Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (34 page)

An op-ed piece in
USA Today
titled “Can a Deeply Religious Person Be Attorney General?” questioned John Ashcroft’s qualification for the job expressly because of his “deep faith,” which could make it “impossible to see other points of view.” The “other points of view” included those of “casino operators, family-planning counselors and gays and lesbians.”
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In a fascinating contrast, the column specifically compared Ashcroft’s “troubling” religious beliefs to “Joe Lieberman’s joyful invocation of the power of God on the campaign trail”—a “joyful invocation” that included Lieberman’s likening Clinton to Moses.

Interviewing independent prosecutor Ken Starr during his investigation of an adulterous felon, ABC’s Diane Sawyer informed Starr that “the American people” had responded to Starr by saying, “You are the only one who is shocked. We are not shocked.” (Apparently the Russians were a little bit shocked. Russian intelligence knew about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky before America did.
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) Sawyer asked Starr if he was simply pursuing “his private view of personal morality.” At that point in the investigation Clinton was known to have molested subordinates, perjured himself, suborned perjury, lied to the country, smeared witnesses against him, and engaged in sodomic acts involving a cigar on Easter Sunday, among many other infractions. Eighty percent of respondents told pollsters they believed it possible that the president was a rapist. Only a religious fanatic would be troubled by any of that. Sawyer probed Starr’s peculiar sectarian views with tenacity, asking Starr if he believed dancing was “wicked” and whether his religious beliefs were “fueling [his] legal work.”
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Questions like “Do you think God is on your side?”—as Sawyer also asked Starr—have a wonderful, apostolic quality to them. All-powerful American institutions speak as one against the menace of morality in American life. Yet liberals behave as if they are under constant threat of extermination from the “religious right.”

Whoever these ruthless Christian conservatives are, these snooty bullies who think “God is on their side,” they are at least not influencing Diane Sawyer. Yet, like Emmanuel Goldstein, though the religious right is universally reviled, it is still, somehow, dangerously beguiling. Despite being “hated and despised by everybody, although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, [Goldstein’s] theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.”
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The imaginary threat of the “religious right” is important because it allows liberals to complain about their victimization by religious zealots. It is not sufficient psychic compensation to be applauded wildly on
Politically Incorrect
and other late-night TV shows, profiled in fawning articles in the
New York Times,
photographed for
People
magazine, showered with awards, Pulitzer prizes, and other sundry tributes. Liberals insist that they also be admired for their bravery in standing up to Christians.

Never have acts of cowardice been so lavishly hailed as raw courage. In any random month, a series of no-account actresses can be found courageously advancing their careers by attacking the Catholic Church in glossy magazines. You would think it would be difficult to be taken seriously as a martyr while being favorably profiled in
Vanity Fair.
But that’s the beauty of modern-day martyrdom: You never have to suffer.

In the February 2001
Vanity Fair,
Lara Flynn Boyle announced her longstanding defiance of the Catholic Church: “I used to lie in confession all the time. I’d never tell them what I really did. Never. I don’t trust the Catholic Church.” Proving their point, she also said: “I got a terrible education from the nuns and the Jesuits. They kept flunking me and saying I wasn’t participating. I grew up thinking I was stupid.” That same month, starlet Heather Graham boldly told
Talk
magazine: “Organized religion, in my experience, has been destructive.”
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This turned out to be a smashingly newsworthy comment, as it always is. Starlet Graham continued with the script, mocking a two-thousand-year-old religion: “Why do I have to do what all these men are saying? Why is a woman’s sexuality supposed to be so evil?”

In response to programmed attacks by these worthless silicone nothings leveled at a two-thousand-year-old church, the mainstream media reflexively issued their own programmed response: wild acclaim for the starlets’ intrepid witticisms. A lone voice of opprobrium came from Catholic League president William Donohue. Donohue said Graham was “now free to throw off all her shackles” and accept “film roles either as a slut or a porn star.” He advised her to skip therapy, saying all she needed was “counseling by a priest.”
Time
magazine compared Graham’s and Donohue’s remarks and adjudged Graham “the winner” of the best “punch” for her tedious Catholic-bashing, despite the fact that there was nothing even remotely unique about what Graham said (right down to the unhappy adolescence). There may be some universe in which it is iconoclastic for anemic Hollywood starlets to denigrate the Catholic Church. This isn’t it.

It is not particularly surprising that average people with average minds—below average, according to the Jesuits—should be eager to submit to the dictates of fashionable Catholic-bashing. But watching as cliché-spewing automatons are hailed as martyrs is more than any sane person should have to bear. Warmly received attacks on religion is not the stuff of martyrdom.

If these were truly self-generated opinions rather than popular clichés, the phraseology would not be so mind-numbingly similar. But when condemning religion, strict rules must be followed. It is never “ministers,” “rabbis,” “priests,” “churches,” “Moses,” “Jesus Christ,” or even just “religion” that is the problem. The proper malediction is “organized religion.” Thus, other recent celebrity opponents of “organized religion” include CNN’s Ted Turner (“I had no use for organized religion”);
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director Marshall Brickman (“It’s the big issue, isn’t it, in the last 2,000 years, whether organized religion has really been a good thing”);
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actor Rupert Everett (“I think Jesus has been completely manipulated and used by organized religion”);
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and Rachel Hunter, model and wife of singer Rod Stewart (“I’m no fan of organized religion.”).
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Like many popular clichés, the opposition to “organized religion” is an utterly meaningless formulation. There are boatloads of religions and thousands of ways religion is organized and practiced. If absolutely none of them float your boat, it may not be a problem of organization.

One of the most ludicrous self-made martyrs of the “religious right” is Jesse Ventura, governor of Minnesota. Among many other wildly novel comments in his 1999 interview with
Playboy
magazine, Ventura attacked ... “organized religion”! Organized religion, he said, is “a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.” This is in contradistinction to the herd of individualists condemning “organized religion.”

Ventura followed the starlet script, saying religion “tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people’s business. The religious right wants to tell people how to live.”
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Topping off his bigotry with a tribute to his own immense tolerance, Ventura said: “I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you’d want them to treat you. The religious right wants to tell people how to live.” His only self-criticism was “I will always be honest, and I think that’s my problem.”
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For an organization whose sole raison d’etre is to “tell other people how to live,” it’s striking that religious people can’t even get celebrities, politicians, newspapers, television personalities, and magazine glossies to stop denigrating them all the time.

Almost overnight, Ventura’s approval ratings plummeted nineteen points. But that was with voters. Among the cultural elites, Ventura’s popularity soared. This was quite a feat since Ventura had taken the opportunity of an interview with a pornographic magazine to commit liberal heresy on the subject of sexual harassment. He said the Tailhook scandal—or, as he put it, “grabbing a woman’s breast or buttock”—was “much ado about nothing.”

Ventura may not be an original thinker, but he was smart enough to know how to spin his interview with the media. In short order, his spokesmen were rushing to explain that Ventura had only meant to criticize “extremists of the religious right who are often intolerant.” In a priceless formulation, the spokesman said his boss—the loud-mouthed anti-Christian bigot—”cannot stand intolerance.”
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Clarifying that his attack was on the “religious right” (and the governor “cannot stand intolerance”!) was the equivalent of saying fifty Hail Marys, as far as the liberal clergy was concerned. As with Clinton, feminist hysteria can be silenced for the greater good of undermining the nation’s morals.

The media responded with gushing praise for Ventura’s frank honesty and daunting courage.
Newsweek
rushed out a major feature piece on the unimportant governor, calling Ventura “beguiling, blunt, a maverick.” The article praised him for his “candid talk.” Of his invective against religion, the magazine explained, “he had a small point; a caveat at the end of his diatribe seemed to imply that he was talking at least partly about the religious right.”
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Newsweek
quibbled with Ventura only for his lack of subtlety— “even blunt talk has its limits, and Ventura appears bent on finding them.” (Similarly, after Senator John McCain assailed Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance” and “forces of evil,”
Time
magazine lamented that “the uproar” had “erased the nuance in his original argument.”
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One must be careful to achieve the proper “nuance” when attacking Christians.)

Time
magazine followed
Newsweek
a few months later with a feature article on Ventura, explaining in the first paragraph that Ventura meant only “some” religions—you know the bad ones that have rules and things.
Time
lauded Ventura for his “authenticity”: “[T]oday’s political culture craves authenticity but bristles when it actually gets some.”

Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen devoted an entire column to lionizing Ventura for his important insights on “reactionaries” in the religious right. Their “views are so retrograde, their thinking so inexplicable,” Cohen rationally explained, “that it is simply asking too much to accord them the respect normally due religious leaders.”
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On ABC’s
20/20,
Barbara Walters referred to Ventura’s explanation that he was attacking only “the conservative right” by saying, “So you made a little mistake. You went a little too far.” She then asked him, “Do you think that a totally honest man can be president of the United States?”
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New York Times
columnist Frank Rich praised Ventura for giving a “lift” to the “stultifying campaign culture.”
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Months later, Rich would be gushing that John McCain was the first major Republican candidate who was not “in hock to the religious right.”
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Columnist Molly Ivins praised Ventura for—surprise!—his courage: “When was the last time you heard a politician take on the religious right?”
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she demanded to know. Finally!
Someone
was willing to take on the witches of Salem. Ivins fancies herself an iconoclast, even while adopting all the appropriate prejudices and hatreds of a good Smith College/Columbia School of Journalism graduate. Her coffee mug bravely proclaims, “Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History,” and a book of her columns was titled
Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?
^&l
What precisely does Ivins say that everyone else is not saying? Since when is attacking the “religious right” a sign of anything but impeccably good manners? It’s not as if she’s doing something shocking like defending Jerry Falwell. Along with the rest of the blabocracy, she slays all the standard media whipping boys and then demands that we pretend they were dragons.

Even the conservative
Washington Times
had kind words for Ventura’s “honesty” presenting “an alternative from the usual stale political fare.”
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Indeed, apart from private opinions of actual people—which were reflected in Ventura’s plunging poll numbers—it was hard to find a peep of protest from any quarter for Ventura’s attack on “organized religion.”

Lurching beyond parody, about a year later Ventura explained that he was meeting with a group of atheists because “we have to be tolerant of different points of view.”
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The Atheist Alliance International gave Ventura an award for guess what? His “political courage.”
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In a demonstration of their hegemonic control over politics in America, religious groups in Minnesota never got a direct apology from Ventura, much less a meeting.

Though there was no shortage of journalists and pundits defending Ventura from an anticipated counterattack from Christians, the attack never materialized. A few months after his snotty, unprovoked assault on them, Ventura received three hundred long-stemmed red roses with a card from “churches, ministries and individual Christians of the Twin Cities who wish simply to bless you and extend to you their prayers for you to have a wonderful Christmas.”