The day before yesterday, my sister and I took a trip to talk to the caretaker of Newell House in Champoeg, OR.  (This is a sister museum to Caples House where I have been spending quite a bit of time recently.)  It was a beautiful day in a heavenly spot.  The Newell House was built in 1852 – making it a very early Oregon pioneer settlement.  Lots of historic reenactment goes on out here – and buses of school kids come through every year.  Check out the linked web site for information on the collections, if you are interested.  (You know my interests…the antique quilts at Newell House are a knock out!)

Question:

“Certain religious groups in the United States are unabashedly focussed on converting others — it’s part of their faith. When the federal government stipulates that it will withhold funding from a group that proselytizes — as indicated by Obama’s ground rules above — is it not, ironically, discriminating against that group on the basis of its religion?,” asked Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University in a blog on Wednesday.

Answer: no. Chump.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions.

You could spend it with fireworks and beer (bad) or with the Muppets and Martin Sheen (good):

(Cookies to People For the American Way)

Happy 4th of July!  Although I have lovely memories of July 4ths earlier in my life in many other parts of the country, there is nothing like July 4th in New England.  Especially in small town New England--there are tons of parades with tractors and fire trucks (Zanzibar and I got to ride in one for a couple of years before my ex moved to a new town), Boy Scouts, Candidates for public office, old cars, Jazzerizers, mountain climbers over the age of 60--you name it!  Oh! Shriners on little scooters with their Fezzes, Antique bikes and unicycles and Uncle Sam on stilts.  There are chicken barbecues, lobster bakes, fried dough, Italian sausage sandwiches, pancake breakfasts and of course fireworks.  Not every town has them, some towns have them at other times, maybe parades at Christmas and Memorial Day--but there are lots of them! Around 800,000 people were expected to visit New Hampshire this weekend.  I live in a vacation area, so we get lots of them here.....can you see me gritting my teeth?  Most touristas are very nice--others, not so much. We actually have traffic this weekend! I have other things to do, so won't be partaking this year...maybe next year.

So, what are you doing?  What are you cooking/eating?  Do you have any July 4th traditions?  Grab a lawn chair, beers and other libations are in the fridge--sit a spell!

Hat tip to Michael Winship for his article, What Patriotism Is.  He highlights an example of what standing and speaking truth to power is – Major David J.R. Frakt exemplifies it in his defense of a Guantanamo Bay inmate, a suicidal young boy who was tortured by lengthy sleep deprivation.

From the closing argument of Major David J.R. Frakt in favor of dismissal of the case against Mohammad Jawad (but please read it all):

That to which we aspire

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Less beautiful stuff below.

Davey Henreckson is afraid I've missed his main point:

I am not try to whine-out about how the left behaves as badly as the right (though that, again, may be very true). I am trying to point out that partisans of both sides of the political spectrum use civil religion for their own purposes. And I would like to suggest that Senator Obama is just as guilty of this sin as Pat Robertson. It’s the whole plank-in-the-eye syndrome that plagues right and left-wingers.

Well, no, I got that. I'm no expert on these issues, but I'm not sure it's safe to say that "both sides of the political spectrum use civil religion for their own purposes." Yes, Obama, yes, Bill Clinton started the Faith-Based Initiatives under a different name. But then who? Carter was open about his evangelical Baptist beliefs, but he was also the one who signed into law the prohibition on religious academies receiving federal tax breaks. LBJ actually slipped the requirement that non-profits abstain from political activity into a bill, literally in the dead of night. You'd really have to go back to FDR's relief efforts to find anything comparable to what Obama's proposing.

All that being said, I'm happy to stipulate for the sake of argument that Democrats would use civil religion for political purposes, if it suited their needs. It's just that we have differentiate rhetorical strategies - which both parties have definitely used, ad nauseum - from actual governance. On the latter score, Republicans almost certainly come out ahead.

All that said, that wasn't even my point, which was mostly aimed at Dreher. Rod, as usual, sets up a false equivalence here, then charges Democrats with not living up to their end of the wankerrific structure he's built for them.

While there are legitimate concerns with Obama's proposal, no responsible commentator that I've seen so far has charged him with creeping theocracy. That, counter to that cretin Dreher, is not because they're hypocrites, but because they understand the difference between actual theocracy and a simple but troubling blurring of the lines between church and state.

Like Davey, I'm tied up in holiday weekend activities, but if you want to know more about the unsavory characters the Bush administration has associated with, and their fundamentally anti-democratic bent (all puns intentional), go read Talk to Action, then read up on the Blogs against Theocracy. It's all very educational and not a little bit creepy. Those guys really are theocrats, as they'll occasionally admit. By comparison, Obama has good intentions but is possibly on the wrong track.

So sure, that might be a speck in liberals' eye compared to the plank in conservatives' oracular apparatus. But the problem with that setup is that while liberals are fretting over their sins of judgment, conservatives are wrecking the joint. There are times when "a pox on both their houses" is the appropriate response, and there are times when you just have to call the B.S. for what it is. Or as Reinhold Niebuhr put it:

Men who are equally sinners in the sight of God need not be equally guilty of a specific act of wrongdoing in which they are involved. It is important to recognize that Biblical religion has emphasized the inequality of guilt just as much as the equality of sin.

[editor's note, by PoliSigh]Happy 4th of July!


Please join our community in prayer.  Just leave your prayer requests and pray for the requests of the community. I welcome all people to join in as the power of prayer/good energy is undeniable.

If you have any favorite prayers or passages or quotes or meditations, please send them to me to share, meeshka1@msn dot com

Please do not argue about the requests of others--you may do that elsewhere!!! If you wish to offer comments of support--please do so! If you choose to rate prayer requests, I like to use a "4" as an AMEN! If you disagree with a request, please just refrain from rating--this is a place where people need to feel they can reveal and unburden their hearts without being criticized. Should any trolls come our way, just surround them with prayer.

Prayer requests remain on the list based upon my judgment.  Removing requests is my decision.  I have no hard and fast rules--I simply act when the list seems to get too long or it seems the request no longer applies.  If I take one off which you would like to remain, please simply request it again.  If the request can be removed earlier, please let me know.  I'm sure we all would appreciate an update.

Thank you!

There's more:

...and no weasels:

Nobody could have predicted...oh screw it, everybody knew reactionary Evangelicals would suck it up and back the GOP nominee, whoever he might be:

More than 90 evangelical leaders representing millions of conservative Christians met in Denver on Tuesday to lament the condition of the religious conservative movement and to conclude they should get behind Sen. John McCain even if they didn’t like everything about him as a candidate.
         
“The alternative is so bad we must support John McCain,” said Phyllis Schlafly, founder and president of Eagle Forum, adding that the leaders should have held a strategy meeting in 2001 when it was clear Vice President Dick Cheney wouldn’t run for president instead of waiting until four months before the 2008 election.

Oh, honestly. The conservative ideology is so far spent that all they can think to do is throw out more sophisticated versions of school-yard taunts. In this case: "So are you!"

Critics of “Christendom” or “Christianism” vary widely. But the more left-leaning critics just got a bit of a blow with Obama’s newly-professed support of faith-based initiatives. Crunchy Con Rod Dreher points out the quandry in which this puts Obama supporters, like Andrew Sullivan.

It’s always been clear to me that liberals don’t really object to religion in public life; they object to conservative religion in public life. Church-state, “Christianist” talk is just rhetorical expediency. After all, how many liberals would have objected to the Catholic Archbishop of New Orleans excommunicating obstreperous segregationist politicians in the 1960s?

I think Dreher makes an excellent point. Christians who are concerned with establishing the independent polis of the Church have reason to be concerned about government-funded/faith-based initiatives. Because the present “conservative” administration first championed the movement, those on the left had an easy target. It’s easy to rail against the “Christianism” of a political movement you hate. But, really—American civil religion has always been championed just as much by the left. Perhaps even more so. The Victorian Social Gospel wasn’t exactly driven by proto-neocons.

No, it isn't an excellent point. It's more wanking from Dreher, who never met a facile point he could pass up. It's quite true that some folks on the left have problems with Obama's continuation of Bush's Faith-Based Initiatives (it's not a new position, by the way).

But for crying in the night, can you blame them? It's not like this program doesn't have a track record. It was designed to shovel money at religious conservatives, many of whom have no use for teh queer like Andrew Sullivan. The church-state concerns raised by faith-based programs may be justified, or they may not. But they're hardly beyond the pale, and they're hardly just partisan slings and arrows.

And since when does Andrew Sullivan get to represent the left? And since when do all liberals object to conservative religion in public life? They often criticize it, but there's hardly a widespread movement to disenfranchise Southern Baptists.

This is really just a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't logical fallacy. If liberals admit that they like Obama's position, then aha! They have to admit that Pat Robertson and his protein shakes weren't all that bad!! And if they say they don't care for it, then aha! Democrats are in disarray and if they get their way Richard Dawkins will teach your children to hate America!!! What a load. Burdening policy preferences with social conflict is the cheapest of cheap shots. Anybody who's read Rod Dreher (or Jonah Goldberg, or Michele Malkin, or...) knows that.

But to Davey Henreckson's point, aren't you forgetting the neo-orthodox challenge to civil religion? Obama is certainly aware of Niebuhr's critique of political overreaching, all the more reason to hold him up to high standards on his use of religious institutions as a tool of public policy. Because surely the only thing worse than governmental arrogance in thinking it can solve the problems of the world is to having the church conned into thinking it can do the same, given enough money and government direction. You don't have to be a "secularist" to think that might be something of a problem.

WATER FIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!