Las Vegas Story: Google Finds Itself Gamed Again by Organized Hate Groups (Back to the Case of Father Martin and Church Militant)

On 21 September, I presented you with a series of screenshots showing you that on that day at about 2 P.M. CST (in the U.S.), the three "top news" stories that Google was returning to those who googled the name "James Martin" were all personal attacks on Father Martin from the Church Militant website, which is not a bona fide news site at all.

The Alt-Right and Donald Trump's Campaign: A Brief Primer

As Charles Pierce wrote yesterday, this is "the week everyone in America started saying 'alt-right.' " As a service to you readers, here's a list of article I've read in the past two days about the alt-right and its mainstreaming via Trump's campaign, which have struck me as helpful. I don't by any means pretend that this is an exhaustive list of articles commenting on these themes. They're only ones I happen to have read in my daily scanning of the news, which I'd like to share with you.

Who Really Set Up Papal Meeting with Kim Davis? Enlightening Comments at Catholic Blog Site

Yesterday at the National Catholic Reporter site, Tom Gallagher posted an article focusing on something about which I spoke briefly in a posting here on the same day: namely, that in the wake of the Kim Davis-Pope Francis debacle, the mainstream media are finally saying out loud what many of us have known and been saying for some time now — that the outfit giving legal advice to Ms. Davis, Liberty Counsel, is an anti-gay hate group. I find the comments in response to Tom Gallagher's article especially enlightening.

Quote for Day: Bill Quigley of Loyola Law School to Justices Scalia and Alito — "Have You No Sense of Decency, Sirs?"

From Bill Quigley of Loyola University (New Orleans) Law School, an appeal to the consciences of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito: "Have you no decency, sirs?" Bill points out that the end of the odious Joseph McCarthy's era of red-baiting began when Joseph Welch stood up to McCarthy and asked him (video link), "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" As he notes, Scalia and Alito's shameless parrotting of crude right-wing talking points about same-sex marriage at last week's Supreme Court hearing deserves the same response.

Mid-Week News Items: Marriage Equality and Religious Groups

More mid-week news tidbits, these focusing on religion and gay issues (the Cincinnati story discussed below does focus on gay issues, since it's about the attempt of Catholic institutions to weed out and control employees who show any support at all for gay people or gay rights):

Cardinal George Says Gays = Klan, but What Does the Klan Say about Gays?

The past-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George, says that gays are like the Ku Klux Klan.

Pastor Steven Anderson: The Impossible Road from Jesus to Hate

Jim Burroway at Box Turtle is asking readers of his blog what we would ask Pastor Steven Anderson if we had a chance to talk to him.

Steven Anderson is pastor of Faithful Word Baptist church in Phoenix. He has made statements that gays should be killed, and accuses all gays of being sexual predators and rapists. For someone who claims to take the bible literally (in its King James version, at that), he has an astonishing facility for twisting scriptural texts to turn them into anti-gay texts, when not even his most ardent right-wing allies have divined the homophobic significance of said texts.

For instance, he reads Noah’s condemnation of his son Shem when Shem uncovered his father’s nakedness (Genesis 9:18-10:32) as a passage about Shem raping his father. It is interesting that Anderson fixates on that particular passage to prove that gays are rapists, given that it has a sordid history in Christianity in quite another direction. It has long been used to suggest that all people of color (who are said, in this fantasy-spinning reading of the text, to descend from Shem) are doomed by Shem’s sin to eternal servitude to lighter-skinned people.

Anderson’s hatred doesn’t focus exclusively on gays. He’s one of those “Christians” now caught up in reviving the tradition of imprecatory prayer in the psalms—despite Jesus’s injunction to his followers to forgive our enemies, and his refusal to condemn the criminals crucified with him—in the hope that President Obama will die and go to hell. And the man who showed up recently at a Phoenix town hall meeting carrying an automatic assault weapon is a member of Pastor Anderson’s church.

I’ve been asking myself precisely the question Jim Burroway encourages his readers to ask: given the chance, what would I ask Steven Anderson? Pastor Anderson has already been on my radar screen, actually. I blogged about him back in February 2008 when he preached on a text—I am not making this up—which, in his view, mandates that real men should urinate standing up.

Pastor Anderson has a bee in his bonnet, and the bee buzzes around questions of male supremacy and male inadequacy, which seem to elicit a great deal of confusion and rage in his psyche. That in itself fascinates me, as a psychological-religious process that happens among so many Christians intent on using the bible to bolster male power and privilege—even (or perhaps especially) when that power and privilege is used to demean, trample on, and even kill the despised other.

And so I’m going to take a stab at asking Pastor Anderson what I’d like to ask him, following Jim Burroway’s lead (and I will post a link at Box Turtle, since it’s Jim’s invitation that leads me to post about this on Bilgrimage).

Pastor Anderson: hatred? It fascinates me that people are energized by hatred. But it fascinates me even more when those who are so obviously energized by hatred also happen to be men of the cloth.

I’m especially fascinated when those intent on hating profess a religion founded by someone who preached that God is love, that we die by the sword when we brandish it, that we need to turn the other cheek and let our enemies smite us on it, to go the extra mile, to forgive seventy times seventy. Jesus taught that we should pray constantly to be forgiven as we ourselves forgive and that we must forgive our enemies—always, everywhere, in every circumstance. No matter what.

How does someone who follows Jesus get onto the road of hatred?

I will admit that I can understand very well how people hate. Being human involves us in dealing with hate—not just the hate of others, but our own hate. Hate is always there inside all of us, like a rank weed ready to spring up at a moment’s notice under the right circumstances.

It’s, frankly, easy to hate. It’s easier to hate than to love. One comes naturally; the other requires, in many circumstances, energy. It’s always easier to tear down in one day a house that was built months on end by many hands and much work.

So I understand hate. I am susceptible to it. Like any human being, I have to learn to deal with it—not only when it confronts me from outside, but when I see the rank weed threatening to sprout yet again inside the dark recesses of my own soul.

But I will admit, what I find a little harder to understand—and please help me here; I am sincerely trying to understand—is hate that we justify. I find it hard to understand hate in which we revel, hate we proudly display rather than admit, shamefacedly, we are struggling to overcome.

How does one come to hate and take pride in hating? Even worse, how does one come to hate and believe that God blesses one’s hatred, that God smiles on one’s hatred and urges it on?

I do not know or understand such a God. If I thought such a God existed, I would turn my back on that God as a force to be resisted and despised, not to be worshiped and loved.

Because in my experience the wonderful things that happen in the world happen when people have the courage to resist hate and to love instead. They happen when a parent nurtures a child. They happen when someone is lying beside the road and a bystander picks him up and takes him to have his wounds treated.

The wonderful things that happen in the world happen when a callow young person takes time to stop and listen to a querulous, wise old person who would otherwise be altogether too easy to overlook and to ignore. And they happen when an elderly person embittered at growing old and being ignored takes a youngster under her wing, and sees that his needs are met.

They happen when we meet our enemy and see that, like us, our enemy has grown older, tireder, slower—that like us, our enemy is simply another human being, and deserves the same compassion we would like for ourselves. The wonderful things that happen in life happen when someone dares to love, by reaching across social barriers that seem impossible to bridge, and discovers that those despised, hated others across the line are human just as we are human.

How have you learned to hate, Pastor Anderson? And to hate with such facility? And to be so absolutely certain that God blesses and energizes your hatred? And to be so sure that who you are—a white, heterosexual American male—is the pinnacle of creation, and everyone else is a lesser being?

And that God has designed things in such a way that you just happen to be the pinnacle of creation?

I really would like to know, if you care to respond.

Monitoring Hate Speech: Recent News in West Virginia and Utah

Two stories in the news the last several days catch my eye. I see connections between them that may not be apparent to some readers. And I think those connections deserve attention.

The first story has to do with a video just released by the group West Virginia for Marriage—WV4Marriage. The video contains footage implying that some insidious group or groups could open fire on unsuspecting “traditional” families in West Virginia.

The video is on the homepage of WV4Marriage (here). The footage showing a family in the sights of a sniper is about a minute into the video. The context leaves viewers in no doubt about who is “attacking” such families in West Virginia. The voiceover states explicitly that those mounting these “attacks” are proponents of same-sex marriage: the gays, in other words.

The first thing that catches my attention here is that this representation of hidden gays planning an attack on an iconic all-American mom-and-pop-and-apple-pie family verges on hate rhetoric. As Jim Burroway notes on Box Turtle Bulletin (here), the video was released just days after the sentencing of Jim David Adkisson, a real shooter who opened fire against liberals and gays in a Knoxville, Tennessee, church last year, and whose written statements about that act suggest that he hoped to spur others to do the same:

And to think that this irresponsible image went out right as Jim David Adkisson was sentenced for training his scope on a gay-friendly church. Images matter, especially in a well-armed state like West Virginia. This conjured image of a “homosexual threat” has clearly crossed the line.

It is malicious and irresponsible for any group to claim that gay folks pose a potential threat to their fellow citizens and to families—a violent threat—in a culture in which precisely the opposite is overwhelmingly the case. LGBT citizens remain susceptible to violence at a much higher rate than most other groups in American society, precisely and solely because they are gay.

Whoever produced this video—and, as I’ll explain below, that’s a question still not completely resolved—is spurring violence against gay citizens. This is a form of hate rhetoric, and it needs to be declared beyond the pale.

The second interesting point about this video: do some digging to try to discover who funded and produced it, and you quickly discover that the answer to that question is—well, mysterious. Heath Harrison on the West Virginia Blue blog has the full story (here).

As he notes, WV4Marriage implores concerned West Virginians to donate to WV4Marriage, but doesn’t provide any clear indication to whom one would be donating, if one did send money. A search for the producer of the video leads to an interesting discovery: it was produced out of state. In Georgia, to be precise. By the equally mysterious group CampaignSecrets.com.

A group apparently led by one Mark Montini. With a history of producing anti-gay web materials and with ties to the Swift Boat Veterans. In the WV4Marriage video, we have, then, a video targeting citizens of West Virginia produced by a citizen of another state, through a website whose sponsors, affiliations, and funding are not made clear, and with a producer tied to (to use Heath Harrison’s phrase) other national-level “conservative misinformation group(s)” that have tried to herd voters to the polls to vote for conservative candidates on the basis of disinformation.

Interestingly enough, this is not the only story to break in the last few days re: a campaign mounted by a mysterious group attacking gays and employing hate rhetoric in the process. As the Towleroad blog is reporting (here), on Sunday, a group called America Forever, with no business license or PAC registration in Utah, placed a full-page ad in the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News. Towleroad characterizes the ad as hate rhetoric:

The ad is replete with hateful rhetoric and fear tactics. In fact it's so extreme that even those who agree with the message behind it think the group, which "does not have a current Utah business license as a nonprofit nor is it registered as a political-issues or political-action committee" according to the Salt Lake Tribune (here), has crossed the line with the ad, which "compares being gay to being 'druggies and hookers,' labels homosexuality as 'anti-species behavior' and concludes that 'gays should be forced not to display' their sexual orientation."

As the preceding statement from Towleroad indicates, a 16 February article by Rosemary Winters in the Salt Lake Tribune notes that America Forever’s lack of Utah business or PAC registration. The article also notes that the group had not responded to the Tribune’s request for more information by the close of business on the 15th. Head to the America Forever website (here), and you’ll find a mission statement, but not (at least, not insofar as I can find) an address or information on who founded the group and/or currently directs it.

And there you have it: two anti-gay initiatives in a matter of days, both inciting hatred of gay human beings, both spearheaded by organizations whose source of funding and leadership is not clear. In one case, the organization producing the material targets a state in which the video producers don’t even appear to live. The same may well be true in the other case, given the lack of any registration in Utah of a group placing full-page ads in Utah newspapers.

What to make of these stories? Now that the economic stimulus plan has been passed, it seems clear that at least one strategy those on the right will be using to attack and undermine the new administration, as the administration demonstrates success in addressing serious problems, is inflammatory anti-gay rhetoric. This is rhetoric designed to trouble the political waters and keep people distracted, so that they focus on hot-button issues and not the success of the new administration. In addition to its video claiming “Christians” are being attacked in our society today if they express anti-gay views, the American Family Association announced on 11 February a new initiative called Project Push Back (here).

It hardly seems coincidental that we are seeing the emergence, all at once and precisely at this moment in the history of the new administration, of well-orchestrated attempts to play the anti-gay card as the administration begins to do its work of putting the nation back on track. These local attempts are part of a larger strategy of the political and religious right to distract by targeting vulnerable groups: to use hate to make political points. To target human beings and human lives. And, shamefully, to do so in the name of God.

Those of us concerned about the use of hate to undermine our democracy need to continue monitoring these groups. And the new administration needs (in my view) to stop playing footsie with the religious right. It’s important to note that, as these initiatives stir hatred against gay citizens, there is still no federal-level protection for gay citizens against discrimination, and no federal hate-crimes law that includes sexual orientation.

We need action on those fronts. Real human beings are the target of these hateful political initiatives. Hate rhetoric has effects on real human lives. We need to find ways to place such rhetoric beyond the pale, and to stop allowing religious groups to claim the right to attack fellow citizens, stir hatred, and discriminate in the name of God.

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.

And Now the Bishops Meet

Beginning with this open letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops on 10 October, I have blogged repeatedly about the opening to violence that hateful campaign rhetoric—especially at rallies of Sarah Palin—has now created in our society (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/open-letter-to-us-catholic-bishops-on.html). I have repeatedly called on the U.S. Catholic bishops as a body to address and condemn such rhetorical violence, and to remind people of good will that rhetorical violence fuels actual violence.

The bishops have remained silent. Since they are now meeting in Baltimore, I renew my appeal to them.

Today, Tim Shipman reports in the London Telegraph that the Secret Service has now released information that they “warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks” (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/sarahpalin/3405336/Sarah-Palin-blamed-by-the-US-Secret-Service-for-death-threats-against-Barack-Obama.html). Shipman notes that Palin’s attacks on Obama “provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling ‘terrorist’ and ‘kill him’ until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.”

During the campaign, two plots to assassinate Mr. Obama were broken up. Others remain under investigation. The Secret Service has warned Obama that he “is a high risk target for racist gunmen.”

Once again: the hate rhetoric that fanned the flames of potential violence walked hand in hand with pro-life rhetoric in the recent campaign. As leaders of a religious community that accentuates the need to respect life, the bishops have an obligation to speak out on behalf of life values and against violence.

Unambiguously, strongly, clearly. Though the campaign is over, when demagoguery begins to elicit violence, people of faith and their leaders have an exceptionally strong responsibility to speak out repeatedly—against violence and for life. And to distance ourselves from those using pro-life rhetoric who simultaneously foment violence and hate.

As one small voice in a large flock, I continue to call on the U.S. Catholic bishops to offer pastoral leadership to the flock. And to offer the nation the moral guidance on which the Catholic community prides itself. The bishops’ voice needs to be heard, particularly when a member of their body, Bishop Rene Gracida of Corpus Christi, released a radio statement during the campaign speaking of Mr. Obama as Barack Hussein Obama as he instructed Catholics to vote against Mr. Obama (www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=30221, www.crossleft.org/node/6606).

This is inflammatory rhetoric. It deserves to be roundly condemned by the bishops as a body. It should be repudiated in a way that makes clear to the American public that the bishops reject violence as a Catholic value.

And on the subject of the pastoral leadership of the bishops—another topic I have repeatedly addressed on this blog—I want to note an 8 November article of Peter Steinfels in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/us/politics/08beliefs.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink). Steinfels asks,

By appearing to tie their moral stance on abortion so closely to a particular political choice, have they [i.e., the U.S. Catholic bishops] in fact undermined their moral persuasiveness on that issue as well as their pastoral effectiveness generally?

In my view, the answer to that question is an indubitable yes. Particularly when there are undeniable indicators of a growing collusion between those using outright hate rhetoric and those who claim to promote the bishops’ pro-life stance. I have documented that link in detail on this blog as the campaign unfolded, and will not repeat what I have said about it.

As I have also noted, a percentage of bishops perhaps greater than in any previous election played overt partisan politics in this campaign, making statements that were either outright endorsements of Mr. McCain (as was Bishop Gracida’s), or were obvious endorsements wearing a disguise so thin no one was in doubt of what lay underneath the scant vestments. Steinfels notes the estimate of 50-60 such partisan bishops that was circulating as the election ended, an estimate I have cited several times from Rocco Palma’s Whispers in the Loggia Blog.

As I have also noted, given the partisan statements of such a significant number of bishops—and the silence of their brother bishops as these statements came forth—the public now has a strong perception that the bishops as a body were strongly partisan in this election.

For many Catholics, it no longer suffices to suggest that the bishops oppose single-issue voting and recognize a range of values and issues that ought to merit Catholic attention. As Steinfels notes,

Many Catholics may understandably feel that the bishops are talking out of both sides of their mouths: Catholics are not supposed to be single-issue voters, but, by the way, abortion is the only issue that counts. The bishops do not intend to tell Catholics how to vote; but, by the way, a vote for Senator Obama puts your salvation at risk. Catholics are to form their consciences and make prudential judgments about complex matters of good and evil — just so long as they come to the same conclusions as the bishops.

Given the now widespread perception of Catholics and the public at large that the bishops play partisan politics as a body, and that their real judgment about the Democratic party and its candidate are clear no matter how carefully some church leaders parse political statements, Steinfels wonders how the bishops will confront their apparent defeat in the election, as they gather in Baltimore.

Steinfels’ emphasis on the (self-created) threats to the bishops’ pastoral leadership is well-placed. The real question that ought to be front and center in the bishops’ minds as they meet now is how to deal with their failed pastoral leadership of the American Catholic people.

School Bullying: We Have Met the Bully; He Is Us

“Truth that makes a difference,” I wrote in my last blog entry. That’s the kind of truth I’m interested in discovering on this blog pilgrimage. That kind of truth requires doing battle—with oneself, first and foremost, so that one keeps pushing to expand one’s horizons when the human impulse is to close in on oneself and become comfortable with the familiar, with the well-worn little truths that comprise one’s grab-bag of certainties.

Discovering truth that makes a difference also requires collaborating with others who are battling for the truth. Truth is not just out there, to be plucked, like a fruit ripening on a tree. Truth has to be searched for and found. It has to be made. It has to be struggled for. Truth that makes a difference is the goal of dialogic exchange in which a community of truth seekers struggle together for the truth. Truth that makes a difference is agonistic: it is found at a certain cost, the cost of challenging the purveyors of misinformation that passes for truth in any society, the cost of struggling with oneself, and the cost of forming bonds of trust and collaboration with others.

Finding that kind of truth in the world in which we live is not easy. For one thing, many forces collude to rob us of the power of solidarity. Believe it or not, there are those—many “those”—who do not wish for us to find the truth. There are many power brokers for whom the solidarity of truth-seekers, the formation of communities of discourse seeking together the truth that makes a difference, is extremely threatening.

These power brokers do all they can to distort plain truth, so that the quest for truth is always fractured, always across a terrain full of crevices and boulders, never simple. They do all they can to sow seeds of suspicion among those who would, in the natural course of things, benefit from seeking together the truth that makes a difference. The power brokers who wish for the world to remain the same (since they benefit from how things are currently arranged), who try to stand astride history and shout stop—these power brokers do everything in their power to thwart the formation of communities of solidarity that band together to engage in a shared quest for truth that makes a difference.

I have been thinking about truth, solidarity, community, and social transformation lately, against the backdrop of questions about how to address school bullying. Even that conversation, about what seems such an obvious need, an urgent need, is fraught with complexity because of the inability of many of us to find common ground regarding issues of gender and education. The plain truth—that children ought not to be beaten into submission or to have their futures mortgaged because they do not conform to preconceived societal expectations about gender behavior—even this plain truth is not plain to many folks, because of political currents that have twisted and distorted our social lenses about gender roles and about the goals of education.

To be specific: I have been listening to responses of people in my own area to the bullying of Billy Wolfe in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, school system. And I have been dialoguing with e-friends who share my concern about school bullying. As I listen and engage in dialogue, I notice some key issues surfacing, which ought not to demand attention, but which have to be discussed, because the right-wing talk machine has been so successful for so long now in distorting the consciousness of Americans about gender issues and the education of our youth, that we cannot see plain truth, and cannot discover the truth that makes a difference, as we look at the phenomenon of school bullying.

Some of those to whom I have been listening lately are asking whether the phenomenon of school bullying really is any different now—any more pronounced—than it was in the past. After all, as they point out, in schools all over the world, bullying of the “weaker” by the “stronger” has been going on from time immemorial. Are things really any worse now? Isn’t the process of taking boys who are prone to wear their feelings on their shoulders and toughening them up good for everyone concerned—for society, which needs men to be men, and for the bullied boys themselves, since they will live in an adult world that expects men to be men?

It’s not that these assumptions are always vocalized outright in discussion of what happens to boys such as Billy Wolfe. But they are the kind of strong unexamined social assumptions that make addressing school bullying difficult in American culture today. These are the unvocalized justifications that many school administrators and some parents use to shrug off school bullying: it goes on all the time; it has always gone on; it’s salubrious practice for real life, particularly for the “too sensitive” boy. Lighten up. Boys will be boys. Don’t intervene in the benign social Darwinism of the school playground, unless you want to tip longstanding scales that keep our social mechanisms functioning, and cause social chaos.

My own take on the bullying problem is that it probably has always been there, but is more serious today for a number of reasons. First, there's the rise in violence in schools (and society at large), and the ready availability of weapons. Grudges that used to be settled by a fistfight are now settled with knives and guns. The growing tacit social acceptance of violence as a way to resolve disputes in adult life, as well as in the lives of the young, when combined with the availability of weapons and the willingness of school children to use them, raises school bullying to an entirely new level at this point in history.

Then, too, the Internet has made communication—including communication in which bullies egg each other on and organize to target an individual—frighteningly easier. As the story of Billy Wolfe (and other recent stories of school bullying) indicates, websites, email, and other tools of e-communication are now being used to make school bullying more “effective” by far than it ever could be in the pre-Internet age. Posting a child’s picture on a website and goading others to hate him allows more and more people to join in the blood-sport of chastising the “weak” link in social chains of power. It allows the bullying to become organized, to extend beyond schools into every area of a youth’s life. It produces a new level of refined cruelty, in which a taunt can pop up in an email at any time, or leap out from a webpage on which the bullied person clicks.

And, finally, I think that there's a heightened awareness of gender and sexual orientation issues, again, partly due to the Internet. Youth today are more aware of their sexual orientation or more willing to explore gender variance at ever younger ages. To a degree almost unimaginable to us who grew up in a world in which the flow of information was confined to print media or the relatively localized media of television and radio, the Internet allows for instant worldwide communication about issues of gender and sexuality that permits ready access to information unavailable to youth in the past.

For many of those who have a vested interest in seeing rigid societal thinking about gender roles shift, this heightened information flow has seemed promising. What I think many of us have not anticipated, however, is the effect of that information flow on the lives of youth exploring gender identity, in a world in which the same information flow permits those opposed to questioning of traditional gender roles to organize.

LGBT youth, and youth questioning traditional gender roles, are now in a double bind. In a way previously unimaginable, they have access to information regarding sexual orientation and gender issues never before so readily available to youth. They also have ready access to information about others who have fought through these issues and become role models for LGBT youth today.

But their bullies also have access to information that permits them to organize, to target, to extend the taunts and threats to every area of a youth’s life. LGBT youth today experience increasing backlash precisely because there is, at one level, increasing ease about coming out. The easier the process of coming out becomes—on the surface—the more difficult it simultaneously becomes, because of the intent of organized groups full of hate to counteract the easy transmission of information about gender and sexual orientation in the Internet age.

I speak deliberately of “organized groups full of hate.” The real bullies, the real villains in the school bullying tragedy, are not first and foremost the youth who kick, hit, taunt, or shoot. The real bullies are the parents, school administrators, church groups, bogus therapists, ex-gay ministries, the media, and manifold right-wing think tanks that disseminate ugly, false information about the gay “lifestyle” and about gender roles to youth inclined to bully.

The problem of school bullying won’t be resolved effectively until the real bullies are exposed and addressed. As Alice Miller’s stunning reflections on how Western culture treats youth note, we are a culture saturated with belief in our extraordinary concern for our youth, who at the same time constantly murder the souls of our young people. Miller’s life-long study of the societal issue of violence towards the young convinced her that the flip side of our sentimental belief that we do everything to protect the young is that we ultimately care very little about the well-being of youth. The too-much protestation in which we engage hides the sordid reality that we do not truly care a great deal about the well-being of our youth.

As a society, we have long been callous about acts of violence perpetrated against the young right in the family circle—the key locale in which young people suffer assault. We do very little to protect young people from what Miller calls “soul murder”—the death of hope, of belief in oneself and one’s potential, the belief that one’s life counts and will make a difference in the world. Miller concluded, after years of exhaustive psychotherapeutic research, that even when youth are not physically assaulted in our culture, their souls are often subjected to murder, because we do so little to safeguard and cultivate the souls of the young.

As an educator, I have become increasingly convinced that something is very awry in our educational system, and that this dislocation of the goals of our educational system is intimately related to the murder of the souls of our youth. We do a decent enough job (in some cases, in some areas, depending on income levels and social status) of educating young people’s heads. We do a dismal job of educating their hearts, of cultivating their souls.

We cannot, in fact, cultivate the souls of youth when we do not cultivate our own souls. I am not talking about the soul here in classic religious terms. I am talking about what is inmost in a human person, what makes that person tick, about what shines forth inside a human being to make that person different from any other human being.

Though for some people this language has specific religious reference, for others it is a useful way to describe humanistic goals without reference to a specific religious tradition or any religious tradition at all. The language of soul need not be left out of our school system and our educational objectives on the ground that it has religious roots. It is a language that is also spoken by those who want to build a better world without necessarily adverting to religion at all.

Our educational system cannot speak the language of soul, or address the murder of the souls of our youth, or stop the problem of school bullying, because our educational leaders themselves too often lack soul. I have thought this for a long time, as an educator. I thought about this problem of lack of soul with a renewed interest yesterday, as I read Patrik Johnson’s article “Rise of the ‘Rock Star’ School Superintendent" in the Christian Science Monitor at
www.csmonitor.com/2008/0331/p01s03-usgn.html.

Johnson reports on a troubling phenomenon in American education today: the ascendancy of a generation (and class) of highly paid bureaucratic “educators” who administer schools, but who have little apparent interest in or understanding of education itself, and of the classic humanistic goals of education. The name of the game in American education today is, frankly, to beat the testing game. Schools—at every level, from kindergarten through higher education—must demonstrate tangible results in the form of test scores.

This impulse in American higher education has resulted in a system of scamming by which schools do all in their power to up test scores, without caring much about what students actually learn—or about who students become, in the educational process. Even worse, the need to scam results in the hire of more and more educational administrators who are, frankly, simply, appallingly soulless.

These administrators thrive in climates in which they can balance fiscal account books, even when doing so requires the same scams that delude people into thinking that test scores are rising. They thrive in climates of obfuscation of the truth, of half-truths, of deliberate lies to governing boards that are, increasingly, comprised of hard-nosed business leaders and not educators.

These “educators” are also highly paid, disgracefully so. The Monitor reports on one candidate for a position in a suburban Atlanta school system, whose demands prior to hire include not merely a very cushy salary (many times more than a teacher is paid), but a Lincoln town car, a chauffeur, and a personal bodyguard.

I speak of what I know. I speak of what I have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears.

I know these “educators.” I have had to interact with them. I have tried to talk to them about educating youth, about shaping the character of future leaders, about cultivating the soul of youth. I have had no success in reaching these “educators.” Their interest is not in the soul. They are tone-deaf to the language of soul and character.

The increasing prevalence of these “rock-star” educators throughout the American system of education points to problems with the system itself—which is to say, problems with us. The Monitor article quotes Walter Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta, regarding what I am identifying as a loss of soul in American education today. Fluker says, "Leadership always is symptomatic, a warning sign of what's happening at deeper and more fundamental levels.”

I conclude from this observation that if the scam artists who are increasingly the rock-star “leaders” of our educational institutions thrive, it is because we allow them to thrive. The problem is us. We are the problem. We do not value our own souls or the souls of our youth.

Until we do so, we will not successfully make our schools places in which the souls of children—and the bodies of youth deemed gender-inappropriate—are safe from murder. We have met the enemy: he is us.