Crossposted from News Hounds

At News Hounds, we have theorized privately for quite some time that something deeply disturbing must be going on in Bill O'Reilly's private life to be driving him so far off the rails so often lately. Thanks to a post on Gawker yesterday afternoon, I think we now know. O'Reilly's involved in a very nasty custody battle with his ex-wife and he seems to think he can get God to side with him against her. Seriously.

We've previously reported that O'Reilly and his wife had separated and that he had allegedly tried to wreak revenge on his wife's police-detective boyfriend by having him investigated by the internal affairs unit. It turns out that O'Reilly is now divorced from his ex and she has married that detective. Gawker and the ACLU are suing for the public records showing whether O'Reilly engaged in any activity designed to intimidate his wife's lover that could be inappropriate at best and illegal at worst. In yesterday's post, Gawker's John Cook says that action is still pending.

Meanwhile, Cook has this at Gawker:

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So after all the to-do about the rise of the Religious Right -- fueled by Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who turned that demographic into a Republican stalwart with all their bluster, it now emerges that religious affiliation is way down.

One-fifth of U.S. adults say they are not part of a traditional religious denomination, new data from the Pew Research Center show, evidence of an unprecedented reshuffling of Americans’ spiritual identities that is shaking up fields from charity to politics.

But despite their nickname, the “nones” are far from godless. Many pray, believe in God and have regular spiritual routines.

Their numbers have increased dramatically over the past two decades, according to the study released Tuesday. About 19.6 percent of Americans say they are “nothing in particular,” agnostic or atheist, up from about 8 percent in 1990. One-third of adults under 30 say the same. Pew offered people a list of more than a dozen possible affiliations, including “Protestant,” “Catholic,” “something else” and “nothing in particular.”
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Experts have been tracking unaffiliated Americans since their numbers began rising, but new studies are adding details to the portrait.

I'm actually surprised by these results, but when taking time understanding the data I think it's pretty evident what has happened.

We think it’s mostly a reaction to the religious right,” said Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who has written at length about the decline in religious affiliation. “The best predictor of which people have moved into this category over the last 20 years is how they feel about religion and politics” aligning, particularly conservative politics and opposition to gay civil rights.

I still identify with Catholicism, even though I've gone my own way when it comes to matters of spirituality. I do remember that when I did go to church, it was all about how I could be a better person, how I could forgive my self and others, and how I could help instead of take. But that was thirty years ago, and a lot has changed; there are a lot of right-wing camels who seem to pass right through the needle's eye these days. The right has infused politics into their religion in a horrific way, and now they tell parishioners who and what to vote for. It's perverse. I can see now why Americans are turning off to their extremism and going their own way.

If we take a look at Mormonism since Mitt Romney is running, their history tells a story of how Joseph Smith ran for president in the 1840s and was consumed with taking the White House. So from the get-go, Mormons were focused on the presidency.

And this statistic is very telling too.

For the presidential campaigns, the data reflect a simple fact on the ground. Three-quarters of unaffiliated voters voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Today, the unaffiliated break like this: 65 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Republican nominee Mitt Romney

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When people tune out and listen to their hearts, they realize the the Democratic party is more in step with their own thinking, even if the party has become DLC lite.

And here is the most telling news coming out of this survey.

The nones are strongly liberal on social issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage, but no different from the public overall and the religiously affiliated on their preference for a smaller government providing fewer services. If they have an issue, it’s that they don’t believe religion and politics should mix. Only a third of them say it matters if the president is a believer. Three-quarters of the affiliated think it matters.

See that? Politics and religion should NOT MIX.

Mitt Romney is the highest-profile Mormon politician in the history of the Latter-Day Saints Church. Since I've been exploring and writing about the subject of Romney's beliefs and how they will shape him as a president, it's not at all surprising to me that he's speaking out against separation between church and state.

Remember, a Mormon such as Romney performed his perfunctory duty by fulfilling his two-year mission work obligation. Not many people realize that the prime directive of Mormon mission work is to convert people to the LDS faith. Many of us are accustomed to Mother Teresa and the sort of mission work she did, which was to help the poor and struggling people across the world. It’s a noble act, but trying to convert someone is hardly noble. It's a recruitment tool, much like what Scientologists and Jehovah's Witnesses use to entice members into joining their flock.

Now Mitt Romney has become the quintessential Mormon Church recruiter, as influential and broad-reaching a figure the Church has ever had, outside of Joseph Smith himself (and perhaps Brigham Young).

Romney said this to the National Cathedral's magazine, Cathedral Age:

Romney said those who "seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God" aren't acting in line with the Founders' intent.

The separation of church and state is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution, but Congress and the courts have debated the practical extent of that separation since its founding.

Romney said the Founders didn't intend for "the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God, 'and in God, we do indeed trust."

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Willard's new ad begins,

President Obama used his health care plan to declare war on religion, forcing religious institutions to go against their faith.

Or, put another way, "President Obama's health care plan requires religious institutions that run secular businesses which employ and provide health insurance to lots of people who don't practice said religion to comply with federal regulations."

But "War on Religion" is much snappier!

Anyway, this ad is clearly targeting Catholics, with the little Lech Walesa/John Paul II pander at the end.

But wingnuts should be outraged that Willard credits Pope John Paul II's words ("Be not afraid,") for the destruction of the Soviet Union. After all, we've been told for years that after hearing Ronald Reagan say "Tear down this wall!" the Soviet Union's leaders realized in an instant that communism was an unworkable system and they just gave up on the spot.

In Rick Scott's Florida, charter schools are the preferred way to deliver "public education," and especially in areas with poor and underprivileged students. They are a gateway to ALEC's goal of completely privatized "public education."

This exposé in Sunday's Tampa Bay Times should be an object lesson for every single state in this country for why charter schools are a terrible idea. Worse than terrible. They're a waste of public funds and place children in danger of being "educated" by fanatics who place profit and dogma over educating children.

Some parents and former teachers at Life Force, which receives about $800,000 a year in public funding, say the Pinellas County charter school has become a Scientology recruiting post targeting children.

Opened to serve a low-income Clearwater neighborhood and advertising classes in computers and modern dance, Life Force had begun pushing Hubbard's "study technology," which critics call a Trojan horse Scientology uses to infiltrate public classrooms.

And while Life Force students and teachers worked in poorly stocked classrooms and teachers went unpaid, the bankrupt school funneled tens of thousands of dollars more to Islam's business interests than she told the bankruptcy court she would charge.

To understand just how bad this is, you should read these essays on Hubbard's "study tech" techniques, which were part of the curriculum these children were required to learn. Here's a snippet:

The Study Tech books fall into two groups. The first three, theBasic Study Manual, Study Skills for Life, and Learning How to Learn, cover Study Technology proper, but are targeted at different grade levels. These three books are the primary focus of this essay. The remaining two titles, How to Use a Dictionary, and Grammar and Communication for Children, are unremarkable introductions to grammar and punctuation that show only a few tiny traces of Hubbard’s influence. The Study Technology is also used in other Scientology-related "social reform" programs, notably the Narconon and Criminon drug and criminal rehabilitation programs. There, it is delivered in the form of a "Learning Improvement Course" utilizing a very similar set of course materials.

All five books (plus their Narconon and Criminon variants) are published by Bridge Publications, the in-house publishing arm of the Church of Scientology. They are distributed by a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization called Applied Scholastics International (ASI). ASI is a subordinate organization of theAssociation for Better Living and Education International (ABLE). This is in turn a subordinate, and an integral part, of the Church of Scientology, which exercises direct overall control of all of the aforementioned organizations. (Recently Scientology also began distributing the books through another front organization, Effective Education Publishing.) This complicated set of relationships, examined elsewhere on StudyTech.org, is seemingly designed to obscure the central role of the Church of Scientology in the promotion and implementation of Study Technology.

[...]

Study Tech is founded on three principles: (1) use pictures and diagrams to illustrate the concepts being taught, (2) break down complex concepts so they can be mastered in a series of simple steps, and (3) always seek definitions for unfamiliar terms. These rules make sense and are harmless enough when phrased in plain English. But the Study Tech books present them in a different manner. The three principles are called “mass”, “gradients”, and “misunderstoods”: terms that were invented or redefined by Hubbard and loaded with significance in the Scientology religion.

From the Miami Times article:

Teachers who questioned study tech were told they had no choice but to implement it. Fifth-grade teacher Jason Lowe, who was fired in January, said Life Force director of operations Vikki Williams told him, " 'We are a study tech school,' and that if any of us had a problem with it, we had to get over it."

Three teachers said they were terminated last month without explanation. Lowe said he was fired because school leaders suspected he spoke with the Times. Several parents and teachers who talked with the Times were reluctant to be quoted because they feared retribution.

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When conservative Congressman Todd Akin a few months back suggested that liberalism was a “hatred of God,” I postulated that given the overwhelming support for liberal and progressive values in the Judeo-Christian Bible, perhaps he had never bothered to actually read the Bible. With Rick Santorum's recent comment that Obama's agenda is "Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,” I am now beginning to wonder if Santorum, Akin, and other conservatives are just reading a different Bible entirely than the one I read.

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Because here's the thing: while you can — if you really work hard to do it — find verses here and there supporting a more conservative political point of view on certain specific issues, there is simply no way to read the Bible I read and not come to the conclusion that it is overwhelmingly supportive of helping the poor, showing mercy to the weak, refraining from judging, treating others as you would treat yourself, calling on the wealthy to give their money to the poor, and all kinds of other liberal, lefty, progressive values. You would have to ignore a great deal of Genesis and Exodus, with their talk of being our brother's keeper and bringing justice to the poor, oppressed slaves in Egypt; you would have to skip over a great many of the verses of Psalms with its poetry about justice and mercy for the poor and the widow; you would have to avoid the books of the Prophets almost entirely since so much of what they are angry about is the Israelite society's mistreatment of poor people and immigrants in their midst. Then there is the New Testament, where between St. Paul, the relatives of Jesus, and the big guy himself, there are so many verses on these subjects that it is virtually impossible to ignore them.

In fact, as I noted in my piece about Todd Akin, Jesus talks about mercy to those in trouble in 24 verses of the Gospels, tells people not to judge in 34 verses, tells people to love and forgive even their enemies in 53 verses, tells people to love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would want to be treated in 19 verses, and specifically tells people to help the poor and/or spurn riches and the wealthy in 128 verses.

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Offered with real love for our religious brethren--and dedicated to the memory of the late, great, Christopher Hitchens.

Ol' Hitch, of course, would have just hated this video. He was a brilliant man not given to seasonal cheer:

"I absolutely abominate absolutely everything about this season of the year...it's not just that attendance and observance are compulsory and conscripted (though that would be bloody bad enough). It's that ENTHUSIASM is COMPULSORY TOO. You can't just conform and get by. You are always being urged to join in. Of what does this remind me? Of Dear Leader's Birthday in some godawful one-party banana republic or people's democracy, that's what." (The Nation, 1/13/97)

Sounds like fun! Uncompromising genius doesn't take holidays.

But though the world of infidels has lost an intellectual giant, it has a chance to grow and evolve. The shrill atheism voiced by the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins is fine for another generation, but there are plenty of atheists nowadays confident enough in their non-belief that they don't feel like they have to be f--king dicks about it.

So, nonbelievers, free to bow your head in insincere reverence as often as necessary--or hell, possible--this holiday season. Part of being a humanist is loving the weird, weird s--t that humans do. Fellow atheist, you probably do all sorts of weird ritualistic s--t that seems strange to outsiders and doesn't do anything but make you feel better about stuff--you just call it "line dancing," or "must-see TV," or "moderate opiate use."

As for Hitchens, all this glad-handing would have just pissed him off.

And that's cool, he has no idea this is happening. Because when you die, you're just dead.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

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Your choice for 36th place in our countdown goes to BillO, who gives literal meaning to the term "lunacy.":

O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

The sun rises and the sun sets. The clock strikes twelve at noon and midnight. Neither of these prove the existence of God, but don't tell BillO. He'd be crushed under the weight of the moon's gravity.

Many of you knew I grew up a Catholic. Being Italian with ancestors from Sicily, I had no choice. I'm not hostile to religion per se, but as I've grown older I'm able to make my own mind up on many issues like choice, poverty and the death penalty. Obviously the rise of the religious right in this country has had a huge negative impact overall in American society. The televangelists made billions of dollars off our teevees and turned con men, liars, hypocrites and circus performers into mega millionaires. PFAW was Norman Lear's response after he saw some of these charlatan's become beltway darlings. Antonin Scalia is one of these religious frauds. He espouses that he is a devout Catholic, but when faced with a true tenet of Church doctrine, which is against the death penalty, he shrivels up into a typical movement conservative player:

That Justice Antonin Scalia believes in execution as a moral form of punishment is a well-known fact. That he is an observant, traditional Roman Catholic is, similarly, well-known. That he appears to believe his church supports the death penalty and that he’s willing to stake his job on that conviction is nothing short of astonishing. But there it is: “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign,” he told an audience at Duquesne University Law School last month. “I could not be part of a system that imposes it.”

Let’s start with Scalia’s implication that the Roman Catholic Church supports the death penalty. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. In 2005, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement saying that “ending the death penalty would be one important step away from a culture of death and toward building a culture of life.” In 2007, the Vatican said that capital punishment is “an affront to human dignity.” Both Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor, John Paul II, have consistently voiced their opposition to the death penalty and praised governments and leaders who abolished it.

In 2007, Benedict sent a letter through an emissary pleading for clemency in the Georgia capital case of Troy Davis. On Sept. 21, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Davis’s petition for a stay of execution and Davis was killed by injection. One doesn't know how Scalia voted. But in any case, that justice’s professional and democratic obligations overrode the express wishes of his pope that night.

I don't pretend to speak for Catholicism at all or claim to be an expert on it either. I do know that it did help me in my own way, but I like to keep what religious or spiritual beliefs I have to myself. I know atheists who have more common decency in their pinkie finger than many supposedly devout Christians. When I was fifteen I made a conscious decision that the death penalty was nothing more than revenge. If one person was executed unjustly then the whole ball of wax comes crashing down. When I started really dating I began to think about what would happen if I got a a woman pregnant. I decided that I would be a stand up guy and do the right thing no matter what, but I made a decision that a woman should have the right to choose what happens to her own body. I was still going to church on Sunday's with my first girlfriend at the time. If I were to have become a devout Catholic, there would be no room for my feelings about the death penalty. I don't think an average working class Catholic living in America was trying to find loopholes in how the church felt about the death penalty even back then.

On the question of doctrine, though, Scalia is out on a limb, and like a cartoon bunny, he’s sawing it off behind him. In 1995, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical — an official document of the utmost importance — called “Evangelium Vitae,” in which he weighed in on the death penalty.

“The nature and extent of the punishment,” he wrote, “ought not to go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible to defend society.” In today’s societies, the pope said, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”

Death penalty opponents celebrated, saying that “Evangelium Vitae” voiced the church’s near total opposition to capital punishment. Although important theologians disagreed, saying the encyclical falls short of calling the death penalty immoral, Scalia was not one of them.

In a 2002 speech at the University of Chicago, Scalia said “Evangelium Vitae” reversed centuries of Catholic tradition by making capital punishment — his word — “wrong.”

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We'll call this "The Full Gingrich." Yes, love, honor, obey - and ditch when they get sick.

Finally Pat Robertson has come out on the side of the suffering - just like Christ. Those suffering with having a wife who's no longer up to snuff.

Asked what a man should do whose wife has Alzheimer's, an increasingly decrepit Pat Robertson says, "I know it sounds cruel but if he's going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over."

In a week of Republicans cheering for record executions and wooing for the uninsured to drop dead - does this even get a blip on our disgust radar?

In a word: YES. This dude is twisted. If a secular humanist went on national television telling people to divorce their sick spouses - it would be the Fourth Horseman of the Atheists Want to Drink White Babies' Blood and Make You Gay-calypse! Every traffic jam would be blamed on the statement. "That seven-minute increase to your commute is a sign from GOD that marriage is near extinction and GOD is angry!"

Haven't these bible-babblers been out allegedly "defending" marriage?! Hasn't the Religious Right for an entire seven or eight years now been on one long parade proclaiming the queers will destroy matrimony if they get to legally do it? And now there's this Crypt Keeper (too obscure? Gollum?) guy - arguably with the highest media profile in the Religious Right - saying that divorce is a way better option than being with a sick broad?

This is probably Obama's fault...

Hat tip Right Wing Watch