Fascinating Journey: How a Former Texas Conservative Operative Left the Religious Right
Elaine White was once in the inner circle of political power. Then a crisis of faith changed all that.
48 COMMENTS48 COMMENTS



A A A
Email
Print
August 29, 2014 |
If you met interior designer and business consultant Joyce Elaine White, you’d never guess she was once the lobbyist for the group that formed the leading edge of the religious right’s takeover of the Republican Party in Texas; that she was once in the inner circle of political power in the second-largest state in the nation. Then a crisis of faith changed all that.

“Rethinking everything has been a long, slow, and agonizing process,” White told me in a 2010 e-mail. And it’s no wonder, when you consider that her faith journey in evangelical Christianity began in earnest before she entered kindergarten.

***

On New Year’s Day 1958, in Odessa, Texas, a place equally enamored with Jesus and high school football, White’s mother rushed her to see Hattie Love Rankin, a missionary doctor. What White, then almost four years old and suffering from what Rankin diagnosed as bronchial pneumonia, remembers most about that day was not the medical treatment but the prayer. Rankin, beloved among Baptists for her long missionary service in China, laid hands on the young girl. “She prayed that God would extend my life and use me for God’s glory,” says White, now 60.

The young girl was not afraid, as she had already heard and absorbed her pastor’s “turn or burn” message. “I didn’t want to go to Hell, didn’t want to take any chances,” says White. “I prayed and made Jesus my personal savior.”

By age seven, White says, she knew she wanted to be a missionary, having heard tales of Lottie Moon, another beloved Southern Baptist missionary who spent 40 years evangelizing in China. “Going into all the world, sharing the faith, and making disciples,” she now says, echoing the missionary line, “that sounded very exotic.”

Nearly 20 years later, White found herself in Mexico, married to a young man she met at church soon after she enrolled at Baylor University. The two would work as missionaries for a controversial charismatic group, since disbanded, the Maranatha Christian Church. When the couple returned to Texas 12 years later with their two children, they arrived during the heyday of the Christian Coalition takeover of the state Republican Party. White became executive director of the Capital City Christian Coalition in Austin, and the Christian Coalition’s lobbyist in the state capitol.

“I was brainwashed,” she says. Now divorced for sixteen years, remarried and bearing her birth name, White is no longer a card-carrying member of the Christian right.


Elaine White today—no longer a card-carrying member of the religious right.
Photo Credit:
The American Prospect
Click to enlarge.
***

I first met White at Texas Governor Rick Perry’s August 2011 prayer rally, dubbed The Response, held in Houston’s Reliant Stadium just days before he announced his 2012 presidential run. White was there, out of a mix of curiosity and a need to grapple with her own past. She had previously reached out to me via email, hinting that she was an ex-fundamentalist who wanted to share her story. But, initially, she was reluctant to be specific or speak on the record. Meeting her in Houston, I still did not know she had held a leadership role in an influential political organization, or that she had been a compliant, homeschooling pastor’s wife, believing that she had a role to play in helping Christians take over Mexico and Central America throughout the 1980s.

At Perry’s prayer rally, White was dressed in a black pantsuit, a professional counterpoint to many of the attendees who were wearing jeans and t-shirts emblazoned with homages to Jesus. We sat at a table in the exterior ring of the stadium while speakers and musicians roared apocalyptic warnings to a nation they claimed had turned away from God. But White was subdued. That February, her adult son, Joshua, had been killed in a plane crash. She carried bookmarks she’d had made bearing a photograph of the handsome young man and a Bible verse.

She seemed pained that a longtime friend, evangelist Alice Patterson, one of the organizers of the rally, was drawing media scrutiny for her writings, including her belief that the Democratic Party is controlled by a “demonic structure.” During White’s lobbying days, Patterson served as the Christian Coalition’s state field director.

When we talked at the rally, White was fiercely defensive of her old friend, and remains so, three years later. “I have the utmost respect for her devotion and integrity in all she does,” White told me recently of Patterson. “Although our paths have diverged, I believe that we share a common bond, that we show love and mercy to all.”

***

In 1973, at the age of 19, White married Robert Hucklebridge, finishing only her freshman year of college. “I was looking to solve my problem,” she told me. “Mother told me I needed to be a virgin when I married, but I was thinking I might not be able to hold out.” But, actually, it was more than that: At the time, White says, she believed that “there were a lot of things that fell into place,” including that she met him in church, and that “he had a strong commitment to God and his Christian faith, and talked about wanting to be a missionary.”

The two settled in Odessa, where Hucklebridge took a job coaching high school football. (Elaine didn’t work outside the home.) White soon discovered that living in a patriarchal marriage was more than she had bargained for. Three years in, she left Hucklebridge, taking up with a friend of her husband’s, and fleeing to southern California. She attended modeling school. She smoked pot. After a few months, White says, guilt began to creep in, and she began questioning her liberating decision—the kind of life change evangelicals describe as “backsliding.” Seven months after leaving Hucklebridge, she returned home from her waitressing job to find him on her doorstep. He had been called to missionary service in Mexico, he said, and he wanted her to come.

He told her he had prayed to God, promising, “If you will bring her back to me, I’ll call her Joy.” She agreed to follow her husband to his mission post, relinquishing her given name.

“I figured my life was over anyway,” said White, “so why not call me Joy?”

In fundamentalist Christianity, White explains, “they tell you that love is not a feeling. Love is a decision. You decide to love this person. You honor your commitment and your vow that you made before God. I’ve even had ministers say this: It doesn’t matter what you want, think, or feel. It only matters what God wants.” (Robert Hucklebridge did not respond to several requests for an interview.)

The pair became disciples of Bob and Rose Weiner, the founders of Maranatha Christian Church, a charismatic group that had university campus chapters across the country. Former members and critics of the group would later charge the Weiners with “us[ing] a form of mind control that isolated students from their parents and then guid[ing] decisions on such personal matters as career choices, politics and marriage,” according to a 1985 Wall Street Journal article. That article also chronicled Weiner’s efforts to organize support for President Ronald Reagan’s policy of aiding the Nicaraguan contra rebels, and Bob Weiner’s appointment of himself as “chief conduit of revelations that he says come from God.”

Bob Weiner declined an interview request, but when I did catch him on the phone, he said about White: “She’s a wonderful girl, no matter what political persuasion she is, she’s an awesome lady.”


The Hucklebridge family's entry in a Marantha Christian Church directory of missions. The Hucklebridges were missionaries in Mexico.
Photo Credit:
The American Prospect
Click to enlarge.
Despite widespread criticism of practices many described as cult-like, religious right leaders defended Maranatha. Ralph Reed, who was then founder of Students for America and would later go on to lead the Christian Coalition, told the Wall Street Journal that Maranatha “has gotten a bum rap.” Maranatha was also popular with Christian Reconstructionists, the strict Calvinist movement founded by R.J. Rushdoony that teaches that Christians should take “dominion” and that the country should be governed by biblical law.

During her 12 years in Mexico, White says she was out of touch regarding the accusations against Maranatha in the United States. She did know, however, of Maranatha’s “heavy-handed discipleship,” which included requiring that members submit their marriage proposals to an “assembly of elders,” which would sometimes block marriages because it wasn’t a “God move.”

“I was always questioning things,” said White, adding that Weiner’s wife, Rose, once laid hands on her and “prayed against my spirit of confusion.”

At Rose Weiner’s suggestion, White read books by Rushdoony, as well as his son-in-law , the economist Gary North, who also served as an adviser to Tea Party godfather Ron Paul, the former presidential candidate and congressman from Texas. The ideas of Rushdoony and North, she says, had great influence on her and other religious right activists. In the 1980s, North praised Maranatha, as well, describing the group in a 1986 edition of his Dominion Strategies newsletter as “steadfastly behind” Christian Reconstructionism.

What White remembers from her reading of Christian Reconstructionism was the call for Christians to take “dominion” over the earth, including politics and government. Her later work with the Christian Coalition, she said, “was a vehicle to do what Rushdoony and North had written about.”

White’s daughter, Christi Vitela, who says she questioned religion since childhood, remembers a very patriarchal upbringing, with frequent citations of biblical verses that many fundamentalists interpret as requiring a wife to submit to the authority of her husband, and to “support the belief that females were subservient.”

“Feminism was not encouraged in our household; in fact it was discouraged,” Vitela said in a telephone interview. About her mother, she added, “I could see she didn’t like being treated like a servant.”

Vitela calls her mother’s time in Mexico her “penance time. . . [My parents] really talked about taking over the world. . . if she didn’t do her part she would be riddled with guilt.”

Under the weight of scrutiny, Marantha began to unravel, suffering financial decline and disbandment. In 1992, in the Hucklebridges returned to Odessa. It was no small adjustment—her two children had known only homeschooling in Mexico—but Elaine found a new calling when she became involved in the local Christian Coalition, during the presidential campaign. When she and her husband moved to Austin a year later, her networking with fellow conservative Christians soon landed her a position as director of the Capital City Christian Coalition and later as a lobbyist for the state organization in the state capital.

Upon returning to the United States, though, White decided to pursue the idea of taking dominion in a role distinct from that of pastor’s wife. She abandoned the name given her by her husband and started going by Elaine, her middle name. Joy, her son used to say, “died at the Rio Grande.”

***

The Christian Coalition was “one of the key organizing groups in Texas” in the mid-1990s, said Kirk Watson, now a Democratic state senator who served, during White’s Christian Coalition tenure, as chair of the Travis County Democratic Party.

Around Austin, White, then known as Elaine Hucklebridge, also hosted a local conservative Christian radio talk show, Life Talk, and had a reputation as an arch-conservative, Watson said. The Christian Coalition, he added, “was one of the key organizing elements in Texas politics at that time,” and, he said, “very effective.”

When Ralph Reed, then-executive director of the Christian Coalition, announced the Contract With The American Family on Capitol Hill in May 1995, White was on stage, along with Republican lawmakers including Newt Gingrich, who was speaker of the House, then-Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, and U.S. Representatives Tom DeLay of Texas, John Boehner of Ohio, and J.C. Watts of Oklahoma. (DeLay and Watts have since left Congress.) The Christian Coalition’s “contract” was the organization’s follow-up to Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” the conservative agenda that helped fuel the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994.


Ralph Reed, at podium with Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana, unveils the Christian Coalition's Contract With the American Family at a 1995 press conference in the U.S. Capitol. Elaine White (then Elaine Hucklebridge), stands on Coats's left (in yellow suit). She was a lobbyist for the Texas chapter of the Christian Coalition.
Photo Credit:
The American Prospect
Click to enlarge.
Opposing abortion and gay rights were the only issues on the state Christian Coalition’s agenda, White said. She pushed these efforts through her lobbying, her oversight of the local Christian Coalition’s storied precinct-by-precinct voter identification and candidate recruitment, as well as the voter guides distributed through churches. David Barton, the religious right’s revisionist historian—still popular today, despite repeated debunking—“was a big guy at that time,” said White. “Everyone was reading him. People were teaching [his ideas to] their children, because many of them were homeschooled; they were teaching that America was a Christian nation.” Barton also served as vice chair of the Texas Republican party from 1997 to 2006.

Local television news coverage of the 1996 presidential primary shows the former Elaine Hucklebridge dismissing charges that the Christian Coalition was a partisan organization. One senses she is reading from a script. “I can’t really speak for what the different perceptions are,” she tells a reporter. “We are an organization that promotes biblical principles and we really want to see Christians effectively involved in the process.”

White’s counterpart in this news coverage was a young Cecile Richards—now president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America—who had launched the watchdog group Texas Freedom Network in response to the rise of the Christian Coalition and other religious right groups in Texas. In the segment, Richards describes the Christian Coalition as “the single most effective political lobby in this country.”

As White intones, “we’re in favor of seeing the traditional heterosexual couple honored as the family unit,” a Christian Coalition newspaper advertisement is shown on-screen. The ad, in response to the Austin City Council’s 1993 decision to allow benefits for same-sex partners of city employees, described the action as “an inglorious event for Austin,” and that through a “shameful vote” the council had endorsed “illegal behavior” and a “negative morality message to youth.”

White is shown affirming one of the Christian Coalition’s lasting impacts on American politics, as she declares, “we are called to get involved at the lowest level” in government—seeking office and involvement in entities such as the school board—and that the Christian Coalition was “fulfilling a need to get people involved.”

When she attended the 1996 Republican National Convention, White says she was struck with a realization: She knew nothing about issues other than those on the Christian Coalition's seemingly narrow agenda. “That was the little crack there,” she said of the beginning of her questioning. “We were a two-issue organization, and we didn’t have a broad knowledge” of other issues.

While the Christian Coalition’s two big issues got plenty of play at the convention, there was also much talk of pulling the U.S. out of U.N. peacekeeping forces, and calls to eliminate a number of federal agencies, along with a laundry list of other agenda items. “I looked around that big convention center in San Diego,” she said, “and I thought, if I don’t know the answer to this.....I wouldn’t think [many there] would,” as many of them were people the Christian Coalition “had recruited over those two issues.”

Despite her well-earned hard-right reputation around the state capitol, Watson said, White invited him to a Christian Coalition issues forum—an effort, in White’s telling, to live up to the Christian Coalition’s claim to be non-partisan—with his Republican counterpart.

Watson, then serving as county party chairman, said he was “skeptical” of the invitation, fearing it was a “set-up.” But when White visited his office to discuss the forum, he found her genuinely inquisitive about “a guy who called himself a Democrat and was chair of the local Democratic Party was comfortable speaking about faith and talking about faith as a guide for politics.”

At the Baptist church where the forum took place, White fended off audience hostility toward Watson, reminding attendees that the Democrat was their guest.

“She was already, I think, in a process of wanting to understand others better,” even though at the time “she was still pretty rigid,” Watson said.

The Rev. Jim Rigby of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, long active in Texas pro-choice politics, debated White for a local television station in the 1990s. After the debate, he offered to discuss common ground they might find together in the abortion debate. He didn’t hear from her—until she showed up at his church, several years later, wanting to talk.

“It seemed to me that she had lost her moorings,” Rigby said. He described fundamentalism as “a kind of prison,” and he saw that White had experienced “some brutal experiences in her own life with male leadership.” She needed, he said, to “be in the driver’s seat” to “hear the difference between her own voice and who she had been taught she was, who she was taught she should be.”

Fundamentalism, said Rigby, has to keep people “permanently frightened or angry” in order to maintain its hold on them.

Although White didn’t appear to be frightened on the surface, he said, she was “terrified of disappointing people, not doing the right thing, disappointing God.”

But, he said, “she didn’t quit. She kept facing her monsters.”

“You have to grieve your way out of fundamentalism,” Rigby added.

White divorced Hucklebridge in 1997, left her position with the Christian Coalition, and began what has become a successful career in interior design, sales and business consulting. Divorce, she said, was frowned upon in her circles, and she began to lose touch with former colleagues.

Around the time of her divorce, a family member asked White to accompany her to the clinic for an abortion appointment, an experience White now describes as “transformative” and “eye-opening.” Another relative came out as gay and went to seminary to become an Episcopal priest.

“We grew up together,” White said of the relative. “I thought. Gosh, I’m not going to reject him.”

***

Describing the internal factionalism that pitted the Christian Coalition stalwarts against such establishment figures as then-U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and then-Governor George W. Bush, Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka called 1996 “the year the Republican Party of Texas turned hard right.” In his 2012 article, Burka writes that following the 1996 state party convention, “social conservatives had seized control of the party, and they continue to control it to this day.” No one, he added, “understood the significance of this development better than Rick Perry. He had never been much of a social conservative before the convention, but he could read the tea leaves and has been one ever since.”

Perry’s 2011 prayer rally, in a departure from the kind of religious-right gatherings seen in White’s Christian Coalition days, had a distinctly charismatic bent. Many “gifts of the spirit” were on display, including prophesy and divine revelations declared from the stage, and audience members speaking in tongues and falling out, evidencing the rapturous peak to which the speakers brought the crowd.

Surveying Reliant Stadium in 2011, White said she believed things had changed since the mid-1990s. “This is a 'mainstream' event, and it just points to how much organizing these groups have done since I was there,” she said. Christian right events in the 1990s, she added, did not put charismatic gifts on display, even though many activists had experience, as she did, with charismatic worship practices. But political organizers—in this case, Perry—are smart, she said. Charismatics “tend to be serious about making America a Christian nation and returning it to its godly roots,” White said. “They all get out and work.”

Sarah Posner is associate editor of Religion Dispatches and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. Read her blog or follow her on Twitter.

What If Everything We Know About Treating Depression Is Wrong?
Scientific studies indicate that current medications target the wrong parts of the brain.
38 COMMENTS38 COMMENTS



A A A
Email
Print

Photo Credit: Michael Kowalski/Shutterstock

September 1, 2014 |




A new study is challenging the relationship between depression and an imbalance of serotonin levels in the brain, and brings into doubt how depression has been treated in the U.S. over the past 20 years.

Researchers at the John D. Dingell VA Medical Center and Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit have bred mice that cannot produce serotonin in their brains, which should theoretically make them always depressed. But researchers instead found that the mice showed no signs of depression, but instead acted aggressively and exhibited compulsive personality traits.

This study backs recent research that indicates that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, may not be effective in lifting people out of depression. These commonly used antidepressants, such as Prozac, Paxil, Celexa, Zoloft, and Lexapro, are taken by some 10% of the U.S. population and nearly 25% of women between 40 and 60 years of age. More than 350 million people suffer from depression, according to the World Health Organization, and it is the leading cause of disability across the globe.

The study was published the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience. Professor Donald Kuhn, the lead author of the study, set out to find what role, if any, serotonin played in depression. To do this, Kuhn and his associates bred mice that lacked the ability to produce serotonin in their brains, and ran a battery of behavioral tests on them.

In addition to being compulsive and extremely aggressive, the mice that could not produce serotonin showed no signs of depression-like symptoms. The researchers also found, to their surprise, that under stressful conditions, the serotonin-deficient mice behaved normally.

A subset of the mice that couldn’t produce serotonin were given antidepressant medications and they responded in a similar manner to them as did normal mice. Altogether, the study found that serotonin is not a major player in depression, and science should look elsewhere to identify other factors that might be involved. These results could greatly reshape depression research, say the authors, and shift the focus of the search for depression treatments.

The study joins others in directly challenging the notion that depression is related to lower levels of serotonin in the brain. One study has shown that some two-thirds of those who take SSRIs remain depressed while taking them, while another has even found them clinically insignificant.

Critics of common antidepressants claim that they’re not much better than a placebo, yet may still have unwanted side effects.

SSRIs started to become widely used in the 1980s. Their introduction was heralded by the psychiatric community as a new era where safer drugs that directly targeted the causes of depression would become the standard. SSRIs, however, aren’t more effective than the older antidepressants, such as tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors, but they are less toxic.

An earlier study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that two out of three patients with depression don’t fully recover using modern antidepressants.

These results “are important because previously it was unclear just how effective (or ineffective) antidepressant medications are in patients seeking treatment in real-world settings,” said James Murrough, a research fellow at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program.

Cliff Weathers is a senior editor at AlterNet, covering environmental and consumer issues. He is a former deputy editor at Consumer Reports. His work has also appeared in Salon, Car and Driver, Playboy, and Detroit Monthly among other publications. Follow him on Twitter @cliffweathers and on Facebook.

Janet Allon 80 COMMENTS
6 Unhinged Right-Wing Moments This Week: Fox's Comical Beyoncé Freakout
Where are her pants? How can she be a feminist without pants?
80 COMMENTS80 COMMENTS



A A A
Email
Print

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

August 30, 2014 |
1. Bill O’Reilly’s 'Achey breaky heart' about Beyoncé videos.

Young women of America, please stop watching Beyoncé videos. It breaks Bill O’Reilly’s heart for some strange reason he has yet to coherently explain.

The good folks at Fox News were mightily confused this week after viewing the pop diva’s performance at the Video Music Awards in which she appeared in front of a huge screen with the word “FEMINIST.” But here's the thing: she seemed to have forgotten her pants. Her pants! How can you be a feminist when you don’t have any pants on? They were stumped.

Later in the week, O’Reilly was chatting away with Dr. Ben Carson about the usual stuff, how black people are to blame for all their own problems, welfare, blah blah blah. It’s very disappointing for O’Reilly; he thought he had already given black people all the moral instructions they need. Because, in the past, there were some really good black people. Why can’t today’s black people be more like black people of the days of old?

“You remember Motown. Do you not?” O’Reilly reminisced. “Wasn't that a fabulous, fabulous music industry, uplifting? You remember Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. Weren’t they fabulous athletes — I idolized Willie Mays....”

Awww, thanks for sharing that, Uncle Bill. We’re always up for hearing more about the black people you approve of. Alas, there are fewer and fewer of them. “And what do we have now?” O'Reilly continued. “What do we have now? Gangster rappers, you know, Beyoncé. The most famous, you know, doing these videos that show these kinds of things to young, 9, 10, 11-year-old girls? I mean — and it’s celebrated. It’s celebrated. You know, that’s the big change.”

He was obviously pretty worked up because he was having some trouble stringing those thoughts together into sentences, you know, that's a problem. It's widespread. It's widespread!

Ben Carson said some things, including thanking Bill O’Reilly for his leadership on these issues (yes, leadership). Then Bill O’Reilly, the great civil rights leader, broke in and declared, “It breaks my heart! It really does.”

Stop, stop, we’re weeping, Uncle Bill. Can't stand to see you suffer so.

2. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly: If women were more focused on getting married, maybe men wouldn’t sexually assault them so much.

Phyllis Schlafly shared some pearls of wisdom with young women on her radio show this week: Stop focusing on your career so much and get hitched. That’ll stop the menfolk from raping.

Brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that?

Wise old Phyllis asked a question she already had an answer for: “What’s the answer for women who worry about male violence?" (Wait, isn't that all women? And all people?) "It’s not to fear all men," Schlafly continued. "It’s to reject the lifestyle of frequent 'hookups,' which is so much promoted on college campuses today, while the women pursue a career and avoid marriage.”

Hell, what are young ladies even going to college for? To selfishly get educated? What’s next? Are they going to selfishly go out and support themselves? And have boyfriends or girlfriends? That is pretty much asking to be raped.

Had enough crazy? Here’s more.

3. Ex-college president says women should be trained not to drink so they can punch their sexual assaulters in the nose accurately.

Direct your letters to Dr. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University, and apparent expert on Greek life and women’s drinking habits. While appearing on the Diane Rehm Show, this beacon of higher education said we should not blame the victims of sexual assault. Then he proceeded to blame them.

"One of the groups that have to be trained not to drink in excess are women. They need to be in a position to punch the guys in the nose if they misbehave," he said, perhaps thinking he was being clever, or kind of cool for that nose-punch line. "And so part of the problem is you have men who take advantage of women who drink too much and there are women who drink too much. And we need to educate our daughters and our children in that regard."

Wait, did we miss the part where he said young men should drink less, and stop raping people? We must have.

4. Always wrong on Iraq and everything else, war-loving Bill Kristol says Obama should bomb them faster and more.

The editor of the Weekly Standard does not let the fact that he was dead-wrong about Iraq last time the U.S. invaded the country stand in the way of his desire to mouth off about what we should do there now. He does not like the fact that Obama is taking so long to bomb ISIS (a.k.a. ISIL) in Iraq, even though Obama had already started bombing Iraq when Kristol said this, so, what the hell is he talking about? Does he even know what he is talking about? It appears not.

He was particularly critical of Obama’s speech in which the President said the whole world is “appalled by the brutal murder of Jim Foley by the terrorist group, ISIL.” Kristol apparently found this statement “appalling" because the President is doing “nothing,” which we suppose is the word in Kristol-speak for launching airstrikes and helping to arm Kurdish militias to fight ISIL. (Although it is not the usual definition of “nothing” as others know it.)

Here’s an example of how Kristol, who no one in their right mind would listen to since he is unfailingly wrong, would handle the problem with ISIS (and possibly every other problem ever, like, say, having to wait too long in a checkout line).

“You know, why don’t we just [bomb]?” he asked military expert Laura Ingraham on her show. “What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens?”

Yeah, just bomb. That never hurts anything.

5. Fox News contributor: Can Michael Brown really be considered an “unarmed” teen when he was just so big?

This bit of genius comes from Fox contributor Linda Chavez, who was on the air this week doing her darndest to dismantle what she regarded as the “mantra” about Michael Brown, namely, the "unarmed black teenager shot by a white cop.” She would prefer a different mantra, perhaps something like Ommmm.

What she does not like about the description, “unarmed black teen shot (six times) by a white cop” is this: “We’re talking about an 18-year-old man who is six-foot-four and weighs almost 300 pounds.”

So, our question is this? What exactly is the size cut-off? When does a person become too big to be considered unarmed? When exactly does flesh morph into a weapon?

We know, we know, when the flesh is black.

6. Tea Partier, former presidential hopeful Herman Cain: Obama is plotting to be impeached.

Remember Herman Cain? The Godfather’s Pizza mogul from Georgia who ran for the Republican presidential nomination and made Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich look, well, sane? He’s still kicking. In fact, in his recollection he “damn near won” that nomination, which isn’t how anyone else recollects it... probably because it didn’t happen.

So, the Tea Partier is no stranger to delusional thinking. Cain recently shared a theory with Rick Wiles' End Times radio show. His theory is that Obama is trying to get impeached. It’s all part of his devilish scheme to keep Democrats in power. Kind of counter-intuitive, right? Cain specializes in that. Also, nonsense.

Cain says the way Obama will accomplish this feat is by issuing an executive order that provides undocumented immigrants with a pathway to citizenship. This will cause Hispanic voters to turn out in droves in the midterm election (and vote for Democrats). But even better for Obama, it will force Republicans to impeach him, which he loves. Everyone loves getting impeached. Just ask Bill Clinton. Here’s how Cain figures it:

"The Democrats would love for the media to be obsessed with impeachment proceedings leading up to November because the Democrats do not want the media to be focusing on failed economic policy, no foreign policy, [and] corruption that's going on in all of the various departments."

So, there it is. The whole dastardly plot. You've been warned.

For me this is a complex question. I do not feel it is my job to teach higher biblical criticism to the average pew-sitter and that as I have said many times: people who respect the bible have never actually read it. Also, I realize that the phrase- traditional xian values is frequently a code word for bizarre right wing fanatical goofiness. One really can't argue with people who use the bible as a conduit for their own self-loathing, hatred and anger. But as always one tries with gentleness and respect

For me this is a complex question. I do not feel it is my job to teach higher biblical criticism to the average pew-sitter and that as I have said many times: people who respect the bible have never actually read it. Also, I realize that the phrase- traditional xian values is frequently a code word for bizarre right wing fanatical goofiness. One really can't argue with people who use the bible as a conduit for their own self-loathing, hatred and anger. But as always one tries with gentleness and respect

I had the amazing hug last Friday, I am sure the memory will haunt me for years and return in very quite moments unexpectantly and I am grateful for it

I had the amazing hug last Friday, I am sure the memory will haunt me for years and return in very quite moments unexpectantly and I am grateful for it

G-d is not calling you to go to church, G-d is calling you to be his church

Don't judge unless you know the whole story and even if you know the story- you the F**k are you to judge

Farts smell

This makes me want to sonder

I heard this song today and thought about our war veterans


FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH LYRICS
Send "Wrong Side Of Heaven" Ringtone to your Mobile
"Wrong Side Of Heaven"

I spoke to god today, and she said that she's ashamed.
What have I become, what have I done?
I spoke to the devil today, and he swears he's not to blame.
And I understood, cuz I feel the same.

Arms wide open, I stand alone.
I'm no hero, and I'm not made of stone.
Right or wrong, I can hardly tell.
I'm on the wrong side of heaven, and the righteous side of hell.
I'm on the wrong side of heaven, and the righteous side, righteous side of hell.

I heard from god today, and she sounded just like me.
What have I done, and who have I become.
I saw the devil today, and he looked a lot like me.
I looked away, I turned away!

Arms wide open, I stand alone.
I'm no hero, and I'm not made of stone.
Right or wrong, I can hardly tell.
I'm on the wrong side of heaven, and the righteous side of hell.
I'm on the wrong side of heaven, and the righteous side, the righteous side of hell.

I'm not defending, downward descending,
falling further and further away!
I'm closer EVERYDAY!

I'm getting closer every day, to the end.
The end, The end, the end,
I'm getting closer EVERYDAY!

Arms wide open, I stand alone.
I'm no hero, and I'm not made of stone.
Right or wrong, I can hardly tell.
I'm on the wrong side of heaven, and the righteous side of hell.
I'm on the wrong side of heaven, and the righteous side of hell.
I'm on the wrong side of heaven, and the righteous side, the righteous side of hell.

I was married once, so I can and have done both and even at the same time!

Sacred cows make the best hamburgers- Abbie Hoffman

Sure I will buy the message, but would rather meet one in person

edited response, but it was funny!

Although I will admit once smashing him into the ceiling- he kept saying higher, higher. Now I feel guilt everytime he does something stupid- so I blame his mother

After raising my stepkids, I can agree with the OP, however, this seems more indictative of the type of relationship the parents have to each other as it doesn't fits my reality

Ok, I got it

Gee I would like to meet one:


A young woman of mainly Indian descent, but can also be Pakistani or Bangladeshi
Respect, glamor, power, sincerity, love, honesty, compassion, creativity, dedication, hard work, brilliancy, beauty, pride flows in their veins.

A Desi girl is very respectable.

• a Desi girl is an all rounder, not a house wife
• a Desi girl keeps her self-esteem and her parents
• a Desi girl has an amazing, unique and sweet personality
• a Desi girl is extremely smart
• a Desi girl sets a good example
• a Desi girl is naturally beautiful although she might forget this at time
• a Desi girl loves what she does

• a Desi girl will make ANYONE proud
Guy 1: who's that girl?
Guy 2: oh. That's a Desi girl. She was born on Diwali, that's why she's a pataka!!!
Guy 3: WOW *drools*

What is a desi girl?