The Friends of Jake

We don't put civil rights on the ballot: Newark Mayor Booker

2012-01-27T13:08:00.000-08:00

Mayor Cory Booker of Newark NJ: thank you..Great response on the Governor's proposal to vote on equality in NJ.

incidentally NJ Gov Christie thinks that if black civil rights had been put on the ballot, that would have worked just fine. "Segregation now, segregation forever...."?More here:

As James Madison put it in Federalist Paper 51: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. If a majority can be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

When Religious Freedom Conflicts with Secular Law

2012-01-25T15:59:00.000-08:00

I bet you think I"m going to talk about same sex marriage here. I'm not, much. I'm going to give you some examples where devout religious belief conflicts with the standards of public life, and have you consider how these conflicts are treated. The analogy to same sex marriage is obvious.

In New York, ultra-orthodox Jews believe in strict separation of the sexes. Women are expected to dress very conservatively . A firestorm erupted last fall when it turned out that a bus company with a franchise on a public route was enforcing a segregated bus, and sending women to sit in the back. Since the bus company was functioning as a contractor to the city, it is not allowed to discriminate.

So, does the desire of the ultra-orthodox to be separated from women require that women not of their faith must sit in the back of the bus, wear long skirts, or step aside in front of men, in a public space?

A letter to the ultra-orthodox community in Crown Heights New York asks landlords to rent only to fellow Jews and not to "yuppies" or "goyim" who do not cover themselves properly. Yet housing law clearly dictates one may not discriminate in renting on the basis of race or religion.

So, does the desire not to be exposed to people of another faith and belief justify ignoring non-discrimination laws?

In Roman Catholic doctrine, marriage is viewed as indissoluble, and remarriage after civil divorce is not allowed. As it says on the website of the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, unless there is an annulment, "no person is free to enter into another marriage without the appearance or occasion of serious sin."Indeed, should a divorced person remarry without an annulment, they are in an "adulterous union" and grave moral sin, and should not expect to participate in the sacraments of the church. (my emphases)

One final situation is that of those who have repented of their illicit union, but remain together for a serious reason, such as for the sake of their children. Catholic pastoral practice allows that IF their pastor judges that scandal can be avoided (meaning most people are unaware of their remarriage and consider them a married couple), then they may live together as "brother and sister" (without any sexual relations), and be admitted to the sacraments. If scandal can not be avoided, then they must either separate or refrain from the sacraments.

So, do you think that the Roman Catholic hospitals and charities check the marital status of their employees?

Do they provide insurance for the spouses of employees who are civilly divorced and remarried?

Those marriages are considered invalid by Catholic doctrine--just like marriages between same sex couples.

And why aren't they advocating to prevent civil divorce? Could it be (gasp) because so many straight Catholics are divorced, and have managed to obtain an annulment?

What do we owe religious tolerance and freedom in the public square?

Soup's on

2012-01-23T08:08:00.000-08:00

Lately we've been eating a lot of soup. It's been cold, we've been late getting home most nights, and a big batch of soup will keep us going for days. Last week BP made us a terrific seafood tomato soup, which was like a quick version of boulliabaise; last night we made this harvest bean soup with warm spices (though we used a mix of beans, not just black). A couple of weeks ago it was a carrot ginger, with a dollop of yogurt on top. I'm threatening to do beet soup soon.

There is something so comforting about soup. And, practical: we can reheat it multiple times, change it up with different toppings, or different bread, or toss in some pasta or grain, for several nights during the week.

The essence to good soup is great stock. We always keep a "stock bag" in our freezer, with pieces of vegetables (such as the ends cut off of carrots, or the limp celery that is too tired to use in a salad), left over herbs, bones from any meat we've eaten (the bean soup was enriched by a nice ham bone). When the bag is big enough, we empty it into a big pot, fill it with water, add carrots and onion, and whatever else we think of: fresh herbs from the garden, a generous pour of black peppercorns, the bay laurel leaves that I collect every time I visit my mother in Berkeley. We regularly make veggie stock too, using mushrooms to give it the savory umami taste. Once it has cooked for hours, we strain it, defat it, and pour it into icecube trays. That way we always have enough stock for deglazing a pan, or putting together to make soup.

In fact, with stock in the freezer, we always have a quick dinner on hand: cut up carrots,celery and onion, sauté quickly, and drop into the broth. Mushrooms, left over chicken, parsley, a can of tomatoes, pasta -- any of this can be added too. Sprinkle with a little parmesan and poof! dinner. Or make it Asian flavor, as a hotpot, using a little soy and sake or miso, to flavor the broth, dipping in tofu, waterchestnuts, frozen edamame or spinach, serving over hot rice.

We think of soup kitchens when we think of feeding people. After Maundy Thursday service there's always a potluck soup dinner in the church. The story of Stone Soup reminds us of community and cooperation. It's the essence of a communal meal; we don't usually make soup for one!

Perhaps a lot of our problems could be solved if we could figure out how to have soup together. Because if you are gathered around the soup pot, passing your bowl to be filled, you have to talk to each other.

Don't you?

Who's the bully?

2012-01-20T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm getting tired of the religious opponents of equality claiming that THEY are being bullied.

Last time I checked, I wasn't trying to deny the civil rights. I wasn't denigrating their families, telling lies about them, and demonizing them. I'm not suing to get married in their churches (something they lie about regularly). I am perfectly happy to let them believe what they want and live as they choose. I only want them to return the favor.

It's ironic, isn't it ? that they feel free to say the most insulting, vicious things about us, and when we complain, they bleat about persecution. But no one is assaulting them for being Christian though they claim they are at risk. By contrast, hate crimes against gay people in California went up by 17% after Prop H8 passed. And we're not talking about stealing a yard sign before an election. (More here).

Disagreeing is not bullying. Religions who force their faith in the public square don't get a bye from being challenged.

Recently, Kate Kendell took on Elizabeth Santorum, who claims persecution because the mean ol' gay people don't like their relationships being compared to bestiality, incest, and polygamy.

Your husband believes that LGBT people cannot be trusted to serve in the military, raise children, form stable relationships or be fully respected under the law. According to you, Rick may love us, but honey, his love is killing us, and we want nothing to do with this abusive relationship. Our community has endured expulsion from family, mass firings, daily epithets, assaults, harassment, humiliation, death, and suicides. We know that if your husband becomes president of our country our long suffering will only deepen and magnify.

So yes, we are calling him what he is: a sanctimonious bigot who believes that we are dangerous, sick, and evil. We are telling the truth about his vision and his beliefs about us. That is NOT bullying, it's about saving our own lives. Your husband would erase the landmark and life-saving changes we have seen over the past few years, and revisit the hell of a government that does not see us as fully human. Given what so many of my brothers and sisters live through daily, you calling us bullies is contemptible.

In Mississippi, about 46% of Republicans think inter-racial marriage should be illegal. I find that an abhorrent statistic in 2012. Nationally, something under 20% of people think interracial marriage is wrong. I consider such an opinion bigoted:

•obstinately convinced of the superiority or correctness of one's own opinions and prejudiced against those who hold different opinions
• expressing or characterized by prejudice and intolerance :

I have pointed out before that it took until the 90s for a plurality of people to approve of inter-racial marriage, which was made legal in 1967, when a scant 20% approved!

By contrast, over half of Americans now believe that gays should have the rights of civil marriage. An additional 25% or so think we should have civil unions. But the conservative Mormons and the Roman Catholic hierarchy think that they have the right to force their religious views on the rest of the country dissallowing marriage AND civil unions between same sex couples.

And yet THEY claim persecution when we challenge them. Why are we letting them get away with this?

The End of the Christian Right?

2012-01-19T07:17:00.000-08:00

Michael Kazin:

Is the Christian Right still a power in American politics? The lavish coverage which its partisans and their favorite issues have received during the current Republican campaign certainly leave that impression. Yet all this attention is akin to the dazzling glow of a setting sun. In fact, the Christian Right is a fading force in American life, one which has little chance of achieving its cherished goals.
....
[W]hatever their influence on the Republican primary, the Christian Right is fighting a losing battle with the rest of the country—above all, when it comes to abortion and same-sex marriage, the issues they care most about.
...
Put simply, the Christian Right is getting old. According to the largest and most recent study we have of American religion and politics, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, almost twice as many people 18 to 29 confess to no faith at all as adhere to evangelical Protestantism. Young people who have attended college, a growing percentage of the population, are more secular still. ... To their surprise, Putnam and Campbell discovered that conservative preachers infrequently discuss polarizing issues from the pulpit. Sermons about hunger and poverty far outnumber those about homosexuality or abortion.

I think this is a little too rosy, given their still powerful influence over the Republican party, but one can hope. In particular, the alliance with the Mormons and Catholic hierarchy on gay issues props them up. Do YOU think their power is waning?

Why not - SOPA/PIPA?

2012-01-18T12:55:00.001-08:00

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

RC Bishops try to make secular argument against marriage equality

2012-01-17T09:39:00.001-08:00

There is a real chance that marriage equality will be passed legislatively in Washington state and signed by a supportive governor.

So of course, the Roman Catholic bishops are desperately trying to stop it. Of course, they are hindered by the fact that most of their flock support recognition of gay relationships.

Meanwhile, as reported in Pam's House Blend, the bishops are making their argument thusly:

…the definition of marriage is related to bringing children into the world and the continuation of the human race. The legislation to redefine marriage, therefore, is not in the public interest.

Yes, because if gay people marry, straight people will throw up their hands in disgust, and stop having children. The argument is ridiculous on the face.

Moreover, the bishops ignore that the lack of marriage hurts the children of gay parents. The PHB columnist goes on to note that 41% of births in this country are to unmarried women. So the way to promote marriage and families is….to deny marriage?

WRites one columnist in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The best advice, which Catholic bishops in Washington and elsewhere should heed, came recently from Nicholas Cafardi, formerly legal counsel to the Diocese of Pittsburgh and formerly a board member of the bishops' National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Youth:

"We need to give it up. This is not defeatism. This is simply following Jesus in the Gospels, who besides telling us not to act on our fears, also told us to render to Caesar what it Caesar's and to God what is God's. Civil marriage is Caesar's."

Cross posted from Gay Married Californian

The Wise Old Cat

2012-01-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

The wise old cat says "It's cold outside,
And the rain begins to fall,
I think I'll sleep upon the bed
And I won't go out at all."

"In my youth," he says, "I'd roam all day
Ignoring rain and wind,
But now I'm over 10 years old,
It's best that I stay in."

"Ah but I ran and leaped and nearly flew
for in those days I was thin,
I terrorized the mice and birds,
But now I will stay in."

Says the wise old cat, "those were the days
In memory, now just a gleam
I'll rest these old bones upon the bed
And sleep and purr and dream."

Poem by IT and Bubba

Religious Freedom (3): The myth of persecution

2012-01-14T08:28:00.000-08:00

The right wing likes to claim that we are a Christian country and they are right. Christian language and Christian symbols are part of our everyday life. We even have state holidays on Christian feast days, But at the same time, we have an explicit protection of religious freedom that is intended to give those of faith broad latitude to practise their religion peacefully, and not to impose it on anyone else. We protect minority religions. And never forget, the biggest growing group in American faith is the "nones".

What they are NOT allowed to do is inflict their religion on anyone else.

But the GOP, and particularly Newt Gingrich, have decided that Christians are more persecuted than gay Americans. (That's Newt's big thing, now that the campaign has moved to South Carolina.)

Because, of course, Christians can't mention their religion at work, or in the military…. they need to keep it in the closet. They can't marry…. they are scorned on the street, subject to violence….

Yeah, right.

Okay, so it's time for Christians who know this is nonsense to stand up to this. I'm calling on all of you who claim "Christian" to write your paper, speak up to your neighbor, and encourage your church leadership to speak up to say,

Enough of this nonsense! You do not speak for me, Newt Gingrich, or Archbishop Timothy Dolan!

BECAUSE we are Christians, we support the full civil rights of LGBT people!
Because if you let them keep telling the lies, without challenging them, they will get away with it.

So, come on, whether you are a Bishop or a pew-sitter, speak out. Talk to the news, talk to your neighbors. Push back! Claim the title of Christian and push back!

Religious Freedom 2: the mendacity of Cardinal Dolan

2012-01-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

USA today

People who tell lies get away with it because those who know better do not challenge them. We need to call them out wherever possible.

This lie come to us from Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, an avuncular engaging and highly intelligent man who will soon be elevated to Cardinal.

He is a passionate opponent of rights for gay people. Speaking about the recent passage of equality in New York, Abp Dolan tells lies:

But "no sooner was the ink dry,"[Dolan] said, than priests throughout the state started coming to him with stories of couples threatening to sue if they didn't agree to rent out their parishes for same-sex weddings.

This is prima facie a lie. It's not possible. Why? Because the NY equality law explicitly states:

…[A] religious entity … shall not be required to provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges for the solemnization or celebration of a marriage. Any such refusal to provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges shall not create any civil claim or cause of action or result in any state or local government action to penalize, withhold benefits or discriminate against any such religious corporation, benevolent order or not-for-profit corporation.

Abp Dolan knows perfectly well that he has full freedom to refuse to marry anyone for any reason. After all, his church considers civil marriages between divorced people to be invalid and refuses to perform them. Yet you don't seem him advocating to prevent such civil marriages, or claiming that the divorced are suing to get into his churches.

While the US Conference of Catholic Bishops attempts to enforce Roman Catholic dogma on civil law, it's important to pushback against their efforts to claim victimhood. Religious liberty is not being infringed. Indeed, it's being protected. What's being curtailed is his privilege of claiming that the Roman Catholics speak for all.

They do not. Many many faithful Christians disagree with Abp Dolan, including a majority of his own laity who support marriage equality!

Archbishop (soon Cardinal) Dolan has used offensive comparisons to describe gay people, and written threatening letters to President Obama demanding that gay people should not have the civil right to marry. This also crushes the religious freedom of LGBT people who worship in supportive religious denominations that support marriage equality.

Abp Dolan is free to oppose marriage equality. But if he uses lies and degrading language, we need to keep calling him out on it. Politely, but firmly.

Update: he's none too nice to child abuse victims either. Read the shocked comments to this post on Abp Dolan's blog.

Religious Freedom 1: protection under the law

2012-01-12T07:55:00.000-08:00

As the march towards full equality for LGBT people continues, those opposed are now cloaking themselves in the mantle of victimhood. They are claiming that somehow protection of a minority's rights infringes on THEIR liberty. I have never understood how being told you can't discriminate can be perceived as discrimination, but as Susan Russell often puts it, this is a bit like claiming sympathy for being an orphan after you've murdered your parents.

Yesterday the Supreme Court passed down a ruling giving broad protections to religious organizations that essentially exempt them from civil laws. This should put to rest the lies they tell. It won't, but it should. From the Daily Beast:

In its first major religious-freedom case in decades, the Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with a Pennsylvania Lutheran school that fired a teacher after she took disability leave for narcolepsy, then returned mid-year demanding her job back. ….
The court based its decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on a long history of reverence for the “ministerial exception”—the idea that it violates the First Amendment for the state to interfere in who religious groups hire and fire. The decision hinged on a broad definition of “minister,” arguing that because she was ordained, considered “called” by God to her position, and collected religious-tax breaks, the teacher is the type of person religious groups should be able to select—and get rid of—without state interference. …

If you’d only been listening to the religious right for the past three years, this decision—especially the fact that it was unanimous—would come as a shock. ...

In the theoconservative imagination, almost everything the government does to ensure equal rights, especially for LGBT Americans, is a threat to religious liberty. Non-discrimination statutes could force churches or Christian businesses to hire gay employees. Legalized gay marriage could lead to churches being forced to conduct gay weddings. The end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell could force chaplains not to preach against homosexuality.

But the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hosanna-Tabor case illustrates how overheated this alarmism has been. ...

It would be nice if this decision made it clear that those claiming Christian persecution are lying, but it won't. We'll continue to explore this meme of "Christian victimhood" in my next few posts.

Family values that break up families?

2012-01-10T07:38:00.000-08:00

Conor Friedersdorf takes on Rick Santorum (my emphases):

I presume everyone reading this post is either married or is close to someone who is married, whether it's parents or close friends or a boss or teacher or colleague. Think of that married couple. That family. Imagine if they got a letter in the mail informing them that by order of the federal government, their marriage is no longer valid. I submit that a man who would send out letters like that to gay and lesbian married couples does not deserve to be labeled as the candidate with the most pro-family agenda. His desire to invalidate the unions of people who are already married, some of whom have kids -- to invalidate existing families by federal mandate -- makes him arguably the least pro-family candidate, despite his other pro-family positions.

That Rick Santorum and his ilk so casually would dissolve my marriage reveals much. He doesn't think we have real relationships, that we are really married. Even Mitt Romney would "grandfather in" existing marriages. But Santorum thinks it's nothing.

It's the degradation of our being... it reminds me of the post-Prop8 period when we had no idea whether the CA court would annul our marriages. (They decided that Prop8 could not apply retroactively, meaning our marriage was safe). It's a kick in the gut.

Fortunately, Santorum got some pushback in New Hampshire from young people. His response was the invoke polygamy. As a reader at Andrew Sullivan's blog commented, that's a slippery slope argument more apporpriate for HETEROSEXUAL marriage. Because after all, isn't it heterosexuals (largely fundy Mormons) who endorse polygamy?

Santorum's daughter Elizabeth, on the trail with her dad, claims they have gay friends who support him. Uh, yeah, right. Dan Savage has asked for proof. It's hard to imaging any gay person actually supporting this guy.

But, some conservative voters seem perfectly happy to overlook Santorum's deeply unconservative desire to dissolve our marriages. However, maybe his stand against birth control will get the attention of straight people. That, and those who really DO have gay friends. Conor Friedersdorf:

The more than a quarter of a million families with a gay married couple at their core are not disconnected from American society. They have extended families: brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, friends who come over every Thanksgiving -- and for all these extended families, for everyone who has a gay person in their extended family, Rick Santorum isn't a pro-family candidate, because he is hostile to their family as it actually exists, and would invalidate it by decree if he could.

Rick Santorum has no family values. He's a bullying ignorant fundamentalist. Jay Michaelson writes,

[W]hat Santorum is motivated by is actually religion: a fear of sexuality and of women souped-up by a misreading of Leviticus, Romans, and Corinthians.

But he can’t really say that on television. If he were honest, he’d just come out and say something like: “I’m sorry, but God just cannot abide any homosexual behavior.” But he isn’t.
....
Let me take one further step. Santorum and other homophobes cannot speak frankly because their real motivations are private, emotional, and incoherent.

Friday High Church Humor

2012-01-06T09:09:00.000-08:00

As I've told you, my wife BP is one of the thurifers at the Cathedral in San Diego, leading me to make comments like "are you thurifing this weekend?" and "I must remember, you swing the thurible and I swing the thurifer!"

Recently, she was invited to begin training as a verger. At the choral Eucharist on Sundays, there are generally two vergers PLUS the Canon Verger, who house-manage the service, wrangle the readers, acolytes, choir, and children, and can step into any other server role as needed. It's a Cathedral, so they do a big service. BP is doing great; altar service is a wonderful ministry for her, and suits her talents well.

However, she still loves to swing smoke. Yesterday she told me that in addition to serving twice a month at the Eucharist, in whatever capacity is needed, she's going to do a regular once-a-month gig as a thurifer at Evensong as well.

My comment?

"Just don't burn out."

Ba-da-BUM. Happy Friday!

(As an aside related to the conversation on the Lead, by offering a traditional choral liturgy, great music, excellent preaching, and inclusive welcome, coupled with an active voice for social justice in the community, the Cathedral congregation is growing, and I see increasing numbers of young people.)

Notes from the morning news

2012-01-05T07:46:00.000-08:00

Linda Hirshman points out Santorum's mediaeval views on sex

Santorum has said repeatedly that he would work to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which stopped the states from making birth control criminal. And just in case you’re thinking that’s just to take the pill from those uppity women, the Catholic teaching is quite clear: All artificial birth control is forbidden, including the good old familiar male condom....

That an advocate of legislating strict Roman Catholic sexual doctrine came within eight votes of winning the first contest for the nomination of one of the two major American political parties warrants attention….

People who are perfectly happy with his assault on gay families may be a little more upset when they realize he wants to ban condoms and The Pill.

Oh, and while you're at it, go read Susan Russell's excellent blog on Santorum:

[T]he Republican presidential poster child for political homophobia Rick Santorum proclaims: "Ask me what motivates me, it's been the dignity of every human life." Unless it's a gay or lesbian life.

From the NY Times, on social mobility. Not only do we have a country where income is outrageously inequitable,we also have lost the much-vaunted "mobility" that supposedly makes any child able to become a millionaire despite that inequality:

At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations....

By emphasizing the influence of family background, the studies not only challenge American identity but speak to the debate about inequality. While liberals often complain that the United States has unusually large income gaps, many conservatives have argued that the system is fair because mobility is especially high, too: everyone can climb the ladder. Now the evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile.

Which is why 1 in 2 Americans are are poor or low income.

And let's finish off with Santorum's top 10. Remember, on top of this, he favors bombing Iran, and denying welfare to black people. Although he may claim to be a "good Catholic" most of his stands against the poor, in favor of war and of torture, are in direct opposition to Roman Catholic doctrine (H/T Ann for the link!)

Stop hiding your light under a bushel

2012-01-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

Several posts over at the Lead are reflecting on the future of the Episcopal Church (you can read them here and here). You know the challenges already: how do you balance the drive for mission (to do good), and outreach (to spread the Word so to speak ;-), with declining numbers and aging membership, expensive old buildings, and inability to pay clergy. Then there's that whole Anglican Communion/Anglican Covenant thing.

So, let's think about this in another way. What draws people to church?

1) First, there's an internal motivation. For some, the desire to belong to a community comes from their religious upbringing. Others may be searching for something. Maybe it's a need for belonging socially. Or for healing: people who think everything is going swimmingly in their lives don't necessarily see the need to connect with others, but those who feel hurt or adrift are more likely to want some structure. We'll call it the community aspect: being part of something.

2) What does church give you? a fundamental part of community experience comes from the liturgy. To me (yes, even me) this offers a tranquil time of beauty and reflection, away from the relentless pace of outside life and frustrations, even though I don't share the meal. The familiar rhythm provides a space for rest for what I will call my teeming brain. I appreciate very much the very traditional chanted liturgy, accented by incense and polyphony. I can see how this isn't everyone's preference, and in turn I wouldn't get as much out of a less formal, more folky experience (so lucky me, that BP wanted to go high church when she swam the Thames). Of course, the liturgy and doctrine are not necessarily accessible to everyone, particularly those who may be more uncomfortable with the open paradoxes of mythos--but that's a call for better education and outreach (see below).

3) What does church enable you to do? It's also important to me and even more so to BP that we are part of a community that is committed to social justice. Call this the mission aspect. BP has commented more than once that the social justice commitment here goes beyond what she had in her former, much larger RC church. Feeding the poor, caring for the sick, coming out politically and marching in the rallies as a voice for justice. But there's a caveat: volunteer-based organizations can burn people out very easily, unless they take care to protect and restore their volunteers (see 1 and 2).

So what's not to love? Why aren't people thronging to the Episcopal Church?

In part, because as a culture we've lost a sense of community overall. Remember the book "Bowling Alone"? Families don't even eat together any more, let along join with other families in church groups. I think part of this is the relentless treadmill of work. I don't know about you, but my "regular" job occupies much, much more than 40h a week and the expectations of my employer continue to rise so that I run faster just to stay in place. Losing a few hours each Sunday to church can be daunting until you work it into your weekly rhythm. And if your kid plays soccer, well, you'll be driving over 3 counties to away games on Sunday instead.

Part of it is because fewer people believe in God--at least, as traditionally expressed in organized religion. Remember, the "nones" are the most rapidly growing group of religious identities. Some might be open, but are put off by what they perceive organized religion is.

So, a big part of it is because "Church" and "Christians" generally are associated with what they (particularly right-wing Christians) are against: sex, abortion, women's rights, and gays. A lot of people are injured by "church" and a lot more have no familiarity beyond what the media tells them--and right now the media equates "Christian" with the right wing. Bickering over internal politics doesn't help. I'd argue that this is the question of outreach and you need to tell people more aggressively what you are FOR, institutionally speaking. I'd like to hear more from bishops and the PB speaking out boldly on social justice issues and pushing back against the right wing. Every statement the rightists make defining "Christian" as their values needs to be challenged.

And not just that. When BP swam the river, many of her Roman Catholic friends were very unfamiliar with the doctrines and practices of TEC (which are, of course, very similar). The nice TEC parish church not far from her big former RC one would offer a lot of those disaffected Catholics a comfortable home, but they just don't know about it. The democratic polity and absence of an authoritarian papacy are also attractive features particularly to the RC. (Take that, Anglican Covenant!)

This leads to the final problem being that you don't tell people about who you are, at the individual level. I have joked many times that I am one of your best recruiters because I am pretty enthusiastic about our experience, and I share that widely and encourage people to try it out. Even strangers on airplanes! But there's a sting to that tale/tail, because I'm not actually a Christian. I think you need to talk more about it (and I'm not talking to my outspoken fellow bloggers, but those quiet lurkers). Why don't you? I suspect there's a big fear of coming across like the evangelizing right-wingers, or the campus crusade cultists, or just some of that English reserve that seems to go along with your still Anglo traditions. But if I, the atheist, can tell my disbelieving scientist colleagues why I go to church on Sundays, so can you.

So, dive in here or over at the Lead. What's your diagnosis and prescription?

Rick Santorum wants to annul all same sex marriages

2012-01-02T12:13:00.000-08:00

From Think Progress, the latest from theocratic Roman Catholic Rick Santorum. As part of supporting an anti-marriage equality amendment for the Constitution, this man would annul all our marriages, because he doesn't consider them anything more than friendships. I can't think of anything else to say that expresses my horror at this disgusting proposal and the smug ass who suggests it.

Q: What would you do with same-sex couples who got married? Would you make them get divorced?

SANTORUM: Well, their marriage would be invalid. I think if the constitution says “marriage is this,” then people whose marriage is not consistent with the constitution… I’d love to think there’s another way of doing it.

He went on to claim that “same-sex couples can contract for everything” except government benefits and compared the loving marriages of many gay and lesbian couples to having a friend or an aunt.

Even Mitt Romney would grandfather in existing same sex marriages.

Of course, Santorum has no chance to be president, but like all the Republicans, he's playing a hate-filled card here to appeal to the handful of social conservatives who participate in the Iowa Republican caucuses. And they love this stuff. Because they consider us less than human, and our relationships less than human. And it is deeply, deeply hurtful as well as frightening to realize that some of the people next to me in the train or in the market agree with him.

Listen, Rick Santorum: maybe this will make it clear to you.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

May 2012 bring justice, peace, and hope.

Do atheists (yes, even Dawkins) do a service to believers?

2011-12-29T12:11:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of late about the relationship of religion and atheism, not just from me, here, but in response to Christopher Hitchens' death. Here's another one from Paul Wallace in the HuffPo: (my emphases)

I am convinced that atheists -- at least the ones I have read and the ones I know -- are working largely with conceptual idols when it comes to their rejection of God. They are not rejecting God; they are rejecting ideas. What is more, they are rejecting idols of Christians' making: a God who deals in rewards and punishments, a God who created the world in six days about 6,000 years ago, a God who shames their sexual desire and shuts down their intellect, imagination, and curiosity. It is easy for Christians to lament the fact that that atheists never seem to go after real theology, but we can hardly criticize them for not looking beyond our own idols.

It's a good thing for atheists to clear out our conceptual idols. We surely don't need them. Such idols are precisely what Christians also must reject. This does not mean a loss of the divine. On the contrary, without a little deconstruction the divine remains gray, flat, and thoroughly boring.

Atheists, rightly understood, are doing nothing less than prying the husk of our misunderstanding from the brilliant, living actuality of the divine. They're helping us recover God. It's hard work and we've been putting it off for a long time. We should just let them do it.

So, lots of you often say "I don't believe in the God Dawkins doesn't believe in, either." But what do you think of the idea that the Christianity specifically, and religion generally, that the new atheists are going after, consists of false idols made by Christians themselves?

So this is another way in which, as we discussed before, nonbelievers can be important to a community of faith.

(I should point out for those who are new that I don't particularly care for Dawkins and his war on religion, which is why I prefer the term "non believer" or "gratheist" for myself).

Preaching atheism

2011-12-28T13:43:00.000-08:00

Harold Pollack in the Washington Monthly makes more sane points about living as a non-believer, and reaching out rather than pushing back.

Drawing on Darwin and the rest, new atheists inherited an intellectual arsenal sufficient to win many arguments with religious believers. They have proven less adept in genuinely persuading or learning from other people. That’s too bad, because atheists, agnostics, and people of faith struggle with similar basic questions about how to live our lives and what these lives are really for.

To embrace our common humanity, we must do a better job of crossing boundaries between believers, non-believers, and doubters. We must really be able to see that people who find very different answers to these questions are capable of living their lives with the same insight, dignity, and depth of experience that we hope to do.

Ross Douthat, in a deeply-felt but I believe mistaken essay memorializing Hitchens, writes: “Rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor.” That’s not the way I experience things. I feel no less joy at my daughter’s dazzling smile, no less pain at the sight of the wrinkles on my mother’s beautiful face, than any religious believer. There’s no need to accept or reject any particular religious view to be moved to action at the sight of a cancer patient going medically bankrupt and losing her home.

There’s plenty to find meaning about in our short stay on this earth. Finding and pursuing that meaning is a challenge for everyone, regardless of one’s religious metaphysics. This is true whatever God is up to, and whether or not he is even there.

We atheists could express the most important and humane messages simply by living worthy lives. We could lower the dose of bullying polemicism and set a better example of humility and empathy, too. Saint Francis instructed: “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” Not bad advice, even for us.

Making peace between science and religion

2011-12-27T17:00:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year for the annual "Top Ten" lists. An article in Religion Dispatches (H/T, the Lead) points at the top ten peacemakers between Science and Religion.

This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now getting old. And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand.

Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.

You can click over to see who they are.

While I can't claim to a place in the top ten, or even the top 100, I'm rather pleased with some of my writings on this subject this year, so forgive me if I use this opportunity to point at them all together:

The unexpected face of the faithful (I) points out that many scientists DO consider themselves people of faith. (I'm not one of them, but I'm friendly!)
Do the Faithful need atheists? considers how the outsider's view may actually be constructive
My Living with Church series described why and how I, as a non-believer, function in a religious community.

Part I discusses how I manage to accommodate, as a cultural rather than spiritual identity
Part II considers the science of faith, and
Part III describes engaging politically, as a non-believing defender of faith.

Science, Faith, Mythos, Logos, examines roots of the peculiar conflict between religion (particularly evangelical) and science.
and from last year, Faith through a Prism

I hope you've enjoyed what I've written. It looks like we'll keep going into 2012, though I hope that my fellow bloggers on this group blog will participate a little more often!

Cat blogging

2011-12-26T17:53:00.000-08:00

Seen on Christmas Eve, a cat asking the eternal question: Is that you, Santa?

Mimi started it....

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T04:00:00.000-08:00

Title: Madonna Adoring the Christ Child
By: Antonio Correggio (1489 - 1534)
Uffizi Museum

A Cat's Christmas

2011-12-23T07:11:00.000-08:00

I'm posting this reprise from last year, because it's brilliant! Anyone who knows a cat will love this--even if you don't have a moggy of your own.

Incarnation

2011-12-21T08:37:00.000-08:00

From Broadwayworld.com

A band of young people in ragged clothes slips through the darkness trying to escape officers clad in black, who are masked in visored helmets and body armor. The band are advocates for justice and peace, sensitive to the needs of the poor and oppressed. It's hard not to see the clear parallels between the action on the bleak stage, and the protests on the streets right now.

The group has a visionary young leader, and a politically savvy activist as his right hand man. But the activist is becoming worried that the leader is starting to believe his own hype, with delusional claims that he is the Son of God. "You're going to get us all killed!" warns the activist. Is the leader David Koresh? Or is he Jesus Christ? How can you tell?

The new production of Jesus Christ Superstar is on its way to Broadway from Canada's Stratford Festival, by way of the La Jolla Playhouse. It is, simply, brilliant--one of the best musical productions I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot, not just regionally, but on Broadway and living for 4 years near London).

BP and I found it particularly moving to see the show the week before Christmas, with the concept of the incarnation, of God made Flesh, so central at this season. (I don't have to believe it to be aware of it). And Superstar forces you to wrestle with Christ the Man as purely human, and thinking about how he felt and how he appeared to those around him in the last week of his life. We know everything that happens… yet somehow it has a new twist, in this rock musical format. There's no deus ex machina here, no indication of anything beyond the grim politics of the real world. And there's something a little mad, a little out of control, in this man, so that one can understand the repetitive basso profundo motif "He is dangerous" from Caiaphas and the other high priests, and concerns over Christ's transgressive rule-breaking.

From BroadwayWorld.com

Indeed Jesus isn't that likable, and certainly not perfect. We can relate much more to Judas, the pragmatic activist, who is much more grounded in the Real World. By contrast, Jesus seems distant. Those parables are annoying and complicated. Why is he talking about his father, when we're dealing with a political occupation? He recoils in a very human way from the mob of grotesques, lepers and deformed folks hounding him and pleading to be healed. He gets hot and hungry, and he can't sleep, and its hard not to agree with Judas, that this God thing is delusional, because you can't see it.

But as the familiar story winds to its inevitable conclusion (compellingly staged by director Des McAnuff) the fact that it IS totally incarnate, here and now, gives it an immediate and visceral power. You experience the story in a different way. You warm up to Jesus. This is a man, only a man, being tortured and executed in a brutal, awful way. (The show ends with the execution). He may be pleading to his father, but there's no father to be found.

From Broadwayworld.com

And as I said at the beginning, it's hard not to draw explicit links between the Roman soldiers dressed like SWAT officers who are beating Jesus, and the police on our streets spraying pepper spray and beating the OWS protestors, extraordinary rendition, and waterboarding.

We wept (yes, even I--it's that good) and leaped to our feet at the end to give a standing ovation. God isn't to be found here-- not in any conventional sense. But Christ is, and you'll meet him in a different way that makes you really grasp the concept of incarnation.
If you get a chance to see this show please see it.

Lessons from Duarte Square: More on Trinity Wall Street

2011-12-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

More about the OWS protest in Duarte Square, the property owned by Trinity Wall Street.

First, let's review the arrests. Retired Bp George Packard was the first over the fence in his purple cassock, and was arrested. His wife was not arrested, but was in a group standing in the street and assaulted by the police. We have now seen over and over again the disproportionate violence practiced by the police in dealing with nonviolent OWS protestors. Bp Packard writes,

From MSNBC
This became an opportunity for individual and gratuitous violence by policemen. The simple arrests were done, why were they messing with these people? Which brings me to the melodrama of the day and the forecasts by our leaders. The only "force or arms" present on Saturday was not in (or at) the han ds of demonstrators....The cop who kneed my wife in the chest three times and threw her into other demonstrators was the same Officer who walked me harmlessly to the paddy wagon.

A police force that has lost respect for the people it supposedly protects is dangerous to Democracy. These acts were done on behalf of Trinity Wall Street, and by extension, TEC. I am waiting to hear "church officials" speak out loudly and with dismay about any acts of violence against non-violent protestors done on behalf of the church.

Put your sword back in its place...for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. (Matt. 26:52)

Next, another protester, the Rev. John Merz calls out Trinity Wall Street (from The Lead):

Privately I must remark on the shocking dissonance between their professed support, their vast resources and power and the things they provided: leaving a drop in center open, allowing group meetings in other space literally a handful if not less of times, deleting posts on their blogs that enjoined them for basic relief of human needs (porta-potties). They never intended to connect, listen to and support this movement in any real way.It is a re hash of their 9/11 record and as many know all too well, locally in times of social crisis, they do the right thing only if self preservation (image) requires it and even then only haltingly.

From GoThereGuide

Ouch. Trinity Wall Street has assets of over $10 Billion. And apparently, many of the Vestry are not even members of the Congregation:

[T]he vestry list reads as a who’s-who of the rich and powerful in New York, including Wall Street bankers, media and real estate executives, and in the most telling case, a former executive vice president of Brookfield Properties, the company that owns Zuccotti Park and pressured the city to evict the occupiers in the first place.

I think every church deals with the balancing act of investment for the future and protection of the institution, and action in the here-and-now. I'm sure some on one edge think that the church should sell everything, and "follow Him". But you won't effect much change as an itinerant, once you've spent the money. The other extreme might be what Trinity is doing--which appears to be pretty much the minimum, and protecting its massive assets. And in response to a protestor who says, "We have nothing, you have more, give it to us," one can understand to some extent. That's theft, right? Or Godless Communism? Or is it instead a voice demanding Biblical justice? And how do you tell the difference?

But whoever has the world's goods, and beholds his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him? (1 John 3:17)

The challenge to the Church is to walk the balance, and it's a fine balance indeed. Because a beautiful church building with an endowment to maintain it is not a bad thing in and of itself. A beautiful liturgical space that offers spiritual sanctuary is not a bad thing. Taking steps to protect it is not a bad thing either. The question surely comes about how much is needed, and whether or not "building the endowment" takes precedence over justice. Does it become about the money as an end, rather than a means?

Bishop Gene Robinson famously says something like this: "Pulling drowning people out of a river is a good thing. But it's even more important to go upstream and stop the person who's throwing them in the water." Similarly, feeding the hungry is a good thing. But it's even more important to stop the policies that are driving them to hunger. As an institution (and yes, one with beautiful buildings and endowments, and that's okay), TEC has a strong voice, large in influence and bigger than its numbers. It's time, surely to use that voice for prophecy. Even if it costs.

As one commenter on Bp Packard's blog wrote,

Upon seeing you in the crowd I was confused why a Bishop was among our ranks in full regalia, but when the stairs went up and I saw you climbing into the park, tears of joy started streaming down my face. I cannot describe the hope and inspiration you gave me in that moment.

And because I can, let's finish with one more Bible quote:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:52-53)

Are the New Evangelicals becoming Episcopalian?

2011-12-18T12:27:00.000-08:00

You may enjoy this article from Jonathan Fitzgerald at Patheos.com about how TEC is attracting new members not just from Roman Catholicism (like BP), but from young people dismayed at their Evangelical traditions.

[T]hose of us who left evangelicalism—and, according to recent Pew surveys there are plenty of us—find ourselves the objects of a process to be reabsorbed into evangelicalism. It's been happening since at least 2007, in the run-up to the presidential election in 2008. Faced with the apparent splintering of young people from the evangelicalism of our parents' generations, attempts were made to reassign us as members of a "new evangelicalism." The problem was, we didn't call ourselves evangelicals....

A commenter on [a NY Times] post notes this.... He identifies a tendency at the Times, and I'd argue that it exists in the media in general, to polarize Americans as either "secular elite," presumably Times readers, and Christians, "Evangelicals (recovering rednecks) and Catholics (white ethnic and brown proles)." He writes, "Guess what: some of us educated, urban-coastal, upper middle class knowledge workers are Christians: liberal, non-evangelical, non-Catholic Christians."

....I, like many of my peers, find it loathsome to have to qualify my Christian faith by constantly informing inquirers that I am not like "those" evangelicals. When I identify as Episcopal or Anglican, there's a lot less explaining necessary.

At the Bible study that my wife and I attended last weekend, the group reflected on gifts from God. In the midst of the discussion, one of the attendees, a new parishioner like us, noted that she was in the process of transitioning away from the faith tradition of her youth, and into one that she felt more fully aligned with God's plan for his kingdom on earth. The gift from God she identified was us, a community of peers on a similar journey.

Trinity Wall Street vs OWS

2011-12-17T19:49:00.000-08:00

You may recall that St Paul's Cathedral, London, wound up with egg on its collective face when it decided it wanted the Occupy London protestors to leave its property. All in all, the C of E was not covered in distinction with that one. Alas, it has happened here as well, with Occupy Wall Street protestors wanting access to an unused (but leased out) piece of property owned by the very, very rich Trinity Wall Street parish, and Trinity refusing.

Despite requests from Bishop of NY and the Presiding Bishop not to do so, today the OWS protestors entered the property and were promptly arrested. But they were led by a retired Bishop, George Packard, leadingto this iconic image (from the Lead) . Now there's a Bishop for ya. Nice move, wearing the purple cassock.

You can reasonably argue that just by virtue of being OWS, the protestors don't have the right to seize and occupy private property at their whim. And of course, that's true. But there's more to it than legality, and in this era and at this time, it's past time to ignore legal niceties, and seize an opportunity to be prophetic. Trinity Wall Street could have added a powerful voice to the dispossessed.But instead, it sided with the "1%" which isn't surprising given its incredible wealth. Just like St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Poor Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori hasn't had a good day. I'm afraid her letter to OWS doesn't come out so well, and then it turns out that Sudan has disinvited her from visiting because of those pesky gays.

Being Outside

2011-12-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

Advent is about waiting and wandering. In the story, people are on the move, going somewhere different, being outsiders. I mean, can you imagine willingly traveling if you are about to deliver a baby, unless you had to? The last place you'd want to be is away from home and the familiar.

Are they the other, these travelers, or are they us? Will they be find a welcome? Or will they be in danger? It's very elemental stuff.

Humans are social animals, and often tribal at that. We reject The Other: whether it is the crazy homeless person on the street, or the people who look different, sound different than we do. Rick Perry claiming tribal identity as an anti-gay Christian is just a particularly ugly streak of this. YOU aren't like ME, he says, which means YOU aren't really American. Never mind that Americans were originally outcasts who left where they were because they were different.

This has its roots in childhood, of course--you remember the unpopular kids? The ones marginalized for being different? That was me. I was terminally unpopular--too bookish, sensitive, no good at sports, and not interested in the prattle of my peers. In high school,I was the only girl in the computer programming classes, I was klutzy, and I didn't like boys like that.. So I embraced being different like a badge of honor.

As I grew up, I continued being on the outside, being different. I discovered science and almost lived in the lab, yet I had a literature degree. I never made friends very easily; too quirky and independent. I lived overseas for a number of years, where my accent immediately identified me as The Other. And when I returned to the US, I discovered that once an expatriate, always an outsider, and never truly at home. On the other hand, I realized that my living abroad had given me a unique viewpoint and objectivity about my own country. I could see things clearly having seen them from a distance.

In any case, I continue to live on the margins, always looking in. I believe that this gives me potential for unique insight. But it can also be lonely. The closest I get to belonging is with my beloved wife, through whom I find community and friends. But at some level, I don't really belong there either.

What's the definition of "normal"? If you are a Christian in a group of non-believers, are you the standard and the atheists the outsiders? Or the atheist in a group of Christians? Does the outsider offer you anything worth knowing? ANd are they worth bringing in?

Belonging

2011-12-12T15:33:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, BP and I flew to the SF Bay Area to spend the weekend with my mom. This is the first Christmas since my dad died, and we’re all getting used to the different rhythms in our family life without him. We helped Mom decorate the tree, and made Christmas cookies. We cooked on her massive 6-burner antique gas stove, ate too much and drank too much, did a challenging jigsaw puzzle (one of our traditions whenever we visit), went for a long hike in Tilden Park, walked the dogs, and had an all around good time. It’s always hard to leave and fly back south.

My mom lives in the same house where I grew up, which is only a few miles from the house where she grew up and the house where my dad grew up. Both of their families are deeply entwined in the history of this place, generations back. My dad's ashes were interred next to his great grandparents, up in Petaluma. So my roots go deep here.

Mom is an amateur genealogist, and in the process of researching our family over the years, she collected an impressive number of family photos. These now hang floor to ceiling in a long back hallway. The earliest pictures are daguerreotypes from the 1860s. It’s fascinating to look through and see the faces of my immediate family looking out from the sepia tints of a hundred-plus years ago.

That civil war soldier has my mom’s bright blue eyes (you can tell by how light they are on the daguerreotype). The picture of my grandfather from the 1890s looks just like my oldest brother. My dad’s wedding picture shows the same quirky smile that I have, with the corners of our mouths not really curling up. That picture of my middle brother as a teenager 40 years ago is the spitting image of his son in 2005. There are flappers and ladies in tight corsets, gentlemen in thick mustaches and cellophane collars, and quite a few navy uniforms from different wars. And the animals of this animal-loving family are also memorialized: from the fading black and white photo of my teenage dad with his horses and his dog, to the dogs that mark my parents’ long marriage. It’s a web of my own personal history, each photo labeled on the back in my mother’s looped handwriting.

I love the Berkeley hills in the winter, with the fog dripping from the eucalyptus. I pluck leaves from the bay laurel trees when I hike through the canyons, and they scent my pockets with memories. I tried several times to get a job back home, but academic jobs are few and far between, with hundreds of applicants for each one.

Still, I’m incredibly fortunate that I got a good job in California, but now I live 450 miles from home. I can’t claim to being a native San Franciscan any more, not like my Grandmother who went through the great 1906 earthquake and had that distinctive old San Francisco accent with its faintly mid-Atlantic intonations. So BP and I have put down our own roots where we are, and are likely to stay there, even though like most Southern Californians, we come from somewhere else. We’ll spend Christmas at our own home with BP’s kids and other family and friends, while my brothers will join mom.

Mom is 84, and my visits to the old family home have a poignancy to them now; we all know they are finite. I’m approaching 50 and with that milestone, the sense of time’s passage becomes more bittersweet. I doubt we’ll go up there very often once Mom is gone. It’s a sense of belonging that will be lost.

Always an exception: Republicans

2011-12-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Mr President

2011-12-07T07:33:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, something amazing happened.

The Secretary of State gave a long, powerful speech supporting the rights of gay people around the world.

From the LA TImes:

In a speech to mark Human Rights Day, which is celebrated Saturday, Clinton declared that protecting the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people is "now one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time" and compared it to the battles for women's rights, racial equality and religious freedom.

(Video and transcript here). Along with this, the Obama Administration has released a memo detailing its efforts.

Now, as you know I'm an advocate for marriage equality.

But this, like many of our issues here in the US are "luxury" issues. Gay people in many parts of the world don't have the luxury of marriage, or serving in the military. They are lacking even fundamental rights like life and liberty. Gay people in many places, particularly but not exclusively Africa, are at risk of violence, imprisonment, and even death simply for being who they are.

There are people here who advocate the same thing. They pop up in the comment threads of articles on line, they write hateful things on the pages of NOM's facebook, they buy NOM"s lies. But they aren't the majority. So they export their hate, and fan the flames in Uganda and Nigeria.

But now, the US is saying with the weight of officialdom, "Being gay is NOT a crime." Well done.

Update: Rick Perry, presidential wanna-be, complains: "Promoting special rights for gays in foreign countries is not in America’s interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers’ money."

Andrew Sullivan fires back: "Not getting murdered is NOT a special right."

St Francis De La Sissies

2011-12-04T21:42:00.001-08:00

Because it's the time of year for Handel's Messiah... and time for a smile.

It's Time (video)

2011-12-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

Watch this. It doesn't need words to make the point! (And I dare you to stay dry-eyed....)

The Decline and Fall

2011-11-29T07:44:00.001-08:00

Over the last year, it has become apparent to anyone with a brain that our democratic republic is in considerable danger. The lunatic fringe has taken over the Republican party-- a mishmash of Ayn Randism, Christianist social policies, and hyperbole. Unaccountably, working people keep voting for these Republicans -- who represent the moneyed classes, and who actively work to deny the franchise to anyone not white and Republican. With a Congress of millionaires who enrich themselves shamelessly at the public trough, is there any surprise that Corporations are people too?

Now we've learned that the bank bailout was much bigger than we thought. While people lose their homes, bank executives and their stockholders live high on your dollar.

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret....The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse

.

Now we see that the Republicans have no objection to raising taxes as long as it's on working people:

Every blessed once in a great while, all artifice is stripped away, rhetoric collapses under the weight of its own absurdity, and we get to see things as they really are. Such will be the case later this week when the Senate tries to vote on extending the payroll-tax holiday. The Republicans will oppose it—that is to say, the Republicans will support a tax increase on working Americans. And why? Because the Democrats want to pay for it with a small surtax on the very top earners. So the choice couldn’t be more direct: which is more important, giving the middle class a tax cut or protecting those who make more than $1 million a year? Republicans are making it clear.

Now we see a suicidal path that sacrifices the basic American economic bargain:

For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling.

...New data from the Commerce Department shows employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929.

Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929.

...Corporations don't need more money. They have so much money right now they don't even know what to do with all of it. They're even buying back their own shares of stock. This is a bonanza for CEOs whose pay is tied to stock prices and it increases the wealth of other shareholders. But it doesn't create a single new job and it doesn't raise the wages of a single employee.

...A basic bargain was once at the heart of the American economy. It recognized that average workers are also consumers and that their paychecks keep the economy going.

We can't have a healthy economy until that bargain is restored.

To keep this unholy alliance going, Republicans are actively trying to suppress Them from voting. You know, Them. The poor, the brown, the students, the young. Those who are "takers". Republican Congressman Paul Ryan makes it explicit:

We're coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society and that could become very dangerous if it sets in as a permanent condition.

This political view is unsustainable. If you don't have people who can make and buy things, you don't have much economic activity. Eventually, that's bad even for the well-off. But in a party where science-denial and rejection of the reality of climate change are doctrines, you can't expect that much foresight.

Anyone who votes for a Republican is voting for the past: the Gilded Age, or the wild '20s, when the rich got richer and the working class suffered. Our infrastructure is crumbling and some cities can't pave roads or light the streetlamps, but the party on Wall Street is ongoing. It's a vote for selfishness, against community, against social fabric, and it's profoundly unChristian.

Now what are we going to do?

Gratheism

2011-11-28T09:18:00.001-08:00

From a reader at Andrew Sullivan's blog: ...

I sit with those who as of this moment cannot believe.....I sit with an increased sensation that we as humans must make deep efforts on one another's behalf, because we may be all we have....

I support and personally feel belief in the mystery of it all, recognizing that we don't know what we don't know; and I have a strong sense that the teachings of Buddha, of karma, of Judaism, of Mohammed, and of Christ have a great deal to offer - that these world views all are directionally healthy if interpreted without literalism, that they all imply reasons for gratitude and that they all help build social fabric as shared belief systems, and that those things are good things which probably outweigh the obvious downsides of groupthink and the devastating divisions they also cause with humans who otherwise have so much in common.

For lack of a better term I call this world-view Gratheism, aka Grateful Atheism, and believe it's a needed antidote to the condescending atheism of writers whose bravery I admire, like Hitchens and Dawkins, but who are - I don't think - building much social fabric, and who I suspect are not winning any converts.

Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

2011-11-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

From Live Science:

The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.

The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration, some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.....

Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran. Some argue that the scrolls were written at the site itself while others say they were written in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israel….

More recent archaeological work....suggests that the site could not have supported more than a few dozen people and had nothing to do with the scrolls themselves. They believe that the scrolls were deposited in the caves by refugees fleeing the Roman army after Jerusalem was conquered in A.D. 70.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich and the secular state

2011-11-22T14:00:00.000-08:00

I do not watch the Republican "debates". I agree with blogger Pam Spaulding who calls the Republican slate the "clown car". When did it because a point of honor for the Republicans to look for the most inept, unqualified extremists and think that somehow they are equipped to run a nation?

In any case, last weekend there was a "debate" on "family values" (which in Repub-speak, means values that exclude anyone who doesn't fit the Christian conservative phenotype).

And as Steve Benen writes,

Newt Gingrich... condemned the very idea of a secular state. “A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have,” the thrice-married, serial adulterer said. “Because we’ve in fact attempted to create a secular country, which I think is frankly a nightmare.”

You remember, Newt, right? The disgraced former Speaker of the House, who recently converted to Roman Catholicism and arranged to have his first two marriages annulled. For a fee, one presumes.

Benen goes on,

.... Gingrich doesn’t have to like it, but we haven’t “attempted to create a secular country”; the secular country was created more than two centuries ago. Our entire system of government is based on a secular Constitution that guarantees a separation of church and state.

I’m curious, though, what Gingrich would prefer we replace our “secular country” with, exactly. There are some countries that endorse Gingrich’s worldview and intermix God and government — Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan under Taliban rule come to mind — but they’re generally not countries the United States tries to emulate.

Of course, it's not just Newt. Rick Santorum, conservative Roman Catholic, has called for there to be a theocracy. He's not quite sure how this is different than Muslims imposing Sharia, however:

Now, unlike Islam where the higher law and civil law are the same, in our case, we have civil laws but our civil laws have to comport with the higher law.

Our civil laws have to ... and that's why, with the issue of abortion, as long as abortion is "legal" - at least according to the Supreme Court, "legal" in this country - we will never have rest because that law does not comport with God's law which says that all life has value, all life is created by [God,] I knew you in the womb.

And as long as there is a discordance between the two, there will be agitation.

The mind, it reels.

What has happened to us?

2011-11-21T07:39:00.001-08:00

In Davis, CA, university police stepped into a circle of students who were sitting in passive civil disobedience and began pepper spraying them. The police were not threatened, but committing an act of deliberate violence. Some reports have said that as students covered their eyes and mouths with clothing, the police pulled that clothing away and sprayed the chemical directly into their throats.

Look at this photograph, of the calm policeman who walked down the line, spraying each student, and then walked back and continued spraying. As one would spray bugs in the house. Utter and total disdain.

James Fallows:

Watch that first minute and think how we'd react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That's what I think here.

At least 50 years ago, they didn't have pepperspray. Then, they used firehoses.

This is America?

Prop8: nothing to see here, move along

2011-11-17T10:06:00.001-08:00

In the tangled web of Prop8 (See graphical timeline), the Federal District Court found that it was unconstitutional. The prop8 supporters appealed. However, because the state refuses to defend the law, there was some question as to whether the supporters had the RIGHT to appeal.

The (federal) appeals court sent a question to the (State) Supreme Court, asking if under California law, there was such a right.

The state court today said, yes, the supporters can appeal.

So now the Federal Court will consider whether they have the right to appeal under FEDERAL law.

So nothing changes. Prop8 is still in force.

And the lawyers continue to argue on a perilous course towards the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), which dominated by unfriendly conservatives. At some level, this case was never about Prop8, but a test case to take a risky strategy to try to change federal law. I'm sure Olson and Boies are happy, because they want to make it to the SCOTUS. But gay Californians still can't marry.

The church of nothing?

2011-11-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

Susan Russell tells a tale of the reaction to her brilliant letter to Kim Kardashian, which has led to her, and the Episcopal Church overall, of being accused of being a Biblically bereft church of nothing. Susan handles it well. REad the story here

Susan concludes,

we'll see where this goes. That may be the end of it and it may be the beginning of something more. I don't know.

But what I do know is every opportunity to witness to God's inclusive love in public platforms of communication are opportunities for evangelism. Opportunities to tell the Good News of the God of Justice to many who have only heard about the God of Judgement. Opportunties to counter the voices of those who have God confused with their own homophobia. Opportunities to take the ancient call to "preach the good news, in season and out of season" to a multiplatform 21st century world ... and preach the good news: online and offline; by blog, tweet, comment, "forward" and "share."

So thanks, Ms. Kardashian and Mr. Backholm for some fertile soil for Multiplatform Evangelism. and to HuffPost, Pam's Blend and Daily Kos for helping spread the good news. Feel free to keep it coming!

Meanwhile, rrom the Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference we hear the following

“We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion,” Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the bishops conference, said in a news conference Monday at the bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore. He added that “well-financed, well-oiled sectors” were trying “to push religion back into the sacristy.”

No, Archbishop, I think this shows that the Rev. Canon Susan Russell is taking religion out of the sacristy to the streets. What you don't like is it's not your flavor of religion. So what's that about liberty?

Updated: Roman Catholic Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2011-11-11T11:24:00.001-08:00

I'm getting seriously annoyed at the Roman Catholics. The Conference of Bishops is meeting and rather than being concerned about social justice, they are going to discuss how to wage the culture war: particularly, marriage equality.

East Bay Express

USA today

LGBTQnation

These are three of the most vocal bishops against us. Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, now Bishop of Oakland CA, was formerly in San Diego. He's extremely smart and widely considered the architect of Prop8. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York puts forward an avuncular face, but he's lobbying the president and vigorously fighting a rearguard action in New York. Archbishop John Nienstedt of Minneapolis is mobilizing troops in each parish to pass a Prop8-style anti-equality amendment there. He has infamously suggested that parents can't support their gay children and be Catholic. These men are intelligent, very powerful, and implacable foes of the LGBT community.

Their new meme is that marriage equality threatens religious liberty. To which the proper answer is, POPPYCOCK. There is no religious liberty if the Roman Catholic bishops impose their will on everyone else. The Episcopalians want to marry same sex couples: how is religious liberty protected if they are unable to do so?

The FACT is that the Roman Catholics are and will be free NOT to marry same sex couples, just as they are free NOT to marry previously divorced people, non-Catholics, or the unbaptized. But right now, most Episcopalians aren't able to perform legal marriages for their LGBT congregants. So say again, who's liberty is being infringed? The Baltimore Sun follows this up.

As you may know, there is some irony that Roman Catholics overall are the religious group most supportive of marriage equality. Thus, the laity is simply ignoring the bishops, much as they do on birth control (I mean, how many RC have more than two children, these days?)

But I'm getting very frustrated with their "Don't Ask Don't Tell". Because while they simply ignore the Bishops, they continue as good Catholics to support the Church, and essentially function as enablers of the Bishops' war against gay people. We have many dear, supportive RC friends who love us to death, but none of them are standing up and saying, "no more!" to the institutional Church as it continues its attacks. None of them are calling out the Church on its actions; none of them are withholding their donations. They tried to persuade my wife to stay Roman Catholic: "just don't tell Monsignor that you're gay," they advised, and seemed unaware of the cost of pretending to be "in Communion" with an institution that reviles you.

It's the Roman Catholic version of the NALTs (not all like that).

Many RC find it hurtful when their church is criticized. After all, they themselves have no problem with their LGBT friends. But I want to get across to my RC friends: The institution that is your church is attacking us. What are you doing--really DOING-- to stop them?

Updated: from the National Catholic Reporter, we learn that Catholics care far more about caring for the poor than for issues around gays marrying.

But the Bishops are putting their effort behind an anti-gay web site (I don't link to such sites; google it if you want to find it).

The Commitment of Marriage

2011-11-08T08:26:00.000-08:00

USA Today has a story describing a new, bipartisan movement towards marriage equality that stresses commitment rather than benefits:

A group of high-profile Democrats and Republicans who back legalizing gay marriage are calling on advocates to shift the focus on the issue from an argument about equal rights to promoting the value of commitment.….

Advocates have long made the case that legalizing marriage for gays and lesbians is a matter of equality, but those who frame the issue that way might be reinforcing a belief among many Americans in the middle on the issue that gays and lesbians want to marry for different reasons than straight couples, according to polling ....

I think this is a smart move.

There is a small slice of the population in the middle that is the swing vote on equality. Prior to Prop8, they were pretty friendly, until the opposition ran their campaign telling lies about teaching children gay sex. The moveable middle panicked, and Prop8 passed. I don't think they really realized what harm they did, because they figured gay couples had domestic partnerships, not realizing that they aren't the same, are not recognized the same, and are treated as inferior. (BP and I never got a DP, because, well, it's not marriage!)

Right now, thanks to DOMA (the mis-named Defense of Marriage Act), BP and I do not obtain any of the numerous federal benefits of marriage. We actually accrue significant disadvantage, such as having to do taxes twice, because the state recognizes us but the fed does not. We aren't on each other's medical plans, because that would be treated as a directly taxable benefit that would cost more than it saves. We have to pay an attorney to set up trusts and so forth, since because of DOMA, we are legally strangers on the street when it comes to inheritance and so on.

So what DOES marriage net us,since doesn't net us any of the typical benefits?

Oh, wow. It's everything.

Every morning I wake up and feel blessed that I am united in marriage with my beloved. That we have made the permanent, joyful commitment to one another, in joy and pain, in sickness and health, till death us do part. I may not yet get any of the legal benefits of marriage, but I wouldn't change for the world the FACT of being married, of looking at that ring on my finger and knowing what it represents.

In her recent blogpost, Susan Russell describes values that make up a marriage:

values that transcend the gender and sexual orientation of the couple. Values like fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect, careful, honest communication, and love -- the values that we in the Episcopal Church have held up as the standards we hold for relationships blessed by our church.

Yup, that's what the values of marriage are. Legal benefits? Sure, we'd like them in all fairness, but they aren't anything next to the experience of standing before friends and family and publicly vowing to uphold those values. I wouldn't exchange for the world the experience of being married, which I blogged for you 3 years ago.

BP reminded me recently that it wasn't till the summer after Prop8 passed when the CA Supreme Court decided that our marriage would NOT be annulled. Can you imagine what that felt like? The sword of Damocles had nothing on it!

So virtually on the blogs, and in real life, we advocate for marriage. And person by person, we explain all of this. For example, this last weekend we were at a birthday party for a friend, and met a charming older gentleman. "How do you know R.?" he asked, and we explained that we had met R and his partner at church. As we are wont to do, we exclaimed over the welcome we have felt in the Episcopal church, and as the conversation moved on we mentioned that we were married, and that our marriage had been blessed there.

Turns out the charming older gentleman was a retired Roman Catholic priest. He was friendly (as I suspect many priests really are), and admitted to a certain fascination with us. You see, he's not from California, and had not met a legally married gay couple before. He quizzed us, gently, on our marriage and our blessing and we responded much as I have here. This clearly delighted the gentleman, and we enjoyed chatting (and dancing!) with him during the evening. And he will take his experience of us back to his unfriendly state, and be able to witness in turn as to what married gay couples are really like.

Making a Commitment.

Living those Values.

That's why we are married. That's the right every couple should have. And that's why I make that witness.

US continues its fall to the bottom

2011-11-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

Shared by the PoliticalProf:

The new gilded age, the loss of Democracy

2011-11-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a visual of the problem. This shows you the income of the members of Congress, House on the top, Senate on the bottom. Notice the number of them who are in the top 1%. Our "representatives" disproportionately represent the richest in this country.

In the comments, Dr Primrose points us to a report, Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10, from the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which looked at 280 of America's top companies. It found that 67 of these firms had an average tax rate of zero, and worse, 30 of them had an average tax rate of -6.7%, meaning they taking more of our money than paying in taxes. A quote,

"[O]ver time, Reagan’s 1986 decision to get rid of corporate tax subsidies and make our big corporations pay their fair share has been reversed. Ironically, that reversal has been led in large part by politicians who claim to be Reagan's disciples and to oppose government subsidies that interfere with market incentives. Indeed, many of these purported fans of Reagan want to expand corporate subsidies and tilt public policy even further in favor of corporate tax avoidance."

And you can see from the image how that happened.

Bill Moyers reminds us that it used to be possible to get a good education in public schools, access books in a public library, and move on to a good public university-- and kids from rich and poor families did it side by side. Now, however, we're a cultural apartheid, where those at the top separate themselves from not just the poor, but the middle class. And it happened with a corporate blueprint to dismantle the New Deal. He writes,

William Simon…. called on “men of action in the capitalist world” to mount “a veritable crusade” against progressive America. BusinessWeek (October 12, 1974) somberly explained that “it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”

Those “men of action in the capitalist world” were not content with their wealth just to buy more homes, more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else. They were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else.

And they succeeded beyond their expectations. After their forty-year “veritable crusade” against our institutions, laws and regulations—against the ideas, norms and beliefs that helped to create America’s iconic middle class—the Gilded Age is back with a vengeance.

Paul Krugman looks at the data and finds that yes, the inequality really is that bad.

But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.

The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger.

Some pundits are still trying to dismiss concerns about rising inequality as somehow foolish. But the truth is that the whole nature of our society is at stake.

Nick Kristoff also joins in

[Y]es, we face a threat to our capitalist system. But it’s not coming from half-naked anarchists manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives.

It’s time to take the crony out of capitalism, right here at home.

Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress vote down every jobs bill, and write unprecedented letters threatening the Fed:

In other words, it looks like the Republicans are once again violating a political norm -- while advising action that could keep hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work -- in order to advance their policy agenda, their political cause, or both. They're breaking the rules, at least as currently understood, because it will help them get their way.

And if you look at the chart with which I started this post, you can see why.

Image from here. H/T Dr Primrose, Counterlight, and Andrew Sullivan

Thank you, Kim Kardashian

2011-11-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

From the Rev. Susan Russell, of All Saint's Episcopal Church, Pasadena CA, a thank you to Kim Kardashian. I hope Susan forgives me the lengthy quote, but this is just TOO GOOD not to share widely:

I am not sure you can appreciate just what a gift it is to have the extraordinarily well publicized news of the end of your hysterically hyped marriage come the very week our congressional leaders are set to begin debating the Respect for Marriage Act on Capitol Hill.

Seriously. As a marriage equality activist I cannot thank you enough for your gift of the stunning example of how the gender of the couple saying "I do" clearly has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with respect for the institution of marriage. It is a gift -- I promise you -- that will keep on giving.

As we continue to work for Family Values that value all families and a Protect Marriage Movement that protects all marriages we will have your example to add to Britney Spears' 55 hour marriage, Larry King's eight marriages and Newt Gingrich's three (just to name a few) as proof positive that marriage needs protection all right -- but not from gay and lesbian couples who want to pledge to live together until death do they part.

We will have another great example to contrast to those couples building lives, families and a future without the 1138 federally protected rights that you and Kris Humphries enjoyed for the 72 days you were married to each other. Rights like social security, inheritance, taxation, hospital visitation and immigration status. Just to name a few.

We will have another opportunity to talk about the values that make up a marriage -- values that transcend the gender and sexual orientation of the couple. Values like fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect, careful, honest communication, and love -- the values that we in the Episcopal Church have held up as the standards we hold for relationships blessed by our church.

And it will give me the chance to talk about the marriages I know about that actually embody all those traditional values which were so utterly lacking in your $10 million dollar nuptial debacle. Like Alec and Jamie. Gay men who have been together for 10 years. Married since 2008. New parents to a 5-year old son adopted out of the foster care system. A son they are raising in a stable, loving home, bringing him to Sunday School every Sunday ... .

So thank you again, Kim. As we work without ceasing to secure for Alec and Jamie and their family the rights you and Kris threw away after 72 days of marriage, I hope you will know how deeply grateful we are for the "on a silver platter" gift you gave us this week as we head into Senate Judiciary Hearings on the Respect for Marriage Act and look ahead to the repeal of DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act). Honestly, we just can't thank you enough.

What Susan said! Well done!

More from London and St Paul's

2011-10-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

You know, it's hard to imagine how they could have handled this worse.

From the Telegraph , an unflattering exposé

One figure who is understood to have taken a particularly dim view of Canon Fraser’s outbursts is the cathedral’s registrar, Nicholas Cottam, a retired Major-General.He has, so far, managed to keep a low profile, but he is described as “the power behind the throne”, and central to convincing the dean to support evicting the protesters.....“He runs the cathedral like an army operation and sees the canons as his troops who should follow orders and not speak out of turn,” says one insider. ....

Senior figures at the City of London Corporation had decided that the protesters must be evicted, and backing from the cathedral Chapter was the last touch needed to give it moral authority.As the fallout from the Chapter’s poor handling of the row has descended into an embarrassing debacle, it has cast the Church in an unflattering light.The canons have been accused of selling out to the wishes of politicians rather than carrying out their gospel duties to care for the poor and downtrodden....

The Rt Rev Alan Wilson, the Bishop of Buckingham, said that it was not just the public who were bemused by the closure.“Cathedral deans I’ve spoken to are mystified as to why they would do it,” he said. “It’s made them look like idiots. Anyone who looks at the camp can see that it is complete nonsense to claim that it was done for health and safety.”The health and safety report published on Monday listed “rope/guy-lines” and rodents among potential dangers posed by the presence of the camp.Sources close to the Dean say that he was baffled as soon as he saw how weak the evidence was, and moved to have the building reopened as quickly as possible....

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has spoken out at the damage being caused to the Church’s reputation, but Dr Rowan Williams, the current incumbent of Lambeth Palace, has remained silent.

From the Independent:

A highly critical report into the moral standards of bankers has been suppressed by St Paul's Cathedral amid fears that it would inflame tensions over the Occupy London tent protest.

The report, based on a survey of 500 City workers who were asked whether they thought they were worth their lucrative salaries and bonuses, was due to be published last Thursday, the day that the Canon Chancellor of St Paul's, Giles Fraser, resigned in protest at the church's tough stance.

But publication of the report, by the St Paul's Institute, has been delayed in an apparent acknowledgement that it would leave the impression that the cathedral was on the side of the protesters.

The Independent on Sunday understands that the decision has upset a number of clergy, who hoped that the report would prove that the church was not detached from a financial crisis that had its heart yards from the cathedral itself. The decision will fuel the impression that the wider established church is attempting to stifle debate about the tent protest, as leading members of the Church of England, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, have failed to comment publicly about Occupy London....

Shocked! Shocked! There's gambling going on in this establishment!

Update: And now the Dean of the Cathedral has resigned. What a mess.

Poll: Charting progress on equality in faith groups

2011-10-29T23:09:00.000-07:00

We know that mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics have a majority in favor of marriage equality. Those unaffiliated with religion are even more supportive -- which explains in part why there is such a conflict between gay folks and Christians. But it's interesting to see the trendlines.

Of course, the Roman Catholic hierarchy is an implacable foe, regardless of the view from the pew which is very supportive. Isn't it time for those supportive RC to stop living "don't ask don't tell" and stand up to their bishops?

From the Pew Forum:

St Paul's, Occupy London, and a sitcom....

2011-10-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

You may be unaware of the drama in London, where the Occupy London protesters have camped next to St Paul's Cathedral. While at first the Cathedral welcomed them in the interest of social justice, they soon got cold feet, leading to an unprecedented shut-down of the Cathedral, threats to remove the peaceful protestors, and a resignation of the Canon Chancellor, Giles Fraser in response.

The BBC report is here. Needless to say, the Cathedral is not coming across well in this, looking like a defender of its own wealth and that of its City allies, rather than peaceful protesters. When the Pope calls for worldwide discussion of economic inequality, St Paul's looks to maintain the income from a stunning £14.50 entrance fee. That's over $20!

On the serious side, the Guardian, of all papers, called out the Cathedral:

If the dean and chapter continue their steps towards evicting they will be playing the villains in a national pantomime. There will be legal battles and, eventually, physical force. At every step, the cathedral authorities will be acting in the service of absurdity and injustice. Yet this is where the logic of their position is leading them. They must see this, and stop. Jesus denounced his Pharisaic enemies as whited sepulchres, or shining tombs; and that is what the steam-cleaned marble frontage of St Paul’s will become if the protesters are evicted to make room for empty pomp: a whited sepulchre, where morality and truth count for nothing against the convenience of the heritage industry.

while other commenters have decried the union of the established church with the Establishment:

The problem with these good intentions is that over the centuries what has evolved is a naturally cautious and inherently tepid Church. ... by and large we remain, as a Church, suitably compliant and that is because we have been genetically engineered to be that way.

...At best the Church's role is to act as a counter-balance to the predations of power and the aching emptiness of materialism – to provide a different perspective on wealth and poverty.

Over the past 50 years we have all felt the cold hands of capitalism squeezing more and more of our humanity out of us. We have all by and large allowed it to happen, believing it was progress. The Church of England has just gone along with it, and we are now utterly embedded in that system.

Under the banner of balance, we at some point took it upon ourselves to "steady the ship" even if it is – as now many of us feel intuitively – going in the wrong direction. As priests we are not supposed to uphold the needs of the State – we are here at best to provide balance against the excesses of power, both political and financial. But we have not remained true to our calling.

And there is also the delicious irony that the Cathedral has been leading efforts to study executive pay , which might prove a bit embarrassing....

It can also be disclosed that a damning report Canon Fraser had been due to publish on Thursday about bankers’ lack of ethics, had been shelved by the cathedral amid concerns that it would only escalate the row.

Of course, true tonational character, there's already a satire sitcom script. The British do this kind of humor so well. Go have a look.

The "ick" factor and conservative politics

2011-10-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

These days, thinking about conservative politics gives me a strong sense of disgust. But it turns out that our sense of revulsion at disturbing images is linked to our political viewpoints quite viscerally. From LIveScience:

Most people would likely avert their eyes when passing by a man with a mouth full of writhing worms, or, say, the sight of a pile of excrement. But some are more disgusted than others, and new research suggests those individuals who respond with a more intense "yuck" are more likely to hold conservative political views and specifically are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage.

Now, we knew some of this already. But a new study looks even more closely.

For the study, Smith, UNL political scientist John Hibbing and their colleagues selected 50 individuals from a random sample ...As the participants looked at a series of 38 images that ranged from pleasant to unpleasant, their skin conductance was measured, which is a gauge of the level of activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that activates the automatic "fight or flight" response in surprising situations....

The participants also answered questions to gauge their political views. The results showed, as predicted, that those who indicated conservative political views responded to the icky pictures with much more intense disgust than did liberals....

Scientists think some level of disgust sensitivity is "normal," and helps us along with our human ancestors avoid disease. "The role of disgust in the avoidance of disease, one of the primary sources of mortality over the centuries, makes it essential to survival," the researchers write this month in the online journal PLoS ONE.

But what does this disease-avoidance system have to do with political views?

"I think that one plausible explanation is sort of along the lines that one way to understand some of these attitudes about politics and morality is that they have a strong emotional component," Pizarro told LiveScience in a telephone interview. Different emotions are linked with different kinds of judgments and behavior, he added. For instance, fear is linked to vigilance and preparedness, he said, while disgust is linked to steering clear of any sort of contamination, "foreign looking" things, or possibly even strange people.

As such, people who are more easily disgusted may be more likely to take on political views that help them avoid these "disgusting" situations.

"Sex, with its exchange of bodily fluids and all that can be viewed as disgusting," Hibbing told LiveScience in an email. "And this appears to be particularly true for homosexual sex [and] in fact this response is often described as the 'ick' factor. So the long-standing hypothesis that variations in disgust would be correlated with policy stances related to sexuality and homosexuality seems to follow naturally from this."

This doesn't explain why conservatives who are opposed to LGBT equality are so often obsessed with the "mechanics" of gay sex. I'm sure I don't have to remind you of the graphic descriptions of certain sexual acts that conservatives seem to relish describing.

Still, what it suggests is that conservativism and anti-gay attitudes are to some extent biological. Well, to some extent EVERYTHING is biological. But what distinguishes us from the beasts is that we have an intellect that can overcome the raw biological instincts with reason.

Although, it would appear that some conservatives are more limited in that department.

Image of the Day

2011-10-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Our Lizard Brains: how do we stop thinking of ourselves?

2011-10-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

Great article from Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair about the economy and the society that bred it:

The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death. The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences....

Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. [has] a theory about American life. He thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. “Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.” ...

Of course this isn't true of everyone. Many of us here try to live without the greed of grasping for more, more, more, and in self-awareness of our desires. I think there'a a liberal idealism that is a "two candy bars later" instead of "one candy bar now". In academe, I figure this explains why liberals are over-represented....we could have made more money on Wall Street or medicine, but there is more than those financial measures of success. THe scientists I least like amongst my colleagues are those who have fallen in love with their fame.

But we are definitely swimming against the tide.

I am tired to death of Californians who want someone else to pay for what they want...and prison guards unions and public sector employees do have some responsibility here, as much as some corporations. No politician is willing to tell the truth or do what's best; the hyper-partisanship of our political system is inevitable when the purpose of politics is not Doing Stuff but Being Elected.

What happens when a society loses its ability to self-regulate, and insists on sacrificing its long-term interest for short-term rewards? How does the story end?

“We could regulate ourselves if we chose to think about it,” Whybrow says. “But it does not appear that is what we are going to do.” Apart from that remote possibility, Whybrow imagines two outcomes. The first he illustrates with a true story, which might be called the parable of the pheasant.

Last spring, on sabbatical from the University of Oxford, he was surprised to discover that he was able to rent an apartment inside Blenheim Palace, the Churchill family home. The previous winter at Blenheim had been harsh, and the pheasant hunters had been efficient; as a result, just a single pheasant had survived in the palace gardens. This bird had gained total control of a newly seeded field. Its intake of food, normally regulated by its environment, was now entirely unregulated: it could eat all it wanted, and it did. The pheasant grew so large that, when other birds challenged it for seed, it would simply frighten them away. The fat pheasant became a tourist attraction and even acquired a name: Henry. “Henry was the biggest pheasant anyone had ever seen,” says Whybrow. “Even after he got fat, he just ate and ate.” It didn’t take long before Henry was obese. He could still eat as much as he wanted, but he could no longer fly. Then one day he was gone: a fox ate him.

The other possible outcome was only slightly more hopeful: to hit bottom. To realize what has happened to us—because we have no other choice. “If we refuse to regulate ourselves, the only regulators are our environment,” says Whybrow, “and the way that environment deprives us.” For meaningful change to occur, in other words, we need the environment to administer the necessary level of pain.

But will that be enough?

Political regression

2011-10-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

Are we finally "as mad as hell and not going to take it any more"? Are we finally going to reclaim our country? Robert Reich contrasts progressive and regressive movements, and the attempts to drag us back into the horrors of the Gilded Age.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.

They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants….

In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.

Nicholas Kristoff points out some facts:

The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.
The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.

Here are some actual data

Kristoff goes on:

More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder. Of the 100 highest-paid chief executives in the United States in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their company paid in federal corporate income taxes, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. …

I believe that over the last couple of centuries banks have enormously raised living standards in the West by allocating capital to more efficient uses. But anyone who believes in markets should be outraged that banks rig the system so that they enjoy profits in good years and bailouts in bad years.

And far from helping us, this inequality is a hindrance. The IMF, hardly a socialist bastion, reports that increased inequality impedes growth

In fact equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth. The difference between countries that can sustain rapid growth for many years or even decades and the many others that see growth spurts fade quickly may be the level of inequality. Countries may find that improving equality may also improve efficiency, understood as more sustainable long-run growth.

This is the context in which to view Occupy Wall Street (OWS)., Sally Kohn opines at Fox News:

The key isn’t what protesters are for but rather what they’re against -- the gaping inequality that has poisoned our economy, our politics and our nation.

In America today, 400 people have more wealth than the bottom 150 million combined. That’s not because 150 million Americans are pathetically lazy or even unlucky. In fact, Americans have been working harder than ever -- productivity has risen in the last several decades. Big business profits and CEO bonuses have also gone up. Worker salaries, however, have declined.

Most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters aren’t opposed to free market capitalism. In fact, what they want is an end to the crony capitalist system now in place, that makes it easier for the rich and powerful to get even more rich and powerful while making it increasingly hard for the rest of us to get by. The protesters are not anti-American radicals. They are the defenders of the American Dream, the decision from the birth of our nation that success should be determined by hard work not royal bloodlines.

Why is this so hard for us to understand?

Update: Dr Primrose highlights this table, from the article I cited above on Wealth, Income, and Power (This is from a sociologist at UCSC). Those at the top rank = less inequality. (GINI coeff of 1 means everyone makes the same; GINI coeff of 100 means one person gets everything.)

Table 7: Income equality in selected countries

Country/Overall Rank	Gini Coefficient
1. Sweden	23.0
2. Norway	25.0
8. Austria	26.0
10. Germany	27.0
17. Denmark	29.0
25. Australia	30.5
34. Italy	32.0
35. Canada	32.1
37. France	32.7
42. Switzerland	33.7
43. United Kingdom	34.0
45. Egypt	34.4
56. India	36.8
61. Japan	38.1
68. Israel	39.2
81. China	41.5
82. Russia	42.3
90. Iran	44.5
93. United States	45.0
107. Mexico	48.2
125. Brazil	56.7
133. South Africa	65.0

Note: These figures reflect family/household income, not individual income.

Source: Central Intelligence Agency (2010).

Protecting whose family? Roman Catholic bishops in MN and KC

2011-10-18T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Roman Catholic archdiocese in MInnesota is mobilizing against marriage, in advance of the vote on an anti-equality amendment.

Archbishop John Nienstedt sent a letter to every priest in the state at the start of October urging them to put every Catholic church in Minnesota to work passing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage....

The archbishop said it wants priests in every parish to identify a “church captain” in order to create an “ad hoc committee” in every church in the state. The “church captain” is a component of the Schubert Flint strategy used in 2008′s divisive Proposition 8 battle in California...

Nienstedt wrote [:] “The sanctity of marriage and vital role of the family is at stake. It is a firmly-held teaching of our church that a marriage is a union of a husband and a wife, and that they together are the ones suited to be a father and a mother.”

Because after all, two happily married gay people are monstrous threat to children and family, unlike the Roman Catholic hierarchy.Of course, previously, Abp Nienstedt suggested that parents should reject their gay children to save their own souls:

those who could not agree with "the teachings of the Catholic Church on homosexuality ... ought not participate in the sacramental life of the church." The archbishop added that the mothers' "eternal salvation" could depend on their adopting the church's position on homosexuality.

And then of course, there's the Church's stallwart defense of family and children in the Diocese of Kansas City

On Friday, prosecutors in Kansas City, Mo., secured an indictment from a grand jury that alleges Bishop Robert Finn neglected to inform the police for months after discovering "hundreds of disturbing images of children" on a priest's laptop in December 2010, including photographs focused on the crotch, up-skirt pictures and at least one image of a child's naked vagina. The offending priest — Shawn Ratigan — was relieved of his position as a church pastor and transferred to a convent, but neither the police, his parishioners nor parents of students at a nearby Catholic school were informed of the pictures until May 2011. In the interim, Ratigan continued to attend events involving children, including birthday parties and a first communion, and allegedly attempted to take lewd pictures of a 12-year-old girl. Finn and Ratigan have both pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.

Hypocrites.

UpdateDr Primrose points out that the Episcopal Bishop of MN has come out against the amendment. Similar to what happened in NY and before that in CA, where the contrast between TEC and RC bishops was very striking.

Update 2: yes, this is legal. Churches can campaign on social issues. TEC can campaign pro marriage, and the RC (to their credit) have typically been positive voices for the immigrants. That's not the point. The point is the double standard on children, what it means to campaign to deny non-Catholics their civil rights, and the hypocrisy of logs and motes....

Science, faith, mythos, logos

2011-10-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

It is a fact that most scientists retain a sense of wonder along with the intense curiosity that drives us to explore the world around us,regardless of our faith or lack thereof. Evangelical Fred Clark makes the case that Christians should be the most passionate scientists.

To all the many practical and pleasurable reasons anyone has to explore the sciences and to be excited and enthralled by science, evangelical Christians can add one more: It’s God’s world, God’s cosmos. God made it. God is redeeming it. God loves it. Anyone who loves God ought to love the world as well — and to love learning about the world.

We Christians ought to be famous for our love and devotion to the best, deepest, broadest and most ambitious science. We ought to be known for the same half-goofy, starry-eyed wonderment that the late Carl Sagan showed toward science.

But alas, Houston, we have a problem. He goes on

Perversely, the opposite is true. …And for American evangelical Christians the track record is even worse. American evangelicals tend to treat science as the enemy and to regard scientists as guilty until proven innocent. This is due to a host of reasons, foremost among them being the perception that evolution poses a threat to the Bible.

And so, as we move into election season, we are treated once again to the spectacle of Republican candidates for president denying evolution, climate change, and science. Think about it. People who want to be President of the US are setting themselves as deniers of rational, fact-driven evaluations. They will be making choices by treating science as just another interest group.

Physicist Karl Giberson blames the Discovery Institute

The rhetorical strategy employed by the Discovery Institute does a great disservice to American evangelicals who, understandably, are drawn to faith-friendly discussions of science. In their eagerness to dismantle scientific objections to intelligent design the Discovery Institute drives yet another wedge between evangelicals and the scientific community, making it harder for religious believers to distinguish science from pseudoscience, in particular, and real knowledge claims from fake ones in general.

The relentless assaults on the integrity of science by groups like the Discovery Institute have made it impossible for many people to understand the significance of a "scientific consensus." If the members of the National Academy of Sciences are just another political group with their own agenda -- left-wing Tea Partiers with Ph.Ds -- we are under no obligation to take them seriously. We can even compare ourselves to Galileo for opposing them, as Rick Perry did in explaining why he rejected the scientific consensus on climate change.

He goes on to explains how the attacks on evolution have led to rejection of science overall, with profound consequences for our political debate

In our new book, "The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age," historian Randall Stephens and I look at the widespread and disturbing inability of American evangelicals to distinguish between real knowledge claims, rooted in serious research and endorsed by credible knowledge communities, and pseudo-claims made by unqualified groups and leaders that offer "faith-friendly" alternatives. Across the board we find evangelical Christians attracted to indefensible views in many areas: American history (the Founding Fathers intended America to be a Christian nation), sexual orientation (you can "pray away the gay"), climate change (not happening), evolution (never happened), cosmology (Big Bang is a big joke) and even biblical studies (the bible tells us what is about to happen in the Middle East).

The tragedy is that nothing within the faith commitments of evangelicals requires the adoption of these various knowledge-denying views.

How did we get to this point? Alex Knapp steps back, after reading Karen Armstrong:

The problem is that with the success of the Enlightenment, science, and our modern culture, we seem to have discarded the idea of mythos as part of our mainstream culture. As a consequence, there are those of faith who confuse mythos with logos - that is, they read a story or sacred text and interpret what is intended to be a symbolic aspect of spiritual life and treat it literally, as though the story happened historically or happened exactly as described. And in rejecting religious belief, a lot of atheists make the same mistake.

This is not to say that I want to reject reason or science – quite the contrary! My point here is that understanding distinction between these truths of mythos and logos points the way towards realizing the compatibility of scientific and religious thought. We need them both. They don’t have to be enemies, as they represent different aspects of the human search for truth.

Philosopher John Gray agrees:

If you go back to St. Augustine or before, to the Jewish scholars who talk about these issues, they never regard the Genesis story as a theory. Augustine says explicitly that it should not be interpreted explicitly, that it's a way of accessing truths which can't really be formulated by the human mind in any rational way. It's a way of accessing mysterious features which will remain mysterious. So it was always seen right up to the rise of modern science—as a myth, not a theory."

I wonder if it is significant that the science-denying Biblical literalists tend to be from a very different practice of Christianity. It seems to me that mainline Protestants and Catholics are more comfortable in balancing "the mysteries of faith" and the concrete facts of the real world. Think about trans-substantiation: that's simply wild as a concept. To believe in that is to believe in a sort of suspension of "real" world laws, that is so extreme, that of course it's in a different realm. Christian faith traditions that are full of paradox and mystery are by this argument, far more able to keep faith and science apart, rather than attempting to impose black-white conformity. Because if there has to be conformity, as in the more literalist views, then religion and science really are the same thing.

John Gray agrees

What these creationists are doing is retreating, they're accepting the view of religion promoted by scientific enemies of religion, and saying, no, we have got science and it's better than your science.

And of course, black and white conformity is what the anti-thesists offer as well--those are the ones I would call "scientific enemies of religion". (As we have discussed before at some length, most scientists are simply not interested in religion or faith issues, so this is not a science v. religion, much as Dawkins and his ilk might like to make it so.)

Whether these experiences are simply all in our heads (as in the patterns of neuronal behavior) or not is, in the end, utterly irrelevant. Can we experience mystery, ambiguity, and transcendence, yet still recognize the facts of the "real world"? I believe that we can, and must. After all, a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

An anniversary

2011-10-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
-Lao Tzu

Today is our 3rd wedding anniversary. Despite all the claims, it seems we did not wreck the institution of marriage, nor cause the decline of responsible child-bearing, nor eradicate religious freedom, nor push the planets from their courses. Maybe next year.

But it continues to have an amazing impact on me. Recently, I posted this in the comments of another blog:

I can attest that the fact of marriage was revelatory to me. Yes, our long term relationship was strong, and we willingly worked to keep it so (since every relationship takes work). But with marriage, that work becomes something profound and beautiful, something that lifts us up beyond ourselves so that the "we" truly becomes greater than the sum of "you" and "me", and further weaves us into the tapestry of community in a way that simply living together never could.

Every day, I feel blessed to be married to my Beloved.

Blog note: this is the 1000th post here at FoJ. We're traveling, so blogging will be light from me for a while (though I've queued a couple of things up for you).

The politics of destruction

2011-10-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan:

To me, from the zero GOP votes for the first stimulus, the last three years have been an exercize in calculated, cynical, partisan destruction. The Republicans greeted a Democratic president eager to reach to conservatives as a Jihadist Marxist they would try to destroy at all costs. They've stuck with the message through thick and thin.

Right now, the obvious strategy for emerging from the economic soup is short-term stimulus combined with a Grand Bargain on spending and taxes for long-term fiscal retrenchment. But this would improve the economy in the next year and so hurt Republican chances to regain the White House and Senate. Hence its evaporation. It is far more important for the GOP that Obama lose his job than that more Americans should save theirs' - even if it means voting against proposals they have endorsed in the past.

For a decade, the Grand Bargain concept was taken seriously by both sides. Then after Obama's election, the GOP decided to go for broke on keeping revenues deeply depressed, while offering politically impossible proposals to end Medicare as an entitlement or abolish social security. And short term, it worked.

Long term, once voters really assess the choice next year? I'm not so sure.

I'm less hopeful than Sullivan. It's not clear to me that, should Obama win a second term, anything will change.

Occupying Wall Street

2011-10-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

Many bloggers and pundits are arguing that the #OccupyWallStreet movement is the start of something big, potentially transformative, that will give us our best chance of wresting our desitny out of the control of the corporate oligarchs, and restore our democracy.

Or is is going to be a brief flash in the pan, with no lasting effects?

I'd like to think the former. I fear the latter. One of my metrics is how many of the privileged college students on my campus really get involved, or whether most will continue their lives of self-absorption. So far, there's not a lot of activity. College students ain't what they used to be.

RMJ at Adventus

The Occupy Wall Street "movement" seems to be less about recreating the democratic republic in miniature, and more about reclaiming the ancient Greek ideal of "democracy." It is not unknown in this country, the idea that democracy means listening to all the voices of all the people. The man standing at the town hall meeting is a citizen entitled to be heard like very other citizen, where the vote is a consensus of those gathered, not the decision of representatives. If Occupy Wall Street doesn't have one message to convey, that is because it is conveying a message by what it is rather than just by what it says. Ironically, in this web-linked and internet besotted age, actions still speak louder than words. And trying to reduce actions to words is as much a distortion as trying to reduce the parables of Jesus to simply moral homilies.

Richard Eskow at HuffPo

How do you end insanity? By seeing the reality as it is - not by seeing parts of the truth, but by seeing the whole. You start by seeing that we're being run by, and manipulated by, a system. It's a corporate system that drives our politics, our news, and even our entertainment. You begin to see it as a system that's overthrown our basic values and discarded our basic sense of decency, replacing themwith an exaltation of consumerism and a condemnation of the unfortunate.

People have been waiting for someone to connect the dots. They've been waiting for someone to explain how these forces act together and work totether to exploit us. They want to know how and why they'e been losing their wealth, their security, and even their self-esteem.

The #OccupyWallSt protestors are succeeding. They're carrying the message - and they're being heard. They've won over the Transit Workers Union, the Airline Pilots Union, the SEIU, and - in an echo of Tahrir Square - soldiers in uniform who are willing to defend them. You don't do that by proposing a financial transactions tax, as important as that is. You do that by demanding an end to the insanity, the madness that's being manufactured and distributed every day by the leaders of corporate America.

Douglas Rushkoff at CNN:

The members of Occupy Wall Street may be as unwieldy, paradoxical, and inconsistent as those of us living in the real world. But that is precisely why their new approach to protest is more applicable, sustainable and actionable than what passes for politics today. They are suggesting that the fiscal operating system on which we are attempting to run our economy is no longer appropriate to the task. They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture.

And in the process, they are pointing the way toward something entirely different than the zero-sum game of artificial scarcity favoring top-down investors and media makers alike.

Keep "thinking different"

2011-10-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

The Idols we Worship

2011-10-04T11:05:00.001-07:00

GO here for the stories, heartbreaking stories: WE are the 99 percent.

Troy Davis and Jamey Rodemeyer: By A Jury Of Our Peers

2011-10-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

JCF points us at this essay about the deaths our society sanctions:

Troy and Jamey may not stand in line together in heaven, but they stand together in history; tried, convicted, and ultimately bullied and betrayed.

Bullying is about entitlement; who belongs and who doesn’t, who can be “othered.” I was ganged up on that day in 4th grade because I was new to the school; I didn’t belong. The image of Troy and Jamey stays in my mind, and begs the question: Who is the face of America? One of the reasons that Michelle Bachmann can be so smug, despite what was once considered the fringe politics of the Tea Party, is that in her whiteness and privilege, her belief is unshakeable that she is America. She owns; blacks and gays are renting. The only way out of this hell is for those of us who have been marginalized to insist on visibility, to find solidarity and stand together....

Troy Davis and Jamey Rodemeyer are dead, both killed at the hands of the State, and the sad news, beyond the fact that no one saved them, is that no one is going to save us, either. And as horrifying as it is to consider, we all know: Troy Davis will not be the last person executed on Death Row who may be innocent, Jamey Rodemeyer won’t be the last gay child to take his life. And the bullies will thrive, and will continue to thrive until gay white men and women will say, “I am Troy Davis”; and blacks — rich and poor, Christian and secular — step out front and say, “We won’t allow you to bully our gay children anymore. I am Jamey Rodemeyer”....

Everyone is essential. There is no one who can be thrown away. And we who are called different will not be “othered” any longer. We stand together. We are America. And the day will come when we all realize there is no “Them”; there never was. It always is, and always will be, “Us.”

Do the faithful need atheists?

2011-09-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

An article in the Washington Post yesterday discussed the concept of Judaism without God.

"Atheism and Judaism are not contradictory, so to have an atheist in a Jewish congregation isn’t an issue or a challenge or a problem,” Shrogin said. “It is par for the course. That is what Judaism is. It is our tradition to question God from top to bottom.” ….

Unlike other religions, Judaism has often embraced its atheist strain. ...And because Judaism is not dogmatic — unlike Christianity and Islam, there is no creed to adhere to — atheists can be open about their lack of belief and still belong to a synagogue….

“An individual who attends synagogue, participates in Jewish communal affairs, and contributes heavily to Jewish charities would undoubtedly be considered a very fine Jew, without asking questions about whether or not that person believed in God.”

Clearly I'm not a Christian. But am I an Episcopalian? I go to church regularly with my wife, we give to the church, and I perform service. Yet I don't believe in any of the creed or the rituals. This article argues that people like me might actually be a benefit to a congregation.

Recently a number of blogs have engaged in their regular pastime of bashing of atheists, by which they mean, Richard Dawkins, for having the temerity to say he doesn't read theology.

Why should he? He's decided that God is a fictional construct, and to him, telling him he has to read theology to decide that is like telling someone they can't criticize StarTrek without reading the elaborate world of fake background developed in the Star Trek handbook I saw on the table at Barnes and Nobel recently. You may not agree with him, but it's consistent with his worldview.

A couple thoughts come from this tiresome Dawkins-bashing.

First, when you go off on "atheists", you are implying that there is no place for the faithless in your churches. And before you say "why would a faithless person come to church?" go read my ruminations on the subject. (We won't even address whether there's room for the "spiritual but not religious".... ;-)

Second, I don't know why you pay any attention to Dawkins. After all, whenever people point to Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps or James Dobson, you are more than ready to dismiss them as not representative of "real" Christians. Pay no attention to the man behind the microphone! But you're all very ready to announce, condescendingly, "I don't believe in the God Dawkins doesn't believe in either." Well, bully.

But lots of "Christians" do believe in that God and so far, they are the ones winning the cultural debate on defining Christianity for the rest of us. As lovely and charming and inclusive as you may feel inside your church, it appears no one is paying attention to you outside. See, you're not "Christian" -- not the way Fox news and Mike Huckabee get away with defining it. And in part, it's you letting them do the defining--not as individuals necessarily, but as an institution.

Two recent articles are worth contemplating in this regard. JCF pointed us to this article by Wayne Besen, calling liberal Christians to task for not fighting back. And Leonardo Ricardo pointed us to this article from Bilerico that says much the same thing.

I would enourage you to stop worrying about Dawkins and the faithless, and start worrying about your fellow Christians. That's a much harder conversation to have--but a far more important one.

And meanwhile, consider that WaPo article. Is there a place for, or even a need for, atheists in church?

Marriage Equality in the UK

2011-09-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

No wonder Rowan wants to retire. Alex Massie writes:

It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer. Doubtless it remains the case that religious Britons are, all other matters being equal, more likely to vote Conservative. But as far as civil marriage is concerned, there is no need to pander to the objections of a faithful minority. Indeed, Britain is a largely secular society these days and, at least as far as same-sex relationships are concerned, a much more civilized place than was the case in years gone by.....

Moreover, civil partnerships—a step forward as they may once have been—still fall short of full equality. Eliminating this discrepancy—it seems likely that Cameron's commission will recommend scrapping civil partnerships—removes the stigma, however minor it may have seemed to some, of second-class status.

The churches may disagree. But there's no reason to grant them a veto over the civil definition of marriage. It is unlikely churches will be compelled to recognize gay marriages any more than a Roman Catholic priest must be cheerfully expected to officiate at a Protestant marriage ceremony. Though often conflated, the civil and religious stamps of approval are different, and the latter need not be expected for every brand of civil marriage.

Indeed. So we have the ludicrous and very insulting view of the C of E denying legal rights and refusing to perform legal ceremonies, and seeking to prevent marriage equality, which means that even denominations who approve are not allowed to perform such ceremonies. Moreover, the CofE are asking embarrassing questions of candidates for Bishop about sex. This is a fast track to true irrelevance, as can be seen in this recent poll of religious belief in the UK.

40% of adults professed no religion, 55% were Christian and 5% of other faiths – age made a major difference, with only 38% of the 18-34s being Christian and 53% having no religion, whereas for the over-55s the figures were 70% and 26% respectively
11% of respondents claimed to attend a religious service once a month or more, 27% less often, and 59% never – non-attendance was higher among the young (62% for the 18-34s) than the old (54% for the over-55s) and among manual workers (62%) than non-manuals (56%), while London had the best figure for monthly or more attendance (16%)
72% agreed and 15% disagreed that religion is used as an excuse for bigotry and intolerance, with a high of 81% in Scotland where sectarianism has often been rife
40% agreed (rising to 46% of men and 44% of 18-34s) and 39% disagreed that religion is incompatible with modern scientific knowledge

Can you spell

DISESTABLISHMENT?

I knew you could!

Government regulation: does it block progress?

2011-09-24T21:18:00.000-07:00

The profit-over-everything motive has led to the excesses of factory farming and food production, and the loss of drugs that are simply not profitable enough.

Grandmere Mimi discusses the loss of chemotherapeutics because there's just not enough money in it for Big Pharm. Let's face it: pharma wants money, and orphan diseases and generic cancer drugs are not profitable. There has to be some subsidy or motivation for them.

Is it all regulation? Oh, evil government, preventing companies from providing products! With the Republican mantra of "less regulation",we've endured summers of Salmonella in the egg supply, traced to un-inspected facilities, and bad sprouts,and contaminated tomates. This is the result of the "less government" mantra that the right wingers are promoting. This is why people are getting sick. In countries where people can buy antibiotics without prescriptions, they no longer work--because overuse leads to resistance.

It's fashionable to blame that Big Bad Government for this. So let me tell you a story.

Back in the 1950s, pregnant women in Europe and Canada were offered a new drug to counteract morning sickness. It worked! And it was widely prescribed.It was never approved by the FDA in this country, however. An FDA inspector, Dr. Frances Kelsey, had some suspicions about it. Free samples had been sent out, but the data seemed incomplete to her--and no one had followed up on the babies born after its use. Although she was pushed by her superiors and the drug company to approve it, she stood her ground. And it was good that she did.

The drug was thalidomide, and it was a potent teratogen that disrupted normal development. Soon enough, children were born in Europe, Australia, and Canada who had no legs, and flippers in place of arms, and this was linked to the new wonder-drug. The approval process was halted in the US, and the drug was withdrawn by 1962 in other countries. The government in the US did its job. It protected the people, and saved countless children from severe defects.

I wonder if anyone ever apologized to Dr Kelsey.

In recent years, thalidomide has been redeemed for usage in leprosy and multiple myeoloma. However, strong safeguards are in place to prevent its administration to women who are or could be pregnant, to prevent further congenital birth defects.

Our system works by checks and balances. Our government works this way (or used to): executive balances legislative balances judicial. The regulatory processes of government balance the profit driven motives of industry.

The key is the balance.

Abolishing regulations completely is good for business. It is generally bad for people. Ask the kids who grew up limbless if the profits were worth it.

Growing support for marriage equality in young evangelicals

2011-09-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

From the HuffPo: (my emphases)

We should not be surprised that a new poll indicates that almost half (44 percent) of young evangelical Christians between the ages of 18 to 29 favor same-sex marriage. ...

Doing our theological and ethical thinking with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other leaves us with decisions we need to make. Either gay and lesbian individuals are persons who have chosen to intentionally rebel against God by deciding to romantically love another of the same gender in defiance of God's will or else they are another group within the rich diversity of humanity that God intends to liberate, treat justly and fairly, reconcile, and include. ...

More than 40 years ago, the Anglican theologian Norman Pittenger addressed these questions in his book entitled "Time for Consent." He argued on the basis of the biblical revelation in Christ that sexual behavior must be judged by its character alone. Is it characterized by commitment and trust, tenderness, respect for the other and the desire for ongoing and responsible communion with the other? Or, conversely, is it characterized by selfish sexual expression, cruelty, impersonal sex, obsession with sex and an unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences? He argued that both gay and straight people desire and need deep and lasting relationships and that appropriate sexual expression should not be denied to either group. He argued that there should not be a double standard of morality, introducing the concept of moral equality -- not judging two different groups by different standards of morality.

The Bible is deeply sensitive to double standards. Some of Jesus' harshest criticisms are reserved for those who lay heavy burdens on the backs of others that they themselves are unwilling to carry (Matt. 23:4). The attempts to use a few verses in the Bible to justify a double standard for straight and gay people will not withstand a careful and thoughtful reading of the Bible.

I believe young, thoughtful evangelicals are discovering this not as a result of the culture blinding them but as a result of the Bible opening their eyes to the dishonesty and hypocrisy of straight Christians who claim for themselves the blessings and comforts of marriage while denying it to others.

Politicizing the pulpit

2011-09-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

Churches and religious groups have substantial tax exemptions. While they are allowed to advocate on general issues, they are not allowed to advocate for particular candidates. Thus, there is a fine line between preaching and politicking.

A recent article in the LA Times examines efforts on the religious right to challenge those rules. Basically, they want to keep their tax exemptions, while being able to advocate explicitly for candidates and viewpoints. The net effect of this is a tax-payer subsidy to their political views.

This new activism has substantial muscle behind it: a cadre of experienced Christian organizers and some of the conservative movement's most generous donors, who are setting up technologically sophisticated operations to reach pastors and their congregations in battleground states....

Both Republican and Democratic strategists say that pastors have already helped unleash an army of voters to shape the GOP primary contests in Iowa and South Carolina, two states with large numbers of conservative Christians. They are making plans to do the same in states that are even more important to next year's general election. Those include Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Virginia and Colorado, where evangelical voters make up about a quarter of the electorate and their participation could greatly aid Republicans.

What happens when a church becomes a political advocacy organization more than a church? One of the pastors profiled in the article admits that some of his longtime parishioners with different political views have left the parish. But he doesn't care: he is fired up with politics.

If this seems like an attack on the rules that separate church and state, it is a very deliberate one.

As pastors speak out on political matters, they've drawn admonitions from groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which warns that such activism could jeopardize their churches' nonprofit status. But the religious leaders are bolstered by well-funded Christian legal organizations supporting their cause.

The most prominent — the Alliance Defense Fund, a group based in Scottsdale, Ariz., that spent $32 million in fiscal year 2010 — is challenging a 1954 tax code amendment that prohibits pastors, as leaders of tax-exempt organizations, from supporting or opposing candidates from the pulpit. The group sponsors Pulpit Freedom Sunday, in which it offers free legal representation to churches whose pastors preach about political candidates and are then audited by the Internal Revenue Service. (So far, no IRS investigations have been triggered.)

I'm sure I don't have to remind this audience of the IRS investigation of All Saints Pasadena a few years ago for preaching an anti-war sermon. Seems the rules are different for the right wing.

And since Rep Bachmann and Gov Perry are making explicit their connections to the religious right wing in their efforts to win the Republican nomination, I suspect we'll see even more of this.

Indeed the connections are already deep between the religious right-wing and the politicians, as Congressional staffers are sent to be trained by them.

This spring, four House Republicans used money from their Congressional office accounts to send five staff members to a training seminar run by a conservative Christian group in Indiana that is leading the charge in the state for an amendment to ban gay marriage.

Apparently, this is perfectly legal. So the reports of the demise of the religious right as a political force are decidedly premature.

JCF points us to an essay by Wayne Besen bemoaning the absence of liberal Christians to push back against this mobilization, as media and popular culture allow the fundies to speak for Christians.

Time and again, I’m disillusioned by the lack of support from liberal and mainstream Christian organizations. It seems they are either afraid to offend their most conservative members or they are mired in passivity that allows extremists to define their faith.

This lack of coherent opposition has led to a dire situation where Religious Right backed presidential candidates are vying to eliminate or reduce social safety nets, persecute immigrants, undermine working people, shred the middle class, turn the poor into destitute beggars, and roll back minority rights.

This reluctance to stand up and speak out has created a hazardous vacuum where only the shrill and unreasonable voices of fundamentalism are heard. Instead of the dialogue that many progressives of faith claim to desire, this perceived weakness creates a lopsided right wing monologue, which is having a deleterious effect on our nation and the world.

So, let's discuss.

What is the proper place of politicking from the pulpit?
Should churches enjoy tax-exemption while becoming explicitly political?
Are liberal Christians really absent from the fray?

The Marriage Vow

2011-09-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

Pat Robertson opened a can of worms with his recent response to a question about a man whose wife has Alzheimer's disease.

“I know it sounds cruel...but if he’s going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over again, but to make sure she has custodial care, somebody looking after her.”

Now, I remember this part in the marriage vow where we pledged to stay together "in sickness and in health" but of course I'm just a godless homosexual destroying marriage as we know it.

It gets better.

[Robertson] said the question presented an ethical dilemma beyond his ability to answer. “I certainly wouldn’t put a guilt trip on you if you decided that you had to have companionship,” Mr. Robertson said, apparently suggesting divorce as a way to avoid the sin of adultery.

That makes it even worse, in my opinion. Do you remember Robertson and his buddies running on about the tragic Terry Schiavo case? They certainly excoriated Schiavo's husband for "moving on". Seems Mr Robertson's views are rather fungible depending on who is doing the asking.

Unquestionably, this is a heart-rending issue and has many complexities, legal and financial as well as ethical and personal. But suggesting divorce should not be the first instinct of anyone.

Sandra Weintraub, professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Alzheimer’s center of the Northwestern University school of medicine, said that many people develop new relationships while caring for a spouse in the last stages of Alzheimer’s, but that advising them to seek a divorce “strikes me as ludicrous.”

Dr. Weintraub said that someone in Mr. Robertson’s public position should refrain from telling others how to solve such a complex problem.

Ya think?

And these people claim to value marriage so much that they deny it to faithful, loving gay couples.

Humor break: Thurifer today

2011-09-16T13:59:00.000-07:00

Discrimination against white Americans?

2011-09-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

Last week, the Brookings Institute and the Public Religion Research Institute released a report based on a new survey, asking about diversity in America on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. In amongst the expected questions about opinions of Islam and immigration, there is this gem:

Nearly half (46 percent) of Americans agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. A slim majority (51 percent) disagree.
•A slim majority of whites agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups, compared to only about 3-in-10 blacks and Hispanics who agree.
•Approximately 6-in-10 Republicans and those identifying with the Tea Party agree that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups.
•Nearly 7-in-10 Americans who say they most trust Fox News say that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. In stark contrast, less than 1-in-4 Americans who most trust public television for their news agree."

I admit to being flabbergasted. i don't know how any white American can possibly imagine they suffer discrimination anything similar to a black person in this country. I just don't.

It's right up there with the idea that Christians are somehow victimized, despite being a clear majority. And then there's this:

More than 8-in-10 (83 percent) Americans say that self-proclaimed Christians who commit acts of violence in the name of Christianity are not really Christians. In contrast, less than half (48 percent) of Americans say that self-proclaimed Muslims who commit acts of violence in the name of Islam are not really Muslims.

Got that? So Anders Breivik, who massacred his fellow Norwegians and justified it by his Western Christian culture, isn't REALLY a Christian, but Mohammad Atta, who flew a plane into the WTC, is a stalwart Muslim.

I despair.

The Unexpected Face of the Faithful (II)

2011-09-13T15:00:00.000-07:00

We've discussed how the more educated surprisingly are more likely to attend church. Another study found that while religious attendance is dropping overall, it is dropping faster in less educated whites.

“Our study suggests that the less-educated are dropping out of the American religious sector, similarly to the way in which they have dropped out of the American labor market,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, who was lead researcher on the project…..

The study focuses on white Americans because church attendance among blacks and Latinos is less divided by education and income.

So, while many tend to think that religion is the pablum for the uneducated masses, that's too simplistic a view.

Lower church attendance among the less-educated may stem from a disconnect between them and modern church values, the study theorizes.

Religious institutions tend to promote traditional middle-class family values like education, marriage and parenthood, but less-educated whites are less likely to get or stay married and may feel ostracized by their religious peers, the researchers said.

The researchers expressed concern about the falloff in church attendance among the less-educated.

“This development reinforces the social marginalization of less educated Americans who are also increasingly disconnected from the institutions of marriage and work,” said Andrew Cherlin, co-author of the study and a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University.

This concern makes sense. A few weeks ago, I described how the bad economy is affecting marriage, particularly amongst those most likely to be suffering. And those are largely red-state citizens. Less likely to be married. Less likely to go to church. And the less educated you are, the more likely you are to be jobless.

These observations suggest a segment of American society that is falling further behind, losing social cohesion and connection. It's not surprising they are angry and resentful. They may still identify as Christian, but it's a tribal identity, rather than a religious one. And it's a recipe for social disaster.

The unexpected face of the faithful (I)

2011-09-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

Recently a number of studies have described addressing who, exactly,is going to church. And the results may surprise you.

One study shows that more educated white Americans are actually MORE likely to attend church regularly.

….with each additional year of education:

•The likelihood of attending religious services increased 15%.
•The likelihood of reading the Bible at least occasionally increased by 9%.
•The likelihood of switching to a mainline Protestant denomination - Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian USA or United Methodist - increased by 13%.
...

“The more educated a person is in their faith, the more cosmopolitan they are in their religious outlook,” [D. Michael Lindsay] said. “They’re worldly in the very best sense of the term. They rub shoulders with people of different kinds of faiths every day and as a result they have different visions of what it means to express your faith in the public square.”

“They’re more open-minded, but here’s the thing: They’re no less faithful.”

Of course, fundamentalists would probably rail at these more educated believers, who are able to grasp allegory, paradox, and mystery without wanting it all laid out in black and white. One might say, a more mature faith.

And while we're at it, let's address the stereotype that people in my profession (science) are all Godless atheists. In fact, studies show a surprising number of my colleagues are amongst those in the pews. Elaine Ecklund of Rice University has examined religion in the science profession, looking specifically at faculty at major research universities--that means doctoral level scientists. Of 1700 surveys, she interviewed 275 closely. From a review of her recent book, Science v. Religion:

Fully half of these top scientists are religious. Only five of the 275 interviewees actively oppose religion. Even among the third who are atheists, many consider themselves "spiritual." One describes this spiritual atheism as being rooted in "wonder about the complexity and the majesty of existence," a sentiment many nonscientists -- religious or not -- would recognize. By not engaging with religion more fully and publicly, "the academy is really doing itself a big disservice," worries one scientist. ….

I'm not interested in the "spiritual but not religious" identification which has been contentious on other blogs . Rather, I'd like you to focus on the fully half of the top scientists who consider themselves religious--including Francis Collins, the head of the NIH.

In an article in the WaPo, Ecklund expands on her findings:

It turns out that nearly 50 percent of scientists identify with a religious label, and nearly one in five is actively involved in a house of worship, attending services more than once a month.....

Unfortunately...most religious scientists do not feel comfortable talking about their scientific lives within their faith communities. They think discussing science within their house of worship might offend fellow parishioners who are not scientists. So they do not bring it up. Instead, they practice what I call "secret science."...[A]nother poll shows that 25 percent of Americans think scientists are hostile to religion...

Ya think? THose stereotypes will bite you every time.

In any case, it is clear that the stereotype that religion is the pablum for the uneducated masses is not correct. THese studies show that highly educated people, including scientists, are active in their faith communities. I'm going to guess that those tend towards particular TYPES of faith communities, such as those represented here on this blog, not those of rigid fundamentalist bent.

(Incidentally, I don't consider myself spiritual in the least. Nor do I consider myself religious. On the other hand, I do go to church with my wife every week, though at times I admit to finding it rather tedious--particularly when the music program is on summer hiatus. But it's such an important part of BP's life that it's important to me to be with her and share what I can.)

So much for the educated. What's happening to those with less education? Why are they NOT attending church? My next post will look at that issue.

Remember

2011-09-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

Art Speigelman's cover, from Counterlight's blog

Into the dark: the San Diego blackout, social media, and being prepared.

2011-09-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

A little before 4pm yesterday, BP telephoned me to tell me that the power was out at her workplace. "We think it's out all over this mesa", she said. "Can you see what you can find out?"

I was standing on a platform at Los Angeles Union Station waiting to board a southbound Amtrak train. Equipped with my trusty iPhone, I went to the internet: first, going to the San Diego Gas and Electric outage website. I couldn't load it. Uh-oh, I thought. THAT can't be good.

There was nothing on the websites yet for either San Diego paper (the Union Tribune, or the North County Times). So I turned to Twitter, performed a search for "SDGE", and immediately saw a flood of tweets complaining about the outage, that was a geography lesson of San Diego. El Centro, El Cajon. La Jolla, Hillcrest. Encinitas, Escondido. Oceanside. All the way across the Mexican border into Baja California in the south, and up into Laguna Niguel, in Orange County. Reports east as far as Yuma,AZ.

I phoned BP back. "It's huge," I said, "looks like the whole county, and SDGE has no idea what happened or when it will be fixed. I'll keep you posted!" And I got on the train and headed south. Slowly, word spread through the railcar about the blackout as commuters phoned home. One guy played the news on his laptop (glad I don't have to pay for HIS wireless data plan!)

I figured that both the iPhone and the train would stop when we reached the region of the blackout. While i am creative in dealing with commute problems, I know my limits, and assumed it would be a long night with this one. Amtrak trains have food, water, and beer, and their own power, so even if we got stuck, it would't be too bad. To my surprise, however, both Verizon and Amtrak kept going. Seems trains do not rely on the local utility for power on the switches and signals (although they did have to go very slowly for crossings). And while my 3G network became spotty at times, and some calls got dead air, I was able to stay online and follow #SDblackout and #SDoutage for news. (ATT apparently wasn't so lucky.)

I stayed in contact with BP till her work phone went out. She would head home before dark and pull the manual handle on our garage door, open up the camping gear, and pull out some battery lanterns, and locate the campstove and hand-cranked radio. She would check on our elderly neighbor. I would make it home when I could. Fortunately, unlike eastern San Diego which is scorching, we live near the coast, and while it was hot, it wasn't unbearable (we don't have or need A/C). We have about 10 gallons of water stored and while it's no doubt stale, it's still potable. I phoned my mom and emailed my brothers in Northern California to tell them we were fine. BP was able to contact the kids and close friends to make sure everyone was safe.

I was able to follow the news conference that informed us the 500kV transmission line in from Arizona had gone down, and that had taken down the San Onofre nuclear power plant that provided the other major line into SDG&E. 1.4 million SDGE customers were without power just from SDG&E. Note that figure doesn't count the many who are not "SDGE customers" -- not every individual pays a utility bill, and a household may have many members. Over 3 million people live in San Diego county. The impact was far greater than 1.4million in terms of people affected, and many more were impacted in other regions as "collateral damage" as far east as New Mexico and south into Baja California. Some news sites estimated over 5 million people were without power.

Twitter was invaluable in this. While eventually the main web pages of the LA Times and the San Diego papers picked it up, the active tweets from SDGE and local folks were much more helpful. The CBS affiliate (CBS8/KFMB) tweeted the SDG&E news conference and other information.

However, as with any live and unverified information, a grain of salt must be taken. One breathless tweet said falsely that there had been explosions at powerplants at the Salton Sea, which lies at the far east of San Diego in the desert. This did get picked up by a few other twitterers, but most ignored it since the news didn't say anything. While I know everyone was thinking "terrorism?" everyone was also very calm.

As the train ran along the beach, surfers were still in the water watching the sun set. The train eventually arrived at my station about 1 hour late, in deep twilight. A man standing behind me fretted over whether he would find a taxi to his hotel , and another passenger immediately offered him a ride. While much of the area was gridlocked traffic-wise, I was fortunate that my route was not too bad. Amazingly, the Google Maps app on my iPhone was able to tell me the traffic--apparently, the traffic sensors in the freeways also are independent of SDG&E. However, at the intersections with the dead signals, far too many cars blew through without stopping.

When I got home, BP had candles and lanterns out and the house looked warm and inviting. The neighbors were lingering outside, and looking at the stars. There was a bright moon. We decided to keep the fridge closed, and ate fresh, home tomatoes with sorrel and basil from the garden, with smoked oysters and white wine. We listened to the news conference on our hand-cranked radio. The cat enjoyed pacing the garden in the darkness, lit only by some wimpy outside solar lights. We went to bed, kinda hoping that the power would stay out for a power-outage day off work tomorrow. We could grill something from the freezer! Cook up stuff on our campstove!

Alas, we were awakened at 2.45am by the cat urping up the grass he had eaten outside, and discovered the lights on. So much for a power-outage day off work.

The best news is that everyone did what they were supposed to. There was no looting or criminality. People helped their neighbors (the elderly lady next door had a steady stream of visitors from the neighborhood checking on her). The city is up and running, albeit cautiously. Fortunately the weather is much cooler today which should ease the load.

Having the camping gear and the hand-crank radio helped us be very prepared. We did identify a problem with batteries (need to stock up with fresh ones). We want to put in more canned food, and recycle the water we are storing in the big containers in the garage.

Other people weren't so lucky. For example, a woman behind me on the train said that she couldn't get in her garage, or her house--because she deadlocked the front door from inside, since she always left through the garage, with its electric door. And of course, you can't pull the over-ride handle for the door if you can't get inside the garage. Also, due to pump failures, some of the areas of the city are under "boil" rules for their water, at least till the weekend. The airport has still not cleared out the chaos from all the cancellations and there was a massive sewage spill that will affect numerous beaches.

Still, of course, a power outage on a warm summer night is one thing. A major earthquake would be something else. We take it as a useful warning.

Now, apparently there was a speech?

Picture from the SD Union Tribune

Republican operative tells us it IS as bad as we fear

2011-09-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

When the sensible Republicans start to say the same thing as liberals like me, you KNOW we're in trouble. (H/T JCF for this one).

From the article Goodbye to all that: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. ....

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.....

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

The author goes on to enumerate the implications, and you should read them. He points out the failings of the Democrats, and the media, to provide a needed counterweight to the extremism.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. ...

2. They worship at the altar of Mars. ....

3. Give me that old time religion....

Indeed, although it seems to be common wisdom that eventually the business and religion ends of the Republican tent will separate, the author is not so sanguine.

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.

He sees clear links between the Prosperity Gospel and apocalyptic end-times thinking, with the care for the rich and the war machine.

And he left because he feared for his own retirement.

While his report is itself somewhat apocalyptic, what is missing is any sense of what to do about it....how to regain the "low information voters" from the cynical manipulation of the GOP (whose ability to make people vote against their own interest is remarkable), and how to recover a functional democracy from a political disaster.

Remember, this is a closely divided country, and not one that is going to vote in favor of a more progressive Utopia. We have to meet them where they are, which is in the middle, and expose the right wing for what it is.

Any suggestions?

The take home from the "debate"

2011-09-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

From ED Kain:

And when Perry is asked about the two-hundred and thirty some people he’s executed on death row during his governorship, the audience bursts into applause. Torture, war, and death, and this is the “pro-life” party.

I submit to you that this moment is perhaps the most telling since George W. Bush left office; that the modern Republican party is not only intellectually bankrupt, but morally bankrupt as well. The conservative movement and the Fox News and talk radio media empire it has built up around itself is not only ethically decrepit but morally atrophid. As Andrew Sullivan noted, “any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join. This is the crowd that believes in torture and executions.” Say what you will about Democrats, but no crowd of Democrats would cheer the execution of over two hundred of their fellow citizens, even if stories like that of Cameron Todd Willingham did not further blemish the record.

Really, I have nothing to add.

Photo from AP via the New Yorker

When faith and science collide: denying Galileo

2011-09-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

We are used to people using Bible verses to deny the equality of gay people. Indeed, many claim that being gay is a choice, not a variant of human biology.

But I was quite surprised to realize that there is a faction of Roman Catholics who believe that the sun revolves around the Earth.

A few conservative Roman Catholics are pointing to a dozen Bible verses and the church's original teachings as proof that Earth is the center of the universe, the view that was at the heart of the church's clash with Galileo Galilei four centuries ago.The relatively obscure movement has gained a following among those who find comfort in knowing there are still staunch defenders of early church doctrine.

And of course, it's all a plot by the Godless.

Those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that Earth revolves around the sun, is a conspiracy to squelch the church's influence.

"Heliocentrism becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system," said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. "False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today.… Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her."

What I find particularly amusing is that rampant creationists are not on board. Seems using the Bible to literally interpret one bit of science is okay, but not others.

Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., said the Bible is silent on geocentrism.

"There's a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated," Ham said.

Of course, what is sad is that any of this happens at all.

Taking away your voting rights: the new Republican strategy

2011-09-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

How do you win an election in a country that is closely divided?

You keep the other guys from voting. And THAT is a deliberate Republican strategy RIGHT NOW.

Reporting in Rolling Stone, Ari Berman exposes this campaign. It is really, really worth reading this article. (My emphases)

Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP's effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

This isn't just being noticed by Rolling Stone. EJ Dionne writes,

An attack on the right to vote is underway across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging. But it’s happening here, so there’s barely a whimper.

The laws are being passed in the name of preventing “voter fraud.” But study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem — and is less of a problem than how hard many states make it for people to vote in the first place....

Again, think of what this would look like to a dispassionate observer. A party wins an election, as the GOP did in 2010. Then it changes the election laws in ways that benefit itself. In a democracy, the electorate is supposed to pick the politicians. With these laws, politicians are shaping their electorates.

It's not just minority and elderly voters. There are active efforts in numerous states to suppress college age voters.

New Hampshire's new Republican state House speaker is pretty clear about what he thinks of college kids and how they vote. They're "foolish," Speaker William O'Brien said in a recent speech to a tea party group.

"Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do," he added....Students lack "life experience," and "they just vote their feelings."

New Hampshire House Republicans are pushing for new laws that would prohibit many college students from voting in the state - and effectively keep some from voting at all.

And if you are poor, really, should you be allowed to vote? A conservative columnist advocates disenfranchising the poor.

Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and "like handing out burglary tools to criminals."

That is the political strategy of the current Republican party. And, as they have policies that actively drive away poor, minority, or immigrant voters, it's important that they prevent those people from voting.

If you are not outraged, you are NOT paying attention.

New poll: views of gay morality, and the role of TEC

2011-08-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

Public Religion Research has published their latest poll, which shows yet again a country evenly split on marriage equality overall, but with very strong support particularly in the young. Majorities of main-line Christians and Catholics support equality, with Evangelicals and black protestants still opposed. You can read the summary as well as access all the data on their website.

So I explored the data and looked at some of their interesting questions about views of the morality of gay persons, and graphed this for you.

First, the poll asked how people viewed the morality of different sexual behaviors : sex between unmarried adults, sex between people under 18, sexting and sexual emails, and gay sex. As expected, sexual acts between gay people were disapproved of, although not quite as much as sex <18 years of age, and not near as much as sexting.

Next, I looked at their data about the acceptability of gay people in different roles in the community. These answers were broken down by the level of comfort.

I was surprised that strong majorities approved of gay people serving as police, judges (despite the Judge Vaughn Walker issue in the Prop8 case), doctors, or elected persons with relatively little "very uncomfortable" beyond a baseline 12%. Curiously, the most vehement response AGAINST anyone was the idea of a gay clergy person. That means that some number of people (around 12% or so) who have no problem with a gay policeman, are uncomfortable with a gay clergy person.

But in some respect, the most interesting data were in the views of the morality of gay persons themselves. Participants were asked to agree or disagree with various statements. I was surprised that relatively few disagreed with the statement that gays can have good moral values, or can be committed to their religion and to God. In fact, a majority agreed that gay relationships should be accepted by society. As before, there's a pretty consistent 12% who disagrees strongly with any gay-positive statements.

Where they disagreed, however, was the idea that gay relationships can be blessed by God. The baseline of 12-15% swelled to 33% who strongly disagreed with this idea. The overall disagreement totaled 47% as opposed to 45% who agreed. Thus, a substantial fraction of those who admit that gay people can have good moral values and be committed to religion, nevertheless feel that gay relationships cannot be and are not blessed by God.

From this selective analysis, I take away two broad points.
First, the marriage equality issue must be separated from the religious aspect of Holy Matrimony in the political sphere. Too many people absolutely disagree that gay couples can be blessed as a couple. Therefore, we must frame the political debate about civil marriage and educate people in how that differs. This includes explicit statements separating what people do in their faith communities from civil law. Yes, I know that they aren't necessary, but we need to make the line bright.

Second, in these and other data from the poll, there appears to be a baseline of about 12% who are completely opposed to any rights for gays, who view gays as immoral, and are always negative. These are the core opposition: the NOMmers and their like. They are not going to be moved. They are implacable foes. Where we have to fight the battle is in the moveable middle.

And that means reaching people in faith communities. Sure, over 50% of lay Catholics and mainline white Protestants are pro-marriage--but we need those numbers to be closer to 60 or even 70% if we are to achieve civil equality. Just as we all need to come out at work and at home, I believe the full participation of LGBT in churches, active participation in religious life, will help. I have to hope that seeing devoted gay couples living faithful lives together will move some of those in the middle from the slightly disagree to sort of agree columns in these polls. Simply by being us, we can make a difference.

And TEC, by recognizing us as couples like any other, could play a big part in this. I think the challenge for GC2012 will be huge: you will need to resist codifying gay relationships as "less than," and fight for the same blessing for everyone. Otherwise, you would commit the ecclesiastical equivalent of domestic partnerships for The Gay Folk. And separate is never equal.

Well, we'll see, won't we?

Update: From the mouths of babes, a great column in the SMU student newspaper (of all places)

The truth of the matter is that what we have here-to-fore referred to as "same-sex" marriage is no different than any marriage between opposite-sex couples. In both cases, two people come together in love and unity to declare, before God, their unending love for one another. It makes no difference whether it is a man and a woman, two men, or two women. Ultimately, holy matrimony derives its sanctity from the love that both partners share for one another, and not from the genitalia with which they were bestowed....

Gay men and women across the country are not fighting for "same-sex marriage;" they are fighting for "marriage."

I hope that GC2012 will make that so.

A graphical history of same sex marriage in CA

2011-08-29T17:07:00.000-07:00

There was yet another hearing today on the never ending subject of Prop8 (read more at Gay Married Californian). Since it's hard to keep track of what's gone on, I thought I'd give you a cartoon version of the saga. Click for a larger view.

A letter to Rowan

2011-08-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

We talked previously about how the legal minds of the CofE have gone to great lengths to figure out how they can ask the right questions about sex in order to ensure no problematically gay bishop is appointed. (This works only as long as those who are already appointed keep to their closets. Which is why Gay Bishops Should Come Out.)

The LGBT-led Metropolitan Community Church scolds Rowan Williams for the hair splitting.H/T to Thinking Anglicans:

We understand that the legal advice suggests that there should be no bar, per se, to gay men serving as bishops provided that they repent of any same sex activity before they entered the priesthood, have lived by the requirement to be celibate since ordination and promise to continue to be celibate.

We feel that the spectacle of the Church of England trying to avoid complying with the law is unedifying and betrays a deep unease about the wonderful diversity of human sexuality. ...

We also think the policy of requiring celibacy will simply make the Church of England look even more ridiculous and open yourselves up to the most dreadful kind of casuistry as people wonder what, exactly celibacy requires. Could, for example, a gay bishop kiss his partner? Does the bishop and his partner have to sleep in separate rooms in the episcopal palace, or would twin beds in the same room suffice? If twin beds are acceptable what would be a “celibate” distance between the beds – 5 feet, 10 feet, or opposite ends of the room? Do any lapses in this celibacy rule have to be reported and, if so, to whom? The Archbishop of the Province? Her Majesty The Queen? The Prime Minister? The Diocesan Synod or just the local press?....

We are an lgbt-led church, yet we talk far more about mission than we do about sexuality. We commend this approach to you.

Heh.

I have often said that I will be very happy to stop talking about sexuality as soon as other people stop making it an issue.

Muslim and gay

2011-08-25T05:18:00.000-07:00

Religion Dispatches has an interview with Scott Kugle, who is Muslim and gay and the author of Homosexuality in Islam: Islamic Reflection on Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Muslim Activists.

As scholar Scott Kugle knows well, to be both Muslim and gay means the possibility of having to "come out twice"—with the likely chance of encountering either homophobia or Islamophobia (or both), depending on the context.

But in recent years, a new discussion of Islam and sexuality has emerged, led in large part by professor Kugle, who teaches South Asian and Islamic Studies at Emory University. Having written many books on Islam, including Homosexuality in Islam: Islamic Reflection on Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Muslims (2010), he is currently working on a collection entitled Voices of Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Muslim Activists (forthcoming in 2012, NYU Press).

Read the interview here.

When the earth moved

2011-08-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

This image from the US Geological Survey shows you the most recent earthquakes in the "lower 48" of the USA. I know that some of you find us Californians unsympathetic, especially to those of you more distant from the epicenter, but if you look at how often the earth moves here, you'll realize why. I lived away from CA for many years and shortly after I came back, I remember being awakened one night by a shaker. My internal Richter scale calibrated it as around a 3.5 or 4 so I rolled over and went back to sleep.

There are a couple of big differences that make this experience very different for the East than the West. We build for quakes out here; I remember when I moved to the east coast I was discomfited that the labs didn't have "earthquake strips" across the shelves--these are wires strung across to keep the bottles from leaping off in a temblor. Brick isn't used here as a major building material in CA. Public buildings are built with quakes in mind, and not to survive long term, but to protect the inhabitants. Retrofitting is continuous, with big steel cross beams obvious on older structures. Cautious Californians strap their water heaters to the wall, use earthquake-resistant cupboard latches, keep water and emergency gear nearby and the camping gear accessible. We have regular earthquake drills. The east coast is simply not prepared for the once-in-100 years event; for one of us, a 5.9 is once every couple of years. (On the other hand, you know how to deal with hurricanes, which probably would freak out most left-coasters.)

The geology is different too. The younger crust in the west dampens the shake sooner, so (for example) the 7.2 Mexicali earthquake in 2010, more than 10x the magnitude of yesterday's Virginia quake, was dampened to a long, long roll in San Diego, just 100 miles away. Very noticeable, enough to roll some things off tables, but not with the sharp jerks and pitches of a nearby earthquake. Mexicali was badly damaged, but it was localized. On the other hand, a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti caused national devastation there.

Now, let's go to the doorway thing. Turns out that standing in a doorway is NOT the preferred spot. Experts recommend getting under something sturdy, like a table. On earthquake practice days, I've been known to insist that 15 people in a meeting with me crawl under the table to continue the conference when the "event" occurs. The biggest danger (particularly in houses) is stuff coming off shelves and breaking on you, not the house coming down. Keep shoes around so you aren't walking in broken glass. But running outside is much worse, because of collapsing glass and masonry. So stay inside till the shaking stops! Be prepared to survive 2-3 days with no help, and known how to turn off the water and the gas. Remember, the worst destruction in 1906 San Francisco was due to fire. (Oh yes, both my grandmothers went through that one.)

I am very glad, given the different geology, and different building codes, that everyone came through safely. I'm sad about the National Cathedral and other damaged buildings, but buildings aren't important: people are. I' m amused that the epicenter was in uber-Republican Eric Cantor's district. Remember he wants to cut funding for the USGS, along with other scientific research. Now, has anyone blamed it on the gays yet?

Ideology versus facts: the Republican rejection of reality

2011-08-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

Global warming. Evolution. Sexual orientation. Gay parents. Abstinence education. These are a few of the hot-button topics where Republicans and Democrats differ. Do you remember the last presidential election where every Republican said he didn't believe in evolution? Apparently, they really DO "make their own reality."

There's a video of Rick Perry being challenged about abstinence education, in which he obstinately insists "it works!" despite the evidence that it doesn't (like Texas having a huge, huge rate of unintended teen pregnancy).

Steve Benen shows the clip, and points out that this represents a fundamental issue in the modern Republican party.

In a case like education and lessons on sexual health, the left tends to look at this in terms of results: what works in preventing teen pregnancies and the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases? For the right, the question is philosophical: what’s consistent with their morality?

The exchange in the clip is amusing because it makes Perry look foolish, but it actually offers a peek behind the curtain: the right believes programs work, even when they don’t work, so long as ideological goals are being met. Real-world implications are meaningless.

It's quite stunning. The facts don't matter, as long as there is ideological purity.

We see this in the challenges to marriage equality, the opponents completely ignore the data. That was made abundantly clear in the Prop8 case, where they actually had to admit as much. But in court, facts DO matter, and just because you say something doesn't make it true. (This is probably one reason they are desperate to keep the tapes of the Prop8 trial hidden, since their lies were so clearly exposed).

That otherwise intelligent Republicans (a category that I do not believe includes Rick Perry) are supporting this worldview to placate their fringe is extremely disheartening. Is there no honor left in public service?

Can the intelligent Republicans really justify supporting people who at worst, lie, and at best, are intellectually challenged, and facilitate the collateral damage they will cause, for the sole purpose of power?

Road Trip! The Golden State

2011-08-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

Lupine in the meadow near the pass

This past weekend, we were invited to a cabin near Strawberry (north of Yosemite) so we drove up state and into the high country. Summer is not complete without a road trip, with BP knitting while I drive, and we sing along with the CDs.

I'm a Californian, with deep roots here. I'm 4th-generation on both sides, born in the Bay Area. I moved to the East Coast for grad school, then a few years in Europe, and got back to my state but in the south. Hey, as I told my Dad, at least I was the same time zone! When Dad died, his ashes were interred in Petaluma next to his great-grand parents -- not bad for a man of 84, with roots in the Gold Rush.

So, up we drove from Southern California. We wended our way through the tangled labyrinth of freeways, leaving the LA basin in the steep drive up the Tehachipis. The "Grapevine" is the crossing over the Tejon Pass north of LA. Although the elevation isn't that high, it's frequently closed by snow in the winter (yes, there is snow in Southern California!) and is so steep, that there isn't room for the whole freeway on one route. North bound and southbound lanes criss cross each other on opposite sides of the canyon, so for a time you drive on the "wrong" side--like a twining vine.

As you drop off the Grapevine, you see the great central valley open before you: flat and yellow. We worked our way up Highway 99 and (thanks to having the iphone) were able to call an old school friend in Fresno for dinner. We stayed the night and continued up towards the mountains.

The mountains are full of history

In the central valley, we were in Ag, Inc, with massive fields of almond trees, fruit trees, hay and corn, and big equipment. We couldn't see the mountains for the haze. But in Merced, we turned off the 99 on state 59. Now we entered the Sierra Foothills, rural ranching country. We wound our way through rolling hills of yellow grass (which I think gave the state its Golden nickname) and live oaks. When we reached the 108, at the southern edge of the Gold Country (the other source of the Golden nickename), the conifers started to come in.

Sonora Pass

4000 and 5000 ft.... the Ponderosa Pines, White Fir. The elevation ticked off and the engine whined. 6000, 7000, 8000.... The next day, we went up to see the Sonora Pass (like most of the passes, closed in the winter)-- the Red Fir, Lodgepole, and White-bark Pines, and wild flowers for which August is still Spring. The White Bark pines are only found at highest elevation. As global warming continues, most species will migrate up in elevation to seek cooler climates. But the white bark pines will expire: they have no where else to go.

I love my state, and I love the mountains. The smell of cedar and bear clover.... the color of the flowers... the rich variety of climates. On the way back down, once we got back to the Central Valley, we stopped to pick up fresh pistachios and stone fruits-- white necterines, two kinds of plums, all fresh picked--- in America's fruitbasket, hot and dry in the summer.

Looking down towards Lake Beardsley

And as we went south, the Tehachipis emerged from the haze, forming the southern boundary of the great valley. We crawled back over the Grapevine to the SoCal freeways. And, then, finally, we emerged out of the heat of the valley to the humidity of FOG in Santa Monica, the natural air conditioning of the coast. We tucked into the carpool lane in the heart of urban life, and went home, restored by our short trip to the top of the Sierras, the Range of Light.

We are hopeful we'll get to go back next summer.

The real threat to marriage: the economy

2011-08-15T07:08:00.000-07:00

While NOM and others fulminate against LGBT couples marrying, they might do better to look at the horrific effects that the recession has on marriage (not to mention conservative policies that disadvantage the poor and jobless).

From the Atlantic, last year but still current:

[J]oblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and—when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis—poses “a profound challenge to marriage,” especially in lower-income communities. ...

Among couples without college degrees, says Edin, marriage has become an “increasingly fragile” institution. In many low-income communities, she fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But “the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,” Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities.

Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower-middle class. ...

Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities—more than half of all new mothers without a college degree are unmarried. For both men and women in these communities, children are commonly seen as a highly desirable, relatively low-cost way to achieve meaning and bolster identity—especially when other opportunities are closed off. Christina Gibson-Davis, a public-policy professor at Duke University, recently found that among adults with no college degree, changes in income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth.

“We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities,” Edin told me, “including white communities. And where it’s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you’re just seeing astonishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don’t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.”

What was that about "every child deserves a mother and a father"?Seriously, the biggest challenge to stable marriages appears to be the economy. If anyone is actually interested in ensuring that children have two parents and safe homes to grow up in, surely, they would be working to promote economic policies that promote marriage. But from those opposed to LGBT marriage equality, we hear nothing about this. In their eagerness to hurt my family, they ignore families who are hurting.Doesn't sound very "Christian" to me.

Remembering Kirstin

2011-08-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

JCF represented the FoJ community at Kirstin Paisley's memorial last month and sends these scans of the order of service. Plus, appropriately, a recipe for bread. You should be able to click for a closer view!

Old Time Tent Revival

2011-08-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

What about TX Gov. Rick Perry's Olde Time Tent Revival? From Time(emphases mine):

The Response, the prayer gathering that Perry sponsored in Houston last weekend, was a fairly typical evangelical revival. It featured personal testimonies, group prayer and smaller prayer circles, and lots and lots of worship music. But it was very clearly an evangelical revival. There's nothing wrong with a politician speaking and praying at such an event. There's also nothing wrong with a politician calling for a day of prayer and fasting. But a politician, especially a governor who is elected to represent everyone in the large and diverse state of Texas, cannot sponsor an evangelical revival. And if he calls for a day of prayer, it cannot be limited to those "fellow Americans" who "call upon Jesus." To do so is to break a rule in something called the Constitution. ...

Perry and his defenders do not seem to understand or care about these distinctions. They emphasized repeatedly that the event was not "political," as if critics were concerned that Perry would use the occasion to speak about a candidacy or question federal policies....

Instead, religious liberty advocates including clergy from around Houston objected to Perry's sponsorship of the revival because his position as governor is always political. Although he was introduced at The Response as simply "Rick Perry, Austin, Texas," Perry can never set aside his official role. Again, Perry can pray to God in public. If he feels a need to ask for Christ's forgiveness on behalf of the nation's sins, he can do that at his church. He can attend an evangelical revival every day of the week if he wants to. But he cannot organize an evangelical Christian revival so that "as a nation" we can "call upon Jesus to guide us."

The fact that this has to be spelled out speaks volumes about our inability to discuss religion and the public square. It worsened during the Bush years, when many liberals treated any expression of religiosity by Bush as inappropriate and when conservatives dismissed as irrelevant constitutionality concerns about some aspects of the faith-based initiative.

Now comes Perry, whose remarks on Saturday contained more religiosity than Bush ever uttered publicly, and whose supporters don't even think that church and state should be kept separate. And because of that, they interpret concerns about Perry's use of his office to promote one religion as criticism of his faith itself. You can't have a conversation when the response to "If the governor wants to hold a day of prayer, maybe it should be open to all faiths" is "Why are you uncomfortable letting us pray?"

If he wants to wear the mantle of Evangelical Christianity, he's going to put off a very, very large swath of voters. It might help in the primary. I think it will hurt in the general.

What do you think?

Walking a mile in my moccasin....er, boot.

2011-08-09T11:57:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me IRL or on Facebook, have heard that I had a bad fall doing a trail run 10 days ago, leading to a very badly sprained ankle (with two small cracks for good measure!) I'm now wearing an aircast boot and walking with a cane. In 2 weeks I start physical therapy; the boot will be on for a month.

In short, I have joined the ranks of the disabled. And the view is rather different!

I'm an active person, noted for my fast walking pace. Not now…. I can't walk fast, and I'm restless with enforced inactivity. At work, I use a standing desk… not now, since I can't stand comfortably for extended periods, so I have to wedge my laptop on a table in my office and sit. At home, I am the gardener… not now, as it's difficult to navigate the pots and the hose on the patio. My routine is streamlined so I know exactly how long it will take… not now, as taping my ankle in the morning and my reduced mobility make everything take longer, from getting dressed to walking to the bus.

But where it's really striking is on my train commute. Normally, I take Amtrak (I have a blog about that too). The Surfliner is a large, two-level train, crowded with commuters. At every stop, the conductors recite the mantra "downstairs seating reserved for seniors and disabled" which I've always heard as background, as I troop up the narrow stairs with the other regulars. We whip out our computers, and the trip is accompanied by the tap-tap-tap of the keys and overheard business calls on cell phones. We check our watches regularly, bitch when the train is late (it almost always is) and position ourselves for a quick get away when we get to our station.

But downstairs, it's not commuters. It's not regulars. It's mostly retired folks, and the occasional person with serious mobility issues. There isn't a computer in sight and almost no one under 50. Folks chat down here (trains induce conversations), look out the window, talk about their destinations or their family. They don't care if the train is late (as long as they still make their connection). When they ask "where are you going?" they are surprised to hear "work!" as they don't really connect the trip with commuting.

After experiencing that demographic difference, I then discovered that my commuter regulars are impatient with me as I go down the stairs from the platform slowly, a step at a time. In the rush of people in the station tunnel, I'm leery of being bumped into and knocked over. I have found that escalators are challenging in a boot. And the steps into the bus are narrow and awkward. I never noticed that before, when I lightly ran up both with ease. And when Amtrak substitutes an older trainset, one that isn't level with our low west coast platforms, but uses rickety folding steps to reach them, it's actually hard to get on the train.

On my first day back at work, I took my big, powerful laptop in my commuter backpack as usual. Not again-- the big heavy bag is awkward to wield when one hand has a cane and balance is uncertain. Now I'm streamlined with my little MacAir and a small bag. I can't use my regular desk anyway, so it doesn't matter that I can't plug in my big monitor.

I'm a fortunate person and I'm counting my blessings. I have a good job and excellent healthcare. My ankle will heal, eventually. I'll recover the ability to navigate and my speed. But I hope my experience will stay with me. The view is different from here. It's a good thing to experience that.

Quote of the Day

2011-08-09T07:05:00.000-07:00

Brilliant article in the NY TImes summarizes our disappointment in Obama. He is not the man we hoped he was.

But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks.

The results of the hostage crisis

2011-08-07T12:59:00.001-07:00

S & P just downgraded US creditworthiness--because of the irrationality of Congress. The result of all that hostage taking in Congress is going to be ongoing debt and higher costs. Because, as Sen. Mitch McConnell said, they will do it again.

Steve Benen remarks:

This wasn’t just another partisan dispute; it was a scandal for the ages. It’s the kind of thing that should scar the Republican Party for many years to come.

Indeed, consider the apparent consequences. This one radical scheme has helped lead to the first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt; it has riled financial markets and generated widespread uncertainty about the stability of the American system; and it has severely undermined American credibility on the global stage.

Continuing in the reality-driven world of sober adults, Tom Friedman in the NY Times explains,

Our slow decline is a product of two inter-related problems. First, we’ve let our five basic pillars of growth erode since the end of the cold war — education, infrastructure, immigration of high-I.Q. innovators and entrepreneurs, rules to incentivize risk-taking and start-ups, and government-funded research to spur science and technology.

…For us to effectively compete…required studying harder, investing wiser, innovating faster, upgrading our infrastructure quicker and working smarter.

Instead of doing that at the scale we needed — that is, building muscle — we injected ourselves with massive amounts of credit steroids…

There is no easy, one-policy fix. We need to help people deleverage, cut some spending, raise some revenues and reinvest in our growth engines — as an integrated strategy for national renewal. Something this big and complex cannot be accomplished by one party alone. It will require the kind of collective action usually reserved for national emergencies. The sooner we pull together the better.

But I'm not hopeful, based on what just happened. In fact, I am sadly confident that the Republicans in Congress are incapable of responding appropriately. Indeed, they thrive on ignorance.

People voted for these bozos. It's ultimately the voters' fault. This is what we get now, if you vote for anyone with an "R" after his name. It's a shameful decline of a political party. And craven as the Democrats are, I don't see how they could have negotiated more effectively, when the opposition was fully prepared to pull the trigger.

Image from MoveOn

Catholics on the campaign against equality

2011-08-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

Over and over again, polls tell us that Roman Catholic laity--that is, the people in the pews-- are amongst the most supportive groups when it comes to marriage equality. But the Roman Catholic hierarchy, that is, the Bishops and up, are amongst the most intense opponents, funneling millions into the anti-marriage campaigns.

Why, in Minnesota, the Archbishop actually suggested that parents reject their children rather than the church. Yeah, how's that workin' for ya?

And NOM, the most active, yet secretive opponent to equality, is run by conservative Catholics as a front group for Catholic money.

The laity have practiced a sort of don't-ask-don't-tell, managing to ignore this, but stories of denying funerals to parishioners who are gay don't sit well with anyone.

As this excellent piece in ReligionDispatches points out, it's as though being gay is a unique sin.

In their zeal to deny any form of legitimacy to same-sex relationships, the bishops have neglected more urgent pastoral duties. Catholic schools and parishes are closing by the dozen in dioceses across the country, yet somehow the hierarchy and its allies in the Knights of Columbus have found millions of dollars to spend in one state after another opposing marriage equality, or its weaker cousin, the civil union.

Many Catholics, though, still believe in their church as an agent of social justice.

...The Church’s teachings on social justice compelled us to act as advocates for fairness, justice, and individual dignity, that its teachings on politics instructed us to vote for the common good, and that in making moral decisions, we were to follow the promptings of our own well-formed consciences

There are times, it seems, when our hierarchy is so committed to cultivating political power, and deploying our Church’s resources in contemporary culture wars, that they expect us to forget all of this. We won’t..

And then, of course, there's the hypocrisy, such as expelling children of gay parents from Catholic schools.

The archbishop argued that parents must be able to cooperate with Catholic schools in the education of their children, and that those who do not embrace Church doctrine cannot do so.

This was not an argument he employed against Protestants, or non-Christians, or children whose parents had remarried after a divorce. It was employed exclusively against lesbian parents. Because in the theological universe that our bishops are constructing to support their personal biases, there is sin, and then there is gay sin, and gay sin is so much worse.

Remember, BP used to be Roman Catholic--until the day she visited an unfamiliar church prior to Prop8, and a priest spat bile and hatred over homosexuals in a vile screeching sermon. Her many, many supportive RC friends urged her to stay with her regular congregation, to practice Don't Ask Don't Tell with the priest. But how can you have a healthy spiritual life if you can't be honest? So BP is now Episcopalian, where she is welcomed as a total person and our marriage is, literally, blessed.

So while it's great that these individual Roman Catholics at Religion Dispatches are calling out the bishops, there's a problem. The Roman Catholic church is not a democracy. The institution is still actively harming gay people, and pouring money into anti-equality efforts. And while individual RC don't agree and don't support that, what are they doing--what can they do-- to stop the abuse?

The end of the Democratic Party

2011-08-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald:

In other words, a slew of millionaire politicians who spent the last decade exploding the national debt with Endless War, a sprawling Surveillance State, and tax cuts for the rich are now imposing extreme suffering on the already-suffering ordinary citizenry, all at the direction of their plutocratic overlords, who are prospering more than ever and will sacrifice virtually nothing under this deal (despite their responsibility for the 2008 financial collapse that continues to spawn economic misery). And all of this will be justified by these politicians and their millionaire media mouthpieces with the obscenely deceitful slogans of "shared sacrifice" and "balanced debt reduction" -- two of the most odiously Orwellian phrases since "Look Forward, not Backward" and "2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate" (and anyone claiming that Obama was involuntarily forced by the "crazy" Tea Party into massive budget cuts at a time of almost 10% unemployment: see the actual facts here).

Ian Welsh:

This “Crisis” is what Obama wanted.

Again, if he didn’t, he would have raised the debt ceiling in the lame duck. Nancy Pelosi was always very good at getting those sort of basic housekeeping bills through. It would have passed. Period. Obama wanted to cut SS and Medicare, and he needed a “crisis” in order to do it. He also needed a Republican House, which he had, because his policies during 2009 and 2010 didn’t fix the economy.

George Orwell:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

The Debt

2011-07-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

From the NY Times.

Destroying America

2011-07-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

Over on Facebook, Cathy asks why we aren't on the streets protesting. I think it's because the country is SO big, that it wouldn't make a difference. Locked in their echo chamber in DC, Congress doesn't give a damn what happens on the streets of Los Angeles, 3000 miles away.

And part of it is that people don't "get" what's going on. They blame the Democrats as much as the Republicans. (I blame the Democrats for trying to BE Republicans, myself. I thought I voted for a Democratic president, but I was wrong. I got a Republican. That's another post.)

Paul Krugman, in the NY Times:

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system....the cult of balance, of centrism.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

THis is absolutely true. We were talking to The Boy the other night. He is a 19 year old college student, disengaged from politics, who roundly blames both sides. No, we said. No, the Dems have given away the store and nothing is enough for these madmen.

Krugman continues:

You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.

Eliminating the opposition: lessons from Norway

2011-07-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

Anders Behring Breivik, described as a right-wing Christian extremist with strong anti-Muslim views, has now confessed to the terrorist attack in Norway. Breivik was outraged by immigration and Muslims in particular.

He's not alone. In the US, there have been hearings about Islam and protests against the building of mosques. There have been general, shameful protests against the Muslim community simply for existing. To his disgrace, Herman Cain, Republican presidential candidate, is running on an anti-Muslim platform.

[He] started a few months ago by telling a reporter that he would not be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet. During a televised debate last month, he said his discomfort was due to the intention of some Muslims “to kill us.”

He quickly moved from that offensive and absurd generalization to advocating an overt violation of the Constitution. He traveled to Murfreesboro, Tenn., this month to make common cause with residents who are protesting the construction of an Islamic center there.

Can you imagine the voices of outrage if Herman Cain advocated against Jewish synagogues, or Catholic cathedrals?

But Breivik wasn't simply an anti-Muslim xenophobe; if so, he'd have shot a mosque. His motivation wasn't religious; he defined himself as a "cultural Christian" rather than a believer. No, his distaste for Islam was merely part of a larger, far-right wing theory. The Guardian describes his

idea that the elite have sold out to "Marxism", which controls the universities, the mainstream media, and almost all the political parties, and is bent on the destruction of western civilisation. "Europe lost the cold war as early as 1950, at the moment when we allowed Marxists/anti-nationalists to operate freely, without keeping them out of jobs where they could seize power and influence, especially teaching in schools and universities," [Breivik] wrote.

These two grand conspiracies are linked by the "Eurabia" conspiracy theory, which holds that EU bureaucrats have struck a secret deal to hand over Europe to Islam in exchange for oil.

In his manifesto against liberal "multiculturalism" he

calls for a "conservative revolution" and "preemptive declaration of war," including "armed resistance against the cultural Marxists/multiculturalist regimes of Western Europe."

It describes "attack strategies," including assassinating professors and carrying out coordinated assaults on multiple targets at the same time.

It is no accident that Breivik attacked the meeting on the island of Utøya. It is there that the Norwegian left had a youth camp of up-and-comers in their teens and 20s, along with current politicians and advisors. Breivik wanted to wipe out the leadership and the future of the political center left in Norway.

Journalist David Neiwert calls this "eliminationism",

a particular trend that has manifested itself with increasing intensity in the past decade: the positing of elimination as the solution to political disagreement. Rather than engaging in a dialogue over political and cultural issues, one side simply dehumanizes its opponents and suggests, and at times demands, their excision.

It's the root of the attacks used against President Obama, attempting to delegitimize him, cast him as a Muslim, an African, a non-American who stole the white house, is inevitable. It started with shouts to "kill him" at Republican rallies, before he was even elected--shouts that went largely unrebuked. That's eliminationism.

Pure crazy can hit either side of the political spectrum, but In the last two years it has particularly hit the right. The language of eliminationism is a staple of right wing radio. And people act on it.

July 2010: Byron WIlliams initiates a shootout with police he was angry at Congress passing all those "left-wing agenda items".
March 2010 John Patrick Bedell, who harbored anti-government views, traveled from CA to shoot up the Pentagon
Feb 2010 Joe Stack flew an airplane into a government office leaving an anti-government manifesto behind
March 2010 Jerry Kane Jr and the right wing Christian Hutaree Militia planned a wave of attacks on government
June 2009: James von Brunnfired at the Holocaust memorial museum and murdered a guard
April 2009 Richard Poplawski killed three officers because he feared liberal gun control.
July 2008 Jim David Adkisson shot up a Unitarian church in Tennessee because it was full of liberals

And much as we'd like to leave this across the Atlantic,eliminationtist rhetoric, with the language of violence in place of political discourse, is very much alive here. Casting the opposition as the "other" is a political staple, even amongst so called "Christians". When Sarah Palin puts gunsights over democratic congressional districts.... When Maggie Gallagher promised a "bloody mess" in New York over marriage equaltiy... they are using the language of violence for political disagreement.

Anders Breivik is not a Norwegian aberration. What he represents is not unique to Norway. It's very present amongst us. We ignore it at our peril.

Alternate Reality: Congressional Republicans

2011-07-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

As I reported some time ago, this Republican Hostage Crisis, in which the Republicans refuse to compromise, is ignoring the fact that taxes are the lowest they've been in 60 years, and a substantial part of the current debt is due to the Bush Tax Cuts.

Unfortunately facts don't matter to these people.

It started, as so much, with the Bush Administration. Or perhaps they were just the first to admit it.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...."

So perhaps it's not surprising that the breathtakingly unaware Republicans in Congress simply don't believe what they are told. Time Magazine, in an article entitled, Can Republicans Overcome Their Alternate Reality to Strike A Debt Deal?, remarks

At first blush, House Republicans’ dismissal of overwhelming evidence from a bipartisan crop of experts seems staggering. ... Democrats believe that the Republican Party’s antipathy toward government, and their members’ perceived mandate to drastically shrink the budget, has clouded their ability to appraise the severity of the situation. And Democrats are clearly baffled by the challenge of persuading opponents who not only have a different set of priorities, but a different set of facts. “There’s a question about how much the facts matter to them,” says a Democratic official. “And I don’t know what to do about that.”

It's not just the debt ceiling. They've decided, by inaction, to defund the FAA. You know, the agency that keeps those tin cylinders with wings safely in the air? Because they added to the bill language that would remove funding for 13 small airports specifically in the districts of several Senate Democrats.

The disagreement means the FAA has to furlough as many as 4,000 workers tomorrow and stop collecting about $200 million a week in airplane-ticket and other taxes until it is resolved, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said yesterday. Air- traffic controllers, considered essential employees, would remain on the job......

Baucus and Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, today urged their colleagues to back extension legislation without the rural airports language. Republicans blocked that bill, offered by Baucus and Rockefeller, from a floor vote. Democrats then thwarted Republicans’ attempt to bring Mica’s version to a vote.

Steve Benen points out that It's tough to negotiate with crazy."

Common norms suggest we’re supposed to simply acknowledge that the parties have sincere, philosophical differences. But eventually, I’d love to see the political world come to terms with the fact that Republicans aren’t just being right-wing; they’re also being dumb. I know that’s impolite. I also know it’s justified.

And Jonathan Bernstein tells us that many House Republicans have no clue how the process works.

One really, really important point to remember about House Republicans right now: There’s a very good chance that a whole bunch of them just have no idea what they’re doing. ...Here’s the thing, though — how do you negotiate with people who just have no idea what they’re talking about?

John Boehner has no control over his caucus. It's clear that "old style" Republicans are dismayed. They have a tiger by the tail, and no idea how to deal with it. And it's going to pull all of us down with them. Aren't there any grown-ups left in the Republican party?

Picture from the Daily Mail

Bombing in Oslo

2011-07-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

BP and I have traveled several times to Oslo, where we have several friends and colleagues. It's a lovely city, and we are very fond of Norway and the Norwegians. Sensible people, family oriented, beautiful country. How awful to hear that the peaceful streets of Oslo were shattered by violence, which spilled over into a youth camp. The dead are still being counted. BP and I have not yet heard from our friends, but hope and pray that they were at work, and had no reason to be near the government buildings.

I mean, NORWAY? Who attacks Norway?

Photo by IT, from the Vigeland sculpture park in Oslo

The road to GC2012 goes through New York

2011-07-19T08:58:00.000-07:00

New York is the most populous state to legalize same sex marriage, and serves as a microcosm of the broader Episcopal Church. The Lead points us to this NY Times article on the different responses of the various New York Dioceses of TEC to the legalization of civil same sex marriage.

[G]ay and lesbian Episcopalians will be allowed on Sunday to get married by priests in Brooklyn and Queens, but not in the Bronx or Manhattan or on Staten Island; in Syracuse but not in Albany.

That is because the church has not taken a firm position nationally on same-sex marriage, leaving local bishops with wide latitude to decide what priests may do when the law takes effect in New York State. In the state, with six Episcopal dioceses, the bishops are split: two have given the green light for priests to officiate at same-sex marriages, one has said absolutely not, two are undecided and one has staked out a middle ground, allowing priests to bless, but not officiate at, weddings of gay men and lesbians.

Rather than re-hash what I've written before, I'm going to point you at a couple of previous posts. As always I have strong opinions on the subject.

A review of where TEC is and the concept of "wide pastoral latitude". In this, I agreed with those who are willing to let the process unfold--pushing it, of course, but letting the process happen.

The question of how do you bless a marriage that isn't, yet. In this post, I pointed out the problems caused by a patchwork of legal recognitions of LGBT couples, who may be married in one state, but not recognized in another; who may be recognized if they are civil unioned, but not if they are married; who may have no legal recognition whatsoever. It's why I think TEC should advocate for legal civil marriage in all states, and the overturn of DOMA, as a justice issue

In thinking about the SCLM consultation, I reflected on the argument about complementarity--and not for the first time, remarked on the REAL redefinition of marriage, which is that both partners are equal now.

I have argued quite a lot for the importance of recognizing same sex marriage as marriage, at least ecclesiastically.

A lot rides on GC2012. My continuing concern is that it will end up with what I call a "gay ghetto": a liturgy specifically for gay partnerships, regardless of whether they are marriages, or DPs, or … nothing legal. My reason for this concern is the comments to this SCLM blog, e.g.

will the same-sex blessings the SCLM are tasked with designing be added to the “list” of sacraments– becoming, as it were, the Eighth Sacrament– or will they merely exist on a lesser plane than marriage as currently understood in the Prayer Book?

Note the explicit assumption that Gay will be Different (and probably lesser).

I think it may be interesting for the task group to consider (1) whether the theology developed through this process could equally justify the creation of a liturgy for blessing non-marital life-long commitments by opposite-gender couples, and (2) whether there are life-long committed same-gender relationships for which the Commission’s to-be-completed liturgy might be inappropriate.

again, the idea of something different and lesser -- gays and not-so-committed straights can have something OTHER than marraige. (Whether DPs should co-exist with marriage, and the idea of "marriage lite", we discussed at length here).

Then there is this summary of table comments from the House of Bishops C056 consultation. While many comments were positive, some were negative about gay people generally. But of greater concern is this idea that marriage is something different if the partners are gay, e.g.,

Is this an additional sacrament?
Will straight couples be permitted to use the new rite?
Distinction between blessings and marriage (this comes up multiple times)
Is this the sacrament of marriage, or something else? It needs to be something else, clearly.

As the Times article says,

Some gay and lesbian Episcopalians said they were content to allow the church to proceed slowly because they believed it was moving in what they viewed as the right direction. The issue of same-sex marriage will most likely be raised again at the church’s next national conference, next summer.

Make or break? Not quite that dramatic. But expectations run high, and not just for the folks in New York.

The importance of the clergy in the fight for equality

2011-07-17T15:31:00.001-07:00

From the New York Times: (my emphases)

The conventional — and erroneous — perception of the gay-marriage issue is that it pits secular forces against religious ones. From New York to California, wherever and whenever the battle has flared, news coverage has focused almost entirely on the religious groups who uniformly denounce it: Mormons, Roman Catholics, evangelical Christians and many Hispanic Pentecostals and African-American Protestants.

Yet the passage of same-sex marriage in New York last month, just two years after its defeat here, attests to the concerted, sustained efforts by liberal Christian and Jewish clergy to advocate for it in the language of faith, to counter the language of morality voiced by foes. In so doing, they provided a kind of political and theological cover to the moderate and conservative state senators who cast the vital swing votes for a 33-to-29 margin.

....

“If religious support is fractured, and supporters of the legislation can point to clergy who are on their side,” [history professor Julian E. Zelizer] wrote in an e-mail, “then it’s easier to counteract the claim of religious conservatives who say there is only one answer to this question. As in previous examples, politicians draw on clergy to give themselves moral authority when taking on these kinds of social and cultural issues. We know more about how the right has done it, but liberals can do the same.”

Yesterday, in San Diego's gay pride parade, St Paul's Cathedral marched: clergy and parishioners, gay and straight, young and old, to raucous cheers from the crowd, and the occasional spectator running over to grab the hand of one of the clergy to thank them, or asking where the church is.

As the Dean's sermon today concluded, quoting the words of theologian Walter Brueggemann: "Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said that the arc of history is bent toward justice. And the parallel statement that I want to make is that the arc of the Gospel is bent toward inclusiveness."

Let those with ears, hear!