You might have guessed that George W. Bush's evangelical armies would wreak havoc upon governmental
health agencies, where they can have an impact shaping policy on abortion, contraception, safer sex and other
social issues. But surely they'd have little interest in the National Park Service, right? Guess again. A
watchdog group has charged that the park service is caving in to zealots intent on a theocratic remake of
American history and geology recorded at historic sites from the Lincoln Memorial to the Grand Canyon
National Park. It's a story that has been simmering for a while, never quite boiling over in the media, like so
many stories these days regarding the Bush administration. And it certainly wasn't going to finally bubble up in
the middle of cow madness and terror scares, though it represents a further scary slouch toward theocracy.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a non-profit that represents park workers and public
employees, charged that the National Park Service is hell-bent on removing images of anti-Vietnam War
demonstrations, pro-choice marches and gay-rights marches from an eight-minute video at the Lincoln
Memorial covering historic gatherings that have taken place there and on the Washington Mall.
'The park
service leadership now caters exclusively to conservative Christian fundamentalist groups,' stated PEER
Executive Director Jeff Ruch in his group's release. 'The Bush Administration appears to be sponsoring a
program of Faith-Based Parks.'
The park service, inundated with calls after the release was reported on
365gay.com and a few other gay news sites, denied the charge and called PEER's report 'erroneous,' though
it did admit it intends to add images to the tape for 'more balance,' which the Washington Post had reported.
Park service spokesman Bill Line told PlanetOut.com that pressure to replace gay and pro-choice images with
Christian and pro-life ones had come from conservative Kansas Republican congressman Todd Tiahrt, who'd
joined a vocal conservative campaign against the park service last February.
The new tape will reportedly
contain footage of a 1997 'Promise Keepers' rally and a march supporting Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
Neither event took place at the Lincoln Memorial or on the Washington Mall, which would still make the
alteration an ugly, ideological and inaccurate revision—even if nothing is being removed from the tape.
PEER's Jeff Ruch told me he believes the park service, by now denying any attempt to actually cut out some
images, is doing damage control, having been caught red-handed. His group's claims about the scrubbing of
the tape, he says, were based on several sources inside the park service who told him that deputy director
Donald Murphy had sent down a directive. Ruch was also following what theocratic gasbags had been
claiming regarding the success of their pressure campaign to get the tape excised and altered.
The
Culture and Family Institute's ever-grimacing Robert Knight had been thundering against the tape for months,
calling it 'pure propaganda designed to equate abortion and gay rights with the civil-rights movement.' And the
odious Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition attacked it as 'first-class ... perversion of Abraham
Lincoln' and charged that 'tax dollars are paying to promote such a lie that Lincoln would have supported gay
causes, abortion rights and feminism.' Rev. Sheldon's rantings are more hilarious in light of the fact that
Honest Abe has been conjectured—by Gore Vidal and others who've studied his public writings and private
diaries—to possibly have been gay or bisexual himself, and a book to be published next year, written by the
late sex researcher C.A. Tripp, is said to provide the smoking-gun diary that will confirm this beyond a
reasonable doubt. (Fasten your seat belts!)
Anyway, Sheldon's group called on the park service to stop
showing the video until it could be re-edited. His son Phil Sheldon put out an order to the minions to 'flood the
park service office with petitions to stop this lie from being shown.' Fox News.com then reported on Sheldon's
bragging that a phone call from him to the White House got the park service to acquiesce.
You only have to
look to the history of the park service under the Bush administration to see the proof of its pandering to the
fundies. This summer the Grand Canyon National Park's bookstore began selling The Grand Canyon: A
Different View, which offers a creationist account of the canyon's origins. As a river guide, author Tom Vail used
to tell people that the Grand Canyon was formed over millions of years, as modern science and geology
explain its evolution. 'Then I met the Lord,' he writes in the book. 'Now, I have 'a different view' of the Canyon,
which, according to a biblical time scale, can't possibly be more than about a few thousand years old.'
Even the conservative, Bush-supporting Web site Newsmax.com seems to be getting the creeps from all of
this, reporting that, 'Earlier this year, the Bush administration prevented park rangers from publishing a rebuttal
to the book for use by interpretive staff and employees, who are often confronted during tours by creationist
zealots.'
Last July, deputy director Murphy overturned a decision by the Grand Canyon National Park's
superintendent to ban three bronze plaques with biblical verses that had been placed on viewing platforms.
The plaques were made by the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, whose convent, called Canaan in the Desert, is
north of Phoenix. The convent was founded by Mother Basilea in 1963 after she had visited Mount Sinai and
met the Lord, who 'spoke to her about His commandments.'
'The avalanche of moral decay is upon us,'
the sisters say on their site. 'God's commandments are no longer considered relevant for today and as a
result our society is disintegrating. Recently this country watched as in Montgomery, Ala., a monument of the
Ten Commandments was taken down, pushed into a back room and locked away because of the deplorable
decision by a judge.'
And like Judge Roy Moore, the man who'd put the Ten Commandments in the
Alabama courthouse rotunda and was eventually rebuffed and removed from his job, the Evangelical
Sisterhood of Mary has become adept at using the media to mobilize Christian armies to influence the Bush
administration.
'We Sisters hardly knew which interview to take first,' they state with glee regarding the
biblical plaque, proving even the most chaste and pious can become lascivious press whores. The Bushies
then decided exactly who would dictate public policy in the park. 'We were kindly invited to put up the plaques
again,' the evangelical sisterhood reports on its site.
Michelangelo Signorile hosts a daily satellite radio
show on Sirius OutQ, 149. He can be reached at www.signorile.com
