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Great Moments in Anti-Religious "Bigotry"

[ 0 ] February 14, 2007 | davenoon

Sadly, the vast archival landfill of the internets has been unable to provide me with an image of this ad, which appeared briefly during the summer of 2001, at the very moment that Der Preznit was — among other things — weighing the enormous moral consequences of embryonic stem cell research.

The Catholic League has asked Unilever, the parent company of Lipton, to withdraw an ad that is offensive to Catholics. The ad, which is published (among other places) in the June 13-19 edition of the New York Press (a free alternative weekly), depicts a man dressed as a priest offering Holy Communion to five parishioners in a church. The priest is holding the Host up to the first person on line who is about to receive. The fourth person on line is holding a bowl of Lipton Onion dip, obviously suggesting that he is prepared to dunk the Host in the dip. At the corner of the ad is a picture of the Lipton “Recipe Secrets” box that features the onion dip.

After Bill Donohue warned that “one thing the Catholic League does not possess is patience,” Lipton withdrew the soup ad. Unilever, makers of Q-Tips and Axe body spray among other fine products, remains — along with the Dallas Cowboys and the makers of Fiddle Faddle snacks — on at least one list of companies boycotted by the faithful.

Curiously, this was not the first time that Lipton had offended the sensibilities of God-fearing Christians. In 1954, Arthur Godfrey — who often gently mocked his show’s sponsors on the air — was discovered one night pitching soup to his audience of millions:

“When it comes to the chicken in Lipton’s soup, you’ve got to have faith,” Godfrey was saying. “Just like it says in the Bible. You know—the Book of Hebrews, Chapter 11, Verse one: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ [laughter]. Or as it says in the Book of John, Chapter 20, Verse 29: ‘Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.’ But don’t go lookin’ in the soup. It’s there, but you’ll never see it [laughter].”

Televiewer Ackerman promptly blew his top at this novel use of Holy Writ. With William A. Chapman, founder of the World Home Bible League, he tore off telegrams to Godfrey and Lipton’s: “Shameful, sacrilegious . . . intolerably obnoxious . . . loose disrespect . . . one of the lowest notes in television history.”

The “Ackerman” fellow was William Ackerman, who was president of the WHBL, an organization determined to make sure that Bibles were available not merely in hotel rooms but in every home the world over. Although Lipton promptly apologized, to his credit Godfrey never acknowledged the non-controversy.

. . . Praise the Lord and pass the onion dip! Neil, in comments, demonstrates his superior Googling skills and delivers this:

“Mmmmmmm . . . sacrelicious . . . .”

VD

[ 0 ] February 14, 2007 | davenoon

An now, a very special Valentine’s Day message from the Bush administration.

Defining Hate Speech Down

[ 0 ] February 14, 2007 | Scott Lemieux

Melissa’s resignation, as many bloggers liberal and conservative have noted, is highly regrettable. The fact that the misogynist, anti-Semite and all around bigot Bill Donohue continued to go after McEwan–who said nothing that, even under the broadest standards, could qualify as anti-Catholic or anti-religious speech unless we’re to believe that cultural reactionaries can’t be criticized long as their beliefs are motivated by religion–gives away the show about this being a faux-outrage kabuki dance. (I should emphasize here that I’m not saying that this means that Melissa shouldn’t have resigned, or should be subject to any criticism–as Christopher Moltisanti said, unless they’re paying your nut nobody has the right to tell anyone how to earn a living, and she should so what’s best for herself irrespective of whether a hateful crackpot will claim a scalp.)

To get something constructive out of this sorry episode, I’d like to turn things over to Julian Sanchez:

For one, I’m fairly contemptuous of the trend toward regarding harsh or snarky criticism of religious (or, for that matter, atheistic) beliefs—propositions capable of being true or false, credible or silly, benign or pernicious—as a form of “bigotry” on par with racism.

Right. The best example of this was Amanda’s analysis of Children of Men, which I’ve seen described as potential “hate speech” (and which of course led Donohue to call for her firing):

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels. But this movie offers an alternative interpretation of the virgin birth—one where “virginity” is irrelevant and one where a woman’s stake in motherhood is fully respected for the sacrifice and hard work that it is.

Look, the category of anti-Catholic bigotry–people subject to discrimination based on generalizations about their religion–is perfectly real. (My grandfather used to get anti-Catholic graffiti painted on his farmhouse when he was a school trustee. And , actually, he wasn’t Catholic–he just had a French name–but that’s never the point.) But Amanda’s post is about ideas. The underlying point–that Christian doctrines are in many respects patriarchal–is not merely defensible but banal. Her application to this case may be right or wrong, it may be subjected to equally harsh criticism–but it’s only “hate speech” if you believe that religious ideas should be ipso facto exempt from external criticism simply by virtue of being religious ideas. Which is not merely obvious nonsense, but a gross debasement of the categories of bigotry and hate speech. Make sure to note everybody making this kind of argument, and make sure to be extra derisive the next time they inevitably invoke the terms “identity politics” or “politically correct.” Just in case you weren’t sure if these terms weren’t entirely devoid of useful content, this should really be the tip-off.

…read this from Slacktivist too.

Tomorrow

[ 0 ] February 13, 2007 | Scott Lemieux

Good one.

Although, in fairness, the Man of More Rubble and Less Trouble was a pioneer of the Hope-Is-Too-A-Plan strategy.

Quiet Time with Glenn Reynolds

[ 0 ] February 13, 2007 | davenoon

whisper small

As Bjork once put it, “You blow a fuse . . .”

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet, I’m Creating A Massively Counterproudctive International Incident

[ 0 ] February 13, 2007 | Scott Lemieux

Shorter Verbatim Glenn Reynolds: “Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists.”

Killing Iranian religious leaders and scientist..quiet. It’s not just that he can’t explain how this would prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, or how this could be in the American national interest. It’s that he thinks this would be quiet. Yeah, if a foreign government just started to kill American religious leaders and scientists, you’d barely notice! Maybe the President would send a strongly worded memo! Can he possibly believe that this would be “quiet”? Teh stupid, it burns.

(Via Greenwald, who has the more patience to deal with this idiocy than I do.)

…In comments, Ted Barlow also notes how Reynolds notes one of his critics “the complete absence of moral outrage aimed at the Iranian mullahocracy.” Touche! I would like to state for the record that I am opposed to illberal theocracies, strangling kittens, and Scott Stapp being given recording contracts. Oh, and lunatic wars that damage American national interests at immense cost.

…Yglesias has more.

…Reynolds, in an update: “And some of those who are outraged say it’s terrible to attack “religious figures and scientists.” But wait — wasn’t the left calling American bomb builders “mass murderers?”" Um, what the hell? I don’t remember that, but maybe The Left will be willing to correct me. Or maybe Ward Churchill can be reached in a pinch…anyway, the update for some reason fails to explain how Iran will be dissuaded for building nuclear weapons if we start killing Iranians at random, or how this would strengthen democratic forces, or how this can be done “quietly”, but none of this matters because The Left are all mullah-loving traitors or something.

…Mithras notes the apparent Tom Clancy influence.

Nork Nuke Deal

[ 0 ] February 13, 2007 | Robert Farley

The Times has the details on the deal. Essentially, the US and the five party group will be trading electricity, fuel oil, food, and some diplomatic goodies for a verifiable freeze on North Korea’s nuclear program. The freeze won’t be wholly verifiable, but the agreement will shut down North Korea’s plutonium program, which is a genuine achievement.

The talks are supposed to lead to further talks in which North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons. Let me go out on a limb here and say that this will never happen; North Korea may give up some of the nuclear fuel that it has, but I very much doubt that it will disarm entirely. Nevertheless, this deal makes the world safer. In comments to this post yesterday, Steve asked “Does this mean Bush was right about North Korea?” The answer is a pretty emphatic “no”. The deal we have today isn’t notably different from the Agreed Framework in 1994, except that it doesn’t promise a light water reactor and North Korea has nukes. It’s also pretty similar to what was on the table in 2002, except that North Korea has nukes. While a success on its own terms, this agreement represents an utter rejection of the Bush administration’s approach to North Korea thus far. Carrots, instead of sticks, brought compromises. Nuclear weapons were the subject of diplomacy, not the precondition. The fact that the wingnutosphere has remained largely quiet (although Red State is trying to blame newspapers for the deal) and that John Bolton denounced the agreement should tell you all you need to know about the type of diplomacy that was conducted here.

Taibbi on Klein

[ 0 ] February 13, 2007 | djw

Most of you probably think you don’t need to read another evisceration of the buffoon Joe Klein, and you’re almost certainly correct. Still, if you’re in the mood, you could do much, much worse than Matt Taibbi’s latest offering. Amongst other strengths, Taibbi revisits Klein’s “extreme peacekeeping” nonsense from November 2003, which I recall reading with a special kind of horror at the time, but I had forgotten it was Klein who was behind it:

After sending a generation of idealistic young whippersnappers off to war in Southeast Asia with snazzy new unis, we end up killing two million people from one of the poorest agrarian countries on earth, turning huge sections of North Vietnam as well as illegally-bombed Laos and Cambodia into permanent moonscapes, and sending 60,000 Americans home in body bags, with tens of thousands more coming back crippled, poisoned, or psychologically ravaged. We furthermore let it get out that we started the war under false pretenses and kept up the fight long after even the Pentagon knew the whole thing was a hopeless waste of lives and money. Beyond that, we dump deadly poison on 5.6 million acres of a state the size of New Mexico, creating conditions that would leave every hospital in South Vietnam filling storage rooms, for the next thirty years, with two-and three-headed babies in jars. Photographers like Phillip Jones Griffiths would come back decades later with horrifying galleries of thousands of twisted genetic freaks left to lie for years on mats in malarial villages…

And yet, despite all of this, the real reason idealistic young people from the fancy classes have not been rushing into the services in the years since then is because the army isn’t offering them their own hat.

And that’s not even the best part. One of the most appalling things about our public discourse these last few years is the casual accusation by both Republican politicians and the likes of Klein–not only are we dirty fucking hippies, we’re guilty of a sort of treason of the heart. We’re not properly “rooting” for America to win. Which, as far as I can tell, consists of a sort of public tinkerbell act. Back to Taibbi:

But according to Klein, if we see a guy step off the top of the Empire State Building, we’re supposed to root for him to nail the dismount. The whole issue is irrelevant and absurd. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. “Rooting” is a kid’s word; grow the fuck up.

A Brief Note to Trolls

[ 0 ] February 13, 2007 | davenoon

If you’re going to drop in on a post about Joseph McCarthy (among other unsavory people), don’t scold your audience for not mentioning the “Soviet archives” called the “Verona” cables — particularly if the Venona project was not in fact spelled with an “r” and was not in fact a Soviet archive but an intelligence operation conducted by the US and the UK.

Oh, and don’t quote Tom Wolfe if you expect to be taken seriously about anything not having to do with white suits.

This has been a brief note to trolls. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

My Chat with Exxon

[ 0 ] February 12, 2007 | Robert Farley

Today I participated in a conference call with Ken Cohen, vice-president of PR at ExxonMobil. Also present were Erik Loomis from Alterdestiny, Mark Nikolas from Bluegrass Report, Matt Stoller from MyDD, and Julie Marsh from The Parental is Political. Matt and Erik have already given their impressions of the meeting.

I was a bit skeptical of the entire meeting, as I have no expertise in energy or environmental policy. Indeed, no one else was really an expert either, which I think limited what we could accomplish. Rather than give a blow by blow, I’ll concentrate on two points; Exxon’s reluctance to acknowledge its past efforts to distort climate change science, and its refusal to think seriously about the consequences of its behavior.

Cohen took pains to note that Exxon is trying to change its public image. It has decided to defund several organizations that exist only by virtue of their global warming skepticism, and to acknowledge that climate change is, indeed, taking place. However, Cohen argued that the extant perception of Exxon as anti-science is simply a PR problem; Exxon hasn’t really turned over a new leaf, they just weren’t doing a good enough job of talking about all the good things that Exxon does. As Chris Mooney points out, this argument is indefensible. Cohen actually argued that Exxon has simply been participating without bias in the scientific debate, waiting until a consensus arrivved such that action could be taken. Again, this is absurd; the essential facts about climate change have been widely known since the late 1980s, and Exxon has fought with tooth and nail against the application of any of that science to public policy. I had half a mind to ask whether Exxon, in the spirit of the free exchange of ideas, gave an equal amount of money to Marxist economists as to their free market opposites, but deferred.

Stoller pointed out that Exxon’s belated conversion probably had a lot more to do with Democratic victory in the 2006 elections that with any change of heart. This helped set up a fine question by Erik Loomis, which focused on Exxon’s culpability in and responsibility for the environmental damage that climate change has already caused. Unsurprisingly, Cohen dodged the question. I doubt that it’s one he could have answered without potential legal repurcussion. Nevertheless, it is an important question; Exxon’s behavior, if only as an enabler of anti-science rhetoric on the right, has served to increase damage to the environment.

As I mentioned, our lack of expertise in environmental science limited what the call could accomplish. Still, we understood enough to challenge Cohen on some of the more important points. In the big picture, I’m really not sure what Exxon is trying to accomplish, as the lefty blogosphere is obviously an unsympathetic audience.

Gordon

[ 0 ] February 12, 2007 | Robert Farley

In addition to an article on the Iranian IEDs on Friday, and an article on the aluminum tubes in 2002, Michael Gordon co-wrote Cobra II, which condemened the administration’s war conduct and use of intelligence in harsh terms. Thus, it’s simply not true that Michael Gordon is “the administration’s best friend” even at the New York Times. While he may be arrogant, he is hardly a “stenographer”. While at the Times, Gordon has published many articles harshly critical and deeply skeptical of administration conduct. Did he forget that he was the administration’s best friend when he was writing them? Did he cease to be either arrogant or a stenographer?

Here’s what I wish. I wish that the blogosphere could think in less dispositional terms. When Gordon, or anyone else, writes a bad article, we tend to attack them on dispositional terms; Gordon failed because he’s a friend of the administration, an arrogant stenographer, a neocon, etc. We don’t have a vocabulary that, for lack of a better phrase, allows us to hate the sin and love the sinner. I love the blogosphere, but I loathe this aspect of it. A few weeks ago, we all had a terrific rage fest against the hack pundit Joe Klein. Then, Klein started to write things that we liked, and the declarations of hackishness and bad faith went away. I still think that Joe Klein is a hack, but that’s rather beside the point; he’s either a hack or he’s not, and just because he starts directing his hackery in directions we like doesn’t change that fact. Same thing with the various writers for the New Republic, the blogospheric reaction to whom vacillates wildly between “foul servant of Dark Lord Peretz” and “Oh, hey, that’s an interesting point”. To use a nearer and dearer example, only part of what makes me loathe Mickey Kaus is his political position; much more irritating to me is his manifest inability to convey a thought in writing and his trivial approach to political questions.

I can even see the point of this kind of thinking, the hope being that the various targets will contribute something more to our liking. I’m not asking for civility, either, or for a turn the other cheek attitude. What I’d like, I suppose, is accuracy; an effort to direct dispositional attacks against those who deserve them, and more precisely aimed barbs against the rest.

Word Press Photo

[ 0 ] February 12, 2007 | Robert Farley

Remarkable. Via Jay.

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