10/18/2004: "The IRD and me"

Unable to answer the criticism of the mainline churches' human rights advocacy by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, blogger Chuck Currie has instead come forth with a large-scale non sequitur in which he attacks the IRD's funding sources and associations. Raising the spector of right-wing boogeymen is a favorite past-time of some on the left, since it relieves them of the necessity to actually deal with the arguments of their opponents. For instance:

The Right Web has information on their site that exposes ties between IRD and right-wing groups like Concerned Women for America, "Project for the New American Century (PNAC), Institute on Religion and Public Life (IRPL), Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), and American Enterprise Institute (AEI), as well as links to the conservative publications First Things, Christianity Today, and The Weekly Standard."

I can see why unspecified "ties" and "links" to publications like Christianity Today and organizations like the Institute on Religion and Public Life would be scary to someone like Chuck. They seek to uphold historic Christian orthodoxy, don't buy into theological and moral revisionism, and worst of all, don't trumpet a left-wing political agenda. That makes them practically fascists. (Hey, wait a minute–isn't guilt-by-association supposed to be a McCarthyite tactic?)

(Turning around the finger and pointing it at Chuck's source for this paragraph, one finds the Right Web is a project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, a looney left organization that counts among its board members and prominent contributors that long-time defender of tyrants everywhere, Noam Chomsky. Right Web says it gets a lot of its information from such notably unbiased sources as "Al Franken, the American Prospect, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Center for Public Integrity, People for the American Way, Political Research Associates (chaired by abortion rights fanatic and Episcopal priest Katherine Ragsdale), the Institute for Policy Studies, Mediatransparency.org, and the World Policy Institute." Al Franken! That explains why there's so much that's so funny on the Right Web site. Oh, I should also mention that the IRC is funded by, among others, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Hunger Program, the Maryknoll Office of Global Concerns, and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. See, two can play this kind of game.)

Chuck also goes on at length about the Scaife Foundation and its evil work. One can play this game ad nauseum as well. For instance, the far left-wing Tides Foundation, which has funded the crackpot "alternative media" Indymedia and the International ANSWER clone United for Peace and Justice, has also funded a variety of anti-death penalty organizations. Does that mean the latter's message is invalid per se? The Ford Foundation has funded a wide variety of gay rights and pro-abortion groups, some of them pretty extreme. Does that mean I should discount the work of Oxfam and Human Rights Watch because they also got Ford money? All this is to say that who someone gets money from says nothing about the truth or falsity of their message. And with regard to the IRD's human rights report, neither bloggers like Chuck, nor official spokesmen like Bob Edgar, have yet replied in any substantive way. They've launched ad hominem attacks, and in Edgar's case misrepresented the report's contents, but not even attempted to refute the analysis.

One other thing: I'm put out. According to Chuck,

It is clear that mainline churches have now become the target of a growing political crusade to shutdown voices of faith opposed to the far-right political agenda. IRD is Scaife’s vehicle for waging this campaign. They receive help from a small number of web sites and bloggers who share the conservative desire to reform their own denominations. These internet sites help spread the propaganda developed by Scaife’s IRD.

That reference to "bloggers" is to yours truly. Now, what I'm put out about is this: if I'm a shill for a Scaife Foundation institute-of-evil, why am I not seeing any of that Scaife money? I want my cut!