9/11: Do Good, Avoid Harm--In Memoriam

My memories of September 11, 2001, will forever be intertwined with the death of my mother on September 15 the same week. September 11 was Tuesday. The 15th was Saturday.

And I certainly mean no disrespect to the thousands who died on the 11th, and their families, by remembering the week as I do. It’s just that when a huge tragedy intersects with a personal loss, the two become part of a single memory in one’s heart.

About the 11th, I have—as almost everyone who recalls that day will have—sharp memories. The clear blue skies as we drove to work, when the first plane was already careening into the first building, though we knew nothing of that at the time.

The faculty who came to my office (I was academic dean at Philander Smith College in Little Rock at the time), frightened, uncertain what to do, when the news broke. To my shame, I actually thought they were joking when they told me the twin towers had been hit by a plane and that the Pentagon was on fire.

The sudden recognition that this was no joke, and my own fright: why are they coming to me, when I have no more clue than they do about what to do? The prayer assembly that ensued, which made the drama so much worse for some of us unused to such piety, since some students wailed, shouted, spoke in tongues, fell out with religious emotion.

And the week of endless arrangements to try to assist students whose lives had been directly touched by the tragedy, who had family involved, who knew someone in the towers, who were traumatized (as I was, as we all were) simply by the images on the t.v. screen, the planes crashing into the buildings, people jumping out of windows, women with purses streaming along, the collapse of the towers. I went to bed night after night as though plugged into an electric charger, unable to exorcise those pictures from my head, unable to sleep, rigid with shock.

The president of Philander Smith at the time, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, was a good Methodist who rose to this occasion admirably by taking to heart John Wesley’s dictum that we must live in such a way that we do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can, as long as ever we can. She mandated that my office set up counseling-support groups for students comprised of faculty and staff with experience in this area.

I spent much of the week coordinating those arrangements and participating in a group. Many students were, indeed, traumatized, and it was good that the president anticipated their needs—a demonstration of what being a faith-based community should be all about in practice and not merely in proclamation.

At this time, my mother was in a care facility suffering from advanced dementia. She had not known me for several years. Her oldest sister, a maiden aunt I loved dearly, who exemplified selfless love within our family, was also in a nursing home, severely impaired physically by a series of strokes, though mentally sharp.

I spent much of each week when I wasn’t working going from nursing home to nursing home, checking on my mother and aunt, seeing to their comfort and needs. I was, as we say in the South, frazzled. My work has always received full attention, such that I take it home, work long into the night and before office hours in the morning, as well as on weekends and holidays. Not a virtue but a vice, since life is more than work.

But my parents taught me a strong work ethic, and I have worked always in church-based colleges with a strong work ethic, where many folks are also adroit at playing the I-work-harder-than-you game. I noticed this game early on in each church-based school at which I have worked: some folks would show up early in the day and again as office hours ended, to spend time in their offices after hours, to make it appear that they were working harder than those who are continuously in their office from the time the workday begins until it ends.

I knew the game. I knew that the game players kept tabs on those of us who left when the workday ended, and reported this, as though it were an indicator we were sloughing off. I believed that anyone with sense and integrity who received such a report would see how false it was, and the malice motivating it. I protected myself against such games the best way I knew how, by working and not pretending to work, trusting that my record and output would demonstrate my hard work in an environment of faith-based game-playing.

By Friday of the week of September 11, I was exhausted—emotionally, physically, mentally. Since we expected my aunt to die soon, my mother’s youngest sister, Steve, and I had attended a seminar on the 11th designed to help family members make the transition of a loved one to hospice care.

So when the nurse from my mother’s gerontologist’s office called on Friday evening to say that my mother had a slight fever, I did not go to the nursing home to check on her. I asked the nurse if the fever were serious. She said it wasn’t: it was slight. She was calling because they had a rule that they must call whenever a patient was running fever.

With the seminar on hospice in my mind, I asked the nurse if she thought we were nearing a point at which my mother needed hospice care. “Absolutely not,” the nurse said. “She’s strong and stable.”

I went to bed somewhat worried, but with the thought in mind that I would see my mother tomorrow. She did not know when I came or went, in any case. She had no idea who I was.

Early the next morning, I had a call from the nursing home staff member who took most loving care of my mother, a deep-souled, compassionate African-American woman named Stephanie Smith. “Come immediately,” she said.

I asked no questions. Steve and I threw on our clothes and went. During the night, my mother had lapsed into a semi-comatose state. Stephanie had not been scheduled to work that day. Something had nudged her to come to work. It was she who found my mother nearing death.

I had a precious hour or so—I really don’t recall the length of time; time becomes meaningless under these circumstances—with Steve and my mother’s youngest sister to stand beside my mother’s bed as she died. To hold her hand and stroke her forehead. To pray with her and talk to her.

Do all good, by all means, in all ways, in all places, at all times, to all people: Wesley’s saying, with its final reminder that our time for doing good is always limited by the time we have left, unfailingly puts me in mind of something that happened in the first several years I began teaching, at Xavier University in New Orleans.

While I was teaching at Xavier and chairing its theology department, a chaplain, Brother Jim, died suddenly. He had had a stroke in the night, was found beside his bed.

I identified with Jim. Like me, he tended to gain weight. Like me, he went on binge diets and lost significant amounts of weight, only to gain the weight back. Both of us had what my family calls the “red Irish face”—complexions that never allow us to hide embarrassment or stress, since we are, as my father’s sister often said, “flushers.” People even sometimes mistook me for Jim, addressing me as Brother Jim.

Jim’s sudden death hit home. It was one of those reminders that come all too frequently in our lives, of how sudden the going home can be. The moral lesson of this death was underscored for me—and remains vivid in my mind more than twenty years later—because of something a colleague in the theology department, Sr. Mary Ann Stachow, said when Jim was found dead.

“Do good. Avoid harm,” Mary Ann said, quoting Thomas Aquinas and his ultimate formula for how we are to live our moral lives. Do good. Avoid hurting others—anyone. Do good all the time, everywhere, in every way possible, to everyone: do good and avoid harm.

Because life is limited: do good as long as ever you can, since our time for doing good (and avoiding harm) will one day end. It is a facile truism to say that those whose loved ones head off to work on any given day, never to return, will inevitably ask themselves what more might have been said and done—what breaches might have been mended—had one only known when the end would come.

I certainly ask myself that regarding my mother’s death. What if I had put aside my own tiredness on Friday night and gone to the nursing home then, when the call about her fever came? Though she would not have known me or have known that I was there, some part of me wants to think it might have made a difference to her, on the night she began her passage from life to death, for me to be there.

But I didn’t go. And she did die. And I must now live with the thought that perhaps I could have done more. And with the hope that, if another such occasion arises in my life, I will respond more readily than I did that night.

Do good. Avoid harm. Life ends. If there are those whose rights we have trampled on; if there are those to whom and about whom we have lied; if there are those whose lives we’ve disrupted out of malice or jealousy or prejudice: there is time, while we are still living, to set things right.

There is time to ask forgiveness. There is time to mend broken bonds. There is time to accord the justice we have denied. There is time to realize that when we practice to deceive, we weave webs that eventually ensnare us. There is time to recognize that in doing violence to others in the manifold ways in which human beings can assault others, we set in motion spirals of violence that eventually bring the violence back to our own doorsteps.

There is time to recover our mere humanity by acting like a human being again.

It is never too late. Except, of course, when the clock ticks down.

That is, after all, what doing good and avoiding harm means. And I say this as a lesson to myself, hoping that the words I am writing today will write themselves on my heart.

Whither the Bishops? U.S. Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Vote

And, in case anyone thinks that the U.S. Catholic bishops are being careful in this election to avoid giving the impression that they have come out (once again) in favor of the Republican candidate, check out Carol Martin’s “Cardinal All But Endorses McCain and Palin” in today’s Chicago Sun Times (www.suntimes.com/news/marin/1154298,CST-EDT-carol10.article).

Martin notes that Cardinal George had a letter read at all Masses in the Chicago archdiocese last Sunday. As she notes, “George's five-paragraph message focused entirely on abortion.” She concludes (and I agree) that the letter represents an attempt to influence Catholics to vote for McCain-Palin.

Yes, this is the same Cardinal George for whose resignation the Catholic lay organization Voice of the Faithful called in a letter published 19 August (www.votf.org/Press/pressrelease/081808.html). The letter notes that Cardinal George’s recent deposition in several cases of clerical abuse “is a clear indictment of his pastoring skills and his inability to lead the people of Chicago.” In the view of VOTF, “His repeated failures in both the Bennett and McCormack cases indicate a trend to disregard advice from outside clerical circles and continue to follow precedents of deceit, cover-ups and secrecy (imbedded in the clerical culture) in lieu of protecting innocent children from irreparable harm.”

Yes, that Cardinal George. The one whose track record as a spokesperson for morality is incredibly impaired by his willingness to protect pedophile priests and to transfer them to parishes without informing parishioners that a predator was in the midst, and by his attempt to have a pedophile priest released from prison before he had fully served his sentence.

The Cardinal George who is the current president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, whose voice many Catholics rightly take to be the voice of the Bishops' Conference itself. Yes, that Cardinal George.

Think these folks haven’t succeeded in controlling the conversation such that new generations of Catholics are woefully ignorant of the meaning of a consistent ethic of life? If you do, check out Diane Tucker’s “Palin Winning Over Twenty-Something Catholics” (www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/palin-winning-over-twenty_b_124893.html). Tucker notes that, after McCain’s selection of Palin, polls are showing younger Catholics who still identify with the church trending to the McCain-Palin ticket—because it’s, don’t you know, pro-life.

A lot of the present furor over the pro-life issue has to do with the recent interview of Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic, by Tom Brokaw, in which Pelosi dared to enter episcopal terrain and try to address the complexity of the abortion debate. Since then, she has been roundly excoriated by many U.S. bishops for what she said. (And, by the way, since when did Mr. Brokaw become a spokesperson for the U.S. bishops and an authority on Catholic theology?)

Though I find what Nancy Pelosi had to say about abortion and the Catholic tradition incomplete, I am not among those detractors who are claiming that Catholic politicians ought to stay out of the theological kitchen and stick to politics. They have to deal with theological issues. They have to try to understand intricate theological points.

There is no option both because they are political leaders dealing with a smorgasbord of issues that have theological underpinnings, and because the religious right (including the Catholic bishops) keep pushing this issue. I am disappointed with some commentators who have stated that Pelosi doesn’t understand abortion well from a theological standpoint and ought to leave the discussion of that issue to theologians and the bishops.

Here’s the problem: the bishops long ago told theologians to shut up about this issue. Saying that Pelosi should leave the discussion to theologians and the bishops is implicitly saying it should be left to the bishops.

Like Cardinal George. Bishops who have not proven themselves, in very many cases, to be trustworthy moral leaders. Who want to claim absolute ownership of all theological and moral discussions.

In a church in which every baptized Christian is a priest by virtue of baptism, someone sharing in the (non-ordained) priesthood of Christ has a right and an obligation to delve into theological and moral issues and to speak out about them, particularly when she has a public office. Why on earth shouldn’t Pelosi speak out about abortion—as a Catholic, who has as much right to think about and come to conscientious conclusions about this issue as any bishop has? As a woman? As a politician?

What this “debate” is boiling down to is whether bishops have the unilateral right to control theological and moral discussion, and to impose a unitary voice on the discussion. And then to use that unitary voice to commandeer the Catholic vote.

They’ve tried this in the past, and doing so hasn’t served church or society well. It appears they are doing so again this election cycle. I doubt that their attempt this go-round will serve church and society well.

In fact, I am coming to the conclusion that we are well-enough informed about many issues—including the bishops’ own malfeasance when it comes to the abuse crisis—to make this attempt to lock Catholic consciences’ up in the Republican closet downright sinful.

Can bishops sin? You better believe they can . . . .

Pro-Life? I Don't Think So: Trying to Put Lipstick on the Pig

Okay, I want to talk about the pro-life issue.

I have refrained from doing so up to now for two reasons. The first is that the term “pro-life” has been so sloganized and stretched in every direction possible that it is, for all intents and purposes, practically meaningless.

The second is that I try to choose my battles carefully. Years back, an African-American friend I admire, someone who lived through the Civil Rights struggle in New Orleans, told me something I have never forgotten.

She said that African Americans have had to learn when to fight, and when to let a fight go. She pointed out that fighting every fight that came along could either 1) get a body killed pretty quickly, or 2) burn you out so much that you had no reservoir of energy left when the really important fight came along.

As someone openly gay—as an openly gay theologian—I’m already fighting a big fight in refusing to shut up about my insistence that churches stop viewing gay human beings through the lens of stigmatizing otherness, and begin talking to us and treating us as persons and not things. I do not want to undercut that battle, to which I’m called existentially by the fact of having been made as God has made me, by engaging in equally monumental battles that make something less of an existential claim on me, no matter how important they are otherwise.

And there’s also the unavoidable fact that one of the basest and most persistent ways in which structures bent on demeaning and expelling gay human beings accomplish that task is by attributing to every single gay person on the planet an anti-life ethic. Much of the anti-gay rhetoric that arises out of the dark places in our society and churches trades on the insinuation that gay people are incapable of reproducing, and must therefore be intent on destroying life, and are thus pro-abortion baby-killers.

Be openly gay—be an openly gay theologian—and suggest that the debate about abortion is considerably more complex than those who have reduced it to a slogan-slinging punching match are willing to admit, and you’re liable to find yourself pounced on by any number of malicious lunatics who have just been waiting for you to prove that pro-gay = anti-life = baby-killer.

There’s no way around the abortion debate, however. There is no escape because 1) significant controverted moral issues make a claim on all of us, insofar as being human and a member of human society is to make value judgments; 2) the religious right refuses to stop using the debate as a tool to silence all moral discourse that is not directly controlled by the religious right; 3) I am a Catholic theologian, and this debate directly engages my co-religionists and me, as a political challenge. It is designed by the religious right to do that. There is no way to avoid engaging not only the issue of abortion, but the maleficent intent of many who use abortion (and the pro-life slogan) as the ultimate end-all-discussion weapon.

The preceding paragraph is central to my argument. It’s impossible to argue the pros and cons of abortion—the morality of abortion—in isolation from the political use that the religious right (and its political fellow travelers) have made of this issue in our culture for several decades now. What might have been a sane, academic, careful ethical discussion is now a heated political discussion—and entirely because the religious right and its political allies have driven the discussion in this direction.

They have worked hard to frame the discussion, to control the conversation, such that anyone suggesting the issues are more complex than the simplistic slogans of we-kill-babies or we-refuse-to-kill-babies permit us to see. This framing of the conversation is deliberate: the pro-life card is the ultimate trump card in the religious right’s hand, in some key respects the only card it has left to play, to stop various progressive movements it resists even more fundamentally, while it claims to oppose abortion.

For this reason, because the deck is stacked, the conversation framed, it’s perilous to step into the arena of discussion with sane suggestions and a belief in rationality as the best guide for civil discussion of controversial issues in a pluralistic society. The religious and political right do not want this issue to be discussed rationally. They do not intend to permit it to be discussed rationally. Call for rational discussion, and they will wave pictures of dead babies in your face and tell you are slime to think that this issue warrants discussion.

So that’s where the conversation begins and ends: dead babies. And, as plain truth (the rationality the religious right wants to exclude from the arena) recognizes, no one wants dead babies! This is why the slogan “pro-life” is ultimately meaningless: despite the stark (and false) dichotomies of killing babies or not killing babies that the religious right wishes to impose on the abortion conversation, no one is anti-life!

Do you know anyone who goes around proclaiming that his or her social ethic is in favor of abolishing and attacking life, of creating a culture of death? I don’t. Of course, I know that some people have pathological attractions to death, and that they sometimes act on those attractions.

But those folks aren’t in my circle of acquaintances. I read about them in the newspaper occasionally, and I pity them—I hope they find healing and treatment for their pathology.

We are all pro-life, insofar as we go on choosing to live and refraining from murdering the people around us. Calling oneself pro-life is meaningless in a social context in which the vast majority of one’s fellow human beings are every bit as much committed to the maintenance and betterment of life as you are.

Those who see more nuance in the abortion debate than pro-lifers do are not anti-life. It is decidedly unhelpful to this public conversation to seek to frame these folks as anti-life. It is possible, in fact, that in key respects, those who see more nuance in the abortion debate than pro-lifers are significantly more pro-life than are many pro-lifers. Framing the discussion to prevent the contribution of those who call for nuanced and rational discussion prevents the contribution of people who have a strong pro-life ethic—in key respects, stronger than that of most pro-lifers—from entering the public square.

And that impairs us all. That contributes to the proliferation of places in our society in which hate—anti-life impulses—thrive, and out of which they rise. Religious leaders who have allowed, and even worked for, the narrowing of the pro-life perspective and debate to a single option centered on abortion are contributing to the destruction of our society and the ethic of cthe ommon good that serves it. In how they have handled the abortion issue, they have encouraged (and they continue to encourage) the manifestation of fascist impulses in our culture that target those who seek to build a better society in many areas other than the area of pre-natal care.

News flash: these are not new insights! The abortion issue has been very carefully examined by theologians, ethicists, pastoral leaders for decades now, and both its complexity and its capability to act as a center for the coalescence of either progressive or regressive social tendencies has been talked to death.

With the ultimate outcome being a hardening of lines on the part of the religious right, including the top leaders of the Catholic church, who simply shut the conversation down, insofar as they could not control it. When you hear Catholic bishops today claiming that the Catholic church has always taught that life begins at the moment of conception, and that deliberate procured abortion from the moment of conception is always heinously wrong, please keep in mind that these same bishops shut down a conversation which long ago recognized that 1) the conclusion that a human person is present from the moment of conception is a very recent development in Catholic teaching, and 2) key Catholic thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, have held that the fetus is not ensouled until the period of its implantation in the uterine wall.

Keep in mind, in other words, that the bishops know that they are misrepresenting the complexity of the tradition they cite, when they claim that the Catholic church has always taught that life begins at conception and that direct procured abortion from the moment of conception is always gravely wrong. One is hard put not to conclude that they are deliberately misrepresenting the Catholic tradition, in order to underscore their own ownership of this complex issue, and their right to teach, as the sole and final arbiter of the discussion.

As anyone who thinks carefully about this issue for a moment realizes, there is a huge difference between saying, “Life begins at conception,” and saying, “A human person is present from the moment of conception.” It is undeniable that “life” is present from the moment a sperm fertilizes an ovum. For that matter, “life” is present in the sperm and the ovum apart from their union.

The question at stake is whether the fertilized ovum has the status of a human person. And that question is far, far from being as resolved as the final-word approach of the bishops wants us to believe it is. If a human person is present from the moment sperm encounters ovum, why are the vast majority of fertilized ova spontaneously aborted before the ovum implants? Is God, then, an abortionist?

If a human person is present from the moment sperm encounters ovum, what are we to make of the phenomenon of twinning, which occurs down the road from conception, a phenomenon in which one fertilized ovum splits to form twins—two persons, and not one person? To ask these questions—and the religious right (and the Catholic bishops) do not want us to ask them—is to underscore how fatuous it is to call oneself pro-life, and to mean by that that anyone who sees more complexity to the abortion issue than almost all pro-lifers do is anti-life.

I am deliberately not wading into the theological and philosophical depths of the abortion discussion. I am not doing so because this is a discussion that has already taken place, with people far more capable than I am making significant contributions to the discussion, and then finding themselves silenced and censured—and branded as anti-life—by the Catholic bishops and their religious right allies. People far more capable than I am have also noted that, regarding other moral issues, the Catholic tradition has often avoided trying to force society to toe its moral line, in pluralistic democratic societies. To revisit the discussion is to give power to those who continue to want to hedge the discussion about with taboos.

Instead, we need to shift our analysis today to the ongoing effects—negative effects, destructive effects—on our society of those who continue to use the pro-life slogan as the ultimate rallying cry of a movement that is really all about standing athwart history and shouting stop. The pro-life movement, as it has come to be embodied in our culture by the religious right, is about much more than preventing abortion from the moment of conception.

It is also about prohibiting sex education in our schools; it is about making it well-nigh impossible for anyone to attain access to contraception, if the pro-life theocracy can finally be established; it is about requiring women to submit to men in the name of God; it is about keeping women from exercising power in corporate, political, and ecclesial power structures; it is about defending ruthless capitalism against proposals to curb ruthless capitalism in the name of the common good; it is about allowing the destruction of the environment by uncurbed capitalism; it is about keeping the death penalty and declaring unjust wars. It is about bashing gay persons, preventing us from having civil rights including protection from discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, and so on. It is about resisting hate-crime laws that would protect us and other minorities from continued susceptibility to violence in this "pro-life" and "Christian" nation.

It is about trying to put lipstick on the pig that is our society, a society far from the pro-life ethic in many significant respects, and, sadly, particularly far from the pro-life ethic in its churches . . . .

It is not, in the final analysis, about life at all—not in the most significant ways in which we all encounter the ethic to continue and preserve life in our everyday lives. And insofar as my own bishops continue to buy into simplistic pro-life sloganizing and try to silence everyone who asks for something more in both the abortion debate and the debate about a consistent ethic of life, my own bishops are doing something sinful and destructive. To the common good. And to the church they pastor.

And I have an obligation as a Catholic to say that, outright.

We Are in Trouble: Comments on theTheocracy Slouching to the Polls to Be Born

I remember reading years ago something German theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote about the Vietnam War. To be specific: what she wrote about is how those who manipulate the public’s consciousness to make war thinkable must inevitably assault the linguistic structures that enable us to see, touch, witness what is going on when we kill fellow human beings in war. They must break the link between what we know to be true with our own eyes, and what they inform us is true.

As well as I remember, Sölle points out that one of the “advances” of modern warfare is its ability to remove the killer from the killed. We now have the ability to kill millions of people in an instant, merely by touching a button. We do not have to see the faces of those we annihilate. We do not have to hear their screams. We do not have to smell the burned skin and witness the mangled bodies. We can fly over, drop the bomb, and go about our other daily business after we've taken care of that bit of business.

War as business, war as transaction, war as techne: it’s only a matter of building the killing machine, deploying it, telling someone to do his duty, and then doing that duty, if we’re the one so ordered. All in a day’s work. I can be flying one hour over the village I napalm, and the next, sitting in a beer hall joking with friends—never having seen a single face of the human beings I have just murdered.

Sölle notes that this capability not only removes the human cost—the human reality, the evil—of war from the table of public life (except, of course, for those who are killed, and for their friends and relatives). It also requires linguistic structures to get the rest of us, who might have qualms about what we understand to be done in our name and with our tax contributions, to buy into the murder.

The new “advances” of modern warfare require words that shield us from the sordid reality of those advances. So we now speak of “neutralizing” the enemy, rather than killing her, of “sanitizing” an area rather than murdering its occupants. And, when the same folks who control the manufacturing of the war materiel and who profit from this manufacture also attain the ability to spin our language outside reality-based boundaries, well, what’s left to do? What’s left to assure their total control over everything?

A next step is to chain the watchdog media insofar as they keep wanting to natter tirelessly on about reality-based inconveniences. It’s important not only that murder of innocent civilians be spoonfed to the public as a winning surge: it’s also crucially important that we never get to see the evidence of our winning surges. That is, it’s imperative that we don’t see the real-life, real-dead human bodies, mangled, splayed, leaking blood and guts, on our t.v. or internet screens. A huge mistake of the Vietnam War was the willingness of the media to flash news to the American public in which we actually saw the little Vietnamese girl running down the road naked, fire streaming from her back. From a bomb we had dropped. From a bomb we in the heartland, munching our suppers at the family dinner table, had paid for.

Seeing, touching, witnessing atrocity has the potential to lead to backlash against atrocity—and our complicity in atrocity. For those trying to sanitize our consciences when it comes to our willingness to accept our complicity in murder, it's important not to allow us to see the bodies returning home, either, the bodies of our own soldiers. These remind us that, as bombs are deployed and enemies neutralized and problem places sanitized, human beings are the ultimate price. Both them and us. Both human.

I bring all of this up today as part of a larger reflection. As the current presidential election slouches towards its final end, I’m asking myself—more than ever before, more than with any previous election I’ve tracked since I began to vote in the late 1960s—what it would take to end democracy in our nation.

That is, assuming that someone, somewhere, would like to see our democratic experiment finally ended. As I think about it, I’m more and more convinced that the final act leading to nightfall is to remove the stinger of plain truth from plain language, so that people no longer have the ability to tell a lie from truth. Or even care to distinguish lies from truth.

Assuming that someone might want to move our faltering democracy in an overtly fascist direction, what would that someone have to do to move us definitively past the tipping point? Well, after years of “sanitizing” and “neutralizing” our language so that red has come to suggest green and pro-life comprises war and the death penalty, after deploying the term “elitist” as a weapon so that anyone asking simple reality-based questions about the growing gap between truth and lies in official rhetoric is, voilà, an elitist, we simply have to sin more boldly. And as we do so, defy anyone to tell us that we are sinning.

We have to start sinning boldly by telling lies that anyone can see to be lies, and declaring them to be true. Because I said so. And God is on my side. And God is not on your side. And if any watchdog group challenges the lie, that group is elitist and I won’t even talk to them until they are chastened and willing to swallow the next lie I intend to tell as I sin boldly.

I used to claim to be great. I now declare myself to be GREAT. Who are you to question that declaration, to ask piddling questions about evidence and facts, when it is I—the GREAT ONE—who have made the declaration, I who have twisted the arms of those I terrorize to make the declaration?

A society that has moved light years beyond doublethink and newspeak to the lie boldly told by one declaring herself or himself GREAT and an emissary of God is a society in trouble.

We are in trouble.

If we let ourselves be duped and bullied in this way, if we do not fight back, we must be prepared to accept the inevitable: the definitive falling of the curtain, the demise of our democratic society. We must be prepared to see people of good will hounded from our midst, people of integrity gloriously smeared in every way possible by people of the lie, and then booted out as troublemakers.

We must be ready to endure the muzzling of poets and artists, the hemlock administered to the philosophers and theologians we have not yet succeeded in making obsolescent, those who will not conform.

We must be ready to stand and cheer as some new group of Brown Shirts burn books and order us to cheer. In the name of God, you understand. We must be prepared to watch with sneers on our faces as rabbis, imams, and pastors who have refused to bow to the new theocratic GREAT ones are publicly humiliated, forced to tape-record canned sermons in praise of the GREAT ones of the land.

I imagine the new Brown Shirts—God help me, but I do!—displaying huge pro-life banners as they do their dirty business in the name of the GREAT ones whom GOD has sent.

Not ready for this? It's coming with a vengeance, if we don't wake up. And the narcotic—of cultivated stupidity, of systemic lying, of god dispensed as right-wing commodity to those who crave a dispensable god that answers to them alone—has been administered for so long now, there is not much hope to postpone the inevitable. Or to make a difference.

Unless we awake from our slumber very soon. And do something.

Mr. Moral Answers Dude: Ethical Reflections on Gay Existence in Church Institutions

Post removed . . . .

It’s not easy fighting for your rights in institutions that talk rights but practice the opposite, is it?

Goats, Sheep, and GASometers©: A Modest Proposal for Catholic Renewal

Today’s Clerical Whispers blog has a posting about a new Opus Dei parish in Dublin (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/09/gays-and-divorcees-must-repent-before.html). In an interview with the Irish Sunday Tribune yesterday, the pastor, Fr. Fergus O’Connor, insisted that gays and divorcees must repent before receiving communion at his parish.

For those who don’t follow bizarre inside-Catholic stories tracking organizations that have tremendous influence on all our lives—Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, non-believer—even when we don’t know it, Opus Dei is a worldwide organization comprised largely of obscenely rich Catholics with connections to high places. Which promotes itself as a corrective to the Catholicism of Vatican II, with its insistence on open dialogue with the contemporary world.

Opus Dei prefers to pursue its goals in secret, mainly through placing its operatives in very high places in business and government, where they can use their wealth and political clout to pressure the secular world to toe God’s line. Or else. It’s no accident that the organization’s ancestry has a direct line of descent from the fascist wing of the Spanish Catholic church in the Spanish Civil War period and afterwards.

So. Father O’Connor insists that gays and divorcees must repent before receiving communion in his church. According to Clerical Whispers, when asked about his stance on this issue, Father O’Connor stated, “The teaching of the church is that if a person is a practising homosexual, [they] would need to repent [i.e., before approaching the altar].”

Then, in case his listeners hadn’t “gotten” it, Father O’Connor immediately repeated the complex statement: “So that's the teaching of the church."

(Note to self: research the following—Is repetition a peculiar tendency of right-wing political and religious operatives? Do said operatives tend to rely on repetition when all else fails? Is there a tendency in these circles to recycle tired old ideas by tricking them out as new, when the ideas are simply being repeated? And are we just not supposed to notice the repetition, we who are not inside the circles of God’s elect?)

But to return to the other scintillating observations of the Opus Dei pastor: Father O’Connor also informed Tribune readers (news flash: radical new Catholic idea approaching!) that, “A person who is not in a state of grace should not approach the altar to receive holy communion. They can come up and get a blessing and so on, but they shouldn't receive holy communion."

Oooh. “And so on.”

The mind boggles at the goodies that this vague term might comprise: a blessing “and so on” at the communion rail of an Opus Dei church! Scapulars? Whips to lash oneself as one prays the penitential psalms? Better yet, a lashing from Father O’Connor his ownself?

And all for dirty practicing homosexuals and dirty divorcees! What goodies “and so on” are available for dirty homosexuals who no longer have to practice, Father O’Connor leaves deliciously unspoken.

I remain fascinated by the novel approach right-wing Catholics are inventing for the practice of communion these days. Traditional Catholic theology has—wisely—left the question of who or who is not worthy to approach the altar up to God. And to the individual believer’s conscience. And to the sacred seal of confession, at which the conscience of the believer is supposed to parlay in total privacy with a confessor.

The fanfare about who shall or who shall not traipse down the aisle to the altar rail is all new to Catholicism. And it raises some interesting new possibilities.

Among them is how to detect those practicing homosexuals before they reach home base and “receive” Jesus into their sordid, sin-ridden, unrepentant hands (and even worse, mouths). It’s not so easy, dontcha know.

In this posting, I’d like to propose the development of a device that, should fellow Catholics cotton to the proposal, I’m prepared to patent. This is the GASometer©.

The GASometer© separates the Goats And Sheep. It performs the nifty little service that has previously been thought to be the Lord’s work at the end of history; it performs that service here and now, in our vice-ridden parishes, for us too impatient to wait for Judgment Day.

Here’s how it would work. Since it has now been scientifically proven* that gaydar actually works—that is, that a statistically significant proportion of observers can accurately determine the sexual orientation of men simply by looking at pictures of their faces—I propose installing in each Catholic parish a GASometer© that will be full of downloaded pictures of known practicing homosexuals, and will alert the parish priest and his Goats And Sheep Ministry Squad© immediately when a homosexual "type", practicing or otherwise, enters the parish church.

Of course, simply identifying a potential goat does not a goat make. There's that goats masquerading in sheep’s clothing thing, you know. Homosexuals, practicing or otherwise, are notoriously tricky. They tend to “infiltrate,” to “disguise” their identity, to try to look “normal”—normal enough to pass for sheep who need no special passes to claim the communion wafer prize at Sunday liturgy.

So along with the GASometer©, parishes would also need to develop a GAS database—preferably, a computerized one, that interfaces with the GASometer© to feed instantly the sighting of a potential goat into the system and determine whether the homosexual intruder (or seeker of a blessing "and so on") is practicing or not practicing. And is repentant or not repentant.

Granted, the GAS Basedata© would need to be continuously updated, what with Saturday evening confessions “and so on” constantly shifting the calculus of who’s worthy and who’s not, who’s in a state of grace and who’s not. And it would have to be fast, since the tricky little buggers are likely to slip into the church right as the Introit is being intoned, leaving little time for the GAS Ministry Squad© to obtain the readout of that particular Sunday’s goats, and to make arrangements to bar those goats from the altar rail.

Whether the GASometer© can be configured to recognize goats of some other variety—e.g., garden-variety goats who have flounced around in a bed other than that of their lawfully wedded spouse and are unrepentant, or who have cheated their employees out of health benefits and are unrepentant, or who have lied and back-stabbed to obtain job preferment and are unrepentant, or who have reveled in homophobia, sexism, racism and been unrepentant, “and so on”—I can’t quite say.

But since the focus of many Catholics today seems to be more or less exclusively on catching genus-goats species-practicing homosexual before they sashay up to the altar and grieve Jesus and his flock oh so grievously by profaning his sacred body and blood, for now, I’m content to let the GASometer© do the important work of gaydar for Christ.

I do wonder, though, what would happen if bishops insisted that every parish install a GASometer© designed to detect pedophiles, and positioned this device both at the church door and the sacristy door . . . .

Would we even be having this discussion now, if we had such GASometer© capability in our parishes at present?

Oh, well, never mind.

*See Matt Kaplan, "An Eye for Sexual Orientation," Science Now Daily News (18 Jan. 2008), citing an upcoming study of Nicholas Rule, July issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Educating for Values (Can't Get Away from It)

And speaking of character. And educating people to have sound values and to make informed decisions about values. And the importance of telling the truth and not trying to deceive your constituencies by means of smokescreens of half-truths and downright untruths:

More bad news from the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) this week. This is especially bad news for colleges and universities that tout themselves as highly successful because their ratings have risen in the ranking of colleges in U.S. News & World Report. As I’ve noted in previous postings about UCA, at the very same time it was reporting record jumps in income and students (reports—self-submitted—that are key to claiming a higher rating in U.S. News & World Report), it earned negative scrutiny around the nation due to some serious lapses in ethical judgment on the part of its president Lu Hardin, who has now resigned.

The story breaking this week is that UCA’s financial situation is considerably worse than recent reports had led the public to believe (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/09/ucas_money_woes.aspx#comments). Anticipating a shortfall, the school has been forced to reduce scholarship expenditures by some $3.5 million, as well as to cut operating expenses. The school is now faced with paying out $1 million to Mr. Hardin as part of his severance package.

Again, my primary concern with this story has to do with what seems to me to the very heart and soul of American higher education, in the social contract it has made with the nation: that is, teaching values. And doing so by modeling values. Beginning with the top levels of a college or university.

If, when, boards do not hold presidents accountable to model impeccable values, if boards themselves elide over values questions in evaluating presidents, it is no wonder that students do not graduate with strong skills to make sound values judgments. We simply have to do a better job of focusing on character formation in all of our educational institutions, from primary school to graduate school. And to do so, we need to leave behind once and for all the numbers nonsense.

It’s values that are important, not dollars generated (or dollars we claim we’ve generated). Producing graduates who have strong values and the ability to make value judgments in professional and public life. And modeling those values from the top down, within our educational institutions. So that students know that values truly are paramount, and not just window-dressing as we prepare them to do jobs.