I have to start here by repeating a caveat, best stated by Esquire‘s Charles Pierce:

“It has been fashionable for a while now to place McCain somehow above politics; the “maverick” thing was based on a sparse list of examples. There was the campaign finance law that he championed with Russ Feingold, a law that lies now in ruins because of judges for whom John McCain loyally voted. He campaigned vigorously to give the president a line-item veto until a Supreme Court led by William Rehnquist explained forcefully that such a measure was hilariously unconstitutional. He thoroughly supported Reagan’s adventurism in Central America, was a protege of Henry Kissinger, got snagged in the Keating 5 corruption and became a campaign-finance reformer only after skating on that episode more cleanly than the other four miscreants, one of whom was John Glenn. He was a reliable Republican vote on every nomination and every policy that evidenced the Republican Party’s slow slide into madness and chaos and he was unable and not a talented enough politician to stop it.

All true, sadly. Yet Pierce, who differed sharply with McCain on these matters, insists that he liked and admired the senator until the end, and misses him now.

I think I’m in much the same boat, though I never actually met him, which Pierce did. Yet if ever my nostalgia for McCain gets too fulsome, I pray a loyal friend will tiptoe up and whisper in one ear, “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull?”

The reflexive answer “Lipstick,” always snaps me out of it.

Nevertheless, McCain was a consistent maverick on one issue, in which I was total agreement with him, except in one particular. That issue is torture.

When McCain ran for president in 2007-08 he sold out many good things he had once stood for, in the manic effort to scramble up the greased pole to the Oval Office window. But as the Politifact checkers later pointed out, he didn’t waver on torture in his climb.

“Anyone who knows what waterboarding is could not be unsure. It is a horrible torture technique used by Pol Pot and being used on Buddhist monks as we speak,” McCain said after a campaign stop in Iowa in October 2007.

“People who have worn the uniform and had the experience know that this is a terrible and odious practice and should never be condoned in the U.S. We are a better nation than that.”

At a Republican debate in St. Petersburg, Florida, in November 2007, McCain again was clear in his conviction that waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques are in violation of the Geneva Convention, “it’s in violation of existing law.”

“And again, I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not 24 and Jack Bauer. Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective,” McCain said. “And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The Army general there said that techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn’t think they need to do anything else.

“My friends, this is what America is all about. This is a defining issue and, clearly, we should be able, if we want to be commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, to take a definite and positive position on, and that is, we will never allow torture to take place in the United States of America.” . . .

McCain continued to speak unequivocally in opposition to torture, as he did in a foreign policy speech in March [2008].

“America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model,” McCain said. “How we behave at home affects how we are perceived abroad. We must fight the terrorists and at the same time defend the rights that are the foundation of our society. We can’t torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured.”

I’ll slide past McCain’s legislative work on the issue: he did his best, but the ban he once managed to get passed was less than total, and anyway was cut down like a sleeping baby in a drone strike as soon as it reached the Bush-Cheney White House.

But he kept raising his voice. Shortly after Osama Bin Ladin was killed in 2011, McCain took to the Op-Ed page of the Washington Post.

He skewered the bogus claims that the raid proved the Bush-Cheney tortures had “worked” to smoke Bin Ladin out, and reminded readers that what was at stake was more than score-settling:

“Osama bin Laden’s welcome death has ignited debate over whether the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners were instrumental in locating bin Laden, and whether they are a justifiable means for gathering intelligence.

Much of this debate is a definitional one: whether any or all of these methods constitute torture. I believe some of them

do, especially waterboarding, which is a mock execution and thus an exquisite form of torture. As such, they are prohibited by American laws and values, and I oppose them. . . .

“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading.

Mistreatment of enemy prisoners endangers our own troops, who might someday be held captive. While some enemies, and al-Qaeda surely, will never be bound by the principle of reciprocity, we should have concern for those Americans captured by more conventional enemies, if not in this war then in the next. . . .

I don’t mourn the loss of any terrorist’s life. What I do mourn is what we lose when by official policy or official neglect we confuse or encourage those who fight this war for us to forget that best sense of ourselves.”

McCain knew this “from personal experience.” He didn’t need to give  more detail.

But the demise of the “black sites” was followed by an all-out CIA-backed campaign to cover their tracks and get rid of the evidence. Damning videotapes of torture sessions were destroyed. And then an even bigger target surfaced: in March 2009, the Senate Select Committee began an exhaustive investigation of CIA records, reviewing millions of pages, to separate fact from fiction and develop a reliable record.

The Agency pulled out all the stops to shut down the probe, and when that failed, their Republican minions on the Committee tried to confiscate all the copies. The main report (6000 or so pages) is still secret, but a 600-page “Executive Summary” (minus many blackout “redactions”) was released in December 2014.

Even with its many large black holes, the summary made hair-raising, stomach-churning reading.  (Full text of the redacted summary is online here.)

McCain was interviewed about it on Face The Nation  by CBS reporter Bob Schieffer. Asked about the continuing efforts to suppress it, he was straightforward:

“But what we need to do is come clean; we move forward and we vow never to do it again. That’s what we did after Abu Ghraib and that’s what we’ve done after other times in our history. We’re not a perfect nation, but we are a nation that acknowledges our mistakes and we move forward. And we are not going to be inhumane.”

You can’t claim that tying someone to the floor and have them freeze to death is not torture. You can’t say 183 times someone is waterboarded.

And, by the way, on waterboarding, it began with the Spanish Inquisition. We — it was done during the Philippines War. We tried and hung Japanese war criminals for waterboarding Americans in World War II. . . .

But, Bob, could I just say — it’s not about them; it’s about us. It’s about us, what we were, what we are and what we — and what we should be. And that’s a nation that does not engage in these kinds of violations of the fundamental basic human rights that we guaranteed when we declared our independence.

Despite the shocking revelations of the report, the pro-torture attitudes of the incoming administration just have cast a deepening shadow over McCain’s final months. They seemed to be spreading like, well, a rapidly metastasizing tumor.

For torture opponents, another major shock came last spring, when formerly secret CIA agent Gina Haspel was named to be head of the CIA. As she (briefly) “came in from the cold,” it was disclosed that she had actually run one of the “black sites,” and very likely had overseen torture sessions. And it turned out Haspel was also up to her eyes in the destruction of the incriminating videotapes.

Nevertheless, a spineless Senate moved toward confirmation. In the process Haspel had a major stroke of luck: she was spared a showdown with the Senate’s most visible and respected torture opponent. One can only imagine what a confrontation that might have been: Haspel, impassive, well-shielded by kevlar secrecy and talking points, versus a legendary torture survivor.

Still, the confrontation was not wholly imaginary; it did happen, but was epistolary: McCain, losing one last medical battle, took time to write a lengthy and trenchant letter to Haspel, which was filled with tough observations and demanding questions. Here are a few:

“These techniques included the practice of waterboarding, forced nudity and humiliation, facial and abdominal slapping, dietary manipulation, stress positions, cramped confinement, striking, and more than 48 hours of sleep deprivation. We now know that these techniques not only failed to deliver actionable intelligence, but actually produced false and misleading information. Most importantly, the use of torture compromised our values, stained our national honor, and threatened our historical reputation. . . .

As you know, many detainees under the custody of the CIA in the wake of the September 11th attacks were subjected to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  In just one case, a Libyan detainee and his pregnant wife were rendered to a foreign country, where the woman was bound, gagged, and photographed naked as several American intelligence officers watched.

Do you believe actions like these were justified, and do you believe they produced actionable intelligence?

What is your assessment today of the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and their impact on the United States’ moral standing in the world?

It is not known if McCain ever got replies to these and other questions in the letter.  Haspel was confirmed by the Senate as CIA Director on April 17, 2018. McCain was in Arizona, undergoing treatment, and did not vote. The epic confrontation was muffled and squirreled away in an online footnote.

For the moment, it would seem that McCain’s long crusade against U.S. government torture has got no further than his other, likewise now-demolished effort to reform and limit big money in political campaigns:  the architects and enablers of official torture are skating toward retirement under a so-far leakproof umbrella of impunity; one of them now commands the CIA; a true friend of eternal detention seems headed for a majority-making Supreme Court seat; and in the White House an itchy finger could loose new tortures as easily as sending out a tweet.

McCain, I’m sorry to say, supported that get-out-of-jail-free card for our torturers. Maybe he thought it was the only way to get a public accounting of the debacle; or maybe actual accountability would have snagged too many of his capitol cronies. For me that decision, one also advanced by Barack Obama (“look forward and not back”), is up at the pinnacle of the Capitol Hall of Shame, next to the refusal to prosecute any of the banksters after they crashed the economy and ruined millions of lives.

But there it all is. And, oh yeah, the Border Wall is yet to receive a nickel; and Puerto Rico is still buried in post-hurricane debris. But Guantanamo is being massively refurbished and expanded, presumably to be ready for the next big batch (batches?) of internees. (And new black sites? Who knows?)

Yet McCain’s voice still echoes, at least for me. Especially this one brief outburst, when he was at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia on November 19, 2016. That was just a few days after what I still (and I suspect he likewise did) call The Earthquake. McCain defiantly insisted that the United States will not engage in torture under any circumstances.

“I don’t give a damn what the president of the United States wants to do or anybody else wants to do. We will not waterboard . . .We will not do it. . . .What does it say about America if we’re going to inflict torture on people?”

What does it say, sir?

It says to me we’re now living in a country where your voice on this matter has departed from among us. And it says the cloud that shadowed your last days has become noticeably deeper. Just since Saturday, August 25.

More about torture and efforts to end it here:

The Quaker Initiative to End Torture

.

The post McCain’s best “Maverick” Performance: as a witness against torture appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Too many media people around this past week’s supreme Court hearings wasted their energy doing horse race and atmosphere coverage. Political sportscasters, I call them; and pretty bush league at that.

Their frame was: the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (hereafter “K“) is a done deal, so all that matters is the hullabaloo, that and the shadow horse race preview of the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Which meant excessive attention to whether aspirants Kamala Harris or Cory Booker managed to draw some blood and get a boost from a bombshell revelation.

But the pair, it was reported, didn’t bring any real ordnance, and neither came out with a 2020 home run. That’s true enough, and for the media political sportscasters, this was all that mattered. And that’s utterly mistaken.

The New York Times’s Saturday postmortem reflected this outlook:

“Boorish. Rude. Disrespectful. Insulting. Grandstanding. Hyperventilating. Deranged. Ridiculous. Drivel.

Those were among the words angry Senate Republicans used this week to assail the conduct of Democrats at a Supreme Court hearing that was often tense and sometimes toxic. . . .

With little power to stop a nominee they saw as a conservative partisan, a Republican-imposed process they considered grossly unfair and a demanding political base spoiling for a fight, they decided it was time to sow disorder over the court.“

For me such reportage was mainly stale baloney. Its superficiality is a disgrace to their profession. It only reports one superficial level of the debate that went on there.

I experienced a very different set of hearings. They began when I tuned in Tuesday morning, and heard Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse’s begin his opening statement.

It was stunning: clear, specific, cogent, passionate, judiciously profane, and set out a well-researched yet concise list of propositions about the likely negative effects of K’s elevation.

The sportscasters basically ignored it, probably because Whitehouse is from a small state — and he isn’t  running for president.

Yet over the next three days I heard a lot of testimony that corroborated Whitehouse’s arguments. On one side, I listened to K set what seemed like a record in spewing non-answers, fouling off just about every concrete issue Whitehouse and then other Dems  threw at him, which they did by the bushel. No surprise there; K has coached others in this drill, and Dems have done it in their turn. Nevertheless, as the hours passed, patterns and themes emerged.

The Republicans also scripted the next part of their campaign well: filling hours with gushing testimonials that became painful earworms, declaring that K is really such a nice guy, kind to kids, coaching girls basketball teams (where;’s he called “Coach K) for the Catholic Youth Organization, yada yada, yada yada, yada yada.

Okay, already; if I was hiring a male nanny, he’d top the list.

Then there came a battalion of former students and clerks to repeat that he’s a highly-regarded law professor, and good at mentoring students and clerks. I don’t doubt it. So if I needed a tutor . . . .

It was soon clear that the GOP goal here was not simply to prove K was a swell fellow, but also to put the sportscasters into a deep sleep  by chanting the same mantra over and over; and at this it was a smashing success. After all, in this era of scandal upon scandal, what is more boring than a certified wholesome Catholic family man. (Especially one who has the votes in his pocket, right next to his visibly dogeared copy of the Constitution).

After a day of this, the sportscasters were squirmingly ready to bolt this snooze-a-thon. The New York Times‘s anonymous inside-the-white-house “resistance” OpEd piece gave them, or at least their editors, the opening:  by Thursday, even if they were still stuck in the hearing room, many were chasing the will-of-the-wisp author (still nameless as of this writing).

So that left Friday, when the Dems were to have their chance with outside witnesses. By then, the sportscasters couldn’t have cared less, and many reports I’ve seen don’t mention them except in passing.

But in fact, the day was full of substance. For one thing, it became clear to me that while K is definitely a total law geek, he’s also full of law shtick.  He has pretty much mastered the legal arcana for the major issues the Democrats brought up, and can riff on them on cue, in whatever length and degree of technicality seems needful to fend off ever committing himself on what he believes or how he might rule on any of them.

While these cases are all above my pay grade, after several hours of this, even I could begin to  discern what Whitehouse had called the key patterns in K‘s thought and decisions. These became more evident when the Dems’  outside witnesses finally alined up on Friday and took their turns at the mike. They included lawyers and professors, plus Parkland survivors, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, and persons with chronic diseases for whom Obamacare is a matter of life or death. About the only ones missing were detainees at Gitmo, but they had other commitments.

One after another, the Dems’ outside witnesses crisply and expertly picked K‘s arguments apart, showing how in one area of litigation after another, amid K‘s thick weeds of legalese, were decisions and dissents that have reliably favored the rich, comforted the corporate, put the knives into abortion, Obamacare, affirmative action and voting rights; and promoted an all-but unchallengeable “unitary” presidency, in peace or especially in war.

This last was particularly eye-opening. K’s president would be free, among other things, to ignore pesky laws (such as the one John McCain authored against torture) with imperial “signing statements”; to squash upstart federal environmental and consumer advocates like so many bugs ; to mock international law, spy on citizens, and torture or imprison suspects (including U. S. citizens) without charge or trial, for life, under the all-purpose rubrics of “national security” and “originalism.”

The Friday session even featured a living ghost and a ghoul. The ghost was John Dean, onetime lawyer to Richard Nixon, whose surprise 1973 testimony against his former boss started the avalanche that swept Nixon out of the White House.

Dean’s message was stark. “If Judge Kavanaugh joins that court, it will be the most pro-presidential powers-friendly Court in the modern era,” he said.

“Under Judge Kavanaugh’s recommendation, if a President shot somebody in cold blood on 5th Avenue, that President could not be prosecuted while in office.”

The ghoul came in the person of Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, off the JV bench, subbing for Committee chair Charles Grassley. Despite his first class law degree from Oxford, Kennedy has cultivated in the senate a deep-in-the-bayou persona and accent, and he picked up the gavel at the session with an old score to  settle: he called Dean a “rat” for testifying against Nixon, and accused him of harming the country thereby.

Dean has heard worse, and was ready. He parried smoothly, replying that he had published a book on Watergate (actually he’s written several such), explaining why he had turned against Nixon, and would send Kennedy a copy to assist his understanding.

Kennedy, who had likely been waiting forty-five years to launch this public sneer at Dean, only managed to show that an Oxford degree is no bar to its holder making a ghoulish fool of himself.

The upshot of these last hours was a cascade of confirmations of the many-counts of Sheldon Whitehouse’s neglected opening indictment. This bookend, as far as I can see, was ignored by the sportscasters, who had to catch up with the latest tweets, or push off for a weekend at the beach.

But at least one non-sportscaster observer did keep up. Adam Serwer of the Atlantic had just posted thus:

“The Roberts Court is poised to shape American society in Trump’s image for decades to come. All three branches of the federal government are now committed to the Trump agenda: the restoration of America’s traditional racial, religious, and gender hierarchies; the enrichment of party patrons; the unencumbered pursuit of corporate profit; the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the rival party’s constituencies; and the protection of the president and his allies from prosecution by any means available. Not since the end of Reconstruction has the U.S. government been so firmly committed to a single, coherent program uniting a politics of ethnonationalism with unfettered corporate power. As with Redemption, as the end of Reconstruction is known, the consequences could last for generations.”

I believe Serwer is quite right that we subjects of this impending legal rollback face a multi-generational agenda of resistance and recovery. And for me, listening with one ear through these grueling days, his and Sheldon Whitehouse’s frame for the week was much more useful than the sophomoric sportscasters’ blather about jockeying by Booker vs Harris. Instead, Whitehouse, Serwer  and the public witness pierced K’s smokescreen. They may not have changed the vote count, but they have laid out the signs of the time.

And for those with eyes to see, and hands willing for the plough, these signs could be invaluable in finding our way into the long journey and multiple struggles ahead.

The post Kavanaugh Wrap-Up: The Wheat from the Chaff appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

I listened to and watched almost all the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing Thursday; 9 hours I’ll never get back. Can  any sense be made of the ordeal? Here are a few observations

One, Ford was very credible. She was credible in two ways: one, her stories, even if incomplete and not thoroughly investigated, hung together.

Second, she was personally credible: Beyond the impact of the assault, her story of struggling with anxiety, her fear of public humiliation (and then death threats) are all too plausible. Even Utah Republican Orrin Hatch grudgingly admitted afterward that Ford was a “very attractive” witness.

Her willingness to talk openly about needing and doing therapy with her husband and then on her own was impressive. Even her fear of flying (which she manages by force of will for work and important family trips) sounded like many people (me for instance), and explained much about why she kept quiet about her story so long. And her naiveté about politics, her vain hope that she could leave her story to have whatever impact it would in the Senate behind the scenes.

Three, her courage, to face the Committee and the country and speak her truth even as her voice shook, was undeniable.

Well, no– “undeniable” is not appropriate here.

In the snake pit of our current politics, her testimony was eminently “deniable” — by the Republican majority, many of whom are skilled professionals in denial and discounting anything that gets in the way of their agenda.

It seems clear in retrospect that their plan as the hearing began was to patronize & brush Ford off. Judiciary Committee Republicans, wisely not trusting themselves to hold back from going after Ford with guns blazing and knives flashing, muzzled themselves and turned to a woman sex crimes prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, imported from Arizona. Her assignment was to undermine Ford’s assertions with  a matronly smile.

Here the majority made a big mistake. Mitchell seemed genuinely impressed with both Ford’s sincerity and her background a a social psychologist. Mitchell’s questions were mainly mild, and as Ford explained many of the points of her story, it seemed that Mitchell was maybe coming to like and admire Ford.  Behind her, the Committee’s eleven alpha male warbirds perched like unhappy manikins, while Democrats heaped her with praise and asked encouraging softballs.

Which is to say that Mitchell was a dud as a committee hatchetperson (to her professional credit, I think).

By the lunch break, it was clear that Ford was a hit. And word came down that the White House was surprised and livid; no doubt many members of the majority couldn’t stand being quiet any longer.

So when the committee reconvened to hear Kavanaugh, the tactical plan had changed markedly. I don’t know if they consciously thought of it this way, but they clearly decided to do a remake of the Clarence Thomas triumph.

Kavanaugh insisted that no one but a few clerks had seen his opening statement before he made it. Perhaps so, but he had spent much time consulting at the White House and with others in prepping for the appearance. As he is known for his studies of precedents, my guess is he went over the Thomas hearings in the process.

The Thomas scenario is built on flipping the abuse script and making the wannabe rapist into the victim.

Thomas claimed that the exposure of his chronic sexual harassment of a professional black woman, Anita Hill, was in fact a white racist plot which subjected him to a “high tech lynching,” in which he (somehow) actually died, and was then reborn as the bloodied but unbowed knight of truth against white supremacist slander.

I know, for younger readers this scheme may sound crazy,  but it worked. And that’s exactly the thrust Kavanaugh adopted.

Instead of white racists, Kavanaugh picked Democrats as the assassins, and among them, fingered the former presidential couple as the kingpins:

“This whole two-week effort,” he charged, “has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. . . .”

“Outside left-wing opposition groups”?? (Is that George Soros I see slinking around a corner, checkbook in hand??)

“No one can question your efforts but your coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name and destroy my family will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to withdraw.”

Destroy? Really? No question, the Democrats on the committee wanted to defeat his nomination. But in Kavanaugh’s political universe his struggle is not political but apocalyptic, life & death: “This has destroyed my family and my good name,” he shouted. “A good name built up through decades of very hard work and public service at the highest levels of the American government,”

Let’s just note that if his nomination were to be defeated, Kavanaugh would still retain his day job as a federal appeals court judge. And if he is confirmed, despite the controversy he’ll have a gig with life tenure.

Nevertheless, he insisted he’s been “totally & permanently destroyed . . . .”

And just like that, he let the dogs out. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina opened by throwing a fit, and he was followed by several more

Graham: To my Republican colleagues: If you vote no, you are legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics. You [Democrats] want this seat? I hope you never get it. I hope you [Kavanaugh] are on the Supreme Court. That is exactly where you should be and I hope the American people will see through this charade.”

“This man is not a monster,” Utah’s Orrin Hatch opined. And not coincidentally, that was the last we heard from Rachel Mitchell, who was supposedly going to grill Kavanaugh as she had Ford. Nope; she sat there, ignored, the rest of the day. (I hope she got paid by the hour.)

Democrats had five minutes apiece to question him, but here he lapsed into his previous well-greased pattern of evasion, evasion, evasion. Was he a college drunk? “I like beer,” was as far as he would go. Several asked him if he wanted an FBI investigation of the charges. All he would say was, “I’ll do whatever the Committee wants,” which means no, because the Committee never wanted one.

And he was clever in dealing with Ford. Here he seamlessly updated the Clarence Thomas scenario. Then, Anita Hill was dismissed as “a little bit nutty, and a little bit slutty,” an aggrieved employee carrying a grudge.

But today, one is constrained to pretend sympathy, especially in dealing with charges of sexual assault:  “I’m not questioning that Dr. Ford may have been sexually assaulted by some person in some place at some time,” Kavanaugh said more than once, “but I have never done this to her or to anyone . . . .”

Consider that Ford had only a few hours earlier directly and unblinkingly affirmed that she was 100 percent certain that Kavanaugh was her attacker. Kavanaugh was too deft to call her a liar, or even a willing participant in the Vast Leftwing Conspiracy which was after him.

Instead, she had to be somehow 100 percent mistaken. Which, for those who had watched her confident affirmation, could mean only that she was delusional; nutty a la Hill– only more than a little bit. Kavanaugh’s dodge there was a metropolitan update of the euphemistically lethal Southern jibe, “Bless her heart, she can’t help it.”

As the hearing adjourned the atmosphere was archetypal: a pack of feral white males had gathered, baying for blood. And they may get it, as soon as Friday.

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The post Notes on a Terrible Day In Our History appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Except for how it turned out, I hate almost everything about this report:

A mass school shooting was foiled on Thursday, December 13; that’s the good part.

But the first thing I hate about it is not in the news, but in myself: when I began checking the evening  headlines yesterday, a thought came:

Isn’t it about time for another big mass shooting? How long has it been—? Let’s see . . . the Pittsburgh synagogue, hmm. Oh yeah, late October: 11 dead, six wounded. . . .
Seven weeks ago; right? So  . . . another one is about due . . .”

Yes, I thought that, unbidden, and I hate that I thought it. A premonition? I don’t think so. It’s just that after these past few years, it does feel like there’s some sort of gruesome rhythm to such events.

The new ABnormal.

Then I glanced at the BBC News feed, and there it was:

Thursday morning December 13, an Indiana teenager allegedly grabbed a rifle and a pistol, and forced someone to drive him to a school less than a mile from his home. Five hundred-plus students were inside.

Meantime, somebody (later confirmed it was his mom) called to warn the school. Staff there ordered a lockdown, which seems to have been completed just in time.

The cops were alerted and also got there in time; and though the boy shot his way into the building, he heard resource officers in pursuit and soon felt cornered in a stairwell. He fired at the officers, they fired back, and then he was found in the stairwell dying of a gunshot wound, reportedly self-inflicted.

It was all over in about three minutes.

No students, teachers or police were hurt. Again, the good part.

The attacker’s name was Brandon Clegg. He was 14. The school superintendent said he was not a student at the school, but went vague about whether Clegg had ever been a student there..

It was a very close thing.

If the cops had taken a few more minutes . . . .

If the lockdown was slower or less complete . . .

It’s great that those pieces fell into place.

But at the same time, I hate it, because it’s like the World War Two air raids during the London Blitz, when civilians learned to rush to the Underground when sirens blared, and wait out the bombing runs in dark tunnels. Some Londoners didn’t get to the tunnels til too late.

American kids today are being trained to act like they’re targets of an enemy blitz, and with good reason.

Except now the “enemies” aren’t foreigners, but typically their own schoolmates or neighbors, almost always males.

We’re at war, with ourselves; and I hate it.

A very close call: If the driver had gone a little faster . . .

If the warning call had been ignored or had touched off a panic . . .

This incident happened in Richmond, Indiana, a small Rust Belt city on the Ohio border. At the Dennis Intermediate School there.

I hate that too, because one of Richmond’s distinctions is that it’s a Quaker city, one of the American centers of this sect, my sect, outside its largest in Philadelphia. It’s twice been selected as an All-American city.

Not that Quakers run the city today, or make up the bulk of its population. But Quakers founded it, and many Quaker institutions are there. And Quakers presume ourselves to be apostles of peace, injecting an irenic influence in public life.

Yes, Quakers are known as exponents and models of peace, and that’s not only in our own humble estimation. We’ll tell you about our Nobel Peace Prize at the drop of a bonnet. (Okay, it may be getting a little dusty, since it’s from 1947, seventy-plus years ago, but so what?)

This is a very comforting self-image; we congratulate ourselves about it at every opportunity.
Me too. So I hate when its illusory character is exposed, even if it’s only likely to be noticed by other Quakers. And few events reveal our hollowness more nakedly than when this present American war of any against all erupts in or near our own back yards.

Our own back yard? Take a look:

A “Quaker Back Yard”: This whole incident took place in an area of about one square mile.  Within this mile, there were two sizable Quaker meetings, a Quaker college, a Quaker seminary, and arguably a Quaker neighborhood. In addition, the target school, David W. Dennis Intermediate, is named after a Quaker Congressman who was born in Richmond, lived there all his life, and whose father was president of (Quaker) Earlham College in the 1930s and 1940s. There are other Quaker institutions in Richmond as well.

I mean no criticism of any of these groups, or for that matter the late Congressman Dennis.  What would I do in their place? Nothing as skillful as the teacher who ordered the lockdown, or the officers who had practiced for such events. And the area’s Quaker presence did not protect a school named after a Quaker. The data confirms a comment by the city’s chief of police:

“If this happens in Richmond, Indiana, it happens absolutely anywhere,” Chief Jim Branum said. “If you had told me 30 years ago that we would have to train officers on entering into a school after a shooter, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Believe it, Chief. Depending on the definition, there has been a mass shooting in the US almost every day in 2018. (My internal sense of their frequency was way low.) Richmond Indiana almost joined the roster, except for well-trained resource officers, a quick lockdown, and a mother’s desperate phone call.

Speaking of mom, as the BBC report put it, “Police say tipster saved countless lives” in Richmond.

I believe it. Almost six years to the day earlier, Adam Lanza in Sandy Hook, Connecticut foreclosed that possibility by shooting his mother, before he headed for the school where he blasted his way through a locked door, then killed 20 students and six adults.

This is not abstract for me: I have grandchildren in school in three states. Besides, schools are hardly the only targets of this internecine guerrilla war: it also breaks out in big cities and small towns; churches, a synagogue, yoga studios, outside a Vegas casino, restaurants, a newspaper office, community colleges, a self-service car wash,  a gay nightclub, and lots more.

What are we Quakers, and others who don’t have a peace prize to flaunt, going to do about this war that can break out anywhere, and can’t be traced to some foreign enemy?

Beyond just facing up to it, I truly don’t have a clue. And you know, I really hate that.

If you find this post of value, please pass it on.

The post A Quaker Meditation: Hating the Good News? appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

So we’re hearing some complaints about sniping back & forth between “theists” and “non-theists in some liberal Friends meetings. I have some thoughts on that. Kind of a long read . . . .

I

Let me work up to them with a story, going back to the turn of the years 1990 into 1991. I was working for the Post Office, as a Mailhander, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. I mainly shuffled bundles and sacks of mail back and forth across the floor of a facility about a quarter of a mile long. It processed several million pieces of mail every day. In those years, I had real calluses on my hands, and a lot fewer pounds around the middle.

I was also surrounded by veterans there, mostly from the Vietnam era, who had preference in Post Office hiring. We weren’t very familiar with the phrase PTSD then, but it was all around me. I felt a lot of solidarity with them, though I didn’t know how to express it. I was an Anti-Vietnam veteran, had protested one way and another all through those years, and bore my own set of scars from it.

November & December at the Post Office were always hectic: Christmas meant a continuing flood of packages, mandatory overtime, and running us off our feet. But the year 1990 brought a big additional burden of stress: the buildup to the First Gulf War, what’s known as Desert Storm, was in full swing.

I’m starting these reflections with a war story, not because I like war stories, but as part of my own grappling with the fact that when I look back over my 76 years, my life as an American and a Quaker has been dominated by war.

Big wars, punctuated by smaller and more secret wars, and then periods of tension and preparations for more war. I’m not sure that many Americans, and Quakers, really take adequate account of that over-arching reality: any American my age and younger has lived in a militarized, war-making country all our lives. And  that reality doesn’t appear to be changing much today.

Anyway, I remember when the Gulf War buildup started, in late summer 1990, when the first president George Bush learned that Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, next door. My memory of Bush is that he was riding in the presidential golf cart, and pulled it to a stop where some news cameras were clustered, and said, “This will not stand. This will not stand.” (Actually, an old video shows him saying that after stepping out of the presidential helicopter. At least I got the words right.)

Reporters shouted questions, but he waved them off with a curt, “I gotta go to work.” 

He had sounded clumsily florid; as most of us knew, he was no orator.

But I also knew in my bones that Bush meant it. He was “going to work” to plan a war, a big one.

II

The conviction stayed. In fact, a few days later I was in a worship session at Ohio Conservative Yearly Meeting, in their big stately old Stillwater Meetinghouse in Barnesville, and I was moved to speak — the whole thing, feeling shaky, reluctant, but pushed.

I rose and said I had been shown there was going to be a big war soon, and that if anyone in the room believed in what Friends call the Peace Testimony, they would soon have occasion to show it, and in ways that might be costly.

I went home from Barnesville resolved to follow my own counsel. If the government was  going to have a war, the least I could do was protest. So I got involved in planning a one-day Quaker peace conference in Washington, on the same weekend as a huge antiwar  march was scheduled. We were hoping against hope there was still a chance that citizen resistance might stop the rush to war.

As an event, the conference was a success: we packed the Florida Avenue Meetinghouse in DC. We had lots of workshops, fiery speeches, we fed everybody, cleaned up, and kept the fee low yet covered all the expenses.

Of course, our gathering made no difference as far as stopping the war was concerned. The epidemic of war fever, ginned up by the government, using slick PR agencies to feed atrocity propaganda to a subservient media, kept spreading. Many people, as I soon learned, were becoming increasingly hostile to dissent.

III

At work, we often wore tee shirts under our shop aprons. I made a shirt with big bright letters on the back, which showed up clearly in my work apron: “No War For Oil,” it said. “One Vietnam Is Enough.”

I wore it a couple of times. Then the third time, within an hour after I’d clocked in, a union steward came up and beckoned me into a quiet corner.

He told me I had to change the shirt. I asked why. He said it was pissing some people off — some of the Vietnam veterans. They thought I was mocking them and dissing their service and their buddies who didn’t make it back.

I protested. “Hey, I respect those veterans, I’m not mocking them, and I’d be happy talk to anybody about it.”

He said, “Look, you don’t understand. This is not a discussion group.”

Then he leaned closer, dropped his voice. “I mean,”he said, “you’re not safe wearing that shirt here. You’re not safe.”

It began to sink in. Of course. Old traumas were being deliberately stirred up and triggered by the drums of war fever and propaganda, swirling and echoing all around us. It was like a rising, threatening wind.

And there was more than just propaganda: preparing a mass invasion is a huge undertaking. A Friend who was in the Army then, told me her part of the war was figuring out how to ship about ten thousand trucks, big and small, from the U.S. mainland to the Persian Gulf.

Also, several hundred thousand soldiers and reservists had to be brought together, given last-minute training, crowded into planes and ships headed for the Gulf. Once there, they had to be fed and bedded down in big tents in the desert. Field hospitals were set up in more tents. Bombers and fighters roared overhead, keeping constant watch; along the coast dozens of Navy ships were assembling.

With this rumbling maelstrom in the background, my tee shirt, despite my high-minded intentions, looked like the enemy to many of the troops and veterans around me. Too many.

I won’t kid you: I didn’t want to get waylaid and beaten up somewhere in the vast parking lot outside. And beyond worries for my own safety, I didn’t want to feed my co-workers’ reflexes about enemies. I wasn’t the enemy of those haunted veterans — or an enemy to the new recruits preparing for their first deadly combat.

So I changed my shirt. Which helped my physical safety, but didn’t calm my internal turmoil, or that around me. This war, most of us worried, was going to be horrible. There were stories of the army secretly packing tens of thousands of body bags on ships headed for the Gulf, to be filled with the corpses of American casualties.

Even after our conference and big march, there were still voices against the war — I remember the Pope, John Paul II, who was no liberal, loudly denouncing it as unnecessary and unchristian. But he was ignored just as the rest of us had been ignored and belittled. They wanted their war, and they were going to have it, come hell or high water. And soon enough, they did.

IV

At that time, my work weekend came on Monday and Tuesday. But of course my meeting, Langley Hill, not far from CIA headquarters, met First Day mornings.

The Post Office was supposed to make a “reasonable accommodation” of my religious observances, so they let me split my Sunday shifts: clock out in time to drive to meeting, then hustle back afterwards, and stay later to make up the time.

It meant a long day, but I did it. And I found myself feeling more urgent about it as the war buildup neared its peak, and several weeks of bombing Iraq began, as a prelude to a massive ground invasion.

I remember driving to meeting on many First Day mornings then, listening with one ear to the latest news about the buildup, and the flickering debate about it.

But there was more than talk. In the other ear it felt as if the drumbeats of war had morphed into a kind of invisible hurricane roaring around me and across the land, all feeding and reinforcing the momentum speeding us to war combat and its awful, unforeseeable consequences.

When I pulled into Langley Hill’s parking lot, I felt surrounded by this cacophony as I walked to the meetinghouse door, stepped up, opened it, and walked through.

And then something amazing happened: The hurricane stopped. Or rather, it continued, but was somehow shut out, kept at bay, quieted.

This was welcome, but very strange: Langley Hill’s meetinghouse was not a fortress, just a small converted Methodist chapel; white clapboard outside, with a steeple: Langley Hill Friends had weighed the stand against “steeple houses” against the expense of taking it down; thrift prevailed. Inside the meetinghouse was suitably plain, long sturdy benches facing each other, cream-colored walls, and a small Clerk’s table.

Yet in this small, unreinforced space, the outside hurricane of war was silenced. Or maybe more accurately, absorbed into the silence.

I can’t explain this, but it happened many times in those days. Spoken ministry was rare, and usually quiet; I don’t remember calls to the antiwar barricades; worship here felt more like largely unspoken mourning for those already harmed in Saddam’s invasion, and for those who would be harmed by the impending invasion, and of the unmasking of our powerlessness in the face of it.

For me, these morning intervals of quiet were religious experiences. They’re in the same category with visions and angels bearing supernatural messages, things I’ve read about in other sources. A visitor might not have noticed anything special, beyond a subdued group of Quakers in gloomy silence; and that would be true enough. But for me it was not the whole truth: those times beyond the grip of the hurricane were more of a lifeline.

These brief periods away from work were something closer to miraculous. I remember thinking, or maybe it was praying, that I had never been so grateful to be a Quaker, among Quakers. When meeting was over, and I passed through the meetinghouse doorway, the hurricane resumed.

V

Looking back, it’s clear that in an outward sense, Langley Hill didn’t “DO” much about the war. Some Friends helped with our conference and other protests; but others were not “active.” They related to our situation in different ways.

I remember one of these “non-activist” Friends in particular. His name was Herbert Brown. He was old, stooped, and retired, likely from a white collar civil service job. He was a very quiet man, whose family had long been part of the Orthodox branch of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, which had reunited with the Hicksite branch about twenty years earlier.

Not long before the war, Herbert Brown began to show up at the meetinghouse several times a week. He became its volunteer janitor and handyman: sweeping, dusting, cleaning, fixing.

He did this quietly, with only occasional help from others. He kept doing it as that long winter of our discontent folded into a bleak spring. Soon the war was officially “won,” and was followed by weeks of jingoistic victory celebrations.

Trying to ignore them, I reflected on the experience of how important the respites from the hurricane of war had been for me. As I did that I also became more conscious of Herbert Brown’s low-profile presence  in that.

I talked to him about it a couple of times. He quietly made it clear that he felt led to do this seemingly menial work, and that it needed to be done. I got the sense that in years past, he had likely filled other slots, maybe more visibly weighty ones: Finance Committee, clerkships and such.

But now, those were in the past. Yet he was hardly useless, or marginalized: he was caring for the meeting house, I realized, in order to care for the meeting. (As in turn, the meeting had cared for me, one of those Friends who could be identified as an “activist.”)

Even more, he understood something about such work that was only beginning to dawn on me. Especially now, looking back, I’ve concluded that if Langley Hill, and other Friends meetings, had any real contribution to make in our crazy world, it would grow out of the combination of these varying leadings in them.

I also learned another thing, in bits and pieces: Herbert Brown had cancer. I forget what kind. It was somewhat in remission, but considered incurable. I screwed up my nerve one day and asked him about it. He answered plainly and calmly that yes, he did have it, the cancer was not curable, but he was “resigned,” and well enough to do his janitorial/handyman work. He planned to keep doing it as long as he could. It was his leading.

And he did do that. Eventually his strength failed, and he took quietly to his bed and died.

VI

Here in sum, I think we can see, or at least I think I can see, that this time of war was also for me a time of learning about the various roles Friends play in meetings and in witness. I don’t know if the pattern I saw is visible to anyone else, though I think I have observed it in other meetings and individual Friends.

There’s a fancy theological term for this pattern: it’s our ecclesiology, our sense of the basic structure and dynamic of a religious community. I think I can summarize this, if the jargon isn’t too complicated, in one line, and the line is this:

“All god’s critters got a place in the choir.” Or: “All God’s Quakers got a place in the choir — even if they’re non-theists in an unprogrammed meeting that doesn’t have a choir.”

(Don’t ask me to sing that song; but I hope it’s familiar.) Here’s a version by Makem & Clancy.

Sometimes that “place” is quite visible: the Clerk presides at business meetings; the Treasurer handles the money. “Activists” talk in acronyms and are busy trying to change the world.

For others, the role is less clearly defined: for instance: who was it that upheld the remarkable atmosphere in worship at Langley Hill, during those awful months when I needed its shelter so much? Was it those who believed most in prayer? (We didn’t talk about that a lot.) Not to mention those who taught First Day School with my children and others? And how much came from Herbert Brown, with a broom in his hands and a screwdriver in his pocket?

If you’re new to a meeting, or to Quakerism, you might ask: how do you find your “place in the choir”?

Good question, and I don’t have a simple answer. Personally, I think I’m a slow learner: not a birthright Friend, raised Catholic and come to Quakers in my early twenties. I began attending in 1966, about eleven years before I came to Langley Hill. For the first ten years I was mostly in a student or apprentice mode: learning; reading a lot, attending meetings, protesting the Vietnam War, absorbing things.

I didn’t join many Quaker committees then, or donate money to the meetings. But I don’t feel very guilty about that: I was poor and struggling professionally too, and I figured, if my situation ever gets better, I’ll do my bit; and eventually it did get better. So also eventually, I ended up on many committees.

In fact I’m now part of the “Quaker Retirement Plan”: no money, just committees till you drop.

VII

Because my profession turned out to be journalism and writing, my first real meeting responsibility was related: I became editor of Langley Hill’s newsletter. One thing led to another, and I’ve been editor for numerous other Quaker projects since. (That also led to the Post Office, since writing for and about Friends never has paid much.)

And that writing background had another important aspect: traveling along Friends, I soon noticed that there were many events and issues that were live and contested among Friends, but which were rarely discussed in Quaker publications. With my journalist’s hat on, these issues looked like stories that needed to be reported and discussed, maybe debated. (Some would call all this “discernment.” Some others might consider it stirring the pot.)

But with my meeting member’s spectacles on, I saw pretty clearly that the institutional pattern was mainly to avoid talking or writing about them, and playing these matters down, especially the difficult ones.

I resisted that pattern, and that resistance initially made me a failure as a Recording Clerk, not once, but twice: at Langley Hill, and then at Baltimore Yearly Meeting. I wrote minutes that were intended to be useful to Friends far into the future, as a detailed window on our history. But enough living Friends in both groups strongly objected to that kind of minute-taking, clearly preferring notes that were brief, oblique, sanitized and became all-but completely opaque within a few years.

So I yielded to the will of the body; that is, I was fired.

That  is, by the way, one effective way to learn it’s time to find a new place in the Quaker choir.

After a bit of  experimentation, I started my own Quaker publications, which examined many subjects, including some of the tough ones. For instance, at the first national Quaker gathering I attended, in 1977, the issue of recognizing the presence of gay & lesbian Friends (trans were not on our radar yet) came up suddenly and explosively, and I ended up writing an article about it that was pretty widely circulated.

Since then I’ve written about many other Quaker concerns, including plenty about the wars. But I realized two years ago, in 2017, that I have been writing about LGBT issues & struggles among Friends for forty years. 40 years! (And those issues are still far from being resolved.)

I don’t apologize for that work, but I can say I didn’t mean to do it; as an old straight guy, I’m no expert; but most of what I reported on, would not have been written about otherwise. Yet these are community struggles, and I’m convinced that silence on such matters does not serve us or the Spirit.

The rise to visibility & inclusion of LGBT Friends in many Quaker spaces, and their continuing exclusion and erasure in others, is much too big a piece of our recent history to ignore; it ought be studied and told by many; but it really hasn’t been yet.

VIII

So I did the best I could; and along the way, there have been a few other “religious experiences” that came at crucial but unexpected moments; but those are another story. And while I’m slowing down with age and trying to retire, these and other issues (especially the wars) are still very much alive among American Friends, and in Quaker groups elsewhere. And the experience of being comforted and encouraged in very hard times by sitting in meeting has returned often in the past two years.

But it hasn’t all been gloom & doom.  I’ve published two books of Quaker humor; I like Quaker jokes;  and they’re a survival tool. Yet as I said earlier, my American Quaker life, now in its 53rd year, has been lived in a time of nearly constant American warmaking. And in that record, I can see the truth in the biblical warning from Galatians 6:  “Be not deceived: God is not mocked. A man (or a country) reaps what they sow.” And as part of the harvest of our military wars, Americans are in continuing domestic conflict on numerous fronts, even among Friends.

If dealing with such struggles makes a Friend uncomfortable, it’s relatively easy to hunker down in a cozy, like-minded meeting and ignore most of them, and maybe that’s the right path for some. (I write that last without being convinced.)

But such cocooning doesn’t make the struggles go away. And sooner or later, one or another of these conflicts may well come knocking on your meeting’s door; and then, for instance, the blessed sanctuary that Langley Hill was for me in 1990 and early 1991 can all-too quickly dissolve into a faction-ridden catfight or worse.

In fact, some years after I left the DC area, Langley Hill started a Quaker school, with high hopes and a dedicated committee. But that project failed, and ended with the school closed and some Friends in court against others.

I don’t know the details, and wouldn’t burden you with them if I did. But I will repeat that the Society of Friends today exists within a larger society and culture that is riven with very deep conflicts, reaping what we have sown, and various aspects of these conflicts afflict many Friends & meetings too. I don’t know how to solve those, or how to escape them. I do have ideas about how to work on some of them, and have done my imperfect best.

I’ve also learned that Jesus’ time was like ours, only worse; do you remember where he ended up? And if you read a serious biography of George Fox, you’ll see that he and the first generations of Friends faced such internal travails as well.

So as I said, for me it took some time, more than a decade, among Friends, to find my place in the choir, and my broadest leading, centered on writing, in which specific other leadings have taken shape, in changing circumstances. And even then, specific leadings can and have changed. Further, some of my most important leadings were ones that I at first rejected and struggled against.

Even so, my basic message still stands, that among Friends, “All God’s Quakers got a place in the choir.”

Let me expand it a bit: you may have to seek, perhaps for years, to find your place. You might even have to struggle to claim it. Or have to invent it, and even stand fast for it. And then, due to “stuff happening,” sometimes positive, sometimes not, and as a consequence of further leadings, your place can change. 

And that’s not to mention that the “choir” may not always get along or sing in perfect harmony.

Nevertheless, “All God’s Quakers got a place in the choir.” That includes you, if you stay with it. And if you don’t remember anything else that I’ve written here, I hope you’ll hang on to that motto. Then find or make your place, stick to it, yet be ready to move when the time to change places comes.

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The post All God’s Quakers Got a “Place In The Choir” — Even the Non-Theists Who Can’t/Won’t Sing appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

In 1988 I wrote a substantial essay laying out my views about abortion, and describing how they had evolved over time. The piece also considered the increasing parallels, both rhetorical and political,  between this struggle and the Civil War.

Thirty-plus years later, despite some continuing evolution and updates, much of the piece still seems relevant, not least the potential for civil  strife.

(Author’s note from 1998 reprint: Many of the policy issues described in this essay still seem timely more than a decade later. Further, the personal journey it describes was an important part of my life, one not to be denied or concealed. It is also necessary background to the civil war scenarios that will also surface. . . . A much shortened version of the piece was published in The New Republic.)

INTRODUCTION: My Abortion Pilgrimage

I first realized I was uneasy about abortion one autumn afternoon, shortly before my first daughter was born. A young woman friend paid a call on us, to say she was unexpectedly pregnant. Unmarried, and not interested in marrying the man involved–what, she asked, did we think she should do?

[Note to the knee-jerk reader now shouting: “You’re a male. You had no right to say anything.” To this I shrug, and point out that this friend, an adult woman, came to us and asked for our feedback and advice. So I told her what I thought and felt. Not sorry about that then, not sorry now. ]

It was 1969. America was at war in Vietnam, and in constant upheaval at home. I thought of myself as a radical then, dedicated to ending the war and reshaping society in some not very clear, but more peaceful and equalitarian manner. This radicalism had always included being progressive-minded, I presumed, on matters regarding sex and gender.

Nevertheless, looking at my wife’s enlarged belly, and then at our friend’s flat one, I heard myself suddenly blurting out, “Well, I think you should have it, and either keep it or put it up for adoption, because that thing in there is human.”

This declaration surprised me as much as it did our friend. But there it was, coming from somewhere very deep inside.

Once I admit to having been raised Catholic, pre-Vatican II, of course, some readers may cry “Aha!” and consider the origins of my reaction easily explained and as easily dismissed. But I had long since shed the other central tenets of my childhood religious training, from transubstantiation to the primacy of Rome (especially this latter), and had found a religious home elsewhere.

“Ensoulment”–Who Needs it?

Moreover I also rejected, then and now, the Catholic doctrine that is at the bottom of this matter (theologically speaking; politically/culturally is something else), that of “ensoulment.”

According to the “ensoulment” idea, at conception God creates and injects into the zygote an incorporeal and invisible essence, its individual immortal soul; and it is this substance, beyond matters of DNA which come from scientific laboratories, which in fact makes that new cell “human.”

One problem I have long had with this notion is that if it is really what happens, the old questions about God’s justice and the suffering of innocents, questions as old as the Book of Job, become, at least to me, not just unanswerable but intolerable.

That is because embryological research has clearly established that somewhere between one third and one half of all such zygotes are spontaneously aborted, many of them so early that the women may not even know what has happened.

Yet according to Catholic doctrine, each of these billions of nascent humans had immortal souls, which made them essentially human, and which, because they were not baptized, are automatically denied access to heaven forever, through no fault of their own. They spend eternity in limbo, wherever that is.

[NOTE: In 2007, the Church abruptly dumped Limbo, after about 1500 years, and the Vatican expressed the hope that unbaptized babies (which must include all those lost embryos) would somehow be saved — though it admitted there was no clear biblical or doctrinal basis for that assertion. Which is to say that, when it comes to replacing the vacant (mostly nude?) eternity of Limbo, the Church is still doctrinally very much . . . in limbo. Whatever.]

Given the high rate of spontaneous abortion, that still means there could be as many souls floating around out there, innocently barred from the salvation which Catholics are taught is the true divine purpose of human creation, as there are who have been born, baptized, and had their chance at heaven.

Perhaps most Catholics and anti-abortionists can swallow such a theology; I cannot.

This “ensoulment” notion, furthermore, makes all the Catholic anti-abortionist waving of bloody prenatal photographs irrelevant in a very basic respect, inasmuch as their own church specifies that it is not the flesh, but this invisible, immorttal metaphysical extra which is the critical factor. (After all, it is not bodies that go to hell or heaven, but the always incorporeal souls. Yet not even the most devout Roman embryologist, assisted by the finest of intrauterine electron microscopy, ever has, ever will or ever could see a soul in their microscopes, or watch one come and go.)

What do I conclude from all this? That while a zygote may be an empirical entity, the issue of when and whether it becomes human is a question not of science but of beliefs; and beliefs vary. That observation is not a criticism of Catholic beliefs; but beliefs cannot be proven, and ensoulment is a belief which, Catholic boyhood notwithstanding, I do not hold.

Leaning Toward Life

In truth, I don’t know when unborn life becomes “human,” and in the years since that encounter in 1969 I have come to doubt the moment of conception is that time, or that early abortion constitutes any morally significant form of “homicide.” For that matter, in some hard/ambiguous cases that “line” might shift. (If a reader needs to pigeonhole me, institutionally I’ve settled firmly, if not entirely comfortably, into the pro-abortion ranks.)

Yet this alignment does not alter my overall uneasiness about abortion as a social phenomenon. The not-yet born unquestionably deserve to be considered human sooner or later, and my gut tells me we had better lean toward sooner rather than later, if we know what is good for us as a society. Which in this matter, I believe we don’t.

I freely admit this is my own belief, a visceral conviction ultimately beyond any form of “proof.”  But if you are tempted to criticize it as such, I would respectfully ask you to examine where your own deepest convictions about “life” come from. In my experience the viscera is as typical and reliable a source as any other in these  matters, and for that matter life itself defies reason.

In any event, this antipathy to abortion is one of the two central considerations shaping my attitude on this issue ever since. The other conviction, which in the beginning was no more articulate but is now firm, is that, nevertheless, the attempt to prevent abortion by outlawing it is not only doomed to fail as a practical political matter, but was dangerously wrong in conception as well, and would prove socially toxic in many ways.

This second conviction is what the following essay is primarily about. But before plunging into it, I’d like to say something briefly about the further evolution of the first factor, and how I have expressed it in the almost fifty years since I discovered it.

Roe v. Wade, and Me

Admittedly I haven’t had great success as an opponent of abortion; our young woman friend heard me out patiently, replied that she had resolved to end her pregnancy, and she did. Then as 1969 turned into the 1970s and the issue heated up in a public way, most of the “progressive” folks I knew lined up enthusiastically in support of legal and publicly-funded abortions. As they did, I hung back and agonized over my heretical notions, trying to reconcile them with the rest of my activist stands.

Actually, such a reconciliation wasn’t very hard to make in theory; if you think the unborn are human, it’s no big jump to add them to the list of blacks, Vietnamese, women and so forth as an oppressed group deserving liberation and protection against undeserved violence. It’s my pacifist friends who have more trouble, justifying their making an exception in this case.

No, the hard part wasn’t the theory, it was the practice. Here the difficulty was twofold: First there was the challenge of breaking with my liberal-radical peers, which I did not want to do; and second, one had to face the company one would be keeping in the anti-abortion ranks. That movement was then made up primarily of Catholics, and the more right-wing, Vietnam War-supporting Catholics at that. What to do in the face of this dilemma?

I attempted a double response to this challenge: First, I tried to carve out an independent, politically progressive anti-abortion stance; and at the same time, I kept looking for other stray souls who didn’t want to save the unborn from being abortion fodder today only so they could be turned into cannon fodder tomorrow.

My first major attempt to state this position in print came in January 1973 in a cover article for the “alternative” weekly I then worked for, The Real Paper of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was one of two such pieces; the other was by the paper’s resident feminist, who made all the usual arguments for it.

My piece asserted that abortion was wrong, and that its widespread use was less a mark of liberation than a barometer of oppression among women, especially the poor and nonwhite; but I also made it clear that I opposed making it illegal.

The piece was controversial, to say the least. Letters came pouring in for three weeks thereafter. Most of them denounced me in various shades of purple prose; scarcely a handful even seemed to understand what I was saying, and of these only one or two backed me up. The vehemence of the response was daunting, but nothing in the letters made me think I had been mistaken.

Then, abruptly, the letters stopped; my heresy was, not exactly forgotten, but definitively swept aside by nothing less than a judicial earthquake: The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which was announced late that same month.

The Vanishing Alternative

And that was largely that. My article was like muttering in a corner; in Roe, the Supreme Court spoke a mighty thunderclap. But outside our newspaper office, the controversy continued, and I kept looking for like-minded folks, and finally, about a year later, I found some.

Kids they were, mostly, part of a group called The National Youth Pro-Life Coalition. Somehow I got connected up with them, and attended a couple of their conventions, where I conducted workshops on nonviolent direct action as a way of expressing opposition to abortion, growing out of my experience in the civil rights movement a decade earlier.

Some of the organizers of the very first civil disobedience actions against abortion clinics I helped train and inspire.  (There’s a brief account of this in the 1999 book, Wrath of Angels, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Risen, pages 60-61.)

Among these youthful, peace-minded anti-abortion activists were some people I still think very highly of, although in many ways we have parted company. For several years we kept in touch, as those who remained more activist than I struggled to find a way to build an alternative presence within the increasingly reactionary political context of the anti-abortion movement.

What came out of their struggle was a small and scattered but seminal network called Pro-Lifers for Survival. PS as it was called was the brain-(and even more, the heart and soul) child of Juli Loesch (now Julianne Wiley), an eloquent, militant Catholic peacenik from Erie, Pennsylvania. I was asked to be on the PS Board of Advisors. This board never actually met but, I was amazed to find, it was indeed asked for advice on a number of occasions.

Even though it never amounted to much as an organization, and finally more or less disbanded in the 1980s, succeeded by what is still called the Consistent Life Network, PS accumulated two very important achievements: One, it helped legitimize the idea that a person could be anti-abortion without thereby being by definition a rightwinger; and two, wonder of wonders, it, and especially the early witness of Juli Loesch, more or less converted the American Catholic bishops, nudged them into explicitly linking their anti-abortion stance with an antiwar position. (I doubt the bishops would ever admit to having been influenced by such an ad hoc, theologically dubious and numerically insignificant band as PS, especially with a female spokesperson, but I make the claim nonetheless.)

Unfortunately, while PS did leave a mark on the anti-abortion movement, the bulk of that constituency in the early 1980s was going a very different route: following the Pied Pipers of reaction into a formal coalition with the nascent Religious Right. Juli Loesch among others followed that path herself. I chronicled some of the formative events of this alliance for another “alternative” weekly paper in Washington. (None of these reports, alas, are online.) The alliance took hold; other one-time “pro-lifers” went for violence and murder.

As far as I could see, by the time Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984, the promising work of PS, and the “seamless garment” philosophy of the Catholic bishops which was its finest flowering, had both been marginalized to the point of practical irrelevance in the face of the anti-abortion movement’s effective absorption into the militant right.

This made me sad, to say the least. But it also made me think. About this time, a number of ex-PSers moved on to form another movement group, a political action committee called Justlife. Justlife set out to collect money for political candidates who back a three-part platform of opposition to militarism and legal abortion plus support for human needs programs.

I was asked to become a charter member of Justlife, thought about it carefully, and then declined. There was something about it that didn’t sit right. I certainly did not object to political action, nor was connecting abortion and war a problem. And surely I was for rebuilding the human needs programs decimated in the Reagan years.

No, as I considered it, my reluctance to sign on with Justlife came down to uneasiness with its acceptance of the standard anti-abortion strategy of attacking abortion’s legality, what is called here  the “Prohibitionist” approach, and its adoption of abolitionist rhetoric and imagery. Melding this with social democracy and disarmament did not, I felt, get to the root of the problem of dealing with abortion.

Trying to Speak Up

But after declining to sign on with Justlife, I felt an increasing need to make articulate my aversion to this strategy. In the light of almost fifteen years of thinking and reporting on the issue, the movement’s approach loomed larger and larger as, it seemed to me, the crucial, fatal, tragic error of the anti-abortion struggle. What at first was another visceral response seemed more and more reasonable, both politically and historically.

But I had not sat down and actually tried to articulate it in a reasonable way. And my sense of the rightward, theocratic trajectory of the anti-abortion movement made me feel it was increasingly timely, even urgent, to make this case, as clearly as I could. In January, 1988 I started writing.

What follows, after more than fourteen drafts, plus some updating, is the result of this effort. I had hoped the whole subject would be out of date by now (2019); but that’s not so. I’ve trimmed it some, but it’s still a “long read.”

 ABORTION AND CIVIL WAR

Completed in 1988; updated May 2019

The Overall Failure of the “Pro-Life”/Anti-abortion Movement

The anti-abortion movement is largely a failure. Whatever else it has done, it has not stopped abortion: The number of abortions performed in the United States steadily increased for some years after Roe v. Wade, with more than a million being performed in the United States annually by 1990. [Update: Since the early 1990s, U. S. abortion rates have gone down markedly. This strong reversal is rich with political irony: the deepest, steadiest decreases have come during the years when Democrats were in power, under policies abhorred by the movement but in line with goals articulated by Bill Clinton of making abortion increasingly safe, legal and rare. This approach (let’s call it SLR) has yielded a record of  achievement for which those who  are anti-abortion ought to be profoundly grateful (I, for one, am) — yet for which the anti-abortion movement will never forgive Clinton, his wife, the others who continued it, or the candidates who want it re-established.]

The trend has continued. The latest numbers, from 2015, show a 40 percent decline in total U.S. abortions since its peak in the early 1990s. This remarkable, unexpected turn offers food for serious thought. For my part, while my opposition to abortion has remained firm since before 1973, it has helped me become almost equally opposed to the anti-abortion movement. In my judgment the record shows that the movement has become one of the biggest obstacles to effective action to slow and reverse the  incidence of abortion; it has become part of the problem.

If there is to be any hope for reaching the movement’s stated goal, I believe it will require that the the current movement be replaced by a different social force with an entirely different approach. And BTW, as we shall see, it’s not the first time an advocacy movement proved to be the worst enemy of its lofty goals.

The movement’s failures may be good news for abortion supporters. But it could also be, paradoxically, even better news for those who are against abortion, because facing that reality could free them to look for better approaches. One such alternative will be outlined below.

This conviction that the anti-abortion movement is not succeeding is based on both practical and theoretical considerations. The practical reasons come down to these:

The movement is unlikely to reverse Roe;

But even if it does, that won’t stop abortion.

The slim odds of reversing Roe are not just a matter of the Supreme Court’s current makeup, which will change substantially in the next few years anyway. Even a new court, I believe, will be very slow to throw out Roe, because the American public has made it clear they support the concepts of privacy on which it is based, however debatable their technical constitutional basis might be.

[UPDATE: That last paragraph was my estimate in 1988, and as late as 2008. Now, with an activist right-wing Supreme Court majority just picking up steam, I’m not nearly so confident about Roe’s survival. But I stand by the conviction that Roe’s reversal would not end abortion.]

The Supreme Court, which knows how to count votes, should not, in my view, be in any hurry to counter the judgement rendered by the public.  [Update: I’m also not so sure of the Court’s reluctance anymore.  Yes, I still think a Roe  reversal would stir up widespread resistance; but today, the nascent rightwing Court majority looks like it’s ready, even eager, to open the floodgates of folly.]

But suppose my 1988 view is mistaken. Suppose Roe is overturned. It certainly could happen. But how much actual impact would reversal have?

Not much directly, I am convinced.

After all, reversal would not ban abortions outright, only return the job of regulating them to the states. While several states are ready  to outlaw it completely, numerous others undoubtedly would still permit it, and some would even continue to pay for it as well. The result would be a patchwork: major, high-population states on both  coasts and in mid-America would stay abortion-friendly. As usual, though, poor women would be most adversely affected; an old, disgraceful story.

Thus, even without Roe, abortion would still be available nearby for  many Americans, and not far away for many more. This was in fact increasingly the case in the years just prior to Roe. Besides, abortion is fully legal and broadly available in Canada, just across our long northern border.

But federalism is not the only tide running relentlessly against anti-abortion activists; there is also technology.

Both pro- and anti-abortion leaders have closely followed the development of drugs which have made possible self-administered abortions in the early months.  In states that ban abortion, such underground practice/resistance can be expected to grow despite anti-abortion efforts to outlaw it as well.

The significance of self-administered abortions will likely increase if clinics are outlawed in some states, making many abortions cheap and accessible. They do so, moreover, in a manner which strongly reinforces the woman’s autonomy. They are “privatizing” it. Doctors, clinics, all the current paraphernalia even of legal abortion will become increasingly optional, and abortion ever more a relatively safe, even solitary affair. Thus any scheme of public suppression would become more difficult to enforce; more draconian measures would raise the odds of a Prohibition era backlash.

Seeking Another Way

All this should be well-known to the anti-abortion movement leadership, if not the rank-and-file. Similarly well-known, and equally futile, are their hopes for a legislative ban, by some version of a constitutional amendment. Congress has been willing to end federal funding for abortions, but it has also made abundantly clear that it is not going to adopt any amendment prohibiting the practice; and if by some chance it did, ratification would be extremely difficult.

At first glance, these mixed legislative messages may seem inconsistent, but to me they actually show Congress performing rather well at its job of representing the public. That’s because most Americans are in fact deeply ambivalent about abortion:

Given a choice, we definitely do not like it, and are content to keep our tax money from paying for other people to get it. But at the same time, most of us definitely want it available, for ourselves, our close kin (or illicit partners) —just in case.

This ambivalence, incidentally, explains why both pro-and anti-abortion partisans can with equal sincerity claim that public opinion polls support their respective positions: The fact is, they’re both substantially right. There is in truth some support for each side, often among the same group of people. (After all, where is it written that public opinion has to be entirely uniform and free of ambivalence?) But this also accounts for the stubbornness with which Congress has stuck to its seeming inconsistency.

The movement, after years of getting nowhere pushing its federal anti-abortion amendments, has tacitly accepted the validity of this analysis. While still paying lip service, it has all but given up on them as a practical objective, aiming instead at the Supreme Court and a reversal of Roe.

Besides court battles, during its 45-year insurgency, some of its leadership have claimed the mantle, and the recollection of dogged determination, of the abolitionist movement and other famous 19th century reformers. And like them, they have had impact.

(An example: a major anti-abortion PAC calls itself the Susan B. Anthony List, appropriating some statements against abortion by the legendary suffragette. In the 2018 congressional elections, they spent $2.5 million on campaign contributions to anti-abortion candidates.)

Now, after many years  of marginalization, in 2019 the anti-abortion movement feels the wind is at its back. When the impact of the rightwing Supreme Court’s actions become known, and the extent of active resistance they evoke is clearer, some hard questions are waiting to be asked, especially: how far will anti-abortion leaders carry enforcement efforts?

I predict there will be sensational trials, if “respectable” mainstream abortion providers are prosecuted. I could imagine that in many communities in abortion-banned states, there will be juries which refuse to convict.

The parallel here is less the Civil War than the bloody turmoil of postwar Reconstruction. If Roe topples, yet abortion remains widely available, I believe the movement will likely face intense internal divisions, as it has before during struggles over strategy.

John Brown Rides Again

While grappling with these questions, some in the movement may be strongly tempted, as others have been before, by what I call the John Brown Syndrome: As hopes for ending abortion by legal means diminish, the resulting frustration could again boil over into renewed outbreaks of violence against abortion facilities, practitioners and supporters. The appeal of  the John Brown Syndrome is reinforced by the comparison to the antebellum abolitionists.

As a typical example of this practice, consider the book, A House Divided, by former Congressman Pat Swindall of Georgia (Oliver Nelson Publishers, 1987). Swindall was briefly a fast-rising New Right stalwart. Politically, he’s now justly forgotten, but his rhetoric not only survives, but it is typical of many more well-known activists over the past three decades.

He took his book’s title from Lincoln’s 1860 campaign slogan (drawn in turn from the Gospel of Mark 3:25); he declares early on that “Our nation today is more deeply divided than it has been at any time since the troublesome days of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency”. (“Troublesome days?” Try civil war, for a bit of plain speaking.) Most of a chapter is taken up with his exegesis of the abortion-slavery parallels.

Despite the euphemism, he sticks with his position’s logic, demanding capital punishment for abortion –indeed, he argued the government has a duty to “apply it equally, consistently and expeditiously to all who take innocent life by premeditation.” [Emphasis added.] “Whether the issue is abortion or capital punishment,” he concludes, “the principle is the same.” [UPDATE: This logic sounded outlandish in 1987; but zombie-like it has climbed from the grave and is again in play, and pieces of it are included in some new anti-abortion laws.]

The emphasis on “all” is mine; but during a radio interview on a Washington DC talk show, Swindall explicitly affirmed that he would like to see all who perform or undergo abortions executed. This statement so shocked me that I ordered a copy of the tape to be sure I had heard correctly; and I had.

Thus if you are one of the millions of American women who has undergone an abortion, or one of the thousands of physicians who has performed one, perhaps you will understand why I regard this matter of historical parallels as of more than merely rhetorical importance. (For that matter, while Swindall did not discuss the penalties for “accessories” before and after the fact of abortion, no doubt he would want them punished severely as well; so the millions more who supported others who had abortions are presumably in jeopardy under a Swindall-like regime as well.)

But if Swindall’s proposals are shocking, his preoccupation with history is not entirely off the mark. First of all, there are indeed a number of striking parallels between the anti-abortion and the antislavery movements:

> a central issue which turns on the definition and value of human life;

> the crucial role of Supreme Court decisions, Roe v. Wade; Dred Scott; and some which are likely soon to come;

> and above all–at least so the anti-abortionists hope–the activity of a crusading movement as a key factor in ending a monstrous social evil.

Yet while there is some validity to this comparison, there are problems with it as well. The most important of these we will get to in a moment; but the first problem with looking to the abolitionists is that the anti-abortionists do not pursue the parallel far enough.

That Other “Slippery Slope”

For instance, they neglect to notice that the abolitionists’ crusade, which was conceived and birthed in an explicit adherence to peaceful methods, was unable to stem a descending spiral of polarization and violence. Its goal of formally ending slavery was reached only after what Swindall, with uncharacteristic delicacy, refers to as the “troublesome days” of Lincoln’s time, that is, to repeat, a bloody civil war.
This trajectory should bring to mind, especially for Quakers, the sage observation of noted historian G. M. Trevelyan:  “Close your ears to John Woolman one century, and you will get John Brown the next, with Grant to follow.”

Too much anti-abortion rhetoric today waxes even more apocalyptic than Brown, repeatedly invoking the language that moved our society to civil and later to a world war.

You don’t have to read much in the old polemics to hear eerie and chilling echoes of anti-abortion rhetoric today.

John Brown, 1859, awaiting execution for his violent raid on a federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, meant to spark a slave uprising: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”

Brown did not succeed in “purging” the “crimes of this guilty land”; but he certainly did help provoke “very much bloodshed.” Is my speculation about renewed possibilities of anti-abortion violence alarmist? Pat Swindall’s personal misadventures in banking, which led to his indictment and defeat after one term in Congress, soon took him off the public stage. But his sentiments are not isolated; and in any case, I am not the first to raise these questions.

Consider another strongly anti-abortion writer, the late Richard John Neuhaus, author of the widely-discussed book The Naked Public Square. In it Neuhaus, who went on to found the influential neoconservative journal First Things, wondered aloud whether we are approaching a condition in this area where Clausewitz’s famous axiom about war being politics by other means is being turned on its head, and politics is becoming civil war by other means.

Compared with Swindall, the style of Neuhaus’ comments is a model of calm; but how different is their substance? To the extent that this is increasingly the case, I wonder how long we can hope for the “other means” to prevail. Remember that for the anti-abortionists, lives are at stake, millions of them. The Nazi Holocaust is another historical parallel often cited in their rhetoric, along with warnings to avoid being seen by history, or God, as today’s “Good Germans” who did nothing to stop the slaughter.

I am not suggesting the anti-abortion movement could produce another region-based secession; pressed to that extreme, the parallels with the Civil War run out. But of two points I am confident: First, that the antiabortion movement is approaching an inflection point: it has labored 45 years to reverse Roe, and will likely soon have its chance. But what happens if this goal, once achieved, does not really end abortion?

And second, in the aftermath of Roe’s legal fate, the John Brown Syndrome will be a factor to reckon with.

I don’t believe this is a hypothetical. Much current anti-abortion rhetoric is suffused with tropes and language that has preceded mass violence.  A recent New York Times Op-Ed, “Beware of ‘Snakes,’ ‘Invaders’ and Other Fighting Words,” underlined this connection:

Over the past few years, far-right nationalist political leaders around the world have been using harsh rhetoric against minority groups, particularly immigrants. We know from history that acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and terrorism have been preceded by periods in which political and social movements employed such rhetoric. In Nazi Germany, Jews were described as vermin, and Nazi propaganda outlets claimed that Jews spread diseases. The recent ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people of Myanmar was preceded by propaganda associating Rohingya men with rape. . . .

But do words really have power to change our behavior? . . . The literature on marketing teaches us that rhetoric can have significant impact on attitudes. Here is one example: Asking people even purely hypothetical questions unconsciously shifts their subsequent preferences and behavior in often dramatic ways. . . .

One way that rhetoric changes perceived obligations is by the recommendation of certain practices. In her 2012 paper “Genocidal Language Games,” the philosopher Lynne Tirrell describes how, for some years before the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu majority called their Tutsi neighbors “cockroaches” and “snakes.” In Rwanda, snakes are public health threats. Ms. Tirrell writes, “in Rwanda, boys are proud when they are trusted to cut the heads off snakes.” Calling a Tutsi a “snake” connected slaughtering Tutsis to the heroic practice of killing snakes. . . .

I used to think that any way you sliced it, with or without Roe, the anti-abortion movement’s practical potential seemed limited, to say the least.

But in 2019, I am no longer sure about that. The pillars of stability in our culture were shaken almost three years ago, and they are trembling still.

Yet I still feel that in its cultural impact, the movement has been a marked failure. That sense did not rest only on an estimate of its  political prospects; rather, this forecast only clarified and reinforced my growing conviction that the movement’s entire strategy has been misconceived and misdirected from the beginning.

Abolition Versus Prohibition

To see why I think it a failure, let’s look again at historical analogies. Despite the superficial parallels with abolitionism, I believe there is another crusade to which the anti-abortion movement is much more truly, and more usefully, comparable: Prohibition. This is so above all because of the kind of problem those two movements were dealing with:

Slavery was a sectional phenomenon, confined in practice to the South, and even there practiced only by a segment of the white population. But abortion is more like alcohol use and abuse–it already pervades our whole society. Abortion is also now a cultural reality: men and women from every region, class and ethnic group have been personally and legally involved in it for two generations, and these roots sink deeper into our cultural soil every day. Most Americans, even many who would never do it, have come to consider it an unpleasant but accepted response to certain unwelcome circumstances.

Another common feature is that each movement wanted a legal prohibition of the behavior they abhorred. More important, each  believed such a ban could actually eliminate the objectionable practice, particularly by criminalizing its purveyors. Like their iconic leader, Carrie Nation, they thought the end of Demon Rum was but a few well-placed, police-backed hatchet strokes away.

The Prohibitionists, of course, proved to be colossally, disastrously mistaken. The combination of alcohol’s pervasiveness, wide involvement and traditional legitimacy for so many produced more obstacles than the Prohibition program could handle. Alcohol problems were not eliminated; but ultimately the electorate rebelled and decisively voted to give up the attempt. The Prohibition movement, despite its apostles’ decades of dedication, proved to be its own worst enemy.

[Note: This parallel should give pause to Quaker readers above all. That’s because Prohibition was a cause which for a century consistently rivaled abolition and women’s suffrage on the list of Friends’ most fervently pursued social reforms. Its legislative “success” in 1919, when Prohibition became law, was at first celebrated as an achievement to match the other two. Later, in response to Prohibition’s (continuing) calamitous outcome, Quakers have collectively chosen to forget this chapter of this history, rather than to come to terms with our group’s  folly. That’s a tragic loss: alcohol abuse remains a hugely destructive social question; but Prohibition was decisively shown to be the wrong answer to it. And for Friends the work of realizing that we are not always “on the  cutting edge,” but can collectively become as damned, self-defeating fools, is overdue, and would be very salutary.]

To me this example illuminates the fatal flaw in the anti-abortion movement’s theory: these same factors of pervasiveness, wide involvement and legitimacy, even more than the hard facts of Washington political life, are likely to make its agitation a fruitless, though destructive exercise.

From this perspective, Roe is a red herring, a huge diversion. The idea that abortion can be stopped by reversing it is Prohibitionist romanticism, as naive and foredoomed as that of the Anti-Saloon League. Quakers and the other Drys managed to pass the Prohibitionist Volstead Act, then choked — and Quakers turned amnesiac — when the “victory” turned to ashes in their mouths.

This points to yet another potential parallel: When the Nineteenth Amendment was repealed, regulation of alcohol use reverted to the states, just as would happen if Roe were reversed; yet no one argues that this led to any meaningful reduction in alcohol problems in America; quite the contrary.

No, the genie is out of the bottle, the milk is spilled, Humpty Dumpty has fallen, Pandora’s box is open. That is still true of alcohol problems; I believe it is true of abortion.

Another Way? HIV and Tobacco

For abortion supporters, this history may provide an occasion to gloat, and I wouldn’t blame them. But for those of us who consider abortion a social evil, it does not have to mean giving up. Rather, it is a signal to go back to the drawing board. If we grant that abortion is a cultural problem not amenable to a Prohibitionist strategy, what is the alternative, if there is one? Where might we even begin to look for it?

The sad fact is that an alternative strategy does not yet exist. But I believe it could. There are possible models for one, along with actual programs aimed at other, apparently equally intractable cultural realities, programs which have in fact had genuine social impact.

I call these models Persuasionist strategies, in contrast to their Prohibitionist rivals. (One might also call them SLR (Safe, Legal & Rare-Plus.) And I find useful examples in two ongoing efforts: the campaigns against smoking and HIV.

Like abortion, smoking is still legal, and was once pervasive and widely accepted in our culture. It is also massively destructive of human life; in 1979 the federal government estimated that it claimed 320,000 victims annually.

But unlike abortion, the incidence of smoking is declining. In 1964, when the first surgeon general’s report declared it to be a health threat, 40 percent of Americans were smokers; by 1986, the rate was down to 26.5 percent.  By 2016 it had slid to 15.5 percent.

Smoking-related deaths remain high; the effects often manifest decades later. Nevertheless, Research data suggests that the decline in smoking is likely to continue. This is a remarkable change to have come about in two generations–and it is not an accident.

What has happened? I believe smoking has been reduced by  three main factors:

First, its progressive delegitimation, especially by the government;

Second, the related educational & media antismoking campaigns;

And third, the persistence of these efforts over more than fifty years.

All these factors have been crucial to changing behavior: By themselves, the educational campaigns have been very small potatoes compared to the billions spent on cigarette advertising in the same period; but putting a government stamp on them helped offset this imbalance by increasing their credibility. And only a long-term program had any chance of countering tobacco advertising and beginning to uproot such a deeply ingrained cultural habit.

A similar pattern developed in connection with HIV. Recent statistics suggest that in at least in one major risk group, white male homosexuals, the educational efforts aimed at slowing the spread of HIV by reducing risky sexual behavior have been highly successful; the extent of the changes is confirmed by an accompanying sharp decline in other sexually-transmitted diseases in this group as well.

These drives have had the backing of the surgeon general and other government officials. While they have not been underway long enough to meet the long-term criterion, there is every indication that they will, and this suggests that over time their impact on behavior will become even more profound. Add in the effect of remarkable new anti-HIV medications, and the domestic picture has greatly improved, though the disease has not yet been conquered.

The HIV experience is significant in another respect. There were once influential voices calling stridently for government to take a strongly Prohibitionist tack and attempt to force behavior changes among risk groups, especially homosexuals, by mandatory testing and what is euphemistically called the “quarantine” of possible carriers. One can still hear echoes of these ideas let’s hope they stay on the fringes (but this is time when the fringes have mov ed very near the center.)

It is no coincidence that these voices both echo and substantially overlap the anti-abortion constituency. But such Prohibitionist agitation has thus far been decisively set aside in favor of Persuasionist tactics, and the numbers suggest that these are paying off.

Persuasionist Thinking

I believe a Persuasionist/SLR-Plus strategy similar to these could be developed to deal with abortion, and that it could not only continue to reduce its incidence, perhaps overwhelmingly, but could do so with much less of the social conflict and polarization that now surrounds the issue.

Such a strategy is not difficult to lay out in theory, though no doubt its implementation would evoke all the usual uncertainties and compromises of politics. It would include all the three elements identified in the earlier examples: Delegitimizing abortion as the major response to problem pregnancies; educating the public, and especially women at risk, about alternatives and sources of support; and third, sustaining these efforts over the long term, at least for a generation.

This delegitimation of abortion, as I hope by now is becoming clear, has nothing to do with attempts to outlaw it, anymore than the antismoking campaigns have sought to outlaw tobacco. Whether women theoretically (or theologically) “should” be the ones making abortion decisions, as a matter of fact they are; and in the future, with self-administered remedies, this autonomous decisionmaking capacity is likely to increase.

Faced with this reality, I argue that the most practical way to decrease abortion is to influence the decisions they make. Many elements of such a policy are already part of federal law, although these scattered bits and pieces would need to be pulled together and thought through. The steady slide in abortions under the “benign” policies of Democratic administrations I claim as evidence that such policies can and do work.

Bill Clinton was on to this quite early. In his 1996 book, Between Hope and History, he said it plainly: “I believe we should all work to reduce the number of abortions.” ( p.137).

The result could, for instance, take the form of a congressional finding that the policy of the United States is to discourage abortion, while respecting the consciences of women facing such decisions. To this would be added an explanation of why this conclusion has been reached, and directives to appropriate agencies to undertake educational efforts to persuade Americans to stop resorting to it, and to provide supportive services for those who seek alternatives.

Incidentally, the goal of discouraging abortion, but not by banning it, would fit well with the ambivalent state of public opinion on the subject described earlier; or at least, it would fit better than either the status quo or a total ban. This better fit should increase its credibility.

With the policy in place, the government would take the lead in underwriting the ongoing educational campaigns, urging women and their partners to take responsibility for avoiding abortion, and to parents and others to respect and support those who have done so.

Such a public campaign, to retain credibility, would need to be backed up with a federal commitment to offer support and services to those seeking alternatives. This would include not only such items as contraception, prenatal and maternal and child health care (putting the “Plus” into SLR+), but also a long-overdue revamping and streamlining of adoption procedures to make adoption a real rather than too often a theoretical option. We are a long way from making these alternatives meaningfully available to large numbers of the women facing abortion decisions.

Finally, this effort would be planned to last at least a generation or two. Abortion has been legal and widely available in America for 45 years; it will take at least that long to diminish its social acceptability.

My own conviction is that a Persuasionist strategy, assertively and persistently pursued, could in time accelerate the declining incidence of abortion dramatically. But even in the best case it would not be expected to eliminate it completely. For that matter, the antismoking campaigns have not totally eliminated the harms of tobacco, anymore than HIV education have entirely eradicated risky sex or the sharing of needles by drug addicts. Yet these two are already smashing successes compared to, say, the long-term failure of Prohibition on alcohol problems.

Prospects and Problems

The same can hardly be said for the current anti-abortion movement. After 45 years of agitation, what does it have to show? Its most concrete policy success was to end public funding for abortions at the federal level and in most states. It has also mounted an ongoing campaign of harassment of abortion facilities. And under its expansive wings, a series of murderers and bombers have sheltered and ventured forth to claim their prey. Beyond that, it has enriched numerous lawyers and campaign consultants, causing no end of political mischief.

What it has not done is, even when backed by movement friendly politicians, is stop abortions, which still top 600,000 per year. Nor, to repeat, does its current prohibition strategy show any real signs of doing so in the foreseeable future.

But are the prospects for developing a Persuasionist approach any better? In the short term, perhaps not. It may be difficult to open up the political space for an alternative strategy before the existing movement has largely burned itself out; and that could take a long time.

An enormous amount of ego and emotion, not to mention money and institutional inertia, have been invested in the present Prohibitionist drive and its Roe obsession. From its present perspective, my Persuasionist concepts are likely to be dismissed as nothing but a sellout. And let us not forget the persistent spectre of the John Brown Syndrome. As the authors of “Beware of ‘Snakes,’” asked  . . .

But do words really have power to change our behavior? . . . The literature on marketing teaches us that rhetoric can have significant impact on attitudes. . . . Asking people even purely hypothetical questions unconsciously shifts their subsequent preferences and behavior in often dramatic ways. . . .

One way that rhetoric changes perceived obligations is by the recommendation of certain practices. In her 2012 paper “Genocidal Language Games,” the philosopher Lynne Tirrell describes how, for some years before the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu majority called their Tutsi neighbors “cockroaches” and “snakes.” In Rwanda, snakes are public health threats. Ms. Tirrell writes, “in Rwanda, boys are proud when they are trusted to cut the heads off snakes.” Calling a Tutsi a “snake” connected slaughtering Tutsis to the heroic practice of killing snakes. . . .

There would no doubt also be opposition to a Persuasionist shift, from the pro-abortion camp, at least initially, particularly those directly involved in the industry–for that, when a 600,000-plus abortions are performed per year, is what it is. They won’t like it because, except for wanting public funding back, the pre-2019 status quo pretty much suits them fine. Yet by sidestepping the issue of legalization, a Persuasionist program would deprive them of their image as defenders of “freedom of choice,” which has always been their strongest card.

In fact, such a shift in direction would put the pro-abortion groups on the spot, since practically all their spokespeople have repeated the SLR mantra,  that they too are “against” abortion, in the sense that they don’t want it to be used any more often than is absolutely “necessary.” In a Persuasionist context, they would be expected to live up to their claim.

One probable result would be a winnowing out in the pro-abortion ranks. No one would be forced to help minimize abortion; but those who declined would look progressively less like mere abortion providers, and more like abortion promoters, salespeople pushing a product.

Anti-abortionists have long contended that such was in fact the underlying reality of the pro-abortion camp; and cases like that of Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, convicted in 2013 of multiple counts of murder after many botched very late term abortions, provided ammunition.

A Persuasionist turn would be a chance for the public to see how true the charge actually is. Given the public antipathy to the actual practice of abortion, such images would greatly diminish the credibility of those thus identified.

But of course, this is all just speculation. Consider that Prohibition was repealed in 1933: That fourteen-year experiment proved so traumatic that eighty-five years later there are only a few voices calling for a rethinking of our approach to alcohol problems, and little sign that they will be seriously heard by policymakers anytime soon. This despite the obvious failure of state regulation to stem the tidal wave of alcohol-related problems, which add up to one of our most serious and destructive “drug crises.”

The same thing could happen with abortion: The Roe obsession runs deep, and its stalemate continues. Furthermore, most of the existing anti-abortion movement–some Catholic bishops are exceptions, along with the small, beleaguered ranks of the Consistent Life Network –has been fully absorbed into the religious right, and now Alt-Right. Indeed, as the Roe era ends, the anti-abortion infrastructure may remain as one of the strongest redoubts of reaction.

As such, its key leaders are no longer satisfied simply to resist abortion; their movement is now rapidly becoming one of the vehicles for an explosively mixed bag of zealots seeking vengeance for a laundry list of putative wrongs which includes much of the basis of twentieth century culture, everything from secular humanism, sex education, the presence of Jews, birth control, the outcome of the Scopes monkey trial and the very Enlightenment itself.

How much longer will this disruptive force continue to wreak its near-random political havoc? How far will it follow its abolitionist star toward some unforeseeable but very possibly tragic denouement? Will the hope of finding a more promising alternative approach become one of its casualties?

Who can say? One thing, though, seems all too clear: in the meantime, every day the culture of abortion becomes ever more deeply woven into the fabric of American society; even the demise of Roe won’t stop that. Will this be the bitterly ironic monument of the anti-abortion crusade? The movement has proven utterly unable to stop this process, and I believe it has little to look forward to but more failure, and not even noble failure at that.

The post Abortion & Civil War – 2019 Update appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

May 24 was (Authentic) Religious Liberty Day (at least it was here), but the Administration has some strange ideas about how to mark it. Like: turn it upside down & inside out.

That day it released  a proposed federal rule that would deny transgender persons many of the medical benefits and legal protections they gained in the Obama years. The proposal is one more chapter in the continuing drive to roll back just about everything the previous administration achieved or initiated. (Full text of the proposed rule is here. )

As the New York Times put it , the new rule

“would no longer recognize gender identity as an avenue for sex discrimination.” Under it, “health care workers would be free to object to performing procedures like gender reassignment surgery, and insurers would not be bound to cover all services for transgender customers. The new rule would fit into a broader agenda pushed by religious activists and is consistent with administration actions to limit civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans in a variety of domains, including education, employment and housing.”

The new rule was explained by Roger Severino, the director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights. It is worth noting that prior to his HHS appointment, Severino was director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. There he cranked out numerous anti-trans and homophobic screeds for its “Daily Signal” PR blog, regularly denouncing Obama’s “radical gender ideology.”

It’s also worth noting that Severino was identified last year as pushing for a plan to have the administration issue an official definition of gender as:

“‘Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth . . . . The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.’” (Emphasis added.)

The key word in this proposed definition  is “immutable.” Though the plan evidently was not such. Public blowback seems to have slowed this push. It may also have led to this new thrust, as a workaround to essentially the same end.

But “Immutable” remains important as a religious code word. In late 2016 I went searching for the religious doctrine basis for transphobia, and found it in a manual issued by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a religious right legal group pushing homophobic & transphobic policies nationwide.

Here’s the definition again [Emphasis added]:

<< It comes in three versions in the ADF manual, to fit different denominations. Let’s look at them:

#1, Preliminary:
“Gender, likewise, matters. God wonderfully and immutably creates each person as male or female, and these distinct, complementary genders together reflect the image and nature of God. (Gen 1:26-27.)
But some individuals reject their biological sex and often present as the opposite sex. In so doing, these confused individuals reject God’s design and the person He created them to be.”

#2. Specifically Protestant:
We believe that God wonderfully and immutably creates each person as male or female. These two distinct, complementary genders together reflect the image and nature of God. (Gen 1:26-27.) Rejection of one’s biological sex is a rejection of the image of God within that person.

Catholic:
Man and woman are created by God in His image and likeness. . . . Therefore, to reject one’s biological gender is to reject the work of the Creator and imply that God made a mistake. God does not make mistakes.

The biblical reference here is to a very short passage, Genesis chapter one, verses 26 & 27:

Genesis 1:26-27:

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion . . . .

27 So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

Then I explored the ambiguities and expansiveness around this short passage and related biblical texts, mainly ignored by the ADF,  Severino, and their allies. Despite the denials, they were plentiful.

Note how key the term “immutable” and equivalents are for the ADF and the HHS proposed redefinition. But first off, it is not in the biblical texts.

Next, I’m familiar with the Genesis passage, and the striking thing for me is how much doctrinal baggage the ADF shovels into it. The text is actually much more flexible (and interesting) than ADF admits.

Like many biblical texts, this one is rich and provocatively ambiguous. Note how God speaks in both plural and individual (male) voices. “Let US make man in OUR image . . .” And the Hebrew is also packed with meanings, vocalized and potential.

What’s rendered “man” here is a generic term, more properly translated as “humankind,” “people,” “anyone,” or as one writer put it, “earthling.”

This new “earthling” is not exclusively male or singular, but it is of the divine “us” and embodies “our” image, potentially both male and female (and maybe more and other than that). When this proto-human is then rendered mostly into male and female image-bearers, the key word is an inclusive “and” rather than the ADF’s&  HHS’s asserted exclusionary “or.”

Thus these verses carry much more fluidity and ambiguity than the ADF reading permits.

But these verses in Genesis do not declare that “either male OR female” are the only options for humans creatures; nor do they exclude, either explicitly or implicitly, any departures from these types. They don’t exclude it, or condemn. They’re better than that.

And while, to be sure, there’s plenty of sexism and homophobia to be found elsewhere in the Bible, there are also texts beyond Genesis which affirm the more flexible potential of this suggestive tale of origins.

For instance, in Matthew 19, when Jesus is disparaging divorce, and the disciples object, he replies:

11“Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

“Eunuchs who were born that way.”  Jesus is saying here that God has created some individuals outside the typical male-female frame; and that’s okay. They should be who they are.

For that matter, a few chapters later Jesus suggests that gender is but a temporary condition: “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” So “genderless” (presumably celibate?) angels also bear the image of God.

Moreover, even Paul (maybe on an off day) insists in Galatians 3:28 that for believing Christians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 

No male or female? If that’s not “rejecting” what ADF calls God’s “immutable either/or design,” at the least it relativizes and shrugs it off.

To be sure, ADF (and Severino) will have none of it.  ADF: “Therefore, to reject one’s biological gender is to reject the work of the Creator and imply that God made a mistake. God does not make mistakes.”

Except that being born and living outside their rigid and limited frame of “biological gender” is acknowledged in scripture (if too rarely) as part of “God’s design,” within the presumably inexhaustible variety of its plural divinity. And if “God does not make mistakes,” then that variety is not a mistake either.

I don’t expect these reflections to persuade any strong supporter of the ADF/HHS outlook, and among more conservative evangelicals and their political allies. Their interpretive frame, (what scholars call a hermeneutic) utterly forbids it; and for them their hermeneutic rules (and they believe it should rule us too).

One other wrinkle  to this outlook is new to me. It’s called accommodationism. It argues that the First Amendment section on freedom of religion is a mandate for the government to “accommodate” to a maximum degree the public practices of various (but mainly Christian) sects, except without special preference for (or “establishment” of) any one denomination.

Why? Because like broccoli and (gulp) kale, accommodationists are sure that religion is good for us.

The early student of American culture Alexis de Tocqueville is a patron saint of this view. Here’s a key quote from him:

“The sects that exist in the United States are innumerable. They all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man…. Moreover, all the sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same…. Christianity, therefore, reigns without obstacle, by universal consent; the consequence is … that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate, although the political world is abandoned to the debates and experiments of men.” 

Sounds great, right? And in many small situations (e.g., allowing members of tiny pacifist sects to be conscientious objectors to being drafted into the national army) it can work with no big impact. But then, if you’re not a Christian — or if you are but have different notions about some of the major duties of man (and woman) to others — then what?

Furthermore some things have changed since de Tocqueville’s visit to the young Republic, which was in 1831. As an unnamed Wikipedia editor put it with polite but unmistakable snark:

In contrast to Tocqueville’s view, different Christian denominations have taken opposing views on moral issues which have been the basis for law, such as slavery, contraception, abortion, Christianity and homosexuality, capital punishment, and war. 

Other than that . . . . Oh, wait: gender. (Not to mention a monumentally bloody Civil War, in which both contending parties were convinced they were on God’s side.)

And one more thing. No doubt to the chagrin of both Severino, ADF, and a bloc on the Supreme Court, de Tocqueville’s perceived “great unity” of Christianity and 1831 morality is rapidly diffusing and even disappearing, right before their eyes.

When the “Church of Nones” is today’s fastest growing “sect” especially among younger Americans, then for better or worse, the  accommodationist frame is beginning to crack and crumble.

As yesterday’s announcement shows, the administration, half of Congress and the Supreme Court all seem poised to impose major rollbacks of the views and practices of those who differ on so many of these issues, one wonders: instead of a force for social stability, could U.S. religion morph into just the opposite? (Or is that already happening?)

And what will the exodus of the Nones turn into? Passive resistance like what filled the speakeasies under Prohibition, undermining it with every jug of moonshine and bathtub gin? More open, organized pushback?

Who knows: but I have an actual example of what could happen in mind: For 300-plus years, the Catholic Church was the dominant institution in Quebec Canada, with immense political as well as social power.  Then around 1960, for reasons historians still debate, Québécois just had enough, and quit showing up. It wasn’t “organized,” but it was  unstoppable. The mass departure sparked what is now called “The Quiet Revolution,” and included the collapse of clerical hegemony.

The shift wasn’t violent: priests weren’t lynched; churches weren’t bombed. But they emptied out, and the Québécois took their money with them. And when I visited Montreal, what’s left of this once-pervasive  clericalist establishment is bent and ghostly.

Given the much more violent U.S. history, I suspect odds are against any similar Révolution tranquille in the U.S. But the precedent is there.

Could it be like that? If we’re lucky. What if ADF and the gang behind Severino  gave a religious counter-revolution, and nobody came?

One can hope. But I’m not dialing back the Religious Liberty struggle. No, not yet.

The post Religious Liberty? Or Dogmatic Transphobia? appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Soon she was leading a successful raiding party along coastal South Carolina’s Combahee River. The raid captured several plantations, sent the owners reeling, and freed at least 750 enslaved people there. (BTW that was hundreds more in one batch than she managed to liberate in her many Underground Railroad expeditions.)

Tubman stayed with the army til several months after the war ended. Later, when the Klan and other terrorists waged their wars on Reconstruction, age, health, and care for her aged parents kept Tubman at her northern home in Auburn New York.

The post Harriet Tubman: Beyond the Underground Railroad appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

The Southern Baptists, you ask me, buried the lead (or lede if you’re old school) about their 2019 national convention as deep as possible:

I admit, though, that preacherly blather (or bishops’ blather) did not hold my attention about the meetings.

Not that clerical sex abuse, especially of the young, should be trivialized. But talk of it is everywhere. And given the record of Baptists and Catholic denominational leadership, such talk, even if it resounds in fancy hotels and high-end conference centers, is cheap.

So I admit that in the long Associated Press story about the SBC, that filled most of a page in the Montgomery (AL) Advertiser on June 13, I was looking for something else — news of the other topic that’s on all minds in such conclaves, though soft-pedaled in these public sessions.

As far as I can tell, neither Baptists nor most other formerly larger denominations know how to slow this broadening, ecumenical exodus. (Nor, for that matter, do I.)

The post Church Sex Scandals, and the Buried Lead appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Ross Douthat, a very conservative Catholic, is persistently the most interesting of The NY Times’s stable of right wing columnists.
For me that’s because he frequently articulates perspectives that resonate to my experience, even if most of his desired remedies sound predictably retrograde.

Take, for instance, this reflection from August 6, 2019 on the recent carnage in El Paso & Dayton:

“I think Trump is deeply connected to what happened last weekend, deeply connected to both massacres. Not because his immigration rhetoric drove the El Paso shooter to mass murder in some direct and simple way; life and radicalism and violence are all more complicated than that.

But because Trump participates in the general cultural miasma that generates mass shooters, and having a participant as president makes the problem worse.
The president’s bigoted rhetoric is obviously part of this. Marianne Williamson put it best, in the last Democratic debate: There really is a dark psychic force generated by Trump’s political approach, which from its birther beginnings has consistently encouraged and fed on a fevered and paranoid form of right-wing politics, and dissolved quarantines around toxic and dehumanizing ideas. And the possibility that Trump’s zest for demonization can feed a demonic element in the wider culture is something the many religious people who voted for the president should be especially willing to consider.”

Thus far, I’m with him (& by extension, New Ager Williamson):
“dark psychic forces” and “demonic elements” are real, even if hard to nail down & hazardous to apply; but there’s more going on here than a tweeter under an Orange hairpiece spouting hate.

Douthat does his best to link these:

“But the connection between the president and the young men with guns extends beyond Trump’s race-baiting to encompass a more essential feature of his public self — which is not the rhetoric or ideology that he deploys, but the obvious moral vacuum, the profound spiritual black hole, that lies beneath his persona and career. . . .”

“A spiritual black hole”; a useful metaphor, useful because it points at something hard to reduce to poll numbers, but which I too am convinced is really there. (My “enlightenment” came not out of “Miracle” weekend retreats, but from spending more than a decade working with soldiers and families shattered by U.S. wars.)

Douthat: “Cultural conservatives get a lot of grief when they respond to these massacres by citing moral and spiritual issues, rather than leaping straight to gun policy (or in this case, racist ideology).”

Not that I dismiss “gun policy” or facing off against racism. But of the responses by Democratic presidential candidates, the one way out front for me is Beto O’Rourke’s shout of rage in El Paso about 45’s stream of vocal excrement, followed by  the profanely apt cry of “WTF!” There are times when expletives are appropriate: when facing the bloody work of demonic monsters is one.

Douthat: “But to look at the trend in these massacres, the spikes of narcissistic acting-out in a time of generally-declining violence, the shared bravado and nihilism driving shooters of many different ideological persuasions, is to necessarily encounter a moral and spiritual problem, not just a technocratic one. . . .”

He’s still right. Douthat then goes on to sketch his usual religious conservative program as the response, and here I mostly part ways. But I won’t belabor all that.

Douthat: “But the dilemma that conservatives have to confront is that you can chase this cultural problem all the way down to its source in lonely egomania and alienated narcissism, and you’ll still find Donald Trump’s face staring back to you.”

That goes for progressives too, who mainly stay in a secular, technocratic lane. But how does one take on “dark psychic forces” which loose “moral and spiritual” barrages on us?

Religious conservatives don’t have an answer to this, in my experience; but they at least have a name for an answer: “spiritual warfare,” drawing on Bible passages such as  2 Corinthians 10 and Ephesians 6.

But these passages are highly metaphorical too, and the practical recipes I’ve looked at mainly boil down to commands to “Pray a lot, send money (and vote Republican).”

Douthat’s is a more sophisticated version of this; but he can have it. What do Democratic techno-wonks have to say? Not much. Among the current presidential flock, only one stands out, Mayor Pete. From the first round Democratic debate:

“. .  .[F]or a party that associates itself with Christianity to say that it is ok, to suggest that God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages has lost all claim to ever use religious language again.”

Of course, that shot hit the target not only because of its truth, but also because Buttigieg actually takes  religion seriously. Yet it’s also a useful example. If progressives are going to take on those who are whipping up the dark psychic forces, I’m one who thinks it will take more than position papers, polls and platitudes.

I’m particularly mindful of that today, August 6th, in the shadow of Hiroshima. Some can look at the images from that day and see only a mushroom cloud, a technical or diplomatic problem.

I see more: a spiritual black hole.  One we, or our parents, opened, and never closed.

The post Hiroshima, El Paso, Dayton & Us appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Flashbacks: an article in the August 17 (2019) Washington Post, about a donnybrook developing around the vacationing Supreme Court, is giving me flashbacks:

It seems like a century ago —

October 4, 2018. The first day of hearings on the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. Everybody was waiting for the predicted bombshell sexual assault testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

But that morning I got my timing mixed up and tuned in early, well before the featured fireworks began. As red-robed Handmaids circled outside, my ears were filled with the platitudes and boilerplate of opening statements by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Lucky for me. At first, all were forgettable (& forgotten) including those by the three committee Democrats tipped to run for president (Klobuchar, Booker & Harris), all of whom stumbled and flubbed their opportunities.But I say the timing was lucky for me, because amid the drone, there was an sudden exception to this soporific parade. A major exception. Striking. Stunning.

The thunderbolt came in the opening statement by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

Who? In this lineup, Whitehouse was previously most distinguished by the fact that he was not running for president, evidently had no interest in it. And thus, the breathless media mavens gathered had no interest in him.

Big mistake. Having evaded the burden of jockeying for higher office, Whitehouse came to the hearing with a different agenda, loaded for bear. He took laserlike aim, shooting holes not just in Kavanaugh’s  reliably rightwing record, but also that of the cohort he was joining, the bloc whose hegemony Kavanaugh was sent to cement.

Whitehouse called the bloc The Roberts Five, and with growing anger he detailed its reactionary record and the anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-civil rights, anti-dam-near-anything-else humane, pro-special interest agenda it revealed. His ire was backed up by oversized charts, graphs and carefully annotated, scathing chapter-and-verse white papers:

A review of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence during the Roberts Era reveals that in the most controversial and salient civil cases – those decided by bare 5-4 or 5-3 majorities – when the right wing of the Court has voted en bloc to form the majority, they do so to advance far-right and corporate interests a striking 92 percent of the time.  In those cases, the “Roberts Five” – Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Justice Antonin Scalia (replaced last year by Justice Neil Gorsuch) – have reliably voted in lockstep to help Republicans win elections, to protect corporations from liability, to abridge civil rights, and to advance the far right social agenda. (Emphasis added.)

Two minutes into this brilliant expose, I was on the edge of my seat. Surprisingly coming out of left field. Whitehouse was stripping bare the record of the Roberts Five in–

73 cases that all implicate a major Republican Party interest. Seventy-three is a lot of cases at the Supreme Court.

Is there a pattern to those 73 cases? Oh, yes there is.

Every time a big Republican corporate or partisan interest is involved, the big Republican interest wins. Every. Time.

Let me repeat: In seventy-three partisan decisions where there’s a big Republican interest at stake, the big Republican interest wins. Every. Damned. Time. (Emphasis added.)

Whitehouse’s statement was so good it should have been a game-changer. When the day’s hearing was over, I couldn’t wait to make a blog post out of it.

But naaah. All anyone was interested in that day was Dr. Ford, and the three presidential wannabes. And we know what happened with all that. Ford’s revelations were muffled, stifled & ignored.

Kavanaugh threw a tantrum built on the unforgettable line “I Like beer!” and was soon installed. The feckless presidential wannabees couldn’t land a punch and are today mired in the lower reaches of  pre-primary polls.

But it turns out that all the work Whitehouse put into his memorable opener has not been lost. Which brings us back to the Washington Post today.

The headline was, “Warning or threat? Democrats ignite controversy with Supreme Court brief in gun case.”

The text focused on

the controversy that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and four other Democratic senators have ignited with a filing that instructs the Supreme Court to either drop a New York gun case it has accepted for the coming term or face a public reckoning.

At stake is a case now before the court, regarding gun control laws in New York.

Whitehouse, as counsel, was joined by Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.).

With remarkable candor, the brief

questions whether the court’s conservative majority — nominated by three Republican presidents — is motivated by partisan intent and is in the pocket of the National Rifle Association and the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

Out in the real world, Americans are murdered each day with firearms in classrooms or movie theaters or churches or city streets, and a generation of preschoolers is being trained in active-shooter survival drills,” Whitehouse writes. “In the cloistered confines of this Court, and notwithstanding the public imperatives of these massacres, the NRA and its allies brashly presume, in word and deed, that they have a friendly audience for their ‘project.’

The amicus brief also repeats the tally of 73 cases decided for the right by “The Roberts Five,” in more technical, but equally unvarnished language, which is worth quoting at some length

“. . . Chief Justice [Roberts] recently echoed . . . that “[t]his Court is not a legislature.”. . . “It can be tempting for judges to confuse [their] own preferences with the requirements of the law,” . . . to legislate from the bench. To stave off that temptation, justiciability doctrines like standing and mootness function as an “apolitical limitation on judicial power,” ensuring that courts do not exceed their constitutionally prescribed powers. . . .

Recent patterns raise legitimate questions about whether these limits remain. From October Term 2005 through October Term 2017, this Court issued 78 5-4 (or 5-3) opinions in which justices appointed by Republican presidents provided all five votes in the majority. In 73 of these 5-4 decisions, the cases concerned interests important to the big funders, corporate influencers, and political base of the Republican Party. And in each of these 73 cases, those partisan interests prevailed.

With bare partisan majorities, the Court has influenced sensitive areas like voting rights, partisan gerrymandering, dark money, union power, regulation of pollution, corporate liability, and access to federal court, particularly regarding civil rights and discrimination in the workplace. Every single time, the corporate and Republican political interests prevailed.

The pattern of outcomes is striking; and so is the frequency with which these 5-4 majorities disregarded “conservative” judicial principles like judicial restraint, originalism, stare decisis, and even federalism. . . .

As scholars, journalists, and commentators have observed, this Court has employed a number of methods to circumvent justiciability limits in decisions that moved the law. . . .

The Court and the country have witnessed an accompanying explosion of strategic “faux” litigation—cases fabricated to bring issues before the Court when litigants presume it will give them policy victories. For example, we have seen flocks of “freedom-based public interest law” organizations that exist only to change public policy through litigation, and which often do not disclose their funders. We have seen behavioral signals, like litigants who rush to lose cases in lower courts “as quickly as practicable and without argument, so that [they] can expeditiously take their claims to the Supreme Court” (ordinarily, in litigation, litigants seek to win).

Almost invariably, and as we have seen in this case, such plaintiffs are accompanied by throngs of professional amici, whose common funding sources and connections to the organizations behind the supposed party-in-interest are obscured by ineffective disclosure rules. . . .

These systematic, industrialized efforts often seek to end-run standing, case-or-controversy, and other separation-of-powers guardrails; often obscure the real party-in-interest; and align with a larger and even more ominous pattern—a pattern of persistent efforts by large anonymous forces to influence the Court.

The anonymous funding of the Federalist Society’s “insourced” judicial selection effort; the anonymous funding of the Judicial Crisis Network’s judicial confirmation campaigns (two $17+ million dollar donations, maybe by the same donor, with unknown business before the Court); the anonymous funding of the strategic litigation shops that bring so many cases behind “plaintiffs of convenience”; the anonymous funding of the amicus armada, as many as fifteen at a clip—none of it is healthy, and it all bodes very poorly for the Court if it turns out that these anonymous donor interests are also the beneficiaries of the 73-decision run of 5-4 victories we described, . . .

Today, fifty-five percent of Americans believe the Supreme Court is “mainly motivated by politics” (up five percent from last year); fifty-nine percent believe the Court is “too influenced by politics”; and a majority now believes the “Supreme Court should be restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.”

The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be “restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.” Particularly on the urgent issue of gun control, a nation desperately needs it to heal. (Emphasis added)

Naturally, the right wing is livid at thus being called out. The Wall Street Journal dubbed Whitehouse’s text an “enemy-of-the-court brief”; David French in the National Review said it was “easily the most malicious Supreme Court brief I’ve ever seen.”

Whitehouse himself

was unapologetic, saying he was cautioning the court, not threatening it.

“In the same way that you might warn somebody walking out on thin ice — ‘Hey, the ice is thin out there, you want to be careful, maybe you want to come in’ — I think that was the motivation for filing this brief,” said the former U.S. attorney and state attorney general.

“To warn the court that it already has its reputation in some degree of trouble . . . it’s getting to the danger that they might fall through the ice.”

In this record-hot summer, metaphors about thin ice may not seem apt. But it does show that the struggle over the Supreme Court is not a matter of one season. Kavanaugh and his dark-money rightwing backers won a big round last year; but Sheldon Whitehouse has now reminded them that more rounds are ahead, and at least some who plan to stay in Congress still know how to land a punch.

The post The Fight Over the Supreme Court is not Over — Just Ask Sheldon Whitehouse appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

In 2004, like the rest of the world, at Quaker House we began to learn about U. S. torture in the “War On terror.”

In one way, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Situated next door to Fort Bragg, we knew that besides being home to the 82nd Airborne Division (Airborne means they troops jump out of airplanes to get to their targets), Bragg also was headquarters for many of the most secret military units: Green Berets, Delta Force, “Jaysock” (the Joint Special Operations Command), and others.

And as torture information leaked out, in bits and pieces, this data was like dots. And connecting the dots produced lines that were like a spiderweb, and many of those lines (not all, but many) crossed and pointed to eastern North Carolina.

There was a county airport not far from us, where a CIA front company called Aero Contractors sent “torture taxi” planes across the Atlantic, to carry detainees who were blindfolded, shackled and spread-eagled on their cabin floors, drugged and diapered for long flights to secret locations called “black sites,” and sometimes Guantanamo. There the unspeakable and illegal was done to them by U.S. government agents. This reality was supposed to stay unknown.

But it didn’t. And soon, to our packed agenda of war protest, we added torture. There were vigils, letters, articles, a few arrests, al that sort of thing. Plus we organized or joined in several conferences. Hopes rose when the now-disgraced president who green-lighted all this malign madness left Washington in early 2009, succeeded by one who promised “Hope & Change.”

Our own hopes in this matter rested on accountability: we didn’t have to write Congress demanding new laws–torture was already a federal crime, a felony.  Give us some law and order! Hopes rose further when the new president ordered a halt to torture.

But there, change was denied us, and hopes were dashed. The perpetrators of torture had walked free during the previous regime; the new boss said we would look ahead, and leave them alone.

Which was to say, U.S. torture was simply put on “Pause,” not truly stopped. The perps were still there. And sure enough, one of the main architects of the torture program was eventually promoted to head the CIA. The laws against torture were made a dead letter; impunity reigned. still does.

Furthermore, under the influence of highly effective popular entertainment like the show “24”, which ran for nine seasons and more than 200 episodes, frequently featuring torture, public opinion swung solidly in its favor — provided that the U. S. was doing the torturing.

Within  a few years, the outcome was plain:  torture may have been wrong, but the American public above all planned to forget about it. This forgetting, or corporate amnesia,  was aided and abetted by its government, from the highest levels. It still is.

Some of us, an ever-diminishing band, kept trying. For several years, some of us periodically picked up trash along the roadside outside Aero Contractors.

There were more conferences and reports, most of which were presented to local, state and federal officials. While mostly polite, it was evident they didn’t want to hear about it, and some defend torture to this day.

It’s pretty quiet now, we’re older, energy is flagging and shouting into the wind is tiring. But a few have not forgotten.  What other countries’ experience has to teach suggests that it typically takes decades for a society to begin to face up to its own atrocities and war crimes, if it ever does.

Last spring, when a peace pilgrimage stopped to have a religious vigil outside the now heavily-protected site of Aero Contractors (the CIA front company is still there, even bigger, but more well-hidden), most of those passing by who took our flyers didn’t know what we were talking about.

Torture, along with the war, was strongly supported by many religious Americans, notably evangelicals. Many such are in the  military, even at high ranks. As an outreach to such, I even ventured into Bible study. I’m pasting it here, because I think it has wider and continuing relevance. If and when this segment of the public awakens from its amnesiac trance, it will still be apt. For others it’s brief.

From, “Patience & Determination,”
a Pamphlet from Quaker House, 2009)

                                             I

Most biblical translators seem reluctant to write the word “torture.” Yet there are places in the scriptures where softer terms read more like evasions. The spirit of torture hovers over many passages, like buzzards circling the lonely figure of Job, alone on a dung-heap.
Indeed, the entire book of Job can be seen as a meditation on the relentlessly inflicted suffering that is of the essence of torture, with Job as the archetypal torture victim. He is innocent and faithful; yet he has been stripped of everything and left bereft and in continual pain, wailing and scratching his sores.
Job’s condition is not accidental. It results from an arbitrary exercise of power, without warrant, limit, or foreseeable end. Worse, as he sees clearly, its source was supposed to be the font and guarantor of justice, not its destroyer.
Yet not only translators shy away from calling such treatment what it is. Job himself confronts a claque of commentators – one is tempted to call them spin doctors – who fill pages like memos to the White House, explaining that what he is enduring is really only a new set of enhanced interrogation techniques, and anyway he must have deserved it.
The victim is not having it. These rationalizations only reinforce his sense of what’s happening:

19:1 Then Job answered: 2 “How long will you torture me, and break me in pieces with words? . . .”

Only one among a score of versions in an online Bible collection (The New Living Translation) boldly renders the Hebrew here as “torture.” In the King James, Job merely sniffs that the apologists “vex my soul”; the Catholic Douay-Rheims version says they “afflict” him. Others speak of “torment,” which at least is closer.
But Job interrupts, at 21:6: “Know then,” he continues, “that God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net around me. . . .”
And when his vivid rage is momentarily spent, he begs,

21 “Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends,’ for the hand of God has touched me! 22 Why do you, like God, pursue me, never satisfied with my flesh?”

A searching question; and whether Job gets any real explanation of what has happened to him (I think not) has been debated by Bible students ever since the book appeared.
Further, Job’s cries for relief and vindication are more than an individual lament. For those with ears to hear, they echo as loudly for us today as they ever have down the centuries.

                                             II

There is torture in the New Testament as well. And here again, translators typically shy away from rendering the term. This is harder to understand in the gospels, because the Greek term used there unambiguously refers to torture as we think of it today.
This specificity should not be surprising; torture was a frequent feature of life and “justice” in Jesus’ world. When demons confront him, for instance, they are expecting it:

Matthew 8:28 “When Jesus came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demoniacs coming out of the tombs met him. They were so fierce that no one could pass that way. 29 Suddenly they shouted, “What have you to do with us, Son of God? Have you come here to [torture] us before the time?”

Luke 8:27: 27 As Jesus stepped out on land (from the sea of Galilee), a man of the city who had demons met him. . . . 28 When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torture me.” (Jesus didn’t torture him. Instead, he banished  the man’s demons.)

For that matter, the scourging of Jesus (Matthew 27:26; Mark 15:15) certainly qualifies; and what else was crucifixion but execution by extended, public torture?
So again, torture was a feature of Jesus’ world, though he did not inflict it. Small wonder then, that when his followers were trying to consolidate their movement after his death, it turns up in a list of general exhortations in the Epistle to the Hebrews:

Hebrews 13:3 “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.”

As with Job, though, only one translation of Hebrews in twenty (The New Revised Standard Version) ventures to say it plain. While the Greek term here is different from that in the gospels, and less exact, it still refers to excruciating suffering inflicted as part of persecution. This is clear enough from an earlier verse from the same epistle,

Hebrews 11:37 “The [early martyrs] were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, [tortured] . . . .”

Here the typical rendering is “tormented.” Yet isn’t it a plausible argument that being sawn in two would be somewhat more than “tormenting”?
The earlier, more explicit term reappears in one more New Testament book, Revelation. The most vivid passage, in Chapter Nine, recounts a vision that for some readers at least, evokes surreal parallels with the more repulsive abuses of our own day, especially when carried out by those charged with upholding law and justice:

Revelation 9:1-11:
1 “And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit;
2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
3 Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth.
4 They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.
5 They were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings someone.

6 And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them.
7 In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, 8 their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth;
9 they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle.
10 They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is their power to harm people for five months.
11 They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon. The first woe has passed. There are still two woes to come.”Would that this woe were the worst, but there is one more passage to contemplate. It is one of the repeated climaxes of the same book, describing the wrath of divine judgement:Revelation 14:9 “Then another angel, a third, followed them, crying with a loud voice, ‘Those who worship the beast and its image, and receive a mark on their foreheads or on their hands,
10 they will also drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger, and they will be tortured with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.
11 And the smoke of their torture goes up forever and ever. There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image and for anyone who receives the mark of its name.’”Such passages have long been a burden to those who can’t see the justice in applying an infinite punishment for the limited evil that even the most fiendish humans can do. Nor are these doubts eased by the pious admonition of verse 12 that “Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus.”
Perhaps that’s why translators prefer “torment” to torture here, although there is no real ambiguity in the underlying Greek. Who wants to think about the worst human torturer in history being subjected to even a worse torture, unendingly, as an endless quasi-pornographic spectacle for the angels and the Lamb, the Lamb who represents the One who is supposed to combine justice with mercy?
I doubt there are many who want to contemplate such a scenario. And for those who were forced to, like Job, perhaps the best response was his:
21 “Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends,’ for the hand of God has touched me!”Have pity, yes. But remember, as Hebrews charges us. Remember, and then act to banish the demons.

On September 21, 2019 Quaker House will observe its 50th anniversary, and is still working with soldier war resisters, military families and veterans.  You are invited to join in. Details here.

The post Quaker House at 50: We tried everything to stop U.S. torture. Even Bible study. appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

So how offensive is this?

“Today I join millions around the world in celebrating the arrival of divinity on earth, who came into this world not in riches but in poverty, not as a citizen but as a refugee. No matter where or how we celebrate, merry Christmas.”

That’s mayor Pete Buttigieg’s Xmas tweet, complete & unexpurgated.

Personally, I thought it was pretty cool, if one is into such things: respectfully restrained, but clear about his own stance. His being “out” about his faith, but not obnoxious or triumphalist, I find an appealing feature of his presence on the political scene.

But it’s blowing up the evangelical internet.

Rev. Dr. Darrell Scott of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, for instance, didn’t put too fine a point on it: “When did you come up with that load of crap?” he explained.

One objection that’s been raised has some merit: it’s not likely that Mary & Joseph were “poor” in first century terms: they could afford to make the trip that took them thru Bethlehem, and likely had the shekels to pay for a bunk in the inn, if it hadn’t been sold out.

OTOH the cries that Jesus didn’t arrive as a refugee are more shaky. First off, he was “homeless” when he landed; staying in a stable was definitely not Doubletree. A lot of things have changed since then, yet stable smells abide . . . .

Then, when the angels quit singing and the three wise guys were gone, there were, you know, diapers, or whatever they called Pampers then. (Jesus may have had a virgin birth, but the prophets hadn’t said squat about a poopless parturition.)

Even worse was the news that King Herod had launched a massacre of male babies, aimed directly at him. I mean, how would he get into the right Betsy DeVos Christian preschool with a price on his head (and no security detail)?

So the parents swaddled the babe & high-tailed it to Egypt, where they were definitely refugees, for a good (if textually unspecified) while. And if they weren’t poor when they started, this long unplanned side trip — several hundred miles, on a donkey, thru hills and across desert, and the roads! (wait, what roads?) –had to bring them close to the edge. (For evidence, check the pictures of homeless camps in your state.)

Okay, whatever: SCOTT and a bunch of other preachers aren’t having it. Still, having their obnoxious “gospel” thus exposed, while it isn’t fun, could be valuable over time: if we’re going to have religion in public life, Mayor Pete’s way of showing it is much more appealing & manageable than that of the prattling theocrats who now cluster & preen around their golden(haired) calf in The Oval Office.

BTW I like Mayor Pete, but this post is not an endorsement.  Too soon for that, and I like others as well. But I do endorse his tweet.

As for Rev. Dr. Scott and his chorus, I can offer but an echo: When did you come up with that load of crap?

The post Mayor Pete & his notorious (Christmas) Tweet appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

A report in The Guardian on December 28 compellingly describes the small, marginalized religious resistance to the self-described ”Christian” authoritarianism of the current Hungarian regime. In this sketch there is much to learn and reflect on for those Americans who feel called to a similar path.

The anti-democratic drive of the Viktor Orban government to undermine Hungary’s independent courts, media and other democratic processes is well-known. So is its unremitting hostility to the homeless poor, refugees, immigrants & LGBT persons, and incitement of anti-semitism.

What was less known, at least to me, is how much this burgeoning tyranny has been wrapped and sanctified in religious terms, as an expression of “Christian liberty,” intended to protect a version of “Christian culture.”  Also new to me is how similar its rationale is to reactionary evangelical/fundamentalist movements in other countries.

Early in December a band of Hungarian religious dissenters responded by issuing what they call “The Advent Statement.” As I read it I noted that, if one replaced “Hungary” with the “US administration” & its cronies, much or most of its text could be an “American Advent Statement.” See if you agree:

“We are calling,” it says, “for resistance to an arrogance of power that makes the concept of “Christian Liberty” a slogan for exclusionary, hate-filled and corrosive policy; a power that destroys the social fabric and eliminates useful social institutions; a power that systematically threatens democracy and the rule of law. We are concerned about the arrogance of power that mixes the language of national identity with the language of Christian identity in a manipulative way. We cannot let our freedom, given to us by grace in baptism, be taken away.

We are concerned by the narrow political usage of the concept of “Christian Liberty”. Our goal is to restore the dignity of this biblical and theological concept. Christian liberty includes freedom from causing harm to the other person and to ourselves, freedom from abuse, exploitation, ignorance and freedom for protecting the other person’s dignity and rights, as well as our own. In this light, we cannot be indifferent to the current state of affairs we experience in Hungarian society. . . .”

Their bill of particulars should also sound familiar to American ears:

“The authoritarian exercise of power is spreading around the world but especially before our eyes in Hungary. We are witnessing manipulation of electoral law and the use oflegislative and executive power in order to provide legislative protection for the corruption inspired by the state. This is a strategy of power that deliberately eliminates political differences of opinion through the eradication of independent media, spreading fake news, discrediting and character assassination, and harassment by authorities.
Because of this, in the name of Christian liberty we would like to be prepared to speak up and act unambiguously. . . . ”

One major difference between the two countries is that in Hungary (as in some other European nations), many churches are subsidized by the government, through allocations from taxes. These payments become an ongoing form of hush money:

Alexander Faludy, a vicar who spent years in forced exile during the time of Communist rule, acknowledges that “The state funding is important of course, acting as both a carrot and a stick” . . . . [Something like that is happening here too, see: “How Mike Pence’s Office Meddled in Foreign Aid to Reroute Money to Favored Christian Groups,”  For that matter, both Barack Obama and George W. Bush pushed through increases in federal aid to churches.]

But as a beleaguered Job noted in the Bible, “the Lord giveth & the Lord taketh away” (Job 1:21). He wasn’t talking about government funding, but the sentiment applies: the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship, whose President, Pastor Gábor Iványi was instrumental in drafting The Advent Statement, saw its state funding withdrawn after the Orban regime consolidated its power. And maybe that’s why the larger Protestant groups in Hungary have not signed on to it.

Beyond direct funding, Vicar Faludy added, “there has also been a  comprehensive instrumentalisation of the churches [by Orban] through the power of prestige. The idea of participation in public life, for people who grew up under communism, when churches were systematically placed at a civil disadvantage, was very tempting. I think that in 2010 [when Orbán was re-elected prime minister] there was a sense of hope in the churches. Church leaders thought: ‘This government may be far from perfect but it’s a way of getting things done, for example of making sure there’s a Christian ethos in the schools.’ From speaking to people in the churches, I think they thought they could ride the tiger.”

After 10 years in which Orbán’s grip on civil society has been relentlessly strengthened, Faludy says: “At best, the churches have chosen quietism rather than prophetic vocation.”

Of course, In the U. S., many prominent evangelical leaders are definitely not “quietist.” Rather, they clearly ARE “riding the tiger,” galloping, they believe, straight toward a promised land where their kind of “religious liberty” will be exercised to ban abortion, roll back LGBT rights, gain government support for their “Christian” schools & much more, so (with the rare exception of, say, editors of Christianity Today magazine), they show no inclination to get off.

Similarly, there’s as yet been no stampede among Hungarian churchgoers to join the Advent Declaration’s public dissent. And this should be no surprise to its authors:

“[Orban] is turning the Christian message on its head,” says Iványi. “Is there any other Christian country in the world where it is written in the constitution that you can be jailed for being homeless? Is it a Christian country where asylum seekers are not given the basic resources they need to survive? Is it Christian to use power to abolish media freedoms, the independence of judges and academic autonomy?

“In ancient Israel, the prophets spoke out against corruption and wickedness. We are now compelled to speak out. We might not be Isaiahs or Jeremiahs. But we take courage from their example.”

Yes, courage. Iványi and his cohorts will need it. The prophets they cite may now loom large in the Bible and the gospels. But in life, theirs was a lonely and frequently fatal career path.

It was also the path Jesus took, frequently denouncing the tiger-riding religious bigwigs of his day as the spawn of those who killed the prophets. And you see where that message got him.

I salute Pastor Iványi and The Advent Statement. And beyond courage, I wish them (& their American counterparts) stamina and determination:  the stories of the prophets also show that it took time, often lifetimes, of endurance, protest and lamentation for their prophecies of greater justice even to begin to come to pass.

The post The Hungarian Religious Resistance: a Mirror & a Beacon to Our Own appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

A bulletin from southern California: The biggest Quaker church in the world wants to shut down one of the smallest. The small church sued in late 2018 to stop the shutdown.

But a hearing in Orange County Superior Court on January 31 could lock their doors & make the small church members and its pastors homeless.

The issue: the small church was helping homeless people.

The Goliath here is Yorba Linda Friends Church, which claims 4800 attenders weekly at its five campuses. Its home is an 18-acre complex, now being expanded again, perhaps best glimpsed from the air. Its website lists 84 paid staff. Its top pastors and prominent members also hold the key posts in the Evangelical Friends Church Southwest (or EFCSW) as a de facto subsidiary.

Founded as California Yearly Meeting, the group has shed the “Yearly Meeting” label along with most other Quaker features, both corporately and operationally. The group’s main session, now called the Annual Conference, is set for this weekend. If the judge rules for them Friday, the gathering will likely see some celebrations, privately if not in the open.

The “David” figure in this drama is the Friends Community Church of Midway City, about a 20-minute (and two or three light-years’) drive from Yorba Linda. Although this group is nearly ninety years old, it is quite small: on a good week, its services draw maybe 30 people. But from all descriptions it is a tightly-knit congregation.

Midway City’s pastors are a couple, Joe and Cara Pfeiffer, who occupy a parsonage along with four foster children. The church pays them a pittance, and they are, in current parlance, “bivocational,” piecing together a modest subsistence with other work, while also pursuing doctoral studies at nearby Fuller Seminary.

The confrontation here brings into pretty stark view three converging, intractable issues of our American moment: inequality, homelessness, and the increasing fervor with which the affluent are preserving their comforts, among which is not having to see or deal with the other two, except on their own terms.

A bit of background: the Los Angeles region is under siege on more than one front. Most of us know about the fires; which we must leave aside here. Often lost in their smoke, but ever-present, is the steady rise of homelessness. This is, of course, a national phenomenon, but seems particularly acute in southern California.

In Orange County, the count of homeless persons increased from about 4800 in 2017 to over 6800 in late 2019. In 2017 a three-mile stretch of tents and camps grew along the Santa Ana River Bike Trail, which winds through central Orange County in Anaheim. The burgeoning settlement was in sight of the Angels baseball stadium, Disneyland and the Ducks Hockey arena, and it rapidly became the tent-crowded “home” of nearly a thousand homeless. (A video bike tour of the stretch is here.)

The trouble that ultimately embroiled these two Friends churches could be said to have begun in late February 2018, when Orange County authorities swept through this three-mile bike trail stretch. There they rousted almost a thousand homeless campers.

In their wake was a vast swathe of trash and abandoned belongings which took weeks to clean up. At length, that stretch of trail was re-opened, and bicyclists had an unobstructed path again.

But where did the many hundreds of bike trail homeless go? One police official told reporters that the whole process was like stepping on a balloon: it might flatten out where you were standing. But then it swelled out somewhere else.

There were already plenty somewhere else. Several months before the river trail sweep, a few of them made their way to Midway City Friends Community Church. Two were a man and wife in a venerable RV. The husband had stage four colon cancer (he has since died). Details are sketchy, but they may well have been among the many who have been bankrupted by medical bills. Pretty soon a couple individuals joined them.

The church had some unused space.

Joe and Cara Pfeiffer were not planning to start a homeless shelter. But they faced what could be called the Matthew 25 Dilemma, drawn from Jesus’ scenario of the last judgment. Let’s review:

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25:31 ^“When the Son of man shall come in his glory. . . ³² And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. . .

³⁴ Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:³⁵ 

For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:³⁶ Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

³⁷ Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and feed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?³⁸ When did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?³⁹ Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

⁴⁰ And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

The Pfeiffers were well aware of how controversial these guests could be. But they are also serious Christians. In their theology, Jesus in Matthew was not laying out a program, like a presidential candidate, for curing homelessness; he was giving his disciples a command to “love their neighbor” by acting with sacrificial compassion.

It was chancy (it was for Jesus); but they did it. Quietly, they thought.

But, not quietly enough.

A hostile neighbor soon noticed the telltale signs: bicycle parts; bare mattresses visible through the windows of spare rooms; the itinerant RV lingering in a driveway. The neighbor called the Orange County Code Enforcement Office, which dispatched an inspector to the church. Shortly a “courtesy notice” was sent, stating that some of these items were in violation of county codes. If they weren’t rectified, the church could be issued a formal citation.

The Pfeiffers saw that the jig was up. Reluctantly they told their guests they had to move on, and tidied up the area. The inspector returned, found the church was in compliance, and no citation was issued.

But in the meantime the County had sent a copy of the notice to Evangelical Friends Church Southwest (EFCSW). Authorities there decided the incident was not over. In fact, it called for a decisive, if drastic response. On March 27, 2018, members of EFCSW’s Elder Board met with its top staff, and decided forthwith to

1. Terminate the Pfeiffers, and instruct them to vacate the parsonage promptly; and
2. Permanently close down the Midway City church, in April.

The Pfeiffers were not informed of their firing until May 3, 2018. That news was delivered by Ron Prentice, Chief of Staff for both Yorba Linda and EFCSW. He takes the minutes of the EFCSW Elder Board meetings. But they and the congregation, while small, stoutly resisted and defied these dictates, and the closing/eviction dates were repeatedly delayed.

In August, the Elder Board, which asserts that EFCSW owns all its members’ church property, set what it thought was a firm closure date of August 31. But it was pushed back again, and in October 2018 Midway City filed a lawsuit, which claims EFCSW does not have any real ownership claim on the Midway City church, which was built and maintained from their own meager budgets,  and that EFCSW had violated its own rules and Quaker practices in its dealings with the Pfeiffers and the congregation. The closure/eviction has been on hold since then.

That’s what the judge will decide. And this shift of focus to the seeming arcana of “Quaker process” may make some readers’ eyes glaze over, I ask that they stay with us a bit, because there’s more here than meets the eye.

Because EFCSW’s top staff and much of the currently ruling Elder Board of EFCSW heavily overlap with the leadership of Yorba Linda Friends Church, the contrasts between it and Midway City ought not to be skimmed over. Let’s consider some of these.

First of all, the setting. A sign on the edge of Yorba Linda modestly dubs it “Land of Gracious Living.” And with some reason: as an old jibe puts it, the Quakers came to Yorba Linda to do good, and some (really many) have done very well indeed. They and their neighbors.

More than once recently, Yorba Linda was named the richest city of its size in the U.S.  Median household income ranged between $110-120,000 per year (probably higher now with the soaring stock market); a real estate site pegs the median house value as $850,000. Only 3.1% of residents are under the poverty line.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the city’s Wikipedia entry notes proudly that besides being the richest of its kind, “Yorba Linda is California’s most conservative large community . . . .” Voters there went two to one for Proposition 8, an effort to stop legalization of same sex marriage. (It passed 52-48%, but was later overturned.) In the 2016 presidential election, while deep-blue California gave Donald Trump only 31 percent of its votes, in Yorba Linda, Hillary took a bare 33 percent, to Trump’s 56 percent.

Twenty miles southwest, Midway City (which is not a city at all, but an unincorporated enclave in the larger town of Westminster) sits  several rungs down the economic ladder.

It’s not a slum, but homes are older, with values under $700,000. Median household incomes are around $47,000, and 13% of residents are under the poverty line. It is home to two trailer parks, plus apartment complexes for disabled, low income and homeless veterans. Here Hillary bested Trump: 51 – 43%.

More to our point, in the latest count of homeless, Westminster/Midway City tallied above 180, and its adjoining towns held 2000-plus. A few miles north, another 2000 were counted in a swath of suburbs running west to east across Orange County. Anaheim, even after the clearing of its notorious Santa Ana River Bike Trail, headed that list at over 1200.

And Anaheim’s northern boundary runs for several miles along Yorba Linda’s town line.

Yet once back past in the Land of Gracious Living, we are in a different world: amid their county’s simmering, surrounding, ever-expanding multitude, the 2019 recorded count of homeless in Yorba Linda was: 1.

[Not a typo: One.]

Not that Yorba Linda’s largest church is indifferent to the plight of homeless people. As its Chief of Staff Ron Prentice testified in a deposition, echoing the Matthew 25 quote above, “It’s actually a call of Christians to care for the widows and the orphans specifically from scripture, and oftentimes we would see homeless individuals in that light, and I believe that by providing shelter in — in — without — without risking liability or — or harm to the culture of the neighborhood, that would — that would align with my thinking, absolutely.”

And true to its word, Yorba Linda Friends Church, where Prentice wears another hat as, again, Chief of Staff, did mobilize groups to visit with and personally minister to the homeless three times in 2019.

Those homeless were Dalits, who are, as the church website put it, “the lowest of the low” in the caste system of India; 8000 miles away from Orange County. The ministry trips cost participants $3250 each.

Closer to home, the group’s concern to avoid “harming the culture of the neighborhood” was evident. The rulers clearly found the Midway City church, and the Pfeiffers, a liability in this regard. Further, the ruling EFCSW Elder Board asserts that it has full authority to deal with such liabilities. As the EFCSW’s book of Faith & Practice puts it, under the heading of “Final Authority””

“Thus EFCSW holds the spiritual and legal power among its churches to decide all such matters, including, without limitation, all organizational and operational matters. Its decisions are final. It can counsel, admonish, discipline, dismiss, or close its subordinate churches.”

Further, this authority is vested, on 364 days of each year, in its Elder Board, a group of up to nine, that meets secretly. On day 365 (which for 2020 occurs Saturday, February 1), a Representative Body gathers for a single session of usually under three hours, to approve the budget and nominations presented to it by the Elders. Information about these items is typically concise: the entire EFCSW annual budget summary for the 39-church group usually takes up less than a single page. [If that thumping sound you hear sounds like a rubber stamp, you could be right.]

It was not always done this way. The Midway City lawsuit argues that the Faith and Practice has been hijacked by a small group, mainly associated with Yorba Linda. The present “Final Authority” text was only inserted in 2011, and all real power has since been concentrated in the Elder Board’s hands, exercised in closed meetings, brooking no challenge, with no regard for the rest of the body, or previous Quaker traditions of broad consultation, open discussion, and sometimes extended seeking of consensus.

A prime instance was the Elders’ decision to terminate the Pfeiffers and close Midway City, neither of which were presented by the Elders to a Representative Body session.

BTW — taking possession of the Midway City church and its acre of land could provide EFCSW a considerable windfall. After all, as the beleaguered church keeps pointing out, EFCSW spent none of its funds to acquire the land, build or maintain the church and its other buildings. With land prices in southern California what they are, just selling the property could likely bring in millions

Has this occurred to anyone in EFCSW? A review of 2018 and 2019 Elder Board minutes turned up frequent discussions of and laments about the lack of funds to pursue their plans, and the need to find more funding sources. Further, in deposition testimony, EFCSW/Yorba Linda Chief of Staff Prentice acknowledged, “I did not deny that the future of the church is being discussed and the option of selling the property is on the table, [but] it was made clear to [Midway Friends] that the reasons for Joe’s dismissal from the position of pastor are based on our questions of discernment . . . .”  “poor discernment”

The charges of “poor discernment” and unacceptable behavior were indeed frequently repeated in Prentice’s deposition, and referred to in Elder Board minutes deposition. Asked if the reputed  behavior included moral, financial, or other such professional lapses, Prentice said no.

What then, specifically? Prentice responded,

“I’m aware of Mr. Pfeiffer’s comments through others during the process of the nomination of Matthew Cork to be considered as the superintendent in replacement of Stan Leach. I was not present at one meeting where Mr. Pfeiffer was vocal regarding the process of selection, and I was present at another follow-up meeting — the final meeting prior to Mr. Cork’s selection as superintendent where  Mr. Pfeiffer was again vocal and dissatisfied with the process of the selection of the superintendent, yes.”

Being vocal and dissatisfied with an opaque hiring process? Showing the temerity to question an Elders’ decision; in EFCSW,  these were grounds for termination & closure, with no appeal.

It’s also a clear enough signal, indeed a warning, to other pastors in EFCSW churches, where there are reports of murmuring and unease with the trajectory of Yorba Linda/EFCSW: speak at your own peril.

EFCSW’s response to Midway City’s suit comes down to repeating the passage on “Final Authority,” insisting that this power is vested in the Elders Board, acting on its own, and that under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause, secular courts have no business interfering with such matters.

That’s why they will be seeking, in the court hearing on January 31, a summary judgement, to toss out Midway City’s  lawsuit on the basis that there’s “no there there,” nothing in it that the court could rightly adjudicate. They may be able to win the judge to this view.

That’s Goliath Quakerism.

Meanwhile, the homeless of Orange County huddle while their numbers grow; The Pfeiffers and their congregation wait to see if they will be joining them; the grand life in nearby privileged enclaves continues; and the credibility of much of American Christianity continues to diminish.

The post David vs. Goliath, The “Friendly” Version: Orange County Quakers Face Off in Court appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

The little church challenging the huge California Quaker megachurch (described in the blog post, David vs. Goliath, the “Friendly” Version, of January 30), won a round in court on January 31; but its reward was only a reprieve. The struggle over an aborted effort to help the homeless continues.

Orange County superior court judge Thomas Delaney denied the motion from the Evangelical Friends Church Southwest (EFCSW), based in Yorba Linda, California, to dismiss a lawsuit by the small Friends Community Church of Midway City, California. The lawsuit  seeks an injunction to stop EFCSW from closing the Midway City church and firing its pastor, Joe Pfeiffer.

Recap

In late 2017 and early 2018 Midway City took in several of the many thousands of homeless people who cluster and camp across Orange County, just south of Los Angeles.

Hostile neighbors complained to Orange county about signs of homeless people staying on church property, in violation of county codes. When an inspector wrote Pfeiffer a letter about it, he promptly but reluctantly complied, sending the homeless visitors on their way.

But when a copy of the inspector’s letter arrived at the EFCSW office, members of the Elders Board, made it the basis for a secret decision, taken March 27, 2018 to close the church, fire pastor Pfeiffer, and oblige him, his wife and their four foster children to vacate the parsonage behind the church.

Pfeiffer and his wife Cara were told of their removal and eviction in June. They were also told to vacate the parsonage within weeks.

The church’s membership, barely 30 people, rallied behind them and resisted the closure order. It was delayed for months, then on October 12, 2018, Midway City filed suit, asking the Orange County Superior court for an injunction to stop the closure and the firing.

EFCSW filed a motion for summary judgment, which argued that the Midway City lawsuit did not raise any issue the court had jurisdiction over. It insisted that EFCSW was a “hierarchical church” with total power over member groups like Midway City: EFCSW  owned the buildings and property, controlled the agendas and conduct of meetings, and could remove pastors at will, without appeal. Its brief claimed the First Amendment religious liberty provision protected the denomination from legal interference. It cited precedents where courts had declined to take up cases involving church doctrine and internal practices.

Midway City countered that EFCSW had in fact frequently violated its own rules with secret meetings and decisions that were not subject to review by the whole body, contrary to its own and other Quaker traditions. They also contended that EFCSW did not really own its buildings and property. Such violations they said, were subject to judicial remedies.

Court Hearing

At the January 31 hearing, Judge Delaney agreed that there were real questions about whether EFCSW’s actions followed its own rules, and thus summary judgment was not warranted. He scheduled another hearing on March 30 to consider the issues involved. Midway City won the day, but the reward was only a two-month reprieve.

What moved the judge? There were technical arguments about passages in the EFCSW book of Faith and practice, regarding quorums for meetings, and about various kinds of property deeds. Such is the nature of most civil litigation.

But there were also in the case file papers of a different sort. Two of these stand out: statements by veteran EFCSW pastors which bring a very different perspective on that body’s life. The two were from James Healton, of Sacramento’s Friends Community church, and Joe Ginder, from Long Beach Friends.

Their statements combined personal witness with long experience both in EFCSW and among Quakers. They directly challenged one of the denomination’s main claims, that it was a hierarchical church, governed by a Board of Elders at the top which was, for all practical purposes, sovereign.

This challenge proved to be risky, as we shall see. But first let’s hear from them directly:

James Healton:

I am the pastor at Sacramento Friends Community Church. Since 1974 I have been a member of the EFCSW . . . . I have served as a local pastor therein since 1982.

During the last twenty years, a number of changes to Faith and Practice were adopted by the Representatives. On the governance side of things, the trend was increasingly toward concentration of responsibility in fewer hands. Those who recommended these changes defended them on the basis that it was increasingly difficult to find enough volunteers to fill all the boards, committees and offices. Despite this trend, we were never told that the Elder Board had replaced the Representatives as the ruling body of the Yearly Meeting, without appeal.

I was present in the Representatives meeting when the language in Faith and Practice . . . was adopted, under the heading, “Essential Business of Representatives”. I asked for and received assurances during the meeting that the words, “The final decisions and actions on the following must be approved by the Representatives”, implied no limitation on what other business the Representatives were free to consider but only a limitation on what other bodies (including the Elder Board) could act upon. We never understood this language to mean that the Representatives could not discuss and decide upon any other matters of concern to them. I had not heard that there was such a limitation implied by that language until I heard it from the attorney for EFCSW . . . .

Moreover, Faith and Practice says that “Other business may be introduced from any of the local churches, Elder Board, and other boards, committees and task forces.”  . . . Again, this indicates that the Representatives have the right to bring any matter they choose before the assembled Representatives. If a church wishes to propose a decision to the Representatives different from one taken by the Board of Elders they are free to do so under the rules governing EFCSW the corporation. This would, of course, include the possibility of an appeal to the Representatives.

In all my years in the EFCSW denomination, I do not recall an instance where a church was closed against the decided will of its members. If pastors were removed by the Yearly Meeting it was on account of serious moral failings or because the local church was divided over their leadership and the Yearly Meeting was asked to step in to settle the matter. To my knowledge it was never the case that pastors were removed because of things like “poor leadership skills, lack of discernment as a minister, an ineffective ministry, inability to increase the membership of FCC, poor decisions” or even “misuse of church property … “ as has been alleged against Pastor Pfeiffer. Dealing with such matters was left up to the local church unless Yearly Meeting staff or other people were asked to help or offered their help.

In the case of Midway City, there was not an offer to help them meet the city code requirements. They were simply told that Joe Pfeiffer was fired, their church was no longer a church in the EFCSW denomination and they had to vacate the premises. Of course, had the church failed to meet the code requirements, there would have been possible grounds for discipline but the church did meet the city’s expectations. Again, this severe a response to a church in need is unprecedented in my experience of more than forty years in EFCSW.

I note that the charges against Joe Pfeiffer and Midway City Friends Church that they violated Faith and Practice were for actions after they had been removed from membership in EFCSW denomination by the Elder Board of the corporation.

These alleged violations all amount to one charge against them: that they objected to, and sought remedy for, the actions the Elder Board had taken against them.

The closing of Midway City Friends Church and removal of Joe Pfeiffer as its pastor represents a sharp departure from what I have known and from what I understood to be the relationship between the local church and EFCSW as a whole. I would also add that though

Pastor Joe Pfeiffer is unafraid to speak his mind I have never known him to be intentionally rude or mean-spirited in his remarks. He has high ideals that sometimes make us feel uncomfortable but it is always clear to me that he is motivated by good will toward others, including those with whom he may, at times, disagree. . . . They did, however object when Midway City Church was closed. To me this indicates that their motive was not to divide the body of EFCSW or vindicate themselves but to protect the interests of their flock and to defend the historic balance between EFCSW oversight and the rights of its constituent churches.

Joseph Ginder:

I have been a member of EFCSW since 1986 and pastor of Long Beach Friends since 1996. . . . I’ve been a representative to the Yearly Meeting / Annual Conference Business Meeting nearly continuously since 1987. The Yearly Meeting is a traditional term for the annual gathering of local Friends church representatives to decide upon the business of the EFCSW denomination as a whole. . . . Prior to coming to Long Beach, I grew up at Anderson First Friends within Indiana Yearly Meeting, soaking up Friends ways from my seniors. Many of my ancestors have been Quakers since the beginning of the movement. . . .

About hierarchy. I read a claim that the EFCSW denomination is a hierarchical church because our Faith and Practice invests authority in some that is not given to all. This is a distortion of the Friends way of doing business. Our Faith and Practice speaks clearly to this. We expect leaders to lead rather than to rule. We do not empower individuals or small groups of leaders to make decisions that disregard the sense of other members in good standing. We empower individuals and small groups to act and lead on behalf of the larger group when the larger group is not meeting, or when the smaller group has followed the Friends manner of making decisions within the larger body as a gathered people of God.

The Friends approach for a group of leaders to take on important decisions is to build unity and listen before taking a controversial direction, at least when a matter requires no urgent action. We always expect our leaders to act to try to build unity. Friends were cast out of a hierarchical church because we did not simply accept the decisions of the few in hierarchical leadership, despite their claim to divine right.

Rather, we held decisions up to the light of scripture and the leading of the Spirit. For this we were persecuted and imprisoned, some unto death. As a representative to the EFCSW denomination representatives business meetings, I have never agreed to or believed we were approving changes to our Faith and Practice which would allow a small group of leaders such as the current board to make decisions that could not be questioned or re-examined by our representatives.

The list of items of “Essential Business of Representatives” in Faith and Practice . . . is a restriction on committees and leaders, not on the representatives! Those who say otherwise are simply in error. [also] any EFCSW church can bring business before representative sessions. Several churches have not been allowed to bring items regarding FCC-MC to the representatives sessions in the past two years.

This is clearly in violation of our Faith and Practice. The representatives in session are the highest authority of our organization and can consider whatever business they choose; all of our churches have access to bring business to the representatives.

The elders board is not exempt from the Friends Way of Doing Business. Faith and Practice, p.33. This way of doing business embodies the value of building unity and seeks to prevent a few from imposing decisions unilaterally upon others without going through our business process of discerning the mind of Christ together. . . .

This description of our way of doing business applies between the Elder Board and other members, not just between members of the Elders Board. . . . We should never hear, “We didn’t have to ask you” as an excuse for excluding stakeholders from participating in the Friends way of doing business as has been done with FCC.

This statement directly contradicts Friends teaching. We are not a hierarchical church and never have been. While FCC (or the corporate elder board) cannot change the Faith and Practice of EFCSW without agreement of the Representatives. . . as Friends we do not empower one group as superior and relegate another as subordinate. Jesus is our Head. We are all subordinate to Him . . . .

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the state of California that the foregoing is a true and correct. Executed this 15th day of January 2020 at Long Beach, California.”

Joe and Cara Pfeiffer came away from the court hearing with a sixty day extension of their residence, and eight Sundays for their church to gather in the home they had built and maintained for nearly ninety years.

EFCSW Annual Conference

Later that same day, EFCSW opened its 2020 annual conference,  with a dinner for representatives from its 39 member churches in California, Arizona and Nevada. As noted by Joe Ginder, in most similar Quaker bodies, such events are called yearly meetings, and extended over several days, with a mix of business sessions, worship, family reunions, and social events. EFCSW had discarded that tradition, and compressed the gathering into one tightly scheduled Friday evening, followed by a Saturday morning session.

Among the attenders were Joe Ginder and James Healton. As they arrived for the opening dinner, they were taken aside by a member of the Elder Board, and shown a letter on a smartphone, addressed to them. The letter sternly rebuked them for submitting the statements, and warned them not to speak openly about the Midway City case during the annual conference. They were taken aback.

Ginder and Healton complied with the letter’s strictures. The evening went as planned.

Saturday morning was similarly programmed, with 35 minutes set aside for a “business session.”

As the meeting was getting underway, Cara Pfeiffer appeared, but members of the Elder Board quickly surrounded her and, despite her protests, firmly ejected her from the room.

Reports indicate that the “business session” lasted not much more than fifteen minutes, although it included formal approval of a $1,200,000 three-part budget, and a pre-selected slate of nominations for various boards. No one spoke about Midway City.

–Well, that last sentence is not quite right. In a packet of “Advance Reports,” Midway City was mentioned in print twice. The Elder Board’s report noted that “A challenge over this past year has been the ongoing legal issue related to the closing of one of our churches. Unfortunately, this issue has occupied a significant amount of the staff and elders’ time and energy. Continue to pray with us for a God-honoring resolution to this issue.”

Then under “Annual Budget,” EFCSW Chief of Staff Ron Prentice reported that “The 2019 General Administrative budget projected a year-end balance between income and expenses. However, the legal costs for the defense against the claims by FCC Midway City and the increase of one staff position from part-time to full-time are the two primary factors that caused our expenses to exceed our income by $111,000. As we look to 2020, the increases to personnel and our legal expenses have been included into our budget projections for the New Year.”  There were no reports that either item was discussed. (The letter read to Healton & Ginder reportedly told them that if they tried to speak about Midway, they would be ruled out of order.)

The business session was followed by a “Prayer initiative and Time of Prayer,” then adjournment for lunch and departure.

Testimony by ECSW staff in pre-hearing depositions made clear that they believed the nine-member Elder Board acted with full authority for EFCSW, 364-plus days per year, except for the abbreviated session on that one Saturday morning. The board also prepared the agenda for that annual half-hour. The Board’s meetings were private, and there was no appeal from their decisions. We have seen what happened to those, like pastors Ginder and Healton, who spoke of when practices were different for that body. Their temerity in submitting affidavits dissenting from the Elder Board’s understanding could be hazardous both to their jobs and the churches they served.

Joe Pfeiffer advised me that late this week there will be a court-sponsored mediation meeting between Midway City and EFCSW officials, to see if a non-judicial resolution is possible. Pfeiffer insists that would be his preference, but says EFCSW Elders have turned aside several such suggestions already.

And lest it be entirely forgotten, this multifaceted melodrama will continue to play itself out against the backdrop of a vast city in which thousands still sleep outside each night, and their number continues to increase.

The post Midway City Update: Quaker David, Goliath & the Two Witnesses appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

Dear SAYMA,

Recently I received an invitation to propose a workshop for SAYMA 2020 this June.

[NOTE: SAYMA is the Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting & Association; it has member meetings in North & South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee & West Virginia.]

I have many fond memories of lively workshops and rich Quaker fellowship at SAYMA, going back over fifteen years.

And I have just the topic for a workshop: a new book, Passing the Torch, which combines the stories of eleven Friends of a certain age, an appealing and diverse sketch of the elder generation.

But I won’t be sending SAYMA a proposal this year, I’m sorry to say. And I’m even more sorry to say why:

I won’t be proposing a workshop for SAYMA 2020, because SAYMA is not safe.

I believe you know why I was forced to reach this sad judgment:

It’s because over the past three years, SAYMA’s annual sessions have been invaded and repeatedly disrupted by an Intruder who has done great harm to the yearly meeting and its reputation. Keynote speakers have been derailed; members and visitors have been subjected to frequent, loud expletive-laced rants; campus security has even been called; all to no avail.

[“The Intruder” is my name for Sharon Smith, based on a long, well-documented pattern of intrusive, disruptive behavior. Smith is not a member of any SAYMA meeting; indeed she is not a member of any formal Friends Meeting. She claims to be a “birthright Friend,” but is habitually vague about which meeting. The last Meeting she had any overt connection with, Sandwich Meeting on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, found her so disruptive over several years that in 2007 it reluctantly issued a minute of disownment against her.]

Her intrusions at SAYMA have been under the guise of a self-styled “anti-racism ministry,” and she brands any objection or disagreement with any aspect of it as  “white racism” or worse terms.  But that “ministry,” over several years and in numerous Quaker settings, has left a trail of disruption, division and demoralization that few avowed enemies of Quakers since the anti-abolitionist mobs could match.

And last summer, the disruption at SAYMA sank to a new low. For one thing, it torpedoed an approved SAYMA workshop. The Intruder pronounced herself the Overseer and Ruler over SAYMA’s program, then entered and disrupted a workshop that was underway, because the leader had not asked the Intruder’s permission.

That charge was technically correct. The workshop leader had not sought the Intruder’s permission; because the Intruder in fact had no such authority. Instead, the workshop proposal had been submitted to the SAYMA planning committee, which weighed it as it did others, and then accepted it. That is, the leader and the Committee had followed SAYMA’s good order.

This good order meant nothing to the Intruder. (In fact, she later bragged about her achievement in wreaking havoc in the workshop in an open internet posting.) The workshop was thoroughly derailed, and the leader was reduced to tears.

Two Friends spoke up in protest during later open sessions, urgently objecting to the Intruder’s behavior. But the pleas for redress for the workshop demolition went unanswered and unheeded. SAYMA is not safe.

Nor is its bank account. Thus emboldened, the Intruder pushed through a demand that she be made Clerk of the Racial Justice Committee, and that she personally be paid on its behalf more than $10,000 from SAYMA’s funds, with zero accountability.

I have heard several Friends who were present speak of the deep unease they felt about both the procedure and the content of these actions. But all were then either intimidated or cowed into silence, and left with continuing regret afterward.

It pains me to say this, but SAYMA from 2018 through 2019 in this and other incidents, has showed itself progressively unable, or unwilling, to protect its own good order, its approved workshops, its program, speakers, attenders, officers and budget from flagrant abuse.

The uneasiness of the Friends who were silent last summer has been fully vindicated in the months since. After being paid several thousands of SAYMA’s dollars, much of which was admittedly used for the Intruder’s personal expenses, the fruit of the new committee’s labor has thus far been 1) a steady barrage of obscenity-laden email tirades including demands for more money, and 2) a handful of links to various race-related articles, videos, and fee-charging workshops.

Setting aside the tirades, the Intruder’s concrete work product, namely the link emails, have cost SAYMA something like $600 apiece over nine months. Most recently the committee announced a daylong workshop for May at Berea KY Meeting; SAYMA participants, besides the $10,000, are to pay $50 each. It also urged SAYMA Friends to join a video seminar for $95 each. Someone clearly hopes to profit off the committee connection.

Some might consider this $10,000-plus for spasmodic clipping and forwarding a steep price tag for markedly sparse  output. Yet the Intruder is now loudly insisting that $10,000 more be allotted her annually in the coming two years, again with no accountability, along with the presumption that such payments will thereafter be made permanent. Again, any doubts or questions are loudly derided as more proofs of white racism.

SAYMA will have a spring representative session on March 14th, to consider, among other items, its next budget. The omens for it are not promising: I have seen recent emails from the Intruder, threatening SAYMA’s Presiding Clerk, Assistant Clerk, Finance Clerk, and Clerk of Ministry & Nurture, unless her demands for continuing payments are met.

Quite frankly, this whole affair has the look of an old-fashioned protection racket: “You pay me, or I’ll make your lives hell.” The Intruder has certainly been making good on that threat. SAYMA is not safe.  She’s turned liberal Quaker guilt and habitual conflict avoidance there into a substantial payday, and may well do it again.

If so, the cost will be more than the number on a budget sheet. I am advised that, as a result of these disheartening spectacles, attendance at SAYMA in these years has declined measurably, with indications that in current conditions the decline is likely to continue. Furthermore, there are reports that more than one SAYMA monthly Meeting has quietly resolved to withhold contributions to the yearly meeting under these circumstances.

To be sure, the Intruder has a circle of supporters.  In mid-January she was already warning them of a “racist conspiracy” by one SAYMA Meeting. Had they joined the Klan en masse? No, merely  expressed doubts about future funds.

Such conversation-stopper epithets may not work this time. But one other effect of this simmering dissension is that SAYMA may be drifting toward another bitter distinction, of being the first liberal yearly meeting since the 1850s to suffer an outright schism.

A liberal split?  Wait — isn’t that what happens to pastoral and evangelical groups??

Well, usually. But I am not exaggerating what has been bubbling below SAYMA’s surface. It could happen informally, by accelerating the attrition of recent years. But it could happen more formally. Given a few more of the Intruder’s obscene diatribes, threats or workshop-like debacles, it would be lamentable but no surprise to see one or more SAYMA meetings heading for the door. (One lesson from recent evangelical splits is that, if a meeting owns its own meetinghouse, institutionally a split is relatively painless. Psychologically and spiritually are another matter, though.)

My pondering of this, and the invitation to propose a 2020 SAYMA workshop, were all made more disheartening by poignant memories: twice in the decade past, I brought a granddaughter with me to SAYMA, hoping she would have an uplifting young Quaker community experience there.

Both of them did — in fact, each had a terrific time, for which they and I are still very grateful.

Today I have seven grand- and great-grandchildren, more than half of them multiracial. In the “good old days,” I would eagerly look again to SAYMA as a time for them to have a superior Quaker community experience, plus a chance to learn something constructive about the ongoing work of racial justice.

But let me speak plainly here: I would not bring any of them within 50 miles of a yearly meeting in which the Intruder has so distorted and undermined Quaker processes and values. SAYMA now is not safe for them.

The Intruder’s brand of “ministry” has repeatedly produced the opposite of its stated goals. It has sown open rancor and division, and reaped destruction and alienation. That “ministry” is a model only for what not to do, and has made SAYMA unsafe and unsuitable for the nurture of a rising Quaker generation.

It would also be hazardous for an adult workshop, such as I have presented in years past. I have told the Intruder plainly of my views of her so-called “ministry.” Also, some of the writers in my book have said and written things she does not like. And she has more than once been allowed to pervert SAYMA into a stage on which to act out her resentments and vendettas.

I’m not afraid of her profane harangues. But what business do I have subjecting other visiting adults to such an unwelcome hazard? Why does SAYMA permit –- and pay for it?

It has been tragic to see, even from a distance, the disarray into which the Intruder has pushed SAYMA. It’s even sadder because there is no real need for it to continue. A few other groups have dealt with the Intruder firmly, to re-establish and preserve their good order.

SAYMA could do this if enough of its weighty members recovered some Quaker grit and resolve.  We value those virtues so highly in our stories of classic Quakers, women and men alike. SAYMA needs some now.

I wish SAYMA Friends the best as they gather to do their yearly meeting’s spring business. They can handle this challenge, if they’re ready. After all, they’re not being asked to make SAYMA perfect.

We just want them to make it, once again, Safe.

The post A Sad Yearly Meeting Report: SAYMA Is Not Safe appeared first on A Friendly Letter.

From “The Bulwark,” a Never Trump blog run by Charlie Sykes, an anti-Trump/somewhat repentant/former right wing radio talk show host.

Trigger warning: this post quotes numerous conservatives who are freaking out over the Supreme Court’s LGBTQ ruling, and who approve of homophobic bigotry.

For those who wonder why I post such stuff, here are some of my reasons:

1. Much of the writing is snappy, vivid & interesting.

2. Also much of it is self-critical. In this it sets an example some woke folks might well follow.

3. For me, reading right wingers (in measured doses) offers a chance to bone up on arguments & materials which might one day help change a few right wing minds. (Hey— it happens, and it HAS happened a lot on these issues in recent decades.)

4. Because my guru Sun Tzu said I should.

Some will remember that Sun Tzu wrote a classic pacifist book, which is required reading for all wannabe peaceniks. It’s as valuable page for page as the Bible (plus a helluva lot shorter), and called “The Art of War.”

In it Sun Tzu devotes a whole chapter to the importance of spies to success in war. His point, in sum, is that to succeed in war (& other conflicts), Know Your Freekin Enemy.

I take his point. So for me, reading right wingers (in measured doses) is my version of such spying; or as college grads call it, intelligence gathering. I believe, as Sun Tzu did,  it works.

Some readers may find exposure to the ugliness of much of the thinking and practice described here difficult; they are authorized to skip it.

Note: This article [excerpted from The Bulwark blog] includes drag queen themes and graphic images. [Further note: the images have been omitted here.] It was written by Tim Miller, a Republican media consultant.

Bulwark: The Supreme Court ruling to protect Americans from being fired for their sexuality is the latest betrayal that degrades family, community, industrial bases, and nations!!

That lede might seem a bit dramatic—nay, flamboyant!—to you. But the people of Appalachia put Donald Trump in office precisely because their lives could not improve unless queers and transgenders could be fired willy-nilly by their employers.

The expert on such matters—America’s own hillbilly-whisperer-cum-Hollywood-producer, J.D. Vance {author of the best-seller Hillbilly Elegy]—said as much following Monday’s ruling.

{NOTE: Vance’s complete tweet was: “The next (and perhaps most important) step is for social conservatives to realize that donor economics is not merely incidental. It flows from, and reinforces, principles that degrade family, community, industrial bases, and nations.”}

And while Vance’s warning about the end of nations may have been a rococo response to the Supreme Court decision holding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on sex discrimination in employment also banned employee termination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, he was joined by a parade of conservatives for whom BUT GORSUCH has gone from a Trumpist clarion call to an incubus that haunts their dreams.

If you’ll allow me a brief respite from the schadenfreude, here follows an interlude on the merits of the matter at hand.

I am not a lawyer and I won’t play one on TheBulwarkDOTCOM. . . .

Look, I’m sure there are some good faith constitutional scholars out there who have genuine objections to Monday’s ruling and the legal implications therein. So let’s assume that a good-faith objection can be made.

What we do not have to assume is that a lot of the “constitutional scholars” presently huffing and puffing had zero interest in legal theory. They had an outcome they wanted and they just want someone who is willing to vote with the team and justify it in whatever means necessary

{NOTE: The blog here links to another rightwing apparatchik’s tweet, from one Sean Davis, to wit:

“The Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a super-legislature run by nine politicians with lifetime tenure. Conservatives need to stop picking justices based on promises from nominees about how they’ll analyze cases and start picking individuals who will vote correctly.”}

Bulwark: And another thing we do not have to assume is that Monday’s landmark ruling of Bostock v. Clayton County will  bring long-overdue protection to the workplace. Because while many people seemed surprised that the risk of job loss over sexuality is still something to be concerned about in the Year of Our Lord 2020, I’m here to report that outside the big city pockets of fabulousness along the coasts, there are many gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans who have lost jobs, been forced to hide their sexuality or gender identity, or been discriminated against in their places of employment. I have heard their stories and been called to their aid.

I once called a gay friend-of-a-friend—you may have heard about our mafia—who runs a company so I could ask him to interview a person who needed a job because he had been fired for being gay. He told me something to the effect of: “If I hired every gay who had been cast out of their job we wouldn’t have room for anyone else in the company.”

So for those who think this was just virtue signaling from the bench, or that gays are not treated differently from their straight counterparts, I’d like to disabuse you of that notion.

Many, many people worked very hard to make Bostock a reality for decades. I salute them and am indebted to their effort. . . .

And yet, on Monday the very people who have been triggered by drag-queen story hour had their illiberal fantasies dashed—crucified?—by a conservative man in a dress. Even in this vale of tears, life does sometimes deliver us small joys.

Consider Sohrab Ahmari, the former Muslim, turned atheist, turned socialist, turned free marketeer, turned passionate advocate for classical liberalism.

This year Ahmari is crusading for a Catholic theocratic junta. And so, having previously celebrated the great and good Supreme Court appointments of Donald Trump, he surveyed the Bostock ruling, declared it “disordered and bizarre,” and announced that it was proof that “originalism has failed.”

In a series of tweets later that afternoon, Ahmari said that this ruling was the moment to leave classical liberalism behind once and for all in favor of ordered liberty that upholds traditional values. (That same afternoon the newspaper whose opinion section Ahmari edits tweeted a picture of Central Park that included two visible male erections. State-managed ordered liberty is a great idea—just so long as it doesn’t interfere with you drawing a paycheck.)

Ahmari wasn’t the only keyboard warrior in Operation Rolling Thunderfuck {NOTE: “Thunderfuck is the stage name of a drag performer.}

Another of them, Josh Hammer, wrote a piece for the New York Post titled: “Neil Gorsuch slapped conservatives by creating new gay rights.” (It is of note that the same headline could’ve been written by Towleroad, {NOTE: “Towleroad” is a website for LGBTQ news and comment, founded by Andy Towle, a gay journalist, editor and traveler.} though they probably would’ve added some additional color to “slapped.”)

Hammer goes on to describe as “harrowing” the threat to conservatism that comes from gays being extended the right to not be fired for being gay. (Not mentioned as harrowing: being fired for being gay.)

Hammer specifically cites the outrage that Catholic schools can no longer fire teachers “whose sexual lifestyle blatantly flouts millennia of Catholic moral teaching.” Set aside the fact that the Court’s Monday ruling does not settle the relevant religious-liberty questions. {NOTE: I am also expecting the Supreme Court to punch holes in its own decision with significant carve-outs.}

What’s striking is Hammer’s concern about Catholic schools being allowed to keep firing gays, which seems to make up the preponderance of the schools’ firings—you don’t seem to hear nearly so much about Catholic schools firing straight teachers for living in sin with their significant others, or for divorce or masturbating or various other violations of Catholic doctrine.

But the hissy fit didn’t just happen over at the New York Post.

At the Conservative Review, Daniel Horowitz sent several tweets decrying the “right to transgenderism,” declared that the GOP is now the “Transgender Party” (if only!), and suggested that this is just one step on the path to rape victims being sent to reeducation camps for complaining about being sodomized in a woman’s bathroom by a cross-dresser.

At the Daily Wire, Michael Knowles said that Gorsuch redefined “the most fundamental aspect of our nature” and proffered that most conservatives prefer to be cucked than to do something to upset the status quo. (Nothing upsets the status quo more than giving a pink slip to the privileged homos.)

{NOTE: Knowles added; “No ruling [Gorsuch] might make in the future could counteract that radicalism. Conservatives will count him among the worst jurists in the history of the United States.}

Bulwark: Though, to be fair, Knowles concluded that this decision might make Gorsuch an accelerationist, a term that has gained recent favor on the far right, describing (favorably) events that will hasten a race war and lead to a white ethnostate.

The Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino declared that the Bostock decision was an “imposter parading as originalism” and an “ominous sign for anyone concerned about the future of representative democracy.”

Over at Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton declared Bostock “an attack on our republican form of government.”

Degrading nations. Causing the advancement of the white ethnostate. Putting the very existence of representative democracy at threat. Well, that’s just another Monday for the gays.

For Neil Gorsuch on the other hand, this is new territory.

Unfortunately for the mild-mannered Coloradan, he has found himself in the crosshairs of the ultimate marginalized group: the zealots who sold their soul to a Bad Orange Man and no longer like what they got in the deal. The only question is whether the end of BUT GORSUCH is enough to make them finally sashay away from their heathen president.

FURTHER NOTE:

Few rightwingers were more angry than Gorsuch’s fellow Supreme Court justice, Samuel Alito. In the decision, Alito wrote in dissent:

“The Court attempts to pass off its decision as the inevitable product of the textualist school of statutory interpreta­tion championed by our late colleague Justice Scalia, but no one should be fooled,” Alito wrote in a dissent.

“The Court’s opinion is like a pirate ship,” he continued. “It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Jus­tice Scalia excoriated — the theory that courts should ‘update’ old statutes so that they better reflect the current val­ues of society.”

Law  professor Mary Anne Case, from the University of Chicago, saw it this way:

“Those with principled conservative approaches to law should be pleased, (but) those whose conservatism pertains principally to social policy and not law will be outraged,” said Mary Anne Case, a law professor at the University of Chicago. The latter, she said, “are merely results oriented, and will blithely abandon all their announced legal principles to achieve desired results.”

And while Gorsuch sided with LGBT advocates on Monday, he left the door open for employers to make faith-based challenges to the court’s ruling on Title VII protections.

“So while other employers in other cases may raise free exercise arguments that merit careful consideration, none of the employers before us today represent in this Court that compliance with Title VII will infringe their own religious liberties in any way,” he wrote.

Katharine Franke, law professor at Columbia University, told The Hill  that even with Monday’s landmark decision, the court will continue on its rightward course as it prepares to release a number of decisions in high-stakes cases by the end of the month.

“So, despite the huge victory today for LGBTQ rights, this remains a very conservative Court and I expect that the right will be consoled by other decisions issued before the end of the term on abortion rights, DACA, and other hot button issues,” Franke said.

Franke’s view was echoed by rightwing tweeters, as tracked also  by The Hill:

“All those evangelicals who sided with Trump in 2016 to protect them from the cultural currents, just found their excuse to stay home in 2020, thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court picks,” Erick Erickson, a conservative radio host and blogger, wrote on Twitter.

Carrie Severino, president of the right-wing Judicial Crisis Network, tweeted: “Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards. This was not judging, this was legislating—a brute force attack on our constitutional system.”

This concludes our intelligence briefing for this afternoon (tho it could have been longer; much longer). I learned a few things.

Now will someone  please pass the hand sanitizer?

For Juneteenth, I should be completely pleased with the news that the City Council in Charleston SC will be doing its best to dethrone a statue of John C. Calhoun.

The plan was announced in connection with the fifth anniversary of the horrible mass killing of nine black worshippers at the city’s Mother Emanuel AME Church. Its projected deconstruction is part of the swell of collective revulsion after the George Floyd killing that is felling one Confederate monument after another. The removal would also defy a state law protecting such monuments.

[Update: on June 23, The Charleston City Council voted 13-0 to remove the statue. The council said the statue will be preserved in “an appropriate site where it will be protected and preserved,” at an as yet undisclosed location. They did not set a specific date for the removal.]

Maybe here is  where my hesitation is triggered: not over civil disobedience against such a statute; but starting with the seemingly technical point that Calhoun was not a Confederate leader, or even a Civil War figure: he died in 1850, eleven years before hostilities started.

(Once the war began, the rebel government sought to enshrine his iconic status by adding Calhoun’s visage to the Confederate $100 bill {at lower left}. When that plan didn’t work out so well, the Defenders of the Lost Cause turned to more durable monuments.)

The fact that Calhoun was a pre-war actor is not a reason  to leave his monument alone. But it does raise the questions of why it’s there, and why it’s so “monumental” — 115 feet high, and officially venerated since its erection in 1896. As an ode to Calhoun by a local poet, Miss E. B. Cheesborough, crowed,

Float it above the city’s spires,
And o’er the bay’s blue tide,
Tell how he battled for the South,
And battling thus—he died. . . .

There’s lots to say about Calhoun, and I’m not scholar enough to do that work justice. But  what I’ve read makes one thing clear, and it’s important: he was not merely an advocate of slavery. He was its principal antebellum theoretician.

Calhoun used an exceptional intelligence to build a system of thought that undergirded and justified the slave system  and the political order built on it. These justifications have lived on in various Post-bellum versions & disguises down to the present.

Consider these few quotes from his famous 1837 speech on slavery as “a positive good.”

“Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually [as today in the American slave states] … It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions.

Many in the South once believed that slavery was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world. . . .

But I will not dwell on this aspect of the question; I turn to the political; and here I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions. It is useless to disguise the fact.

There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict; and which explains why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding States has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North. . . . ”

He argued this key proposition relentlessly, year after year, both in writing and oratory, as well as the hurly-burly of politics.  Its echoes and reverberations are with us still.

And this is the important point for me: the protests and debates today emphasize — rightly — the violence of American racism, its founding in chains, and the upholding of it with the lash, the lynching  rope, and the bullets of police impunity. These are indeed its continuing baleful fruits.

Yet slavery and segregation were more than that. Their roots included ideas and ideology, and in their way these abstract tools were as crucial to maintaining the edifice of oppression as the sharpest blade and the white klansman’s hood. And they are above all Calhoun’s intellectual offspring, still alive and active in our society.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for taking down the Charleston monument. But that work, I believe, will be radically incomplete if we do not also confront & dismantle Calhoun’s ideas, in both their early and current guises and disguises. As the besotted Miss Cheesbrough intoned,

He bore the odium of reproach
While battling for the right;
His prophet voice in clarion tones
Foretold the coming night. . . .

While History weaves for him her crown
The fairest ever seen,
Carolina’s daughters long will strive
To keep the garland green.

And so many of them have.  Not to the pleasure of all Charleston citizens. The city’s Post and Courier quotes “Ms. Mamie Garvin Fields, who was born shortly after the statue, said it seemed to point at her and others like her and say: ‘You may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place.’”

Hence, after his visage is brought down from its looming pedestal, let it be put somewhere out of public display but still accessible for viewing and the facilitation of  analysis and  intellectual autopsy.

As an editorial in Charleston’s Post & Courier put it:

If Charleston’s mayor and City Council ultimately vote Tuesday to remove the Calhoun statue from Marion Square, they should make sure it finds a home in a local museum or educational institution, so his story would still be on the city’s landscape, albeit in a far less conspicuous spot. . . .

By removing the statue rather than revising it, we would be passing up a serious opportunity to continue to learn from our past.

Mr. Calhoun is arguably South Carolina’s most significant statesman, a vice president under two presidents, a secretary of war, a secretary of state, an influential U.S. senator and a leading political thinker who penned two major works on the U.S. Constitution and federal government. People today should know who he was, for better and worse.

For many, it might feel good to bring down the likeness of a controversial historical figure so linked to the perpetuation of slavery, especially one who has occupied such a high perch for more than a century. We get that. But we take our most important steps forward by understanding our history, not by removing it from view.

Or as James a Baldwin much more pithily put it: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Miss Cheesbrough again:

O, prophet of the eagle eye!
O, patriot without stain!
Thou’st given a priceless gift to us
In thy untarnished name.

For this we’ve sought to honor thee,
Great champion of the Truth;
And fain would have this hallowed spot
A Mecca for our youth.

I know about the register-for-Free-on-the-net thing for Trump rallies. I did it myself in 2016, twice.

But not as a trick. I actually went to those rallies, in Fayetteville NC, one before and one after the election.  I’m the wrong generation for such tech maneuvers

For the first one, I printed out the ticket, and had it ready in my pocket.  But nobody at the gate asked for it; the second time, I didn’t bother.

I was about as far from being a Trumper as one could get. But I went to see if what the media was going nuts about was really happening. Intelligence gathering.

As we now know, way too well,  it was real enough. Or maybe really surreal.

And I suspect that what the New York Times reported today, about the Tik-Tok “attack” on Trump’s Tulsa rally was real too:

Mary Jo Laupp, a 51-year-old from Fort Dodge, Iowa, said she had been watching black TikTok users express their frustration about Mr. Trump hosting his rally on Juneteenth. (The rally was later moved to June 20.) She “vented” her own anger in a late-night TikTok video on June 11 — and provided a call to action.

“I recommend all of those of us that want to see this 19,000-seat auditorium barely filled or completely empty go reserve tickets now, and leave him standing there alone on the stage,” Ms. Laupp said in the video.

When she checked her phone the next morning, Ms. Laupp said, the video was starting to go viral. It has more than 700,000 likes, she added, and more than two million views.

She said she believed that at least 17,000 tickets were accounted for based on comments she received on her TikTok videos, but added that people reaching out to her said tens of thousands more had been reserved.

Ms. Laupp said she was “overwhelmed” and “stunned” by the possibility that she and the effort she helped inspire might have contributed to the low rally attendance.

“There are teenagers in this country who participated in this little no-show protest, who believe that they can have an impact in their country in the political system even though they’re not old enough to vote right now,” she said.

The effort to deprive Mr. Trump of a large crowd spread from Twitter and TikTok across multiple social media platforms, including Instagram and Snapchat.

I’m also quite familiar with the follow-on to this kind of registration: data-mining. . . .

She added that several people who took part in her campaign complained that once they signed up for the rally with their real phone numbers, they couldn’t get the Trump campaign to stop texting them and sending them messages.

I’ve been getting three or four texts daily from the Trump campaign ever since. More intelligence-gathering.

They’re annoying, often offensive, and most I reflexively delete. But they’ve kept me current.

And a few are so bad they’re good, or at least hilarious. Here are three of my current favorites. Their awfulness is truly, er,  memorable. And surreal:

Here’s the cover:

I was also sorely tempted to get this one:

But the price was too high. (Did I mention that every text wants a donation? My middle class upbringing finds this forever rude and crude. But clearly it works. All the other major campaigns this year — or at least all the “progressive” ones I’ve been interested in–have followed Trump’s example.)

The Times concluded:

Whether or not the prank to call in false tickets was the reason for the empty upper rafters at Trump’s rally, teenagers online celebrated. On Twitter, several accounts tweeted, “best senior prank ever.”

To which I would add: you live by manipulating the media, Dude, the media will finally catch up with you. And maybe it’s finally starting.