Colorado Springs is the "New Nuremberg" for The Religious Right (pre 1945)

I posted this in other sections, editorial and political discussion but formally being from colorado I thought you guys might want to spread the happy happy, joy joy.
I am too lazy to put in the bold typeface stuff again. go to the editorial page if you want.

Colorado Springs is the "New Nuremberg" for The Religious Right (pre 1945)


Just a little Rant and Heads up on What the hell is going on out west.
First all the dots connected
Colorado Springs Population 360,890
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Air Force Academy chaplain `was fired'
General disputes punishment claim

By Robert Weller and Jon Sarche
Associated Press
Published May 13, 2005

Colorado Springs -- A top Air Force Academy chaplain said Thursday that she was fired for speaking up about anti-Semitism and other reports of religious intolerance among cadets and staff members, including allegations that evangelical Christians wield too much influence.

Capt. Melinda Morton said she was fired last week by her boss, Col. Michael Whittington, the academy's chief chaplain, after he pressured her to deny a professor's account of a religious service for new cadets last year.

Gen. Baldwin acknowledged in an interview that he felt too many scenes in the film portrayed Christians at fault for excessive evangelical proselytizing.

He also said he asked that the Air Force cut segments on non-Christian religions such as Buddhism, Judaism and Native American spirituality.

The problem in dealing with proselytizing and church-state issues at the academy, he explained, "always is, when is a person crossing the line, or when are they being a positive person of faith, like our president."
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/5/12/150704.sht ...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0505 ...

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Look at the gravy it got from the base closings
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Victory for Colorado
Leaders pleased with increasing military presence

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News
May 14, 2005

WASHINGTON - Colorado could end up as one of the biggest winners in a nationwide military base shuffle that began Friday.

State leaders cheered news that none of the state's major military installations was targeted for closure in Department of Defense recommendations forwarded to a Base Realignment and Closure commission.


Instead, Colorado stands to gain 4,585 military and 356 civilian jobs, led by the move of an additional brigade combat team to Fort Carson in Colorado Springs and additions to Peterson, Schriever and Buckley air force bases.

The gains would be on top of a previously announced move of more than 3,700 troops from South Korea to Fort Carson. Together they are enough to move El Paso County's population past Denver's by more than 6,000 people and boost the Colorado Springs economy by hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

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The Growth of the CIA in the Colorado Springs/Denver Corridor
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Washington - The CIA has plans to relocate the headquarters of its domestic division, which is responsible for operations and recruitment in the United States, from the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters to Denver, a move designed to promote innovation, according to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials.

About $20 million has been tentatively budgeted to relocate employees of the CIA's National Resources Division, officials said. A U.S. intelligence official said the planned move, confirmed by three other government officials, was being undertaken "for operational reasons."

A CIA spokesman declined to comment. Other current and former intelligence officials said the Denver relocation reflects the desire of CIA Director Porter Goss to develop new ways to operate undercover, including setting up more front corporations and working more closely with established international companies.

Associates of Goss said Thursday that the move also was in keeping with his desire to stop the growth of CIA headquarters and headquarters- based group-think, something he criticized frequently when he was chairman of the House intelligence committee.

Other CIA veterans said such a relocation would make no sense, given Denver's distance from major corporate centers.

"Why would you go so far away?" one asked. "They will get disconnected."

The main function of the domestic division, which has stations in many major U.S. cities, is to conduct voluntary debriefings of U.S. citizens who travel overseas for work or to visit relatives, and to recruit foreign students, diplomats and businesspeople to become CIA assets when they return to their countries.
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Focus on the Family Headquarters Colorado Springs
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From the Denver Post
Focus on the Family is anti-Catholic.

Salazar lets fly
Focus on Family aims to create theocracy in U.S., senator says

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News
April 22, 2005

WASHINGTON - Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., intensified his war of words with Focus on the Family on Thursday, accusing its evangelical Christian leaders of trying to turn the United States into a theocracy.
A political arm of the Colorado Springs-based ministry has mounted an aggressive ad campaign against Salazar and senators from 15 states. It is pressuring them to scrap filibuster rules that have allowed Democrats to block a handful of controversial judicial nominations.
http://insidedenver.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_ ...

From the focus on the family site located in Colorado Springs

Now more than ever, we at Focus recognize the need to make our voices heard in the public square. Judicial tyranny, the homosexual agenda, pornography and gambling are among the front burner issues that threaten the foundation of the family. In a nation where individual “rights” increasingly trump biblical truth, abortions continue to be performed at alarming rates. On a larger scale, a world unschooled in the value of premarital abstinence is fraught with diseases like AIDS.

Our Government and Public Policy outreach addresses these issues through a number of venues. Today, nearly 140 senior executives of major corporations with annual revenues of $100 million or more participate in this program designed to “encourage the development of spiritual statesmen . . . by promoting ‘safe connections’ with their peers and needed spiritual resources.”



http://www.family.org/welcome/aboutfof/a0007486.cfm
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New Life Church Colorado Springs----Mega church
From their site
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It has been said that New Life Church is the smallest big church in the country.

Though we number 11,000, we are a close family. We don't just meet together on Sundays -- we spend the whole week together, too. Through small groups that meet all over the region, New Lifers get together each week to have meals, pray, study, play, and serve the city of Colorado Springs.No Pastor in America holds more sway over the political direction of evangelicalism than does Pastor Ted, an no church more than New Life. . . . Evangicalism is as much an intellectual as an emotional movement; and what Pastor Ted has built in Colorado Springs is not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them.

From Randi Rhodes: connection on Pastor Ted

Pastor Hayford wants to "wedge" an idea in our minds. The idea is "Order." The illustration is the Book of Revelation's description of four creatures surrounding Christ's throne. "The first ... was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying angel." Look! Said Pastor Hayford, his voice sonorous and dignified. "All wonderful, all angels." The angels were merely different from one another. Just, he said, as we have different, "ethnicities." And just as we have, in politics, a "hierarchy." And just as we have, in business, "different responsibilities," employer and employees. Angels, ethnicities, hierarchy, employers and employees - each category must follow a natural order.
Next came Pastor Larry Stockstill, presenting yet another variation of preacher. He took the stage with his wife, Melanie, who wore a pink pantsuit. Pastor Larry wore a brown pinstripe suit over a striped brown shirt and a golden tie. His voice was Louisiana, with "Pulpit" pronounced "pull-peet."

"There's a world," he preached, pacing across the stage. "I call it the Underworld." The Underwold, he explained, is similar to what he sees when he goes skin diving; only instead of strange fishes, there's strange people. Too many churches, he said, focus on the Overworld. "That's where the nice people are. The successful people. But the Lord said, `I'm not sending you to the Overworld, I'm sending you to the Underworld.' Where the creatures are. The critters! The people who are out of it. People you see in Colorado Springs, even. You got an underworld of people. The tattoo crowd, the people into drugs, the people into sex. You find `em . . . in the Underworld."


Which brings us back to "Order." Key to the growth of evangelicalism during the last twenty years has been a social structure of "cell groups" that allows churches to grow endlessly while maintaining orthodoxy in their ranks. New Life, for instance, has 1,300 cell groups, or "small groups," as Pastor Ted prefers to call them. Such a structure is not native to Colorado Springs; in fact, most evangelicals attribute it to Pastor Paul Cho, of South Korea, who has built a congregation of 750,000 using the cell-group structure. <
American megachurches that have adopted the cell model unaltered have had only partial success.
Pastor Ted's insight was in adapting this system for the affluence of the United States. South Korea, he notes, is on the "front lines" in the war against communis, "so they needed a strongchain-of-command system." But not so Americans. "Free-market globalization" has made us so free, he realized, that an American cell-group system could be mature enough to function just like a market.
. . .
Free-market economics is a "truth" Ted says he learned in his first job in projessional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler in Eastern Europe.
. . .
So the Catholics are out, and the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Islam. "My fear," he says, "is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state."

And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. "I teach a strong ideology of the use of power," he says, "of military mights, as a public service." He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bibl's exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive pardigm, and he is for ferocious war because "the Bible's bloody. There's a lot of blood."

http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/4/24/134737/474
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If that's not enough
I have more on connecting the dots

I hated it with a fiery passion. I cannot say enough bad things about that city. You could not pay me enough to live there again.

Not only does Focus on the Family have a stranglehold on the town (they have their own fucking highway sign, for fuck's sake - so much for separation of church and state), half the people you meet are religious nutjobs and the other half are mindless SUV-driving suburban soccer cows...er...moms.

The town is ugly and dry because of the endless drought. Everything is brown. Although the mountains are kind of pretty, they take up the entire western horizon, blocking the last 2 hours of sunlight every day. If you look up the word "urban sprawl" in a dictionary, you get a picture of Colorado Springs. Half the city is comprised of an endless horizon of identical surburban houses with identical children playing on identical lawns next to their families identical SUVs. It's like fucking Stepford. Except with Focus on the Family to serve as spiritual guidance.

There's absolutely no culture there. Nobody is interested in teh symphony or ballet - they both went broke when I lived there. Literally every person I met in my time there was totally insane in one way or another, even the liberal non-fundie ones. The whole town is filled with psychos. Bullying in the schools is rampant there, and completely covered up by the CS school districts ( http://www.csindy.com/csindy/2002-02-07/news2.html ) Colorado Springs also has a very high suicide rate. http://www.csindy.com/csindy/2001-05-10/iq.html

Woe to you if you are "different" in Colorado Springs. That town will eat your soul.

Not that I'm bitter or anything...

yeah the town sucks hated it also, lived in Denver and Crested Butte

but this is not about that it is more of a national picture.

I like the downtown area and manitou, a bunch of good independent restaurants and stuff, a couple good theaters, some of the most beautiful sunsets i've ever seen, etc...

But man this place is filled with nutjobs. Everytime you go into a store where the TV is on, it's tuned to Fox News. Republicans control pretty much everything, and as republicans tend to do, they don't mind shitting in their own beds. There are parts of the springs that are beautiful criss-crossed with parts that look like a godzilla-like sprawl monster came in and shat strip malls everywhere. Total corporate whoredom. And Generally, If you can't see it, smell it, or taste it, they tend to ignore pollution issues. Hell, down south it tends to smell like... poop. I don't know what causes it, or why people would want to live in an area that smells like someone tipped over an outhouse... but it's there.

And now it's going to expand, with tons more nutjobs and republicans being imported by the government, the AA religious infiltration. It's getting scary.

This place is just terrible. Way too crowded. If you're thinking about moving here, whatever you do, DON'T!

In fact, if you live in Colorado Springs ... please ... MOVE AWAY!

I lived here before Focus and I'll outlast the religious fascists. This is my town 28 of my 31 years have been spent here. I'm not giving it up for these nuts.

Welcome to DU!! :toast: