I learn today through my compulsive news feed monitoring that May 6th, 2010 is the ‘National Day of Prayer’ here in the United States. I also learn that it may be the last. Hopefully.

My first inclination was naturally enough to ignore the whole thing. After all, I have chores to do, books to read, and a pleasant walk to the grocery store to make (because I forgot to buy onions last weekend). Why worry about the government poking the non-believer population with a rhetorical stick? Not like it’s the first time.

This year’s different though, and for whatever reason, there’s finally some real resistance to the most powerful government in the world leaning on its citizens to pray.

First, a Federal judge in Wisconsin is filling my transplanted heart with pride, having ruled that the government setting aside a day and telling its citizens to pray flies in the face of the First Amendment, which was supposed to leave such matters up to the individual:

In her ruling, Judge Crabb said that the NDP “serves no purpose but to encourage a religious exercise, making it difficult for a reasonable observer to see the statute as anything other than a religious endorsement.” Judge Crabb also wrote: “It bears emphasizing that a conclusion that the establishment clause prohibits the government from endorsing a religious exercise is not a judgment on the value of prayer or the millions of Americans who believe in its power. No one can doubt the important role that prayer plays in the spiritual life of a believer. . . . However, recognizing the importance of prayer to many people does not mean that the government may enact a statute in support of it, any more than the government may encourage citizens to fast during the month of Ramadan, attend a synagogue, purify themselves in a sweat lodge or practice rune magic.”

Judge Crabb also ruled that the law “does not have a secular purpose or effect” and does not “survive scrutiny under Lemon and the endorsement test. . . . The statute does not use prayer to further a secular purpose; it endorses prayer for its own sake.”

Interestingly enough, none of the mainstream press mentions I found about this controversy mention *why* it came to a head here in Wisconsin: as it turns out, this is the result of a longstanding lawsuit against the White House from the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation. It started out suing Bush and Dana Perino, and has since moved on to targeting President Obama, Robert Gibbs and others. (The reason it names the press secretary is because their office issues the annual proclamation)

The FFRF is controversial even here in ultra-liberal Madison, and can come off a bit bristly, but I’d like to offer them a hearty congratulations on this victory.

Second, beyond issues of the appropriateness of government endorsed prayer, the rather seedy nature of the people who run the National Day of Prayer has come to light. First, one of the Graham clan of creepy bible thumpers had to be disinvited to lead an NDP event at the Pentagon after objections over some of his less tolerant positions:

The Army recently rescinded its invitation to Graham to participate in the Pentagon’s Day of Prayer event after he made controversial remarks about Islam.

“True Islam cannot be practiced in this country,” he told CNN’s Campbell Brown in December. “You can’t beat your wife. You cannot murder your children if you think they’ve committed adultery or something like that, which they do practice in these other countries.”

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Graham — son of famed evangelist Billy Graham — called Islam a “very evil and wicked religion.”

Whoever could have guessed that mixing the state and religion would lead to a struggle for religious dominance of the state, and fighting amongst the believing population? I’m shocked, shocked!

Well, not that shocked.

In all seriousness, this was especially predictable considering that the people running most of the NDP are a bunch of Grade A Whackjobs:

Yet the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a nonprofit organization founded in 1988 and led by Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, limits its events to people of “Judeo-Christian” heritage. Only Christians are allowed as state coordinators.

Christians say anyone is free to organize a prayer event outside the task force’s purview.

Yes, that’s right; the National Day of Prayer is effectively a Focus on the Family/Dobson bible-thumping clan production… with an annual press release put out on White House letterhead.

Feel squicky yet?

What this ultimately boils down to is a debate over the role of government, not just in religion, but in all matters of personal conscience. Do you really want the government setting aside days for particular belief systems, then handing over its bully pulpit and microphone to whatever crazy/adherent happens to scream the loudest for attention that year? Do you think that the government of a nuclear superpower should ever be used for directly religious ends?

It is therefore also about the gradual infiltration and dismantling of a largely secular government in favor of something very different. Jeft Sharlet has written extensively on this subject, and how seemingly innocuous entanglements of church and state are in fact the vanguard for some truly unsettling movements. (The National Prayer Breakfast, for example, is run by the secretive cult known as ‘The Family’) Meanwhile, Dominionist factions work to subvert the military from within (particularly the Air Force) and turn it into a tool suitable for spreading a grand Christian empire. A recent post on FDL discussed the difficulties of rational decision making under such influences.

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is another example of the trend, having both his own infamous mercenary army and ties to Timothy LeHaye (of Left Behind fame), James Dobson, the Family Research Council and of course the GOP.

So here we are, on May 6th, 2010, debating the merit of a National Day of Prayer. On one side you have a tiny activist group looking out for the rights of atheists and agnostics in a country that, and let’s not mince words, hates us. On the other you have, at least for the moment, the Obama Administration backing the Grahams and the Dobsons of the world, who would like nothing better than to turn the United States into a theocracy once and for all.

But who knows; maybe next year the first Thursday in May will go without the state sharing a stage with religion.

(Yes I know, it’s a very hopey-changey movie, and honestly the ‘get rid of handguns’ thing at the end feels really tacked on)

So the Huffpo piece “Power Struggle: Inside The Battle For The Soul Of The Democratic Party” is the gift that keeps on giving; it’s just full of useful information.

One of the most fascinating parts for me was the discussion of just how shellshocked the Democratic leadership was by losing power in 1994, and how desperate, absolutely desperate, they are to retain power — at seemingly any cost.

For the next 12 years, Democrats came to Congress to run out the clock. Chastened by the losses of the 1980s and early 1990s, they triangulated, pushing policy positions not because they were good in and of themselves but because they were better than the opposite. They wanted to be in the majority because it was awful to be in the minority.

…

After all, what could possibly hurt the progressive agenda more than losing the majority? A former Democratic staffer who came to the Hill in 2001 says padding the majority is a worthwhile endeavor.

“Anybody who actually says [we'd be better with a smaller, more progressive majority] may or may not have experienced the minority and doesn’t know how terrible it is living in that world,” he says. “It’s a shit world to live in. On the House side, to be in the minority, you get nothing. You get absolutely nothing. No legislation gets enacted. You have less staff. You have less resources. You have hundreds or thousands of well meaning young progressives out of work. It’s a terror — it’s an absolute terror.”

Yes, people being out of work, not having resources, that’d be a shame, wouldn’t it? Terrifying, even. It’s therefore good that we defer major political goals (like, say, reducing the catastrophic unemployment rate outside of the Capitol) to ensure that young progressive staffers don’t face unemployment of their own.

God-fucking-damn. Do these people listen to themselves talk, or is there some kind of mental filter that screens out narcissistic bullshit? I hope, if I ever acted like such a selfish douche in public, that the universe would have the mercy to shut my mouth for me. Maybe make a bird fly down my throat, or cause a sudden, highly localized earthquake to knock me off my feet so that the whole world can literally kick my ass.

This is the crux of the problem with our modern Democratic party, right here, and the reason I attached that video at the top and stole its phraseology; our so-called leaders are so paralyzed with fear that they stopped doing their jobs a long time ago, opting instead to take any expeditious route they can find toward KEEPING their jobs.

Because, in politics, performance doesn’t have to correlate with reward. You could work hard, craft logical legislation that advances the public good and then try to sell it to a public that admittedly cares more deeply about reality television and Twilight movies. That’s very hard, and there’s every chance you might lose your next election. Alternately, you could sell out, take huge sacks of cash from Wall Street, big polluters, health insurers and other scumbags, and blanket local tv with 30 second suckup ads extolling your great moderate virtues. That’s comparatively simple, and the odds are against your loss, thanks to the incumbency protection racket.

It’s a move right out of the Rahm playbook. We all know how that turned out last time, too.

What a sick, sad, vomitous world we live in.

The Huffington Post recently posted an utterly fantastic and incredibly illuminating look at the intra-party fighting, both within the Democratic Party as a whole and the Progressive Caucus in particular. It’s fairly long but incredibly compelling, and kept me up way past bedtime last night.

There’s enough material in there to write a dozen blog posts, and I intend to get into deeper detail on it later, but first there’s one blackly humorous note that I think deserves some attention. Over the course of the health care debate we often saw a lot of Obama supporters claiming that, contrary to any available evidence, the President deeply supported the Public Option. There were just… obstacles.. in the way to prevent him from, you know, actually supporting it. It might be Baucus, it might be Reid, it might be Lieberman or the House, but it was always something. Something that forced the sacrifice.

Of course, we know that not to be the case. Obama not only didn’t push for the Public Option, he actively campaigned against it, then traded it away in secret to the big for-profit hospitals.

Still, the depth of contempt the White House had, for this already heavily compromised bit of liberalism and its supporters, wasn’t in evidence until now:

Take the case of Reps. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). This past January, the health care reform effort was collapsing amidst the rubble of the Senate special election in Massachusetts and Obama was talking publicly about paring reform down to a few essential pieces. Polis had a different idea. In a meeting that Pelosi held for Democratic rookies the week after Scott Brown’s surprise victory, he suggested reviving the public option. The Senate had lost its 60-vote supermajority and was in the process of considering the use of the reconciliation procedure, which would require only 50 votes and eliminate the need to placate public option opponents such as Sen. Joe Lieberman.

…

As the number of senators joining the effort expanded, it generated leadership support, with Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Bob Menendez (N.J.) getting behind it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was the next to jump on board.

…

It gave new life to the effort and cemented the policy as a key legislative priority in the future.

“It helped a whole lot,” says Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the man in charge of whipping votes, of the Pingree-Polis letter. “The base getting fired up helped a whole lot. We could feel it out there.” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), reflecting on the letter, agrees. “It added energy to the effort to get to where we wanted to get,” he says in an interview in his office the week the House passed the final piece of reform.

The White House didn’t appreciate the new energy. A few hours after Reid’s office put out a statement in support of the public option, Rahm Emanuel met senior Reid aide Jim Manley and a few reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times for dinner and drinks at Lola’s, a Capitol Hill bar and grill. Seeing Manley, Emanuel offered a response to Reid’s gesture with one of his own: a double-bird, an eerie sight given his half-severed right finger.

I’m beginning to think Rahm enjoys hippie punching as more of a fetish than a hobby.