Conservative Irony: Update

“And this is why we might suggest conservatives don’t do irony well. Sometimes it really does seem like a bad joke, when equality means supremacy, and freedom means the power to strip others of their rights.”

—B.D.

Just a brief update on the NCLP, a moronic cohort who believe physical fitness is a religion.

They lost:

A San Diego Superior Court judge rejected a claim Monday by parents in the Encinitas elementary school system that teaching yoga in the schools is an improper attempt at religious indoctrination.

The ruling by Judge John Meyer, who heard the case without a jury, means that the Encinitas Union School District can continue to teach yoga as part of a health and exercise curriculum.

Dean Broyles, president and attorney for the Escondido-based National Center for Law and Policy, had filed a lawsuit on behalf of a couple with two children in the school system. The suit sought to have the program ousted as a violation of state law prohibiting the teaching of religion in public schools.

Broyles said having yoga in the schools “represents a serious breach of the public trust.”

But Meyer sided with the school district’s explanation that it has taken out any references to Hinduism and its liturgical language, Sanskrit. Yoga, the judge said, is similar to other exercise programs like dodgeball ….

…. “We are not instructing anyone in religious dogma,” Baird said. “Yoga is very mainstream.”

Yoga supporters noted that it is used at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego to help military personnel wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan recover from injuries and regain self-confidence.

But Broyles said he “strongly disagrees with the judge’s ruling on the facts and the law.” During the trial he insisted that yoga poses are integrally linked to religious and spiritual beliefs.

“This case is simply about whether public schools may entangle themselves with religious organizations like the Jois Foundation and use the state’s coercive powers to promote a particular religious orthodoxy or religious agenda to young and impressionable schoolchildren,” Broyles said after Monday’s ruling.

(Perry)

It’s worth noting that Judge Meyer criticized the NCLP suit, noting the inaccurate information that seems to have come from dubious internet sources. “It’s almost like trial by Wikipedia,” Meyer admonished, “which isn’t what this court does.”

But, as usual, the idea of facts don’t matter to Christian fanatics like Dean Broyles.

Conservative irony

Politically conservative groups in the U.S. don’t do irony very well. Or, as Rob Boston noted last month:

Religious Right groups spend a lot of time beating on church-state separation. TV preacher Pat Robertson once called that constitutional principle “a lie of the left” and said it comes from the old Soviet Constitution.

Not to be outdone, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association asserted that Adolf Hitler invented church-state separation

Others have been less hyperbolic but have still made it clear that they’re no fans of the handiwork of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Take Alan Sears, for example. Sears runs the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the nation’s largest Religious Right legal group. He once called the church-state wall “artificial.”

Funny, though, how that “artificial” wall that the Religious Right tells us over and over doesn’t exist and was never intended by the Founding Fathers can come in handy sometimes – like when the right wing wants to attack yoga in public schools.

In Encinitas, Calif., an attorney named Dean Broyles has filed suit against the Encinitas Union School District, asserting that a voluntary yoga program for students violates church-state separation. Broyles runs a small legal outfit called the National Center for Law and Policy, which, according to its website, defends “faith, family and freedom.”

Broyles is proud of his association with the ADF and notes that he “has received extensive training in pro-family, pro-life and pro-religious liberty matters at ADF’s outstanding National Litigation Academies (NLA). Because of Dean’s pro-bono work, he was invited to receive special training at ADF’s advanced NLA. Dean is proud to be an ADF affiliate attorney and member of ADF’s honor guard.”

Was Broyles asleep when Sears explained that separation of church and state doesn’t exist? How else can we explain his use of the principle in this lawsuit?

‘Tis a fine question.

Faithless

I had a curious discussion the other day about church and state. In recent years, it seems a tendency to demand very narrow definitions has become more prevalent, with the result that you start wondering where people have been that they are unfamiliar with the common context of words and phrases. In this case, the discussion had to do with church and state, and the assertion that there is still some crossover taking place. A person of faith wondered what century an associate was living in, so I gave a twenty-first century example of the Bush administration appointing a woman named Pam Stenzel to a task force within the Department of Health and Human Services to promote and implement guidelines for an abstinence education program.

The thing is that abstinence education doesn’t work, and Stenzel knows it. According to Michelle Goldberg, Stenzel addressed the 2003 Reclaiming America for Christ conference, and told them a story about a man she met on an airplane, who asked about how well the program works:

At Reclaiming America for Christ, Stenzel told her audience about a conversation she’d had with a skeptical businessman on an airplane. The man had asked about abstinence education’s success rate, a question she regarded as risible.

“What he’s asking,” she said, “is ‘does it work?’ You know what? Doesn’t matter. ‘Cause guess what? My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex. The public school’s job should not be to keep teens from having sex.”

Then her voice rose and turned angry as she shouted, “Our job should be to tell kids the truth!” And I should say that up ’til then, I agreed with her. But here’s what she means by the truth:

“People of God,” she cried, “can I beg you to commit yourself to truth? Not what works, to truth! I don’t care if it works, because at the end of the day, I’m not answering to you. I’m answering to God.

“Let me tell you something, People of God, that is radical, and I can only say it here,” she said. “AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy! I will not teach my child that they can sin safely!”

My associate asked what church that was promoting. The answer, obviously, is Christianity in general. But he wanted something more specific.

These aren’t the old days of the Maryland colony; indeed, if you look at the First Amendment and the judicial history thereof, everything pertains to religion as opposed to sects or denominations. The idea of one promoting specifically a Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, or other such agenda always comes back to the root faith: Christianity. It’s not simply about denominations, branches, or sects, but also—and perhaps fundamentally—the broader religious paradigm. One need not be a constitutional scholar to recognize this; the legal layman can certainly do something like examine judicial decisions and compile a list; Torcaso v. Watkins, for instance, pertained not to sects or even religions, but a question of theism and atheism—the state cannot compel a person to swear belief in God as a prerequisite for holding public office.

Questions of church and state in the twenty-first century have a slightly more subtle context, and this isn’t really anything new. In the twentieth century, we still fought over whether to adopt a faith-based definition (life begins at conception), faith-based “science” (creationism/intelligent design), faith-based civil rights (homosexuality), and so on. The Oregon Citizens’ Alliance and its decade-long crusade against gays wasn’t a sectarian issue, but rather a Christian-values issue.

Z is for “zaftig” …

… a polite word, as I understand it, for “buxom”. Its etymology includes the Yiddish word for “succulent”.

Seriously.

Zaftig. I kind of like it. Old-fashioned, sublimely dirty, and just mysterious enough that the kids might like it.

Aah, family values.

Lesson over, right? Well, I should probably make a usage note to help you out. So a little background, first.

The word came to me via that forgotten magic medium called the radio. For those who have forgotten, the radio, once upon a time, was a useful and even important means for distributing information. Whether news and commentary, or sheer entertainment, there was a time when American families actually gathered around the radio in order to spend “quality time” absorbed in common experience. To the other, though, I should probably shelve, as being at least slightly neurotic, any glorious fantasy of quiet evenings spent with my daughter enraptured by public radio.

I mean, really. Come on.

Nonetheless, it happened that last month I happened to catch an episode of Speaker’s Forum on Seattle’s KUOW. The episode featured Michelle Goldberg, who covers politics for Salon.com, and who came through Seattle in April, 2007, in support of her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. She gave a good talk at Elliott Bay Book Company:

So at the 2003 conference, when the abstinence educator Pam Stenzel spoke, she knew she didn’t have to justify her objection to sex education with prosaic arguments about health and public policy. She could be frank about the real reasons society must not condone premarital sex. “Because it is,” as she shouted during one particularly impassioned moment, “Stinking filthy dirty rotten sin!” A pretty, zaftig brunette from Minnesota with a degree in psychology from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Stenzel makes a living telling kids not to have sex. Rather, she makes a living trying to scare kids out of having sex. As she says in her video, No Screwing Around, “If you have sex outside of marriage, to a partner who has only been with you, then you will pay.” A big part of her mission is puncturing students’ beliefs that condoms can protect them. She says she addresses half a million kids each year, and millions more have received her message via video. Thanks to George W. Bush, abstinence education has become a thriving industry, and Stenzel has been at its forefront. Bush appointed her to a twelve-person task force at the Department of Health and Human Services to help implement abstinence education guidelines. She’s been a guest at the White House and a speaker at the United Nations. Her non-profit company, Enlightenment Communications, which puts on abstinence talks and seminars in public schools, typically grossed several hundred thousand dollars a year during the first Bush term.

At Reclaiming America for Christ, Stenzel told her audience about a conversation she’d had with a skeptical businessman on an airplane. The man had asked about abstinence education’s success rate, a question she regarded as risible.

“What he’s asking,” she said, “is ‘does it work?’ You know what? Doesn’t matter. ‘Cause guess what? My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex. The public school’s job should not be to keep teens from having sex.”

Then her voice rose and turned angry as she shouted, “Our job should be to tell kids the truth!” And I should say that up ’til then, I agreed with her. But here’s what she means by the truth:

“People of God,” she cried, “can I beg you to commit yourself to truth? Not what works, to truth! I don’t care if it works, because at the end of the day, I’m not answering to you. I’m answering to God.

“Let me tell you something, People of God, that is radical, and I can only say it here,” she said. “AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy! I will not teach my child that they can sin safely!”

The crowd applauded. Of course, Stenzel isn’t just teaching her child.

Family values, indeed. Gather up the kids and have a post-pomo throwback to the glory days of radio. Or maybe put the kids to bed and fire up a joint before listening to this one. It might actually help.

Anyway, Z is for zaftig. Go on. Impress your friends with the new word you learned today.

What? I had to look it up when I got home. And judging by the puzzled looks I’ve been getting as I play around with the word, I don’t feel stupid for having to. So neither should you, if you’ve never heard it before. In fact, if you already know this word, consider yourself either smart or old. Maybe both.

Seriously. I’m just glad the explanation didn’t involve any crippling moral dysfunction.

Oh. Right. Sorry. My bad.