The Broad View

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God works in mysterious ways

November 2007

March 2008

The last word on the Word

A correspondent on one of my listservs uses this as a tagline, and I hasten to share it with you:

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

Sorry I haven't got an attribution. Anyone know what wag said these, er, immortal words?

Mandeans, lip service and buck-passing

Update below.

One of the most distasteful aspects of our occupation of Iraq has turned out to be our insufferable smugness regarding the Iraqi capacity to appreciate our priceless gifts of Democracy and Self-Government. It is beyond ironic to witness the American power elite chiding Iraqis as if they are incorrigible children and warning that we'll take our soldiers and go home if they don't shape up to our satisfaction. As if.

They all do it: Bush, the dreadful Rice, Congressional bloviators, self-righteous presidential candidates, pompous pundits. They're all looking to blow a smokescreen over their own hideous lapses in judgement from the get-go in Iraq. It's "Blame the Iraqis for the Mess They're In." So consistently has this idea been promoted that it may well become the hook we'll latch on to if we finally do decide to bug out.

In the meantime, I say it's pretty cheesy to be blaming hapless Iraqis for the whirlwind we unleashed. It's also unconscionable to be giving endless lip service to protecting Iraqis when we know those who've been working for us are toast if we don't allow them into the U.S. when we leave.

The same goes for a group of Iraqis that I'd have thought the right would be clamoring to save: the Mandeans, "who are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity." Oh, wait. Heretics. They'd probably rather let Muslims in over Gnostics.

Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of religion at Swarthmore, writes in today's NYTimes that the number of Mandeans in Iraq has shrunk from approximately 60,000 when we invaded to fewer than 5,000 today.

Unlike Christian and Muslim refugees, the Mandeans do not belong to a larger religious community that can provide them with protection and aid. Fundamentally alone in the world, the Mandeans are even more vulnerable and fewer than the Yazidis, another Iraqi minority that has suffered tremendously, since the latter have their own villages in the generally safer north, while the Mandeans are scattered in pockets around the south. They are the only minority group in Iraq without a safe enclave.

When Mandeans do seek refuge in the Kurdish-dominated north, they report that they are typically viewed as southern, Arabic-speaking interlopers, or, if their Mandean identity is discovered, persecuted as religious infidels. In Syria and Jordan, Mandeans feel unable to practice their religion openly and, after years of severe deprivation, some have begun to convert simply in order to receive aid from Muslim and Christian relief agencies.

Their 2,000-year-old culture is unique in the world and completely vulnerable to the surrounding chaos. It will probably not survive unless they can emigrate en masse to the U.S. Given our track record so far in that regard, we can probably start playing taps for the Mandeans. Read the piece and weep.

Update: While on the subject of what I believe is our obligation to accept Iraqi refugees who request asylum, the Sunday NYTimes has a report on the "life of lies" that Iraqis who work for us are forced to lead.

For the tens of thousands of Iraqis who work for the United States in Iraq, daily life is an elaborate balancing act of small, memorized untruths. Desperate for work of any kind when jobs are extremely hard to come by in Iraq, they do what they must, even though affiliation with the Americans makes them targets. [...]

“Our life, it makes you laugh, but it’s a tragedy,” said Felah, a bowlegged Shiite man with a tired look, who has lost six close relatives, including a brother, to Sunni militants, and whose wife and children have been forbidden to see him by a bitterly sectarian father-in-law. “We feel that we are not telling the truth, but what can we do?”

Every well-fed, comfortable chicken hawk who insists we've got to stay in Iraq with one breath and screams about Muslim terrorists coming over here in the next breath, should be forced to live Hamed's life:

The real trouble began last fall. An envelope with two bullets was left outside his front gate. He said it contained a note: “Spy,” it read. “You will be killed.” A few days before, someone from his neighborhood had seen him leaving work at the base, a friend told him. He and his family left his home immediately.

He rented an apartment for his wife and children, and then traveled to Lebanon. There, he applied for refugee status, encouraged by an announcement by American officials that immigration quotas for Iraqis would be raised, but ran out of money after waiting months for his application to be processed. Unable to work in Lebanon legally, and faced with a choice of bringing his wife and children into poverty there, or living apart in Iraq, he decided to return to Iraq, forfeiting his application.

Now he lives on the third floor of a cheap motel in a poor neighborhood in Baghdad, away from his wife and children. He sleeps on a thin foam mattress and padlocks his door at night.

“My economic situation controls me,” he said. “I have nothing now.”

Such are the joys of Democracy and Self-Government that we've brought to the benighted Iraqis. This nation will be paying for our criminally negligent blunders for a long time -- at least as long as the long-suffering Iraqis.

Torture: plus ça change . . .

Last night Turner Classic Movies showed a haunting film about Antonio Gaudi, the Art Nouveau architect whose phantasmagorical forms are enduring showpieces in his native Barcelona.

Early in the film (with only music throughout, but no narration) the camera's eye roves over a series of paintings and mosaics from an earlier age — and among these public artworks are images of unspeakable cruelty. The torturers — seen boiling victims in oil, piercing a victim's eyes with arrows — are churchmen, doing what is presumably God's work.

The Church has tried throughout its history to rationalize what cannot be reconciled (a loving God and the misery men endure) by blaming "sinners" or apostates; and its henchmen are surely the avatars of the very worst that man can dream of doing to his fellow man. The same may be said of Islam. And as for the Jews, let's not forget that the word zealot comes from the name of a fanatical Jewish sect that sought to establish a Jewish theocracy and, um, zealously resisted the Romans — by means that today we would call terrorism — until the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

It left me breathless...

Our esteemed colleague and friend, Honorary Broad R.J. Eskow, has a piece at the Huffington Post that left me breathless. That is, I started reading and realized only when I'd done that I'd been holding my breath, waiting for the dénouement I knew was coming. It was the same kind of anticipation I'd felt upon reading, for the first time, Stephen Vincent Benet's 1940 story, "By the Waters of Babylon," to which I commend you equally. (The text of the story is here.)

"Stridently secular rhetoric"

Digby and others comment on the issues raised by Gregory Rodriguez in an LATimes op-ed. Rodriguez writes on Barack Obama's recent speech about Democrats and their supposed intolerance of "religious voters":

What Democrats won't say, however, is that the secular posturing Obama is railing against is more a function of the party's desire to appease a powerful, but relatively small, constituency than it is a deeply held, widely shared ideological stance. Just as the Republican Party pays obeisance to the demands of the 37% of its base that is white evangelical Christian, the Democrats feel they must not offend the 22% of their core voters who claim no religious affiliation. Why not? Because although they make up less than one-quarter of the coalition, these secular Democrats are much more likely than others to be high-level party activists. [...]

But does Obama's appeal to religious voters mean that if Democrats want to win they have to adopt the positions of the religious right? Absolutely not. The good news is that the vast majority of Americans are sitting out the culture wars. The real combatants are actually minority constituencies within each respective political party — the secularists among the Democrats and the evangelicals in the GOP. Look closely at surveys on religiously charged issues and you'll find that all religious voters don't think alike. [...]

It is no doubt too late to win back the religious right. Democrats aren't about to change their positions on issues such as gay or reproductive rights. But they can still woo the moderate religious voters who were turned away by the party's stridently secular rhetoric. [emphasis added]

I've had my say about Obama's speech, but this column advances the same wrong-headed notions about Democrats -- and the nature of our secular democracy -- that really must be answered once and for all.

I am one who could certainly be described as using "stridently secular rhetoric." But I am not the Democratic Party. I am an individual Democrat very much in the minority, as Rodriguez points out.

However, I'd like to see him cite one -- ONE -- example of "stridently secular rhetoric" by any Democratic Party leader or politician. Is there a single one? I doubt it. But I do not doubt the damage a supposed "friend" of the party does when he perpetuates Republican talking points while offering advice. Or when he suggests that the Democratic Party "piss on [its] secular supporters" in the forlorn hope of gaining a few mushy middles while demonstrating to all the complete lack of any core principles.

Beyond that, I'd like to know how Rodriguez defines "stridently secular rhetoric." Is he, perhaps, referring to Democrats' insistence that the First Amendment means what it says?

The First Amendment clauses on religious freedom and separation of church and state have been continually debated and litigated and I fully expect that to continue. Can my Town Hall put up a creche at Christmas? Yes, as long as they put up an incredibly tacky menorah as well. Frankly, I think that entire issue is ridiculous and perfectly indicative of how arbitrary the decisions based on such irrationalities must be.

But sectarian prayer -- or any prayer -- in public schools is not a minor issue. Nor is the use of public funds to advance a religious worldview under the guise of creationism in public school science classes. Nor are the efforts to infiltrate the Air Force Academy with aggressive evangelism aimed at establishing an official service-wide faith.

These are matters that go well beyond the letter of the law as spelled out in the First Amendment. This goes to the heart of what our constitutional democracy is about and how it functions in the real world of divergent interest groups.

As Rodriguez says, both my viewpoint and the religious right's are in the minority. So should we all follow the mushy middle, represented by the semi-secular, generic Protestant viewpoint? Maybe we could have a little prayer to an unnamed god in our schools? After all, the majority of Americans are somewhat religious, most believe in some form of Christianity in various interpretations.

But we have a Constitution that guarantees and protects the specified rights of those who are in the minority against the tyranny of the majority. That is the import of the entire Bill of Rights.

We are not a strict majoritarian democracy. We all must bow to the rights of those with whom we disagree, even if they are in the minority:

"Let me make it clear. I would shed my last drop of blood to defend their right to hold that biblical worldview. They are absolutely entitled to believe that Anne Frank is burning in hell along with Dr. Seuss, Gandhi and Einstein," he says. "But I will not accept my government telling me who are the children of the greater God and who are the children of the lesser God. That's the difference. I will not defend -- I will fight them tooth and nail, and lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds -- if they engage the machinery of the state, which is what they're doing."

And that is what the Democratic Party is doing when it insists on the rule of law in matters of religion and refuses to pander to those who'd be more comfortable with state sponsorship of their personal beliefs or worse, those who would re-ignite the sectarian wars that chased our ancestors to these shores in the first place.

And the religious among us should understand that this insistance that government remain above the religious fray protects them every bit as much as it protects me.

So let the Democratic Party and its representatives be clear about this once and for all: The state has no business in sponsoring any religious or sectarian viewpoint. We have a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people and we abandon that at our peril.

Science, the Devil's Playground

Two more miserable instances of this country's dogma-fueled descent into the Age of Ignorance. Last night brought this headline:

Report: Women misled on abortion risks

By Kevin Freking, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON --Women who consult with pregnancy resource centers often get misleading information about the health risks associated with having an abortion, according to a report issued Monday by Democrats on the House Government Reform Committee.

Congressional aides, posing as pregnant 17-year-olds, called 25 pregnancy centers that have received some federal funding over the past five years.

The aides were routinely told of increased risk for cancer, infertility and stress disorders, said the report, which was prepared for Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Today we can enjoy this with our morning coffee:

Bush vows swift veto of stem cell bill

By Laurie Kellman, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Senate is poised to send a bill expanding federal funding of embryonic stem cell research to President Bush, who has promised a swift veto — his first. [...]

"There are some issues that you just can't get off the national agenda, and this is one of them," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. Enactment of the bill may need to wait for another Congress and another president, he acknowledged. "It's going to happen with the president's support and it's going to happen without."

Not this year, Bush declared, with midterm elections just ahead and the Republicans' congressional majority at stake.

One of the most damaging aspects of Bush's misrule has been the abandonment of reason in favor of superstition and dogma in all things.

While pleasing to the howling congregations of the religious right minority -- and I emphasize minority -- the effort to make scientific fact just go away has demonstrably harmed our country's security, our economy, our competitiveness, our prestige, our future.

It has damaged individual citizens' lives, from the extremes of intrusion by the state in the Terry Schiavo matter and other cases of government meddling in personal affairs to the loss of jobs and livelihood by professionals in science and research.

I, for one, am damned sick and tired of people's welfare and the course of our country resting in the hands of a mob of know-nothings, persistant and unrepentent in their abysmal ignorance and smug in their insufferable arrogance that they know what's best for everybody.

Kulturkampf

One particularly nasty story popped up in Left Blogistan on Wednesday, starting with the General, on to Bartholomew's Notes on Religion, Atrios, a DKos diary by Troutfishing, Crooks and Liars and beyond. The original story was reported on Jews on First, a site organized to defend First Amendment rights, and here are the ugly particulars. I will quote freely and extensively from the original, as I have no doubt the authors would like to see the widest possible publicity:

A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit. The religion (if any) of a second family in the lawsuit is not known, because they're suing as Jane and John Doe; they also fear retaliation. Both families are asking relief from "state-sponsored religion."
[snip]

Among numerous specific examples in the complaint was what happened at plaintiff Samantha Dobrich's graduation in 2004 from the district's high school. She was the only Jewish student in her graduating class. The complaint relates that local pastor, Jerry Fike, in his invocation, followed requests for "our heavenly Father's" guidance for the graduates with:

I also pray for one specific student, that You be with her and guide her in the path that You have for her. And we ask all these things in Jesus' name.

The Dobrich's lawsuit contains a list of particular and repeated instances of the school district's overt endorsement of Christianity and describes their attempts to have the issue addressed by the district and the school board.

The board opened the June 15, 2004 meeting at which Dobrich was prepared to speak with a prayer in Jesus' name. The board was not forthcoming to her request that official prayers be in "God's name" rather than in Jesus' name. The high school athletic director veered from his agenda topic to encourage the board to keep praying in Jesus' name.

Board member Donald Hattier followed Dobrich out and offered to "compromise" by keeping graduation free of prayers to Jesus. And, according to the complaint, he warned her not to hire a lawyer.

A large crowd turned out for the next board meeting and many people spoke in support of school prayer. Mona Dobrich spoke passionately of her own "outsider" experience as a student in Indian River District schools and of how hard she'd worked to make sure her children didn't also feel like outsiders.

Hattier again approached her after the meeting. This time, the complaint alleges, he told her he'd spoken with the Rutherford Institute, a religious right legal group.

From here on, the situation grew even uglier:

The district board announced the formation of a committee to develop a religion policy. And the local talk radio station inflamed the issue.

On the evening in August 2004 when the board was to announce its new policy, hundreds of people turned out for the meeitng. The Dobrich family and Jane Doe felt intimidated and asked a state trooper to escort them.

The complaint recounts a raucous crowd that applauded the board's opening prayer and then, when sixth-grader Alexander Dobrich stood up to read a statement, yelled at him "take your yarmulke off!" His statement, read by Samantha, confided "I feel bad when kids in my class call me Jew boy."

A state representative spoke in support of prayer and warned board members that "the people" would replace them if they faltered on the issue. Other representatives spoke against separating "god and state."

Well, we know what comes next. That's right. It's time for the rightwing eliminationist rhetoric, the thinly-veiled threats:

A former board member suggested that Mona Dobrich might "disappear" like Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the atheist whose Supreme Court case resulted in ending organized school prayer. She disappeared in 1995 and her dismembered body was found six years later.

The crowd booed an ACLU speaker and told her to "go back up north."

In the days after the meeting the community poured venom on the Dobriches. Callers to the local radio station said the family they should convert or leave the area. Someone called them and said the Ku Klux Klan was nearby.

Now this suit was first filed in February 2005. Accusations and counter claims have been flying since then as the school board seems to have dug in its heels:

In April the board's insurance company, which had been representing the district in the lawsuit, filed suit against it (and the individual board members) because they had, against its advice, rejected the settlement offer. The board fired the attorneys that had been representing them and hired a new set. The insurance company is reportedly refusing to pay for the board's legal defense from the date the members rejected the settlement offer.

Unless a settlement in reached, the case is scheduled for trial in June 2007. The Dobrich children will have long put the Indian River School District behind them, but they won't forget it.

As for the school board, they must be understood as foot soldiers in the modern American Kulturkampf. I come to this description via a timely post by Billmon that is predictive of the Dobrich/Indian River School District affair.

Billmon starts out to critique a Tierney column in the NYTimes. Tierney hypothosized about the effects today -- in less stress and polarization -- if the Civil War had ended with two independent countries, North and South. As Billmon writes:

If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology) libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government.

[snip]

Rapid social changes often produce cultural reaction, which in turn spawns angry political movements. [...] But two things complicate the schematic. One is the fact that the modern American political dialectic is superimposed on older but still extant divisions: geographic (North and South), religious (Catholic and Protestant), ethnic (WASPs and everybody else) and of course class (with the great divide in American politics usually falling between the middle class and the poor.)

[snip]

These underlying fractures, however, don't ameliorate the kulturkampf, they aggravate it. They force politicians on both sides to tune their messages to hit the most incendiary hot button issues -- abortion, gay rights, immigration, terrorism -- in order to hold their disparate coalitions together.

The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole.

[snip]

The result of all this is a political conflict that grows steadily more vituperative, uncivil and tinged with overtones of violence -- a dynamic which, given the emotional and philosophical tendencies of the two camps, definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists.) [emphasis added]

Billmon goes on to say that the familiar red state/blue state electoral map doesn't remind him of the Old Confederacy as much as it reminds him of the map of Spain in 1936, at the height of the Spanish Civil War.

The point is obviously not that all these conditions exist in America today .... But the fundamental political dynamic of a society polarized between two broad cultural coalitions, deeply hostile to each other, but also riven by internal contradictions, does seems highly comparable. And, as in Spain, the growing paranoia of the traditionalists is being fed by an almost obsessive fear of external enemies -- Al Qaeda and immigrants instead of the Comintern and socialism.

What's most sobering about all this is what happened in Spain when the moment of truth came. Because the two sides didn't begin the war with neat geographical boundaries between them -- e.g. the blue states and the gray -- the result was a chaotic bloodbath. Every city, town and village in Spain became a battlefield where old scores were settled and new ones made.

[snip]

Talk of disunion and civil war may seem like hyperbole. I'm sure it would certainly seem so to the vast majority of Americans who don't think much about politics or culture and just want to get on with their lives. I'm sure most Spaniards felt the same way in the summer of 1936, just as most Americans did in the winter of 1860.

But the historical truth is that civil wars aren't made by vast majorities, but by enraged and fearful minorities. Looking at America's traditionalists and the modernists today, I see plenty of rage and fear, most, though hardly all, of it eminating from the authoritarian right. For now, these primal passions are still being contained within the boundaries of the conventional political process. But that process -- essentially a system for brokering the demands of competing interest groups -- isn't designed to handle the stresses of a full-blown culture war.

Can we characterize what happened to the Dobrich's one of the early skirmishes in a full-blown culture war? They were, in essence, driven out of town because the dominent local culture would not temper its dominence in accordance with Constitutional law. Had the Dobrich's stayed, there might well have been bloodshed.

The politicians and school board members of Indian River School District aren't stupid people. They have educations and civic responsibilities that make it certain they know the broadest provisions of our Constitution and the First Amendment. It must be then that they don't care. They don't support the Constitution in its entirety and they find the law of the land personally threatening. Should feelings like these become deep enough and widespread enough, our nation will not stand. It is the rightwing that is driving this process, and I can only hope they understand the danger before they go too far.

Acknowledging the power of faith

Thank you, Senator Barack Obama, for reminding me that as a Democrat I should "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy."

And I do acknowledge that power. I acknowledge it every time a pandering politician shoves his personal deity in my face on television, radio, and in print. I acknowledge the power of that faith every time I think about our faith-based president and the zealots who contributed so much toward his insertion into the Oval Office. I acknowledge the power of evangelical faith when I tally the freedoms that might be lost by decisions of the faithful now sitting on the Supreme Court.

What I believe is that many of the faithful do not acknowledge my Constitutional right to be free of their faith, to not have it govern our common laws and dominate our public institutions. I further believe that many of the faithful have no real interest in joining a serious debate, much less reconciling their faith with a modern, pluralistic democracy. Besides, the debate was concluded 219 years ago. A secular nation won.

I also don't appreciate lectures from you, Senator Obama, that undermine the Democratic Party by confirming Republican smears of Dem godlessness (with the notable exception of, ahem, yourself). In your brief Senate career, you seem to have fashioned a role for yourself similar to that of Joe Lieberman's holier-than-thou public scold. The Democratic Party does not need you to do Karl Rove's job.

You might want to see a Democratic Party that would bend the Constitution to accommodate evangelicals. I don't. But that doesn't mean that we have closed our party to evangelicals. You joined, didn't you? And you are free to speak to your audience in whatever religious terms you wish. So let's just leave it there, shall we?