As the Right Wing base sinks to new levels of insanity taking the Republican brand with it, “going stealth”  has become the campaign strategy of choice in districts where an all-out, Teabagger Town Hall, Palin-Beck, froth-mouthed feeding frenzy would just turn stomachs.  The Right’s agenda isn’t evolving, just its tactics.  You have to give it to those frackers.  They are smart. 

They still want to drown government in a bathtub.  Never mind that we need our safety net and education system more than ever.  They still think that some hubba hubba god made women “separate but equal"—men with brains and biceps, women with vaginas.   (It’s called complementarianism).  They still think we can teach creationism in schools and expect to be competitive internationally. (Bing “Academic Freedom Bills”). They still value life until birth. They still think we can end drug use by jailing addicts. They still think that guns don’t kill people.  They still think the problem with their marriage is my brother.  And they still think that you can give the free market absolute power without it corrupting absolutely.

But in some of the best run Republican and Religious Right (Rebiblican) campaigns in the country, you’d never know it.  Here in King County, Washington, the Right even funded a charter amendment making county races nonpartisan before running a “moderate, nonpartisan” Rebiblican named Susan Hutchison.  In Virginia and New Jersey, to quote Frank Rich,

"The very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine."

As several bloggers have warned (here, here, here), we should expect to see more of this over the next few years, especially since it worked beautifully for both McDonnell and Christie. The crowing about these two Rebiblican wins has spanned the country, in contrast to the dead silence about the Palin-Beck chow fest in upstate New York that the voters barfed up. 

What’s interesting is that the same stealth strategy failed miserably in Washington State.  Palin-wannabe Susan Hutchison was defeated by fourteen points after being ahead in the polls just weeks ago. 

What happened?  It’s very simple:  Word got out about who she is, and it made King County’s voters a bit queasy.  Reproductive rights activists took to the streets with homemade signs that made evening news. An anti-dominionist did research and then rallied colleagues at other blogs (e.g.God’s Own Party).  A public access TV host recruited guests to talk about Hutchison’s brand of politicized creationism.  A lefty blogger (Horsesass.org) defied copy-right claims to show footage Hutchison speaking to her base.  So did her opponent’s campaign.  So did local students.   A Seattle comic made his own funny low budget cartoon ad exposing Hutchison’s puppet masters.  

It is also true that the usual suspects—campaign professionals and volunteers, unions, advocacy groups and donors--played their roles and played them well.  And Susan Hutchison's opponent Dow Constantine, now King County's executive, is solid and experienced.  In the long run, that might have been enough.  But it wasn't until Hutchison got exposed relentlessly and repeatedly from all sides that the tide of voter opinion turned.  By November 3, the voting public knew who Susan Palin Hutchison is, and for a stealth campaign, that’s lethal.  Several years ago, George Lakoff said that when the Right uses our language to cover their agenda they are showing us where they are weak, where the public actually disagrees with them.  When Rebiblicans pose as moderates and change agents, they have just exposed soft tissue. 

The right has the advantage in mainstream media, in hierarchy, authority, and message discipline.  But the left has the advantage when it comes to distributed information networks, outspoken renegades, and innovation.  If we want that East Coast crowing to stop, we need to start engaging these networks and cutting them loose (with funds as needed) to do what they do best.

The most controversial check I write each year is the one that goes to a small nonprofit called Project Prevention. Project Prevention pays drug addicts and chronic alcoholics to get permanent or long term birth control. Director Barbara Harris founded the program after adopting not one or two but four drug addicted babies from the same mother. She watched them scream and writhe inconsolably, backs arched and hands clenched, and she said, "Enough."

Reproductive rights organizations that I support like Planned Parenthood and NARAL don't approve of Barbara's work. It operates in a bioethical gray zone that makes them uncomfortable, and should. Here is their reasoning: Payment has the power to manipulate people into decisions they will regret. An addict may be desperate enough for a fix that she'd sell her soul, let alone her ability to reproduce.

I think they are right. Addiction does make people that desperate, and a decision born of desperation is a decision coerced. Consequently, addiction pits two things I cherish against each other. One of them is reproductive freedom. I believe passionately that parenthood is one of the richest, most spiritual dimensions of life, and that we collectively should neither obligate nor restrict it without overwhelming cause.

I also believe is that childhood is a precious trust, and we should bring children into this world only if we are prepared to honor that trust--to give them a decent shot at flourishing. Under the wrong circumstances childhood can be a living hell. And that is far more likely to be the case when children are the unintended product of unprotected sex, with the judgment of involved parties clouded by addiction.

When our ancestors had no control over fertility, childbearing wasn't a moral decision. But now it is. I tell my children that we are responsible for what we have control over; power and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Contraception is one of humanity's newfound powers. So it is that contraceptives bring a new dimension of moral decision making to the human race. And as someone who has influence over another person's reproductive decisions through my charitable giving, I end up having to weigh moral questions.

In my experience, we encounter moral dilemmas most often when two good things or two bad things are pitted against each other. It's easy to say that childhood health is a good thing or to say that personal freedom is a good thing. But which matters more-- the freedom of women to reproduce as they choose, or the right of children to have a healthy start in life?

As a woman, I am utterly grateful that my culture, U.S. Laws, scientific advances and financial privilege gave me a high level of reproductive freedom. I had the freedom to defer childbearing-- to go to school, travel, and heal my childhood wounds first. I had the freedom to abort an unhealthy fetus. I had the freedom, finally, to bring two chosen daughters into a solid marriage with a bounty of love and life experiences to share. When I think of my own life, I value reproductive freedom a lot: for people I love like my daughters, but also for people I've never met.

But is it the needs of women or children that go most to the core for me? Mercifully, they often are aligned. Still, how do I weigh them when they come into conflict?

One way I get insight into my own hierarchy of values is by looking at what I do. Throughout my adult life, my most compelling efforts (grad school, work, volunteering, giving, writing) have been about making room for a little more delight and a little less pain in this world. To me, more reproductive freedom and fewer addicted babies both matter because they serve this end. But if I look closely at my own history, one of these values trumps the other. The lettering I painstakingly stuck on my car as a young therapist said, "Children deserve to be planned for and chosen." Years later, I was instantly smitten with a quirky warm political co-conspirator, Patricia, who declared that she was pro-choice because, "All babies deserve to have their toes kissed."

My checks to Project Prevention fit a pattern. They tell me that over all these years, my values--in this area, at least--haven't changed. All babies do deserve to have their toes kissed, and their knees and elbows and unclenched hands. It is a bonus that, from the sound of things, most of Project Prevention's efforts--inspired by Barbara's babies--are giving women healthy (new) beginnings in life too.

(Huffington Post - October 13, 2009)

Next week in King County, Washington, "nonpartisan" Susan Hutchison will be vying with Democrat Dow Constantine for the role of County Executive. The seat controls significant resources in a region that often plays a leadership role in future oriented public policy. If King County were a state, its budget size would be 13th in the country. Economically, the county lives on cutting edge science, engineering and technology: Microsoft, Boeing, Amgen, Nintendo and a host of tech/biotech startups.

What national precedents is King County likely to be setting in the next go around? That depends in part on who sits in the executive seat. Constantine has track records in brokering anti-sprawl, sustainable development and historic preservation. He's a proponent of strong, innovative carbon policies. But who is the elusive Hutchison? Seattle Times reporter Danny Westneat called Susan Hutchison a sort-of-Republican. Erica Barnett at the Stranger called her a Republican Religious Wingnut. A member of her own party called her "our Sarah Palin." Is Susan Hutchison a Palin in the making? You be the judge.

In this post, Bill Alford at Moral Politics Television, Seattle, interviewed Dr. Valerie Tarico, author, activist and former evangelical about what she perceives behind the nonpartisan veil.

Is Susan Hutchison a stealth right-winger and closet fundamentalist, as some folks are saying?
Let's start with her political leanings. Hutchison is a solid triple R: Religious Right Republican. Since 2003, her political giving supported Mike Huckabee (over John McCain), George W. Bush and Dino Rossi. She spent $3000 trying to get Rossi into office. All of her political/religious affiliations are with what I would call effective, conservative or evangelical organizations with good PR. Calling herself "nonpartisan" is a smart posture, because King County majorities probably wouldn't vote for Susan Hutchison if they were clear on her political identity. And it works. In an early interview with Seattlepi.com reporter Neil Modie, Hutchison herself said, "Our polls showed that 10 percent of the people responding thought I was extremely liberal." Her team is working to sustain that confusion.

Solidly Repubican. How about fundamentalist?
Well that depends on what you mean by fundamentalist? If you use fundamentalist to mean strident, cut-off-from- the-world and fringe, then no. Hutchison is gracious and charming and obviously right in the swirl of the Seattle's fine arts community. If you mean a fundamentalist from a theological standpoint: the Bible is literally the perfect word of god, Jesus was born to a literal virgin, Jesus was a human sacrifice, people who don't believe that are going to be tortured forever. Yes. It would appear from Susan Hutchison's own words that she's a born-again fundamentalist who thinks that politicians should use their status to promote their religious beliefs. Hutchison gave the keynote at a prayer breakfast this spring. Here is a reading she chose, which was followed by her own born again testimony and exhortation for politicians to use their bully pulpit to promote their (Christian) religion.

"It was through what his son did that God cleared a path for everything to come to him all things in heaven and in hearth . . . for Christ's death on the Cross has made peace with God for all by his blood . . . He has done this through the death on the cross of his own human body . . . The only condition is that you fully believe the truth, believe the truth, standing in it and never shifting from trusting him to save you. This is the wonderful news that came to each of you and is now spreading throughout the world. Prayer Breakfast 1:02:35 to 1:04:40

Note the emphasis on blood sacrifice, belief and spreading the good news. This is a very evangelical choice, and she follows it with stories that reinforce the message. You can hear Hutchison's message at WTV, linked above through Barnett's article. Hutchison begins around 47 minutes into the breakfast.

What exactly is the part you quoted?
Well, what she was actually reading from is something called the Living Bible. It's not a translation, so you won't find it even at Evangelical sites like www.biblegateway.com that allow you to compare Bible translations side by side. Back in the 1970's a fundamentalist preacher and writer named Kenneth Taylor decided he wanted the Bible to be more accessible, so he wrote his own version, an admitted "paraphrase." That means he put in his own words what he thought God was trying to say. I can't resist quoting George Bernard Shaw here: No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.

Actually, it's not unusual for Biblical literalists to pick and choose what translations or paraphrases they use to make a point, as Hutchison has done. In The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren uses over 15 different translations, if I remember correctly. He chooses whichever translation best suits his point for different verses he cites.

Hutchison chose not only her Bible but her text fragments carefully. She left out some parts that might have been a bit jarring. For example, early in her message she emphasized that Jesus made: "the earthly world with its rulers and authorities, its Washington State government . . . " The words "Washington State government" replaced the words, "all were made by Christ for his own use and glory". His own use? His own glory? It sounds kind of ugly. So she put in something benign that doesn't jar listeners out of the narrative flow and in fact brings it closer to home. She is a wonderful evangelical speaker. Her message quality is on par with that of Joel Olsteen or Rick Warren. In a denomination that allowed women in the pulpit, she could draw a large congregation.

But wouldn't any real Christian be comfortable with those words she wrote? Wouldn't they agree with them?
Not necessarily. Many, many Christians would chose other words to represent their faith. Remember that for Susan Hutchison to read these words -- there are layers of filtering here. As more is known about the Bible through linguistic analysis and archeological discoveries, more and more Christian theologians don't think of the Bible as the literally perfect word of God. We know that some parts were copied from Akkadian and Sumerian texts, some parts were handed down through oral traditions. The Catholic councils that decided what got into the Bible and what didn't -- they didn't have access to the same quality of information we have now, and they were responding to a specific political context. Hutchison's reading is her edited selection of a paraphrase by Ken Taylor of The Book of Colossians. But who wrote Colossians? Scholars aren't so sure any more. You can get a glimpse of the dispute even on Wikipedia.

Hutchison chose this fragment of writing by a contested author paraphrased by a fundamentalist to fit her own beliefs about blood atonement and salvation -- and her evangelistic message to electeds. This is a fundamentalist evangelical choice. People hear that Hutchison attends a Presbyterian church and they assume that she is mainstream in her community and beliefs. What they don't know is that fundamentalism as a movement actually emerged out of the Presbyterian seminaries in the early Twentieth Century, and Presbyterian churches vary widely in terms of where they fall on the continuum. Hutchison's church is not middle of the road for Presbyterians in this region. It is fairly middle of the road for evangelical churches. During the prayer breakfast message, Hutchison made another move that reflects both fundamentalist theology and her personality: She very graciously but clearly used evangelical language to dismiss other forms of Christianity.

What do you mean?
Well, part of the talk is a classic evangelical "testimony." This is a stock form of proselytizing in which the speaker shares their own born again experience. She talks about how she was raised in Christianity, knew the Bible but she wasn't a real Christian until she realized she needed a "more personal faith" and had this "thing happen to her." The word personal -- personal relationship with Jesus, personal salvation and so on -- it's a big word in Evangelical circles. She emphasizes salvation by belief in blood atonement. She repeats it several times. This is a way that Protestants, particularly Evangelicals differentiate themselves from Catholics, who believe that salvation comes through both faith and works. The message is that you are not really a Christian until you have this personal relationship, and salvation is about belief.

The real question here is: What are the implications for her likely priorities in public office?
What is the old saying? We are known by the company we keep. That is actually reasonable folk wisdom. James Wellman, University of Washington sociologist likes to say that, "Our sense of reality is socially constructed." It makes sense to assume that Hutchison's priorities are shaped by her expressed values and her associations, just like the rest of us. So, independent of her work for the Simonyi Foundation, who does Hutchison hang out with?

Her prayer breakfast talk was hosted by an organization called Washington Leadership. Their tag line is: A place where state and community leaders can come together with emerging leaders around the person of Jesus. I might expect Hutchison to be a bit fuzzy on church/state separation issues, because the evangelical mandate as I know it, and as she manifested it in her prayer breakfast talk, trumps separation. Hutchison appears to place a strong value on leveraging public exposure to spread her version of Christianity. Hutchison is on the board of Young Life international, which fits perfectly. It is a fun, smart evangelical organization that seeks to convert teenagers and get teenagers to convert each other to this fundamentalist theology we heard her reading.

Until she began her run for office, she also was on the board of the Discovery Institute, which gets evangelical funding to undermine secular "materialist" science education and replace it with a sophisticated version of creationism called Intelligent Design. They claim ID is science, but even the Templeton Foundation, an organization that funds the intersection between faith and science disagrees and won't give them money. I find it dismaying that Hutchison has been around the caliber of scientists she claims to have encountered through her work at Simonyi without developing a deeper understanding of the scientific method and why it works so well.

Hutchison spoke this month at a conservative think tank, the Washington Policy Institute that espouses free market fundamentalism and right now is promoting a film trying to deny climate science and dissuade climate action. So again you see this inclination toward undermining the scientific enterprise -- in the WPI case with an eye toward economic policy. In my mind the connection between free market fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism is an orientation toward ideology (ie. strong narrative filters that screen out contradictory information) and perhaps consequently a weakened ability to run a recalculation on early assumptions and decisions.

Any final thoughts?
I look at Susan Hutchison, and as a former evangelical I see a woman on a mission, in that sense much like Sarah Palin, but without the weird exorcism of witches stuff. Hutchison's evangelical associations have steered her in a very specific political direction: She gave money to evangelical Republican Mike Huckabee over John McCain. She refuses to answer questions about reproductive rights. Heck, she even refuses to tell people that she's a Republican. While working for Charles Simonyi and giving away his money, she has had plenty of opportunity to become more sophisticated about the scientific method and data based decisions -- but instead I worry that she has become better at clinging to an ideology in the face of evidence to the contrary. I personally prefer having someone in the King County Exec office who bases their policy decisions on data and who is on a mission to serve the people of King County.

On October 2nd, The Seattle Times featured an AP article about the recent quake in Sumatra, along with a "how to help" list. At the top of that list was World Vision International.

What the article failed to mention, and many donors fail to realize, is that World Vision is an Evangelical Christian organization with a mission that includes "serving as a witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ." Perhaps the best known program of World Vision is their child sponsorships. As an Evangelical college student, I sponsored a child in India. I even got and sent a few letters, and it felt great knowing that thanks to me he could afford to attend a Christian school in his area.

World Vision explicitly states on their website that they "do not proselytize or work with those who insist on proselytism. Proselytism takes place whenever assistance is offered on condition that people must listen or respond to a message or as an inducement to leave one and join another part of the Christian church." The organization ascribes to Red Cross standards prohibiting conversion activities. But consider the next paragraph from their website:

"At the same time, World Vision shares the Church's commitment to disciple followers of Jesus Christ who bear witness to the Gospel by life, deed, word and sign, with the goal of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel. We do this through the life of service that we lead, the deeds of Christian love we perform, the words that we share about our faith and the signs of prayers answered as we visibly and concretely improve the lives of others." (emphasis theirs)

People in disaster zones and small children, the two primary populations served by World Vision, are both particularly vulnerable, and because of this they are particularly vulnerable to influence. It's great that World Vision doesn't take an "or else" approach to aid: listen to our message or else go hungry. Not all missionary organizations adhere to this ethical boundary. But to deny the conversion pressures of money and medical care or education is naive. Consider the plight of Hindu parents who have a choice between a bare local school or a Christian school that provides paper, pencils, and books. All over the world, vast differences in power and resources say to desperate people: Christians have what you need; Jesus is the answer. The World Vision mission, in its own understated way, acknowledges this.

Does this make World Vision a bad investment? It depends on your own values, on whether their mission of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel is also yours. Make no mistake. In evangelical circles, the word "witness" is code for seeking converts, and "Gospel" means salvation by the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. If that is a message you want carried to the world by a competent, compassionate aid organization, World Vision may be your ticket. If it's just the competent, compassionate aid that you care about, then you're likely better off sending your money to an organization further down the list. Try Mercy Corps, for example, or Doctors without Borders or that standard bearer, the Red Cross itself.

 

Republicans say that Democrats fail to encourage personal responsibility.   A battle in Seattle Washington over plastic bag fees provides a perfect, if minor, example.  After the city council voted to require a twenty cent per bag fee for disposable grocery bags, CAMP, the Central Area Motivation Program joined the chemical industry in opposition.  A fee, they said, would adversely impact poor people, even if they are provided with reusable bags for free.  It’s just too much to ask that poor people remember a bag when they shop, and so they will get charged for them.  That’s the reasoning—from a “Motivation” program, which is now lending credibility to a $1.3 million dollar referendum propaganda campaign by a plastics trade group—all aimed to ensure that those fees don’t happen. 

 

Why all the money?  Well, right now the average Seattle resident uses over 500 disposable bags per year, and a similar fee in Ireland reduced disposable grocery bag use by 90%, with approximately one billion fewer bags consumed per year.  Yes, people replace some of those free grocery bags with purchased garbage bags etc, but the chemical industry’s opposition tells us loud and clear that they expect overall consumption of plastics to go down here too.  Now add the fact that the Center for American Progress heralded the Seattle fee as a model for cities across the country.  The chemical industry thinks it’s worth crushing this thing before it gains momentum. 

 

I’ll confess, it took me months to get used to bringing bags when I shop, but given a little time, even harried old dogs can master new tricks.  My own tricks all aim to get around forgetfulness:

 

1.In the bottom of my purse I keep a plastic grocery bag or two folded into little triangles as demonstrated by a Japanese friend.   (You fold it like a flag, then tuck in the little end.  Very OCD, but it ends up teeny and cool looking.)

2. A thin nylon bag that stuffs inside itself (given to me as a party favor) now clips onto my bicycle;

3. After shopping I leave my collection of canvas bags prominently in the entry way where I get annoyed enough at tripping over them that I put them in the trunk. 

4. Even so, I’ve had to locate the bag recycling bins at my grocery stores for the times I still walk in the door without one. 

My four tricks get me to about 90%, --the magic Irish number.  That would be fifty bags per Valerie per year instead of 500, a little embarrassing still, but a major accomplishment for someone with the memory of a gnat.   

 

It’s time to stop the utter condescension that says harried poor people can’t learn new tricks too and that expecting them to participate in the common good is unreasonable.   One of the fascinating differences between government programs for poor people and faith-based programs is that church communities expect people to give back.  And they do, at a much higher rate.  They volunteer in child care and food banks, and as ushers, and in Vacation Bible Schools.  By contrast, government assistance far too often treats poor or disabled people as if little to nothing can be expected of them, which is just plain degrading. 

 

Reciprocity is hard-wired into our moral instincts and it is written into the expectations of cultures around the planet.  Even chimps expect favors for favors and punish or shun cheaters.  We humans give gifts and we receive gifts back.  We do favors, and we expect favors back.  We provide mutual support.  Sometimes we are happy to say “Don’t pay it back, pay it forward.”  But we want our efforts and generosity to go somewhere instead of dead-ending. The only people who aren’t expected to engage in reciprocity are young children and those who we consider debilitated beyond hope.  And for children,  moving toward independence means participating as household and community members to their growing level of ability.  Give-back expectations go hand in hand with dignity, respect and self-respect. 

 

I’m not advocating faith-based services.  Those who know me know I prefer that people receive services without a dollop of dogma on top—and I think social services often are used unethically as bait by those who think themselves heaven-sent fishers of men.  I also realize there are far more significant examples of responsibility and dignity than the question of whether poor people can be expected to bring bags to the grocery store.  But conservative complaints often contain kernels of truth that progressives should learn to heed.  If we really want to empower and motivate people, we do well to expect things of them –even small things like being resourceful enough to get the groceries home.   

"you f*****g piece of shit jew and your stinking jew woman and inbred jew childrun and jew-lover traiter daughterinlaw deserve to torture die you filth jew liberil america hating jesus hating basterd Lord willing none of us will have to wait long america is too good for dirty jew scum of your family and your commie foundasion" - anonymous email, April 21, 2009

Mikey Weinstein is President and Founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. A Jew, a former Reagan Whitehouse attorney and an honors graduate of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, he spends his days fighting back against what has been called an "Evangelical coup" in the U.S. Military. (See Jesus Killed Mohammed 5/09.) Mikey writes letters, makes phone calls, lobbies and, when all else fails, files lawsuits on behalf of religious minorities and mainline Christians who are being subjected to relentless proselytizing from fundamentalist officers and peers. One routine part of the reaction is letters like the one he received above.

Liberal anti-Semitism is more subtle and sophisticated. Even at our worst, we don't talk about Jews, we talk about 9/11 conspiracies orchestrated by agents of Mossad. We talk, as our medieval Christian and Christian Nationalist predecessors did before us, about undue Jewish control of the monetary system. Mostly we talk about Zionists, and every Jew who has a more complex perspective on the Middle East than Amy Goodman is one.

I'm not a Jew. I am a psychologist. One of the things I learned as a therapist was to respond not just to surface words but also the feelings and implications behind them. As a therapist, you listen to your body--your intuitive emotional response to what is being said, and then use your mind to sort things out.  I can't say how many comments about the Israel-Palestine situation I've read on liberal blogs. What I can say is that the comment threads often make my stomach hurt--and not because of what is going on in Israel and Palestine. Here is the tread that triggered this post.

The plight of the Palestinians is anguishing. And yes, Israel has violated international law and may well be guilty of war crimes. But at a visceral level I often have a hard time experiencing my own pain and moral sensibilities about the Middle East situation. I get so overwhelmed by the flood of thinly veiled anti-Semitism that I can't respond to anything else.

Let me state for the record: I categorically do not believe that criticizing Israel is inherently anti-semitic. There is plenty of reason to protest Israel's part in the seemingly endless Middle Eastern cycles of violence and suffering. What I am talking about is a certain quality of this conversation -- a distancing from Israelis explicitly or Jews more broadly as people, an exceptionalism that characterizes liberal American disgust at and demands of Jews, a pattern of silence toward some things and outrage toward others that suggest bias. And subtle or not-so-subtle versions of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes that escape criticism (except from offended Jews) on liberal blogs.

Perhaps I am projecting my Seattle experiences onto the net. One sweet, progressive activist neighbor refused to come to a panel discussion I hosted because, along with an atheist, a Christian minister and a Sufi minister the panel included a rabbi. A friend equated the invasion of Gaza with the Holocaust. A political teammate couldn't see the difference between Obsession's bitter flow of misogynist verses and the forged conspiracies in the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They do all love Amy Goodman. So maybe my gut is wrong.

But besides gut feelings, there are other indicators that something more than compassion, fairness and yearning for a better world is at play in left of center reactions to the plight of the Palestinians. Several writers (e.g. here and here) have listed factors that in their minds differentiate legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism. Here are the things that caught my attention:

1. The failure to focus on the log in our own eye. Two towers come down and 4000 people die, and the majority of our population (who suddenly feel unsafe) bless the destruction of 100,000 Iraqi citizens, their basic infrastructure, their museums and their schools. Yet we mock the Israelis' sense of threat and demand inhuman perfection in their reaction. Granted, American liberals have worked long and hard against war in Iraq, but we were more conflicted about Afghanistan. And in both cases the protests lacked the absolutism of our reactions to Israel. I hear the Israeli attack on Gaza described as genocide.  I never hear the American attack on Iraq described that way.

2. Our silence when it comes to the role of the surrounding countries, who want the Palestinians to remain right where they are as pawns in a global power struggle. Palestinians don't have the option to leave because Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and others don't give them that option any more than we do. Israeli-Gaza border closures work only when Egypt keeps her border closed as well. Within any group of refugees there are those who don't want to sacrifice their children on the altar of their politics--who simply want to go away and start a better life. But they are denied resettlement rights elsewhere. The Palestinian people are bandilleras in the flanks of a Spanish bull--goads that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations.

3. Our indifference to Jewish post trauma dynamics and conditions that reactivate trauma. In Israel, men who spent their teenage years dragging bodies out of gas chambers and burying them in trenches are only just dying off. To make matters worse, threats of annihilation are ongoing. When a woman who has been molested has someone hit on her, she often gets triggered, under- or over-reacting because she is re-experiencing the earlier trauma. When people who have been the targets of genocide hear surrounding leaders pledge their extinction, I might imagine they would get triggered, too. If we Liberals are willing to assume that it takes a people generations to recover from slavery, can we not assume the same of genocide? I grieve at Israeli reactivity just as I grieve when African American young people say that success is White. But grieving and demanding that they be over it are two different things.

4. A double standard for Middle Eastern Countries. When Arabs or Muslims engage in mass political extermination, we say little. The same with smaller cruelties. Yet we hold the Israelis to a higher standard. Why is this? Why do we scream about Israeli rockets and yet we're mum when Hamas and Fatah are murdering each other? How about the slaughter of the Kurds or on a smaller scale, the execution of female teachers in Afghanistan. (Sometimes I wonder if it is actually a form of racism against Arabs and Muslims, like when we assume that a kid is fated to be a low-achiever and we write them off.) But consider: How would we react if the Israelis treated their women like Saudis do? If they treated their Hindu servants like Omanis do? If they treated their religious minorities like the Iraqis do? If they pledged the extermination of Palestinians the way that Hamas pledges itself to the extermination of Jews?

5. Our lack of comparable passion about other suffering in the world. How come the Palestinian plight taps deep feelings for so many liberals, and yet brutalities in Sudan  or Sri Lanka don't have the same power to arouse us? To draw an analogy from my work opposing fundamentalism, when Evangelicals cite Leviticus to justify their attitudes toward homosexuals but then ignore the rest of Mosaic Law, something other than biblical literalism is at play. When the suffering of the Palestinian people arouses the kind of venom that seeps through in Liberal blogs while other suffering leaves us cold, something more than compassion is at play.

I loathe the kind of ignorant right wing rant that kicked off this article. But the subtle bigotry of some fellow liberals feels worse. It violates the very humanitarian rhetoric that gives it cover. As a progressive, it shames me. And it makes me scared.

Christians and their cultural descendents have been finding reasons to single out Jews since the First Century. Always there is some social issue that makes the antipathy seem justified to many people in the short run.  And always to date anti-Semitism seems obvious in retrospect.

 We humans are probably hard-wired for tribalism, and we need little excuse to see the "other" as disgusting or evil. But we also are capable of thinking more complexly. One who suffered much, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had this to say: "If only it were all so simple, if only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." Maybe in addition to looking at the dividing lines in the Middle East we could be looking more at the dividing lines in our own hearts.

What did Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin have in common besides their February 12, 1809 birthday?  Both men transcended the self-centered thinking so characteristic of our kind, allowing them to see the unity of life in a new way.   By self-centered, I don't mean selfish.  I mean our incredible tendency to perceive ourselves as the measure of all that is:  My tribe, my religion, my nation-state, my gender, my "race", my species--all else is here to serve us.

This bias is totally built in.  During my graduate student days, I worked with an industrial organizational psychologist seeking to improve personnel interviews.  One problem with interviews is what psychologists call a "similar to me" bias.  Someone who is similar to me on completely irrelevant characteristics--same home town, same hair style, same musical tastes, same ethnic heritage--is seen as more competent as a result. Since interviews seek genuine competence, this is a problem, and interviewers are trained to resist it. Unfortunately, the similar-to-me bias shows up in ordinary life, where we often have no idea how powerfully it is shaping who we care about or whose ideas we take seriously.

At a time when many of his compatriots saw dark skinned peoples as less than human, Darwin methodically mapped universal human emotions:  surprise, disgust, anger, fear, and happiness.  He defined us within a broader web of life that brought into sharp focus our human similarities in a way that old dogmas had not.  Why?  Because he brought a scientist's mind to the task - a painstaking process of gathering data, obsessing over small details, brooding over what he had found, and following the data where they lead.  Lincoln, the politician, looked at those universal human emotions and thought about individuals and society.  He brooded, not over details of bone and sinew, but over tensions and ethics:  What does our basic humanity imply about how we should live in community with each other?  

The scientific mind and the mind of the ethicist/politician are a great pair.  We grow best and flourish best with the two informing each other.

The work of Darwin and the work of Lincoln is ever unfinished--each represented a point of consciousness in a broader human endeavor.  Even in their own day, they were not alone.  Wallace independently discovered the process of natural selection.  Wilberforce fought to end slavery in the British Empire.  Today, scientists have established that at a genetic level "race" is a falsehood, an artifact of the human mind's tendency to take shades of gray--or in this case brown--and break them into oversimplified categories.  

And yet, even today, with a brown man in the White House, the front page of my local paper today was dominated by a story of racial violence.  My generation is plagued by a self-centered tendency to spend more than we earn--to borrow against future generations who have no voice or vote.  Our religions continue to be plagued with self-centered claims of exclusive salvation.  The American nation state is plagued by a self-centered mission to rescue our oil from under their sand. Our citizens are plagued by a self- centered habit of asking what our country can do for us.The work of Darwin and Lincoln is yours and mine to continue.  Only with a thousand points of insight and a thousand bodies living for change, will we get to the point that we can use our knowledge and power for the good of all.

Barack Obama’s campaign wasn’t a campaign to get elected.  Yes, that was front and center in most of our minds and, I’m sure, his for the last year plus.  But he said from the beginning that the end goal of this campaign was to create a movement for change.  That means the campaign isn’t over. 

More interesting, it isn’t over in the minds of millions of people across America who helped in one way or another to put Obama in office.  People are waiting for the next big ask.  In a recent meeting with Senator Patty Murray, in a gathering of progressive donors, even in my dentist’s office, I’ve heard people saying:  What’s next?  They are saying it with their sleeves rolled up.  What do you want me personally to do about the economy?  What do you want me personally to do about the future?

Obama gets one big ask.

Some have said that the ask is being made already.  Valuable data files are now accessible to progressive organizations across the country.  Campaign workers recently were urged to get together and decide what they want to do on a more local level.  Star volunteers and staff have been recruited into state level efforts.  And we all got email about house parties to support the stimulus package.

But none of these match the depth of the question itself.  People are wanting to be a part of something bigger than policy change and harder than a house party.  This is about Change with a capital C in the middle of a capital C Crisis.  We want guidance—sharp, focused, smart leadership--for not only DC policy making but for the broader campaign that we signed on to:

1. Phase Two of this campaign, just like the electoral phase, needs a tangible, specific set of objectives set by movement leadership. 
2. These objectives need to come from Obama and his proxies.  Any movement has a shared vision at its center, and we are hard wired to want this vision embodied by a charismatic leader. Demagogue, demigod, or ordinary human, Obama is the guy who has our attention.
3. As in the electoral phase, objectives must scale to the power of each person involved.
4. The campaign leadership needs to provide a set of tools or processes that enable people to do their part

Dreaming Big

Our current crisis and the highly sophisticated Obama campaign structure together create a once-in-a- generation opportunity to build lasting community infrastructure for the common good – not government based, not faith-based, not politically based.  Community based.

What might this look like? Here’s mine:

The ask:  “I’m asking you to take care of each other through this financial crisis in some very specific ways.”

Active ingredients: elevates communal barn raising archetype over cowboy archetype (see The True Patriot); commitment is time limited; leverages crisis urgency; has middle class relevance

The structure: Each precinct gets a community organizer (possibly the Democratic pco) who is responsible for managing a set of online assets, events, and community activities.

Active ingredients:  taps Obama organizing model, is place based, scale fits size of traditional social networks, if Dem branded then Dems get credit as in DemocratsWork.

The content:

          Skill bank (relevant models: timebucks.org; www.brightneighbor.com)  The skill bank uses new web tools to create a non-monetized informal economic exchange like that internal to tribes, churches, pioneer communities. Within each precinct people make their skills available to each other on a trading rather than donating basis. People also can donate skills, which get banked and allocated on a needs basis by organizer or committee or simply via request to donor. 

Active ingredients:  people asked to do what they do best vs stuffing envelopes, builds relationships and thus other kinds of social support, mildly offsets decline in monetized exchanges, increases personal relevance for unemployed or underemployed, turns idle time productive, decreases isolation (all of which decrease mental health costs). Skill banking is reciprocity-based vs the one way flow down advocated by D’s or one way flow up advocated by R’s.

          Real Time Rides. Planned and spontaneous ride sharing via interactive web w/ precinct community filter. Cellphone based.

Active Ingredients:  builds relationships, decreases CO2, decreases need for transport infrastructure. 

          Events and Activities, misc.: (relevant models: www.brightneighbor.com; Lake Hills Liberals)  Annual social.  Welcome committee.  Soup brigade.  Community garage sale day. Idea templates for Friday Night at the Meaningful Movies or book club or exercise group as volunteer hosts emerge based on their interests.

Active Ingredients:  broadens & deepens social bonds; taps the Applebee’s America phenomenon, taps instinctive recession-related desire to retreat into a better past, decreases “ stuff”, increases community safety, increases Gross National Happiness. 

          Tools.  Campaign central provides web based tools for managing contacts, skill bank, real-time rides, and events as well as technology for tabulating/showcasing community outcomes (relevant model: Zazengo.com) both locally and nationally.

Active Ingredients:  Taps new technologies, creates community role for tech savvy young people. 

Additional Rationale:

Right wing ideologues have been successful in moving our political dialogue in part because they tapped existing affinity groups such as evangelical churches, business organizations, and gun clubs.  Members don’t join these groups for political purposes, and most of the benefit they receive has little to do with party politics.  Rather, these groups are woven into the fabric of a member’s individual identity and sense of community.  These groups have electoral and policy influence in part because they create sustained, multifaceted relationship among people. 

Those of us who value the common good often have been frighteningly narrow in our attempts to engage people.  Not only are we bound to the election cycle, but we reach out specifically in a political role for a political conversation—often in the absence of any deeper relationship.

Trends among young people suggest increasingly that they solicit information through trusted social networks.  If we really care about the common good, our best hope – perhaps our only hope—is to nurture social networks that embody these values and for whom political priorities and civic engagement are simply one manifestation of these broader values.

What do you think the ask should be?

Valerie Tarico interviews Dr. Tony Nugent, scholar of world religions. Dr. Nugent is a symbologist, an expert in ancient symbols. He taught at Seattle University for fifteen years in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and is an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Most Americans know how Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25: The Emperor Constantine chose the date because it was winter solstice in the Julian Calendar, the birthday of dying and rising gods like Mithra and Sol. Some people also know that our delightful mélange of Christmas festivities originated in ancient Norse, Sumerian, Roman and Druid traditions - or, in the case of Rudolph, on Madison Avenue.

But where does the Christmas story itself come from: Jesus in the manger, the angels and wise men?

The familiar Christmas story, including the virgin conception and birth of Jesus, is found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Scholars have pointed out that these stories are somewhat disconnected from other parts of these Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. In fact, by the time he is a young boy in the temple, Jesus's parents seem to have forgotten the virgin birth. They act surprised by his odd behavior. There is never any other mention in the New Testament of these incredible events! These stories seem to be an afterthought, written later than the rest of the gospels that contain them.

To make matters more interesting, the stories themselves have inconsistencies and ambiguities - contradictory genealogies, for example. Our Christmas story (singular) is actually a composite.

Or consider the idea that Mary is a virgin. The Greek writer of Matthew quotes Isaiah as saying: "a parthenos shall conceive and bear a child." The Hebrew word in Isaiah is "almah," which means simply "young woman." But the Greek word parthenos can mean either a virgin or a young woman, and it got translated as "virgin." Modern Bible translations have corrected this, but it is a central part of the Christmas story.

That's a lot of added complications. If the rest of the New Testament doesn't refer to these stories or need them, then how did we end up with them? Where do they come from?

One part of the answer comes from Hellenistic culture. (It is no accident all New Testament books written in Greek.) In this tradition, when a man did something extraordinary there was the assumption that he did this because he was different, either divine or semi-divine. They would make up a story about how he came to be divine. Almost all Greek heroes were said to be born of a human woman and a god--even Alexander the Great, Augustus and Pythagoras.
The father typically was Zeus or Apollo. The god would come and sleep with the woman, pretending to be the husband or as a bolt of lightning, or some such. Greek mythology also shows up in the book of Genesis: the gods lusting after the women and coming down and mating with them.

Why were they added to the Christian story?

Jewish Christians - the first Christians didn't believe in the virgin birth. They believed that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus. Part of their Christology was "adoptionism"--they thought Jesus was adopted as the unique son of God at some time later in life. There were disagreements about when - Mark suggests the baptism, Paul suggests the resurrection.

Over time, gentile Christianity replaced Jewish Christianity. There were Jewish-Roman Wars. The Jewish Christians were marginalized and oppressed. The Gentile branch became dominant. Eventually we get the gospel of John which pushes the sonship of Jesus back to the beginning of time. This writer is at the other end of the spectrum from the Jewish Christians.
But Matthew and Luke think that the Sonship of Jesus began at birth. And they want to tell a story that reinforces this point. Matthew and Luke are the source of the Christmas story as most of us learned it.

Why didn't the writers do a better job of cleaning the contradictions? They did, some. This is called the "orthodox corruption of scripture." (Bart Ehrman article , book) . But it appears that these birth stories were added toward the end, so scripture got frozen before they could get integrated.

I was raised that the bible was the literally perfect, "inerrant" word of God, essentially dictated by God to the writers. What you are saying about the Christmas story sure calls into question this point of view.

Which Bible?! There are thousands of manuscript variations.
Most biblical stories are probably fiction, not non-fiction. They are mythology in the deepest sense of the word. But we need to get beyond issue of whether biblical reports happened in the historical, physical sense to understand what they mean spiritually and mythically.

Ok. Back to Christmas. Of all the images from the Christmas story, the one that people fall in love with most is angels. The Christmas story is full of angels, beings of light. Is this because of the solstice tradition?

Actually it comes from the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish scriptures that were eventually adopted into the Christian Bible as the Old Testament. It also comes from the Jewish literature written between the Old and New Testaments that didn't get into the biblical canon. Some of these are even quoted in the New Testament, for example Enoch, from the 2nd Century BC. It's all about angels.

What are angels in these stories? Who are they?

The Bible calls them the sons of God, the Divine Council. The word used for God in parts of the Hebrew Bible, Elohim, is plural implying a family of deities. Angels are the lesser gods of the deposed pantheon of ancient Israel. They are under the rulership of Yahweh. Together with Yahweh they are part of Elohim, a plural word that we translate "God" in the book of Genesis. Elohim/God says "Let us make humans in our image." Christians understand this to refer to the trinity, but that is a later interpretation. These angels came from the ancient pantheons of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Many of these gods come from stars. There is a strong astral dimension. "Heavenly Hosts" are stars.

The Luke story focuses on one angel specifically: Gabriel. Is he the archangel?
Gabriel is the Angel of the Lord. He is one of two angels who are named in the Jewish canon and the Christian canon outside of the apocrypha: Gabriel and Michael. They are the angels of mercy and judgment. Gabriel means "Strong One of El." He is first named in Daniel.

If you go into an Eastern Orthodox church you have two icons on the north and south. Michael is on the North to fight with Satan who lives there. Gabriel is on the south. He is more like what the angels originally were, which is messengers of the gods. That is what angel means. The idea that God has a special messenger is exactly what we read about in the Middle Eastern mythologies. Each of the earlier gods has his own special messenger. Enki, who becomes Yaweh, has Isimud. The goddess Inana has Ninshubur. Each high god will have an envoy or assistant, who is a lesser god. The angel of the lord is the same thing. The distinction between angels and gods came later.

Is he a star person? Or one of those semi-divine descendents of gods and women?

He is one of the gods who would come down to earth.

Why do you say that?

The offspring of the gods mating with women are called Gaborim--from the same root as Gabriel. In the second century, Gabriel appears in the Epistula Apostolorum. It talks about Jesus and these secret teachings that he gave to his apostles after the resurrection. One of the secrets is that he is actually Gabriel. After Gabriel took on flesh and united with Mary, then he becomes Jesus. The idea that Christ was an angel was extremely popular in the early church. Later we find this really strict separation between humans and angels; between gods and angels. (more)

We have time for just one more favorite Christmas story: The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi.

The Magi are astrologers. They are Zoroastrian priests. Just to the east of the Roman Empire was the Persian Empire, which was Zoroastrian. They see this star at its rising (the better translations don't say in the East). The astrologers paid a lot of attention to this. It is likely that what this refers to was a heliacal rising, which is the first time that a star appears over the horizon during the course of a year. They thought this was a sign of the Jewish messiah. Scholars speculate that they would have been living in Babylon, where there were lots of Jewish merchants. The Jews had been there from the time of the Jewish exile from Babylonia. We have cuneiform records from them.

Are you assuming that this story is historical?

Think of it as a frog and pond. The pond is real, the frog is not. They are fictional stories in a real setting. They don't always get the details of the setting right, but they are fictional characters in real places. The Magi follow their star from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The author has in mind a real star that would be in front of you in this situation. It would have to be a star in the far southern sky. Remember what I said about the Heavenly Host being stars? The star in Matthew and the angel in Luke are two variants of the same mythology.

My former fundamentalist head is spinning. Is there anything else you'd like to say in closing?

We need to be able to appreciate these stories as myths, rather than literal histories. When you understand where they come from, then you can understand their spiritual significance for the writers and for us.

That sounds like another interview. Thank you.

This article is reprinted from the Huffington Post, December 25, 2008. 

As a psychologist and former language student, I have often thought that a key factor perpetuating tribal racial identity is that we don't have a good label for the growing percent of the world's population that is multi-heritage.  If we did, the number of people fitting and adopting this label would swell over time.  Then, racial tribalism and concomitant tribal violence might be just a tad harder for demagogues to conjure. 

 

While a friend and I waited for the election returns on the unforgettable Fourth, we discussed this issue, and we played around with various coined words--mult, mu-he, etc.-- none of which had any appeal.  Finally she commented that we should simply use the word "mutt."  I laughed because I have called my own heritage "Northern European mutt" for years. 

 

But then I actually started wondering if it might have potential.  There can be power in serenely or playfully or proudly adopting a term that by tradition is belittling.  Think Yankee. 

 

As far as that goes, mutt is pretty benign and has a fair number of positive connotations for the millions of us who have adored one.  Mutts are often stronger, healthier and smarter than purebreds.  They tend to live longer.  They surprise you more.  They're less prone to neuroses and other kinds of twitchiness.  They're about substance rather than style; personality rather than sheen.  They're adaptable.  And nobody freaks if they get scruffy, as long as they get the ball. 

 

Now, as if I weren't already madly in love with the character and mind of our new president, he goes and calls himself a mutt. Might Obama's opener, with help that is already emerging among the netroots give yet another impetus to the identity shift that is already happening? I suddenly want a mutt t-shirt, even though I may not deserve one-- in-bred, white bread, and twitchy as I am. Maybe the best I can hope for is to look on in envy and delight when my twinkle-in-the-eye grandchildren get to check "mutt" on their census forms.

 

Valerie Tarico, Ph.D.

Seattle

November 8, 2008

Valerie Tarico is the author of The Dark Side:  How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, and founder of www.WisdomCommons.org

When moral and spiritual ideas were handed down via oral tradition, they could evolve with the cultural and technological context in which they existed.  Some stories were repeated often around the fire while others, less favored, eventually faded into the hazy past.  Uninteresting details might be omitted by a storyteller, others elaborated.  New implications might be extracted—rules, roles, and ideas about the natural world--depending on the needs of the era.  The gods themselves matured.

 

The advent of writing changed this.  On the one hand, writing was one of humanity’s most powerful inventions.  It allowed information to be transmitted directly between people who didn’t know each other.  It allowed knowledge to accumulate.  But it also allowed ideas –especially those that couldn’t be tested—to stagnate.  Written words are frozen in time, a snapshot of the mind of the writer at a specific point in history.  Allegiance to a set of civic, moral or spiritual writings allows a person or a group of people to become developmentally arrested, bound to the insights and limitations of the authors.

 

Canonization, the process by which an authoritative body designates a specific set of writings as complete, perfect, or more holy than all others, makes this worse.  Prior to canonization, a single fragment of text may be static but the mix can evolve, with some documents moving to the fore and others falling out of favor, perhaps being lost altogether.  Canonization freezes the mix, giving priority not only to the written word, but to a specific set of written words that have received the blessing of a specific human hierarchy. 

 

Ironically, the invention of the printing press, a world changing wonder insomuch as it accelerated the growth and spread of human knowledge, made even worse the opportunities for developmental arrest.  By making a static set of sacred texts widely available, it removed yet another form of flexibility and spiritual/moral growth.  Clergy could no longer selectively emphasize those canonical texts that fit the moral consciousness of a given time period (omitting the rest), without losing their authority in the minds of many adherents.   Some scholars have suggested that fundamentalism had its birth in the invention of the printing press, and that its spread across the planet region by region, religion by religion, has paralleled the growth of literacy.

 

This leads to two conclusions:

 

1:  Religious fundamentalism, a phenomenon that many consider one of the top current threats to our longevity as a species, can be thought of as problem of communication technology.  Specifically, it may be thought of as book worship or, in religious terms, bibliolatry.   Recall that an idol is an object (shaped by human minds and hands) that attempts to represent and communicate the essence of divinity.  For pre-literate people, statues, images, icons, and sacred spaces filled this role.   In an age of mobility and literacy, what better idol than a book?  And what more likely idolatry than bibliolatry?

 

2:  As a problem that originated in communications technology, the nuclear standoff of tribal fundamentalisms in which we live may be transcended also by communications technology.  Problems introduced by technological evolution frequently are solved by further technological evolution.  In fact, I might argue that they are rarely solved otherwise. 

 

In this light it is tremendously exciting that now, for the first time in human history, we have communication technologies that combine the best of oral tradition and the written word.  For the first time, utter strangers thousands of miles apart can exchange ideas and information via living documents that evolve continuously.

 

A book, they say, is out of date the day it is in print.  Not so with the Web.  Web 2.0 allows an individual text to evolve the way that oral instruction once did.  Wikipedia articles change daily as new information becomes available.  The Web also re-opens evolution at the level of the collection—a rich, indexed, ever-changing library replaces a canonical list of authoritative texts. 

 

Savvy, entrepreneurial fundamentalists have latched onto new web technologies as a means of dispersing the words and world view of our Bronze Age ancestors, just as their ideological forebears did with the printing press.   But in their devotion to this world view they miss the stunning opportunity we have been given. 

 

Now as never before we have the means to honor not the answers of our spiritual ancestors but their questions:  What is Real?  What is Good?  How can we live in moral community with each other?  Because we have moved beyond the age of the book and of sacred books, we have the means to make this a conversation, not of a priestly class nor of a single culture, but of scholars and seekers and life lovers from every part of this precious planet.  Together we can take the conversation from where it got stuck and set it free once more to flow forward on the currents of human need and knowledge.  

 

Valerie Tarico, Ph.D.

Seattle, 2008

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.--Basho

www.wisdomcommons.org

 

Two New York reporters referred to Bristol Palin as doe-eyed  -- a somewhat odd choice of words given her mother’s heralded talent for gutting doe-eyed creatures.  Or perhaps the metaphor is weirdly accurate.  Sarah Palin’s ideologies and aspirations have caught her teenage daughter in the public spot lights and gun sights —where she is destined to become a trophy to Palin’s failed abstinence-only education policies. 

 

I can sympathize.  Let me tell you.  Sarah Palin self-describes as a “nondenominational” Christian.  That’s home turf for me.

 

As a nondenomonational teen, the only information I got about reproduction was a book about hamsters, Susie’s Babies.  There were eggs and sperm involved, but to this day I couldn’t tell you how hampster sex works.  I can tell you that Susie didn’t make any decisions whatsoever—about whether she wanted that little hamster “pellie” (as we called it) in her little hamster place, or whether she wanted babies sucking on her little hamster nippies afterwards.  The before-conception part and the after-delivery part just weren’t that important. 

 

Sound familiar? 

 

Unlike Palin’s daughter, I wasn’t the offspring of a beauty queen, and I was a nerd, so the abstinence/ignorance approach worked for a while.  I finally got around to having sex during my junior year away from Wheaton College (of Billy Graham fame) – because my virginity had become something of an embarrassment.  Even then, my ignorance was as intact as my hymen.  I was utterly surprised to see the mess we created.  (What did that poor boy tell his parents about their upholstery?)  Two years later, when I finally settled into a rather normal sexual relationship, I was secretly convinced that I myself was not normal.  Why?  Because when I had sex, wet stuff came out afterwards.  Nobody in books ever has that happen.  

 

What did Bristol know the first time?  I wonder. 

 

The trinity of fundamentalism in church, denial at home, and Falwellian education policies leave kids like Bristol to rely on willpower and prayer for contraception.     If either worked reliably, the human race would be extinct.  Instead, the call of the wild is so powerful that people have sex in places and at times where they could be killed for it--and are!--because the virginity code also appears to have its roots in biology.

 

Biologists explain our obsession with virginity as the need of males to invest their efforts in rearing their own genetic offspring.  But in day to day life, the elevation of virginity is far from rational.  Female virginity has magical curative powers in some places, magical erotic powers in others.  Among Christian fundamentalists, it is sacred.  Kids deal with the battle between their biological and religious imperatives by pretending that nothing’s happening.  A major problem with pills and condoms, besides inconvenience and cost is that contraception messes up the pretense.  If you go on the pill or buy condoms, then what might have been a forgivable sin of passion becomes premeditated sex.  Ooh. 

  

Palin has said that she is proud of her daughter’s choice to continue her pregnancy.  But  really, what choice did Bristol have at that point?  Ruin her mother’s career by having an abortion?  Violate one of her family’s defining values?  Do the thing that her God hates the most? 

 

Besides, where would she even go?  Imagine living in a town small enough that a girl's pregnancy is an "open secret.”   What is the likelihood that a governor's daughter can walk into a clinic unnoticed? How about just walking into a drug store and buying a pack of condoms without bumping into someone from church or school? The alternative to pregnancy: premeditated sin plus public exposure.  Bristol, like many teens under similar circumstances, chose to gamble.

 

I'm thankful that, for the time being, my own daughters have a broader array of options. 

 

Seattle

September 8, 2008

 

The Spiritual and Moral Heart of Progressive Politics 

 

The world’s great religions and moral philosophies, including Christianity, converge on three core virtues.  Together, these three virtues make up the moral core of progressive politics.   They are:  humility, charity, and veracity.

 

Humility (Equality):  At a religious or spiritual level, humility means that each individual cultivates a sense of being one among many, no less, no more.  In their earliest forms ancient religions often applied virtue only within a small group with shared identity (a single tribe and gender, for example).  Across history, the world’s religions have tended to grow toward more inclusive ideas of who is human and worthy to be treated with respect and humility.   In political terms, humility is usually known as equality.  One expression of humility in the political sphere is policies that safeguard self-determination, the belief that we must be cautious about imposing the will of one individual or group on another.  Another policy that embodies this virtue is progressive taxation, which redistributes wealth.  Progressive taxation, like the ancient year of “jubilee” recognizes that inequities accumulate unless society has mechanisms to level the playing field.   

 

Charity (Compassion):  Religions often call this virtue love.  It is expressed in kindness, nurturing, tenderness, patience and mercy.  It recognizes that although all may be equal in value, we are not made equal in resources or circumstances.  In many religions, including Christianity, this is the highest virtue. Civic agreements that embody compassion often take the form of social programs. Through such programs, stronger members of society fulfill a moral obligation to care for the wellbeing of those who are weaker by providing a safety net and paths toward a better way of life. 

 

Veracity (Objectivity):  Veracity is truth seeking and truth telling, but goes beyond these.  It religious terms, it includes honest self appraisal, discernment, and sublime objectivity. In public life, veracity is the opposite of ideology. It is open, outcome driven, and self-correcting.   

Conservative Political Philosophy vs. Progressive Political Philosophy:  Progressive politics differs from conservative politics because conservative politics largely ignore these virtues; conservative politics are built around suppressing vices rather than cultivating virtues.  Conservative politics also have a strong basis in religious tradition.  The world’s religions generally agree that certain vices are to be avoided including murder, theft, lying, and promiscuity. Conservative policies focus on punishing these vices, but otherwise allow citizens to pursue their individual self interest, trusting that if each individual member of a society pursues his or her self-interest, the good of all will result.  This trust is based on ideology, not outcomes. 

 

By contrast, progressives believe that the shared resources of our society will bring about the highest common good only if our social contracts reflect our core virtues:  equality, compassion, and veracity.  In Biblical terms, conservative policies embody the “do not’s” of the Ten Commandments, while progressive policies embody the “do ye’s” of the Gospels and Talmud.  Conservative policies conserve an ancient and limited social contract.  Progressive policies reflect the moral and spiritual progress evident in Judeo-Christian teachings and value progress in society. 

 

Ironically, although conservative politics recently have been endorsed by the religious right, they embrace a form of social Darwinism – of elevating natural selection itself to the status of a social virtue.  Progressive politics by contrast parallel the mutuality or communal mindset of the Early Christians, monastic orders in various religions, and secular kibbutzim. 

 

A progressive political philosophy can be summarized like this:   A society built on the shared virtues of humankind (equality, compassion, and veracity) invests in the commonwealth for the common good, so that individual citizens, both ourselves and our posterity, can experience the richness of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

 

How the Progressive Social Contract Reflect the Moral and Spiritual Foundation of Progressive Philosophy: 

 

1.  Economic Justice:  (Virtues – equality, veracity).  Economic justice is an equitable distribution of the goods, services and other benefits gained from economic activity. (equality)  Progressives acknowledge that due to social and economic conditions, the benefits of work don’t always accrue to the ones who created the value. (veracity)  They implement policies that seek to return the benefits of hard work to workers and that counterbalance the unfair advantage of those with power and wealth when they negotiate economic agreements with individuals who are less wealthy or powerful. (equality)

We seek leaders who will work to ensure a world in which prosperity is shared among the many and not merely the few. Shared prosperity requires a commitment to full employment as a priority for economic policy, tied to a commitment to decent work standards for all people. In the pursuit of economic justice, our priorities include:

• Protecting the right to organize and to strike;
• Developing and enforcing work safety standards and expanding workplace right-to-know laws;
• Penalizing corporations that are repeat offenders of workers' rights, consumer and/or environmental laws;
• Raising the minimum wage to a living wage that can sustain the family of a full-time worker;
• Enforcing pay equity for men and women doing equivalent work;
• Requiring workers' rights, human rights and environmental protections - and the mechanisms to enforce them - in all trade accords;
• Protecting Social Security and expanding pensions;
• Passing new initiatives to hold corporations accountable, shut down sweatshops and turn export-processing zones into fair workplaces, not back alleys of exploitation; and
• Developing an America that leads in the struggle against poverty, while creating the example of a just democracy for all.

2. Civil Rights:  (Virtues – equality, veracity).  Civil rights insure that each citizen is accorded the same privileges, responsibilities, and protections as any other citizen under the law. (equality)   Progressives acknowledge individual differences, the tendency of human beings to form tribal groupings based on these differences, and the tendency to diminish the value and rights of outsiders. (veracity)  Progressive policies establish safeguards to insure that groups of citizens do not use these differences to infringe the inalienable rights of other groups or individuals. (equality)

We seek an America that offers equal opportunity to all. This requires protection against discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, physical or developmental ability, and sexual orientation. In the pursuit of protecting civil rights and liberties, our priorities include:

• Ending racial profiling and discriminatory sentencing;
• Prohibiting bias and discrimination in employment, public accommodations and housing practices;
• Promoting policies that protect immigrant workers;
• Appointing judges who will protect the rights and safety of all people; and
• Punishing hate crimes to the fullest extent of the law.

3.  Health Care:  (Virtues –compassion, veracity).  Universal health care protects the minimal well-being of the weakest members of society:  children, the elderly, the ill and injured. (compassion) It asks those who are able to be economically productive to assume responsibility for minimizing the suffering of those who are not. (compassion)  As a policy agenda, it acknowledges the reality that economic injustice exists and that some who contribute to the functioning of society do not receive an adequate return to insure access to the most basic of human needs:  health. (veracity) It also acknowledges the long-term economic efficiencies created by a healthy workforce and healthy families. (veracity)

Americans should be guaranteed affordable, high quality, comprehensive health care. It is simply unacceptable that this nation spends more of its resources on health costs than any other, yet nearly 44 million Americans still go without health insurance. In the pursuit of affordable and accessible health care for all, our priorities include:

• Investing in public health and preventive health programs;
• Securing a right to long-term care;
• Passing a strong, comprehensive Patient's Bill of Rights that holds HMOs and insurance carriers accountable;
• Providing pre-natal care and infant health and nutrition to all families;
• Providing comprehensive health care for the uninsured and the underinsured;
• Increasing equality in biomedical research, health education, and access to quality health care;
• Ensuring a secure and expanded Medicare program that includes a prescription drug benefit; and
• Ensuring health care that is protected against the soaring cost of medicine and drugs.

4. Sustainable Commons:  (Virtues - equality, veracity).  Progressives acknowledge the clear if inconvenient scientific evidence that suggests current practices are destroying the rich heritage that belongs to posterity, thus diminishing their potential for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (veracity) Embracing the equality of future generations, progressive bound current consumption to insure a future that is rich in natural resources and natural beauty.  (equality)  Progressive policies are reality driven. (veracity)  They invest in efficiencies and innovation to maximize current quality of life while placing equal priority on the quality of life of our children’s children. (equality)   

Environmental pollution has gone from nuisance to threat. From global warming to toxic waste, pollution threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the very climate in which we live. Our priorities for investment in a sustainable economy include:

• Increasing public health inspection and enforcement of clean water, clean air, and food quality regulations;
• Investing in renewable energy, while helping to create the markets that will make renewables cost-competitive;
• Promoting policies that demonstrate a commitment to environmental justice and the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields;
• Enforcing laws against toxic waste dumping that require polluters to pay to clean the waste they create;
• Promoting clean energy, rebuilding the infrastructure of our cities, and using skilled labor and ingenuity to replace waste and pollution;
• Increasing public investment in the transition to green growth;
• Making the transition to a sustainable economy; and
• Planning and creating incentives to preserve our wilderness, protect ecosystems, and curb suburban sprawl.

5.  Reproductive Freedom (Virtues – equality, compassion, veracity).  Progressives support the right of women and men to control their own fertility. (equality)  They recognize that the unique position of women in childbearing carries with it an equally unique responsibility for decision making. (compassion)  They acknowledge the suffering induced by unwanted pregnancies, a burden which falls disproportionately on women and unwanted children, and they seek to establish policies based on compassion. (compassion)  They rely on objective evidence rather than ideology when it comes to determining which policies minimize suffering, both of sentient fetuses and of women and children. (veracity)  They further acknowledge the widespread human tendency of societies to give men control over women including over their physical wellbeing and fertility and the threat this poses to human equality. (veracity)

All people have the inherent right to self determination. Families, not politicians, deserve the right to make deeply personal decisions about abortion in private and in consultation with their own personal advisors. Women and men deserve all the necessary tools to plan their childbearing according to their unique individual circumstances - and in accordance with their own personal and moral beliefs. Our priorities include:

• Leaving the full range of reproductive choices to women and men, without stigma or government sanctions, regardless of economic status;
• Supporting policies that promote everyone's right to bear children, make personal decisions about sexuality and sexual activity, and adopt or place a child for adoption;
• Increasing access to effective contraception, safe abortion services, fair adoption programs and accessible child care;
• Protecting laws that leave complex, personal decisions about abortion to women;
• Providing youth with comprehensive information about sexuality, pregnancy prevention; and STD/HIV/AIDS prevention;
• Ensuring increased participation of women of color in the development of policies, legislation and research affecting women's reproductive health; and
• Increasing community-based reproductive health services and programs available to women in need. 

Corollary Differences between Conservative and Progressive Political Philosophies that Derive from their Respective Focus on Avoiding Vice and Pursuing Virtue.

 

Conservative political philosophy values heritage or tradition--the wisdom of the past over the promise of the future.

• It values hierarchy and patriarchy, which are given the authority to suppress societal evils. (A familiar model for the role of government this framework is the authoritarian father. Deference to governmental authority is assumed.)
• It prioritizes the safety and clarity of cultural traditions over the uncertain promise of cultural evolution. 
• It serves the interests of established successful businesses over innovative newcomers, of older generations over younger generations, and powers that be over the less powerful.
• It sees outsiders as a potential threat to established relationships among people who play familiar and functional roles.
• Apart from suppressing vice (and maintaining the established hierarchies necessary to this end), conservative philosophies see little role for government.  They advocate small government and minimal taxes.
• Conservative tendencies (both the tendency to defer to authority and the tendency to pursue self interest) grow in strength when people are threatened or overwhelmed. 
• In a conservative framework, education is a process by which the best answers available are provided to future generations.

 

Progressive political philosophy is future oriented and assumes that collectively we can learn and develop better agreements than those reached by our ancestors.

·         It values mutuality and social contract, through which virtues are cultivated. (A familiar model for the role of government in this framework is the nurturing parent.  Deference to governmental authority is earned.) 

·         It prioritizes faith in societal progress and the hope of a better future over the security of traditional codes and structures.

·         It nurtures innovation, generations to come, and the powerless.  

·         It sees outsiders as a potential source of new ideas and mutual assistance.

·         Progressives believe that legitimate government is a key component to building a society based on shared virtues, which enables personal freedom.  They advocate effective government and fair taxes.

·         Progressive tendencies (the tendencies toward mutuality and quest) grow in strength when people feel secure and hopeful.

·         In a progressive framework, education is a process by which the tools of inquiry and innovation are provided to posterity.    

 

Note:  Unfettered plagiarism throughout.  Gray matter taken directly from Progressive Majority website.:)   Credit to:  Progressive Majority (policies), Houston Smith (convergences), George Lakoff (common good), Paul Abrams (Preamble), Dave Kaplan (Decalogue).

 

Should I love my country any less?

 

 

If we love our children we reprove them.  We chide them quietly in private if we can, but loudly or publicly if we must.  We look them straight in the eye and tell them when they are going wrong and where we see a better path.  When our love for them can rise above our fatigue and failings, we hold them, with determination and clarity, to a standard that insists they grow.  A standard by which we draw them as best we can toward goodness and truth. 

 

Should I love my country any less?

 

 

If we love our friends we are honest.  We tell them when a haircut is crooked, a boyfriend is cheating, a new sofa doesn’t quite work.  We help them see that a quarrel with a spouse is partly their own doing.  We name their addiction when they have become alcoholic.  This tender honesty is a gift we offer only to those we care for and trust most deeply.  

 

Should I love my country any less?

 

 

When we love ourselves truly, securely, we admit our flaws.  We acknowledge the dark secrets of our past.  And we recognize the even darker possibilities of which we are capable.  Yet we see the goodness that coexists with these and embrace with pride our tattered humanity.

 

Should I love my country any less?

 

 

When we feel loved absolutely, it is because we are cherished by someone who has seen us when we get up in the morning, stripped of the face we wear in public.  Someone who knows that we can smell bad and we think ugly thoughts.  Someone who has heard our most guarded secrets.  Someone who knows our shame and who sees our beauty.  All else feels ultimately fragile or false. 

 

Should I offer my country anything less?       

'A very generous people'

Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who is frequently outspoken in favor of U.S. humanitarian ventures, said he believes the initial U.S. response (to the tsunami) has been appropriate, even without a public role for Bush. "I think the world knows we're a very generous people," he said. - MSNBC

Do they?  Are we?

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland grumbled last Monday that the richest nations of the world give less than 1 percent each of their gross national product for foreign assistance.  "It is beyond me why we are so stingy, really," he told reporters.  Oops.  In the face of bitter backlash from, specifically, the U.S., Egeland has retracted his statement.  But the facts would suggest that his initial outburst was more honest - and more accurate - than anyone cares to admit. 

Research shows that Americans consistently guess wrong if asked to estimate the percentage of our taxes that are devoted to humanitarian aid - often by a magnitude of ten or more.  The bottom line is that on any ordinary sheet of paper with an ordinary sized pie chart, the amount devoted to humanitarian aid is vanishingly small. 

We are much more generous when it comes to providing military assistance to our allies - hardly, however, a persuasive indicator of generosity.  Not only does this assistance benefit a highly subsidized industry (weapons have been promoted for over twenty years as one of our major exports), but an overlord is rarely thought of as generous for providing swords to his foot soldiers.  Generosity is not the same as prudence.  Both may be virtues, but they are not synonyms.     

Among the world's two dozen wealthiest countries, the United States often is among the lowest in donations per capita for official development assistance worldwide, even though our totals are often larger than the totals given by other countries or coalitions of countries.   According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development of 30 wealthy nations, the United States gives the least -- at 0.14 percent of its gross national product.  Those godless socialists, the Norwegians give the most at 0.92 percent.  That is why we don't like talking about percentages.  If you listen closely, you'll notice that what you hear in the media or from government officials is that our total constitutes millions or tens of millions of dollars or is greater than the total donated by this or that country -- never mind that their economy and population may be a small fraction of what ours is.

But sometimes even the totals are embarrassing.  In response to the Tsunami that devastated countries around the Indian Ocean this week, Canada, with close to one tenth of our population, pledged 40 million.  The Bush administration, amidst international mutterings, bumped its pledge from 15 to 35.  Get it?  For us to donate as much per capita as Canada we'd be pledging closer to 400 million. A New York Times editorialist points out that the original 15 million was less than half of what the Republicans plan to spend on Bush’s inaugural festivities.  Feel at all egg-faced?  Colin Powell, Bush himself, and other spokespersons for the administration have insisted, with some irritation, that the 35 million is just for starters--the number will grow.  And it probably will.  In fact, the final tally will probably even include some diversion of our military resources to civilian command or search and rescue. 

But I, personally, can't get past that 0.14 percent. 

As a child I was taught a story that imbedded itself in my moral core:  Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others.  They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything–all she had to live on.”    Mark 12:41-43

The message?  Generosity is measured not in total given, but in what it costs the giver. 

When I was traveling in India this October, I sat down in an airport next to two evangelical fathers who had brought their sons to witness the power of church-building among India's rural poor.  It was the week of Durga Puja, the most holy holiday for Hindus in West Bengal, and the new converts, as Christians have done from time immemorial, were adapting the local holiday to their new faith.  They had pooled their resources to create days of communal feast and celebration, a time when their sharing meant none would go hungry.  But this, according to the men, was just one manifestation of their spirit of giving.   "These people are amazing," commented one of them.  "In the States, less than five percent of Christians tithe, but here they all do." 

I was tempted to point out that maybe American Christians, being uniformly literate and having access to Bibles, were more able to figure out that tithing is an Old Testament affair, part of the same holiness code that prohibits eating shellfish or milk and meat together--the code that condemns not only homosexuals to death but also nonvirgin brides and women who get raped within the city limits; the code where the price of a broken betrothal may be one shoe.  Maybe American Christians were less generous because they were more informed, and Indian converts were being exploited because of their ignorance. 

Maybe.  But do I think that is all that's going on?  No.  The New Testament message is clear.  Giving should be voluntary, of the heart, but here is the apogee of generosity-- a widow with two coppers.  If anything, the gospels set a higher standard than the Books of the Law.  They replace the ten percent rule, a flat tax if you will, with a standard that requires individual heart-searching and a priority on each giving as he or she is able. 

Not that I want to open a big can of nightcrawlers, but did you notice that it sounds almost like voluntary Marxism a la Israeli kibbutzim? In fact, the early Church, which took these commands quite seriously, apparently espoused a form of communalism, a god-ful socialism that made them look more Norwegian or Israeli than American.  And interestingly, when a rich man asked Jesus what he must do to enter the kingdom of heaven, the Teacher told him to sell all that he had and give the proceeds - not to the church or to the disciples or to Jesus himself (in contrast to some modern cult leaders and evangelists) - but to the poor.  "And come follow me."  John the Baptist, when asked how to prepare the way of the Lord, said, “The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same."  Definitely a higher standard, both for individuals and for Christian communities.   No, the difference between early Christians/Indian Christians and American Christians is not about Old Testament/New Testament distinctions.   It's about American culture, a culture that prizes material wealth and individualism.  It's about the amazing ability of that culture to filter the words of Jesus and produce an ethic that says, at its most crass, God wants you to be rich, and prosperity is a sign of His favor. 

Are we generous?  What would it mean to be generous by New Testament standards? 

I understand that thing about two tunics, but what if my ten are all different?  And what's to be done with the Godiva chocolate that I hide from my kids?  And if I share my chocolate, do I have to share my collective resources, my tax money, too? 

January 2005

 

 

 

My Kind

 

As much as I try to see myself as a citizen of the world, as much as I work to embrace my kinship with all humans and with life itself, what makes me the most angry about the war in Iraq is its impact on My Kind:  Women. 

 

Many aspects of this war “against terrorism” or “for oil” or “for freedom and democracy” or “for hegemony” or whatever it is--many aspects of this war grieve me.  I am grieved by the thought of my countrymen – country kids, many of them - coming home in body bags or without limbs.  I am grieved by the images of Iraqi mothers holding their dead children and of dazed children clinging to dead parents.   I ache about cities shattered, about the shared patrimony of humankind stolen and destroyed by looters, about black oil clouds billowing into carbon-heavy skies.  But one thing in particular clenches my stomach and pounds in my temples:  the systematic degradation of my kind.

 

I felt it this morning, when the newspaper confronted me with imams in black halos followed by a crowd of marchers chanting, their faces distorted with anger, all male—not one of us in the whole mob.  I clenched my teeth, dropped the paper on the table, and left the room.

 

I felt it last week, when the same newspaper celebrated the face of freedom – an Iraqi woman at the polls, shrouded in black.   I stared.  I stared, and I wanted to scream.  Does anyone see the irony here?!  Is anyone seeing this?!  Iraqi women didn’t wear black shrouds, for the most part, before we took out Saddam Hussein.   

 

Perhaps you noticed the Reuters footage before the war – of Baghdad women in Western clothes or scarves and outerwear strolling between boutiques.  Did you also hear that Iraq had the highest level of education for females in the region?  That’s university education.  We’re talking Islamic women getting B.A.’s and Ph.D.’s  -- before a club of old boys in D.C. who don’t wear black shrouds decided on behalf of all Iraqis that theocracy was preferable to repressive dictatorship. 

 

That’s not what they decided, you say?  They sure as hell did.  The current and growing fundamentalist oppression of Iraqi women was as predictable as the consequences of driving drunk on a crowded sidewalk.  Some of us – male and female – tried to say so before the bombing started, before the vegetable patches of desert dwellers became craters and the mosques of Fallujah lay in rubble.  Before the leering specter of a hated occupier recruited thousands of –I’m going to say it-- fanatical willing-to-die-for-virgins males from all over the Islamic world to the streets of Iraq.   That was before they started systematically targeting females with professional jobs or too many years of schooling:  women with voices, women with power.   That was before the women of Iraq began clothing themselves like the legions of the dead.  Camouflage, I call it.  The theocrats aren’t in power yet, but their minions are patrolling the streets.  Look dead, and they may save their bullets.

 

After the Taliban fell, the media loved to show us faces of Afghani women.  Soft, round faces or old and creased, faces with brown eyes, green-flecked or surprisingly blue.  Freeing women from burkas in Afghanistan was great P.R.   Forcing them into Saudi abayas in Iraq is a minor inconvenience, one of those collateral consequences not worthy of mention when people are still losing limbs and lives in a war that consumes ever greater tons of explosives against non-military targets.   To the American media, it is simply uninteresting that women have been forced out of school, sequestered in single room dwellings, even executed and dismembered for wanting to marry someone they loved.  It doesn’t matter to the people who are exporting “freedom” that the free lives these women lived or dreamed of living are – for all intents and purposes – over. 

 

The farce of it all is bitter and grinding.  Which “freedom” would you rather have—the the right to vote or the right to feel the sun on your face?  The right to cast a ballot or the right to learn – to become a psychologist or teacher or engineer and to hope the same for your daughter?  The right to stand in line at the polls every few years and check a box for one of the feudal patriarchs competing for the loyalty of your clan, or the right to love whom you will.  Suffrage has meaning only when it builds on a foundation of personal and intellectual freedom.  In Iraq these days, it is merely window dressing for servitude. 

 

I, personally, am nowhere close to forgiving those who calculatingly or casually substituted this façade for the genuine, if limited, freedoms once held by my Iraqi sisters.

What I feel when the newspaper shoves in my face those images of disinhibited males and shrouded females is beyond anger.  It is rage.  When it hits, my whole body reacts.  I want to throw rocks.  I want to destroy things.  I want to pick up a gun and annihilate the forces that are turning my kind into Undead who carry their schoolbooks inside of shrouds, shop inside them, and do their grieving muffled in polyester darkness. 

 

I haven’t started accumulating weapons— in fact, I rarely touch them since my NRA rifle club dropped away sometime during high school.  I don’t throw rocks through windows or set anything on fire or talk to military recruiters or search the underground for private militias.  That isn’t what my kind do, is it?  But I am shaken by the power of hatred – my own – and by the power of tribalism – also my own.  And I am left with a slow, simmering burn that waits for the uprising of my kind on behalf of my kind.   

February 6, 2005     

 

  

Evolution is a Theory, not a Fact 

 

The success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive—the ones which in fact latched on to the actual regularities in nature. - Bas Van Fraassen , The Scientific Image, p. 40 (1980).

 

On Friday, January 14, 2005, the following “Brief” appeared in the papers across the country: 

Georgia – A federal judge yesterday ordered a suburban Atlanta school system to remove stickers in its high school biology textbooks that call evolution “a theory, not a fact,” saying the disclaimers were an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  The stickers were put in the books by school officials in Cobb County in 2002.
            “By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism, or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories,”  U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said. 

The honorable judge’s logic---that the stickers constitute an endorsement of religion may puzzle many people.  It was based on the impact of the stickers—they were intended to and do in fact promote Genesis literalism in Cobb County schools.  Here is another way in which his ruling makes sense:  Since there is no viable scientific alternative to evolutionary theory, singling out evolution for such a sticker could only be attributed to pressures from the religious right.  If this were not the case, we would have similar stickers throughout the biology book, for example, in the part that described germ theory.  Imagine the infectious disease section being tagged with stickers that said “germ theory is a theory, not a fact.”  Sounds kind of silly, doesn’t it? 

Now for the twist:  Such labels might sound silly, but they would, in fact, be technically accurate.  The word “theory,” as used by scientists, has a very precise meaning--a theory is a system of logic that integrates a set of data points.  Encarta Dictionary defines a scientific theory as  a set of facts, propositions, or principles analyzed in their relation to one another and used, especially in science, to explain phenomena. 

A scientific theory is bound by certain rules. 

1.      It must provide abstract principles that summarize or integrate specific points of data or findings from the real world.
2.      It must follow the rules of logic. Therefore, it cannot be internally contradictory.
3.      It must not be contradicted by empirical findings from the real world, in other words, by facts.
4.      It must make accurate predictions about what will be found in the future, whether by research or by exploration of the world around us. 
5.      It must be testable.  We must be able to engage in inquiry that will either confirm the theory or cause us to modify or abandon it.  
6.      No theory is ever a “fact.”  Over time, though, as the evidence accumulates we may come to the point that finding a better theory seems highly unlikely and a general consensus is reached within the scientific community.  

By these rules, Judge Cooper misspoke in his brief statement.  While discussing the scientific theory of evolution, he referred to “alternative theories,” meaning creationism.   But according to the definition above, creationism is not a theory.  It is a notion, a faith-based intuition, or a belief, perhaps, but not a theory.  Confusion arises from the fact that in every day speech, we use the word “theory” to mean just this, a notion, hunch, or idea.  Here is one non-scientific definition of the word “theory,” also from Encarta:  an idea of or belief about something arrived at through speculation or conjecture.  

Judge Cooper inadvertently played with words.   Alternative theories compete with the theory of evolution only if you pit the two definitions of the word against each other.  In the world of science, evolutionary theory has no viable competitor.  No alternative system of logic and evidence passes the test.  But the judge must be forgiven for blurring two very different kinds of “theories” into one.    Gullible school boards, earnest reporters, and ordinary truth seekers make this mistake all the time.  In fact, they are encouraged to do so by creation propagandists, like those of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.   

In science, just because something is called a theory doesn’t mean it is on shaky ground.  Since germ theory was first proposed, scientists have accumulated an incontrovertible body of evidence that infectious diseases are caused by microscopic bacteria, viruses, protozoa and fungi.  Likewise, since evolutionary theory was first proposed by scientists, a similar accumulation of evidence has substantiated the mechanisms and processes by which evolution has occurred in the past and is occurring daily.   

Creationists, or, as they prefer to be called these days, defenders of intelligent design—that’s ID to insiders--frequently point out gaps in the fossil record to argue that evolutionary theory is bogus.  See, they say – and they have been saying it for almost a century now – See!  There is a missing link, and another one.  You can’t prove that species evolved from each other.   

They are right, of course.  Some creationists argue that the world was created six thousand years ago with seemingly ancient geological strata and fossils strategically formed and placed during six literal days of creation in order to test our faith.   Whew!  We can’t prove them wrong.    In fact, we can’t prove that the world wasn’t created yesterday, with not only the fossil record but our own memories and everything around us scripted to look and feel like it has a past.  This hypothesis sounds, well, trippy, but both it and the suggestion that the world was created six thousand years ago follow the same path of logic and require the same leaps of faith.  

Again, the focus on absolute proof misunderstands the process of scientific inquiry.   Scientific theories don’t get proven.  They get subjected repeatedly to rigorous tests that could show them wrong, and they either withstand the testing or they fail.  They aren’t proven, but evidence does accumulate, and, oh boy, has it accumulated when it comes to evolutionary theory!  Following the very same rules of logic and sensory input that I have used to write this page and that you have used to access and read it, decades of worth of evidence have piled high.  Take a glance at the stack: 

Geology, paleontology, and the fossil record - For over a century, findings in these fields have been trending – no surprise – in the wrong direction for wishful creationists.   Excavations keep narrowing those gaps in the fossil record.  And narrowing them.  And narrowing them.  In addition, creationists who used to love bashing the vagaries of carbon dating, have gotten no support or consolation from other, more recent methodologies for dating rocks and fossils.   

Naturalistic Observation -  Micro-evolution, meaning small-scale, rapid change has been observed in various species.  One of the earliest examples was a species of moths that evolved a darker coloring as coal burning dirtied their natural habitat and changed the optimum color for camouflage.   On isolated islands, dwarf or giant members of a species may be evident, offering another interesting bit of data linking environmental nuances to change.    

Genetics –  Genetic studies have allowed us to determine when and how biological mutations occur and how changes are passed on.   Remember, natural selection was discovered long before it was understood how information was transmitted from one generation to another.  With the discovery of DNA and genetic mutation, another puzzle piece fell into place.   In recent years, gene mapping has allowed evolutionary biologists to create a more accurate evolutionary tree, using DNA sequences to identify relations among and ancestry of modern plant and animal species.   Some cutting edge research in genetics involves deliberately altering the DNA code to cure genetic disorders, produce disease resistant plants, improve the quality of food products, and so forth.  

Laboratory Research – Biologists are beginning to investigate natural selection under controlled laboratory conditions.  They do this by cultivating rapidly mutating species of bacteria and then subjecting them to environmental pressures.  In one such experiment, a parent strain of bacteria evolved into two strains, one of which lived off of the waste produced by the other.  In the laboratory, population change and equilibrium can be manipulated by changing the host environment. 

Logic -  Natural selection is a very simple concept.  Understood in its most basic form, it can’t not be true.  It says only this:  If you have genetic variation in a population (which we know to be true of terrestrial life forms) and mutations occur (which we know to be true of terrestrial life forms) and you have differential rates of reproductive success (which we know to be true of terrestrial life forms), then the organisms that are most successful in producing offspring will have their characteristics represented in greater numbers in the next generation.  Duh!  Try, for a moment to argue the reverse.  It’s simply nonsense.  When a creationist points to the world around you and says that it couldn’t have happened by chance, tell them they are absolutely right.  It couldn’t.  Only the mutations are “chance.”  From there, the process is ruled by an iron hand, which needs no external transcendence to guide it.  Whether such Transcendence exists is another question; speciation offers no evidence one way or the other.  If your creationist looks doubtful, refer them to The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. 

Mathematics -  Computer programs have been created to model evolutionary change.  Entities that vary, replicate, and have differential reproductive success (all created out of series of binary equations) are allowed to iterate, producing – you got it – population change.  

Natural selective processes explain the spread and change of entities that are nonbiological.  The field of memetics studies mutation and natural selection in the spread of ideas through human populations.  Think about computer viruses, for example.  Social trends, political ideologies, business competition, even the evolution of religions can be modeled by applying the concept of natural selection and survival of the fittest.   

These are facts – observed evidence from the real world.  Evolutionary theory is called a theory because it is a logical structure that accommodates and integrates these facts.  It spells out regularities and principles.  It calls out the common patterns in the changes that occur over time in ideas, cultures and biological species.   It has stood the test of intense scrutiny.  Evolutionary biology is not mere fact, nor is merely conjecture.  It is scientific theory.  

 January 16, 2005