Catholic Ethicist Daniel Maguire on USCCB President Timothy Dolan's "Love Letter" to Paul Ryan

Also noteworthy today: Marquette University ethics professor Daniel Maguire's assessment of the recent love letter that the head of the U.S. Catholic bishops Timothy Dolan wrote Representative Paul Ryan.  Though Ryan seems to have only the most tenuous possible passing acquaintance with Catholic social teaching and with the preferential option for the poor that animates this teaching, and though he has stated that his social philosophy is radically influenced by the self-centered social Darwinism of Ayn Rand, the USCCB president has essentially given Ryan his blessing and imprimatur.  

While he lays into Catholic thinkers who even begin to imagine deviating from the Catholic magisterial party line on issues like contraception, abortion, or homosexuality.  As Maguire notes, he himself experienced the rough side of Dolan's tongue in a letter Dolan wrote him as archbishop of Milwaukee, which characterized Maguire's moral theology as "preposterous and disingenuous," and "totally at odds with clear Church teaching, Sacred Scripture, the Magisterium, and Natural Law."

Ryan, by contrast, receives from Dolan a missive that is, in Maguire's view, a "mellifluous effusion" dripping with "adulatory congratulations" and "sweet nothings."  If Dolan were acting "in Jesus mode" (and not qua the mouthpiece of the Catholic Republican American Party [CRAP] that he actually is), he'd come to conclusions similar to those of the seventy Catholic scholars who recently took Speaker Boehner to task for promoting social and economic programs that attack and damage the least among us:

Could you not be as tough as Jesus was when he rebuked those in power who were mouthing pieties, while stripping the poor and favoring the pillaging rich? “Whitened sepulchers,” Jesus called them, covered with platitudinous posturing on the outside but inside filled with the stench of moral decay. “Hypocrites,” Jesus called them repeatedly, “blind guides” who are “fit for hell.” “Outside you look like honest men, but inside you are brimful of hypocrisy and crime.” (Matthew 23)

Nothing tepid about Jesus when poor workers and children were being trampled.

But, then, Archbishop Dolan doesn't intend to speak and act "in Jesus mode."  Not as long as he is  financed by, indebted to, and answerable to the Republican business leaders to whom he and other U.S. Catholic bishops have sold their soul.

For whom Jesus and his teachings clearly mean far less than Ayn Rand does.

Link roundup

1. An explanation for why "illegal immigration is the best immigration."

2. "Jon Stewart is misleading stoned smart-alecks in dorm lounges across America about how things really work."

3. Jennifer Aniston recently bought an apartment in her dog's name.

John Boehner as Catholic University of America Commencement Speaker: Where's the Outrage?

David Gibson has started a valuable thread at Commonweal's blog today, noting the contrast between what happened when President Obama gave the commencement address at Notre Dame University two years ago, and what's happening now as Speaker John Boehner gives Catholic University of America's commencement address.  There's no outrage, none of the vitriolic reaction many Catholics exhibited when the president spoke at Notre Dame--vitriol stemming from the claim that the president undermines Catholic values, particularly in the area of respect for life.

Remember the firestorm that bishops including high-ranking Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston and Bishop Gregory Aymond of Austin tried to ignite when Notre Dame announced President Obama as its commencement speaker? DiNardo opined that the invitation militated against Catholic values--namely, "the fundamental moral issue of the inestimable worth of the human person from conception to natural death is a principle that soaks all our lives as Catholics . . . ."  Aymond argued that Notre Dame was "not living up to its Catholic identity" in inviting Mr. Obama to be a commencement speaker.  And his opinion must have been pleasing to some powers that be somewhere, since a few weeks down the road, he was named archbishop of New Orleans.

Well, it's perhaps not quite right to say that there's nary peep about Boehner's invitation to Catholic University, and how the values promoted and served by Speaker Boehner clash with "the fundamental moral issue of the inestimable worth of the human person from conception to natural death."  As Gibson notes, more than 70 Catholic theologians, scholars, priests, sisters, and social justice leaders have sent a letter to John Boehner as he prepares for this commencement address, noting that his "voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings."  Michael Sean Winters has made the letter available at the National Catholic Reporter site.

The magisterial teaching about respect for life with which Speaker Boehner's record is at variance?  It's the teaching consistently held by the Catholic church from the church's foundations up to now that we are required to put the needs of the poor and vulnerable first in social, political, and economic decision-making.  The letter to Boehner states:

From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.

I wonder if Cardinal DiNardo and Archbishop Aymond will be speaking out about the threat to Catholic values and Catholic identity now that Speaker Boehner is headed to Catholic University of America.  Somehow, I doubt that this will be the case--particularly not as Cardinal Raymond Burke, whom Colleen Kochivar-Baker rightly calls "the de facto pope of the Republican Catholic Church," comes to Houston to lead a demonstration at a Planned Parenthood clinic.  

Cardinal Burke certainly gets around, as he flies from Rome to the U.S. to mount political demonstrations that predictably target one political party and anoint the other as the Catholic pro-life party, or as he flies to Australia to give lectures to college students about the decline of the Christian west.  As the Texas Tea Party Republican Women's website is announcing right now, in addition to his carefully staged Planned Parenthood demonstration, Burke will be in Kansas City this summer speaking at a conference being touted by the Texas Tea Party Republican women.

I wonder who foots all the bills for all those trips.

And I wonder why the focus of Catholic leaders and many Catholic pro-lifers on what is or is not a threat to the "inestimable worth of the human person from conception to natural death" is so slippery, so constantly shifting.  So selective.  And so selectively politicized.

Illustration roundup

Lots of great (and silly) Thor by Kirby pages in this gallery. You can buy Kirby's Thor collection at Amazon.




This is a dating don't.




Editorial illustration by Tomer Hanuka for the NY Times.





Spider-Man and Daredevil by Moebius (from a gallery of Moebius art). (It's interesting that Moebius is so famous, yet doesn't have a single comic in print at Amazon.) Via.




Pen Ward looking for a drinking buddy the other night.

Link roundup

1. This Reddit thread has links to several iPhone wallpapers, including Pac-Man and Tron.

2. Why are most livable city lists always so lame?

In fact, Vancouver’s boringly consistent topping of the polls underlines the fundamental fault that lies at the heart of the idea of measuring cities by their “liveability”. The most recent surveys, from Monocle magazine, Forbes, Mercer and The Economist, concur: Vancouver, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Munich dominate the top. What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No LA or HK? None of the cities that people seem to actually want to emigrate to, to set up businesses in? To be in? None of the wealthiest, flashiest, fastest or most beautiful cities? Nope.

This article tries to explain. Via.

3. It's always good to be reminded how politicians (in this case Obama) stage photos.

Link roundup

1. NERF stands for NonExpanding Recreational Foam. Via.

2. Lots of interesting anecdotes in this article about Tina Brown (including how much money The Daily Beast and Newsweek have lost recently). For example:

As is not uncommon in preparation for Brown’s parties, that afternoon the room’s furniture was loaded into a truck, which was waiting, out of sight, for the last guests to leave before unloading its contents back into the apartment. Sir Harold Evans, Brown’s 82-year-old husband, has been known to joke with friends that he’d prefer to be in the truck, where he could circle the block in the comfort of his own home.

And:

As her guests said goodbye, Brown and Evans looked eager to get their furniture back. Suddenly the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy wafted in, dressed in black and trailing a cloud of cologne and his mistress, Daphne Guinness, who was wearing a revealing black cat suit and heelless Alexander McQueen platform shoes. Lévy was fresh from Paris, where, he proceeded to tell Brown and a few stragglers, he had just single-handedly persuaded his old friend President Nicolas Sarkozy to go to war against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. (A few days later, Steven Erlanger of The New York Times reported that this had, improbably enough, been the case.)

3. "An ongoing fight between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei has taken a turn for the weird, as several of the president's closest advisers have been arrested and charged with being 'magicians' and invoking djinns, or spirits."

Link roundup

1. FYI, you have to pay $150 to $495 to be nominated for a Webby award.

2. If you missed it, Minnesota House Majority Leader Matt Dean said he "hated" Neil Gaiman and called him a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota." Neil Gaiman responds here. His response includes a link to Dean's contact page and encourages you to share your thoughts with Mr. Dean.

3. Here's an explanation for why eating asparagus makes your urine smell. Via.

Matt Drudge on Osama's death

Drudge on Osama's death via.

Link roundup

1. SF Chronicle:

In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.

Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:

Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all.

2. The time Jim Carrey went totally nuts for new year's eve on David Letterman.

3. How law schools trick students into attending by promising them merit scholarships, and then keeping secret how likely it is that they will lose the scholarship after their first or second year. Via.

Link roundup

1. Thomas P.M. Barnett applauding the utilization of weaponized drones in Libya:

This sort of response sends a lot more signal than the heavy hardware or brigades. It says America will continue to fight as it always has: by generating more stuff than you can possibly imagine. The old model was big stuff. The new model is small and disposable and unmanned stuff. It comes with willpower attached. It's staying power is its dwell time.

China thinks it has a grip on the future with a carrier killer, but it's protecting itself from the 20th century. The name of the game going forward is what it has been these past two decades: globalization's advance, the remapping of fake states, the liberation of people long oppressed by their conditions and cruel leaders, and the new matrixing of supply chains and labor pools as this magnificent process continues to unfold.

2. Octopus ride. Via.

3. Writer discusses how incredibly easy it was to create a fake photograph of an iPhone 5, and get the photo on the main tech blogs.

*Buy iPads at eBay.

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.

Rick Santorum on Crusades: The Left Hates Christendom

 

Yesterday, as I wrote about the presidential aspirations of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, and how both gentlemen are now doing everything in their power to position themselves as the candidate of choice of the religious right, I said,

The 2012 election cycle is going to be interesting to watch.  I predict it will be one of the slimiest, most unabashedly mendacious eruptions of religious and moral hypocrisy by so-called defenders of religion that we've seen in a long time on the American political scene. 

In a separate posting on the ongoing and astonishing attempt of the leaders of the Catholic church to redefine the term "religious freedom" to mean that they have the right to block the freedom of other religious groups to solemnize gay unions, I wrote,

Interesting, isn't it, to see people twist words like "freedom" and "non-discrimination" (not to mention "love," if they ever get around to talking about it) into something that means the very opposite of what the words actually mean, even while claiming that they are the ones whose freedom is being curtailed, and they are the ones being discriminated against?

And here's a story that combines aspects of both of those previous postings: another right-wing Catholic who is making noises these days about a 2012 presidential run, and who, like his fellow Catholic Mr. Gingrich, is also seeking to woo the religious right, is Rick Santorum.  And recently, in the heartland of the American religious right, at a private Christian school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Santorum made the baffling claim that the medieval crusades were not about aggression at all, but that the "left" has revised the history of that shameful moment of Christian history in order to score points against Christendom.

Santorum stated,

The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical.  And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.

And he went on to say,

What I'm talking about is onward American soldiers.  What we're talking about are core American values. "All men are created equal" — that's a Christian value, but it's an American value.  It's become part of our national religion, if you will.  The point I was trying to make was that the national faith, the national ideal, is rooted in the Christian ideal — in the Judeo-Christian concept of the person.

Islamic violence = evil aggression.  Christian violence against Islam = good and holy non-aggression.  American values = Christian values.  American aggression = God at work in the world defending the world against evil.

As I've been saying about Mr. Gingrich, it will be interesting to watch this election and see just how willing American Catholics are to be duped by these folks intent on selling out core Catholic values as they pander to a religious right whose values have little in common with Catholic values.  The U.S. Catholic bishops have worked long and hard to fuse the American Catholic church and the Republican party by getting into bed with the religious right.

Messrs. Gingrich and Santorum are the result.  As an indicator of how willing some American Catholics are to give Newt a free pass to engage in shameless pandering, since these Catholics are comfortable with equating the Catholic position on political matters with that of the Republican party and the religious right, watch the responses to Michael O'Loughlin's latest posting at the America blog.  O'Loughlin focuses on how Mr. Gingrich "is pontificating on various moral issues of the day even as he battles questions about his own moral failings."

And some of his brother Catholics are already logging in to indicate that said pontificating (on an exceedingly shaky moral foundation) doesn't matter in the least to them: Gingrich is an outstanding leader with a viable moral vision for American society.  Watch the blather about admirable Newtian moral leadership pile higher and higher at this site as O'Loughlin's posting reaches the ears of the right-wing Catholic talk networks.

The graphic is Tea Party Jesus's send-up of Santorum's recent remarks in South Carolina.

Diana Butler Bass and Jim Wallis: Moral Dimensions of Wisconsin Story

 

And, turning from Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee to some real and substantial moral analysis of the current American political scene: two good commentaries as the week ends by Diana Butler Bass and Jim Wallis about the situation in Wisconsin.  Both touch on the significant moral-religious issues involved in what's happening there.

As Bass notes, though a large number of religious leaders, including several Catholic bishops, have condemned Gov. Scott Walker's attack on labor, Walker does not intend to relent.  Butler's explanation of why Walker remains obdurate in the face of strong opposition from faith leaders is compelling: as she indicates, he is firmly ensconced within a particular kind of evangelical spirituality strongly represented in some areas of the U.S., with strong political influence.  This kind of American evangelicalism stresses biblical inerrancy, sin (viewed in narrow individualistic and moralistic ways), exclusive salvation through Christ,  eternal damnation for unbelievers and the immoral, and and individualistic "Jesus and me" approach to salvation.

And so issues like how corporations or governments treat working people are not, in the view of this individualistic, moralistic kind of evangelicalism, even moral at all.  Morality has to do with what one pelvis does to another pelvis, or with what women who are outside male control do with their bodies.  It doesn't have to do with what happens to workers, with the oppression of the weak by the strong or the poor by the rich.

Moreover, in this form of American evangelical piety, it's considered a virtue to be defiantly stubborn in the face of opposition--including or even particularly opposition coming from other religious groups.  You and you alone, your group and your group alone, has the corner on the salvation market and the bible-interpreting market.  And Butler's conclusion: 

Walker and those who stand with him in this particular (and powerful) corner of the religious right are dangerous--dangerous to all the rest of us, because they do not intend to dialogue, compromise, listen, have any checks placed on a power they regard as handed to them directly by God: Unlike the Roman Catholics and traditional Protestants who have spoken on behalf of the laborers, Walker has no spiritual "check" on him, no authority other than the ones he hears in his own head, and no moral culpability in this situation. He's the good Christian soldier, just following God's lead.

And this is why Scott Walker's religion is actually dangerous in the public square. Because it lacks the ability to compromise, it is profoundly anti-democratic. Many faith traditions actually possess deep spiritual resources that allow them to participate in pluralistic, democratic, and creative political change. But those sort of traditions tend emphasize the love of God and neighbor over strict obedience to an unyielding Father God. Despite anything Scott Walker might say, the confident dictum of the old hymn, "Trust and Obey" is not the best way to govern a state.

And Jim Wallis's take--also from an evangelical standpoint, but fan evangelical standpoint that recognizes the obligation of all followers of Christ to do justice in the public square: programs that target the weak and vulnerable, and seek to transfer the burden of balanced budgets onto the backs of the poor while giving the rich a free ride, are not and cannot be called moral.  Not ever:

The Republican governors' counter parts in the U.S. House of Representatives are also not cutting spending where the real money is, such as in military spending, corporate tax cuts and loop holes, and long term health-care costs. Instead, they are cutting programs for the poorest people at home and around the world. This is also just political and not genuine fiscal conservatism. It is a direct attack on programs that help the poor and an all-out defense of the largesse handed out to big corporations and military contractors. If a budget is a moral document, these budget-cutters show that their priorities are to protect the richest Americans and abandon the poorest -- and this is an ideological and moral choice. The proposed House cuts, which were just sent to the Senate, are full of disproportionate cuts to initiatives that have proven to save children's lives and overcome poverty, while leaving untouched the most corrupt and wasteful spending of all American tax dollars -- the Pentagon entitlement program. This is not fiscal integrity; this is hypocrisy.

What Jim Wallis says here, and his subsequent observation that American military spending now constitutes 56 percent of all military spending around the world and is more than the military budgets of the next 20 countries in the world combined, brings me back to the ongoing discussion of the attack on Planned Parenthood on this blog.  As I've said in that discussion and will repeat again: until my brother and sister Catholics who are calling for elimination of federal funds to a program 97% of whose services are medical services to poor women begin talking about withholding their tax dollars used for military expenditures, I will continue not to find the Catholic pro-life movement credible.

Though many Catholics have allowed themselves to be duped by the lie that their tax dollars support abortions through Planned Parenthood, no tax dollars may be used to support abortions.  This is expressly forbidden by law.

But all of us are funding that out-of-control military budget through our tax dollars.  All of us are buying weapons and assisting wars through our tax dollars.  Even if the question of war is morally debatable, there is something extremely troubling, in moral terms, about the selective blindness of the Catholic pro-life movement in the U.S.--and, now, about its willingness to collude in and egg on a cynical politically motivated attack on an organization providing much-needed medical services to poor women.

While those applauding the attack on Planned Parenthood aren't talking about how their tax monies fund the production of weapons and the waging of wars.  If pro-life means anything at all, pro-life means pro-life.

Period.

Snapshots of the Soul of American Democracy, 2011: Three Disturbing Takes

 

This is one of those news-commentary compendium postings I do every now and then, when several articles that seem to me to connect dots appear around the same time.  What strikes me with the following three articles is that they seem to be connecting the same dots from different vantage points.

All three articles address the underlying reasons that we see such a sudden proliferation of initiatives in state legislatures across the U.S. and at the federal level to pit one group of Americans against another: to pit the "Christian" nation against Muslims with spurious anti-Sharia laws; to pit citizens against so-called illegal immigrants with mind-boggling laws like one under consideration now in my state legislature which would require anyone using public services to have a notarized copy of a birth certificate in order to qualify for a service like an emergency room; and to pit "traditional" families against gay and lesbian people.

Each of these articles suggests to me that this flurry of pending legislation has, at least in part, a diversionary intent.  It's designed to keep us fighting as further inroads are made into our democratic system by a wealthy elite of corporate owners who want to have total control of the political process.  And to undermine our democratic system.

Here's Robert Reich's perspective in a recent Huffington Post article.

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class -- pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

And here's George Lakoff on the patriarchal mindset being used to justify this grab at power by corporate elites: 

The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.

The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women's rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting, and on and on.  . . .

Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.

And, finally, here's Jim Hightower commenting on the role that the judicial branch of government has been playing and continues to play in the corporate takeover of our democracy:

Forget modesty and humility, an aloof and arrogant judicial branch of government has arisen and become openly political. Federal judges across the country are flagrantly abusing their authority and public trust by rigging America's economic and political rules for the further enrichment of already powerful and privileged corporations. The 'umpires' have taken sides against us, and it's time to call them out.

Progressives, along with honest conservatives, must focus more on this corporate takeover of the judiciary and directly challenge the judges' service to the moneyed elites. Let me be blunt: John Roberts, the leader of the pack, has turned into an autocratic, unelected national lawmaker, imposing his political vision as the law of our land. He is doing major structural damage to America's unifying sense of fairness and justice. We can't allow him to keep hiding behind the judicial robe while he mugs us and our democratic ideals. He should be impeached.

We are living through a moment of unprecedented peril for American democracy.  Unless we inform ourselves about what is happening and why it is happening, and unless we organize to fight back--as people in Wisconsin are now doing--it may soon be too late to recover the democratic structures we've built painfully and all too imperfectly since the beginning of the nation.

Comparing Egypt-Iran with Wisconsin

 

Quick note: I find it fascinating that some of the centrist websites that can't get enough of the democratic revolution in the Middle East have been absolutely silent about what's happening in Wisconsin.  And when they approach the latter democratic uprising, they are bound and determined to present "all sides" of the story.

The revolution in the Middle East apparently demonstrates (so they imagine) that the obsessive hawklike focus of the American right and center on the Islamic threat has been right on target.  But the uprising in Wisconsin proves inconvenient for the dominant narrative of the right and center, with its constant nattering on about the free market and balanced budgets--

Which are always free markets only for the grossly rich elite controlling our economic life, and which are always budgets balanced on the backs of the poor and middle classes.

Just saying.

P.S. (later in the day): I'm just now seeing this great article by Medea Benjamin at Common Dreams drawing the parallels between Egypt and Wisconsin, thanks to Michael Bayly of the wonderful Wild Reed blog (which is linked to the Bilgrimage homepage).  And I discover in Benjamin's article that the graphic I had chosen for this posting is a picture of Egyptian engineer Muhammad Saladin Nusair holding a sign in Tahrir Square saying "Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain."

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on President Obama's Response to Egypt: Failure to Lead

A brief postscript to my two previous postings about the Egyptian revolution--the first reflecting on the inconsistent way in which the American government approaches the aspirations of people to democratic self-governance in different parts of the globe, the second on Nicholas Kristof's appeal to President Obama to speak out forcefully to condemn the violence in Egypt:

I agree with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's analysis of Obama's behavior during the Egyptian crisis as not in the least praiseworthy--specifically, as a failure to lead.  Boteach: 

Obama was supposed to be a transformational president. An African-American had risen to the highest office in the land and the most powerful post on earth. Surely, even more than President George W. Bush -- a son of privilege and wealth -- he would emerge as a champion of freedom and democracy. Surely such unmatched eloquence would be employed in the cause of human liberty.

But we were all given pause when Obama, in the first months of his presidency, embraced dictator Hugo Chavez with a wide grin and bowed to the tyrant-king of Saudi Arabia. Chavez had called George Bush 'the devil' from the rostrum of the United Nations and has singled-handedly dismantled democracy in Venezuela, throwing his political opponents in jail. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia presides over a regime so ruthless that women are imprisoned and lashed simply for being in a closed space with a man who is not their husband and can't even drive a car. Perhaps these were just glitches. Perhaps Obama really did have a freedom agenda tucked away that he would finally pull out.

But from there it only got worse, with Obama's foreign policy repudiating most of President Bush's democracy-building gestures and opting instead for Kissingerian realpolitik, with America prepared to do business with almost any kind of dictator so long as it served our interests. Obama even won a Nobel Peace Prize simply for not being George Bush. We thought Obama's lauding of tyrants reached its zenith with Obama holding only his second State dinner last month to honor the President of China, one of the most oppressive regimes on earth. It's one thing to do business with China. But to honor its brutal leadership?

Now with Egypt the circle is complete.

 It's about leadership.  And it's about human rights.  This president has squandered opportunity after opportunity to demonstrate transformative leadership--at a moment when such leadership is imperative if American democracy is to survive--because he has prevaricated again and again on matters of human rights.

And the results for our national economic, political, and cultural life have been disastrous and will continue to be disastrous.  Obama's weakness as a leader and his waffling on issues of human rights have opened the door to a recrudescence of the worst excesses of an emboldened political right.  As we face economic collapse, we must now contend, in state legislature after state legislature and in D.C., with challenge upon challenge to women's rights, to the new health care program, to the human rights of immigrants, to gay and lesbian rights, and so forth.

These enervating culture-war debates siphon off much-needed energy to address our dire economic problems--which have to be addressed effectively if we expect our democratic system of governance to thrive again.  And none of this need have happened, had the leader we thought we were electing--with his clear pre-election vision of human rights--seized the opportunity to lead that he was given with a large popular mandate in the last elections.

I am ashamed at which this promising president has made of his presidency.  His response to the Egyptian situation only deepens my shame.  As Nicholas Kristof notes, the Obama administration desperately needs to "learn the future tense" if we expect the future to be bright either for the United States or the rest of the world.

Laura Miller: Gender Gap in Literature Continues

One more posting following up on themes from the past: back in October 2009, I noted that when Mr. Obama went on vacation in the summer of 2009 and published his vacation reading list, it struck me that every author on the list was male.  And since I happen to think that the world might be a more humane place if leaders of various societies and institutions did more to incorporate the viewpoint of women into their governing perspectives, when Huffington Post then invited its readers to submit suggestions for other works the president might bring along with him, I suggested a number of important literary works by women.

I blogged about this matter again later in October 2009, here.

And because I have not changed my mind since then, I am not surprised, but still saddened, to read Laura Miller's essay at Salon today reporting on a survey the group Vida did recently, which suggests that the gender gap in what publishers publish and in what men and women read remains as strong as ever.  And that men continue to regard literary works written by women as less significant than those written by men--so that men continue stubbornly to overlook and not to read many significant literary works authored by women.

And I continue to propose in my naive, wild-eyed and probably quite ineffectual way that the world might well be a better place if we could redress this imbalance.  And if people like Barack Obama or Tom Monaghan or Clarence Thomas or Timothy Dolan or Pope Benedict or John Boehner spent more time reading novels, poetry, and plays written by women over the centuries, and less time reading what I suspect they read on a daily basis.

Reporters Being Rounded up in Egypt

Situation not looking at all good now in Egypt.  Anderson Cooper was attacked again today, and reporters being rounded up.  Nicholas Kristof wonders what the government is staging, that it wants to hide from reporters.

The Euteneuer Story: Right-Wing Catholic Websites in Uproar Over Pro-Life Priest's Confession

 

The story about Fr. Thomas Euteneuer just continues to get stranger and stranger.  And here’s one of the strangest aspects: it seems to have broken—it exploded wide open—on right-wing Catholic websites first of all.  Which is to say, on the websites of those for whom Euteneuer has been a hero until recently.  That in itself is a big story, it seems to me.  When folks of the political and religious right finally turn on one of their own, they almost always do so only after they’ve accumulated incontrovertible evidence of his or her betrayal of their trust.  Unlike their counterparts on the left, folks on the political and religious right are not in the habit of creating circular firing squads to assassinate each other.  They stick together and save their fire for the enemy.  

But when they do finally turn on one of their own, they usually do so with a vengeance.  And so what I’ve been reading on some of the websites of the Catholic right in the past day or so, after having learned of Euteneuer’s confession, is hair-raising.  Euteneuer’s confession about his “violations” of chastity is here, by the way, at Lifesite news.  This link was embedded in yesterday’s article at Right Wing Watch to which my posting last evening links.

I don’t spend a lot of time on the websites of the Catholic right (or the religious right in general) because, to be frank, there’s a lot meanness on them.  Many of them bubble with vitriol and spite.  And frequent encounters with that kind of meanness—the particularly livid kind fueled by unquestioned belief in one’s own religious uprightness—can quickly corrode the soul.  Since I already have reasons aplenty in my own life to ward against corrosion of the soul, I don’t go looking for new ones.

And then there’s the—well, plain stupidity—of some of these websites and their theological prescriptions and proscriptions, which tend to be as devoid of thought as they are of humanity.  And which contain paragraphs like the following (this in a recent posting commenting on Euteneuer’s case):

Unrepentant sin turns your soul into a magnet for diabolical spirits. The Rosary, the Crucifix and a state of grace is the repellent.

Honestly, I don’t know whether the childish, magical theology in that paragraph offends me more, or the subject-verb agreement error.  Best to stay away from these sites and try in that way to keep the demon of snark inside me ill-fed.

It’s important in the case of the Euteneuer story, however, to take a peek at what’s bubbling furiously these days on right-wing Catholic websites, I think.  I recommend this because there are important pieces of the story on these sites that add valuable context to Euteneuer’s published confession yesterday.  Pieces from Euteneuer’s former cronies which suggest that there may well be more to the story than he himself is telling in his confession.

In what follows (and in a subsequent follow-up posting), I want to bring to readers’ attention a sampling of statements about the Euteneuer case from recent reactionary Catholic blogs, where the story appears to have been breaking for some days now.  In fact, it appears that the choice of some blogs maintained by former admirers of Euteneuer to begin breaking his story is precisely what precipitated his published confession yesterday.

As I offer these links to various Catholic blog and news sites, I want to underscore that this is an important story.  The Euteneuer story is important for the following reasons:

1.    Euteneuer has been an important figure in American Catholicism up until recently, a major player in the powerful right-wing sector of the American Catholic church which exercises growing influence over the direction now being taken by the entire Catholic church in the U.S.

Google the terms “Euteneuer” and “EWTN,” and you’ll get 64 pages of hits.  Fr. Euteneuer has been all over that major Catholic network for some years now, a network regarded by many Catholics and non-Catholics as the official voice of the U.S. Catholic church, whose founder Mother Angelica last year received the top honor the pope can offer lay or religious Catholics, the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice medal.  You name the topic in the past decade, and Euteneuer has been on EWTN talking about it— pontificating about exorcism and peddling his book on that topic; broadcasting homilies about the Terri Schiavo case; celebrating EWTN Masses; chatting with Raymond Arroyo, Life on the Rock team Fr. Mark and Doug Barry, and EWTN radio talk host Barbara McGuigan.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg, vis-à-vis Fr. Euteneuer’s media visibility and connections.  As I noted yesterday, he’s been on FOX news to go toe to toe with Sean Hannity, representing himself as the official voice of the Catholic church on issues like whether married Catholics practicing contraception should be denied communion.  He’s had feature articles in the Legionaries of Christ-owned newspaper National Catholic Register (which EWTN has just bought).  In 2005, the Catholic lay group Legatus awarded Euteneuer its distinguished John O’Connor Award for Life.  And as Loma O’Connor notes in a Palm Beach Post article* yesterday, Euteneuer himself says that in the last ten years, he has he traveled more than 1.1 million miles, visited 58 countries, and made thousands of public appearances to spread his version of the Catholic message. 

This is a man of great prominence who has had entrée in the most influential circles of the American Catholic church, and who has been lionized by those circles.  What he is now revealing is a big deal, because it implicates all of those influential circles and not merely himself.  Media superstars are our own creation: Euteneuer is, to certain extent, what we in the American Catholic church have wrought in the past decade, and the mirror he holds up to us now ought to show us who we have become, to a great extent, in the past decade.  The picture is not pretty.

2.    This is a big story, as well, because the group that Euteneuer headed for a decade, Human Life International, is a right-wing Catholic political activist group with strong influence both in American political life and around the world.  As the Reality Check website’s  overview of HLI notes, the organization holds training conferences and sponsors “pro-life missionary trips” around the world.  The HLI website claims it has trained activists in 160 countries, through these missionary trips.  It has 59 satellite offices in 51 nations, and is considered one of the largest anti-family planning organizations in the world.  

For a number of decades now, with strong but not always easily tracked funding sources, this organization has bombarded nations around the world with pamphlets and media materials promoting its peculiar version of Catholic pro-life teaching, which regards contraception as a kind of gateway drug leading to abortion and a "culture of death."  Rather than diminishing abortions, HLI teaches women in nations throughout the world to think, contraception fosters abortion and is in and of itself as anti-life as is abortion itself.  By preventing unwanted pregnancies, we are, in some magical-mystical universe of belief inhabited by these folks, increasing abortions.

3.    Finally, the Euteneuer story is a big story because, as I’ve previously noted, this is a story that has broken first on the websites of individuals and groups formerly strongly allied to Euteneuer and strongly supportive of Human Life International.  When sources like this—friends—begin to speak out about an individual who has formerly been held in almost godlike esteem in their circles, it behooves us to listen.  We need to listen because when former allies and friends begin providing information to fill in a hazy and ambiguous picture about spectacularly unprincipled behavior on the part of someone whose career has been built around preaching principles to others, you can be sure we're hearing accurate information.  And necessary information, if we want a complete picture of what's going on.

Finally, it's important to hear this testimony right now, because it's entirely possible that some of it will now begin to be scrubbed from various websites and publications, as various groups seek now to disguise the strong ties they've had up to now with Euteneuer and HLI.  I've already found one instance in which I think such scrubbing has taken place recently, and will report on that in my next posting.

And that posting will provide readers with a smorgasbord of links to Catholic websites I've read in the past day, commenting on the Euteneuer story and its implications.  As you'll see when I point you to these sites, they've already been discussing this story for some days now, and it's apparent that what Euteneuer chose to reveal in his confession yesterday is a response to what is circulating on these websites--and is rather more damning than what he chose to reveal, if the sources cited on these sites are speaking truthfully.

*H/t to my wonderful e-friend Kathy Hughes, who provided this article.

Robert Kuttner on Mr. Obama's Centrism: Get Ready for "Triangulation II"

 

Robert Kuttner gets the centrist game exactly correct: as the political trend has moved relentlessly right for almost half a century now, the center moves right as well.  And so when people talk about being centrists (because it's always far more comfortable and rewarding to go along with the prevailing trend of power and to please and be rewarded by the powerful), what they're actually talking about is letting those on the right control.  While marginalizing the left.

Here's Kuttner's take on Mr. Obama's centrism, which we'll see on full display in his State of the Union address:

If you liked Bill Clinton as Triangulator, you will love the era of Triangulation II. The danger, of course, is that the man at the apex of the triangle fares better than his party.

He is now Mr. Reasonable Centrist -- except that in substance there is no reasonable center to be had.

A well funded and tightly organized right wing has been pulling American politics to the right for three decades now. And with a few instructive exceptions, Democrats who respond by calling for a new centrism are just acting as the right's enablers.

What exactly is the beneficial substance of this centrism? Just how far right do we have to go for Republicans to cut any kind of deal? Isn't the mirage of a Third Way a series of moving targets -- where every compromise begets a further compromise?

"Well funded" is the operative phrase in Kuttner's analysis: on the almost total exclusion of any viewpoints of the political left from American media now, due to the power exercised by the corporate owners of all media outlets, see Robert Parry at Alternet today, commenting on what happened to Keith Olbermann.  As Kuttner notes, the skewing of our media to the right and the control of the media by corporate interest groups give the political right "enormous capabilities to control the national debate."  Using media spokespersons as mouthpieces, the political right creates diversionary crises--death panels one week, the ground-zero mosque the next--that leave liberals scrambling to respond.  Diversionary crises that distract us from the real business of the corporate managers of America, which is continuing to enrich themselves and the tiny circle of Americans that own the vast majority of the country's resources, at the expense of middle- and working-class people.

When the response of liberals to these manufactured crises is timid and inconsistent--as it often is--the media then use the manufactured controversy to heap scorn on the political left, marginalizing it further.  And reinforcing the power of the right to control the conversation--moving the "reasonable" and "moderate" center even more to the right.

Parry rightly notes that this trend is not going to get better anytime soon.  The ultimate game plan is to consolidate the control of the corporate sector over the American political process.  It will not stop until that control is complete, or until someone, somewhere begins to call the bluff of those playing the centrist game.

But how to do that, when progressive voices are almost totally excluded from the conversation of the center?  And when the faith communities of the nation, which used to take seriously their obligation to speak truth to power and defend the least among us, actively collude with the dismantling of social networks designed to assist the poor, while screaming (along with those on the political right calling for the dismantling of these networks) that the only issue in which the vulnerable deserve attention is abortion?