The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro.  They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony.  But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions.  It has been sincere and even ardent in welcoming some change.  But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken.  Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation.  The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform. [emphasis mine]

To be sure, the theme on the surface is not something I disagree with.  Who would with God and country?  But here is why I find the Back (and Palin) offensive in connection with Dr. King.  I don’t have the eloquence but MLK does.

“When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process.  Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate healthcare—each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage.  Each will require billions of dollars to correct.  Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in financial as well as human terms.  This fact has not been fully grasped, because most of the gains of the past decade were obtained at bargain rates.  The desegregation of public facilities cost nothing; neither did the election and appointment of a few black public officials.”

“A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions.  Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity.  Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal.  It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself.  This means, at bottom, that the Christian gospel is a two-way road.  On the one hand, it seeks to change the souls of men and thereby unite them with God; on the other hand, it seeks to change the environmental conditions of men so that the soul will have a chance after it is changed.  Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.  Such a religion is a kind the Marxists like to see—an opiate of the people.”

“A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’  This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.  A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on  programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“Those of use who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the propaganda of war, we must spread the propaganda of peace.  We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement.  We must demonstrate, teach, and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken.  We must work unceasingly to lift this nation that we love to a higher destiny, to a more noble expression of humaneness.”

“I have tried to be honest.  To be honest is to confront the truth.  However unpleasant and inconvenient the truth may be, I believe we must expose and face it if we are to achieve a better quality of American life.”

So you can imagine what I think of Palin mocking the first black President, a physical manifestation of King’s dream becoming reality, as a community activist without “real responsibilities.”  You can guess what I think of Beck calling that same man a racist that hates white people.  You can also imagine what I think of him lambasting liberation theology, which King practiced, calling it Marxist on the anniversary of King’s “Dream” speech even in the midst of apologizing for his Obama-racist remarks during a rally about positiveness.  Ironic, offensive and ignorant just doesn’t cover it.  (Note: I have not engaged in ad hominem attack.  I have attacked action.)

Recently, I was taken to task about the morality of homosexuality and how the Bible “clearly” teaches it’s practice is a sin.  Frankly, I never believed that and having other priorities chose not to bother examining the issue other than cataloguing some verses.  Other things are important to me in my faith journey.  But given all the proud bigotry surrounding so-called “gay marriage” and the civil rights of LGBT persons I’m seeing, I decided to give it a look see.

What the Word Is Not: A Golden Calf

As a Catholic, I come from a faith tradition that recognizes human tradition (sometimes to a fault) in the organic relationship it has with reading the Word of God in the Bible.  Proper interpretation is known by its adherence to apostolic tradition, that is the tradition of understanding God as Jesus’ apostles do.  My Protestant brethren do not necessarily see this very well.  I have heard them quote Jesus as he quoted the prophet Isaiah in Matthew 15:9 or Mark 7:7 in criticism of my church: “In vain do they worship [God], teaching as doctrines human precepts.” (Of course, they neglect to read the previous two verses which speak of hypocrites who don’t love God and who only give lip service to him, but that’s another story.)  For my Protestant brethren, it’s the Word and only the Word and the Word says so!

There isn’t problem a problem with Sola Scriptura per se but often in my experience I see my brothers and sisters conflating the Word with their interpretations of the Bible and implicitly ignoring this fact, compounding that error.  What you hear is, “I believe in the Bible” or equivalently “I believe in the Word” (which strictly speaking is not true if there is an interpretation with which they disagree).  At that point they have forged a golden calf.  Belief becomes bibliolatry.  Simply reading the Bible is an act of interpretation inseparable from us and contains all our biases.  This is why I am deeply skeptical of any person who with any certainty claims to speak with God’s voice.  I am not speaking here of confessing one’s faith only problematic utterances that omit implicitly or explicitly the important caveat: “This I believe.”  

It takes discipline to give more than lip service to the notion that the Word is beyond our understanding and that we have but a dim view in God in the Bible.  We see through a mirror darkly.  It’s hard work to believe in something ardently and yet always open to change.  We instead want the quick fix, the emotional comfort that certainty through blind faith entails.  I am not immune to this.  So when we read the author of 2 Timothy writing in St. Paul’s name:

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

Amen.  We can read into the verse that Scripture is all we need and get lazy about it.  We forget historical context is important.  What we are not often taught is that, at the time 2 Timothy was written, scripture consisted only of the Old Testament, the Septuagint as a matter of fact!  The Gospels had not been written yet, but were little more than disjointed oral stories and traditions about Jesus.  This verse is often used to make the classic appeal that the whole Bible refers to itself as the Word of God with no realization that in context, it did not.  If you ask the average Christian about this, they probably have no idea.  Theologians do.  Catholic priests do.  Seminarians do.  But rarely the folks in the pew do.  It’s problems like this that make talking about the Bible and its contents with my fellow Christians so difficult.  And this is just one tradition that goes unnoticed, invisible.

If I bring stuff like this up, I’m often met with all kinds of resistance, anger, name calling, etc.  My faith is questioned.  My love of Jesus is called into doubt.  My allegiance to Satan is implied.  Yet, all I’ve done is read the Bible as it is, in the context in which it was written.  People are invested in their traditions, they are loathe to give them up.  And that is a very human thing.  Again, I am not immune to this.  So I understand that it’s much easier to malign me or claim I’m in the thrall of all manner of delusions than to admit one’s cherished beliefs might be mistaken.

I say all this to say that things are not nearly as ironclad as is often asserted in the Bible.  God and his Word always seem to elude being boxed in.

What the Word Is: God’s Biography

So what the hell is the Bible?  For me, the Bible is to quote my Church, “the Word of God written in the words of men.”  It’s one of the central ways of getting to know God in the intimate, personal way Jesus said. A way that connoted the deep intimacy of sexual intercourse.  So, I cherish my Bibles, all of them.  They are sacred.  Not in some magical or superstitious way but in holiness, that is “set apart.”

And the Word is written in the words of men who were full human beings limited in time and space with personal beliefs, biases and understandings that are evident in the text.  That’s why the sky is a dome and the earth flat in Genesis.  This was the “scientific” understanding of its authors.

So when I go to Bible study, I have these facts in mind.  I’m looking for God to teach and correct and such but with the clear-eyed view that the Word is distorted by the words, by me.  Just as any biography can only scratch the surface of a person’s life and who they are/were or just as no words could ever fully describe my love for my wife and son, words as symbols fall short of reality.  And most importantly, symbols are not the reality.  This does not mean that symbols are less than reality.  Just as my Christian brothers are one with Christ as his body and represent him in this world, we are not Christ.  So too do I see the Bible and the Word.  It is deep intimate connection, not identity.  So I am very, very careful to separate the timeless from the time bound, the transcendent from the mundane, and frankly, the good from bad.

Homosexuality: “Clearly” a Sin

So let’s get back to “the gays.”  I want to be illustrative rather than exhaustive for the sake of brevity, but my main point can be applied to other parts of the Bible.  My point being that people who claim what the Bible “clearly says” is not so clear on further inspection.  Room for interpretation abounds.

First let me quote from the Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 6:9 in New Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition:

Do you know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived!  Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers–none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

and the New American Bible:

Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

(I love the word choice “practicing homosexuals” vs. sodomites. My church is PC.  LOL)  Sounds cut and dry doesn’t it?  I mean a sodomite is a sodomite.  But remember context.  This was a letter written in the Roman empire where man-on-man sex was deeply taboo because patriarchal as the Roman’s were, they couldn’t stomach a man penetrating another in coitus.  Men should penetrate lesser forms of human being, i.e. women and boys, since the penetrator is considered dominant.  Further, this fact is implicit in the footnotes for this verse in the New American Bible:

1Co 6:9(b) The Greek word translated as boy prostitutes may refer to catamites, i.e. boys or young men who were kept for purposes of prostitution, a practice not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world. In Greek mythology this was the function of Ganymede, the “cupbearer of the gods,” whose Latin name was Catamitus.  The term translated Sodomotes [This was rendered "practicing homosexuals" in the updated text but apparently the footnote was missed in my edition.]  refers to adult males who indulged in homosexual practices with such boys. See similar condemnations of such practices in Romans 1:26-27; 1 Tim 1:10. [emphasis mine]

So we have important qualifying information about the biblical text.  Paul is literally saying that NAMBLA-esque pagan gay temple sex and those who engage in it are wrong and will not be part of God’s kingdom.  It is we  today who interpret and expand that to include, say, two men raising a family in a domestic partnership seeking to get married.

The Bible Reports: You Decide

And that is why I stand up for my LBGT brothers and sisters.  I believe such interpretation is wrong not because of bad exegesis (frankly it’s not) but because of the bigotry and hatred it engenders and gives joy to.  My Master teaches, “You shall know a tree by it’s fruit.”  The fruit ain’t good.  Because God is love and marriage is a public expression of love, to quote this verse to malign such between LGBT persons is proof enough for me that the interpretation is problematic at best, evil at worst.  We are supplanting our bigotry for the Word.  Not good.  Not good at all.

One must wonder whether physicians, nurses and other workers toiling day and night in health care — let alone the medics and helicopter pilots who risk their lives to help the wounded — see their work and its product quite as Mr. Limbaugh casts it.

One further wonders whether families with a cancer-stricken member are likely to view going without health care as the moral equivalent of going without a beach house.

via Is Health Care Special? – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.

Great article.  There are moral dimensions to healthcare and it shows how economics can handle something as thorny as morality. But, as for Limbaugh, I can see why Jon Stewart calls him a douche.  Wow.

“We’ve posted no shortage of pieces on political attacks that leave context on the cutting room floor to give the public a misleading impression. An opponent’s statements, cherry-picked and shorn of any language that could provide the intended meaning, can be shaped into a slashing ad. 
Or they can lose a woman her job. The latest victim of the missing context trick is U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod. Her story shows the harm that can result from taking something out of context — or acting before all the facts are in.”

(Via FactCheck.org.)

Fox News and Andrew Breitbart (no I won’t link to them) should lose a good amount of credibility. This was malice aforethought.

“It’s important to note the shift in argument from ‘elements of racism’ to ‘a racist group.’ Perhaps Biden just answering a question. In any case, he was not at pains to take up the NAACP’s more nuanced point. Nor was he much interested in the question–the notion that Tea Party racism is reducible to people ‘on the periphery’ who have ‘expressed really unfortunate comments’ is a woeful understatement directly at odds with the facts. But that is the administration’s position.”

(Via The Atlantic.)

I missed this.  Coates is right on point.  Shame on Obama for that.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the immigration legislation is the requirement that citizens report anyone suspected of illegal status. Such a requirement is eerily reminiscent of Nazi Germany, Cold War Russia, and Fascist Italy, when snitching mandates were central to sustaining a regime of fear and central control. Sadly, these demands are not exclusive to the immigration bill, as everything from drug enforcement policy to the Obama Administration’s counter-terrorism strategies are undergirded by the expectation that everyday people will be forced to report the alleged misdeeds of others. Like many dimensions of fascist politics, the notion of the citizen-informant seems relatively harmless. Unfortunately, evidence shows that such a practice is unreliable and ineffective, not to mention devastating for the moral and cultural fabric of a community.

Although it would be hyperbolic to say that America is destined to become a truly fascist nation, the Arizona immigration bill reflects the nation’s continued shift away from its expressed principles. Unless we quickly begin to organize and challenge what currently counts as “common sense,” we may lose the opportunity to save what’s left of our democracy.

via A new breed of racial profiling invades Arizona | TheLoop21.com.

For once, I’m in complete agreement with Dr. Hill.

His response is a caricature of the worst stereotypes of white liberalism. Note the invocation of a “Marxist View Of Race.” Note the sense that blackness is strictly the work of “Southern Whites.” Note the arrogance of assuming that “blackness” is defined by 17th century racists, and that the people being defined have no agency. In one fell column, Judis anoints himself High Arbiter of Blackness, and then dismisses Obama’s complicated and arduous process as the president simply doing “what was expected of him.”

The only appropriate response to this sentiment is to regrettably resort to the language of my folks and ask the following–Who the fuck is John Judis?

via We’ll Tell You If You’re Black Or Not – National – The Atlantic.

But seriously, who the f— is he?

A canonical trial authorised by Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy was halted after Fr. Murphy wrote to the future pope asking that proceedings be stopped, despite objections from a second archbishop.

The accused priest said in the letter that he was ill and wanted to live out the remainder of his time in the “dignity of my priesthood”.

Victims say Fr Murphy – who died in 1998 – assaulted boys while hearing their confessions, in his office, his car, at his mother’s house and in their dormitory beds.

He was quietly moved to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes and schools, according to one lawsuit.

via BBC News – Pope accused of failing to act on sex abuse case.

What bothers me is the Vatican’s response to this.  Instead of quiet dignity, we find defiance: it’s about the pope and not about the children who were abused under his watch.  Directly or not, you are responsible Pope Benedict.  Take responsibility.  Accusing the media and critics of “petty gossip” about really serious matters only serves to paint you as petty and seeking to deflect attention from those sins you may have committed.  Focus on what matters.  Further, you are the Vicar of Christ; so much for blessing those who curse you.