Raking in huge profits and pretending needing to be rescued

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos, in this week’s edition of stories to know series included:

On March 8, the NOAA announced that this has been the warmest winter in U.S. history, with overall temperatures 5.4 degrees above average. The winter was also wetter than usual. That may generate temporary relief in some drought areas, but it's unclear if this will continue into summer, when more record heat is expected.

Sumner also included a video created by Steve Shives who discusses how comics are important to life. In this 23 minute video Shives talks about an edition of DC Comics Superman from 20 years ago and why this particular story is relevant to today. I’ve watched an occasional movie based on DC and Marvel comics. It’s been many years since I have, mostly because there is too much violence. In this story Superman faces some bad guys that act like good guys in that they get rid of other bad guys. The reason why Superman considers them bad is they are unconcerned with collateral damage and they think killing the actual bad guys is a good thing. Superman responds with why disabling the bad guys, yet keeping them alive, is better. The story also include Superman listening to why people are drawn to his new enemies (as people are always drawn to strongmen). Yes, there are a lot of intentional parallels to authoritarians, even though this was published before the current batch. Superman’s way allows the author to explain to the characters and to us why Superman’s way is preferable. Back to the climate. In an Earth Matters column for Kos, Meteor Blades, had a few interesting stories. Rebecca Burns of Sierra magazine wrote about the latest tricks the climate deniers are using. Blades wrote about a couple of them. One is going into rural communities and get the residents riled up against wind turbines. Of course, the reasoning they use is mostly lies (I’m not familiar with how loud a wind turbine actually is and whether the claimed noise is a lie). They also go to state legislatures to restrict spending on climate action. When visiting my aunt and uncle in Ohio several months (or maybe a couple years) ago I saw small signs by the road at some farms saying the owner was against a wind project. My aunt lamented the appearance of these signs and said they were because of what the Sierra magazine discussed. Blades also wrote about a study from the Environmental Protection Agency about the life cycle emissions of electric vehicles. There are claims that EVs are as bad or are worse that ICE (internal combustion engine) cars. The claim says one must add in the emissions during manufacturing, especially of batteries, and the emissions of generating the electricity. The EPA looked at EVs in five countries. In France EVs are cleaner (even considering all sources of emissions) after 25K kilometers (15K miles), while in China the breakeven point is 153K km (92K miles). But as manufacturing of batteries becomes more efficient and power plants switch to cleaner sources the breakeven point will drop. FishOutofWater of the Kos community posted the Atlantic heat anomaly map for March 12. Yeah, the water is warm and has set a new record. Last year the sea surface temperature started heading higher than previous readings at the end of April. It set a record in mid August. This year the readings are way above previous readings for this time of year and earlier this month topped August’s reading. The rest of the post gets rather technical, but it leaves with this thought: The 2024 hurricane season could be nasty. Sumner looked at the nasty guy’s claim (threat?) to “Drill, baby, drill” if he gets back to the Oval Office. But...

The idea that President Joe Biden is holding back American energy production and has “destroyed U.S. energy independence” is being spread not just by Trump but also by Republicans in the House and Senate. Claims of a Biden “war on energy” are front and center in Republican campaigns, in claims by the conservative Heritage Foundation, and in Trump’s dictatorial ambitions. But all of this is just lies, baby, lies.

The US is in the middle of a record oil boom. It hasn’t needed to import oil since about 2020 and now produces enough to export. That’s while the US had a record year for renewable energy and installing renewable capacity. While the nasty guy’s – and Republican’s – claims are easily disproved, energy is supposed to be one of the issues Republicans are good at. That “drill, baby, drill” line has been used by Republicans since at least 2008. Republicans are making energy an issue because the oil and gas industry is a significant donor – and because Biden keeps calling for immensely profitable companies, like oil and gas companies, pay their fair share in taxes.

It also helps that Republicans are still calling both renewable energy and the climate crisis is a hoax. Fossil fuel companies really like that. Give them lower taxes, lower regulations, cheap public land, and cripple their competition? They’ll take that any day. So they’re both raking in huge amounts of money and pretending that they need to be rescued from mean old Biden.

A week ago I thought I’d soon be writing about my forsythia blooming. A few years ago I posted that it bloomed at the end of March, which was rare. And now I’m looking at it blooming in mid March. Except we are having a cold snap and maybe snow tomorrow. So instead of blooming it looks like most of the buds on a few of the shrubs were killed by the cold. This is the second time my forsythia didn’t bloom because early warm days were followed by cold ones. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about the practice of judge shopping. Conservative ideologues would file their case in the court of a judge they knew would be friendly to whatever cause they wanted to enforce across the country that they knew would never be approved through the ballot box. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo has gained fame for being the judge of choice for the forced-birth movement. He’ll give them what they want, no matter hour convoluted his ruling. Since Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge in Amarillo he handles all cases. If they’re appealed (and they are) they go to the conservative 5th Circuit Court. So last week the Judicial Conference of the United States, which creates policy for the federal courts, unveiled a plan to end judge shopping. The plan was that cases would be randomly assigned to one of the federal courts in a state (or region) so plaintiffs couldn’t pick their judge. There was joy that such anti-democracy practices would be ended. That joy lasted about three days. Then far right judges, as well as members of Congress who installed them (like Moscow Mitch), started complaining. And quite quickly the Judicial Conference said the plan is only “guidance” (which can and will be ignored).

It’s telling that nearly all of the objections cited by The Washington Post come from Republican-appointed judges and their backers. But as corrosive to the legal system as the practice of judge shopping is, thanks to the seeding of the federal judiciary with these transparent ideologues, the entire institution is now appearing more and more tainted. ... Due to this rampant ideological corruption—from the top on down—conservatives are gradually transforming the federal judiciary into an institution that many Americans sensibly fear, especially since it can take away established rights without being held accountable. It is a judiciary that does not foster the notions of fairness that Americans have every right to expect from it. It is a judiciary that is becoming increasingly illegitimate in the eyes of the public, because its application of the law is increasingly seen as selective, arbitrary, and politically infused. No ham-handed public relations campaign from the Supreme Court is going to change that, particularly in a system where constitutional law professors can no longer even look their students in the eye and assure them that the nation’s founding principles are being fairly interpreted and applied. Americans should not have to live in dread of how some unelected judge in Amarillo or Fort Worth may decide to rule on an issue that could seriously alter their lives. They shouldn’t have to put up with the arrogance of an unaccountable judiciary that has been deliberately manipulated to fast-track the rabid dreams of domination by a tiny minority.

Mark Ira Kaufman of the Kos community looked at the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament) and showed – contrary to the strong emphasis of Christian evangelicals – the Bible does not command belief in God. Instead, what is commanded is to do what God wants us to do. And what he wants is for us to help and love each other.

The flawed human heart is especially problematic for those whose reliance is on faith to be right by God. Why? Faith, unfettered by reason, is a product of that messed up heart. But if faith doesn't impress God, what is there that can? The answer is offered in the very next verse, calling for righteous conduct. So for those of you pious reprobates who think you're hot stuff in God's eye because of your faith, think again. And don't blame me that your faith might not mean anything to God. I didn't write the Bible.

That “very next verse” is at the top of the Ten Commandments (which Jews call the Ten Utterances), in which God says don’t worship anything else. But why do we need to “impress” God? Doesn’t He love us anyway?

Where people use religion to brand their hatred as love

Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections spelled out that Speaker Mike Johnson has his job (and Republicans have a majority in the House) due to gerrymandering.

The math is striking. Republicans hold just a five-seat majority in the House—and courts have ruled that at least six congressional districts that were in effect for the 2022 midterms in five states broke laws that ban discrimination against minority groups or prohibit drawing districts for partisan advantage

. Those five states are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio. While some of these states are facing legal remedies to add a black majority (and likely Democratic) district Republicans in North Carolina just passed a new map shifting four seats hard to the right. The rest of the article discusses how we got into this mess. Kerry Eleveld, working from polling data from Kos Civiqs, reported that approval of Congressional Republicans is 60 points underwater – 12% approve, 72% disapprove. Congressional Democrats are only 26 points underwater – 32% to 55%. When asked which party is more trusted to tell the truth the results were Democrats 37%, Republicans 26%, and neither 34%. Yeah, a third of voters don’t trust either party. In a pundit roundup for Kos, Chitown Kev quoted Charles Blow of the New York Times. Blow is from the same area of the country as Johnson and knows the type.

He is from a part of the country where your nemesis will smile at you and promise to pray for you, where people will quickly submit that they “love the sinner but hate the sin,” where one hand can hold a Bible while the other holds a shackle. He is from a place where people use religion to brand their hatred as love so that they act on it cheerfully and without guilt. He is what many have feared: an example of second-wave Trumpism — politicians rising in Trump’s wake who come with the same policy priorities and ideological proclivities, but in a far more congenial and urbane package, propelled by something more than personal grievance. Trumpism is a religion developed to serve a man. What happens when it evolves into a pillar of an established creed and is viewed as a way to serve God?

Charles Jay of the Kos community started with a review of what Jesus thought of rich people. An example:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24).

From there Jay turned to Jesse Duplantis, a prosperity gospel preacher in New Orleans, who asked believers to send him donations so he can buy another $54 million personal jet. Duplantis thinks if Jesus were around today he’d give up his donkey and fly around the world to preach. I’ll summarize Jay’s quote from the Harvard Divinity School’s definition of the prosperity gospel. It is frequently associated with evangelical Christianity. It “emphasizes believers’ abilities to transcend poverty and/or illness through devotion and positive confession.” It affirms “the religious and spiritual legitimacy of wealth accumulation,” equates financial success with moral soundness, and material blessings are earned from God. When preached to the poor it can be predatory and manipulative. It seems Duplantis is saying give me your money and God will give you money. Then compare it to the Bible verse above. This bad theology is becoming more popular in the midst of the Great Dechurching – 40 million members have stopped attending church in the last 25 years. Some Republicans, including Johnson, have latched onto this bad theology, which allows them to shift the war on poverty to a war on the poor – they’re poor because of insufficient faith. Many prosperity gospel preachers are non-denominational. And many critics of this theology come from mainstream denominations – including Southern Baptists. Laura Clawson of Kos looked at an article by Tim Alberta of The Atlantic that gushes over Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of him either. Between the gush Alberta insist Biden is a weak candidate – which seems to be news to Democrats, likely a reason no one else is running against Biden. I think Clawson understands the real reason for the article:

It’s about the media’s urge to juice the horse-race angle of any election that seems like a foregone conclusion.

It’s about the media thinking social hierarchy terms. They’re interested in who is winning and who is losing and assume we are also interested. If necessary they’ll make up a story. Hunter of Kos reviewed the campaign of DeathSantis. The short description is the more people get to know him the less they like him. As for the rest of the Republican field:

Haley and the others are simply around, making no solid case for themselves while refusing to take Trump on out of fear of his possible violence-baiting response. If Trump’s supposed competitors aren't willing to make the case that 91 felony counts ought to disqualify someone from a second go at public office, then what purpose do they serve?

I’ve written only a little about the Israel/Hamas war. I guess I’m waiting for a few more stories worth writing about and then put them together. I haven’t seen many stories yet – my regular news source Daily Kos has not been covering the war, unlike the war in Ukraine – though I’ve heard a few on NPR. So I know Israel now has troops in Gaza and I think I heard Israel bombed an ambulance convoy because they claimed Hamas was using the convoy as a shield. The whole situation is a mess! I guess I no longer want to wait to include an article in a larger story, especially since this one is 11 days old. In another pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted an opinion piece in Haaretz:

If at first Netanyahu's efforts were to weaken the state institutions in order to sabotage criminal proceedings against him, by January 2023 he moved to dismantle them altogether, reducing them to such a low level of functionality that Israel, in many aspects, began to resemble a failed state. Why did he do this? He believed that he was betrayed by the state itself – as some would put it – the "deep-state". So according to his logic, it was not only necessary to take control of its institutions, but essentially, destroy them. A key tool in this operation was his move to appoint loyalists with minimal qualifications – if any. The dysfunctionality has been evident to all, most clearly seen first with the unrestrained deadly rampage of criminal gangs in the Israel’s Arab towns and cities and unchecked violence by West Bank settlers towards Palestinians.

I add that the nasty guy and many Republicans feel the same way about the US government and want to act against it in the same way. Rob Rogers tweeted a cartoon appropriate for this war. A woman is standing in the rubble. She is holding one child and another is hiding behind her. She’s looking up at several bombs labeled “For: Hamas, From: Israel” coming over her. To the side an Israeli soldier says, “Relax... We’re not aiming at you!” A third pundit roundup, a second by Greg Dworkin, quoted a tweet by Jonathan Martin from just before Johnson was elected as speaker:

A sage Dem texts, basically: Repubs are gonna elevate a speaker who tried to overthrow the election and backs an abortion ban - the two issues we won on in 2022 “What are they thinking?”

And down in the comments is a meme tweeted by Anonymous and created by Noah Garfinkel:

The “Guns don’t kill people” people sure seem to think a book can make you gay.

A couple more cartoons. Michael de Adder of the Halifax Chronicle Herald tweeted one titled “Pro-Life in America.” It shows a street that has gun shops and only gun shops and down a side alley is the entrance to an abortion clinic. A cartoon by Jay Wamsted shows a teacher throwing down the chalk on his way out the door. On the board he had written a story problem, “If an unappreciated $39,000-a-year math teacher leaves at 11:30 a.m. for a $90,000-a-year job in the private sector, and travels 52 miles at 88 miles per hour, what time will he arrive?”

Mass shootings & police shootings are not separate issues

Rachel Martin of NPR spoke to Beth Allison Barr about her new book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. The link is to highlights of the discussion, though there is also the 7 minute audio of the whole thing. The book began with the realization that what the Bible was saying women were supposed to do (Barr had been teaching about women in the early church) did not match what her Southern Baptist congregation was saying what women were supposed to do. What the church was telling her was straightforward: submit to your man. She went to the church elders to allow them to present her reasoning why women should be allowed to teach Sunday School. She was denied. I’ve heard the about complementarianism as a reason why same sex couples should not be legal and not raise children. The reason was that men and women were different and complementary. To thrive a child needs the firmness of a father and the nurturing of a mother. Of course, that’s bunk. Men can be nurturing and women can be firm. Barr explained complementarianism in an opposite sex marriage:

In the evangelical understanding, complementarianism is this idea that women are created differently from men. And that difference means that women cannot be leaders, that they cannot have authority over men, and that within the marriage relationship they are called to always be under the spiritual authority, the headship of their husbands. So complementarianism is that women are divinely created to be under masculine authority.

Barr explained that the current patriarchal thinking comes from taking a handful of verses from St. Paul and interpreting the rest of the Bible through them. But that obscures that God is always depicted as fighting patriarchy and raising up women into leadership. Even those verses from St. Paul are taken out of context. There is also the doctrine of inerrancy, only a hundred years old, that one must believe the Bible literally – or as men in the early 20th century read it. That made patriarchy part of the Gospel.

If you look throughout the New Testament, when Jesus tells somebody they are of great faith, it's women. And so women are not only recognized by Jesus in a way that their patriarchal society would not have done so, but they are also given the spiritual authority of being recognized as those who see Jesus and understand Jesus for who he is.

Ben Franklin tweeted:

As it becomes clearer and clearer what happened on January 6th, you must ask yourself why the ringleaders of the attack continue to walk. This is not how a serious country responds to a coup attempt. Something is very wrong, no excuses.

Editing the Gray Lady is a bot that highlights the changes on the main page of the New York Times and tweets the differences. This is an example of how a headline can change how we interpret a story. The example is the recent fatal shooting of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Corner, Minnesota, north of Minneapolis. Headline: Officer Near Minneapolis Kills Motorist, and a Crowd Confronts the Police. Became: Officer Near Minneapolis Shoots Motorist, Who Dies, and a Crowd Confronts the Police. And became: Minnesota Officer Shoots Driver, Protesters Clash With Police. They seem to get more and more vague. The second one implies the death wasn’t because he was shot. The third implies he didn’t die. There was a mass shooting in Indianapolis last night. Emily Hauser tweeted:

I'm begging you to start seeing that mass shootings (Indianapolis, Boulder, Atlanta) & police shootings (Duante Wright, Adam Toledo) are different sides of the same gun violence epidemic. Each reflects *many* terrible truths about this country, but one of those truths is that we're awash with guns & marinated in gun culture, itself steeped in toxic masculinity that demands violence from & in response to men. Violence as power - the greater the violence, the greater the power. Add easily accessed lethal force & death is a foregone conclusion. We know we have more privately-owned guns (>400m) than citizens - but that doesn't include firearms carried by law enforcement, who live in the same culture *and* are elevated & empowered by the state to be violent. Mass shootings & police shootings are not separate issues.

The mass shootings, the police shootings, and the gun culture are all aspects of supremacy. Supremacists have become far more willing to act. Supremacists always act through violence. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. Sargent wrote about Jason Watts, a local GOP committee treasurer, who never voted for the nasty guy.

Watts lamented the GOP’s lockstep loyalty to Trump, because “this undertone of hatred, this fealty at all costs, it’s going to damage us.” ... In so many ways, this story captures our times. But not in a told-you-so kind of manner. Instead, it points to how difficult it may prove to move past the wounds that Trump has inflicted on this nation, and how the eager complicity of many Republicans continues to make them all the worse.

At a meeting where Watts defended himself few wore masks. Later Watts tested positive for the virus. John Stoehr and his Editorial Board explaining politics in plain English tweeted a thread. Washington reporters used to get under the skin of Democrats by laundering right-wing propaganda. They’re baffled because it isn’t working anymore. Reporters feel the dread that they’re on the outside looking in, that Democrats know something. What Democrats know: The GOP doesn’t have policies to offer. They want a country the rest of us don’t want to live in. They’ve lost a feel for what the whole country wants.

Moreover, policies like green energy, which were unpopular the last time they had unified control of the government, are now popular. If the president is acting like he doesn’t need the Republicans, it’s because he doesn’t need the Republicans. And because he doesn’t, the president really is redefining what “bipartisanship” means. Let me put this another way. The Republican Party is the anti-government party. It has been for decades. During the Trump era, however, the party crossed a moral threshold many GOP voters would not. The Republicans became the party of treason. It literally acquitted the former president’s attempt to overthrow the United States government. At the same time, a vast majority of Americans, all living under the smog of the covid pandemic, realize government action was the only way out of the emergency. They couldn’t turn to the Republicans a) because the former president was most responsible for allowing the emergency to become the worst among rich counties and b) because they were the party of anti-government before they became the party of treason. The Republicans turned their backs on the whole of the country when the whole of the country most needed the government to take action. The primary consequence of this, I contend, has been to make government action popular all by itself, regardless of any particular policy.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. One example:

The industry hit hardest by Covid? Novelty hand buzzers. —Conan O'Brien

Got it wrong

In my summary of Dan Savage's book American Savage in yesterday's post I left out an important point. In the last chapter, in which Savage debates Brian Brown, the argument turns to the authority of the Bible. This is important when so many of our opponents believe the Bible is the Word of God and therefore without error. Savage stated if the Bible got slavery wrong – and it did – what else did it get wrong? If it is so wrong about an easy issue such as slavery what are the chances of it getting a complicated issue such as human sexuality 100% right?

Brown tries to claim that the brutal form slavery as was practiced in America is only an Old Testament thing, and the slavery practiced in New Testament times, or at least with Hebrew masters, wasn't all that bad. It was mostly voluntary (indentured servitude) and of a short duration. In addition, the New Testament doesn't really support slavery.

During the debate Savage let Brown's comments go. There were so many other illogical threads to chase after. Once the video of the debate was made public others refuted Brown's claims. Yes, even New Testament era slavery was brutal and yes the New Testament does endorse it and doesn't condemn it. So, back to Savage's question. If the Bible got slavery wrong what else did it get wrong?

That's another way of saying our morality is and should be independent of the Bible.

To be fair, the Bible also got a great deal of morality right. Do unto others... Love one another... There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female...

Holy Terror, part 7: Love

In his book, Holy Terror, Lies the Christian Right Tells Us to Deny Gay Equality Mel White talks about progressive values. In the last post I talked about progressive political values, those based on the Constitution. In this post we move on to progressive moral values, those based on the Bible.

Yes, the previous section discussed that the Constitution is more important than the Bible in a democracy. But the Bible is still quite important. We must rescue it from abuse.

* We reclaim the Bible as a primary source of our progressive moral values and we will resist fundamentalist efforts to claim the bible as their own.

White describes the Bible as the Greatest Book Never Read. Lots of people profess to believe what is says. It seems very few have actually read it. White describes the lives who suffered for the Bible: John Wycliffe and William Tyndale – both had translated the Bible into English and the king felt threatened. There are those sustained by it – Captain Howard Rutledge in solitary confinement sustained by verses he memorized as a child. White gives the example of his own father, a pillar of the church, who defied advice of church leaders and rode with his son in a Pride Parade.

* We reclaim our faith to help empower & inform our progressive moral values and will resist any fundamentalist efforts to define God for us.

White heard stories for E. Stanley Jones, a famous evangelist, talk about what he had learned from Gandhi. Jones said Gandhi had loved and respected the teachings of Jesus, yet remained Hindu. Jones reportedly asked Gandhi, "What makes you different from the average Christian?" Gandhi replied, "I think Jesus meant it." Jones asked how he and his colleagues might be more effective in sharing their faith. Gandhi replied:

First, I would suggest that all of you Christians must begin to live more like Jesus. Second, practice your religion without toning it down. Third, emphasize love and make it your working force for love is central to Christianity. Fourth, study the non-Christian religions more sympathetically to find the good that is within them, in order to have a more sympathetic approach to the people.

White responds:

Gandhi and Jones taught me how to be entirely "out" as a Christian and at the same time be totally accepting of anyone who disagrees. Trusting that the Spirit of Truth with touch us both in the process.
…
Unfortunately, this means dialogue, and, as the well-known language theorist Stanley Fish has said, a fundamentalist "doesn't want dialogue about his beliefs; he wants those beliefs to prevail. Dialogue is not a tenet in his creed, and invoking it is unlikely to do anything but further persuade him that you have missed the point."

White is concerned for the large number of people, mostly sexual minorities, who have been so damaged by religion they have stopped their spiritual journeys. That, says White, has serious consequences for our liberation movement and for progressives in general. Without this force for love our values are likely to break down at a critical moment.

* We reclaim the values of the Jewish prophets: justice and mercy; therefore we will resist injustice and seek to be more merciful to those who suffer injustice.

I've written before about the many Bible verses that discuss justice and mercy as part of discussing how the tax system purposefully underfunds schools to make sure the poor and racial minorities do not have the education to rise to the middle class.

Here are a couple more definitions. From Gandhi: "'Mercy' means helping those who suffer, and 'justice' means cutting off that suffering at its source."

And from Dietrich Bonhoffer: "Our role is NOT just to bandage the victims pulled out from under the wheel, bu to put a spike in the wheel itself."

White's hope: We see that sexual minorities are in desperate need of mercy and justice. Those who have been damaged by Fundie actions will see that Jesus was not a fundamentalist nor held fundamentalist beliefs.

* We reclaim the primary value of Jesus love. Therefore we will resist thoughts, words and actions that are unloving and put nonviolence into practice with out friends and enemies alike.

Those damaged by fundamentalism hear White speak and they come to him with a burning question, "How can you be sure that God loves you, too?"

The answer is to let Jesus speak for himself. The stories of Jesus assure us he loves outcasts best. From his first sermon Jesus condemned the Pharisees "who knew the law by heart but had forgotten that love is the heart of the law."

As for outcasts: Jesus was born of an unwed mother in a conquered nation and spent time as a war refugee in Egypt. Jesus did not graduate from college or even high school and made his living as a laborer. Jesus gathered quite a collection of outcasts as his disciples. Jesus healed the outcast leper, the outcast woman with a flow of blood, the outcast lunatic in the graveyard, the outcast man blind from birth. He accepted a drink from the outcast woman at the well. Jesus healed the centurion's "special servant" – an outcast both because he is part of the occupying army and because that "special servant" is almost certainly a gay lover.

White concludes this chapter by writing:

Becoming and activist is simply a matter of putting love into action. For activists, love is something you do, not something you just talk about, and that's when the fun begins.

Love and religious trappings

Michael Wood explores Romans, chapters 1-3, the passages around the only reliable mention of homosexual acts by Saint Paul (other passages have translation issues). I didn't realize this chunk of text contains an apparent contradiction. Paul appears to say both that we are justified before God by what we do and that we cannot be justified before God by what we do.

So Wood consulted translation specialists and went digging. What he found is that the commandments of the Old Testament are of two types. One type is an expansion of Leviticus 19:18 -- "Love your neighbor as yourself." These are commandments on ethical issues about how one person is to treat another.

The other type of commandment deals with the rituals of worship, religious ceremony, circumcision, diet, cleanliness, and what it means to be holy. Put it another way, these are all the things that make a person a Jew.

What Paul is saying is: If you love your neighbor you are doing what God wants.

If you do all the other religious trappings except love your neighbor you are not doing what God wants.

Liberal Christians have a tendency to dismiss Paul's writings. The contradiction above -- and Paul's one comment about homosexual acts -- are some of the reasons for that dismissal. But conservatives don't. And a liberal dismissal of Paul only makes conservatives dig in their heels. But with this understanding Liberals can embrace Paul.

All issues, including sexual issues and including homosexuality, can be discussed in view of whether the action shows love or doesn't. If it shows love, it is good. If it works against love, it is bad. If neither (such as dietary laws) it has no moral component. Homosexual love is good. Homosexual rape is bad. Homosexuality by itself has no moral component.

Wood is convinced this new historical understanding will lead to conservative acceptance of gays. I'm not at all convinced. Yes, it will help.

Alas, a great deal of the conservative view, though originating in the Bible, is now intertwined with other things:

* Fear of gay people.
* A strong need to assert superiority (heterosexual superiority is only one part of this).
* A strong need to claim their worldview cannot change.
* They've built a religion on the inclusion of a strong denunciation of gays revising this piece brings the whole thing into question.
* Their pronunciations give them power which they won't let go of easily.

So, I don't think this will change their minds. It is too easy to brand Wood as misguided or a heretic.

Under no circumstances is it every okay

The Onion is known for using satire to tell the truth, but every so often they create a story that steps well beyond satire. The news source made up a story about a coalition of 10 year old boys holding a news conference outside the Penn State football stadium. Their message was simple.

"It doesn't matter who the boy being raped is, and it doesn't matter who is doing the raping, just please, please alert law enforcement. And by the way, under no circumstances is it ever okay for an adult to rape a 10-year-old boy, so you really can't go wrong by calling the police when something like that happens."

Don't even wait until after lunch.



If a church leader or lawmaker pushes for stringent laws against gay people (perhaps, as is proposed in Uganda, including death) they might find their efforts backfire. Their opponents may accuse them of being gay just to get rid of them.

That may have happened to Bishop John Atherton in 1640. He pushed hard for the death penalty for the crime of homosexuality and then was the second person hanged for that offense. He may have been gay (not enough evidence) or his opponents may have found a way to get him out of the way.



Jay Michaelson wrote an article for The Jewish Daily Forward highlighting the ideas in his book God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality. He says that all Biblical passages can be interpreted in a variety of ways. To be ordained a lawyer-rabbi was once required to be able to argue both sides of an issue.

So does that make all interpretations equally valid? Not at all. The proper interpretation is the one that matches the fundamental values of the Bible, building life, living honestly (which I see as the same as living with high mental health), and sanctifying love.

We grow as religious people because the Bible allows for reinterpretation. If it didn't we would remain ethical infants.



Retired Army captain and atheist Jason Torpy says that atheists need chaplains too. In addition to religious duties, chaplains also advise and counsel the soldiers under their care. Atheist soldiers need that counseling too, preferably from an atheist chaplain. Torpy has made a request for such chaplains. The Chaplain Corps hasn't said no, but isn't pursuing the idea very quickly.

Fumbled in translation

The King James Bible was translated about 400 years ago. Dr. Joel Hoffman, a Biblical scholar writing for the Huffington Post, notes six problems in translation techniques used in the creation of that Bible and English Bibles since then. Many of those errors persist in newer translations in spite of better scholarship.

How do we know if a translation is correct? We talk to someone who speaks the language and figure out whether the meaning they get from it is the same meaning we get. That doesn't work with ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew. Even so, ancient languages work in many ways similar to modern languages so if we see a problem in modern language translation we can assume the same problem exists with ancient languages.

Here are the problem areas.
1. Etymology. Meanings of words are determined from their root words and the word's ancestry. But "grammar" and "glamour" mean two different things. Same with "ballot" and "bullet."

2. Internal structure. Look at typical suffixes, and word combinations. What does "strip mall" and "drive through window" literally mean? Does "office" relate to "officer"? Compare "post" and "postage" with "host" and "hostage."

3. Cognates. Meanings of a word or phrase in one language can differ from the same thing in another language. I ran across this one first-hand when I lived in Germany. The English "must" is the same as the German "muss." But "must not" means forbidden and "muss nicht" means optional.

4. Time. Even dealing with just English, words have changed meaning in the last 400 years. The case I know best begins, "Suffer the little children…" which does not mean Jesus wanted the kids to feel pain. Another example is we think of "you" as informal and "thee" as formal. But 400 years ago the opposite was true.

5. Metaphors. Shakespeare wrote, "Juliet is the sun." A modern take on the phrase is that one should be wary of melanoma when around Juliet.

6. Translators are quite reluctant to throw out old meanings. Lots of people my age and older want the King James version of Psalm 23 read at their funeral. But are those words still accurate?

What does work? Context. The word "sincerely" at the end of a letter only means "the name is next."

This posting includes a 21 minute TED talk by Dr. Hoffman that goes into these points in more detail and offers a few more examples.

Quixotic and damaging battle

Congress repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The Southern Poverty Law Center has tagged several Fundie organizations as hate groups because they demonize gay people using false information. The ex-gay group Exodus International has ended its support of "Day of Truth," which was designed to counteract the gay "Day of Silence," so that it can better support the Golden Rule. All are signs of increasing acceptance of gay people and their relationships.

Which means those anti-gay Fundie organizations have a choice, says Tom Krattenmaker of USA Today. Do they continue to fight gays to the bitter end or turn their attention to other issues?

If they take the first choice their battle looks increasingly quixotic and damages both the reputation of the fighters and of Christianity as a whole. Since so many people know and are friends with gays the talking points are increasingly seen as not matching reality. Even young Evangelical leaders don't want their gay friends to be demonized.

But we have the Truth about the Bible! many Fundies claim. Not so fast, say modern biblical scholars. More on this below.

Those Fundie leaders insisting that being Christian means continuing the fight are defining Christianity as a hate group. And that is a ticket to infamy, similar to that of Bull Connor and George Wallace.


Those modern scholars produced two new books: Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire by Jennifer Wright Knust and God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says by Michael Coogan.

The conservative view of the Bible -- including the view that it roundly condemns all sex outside of a lifelong straight marriage -- has lead many Americans to conclude the Bible doesn't speak for them.

Here are a few of the arguments Knust and Coogan write about, as reported by Lisa Miller of Newsweek. I've heard some of them before.

* The Bible is an ancient text and its particulars don't apply to the modern world. It is a "record of the beginning of a continuous movement toward the goal of full freedom and quality for all persons," writes Coogan.

* Sex in the Bible is sometimes hidden and is much more prevalent in the Bible than most believe. References to sex organs are sometimes disguised as "hands" or "feet" -- Ruth lies down next to Boaz and "uncovers his feet."

* That which is forbidden is also allowed. Tamar, a widow, poses as a prostitute and seduces her father-in-law so that she will have children. David loved Jonathan, "Your love for me was wonderful, passing the love of women." The Old Testament approves of divorce, but Jesus does not. The message is contradictory.

* Accepted interpretations are sometimes wrong. Top example is insisting the story of Sodom is about homosexuality rather than hospitality.

The purpose of these two books, and others like them, is to fight against the "official" interpretation of the Bible. With these books providing healthy skepticism to balance our faith, we can read the Bible for ourselves.

Which is exactly what conservatives don't want us to do. Our reading and study should be supervised by proper authorities. They say not everyone is qualified to read the Bible. We may come to the wrong conclusions. The Bible has been used to support slavery, wife-beating, kidnapping, child abuse, racism, and polygamy. That particular argument seems ironic because many (if not all) of those supposedly wrong conclusions were supported by the official church, the ones who are telling us we need their guidance to read the Bible correctly.

I do need the input of scholars who have come before me. But when issues of sexual morality are this divisive (and when I'm at the center of the storm) we should not simply cede the field without debating what the Bible actually says.

Mistranslation and misinterpretation

In case you haven't explored why many Christians believe the Bible does not condemn gay people (or you need a refresher) Bishop Gene Robinson wrote an excellent series of articles for -- of all places -- The Washington Post. Though that is a surprise I'm pleased to see these arguments in such a prominent secular venue. I've seen all of these points before.

In "Texts of Terror" he discusses how one should read the Bible. One major hurdle is making a distinction between what the words mean now and what they meant in context of the society in which they were written. He also explores the importance of Tradition and Reason, which (with Scripture) make up 3 parts of the Quadrilateral that John Wesley described. The fourth is Experience. Robinson also declares he does not believe God stopped talking to people once the books of the Bible were chosen and made official.

The two condemning passages from Leviticus chapters 18 and 20, the ones that refer to male-male sex as an abomination, are in the section describing purity. They assume that everyone must be straight, so gay sex is a person acting against nature and is thus unclean (in the same manner a woman's period is "unnatural" because it happens only for a short time each month. The surrounding passages also uphold common cultural stigmas and current understandings of how the world works. They might have been important in ancient Israel, but the whole lot of them are not binding on us today.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19) is frequently taken as a prohibition to gay sex. However, the story is about coerced sex, or rape. Elsewhere in the Bible, including by Jesus, the story is declared to be about not offering proper hospitality.

Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. One would think an issue causing denominations to split would be worth a mention.

In Romans 1:26-27, Paul appears to be using the same argument as Leviticus -- that since the ancient world didn't know the concept of homosexuality all people were assumed to be straight. Worshipping idols (instead of God) would cause people to do things which are not natural, so straight people would engage in same-sex acts. Other than that, there are several sexual acts, such as temple prostitutes, that Paul is upset about, but he never actually says. Just a few verses later at the start of chapter 2 Paul issues a strong condemnation against judging others. This is the part conservatives ignore.

Passages in the letters to the Corinthians and to Timothy that are used as texts of terror use a Greek word that is used nowhere else in Scripture nor in other texts of the time. It's meaning is unknown. Modern translators have, of course, imposed their own biases onto the word.

These passages simply do not address the modern concept of two people of the same sex in a loving relationship. That means while we should not interpret the Bible to condemn gays we also cannot say it supports gays. The concept of homosexuality was unknown at the time. However, the Bible has a great deal to say about empathy, justice for the marginalized, honesty, and loving relationships. Those concepts should guide us when dealing with gays and gay relationships.


Another excellent discussion of these texts of terror can be read in the Soulforce guide "What the Bible says -- and doesn't say -- about homosexuality."

The view from on high

Somebody had fun. Here's a series of 67 photos of Manhattan taken from the air. Most are from earlier this month, though a few are from as long ago as 2008. Some get up close and personal to well-known skyscrapers. Alas, in this format most photos are too big to be seen on my computer screen in their entirety. I'm not quite sure why these great images are on the Denver Post website.

A handful of the photos in a size I can handle.

Artist James Dive used images from Google Earth and some photo manipulations to create overhead images of Biblical events. This page contains a handful: Garden of Eden (with Belgium as a stand-in), Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat, Parting of the Red Sea, and the Crucifixion of Jesus.

A corrupt equivalence

Not content to preach about how America is a Christian nation, Fundies have put it in a new bible to "prove" it. You can now get an American Patriot's Bible. I'm not too keen on looking at the bible's website, so I only have an article in USA Today to go by. As far as I can tell, the actual text of the bible is unchanged (though they don't say which translation they use). What makes it a Patriot's Bible is the 300 articles sprinkled throughout on a wide variety of Fundie talking points -- the right to bear arms, religious broadcasting, the impact of Ronald Reagan.

Here's just a few things that are wrong with this bible:
* It equates patriotism with Christianity, corrupting both.
* It elevates Fundie talking points as having come from God (and most of them don't).
* It implies these articles are commentary on biblical passages.
* It promotes and "proves" the lie that America was founded as a Christian nation.
* It promotes the culture wars and partisan divide and implies the battle is blessed by God.
* It implies that to be a patriot one must be a Christian, and to be a Christian one must be a patriot.
* It drives those who aren't Christian Patriots farther away from the bible and the church.

Some commentators have used these words to describe it: heresy, corrupt, idolatrous. I strongly agree and would add one more descriptor: abomination.

Read it for myself? I can do that?

Is there a right way to read the bible? David Plotz, an unobservant Jew, was thumbing through the bible (Genesis to Chronicles) during his niece's bat mitzvah and encountered the story of Dinah, a quite gruesome tale. Why didn't he know about such a morally ambiguous story from Jewish school? So he decided to read the bible and blog about it. His blog postings have now been gathered into The Good Book. Plotz admits upfront that he has no training in biblical scholarship. But that doesn't stop him from drawing lessons from what he reads. For example, Samson and Delilah means "1. Women are deceptive and heartless. 2. Men are too stupid and sex-crazed to realize this."

Naturally, conservative Jewish and Christian scholars are jumping all over Plotz. How dare he tell us what these stories mean! One needs instruction to interpret the bible.

Actually, Plotz is saying these are what the stories mean to me. And I'll add they'll mean something different to each reader. So read it. Let it speak to you. Talk to others to find out what is says to them. Study it to find out what it has said over the ages. Don't worry about being right (unless you're a preacher or scholar), because the point is to let it become personal.

As for Dinah, she was raped, married off to her rapist, widowed when her brothers go on a murderous rampage, then listens to her father rebuke them for ruining his reputation. And she says nothing. The spiritual message? I have no idea. It probably has more to do with Jewish history than with insight into God.