This past April, I wrote a diary following the Monica Goodling scandal titled "Yet Another 'Sleeper Cell,'" in which I identified a few more fundamantalist activists like Goodling working within federal government. I also proposed that bloggers systematically take up the work mainstream media had failed to do: Looking beyond the headline names in government to the mid-level positions that actually effect how things are run.
Me with my big ideas. My editor for a major national magazine had the very same idea, only, instead of suggesting the blogosphere take it up, he suggested I take it up for a fall issue of this magazine. So my job this summer is to see if there aren't more Monica Goodlings out there -- not just in DOJ, but throughout federal government.
Kossacks -- help!
Last April, I wrote:
It doesn't take big media to bring down an unqualified or crooked official. Joe Feuerherd, of the National Catholic Reporter, forced the resignation of ultra-right Bush Catholic liaison Deal Hudson; Ayelish McGarvey, a young journalist with hardly any clips to her name, brought down Bush's FDA thug Dr. David Hager; journalist and blogger Cynthia Cooper exposed Health and Human Services Secretary Wade Horn as a fundamentalist flunky with shady ethics, leading to his resignation. Who'll reel in the next one? Could be you.
I hope it will be you, and if it is, I can help get the word into mainstream media. I've been working with activists and other journalists to get a full picture of the problem, from the well-known infiltration of "abstinence-only" anti-science to a range of other troublesome areas I'll include in the story this fall.
But there's too much for any one reporter to look at. Just look at this massive list of U.S. government departments and agencies. There's no way we check out them all, but I'm hoping the blogosphere will help extend our reach.
Here's what we're NOT looking for: Christians, evangelical or otherwise, appointed or career, who do their jobs honorably and with a clear grasp of the wall between their faith and their governmental duties. That undoubtedly describes the vast majority of evangelicals and Christian conservatives working in government. This is not an anti-Christian crusade.
UPDATE: PhillyGal calls this a "witchhunt" in the comments below. That is the last thing we want. Not only is this not a witchhunt, but I'm not interested in ANY anti-Christian comments. It's never ok to discriminate against anyone because of their religion. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being an evangelical, or even a fundamentalist, in government. It doesn't matter whether you are or ever were a member of Jerry Falwell's church. It doesn't matter if you're a top official who thinks Jesus whispers in Cheney's ear. WHAT MATTERS IS WHAT YOU DO. The anti-communist red hunters of the 40s, 50s, and 60s (it wasn't just McCarthy) wanted to purge the government of anyone who had the wrong ideology. What we want to do is write about people like Dr. David Hager, who used his position on an FDA advisory board not to promote science, as he'd been tasked, but to promote his personal religious beliefs. Contrast Hager with Reagan's surgeon general C. Everett Koop, as devout a pro-lifer as there ever was; Koop was also a great public servant, who understood his brief was public health, not tearing down the wall between church and state. I can't emphasize this enough -- there's nothing wrong with being an evangelical or a fundamentalist in government. I may disagree with the politics of those people, but that's fine. What we want to know is whether there are other people in federal government not doing their jobs because they think their religion trumps the Constitution.
What we're looking for are those federal employees and top military personnel -- appointed or career -- who see their jobs as opportunities to advance their particular faith, without regard for the separation of church and state, and men and women such as Monica Goodling, whose fundamentalist educations somehow didn't prepare them to discern right from wrong. People like
Major General Jack Catton [who] says that he sees his position as an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a "wonderful opportunity" to evangelize men and women setting defense policy. "My first priority is my faith," he says. "I think it's a huge impact...."
Maybe so, General Jack, but your first priority as an advisor to the Joint Chiefs is not the state of their souls but the state of the nation's defense. Anything else endangers the plain ol' earthly bodies of the rest of us.
I broke the story of General Jack last November in Harper's and added to it here on Kos. But since then, Mikey Weinstein, the prime mover behind the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has run with it and pushed much further. Meanwhile, two of my friends at Talk2Action, Chris Rodda and Bruce Wilson (aka Troutfishing here on Kos) have been doing more than any MSM journalist I know to track the erosion of church/state separation within the military. I'm counting on their help.
That's how it should work. With this post I'm not just asking for help from Kossacks, but also, I hope, nudging us closer toward more useful collaborations between bloggers and traditional media.
SO: If you know of fundamentalist or ultra-right Catholic activists working in government or military without a clear understanding of the wall of separation, let me know. If you want to look at this list of U.S. government departments and agencies and see how they're doing, please share with me what you find out. If you want to blog it here first, great! The point isn't for bloggers or mainstream media to race each other for scoops -- the point is to take seriously the problem of fundamentalist activists who'd drive the U.S. small step by small step toward theocracy.
Post your ideas as comments, or, if you'd prefer to keep em quiet for now -- that's worth doing in many cases, so that we can gather more information -- email me at jshin dot tov at gmail dot com.