Early Posts
Welcome:
I’m starting this out for the simple reason that I have something to say and I want people to hear it. This is, after all, the entire reason the blog came into being. Hopefully, I will find an audience and not be speaking to open web-space.
Who am I? I’m just a simple guy with the ability to look at things in a slightly different way. I grew up in rural West Texas and Eastern New Mexico and saw absolutely no way to get ahead there, so I followed my father’s footsteps and joined the Navy. Six years later, I drove back to Texas with my future wife and a head full of dreams. I found out that life has its own sense of humor. Better trained than almost anyone I came in contact with, I still couldn’t get much better than minimum wage.
Although things turned out badly between me and my first wife, we had our good times. We lived in Corpus Christi and I fell in love with the Coastal Bend. I spent many wonderful hours with my brother, drinking beer and watching our fishing lines bob in the sun. Life, without any sense of humor, took both his wife and his five year old son and I feared that I would lose my brother, too. I still think it was close – probably closer than I want to know – but he’s still with us and I’m glad of it.
We adopted two kids and I loved being a dad more than I ever loved anything I did. I put my education on hold and focused my efforts at getting two kids through school without drug problems or pregnancy. I’m happy to say they both made it and are able to take care of themselves, even if their father doesn’t agree with everything they do. When I told my grandma about our decision to adoopt, she told me “Being a Daddy is the scariest thing you’ll ever do – if you do it right. You’ll never know if you did the right thing until long after it’s too late to change.” Like so many other things, she was 100% right.
We moved to Florida to be closer to my mother-in-law, who was diagnosed with cancer. She got better and we bought a house and then we got divorced. I managed to keep things going long enough to get the kids graduated from high school and myself graduated with a BA in Psychology. I tell people that a BA in Psychology is good for impressing your cousin when they look at your wall. Basically, I learned that psychologists learn to give people tests to determine their IQ and what ways they fail to deal with reality. In other words, they tell people if they are stupid or crazy. I decided I wanted to put that knowledge to use right away, so I applied to the University of Central Florida to study political science.
I finished my MA in Pol Sci (Public Policy tract) and fell in love again. I’m now remarried and living in New Jersey. I am continuing my studies in politics at the City University of New York and hope to someday be done with school. I’m still interested in public policy, particularly how political theory drives policy decisions.
I’m also learning to be at ease with my faith. I grew up in a Church of Christ, moderated as a teen to a Southern Baptist, then as an adult to a United Methodist. I’m also politically a liberal, and find no problem with stating that I am liberal because I am a Christian. I find it increasingly hard to stomach that Christianity is being used as a crutch for hate rhetoric and a restrictive government.
That brings me here. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even know all the questions. I do know that a lie, if unopposed, becomes true by default. When I was seventeen, and did not yet know the full meaning of my words, I swore before the American flag and upon a Bible that I would defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I cannot turn my back on that promise.
So here I am.
Liberal and Christian? Get Real!:
Well, Democrats have gotten the message, right? Barak Obama told us that blue states worship a mighty God and Hillary Clinton is attending prayer breakfasts and saying that we need to respect anti-abortion extremists and work to eliminate abortion, though maintain its legality. The would-be bastion of liberal-ness, Air America Radio, has even interviewed Jim Wallis – a liberal Evangelical Christian and author – on several programs. Any second now the stampede of Christians will overwhelm the secular left.
I’m not holding my breath for that. I have no doubt that Obama and Clinton are both being sincere in their remarks. I’m very sure that Jim Wallis means what he says. However, if talking to Christians means giving up what it means to be liberal, there will be no more converts than there have been through the years when being liberal meant giving up what it means to be Christian. In other words, until one can safely be Christian and liberal, there will be no Great Uniting of the left.
It’s probably wrong to look to political leaders to start a dialogue with liberal Christians. At least, it’s the wrong way to look if you are a liberal Christian looking for a political voice. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t wait until Lyndon Johnson saw the wisdom of equal rights before he began to speak. The Quakers of the 1860s didn’t wait for Lincoln to condemn slavery before they helped create the Underground Railroad. John Wesley didn’t wait for the Crown to call the Anglican Church back to basics. Jesus didn’t wait for the Romans to grant voting rights to the Jews before he delivered his message.
No, for a truly liberal theology of Christianity to find a voice, it must find its voice from the body of believers. Once that voice is found, and honed, and resonates with voters, then the politicians will be pay attention to it. Denouncing politicians for not hearing a whisper in the crowd is a bit like getting mad at a dog for scratching fleas. It’s just the nature of the animal. Politicians tend to gravitate to, and from, vocally significant influences. So liberal Christians, like myself, have no one to blame but themselves for being ignored.
This is partly why I am working on this blog. I don’t believe I am anywhere close to the caliber of leader that will be required to advance this cause, but I do believe it is a just cause. I believe I can help shape the discussion and, by giving voice to my concerns, I can give hope to others like myself who feel their light is hidden under a basket. Christians are called to be the salt of the earth, but salt on the shelf does not add any taste to the pot. Maybe my feeble efforts can push a few like-minded individuals into the soup, so to speak.
If so, then my voice can become one of a chorus. It can be a simple chorus where the idea of a liberal Christian is not a rude joke, but a loving reality. It can be a chorus where reality is addressed bravely, without cowardly retreat to hollow ideology or immoral sanctioning of anything that feels good at the moment. Perhaps it is a chorus that can make America once again a shining nation on the hill that reaches out to those below us with humility and honest affection rather than arrogance and a bullying nationalism.
There is no shortage of topics that cry out for justice under a liberal theology of Christianity. Poverty abounds and the forces of superstition have forced retreat upon the defenders of the Enlightenment. Honest people are left behind in the headlong crush of free trade and tax reform. People die of preventable diseases and malnutrition, are locked out in the street, and struggle just to be seen as human beings. This is right here in America!
I call on every believer to earnestly search their hearts, their Bibles, and their beliefs for reasons not to address these concerns. We should not let the five percent that we disagree upon prevent us from solving the ninety-five percent of problems we agree upon. We should embrace our brothers and sisters, even when they fall. No – especially when they fall. Ours should be the first hand reaching down and the last to let go.
This is, after all, what it means to be a Christian.
It was my moment of epiphany. I looked around the room at my colleagues and realized that they didn’t want the rational debate they so often claimed. They didn’t really care about maintaining dignity, either in themselves or in their opposition. They wanted to hate. They wanted to single out a group of people that were so different and so stubborn that they could heap every bad thing that mankind does to itself at their feet.
What was amazing was that this was a group of people that would have at least one person stand up and denounce the use of any racial epithet or the slightest hint of sexism in any way. Yet they were perfectly willing to sit and openly sneer and question, not just the intelligence, but the ability to have intelligence, of this group. And the whole reason for this hatred was that the group held legitimate opposing political views.
It was back in November, as the votes were still being tallied in Ohio, when I blew up at my fellow political scientists. How could this group – this self-described bastion of liberal thought – be so narrow-minded, short-sighted, and intolerant? How could they sit and speak of Christians as if they were somehow less worthy of respect and dignity for their beliefs than even an aborigine deep in the jungle? How could they make me feel so unwanted when I had fought so dearly for what had always been described as a common ideology?
Some were taken aback and lapsed into silence. Most looked around and blinked as they collected their thoughts. A few launched a counter-attack. How can anyone who claims to be an heir of the Enlightenment also claim to believe in creationism or the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection? Why should liberals learn to speak to Christians when Christians so obviously want to turn back the clock to the Dark Ages? What had Christians ever done that a liberal would want to associate him or her self with?
I felt not unlike I had through my earlier years when I attended church regularly. When I dared raise questions that threatened the rather small world-view held by the vocal few, suddenly my very existence was called into question. As I ran through the scene in my mind over the next few days, I began to understand a couple of currents in the modern political landscape. I began to understand how, and why, Democrats have consistently lost voters over the last thirty years.
In the early 1970s, the Silent Majority decided it wasn’t really silent and became the Moral Majority. The outright purpose of this group, and many knock-offs, was to simply build the political power of the religious right. The movement religious-ized the electorate and politicized the church. They began with the seemingly natural discussion of school prayer. When they moved on to abortion, it had already become commonplace to hear preachers giving what amounted to political action speeches.
The effect was to pull the faithful to the right. This was done simply by shouting down any and all opposition. Ask Jim Wallis if you don’t believe me – he was called many unchristian things for simply advocating the church keep its eyes on the church. Anyone who opposed the outspoken prophets of the right were either misled, or, increasingly, were not really Christian at all. They were separating the sheep from the goats, from their perspective. What they have really done is kill both the church and the electorate.
Over the last twenty years, the number of Americans attending Church weekly has fallen from around forty-nine percent to about half that number. If the body of the Church mirrors the conservative/liberal cleavage in society at large, then there’s a good chance that the missing half are the liberal Christians who got tired of being told they didn’t exist. If this is true, and I don’t see why it couldn’t be, then the polls that show so many people stay at home on election-day while those who attend church weekly overwhelmingly vote Republican are telling us something else, too. Those missing liberal Christians fell out of the electorate as well.
It isn’t difficult to understand why a liberal who felt so uneasy at Church that they dropped out of that body would also be a Christian who felt so uneasy around liberals that they simply dropped out of that body. Making a rough estimate of demographics, this gives us about ten of the electorate that should be liberal Christians – if only someone would make them feel welcomed.
Think that isn’t much? A ten percent swing in votes towards liberal candidates puts almost every Republican House seat in play. It puts the Senate solidly in Democratic hands. It reverses the Presidency of George W. Bush.
Sometimes not much can still be enough.
Policy – Medicare B
Like I’ve said before, I try not to talk too much about policy around here. No one, even me, likes to sound like a huge geek (note to all Democrats running for office: drop the geek-ness). While I do enjoy talking in general, I like it even more when someone listens. Cats, I find, are good for this (at least they act like it).
But, dig into the cookie bag and reward yourself for being a good boy or girl and listen for a few minutes.
The United States is facing a crisis of health care. Things have changed a lot since my grandma paid the doctor fifty dollars and a live chicken for “birthing” her youngest son (my uncle). I haven’t actually tried to give my doctor a live chicken for seeing me, but I’m willing to bet he would prefer the insurance co-pay.
I’m fortunate and I know it. My wife works for an insurance company, so we are pretty well guaranteed some of the best coverage available – as long as she works there. There have been times when I was not covered. Anyone who refers to health insurance as a luxury has never stayed awake all night listening to the breath rattling in their child’s lungs and praying that it doesn’t stop. They’ve never limped to work with a knee that didn’t quite bend fully. They’ve never watched a doctor’s face change as he noted on your chart that there was no way you could possibly pay for his time, much less the x-rays and CT scans and blood work he’d really like to have.
Health insurance, in modern America, is a necessity.
Yet it is a necessity too many working people do without. I’m not talking about the homeless or indigent here. I’m talking about men and women (mostly women) who get up every day and go work at least eight hours a day and see a deduction in their paycheck to pay for Medicare. It’s inhumane to make someone pay for health care for the elderly while they do without the same benefits. It’s robbery.
A report released today by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows that almost a third of all workers in the state of Texas do not have any medical coverage at all. New Mexico, Florida, Montana, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Arkansas all have more than 20 percent of their workforce uninsured. Nationwide, over forty percent of these people have been unable to see a doctor in the last 12 months because of the cost of doing so. More than half of them don’t have a personal doctor and twenty percent rate their health as fair to poor.
According to Regency Blue Cross of Idaho more than 70 million Americans (out of a total of 180 million) go without health insurance for at least one month out of every twelve. The average time spent without insurance by those people is between five and six months (because a new job requires 90 days before you get benefits usually). Better than 60 percent of these people are under the age of 34 and only 20 percent are unemployed. Less than a quarter of these people have less than a high school diploma (meaning they aren’t stupid) and more than a third work for small businesses of less than 25 people (which is too small for group benefits and exactly the type of business the President loves to promote). Almost three-quarters of those without insurance were born in America.
Not exactly the picture of lazy, illegal immigrants soaking up benefits the right likes to paint, is it?
The fact is that everyone already pays for these people not being insured. Think about it. If your child has a high fever are you going to do nothing? Most likely you’ll take them to the hospital – to the emergency room. Of course you can’t pay the bill. Does this care come free? Hardly. Instead, hospitals over-bill others in order to break even (or make a profit).
The top four reasons a person is without insurance are: 1) They can’t afford the coverage offered by their employers; 2) there is no coverage offered by employers; 3) they lost their coverage when they lost their job; and 4) loss of coverage due to divorce or children are too old to be covered on parent’s policy. None of these are the fault of people who are doing their best to make ends meet. To say that it is their fault is to spit in the face of every working man and woman in America.
I suppose Congress believes that the retired poor should have just as crappy a life as the working poor. Congressional Republicans now agree that they will only cut ten billion dollars from the Medicare program instead of the twenty billion dollars the House wanted to strip from the program. At the same time, they are voting for another $70 billion in tax cuts. It’s a good thing they passed that prescription plan for Medicare because it won’t have any money to buy prescriptions anyway. (Oddly enough, they never explain how cutting $10 billion in spending and $70 billion in revenues works towards balancing a budget.)
So what’s the answer? As I blogged not long ago, the answer is to expand Medicare. Allowing every American to buy into Medicare B (or optional C) would flood the program with money. Coupling it with a one dollar an hour hike in the minimum wage would provide almost all of the money needed to buy into coverage. If the cost is split with the employer, who can then get a tax break (remember, small businesses are good), then everyone actually ends up slightly better off than they were when the mess began. Instead of following Wile E. Coyote over the cliff, we actually stop with the Roadrunner and take a step back from the cliff.
I’m trying hard to get this idea in front of enough people to make some headway. It makes sense to me. No one gets hurt and everyone benefits. Why is it so hard to get such an idea in the public arena? Perhaps it’s because it doesn’t scare anyone and, thus, does not translate into votes.
We need Congressional leaders who are more worried about leading and less about how they look when they lead. We need some leaders with enough spine to defy both parties and say, “This is best for the country.” Two nights ago I listened to Rev. Jim Wallis tell a crowded lecture hall, “You are the leaders you are waiting for.”
My friends, today I lay those words at your feet. What you do with it lies on your conscience.
There seems no limit to how far Objectivist Republicans will go to take apart the federal government. Old Town Review makes brief mention of this attempt by Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum to outsource the National Weather Service . While they tend to write it off as just one more attempt of a loony politician to gain some attention, I believe it is just a symptom of the ongoing hi-jacking of the Republican Party by Objectivists.
Objectivism , for those who don’t know, is a philosophy created by writer Ayn Rand . Her body of work, including the masterpieces The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were basically dedicated to one purpose – providing a moral imperative for capitalism. Her basic premise is that, as a private philosophy, on intense self-interest is a legitimate action. She set this out specifically in the treatise as The Virtue of Selfishness .
Objectivism is a simple philosophy – as simple as taking the most selfish action possible at every step of the way. However, everyone has the right to be a selfish bastard if they choose. The problem is that Objectivism is not satisfied with making a meaner world one person at a time. They want to make it a meaner world by overtaking the government.
That makes it a problem for all of us. Part of the “Conservative Revolution” was a uniting of several philosophies into a common political agenda. It was headed by true Conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, but it also included a lot of Libertarians and Objectivists – like Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. As long as they were in the minority, the specific differences didn’t make a lot of difference. All three groups had an anti-New Deal attitude and agreed that dismantling the social safety net created by Democrats in the 1940s and 1950s.
The problem now is that they are in power. Republicans hold majorities in both Houses of Congress. They have held the White House for all but eight of the last twenty-five years. They have a majority of federal judges that agree with them. What united them for so long now divides them.
You can still see Conservatives arguing that the federal deficit is destroying the freedom of our children by obligating them to higher taxes for our spending. You hear Libertarians arguing that much of the Bush Administration is in direct opposition to the guiding principals of the US Constitution. And you hear the Objectivists applauding pretty much everything the Government is doing now.
Objectivism holds that the only legitimate function of government is to hold a monopoly on force. The monopoly of force is necessary in case of the masses rising up against the wealthy to rob them of their wealth. This is necessary because Objectivist society is based on pure capitalism – what I was taught as a child was called pure greed. Objectivists have moralized capitalism in a manner somewhat reminiscent of John Calvin’s idea that worldly wealth is evidence that God approves of what you are doing.
Of course, strict Objectivism is actually atheistic. The little twist of throwing God in the mix is a result of the constant pandering to the religious right. It’s a dangerous twist, though, because it legitimizes every underhanded capitalistic trick that can possibly be pulled as long as it increases the bottom line. It believes that the poor are poor simply because they are morally inferior – and holds this as self-evident because God would not allow a worthy person to be poor, or sick, or stuck in a war zone.
This is really what is behind the push to privatize Social Security – not that anyone will be better off, but that God will work through the stock market to choose who he wants to be better off. The rest simply don’t matter. This is what is really behind the push to minimize government – in every area except the use of force. This is why the Administration worked so hard to build a (false) case against Saddam Hussein – and why they are now trying to connect him to Oklahoma City and every other bad thing that happened in history – because Objectivism cannot justify pre-emptive war.
If I am wrong, then I am simply a misguided liberal trying to hold on to the social contract that was in place at my birth. If I am right, however, then every one of us has a lot to worry about. Objectivism views every attempt to even soften it around the corner as a moral attack on its basic premise. It views anyone who doesn’t go along with it as a heretic and an enemy.
It didn’t change on 9/11. It changed ten years ago today (click here ).
At approximately 9:00 am, Timothy McVeigh shut the door on a rented truck and walked away. When the clock in the nursery school at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building read 9:02, his hatred tore a gaping wound in our national conscience and forever changed us all. At least, it should have.
It didn’t take long – about as long as was needed to prove it wasn’t really an Arabic person that set off the bomb – for the apologists to begin clamoring. It wasn’t really McVeigh’s fault, they claimed. His cold-blooded murder was the direct result of and response to over-reaching government that had become criminal at Ruby Ridge (click here )and Waco ( click here ). It was, they claimed, like everything else wrong with the world, Bill Clinton’s fault ( click here ).
It’s the same hatred that motivated Eric Rudolph to build and explode four bombs in Georgia and Alabama ( ongoing coverage ). Two women’s clinic, a lesbian nightclub, and the Olympic games were Rudolph’s targets. An off duty police officer lost his life and a nurse lost her eye. Rudolph, like McVeigh, shows no regret but shrugs off the suffering he caused by saying the attack wasn’t personal.
The same is true for James Kopp ( click here ). He was found guilty of the sniper-style death of an abortion doctor in New York. His trial took place five years after he decided to kill someone because similar minded people agreed to grant him shelter and give him food. At least he never claimed it wasn’t personal.
Of course, it wasn’t Clinton’s fault and it wasn’t a rational and necessary act by a freedom fighter. It was a cowardly and despicable attack on the most defenseless citizens of this country. Even if the actions of the government at Ruby Ridge and Waco were criminal, nothing – nothing – excuses such terrorism. Adding to the blood of innocents with even more innocent blood is never a just way to make a point.
It is, however, the rational act of someone in whom a deep-seated hatred was bred. It didn’t occur naturally – hatred never does. It was taught and learned and mastered and passed along again. That hatred still has a palpable heartbeat today – ten years after it should have been snuffed out. Instead, it is now being preached by members of Congress.
Tom DeLay of Texas issued a thinly veiled warning against federal judges after they failed to rule in what he determined was the proper way ( click here ) in the Terri Schiavo case. His buddy, John Cornyn, then used the case to excuse those who take violent action against judges ( click here ). Only ten years ago, this was the rhetoric of the “lunatic fringe” and now it is so mainstream that we actually have people running for Congress on it as a legitimate issue.
DeLay and Cornyn are simply passing along the hatred that is ripping this country apart. It has to stop. It is wrong in every sense of the word. It is anti-American and it is anti-Christian – regardless of the claims that they are done in the best interest of the country and at the behest of a vengeful God. Honestly, isn’t this the exact claims made by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden?
If we are going to truly wage war against terrorism, then we must start at home. We must root out and destroy the hatred that is the core reason that terrorism exists. We must label acts of violence against innocent people as terrorism – no matter who acts and who is the victim. We must denounce those who speak words that even come close to legitimizing such senseless attacks.
One of my favorite prayers begins, “O Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” President Bush should seize upon the opportunity to engage in a national day of prayer and lead us in that prayer. We are a country badly in need of healing, a people badly in need of someone to unite us.
It has been said, “If everyone lives by an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will all be hungry and blind.” That is, of course, assuming that anyone is left alive.
When Bad Theology Threatens Life
Sometimes we are at our most hurtful when we are trying to be merciful. It is perhaps one of the fundamental problems with human nature that we judge the world by our own experience. We forget, in our hubris, that even the wisest among us is only of very limited intelligence. We think we are doing right, but we are not. We think we are being merciful, but we are increasing pain and suffering, not lessening it.
Here is the story of the Ali family (free registration required for the full story). I encourage you to read all of it and seriously consider what it means to your view of how we should, as a community, defend life. If you do not find at least one point to challenge you; then you are simply being willfully blind to the paradox the family had to face.
I started out reading with an enormous amount of empathy for both parents. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in that situation. While I will not question if their decision was correct for them, I will question the religious teachings that framed it for them. I will question a theology that forces a woman to deny reality and for a man to face the very real possibility of losing a wife he loves for the sake of a baby that can never live more than a few minutes. I will question a theology that requires a woman to bring forth a life that is doomed to die in a horrible fashion.
Evangelical theology continues to teach that life begins at conception, and must be defended from the time the sperm cell unites with the egg. This demands that abortion is not an option under any circumstances. Susan Ali’s circumstances were extreme by any measure. Her theology forced her to believe that subjecting her child to a slow death of suffocation under the weight of its own lungs was the will of a loving and merciful God. Her theology forced her to deny the medical reality until it was too late to take action. Her theology forced her to stand against the one person that loves her more deeply than any other in the world – her own husband.
I do believe that life – and especially human life – is a miracle. That we can explain how it happens makes it no less miraculous to me. I do believe that a human fetus is worthy of greater consideration than, say, a cat fetus. However, I can’t really see how the life of the baby was ever a real consideration. The consideration seems to have begun and ended with the evangelical ideology of abortion.
To me, if the life of the child were considered, then it would have been much more merciful to have aborted it early. Even relatively late, when it was discovered that the baby’s lungs were so full of liquid that breathing would be impossible, I believe it would have been more merciful to administer anesthesia and perform a C-section that resulted in the death of the fetus. Killing the fetus in-utero would have been much more merciful and exposed the child much less pain than giving birth to it, then going through the same stages.
It also brings up a point of hypocrisy. The right-to-life theology insists that there is no difference between a fetus at three months prior to birth and one three seconds after birth. If we know that a child will die within five minutes of birth, how can that reasonably be called sin to allow that death to occur before the baby’s pain centers are fully formed? If it is all right to administer medication to prevent a fully formed baby, only minutes from the womb, from feeling pain as it dies; how can it be sinful to administer medication that will end the growing life before it experiences that horrible crushing weight of its own body?
A second point of hypocrisy is that the doctors were allowed to administer this child medication to make its passing painless, but Terri Schiavo was denied the same mercy. If we agree that it is merciful to administer medication to prevent even a brain injured person from feeling a limited amount of discernable pain, then why is it not merciful to grant everyone in that situation the exact same consideration?
The real problem with this idea of “life-begins-at-conception” is that it denies reality. It gave Susan Ali hope beyond anything grounded in reality that her baby would somehow be normal. It put Susan Ali’s life, her marriage, and her future at risk for the sake of a child that never had a scrap of a chance to survive. It taught that her choice was in no way different than someone who was merely inconvenienced by their pregnancy. It taught that mercy was condemning an infant to a painful death that was totally unnecessary.
