Category Archives: politics

SPLC on NSA

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The antiracist Southern Poverty Law Center, which has previously called attention to the racist politics of with New Saint Andrews College founder/eminence grise Doug Wilson, now takes the New York Times to task for its deferential reporting on the pseudo-accredited Bible college in this Sunday’s Magazine:

Saint Andrews treats as a foundational Western thinker, right up there with Plato and Aristotle, a 19th-century theologian named Robert L. Dabney — a Confederate Civil War chaplain who described blacks as “a morally inferior race,” a “sordid, alien taint” marked by “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste.”
…
None of this makes it into Worthen’s article. In fact, when she does give a three-word quote to a Wilson critic, she uses the occasion to sarcastically describe how the woman took “two hours to detail Wilson’s crimes” — almost none of which are mentioned. Instead, Worthen refers lightly to Saint Andrews’ “chronic spats with liberals in town.”

Honestly, it was ridiculous that the Times gave no space to the multifarious connections between NSA and white supremacy. The absurdity of NSA’s intellectual pretenses pales next to the outrageous positions of its founder.

Ding-dong, the Religious Right is dead?

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In a triumphal column over at Time.com, left-leaning political preacher Jim Wallis declares that “the Religious Right’s era is over.” This week’s New York Times Magazine is running an opinion piece that asks whether Democrats may be “narrowing the religion gap.” Is it time to start celebrating?

Not yet. Here in Moscow, Idaho, the Religious Right is still alive and kicking. Wallis’s will truly have arrived when the most visible representatives of Christianity in this sleepy little college town are no longer the members of near-cultlike Christ Church – and when I don’t have to spend my time in church mostly avoiding talking about my career in science and my time in the lab mostly avoiding talking about my faith. As for the Times article, its thesis is not that the Religious Right is losing steam, but that churchgoing Democrats will bring “welcome moderation” to the Culture Wars. Meanwhile, the worldwide Anglican Communion has given the American Episcopalian Church eight months to stop blessing same-sex unions. Moderation, it seems, may be understood to mean that liberals will tack right – but not that conservatives will give an inch to the left.

Of course, the tide can be turned, and it’s the responsibility of every liberal Christian to present to the world a face of Christ that isn’t defined by prejudice or powerlust. But we’ve still got a long way to go.

Hussein Hanged: guess what – it makes things worse

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Over on Slate.com, Christopher Hitchens directs the full force of his vitriol at the shameful execution of Saddam Hussein’s, well, execution: “The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution.” Is Hitchens, the great defender of the Iraq invasion, working on a change of heart?

Possibly the most important point that he makes in generalizing the Hussein execution debacle into something approaching a critique of the death penalty: the cruel spectacle of a fallen dictator mocked by those he once tormented is not so far removed from the slightly more civilized executions that occur regularly in the United States. Although an extreme example, it points to the motivations underlying every killing performed by the state in the name of justice, and suggests that the value of the death penalty to society may be much less than we like to think.

Here we go again

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Slate reports on right-wing ribbing directed at Barak Obama’s middle name. Which is, unfortunately, Hussein. Having grown up with a surname that rhymes with “odor,” I can sympathize.

Key phrase: having grown up. Is the conservative wing of the comentariat so hard up for substantive criticisms of the junior senator from Illinois that they’re forced to resort to the sort of tactics I last encountered firsthand in elementary school? I’m not convinced yet that Obama is as good a choice for President as he is charming, but I hope that if he runs, he encounters critics who can demonstrate they’ve graduated the sixth grade.

Why?

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Blogging is a terribly, terribly egotistical activity. It assumes that the world in general cares what I, personally, have to say about whatever topics catch my fleeting, Internet-era attention. It’s so egotistical, in fact, that some people (bloggers all) have carelessly described blogging as journalism, by which standard anyone who turns to anyone else and says, “so I read/heard/saw X in/on The New York Times/NPR/CNN and I think …” is a journalist. Even with the tiny taste of journalistic experience I have (three years on my university’s campus newspaper), I know that journalism takes far more than an opinion.

So if all I have to offer is an opinion, why should anyone care? My dad used to say that opinions are like assholes – everyone has one, but you don’t show them off in polite company. But I spend a lot of time online these days – both for work and to read the news – and it’s hard not to see that todays politics is increasingly driven by what’s said online, whether or not what’s said is worthwhile.

To the extent that I have something valuable to say, it’s because I think I can offer a perspective that isn’t represented anywhere else out there. My background crosses some of the major cultural divides of present-day politics: I’m a baptized member of the Mennonite Church who grew up in rural, conservative Lancaster County, PA, and I presently live in Idaho, in one of the few congressional districts in the nation to remain solidly Republican in the 2006 election. However, my parents raised me to view the Bible as an important, not infallible story; I voted for the Greens in 2000 (for every post except President); and I’m living in Idaho because I’m earning a doctorate in evolutionary biology in the excellent biology department at the University of Idaho. Does that make my perspective unique enough to rate a personal soapbox? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Testing

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To refer to peregrinating Celtic monks and fundamentalist lobbyists, Origen and Oral Roberts, the Desert Fathers and Tim La Haye, Jerry Falwell and Dante, St. Francis and the TV “prosperity gospel” hucksters, Lady Julian of Norwich and Tammy Faye Baker, or John of the Cross and George W. Bush all as Christian stretches the word so thin its meaning vanishes. The term “carbon-based life-form” is as informative.
–David James Duncan, “What Fundamentalists Need,” Orion Magazine, July/August 2005.