{"id":186342,"date":"2014-02-23T21:41:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-24T02:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/02\/23\/former-bush-aide-matt-dowd-goes-there\/"},"modified":"2014-02-23T21:41:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-24T02:41:00","slug":"former-bush-aide-matt-dowd-goes-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/02\/23\/former-bush-aide-matt-dowd-goes-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Bush Aide Matt Dowd Goes There"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 400px;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"256\" src=\"http:\/\/embed.crooksandliars.com\/embed\/Mjg5MDNdLQ\" width=\"390\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>He <a href=\"http:\/\/crooksandliars.com\/2014\/02\/fmr-bush-aide-matt-dowd-arizona-anti-gay\">compares the anti-gay right to Islamic Terrorists<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Of interest is his invocation of the history of religious justifications supporting slavery:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;This is one of those problems when people use religion as a way to sort of enforce discriminatory practices,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;People used religion back in the 1860s when they defended slavery. They used religion to defend slavery.&#8221;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;We&#8217;ve used religion to go to war. People have criticized Islam because they use religion to fight people and kill people. This is the problem with that [bill].&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That first bit seems to me to be a subtle slam at the Southern Baptists, whose genesis was a schism with the American Baptists over the morality of slavery. (The Southern Baptists were on the wrong side of the argument.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not quite sure what, if anything, was his intent in saying this, but I agree with Max Blumenthal&#8217;s analysis, which is that Dowd is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/opinion\/blumenthal\/2007\/04\/05\/matthew_dowd\">primarily an opportunist<\/a>, so I think that there is some sort of an angle on this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>He compares the anti-gay right to Islamic Terrorists. Of interest is his invocation of the history of religious justifications supporting slavery: &#8220;This is one of those problems when people use religion as a way to sort of enforce discriminatory practices,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;People used religion back in the 1860s when they defended slavery. They used &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[967,971,1030,978,1021,1027],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigotry","category-civil-rights","category-lgbtq","category-politics","category-religion","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186342"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}