154. GAY SEMINARIANS & ECLECTIC SPIRITUALITY

From the Archives

(September 2005) And now the latest in homophobia (which, at this rate, could become a column at the end of my entries, perhaps replacing SINGING IN THE SHOWER, which I always forget to include): The Vatican is sending inspectors to each of its US seminaries to look for evidence of homosexuality and for instructors who dissent from church teaching.

Does the phrase “witch hunt” mean anything to anyone?

This news got me thinking about my radical co-conspirators at The Quixote Center, where I worked in the late 80s. We sent humanitarian aid to Nicaragua, started an artist collective in Nicaragua, worked to end sexism in the Catholic Church and to have women ordained as priests, and I wrote one kick-ass full-page New York Times protest ad in response to the Bishops’ restrictive Pastoral Letter on Women.

Bill, the Jesuit priest who co-founded the Center, was excommunicated after refusing to cease and desist associations with the Center and its work.

Of course, the current apostolic visitation has nothing to do with Bill, but is instead in response to the burgeoning sexual-assault scandal.

The church has, historically, demanded that priests repress their sexual urges and then hidden the results of their sexual urges seeping out all over. Yet stil they deny these natural longings. Jesuits are instructed to wrap barbed wire around their thighs to rid themselves of arousal. And gay men are instructed to take an abstinance oath, to bury their longing as well.

And um need I mention that sexual attraction to children and sexual attraction to grown men are entirely separate things? Yet these people insist on lumping gay people in with the largely hetero child abusers.

The New York Times notes that “the catechism of the Catholic Church says people with deep-seated homosexual tendencies must live in chastity because homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” ... I guess because a bunch of men who never have sex are more qualified to define sexaul disorders than the psychiatrists who are experts in this area.

Here’s a sample question that will be asked of every faculty member, seminarian, and student who graduated in the last 3 years:

Is the seminary free from the influences of New Age and eclectic spirituality?

Amazing how subjective this question is—but, of course, we are talking about a witch hunt, aren’t we?

(Um does a spirit catcher hanging off my mirror count as New Age spirituality, guys?)

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In other news, Massachusetts soundly rejected a bill to eliminate gay marriage by 157 to 39. More than 6,500 same-sex couples got married last year in this state and, turns out, most of the lawmakers who supported marriage equality were re-elected.

Still, it looks as if we’ll have a new Supreme Court justice who is comfortable weakening the separation of church and state and who had no qualms about weaseling his way around answering those pesky Roe v. Wade questions.

And did anyone else note that an NPR commentator referred to media coverage of the Supreme Court as “the sound byte-ification” of the Court? I wonder if that term will show up in Webster’s 12th?

Meanwhile, here’s an apt op-ed piece that ran in today’s New York Times:

READY? CUE THE SUN...
by David Brooks

ARLEN SPECTER Welcome to Day 3 of the confirmation hearings of John Roberts. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind the nation of what a wonderful job I'm doing chairing this committee, and I'd like to let the ranking member tell me so.

PATRICK LEAHY Absolutely, Mr. Chairman! And let me kick off this morning's platitudes about the grandeur of our Constitution by quoting its first three words, "We the People." That means that here in America the people rule - except on issues like abortion, where their opinions don't mean spit.

SPECTER Very well put, Senator Leahy! And welcome Judge Roberts back before our committee.

JOHN ROBERTS JR. Aw, shucks. This has been a humbling experience, Mr. Chairman. To think that a boy from an exclusive prep school and Harvard Law could grow up and be nominated for the Supreme Court—it shows how in America it's possible to rise from privilege to power! That's the hallmark of our great nation.

So while, of course, I can't talk about specific cases, or any emotions, weather patterns or sandwich meats that may come before the Supreme Court at any time between now and my death in 2048, I do want to reiterate that I feel humbled by this experience. I feel humbled that my wife is dozing off behind me. I feel humbled by this committee's inability to lay a glove on me. And I feel modest. You see this suit? I skinny-dip in this suit. That's how modest I feel.

TOM COBURN Well put, Judge Roberts. Yet when I think of the polarization that still divides this great nation ... waaaahhhh ... waaaahhhh. (Senator Coburn breaks down weeping.)

JEFF SESSIONS This may be a good moment to remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that in this country unelected judges don't write the laws. We have unelected lobbyists to do that. Under our system, judges merely interpret the law and decide presidential elections.

SPECTER Senator Sessions, let me interrupt you right there. We're not here to argue among ourselves and ignore the nominee. We're here to deliver thirty-minute speeches disguised as questions and ignore the nominee. So let me turn to Senator Bid—

COBURN And when I think of the flaws in the reconciliation process! And the gerrymandering! Oh, the suffering! Oh, the humanity! Waaaahhhh ... waaaahhhh. (Senator Coburn collapses and is taken back to his office on a stretcher.)

SPECTER As I was saying, Senator Biden, you have the floor.

JOSEPH BIDEN JR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought this might be a good moment to give the committee a complete history of my heroic sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt myself by mentioning that I ride the train every day, often speaking with regular Americans, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt my interruption of myself by asking the chairman to restrain the nominee. During my first round of questioning, the nominee continually interrupted my questions by trying to give answers. I could barely keep up my train of thought on stare decisis.

EDWARD KENNEDY Starry De Cysis? Didn't she do a fan dance down at that old burlesque house in Providence?

ROBERTS Mr. Chairman, I certainly don't mean to draw attention to myself, for, as I have said, judges are like umpires - not home plate umpires, but those umpires stuck way out by the right-field foul pole. Nobody ever went to a game to watch the umpires.

But as you know, Judge Ginsburg, during her confirmation hearing, had herself wrapped in duct tape for fear that any involuntary reflex gestures she might make would mar her impartiality in deciding cases later on. Following her example, I have decided to spend the rest of these hearings in a soundproof booth, sunk in a tank of ravenous sharks and accompanied only by the illusionist David Copperfield. But before I go into isolation, I would like to mention the intense modesty I feel at this moment, notwithstanding the fact that not a single one of you slobs could have charged $700 an hour the way I did in private practice.

RICHARD DURBIN Judge Roberts, before you go, one of the ways we in the Senate prove our superior souls is by emoting mawkish sentimentality on cue. Would you please emote sadness and pain on behalf of politically powerful but downtrodden groups?

ROBERTS I am emoting, senator.

134. AGE OF UNREASON

From the Archives

(August 2005) So yeah I know I should probably just paste a hyperlink here instead of pasting an entire (brief) article, but just quit reading already if you aren’t concerned about the fact that only 28 percent of US citizens believe in evolution but 68 percent believe in Satan. And since Bush's endorsement of so-called Intelligent Design, the battle between faith and reason is growing stronger every day.

So here’s a damn good article:

WIDESPREAD IGNORANCE
by Sam Harris, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted on ALTERNET August 10, 2005

President Bush has endorsed the pseudo-scientific notion of "intelligent design" (ID) and declared it to be a legitimate alternative to the theory of evolution. This is not surprising, as he has always maintained that "the jury is still out" on the question of evolution.

But the jury is not out—indeed it was well in before President Bush was even born—and anyone familiar with modern biology knows that ID is nothing more than a program of political and religious advocacy masquerading as science.

It is for this reason that the scientific community has been divided on just how (or whether) to dignify the spurious claims of ID "theorists" with a response. While understandable, I believe that such scruples are now misplaced. The Trojan Horse has passed the innermost gates of the city, and scary religious imbeciles are now spilling out.

According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution.

As the President is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance.

Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma.

More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United State—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium.

Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can "rule out" the existence of the biblical God.

There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not "rule out," but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe—that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.

Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: "Behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus." Imagine his speech to Congress containing the sentence "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that Apollo is not neutral between them."

Clearly, the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs. Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to him. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery." This should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world.

The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

A president who regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century—and he’s certainly not talking about the fact that 98 percent of our genes are the same as those of chimps! And, these days, our populace revels in its own ignorance.

Sadly, that describes a good portion of the populace of the deep South (and, yeah, I know I just raised some Southerners' hackles, but they also know that this is true. Plus, I'm from the deep south myself and I choose to live and beat my head against the wall here, so I'm going to say it anyway. Only now it's the entire country, seems like, and not just one region, that's embracing this unreason.

A commentor says “If there ever was an Anti-Christ, I would have to say that it is religion.”

BEST OF SPAM: Find Mr. Right and Keep Him. (No thanks. Saw enough hairy backs at the beach this past weekend.)

JUSTICE SUNDAY?

From the Archives

(April 2005) I'm pasting this entire article because the news is so obscene. We’re already a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy; will we be a theocracy by the time Bush finally leaves office?

FRIST SET TO USE RELIGIOUS STAGE ON JUDICIAL ISSUE
by DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, New York Times
Published: April 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, April 14—As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias [by SC Dixicrat Strom Thurmond-MEDEA], and it is now being used against people of faith."

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.

Dr. Frist's spokesman said the senator's speech in the telecast would reflect his previous remarks on judicial appointments. In the past he has consistently balanced a determination "not to yield" on the president's nominees with appeals to the Democrats for compromise. He has distanced himself from the statements of others like the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, who have attacked the courts, saying they are too liberal, "run amok" or are hostile to Christianity.

The telecast, however, will put Dr. Frist in a very different context. Asked about Dr. Frist's participation in an event describing the filibuster "as against people of faith," his spokesman, Bob Stevenson, did not answer the question directly.

"Senator Frist is doing everything he can to ensure judicial nominees are treated fairly and that every senator has the opportunity to give the president their advice and consent through an up or down vote," Mr. Stevenson said, adding, "He has spoken to groups all across the nation to press that point, and as long as a minority of Democrats continue to block a vote, he will continue to do so."

Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The event is taking place as Democrats and Republicans alike are escalating their public relations campaigns in anticipation of an imminent confrontation. The Democratic minority has blocked confirmation of 10 of President Bush's judicial nominees by preventing Republicans from gaining the 60 votes needed to close debate, using the filibuster tactic often used by political minorities and most notoriously employed by opponents of civil rights.

Dr. Frist has threatened that the Republican majority might change the rules to require only a majority vote on nominees, and Democrats have vowed to bring Senate business to a standstill if he does.

On Thursday, one wavering Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, told a television interviewer, Chris Matthews, that he would vote against the change.

"By the way, when Bill Clinton was president, we, effectively, in the Judiciary Committee blocked a number of his nominees," Mr. McCain said.

On Thursday the Judiciary Committee sent the nomination of Thomas B. Griffith for an appellate court post to the Senate floor. Democrats say they do not intend to block Mr. Griffith's nomination.

That cleared the way for the committee to approve several previously blocked judicial appointees in the next two weeks.
The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.

"As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group's Web site. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

Democrats accused Dr. Frist of exploiting religious faith for political ends by joining the telecast. "No party has a monopoly on faith, and for Senator Frist to participate in this kind of telecast just throws more oil on the partisan flames," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

But Mr. Perkins stood by the characterization of Democrats as hostile to faith. "What they have done is, they have targeted people for reasons of their faith or moral position," he said, referring to Democratic criticisms of nominees over their views of cases about abortion rights or public religious expressions.

"The issue of the judiciary is really something that has been veiled by this 'judicial mystique' so our folks don't really understand it, but they are beginning to connect the dots," Mr. Perkins said in an interview, reciting a string of court decisions about prayer or displays of religion.

"They were all brought about by the courts," he said.

Democrats, for their part, are already stepping up their efforts to link Dr. Frist and the rule change with conservatives statements about unaccountable judges hostile to faith.

On Thursday, Mr. Schumer released an open letter calling on Dr. Frist to denounce such attacks. "The last thing we need is inflammatory rhetoric which on its face encourages violence against judges," he wrote.