Stanley Rogouski responds to a letter criticizing his article "Christian Fascists Taunt Democrats Abandon of Feingold's Censure Motion" for supposedly being "anti-Christian".

To Mr. Rogouski,

I live in Naperville, Illinois. I read your article from 3/17/06 and I find it quite amusing that you make a "moral" equivalent between Fascism and Christianity. Mr. Rogouski, you obviously have never read your Bible or you would know that true Christianity has nothing to do with your charges of a Christian "agenda" to take over the United States government. Our country was founded on Christian principles and if there was ever a time for your fantasy of a theocracy coming to fruition it would have had a better chance of forming some 220 years ago when Christianity was widely practiced, but it didn't.

Your Christophobia smacks of ever charge of discrimination that you levy at Christians but you conveniently hide behind the typical rhetoric that attacks Christians. I challenge you sir to find in the Bible where it directs Christians to control or subvert governments. I challenge you. You won't find it anywhere. Nor will you find anywhere in the Bible where it says to harm other human beings who do not follow Jesus Christ or refuse
to become a Christian.

So I ask you Mr. Rogouski, why do you have so much hatred towards Christians? I have been a Christian my whole life and this idea that there is a "Christian right" makes no sense. I'm on the side of Christ and there is no "left" or "right". Those are terms that our society created to label people and categorize a person's beliefs.

Right now in our world, a religion (Islam) wants to cut off the head of a man who converted to Christianity 16 years ago and I'm wondering where the outcry from people like you is being printed. If the shoe were on the other foot and it was Christianity threatening the same thing, no doubt you would have been busy writing article after article against Christianity. But in reality, Christianity isn't your problem. It seems that you and your organization have a political agenda to force your will on the rest of this
country.

Christianity lets a person decide for themselves if they want to accept Christ as their savior. If a person refuses, then that is their personal choice and that is how it has always been. Nothing in the Bible commands a Christian to chase after a non-believer or threaten them with violence if they choose to go their own way. In conclusion Mr. Rogouski, if you are going to attack Christianity, attack it on the merits of what the Bible says about it instead of misinforming your audience based on your own biases and prejudices thus misleading people through your lack of Biblical knowledge in the first place. I'll be happy to read your rebuttal of any New Testament scriptures you find to support your case against Christianity.

Dear Correspondent:

First of all I'd like to thank you for taking the time to write. It's always flattering when people are interested in what you've written and take the time to respond.

But unfortunately, you seem to be responding to an article I haven't written, and not one I have.

The article that was posted on the World Can't Wait website is neither an attack on Christianity nor an attempt to discuss the Bible. If anything it was an attack on the Democratic Party for abandoning Senator Feingold when he most needed their support. Senator Feingold very courageously stuck his neck out to defend the Constitution and to hold President Bush responsible for the illegal and unconstitutional use of the NSA to spy on American citizens. And all he heard from his own party was doubletalk and evasion.

Although not a Christian myself, there are many Christians that I do admire. Martin Luther King and Oscar Romero were two of the towering figures of the 20th Century. I wonder where your outrage was when Romero was murdered by the agents of the US puppet government of El Salvador in 1980. Phillip and Daniel Berrigan as well as William Sloan Coffin helped lead the resistance to the murderous American war on the Vietnamese people. The five American nuns who were murdered by the same American funded government that assassinated Archbishop Romero were courageous women and deserve to be recognized by the Vatican for their decision to give their lives to help the poor. In our own time, the Episcopalian church deserves credit for appointing Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in their churches history. The Riverside Cathedral in Upper Manhattan and the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn have led the fight against the New York Theater Workshop's decision to censor the play My Name is Rachel Corrie. Last fall, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine bucked enormous public pressure and let Cindy Sheehan speak in front of an audience of over 1000 people.

So don't imagine for a moment I have anything against Christians.

People like Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and President Bush may call themselves Christians. But they're also very bad people who pervert the teachings of Jesus. In much the same way that Osama Bin Laden has co-opted Islam, President Bush and men like Dobson and Falwell have hijacked the Christian religion for their own authoritarian, hate filled agenda. You are correct when you say that Jesus never called for the overthrow of a government, but you can't quite say the same thing about Pat Robertson or George W. Bush. In a speech on August 22, 2005, Robertson called on the US government to murder the democratically elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. I believe the exact phrase was 'let's take him out'. George Bush has repeatedly used the Christian religion to support his own highly partisan, violent politics. Whether it's calling for a 'Crusade' in the Middle East, 'regime change' in Iraq, or for a constitutional amendment to prevent gays and lesbians from getting married, George Bush seems to have read a different Bible from the one you claim doesn't call for Christians to overthrow legitimate governments or interfere in the political process. Maybe you should send him a copy.

I'm also not quite sure why you're complaining to me about the attempt by the Afghan government to execute Abdur Rahman. The warlords who run the government of Afghanistan were put in power by the Bush administration and President Karzai would be a dead man within a matter of hours if he didn't have the US Marine Corps riding shotgun for his theocracy. President Bush also supports the Islamic theocracy in Saudi Arabia and the military dictatorship in Pakistan. Where's your outrage here? Indeed, where was your outrage when the Reagan administration funded, armed, and supported the Islamic theocrats in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s? It's not 'Islam' that's the problem. It's Islamic theocrats who, more often than not, cut checks written to them in Washington or by Americans addicted to their oil.

What's more, you accuse me of being indifferent to the abuses of Islamic Fundamentalism. On the contrary, World Can't Wait has organized protests against the theocracy in Iran in Solidarity with International Womens Day in Europe.

http://rogouski.com/gallery/womens-day-2006

We've seen what your president's solution is. Bomb them. We also see how little that's done in Afghanistan or Iraq. Afghanistan, as you rightly point out, is run by theocratic warlords. Iraq is well on the way to becoming a Shiite theocracy.

Here's where I would agree with you.

'Our country was founded on Christian principles and if there was ever a time for your fantasy of a theocracy coming to fruition it would have had a better chance of forming some 220 years ago when Christianity was widely practiced, but it didn't.'

In fact, I would go one step beyond you. Not only was America founded on Christian principles, it was founded as a Christian theocracy. The only thing you get wrong is the year.

You mistake 1789 for 1619.

You confuse the US Constitution with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the founding of the United States of America with the beginning of the theocracy in 17th Century Puritan New England. Indeed, Massachusetts Bay was a Christian state, so theocratic that only a Christian could hold political office. Senator Feingold, the man slandered by Tony Perkins in is e-mail could not have held office and could not have even voted. Senator Feingold's Jewish. He would have had no place in your 'Christian' America. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts argued that America should be a 'City on a Hill', a Christian government where the entire state was subject to the rule of a small group of theocrats. Needless to say Winthrop's vision had no more use for women than for Jews. Strict laws governed their behavior and severe punishment was meted out to women who had sex outside of marriage or disobeyed their husbands. Women in 17th Century Massachusetts were murdered as surely as they were by the Taliban. In 1692, 19 women were executed for witchcraft.

Osama Bin Laden would have been right at home in 17th Century New England.

The American Constitution, on the other hand, is a secular document founded on the principles of the French Enlightenment. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine may have believed in God, may have read the Bible and occasionally invoked the power of prayer, but they were no more Christian theocrats than a churchgoing Episcopalian is today. They believed in the principles of science and critical thought. They would not have stood in the way of teaching Evolution to replace it with 'intelligent design.' Indeed, their conception of God was different from yours. Instead of God as a personal savior, they believed in God as a divine watchmaker, a creator who set the universe going and left us with the 'personal responsibility' to make our own way in it. Above all, they believed in the United States as a country where you could be free to practice religion according to your own conscience.

This is best summed up by John F. Kennedy's great speech in Houston.

'I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. '

But let me repost the e-mail in case you missed what I objected to.

''Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is perilously close to the border. I mean the border between loyal opposition and treasonous conduct. He has allowed his political ambition to drive him into ever more strident attacks on President Bush. Now, he has introduced a censure resolution in the U.S. Senate condemning the President for what he claims are violations of law in the National Security Agency surveillance program. In World War II, such an action by a Republican senator would have been viewed as treason plain and simple. FDR's administration opened every letter sent to or by 12 million members of our armed forces. Millions of personal letters were microfilmed, censored, and only the redacted copies were sent on. They were called V-Mail. If anyone then had said "FDR spied while GI's died" he would have been put in a straightjacket. That "V" stood for victory. Apparently, Sen. Feingold doesn't care about victory in America's war on terror. Feingold is so far out that even his fellow liberals have abandoned him. They ran like scalded donkeys, oops, I mean scalded dogs when Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) boldly called their bluff. Frist said, "OK, let's vote on the Feingold resolution." Feingold should be careful. The only President ever censured by the Senate was that great Democrat Andrew Jackson. Jackson's supporters were so outraged that they came roaring back, won the Senate, and then expunged the record.'

It's not just that Mr. Perkins slanders Senator Feingold and calls him a traitor (Feingold's a big boy and can take care of himself) . It's the overwhelming, sickening idea that America shouldn't stand for innovation and critical thought, shouldn't continue to move forward and continue to expand freedom, but should go backward in time.

Yes, President Roosevelt had the US Military spy on our soldiers in the Second World War but does that make it right. America is a much better place in 2006 than it was in 1942. In 1942, blacks in the south couldn't vote. All Americans of Japanese extraction were locked up in concentration camps and stripped of their property and civil liberties. The army was segregated. Women had few rights and privileges. Jews were kept out of Ivy League schools in order to maintain their 'Christian' character.

Is that what you want to go back to? Tony Perkins certainly does, having long standing ties to white supremacists in Louisiana. Indeed, Mr. Perkins actually bought David Duke's mailing list to use as a database for his first political campaign. But, what's more, Mr. Perkins doesn't only want to go back to 1942, he wants to go all the way back to 17nth Century Puritan America, to the days of witch burnings and of theocracy.

Just look at the e-mail I quoted above. Yes, Roosevelt spied on American soldiers for and justified it by some dubious claim of national security (nice wasn't it? Assuming the 'greatest generation' was made up of potential traitors) but Mr. Perkins would like to extend that control too all of us, civilians, as well as soldiers in combat. While you can make a reasonable argument for censoring the mail of a soldier serving in a combat zone (He might get careless and reveal troop movements) none of this can apply to civilian unless we're considered in a state of universal mobilization for permanent war. This is a radical, even utopian demand and it is just what I said it was, fascism, and Christian fascism. And I for one don't want to live in an America governed under the principles of Tony Perkins and John Winthrop because that means no legal abortion, no rights for gays and lesbians, no true citizenship for Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or atheists like myself. Let it stay in the past.

-Stanley Rogouski 

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