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My dearest friends Matt and Sara had a baby boy on Mother's Day. I think he's the most beautiful baby boy I've ever seen... and he looks just like his daddy! Congratulations to my two old friends and my new one. Oliver... I can't wait to meet you in person.
Karekin
Kendall Harmon has to monitor his blog these days, so he can delete insults and offensive language from the comments section.
His topic: the Episcopal Church.
As a critical church meeting on homosexuality nears, the debate online and in public comments has grown so intense that one publication has dubbed it ``blood sport.''
``I think people are dreading possible outcomes and when you're dealing with the unknown, fear kicks in in a big way,'' said Harmon, a minister and conservative leader in the Diocese of South Carolina. ``And I do think things are more polarized now.''
The Episcopal General Convention, which begins June 13 in Columbus, Ohio, must respond to fellow Anglicans worldwide who were outraged by the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop - V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. The votes will shape not only the church's future, but also its role as the U.S. representative in the Anglican Communion.
The emotion of the moment is visible in the explosion of blogs since the convention three years ago, when delegates voted to confirm Robinson's election. A quick Web search yields at least 20 dedicated to the plight of the 2.3 million-member denomination. The Living Church, an independent magazine, compared the tone of the discussion to ``a wrestling cage match'' in an editorial titled ``Blood Sport.''
Some bishops have complained of being flooded with hateful e-mails and of being personally attacked on the Web. Harmon, who runs the widely read titusonenine blog, has had to take down comments he said were ``cynical, angry and alas, even petty.'' He now reviews all statements before they are posted. Some liberal-leaning blogs have had to do the same.
``The Internet and blogs do give megaphones to anonymous bigots, but they also allow you to organize more quickly and, in some instances, trade opinions across ideological lines,'' said Jim Naughton, a liberal who runs the blog for the Diocese of Washington and has had to warn people about the language they use there. ``It intensifies the conversation for better and for worse.''
The debate goes beyond the Internet. Episcopalians with traditional beliefs on homosexuality, a minority in the denomination, feel persecuted and silenced by the majority - and their public statements reflect a deep anger over their circumstances.
A conservative group called Lay Episcopalians for the Anglican Communion is pressing for a church trial of Robinson and the dozens of bishops who consecrated him. A spokesman for the advocates, James Ince, said the debate is becoming more direct and truthful, not harsh.
``You can expect the liberals not to appreciate the clear, straight language from lay organizations because they're used to this goody goody two-shoes pantywaist stuff,'' Ince said.
The Rev. Paul Zahl, dean of the conservative Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa., said in a May 10 letter posted on the school's Web site that an ``army of Brown shirts'' was falsely interpreting Scripture to fuel ``the gay-agenda steamroller.''
Some moderates and liberals have responded by accusing traditionalists of being more concerned with power than with faith. In a recent edition of The Washington Window, the newspaper of the Diocese of Washington, Naughton wrote a two-part report called ``Following the Money,'' linking conservative Episcopal advocates to right-wing donors intent on fighting the political stands of liberal Protestants.
Perhaps the most inflammatory commentary can be found on the Web site virtueonline, where, for example, founder David Virtue refers to one of the church's first openly gay priests as the ``First Sodomite.'' Virtue says anyone offended by his language should not read the site.
Delegates will be entering the convention in Columbus under a heavy burden. They will decide whether to fulfill a request from Anglican leaders for a moratorium on electing partnered gay Episcopal bishops and on creating blessing ceremonies for gay couples.
If Anglican leaders conclude that the General Convention has not moved far enough toward discouraging the practices, it could break apart the 77 million-member Communion.
``I definitely think the tenor of the conversation is a little stronger right now, primarily because both sides of the political issue think there's a lot to lose and there is,'' said Brother Karekin Yarian of Every Voice Network, which works with moderates and liberals in diocesan groups called Via Media. ``Both sides are concerned about the church splitting and no one wants to see that happen.''
On the Net:
Conservative-leaning blogs:
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/
http://www.standfirminfaith.com/index.php/site/index
Liberal-leaning blogs:
http://frjakestopstheworld.blogspot.com/
05/18/06 14:43
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reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be
published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written
authority of The Associated Press.
So, I've been pestered for weeks now by visitors to my website for shirts that have the PunkMonksf logo on them. Never imagined THAT would happen. So, I took the leap and designed them. They are now for sale on my website: http:///www.punkmonksf.com.
This is just too weird. Can't wait til I get MINE. Plan on wearing it to General Convention next month.
For as long as we've known that the Bush administration routinely breaks the law by spying on American citizens without required warrants, the standard line from George W. Bush and his minions has been that only international transmissions are snooped and, within that select group, only those communicating with known terrorists are spied upon.
Now we have the bombshell disclosure yesterday that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using most of the major phone carriers in the United States.
If an American citizen "...is talking to al Qaeda, we want to know why," our fearless leader has said on many occasions since first getting caught with his hand on our telephones and keyboards.
Indeed, it was just yesterday that Bush said that he had authorized the NSA to "...intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. In other words, if al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States or out of the United States, we want to know what they're saying."
And, of course, you would need a calculator to figure out how many times those same assurances have been given by outgoing White House Press Secretary Scott "The Lyin' King" McClellan.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'll tell you that I am not an experienced spy. I have never worked for the CIA or the NSA so I'm not sure exactly how their eavesdropping methodology works. But I have worked in computer security for about 20 years, have done my fair share of hacking, have even caught some bad guys in the course of my day job and know a tiny bit about "sniffing" over a telephone wire.
And, while hardly a simple job on a massive scale, the speed and sophistication of the parsing and data-aggregation technology that is available to the upper, most-secret reaches of our government makes something very clear about the president's program: Either it's incredibly broken and ineffective or they're lying through their teeth about the extent of the whole thing.
Let me give you an example. In my world, let's say I want to track down some real porn-surfing deviant on my company's international network. I would "sniff" the wire for people scanning the Internet with search qualifiers such as "O'Reilly + naked + falafel," or "Limbaugh + Oxycontin + orgy." "Cheney + snuff + film" might work too. But once I set my radar on that, I would find out in pretty short order where my culprit was located in very specific terms.
What should make it even easier on Bush's anti-Constitution crew is that, according to what they tell us, they already have half of their riddle solved. Given Team Bush's assertion that they're only spying on people talking to known terrorists, a logical conclusion is that they already know who's on one half of the phone calls snooped -- which means, with today's technology, they should be mighty close to nailing themselves some real, live evildoers.
Which leads me to my questions that I'm hoping somebody in the White House or the NSA reads -- if they didn't get this post in transit -- and can clear up this confusion, lest I be forced to believe they're either lying or stupid:
* If you have already narrowed down who the terrorists are right down to the physical and logical addresses of their telephones or computers, why don't you just go get them?
* Assuming you're filtering through millions of phone calls and you already have them winnowed to bad guys and their possible confederates in the United States, where's the results? I'm sure a political genius like Karl Rove would just love to shut us liberals the hell up by doing a perp walk -- before his own, of course -- with a really bad guy and being able to attribute the righteous bust to the "terrorist surveillance program." Wouldn't that be worth its weight in political gold? So where's the prizes for all this concentrated effort?
* I know that many of us prickly Americans are absolutely obsessed with the whereabouts of the people who, well, you know, attacked us on September 11, but it's been almost five years and Osama bin Laden is still running free and podcasting threats at us. Why is it that you still don't have him in custody with a massive program like this in place?
* According to Senator Russ Feingold, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, al Qaeda is still operating in at least 60 countries, which is roughly the same as when we were attacked in 2001. If you're doing all this spying and it's targeted at known members of al Qaeda, why hasn't that number gone down in almost five years?
* When you constantly say that our troops are "fighting for our freedom," isn't our government undermining the very freedoms our brave men and women are allegedly protecting?
Finally, there seems to be very little doubt that the White House has violated the law by spying on American citizens without warrants -- according to the USA Today story yesterday, it may be up to 200 million of us, or two-thirds of the U.S. population -- and I guess that leads to my final question.
How do we teach our children the value of obeying the law when the President of the United States sets such a horrible example?
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We'll see what happens
While virtually every other country in the Western world recognizes May
1st to be 'the International Day of The Worker,' we here in America
studiously ignore it as anything other than just another day. That's
training for ya.
Sure, the occasional rabid pundit like confessed drug addict Rush
Limbaugh or classified info leaker Robert Novak might reach deep into
their propaganda bag of tricks to remind us that May Day was officially
ordained 'Law Day' by that friend of the working man, President Ronald
Reagan, but in general the media does it's best to placate its owners
and not give the uppity working man his due.
You remember Ronald Reagan, whose first official act as president (if
you don't count negotiating with the Iranian government to keep their
American hostages until after he defeated Carter), was breaking the
strike of air traffic controllers, the first salvo in an assault on
worker's rights that follows a direct line through NAFTA to our current
abominations of pension theft and the elimination of minimum wage in
New Orleans? A real man of the people.
It was under Reagan that the whole religious 'Great Awakening' began,
which wasn't so much an embracing of religion as it was a repudiation
of the social advances of the 60's, with Donald Wildmon and James
Dobson peddling their pre-Focus on Family 'Promise Keepers,' (where men
rule the household), Phyllis Schafly screaming equal rights for women
undermines 'family values,' and Charles Schaar Murray declaring--with a
straight face--blacks do worse in America simply because they're
stupid. It was an awakening, all right.
Suddenly, the 'ostracized' religious right were 'rejoining' the national debate
under the 'revolution' of faith---spearheaded by a president who rarely
set foot in a church during his reign, lied regularly and outrageously
to the public, and illegally funded nun-killing death-squads in Central
America.
Or so the story goes, if you listen to Karl Rove, Robert Novak, Peggy
Noonan and the other shit-spinners who learned their chops at the feet
of Reagan/Bush PR wunderkind Lee Atwater, a vicious mudslinging thug
who died young of a brain tumor and renounced his scurrilous tactics on
his deathbed---tactics that have made Karl Rove a household name.
What the Reagan years really ushered in was the start of 'The Great
Hypocrisy,' the GOP's twisting of religion to create a class of
disgruntled zealots so blinded by hate they'd rush to vote into office
the very thieves, liars and torturers who would not only screw them at
every turn, but would decades later deliver George W. Bush to our
doorstep with his Faith Based Everything.
And 'the national debate'---where is it? There is no debate, just
ideologues screaming at each other to see whose one-dimensional
faith-based sound byte can 'win'--nonsense like 'God Hates Fags' and
Rick Santorum's equating homosexuality with bestiality.
It used to be that Christians were known to all by their good deeds,
but after almost four decades of the GOP's cleaving the populace into
warring sects to be manipulated at the polls, 'being Christian' is no
longer defined by doing good deeds, it's defined by an arrogant mission
to tell others how they must live---who they can marry, who they can
adopt, what they can say in public, what they must teach in
schools---all the way down to what kind of medicine they should have
access to.
It was easy to look away from inconvenient historical facts of
Christianity like the Inquisition, the Crusades, or the pedophilia of
the priesthood when you could still see true people of faith marching
for civil rights, working in soup kitchens, or bearing witness in
Nicaragua as the Reagan-funded militias gunned down families of
peasants.
But 'The Great Awakening' now brings us faith-based leaders promoting
torture and war, who lie to us on a daily basis, and violate our
constitutionally guaranteed rights. The 'national debate' about values
is reduced to quippy bumper stickers like 'It's Okay To Pray' or 'One
Man + One Woman = Marriage.' Our national conversation on ethics,
morality, and faith has become a kind of WWF 'Religious Smackdown.'
The Great Awakening has also brought us, as reported in the Boston
Globe, a president who claims the authority to disobey over 750 of our laws.
Maybe it's time to ask ourselves what exactly has really been awakened.
Is it a coincidence that our most pro-faith president is also our
biggest law-breaking president, presiding over our most scandalized
administration in history? You tell me.
Is it coincidence that our pro-faith vice president has a gay daughter
he'd prevent from adopting a child or marrying her lover, a great
Christian whose wife converts from writing lesbian romance novels to
ethics primers for kids in the blink of a presidential campaign, a
soldier of Christ who tells a senator on the Senate floor to go fuck
himself? You tell me.
We have two million people incarcerated in federal prisons. If we're to
believe the polls the Pat Robertsons and Bill O'Reillys constantly
throw at us that 89% of our country are practicing Christians, that
means our federal prisons are stuffed to the breaking point with about
1.8 million Bible-thumpers. Hmmm.
How come when we talk about religion in the great national debate, it's
never fact s like these we discuss, instead of arguing over posting the
Ten Commandments in City Hall?
What about Lynddie England, described as rarely leaving her barracks in
Iraq except to go to church--and of course torture naked Iraqis by
forcing them to simulate anal sex for snapshots taken by the father of
her illegitimate child. If that 89% is correct, wouldn't that mean that
the majority of Lynddie's co-torturers were, you know, Christians? When
are we having that faith-based discussion?
And poor Clay Aiken, touting his Christianity to the blind, er, I mean,
fans of American Idol, rumored to be caught in a gay relationship and
seeking the love that dare not speak it's name on the Web, all the
while recording an album of ---you guessed it---Christian songs. His
fans are so mad they want to sue RCA for false advertising. Why aren't
we hearing any talk about the gullibility of a Christian audience in
our national debate? Why is this kind of intelligent discussion avoided
in favor of finger pointing and sneering? If Aiken was gay, his claim
of devout Christianity gave him the power to fool--or at least
encourage denial in--millions. Shouldn't we look into that power?
And what about the Duke lacrosse team? The entire debate is whether or
not a rape occurred, not what were a room full of Christian boys from
'good homes' (two of them educated by Jesuits) doing ordering strippers
to entertain them while threatening sodomy with a broomstick and
taunting black women with racist jibes about their cotton-picking slave
grandparents? Why don't we discuss Christianity in that context?
And of course there's Tom Delay, the great born-again purveyor of moral
rectitude, the man with his hand in so many tills even Texas
republicans had to cut him loose. The President salutes him as a great
patriot who 'served his country well' and the Rove-minions repeat ad
nauseum, 'the Dems don't have their poster-boy for corruption to kick
around anymore.' What does that mean, exactly? Did he do it, or not? If
he's innocent, then how could he possibly be a poster-boy for
corruption? And if he's guilty, why is the president saluting his
patriotism? And if he's a thief and a liar, what are we to think of his
relentless touting of Christian values? Doesn't that mean he's a
hypocrite, and that Christian values, in a political sense, are
meaningless?
What all this tells us is claiming to be Christian, on it's own,
signifies nothing. In fact, given the religious makeup of our populace,
pedophiles, thieves, liars, hypocrites and torturers in America are
more likely to be Christians than Jews, Buddhists, Muslims--or
atheists. It's simple math.
This is why the Founding Fathers--God-fearing men all--were smart
enough to keep religion out of government. They knew the power
appealing to a people's spirituality could have, that faith could be
invoked while hiding great violations of it's very tenets, encouraging
otherwise docile people to do and say despicable things, to hate each
other, to threaten the very fabric of a progressive, democratic,
rational society.
Ironically, what Bush, Rove and the rest of the Fourth Reich have shown
us is that putting more religion into government doesn't make it more
moral; what it does is allow every cut-rate thief, liar and hypocrite
to hide behind the cloak of morality while committing immoral acts
around the globe and at home that would shame any real person of faith.
It's not a coincidence that the most 'faith-based' government we've had
in over a century is also the most corrupt, secretive, murderous,
lying, and law breaking in history. In the name of 'reawakening'
Christianity in government, Bush, et al, have shown us why it should be
locked out. As soon as a politician starts quoting the Bible and going
on about his faith, we should run him out of town.
What the GOP has in fact done is mock and destroy Christianity, and
that's a shame. Like Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism,
Christianity and God are some of our greatest creations. By appealing
to an ignorant fringe of assholes who codify their hatred behind a
misuse of spirituality, the GOP is an embarrassment to not only truly
devout Christians, but to the rational world at large.
But they've done us an odd--if unintentional---service by showing us in
practice exactly what the Founding Fathers feared and tried to prevent;
that religion strikes so deep and renders people who want to be 'good'
so gullible to manipulation, that any absurdity can be pushed through,
including nonsense like dinosaurs walked the earth only two thousand
years ago, praying can stop cancer, and somebody else's marriage can
threaten your own.
So if you're against abortion, don't have one. If you're against gay
marriage, don't marry one. And if you're against illegal immigrants,
don't hire one. Clean your own damn house and pick your own damn
broccoli, and when you're unmarried daughter breaks her pledge and gets
pregnant, face your own moral dilemma and search your own spirituality
for answers--just don't force me to apply those answers to my daughter.
I'll handle her, and my grandchild, on my own.
But if you want me to see the beauty and the power of your faith, lead
by example, not by cramming it down my throat or voting for politicians
who want to screw all of us so the rich can get richer. Christian
values are feeding the hungry, helping the poor and aiding the
sick---not cutting Medicare, veteran's benefits, environmental
protections, school lunch programs or health care. Period.
Values are something you adhere to, not something you force someone else to adhere to; that's called fascism.
And don't stand there and tell me a smiling president who reserves the
right to violate a Congressional ban on torture is a man of faith.
That's called stupidity.
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