Update on Previous Stories: The Fast for Justice, the Koran Burning

Quick updates (and further commentary) re: two stories about which I've blogged recently:

First, at Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner addresses the fast for economic justice about which I blogged several days ago.  Posner notes that the fast has some high-profile support, but she doubts that it will have much effect on the current Democratic leaders in D.C.

And I agree.  As Posner notes--and she's right--the power-brokers of the Democratic party as it's presently configured don't intend and have never intended to listen to the viewpoints of people of faith to the left of center in the American political arena.  Because, they imagine, they don't have to do so.  Our votes are sewn up, taken for granted, since we certainly don't intend to vote for leaders of a party that even more overtly and more unconscionably serves the interests of the tiny elite of rich citizens now controlling our political process.

That is, our votes will be taken for granted unless something new and unexpected comes along to offer an alternative to the deadlock both major political parties have created.  And it's for that that I will keep praying.  And fasting.  Since the God to whom we pray is the real owner of the future that our political leaders keep mortgaging on behalf of all of us.

Also at Religion Dispatches, and again Sarah Posner: commentary on Pastor Terry Jones's burning of the Koran, about which I posted this weekend.  Posner notes that strong indicators suggest Jones burned the Koran hoping that precisely what did happen would happen: that there would be a violent response in some Islamic parts of the world, which would prove the point he and his cronies want to make to the American public: that Islam is in and of itself violent.

Unlike Christianity.  Which would certainly never countenance someone doing an incendiary act that they knew would incite a violent reaction that might result in the deaths of innocent people.  

Would it?

And on the Islamophobia that is now sweeping through some parts of American culture like a mass delusion, and which is being cynically and deliberately promoted by the leaders of the Republican party, see Roger Cohen's good op-ed statement in today's New York Times.

Play with fire and you'll get burned.  And those who are going to get burned as this mass hysteria keeps playing out are going to be many of us in the U.S, I fear, who should be speaking out and pushing back against the hysteria right now, if we really want these fires to be put out.

Andrew Sullivan on Frank Rich: A Tory President Triumphs via DADT

Andrew Sullivan's response to Frank Rich re: centrism is telling for all kinds of reasons.  First, it's interesting that A. Sullivan considers it important to counter Rich.  I suspect that, in doing so, he's reflecting a centrist preoccupation of sectors of the mainstream media, which deem it necessary to marginalize what they judge to be the left wing of the Democratic party.  And which continues to consider it worthwhile to try to offset any critical influence that what they see as the left wing of the Democratic party might attain.

Second, it's interesting that, in countering Rich and defending a "pragmatic, liberal reformism" enacted by a cold-blooded (Sullivan's phrase) president with ice running through his veins, Sullivan ends up with a Tory Obama.  Evidently, what we're to find most alluring about this president's cold-blooded pragmatism is that it predictably leans right whenever possible--despite the loud and clear preferences of his own base.  As with the tax-cut compromise or the health-care compromise or the Wall Street and banking bailouts . . . . 

What doesn't really appear on the table in Sullivan's essay, but is definitely on the menu in Rich's, is this: centrism--and the right-veering "pragmatic, liberal reformism" it promotes--are all about shielding the central economic mechanisms of our current system from searching critical inquiry.  In its desire for pragmatic balance, and its cold-blooded pragmatism, centrism is all about assuring that we don't recognize, talk about, or above all change the economic inequities on which our system thrives.  Along with the exploitation of those at the margins . . . .

Interesting, too--and this is also on the table with Rich but not Sullivan--that Rich zeroes in on how the centrist club controlling the beltway media is essentially an old boys' network.  It's a network in which Mr. Cabot talks only to Mr. Lodge, in which the Anglophile habit of American ivy league universities--Sullivan talking to Dreher talking to Jenkins talking to Coates--carries over into all the penchants and practices of the club.  So that it is and remains an old boys' club intent on keeping women and other threatening outsiders at bay.  Since the viewpoints and critiques these refractory outsiders might bring to the center, if they were allowed inside,  have the potential to unsettle the economic arrangements on which the club depends for its existence.  And which it was organized to maintain and protect.

I'm with Rich here.  And I also very seriously doubt that the abolition of DADT had much to do with the president's vacillating and unprincipled pragmatism.  I think that  DADT's eradication was ultimately an unexpected consequence of a vacillating and unprincipled pragmatism that was never intended to move this or any other human rights issue forward.  The ending of DADT has everything to do with the courage of a few principled political leaders--including but not limited to Patrick Murphy, Dan Choi, and Geoff Farrow--and not with the silent homophobia of Messrs. Obama, Emanuel, and many Congressional Democrats.

Robert Scheer on Mr. Obama's Decision to Rely on Mr. Clinton to Sell the Tax Deal: Desperate

A campaign is already underway to give President Obama cover for his tax-cut deal and his decision to bring in the master triangulator, Bill Clinton, to soft-sell that deal to the American public.  I'm not persuaded by the apologists, though.  

For my money, Robert Scheer is right when he says the following: 

The sight of Bill Clinton back on the White House podium defending tax cuts for the super-rich was more a sick joke than a serious amplification of economic policy. How desperate is the current president that he would turn to the great triangulator, who opened the floodgates to banking greed, for validation of the sorry opportunistic hodgepodge that passes for this administration's economic policy? A policy designed and implemented by the same Clinton-era holdovers whose radical deregulation of the financial industry created this mess in the first place.

Many of us feel sorely betrayed precisely because Mr. Obama ran as an alternative to the Clinton style of Democratic leadership, with its constant concessions to neo-conservative ideology, its deal-cutting and principle-waffling.  Many of us were persuaded that things had become so bad for our nation during the Bush period, we needed (and would surely get, with the new president) a clean break with both the neo-conservative paradigm and the new Democrat paradigm that tries to reframe the traditional values of the Democratic party as neo-con values.

And so we feel conspicuously betrayed by this president, and determined to continue dissenting, because the socioeconomic problems facing our nation remain acute, and we know full well that more of the same, whether that neo-con same comes to us outright through the Republicans or in Democratic disguise, is not going to get us out of the mess we're in.

We need a whole new paradigm if we're to succeed as a nation.  That paradigm has to return to the classic values of participatory democracy.  It has to make every voice count.  It has do to so first and foremost by listening as attentively to the experience of everyday citizens as it does to the voices of CEOs.  

Nothing short of this--nothing short of a new paradigm rooted in the now-imperiled values of our participatory democracy--will retrieve democracy in the U.S.  This president's decision to keep playing by the rules of the new Democrat playbook written by Mr. Clinton has proven to be a coda to--and a dangerous one, at that--the narrative of erosion of democracy that is the legacy of the Bush era.  Not a viable and praiseworthy alternative to that legacy.  Anything but that.  To the woe of many citizens.

Robert Reich on Why Obama Shouldn't Listen to Clinton re: Tax Cuts

With its emphasis on core principles, Robert Reich's analysis of why President Obama should not be touting the wisdom of former President Clinton vis-a-vis the shameful tax-cut deal seems to me right on target:

If the Democratic Party has stood for anything over the years it is to maintain and restore upward mobility for the majority of working Americans, ensure that the playing field isn't tilted in the direction of the privileged, and limit the power of the richest among us to entrench themselves and their heirs into a semi-permanent plutocracy.

Continuing the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, including a sharp cut in the estate tax, violates these core principles. Doing so in the midst of an economic emergency that demands bold measures to rescue America's vast middle and working class adds further insult. For President Obama and former President Clinton to tell America there's "no other choice" or that "this is the best we can do" -- when Democrats remain putatively in control of the House, Senate, and the presidency -- is misleading.

I admire Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. I advised the former and worked for the latter. They are good men. But they have either been outwitted by the privileged and powerful of America, or seduced by those on Wall Street and the executive suites of America into believing that the Republican nostrums are necessary, or succumbed Democratic advisors who think in terms of small-bore tactics rather than large and principled strategies.

I urge congressional Democrats to remember the larger principles -- not in order to be purist or make the perfect the enemy of the better, but to move toward an economy and a society that we believe in, that reflects the needs of the vast majority of Americans at this difficult time.

Reich, who worked for Clinton, is absolutely correct to note that some kinds of pragmatism, posturing as necessary deal-cutting to get business done when elitist purism can't do business, are sell outs.  As he notes, the core principle Mr. Obama has now sold out--one integral to what the Democratic party stands for--is standing not with economic and social elites, but with those struggling to make a go of it. 

I'll say it again: we have elected a Democratic president whom many of us expected not only to clean up the mess the Bush administration (and years of Reaganomics) have made of the country, and to break with the cynical deal-cutting, wind-testing calculating pragmatism of the Clinton period.  Instead, it seems we've elected a man who has now made the Reagan revolution complete, while pretending to stand for core Democratic principles. 

The price the whole country is going to pay for this folly for many years to come is going to be steep.

William K. Black on Wealth Managers' and Bankers' Support of Tax-Cut Deal

And look at who else (besides David Brooks) is crowing about the president's "very good week" (never mind the DADT failure this same week, and the president's refusal to move on eradication of discrimination in the military from the outset of his presidency): as economics professor William K. Black reports at Huffington Post today, the Obama administration has set up a website to justify its tax-cut deal.  And the people it's solicited to praise the tax deal?  "Wealth managers" and bankers.

Black writes:

You know the administration is desperate when it creates a web page citing economists who support its capitulation on taxes.  . . .  The administration thinks it says good things that the Bush administration's principal apologist for its tax cuts for the wealthy supports Obama's agreement to extend those tax cuts. The mind boggles.  . . .  All of these endorsements simply emphasize the extent to which Obama was taken to the cleaners. It's bad to be bullied, but it's pathetic to cite the testimonials of those that got even wealthier through the bullies' triumph as evidence of your success.

I've been characterizing this president's leadership style as principles-lite.  But the more I read about the shameless attempt of the administration to spin its sell-out to the Republicans and the very rich as a Santa Claus gift of munificent largesse to everyone, which enriches all of us at the same time that it puts even more money into the pockets of the already filthy rich, the more inclined I am to conclude that this administration and its leaders have no real principles at all.

No real principles other than doing the bidding of the wealthy and powerful.  And rolling their supporters, while delighting in the pain they produce as they do this, since that pain is the one indicator they can find in their otherwise morally pusillanimous behavior to suggest that they're big, tough macho men.  And feathering their own nests, assuring that, whatever comes down the pike for them politically, they'll still have a cushy place to return to in the corporate structures ruling the nation, once they're out of office.  

The failure of DATA repeal has everything to do with the moral vacuity of the tax cut deal.  Mr. Obama never had any real intent of tackling the human rights issues of gay citizens, because he has no real commitment to human rights, period.  And he does not intend to pay any political price for any of the lavish promises he made to support human rights on the campaign trail, and to help heal the deep wounds inflicted on the nation by several decades of neo-conservative dominance.

To the contrary, he's making the wounds much deeper.  And is assuring the final triumph of the neo-conservative dominance that has gotten us into the dark pit in which we now find ourselves.

Mr. Brooks on Mr. Obama's Very Good Week: A Return to First Principles

David Brooks' fulsome praise of President Obama's performance in the tax-cut deal is telling for all kinds of reasons--but most of all, for whom it addresses and what arguments it tries to overturn, more than for what it says by way of (weak and insincere) praise of the president's weakness centrism.

Brooks is, of course, delighted that Mr. Obama has just cut such a zaftig deal for the rich the Republicans.  And that says quite a bit about where centrists like Brooks are coming from, when, albeit that they are Republican in loyalty and affiliation, they praise this Democratic president to the skies.  

They're coming from the side of the rich.

And they want to convince us, even now, in the midst of the stark economic malaise through which we're living, that giving to the rich will magically enrich all of us, as some hidden (and divine) hand fans the flames of the economy after we hand over one more chunk of our own wealth to the already obscenely rich.  Mr. Brooks and the other centrists who find such great good in what the president has decided to do want us to keep believing in the voodoo economics of Reagan's trickle-down theory, despite the way in which that economic system has gutted our nation economically and brought us to the point of near ruin.

And so, of course, they now have nothing but praise for the president, and nothing but glee at seeing the purist "lefties" trampled on yet again by a sitting Democratic president whose core values are far from those of his own party, but closer to the neo-conservative values that have produced the economic and cultural malaise most of us thought we might have a chance to get out of, when we elected a Democratic president who told us he had a progressive agenda for the nation, and would do business on our behalf from the side of his principles.

And so to principles: Brooks obviously recognizes the central weakness of his argument that Mr. Obama is a  weak and vacillating pushover "network liberal" willing to concede to cut deals with the Republican party as he tramples on his Democratic base.  That central weakness is, to put the point bluntly, that the president is unprincipled.  That he is willing to cave in on and waffle about anything at all, in order to get business done.

That he has no strong commitment at all to what is for many Democrats, including those who come to their political convictions by way of religious belief, a core ethical principle of political life: putting those on the margins first, and analyzing socio-economic structures from the standpoint of the dispossessed.  And so Mr. Brooks declares that Mr. Obama's "very good week" is all about principle:

The big story of the week is that Obama is returning to first principles, re-establishing himself as a network liberal. This isn’t a move to the center or triangulation. It’s not the Clinton model or the Truman model or any of the other stale categories people are trying to impose on him. It’s standing at one spot in the political universe and trying to build temporarily alliances with people at other spots in the political universe.

You don’t have to abandon your principles to cut a deal. You just have to acknowledge that there are other people in the world and even a president doesn’t get to stamp his foot and have his way. 

Mr. Obama had to strategize, you see--he had to return to his "first principles," which are all about abandoning first principles in order to cut cold-hearted pragmatist deals with the political right--because he had a "weak hand" to play with the tax cuts.  Or so Mr. Brooks informs us.  But how this president's hand happens to have become weak when he came to office with a sitting majority of his party members in the House and Senate, and with a large popular mandate to do a different kind of business for the nation, Mr. Brooks doesn't say.

Because what has been important for the political right and its centrist shills from the outset of this presidency is assuring us that we're a center-right nation and any deviation from the political domination of the right, even when it's in a minority governing position, is unthinkable.  It's idealistic "leftie" purism.  It has no place in the hurly-burly of American political life in which real liberals, vacillating, unprincipled pushovers network liberals, roll up their sleeves, eschew elitism, and get down into the mud with Republicans.

And concede cut deals.  In the name of first principles, principles which are to wit.: 1) if you're to the left of the Republican party and have a majority behind you, you must always concede, because that's the only way business will get done in this center-right nation; and 2) pragmatist deal-cutting must always trump any and all other ethical principles, when the interests of the rich Republicans are concerned.

And so, q.e.d., we've had a very good weak week.

Robert Reich on Tax-Cut Deal as Confirmation of Republican Narrative

This is what I meant when I wrote yesterday that the principles underlying President Obama's political decision-making are neo-conservative ones that reward the rich with the expectation that rewarding the rich will then turn around and pour capital into the economic engine of our society and spread wealth around: Robert Reich notes that Obama's tax-cut deal confirms the false Republican narrative that has gotten us into the economic crisis in which we find ourselves:

By agreeing to another round of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the president confirms the Republican story. Cutting taxes on the rich while freezing discretionary spending (which he's also agreed to do) affirms that the underlying problem is big government, and the solution is to shrink government and expect the extra wealth at the top to trickle down to everyone else.

Obama's new tax compromise is not only bad economics; it's also disastrous from the standpoint of educating the public about what has happened and what needs to happen in the future. It reinforces the Republican story and makes mincemeat out of the truthful one Democrats should be telling.

With Mr. Obama, we find ourselves in the hands of yet another New Democrat who has conceded large ground to the neo-conservative movement, and who is actually doing their work for them by making "pragmatist" decisions that sell out anyone to the left of Newt Gingrich, and anyone motivated by ethical principles that require us to look at our socioeconomic life first and foremost from the standpoint of those on the margins, and not from the standpoint of the obscenely rich.

This is the new principles-lite style of the Democratic party, which completes the neo-conservative revolution of the latter part of the 20th century by gutting the traditional principles of a party rooted in the New Deal and Civil Rights movement.  Gutting these principles in the name a best-we-can-do pragmatism that is only a smokescreen for the decision of these principles-lite leaders to keep serving the very rich at the expense of the needy . . . .

More on the False Pragmatist vs. Idealist Meme about Obama's Tax-Cut Deal

As I noted yesterday in commentary on the president's tax-cut deal, the meme of centrist political commentators who persistently echo the echo chamber of the beltway media is that we're now seeing the pragmatist Obama emerge, and those who expected this president to govern according to ideals are hopelessly naive, and know nothing about how politics works in the real world.  The president actually said as much to his base yesterday in the news conference about which I posted in my final posting yesterday.

This analysis sets up a false dichotomy between pragmatism and idealism which is really all about putting a screen around the real principles according to which the current president makes his decisions.  From my reading of John Dewey and other American pragmatist thinkers--reading I did as a backdrop to my study of a social gospel theologian in my doctoral dissertation work--I know at least a little bit about the pragmatist tradition.  And what I know leads me to conclude quite decisively that the pragmatism-idealism meme so beloved of centrists and the beltway media--as they beat up on anyone to the left of center--is deliberately misleading.

Pragmatism isn't about making the best decision possible as one passively waits for any and all decisions to come along.  It's about fighting for one's ideals as long and as hard as possible, and when one has done all one can to attain those ideals, then making realistic pragmatic decisions about how to move towards those ideals in a world that never perfectly mirrors the ideal.

What we've seen with this president from the time he took office has been an altogether different kind of pragmatism--one that's not really pragmatist at all, but is essentially neo-conservative in style and flavor.  Rather than enunciating some clear principles according to which he intended to govern, and setting goals (i.e., ideals) in line with those principles, from the outset of his presidency, Mr. Obama has told us repeatedly that we need to concede core Democratic principles to the Republican party, to seek a fatuous and totally idealistic bipartisan consensus, and to stop expecting political decisions to mirror core principles of his own party and of its base.

The pragmatist model according to which this president governs is principle-lite.  It is also solidly neo-conservative behind the shifting screen of elusive lite principles by which the president claims to be making his political decisions.  This is not a pragmatist model grounded in the philosophy of classic American pragmatist thinkers like Dewey, who developed their systems of pragmatism to explain how social groups like nations can realistically pursue ideals like participatory democracy, while pursuing those ideals in a real world that never adequately attains the ideal.  

With its fast and free, loose way with core principles of his own party--e.g., the need to make political and economic decisions with those at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid in mind first and foremost--Obama's pragmatism is a mask for the real principles according to which he governs.  These are neo-conservative principles that reward the rich with the expectation that rewarding the rich (Wall Street, bankers, the top 2% of the economic bracket) will then turn around and pour capital into the economic engine of our society and spread wealth around.

Increasing numbers of Americans are seeing that this neo-conservative economic myth is absolutely false.  And so a large percentage of American citizens were resolutely opposed to the continuation of tax cuts for the very rich.  That makes the attempt of the White House to convince us that it cut its deal on tax cuts as a response to widespread support for a continuation of the Bush program not merely false, but obscene.   

Once again, we're being asked to swallow a script generated by this administration, which informs us that progressives ought not to demand principled action on the part of the president, since that demand is rooted in hopeless, naive idealism.  And we're being implicitly told that the administration will cut deals whenever necessary--regardless of the core principles at stake--if its cold-hearted political calculus tells us that the populace wants such a deal, and that making a deal will score political points for the administration.  

Finally, this administration continues to say, loudly and clearly, to its own base that if those of us who voted Democratic in the last election don't like what we're getting, we might as well lump it.  The people who really count are the minority of wealthy neo-conservative interest groups who set the political and economic agenda for the nation.

Obama Castigates His Base (Again)

As usual, his anger is reserved largely for members of his own base who expected him actually to adhere to the principles we heard him enunciate as he campaigned.

With the Republican right, he's willing to negotiate and cut deals.  With fellow Democrats for whom certain core principles (e.g., don't sell out the poor, don't favor the rich) are the moral compass of political decision-making, he's disdainful.  Angry. 

And the centrist talk of principles as "idealistic" and not adaptable to real-world politics: it merely echoes the obscene, self-serving rhetoric of the beltway media, who never miss an opportunity to beat up on anyone to the left of, say, John McCain.

Steve Hildebrand on the Huge Mistake of Obama's Tax-Cut Deal

Steve Hildebrand on Obama's "huge mistake" in cutting a deal with the Republicans re: taxes:

"I think the president made a huge mistake in supporting any extension of tax cuts," said Steve Hildebrand, the deputy national director of Obama's presidential campaign and a strategist who has long grown sour on Washington. "We can't afford it as a country, and we should recognize that. We need his leadership and bipartisan congressional leadership on it. And the whole idea of negotiating with Republicans who won't negotiate in good faith, it is not the direction the president should be taking." 

Unless, of course, this president was elected with the support of Wall Street and bankers precisely to do what he has done consistently since he was elected: concede gladly to their demands and to the demands of the political party that shamelessly serves their interests.  Which would mean that citizens like me were total fools to imagine that Mr. Obama ever intended change we could believe in.  Or that we have any real power to change anything in a political process now owned outright by the very rich.

And because I am inclined to think that what I suggest in the preceding paragraph may well be on track (that is, I'm inclined to believe that politics is far more a theater staged by dominant economic interest groups than many political analysts in Western societies appear willing to admit), I find little to praise in all the centrist analysis right now, which is applauding the president's continued commitment to the cold-hearted pragmatist principles that one has to accept, we're informed, in order to get political business done in the real world.  

Centrism is all about assuring that, when things do change--as they inevitably must, at some point, in any social arrangement--the system being changed remains relatively intact while it's tinkered with in cosmetic ways for as long as possible.  With the centrists, who intend to stay at the center, allocating power and determining who will be in the important conversations of any given social structure, still in their accustomed place, of course.  Still in the center.  Still opening doors for some and closing them for many others.  Still allocating power and praising the cold-hearted pragmatism that oils the machinery.

And in the world in which we now find ourselves, the price of that pragmatism grows ever higher.  Except for those who are already obscenely wealthy, of course.  

And for those apologists of the center willing to do their bidding.

Blue Dogs Betrayed by Wealthy Donors Who Backed Blue-Dog Opponents

Interesting: after buying blue-dog Democrats and their votes, the wealthy donors pouring billions into the American political process to assure their right to keep fleecing middle-class and struggling Americans then turned around and backed the Republican opponents of the blue dogs.

So the blue dog Democrats have been lying down with flea-ridden other dogs.  And all they have for their trouble now is a big new crop of fleas . . . .

Paul Krugman on Obama's Moral Collapse

Paul Krugman in today's New York Times on President Obama's moral collapse:

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

Yes.  It's that indifference to the betrayal of one's followers that has gotten me from early on, with this administration.  And it appears I am far from the only gay citizen who is reacting to the betrayal.

Democratic Failure to Change the Terms of Debate (and Implications for Centrist Catholicism)

Note the fulcrum point in the see-saw diagram I just used in my posting about the American Catholic center, to indicate the dishonest, unjust balancing act in which the center continues to engage: balancing viewpoints whose legitimacy has been radically called into question in almost any respected arena outside the parochial boundaries of the Catholic church with viewpoints that point to greater justice for and fuller inclusion of minorities.

When the center works overtime to recycle outmoded ideas that are being challenged for valid reasons by increasing numbers of people of good will, and when it calls its recycling of outmoded ideas a balancing act that assures a fair hearing to all ideas, it actually pivots the discussion in the direction of the rightly discarded ideas.  Not in the direction of full, inclusive discussion of a new consensus that tries to overcome the blind spots and exclusions of the old one.

This is what is going on when the Catholic center claims, on the one hand, to deplore exclusion of gays and lesbians from full participation in the life of the church and discrimination against gays and lesbians, but tries on the other hand to rehabilitate long-exploded clinical terms like "homosexuality."  And while it discusses the place of "homosexuals" in church and society as it rules out the actual testimony of real gay and lesbian human beings as "political" testimony, as promoting a "p-c" "agenda" that has no place in the church.

Though this balancing act, in which the illegitimate claims of now outmoded (but still powerful) ideas of the past are weighed against the legitimate (but often marginalized) views of those pointing to a future necessary to the construction of a more humane world, offers us a false sense of fairness and an illusory sense of stability, it is ultimately destructive to the institution engaging in such a balancing act.  It is destructive because the stasis we achieve when we keep legitimating ideas and linguistic patterns that have rightly been challenged by those building a more humane future places us on the side of injustice and of retrogressive, anti-progressive movements.

When organizations that claim to be on the side of human rights, justice for all, and full inclusion of all human beings in the human community--organizations like the Catholic church--deliberately play retrogressive political and linguistic games to "balance" their discussions of matters of rights, justice, and inclusion, they undermine their ability to give unambiguous prophetic witness to any issue in which rights, justice, and inclusion are at stake.

It's important to note that this is a point now being made in political discussions of the recent U.S. elections.  As Ruth Rosen notes at AlterNet today, underlying the repudiation of the current Democratic administration (and the failure of the Democratic party to mobilize its base to vote) in these elections is widespread revulsion against the refusal of the Democratic leaders elected in 2008 to change the terms of debate following the 2008 elections, with the large popular mandate those leaders were given precisely to do what they had promised: to change the national political conversation.

Rather than take the courageous (and necessary) step to do that, the Democratic party has persisted in keeping alive the old terms of debate, the old "balances" that it inherited from previous failed administrations--at a point in history at which large numbers of Americans indicate discontent with both political parties and the way in which both parties continue to try to recyle now outmoded ideas and solutions to our pressing economic and political problems.

As Rosen argues,

Barack Obama ignited a hope for change and then squandered the opportunity -- right in the middle of high unemployment, terrible economic anxiety, and widespread fear of a declining America -- to hold tightly to the terms of debate that vaulted him to power and might have resulted in many fewer Democratic losses.

And as she concludes,

History reminds us that any social movement that changes the terms of debate will eventually change the national conversation.

Rather than build a new consensus with the mandate they had received in 2008, the leaders of the Democratic party chose to engage in a futile, false "balancing" act in which the very ideas and political strategies that brought us near the brink of economic destruction in the final decades of the 20th century have been treated as legitimate, as a necessary "balance" to a progressive agenda that points the way to a far more viable future for the nation.  To a necessary future.  To the only future possible, if we expect to survive as a nation.  

And into the gap between the glowing progressive campaign rhetoric of the leaders of the Democratic party in 2008 and the plodding, pedestrian way in which those leaders chose to do business once in office, the tea party and the far right leapt.  Relegitimating their voices and spurious ideas after those voices and ideas were resoundingly repudiated in 2008.

And filling the void with constant loud chatter about how science really doesn't know whether evolution is a legitimate theory, or how the constitution really doesn't draw a line of separation between church and state, and how Islamic sharia law is a real threat to the heartland, and how immigrants are beheading American citizens along the Mexican border (even when no headless bodies can be found), and how states need to amend their constitutions to reinforce the constitutional right to hunt, since it may be taken away by federal laws.  And how homosexuality is a chosen "lifestyle" and all homosexuals are likely to die young because they engage in destructive, promiscuous, disease-ridden sex and are prone to suicidal depression.

On and on.  Totally indefensible ideas, rooted in irrationality and prejudice, in bogus science and malicious theology.  

Just like the continuing assault in centrist Catholic circles on the well-substantiated scientific finding that sexual orientation is not a matter of choice, and is established at birth or soon after.  And that even teens can know with assurance that they are gay, and can be bullied to suicide precisely because they are gay.

Going backwards--pretending that God made the world in seven days some 4,000 years ago and that the Muslims of the world have targeted Oklahoma for control by sharia laws--doesn't help us move forwards.  Not at all.

Neither, in American Catholicism, does the attempt to rehabilitate the term "homosexual" and to exclude authentic gay and lesbian voices--real gay and lesbian human beings, brothers and sisters in Christ--as political activists, when we're discussing the place of gays and lesbians in church and society.

The Democratic party is in real hot water because it failed to delegitimate nonsensical anti-scientific and historical ideas from the outset, once it came to power in 2008, and to move the conversation forward--to shift the fulcrum point of the center, because it has to be shifted, if we expect to have a bright future as a nation.

And the American Catholic center is radically undercutting its credibility as a voice for authentic Catholicism and for a bright Catholic future, as it continues to legitimate viewpoints and terminology regarding its gay and lesbian brothers and sisters that have been rightly discarded by people of good will outside the parochial boundaries of an inward-turning church that increasingly sees itself as the only light in a dark world headed for hell.