Perhaps the best way to get your hands around this latest example of theo-thugs gone wild is to think of local sanctimonious mouth foamer David Caton as the North Korea of faux piety.
For whenever Caton feels he's fallen off the publicity-hound radar and isn't being paid enough attention, the vicar of vituperativeness feels compelled to engage in some really daffy behavior as if to reassure the world he's just as loopy as ever.
Well, brother and sisters — he's back! It was this man of fleece who just a few weeks ago managed to persuade Lowe's, a Fortune 500 company, to drop its sponsorship of All-American Muslim on TLC.
Caton got his sackcloth in a wad because the series revealed Muslims in America are quite capable of living just as stultifyingly boring, law-abiding lives as Protestants, rather than spending their days assembling car bombs.
And Lowe's fell for it, acquiescing to the Islamaphobic demands of a single illiterate hate-monger who should have about as much influence on the affairs of the day as the defense minister of Groucho Marx's Freedonia.
Now, fresh off his Florida Family Association campaign to make Lowe's look like corporate America's answer to a cowering puppy that just piddled on the kitchen floor, Caton, the Ernst Blofeld of the Bible, has set his myopic sights on Kelly Miliziano, a history teacher at Steinbrenner High School, who committed the unpardonable, unforgiveable sin of (dare it be said) educating her students.
For several years Miliziano has invited speakers representing various faiths to meet with her classes. The idea here is to expose students to a range of ideas and beliefs, which in the end will serve to make them better informed, discerning, well-rounded, independent-thinking, educated members of society.
Miliziano obviously posed a threat to Caton's recruitment efforts. After all, if these kids learn stuff, well, the next thing you know, they'll figure out obtuse gasbags like Caton are full of hooey. And that's bad for the bigotry business, which needs a steady stream of lemmings to keep the flames of malevolence burning.
So when Caton found out Miliziano had invited Hassan Shibly from the Council on American-Islamic Relations to speak to her class about Muslim stereotypes, human rights and the role of women in Islam, the ayatollah of intolerance when into a full DEFCON1 liturgical lather.
Caton demanded Miliziano and the Hillsborough School District had an obligation to offer students a Christian point of view to debunk whatever Shibly said. But in fact Miliziano has invited Christian speakers. She's fulfilled her academic due diligence.
Perhaps Caton is miffed he wasn't asked to slime over to Steinbrenner. But inviting David Caton to deliver a lecture on religion would be like offering David Duke the Martin Luther King Chair for Advanced Racial Harmony.
The Florida Family Association is a cabal of one squirrelly little biblical bully, armed only with an email list of like/narrow-minded self-righteous fellow travelers who wouldn't know the meaning of faith, hope and charity if they tripped over it.
David Caton is a plague of boils on the community's spiritual life. Enough.
Perhaps a giant sign erected in front of the FFA bunker imploring Caton to: "Please, for God's sake will you just SHUT UP!" would be in order.
Lowe's can provide the materials — as a public penance.
David Caton owes me one. I interviewed the head of the Florida Family Association last week during his bigoted but successful crusade to get companies like Lowe's to pull ads from All-American Muslim, the Learning Channel reality show about a community of Muslim Americans. Before Caton hung up on me — he gets angry when you question his complaint that the show presents Muslims in too positive a light and not as crazed radicals plotting to impose Islamic shari'a law from Maine to Monterey — I corrected his pronunciation of imam, a Muslim cleric, from Eye-mam to the proper Ee-mawm. Later that day, I heard him say it properly on CNN.
But that's all he got right. I concern myself with Caton — who also likes to hire small planes to haul banners over Orlando warning people that homosexuals visit Disney World — only for two reasons. One is that a major corporation like Lowe's actually caved to the Evangelical's ugly Islamophobia. The other is that he got his 15 minutes of fame at about the same time that Christopher Hitchens died, on Dec. 15. Hitchens was best known as one of the "angry atheists" for his 2007 best seller God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and narrow-minded fundamentalists like Caton made his work a lot easier. So of course did extremist Muslims, as well as extremist Roman Catholics, Jews, Hindus and all the fanatics who ruin religion the way drunks ruin driving. Which is why Hitchens' attacks on faith, while brilliantly written, could also feel gratuitous.
(See "Christopher Hitchens, RIP.")
So it's fitting, at least for the silent majority of Christians who aren't hatemongering zealots but who derive hope and humane inspiration from our beliefs, that Caton and Hitchens should both be in the news during the Christmas season. The holiday's anticommercialization critics are right to argue that Christians spend too much time on outdoor lights at the expense of the inner light kindled by the story of God's incarnation in a manger. I'm as guilty as anyone in that regard. But Caton and Hitchens at least give us Christians a convenient place to start. They prod us on the one hand to assess what isn't Christian — like demonizing gays and Muslims — and on the other hand to reaffirm why Christianity and religion itself are a positive and not always poisonous influence in the world.
The crux of the Florida Family Association's campaign is Caton's preposterous claim, as he told me, that "every Eye-mam in this country wants to put the U.S. under shari'a law." Every imam I know here in Miami rejects the idea. "Muslims are only 6 million out of 300 million in this country," one reminds me. "We rely on U.S. law to protect our rights as a minority." They're also a minority who wish Christians well at Christmas: the Koran reverently mentions Jesus and the Virgin Mary almost 60 times.
(See "Do Shari'a Courts Have a Role in British Life?")
One way, then, that Christians can practice Jesus' teachings of love, tolerance and charity this yuletide is by resolving to reassure folks like Muslims that we're not like the Florida Family Association. That we're committed to the code of Christmas — "Peace on earth to people of goodwill" — trumpeted by the same angels we place atop the trees in our living rooms.
That's also one of the best ways to answer Hitchens as well as other angry atheists like Richard Dawkins and quite a few members of my own hypersecular profession. It's a fairly widely accepted maxim that atheist fundamentalists, as I call them, can be just as intolerant as religious fundamentalists. And the problem they share is that both take religion way too literally. Just as Christian fundamentalists insist on a literal reading of the Bible, angry atheists tend to insist that belief in God qualifies you as a raving creationist.
(See "Why Christopher Hitchens Is Wrong About Billy Graham.")
Here's what they refuse to get: Yes, Christians believe that Jesus' nativity was a virgin birth and that he rose from the dead on Easter. But if you were to show most Christians incontrovertible scientific proof that those miracles didn't occur, they would shrug — because their faith means more to them than that. Because in the end, what they have faith in is the redemptive power of the story. In Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, an agnostic says to his Catholic friend, "You can't seriously believe it all ... I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass."
"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."
"But you can't believe things simply because they're a lovely idea."
"But I do. That's how I believe."
I'm willing to bet it's how most believers believe. Before Hitchens died at 62 from esophageal cancer, he made a point of declaring he was certain no heaven awaited him. But that swipe at the faithful always misses the point. Most of us don't believe in God because we think it's a ticket to heaven. Rather, our belief in God — our belief in the living ideal of ourselves, which is something even atheists ponder — instills in us a faith that in the end, light always defeats darkness (which is how people get through the wars and natural disasters I cover). That does make us open to the possibility of the hereafter — but more important, it gives us purposeful inspiration to make the here and now better.
With all due respect to the memory of Christopher Hitchens, making the here and now better would be difficult without religion. But it's also hard enough without the un-Christian antics of people like David Caton. As Christmas ought to remind us.
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DiggRedditTumblrPermalink. During the mid-1990s, after hearing about the harassment of gay students, the principal of Largo High School in Florida created a support group for them. Over the next year or two, the meetings also drew sympathetic friends, evolving into a club called the Gay Straight Alliance. For a while, it operated in comfortable obscurity.
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“All-American Muslim,” a TV show about five families in Dearborn, Mich., has come under fire from a single, determined critic.
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David Caton calls the show a front for an Islamic takeover.
Then, in 1998, the principal, Barbara Thornton, began receiving postcards, many bearing the identical message bizarrely denouncing the alliance as a “government-funded witch hunt.” The local school board felt compelled to take up the issue, with 400 parents attending a meeting at which one speaker compared the gay students to murderers.
During that session, Ms. Thornton encountered the man who had manufactured the entire controversy: David Caton. An accountant turned rock-club owner, the author of a book about his pornography addiction, Mr. Caton had become a born-again Christian and the founder and sole employee of a fundamentalist group called the Florida Family Association.
This dispute, otherwise a mere footnote in America’s culture wars, matters very much right now. This same David Caton is the person who has maligned the television show “All-American Muslim” — a reality series on the Learning Channel about five families in Dearborn, Mich. — as a front for an Islamic takeover of America and pressured advertisers to pull their commercials.
At least two, Lowe’s Home Improvement and Kayak.com, have acknowledged doing so, partly in reaction to Mr. Caton’s campaign. Subsequently, after being criticized by consumers and antidiscrimination groups, both companies issued statements declaring their support for tolerance and diversity.
It would be upsetting enough if a well-financed, well-organized mass movement had misrepresented a television show, insulted an entire religious community and intimidated a national corporation. What makes the attack on “All-American Muslim” more disturbing — and revealing — is that it was prosecuted by just one person, a person unaffiliated with any established organization on the Christian right, a person who effectively tapped into a groundswell of anti-Muslim bigotry.
“We live in the age of the Internet and a well-organized extreme right,” said Mark Potok, who investigates hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center and has followed Mr. Caton’s activities. “This little man was able to have his voice amplified in huge ways.”
Wajahat Ali, who has written about “the Islamophobia network in America” for the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group, made a similar point in an interview.
“It’s literally one dude with a poorly made Web site, one fringe individual with an e-mail list,” Mr. Ali said. “But by parroting the talking points created by this incestuous network, he’s triggered a national crisis.”
Mr. Caton did not respond to numerous calls seeking comment. On his association’s Web site he had accused “All-American Muslim” of hiding “the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.” In an interview this week on CNN, he reiterated the thesis.
Yet, with its focus on such wholesome archetypes as a police officer, a newlywed couple and a football coach, “All-American Muslim” struck many reviewers as too tepid to be entertaining. It aspires to do for Muslims what earlier television series like “The Goldbergs” and “Julia” did for Jews and African-Americans — show they’re just regular folks.
The question is why anybody, especially a major company like Lowe’s, would be swayed by Mr. Caton’s campaign. (A spokesman for Lowe’s declined the opportunity to comment.) The 2010 federal tax forms for the Florida Family Association list Mr. Caton as its only paid employee, earning $55,200. The association took in $172,133 in donations and closed out the calendar year with precisely $8,868.76 on hand.
Mr. Caton set up the Florida Family Association after having broken with the American Family Association, a more mainstream group within Christian activist circles, for reasons that remain unclear. Mr. Caton worked independently of such established groups as Florida Family Action, Focus on the Family and the Florida Baptist Convention during the 2008 campaign to amend the Florida Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage.
“His tactics may differ from other organizations,” said Mathew Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit law and policy organization often involved in evangelical Christian issues. “Other organizations may have similar goals but use different tactics.”
For the first 15 years of his public life, Mr. Caton aimed almost entirely at homosexuals, whether with the high school club, the marriage amendment or gay rights measures in Tampa, Fla. He even urged Florida to fire an openly gay lawyer from the state attorney general’s office.
Mr. Caton often used the tactic of pressuring advertisers on shows he depicted as advocating for homosexuality — “Sordid Lives,” “Degrassi High” and “Modern Family.” On the Florida Family Association Web site, he posted grandiose claims about the companies that pulled their advertising and the cable networks that canceled shows. He appears to have frequently exaggerated, but he was almost never publicly contradicted.
Within the past two years, Mr. Caton has largely dropped the anti-gay banner in favor of a new villain: American Muslims. His concern about Sharia law partly grew out of a court decision in Tampa in which a judge allowed a mosque to settle an internal dispute according to religious law.
But Mr. Caton’s new obsession also drew upon the heated comments of such prominent anti-Muslim activists as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. And it coincided with the national controversies about the “ground zero mosque” — in fact, an Islamic cultural center several blocks from ground zero — and the hearings led by Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican, on alleged subversion by American Muslims.
If there is any upside to the campaign against “All-American Muslim,” it is that national scrutiny has cut Mr. Caton down to size. Several major companies that he claimed had stopped advertising — Home Depot and Campbell’s Soup — issued statements saying they had done no such thing. The entertainment mogul Russell Simmons paid the Learning Channel for the advertising revenue lost from Lowe’s. Mr. Caton’s broadsides have potentially created a larger, more sympathetic audience for the very series he reviles.
That would not be the first example of unintended consequences in his career. “We found it a good thing he brought the issue out,” Ms. Thornton, the Florida principal, recalled. “It ended up with the student population at large supporting the Gay Straight Alliance because of the attacks from outside.”
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2102927,00.html#ixzz1r7gpFJ6D
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/david-caton-a-biblical-bully-who-just-needs-to-shut-up/1210352
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2102927,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/us/on-religion-a-one-man-war-on-american-muslims.html?_r=1
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