FIRST DRAFT

God's Plans

"Even our savior on the cross believed that the Lord had forsaken Him." 

"You don't want to try that with me. It was all over for Jesus in three days." 

-- Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

I often wonder why nobody has politely suggested to Him that He let somebody else plan the damn parties from now on, because when He does, we always run out of beer early and somebody winds up having to drag a goat out of the swimming pool: 

Abed, the truck driver, said that God, not he, had caused the crash (adding that he had lived an unholy life before the crash, partying in Tel Aviv and Haifa). He did not note that he had ignored large yellow signs instructing him to shift his truck into a low gear (evidenced by police photographs of his brake pads). And he did not note that he had already been guilty, at age 25, of 26 driving violations.

But I noted these things. And what for so many years had seemed to point to the arbitrariness of life was soon evidence of the opposite -- my broken neck the almost inevitable consequence not of a divine plan, but of a reckless driver, a truck loaded with four tons of tiles, a backseat with no headrest, and a dangerous road. And it was out of this recognition that the narrative of a slim book grew, careful always to make sense, to reflect, to contextualize -- the obvious efforts of a once passive victim to exert agency over an ungovernable act.

That agency is important for the writer. It is what enables him or her to wring meaning from facts and observations, and then be free of them. And because agency informs the narrative, it is important for the reader too. Millennia after Job suffered, my Chasidic crash-mates put him forth to me as an example of faith in the face of sorrow. But he had ached to write his own narrative too.

Can I be blunt? People who say "it's God's plan" to you after something shitty happens are assholes. They just are. Assholes who just want you to stop being so damn SAD. Assholes who don't know what to say and so instead of saying nothing say the thing they've heard a thousand times that everybody says that means nothing and helps not a whit. 

God may, indeed, have a plan. You may, indeed, come to believe that, in your searching to make sense of the lousy way your life has twisted this week. But nobody else gets to make that decision for you. Nobody else gets to suggest how you think, or how you grieve, or how you believe or don't believe. Trust in God? What is that, an order? Is this my inherent rebellion against authority, that I hear somebody tell me to trust in God and want to say NO just to piss them off? 

It's not as if I'm unfamiliar with the benefits of the concept. One of the great solaces of my life during a really, really crappy time of it was looking upward and saying, "KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF, YOU JACKASS, GO FUCK WITH SOMEBODY ELSE FOR A WHILE." The best part of belief, for me then, was having somebody to argue with, kick, and blame. I know people who've been made immensely happy and peaceful by the idea that somewhere in their suffering is a deeper meaning. I have no quarrel with them.

For me the key is the same as the author's above: The agency of the thing. I don't like the idea that we're not in charge of our own lives. I don't like being absolved of responsibility. I don't want to kick back and let God handle things. I guess I am a spiritual control freak. Besides, the couple of times I have let Jesus take the wheel, He's wrapped the Porsche around a tree and staggered off into the woods singing Danny Boy, leaving me to wait for the cops.

I know, okay, that we're trying to make sense of things. And I know that most of our stories, most of our poetry that we call scriptures, is the way that people made sense of the world and still make sense of things they can't understand. What frustrates me is the unwillingness to let things NOT make sense. Things don't make sense. Why do they have to? The universe is awful and random and life is short and it sucks a lot of the time. Why, why, why shove a God with a plan in there? To make it bearable? Does it make it bearable?

It doesn't, for me. I despise easy answers. I loathe them. They make me want to hit things. I get so angry at the harmless people saying the harmless shit everybody says, the "thoughts and prayers," the "God's will," the "trust that there's a deeper meaning in some dead kids," the comparisons to Job and Lazarus. Did either of them ask to play a part in this mess? Did anybody ever bother finding out if THEY thought it was all worth it? 

Or is that just something we said to make ourselves feel better? And if so, how dare we make this all about us? 

A. 

Who Will Speak Up for Christianity in an Age of Rampant Girl-on-Girl?

If only it had a champion, such as the Tribune's John Kass: 

I'm not opposed to same-sex unions. Americans have the right to equal protection under the law, and same-sex couples should be able to expect the same tax benefits and other considerations allowed to those of us who are now being called, in some quarters, "opposite-sex couples."

As far as I'm concerned, Americans have the right to do as they please as long as they don't infringe upon the rights of others. America is all about liberty and freedom.

But this all comes now during the season of Lent, a time of fasting and prayer, when Christians are compelled to confront the obligations of their faith.

And while I hear the new moral arguments, about equal rights and equal protection, I've read little about the religious freedom aspects and what the Supreme Court's ruling might mean for houses of traditional worship.

You've read LITTLE? Really? Where have you been? 

And by the by, "opposite sex" is what heterosexual couples have been called since I was a kid. The opposite sex, that isn't a pejorative, unless you make it one in order to feel put upon. 

The federal government has already told religious institutions that run hospitals that they must provide contraceptives to their employees, even if it runs counter to their beliefs. So now, if the government ultimately compels us to describe same-sex unions as marriage, what's next?

No, they've told religious institutions that run hospitals that they must provide COVERAGE for contraceptives to their employees, if they employ large numbers of employees. They don't have to hand out condoms at gunpoint and put the pill in with the W-2s every spring. 

Plus Catholic women are already on this.  Never mind the non-Catholic ones who just want to get jobs. 

As for "what's next," I think the answer is church-mandated man-on-dog. We're only a minute away from that at any time. 

To speak of faith in this context is to invite the charge of bigotry — if not outright, at least by comparison to angry fire-and-brimstone preachers who seem to use the Bible as a lash. Some wield the Old Testament like a cudgel, and avoid the New Testament, in which Christ asked us to refrain from judging and to love our neighbor.

No one with half a brain wants to be thought of as a bigot. But that's what I and others risk as members of a distinct and irritating minority — as traditional Christians in journalism.

No, being a bigot is what invites charges of bigotry. There is nothing in "traditional Christianity" as embodied by Jesus Christ that makes you a bigot. There is much in the politics of traditional Christianity and Roman Catholicism as embodied by its present leaders that makes it glacially slow to change and pathologically quick to conflate religious and secular practice in an effort to hold onto power, but that has absolutely dick to do with Jesus. So to speak. 

As to the minority status Mr. Kass is so quick to claim, nailing yourself to the cross and then bitching that your hands and feet are sore and you're thirsty is not martyrdom, it's self-indulgence. Nobody is going to fire you because you go to church on Sunday or wear a cross. 

Being incoherent and maudlin, on the other hand, should be a dismissable offense: 

It is a world of language and political symbolism, a world where ideas are often framed so that they may lead to inexorable conclusions favored by the dominant culture. In this media world, I sometimes wonder whether the word "sin" has been outlawed by the high priests of journalism for fear of offending one group or another.

So you really WANT to write a column calling all gays sinners, but you're afraid for your job? What? What does this even mean? 

As to the great risk you're running here, Mr. Kass, I'd note you're writing this in a major metropolitan newspaper. You're not exactly preaching in the desert, to the stones. 

Now that the debate has been framed, if I hold to my faith and resist applauding the changes, I'm easily cast as some drooling white cartoon bigot of the Jim Crow era, denying black Americans the right to sit at a lunch counter and have a meal with the white folks.

You know, you can't claim to be the voice speaking up for the unpopular view, and then lament that it is so unpopular and makes you a target for negative attention. I mean, you can, but the rest of us find it exhausting. 

What is also clear is that, given demographic shifts and attitudes, particularly by young people regarding sexuality and family, traditional Christianity is no longer the dominant culture.

It is the counterculture, fast becoming a minority view.

No, opposition to marriage equality is fast becoming a minority view. Christianity is in no danger whatsoever. Mistaking the one for the other is the central problem with this piece. 

And while I struggle with the fast-moving issue of the redefinition of marriage and its effect on our culture and how to reconcile the rights of others and my own religious beliefs, I ask only one thing:

Tolerance.

Remember that word? Tolerance?

Tolerance for those whose faith and traditional beliefs put them in what is fast becoming the minority.

Absolutely no one is breaking down your door demanding you marry another dude. You can go to church without fear of ever having to see two women plighting their troth before the altar. This changes nothing for you, except that you have to deal with losing privilege and impunity to say whatever you please without fear of disagreement.  

That isn't being a "minority." It isn't being persecuted. You long for bastions of traditionalism; well, you have those in your churches. You can go there and feel the comfort you need. And when you say, over and over, that you support gay people having the same rights as everybody else but you are just afraid this will start some kind of pogrom against Christians ... I mean, remember the way the cities of Iowa were in flames for months after the first gay wedding? People were eating their household parakeets to stay alive. It was monstrous. 

Pray, I ask you all, for peace in the Middle West. 

Snark aside, somewhere in this mess is a good column, about the inability of many to articulate the fear of change that strikes us all at one point or another, and how that fear of change can prevent us from being the people we know we should be. I think what Kass is really asking for is not tolerance, but patience. 

Patience with the struggle of people to understand their own faith (and their own religion, and the diferences between the two), to reconcile their childhoold lessons with the consciences God gave them, to grow and change and love each other not just in words and hugs at Christmastime but in actions and rights and responsibilities. 

And if he'd asked for patience, for time to adjust, I'd still respond, and direct him to a fierce and unapologetic proponent of Christianity for some words upon the subject: 

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

There is, you see, a tradition here as well. 

A. 

Update: Whet has more on the utter allergy to facts going on here.

On The Road With Cardinal Scola

It's conclave Tuesday, y'all. The gathering of what Charlie Pierce loves to call the "cult of the red beanie." I have no red-hatted dog in this fight but I've gotten a kick out some of the pre-conclave spin. My favorite was this item about Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milano:

To illustrate that life is a journey, one of the Italian cardinals touted as a favorite to be the next pope doesn't just turn to the Scriptures – but also to Jack Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy.

Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan, is seen as Italy's best chance at reclaiming the papacy, following back-to-back popes from outside the country that had a lock on the job for centuries.

<snip>

Quoting from Kerouac's iconic Beat Generation novel `'On the Road," Scola invited his audience of students to reflect on whether they `'were going to get somewhere, or just going." And he cited McCarthy's post-apocalyptic father-son journey in `'The Road," urging youths to consider the meaning of "destination" – a key theme in McCarthy's work.

`'The destination is a happy life, an accomplished life that doesn't end with death but with eternal life," the archbishop said.

Jack Kerouac? Crazy, daddy-o. The Cardinal actually quoted a notorious bi-sexual alcoholic drug user. Awesome. Does this make him a closet liberal? Unlikely. Perhaps he'll quote Ginsburg or Ferlinghetti next, which inspires me to suggest a possible name: Pope Beatnik I. The hipsters will love it and it shouldn't scare too many old ladies or altar boys. The latter, alas, are always scared and the former mostly admire the Cardinals for their red frocked finery.

I'll let Ian Anderson, of all people, have the last word, with this ode to the Beat Generation:

 

Oh Bite My Rosy Red Ass, Mahony

For serious: 

Mahony, who has been criticized for moving predator priests from posting to posting, told Corriere della Sera that "after 20 years, people are talking about abuse as if we had not done anything. However, since 2002, we have had our program Protecting the Children, in which we illustrate procedures and the guidelines of our zero-tolerance policy that allows no possibility, for example, of anyone found guilty of abuse of minors working for the diocese."

Well, since 2002! That's like 11 whole years of not protecting molesters, hiding them from cops, and inflicting them on unsuspecting and vulnerable children and families while blaming those families for the abuse they suffered! AMAZING.You're just like a saintly, wonderful person, just like ... wait, hold on, it'll come to me ... JUST LIKE JESUS.

And what would Jesus have done? Convened a panel, certainly. All these guys do is blither around about how they handled abuse the way they thought they were supposed to handle it, and blah blah blah the psychological literature: 

"Anyone who looks at the psychiatric and psychological literature then will see that I applied the professional approach suggested for all institutions. We tried to follow the best practices of the period."

Well, as long as you did what it said to do in the BOOK. I mean, how can anyone blame you for that? 

Mahony said he subsequently set about building a network of safeguards against abuse, including the hiring in 1994 of a retired judge to head a Sexual Abuse Advisory Board for the Los Angelees archdiocese.

"My rather painful mistake was to not apply the work of that committee to previous cases. I was more focused on new cases. However, that was an error I completely rectified in 2002," Mahony said.

THE POINT IS YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO TELL THE FUCKING COPS. God. 

Your internal policies and procedures and whatnot have NOTHING TO DO with anything, that is the point that is so hard to get across to these guys. Canon law is not civil law and never will be, and quite frankly shouldn't be. You hear of somebody raping a kid, you tell the goddamn police. You don't conduct your own investigation first, you don't hire your own Church Cops and Church Judges and hold a Church Trial and throw the guy in Church Jail.

These people weren't breaking church law. It's not like they're banging consenting chicks and you need to fire them for it. They're breaking AMERICAN law, and they needed to face American legal consequences. 

A. 

Does He See the RICO Case Coming?

I mean, it's basically Boardwalk Empire up in there anyway: 

The abuse scandals dominated his seven years as leader of the world's Catholics. Before his accession, there had been scandals in the United States and Ireland. But in 2010, evidence of clerical sex abuse was made public in a succession of countries in continental Europe, notably Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Benedict's native Germany.

The pope was himself affected by one of these scandals. It emerged that, while he was archbishop of Munich, a known molester was quietly re-assigned to duties that, in time, allowed him to return to pastoral duties and make contact with young people.

The flood of allegations represented a vast setback for the project at the heart of Benedict's papacy. The goal he had set for himself, and for which he was elected, was to launch the re-evangelisation of Europe,Catholicism's heartland: it was why he adopted as his papal name that of the continent's patron saint, Benedict of Nursia. But if the numbers of the faithful in Europe as Benedict leaves officeare fewer than when he was elected, then – surveys repeatedly indicated - it is in large part because of anger and despair in the Catholic laity over the sex abuse scandals.

When the abuse story broke in Boston -- and Boston was the first place to really connect it to the bishops' power rather than individual priests' horrifying crimes -- I said to someone at the time that this was the end of the Catholic Church in this country. 

I didn't think, even then, that it would be the end of the Catholic Church everywhere. But they managed to fuck this up in every way it could be fucked up, and then be assholes about being called on it, over and over and over. You might survive with total transparency, a full house-cleaning, and a true lack of whining, but that wasn't in these guys' DNA. 

And by the by, these are not "scandals." A scandal is where a senator gets caught with a hooker. These are "criminal conspiracy to conceal child rape." Somehow, not as fun. 

A. 

If Jesus Says He Loves You, Check It Out: Manti Te'o, Faith, and Journalism

From Deadspin's continuing coverage of the Manti Te'o sitch, something that actually interests me about it:

suitwearer 5 days ago Colin Cowherd (or however the fuck he spells it) this morning said that the fact Te'o is "a man of faith" means it was reasonable for the press to not pursue this story, despite the inconsistencies. What does that mean and why does it make me so annoyed?

Drew Magary @suitwearer 5 days ago Because he's a fucking moron. The idea that having an open faith makes you a more reliable person is stupid. And with Cowherd still employed, it's proof that you aren't gonna see much change in how sports or covered. The media isn't gonna stop offering you this sentimental dogshit. They'll just steamroll through and keep offering the same terrible product they always do.

I don't know who first figured out that muttering AS JESUS SAYS after every piece of stupid shit that pops out of your mouth made people afraid to question you, but I'd like to buy that public relations genius a beer and ask just how he came up with the idea.

(It probably was one of the disciples. Probably Paul. Paul was a dick.)

We give a ridiculously wide berth to "people of faith" already. We let them define faith however, which is why assbuckets like Bill Donohue can act like God's Perpetually Snippy Receptionist and dole out who gets what paperclips from the drawer that day, because there's no law saying he's not a Catholic just because he's a gigantic douche. We place no requirements on anyone "of faith" to demonstrate that faith whatsoever, absenting Democrats who happen not to want the state to regulate childbearing. All you have to do to be a "person of faith" is say that you are. Maybe put a plaque of some kind up during your interview.

It's not like you have to show a diploma, after all. I got ordained on the Internet a few years ago and married some friends of mine (best idea ever, by the way, if anyone asks you DO IT) so technically I could set up shop in a storefront and start holding services. Technically I could do that anyway, provided I met zoning restrictions and whatnot. We let people do that, in America, be whoever they say they are. In most religions, the process of becoming a member is pretty loose. Hell, the process of becoming a LEADER is pretty loose. Again, Bill Donohue.

Part of that agreement to live and let live, though, should be not allowing people to use their professed faith as a bludgeon. If we are all who we say we are, then we all meet on equal ground. You don't get a pass because you wave a crucifix around, and I don't get a pass because I face east at dawn. We all should be required to live up to the same standards of truthfulness, generally non-assholish behavior, and character in action. We should all be subject to the same stringent examinations of our histories and stories. We shouldn't be able to just sing some hymns and make all that inconvenient scrutiny go away.

As a "person of faith" (the First Church of Athenae is just be scotch and Galactica re-runs, so consider yourselves all converted) I'm insulted by the idea that because I can quote chapter and verse, I somehow have LESS work to do to prove myself in the world. I should have MORE. I shouldn't be able to say, well, Jesus gives me strength (Jesus has been bugging me lately about coming over "just to talk," for those tracking our soap opera) and everything you were about to ask about why I was a bitch to you that time flies right out of your head. That's ridiculous. I am just as accountable for my actions as any atheist, as any agnostic, as anyone of any "faith" and I resent the concept that I should be treated delicately.

So the idea that it was "reasonable" for reporters not to question Te'o's story (I think maybe they should refrain from covering these guys like the E True Hollywood Story every damn year but that's me and I have no love for college football) because Te'o was religious is insane. If faith gives us all so much strength, then bring it on, fuckers. Ask the toughest questions. Pick over every detail. God's here for me.

I think people didn't question the Te'o story because it was an easy, pre-set narrative that sounded good and we're all on deadline. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by laziness and stupidity. But the idea that people of faith are inherently trustworthy is a lazy, stupid narrative too, and it's past time we threw it out and started approaching every story from the same standard of skepticism, no matter what god a football player worships.

A.

Come Inside

I watch this every year, because I've always loved this story: 

This time of year, I've written before, is about grace from unlikely beginnings and light in dark times. The older I get, the less interested I am in the war on Christmas, the war over Christmas, the endless back and forth. It's exhausting, and it isn't the point. I've never understood why science is a threat to belief, why the earth has to be a certain age, why it matters that Jesus was born in summer, how long it really took the wise men to reach him. I've never understood why what we learn about the world has to destroy the stories that make us want to live in it. I've never understood why we're at war at all. 

Even if they're only stories, the tales we hear this time of year, there are worse things than stories, especially stories that remind us what a radical act it is to trust that the world will swing toward light again. We never think it will, even though it always has. We have terribly short memories, so hope is always a radical act. We are always more than we think we are, and making the particulars of what we call that — God, our innate human beauty, nothing at all — into a bludgeon is the blasphemy, when the best weapon anyone ever had in darkness was a torch. 

If I have a doctrine at all at this point and I'm not sure I do, it's this: Come inside. Everyone come inside. It's cold and dark out and there's a fire here, and the only story worth anything is the one we'll tell tomorrow about what we did today. Come inside. Even if you're poor, or you're sick, or you're angry, or you're lost. Even if you're not sure what you are yet. Even if you don't think you'll ever know. Come inside. 

Even if all this is, is a manger, even if there's only straw on the floor and the only stars that drape the door are the ones in the sky, come inside. 

A. 

Puny God

I've spent approximately six minutes on Facebook in the last 72 hours. Treacly remembrances of things make me crazy, appropriation of other people's pain to make oneself feel important makes me crazier, and in the history of everything there has never been an intelligent discussion of anything on Facebook. It's the butthole of the Internet. I like mine because I like memes and pictures of my friends, but Christ almighty, sometimes I want to set two thirds of it on fire. 

In those six minutes I managed to see this about nine times:

Forget arguing the actual point, because there isn't one beyond modern Christianity's eager self-martyrdom reality show. Let's talk about this:

SOMEBODY CAN KEEP YOUR GOD OUT OF SOMEPLACE HE WANTS TO BE?

Really? Your God listens to the Supreme Court? People ON the Supreme Court don't listen to the Supreme Court, but your God obeys them? Your God takes orders from the Freedom From Religion Foundation? Your God listens to that dick who has to inject his lack of belief into every conversation about everything from recipes to road head? Your God is cowed by that? Even other atheists think Richard Dawkins is an asshole, but your God takes one look at an op-ed of his and turns tail and runs?

What kind of pathetic weak-ass God do you worship, anyway? A God who needs national approval to show up in the schoolyard and help out kids who are being bullied and beaten and stabbed and shot? A God who needs an official memo complete with TPS report cover to get His job done that day? A God who respects a lock on the door, a bar on the window, a sign that says go away?

Have you ever read the Scriptures you claim to revere?

That God drew water from the rock, parted the seas, raised the dead from their graves, smashed the cruel and corrupt. That God swept down over the earth and uprooted tyrants, freed slaves, inspired nations, lifted up the widow and the orphan, all before His daily Chipotle run. That God was here for the ones who wanted Him, sure, but He was there for everybody else, too, and certainly wasn't waiting for an engraved invitation to get shit done. His Son declared that He had sheep not of this flock, and that no one, no one at all, would go to the Father except through Him, that He was there for everyone. He didn't ignore the people who rejected Him, wag His finger and cluck that He told them so and they'd be sorry.

He forgave them their rejection and welcomed them to His cosmic party no matter how late they came or how lousy their hostess gifts were. That was the WHOLE FECKING IDEA.

That's the God worthy of worship, not this petulant bastard who whines that He didn't even WANT to be in your stupid school anyway, and if a bunch of kids get shot then GOOD because it proves His point. I don't know who'd want to worship that jackass. I wouldn't sit next to Him on the subway, much less build Him a temple and name Him my king.

A.

All Christians Should Have The Right to Bully You

I will never understand why the greatest defenders of American Christianity seem to need to think that all Christians secretly want to behave like total assholes: 

“Anti-bullying legislation is exactly the same,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda. No one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized.”

Fischer is complaining about schools encouraging students to "Mix It Up" by sitting with different kids during lunch periods. I remember my first same-sex french-fry encounter, and it changed me forever. He's absolutely right to guard against such temptations among our impressionable youth. 

Seriously, though, what is wrong with these people that they think all Christians really want the biggest opportunity to be bullies and dicks? Fischer is fighting for your right to tell people they're living their lives in contravention to God's will and are probably going to burn in hell for it? Is that what he thinks most Christians should walk around saying to one another? Is that the highest expression of Christianity to which he can imagine aspiring, such that it must be protected so fiercely in math class and now in the lunch room? 

It's not exactly a compliment to his fellow Christians, that this is what he thinks they want.

A. 

Intrinsic Evil

Illinois bishop Thomas Paprocki, formerly an auxiliary bishop of Chicago and generally somebody I would not have expected to be this obtuse: 

There are many positive and beneficial planks in the Democratic Party Platform, but I am pointing out those that explicitly endorse intrinsic evils. My job is not to tell you for whom you should vote. But I do have a duty to speak out on moral issues. I would be abdicating this duty if I remained silent out of fear of sounding "political" and didn't say anything about the morality of these issues. People of faith object to these platform positions that promote serious sins. I know that the Democratic Party's official "unequivocal" support for abortion is deeply troubling to pro-life Democrats.

So what about the Republicans? I have read the Republican Party Platform and there is nothing in it that supports or promotes an intrinsic evil or a serious sin. The Republican Party Platform does say that courts "should have the option of imposing the death penalty in capital murder cases." But the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (in paragraph 2267), "Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself — the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."

One might argue for different methods in the platform to address the needs of the poor, to feed the hungry and to solve the challenges of immigration, but these are prudential judgments about the most effective means of achieving morally desirable ends, not intrinsic evils.

Certainly there are "pro-choice" Republicans who support abortion rights and "Log Cabin Republicans" who promote same-sex marriage, and they are equally as wrong as their Democratic counterparts. But these positions do not have the official support of their party.

Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against, but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.

None of this is new, of course, and part of what's got my back up here is just the passive-aggressiveness of it, as if Paprocki is God's Perpetually Angry Receptionist, saying he's not ACCUSING you of taking all the paper clips out of His drawer, but maybe you should think VERY CAREFULLY about what kind of employee you want to be. For your own sake. And clean out the damn fridge already; it smells like something died in there. 

US Catholic magazine, which is really warming my black little heart with its borderline-blasphemy these days, fixates on the tax exemption issue that always pops up when some purported servant of God shoots off his mouth: 

So, I could be jeopardizing my salvation if I vote for a candidate who supports the Democratic platform (but not if I vote GOP), regardless of what a particular official actually does when elected. This is sketchy moral logic to say the least, but my real question is: Does it constitute an endorsement, which would jeopardize the Springfield diocese's tax-exempt status? Paprocki writes that he feels duty-bound to speak, even if he sounds "political," but wouldn't be easier just to abandon tax exemption and jump into poliics with both feet?

But I'd like to talk about Paprocki's seemingly endless fixation on words, because that's where his argument falls down.

He spends the first few grafs of this piece boring on about the word God being in or out of the document, and then segues into this comparison of what is written in both parties' platforms. Nowhere does he talk about what each party practices. He makes a deliberate equivalence between Democrats' support for abortion rights (or, putting it in terms a pro-life Catholic Democrat might, their opposition to empowering the state to force a woman to bear a child against her will) and Republicans' support for the death penalty. Both are things that might make voting for either party morally objecitonable. 

Then he goes on to be all EXCEPT NOT REALLY on the death penalty, ignoring the fact that in practice, Republicans are far more eager to impose the death penalty upon the unwilling than Democrats are to impose abortion. 

In practice is where his argument falls apart. What happens when a particular party's will is imposed? Forget what a man says; what does he DO? What consequences do his actions produce? What aim does he have in pursuing his goals? What kind of world does he want? If we follow him, what kind of world do we get? Paul Ryan spells it out pretty clearly. Mitt Romney isn't making much of a mystery these days of what he really thinks of everybody. Paprocki's focus is on the words. On the rules. On the platforms and what they say. On the lines of code in the box and not what that code looks like spun out to its logical end. 

Time was, a decent fellow and fair to middling carpenter set out on the road to tell people that the rules don't matter if people don't matter. If the system of laws and words doesn't serve people, then you burn that whole thing down. Results are what matters. Not what the code in the box says, what it looks like when spun out to its logical end. 

Yet here's Paprocki back again, saying we should prize a platform that does not promote "intrinsic evil" over a party that, more often that not, lately, produces it in spades. 

A. 

Two Years' Probation

It's lucky His Grace wasn't a 20-year-old black man with a crack rock in his pocket. 

A. 

$20 from a safety net

Her name was Rachael and she would have been 14 this year.

I usually think about her as school gears up each fall, as kids shop for school supplies and new gym shoes.

I think about her parents, both of whom are now well on their way to middle age. When Rachael was born, they were two scared 20-something kids with a daughter in danger. He was an agricultural laborer, and she was a stay-at-home mom.

I thought about all of this today in the wake of Mitt Romney’s speech at the RNC last night. He spoke out against the failure of Obama to do much of anything good. Jobs lost, costs hiked, people screwed.

(Side Note: I have to give the RNC a lot of credit for one thing: Clint Eastwood. Instead of the media going after Paul Ryan’s horseshit or Mitt’s bullshit, everyone is enamored by rambling oratory that was likely taken from the “Book of Speeches, Salutes and Wedding Toasts delivered by Drunken Brothers-in-Law and Other Morons Who Grabbed the Mic.” Nice inadvertent idiotic brilliance.)

When Mitt was yammering, I was flipping back and forth between two channels filled with lies: The RNC on one station and the Green Bay Packer announcers who were trying to convince me that the Packers wouldn’t miss a beat if Aaron Rodgers went down and Graham Harrell had to take over on the other. I was also uploading news articles I needed my students to read this term for my feature-writing class, which is where I came across a piece on Rachael.

And then it all came back.

 

When I worked as an editor in Missouri, one of the things we didn’t lack for was reporters. The students would fill the newsroom each year and look for stories that hadn’t been done before. The joke around town was that if you hadn’t been interviewed at least three times each year by someone on our staff, chances are you were dead.

Most of the stories were what you would expect out of a newspaper brimming with cub reporters: fires and floods, meetings and speeches, pomp and circumstance.

I was helping to oversee coverage of outlying areas, which usually led to some meeting stories and an occasional county fair story. If it was happening out in Boonville (an actual city, not a slight) or beyond, chances are no one really cared.

One day, a kid came to me with a scrap of paper he’d pulled from a weekly paper that covered an outlying farm community. It was a tiny ad, alerting the community at large that someone was hosting a chili supper with proceeds to benefit a girl named Rachael.

“Can I go?” he asked, understanding that space and mileage money were tightly rationed.

“Sure,” I told him, figuring not much would come of this. “Let me know what happens when you get back.”

The next time I saw him, he was chattering away like an agitated monkey. He told me the story of Rachael, a baby with Down Syndrome and a hole in her heart. The family had no insurance, the dad was the sole source of income and they had already been drained by all the complications associated with Rachael’s birth.

Her grandfather had gotten some people together to make and serve chili to help defray the cost of the upcoming open-heart surgery.

The family wasn’t thrilled about this nosy kid who was writing down everything thing they had to say. They were guarded and concerned.

But, the next time they had a supper, back the kid went for another update about the fundraising and the girl.

The more he went, the more he wrote. The more he wrote, the more people heard. The more they heard, the more they gave.

Eventually, the family adopted this goofy college student who had taken up their cause in print and started opening up about all of this. They told him they never regretted the decision to have a child they knew would have these problems. They felt both saddened and overwhelmed with gratitude when people started to donate to their cause.

“We’re afraid to ask how much it’s going to be,” the mom said at one point. She had been trying to find a job to help out, but between caring for Rachael and the general state of the economy, she couldn’t manage it.

Her husband did everything he could to be the breadwinner. He worked upwards of 80 hours a week during planting season in an attempt to help the family cobble a life together.

He might have been better off if he hadn’t.

In one of the last interviews leading up to the surgery, the mom revealed her husband made too much money in the previous fiscal year to qualify for Medicaid and WIC benefits that would have taken care of much, if not all of the bills.

“How much is too much?” the kid asked.

“We missed the cut off by about $20.”

 

Rachael kept getting worse and then a bit better and then a bit worse.

Something had to be done.

The surgery happened in November of that year. She was less than two months old when her family gathered in a private waiting room. Her grandfather was in a hospital bed on one floor, recovering from his heart attack while she was being tended to on another floor.

My kid was there as well, at the behest of the family, watching all of this come together.

Were the chili suppers enough to pay for the bills? No one knew.

Would she make it out alive? It was a 50/50 bet.

He was rolling through these thoughts as a nurse came in and told the family that things weren’t great.

“Please, God, let us keep her,” Rachael’s grandmother said in a quivering voice. “… We need her more than she needs us.”

She survived the surgery and continued to struggle forward. Each day, one small step in a positive direction. The family spent weeks holed up in the waiting room, each day, praying for a small miracle.

“She still has a chance,” her mom told the reporter. “But everything has to go perfect.”

Everything didn’t.

 

Years after that story ran, two things remain fresh in my mind.

First, that story wrecked my reporter kid in a way that I never would have imagined. He was about 20 years old at the time he wrote that story and he was never the same after it.

He had grown up in an America that preached the idea of hard work, sacrifice and prayer. If you wanted something badly enough and you worked hard enough, then you would always triumph, the story went.

He gave everything he had to telling that story.

The community gave everything they had to raise the funds.

The family sacrificed and prayed.

The girl died.

This wasn’t the script he was used to.

The parents were close to his age. He sympathized and became part of a story that consumed him. He couldn’t let it go.

Years later, I got in touch with him and found out it still haunted him in some ways. He was a serviceable reporter doing a good job and managing post-collegiate life.

“It’s funny,” he once wrote to me. “After all I’ve done in the years that have passed, I still remember that story. It’s always with me.”

The second and more depressing thing was the quotes from the family. They prayed and hoped and loved and more, but so many of the quotes came back to the issue of money.

They were trying to earn money.

They were trying to raise money.

They didn’t want to know how much this would cost.

They feared the costs associated with the life of their child.

At a time in which they clung to hope, the niggling fear of funding scratched loudly at the corners of their mind.

I can’t say for sure that they didn’t get the best possible care for their child. I have no idea if there was a “broke people” wing for folks without bulletproof insurance or if they had insurance it would have been better or faster or stronger care. I have no idea if that $20 kept their kid from landing in a safety net of government assistance and medical assurance instead of crashing into an early grave.

I can say, however, that isn’t a concern anyone should face while their infant’s life hangs in the balance.

 

Healthcare is a rather abstract concept to people who have it or don’t need it. If you are healthy or insured, chances are when Romney says, “We must rein in the skyrocketing cost of healthcare by repealing and replacing Obamacare,” it doesn’t mean much. It’s just a word like socialism, communism or whatever ism is on the outs at the time the writer is using it.

Obamacare. Like he’s the guy giving me my prostate check each year.

Obamacare. A Franken-word that smacks of too much government and not enough freedom.

Obamacare. A term inviting the icy scorn of those who believe they just hit a triple, when in actuality, they were born standing on third base.

And that’s exactly who Mitt Romney is and why it’s hard for me to take him seriously when it comes to problems that impact people who earn in a year what he took home in a day.

When he talks about working hard as a businessman, I’m sure it was never in a Missouri farm field, planting seeds for 10, 12 or 15 hours a day.

Sweating for life. Praying for hope. Losing both.

Thursday, Mitt Romney told us, “If I am elected President of these United States, I will work with all my energy and soul to restore that America, to lift our eyes to a better future. That future is our destiny. That future is out there. It is waiting for us. Our children deserve it…”

Today, Rachael rests in a small grave in a small town in Missouri with a marker noting she lived for 63 days.

Each one of those days, her parents had to worry about how much money it would take to keep her alive.

That can’t be our future.

It can’t be our destiny.

No one deserves that.

Avoidance

So some members of a Baptist church came to the pastor and said, we heard you're marrying some black folks in here and we're not okay with that. 

All due respect, my children, the pastor replied, that you are freaked out by non-white peoples is not Jesus's major problem at the moment. Nor is it mine. I am sorry, but you are going to have to suck it up and just ... I don't know, not come to the wedding? Were you even invited? Then what the heck do you care? Go home, watch Storage Wars and smoke marijuana like normal people do on Saturdays. 

Except not: 

Insiders say five or six members went to the Rev. Stan Weatherford after seeing the couple's wedding rehearsal the Thursday night before their Saturday wedding.

The church pastor said he was surprised by the reaction of some church members.

"I didn't want to have a controversy within the church, and I didn't want a controversy to affect the wedding of Charles and Te'Andrea. I wanted to make sure their wedding day was a special day," Weatherford told WLBT-Channel 3.

Charles Wilson said it was a huge disappointment that he and his wife couldn't get married at the church they attended because of the color of their skin.

"I feel like it was blatant racial discrimination," Wilson said Friday.

The 150-year-old church hasn't had any black couples married there in modern times. Weatherford married the couple but moved the ceremony to a nearby church.

He didn't want to have a controversy, so he appeased the loudest, angriest people in the room, and told the couple who wanted to get married that they'd have to move so that ... I don't get exactly what they were hurting. He didn't want to have a controversy. Well, he's sure got one now, and it's well deserved.

I like the line about how it was the rehearsal that got the bigots upset, because the bride and her family had been involved with the church for a while and the groom had been attending. So a couple of black people in the congregation on Sundays was okay, but a whole bunch of 'em? Like more than three? Standing together? Clearly that's an invasion of some sort and we can't have that. 

And the comments are full of "this isn't the whole church, some of us like black people, etc" which I'm sure is also true. The defending your own Something about that, though: The five or six people who asked him to get the black couple out of sight of their white eyeballs are assholes, but there are always assholes in the world. All the bigots will not eventually die out. It will never happen. They don't win when they act like bigots, they win when nice-enough well-meaning people who are supposed to be better than this decide that in order to keep the bigots quiet, we all should pretend to agree with them. 

In which case not only is the controversy not avoided, but nobody learns anything and nobody grows one bit. You can avoid and avoid and avoid, and keep shrinking the world down so that eventually it's just a ten-by-ten room with you and your fellow racists, but that's not living, people, that's not life. In a church of all places you should be throwing the doors wide, letting in as many people as possible, especially the ones who aren't familiar to you and the ones who make you nervous and the ones you aren't sure you're gonna like.

That's the only way any of this gets better. I can sit in my house with my fellow white people and think about how I need to be less of a racist, but I'm not gonna be less of a racist unless I get out there and get to know a lot more people and start ACTING LIKE LESS OF A RACIST.  This pastor could have done quite a job by asking people who objected to the wedding to attend it, or watch the video later (admitting creepy bigoted busybodies to your wedding not being a thing many people want to do, shockingly) or really anything else up to and including telling these few people who have nothing more pressing to worry about to shut the holy hell up.

That wouldn't have avoided controversy, certainly. Last I checked, though, the head of that particular religion got himself nailed to a tree for making a scene in public about the treatment of the downtrodden. Maybe he should have just moved somewhere else. 

A. 

Witness for the Persecution

Requiring insurance plans to cover contraception is just like dissolving the Catholic Church in England so Henry VII can marry a harlot:

Making the connection to the Fortnight crystal-clear, the archbishop emphasized: “St. Thomas More could be said to represent that conscientious private employer or employee who seeks to avoid doing or facilitating moral evil in course of daily work while striving to live and work in accord with the demands of social justice. He stands for those who go about their daily work in accord with their faith . . . and those who understand how dangerous it is to the common good to separate faith from life, the Gospel from culture.”

Yes. St. Thomas More would be all OVER making non-Catholic (and Catholic, too, but we'll get to that after more quality crazy) women pay out of pocket whatever wealthy pharmaceutical companies wanted to gouge them for the privilege of not having a fifth kid in six years, or a kid out of wedlock, or LET'S NOT FORGET MEDICAL ADVANCES LIKE NOT BLEEDING TO DEATH FROM BENIGN TUMORS. St. Thomas More would be all, "Let the bitches pay $80-$100 or just die already."

Take it away, K-Lo:

We got to this point in United States history, in which religious liberty is being redefined and eroded before our eyes, in part because we haven’t been answering our call as the laity — to be authentic Christian witnesses in our daily lives. Think of what it means to be a Catholic in public life. Is it distinguishable from anyone else’s, in ways beyond rhetoric? Do we live differently? Do we vote differently? Do we have different priorities and approaches based on authentic discernment of Christ’s daily call to us?

Clearly somebody fucked up somewhere, because something like 90 percent of Catholic women use birth control in some form, and the other 10 percent are most likely nuns. Clearly what needs to happen here is all good Catholic ladies need to renounce this "modern day" and throw their pills in the trash (and make their husbands burn the Trojans, too).

Or, you know, Holy Mother Church could get Her shit together and, instead of basing policy on an archaic system of doing things that hasn't been operative since dinosaurs ruled the earth, allow people to use their God-given consciences to make the best decisions for themselves, while concentrating on boring shit like feeding poor people.

This shit makes me so crazy. The Rules are only the point if they actually help somebody. Forcing women to live as if it's 1855 and they have to have a child every time they have sex helps nobody. Forcing women to live with preventable illness and pain helps nobody. Forget the women, even, since these people seem to: Forcing women to have unwanted children doesn't help those children one bit. It doesn't help their husbands, either, really: More kids to feed and corral and send to college isn't an automatic in the win column if you have less money than, say, a Romney. Theoretically, we put The Rules in place in order to make people's lives better, and perpetuate them in order to continue that work.

This is perpetuating The Rules for the sake of The Rules, which is kind of what a very nice man got himself nailed to a tree for trying to tear down in the first place.

A.

Love Wins

Go read this. 

Not everything sucks. Sometimes it's nice to remember that. 

A. 

Way to Pick Your Battles, Catholic Church

Continuing their theme of assigning tasks based on angry wingnut e-mail forwards from America's brothers-in-law, now U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops think the Girl Scouts are leading our young astray: 

The new inquiry will be conducted by the bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It will look into the Scouts' "possible problematic relationships with other organizations" and various "problematic" program materials, according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops.

The bishops' conference provided a copy of the letter to The Associated Press, but otherwise declined comment.

[snip]

One of the long-running concerns is the Girl Scouts' membership in the 145-nation World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.

The association, known as WAGGGS, is on record as saying girls and young women "need an environment where they can freely and openly discuss issues of sex and sexuality." It also has called for increased access to condoms to protect against sexually transmitted diseases.

Somewhere in my mother's house is the Girl Scout sash I earned with every badge on it and maybe I missed class that day but not one of them is the Condom Distribution & Promotion badge. Mostly, sitting around the campfires making s'mores, we earned badges in things like sewing and woodworking and finding our way with a compass and stuff. We did service projects and collected food for pantries. I must have missed the meeting where we got our Dildo Use for Fun and Profit instructions. 

Recently I hosted a group of Brownies at the ferret shelter, where they were earning badges in caring for animals, so they got to pet the adoptables and see how we cleaned cages and gave medications and feedings. Nobody told me I was supposed to cover how to procure a hasty abortion, and we were short on time anyway, so my bad. 

This is so stupid and small and pointless and silly. The Girl Scouts aren't even saying anything about condoms. They're "associated" with a group that is "on record" as saying something as innocuous as "condoms prevent disease and we should probably not all die of syphilis because it's no longer 1742 and also yuck."

They're not even saying "girls should be able to have whatever sex they feel they should have," which would be sensible enough. They're just saying, "girls should have an environment in which they can talk about sex without being afraid of some asshole calling them whores for asking questions about their own bodies." Even devout Catholics who intend to be virgins until marriage could still benefit from an environment in which they can talk about sex. That is, unless you're the kind of pinched, unhappy, punishing jackass who thinks even the word sex is just too dangerous for young female minds. 

That sort of person seems to rise high in the administration of the bishops. 

A. 

Nuns vs. Bishops

My money's on the nuns: 

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents 80% of America's 57,000 nuns, was the subject of a lengthy of investigation led by Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio.

The resulting report noted the good work they did with the poor and in running schools and hospitals, but also documented what it called a "grave" doctrinal crisis.

It said the sisters were promoting radical feminist themes and criticised US nuns for challenging the bishops, who it said were "the church's authentic teachers of faith and morals".

The Archbishop of Seattle, Peter Sartain, is to lead a reform of the LCWR.

This will include a review of ties between it and its close partner, Network, a social justice organisation involved in healthcare and poverty programmes.

Network was singled out for criticism in the report for "being silent on the right to life" and other "crucial issues" to the church.

Sister Campbell suggested that her organisation's vocal support for President Barack Obama's healthcare bill was behind the slapdown.

"There's a strong connection," she said. "We didn't split on faith, we split on politics."

And not just because I was taught by nuns and YOU DO NOT MESS, son, and all the other too-easy jokes about how mean nuns are and ha ha ha. 

Putting things bluntly, Catholic nuns have been doing the actual work of keeping the church alive while the bishops sat on their asses and complained. They staffed the schools and ran the hospitals, teaching the faith and caring for the sick, day in and day out, when nobody was watching. The bishops get all the pomp and all the press, but you know who wins things like this? You know who wins these fights?

The people who have the patience to outlast the latest loudmouth Your Grace blathering on about obedience and one's proper place. The people who've been there before him and will likely be there after. The people who show up to work and keep showing up long after the fanfare's over. 

A. 

The Bishop Abuse Cover-Up Scandal

On trial in Philadelphia: 

Few victims or members of the public have been attending the trial in downtown Philadelphia, but retired Philadelphia detective Arthur Baselice III of Mantua, N.J., turned out Monday.

His 28-year-old son, Arthur Jr., died of a drug overdose in 2006, after his civil lawsuit against the church accusing his high school principal of molesting him was thrown out because of legal time limits. The former principal, a Franciscan friar, is in prison for stealing nearly $900,000 from the school and the Franciscans, some of which fed the younger Baselice's drug addiction, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors are detailing allegations made against nearly two dozen priests since 1948 to show that Lynn and other archdiocesan officials kept suspected predators in jobs around children.

Any entrenched power structure is eventually only interested in protecting itself. It's why we have to have checks and balances, systems designed to provide oversight, because this is what we do, we close doors and pretend that our sins aren't ordinary sins, they're special somehow and the rules don't apply. 

A. 

What Churches Risk

In the headlong rush into sexual political fights: 

It's too bad U.S. bishops are spending so much political and cultural capital on the religious liberty fight which is now becoming bogged down over contraception. Too bad because while they are engaged in what I suspect will be a losing battle in a rhetorical war, the voice they are raising, rare these days in Washington, against a real war is getting lost in the cultural haze.

As U.S. Senators have essentially now begun taking orders directly from AIPAC and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in a manner that would no doubt generate outrage in Israel were such frank interference attempted by the Obama administration—and as media reports continue to "soften" the American public in preparation for an "inevitable" confrontation with Iran, U.S. bishops have finally stepped into the fray raising a hand of warning.

In a March 2 letter from Bishop Richard E. Pates of Des Moines, chair of the U.S.C.C.B. Committee on International Justice and Peace, to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the bishops noted their concern over “an alarming escalation in rhetoric and tensions,” including Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic and speculation on the possible use of force against Iran, including an Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

That link goes to the US Catholic magazine's blog, btw, not to some crazy hippie site. Here's another entry:

Did you know, for example, that the bishops are presenting President Obama with a petition to change our country’s policy on nuclear weapons?

The USCCB’s website currently has a petition titled “President Obama, move us closer to a world free of nuclear weapons.” Says the petition: “In the 21st century, nuclear weapons are a global security liability, not an asset. You must act now to reduce the nuclear danger and the role of nuclear weapons.”

Why isn’t this being preached from the pulpit?

Um, because wer'e too busy talking about sexy things like gay sex and birth control and who has the right to have the holy sacrament of humping where and for how many cookies? I can't fault, entirely, the bishops for the relentless focus our national media has on boning, but I can fault them for not realizing that the minute they open their celibate traps about sex that's all anybody's going to talk about. After all, it's only been like 40 years of this now.

I know Holy Mother Church thinks in millennia, and I know being media-savvy isn't exactly their strong suit, but you'd really think they would have figured this out by now. That they're acting like they haven't means they're either criminally dim or deliberately so, and either way it's bad news for anybody who'd like anything done that doesn't involve policing where people put their penises. 

When it comes right down to it the Church has made a deliberate choice that sexual intercourse is going to be the hill they want to die on. And absent some massive backlash on the part of the faithful, dying is exactly what they're going to do. 

A. 

Living for Bread Ain't Worth Living At All

RMJ on a Lent I could get into: 

You have heard; you have seen; perhaps today you even bear the ashes on your head; perhaps you didn't, or you wiped them off at the church door. It doesn't matter! What matters is what you do, and if you remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return, then you'll realize that we are all dust! And we are all deserving, we are all going down, in the end, to the same place, and it's high time we started sharing the joy of the experience rather than fearing we won't have enough accumulated for ourselves at the end! Where is your treasure? Where rust corrodes and thief steals and moth devours? Get rid of it! Your treasure is in the homeless person you can help, in the hungry person you can feed, in the naked person you can clothe! Your treasure is all around you; now put your heart there, and open the eyes of your spirit, and see it!

We've been lucky in a mild winter this year. We've been lucky in a winter that feel shorter than in years past, that feels more like an endless November than our usual endless frozen January. I have a window open today, and yesterday it was still fully light at 5, and usually I'm thinking around this time that the winter will never end and we might not survive it. This year I'm thinking maybe it's almost over, and we will. 

I said to my mother the other day, when we were talking about a project I'm working on involving the ugliness of the church, that the reason I call myself a practicing Catholic is that I"m not very good at it. It's glib but it's true, and my most frequent prayer is, "I'm trying here, Dude, cut me some slack already." It's easy to confuse ritual and repetition with the point, and I'm good at the point but not at the ritual. Some instinctive resistance to authority, maybe, or just the subsconscious desire to fuck something up so that I have something to beat myself up about? As it is, I'm not making it to church all that often, and when I am, I'm distracted. 

None of this is helped, of course, by the sad spectacle of the church attempting to smash itself on the rocks of contemporary American sexual politics, evidenced most profoundly by shit like this: 

At her mother's funeral mass at the St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Md., a grieving Barbara Johnson was the first in line to receive communion.

What happened next stunned her. The priest refused Johnson, who is gay, the sacramental bread and wine.

"He covered the bowl with the Eucharist with his hand and looked at me, and said I cannot give you communion because you live with a woman and that is a sin in the eyes of the church," Johnson told ABC News affiliate WJLA.

And this is so clearly the opposite of the point that it makes my vision go white with anger: That altar, that table, is a place of profound and radical equality. We come to that place tarnished and damaged, all of us, and all of us the same, and if there is a test in that place it's the test of those giving and not those receiving communion. We are all the Stranger in someone's eyes, all the Other. We are all the undeserving. Throw the first stone, bitches, I dare you, because we will all, someday, approach a door behind which could be welcome or condemnation and our only forlon fucking hope is that we meet with treatment we do not deserve. 

The stories in the Bible, at least the ones that speak to me most clearly, are not about daring to go inside. They're about daring to let others in, to accept the person feared, to say yes instead of no when asked a question, to help instead of walking past. That's the message that has even the barest chance of connecting with people in the world today, not this endless bludgeoning of the insufficiently devout in matters of sexual behavior and political thought. Not this cycle of punishment and purging. I hear people talk about a smaller, stronger, purer church and I think how completely opposite that is to the aim of everything I've ever been taught by the church itself.

We're supposed to try to be more, not to force others to be less. 

A. 

Cheap Shots and Christ on Sale

The NYT's Charles Blow tried to make a funny about Romney's magic underwear, failed, and got smacked around for it, but what I want to talk about is this statement:

‏ @thepubliceditor: I applaud @CharlesMBlow for apologizing for his tweet on Romney. Criticism based on religion is inappropriate, on Twitter or anywhere else.

Blow really should have been reprimanded for not being able to come up with anything better than the magic underwear thing. You work at the Times, man, put your shoulder into it! Have one of your interns look up something about Mormonism that all of Twitter hasn't adequately addressed before now.

Unfunny schoolyard cracks that Conan O'Brien's writers would have passed on are indeed inappropriate. However, criticism based on religion is most assuredly appropriate, at least, as appropriate as criticism based on anything else.

We can't sit here and rule things out of bounds to talk about on the basis of somebody said the word "god" and now that means we all have to stop questioning. Faith is used too often as some kind of prophylactic against criticism in public life, an instant protection against having to explain one's positions and justify one's actions. "I believe" has come to mean "now you can't object, because I invoked the Jesus Pokémon, regardless of what insane shit comes out of my mouth next."

Which is a pity, because in the best traditions of faith doctrine can be the result of long periods of learned argument and study, and talking about one's faith doesn't have to be a threat to that faith. Sensible criticism about a politician's faith would, one can hope, prompt a deeper explanation of how that faith informs a candidate's actions.

In Romney's case, that would mean exploring a candidate's explicit view of his campaign as some kind of affirmation that AMERICA IS TEH AWESOMEST SEZ GOD and go fuck a French mime if you think differently. So I can see why his campaign wouldn't exactly welcome that discussion.

A.

x-posted at Firedoglake

Jurassic Prick

Jesus and I need to have a talk about his shitty friends, and how they're not invited to our parties anymore. 

A. 

Both Sides Always

Who can tell what's really going on?

Religious liberty has been a leading topic in recent weeks because of the Obama administration's mandate that insurance companies provide free birth control even to people employed by church-affiliated organizations, including schools and hospitals. Opponents frame the debate as one of religious liberty while proponents of the mandate say it's about women's health and access to contraception.

Figuring out who's right is WAY TOO HARD, you guys. Especially right after quoting shit like this: 

Romney rarely ventures into social issues in his campaign speeches, but people participating in a town hall-style meeting one week before the Michigan primary asked how he would protect religious liberty.

"Unfortunately, possibly because of the people the president hangs around with, and their agenda, their secular agenda — they have fought against religion," Romney said.

A. 

How Life Began at Conception

Via Ntodd, here's a great piece of history: 

That year, Christianity Today — edited by Harold Lindsell, champion of “inerrancy” and author of The Battle for the Bible — published a special issue devoted to the topics of contraception and abortion. That issue included many articles that today would get their authors, editors — probably even their readers — fired from almost any evangelical institution. For example, one article by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary criticized the Roman Catholic position on abortion as unbiblical. Jonathan Dudley quotes from the article in his book Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:

God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.

Christianity Today would not publish that article in 2012. They might not even let you write that in comments on their website. If you applied for a job in 2012 with Christianity Today or Dallas Theological Seminary and they found out that you had written something like that, ever, you would not be hired.

Quite frankly I think the debate over when life begins is a way to distract people from the fact that this entire debate is about the power of the state, and whether government should have the ability to force you to bear a child against your will. Not to mention prevent you from obtaining much-needed medical treatment in the guise of morality, should your pregnancy go terribly wrong in the way that pregnancies can. 

Nevertheless, it's fascinating to see the way the desire for power has shaped the public positions of evangelical Christians who claim their authority comes straight from God. Go read the whole thing. 

A. 

"Yes. This is Dog"

"You think dogs will not be in heaven?
I tell you, they will be there long before any of us."  

Robert Louis Stevenson

As skeptically humanist as I remain about heaven, I still want to believe that all dogs go there. And I believe it looks like this. Or maybe this.

There's a reason both the links above went viral this week. This is what joy looks like. Throw the ball!

War on the Modern World

Go for it. Just go for it. Burn it all down. Pile everything you've ever said was important to you in the street, douse it in gasoline, and let the blaze light up the sky. 

This puts it all on the table. Republicans and Catholics and Republican Catholics and Republicans who just say they're Catholic and Catholics who are Republican because abortion seems yucky are now all just going to have to say it now. 

They would rather lots and lots of women die from preventable conditions, too many unwanted children, and abortions that should never have to happen, than that they have to put up with the thought that some woman somewhere is making her own decisions regarding who she has sex with and when. 

I got news for a lot of people what think this is some kind of winning argument about religious freedom for Catholics. Catholic women have memories of the battle over the Pill and the issuance of Humanae Vitae the first time around.

For instance, the Belgian bishops stated: "Someone, however, who is competent in the matter under consideration and capable of forming a personal and well-founded judgment--which necessarily presupposes a sufficient amount of knowledge--may, after a serious examination before God, come to other conclusions on certain points. In such a case he has the right to follow his conviction provided that he remains sincerely disposed to continue his inquiry." Of those who arrived at conclusions differ­ent from Humanae Vitae, the Scandinavian bishops stat­ed: "No one should, therefore, on account of such diverg­ing opinions alone, be regarded as an inferior Catholic." The Canadian bishops made a similar statement: ’These Catholics should not be considered, or consider them­selves, shut off from the body of the faithful."

Catholic women remember the woman in the pew next to them in church, dragging 13 children behind her, her husband dead or gone and no help at hand. They remember the neighbor who died in childbirth because her doctor was bound by faith to save her baby at all costs. They remember the relative whose husband defied the hospital's orders to make sure there were no more children, who suffered horribly before the end. They remember their own miscarriages, stillbirths, when God wanted them to have just one more baby, at the age of 45 in 1953.

And those were the married women who wanted the children they had. Those were the ones doing it right, in the eyes of the more conservative bishops and members of the church. That was the fate due the good girls. I don't need to go over what happened to the bad ones, and what we remember about them. 

So go ahead, tell those women that a condom is cause for excommunication. Tell those women that the greatest threat to their liberty is some other lady in their health plan getting the pill for free. Tell those women, who lost their sisters, who lost their aunts, who lost their mothers, who saw the women around them worn out and rubbed down to nothing, that they don't have the right to painlessly, reasonably ensure that they live to care for the family they want. Let's have that fight. Let's haul out all the arguments. 

Let's talk about how God really wants our infant mortality rate to skyrocket. Let's talk about how many women, exactly, God wants dead. Let's make adherence to a rule of the modern world the be-all and end-all test of who is a true believer. That's never gone horribly wrong before. 

Let's have that fight, because there's no way it goes the way the bishops think it's going to go. This is the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, writing in 1968: 

In view of the American tradition of freedom and pluralism, it would be a serious mistake to use the encyclical as a kind of Catholic loyalty test. Nothing could so quickly snuff out the spirit of per­sonal responsibility, which has done so much to invigorate American Catholicism in the past few years.

Nothing could be more discouraging to young people and intellectuals, upon whom the future of our Church so greatly depends. Nothing could be more destructive of the necessary autonomy of Catholic universities and journals, which have begun to prosper so well. Nothing, finally, could be more harmful to the mutual relations of trust and cordiality that have recently been established between bishops and theologians.

He could have been speaking directly to the bishops and their power-hungry enablers in Congress today. Have that fight. Go ahead. You won't like the outcome. I've been saying for years that our vicious abortion politics are burning down everything else the Church has ever considered important, and this? This is like throwing a bottle of lighter fluid onto the kindling before striking the match. 

A. 

Religion Is Poison

It comes in Christian and Buddhist and Animist and.....

When I was talking to a friend this weekend about the same stuff I put in yesterday's post, she mentioned that his Mormonism also put people off.  I said, sure it does for the crazy fundamentalists who think that Jesus rode to work on a dinosaur, but most people don't really care about that; his Daddy Warbucks/sea snake mash-up is much more of a problem.

So then she started talking about just how crazy Mormonism is.  Which, don't get me wrong--it's nuts.  But I don't see it as any crazier than any other religion.  Some years ago, I decided that if your explanation for things requires any magic or supernatural intervention, it has passed a crazy event horizon; past that, all explanations are equally nutty.  One you've invoked a non-testable, non-natural cause, off you go.  And every single religion does that. 

Here's the beauty of this way of thinking: I no longer have to spend time categorizing which religions are crazier than the others.  Wicca?  Mormonism?  Islam?  All the same.  They're exactly the same, because they're all past the event horizon.  So instead of having to talk about how the revelations of the angel Moroni or whatever are WAY nuttier than the idea that a zombie Judean carpenter will grant you an eternal yet incorporeal existence, I can spend time oh, I don't know, writing smart-ass things for the Internet.

As noted, I say that religion is poison.  I don't just mean because of all the wars and intolerance; we can find other excuses to engage in those very human behaviors.  It's poison because it is a barrier to understanding why and how things work; when you don't know why something happens the way it does, you can just throw up your hands and say God/the spirits of our ancestors/Xtapolapocetl did it.  Worse yet are the people who do that god-of-the-gaps bullshit--when they come across a phenomenon that we don't have a good explanation for, they use that as evidence that their particular delusion must be responsible for it.  They're never heard apologizing for getting it wrong when we do come up with an explanation for the phenomenon in question.

I know that some people will tell me that religions can motivate people to do good things, or that there are beautiful stories to be found there; you could say the same about Aesop's fables.  And that also leaves you open to the fact that people can do terrible things and tell horrific stories thanks to religion.  And no amount of good works or stories can, in my mind, make up for the existence of Pat Robertson.

So that's my take.  You may commence bitching about me/it, condemning my non-existent soul, attempting to explain how your beyond-the-event-horizon idea is different, and/or whatever else in the comments. 

Ross Douthat: Love is a Bowl of Sugar

OH GOD IT'S NOT LIKE THAT YOU CLOWNASS: 

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

I've noticed that we have no more private contractors, because we have an army. Before 1776, life was paradise for Blackwater but the minute we formed militias, they were fucked. Such a sad state for a glorious private enterprise. 

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches.

Or to Applebees. Won't the government think of the jalapeno poppers? 

This is another "reasonable conservative" tic I've noticed from acquaintances of late: "I, personally, would give more money to charity or hire more people at my office if I paid less in taxes and various fees." And yes, you, nice person that I know, probably would. Ross might actually give more to charity if he had that money laying around. Does that mean we should give EVERY rich person free money on the off chance one or two of them might kick in $25 to the local food pantry? 

How is that any less governmental social engineering? 

Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

There is distinct lack of soup kitchens and food pantries, now we have a welare office. What a fucking idiot. 

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions — hospitals, schools and charities — in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. 

A) No, it doesn't. 

B) This does not, actually, violate the consciences of anybody, and here's why: Hospitals and insurers only have to COVER contraception, and only if they employ large numbers of non-Catholic employees. Nobody who is Catholic has to take it. Therefore, we should be counting on the large numbers of Catholics who are so serious about this shit that they won't take the pill to stand up for their own morals and against the horror that is Obamacare. 

I'll give you a minute to stop laughing. 

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not.

Yes. Catholic hospitals are just in this for the decency of serving others. I'm not saying some of them weren't, in the beginning, but you can't pretend that a lot of this isn't profit-driven, and a lot of that profit isn't helped by massive tax exemptions. 

The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”

Actually, that is exactly what Catholics leaders are saying by choosing not to follow the law. You know, this is a thing I keep hearing from Catholic officials in other contexts, this constant talk about church canon law, as if that should supersede actual real-life American law. I'm pleased as punch we all have our own ways of doing things and our own rules, but when you get right down to it, if you want to be a member of a community, you have to do more than just loudly demand that the entire community "respect" your beliefs by changing its morality to suit yours. 

The larger point Ross is making is actually more offensive, though: We can either have government or charity but not both. Our government cannot pursue any common good, because that will mean that everybody will assume shit is all handled and we can go back to watching the Super Bowl. If someone else has it taken care of, then I don't need to give a shit.

I don't know if Ross has met any of his fellow humans, but we're actually not like that. I post a lot of stuff about how stupid and selfish and mean we can be, but I believe people are basically decent and that given half a chance we will help one another. Given half a chance and a bit of encouragement, we will feed the stranger and clothe the naked and take care of the grandma whose car broke down on the freeway. I know this because I've seen it happen at least as often as I've seen people be awful, and I choose to believe that love isn't a bowl of sugar. There isn't only so much. If our government takes care of many of us, we will still take care of each other, because that's what we do. It's in our bones and blood, and hundreds of years of inhuman cruelty haven't beaten it out of us, not entirely. 

Decent government that acts in our interests doesn't kill the charitable impulse. It encourages it. It offers official approval of the nagging feeling in the pits of our stomachs that says, "somebody should be helping these people." It represents, outwardly, the best of us, and the only reason Ross or anybody like him has a problem with that concept is they don't want to be forced to give a shit about anybody but themselves. 

And that's fine, really. There are nice libertarian islands being built for people like that. 

Schmuck. 

A. 

Local Church Acts Reasonably; Church Hierarchy, Not So Much

Oh, sit DOWN like you supposed to: 

CHICAGO — On the heels of an agreement about parade times reached between Chicago LGBT Pride organizers and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel church — which sits on the June parade route — the Windy City’s Cardinal Francis George compared the event to “something like the Ku Klux Klan.”

“You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism,” the Cardinal told Fox News Chicago on Sunday.

When FOX tells you to chill out with the inappropriate and inflammatory rhetoric, you might want to consider heeding their advice, but no: 

“That’s a little strong analogy, isn’t it? Ku Klux Klan?” the Fox reporter said to the Cardinal in response.

“It is, but you take a look at the rhetoric,” he responded. “The rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan, the rhetoric of some of the gay liberation people. Who is the enemy? Who is the enemy? The Catholic Church.”

The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, pal. The fact that the parish in question was just fine with the parade (just not with the timing, which would have snarled the hell out of traffic, so parish leaders acted like grownups and reached an actual solution) makes it all the more ridiculous that His Eminence went out of his way to fall on his keys, in a public-relations sense.   

A. 

 

Happy Hanukkah!

A.

A Secular Nation

Newt, Newt, Newt: 

The quote came from Newt Gingrich, who 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.”

Several things. First of all, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually miss Bob Dole. I miss the intelligent, high-minded Republican campaigning of the FREAKING 1990s, is how crazy this shitfest has become. They are just these total clowns, and I know I should take them more seriously, because lots of people will vote for anyone who isn't Obama, but they're so content-free these days that it's easier to just sit back and watch. The craziest thing as was said yesterday, somebody will say something crazier tomorrow. 

Second, when blithering on about how the government needs to get back into the God business, I wonder if these dinks consider that plenty of people IN the God business don't want their state or federal government anywhere near them or their assets. You think your church telling you how to run your government is scary? That scenario has nothing on your government telling you how to run your church, and all those big-money megachurch pastors might not like it so much when guys in suits are crawling all over their donation boxes. 

Third, oh for fuck's sake, shut up, Newt. A secular state is reason your creepy ass could get married three times, as a state truly run by Biblical principles would of course outlaw divorce. And probably stone you for your poly-blend sport coat, too. And the most of us have been led by Republican presidents since 1963, so who appointed all those judges who are now hating on God, anyway? Just shut up, and go buy yourself something pretty from Tiffany's. I know that always clears my head. 

A. 

Tim Tebow Doesn't Want You to Leave Tim Tebow Alone

Not only can he take it, he wants to take it:

I'll go a step further and say that, in so doing, Tebow knows full well that he is opening himself up to satire, because that is also a part of the deal evangelicals make when they dedicate themselves to converting a skeptical public. That's why, when Clay Travis famously asked in a press conference if Tebow was a virgin and caused so many sportswriters to flutter their lace hankies, Tebow simply smiled and answered the question. He wants people to ask that question. He wants every opportunity to talk about his beliefs in public, and he is smart enough to know that he will often rile folks in the process. Bruce Arthur and Jemele Hill and the Very Serious Media People are throwing a sneeze-guard around Tebow's religion that Tebow never would've asked for in the first place.

As usual, the problem is not with the thing, it is with the fan club. As with the Beatles, Jesus and Bill Maher, Tim Tebow could never hope to approach the level of offensiveness that his fans achieve on his behalf. Being defended is, in some ways, worse than being attacked, because your attackers at least give you the credit of assuming you are on their level.

Your defenders want you to be smaller, and in need of their protection. So that they can be bigger.

A.

Fuck Yeah, Church of England!

How often do  I say that around here?

The canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, the Rev Dr Giles Fraser, has resigned in protest at plans to forcibly remove protesters from its steps, saying he could not support the possibility of "violence in the name of the church".

Speculation grew in the last 24 hours that Fraser, a leading leftwing voice in the Church of England, would resign because he could not sanction the use of police or bailiffs against the hundreds of activists who have set up camp in the grounds of the cathedral in the past fortnight.

Just after 9am on Thursday, Fraser tweeted: "It is with great regret and sadness that I have handed in my notice at St Paul's Cathedral."

In a statement to the Guardian, Fraser, who was appointed canon in May 2009, confirmed his resignation, saying: "I resigned because I believe that the chapter has set on a course of action that could mean there will be violence in the name of the church."

[snip]

Fraser quickly became a hero figure among the Occupy the London Stock Exchange (LSX) movement, clearing police officers off the steps of St Paul's and supporting the group's right to peaceful protest after a court injunction stopped it from setting up camp in nearby Paternoster Square. He also delivered a Sunday sermon decrying corporate greed, which was seen as another sign of his endorsement of the protest.

Occupy London said it was "deeply moved" to hear of his resignation.

"He is man of great personal integrity and our thoughts are with him. He respected our right to protest and defended it. For that we are very grateful, as he ensured that St Paul's could be a sanctuary for us and that no violence could take place against peaceful protesters with a legitimate cause - challenging and tackling social and economic injustice in London, the UK and beyond."

The Catholic Church I attend when I drag my lazy ass out of bed on Sunday spends a lot of time gathering donations for the local food pantry, running benefits for the homeless, and generally working in the neighborhood around it, which isn't the richest in the whole world.

It's why I kept going after I felt I'd done my best to do the whole "believe in God" thing and was only ever going to get partway there. I kept going there because it wasn't just "try not to be such a douche all the time," though those sermons are useful to me. I kept going because I felt like that was the kind of place the church, and organized religion generally, needed more of: not a word about how women are whores merrily having abortions all the time, and lots and lots of actions about feeding some damn poor people already. 

Somewhere along the line we got the blasphemous idea that the only moral issues the church could take a stand on had to do with sex. As if there was any damage we could do by banging each other that would begin to approach the level of damage we do walking around every day in a world where some of us have more than enough to eat and some of us don't and that's somehow okay.

Kudos to Rev. Fraser for making a moral stand.

A.

This Doesn't WORK, France

Of course it's also bigoted and goes against all principles of free speech and equality, too:

MUSLIMS will be banned from praying outdoors in France from today in the latest move by officials to remove Islam from the public sphere.

The ban, announced by the government yesterday, infuriated French Muslim leaders, one of whom accused President Sarkozy's government of treating them like cattle.

They say that Muslims, who pray outdoors only because of a lack of space in mosques in France, feel stigmatised.

But Claude Gueant, the Interior Minister, said that the sight of hundreds of people gathering in the streets of Paris and other cities for Friday prayers was "shocking".

It comes after laws to prohibit pupils from wearing headscarves in schools and women from wearing the niqab, the full Muslim veil, in public.

Mr Gueant described outlawing street prayers as the latest brick in the wall that is shoring up the secular nature of the French state. He said that he had nothing against Islam, but wanted it out of the public eye.

Yes. Because nothing says "I like Islam fine!" like making sure you never have to see anyone practicing it.

For fuck's sake. In the history of the world, has persecuting the religious ever actually stopped people from adhering to that religion? If anything, oppression only empowers religious leaders to make the case that their cause is just, because if it wasn't so righteous, evil men wouldn't be trying to stop it. For like ten thousand years this has been true. I'm not asking that everybody know everything all the time, but some basic human psychology would be useful if you're going to make your living in politics.

A.

Yes. Jesus Needed MOAR PEEN.

Or something:

The macho Jesus movement has been bolstered by books like No More Mr Christian Nice Guy and The Church Impotent – the Feminisation of Christianity. But it's artist Stephen Sawyer, whose paintings of the Son of God as a tattooed biker and boxer have captured the imagination of Christian men searching for a more manly role model.

As Kentucky-based Sawyer, 58, points out: "I scarcely think Jesus could have overturned the tables of the money-lenders and driven them from the temple if he was a wimp. The model I use for my paintings is a surfer guy who's built like a brick shithouse."

But while you might expect this thinking to flourish in the American South, it's probably more surprising that it's gaining ground in the UK.

According to recent polls, the ratio of women to men worshippers in this country is 65% to 35% – and too much girliness is getting the blame for the gender imbalance.

As to the book titles, can someone please explain the difference between "feminine" and "impotent" to that fuckstick?

As to our painter friend, I think the best illustration of Jesus not being a wimp isn't surfing or boxing or riding a motorcycle but GETTING NAILED TO A TREE AND BEING OKAY WITH IT. Forget turning over the tables of the moneylenders in the temple, you want badassery, try getting railroad spikes driven through your palms. Jean Claude Van God Damme.

As to the entire concept, which is gross: I think if you want to attract straight men on Sundays, you don't recast him as a buff biker. You put his head on a Playboy bunny's body, am I right fellas?

What a load of nonsense. I hate this crap for the same reason I used to hate Guitar Jesus Living is Easy Mass in high school, where they acted like all that was holding teengers back from Christianity was the desire to sit on cushions in a circle instead of pews in a row. This is just an argument about the trappings, not the substance, and if the trappings are what's holding you back go find yourself a genuine theological crisis because we all have better things to do.

A.

Ewww

Joel Osteen got cooties all over my city.

*crosses fingers*

Hey, anybody who preaches what he preaches deserves a response on exactly this level.

A.

LeBron and Me

(Got a "hall pass" from A to post as long as it was before midnight. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. -- Doc)

One year ago, I took advantage of an off-day “hall pass” to complain about “The Decision” and the loss of LeBron James from my beloved Cavaliers.

I then spent every second of my basketball watching hoping that he would hurt as much as I hurt.

Every Miami loss was a celebration, every bad game, a triumph.

As the playoffs began, I found myself watching game after game, hoping that the Heat would get bumped off.

Each game they won, I wondered if there really was such a thing as karma.

I started getting very emo.

“If there is a God, how can he let this group of mercenaries and self-centered assholes win?”

“If life is fair, how can this be happening?”

“If I have to say, ‘NBA Champion LeBron James,’ I might start Betsy up in the garage, close the garage door and turn on a Cure album.”

Tonight, I realized that it had to be this way for karma to fully bloom.

For James to hurt as much as I did, several things had to happen:

• He had to be teased.
• He had to get as close as possible, only to have the diamond snatched away from him.
• He had to be crushed under the weight of his own ego.
• He had to lose in the worst way.

Mission accomplished.

He lost, not in the first or second or third round, but in the finals. He got there, got close and got kicked in the balls.

He lost to a team led by a guy who never asked out of town, never threatened to leave and never went on TV talking about himself in the third person.

Dirk Nowitzki said in an ESPN interview that when he was available as a free agent, not a single team called him. It wasn’t due to their lack of interest or his lack of talent.

They knew he was staying in Dallas. Why bother?

Loyalty.

A word that tested Dirk when owner Mark Cuban let his running partner and point guard of the gods, Steve Nash, bolt for Phoenix.

A word that angered Dirk when media pundits argued he’d need to leave the Metroplex if he were to ever win a title.

A word Dirk saw every day at practice, as it was tattooed down the left arm of Shawn Marion.

Marion, one of the pieces that Cuban quietly brought to Big D in an attempt to give Nowitzki one more run at a title, was no longer the Matrix.

He was more name than game.

The same could be said for the other broken toys that Cuban added.

Jason Kidd, the same point guard that was sent from Dallas to the Phoenix Suns in 1996 for Michael Finley, A.C. Green and Sam Cassell.

Tyson Chandler, a former first-round pick of the Bulls who never lived up to expectations.

J.J. Barea, an undrafted 5-foot-9 point guard who was best known for dating Miss Universe 2006.

Brian Cardinal, Brendan Haywood, Ian Mahinmi, DeShawn Stevenson, Corey Brewer and more. All guys who were bit players, castoffs or otherwise damaged.

All of these guys played meaningful minutes in a finals series built for crunch time.

Three of the six games came down to the final shot.

In none of those games was it James who delivered.

----

 The thing that kept playing in my head all night, as the clock wound down and the Mavericks’ lead grew to an insurmountable level was the opening scene of “Miracle.” When the Olympic hockey committee is yammering about how the Russians beat their guys, the NHL, the All-Stars, a clearly perturbed Herb Brooks makes the passing remark, “It wasn’t because you weren’t good enough.”

When the men cast an incredulous stare upon him, Brooks elaborates with, “All-Star teams fail because they rely solely on the individuals talent.”

That was the Miami Heat: An insanely talented group of individuals.

Not a team.

A team knows where it’s going when the chips are down. In two of the finals games, it was Nowitzki making the final plays, calling for the final shots and making the crucial decisions.

A team knows how to step up. When Nowitzki started off Game 6 with 1-for-12 slide, Jason Terry and DeShawn Stevenson stepped up, drilling shot after shot, holding off the Heat until reinforcements arrived.

A team knows to have faith in each member of that team. When Haywood couldn’t go and Chandler got into foul trouble, Mahinmi and Cardinal played gut-check minutes, despite lacking the Heat’s star power or talent level.

A team wins, because it’s greater than the sum of its parts.

That was always Brooks’ message.

It’s one I doubt the Heat won’t get tonight.

It’s something James will never understand.

---

A river of schadenfreude is likely flowing freely through the streets of Cleveland tonight. Sure, we didn’t win the NBA title, but neither did the man who quit on us and then pissed on us and then tried to pretend like we should all get on with our lives.

He walked down an empty hallway to a locker room that was devoid of championship goods. No special hats, no T-shirts, no champagne.

Tomorrow, thousands of kids in Nairobi, or wherever we send the losing merchandise, will likely be donning “A Ring for the King” T-shirts that were supposed to be flying off the shelves in Miami this week.

Tomorrow, he can read the clever headlines, the pundit columns and the general bile directed at him.

Tomorrow, I’ll get up and he’ll get up and we’ll be exactly the same.

Two guys without an NBA title.

Only this time, he’ll be hurting.

And I won’t be.

Malakas Of The Week: The U.S. Conference Of Catholic Bishops

It's institutional malakatude time again here at First Draft. The Catholic Bishops have issued their long awaited report on pervy pedophile priests. Do they blame celibacy? Hell, no. They blame hippies like Wavy Gravy and Woodstock, man.

The report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.

Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims.

The “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002 and by Pope Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.

Hmm, I wonder what kind of weed the authors of the report were smoking: I want some, man.

This is a ridiculous conclusion that lets the Bishopric (apt image, no?) off the hook. My theory is that celibacy and sexual repression were the primary causes. Imagine a very religious young man who finds himself turned on by other men; something that is verboten under Catholic doctrine. He struggles against his desires and realizes that there's no better place to repress sexual longings than the priesthood. Some of those young men had genuinely perverse desires to repress but not according to the lawyers who wrote the report:

In one of the most counterintuitive findings, the report says that fewer than 5 percent of the abusive priests exhibited behavior consistent with pedophilia, which it defines as a “psychiatric disorder that is characterized by recurrent fantasies, urges and behaviors about prepubescent children.

“Thus, it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as ‘pedophile priests,’ ” the report says.

That finding is likely to prove controversial, in part because the report employs a definition of “prepubescent” children as those age 10 and under. Using this cutoff, the report found that only 22 percent of the priests’ victims were prepubescent.

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies a prepubescent child as generally age 13 or younger. If the John Jay researchers had used that cutoff, a vast majority of the abusers’ victims would have been considered prepubescent.

This is not a "report" it is an argument on behalf of the Bishops. That's right, the same men who either stuck their heads in the sand, looked the other way or actively covered up for pervy padres. The Bishops continue to allow their need to defend themselves from litigation to overwhelm their pastoral duties to their parishioners.

The only positive thing I can say about the "report" is that at least it doesn't blame same-sexuality, which some members of the Catholic clergy and laity are prone to do. The whole thing reeks of malakatude of the most odious kind.

I'm not Catholic but my wife is and we live in a very Catholic city. Dr. A stopped going to mass because she got tired of being hectored by Opus Dei-style right wing priests on hot button social issues like abortion instead of hearing about social justice and protecting the weakest members of society such as children. Of course, our former Archbishop Alfred Hughes helped run the pervy priests cover-up for Cardinal Law in Boston so what else could we expect?

Finally, back to the preposterous imagery that this report planted in my brain: blame it on Woodstock. If that's the case perhaps the Bishops need a new logo: something along the lines of the keep on truckin' guy in a cassock holding a lighter whose flame forms a cross with the Woodstock logo in the background. That would be silly but no sillier than this report's passing the buck from the Church to hippies and free love. Bollocks.

It's time for the Bishops to face the music instead dancing around the truth:

 

 

 

'Here In This Country, At Least'

In which ABC News contrasts Stephen Hawking's comment that physical, Biblical heaven is horseshit with a 12-year-old who claims to have seen Jesus and "two of the Apostles" while undergoing emergency surgery at the age of four.

The segment begins at about minute 17 here.

Now, I don't want to bag on this kid, who after all is a kid, even if his pastor father has written a book alleging the family's miscarried child waits for them in the actual scriptural heaven. Believers of all kinds abound and generally they don't bother me very much, because being bothered by them would take away time I need to devote to playing Scrabble and watching The Good Wife and laughing at Bucky when he runs into things. 

I also, quite honestly, find the entire debate over what kind of afterlife there is and what it looks like and what you have to do to get into or out of what is usually characterized as the cosmic cool kids' club to be an utter distraction. If the whole point Jesus was trying to make is that systems and rules run a distant second to helping actual alive people in need in front of you, spending days on end wanking on about if there are 72 virgins or pearly gates or I can't get in if I cuss too much is unconscionable and ridiculous. Your treasure is in heaven? That's completely stupid. It can't be used to feed any poor people up there.

I do want to talk about ABC News' decision to cast the physicist and the pastor's son as if they were equals claiming precisely opposite things. Hawking isn't saying this kid didn't see what he thinks he saw, and also this kid is 12, and this is dumb anti-intellectual nonsense. But the reporter, Brian Harris, really outdoes himself in his little coda to this unbearably faux-folksy waste of oxygen.

"Stephen Hawking may have written more books and have many more advanced degrees than young Colton, but here in this country, at least, it's more than likely that the winner of the debate would be the 12-year-old."

WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? Here in this country, unlike in godless Europe or wherever that strange moon-man Stephen Hawking is from, we know that heaven is real? Here in this country, we like our physicists to debate seventh graders on a moron news show? Here in this country, we don't hold with no homosexual free-thinking sciency stuff? Here in this country, we're fucking idiots, and boy do we love God?

It's not that I would disagree with Harris, exactly. I mean, plenty of people do seem to love a version of God that is literal and materialistic and kind of dumb all around, who wants his followers to hate women and gays and poor people, who only cares if you have a little metal fish on your car. I think that's pretty much borne out in every voting pattern of the last 40 years. But that's not something that should be expressed with the kind of smug, chirpy joy Harris seems to be feeling here. If we truly would side with the 12-year-old, that's not, you know, an actual achievement. Nobody should be getting a cookie.

The other thing that makes me nuts about shit like this is it's not exactly a compliment to believers, either. It casts all those who do believe in heaven as stupid hick-ass 'necks who don't want to think about stuff any harder than some kid waking up from a weird anasthesia reaction. That's not really the way you want your side to look in this, or any, fight.

Thanks to CM on Facebook, who sent me in search of this idiocy.

A.

They'll Do Anything to Avoid Giving Obama Credit

Now John Paul II killed bin Laden:

A US military mission that cornered and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan was nothing short of a miracle, said Peru's President Alan Garcia, who attributed the divine intervention to newly beatified pontiff John Paul II.

"His first miracle has been to rid the world of this incarnation of evil, this demon of hatred and criminality," the Peruvian leader said, referring to the Al-Qaeda leader.

The late John Paul II showed uncanny timing, with his miracle falling on the very same day as a Rome ceremony beatifying him.

You know what this reminds me of, right?

A.

Is Our Catholics Learning?

Apparently Facebook is making all Catholic children into little sexy heathens:

"Facebook and other social media violate a person's privacy as it encourages young people a message to 'Publicize yourself!' The problem with this is that one's pictures, actions, and thoughts are shared instantly, globally and permanently," says the bulletin. "This is exactly the opposite of the Christian culture where people go into the secrecy and sacredness of the confessional to blot out their sins forever."

The bulletin lists four dangers associated with social network sites — dishonesty, predators, wasting time, and denying reality.

Emphasis mine, because I think a larger problem is Catholic parish bulletins encouraging young people a message to fucking write incorrectly. I get that not everybody proofreads everything for AP style, but could we please get together on the need to instruct our children in subject-verb agreement? Forget posting racy pics in an effort to create a permanent record of your sins. A permanent record of you blithering in AOL kiddiespeak is far more damaging to your long-term employability.

Now, on to the dishonesty, predators, wasting time and denying reality: Copping to the timesuck apect (damn you, Word Twist!), it occurs to me that a way around the reality denial and dishonesty is not to have your children be delusional liars to begin with. I've been online since there was an online to be on, and I've noticed that despite certain crazy exceptions, people tend to be online who they are in life. I've met lots of people in person that I first got to know online and, some social awkwardnesses anonymity helps us overcome aside, we're all pretty much the same people we are in pixels. People who are smart and funny are smart and funny. People who have short fuses have short fuses. People who are mean are mean.

The predator argument is one about paying attention and having some sense. I wouldn't shack up with somebody based on one comment at the Crack Den, but I wouldn't do so based on one date, either. No matter where you are, you need to be smart, and I know everybody's got a story about a predator, but how many of those stories wind up being about things that could have easily happened offline? Criminals were criminals before the Internet, and pretty much anyone who e-mails you out of the blue offering to do stuff for you for money is scamming you somehow.

A.

She Sells Sanctuary

 

 

In perusing my life over the past three weeks, it’s dawned on me that I’ve spent entirely too much time worried, pissed or in a funk. This kind of thing can happen when your governor decides to test the tensile strength of your asshole with a fucksaw, your kid is spiking a fever every six seconds and your wife is setting a record for “worst days at work ever.” I also found out that unless I can write two chapters in a week and a half, our book will be pushed back for more than a year and we will have violated a contract that they can then terminate.

I learned this week that Governor Deadeyes spent his formative pre-dropout college days probably stealing newspapers, that the dead poor soon will have more support than the living poor in this state and that giving up booze for Lent was probably the dumbest thing I could have done this year. I also realized that there is a tipping point between aggression and depression.

Something had to change, so I went to see a man about a horse

---

The snow mounds near the house had become leaking piles of dirt-tipped ice, with muddy pools of semi-ice popping up all throughout the area. The roads were dry and silted with a thin layer of dust, grime and rock salt. Mid-March in Wisconsin offers many things, but beauty isn’t one of them.

Hope, however, is.

We hope that spring will soon bloom. We hope that a freak snowstorm doesn’t cause us to regress toward winter and curse as we shovel. We hope gardens can be planted, heavy coats can be put away and grills can start filling the air with the smell of burning charcoal.

We hope. We have to.

With The Midget in tow, I eased the Civic into the back lot of the local oil change/car wash place. A feed-barn structure stretched out across the asphalt, presenting 12 unlabeled corrugated metal doors, each bolted shut with a padlock. I counted four doors from the right and dug in my pocket for a key.

The lock slid off easily but the rusty bolt took some elbow grease to crack. Finally, it slammed back into the side of the wooden frame. I dug into the small pile of snow at the base of the door, found the small metal handle and pressed it heavenward. The door collected along a spring-loaded roll as it moved out of the way.

The feeling was like being a kid running downstairs on Christmas morning. I found the best present under my tree at that very moment.

“Hello, Betsy.”

She sat there quietly, with dignity and sense of class, the way I imagine Cleopatra’s prized feline would. The trunk, recently rebuilt and repainted, glistened as the fading sunlight hit it. I sidled between the door and the sidewall of the structure and opened the hood. No mice, no puddles. Things were looking good.

I carefully removed the 87 sheets of Bounce fabric softener from the engine, wheels, interior, trunk and tailpipe. Someone told me that mice hated the texture and chemicals in Bounce dryer sheets and that they stored their car with sheets of Bounce all over it. I was uncertain if no mice had visited or if the Bounce had helped. At the very least, she smelled nice.

I slipped out of the storage facility and grabbed the car battery out of my trunk. I pressed it into the tray and attached the two cables. The light under the hood popped on, indicating that she still held a charge. Another good sign. I tightened down the cables and then I slid behind the wheel.

Three pumps, two cranks. She roared to life.

As she warmed up, I went back to the car. The Midget was hopping from seat to seat and having a great time. I grabbed a screwdriver and the horn pad that I’d spent half the winter refinishing and rebuilding. Without an airbag or a horn button, this was still a complicated little bastard. It had six plastic insets, a rubber pad that needed to be repainted, a new plastic chrome rim, a logo pin for the center and a foam pad it all was crammed into.

The rebuild wasn’t easy (painting rubber never is) but it was enough to keep me distracted from the fact that I was doing it in January and that it would be months until it were warm enough to get her out of storage.

I pushed the horn pad back onto the steering wheel and tightened it down. More parts were coming later this week. If FedEx got off its ass. The website was blaming late deliveries on “the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck eastern Japan.” Apparently, Lewisberry, Pennsylvania got hit with an aftershock or something, as my shipment got delayed twice.

The engine kicked down to a low hum, letting me know she was warm and comfortable, like my kid when she snuggles in on the couch while we watch Saturday morning cartoons. I eased Betsy out of the storage facility and transitioned The Midget from one car to another. I then put the Civic in the slot, locked her in and got back behind the wheel.

My body felt like it was one giant nerve.

“We get to ride in the MUSTANG!” The Midget shouted, almost as happy as I was. “Can we go to McDonald’s?”

I haven’t eaten McD’s food in almost six years, ever since a food-poisoning incident almost killed me. Even smelling the grease as I drive by is enough to give me a seizure.

“SURE!” I told her. “LET’S GO!”

I plugged in my iPod. The stereo connected and chose a song.

Thunder Road.

I eased her out of the lot and drove toward the closest circle of fast food Hell. I didn’t mind a bit.

---

We drove the back roads home, taking every possible “long-cut” we could. I found a stretch of country road that was deserted and dry. I stepped her down and she screamed with delight. Betsy tore across the asphalt, churning up dust, begging for more gas.

The Midget was gobbling down McNuggets and I had the radio on way too loud.

Smiles were everywhere.

It was at this point that I realized this was what I needed. I think in some way we all need something like this now.

Not everyone is going to get all sex-nuts over a car, but you’ve got to have something that you love to do, you love to see, you love to touch, you love to eat or you love to be near.

What I realized is that Scott Walker had done was worse than taking away our money or our unions or our rights.

He tried to take away our joy, our hope, our love. In having to gear up every day to fight an opponent who had no soul, we were losing our own.

As the protests continue, as the lawsuits rack up and as our “new normal” begins to emerge, we must remain vigilant against the tyranny of evil men.

However, find something small, something worthy, something freeing and let yourself enjoy it. Even for a moment.

Without it, you might forget what you’re fighting for.

On God's Side

In addition to the highest-ranking Roman Catholic in the state, unions have picked up support from other people whose phone lies go straight to the top:

Others chimed in with Bishop Linda Lee of the Wisconsin Conference of the United Methodist Church writing to Walker: “…far more is accomplished for the best interests of all those we serve when employers and employees work together, I am writing to ask you to reconsider your initiative.” And Rabbi Renée Bauer, director of the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin has spoken out against Walker’s legislation and is circulating a letter which says “as rabbis this an affront to our values—the Jewish mandate to protect workers, as well as the poor and needy among us… And it is an affront to our belief that these issues should be debated openly and fairly under public scrutiny.”

Good on them. This is not just a procedural issue, it's a moral one, and casting it as such will sway some folks who otherwise tend to tune out anything "political" as somehow being beyond their understanding.

A.

Milwaukee's Archbishop Stands With Unions, And So Should You

This morning Milwaukee's top Roman Catholic figured out where his bread was buttered:

"The Church is well aware that difficult economic times call for hard choices and financial responsibility to further the common good. Our own dioceses and parishes have not been immune to the effects of the current economic difficulties. But hard times do not nullify the moral obligation each of us has to respect the legitimate rights of workers.

"As Pope Benedict wrote in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in veritate:

‘Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labor unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church's social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum [60], for the promotion of workers' associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honored today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level. [#25]'

Listecki was an auxiliary bishop in Chicago when I was at the Southtown. I interviewed him back then about his past, which makes it clear this is old home week for him. The story's not online but I looked it up this morning:

   He was the firstborn son of Alfreda Kasprzyk and Harry Listecki, who
first owned taverns and then drove a city bus. The family lived near the
steel mills in South Chicago, in an area populated by first-generation
Polish and Mexican immigrants and St. Michael, he remembered, was "the
Polish cathedral."
   He attended St. Michael the Archangel Catholic School and then Quigley
Preparatory Seminary South, where he said his youthful choice was affirmed
by his teachers and fellow students.
   "You were thrown together with young men who had a singular vision or
singular desire to see whether or not they could be priests," Listecki said.
"Imagine a 14-year-old or a 15-year-old who says this is what I want to be,
and makes a commitment to do that. That shapes whatever you're going to do
for the rest of your life. That already defines pretty much your character."
   In the summers, seminarians were allowed to work to earn money, so when
he turned 18 Listecki walked across the street to U.S. Steel and applied for
a job. He got one, in the blast furnaces, hot and dirty work even for
someone used to hard tasks.
   "Let's put it this way, it's not desirable to work in," he said. "To be
a laborer in those places, you know what it is to labor."

Damn right. I've seen a lot of comfortably situated loudmouths today asking, "Why should you be protected from losing your job, if I'm not?"

I wish they asked the question, "Why don't I have protection from the most capricious employers, from the whims of shareholders, from bosses who would rather steal than steward?"

I wish they asked the question, "Seeing these people united, how can I go on alone?"

I wish they asked the question, "Who will be there for me when someone rips the world out from under me?"

They say, you shouldn't be safe if I'm not.

Thirty thousand people in Wisconsin say, I am not safe if you're not.

A.

The Chasm Between the Saved and the Damned

So Eric Erickson made an ass out of himself today. That's not surprising. What is surprising is this:

The topic of faith in Christ makes people cringe. But whether you believe it or not, here is the reality: beyond us is a world we cannot see with our eyes. It impacts us on a daily basis. It is a world of very real angels and very real demons. It is a world of a very real God and a very real Satan, a very real Heaven and a very real Hell.

The back and forth and accusations and lies surrounding Jared Loughner should be a constant reminder to us that there is more at play in our world than what we see. And, frankly, at times like this I am more and more mindful of the great chasm in this world between the saved and damned.

Because to be honest, I don't give conservatives a lot of credit when it comes to faith. I tend to think most of them are just jerking off when they talk about Their Jesus, using Him like a get-out-of-jail-free card and a way to deflect the conversation. It's why "the topic of faith in Christ" makes people cringe. It isn't out of revulsion at Christ; even those who don't worship Him seem to agree He's a fairly decent sort of person who would be harmless if not for His asshole fan club. It's at the transparency of your attempt to get us to stop talking about the dead hookers or the baby rabbits or whatever other sick shit you're into by blithering on about how much you love some undead carpenter, like THAT is more normal.

But this? This is AWESOME.

Real angels and real demons fighting for our souls! A direct call-out to the Left Behind crew that MAYBE THE RAPTURE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED and now they all have to be Kirk Cameron and defend the Earth or whatever that bullshit was about. The chasm between the saved (conservatives, presumably, and people who drag Christ into conversations that don't need His intervention, like, let the man sort His junk mail or whatever, already, sheesh) and the damned (liberals, I guess, and anybody who points out that faith in Christ doesn't stop a speeding bullet) is now Our Earth, and what Erickson's asking here is what side you're on.

I personally would be inclined to be on the side that says all things being equal, the Zombie Apocalypse is the Zombie Apocalypse and I'mma stock up on dry goods at the store this weekend either way.

A.

 

 

Not Reception

THIS:

The book states that, for him, the worst moment of his presidency was, not 9/11, or the hundreds of thousands he killed or maimed, or the millions he made homeless in Iraq and jobless in the United States, but when the rapper Kanye West said, in a fundraiser for Katrina victims, that Bush didn’t care about black people.

West was only half right. Bush is not particularly racist. He never portrayed Hispanics as hordes of scary invaders; Condi was his workout buddy and virtually his second wife; he was in awe of Colin Powell; and he was most comfortable in the two most integrated sectors of American society, the military and professional sports. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about black people. Outside of his family, he didn’t care about people, and Billy Graham taught him that ‘we cannot earn God’s love through good deeds’ – only through His grace, which Bush knew he had already received.

Right. He was done. This is my problem, right here. He was already okay with himself and the world no matter what he did or didn't do in life, so this was all like Candyland to him, like a big adventure game where nothing was real. People like him have learned the wrong lesson from that book they like to talk so much about. It's not, hey, you're saved, now you get to kick back and be a dick the rest of your life. I really loathe the passivity with which we talk about religion a lot of the time, like you just sit around feeling things and that's the point.

Yes, this is the part of the holidays where I talk about God a lot. I've spent the past year -- I can't believe it's been a year she's been gone, except as my aunt said at Christmas sometimes it seems longer and sometimes not -- walking like a duck and talking like a duck and listening to two priests boil everything down to, basically, "try not to be such a shithead all the time, please." I still feel very few urges to quack or to migrate and I can't swim at all. I'm trying to be patient. It's not like faith has a deadline. Act as if ye have faith, I say to myself a lot.

But ... faith will be given to you? I'm not sure I want it given to me. Part of the problem with how I approach this is that I think about it as earning something. Working at it. Doing things. Even if it's just prayer, whispered to probably a Void, that's still action, still address and not reception. I don't feel like this will ever be done. I don't really think I'll ever be a duck. I get irrationally pissed off at bumper stickers on the freeways: Don't Let the Car Fool You, My Treasure is In Heaven, and I come home and read a guy writing about a science fiction show:

What if we're not storing up riches in Heaven? What if there's no Gods, and Earth is a lie after all? What then? This is why Communists are atheists: what if this is all there is? What if we keep running, forever? The lines we draw in the salt now, the systems we put in place now, aren't just preserving the Colonies as they are, they're creating the Colonies as they will be. The responsibility isn't just to preserving democracy and the spirit of the Colonies while in a time of war, but making allowances for what happens if this never ends. If all we have left are rough spots, what then?

And I think, okay, what then? If this is it? Assume this is all there is, the responsibilities we have here to be decent people don't go away. I really hate talking about God like he's a get out of jail free card, talking about grace like it's about deserving and undeserving. That's what this comes down to, for Bush here, the idea of grace and forgiveness as a finish line, as a gold star on a school paper, as opposed to maybe the midpoint of a marathon, and you still have to keep running, hoping you'll sprout wings and fly.

A.

ps. Speaking of God stuff, did anybody but me really like The Book of Eli? Maybe it's just my current post-apocalyptic kick, and Mila Kunis is crazy hot in it, but I've watched it twice now and I freaking loved it. It got bad reviews.

You fed me when I was hungry

I am your savior

I am your lover

I am several others

and I am your mother

who moves from your presence

If we're lucky and the timing is right, and we're paying attention, sometimes we find our people, whether we get to know them as friends and intimates, or whether they become teachers, icons, books on our shelves, that poem we've carried with us from house to house to house over the years, the ones who, literally or metaphorically, feed us when we're hungry.

I can't imagine how I'd feel about this mean cold world if Patti Smith hadn't always been around, more than once, when I was hungry over the years. What a gorgeous warm soul.

The National Book Awards are announced tonight.  Smith's one of 20 finalists for her wonderful Just Kids.

 

Fifty Years Ago

 

Above is the scene outside Frantz Elementary School in the Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans in 1960. It's now a hipster haven but back then Bywater was a hard scrabble working class area and it was where the battle over NOLA school integration was waged fifty years ago this week.

Representatives of Tulane University approached the Orleans Parish School Board about using a school near Tulane's Uptown campus as the inaugural site. They were rejected. Why? The Tulanians (bless their hearts) wanted desegregation to succeed and the OPSB wanted it to fail. Here's how Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry describes the scene:

That's what's so impressive -- and bewildering -- about the parents of Ruby Bridges, Gail Etienne, Pam Foreman, Yolanda Gabrielle, Tessie Prevost and Leona Tate. Fifty years ago this week, they sent their babies -- five first-graders and a kindergartner -- to William Frantz Elementary and McDonogh No. 19 through a gauntlet of spewing and sputtering segregationists so committed to their backwardness that they assembled to yell obscenities at small children.

Ruby Bridges, for example, taught one of her playmates a new chant she'd heard, and the girls jumped rope to it: "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate."

Nobody would have blamed the girls' parents if they'd decided to protect their children from such hate-filled madness. Good people would have understood if the parents succumbed to a loving impulse to cover the girls' eyes and ears and remove them from a campus where so many bigots had gathered to yell at them. Nobody would have blamed them. Which makes their decisions all the more worthy of praise. They didn't have to buck against the status quo. They didn't have to offer their children up for the integration experiment. But they did.

Thinking about what happened here in New Orleans fifty years ago shows us both how much and how little things have changed. We no longer have howling mobs of people screaming obscenities at children for the crime of being "the other" but we still have howling mobs of people denouncing people for being Muslim and calling the first African-American President a Nazi/Marxist/Grandma killer.

Eventually, of course, the mobs dispersed but white flight from OPSB schools accelerated. Since I usually beat up on the current hierarchy of the Catholic Church, I have to give some credit to then Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel for his role in both calming the situation and shaming the protesters. Rummel, who I once heard described by a priest as a "big German dude," denounced the protests, supported integration and declared that racism was a mortal sin. Hence the sign in the picture at the top. Rummel also put his money where his mouth was by intergrating the diocese and parochial schools. A brave man in a time of cowardice and bigotry.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

I'll let Jarvis DeBerry have the last word. He's a closer, y'all:

Children seemed to always be on the front lines in our country's often bloody battle for civil rights. Not all of them wanted to be. The 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Miss., shocked the national conscience, and months later, Rosa Parks was refusing to budge from her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus. In September 1963, four little girls in Sunday School at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church died when the Ku Klux Klan attacked their church with dynamite. The next year President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

And in 1960, six little girls in New Orleans -- four black, two white -- were sent by their parents into a hate-filled mob. What a heart-wrenching decision that must have been.

What a sad place this would be if they hadn't made it.

DSTWTFUS: Wade! Wade! Wade!

Going out of turn because forward or backwards, the daylight savings transition is tough and we need some WTFU up in here. Hence, Mavis. Mighty. Mighty. The lady said "Wade!" Y'all get to it.

There's a seven-minute version of this on the very wonderful Live: Hope at the Hideout. I listen to it nearly every day on my commute and I swear that track is as essential to my wellbeing as any of the meds I take.

Take heed y'all, this woman is still very much with us and performing regularly. If you haven't seen her live, you got no damn excuse. She's one of our treasures and she WILL take you there.

 

WWTFUS: The Great Pumpkin, the Man in Black, and Bodhichitta

Firstly, this wasn't really a major story in the big scheme of things, but I find it awfully illustrative as to the character of the opposition and it reminds us not just who we fight but who we fight for.  I happened to be hanging out on Twitter when it went down, I follow @rosannecash and I admire the way she handled Boehner, as well as the subsequent personal assaults by craphurling winged monkeys unleashed by Politico's post. 

Secondly, what Merle says below sort of points out that no one of us, whether in heartfelt admiration (my grandma was fond of saying that she loved Johnny Cash just like she did her own equally flawed yet mostly goodhearted sons) or in venal opportunism (Boehner), has any real rights of appropriation to the individuals who become our cultural icons, but we still keep trying to possess them nonetheless, usually to their ultimate detriment. And to ours.

Thirdly, that said, when such an individual, or said individual's family, tells you to back the f*ck off, backing the f*ck off is usually considered the decent thing to do, at least by principled folk.

Fourthly, on the eve of a monumental election, shouldn't Politico have been putting their energies to something, I don't know, a bit more substantive?

Fifthly, as expletives go, "asshat" barely qualifies, despite Smith's pearlclutching.

And finally, even when I was a kid, this song always made me cry, and it still does. Splits me open straight to a tender, unguarded place. That tender ragged place is a good place to be this dark morning, rather than curled up, closed off, defended, and blind.

"Till things are brighter," this is good practice for these times. So, I guess thanks to the Great Pumpkin are in order for this reminder of our marching orders, and a chance to revisit an enduring piece of art by one of our great flawed warriors.