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 creationbills 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).
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.
On Saturday January 8, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a 22-year-old man identified as Jared Lee Loughner. Congresswoman Giffords was Arizona’s first Jewish member of Congress. An individual identified as Jared Lee Loughner had recently posted a number of videos on YouTube including one that listed Mein Kampf as a favorite book.
At first glance the videos, which consist of incoherent white text on a black background, appear to be the ramblings of a lone, mentally ill individual. Upon closer inspection however, they spew the rhetoric of an anti-semitic, anti-hispanic, “Christian” right wing confederacy known as “Sovereign Citizens.” This loosely organized, little-known menagerie of militias, miscreants and misfits spawned such violent luminaries as Oklahoma City Bomber Terry Nichols and, more recently, father and son team Jerry and Joseph Kane who gunned down two Arkansas police officers during a routine traffic stop last May.
The Southern Poverty Law Center posted this instructional video on YouTube on November 1, 2010 to assist law enforcement officers to identify potentially violent “freemen” on the highway and to take appropriate precautions when approaching them. The video shows Jerry and Joe Kane mowing down two policemen in cold blood. It also shows Jerry Kane threatening to murder government officials prior to the shooting. This video should be shown to every police officer in America.
It should be impossible, shouldn’t it? But now it’s looking possible and some researchers think they have found evidence of it.
A major milestone in the development of evolutionary science was the defeat of the idea held by evolution’s first great theorist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829), that offspring could inherit the characteristics that their parents had acquired during their lifetimes. This was before it was worked out that biological inheritance works through genes and the language of DNA. While your DNA can be damaged, there is nothing you and your mate can do to otherwise change the genes you pass on to your biological kids. So if you learn to live in the desert or play the violin, you can teach the desert or violin skills to your kids but they won’t inherit them. “Lamarckism” became a major heresy in evolutionary science.
There is a great deal of hope and comfort in this for anyone who has lived through the worst that humans can do to each other: war, genocide, famine, prison, or other horrors. At least your kids can get a fresh start, if you can raise them somewhere safe. Yes, your own fears and trauma will inevitably be transmitted to them in some ways, but that will happen culturally, not, thank goodness, biologically. Biologically they will be a blank slate.
One month ago I drank some extremely noxious laxatives, and went into a small room where a man stuck a camera up my rectum and took a series of photos. It was an invasive and unpleasant procedure, one which I repeat every five years, thanks to advice from my doctor and two friends who have survived colon cancer. I’d rather have a colonoscopy than colon cancer. Whether I want to go through a similar procedure every time I take an airplane is a related question, one we may face in our immediate future. The path that leads to that hypothetical question starts with a media scan of the new TSA (Transportation Security Association) scanners and the policy that comes with them..
The “naked-scanners” are now in place at many US airports, and the plan is to have a thousand installed by the end of 2011. A bill to make them mandatory at all airports by 2013 is currently before the Senate. But at present would-be air travellers have a choice: they can be seen naked by air agents or be “patted down”. There are some good reasons not to want either of them, but you won’t get on the flight without one. We’ll start with the scanners, which have three really basic problems: safety, privacy, and functionality.
We Europeans find a lot of news of the United States in our media. Many of us follow with interest, much puzzlement and relatively little understanding of the posturing, the insults, the exaggerations. Obama doesn’t look much like a socialist to us… But I was hurt the other day by the nameless Republican figure who sneered that Obama was trying to make the US more like Europe – but that Europe was 20 years behind. Behind what?
I believe that we should all be able to cultivate a healthy nationalism, a pride and love of country. But perhaps we all also need to work harder to work our way up the league tables, by learning from each other’s best practice. Take education. The United States objectively has much to learn here; her ‘end of term report’ reads much like my school reports: ‘Could do much better. Needs to try harder.’ (see UNICEF’s “big picture” comparison of the performance of schools in the world’s rich industrialized nations.) The US is close to the bottom of many league tables of school achievement. But who has got it right? Here in Europe, the Finns seem to have got a lot of things right, and apparently they’re rather overwhelmed by the visiting delegations wanting to pick up good tips. But I find that highly encouraging: clearly in some fields, we are getting more ready to look around and see what we can learn from those who seem to be doing better than us.
People need a progressive vision. The various progressive initiatives and solutions to the problems of our society and of our world seem strange standing alone. We need to put them into a larger narrative that captivates the imaginations of a coalition of American people that is large enough to carry elections.
In my opinion, President Obama was right to pass healthcare, even though it was not the kind of healthcare program that progressives wanted. He is a pragmatist, and he necessarily has to work with the people present in the room. If he had waited for this election to try to get health reform, he no doubt would be looking at the same situation only without a landmark piece of legislation to show for his time in office. The Democrats did not defend the legislation. They could have. They should have. However, healthcare is difficult to defend without placing it into a larger narrative of how a 21st century America and a 21st century world ought to look. The Democrats were criticized for the size of government. However, they did not defend the stimulus. That was difficult to do without putting it into a larger narrative of how it would help to bring the country back from the economic brink of disaster. They did not drive the point home that the stimulus contained money for unemployment compensation that Republicans opposed.
The Democrats did not say how the financial reform legislation would help ordinary people, especially the poor who are victims of immoral pay day lending practices. They did not say enough about how the various government interventions — TARP, money to the auto industry and the stimulus — were necessary to keep the country from going into another Great Depression. I do think that President Obama’s attempt to gain Republican support by putting tax cuts into the stimulus bill was a mistake because it took money away from projects that could have gone to giving people jobs.
Many, many questions arise in our minds when someone close to us is seriously ill. It takes a while to realize that these questions do not have one answer. They have many answers, appear in different ways, and may have different impacts on us at different times. In a sense a finger is being pointed in our direction. These questions are demanding a response . . We cannot be free from answering. Life itself is demanding a reply. Some of the questions we struggle with are:
“How is suffering truly relieved?”
“What is the best way through serious illness and beyond?”
This week I am in Denver at a different kind of Health Care Reform rally. Community Health Coalition activists from across the nation are meeting with one another and with the bureaucrats who write and enforce the regs. We are learning how health care reform regulations will be rolled out, what they will mean for our country, and how to incorporate them into our organizing practice.
On Friday my husband and I cooked wild caught salmon over a wood fire. We enjoyed it with garden vegetables and maybe a little too much wine. When the subject of genetically modified salmon came up, I was surprised to find that we disagreed – vehemently on my part.
The Food and Drug Administration is currently holding meetings (for only two days!?) on whether or not to approve marketing of a species of salmon genetically modified to produce growth hormones all year long instead of seasonally. Proponents argue that this fast-growing salmon would be a significant new food source whose consumption would also spare wild salmon populations. Critics are concerned about allergens in this untested food and also about what could happen if genetically modified salmon were to escape. Would their rapid growth mean that they would consume more food to the detriment of existing wild species?
In this last installment of my interview with Bishop Gene Robinson, we discuss interpreting collective story in an inclusive fashion culminating in Gene’s interpretation of Exodus as “The Greatest Coming Out Story Ever Told.”
Unless you have been blogging at community sites such as Daily Kos and Streetprophets, you probably do not know that a blogger who calls herself Kitsap River needs a kidney.
Some of us contributed to the community quilts Sara R made for River and her husband, CharlesCurtisStanley. For the past year, I have been (somewhat ambivalently) completing requirements necessary to donate a kidney to River. River lives far from me, and even if she lived nearby, she is not someone I would have been likely to cross paths with. We frequent different worlds. Nevertheless, last week, I underwent my first set of blood tests.
The donation center mailed a kit to my local hospital. I fasted and drank a dreadful bottle of orange sugar water. Over a four hour period, I gave up 20 vials of blood and a jar of urine for the cause.
I was surprised by my personal reaction to the tests: I felt suddenly and overwhelmingly guilty.
A few weeks ago, the congregants of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe were honored by a visit from Bishop Gene Robinson who delivered the evening’s d’Var Torah.
Bishop Robinson is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. He was invited to Santa Fe as Grand Marshall of the Gay Pride parade. When Rabbi Marvin Schwab learned from a colleague at St. Bede’s that Bishop Robinson might be barred from speaking in an Episcopal Church, he invited him to deliver the Friday Night D’Var Torah at Temple Beth Shalom. I remembered the Bishop from his inaugural prayer. His sermon was an inspiration. After services, my teenage daughter, who had complained incessantly throughout the long drive from Albuquerque about being dragged, dragged to Temple for her brother’s best friend’s eruv bar mitzvah, turned to me and exclaimed, “Oh My God! I’m so glad I came!”
I asked Rabbi Schwab why he had extended the invitation and what he thought the impact would be on our congregation.
I felt that what Gene had to say was important and it was important that the community have a chance to hear it and that Temple Beth Shalom would be a neutral ground where he could speak and say anything he wanted. I think it was great. I think in terms of speaking to tolerance, respect for people as human beings, to see human beings with respect to see beyond some of the nonsense and to see that everyone has a divine spark within them… This was a message that Gene could deliver with eloquence. We are a welcoming congregation. We have members that happen to be homosexual. This was a way of reaffirming for them that they really do have a place within our congregation and the greater community.
Rabbi Schwab lent me the Temple’s DVD recording of the d’Var Torah. The instant I figure out how to upload it to the web, I will embed it in a diary. However, Bishop Robinson was kind enough to grant me this interview for Tikkun Daily. The first installment of the interview, Bishop Robinson on Obama, follows below the break.
For years, Rio Arriba County has been the butt of jokes about its high overdose death rates and its supposed lack of coordination between providers. But on August 25, over 350 people showed up at my office (a huge crowd for a working day in Espanola!) to celebrate our town’s health care reform success. (More)
If you have followed my recent posts, you know that I believe the recent right-wing push towards extreme bigotry and hate-mongering is a sign of desperation. America’s demography is changing. it is growing younger and browner. At the same time, population is shifting from the northeast and midwest, to the so-called sunbelt: states with large Hispanic population.
The Bush regime recognized the growing importance of the Hispanic vote, and worked aggressively to reach out. Today’s Republican party has been siezed by right wing sycophants such as Beck, Gingrich, Limbaugh and Palin, and has eschewed policy entirely in favor of race-baiting.
A manager in a failing department store runs to the bathroom and throws up, consumed with the fear of losing her health benefits which, even with COBRA, will cost too much.
A teacher wakes up multiple nights a week with his whole body clenched, dreading that California’s annual pink slip won’t be retracted this time.
A factory worker grieves the loss of friendship and socializing at work as much as the lost income.
Very likely everyone reading this knows someone who has recently lost a job. Unemployment is a strange word; defined negatively, it fails to convey the meaning of an often devastating experience (though one that, together, we can mitigate). In a society that has allowed many supportive institutions to atrophy, job loss looms even more menacingly than it would elsewhere. Added to the practical economic blows are wrenching emotional wounds: fear, self-blame, despair, and lowered self-esteem.
The late Cambridge University professor Marie Jahoda (a Jew and former prisoner of the Austrian Fascists) noted in an important 1982 article, that having a job “imposes a time structure on the waking day; it compels contacts and shared experiences with others outside the nuclear family; it demonstrates that there are goals and purposes which are beyond the scope of an individual but require a collectivity.” Unfortunately, for too many, work is the only significant collective activity they have outside the nuclear family.
Last Thursday July 15th Fran Luck interviewed Abby Scher and me about right-wing “feminism.” I wrote about it after our talk, and I just wanted you to know that you can hear us at http://archive.wbai.org. Just scroll down the page until you come to the “Joy of Resistance” on Thursday July 15 at 11:00am (the listing is in reverse chronological order). The first half of the show concerns current news about women around the world, and the interview begins at 31:17 (i.e. 31 minutes and 17 seconds into the program). Hope you enjoy it.
Having infuriated Democrats with her astonishing loss of Ted Kennedy’s long-held Senate seat to a suburban truck-drivin’ pin-up populist, Martha Coakley is back. But this time she’s racking up a series of impressive legal victories for liberals. She has won a $102 million dollar settlement against Morgan Stanley, taken on insurance companies for paying hospitals based on political clout rather than quality, and successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
Athough unchallenged by the GOP in her November race for Attorney General, Coakley is campaigning vigorously. Could she be positioning herself to recapture the MA Senate seat from Scott Brown for the Dems? Is this the real Martha Coakley? Or both?
