First Draft

Religious Devotion

Now this is how you show your love for his Noodly Appendage.

A.

God's Laws

Something Sanford said at his press conference that's been bugging me since:

But I -- I guess where I'm trying to go with this is that there are moral absolutes, and that God's law indeed is there to protect you from yourself.

Because ... I'm sorry, it isn't God's law that keeps me from cheating on my husband. It's the promise I made in public to basically not be an asshole to him for the rest of our lives, and that I like him quite a lot and don't want to upset him. God is not my traffic cop, and I just find the idea that He should have to be so very tiresome. Doesn't He have enough to do without protecting me from my otherwise uncontrollable urges?

Now, granted, God and I have a relationship not unlike two exes who meet once a year for a quickie in a hotel room to get it out of their systems and then spend the other 364 days bitching about each other, but I'm not unaware that many people do rely upon Christian moral teachings for guidance as to how they live their lives. I'm not talking about looking at the life of Jesus and thinking, "You know, I should be like that guy, with the working for the poor and the defense of the decent and downtrodden and whatnot." There's nothing wrong with inspiration and motivation.

I'm talking about this certain conservative fundie tendency to cite God as a preventative, like chemical castration or something. You can be the biggest dick on the planet but so long as your Cosmic Crossing Guard is there, you'll stay inside the white lines? God's a vaccine, basically, to keep away the kind of flu that leads to you sticking your dick in somebody you're not married to?

How ... reductive.

A.

They Put Jesus in Show Business

Now it's hard to get in the door:

On this blog and in right wing watch circles in general, we spend a lot of time tracking the religious right’s assault on human rights and secular democracy.  But it’s also important to think about how they financially exploit their own followers, who are lured in with Jesus and fetuses and fears of dudes kissing, and told to open their wallets.  You can usually tell what’s going on with the wingnuts by what they claim The Left is doing, and so it’s not for nothing that there are constant, baseless claims that feminists are in some baby-killing money-making conspiracy---classic projection, a way to push their own angst about the way they really do financially exploit the everyday follower.  As this Kinkade lawsuit shows, the exploitation is endemic, and reaches way past just the televangelist begging.

The merchandising of Christianity has driven me nuts since the crucifix nail necklaces that accompanied The Passion of the Christ got released. It goes on and on and it never ends, like the Pokemon from hell. My favorite example of this is this china, which is advertised in an entirely secular magazine I get.

I'm torn between wanting to laugh at the thought of early Christians' reaction to the trinkets now sold in their names and an abiding disgust for the people attempting to profit from exploiting a market that, while maybe not now, was once made up primarily of people sincerely searching for truth in the world. Who are then told that in order to find that truth, they need a set of plates with Holy Writ upon them, and a painting by Thomas Kinkade.

A.

Cut it OUT

Why do you persist in doing this stupid, useless crap, Republicans?

Just ... I just ... *puts on voice used to tell ferrets to climb down off table and piano* LOOK. I see what you're doing. I don't approve. Nobody told you you could do that. Just cut it out. I have stuff to do today and none of it involves picking up after the mess you made by doing that idiotic thing I told you NOT TO DO NOW GET DOWN OFF THERE ALREADY. Yes, you. No, the other one who looks you like who's doing what you're doing. Right.

This shit is just so profoundly tiresome. We have, at last count, two wars, about a zillion people out of jobs, we're about to donate all of Michigan to the Salvation Army, parts of Chicago look like the parts of Jamaica the tour bus takes you past really fast, kids are sick, people are shooting at each other over nothing, Glenn Beck continues to be on TV, and there's homeless fucking veterans in the world. We are not short on stuff we need to get done. And yet what the Republican party wants us to get amped about is a resolution saying the Bible is awesome and by the way, it will feel neglected if we don't buy it drinks at the Cinco de Mayo party? Honestly?

One thing I've never understood about these assholes is their conception of Christianity as a religion that simultaneously thrives on persecution and is strong enough to withstand the most fearsome storms in human history, yet needs the approval of the U.S. Senate lest it collapse entirely in the face of ... I don't know, Islam and kids learning about Kwanzaa in school. Either your Jesus is Clint Eastwood or Greg Kinnear, he can't be both, okay?

I personally think it's kind of insulting to opine that anything that has had as profound an influence on human thought and history as the Bible needs to be declared an official mascot of the year 2010 like it's one of those fucking Olympic animal toys.

A.

What Would That Be Like?

I can't imagine:

The Minnesota congresswoman takes to the floor of the House to claim that the TSA is going to start picking pro-life, pro-gun conservatives out of the security line at the airport for extra scrutiny.

Extra scrutiny at the airports? Maybe people will start throwing bricks through the windows of their houses of worship, too. Or dumping pig's blood on their doorsteps. Or sending threatening letters. Or shooting them at gas stations for the crime of dressing as they damn well please.

Maybe they'll demand their children be pulled out of school so they don't have to learn about Christian holidays, or start talking about how they shouldn't be allowed to serve in the legislature, not if they're going to demand to get sworn in on that crazy holy book of theirs.

Maybe they'll turn on the TV or the radio one day and hear some guy talking about how the government ought to count up how many of "them" are being born each year, and institute measures to correct those numbers. Maybe they'll hear talk about how many of their churches and YMCAs there are, and how every one of them poses a danger to society. Maybe they'll be so angry they'll want to fight back, but they won't be able to, because every raised voice is just a confirmation of what others think all along: that they're dangerous, and should be controlled.

What would that be like? It would be awful, right? It would be unjust. Such behavior would be a sign not only of a government but of a society gone utterly mad with rage and fear. It would be unconscionable. It would be un-American. It would be vengeful. It would be wrong.

A.

So Long As There Are Still Sheep In America

Bill Donohue will remain un-laid:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Director Ron Howard on Tuesday defended his film adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons" from criticism that it smears the Roman Catholic Church, heightening an ongoing battle over fictional depictions of the Vatican.

Howard, who also directed the 2006 movie adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code," posted a blog at The Huffington Post website saying that neither he nor his new movie "Angels & Demons," which debuts in May and stars Tom Hanks, are anti-Catholic.

"And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome," Howard wrote.

Howard's post came in response to an opinion piece in the New York Daily News by Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, last week. Donahue accused Brown and Howard of "smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales."

Last year, the Catholic Church refused to let "Angels & Demons" be filmed in churches in Rome because of the Vatican's outrage over "The Da Vinci Code."

My chief problem with "Angels and Demons" (the book, natch, nobody's slipped me a screener or anything) is that like "The DaVinci Code" before it, it's such a gigantic piece of shit. I'm a card-carrying confirmed member of Donohue's cannibalistic crucifixion cult, so I'm as available as anyone to get offended by depictions of the Roman Catholic Church as a power-mad conspiracy-driven sinkhole where decency and faith go to die and power goes to become exalted through corruption, yet I remain unoffended by the work of Dan Brown because it's such fucking CRAP.

Honestly. When The DaVinci Code was first published there was this huge scandalous nonsensical brouhaha, and it enraged the shit out of me, mostly because it was billed as this groundbreaking work of religious blasphemy, and in reality it was this cheap, pulpy, kind of sad book sold to people who don't really know much about religion or faith.

It violated Athenae's First Rule of Being An Asshole: If you're going to be offensive, make it fucking count. There wasn't anything alleged in TDC that hasn't been well-known to basement-dwelling nutbars for decades, not to mention actual Biblical scholars. Shock the shit out of me, you mean Mary Magdalene might not have been a whore as we know whores today, that her role in Jesus' band of merry men might have been deliberately dumbed down and obscured to preserve an all-male priesthood? Get the fuck out. Apparently I was supposed to be scandalized by this accusation which no one had ever made before except for everybody ever. Unfortunately I'd read this, and so my outrage was focused on Brown ripping off Laurie King's idea and hoping she'd sue his irritating ass.

The real reason I lack outrage, though? The fucking earth is caving in right now. Iran's about to go all nuke-tastic, apparently Venezuela can kill us all with books, everyone I know is either out of a job or about to be, and every day children starve to death all over the planet and get blown up by land mines and don't have access to schools and get married off at the age of seven to creepy old dudes who may or may not be related to them but want to rape them no matter what. Every day this occurs. There is no shortage of shit for Catholics to do. It's not like we're sitting around twiddling our thumbs.

Yet what Donohue, a man with an enormous microphone and a willing audience of the easily led who apparently hang on his every word, wants us Catholics to get morally outraged about is a movie made from a crappy book which last I checked has killed exactly nobody. That's a much bigger scandal than anything Dan Brown's admittedly limited imagination has cooked up to date.

A.

Happy Easter

A.

Abuse of Power

Via Oliver, good God:

In a 1957 letter to an unnamed archbishop, Fitzgerald said, "These men, Your Excellency, are devils and the wrath of God is upon them and if I were a bishop I would tremble when I failed to report them to Rome for involuntary layization [sic]." The letter, addressed to "Most dear Cofounder," was apparently to Archbishop Edwin V. Byrne of Santa Fe, N.M., who was considered a cofounder of the Paraclete facility at Jemez Springs and a good friend of Fitzgerald.

Later in the same letter, in language that revealed deep passion, he wrote: "It is for this class of rattlesnake I have always wished the island retreat -- but even an island is too good for these vipers of whom the Gentle Master said it were better they had not been born -- this is an indirect way of saying damned, is it not?"

The documents were sealed at the request of the church in an earlier civil case involving Fr. Rudolph Kos of Dallas. Eleven plaintiffs won awards in the case in which Kos was accused of molesting minors over a 12-year period. He had been treated at the Paraclete facility in New Mexico. The documents were unsealed in 2007 by a court order obtained by the Beverly Hills law firm of Kiesel, Boucher & Larson, according to Anthony DeMarco, an attorney with the firm that has handled hundreds of cases for alleged victims of sexual abuse in the Los Angeles archdiocese and elsewhere.

According to Helen Zukin, another member of the firm, the documents have been used in some cases to dispute the church claim that it knew nothing about the behavior of sex abusers or the warning signs of abuse prior to the 1980s.

In a September 1952 letter to the then- bishop of Reno, Nev., Fitzgerald wrote: "I myself would be inclined to favor laicization for any priest, upon objective evidence, for tampering with the virtue of the young, my argument being, from this point onward the charity to the Mystical Body should take precedence over charity to the individual and when a man has so far fallen away from the purpose of the priesthood the very best that should be offered him is his Mass in the seclusion of a monastery. Moreover, in practice, real conversions will be found to be extremely rare. ... Hence, leaving them on duty or wandering from diocese to diocese is contributing to scandal or at least to the approximate danger of scandal." The advice was ignored and the priest was allowed to continue in ministry, and was ultimately accused of abusing numerous children, for which the church paid out huge sums in court awards.

This scandal was never about priests. Never. It was about the church hierarchy that protected criminals at the expense of the faithful who truly believed that their religion was a way to accomplish good in the world.

Read the whole thing. There's a lot of meat in there, including Fitzgerald's idea to buy an island to house all these child rapists together so they couldn't ever get at a kid again. It's more humane than what I'd like to do to them. No word, though, on whether the bishops who kept them in place would have to share that tropical paradise.

A.

How Dare You, Sir? I Say, How Dare You?!11!OMG!!!BBQ!

Oh, God, now they're going after Notre Dame. Release the flying monkeys!

PERFIDY!

The word “perfidy” derives from the Latin “perfidus,” that is, “faithless” or “detrimental to faith”; it is also synonymous with “treachery,” or “violation of allegiance or trust.” The University of Notre Dame’s decision to honor President Obama as its commencement speaker in May is perfidious and treacherous in the extreme.

A.

How To Tell You're About To Be Unemployed

You work for the Pope and you go around Scotland saying shit like this:

Brother Consolmagno, who was due to give a speech at the Glasgow Science Centre last night, entitled "Why the Pope has an Astronomer", said the idea of papal infallibility had been a "PR disaster". What it actually meant was that, on matters of faith, followers should accept "somebody has got to be the boss, the final authority".

"It's not like he has a magic power, that God whispers the truth in his ear," he said.

First Draft needs its own astronomer.

Via ONTD_Political.

A.

Column: Cruelty

Link:

To the credit of many Catholics not wearing a bishop's robes, the backlash against the actions of Sobrinho and Battista Re has been intense. It continued Sunday with an unusual rebuke from Archbishop Rino Fischiella, head of Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life, who called out his two fellow bishops for their actions. Fischiella wrote in the Vatican newspaper that the girl "should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction."

Excommunicating those who tried to help her "unfortunately hurts the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy."

It's a fairer statement than that of his fellow archbishops, but still short-sighted and narcissistic. In the eyes of many, it is that concern for the church - the at-risk "the credibility of our teaching" - above the concerns of its faithful is the very moral incoherence that has led to a decline in the church's influence in the past decade.

Far more at risk than the credibility of the church's teaching or the integrity of its laws is the faith of those who look to the church's treatment of a 9-year-old girl and her protectors and see, instead of the mercy preached by the church's founder, only the cruelty of ordinary men.

A.

It's Not About The Sex

DougJ asks: What is it about religion and sexual abuse?

The answer is nothing. It's not about religion and sexual abuse. The priest sex scandal was not about sex. It was about the abuse of power by the bishops and archbishops and cardinal archbishops and the Vatican hierarchy to deny and conceal sexual abuse, pressure abuse victims to retract their claims, and protect the abusers above all else. It's not about sexual abuse. It's about power abuse.

When this thing became known as the "priest sex scandal" that's when I knew it wasn't going to lead to either the downfall of the present church in America (which it could have) or to sweeping changes in the church's hierarchy overall. Because if it's about priests and sex, then we're all still arguing about the wrong things.

But it's a lot more titillating to talk about dirty vicars and whatnot than it is to argue legal cases involving the statute of limitations and the reasons for sealing court records and the case for having them unsealed. So "priest sex" is the shorthand, not "bishop fraud" or something similar.

A.

What Phila Said

Here.

A.

Nine Years Old

Occasionally it becomes blindingly clear to me that nobody on this planet knows what the fuck they're doing when it comes to what God thinks about anything:

The row was triggered by the termination on Wednesday of twin foetuses carried by a nine-year-old allegedly raped by her stepfather in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco.

The regional archbishop, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, pronounced excommunication for the mother for authorising the operation and doctors who carried it out for fear that the slim girl would not survive carrying the foetuses to term.

"God's law is above any human law. So when a human law ... is contrary to God's law, this human law has no value," Cardoso had said.

He also said the accused stepfather would not be expelled from the church. Although the man allegedly committed "a heinous crime ... the abortion - the elimination of an innocent life - was more serious".

Battista Re agreed, saying: "Excommunication for those who carried out the abortion is just" as a pregnancy termination always meant ending an innocent life.

(Insert too-easy cheap joke about how if the Vatican went around kicking out child rapists they'd have no one left to dust the gold dinnerware and the Renaissance art collection, occupy their spacious villas, and run the Christmas pageants at their elementary schools.)

(Insert donation to local women and children's shelter in the names of these nameless victims here.)

(Insert seven-to-eight-minute interval for screaming and throwing of things, expressions of disgust with humanity as a whole, pouring of bourbon, and eating of chocolate frosting out of can so as to calm self down.)

Okay. One of Dependable Renegade's commenters pointed this out:

He also said the accused stepfather would not be expelled from the church. Although the man allegedly committed "a heinous crime ... the abortion - the elimination of an innocent life - was more serious".

You know, I absolutely agree that this is serious. This 9-year-old girl's life has basically been ruined. I can't even imagine her mother's life right now. And at a time when this family could probably use the comfort of their faith community as at no other in their lives, their church has not merely reprimanded them in public but thrown them out into the street. Suffer the little children, indeed.

A.

Saturday Blogwhoring Thread

Post away.

A.

Weekend Question Thread

Are you religious?

A.

Being Right That The World Is Burning Down Kind of Sucks

A lot of people who are right are fucking crazy nuts:

But not a condition that has to; indeed, this is why all the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament were not organizational men. Stephen, the first martyr, got enough people mad at him to get stoned to death for his trouble of speaking the truth (which is all that prophesy is). Jeremiah constantly cried to God to relieve him of the stress of being a prophet. Ezekiel reads like he found some funny mushrooms there on the banks of the Chabar, and clearly suffered the torments of the damned on more than one occasion. Hosea took a whore for a wife, and named his children after Israel's most prominent sins, all to make a point. Amos averred he was simply a dresser of sycamore trees. None of these guys lead a movement or administered an organization. Which is ultimately the problem, of course.

Because if your job is bailing out the be-cannon-holed boat that is the world, not only do your arms get tired but the minute you start asking why on earth you're doing this is the minute you start seeing stuff and talking to yourself. It's the oldest story on earth, trying to do something nice only to get kicked in the nuts for it, repeatedly, and the scariest thing isn't that your kickers are right and you're crazy, it's that you're sane and they might win anyway. I talk about this all the time: Convinced you have a destiny and thwarted in it, the most horrifying thought is not that you are deluded but that you are not. You let yourself be talked out of saving the world when you could have done it. What kind of fucking moron does that? Get off your ass! You have poor people to feed!

Be sure to follow the link to Jake T. Snake's post over at Whiskey Fire. During the holidays I kind of mentally check out of blog world even when I'm not running two fundraising drives at once while baking for an army, so I miss a lot of stuff, but Jake's post should be shoved up the mental asshole of every single person who every shied away from giving five bucks to charity on the grounds that it's better spent at motherfucking Starbucks. I'm not kidding, this kind of shit makes me HULK SMASH kind of pissed. As Jake says, it's exhausting:

Our local social services department actually hired fraud investigators at the same time that it was laying off child protective workers demonstrating conclusively where our values lie and how genuinely mean spirited we are as a people. At the federal level Social Security routinely denies people eligible for benefits in the hopes that they will not reapply. Many people who receive benefits must hire a lawyer before social security will concede that they are indeed eligible. As the resources have become more limited, the level of scrutiny and inhumanity has risen accordingly.

The scrutiny is what always gets me. Always on the alert, we are, for fraud and waste and corruption everywhere but the top fucking tax bracket. Always want to make sure our annual five bucks for the poor isn't being misused. Always quick to suggest something, anything, other than us fucking helping out a little bit more, always eager to offer advice as we put the checkbook away. Just clip some coupons, we say. Apply for a grant. Sell some bling. There's got to be something you can do other than bothering me by being poor and, you know, in my sight line. Go away. I've given you the benefit of my wisdom, isn't that enough?

It's exhausting because who deserves what is so far from the goddamned point it takes a telescope to see the point at all. Somehow in the past half a century or so we have completely overburdened the recipients of generosity with all the pressure to be deserving, and entirely removed the givers from the same. Does so and so or such and such deserve your charity? Do you deserve to be charitable? That might be a better question.

A.

Little Saint Nick, Little Saint Nick

Robert's every post is like a bucket of cold WAKE THE HELL UP on my warm self-satisfaction, damn it. And thank God.

A.

Nowhere To Go

Sigh:

The nation's Roman Catholic bishops vowed Tuesday to forcefully confront the Obama administration over its support for abortion rights, saying the church and religious freedom could be under attack in the new presidential administration.

In an impassioned discussion on Catholics in public life, several bishops said they would accept no compromise on abortion policy. Many condemned Catholics who had argued it was morally acceptable to back President-elect Obama because he pledged to reduce abortion rates.

[snip]

Dr. Patrick Whelan, a pediatrician and president of Catholic Democrats, said angry statements from church leaders were counterproductive and would only alienate Catholics.

"We're calling on the bishops to move away from the more vicious language," Whelan said. He said the church needs to act "in a more creative, constructive way," to end abortion.

Catholics United was among the groups that argued in direct mail and TV ads during the campaign that taking the "pro-life" position means more than opposing abortion rights.

Chris Korzen, the group's executive director, said, "we honestly want to move past the deadlock" on abortion. He said church leaders were making that task harder.

"What are the bishops going to do now?" Korzen said. "`They have burned a lot of bridges with the Democrats and the new administration."

That's the point, though. The point was to burn bridges, because without being able to point to the smoke rising from the wreckage, how are you going to prove to your followers that you're doing anything at all? Besides fetishizing infants, demonizing women, and pretending you have any moral ground to stand on after an abuse of power scandal that destroyed any credibility you ever might have had on the issue of human sexuality. Get back to me when you're done dealing with the economic terrorism killing more children in this country than any nightmare of an abortion clinic ever could, and then we'll talk about how pregnant, frightened 14-year-olds are the real problem these days.

Schmucks.

A.

What Not So Fresh Hell Is This?

Okay, as a Roman Catholic educated by nuns and Jesuits, I admit to being somewhat of a snob when it comes to my religious leaders. I like them to know stuff. I expect people who've spent their lives involved with religion on a regular basis to know their own traditions well and have at least a passing familiarity with those of others. To know, for example, that "Hindu" is not a god:

I would also pray Lord that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their God -- whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah -- that his [McCain’s] opponent wins for a variety of reasons.

And Lord I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you would step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and Election Day.

Oh Lord, we just commit this time to you, move among us, make your presence very well felt as we are gathered here today in Jesus's name I pray.

Being charitable, I'm sure this "pastor" was just throwing a bunch of shit at the cross and seeing where it would stick and where it would catch on fire, but for the love of the God who he claims to serve, pick up a book on world religions and look this stuff up before you open your trap.

This is of course ignoring the STAGGERING offensiveness of assuming God or gods give a flying fuck who wins the election to the presidency of the United States. Republicans' narcissism makes me so exhausted, you guys. I can't imagine how God feels about it. He has stuff to do. He needs to clean His fridge out and sort His junk mail and keep His eye on sparrows and stuff. And here's the wingnuts, clinging to His cosmic pantleg and whining every time He talks to someone who isn't them. Demanding that He validate their screaming need for approval every single second of His precious day. Making Him stop what He is doing and deal with their crises. No wonder every once in a while He hauls off and smites a bitch.

A.

It's Not A Cudgel

Ask a question:

Will Antonin Scalia be denied the Eucharist for his public mis-statements of the Roman Catholic church's position on the death penalty? Will Scalia, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas be refused communion for their continued enabling of the very kinds of state-sponsored acts of judicially mandated killing opposed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops [pdf]?

Will Rudy Guiliani and countless other Roman Catholic politicians be denied the Eucharist because they are divorced and remarried? (Pope Benedict certainly thinks they should be, by the way.)

Will Roman Catholic priests be denied the Eucharist for their acts of sexual abuse of minors? Will Roman Catholic bishops, archbishops, and cardinals in other places be denied the Eucharist for putting their church's reputation ahead of the safety of "the least of these," the children entrusted to their care?

From the .pdf file Peter links to in that post:

The reception of Holy Communion is an act of the Church as the Body of Christ. While we each personally receive Holy Communion, it is not a private devotion. Rather, the reception of Holy Communion is an integral part of our worship as a community of faith.

[snip]

Some Catholics may not fully understand the Church’s doctrinal and moral teaching on certain issues. They may have certain questions and even uncertainties. In these situations of honest doubt and confusion, they are welcome to partake of Holy Communion, as long as they are prayerfully and honestly striving to understand the truth of what the Church professes taking appropriate steps to resolve their confusion and doubt. Individuals who experience difficulties with or doubts about Church teaching should carefully study those Church teachings from authentic sources and seek advice from a confessor or pastor.

If a Catholic in his or her personal or professional life were knowingly and obstinately reject the defined doctrines of the Church, or knowingly and obstinately to repudiate her definitive teaching on moral issues, however, he or she would seriously diminish his or communion with the Church. Reception of Holy Communion in such a situation would not accord with the nature of the Eucharistic celebration, so that he or she should refrain.

In other words, up to you.

No, really. I'm not a theologian, so anybody who is, chime in here, but I was a religion reporter for four years in one of the most Catholic cities in the country, and I've been a practicing (in the sense that I'm not very good at it) Roman Catholic since baptism at the age of three months or whenever, and I think I can say pretty definitively that nothing I've ever been taught about Holy Communion involved it being used as a bludgeon to compel behavior and the entire concept is repulsive, and so foreign to me it might as well still be in Latin.

A friend once hit on the thing that most appeals to me about the Communion rite, and it isn't the mysticism of it (I think faith far more than I feel it, as I was explaining to my mother recently). It is the radical equality of the table itself: we come to it, prince and pauper, all of us the same, and all of us tarnished and damaged. We come with our plenty or our poverty, our security or our fear. We come with the things we carry, all of us, and if we spend our time there thinking about what our neighbor might be doing to make himself unworthy, we're not focusing hard enough on our own unworthiness.

I have no problem whatsoever with public officials sitting down with leaders of their churches and talking about policy and religion, as the archbishop and Pelosi might do, being as they are two people who belong to the same communion. What I do have a problem with is turning the Church into some bullshit judge-y small-town gossip session where people the pews are presumed to have the privilege of deciding one another's worthiness, like it's a beauty contest, like it's punishment for wearing a low-cut top or reward for feeding some puppies.

I have a problem making something so big, into something so small, and if I were archbishop (can you imagine?) my only response to those writing me nasty letters asking me to school Pelosi or anyone else would be a suggestion they go find a homeless shelter to volunteer at, or some prisoners to write to, or some hungry people to feed. "You got time to lean, you got time to clean, pal," is about the size of it, which is just one of the many reasons that I will never be archbishop. Along with the pope's problems with my chromosomal makeup, and my disinclination towards grad school.

A.

Oh, For The Love of God -- Really

The AP interviews a bunch of people who don't know shit, News At Eleven:

"It's important that people of faith are being listened to just like other constituencies, that we're not marginalized," said Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which has pressed the party to support policies aimed at reducing abortion rates. "Just because we're participating in the process and engaging people who may not agree with us doesn't mean we're just a mascot."

Emphasis mine. They already do. They always have. And for at LEAST four years and probably longer, they've been packaging those programs specifically as abortion prevention, and marketing them that way, not that anybody gives a fuck when there's a cheap and easy storyline to reinforce. I'm not asking that we agree. I'm just asking that we pay marginal amounts of attention to the actual shit going on in the actual world.

And then we have this:

Donald Miller, a 37-year-old author from Portland, Ore., is little known to most voters but revered among many young evangelicals for his best-selling spiritual memoir "Blue Like Jazz."

Miller was a loyal Republican but said he left the party, in large part, because he thought Republicans pandered to evangelicals on abortion and gay marriage to win votes without accomplishing much.

Democrats are "reaching out to us, and I'm not naive as to why — they want our votes," said Miller, who gave a two-minute prayer to close Monday's convention session. "But they won't get them and keep them unless they continue the momentum of adopting policies that promote the sanctity of life."

Miller cited progress along those lines — including on abortion. His other priorities — poverty, global warming — also reflect a widening evangelical agenda that might benefit Democrats, if not in large numbers in November then in future elections. Miller also said he'd leave the party if some Democrats keep mocking people of faith.

"I'd like to see Obama address that — say that voice is no longer welcome," he said.

As to what that mockery might be (one dude in an Obama T-shirt somewhere maybe says he dislikes fundamentalist whackjobs and that counts as some kind of official statement by Democratic Party that we hate Christians, or something?) we don't know. The AP either didn't ask Mr. Miller, or didn't think it was necessary to support that contention with facts. As per usual.

I just really wish the people making these arguments -- Sullivan and Rauschenbush on Monday, Miller today -- would differentiate between an official party statement and individual people being dicks. There are rude assholes in the Democratic Party, who will call you names. There are rude assholes in every party on earth, in every job, everywhere. There is a world of difference between somebody being a rude asshole (even on a blog) and "The Democrats" doing anything, but the so-called progressive religious commentators called upon for stories like this seem to love using a pointless anecdote or two about somebody calling them names to reinforce a destructive and incorrect meme about Democrats needing to get their religion back.

The reason it makes me so insane is that it's no different from the Republicans who use a pointless anecdote or two to make their arguments against social programs, or affirmative action, or (yes, Amy) abortion. They knew somebody once who cheated the government out of welfare, so we should drown government in a bathtub. It's lazy thinking and lazy argument, which I expect from professional jackasses like Jonah Goldberg, but hearing it from "our" side offends me. Who do I have to pay to get RMJ or Grandmere Mimi in one of these stories?

A.

Faith in Public Life -- In One Hour

To their credit, most of the people at this morning's Big Tent panel seemed to realize it was ridiculous to try to cover Dems and religion in 25 words or les. Highlights:

Amy Sullivan: Liberal evangelical is not an oxymoron. She said in an interview afterward that it wasn't that Democrats didn't respect religious people (the assertion of Paul Rauschenbush, at whom I was contemplating throwing stuff), it was that there had been no concerted outreach like there was to veterans, union people, all those for whom there is a designated outreach effort.

Alexia Kelly: Catholic voters are a quarter of the electorate, more than 30 million of them voted in 2004, and this year there are 11 percent more "swing Catholics" than there were four years ago. She attributed this to an increase in religious outreach by Dems, but I personally attribute it at least in part to the increase in upfucking of just about everything on the part of Republicans, to the point that even people who are concerned about the abortion issue are realizing that these guys kind of suck. Catholics, though, she said are "politically homeless," in that they don't feel either party really speaks to their needs.

Everybody seemed to agree that Democrats need to do a better job of convincing this apparently virulently anti-abortion country that they're not all militant atheistic baby killlers. They expressed hope that Barack Obama's candidacy would help focus people on things the party already supports which prevent abortion and unwanted pregnancies. Rauschenbush went so far as to say that "religious progressives should challenge the party to have a new position on abortion." What that ought to be, he didn't say. I personally don't see the screaming emergency, but ask me again around the second week of November, maybe I'll have come around to his point of view.

Or maybe I'll just still be drunk.

Katrina panel coming up in about 20 minutes. More on that later.

A.

On Rick Warren

What RMJ said.

A.

"The heavy-footed hoped to silence us"

Once, years ago, on a sunny afternoon, I almost died.

It was a boating accident, three teenagers miles offshore in a 16-foot Kestrel, a speedy British-built centerboard racing boat. It was an exhilaratingly windy day. The tall redheaded boy at the tiller was an experienced sailor, he knew how to make his boat fly. The other girl was my best friend, a star athlete.  Our feet tucked under the hiking strap, we were giddy with the speed, straining to lean back and out as far as we could over the wet chop, getting sprayed with each bounce, laughing our salty asses off. Then the hiking strap snapped.

We flew like watch springs in three separate directions, backwards. Tumbling over and down, then underwater forever.  Then up, gasping for air, separated from each other and unable to see over the whitecaps for more than a second at a time. It turned out that the Amazon athlete had lied to everyone for years about knowing how to swim. We were 16, of course we hadn't worn the life jackets.

We all made it. The redhead kid managed somehow to keep the jock from drowning them both in her hysteria, I still don't understand how I was able to swim back to the half-sunken boat, dive underneath the limp sail and through the mess of floating ropes, find the life vests, then swim back against the current to the others. We had to float the six or seven miles back in, it was close to midnight by the time we made it, falling and stumbling ashore, our legs like jelly from being in the water so long. Ironically, all our parents were completely oblivious, each thinking their kid was at one of the other's houses. By the time they found out, we were safe home, loopy and tired, full of teenage bravado.

But in that first slow-motion half hour, out there fighting those waves, nothing had been certain.

And here's the thing. It doesn't matter what you're doing, where you are, flailing and drowning on the open sea, or asleep on your couch. It doesn't matter how old, young, smart, dumb, poor or rich you are, on skid row or behind a huge desk in the corner office.  Nothing ever is certain, ever. Merrily fucking merrily, life, and safety, is but a fake out, a total illusion. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  He doesn't know how to get back to Kansas either, no matter what he says.

'Regard all dharmas as dreams'.

That also applies to politics and presidential elections. What, you disagree? Don't argue with me, argue with an esteemed poet. In 2007, Adrienne Rich was honored by the organization Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), a New York non-profit that singles out deserving activists working for social justice to receive their annual Risk-Taker Awards:

This campaign? This election? It's today. It's tomorrow. Wherever the edge of your envelope is, it's time to push it. It's time to be a risk taker. No matter what they tell us otherwise, no matter how they try to scare the crap out of us, or lull us into trusting their version of reality, it's time, our time. We have a choice every day to stay scared when they get the best of us, or to keep breathing through it, trusting ourselves in the midst of the uncertainty.  Because it's all uncertainty.

That's the other other thing. You already know this, all of you, but the conventions, then the election, and then... we have to keep it up.  Even when/if our guy wins, we have to keep it up.  We're going to have to fight him, and we are going to have to fight the other guys, and they will never give up. Every cabinet appointment, every agency head, every judge, every anybody, every bill, every vote, every anything. None of it is certain.

"Thank you demons, for coming today. Come again tomorrow then. And from time to time, we will converse."

Rich lays it out for us, the true risks of silence, what it costs to speak, and why we have to pay that cost, have to make that choice to remain fully conscious of the nature of realities both internal and external.

The second poem is one of Rich's own, and by all means, go watch her read it, in the original video here.

For more information on the work of JFREJ, visit their website

Narcissus

On Donohue and this whole PZ Myers pig fuck:

For such a staunch defender of Catholicism, it seems that Donohue doesn’t know much about it. His views consistently fall more with Protestant fundamentalists, and I’m increasingly suspicious that he’s less a true believer with his head up his own ass and more a right wing operative trying to increase the political power of the religious right by luring Catholics into the fold. The irony of all this is that the agenda is basically to turn America into a theocracy where the rights of atheists are threatened. Trying to orchestrate the public firings of prominent atheists because they are atheists is part of that, as is the hat tip to a fundie-not-Catholic view of evolutionary theory.

Chew this over with me a bit. The reason Donohue is adopting fundamentalist Protestant constructions and tactics is because his aim, like those of fundamentalist activists like Dobson and the unlamented Falwell, is not doctrinal adherence or political advancement but personal power. Validation of his poisonous narcissism. A mirror to make out with.

It’s not about respect for the Communion rite or the wafer itself. Donohue could give a fuck that Myers disrespected the Body of Christ. He’s not in this to make PZ Myers respect the Eucharist. If he was, he wouldn’t be screaming publicly for Myers’ head, he’d be attempting some kind of education, with his own being a healthy dose of understanding that nobody is really required to respect your traditions and beliefs. It would be nice if they did, but by doing so they are basically doing you a favor. Myers broke no rule Myers is required to follow here.

This also isn’t necessarily about political power, though. That his advocacy benefits the right wing shouldn’t persuade us that he’s really a winger at heart. That his goals dovetail with those of all the greatest assholes of our time is a happy coincidence for them and for him; however, he shouldn’t think for one minute they’re gonna invite him to their parties once his usefulness has lapsed and truth be told, I don’t think he does. I’ve said before that lots of the “conservatives” on the wingnut welfare circuit would be liberals in a flash if there was an equally easy buck to be made there. After all, public conversions from one political persuasion to another are worth millions in street cred with the “serious” press corps, it's just that the love comes quicker when you decide that Satan has better hors d’oeuvres and burn your Democratic Party badges and sash for a taste of Republican cocktail weenie.

What Donohue is after is seeing Donohue’s name everywhere he can plaster it, seeing himself on TV, hearing his voice raised in the wilderness, the lone arbiter of theological truth. Even other Catholics think he’s a fascist, and he makes a royal pain in the ass out of himself because he loves to hear himself talk. Taking it any more seriously than that with these guys is giving them more credit than they deserve. It’s not about religion and it’s not about politics. As with so many other tentacles hanging off the right-wing beastie, it’s about them.

Which doesn’t make it better, of course. It makes it worse.

Schmuck.

A.

It's About Time: Catholic Edition

HIT BACK.

The only reason scumbags like Donohue get away with claiming to represent all Catholics, or all "people of faith," or all Christians, is that no one else is out there being accessible and public with a dissenting view. You'd be stunned how many stories of the type we deride as stupid and shallow are the result of simply not being able to get somebody on the phone. Yeah, sometimes it's laziness, sometimes it's willful stupidity, but sometimes it's simply, "WHOASHIT I need to get this filed NOW" and Bill Donohue will always make himself available to fill the slot you need for "Catholic 'authority' commenting on elections."

An ever-wider availability of alternative voices will make it that much harder for the last to be used as a defense, and the more actual grown-ups forcing themselves into the discourse will help edge the likes of Donohue out.

A.

Love's Work

Look how each becomes gift and giver:
their veins with nothing but spirit flow.
Look how their forms like axles quiver,
round which revolving raptures glow.
Thirsters, and straight there are draughts for their drinking;
wakers, and look, they are sated with sight.
Let them, into each other sinking,
rise, surviving each other’s might.

-- Ranier Maria Rilke

Celebrate family, today.

While we're on the topic of love, a column I forgot to whore out last week:

In 2004, most Republicans and many Democrats credited ballot measures like this for helping to re-elect President Bush by turning out socially conservative voters. When Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) lost the election, pundits were quick to opine that Democrats needed to do more to appeal to such "moral values" voters.

Doubtless, some advisers now are telling Clinton and Obama the same things, urging caution in the face of injustice, lest some straight man or woman somewhere be turned off voting for them by their promises to, I don't know, uphold the Constitution. The advice will, of course, ignore the reality that Republicans always will characterize Democrats as the party of gay marriage, whether Democrats support it or not.

In the end, though, all this fear is just that. There are no gay raid sirens, no one is coming to take your marriage away. What the Supreme Court in California did two weeks ago was merely affirm what Americans have always known: that under the law in this land, we are all of us safe, all of us equal, all of us protected - all of us, or none of us is.

That's not cause for alarm. That's cause for celebration.

Someone pass me a glass of champagne and be sure to save me some cake.

A.

They Burn Saints, They Always Have

A.

Yeah Yeah Yeah ... Wait, What?

It's possible I'm going crazy. It's possible. But do you see this?

The Pope said church officials were going through the seminaries that train would-be priests to make sure that those candidates have no such tendencies. “We’ll do all that is possible to have a strong discernment, because it is more important to have good priests than to have many priests.”

Those are the choices? Bunch of pedophiles, or not enough priests? What kind of idiotic veiled threat is that? Your recruitment problems, Holy Father, are not caused by having to weed out all the child molesters because it's required by law. Your recruitment problems are caused by your continued efforts to force a church that, let's face it, has never been exactly forward-thinking further back into the dark ages while rewarding those who coddle child rapists with rich villas in Italy. Your recruitment problems are caused by this and any number of other things, so maybe NOT SO MUCH with blaming the necessity of getting rid of criminals for your abandonment of your stewardship responsibilities.

Jesus.  Pun intended. 

A.

New Sins

Stop that cloning. Stop it right now:

Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of "new" sins such as causing environmental blight.

The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican's number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

Asked what he believed were today's "new sins," he told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

"(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control," he said.

The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.

Two questions:

1. Does this mean we can threaten people who litter with hell? Cuz I'm all over that. When I was in Florida last summer, glorious sun, vast sandy beaches covered with the Big Gulps of the American south, all I could think about was how satisfying it would be to kick the next person I saw drop a Cheeto bag in the ocean really hard in the balls. It wouldn't be quite as gratifying to just say a rosary for their sure-to-burn pathetic souls, but with the way my writer's block is settling in for the long haul, I'll take my accomplishments where I can get them.

2. Can the list possibly be expanded to include whatever it is Vera Wang is doing at Kohl's? I was over there this weekend, looking for new mixing bowls and ... I don't know what that woman's smoking but I want some of it. Is this just me being one of those people who thinks the purpose of clothes is to make you look nice, rather than make people go "oh, what an interesting designer you're wearing"? Because a sack dress with a bunch of plastic shit glued on the front of it is ... not productive, let's just say. And while I personally love chartreuse, the idea of it anyway, finding six people who don't look like a dog's dinner in it is a hard fucking sell. I don't think it's nice, somehow, making things that look like that. It feels perverse, like she's screwing with us. Maybe the Holy Father can intervene.

A.

Take Your Holiday Back

Hecate, of course, gets to the heart of what I was fumbling towards a few days ago:

It wasn't until I finally began to realize that this time of year is about the Dark, about going into the cold cave without enough food, about surviving -- by hook or crook or sheer, cussed refusal to die -- long enough for the sun to begin to linger longer in the Spring, that I became a fan of the last weeks of December. And, as Sia so beautifully puts it, I've also worked to take back this holiday, back from the xians who want so terribly to completely OWN this time of year and back from the corporatists who want so terribly to make me need to BUY THINGS in the vain hope that they will fill the dark hole of Winter.

Sia: I began to take back the things of the past many seasons ago. That tree for one thing, that World Tree, that's mine. And those bright, hopeful candles are mine again, as well. This is a festival of light, after all. That circle called a wreath is mine, so too, the holly bush. Before I became Pagan, I was always drawn to pictures of a stag standing alone in snow. I'd see this design in different forms over the years and it always spoke to me. Now I know why. And look at that old Shaman dressed in furs. He's mine now, too. He was lost for a time, selling sodas if you can believe it, but he's back again where he belongs. He still brings gifts, but the gifts he offers are very different than the ones I'd known before.

One of the things that age has taught me is: things change. The Wheel of the Year turns. What seems terrible beyond belief and insurmountable now will seem ok and manageable later. The frozen lake will thaw. The leafless forsythia bush will bud. The evil ruler will die and the good leader will emerge. A clueless people will wake up and live up to their potential. Peace will break out and nameless forces for the good will appear at the needed moment. Women will be happy and busy and children and gardens will flourish.

Whatever this time of year is like for you, right now, I wish for you: time for reflection, a willingness to dance in the dark and drink from glasses chipped from ice, a face-to-face sudden encounter with your Fear, time to hibernate, dream, and plan, and great, bracing draughts of crystal cold fresh air to breathe. And I hope that you can see the Sun rise on Sunday morning. I'll be out in the freezing cold with the witches, beating on pots and pans, blowing whistles, yelling, whooping, and shaking tambourines to wake her up from her sleep, to make sure that, one more time, as she has for all of my great, great, many-times-great grandmothers, she decides to linger longer and turn the Winter into Spring. A witch's job, after all, is to turn the Wheel, and round and round the Wheel does turn. If you yell loud enough, I just might hear you. If you listen carefully, you just may hear me beating on my soup pot with my wooden spoon.

A.

Columnwhoring: Jesus Is Not In Your Job Description

Whatever, Mitt:

Though one might find it comforting that a leader shares one's personal religious faith, I myself would be far more comforted by having a competent individual in the job who does his or her work with care and responsibility, no matter where he or she spends the Sabbath.

It mattered very little that President Bush professed to be a Christian while Americans drowned and died in New Orleans. It mattered very little that his advisers and appointees claimed kinship with Christ while waging underplanned, unprovoked, illegal war with Iraq and dividing the spoils amongst campaign contributors and old friends.

Being president, leading this country, is a job, with particular tasks that need to be done to certain standards outlined in writing.

As in any job, it is your fulfillment of those requirements that matters. If you cannot perform to those standards, your prayers may make you feel better, but they won't satisfy your bosses.

A.

There May Yet Be Hope For You

Robert:

That is the burden of a lonely heart, of a heart you carry on your own and keep closed to every other human heart. That will lead you to stand on the thin ice and lure your tormenter there, and then stand tormented about what you really want to do: save him? or watch him suffer? That is what faith outside a community leads you to.

But is faith inside a community any easier? No. No, it is not easy at all. But it is faithfulness, to carry the burden of others as well as the burden of yourself. The goal of faith, as Christians define it, is not to know God in your own thoughts, but to know God in the experience of other people. So even the Desert Fathers did not retreat to the mountains, did not abandon all human contact and disappear from human society; so even monks and nuns live in community, carry out the tasks of faith by living together. Faith, in Christian terms, is about living for others; living for others whether or not your faith is known to those others.

But that is a dry and empty exercise, if you try to do it alone. That is a fruitless and thankless task, if you try to be faithful all on your own in a world that doesn't recognize anything about your faith and what it asks of you. Faith alone soon turns either into an excuse for retribution or a private scorecard used to measure yourself against others. Faith lived by the individual alone is "too much of nothing," and it soon decays into faithlessness, no matter how faithful you think you are. Because faith that is not lived with others and in others who share your faith, is faith lived for you. It is faith in yourself, and when the time of trial comes, you are not ready to receive the words you need. For God is not known in the solitary confines of the human heart: God is known in the faces and hands and eyes and ears and mouths of people: people of faith, and people of no faith. "Christ before me, Christ beside me...Christ to comfort and restore me....Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger" is not just a prayer for protection, it is also a confession of the true nature of faith and faithfulness.

Faith, in other words, is not fire insurance, as a dear friend put it to me once. It's not about hope of reward or fear of punishment.

(Nor, I think, is atheism about the rejection of consequences. Among my many shitty TV habits is House, a doctor who is supposed to be an atheist, and who had an utterly stupid and dishonest conversation with the Mary-Sue-est of all patients who tried to convince him that faith was about ultimate payout. His answer, since he's written by a not-too-bright high school sophomore who's just discovered Nietzsche and Nine Inch Nails, is that there are no consequences, which is a stupid fucking thing to say. It's not that the consequences don't exist, it's that they're here, now, today, not a hundred years from now when our cosmic prince arrives to count out who was naughty and who was nice. I was dying for him to say that, but this is network TV, not eternal salvation, so I was left to fling throw pillows at the screen, declare my love for the show over, only to turn back in the following week because Hugh Laurie is really, really, really hot.)

Christmas is making its annual spiritual booty call. The days are getting darker and it starts making more and more sense to go inside, light some candles, and be with people. Eat some fruitcake already. It's the story of the stranger, rather than the friend, that calls to my fearful soul: The assurance, which I never really had until I traveled far outside my comfort zone, that the world will catch me, that somebody will give me directions or feed me or patch up my wounds if I'm hurt on the road. That if I'm poor, and lost, and scared, and there's no room at the inn, somebody will give me a place to sleep, even if it's in a stable, even if. I'm not sure that's got to be God, but I'm also not sure it's anything else.

A.

What We Owe Each Other

There are days I just feel like I'm pushing the rock downhill instead of up and instead of being easier, it's harder, and I read Robert and he clarifies it perfectly.

A.

While I'm On The God Topic

I'm glad Robert decided not to quit after all:

We are all guests in God’s creation, we are all given stewardship over the creation, and responsibility for one another. Elijah doesn’t say: feed me first, you’ll get yours later. The widow doesn’t respond: I must think first of my child! They are both strangers; they are both guests. They are both responsible for one another. Had either failed to be impractical, the practical would have overwhelmed them. Having been impractical, having trusted to God’s extravagance, the practical saves them.

It was when I was in the desert that I started thinking about hospitality. About a place hot and dry and poor, where few things will grow, where a bad season could wipe out your entire family. About the trust necessary to life in such a world, to live in such a world without going crazy from fear.

We do this on purpose, everywhere: We build networks of friends, people we can call on when the car blows or the job disappears or the boyfriend bolts, people who will help us pick up the pieces when things go to shit. People we don't have to worry about calling at 3 a.m.; people whose 3 a.m. calls we'll take. About A Boy is a very annoying movie in a lot of ways, but I've always enjoyed the very, very end of it, when the little kid says, "Two people aren't enough. You need backup. You need lots of people."

What if the country, what if we all, had that expectation of one another? What if we were extravagant in our hospitality the way we'd be to "our own?" What if we drew the circle of responsibility so far around us that we couldn't see the end of it? What if our love had no limits?

What if the question wasn't "why should I help you?" but "why shouldn't I?" What if the calculation wasn't "how little can I get away with doing and not feel guilty anymore about my abundance" but "how much can I give?"

Who would we be, in that reality?

What our country look like then?

A.

It's Not That I'm Pleased About This Exactly

But at least he's consistent in his lunacy:

ST. LOUIS - Roman Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke, who made headlines last presidential season by saying he'd refuse Holy Communion to John Kerry, has his eye on Rudy Giuliani this year. Giuliani's response: "Archbishops have a right to their opinion."

Burke, the archbishop of St. Louis, was asked if he would deny Communion to Giuliani or any other presidential candidate who supports abortion rights.

"If any politician approached me and he'd been admonished not to present himself, I'd not give it," Burke told The Associated Press Wednesday. "To me, you have to be certain a person realizes he is persisting in a serious public sin."

And look, I can say the same thing about this that I said about it the last time, when it involved a Democratic candidate. To use communion as a weapon to bludgeon other people is a gross violation of its spirit and it revolts me. Communion is one of the very few places we are all equal, and what's more, we are equal in our unworthiness before God. We come to that table tarnished and damaged, all of us, undeserving but blessed anyway, and turning that grace into a chit to identify who is and who is not worthy is perverse.

As is this:

Asked if the same would apply to politicians who support the death penalty or pre-emptive war, he said, "It's a little more complicated in that case."

Of course it is. Abortion involves adorable little tiny babies, doesn't it? It involves a very easy moral choice for people who've never had to face it: Either you love babies or you don't. That's how it exists for these folks, in sentimental imaginaryland. Whereas the death penalty ... well, those people are criminals, they've sinned, they're able to be judged much more easily. Pre-emptive war? That just makes us all feel good and powerful and big and strong, so that's much, much more complicated. Of course.

And look, there are assholes and insects in every line of work, in every profession and trade. The priesthood is no exception, and you don't rise in the hierarchy of any powerful organization without compromising yourself in some fashion, so by the time you're handed St. Louis, you've most likely done some things that once upon a time you couldn't imagine doing. So I'm not surprised Burke's a hypocrite.

I am, however, marginally satisfied that his hypocrisy is consistent regardless of political party, and kind of amused that Giuliani, the best hope of the unbelievably shitty Republican field, is getting smacked around for not being Republican enough, because hee.

This all, of course, leaves out the real problem with this story, which is that it's unlikely to turn into 24-hour Giuliani Communion Watch the way Kerry's moral standing did. And that has very little to do with matters of the spirit and everything to do with how far modern punditry has stuck its head up its ass.

A.

May the Road Rise to Meet You

RMJ bids a blog-farewell.

A.

Sweet Bishounen Christ

Manga Bible.

Now I have to decide if I get my brother this for Christmas, or Battle Pope.

A.

If Someone Says He Is A Believer

I cannot think:

If someone says he is a believer, why is that not accepted? He (Moyers) has decided he will be the judge and the jury about whether I'm a believer.

It probably didn't help that I read this with Baghdad ER on in the background, while thinking about the value of government as ComEd finally pulled the dead squirrel or whatever out of the transformer and turned my lights back on after 24 hours. The value of government, and where we are, and why we're there, and what exactly the fuck is wrong with us all right now. And on my newly reawakened TV, a guy gets his wedding ring cut off before they amputate his fingers, because he got blown up in a war we shouldn't have ever started, not for a minute, and Karl Rove's asking, why don't you believe what I say?

Because it doesn't matter what you say. I've been trying to crystallize this in my own head, during some meatspace work, that it doesn't matter what you say you love. It doesn't matter what you say you value. It doesn't matter what you say you believe. It just doesn't, and this is me, okay, saying words don't matter, but you know what? When you get right down to it, they don't. They don't. Because what you say only matters if you fucking back it up.

And whatever the black hole polar opposite of backing your shit up is, that's what Rove has done with his Christianity, giving as I am the benefit of the doubt and assuming it's not one more pose, but since he seems to be having a righteous hissy about not being taken seriously, let's take him seriously, because that makes it worse, not better.

If you say you are a believer, if you say that to me, you'd better be ready to cite chapter and verse with your waking breath because it's not that I think it's easy, it's that I think you don't speak up until you know what you're about. Otherwise you're just embarrassing yourself, you're just wasting everybody's time. And once you speak up, once your words leave your mouth, then YES, you fucking kitchen appliance, the rest of us are allowed to look, to see, to comment, to say back to you, not good enough, F minus, try failing less, and come back when you're not so completely full of shit, and by the way, ask Jesus what he thinks about all the blood on your hands.

And so no, you're not entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and the idea that anybody is, the idea that all you have to do is say something and it's some kind of shield against being questioned, the idea that it somehow protects you from consequences, that's appalling, and yeah, okay, whatever, welcome to Republican Christianity, but come the fuck on, anyway. Just because it sucks the same way it's sucked for a while doesn't mean we don't have to say it's insane, just because it's been insane for a while doesn't make it less so. If someone says he is a believer, and he's done what Karl Rove has done, then yes, I get to say what I say.

Which is, bullshit.

Schmuck.

A.

When a guy tells a guy he loves him

I am going to a beach party this Saturday so I don't intend to blog until Sunday night at the earliest. I am sure Holden will find plenty of stuff about Bush to hold your attention.

I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused. Or lyrics to that effect.

But last weekend I went to a wedding reception after the memorial service I already wrote about.

The party was for my best buddy at work. In fact, someone started saying we were like a married couple, that we were each others' work wives.

I don't care. My buddy amuses me. He's still young and blustery and wants to actually do things, Sometimes those things are stupid, like when he wanted to infiltrate a dog fighting rings and take pictures. This was long before Michael Vick made the subject what it is today.

Still, a 6' 3 Lithuanian guy with way too much gel in his rockabilly hair probably isn't going to bland in the with pitbull set. And where did he intend to put his camera?

Still, at least he has ideas and energy. And we go to lunch together at least once a week to shoot the shit.

I don't know about where you all work, but there was a spell at my office where unless you brought food, finding someone to grab a meal with was pretty tough. So I appreciated his effort. And I think he could tell I  have been down in the dumps the past few months so it has been nice of him to continue to ask, to put up with mopey Mike.

Well, my buddy is a bit of a worrier, just like me, and shortly before his wedding he tells me not to make any work wife comments on his fabulous day.

Mind you, at the reception part of the festivities my pal pulled a chicken out from under his bride's dress; danced to an Ozzie Osborne song with his mom; sang along to Bohemian Rhapsody while his friends circled around, then did a mosh pit to the fast part, then he wound up in the middle of the circle at which point I threw a dinner roll at him.

It was funny at the time.

After the reception there was more food and a party in his parents' back yard and it was a nice time, one of those summertime moments you wish there were more of, but since there usually aren't it actually makes them even more enjoyable.

There was drinking and swimming and more food, because we are Chicago people and we love to eat, dammit. And two nice looking blond women showed up with cameras. And there was more drinking.

And when I went to say good-bye to my buddy, he tells his wife, "Oh this is Mike, the guy I tell you about. They say he's my work wife."

Awkward moment, yet inside I am laughing.

Then my buddy hugs me and tells me he loves me. And I think he hugged me one more time.

He was drunk, because sometimes, a lot of times its easier for guys to say that to their pals with the help of booze.

That phrase, "I love you," is a tough one. It can cause so much trouble. It has for me and probably for a few of you. It's become overused and underused at the same time.

But I knew what my big tipsy friend meant and I told him I felt the same. His wife just stood there, probably knowing her husband all too well. He's goofy. His best man used a prop monkey filled with candy as a metaphor for him.

Still, according to an Internet game, if I were a dog I would be a St. Bernard, so I am a goof too, I guess: just a big, loyal, drooling, overweight, attention hungry, knock things over unintentionally, run through the snow with a barrel of booze around my neck kind of guy. Better that than a dog that fits in a purse.

So I headed home. A night can't end any better than with some sloppy silly moment that makes you feel good about yourself, that makes the Sinatra songs they play at weddings run through your head while you drive into the suburban summer night.

A life led with grace

There’s a quality sorely lack in these times, probably any time really, and that quality is grace.

Grace, like jazz, is hard to define, but you know it when you hear it or see it.

Hemingway’s code involved having grace under pressure, but how many heroes are there in these loud, tattle-tale times? I mean, I am sure they are out there, but if you have grace you’re probably not inclined to brag on a blog, smugly host a cable show, or yell at anyone to get attention.

I worked with someone who died recently who seemed to have this quality, which I readily admit I sorely lack. I am a mope by nature, sometimes an amusing one, other times a brooding Dane. But I am working to change that.

Steve Siracusa, though, seemed to go through his days with the grace of Gene Kelly dancing in the rain.

I didn’t know him very well, but that at first glance Steve seemed to an idiot like me to be a quaint old guy in rumpled out of fashion clothes (which he actually wore with a certain flair) who told corny jokes.

But Steve made people smile and had this joy of life about him.

Me, I am still all weepy over a broken relationship I don’t even want to talk about and whine about not being able to find a better job and don’t feel I’m in a good place for me right now, and, and, and, but, but, but…

In other words, I am a product of my bitching and moaning era, just another middle aged white guy stuck in the suburbs.

If anyone had a reason to be sour on life it would have been Steve. He served as an Army captain, and after World

War II, he was assigned as a traffic manager of sorts, directing all parties involved with the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials to their lodging.

He heard the horrible, evil stories, to see the cruel evidence: a Nazi wife who made lampshades out of Jewish skin; another Nazi who collected shrunken Polish skulls.

You’d think that kind of crap would haunt you for the rest of your life, leave you sour on sorry-ass humanity. Instead, he fell in love with Edna Skowbo, who worked for the Allies' legal team, who became his life.

And he spent most of the rest of his life as a salesman, including in his later years, here where I work. He didn’t seem to be one of those slimy types, either, but a guy who used his optimism to get you to buy something. Word is he even paid for newspaper subscriptions for a few people who told him they couldn’t afford one.

He wasn’t Willy Loman, but what good old Willy wished he could be.

After he got sick in his last few years, he volunteered at the hospital, helping others going through pain like he had.

The story goes that before he died a line of hospital staffers waited for a chance to say good-bye to the little guy with the smile and the optimism.

Not to get all Mitch Albom on you, but he said he hoped to see them all in heaven.

We Are Each Of Us A Stranger

Barbara:

I don’t have to tell you there’s some heavy-duty weird shit going on in American Christianity. Militant Christianists are out to abolish reproductive rights, dictate science curricula, and even run the Pentagon. But at the same time, another part of American Christianity seems downright soft and fluffy, and getting fluffier.

And you know, it is the fluff that offends me more than the militancy. I'm a fanatic at heart, after all, I get the militant mindset even if I don't agree with this particular militant group's ends. But the easy, fluffy, go-see-a-movie "spirituality" gets on my fucking nerves. It's my Catholicism, and the oldest-child thing, always saying, "It wasn't easy for me, why should it be easy for you?" In some twisted way I want everybody to struggle and fight to get to God the way I did, the way I do.

Because if it's easy, then what the fuck am I puzzling over all the time? Why can't I just go to church like a good girl and get over it all, be happy in God's love and feel good like these people do? What's wrong with me that I can't just do this thing that others make look so effortless?

So much of my problem with the world is my own selfish crap, really, which is what I think of when I read on in the post:

The statistics suggest that more people “believe in” the Ten Commandments than actually know what the Ten Commandments say. And I don’t care what religious tradition you call your own; just “believing in” something that you don’t practice or understand or follow is crap. It’s not even religion. It’s an idea of religion, but not religion itself, except on a very primitive level.

I think many Americans regard the Ten Commandments as something like a tribal totem. They want it placed in institutions of power, like schools and courthouses, as a symbol of their tribal dominance. Think of it as territorial marking. And this is just as true of the hard core fundamentalist as it is for the “cultural” Christian who has read most of the Left Behind books but doesn’t know the Beatitudes from spinach.

It’s hard to define religion in a succinct, universal way. The dictionary definitions don’t quite reach it. Non-religious people assume that religion is a supernatural belief system, but beliefs are what define the parameters of a particular religion; they aren’t the heart of it. The heart is devotion, commitment, and practice.

I like Paul Tillich:

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.

If I might presume to speak for the sincerely religious, I’d say religion is what provides the context of our inner life. Whether a devotional faith or a mystical practice, religion helps us come to terms with who we are while expanding our sphere of concern and compassion outward to others.

Faux religion, on the other hand, is about bullshitting ourselves about ourselves and demanding that the universe cater to our greed and fears and ignorance.

I got religion when everybody else was losing it, in college. I started going to this little, mostly empty church not far from campus, going Sundays and sometimes on a weekday morning or two, just me and a couple little old ladies and Father Kevin, who could not have been more conservative had he actually been running an Inquisition. Father Kevin and I annoyed one another, but he would make arguments that made me stretch and work for the few points I did score, and I appreciated that, after years of High School Hey Kids Guitar Jesus Livin' Is Easy Mass and being told I didn't need to do anything special to impress God or make him love me.

I appreciated having my daddy approval issues and my attention whore-itude validated that way, and that's not so different from wanting greed validated, or wealth, or selfishness. Which is my whole problem with religion, really, in that I've never been able to come to terms with the fact that so much of it is about us, and so little about whatever deep forces move us.

Is God there for us or are we there for God? And if we behave like decent and moral people, does it really matter?

A.

Buddy Christ

Seriously:

One of the most striking developments in Bible publishing is the Biblezine, developed by Nelson to appeal to teenage girls. Resembling such magazines as Seventeen or InStyle, an issue of a Biblezine called "Revolve" features such catchy cover lines as "Top 10 ways to make an impact on your world," "Beauty secrets from the inside out" and "Guys speak out on faith, love and much more."

Inside, the text of the New Testament is broken up with highlighted quotes and short articles, illustrated with photos of smiling teenage boys and girls.

I get that you want to reach people where they are, but ...

Seriously? We need to trivialize religion for teenagers by making sure they know it's about boys and beauty? That's how we want young girls to begin experiencing the word of God? We want to make sure they know it's just like reading any other magazine, that they don't have to make any more effort than they ordinarily would? If I was the target audience for this, I'd be insulted. I can't handle the big words, just tell me how God says I should dress and what kind of boys He thinks I should date.

All I really want to know is if Jesus thinks I'm his special princess or not. You know, this might be my ingrained childhood Catholicism speaking, my need for religious authority figures, but I don't want God to be instantly accessible to me. I prefer to think of God as someone/something you've got to put a little effort into. I want to work for it, not just get it in my mailbox with hot-pink ink on glossy pages.

On the other hand, this I wholeheartedly approve of:

Zondervan's audio production "The Bible Experience" features an all-black cast, including Blair Underwood as Jesus and Samuel L. Jackson as God.

Motherfucking AMEN.

A.

Conduct Unbecoming

Headdesk. (link fixed)

No word on the death penalty.

Or war.

Or the continued and obvious screwing of the meek, the poor, the powerless.

No word on whether it's okay to take communion while you spew bigotry and call for the extermination of your political enemies.

No word on any of that.

But the widdle babies, we can get all gooshy over that without any ambiguity.

You know, it's not like I don't know my childhood church has problems. It's not like I haven't read about the Vatican and Hitler and all of that. It's not like I think anything Benedict's done so far is exactly a recruitment poster for Catholicism.

So I don't know why I'm so fucking disappointed and angered every time something like this happens, every time they prove that Democratic sins are worse than Republican ones, that dictatorial thinking and pointless self-denial are still the rules of the day, and that some kind of Cosmic Just Say No is deemed to be enough in a church with theology so complicated you could study your whole life and never understand it all.

Except that I guess I still hope. And I still push. Just BE BETTER, God, Benedict, everybody. Just ... be better than this shallow, unworthy tool you've become. Be more complicated than this. Be deeper, stronger, more able to grasp the complexity of the issues of the day here. Be able, for the love of your little plastic Jesus, to grasp that there are more powerful forces at work here than just a question of doctrine.

Act like grown-ups. God.

A.

This Idea

Wins the Internet.

A.