“Something Is The Matter With Kansas”: When Does The Madness End?
Kansas State Representative Keith Esau has introduced a bill that would eliminate no-fault divorce in the Sunflower State. He has some interesting ideas on matrimony:
“No-fault divorce gives people an easy out instead of working at it,” Esau told The Wichita Eagle on Friday. “It would be my hope that they could work out their incompatibilities and learn to work together on things.”
…Esau disputed the suggestion that bill was an example of government overreach. He said the state gives benefits to married couples, such as tax breaks, so couples shouldn’t enter into the institution of marriage lightly.
Moreover, he said, the state has a vested interest in supporting “strong families,” and divorce undermines that.
“I think we’ve made divorce way too easy in this country,” he said. “If we really want to respect marriage it needs to be a commitment that people work at and don’t find arbitrary reasons to give up.”
Of course, one of the immediate effects of this law would be that couples seeking a divorce would have to face-off in court and point fingers at each other. Either that, or one of them would have to accept the blame for their failed relationship.
Divorce is tough on kids, but nasty divorces are toxic.
But this isn’t even the worst bill that was considered in the Kansas House this week.
On Tuesday, the Kansas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a measure designed to bring anti-gay segregation—under the guise of “religious liberty”—to the already deep-red state. The bill, written out of fear that the state may soon face an Oklahoma-style gay marriage ruling, will now easily pass the Republican Senate and be signed into law by the Republican governor. The result will mark Kansas as the first state, though certainly not the last, to legalize segregation of gay and straight people in virtually every arena of life.
If that sounds overblown, consider the bill itself. When passed, the new law will allow any individual, group, or private business to refuse to serve gay couples if “it would be contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Private employers can continue to fire gay employees on account of their sexuality. Stores may deny gay couples goods and services because they are gay. Hotels can eject gay couples or deny them entry in the first place. Businesses that provide public accommodations—movie theaters, restaurants—can turn away gay couples at the door. And if a gay couple sues for discrimination, they won’t just lose; they’ll be forced to pay their opponent’s attorney’s fees.
Unlike Rep. Esau’s idiotic no-divorce bill, the anti-gay measure will actually become law. Most likely, the federal courts will strike it down as unconstitutional, but that won’t prevent Republicans in Kansas from wasting money defending it.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 15, 2014
“What Was Huckabee Talking About?”: I Can Hardly Believe That I Share The Same Country With The Man
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus invited former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be the keynote speaker at the RNC’s winter meeting, but it appears that he regrets that decision:
Priebus responded to Huckabee’s comments, telling the Washington Post, “I don’t know what he was talking about. Sort of a goofy way of using some phrases. Not the way I would have phrased it.”
I don’t know what Mike Huckabee was talking about, either. When he was serving as governor, Huckabee signed a law mandating that health insurance plans provide contraceptive coverage, and he made no exceptions for religious institutions. And, despite the fact that his hero Jesus was quite clear that he had nothing but the harshest contempt for hypocrites, Huckabee is now behaving as if contraceptive coverage in health care plans is some kind of violation of people’s religious rights.
His actual comments were more than ‘goofy.’ They were nonsensical. I don’t know if he asks his nieces to refer to him as ‘Uncle Sugar,’ but I certainly hope not. The main thing is that he wants us to have a national discussion about contraception.
“If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America.”
I’m not sure that anyone knows quite what the hell that comment is supposed to mean. He later explained that “My point was to point out that Dems have put a laser-like focus on government funded birth control and given it more attention than cancer drugs.”
Does anyone think Huckabee’s point was that Democrats are not highlighting enough how ObamaCare is giving people access to life-saving cancer drugs?
Anyone?
I’ve tried to decipher Huckabee’s meaning and I’ve read other people’s attempts to explain his comments, but I think I’ll have to chalk it up to some kind of cultural misunderstanding. It’s kind of like the tension I feel between having total contempt for how Saudi Arabia treats women and religious freedom and my tolerance for different cultures having different laws and beliefs. Maybe your typical Saudi understands what Huckabee was trying to say, but I certainly don’t. I can hardly believe that I share the same country with the man.
As best as I can tell, he was saying that Republicans have enough respect for women to believe that they can remain chaste until marriage, as they should. Maybe ObamaCare should cover the expense of burkas. Would Huckabee support that?
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 25, 2014
“Why The Religious Right Is Losing The War On Christmas”: The Season Is Not Owned By One Religion, But Rather Everyone
The annual “war on Christmas” took an unexpected twist this holiday season, when the UK-based website the Freethinker published the ironic headline “First known casualty in America’s 2013 ‘War on Xmas’ turns out to be a Salvation Army member“.
A woman attacked a bell ringer in Phoenix, Arizona because she was angry at being wished a “Happy Holidays” instead of honoring Jesus’ birth by saying “Merry Christmas”.
In another act of Christmas violence, unidentified arsonists tried to torch one of the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s billboards that proclaimed “Keep Saturn in Saturnalia” – a reference to an ancient celebration of the Roman god of agriculture.
The Gospel According to Fox News preaches a tale of Christian persecution running rampant through America. While others around the world face imprisonment or even execution for their religious beliefs, Christians in the states suffer the indignity of facing a holiday season sans baby Jesus Christ’s omnipresence in the public square.
Instead of sharing parables of the Beatitudes in practice, Fox’s Meghan Kelly’s chose to push forth the blatantly racist proposition that Jesus and Santa are white; the line between Fox News and the Daily Show’s parodies have now become almost indistinguishable.
Kelly added to her extensive mythmaking repertoire by claiming that the American Humanist Association (AHA) is denying toys to poor children. Roy Speckhardt, executive director of AHA, recounts his televised appearance with Kelly where he tried to discuss how Samaritan Purse’s Operation Christmas Child tries to use public schools as a workforce for their presents for conversions program. He noted:
It’s hard to take seriously a program that expects poor kids to convert just because they receive a Christmas present and a pamphlet about Jesus. If only it were so easy to convert, and de-convert, kids would be getting presents from all sorts of groups.
Fred Edwords, the national director of United Coalition of Reason offered this perspective on the history of the war between evangelical Christians and atheists:
The religious right started this whole “war on Christmas” myth when a few years back they launched their organized attack against calling the trees erected at the capitol and White House “Holiday Trees”. They also boycotted major businesses that said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. As a result, their pressure effected some change, and they gloated on their success. But then humanist and atheist groups decided to launch awareness campaigns during the winter holiday season, reaching out to those who may have felt excluded by all of this nonsense. And the religious right went ballistic. After awhile, however, these campaigns got predictable and became less effective. So fewer of them were launched. But the religious right was still there – never having needed atheists to prompt them in the first place. And this year is making that reality abundantly clear.
Crossing the front lines to the atheist base, one finds a spirit of fun and playfulness seems to have replaced the angry atheist persona of yesteryear. For example, instead of protesting the presence of a nativity scene in the Florida State capitol, an atheist chose to erect a Festivus Pole made from beer cans.
This pole was designed to commemorate the infamous holiday popularized by the television show Seinfeld joins other displays in the rotunda including a nativity scene, posters from atheists, and a crudely-made Flying Spaghetti Monster. (A petition to include a similar satanic display was denied.)
According to David Silverman, president, American Atheists, this shift from activism to pluralistic accommodation “sends the clear message that the season is not owned by one religion, but rather everyone, and reinforces the idea that Christianity is one religion of many. While this is correct, ethical, and American, it’s a clear defeat for those who prefer the old days of inequality.”
A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Group points to a shifting toward such pluralism, with close to half of Americans (49%) surveyed agreeing that stores and businesses should greet their customers with “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings” instead of “merry Christmas”, out of respect for people of different faiths. This number is up from 44% when they conducted this survey in 2010.
Michael Dorian, co-director of the documentary Refusing My Religion notes, “many now understand that most people – whether believers or nonbelievers – can appreciate the holidays and just want to celebrate the season by socializing with friends and family, and that can be easily achieved with or without the trappings of religion”.
As the number of Americans who understand what it means to live in an increasing pluralistic country continues to grow, those faithful to the Fox News brand of Christianity – and its need to be ever dominant and combative around the holidays – will continue to look ever more foolish and out of touch.
By: Becky Garrison, The Guardian, Published in Business Insider, December 24, 2013
“The Power Of Christmas”: Christian Influence Is Not Expressed In The Grasping Struggle For Legal Rights Or Political Standing
’Tis the season for crèche display controversies and public-school decoration debates and First Amendment argumentation, when all the ideologues get a little extra outrage or victimization in their stockings. The holiday is observed across the nation with injunctions and festive debates on cable television. Little children wait in line at the mall to have their picture taken with Bill O’Reilly or the Rev. Barry Lynn. (That last part, to my knowledge, is not true, but it should be.)
This year’s celebration is all the more poignant in the light of a fallen reality-television star who manufactures duck calls and culture war imbroglios. Some liberals, it turns out, can act with the zeal of theocrats. And some Christians, it seems, hold a faith that more closely resembles the prejudices of Southern, rural culture than the teachings of Christ. (See the contrast — the vast, cosmic contrast — between the patriarch of “Duck Dynasty” and the current Bishop of Rome.)
These debates persist because there are often no easy or final answers. They are conducted on a slippery slope. Some forms of speech are rightly stigmatized. But tolerance is the virtue of permitting room for speech we think is wrong. Some public expressions of religion are inconsistent with pluralism. But true pluralism is a welcoming attitude toward all faiths, not the imposition of a rigid secularization — itself the victory of one, dogmatic faith.
Ultimately all of these disputes resolve into an argument about power: Who has the ability to define and enforce the boundaries of the acceptable? In America, thank God, this is generally a legal and social disagreement. In other places, advocates evangelize with the gun or gallows.
Particularly in this season, what is most conspicuous about these disputes is their disconnection from the actual content of Christmas, which involves an alternative definition of power.
It is easy to downplay or domesticate the Christmas story. The whole thing smacks of squalor and desperation rather than romance — the teen mother, the last-choice accommodations, the company of livestock. Whether the birth was accompanied by angel choirs or not, it was certainly attended by buzzing flies.
If you ascribe eternal significance to these events, they are theologically and socially subversive. Rather than being a timeless Other, God somehow assumed the constraints of poverty and mortality. He was dependent on human care and vulnerable to human violence. The manger implied the beams and the nails. To many in the Roman world — and to many since — this seemed absurd, even blasphemous. Through eyes of faith, it appears differently. Novelist and minister Frederick Buechner sees the “ludicrous depths of self-humiliation [God] will descend in his wild pursuit of mankind.”
In the story, politics plays a marginal but horrifying role. King Herod perceived a vague threat to his power and responded with systematic infanticide.
But the incarnation has unavoidable social implications. If the deity was born as an outcast, it is impossible to view or treat outcasts in quite the same way. A God who fled as a refugee, preferred the company of fishermen and died as an accused criminal will influence our disposition toward refugees, the poor and those in prison. He is, said Dorothy Day, “disguised under every type of humanity that treads the earth.”
This birth and life had an entirely unpredictable historical outcome. The proud, well-armed empire that judicially murdered Jesus of Nazareth exists only as a series of archaeological digs. The man who was born in obscurity and died an apparent failure is viewed as a guide and friend by more than 2 billion people. Our culture — its history, laws and art — is unimaginable without his influence.
Which brings us back to the meaning of power. It is unavoidable for citizens to argue over the definition and limits of religious liberty. But Christian influence is not expressed in the grasping struggle for legal rights or political standing. It is found in demonstrating the radical values of the incarnation: Identifying with the vulnerable and dependent. Living for others. Trusting that hope, in the end, is more powerful than cunning or coercion. The author of this creed sought a different victory than politics brings — the kind that ends all selfish victories.
Or so the story goes. “The night deepens and grows still,” says Buechner, “and maybe the only sound is the birth cry, the little agony of new life coming alive, or maybe there is also the sound of legions of unseen voices raised in joy.”
By: Michael Gerson, Opinion Writer, December 23, 2013
“Santa Sure Is A Colorful Guy”: Pondering The Wisdom Of An Unexpressed Thought
Many of us who grew up believing in Santa Claus can recall that moment when we started having our doubts.
If we were lucky, we had a special someone in our lives willing to quash the ugly rumors for a little bit longer.
That was my mother. She had her reasons. She was only 8 when her parents divorced and handed her off to grandparents, who raised her. She faced hard realities at a young age. After she became a mother, she saw it as her maternal mission to wring out every bit of life’s magic for her four children.
My mother had a gift for the alternative narrative. This came in handy when, at age 7, it dawned on me that Santa was a little too ubiquitous in Ashtabula, Ohio.
How could Santa be at Hills Department Store, J.C. Penney and Kmart on the same day? That was what I wanted to know.
My mother laid out the facts with the expertise of someone who’d just had that very conversation with Santa’s missus.
I was right, she said, to suspect that Santa could not be everywhere. The brilliant Mrs. Claus — in Mom’s stories, the wife was the genius in every marriage — came up with the idea to hire some of the elves to fill in for him. They had photographic memories, Mom further explained, so they were able to pass along to Santa the wishes of every single child who sat on their laps.
Whew. She was good.
I met my first black Santa at our fourth-grade Christmas party, in 1966. He looked suspiciously like my classmate’s father, which I duly noted to the clueless child, in front of my mother. The little girl burst into tears, and I was grounded for a week, which gave me plenty of time to ponder the wisdom of an unexpressed thought.
In the spirit of Christmas, I want to thank Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly for stirring up that memory after she insisted last week on her show that Santa is white, and so was Jesus.
Well, let’s talk about Jesus. He was a Jew who lived 2,000 years ago in the Middle East. The odds that he was white are about as good as my chance of waking up as a natural blonde tomorrow.
Some have defended her, saying this was the version of Jesus she knew as a child. I get that, but we’re living in the grownup world now. The portrait in our living room made Jesus look like a blue-eyed white guy with an enviable tan, but I don’t recall ever thinking about his race. I was far more obsessed with his demeanor.
Why, I asked my mother, did Jesus never smile?
She had no patience for this line of questioning.
“He has a lot on his mind,” she’d snap. She wasn’t big on glum Jesus, either; I just knew it. Her Jesus was a happy warrior for justice.
Back to Santa. Kelly’s glib assertion that Santa is white — not coincidentally, white just like Kelly — triggered the usual round of derision and ridicule, mostly from liberals. I winced as some of them insisted on national television during the day and at dinnertime that Santa Claus does not exist.
“Little ears, little ears!” I yelled to nobody who was listening. Why must we liberals be more factual than necessary?
Kelly deserved criticism. She is a highly educated white woman who exhibited an astonishing lack of awareness for how children of color yearn to see themselves in their heroes, fabled or otherwise.
That is why she reminded me of my far less educated mother. Mom grew up in a rural patch of white America and then spent her entire adult life in a small but diverse town full of people she might never have met had she stayed on the farm.
These encounters chipped away at her youthful biases. By the time I had blown it with Santa’s daughter at that fourth-grade Christmas party, my mother saw the world as far more complex than she had been raised to believe.
Little girls imprisoned in their own homes for bad behavior have plenty of time for reflection. Still stinging from my mother’s reprimand, I asked whether she thought Santa could be black.
I don’t remember her exact words, but I still recall her message: Santa is magical, and so he can be whoever we want him to be.
I am grateful for a mother who didn’t care which Santa we saw landing on rooftops. She just wanted her children to feel the magic for as long as we could.
I still believe in Santa Claus.
For my grandsons, you bet I do.
By: Connie Schultz, The National Memo, December 19, 2013
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