Religious Right In Revolt

A Better Place - 4/30/05 - Thousands of American "people of faith," gathered at the President's Crawford palace to protest the efforts of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and George W. Bush to prepare a peaceful transfer of power from the clinically dead Prince Faisal to the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia, even as Saudi police arrested 40 Christians in Ridyah, Saudi Arabia.

"It's outrageous that the President meet with those who hold the nation's economic future hostage and tolerates their suppression of religious expression," said spokesman for the protestors, Randall Terry . "Why if the President simply insisted that Congress increase gas mileage standards over the next decade, America could end it's dependence on foreign oil, rather then bend its knee to the demands of foreign potentates who abuse Christians with impunity. Instead, like a provincial governor bending his knee to the Emperor of Oil's legate, Bush begs for more oil for Americans and promises to support the legate's succession. It's outrageous, and more than a Christian should have to bear."

We awake from this dream to discover, instead, that the "reds" who claim to be Christian are too busy trying to get Florida courts to compel a 13 year girl who became pregnant when a ward of the state's Department of Children and Family Services (some service, huh) to bear a child against her stated wishes and legal right.

Randall Terry, former leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, jumped into the case Friday with a letter asking the governor to intervene.

"Please fight for this baby's life, and do not surrender this unborn child to the hands of his would-be slayers under any circumstances," he wrote.

Forty Christians in Ridyah or one fetus in Florida. You just know where Randall's gonna be, don't you.

It Could Happen Here

People power rattling politics of Latin America - This week, Mexico was the latest to experience a new civic activism. - MEXICO CITY – First came the indignation, then the street protests and the disapproving comments from foreign countries. It culminated last Sunday with an estimated 1.2 million Mexicans marching silently through center of the capital. But President Vicente Fox moved to defuse the political crisis Wednesday night by accepting the resignation of his attorney general, who had been leading the criminal case against popular Mexico City Mayor and 2006 presidential hopeful Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Chalk up another victory for Latin American people power. In the 1990s, what politicians feared most was apathy. But lately, Latin Americans from Mexico City to Quito, Ecuador - much like the citizens of Ukraine and Lebanon - have been taking to the streets in unprecedented numbers. Civic protest is emerging as an increasingly effective - if controversial - political tool. [--snip--]

Marta Lagos, an economist and pollster in Chile, says, "This is all a very healthy thing. People have an idea what real democracy is, and they know they don't have it quite yet. They want governments that represent them and they will go out to the streets to get that."

Perhaps the kids at Princeton will start something. But it seems to us that a few, large, peaceful demonstrations outside our congress critters' local offices for the purpose of establishing the fact that they should not ask the poor to rob the middle class in order to preserve wealth transfers to the rich under the rubric of "social security reform," would not be amiss.

Christianity For Dummies

• Christian
• unchristian
• people who claim to be Christians giving Christianity a bad name in a way that's not great for the Constitution

It's just not that complicated, people.

The Mills of God

Methodist panel reverses defrocking of lesbian minister - LINTHICUM, Md. (AP) — The United Methodist Church reversed itself Friday, deciding to reinstate a lesbian minister who was defrocked after revealing her relationship with another woman.

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.

Longfellow, Retribution

Doomed To Repeat It

Via Americablog we learn that a roman catholic cardinal in spain told a news station that gay marriage will lead to auschwitz style death camps.

Cardinal compares gay marriage to Nazism - Gay rights groups in Spain reacted with anger on Wednesday after a Roman Catholic cardinal compared obedience to the legalization of same-sex marriage to the process that led to the creation of Nazi death camps, Agence France-Presse reports. "If you give obedience to the law priority over obedience to your conscience, that leads to Auschwitz," Cardinal Ricard Maria Carles, former archbishop of Barcelona, told a Spanish television station. [--snip--]


The Triangulo foundation, a Spanish gay rights group, said that comparison with the Holocaust was "repugnant" and called on the church to "stop sowing hatred against victims of discrimination and against victims of the Holocaust, among whom there were many homosexuals."

Cardinal Carles has achieved some notoriety in the past as well. In 1999 he condemned a campaign by the Spanish government encouraging young people to use condoms in order to prevent the transmission of aids:

The cardinal said it was "feeble and deceptive" to promote condom use as a way to engage in safe sex, and railed against what he called authorities' failure to warn the young that this method could fail.

That same year he objected to a request of Muslims in Spain to build a mosque in Barcelona unless Catholics were allowed to build churches in Islamic countries for every mosque opened in Spain, France and Germany. Four years earlier, Cardinal Carles had been the subject of a criminal investigation by Italian authorities into a network of arms dealers who were alleged to have laundered money through the Vatican Bank. According to an AP story on 12/2/95:

Police have said the Vatican bank may have been used to process some of the alleged illegal profits, and want to question Barcelona's archbishop, Cardinal Ricard Maria Carles, about whether he knows of any money laundering. Last month, the cardinal denied any such knowledge, and the Vatican said allegations about the cardinal and the Vatican bank were unfounded.

Investigators twice sought permission to interview Cardinal Carles, but Spanish authorities declined the request, having determined after their own investigation, that none was necessary (the AP stories from December 1995 and June 1996, and the October 18, 1996 article, from Deutsche-Presse-Agenteur, describing the investigation are available on Lexis-Nexis).

It's interesting that Cardinal Carles (now retired) chose to invoke the image of the Nazi holocaust when discussing gay marriage. The Roman Catholic hierarchy had the opportunity to closely observe Nazi methods before the Second World War. The Catholic Church in Spain was a crucial supporter, some might even say instigator of the military rebellion against the democratically elected government that led to the Spanish Civil War. That war was waged brutally and the both sides stand justly accused of atrocities which included the murder of priests and nuns by anti-clerical republicans.

The Nationalists, led by General Franco, and abetted by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, however, were the ones who invited the German Nazis and Italian Fascists in to help out. Hitler, eager to test the his new airforce sent Franco, the Church's man, hundreds of airplaines and pilots. One of the singular consequences of this Catholic-Nazi collaberation was Picasso's great painting Guernica. Unfortunately the price of this masterpiece was the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians and the destruction of the town, for which the masterpiece is named, in Nazi air raids designed to ensure that Franco, friend of the Catholic Church, could control this city. Wikipedia describes the attacks:

The attacks created a firestorm and destroyed nearly the entire town. Three quarters of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and most others were damaged. Among the few buildings spared were the arms factories of Unceta and Company and Talleres de Guernica and the Assembly House (Casa de Juntas) and the Oak. The bridge, the overt target of the early Italian attack, survived.

There are no generally accepted official figures as to the number of casualties. Estimates range from as few as 120 dead to as many as 10,000, with the consensus standing close to the 1,650 that the Basque government of the time gave as the minimum number of dead. The dead appear to have been mostly old people, women, and children.

Are we being too harsh in judging the conduct of the Catholic Church in the Spanish Civil War? Not according to the Spanish Catholic Church. Indeed, in the first general meeting of Spanish bishops in 1971, the hierarchy of the Spanish Catholic Church, by a reasonable majority of bishops (137 in favor, 78 opposed, 19 expressing reservations, and 10 abstentions)voted to seek forgiveness for the partisan role it took in the Spanish Civil War a generation earlier:

"Thus we humbly acknowledge our faults and implore pardon, for not knowing at the time how to comport ourselves as true ministers by seeking the reconciliation of our people, divided as they were in a fratricidal war."

Better late than never, we suppose. We're not sure which way Cardinal Carles voted on the Spanish Church's request for forgiveness, but we tend to agree with John at Americablog, that the cardinal's prediction of death camps via gay marriage may be more correct than even he suspects. The last time fascists took over governments in Europe, they did so with the willing collaboration of institutional churches, who whipped up support among the laity with "moral values" campaigns and explicit appeals to bigotry, most famously anti-semitic, but also homophobic. The collaboration of institutional churches who claimed to be Christian with these fascists and their campaigns for power did lead to directly to the Nazi death camps.

Perhaps we should ask Cardinal Carles, "is that a promise or a threat?"

wild about harry

republicans refuse offer on judges - democratic plan sought withdrawal of some - senate republicans rejected a democratic offer to resolve an impasse over judicial nominees yesterday, as members of both parties said they are under strong pressure from interest groups to hold their ground.

(cross posted at skippy's)

how can we show harry our gratitude and affection? it is traditional, in many culturals, including this one, to show gratitude and affection by means of gifts – cash is an acceptable form of such gifts.

pudentilla thinks, and hereby pledges to give money to the democrats the day frist pulls the trigger on the nuclear option. to whom? hmm – how about howard dean’s dnc? that way, when frist leads the republican assault on american constitutional traditions, we can register our opposition to his shameful power grab by strengthening the ability of the democrats to resist his tyrannical tactics in time for the 2006 elections.

wouldn’t it be nice if all the famous bloggers in blogtopia (y!sctp!) like atrios, the suburban guerrilla, josh, echidne, kevin, the dcmedia girl and kos and, why, our very own skippy (and many others – you know who you are), got together and organized a "pledge drive for democracy" on the internets. they could set up permanent threads and encourage their readers to make pledges in the comment section and announce the totals on a daily basis . (this is just an example, the famous bloggers are really smart and may have better ideas about the format ). we think that they should also encourage their readers to make small denomination pledges – say $5 or $10 dollars – so that folks could and would eventually donate. we could have press releases and blogtopia (y!sctp!) media events – a kind of skippy hippy circus atmosphere that might with humor attract adherents to the humble cause of saving our democracy from the “reds.”

when the kitten killer pulls the trigger, the famous bloggers will provide their readers with the link to the dnc’s paypal account (maybe howard would set up a special account for the drive) and nudge us all to pay up. now, it’s entirely possible that frist’s tyrannical tactics will fail – that he won’t get the votes and the denizens of blogtopia (y!sctp!) will – in theory – be off the hook for all the dough they pledged. but it might be nice to contemplate, at that point, by way of a victory celebration, showing howard and harry our love anyway.

well that’s pudentilla’s modest proposal for the day. she pledges $50 bucks to the dnc the day that frist pulls the trigger. as the big dog liked to say, “i challenge you” to do the same. furthermore, she promises to personally pay for a booby prize for the last person who pays the pledge (we're contemplating zell miller's autobiography).

y!sctp! – yes! skippy coined the phrase!

May God Bless You

May I please just say that Christians, as a group comprising all denominations who claim that name (regardless of my personal opinion as to their Christianity), are the least persecuted group in America. These spokespersons are not persecuted for being Christians. They are rejected and scorned for being hateful demagogues who project there own issues onto the rest of the world and who live in abject fear of a God of their own creation. There. I said it.

May I also get on my high horse for a moment to amend that statement? In their vision of a theocracy, there is no room for anyone’s God except theirs. Period. Make no mistake-you will only be a Christian if they say you are. Those of us who reject that vision of God as Christians have a dog in this fight. Those of us who reject that vision of God as followers of other faiths and spiritual paths have a dog in this fight. Those of us who reject any vision of God at all have a dog in this fight.

As a person called to the ordained ministry, I am beginning to understand my responsibility to release the hounds.

we heart left rev. we also heart rmj, but it was left rev's post. we recommend adventus with great pleasure to all.

Evil Catholic Sexual Practices?

Growing up Catholic in Chicago, it never occured to us to question the priestly practice of celibacy any more than we would have questioned the aphorism, "the lake is always east." As a newly minted Protestant, however, we wonder at this odd sexual practice not merely condoned, but celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church.

We confess, our pre-occupation with priestly sexuality also arose in connection with the election of Pope Ratzo, who is famous, at least to Pudentilla, who is gay as a goose, for defining homosexuality as an "intrinsic moral evil." (And this from a fellow who justified joining the Hitler Youth because of the tuition discounts membership promised.) Ratzo's distaste for queers is not your guardian variety homophobia, he used his position as the chief inquistor for the Catholic Church to silence numerous theologians who took the utterly radical step of considering the possibility that queers might not be entirely loathesome. Did you even know, Gentle Reader, that numerous Catholic theologians considered this possibility? Probably not, given how effective a Grand Inquisitor Ratzo was.

The funny thing about Ratzo's insistence that Pudentilla's life is intrinsically, morally evil is that this insistance is also paired with an insistence that priests take vows of celibacy. The scriptural basis for celibacy is as thin and contested as the scriptural basis for Ratzo's condemnation of homosexuality as an "intrinsic moral evil." The historical basis for the insistence on priestly celibacy is even shakier. Priests were not celibate in the early church. As the church acquired an institutional structure, some factions within the bureacracy tried to insist on celibacy and their position was rejected in the 4th century and again at the end of the seventh. The anti-sex crowd gained some traction in the 12th century and were able to outlaw marriage for priests - but not sexual activity. For centuries the specter of a village priest and his concubine would have been unsurprising in the medieval Catholic world. After Martin Luther invented protestantism, the Vatican began insisting on vows of celibacy and made some sort of effort to enforce them. It would appear such efforts have been largely unsuccessful. According to Richard Snipes' recent study of contemporary Roman Catholic priests (A Secret World--Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy) on any given day half of the guys who took the vow are not observing it.

Now, there's ample evidence in both the pre-Christian and non-western world of religious uses of celibacy, so we wouldn't go so far as to call the sometimes celibate priests of our own day freaks. We should acknowledge, however, that those who publicly proclaim (regardless of their practice) their own sexual inactivity have been more of a minority in their sexual orientation than even queer folk, for whom there is ample evidence of their intrinsically evil sexual identity throughout the human and animal world since - well since God made the world.

Ratzo will tell you that celibacy is a Gift From God and a very wonderful thing available only to priestly Catholics (and straight women in San Francisco?). Many queer people, like Pudentilla, however, will tell you that a gay sexual identity is also gift from God, to be cherished and honored like any of the other gifts with which God endows us. The difference between us is that Ratzo will be wearing drag when he makes his claim.

We wonder at the audacity of Ratzo's claim that an entire group of people participate in an intrinsic moral evil. He, unlike Pudentilla, got to know the Nazi's very well. The general historical concensus in the west is that the Nazi's demonization of Jews (and, to be fair, queers, communists and gypsies) was a hideous disaster in Western history in which the institutional organs of Christianity played, at best, a shabby role. We note that many Christians, despite the compliance of their churches, resisted the Nazi's at the risk and often cost of their own lives. It is true that Ratzo was not one of these brave, individual Christians - but still, you'd think the Church and it's leaders would have bought a clue after the camps were opened and said - perhaps we should eschew the demonization of whole segments of the human population henceforth. But Ratzo, at best, seems to have concluded from his experience in the Hitler Youth, that while dissing Jews is a bad thing for Christians to do - dissing queers is fine.

Tolerance is not moral relativism as Ratzo likes to claim. It is an affirmative virtue based on two moral insights. First, by definition, no indivdual or insitutions can claim perfect knowledge of this world or God's plan for it. The last guy who tried was named Lucifer and look what good it did him. Second, individuals and the institutions they create often perpetuate the greatest evil when claiming the authority of a moral absolute. Tolerance requires us to acknowledge our own epistemological limitations and guard against the consequences of these limitations.

Thus, Pudentilla will not say that all those priests who at least claim to be celibate are freaks, much less evil. They are, rather, mere mortals like herself, struggling to make a meaningful, if difficult to achieve, connection with their God.

God's Rotweiler Bites

Well, it didn't take long for the the thin veneer of papability to wear off, did it?

New Pope condemns Spain gay bill - Pope Benedict XVI has responded firmly to the first challenge of his papacy by condemning a Spanish government bill allowing marriage between homosexuals.[--snip--]

A senior Vatican official described the bill - which is likely to become law within a few months - as iniquitous.

He said Roman Catholic officials should be prepared to lose their jobs rather than co-operate with the law.

The bill would make Spain the first European country to allow homosexual people to marry and adopt children. [--snip--]

Interviewed in the Italian newspaper, Corriere de la Serra, Cardinal Lopez Trujillo said the Church was making an urgent call for freedom of conscience for Roman Catholics and appealing to them to resist the law.

He said every profession linked with implementing homosexual marriages should oppose it, even if it meant losing their jobs.

The cardinal insisted that just because something was made law it did not make it right.

Cardinal Trujillo's insistence that Spanish Catholics practice civil disobedience on this one, even if it means losing their jobs contrasts rather markedly with Pope Ratzo's justification of his decision to join the Hitler Youth, as the law required, in terms of the tuition breaks membership promised:

"When the Hitler Youth was established, my brother was forced to become a member," Cardinal Ratzinger said in an interview in 1997. "I was still too young, but later, when I entered the seminary, I also joined. But as soon as I had left the seminary, I never went to see them again. And this was difficult, because in order to be entitled to get a discount on the tuition fee, which I urgently needed, one had to prove that one was a member of the Hitler Youth."

We are indebted to Rodger Ailes (no, not that one) for the cite. Perhaps realizing that their visions of Roman Catholic civil servants bring the marital apparatus of Spain to a screeching halt will never happen in the increasingly secular Spain, Cardinal Trujillo also appears to demand a "conscience clause" exception for folks who identify as Catholic.

Like the "red" pharmacists who claim they are Christian, these folks want all the benefits of their "conscience" without any of the work a finally tuned moral consciousness demands. The great virtue, from the "red" point of view, of conscience clauses is that they vitiate the effectiveness of the laws. Citizens cannot know in advance whether the bureacrat at the counter of the marriage registry or the pharmacist in the drugstore will allow them to excercise their legal rights or frustrate their attempt to do so. These rights, accordingly, become less certain, and thus devalued.

Now in previous generations, people who called themselves Christians did stand against laws they considered illegal. They went to jail for their efforts. The political spectacle they created shocked the conscience of the nation and helped many to rethink their support for the laws whose morality was challenged. But they went to jail.

Which leads us to believe that Cardinal Trujillo and Pope Ratzo and all the "red" pharmacists in America, who want a get out of jail free card for their moral sensibility, know that the communities in which they live utterly reject the moral stance they adopt. There will be no spectacle of Catholics in handcuffs led off to jail because they refuse to enable the operation of laws they find repugnant. It's not worth their jobs. What those who lead the "red" pharmacists and Catholic homophobes want is the political power that playing the "morals" card can offer politicians and institutions - they really don't want the moral principle itself. That would be too costly.

And if they won't pay the price that they claim their conscience demands, why should anyone else?

What if their were no filibuster?

• Republicans like Trent Lott wouldn’t be able to filibuster legislation against bills that aid workers in devastated industries (like aviation workers who lost their jobs after 9/11).
  
  
• As Senator Leahy has noted, Republicans wouldn’t be able to use filibusters to block democratic economic legislation, health care reform, bills to protect unions from corporate use of scabs as they did in 1993 and 1994.
  
  
• Republicans won’t be able to filibuster judicial nominations by a Democratic president, as they did during the Clinton years.
  
  
• Republicans won’t be able to delay legislation governing ethical activity by federal employees as they did in 1993, when they filibustered amendments to the Hatch Act.
  
  
• Republicans would not be able to filibuster gun control legislation offered by Democrats. The Freepers are very concerned about preserving this filibuster.

Our inner-Democrat, in other words, would be very happy if there were no filibuster, because laws we like would be easier to pass. Of course, Pudentilla recognizes that by claiming this she puts herself squarely in the “some day Democrats will control Congress again camp,” of which Senator Frist and Rep. Delay, agents of the “red” Christian movement to destroy the Constitution, are not members.

But our inner-democrat, who thinks that the evidence of history is on the side of the Founders, who wanted the Senate to slow things down and created an institution whose processes and habits would ensure democracy by preventing the tyranny of a majority. Even when the majority consists of hippy-dippy liberals like Pudentilla, who of course are correct about most policy issues, the Founders thought that they should not be able to tyrannize the minority – even when the minority consists of despicable “red” Christians who want both to destroy the Constitution and to desecrate the message of love and hope Jesus preached.

So this Democrat thinks we should support the filibuster for the sake of our democracy, which, in the end, is more important than her party.

Father's Day, Early and Late

Pudentilla is thinking much about her late father today. The reason is yard work. We have been doing vast quantities of yard work for the last week because the weather in central Maine, until yesterday afternoon, was glorious. 65-80 degrees, sunny, a nice breeze. The snow banks in front of our house that topped six feet in mid-March, had melted and Pudentilla's partner decided it was time to finish off that poison ivy patch she'd been blasting with brush-be-gone for the last two years. Since she had rather generously helped Pudentilla move a ton (literally) of gravel last spring to lay paths around the vegetable garden beds last spring, Pudentilla's available rhetorical responses to her requests for help consisted of "yes" and "we'd love to!"

So we raked out the offending area, covered it with landscape fabric and bought a dozen bags of mulch. A friend then gave us a bale of pine needles to cover the mulch, which lay on a slight slope, so that it wouldn't erode in rain. It looks very nice and in a few years we'll landscape the area. The project took about a day and we were completely beat by the end of it. Which is why Pudentilla's thoughts turned to her father.

In our whipper-snapper days, we helped our father with the yardwork in spring and fall and the reward was a night out bowling with the Old Man. Perhaps, you, Gentle Reader, would not have been highly motivated to do yardwork by the promise of a night out bowling with your dad, but our Dad was, in his day, a most excellent bowler, one of the champs in the Holy Name Bowling league in our parish. He managed to teach us how to bowl and how to enjoy bowling. He was a good teacher. By her sophomore year in highschool, Pudentilla was the champion bowler in her highschool league with 5 (I mean f-i-v-e) 200+ lines to her name. To this day, Pudentilla is wont to shock her first year students by rewarding them for a semester of hard work with a night of bowling, during which she cleans their clocks. The reward for yardwork was that Pudentilla, uncluttered by the company of competitive siblings, got to go bowling with the Old Man. It was worth a lot of raking.

The Old Man also fostered Pudentilla's love of the game of golf. Our brother wanted to try the game and Dad took him to a local driving range. Pudentilla, who, at the time, was barely as tall as a brassie herself, tagged along and learned to love hating the game. There was a public golf course about 20 miles from our house that would let the first dozen golfers play nine holes for free on weekend mornings. Since we were too young to drive, our dad would rise at 5 in the morning many a summer weekend to drive us out to the links so we could play. Pudentilla was not, even in her callow youth, an ungrateful git and on the Father's Day that followed her graduation from college, since she finally had a paying job and some spare cash, she wanted to take the Old Man golfing at a fancy course, with a fancy lunch after, by way of saying thank you for a life time of dawn drives to the golf course.

We discovered, to our amazement, when we called to arrange the day, that the Old Man hated golf. He had been appalled all those years ago to discover that he was stuck with offspring who loved a game that required one to play outside during the day, rather than inside, after dinner - as bowling, the activity of civilized men and women, allowed. But he figured you take the kids God gives you, so he took us golfing. So we took him out for ribs and bowling that Father's Day, amazed that we had never even suspected, all those early Saturday mornings, that he didn't love to golf as much as we did.

Which brings us to Pudentilla's aching knees, shoulders, back and feet. The poison ivy project was so successful, Pudentilla's partner decided to spend the rest of the week reclaiming a sloping garden on a ledge behind the house that previous owners had let return to a wild, and as we have discovered, unreclaimable mass of weeds spotted with occasional interesting perennials. Three days of landscape paper, two truck loads of mulch, and an afternoon of assistance from a good friend later, we have rendered this slope quite pleasing to look at. Thank the lord, it poured rain last night and the temperature has dropped 20 degrees. Our partner's spring gardening frenzy appears to have worked itself out and we know longer owe her bigtime for the ton of gravel.

Let us just say that if we had to take a 10-year old bowling any night this week we would have bought a gun and done violence to someone or thing. Which makes us realize with every ibuprofin tablet that the Old Man was made of more sterling stuff than we had the sense to appreciate.

Christ on a Cross

This is how the death of Matthew Shepard is described at Matthew's Place a memorial maintained by Judy Shepard.

Matthew's Life - Matthew was a member and also an acolyte in St. Mark's Episcopal Church.
Matthew had been lured from a campus bar shortly after midnight on October 7 by two men (Aaron McKinney, 22 and Arthur Henderson, 21) who told him they were gay. He was driven to a remote area near the Sherman Hills neighborhood east of Laramie, tied to a split-rail fence, tortured, beaten and pistol-whipped by his attackers, while he begged for his life; he was then left for dead in near freezing temperatures. A cyclist who found him on Snowy Mountain View Road at 6:22 pm, some 18 hours after the attack, at first mistook him for a scarecrow. He was unconscious and suffering from hypothermia. His face was caked with blood, except where it had been partially washed clean by tears.
Matthew died at 12:53 am on Monday 12th October 1998, at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his family at his bedside. Hospital officials said Matthew had a fracture from behind his head to just in front of his right ear and a massive brain stem injury which affected his vital signs, including his heart beat, body temperature and other involuntary functions. There were also approximately a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. He was so badly injured in the attack that doctors were unable to operate. He never regained consciousness after being found, and remained on full life support.

While Matthew's murder was the worst violence a young gay person can face, it was not unusual. A story in today's Chicago Tribune, for example, notes:

According to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network in New York, 4 out of every 5 lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender students have reported being verbally, sexually or physically assaulted at school because of sexual orientation. Riley Snorton, the group's spokesman, said a recent survey showed 1 in 3 gay students has skipped a class in the last month because of fear.

The same story recounts the travails of gay students at Chicago's Homewood-Flossmore highschool. Today many students are expressing support for their gay peers by wearing tee-shirts that say, "gay? fine by me." That was studied indifference from the foundation's of the earth you felt while reading those words, Gentle Reader. Students who claim to be Christians, organized by a Tinley Park pastor, will, in opposition to this radical and pernicious sentiment (that is, "gay? fine by me") wear tee-shrits citing "crimes against God." The pastor, who claims to be a Christian, denies that he is in a fighting mood:

Jacques Jacobs, a youth minister at Family Harvest Church, said his church is "not fighting anybody, we are only standing up for the rights of the Christian student."

He said the T-shirts have been circulated among students at dozens of other high schools in the Chicago area.

"I do know that Christian students, their right to pray has been taken from them," Jacobs said. "Their right to believe in their values has become an offense to many people. The Bible has become an offense."

The Rev. Jacobs, however, was not able to identify any students who call themselves Christian who have been deprived of their ability to pray or to identify anyone who believes that the right of those who call themselves Christian to believe in any values, however offensive those values to be, should not be respected in the United States. Nor did he reveal just how or to whom the Bible has become an offense. Rev. Jacobs, however, did deny that his tee-shirt protest against the right of highschool students (whether or not they call themselves Christians) simply to say, "gay? fine by me," was not linked with the protest organized by churches claiming to be Christian in the area which planned to protest outside the school today.

Through one of those synchronicities that make life delightful, today we also learned, via the Raw Story, that students who call themselves Christian are harassing and intimidating students who do not at the U.S. Airforce Academy:

Air Force Cadets See Religious Harassment - Less than two years after it was plunged into a rape scandal, the Air Force Academy is scrambling to address complaints that evangelical Christians wield so much influence at the school that anti-Semitism and other forms of religious harassment have become pervasive.

There have been 55 complaints of religious discrimination at the academy in the past four years, including cases in which a Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.

The 4,300-student school recently started requiring staff members and cadets to take a 50-minute religious-tolerance class.

Why, you'd wonder if all these folks who call themselves Christians, but act like Roman persecutors, were - what's the word - projecting, a bit. It would seem that folks who call themselves Christian are oppressing anyone who doesn't believe what they believe - and then claiming that the people they are oppressing are, instead, persecuting them. But you would be wrong, Gentle Reader.

Two of the nation's most influential evangelical Christian groups, Focus on the Family and New Life Church, are headquartered in nearby Colorado Springs. Tom Minnery, an official at Focus on the Family, disputed claims that evangelical Christians are pushing an agenda at the academy, and complained that "there is an anti-Christian bigotry developing" at the school.

If Focus on the Family feels that "anti-Christian" bigotry is developing at a school where more than 90% of the students self-identify as "Christian," can the persecutions of Diocletian be far behind? We guess if Mr. Minnery defines "bigotry" as objecting to the efforts to impose his version of Christianity upon an unwilling populace, he may be on to something.

Three Questions About the Constitutional Radicals

Jeffrey Rosen's NYT magazine article on the "constitution in exile" radicals who are nearing the successful completion of their decades long assault on the american constitution has put blogtopia (y!sctp!) into a bit of a spin. DavidNYC at Kos calls the article "terrifying." Pam of Pam's House Blend, is more sanguine, believing that when folks here what these nominees stand for at confirmation hearings, their candidacies for the Supremes will plummet. From Pam's blog to God's blogroll, as they say. We would also hope that constituent support for all the "red" politicians who support Bill ("you Democrats hate Christians") Frist's nuclear option so that they can vote for these ideological extremists would plummet as well.

For us, the article raised several questions. First, have all good Senate Democrats highlighted this paragraph?

He said he is especially happy that Bush has tapped William Pryor, the former attorney general of Alabama. Greve noted that in one of the big Supreme Court cases involving the limits of federal power, which ultimately invalidated parts of the Violence Against Women Act, Pryor wrote a brief that Greve and other libertarians greatly admired. ''Bill Pryor is the key to this puzzle; there's nobody like him,'' Greve said. ''I think he's sensational. He gets almost all of it.''

Of Mr. Pryor, ACSblog said:

Another example is former Alabama Attorney General William Pryor. Pryor has called Roe v. Wade, which invalidated state anti-abortion laws, the "greatest abomination" in the history of the Supreme Court; he strongly advocates barring Medicaid beneficiaries from enforcing in court the right to treatment to which they are entitled by federal law.

Of Mr. Pryor, LeanLeft said:

“Right-wing Zealot is Unfit to Judge”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 6, 2003)

“Unfit to Judge . . . Mr. Pryor’s speeches display a disturbingly politicized view of the role of courts.”
Washington Post (Apr. 11, 2003)

Pryor, 41 years old, has used the power of his office in an effort to push the law in an extreme far right direction harmful to the rights and interests of ordinary Americans. Pryor has done this not only through litigation in which Alabama was a party, but also by electing to file amicus curiae briefs in cases in which Alabama was not involved and Pryor had no obligation to participate. Pryor is also a frequent public speaker whose speeches make clear that the ideological positions he has taken in these cases are his own.

He personally has been involved in key Supreme Court cases that, by narrow 5-4 majorities, have hobbled Congress’ ability to protect Americans’ rights against discrimination and injury based on disability, race, and age. Worse, he has urged the Court to go even further than it has in the direction of restricting congressional authority.

Pryor has advocated the view that the Constitution should not apply to some of the most critical issues pertaining to individual rights and freedoms — including reproductive choice, gay rights, and school prayer — and that these matters should be decided by the states, based on majority vote, regardless of whether constitutional rights are violated. . .

Pryor has urged Congress to consider repealing or amending Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, as well as pushed for other modifications of this critical civil rights law. . . .

Pryor would deny gay men and lesbians the equal protection of the laws. He believes that it is constitutional to imprison gay men and lesbians for expressing their sexuality in the privacy of their own homes and has voluntarily filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court urging the Court to uphold a Texas law that criminalizes such private consensual activity. Pryor is also a staunch opponent of a woman’s right to choose. He has called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and has supported efforts to erect unconstitutional barriers to the exercise of reproductive freedom.

Pryor has also tried to undermine the separation of church and state, urging the courts to uphold a judge’s official sponsorship of sectarian prayers before juries as well as religious displays of the Ten Commandments. Most recently, Pryor has supported the efforts of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore to display a nearly three-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the state Judicial Building, a display ruled unconstitutional by a federal district court.

It's not just that Pryor believes bat-shit stuff, it's also that the leaders of the movement which wants to destroy our constitution believe he is the key appointment they need to succeed.

Our second question: do the leaders of this radical movement even read the papers:

Although Greve's liberal critics have argued that resurrecting strict constitutional limits on federal and state powers would essentially mean a return to the unregulated climate of the Gilded Age, Greve emphasized that he doesn't have the Gilded Age in mind. The ''modern, vibrant, mobile'' and global economy of the 21st century, he argued, is competitive enough to regulate itself in most areas. Though he envisions a role for government in protecting against egregious forms of coercion, force and fraud, all other abuses would be regulated by private agreements among citizens. ''I don't think much would be lost if we overturned federal wetlands regulations or if we repealed the Endangered Species Act, just by way of illustration,'' he said.

Is Michael Greve unfamiliar with the words, "Enron, " or "WorldCom" or "Tyco?" Perhaps the constitutional extremists are untroubled by these words because they live in the land of think tanks where their own economic security is guaranteed. There arguments might be a tad more compelling if they had to confront the disaster il Ducetto has made of the American economy with their own wallets.

Finally, while these radicals seem pretty clear about their absurd interpretation of the "Takings Clause," do they have a jurisprudence that governs a dispute that arises when economic actors "take" Pudentilla's ownership right in air that is fit to breathe (which, since she has asthma, is rather directly linked to her right to life). Hmm - it appears not. A theory of taking without a theory that redresses the tragedy of the commons is simply an effort to replace our constitutional system of ordered liberties with a simpled minded glorification of the maxim "might makes right."


*y!sctp!: yes! skippy coined the phrase

They're Not Christians, But They Are Republicans

Last night on the NewsHour, Babbling Brooks offered a brief, muttered defense of Bill Frist's decision to speak at the little Democrats Hate Christians telecast the Family Research Council is organizing. The Babbler's line: well politicians speak at all kinds of events and don't necessarily agree with everything the organizers say. Fortunately Jim Lehrer was awake and thought to pursue a follow-up: well has Frist said he thinks Democrats are against people of faith because they are willing to use the filibuster against only 10 of all the judicial nominees il Ducetto has proprosed? No. Frist is hiding out and his staff isn't returning calls. "He's a decent man, but weak." Mark Shields says a source told him. Well "weak" we agree with.

We are learning to reject those mental images of Gerry Ford, Dwight Eisenhower and Everett Dirksen that come automatically to our mind whenever we hear the word "Republican." Hey, we grew up on the south side of Chicago - other than Richard Nixon, these were the only Republicans we ever heard about growing up. (Ok, sometimes we heard about Illinois' Republican governor - but he was downstate and only the Tribune thought he was worth mentioning). And other than the National Committee of College Republicans, who embrace Nixon as a role model, fair minded observers would not equate all Republicans with Nixon.

People who called themselves "Republican" because they believed in civil liberties, a small and restrained federal government, fiscal sanity and a foreign policy of international cooperation let the people who want a large federal government with the ability to increasingly intrude on the private lives of its citizens and who think a foreign policy based on "go it alone interventionism" is a good idea take over the party. Oh and these people love deficits because they love tax cuts and hate cutting government spending. Oh, and these people want the judiciary to be dependent on the the legislative branch - which is not how the Founders viewed the matter, but that doesn't matter, because these people want a "Christian" nation - and by "Christian" they mean really angry about anyone who isn't middle-aged, middle class, white, and evangelical or at least willing to quake before the authority of those who are.

So what happened to all those guys and gals who called themselves Republican because they believe in civil liberties, a small and restrained federal government, fiscal sanity and a foreign policy of international cooperation? Well, they're still Republicans. They're just "weak," like Senator Frist. They got their tax cut and they imbibed Newt's campaign to demonize the Democrats like mother's milk. Or at least they got their tax cuts. Gentle Reader, you might ask, "what profit a man to give his soul for the whole world? - much less a $78K tax cut. But your disbelief would not be warranted. These are the Republicans now. Fair minded observers are right, when they hear the word, "Republican," to think of Tom Delay, Bill Frist, John Cornyn and all the other agents of the angry American mullahs like the Rev. Dobson, who command we destroy our Constitution in Christ's name

Actually, we don't think the mullahs are Christians. There taint nothing in the New Testament about Jesus being a Republican and folks who preach that he was - and that is precisely what the mullahs are doing - are leading the flock astray for the sake of worldly power (cash donations and political influence). What is saddest about the defiled gospel the American mullahs preach, of course, is that it aligns people who claim to be Christians not with the followers of Jesus in the New Testament - but with their Roman persecutors. It was the Romans who used (admittedly infrequently, indifferently and ineffectively) the power of the state to persecute religious dissent. Ironically, the Romans cared little about what Christians believed, but when they were in a persecuting mood, insisted that the Christian failure to participate in Roman religious ritual threatened the state.

Equally ironically, once Christians took control of the Roman state, they began to persecute those who didn't share their beliefs. Of course, over time, all the Europeans began to claim the mantel of Christianity to justify their wars and persecutions. Nothing in the New Testament could lead any sane person to believe that the folks doing the warring and persecuting were, in fact, followers of Jesus, but we were stuck with this label, "Christian," and the connection the word had to the connotation "follower of Jesus" was severed. In horror at the blood baths embraced in the name of Jesus, our Founders came up with the clever, if desperate, notion of a state which tolerates all private expression of sectarian belief, but refuses state identification with any. It was a noble idea and it worked 250 years until the Republicans decided to piss all over it.

They are Republicans - but there is nothing about what they do or preach that you could find in the New Testament. Jesus was not about hate and fear and the use of any political means to obtain and maintain power. The Republicans are.

Jesus Jumps Ad Revs At NBC

We confess we didn't watch "Revelations," NBC's rip off of the "Left Behind" series of novels which manages to appeal to a demographic which is both fundamentalist and believes in alien abduction. We had thought it would be bland christian-lite for the "Touched By An Angel" crowd with a dash of fundie edge. But it appears we were wrong:

When dogma meets drama on television - Soft-focus spirituality on TV gives way to programs with a more explicit religious viewpoint. Will audiences accept it?LOS ANGELES – When it comes to religion and pop culture, network television has never been much of a pioneer. Angels and vague references to God are about as much success as prime time has had with the topic - think "Joan of Arcadia," "7th Heaven," and "Touched by an Angel." But now that the film "The Passion of the Christ" has revealed an appetite for entertainment with specific religious themes, the small screen can't feed it fast enough.

This week, NBC launched "Revelations," a big-budget series that melds the mystery of an "X-Files" with prophecies ostensibly based on the New Testament. Writers at a scriptwriting conference last fall reported that all the network executives were asking for "anything with a religious theme." One such Bible-based show, "Book of Daniel," is in development for NBC.

What we don't get is how the networks can justify devoting so many resources to presenting a specific sectarian point of view in a series, but refuse to except UCC advertising, which promoted the radical notion that "jesus didn't turn anyone away, neither do we." It can't be, because of the money. The UCC, after all, was willing to pay to air the ad. Perhaps it's because NBC actually wants to promote the weird sectarian premises which underly "Revelations." Or maybe it just because the think they can rip more money off the "reds" on this then they can the blues.

Our muse is older than yours

in honor of National Poetry Month we offer Sappho 31:

He seems to me - that man -
to be equal to the gods,
who right across from you
is sitting and near to you, listens
as you sweetly speak

And hears your lovely laughter,
Which stirs the heart in my breast -
As soon as I look at you
No words remain in me

Instead my tongue breaks and at once
A subtle fire rushes under my skin,
With my eyes I see nothing and a
Whirring sound is in my ears.

I break out in sweat
Trembling seizes me entirely
Greener than grass I am,
But little short of death
I seem.

You can read the original Greek here and a translation by someone who actually knows something about poetry (unlike your Pudentilla who is a Roman historian), here. It is a source of unending mystery to Pudentilla that whole populations do not cease all their other activities immediately and begin to study ancient Greek, after having read any of Sappho, whom Socrates called the Tenth Muse.

Now Sappho, who had a thing for girls, was writing about the feelings of a woman who observed her girlfriend's wedding feast. Since Pudentilla does not wish to privilege the perceptions of queers during National Poetry Month, she also offers a translation of a Roman poet, Catullus, who adapted Sappho's poem to the perspective of a man who observed his mistress with her husband. Catullus 51

That man to me
Equal to a god seems.
If such a thing could be,
Greater than gods – that man
Who sitting across from you over and over
Looks and hears

You laughing sweetly, which rips
Every sense from my wretched self.
For once I have looked at you, Lesbia,
Nothing is left of me.

Instead my tongue grows thick,
subtle beneath my limbs a flame
slips down, with their own din
my ears ring, my two eyes are touched
by night.

Too much time, Catullus, is bad for you.
Too much you enjoy, you engage in idle time.
Before you, both kings and fortunate cities, empty time
Has utterly destroyed.

You can read Catullus 51 in Latin, here - and translations by folks who actually know what they're doing here and here. It is a source of unending mystery to Pudentilla that the whole world doesn't stop what its doing and begin studying Latin immediately upon having read a poem by Catullus. But, that just goes to show what Pudentilla knows.

Bashing Popular Culture As A Political Strategy

We followed yesterday's discussion on the blogs between Amy Sullivan (and here, quoting Dan Gerstein), Matt Yglesias, Digby (and here), Atrios (and here and here and here and here and here), Rox Populi, Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged and Oliver Willis with a sense that the tactical tangent was a bit off.

We should state as a preliminary disclaimer that we don't have kids ourselves, so we haven't grappled with this question when the stakes were real. But we do have nieces and a nephew about whom we care deeply so the question is of some urgency to us. Our parents dealt with the matter differently than pomo parents appear to. We weren't allowed to watch television during the school year after 5:00pm on schoolnights. Our Mom was not so much concerned about the issue of popular culture affecting our values as she was about our academic success. She was a school teacher and had come to the conclusion that kids who read alot did better in school, got into less trouble and tended to go to college. So she created a home environment where the only entertainment available was from books. We could read anything. Once or twice she booted a book she thought was too trashy for words (and it was in retrospect) but by and large we could read anything. Weekly visits to the library, bonus trips to the bookstore if we behaved well at the mall, always books for every present-giving occasion.

She was very strict about the no-tv rule. She made us get notes from our teachers in highschool when they wanted us to watch something on public tv for class. The one great exception was when we persuaded our father to let us watch the Masterpiece Theater series, Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth R, on Sunday nights (8-9pm). Dad was a history buff and negotiated a waiver from Mom on our behalf. We have almost no memories of watching television that don't include a parent in the room until we were 16 or 17 years old. True, we went through a tv binge period in our dorm lounge our first year in college, but by then our tv tastes had been so well developed that the big splurge involved watching PBS reruns of the Forsythe Saga.

Our folks were of the generation that believed they could do one thing and make their kids do another as long as they kids weren't contributing to the mortgage. So, many a night after dinner my dad would turn on the tube and we would retire to our rooms to do homework and read. Even in the summer when we were allowed more access to television they were quite comfortable booting us from the room if they felt the show they weren't watching wasn't suitable for our tender sensibilities. We get the feeling parents nowadays aren't comfortable taking this position.

Despite the success of our Mom's efforts (and we are deeply grateful for them), we're not so sure that they are easily imitated today. For one thing, the debate as we understand it from the blogs, is popular culture - good or bad, or popular culture - how to insulate your child from its effects. Mom didn't care much one way or another about popular or high culture. Her affirmative and oft articulated goal was to turn us into readers.

More importantly, she felt confident that she could. She was a teacher, so she was home by 3:00pm everyday. Her mother stayed at the house during the day, so we always had adult supervision when we were growing up. Both of our parents had good jobs with good health benefits. They sent us to the local Catholic school, which booted all the "discipline problems" into the public school, so they never worried about our education. We lived in an Irish neighborhood on the south side of Chicago populated by city cops, firemen and other city workers. There simply was no crime. Even though we were allowed to watch tv between 3 and 5 pm, we never did if the weather was good. We roamed the neighborhood widely after school with our friends under the eyes of everyone's mother (most of whom, unlike our mom, didn't work outside the home). Many was the time we returned home for dinner to be confronted with the question, "and just what were you doing on 111th street?" 111th street was within the nominal bounds of the neighborhood, but far enough from the house that when someone's mother observed us through the kitchen window, she thought nothing of calling our Mom to report our presence on the boundaries of geographical propriety.

We're not sure that world exists anymore. Most moms have to work outside the home to ensure that their kids get health benefits and access to decent schools. Fewer adult eyes scrutinize kids at play and cities don't have the resources to provide neighborhoods with police patrols that will guarantee parents the peace of mind required to let one's children roam the neighhborhhood. So we think the "sucks to be you" approach recommended by Julia - (i.e., be fully and constantly present in your children's lives) answer to Amy's question only works if you have enough financial security to personally provide the kind of support network we had growing up that then was funded at least in part by the larger social and economic structure. If the reason you're not home when your kids get home from schools is that your working to pay the mortgage and save for their tuition payments, or maybe just to pay the rent and groceries, the approach our Mom adopted simply won't work.

On the other hand, we don't believe that Americans really want the government controlling popular culture. We think they want what our Mom had, confidence that she could raise her kids they way she wanted, certainty that she had the resources to insure that her values were the values we would learn to cherish as she grew up. Now, the "reds" don't really give parents that certainty and confidence. But their thundering against the idolators in Hollywood legitimates the ordinary desire of parents for that certainty and confidence. Digby can observe that no one uses the v-chip, but we distinctly recall our sister declaiming at one election, "I don't give a damn what they do about the Middle East, just let them give me my v-chip." We have no idea whether she ever used the thing. But she voted for Clinton in part because he was able to persuade parents that their desire for certainty and confidence that they would have the resources to raise their kids the way they wanted to was appropriate.

We think rather than bash Hollywood, and let's be fair, the "reds" have already cornered that market far more authoritatively than the blues every will, liberals and progressives should come up with policy proposals that speak to the real and not irrational anxiety parents face when considering the task of raising kids. Indeed, we think that attempting to engage the "reds" directly on the the "moral values" axis of the argument is a prescription for failure. Blue values, are about individuals making choices for themselves and respecting the right of others to make choices they disagree with. Jumping on the bash Hollywood bandwagon would require us to abandon our core values only to sound like "red-lite." Parents want to believe that they have the resources and ability to make the choices they make about raising their kids stick. People don't want folks telling them what to do, they want to be confident they have enough control of their own lives to do what they want. That's the desire the blues should speak to.

• For example, why is il Ducetto cutting funding for programs that allow cities and towns to hire cops? If your neighborhood has good police protection, it has low crime. If it has low crime, it has kids riding around on bikes and parents not worried about their safety.
  
  
• For example, why won't il Ducetto fully fund his educational programs? It's hard enough to raise kids these days without worrying that the school you send your kids to will fail because the politicians would rather give tax cuts to the wealthy than make sure your kids are educated to compete in a global economy.
  
  
• For example, why can't working parents get decent after-school care for their kids? Every country in the industrialized world has solved this problem except ours. Why do parents in France get to work hard for their family, confident that their kids are well-supervised and educated, but parents in il Ducetto's America have to worry that if they're working to help their family, they risk leaving their kids alone and unsafe.

It seems to us (and again, we concede that we don't have kids ourselves) that if folks believed that Democrats were working to ensure that they personally had the resources to raise their kids the way they wanted to, no amount of decrying Hollywood would persuade them to vote "red" on this issue.

Of Cabbages and Kings

As we noted over at skippy's this morning, John Bolton made a rather bracing assertion in his confirmation hearings yesterday:

U.N. Nominee, Democrats Lock Horns on His Record - "I've never tried to change anybody's position through any kind of improper influence or pressure," he said.

Gentle Reader, you may find it difficult to square this assertion with the evidence that the Walrus tried to have State Department analyst Christian Westerman fired. Westerman refused to give a clearance to language that the Walrus wanted to use to a speech to the Heritage Foundation (a place where "red" phds who can't teach and don't want to submit their work to peer reviewed journals hang out).

Mr. Westerman objected to a claim by the Walrus in his speech that Cuba had a bio-weapons program. Westerman felt that the CIA and other intelligence communities did not believe that the evidence supported the Walrus' claim. He drafted less expansive and more accurate language and suggested that the Walrus use those words instead. The Walrus had a hissy-fit and fired off a reply to Westerman that did not engage Mr. Westerman's efforts to make the Walrus' speech factually accurate - time was of the essence. It appears his crowd of true believers over at the Heritage simply not wait to be told, as soon as possible, about the Walrus' vision of the world - whether or not it accorded with reality. So Mr. Westerman forwarded the Walrus' emails and his own to the CIA and let them handle it.

The Walrus was enraged. We suspect that the Walrus' outrage had at least two parts. First, he was denied the opportunity to do what he wanted to do (in the land of the "reds" there is no greater suffering). Second, in the great game of D.C. bureacracy, he had just been stuffed. Responding to his ego injury in typical "red" fashion, he called Mr. Westerman on the carpet in a rather unseemly fashion, and them, perhaps realizing that he was not, in fact, Mr. Westerman's supervisor and that spluttering at him like an outraged dean of students would have little effect, he called on Mr. Westerman's boss to complain that a "mid-level munchkin analyst" had dared to edit his text.

Perhaps this was a third source of outrage for the Walrus. Because "red" academics have so little experience with the process of peer review they have not fully developed the ability (which characterizes mature scholars and adults in general) to distinguish between their texts and themselves. When Mr. Westerman's boss, Mr. Ford, refused to scold the analyst, much less transfer him as the Walrus wanted, for his committment to reality, the Walrus became enraged. He has refused to speak to Mr. Westernman's boss, since that very day. We guess the Walrus really showed him. We wonder how many at State envied Mr. Ford. More will be revealed today, when Mr. Ford, will speak to the Senate Foreign Relations Committe.

In the Walrus' world, the fact that he was wrong is rather irrelevant. We believe that when the Walrus said, "I've never tried to change anybody's position through any kind of improper influence or pressure," he was telling the truth as he understood it. You and Pudentilla might be glad that civil servants who toil without fortune or favor in the labyrinth of government bureacracy require our policy makers to submit their pronouncements to review for factual accuracy. The "Reds," do not share your committment to reality, Gentle Reader.

They know the big picture (Iraq bad, North Korea bad, Cuba bad - bad! bad! bad!) and they must struggle without thanks to persuade the rest of us of this overriding and overwhelming reality so that we will empower and embolden them to take the actions necessary to operate effectively in the big picture. Like Lilliputians we hobble with little facts and tiny truths their efforts to stride like giants across the world's stage. And have we not been proven wrong? Why consider Iraq....!

Well perhaps not. But we don't think the Walrus was fibbing when he testified. Lewis Carrol knew how the Walrus felt:

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done--
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"

For our part, however, we'll stay in the waters of reality with the old oysters and decline the invitation of the Walrus and his friends to lunch.

Weather Report

It is snowing today in the small town in central Maine where Pudentilla is fortunate enough to live. Since she believes in the promise of the Resurrection, Pudentilla cannot attribute this climatological phenomenon to the wrath of an outraged deity. The snow does, as it accumulates, however, summon to mind the concept our grandmother used to call, "a test of faith." It does not seem possible that there will be peas this spring.

Why "Reds" Want To Destroy The Academy

Juan Cole describes quite well the goal of good teachers in colleges and universities:

I am saying that "bent" is not a relevant category of analysis when evaluating university teaching. Everybody has some bent. The question is, whether students come out of the class having learned to reason about a set of problems or not. The content is not as important, since they'll forget a lot of the content anyway, and will receive it selectively, both during and after the class. But if you teach them to take things apart and see how they work, to think about social and political causation, to see how things work together, in a particular field, then they can produce their own knowledge and understanding about it thereafter. They can also question their own and the professor's premises because they will have learned about hidden premises and how to bring them out in the open and interrogate them.

Enough students like this and Tom DeLay would still be slaughtering roaches in Sugarland.

Lobster Update For Returning Snowbirds and Incoming Summer People

We had occasion to do further "work" on our sempiternal research project on the question, "where can one find the best lobster meal west of Bar Harbor," this weekend. While nothing has shaken our opinion that the Broad Arrow Tavern in Freeport, ME makes the best lobster stew (a dish devised by divine providence to comfort mortals in this veil of tears), we now believe that the Azure Cafe, offers the best lobster roll - an amazing experience - a sort of culinary contact with the face of buddah moment, really.

editorial note 1: While extensive, our research on the best lobster shack west of Bar Harbour award has yet to coalesce to a degree we could confidently award a "best" prize to any single one.

editorial note 2: We regret to report that we have yet to have the opportunity to begin serious research on lobster meals east of Bar Harbour.

Flee the Suburbs

buy a hybrid, get a wood stove and carry no debt. Despite the apparent ceiling reached in oil prices, Calculated Risk at the Angry Bear thinks we're going to have an oil-price induced recession.

They're Coming for the Queers

via americablog we learn that flordia republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has called for an end to don't ask, don't tell. we guess they ran out of disabled vets to recall to iraq. anyone feel a draft?

Why Rummy Can't Teach Soldiers Arabic

Based on our personal experience, we believe that it should not be hard to teach soldiers a foreign lanuage. Many years ago, when Pudentilla was a graduate student, she was fortunate enough to teach a summer, intensive course in Attic Greek. Her students included an undergraduate who had decided he wanted to be a classics major rather late in the game and needed to catch up on the major's language requirements, a seminary student who wanted to get the Greek requirement for her degree over with as quickly as possible, a software engineer who had somehow convinced his employer that studying Attic would enhance his ability to prepare software whose interface would be written in the languages of the Indian sub-continent (two years before he had convinced his employers to let him study Sanskrit as well - teaching Attic to someone who already knows Sanskrit is a special pleasure, let us tell you - we learned more about systems of reduplication in the perfect tense than we ever thought possible) and finally, the point of our story, a young captain in the U.S. army.

The Captain had been serving in Iraq in the first Gulf War when he received his orders to return to the United States and get a graduate degree in philosophy so that he could teach at West Point a few years later. Apparently the Army has a computer program that determines which soldiers shall receive such orders, and based on one data point, we suspect it's a pretty good one. Anyway, the Captain had fallen in love with Aristotle in a philosophy survey course he had taken during the regular school year (it happens, really, it happens) and decided to learn Attic so he could read Aristotle in the original.

Intensive language classes are quite challenging. One progresses from knowing no Attic, to reading Plato within 10 weeks by a process called studying. Studying requires great discipline and application. We had three hours of class a day and the students studied 10 to 12 hours in preparation for each class. Pudentilla always felt like a wet noodle after class. She has no idea how the students managed to go home and study and memorize for the rest of the day. They did, however, and one of the reasons we recall that class as one of our most extraordinary pedagogical experiences was the Captain. He inspired everyone, Pudentilla included. One could simply not give him enough work. The hill he wanted to take was Aristotle and all that stood between him and the hill was the process of learning Attic. "Come on, Pudentilla," he often begged, "give us another -mi verb." "-mi" verbs are the bane of the existence of the student of Attic Greek. They are regularly irregular in their formation and because the Greek verbal system is extraordinarily extensive, mastering a -mi verb requires a ton of work. The Captain always wanted more. By August, under his leadership and with Pudentilla's technical advice, the class ploughed through Plato's Apology as though it were a good detective novel.

Now, learning Attic Greek and modern Arabic (and related languages) are not completely similar tasks. There is very little emphasis put on oral ability in the teaching of Attic Greek (after all, anyone who could correct your accent authoratively has been dead for two millenia). One presumes that one of the points of teaching soldiers Arabic (and related languages) is to promote their ability to communicate with native speakers. Nevertheless, if the Captain is any measure of the ability of soldiers to learn difficult foreign languages, our uniformed kids should be extraordinarily able students.

And, indeed, the problems that Rummy is having teaching soldiers Arabic arise not from the quality of the student population - but from the unbelieveable incompetence of Pentagon managers, as Fred Kaplan's article in Slate, points out. Now, Rummy could simply send soldiers to school, as the army sent the Captain when they needed a philosophy teacher at West Point. Indeed, as Juan Cole notes, teaching centers supported by federal funds located in universities are actually very good at teaching the very foreign languages that the Pentagon needs its soldiers to learn.

One wonders why, instead, the Pentagon has spent the years since 9/11 demonstrated the nation's woeful inadequacy in this area (remember the trailers on the CNN and MSNBC: "if you know Arabic or Pashtu, please call the F.B.I.) writing memos about how the Pentagon needed a better plan to teach languages. Memo to Rummy: the universities already have a better plan and are already implementing it. Outsource this, you twit. True, your soldiers will be exposed to liberal professors and gay T.A.'s and peers in their age group whose world view does not, on all points, agree with Pentagon doctrine. But they will learn Arabic - which might actually, you know, help defend the country.

In Praise Of Conservative Philosophical Debate

• Douglas Wead wanted to make his tape recordings of conversations with il Ducetto public for the sake of history before he debated with himself (and perhaps others) and decided that personal relationships were more important than history.
  
  
• Republican Congressman Charlie Norwood was for a patient's bill of rights and against il Ducetto's insurance companies' bill of rights before he debated with the White House for an hour and did a 180 degree turn on his own bill.
  
  
• John Weaver was a critic of Karl Rove, claiming that Rove had slandered him in Texas, before he debated his issues with Rove in a private meeting and then publicly called him "gracious."
  
  
• John DiIulio was a veteran and thereby a staunch critic of the the policy process in the White House for about 24 hours during which he debated with himself (and perhaps others) and then decided to express remorse and apologies for his remarks.

Jonathan Chait (from whom we borrow shamelessly) rebutted David Brooks' latest piece of drivel before Brooks even wrote it. via Digby, we learn that Chait further rebutted this drivel after Brooks wrote it. And Davey, Pudentilla's favorite philosopher (if you insist on equating the activity of philosophy with the selection of radio stations and ice cream flavors) is John Rawls. Conservatives probably haven't heard of him because he was a philosopher of law - a topic which, at least as the rather abundant evidence of the last few weeks suggests, conservatives and Republicans hold in slight regard.

We Write Letters

Dear Senator Snowe,

I read with great dismay the remarks of your colleague and fellow Republican, Senator Jon Cornyn of Texas. According to a transcript of his statement, published at the Raw Story website, yesterday, your colleague and fellow Republican made the following comments about the recent spate of judicial murders:

I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence.”

Leaving aside the stunning factual inaccuracies of your colleague and fellow Republican's remarks (the murder of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother in Chicago, and the murder of Judge Barnes in Georgia, appear to have had no political connection whatsoever), I am greatly concerned that a United States Senator would seem to justify, if not condone, the use of judicial murder as a political response to an decision deemed unfavorable by partisan interests. That he would make this statement in the midst of the political scandal your party made of Mrs. Schiavo's tragedy, and with the knowledge that the judge in that case already required police protection against murder threats, betrays a dangerous lack of responsibility and a callous disregard for the lives and safety of judicial officials (and innocent bystanders).

As you know, judges in Maine are particularly vulnerable to the violence that your colleague and fellow Republican, Senator Cornyn's remarks justify, because our state simply can't afford the equipment and personnel necessary to properly screen courthouse visitors. As someone charged with the representation of Maine's interests in the nation's capital, accordingly, I would expect you to be particularly incensed by Senator Cornyn's remarks. Will you condemn your colleague and fellow Republican's dangerous and undemocratic remarks as publicly as he made them? If not, could you please explain to me why not?

Sincerely,

Pudentilla

We're not telling anyone what to do, but we think it'd be a good idea for folks who have an incumbent Republican Senator running for re-election in their state in 2006 to consider sending off some version of the above.

Compare and Contrast

As il Ducetto and his minions prepare to leach as much popularity as they can from the Pope's death, we thought it might be instructive to compare and contrast the careers of the late Pope and the current occupant of the White House.

number of languages spoken:

The Pope: 11 - source
Il Ducetto: ≤ 2 - (spanish: poorly, but with great confidence; english: we defer to your own observation)

activities in high school and college

The Pope:

resists Nazi occupation of Poland; starts underground theater, joins underground seminary (source)

Il Ducetto:

a beneficiary of affirmative action, he went on to become head cheerleader at his prep school; again a beneficiary of affirmative action, he attended Yale, where he joined the secret society Skull & Bones and served as president of the fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon; arrested, but charges dismissed, for college prank.

early career

The Pope:

recognizing his intellectual brilliance, the Polish Church sends Wojtyla to Rome to pursue studies in support of doctorate; back in Krakow, in defiance of communist authorities, he pursues a second doctorate, career as an intellectual and academic and provided pastoral care to university students; as bishop, archbishop and cardinal, he defended and furthered church interests without precipitating a crackdown from the communist regime. (source 1 and 2)

Il Ducetto:

drinks alot, pleads guilty to a dui, loses congressional campaign and some businesses; a vigorous hawk on Vietnam he declines assignment there when he joins the National Guard where the record of his service has generated not inconsiderable question. (source 1 and 2)

as a leader

The Pope:

initiated reconciliation with Islam, Jews and Orthodox Christians; champion of the poor; opponent of il Ducetto's war in Iraq (source 1 and 2)

Il Ducetto:

alienated allies, war-mongered, helped corporations and rich people pay less taxes (source 1 and 2)

on domestic issues

The Pope:

against birth control, abortion and death penalty; for feeding tubes at end of life - except at the very end of his own

il Ducetto:

against abortion, for the death penalty and for feeding tubes at the end of life - except for the uninsured.

Meanwhile, back in the 20th century

Maine's legislature has passed, and Governor Baldaci has signed, legislation that makes it illegal to discriminate against gays in housing and employment. The statute explicitly says that this grant of legal protection has no bearing on the right to marriage question. You would think that this would be a non-controversial piece of legislation. After all, it sucks to be discriminated against, and as a legislator who outed himself during the debate demonstrated, queer people in Maine are still discriminated against in employment and housing.

And guess what? It is non-controversial. The Bishop of Portand has chosen to remain neutral on the law. The icing on the cake, as Mike of Maine Politics points out, is that the Hateful Christians are reduced to attacking the law as "pro-gay marriage." Their little "coalition for marriage" web site doesn't even mention discrimination or employment. Talk about bait and switch.

The leader of this little group of people who call themselves "Christian," is a thug, named Michael Heath, who only a year ago was disciplined by his own organization for a McCarthyite call to out gay legislators. Maine's legislators responded by wearing pink triangles to work and stuffed the hateful little omadhaun.*

But he's back, unrepentent and unpersuaded by Christ's command to "love one your neighbor as yourself" (Matt 22:39). He and his ilk are planning a referendum campaign to put the law to the voters for a "people's veto." Personally, we hope the opposition focuses on Heath, himself. E.g.:

Michael Heath is not a Christian - he just plays one on the news, and he thinks you're stupid. Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself. So unless you enjoy being discriminated against, one would think the Christian thing to do is support Maine's law banning discrimination against gay folks. Heath's telling people the law is about gay marriage but the law itself says that its anti-discrimination provisions can't be used to support gay marriage. Tell Michael Heath that you're smart enough to read for yourself. And tell him that Christians in Maine don't discriminate against their neighbors in housing and employment.

*omadhaun, a gaelic word almost yiddish in its precision. the OED defines it as, "an idiot or fool," but our grandmother used it to refer to "an idiot or fool you have to live with."