Whatever they find to scream about loudest, do more of

The General Conference of the United Methodist Church is underway. This is the first GC since the one scheduled in 2020 was canceled. GC is the legislative body of the denomination and has the power to revise the denomination rule book and to set budgets. Delegates come from the US, Africa, the Philippines, and a few from Europe. The 2020 GC was supposed to approve guidelines for congregational disaffiliation, a way for those that disapprove of better treatment of LGBTQ people to exit gracefully. The guidelines were not approved. About a quarter of US congregations left anyway. That gives those who remained an opportunity to make the denomination more welcoming to LGBTQ people. The first vote to help that happen came sooner than I expected. My friend and debate partner found an article by Peter Smith of Associated Press that reports on the vote. Up to this point the United Methodist Church was structured so that local regions, such as Africa, could adapt the rulebook to their local situation. Congregations in the US could not. The worldwide delegation voted on US pensions – and the way US churches were allowed to treat LGBTQ people. That has meant restricting what we could do. This vote was to make the US its own region with the ability to adapt the rulebook to our needs. It passed by 78%, which is good because this is a constitutional change and needed 66% to pass. It now goes to conferences in each subregion (such as Michigan) for approval over the next year. Over the next week there will be two more important votes. One is accepting a rewrite of our Social Principles. This version was led by the global church, not by the US. It is a way of decolonizing the denomination, avoiding the US view being imposed on other countries. The other vote is to remove language harmful to LGBTQ people. The LGBTQ caucus is not (yet) promoting adding pro-LGBTQ language, which could be voted down by the more conservative African churches. Once the harmful language is gone then the US as a region could adapt the rulebook to local needs and add pro-LGBTQ language for US congregations. The investigation into attempting to find impeachable crimes committed by Biden has been led by House Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that after 15 months of trying Comer just wants the whole thing to end. He’d even accept divine intervention. Comer is done because they have found no evidence of impeachable crimes. All of their “witnesses” were nothing. And they’ve been well played by Democrats and even Hunter Biden, one of their targets. McCarter wrote, “There’s just so much humiliation one man can take, I guess.” On to other stupid things Republicans have been doing. A year ago a gunman killed three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville. Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that now Republicans in Nashville, learning nothing, have approved to allow teachers to carry concealed handguns. The protests from the galleries was loud enough that the Speaker ordered them to be cleared. Rep. Justin Pearson, one of the two black men expelled a year ago and voted back in by their district, wrote a protest piece for CNN:

Arming teachers increases the likelihood of shootings in schools, increases the chance that students will have access to guns and erodes trust in educators. A teacher with a handgun is unable to stop a shooter with a military-style weapon, and teachers aren’t able to respond in the ways trained law enforcement agents can. Adverse impacts — including fatal outcomes — will disproportionately fall on already marginalized populations such as disabled and Black students.

Jay wrote:

The bill would require any school employee who wants to carry a handgun to have an enhanced carry permit, obtain written authorization from both the school’s principal and law enforcement, clear a background check, undergo a psychological evaluation, and complete 40 hours of handgun training. One point of contention with the legislation is that parents would not necessarily know or be notified if their child’s teacher was carrying a handgun.

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed the Republican response to the likelihood of an abortion rights proposal being placed on the Arizona ballot in November in response to the 1864 abortion ban being ruled enforceable.

According to a leaked PowerPoint presentation prepared by Arizona House GOP general counsel Linley Wilson, Republicans’ best course is to deceive Arizonans by forcing them to wade through one, two, or even three competing anti-choice initiatives in order to “dilute” support to amend the state constitution in favor of abortion rights. ... The Arizona GOP has reacted to the backlash against the resurrection of this grotesque “zombie” law by doubling down on the same strategy that has always served them. It begins and ends with the premise that anyone who becomes pregnant is simply unfit to decide these issues for themselves. That assumption is more than just offensive and insulting: It’s fundamentally dehumanizing. Democrats should take special care to underscore that aspect as the 2024 election approaches.

Gloria Rebecca Gomez, in an Arizona Mirror article posted on Kos, reported the Arizona House managed to pass a repeal of the ban. It took three tries to get enough Republican support to get past the procedural vote that allowed voting on the bill. It now goes to the Senate where they might take action on May 1. Nadra Nittle, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos, reported that many times to get a book pulled from a library it is labeled “obscene.” Getting tagged that way are books about sexual assault, about violence against women told by the female survivors. These make up 19% of banned books. Survivors need to have their literature reflect their experience. If they think they’re the only victims they will likely blame themselves. And no, this isn’t an adult topic – about 27% of girls and 5% of boys 17 years old have experienced sexual abuse. The numbers are much higher for LGBTQ youth. Scott Berkowitz of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network he founded and leads said that these bans play into the common misconception that sexual assault is about sex when they’re really about power. Mokurai of the Readers and Book Lovers community on Kos discussed the book Why We Can’t Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer and published in 2015. Here’s a quote from the book:

How can it be claimed that we can’t afford the rich? Here’s a short answer. Their wealth is mostly dependent ultimately on the production of goods and services by others and siphoned off through dividends, capital gains, interest and rent, and much of it is hidden in tax havens. They are able to control much of economic life and the media and dominate politics, so their special interests and view of the world come to restrict what democracies can do. Their consumption is excessive and wasteful and diverts resources away from the more needy and deserving. Their carbon footprints are grotesquely inflated and many have an interest in continued fossil fuel production, threatening the planet.

The book says real development means allowing everyone to have a good life. That includes having enough food, shelter, health services, security and freedom from violence, being able to participate in political decisions, and being able to interact without coercion or neglect. Mokurai lists a way we might get to this. Make taxes more fair. There are alternate ways of doing things, such as cooperatives instead of corporations. Some things, such as public transportation, education, energy, and water should be run by the government or by tightly regulated companies. There should be basic income, help for the disabled, and pensions. And remove the political dominance of the rich. And one last quote from the book:

Whatever they find to scream about loudest, do more of.

George Packer of The Atlantic discussed the ongoing protests at Columbia University and other schools. He said what we see now is a consequence of the protests back in 1968 when students were upset with the Vietnam War and used tactics far more severe than they are using now. Some of his major points: A university is a special place whose legitimacy depends on recognition of reason, openness, and tolerance. That can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. Packer quoted Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1968 commencement address at Columbia:

“A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.

It didn’t work that way. Universities did not remain neutral. Radical students claimed they were oppressed. Radical ideas in the 60s, such as decolonization, were folded into reading lists and core curriculum. Which means now students take decolonization for granted and don’t actually think about it. The university leaders call the cops on students for practicing what they’ve been taught. What universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another. After October 7 Jewish students were harassed. They responded in the way they had been instructed to respond to hurt, by saying they were “unsafe.” In 1968 Republicans exploited the campus takeovers and the protests at that year’s Democratic Convention and we got Nixon. Republicans are already exploiting campus protests and activists are promising to show up at this year’s Democratic Convention. A few months ago I wrote about Rep Elise Stefanik and her questions to university presidents, including Harvard. The president of Harvard muffed the question and she soon had to resign. At the time I was suspicious because Stefanik is very hard core Republican and doesn’t really care about how minority students are treated. Why weren’t media outlets also suspicious? Packer’s reporting suggests I was correct in my suspicion. Stefanik’s question was whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct.

If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?”

Which means Stefanik’s question was a gotcha question with no answer that would please her. I didn’t know and had no reason to find out that diva Bette Midler tweets. And she can be delightfully snarky. I found her because a pundit roundup included one of her tweets. The nasty guy’s election corruption trial is in progress and he has been sleeping on occasion (the thing he accuses Sleepy Joe of doing). So Midler tweeted an image of “My Pillow, Court Room Edition.” Another of her notable tweets (and I see them only the ones that get a huge response), this one from 2022, includes a list of incidents where there is a minor threat but it changed the way we do things. Here are the last two entries:

2001 – One person attempts to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb. Since then, all air travelers have to take off their shoes for scanning before being allowed to board. Since 1968 – 1,516,863 people have died from guns on American soil. Gun violence kills an average of 168 people every two days! Now, the problem apparently can’t be solved except with thoughts and prayers.

And another:

Planned Parenthood isn’t killing children. You’re thinking of the NRA.