#643: John Eidsmoe

John Eidsmoe is a legendary Alabama attorney and Christian reconstructionist (dominionist) who is on the record demanding a “full scale offensive” to take over the nation and impose Christianity by force of law (also here). He also has, as you may suspect from an Alabama dominionist, what could perhaps be characterized as a more “nuanced position” on slavery.

Eidsmoe is the proud possessor of, in addition to a J.D, a doctorate in “ministry from the Oral Roberts University” and in fact a variety of (unaccredited) degrees from other rather shady places trying to pass as educational institutions. Then again, Eidsmoe is severely mistrustful of education, and is on the recording dismissing accredited education as brainwashing since education introduce kids to reality and Eidsmoe disagrees with reality. Given his expertise on such matters it is little surprise that Eidsmoe was the legal advisor to Roy Moore during the latter’s 10 commandments statue debacle.

Eidsmoe’s rise to fame is primarily related to the fact that Michelle Bachmann was one of his students while she attended Coburn Law School at Oral Roberts University. Indeed, Bachmann describes Eidsmoe as “one of the professors who had a great influence on me” (she still has the audacity to criticize Obama for Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright, by the way), and Bachmann his research assistant on the 1987 book “Christianity and the Constitution”. That book argues that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy, which of course is in blatant contradiction with the facts, but being in contradiction with reality has never have never mattered for professional Liars for Jesus and is a necessary qualification for being, as Eidsmoe was, enlisted by the rabidly fundamentalist pseudo-science organization WallBuilders – which is how he came to be hired by Ohio’s Springboro School District for their summer course on the Constitution. One may wonder how Bachmann aligns herself with Eidsmoe’s opinion that “women must submit to their husband”, but come to think of it Bachmann has in fact said precisely that herself. Bachmann also seems to have got her theocratic sympathies from Eidsmoe.

No points for guessing Eidsmoe’s attitude toward zeh gays (they are destroying society by incurring the wrath of God, if you ever wondered). In Gays & Guns he writes that “one cannot help wondering why homosexuals would persist in a life-style that is in fact a ‘death-style’,” and urges the military to adopt reparative therapy as a means to change the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian servicemembers. In said screed he uses phrases such as “considerable evidence indicates that,” but unfortunately seems to think that “considerable evidence” is just a nicer word for “the zealous bigotry I have decided to adopt.” The proposed measure is apparently needed since gays who join the military will molest children.

Eidsmoe has been considered too extreme and asked towithdraw as a speaker by Tea Party rally organizers. That should tell you something.

There’s a fairly comprehensive Eidsmoe resource here.

Diagnosis: A significant source of evil in the world. Should be approached with care and preferably not at all.

#613: Bradlee Dean

We are not completely convinced that Tony Davis of the International Legal Services counts as a loon, despite his assurations to clients that due to technicalities every conviction in the last 60 years is null and void (a theory rejected outright at every level of the legal system). There are other explanations for his behavior than craziness.

You can’t fake being Bradlee Dean, however. Dean is not a fraud. He is one of the most aggressively insane persons to spread his breathtaking mindrot in the US at the moment, challenging Fred Phelps himself for hatred and Ray Comfort for density. Dean is the founder of the Taliban satellite organization You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide International. The Ministry has made itself famous for using bait-and-switch tactics to push a hardcore fundamentalist Christian agenda in American public schools by claiming to teach kids about how to fight drugs (that’s his gateway to public schools) but instead turning the sessions into frothingly insane Jesus events accompanied by psychotic gay-bashing – though it should be mentioned that his bait-and-switch technique did not go over particularly well in Dunkerton, Iowa.

Dean’s most frequently appreciated pastime, bashing gays, desevers a few words, starting with pointing out that when engaged in the activity Dean does not always observe the strictures of common decency or coherence. For instance, he supports castration of gays for the not entirely coherent or accurate reason that the Founding Fathers wanted that (he may actually believe that himself, or he may be lying; Dean has a well-established problem with that truth-thing). This should presumably be part of the legal punishment gays should face for their dirty thoughts and inclinations. In fact, jailing and castration are merely just punishment for the past sins of homosexuals; after all – according to Dean (who has jumped onto the Scott Lively bandwagon) – homosexuals were responsible for the Holocaust. Apparently they must have collaborated with the evolutionists (or the “religion of evolution”), given that Dean thinks the evolutionists are responsible for the holocaust as well.

In one of the most ridiculous displays of fatwa envy ever, Dean also praised Muslims for executing gays: “Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America. This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do.” (His subsequent attempt at backpedalling was rather feeble). Nevertheless, Dean is of course virulently anti-Islam, since there is “a correlation between the Muslims and the homosexual agenda.” Though he doesn’t say it in so many words, coherence is apparently an enemy of Dean’s as well. It is probably a gay-Muslim-liberal conspiracy. Here he argues that Muslims have infiltrated our schools and are teaching kids to be jihadists.

In 2011 Dean filed a 50 million dollar lawsuit against Rachel Maddow for defamation after Maddow reported on Dean’s anti-gay stance, presumably targeting her in particular because she is herself openly lesbian. In fact, Dean has a history of completely baseless lawsuits, which he tends to lose badly. He has indeed also been noticed for trying to censor his critics on youtube. It is less clear that censoring his critics really matters when his own screeds are so batshit insane that even the most hardcore wingnut would hesitate over them to begin with (here, though, is Dean arguing that negative reactions to his offensive bigotry are offensive). If you want to access any of said screeds, you can go here – we don’t feel particularly comfortable linking directly to any of it, though here is his rant at the 2013 Awakening conference, where he argued that the Supreme Court has “opened the door to Satanism” by ruling that the government can’t force kids to pray and that Obama is just like Chairman Mao. (And not only Mao – apparently the American government is “emulating many similarities” with Nazi Germany, such as freedom of religion, equality, tolerance and liberty; the similarity ostensibly being that the government, like the Nazis, is “setting itself at war with God”).

A particularly notable event in Dean’s career occurred when the Minnesota Republican Party invited him to lead the ceremonial prayer at the start of the Minnesota House's legislative session. Dean's prayer turned out to be, shall we say, controversial; he would only recognize Christian members of the legislature and, for good measure, accused Obama of being a Muslim. It was in fact sufficiently appalling for the Speaker of the House to order a full re-start of the session and issue an official apology for the event. Dean later lambasted the Republicans for not endorsing his ridiculously insane, incoherent piece of fuming rage. As indicated, Dean is of course also a hardcore dominionist, who calls liberals “criminals” and urges the right to take up weapons against a liberal government (his association with the Sovereign Citizen movement is discussed here). You can imagine he was upset when Minnesota legalized same-sex marriage. Apparently they did it “covert-like” so as not to draw unwanted attention, because apparently elected officials passing a bill with the attention of the whole state is being “covert” when Dean disagrees with the bill’s content.

In his daily life, Dean is the drummer for the band The Junkyard Prophet, a hardline Christian conservative band promoting and promoted by his front organization. They are evil, and the other members, Rene Benton (guitar/vocals) and Massey “Mass Dogg” Campos (bass/vocals), have voiced their share of crazy as well.

Dean’s local wingnut radio show, The Sons of Liberty, has also established itself as a legend of untarnished lunacy. Rick Santorum has appeared on the show praising Dean for his stance on homosexuality and voicing his support for criminalizing sodomy. He also occasionally writes columns for WND, primarily for promoting shit he has to sell you (check out the Ray Comfort quote in that link, by the way.

Oh, and he is of course a hardcore conspiracty theorist. In fact, Dean is a Sandy Hook truther; that is, he claims that the (Aurora and) Sandy Hook shootings were orchestrated by the government (I suppose disagreeing with him is still considered “offensive”). Public schools are also part of a conspiracy – the rigorous International Baccalaureate program is, according to Dean, part of a global scheme to disarm Americans and indoctrinate students in a homosexual agenda (as well as Islam). Dean himself, on the other hand, apparently learns the stuff he should have learned at school from David Barton, with predictably disastrous results.

It is probably little surprise that Dean is a supporter of – and is endorsed by – Michele Bachmann. I don’t know who comes off worse by that association. More here.

Diagnosis: His level of crazy is only matched by his malice and bigotry. A rather unsavory fellow, in other words.

#607: Dave Daubenmire

A.k.a. Coach Daubenmire

A.k.a. Your Friendly Neighbourhood Demagogue

Coach Daubenmire is a former high school football coach who ran into some career trouble in the late 1990s for coercing his students to pray. He was sued by ACLU, though according to himself “the ACLU relented and offered Coach an out of court settlement. God honored his stand and the ACLU backed off,” which sort of fails to mention the fact that the court ordered Daubenmire to stop leading religious activities at school and that the school board paid an $ 18,000 settlement. But Daubenmire is a traditional Liar-for-Jesus, so you wouldn’t expect much honesty from that source. “As a result of the experience, Coach heard the call to move out of coaching a high school team, to the job of coaching God’s team,” is not entirely accurate either.

Well, Daubenmire has built his entire post-coaching career on telling people how his first amendment rights were violated by the Constitution, and on running the ministry he founded, Pass the Salt Ministries (no kidding). Pass the Salt is perhaps most famous for hosting the right wing conference “A gathering of Eagles”, promoted as a “NON-POLITICAL event […] designed to educate Christians about the great moral issues facing this country [,…] such as The Gay Agenda, Abortion, Individual Liberty, Hate Crime Legislation, and the religion of Secular Humanism,” which does not sound distinctly non-political but there you go. Guests included several famous non-partisan Christians such as Flip Benham, Rick Scarborough, and Peter Labarbera.

Daubenmire also runs something called “Minutemen united”, a group of people who disrupts church services to proclaim their anti-gay stance. Those activities have landed him several high-profile television appearances, where he has attempted to (chime in on the Freshwater case and) portray himself as your humble, friendly servant of God – he doesn’t hate his opponents, you see, it is just that they are “enemies of God”. He also advocates revolution to obliterate the distinction between church and state, and is apparently a big fan of David Barton’s dominionist mangling of history.

Now, Daubenmire asserts that he is “not homo-phobic. I'm not homo-hateful. I'm not homo-latent. I'm homo-nauseous. I really couldn’t care less where a man desires to put his appendage. But I’m sick of hearing about it. I’m sick of talking about it. I’m sick of it being force fed to me on TV,” which would at least made slightly more sense if Daubenmire hadn’t so tirelessly talked about it and weren’t so all-consumingly obsessed with it. One wonders how he squares being tired of the debate with his repeated calls on Obama to come clean and admit that he is gay (as well as admit that he is a socialist who is trying to destroy the economy and that he is not really a Christian; Obama is apparently also a sociopath). Then he complains that people say that he says stupid shit.

He didn’t quite get through the Jason Collins affair with his dignity intact either. Daubenmire was predictably outraged that Obama supported him. He also boldly declared that he hates homosexuality, which apparently must be consistent with being “not homo-hateful”, primarily one supposes in virtue of the lying-for-Jesus discourse mandate he seems to possess. He furthermore claimed that homosexuality only exists “because men like you and men like me are letting it go on and won’t stand up and push back and say anything about it.” Because there is surely a shortage of rabid bigots fuming about homosexuality at the moment.

Diagnosis: Homo-hateful, abysmally ignorant theocrat. He’s pretty loud, so he has apparently made some impact.

#564: Jane Chastain

Honorable mention to bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman, Sr. for claiming, in 2003, to have “mastered the new art of Neruological Visual Profiling or N.V.P. The criminal or Predator puts off a certain ore about themselves. By using N.V.P Dog can predict the ’Danger’ before it happens.” (There is reason to think that “ore” is Dog’s version of what others call “aura”, although it makes just about as much sense in either case).

But Dog’s antics pale in comparison with Jane Chastain, who has a rather long story of ardent promotion of loon. Chastain is a former nationally-known sports announcer turned conservative political writer and commentator, in particular for WorldNetDaily. To give you a sense of Chastain’s connection to reality, one of her WND commentaries argued that “President Bush has done more than any president in history to advance gay rights.” One supposes that the comment should be understood in light of the fact that Chastain doesn’t seem to fancy the existence of domestic partnerships or gay marriage.

She has also peddled some of David Barton’s fake Founding Father quotes. The crazy is taken to dizzying levels of nonsense, however, when she later tried to defend her use of the quote. During the 2008 elections, Chastain favored McCain, and tried to convince her readers to vote McCain because Biblical law told us to and because God would otherwise destroy America.

She also thinks climate change is a conspiracy by the scientific community to “to scare us out of our hard-earned cash,” and has repeatedly pointed out that climate alarmist scientists are securing shitloads of money for their universities. She is also a staunch creationist, offering “There is no evidence (only theory) to prove that man came from the apes,” continuing with the always impressive gotcha “why are the apes still with us?” to clinch the matter.

Perhaps most famous, however, is her struggle with a deep moral dilemma described thusly: “[B]uying that box of cookies now presents a moral dilemma, as the Girl Scouts have become a training ground for the left-wing feminist agenda.” Or perhaps her (despite her general anti-abortion stance) suggestion that we should sterilize everyone who applies for guest-worker status to prevent them from having anchor babies. No wonder she struggles with some moral dilemmas.

Diagnosis: Although her devastating challenges to science should leave scientists working hard to revise their theories from the very foundations of those theories, we know that they really won’t since they are in a conspiracy to take your money. Fortunately Jane Chastain is there to reveal the nefarious points. Thank you, Jane.