#1603: Thomas Farr

It’s important to understand how deeply ingrained the persecution complex is in the religious right (brief but good discussion here) – the idea that Christians in the US is a minority that everyone else is out to get is utterly delusional, of course, but it is rhetorically pretty effective when it comes to rallying the troops whenever any policy, idea or statement they disagree with can be construed as a direct attack on them (and, by extension, on Jesus).

The perspective is needed to understand the otherwise deranged mission of the organization Open Doors, which is dedicated to “serving persecuted Christians worldwide” with a mission to work in the “world’s most oppressive countries, strengthening Christians to stand strong in the face of persecution and equipping them to shine Christ’s light in these dark places,” since the mission would otherwise have sounded rather reasonable. It isn’t.

In 2011, then, Open Doors issued a pledge calling on presidential candidates to promise to protect “the right to employ religious arguments, or religiously-informed moral arguments, when contending for or against laws and policies, such as laws designed to protect the unborn and traditional marriage” in the US and to “nominate to the U.S. federal bench judges who” woud defend that right. Of course, the religious right empoys religious arguments all the time, but what Open Doors has in mind are things like the ruling in the Propositon 8 case, which according to pledge co-author Thomas Farr (the other author is Carl A. Moeller) is precisely an example of how Christians are being persecuted in America. “Religious freedom is in crisis” in the US, according to Farr, since lots of people have the audacity to disagree with God him on social issues. So, yes – once again “persecution” means “people, especially lawmakers, disagreeing with them.” And by that definition, there is, of course, plenty of persecution going on in the US. And so it goes.

Diagnosis: It is hard to emphasize strongly enough how abysmally delusional people like Farr actually are. They are also zealous. The combination of delusions and zeal is a common one, but always bad news.

#1602: Lynda R. Farley

Ok, so this one is probably not a very influential figure, but Lynda R. Farley is so colorful that we can’t just let her be. Farley drew a bit of attention to herself when she was part of a “million” veterans marching on Washington DC (more like a few hundred) to protest Obama in 2013, presenting herself as the “Smoker on Strike” with messages like “George Washington, father of our country & a smoker!” and “the person who first promoted the lie that ‘smoking causes lung cancer’ was Adolf Hitler” (not entirely accurate, but that’s not the main problem with the message), presented in … unusual combinations of colors, fonts and capitalizations – nothing compared to her website, though, which is absolutely amazing (she calls it “the most beautiful pages on the WWW,” and it is hard not to conclude that she really is unable to distinguish between “I say so” and “it is the case”). Even her website cannot compare to her car, the “liberty van” (do look it up), however.

As for the message: Yes, Lynda Farley is a denialist about the negative health effects of smoking. The most important line of argument (it seems) is that she “personally believe every word in the King James Bible. ‘Thou shalt not smoke’ is NOT in there. And, the verses usually quoted about holiness, and the body being God’s temple nowhere refer to smoking or not smoking,” which is probably correct. Meanwhile, she rejects “the anti-smoker’s junk science. And there’s GOOD EVIDENCE that they LIE about the ‘risks’, or at the very least, exaggerate greatly.”

One of her own rants is here, and she also links to this, shall we say, “interesting” website of “research”, mostly consisting of the rants by the late Lauren Colby. The basic idea is that you cannot trust science, since most scientists are funded by the powerful anti-smoking industry. Since you cannot trust the scientists, it apparently follows that any beliefs you may have about the issue are equally valid. Farley herself adds that “it seems God created all of us with NICOTINE RECEPTORS IN OUR BRAINS.  And, nicotine is a form of NIACIN – which is a VITAMIN.” So there. She also links to the pro-smoking works of William Campbell Douglass, whom we have encountered before.

Other than that Farley seems predictably enough to promote a variety of wingnut conspiracy theories such as global warming denialism.

Diagnosis: Not very influential or likely to be taken seriously by many, but the kind of lady who simply adds some color to our Encyclopedia, the Internet and wingnut protests. And her main platform is crazy enough to impress even us.

#1601: Richard Fales & Willie Dye

Oh, the stuff that one can dredge up on the Internet. This time it’s a matter of a couple of rather obscure Biblical archeologists. Richard Fales is listed as professor of Archaeology, Greek, and Apologetics at the California Pacific School of Theology. The California Pacific School of Theology is an unaccredited diploma mill (and possibly defunct at present), but their school catalog at least used to list Fales as a “genuine archaeologist” with post-graduate degrees from the Baptist Bible Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Both deny ever having had a Richard Fales as a graduate or student, respectively. Not that it necessarily makes much of a difference given the field, but still.

Willie Dye seems to outdo him, however, and lists multiple Ph.Ds in his CV from various – shall we say – “dubious” sources. Dye is also president at the same, uh, institution … oh wait, he’s academic staff at that school (the president is one Bill Forges, who has his PhD from … California Pacific School of Theology, and who is afraid of demons); Dye is president of the Pacific National University – which may or may not be indiscernible from the other institution in anything but name.

They’re otherwise pretty obscure, but Fales did at least contribute a section to Ray Comfort’s hilariously desperate Scientific Facts in the Bible: 100 Reasons to Believe the Bible is Supernatural in Origin arguing – through misrepresentations, inaccuracies and making things up – that the New Testament is heavily corroborated by independent sources. He was also featured – as “Dr. Richard Fales” – in the 1983 film “The God Makers”, but there really is no reason to go searching for that one, methinks.

As a student of Fales, Willie Dye is pretty obscure as well, but we have at least found him ranting about the alleged conspiracy by scientists to cover up the Truth of the Bible. He also delves into “the origins of life issues” and examines evidence that proves that “design requires a Designer”, and he is apparently in possession of “eye-opening physical proof” that the race of ancient giants known in the Old Testament as the Nephilim actually existed as well as a “startling discovery about dinosaurs that challenges the scientific community!” We don’t know the precise nature of the discovery, but we can’t help but notice that he has been “working on vertebrae paleontology and ichnology in Glenrose, Texas, at the Paluxy River Bed.” Oh, yes, the Paluxy River Bed.

Diagnosis: Yes, there are grown-ups who really don’t have the cognitive skills necessary to grasp the distinction between truth and falsehood, or between deception and honesty. It actually seems like these people believe they are helping. Which is … pretty sad.

#1600: Mike Fair

More state legislatures; this time it’s the South Carolina Senate, which is unfortunate enough to be saddled with Mike Fair (6^th district). Fair, a resident of Greenville, has been serving since 1995, and as a hardcore religious fundamentalist he has been promoting things like abstinence-based sex education and proposed legislation mandating that sex education classes include information that homosexual behavior is “unnatural, unhealthy and illegal.” Yeah, accuracy isn’t his strong suit, but incorrectness is par for the course. In 2014 the South Carolina House voted to cut $70,000 from the budgets of two state universities to punish them for assigning books about LGBT people to students; Fair followed up by accusing one of the schools of gay “recruitment”.

But perhaps most importantly, Fair is a creationist who has achieved quite some notoriety for his long-standing efforts to have intelligent design creationism taught in public schools:

-       In 2003, he tried to amend a bill dealing with instructional materials and textbooks to require a disclaimer about the origin of life as “not scientifically verifiable”; failing that, he got support for establishing a committee to investigate the science standards regarding the teaching of the origin of species, determining whether there is a consensus on the definition of science, and whether alternatives to evolution should be offered in schools. He explicitly said his intention was to show that Intelligent Design was a viable alternative. The bill died, however, when the legislature adjourned.

-       He quickly bounced back, however, with numerous new efforts, including S.909, a bill modeled on the so-called Santorum amendment. If enacted, it would have required that “[w]here topics are taught that may generate controversy, such as biological evolution, the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.” That one failed as well.

-       In 2005, he launched (together with Rep. Bob Walker, who sent a letter to the Board of Education claiming that it was “unanimous” that the evidence for evolution had been fabricated) a Discovery Institute-backed campaign against the treatment of evolution in the state’s science standards, once again pushing “critical analysis” language for the purpose of undermining the teaching of evolution. He didn’t get it, despite the backing of governor Mark Sanford, but claimed a victory for intelligent design nonetheless. As did the Discovery Institute, but they tend to claim victory no matter what happens.

-       In 2008 he introduced an “academic freedom” bill (S.B. 1383) that would have specifically allowed public school teachers to critique evolution in their classrooms (which died in committee).

And so on. In 2014, in particular, Fair was annoyed by the fact that a study done for the Fordham Foundation once again gave South Carolina an “A” for how well it teaches evolution, thus threatening South Carolina’s reputation as a backwards hole, we suppose, and pointed out that no one was there when life began to make a scientific observation about it (no, he doesn’t even …) and proposed, once again, that science books in South Carolina public schools should have the following statement posted in them: “The cause or causes of life are not scientifically verifiable. Therefore, empirical science cannot provide data about the beginning of life,” which has nothing to do with evolution but does reveal, yet again, a staggering lack of understanding of the scientific approach to questions (hint: hypotheses-testing by virtue of a hypothesis’s observable predictions: Claims about the past tend to predict certain observations now). Apparently the eye is also a serious objection to evolution, mostly because Fair can’t be bothered to, you know, consult the relevant literature.

At least Fair got support for his efforts from USC math professor Daniel Dix, a member of Bill Dembski’s International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design and a signatory to this, who appealed to incredulity and his lack of background in evolutionary biology to question evolution, and Joseph Henson, chairman emeritus of Bob Jones University’s division of natural science, who appealed to the Biblical Flood. The Board of Education once again ignored Fair’s concerns, however (also here); this one involving Fair and another SC legislature creationist, Kevin Bryant, is telling as well). But perhaps Fair used the aftermath to figure out why scientists reject his objections? Oh, yes. He returned later in 2014 after apparently doing some research to require that evolution should be taught as a theory, not a fact. So there. He also claimed that “the evolution controversy often comes down to understanding the difference between macro-evolution and micro-evolution” and that there are gaps in the fossil record – but of course, deep down, debates over topics in science are for Mike Fair really a debate over values. Here he shakes his fists at the courts.

Fair hasn’t restricted his lunatic antics to evolution, however. He has also referred to abortions as our nation’s holocaust – in response to a poll of three Senate districts, showing that a majority of respondents to the poll said they support access to abortion at 20 weeks after they were told that such abortions are rare and often involve fetal abnormalities; Fair effectively said that he didn’t trust the poll because he didn’t like the results.

In 2011, Fair proposed a bill that would have prohibited Sharia law from being enacted in the state of South Carolina (it is hard to express how silly such a bill is), and (unsuccessfully) introduced legislation that would have prohibited Common Core educational standards from being imposed on South Carolina public schools.

Diagnosis: Plenty of gohmerts in the state legislatures, but Mike Fair is still an exceptional specimen. Anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-accuracy to the core, he hasn’t had much success thus far; he does, however, remain in a position of power, a fact that does not reflect well on the people of South Carolina’s 6th district.

#1599: Pat Fagan

Being a senior fellow at the Family Research Council (FRC) is a good way of shouting out to the world that you are crazy and evil, and Pat Fagan is also the director of FRC’s MARRI institute, which a purports to be a “social science institute studying the impact of marriage, family and religion on children, adults and society in general.” It doesn’t have much to do with science. Fagan is the kind of guy who compares a UN report criticizing the Vatican over its handling of sexual abuse cases to the Kristallnacht – the children’s rights committee are like Nazi forces and the UN like the complicit German authorities –  because it dares to criticize the Vatican for failing to … you know, it’s difficult to figure out how a deranged mind like Fagan thinks the comparison is supposed to work.

Though he doesn’t like Nazis, Fagan doesn’t like freedom or liberty either. Railing against the 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird ruling, Fagan said that any “functioning society” should ban all sex outside of marriage and that the overturning of the Massachusetts law banning the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people, may rank “as the single most destructive decision in the history of the Court.”

In the Q&A session of a talk by Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson, Fagan suggested a novel (juvenile) strategy for winning the marriage equality issue: Call gay marriage “garriage”, lesbian marriage “larriage” and generic homosexual marriage “harriage”. By doing so, Fagan reasoned, you will convince people that gay marriage is ridiculous and eventually, gradually vindicate bigotry: “getting these words into use I think is key. And that will take time, but whomever holds the language ultimately holds the whole game,” just like in a schoolyard, if some kids make up a mean nickname for some other kid, it might catch on and ultimately turn the rest of the kids against the initial victim.

Diagnosis: Rabid, lunatic, religiously fanatic bigot. Evil to the core may, however, explain his behavior better than insane, though the two aren’t easily distinguishable.