Calling a Spade a Spade

For the last few days, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and soul-searching about Dylann Roof’s murder of nine black people during a bible study class at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, SC, last week. First, I will not do what I’m still hearing the media do: call Roof a “suspect” or say that he “allegedly” carried out this massacre. There’s no suspicion or anything alleged about it. This sick ticket told friends he was going to do it; wrote a manifesto about it on his website; and confessed to police that he had done it. We know who’s dead, we know who killed them, and we know why.

The other thing I will not do is call this incident an act of terrorism. That word has other connotations and we as a nation have become comfortable with it – albeit in a frightened, unsettling way. This was a plain, old fashioned, act of American racist murder. And the word we no longer want to say is racism.

There are supposedly intelligent people out there who think racism is over because we elected a black president. On the contrary, the deep core of racism that still exists in this country – but which a lot of people had been keeping quieter about with the passage of time and the undeniable strides of the Civil Rights Movement – has been surging upwards because of President Obama’s election. What do you think the Tea Party types mean when they say “We want our country back”? Who do you think they think took it away? How do you think they feel when they see an increasing number of black people in other significant positions of authority in government and in business?

What else explains the fact that quite a few of the 684 Republicans trying to run for president said of Dylann Roof that we’ll never really know why he did what he did. Really? He made his reasons pretty clear. He said black people were “raping our women, and taking over the country. They’ve gotta go.” That clear enough for ya?

I also want to add here something I was saving for after the 2016 election. I do believe that many Republicans and Conservatives in both houses of Congress were genuinely concerned that President Obama would attempt to do all sorts of radically liberal things; after all, he had campaigned so vehemently about “change” and “it’s our time” and all that. But the reality turned out to be that his governance has been remarkably centrist, even right of centrist, in a determined effort to work cooperatively with the opposition.

But no matter what he did or didn’t do to try to reassure them, their response was to not work with him at all! Instead, they gave obstructionism powerful new meaning. They actively disrespected him to a shocking extent. They questioned his citizenship, patriotism, college record, honesty, and said he was not a “legitimate” president. And in so doing, they riled up white supremacists like Dylan Roof and, all puns intended, showed their own true colors.

What’s hurt me most about the behavior of those who call themselves members of The Party of Lincoln, is that it clearly never even occurred to them (1) how much this milestone meant to black Americans and (2) it would have been a real gesture of human kindness and political decency if they really enhanced their efforts to treat him with extra respect and work with him especially cooperatively. They had the power to make sure he didn’t do anything too liberal. So why didn’t they do anything like this? Because it makes them crazy to see a black man in The White House. 

Despite all the racial violence we’ve recently witnessed by white police against black citizens; and despite all of the incredibly racist connections that exist in relation to poverty, hunger, disproportionate incarceration, education, unemployment, income inequality, etc., etc, etc., there has also been heartening progress in other ways. And oddly enough you see it more in the south than you do in the north. A lot of white folks who were raised in a climate of racism have matured out of it. It’s why I chose the photo shown above, of a white man grieving at the gate of the South Carolina church. 

And then there’s this. Many atheists think anyone who is religious takes a moronic, literal, evangelical view. Not true. Most look to their faith for strength, courage, basic values to live by, wisdom, patience, and the capacity to love and forgive, even when such feelings would seem impossible. As a secular Jew and Interfaith Minister of Spiritual Counseling, I admit, to my chagrin, that I haven’t found within myself the capacity to love or forgive Dylann Roof – not yet. But I’m paying attention and trying to grow. And at the very least, speak truth to power and weakness. My own and others. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

Twisted Justice

Yesterday, when America’s Supreme Court once again decided 5-to-4, this time in favor of Hobby Lobby/Conestoga Wood, they asserted that the religious beliefs of the owners of private corporations trump the individual beliefs and rights of their employees. This decision does much more than deprive women of insurance coverage for certain kinds of contraception. It gives seriously discomfiting credence to the ridiculous notion that corporations are people and that the rights of corporate persons are greater than the rights of human persons – which is pretty much how things have been going in all areas for some time.

So the Court ended its session with yet another attempt to further a Conservative Christian agenda, redefine personhood, set a dangerous precedent, and create genuine confusion about what is legal, let alone Constitutional. It’s no wonder that Justice Bader Ginsberg in her dissent said, “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”

I’m so angry about this latest SCOTUS bullshit that I am literally physically, emotionally, and mentally drained. And the thought that I’m morally obliged to help fight this is thoroughly overwhelming – in large part because I don’t understand it.

According to the research I’ve done, the Constitution, in the First and Fourteenth Amendments, makes clear the necessity for a separation of Church and State, even though that specific language isn’t used. But it doesn’t address a unification of Church and Commerce. So what in the Constitution makes it legal for the owners of a private company to determine what kinds of health insurance coverage they will or won’t provide to their employees, not based on cost or law, but on the company’s owners religious beliefs?

Hobby Lobby is a very big company, which is what makes it a corporation. It has thousands of employees in hundreds of stores across the country. This is not a new business, so employees had health insurance in the past. Apparently, it’s the provisions of Obamacare-governed insurance that added types of contraception – such as the Morning After pill and IUDs, methods that can induce abortion – that the deeply anti-abortion Green family (the owners) object to and therefore don’t want to include or pay for (they don’t object to other forms of birth control, such as the pill or diaphragms, which they are willing to pay for – thank you, Green family…).

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that corporations are people. Why do they have rights that human people don’t have? For example, I have Medicare and pay over $100 a month for it. Medicare covers many things that I will never need, such as medications, treatments, and surgeries that only apply to men. Medicare doesn’t cover dental care or eye glasses or hearing aids – all of which I do need.

Yet I can’t say “I don’t want to pay for men’s stuff, I want my Medicare payments to cover what I need.” If the Green family gets to cherry pick the coverage they will and won’t cover – not just for themselves but for thousands of other people – based on what they believe, why can’t I do the same, just for myself, based on what I actually need? 

This whole thing is fucked up. As usual, it’s about religion, women, and sex, a combination that Conservatives are very uptight about, as well as the idea that big business and microscopic goo have more human rights than women. The mind reels.

It would be bad enough if it stopped there. But as Justice Bader Ginsberg also pointed out, “Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today’s decision.”

This, my friends, is what’s known as a truly slippery slope. All of America, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.

Class Warfare 2

I got two emails about my first post on the need to fight back hard against the class warfare being waged by the Right. One came from a Conservative friend who is by no means a rich man but is very, very concerned about the economy and our national debt and deficit, and believes that if you push the rich too hard they’ll go away, and jobs and the very underpinnings of our economy will disappear. It seemed that all he got from that post was that I was advocating for higher taxes on the rich. The other came from a Liberal friend who said he and his wife had been politically active for decades, often to no avail and frequently suffering harsh and ridiculous response from within the ranks, which is why he’s now a burnt-out recluse and won’t do much anymore.

While I am all for increasing taxes on the rich (not the 80%-90% it was during the Eisenhower years, but a healthy 30% they can’t avoid through tax loopholes, hiding their money offshore, or special privilege), higher taxes on the rich wasn’t all I had in mind. And, I too was more politically active for decades than I am now, and learned that victories are often minimal and your “friends” can be really annoying, short-sighted, easily distracted, rigid and hostile. Trying to organize the Left is like trying to corral a bunch of smart kids suffering from ADD wandering around a large room.

So let me get to the guts of this hopefully more explanatory post by saying this: class warfare – which, ironically, the rich usually accuse the poor of initiating with their commie-inspired protests and other carrying on – is not just about money. It’s about a combination of economic fairness, social justice, how we view each other, and how we view the role and responsibility of government. We, the 97% who are struggling, for the most part see things differently than do the 3% who are very rich. Politically, the 97% isn’t united. What we have in common is that we’re all having a very hard time – a situation created by the 3%. Which is why, God help us, we have to try to get together and push back.

Now nearly every member of Congress and the Senate is a millionaire to one degree or another, and both bodies are largely white and male, all of which makes it difficult for them to understand the plights of ordinary people. Add to this the impact of the demented Tea Party, whose original concerns were economic (like my Conservative friend), but which came to include social issues over time with positions based in Christian Fundamentalism. Their strident über conservatism completed the co-opting of the Republican party that began when the sanctified Ronald Reagan said our national problems weren’t about dysfunction in government, the problem was government itself. Then Wall Street collapsed and America elected a Black president who intended to use progressive approaches to financial and social issues and all hell broke loose.

When the people who run government don’t believe in government, government doesn’t run well. When government is run by people with money, privilege and power, government will not make policy that creates/provides economic fairness and social justice. When you throw religious ideas into the mix, which have no place in government to begin with, you end up with wildly unbalanced economics, a huge lack of social justice, and very twisted views of one another and the role and responsibility of government. In other words, you end up where we are now.

The Right is telling us that the rich are job creators and the poor have brought their problems on themselves, neither of which is true. They also tell us that unrestricted free-market capitalism is the best and only way to go, which it isn’t. They say it isn’t government’s responsibility to help us, which it is. And their primary goal is to generate profit from everything and to maintain a massively expensive and totally unexamined system of military defense, which is insane. They say government should be small, when what it should be is efficient, regardless of its size.

They say government should not intrude into people’s personal lives, except when it comes to women having control over their own bodies and people having the right to love and marry who they choose, even if they’re of the same sex. They say racism no longer exists, which is a lie; that science is wrong about everything, which is religion talking; and that government can’t afford to pay for things like healthcare, social services, education, infrastructure repair, or to fight poverty and hunger – all of which is precisely what government should spend its money on.

The Left is speaking out against all this, but not very loudly and not in a unified voice. Which is why government is getting nowhere – or moving in the exactly opposite and wrong direction – when it comes to major reforms in tax policy, immigration, unemployment/job creation, the role of money in electoral politics, voter suppression, gun policy, economic gender inequities, environmental protection, the better understanding and use of new technology, creative and enlightened foreign policy, prison policy, drug policy, and all the other things mentioned in the paragraph above. These are the reasons we’re already engaged in class warfare and why we have to fight back harder and better. Nothing less than our survival – individually, as a people, and as a country – is at stake. I hope I’ve made my argument clearer.

The Surreality of Now

April has always been a melancholy month for me, but this year the craziness of the present has overcome the wistfulness of the past, because some of the social and political events going on have left me laughing and crying at the same time.

Let’s start with a little item out of Pakistan. A nine-month old baby was officially charged with attempted murder, because he, along with his father and grandfather, were part of “…a mob protesting against gas cuts and price increases [that] stoned police and gas company workers trying to collect overdue bills…” according to an NBC News affiliate. As pictured above, the baby cried while being finger-printed; later tried to play with reporters’ microphones while the media interviewed his father; and is now in hiding in an undisclosed location. My favorite line was that this incident “…has thrown a spotlight on Pakistan's dysfunctional criminal justice system.” Yeah. And these people have the bomb…

There have been several recent articles about the growing increase in sexual desire and activity among the aging and elderly – which has resulted in an increase in STDs, but also hope for folks in their 60s (like me) and 70s and 80s, too. But my favorite story on this phenomenon came from a CBS News affiliate about a nursing home in West Babylon, NY, that was being sued by the son of one of the residents after a male stripper performed there. “A 16-member resident committee had requested the September 2012 performance and the nursing home paid the $250 fee,” explained an attorney for the home. This is a picture of one of the old ladies stuffing money into the stripper’s briefs:

I could show you a photo of the U.S. Supreme Court, but why bother? You know what that 5-to-4-Right-leaning-crowd looks like. What I can’t show you is what’s been going on in their heads lately. Their most recent decision on money in politics, McCutcheon Et Al vs. Federal Election Commission, on top of the previous Citizens United decision, as well as their gouging out a core portion of the 49-year-old Voting Rights Act, breaks my heart and blows my mind.

How can these people (the five Conservatives) truly believe that allowing more money into the already overpriced and corrupted political process is a good idea – or harmless at worst? After the blatant and still ongoing efforts in many states to make it harder to vote for young and old people and people of color, how can they think that any portion of the Voting Rights Act has become obsolete? I know that none of the justices is stupid. So what am I, or any American, to think: that they’re uninformed, or racist, or mean, or on the take? If the top court of the land is fucked up, where do we go from here?

I’ll tell you where: from Democracy to Oligarchy. If for some reason you don’t know what that is, it’s a form of government in which all power rests in the hands of a small group or class…like, say, the very, very rich and their friends: the very rich and the plain old rich. And the first order of business of an Oligarchy is to suppress the will (and possibly existence) of the vast majority that isn’t them. The second task is to make sure that the different members of that majority see each other as the enemy, the problem, rather than join forces against the tiny minority with all the money and power. The third task is to make day-to-day survival so difficult for the vast majority that they focus the rest of their time just trying to put food on the table. It also helps to do things like gut social programs as deeply as possible, keep basic education mediocre and higher education unaffordable, and turn your own religious beliefs into laws, so that people are more concerned with being sinners than citizens (that only partially works).

And whatever you do, make it harder for people to laugh – because as all survivors know, laughter makes fighting the good fight easier.

Calling Out The Orthodox Atheist

I am an Atheist. I do not believe in a personified deity called God. I don’t believe in one or more gods. I don’t believe a God created the universe, our galaxy, solar system, planet, or life of every kind on this planet. I don’t believe that any religious scripture is the Word of God, but instead is the work of numerous men (males) who, over time, wrote, revised and sometimes eliminated various myths, parables, cautionary tales, rituals, and histories (some true, some not) to give a religion’s believers a sense of who they are and guidelines for living moral, ethical lives – such as they were thought to be at the time – which was thousands and then hundreds of years ago. I do not believe in heaven or hell, or that the alleged God knows about, loves, and protects me.

However, I am also a Jew, a Spiritualist, an ordained Interfaith Minister of Spiritual Counseling (from a real seminary, not from a matchbook or a quickie online mill), and in a variety of ways, a spiritual person. I don’t believe Jesus Christ was a God, but rather a wise and compassionate human, Jewish rabbi (rabbi means teacher) whose teachings, for the most part, constitute a decent way to live and treat other people. I feel the same way about most of the Ten Commandments. If all this seems contradictory to what I wrote in the paragraph above, it’s because I haven’t gone into explanatory detail, and, I am not an Orthodox Atheist.

Considering that there are 40 million Fundamentalist/ Evangelical Christians in this country, people who take every word of the Old and New Testaments literally; who believe that what they believe is the single legitimate truth; and who have made a long, concerted, and successful effort to integrate their politically and religiously conservative views into secular American law, I am delighted that Atheists are coming out of the Belief Closet in considerable numbers and working to fight the financially rich and intellectually bankrupt Fundamentalists – who genuinely think this is a Christian country and have no working concept of the vital separation of Church and State.

The problem is that Atheists alone cannot fight Evangelical fervor and ignorance. But many have created a kind of religion of their own – and Atheists really hate it when you call Atheism a religion! – by assuming that anyone who embraces any aspect of a religion believes in all the myths and parables and is incapable of separating personal belief from intellectual understanding. Not all religious people are stupid, stubborn, silly, or determined to proselytize their way to power. They don’t all deny science, including evolution and climate change. They don’t all oppose abortion, gay rights and the legalization of marijuana. And unlike their Fundamentalist cousins, most religious people understand the importance of and support the separation of Church and State.

It’s also worth noting that not all intellectuals and scientists reject religion – notably the great Albert Einstein, whose belief in Judaism did not prevent him from being rational and devoted to scientific inquiry. It would behoove Orthodox Atheists to recognize that they can gather more allies for the fight against the worst kind of religious dogma if they recognize that not everyone who doesn't think exactly as they do is the enemy or are not sensible people. The idea that one’s own sense of truth is the only legitimate truth is a dumb religious notion – and Atheists of all people should know that.

Separation of Church and State For Real

I want to remind you, dear reader, that I'm an ordained Interfaith Minister of Spiritual Counseling.  It is most particularly in this capacity that I'm deeply troubled by the increasing lack of separation of Church and State.  One’s personal faith, or lack of it, legally and, yes, morally, should have no place in how government or business operate.  Religious fundamentalists, whose political influence is extensive and disturbing, would have citizens and government believe otherwise.  They are legally and, yes, morally, wrong.

Nonetheless, recent presidential elections – most starkly in 2000, but it’s been going on for longer than that – have taken on a dangerous and onerous religious undertone, overtone and shocking role as a necessity in a candidate’s persona and policies.  Regrettably, there is little genuine understanding (by politicians, the public and the press) about the Constitutional proviso for “Separation of Church and State.”

It is ironic that during the 1960 presidential campaign, there was wholesale concern that John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism would play an inappropriately active role in his governmental leadership.  Now, the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction, there is wholesale concern that a leader who does not bring strong personal religious belief to the political table will lead us straight to hell.  How times do change…

This week, President Obama announced that all employer-provided health insurance plans had to pay-in-full for women’s contraception, including those plans offered by secular institutions administered by religious organizations – including the very rich and politically powerful Catholic Church, with its many universities, hospitals and charities.  The Church,  the Republicans, and some members of the media (including a few on the Left) responded as if the President had just ordered the slaughter of all first-born male babies.  The Democrats and others who are presumably Left of Conservative Everything, have, as unfortunately usual, done nothing to present a cohesive rejoinder.

Here is what the First Amendment of the Constitution says about religious freedom: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof… (the remainder details all that pesky free speech and free press stuff).  President Obama’s regulation regarding the limits and responsibilities of religious employers who provide health care coverage does nothing that breaks this law.

There is a great piece in today’s New York Times Online “Opinionator” section by Linda Greenhouse entitled “Whose Conscience?” that I earnestly hope you’ll take a look at, since she covers more legal ground and cogent observations than I have room for here.  Suffice it to say, however, that this latest brouhaha over the relationship between government and religion and its impact on all citizens (regardless of their religion or lack of it) brings into uncomfortable relief the fact that there has been far too much overlap for far too long.

As Ms. Greenhouse points out: “The regulation doesn’t require anyone to use birth control.  It exempts any religious employer that primarily hires and serves its own faithful, the same exclusion offered by New York and California from the contraception mandate in state insurance laws…  Permitting Catholic hospitals to withhold contraception coverage from their 765,000 employees would blow a gaping hole in the regulation.  The 629-hospital Catholic health care system is a major and respected health care provider, serving one in every six hospital patients and employing nearly 14 percent of all hospital staff in the country…  These institutions, as well as Catholic universities – not seminaries, but colleges and universities whose doors are open to all – are full participants in the public square…”  In other words, when the Church ventures into the public secular arena, it is obliged to play by public secular rules.

Let’s forget for a moment that numerous statistical sources show that 98% of sexually-active American Catholic women have used contraception at some point in their reproductive lives.  The larger point is that until now, the same insurance companies that routinely pay for men’s erectile dysfunction medication do not pay for women’s contraception, a disconnect that would be laughable if it weren’t so serious and downright discriminatory.

The fact is, all women who want contraception, regardless of the religious strictures of their employers, should be able to get it free of charge.  The alternative is an $800-$1200 out-of-pocket annual expense that is an extreme hardship for many women and therefore a clear path to more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions.  How Church or State can justify this is beyond me.