Posts in month: March, 2009

Do the Right Thing Now
by Steve Hollingsworth
Jeff | March 27, 2009 | 10:49 pm

Eight in ten Americans support repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  A majority of service members in a recent Zogby poll have indicated they are ready and willing to serve with openly gay colleagues. Our men and women in uniform have come to the unmistakable conclusion that open service only enhances our military’s ability to get the job done.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is anti-family, anti-military and un-American.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili and the first 3-star female Army General, Claudia Kennedy, have called on Congress to end the ban.

The time to do the right thing is now.

Click on this URL to take action now!

Published in Other Voices  | Comments closed
Decline of the Culture Wars
by Martin E. Marty
Jeff | March 24, 2009 | 1:43 pm

Eight days ago columnist Frank Rich in the New York Times joined the company of those who note, as his headline says, that “The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off.”  He wrote of the “upside to the economic meltdown,” one which allows citizens to get serious now about drastic issues and render secondary the no-win/no-lose fights over what get called “cultural” as opposed to “political” or “economic” conflicts.  Rich reported on the strangely muted response by legislators to news that seasons ago would have led them to, yes, outrage:  Rich pictured that when the Administration shelves the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about gays in the military, it “will be greeted with more yawns than yowls.”  

In his view, the old New Right has lost credibility, as when “the two top candidates for leader of the post-Bush G.O.P., Rush and Newt, have six marriages between them,” and a roll call including Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter, and “the irrepressible Palins” render talk of “family values” idle.  “The religious right is even more in denial than the Republicans,” Rich adds, reacting as it does with non-apoplectic responses to the appointment of Kathleen Sebelius, who supports abortion rights, to the Health and Human Services post.  Similarly, Congressional Republicans made tepid response or ignored it.  Reaction to new action on governmental support for stem cell research lacked its old fire.  “The family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth—Falwell, Robertson, Dodson and Reed—are now either dead, retired or disgraced.”  Et cetera.

Rich went on with a chancier comment on how seriously to take the polls, which show that “nones”—people with no religious attachment or interest—is a fast-growing camp in America.  That’s a different topic for a different day.  For now, it’s advisable to keep fingers crossed.  Culture wars, like other wars, can get heated up after cooling, but they are not likely to take the forms they did, nor keep media over-awed again.

Similarly, non-culture-warring phenomena tabbed ‘Evangelical” are also meeting changed fates, as a spate of books proclaims the decline, if not the fall, of the churchly evangelical empire in America.  Those within the evangelical camp do show some signs of worry, but those outside it are grossly inaccurate in their visions of drastic decline.

The one issue in the culture wars that still has energy is “gay marriage”—“same-sex unions,” and the like.  While most public attention goes to its political and judicial fronts, as with Proposition 8 in California, less notice is given, except to members of some church bodies, to the battlefields in the churches.  Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists and other Protestants of many sorts seem bent on policies of self-destruction at their assemblies and conventions; so say those who anticipate with dread their denominational conventions this summer.  We recall “good old days,” when church leaders debated doctrines of the Trinity, Christology, and not just sex-sex-sex.

Listen to those close to the scene and you will hear of ironies.  Thus, the power people and convention voters tend to be older people, and they will decide on issues that—ask any campus pastor, for example—are seen as only old peoples’ issues, not part of the world younger generations inhabit.  Another irony:  Most of those caught in the middle of these battles know that there will not be any winners—just wearied conventioners who trudge home, confident that they have served God, ready to take up more important church work with those who are left, and necessarily girding up for battle on the same issues in 2010.  Maybe the economic crisis will distract them.

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Published in Sightings  | Comments closed
Forgiveness: Antidote or Absolution?
by Lisa Earle McLeod
Jeff | March 24, 2009 | 8:16 am

“Here’s the big secret about forgiveness – you don’t do it for them, you do it for you.”

“I can never forgive him.”

How many times have you heard that?

We all want our own mistakes to be forgiven. But how many of us truly want to forgive? Especially on the big stuff?

Every time I write about forgiveness I get angry letters from people virtually shouting, “Why should he/she be forgiven? What they did was wrong.”

I would never minimize anyone’s pain, but isn’t that kind of the point of forgiveness? If they hadn’t done something wrong, there would be no need to forgive them.

The whole act of forgiveness is predicated on the understanding that the other person committed a transgression.

I think one of the reasons that we’re often reluctant to grant someone the grace of forgiveness is because we don’t want to validate their bad behavior. We might forgive a spouse who forgets to bring home the dry cleaning, but if someone cheats on us, steals from us, or does something even worse, we want them to have to pay for their actions.

And if they refuse to own up to it, forgiveness is even harder to find.

So how do you forgive a person who shows no remorse? And why would you even want to?

Here’s the big secret about forgiveness – you don’t do it for them, you do it for you.

It’s been said that denying forgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. When you refuse to forgive, nothing bad happens to them, but a lot of bad things happen to you.

Think of the most resentful, angry, unhappy person you know. I bet they can rattle off a whole list of all the people who have done them wrong. Some of them probably even have it written down.

Doesn’t that sound like a fun way to go through life?

I have no idea how people forgive drunk drivers who mow down their children, or evil leaders who commit genocide, or even spouses who cheat.

But they do, and I notice that the common denominator amongst people who can forgive is peace.

When someone does something awful to you, they take power away from you. But when you forgive them, you take it back.

Think about it, if someone sincerely apologizes and asks you for forgiveness, don’t you feel better? Of course you do, because you feel heard and in charge of what happens next.

But you don’t have to wait for them to show remorse to start.

If you’re struggling to forgive someone, and they haven’t owned up to their mistake, find a sympathetic ear, speak the hurt out loud, let the other person validate it, and begin the process of moving on.

Yes, you deserve to have your hurt acknowledged. But the person who caused it doesn’t even have to be involved.

For what it’s worth, in all likelihood whoever hurt you probably had some hurts done to them and they were just simply playing it forward. I know that can be hard to hear, and it doesn’t mitigate whatever they did to you.

But it does illustrate why it’s in your best interest to stop the chain of pain. Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting, but it does give you the power to move on.

Because who wants to spend the rest of their life with a belly full of poison?

lisa_mcleod_02

Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, keynote speaker, nationally syndicated columnist, business consultant, and media personality. Lisa Earle McLeod’s comments can be read at <www.forgetperfect.com>.

Published in Other Voices  | Comments closed
What’s Wrong With That?
Jeff | March 12, 2009 | 8:35 am

Below is my letter to the editor sent on March 11, 2009.  BTW, I sent a similar letter yester day to a reporter, Herman Wang, calling him out for publishing the same false information.

The Free Press editor combines with a sympathetic reader in today’s (March 11) edition to foster the incorrect idea that the Employee Free Choice Act eliminates secret ballots in union organizing decisions. The words, “free choice” in the title refer to a choice between a secret ballot and a card check system to determine the union’s future. In other words, workers could choose to have secret ballot or not. What’s wrong with that?

In the editorial, comparing organizing efforts to the election of officials when both use a secret ballot is a false comparison, similar to comparing hay wagons to station wagons because they both have wheels. Both Mr. Divine and the editor use absolute words, such as “deny” and “loss” to make the reader believe that secret ballots are forbidden by this bill. They’re not. The bill merely gives workers another system to make a decision. What’s wrong with that?

The bill might even make it more difficult to organize a union because it demands 50% of workers sign a card to acknowledge a collective bargaining unit. However, only 30% of workers are needed to petition to have a secret ballot.

What’s wrong with that?

Published in Letters from the Minister  | Comments closed
Mainline Clergy
by Martin E. Marty
Jeff | March 11, 2009 | 11:23 am

While the number of Americans coded as “Mainline Protestant” has gone down (almost) twenty percent in (almost) fifty years, still (almost) one in five Americans and (almost) one in four voters are part of this often (almost) invisible cohort which receives (almost) no prime time or front page media and even (almost) no slot when pollsters interview and rank voters.  You will see and hear more than usual about them, thanks to a Public Religion Research survey released Friday, entitled Clergy Voices: Findings from the 2008 Mainline Protestant Clergy Voices Survey.  Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox present their findings, which are active enough, but in their own way.

Until around 1960 this cluster dominated much public discourse, as it does not today.  Happily, Jones and Cox don’t waste any of their thirty-five pages revisiting the overdone analysis of reasons for their relative decline in size, status, and noise.  Old stuff.  The new stuff here is their set of findings about clergy voices and actions today (as of last August, that is).  While the mainliners have enemies, mainly among conservative Protestants and think-tanks on the right, they go about their work in thousands of vital congregations and more struggling ones.  Those enemies like to portray them as ideological leftists; Clergy Voices does not find them so.  The word “diffuse” shows up in the reports.  They have voices in public affairs, but rarely and mildly try to project or enforce social justice “dogma.”  Some see their limits as a result of lay reaction to leftism, but current members are not massively assaulted with radical preachments and policies.

Politicians who would organize and exploit them, as they do some other religious groups, would have difficulty doing so; constituencies vary too much by denomination, region, social class, and height of  boundaries that might be used to keep members in and others out.  Their members may have strong social justice commitments, but they blend them with those in other religions or in the secular order.  Yes, half call themselves “liberal,” because they are not afraid of the label, but a third are “conservative.”  Over half are Democrat-“leaning” and one-third “claim a Republican affiliation.”  No surprise here:  More than three-quarters want the federal government to do more on the social problems front, especially in respect to environmental and health care issues.  They fall into the “church-state separation” camp, and far more are worried about public officials who are too close to religious leaders than about those who are too far.           

Four out of five speak up on hunger and poverty issues but—and this fits the stereotype—only one-fourth “often discussed the issues of abortion and capital punishment.”  They are friendlier than not to gay and lesbian people, and a majority supports their rights.  Clergy?  Ninety-three percent are still white, eighty percent male, only twenty-nine percent believe in biblical inerrancy, almost eighty-percent say they are strongly interested in politics, but most don’t preach on specific legislative or candidacy themes.  They and their members pitch in on other than directly political causes and prefer broad-based works of mercy through voluntary associations in church and beyond it.  On the large screen, most “are firmly opposed to the war in Iraq and most think Israel has to make greater concessions to achieve Middle East peace.  That, in our reading, is the solitary issue that prompts editorial and talk-show talk.  They are generally for control of guns.  Maybe that’s a clue to the reasoning of those who attack them:  Taking on guns, they attack what may be America’s real religion.

References:

Find information on the sponsoring agency of the survey at www.publicreligion.org; the survey itself is available at http://www.publicreligion.org/research/?id=167.    
 
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  

 

 

Published in Sightings  | Comments closed