Is it just me or...

...is the size, ornateness and majesty of any given architecture proportional to the sheer brutality of the institution it represents?

The Nativity Story

Whatever you happen to call this time of year -- Christmas, Winter Solstice, Yule, etc. -- it is supposed to be a season of reflection and reconnection with family and friends. But if you live in Northeast Wisconsin you're aware of a debate dividing people and fanning tempers.

That debate is over a nativity scene placed atop of Green Bay's City Hall. Alderman Chad Fradette, as a sign of solidarity with a town in Northern Wisconsin that has taken some heat for their nativity display, chose to put the Christian symbol up to the exclusion of every other faith in the area. When confronted by the opposition, specifically a Madison chapter of the group "Freedom From Religion", Fradette exclaimed he didn't want their "Madison values" in Green Bay. Hmmm, I think those Madison values are also those of the Founding Fathers. Bare in mind this is from a guy who bemoaned the idea of some people wanting him to check his religion at the door when legislating.

Moving on. As a compromise the city's Mayor, Jim Schmitt, opened the door to all displays. First to join the manger was a Wiccan Wreath, which was soon vandalized. A peace sign was scheduled to be set over City Hall too but never made it. That's because concerned citizen and community activist, Wendy Corriel, arrived at City Hall with a cross wrapped in the American flag, representing the merging of Church and State. Mayor Schmitt accosted Corriel proclaiming that he "ran the city" -- clearly Schmitt's "decider" moment -- to which Corriel promptly corrected him saying "No the people run this city sir, the people run this city."

The Green Bay Aldermen held a meeting to enact a few guidelines. They split with a 6-6 vote with the Mayor breaking the tie in favor of keeping the nativity scene, and only the nativity scene, up through December 26th. According to Corriel the proceedings were nothing short of an embarrassment to the democratic process. One member said he wasn't an expert on the Constitution; another, Guy Zima, debased Wicca and said "they [every religion other than Christianity] are just trying to push their views on everyone."

I'll pause for a moment and let you absorb the irony.

These charlatans are running Green Bay. It's astonishing they can even feed themselves. I mean at least learn the principle document the country's laws are based on before running for public service. Ms. Corriel is about to rightly file a lawsuit against the city as it is in violation of the Establishment Clause. It's just her way of wishing Fradette, Schmitt, Zima and the rest a very merry Christmas.

Christ Weary of Mike Huckabee: How Crazy Christian Do You Want Your Candidate, Republicans?

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You look into former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's eyes and those fuckers are spinning. Fast. Exactly how insane Huckabee may be has been the subject of discussion before, most notably in Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article on the Republican candidate and through his isolate-the-AIDS-plague-victims remarks and his "I ain't a primate" talk, but there's levels of bugfuckery in Huckabee that are so damn scary that Jesus must be wanting to make a special appearance just to say, "Whoa, whoa, don't let this nutsy fucker represent for me."

Here's a few insane tidbits:

In 1999, as governor, Huckabee declared a "marital emergency" in Arkansas and said he would cut the divorce rate in half by 2010. He signed a bill into law creating covenant marriage options in Arkansas, which forces a two-year waiting period on couples who have entered into that contract, according to the book Who We Are Now by Sam Roberts.

And then, in 2005, Huckabee and his wife changed their marriage to a covenant. Which means if Janet Huckabee wants to run away from this crazy bastard, she's gotta suck it up for 24 months and then she'll probably wanna fuck like ten different guys of different races in order to make the process move along more quickly. Here's the fun part: they did it in front of 5000 people at a Little Rock auditorium, revising their wedding vows during some clusterfuck ceremony for marriages.

In the fucked up case where Governor Mike denied Medicaid funds for an abortion for a retarded 15 year-old girl knocked up when she was raped by her stepfather, he didn't even have the balls to say it was because of his rabid pro-life position. Nope, Huckabee said that the girl was just a tiddly-wink in a lawsuit trying to get the state out of following federal law on Medicaid. It wasn't a moral stand. He had to protect the rights of all Arkansans by making that little whore pay for her own abortion (which was eventually taken care of by private donors).

The ordained Baptist minister was governor for an execution trifecta, three convicted murderers put to death on the same night in January 1997. While there's no reports of Huckabee mocking the pleas of any of the condemned, it sure seems like Jesus would at least want the executions staggered over a couple of days, maybe even a week. But, hell, we can all make up shit that Jesus might want, eh?

In one of those splendidly idiotic semantical tiffs that twisted fundamentalists love to engage in, Huckabee refused to sign a bill that would help storm victims from getting dicked over by insurance companies. This was in March 1997, after massive storms and tornadoes had wrecked a couple of towns and killed 15 people. Why would Gov. Mike object? Because the bill described floods and tornadoes as "acts of God," like virtually every homeowners' policy in the country. Apparently, it made the baby Jesus cry to hear described "a destructive and deadly force as being 'an act of God.'" And, while the Rude Pundit's no theologian, it does seem like God is fond of the flooding. Huckabee actually wrote to legislators, "I feel that I have indeed witnessed many 'acts of God,' but I see His actions in the miraculous sparing of life, the sacrifice and selfless spirit in which so many responded to the pain of others." Jesus was drinking a Fresca at that moment, and he spit it out laughing when he was told.

But here's some bottom line shit: Mike Huckabee was a low rent televangelist in Arkansas during the Reagan/Bush I era. You think in Texarkana in 1989 that the Southern Baptists would embrace anything less than a completely nutzoid preacherman? Motherfucker used to do tent revivals, was the President of the Arkansas Baptist Convention, and no less than one of the chiefest deranged Christians, Rick Scarborough, says, "I suggest that God may be sending us a lifeline. Who better to lead a nation nearing moral collapse and perhaps World War III than a president who is also a pastor with 10 years of senior executive experience as a governor?" And that should give us all the night sweats and explosive shits. When we finally see or read Huckabee's sermons from those early years, it's gonna be some hellfire and damnation.

Hell, though, Republicans, go ahead and nominate an apocalyptic sounding prick, one who believes we are in World War III, who is supported by Mr. Left Behind himself, who says of our current conflicts, "This is not like most wars and battles, which are fought over property or prosperity or personalities or even politics. At the heart of this is religion. But a perversion of religion. Islamic fascism is real, and the jihadists that have declared a war against us must be understood in the theological context in which this war is being waged." Religious war, man. Enjoy it all the way through the American Rapture.

By the way, if anyone out there watched Huckabee during his pastor days, write in and tell the Rude Pundit what you saw.

The Secret History of "In God We Trust"

Everybody knows there's two topics you can't mention in polite conversation: religion and politics. I must be a bad seed because these are the only two subjects I discuss. Being a liberal in America, where even the Democrats are conservative, I have the ability to get under a lot of people's skin. For instance, I was ranting about the erosion of the separation between Church and State at work in earshot of a Fundamentalist Methodist. When I railed against the pledge of allegiance and the insertion of "under God" the Methodist spun around and barked "If you don't like it don't spend any money because it says 'God' on all our cash. It's been like that since day one."

A pronouncement of such staggering ignorance knocked the breath right out of me. That's when I realized the majority of folks out there in middle America think God himself minted our currency with his holy moniker lovingly writ on each bill. Such is the power of revisionist history.

In reality, "In God We Trust" has its roots in the post-Civil War era, when the country was bursting with religious passion. The man who started it all was a Reverend by the name of M. R. Watkinson, a harbinger of Pat Robertson no doubt. Rev. Watkinson wrote the following letter to then Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase:

"Dear Sir: You are about to submit your annual report to the Congress respecting the affairs of the national finances.

One fact touching our currency has hitherto been seriously overlooked. I mean the recognition of the Almighty God in some form on our coins.

You are probably a Christian. What if our Republic were not shattered beyond reconstruction? Would not the antiquaries of succeeding centuries rightly reason from our past that we were a heathen nation? What I propose is that instead of the goddess of liberty we shall have next inside the 13 stars a ring inscribed with the words PERPETUAL UNION; within the ring the allseeing eye, crowned with a halo; beneath this eye the American flag, bearing in its field stars equal to the number of the States united; in the folds of the bars the words GOD, LIBERTY, LAW.

This would make a beautiful coin, to which no possible citizen could object. This would relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism. This would place us openly under the Divine protection we have personally claimed. From my hearth I have felt our national shame in disowning God as not the least of our present national disasters.

To you first I address a subject that must be agitated."

Chase's response? To start drafting a working slogan immediately. OUR GOD AND OUR COUNTRY and GOD, OUR TRUST were some early versions of the would-be national motto. But in April of 1864 Congress approved the more familiar phrase "In God We Trust" to be placed on our coins. It is important to note that at this point "In God We Trust" wasn't obligatory and it was only placed on coinage not paper currency.

Fast forward to 1957 with another religious revival in America. This decade saw the emergence of Rev. Billy Graham who used scare tactics to fuel his religious movement. Rev. George Docherty petitioned for an amended pledge of allegiance to include "under God" and received his wish on Flag Day of 1954. We had atheist enemies namely the Soviet Union who had nukes pointed right at us, so we obliged with a couple Earth-decimating warheads of our own. We weren't "heathens" like those reds, but we needed a way to demonstrate this fact. The 84th Congress came up with a solution. They declared us a Christian Nation by making "In God We Trust" our national motto. It wouldn't be long before our paper currency appeared with the shiny new maxim. Now it was mandatory. Every denomination would bear it, and by the mid-'60s the transformation would be complete. America had always been and always will be Judeo-Christian.

What would the Founders think? That's easy enough to determine, just look at what they said about religious/governmental overlap. The most obvious opponent of such a take-over is Thomas Jefferson.

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man
and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his
worship,that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not
opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American
people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus
building a wall of separation between Church and State."

A powerful condemnation of the concept of "In God We Trust" if I ever heard one. It doesn't end there. According to the Constitution itself:

"Article VI: Clause 3: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned,
and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and
judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be
bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious
Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust
under the United States."

There are several more examples but in the interest of brevity I'll include one more. This time from James Madison who said "The settled opinion here is, that religion is essentially distinct from civil Government, and exempt from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to both."

But, oh yeah, they used "Creator" once in the Declaration of Independence that's a lot to hang your hat on if you ask me.

Most every religion believes under its instruction society would benefit most. That's exactly why we need a sturdy wall of separation. I'd like to offer Thomas Paine as a decisive rebuttle.

"An unjust composition never fails to contain error and falsehood. Therefore an
unjust connection of ideas is not derived from nature, but from the imperfect
composition of man. Misconnection of ideas is the same as misjudging, and has no
positive existence, being merely a creature of the imagination; but nature and
truth are real and uniform; and the rational mind by reasoning, discerns the
uniformity, and is thereby enabled to make a just composition of ideas, which
will stand the test of truth. But the fantastical illuminations of the credulous
and superstitious part of mankind, proceed from weakness, and as far as they
take place in the world subvert the religion of REASON, NATURE and TRUTH."

Instead of "In God We Trust" our money should claim "In REASON, NATURE and TRUTH we Trust." We should not bow to the tyranny of dogma but seek to invalidate it.

Before 1957:

After 1957:

The ageless wisdom of Christopher Hitchens

Anyone who knows me can figure out that I don't see eye to eye with Hitchens on everything *cough* Iraq *cough* but I will say that he argues the case for that clusterfuck better than any other war apologist out there. When it comes to matters of history and political philosophy he's peerless. These clips are fine examples of Hitch's acid-tongued insights:

Hitchens calls Falwell a "toad" and "huckster"



Hitchens visits Hannity's America



The Moral Necessity of Atheism

Religious Triple Feature

Trouble With Atheism



Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion



Life of Buddha