The Bitter Last Days of Bernie's "Revolution"

I have conjectured about Bernie Sanders' bitterness and refusal to accept that Hillary Clinton has defeated him - something abhorrent to his seemingly huge ego - and now a piece in Politico with information sourced from within his campaign confirms some of my thoughts.  Moreover, it appears that Sanders has been extremely "hands on" in running his campaign which is not a bad thing in and of itself.  However, it makes it very difficult for the candidate to blame missteps and nastiness on others.  The piece also suggests that there is strong split in the campaign between some staffers and Sanders as to a rational basis for continuing the campaign now that no path to victory remains.  Here are highlights:

There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders.

It was the Vermont senator who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention and blamed the political establishment for inciting the violence.

He was the one who made the choice to go after Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her blasting him on television.

He chose the knife fight over calling Clinton unqualified, which aides blame for pulling the bottom out of any hopes they had of winning in New York and their last real chance of turning a losing primary run around.

There are many divisions within the Sanders campaign—between the dead-enders and the work-it-out crowds, between the younger aides who think he got off message while the consultants got rich and obsessed with Beltway-style super delegate math, and between the more experienced staffers who think the kids got way too high on their sense of the difference between a movement and an actual campaign.

But more than any of them, Sanders is himself filled with resentment, on edge, feeling like he gets no respect -- all while holding on in his head to the enticing but remote chance that Clinton may be indicted before the convention.

Convinced as Sanders is that he’s realizing his lifelong dream of being the catalyst for remaking American politics—aides say he takes credit for a Harvard Kennedy School study in April showing young people getting more liberal, and he takes personal offense every time Clinton just dismisses the possibility of picking him as her running mate—his guiding principle under attack has basically boiled down to a feeling that multiple aides sum up as: “Screw me? No, screw you.”

This isn’t about what’s good for the Democratic Party in his mind, but about what he thinks is good for advancing the agenda that he’s been pushing since before he got elected mayor of Burlington.

Sanders owns nearly every major decision, right down to the bills. A conversation with former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin about getting left in personal debt from his own 1992 presidential campaign has stayed at the top of Sanders’ mind.

Aides say Sanders thinks that progressives who picked Clinton are cynical, power-chasing chickens — like Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of his most consistent allies in the Senate before endorsing Clinton and campaigning hard for her ahead of the Ohio primary. Sanders is so bitter about it that he’d be ready to nix Brown as an acceptable VP choice, if Clinton ever asked his advice on who’d be a good progressive champion.

Every time Sanders got into a knife fight, aides say, they ended up losing. But they could never stop Sanders when he got his back up.

Top Sanders aides admit that it’s been weeks, if not months, since they themselves realized he wasn’t going to win, and they’ve been operating with a Trump’s-got-no-real-shot safety net. They debate whether Sanders’ role in the fall should be a full vote-for-Clinton campaign, or whether he should just campaign hard against Trump without signing up to do much for her directly.

They haven’t been able to get Sanders focused on any of that, or on the real questions about what kind of long term organization to build out of his email list. They know they’ll have their own rally in Philadelphia – outside the the convention hall—but that’s about as far as they’ve gotten.

Losing a campaign is hard, as I know from my own run for office years ago.  But part of Sanders' bitterness may be from the fact that in the last analysis, he has no one to blame but himself.  Whatever he decides to do, being bitter, angry and nasty will not attract sympathy or support over the long haul.  

Vatican Fires Priest After He Comes Out as Gay

After going to great lengths to distance Pope Francis from batshit cray and uber modern day Pharisee, Kim Davis, and confirming that Francis met with a gay couple while in Washington, D.C., the Vatican has continued its schizophrenic approach to gays by immediately firing a priest at the Vatican after he came out as gay.   The take away?  In my view, the advise remains the same: walk away from the Church and work to convince as many friends and family members as possible to do the same. Let the Catholicism become an Africa centered religion that depends on ignorance to survive. The ultimate irony is at the biggest sin of Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, a Polish priest and theologian working in the Vatican, was that he was honest and truthful (his full interview is here), an unknown concept to the bitter old men in dresses who inhabit the Vatican.  Towleroad looks at this latest signal to gays and their families to walk away from the Church.  Here are highlights:

Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, a Polish priest and theologian working in the Vatican, was fired on Saturday after he came out as gay in an article in the Corriere Della Sera newspaper, an interview in which he urges the Catholic Church to change its stance on homosexuality. Charamsa’s interview came on the eve of the Synod, when the world’s bishops gather to discuss issues such as family, LGBT outreach, and Catholic tradition.

Reuters reports:

Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa was removed from his position at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal arm where he had worked since 2003, a statement said.

Charamsa, 43, and a Polish theologian, announced he was gay and had a partner in a long interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper on Saturday. He later held a news conference with his partner, a Spanish man, and gay activists at a Rome restaurant. They had planned a demonstration in front of the Vatican but changed the venue several hours before it was due to have started.

Charamsa told the paper that it was his duty to the LGBT community as a gay man to come out of the closet and speak truth, saying the Church is way behind in the way it handles gay issues:

“There comes a day when something inside you snaps, and you can’t go on. If I had been alone I would have lived the nightmare of a denied homosexuality, but God never leaves us alone. And I think He has helped me take this important existential step. It’s important because of its consequences, but it’s also the premise for living honestly, which should be natural for every homosexual.”

He adds:

“It seems to me that in the Church we are ignorant about homosexuality because we don’t really know any homosexuals. We have them all around us, of course, but we never look them in the eye, because they seldom say who they are. I hope that my personal experience will help stir the Church’s consciousness in some way. I will personally reveal my identity to the Holy Father in a letter. And I will tell the universities in Rome where I teach who I am; to my great sorrow I will probably no longer be allowed to work in Catholic education”.

The Vatican said that Charamsa’s interview was “grave and irresponsible” and would put unwanted media attention on the Holy See.

But Charamsa knew that would be the case and he didn’t care, adding, in the interview:

“If I failed to be open, if I didn’t accept myself, I couldn’t be a good priest in any case, because I couldn’t act as an intermediary for the joy of God. Humanity has made great progress in its understanding of these issues, but the Church is lagging behind. This is not the first time, of course, but when you are slow to understand astronomy the consequences are not as serious as when the delay regards people’s most intimate being. The Church needs to realise that it is failing to rise to the challenge of our times

I disagree with Charamsa on one point: his statement that the Vatican doesn't know gays.  In fact, it is full of gays, but they prefer to hang onto self-loathing that has been brainwashed into them and to pursue their quest for power and prestige within the club that is the Church hierarchy.  

Is the Roman Catholic Church Capable of Change?

This month the Roman Catholic Church will hold an Extraordinary Synod in Rome where bishops and cardinals will ostensible meet to discuss possible changes in the Church's position on divorced Catholics and other issues that liberals are saying are driving the decline of the Church in Europe and North America.  Many apologists for the Church seem to be hoping that Pope Francis can push through changes to modernize the Church.  It would be nice to see that happen, but I'm not holding my breath.  Moreover, I hope Francis has a food taster - I would not put it past some of the power mad bitter old queens in the Vatican to want to hasten him to his heavenly reward so to speak.  Here are highlights from the New York Times on the coming gathering:

From the outset of his papacy, Pope Francis has encouraged a robust and open debate over the contentious social issues that have long sundered the Roman Catholic Church. Now, with a critical meeting on the theme of family about to begin at the Vatican, he is seemingly getting what he wanted: a charged atmosphere with cardinals jousting over how and whether the church should change.

Conservatives, in particular, are trying to stop any prospects for allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacrament of holy communion. A group of powerful conservative cardinals has released a handful of books — timed to coincide with the opening of the Vatican meeting on Sunday — that are fashioned as rebuttals to such proposals but that some analysts see as thinly veiled swipes at Francis.

“The conservatives have already mobilized,” said Marco Politi, a longtime Vatican analyst and the author of a new book, “Francis Among the Wolves.” “Now it is up to the reformers to come out.”

For Francis, the two-week gathering is the beginning of a yearlong process that could determine what sort of changes he will, or will not, bring to the church’s approach to social issues such as divorce, gay civil unions or single parents. The meeting, known as an Extraordinary Synod, is an open forum at which 191 bishops, cardinals and other church leaders are expected to debate these and other issues, and to set the agenda for a final, decisive synod next October.

Having enjoyed a mostly charmed papacy, Francis is now plunging into contested terrain that requires confronting entrenched power blocs in the Vatican and beyond.

Some analysts believe he [Francis] sent a pointed signal last month when he oversaw a wedding of 20 couples in St. Peter’s Basilica, including couples who had been living together and a person whose previous marriage had been annulled.

“The synod is dedicated to the family because the context of the family has changed from the way it was 33 years ago,” said Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri during a news conference at the Vatican on Friday. Cardinal Baldisseri, appointed by the pope to oversee the synod, added, “We need to be able to put the church’s reality in today’s reality.”

He noted that although the Western news media and many Western Catholic leaders have fixated on certain social issues, the talks would be wide-ranging, given the church’s global scope, to include issues like poverty, migration and polygamy.

Yet for many, the bellwether topic will be whether church leaders will ease the process for allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion. The church already uses annulments to declare that a marriage was never actually valid, clearing the way for Catholics who have divorced and remarried to receive communion. But annulments are usually a cumbersome, time-consuming process. Recently, Francis appointed a commission to simplify procedures.

The opposition is led by a group of conservative cardinals who this week published a book, “Remaining in the Truth of Christ,” that included essays intended to rebut Cardinal Kasper. In a conference call with journalists this week, one of the authors, Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, said the church could not change teachings on marriage and bluntly criticized Cardinal Kasper.

Mr. Politi, the Vatican analyst, said the emerging political fault lines were actually a boon to Francis, who organized the synod over two meetings — divided by a year — in order to stir the sort of deep conversation needed to bring a mandate for change.

“You can only have big changes to the Catholic Church if all the bishops and cardinals are involved,” Mr. Politi said. “For Pope Francis, it is important that people speak out, even if they speak out against him.”

The Church remains a Medieval monarchy where the Pope as emperor needs to be just as worried as monarchs of old about treachery, poisonings, and insurrection by power mad courtiers and  underlings.  If I were Francis I'd sleep with trusted guards watching over me and a food tester.  The Vatican is a snake pit filled with bitter neurotic old men unduly obsessed with all things sexual.

Catholic Marriages in America Are on a Steep Decline

While the bitter old queens men in dresses - i.e., the Roman Catholic hierarchy - in America are still throwing tons of money at efforts to bar same sex marriages (I continue to suspect the National Organization for Marriage is a front group for the Catholic Church) and remain fixated on controlling women's wombs, they apparently have been ignoring what ought to be perceived as a far larger problem: the number of church weddings among straight Catholics has been plummeting,  Like many other young people, young Catholics are simply not having church weddings.  Part of it is the fact that younger Catholics are leaving the Church in droves even if the Church keeps them listed as "members" absent a formal withdrawal such as I undertook when I formally notified the Diocese of Richmond to strike me from the membership rolls.  Another part of the phenomenon is that the always rule obsessed Church throws many obstacles in the way of those seeking a church wedding.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the precipitous drop in church weddings:

Many elements of the archetypical American wedding echo the formality and traditions of the country’s largest single religious tradition, Roman Catholicism. But Catholic weddings themselves are becoming rarer and rarer. 

 In 1970, there were roughly 426,000 Catholic weddings, accounting for 20 percent of all marriages in the United States that year. Beginning in 1970, however, Catholic marriages went into decades of steady decline, until the turn of the new century—when that decline started to become precipitous: Between 2000 and 2012, Church weddings dropped by 40 percent, according to new data from the Official Catholic Directory. 

According to Catholic doctrine, marriage is a sacrament, or holy rite of passage, that can only be received if both husband and wife are baptized in the Church. In many cases, bishops can grant a special dispensation for interfaith couples, which allows them to be married in a church by a priest. But for faithful Catholics who want their marriage to be fully recognized by the Church, the options are either marrying a good Catholic girl or boy, or convincing their partner to convert.

Between 2000 and 2012, adult baptisms declined by nearly 50 percent, which, Gray said, probably has something to do with the declining rates of marriage.

 So why are couples choosing to get married outside of the Church? . . . . "More people are choosing to get married in country clubs and at the beach," said Gray.

Meanwhile, fewer Americans are getting married generally.  But while that's a factor in declining Catholic marriage rates, the deeper cause is the changing relationship between people and traditional institutions, Gray says. "It's not just churches, but all kinds of institutions have experienced detachments from the 'brick and mortar,'" he said. By “brick and mortar,” Gray means in-person religious communities: people physically coming together in churches to worship together. In general, Americans are becoming less affiliated with traditional religious institutions, not just the Catholic Church

Still, Gray said, "I do think what we're seeing is different among Millennials. They are seeing their social networks across the Internet rather than across geography. So much of parish life takes place in brick and mortar, and for Millennials, so much of their social life is not in brick and mortar.” Among Millennials, defined here as 18- to 33-year-olds, religious disaffiliation is higher than it has been for any generation

it’s also possible that beach weddings are an early sign of a generational shift among religious Americans, with more and more people finding meaning beyond the walls and words of a church. 

Of my children and nieces and nephews, all of who were raised Catholic, five have married.  None have had a Catholic wedding and only one was married by a minister.  Equally telling, only one remains a sometimes church goer.  The others have more or less walked away from Catholicism - as have many of their friends.  The irony, if anything, they are more moral in their standards and treatment of others than the "godly Christians" and "good Catholics" who make a show of churchgoing and condemning "sinners" while otherwise acting in a manner that make the Biblical Pharisees seem upstanding.

A Long Ago Defense of Sexual Liberty

The burning of the knight of Hohenburg with his servant before the walls of Zürich, for sodomy, 1482

In addition to power and money one of the things that has always defined religion and religious leaders is a desire to control others.  And given that the majority of Christianity's history has been dominated by bitter supposedly celibate men in the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, one of the areas of control that became an obsession was the control of other peoples' bodies and their sex lives. If the bitter old men could not openly enjoy sex, then they wanted to make sure that no one else did either. Throughout time their have been rebellious free thinkers who are not afraid to think or question the all too often oppressive status quo.  One such person was British thinker and essayist Jeremy Bentham.  Andrew Sullivan notes the publishing of previously unpublished writings of Betham which would make the bitter old queens at the Vatican and the sexually frustrated males at the Southern Baptist Convention have conniptions.  Here are excerpts:

Jeremy Bentham’s collected writings on religion and sex have recently been published for the first time. Bentham argued for a perspective on sexual morality that was, to say the least, unusual for his era:

If an activity did not cause harm, Bentham had argued as early as the 1770s and 1780s, then it should not be subject to legal punishment, and had called for the decriminalization of homosexuality. By the mid-1810s he was prepared to link the problem not only with law, but with religion. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was taken by ‘religionists’, as Bentham called religious believers, to prove that God had issued a universal condemnation of homosexuality. Bentham pointed out that what the Bible story condemned was gang rape. Paul’s injunctions against homosexuality were also taken to be authoritative by the Church. Bentham pointed out that not only did Jesus never condemn homosexuality, but that the Gospels presented evidence that Jesus engaged in sexual activity, and that he had his male lovers — the disciple whom he loved, traditionally said to be John, and the boy, probably a male prostitute, who remained with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane after all the disciples had fled (for a more detailed account see ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’). …

Bentham looked to ancient Greece and Rome, where certain forms of homosexual activity were not only permitted but regarded as normal, as more appropriate models for sexual morality than that which existed in modern Christian Europe.

 Bentham attacked the notion, still propagated by religious apologists, that homosexuality was ‘unnatural’. All that ‘unnatural’ meant, argued Bentham, was ‘not common’. The fact that something was not common was not a ground for condemning it. Neither was the fact that something was not to your taste. It was a form of tyranny to say that, because you did not like to do a particular thing, you were going to punish another person for doing it. Because you thought something was ‘disgusting’ did not mean that everyone else thought it was disgusting. You might not want to have sex with a sow, but the father of her piglets thought differently.

These writings were, for Bentham, a critical part of a much broader attack on religion and the ‘gloomy terrors’ inspired by the religious mentality. By putting forward the case for sexual liberty, he was undermining religion in one of the areas where, in his view, it was most pernicious.

Conservative fundamentalist religion is a pernicious evil whether it be Christian or Muslim in its dogma.  The main goal is to degridate individuals and give power to the clerics who are ultimately only concerned about their own power, ability to control others and wealth.

The Mormon Church's Seriously Flawed "New Policy" On Gays

It is unclear what motivated the Mormon Church's announcement of a new policy towards gays but it is at best a half way measured and still condemns gays to a life of loneliness in order to remain in the Church's good graces.  On the positive side, the Mormon Church has half way caught up with modern science and medical and mental health knowledge and admitted that (1) being gay isn't a choice, (2) sexual orientation is not changeable, (3) advises against shaming and rejecting gays and lesbians, and (4) recommends that gays not marry opposite sex spouses and try to be straight.  But then, in nearly the same breath, the Church basically says "so what" to this new found acceptance of reality and commands that gays and lesbians "remain chaste" and never act on their God given sexual orientation.  All because the bitter old men in Salt Lake - like their Catholic counterparts in Rome - refuse to face the fact that the ignorant writings of nomadic herders in Palestine of 2500+ years ago - which were mindlessly regurgitated by the Apostle Paul, a legalistic Pharisee - are simply wrong.  If the alleged "new policy" is an attempt to improve the Mormon Church's image, one can only hope the PR effort falls flat on its face.  A piece in Think Progress by my blogger friend Zack Ford looks at the disingenuous bullshit emanating from Salt Lake.  Here are excerpts:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has published a new resource addressing the issue of homosexuality that has some commendable changes, but many of the same stigmatizing problems as before. Framed under the title of “Love One Another,” the new collection of text and video testimonies advises the following important improvements to how Mormons understand and respond to gays and lesbians in their lives:

• NOT A CHOICE: “The attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is. Even though individuals do not choose to have such attractions, they do choose how to respond to them.”
• DO NOT SHAME OR REJECT: “We recognize in each other our common needs for intimacy and companionship and can discuss them without shame or rejection.”
• NOT A DISEASE: “Attraction to those of the same sex, however, should not be viewed as a disease or illness. We must not judge anyone for the feelings they experience.”
• GAYS SHOULDN’T TRY TO FAKE IT: “Unlike in times past, the Church does not necessarily advise those with same-sex attraction to marry those of the opposite sex.”

Indeed, these improvements over blatant ostracization and condemnation could very well save the lives of many young people and help keep families together. However, with this approach, the Mormon Church has essentially only caught up to the “hate the sin, not the sinner” approaches of the Catholic Church and many evangelical Christians, which are still incredibly problematic.

According to the new guide, gay Mormons can only stay members of the Church if they practice chastity, forcing a choice between a life with love and a life with faith. The acknowledgment that sexual orientation is not malleable is worthless if individuals are still shamed by “sin” to repress that sexuality — often through ex-gay therapy — and spend their lives alone. There’s also something insulting about the Church’s suggestion that maybe gay people will be lucky enough to marry someone of the opposite sex in the next life .  .  .  .  It is sadly ironic that the Church is using the frame of love to justify depriving individuals of love, and even sadder that this can be called an improvement over its previous position.

The Bible continues to be the source of misery and degradation for millions around the world because power hungry and psychologically damaged men cannot face the fact that their "faith" is no better than a house of cards.  They cannot tolerate anyone or anything that makes it objectively obvious that the Bible is untrue on many matters and issues.