Remembering: One Gay Soldier Who Gave His Life

We Americans are a famously insular folk, and readers of this blog in other places may not be aware that today is a national holiday in the U.S.: Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember those who have died in the nation's wars.  Steve and I are using the holiday weekend to spend some time in Minnesota, so that he can visit his mother, whom he hasn't seen since his father's funeral.  And his aunts who are Benedictine sisters, who remain constantly welcoming and affirming of us as a gay couple, while Steve's über-Catholic siblings don't welcome us.  One of them even warned us not to come home to visit his mother on this whirlwind trip. 

We've also seen oodles and kaboodles of cousins, and I'm now a bit dazed by several days of driving up and down the state.  Minnesota is a looong state, and Steve's family live at the opposite end of the state from the twin cities, where our flight took us.  An interesting drive, though, with rolling hills and small lakes giving way to sandy, higher terrain with sparser vegetation, and then ending in the flat, land-rich Red River Valley on whose eastern edge Steve's family live and farm.  Full of one tiny town after another, many of them (including Steve's hometown) featuring signs equating abortion with the decline of the nation, with the original sin of the nation, on the outskirts of town, as you enter and leave the community.  

These are warning signs.  You're meant to see them as you drive into and out of town.  They're warnings of what the nation--our nation, the underlying, hidden text reads--will become if people stop voting right.

To me, the signs are reminders of how strong remains the political outreach of those using Catholics to shore up the Republican party and to get Catholic voters to vote "right," in areas like small-town Minnesota.  I'd find the insistence on forcing the rest of the nation to accept Catholic pro-life stances on abortion a lot more compelling, if I saw a similar concern for human life across the spectrum on the part of those staging this political crusade.

But, instead, I see the opposite: I see a blind, mindless equation of American values at their crudest, at their most anti-life, with the gospels, among many of those crusading against abortion.  For example: as we drive into Steve's hometown, we're listening to a radio station playing polka music, making Norwegian jokes, and celebrating the holiday weekend with patriotic and religious songs.  The program ends with an announcement (the man doing the announcing happens to be a cousin of Steve's, a staunch German-American Catholic who, Steve and I know, has a cousin who was a Nazi soldier in Germany, with whom the family remained in contact) that, it being a quasi-sacred holiday and all, we'll finish with an appropriate hymn, "The Old Rugged Cross."

But by mistake, the announcer plays, instead, "God Bless America."  And that seems to say it all, for small-town pro-life values: American dominance in the world portrayed as divine will, civil religion tragically intermixed with Catholic and evangelical values and teachings, the cross wrapped in the flag.  Nothing much examined very carefully, as long as it's proclaimed to us by some traditional authority figure somewhere, who tells us who's the real enemy (liberals, people of color, gays, Muslims, environmentalists, "them"), and who stands on God's side (George Bush, of whom one of Steve's uncles has just made a small statue, celebrating Bush's appearance at the 9/11 site, bullhorn in hand; Republicans; the pope and bishops).

And I feel millions of miles away from all of this, culturally and spiritually.  For one thing, I have no recollection at all of Memorial Day from my childhood.  We never celebrated that holiday.  Didn't even know it existed.  

And as I grew up and learned of its existence in other parts of the country, I discovered the reason why: this was a holiday that, in many parts of the American South, was considered an imposed holiday to remember them rather than us.  To commemorate the Union dead and not the Confederate dead.

So that we substituted our own version of memorial day, with Confederate themes, which was celebrated several weeks later than the Yankee holiday--in early June.  As I became an adult, I realized that this was why the cemetery in which my mother's family have been buried for several generations in southeast Arkansas has always held its decoration day on the first weekend in June, followed by a church homecoming the following weekend.  And this is why my father's maternal family have always gathered that same Sunday in June for their family reunion, which is centered around and attached to another small church cemetery in Louisiana where many of my forebears on that side of the family are buried.

I grew up with alternative traditions, and for me, the rhetoric about God and country that comes so easy to people of faith in the heartland seems alien, something from another land, another set of experiences than those that shaped me as a child.  For me, given my formative experiences, it seems dangerous--actively so--to equate God and Christian values with patriotic values and with the aspirations of any particular nation in the world.  All of which live under the eschatological proviso, and none of which deserve divine status or idolatrous adulation.

I've been remembering already, much of May, since May is the month in which that small cemetery in which my mother's family are buried issues its annual appeal for donations.  Since it's a "free" cemetery--no one pays for plots there; if you have roots in that church community, even if you don't belong to the church, you simply have to sign up and claim a plot in the cemetery--I feel obligated to give money to the cemetery each year, to assure that it's maintained. 

And as I give, I remember my mother and brother, both buried in this cemetery, along with my maternal grandparents, three great-grandparents, two great-great grandparents, and numerous other aunts, uncles, cousins buried in the cemetery.  I also remember, each May, my grandmother's death on May 23 in 1968, several days before I graduated from high school.  I remember my grandmother with great devotion, because of all she meant to me as I was growing up.  She was a strong, upright, tender woman who also had a fierce streak that frightened my brother.

But not me, for some reason.  I saw the fierceness as the external shield for the inward tenderness and inner strength: the way in which those virtues communicated (and protected) themselves in her interaction with others.  And so I remember, each May, all that my grandmother did to shape me as a human being from the time I was born--born with, so I'm told, a slightly misshapen head, since the doctors feared that labor was taking too long, and used forceps to pull me head-first from a womb I apparently intended not to leave, causing my skull to be somewhat lopsided when I emerged into the world.  So that my grandmother spent the first weeks of my life literally shaping me, carefully kneading my skull back into the seemly round shape of a well-tended child.

Steve and I are remembering this weekend in another interesting way, as we celebrate our idiosyncratic Memorial Day.  One of the cousins we visited yesterday has, over the past several years, generously shared with Steve some five or six photo albums and scrapbooks that her mother meticulously put together over the years.  Because the cousin is 87, the photos, newspaper clippings, prayer cards, and so forth in these albums go back quite a ways.  They're treasures for family historians.

And as Steve photographed and scanned all of these albums over the past year or so, we made a curious discovery: one of the people commemorated in the albums is an uncle of the cousin who owns the albums, who died in World War II.  He's not directly related to Steve, since he's on the French and not the German side of this particular family.  And he was, it's clear to Steve and me as we look at the photos his sister kept of him, a gay man.

A gay man who left small-town Minnesota before the war to go to San Francisco with a friend.  So that many of the pictures in the album show him in his San Francisco life--at the beach, with several other handsome men (and always beside him the same handsome man whom the sister carefully labels "the Virginian" in each photo).  Or sitting in a convertible, top-down, beside the Virginian, in whimsical drag, scarf carefully arranged in Grace Kelly style, demure white gloves.

Just because.  Because, it's clear from many of the pictures, this was a young man who loved life and loved to have fun, who had himself buried in sand on the beach, with tiny little legs formed from the sand to match a full-sized body. 

A man who was an accomplished amateur painter, who did paintings for some of the churches in his community in small-town northern Minnesota before he left for San Francisco.  (This is a theme not new to me.  My sister-in-law's uncle was a gay man who left small-town Arkansas for San Francisco in a slightly later period, in the 1950s, who painted a stunning mural of Christ the Good Shepherd for the baptistry of his childhood church in Arkansas.)

Yesterday, when we visited the elderly cousin so that Steve could return to her the albums she had loaned him, he asked about her uncle Enthyeme's art work, and she rummaged around and brought out a number of paintings he did while living out west.  They're wonderful landscapes in vibrant colors, with witty little touches that go along with the too-small legs of sand and the natty white gloves.  For instance, Enthyeme hides his initials in tiny details of the landscape, so that you have to search the whole painting to find them.

And here's what we were able to tell his niece, who knew that he had died in the war, but didn't know the details, since her knowledge comes from one final, censored letter he sent his sister, saying that he was on the front lines: when we saw his pictures in the photo album and wondered who he was, we did a bit of online research and found he died in the landing at Anzio.  And that he's buried in a military cemetery there, whose tombstones have been photographed and are online.

So that we could retrieve a photo of the tombstone and share it with Steve's cousin, who had never seen this photograph and wasn't sure where her uncle was buried, or even where, precisely, he was killed as a soldier.  And, strangely enough, the very day we did this online research and found the photo turned out to be the day Enthyeme died.

And so we're remembering today: one soldier who left no wife and children behind, who was drafted after he'd begun a new life as a gay man (of this we're certain from the photos, though it's not something anyone in Steve's family has ever said to us, or may even know) in San Francisco.  A young man full of fun and talent, with his life ahead of him.

Who gave his life for his country, because he was called into action, despite the fact that the American armed services pretended for far too long that gay men could not make adequate soldiers.  Or were a threat to the coherence of a military unit.  Or posed a danger to the country because they could be blackmailed.

Enthyeme gave his life.  And we're determined to remember, because the pictures we see of him in the albums Steve has now copied, and the paintings of his we saw yesterday, remind us that this was a life well worth remembering.

Prominent Right-Wing Catholic Priest-Activist Fr. Euteneuer Caught in Scandal

Remember Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, the priest-director of the high-profile right-wing Catholic Republican party front "pro-life" beltway organization Human Life International?  Euteneuer came on my radar screen back in 2009 when he published a Good Friday homily entitled “Good Friday: The World’s First Exorcism,” which he apparently first delivered in 2006, and which he then published on his HLI  blog in 2009.  A homily that was, well, flat crazy.  And not a little dangerous.  

It's full of apocalyptic folderol and bloody apocalyptic imagery, and uses the word "Jesus" twice, while it talks about "blood" ten times, and about people "mired in" "immoral lifestyles" on whom we need to call  down the blood of Jesus and free from the clutches of Satan.  Euteneuer continued on my radar screen as he combined his Republican front work "pro-life" activities with some good old-fashioned gay-bashing, writing hair-raising essays about how gay marriage spells the end of civilization.  

And my radar continued to ping when one of the top employees of HLI began to plaster this blog with toxic comments about this and that--most recently, with rants about the end of DADT and the moral decline of the military.  Which is a big theme with HLI--the military, that is.  Fr. Euteneuer used to make much of his supposed Marine background until a former Marine and Catholic convert named Frank Weathers began to question Euteneuer's claims about the extent of his military service, and those claims began to be revised in publications about the HLI director. 

Euteneuer and the HLI bunch are, in other words, firmly in that manly-man camp of thinking about the priesthood, re: which I blogged earlier today. They're in the camp that sees the gays as the problem in the priesthood and the world at large, and they're just outdone that the military, which looms large in their apocalyptic right-wing version of Catholicism, will now begin permitting openly gay service members to serve. 

And so with my radar pinging along, I wondered what on earth was going on a few months back, when Euteneuer suddenly disappeared from his post at HLI and showed up back in the diocese of Palm Beach, Florida, where he's apparently incardinated as a priest, and where he has also apparently been continuing what he calls his "ministry of exorcism."  I wondered, because priests who head high-profile Republican front groups right-wing Catholic "pro-life" organizations don't normally up and leave those organizations in haste like this unless some story is attached to the departure.

I said nothing about any of this on this blog because, of course, I knew nothing.  But I continued thinking my own thoughts and wondering whether we'd hear some story to explain that departure down the road. 

And now the story begins to come out: all the while that he was calling down the blood of Jesus on those "mired in" immoral lifestyles and ranting about gay marriage as the end of civilization and casting out demons, it appears Fr. Euteneuer has been involved in his own little drama.  Involving, he admits, an adult female with whom he "violated the boundaries of chastity" without engaging in "the sexual act."  Said adult female was, in fact, under his pastoral care in his "ministry of exorcism."

And what an adult chooses to do with another adult in a private and consensual relationship, I wouldn't  usually care a flip about or consider any business of mine at all.  Except for this: when religious authority figures betray the trust of someone to whom they're ministering by enticing them into an intimate encounter, they do something seriously harmful and seriously wrong.  By its very nature, such a relationship involves a power dynamic that  threatens to turn the person enticed into intimacy by the religious authority figure into an object, and which turns the relationship into a relationship of coercion.  I'm of the opinion that those who take vows of chastity should try to abide by them or seriously consider leaving ministry if they are unable to do so.

As I say, I wouldn't consider any of this my particular business, except: for the exceptionally serious violation of pastoral trust that is, by Fr. Euteneuer's own admission, at the dark heart of this story.  And except for this: except this particular priest has made it his business to advocate for the denial of communion to Catholics using contraception.  And to argue that Senator Ted Kennedy was a "heretical Catholic" about whom there was nothing admirable from a "moral point of view," and that this fellow Catholic should be denied a Catholic burial. 

And he has stoutly defended the barring of gay persons from the priesthood on the ground that "celibacy . . . requires that men renounce marriage for the sake of the kingdom of God—something homosexuals cannot do."  And that the homosexual "lifestyle compromises a man’s ability to competently serve as a priest."  And  permitting gays to form legalized same-sex unions will spell "'the end' of the Christian civilization whose values used to form the basis of American common life."  

And while decrying the immorality of his brother and sister Catholics who happen to be gay or lesbian, and while denouncing a brother Catholic as "heretical" and arguing for the denial of Catholic burial to him, and while calling for the barring of Catholics using contraception from the communion table, Fr. Euteneuer has been using his "ministry of exorcism" to violate "the boundaries of chastity"?  Something's wrong with this picture.

As I say, none of this would be my business or would merit commentary if this particular right-wing Catholic activist in a clerical collar had not made it his business for some years now to try to further the cause of one political party and the agenda of that party to capture the Catholic vote, by playing the gay-bashing card over and over, and by attacking fellow Catholics who have different political and theological views in a conspicuously nasty way.  While, it now appears, betraying the moral principles he accuses others of betraying.

And so here's yet another of those rabidly anti-gay manly-men priests who should give anyone thinking about their analysis of the ills of the contemporary church, and of the remedy for those ills, serious cause to think.  Serious cause to think about the pitfalls of their analysis that the gays are the big problem in the priesthood, and getting them out of the way--and attacking them at every turn in society at large--will surely cure the ills of the church today.

Cindy Jacobs Explains It All for Us: DADT Repealed, Birds Fall from the Sky

Max Brantley at the Arkansas Times blog notes (citing Right-Wing Watch) that right-wing Christian nutcase homophobe evangelist Cindy Jacobs explains it all for us: Jacobs explains why birds fell from the sky on New Year's eve in Beebe, Arkansas, that is.

It goes like this: the birds fell on the town of Beebe.  And Arkansas's current governor is named Beebe, don't you see!  And a previous Arkansas governor who became a U.S. president, Bill Clinton, brought us don't ask, don't tell.

Which in some way that escapes rational (if not theological) analysis opened the door for the recent repeal of DADT.  Which is a violation of God's laws for nature.  Which therefore results in blackbirds falling on the (heavily Republican) town of Beebe, Arkansas.  Which is in the Church of Christ belt of the state, a staunchly conservative part of the state that tends to oppose any overtures to gay rights.  (And which is in the same county as Harding University, a Church of Christ-sponsored school attended by Kenneth Starr, the right-wing tool attorney who hounded President Clinton for a number of years, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars as he tried to find a basis to impeach the president.)

And let's not forget that drum fish also died in Arkansas not long before the blackbirds fell, so God must also be giving us some kind of semantic sign there, too--a drumroll for holiness, perhaps?  And what remains to be explained is why the birds didn't fall over Clinton, Arkansas, since that would make the connection to the former president and DADT even more obvious.

Wouldn't it?

Well, watch for yourself and see if you can understand this batch of lunatic reasoning theological argumentation about why we can expect nature to rebel if we grant any concession at all to the humanity of gay and lesbian human beings:

DADT Ends, and Some Catholics Refuse to Rejoice

With the end to official discrimination against a targeted minority in the American military, I've received several fascinating comments here by someone who works as publicity director for a Catholic anti-abortion group in the U.S.  He's clearly intently unhappy to see legalized discrimination against gay human beings ended in the military.

And that makes me ask questions that fascinate me.  First, what's the link--and it seems obvious to a certain set of Catholics of the political and religious right--between defending the value of human life in opposition to abortion, and defending discrimination against those who are gay and lesbian?  Is there some genetic connection between being anti-abortion and anti-gay?  Must one who defends the value of human life by opposing abortion also support discrimination against those who are gay or lesbian? 

I suppose the answer many Catholics of the right would give to that question is that, in both areas, "Christians" are fighting an intractable battle against a godless secular culture that is eroding Christian values in (and Christian control of) the public realm.  On the face of it, however, it seems to me that seeking to defend the value of human life by attacking the value of some human lives is counterintuitive.  If anyone is eroding the case the religious right wishes to make for the sanctity of human life vis-a-vis abortion, it's members of the religious right themselves, by their callous and seemingly endless attacks on the dignity and worth of the lives of gay human beings.

As I've said before, I have great difficulty believing that many of those who claim to promote the value of human life in the abortion debate even believe seriously in the value of life.  Their behavior, and the inconsistency of their position about the value of particular categories of human beings, lead me to conclude otherwise, and to conclude that the battle against abortion is largely fed by the desire to control women and to keep male control of women alive.

And in this respect, their opposition to anti-gay discrimination reflects their core values of male domination and control of women and men they regard as feminized.  They sense an important symbolic defeat in the end of legalized discrimination against gays in the military, because this will open the door to permitting men they wish to demean to assert their masculinity in an arena that these Christians of the right want to keep barred to anyone except men they imagine as bona fide men--heterosexual men.  It's patriarchy Catholics of this ilk are defending, and male entitlement and male domination of women, not Catholic values.

Another fascinating question my recent exchange with the Catholic anti-abortion activist who has written me about DADT raises is this: how is it possible to claim that one represents Catholic teaching and Catholic values in a more or less exclusive way, while one totally ignores the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church forbidding discrimination against those who are gay or lesbian?  Fr. James Martin is asking that question right now in a blog discussion at America, and some of the responses he's receiving--from readers who routinely log in to attack gay and lesbian human beings, and whom I've mentioned on this blog in the past--are revealing.

These responses show that, for a certain group of Catholics in the U.S., the teaching of the catechism forbidding anti-gay discrimination is null and void.  These Catholics have every intent of discriminating, whenever and wherever they can.  And they intend to claim warrant for their discrimination in Catholic teaching, even as they completely ignore what the catechism says on this point.

And one has to wonder if the total silence of the U.S. Catholic bishops on this important human rights issue, and on the human rights breakthrough represented by the end of legalized discrimination in the American military, is designed to give heart and cover to this powerful minority of anti-gay Catholics who do not represent the consensus of most American Catholics on this human rights issue.

John Lewis and Louis Gohmert on Discrimination in the Military: Who Owns the Future of American Democracy?

Another way to put the point about Archbishop Dolan and Bill Donohue: these battles about who owns central Christian symbols are really also about who will ultimately prevail as history moves along, and as a rich, multifaceted tradition like Catholicism moves along with the current of history.  And as the meaning of its central symbols unfolds under the impulse of historical development, as believers appropriate the symbols and apply them to their experience in ever-shifting cultural contexts.

And that's the same battle that's now occurring in American democracy, as Congress debates the eradication of discrimination in the military.  John Lewis's rejoinder to Louis Gohmert is a classic encapsulation of conflicting tendencies within our democracy.  One tendency, rooted in the experience of the founding fathers themselves, has been, from the inception of our democracy, to restrict rights and privileges to white, property-owning males.

Gohmert continues that tradition, which, throughout American history, continuously finds new minority groups to oppose and exclude, from freed slaves to women to immigrants and gays and lesbians. 

John Lewis stands within another tradition in American democracy, which calls on our nation to live according to its better angels, to open wide the door of freedom and opportunity to everyone, and, in particular, to those most in need of a helping hand.  

For my money, one of these tendencies represents the future of American democracy (if we want to have a viable future).  The other doesn't.  I'll leave it to you to decide which is which, and where the moral arc of the universe seems to be pointing.

Top Catholic Chaplain Opposes End of Discrimination Against Gay Service Members

 

 

You know that line in the Catholic catechism that deplores discrimination against gay and lesbian folks?  Well, it appears not all Catholic pastoral officials really believe the catechism, when it comes to this issue.  As Eugene McMullen notes at Religion Dispatches today, the Catholic Archbishop for the Military Services Timothy Broglio opposes ending the ban on openly gay soldiers in the American armed forces. 

Broglio quotes the catechism for his defense (conveniently overlooking that line about discrimination), declares gays akin to alcoholics, and suggests (mendaciously) that permitting openly gay soldiers to serve would erode the religious liberty of Catholic chaplains.  

Don't expect any big outcry about this defense of overt discrimination, by the way, from those influential journals of the American Catholic center.  None of them have even mentioned DADT--not in their official editorial sectors, or by way of substantial articles.  A significant national discussion is going on right now about ending legal discrimination against a despised minority in a major American institution, and the Catholic journals have their lips sewn shut.

It's as if the schools were being integrated in the 1950s and 1960s, and Catholics were sitting around talking about, oh, whether priests should wear collars in public or not.  Or whether Catholics can nor cannot sing well.

A recipe for irrelevance?  Yes, absolutely so, especially when Robert Putnam and David Campbell are reporting in their recent book American Grace that the homophobia to which some faith communities insist on clinging is the primary reason that young folks are leaving the churches. 

And, in its own way, just as immoral (and a manifestation of the same anti-gospel mentality) as the refusal of the Vatican to assist the Irish government in tracking down priests abusing minors.  Silence in the face of discrimination and other social evils is never defensible.  

Something about the way even "good" Catholics of the center are dealing with their gay brothers and sisters these days seems just not right.

Chris Weigant: Attach DADT Repeal to Tax-Cut Bill

And here's a clever political proposal: Chris Weigant suggests removing the don't ask, don't tell repeal from the military budget bill and attaching it to the tax-cut deal.

Yes.  Get our Congressfolks to vote on monetary issues, and you'll get them to vote on what really counts for them.  Human rights be damned.  "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Luke 12:34, Matthew 6:21).

Get our senators to vote on something that involves their own self-interest, and attach legislation designed to protect a stigmatized group of people from discrimination, and we might finally get some much-needed movement in the direction of principle.  And meaningful democracy.

Military DADT Report Undercuts Religious Right Arguments about Religious Freedom

When the religious right loses the military, it has really lost any claim to represent the cultural mainstream.  The attempt to argue that permitting openly gay people to serve in the military will inhibit religious freedom of chaplains is absolutely disingenuous.  It turns on the premise that if chaplains don't have gay folks to single out, target, and bash, they might as well shut down shop--since there's no other sin on which to focus.

And where else are we hearing that argument these days?  Oh, yes, in the statement of the Illinois Catholic Conference to which I linked yesterday, as the Catholic bishops of that state oppose same-sex civil unions.  There, too, the bugbear of inhibition of religious freedom is pushed as an argument against gay civil unions, with claims that protecting gay families from discrimination will force Catholic institutions to provide services to gays they would otherwise withhold.

Which shows you the extent to which the American Catholic bishops have chosen to get into bed with the religious right in its meanest, most hate-mongering manifestations.  Completely undercutting their claims to be all about human rights and combating discrimination, and respecting the values of life.

And just as the religious right is losing the battle to make the military an extension of evangelical churches, the Illinois Catholic bishops lost round one of the battle against same-sex civil unions yesterday, as the Illinois House voted to bring the civil unions bill to the Senate.  The moral arc of history is moving beyond faith-based groups that continue to want to target and hate gay and lesbian people in the name of God.  

Perhaps it's time for those groups to reconsider and to ask whether God ever blesses such hatred poured out in God's name.

Andrew Sullivan on the White Evangelical Exception in American Politics

 

Andrew Sullivan writes yesterday about "the white evangelical exception" in American politics.  As he notes, the latest Pew study about gays in the military shows Americans favoring an end to DADT and its ban on gays in the military by 2-1.  

But with one notable exception: about half of white evangelical Protestants remain opposed to letting out gays serve in the military.  Sullivan concludes: "In some ways, much of American politics is about just how much of a veto this group can exert over the rest of the country, and how determined the majority is to resist them."

He has that right.  The political (and cultural) history of the U.S. has been determined by some time now by a white evangelical Protestant minority, primarily but not exclusively in the Southern states, to whom the center continues to cater in the name of "balance" and pragmatism.  And as Steve Kornacki reports at Slate, the more the nation moves Democratic at the federal level, the more determined the states of the Old South are to move Republican. 

Throughout the Southeast right now, Democratic legislators are switching to the Republican party in the wake of the recent elections.  In my home state of Arkansas, one of our Democratic senators, Mark Pryor, has just announced that he's not about to vote for ending DADT because homosexuality is a sin.  Those who have seen Bill Maher's film "Religulous" will  recall that in that film, Maher pushes Mark Pryor on the question of evolution--whether he accepts the scientific theory of evolution--and Pryor equivocates.  He suggests, ludicrously, that we just don't know enough to say yea or nay about this matter, and the biblical creation narratives, read literally, might very well be scientifically true. 

And as a minority of faith-based voters in the American Southeast continue to determine the nation's future, as a drag on every forward step politically and culturally, Katherine Q. Seelye reports in the New York Times today that the Old South is gearing up to celebrate the 150th anniversary of secession with style.  With  "a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink" in Charleston, where a distant cousin of mine, little Doushka Pickens, who was three years old at the time, lit the fuse for the cannon that was fired at Fort Sumter, setting the civil war into motion.

And by the way, as the Times article notes, we can anticipate that the celebrations of secession will remain silent about the issue of slavery and the role it played in the war.  And as Andrew Sullivan suggests, the big question to be considered here is why the majority in the nation as a whole continues to give veto power to this minority.  (And, I'd add, why Catholics who have moved increasingly into the Republican fold imagine the values and ethos of Catholicism are congruent with the values and ethos of Southern-style evangelical Protestantism.  I grew up in that tradition before I became Catholic, and I'm here to tell you they're not.)