No one is coming to save us

In mid November I wrote about Pastor Craig Duke of Newburgh United Methodist Church in Evansville, Indiana who took part in a drag show as part of the HBO series We’re Here. Though I saw a follow up post three weeks ago I didn’t write about it. Another post brought it to mind (and provided a link). Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos reported that alas, after the episode featuring Duke appeared he was “relieved of his pastoral duties.” His wife resigned as youth pastor. He is living off donations to his GoFundMe page. Higgins reported there was discontent in the 400 person congregation when the episode was recorded in July. Though the congregation seems divided the discontent continued and the church leadership relieved him of duties. He wasn’t exactly fired, though will have to move out of the church supplied house by the end of February. Duke isn’t interested in another pastoral role and is considering building an inclusive camp for youth. Higgins wrote:

Folks connected to the show are calling out the cruelty in action. Shangela [one of the hosts], for example, summed up the situation as Duke basically being “bullied” out of his job because “he is a person who believes in love and acceptance and faith and inclusion.”

On to the good news that prompted me to go back to this bad news. Higgins reported that gay pastor (already a good thing) Aaron Musser of St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Chicago did an Advent children’s sermon in drag. He called it “A Dress Rehearsal for Joy.” Higgins wrote:

In a video clip of the service as shared by the Post Millennial, Musser encourages children to gather around before he begins to read from Joy. “Have any of you ever seen a drag queen?” Musser asks the children. “No? So, is it everybody’s first time ever seeing a drag queen? Well, hello. I am also a boy most of the time when I’m here, but today, I’m a girl.” Thankfully, people are heard clapping and making murmurs of affirmation in the background. ... “Today, we consider what it might be like to have a dress rehearsal for the kind of joy awaiting us on the other side of Advent,” Musser wrote following the event, in which he wore a long white dress and a wig. “It’s been so hard to know what that joy will be, because it’s been so long since some of us have been joyful. It’s been a difficult and tiring couple of years,” Musser wrote in a Facebook post following the sermon. “And I decided instead of telling you, ‘This is how I want you to be joyful,’ as we prepare for this dress rehearsal,” he continued. “I figured I would instead put on a dress as so many who have inspired me have done. I decided to follow their example, showing that liberation from oppressive laws clears a path for joy.” Musser added that allowing yourself to feel joy can be “scary,” and that he wasn’t sure how people would react to him in drag.

Comments from the congregation to that Facebook post were mostly supportive. Alas, there were so many trolls he closed comments. Chrislove of Kos, who hosts a monthly discussion of LGBTQ books, wrote that today’s installment was only to ask for writer’s for the coming year. However, he did include a four minute video from Posten Norway titled “When Harry Met Santa.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa died this weekend at the age of 90. A Martinez of NPR spoke to Rev. Michael Battle, director of the Desmond Tutu Center at General Theological Seminary in New York. Some of what Battle said:

Well, I think one of the key things for him was that you have to understand what it means to be human. And he's famous for this concept called ubuntu, which means I am because you are, and because you are, I am. And he understood that just - not just for those that - people that he loved, but he understood that about his enemies, that his enemies are also a part of his identity. And I think Tutu is going to be well-known for that concept of ubuntu and his spirituality. He's going to be well-known for chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, giving the distinction between retributive justice and restorative justice. He's going to be well-known for ecumenism, or inter-religious dialogue, as one of his best friends was His Holiness the Dalai Lama. There's just so many things, I think, that are so profound about the arch. ... Well, you know, apartheid really is a religious worldview. It was a worldview that those who were from the Afrikaner ethnicity understood God was on their side. And so Tutu's brilliance and his genius was to tap into the core of spirituality, that God is not against anyone. And he helped to argue against apartheid spirituality and to get them to see, especially through ubuntu, that they cannot be sufficient human beings without those who - that he - they consider their enemies, as well.

Several news reports have said “the arch” is the common reference to the Archbishop. Back in 2017 I wrote about ubuntu as part of a discussion of the book Sundowner Ubuntu by Anthony Bidulka. It is part of a series that features private investigator Russell Quant of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In this book clues take him to South Africa. While visiting a township a case of camera lenses is stolen. It is ubuntu that prompts the return of the case. Ubuntu means there is an emphasis on community, that we are a part of each other. Community is more important than a position in the social hierarchy. Stealing from the community cannot work. Cleaning out old tabs... Grorgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Barton Gellman of The Atlantic, who wrote that American democracy has a serious risk of ending in 2024 and urgent action isn’t happening.

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

John Stoehr, as part of an introduction to an article on his Editorial Board, quoted Don Moynihan, a professor at Georgetown University:

The partisan Covid gap is worsening. Research using careful causal designs show that media messaging, in the form of Fox News, is leading Republicans to take the pandemic less seriously, resist vaccines, get sick and die.

Stoehr added:

The midterms are going to be decided by swing voters who can’t or won’t figure out for themselves that the GOP is knowingly killing GOP voters for the purpose of prolonging the pandemic in order to blame the damage done on the Democrats.

I add that the weak response by Democrats at the federal level (Biden) and state level (Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan) is making that claim all too plausible. Moynihan’s full thread traced why messaging from Fox News is a big part of the problem.

It's bad that a lot of Americans are dying because they trust the bad public health messaging of Fox and other elites. Even if you don't care about Fox viewers, the nature of the pandemic means we are all in the same boat. Its just that some people are trying to sink it.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

If the GOP—now an overtly white supremacist fascist cult—wrests full control of the United States government, no one is coming to save us. The UK is also at risk. The EU lacks the power, as do states in the Global South. Russia will celebrate. China will exploit the opportunity. We’ve become overly accustomed to analogies involving Nazism and the Third Reich and—implicit in those analogies even if unconsciously so—is a belief that such a force for evil will eventually be defeated within a relatively short time span. That’s simply not the case. None of us can know the future. But I caution against the normalcy bias that has continually served to hasten us along this road as people have denied what is happening before them only to begin to speak out when it might be too late. We are living in an historical flex point.

I’ve been thinking a bit about that short time span. Nazis fell in 12 years. But the dictatorship in the Soviet Union lasted 70 years. And the one party rule in China has lasted 70 years and is tightening its hold (see: Hong Kong). Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, the hosts of NPR’s history podcast Throughline talked to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project that researches how slavery has affected American History. The year in the title is when slaves were first brought to this country. I was going to quote a bunch of the dialogue, but it was about one host proposing a framework for looking at the Revolutionary War and Hannah-Jones saying that isn’t quite right. So instead of getting the wrong idea stuck in your head, here’s a bit of what she said:

For a long time, historians didn't even deal with slavery in a revolution that was largely led by slaveholders. But you have - for the last 40 years, have had historians who are really trying to excavate the role of slavery. And they have come up with scholarship that says that slavery played a prominent role.

To get more detail one would have to read the book that resulted from the project. Or wait for further research.