Don Feder (Credit: TANJUG)
Monday, we began looking at Don Feder, the communications director for the World Congress Of Families, discussing the idea of “Judeo-Christian” supremacy and the world view associated with it. In short, “Judeo-Christian” supremacy is the idea that the most conservative, extreme adherents of Christianity and Judaism are the moral arbiters of society, and that our public institutions and culture should be structured around their beliefs. We talked about their idea of “religious freedom,” which, in today’s religious right parlance, roughly translates something like this:
Anyone should have the right to worship — or not — as they please, as long as society is built upon the far right tenets of “Judeo-Christian” supremacy. They believe that society will simply cease to function — or already has — if religious freedom actually means what it means. And if their “religious freedom” isn’t given the pedestal they believe it deserves — if their “religious freedom” doesn’t trump your and my constitutional rights — then they will go to great pains to depict themselves as oppressed victims.
In the coming days, we’re going to examine Feder’s beliefs on specific issues, and what it would look like if his beliefs, and those of the World Congress, were to be foisted on innocent people in the United States and around the world. But first, I’d like to take a few moments today to explain what Feder and friends think about you, the reader who is not a religious right wingnut. You don’t have to be an east coast liberal to be the villain of this story, as Feder’s Judeo-Christian Supremacist worldview doesn’t really allow for gray area. With reasoning as simplistic as that which led us into war with Iraq, you are either with them or against them.
We already talked about his opinions on those of the Abrahamic faiths (but not Islam) who don’t conform to the most far-right, extremist versions of those religions — they’re apostates. Feder, a conservative Jew, is a better Catholic and a better Protestant than most adherents of those faiths. And Pat Robertson is a better Jew than the great majority of American Jewry:
“Few American Jews take Judaism seriously because they already have a deep and passionate commitment to another religion — liberalism.” (p. 30, Don Feder, Who’s Afraid Of The Religious Right?)
And what, according to Feder and company, is a liberal? You probably won’t be surprised to find out that their notion of who liberals are, why they believe what they believe, and what motivates them, is so hilariously off point, such a cartoonish caricature, that they come off as evil antagonists in a child’s fairy tale. Enjoy this tale of the heroic prince (Feder) and the malicious ogres he has to share the world with:
“We believe in the divine origins of man; they believe mankind is a gigantic cosmic accident resulting from the random collision of molecules in a prehistoric sea. We believe in free will; they believe in determinism. We believe humanity is basically flawed. They believe mankind is innately good and infinitely perfectible.
They believe man is corrupted by society; we believe man is corrupted by himself. We believe in rights balanced by responsibilities; they believe in rights infinitely extended. We believe in punishment; they believe in rehabilitation. We believe in the death penalty; they believe in gun control.
We believe in productivity; they believe in equality of outcome. We believe in the family; they believe in social parenting. We believe sex has a moral dimension; they believe it has none, beyond the requirement of consent.
We believe in God; they believe in Freudian psychology or the Marxist class struggle or Keynesian economics, or feminine-centered spirituality, or success conditioning or New Age mantras.
Our values work. For the consequences of theirs, visit any VD clinic, drug rehab center, inner-city public school, or tune into the Oprah Winfrey Show.” (p. 11, id.)
Aside from the fact that his conception of liberals isn’t quite accurate, he fails to prove either that his values work or that liberal values cause the ills he describes. I could just as easily point at Alabama and Mississippi as examples of what happens when traditional values conservatives run the show.
However, the above quote is mild for Don Feder, for he truly is the Bryan Fischer of the World Congress Of Families. (He likely would incorrectly take that as a compliment.) Just today, he referred to President Obama as “the human WMD in the White House.” He, of course, believes that Obama is a greater threat to our national security than Vladimir Putin is. Also a greater threat to national security? Gays and lesbians in the military who, incidentally, have been putting their lives on the line for decades in order to preserve Feder’s right to spew his hate:
If Putin doesn’t take us seriously, is it any wonder? The headline in the March 2 Stars and Stripes beams: “Gay, lesbian troops perform in drag at Kadena Air Base” in Okinawa. The publication disclosed that the drag show was “in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered troops.” Doubtless, this will do much for the morale of the non-LGBT troops. But as then-Army Chief of Staff George W. Casey, Jr. said at the time of the Ft. Hood massacre (which the administration still refuses to call a terrorist incident), diversity is the New Action Army’s most important product. Perhaps we could deploy an elite unit, armed with vibrators, to the Crimea to counter Spetsnaz commandos.
On the subject of marriage equality, Feder perpetuates the viewpoint that, whereas millions of LGBT people simply want to be treated equally under the law, it’s all really a grand conspiracy to destroy Feder’s concept of morality:
“Gay marriage” itself is merely a milepost on the sexual-equality death march, which ends with the demise of Judeo-Christian morality.
…
Just as there’s always been same-sex attraction, there have always been blood relatives who’ve violated the injunctions of Leviticus, men who wanted harems, adults with an unhealthy attraction to children, fetishists, sadomasochists and Michael Jackson. Erotic attraction can get as messy as the human psyche.
Civilization depends on taming self-destructive sexual urges, which do great damage to the social fabric. The continuation of the species, and the proper upbringing of the next generation, is based on men marrying women, who will remain true to each other and raise their children with loving discipline.
You see, with people like Feder and the World Congress, everything is a sinister conspiracy to hurt them. Everything is extremely dramatic, and whereas normal people know that once LGBT people have won full equality in this nation, we really won’t pay much attention to the Don Feders of the country, they cling to the delusion that they are under constant siege, and that this is all part of some sort of spirtual battle for the soul of the nation.
Feder’s disdain extends much further than gays, lesbians and Barack Obama, though. This is his judgment on those who make up the Democratic base in the United States:
The message [of Obama’s 2012 campaign] was aimed at mobilizing the ideological, the envious, public employees, angry, single women and the mooch brigade – the Democrats’ core constituency.
He’s not much for Latinos either, whether they come here legally or illegally:
The illegal immigrants swarming over our southern border are more akin to the pagan armies which regularly invaded the land of Israel and were repulsed by military force.
…
This is a constituency that yearns to breathe free stuff. An April 2012 Pew Hispanic Center poll showed a staggering 75% want more government services, compared to 41% of the general public. Among the public at large, 45% want smaller government, against 19% of Hispanics.
He descibes Hispanic immigrants as a group of infiltrators, made up of “parasites, criminals, potential terrorists and the arrogantly unassimliable [sic].”
And Feder definitely doesn’t like Islam, and claims that the American Left and the Islamic world are in cahoots, so that they may (of course) destroy America:
The left should be scared to death of Islam. Frankly, I think everybody should be scared of Islam; political Islam, at least. So why have they allied themselves with Islam? Two reasons: The first is, our mutual friend Gary Bauer says, they are both totalitarian movements, they both advocate unified control of humanity, one group on a religious basis, the other group on an ideological basis. Beyond that, they are both anti-American. I think that is what unites them more than anything else. That is why the left will go to ridiculous extremes to defend Islam because if an organization, if an entity, if a religion is anti-American then the left will naturally support it, as Islam is. That’s the trump card, anti-Americanism. That and the fact that I think the left views Islam as a Third World religion and of course as you know the left is very big on supporting Third World people over Western people.
If, at this point, you’re thinking, “Ooh, I wonder what horrible things he has to say about black people, women, or anyone else who isn’t a religiously conservative white male!,” you’re beginning to understand Don Feder and the coalition he represents.
As I said above, there is no gray area. Feder and the World Congress of Families are not an opposing side which wishes to live democratically alongside the rest of us, negotiating and respecting the fact that our nation is made up of a melting pot of political beliefs, religions, races, sexual orientations and whatnot. Because they so delusionally believe that the majority of the nation that has moved past their antiquated views, led by our overlord Barack Obama, is actually determined to round them up in cattle cars and send them to concentration camps — seriously, Feder believes this — they believe that they must take control, here and abroad, in order to reorder society to their liking.
In the next few reports, we’ll discuss what this means for specific issues like women’s health, LGBT rights and poverty, in order to cement our understanding of what the World Congress Of Families means when they say their next conference will be all about protecting “religious freedom.” As we’ve learned, when they say that, that means your Constitutional rights are on the line, because you — whoever you are, if you’re not a theocratic-leaning Judeo-Christian supremacist of the first order — are their enemy.
