Between January 9-13, I taught an ethics course called “Resilience and Resistance” at Starr King School for the Ministry, a member school of the Graduate Theological Union. Eleven faith leaders of multiple religious traditions explored life stressors, historical trauma, and health in the context of oppression, white supremacy and social movements. Through rigorous study, dialogue and spiritual reflection, the students analyzed and interrogated the historical and cultural dynamics of stress and resilience, hoping to identify contextual factors and healthy strategies and promote cultures of resistance in their ministries and activism. Course readings, guest presentations, and class discussion drew heavily from the scholarship from and lessons learned through movements led by people of color and poor/working class people. A website designed for the course will make available to the public some of the student’s final projects and begin a collection of web resources designed by seminarians for faith leaders involved seeking social justice.

Opportunities for praxis (reflection-and-action as an emancipatory component of education) were crucial to the course. One Phoenix-based Master of Divinity student, Nastasha Ostrom, spent her time applying her street medic skills and interest in resilience/resistance to Occupy Oakland. Her reflections show a piece of what self-care looks like in the context of protest, state violence, and community activism. As Occupy Oakland experienced yet another wave of police brutality, and arrests, as well as solidarity from various other cities’ demonstrations this past weekend, Ostrom’s insights seem increasingly relevant in the public dialogue about caring for each other in the faith-full struggle for social justice.

Demonstrators in Washington, D.C. rally for single payer healthcare on October 15, 2009. / Courtesy of Code Pink

Health care is a basic human need. The ability to get this care is a basic human right. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he was stating that all people have the right to equality under the law. Our Declaration of Independence was a call to liberate us from the tyranny and oppression of a ruling power that had no regard for the people they ruled.

Now, more than two centuries later, we are again besieged by oppression and discrimination. The control of health care by private insurers is no less a serious threat to life and liberty than the despotism against which our Founders fought so fiercely. Just ask the 45,000 Americans who will die needlessly each year because of a lack of health care. Ask their family members who must survive without them.

Universal single payer healthcare is a not-for-profit healthcare system that would provide equality of medical opportunity for all people living in the United States. Equality of opportunity is the foundation of our American democracy. Under Single Payer, all medical services and care would be paid by one non-profit funding agency or mechanism, as Medicare does today, without the 20 percent co-pay.

I am not someone who usually agrees with Chuck Norris, who is a staunch Christian conservative activist, in addition to being a martial arts star. Consequently, I was shocked when I came across his recent column on the American Family Association website and found that I agree with it 100%!

The Houston Chronicle reports that the ubiquitous hacktivist (dis)organization Anonymous is celebrating Halloween by threatening to expose the members of Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico.

My little county, Rio Arriba, in northern New Mexico, has long been overrun by drugs because of this cartel. The guys on the left are not drug kingpins. They are ranchers. And they are seriously put out with the cartels.

Rio Arriba County suffers the highest heroin and polydrug overdose death rates in the US. A few months ago, a beautiful local mountain lake was befouled when a plane flying low to avoid being detected by radar crashed into it, spewing cocaine, fuel, and bodyparts into the water. Nobody knows who was in the plane.

Our rural Hispanic and Native American youth are being systematically plied with drugs by Mexican and Californian gangs to entice them to become mules. We have watched our teen drinking rate creep upward. Children as young as 12 are now addicted to heroin.

I couldn’t be happier that Anonymous has taken on the cartel. However, I wonder if bloggers everywhere will suddenly find themselves targets in a new kind of war. I know how quickly those kinds of wars can sneak up on you.

CROSS-POSTED AT Native American Netroots

by Paul Glover

For ninety-nine years the campaign for universal health coverage has relied on conferences, panel discussions, petitions, and rallies. These vent moral indignation but lack power.  Today, 51 million Americans without medical insurance and 30 million Americans paying for inadequate coverage will not get prompt affordable health care through polite legal means.

That’s because Congress and insurance companies are now significantly owned by multinational investment firms. Thus policy is made in remote boardrooms that maximize profit and minimize people. These stuffed suits and their puppets have no concern for suffering Americans, slick advertisements notwithstanding.

Therefore, to take effective control of medical care, the uninsured and our allies have begun organizing to damage the profitability of insurance investments, while building a new American health system.

The League of Uninsured Voters (LUV) embraces the American tradition of rowdy confrontation that ended slavery, gained votes for women, won the eight-hour workday, pressed for social security, demanded civil rights, secured AIDS funding, and established the nation.

Through LUV, we uninsured take leadership to expand Medicare to all. Liberal campaigns need our initiative, because moral indignation is less powerful than desperation. Richard Kirsch, director of Health Care for America Now said, “We would never want to organize the uninsured by themselves because Americans see the problem as affordability,” according to an AP news article. We 50 million uninsured, though, see the problem as life-or-death.

There was good news on the front page of the New York Times this week. Apparently, “a leading medical advisory panel recommended on Tuesday that all insurers be required to cover contraceptives for women free of charge as one of the several preventive services under the new health care law,” and the Obama administration is “inclined to accept the panel’s advice.” Even better, no Congressional approval is required.

As Senator Barbara Mikulski put it, “We are one step closer to saying goodbye to an era when simply being a woman is treated as a pre-existing condition. We are saying hello to an era where decisions about preventive care and screenings are made by a woman and her doctor, not by an insurance company.”

Affordable contraceptives are sorely needed in the US, where “nearly half of all pregnancies” are unintended, and “about 40 percent of unintended pregnancies” end in abortion. Since women living in poverty are four times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally, there is reason to believe that price is an issue.

Because making contraceptives more accessible should decrease the number of abortions, the Christian Right ought to be rejoicing about this proposed policy. Strangely, however, the Family Research Council (FRC) opposes it. It is not strange that the Catholic Church opposes the measure, since they consider contraceptives immoral, but Protestant Christianity allows for the use of birth control. What gives?

Across California, 6,600 prisoners have joined in the hunger strike that began July 1 with prisoners held in security housing units, a sanitary term for solitary confinement, inside Pelican Bay State Prison refusing food and issuing demands that include adequate food and nutrition, an end to group punishment and abuse, as well as compliance with the 2006 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons recommendations on ending solitary confinement practices. On the outside, demonstrators and coalitions have shown their solidarity with the prisoners through rallies in various cities, online petitions and calls to action. So far, the California Department of Corrections and “Rehabilitation” (CDCR) has refused to negotiate or show any signs of addressing prisoners’ demands.

I wrote about the start of the Pelican Bay Prison hunger strike in a July 2 posting;in the meantime, solidarity with prisoners has expanded both inside and outside the prison. There are ways to get involved and express solidarity: call the CDCR or your elected officials and urge them to honor the prisoners’ demands. You can also tell them you are a person of faith and why you support human rights and true justice for all people. (Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity, the coalition of organizations outside of prison speaking on behalf of and supporting the striking prisoners, even has a sample script and list of phone numbers to make it easy for you to do yourself and share with friends.)

While many people of faith reject the death penalty, solidarity with prisoners has been a difficult pill to swallow for many people of faith on the outside, particularly those of us who believe ourselves to be personally disconnected from the prison system or not “having friends who are felons.” Similarly, we may have thought at some point that having solidarity with prisoners is to turn our backs on victims of violence. There are facts and statistics that can help us deal with this discomfort. For instance, prison sentencing for nonviolent crimes has expanded heavily in just the past few decades. Also, solitary confinement has been practiced under the auspices of deterring violence inside prison, not because of original crimes committed outside (and that method has its fill of unjust procedures, like the debriefing rule, which the hunger strike and the video linked below help to illuminate). Still, something stops a large number of us from saying “yes” to solidarity with prisoners and no to solitary confinement. Luckily, many of us rely on traditions and sources of moral wisdom, which for centuries, have called for human dignity, liberation and freeing the captive.

Across California, 6,600 prisoners have participated in the hunger strike begun on July 1 at Pelican Bay State prison’s security housing unit or solitary confinement.

On July 1st, 43 prisoners inside California Pelican Bay State Prison’s security housing unit (or SHU, a fancy name to get those of us not in prison to think it is something other than solitary confinement and all that entails) began a hunger strike against torture and for self-determination and liberation. Solidarity with prisoners who are organizing themselves for justice is just a click away. Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity, a San Francisco Bay Area coalition of grassroots organizations “committed to amplyifing the voices of and supporting the prisoners,” has a blog and I suggest you check out like I did by clicking here.

It’s day two and at the same time as these 43 prisoners refuse food in participate in this hunger strike at Pelican Bay, 2.3 million people are in similar conditions, marginalized in solitary confinement and isolating conditions within an already hidden and dehumanizing system. For those of you who have not thought about the prison industrial complex as a justice issue for people of faith specifically, just that number of people hidden in our society seems like something to pray on. Here’s a couple other reflections that convinced me to learn about mass incarceration as a social justice issue and now to write about and pray for the Pelican Bay prisoners:

The City of Orlando has made over 20 arrests for sharing meals with the hungry at Lake Eola Park. The city limits the group to sharing twice a year per park.

Food Not Bombs has been sharing free vegetarian meals and literature in public for over 30 years. While many believe that hunger and poverty is the result of personal failing and the solution can be found by getting closer to God, Food Not Bombs thought the solution could be found in changing public policy, economics and society.

Risking arrest sharing food in Orlando (courtesy FNB website)

With fifty cents of every federal tax dollar going towards the military, no one in the world’s wealthiest country should have to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen. It was clear that fliers and banners were not enough to motivate the public to take action to redirect military spending towards the real security of education, healthcare and other social services so the eight co-founders started to share meals at their literature table. People of all walks of life visited Food Not Bombs at Harvard Square and the Boston Commons. Visitors engaged one another in dialog. People new to the ideas of peace and social justice were introduced to groups organizing to end the war in Central America, the Nuclear Arms Race and the virtues of vegetarian meals.

The corporate machine’s drive for profit has resulted in a race to the bottom. The bottom line is profit at the expense of people, social justice, and the environment. In the United States, wages are stagnant, unemployment and homelessness grow, and more families are finding themselves unable to afford food.

Food Not Bombs is doing something about hunger. A worldwide all-volunteer organization that has existed for 30 years, Food Not Bombs feeds people vegetarian meals and protests war and poverty. Around the world, nearly one billion people go without food every day, and more than 25,000 die each day as a result. Hunger is growing in the United States, where more than 44 million people rely on food stamps and food pantries and kitchens are so overwhelmed that they are turning people away. This is unacceptable, especially in one of the richest nations of the world.

It is even more unacceptable that people are being arrested for sharing meals with the hungry. Volunteers with Food Not Bombs were first arrested in Orlando, FL, on June 1. They continue to return to feed the hungry and undergo arrest. Cities throughout Florida are introducing laws that could restrict Food Not Bombs to sharing food only twice a year per park. Can you imagine that now it is a crime to give food to hungry people?

Mr G.

Meet Mr. G. He’s been teaching high school in Santa Fe for twenty years.

You might ask,”Is that a neck brace he’s wearing?”

Now that you mentioned it, yes. Mr. G. is wearing a neck brace.

This is the story of how, after an excruciating year of teaching, Mr. G. discovered he’d been standing at the blackboard with multiple neck fractures.

And stage 4 cancer.

He kept teaching until he was unable to stand on his feet.

If the Left is ever to rebuild support for a progressive agenda, we need to persuade more folks to support us. Certainly, we should try to mobilize people who are not currently involved politically, but we should also try to find common ground with people currently on the Right who support a populist economic agenda – those who really should not, on the basis of economic self-interest, be voting Republican, the party of corporate oligarchy.

It’s important to note that when I advocate finding common ground with Republican voters, I do not mean moving to the Center. To the contrary, I mean trying to pull working people who currently vote Republican onto the progressive side by actually generating and working for a Left agenda that they would support. To do this we have to get the focus off of abortion and gay marriage and onto policies that help working and middle class people and their families.

My hope for this strategy deepened this morning, as I read the opening passage of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009) by Bethany Moreton:

In 1999, the Pew Research Center announced the appearance of a new force in American politics. The key to electoral success in the new millennium would lie with a voting bloc that Pew called “Populists.” These voters were largely white Southern mothers, conservative Christians trying to care for families while wages stagnated and public services dried up. They staunchly opposed abortion and gay marriage, but overwhelmingly welcomed government guarantees of higher minimum wages and universal access to health coverage. Pollsters quickly assigned Pew’s Populists a more contemporary moniker: The fate of the nation, they asserted, lay in the hands of the Wal-Mart Mom.

It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it. They no longer needed a Democratic Senator for a quorum, since the bill was no longer ostensibly about finances! They unmasked themselves with this political maneuver. Now everyone can see that it never was about the money. It was an attack on workers’ rights all along. And despite massive protests last night and today, the Republican Assembly passed the bill as well.

Many of us thought Republican legislators were shoving an undemocratic bill down our throats three weeks ago. But at least they gave us six days (a ridiculously short amount of time) to think and talk about it then. Yesterday’s two hours of discussion breaks that record by a yard. The upshot of all this is that 60 years of workers’ rights have been swept away using undemocratic methods for an undemocratic outcome (there will probably be a lawsuit about the tactics). This is especially hard to take, since polls show that anywhere from 65% – 74% of Wisconsinites believe that public workers should have the right to organize.

This Sunday, I published an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal North explaining why I terminated a pregnancy at 16. I was inspired by Democratic Representatives Gwen Moore (WI) and Jackie Speier (CA) who stood up on the House floor in the middle of an assault on Planned Parenthood and the definition of rape and described their own decisions to end a pregnancy.

I intend to mail a photocopy of my editorial to the Congresswomen.

I hope every woman who has ever faced this decision will do the same. If we refuse to be intimidated or shamed, then we can’t be intimidated or shamed.

My public response, which appeared in the Journal North on March 6th follows below the jump. (Sorry, I can’t link because I don’t have a paid subscription to the Journal online).

How can anyone oppose Michelle Obama’s campaign to combat the childhood obesity epidemic by educating children about healthy eating and exercise? How can anyone not rejoice about recent changes in USDA policies that will make school lunches healthier? Wouldn’t most people agree that it would be a positive thing to use government subsidies to encourage the production of healthy foods and sustainable agriculture, instead of the opposite?

As Mark Bittman wrote in the New York Times this week:

Agricultural subsidies have helped bring us high-fructose corn syrup, factory farming, fast food, a two-soda-a-day habit and its accompanying obesity, the near-demise of family farms, monoculture and a host of other ills. Yet – like so many government programs – what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward. Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat – like apples and carrots – while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies.

Eating healthier foods and exercising more are hardly controversial goals, yet some people on the far right are trying to politicize these common sense recommendations in order to score political points. Does Mrs. Obama’s contention that people should skip dessert once in a while really deserve Palin’s derision? Since when is trying to educate children about health and nutrition coercive? Should children really be allowed to eat whatever they want? Should any of us choose to indulge in whatever we want anytime we want?

On Thursday, February 17, I received one of the best phone calls of my life.

I wondered who was calling me from the (306) area code. Where was that anyway?

“It’s mrghhtbfxr,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Who?” I asked.

“mrghhtbfxr!” repeated the voice excitedly.

“Who????!!!!!”

It’s River! I’ve found a kidney!” Kitsap River is a Daily Kos blogger. I had been trying to give her a kidney.

I was so happy for River. But I was also so happy for me!

After a year of tests, I had just been confirmed as a match. I was mustering my courage for a SERIOUS TALK with the husband and kids.

Saved by the bell! Now I could keep my kidney without feeling guilty.

Church of the Pilgrims, Washington DC (photo by Drama Queen)

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that homosexuality is “against the human spirit” even as several Iranian men are hanged for “sexual offenses.” A gay activist is murdered in Uganda and Christian preachers disrupt his funeral so viciously that the townspeople won’t bury his body. A Utah legislator introduces a state bill that would require all publicly funded programs, laws, and regulations to exclude families headed by same-sex couples; his reasoning is based overwhelmingly on his religious values. On a different but not entirely unrelated topic, Roman Catholic bishops strip hospitals of their Roman Catholic affiliations because the hospitals are willing to perform abortions to save the mothers’ lives. Less related but still painful to me, a Huffington Post columnist points out that many conservative Christians see Obama’s health care plan as the work of the devil.

How does one even begin to respond to the above list? Religion is not supposed to be death-dealing; it is supposed to be life-giving. If the only way it can be experienced as life-giving by some people is to deal death to others, whether social death or physical death, something is very wrong with that religion. The blame cannot lie entirely with sacred scriptures; every major world religious tradition, after all, has a version of the golden rule. No, this must be human frailty at work, painfully stripping people of their life chances and even their lives.

Far from being a “job-killing health care law,” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is one of the largest job creation bills New Mexico has seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. PPACA also contains a number of common sense insurance reforms that take effect immediately. In the exclusive video below, Senator Jeff Bingaman describes some of the most important reforms and what they mean for New Mexico. (Ironically, he was suffering from a cold when I interviewed him.)

Please feel free to share this video with friends who want to know how they will benefit from PPACA

Rabbi Lerner, in his recent post, alerted readers of Tikkun Daily to two pieces of policy legislation introduced in Congress this week: the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment and the Global Marshall Plan. Both aim at creating a more caring society.

In direct contrast to the humanitarian agenda of the interfaith Religious Left articulated in those initiatives stands the exclusionary and divisive agenda of the specifically Christian Right, as exemplified by the Manhattan Declaration (2009).

Borneo

We had an email last week from an American physician and writer who is volunteering in rural Borneo. She wrote asking for an online subscription to Tikkun because Michael Lerner’s book “Jewish Renewal is one of the few precious books I carried here in my suitcase, and it is truly invigorating to me, a passionate religious liberal who is hungry for Yiddishkeit yet disappointed by much of the thinking that goes on in modern synagogues.” I asked her if she might be interested in writing some of her experiences for this blog and she sent this wise post about the problems of giving without an adequate understanding of what is needed. She blogs regularly at lowresourcemedicine.blogspot, where, to minimize potential problems for both herself and her NGO, she goes by Dr. Jenny.

The road to hell and the privilege of volunteering

By Dr. Jenny

An odd little encounter in our rural Indonesian nonprofit clinic yesterday made me think more about the consequences of volunteering.