While all eyes are on the presidential slugfest, and races that could determine control of the U.S. House and the Senate, there is a race for a seemingly obscure office in Massachusetts that may have national implications.

The office is Councilor, a member of the Governor’s Council, that is. The Governor’s Council is an eight-member elected body that, among other things, confirms or rejects the governor’s nominations for state judgeships.

The importance of this body was underscored this year when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex marriage in a case called Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health. It was a 4-3 decision.

Since then, Republican Governor Mitt Romney (who has national political ambitions) has done every thing he can to get the court to reconsider, and through a series of executive decisions, minimize the impact of this far reaching civil rights case.

If one of the Goodridge Four justices dies or resigns from the Court, Governor Romney will certainly appoint an opponent of marriage equality, setting off a nationally watched confirmation battle. Odds are — that judge will be antiabortion as well.

Peter Vickery is the Democratic nominee for an open seat on the Governor’s Council, from Western Massachusetts. He is an attorney and a progressive democrat for whom being pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-clean elections, and a strong supporter of the Goodridge decision are things to be proud of. Vickery, running for the first time for public office, defeated three better-known opponents in the Democratic primary in September.

Here is a taste of Vickery’s clarity and forthrightness: “Judicial independence is under threat in Massachusetts. Conservatives in both major parties want to politicize the judiciary by making judges run for re-election every six years. And they want to amend the Constitution to undo the Supreme Judicial Court’s equal-rights decision in the Goodridge case… I support the right of same-sex couples to marry and I support a woman’s right to choose. I will vigorously oppose any attempt to take those rights away.”

A victory for Vickery will be a breath of fresh air in a state where patronage jobs are a major political currency — undermining excellence and even competence in state government.

While the top democratic elected officials, such as U.S. Representatives John Olver and Richie Neal, have rallied around Vickery in the tradition of party unity in this area, and he has been endorsed by the state AFL-CIO, analysts believe that the race is not a foregone conclusion – even with Massachusetts Senator John Kerry heading the ticket.

Vickery is opposed in the general election by a criminal defense lawyer named Aaron Wilson, who shied away from competing in the primary and instead became an independent to run in the general election. Wilson ran in the democratic primary in 2002 against a 30-year incumbent (now deceased) and won 38% of the vote. He is well-funded and is a tough campaigner. There is no Republican in the race, but Wilson is apparently running as the defacto conservative Republican, since, unlike Vickery, he refuses to say where he stands on choice, marriage equality and workers’ rights.

I invite residents of western Massachusetts who want to see government reformed, and oppose the patronage system and the old boy network wherever it may be found, to join me in voting for Peter Vickery on Election Day. Even if you do not live in Massachusetts you can contribute to his campaign.

http://www.votevickery.com/index.html

Amidst all the campaign hoo ha there are sleeper factors at work that are beyond the control of the presidential campaigns and the political parties. These factors are present in events that are causing people to talk with and learn from one another in ways that the media cannot track, and the pollsters cannot measure. I believe these sleeper factors may very well determine the outcome of the presidential election.

Last week I wrote about what I called “The Moore Factor” — the release of the video and DVD of Fahrenheit/911 in tandem with his national speaking tour, mostly on college campuses. While it may seem odd to talk about the high profile Michael Moore as a sleeper factor, I promise to explain in a moment.

Consider this: the first day sales of Fahrenheit/911 videos and DVDs on October 5th, set a record. According to a Reuters report, “Day 1 sales figure and projected Week 1 sales of 3 million combined units set the benchmark as the most successful documentary ever released on home video.” One-point-four million of these “units” were sold on the first day to stores, which in turn, have to sell them to customers. But clearly, they wouldn’t be buying units they did not believe they would sell. That means of the first day sales, 600,000 were sold to individual customers. Fahrenheit/911 is at the top of the Amazon.com sales charts.

The political impact of so many people viewing and discussing this film with friends and family, unmediated by the campaigns and the pundits, is incalculable. How people react to this film in the privacy of their homes or their dorms — as they go back to watch certain scenes again, and again — is a force now being unleashed that will alter political culture in America.

Part of Moore’s call is for people to think and act for themselves. If one believes the polls and the news media, only a handful of states are even worth voting in this year in terms of the presidential contest. Moore went to Nashville, Tennessee and sought to deprogram people from believing that Tennessee, which polls show to be fairly close is necessarily a Bush state. “I don’t trust these polls and I’ll tell you why,” he declared. “First of all, they’re not polling young people; they’re not polling anyone with a cell phone. They poll likely voters, and “likely voters”; means someone who is consistently voting. So that means they’re not polling first-time voters, and they’re not polling the nonvoters or the occasional voters that we’re going after… It’s said so much that this is a Bush state, people just start to believe it; I don’t believe it. I believe John Kerry can and will win this state.”

Millions of young voters have been registered this year — hundreds of thousands in swing states like Ohio and Michigan alone. And Moore’s efforts have helped. But the polls have no way of measuring the likely impact of all this. Moore is correct about the inherent unreliability of supposedly scientific polls that cannot control for so many new and large variables. Of course, its in the business interest of the polling companies to pretend, but that does not mean that the rest of us have to believe.

Meanwhile, there is another catalytic tour that is reaching out to prospective voters in swing states. Unlike Moore’s mediagenic arena events, (reliably assisted by protests by the College Republicans), two touring companies of actors are staging performances of Words of Choice, a compelling play by Cynthia Cooper, that has been playing in comparatively smaller venues all year, and is now on a “Go Vote” tour. The show ends up in the swingest of the swing states, Florida, where there will be shows in Coral Gables, Gainesville, Tallahassee and Orlando.

Here is a description of the play: “A fusion of shorts from journalism, poetry, oral history, comedy and spoken word, Words of Choice projects the rich panorama of modern lives. In it, a father describes his feelings after learning of his daughter’s rape, a pregnant teen tries to recall the phone number of her date, a woman learns of severe fetal anomalies during Jewish holidays, two adventurous thirty-somethings spill all in comic confessions, and a deranged publicist announces the release of the morning-after burrito. A dozen writers are represented, including Kathy Najimy, Angela Bonavoglia, Justice Harry Blackmun, Gloria Feldt, Emilie Townes, Judith Arcana, Michael Quinn, and The Onion. Performances are followed by a discussion with artists and activists.”

Cooper wrote in her new blog on HotFlashReport about a recent performance in Wisconsin: “…our three actors had performed at the Electric Earth Cafe in Madison. Young women from the university — freshmen, it turns out — commented after the show. ‘I grew up as a Catholic. I grew up hearing pro-life messages and I sort of thought I was pro-choice, but I was really confused,” says one. ‘I came for information. All of the women’s stories are great. All of the different reasons that women have. A lot of people forget about women’s rights. It really makes you think,’ she says.”

Sometimes performances of Words of Choice are followed by news stories as well — maybe not as often as Michael Moore, but certainly as deserving.

Moore and Cooper’s events are each in their ways, building a new and vibrant political culture. They are bringing art, entertainment, history and journalism alive — and engaging people in the politics of the moment in ways that help people to experience thier place in history, as actors on the Ameican stage. What could be more politically profound than for people to come away with a better appreciation of their roles as citizens, and communities of citizens, instead of as passive consumers of political “messages” and dubious political data?

Words of Choice invites people to think, and to talk with each other about things often left undiscussed in our culture. But Cooper is determined to let thoughtful discussions of abortion take place in this election year, this last month, when so much is at stake for reproductive rights for women.

I think it will be at events like these, and in the conversations that take place afterwards among friends and family, that this election will be decided — when people talk about what is really important in their lives, and what is important the country and in the world. These are the kinds of events, and the kinds of conversations, that break through the group-think of the political parties and the mass media. These are events at which people are free and encouraged to think for themselves. There is nothing more vital to the health of a constitutional democracy.

Ten years ago investigations by Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and The New York Times exposed how the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon was quietly infiltrating school systems and other institutions with a deeply flawed sexuality curriculum called “Free Teens” in New York, New Jersey and around the U.S.

Fast forward ten years: Free Teens is still at it. But the difference between then and now, according to a remarkable investigative report by veteran religion reporter Don Lattin in The San Francisco Chronicle, is that not only is the Bush administration in the business of providing patronage grants and jobs to its political supporters in the religious right through the so-called Faith Based Initiative, but the Moon empire is getting its share.

I was particularly struck by this report because I was a co-author of the PPFA investigation into Free Teens, as the editor of its investigative newsletter at the time, Front Lines Research . Once exposed, school systems, Catholic churches and other “abstinence” oriented organizations dropped the Free Teens program like a hot potato. But the Moon organization has a way of surviving such set backs. Indeed, they have friends in high places.

The Chronicle reported, “Moon has also partnered with the Bush administration in support of the Korean evangelist’s strong teachings against premarital sex. Free Teens USA, an after-school program in New Jersey promoting abstinence until marriage, has been given $475,000 by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, another part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Free Teens is led by Richard Panzer,… [an] alumnus of Unification Theological Seminary. Panzer was also a leader in the American Constitution Committee, one of many political organizations affiliated with Moon.”

The Chronicle also sat in on a “marriage seminar” for church leaders taught by a “marriage specialist” with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Unbeknownst to the audience and, apparently to the sponsors of the event, the teacher was a graduate of the Rev. Moon’s Unification Theological Seminary, and before her job with the Bush administration, “was the director of marriage education at the University of Bridgeport in Bridgeport, Connecticut” a Moon controlled school whose president, Neil Salonen, is a former president of the Unification Church in America. People who completed the three-day seminar held last month in Oakland, received a”Certified Marriage Education Professional Document of Completion,” from, you guessed it, the University of Bridgeport.

All this may strike people as rather unusual, since according to mental health professionals and former members, the Unification Church almost arbitrarily selects one’s spouse, and marriages are performed in mass ceremonies in sports arenas. That’s after the deceptive recruiting practices that separate people from their biological families in order to induct them into the “True Family” headed by the Rev. and Mrs. Moon. It is for these, among other reasons, that the Unification Church has been called a cult, and across the political and religious spectrum is understood to be an organization that engages not in family building, but family smashing activities. I could go on — and I did in my book Eternal Hostility: the Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, in which I discuss, among other things, the role of the Moon organization in the abstinence education movement and its ties to former president George H. W. Bush.

As for the New Jersey-based Free Teens, their web site says up top that there are “alternatives” to sex. It doesn’t quite say what those are, but indeed, you could join the Moon organization and not have any. Members are to remain abstinent until marriage, and only allowed to consummate the marriage when church leaders give the green light, usually after years of missionary or political work.

The sound of desperation you hear when some people talk about Michael Moore is usually an indication that they understand that Moore and his messages are resonating with an ever-widening swath of the electorate. It’s beyond dispute that Moore has already affected the national debate about the war in Iraq as well as the credibility of the Bush administration, but it could be that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The video and DVD for his documentary film Fareinheit/911 will be available beginning October 5th in video stores nationwide. Millions more people will be renting it, and having group showings and discussions. Fundamental questions about the behavior and intentions of the Bush administration will be raised in ways largely unaffected by slick television ads, stodgy newspaper editorials and yammering commercial radio talk show hosts and TV talking heads.

That Michael Moore has struck a chord is indisputable. Although some in the mainstream news media sneer at his style, others quietly cringe that he beat them to important stories about the Bush administration and that he raises questions that others dare not. Moore is popular because people recognize his profound sense of humanity, and his clear compassion for and identity with the lives of ordinary people — something that too many people in public life are at considerable pains to find within themselves. What’s more, the baseball-hatted filmmaker clearly has the guts — and the means — to take on the rich, the powerful, and the hypocritical. That he makes us laugh – and cry – is such a refreshing change from the insufferable tedium, sanctimony, and transparently disingenuous “spin” of so much that passes for public discourse, we appreciate the effort, even when the gags get a little lame.

Currently, Moore is on a speaking tour of 60 college campuses and NBA arenas — and he is drawing big crowds. Five thousand people turned out to hear him at Richard Stockton College in the swing state of New Jersey; ten thousand at Syracuse University in upstate New York, four thousand at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and so on. Moore calls it, “The Slacker Uprising Tour,” and he is seeking to rouse students and other non-voters to register to vote prior to the registration deadlines, which vary by state.

If all this were not enough to make Moore a factor in the closing weeks of the national elections, he also has two books coming out — a collection of letters letter and emails he has received from American servicemen, titled “Will They Ever Trust Us Again? Letters from the War Zone” and “The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader.” Additionally, the film is still showing in hundreds of theaters across the country.

Of course, Republicans are freaking out, and in at least one instance, have resorted to censorship. When two GOP Virginia state legislators publicly twisted the arms of administrators at the state funded George Mason University, the school quickly caved and cancelled a scheduled appearance by Moore on October 28th. CBS News reported that this institution of higher learning didn’t even bother to inform Moore before announcing its reversal to the press. But the censorship is already backfiring, generating more attention than the event itself would have. Never one to back-off in the face of censorship, Moore is promising to show up anyway.

Rev. Jimmy Swaggart is back in the news because he thinks joking on TV about killing gays is funny. (It seems like whenever Swaggart makes the news, its for consorting with prostitutes or for spouting hateful rhetoric. I could have missed something, but barring extensive research, that’s what it seems like from where I sit.) The latest Swaggartism is, of course, from column B. According to the Associated Press, Swaggart told his television audience on September 12th that he would “kill” any man who looked at him romantically.

“I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry,” he declared in his internationally viewed broadcast. “And I’m going to be blunt and plain. If one ever looks at me like that, I’m going to kill him and tell God he died,” Swaggart announced as his congregation laughed and applauded.

The last time Swaggart distinguished himself in this way, he was a leader of the bash Islam brigade of American evangelical Christian leaders, whose display of rhetorical pyrotechnics was almost certainly the largest outburst of religious bigotry in my lifetime. Among other things, Swaggart called Islam a “failed religion of hatred.”

Swaggart is now busy surfing waves of complaints and unflattering media attention, and has apologized for saying he would kill gay men and lie to God that he had done it. He says he threatens to kill various people in this same “joke” formula all the time. Funny guy, that Jimmy. Perhaps he is unaware that so many people are victims of violence for the mere fact of being gay, or being mistaken for being gay, that the FBI has collected statistics about it for a decade as part of a national effort to combat hate crimes. Swaggart told his hometown newspaper, the Baton Rouge Advocate that he is sorry he offended anyone, he does not condone violence, and he continues to oppose homosexuality.

Given Swaggart’s resolve in the face of controversy, perhaps he will be calling on fellow televangelist, Rev. Paul Crouch, who may be in need of some counseling.

According to an extraordinary series of articles in the Los Angeles Times, Rev. Paul Crouch, head of Trinity Broadcasting Network, (TBN) settled a lawsuit against a former employee for $425,000 to silence him from disclosing a homosexual affair in 1996. The agreement was confidential, but the former employee is now claiming, among other things that he felt he was forced to have sex with Crouch in order to keep his job. Enoch Lonnie Ford, 41, the alleged victim, says, “Paul Crouch needs to be exposed, and the truth needs to get out.” Crouch, now 70, is president of the Orange County-based TBN, the largest religious broadcaster in the world.

Crouch and TBN deny the allegations and say that they only settled the suit as the best way to protect the ministry against the scurrilous charges. They also say, and the LA Times account confirms, that Ford sought millions of dollars more from Crouch and TBN for not publishing a manuscript in which he details the charges he already agreed to keep confidential in the settlement agreement. TBN calls it “extortion,” and revealed that Ford is a convicted sex offender and a drug user.

Wow! Some sensational story, huh? Its eerie, though, that the vast media pack hasn’t jumped on this story of alleged sexual coercion, hypocrisy and criminal activity on the part of one of the most prominent religious leaders in the world. Coverage and commentary has been spotty at best. It’s unfair of course, for the media to function as a conveyor belt for unsubstantiated charges against public figures from disreputable or highly biased sources. Maybe the vast media pack has gotten gun shy after recent debacles like the duping of Dan Rather and the smear campaign waged by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth…

Nah. More likely, the LA Times is so far ahead in reporting on this, that the competition is caught short. Additionally, although Crouch’s empire is far larger than any of the other televangelists he is less well known beyond his audience than the more flamboyant Swaggart, or the politically prominent televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Still, the relative absence of follow-up reporting and commentary is striking at a time when sex abuse by Catholic priests and settlements from church funds to silence alleged abuse victims, and cover-up on the part of church authorities continues to be one of the largest, if not The largest corruption scandal in the history of modern religious institutions. Oh yeah, and until a series of excellent investigative reports by the Boston Globe broke the dimensions of the story wide open, press coverage of that one was spotty too.