prominent Democrat affiliated with this new world order is Hillary Clinton, who either isn’t the Antichrist after all or is overcompensating like Barack Obama at AIPAC. The details appear in this story, again by Jeff Sharlet, about Clinton’s own personal Jesus and religious references on the campaign trail, from Mother Jones:

Such references to spiritual warfare—prayer as battle against Satan, evil, and sin—might seem like heavy evangelical rhetoric for the senator from New York, but they went over well with the Sojourners audience, as did her call to “inject faith into policy.” It was language that recalled Clinton’s Jesus moment a year earlier, when she’d summoned the Bible to decry a Republican anti-immigrant initiative that she said would “criminalize the good Samaritan…and even Jesus himself.” Liberal Christians crowed (“Hillary Clinton Shows the Way Democrats Can Use the Bible,” declared a blogger at TPMCafe) while conservative pundits cried foul, accusing Clinton of scoring points with a faith not really her own.

In fact, Clinton’s God talk is more complicated—and more deeply rooted—than either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the gop, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics. Over the past year, we’ve interviewed dozens of Clinton’s friends, mentors, and pastors about her faith, her politics, and how each shapes the other. And while media reports tend to characterize Clinton’s subtle recalibration of tone and style as part of the Democrats’ broader move to recapture the terrain of “moral values,” those who know her say there’s far more to it than that.

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. “A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation,” says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. “I don’t….there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer.”

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June 24, 2008 | 11:49 am

Server problems

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Jewishjournal.com was offline for the past while. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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June 23, 2008 | 9:30 pm

The Obama camp’s delicate dance *

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Obama poses after the hijab incident

I’ve been uncomfortable with the word “smear” since Barack Obama began refuting the rumors that he was a Muslim (and yet the term has appeared in at least two headlines on this blog). Calling the Muslim designation a smear suggests that we Americans have, at best, an automatic aversion to followers of Islam. Indeed, Muslims have clearly been stigmatized in the West during the past few decades, and particularly past seven years, but this shouldn’t be the case.

Obama’s campaign obviously has walked a tight rope in dispelling the Muslim myths: They want to assure Christians and Jews that Obama is their guy while not alienating Muslims inclined to vote for him. Amy Chozick had a good article about this pickle in today’s Wall Street Journal:

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June 23, 2008 | 5:23 pm

Terror cell member sentenced for plotting LA attacks

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Washington

Levar Washington, a prison convert to an extremist brand of Islam, was sentenced today to 22 years for planning to blow up Los Angeles military institutions, synagogues and the Israeli consulate. Washington and two other members of the cell pleaded guilty in December:

Torrance police stumbled on the cell when they arrested Washington and Patterson in a string of gas station robberies intended to raise money for the planned attacks.

A search of Washington’s apartment yielded “jihadist” literature, a cache of weapons, a target list and a lead to James as the JIS leader. A search of the latter’s cell produced the draft of a press release to be issued after the first attack, which included a warning to “sincere Muslims” to avoid potential targets, including “Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of an Israeli state.”

Listed as planned targets were National Guard and military installations and a range of Jewish targets, such as the “Headquarters of Zion,” followed by the address of the Israeli consulate, an unexplained “Camp site of Zion,” and the El Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles International Airport—the site of a murderous rampage in 2002, which killed two Israeli Americans—and two synagogues.

The irony is that this terror cell was discovered by chance, whereas several cases that the U.S. Department of Justice brought against alleged terrorist organizations and individuals turned into international embarrassments because of shoddy investigative work and overzealous prosecutors. And I thought terrorists were the dumb ones?

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