Large serving of irony, anyone?

[mijan]

A couple of weeks ago, the fundamentalist Christian group, "Focus on the Family", prayed and demanded that God send "abundant, torrential" downpours to flood the city of Denver and stop Obama from accepting the nomination.

Well, there was indeed a flood at the Democrat National Convention.  In the Pepsi Center where they're holding the convention, in ONE specific sky box, there was a sprinkler malfunction... and the Fox News sky box was flooded.

The irony... let me show you it.

Comments

[carnap.livejournal.com]

No, Focus on the Family is a plain-vanilla rightwing Christian group, not an "extremist" rightwing group. They're only "extreme" if anyone further left or right than the centerpoint of their party is "extreme"--i.e., if every plain-vanilla progressive is "extreme." And that Times article's description of Focus as a "fundamentalist" group is bullshit.

[mijan.livejournal.com]

Okay, obviously this is a public post, and anyone can reply, but who the hell are you, and where did you come from?

Focus on the Family practically self-describes as fundamentalist. I consider much of their movement to be extremist. Just because a lot of people are blindly buying into their rhetoric doesn't make it "moderate". They have always been further right than the center-point of their party, and they're dragging the party lines further and further right to accommodate their demands. They advocate hate speech against gays, use false science and false medical statistics to advocate the banning of birth control, and push Christianity into what should be a secular government.

They appear "plain vanilla" on the surface, and ONLY on the surface. A bit of research into their connections with other organizations reveals a much nastier picture.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

I'm a friend of god_of_belac's; he linked (approvingly) to your post. Focus is an evangelical group, not a fundamentalist group; this is an actual difference. I didn't call them "moderate" or claim they're at the center-point of their party. They are neither. But neither are progressives.

You're also misrepresenting their positions, at least as I understand them. I don't see anything about them banning birth control (as opposed to banning certain forms of birth control, which they do favor). I haven't seen any "advocacy" of hate speech against gays either, though I suspect I have a stricter standard for what constitutes "hate speech" than you do. And I vehemently disagree that it's "extreme" or even inappropriate to advocate political positions based on your religious views.

[mijan.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok.

I consider them to be fundamentalist, you don't; we can perhaps chalk that up to semantics, but based on my understanding, a fundamentalist group typically advocates a social model based on a fundamental (often literal) understanding of a religious text.

You can advocate political positions based on your religious views. You have every right to do that. However, our Constitution and our laws are secular, and it is highly inappropriate to suggest that we should be obligated to ensure that our laws are "Biblical". Our laws should be Constitutional. If enforcing a "Biblical" principle on all Americans violates their Constitutional rights, then that law could not be permitted under our Constitution.

Focus on the Family doesn't directly speak about the evils of gays, but they are sure to point out that our "deviant lifestyle" is disruptive to society, destroys the sanctity of marriage, and should not be given any sense of legitimacy by our government. Their arguments are not supported by facts, statistics, or science, yet they are demanding that an entire major demographic is marginalized and subject to discrimination based on those arguments.

The position of FotF regarding birth control has always been as restrictive as they felt they could possibly get people to accept at the time. The Bush Administration's recent push to ban many types of common contraception can easily be traced to FotF lobbying.

[god-of-belac.livejournal.com]

Duplicating the thread in my own post,

They're only "extreme" if anyone further left or right than the centerpoint of their party is "extreme"

The fact that the Republican Party has become significantly more right-wing in recent years does not mean that the groups that were already hard right are not extremist. It just means that more people are on the extreme.

(Focus on the Family, like the Parents Television Council, is also one of those organizations that conducts astroturfing campaigns against various generic, mainstream things they dislike. That, in my book, classifies them as extreme--if they weren't extreme, they could get real people to write those letters).

Also, the action the OP was about strikes me as extremist--calling down the wrath of God on a mainstream political party, demanding the murder of thousands of innocents living in the city the convention is being held in, because you don't like the party's candidate...if that's not extreme, then what is?