The least of these?

Old news, but the attack on the poor and the needy continues.  In Pennsylvania, the Republican governor is looking to reduce assistance to the needy, "including cutting support for the mentally ill." The mentally ill aren't the only ones, of course.  Anyone at the bottom is under attack to take care of themselves.  Or not. 

In Kansas, Brownback just signed a tax law that removes income tax for businesses, professional income, or anything that can be sheltered in a trust or partnership.  The elderly, the working class, and anyone who doesn't make enough money to shelter their money will still pay income taxes.  For reduced services that they need more, of course. 

All this, while my Christian conservative friends pray for the ACA to be overturned and for Obama to lose his reelection bid.  Obviously, for many of you here, that doesn't surprise or shock you, because as Leighton just said so eloquently, "lies for Jesus are just simply lies."  I still, stupidly want to believe that my conservative Christian friends--the ones who speak glowingly of their personal relationship with someone who healed the sick and hung out with whores and lepers--would actually want policies that look after the "least of these." 

But for many of them, Obama's race undoubtedly taps something they can't openly address.  For others, deep down, they just don't like poor people, and assume that many of those who are homeless or ill or poor are just lazy and immoral.  I wish I could say I understood that, but there is a cruelty there that is just scary.  But I absolutely don't understand their sycophantic kneeling at the altar of the wealthy and powerful. 

Read this from the late departed Elizabeth Edwards.  In this 2008 essay, she describes meeting a single mother (apparently), seemingly employed, grabbing Edwards at a talk and telling her that she was terrified by the lump in her breast, but could not get it checked because she had no insurance.

In the landscape of the health-care debate, two very different paths lie in front of us. Which one we choose will speak volumes about who we are as a nation and what values we hold dear. Our choice will determine what we say to women like Sheila—whether we say, “We are with you. Your challenge is our challenge too, and we will help you face it,” or simply shrug and say, “Sorry, you’re on your own.” That’s the moral choice we face today and which path we walk down is up to us.

My Christian friends don't want to admit it, but the people who pray to a man who healed women and lepers, are saying to people like Sheila, "you are on your own." 

There is nothing Christian about that response. 

Anti-intellectualism, evangelicals and the American mind

Two posts the other day caught my eye.  The first was this from Fred Clark on how professors in evangelical schools often have to lie to their students.  I remember as a teen a discussion about seminary.  One person noted that those who went to seminary expecting to get their beliefs rubber-stamped were in for a big surprise.  But I then watched as conservatives within the SBC went to rather extreme efforts to make sure that was no longer true.  And this is what Fred observes.  Intellectual inquiry has been banished, because for conservatives, intellectual inquiry and curiosity are bad things.

This, along with the emphasis on female submission started my exodus from the church.

But it isn't just the church that struggles with anti-intellectualism.  Americans, as Richard Hofstadter noted, have always struggled with this distrust of the academy and the intellectual life.  But in recent years, that has taken a different tack toward seeing education as just another market-driven problem.  I see it all the time with college students who see their tuition as payment for a degree, or, in my class, payment for a grade.  Not access to learning.  Just that letter grade and the ultimate degree.

But they aren't alone.  Conservatives everywhere have decided that education should be run as a part of a free market economy.  Cheaper to just use people like me to educate, and push everything to the online environment or for-profit education.  Chris Hayes has a really good discussion here.

I would have liked to see more discussion on the role the university itself has played here, but that will come.  I would also like to see more discussion of the role that education has played in research and social mobility.  But conservatives don't seem to value either.

Man walks up to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates

Peter asks, "Why should you enter the gates of heaven?"

Man:  "I fought for lower taxes and opposed healthcare for the poor."

Peter:  "Sigh"

Conservative Jesus

The Good Samaritan

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”

28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

30 In reply Jesus said: “A Moor was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was picked up by soldiers and took to a room. There they stripped him of his clothes, drown him in water until he was almost dead, and left him naked in a very cold room. His screams filled the air, but those who heard looked the other way.  31 When news of this reached the village, the local leader assured the people that he, a very religious man, had done nothing wrong, and the Moor was very dangerous.   32 The local priests agreed, and commended the leader for his righteousness.  Local church members also shrugged and told each other the Moor was a dangerous man who asked for violence.  33 But When one of the religious leaders objected, and asked if we were not to "love our neighbor," the leaders condemned him as valuing the life of the enemy more than the villagers. 34 After many more awful days, the Moor died in his cold cell and was buried without ceremony.   The village leader, who often prayed in public, retired from public life without punishment, though he often boasted of protecting the village from the Moor.  35 The religious people of the village nodded in agreement, and told future leaders to do likewise.  

36 “Which of these do you think was a neighbor to the Moor?”*

*Well, it might not have gone exactly that way.  You can read the real story here.

Handy Pro-life guide

The betrayal of the faith

As usual, Leighton has an insight that needs some thought:

I think that in practice, faith among laypeople in the U.S. (in the sense of non-ordained, not uneducated) seems to be rarely about belief in an actual deity, so much as a belief in the power of a group or organization that preaches love and charity to breathe life into its vision. It's a faith that the church can actually make things better for people - make sure they are safe and fed, give them meaning in the midst of the crushing dullness of the present, and hope for a better future for them and their children.

Seeing so many churches and prominent people of faith going out of their way to comfort the comfortable and oppress the afflicted is a terrible betrayal for people who try to have faith in the message of hope ostensibly championed by those who are working diligently to crush that hope. This doesn't have any direct connection to God (except that for whatever reason, God is not preserving his/her message). But that betrayal of trust by people can make it harder to trust people in general. This can be a deeper and more grievous wound than losing faith in someone who was never really there to begin with.

Struggling

Last night's outcome in Wisconsin is troubling for many reasons.  From what I read, Walker used tremendous amounts of anonymous money to spread complete disinformation.  In this world, disinformation works, because so many people are low information voters.  I know several people who vote based on completely half-assed information.

These Republican voters can't identify Grover Norquist, may not have heard of the Supreme Court case Citizens United, and probably aren't aware of the Koch brothers.  I have run into several who had no idea that Norquist dominates the Republican party tax policy.

None of that stops them from voting Republican, mind you.  Just as learning about torture or cuts for the disabled didn't stop them.  And the fact that so many of them are Christians just makes it all the worse.  I know that Leighton is correct in why these people vote the way they do--I get that in my head.

But the kid who grew up going to vacation bible school and revival meetings is struggling with the fact that my Christian friends don't actually care about others outside their view.  Oh sure, all of them do some for the poor.  I get that too.  But at the same time, they vote for policies that harm others--and don't care.  Their "relationship" with God is so powerful in their life that they can't manage to give a flying fuck about some poor disabled person who just lost some assistance.  Just as they didn't care when our government tortured people to death in their name.  Their God either communicates so badly that they can't hear--OR he doesn't mind torture and poverty either.

One Christian friend told me that Jesus said "the poor will always be with us," so we should just do what we can, cut government programs, and trust that "God is in control."

Jesus.

Are they trying to recruit for atheism?  Because that is unbelievable.  But on every issue--women's health and pay equity; poverty; the environment; torture and war; tax policy, etc. these good Christians in prayer and "quiet time" can't seem to care.

I am trying to believe.  But you guys are not helping.

When churches become more political than, well anything else

The Story of a Centrist is a great post (actually book excerpt) from Jonathan Merritt about his experience trying to address environmentalism from a Christian point of view.  You can read it, but it won't surprise you that at first he found great support from Southern Baptist circles.  But then the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission) found out and used what can be called "strong arm" tactics to try to silence the effort.

Some of this is the naiveté of someone who wanted to believe that churches were somehow different than other institutions.  I was certainly guilty of that.  I wanted to believe that because people used a language of faith that they operated from a different set of rules.  And to be fair, some groups do--both in and outside the church.

But the other part of this is the history of institutions.  At some point, the institution becomes more about protecting and defending the structure than anything approaching the ideas or goals they started with.  The Southern Baptists may have started as a group dedicated to religious liberty and the "autonomy of the local church," but they have become a de facto arm of the Republican party.  The same can be said of the Catholic church who are more about defending the structure than protecting kids, or punishing priests, or actually providing care for women.

You'll get my 40 oz. soda when you pry it from my cold, chubby fingers

So this last week, Bloomberg called for limiting soft drink sizes to 16 oz.  Not limiting people to 16 oz. of soda, by the way, but limiting the cup size.

You would have thought he called for the end of freedom.  I saw a lot of conservatives deriding this as the "nanny state" and an imposition on individual freedom.

Personally, I would advocate taxing soda and other foods that use high fructose corn syrup, but the Bloomberg model hopes that limiting cup size will serve as a subconscious trigger that the consumer has had enough.  I don't know.  High fructose corn syrup is different than other sugars, evidently, and may make people fatter than other sugars or fats.  The argument here is that these sugary drinks contribute to obesity, which costs our economy billions in healthcare costs, lost productivity, etc.   We all pay for those costs.

There are two real problems for me here.  First, is the assumption that this limit is somehow the first government intrusion into the fast food or junk food arena--or that it is completely unprecedented.  Yet corn is heavily subsidized (as is sugar) so this area is hardly some paragon of the free market.  Second, this is hardly new.  We have always made choices about things that we deem to be dangerous.  We are increasingly limiting areas where one can smoke, and charge taxes on alcohol and tobacco.  We force passengers now to wear seat belts (because the link between seat belts and saved lives is clear, btw), and impose all sorts of limits on various drugs.

But my first complaint with this is about the nature of conservative governing.  Their philosophy, as I am told, is that they believe in smaller government and more individual freedom.  Yet, the list of government intrusions they tolerate is rather stunning.  These same conservatives had no problem with the Patriot act allowing the government to invade their privacy without a warrant.  These same conservatives shrugged when their government tortured people.  These same conservatives seem to have little problem with a state that executes people even when we know that the death penalty is rife with class and racial bias.  These conservatives cheer a government that invades a woman's womb and reproductive system.  Or cheer a government that allows doctors to lie to women, or in this case, denies a rape victim access to emergency contraception.

Access to healthcare and reducing soda intake offends my conservative friends.  Torture and shaming a raped woman?  Not so much.

Is it too much to ask for some philosophical consistency?

Wrong place, wrong time.

Heard a fascinating interview on the BBC with a historian studying the Adolf Eichmann trial.  Turns out this is the 50th anniversary of his trial and execution.  The point that caught me was the observation that until this trial, most Israelis saw the Holocaust victims as "ghetto" Jews who were too weak to stand up to the Germans.  The Israelis had just defeated several Arab nations and thought of themselves as strong and self-reliant.  Hearing the testimony of the survivors at Eichmann's trial made them realize there was no difference.  The Holocaust victims were just at the wrong place in the wrong time.

The story before this was about the Sudan and people trying to survive.  Pulling them both together I was struck by the continuity of fortune.  I was fortunate in so many ways.  I was born in a peaceful part of the world, far from pogroms and death squads.  My parents provided more food than we could eat.  I didn't experience oxygen deprivation at an inopportune time.  I survived childhood with my wits intact, and after many childhood diseases had been virtually eradicated.  I had access to education and entertainment.

But in a different country; in a different family; in a different state of health--all the difference in the world.  A difference we take for granted in this country.  And this is not an American Exceptionalism talk.  I am stunned that Republicans have made that a requirement for patriotism.  I understood that as hubris and blind following.  American Exceptionalism is the opposite of humility, and for the life of me, I have no clue why conservatives don't see that.

If I were born south of the border, or in the wrong country in Africa, or a Jew in 1930s Germany--everything would be different.  If I were a minority and poor in this country, everything would be different.  I would be more likely to end up in prison, or on death row.

Our playing field isn't level--either in this country, and certainly in the world.  Conservatives would do well to acknowledge that.

I was born in the right place at the right time.  I was born to parents who love me.

I was blessed.

That wasn't due to my effort.

Profiting from the poor

I am a capitalist.  I like the profit margin and believe that competition and greed produce some very good things.  That search for profit has given us home improvements, Ipods, great strides in medical technology, and even safer and more efficient cars.

But there are aspects of capitalism that bother me.  Capitalism, after all, cares not if the worker is 12 or the byproduct poisons the local river.  But there is a new trend in capitalism of profiting from the poor.   This occurs in tax policy, in wages, and especially in lending practices.

I still remember when I first discovered "signature loans."  My mother scowled and said very plainly, "those are nothing more than usury."  Now, the payday loan people probably scoff at the signature loans.

Capitalism makes great cars, but there are some areas that are not made better by the free market's drive for profit.  Prisons, poor people, and I would argue, education are not improved by transforming them into revenue streams.

We can do better.  But since we have decided that the free market is a divinely inspired mechanism, it is doubtful we will.

Texas executed the wrong man in 1989--WTF?

Wrong man was executed in Texas, probe says - Yahoo! News

On gay marriage

This has been an interesting week, that is for sure.  Watching the train wreck in North Carolina was painful.  But then, the next day, President Obama became the first sitting President to affirm gay marriage.  The response has been interesting.  Conservatives said that Obama had declared war on traditional marriage, and some on both sides accused the President of acting out of pure political expediency.

That may be true.  I would be naive to suggest that the Obama camp didn't have extensive meetings on this subject.  But I am also willing to give him the benefit of the doubt--that the story he told of his "evolution" is true.  Because that is my journey too.

I don't think I knew any openly gay people until my 30s.  SOF and I have been trying to recount the first time we met someone out of the closet.  Certainly in my high school there were people we suspected as gay, but none were open.  Like Fallows, I wonder how many times I used anti-gay slurs around gay people without knowing?  I hope I didn't.

In that context, gays were always illicit and perverse.  And, of course, it ran right into the complex sexual awakening of teen years, so any challenge to that was always difficult.  But, as Obama notes, times have changed.  I have had several gay colleagues, and we have neighbors who have been together longer than our nearly 24 years.  It becomes increasingly hard to dismiss that kind of relationship.

Obama noted that his daughters had friends with same-sex parents, and it was inconceivable to Sasha and Malia that those parents were somehow less than their own.  That is the generational gap that so many evangelicals and conservatives don't see.  The younger kids are around openly gay people--in their family or circle of friends.  They see them as humans, not as deviants.  And, as Rachel Held Evans notes, that is also true in conservative evangelical circles.  Watching her social media feeds Tuesday evening, she saw the divide.

Christians over 40 were celebrating. Christians under 40 were mourning.  Reading through the comments, the same thought kept returning to my mind as occurred to me when I first saw that Billy Graham ad: You’re losing us

I don't think they can change, however.  The entire conservative movement right now is consumed with trying to stop the country from changing into a world where white and straight privilege don't dominate.

They won't win this war, I don't think.  But the casualties will be many.

More on the GOP as the problem

And I know that at least Steve wasn't impressed with this argument, but I certainly find it convincing.  Sully notes some reactions.  One of the key points is that this is not an issue of conservative v. liberal.  I don't think what the Republican party is doing on foreign policy or domestic policy is really conservative.

To give two simple examples: the outrageous use of the filibuster in the Senate and the refusal to give an incoming president in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s a single vote on a stimulus package that was one third tax cuts.

The Self-Made Myth

As I posted at the beginning of this year, I was interested in studying the role that government plays in our lives.  Obviously, that has fallen by the wayside--even with great assistance and information from people like Smitty--partly because I could not get a handle on the information.

Perhaps it has already been done.  Reading this on the "myth of the self-made man" and think this might be a good start.  I have several relatives who remind me of this story.  They see themselves as self-made, are angered by taxation, and just want others to work harder.  And they have worked hard--no doubt, but they aren't acknowledging the myriad ways that they have received help from others--because if they do, they will have to acknowledge the need to pass it forward.

Turns out this mythology is older than Horatio Algier.  In The Americanization of Ben Franklin, Gordon Wood argues that, in part, being "americanized" was to be a self-made man who had come out of poverty.  That was a new thing--coming from poverty was not a good thing before.  Of course, as he notes, Franklin wasn't actually self-made either.

But that mythology continues.  And it is a destructive mythology, unfortunately.  Not by encouraging hard work and effort, but by removing that group and community assistance that we all need.

Let's just say it: The Republicans are the Problem

Finally, someone says it: the Republicans are the problem, and avoids the normal media approach of blaming both sides.

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

It is always dangerous to wax nostalgic about the past.  And there is no doubt that we have some heavy handed partisans in our past.  But my memory and reading suggests that we always had a pretty good mass of people who, while not motivated by altruism, had at least a goal of good governance.

I don't see that in the modern Republican party.  The Democrats, while hardly perfect, worked with Bush when they could.  Republicans, on the other hand, refuse to work with Obama, and reject even conservative proposals if they perceive that Obama might get credit.  Nothing is more important to these people than defeating Obama--and that includes serving the American people.

What is more amazing to me, however, are those still voting for the GOP.  At first, I wrote that off to the conservative lack of compassion toward the poor, and I still see that.  Conversation after conversation suggests that my conservative colleagues see the poor primarily as lazy and possibly immoral.  They have compassion, but think that most of the poor can, and should, work harder.

But this last round has revealed that it isn't just the very poor.  The GOP reviles the working poor too--those who work multiple jobs, but still apply for SNAP benefits to eat.  And let's take it just a little further.  The GOP is after the safety net, and even the safety net that middle and upper middles look to in their retirement years.  If the GOP gets their way, they will reduce Medicare to a voucher that increases only at inflation, leaving the elderly to negotiate for healthcare on the open market on a fixed income with less and less assistance.  As I mentioned to one of my friends the other day, middle class Republicans are not only voting to make life harder on the poor, but voting to make their own retirement more painful.  They are voting to cut their own throats, and thanking the GOP for the opportunity.

I hope they will wake up, but I am watching people vote out of emotion rather than logic--and emotion is much easier to manipulate.  And the GOP can manipulate emotional hatred of Obama (or whoever we throw up there, let's be honest) and distract their voters from the attack on their own interest.

Lest we forget, Christian President George Bush tortured early, often, and indiscriminately

Haven't talked about torture since the last time a Republican defended it--and that would be just a few months back.  The leadership of the party thinks that torture is acceptable and even moral. And why should they not?  It polls well among their base, as we have also discussed.

But a reminder of what these people did in our name:

Bush ordered the torture early in the war, and did so over the objections of moral people all along the way. To do so, they found lawyers to simply write briefs saying the torture was legal.

Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

You get that?  They didn't just torture Khalid Sheik Muhammed, they tortured innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They tortured people who had a tenuous connection to torture, and they did it when there was no imminent threat.  The sadists we elected in 2000 and 2004 overrode the torturers in two cases and ordered more pain and more abuse.

Need I remind you these are the same people most likely to quote from the Bible as they run for office?  Most likely to talk about their "personal relationship" with Jesus as they authorize or defend torture?  Most likely to talk about "moral values" and their decline as they order some innocent person shackled by wrist and ankle to a D-ring in the middle of the floor and then induce hypothermia.

The Republican party is the party of torture.  They love it.  They want to do more of it.

capitalism, morality, and evangelical tribalism

It has been an interesting few weeks.  We had some great guests stay with us the last few weekends, and then this most recent Friday had to retreat to our shelter as a tornado came within a half mile of our humble home.  We were lucky, but one of our good friends had damage to her home and fence.  Luckily, she and her family are safe, but it was one of those afternoons that will get your attention.

I have had an on-again, off-again conversation with some evangelical conservative friends of late.  One of them works in a student ministry, and the other used to be a pastor--though that very fact both scares me and makes me very glad that he is no longer in that position.

Anyway, the conversation has been predictable in many ways.  Both tend to recycle right wing talking points, and many times, I think, without even knowing.  Both are convinced that government programs are inherently inefficient, and that a good many people who receive government assistance should not.  Both of those viewpoints, I think, reflect this idea of "tribalism" where they see things purely through a lens of  "with us" or "against us."  Conservatives have been very effective at using that belief, I think, in convincing conservatives (and many liberals) that the media is biased against conservatives, or most recently, that any program that Obama supports is probably a bad idea.  Fred Clark has written on this lately, and his last one suggests that this tribalism comes from a deep insecurity.

I am going to keep thinking about this idea.

But back to my conversation.  Beyond the rather reflexive "government is bad" from both, I also see what I believe to be a false sense of what the unregulated market will produce.  Both express a belief that people--as families, or as individuals, or as sexual beings--should act in a certain moral way.   But at the same time, they suggest that an unregulated market is best.  E.J. Dionne writes about this phenomenon, noting that most two-income couples are two-income by necessity.  But those who want one parent at home with the kids seem to also want the market unregulated.

As I pointed out (we will see if they respond), the market doesn't care about morality.  The market cares about profit, and if that profit comes by child labor, or selling crack or prostitution--that is fine.  The market only cares if the worker dies if he or she can't be replaced.  Same for the consumer.

And as I also pointed out to my friends, they tacitly accept this because they both want the government to ban certain things they don't like--drugs, abortion, and gay marriage.  The free market, however, doesn't care about either of those.

Why the market is to be trusted in some areas, but not others puzzles me.  But to be fair, so does the belief that somehow the market will magically address social or moral issues.  Not sure why anyone would think it cares.  Those things are only addressed when people make political and personal choices, and ask what are often hard questions.

Christianity in Crisis

On this day, one year ago, we said goodbye to Streak.  Amazing how much we still miss him.

My last post was obviously strident.  But the cognitive dissonance of conservatism and conservative Christianity is very hard to take.  I don't get it.  How do people who follow Christ (just ask them) embrace the politics of the rich and powerful, while stepping on the necks of the poor?  How has the teachings of an itinerant preacher become the preferred faith of the gated community set?  How do they not see a problem with that?

Thankfully, I am not the only one who sees a problem.  I know other readers here do, and it is nice to see others around the country asking the same questions.  I appreciate Andrew Sullivan's writings--I think he has written on torture more than just about anyone.  Here, in his article, Christianity in Crisis, he really examines the crisis of the faith, from the decline among Catholics to the disappearing mainline protestants to the evangelical protestantism.  But, as he notes, that evangelical protestantism is part of our problem, not part of the solution.  Not only do they embrace anti-intellectualism in just about every area of life, but an almost mindless authoritarianism.

And what group of Americans have pollsters found to be most supportive of torturing terror suspects? Evangelical Christians. Something has gone very wrong. These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear before an amorphous “other.” This version of Christianity could not contrast more strongly with Jesus’ constant refrain: “Be not afraid.”

I have said to my evangelical friends that very phrase, "something has gone very wrong," and they just shake their head and insist that everything is fine.  But it isn't fine.  The most vocal followers of Christ are more interested in shaming women then preventing abortions.  They are more interested in protecting tax cuts for the rich than helping people rise out of poverty.  And they cheer the prospect of millions without health insurance.  Something very much fucked up about that.

One of my friends chastised me for my frustration during Holy Week.  He seemed to think I need to just focus on the meaning Easter has, and somehow look away from the rest.  But I can't easily do that.  I can't just turn my face from the attacks on the poor and women.  And, quite frankly, I won't.  I find great commonality in Sullivan's discussion of searching for God.  But I know he doesn't force women to have transvaginal ultrasounds against their will.  And he doesn't turn away from the hungry infant, or the sick mother.  If you expect me to just put on a nice suit for Easter and ignore all of that, then you don't know me.

Sullivan has hope for the faith:

This Christianity comes not from the head or the gut, but from the soul. It is as meek as it is quietly liberating. It does not seize the moment; it lets it be. It doesn’t seek worldly recognition, or success, and it flees from power and wealth. It is the religion of unachievement. And it is not afraid. In the anxious, crammed lives of our modern twittering souls, in the materialist obsessions we cling to for security in recession, in a world where sectarian extremism threatens to unleash mass destruction, this sheer Christianity, seeking truth without the expectation of resolution, simply living each day doing what we can to fulfill God’s will, is more vital than ever. It may, in fact, be the only spiritual transformation that can in the end transcend the nagging emptiness of our late-capitalist lives, or the cult of distracting contemporaneity, or the threat of apocalyptic war where Jesus once walked. 

For this Holy Week, that is a good place to start.

Dear GOP, how do I help the fertilized egg without helping the slut carrying it?

Dear GOP,

As a new conservative, I am trying very hard to wrap my mind around uphold the Republican party's stance on issues.  I understand I am only supposed to care about the fertilized egg, because, as Oklahoma's legislature has decreed, it is a "person" with "14th Amendment rights."

I also understand that we need to ignore the suffering of the disabled, poor, and hungry infants cut taxes for the "job creators" and simply don't care can't afford to help everyone.

But since I do care about the fertilized egg (person) and would like to help him, her it, how do I help that fertilized egg person without helping (and therefore encouraging) the slut carrying help him, her it?  What if the fertilized egg person has severe disabilities or may not survive to be ignored as an infant?  What do I do then?  Obviously, the slut carrying it has no say here--that goes without saying.  (Which is why I said it.)  Nor, of course, do all infants.  But what if that fertilized egg person needs expensive healthcare?  I know we don't believe in healthcare for individuals, so if that egg person is now a "person," it doesn't qualify for healthcare either, right?  After all, we can't ask the job creators to pay for that.  That would be ridiculous and quite possibly Socialism.  Or Communism.  Or Fascism.  Or Kenyanism.

Here is hoping you all have a happy Easter.  Now is the time to remember the torture enhanced interrogation techniques that our Lord endured for our sake.  Oh wait, that doesn't sound right at all.

Streak

Dear GOP--I am working on not caring

As a new conservative I am trying to adjust to not caring about others--you know, those without insurance, or immigrants, or women who need contraceptives, etc?  I get part of it.  After all, if you were stupid enough to be born poor or female, you kind of asked for this, right?  And it isn't my fault, so why are you asking me to spend my hard-earned dollars to help you? (how is that?)

But my problem is then making that pivot back to caring about a fertilized egg.  That is a hard one. After all, if I don't care about the egg's future healthcare needs, or that egg's future family's healthcare or nutritional needs, why do I care about the egg again?

I am sure there is some trick here--some way of forcing cognitive dissonance that I am missing.  I hope you will advise.

Streak

PS, once I have turned off the caring about my neighbors and friends, can I ever turn it back on?

Being Republican means not caring what happens to other people

Well, that obviously isn't completely true.  As a Republican I am supposed to care deeply about a fertilized egg, and actually care more about that egg than the woman carrying it.  But once that egg is born and in the open air, I am not actually responsible for helping him or her.  That little infant is on their own. If their family is poor, or abusive, that, politically, is not my problem.

As you can tell, I have been having a rough time of things lately.  The news that the ACA might be overturned which would make the Republican happy, has pushed me into a bit of a funk.  I am once again reminded that Republicans found it offensive that we get everyone into some kind of insurance plan.  That act offended them.

Torturing Muslim suspects didn't offend them, but making sure that everyone could purchase insurance, not be denied based on a pre-existing condition, and not be kicked off if they got too expensive?  Conservatives found that to be offensive.

I have no idea how to operate in that moral world.  It makes absolutely no sense to me.  It scares me greatly, I have to say, at a personal level because I know that we are one layoff away from losing healthcare, and one major illness away from bankruptcy.  It is that simple.  And if Republicans get their way, that insecurity will continue well into retirement, because they don't want me or SOF to be guaranteed coverage.  At any level.  And, while the condition is not threatening or dangerous, a pre-existing condition makes us uninsurable outside a group plan.

And Republicans want us to be insecure about that.  They are cheering news that the ACA might be overturned and that hated "mandate" be struck down.  They want to go back to the environment where we are all one major illness away from bankruptcy, and one layoff away from being uninsured.

All, by the way, as the Republicans push their budget bill before Congress.  It won't pass--thank the Lord--but it reveals their priorities pretty clearly.  Turn Medicare into a voucher system so that I, as an 80 year old, will need to negotiate and shop for health insurance--and hope--fucking hope--that we have enough retirement to account for rising costs.  Because if we don't, then we are done.  And, of course, the same budget proposal wants states the option of handling Medicaid completely as they want.  If we stay in Oklahoma, I predict that means the bare minimum.

All while they absolutely and stridently insist that no rich people be even troubled by this sacrifice.  No tax increase for them.  No problem for their retirement.  No, the sacrifice has to be for those who are at the bottom of the heap.  And, of course, those low-information voters who don't realize that their middle class won't protect them from ruin and illness.

But that's the beauty of being Republican.  If I choose to go that route, I don't have to care about what happens to the poor and needy.  That is their responsibility, not mine.  My responsibility is to get as much as I can, because I am the only one who matters.

Yeah, I know.  I need to really think about a news fast.  But just because I don't read my twitter feed, blogs, or the news doesn't mean this reality will go away.  Nor will the fact that not caring is the hallmark of modern conservatism.

Guest Post: Does the Frontier explain our political incivility?

CIL left a very thoughtful comment on the previous post, and I thought it was worth reposting for a wider reading.  My first title was, "This is all the fault of Frederick Jackson Turner" but thought that was a bit much.

Streak,

You have raised similar issues on this blog, but the question I have is why? Why has the level of political civility apparently declined? Why is there such an attack on women's rights, people of color, etc. as we have seen in places like Arizona?

I wonder if it is not two issues. First, and I think you have disagreed with me about this before, I think that the United States is more of a conservative-leaning nation. That when pressed, the nation has not pushed social reform issues further than it could have because of inherent conservative tendencies. I think of Gordon Wood's discussion of the Constitution, Eric Foner's work on Recontruction, historians who assess the impact of the Progressive movement and the Great Depression.

Second, I wonder how the frontier mythology on which the nation is contracted is partly at play here as well. In other words, I trace much of the current retrenchment, xenophobia and the like to 9/11. Turner argued that the "consolidating agent" on the frontier was the fear of Indian attack. So, in this way, 9/11 resembles the colonists' and nation's response to things like the Pequot War or Pearl Harbor. Rather than bringing out the best in people, there is a backlash - sending Pequots into slavery in the Caribbean, interning Japanese American citizens, endorsing torture. 

For those who may not know, Gordon Wood is one of the preeminent scholars of the American Revolution, and he argued, among other things, that the constitution represented a fundamentally conservative retrenchment against the excesses of direct democracy and the rather flippant ideas of the Declaration of Independence.  For Wood, some of the freedoms that Americans realize after 1787 are almost accidental--in that the founders really didn't intend for those terms and ideas to apply to the "common man."

FJ Turner wrote a very influential article called "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," that redefined American history at the time.  He argued that the frontier, or availability of "free land" defined America and encouraged the creation of American ideas like individualism, egalitarianism, and even our form of democracy.   And, as CIL notes, the identification of the Indian as "other" is critical to that American development.

Discuss.

Obama and Oklahoma

We all know that Oklahoma is the reddest of the red states.  Not one county voted for Obama in 2008, and that is unlikely to change in this election.

So this past week, Obama visited the state to speak for improving our oil distribution.  But not one of the State's Republican leaders was there to welcome him.  Not one.  And here is the sad part.  They won't suffer politically.  In fact, one could argue that the demonization of Obama and liberals is so fierce here in Oklahoma, that Mary Fallin or other Republicans would have been politically harmed had they done as much as greet the President with a cordial handshake.

What does that say about our political discourse?  I am not sure.  I don't recall the opposite happening with Bush and our former Democratic Governor, Brad Henry, either with a snub, nor with a political cost to the governor for being seen with Bush.

This is another example of how things are worse on the right than on the left.  The Tea Party and talk radio have pushed a degree of incivility that has become accepted by people who, as this editorial suggests, were "raised better than that."

On Trayvon Martin

I was out of town this past week on a short vacation, and realized on the road that I left the last post on misogyny in disarray.  Blame part of that on my fatigue, and part on the new Blogger interface.  Anyway, I have fixed it.

I come back to the world reminded again that the Republican party seems hell bent on alienating everyone other than white males--which puzzles the hell out of me.  But I also thought of the GOP's "southern strategy" when reading about the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida.  When Newt and others play that race card in the South, they play to this kind of environment where whites fear blacks in a false way, and don't even recognize the extent at which blacks live with genuine and very real fear that whites will use the power of the state or the gun against them.  That idea of white privilege is something I wish more white Americans would consider.  Yesterday, I watched ESPN's Michael Wilbon discuss the story about Lebron and the Heat donning hoodies to show solidarity with Martin, Wilbon just casually remarked that he had been stopped "driving while black" in his own neighborhood.  Or this from a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune.  Some of these stories are historical, but others are current.  

The furor over Martin is growing, and that is a good thing.  We should have a discussion about armed civilians taking the law into their own hands.  I know the trend (certainly here in OK) is to loosen and loosen gun laws and encourage more open carry, and in Florida, the trend has been to add easy justification for shooting if you are in fear.  Maybe this will change.  But, as Sharifa notes:  

"What nauseates and scares me is the deafening silence from the masses concerning Trayvon Martin, our neighbor. It’s curious to me how easily 100 million people could see the Kony video, buying t-shirts and forwarding videos, and yet remain silent about the neighborhood watchman in their own backyard who shot an unarmed boy for carrying Skittles."

This speaks to the same sentiment where people are deeply concerned with poverty in Africa, see the poor here as unworthy and lazy.  Our racism is deeply encoded and most of us don't even see it.  I see my own, and it bothers me greatly.  Or, let me say, I see some of mine.  I suspect some of mine is out of sight for me too.  But what I see bothers me, and I struggle to fight those voices.

As is very usual, Leighton has some wisdom to add to this conversation.  In comment from last week, he noted this problem of a world-view that doesn't include other people.

There is large subset of the population that has trouble with abstract thought, and tends to view the world in simple, black-and-white terms. It's been my experience that people like this will have moral universes that include only people they personally know, and strangers who are seen as simply good: fellow believers, their countrymen (so long as they aren't liberal), starving children in Africa (usually just the children), etc. Everyone else whose circumstances might require analysis or difficult consideration is rejected out of hand. To my mind, this explains why people who clearly care deeply about the people physically around them can be so vicious toward strangers, because it really isn't about people at all for them.

There is still much to learn about the Martin shooting, but there is some sense that the shooter saw Trayvon as a stranger and sub-human (in some sense, anyway) because he was young, and black in a white neighborhood.  He simply didn't fit.  Perhaps we will learn that the shooter's fears were real and legitimate, I don't know.  But the broader issue remains, and remains for all of us.  What limits do we put on those we care about, or will protect?

Republicans, conservatives and misogyny

This entire contraceptives battle has revealed an underlying misogyny that I didn't anticipate. Abortion, I understood, even as I disagreed with many. There has always been this deep discomfort with abortion in the American populace--a broad and shared sense that abortion is tragic and should be avoided if possible, but also a belief that it should be an option.

But there have always been those who were on the anti-abortion side, so it didn't surprise me that the pendulum swing against abortion sided to the conservative under Republican led states. I wasn't surprised at that. I was surprised, however, that the anti-abortion side started going so far as the "personhood" bills, but not that they went after abortion.

But the contraception angle is different. And reveals an underlying misogyny that I find deeply troubling. The defense is "religious liberty," but it dawned on me today that I don't find that convincing in the least. First of all, those crying "religious freedom" the loudest are the Catholics (makes sense) and the conservative evangelical base of the Republican party (makes less sense). That last group doesn't actually believe in religious liberty--not for others, at least. They are the heirs to the Puritan mentality where religious freedom was about their own approach, and was not for Quakers or Catholics or Baptists.

Historically, this group has never cared about Catholic freedoms, and has, in fact, often argued that Catholicism is either a cult or simply not truly Christian. Their adoration of Mary, the fixation on the cross, and, even, their opposition to contraception--Protestants have opposed (vocally) all of these aspects of Catholicism. And protestants have not historically opposed contraception. Abortion? Maybe. Depends. But not contraception.

And let's not forget that this group is part of the vocal and angry opposition to the supposed mosque in New York, as well as opposing the construction of mosques throughout the country. Their chant then was not "religious freedom," but "don't build that here."

Yet, they are now claiming religious freedom for a belief they don't hold. There are two possible explanations. One, is that they just instinctively oppose anything that Obama supports. That is part of this, I don't deny. But the other part, and the more shameful one, is that they have always been a little anti-women. This is the group pushing "submission" and decrying women clergy. This is the group that has opposed feminism and called female employment a "sickness" and an effort to undermine the family. And this is part of a larger group that referred to sexually active young men as "boys will be boys," but saw sexually active young women as "harlots," if not "sluts."

At some point many in this group will realize that this attack on women harms their own interests--and harms their mothers, sisters, daughters and wives. But until then, they will continue the lie that they are standing on some religious freedom principle. But that is a lie.

Gospel reading: Jesus rebukes an unclean slut

Fred once again posts a brilliant satire on the whole "slut shaming" from the religious right. And in doing so, reminds me of what has drawn me to the idea of Jesus. I lose sight, to be honest, listening to my religious conservative friends talk about the poor or in these discussions about women.

I continue to be amazed, frankly, at the lack of compassion or love for anyone who doesn't look like a middle-class evangelical Christian. I shouldn't be surprised, and am sure that Leighton will read this wondering just how long it will take me to figure this out. But it still stuns me that people who claim to follow Jesus have such little compassion for the poor, or for "difference" or for the "other" all while reading passages (or reading past) where Jesus demonstrates great love for those very people.

Here in Oklahoma, Republicans are trying very hard to do a couple of things in our legislature. One is to cut the income tax, and the other is the "personhood" bill that transforms a fertilized egg into a legal person. Meanwhile, our health is among the worst in the nation, and we also lead in abuse of prescription drugs.

The conflict between these two trends is very clear to me. Not so much to Republicans, or perhaps they just don't care. One of my FB friends defended the personhood bill as "biblical" (?) but about cuts in services shrugged and said something about there is "need everywhere."  When a poor or sick woman struggles with her pregnancy, they will say "God doesn't make mistakes," and "that is a human life that is sacred," and, of course, "your morals may not be the best."  If she needs pre-natal care, she may or may not get it.  If the child is born, they may or may not have food, or vaccinations.

She will absolutely have to give birth--even if it kills her.  But if that child dies during the first year (and we are on the bad list for children in poverty, and infant mortality), my Republican friends will shrug and blame the mother.  Or lack of a father.  Or both.  It just won't be their fault.

The people who talk about Jesus the most, are passing legislation that shames women, ignores the poor, and celebrates wealth and power.  Whatever this is, it isn't Christianity.  Or, to be more accurate, their policy doesn't, in the least, reflect the teachings of Jesus.

But according to my FB friend, the problem is my lack of faith.

Sigh.

Small government/failed state

Grover Norquist is most famous for wanting to make government small enough to "drown in a bathtub," an image that haunted many of us as we watched NOLA drown during Katrina. But we are seeing the impact of Norquist's small government-no taxes, ever policy across the country. In Ohio, at least one town is simply going to go out of business if they can't raise taxes. Norquist was asked if he would support raising taxes in the case of a natural disaster. He replied, so a tornado takes your house, how does raising your taxes help you? Yeah, that tells us a lot. No concern for the others who lost their homes. Just how does this effect you?

But the best example is Colorado Springs, Colorado--otherwise known as the home of Focus on the Family, the Air Force Academy, and many other right wing organizations. It is a very conservative town. They are so conservative, they really started the whole "tax payer bill of rights" nonsense. This American Life had a segment the other day, and it is really one you should hear. Turns out Colorado Springs is run primarily through sales taxes--taxes that are very vulnerable to economic changes.

When the recession hit, tourism dropped, and their operating budget sank. It dropped so low they actually stopped mowing city parks, and turned off streetlights. The city floated a tax increase which failed miserably, so the local leaders started pushing solutions such as lowering wages for city workers and cutting benefits. They also privatized many city services. And when the budget was at its lowest, the city actually privatized parks and streetlights. If you wanted your lights on, or trash cans in your city park, you could pay for it.

 Couple of lessons here. One, privatization is really suspicious--at least when the purpose is supposedly to save money. I have never understood that argument. I understand that a private company can pay lower wages, or benefits, perhaps, but the profit margin usually makes up for any difference. And in some cases, our privatized services are more expensive (Xe or Blackwater comes to mind). Using outside firms for expertise? That makes sense. But not if the justification is to save money. That was fairly clear in Colorado Springs. The best example was the landscaping company that took over mowing the parks. The workers made less in wages (though not tremendously so), and had to pay more for fewer benefits. But there was no evidence that it saved the city money. And that was the point, remember? Oh, and they are doing less too. Fewer maintenance projects on older parks. But no evidence it is saving money.

Second, and the part that just struck me to the core, was a conversation between a city leader and a taxpayer on the failed tax increase v. paying for your own streetlights. This guy thanked her for that program and said he had gladly paid $300 for his own streetlights. She pointed out that the tax increase would have meant only $200 out of his pocket, and that would have allowed for all the services to work. Everyone's streetlights working, and all the parks mowed and cleaned up. The guy said he would never vote for a tax increase for government.

 That is the sickness of this anti-government bullshit. This guy was willing to pay more to have less, all because he hates government more than he cares about his fellow man. When those lights were out, it was the more affluent neighborhoods who could afford to pay. The poorer ones were dark, and their parks were brown and dirty. He didn't care about that. All he cared about was himself. This is the "I've got mine, you can fuck off" mentality of the anti-government Republican party. And it makes me a little sick. This is the breakdown of community, at its very basic sense--some kind of shared experience and shared services.

Stupid people saying stupid stuff and enacting stupid and racist laws

The Tea Party Republicans have sure made their mark.  Their stupidity is only matched by their outrage and willingness to completely ignore facts or evidence.  Good god!  I thought George Bush was stupid, but he is getting smarter by the day.

Where to start, where to start?  How about Utah? Where their Senate just passed a law banning schools from talking about contraception.  Or homosexuality.  Or "erotic behavior."

Or, in the other wacky state, how about the fact that Florida's racist anti-Sharia law may result in interfering with Jewish divorce proceedings and other --you know, outside religious traditions.

Oh, but there is more.  Even Ron Paul had to note that the Republican criticism of Obama's apology for the Koran burning was over the top.  That didn't stop former half-time governor, (but full-time idiot) Sarah Palin from calling Obama naive and calling the people we are supposed to be helping, you remember, the people of Afhanistan, "savages."  Nothing says Christian like "we don't apologize to lesser beings."  And speaking of vocal Christian idiots, nothing says stupid like Michele Bachmann saying that the contraception order is just steps away from our government limiting family size.

Oh, and contraception, and the Republican obsession with women's sex lives.  As I read today that state legislatures have passed some 430 limits on abortion rights, I am reminded of how little those people seem to care about actual women's health.  Same people cut funding for Planned Parenthood in Texas (we will show them!) but you can't actually just pick and choose the legal services.  So Texas prefers that some 130,000 women go without healthcare.

Impressive. But the best, of course, goes to the Republican response to Sandra Fluke.  And no, I am not talking about Jabba Limbaugh's "slut" comment.  I am talking about all the people who either don't know how birth control works, don't care, or are just too stupid to be on TV (I vote for all three).  Amazing how many of them said that Fluke wanted us, the taxpayers, to pay for her birth control to have sex.  A), she didn't actually talk about sex, but about the non-sexual uses of contraception, and B) it isn't the taxpayers who have to pick up the bill.

Why do people still talk as if healthcare reform in this country is about giving it away for free?  These women under discussion, pay (along with their employer) for the insurance.  That is where that comes from.  Not from Bill O'Reilly's "hard earned" money.

As usual, Jon does it better.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Oh, and Fred, as usual, has a great take on some of the stupidity surrounding contraception.  I especially love the Republican arguing that something is an abortifacent because it is his religious belief that it is.

Cost of healthcare--or the world before the safety net

I am struck by the conservatives who seem to long for the world before the social safety net.  Several people I know just routinely talk about the fact that we used to "take care of" people at the community and church level.  But all of that misses two key points.  One, that the reason for Social Security and then Medicaid and Medicare was that churches and communities weren't able to help everyone.  Two, they are remembering a time when healthcare costs were much, much, much lower.

Here are some numbers, though as I start this process, I realize how hard it is to find good numbers and consistent numbers.  Bear with me.

Prior to 1920, medical technology wasn't much, so there wasn't that much doctors could do that was that expensive.

 In fact, the chief cost associated with illness was not the cost of medical care, but rather the fact that sick people couldn't work and didn't get paid. A 1919 State of Illinois study reported that lost wages due to sickness were four times larger than the medical expenditures associated with treating the illness

In 1929, one study has the average family paying medical expenses of $108 per year.  One estimate I saw had the average income around $1,400 per year, so medical expenses were less than 10% of income.  This was without insurance, mind you, as most didn't purchase insurance, and a small percentage of this was hospital stays.  So this is paying for the cost of healthcare, not healthcare insurance.  Hospital care starts to get more expensive as we move through the century.  Almost nothing in 1900, by 1965 a day in the hospital cost $128 but was up to $1,289 in 2002.

That alone demonstrates one huge leap in healthcare costs.  I will keep working on this, but I think comparing a world before 1930 with today is comparing apples with computers.  I read the other day that Rick Santorum had incurred some $100,000 out of pocket expenses taking care of his disabled daughter.  Those are costs that the uninsured simply can't do.

Imagine taking away that safety net all together, and then imagine the elderly without prescription coverage, assisted living, or access to expensive treatments.  Imagine the poor disabled and their costs.  We are not taking care of them now, but imagine that with a gutted Medicaid?

Anyway.  This is an early take.  I welcome your thoughts.

Why Does Rush Limbaugh Get Away With Calling a Young Woman a 'Slut'?

Because he is an asshole--is the short answer. But, as Friedersdorf notes, this says more about conservatism than this one misogynistic idiot. Conservatives celebrate this man, no matter what he says. Former Veep Dick Cheney joked about waterboarding with Limbaugh, and conservative organizations give him awards.

Obama called the young woman and told her that her parents should be proud of her. I can only imagine what that meant to her. By contrast, Mitt Romney hasn't said anything, and Santorum dismissed it as Limbaugh being an entertainer.

Sigh.

Adult males, supposedly reared in a religiously moral context can't just call this what it is. I am embarrassed for every conservative who votes for this party--a party so cowed that they can't stand up to this man.

Christian Nation: Love it or Leave it

Leaving school this afternoon, I headed through a drive-through for some greasy protein.  While waiting for my food, I noticed a SUV parked ahead with a bumper sticker that showed the outline of America, with the letters around the top:  "don't love it?  LEAVE IT!"

The stupidity of the bumper sticker struck me.  I am 99% confident that they were conservatives, and 100% sure that as conservatives, they spend more than a little time "bitching" about things American.  I am guessing that they don't like their black President, and they don't like the laws that their black President has signed into law.  I am guessing they don't like the programs their government does to help poor people (especially the black ones), nor the programs that back science and technology.

But they don't see their dislike of country as "disliking America."  Why?  Why could Jerry Falwell blame liberals and gays for 9-11, yet not be accused of "blaming America first."

The answer is why I hate the idea of a Christian nation, because those two in the SUV and Jerry Falwell believe that the country is theirs, and theirs alone.  They don't think America belongs to liberals, or to Obama, or to people like us.

There is such an odd and bizarre quality to it too.  "This is a Christian nation, and if you don't like it, you should just leave."  Can't quite connect that to the Jesus of the Bible, can you?  Reminds me of our extended relatives who bragged of going to Town Hall meetings with their Tea Party members.  Those, we can all remember, who liked to shout at their representatives.  You know, for Jesus.

Two thoughts.  One, this image I have posted before, and one that really needs no words.

Second, this great story from Fred at slactivist about a young girl in Rhode Island who protested the posting of a sectarian poster in her school.  Leave aside the debate over whether or not she should have protested, or whether or not the school should have allowed it in the first place.  Fred addresses that better than I.  

The young woman received threats--as you might have anticipated.

That’s a tribal response. It shows that, for these angry Cranston residents, this “school prayer” was no longer a prayer at all, but a tribal symbol, a tribal battle flag.

A prayer that included an appeal for divine help “to be kind” ceased to have anything to do with either kindness or prayer once it became an established, state-sanctioned symbol of privilege for a particular sect. Whatever that sect may have been about originally, its establishment as the official, privileged sect of Cranston turned it into something else — into the same thing that every privileged sect becomes.

This is what happens when religion is established and made official. This is what always happens when religion is established and made official. The privileges that arise from being the official, established sect become the entire substance of that sect. The defense of that privilege replaces every other purpose, meaning or reason for existence until it is all that is left.

My friend Anglican has often wryly asked those who claim us as a Christian nation, "so how Christian have we acted." It is a good question.  But one that is lost, I think, on people who believe in the "love it or leave it" America.  

Religious liberty--what a radical idea

Always nice when history shows up in a thoughtful way. No, not Santorum--or hell, any of the GOP talking about religion and history. But this nice piece on a new Roger Williams and his radical idea of religious liberty. Reminds me of the good old days, when people talked about ideas and history.

This was actually nice for me, and I am not being sarcastic. I remember well learning from other Baptists about the connection to people like Roger Williams. That came from another time, of course, when separation of church and state was not considered some "liberal" lie, but was something of which to be proud.

I also like the debunking of the Puritans seeking "religious freedom," and that is a point I try to make to students when the issue arises. Puritans believed that freedom meant having the right to follow God--as they defined it, and that certainly sounds like Rick Santorum, as well as much of the GOP base.

Where my pleasant memory fades, however, is when I recall the brutal conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. While I didn't know much about it when I lived in Colorado, my time in Houston included time in both a fundy church and one of the last remaining moderate congregations in the area. We watched as conservatives led by Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler gutted the SBC of thinkers and moderates. Anyone who questioned inerrancy had to go.

Sullivan reminded me of that with this brief post on the same process in the GOP. When I was young, like the SBC, a moderate Republican was not rare. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. I have to say that both the SBC and the GOP are worse for all of that. The emphasis on purity and dogma has robbed the country of one of the rich denominations that traced back to people like Roger Williams, and has turned the "party of Lincoln" into a freak show.

Open letter to Franklin Graham

Dear Mr. Graham,

You need to fire your staff, and need to do so immediately.  If your staff didn't immediately confront you when you left the Morning Joe set--you remember, after you again suggested that Obama was Muslim--and tell you, "sir, with all due respect, that was both stupid and immoral," then you need to fire them.  All.

I say that knowing that no single staffer is in danger after your words.  Because you have done this before.  And you need to stop.  But I am as sure that you won't.  You are not what your father was.  No, you are a political hack, and a stupid one at that.

Make no mistake.  I never thought your father was an intellectual.  I found his theology simplistic and superficial.  But he understood a few things that he clearly didn't pass on to you.  He understood that politically, it was unwise to divide his target audience into political camps--not if he wanted to be able to speak to both.  And at a moral level, I think he understood that whatever Christianity represents, it is supposed to be a welcoming faith.  Your father learned those lessons the hard way after he revealed a conversation with President Truman, though he didn't actually learn his lesson until he learned of Watergate and Nixon's true character.

You could know this, of course.  Not only are you your father's chosen successor, but his biography is well known.  In fact, your father said last year that he wished he had stayed out of politics.  Perhaps you don't read.  I don't know.  Perhaps you are just unintelligent.  That seems more likely.

I do know that while your father is hardly an intellectual giant, next to you he looks smarter every day.  I am sorry.  I don't mean to insult, but you revealed your stupidity when you dabbled with the "birther" controversy.  Only idiots think the President wasn't born in Hawaii.  You embarassed every person of faith that day, and have done little to remedy the situation.  Because you aren't just dumb, you are also a bigoted political hack.  When you said that you were more confident of Santorum's Christianity because of his "values," you revealed that your Conservative leanings are much stronger than anything approaching Christianity.  

You really need to shut up.  Seriously.  Read that damn Bible from which you claim to preach.  Check what it says about lying about others.  See what it says about how to treat your adversaries.

Read some books.  Hell, read some books about your father.  But shut the hell up.  For your own good.  Please.

Thank you,



Streak

Legal or not, abortion rates similar

Interesting study on abortion laws. Suggests that globally the rate is relatively constant regardless of if it is legal or not. But they also suggest that when it is illegal, the danger for women goes up.

Which is why I hate the pro-life tactic of attacking the women, but not trying to address the other issues. Access to good healthcare, contraceptives and reducing poverty will do more for everyone involved. Certainly more than these "personhood" bills.

Christians and fake oppression--birth control edition

Fred Clark is on a roll, and my blog is in danger of becoming a "hey, look what Slactivist wrote again this week" type of place.

Anyway, in this edition, he points to the ridiculous example of Rick Warren vowing to go to jail rather than provide health coverage for women. Or something like that. Except, as Fred and others note, no one is asking him to either go to jail or provide those nasty contraceptives to women. Churches get an out. Oh, and California has had the same law for the last 13 years.

Oh, Evangelical Mind? Where the hell are you?

Jon Stewart's clip on the contraceptive wars had a lot of the same posturing bullshit, including the embarrassing Richard Land, who compared this ruling on contraceptives to the beginning of Hitler's reign. You know, "when they came for the Commies, I did nothing, because I was not a godless Commie?" Because requiring people of faith to take care of women's health is exactly what Hitler did.

Richard Land makes me embarrassed that I ever called myself a Baptist, and all of these men embarrass me for not recognizing a few key issues here: A) that the contraceptive rule has been on the books since 2001 (when whatsisname was declaring war on Christianity) and B) that their prophetic role (however they understand that) is not to be political shills.

But these people are all conservatives first and foremost, and Christians, eh, third or fourth. Have to throw "male" in there somewhere, and "jackass" somewhere. As Natalie Burris tweeted, "in actual fact they are the heirs--precisely--of the white clergymen who were standing in the way of human rights."

Let's see if we can count this up. Conservative Christians don't mind torture (that is understandable--after all, remember the fear we felt on 9-11), don't mind cuts for the disabled poor (we sadly just can't afford to help everyone), but are opposed to extending contraceptive and screening help to women. Oh, they will mandate that same woman take her rapists baby to term, but they won't have their tax money pay for her pre-natal exams, nor the baby's nutrition or shots. "Just let me know when that little bastard needs a prison term. I will pay taxes for that--well, not actually pay taxes, all taxes are evil--but I won't complain when my government builds them or privatizes them at more cost to the state."

They openly cheered Bush's invasion of Iraq and are now cheering for the next war. They sit silently or passively while white racism is on the rise, and have really nothing to say about inequality--well, in the oddest damn little Marxist way--when they say that God isn't concerned (really) with their physical deprivation, only that their "relationship" with God is sound.

Wow.

Evangelicals and "life begins at conception." Yeah, not so much.

slacktivist: The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal

This is a must read, and yet another example of what Mark Noll called the Scandal of the Evangelical mind. This is what happens when you don't value the mind, or value a historical understanding of your own intellectual process. In this case, you miss that just 30 years ago, Evangelicals openly rejected the idea that life began at conception.

Abortion wars, continued

This week the Oklahoma Senate passed one of those "Personhood" bills. It passed with overwhelming support even though it has no out for rape or incest, (nor ectopic pregnancy) and was opposed by medical professionals. And, as Sarah Morice-Brubaker reports, the bill writers don't even intend to enforce the law in those troubling areas, but wanted to pass a universally pro-life bill as a "symbol." The bill has created quite a response among the liberal community, and among women who are not normally political--at least in my circle. Many are concerned that this bill will ban certain contraceptives, as well as in vitro fertilization.

I have been thinking about Leighton's comment on my most recent abortion post where he countered my "reluctant pro-choice" in typical elegant and thoughtful prose. My reluctance on the matter has always been out of some respect for the people around me who feel so strongly that abortion is taking a life. But those concerns have usually been couched in some kind of complex worldview where contraceptives were rational and we talked about things like viability or consciousness.

But this personhood nonsense and the previous attack on contraceptives has made me far less reluctant. One of my facebook friends was so reflexively defensive of this clearly idiotic measure--well, it just pushed me over the edge. As I noted on FB, if you oppose contraceptive services, good sex ed, healthcare for women and nutrition and vaccination services for infants? You aren't pro-life. You are anti-sex, perhaps, or certainly are dismissive toward women. The same Facebook friend who defended this personhood bill as a defense of God's infallible decisions, defended cuts for disabled children over tax cuts for the rich. There is nothing pro-life about this stance.

Leighton wonders "if the conservative stance on abortion is partly (mis)informed by its inability to comprehend the effect of collective systemic actions through its lens of everything reducing to personal, individual responsibility." I think that is certainly part of it. I am struck by so many conservatives (certainly not all) who seem incapable of walking out the consequences of an action or law. I see this in the death penalty where people who would never openly approve of executing someone who was innocent--but who have essentially stopped processing the morality of capital punishment after some theoretical "eye for an eye," and have never added racial or class bias to the mix, nor the DNA evidence that shows the flaws in the system. Likewise, they look at supply side economics, and just assume it should work. Forget evidence that it doesn't. The decision has already been made.

My facebook friend stopped after assuming that this personhood bill was "pro-life." That is good enough for him, even if it causes great harm to women, and even if the same people passing this bill will cut programs that help pregnant moms, infants, and children. There is no follow through. And despite the assurance that this bill was aimed to "save lives," it will kill people. Real people. People who have kids, or siblings, and who are absolutely and clearly conscious and among us. As Leighton also posted, everyone should read this story of a woman who nearly died because doctors wouldn't perform an abortion.

Kathleen Edwards

Last year's music scene was incredible.  I had about 18 top albums that were (and are) solid musical efforts.  Enough that I look at this year with a bit of skepticism.  Not sure who else I like can release new music.

But my first new album of the year is rock solid.  Kathleen Edwards has been one of my favorites since her first album (Failer) and her new one (Voyageur) shows her maturing into a first-rate songwriter.  There are several amazing songs on this album, but here are a couple of great live versions.  First, she joins with Sarah Harmer (another great voice) in House full of Empty Rooms



And this may be my favorite song--Soft Place to Land.  Just gorgeous.

Ugh, abortion wars

I have said here many times that I am one of the most uncomfortable pro-choice people out there. But I will say that the Republican and evangelical attacks on women are making me more pro-choice, not less.

Let's start with the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood fiasco, where a right wing Tea Party Republican led the effort to cut funding to PP. Not only was this blatantly an attempt to make everything political and charged, but it was, from my perspective, throwing women's health under the bus for a political attack on Planned Parenthood. All I heard out of that was "I don't really care if women get access to healthcare, contraceptives, screenings, etc--I just want to stop abortions."

Which would be one thing, but at the same time, Republicans are cutting programs that help poor kids and infants, and are attacking the very safety net that has helped parents with young children. Pro-life? Not sure about that.

Then I read this morning that Oklahoma Christian Republicans are pushing for a "personhood" amendment, and Kansas is pushing for extreme legislation that would require that women be told (falsely) that abortion can cause breast cancer; allow doctors to lie to patients, and other draconian measures.

Again, while cutting funding for poor people. And making it harder to get contraceptives. At a certain point, this isn't anti-abortion, or pro-life, it is against women having sex outside planned procreation.

Add that to attempts by conservative evangelicals to allow students to bully gay kids as long as it comes from their religious belief, and the very continued reality that every Republican will be voting for a torture defender this coming fall--and I am having a harder and harder time respecting anything conservative.

Obama and race--the Jan Brewer edition

This is old news now, but Jan Brewer's finger wag still bugs me. As does Newt Gingrich's "food stamp President" line. In fact, I think Republicans have returned to racism to attempt to win this year. Good god, they have a horrible record on this going back to Nixon, but it is still sad to see. I don't know if Gingrich is actually a racist, but his willingness to use racial code words makes him, in many ways, worse.

As for Brewer, she reminds me of the aphorism that we have no racists in America any longer. I have friends like her. Their racism is there, but they don't even know, or acknowledge it. After all, no one wants to call themselves a racist, so it is easier to convince yourself that your stereotypical view of people of color has nothing to do with race. And if you know little of history, perhaps you really don't know that the "angry black" man or woman is deeply encoded in our history, or that the "lazy black" person goes back to Reconstruction and the South's open rejection of black equality.

I would find this sad, but the consequences are so severe. Republicans seem hell bent on making racism acceptable again--all to win elections.

What Obama means for race

I started to rant about this, but think the picture tells it all.  This little boy, btw, wanted to know if the President's hair "felt like his."  

Awesome.    

Obama X

I don't know if any of you have seen the Bill Maher "New Rules" bit from last week, but it actually relates to our conversation about moral authority, and the late Internet Monk's comments about conservatives listening more to Limbaugh and Fox than thinking about their faith.  You can watch Maher below (f bomb warning), as long as it plays in my template and that HBO has not yanked it.  (If that happens, you can read some of the transcript here).

In this case, Maher is talking about Newt Gingrich's common tactic of invoking Saul Alinsky to somehow disparage Obama and liberals.  Alinsky, as it turns out, was a community organizer who tried to get African Americans and poor people to actually push for political change.  But in Gingrich's world, there is something nefarious about "community organizing" (and I wish I had some money for each time a conservative has thrown that at me online).

But Maher's bigger point was that conservatives have created a bogey man in Obama that is constructed out of nearly whole cloth.  As Steve noted in one of the recent comments, there are things to be concerned about with Obama on rendition and detention, but conservatives don't complain about those.  They like them, in fact, but they don't give Obama credit for that.  Instead, he is soft on defense, anti-business, wants to take your guns away, and doesn't actually like America.  Or, as Maher notes, he is supposedly anti-work, while Republicans love it.

That hit home after several of my recent talks with conservatives.  Almost word for word, they said that Obama was soft on defense, anti-gun rights, and anti-American.  He has raised our taxes (not true) and wants a huge government (government employment is down, which is part of our economic crisis), and wants to read terrorists their rights.  Yeah, whatever.

The bubble is pretty striking.  And disheartening that people who claim to read the Bible, pray, and attend church regularly have such little regard for the truth.  I shouldn't be surprised, I understand.  But I still am.

(NPR also did a story on Alinsky, and even noted that Gingrich used an Alinsky tactic in his debate the other day.  Irony.)