#725: David Grisham

David Grisham, a security guard at the nuclear-bomb facility Pantex, is the leader of the quasi-militaristic Christonazi organization Repent Amarillo, a branch of the Texas Taliban whose motto is “Army of God”, a rough translation of “Hizbollah”. The group advocates the “spiritual mapping” and targeting of specific local areas and venues in order to exorcise “demons” from those areas. Of course, they generally target minorities and vulnerable or small groups, something that has earned them the well-deserved epithet “hate group”. Among their more notable actions are their protests against a small, discrete swingers group, LGBT people, abortion clinics, Muslims, Buddhists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Universalists (who “teaches that everyone is going to heaven. This calls Christ a liar. You cannot be a Christian if you call Christ a liar,” according to Repent), Unitarians (“Pagan and witchcraft headquarters for Amarillo; pagan and witchcraft celebrations and rites are performed here”), and other groups deemed “not Christian”, as well as events such as gay pride events, “Earth worship events”, “Pro-abortion events” or places such as Planned Parenthood, breast cancer events such as “Race for the Cure” (they claim that they want more focus on the – thoroughly discredited – alleged link between abortion and breast cancer), opening days of public schools to reach out to students, spring break events, “Demonically based concerts”, Halloween events, and other “events that may arise that the ministry feels called to confront.” “As Christians, we cannot stand by and watch 67,000 of our neighbors walking through the gates of hell,” states the group, and accordingly views it as their mission to forcibly stopeveryone else from doing what Grisham doesn’t think he would like to do if he got the chance. As for the swingers case, Repent set out to destroy the club through harassment after discovering its existence. On New Years eve, they showed up in military fatigues and bullhorns, blaring Christian music at the swingers’ club building, thereafter stalking the members at every following visit to the club, took video of each member, obtained the swingers’ license plates, dug through their trash, and informed neighbors and coworkers of the activities. Their tactics have frequently involved attempting to get people associated with viewpoints they don’t like fired, but since their charges often include accusations of “witchcraft” their success rate is variable. Their attempt to burn the Quran was unsuccessful as well. Their execution of Santa Claus by a firing squad was more, uh, successful, but only given certain particular criteria for success.

Grisham has also tried to run for office on a dominionist platform, asserting that “so as far as I’m concerned there is no separation of church andstate.”

In fairness, quite a few of Amarillo’s inhabitants have grown tired of the group’s antics, and the groups evangelizing outreach campaigns seem to have backlashed.

Repent Amarillo is part of  RAVEN International, headed by one Troy Bohn. Bohn takes credit for the spiritual mapping (i.e. recognizing where the evil demons lay hidden in Amarillo), and it was Bohn and RAVEN leader Alex Hill who initiated the “Adopt-a-Block” program to organize efforts to remove the demons.

Diagnosis: The group and its members resemble the groups one reads about in horror stories from parts of Africa or Afghanistan. In short, there is really absolutely nothing to distinguish this group from the Taliban or Grisham from a zealous, fundie Taliban mullah. Or a raving madman, which he is.

#647: Paul Ellwanger

It’s thirty years since Paul Ellwanger achieved fame and we have barely heard from him since the eighties. I really have no idea if he is still kicking around, but no evidence of his demise either. So we’ll assume that he’s still qualified for inclusion. Ellwanger was the guy who drafted the creationist “balanced treatment” bills that became law in Arkansas and Louisiana, and which were eventually declared unconstitutional in the celebrated MacLean vs. Arkansas Board of Education (thorough documentation related to the case can be found here) and in Edwards vs. Aguillard. It is a little remarkable how this local crazy, leader of the groupe Citizens for Fairness in Education, was able to have his rants passed as law, but he did, and the world is thirty years on an altogether better place for it (because, of course, of the subsequent court cases). His policy suggestions from 1988, updated in the face of the rather severe drawbacks of being judged unconstitutional, are discussed here. Less famously, Ellwanger is/was also a geocentrist and actually attempted to have “equal time” bills for geocentrism passed as well.

Whatever the case may be with Ellwanger, at least Wendell Bird, the guy who officially pushed the Arkansas creationist bill, is still on the loose. In 2005 Bird filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of an association of Christian schools against the University of California system accusing them of discrimination because they wouldn’t recognize the validity of some courses at Christian secondary schools that use creationist textbooks (these books, including a hardcore creationist Biology textbook by Thomas E. Porch & Brad R. Batdorf that states that “If the conclusions [of scientific research] contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them”). They lost that one (also here).

Diagnosis: As opposed to the vast majority of loons in our Encyclopedia Ellwanger’s contributions are actually among the most significant demonstrably positive contributions to the side of reason in the US the last decades. Unintentionally so, of course, but Ellwanger was to a large extent responsible for both Edwards v. Aguillard, and for MacLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, two landmark victories for sanity. 

#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.

#630: Mark Downey

And just in case you thought you’d seen the worst of lunacy by now, we give you Mark Downey. Reverend Downey is the culprit behind the “Christian Identity” website Kinsman Redeemer Ministries, which is a good place to go to give up all hopes for humanity. Downey’s main tenet is that the so-called “Chosen People” of the Bible are – as opposed to what the Bible suggests – not the Jews, at least not today’s Jews, but rather the “Germanic, Celtic, Scandinavian, and Anglo-Saxon” peoples. And thus you may get an impression of the direction in which Downey is headed. And indeed: “Adolf Hitler showed the world the mercy and loving kindness of Positive Christianity,” he says, but we failed to listen and were instead fooled by a Jewish conspiracy to view Hitler as evil. Yes, that’s the idea, and even among the most insane it will probably remain a minority view for some time. As for anti-semitism, Downey has revived most myths from ancient and medieval times. “How many of the innocent youngsters you see on milk cartons have fallen prey to the ceremonial knives of rabbis and lie buried in secret graves or were ground up into dog food in some jewish-owned processing plant?” asks Downey in his series of articles charmingly titled "Why We Hate the Jews", and follows it with this.

But Downey isn’t quite done. The whole idea of the notion of “Kinsman Redeemer” is that Jesus came to redeem not all humans, but his kinsmen. His kinsmen were the white people (since, as most renaissance paintings so accurately depict him, Jesus was blond and blue-eyed). It doesn’t really help, then, that Downey actually purports to reject “white nationalism” – he rejects white nationalism since white nationalism is, according to Downey, a pagan movement. Instead, he prefers to view his ideas as “Christian nationalism”, which combines the main tenets of white nationalism with dominionism and hysterical endtimes babble. It is not as charming as it sounds.

Of course, Downey and his group also rejects evolution – not on technical grounds but because evolution implies common descent and by the inference rule of Downey’s wacky wishful thinking evolution must therefore be false. Instead they claim that all races were created separately (and should not be mixed – “race mixing adulterates God's plan for the Ages”) and that the different races represent not only different species, but different genera (no, they do not exhibit any trace of having the faintest idea what that would mean).

To really emphasize their fervent contempt for reality, they are also 9/11 troofers (though you probably saw that one coming), and promote the idea that the levees of New Orleans were destroyed on purpose by the guv’mint during Hurricane Katrina, which, alongside most other natural disasters, was a punishment from God for America’s rejection of God’s laws on race in any case. I don’t think much good can come from delving deeper into Downey’s ideas so we’ll leave it at that. (We are also reluctant to link directly to any of Downey’s own stuff; you’ll have to google it).

Diagnosis: Could he be the most deranged psychotic madman we’ve encountered thus far? His candidacy is at least a strong one, though his influence will probably remain somewhat limited for the foreseeable future.

#629: Russell Doughten

The absolutely rabidly insane 

antivaxxer activist Meryl Dorey 

used to be American, but 

she works in Australia at the moment and must be counted as primariy “their problem” (though she is, indeed, a serious problem, and deserves any negative exposure she can get).

Russell Doughten, on the other hand, could only happen in the US. Doughten rose to fame in the late seventies and early eighties through a series of films promoting a dispensationalist, premillennialist view of the endtimes and the rapture; in short he produced a series of Taliban fundamentalist sci-fi flicks most aptly described as forerunners for Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series. The titles of Doughten’s efforts are “A Thief in the Night”, “A Distant Thunder”, “The Image of the Beast” and “The Prodigal Planet”, and they are uniformly distinguished by their badly acted and extremely dated dialogue and fashion. Ideologically they are close to Hal Lindsey’s legendary The Late Great Planet Earth, and plotwise they contain exactly what you would have predicted: a liberal Christian minister misses the rapture since he doesn’t take the Bible literally (though he later comes to see the errors of his ways), and The United Nations declares a state of emergency from which they rise to become a world empire (complete with mobile guillotines to behead anyone who doesn’t accept having the mark of the beast tattooed on their forehead), thus rising to become the Kingdom of Earth predicted in Revelations. (The precursors of the films, Ron Ormond’s movie “If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?” featured a communist world empire instead, but conspiracy theories have to evolve with the times.) A more thorough commentary on the movies can be found here, and they can be watched here, here, here, and here. Anyone who watches them all deserves a prize. 

Diagnosis: The crowd at Rapture Ready are apparently huge fans, however, which is an indictment as damning as any we could come up with. If he is currently more of a fascinating cult relic than a real threat to civilization, that is not for lack of trying.