Bartholomew's Notes

Several bloggers (in particular Sadly No!) bring to our attention bearded patriarch Stephen Baskerville, Howard University political scientist and “fathers’ rights” champion. Baskerville has a huge stack of anecdotes to raise your righteous wrath, in which wayward wives use no-fault divorce laws to abandon their husbands, taking the children with them and then proceeding to fleece their hapless exes for everything they have while threatening them with prison if they dare even to give their children Christmas presents. Civilisation itself is in peril: an interview with Baskerville, linked via World O’Crap, includes the following (although not directly quoted from him):

Social thinkers throughout history, including the most influential thinker of the 20th Century, Sigmund Freud, have affirmed that the patriarchal family, with the father at its head, is the basis for civilization.

The danger is all, of course, due to the workings of feminism and big government, but his latest WorldNetDaily piece expands his moral crusade further:

Could your kids be given to ‘gay’ parents?

Not sure why “gay” has quotation marks around it. Anyway, his argument is that as homosexuals cannot reproduce, they seek children from other sources:

Governments that kind-heartedly bestow other people’s children on homosexual couples also have both the power and the motivation to confiscate those children from their original parents, even when the parents have done nothing to warrant losing them…Child abuse is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of single-parent homes. Government and feminist propaganda suggest that single-parent homes result from paternal abandonment. In fact, they are usually created by family court judges, who have close ties to the social service agencies that need children. By forcibly removing fathers from the home through unilateral or “no-fault” divorce, family courts create the environment most conducive to child abuse and initiate the process that leads to removal of the children from the mother, foster care, and adoption. Gay adoption is simply the logical culmination in the process of turning children into political instruments for government officials.

Actually, I do recall a time when many children were unfairly taken into care, both in the USA and the UK: back in the 1980s and 1990s, when Christian fundamentalists, heads full of bogus “Satanic survivor” paperbacks, instigated a mass panic over Satanism. But that’s not what Baskerville is concerned with. The “two evils” for him are “the child protection gestapo and the even more formidable ‘no-fault’ divorce machine.”

So who is he? Baskerville constantly mentions his PhD from the University of London (I’ve got one of those too, as it happens, although from a different college of the university), but biographical detail is scattered. WND notes that he is

Charlotte and Walter Kohler Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.

Another site adds his media appearances, and that

He is a regular radio commentator for the Free Congress Foundation…He is an advisor to the American Coalition for Fathers and Children and the Men’s Health Network and spokesman for Men, Fathers, and Children, International, a coalition of 12 fatherhood organizations from 9 countries. He also serves on the board of affiliates of Gendercide Watch, a human rights organization that monitors gender-selective atrocities.

As well as his academic work, Baskerville has written articles for a number of media outlets:

the Washington Post, Washington Times, Liberty magazine, Women’s Quarterly, Catholic World Report, Crisis magazine, Insight magazine, World Net Daily, Family Policy, the American Spectator, The Spectator, American Enterprise magazine, National Review, Human Events, the Salisbury Review, the Sunday Independent, and others.

Many of his columns are reproduced on various anti-feminist and “pro-father” websites. World O’Crap also links to an account of his ideas and activities by Trish Wilson.

Baskerville is cagey about his religious affiliation, although The Howard Center  (unrelated to Howard University) is linked with the World Congress of Families, and the two organisations share the same definition of the family:

We…affirm that the natural human family is established by the Creator and essential to good society…The natural family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature, and centered on the voluntary union of a man and a woman in the lifelong covenant of marriage. Whether through pornography, promiscuity, incest or homosexuality, deviations from these created sexual norms cannot truly satisfy the human spirit. They lead to obsession, remorse, alienation, and disease…Religious institutions have the crucial cultural-leadership role of affirming that: the natural human family is established in creation and is essential to a good society…the family is sacred and has the unique authority, responsibility and capacity to provide for its members’ education, health care and welfare; and all social institutions should respect and uphold the institution of the family.

The World Congress of Families is also an official US NGO delegate to the UN, and works with the Family Research Council.

The Charlotte and Walter Kohler Charitable Trust, which is providing Baskerville’s fellowship, is a slightly mysterious outfit. Although it has no website that I could find, it contributes to a number of conservative organisations that aim to influence the thinking of the powerful. This includes the Center for Military Readiness, which battles the agenda of “Pentagon feminists” in the American armed forces; the Institute of World Politics, which offers a graduate curriculum for leaders “based on recognition of the necessity for education in natural law – deriving from the Western, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian moral tradition” (they mean anti-left, but waffle around it); and the The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, which runs seminars to explain “the importance of secure property rights and economic freedom to the efficient and sensitive use of environmental resources” (i.e. freeing business from environmental regulations will improve the environment).

Trish Wilson also has lots of other stuff on the “Fathers’ Rights” movement.

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ASSIST Ministries is an unusual mix: some decent reporting of religious news and profiles unavailable elsewhere amid some mildly conservative cultural analysis and a spattering of credulous items on faith healings and such. However, I’ve just noticed that it also provides a platform for NewsMax pundit Tom Marsland:

Former heavyweight wrestler, corporate CEO and major market radio talk show host, Tom Marsland’s been a guest of both the White House and the West Wing Press Corps. Tom’s a volunteer for Pres. Bush’s Faith Based Initiative and is U.S. correspondent to New Zealand’s Nation-wide Radio Rhema.

Marsland’s topic this week is Michael Moore, and he asks, with great subtlety:

Is Michael Moore the New Leni Riefenstahl?

…Like Riefenstahl, Moore claims to seek the very truth he often violates. This is indeed curious, as lying is what he endlessly castigates Pres. Bush for. Perhaps he is familiar with the art of prevarication himself? Just as the Nazi film maker claimed that “reality does not interest me,” perhaps it doesn’t interest Moore either. Lastly, like Frau Leni, Moore too calls his film op-ed a documentary.

So Moore is just like a Nazi! This inspired me to look up some of Marsland’s other critiques. Also on his hate list is the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which promotes gun control. In May 2003 Marsland hilariously showed (piece reposted from an uncredited site) what the paper really stands for with crushing mockery of the paper’s name, which should really be the:

Minne-soviet Star & Sickle

In an undated piece for ASSIST (also only available via a reposted site), atheists are attacked for their, er, Islamic fundamentalism:

How can anyone silently stand by and watch, much less participate in the murder of children and the elderly? Ask an atheist. They’re often in ideological league with folks who have no problem with sacrificing children, whether on the streets of Jerusalem, or in Roe-V-Wade abortion mills.

Though these anti-religionists claim absolute ‘non-belief,’ they just happen to ‘believe’ very strongly in the essential goodness of man, a humanist value. I guess they must have slept through the whole Hitler thing in Mrs. Johnson’s history class. Their eyes apparently remained closed through Mao Tse Tung, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Stalin, and even the most recent batch of mass murderers, as in Arafat, Saddam, and Osama. Fools educated to the point of ignorance, plain and simple.

Last February in NewsMax he also denounced Dan Rather, for his interview with Saddam Hussein just before the war on Iraq:

He called the mass murderer Hussein “Mr. President” and disrespectfully referred to his own President Bush as simply “Bush.”

Marsland, drawing again on his extensive historical knowledge, pointed out that Hussein is like Hitler, so Rather was like someone fawning to Hitler.

Around the same time, Marsland also weighed and found wanting Europe, in thrall to secular humanism. Europe should know that:

The abbreviated list of secular humanist failures in the past century have included the former USSR, Communist China, Hitler’s National Socialism, Castro’s Cuba, Central American communism, Japanese imperialism and Mussolini’s Italian fascism.

Marsland concludes that:

Europe is now first hog at the secular humanist trough, with little appetite for our Creator. If I lived in Europe, I believe I’d duck every time I heard thunder and lightning strike.

But I fear Marsland’s advice on how to appease a roaring, wrathful deity comes to late: due to the godless European education system, people there take thunder and lightning for natural phenomena caused by static electricity, and merely avoid carrying umbrellas on hilltops during storms.

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A couple of months ago John Gorenfeld’s blog reported on the crowning of Rev Moon in the Dirksen Senate Building, in a ceremony attended by a number of politicians and religious figures. After plugging away for a while on the blogosphere (helped by Politics1 and other bloggers), Gorenfeld was recently invited to write a piece for Salon, since when the story has gone global, with dramatic results: press conferences, statements of clarification and disclaimers by some of the politicians involved (some now claim that they were tricked into taking part), and robust justification (in particular, independent Archbishop George A. Stallings, Jr. claims that since he is black those who criticise his links to Moon are racist – listen here, via the Talk Radio News Service).

So, in a shameless bid to get a piece of the action, I’ve tried to track down a couple of the lesser-known religious figures who were there – a tricky business as there are often multiple spellings and variations to contend with.

On June 29-30 Gorenfeld considered Rabbi Mordechai Waldman (also spelt “Mordehi Waldman” and “Mordechai Waldmann”). Gorenfeld notes that:

According to reader Rob, who attended [the coronation], Rabbi Waldman attended, blew a shofar and was identified as being from Temple Beth Tephilath, apparently in suburban Detroit.

A photo of the rabbi appears in his entry for the previous day. According to the Detroit News in 2002:

On the high holidays, Beth Tefillat Moses of Mount Clemens draws 100 or so worshippers. “I don’t know where they come from,” he [Waldman] says. Most Saturdays it’s all the temple can do to scrape together a minyan, the 10 males age 13 or older who have to be on hand before services can start.

Waldman arrived a decade ago after confounding everyone, including himself, by surviving a massive and hugely unpleasant cancer operation. After all concerned woke up and pinched themselves, his doctors told him he needed to slow down. That’s when he saw an ad for a part-time rabbi in Mount Clemens, wherever the heck that was.

“I thought it was the other side of the world,” says the 50-something Waldman. He grew up on the west side of Detroit and had always worked in Oakland County, and “I thought you needed a passport to go east of John R.”

The synagogue does not have much web presence, although I found the following listing (spelt as “Beth Tephilath Moses”), where the rabbi has, even more mysteriously, become  “Mark Waldman”. You can listen to Waldman blowing his shofar in honour of Moon here.

Standing behind Waldman in the picture of him provided by Gorenfeld (to our left) is Dr Joshua Ben-Ami (also known as Shuki Ben Ami and Shuki Yariv Ben-Ami). Ben-Ami flew from his native Israel to Washington for a press conference after the story broke, where he announced that only Moon has been interested in Israeli/Palestinian peace, so “I crowned, with my ten fingers, with white gloves, Father Moon, and I wish to do it again.” (Here on mp3). Unification Church press releases and other reports describe Ben-Ami as dean of the Emil Frank Institute in Jerusalem, afiliated to the University of Trier. The Trier Emil Frank Institute website makes no mention of this link (perhaps if someone could do a search in Hebrew more could be found).

Ben-Ami is also given the title of “President WMA, Israel” in this news report from Moon’s Interreligious and International Peace Council, where there is a photo. WMA is the World Media Association, another Moon concern directed by Mike Marshall, editor-in-chief of Moon’s United Press International. According to a Unification Church news report, Ben-Ami considers Moon to be the Second Coming, and at church events gives testimony “about giving Jesus the crown”.

I could not find out whether Ben-Ami is related to David Z Ben-Ami, founder of the American Forum for Jewish-Christian Cooperation, who has also made comments in support of Moon.

PS: Although a bit off-topic, I cannot resist noting that this UPI report (via Moon’s Washington Times) places Yorkshire in Australia: Moon clearly has great powers…

UPDATE (4 July): Gorenfeld provides a link to an Ambassadors for Peace account of the press conference, which took place at the National Press Club. Here there are pictures of many of the religious figures involved. Waldman gets a quote, but no new details, while a slightly different profile for Ben-Ami is given:

Professor of Theology at Emil Frank Theological Institute in Germany, specializing in early Christian history and the Dead Dea Scrolls. Currently, Dr. Ben-Ami is president of the Israeli Chapter of the World Media Association. Formerly he served as the President of Mitchell College in Jerusalem. Dr. Ben-Ami is author and publicist of many books and essays, including, “Faith of God in Man According to Jewish Tradition,” “Jerusalem Stories,” and “Native American Culture in South Dakota.”

This is confusing: he’s no longer head of an Israeli branch of the Emil Frank Institute, but is working at the main German part – although absent from the Institute’s website. Mitchell College has no web presence (although I can’t search very well at all in Hebrew), except as part of the address of a German cultural centre. I eventually sussed how to search for Ben-Ami in Hebrew, but all I found was one of his Native-American themed works, for sale here.

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WorldNetDaily, and many other sources, shriek that “New Bible Translation Promotes Fornication“. I think I already have a copy; yes, here we are:

Genesis 38.15: Judah, seeing her [Tamar], took her for a prostitute, since her face was veiled. Going up to her on the road, he said, “Here, let me sleep with you.”

…Judges 16.1: Samson then went to Gaza and, seeing a prostitute there, went in to her.

However, WND is not upset by this (found in all translations) but by John Henson’s Good as New translation, that allegedly reworks St Paul’s commands. WND contrasts the new translation with how several passages are translated in the KJV, including 1 Corinthians 7.1-2:

KJV: “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: [It is] good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, [to avoid] fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.”

New: “Some of you think the best way to cope with sex is for men and women to keep right away from each other. That is more likely to lead to sexual offences. My advice is for everyone to have a regular partner.”

Alas, my Greek is very bad, but the orginal does say “man” and “woman”. However, an overview of Paul’s thought makes it very clear that wedded heterosexual monogamy (and a bit grudging at that) is the only kind of sexual expression allowed (despite Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha). But why is WND getting upset over an unofficial translation put out by a small British publisher? The answer is that Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams has provided a foreword:

Patiently and boldly, he [Henson] has teased out implications, gone back to roots, linguistic and theological, and re-imagined the process in which a genuinely new language was brought to birth by those who had listened to Jesus because they knew they were in a genuinely new world.

Some of John [Henson]‘s versions will startle; but only because we have forgotten what the impact might have been in the ancient world of a small library of books written in the dialect of the streets and shops, with many of the leading characters identified by slightly outlandish nicknames. And also, because we have not much living language left for authority figures, we fail to sense the impact of the images of royalty and so on in the pages of scripture; we need other terms to make them come alive.

That actually seems quite sensible. No one translation can do justice to any text, and different perspectives can shed light on different areas. In the case of the Bible, when so many translations are burdened with having to be answerable to a denomination, an independent translation, produced by an individual rather than a committee, is all the more valuable (although I do recall a Gospel of John purged of anti-Semitism from a few years back that quickly vanished). It would be a shame if the book only receives sensationalist coverage for one or two passages. The translation also includes the (vastly overrated, in my opinion) Gospel of Thomas, and drops Revelation.

It should be noted that Henson is a retired Baptist minister, and that the translation has also been praised by the President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain. Get Religion also provides a link to the ONE Community that sponsored the translation.

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An email from CBA (the Christian Bookselllers Association) announces that Michael Moore will soon be undone:

The documentary George W. Bush: Faith in the White House, which premiered at CBA Convention, will air on network television in September and may release in theaters later this summer as a contrast to the negative Fahrenheit 9/11

The documentary was made by Grizzly Adams Productions, whose producer is David Balsiger. Balsiger is a one-time Council for National Policy member, and is best known as the enabler of two hoaxes. The first, in the early 1970s, was when he co-ghostwrote Mike Warnke’s autobiography The Satan Seller, launching the “Satanic survivor” genre that caused so much panic and harm over the next twenty years (Balsiger still stands by the book). The second was in the 1990s, when his Sun International Pictures made The Quest for Noah’s Ark, a pseudo-documentary that included an interview with a man who falsely claimed to have found it. That fiasco led to the termination of a contract with CBS.

In 1977 Balsiger also made The Lincoln Conspiracy, about the assassination, for which he won an honorary doctorate from the Lincoln Memorial University.

Balsiger’s other works include:

Secrets of the Bible Code Revealed

How to Prepare Your Family for Y2K

Bible Code: The Future and Beyond

The Bible’s Greatest Secrets Revealed

The Bible’s Greatest Miracles

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Back in March, Cypriot Justice Minister Doros Theodorou declared fears about Satanism on Cyprus to be baseless. He now seems to have changed his tune, according to the Cyprus Mail:

Speaking at a conference on Satanism in Limassol yesterday, Theodorou said the Council of Europe and European Parliament had both called on their members to confront the problems connected with sects and new religious movements on a political, social and economic level…”both neo-Satanism and Occultism are groups that belong to the so-called ‘New Age’ and move within society using various masks”.

Further:

He said the best tool against these dangers was prevention through providing correct information and sensitising people to the actions and dangers surrounding these groups.

Well, if that’s his aim the conference is likely to be counter-productive. Most of the information about Satanism on the island comes from Archimandrite Christophoros Tsiakkas, head of the Pancyprian Parents Union for the Protection of the Greek Orthodox Culture, the Family, and the Individual (P.P.U), which was founded in 1944. Tsiakkas (also spelt as Christoforos Tsiakkas or Christoforos Chiakkas) makes some lurid accusations, claiming there is a “mass initiation of school students into Satanism.” He has also warned of a “Satanic conference” that took place on the island on June 14 and claims that a Satanic temple has been built in Limassol.

However, Tsiakkas has been banging this drum for a while. A previous conference was held by the PPU and the Ministry of Justice and Public Order back in 2000, where he announced that “18.9% of High School children had some experience of Satanism and Occultism.” Part of his “evidence” was that high school students considered rock music to be Satanic and supposedly had the following feelings when listening to it:

32.5% fear
28.4% disruption
26.8% disturbance
22.0% rage
20.5% anger
7.2% pleasure
4.5% tranquillity

Back then, Ministry officials vowed to act against the “200 cults” on Cyprus, in order to “protect and safeguard public order, national security, and national sovereignty.” Seems rather peculiar that nothing seems to have improved after four years – unless, of course, the threat is an imagined one.

The 2004 conference also featured Alexander Dvorkin, a man with rather extreme views. According to the American conservative CNS News, at a roundtable in Moscow in 2003

Dvorkin lashed out what he called “imported sects.”

Dvorkin, who is attached to the Orthodox Church, is a U.S. citizen who has lived in Russia for about a decade on a permit for foreign residents. A controversial figure, he has even labeled Pentecostal Christianity as a “totalitarian sect”.

Clearly, the Satanic threat is being manufactured from a conflation of new religious movements with Satanism and of harmful religion with anything that the Orthodox Church disapproves of, including rock music. Theodorou should go back over his notes from March.

(Several links for this entry came via the Religious News Blog, the Pagan Prattle, and the Wiccan Web)

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The Observer profiles the Peacemaker Circle International Community, a Zen Buddhist group that holds “street retreats” in which participants spend several days living homeless in major cities. At a “retreat” in London this weekend, participants paid £150 (about US$220), much of which is donated to homelessness charities, but their time on the streets includes making use of facilities (soup kitchens and free blankets) intended for the genuinely homeless. The experience was also supposed to include begging, although a police warning put a stop to that. Speaking to the Observer’s sister paper The Guardian a few weeks ago, group leader Grover Gauntt (or Senso Grover Genro Gauntt) had explained the motivation behind the “retreat”:

Everybody takes away something different…To understand the other you begin to understand yourself, to bear witness to what actually is; you transform yourself.

However, according to the Observer journalist, who lasted half of one night undercover with the group, many people are unimpressed. The journalist herself was left

cursing the self-righteous and self-indulgent arrogance of some so-called spiritual communities.

Homelessness charities have complained of “grotesque tourism”, arguing that it “is dangerous, obstructive, foolhardy and patronising. It is obscene.” Homeless people themselves were also critical, calling the group “bonkers”, “religious nutcases”, and expressing scepticism over their decision to sleep rough in June rather than during the winter.

The “street retreats” actually predate the Peacemaker Circle, although both were begun by ex-NASA scientist Bernie Glassman (or Bernie Tetsugen Glassman), first President of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association of America. Glassman (of whom Gauntt is a “dharma successor”) considers “street retreats” to be a form of “Bearing Witness”. The Peacemaker Circle and Glassman’s Zen Peacemaker Community also undertake retreats to Auschwitz, have organised various reconciliation/dialogue events in Israel/Palestine and Jordan, and have some community programmes in New York. In 1991 the PCI won a “Best of America Award for Social Action” from US News & World Report.

Glassman himself studied under Roshi Taizan Maezumi,* a Soto Zen monk who established the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967. Maezumi, the son of a prominent Soto Zen priest, received approval from three teachers: Hakujun Kuroda (who seems to be confused with Maezumi’s father, Baian Hakujun Daiosho, on some sites), Koryu Osaka, and Hakuun Yasutani (whose wartime militarism and anti-Semitism, some years before he met Maezumi, were exposed by Brian Victoria, as reported here). More of the lineage is untangled here.

*Japanese family names here appear after the given names, in Western style.

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With all the attention given to the Texas GOP, no-one seems to have noticed that the theocrats also hold at least some influence in the Oregon Republican Party. Writing in The Oregonian (link via Christianity Today), former Oregon Republican congressional district chairman David Crowe chides Christians who failed to vote in 2000:

This failure to exercise our most fundamental citizenship duty cannot continue, lest we allow the secular minority to destroy the Christian foundations upon which our nation was established.

…Far too many Americans, by their indifference to revealed truth, are in rebellion to God, and far too many American Christians are ambivalent when unrighteousness prevails through unenlightened legislation and judicial decision.

A Jeremiad against abortion, MTV, gay marriage and the removal of the Ten Commandments from courthouses follows, along with this observation:

Truthfulness is not important to most secular candidates and some Christian candidates. It has become the acceptable mode of politics to posture and deceive.

Crowe, a Vietnam veteran and ordained graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary, runs Restore America, a “grassroots” organization that was founded in 1999 and which hopes to achieve “100 percent Christian voter registration and turnout in the November general election”. Restore America is endorsed by Perry Atkinson, another former Oregon GOP chair. Although Crowe seems unlinked to many of the other theocrats we have considered recently, his political vision is a familiar story of religious coercion dressed up in the language of freedom:

Our parents are not to take God’s place and rule in the family independently of Him. Our teachers are not to take God’s place and teach as if there were no authority that gives all the facts in the universe meaning. Civil government is not to take God’s place and rule independently of His one government (Isaiah 9:6,7; cf. Romans 13:1-7). Whenever any government oversteps its proper magisterium, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29; cf. Daniel 3:16-18; 6:10ff).

But don’t we act as if someone else is god? We want the state to educate our children, to nurse us when we get sick, to establish homes for us when we get old, to protect us from ourselves, to care for the poor, and to support us when we are out of work. Man often makes the state civil government into an idol.

An epic list of affirmations and denials follow, which include the following highlights:

We deny that any final authority outside the Bible (e.g., reason, experience, majority opinion, elite opinion, nature, etc.) ought to be accepted as the standard of government for any individual, group, or jurisdiction…

We deny that man’s government is independent and unlimited, and that any government can claim independence from God on the basis that governments arise out of “social contracts.”…

We affirm that Jesus Christ, supporting the jurisdictional separation between Church and state set forth in the Old Testament, acknowledged and supported the legitimate but divinely limited jurisdiction of civil government when He commanded us to “…render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:22).

While opposing eccleslocracy, the control of the state by a particular church,

We deny that Christians should take fellow Christians to civil courts, and that the state ought to usurp the legitimate and God-ordained jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts…

We affirm that civil governments everywhere ought to follow a Biblical moral order…

We deny that civil government has a duty to care financially for widows, orphans, aliens, and the truly needy through a coercive tax system, unless the primary providers totally fail to fulfill their responsibility to do so.

And, rather obscurely:

We deny that any civil government ought to overturn its obligation to maintain just weights and measures by issuing any type of fiat currency

This is all inspired by the Coalition for Revival, which endorses Crowe’s organization. The CoR is run by Jay Grimstead, a disciple of Francis Schaeffer, and is focused on bringing a wide variety of conservative Christians together along fundamentalist lines for political action. Its “42 Articles of the Essentials of a Christian World View” (no homage to Douglas Adams intended, I’m sure) can be seen here.

Other endorsements come from a variety of religious figures, the most well-known being Frank Damazio and the most odd-sounding being Clifford Mansley of the “Protestant Committee on Scouting”.

But what of the actual Oregon Republican Party platform? Well:

We believe all authority flows from The Creator to the parent and family. Parents have the inalienable right as well as the responsibility to form the character of their children, including but not limited to, correction, religious instruction and expression, general values and education. We believe it is the role of the parent and family to direct topics of education in sexual matters, sex related diseases, birth control, ethics and moral values. Governmental or public agencies shall obtain parental permission before discussing sex-related subjects with minor age children.

How this fits with a later commitment to “educating the public” about AIDS is not explained (and are there any non-“minor age” children?). Further:

We recognize the practice of homosexuality to be a matter of personal choice, and morally wrong. We oppose efforts to teach, promote or present homosexuality in public schools.

Also:

Science [education] shall include scientific creationism.

Plus, among much else:

We support academic freedom in higher education and oppose policies which call for the teaching of secular humanist/socialist theories as the only acceptable world view.

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Jack Ryan, GOP Senate candidate for Illinois, in public, from the Chicago Sun-Times in April:

Still, every day, at some point, Ryan can be found in one of the back pews of a church, praying.

“People ask me, ‘Why do you go to church every day?…I’m not very effective in my home. Too many distractions…

“I believe in God,” he says. “The order of priorities is no revelation here: God, family, country. That’s how I try to think about my life, in that order.”

And he believes in prayer, he says, explaining that he doesn’t recite specific prayers. He has a conversation with God.

Discussions of C.S. Lewis, St. Thomas More, St. Francis of Assisi and his calling from God to enter public service follow.

Jack Ryan, GOP Senate candidate for Illinois, in private, from the Chicago Sun-Times in June:

Actress Jeri Ryan accused ex-husband Jack Ryan of insisting she go to “explicit sex clubs” in New York, New Orleans and Paris during their marriage — including “a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.”

According to her declaration:

[Jack Ryan] took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to… It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.

[He] wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. [He] asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset.

Well, as Evelyn Waugh replied when challenged about his behaviour: “think how much worse I would be if I wasn’t [a Christian].”

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The BBC (cribbing shamelessly from the PA) reports on an Anglican church service due to take place today:

An anti-EU vicar is planning to hold a special service on Sunday, thanking God for the European election results.

The Reverend Philip Foster said the UK Independence Party’s success showed the tide was turning and Europhiles could be beaten.

Mr Foster wrote to the congregation of St Matthew’s Church, Cambridge, inviting them to the thanksgiving as a “sign of God’s mercy on our country”.

Last week’s European election results were a breakthrough for the UK Independence Party, which wants Britain to leave the European Union. They approach the subject from the right, and although their campaign concentrated on the issue of sovereignty, anti-immigrant feeling may well have played a part in their success.

Foster is a long-time campaigner against the EU, as well as against regional assemblies for England, as reported here:

Rev. Philip Foster from St Matthews, C of E Church, Cambridge also wrote to all 43 diocesan Bishops explaining the hidden purpose of regionalisation. In his letter to Bishop Langrish he wrote “My very worst fears about this imposed parliament were most dramatically realised before my eyes and ears…we were faced with a demand that we either sign a paper approving regional parliaments or be asked to leave… I beg you and your fellow Bishops similarly engaged to withdraw from your frankly treasonous activities”.

Unsurprisingly, these political activities are tied to his religious vision. From his church in Cambridge he runs St Matthew Publishing Ltd., which includes the following titles on its booklist:

The Principality and Power of Europe: Adrian Hilton Britain and the Emerging Holy European Empire by Adrian Hilton Extended and UPDATED Where is the European Union taking the United Kingdom and why? This timely and lucid book throws light on the spiritual and political powers at work throughout Europe. This book looks squarely and honestly at what our rulers are seeking to impose upon Britain…

The Final World Empire by Alan Franklin A most comprehensive Christian book on the EU’s current activities and their ultimate destination in relation to what the Bible has to say. Alan has been a newspaper editor in Britain for 18 years and a journalist for 38…

UN Global Straitjacket by Joan Veon World government is far closer than you might think

Another author on his list is James Jacob Prasch, who runs the Christian Zionist Moriel Ministries. An article on Prasch’s site to which Foster is just one signatory includes the following:

I have no doubt that the Ecumenical movement is a prelude to the rebirth of Babylon the Great in Revelation and that deceptions like [the neo-Pentecostal revival at] Pensacola are preludes to the Great apostasy of Thessalonians. With the current drive for a false peace with Islam in Israel and the reconfederation of the Roman Empire via a pseudo-democratic federal Europe, the juxtaposition of these trends and the constellation of events that result indeed are setting the stage for the Man of Sin which Antiochus [the Syrian King who desecrated the Jewish Temple in 169 BCE], among others, typifies and foreshadows.

Although himself a Charismatic, Foster objects to much in the neo-Pentecostal movement, and contributed to The Signs and Wonders Movement-EXPOSED, a critique of John Wimber. Other targets include the Promise Keepers and the Alpha Course.

Foster is also part of Christian Witness Ministries, where he tells us about the satanic Eastern forces allegedly at work in the Christian West:

By the 19th century, despite the evangelical revivals under the Wesley’s, etc. the general ethos of the West was once more wide open to Eastern influence. This time the onslaught was more subtle. By the end of the 19th century only the elite’ were getting involved in the occult. Partly as a result of Darwinian Evolutionary philosophy, which encouraged the removal of moral law, and encouraged belief in the survival of the fittest: men began to dabble in dirt’…

The emergence of Theosophy and occultism as a respectable para-science by the turn of the century led to the impact that was to come through Carl Jung…The demons of the East awaited their opportunity!…

It startled me most of all to discover that the philosophy behind the whole counterculture of drugs, rebellion, and rock music was basically Hinduism: the same deception about the unity of all life, vegetarianism, evolving upward to union with the Universe, and doing one’s own thing.

A few more personal details are available here.

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