O God, do you see this?

I do not ask why an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever present God has allowed the tragedy of the mass killings in Newtown Connecticut. I do not ask why 20 children and 8 adults are dead at the intersection of mental illness and semi-automatic assault weapons. God gives human beings free will. So, my cry is a human cry to humanity. The correct question is: why do we allow this?

The National Rifle Association continues to insist that easy access to semi-automatic weapons is not the reason for the series of mass shootings that this nation has witnessed. Their spokespeople claim that culture, mental illness, and not enough guns in schools are responsible for the recent tragedies. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, says the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Such thinking is nonsense. Bullets cannot tell a good guy from a bad guy, and there is no guarantee that when the smoke clears, the good guy will be the one left standing.

We have genuflected too deeply and given too much power to a misanthropic, misinterpretation of the second amendment of the United States Constitution. A fusion of past, present and future horizons provides a necessary context for a correct interpretation of this amendment. When we consider the past, it is important to know that the founders thought that a standing army was a threat to liberty. They thought it would be too costly.

This was the historical moment of citizen soldiers who would take up arms when a specific threat arose. Moreover, the idea was the citizen soldier would be a part of “[a] well regulated militia.” Writing about the bill of rights, James Madison said government existed: “for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

The founders believed in natural rights that inhered in our humanity before the establishment of positive law. Such rights included: conscience, religion, property, happiness and safety, speaking, writing, publishing, peaceable assembly, and petition of government. The purpose of the second amendment is “the security of a free state.” Its purpose is not to protect the individual from the government. All of our friends who interpret the US Constitution according to its original intent ought to understand that it does not give ordinary citizens an unlimited right to bear arms. One could argue that only those who are members of their state’s national guard have the right to keep and bear arms.

Lawmakers from the Senate and House met in a closed-conference and released the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report Tuesday night, whereby conferees reinserted language in the bill that allows for the indefinite detention of Americans without charge or trial. The NDAA is unconstitutional and un-American.

Tell your representative to say NO to indefinite detention and vote NO on the NDAA!  

To close the Guantánamo prison was a hallmark of the president’s 2008 campaign. Urge President Obama to VETO the 2013 NDAA and tell him that he campaigned on the promise of a renewed commitment to the rule of law, and by signing the defense bill, he will not be able to fulfill his commitment to closing the infamous detention center in Guantánamo once and for all.

Having served in the United States Air Force for eight years, I’m a person who takes the oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States quite seriously. I also served in an intelligence role, and our training at the time emphasized the limits under which we operated, limits specifically in place to help protect American citizens, and especially to preserve their freedoms. The idea that our government thinks it can lock an American up based on “suspicion” that he or she somehow “supported” an alleged “terrorist” organization just doesn’t seem very constitutional to me! Yet our current law allows just that. Senator Dianne Feinstein and others in the Senate are trying to do something about indefinite detention and I’m hoping they’ll get enough support from Americans across the political spectrum to remove this affront to freedom from the next Defense Authorization bill. Perhaps they could call it a Korematsu amendment.

Recently two seemingly unrelated events came together: I volunteered for Measure D to raise the minimum wage in San Jose to ten dollars an hour, and I watched another episode of the BBC’s excellent production of War and Peace.

War and Peace BBC

In the episode I watched, a wealthy family, the Rostovs, is crating up their numerous possessions, china, furniture, dresses, vases, and clocks, to flee Moscow in the face of Napoleon’s oncoming troops. They look out the window: a long line of wounded Russian soldiers is wending its exhausted way through the city – now abandoned by most of the rich. At first, the family watches, curious, as the soldiers drag and are dragged past their front door. Then the daughter, Natasha, a person of great spirit and integrity, asks what it could hurt to let the wounded be brought inside and laid on the floor; the family is leaving the city anyway for their country estate.

Just as the family is about to leave, an officer begs them to take a few of the wounded along. Natasha’s father okays replacing a few boxes with soldiers. But when his wife hears of this, she bursts into an impassioned plea: These goods are our children’s heritage! You’ve mismanaged our money, made bad business decisions, and now you’ll deprive them of this too?

Her husband, chastened, goes back on his decision. Natasha, however, explodes: These are only things! I don’t want them! How can you save things instead of human beings? She points down at the soldiers: These are human beings!

In the end, they make the miraculous decision to leave their goods and fill the carts with wounded soldiers. As it happens, lying among the wounded is someone they know, someone very important, but they only find that out after the decision is made.

Cockamamie:  adjective.  1. Of poor quality, inferior  2. Silly; ridiculous

Texan oil and gas magnates David and Charles Koch, and a few other billionaires and multi-millionaires, such as Los Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, are each pouring hundreds of million dollars into the elections, mainly to try to elect Mitt Romney as President and to ensure a Republican Congress. The unprecedented tsunami of big money into political campaigns – expected to total between $6 and $7 billion in the first Presidential electoral season since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court case removed any limits on contributions – marks a qualitative shift from Constitutional Democracy toward what might be called “Kochamamie Democracy.”

In Constitutional Democracy, the guiding principle is one person/ one vote. In Kochamamie Democracy, it is one dollar/one vote.

One dollar/one vote is the legal principle governing US corporations, with each shareholder entitled to the number of votes corresponding to his or her number of shares, deviating from the Constitutional principle that each citizen is entitled to equal voice, whatever their wealth.

Kochamamie Democracy thus represents the corporatization of American democracy. Billionaires such as the Koch Brothers, who own the second largest privately held US corporation, Koch Industries, have pledged 100 million of their own money as well as to bundle at least $300 million more in their Super Pac, Americans for Prosperity, to elect Romney and help consolidate corporate control over US elections and the US government.

At first, I was worried that a one-day conference wouldn’t be worth $99 or, at the last minute, $149, but the moment I was welcomed into the Unitarian church on Franklin, I received a nice string backpack containing three new books, all useful, and two, especially valuable. Already I had recouped $60! And there was much more. This is a conference I believe many Tikkun readers would appreciate.

photo by Marty Castleberg

Hawken and the Seattle Protests: Writing That Changes the World

The best moment – Paul Hawken’s speech – came first. It was wonderful to hear that someone hugely successful, the pal of people like Clinton, had shown up in person at the WTO protests in Seattle, an event he felt was grossly misrepresented by the likes of Tom Friedman who opined from a continent away. In response, he wrote a 10,000-word email. He asked for no payment from the publications that accepted it, but wanted them to give up exclusive rights so that it could be freely and widely shared. Eventually, it turned into his latest book, Blessed Unrest, a title that came from Martha Graham’s words:

For what many of us happens to be a subconscious pattern, at every single moment our bodies are set to move with an internal rhythm, a frequency of flow. It is so obvious, so integral, and so taken for granted that it is most likely not something we pay that much attention to. This rhythm is breath, and without this beat, there is no life in the bodies we reside in. The beautiful thing about this simple and subtle, often forgotten, internal movement is that when you pay it some attention, it can take on the force of powerful winds, of strong waves. It creates its own gravity and momentum, each movement taking on an exaggerated expression. Each inhale lifts your lungs and belly, inflating what now feels like elastic skin. Each exhale becomes a gratifying release and surrender, an emptying of something you never knew could ever be so full.

Possibilities for hope and healing are glimmering amid the dark violence and greed of our world: a deepening environmental consciousness, a more sophisticated movement for nonviolent communication and peace, a growing acceptance of gay marriage, and even a widening commitment to corporate responsibility, to name a few. Our task as spiritual activists is to articulate the common spiritual dimension in all these areas and to show that spiritual energy will light the path forward. Taming the ego and finding the deep human connections underneath, and trusting in a power and presence beyond the material world, are the essential ingredients for tikkun olam, healing and restoration, in the 21st century.

Introducing spiritual concepts into policy discussions is not easy, but fortunately science is on our side. The latest developments in physics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology all confirm the fundamental connection of all humans and the centrality of consciousness to existence. Now we can talk hard science as well as soft-hearted spirituality in advocating for change.

My judicial career has been focused in family law, which is hopelessly behind in coping with 50% divorce rates and 40% unmarried parent rates. Family fragmentation on this scale, the worst in the world, is going to have devastating social consequences unless we soon develop more child-friendly legal and social structures.

In this talk, drawing on the piercing legal critique developed by my friend and Tikkun editor Peter Gabel, and the latest scientific evidence brilliantly summarized by Lynn McTaggart in her new book, The Bond, (referring to the bond between people) I offer a vision of divorce without courts. The substantive issue–humanizing the divorce process–is terribly important. Equally important is that this kind of spiritual analysis can be applied to many other issues. Watch it and tell me what you think! My email is bruce.peterson@courts.state.mn.us.

How much longer will we tolerate politicians who stoke bigotry like that which drove Wade Michael Page to kill?

(Crossposted from Salon.com)

Here are some of the things we know about Wade Michael Page: He led a “racist white power trio” called End Apathy; he had a tattoo commemorating 9/11; he shaved his head; and, on August 5, he killed six individuals and wounded a police officer at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

Wade Michael Page. Credit: Salon.com.

We have yet to determine if Page mistook Sikhs for Muslims, but such questions are irrelevant. In today’s Islamophobic atmosphere, there has been increased marginalization of all AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian) communities. In particular, Sikh Americans have faced the brunt of post-9/11 hate crimes and backlash, with Sikh men often being mistaken for Muslims. The first post-9/11 hate crime murder was of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona, whom the murderer chose because he was “dark-skinned, bearded and wore a turban.”

This extremist violence and fear-mongering does not exist in a vacuum. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported the highest number of hate groups ever recorded in U.S. history,with nearly 1,018 active groups. Furthermore, anti-Muslim hate groups have increased 300 percent in the last year, and the FBI reported a 50 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes. The reasons for the record rise in hate groups are due to the faltering economy, changing racial dynamics in America leading to a minority-majority country, and the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

Ramadan is one of the holiest times of year for Muslims. Credit: Creative Commons/Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard.

A story that has gained relatively little attention from the press is that of a mosque in Tennessee that is undergoing a now two-year legal battle. Local residents of Rutherford County initially filed a lawsuit against the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro in 2010 during its construction, citing, among other things, that Islam is not a real religion and that the mosque users are attempting to overthrow the US Constitution with shariah law. In addition to not being able to open its doors, the mosque has suffered arson and vandalism, including bomb threats from the surrounding community.

Earlier this month, a local judge barred the government from issuing an occupancy permit for the mosque. US District Judge Todd Campbell reversed the decision last week, giving the center a green light for inspections and hopefully, ultimately a certificate for occupancy.

This two year extravaganza has prompted the US Department of Justice to sue Rutherford County for violations of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, acts that serve to protect against such religious discrimination. They claim that the local authority has set the mosque to a higher standard than would be used for other such religious institutions or places of worship. Simultaneously, the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro itself has also filed a lawsuit against the county, and is being represented by The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.