MoDo on Obama's Walk-Back of Mosque Comments: The President Fumbles Again

Meanwhile (linking to what I have just posted about U.S. churches and the bogus "ground-zero mosque" controversy: Maureen Dowd at the New York Times gets it just about right, as she looks at how President Obama walked back his sane, principled defense of the right of a religious group to build a community center on one day, with a comment the following day parsing the meaning of "is."

U.S. Church Groups on the "Ground-Zero Mosque" Controversy: The Sound of Silence

I blogged on Sunday and Monday about the Republican-engineered controversy re: the Islamic cultural center being considered for the ground-zero site.  In my first posting on this topic, I noted that Sarah Palin is seeking to exploit this manufactured controversy in order to appeal to Christian supremacists who regard only Christianity as a valid and legitimate path to God.

Prop 8 Decision: Homophobia on Trial, Engaging Irrational "Arguments" on Which It Rests

Imagine, for a moment, that we are now down the road of history, and the dust of the journey has begun to settle with Judge Walker’s recent prop 8 decision.  (We’re not there yet: as yesterday’s decision to continue the stay on same-sex marriage in California indicates, the prop 8 ruling is, at most, a penultimate answer to the vexed cultural question with which we’ve been dealing on our journey—the question of where, in our cultural interstices, to place the particular demeaned minority of human beings who happen to be gay).  But for the sake of argumentation here, let’s pretend: we’ve now arrived.

And so, looking back, as people inevitably do, we ask: what was it all about, in the final analysis?  What was it about, this long, protracted, pain-filled journey that consumed so much of people’s valuable energy in the last half of the 20th century and the start of the next, the journey to grudging acceptance of the humanity of their gay and lesbian fellow citizens?

Jeffrey Feldman and Joan Walsh Bring Light to the Heat of Ginned-Up Ground-Zero Mosque Controversy

Jeffrey Feldman and Joan Walsh bring welcome light today to the heat of the Republican-manufactured controversy about the Islamic cultural center being planned in New York City.  As both writers remind us, the projected structure isn't even a mosque, but a Muslim community center with a room for prayer.

I particularly like Feldman's reminder that the need to demonize and scapegoat despised others runs deep in American history, and this need must continuously be resisted in each generation.  Feldman parallels the Republican-engineered mass hysteria about this Islamic culture center with the witch trials in Puritan Massachusetts, as depicted by Arthur Miller in his classic play The Crucible.

Colm Tóibín on Gay Culture in the Catholic Hierarchy: Now You See, Now You Don't

Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s review of Angelo Quattrocchi’s The Pope Is Not Gay in this week’s London Review of Books is one of the most brilliant statements on the Catholic clerical sexual abuse crisis I’ve yet seen.  Artists see, by profession.  Tóibín sees what many of us who lack the novelist’s eye otherwise miss, as we look at the abuse crisis.  The telling nuances, the all-important occlusions, the skull beneath (and hidden by) the skin . . . . 

And that Tóibín sees specifically as a gay man raised in a heavily Catholic culture whose church has been decimated by the abuse crisis matters significantly.  His analysis of how a twisted and vitriolic, hidden but omnipresent and pervasive homosexuality in the culture of the Catholic hierarchy turns into cynical blame of openly gay men as a diversionary tool in narratives about the church’s role in the crisis is breathtaking.  And undeniable: Tóibín not only sees what’s there.  He also makes us see.

Archbishop Chaput's Catholic News Agency Slams Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Her "Dissenting Outreach Effort" to Gays

One day, both Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Archbishop Chaput, with whom Catholic News Agency is closely associated, will stand before the Lord at the end of their lives (as will I).  And, as with all of us, they will each answer to the Lord for what they have done and left undone.

It is clear to me that one of these two Catholic leaders of our period will be able to bring to the Lord a history of healing, reaching beyond boundaries, loving the despised, bringing the outcast into the Body of Christ, welcoming the stranger, and defending the oppressed.

Sarah Keeps Tweeting: Now Attacking Obama's Support of Ground-Zero Mosque

Sarah Palin is sniping away at President Obama with tweeted questions about his support for the right of the Islamic community to build a mosque near the ground-zero site.  She's been working this angle for some time now, since she tweeted that a mosque at the site would "stab hearts."