Right Wing Nuts Still Wrong, Still Extreme, Still Harping on the Turkey Thing

This turkey of a story has more legs than ......well, than a real turkey has drumsticks!  Right wing watch caught this from the American Family's Bryan Fischer (he's also afraid of Mormons as well as Muslims) who was prominent in Rick Perry's political evangelism event earlier this year. 

This is not a passing aberration; this turkey story.  Rather this is part if a larger issue, a core theme, a central topic in the 2012 GOP political debate.

To correct the inaccuracies that Fischer is pushing - all turkeys are slaughtered the SAME. There is NO PRAYER said over them, and they are not labeled as being different, because they are NOT different from the way non-religious designated meat iss always slaughtaered - (and not just turkeys) . Any turkeys tht are subsequently labeled Halal - OR KOSHER - have the pertinent religious requirements satisfied for such labeling at the retail distribution source, where the labeling is then, appropriately, noted.

In the case of Butterball turkeys, Butterball indicates this occurs primarily in other countries to which they sell turkeys; there are more than 20 other countries to which Butterball exports this American ag product.

Fischer was a prominent speaker at the Rick Perry Prayer event; he was a prominent speaker at the Values Voter Summit, where every political candidate in the GOP Presidential contest spoke, along with the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.  Islamophobia is a key part of a number of our would-be candidates, notably Gingrich, Cain, Bachmann, Santorum.  The only consistent exception has been Ron Paul, and he is highly unlikely to be the next GOP presidential candidate.

These candidates have a fundamentalist approach that would make Christianity and secular law identical.  They would make a Christian version of our secular law which given NO religion a preference something different than what it is NOW.  Frightening people over Sharia law and pseudo-Halal turkey is not different than some of the similar anti-Semitic tactics which used to target Jews.

This Halal turkey story is NOT going away, it is not merely a minor embarassment of a lone extremist.  It IS part of a larger facet of conservative politics.  It is a dog whistle; it is fear mongering, a straw man bogey man of hatred.  In that sense, it is no different than the straw man effigy that conservative students burned in Scotland.  This is just a different Islamic strawman, thrown on a different bonfire, a U.S. conservative bonfire.

These people throw around the word Freedoms constantly.  But what they want to do is to take away freedom - freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, rule of non-partisan unbiased law.

We don't need religious crazy fundamentalists in the White House. We don't need race and ethnic or religious hatred in our politics.

I found this quote from Reuters about the crosses case in question, which pertains ONLY so far as I understand this, to the installation of a religious symbol on public property.  In the past there have also been controversies about putting up crosses to honor someone who was not Christian but another religion - notably Jewish, which boiled down to the issue of are crosses specifically Christian or not (it was determined they were) so a further issue here may have been the respective religions, or atheism, of the fallen officers.

"The challenge to the Utah crosses was brought by a Texas-based group called American Atheists, which sued to remove the memorials from state property."

I haven't gone looking for any studies yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a close correlation between being pro-gun, and anti-muslim/anti-sharia law, and those who are also pro-Christian dominionism/christian political evangelism. That excludes Jews, Muslims, and Mormons, and in some cases Roman Catholics. I'm not saying ALL pro-gunners are fundamentalist crazy haters and bigots, but there IS a significant overlap.

Fischer would ban Muslims from joining our armed forces, and has also lobbied for Muslims to be allowed to immigrate to this country ONLY if they converted to Christianity, as well as demanded that Native Americans convert to Christianity 'in order to be full U.S. citizens'. Fischer has had extensive support from the candidates, some even before they were running for President, including during their campaigns for other offices.

The sham historian David Barton has also been prominently promoted by a number of the Republican candidates, especially Michele Bachmann who has invited this pseudo-scholar to address 'classes' on the U.S. Constitution - which he is emphatically NOT qualified to do by any legitimtate standard of knowledge - specifically to promote the idea that this is an exclusively Christian nation, and that other religions should at best be tolerated, but that U.S. laws must conform to "Biblical Christianity".