10 reasons why the religious right is not pro family

[ladyinred]

"America is involved in a Second Civil War," screams the cover copy on James Dobson and Gary Bauer's 1990 book Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids. "On one side are those who defend family, faith and traditional values. On the other side are those who aggressively reject any hint of tradition or religion and want a society based on secular values."

Randy Tate, Executive Director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, warned in August that if Coalition members failed to vote, "the anti-family, anti-Christian Left ... which undermines the marriage-based family" would run America.

It seems as if every other word out of the mouths of Religious Right leaders these days is "family." Dobson calls his group "Focus on the Family." Bauer, his Washington sycophant, heads the Family Research Council. Religious Right leaders constantly claim to be carrying forth the banner for "family values."

Having monitored the Religious Right for 12 years, I am convinced that the Religious Right is many things, but pro-family isn't one of them. The banner that the Religious Right hoists is for narrow, reactionary, right-wing politics, not family values.

With that thought in mind, here are ten reasons why the Religious Right is not "pro-family":

1. Ignorance Is Not Pro-Family.
Parents who really care about children want them to grow up well educated and ready for the challenges of an increasingly technological society speeding toward the next century. Yet the Religious Right, through its constant advocacy of creationism, would have children learn Bible stories in place of real science. Thanks to their meddling, many public schools are afraid to teach evolution, and biology textbooks give the subject scant attention. As a result, an entire generation of public schoolchildren may grow up lacking an understanding of the principles underpinning modern biological sciences. Such ignorance cannot fail to have widespread and dangerous repercussions in the fields of medicine and research.

Furthermore, Religious Right activists bash public education incessantly, yet they have constantly stood in the way of efforts at innovative school reform. Instead, they champion outdated techniques such as rote drilling and mindless memorization.

2. Denying Children Access To Sex Education Is Not Pro-Family.
Concerned parents realize that children are curious about how their bodies work and need accurate, age-appropriate information about the human reproductive system. Yet, thanks to Religious Right pressure, many public schools have replaced sex education with fear-based "abstinence only" programs that insult young people's intelligence and give them virtually no useful information.

One Religious Right video I saw a few years ago depicted an actress dressed as a nurse lecturing a classroom full of high schoolers on the importance of abstinence. One boy raised his hand and asked what would happen if he engaged in premarital sex anyway. The "nurse" sighed and replied, "Well, I guess you'll die." Real pro-family parents don't deny the importance of stressing abstinence to young people, but they also know that today's teenagers are sophisticated enough to see right through simplistic, fear-based messages.

3. Censorship Is Not Pro-Family.
Most parents want their children to grow up with a love of reading. But in public education, the Religious Right does all it can to disrupt this by constantly challenging works of literature. At a certain age, young people need books that are compelling and interesting, books that are more than simply high school versions of "See Dick run." Yet Religious Right organizations have challenged novels like The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and a host of others. Not satisfied with having their own children excused from reading these modern classics, the Religious Right has sought to have them completely taken out of schools, denying access to other people's children as well.

In recent years, Religious Right groups have stepped up their attacks on America's libraries, insisting that all "controversial," "anti-religious," or "pro-gay" materials be placed on restricted access or removed altogether. The Religious Right has even attacked children's books that dare to portray nontraditional families in a positive light.

4. Religious Coercion And Intolerance Are Not Pro-Family.
Religious Right groups conceived and advocated for the odious and misnamed "Religious Freedom Amendment," a constitutional amendment that would have removed the separation of church and state from the Bill of Rights and replaced it with religious majoritarianism and heavy-handed coercion. Real pro-family parents recognize the equal rights of all children in public schools, no matter what their religious or philosophical beliefs and reject all forms of coercion in the schools. Contrast this to the Religious Right view, which holds that the majority should be able to impose its religion on everyone else. How would you like your child to be the only first grader sent out into the hall every morning during prayer and Bible reading because you're not Christian? Doing something like that to an impressionable youngster is child abuse, not practicing family values.

5. Denigrating Some Families Because They Are Different From Yours Is Not Pro-Family.
Real family values advocates recognize that child rearing is difficult and that all families need support. The Religious Right's view is that only heterosexual, two-parent families are worthy of support. Single-parents are criticized, and gay parents are routinely vilified.

Religious Right groups would deny gay people the right to adopt, even if that means children must languish in institutional care. Some groups go so far as to support denying gays access to their own children. In Virginia, several Religious Right organizations supported a court ruling denying a lesbian mother custody of her own child, for no other reason than her homosexuality. Real family values means realizing that people who think or live differently than you can be good parents too. The Religious Right has always been too immature and intolerant to recognize this.

6. The Philosophy Of "The Ends Justifies The Means" Is Not Pro-Family.
In the political sphere, Religious Right groups will do anything to win, including smear its opponents, distort their records, lie, and violate federal election laws. Real family values proponents struggle to teach their children ethical values, including those of fair play and honesty. Leaders and members of the Christian Coalition have the gall to accuse the group's opponents of being "anti-family" when it's their actions that have dragged our political system further into the gutter.

7. Hatred Is Not Pro-Family.
No parent in his or her right mind would teach a child to hate. Yet the Religious Right's rhetoric toward its perceived enemies is laced with hatred and intolerance and has that effect. Gay people, liberals, the nonreligious, pro-choice Americans, advocates of women's rights, and others have all been subjected to vicious verbal assaults and name-calling by Religious Right organizations. Real pro-family Americans realize that they should strive to avoid saying things they would not want their own children to repeat. Children exposed to Religious Right rhetoric could not help but learn to hate and fear those targeted by these organizations.

8. Hating America Is Not Pro-Family.
Real pro-family parents teach their children that our nation, while it has often fallen short of its lofty ideals, strives to be a good country where people are treated with justice and fairness. They recognize the occasional shortcomings of our political and economic systems and urge children to work to correct injustices. The Religious Right's rhetoric increasingly attacks and vilifies America. Many groups assert that our government is no longer legitimate because of court rulings they dislike, going so far as to flirt with approving of armed rebellion. This extreme view does nothing but give intellectual aid and comfort to the "hate America" crowd, exemplified by violent militias and other radical anti-government activists.

9. Ignoring Children's Needs Is Not Pro-Family.
The Religious Right is obsessed with children, but only "unborn" ones. While they constantly assail legal abortion, Religious Right groups have done virtually nothing to improve the lot of American children across the board. These organizations never lobby for better health care for poor children or seek to improve the circumstances of poor families. Robertson once attacked Head Start, one of the most effective programs for helping poor children get a decent education, and he has been a vociferous critic of welfare, even though children are the primary recipients of many welfare programs. Robertson also advocates turning education over to "free market" forces, which would all but guarantee no access to decent education for the poor. Many Religious Right groups, notably Dobson's Focus on the Family, actually advocate violence toward children. Dobson is a vocal proponent of corporal punishment, despite the fact that numerous studies have shown that striking children is ineffective and actually fosters anti-social behavior.

10. Attacking Working Moms And Making Them Feel Guilty Is Not Pro-Family.
Real family values advocates support all mothers, whether they work outside the home or not. The real pro-family position recognizes that many mothers today are conflicted about working outside the home and that some do so because of financial necessity, others because they choose not to withdraw entirely from the workforce. Religious Right groups seek to make working moms feel guilty, yet they have done nothing to help make America's business climate friendlier toward working mothers. In fact, when family needs and big business wants collide, Religious Right groups usually side with big business. Many opposed 1993's Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires companies to give parents time off to tend to sick family members, holding that it would harm the nation's business climate.

On the issues that really are "pro-family," such as affordable health care for children, creating quality, safe public schools, or ensuring access to affordable, safe day care, the Religious Right has either been silent or has served as obstructionists. In the place of these issues, the Religious Right has substituted its own agenda, which includes creationism and mandatory worship programs or coercive prayer in public schools, censorship, an end to legal abortion, and mean-spirited attacks on gay people and others who serve as targets of their hate. They can call it "pro-family" if they want, but plenty of evidence, including plain old-fashioned common sense, would seem to indicate otherwise.


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Rob Boston is the Assistant Editor of Church & State magazine, published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, D.C.. He is the author of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition (Prometheus Books, 1996) and Why The Religious Right Is Wrong (Prometheus Books, 1994).

[ladyinred]

Personally I thought the bible taught the Good news, to offer hope to those who had no hope. http://www.alternet.org/story/46908/
Excerpted from the article:

They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.

*****The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.********

Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.

Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to "secular humanists," to "nominal Christians," to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.

All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the Executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to pass them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.

They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else

[Diane Vera]

Originally Posted by ladyinred

"America is involved in a Second Civil War," screams the cover copy on James Dobson and Gary Bauer's 1990 book Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids. "On one side are those who defend family, faith and traditional values. On the other side are those who aggressively reject any hint of tradition or religion and want a society based on secular values."

...

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Rob Boston is the Assistant Editor of Church & State magazine, published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, D.C.. He is the author of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition (Prometheus Books, 1996) and Why The Religious Right Is Wrong (Prometheus Books, 1994).


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You apparently copied and pasted the above article from here:

10 Reasons Why the Religious Right Is Not Pro-Family
by Rob Boston
Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 19, Number 1.
Council for Secular Humanism

I would appreciate it very much if you could always make a point of both crediting (by name of both author and publication) and linking to your sources. This would make your posts much more useful to those readers (such as myself) who in turn may wish to use your info to educate others.

[ladyinred]

Ok,I'll need to do that. I think in the article they make valid points. It seems that the religious right decry that Christians are under attack, but in fact they attack anyone who doesn't go along with them including Christians. I often have posted articles here at soul force by atheists, because even though not of a religious faith, they have many common sense ideas.Atheism is also under attack by the religious right. And often they are demonized as "evil " as well. But talking to atheists and reading somewhat on the subject, I would hardly characterize them as evil. In fact many atheists have supported GLBT rights. There is another website you might be interested in, the positive atheism website,
[url]www.positiveatheism.org He published some of my comments and emailed me a few times. http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/...startframe.htm This is the section on scary quotes.another website you might find interesting:http://atheism.about.com/od/religiou...n_Religion.htm

[ladyinred]

Here is something I would like to add ,with all the issues facing our nation today, from lack of medical care, to education, to crime, and poverty, the environment, to jobs and rights for workers, which by the way the religious right has helped work diligently against, you have to wonder why they have such a myopic and obsessive focus on gays. Since we supposedly make up 2% of the population according to their statistics. It would seem to me that we hardly pose a threat to the rest of the 98% of the population who are in the majority.

The only reason to me it seems that they want to have a marriage amendment is not to protect marriages but to make sure that GLBT won't be able to ever have a say so in the matter and won't ever have the right to marry.

The real issues that are actually posing a threat to Americans families have alot to do with what I've mentioned above, plus job outsourcing,the deficit,and there are a list of others that I can't mention here.


I also see the threat to our security as having to do with other factors such as the radical right trying to do away with separation of church and state as well as undermining our constitutional freedoms and rights. There is no real security when people abdicate their liberties and rights for a false sense of security.

Think about that for a moment , live a country where they have repressive regimes and govt.. what freedom do the people actually have? If you say the wrong thing you may end up in a prison or worse. These people live under constant tyranny and often fear for their lives. I've talked to people living in such countries who were actually thrown in jail for speaking up. They came to the U.S. just to get away from that.

Of course if the Christian "taliban" gets it's way ,we'll have a theocracy similar to ones we see in Middle Eastern countries,you can count on that. We are much a safer society as a democracy confronting the issues and challenges we face. I don't think any of us can truly feel safe if we live under tyranny.

Also my objections to the Bush administration is this, is that it is the antithesis of a democracy.The radical right may adore him, but he is basically pro-big business and anti-family in my view.