#621: Penna Dexter

When you come across something called the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, you can be pretty sure its purpose is not to promote ethics or religious liberty. Penna Dexter is a member of  the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and she used to be a cohost in the fundamentalist radio talkshow “Point of View” (host: Kerby Anderson). Dexter’s main concern – despite what she might, in fact, think herself – is not liberty.

Instead Dexter is extremely concerned about zeh Gays: “It's not politically correct to say so, but the greatest threat to America … today is the advancing homosexual agenda” (also here). The main problem with that statement is not that it is not politically correct; in any case, to remedy the gay situation, Dexter therefore calls on Americans like herself, who are concerned about “so many attempts to silence God's word,” to pave the way for political action with “fervent prayer,” and I suppose it would be a good thing if people like Dexter restricted themselves to prayer as a strategy but you suspect she won’t. She has also been caught blaming the suicide of homosexual teens on themselves.

Dexter’s other main schticks include the obliteration of the separation of church and state, in line with how she and people of her ilk understand “religious liberty” (i.e. not). After all, the First Amendment, the way Dexter has read it (hardly) just means that everyone has the right to be Christian. Then there is the usual anti-healthcare stuff, her admirably unambiguous position in the ongoing War on Christmas, climate change denialism (“Climate doom and gloom is a ruse to empower a world body and to spread the wealth,” case in point: “Climategate”), and exposing the liberal conspiracies that are the U.S education system, in particular universities (I won’t link to her articles on these issues; you’ll have to seek them out herself).

Diagnosis: Completely typical representative of the mass of batshit crazy nuts who makes up the Taliban alliance against reality. I suppose Dexter is not particularly influential, or particularly extreme; she is still a flailingly insane bigot, and as such dangerous.

#618: George Deutsch

George Carlton Deutsch III was a press officer of the United States space agency NASA, appointed by Dubya after having worked on the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign. He has gone down in history as the very symbol of wingnut efforts to obstruct and suppress science that does not conform to political ideology, and for cutting support to scientists whose results do not line up with convenient denialist talking points. In short, Deutsch was instrumental in implementing an American version of the celebrated scientific policy of Lysenkoism.

Deutsch gained particular notoriety in late 2005/2006 when he instructed a NASA website designer to add the word “theory” after every occurrence of the phrase “Big Bang”, writing in his memo to the designer that Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion ... It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator ... This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue.” More here.

It created a bit of a stir, which partially ended in the discovery that Deutsch had lied about having a B.A. degree in journalism on his resume, which forced him to resign. True to his inborn persecution complex Deutsch later claimed that the only reason his appointment was controversial was because he was a Christian, which, while blatantly untrue, landed Deutsch a career as yet another wingnut on wingnut welfare for what he and his co-conspirators deemed to be ideological reasons.

Dr. James E. Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and several other career NASA scientists and public affairs officials, complained in interviews about “intensifying efforts by political appointees in NASA, including Mr. Deutsch, to control more closely” the content of their public statements, whereas Deutsch claimed – without anything resembling competence on the issue – that Dr. Hansen exaggerated the threat of global warming, and pretty much that NASA’s mission should be to use research to underpin already existing political agendas regardless of whether science or reality, those liberal conspiracies, agreed.

The always perceptive Deutsch had earlier been noticed for claiming that the ties between Al-Qaeda and Iraq were so clear that any informed person should see them.

Diagnosis: As a professionally appointed derp (apparently his job description), Deutsch exhibited spectacular failure to distinguish reality from ideology (i.e. facts from wishful thinking), and a horrifying display of the dangers when such morons achieve positions of power. Don’t for a moment think that Deutsch is an isolated case, however.

#608: Avi Davis

Donnie Davies is a spoof, but frighteningly similar to a bunch of completely serious loons you’ll encounter on the wingnut phalanx.

Someone like Avi Davis would at least come close. Davis is executive director of the American Freedom Alliance, which – of course – has nothing to do with freedom, but everything to do with reality denial (though Davis calls it “a non-partisan and non-political organization”). It is, for instance, heavy into global warming denialism. The Alliance is even better known, though, for their promotion of Intelligent Design Creationism, and in particular their ongoing legal struggle with the California Science Center after the latter cancelled a vigorously anti-science event to be held at the center in 2009 (if anyone has any updates, let us know). The plan had been to show Lad Allen’s movie “Darwin’s Dilemma”, which supposedly explores the “Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion in Fossil Records,” and about which Davis said that “[n]ew scientific evidence makes it vital that we take a close look at the numerous inherent scientific problems of the Darwinian theory of evolution,” which is undermined by the fact that Davis had absolutely no new scientific evidence and wouldn’t be able to distinguish scientific evidence from bullshit in any case.

In fact, the AFA is probably best known for their stance on Islam (Robert Spencer is a prominent member). Davis combines his stance on Islam with promoting the kind of support of Israel that only end-time American fundamentalists can provide, and you don’t even want to go there.

Diagnosis: Yup, yet another moron whose criminal lack of critical thinking skills has not prevented him from earning a certain amount of recognition in admittedly already severelly reality-challenged circles.

#605: Charlie Daniels

Ted Nugent is not alone. Indeed, Charlie Daniels has in many ways had an even more impressive career as a musician, and he promotes the same kind of inane wingnuttery, bigotry and denialism. Daniels’s views of life and politics, in all their erudition, are detailed for instance in his 2003 Open Letter to the Hollywood Bunch in defense of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy against many other artists and celebrities, and his book (same year) Ain’t No Rag: Freedom, Family, and the Flag, which espouses more or less precisely the kinds of views, bigotry and fallacious reasoning you would expect from a book of that title. Around the same time, during the 2004 presidential election campaigns, Daniels was also a staunch promoter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth manufactroversy strategy against John Kerry (the 2004 counterpart to birtherism).

Daniels is of course also a creationist, having predicted – on the basis of his expertise in the field – that “[i]n the future Darwinism will be looked upon as we now look upon the flat earth theory.” To elaborate: “Darwin’s theory is just that, an unproven idea written by a very fallible human being. Now I don’t expect these learned scholars to give any credence to what someone like me says [oh, how humble of you], but now there are imminent [sic] scientists who say that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is fatally flawed and should not be taught in our schools as fact [no names provided]. This world was created by Almighty God and no amount of theories or college professors can change that fact [damn all you elitists who know stuff]. The truth of the matter is that evolution cannot be proven. It never has and it never will because you can’t prove a lie.” Good to hear it from an ol’ common sense Southern guy whose musicianship has awarded him with great scientific insights. In 2008 Daniels was also nominated for a Creamy Baileys Nobel Peace Prize for Science for his work on global warming, which Daniels dismissed as “a yankee conspiracy.”

The WND, being predictably interested in Daniels’s informed opinions on matters politics and science, could report his characteristic positions on society and politics as “[t]here’s a move afoot to change life in America into a totally European – I’ve heard that so much I’m getting sick of it: ‘European’ – socialist thing; but it’s the dag-blamed truth [sic], and it don’t work, it never has worked, and if America goes that way, America will never be America again.” There is a certain disconnect between the strands in that observation, but Daniels or the WND would of course never notice.

Diagnosis: Stupid and proud of it, and standard denialist, but Daniels does admittedly have a way of rejecting truth that is intermittently fascinating.

#603: Curtis Dahlgren

I know little else about Curtis Dahlgren, but he has written some columns for RenewAmerica, Alan Keyes’s blognetwork and truly a remarkable collection of nonsense. Indeed, Dahlgren has contributed some of the most absurd rants ever committed to the Internet; a prime example being his rant against the legal system and some decisions he disagrees with in which he blamed their perceived errors on elitism, though the lack of any clear point and connection between his (often weirdly false) claims makes it hard to sum it up in any better than that. At least it deteriorates into a cranky rant about those darn hippies and their horrible “civil liberties”, which they have obtained because courts cherry-pick jury members to get the results they want (i.e. there is some sort of conspiracy going on stemming from the “Dark Force” of the left).

Although it is a little hard to discern exactly what his problem is in said column, it is rather obvious that it was written by someone with a tenuous hold on sanity and reason. Dahlgren has also penned columns trying to unmask the conspiracies among those elitist scientists, and his targets are the scientists in precisely those areas you’d expect, evolution and climate change – he calls environmentalist one of the curses of the present age. Dahlgren shows that it is all a matter of politics (failure to draw the distinction between science and politics is a hallmark of wingnuttery), and cites – apparently as support for his claim – how Russians in the 1860s appropriated Darwinism and hence that the Bolsheviks were influenced by the nihilism contained in the theory of evolution. Hence … I have no idea, except that he laments the fact that people always turn to those greedy scientists when they want their problems solved.

Diagnosis: A source of some of the most absolutely utter bizarreness you’ll encounter on the Internet – apparently coherence is no virtue for Curtis Dahlgren, and truth isn’t even on the radar (I suspect even elementary school kids could easily spot a couple of blatant, bizarre falsehoods in any one of his columns in a few seconds).