CNN's God's Warriors

CNN has run three, two-hour programs about God's Warriors, which seemed to be trying to draw some moral equivalence between Islamic jihadists, Jewish extremists, and the Christian Religious Right. The problem was that while there are vast numbers of Islamic jihadists beheading people, raping, murdering, etc., there's a real shortage of those among Jews and Christians.

Yes, there was the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, and there have been other dangerous Jewish extremists out there. But I suspect that if you totaled up all of them over the last 30 years, their victims wouldn't exceed a typical day's victims from al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq.

Yes, CNN reminded us of abortion clinic bombings and assassinations by Christian pro-life murderers (and yes, I use "pro-life murderer" together for the irony of it all). But again, the Christian "God's warriors" that CNN profiled weren't terrorists--they were people working through the political process, trying their best to raise their kids, really no different from their liberal counterparts.

I suppose if CNN had compared the Religious Right to libertarian ideas about minimal government, they could have made the Religious Right look like dangerous totalitarians (or something close). But being CNN, they can only really compare the Religious Right to liberalism or leftism--at which point the Religious Right is less statist than liberals, and far less statist than the average hardcore left-wing Democrat. You can argue about which values should be given preference in writing laws--the majority (why the Religious Right has generally supported allowing legislatures and initiatives to prevail) or the elite (why the liberals and left rely on judges to overturn popular government). But such a comparison doesn't make liberals and leftist look too good.

What really impressed me was the amount of attention that this report gave to Ron Luce's evangelistic operation Teen Mania, which runs an event called Battle Cry. Luce is 46, someone who came out of a very messy family situation, was headed down to destruction when he found Jesus, and turned his life around. I was also impressed with some of the people that CNN interviewed that work for Teen Mania--one 22 year old young lady who, in spite of what I am sure was CNN's best effort to make her look like a fanatic, came across as a reminder that no matter how broken a life we have had, we can move beyond it.

Best of all was the contrast between what happened when Battle Cry came to San Francisco, and the bunch that showed up to protest that groups like Battle Cry shouldn't be allowed in San Francisco. To quote Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who told counterprotesters at City Hall on Friday that while such fundamentalists may be small in number, "they're loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco." (Those lefties: so tolerant that they excuse pedophilia and naked half-transgendered people in public, but not Christians encouraging kids to turn away from a culture of drugs, suicide, and despair.) As I mentioned last year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors actually passed a resolution condemning Battle Cry.

As much as CNN may feel the need to draw bogus moral equivalences, they failed. What is wrong with Islam isn't a few kooks on the edges, but a large and dangerous faction of Islam.

Teen Mania runs a school in Texas where they train their people. They have all sorts of very strict rules: no smoking; no alcohol; no R-rated movies; and skirts have to be a certain length.

Amanpour had the nerve to suggest that this was like the Taliban. Yes, except the Taliban executed homosexuals, "loose women," prohibited girls from receiving an education; banned clapping at sporting events; made apotasy from Islam a capital crime; blew up the symbols of other religions. Yes, that's quite similar to a dress code. How did I miss the comparison?