Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/timothyvillareal/page/3/)
All Americans, including spiritual progressives, who are sick and tired of the great American gun plague, need solid arguments for outright Second Amendment repeal, not failed, piecemeal gun control strategies.
American Catholic bishops continue to equate homosexuality and abortion. It’s just a more sophisticated form of screaming “I hate fags!”
For preachers of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” business is booming. They even have their own cable reality TV show. What First Amendment-sound legal reforms might we consider to stand against the commodification of God?
Chuck Hagel is a good Nebraskan. But he can’t connect the dots between a for-pay soldiery and military sexual assaults.
When a head of state, Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has already used what amounts to mobile gas chambers on his own people, remains firmly in power – with no prospect of end to that power – there is nothing whatsoever about that circumstance that can be remotely characterized as a moral victory. And yet, many on the Tea Party Right and what I’d call the Neo-Soviet Left are indeed crowing about the post-August 20th series of domestic and international political events vis-a-vis the Syria crisis; political events, like the deluge of Americans calling and writing to their members of Congress, which have averted what may or may not have been a pointless and merely “symbolic” cruise missile strike against the Assad regime, a mere “shot across the bow” as President Obama put it. Simultaneously, the one-note nature of this particular brand of opposition against any U.S. military intervention in Syria has effectively midwifed a new – and exceedingly dangerous – geopolitical paradigm: the use of the United Nations to elevate the regime of a gas murdering despot to a legitimate interlocutor on the world stage. As a card-carrying liberal, as a spiritual progressive, that’s not an international system I want this generation, nor future generations, to live in. Earlier this week, at a Syria policy panel discussion held at Washington’s Busboys and Poets, Judith Le Blanc, field director of Peace Action, openly thanked Vladimir Putin – yes, the same Vladimir Putin who is presently making life a living hell for gays in Russia – for his “leadership” on bringing about the recent Syrian chemical weapons disarmament plan.
Many are complaining about mixed moral messaging coming from Pope Francis, including on the subject of abortion. Is it not better to ask if Pope Francis and Spiritual Progressives can find common ground to that assert all human beings are made in the image of God?
Those who have no sense of personal dignity, including elected officials, are not capable of contributing to democracy, and inevitably scapegoat others for their failures.
Bashar al-Assad is a mass killer. Can the American peace camp offer anything more than picket signs and chants? Or is that precisely what the right-wing wants from us?
Pope Francis has been placing a great deal of emphasis on mercy and compassion. Will he also emphasize that Jews and people of other faiths, or no faith, can be just as merciful and compassionate as Christians?
Unlike the vast majority of men and women who have survived clergy abuse, Steve Theisen was not sexually abused by a Catholic priest. He was sexually abused by a Catholic nun. Theisen’s testimony is gut-wrenching to hear. One of the saddest things Theissen told me was this: “The Catholic Church is supposed to be a community, but sex abuse victims are not treated as members of the community.”