tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-121264322024-02-03T10:48:54.116-06:00left cheekTurning the other cheek since 75.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.comBlogger1063125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-76736427798137551912013-04-18T17:25:00.005-05:002013-04-18T17:25:42.412-05:00Moved!Due to some spamming and stuff, I decided to move, at least temporarily, into the backup <a href="http://leftcheek.wordpress.com/">WordPress space</a>. Several new posts have come up since then - most of which I'm really proud of. *derp*<br />
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So, please change your settings to view us at <a href="http://leftcheek.wordpress.com/">Leftcheek Deux</a> for the time being. <br />
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That is: http://leftcheek.wordpress.com/jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-59254765123930368322013-03-31T08:23:00.002-05:002013-03-31T09:34:20.783-05:00Would They Deny the Body to the Body?<br />
Pope Francis went into a juvenile detention center and washed some feet. Scandal of scandals!<br />
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No, seriously. The idea that the Holy Father would get down on his feet in front of poor law-breakers - some of whom are female - is scandalous, <a href="http://newsok.com/popes-foot-wash-a-final-straw-for-traditionalists/article/feed/520464/?page=1">according to traditionalists</a> within the hierarchical Catholic Church.<br />
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[On] Thursday at the Casal del Marmo juvenile detention facility in Rome... <b>the 76-year-old Francis got down on his knees to wash and kiss the feet of 12 inmates, two of them women. The rite re-enacts Jesus' washing of the feet of his 12 apostles during the Last Supper before his crucifixion</b>, a sign of his love and service to them. </blockquote>
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<b>The church's liturgical law holds that only men can participate in the rite, given that Jesus' apostles were all male</b>. Priests and bishops have routinely petitioned for exemptions to include women, but the law is clear... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"People naturally imitate their leader. That's the whole point behind Jesus washing the disciples' feet. He was explicitly and intentionally setting an example for them," he said. "Pope Francis knows that he is setting an example." </blockquote>
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<b>The inclusion of women in the rite is problematic for some because it could be seen as an opening of sorts to women's ordination</b>. The Catholic Church restricts the priesthood to men, arguing that Jesus and his 12 apostles were male.</blockquote>
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There is much to like and perhaps to not like about the new pope. There are many controversial decisions (for whatever reasons, his not wearing of fine vestments is one of them) that he has made in his short papacy, but<b> I want to focus on the scandal of the idea that women can receive a sacrament meant only for men.</b><br />
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Because the origin of the limitation here is built on a notion that I've heard in hierarchical Evangelical churches as well (aka, Complementarians): the idea that Christ's apostles were men and only men. Therefore a sacred task (washing the feet in Catholic church tradition, preaching in Complementarian churches) is open only to males. <b>No matter how socio-economically open, no matter how racially or ethnically diverse, or even how ecumenical, still one half of the world is denied something so holy.</b><br />
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But <b>wouldn't this then limit also the taking of the Host</b>, since the same foot-washing apparently limited to only Jesus' male disciples was also the same event wherein they shared the Last Supper. Shouldn't only then males drink the blood and eat the body?<br />
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Jesus' encounters with the excluded (whether they be blind, bleeding, Roman centurions, Syro-Phoenician mothers, tax collectors, the physically handicapped, the psychologically tortured (demon-possessed), or the dreaded Samaritans - even Samaritan females!) shows a different Christian witness - the witness of intentional inclusion.<br />
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<b>In fact, if the definition of Apostle is "One sent to give witness to the Risen Christ"</b> (which we particularly remember today), <b>then the first Apostles were women</b>. For <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2024:1-12&version=NLT">they were the first</a> to witness the empty tomb and the first to hear word of the Risen Christ and the first to spread the message - the hopeful, terrible message - of the empty tomb and not-dead Jesus.<br />
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But I guess it should be noted that <b>those same women were at first also dismissed by the male hierarchy of the original church</b>, as it were. It seems that much of the Christian Church is stuck in a certain time - the time after Jesus had defeated death with its finalities and its exclusions, but before the rest of the world discovers what impact this would have on them - how his resurrection and Kingdom Life would negate the distinctions the world places between Male and Female, Greek and Jew, Freeborn and Slave.<br />
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For <b>in the body of the Risen Christ is the body of <i>all</i>. And the Christian Church should be a witness to that, should be leaders setting a new example, should be apostles of a New Way of Being.</b><br />
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<br />jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-71995887069576705112013-03-25T21:00:00.000-05:002013-03-25T20:40:35.818-05:00"There is no wasted bullet": American Christianity's God and Terrorism<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This movie should disturb Christian consciences.</blockquote>
Mike Kosper, <a href="http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/03/19/terror-and-torture-at-zero-dark-thirty/">writing for The Gospel Coalition</a>, is right. <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>, a gritty, controversial movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, <b>should </b>disturb the Christian conscience. But not in the direction that Kosper seems to be headed.<b> Like most American Christians</b> - like most people, period -<b> Kosper arrives at his ending under the prevailing assumption that violence is a necessary tool used to fight evil.</b> As most American Christians presume,<b> he believes that God wills and desires violence and that Jesus' death on the cross was a satisfactory use of violence to quench God's thirst for violence</b>. A violence that otherwise would overtake the world in its wrath.<br />
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Kosper lets filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow's statement that she is a pacifist stand without question. And then he quotes and agrees with her refutation of that very claim:<br />
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Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.</blockquote>
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This is not a statement of pacifism. <b>It is not a statement of someone who believes that war is an active and nihilistic participation in evil and unnecessary violence. It is a statement of triumphalism, of nationalism, of agreement with those who gloat over the death of people</b>. A winning side, a losing side. And so the game continues.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DaqTAmpNJj4/UU4GFBAo8gI/AAAAAAAAKbg/fbwmC1hbPck/s1600/Zero+Dark+Thirty+Night+Laser.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DaqTAmpNJj4/UU4GFBAo8gI/AAAAAAAAKbg/fbwmC1hbPck/s320/Zero+Dark+Thirty+Night+Laser.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Rather than showing Seal Team Six to be superhuman warriors, surging with testosterone and screaming as they wreak havoc, they're more like a work crew, methodically operating a machinery of death that dismantles the compound and kills their targets with grim efficiency. There is no wasted bullet. No wasted energy or action. It's well coordinated, rational, and absolutely deadly.</blockquote>
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The quote here, gruesome in itself even in its cold and methodical aims, reminds me of Calvinist theology - a cornerstone of neo-Reformed The Gospel Coalition. In fact, the Gospel itself is confused for Calvinist theology in TGC (So much so that those who do not agree with Reformed theology are accused of being unorthodox heretics). According to the Reformed doctrine of Limited Atonement, Jesus' blood on the cross was spilt for <i>and only for</i> those who would accept him, for those predestined to be saved. If Jesus died for those who would never accept him, his blood would have been wasted. But this idea is <b>built upon the theological presupposition that each person is evil to the core and that nobody is intrinsically worth saving. It is a theology of violence</b>.<br />
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On the other hand, a more open-ended view of Jesus' blood and salvation could lead one to believe that Jesus' blood was spilled not through the work of God, but as a work of violence of the state itself. <b>The same state powers practiced to annihilate Osama bin Laden and kill children in his compound were the same forces used to kill Jesus. </b><br />
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The same state powers used to <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2013/03/cps-and-further-de-stabilization.html">dislocate dozens of thousands of black and brown school children in Chicago</a>. The same state powers used to back up corporate and industrial wars of aggression throughout the world. The same state powers that train fascist leaders and their henchmen in Third World nations - that have thrown dissenters in rapid rivers from helicopters, that employ children as soldiers, that kill our prophets.<br />
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The same state that overflows prisons and blames murder on bad people, rather than the bad socio-economic systems that it is designed to support.<br />
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The same state that says that drones are necessary because the other option is to put troops on the ground.<br />
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The same state that assumes that some have to starve for others to live plentifully.<br />
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Yet,<b> the neo-Reformed movement, with its intense focus on heavenly rewards and the futility of this life outside a very narrow structure focused on death, also bears a striking resemblance to the the other side of the War on Terror coin - <i>terrorism as a strategy</i>.</b><br />
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Can there be much more terrifying than that cruciform of neo-Reformed texts, Jonathan Edwards' "<a href="http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/sermons.sinners.html">Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God</a>"? A theology that has as its pretext the fact that God is angry, and this angry God needed to kill - and die - in order to sate his anger (which is still not satisfied) is a theology wrapped in terror and fear.<br />
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It seems that American Christians - and particularly the neo-Reformed Christians - need to believe in an evil other, need to believe in the holiness of violence, need to find more and more sacrifices to their terrifying version of God.<br />
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And that's terrifying. And torturous.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-73023317292410621282013-03-23T12:41:00.000-05:002013-03-23T12:41:30.069-05:00And on an unrelated topic<div class="separator tr_bq" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bojgTZ4VJ6E/UU3oUw5veQI/AAAAAAAAKbQ/R5EjXQ8bnIU/s1600/Arrested-Development-arrested-development-44764_1024_768.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bojgTZ4VJ6E/UU3oUw5veQI/AAAAAAAAKbQ/R5EjXQ8bnIU/s400/Arrested-Development-arrested-development-44764_1024_768.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Geeking out big, freaking time!</div>
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<blockquote>
<a href="http://www.gq.com/style/wear-it-now/201304/jason-bateman-interview-gq-april-2013?mbid=social_tumblr_gqmagazine">GQ</a>: What else can you tell me about the show? The entire Internet wants to know. </blockquote>
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Jason Bateman: The last line of the last episode of Arrested Development was Ron Howard saying to Maeby—she’s pitching him a show about her family at Imagine—and he says to her, “No, I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie!” And then the screen goes black. That’s it. So Mitch [Hurwitz, the show’s creator] was always planning on writing a movie. Every time he went to start a movie script, there was so much work to be done just to fill the audience in on where the family had been since the end of the show, and to also initiate the uninitiated about who these characters are. So he thought: <b>The only way to tell a story of this size is to do the first act in episodes. So it’s really a hybrid distribution of one big story. The episodes are simply act 1, and the movie will have act 2 and act 3 in it. So one does not work without the other. </b></blockquote>
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GQ: So there are stories in the episodes that won’t resolve until the movie? </blockquote>
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Jason Bateman: There are many, many questions that these episodes ask that only the movie will answer. And there are many stories where the loop is closed inside the episodes. But the overall story, the bigger story, once you see the movie you will see that “oh, this story started with those fourteen episodes,” because<b> the action in these fourteen episodes happens simultaneously</b>. Each character has their own episode. There’s a Michael episode, a Gob episode, a Lindsay episode, a Maeby episode. And the action across the episodes is happening simultaneously. If I’m driving down the street in my episode and Gob’s going down the sidewalk on his Segway, you could stop my episode, go into his episode, and follow him and see where he’s going. </blockquote>
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It’s not exactly like a Choose Your Own Adventure type of thing, but Mitch has written these episodes exclusively for the distribution platform and format of Netflix, knowing that they were all going to be released, like an album, on the same day. So<b> certain clues are revealed to you based on the order in which you watch them.</b> There will be an order that is suggested, but because part of the fun of what he does is so dense and multilayered—I mean,<b> if you could see the writers’ room before we started shooting—the cards and literally the strings of yarn, different colored characters where plotlines and index cards are matched to this one, and then there’s an entire other room that is the movie</b>. It looks like<i> A Beautiful Mind</i>.</blockquote>
jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-39783235313297440192013-03-22T12:18:00.001-05:002013-03-22T12:20:03.811-05:00CPS and Further De-stabilization<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;">
<i>"We're stabilizing our district so we can build the academic performance"</i> </div>
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- Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennet <a href="http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=9036942">on the closing of 52</a> schools in one year</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dHWmjbfh87M/UUyKBEP0SqI/AAAAAAAAKbA/sZOgHocmtd0/s1600/rahm+school+closings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dHWmjbfh87M/UUyKBEP0SqI/AAAAAAAAKbA/sZOgHocmtd0/s320/rahm+school+closings.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
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We've<a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2013/02/guns-and-race-in-chicago.html"> recently discussed</a> how a mayor who is quickly undermining the public sector and removing funding from anti-violence measures in the city has also <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-infantization-of-chicago-schools-in.html">blamed residents</a> for the gang-centric violence in their own neighborhoods.<br />
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And now he closes down more than 50 schools in these same <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-racist-classist-failure-of-public.html">high-poverty, high-crime, underresourced, segregated neighborhoods</a>. In one shot. In one year. Without adequate research, cost-analysis. Just decides it needs to be done. Tells us it needs to be done. Holds some hearings, wherein parents come out in droves to voice, loudly, their disapproval. Where parents protest, where parents and students testify that shutting down their schools is dangerous and destabilizing, where parents hold mic-checks to send signals to CPS that CPS needs to listen to us.<br />
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And <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-infantization-of-chicago-schools-in.html">CPS ignores u</a>s. They send out proxies, but the proxies are bored. Rahm is nowhere to be seen. No, wait, he's riding the slopes when this announcement is made. On his behalf.<br />
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What effect will all this have? There are some things we can guess. But for the most part, we've already seen the effects of closing down several schools simultaneously. It's violence. Kids having to choose between gangs. In a highly-segregated city replete with racialized violence against young people, do you really believe that something horrible won't happen? Just as the shooting numbers are decreasing, children and care-givers will begin the new year at the tail end of a lethal summer running from gangs? Thanks, Rahm and Barbara.<br />
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In the meantime, hundreds of Chicago residents have been summarily fired. So much for stabilization, Byrd-Bennett!jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-79707662334706445242013-03-20T08:57:00.003-05:002013-03-21T15:27:58.064-05:00Waiting for Scabby (Schools in Crisis III)I know unions are often vilified as the unjust protector of the lazy, incompetent, shiftless worker. Especially when it comes to public sector unions. And it's particularly fashionable to<a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/09/thinking-of-children-will-not-anyone.html"> blame teachers unions</a> such as the Chicago Teachers Union for poor performance of schools and students, especially thanks to liberal movies like <i>Waiting for "Superman."</i> There are times when it is true that unions protect bloating, ineffeciency, or bad workers, but those few cases are stymied out of proportion. The enemy isn't the <b>unions</b>. No, in fact, they <b>protect against growing inequity, and in the case of education unions, against the corporatization and privatization of education. They protect against the current tides that would turn our students into commodities </b>- a tide that we see is unrelenting in the post-secondary world with overwhelming debt to an increasingly costly higher education.<br />
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Rather,<b> the enemy is a mindset that says most of our children are not welcome to the education that the wealthy kids in the wealthy regions have.</b> The enemy is a mindset that places high "accountability" on teachers to bring test scores of students with high stress levels, with malnourished stomachs, in overcrowded and underresourced schools up to par with wealthy, well-fed, well-regulated students with private tutors and classes no larger than fifteen a piece. <b>Our children are taught to the test. Wealthy children are taught to succeed</b>. I'm not hating, it's just that we need that as well.<br />
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<b>The enemy is a system that takes what little money goes to working class and black/brown students and sucks it out through the Industrial Testing Machine to "assess" what students are learning through worthless and disenfranchising bubblesheets</b> - bubblesheets that teachers spend the better part of the year teaching their kids how to fill correctly so they'd have a chance to allow the school to not be drastically defunded.<br />
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No, the union member who is teaching my daughter how to read and add in English and Spanish is doing a fantastic job. <i>Because </i>she has some protections. And she is being compensated decently for it as well - not as high as should be. But decently. As should be.<br />
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I worry about the next few years, as <b>my daughter will have to</b> - in order to meet national "standards" that unions are trying to fight against even as the administrators shout "Do not resist!" - <b>conform more and more to testing apparatuses that stifle intellectual curiosity</b>.<br />
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The main problem isn't the unions or their pensions. <b>The main problem is that teachers are not encouraged to educate in a cooperative and meaningful fashion - but compelled to conform to normalizing and competitive corporate powers.</b><br />
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That's what propaganda like <i><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/">Waiting for Superman</a></i> is about. Diane Ravitch:<br />
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It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, <a href="http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/">Finland</a>, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than 5 percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who insist that poverty doesn’t matter, that only teachers matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts. </blockquote>
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If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and mentoring systems, and better working conditions.</blockquote>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="288" src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/embed/mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:376268" width="512"></iframe><br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 4px; padding: 4px; text-align: left;">
<b><a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-3-2011/diane-ravitch">The Daily Show with Jon Stewart</a></b><br />
Get More: <a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/">Daily Show Full Episodes</a>,<a href="http://www.comedycentral.com/indecision">Indecision Political Humor</a>,<a href="http://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow">The Daily Show on Facebook</a></div>
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<b>Teachers unions are among the only forces fighting for education of our youth in the US</b>. So-called liberal education reformers, whether their names be Duncan, <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-15/business/ct-biz-0315-confidential-pritzker-20130315_1_penny-pritzker-bryan-traubert-resignation-letter">Pritzker</a>, Guggenheim, or <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-infantization-of-chicago-schools-in.html">Byrd-Bennett</a>, fight for educational funds, using the the people's investment money to make a few people rich. This is the price we pay for not wanting to adequately fund our future.</div>
jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-30575876766191462822013-03-19T15:54:00.000-05:002013-03-19T16:39:22.701-05:00Robbing Widows BlindThinking about a certain <a href="http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/money-and-power-the-elephant-room">megachurch pastor</a> in the area and how he connected himself with <a href="http://thewartburgwatch.com/2012/10/15/james-macdonaldmark-driscoll-sacrificial-servants-or-serving-it-up/">other megachurch pastors</a> - one of whom is both unsavory and infamous - and how they are all about the <a href="http://theresurgence.com/2012/10/01/why-james-macdonald-at-r12">money in the guise of being all about the ministry and God</a> and how they have zero accountability because their churches are non-denominational and their elder boards (which in the schematic of CEO-like churches run by the head pastor act as, well, a board) are staffed by and headed by complete Yes Men.<br />
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Thinking in wider terms about how much is too much. <b>Teachers are assailed for making around $50,000 a year with a kind of venom usually reserved for the evil landlord from vaudeville plays, while a "successful"</b> (whatever that word means) <b>pastor can make $600,000 </b>(even as <a href="http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/money-and-power-the-elephant-room">his church is millions of dollars in debt</a>) a year. A "successful" businessman can make one-fourth to a hundred times as much.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WNi9y-2IuzQ/UUi_Mz3LMEI/AAAAAAAAKaw/rYWkub7i4Zs/s1600/PennybagsAndBurns.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WNi9y-2IuzQ/UUi_Mz3LMEI/AAAAAAAAKaw/rYWkub7i4Zs/s1600/PennybagsAndBurns.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
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The rubric for "successful" in this case is messed up, of course. <b>How do we measure success? By the amount of money one is able to siphon from parishioners, customers, clients, workers, widows and the impacted communities?</b> How we measure the success of teachers has already proven to be completely fallible, erroneous, and dangerous. So maybe we should redefine success, and re-calibrate its measurements thus. While we're at it, we we should reconfigure how we determine compensation.</div>
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<b>Maybe success should look be assessed on the overall value our work gives to the world</b> - in terms of the worker, her neighbors, the community, the world. In other words,<b> the assessments should be tied to value and worth of the work and the worker </b>(as they relate to the greater good of the world)<b> as a much larger goal, rather than the explicitly limited topic of finances and how much money is generated/saved/returned</b>. For <b>in the former, we value</b> <i><b>people</b></i>, we value <i>work</i>, we value <b><i>life</i></b>, we value <i>knowledge</i>, we value <i>wisdom</i>, we value <i>relationships </i>and everything that is good which we desire to share with one another. <b>In the latter, money</b>. When our work is tied into such a limited use, our work is of little use - it is stifled. And we, as workers and as beings, are stifled.<br />
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With this correction in goals, we must also ask what is it that we value. And <i>who </i>and <i>how </i>we value.<br />
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Additionally, when a pastor-as-CEO makes the primary goal money, he (or she) devalues the very flock that he is supposed to guide and care for. <b>He looks upon his congregation not as fully human beings to be loved and nurtured and cared for, but as products and banks to be reaped and profited from</b>. The <b>widows no longer need care and solace, they need to be unloaded of their houses</b>. The orphans no longer need protection, they are just in the way of the pockets of professional parents.</div>
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Now we must ask how to compensate.<b> <span style="color: red;">The <i>worth </i>is in the <i>work </i>and the <i>worker</i></span></b>, but again, we've tied it all to money and thus limited all three. Money should neither be the primary evaluation nor the primary compensation. For under that rubric,<b> a few will position themselves to acquire the most while most are purposefully positioned to acquire little </b>(and are thus sacrificed).<b> Not only is this game not fair, it is not just. Not only are the rewards for the work not equitable, they are not humane</b>. Some must starve while others have so much money they don't know what to do with it? This is cruel and unnecessary and does no promote value or work - it promotes brutality. A brutality that makes itself exceedingly well-known in Third World conditions that live within First World nations.</div>
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This is what I say: Let every teacher make just more than living wage. Allow every pastor to also make as much as a living wage. Every executive? Also, frame it on the living wage. Every farmer, harvester, technician, politician, homemaker, lawyer, accountant, mechanic, doctor, journalist, bureaucrat, deliverer, janitor, etc - all should make roughly a living wage - with modifications weighted to the worth of the work provided.</div>
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That may sound cruel. But this is also what I believe:<b> Every home should be available and affordable and safe and functional for every person and family unit</b>; <i>every part of medical and dental care should be completely accessible, qualitative, and covered</i>;<b> every meal should be accessible,</b><b> healthy, adequate, and</b><b> free from poisons and heavy process,.</b></div>
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So, <b>maybe that means a re-assignment of value and property. And maybe a James MacDonald won't have as much monetary property as before. But then, he won't have as much debt to worry (or make his congregation worry) about either.</b></div>
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That would seem to go well with the <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/12/forgiveness-us-our-debts.html">whole Jesus thing</a> anyway. </div>
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jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-74834541368189152232013-03-17T08:44:00.000-05:002013-03-21T15:29:03.170-05:00The Infantization of Chicago (Schools in Crisis II)As a new parent with some of my upbringing stuck deep inside me, I found the idea of an incredulous toddler maddening. I had to learn to break the habit of spanks and taps – all of which hurt my daughter incredibly more than any other act of hurting. She trusted her parents, I learned, and I was given the gift of her trust. So I learned in the process that I couldn’t just pick her up and do my will. She would have to make up her mind of her own volition. This would take a lot of patience on my part, a patience that I didn’t always want to sacrifice.<br />
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But, she was worth it. The trust she endeared in me was worth it. Her dignity and humanity was worth it. And the chance to retain a leadership status into the future is worth it.<br />
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Contrast that to this skeezbag of a pastor, who claims to<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/03/15/christian-pastor-i-carry-my-wife-around-the-house-every-day-to-show-her-whos-boss/"> pick his wife up everyday just to show her who's boss</a>.<br />
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The amount of abuse that happens in that household and within his congregation is unfathomable, for sure. But <b>what happens when a mayor and his staff does that to an entire metropolis? </b>Is this not systemic abuse?<br />
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Let's look at Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Barbara Byrd-Bennett.<br />
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<b>Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett are positive that the best things for Chicagoans are what Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett insist are the best things for us. And then they tell us that we will thank them for it in the future,</b> but that their austerity plans are the best for us now. They may even try to convince us that we like their plans <i>right now</i><b>.</b><br />
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<b>Byrd-Bennett, in fact, never once showed at one of the loud, cantankerous school closing hearings held throughout the city.</b> I was involved in one, and heard from several friends and media reports in the majority of others. <b>Parents were irate. Parents were upset. They did not want their children's schools shut down and they overwhelmingly asked for <i>more </i>resources, not less.</b><br />
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<b>But </b>then there's Byrd-Bennet, <a href="http://www.wbez.org/news/cps-bringing-security-backup-school-closures-106112">treating us like confused children</a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Everybody got it, that we really needed to close schools, that we really needed to consolidate.</blockquote>
Whereas Rahm has previously worked hard to attack teachers and other union workers (including those dreadful, evil librarians and bus drivers) as being shiftless and out of touch - as being enemies of the public rather than members of it, at least Byrd-Bennett had the good sense to stay out of it, at least in public. And now that she's been so far removed from public that she doesn't even show up in public, she decides that we're gonna need a corrective.<br />
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So she pictures parents as being pliable, compliant, willing to listen to her suggestion/ultimatum: That we need to close down schools (which we don't; it will not save money in the long or short run). And, according to her account, that's what we all learned. Even as it wasn't.<br />
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<b>How does she document this since she wasn't there? She has <i><a href="http://www.wbez.org/news/cps-bringing-security-backup-school-closures-106112">binders </a>full of parents</i></b>.*<br />
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She who tried to <a href="http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/persepolis-it-wasnt-just-a-bureaucratic-mistake-byrd-bennett-really-banned-the-book-on-purpose/">ban</a> the graphic novel <i>Persepolis</i> from the libraries and classrooms of Chicago Public Schools. High Schools like Lane Tech, one of the consistently top-ranked schools in the city. But then she slightly retracted, saying it was too mature for seventh graders. The same graphic novel on coming of age in Revolutionary Iran that is stocked in the YAL section of my local library - without adult supervision?<br />
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As Kenzo Shibato <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenzo-shibata/chicago-public-schools-ba_b_2884428.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications">put it</a>:<br />
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Persepolis is the story of a young girl growing up during the Islamic revolution in Iran. She is an inquisitive girl who speaks truth to power and refuses to believe the lies of a tyrannical government. She suffers censorship and austerity at the hands of powerful ideological bureaucrats.<br />
Maybe it hits a little too close to home for CPS.</blockquote>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2UdQjK-UQpE/UUXHkPmaEpI/AAAAAAAAKag/Wt69TB2EwPs/s1600/punk+is+not+dead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2UdQjK-UQpE/UUXHkPmaEpI/AAAAAAAAKag/Wt69TB2EwPs/s320/punk+is+not+dead.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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And he has the audacity to pretend that he knows perfectly well about raising children in poverty and the temerity to<a href="http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130315/chicago/rahm-bad-parents-hinder-learning-opportunities-for-kids#ixzz2NjDvjojm"> blame parents</a> - when he's not blaming teachers - for the failure of kids in the classroom? </div>
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“The real problem is not just the education of our children,” he said. “We have parents that can’t be parents.<br />
“We have too many kids, literally, from a broken home.”<br />
The mayor said the city is making headway in connecting parents to their kids’ academic success, pointing to an initiative sponsored by Walgreens that rewards parents with $25 gift cards for picking up their child’s report card.</blockquote>
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Tell me in what ways he doesn't sound like <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/post/romney-visits-inner-city-charter-school-in-philadelphia-in-outreach-to-black-voters/2012/05/24/gJQAWBWYnU_blog.html">Mitt Romney here</a>?* Oh yeah, he's willing to "give free stuff" to parents who pick up report cards (despite the fact that many just can't get out of work in time to pick up report cards regardless of a gift card). </div>
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<b>Sure Rahm, some parents of school children need to be dressed down for not taking responsibility for their children's well-being.</b> But by people who know what they're going through.<b> Not by some silverspoonin', North Shore, Austerity-promoting, anti-working poor mayor closing schools in our neighborhoods</b>. <b>Not only do you and can you not know what those parents are honestly going through that they can't or choose not to be at every meeting, you don't even listen to the ones who <i>do </i>involve themselves to the breaking point</b>, who show up, who put in the time and volunteer, who know very well the cost of shutting down their children's schools or their neighboring schools. <b>Who vigorously and pointedly protested and yet were dismissed like cantankerous children</b>. What would make the already-beyond-taxed think that you'd be ready to do anything for them anyway, that things will go great for them if those who have been applying by all the rules can't even catch a break in your system?</div>
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This is not the first time Rahm's been to this rodeo, though. Shortly before, while visiting the West Side to introduce some new plan of reshuffling police officers in high-crime areas, he offered that it wasn't as much the job of the police to shut down crime as it was the job of community members. <b>Rather than encouraging partnership, though, he is actually shutting down one of the only resources that has effectively connected community members and their beat cops</b>, CAPS. Which means that <b>the resources that we have to fight the effects of poverty and crime (in the form of working community schools or programs that connect police officers with the neighborhoods that they are often estranged from), as little as they are, are actually being taken away from us</b> during the times when we most need them.</div>
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And you have the audacity to tell us your plans for us are for our own good? The obnoxiousness to carry us over your shoulders until we stop our temper tantrums? That's how you treat us?</div>
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And we're supposed to accept that, Chicagoans, as being better for us. But we know better than that. We're smart and aware. And grown-ass folks to boot.</div>
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*There are several other ways that Rahm and his administration remind me of Romney. Romney said in that <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/post/romney-visits-inner-city-charter-school-in-philadelphia-in-outreach-to-black-voters/2012/05/24/gJQAWBWYnU_blog.html">meeting in a West Philadelphia school</a> that classroom size doesn't affect performance, hinting that more students per class should be all right in an overly-crowded system. <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-06/news/ct-met-cps-school-closing-class-size-20130306_1_class-size-state-records-high-schools/2">Guess what other non-educators with children in small classes have been saying such terrible nonsense</a>?</div>
jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-54706991175003938632013-03-15T23:09:00.001-05:002013-03-15T23:09:23.606-05:00Right-to-Label<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Slzb2Lp2r-E?rel=0" width="560"></iframe><br />
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I can't get this story out of my head. For another rundown of the <b>White Guy Yells at Black Guy Questioning Why There Aren't Any Black People at the Major Conservative Convention of the Year and Gets the Black Man Pushed Out</b>, check <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/15/1194126/-CPAC-Video-Black-guy-escorted-out-by-police-after-White-guy-screams-at-him-that-Race-Doesn-t-Matter">DailyKos</a> here. The man's question is, of course, a canard. If he really was curious all he would need to do is check out video and transcripts from prior years at CPAC. People of Color are not welcome there. Largely, neither are women. (For more proof from today, check out<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/03/15/1729331/cpac-slavery-minority-outreach/?fb_action_ids=312756468847774&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B497974726905520%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.likes%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D"> this charmer here</a>). But the point of asking questions isn't necessarily out of curiosity as it is provocation. <b>In a zone where minorities and women do not feel safe, provocation is a good thing. </b><br />
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But what stuck with me among many, many other concerns was this insistence by the Arguing White Man that the Questioning Black Man isn't "Black." No, <b>to AWM and other White Supremacists, the ability to label oneself is reserved for White Males</b>. These same people who will argue that Obama cannot be Black, he is "Half-Black, Half-White" - despite the fact that he claims his Blackness. The same people who spent a good century arguing that a person who has a great-great grandparent of African descent is immediately qualified as Negro. <b>The same people who had associated violence with a Spanish name for a color and are angry they are not allowed to use that term anymore</b>.<br />
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<b>The same people who try to apply the adjective "illegal" to human beings who are, in turn, dehumanized, detained under inhumane conditions, and deported under anti-family measurements</b>. Yet many of these same people have the audacity to use the term "pro-life" on themselves. The same people who love to talk of dividing people into two groups: <i>Good, Law Abiding Citizens </i>and <i>Criminals</i>. Only the <i>Criminals </i>(or the "mentally insane") would do something bad with a gun. Only the <i>Criminals </i>would or could rape a woman. Only the <i>Criminals </i>are suspicious and would steal from<i> Good, Law-Abiding Citizens</i> (they obviously don't know how banking works). Only the <i>Criminals </i>don't obey the law at every time and therefore have something to fear from the police. Essentially, even <b>criminal behavior has been racialized</b>. Or, in another perspective, <b>non-whites have been criminalized</b>.<br />
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But only they can tell us when and how to identify ourselves. Being mixed-race, I'm not cool with that. Nobody else gets to tell me who I am after I've been ostracized from every club there is for not being "pure" enough.<br />
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But being human, I'm also not cool with that.<br />
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Why is anyone?jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-86552899948342409572013-03-09T13:27:00.003-06:002013-03-21T15:28:39.648-05:00The Racist, Classist Failure of a Public Schools System (Schools in Crisis I)<br />
A few things seem obvious to me as I sink my teeth into trying to understand the behavior of the official City of Chicago (the politicians) towards its own public school system. For this edition (the first of several on Chicago Public Schools and its racist, classist, anti-worker, poverty-enhancing displacement of students and closings of resources), I'm going to look at the forest. And the outlay of the forest from a widespread and historical view says a lot about City Hall's priorities. And<b> despite the best Orwellian attempts at manipulating language, the powers-that-be at City Hall and the Chicago Public Schools, clearly, are not thinking of the children.</b><br />
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And that's the problem. The primary priority isn't to aid or mature or set students on a course for success. I don't think they're trying to fail them, either. It's just that<b> the students that are in the crossfires are looked upon as cannon fodder. They choose these schools because they figure it will be easier to push them around because they're already on the margins anyway. </b><br />
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It's nothing <i>less </i>than racism and classism. The same kind of racism and classism that has been institutionalized in the industrial North since Ford made his cities for White and Black workers around Detroit and since the Chicago Housing Authority was pushed by Daley, Sr., to segregate between white and and "encroaching" black citizens. Not to mention the redlining, the highways, the so-called urban renewal projects of the University of Chicago, the buffer area that protected the 1st Ward's white residents from the growing black population. The fact that King said he'd never approached the type of racism he encountered in Chicago.<br />
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And then <b>decades upon decades of disinvestment from, marginalization of, and criminalization of the black population</b> (as is seen in our War on Drugs that disproportionately affects black males at rates of nearly twenty-to-one in Chicago in terms of police harassment, arrests, and sentencing, with much stiffer fines and imprisonments tending to go towards people of color when they are charged)<b> leads us to today's situation. It's a tale that can probably be best overseen with maps.</b><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6xJTwTlaYYg/URP6ZUPt0aI/AAAAAAAAKXk/SkvKsccjV4c/s1600/chicago+homicide+map+2012.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6xJTwTlaYYg/URP6ZUPt0aI/AAAAAAAAKXk/SkvKsccjV4c/s320/chicago+homicide+map+2012.png" width="230" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Map courtesy of <i>Chicago Sun-Times</i></td></tr>
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The map here (that we showed on the topic of guns and race in Chicago) shows an outline of where murders in Chicago have happened in one year. Just one year. Notice that there are huge swaths of areas largely unaffected by homicidal violence - and others where streets are overrun by it. This isn't a sign of moral failure of the population - but of moral failure of City Hall and of a society that allows for and supports racism and economic apartheid.</div>
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Notice the trends, again.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ix5_vHI3_So/UTuCM1Ip3DI/AAAAAAAAKaM/yg06twAaEvw/s1600/HighwaysPoverty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ix5_vHI3_So/UTuCM1Ip3DI/AAAAAAAAKaM/yg06twAaEvw/s320/HighwaysPoverty.jpg" width="247" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Map courtesy of <a href="http://www.horizonmapping.net/projects/tmc/tmc_gallery/Tutor_Mentor_poverty_maps.html">Horizon Mapping</a> (which is another issue for another day, but...)</td></tr>
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Look familiar?</div>
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Check out the map of <a href="http://www.wbez.org/news/history-school-closings-chicago-2002-12-104383">schools that have been closed down over the last ten years</a> (off site. Sorry) </div>
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Now look at the map of the <a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/news/2013/01/graphic_potential_school_closings.html">elementary schools on the chopping block for closing</a>. (If somebody could teach me how to search googlemaps for these images and bring them here, much obliged)</div>
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Now, if those schools were closed down for better schools, there may be something happening here. But they weren't.<b> They were closed down for the same reason this next wave of schools will be closed down: To make way for privatized public schools with non-union and lower-paid teachers </b>(charter schools).<b> Not all charter schools are evil, but then again, not every person working in City Hall is evil either. </b>The overall effect of charter schools, on the other hand? That's what we'll get into later. </div>
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But for now, <b>recognize that the goal is to take money and wages from the workers and give them to the wealthy and connected through the process of privatizing public schools. The fact that it's happening and negatively affects black and poor neighborhoods is an<i> after-thought</i> to City Hall</b>. The fact that - once again - thousands of black and poor students will once again<b> be displaced</b>, and put in harm's way (traveling through several gang territories) while traveling further to other underresourced schools for the whims of the powerful is a price to pay, according to downtown.<b> The fact that hundreds upon hundreds of students with special needs will have to get acclimated to new schools and new teachers and further be robbed of their agency and decisions as to how their lives are affected is of little consequence for the heads at Chicago Public Schools, the bosses at City Hall, and their monied friends with benefits</b>.</div>
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And that is <i><b>evil</b></i>. Unmistakable and unpardonable social evil.</div>
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jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-75571981160457008722013-03-08T10:52:00.000-06:002013-03-08T10:59:09.285-06:00Sunday Billy SundayIt was kinda odd to read about this trendy little cocktail spot in (one of) my neighborhood(s) named after Billy Sunday, the famous prohibitionist/fire-and-brimstone evangelist/baseball player from the turn of the 20th Century.<br />
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Of course, like the neighborhood itself – Logan Square – the name has a way-too-big hipster/ironic quotient. A place that sells liquor going by a character name-checked in Frank Sinatra's "My Kinda Town" as the guy who couldn't shut down the nightlife during Prohibition.<br />
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Prohibition for Sunday, the converted ex-alcoholic-turned-evangelist, may have been his only social work - and it wasn't necessarily a bad one. Not well-thought out, of course, in that it was coercive and treated the addictive object, but not the addicts themselves. But then again, the effects of unchecked alcoholism are coercive on societies and on the more vulnerable, so I can't blame people for having decided that the best way to fight the effects of alcoholism is by making alcohol illegal.<br />
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To suggest Billy Sunday was a bully and used his stage and acclaim in Chicago as a bully pulpit is to miss a much wider picture of him. It may be true of the effects, but it misses why he thought such things were necessary. And that is because <b>Billy was much like contemporary Evangelicalism: very, very gnostic.</b> And proud of it.<br />
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This is the Billy Sunday who would lead spiritual revivals by calling men and women to repent of their sins, come to the altar and ask Jesus to forgive them. With this action, he would proclaim<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Now you can go out into the street and walk in front of a bus. And that would be the best thing to ever happen to you because you would die perfect and live forever with Jesus!"</span><br />
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<b>The purpose of gnostic Christianity is to die and go to heaven. There is no heaven on earth. There is no hell on earth</b>. Earth - and the body and everything physical - is a mere ladder, a resting place, a waiting room, an station where we expectantly twiddle out thumbs anticipating the Glory Train. The rest of the world can burn, and will. Just try to save as many people by bludgeoning them with scary words about their eternal damnation while you can.<br />
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That's gnostic Christianity in a nutshell. And it prioritizes individual over social, the powers-that-be over the oppressed, the here-and-now over sustainability. <b>It <i>expects </i>heaven. It doesn't <i>participate </i>in bringing heaven to earth. For heaven is for the Christians only</b>, according to gnostic Christianity. And if we brought it here, what's the purpose of an afterlife?<br />
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To read more about the gnosticism that has infected Conservative Christianity in the US - and therefore the world - read my book: <i>Shout It from the Rooftops</i>. <a href="https://www.createspace.com/4146112">$5.50</a> for print. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shout-Rooftops-Cheek-Books-ebook/dp/B00B5HNL4Y/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1">$2.99</a> for Kindle.<br />
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Do it for heaven. Because getting hit by a bus just isn't worth it.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-66390169251998421582013-03-07T14:48:00.002-06:002013-03-07T15:41:34.273-06:00Filibluster - or - Whose Freedom?<b>Yesterday was Backwards Day</b>. It must have been. During Rand Paul's filibuster related to Obama administration drone policies to extrajudicially target, strike, and execute US citizens, <b>Congress Democrats</b> - the political wing of the Left, or as close to it as we have in the States -<b> were silent</b>. Meanwhile, the Twitters were abluff - <i>ABLUFF </i>I say! - with <b>unmitigated leftist support for Rand Paul, </b>who was labeled "courageous" for his approach.<br />
<br />
It should have been the other way around. Washington is the place to make odd political pals. Washington is the city of pragmatism and political expediency. If political liberals and political conservatives can agree that a specific policy area is immoral - for whatever the reason - this would be a place to do it without equivocation. There is no need for a statement to the effect of: <u>While Congressperson X is vile and decrepit and immoral on 95% of issues and while I distrust X's reasons for standing in agreement with me on this issue...</u><br />
<br />
There is no need for such statements because <b>Washington is</b> a place to get things done. Not a place for testing ideas.<b> Not a place for integrity</b>.<br />
<br />
With even the Tea Party decrying military reach and most wars, I don't know what Democrats are afraid of when it comes to drones and the Military Industrial Complex. Who are they now afraid of that they go <i>out of their way to grandstand and advocate </i>anything explosive?<br />
<br />
Liz Cheney? Michael Bay?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-477FN8c8pJ8/UTj80LWgsBI/AAAAAAAAKZs/8eSjPcCk0jQ/s1600/hd_transformers_2-wide.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-477FN8c8pJ8/UTj80LWgsBI/AAAAAAAAKZs/8eSjPcCk0jQ/s320/hd_transformers_2-wide.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Democrats do not want to upset their central Autobot/Union demographic</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
So shame on the Democrats for being shown as the unconcerned loyal politicians they are. Grow some effing balls, dammit! You can't claim to be the Party of the People if you're okay with wars and overlooking the very basic constitutional rights that protect citizens from undue legal judgments - less alone allow them to be executed without a proper judge, jury, or legal defense team.<br />
<br />
Instead, we've had to rely on Rand Paul to speak up in this area. And that's troubling not just because he is a Republican, or of the Tea Party. No,<b> it's troubling because Rand Paul is deeply, deeply troubling. And, to be honest, more scary than a flying robot killing machine</b>.<br />
<br />
Rand Paul said he'd strike out parts of the Civil Rights Act that have to do with <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/20/rand-paul-tells-maddow-th_n_582872.html">businesses serving people of color</a>. And called his open opposition to key parts of the CRA - which he calls an issue of "controlling property" - an "<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/01/09/400521/rand-paul-explains-his-familys-opposition-to-civil-rights-act-its-about-controlling-property/">obscure issue</a>."<br />
Rand Paul tried to <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/06/rand_paul_again_floats_distort.html">distort to discredit</a> the Americans with Disabilities Act <br />
Rand Paul <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2013/02/if-they-get-rights-then-nobody-gets.html">openly opposed</a> the Violence Against Woman Act<br />
Rand Paul attacks not only<a href="http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/jeboch/help-rand-paul-stop-the-epa"> national environmental regulation</a>s - saying that such regulation should be handled by the state governments, which, incidentally are more in line with the dominant industries of their area - but also pretty much all <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/09/09/314936/rand-paul-the-epa-turns-everyday-life-into-a-federal-crime/">environmental regulation</a> .<br />
Rand Paul's father is an unmitigated <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2011/12/there-are-better-ways.html">Slavery Apologist</a> who had blatant White Supremacist campaign letters coming from his office.<br />
Rand Paul wants to cut spending pretty much everywhere, <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/05/14/rand-paul-cut-spending-but-not-medicare-doctor-payments/">except for Medicare</a>. Because that would hurt good, honest, hard-working doctors (like himself).<br />
And then there's his and his father's direct connections with <a href="http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/top-5-worst-rand-paul-supporters/">campaigners </a>who <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2010/10/wuss-by-any-other-name-part-1.html">stomp on female protester's heads</a> and are in charge of directly racist organizations.<br />
Rand Paul is in no way distancing himself from his father, but is - actually <i>without the charm</i> - <b>committed to furthering the very <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul-other-wars.html">disastrous racist, classist, misogynist, and ableist policies that his father built his reputation on</a>.</b><br />
<br />
So now <b>I'm disturbed by the Prophetic Left who praise Rand Paul for his "bold stance" on drone strikes against American citizens but neglect to mention that Paul seeks to erode<i> if not eradicate</i> what little liberties and protections women, minorities, disabled people, workers, and the poor have from the government.</b> Aren't these the very issues that are sacred to us?<br />
<br />
And don't give me the bullocks that the states will be better equipped to deal with their local populations than the central government. It hasn't happened; it won't happen anytime soon. That is why we needed the ADA, the ACA, and the CRA.<br />
<br />
He can say that he opposes the War on Drugs that unfairly and disproportionately affects people of color, but that doesn't give him a pass. It doesn't mean he isn't a racist. In fact, we must ask, every single time a Rand Paul decides to speak out on behalf of constitutional rights and liberties: <b>Whose rights are being sought? Whose liberties are we protecting?</b><br />
<br />
It disturbs me because the PL are the very people who do not need to kowtow, who do not need to compromise, who can hold the DNC accountable without hurrahing racists like Rand Paul as some sort of hero. The fact is that I don't trust Rand Paul on anything. And any person of color aware of Rand Paul's positions has every reason to distrust anything embraced or led by him.<br />
<br />
After all<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
When I'm killed in an extrajudicial fashion, I want it to be from a militarized SWAT team with the wrong address, not a GODDAMNED ROBOT.<br />
— norbizness (@norbizness) <a href="https://twitter.com/norbizness/status/309493215168458752">March 7, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
So forgive me if I'm not AS concerned about the remote possibility of American citizens being killed extrajudiciously <b>WHEN IT'S ALREADY HAPPENING</b>. This isn't a mere overreach of federal government - this is institutional racism and classism. This is the protecting of American business interests - same as ever. And if Rand Paul can't seem to understand that, then we have other major issues here.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-52589493709729183452013-03-05T11:59:00.000-06:002013-03-06T16:55:43.043-06:00White Christian Males and the Good News of EqualityLet us clarify what we mean when we talk about equality. Because conservatism is based on the idea that some deserve and others don't, that those on top should stay on top and those in the bottom need to stay there, it does a pretty bang-up job of disseminating false information concerning equality - as it does about the word "freedom." Equality doesn't mean that each person gets the same stuff. It also doesn't mean that each person is treated exactly alike. <b>Equality means that each person - and each grouping of people - has the same opportunity and is treated with the dignity of people who have lives, experience, value, and worth that are different than the next person's</b>. Not less, different*.<br />
<br />
So when one <a href="http://www.thechurchofnopeople.com/?p=5063">claims to not believe in equality</a>, one fights against the idea that all human beings are human beings. <b>The Christian who fights against equality doesn't accept as doctrinally central the idea that all humans are created in the image of God - male and female</b>. He fights against the idea of a God of impartiality, but rather serves a version of God that is on the side of the status <i>quo </i>- of Rome, of Babylon, of Egypt - over and against the slaves and exiled and oppressed subjects. This is the very first thought that Church of No People brings to mind here (and in his clarification <a href="http://www.thechurchofnopeople.com/2013/03/clarifying-thoughts-on-why-i-dont-believe-in-equality-but-why-im-a-feminist/">here</a> which, to be honest, I don't think is all that clarifying) - and is thoroughly reinforced by a bad and quite oppressive interpretation of the Pauline letters.<b> All of which ignore the calls and strains of justice evident within the Bible - from Moses to Samuel and Nathan to Isaiah and Amos and Micah to Jesus and the disciples to John the Revelator, James and - <i>gasp</i>! - Paul.</b><br />
<br />
The very same Paul who told a slave master to accept his slave (read: property) as his own kin. The same Paul who upturned the Greek status quo by equalizing slaves and freeborn, males and females.<br />
<br />
In his proof-texting, Matt seems to misunderstand that <b>humility is a route to justice, as it causes those with power and privilege (for example, Jesus) to humble themselves to a point of being allied with the oppressed ( for example, the poor). </b>Rather, in his interpretation of humility, humbling is a weapon against the marginalized and oppressed. Against survivors. Against single mothers. Against the poor. Against trans* people. Matt needs to understand, without apology, that those who have already been humbled by their marginialization do not need to be <i>further </i>humbled.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, Matt makes it apparent that the poor, that women, that people of color, that GLBTQ, those with disabilities etc, etc, do not get to have agency. That <b><i>he </i></b>gets to define what injustices are for other people and - as with most injustices concerning people in power and their apologists - that the issue at hand will be addressed at the opportune moment. To which Martin Luther King replied, "It is always the right time to do the right thing."<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/myhourglass/266237893/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Anti-Chen Protest Day 32 - Million Men March by My Hourglass, on Flickr"><img alt="Anti-Chen Protest Day 32 - Million Men March" height="333" src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/90/266237893_7090b1bb9f.jpg" width="500" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Go home and be humble!" is NOT the Gospel</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Some other issues with this post (and I know I'm only scratching the surface) that I largely tweeted upon first reads:<br />
<br />
I'm not sure that every feminist believes in equality. First because feminism is a large label used for many movements - but most believe that women should be treated as fully human and complex people. The idea of equity between men and women (for starters) would probably not fit with a few on the extreme margins of feminism. To be honest, there is much inequity in the center of feminism (<a href="http://carolynedgar.com/2013/02/27/working-women-blues/">where affluent white women's concerns are brought to bear in affluent white women's voices as <i>de facto</i> women's rights</a>), but at least the idea is that <b>men and women should be equally respected in matters of justice</b>. So, while there are several definitions/manifestations of "feminism," that doesn't mean you get to claim your own for your own self when it is contrary to the spirit of feminism.<br />
<br />
<b>And if you are a male and do not believe in equality, you probably most definitely are <i>NOT </i>a feminist.</b><br />
<br />
If you claim to be a feminist because you "protect" and shelter your wife, your argument is invalid.<br />
<br />
Further, <b>if you think that love means putting others on a pedestal, you misunderstood "Love your neighbor <i>AS </i>yourself."</b><br />
<br />
<b>If you think the good news, the Gospel, is somehow antithetical to the message of equality and justice, then you should learn what it means to love justice and walk humbly with the Lord, dear white male Christian</b>.<br />
<br />
Finally, white males don't get to preach at marginalized, telling them they should "lay down their lives" more than they already are.<br />
<br />
Post-Note:<br />
I'll be adding the voices of other bloggers on this issue and in relation to these specific blogs as I find them.<br />
Sarah Moon: <a href="http://sarahoverthemoon.com/2013/03/05/equality-humility-privilege-matt-appling-oppression-freedom/">On Equality, Humility, and Privilege</a><br />
Dianna Anderson: <a href="http://diannaeanderson.net/?p=2126">Heavy Words and Co-Opted Meanings</a><br />
<br />
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
*I know that conservative mouthpieces like Limbaugh like to make fun of "liberals" (in whatever way that term is meant, usually pejoratively) for that phrase - but that speaks to the lack of conservative imagination. Conservatism doesn't want to think of people and cultures as being worthy of respect, so it defames even the notions of such whenever it gets the chance. In conservatism, White, Male and Monied are best - everything else is inferior.)jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-71547516675457900522013-02-26T15:18:00.001-06:002013-02-27T05:59:33.277-06:00Mockery and Shamed VisiblenessWhen I was a teenager, I found out that my mother had bipolar disorder. Found out the hard way. And it was devastating. I'll spare you most of the details. Except one: What an ass I was to her.<br />
<br />
<b>Unmitigated, foolish, selfish, immature, impatient, ignorant ass.</b> She, suffering untold, unspeakable mental and emotional anguish. Something she couldn't control; something she couldn't figure out; something it takes a bit of courage to make it through. Me, the "good son," not able to figure this out; believing that emotions are something that one controls, and believing that moms are made for their children.<br />
<br />
<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">Snap out of it, already!</span></i></b><br />
<br />
That's what I told her.<b> Because I didn't believe her feelings were tied to reality. Because I didn't believe the sickness was as real as a, y'know real sickness</b>. Like cancer. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Or a cold</span>.<br />
<br />
Some years later those words came back to haunt me like an avenging spectre when someone close to me said them to me during the depths of my depression. And I felt the horror, and the hurt, and the guilt and shame and helplessness.<br />
<br />
I thought of this long after my initial shock and anger at the Onion for making a full-fledged "comedic" verbal sexual assault at a nine year old African American female actor (warning:<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/25/onions-controversial-tweet-quvenzhane-wallis_n_2757532.html"> TRIGGERS</a>), when the next day I found that several white males were saying, <i>You don't know how hard it is to do comedy. You should allow comedians to do comedy without being offended. Your offense isn't real. Your offense is coming from a place of privilege. Here, find something REAL to get offended about. Who we really should be concerned about are the writers (and, by extension all white males) who will not be free to make fun of little black girls anymore. And you, you should be ashamed of having feelings and feeling the way you do about the things you do. Patriarchy is dead; there is no sickness here. Be real. Snap out of it already</i>.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zk1GQzKSwc4/USzJ_1lx7zI/AAAAAAAAKZY/bcrnheWQnO0/s1600/Quvenzhane-Wallis-accepts-Oscar-nomination.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zk1GQzKSwc4/USzJ_1lx7zI/AAAAAAAAKZY/bcrnheWQnO0/s320/Quvenzhane-Wallis-accepts-Oscar-nomination.jpg" width="246" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small; text-align: start;">Quvenzhané Wallis deserved this?</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Twitter was full of such asshattery.<br />
<br />
From a media columnist for the New York Times:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Onion to writers: Tweet incredibly edgy, funny stuff. If you go over the line, we'll just slide you under the bus.<br />
— david carr (@carr2n) <a href="https://twitter.com/carr2n/status/306087130499796993">February 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
To an activist for gay rights:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Quvenzhané Wallis was the youngest woman ever nominated for an Oscar. Hard to see her as very put-upon…<br />
— Ryan J. Davis (@RyanNewYork) <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanNewYork/status/306034905467461632">February 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/gmgeiko">gmgeiko</a> I know plenty of black actors and am aware of the problem.<br />
— Ryan J. Davis (@RyanNewYork) <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanNewYork/status/306038717141880833">February 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/geedee215">geedee215</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/gmgeiko">gmgeiko</a> oh golly, i just mean i've had many conversations on this issue. I directed many shows.<br />
— Ryan J. Davis (@RyanNewYork) <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanNewYork/status/306041732972290049">February 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
Or a senior writer for the Huffington Post:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/radleybalko">radleybalko</a> cool, how bout racism and sexism then?<br />
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) <a href="https://twitter.com/xeni/status/306088741745881089">February 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
@<a href="https://twitter.com/radleybalko">radleybalko</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/xeni">xeni</a> "why not focus on places where -isms cause tangible harm?" You mean like public racist and sexist jokes?<br />
— jasdye (@jasdye) <a href="https://twitter.com/jasdye/status/306094552811462658">February 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
I'm not including angry responses sent to me by a clearly frustrated 12 year old boy and/or Men's Rights Activist*. <b>These are more-or-less progressive/liberal voices working for progressive/liberal media.</b> Talking about the "oppression" caused by reacting in anger/frustration to horrible names. When <b>those taunts are reflective of and public manifestations of sexist and racist (and ablist/homphobic/transphobic/ageist) put-downs and marginalizations all ove</b>r. So, yes, defending the comments or attempting to silence those who speak out against such put-downs is an act of marginalization. It very much so continues the keeping-in-line and oppression of non-cis gendered / white / able-bodied / able-minded / middle-and-upper class and/or male persons.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, while traveling with my own grade school-aged daughter, we were joking around. And I was trying to teach her how to do the thing where we make exaggerated motions and cop each other's voice. "I'm Jason and I..." And I tried to be mindful and not hurt her. And I think I may have succeeded, but maybe I pushed an emotional button - if not for her, then for me. Because then she told me a "secret." It was ludicrous and silly and preposterous. But her secret, even though it wasn't true and we both knew that we both knew it wasn't true, was still in the realm of secret. And, as such, she warned me not to blurt it out. Of course I wouldn't. But I egged her along so much that she thought that I actually did, out loud, for passersby to hear.<br />
<br />
And she cried heartbroken tears. And I felt like a mighty jerk. As well I should. And I explained to her that I was sorry. That I didn't say her secret (you know how you expect something so shocking to come that you shut down your senses, so you may not even experience it, just the expectation? I think it was like that), and I didn't mean to hurt her. I didn't want her to cry. The reasons for her tears in this case may not have been what she thought they were, but her reasons for crying were. And her feelings sure were. They are real - they had a right to feel pushed and violated. I did push her, my precious one. I was being an ass for the sake of "comedy."<br />
<br />
<b>But my daughter shouldn't have to be subjected to degrading insults by infantile men getting their jollies by teasing girls.</b><br />
<br />
Not <i>just because</i> she's my daughter. That's what makes it personal, for sure. As does the fact that joking bullies helped to make high school a repressed memory for me. But moreso<b> because she's a human being.</b> A girl, a child, a female. A human being and<b> worthy of dignity and self-respect</b>. And:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
there comes a point where you're simply FATIGUED. fatigued that comedy has STILL not found a way to evolve from making you the punchline. +<br />
— she was a showgirl (@mslooola) <a href="https://twitter.com/mslooola/status/306047949622874114">February 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<br />
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
Grown men telling me that I shouldn't be insulted by such "jokes" are infantile assholes.<br />
<br />
PS:<br />
I'd also encourage you to read Grace from Are Women Human's response <a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/post/let-me-explain-why-the-onions-quvenzhan%C3%A9-wallis-tweet-was-so-hurtful">here</a>.<br />
-------------------------------------------<br />
*Apparently, there's a lot of overlap.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-74031001783413715112013-02-23T19:21:00.004-06:002013-02-24T13:42:41.322-06:00And I Had Such High AspirationsTimothy Dalrymple, Evangelical Gatekeeper, asks, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2013/02/23/defense-of-traditonal-marriage-like-defense-of-slavery/">Is the Defense of Traditional Marriage Like the Defense of Slavery?</a>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
While [sic] I believe (and I would encourage all Christians to believe) that every homosexual individual deserves all of the same rights and protections that heterosexual individuals enjoy — and preventing gays from suffering bullying, for instance, is absolutely a civil rights issue. </blockquote>
<br />
Well, not exactly a civil rights issue. More a<b> human dignity</b> issue. But in the case of protection in the law, yes. In terms of hate crimes and such, yes!<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I believe all humans are, essentially and in themselves, equal in the eyes of God and ought to be treated as equal before the law. </blockquote>
<br />
Wow. That was just... I'm amazed! I'm floored, really; I can't believe such a prominent member of the religious right is making such a bold declarative statement on behalf of the rights of LGBTQI.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But...</blockquote>
<br />
Ah, daggannit. Spoke too soon, didn't I? I shouldn't be surprised, of course. Just, I...<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...just as it does not follow that every human action is equal in the sight of the law (the state has every right to treat people differently on the basis of their actions), so it does not follow that every human relationship need be equal in the sight of the law.</blockquote>
<br />
<i>SMDH</i>.. One can assume just from this that Dalrymple isn't arguing that homosexuals are equal before God. Certainly I'd expect him to say that same sex/queer relationships aren't "God's plan for our best" or some such argument that the Christian church should continue to shun, alienate, and perhaps belittle non-heterosexual relationships. But this goes the extra step to say that such relationships should also not be recognized as on equal level with heterosexual relationships.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/holeymoon/2131047005/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" title="not equal by holeymoon, on Flickr"><img alt="not equal" height="320" src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2242/2131047005_62ce21d6b0.jpg" width="270" /></a><br />
I can see why gay rights advocates make the comparisons in their plight to the struggles of Black slaves and unwilling-participants of Jim Crow, and I can also see why such incomplete comparisons are troubling to African Americans (in that making such comparisons is belittling to both struggles with their unique identities). But Dalrymple here brings up a very familiar argument I hear in studying Black US history: <i>Of course <b>they </b>are equal before God and before the law. Except in practical terms. And <b>they're </b>not really human, too.</i><br />
<br />
Also.<br />
<br />
Oh, and the short answer to Timothy's question? The same biblical exegesis used to promote freedom for slaves is the same used to liberate Christianity from homophobia. The same exegesis used to promote slavery is the same used to entrap Christianity within homophobia - and thus teach that White, heterosexual Christianity serves a God who can't see outside White, heterosexual Christianity, and is afraid and hateful of those outside the gates.<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. Gatekeeping.<br />
<br />
Come on, Timothy. Surely you can do better. I believe in you.<br />
<br />
<b>EDIT</b>:<br />
There is much more to say about this. I know that many would argue that Timothy - who is a Facebook friend of mine, though we never interact - is a good guy and that others would argue that there isn't a homophobic bone in his body, etc., etc. The truth is, whether or not he, <i>personally</i>, is a bigot is not the point. I don't blog just to point out the errors and the prejudices of specific people - that would take too long and that's what HuffPo is for. I'm also not interested in whether or not this person has a good heart and is kind to homosexuals/kittens/undocumented/little old ladies. I mean, it'd suck if he wasn't and be nice if he was. I'm taking issue with his stated words which have power. I'm interested moreso in patterns and particularly the patterns of Evangelicals that are used to silence, shame, sequester, ostracize and, yes, oppress those who are different than they. And Mr. Dalrymple is but one of many, many, many within that movement - that I myself am a native son of and still love and want to identify myself with - that make such alarming and disastrous mind-bends. It is a very, very, very unloving and unChrist-like and bigoted position and posture to publish to take against people while at the same time say that you're NOT taking such a position against people. This is not to mention how the guest post was all sorts of wrong, using a tradition that has not been kind to women, the poor, slaves, and people of other faiths and ethnicities as a rubric for how we should now treat gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans* people.<br />
<br />
Not cool. Not cool for Dalrymple. And not cool for Evangelicals who read and agree with his positions and further along marginalization and oppression in the name of a man who affirmed, invited and welcomed all outcasts and outsiders.<br />
<br />
Not. Cool.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-49703312444131407572013-02-23T16:17:00.005-06:002013-02-23T16:30:29.139-06:00Proudly Union Free and Immoral<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosaluxemburg/3089692485/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="workers of the world, unite! by rosaluxemburg, on Flickr"><img alt="workers of the world, unite!" height="340" src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3109/3089692485_d7151fafcb.jpg" width="459" /></a></div>
<br />
From Michael Lind's article, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/02/19/southern_poverty_pimps/">Southern poverty pimps</a>, at Salon:<br />
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The essence of the Southern economic model is not low taxation, but a lack of bargaining power by Southern workers of all races. Bargaining power at the bottom of the income scale is created by tight labor markets; unions; minimum wage laws combined with unemployment insurance; and social insurance, such as Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Naturally, the 21st-century descendants of Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun want to weaken everything that strengthens the ability of a Southern worker to say to a Southern employer: “Take this job and shove it!” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Tight labor markets are anathema to Southern employers. They want loose labor markets that create a buyer’s market in wage labor. That is why, at a time of mass unemployment among low-skilled workers in the U.S., most of the calls for expanding unskilled immigration in the form of “guest worker” programs are coming from Southern and Southwestern politicians. Guest workers — that is, indentured servants bound to a single employer and unable to quit — are the ideal workers, from a neo-Confederate perspective. They are cheap and unfree.</blockquote>
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The article is worth a read. But it contributes to the malaise of false dichotomies. As if the North and the Rustbelt weren't taking on these same practices. Wisconsin, Indiana and even Michigan have elected pro-big business governors and legislatures who are working hard to dismantle worker's rights to bargain and act as professional organizations to temper corporate malaise affecting both the public and private sectors. Even union-happy Chicago is under attack from our overwhelmingly-elected mayor, a Democrat who was former Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama.<br />
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So, yeah, there's that. Meanwhile, capital created by workers continues to climb back to the top - or rather, flow back to the lowest levels- the ultrarich. But it's the working poor who are blamed for being poor and demanding anything of worth for their work. Got it.</div>
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Oh, and there is this from Lind's article for my fellow Christians who either hear or peddle the nonsense that charities should take care of the poor, not government (and for whom the words "<a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/02/futile-complications-of-wagery.html">economic justice</a>" do not ring a bell):</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="line-height: 20px;">In order to maximize the dependence of Southern workers on Southern employers in the great low-wage labor pool of the former Confederacy, it would be best to have no welfare at all, only local charity (funded and controlled, naturally, by the local wealthy families).</span></blockquote>
We've dealt with that <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/05/putting-mouths-where-money-is.html">nonsense</a> <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/09/capitalism-and-charity.html">here</a> and <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/07/strings-attached-are-attached-to-all-of.html">here</a> and <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2011/05/poor-will-always-be-amongst.html">here</a>, <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/02/charity-and-greed-2.html">though</a>. </div>
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jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-58792122748426549282013-02-21T09:32:00.000-06:002013-02-23T14:34:33.621-06:00Lenting Towards Radical HeartsThose with power want order to retain and work to make as little change as possible so that the structure and flow of power continues in their favor as much as possible. Wherever rights are granted and wherever the money flows, conservatism wants to continue that.<br />
<br />
This is most evident in the hashtag/flimsy excuse for rape jokes and sissy-liberal mockery that is #<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/02/liberaltips2avoidrape-most-horrible-hashtag-week-explained-joe-salazar-colorado-rape-guns">LiberalTips2AvoidRape</a>. And that is of the same air - and allows for horrible crap like this - where a defense attorney seriously claims that raped students just had a case of "<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-attorney-loyola-rape-case-accusers-had-buyers-remorse-20130219,0,3164202.story">buyer's remorse</a>."<br />
<br />
<b>Conservatism is dead intent that The Powers That Be should <i>remain </i>The Powers That Be. Ergo, TPTB are always correct and , then it's <i>your </i>fault for not understanding or accepting their sage benevolence, not the fault of TPTB for being wrong or abusive or for using abusive language.</b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bestrated1/44186042/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="King Louie by Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton, on Flickr"><img alt="King Louie" height="375" src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/30/44186042_b95f97031d.jpg" width="500" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It's YOUR fault for putting your body underneath the horse!</td></tr>
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<br />
But conservatism also acts in much more subtle and even acceptable ways, with tones that aren't as nearly outlandish. Ways that I've encountered and sometimes accepted, sometimes outright rejected, but more often just shook my head at but sat silently in my own churches and among the literature from those churches. Like the number of times I've heard pastors - even friends - accuse Bathsheba of seducing King David rather than allowing that the tragic hero David raped Bathsheba.<a href="http://crystalstmarielewis.com/2013/02/19/when-perception-matters-most-david-bathsheba-and-hearing-the-victims-story/"> Crystal S Lewis</a> has a great break down here of the read from a conservative study bible (a bible with a built-in commentary).<br />
<br />
(Italics are from commentary in the Life Application Bible Study):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"<i>David put both Bathsheba and Joab in difficult situations. Bathsheba knew <b>adultery </b>was wrong, but to refuse a king’s request could mean punishment or death… We sometimes face situations with only two apparent choices, and both seem wrong. When that happens, we must not lose sight of what God wants. The answer may be to<b> seek out more choices</b>. By doing this, we are likely to find a choice that honors God.</i> ([Life Application Bible Study] pg. 521, emphasis mine) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>Bathsheba’s Weakness and Mistake</b>: She committed adultery </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>Lessons from Her Life</b>: While we must live with the natural consequences of our sins, God’s forgiveness of sin is total.</i> (Profile of Bathsheba, pg. 555) "</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...Contrary to any of the dialogue in the story and contrary to the context, the editors interpret Bathsheba’s post-menstrual ritual bath as an act of seduction. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
They don’t bother to consider that Bathsheba likely thought she was alone and unseen while bathing in the courtyard. After all, as James Freeman notes in Manners and Customs of the Bible, “the bath in which Bathsheba was washing was secluded from all ordinary observation”… The LASB’s editors also don’t consider that Bathsheba likely missed her husband and longed for him (after all, she grieved when he was killed later in the story). Finally, they don’t consider that she may have been terrified when David’s messengers came for her. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><i>Instead</i></b>, the LASB’s editors write that she “may have been rash in bathing where she may have been seen,” and that upon hearing the king’s request, she should have “sought another option” to avoid committing her sin. <b>(What kind of “other option” could a woman– a piece of property with no status of her own– have presented to the most powerful and most ruthless human being in the land?</b>).</blockquote>
In order to save face for a king already accused of murder and adultery, the editors here - as many within the patriarchal conservative church continue to do - put the onus of the blame on the woman and victim. I remember bible studies where Bathsheba was portrayed as a gold digger, out tempting the king to get to him and his earned wealth.<br />
<br />
"She knew what she was doing."<br />
<br />
That's conservatism. Keeping in place.<br />
<br />
And then there's the ways that Christians are implicit in negative portrayals of the Third World(s) in gloating terms. As if to say that we are better than they because we did this and are better for the wear.<br />
<br />
An African American pastor <a href="http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabitianyabwile/2013/02/14/matthew-parris-goes-to-africa-and-gets-religion-sort-of/">writes a glowing review</a> of a <a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/3502-matthew-parris-as-an-atheist-i-truly-believe-africa-needs-god">White Colonialist Atheist</a> in The Gospel Coalition because he is amazed that the atheist would speak so glowingly of Christendom's influence in Africa. Of course, the atheist sees Christianity's effects to "civilize" tribal and "superstitious" people as being its selling point.<br />
<br />
This is a problem within the more respectable parts of conservatism, and this pastor is but one example of it, defaming non-Christian Africans as "pagan, tribal witchcraft," as if this were King Kong. When confronted (via twitter and through <a href="http://politicaljesus.com/2013/02/18/atheists-and-christians-promoting-empire-what-a-novel-concept/">Political Jesus</a>) about the implications of the language, he tells us he understands that the terms <i>have been</i> negative, but that he means this in a "Christian" sense. I should, he says, "allow me the freedom to speak in what I understand to be Christian terms," and take it for granted that he did not mean what he just said in its pejorative sense - even though that is how they are commonly understood. Even as he refuses to refute what he just said.<br />
<br />
But then <b>conservatism is, at heart, reactionism against the tides of change</b> - a sharp rebuttal to the idea that people can be equal and that those attacking the villagers from their high horses may not deserve being up there in the first place, and certainly need to come down for the crimes of stomping on people.<br />
<br />
The more reactionary factions of conservatism (the overt racist attacks on Obama, for a clear instance) are just that, reactions. I prefer not to react to the reactions - but that's the nature of the Beast, right? To continue the cycle in such a way where the work of equality, fraternity, liberty (ie, equality) is limited. It is good to be angry, when the point is to head somewhere (being angry in itself does not operate in some opposite footing from dichotomy). The political left and right brim with reactionism. Someone does something, someone else points it out as THE. WORST. EVER. And the cycle continues.<br />
<br />
And I am not above that. In some ways, I don't want to be above that. <b>It's human </b>(natural and good)<b> to be upset at something that strikes against our sensibilities. My question would be, what is our sensibility towards?</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>In being a radical, I want to dig at roots in society and in myself.</b> This blog is a chance for me to ponder and dig a bit deeper through restorative and also inflammatory language. I want to incite, if no one else, <i>myself </i>to see the inequality - to perceive, as the kids say, the violence inherent in the system. And <b>how that violence permeates <i>all</i></b><i> </i>- <i>how it affects, impacts and is carried out and against us all in one form or another</i>. How we can be anti-racist but still sexist, or feminist but sexist, or liberal and "color blind", or even<a href="http://muslimreverie.wordpress.com/2012/12/22/when-men-on-the-left-refuse-to-see-their-sexism/"> feminist but still perpetuating female subservience and violence against women</a>. Or<a href="https://www.facebook.com/LikeChristWire/posts/329998717111811"> tell and defend racial domestic violence jokes</a> because, after all, people don't like Chris Brown.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/icyaero-photography/6038575932/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="Dusty by IcyAero, on Flickr"><img alt="Dusty" height="213" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6209/6038575932_89bbb3c383.jpg" width="320" /></a>And then<b> I want to move away from that, while recognizing the evil within my heart and recognizing ways that I - or our collective silence - hurt people or oppress or silence people because of their race, sexuality, beliefs*, class, mental / physical / social / psychological disabilities, sex, age</b>. I have to be able to recognize the violence inherent in me. I have to be able to not just react to what I see in others, but use that energy as a force to weed out and de-root that violence that has dug its way into my heart over a period of nearly forty years of constant commercialization and violent depictions of a <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidhenson/2013/02/djesus-uncrossed-tarantino-driscoll-and-the-violent-remaking-of-jesus-in-america/">DJesus Uncrossed</a>.<br />
<br />
I want to be a part of a movement - one of several that is happening through the world - that creates a safe space, a burgeoning political, economic and social realm where each can be fully realized and actualized for talents and skills and work. And just being.<br />
<br />
<b>My radical structure</b>, after all, <b>is based on the radical notion that all are created in the image of God and are loved unequivocably by God.</b> So much so that God became one of us, died for the sin of upsetting the balance of power, and humbly walks with us.<br />
<br />
Radical, dangerous notion, that.<br />
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*My conservative Evangelical friends often tell me that they're hurt by accusations of being homophobic for believing that homosexuality is a sin. I want them to consider how much it hurts to be consistently treated as a sub-human. I do not agree with them that same sex attraction or impulses are sinful, or that consensual sex between adults is inherently wrong - though I think there are healthy and unhealthy modes of sexuality that the Christian witness should pull towards. However, Christians should consider what kind of message we send when we say that our beliefs as Christ-followers allow us and compel us to marginalize any people group. When we consider that, maybe we'll better understand why there is so much vitriol against traditional understandings of Christianity. As a wise man once said, first we must clear order in our own house.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-6239868278507578892013-02-18T08:00:00.000-06:002013-02-22T07:26:55.645-06:00Compromise IS American, And That's the Problem<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristianvinkenes/56884145/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="Chains by Kristian Vinkenes, on Flickr"><img alt="Chains" height="212" src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/24/56884145_6ab357990f.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
James Wagner, the president of Emory University, wrote an editorial on how compromise is a good thing, is fundamental to how the US operates, is a higher order for a good cause. It's important, he states, for getting by, for learning how to negotiate, and for political discourse.<br />
<br />
He outlines this all in his Letter from the President, “<a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/emory_president_holds_up_three_fifths_compromise_as_noble_honorable/">As American as … Compromise</a>.”<br />
<br />
He's wrong about pretty much everything. <b>Citizens and students don't become better and wiser citizens and students through compromise. We do through <i>listening </i>and <i>experience </i>and <i>higher ordered thinking</i> and going through the wringer of experience and critical thinking and listening <i>again and again</i>. And we learn <i>through history</i>, <i>especially </i>history <i>of the marginalized</i>. </b>And we make connections and we consider again and again how these connections are relevant to not just ourselves but those inside and outside our neighborhoods, those who work for us, those who make our products, those who are in our prisons, those the majority society consider less-thans.<br />
<br />
And we repent where we need to <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidhenson/2013/02/on-our-behalf-reclaiming-repentance-as-a-progressive-christian/">repent</a>. We recognize the evil and the grave mistakes that we as a society and a people have done and in many ways continue to do and we take that evil seriously in order to exorcise it from our collective and individual actions.<br />
<br />
But<b> James Wagoner demonstrates that White America has yet to repent</b>. Has yet to listen or make connections or consider history or the present through non-privileged perspectives. Has yet to consider amends because it hasn't made a conscious choice yet to repent of the very horrible sins that <a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/01/10_things_django_wont_tell_you_about_slavery.html">made it phenomenally rich</a>.<br />
<br />
To much of White America, the three-fifths compromise was a necessity in order "to form a more perfect union." <b>The ultimate compromise on slavery - which allowed it to operate mercilessly for generations and allowed its primary stakeholders undue influence in US politics - <i>wasn't </i>appalling, <i>wasn't </i>a sign that the United States was based more on slavery and destruction of human beings and families than on its alleged "freedom.</b>" No. <b>According to Wagoner </b>(and many textbooks from my own childhood)<b>, the need to bring the two opposing sides together for the lofty goal of making a United States was a "higher aspiration.</b>"<br />
<br />
Higher, apparently, to minds in the 21st Century, than an unequivocal call for the end of any form of slavery, than for an end to the slave trade or the end to considering human beings as chattel.<br />
<br />
Compromise may sometimes be a negotiable we have to work through. But consider what there is to negotiate. <b>The so-called "Third Way" isn't necessarily a better way because it's more expedient</b>. In the case of the Three-Fifths Compromise,<b> the lives of millions of African and Black slaves were disregarded and then monetized for political "purity" of white folks.</b> That's <i>not </i>a good thing. Not back then. Not now. <b>In the case of the so-called Fiscal Cliff, the lives of millions of poor people hang in the balance of a highly politicized scandal of American-styled "justice."</b><br />
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<b>It is a great evil that rich, white men can claim the stakes for everyone else and then dress up their card game as a noble pursuit.</b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/50170571@N02/4777920960/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Card game. Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park, CA. 1932 by CAS Library, on Flickr"><img alt="Card game. Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park, CA. 1932" height="333" src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4081/4777920960_ba14170bea.jpg" width="500" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Insert tired Frenchie joke here.</td></tr>
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<br />
<b>The underclass is not some<i>thing</i> to "balance" or compromise on, are not tokens, are not poker chips</b>.<br />
<br />
NOTE:<br />
With his <a href="http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2013/winter/register/president.html">response/clarification</a>, Wagner <i>apologizes </i>for his insensitivity, makes some profound statements that gave me pause to think that he would retract his earlier statement,<b> but then doubles down on the "higher aspirations" language and reprints the original.</b><br />
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Why not just admit it was a complete failure? Are the "chattel" not worth it?jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-40296796914744568662013-02-16T16:16:00.001-06:002013-02-22T16:34:40.696-06:00Thin, Ephemeral, Light, Profoundly UnsatisfyingFor a decade I worked at and became contextualized in a conservative <i>Bible </i>college. We understood ourselves to be true to the <i>Bible </i>(that was in the name of the school and the church I centered my life around. And my <i>Bible </i>was dog-eared, so it must have been true) and <i>thus </i>to God. And we understood that other types of Christians were classified under a few different labels, but they were all like hell-bound heretics. Not <i>necessarily </i>- for God could save <b>anyone</b>. Just <i>most likely</i>. I, quite honestly, didn't understand why they even bothered with the name "Christian." That was OUR name.<br />
<br />
First were the old orders: Catholics and Orthodox. Then were the liberals. After that, and less on the heretical slide, were the weirder denominations (y'know, like Charismatics) and then the liberal Evangelicals (those who, like some from Wheaton, thought the world to be more than 6,000 years old!).<br />
<br />
And I was pretty good at this safeguarding.<b> I couldn't tell you that you were going to hell for your sins, but you were probably on<i> not-safe ground</i> traveling around in your <span style="color: blue;">Liberal Hippy Christianity Bug</span>. </b>On the way to hell, of course<b>.</b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wylio.com/credits/flickr/152639618" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ - click to view more info about 'Hippie VW 3' or find free 'hippy' pictures via Wylio"><img alt="'Hippie VW 3' photo (c) 2006, Marshall Astor - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" height="385" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-BJhlFAEWj00/URvsFBZGT2I/AAAAAAAAKYg/Cu5ScLXkI7Q/Flickr-152639618.jpg" style="float: none; margin: 10px auto;" width="500" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Weeeee! Jesus may or not be the Son of God, but I'd be on my way to hell if I believed in such an ontological destination!</td></tr>
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This is fundamentalist Christianity 101. <i>We take the Bible seriously and we know and are sure of what the Bible teaches! The Bible is the Word of God and it teaches what is true and if you don't believe what we believe about God through our understanding of the Bible, you don't take the Bible's revelations seriously! And if you don't take the <b>Bible </b>seriously, you don't take <b>God </b>seriously! You have no faith and your non-faith will send you to hell!</i><br />
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But I wasn't a strict fundamentalist. I was a conservative Evangelical. So that meant<b> I was <i>nicer </i>in my fundamentalism. You're not <i>necessarily </i>going to hell... Just <i>more likely</i> to.</b><br />
<br />
Roger Olson, post-fundy Evangelical New Testament professor, reminded me of those uncharitable descriptions in his post, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/02/why-i-am-not-a-liberal-christian/">Why I Am Not a "Liberal Christian.</a>" He gives several rubrics to identify if a person or church is a liberal Christian by what she, he or they believe. And that, in itself, is instructive. The first, for example:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
How do they approach knowing God? Do they begin with and recognize the authority of special revelation? Or do they begin with and give norming authority to human experience, culture, science, philosophy, “the best of contemporary thought?”</blockquote>
<br />
As<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2013/02/11/am-i-a-liberal-christian-according-to-roger-olson/"> Tony Jones says</a>, this is bunk. Neither I nor you nor Pastor Jack nor Roger Olson can "recognize the authority of special revelation" without having begun with (and giving "norming authority" to) experience, culture and other contextualizations.<br />
<br />
But there's the awareness.<b> The awareness of context and how that enables and helps and stifles and gives us room to build or not build - but mostly to <i>be</i>. And with the awareness comes the acknowledgement</b> - <i>according to a traditional theological view, if not a correct one</i> -<b> that we are adversarial to faith</b>. Knowledge is forbidden in many corners of Christianity because knowledge diverts from this traditional view of faith. <b>Knowledge could cause us to see that maybe things aren't the way we're led to believe they are.</b><br />
<br />
The rest of Olson's checklist also sets up these dichotomies, though not quite as contradictory. Although the age of the earth and whether or not one accepts evolution isn't on Olson's list, the virgin birth and literal resurrection of Jesus are. In such a list, one must be sure of either the veracity or the nonsense of such claims - one can only be sure that it did happen or that it did not happen. Such a list based on what one is sure of in doctrinal terms fails to make sense to me anymore. Since in many of these positions, I find myself in between one point or another. And I sense very much the same position that I myself limited myself and other Christians to just a scant few years ago.<br />
<br />
But then there's this definition, which struck a chord:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Historical theologian Claude Welch... boiled it (viz., “liberal Christianity”) down to a phrase: “maximal acknowledgment of the claims of modernity” in theology.</blockquote>
<b>But <i>of course</i> my approach to viewing the bible and theology and Christianity and acts of faith is informed by modernism.</b> Of <i>course </i>it is. How could it not be?<br />
<br />
<b>So is yours. So is Roger's. So is the pastor of the local Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church. And the Church of Christ across the tracks from it. As well as any atheist.</b> That's because that is where we live and how we are contextualized: In modernism. My postmodernism is contextualized in modernism. <b>Fundamentalism is</b> a rejection of modernity - but it's <b>contextualized and fully a product of modernism</b>.<br />
<br />
So a liberal Christian, then, is <i>aware and accepts the fact</i> that we live and breathe and think in a landscape thoroughly influenced by modernism. <b>However, I</b> - and most progressive Christians I know - <b>would deny many of the claims of modernism</b>: that we can become better people simply through knowledge, that the world evolves towards a more enlightened sense, that knowledge is fundamentally moral. But I won't deny that living in a post- modern world shapes my reality fundamentally. It shaped everything.<br />
<br />
So I guess by this standard, I am a liberal Christian. Scare quotes optional.<br />
<br />
But in case one would think that this is a neutral or positive label to the Evangelical Gatekeepers:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If I ever wake up and find that I think like a true theological liberal, I hope I will be honest enough to stop calling myself “Christian.”</blockquote>
<br />
This conviction - one I shared just a scant decade ago - is based on some idea that a liberal Christianity is weak and lacking distinctive features. Which is odd to me, at least on this edge of "liberal Christianity" (or whatever it is I am).<br />
<br />
<b>I and those like me follow a religious practice that is, in Roger's words, "[T]hin, ephemeral, light, profoundly unsatisfying."</b> We lack prophetic voice and identity, apparently. (Post-Evangelical Eastern Orthodox Frank Schaeffer apparently argues the opposite, claiming that all Protestants, and at the height of that, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, lack Christian identity because they don't hold to liturgy. None of this surprises me, I suppose. In building and maintaining our own tribes often we tear down others that are less recognizable). My actualization of my faith has been called many things, but lacking in prophetic utterances has hardly been one of them.<br />
<br />
But here I stand. Thin. Ephemeral. Light. Profoundly unsatisfying.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/yorkminster/4303657462/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="COMMUNION WAFER P28 by York Minster, on Flickr"><img alt="COMMUNION WAFER P28" height="500" src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4063/4303657462_2e300b4c67.jpg" width="333" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>We are Eucharist wafers, apparently.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<b>The fundamental problem I have with all of this is that Roger defines us all by what we "believe"</b> - ie, what we profess to or acquiesce to as being real or true. And when I say "all", I mean "all." We all, according to this theology, this perspective, will enter or be denied entry to heaven and the presence of God by whether or not we agree with and can check off certain beliefs that are, frankly, not consequential to our current reality.<b> Does it - in the grand scheme of things - matter whether one can agree with the Nicene Creed? Is that what Jesus required to enter his Kingdom?</b> Did he ever mention those as prerequisites, as keys to the gates, as the entrance points into which one comes into the sheep fold?<br />
<br />
No. But Jesus wasn't a very good gatekeeper, I guess.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-57511888406992125002013-02-14T12:16:00.000-06:002013-02-16T16:53:24.162-06:00Love and Race and BlindnessSo I guess my very existence gives hope to White Christian male <a href="http://diannaeanderson.net/?p=1349">bloggers</a> <a href="http://sarahoverthemoon.com/2012/06/23/same-ol-story-sexual-abuse-consent/">obsessed</a> <a href="http://sarahoverthemoon.com/2012/06/27/experience-abuse-derailing/">with</a> the sex habits of women?<br />
<br />
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Bi-racial couples give me a bit more hope for the human race.</div>
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<span class="metadata" style="color: #999999; font-size: 12px; line-height: 24px; overflow: hidden;"><span title="2:51 PM - 13 Feb 13">2:51 PM - 13 Feb 13</span></span></div>
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(h/t to <a href="http://diannaeanderson.net/">Dianna</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/diannaeanderson">Anderson</a>)<br />
<br />
<b>The human race is saved because black and white people can be sexually attracted to each other! <i>yay</i>...</b><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nYFNyFytCJY/UR0pJwd2KZI/AAAAAAAAKZE/5J39h-ooobo/s1600/kim+k+will+save+us.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nYFNyFytCJY/UR0pJwd2KZI/AAAAAAAAKZE/5J39h-ooobo/s320/kim+k+will+save+us.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kim Kardashian gives me hope for the human race!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
Now, being the product of interracial couples (notice the plurals), I can say that this is in some ways more positive approach than that of, say, a Focus on the Family newsletter I read as a kid that said that although interracial relationships aren't <i>sinful</i>, per se, they could be unsettling to the faith community and other families so it may be unwise to pursue that relationship with that other-colored person.<br />
<br />
<i>We wouldn't want to upset the sensibilities of good Christian folks, now would we?</i><br />
<br />
But I hate this idea that, for one, interracial coupling is new, unique, or bold and progressive. It may be fairly unique for Anglo-dominated cultures, but it happens in any society where races mix - no matter the conditions. Particularly for Latin America, there is nothing unique about this (which is why I find the racial qualifiers in the US so troubling. Am I White/non-Hispanic, Hispanic, Native American? Yes!). In fact, <b>it is White Supremacy that has created, maintained, and promoted this horrible myth of "racial purity" - of which the surprise of interracial love (or anything interracial) is a product</b>.<br />
<br />
I also detest this notion that any relationship I am a part of (when you're bi-racial, after all, every relationship you enter into is interracial) is a sign <i>in itself</i> of progress against racism. Especially, as <a href="https://twitter.com/graceishuman">Grace</a> from <a href="http://arewomenhuman.me/">Are Women Human</a> points out, <b>the poster is part of an entire culture that denies the present and brutal reality of systemic racism</b>.<br />
<br />
<b>As if sexual attraction could fix</b> educational, social, class issues related to racial-apartheid, could effect the <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/11/legal_scholar_michelle_alexander_on_the">criminal justice system</a>, could fix the so-called "<a href="http://thenotebook.org/blog/125318/please-stop-using-phrase-achievement-gap">achievement gap</a>" between white students and those of color, could silence the jokes implying inferiority, could spur investment in Black and Brown neighborhoods and businesses, could curtail ethnic violence, could make one <i>NOT </i>racist (This would be news to Sally Hemmings, to slave owners that raped their female "property." Or Jesse Helms).<br />
<br />
Nope. But sometimes it helps to ease guilty White consciences.<br />
<br />
So... <i>happy Valentines</i>?jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-83079638344550901002013-02-14T09:20:00.001-06:002013-02-14T13:08:06.242-06:00Ashes of PrideIt was somewhat weird and unsettling, going out of my way to find someone from my church who I've never met before on a street corner I haven't been to since Lord Knows When, in what is generally referred to as Lakeview but commonly as Boystown, to have this stranger, in the middle of this busy intersection in the middle of rush hour in a gay neighborhood, recite cryptic Middle Eastern poetry at me while he wipes my forehead with his dirty thumb print of ash.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m5nw1X7PRgQ/URyC9RBA1pI/AAAAAAAAKYw/ugbs-BM8iAo/s1600/Newspaper-financial-ashes-4e8f3e701b598_hires.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m5nw1X7PRgQ/URyC9RBA1pI/AAAAAAAAKYw/ugbs-BM8iAo/s320/Newspaper-financial-ashes-4e8f3e701b598_hires.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.pxleyes.com/photography-picture/4e8f3e701b598/Newspaper-financial-ashes.html">Newspaper financial ashes</a> - Remsphoto </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
It was somewhat unsettling to have to bend down, and stop for just a few seconds in the midst of the bustle. To accept this sign, one vertical swipe and one horizontal one that I have never, ever received before - it is a bit unsettling. <b>This sign of mortality, this badge of identity in a once-persecuted community, touches me and shakes me up way down to the back of my spine.</b><br />
<br />
I know my religion is the majority religion - but I also live in a place where this tradition of marking myself is rarely seen - certainly not by white males. It is the yearly ritual of the "superstitious", of ethnic minorities who are already branded by the color of their skin. And I rode on the train and people looked at me odd - as if I exploded on my head. And then I recalled that I am a tall, white, curly-haired male with soot etchings on my head. And then I recalled that I couldn't help but stare at the markings on other passengers just a few minutes earlier.<br />
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And it's all unsettling.<br />
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As it should be. I'm used to unsettling things happening to me that are out of my control. I'm used to winging it - and a bit too used to worrying about money and work. But I needed someone or something to touch - physically - my soul. And unnerve it, just so that I may feel that I still have one.<br />
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And I do.<br />
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And that, remarkably, is very settling.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-85126437532480629072013-02-10T09:52:00.000-06:002013-02-10T10:43:44.850-06:00On a Sunday Morning Chatfest in a Parallel UniverseIf this world were a just one, my friend Don Washington (aka, <a href="http://mayoraltutorial.com/articles">Mayoral Tutorial</a>) and others like him - interested and knowledgeable about the public good, not the laughable rotting riot of clueless pundits and warmed-over politicians - would be welcomed every week on Sunday morning talking head shows, not (just) on public access tv.<br />
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Not that there's anything wrong with public access, except for the exposure. If it weren't for Public Access TV, we wouldn't have <i>this</i>, for instance. <i>This </i>being an informative and rather delightful discussion about the public good and the need for a space and a government that is specifically looking for the public good (which is not happening in our city and certainly not with our mayor). There is also a brilliant deduction by Don as to why we need to raise the minimum wage several times over: We're paying for whatever we don't fund directly anyway. But, the typical mainstream media once again shows little-to-no-regard for the lives of poor people, so they keep running to business leaders (who do not want to pay increases and so will tell you how something that is good for the working poor is automatically bad for business).<br />
<br />
Which is why such alternative, non-commercial news is so important. Not to mention insightful and sometimes even delightful. As it is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vI13lAqJCHw#!">here</a>.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vI13lAqJCHw?rel=0" width="420"></iframe><br />
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If you haven't had the chance to, check out Mayoral Tutorial - as a <a href="http://mayoraltutorial.com/articles">blog </a>and a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/mayoral.tutorial">Facebook </a>page.jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-27512267274147509882013-02-08T15:27:00.003-06:002013-02-08T15:28:34.453-06:00Bad Scholarship, Bad TheologyLet's be perfectly clear here: Eric Metaxas is nothing but a political hack. Nothing. But.<br />
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A writer for Culture Warrior Chuck Colson's Breaking Point and a current hack author and talking head for evil political network Fox News and hack news network CNN, Metaxas read some stuff on the complex German theologian and Nazi-resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer and wrote a book about how Bonhoeffer would have written for Breaking Point and commented at Fox News if he were alive now. Or something like that.<br />
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Metaxas, like much of White Evangelicalism, takes an iconic and rebellious figure like Bonhoeffer and whitewashes him. White Evangelicalism - particularly the more conservative wings, but not solely - consistently does the same with other radical movements and figures.</div>
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White Evangelicals claim the abolitionist movement as their own*, and the Civil Rights movement as their own. And Martin Luther King, Jr. as their own.<br />
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And if Dr. King were alive today, he would be against Affirmative Action and <a href="http://www.timwise.org/2003/01/misreading-the-dream-color-blindness-and-the-distortion-of-martin-luther-king-jr/">pro-color blind</a>. Because restorative justice is racist, apparently. </div>
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Jesus would <a href="http://www.alternet.org/conservative-jesus-wants-everyone-have-giant-gun">want us to buy guns</a> and shoot bad people.<br />
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And the same guy who wrote the radically egalitarian anti-hierarchical statement, "In Christ, there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free-born," would want women to be subservient, want the rich to control the earth, and Americans to control everything else.<br />
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<b>Not only do they defang these leaders, re-haloing them for their purposes, they completely co-opt them for a double-negative impact - both taking away from their messages of radical inclusion and justice and re-purposing them towards an agenda that is exclusionary and privileged for a small minority of people</b> - particularly those who can afford privileges. And so <a href="http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/21399">Metaxas compares</a> Bonhoeffer and his Barmen Declaration with conservative Evangelicalism and its Manhattan Declaration (this, by the way, is <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2009/12/01/the-fatuous-foolishness-of-the-manhattan-declaration/">old hat for this group</a>. They've already compared the MD, which is a religious-cloaked cultural assault against homosexuals and the poor, to "Letter from a Birmingham Jail").<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[W]ere he alive today and living in America, costly grace for [Bonhoeffer] would likely mean preaching what the Word of God teaches about human sexuality**--even when activists and their allies in government try to suppress his work and attack his church***. Costly grace would mean standing against churches that mix radical new doctrines about marriage with Christian truth. Costly grace would mean standing up to a government attempting to force him to buy health insurance that violates his beliefs—even if it led to his arrest.<br />
And costly grace would, I believe, lead him to sign the Manhattan Declaration in defense of human life, marriage, and religious liberty, just as he signed the Barmen Declaration, which I quote at length in my book.<br />
Now I must say that Chuck Colson had the Barmen Declaration in mind when he co-authored the Manhattan Declaration. Chuck saw many parallels between what the church faced in Nazi Germany in the thirties and what faithful Christians are facing today in America.</blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nazi cat forces you health care and gay marry.</td></tr>
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Such views are based on bad scholarship, as Victoria J. Barnett, the editor for the English edition of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, and the Director of Church Relations for the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains. She <a href="http://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2010/09/review-of-eric-metaxas-bonhoeffer-pastor-martyr-prophet-spy-a-righteous-gentile-vs-the-third-reich/">speaks of Metaxas' book on Bonhoeffer as "badly flawed</a>."</div>
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There are two central problems [with the subtly-named <i>Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich</i>]. The first is that<b> he has a very shaky grasp of the political, theological, and ecumenical history of the period</b>. Hence he has pieced together the historical and theological backdrop for the Bonhoeffer story using examples from various works, sometimes completely out of context and often without understanding their meaning. He focuses too much on minor details and overlooks some of the major ones (such as the role of the Lutheran bishops and the “intact” churches). The second is that<b> theologically, the book is a polemic, written to make the case that Bonhoeffer was in reality an evangelical Christian whose battle was not just against the Nazis but all the liberal Christians who enabled them.</b></blockquote>
But Metaxas also misunderstands the type of teaching that he promotes here:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
All of this, however, leads to a selective misreading of Bonhoeffer’s theological development and a profound misunderstanding of what happened to the German churches between 1933 and 1945. The failure of the German Evangelical Church under Nazism was not that it was filled with formalistic, legalistic Lutherans who just needed to form a personal relationship to Jesus, but that it was filled with Christians whose understanding of their faith had so converged with German national culture that it tainted both their politics and their theology. (As an interesting aside, when I first interviewed Eberhard Bethge in 1985 he explicitly compared this kind of Protestantism to what he had seen of the American religious right. A thoughtful evangelical reading of the development of Bonhoeffer’s extensive writings on the church-state relationship and the public role of religion would be a major contribution to the field, but Metaxas doesn’t even mention that aspect of Bonhoeffer’s thought). <b>What Metaxas fails to grasp is that there were many devout, well-educated, Bible-reading Christians in Germany who read their <i>Losung </i>each morning and fully supported National Socialism</b>.</blockquote>
You can read the whole review (and these critiques are just the tip of the Nazi iceberg) <a href="http://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2010/09/review-of-eric-metaxas-bonhoeffer-pastor-martyr-prophet-spy-a-righteous-gentile-vs-the-third-reich/">here</a>. And then read Clifford Green's <a href="http://www.christiancentury.org/reviews/2010-09/hijacking-bonhoeffer">critical review here</a>. Green, by the by, is the executive director of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Descending to insult, <b>even insulting the subject of his own book</b>, is a sure sign that an author is in trouble. Why does he do this? Ostensibly because the death-of-God theologians, those "liberals," have "hijacked" Bonhoeffer. But why whip a few writers who made a brief splash 40 years ago and who have had little or no influence on theology or the church? Because they function as straw men in his polarizing narrative about "orthodox Christians" and "liberals." His real target is liberals, and not just theological liberals, but political liberals too.</blockquote>
Metaxas insults Bonhoeffer throughout his book by misrepresenting him. And he continues the insults on every given opportunity with bad scholarship, bad analysis, bad politics.<br />
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Such bad scholarship is based itself on bad theology - a theology that teaches its adherents to displace and de-contextualize whatever it is studying to fit our own prejudices. <b>The bible</b>, according to such theology, wasn't written by men and women who live in a specific time and addressing specific issues for specific audiences and specific times - it <b>was written, they believe, in a placeless heaven and has the same impact for White Conservative Evangelical Republicans as everybody else at all times.</b> <i>Which then means that other readings of the bible are incorrect because they are not understood through the particular lens of White Conservative Evangelicals. </i><br />
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Metaxas' "scholarship" leads conservative Evangelicalism to deny poor and marginalized people common rights and access under the guise of the "true" "Confessing church" - which he misrepresents.<br />
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But the true Confessing Church will not deny access. It will swing wide open the Kingdom of Heaven for <i>all </i>to enter. It will seek healing. It will feed. It will clothe. It will forgive debts.<br />
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That's what the Kingdom of Heaven is about. Not White, Middle Class Christian Hetero privilege.<br />
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*Yesterday, on a shared link from the Left Cheek page, I saw a woman argue that white Christian women were the ones most responsible for protesting slavery and freeing slaves in America. No shit. Guess all the black slaves were too busy enjoying their slavery to protest it.<br />
Also, you know who the second largest proponents of American slavery was? White Christian women. Right behind White Christian men.<br />
**ie, <i>Gays can't marry other gays! That's gross and ungodly somehow or another!</i><br />
***ie, <i>Allowing gays to marry gays is persecution!!</i></div>
jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-50936693632541238502013-02-07T16:44:00.000-06:002013-02-07T16:44:10.251-06:00Guns and Race in ChicagoLet’s talk about the second amendment. Let’s talk about the fact that it was never meant to be about individual rights to carry whatever weapons one wants. Let’s talk about the fact it was never written with the idea of semi-automatics or tanks. Let’s talk about well-regulated militias, which eventually became state guards, but which at least one purpose was <a href="http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/Bogus2.htm">for the regulation and keeping in line of slaves</a> to guard against the very real threat of slave revolts. But it was never, until recently, meant to be constitutionally interpreted as being a right for individual firearms owners to own whatever weapons they wanted.<br />
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Let’s talk about the NRA. Let’s talk about the fact that they’ve spent the last three decades not just <a href="http://mobile.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/12/gun_violence_research_nra_and_congress_blocked_gun_control_studies_at_cdc.html">actively blocking through legislative bullying</a>, but torturing and threatening the lives of any who would dare study the effects of guns and weapons of mass destruction and effective methods of gun control that would save lives without taking away our rights. Let’s talk about Wayne LaPierre, the cro-magnun carrying rhetoric too insipid, vomit-inducing, and warmed over for even Fox News. <i>And Fox News is the Hot Pocket of media rhetoric</i>.<br />
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<b>Let’s talk about white people hyperventilating about the widespread violence in Chicago’s West and South Side neighborhoods as if it was a place in which they had any involvement, investment, or concern</b>. And here I don’t want to just limit the scope to the Second Amendmenters, the TP, the gun fetishists, the neo-cons, or Republicans. I want to consider such auspicious Democrats as Rahm Emanuel and most of White Chicago. For if we cared about the people and neighborhoods of color in Chicago, our crime prevention would have a hell of a lot more involved, intricate, and inspired investment than locking up significant percentages of the young-to-middle-aged black and brown male populations. There is work, there is money. Lord, there sure is a lot of wealth accumulating in this city – but it accumulates at the White Center: The Loop, Lincoln Square, gentrifying neighborhoods like my own Logan Square and Humboldt Park neighborhoods. Those areas largely unaffected by red and yellow dots.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6xJTwTlaYYg/URP6ZUPt0aI/AAAAAAAAKXk/SkvKsccjV4c/s1600/chicago+homicide+map+2012.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6xJTwTlaYYg/URP6ZUPt0aI/AAAAAAAAKXk/SkvKsccjV4c/s400/chicago+homicide+map+2012.png" width="287" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Courtesy the <i><a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/violence">Chicago Sun-Times</a></i></td></tr>
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This money is set aside by venture capitalists <i>for </i>venture capitalists. The rest of the city (“Brown Chicago”) gets token scraps here and there. But <i>even those</i> are threatened. Union jobs for the city? Not if some in White Chicago have their say. Unions are made of the rabble, and therefore not dependable to keep their money circulating where its immediately valuable to the center of WC.<br />
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But as long as the Loop, Lincoln Park, and Wicker Park are operating, the poverty and gun violence of Brown Chicago barely registers as a problem in White Chicago. <b>So the mayor can shut down schools and after-school programs and community-based mental health clinics and homeless transitioning programs – what little that has worked to reduce violence and increase safety for children and adults – while touting a broken-windows crime-fighting system that does not work</b> (unless the effectiveness we’re looking for is how much of BC can end up locked-up for non-violent offenses). He can close down those schools and open up non-union charter schools run by unprotected teachers and as a business – a business that, incidentally, is run like many other businesses in Chicago. Which means there are plenty of jobs and money for the city and even for minorities! <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/watchdogs/17920483-452/for-insiders-community-group-unos-charter-schools-pay.html">As long as you’re connected to influential politicians in the city</a>. The rest of Brown Chicago can, apparently, suck it.<br />
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You see, as long as blow-hards like Wayne LaPierre and states like Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana continue to justify and act as points of access for guns in Chicago, it really doesn’t matter how tough the gun laws are in Chicago. <b>We have too many guns with too much access for too many people. As a result - mixed in with racial and class violence that is top-down by its very nature - dozens of innocent children and young folks are gunned down every week,</b><i> long before God has kissed their lives</i>.<br />
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<b>So though Chicago can do little about the gun culture</b> (thanks to back-ass gun fetishists), <b>we <i>can </i>do much to alleviate violence in our city</b>. We can supply meaningful, living wage jobs in our economically depressed regions, we can support grassroots collaborations between neighbors, we can entreat the mayor to expand schools rather than close them, we can support affordable housing over homelessness and displacement. We can <a href="http://mayoraltutorial.com/articles/the_trauma_of_socioeconomic_violence">open hospitals and trauma centers near the centers where trauma tends to take place</a>.<br />
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<b>We, in WC, can partner listen to (and patronize the businesses of) BC and partner with them to see effectual, transitional, substantial, lasting change.</b>jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12126432.post-37845004348601929992013-02-05T08:48:00.004-06:002013-02-05T12:29:54.386-06:00If They Get Rights, Then Nobody Gets RightsSenators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Tim Scott (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Johanns (R-NE), <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2010/10/wuss-by-any-other-name-part-1.html">Rand Paul</a> (R-KY), Pat Roberts (R-KS), and James Risch (R-ID), I don't think, are <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/02/04/1540321/senators-block-vawa/">blocking the Violence Against Woman Act</a> on the grounds that they hate women. I'm sure they'll all tell you that they love women. And that they treat their wives well and want their daughters to grow up to be strong and capable and even independent.<br />
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Their objections arise because they refuse to allow undocumented immigrants, internationally trafficked sex slaves, transgendered*, and <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2012/12/white-rapists-native-women-and.html">indigenous women who live on tribal lands the same protections</a> that other American women receive from domestic abuse - which, sadly, is very limited as it stands.<br />
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<b>So, Cruz, Lee, Scott, Rubio, Johanns, Paul, Roberts and Risch hate immigrant and First Nation women. And they hate them so much that they're willing to dismiss the needs of all other women in the United States.</b><br />
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No, wait.<br />
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I guess <a href="http://leftcheek.blogspot.com/2010/10/wuss-by-any-other-name-part-1.html">they <i>DO </i>hate all women</a>.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wj1d0GJo6EE/UREbMQ9Bs-I/AAAAAAAAKXQ/Gg9JdouWEPE/s1600/537870_421195021289784_359386159_n.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="280" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wj1d0GJo6EE/UREbMQ9Bs-I/AAAAAAAAKXQ/Gg9JdouWEPE/s320/537870_421195021289784_359386159_n.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Courtesy of FB's <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=421195021289784&set=a.266749146734373.61561.263103507098937&type=1&theater">One Million Vaginas</a></td></tr>
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Feel free to print this poster out and defecate on it.<br />
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*When I first wrote this post, I had forgotten about the language that would also protect international sex slaves and the transgendered people as well (additionally, men who are also victims of domestic and sexual violence). I apologize for those glaring omissions.</div>
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jasdyehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17492591447246532970noreply@blogger.com2