copen73 said:
kbm8795, where did you get the Sun Myung Moon story?
That appeared in a column in the New York Times (three months after the fact) and there was a story in the Washington Post. Seems like there are some lawmakers trying to quickly backpedal from their observance of Moon's "coronation"...some are claiming that they thought it was just an award (strange, since he and his wife were dressed in medieval royal robes and had gold crowns placed on their heads). The moonies are quite active in politics, especially the Republican Party. Among Rev. Moon's agenda is that homosexuality can be cured by heterosexuals sleeping nude together (yeah...figure that one out) . . .and that the Black race is only that way because of environment....if they would go live at the North Pole, they would be white in a few generations.
Sounds like something straight up the extreme right's alley. . .fascism can thrive quite well behind the cloak of "religion." The Moon's support a dozen national legislative proposals to grant churches more power over public policy and government. Strangely enough, as many conservatives scream about Muslims, they generally are silent when it comes to that wealthy theocratic wing of their own Party. As we keep our attention focused on Iraq, one wonders where discussion of the domestic agenda is. . . but we are beginning to have clues. In Alabama, one religious group is demanding that judicial candidates answer questionnaires about their religious beliefs and the "commitment" to them. In North Carolina, which has a misdemeanor anti-cohabitating law dating from 1805, a former police 911 operator felt she had to leave her job because the sheriff felt that her living with a boyfriend of 12 years was immoral and employees couldn't be breaking the law.
The Alabama Senate had passed a law dictating that state property can be used to post copies of the Ten Commandments - indicating that Christians must forget them so often that they need to be reminded of them every time they walk into a public place. And on the federal level, legislation designed to force employers to grant wider freedoms for "religious" convictions (meaning, make allowances for fundamentalists who don't like women working, gays, or feel that other religions are not "truth" so they can either proselytize or avoid having contact with them). This is rather similar to a Michigan law that allows medical personnel to refuse treatment of people who go against their personal religious beliefs (and one wonders how anyone would KNOW someone walking into a hospital might engage in behavior that isn't acceptable to a nurse's religious doctrine).
One reason the extreme right has limited their "defense" of marriage to attacking gay couples instead of demanding a federal amendment outlawing divorce and enforcing adultery is because so many of them are wrapped up in their own personal dysfunctional marriage dramas. Roberta Combs, the current director of the Christian Coalition, is allegedly (and expensively) involved with the divorce of her own daughter. And some evangelicals support divorce, especially in cases where wives are not allowed to take their "traditional" roles as housewives within their marriages.
Meanwhile, our own Ayatolluh...er...President...continues to earmark taxpayer dollars for marriage educational programs (usually faith-based from ...you guessed it...an evangelical organization) and freely doles out taxpayer grants through his "faith-based" charity programs to Pat Robertson and churches that publicly endorse him. But now that Moon has been crowned monarch of America, conservatives should take great jubiliation from his claim that all deceased American ex-presidents spiritually communicate with him from the dead and that ALL of them support his role as the new Messiah. Other religious conservatives may be unhappy with this revelation, since they've been increasingly contending that the Prez himself was chosen by God.
Sounds like Bush and Rev. Moon could end up on a theocratic collision course. Hold onto your bibles, Americans....our own special brand of homegrown religious terrorism is soon to come.
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