by Rebecca Hamilton, patheos.com / July 8th 2013

Jim Koch, founder and chairman, Samuel Adams Beer

Kathy Schiffer wrote a post yesterday that moved Samuel Adams beer from a purveyor of too-politically correct advertising to dedicated Christian basher and misogynist.

I wrote a couple of days ago about the Samuel Adams beer commercial in which the company aired an ad that conflated their beer with the Declaration of Independence and then paraphrased it to take the words “endowed by their Creator” out of this quote?

Once the not-so-surprising backlash began, Samuel Adams issued the meaningless comment (I wouldn’t call it an apology) that they were just following the guidelines of the beer manufacturer’s association. I assume that Samuel Adams beer is a member of this association and voted on these “guidelines” which hardly makes them binding. The comment is, as I said, meaningless.

However Kathy moved the discussion to a whole new level by informing her readers of Samuel Adams’ past behavior. She is speaking of Samuel Adams’ company chairman, Jim Koch, when she says (emphasis mine):

It appears that Mr Koch made the usual lame comment when the public got angry. “We are not in control of the program,” he claimed, “and it was never our intent to part of a radio station promotion that cross the line.” In 2002, Boston Beer Company Chairman Jim Koch (pronounced “Cook”) was the so-called Grand Marshall of the “Sex for Sam” stunt, a radio contest on WNEW-FM in Manhattan. Syndicated radio shock jocks Opie and Anthony staged a contest, challenging couples to engage in sexual activity in risky public places: in taxis, in ATM vestibules, in the Disney Store and—wait for it!—in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Couples earned points (5, 10 or more) for each tryst in a public place. The couple who succeeded in engaging in sexual intercourse in St. Patrick’s Cathedral were awarded 25 points for their effort. The only way to earn more points was to engage in coitus at Koch’s feet—for which enterprising exhibitionist couples earned 30 points.

There are a few holes in the denial I [underlined].

First, as Kathy points out:

Of course, this was the third time Koch’s company sponsored the “Sex for Sam” contest. And while acknowledging that his “presence on the show was a lapse in judgment, a serious mistake,” Koch has avoided describing just what he was doing in Opie and Anthony’s studio.

Along with handing out bottles of Sam Adams to contestants who stopped by the studio to take a break from having sex in cabs, ATM vestibules, and the Disney Store, Koch also served as the contest’s official “celebrity” voyeur. That meant if couples had sex in front of Koch, they were awarded 30 points (by comparison, sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral was worth 25 points).

According to the audio clips you’ll find below, Koch watched as five couples attempted to obtain those 30 points (only two, um, succeeded). While Koch said he felt embarrassed for the three couples who failed to complete the act before him, he told Opie and Anthony that the competitors were, “awesome, all of ‘em, better teams. The quality gets better every year. (To read the rest go here.)

Second, he was advertising on and participating in the Opie and Anthony Show. Does anybody remember Opie and Anthony? They’re the sorry excuses for men who “interviewed” a “homeless” man and laughed approvingly and joked with him as he described in graphic terms how he wanted to rape and beat then Secretary of State Congoleeza Rice and also how he wanted to rape First Lady Laura Bush to death. I’ve heard a recording of this routine. I am not going to say more about it, because it makes me too angry.

One ad might mean that the advertiser approved the campaign and was not aware of exactly what each specific ad had in it. Lame comments about following their own manufacturer’s association guidelines are admission that they knew, approved the ad, are not sorry and think we’re all stupid enough to buy their little comment as a reason.

But four times is a pattern, especially when three of those times involved active participation by the company’s founder and chairman. It moves the question from political correctness carried to the point that we are now editing the Declaration of Independence (which is bad enough) to deliberate Christian and Catholic bashing. The kind of thing the company sponsored on Opie and Anthony puts them outside the line, or at least it does with me. The fact that they supported Opie and Anthony …. no words.

I believe that the “comedy” routine about the First Lady and Secretary of State came after Samuel Adams’ beer sponsored the Sex for Sam promotion. But it is in keeping with what the continuous message of the show. Opie and Anthony had one “joke:” degradation of women and overt misogyny. In my opinion, misogyny, including incitment to violence against, and in some cases such as the one concerning the First Lady, murder of women, for laughs was the Opie and Anthony show.

Frankly, I don’t see how any decent human being would ever advertise on Opie and Anthony, based on their misogyny and support of violence and degradation of women.

My advice to those who want a clean conscience: Lay your money down for a product that does not support Catholic bashing, Christian bashing, dehumanizing and degrading exhibitionist sex and does not buy advertising on shows that promote the rape, battering and murder of women.

Christian Bashing: Are There Any Limits?

May 3, 2013 By Rebecca Hamilton 8 Comments

Cban

Michael Weinstein, Esq, the Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is living proof that anyone with a word processor can call themselves a civil rights activist.

He’s also living proof that you can say just about any Christian-bashing thing you want and get away with it.

I ask you, what would happen if you substituted “Jew,” or “black,” or “Muslim” or just about any other group of people for Christian in this little diatribe:

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me tell you of monsters and monstrous wrongs. And let me tell you what these bloody monsters thrive on.

I founded the civil rights fighting organization the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) to do one thing: fight those monsters who would tear down the Constitutionally-mandated wall separating church and state in the technologically most lethal entity ever created by humankind, the U.S. military.

Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces. Oh my, my, my, how “Papa’s got a brand new bag.”

What’s Papa’s new tactic? You’re gonna just love this! These days, when ANYone attempts to bravely stand up against virulent religious oppression, these monstrosities cry out alligator tears in overflowing torrents and scream that it is, in fact, THEY who are the dispossessed, bereft and oppressed. C’mon, really, you pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers? It would be like the utter folly of 1960′s-era southern bigots howling like stuck pigs in protest that Rosa Parks’ civil rights activism is “abusing” them by destroying and disenfranchising their rights to sit in the front seat of buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Please, I beseech you! Let us call these ignoble actions what they are: the senseless and cowardly squallings of human monsters.

Queasy with the bright and promising lights of the cultural realities of the present day, those evil, fundamentalist Christian creatures and their spiritual heirs have taken refuge behind flimsy, well-worn, gauze-like euphemistic facades such as “family values” and “religious liberty.” These bandits coagulate their stenchful substances in organizations such as the American Family Association (AFA), the ultra-fundamentalist Family Research Council (FRC), and the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty(CARL). The basis of their ruinous unity is the bane of human existence and progress: horrific hatred and blinding bigotry. However, when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and others correctly characterize them as “hate groups,” they all too predictably raise a deafening hue and disingenuously bellow mournfully like the world class cowards they are. (Read the rest here.)

Idoppersecution

These lovely words did not come from some seldom-read little blog run by a nut and his pals. They were right up front on Huffington Post, with its huge circulation.

I ask again: If the group which is the object of all this hatred was any other than Christians, what would the reaction be? But since it is about Christians, I ask you to notice the deafening silence.

When it comes to discrimination and persecution, speech precedes action. Talking about people like this wears away the resistance to thinking about them in this manner. Thinking about them this way wears away the resistance to legal discrimination and ultimately, violent persecution.

Zeke Pipher, who blogs at Man on the Run, has written an excellent article on Mr Weinstein’s Christian-bashing rant. You can find it here.

My question: How far does this have to go before Christians wake up, stand up, and say, Enough!

Persecuted