By Bill Berkowitz.
Originally published on Buzzflash on Wed, 08/25/2010
The Christian Action Network, a long-time anti-gay/National Endowment for the Arts organization is back on the scene with ‘Islam Rising,’ a film, it claims, ’exposes the dangers of radical Islam to the Western world.’
Months before the current controversy over the building of an Islamic community center a few blocks from Ground Zero brought a host of professional anti-Muslim bigots out of the woodwork, a small group, long associated with a bevy of Religious Right causes, was marketing its own brand of Islamophobia. Welcome to the world of the Christian Action Network.
Throughout the past two decades, the Christian Action Network CAN), founded in 1990 by Martin Mawyer, has been a relatively marginal, yet occasionally effective, Religious Right enterprise. During the early-nineties’ epic congressional battles fought over the conservative movement’s efforts to de-fund the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the CAN received a fair amount of notoriety. These days, the Christian Action Network is involved in what they would probably describe as an even more epic battle: The fight against the Islamization of the Western World.
“CAN has always operated on the fringes of the Religious Right,” Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, told me via an email. “Its budget is about $1 million a year, which is pretty small by Religious Right standards. Over the years, it has focused on various issues – the NEA, gays and now Islam bashing. Martin Mawyer tends to alight on whatever issue he thinks will be most lucrative.”
Back in the day, the most memorable stunt the Forest, Virginia-based Christian Action Network came, as Jack Fritscher wrote in an essay called “What happened When: Censorship, Gay History, & Mapplethorpe”, when Mawyer “tried to set up a display of sexually explicit ‘offensive’ art by [Robert] Mapplethorpe, [Andres] Serrano, and mystic-photographer Joel-Peter Witkin in the Capitol Building. Mawyer was banned from the building before [it] opened, and then was closed down by House Speaker Thomas Foley after fifteen minutes of fame in another location. Mawyer claimed he was being censored; Foley ruled Mawyer was violating house rules on lobbying in the Capitol.”
Mawyer thought he had it all figured out: flashing a few Mapplethorpe photos or pictures of Serran’s “Piss Christ” would convince legislators that tax-payer money – through the NEA — was supporting this work, and voila, the end of the NEA.
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