God's Design for Discrimination

In case you've forgotten over the summer, Minnesota will have a "reserve civil marriage for straight people only" amendment on the ballot in 2012. The campaign has now started, since the Minnesota Patriarchy Council has put out a call for volunteers. There's a bunch of rigamarole in their letter about "unaccountable judges" (in a state with judicial elections) and outside money (because none of the money they're raising will come from out of state) that you can read for yourself, but much of it is about religion.

Their letter, however, demonstrates once again that the only argument (aside from an uneasy excitement over the details of gay sex) for denying all consenting, adult couples the right to marry is religious.

In November 2012 a measure will appear on Minnesota’s ballot to place the traditional and biblical definition of marriage – one man and one woman – into our state constitution.

Well, that's one way the bible defines marriage, but it's hardly the only.

As you no doubt know, Minnesota Family Council has been working for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity since 2004 – and your prayers and financial support helped make it happen.

Mostly the financial support--and the polls that have shown that more Minnesotans are coming to support marriage equality all the time. Better get this done right quick before more people have gay friends.

Now we have to get the amendment passed. To help make this happen we have become part of a broad coalition of leaders who are assembling the campaign to ensure this amendment passes, and I am writing to ask you to join our coalition as a volunteer. The coalition is called Minnesota for Marriage and includes Minnesota Family Council, Minnesota Catholic Conference, and National Organization for Marriage to name a few.

This is a coalition, yes. Broad, it is not. It's a bunch of religious organizations. Where is any secular group claiming marriage equality would create any ills in this lifetime?

Even though this campaign promises to be a great struggle, we are very confident of victory – if we receive your help and that of thousands of other Minnesotans who believe in God’s design for marriage. With your support, we will help the voters of our state see the timeless institution of one man-one woman marriage as the foundation on which our society is built and the best environment for producing and raising children.

Timeless, huh? Like those polygynous marriages in Exodus?

While death and divorce too often prevent it, children do best when raised by their mother and father in a low-conflict marriage.

We know how well they pay attention to these studies.

We want to give every child in Minnesota the best opportunity for success.

Except the children of gay couples. They're perfectly happy to deny those children the advantages of having parents who are married.

Whatever one may think of so-called same-sex “marriage,” every gay “marriage” intentionally deprives a child of either a mother or a father.

Setting aside the gender essentialism involved in skipping over the fact that another mother or father is added--"intentionally deprives"? Uh-huh. Where do these kids come from? If it's divorce, they've got another (hopefully) involved parent. If it's adoption, they didn't have any to start with. If it's an egg or sperm donor, that donor is also sometimes involved in raising the child and sometimes simply not interested in raising that child--or they wouldn't have donated. In any situation, marriage equality adds a parent the child didn't have before. What child loses by that?

For our campaign to be successful, however, we need people of faith to rise up, speak, and participate in the campaign.

Prayers won't cut it here, either.

We know that when people of faith who support marriage stand together and participate in the kind of grassroots activities we have outlined, our campaign for traditional marriage will succeed.

Because the only people agitating against marriage equality are the ones who think their god has called upon them to discriminate.

God is the author of marriage, and our campaign will fight to preserve His vision of marriage as the union of one man and one woman for the benefit of families, children and all of society, and for His glory. Please join me in becoming a supporter of the marriage amendment today!

Yeah, no. I'm still pissed about the wedding I didn't get to go to because it had to be held in Iowa. I'm cheering for the best man at my wedding, who is in the process of adopting one of those kids without any supportive parents. And I don't think the appropriate place for constitutional amendments or religion is in denying people equal rights. Even if religion is really good at it.

Benny the Rat Embraces His Nazi Past

I wasn't terribly concerned over Joseph Ratzinger's election to pope simply because he had a Nazi past, having been part of the Hitler Youth. He was, after all, quite young at the time. That he didn't make the hard choice to oppose the government of his time was not exceptional, a fact that undermined any claim to a particular inherent virtue in the new pope but didn't make a case for inherent evil either.

That case was made by Ratzinger's adult behavior. His regressive attitude toward his predecessor's humanitarian gestures and his emphasis on authority over forgiveness on the subject of HIV and condoms told me all I needed to know about this new pope. Later revelations about his role as enforcer in keeping the church's predatory scandals quiet weren't a surprise. Not from Benny the Rat.

Now, however, Ratzinger seems to be reaching back to embrace his Nazi past.

Yes, I'm quite serious. What else can you call his recent statement about atheists?

“Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live,” he said.

“I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious people who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.

“As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society …”

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs rightly calls it revisionism. Beyond that, it is revisionism that parallels what Ratzinger has seen before, in his formative years.

Jews may not be acceptable targets in most of the civilized world at the moment (I wish I could say, "anymore"), but atheists are still subject to open and unapologetic religious discrimination even from sects and authority figures that consider themselves religiously liberal. It is perfectly fine to suggest that our moral character is inherently defective, despite evidence to the contrary. It’s almost trendy to characterize our open, unashamed, sometimes opinionated existence as an attack on others. Our very lack of invisibility is considered a problem.

Then there is the atmosphere in which the pope's statements were made. It is not a mere coincidence that the Nazis came to power during a time of international economic turbulence and deep uncertainties about the future. I could say more about that, but Tom Levenson's excellent post on what Albert Einstein has to tell us about the tea partiers says it more eloquently than I could. (Read also his take on the moral failure of Ratzinger's remarks.)

Nor is the problem just that the pope is exploiting the uncertainty of our times. He is doing it as the head of an institution that bears direct responsibility for many of our global problems. Don't know what I'm talking about? Turn away from your comfortable "First World" life for a moment and think about what the promotion of poverty, disease, overpopulation and submissiveness means to our world, both in general and specifically in building tensions between the have-littles and have-nones. This tension is a political force that should never be underestimated, particularly in its power to destroy.

Yet Ratzinger not only fails to take responsibility for the actions and policies of his institution, or for the power that gives them such far-reaching effects. He also deflects this responsibility onto atheists, an unorganized group without anything like the power to create the phenomena for which he blames them. Atheists, denied social influence by virtue of their atheism--and political power in many places, can no more be specially responsible for the world's problems than the Jews of Germany could be responsible for the failures of the German government.

They can, however, serve as a scapegoat for a leader who wants power without the responsibility that should come with it. Of all the current political and religious leaders in our world, Ratzinger has the fewest excuses for claiming ignorance as to where that can lead.

Ratzinger was a child when he participated in the Hitler Youth. He shouldn't be held responsible for what he supported then, although a truly moral man might claim that responsibility despite his immaturity at the time. We are, after all, none of us ever truly mature, and it's the repercussions of our lingering immaturities of which we should be most aware.

Benny the Rat is no longer a child. He is an adult of an age to have seen the Holocaust first hand and remember its lessons. That he has said what he has said under the circumstances in which he said it strongly suggests that he is embracing those lessons. It is appalling that he can remain the head of an institution with any power at all when he is so clearly embracing the wrong ones.

Korans and Crackers, Identity and Authority

I generally agree with PZ Myers on the topic of Crackergate, but he has a post up today that makes me wonder a little whether he's forgotten exactly what he did. He's defending, by analogy to his own actions, the burning of the Koran that is scheduled to take place in Florida this weekend. I understand that he's reacting to some statements that protest the proposed burning on ridiculous grounds. However, I don't think that's any excuse for underestimating the thought that he put into throwing a communion wafer (or whatever the exact appropriate terminology is) in the trash.

PZ didn't just throw away a cracker and a rusty nail. He also included pages from the Koran and Dawkin's The God Delusion. Those were critical to conveying his message that the authority claimed by the church was the problem, as is any authority, religious or secular, that can't provide external justification for its actions. Admittedly, many people weren't and still aren't capable of understanding that, but that doesn't change the fact that those pages were important to what he did.

Nor did he just post a picture of his trash can. The "offending" picture was accompanied by a history and explanation of blood libel--one cost of the authority of the church to those over whom it claimed that authority. Beyond that, the whole brouhaha occured in the context of the church exercising its authority over someone without consent.

That was the message I supported and still support.

That is not the message coming out of Florida. Jones will not undermine his own authority in order to call the authority of the Koran dangerous. In fact, he is claiming the authority for his actions comes from his god, and burning the authority of another is only intended to raise him further. This authority allows him to call Islam the "devil's religion," making believers not misguided equals or the blindly privileged, but a dangerous minority who are a threat not for what they do, but for who they are. And we know how that works, or we should.

That isn't a sloppy version of what PZ said much better. It's an entirely different animal, whether or not believers can't see the difference. I would hope that the rest of us can.

Reporting Non-Default Religion

I've been reading about the Fort Hood shooting this morning, like most everyone else. There's lots of bad and misleading information being passed around this close to the confusion, I'm sure. A few things stood out in the reporting, though, most of them having to do with the alleged shooter being Muslim, or more specifically, not Christian.

1. Major Hasan apparently received a load of flack from fellow soldiers over the last eight years about how his religion has allied him with the enemies of the U.S. We are currently involved in two wars. In both wars, our allies and our enemies share a religion, although the details vary. If we can't distinguish between the two better than that, we're in incredibly deep trouble.
2. Major Hasan was reportedly reprimanded for proselytizing. Considering the current state of our evangelical armed services, this is galling. How much did the unequal treatment contribute to turning fellow soldiers into targets?
3. Major Hasan reportedly shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" before shooting. This is being treated as evidence of motivation in several venues. This is a ritual phrase. If he had shouted, "Help me, Jesus!" instead, would it be so widely reported? Would anyone think it was a clue to anything aside from a religious person being terribly upset?

We don't know what happened with this shooting, or why. It's going to be some time before we do--to the extent we ever know. In the meantime, beware of people trying to play on your own internalized narratives. Watch out for reporting that creates stories out of stereotypes and xenophobia.

The shooting has stopped. We can afford some uncertainty. We have time to figure out what happened. And we've seen enough in the last eight years to know how well it goes when we lay blame and act before we do that.

Supply-Side Jesus

There is now a project, from the "minds" behind Conservapedia to wipe the liberal bias from the second-most cited document on the internet--the Bible. No, really. I can't think of a better way to commemorate the announcement, while simultaneously demonstrating the work required, than to post this lovely animation of Senator Al Franken's (hee, I love saying that) "Supply-Side Jesus."

Holiday Xenophilia

The thing I don't get about the War on Christmas hoopty doo--

Let me start by saying that there are plenty of things I do get about it. I get the place it plays in distracting people from their real problems and who created them. I get the formation of group identity (the "persecuted majority") and consolidation of power in the hands of a few people who created the issue they promise to solve. I get that fear = attention = advertising dollars. I get all that.

What I don't get is why anyone is willing to play along when it means narrowing the definition of the holidays.

Much of the richness of the winter holidays is in the variety of traditions one can experience. Just within Christian religious traditions, one finds extended observations such as Advent and brief Christmas Day services. One finds Latin masses at midnight and parents leaving work early to see their kids play stagestruck camels and sheep. Music is provided by pipe organs and massive choirs and folk singers with acoustic guitars.

But it is outside the Christian observances that one finds the wealth of experience that keeps the cold, dark days from being bleak. Lights abound, of course, but they may be faerie lights, plastic figurines, bonfires, candles, oil lamps or even volcanoes. And noise, the joyful noise of fireworks, crackers, ratchets, whistles, horns, drums and blowouts is everywhere.

We must have food and feasting to keep us warm, of course. Will we have goose or lutefisk? Brisket or prime rib? Turkey or curry or spaghetti? Drink wine or cider, mulled or straight? Maybe eggnog? Finish with plum pudding, krumkake, potica, doughnuts, panettone, jalebi, stuffed dates or frosted sugar cookies?

Many of us give gifts. Are they large or small, and how does giving follow patterns of social obligation? Do adults receive presents at all, or are gifts only for the children? And who gives them to the children? Is it only family or some fantastic figure? An overgrown elf, a pagan god or a saint? Male or female, adult or child?

As I was growing up, Santa meant the extra-cool presents in stockings on Christmas Day, after all the family presents were opened. In my husband's stepfamily, Santa comes on Christmas Eve. The children bundle up after dinner and take a walk, watching the sky for Rudolph's nose. Once enough energy has been run off, one of the older children, in on the joke but happy to get out of the house for a bit, points to the red blinking light on an airplane overhead and declares Santa to have been spotted. Back at the house, all the adults have miraculously fallen asleep, and Santa has left oranges and candy in the shoes on the hearth. The fire may now be lit and the big presents opened.

Some people fill their holidays with a mad whirl of concerts and parties. Some spend weeks hardly leaving their kitchens. Some people bring family together to nest, and others take advantage of empty exotic vacation spots. Some shoulder the responsibilities of making tradition for all, and some grasp the opportunity to be children again. Some simply continue about their everyday lives as though the rest of the world weren't going a little mad.

In short, there are as many ways to observe the winter holidays as there are people to do the observing. Why would anyone look at this big, messy time of noise and cheer and decide that only some tiny part of it is real and valid? Why would they use this occasion to separate themselves from their neighbors when they could come together over something as simple as a piece of sweet bread?

No matter who is calling for them to do it, why would anyone turn their backs on a million traditions meant to bring warmth and light and community? Why embrace the dark and the cold?

Why spend your holiday--ultimately--alone?