#534: Judie Brown and the American Life League

Judith Ann Limbourne ”Judie” Brown is the president and co-founder (with her husband Paul) of the American Life League (ALL), reportedly the largest Catholic pro-life organization in the United State and an enthusiastic supporter of Operation Rescue, which augments its pro-life stance with being opposed also to birth control, stem cell research and euthanasia (and opposition to universal health care because of some garbledly messy conspiracy theory about super-death panels). Her and her organization’s arguments belong to the, shall we say, less well-hinged side of the debates. Here, for instance, is ALL representative Jim Sedlak arguing that by supporting Planned Parenthood, Obama is also supporting genocide against African-Americans. ALL has also argued that Notre Dame should no longer be allowed to be considered a Catholic university (i.e. be removed from “The Official Catholic Directory”) after allowing Obama to speak there, and here is Brown claiming that Obama isn’t really a Christian since he’s not rightwing. She has also said that the Catholic Church must drive out liberal groups since these groups are under “demonic deceit”, which is apparently the best explanation for their support “anti-family militant homosexuality and the destruction of marriage”. Yes, being ”militant” means failing to line up with Brown’s way of viewing the world, and those militant dissenters must be banished and excommunicated.

ALL also went appropriately unhinged when Krispy Kreme gave away free doughnuts on Inauguration Day because the company's press release says it is celebrating “the freedom of choice,” which ALL says is a “tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand.”

As for stem-cell research, Brown herself has stated that embryo research is like “throwing away” a 1-year-old since “size and age; [t]hat’s the only difference,” an argument that must rank among the most abject failures to reach even the status of “wrong” ever made.. As for euthanasia Brown actively warns people not to be organ donors since doctors apparently routinely hasten along brain death in comatose people who have volunteered to be organ donors to harvest their organs while their heart still beats. I.e. sacrificing the lives of people who need organ transplants in the cause for the perceived greater good is entirely unlike throwing away one-year-olds because of something to do with Jesus, even when “the greater good” in this case is a figment of Brown’s incoherent and delusionally paranoid imagination.

Brown has also supported the idea that Obama’s stance against AIDS is incoherent because he is so pro-death in other areas. Her position presumably reflects the same sentiment that fuelled her reaction to the Gates Foundation’s teaming up with Warren Buffet to donate billions of dollars to improve global health; Brown said that the Gates Foundation is heavily involved in bankrolling “women's health” initiatives in Third World nations, that “most of those reflect or are directly a result of the efforts of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.” Hence, ALL is “extremely concerned that millions and millions of dollars are going to go to the ultimate goal of ending the lives of millions of preborn babies – and jeopardizing the health of millions of women and men,” a reference to the Gates Foundation’s contributions to distributing birth control measures, which in Brown’s bizarro world is a health risk. The rant ends in an account of how the efforts of Gates and Buffet will eventually destroy these countries because of their effect on the birth rate. Which, of course, is so far removed from any semblance of a foundation in reality that it is even hard to respond to (hint: a lack of increase in the population due to birth control is not among the most serious challenges the countries in question are currently facing). At least Brown’s overall stance emerges, bright and shining: sacrificing the life and health of millions and millions may be necessary to stop the use of birth control.

Brown was also enraged by the West Point Combating Terrorism Center’s 2013 report Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right, which catalogued the many threats posed by far right movements with a long history of domestic terrorism, apparently because bomb attacks against innocents aren’t terrorism when Brown agrees with the cause.

There’s a good ALL resource here.

Diagnosis: The world corresponding to Brown’s projected causal relations is a world pretty far removed from the actual one. Given that she’s somewhat influential, that discrepancy is rather worrisome. Delusional, morally bankrupt, and dangerous.

#172: James Hartline

San Diego’s most famous wingnut, and one of the most thoroughly unhinged anti-gay activists out there (the competition is pretty fierce), James Hartline is the publisher of The James Hartline Report, which addresses issues involving homosexuality. A fine example is here, where Hartline urges his voters not to cast their votes for Mayoral Candidate Jerry Sanders because it violates the Bible, and because Sanders “will be bringing with him a new wave of moral compromise and radical homosexual ideology. This is the core problem in San Diego, which, for the last ten years has destroyed all sense of morality in America's once Finest City, and left the citizenry with an unfixable financial black hole.” The point was the Hartline found homosexuals among Sanders’s campaign sponsors (which are, by default, extremist promoters of the insidious homosexual agenda). By not treating gays as shit, Hartline claims, Sanders is disrespecting every Christian voter. He also claims that “both Jerry Sanders and Donna Frye are rabid supporters of the liberal, social experiment of the sexual revolution”, but I am unsure that Hartline has earned the right to use the adjective ‘rabid’ of other people. Here, by the way, is some context and a snapshot of ordinary San Diego lunatics.

He also blamed the 2007 forest fires on the gays (God’s punishment), or actually on the anti-christian California lawmakers who even considered legalizing gay marriage.
And last year, the torrential rains in Southern California were … well, you guessed it.

Particularly charming is his tendency to start sounding like an incoherent Old Testament prophet when his hysterical rants reach their climax. He is also oppsed to the “Nazi-style stem cell research”.

This entry could also serve to indict Phil Magnan, the director for Biblical Family Advocates, who joined forces with Hartline on at least this occasion, and who thought it was ‘sad’ that the Gay Men's Chorus of San Diego was allowed to sing the National Anthem at the San Diego Padres baseball stadium.

Diagnosis: Hartline’s Report is one long, hysterical, unhinged, garbled primal scream against sanity, reason and freedom, and the guy is totally insane. Impact unclear, but I doubt he convinces anyone not already positioned well beyond the reach of reason

#107: James Dobson

Dobson runs the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family (although he has stepped down as chairman and CEO), an organization in war with the evil Big Government that wants to steal your children and which strongly encourages corporal punishment for kids. A helpful site for information about the organization is this one. The organization is also behind the sites “True Tolerance” (i.e. intolerance) and “Stand for Christmas”

They are also strongly committed to Biblical values being observed in Washington (Obama, for instance, isn’t really Christian because he distorts the Bible), and argue incessantly for the right of Christians to discriminate against gays and Muslims (the allowing-gays-to-marry-is-discriminating-against-Christians argument). Dobson is also personally committed to restoring Tom DeLay’s reputation (which is especially awesome in light of DeLay's recent conviction).

He has also claimed that teaching tolerance in school leads to Hitler.

Dobson is (unsurprisingly) a creationist and a frequent critic of evolution. He also, with 24 other evangelicals, called for the ouster of Rev. Richard Cizik from his position at the National Association of Evangelicals because Cizik had urged evangelicals to take global warming seriously. Dobson was also a firm opponent of McCain’s presidential candidacy, partially because he “voted for embryonic stem-cell research to kill nascent human beings”.

If you're willing to run the risk of your head exploding, you can watch this dialogue between Dobson and Glenn Beck.

Diagnosis: An astoundingly repulsive character, and a true loon. He has been referred to as "the nation's most influential evangelical leader" by Time, and Slate described him as "America's most influential evangelical leader." A not insignificant threat to civilization, then.

#38: Sam Brownback

US senator (Kansas-R) and a pretty high-profile fellow. Fundamentalist theocrat and outspoken creationist. Yes he’s been known to pound on the “evolution is just a theory” confusion, thereby automatically displaying his meager understanding of science. Even worse he believes in “micro-evolution, but not macro-evolution” (a well-known gambit, using a distinction that makes absolutely no scientific sense), relies on false appeals to controversy (look, biologists don’t agree on the details, hence the theory of evolution must be false), claims that evolution is an atheistic conspiracy (evolution entails materialism and determinism, modus tollens), and says that evolution means that everything is just chance (no, he doesn’t understand the theory of evolution). Dunning-Kruger running rampant, in other words, but ignorance has never stopped a politician like Brownback.

Brownback also asserts that if science contradicts the Bible, then science must go:

“While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man's origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.”

His views on science are nicely summed up here, and (more succinctly) here, and also here.

The famous “blogs for Brownback”, notable for arguing that heliocentricism is an atheist conspiracy and that electrons are really angels in disguise whereas protons are demons, is widely believed to be a parody and might easily be.

Among other notable views, Brownback is known to support stem-cell research – conditional on advice from the Family Research Council (the “Research” part must surely be a typo), as described here. Brownback also wishes to ban human-animal chimeras. Also seems to toy with David Barton-style reconstructionism.

Diagnosis: Zealous Lysenkoist. His understanding of science is best characterized as a severe case of Dunning-Kruger. Moron. Wields some power, but will apparently retire from the Senate this year.

#10: Ted Baehr

Baehr runs Movieguide which, despite its neutral name, describes itself as a ministry "dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media according to biblical principles, by influencing entertainment industry executives and helping families make wise media choices" (i.e. rave reviews of creationist propaganda). Baehr is also chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and a columnist/movie reviewer for Worldview Times. He wasn’t happy with Religulous, as this review shows (and this review alone merits Baehr’s inclusion in the Encyclopedia):
http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=4011.

Also a vigorous opponent of e.g. stem cell research (apparently he views The Family Research Council as an authoritative source here); staunch anti-elitist religious crackpot who argues that science (at least science whose results don’t support (his interpretation of) the Bible) is a liberal conspiracy, as in the article discussed here:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/religious_right_leaders/

Diagnosis: Zealous, paranoid wingnut and pathological liar, religious fundamentalist and general loon. Angry. Influence: hard to tell; there are a lot of these guys out there, but he is relatively prolific and seems to have some readers.