Frank Schaeffer, Founder of the Religious Right, Speaks Out Against FOX News Vicious Untrue Comments

Frank Schaeffer's books and lectures gave the Right Wing the theoretical basis for justifying the actions of the Religious Right including even murder by directing them to select contradictions in the Old Testament and ignoring Jesus' Teachings. Republican Gomorrah by Max Blumenthal interviewed the major leaders in the Right Wing and dug into how their personalities and paranoia led to our current religious leaders including the recently deceased Falwell.

I found it very disturbing that almost crazy people with no Christian Ethics are running the disciples of the Religious Right. Schaeffer's teachings misinterpreted or extrapolated led to radicals and crazies who elected the most radical Republicans in their primaries and won elections by using smear tactics and lies with money from multimillionaires and billionaires who wanted to use them for profit and to enhance their wealth and power.

Recent research has shown those who were born in crowded cities became Schizophrenic at more than twice the rate of the general population. Apparently New York City has about 30 percent of the residents in need of psychological or psychiatric care. Those who grew in less conflicted homes are much more sane. Here is a case finally published after many rejections by establishment journals when race is mentioned as an important factor in mental illness with Caribbean Blacks having many more cases of Schizophrenia than the rest of the British population. African based people's in all income brackets seem to have a higher rate of Schizophrenia although no genetic basis has been established.

The researchers have determined that Epigenetic environmental factors over-write the genes by controlling whether the genes are off or on as we have seen many times among identical twins with one prone to cancer and the other not. Stress, for example, causes one identical twin to have many more wrinkles than her sister.The November 2009 Scientific American has a short summary of these results. http://discussion.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=79040

It is well known that Ireland has a very high rate of Schizophrenia. I suspect most of it is in Northern Ireland where many Scot-Irish who immigrated to the USA South and further spread into the mid-west and California's Orange Country. This probably accounts to some extent to their radical Republican view of the world. Mental illness, I suspect, is not an off or on thing but a gradation to insanity like some of those at FOX news and especially the House Republicans.

Even before he had the final clarity, Schaeffer became increasingly disturbed by the people attracted to his teachings. In Geneva, Switzerland, his colony was somewhat akin to a Hippie colony and even attracted Bono and homosexuals. Schaeffer called Falwell stupid and Robertson crazy in his interviews with Max Blumenthal in "Republican Gomorrah," a book well worth reading to understand the Republican Right.

Jim Kawakami, Oct 23, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Obama vs. FOX

October 23, 2009By Frank Schaeffer
Source: Afterdowningstreet

Frank Schaeffer's ZSpace Page

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22930

... Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism). ...

President Obama is getting criticism for going after Fox News. I fault the White House too: for not going far enough. The real issue is not Fox's right wing "bias." The real issue is that FOX News seems to be trawling for assassins. Here's the letter White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs should write. Or maybe it should come from the head of United States Secret Service.

Dear Rupert Murdoch, since you are responsible for what is on Fox News I have a question for you: Do you ever wonder how you'll be remembered by Americans and the world (not to mention your children) if someone takes a shot at President Obama, and when asked why they did it, quotes the misinformation spouted by Fox News as their "reason?"

You have dozens of far right and dangerous and/or crazy seeming commentators working for you but let's just talk about one as an example of the rest. What of Glenn Beck?

Does the name Father Charles Coughlin ring a bell? Do you want to be remembered as the facilitator of today's version of that deranged radio personality and hater who hounded President Roosevelt? What if a Coughlin devotee had assassinated Roosevelt? Instead of just being a nasty footnote to American history, Coughlin would be remembered as another John Wilkes Booth. What if Coughlin had had someone with money and virtually unlimited influence backing him and amplifying his remarks? How would we feel about his backer?

Glenn Beck is a second rate, not terribly bright Coughlin-type demagogue with rather dimwitted followers. And you are the paymaster making his silliness dangerous by giving him a voice that would otherwise be heard only by those who happened to hear him barking at the moon on some lonely street corner.

You've given today's Coughlins -- the haters -- a national platform. And they have taken the lies of the "birthers", "deathers", "Obama-is-the-Antichristers" etc., nationwide. It was a bad day for America when you became a citizen for the sole purpose of purchasing TV stations and invading us with your far right agenda. But you've gone way past politics, even the politics of hate. You have legitimized actual insanity by widespread repetition of extremist racist and religion-based lies to the sort of people who believe the earth is 6000 years old, that Jesus will come back soon and send everyone not like them to Hell, that Obama is the Antichrist. In other words, you've got the keys to the national asylum, are stirring up the inmates and threatening to unlock the door!

Here's a sample (compiled with the help of Media Matters and the online magazine Crooks and Liars) of just a small stock of the incendiary rhetoric and bare-faced lies your money pays for.

Fox News host Glenn Beck has:

# said President Obama has, "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,"

# flirted with the idea that FEMA is building detention camps,

# suggested that President Obama is purposefully "tanking" the economy to force young people to work for AmeriCorps, ...

You can't claim you're not having a baleful impact. How about this? According to the Boston Globe ("Secret Service Strained" October 18, 09),

"The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency's overall mission." ...