#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.

#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.

#616: Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Nancy Leigh DeMoss is a hardcore dominionist wingnut and author of Lies Women Believe: And the Truththat Sets them Free, which has apparently sold some copies worldwide. The purpose of the tract is to identify (40) lies that have been told to women. Among the obvious ones are the lie that women have rights, as well as any claim that religion is not the be all – end all for women, or that continuous, daily prayer is optional. The whole rag is really just a more fundamentalist religious rewrite of this one, and other notable lies include:

- “A career outside the home is more valuable and fitting than being a wife and mother.”

- “If I submit to my husband, I'll be miserable.”

- “Sometimes divorce is a better option than staying in a bad marriage.”

- “It's up to us to determine the size of our family.”

- “Children need to get exposed to the ‘real world’ so that they can learn to function in it.”

- “I shouldn't have to suffer.”

In short, Satan – who controls most of the media – has managed to implement his grand schemes (birth control, in particular) in modern culture, leading – according to DeMoss – to acceptance of infanticide. Using contraception is furthering Satan’s grand plan. Indeed, trying to avoid suffering and achieve fulfillment is inherently Satanic lustfulness and should be dealt with accordingly.

DeMoss also appears to be behind Answers In Genesis’s quiz about modesty. You can guess the drift; the designated “correct” answer for “I can't help it if guys struggle morally because of what I wear. It's up to the guys to control their minds. I shouldn't have to change the way I dress just because they can't control themselves” is “false”).

DeMoss also appears to lead the True Woman movement, whose goals are to lead women back to the kitchen where they belong, in accordance with the Bible or DeMoss’s deranged, psycopathic lunacy. It is a little striking that their heroes seem to be the notoriously un-kitchen-bound  Michele Bachmann and Phyllis Schlafly, but then again I suppose few expected coherence from this gang.

Diagnosis: Pure evil, hatred, and Taliban mysogyny packed in cupcakes, fire and brimstone. Despite appearances I wouldn’t quite count them off as a threat to human advancement and well-being. 

#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.

#591: W. Gary Crampton

W. Gary Crampton is one of, one suspects, a scary number of people with a certain view of the relationship between religion and science. Crampton is associated with The Trinity Foundation, which also has something to do with John Lofton but is run by one John R. Robbins (who seems to be an enormously prolific producer of unhinged bullshit). They seem to have an annual “Christian Worldview Essay contest”, an opportunity for kids to write blithe, sheepy-eyed praise of the monstrously delusional Calvinist theologian Gordon Clark (famous as the main defender of presuppositional apologetics, who claimed single-handedly to have refuted all of philosophy and all of science; therefore the Bible is inerrant.

In any case, this is Crampton’s background, and he seems to be a fair representative of the tradition with his essay “The Biblical View of Science” (discussed here). His view of science is, fundamentally, that science “does not explain how the laws of nature work, nor does it accurately define or describe things. Science does not discover truth; it is a method for dominating and utilizing nature.” Why not? Well, Crampton claims that the problem of induction shows that scientific knowledge is impossible, and notes that since observation is sometimes unreliable, scientific knowledge is never certain, hence science doesn’t provide truth, hence scientific claims obtained by experiment and observation are always false. Instead “[t]ruth is found in the Scriptures alone; the Bible has a monopoly on truth. It is God's Word that must be believed, not the experiments of men.” Spotting the flaws in Crampton’s argument is left as an exercise (that he seems not to know what ‘truth’ means is only a symptom). To end it with a flourish, Crampton quotes Robbins: “Science is false, and must always be false. Scripture is true and must always be true. The issue is as clear, and as simple, as that.”

Diagnosis: Apparently progress got off the rails with Plato. Good thing Crampton and Robbins are there to tell us how to get epistemology back on track,far from the Satanic blind alleys of careful observation, science, induction, reason, justification, rationality, critical thinking, knowledge, reality, confirmation, accuracy, veracity, experiments, logic, evidence, or truth.