Monday, September 24, 2012
More Fallout - Jesus Said To Them "My Wife
I have followed with amusement the reactions of the "godly Christan" crowd and the professional Christian set in particular to the news coverage on the 4th century papyrus fragment of a Coptic text that includes Jesus saying the words, "My wife..." Many of these folks are incensed and claim that the fragment is a fraud and forgery, etc. The real issue in my view is that conservative Christians - especially those who claim the deeply flawed Bible is inerrant - simply cannot tolerate ANYTHING that suggests that their neat check the box off the list belief system might not be true. It simply terrifies them to distraction. Any student of early Church history knows the maxim that "the winner gets to write the history" and that the factions in early Christianity diligently worked to wipe out all texts and communities (yes, godly Christians murdered these "heretics") that failed to adhere to the official story line that ultimately came to be dictated from Rome. Andrew Sullivan has some reflections on the controversy. Here are some highlights:
At every turn, King emphasizes merely that the papyrus teaches us about the diversity of views in early Christianity, rather than "proving" Jesus had a wife. An example from the Q&A she provides:
...this fragment does not provide evidence that Jesus was married. The comparatively late date of this Coptic papyrus (a fourth century CE copy of a gospel probably writtenI am not that interested in whether Jesus was married or celibate. But I am interested in the way in which a patriarchal, male-only hierarchy, which has been exposed as a conspiracy to commit and then cover up child-rape still excludes half of humanity from true equality in a church based on Jesus' teachings. Jesus clearly saw women as total equals, trespassed over gender lines constantly, and told all of us to become like little children if we are to live in God's full love. Paul told us that there is "neither male nor female" in Christ's vision of our equality on His love.in Greek in the second half of the second century)
argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus. Nor is there any reliable historical evidence to support the claim that he was not married, even though Christian tradition has long held that position. The oldest and most reliable evidence is entirely silent about Jesus's marital status.
The first claims that Jesus was not married are attested only in the late second century CE, so if the Gospel of Jesus's Wife was also composed in the second century CE, it does provide evidence, however, that the whole question about Jesus's marital status arose as part of the debates about sexuality and marriage that took place among early Christians at that time. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better to marry or to be celibate, but it was over a century after Jesus's death before they began using Jesus's marital status to support their different positions. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married, but now the Gospel of Jesus's Wife shows that some Christians claimed Jesus was married, probably already in the late second century.
These little moments - and this is a tiny one - help open that reality to the light: that the message and truth of Jesus is tragically being obscured by some of the Pharisees of our time.
Televangelist (And Asshole) Joel Osteen Says Homosexuality is a Choice - Even though Heterosexuality is Not
The nastiness and dishonesty of the professional Christian set - who are in my view little better than con men who shake down the ignorant and gullible for money - continues to be stunning. A case in point is Joel Osteen who lives VERY well by convincing the simple minded to send his "ministry" money. In an interview on CNN Osteen was pressed to admit that he never chose to be straight - it was simply who he was. Meanwhile, however, Osteen argues that being gay is a choice either out of intellectual laziness or fear that admitting that God made some of us gay might prove the Bible wrong and, in the process, cause his house of cards faith message to collapse. It is individuals like Osteen that maintain the pressure on gays to marry and try to be straight with the result that straight spouses and children find themselves in ultimately doomed marriages. Think Progress looks at Osteen's dishonest and disgusting comments on homosexuality. Here are excerpts:
Joel Osteen, the televangelist who presides over the nation’s largest congregation at Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, appeared on CNN’s morning show Starting Point this morning to discuss his latest book and ended up in a lengthy conversation about his views on the LGBT community.Host Soledad O’Brien and panelist Richard Socarides pushed Osteen on his beliefs on homosexuality, and whether his message of lifting people up can coexist with his church’s view of homosexuality as a sin:O’BRIEN: You make it clear that you think that homosexuality is a sin…
OSTEEN: When I read the scripture, that’s what I believe; that the scripture condemns it or says it’s a sin. But it also says that you know, lying is, and that being prideful is…
O’BRIEN: Right, so then you shouldn’t lie. But for people who are gay, you’re saying so then you shouldn’t be gay?
OSTEEN: Well, I think that’s the big debate. The scripture says you’ve got to work out your own salvation…
SOCARIDES: Do you think you can choose to be gay or not gay? You think you choose to be straight?
OSTEEN: I know I have not chosen to be straight, I feel like that’s who I am…
HOST: Well so how can I choose to be gay?
Osteen is little better than a sleazy snake oil merchants. And, in my opinion, he strikes me as pretty gay. I hope that some day frauds and charlatans like Osteen find themselves out of business.
New POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Poll - Bad News For Romney
Thankfully, a new POLITICO/George Washington University poll f "battleground states" provides more bad news for Mitt "I'm a cyborg" Romney. While the overall results are still far closer than I would like, it does appear that more Americans are deciding that they don't like the Romney/GOP vision for America. As I noted at dinner last night I truly believe that to be a Republican nowadays, you need to either be (i) a racist who hates non-white minorities of all types, (ii) a crazed Christianist extremist, or (iii) motivated by greed and a desire to retain every possible dollar for oneself regardless of the consequences to the nation or others. Politico looks at the new polling results. Here are highlights:
Obama leads 50 percent to 47 percent, which is within the margin of error. His 50 percent job approval rating puts him at a crucial threshold for an incumbent seeking reelection. It’s an uptick from the spring and summer, but 48 percent still disapprove.Romney, meanwhile, finds himself sliding in the wake of two events — the choice of his running mate and the Republican national convention — that were supposed to buoy his candidacy. His unfavorable rating ticked up from 46 percent to 49 percent over the past seven weeks, as the share viewing him favorably held steady at 46 percent. Personal likability boosts the president, who is viewed favorably by 53 percent.
“The window is narrowing for Romney, and he’s in deep, deep trouble,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who helped conduct the bipartisan poll, said Sunday. “Ultimately, people don’t like this guy. If they don’t like someone, it’s hard to get people to vote for him — particularly to fire someone they do like.”
Obama now ties or has an edge over Romney on who is best to handle every major issue except the federal budget and spending.
Romney has lost his edge on jobs. A month ago, he led Obama by 6 points on the question of who is best equipped to put Americans back to work. Now they’re even. Among those who say creating jobs is their top priority, Obama’s up 11 points.
A slight majority disapproves of the way Obama’s handling the economy, yet he narrowly leads Romney on who is better to manage it.
Approval for Obama’s tax policy has risen from 46 to 51 percent in the last month, and Obama has a 4-point edge on who will better handle the issue after the two tied in the previous poll.
The Democrat has also expanded his advantage on Medicare. He leads Romney by 9 points, 52 percent to 43 percent, on who can better handle the entitlement program. The president had a 4-point edge in the week before Romney announced Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate.
The problem for Romney is that he’s now exhausted two of his three major opportunities to win over new voters. Picking Ryan has not discernibly shifted the dynamics of the race, and the GOP convention did not shift voter attitudes.
Hostility toward Obama drives less of the enthusiasm for Romney than before. Last month, 52 percent said they supported Romney because they considered it a vote against Obama. Now it’s 42 percent. Nearly half of Romney supporters say they are voting for Romney as opposed to against Obama. This suggests that the Obama campaign’s efforts to make the election more a choice between two candidates than a referendum on the vulnerable president have succeeded to some degree.
The rising Obama tide is lifting congressional Democrats, who now lead Republicans 47 percent to 45 percent on the generic congressional ballot. Republicans led by 3 points, 45 percent to 42 percent, in August.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
David Brooks Unloads on Romney Yet Again
As a former Republican who is dismayed over what has become of the Republican Party that once supported rationality and competency I am taking some solace that there are a few rational, thinking Republicans and it seems that many of them are venting over Mitt Romney's horrible campaign and the man's contempt for average Americans. I've noted before that David Brooks is less than happy with the hapless Mitt. Now, in the wake of Nicholas Kristof and Peggy Noonan, David Brooks has gone off on Romney again, this time on Meet the Press. Here are highlights from Politico:
David Brooks is continuing his assault on Mitt Romney.
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, The New York Times conservative columnist continued his full assault on the Republican presidential nominee, saying he's simply not into his campaign.
"Mitt Romney does not have the passion for the stuff he’s talking about," Brooks said. "He’s a problem solver. I think he’s a non-ideological person running in an extremely ideological age, and he’s faking it. So if I were him, I’d go to what he’s been for the last several decades of his life: be a PowerPoint guy. Say ‘I’m making a sales pitch to the country here are the four things I’m going to reform. You don’t have to love me but I’m going to do these four things for you.’ And so I’d do a much more wonky and detailed thing than he’s done so far."
Personally, I don't think Brooks' proposed remedy will save the day for Romney. As Peggy Noonan said, Romney is a cyborg with no human empathy - or concern, for that matter - for average people who I increasingly believe he sees as some sort of inferior species. Romney wants the presidency simply because he wants it and, given his privileged life, he thinks he's entitled to it simply because he wants it. The sad commentary is that Romney is even the GOP nominee, yet given the insanity and dysfunctional nature of today's GOP, Romney was the only half way rational contender for the nomination.
Australian Catholic Church Reveals 620 Sex Abuse Cases
I noted recently how Pope Benedict XVI launched his latest attack against gays and gay marriage during which the Nazi Pope claimed that same sex marriage is a threat to society. At the time I noted that it would be nice if Benedict spent half as much time addressing the global sex abuse scandal that continues to engulf the Church. Yet another example of the Pope's misplaced priorities is news coverage out of Australia where the Church in the State of Victoria alone has admitted that at least 620 children were sexually abused by Catholic clergy. Remember, the 620 figure is only for admitted cases in the State of Victoria alone. Worse yet, many believe the figure greatly understates the actual number of victims. The disclosure has renewed calls for a separate government investigation of the Church. AFP has coverage. Here are highlights:
SYDNEY — The Catholic Church in one Australian state has revealed that at least 620 children have been abused by its clergy since the 1930s, sparking a fresh call Saturday for an independent inquiry into sex abuse.
The Catholic Church in Victoria revealed the number in a submission to a state parliamentary hearing on Friday but said the instances of abuse reported had fallen dramatically from the "appalling" numbers of the 1960s and 1970s.
"It is shameful and shocking that this abuse, with its dramatic impact on those who were abused and their families, was committed by Catholic priests, religious and church workers," Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart said.
[V]ictims' supporters say the number of children abused was likely much higher than that confirmed by the church in its own inquiries.
Chrissie Foster, whose two daughters were raped by their parish priest from the mid-1980s, said the church had had decades to address the issue but had only revealed the figure to the Victorian inquiry on Friday.
"It's only been victims coming out and going to the police that has stopped all of this," she told the ABC.
"The church has never lifted a finger to stop their paedophile priests," added Foster, who said one of her daughters had ultimately taken her own life.
President of the Law Institute of Victoria, Michael Holcroft, said there was a need for more independent investigations. "Obviously there's a public perception that the church investigating the church is Caesar judging Caesar and I think that the community is now looking for somebody external, someone independent to get to the bottom of what's obviously been a big problem for a long, long time," he told the ABC.
The Victorian state government announced the inquiry into the handling of child abuse cases by religious and non-government bodies after the suicides of dozens of people abused by clergy.
Heading To The Outer Banks
This photo of Coquina Beach is courtesy of TripAdvisor
The boyfriend and I are headed down to the Outer Banks this morning for a few days. Friends are renting a condo and we will hit the road early this morning. Later today the four of us will be going to Coquina Beach - pictured above - just south of Nags Head in the Hatteras National Seashore which is the closest thing to a gay beach in these parts.
With our Obama campaign staffer living with us we have a built in house sitter which makes being away all the easier. Being out of town, blog post volume may be down. I'll try to put things up whenever I have a chance.
Former Pirates Owner and Newspaper Heir Kevin McClatchy Comes Out
In some ways it is heartening to see older gays finally coming out. Finally coming to terms with who one is - even if it takes years of therapy to make the transition - is extremely liberating and not hating and despising oneself daily makes for such a sense of inner peace. That said, there are still many trials and tribulations that need to be surmounted and, as noted in a prior post, for married gays there is the calamity of telling your straight spouse and in many cases children. Indeed, I DO understand why some individuals choose to take their own lives as an alternative given the daunting journey coming out later in life entails. One individual who has decided to take the plunge and be honest with himself and the world is former Pittsburgh Pirates owner and newspaper heir Kevin McClathy. In a column with Frank Bruni of the New York Times McClatchy (pictured above) talks about his decision to come out. Here are some excerpts:
THE way Kevin McClatchy figured it, he had to choose. He could indulge his dream of presiding over a big-time professional sports team, or he could be open about his sexuality. The two paths didn’t dovetail.He went with sports, and in February 1996, at the age of 33, became the youngest owner in major league baseball when he led a group of investors who bought the Pittsburgh Pirates. For the next 11 years, he was the team’s managing general partner and chief executive officer, not to mention its public face. And for all of that time, he took pains not to let his players, the owners of other teams or anyone beyond a tiny circle of family and close friends learn that he was gay.He stepped away from the Pirates in 2007, but it took five years for him to reach the point where he felt even remotely comfortable sitting down with a journalist, as he did with me recently at his home here, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, to talk about his private life. Secrecy is a hard habit to break. And the world of professional sports, to which he is still connected, isn’t exactly crowded with proud, out gay men and women.He once did some arithmetic. Over the last four decades, he said: “Tens of thousands of people have played either professional minor league baseball or major league baseball. Not one has come out and said that they’re gay while they’re playing.” Nor has any active player in the principal leagues of football, basketball or hockey, America’s three other major professional sports. That silence is a sobering . . .McClatchy, whose interview with The Times was his first public acknowledgment of his sexual orientation, could do considerable good.And pro sports offers a frontier on which there’s considerable good to be done. One reason there has been so much attention lately to statements about homosexuality, supportive and derogatory, from prominent male athletes is that they inhabit a stubborn bastion of reductively defined masculinity, and many impressionable kids take their cues from it. If its heroes make clear that being gay is O.K., the impact could be profound: fewer adolescents and teenagers bullied, fewer young and not-so-young adults leading stressful, painful double lives.McClatchy, 49, said that his took a toll. “I think I was more paranoid, for sure, about people,” he said. “And suspicious, definitely. And angry.” His serious romantic relationships with men were few and strained until he left sports, and his partner of the last four years, Jack Basilone, who shares his home here, told me that McClatchy remains guarded, wary.McClatchy said, “I’m sure people will criticize me because I came out later, and I should have come out while I was in baseball and in the thick of it.”But, he added, “I could find excuses for why not to do this article until I’m blue in the face.”“I’ve got a birthday coming up where I’m turning old,” he said, referring to his 50th, in January. “I’ve spent 30 years — or whatever the number is specifically — not talking about my personal life, lying about my personal life.”He shook his head. “There’s no way I want to go into the rest of my existence and ever have to hide my personal life again,” he said.
I wish him well and hope he finds the peace I found eventually. The saddest thing in my view is those who spend their entire life in the closet and never know the feeling of self-acceptance. I cannot image an entire life of lies and unhappiness and possible futile efforts to change the unchangeable.
The Republican Party’s Race Problem
There have long been those who view the Republican Party as being anti-black (along with anti-gay, anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant, etc., etc.). But it wasn't always that way, at least in terms of anti-black racism. So what happened? A new book, Strom Thurmond’s America, by Joseph Crespino, suggests that the root cause of this change was the influx of former Southern Democrats led by the late Strom Thurmond, who switched to the GOP as the Democratic Party at the national level embraced desegregation and the Civil Rights Act - which effectively ended the Jim Crow laws. Since then, the GOP has continued on the road to becoming a largely lily white party - especially to angry white men - that is hostile to anyone who is racially or ethnically different. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the transformation of the GOP and Crespino's narrative of the party saga to embrace racism. Here are highlights:
Anyone doubting the myths conservatives cling to must consult Strom Thurmond’s America, a well-researched new book by Joseph Crespino, a historian at Emory University. The longtime South Carolina senator was representative of the trajectory so many Southern Democrats embarked on in the 1960s. As the Democrats abandoned their longtime hostility to African-Americans’ civil rights in the 1940s, Thurmond and his compatriots moved to the Republican Party. Thurmond “quit the Democratic Party at the high-water mark of the civil-rights revolution, helped Barry Goldwater win five Deep South states in 1964, and led a historic shift of white Southerners into the GOP,” Crespino writes.
Thurmond fled the Democrats when President Harry Truman urged legislators to implement the sweeping document issued by his Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights. Among other measures, the report called for ending economic discrimination, desegregating all public facilities, establishing regional offices of the Civil Rights Section of a strengthened Justice Department, passing an anti-lynching law, and creating permanent civil-rights commissions in every state to monitor civil rights.
In response, Thurmond created the States’ Rights Democrats, more commonly known as the Dixiecrats Party. “[T]here’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” he said as in his first speech as the party’s presumptive president. It was the first toss in a game that would see virtually the entire South migrated to the GOP.
Strom Thurmond’s America fairly observers that racism was not the only reason. Thurmond and the South defected from the Democrats. Many soon-to-be conservatives (most still called themselves liberals) were motivated by “Cold War anticommunism, anti-labor politics, conservative religious beliefs and opposition to liberal church groups, criticism of judicial activism, and hyper-militarism.” One might add growing concerns about crime and maintaining law and order. All of these issues were intertwined with race in many Southerners’ minds, led by Strom Thurmond.
Richard Nixon pioneered the ‘Southern strategy,’ which Crespino persuasively argues is misnamed because it was designed to appeal to the prejudices of both Southerners and a newly conservative Sun Belt. The plan was to attract Americans to the GOP by opposing busing and desegregating schools, advocating states’ rights and prioritizing law and order. . . . . The strategy worked brilliantly. Today Democrats cannot hope to compete in the South, which is now as solidly Republican as it was once Democratic.
All of this might be of interest only to historians if Strom Thurmond’s Republican Party had nothing in common with today’s. But it does. When Newt Gingrich calls Obama a “food-stamp president,” he is maintaining his party’s post-1960s appeals to racism. When the late conservative icon Andrew Briebart manipulated a speech by African-American leader Shirley Sherrod to make her seem racist, he was appealing to the myths of whites’ victimization at the hands of blacks.
Many leading conservative figures and intellectuals not only solicit this racism; they bond it. Rush Limbaugh is the most prominent racist in all of America with his ranting against imaginary black gang-beatings of whites spurred by Obama. Right-wingers believe racism exists—but it always is directed against whites.
These delusions have real-world consequences. Though the vast majority of opposition to Obama is not remotely race-related, some of it (PDF) surely is, and conservatives not only ignore but outright appeal to it.
Conservatives' blindness to offenses against people of color has its roots in historical Republican offenses against people of color. To concede that William F. Buckley and Jerry Falwell were segregationists is to acknowledge that modern conservatism was built and sustained in large part on bigotry.
For northern Republican such as those in my extended family it took us a while to finally admit that what had happened to the Republican Party was indeed something ugly. The final straw for me and other family members was when the Christofascists took over the Party and the concept of the separation of church and state ceased to exist. Since our exodus from the GOP years ago at this point, things have only gotten worse. We did not leave the Republican Party - the Party left us. It also left rationality and decency in my view.
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