#559: Gary Cass

Gary Cass is executive director of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, and president of the gloriously insane Christian Anti-Defamation Comission (CADC), an organization devoted to nurturing martyr- and persecution complexes – their mission is to be a ”champion of Christian religious liberty”, though it has approximately as much to do with liberty as you’d probably expect. To get the idea, you can see their list of ”top 10 most egregious acts of anti-Christian defamation, discrimination and persecution in America” in 2010 here, which includes the media’s criticisms of Pat Robertson’s views on the Haiti disaster, the appointment of Elena Kagan to Supreme Court, media criticism of TonyPerkins for saying that gay teens are suicidal because they know they are ”abnormal”, and the fact that Comedy Central was considering airing a new show called ”JC” based on the life of Jesus Christ. Persecution indeed.

The target of CDAC’s efforts is primarily homosexuality, which is a ”complete rebellion against God”, and Muslims, two of the greatest threats to religious liberty at present. Here is an example of Cass’s unwavering defense of religious liberty.

Cass was also among the bigots who urged a boycott of Ford because Ford advertises and sells cars to gay people, a clear violation of Cass’s religious freedom if ever there was one. He weighs in on the “It gets Better” campaign here to assure gay people that he’s going to do all he can to ensure that it doesn’t get better.

Cass, a True Christian™, may however be most famous for his profound arguments to the effect that Obama is not a true Christian: ”Obama can talk the talk and even have secret meetings with religious leaders, but he has no credibility as a true Christian. At best Obama is a deist or a Universalist, but according to his theology and his policies, he definitely is not a Christian.” The CDAC even issued Ten “Irrefutable Proofs” that Obama is not a Christian, listing things such as his Marxism (yes, the evidence for Marxism is the inference “I don’t like Marxism; I don’t like liberals; hence liberals are Marxists” – Cass’s version of the inference is given in detail here), his appointment of Elena Kagan as Supreme Court judge, Obamacare, and the fact that he was “an unabashed supporter of special privileges for homosexuals” (more evidence here). As an apropos, Cass has very often chastised the media for attacking the faith of political candidates, i.e. those candidates that agree with Cass politically – though not Romney, whose Mormon beliefs, according to Cass, appear to be unconstitutional. 

At this point you may of course wonder what it takes to be Christian, on Cass’s view? Well, according to Cass, at least you can’t be a Christian unless you own a gun.

In his review of “proofs” of discrimination like these Cass urged parents not to let their children watch Obama’s 2008 inauguration, the “most perverted [inauguration] in our nation’s history,” and he warned that God might destroy the nation’s capital because of it (apparently Ellen DeGeneres’s Christmas Special in 2010 was predicted to cause Armageddon as well). In a spirit of bipartisanship, Cass also attacked Glenn Beck for his Mormon faith, since Beck's religious commitment is clearly and unambiguously a violation of Cass’s religious freedom as well.

Cass was also a signatory to the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance’s campaign to show that global warming is a hoax.

He is featured in a useful roundup of wingnut reactions to the repeal of DADT here, and there is a fine Gary Cass resource here.

Diagnosis: A mind-bogglingly evil person whose rank insanity is just barely matched by his hypocrisy. Dangerous.

#558: Rebecca Lee Carley

Honorable mention to Orson Scott Card for his not entirely scholarly understanding of evolution and his call for armed revolution if gay marriage were to be legalized (though in fairness some commentators failed to explain the context of the screed).

Rebecca Lee Carley is fortunately less famous and influential. She makes up for that in terms of levels of sheer crazy. Carley is a former MD and anti-vaccination activist whose licence to practise medicine in the state of New York was revoked in March 2004 as a result of general unhingedness (in fact, she was found ”guilty of practicing while impaired by a mental disability and having a psychiatric condition which impairs her ability to practice medicine;” more here and here) – though she is still cited as an authority among the more batshit antivaxxers. According to herself, Carley doesn’t need that license anyways, and the whole system of licenses and doctors and Big Pharmas is just a conspiracy against her ability to treat cancer.

Her claims about vaccines are the usual ones; vaccines cause autism, cancer, autoimmune diseases, and shaken baby syndrome (and Carley gives you ”personal stories of vaccine damage” to back up her claims). You can read her essay ”The True Weapons Of Mass Destruction Causing VIDS (Vaccine Induced Diseases) An Epidemic Of Genocide” on whale.to (no link). It is spectacularly insane, and includes (plenty of) deranged claims such as ”Bechamp proved that Louis Pasteur's ’germ theory’ of disease was incorrect due to this ability of organisms to transform and mutate based on the body's internal terrain (as Pasteur admitted on his deathbed).” Interestingly, on her website Carley also offers a phone number that you can call to get advice on how to reverse your disease with natural remedies, and she doesn’t even ”need to see you in person,” an admission that suggests that Carley may be semi-aware of the quality of her advice. Discussed here, with some interesting highlights from her problems with the Medical Board. One supporter, Arnold Gore, has his own take on that medical license thing on whale.to.

Diagnosis: The scary thing is that she still got plenty of people willing to listen to here, despite the incoherent insanity and combination of megalomania and paranoia being rather obvious.

#557: Leonso Canales jr.

Leonso Canales, Jr., a flea market owner of Kingsville, Texas, is immortalized through his campaign to replace the greeting ”hello” with the more friendly and God-fearing ”heavenO”. As he writes on his website ”The ’O’ is not enough to hide the most negative word (Hell) printed in every dictionary,” while the ”Universal greeting ’HeavenO’ is a symbol of Peace, Friendship and Welcome.” He achieved a measure of success in 1997 when the dingbats of Kleberg County (also Texas) were convinced to adopt ”HeavenO” as the county’s preferred form of greeting. According to Canales, his campaigns have led to the decline of “hello”, even where “HeavenO” has not been officially adopted, but his documentation for the claim is a little weak.

Of course, there were trouble ahead. Carl Matthews of North Carolina claimed to have been the real originator of this remarkable idea, and that “[t]he copyright means the property belongs to me and cannot be commercialized on,” though the officials didn’t agree.

Diagnosis: Completely harmless village idiots add color to life; the slightly ominous part of the story is the Kleberg County officials’ decision to adopt his ideas, suggesting a certain susceptibility to the kinds of ideas officials would ideally not be susceptible to.

#556: Natasha Campbell-McBride

Continuing our foray into slightly less prominent (but not necessarily less nefarious) enemies of reason and science, we present to you Natasha Campbell-McBride, a physician who is perhaps most famous for appearing in one of Joe Mercola’s videos explaining how she cured her son of autism. In her explanation, she perpetuates most of the myths concerning autism, and commits most of the fallacies associated with inductive reasoning – thus providing Mercola with another testimonial of the kind Mercola relies on. Campbell-McBride falls hard for the myth of the autism epidemic; she suggests that there is no genetic component to autism, and prefers to run with a toxins gambit instead. She’s even come up with her own syndrome: Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) (her private invention; do try to ask her about evidence), and as it turns out she has – in typical crackpot vein – developed a whole industry of dietary woo to treat it (but – of course – no trials or anything remotely suggesting that she is in any way close to correct). Her book, Gut and Psychology Syndrome Book: Natural Treatment For: Autism, ADD, ADHD Depression, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Schizophrenia, tells us how she’s apparently able to treat them all.

Yes, Campbell-McBride is another one of those woo-masters who have located The One True Source of All Disease, and on her website , Doctor-Natasha.com, you will find her claim to be able to treat anything from acne to depression to diabetes to autism to ADHD to schizophrenia to tummy pain. And in support of her hypothesis? Testimonials, of course. That, and Ancient Wisdom.

Her views on vaccines are discussed in detail here, and her diet has received some coverage here.

Diagnosis: I suppose that in order to count as a quack you have to intentionally mislead people, and it seems that Campbell-McBride believes that what she’s doing actually works. So we may have to have some discussion about labels.

#555: Dennis Campbell

Dennis Campbell is a self-proclaimed fundamentalist, and a baptist minister in St Cloud, Minnesota. He is pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things, one supposes, but his screeds are fairly typically crazy, and sufficiently incoherent to earn him a place in our Encyclopedia. Campbell has warned us (in an ad in a local newspaper) about the Muslim threat to the US, pointing out that ”Moslems seek to influence a nation by immigration, reproduction, education, the government, illegal drugs, and by supporting the gay agenda.” The evidence is, presumably, that gay rights were very high on the agenda of e.g. the Taliban. There’s an interesting follow-up to the ad here, and a good Dennis Campbell resource here. Campbell has also led a prayer in the Minnesota Senate, an event that was the source of some controversy.

Diagnosis: I suppose the indictment in this case really concerns a particular way of thinking: X is my enemy; Y is my enemy; hence X and Y are allies – a variant of the fallacy of the undistributed middle endorsed by a wide range of moronic wingnuts.