In the News: Catholic Bishops, Abortion, and Health Care; Rick Warren and Uganda

A long day winding down (collards and turnip greens—and turnips—simmering on the stove, cornbread baking, cookies cooling on racks), and as evening arrives, I want to take note of several news items and postings on blogs elsewhere that have caught my eye in recent days.

First, as a continuation of the discussion on this and related blogs of the growing concern of many American Catholics to make public statements of protest against the partisan political involvement of high-profile Catholic bishops: I highly recommend Frank Cocozzelli’s latest article in his series on Catholic remonstrance. A copy is at Talk to Action (see the preceding link), as well as several other religion-and-politics websites now.

This article links to two previous articles that Frank has written on this topic—one noting that many of those Catholic politicians most in the pocket of Catholic bishops seeking to impose their sectarian religious views on the nation at large in the abortion debate have strong ties to the tobacco industry. Which is conspicuously anti-life rather than pro-life.

Frank Cocozzelli notes in particular the lethal effects of maternal tobacco use on fetuses—something totally ignored by bishops who are mono-focused on abortion as the sole pro-life issue on whose basis Catholics should form their political conscience.

In a previous article, also linked to the article cited in the second paragraph above, Frank explains his call for Catholics to engage in “dignified acts of resistance”—in acts of remonstrance—as some bishops play political games with the Eucharist. The current article in the series notes the large contributions that the tobacco lobby has made to leading “pro-life” Catholic political figures including Rick Santorum, David Vitter, and Bart Stupak, the latter the bishops’ point person in their latest drive to impose their understanding of pro-life positions on the nation at large in the health care debate. Frank concludes:

Archbishops Burke and Chaput, as well as others in the hierarchy, have made the relatively small amounts of money that might go to subsidizing insurance policies that includes abortion coverage -- coverage that most women will never actually use -- a deal-breaker on pending health care legislation. Relatively small amounts of taxpayer funds touching on abortion is their sole reason for threatening to kill health care reform, with all that it means for saving people's lives or abandoning them to medical ruin -- but nothing is said about these politicians' hypocritical relationship to tobacco money.

But as I observed above, I cannot think of one elected official has been threatened with loss of the sacraments for taking tobacco money.

Absolutely right, it seems to me. And because the wildly partisan “pro-life” approach the bishops have taken in the current health care debate does not, in my view, reflect a compelling, integrated pro-life theology or politics, I will continue to dissent from what the bishops are trying to do, as they seek to strong-arm our elected representatives and use health care reform as a political bargaining chip in this coercive political game.

I am also dismayed at the bishops’ attempt to impose their understanding of Catholic values on the political process, at a point in history in which they’d be far better served—and more respected, I believe—if they gave honest, soul-searching attention to what they’ve done in the abuse crisis. I have long since concluded that letting the bishops score political points now in the health care debate will actually be destructive to the Catholic church in the U.S., long-range. Now is time for them to put their own house in order, not to try to dictate how others’ houses ought to be set up.

Also at Talk to Action right now is an important piece by Frederick Clarkson about the creeping influence of the religious right in the Democratic party. This summarizes a lengthier article at Public Eye in which Fred develops this argument with scholarly citations.

Fred Clarkson argues persuasively that a coalition of conservative evangelicals and Catholics with increasing clout in the Democratic party seek, under the guise of reducing the number of abortions, an America “whose politics and public policy advances reduce abortions while seeking to build political clout sufficient to criminalize abortion forever." Though he doesn’t note this, many of the names he cites here—Dobson, Robert George, Weigel, and others—played a key role in drafting the recent Manhattan Declaration.

These folks’ political agenda goes way beyond reducing abortions. It is overtly theocratic and overtly anti-women’s rights and anti-gay.

Meanwhile, I’m delighted to read that Rev. Rick Warren has now denounced the viciously anti-gay legislation under consideration in Uganda as “terrible,” “unjust,” “extreme,” and “un-Christian.”

I agree with Andrew Sullivan that Warren’s call to other pastors to disown this draconian legislation is a “real step forward.” Like Andrew Sullivan, I also wonder why, if Rick Warren can speak out, Benedict continues to choose to remain silent. And I think that John Aravosis is correct when he notes that Rachel Maddow’s brilliant, unrelenting journalism about the Ugandan situation has played a significant role in pushing Warren to do the right thing.

Rick Warren and Ugandan Legislation to Criminalize Homosexuality: Bitter Fruit

Pastor Rick Warren is back in the news again—in a way that I don’t imagine will please him, as he tries to craft a kinder and gentler, a non-homophobic, public image for himself. Today, Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank that publishes The Public Eye, has issued a press release calling on Rev. Warren to renounce the savagely anti-gay legislation now before the Ugandan legislature.

This legislation seeks to criminalize gay sex with a penalty of life imprisonment for those who engage in gay sex. It would also provide capital punishment for those having same-sex relations if they are HIV+ or having sex with someone under 18. No such penalties are envisaged for straight people engaging in the same activities. The law also seeks to outlaw all human rights groups advocating for LGBT rights.

Why call on Rick Warren to involve himself in Ugandan politics? Well, it appears he has a certain history with that nation. He’s already involved. Quite a few commentators on the Ugandan situation are suggesting that the savage homophobia now on display in the country’s governing body is a direct outcome of years of right-wing American evangelical meddling in the affairs of this African nation—meddling in which Rev. Warren has played a key role.

As Political Research Associates note, in March 2008 Warren told Ugandans that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. And as Rick Street at Religion Dispatches points out, Rev. Warren has identified Uganda as a “purpose-driven nation.” One of the leaders of the anti-gay campaign in Uganda, an evangelical pastor named Rev. Martin Ssempa, who has called for the arrest of gay activists, is a disciple of Warren’s.

A Zambian Anglican priest, Rev. Kapya Kaoma, who has documented the influence of U.S. evangelicals on African politics, states,

Rick Warren shows one face in the United States where he says he loves gays, and another face in Africa, which is on the verge of pogroms against this community. We need to hear his voice loud and clear on this issue that gays and lesbians are entitled to full human rights.

In Rick Street’s view, Uganda is “in many ways an experiment in right-wing Christian social thought.” The country’s location on the borderline between Christian and Muslim areas of Africa has attracted American evangelical missionaries who want to promote a militant Christianity to counter Islam. To further this agenda, right-wing American Christians have deliberately exported Western culture-war battles to Uganda, as they try to craft a truly godly Christian nation in Africa to shame decadent Western Christians who increasingly tolerate and affirm gay persons.

As Tarso Luís Ramos, the executive director of Political Research Associates, observes,

Anti-gay activists here in the U.S. have used vitriol and money to entice their African counterparts to campaign against ordination of gay clergy in the Episcopal and other U.S. mainline churches. They have also exported the U.S. culture wars, fomenting particularly severe forms of homophobia in Uganda and other African countries whose sexual minorities are now the collateral damage to our domestic conflicts.

And now this religio-political meddling in the affairs of African nations is bearing bitter fruit. The Ugandan legislation to criminalize homosexuality was introduced this past March, immediately following a conference held by the Ugandan Family Life Network, at which Don Schmierer, president of Exodus International, and Holocaust revisionist and anti-gay evangelical activist Scott Lively deliberately fanned the flames of homophobia in the nation’s political life. As Jim Burroway notes, Lively addressed members of the Ugandan parliament, informing them that legalizing homosexuality would be like legalizing “the molestation of children or having sex with animals.”

For those interested in global trends in Christianity, this is a significant story to follow. One of the powerful memes the religious right has sought to plant in the American mainstream media claims that African Christianity has retained a purer, truer form of Christian faith than have the decadent churches of the West. The claim constantly made in media presentations of the African churches is that these churches are now embattled, that they are being pushed by progressive groups in North American and European churches to adopt practices alien to traditional African Christianity—practices like accepting women in positions of leadership and tolerating gays and lesbians.

This is a completely distorted—a false—representation of the historical roots of African Christianity. This interpretation assumes that the churches of Africa have previously been immune to political and theological influences from the West, and are only now encountering these influences in the form of corrupting cultural currents that call misogyny and homophobia into question.

Uganda has a well-developed history of right-leaning evangelical Christianity that was exported from England, particularly in the East African revival period of the early 20th century. For various political reasons, the churches of Europe and North America have long had a vested interest in determining the fate of African Christianity—as these areas have had a vested interest in determining the economic and political course of African nations.

To a great extent, African churches are being treated today as the playground of the European and American political and religious right. In what is now happening in Uganda, we can see the outcome of the attempt of right-wing groups in the West to use African culture and African churches as toys in Western political games—we can see that outcome in its most horrifying and brutal manifestations.

I wholeheartedly agree with Political Research Associates. Rick Warren needs to take responsibility for what he and his confreres have accomplished in Uganda.

The graphic shows Rev. Rick Warren with Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

A Pastor for the Nation: Rev. Joseph E. Lowery

From what I've been reading on various blogs (admittedly, progressive ones, though I scan widely), the response to Rev. Joseph E. Lowery's benediction at today's inauguration was phenomenal. I'm reading that there were loud amens from many in the audience when he finished his benediction.

By contrast, Rev. Rick Warren received a lukewarm welcome at best, according to many blogs I'm reading. A scattering of applause, a few boos, a sense of relief when he had finished orating.

The difference in how the two pastors were received seems significant to me. It has been clear to many observers for some time that Rev. Warren has been positioning himself to inherit Billy Graham's mantle and be the new pastor to the nation.

It's also clear to me that the nation, at least, insofar as it was represented at this inaugural ceremony, has spoken. It wants a very different kind of pastor. The right-wing hate machine has been working overtime in the last few days to depict supporters of Bishop Gene Robinson and critics of Rev. Rick Warren as godless secularists intent on removing religion from the land.

I think what we saw happen today with the two pastors involved in the inauguration is a clear indicator that the nation wants a different kind of religion than that offered by Rev. Rick Warren. People are tired of the religious right and its misrepresentation of authentic faith for political ends. They see through the machinations of this essentially political, not religious, movement and they are tired of those machinations, even in the recycled kinder and gentler packaging of Rev. Warren.

It is not religion people are throwing away when they turn their backs on Rev. Warren. It's his kind of religion. A politicized gospel that thrives on turning some human beings into enemies, and then justifying our abuse of those "enemies" on "religious" grounds . . . . People are sick to death of being encouraged to hate in the name of God.

It seems clear from the very different response given to Rev. Warren and Rev. Lowery that many Americans would welcome the kind of religion Rev. Lowery represents: inclusive rather than exclusive, loving rather than hating, building rather than tearing down, engaging our energy in the political and cultural spheres to make the world better, not to condemn it and to attack those seeking to craft a better culture. A Christianity that opens to the contributions of the other religions of the world--Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, the religions of Africa and Polynesia, and so on. A Christianity that places love and understanding ahead of hate and condemnation.

Two evangelicalisms: that of the largely white religious right, and that of the black church. If the response to the two pastors who prayed at the inauguration today is any indication, the American people increasingly recognize the latter as a more adequate embodiment of the Christian gospel than the former. If we are to continue the tradition of having a nation's pastor, and if that pastor has to be Christian, then I think the verdict is clear: Rev. Lowery. Not Rev. Warren.

And what will the new administration take from what happened today? Perhaps one lesson is to stop trying to appease those on the far right who use religion to divide us. Stop giving power to a movement that many of us want to see fall by the wayside, because it is trying to tear apart our democratic institutions.

Stop calculating, trying to end up on the expedient side. Do the right thing. Stop listening to those who try to take the political pulse of the nation, while ignoring the demands of conscience.

There's still work to be done. While we were permitted to hear and weigh the words of Rev. Lowery and Rev. Warren, "technical" problems and scheduling oversights prevented us from even hearing what Bishop Robinson had to say.

There's a parable here. The evangelicalism of venerable civil rights leaders of the black church has brought us to a very good place, and we need to continue in that place. But to the extent that the black church in recent years has allowed itself to be courted by the religious right, and to sell out its historic commitment to human rights for all when it comes to gay brothers and sisters, there's still work to be done. To the extent that Rev. Lowery's United Methodist church continues to belie its claim to have an open mind and heart and open doors, while it treats gay human beings as second-class human beings, there is work to be done.

The voice of Gene Robinson should count, too. And it is impossible to justify the structures of exclusion that silenced him yesterday, if we take seriously what Rev. Lowery said in his prayer. It's time to stop the hating, and to end all the little self-justifying maneuvers by which we assure ourselves that the way we treat our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters is not really hateful.

It's time to listen carefully to the witness of venerable pastors like Rev. Lowery, who have spent years struggling to make their faith count as they sought to make society better, and to move forward with hope that we can build a more humane world. For all.

Mary Frances Berry: By What Yardstick Do We Deny Gay Human Rights?

Kudos to Mary Frances Berry for a fine, moving statement today about the need for our democracy at this point in its history to address the question of human rights of gay persons head on for a change. Today’s New York Times carries an op-ed piece by Berry on this topic, entitled “Gay But Equal?” (www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/opinion/16mfberry.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink).

Berry, who was chair of the federal Commission on Civil Rights from 1993 to 2004, argues for the creation of “a new, independent human and civil rights commission” by President Barack Obama, to replace the current (and moribund) Commission on Civil Rights. As she notes, President Eisenhower created the initial federal civil rights commission in 1957 in a period of escalating tension over the human rights of African Americans—a period such as the nation is now witnessing regarding gay human rights.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles encouraged Eisenhower to create the civil rights commission because the positive opinion of the United States in the world community was being undermined by the nation’s treatment of people of color as “less-than-first-class citizens.” As I have done in posting after posting on Bilgrimage, Berry notes the many respects in which gay citizens today are treated as second-class citizens and thus as less human than other citizens of our democratic society:

Federal Social Security and tax benefits from marriage that straight people take for granted are denied to most gays in committed relationships. And because Congress has failed to enact a federal employment nondiscrimination act, bias against gays in the workplace remains a constant threat.

Gays are at risk under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. And people who are only assumed to be homosexual have been subject to hate crimes. José and Romel Sucuzhañay, two brothers, were attacked in New York City last month by men yelling anti-gay and anti-Latino epithets. José Sucuzhañay died from being beaten with a bottle and a baseball bat. Yet the effort in Congress to enact a law that would increase the punishment for hate crimes against gays and lesbians is going nowhere.

As Berry insists, the central consideration at stake in this litany of rights denied is the question of human rights: when we deny human rights to a select group of human beings,while according those same rights to everyone else, we make a clear statement that the humanity of the targeted group is inferior to that of everyone else. As Berry notes, Coretta Scott King once told her, when she asked herself how Martin Luther King, Jr., would have responded to “don’t ask, don’t tell”: “What’s the yardstick by which we should decide that gay rights are less important than other human rights we care about?”

Indeed: “What’s the yardstick by which we should decide that gay rights are less important than other human rights we care about?” On what basis does anyone, anywhere ever decide to treat the human rights of any group, the humanity of any group, as less significant than those of other groups? On what basis does one ever justifiably deny the full range of human rights to any group of human beings?

Mary Frances Berry gets it. The Mormon and the Catholic church and their allies in the religious right do not get it, with their dissimulating, dishonest claim that the denial of human rights to gay citizens is about morality, not about rights.

Will the new president get it? His choice of Rick Warren as his pastor for the inaugural invocation gives me pause to wonder. I hope that Mary Frances Berry’s powerful witness reaches his conscience.

And the Lies Continue to Pour Out: LDS Church and Donations to Prop 8 Campaign

News is breaking on many websites the past two days of strong indicators that the LDS church, in its official face, has an extruding nose as 2009 arrives. The Mormon church claims to have spent only a few thousand dollars fighting gay marriage in California.

This American News Project documentary video offers substantial reasons to doubt the LDS church’s official report about its outlay of money to defeat gay marriage: http://newsproject.org and www.alternet.org/blogs/video/119872/prop_8_-_did_mormons_go_too_far.

As I watched the ANP video scrutinizing the Mormon contributions to the campaign for prop 8, I was struck in particular by this claim in the text accompanying the expensive media items the LDS church produced to win the prop 8 battle:

“This is not a matter of civil rights. It is a matter of morality.”

And this is a lie. The battle to safeguard and promote the human rights of anyone is a moral battle, an intrinsically moral one.

Morality is hardly confined to sexual issues. Morality has to do first and foremost with how we treat other human beings, with whether we acknowledge their shared humanity and accord them the dignity and respect they deserve as human beings.

The Jewish and Christian scriptures constantly insist that believers will be saved on the basis of how they have dealt with others—on whether they have dealt with others lovingly and justly. Sexual morality is not the primary focus of traditional, biblical Jewish and Christian thinking about moral issues.

The claim that the human rights of gay persons can rightly be placed in a special sub-category, apart from the rights of other human beings and apart from moral consideration, runs through the lies told by the religious right about gay human beings. The pastor Mr. Obama has invited to give his inaugural invocation, Rev. Rick Warren, mouthed precisely that lie in a statement to his church indicating his support for proposition 8. Rev. Warren stated, "This is not a political issue -- it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about" (www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=29209).

This is the same lie—not a matter of rights but of morality—that runs through the various Vatican statements about gay human beings I have been highlighting in the new year.

This lie permits those who tell it to imagine that their immoral behavior—discrimination, denial of human rights to selected groups of human beings—is permissible, because the human rights they are denying to gay persons are “special” rights, and not the same rights people of faith defend in general.

By removing the question of human rights for gay human beings—of how we treat gay human beings, of the special, inferior status to which we relegate gay human beings within the human community—we permit ourselves to posture as defenders of morality when we do what is fundamentally immoral. Watch for the religious right to continue in 2009 promoting the lie that the question of gay human rights is not a matter of morality . . . .

Continued Extrusion of the Religious Right's Nose: Further Prognostications for 2009

Cassandra here. Again. Doing her sad old song and dance, warning, warning with little assurance that her warnings will be heeded. At least, as the script I see now unfolding (and no, the Deity has not spoken or shouted or shown his Old Man in the Clouds™ face to me; I just use my head and see what’s before me) does unfold in 2009, you can say you heard some of those prognostications on this website.

As the new year has approached, I’ve been blogging repeatedly about the revamped, ratched-up strategy I expect the religious right to employ in the coming year, to try to recoup its recent political losses and beef up its dwindling numbers. As I’ve noted in posting after posting, I expect the religious right to do all but stand on its head to try to woo new young adherents. I also anticipate a nasty time for both the black and gay communities—and our nation as a whole—as the religious right tries to force the wedge between those two marginalized communities deeper in 2009.

As this agenda starts to play out with the new president’s inauguration, look, too, for the religious right to begin presenting itself as a kinder, gentler version of its doddering old cranky-man self. Watch for Rick Warren’s face to be plastered everywhere, as this claim is driven home. A chubby, smiling, avuncular face, the face of someone you want to hug, someone who can’t be all bad, can he, if he helps babies with AIDS in Africa and recognizes that the environment is endangered. It’s just the gays he’s after, anyway, isn’t it? And doesn’t the bible say . . . ?

With the kinder, gentler religious right, watch for one thing to remain the same: the lies. In fact, expect them to get bolder, more fantastic, the kind that would grow huge noses on the faces of people with any scrap of conscience at all. And look for the mainstream media to continue colluding in these lies, since their bread is buttered by the same folks who butter the bread of Rick Warren and his bedfellows.

In the interest of pursuing truth when falsehood threatens to prevail—a task given to all believers all the time—I’d like to point out some of the brand-new whoppers members of the religious right are telling as the new year gets underway. These lies are perhaps not entirely new ones, but the enormity of the claims now being made to prop them up is new. And that enormity will continue to be in evidence in this period of sharpened conflict between the religious right and the will of the American people in the new political landscape. We are now seeing only the tip of the big nose that will extrude from the religious right in 2009. . . .

Whopper #1: reactionary religion is succeeding in reviving the churches and attracting youth to the churches.

This is one that’s been around for some time now. The media have helped spread it—have played a crucial role in that respect, as a matter of fact. Throughout the papacy of John Paul II, in which the current pope Benedict XVI played a preeminent part as ideological czar of reaction, we were informed again and again by sober media analysts that right-wing Christianity was succeeding at doing what liberal versions of Christianity had failed to do: attract adherents; fill seminaries; bring young folks to religious vocations.* We were told that the yearly World Youth Day circus John Paul II began would fill the churches with card-carrying right-wing Catholic youth, the kind we needed to take the church back for Christ.

It hasn’t happened. The attempt to pitch reactionary forms of Christianity to youth around the world hasn’t succeeded. It hasn’t brought large numbers of youth back to the churches. If anything, it has succeeded in shoving away those who wanted to remain connected to the churches, but who did not want do so by paying the ideological price demanded. These youth have not wanted to join a neoconservative version of the Hitler Youth movement, have not wanted to leave their minds at the church door, and have not wanted to reduce their moral compass to genital fixations.

Many youth who are distancing themselves from reactionary churches today are intently interested in morality, but in an integral morality that applies faith to the wide range of moral problems demanding the attention of people of faith, which transcend the pelvic preoccupations of the religious right. To issues like the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of women by men, the injustice of an economic system that enriches the few at the expense of the man. And yes, to issues like gay rights.

Despite clear statistical indicators that reactionary forms of Christianity are not reviving the Christian churches—as in attracting huge numbers of new adherents—the lies continue rolling forth. From representatives of the religious right. With the collusion of the media.

Shortly before Christmas, mainstream media sources around the world blared forth a boast of the religious right that the downturn in the world economy was sending folks back to church—to their churches, the churches of the right. This is a version of a story that crops up predictably in the media anytime disaster strikes.

After 9/11, we were told that the churches had filled again—with the implication that most of us are a godless lot of secularists who turn our backs on God when things are going well for us, until some disaster urges us back to mother church and father God. To our role of unquestioning, childlike filial piety—the kind of unquestioning filial piety it would behoove us to adopt, as well, vis-à-vis the big men pulling the economic levers, who have our well-being at heart just as mother church and father God do.

What I am suggesting is that, for its own political and economic interests, the mainstream media have as much invested in telling us this lie of the superiority of reactionary religion, as does the religious right. Both are perfectly capable of inventing huge whoppers about the return to the churches (the “right” churches, the ones that preach about sin and hell and condemnation and the need for unquestioning obedience) when times are hard.

Though the preceding story of miraculous new conversions to the churches of the right rolled out just before Christmas, it has now been shown to have been false (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3043). Gallup polling data in December show no increase at all in church, synagogue, or mosque attendance of Americans at any point in 2008. Polls in other parts of the world indicate the same lack of a new fervor for right-wing religion in the face of economic downturns.

Despite what the data indicate, one of the boldest spin doctors of the Catholic right, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia, has informed the media (who dutifully reported Pell’s story without asking for evidence to confirm the claim) that last year’s World Youth Day events in Australia had led to an increase in conversions, as well as to increased numbers of young men entering the seminary in Australia (http://zenit.org/article-24687?l=english and www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=10936). No empirical data support Cardinal Pell’s claims here—claims that are suspiciously matched to statements both he and Benedict made last February, prior to World Youth Day, in which they predicted conversions of Australian youth due to WYD, as well as a rise in numbers of seminarians (www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/188925,pope-hopes-for-religious-revival-in-australia--feature.html).

Pell delivered his pronouncements of the success of World Youth Cay on new year’s day. Two weeks later, Father Peter Kennedy of St. Mary’s church in Brisbane announced that he would lead his parish into schism if the archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, closes his parish (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/dissident-australian-parish-threatens.html). The threat posed by this parish? It is actually flourishing, in the real world, not just the world of wish-fulfillment. But it is an innovative parish that crafts inclusive liturgies which energize everyone in the congregation, a parish that invites native peoples to contribute to shaping the liturgy and the life of the community of faith.

It is a success story that directly contradicts the lie of the religious right that progressive religious groups are waning while right-wing religious groups are on the rise. And so it is a story that must be swept under the rug, even as stories of bogus right-wing success, based on no evidence at all, are put forth as gospel truth—with media collusion.

The real story, the factual one, of the “success” of Benedict’s reactionary movement, is quite different from the one Pell wants us to believe. As the Clerical Whispers blog reported on 10 January, Catholic marriages in England have declined by 24% since 2000 (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/roman-catholic-church-marriages-fall-by.html). The Vatican itself is admitting that vocations of women to religious life are declining rapidly—though it is seeking to blame that drop in vocations on women’s refusal to adhere to traditional gender roles (www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0900109.htm). And in Austria, despite a high-profile visit of Benedict in September 2007 aimed at reviving Catholicism there, 40,595 Catholics formally renounced their affiliation with the Catholic church in 2008 (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/catholic-church-exodus-rolled-on-last.html).

Cardinal Pell is, quite simply, lying. And the mainstream media that assist him in lying have to know this. The reactionary movement in the Catholic church has perhaps succeeded in seizing and holding the reins of power. But it has succeeded in little else. It has not brought large numbers back to the church, to the seminaries, and to religious life.

It has, in fact, succeeded in decisively alienating many of us. And lying about it will not change that fact. And there are strong parallels between the declining membership of the Catholic church and another mainstay of the religious right, the Southern Baptist church, whose numbers have been stagnant for several years now, as the face of congregations grows ever older and as young folks do not choose this and other right-wing churches in large numbers.

People are tired of being told no repeatedly, as if that message is the gospel message in its entirety. People rightly expect something more from authentic religiosity and spokespersons for authentic faith.

Whopper #2: Openly gay bishop Gene Robinson has split the Anglican communion.

That nasty little lie comes from the mouth of Tony Perkins, president of the right-wing Family Research Council. Perkins is reacting to the news two days ago that Obama has chosen out and partnered gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to give the first prayer of the inauguration ceremonies at the Lincoln Memorial (www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-obama-clergy-webjan13,0,7483819.story).

In response to this announcement, Mr. Perkins states,

I find it kind of ironic that some were adamantly opposed to Rick Warren because he was “divisive,” If you want to talk about somebody that is divisive, look at Gene Robinson. He essentially split one of the oldest Christian denominations in this country.

The truth? The truth that Mr. Perkins knows very well, since he’s a big part of the story? The religious right and its adherents have worked overtime in the past decade to split the worldwide Anglican communion, to the extent that this communion has sought to ordain women and openly gay folks, and to promote social teachings that call neoconservative ideology, with its claims to represent Christian orthodoxy, into question. Well-funded and politically powerful groups such as the Institute on Religion and Democracy have done all they can to sow seeds of discontent in the Anglican communion, by seeking to convince Anglicans of color in developing nations that Anglicans of the developed nations—many of whom are sympathetic to women’s and gay rights—take people of color for granted.

The IRD has exerted tremendous influence on the mainstream media to assure that the mainstream media adopt this script, a script that depicts progressive Anglicans as empty liberals exploiting people of color while abandoning the core truths of Christianity, and Christians of the developing nations as saviors of the creed. I’ve blogged repeatedly about these matters, and for anyone interested in documentation of the points I'm making here, I suggest entering the phrase “Institute on Religion and Democracy” into the blog search engine at the top left of the Bilgrimage homepage. You’ll find a world of links there to substantiate my claims.

Lies told by victimizers who seek to make the victim responsible for the reprehensible actions of the victimizer are particularly nasty lies. That’s the kind of lie Tony Perkins is telling here.

We’re going to see a lot more of this sort of lying by members of the religious right in 2009. For those of us who hope for a renewal of our democratic culture under a new president and a new Congress, it is important to keep monitoring the lies of the religious right—and to challenge them. And, above all, to call the media to accountability, when they sell their integrity to the religious right and turn themselves into mouthpieces for a political movement wearing a religious mask to conceal its real intent, which is destruction of democratic institutions . . . .


* Though the term “religious right” generally refers to a coalition of evangelical Christian religious groups in the United States, in my view, in its stance on family issues and sexual morality, the Catholic church is also a part of the religious right.

News Updates: Tennessee Gay Firing, Vatican and Human Rights, Obama and Lincoln

Interesting updates to several items I’ve posted in the recent past.

As I noted several days ago, when David Hill, a hotel employee in Tennessee, recently found himself fired because he was gay, another employee of the hotel, Leonard Stoddard, courageously blew the whistle and informed the media that his colleague had been terminated because of his sexual orientation (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/prop-8-and-black-voters-again-timothy.html). My posting notes that Stoddard expected to be fired in turn.

And so it has happened. Pam’s House Blend and Box Turtle Bulletin have just carried reports today that, following his whistle-blowing interview with the media, Leonard Stoddard was fired (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9009, www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/12/8012#comments). By email. Predictably, hotel owner Tarun Surti accuses Stoddard of lying. And just as predictably, he claims that the termination of Hill and now of Stoddard is due to financial exigency.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen academic institutions in states where there is no legal protection for gay employees subject to discrimination—states like Tennessee, in other words—behave just this way, I’d be a rich man now. Fire folks because they’re gay. Claim that they and their supporters have lied when they blow the whistle. Then invent a case of financial exigency or (undocumented) poor job performance to cover your backside.

This story illustrates why the battle for gay rights cannot be confined to the right of marriage. Too many gay citizens of the United States still live in places—in 31 states, for God's sake!—in which there is no legal protection at all from being fired, denied housing, or denied basic rights in many other respects, solely because one is gay. All LGBT citizens of the United States lack the most basic protection of all, in cases in which one is assaulted simply due to sexual orientation.

Laws defining such assaults as hate crimes in the case of women assaulted for their gender or people of color for their race are in place. There are no such federal protections in place for those who are gay.

We have a long way to go.

I’ve also blogged repeatedly about the Vatican’s opposition to the 19 December resolution presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations that called for worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality and for inclusion of gay human beings in the human rights covenant of the UN (see, e.g., http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/questions-that-wont-die-vatican-and.html).

I’m heartened to see America magazine address this topic in its latest editorial (http://americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11348). As the editorial notes, the Vatican professes to condemn violence against gays and lesbians, but found the wording of the UN resolution open to applications that might, Rome thinks, lead to discrimination against people of faith who want to maintain anti-gay moral stances.

But as the editorial also notes,

Last year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hate crimes in this country against gays and lesbians rose by 6 percent, while crimes against almost every other group fell. Stronger public steps are necessary to oppose the execution and murder of gays and lesbians.

Yes. And in the tortuous and painful debates now underway about the relationship between the African American and the gay communities about which I don't know how to refrain from blogging, because they continue, I hope that these brute facts about the legal position in which gay citizens find themselves in this country can remain on the table.

It does no good to compare gay suffering and black suffering in a zero-sum game. Both communities have suffered and continue to suffer in gross and unjustifiable ways.

But one of those two communities nonetheless enjoys—at least, and thank God—federal protection from violent acts perpetrated against members of that community, solely because of innate characteristics of members of the community. The other does not. And this lacuna should not be justified or overlooked by any member of any marginalized community. What we allow to be done to others because of their skin color, gender, or sexual orientation will one day be done to us solely because of who we are, too.

I’d also like to note a very good article at Huffington Post recently, which deals with a topic about which I have blogged repeatedly: the relationship between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln (www.huffingtonpost.com/john-stauffer/what-obama-can-learn-from_b_156997.html). John Stauffer’s interpretation of Lincoln’s 1860 inaugural address differs from mine, in that he sees Lincoln bending over backwards to appease slaveholders (for my reading, see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/12/societies-changing-moral-minds-changing.html and http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/12/lincoln-vs-obama-re-better-angels.html).

Even so, Stauffer ends up in precisely the same place in which I end up in my reflections on the Lincoln-Obama parallels. My postings argue that Lincoln saw clearly the need to chart a moral course for the nation that excluded slavery. He recognized the necessity of making momentous moral choices even as he engaged in the necessary work of political compromise.

And he eventually recognized that he had a moral obligation to form solidarity with his friends and supporters, not with those who appeared to have power but who had no intent of walking where Lincoln insisted the nation had to walk. Just as I think Mr. Obama has an obligation to do in the case of those progressive citizens who see his election as a mandate for real change, effective change, and not just cosmetic change. As Stauffer notes,

Their [i.e., Lincoln’s and Frederick Douglass’s] profound shift from enemies to friends stemmed in large part from Lincoln's abandonment of his "team of rivals" model of leadership, coupled with his realization that he needed radicals and progressives--especially blacks--on his side.

Douglass' response to Lincoln's Inaugural Addresses thus offers a salutary lesson for Obama: as he tries to move beyond partisan politics, he needs to be careful not to alienate his natural allies and renounce his campaign promise to "bring the change our country needs."

The choice of openly gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to give a kick-off prayer at the Lincoln Memorial during Obama’s inauguration is a step in the right direction. The choice of Rev. Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration is not such a step, in my view.

God's Oracles in 2009: White Men Rule (Again)!

The Deity (aka the Old White Man in the Clouds™, aka God) has been mighty busy of late. Goda'mighty busy. Talking to His appointed oracles in the world, doncha know. To white men. Men like Himself, which is, after all, how we happen to know He is Himself and not Herself.

As 2009 arrived, the Old Gent was, of course, intent as he always is to give His first hearing of the new year time to the Reverend Robertson in Virginia Beach, Virginia (http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&hl=en&q=pat%20robertson%20predictions&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#). God spends quite a bit of his time in conferences with Pat at any moment in the year. But new year’s is a special time.

It’s a season in which the Deity chooses to open the secrets of the future™ to Rev. Robertson. Unfortunately for us, who would prefer to hear God’s word straight from the horse’s mouth with no interpretive screens, it appears that in these audiences with his Virginia oracle, God assumes the role of a doddering old gentleman—perhaps under the rubric of becoming all things to all men?—since Rev. Robertson’s usual mode of delivering his new year’s predictions requires him to issue disclaimers like, “If I heard correctly,” or, “If I understood right.”

Evidently when the Most High conferences with Reverend Robertson, He speaks in those maddening disconnected elliptical utterances so favored by the reminiscing elderly who are not quite there—in the same room with the rest of us. That befits the Deity, of course. One has to listen carefully, join the dots, and make inferences that are not directly spelled out in the meandering pronouncements.

And evidently Reverend Robertson does not always hear precisely, since he has made spectacularly off new year’s predictions in the past, including the submersion of the Pacific northwest by a tsunami due to that region’s tolerance of the gays. This year’s predictions are perhaps safer and more probable: recession, rising oil prices, wars and rumors of war.

Things are quite different when the Deity communes with another of his favored earthly embodiments, news commentator Mr. Tucker Carlson (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/when-tucker-car.html). In contrast to the maddeningly evasive way in which He reveals Himself to Mr. Robertson, when contacting Mr. Carlson, God speaks out loud and very, very clearly. Perhaps He even shouts, as His representatives on television and radio are wont to do. Thinking as He does so that Flannery O’Connor had it right, when she observed famously that if one wishes to reach the deaf, ONE SHOUTS. All things to all men, depending on what said men happen to need . . . . To the doddering, one becomes doddering; to the stolid, stolid.

Not only is God speaking to His divinely appointed spokesmen: he’s also showing his face to specially favored recipients of divine self-revelation. Quarterback Kurt Warner has favored us with a picture of God in this new year: “the old man,” “gray hair,” “long beard,” according to Warner (http://vodpod.com/watch/1275009-qb-kurt-warner-draws-his-god). Unfortunately, when Mr. Warner recently drew God the Father, he ended up inadvertently sketching Jesus instead—entirely understandable, given that Jesus is the “young man” and God the Father the “old man,” as Mr. Warner brightly informs us.

Why men, one wonders? Why white men? Why white men whose primary interest in religion seems to be in finding a God who looks, talks, thinks, and acts suspiciously like them, one asks as one ponders the surprisingly various yet predictably patriarchal ways in which God reveals Himself to his favored representatives in the world? To pastors and football players and television gurus—to those most likely to speak for God, since they are, as well all know, most like God, His best buddies and primary defenders in a world hellbent on going to the multicultural, gender-bending dogs.

To ask these questions is perhaps to answer them.

And thank God that Stephen Colbert is getting in on the act, with his new “Yahweh or No Way” segment: www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/215452/january-08-2009/yahweh-or-no-way---roland-burris. With all due respect, Mr. God, would you plea'sir spend more time talking to Mr. Colbert and a tad bit less communing with Rev. Robertson, Rev. Huckabee, Pope Benedict, and Rev. Warner in the coming year?

Some of us find You a little more believable, Sir, when Stephen Colbert speaks on your behalf.

Obama's Election and the Rise of Hate Groups in America: Old Hate, New Masks

Even before I read news this weekend that the Southern Poverty Law Center sees hate groups gaining in numbers now (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/10/AR2009011002039.html, www.americablog.com/2009/01/another-bad-effect-of-tanking-economy.html, www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=A48A7F08AF6F6DA19DA1BAF24D112C7C?diaryId=8997), I had sketched notes to blog about the need some of us have to keep constructing new enemies even as our former ones wiggle out of our sights. I’m particularly interested in tracking this phenomenon after the election of Obama and the turn of the U.S. away from a politics of neoconservative dominance.

The Southern Poverty Law Center thinks that the election of an African-American president is causing a spike in hate groups in the U.S. The troubled economic times through which we’re now passing also cause some folks to turn to hate as a way of venting economic frustration.

It certainly makes sense to me that hate groups would be on the rise as a result of both factors. But I also think something else is going on now with the phenomenon of organized hate, in the wake of Obama’s election and the nation’s repudiation of the ideology of neoconservatism that has dominated our political discourse for decades now. I suspect that we are living at a moment of confusion and fear on the part of the right, in which there is a desperate need to construct new enemies (or reframe old enmities in new representations)—precisely because the tried and true discourses of demonization have begun to fragment, with the shift from neoconservativsm.

What remains constant is the need to hate. What shifts is the way that hate is expressed, those it targets, how it constructs itself. In my view, we are in for a hard ride now, not merely because the economy is tanking and we have elected an African-American president. We’re in for a difficult period because those who consider it important to hate are not precisely sure how to do so in the new America taking shape right now. We’re going to see a lot of free-floating hate in coming days, hate looking for targets: hate casting about to find sore points in the psyche of our culture, which it can manipulate to elicit more hate.

I’ve watched this search to groom hate develop on the blog of my statewide free newspaper Arkansas Times. I’ve been fascinated by one poster, in particular, who logged in with guns blaring during the period preceding the national elections. This is a poster whose raison d’être is to stir hate. In any way he can. By any means he can.

When he arrived on the Arkansas Times blog, he announced he wouldn’t be voting for McCain, who was evidently too close to the center for this blogger. He’d be sitting out the elections.

But not—definitely not—as a critic of his own party silent about the shortcomings of the other. The blogger has made it plain he intends to attack, to subvert, the other side in any way he can do so. He’s not merely a loyal critic of his friends; he’s a bitter, partisan enemy of everyone else. He is adroit about sowing seeds of disinformation, and unapologetic about doing so, when that disinformation serves his political purposes—to stir hate and stop constructive discourse that might fashion a new political consensus.

This professional hate monger has a modus operandi that has become very clear to me, as I’ve watched him at work. Anytime the blog posts an article that he can twist towards hate, he immediately logs in to inject his dose of toxins. He does so at the outset of the conversation, to try to determine the conversation—to twist it. To poison it.

All that takes place on the thread he has thus tainted then turns into commentary, either overt or covert, on the hate he has introduced. Everything becomes a response, covert or overt, to the parameters of hate he has set for the conversation. In this way, he controls the conversation, even when folks try to ignore him. Just as right-wing talk radio hosts, whose “ideas” he constantly channels to the moderate-leaning Arkansas Times blog, seek to do: framing the cultural discourse so that we can never move beyond anger, hate, targeting of perceived enemies, shouting, lying.

Framing the discourse, that is, so that they can remain on top—white males. In control of everything. Letting us know when it is safe for us to move forward. Preventing us from doing so until they give the word.

As I watch this professional hater at work, it becomes increasingly clear to me that his hate is clinical, and if I can use this word, even clean. He is not motivated by hate, precisely. He is not passionate about those he hates.

What he is passionate about is hate itself, rather than the object of hate—about keeping hate alive, about the clinical, clean pursuit of a politics framed by hate. He is passionate about keeping hate alive so that our culture can remain gridlocked in the shouting match that enables big boys like this hater to continue their illusion of illusion of being in control. This is not a politics that wants to go somewhere specific. It is a politics that wants to stop all forward movement at any cost possible, including the cost of social fragmentation.

In fact, it is a politics intent on stopping forward movement at the deliberate cost of fragmenting our society, because fragmentation produces the stasis those manipulating social antagonisms need, in order to assure their control.

I have been fascinated by the constancy of this blogger’s hate, and at the same time, by the shifting face of those we are instructed to target as the enemy. Same language, different faces. During the election, mindless liberals and Democrats were the targets—even, God help us, FDR and Jimmy Carter. Once the election had ended and there was discontent in many quarters with the victory of proposition 8 in California and of the adoption initiative in Arkansas, the hate shifted to gays: animals rampaging in the streets, we were told, attacking godly citizens whose majority vote had just put them in their place, back in their cages.

Point out any parallel between the struggle of gay citizens for civil rights and the struggle of black citizens for rights in the 1950s and 1960s, and this blogger will immediately inform you that blacks don’t like having their admirable civil rights struggle equated with the illicit struggle of dirty gay animals. Though he’s a white male (or represents himself as such—and I have no reason to doubt this self-representation), he regards himself as the spokesperson of all people of color, when it comes to the relationship of black folks and gay folks. He places himself in that role even though, when it is convenient for him to attack people of color as animals, he does so with the same vengeance he deploys in his anti-gay rhetoric.

This man also occasionally seeks to paint himself as a God-fearing Christian, though that aspect of his political discourse is always muted and always subordinated to the need for hate. God and faith are tools to bolster, not to curb, hate. Hate comes first. One has the sense, listening to this professional hater, that he's not really interested in religious issues at all; he's interested in their utility for stirring hate.

For some time after the election, and after the protests about proposition 8 died down, this hate-monger went silent. He did so because—this is clear in comments he has made since returning to the board—the victory of Obama and of Democrats in elections across the nation has left him baffled. That victory has left him confused regarding his hate. Not whether to hate, but how to hate, in the new political culture now taking shape in our nation with the elections.

Consequently, this advocate of hate is now logging in with postings that try out new lines of hate, tentative castings in this or that pond of hate, to see who will bite. The problems in Gaza have given him room to try on a refurbished Islamophobic face. Whisper that Israel may not be admirable in its treatment of its Islamic neighbors, and the hate-monger will be quick to tell you that you are an antisemite and Muslims—all Muslims—are brown-skinned terrorists trying to find ways to worm themselves into our nation and overthrow it from within.

If Muslims are bad—if we need them to be bad, in our black-white formulas of hate—then Jews must be good. We need them to be good, in those formulas. All Muslims. All Jews.

This, I propose, is the kind of hate we are now going to see on the rise after Obama’s election—free-floating hate desperately looking for some enemy, any enemy, to keep the politics of division alive. In direct proportion to the check that the turn from neoconservativism poses to these haters, their hate will become stronger. It has to become stronger, since they have constructed their whole identity as white men on top around the politics of hatred and division. And it has to strengthen because the possibility of a cultural turn that will make such hatred superfluous is becoming more apparent.

Look for hatred to be on the rise now: the Southern Poverty Law Center is correct about that. But look for it to be seeking new ways to represent itself and its enemies. Look for it to be more adroit about the lies it tells to justify its existence.

And saying that leads me to two predictions for the coming year, vis-à-vis the religious right:

1. Look for the religious right to try desperately to represent itself as a kinder, gentler version of its old self, as it crafts new strategies of outreach to youth: campus visits, campus crusades, enhanced web technologies. And newly minted lies about gays and gay marriage . . . .

2. Look for the new kinder, gentler religious right to pitch itself to the African-American community as a strong ally, even as the religious right works overtime to drive new wedges between the black and the gay communities. The invitation of Rick Warren to speak this year at Ebenezer Baptist church’s MLK celebration is just the beginning. Under the aegis of strengthening ties between white and black evangelicals, we’re going to see a strongly revved-up attempt to continue to make inroads into the black community, to promote an anti-gay agenda. And we’re going to see lots of money thrown in the direction of conservative evangelical black churches, to achieve these ends—money ostensibly given to bolster the faith-based outreach efforts of those churches. You ain’t seen nothing yet . . . .

And as these new manifestations of tired old hate wearing the latest fashions take place in the U.S., count on the Vatican to ramp up its lies and its attack on science, insofar as science does not reinforce the Vatican’s need to construct some groups—women and gays, for instance—as objects of hate. Look for the Vatican to lie more and more boldly about scientific “findings” like how women’s urine is polluting the environment and causing male infertility. As my friend Colleen Baker at Enlightened Catholicism has been pointing out for some time now, watch the Vatican try to frame discourse around environmentalism to convey some very reactionary concerns, in the coming year.

(Can the Vatican engage in hate speech? Yes. Is the pope Catholic?)

It’s only now getting underway, and those of us who want something different—something constructive, something based on energies other than hate—need to be vigilant, if we do not want these new manifestations of hate to capture the attention of the cultural mainstream.

The graphic is the current Stand Strong Against Hate map at Southern Poverty Law Center's website. Red areas are documented hate groups; green ones are citizens who have joined the SPLC's Stand Strong Against Hate project.

Sanjay Gupta? Count Me Underwhelmed

To say that Obama’s choice of Sanjay Gupta for the position of Surgeon-General underwhelms me would be understating the point. I find the choice totally uninspiring. It makes me wonder even more about the ethos the new president intends to create in his administration.

It’s not just the despicable way Gupta treated Michael Moore (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-trouble-with-sanjay-gupta). And, yes, I did recall that “mugging” (to use Paul Krugman’s term) as soon as I read the news that Obama had chosen Gupta as health czar. I have the long memory of my Irish ancestors. And, like many of my Arkansas ancestors, I remember well who has proven to be my friend and who my enemy.

No, it's not just the Michael Moore case, though that counts for me. For me, the sticking point is Gupta himself. He’s just so . . . insubstantial. Glitter and not gold. Image without substance. Someone who seems to have crafted himself for the camera and the American media, at the loss of a significant portion of his real identity.

I’m not opposed to having a celebrity in this position. It may be a stroke of brilliance to think in that direction, to assume that someone with a name and a face will convince people to take health issues seriously—to see health as sexy.

I like the choice of someone with ethnic roots for this position, of a person of color to hold this distinguished title. One of the things I held against Bill Clinton was his treatment of Joycelyn Elders when she ran afoul of the right due to her honesty. Up to then, I had admired Clinton for choosing a woman of color for this position.

But Gupta? Count me underwhelmed. He’s about as substantial as, well, as CNN.

Looks like I’m going to spend the next four years in a seat I don’t relish—that of loyal critic of an exciting new president whom I wholeheartedly supported during the election. With each choice Mr. Obama is now making, my fears grow stronger that he has a fatal infatuation with image that has no substance behind it (can anyone say Rick Warren?), and will be tone-deaf to the insights of those on the left who helped put him in office, but whom he knows he can blow off because we have little power except to raise our voices, when he betrays our ideals.

Ideals that he himself has professed to cherish, since they're central to the participatory democracy he claims to value.

The Lion, The Lamb, and Rick Warren

I forget which liberation theologian wrote some years back something like the following: When you invite both the lion and the lamb to your table of inclusive dialogue, how will you assure that the lion doesn't eat the lamb?

It may have been Gustavo Gutiérrez who wrote an insightful comment to that effect. Or perhaps Juan Luis Segundo, or another Latin American liberation theologian. I don't recall, and would have to search years of back journals with no indexes in order to find the source of the observation.

What I have always admired about the liberation theologians is how their outsiders' perspective into the shell games of our liberal political worldview exposes what's really going on in those shell games. We pretend that, in trying to include everyone, we truly welcome the voice of everyone.

Without admitting that some of us are lions and some are lambs. Some have voices that count and some have voices that will not be heard at the table of "inclusive" dialogue. Some have power and others don't.

To host an "inclusive" table at which the power dynamics of domination and submission are not overturned reinforces those dynamics in a purportedly "inclusive" context in which we ask the lamb not to protest as the lion eats him, because protesting is bad form, unwelcoming behavior in an inclusive society.

This liberal use of the language of inclusivity, of bringing everyone to the table, of just all getting along, is obscene. It refuses to recognize the essential point, if inclusion is not to reinforce domination: that is, that power is distributed very unequally in our culture, and bringing everyone to the table without changing the power dynamics only allows those who already dominant to dominate even more fiercely, at the table of inclusion.

This liberal use of the language of inclusivity overlooks the intent of inclusivity and of bringing everyone to the table. It allows the dynamics of domination and subordination to continue in a new guise in which the lamb has even less protection than she ever had before, because now her very protest against being eaten will be taken as an act of ill grace at the inclusive table.

Why does the invitation of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation at the start of a new administration dedicated to change we can all believe in cut some Obama supporters to the quick?

If you want to know the answer to that question, you must ask the lamb. Not the lion.

Societies' Changing Moral Minds, Changing Societies' Moral Minds: Reflections on the Eve of a New Year

I ended yesterday’s posting with a comment about the changing moral mind of our society—about our culture’s developing moral consensus that gay human beings are fully human and deserve all rights accorded to any other human being. Today, on this eve of a new year, it strikes me as important to talk further about the idea of the moral mind of a society, and how that moral mind changes.

The concept of society’s moral mind is a key theme in social gospel theology—a theological movement linking action for progressive social change to Christian theology, which had strong influence on American religion and culture in the latter part of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century. The influence of the social gospel has continued in American Christianity up to the present, even though the movement itself fell into decline after World War I.

For instance, there are strong social gospel motifs in the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. King’s education in both Atlanta and Boston brought him into contact with scholars steeped in social gospel theology. His own powerful theology constantly echoes social gospel themes. King’s oft-quoted statement—highlighted in the graphic accompanying yesterday’s posting—that the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice, is a social gospel insight, one that captures the responsibility of people of faith to discern the trend of justice in their society and move their churches towards that trend.

The theology that developed around the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s incorporated key social gospel themes, including the insistence that societies can sin and that social groups can develop a new moral awareness. Social gospel theology insists that people of faith have an obligation to pay attention to the developing consensus of the social groups to which they belong, since that consensus often challenges churches and demands that they undergo conversion of taken-for-granted assumptions that have begun to appear as immoral, in light of shifts in the moral awareness of society at large.

Influential social gospel theologians, including Walter Rauschenbusch and Shailer Mathews, the subject of my doctoral dissertation and of a book based on that dissertation, note that the trend of societal moral development is ineluctably towards greater and greater recognition of the personhood of those previously depersonalized. American slavery rested on the assumption—it justified itself by assuming—that slaves are 3/5 of a person. Women were depersonalized for generations because the legal systems of many societies enshrined beliefs that women require male control and supervision, since they are less able than men to govern themselves—less fully personal than men.

As social groups become aware that these depersonalizing assumptions, applied to one group and then another, are immoral, since the humanity of all human beings is equal, movements to change the moral consensus of society around these assumptions begins. Those movements gradually shift the thinking of the culture at large, and eventually that of churches, as well—culture first and churches second in many instances, because churches all too frequently prove to be the bastion of resistance to progressive social change.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., put the point, churches too often form the taillight to progressive social movements, rather than their headlight. Here, too, King was echoing social gospel thinking, which sees the development of new moral awareness in social groups as a process that goes far beyond the boundaries of churches, and which often requires churches to address their own complicity in sinful social practices such as racism and misogyny.

It has now become commonplace to analyze what has happened in Western cultures with racial and gender prejudice as a breakthrough of moral awareness, based on a growing consensus that it is immoral to treat people as less than human because of pigmentation or gender. Once that breakthrough of awareness has happened, we cannot go back: we cannot choose again to countenance slavery or outright, legally protected misogyny without undermining our claim to be a society built on moral principles, a democracy built on the key insight that all people are created equal and should have access to the same set of human rights.

Many citizens of Western societies, however, continue to resist the breakthrough of a similar moral awareness regarding the humanity of gay persons. And much of that resistance is fueled today—as it was in the movements for rights for both people of color and women—by the churches.

Viewed from an historical perspective, many Western cultures are today where they were in the past, at that threshold moment when the social consensus re: people of color and women was just about to shift decisively: on the cusp of a new moral mind regarding the place of gay human beings in society—regarding the humanity, the full humanity and access to the full gamut of human rights—of gay human beings. We are there because we have reached a point of moral awareness from which there is no retreat.

Once increasing numbers of people in democratic societies begin to recognize that prejudice based on innate characteristics such as race, gender, or sexual orientation, cannot be justified, because there can be no justification for using innate characteristics to dehumanize and depersonalize any group of citizens in a truly democratic society, change has to happen. It has to take one of two forms: either the society has to reject the claims of the group now demanding attention as a dehumanized group, or it has to eradicate all barriers to that group’s access to human rights.

At the breakthrough moment, society has to act. It has to make choices. People have to make choices and take stands. We have to make choices and take stands.

There is no morally justifiable intermediate stage in the process of developing moral awareness after that process has reached the moment of breakthrough insight. Once that stage has been achieved, there can no longer be weighing of claims or moral calculation, with the attendant assumption of such weighing and calculation that prejudice remains legitimate, simply one acceptable opinion among others in a pluralistic society.

Once society has come to the moment of breakthrough awareness of its complicity in historic injustice towards a dehumanized group of people, the time for compromise, for bringing everyone on board before we make up our cultural mind, for permitting prejudice masked as religious belief to impede democracy, is over. Breakthrough awareness introduces a time for change: a time when decision is demanded.

I have explored these themes in published works that track my own response to racism—to my racism—in my life journey. These autobiographical theological reflections examine the moments in which I became critically aware that I had taken for granted attitudes and assumptions from my formative years which were racist.

As the reflections note, once I saw these attitudes and assumptions for what they were—social constructions of reality rather than accurate readings of social reality; prejudice imposed on me by the culture in which I grew up—there was no going back. Once my eyes were opened to the racism in the society around me and in myself, I had no choice except to make a choice: to confront my own prejudice and to deal with it, in every way I could discover it in my attitudes and decisions. That is, I had no choice if I wished to continue claiming an interest in being a moral agent, someone who took the moral claims of others seriously.

My articles reflecting on my own struggle to deal with my breakthrough awareness of the racism of my culture of origin, and my own racism, use that reflection as a prism to look at the struggle of social groups to deal with such breakthrough awareness. As I reflect on how social groups incorporate new breakthrough moral awareness and change their moral minds, it has become clear to me that the urge to shift moral thinking about human rights issues does not come from the center.

It comes, instead, from prophetic and progressive movements within faith communities and in society at large. It comes from those who explore the growing edge of moral awareness in their own social and faith groups—those who are willing to move away from the warm, safe embrace of the center to the margins, where the beliefs of the center are tested and proven true or false.

This movement from the margins to the center, this challenge of the prophetic minority to the center, has been going on for some time now in Western cultures, vis-à-vis gay human beings and gay human rights. We are now at a moment of breakthrough awareness in which what prophetic and progressive movements in our culture have seen for some time—that gay human beings are as fully human as other human beings, and deserve the same human rights as other human beings have—is beginning to impinge on the consciousness of the culture at large.

As that breakthrough awareness is communicated from the prophetic, progressive margins to the center, it becomes impossible for those who claim to lead from the center to ignore the growing moral consensus of their society. Certainly many church groups that have much invested, historically, in marginalizing and condemning gay human beings, will continue to resist the breakthrough of moral awareness and the new moral consensus that this breakthrough implies.

Leaders that concede moral ground to these resistant religious groups will fail, however, in one of their chief tasks as leaders in a democratic society, if they allow these groups the right to determine the direction of their society, vis-à-vis the question of human rights for gay persons. While religious groups have and should have, in a pluralistic democratic society, the right to hold their unique beliefs, they do not have and should not have the right to determine the moral consensus of society about the human rights of marginalized groups about whose humanity the society is slowly shifting its awareness.

There are religious groups that continue to imagine women as inferior creatures, and which build their church polity and dogmatic systems around that fantasy. There are religious groups that continue to denigrate people of color by overtly racist teachings and by church-political decisions that contribute to the marginalization of people of color.

We no longer permit these groups to determine the social consensus—the moral mind of our society—about people of color and women, however. We do not do so because, at the moment of breakthrough awareness in these areas, we decided once and for all that our future as a democratic society required us to make a choice. We chose to underscore the humanity of women and people of color—despite what many believers and many churches continued to teach.

The role of national leaders like Lincoln (or, later, Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson) was crucial in the process by which the center affirmed the growing moral consensus of its day, re: issues of race or women's rights. We have successfully negotiated the difficult passage to new moral consensus regarding racial and gender issues because we have had leaders willing to stand at the center in order to redefined the center, morally speaking.

Lincoln exemplifies the process I am sketching here. Lincoln deliberately claimed his role as a moral leader at a time of shifting moral consensus. He did not flench from the moral obligation his presidential office imposed on him, at a time of shifting national moral consensus about slavery.

When Lincoln took office, the nation was deeply divided over the issue of slavery. In assuming office, Lincoln stood at the center and sought to hold the nation together. At the same time, he refused to yield to arguments that holding the nation together and representing the center required him to concede anything at all to those people of faith and those churches that supported slavery and the continued dehumanization of African Americans.

As president, as the moral leader at the center of a nation that purported to value democracy while practicing slavery, Lincoln recognized the inescapable force of a new moral consensus regarding slavery, which had slowly developed on the margins, in prophetic movements of abolition with both secular and religious roots. Lincoln saw that the center had no choice except to endorse that moral consensus, if the American people wished to be faithful to the ideals with which their democratic experiment began.

Sound leadership in a democratic society has an important and inescapable moral dimension. It does so because questions of human rights are always moral questions, and democracy is centered on assumptions about human rights. At historical moments in which the moral mind of a society has begun to coalesce around growing awareness that a social group has been dehumanized and denied human rights for insupportable reasons, the only possible option for a leader who wishes to lead with moral authority is to recognize and deal with the growing new moral consensus in her or his society.

And to lead the nation towards that consensus, when it extends human rights to a group previously marginalized. Even when that leadership requires the leader to stand up to the moral authority of religious groups who wish illicitly to impose their peculiar, anti-democratic presuppositions about the marginalized group in question on society at large.

This is where we find ourselves today, as a people, I believe: this is where we are on the eve of 2009. This place in which we find ourselves calls for exceptionally strong leadership that does not eschew moral responsibility. I pray that the new president will be capable of providing that leadership. And I promise continued discussions of these important issues (important to me, if to no one else) in the new year.

Uncorking the Pandemic of Crazy: Predictions about the Religious Right in 2009

And on to the prognostications. Which I’m not sure many folks will want to hear—in part, because what I see down the pike is not promising for those who think we can relinquish the battle with the religious right as that movement dies and a new generation of younger evangelicals takes over.

I certainly take hope from that demographic shift, and I am convinced it is underway. But. A big but: I do not think that this shift should encourage those who see the religious right as one of the biggest threats to democracy in the world today to relax our vigilance. If anything, I believe that, after the election of Obama, we are going to see redoubled efforts on the part of the religious right to exercise control in American culture and politics—redoubled efforts to extend the influence of this political-religious movement and to secure the place of the movement in American life.

And along with those redoubled efforts will be a savage attack on gay citizens unparalleled by anything the religious right has sought to do in the past. After all, what does this movement have left, except the gay card? We are it: we are the last, best hope for the religious right to continue as a major political player in the Obama era.

I think Bob Cesca is absolutely correct when he observes in a recent Huffington Post article on the influence of the religious right, “Nevertheless, we can bet on the fact that the far-right is going to be uncorking a pandemic of crazy so unrelenting as to make the 1990s seem quaint by comparison”
(www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/fighting-back-in-the-age_b_153376.html). Get ready for it: we ain’t seen nothing yet. The pandemic of crazy headed our way now that Obama is president is going to make what the religious right has sought to do to gay citizens up to now look mickey-mouse.

As I look down the road and see this coming, I am intently concerned at the cavalier attitude of many of my fellow citizens—including many LGBT citizens—to all the ominous signs now appearing on the horizon. In some sectors of the gay community, there is the perception that older, politicized gays have done yeoman’s work fighting culture-war battles that they are now unwilling to give up, as the need for fighting those battles wanes with the passing of generations.

I think this is a naïve and dangerously apolitical approach to the continued power the religious right exerts in American culture—and in global culture, as well, since this movement has adroitly sought to replicate itself in other cultural contexts, and to fan flames of homophobia wherever it can across the globe. Those of us who have long fought these culture-war battles haven’t done so because we enjoy the fighting.

We’ve been fighting for our lives—for our humanity, for our human dignity and human rights. We’ve been fighting because we have had no choice. That’s what you do when life and dignity are at stake. That’s how you respond when others seek to diminish your humanity.

It was the religious right that declared these culture wars, after all, and which put all gay human beings in the world in its sights as it did so. When one is in the sights of an enemy, it does no good to say that one does not relish fighting. The only productive options are either to run fast, or to stand your ground and fight back.

And the fight is clearly not over. As Frederick Clarkson argues in a recent Alternet article, the religious right is not going anywhere. It will, Clarkson is convinced, continue to pose one of the central challenges to our participatory democracy:

There is a religious war going on in America in which one side seeks to thwart, and even to roll back, advances in civil rights. This poses one of the central challenges of our time for those of us who are not part of the Religious Right; those of us for whom religious pluralism and constitutional democracy matter, along with such closely related matters as reproductive freedom, marriage equality and free, quality and secular public education. The defense and advance of our most deeply held values requires our holding clear-eyed assessments of how the Religious Right adapts to the changed political environment (www.alternet.org/story/114798/merry_war_on_christmas_--_the_religious_right_isn%27t_going_anywhere).

The defense and advance of our most deeply held values requires our holding clear-eyed assessments of how the Religious Right adapts to the changed political environment: this is an extremely important point. The religious right is not merely carrying on the traditional culture wars it has inflicted on our culture—that is, carrying on those culture wars in ways we have all come to see as typical of the religious right. The religious right is now adapting to a changed political environment. It is developing new strategies and new techniques. And it behooves any of us concerned about the preservation of democracy to understand and combat those strategies.

The religious right is adapting to remain alive, to continue, and, if possible, to extend, its influence. Unless we track the adaptation process, become aware of it, predict its moves, we will not succeed in holding this powerful anti-democratic movement in check.

We have seen some indicators of where the religious right is going in recent weeks, and the response to those indicators should trouble those on the progressive end of the political and religious spectrum. This response suggests that too many of our fellow citizens are oblivious to the real threats the religious right poses to participatory democracy, and too willing to excuse this movement’s attacks on democracy, or to imagine that the religious right is obsolescent.

Look closely at what happened with both the Rick Warren selection and the Christmas message of Benedict XVI to the Curia, for instance, and you will see a clear pattern—one predictive of the strategy the religious right intends to employ now. Those who reacted against the inaugural selection and the papal statement immediately found themselves on the defensive.

And they were placed on the defensive not merely by the right, but by influential forces in the center that clearly do not want the religious right marginalized, for a variety of reasons. Those raising legitimate and important questions in both cases were immediately accused of being divisive and even dishonest. Rick Warren and Benedict, who both have strong, easily tracked records of hostility to the gay community and to gay human beings, were depicted by their centrist defenders as inoffensive and morally upstanding, while their critics were slammed as offensive and anti-religious.

Most worrisome of all, in both cases lies have been permitted to pass as acceptable public discourse in a democratic society, even as we have allowed those in the center to paint those challenging the lies as the real malefactors. When asked to own his rhetoric linking gay people to pedophilia, Rick Warren simply lied: he denied having said what he had said, even when clips of his homosexuality-pedophilia remarks are widely available. Just as he denied having allowed McCain to monitor the responses of Obama at the Saddleback Church debate, even after it became apparent that Warren’s claim that McCain had been in a sealed, soundproof room was false.

Re: Benedict’s Christmas statement, there have been repeated attempts in the mainstream media to claim that Benedict did not say what he did, in fact, say, or to minimize what he said by calling for contextual understanding of his statement about gay people as threats to the human ecology. There have been suggestions that the little pill of poison was, after all, tiny, and only a tiny portion of the overall argument—as if a tiny pill of poison hidden in a large concoction is somehow less dangerous simply because it is discrete.

What we are seeing here—and should prepare for throughout the Obama administration—is a bold mainstreaming of plainspoken homophobia. Read the blogs of liberal Catholic publications, as I do daily, and you’ll see a worrisome development in recent weeks: the homophobic rhetoric—the overt homophobic rhetoric—is no longer coming only from those on the far right. It is now pouring out from those at the center, who have been afraid until recently to express openly their reservations about gay rights and gay persons.

The closer our society comes to a moral turning point, to a line of no return at which people have to declare their solidarity with or opposition to gay persons, the more we can expect this open expression of homophobia to proliferate. And buried at the center of it all will be the religious right, working (as it did in California with proposition 8) to disseminate disinformation and to elicit fear and hostility among centrist citizens who have not previously been opposed to gay persons and gay rights.

Expect more—much more—“journalism” of the ilk of Jeffrey T. Kuhner’s defense of Benedict in this past Sunday’s Washington Times (www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/28/papal-denunciation). What is remarkable in this shoddy mess of homophobic disinformation about Ratzinger/Benedict’s track record re: the gay community is not just the defense of Benedict. Kuhner has written in that vein before.

No, what is remarkable is that Kuhner now feels free, after Obama’s election, to pen the following poison, knowing it will be printed in a mainstream publication:

Homosexual behavior (along with abortion, contraception, euthanasia, and pornography) represents a key facet of the modern West's “culture of death.” The homosexual lifestyle is inherently dangerous and destructive. It is not just that most gays and lesbians are casually promiscuous, and that ritualized sodomy is profoundly unhealthy. But homosexuality is incapable of natural reproduction; its lifestyle is one that is barren and childless - and without children, there can be no future and ultimately, no hope.

What is remarkable is that a mainstream newspaper, a “centrist” media outlet, feels perfectly free to print lies that, before the election of Obama, would have been confined to hate sites on the internet.

It’s now out in the open, after the election of Obama. And it will continue to come out into the open now, with the religious right egging the rhetoric on: gays as “inherently dangerous and destructive,” as barren purveyors of a culture of death. Rhetoric very much like the antisemitic rhetoric that poured forth in Germany before the rise of the Nazis to power. Rhetoric that respectable mainstream media outlets and respectable religious journals would not have printed before. Rhetoric passed on as legitimate opinion by centrist religious and political thinkers who would never utter such statements about someone who is Jewish. Or about someone who is African American.

After the election of Obama. Something about this event, the election of a new president who has expressed mild support for gay rights and gay persons, is eliciting this rhetoric. It is doing so because the election of Obama is eliciting fear—fear of gay persons and gay rights—among many citizens, including (and increasingly) among citizens at the center. There is fear of a new moral turn in our society, which many of those at the center resist, and about which they have previously been unwilling to admit their ambivalence.

This is, in my view, ultimately why Mr. Obama chose Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, and why that choice should deeply trouble those of us who are either gay or in solidarity with gay persons and who support Obama. As numerous observers have noted and as Obama himself has stated, in making this choice, Obama is playing to the center. He is assuring his support at the center of our culture.

Obama is a skilled politician. One of the strengths of his campaign was its ability to crunch numbers more effectively than the campaigns of his competitors—the ability to get its fingers on the pulse of the voting populace and to anticipate what voters would do.

Obama knows what he is doing in selecting Rick Warren for the inauguration, and in playing to the center. He is consolidating his power. He is making a political calculation that will not harm him, and will, in fact, aid him.

There is a price to be paid in making this calculation, and that price is the disenchantment of many gay voters and many voters in solidarity with gay persons. But that price is not a high price to pay—not high in political terms, that is. Gay voters simply do not have the political clout to cause concern to anyone who runs roughshod over gay rights and gay lives. And Americans of the center have still not moved decisively in the direction of gay rights—and, in fact, may move in the opposite direction as the religious right massages anti-gay sentiment to extend its power in the Obama era.

Obama is aware of this. His strength—and, in my view, his most significant shortcoming—as a leader is his political canniness. Obama is a liberal politician, par excellence. The strength of liberal politics is its ability to calculate, to predict on the basis of numbers and trends—and to play one competing interest group against another without ever standing with one of the competing groups until it becomes clear who will be the winner.

Liberalism is long on calculation. It is short on solidarity. Its strong suit is its ability to predict what will happen on the basis of hard data carefully gathered. Its weak suit is its inability to take moral stands—its unwillingness to take moral stands.

Calculation can only go so far, after all. The decision of a culture to shift its moral consensus on issues like slavery or women’s rights—that decision depends not entirely on calculation (and thus it cannot be entirely predicted by calculation): that decision depends on the formation of a new moral consensus that occurs in ways outside the purview of polls and number crunching.

And this is where things may get interesting for the new president, if he continues to rule by liberal calculation. It is possible, after all, to miscalculate. I have seen the effects of such miscalculation in educational leaders time and again. I have seen leaders topple, after they were unwilling to support what is clearly the moral thing to do in a situation, because they calculated that the decision to do what is moral would cost too much and would weaken their support.

In calculating the expedient thing to do and in overlooking the moral thing to do, leaders can succeed in undermining the strongest arguments for supporting them and their platform, in a democratic society: the argument that one should do right and not what is popular. Democracy rests, after all, on foundations that are in the final analysis moral. It rests on the belief that God has created all of us equal and endowed us with inalienable human rights.

Leaders who remove the moral calculus from their political calculations in democratic institutions may make temporary political gains, while undermining their effectiveness as leaders in the long run. I have seen it happen before; I have learned to recognize the pattern. I have watched a university president who likes to speak glibly of human rights miscalculate and violate the rights of some of her gay employees in an egregious and public way. As she did so, she miscalculated from the outset. She willingly listened to poisonous misinformation poured into her ears by those who sought to convince her that she would be shielded from charges of homophobia because those she targeted had no support, precisely because they were gay.

She was wrong. More eyes saw the disconnect between her rhetoric about human rights and her real actions than she predicted. Because her advisors are not morally admirable human beings, but motivated primarily by petty jealousy, they did not bring accurate information to her. She is now beginning to pay a high price for her miscalculation. She has dramatically undermined her effectiveness as a leader in a values-based democratic institution that proclaims the equality of all human beings under God.

I do not want to see this happen to the new president. I think it may well happen, however, if the Rick Warren selection is any indicator of how Obama intends to approach his responsibilities as a moral leader. It is possible that Obama is calculating well, as he courts the center in the election of Obama. It is possible that his calculation that gay human beings do not have sufficient support at the center is a good calculation.

But it is also possible that he is simply wrong. It is possible that we have moved, as a society, further down the road to a new moral consensus that gay human beings are fully human than Mr. Obama's advisors recognize. If so, and if he is miscalculating where the moral mind of the nation is heading regarding this decisive civil rights issue of our time, the religious right leaders to whom the new president is now seeking to cozy up—including the "kinder" and "gentler" types like Rev. Warren—will not be there to support him if he enters into difficult days. They will be exulting in the back room with all the others who hope to undermine his effectiveness as a moral leader, from the inception of his administration.