01Aug

Selling Body Parts, and Giving Away Our Collective Soul

“You have the forehead of a prostitute, you refuse to be ashamed” (Jeremiah 3:3). Thus says God to his rebellious kingdom. The “forehead of a prostitute” is an ancient expression that referred to an inability to blush. It bespeaks a loss of shame, a seared conscience, a calloused soul, and a hard heart.

What is shocking about the recently released Planned Parenthood videos isn’t just the scandal of fetal parts for sale by abortion providers, but the disturbing nonchalance (nay, defiance) with which it is being greeted by many. (I’ll pause, of course, to acknowledge that Republican presidential candidates have made a lot of noise about this).

A writer named Robin Marty at cosmopolitan.com opined on July 14: “I’ve read the emails. I’ve watched the short-version video. I’ve read the website and the other anti-abortion action groups’ press releases. I’ve even poked through all the primary sources posted so far in the “Document Vault.” Now, frankly, I’m just going to yawn.”

A conservative website called Newsbusters has helpfully counted up the minutes and concluded that “the broadcast news shows spent more time in one day on Cecil the Lion than they did on the Planned Parenthood videos in two weeks.”

The media have begun to cover this because they aren’t able to cover it up. When they have taken up the story, it has generally been to sympathize with Planned Parenthood. Lester Holt on NBC’s Nightly News intoned that Planned Parenthood is “under fire” from “activists”. This headline from Reuters proclaims: “Planned Parenthood slams secret video as false portrayal of fetus tissue program”. The “Grey Lady” leads off an online article in this way: Abortion opponents on Tuesday renewed their campaign against Planned Parenthood, with immediate impact among Republicans in Congress and the presidential race. (The New York Times online).

The dominant narrative of the media seems to be that this is a “stunt” or “fraud” (as though the Planned Parenthood representatives are scripted actors), perpetrated by a “far right” (and therefore dismissable) group. (As an aside, I find it odd that we never hear of any “near right” groups, or of conservatives that aren’t also “extremists”).

Salon.com has screaming headlines like “What the Planned Parenthood hoax really proves: Right-wing extremists have no qualms about destroying peoples’ lives” and “The Planned Parenthood hoax is the GOP’s Trojan horse: How Republicans are hijacking the national conversation” (www.salon.com).

Newsweek (article here) implies soothingly that one can disregard the source of the material, because David Daleidan once wrote an anti-abortion article for the conservative outlet “The Weekly Standard”, and made reference to “prayer life”.

Even the Obama White House has chimed in: The White House on Thursday waded into the debate, calling the group behind the sting videos “extremists on the right.” (CNN article) Always keen to show that they are thinking for themselves, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said. “And Planned Parenthood has indicated that’s what has occurred here.”

I am not going to opine here about the legality of the fetal parts trade–I don’t doubt that in fact it is legal, just as abortion is legal. “Legal” doesn’t equal “good”, of course. I’ll accept that Planned Parenthood doesn’t make that much money per body part–as if that has any relevance. Perhaps people can even justify the fetal body parts market, by representing fetal biomedical research as a silver lining of hope in the dark cloud of abortion. I furthermore won’t even question here the claim that Planned Parenthood may provide many good medical services to women that are not related to its abortion provision.

At the end of the day, though, all of this public conversation depressingly reveals the coarsening of our culture. Our outspoken ones flash with anger that any would dare shine a spotlight on this tragedy, but do not blush with shame that it has even been occurring. It reveals just how far askew our moral compass has drifted in recent decades. Our national discourse has become an echo chamber of cynicism and spiritual death.

We have sold baby parts, and bought a prostitute’s forehead in the bargain.

27Jun

Cheap grace

In the aftermath of the tragic shooting in South Carolina, a shockingly racist hate crime, this bit piqued my interest:

What too many whites seem to demand from these families’ statements, however, isn’t really grace. As the journalist Jamelle Bouie pointed out, people like Santorum insist on what the German theologian and anti-Nazi freedom fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” — the “preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance” from those who have sinned. The forgiveness they want is so cheap that I can only call it “Wal-Mart grace”: low-priced but shoddy, destructive of real community and built on exploitation.

Source: LA Times editorial online at: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0625-baptist-charleston-forgiveness-20150625-story.html

The author goes on to suggest a theological error–that whites need to atone for their years of racism. As if they could do so. In fact, the heart of the gospel is this: We cannot atone for our own sins. Only Jesus can pay that price.

However, while we can’t atone for the past, we can choose a better future. We go forward trying to live differently, and making what amends we can out of love and gratitude. The word that the author should have chosen here is the word “repentance”. This is the word that Bonhoeffer chose. For even as Jesus says “I forgive you”, he also says, “go, and sin no more.” To do otherwise is indeed to cheapen that precious gift of grace.

28May

Dollar–A Good Name for This Guy

Some folks apparently missed the bit in Scripture where Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and Money.” Mega-rich pastors preaching the false gospel of prosperity are probably one of the biggest things, after pedophile priests, to give Christianity a bad name in the world.

Take the latest controversy regarding the televangelist with the rather appropriate name of Creflo Dollar:

…the finances of the televangelist’s 30,000-member church, World Changers Church International in College Park, Georgia, are under close scrutiny after Dollar asked his followers to buy him a $65 million private jet.

Dollar’s sermons pack his 8,500-seat mega-church, and like any house of worship, the church is non-profit and tax-exempt, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann.

His ministry has prospered with satellite churches in at least a dozen states and hundreds of thousands of online followers. Dollar owns a multi-million dollar mansion and condo.

Read it all: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/televangelist-creflo-dollar-under-scrutiny-asking-for-65-million-private-jet/

13May

More police brutality: Even the dog?

While reading about the baltimore riots, we came across this interesting story:

“A federal court case has been launched after a SWAT team in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area busted into the wrong house, shot the family’s dog, handcuffed the children and forced them to “sit next to the carcass of their dead and bloody pet for more than an hour.”

It appears that the case was dismissed in 2013, due to the plaintiffs and their lawyer not following through with a response to the motion to dismiss. You can read the court proceeding here:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCOURTS-mnd-0_12-cv-01706/pdf/USCOURTS-mnd-0_12-cv-01706-0.pdf

29Apr

Police Brutality and Rioting: Thoughts on Baltimore’s Crisis

There seems to be a growing tide of stories about police excesses, followed by ugly destructive riots. Baltimore has followed quickly on the heels of Ferguson, MO. The mysterious death of Freddie Gray while in police custody has caused an explosion of violence that took the city by surprise.

The rioters can and should be held culpable for seizing on an excuse to indulge in an orgy of burning and pillaging. Attempts by those analyzing the violence to recast it as a racial struggle or a freedom fight or a revolution must be resisted. A recent CNN commentator went a bit over the edge when he said that the rioters are engaged in “righteous rage” against “police terrorism” and that the city is “not burning because of these protesters. The city is burning because the police killed Freddie Gray and that’s a distinction we have to make.” (Marc Lamont Hill on Breitbart.com)

Unfortunately it is in the moments when those we trust the most let us down, that the opportunity arises for such opinions. The police should not be completely let off the hook here. As a component of the public service, they should not brutalize those they are charged with protecting. Of course, as long as the uniforms are filled by humans, there will be corruption within the ranks, but as an entity the police force should be vigilant in fighting against it. They should avoid arrogance, remembering that their role is to be public servants, not public lords and masters.

Is this a sign that our civilization is decaying? Of course, the answer is “yes”, but it is no more than the same primordial decay that has afflicted humanity from the beginning.

We call this series “Reflections of the Fall.”

28Mar

Hell on Earth

(Administrator’s note: Today we welcome a new author/contributor, Sister Marie. We appreciate this insightful posting, and look forward to future work from her).

“A cleaner version of Hell” is the phrase used by Robert Hood, to describe the place where he was warden during the years 2002-2005. This “hell” is the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo, or “ADX” for short, also known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”. Some of the worst Federal offenders are living out their remaining days here, including 9-11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, the spy Robert Hanssen, Oklahoma City Bomber Terry Nichols, and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, to name just a few. ADX has gotten a rare detailed airing in the New York Times; You can find the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-toughest-federal-prison.html?_r=1

I was struck by two things when I read this article. First, I find remarkable the appropriateness of the term “hell” as a description. It is said that inmates spend 23 hours of their days in solitary confinement, isolated from any human contact. Their only glimpse outside of their cell is of a bit of sky through a 4 inch wide slit-shaped window. Inmates in solitary confinement generally do not cope well, as this article states: Whatever the reasons, such extreme isolation and sensory deprivation can take a severe, sometimes permanent, toll on emotional and mental health. Researchers have found that prisoners in solitary quickly become withdrawn, hypersensitive to sights and sounds, paranoid, and more prone to violence and hallucinations. Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has documented several cases of individuals with no prior history of mental illness who nonetheless developed paranoid psychosis requiring medical treatment after prolonged solitary confinement. The aforementioned Mr. Hood sums it up: “this place is not designed for humanity.”

Isolation is also a hallmark of the Biblical Hell, described by Jesus as “outer darkness” (For example, see the fate of the unprofitable servant in Matthew 25:30). It is the loneliness of being shut out from God’s presence. In Matthew 7, Jesus states that some will be told “away from me” and “I never knew you.” The Greek word that is commonly translated as “Hell” in the New Testament is “gehenna”, which referred to the valley of Hinnom, which at the time was a desolate place outside the city of Jerusalem that was being used as a kind of garbage dump into which all kinds of excrement (including corpses) might be cast (See, for example, this entry from The New World Encyclopedia).

The second thing in this article that has struck me is how our far our earthly justice is from divine justice. Despite our best efforts, human justice is tainted and corrupt. The mental illness found at the Supermax is not merely due to the deleterious effects of isolation. The reason that the NY Times article has emerged is that the U.S. has been incarcerating those who are mentally challenged, in contravention of our own statutes:

The story of the largest lawsuit ever filed against the United States Bureau of Prisons begins, improbably enough, with this letter. Deborah Golden, the director of the D.C. Prisoners’ Project, fields approximately 2,000 requests each year, but Bacote’s, which she received in October 2009, caught her eye. “I thought I might be missing something, because it was inconceivable to me that the Bureau of Prisons could be operating in such a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional manner,” she said. Golden was referring to B.O.P. regulations that forbid the placement of inmates who “show evidence of significant mental disorder” in prisons like the ADX.

I’m filing this one under “Reflections of the Fall.”

Photo above: “Supermax prison, Florence Colorado” by US Bureau of Prisons – http://www.miamiherald.com/graphics/rich_media/1027903.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

23Jan

Fraudulent Service Animals

My wife noticed some suspiciously unruly service animals at her workplace last month, and wondered about this. Looking into the situation further, it appears that there is a veritable epidemic of fraud. Ordinary pet owners are passing off their mangy beasts as trained service dogs.

There is no shortage of news features on this increasingly common practice. Here is one of those articles, from 2013:

CHICAGO (CBS) – Despicable. That’s the word used by advocates for the disabled to describe the newest trend – people disguising their dogs as service dogs to travel, shop, and even go to night clubs.

“People think what they’re doing is harmless but it’s not. It’s very harmful,” said Marcie Davis, founder of International Assistance Dog Awareness Week.

As a paraplegic, Davis uses a real service dog, one that’s been trained and certified over hundreds of hours.

Read it all: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/08/21/despicable-epidemic-people-using-fake-service-dogs/

Brother James’ Airs

Category: Reflections of the Fall