July 22, 2012 11:14 PM UTC

It's Never Too Soon To Stay Classy

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• by: Colorado Pols

We feel like at this point we can offer a few words on the inevitable and premature attempts, on both sides of the aisle, to make Friday morning’s tragic shootings at an Aurora movie theater comport with pre-existing political agendas. By now you’ve no doubt heard about the unfortunately-timed Tweets by the National Rifle Association and online shopping site called Celebrity Boutique–the latter particularly offensive as it appeared to commercialize the tragedy directly. As crass as those appear at a glance, in both cases they seem to be inadvertent.

We would like to apologize on behalf of the American fourth estate in its entirety and ABC News in particular, for their mistake of reporting on unverified references to a person of the same name as the alleged killer on a Tea Party website. Because the “liberal media” is never going to hear the end of it anyway, that’s as much oxygen as we care to expend. They screwed up. Also, we, meaning bloggers, commenters, and everyone else, should not have been so presumptuous about the lunatic who shot Gabrielle Giffords. Again, we are just saving readers the trouble.

With all of that laid out as candidly as we may, Right Wing Watch has the response to the Aurora shootings from the influential conservative American Family Association.

Fred Jackson, the American Family Association’s news director, while discussing the Colorado movie theater shooting today said that liberal Christian churches and liberal media helped contribute to violent incidents by supposedly deemphasizing the fear of God and the Bible. During AFA Today, Jackson had on as his guest Jerry Newcombe of Truth in Action Ministries to discuss his column on the AFA’s OneNewsNow blaming the shooting on a waning fear of God and Hell, and blamed the American Civil Liberties Union for destroying the public school system by supposedly forbidding students from reading the Bible. “You wonder why all these terrible things are happening to us when there is no fear of God,” Newcombe said.

Jackson maintained that unlike in the communities of forty years ago, liberals in the media and churches, along with movies and the internet, have “have come together to give us these kinds of incidents.”

…Later in the program, Jackson and co-host Teddy James of AFA Journal said the shooting is a sign of God’s judgment for the failings of the public education system and liberal, mainline Protestant churches that affirm gays and lesbians.

Jackson: I think the sources of this is [sic] multifaceted but you can put it all I think under the heading of rebellion to God, a rejection of the God of the Bible. I think along with an education system that has produced our lawyers, our politicians, more teachers, more professors, all of that sort of thing, is our churches, mainline churches. We’ve been dealing Teddy and I know the AFA Journal has been dealing with denominations that no longer believe in the God of the Bible, they no longer believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation, they teach that God is OK with homosexuality, this is just increasing more and more. It is mankind shaking its fist at the authority of God.

James: And God will not be silent when he’s mocked, and we need to remember that.

Jackson: We are seeing his judgment… [Pols emphasis]

It would be easy to lump this in the Westboro Baptist Church category of nonsensical hate-filled inbred blather, but the AFA spent over $20 million in 2011 as one of the principal ‘culture war’ groups on the Christian right–billing itself as “one of the largest and most effective pro-family organizations in the country” with an email list of millions and almost 200,000 donors.

Since a mere “leading pro-family advocacy organization” may not be enough for some, the Washington Post quotes one Rep. Louie Gohmert, Republican congressman from Texas, from his Friday interview with the Heritage Foundation (perhaps you’ve heard of them).

We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country … and when … you know … what really gets me as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs and then a senseless, crazy act of terror like this takes place.

You know, when people say, where was God in all of this? Well, you know, we don’t let … in fact we’ve threatened high school graduation participants that if they use God’s name that they’re going to be jailed, we had a principal of a school, and a superintendent or a coach down in Florida that were threatened with jail because they said the blessing at a voluntary off-campus dinner. I mean, that kind of stuff … where is God? Where, where? What have we done with God? We told him that we don’t want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present.

That’s just cherry-picking the most far-out examples we can find, right? After all, who the heck is Rep. Louie Gohmert, anyway? It may interest you to know that Rep. Gohmert is vice chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.

So no, it’s not really fair to call this “cherry-picking.”

In the aftermath of any high-profile act of violence, with which the great state of Colorado has become sadly well acquainted in recent years, there is always a period when it is inappropriate to invoke the tragedy as retribution, divine or otherwise–hopefully you never do that, but one should at least wait until the mourning is complete. The farther away one is geographically from the event, not to mention from the ideological mainstream, the shorter that period seems to be. The hole in our theory is the question of whether this is really “out of the mainstream” anymore. If the above can be regarded as “mainstream” on the right today, what does that mean?

We will obviously revisit this subject. Today, it’s enough to call Gohmert grossly misguided, and at least some “American Families” to tell the AFA where they can cram their “Association.”