My posting today (and for a few days ahead) may be light, since Steve and I are traveling to North Carolina to visit a friend. Steve’s birthday arrives this week, and we plan to celebrate it with a friend in Charlotte. I do hope to find time to keep up with this blog, but am uncertain how much time I’ll have as we drive.
Today, I’d like to note some recent articles that touch on themes about which I’ve blogged here. I wrote yesterday that, as much as I’d like to agree with Frank Rich that the reaction to Mel Gibson’s latest rants signals that we’ve entered a new era of waning religious right influence, I remain cautious.
And now I see that Jonathan L. Walton blogged about Rich’s article yesterday at Religion Dispatches, reaching conclusions similar to mine. Walton notes the very much alive-and-well anti-gay marriage initiatives now being worked up in various areas, Glenn Beck’s ongoing attack against social justice ministries (about which Sarah Posner has just posted an instructive essay at Religion Dispatches), and Sarah Palin’s steady stream of hateful (and exceptionally illiterate) hate invective through Facebook and Twitter.
And so he wonders,
So does Mel Gibson’s misogynistic, racist, and violent rant represent the death rattle of a cultural moment in decline? Or, in the wake of a double-dip recession, underemployment, and economic angst, is Gibson possibly emblematic of a mood of hatred and violence that’s very much on the horizon?
As I said yesterday, I think the answer to Walton’s sharp and necessary final question remains to be seen.
Last night, as we surfed channels at our motel between Memphis and Nashville, I was startled—but not surprised—by the volume and tenor of local political ads for the fall 2010 elections in Tennessee. Again and again, the Tennessee politicians featured in the ads lambasted immigrants, who are—they claimed, without a scrap of evidence—taking jobs from hard-working Tennesseans.
It’s clear to me that these ads are a broadside attack on the Obama administration, and an attempt to work up the not inconsiderable animus of many people in the white, “Christian,” Republican South against President Obama for the political gain of the politicians mounting the anti-immigrant attacks. And I also suspect many of these politicians will win office this fall.
It’s clear to me that these ads are a broadside attack on the Obama administration, and an attempt to work up the not inconsiderable animus of many people in the white, “Christian,” Republican South against President Obama for the political gain of the politicians mounting the anti-immigrant attacks. And I also suspect many of these politicians will win office this fall.
That does not portend a bright future for our nation, and does not suggest to me that we’ll be hearing the religious right’s swan song anytime soon. Particularly not as we drive past huge, blaring signs in rice fields Arkansas encouraging parents to use the rod to beat their children in order to save their souls, and one car after another in Tennessee with bumper stickers urging us to pray, vote, and then pray again . . . .
Speaking of President Obama, I’m taken with the analysis of Peter Daou’s essay at Huffington Post yesterday, asking how a president who has shepherded quite a few significant accomplishments through Congress thus far can be perceived as a failure: the Obama paradox. And I agree completely with Daou’s conclusion:
Speaking of President Obama, I’m taken with the analysis of Peter Daou’s essay at Huffington Post yesterday, asking how a president who has shepherded quite a few significant accomplishments through Congress thus far can be perceived as a failure: the Obama paradox. And I agree completely with Daou’s conclusion:
What's far more interesting is that there is one thing Obama can do that transcends the ebb and flow of events, the endless swirl of opinion, the daily wins and losses, the progress and setbacks that constitute governing. It is the one thing with lasting appeal and enduring value and a prerequisite for unqualified success in any endeavor: standing for something worthwhile, for a set of well-articulated principles, and fighting for those principles tooth and nail.
The real Obama paradox is why that hasn't happened when it's good policy and good politics.
As I’ve said from early in the Obama administration, I just don’t get it: I don’t get the unwillingness to articulate clear progressive principles and to stand on those principles. Particularly when, as Daou points out, doing that would be not merely good policy, but good politics. This president has been very badly advised by his inner circle. But, then, he himself drew that circle around him, so something in the values-free pragmatism that concedes everything to the far right while poking sticks in the eyes of progressives appears to flow from the president’s own heart and mind.
And I still don’t get it.
On another theme: a wonderful reader of this blog, Kathy Hughes, emailed me some time back to suggest that I do some research on the role of the Christian dominionist movement in the military, as the military surveys soldiers about how they’d feel if they had to shower with homosexuals. I told Kathy that I suspected her instinct about the significant role that far-right Christian groups are playing in the foot-dragging re: ending DADT is probably right on target, but I haven’t seen much analysis of this in the news.
Today, however, Matt Harwood has cross-posted at Alternet an article he wrote a week ago for the TruthOut site. It paints a scary picture of the fight of Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in Albuquerque to challenge the attempt of Christian supremacists to take over the armed forces.
And I still don’t get it.
On another theme: a wonderful reader of this blog, Kathy Hughes, emailed me some time back to suggest that I do some research on the role of the Christian dominionist movement in the military, as the military surveys soldiers about how they’d feel if they had to shower with homosexuals. I told Kathy that I suspected her instinct about the significant role that far-right Christian groups are playing in the foot-dragging re: ending DADT is probably right on target, but I haven’t seen much analysis of this in the news.
Today, however, Matt Harwood has cross-posted at Alternet an article he wrote a week ago for the TruthOut site. It paints a scary picture of the fight of Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in Albuquerque to challenge the attempt of Christian supremacists to take over the armed forces.
The article doesn’t deal with DADT or with gay issues in the military at all. But with opponents of Weinstein’s work sending hate messages like this—“I hope all your kids turn out gay as hell, take it in the ass, and get aids and die!!!!”—I’d say there’s a very good chance that the far-right Christian dominionist groups that have such strong influence in the military might just be egging on the opposition to ending DADT.
Finally, don’t miss Tim Padgett’s article yesterday in Time magazine about Rome’s “avowal, as obtuse as it was malicious, that ordaining women into the priesthood was a sin on par with pedophilia.” What I appreciate about Padgett’s statement is that it looks at the recent Roman document as part of a larger, and worrisome, stepped-up campaign of frankly hateful actions and statements by Catholic pastoral leaders recently—what Padgett calls “an increasingly spiteful rhetoric of bigotry.”
Padgett notes the following:Finally, don’t miss Tim Padgett’s article yesterday in Time magazine about Rome’s “avowal, as obtuse as it was malicious, that ordaining women into the priesthood was a sin on par with pedophilia.” What I appreciate about Padgett’s statement is that it looks at the recent Roman document as part of a larger, and worrisome, stepped-up campaign of frankly hateful actions and statements by Catholic pastoral leaders recently—what Padgett calls “an increasingly spiteful rhetoric of bigotry.”
When Argentina in mid-July legalized gay marriage, the country's Catholic bishops weren't content to simply denounce the legislation; they used the occasion to argue for the subhumanity of homosexual men and lesbians, the way many white Southern preachers weren't ashamed to degrade African Americans during the civil rights movement. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio not only called the new law "a scheme to destroy God's plan"; he termed it "a real and dire anthropological throwback," as if homosexuality were evolutionarily inferior to heterosexuality.
Why are the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church going this route, when our tradition has outstanding examples of resistance to prejudice and outspoken activism on behalf of civil rights initiatives? In Padgett’s view, an institution that premises everything on its infallibility reacts with “Dostoyevskian paranoia” to criticism of its leaders and behavior—criticism of the sort now bubbling everywhere in the world, as we learn more about the cover-up of clerical sexual abuse of minors.
Padgett’s recommendation to Catholics faced with this response? Keep on living your faith, and remember that “the bunch of homophobes wearing miters” aren’t the church—they aren’t in any shape, form, or fashion the church in its entirety. The perfervid resistance of the current crop of bishops in the U.S. to gay people and gay rights doesn’t at all represent where the American Catholic church itself is in this area: as Padgett notes, Gallup polls indicate that 62% of American Catholics find gay relationships morally acceptable.
I agree with Padgett. And I’d also add that living one’s faith means pushing back against the hate. Even when it comes from homophobes wearing miters who claim that they represent the church for the rest of us.
I agree with Padgett. And I’d also add that living one’s faith means pushing back against the hate. Even when it comes from homophobes wearing miters who claim that they represent the church for the rest of us.