Society

Just Disagree

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

In these days of heated disagreements online between Facebook friends and distance foes often conversations either end with so much digital huffing and puffing, the rare point of cognitive confluence, and often with the saccharine and amicable appeal to “agree to disagree.”

This appeal comes from several motivations, at least some of which are likely related. One is to end the conversation where it is regardless of any expected outcome. The person offering this alternative might just be too tired or too bored to continue. That is all well and good. With attenuated attention spans and over-committed lives, persisting in online conversations heading nowhere with a stranger feels rarely worth the time and effort.

Another motivation is to end the conversation, but on amicable terms. Each response is a new brick of anxieties placed in a growing wall of alienation from the person with whom you are engaged. To avoid the risk of severing ties you find the one thing that you can agree upon and that is the obvious observation of disagreement itself.

These two competing reasons of relative exhaustion or relational disconnection seem reasonable enough to end a conversation at least on good terms before it dissolves into inevitable blocking. But there is another reason why this happens that is perhaps no less reasonable, but far more damaging.

By saying that you should “agree to disagree” you are saying not only that you wish to end the conversation for the reasons listed above in the short term, but to end it permanently. It is at once an admission that you are unwilling to entertain the possibility that your interlocutor’s position might be more correct than your beliefs are willing to give and a removal of at least one thread of conversation from the relationship you have with the person on the other side. It is a rather weak but clever power move that sets the terms for the relationship and the conversation moving forward.

Rather than remove the agency of the people with whom we disagree by dismissing the conversation altogether, we should be more willing to allow disagreements to exist in the context of our human relationships. It is a way of reaffirming each other’s power to acknowledge another person who has ideas and at least a modicum of competence to communicate those ideas as well as to reaffirm one’s own status as one empowered to raise issues that may be controversial to those who disagree with one’s position.

Simple disagreement is also a path to greater vulnerability with each other. By affirming the disagreement with no qualifications, we are inviting the conversation to continue with the possibility that the positions we hold so dearly will be proven to be wrong at least in part. Simple disagreement invites the possibility of change where dissolving into a false agreement demands resolution where in reality there is none forthcoming.

In an effort to construct conversation that does not demand false resolutions of civility or concede an end of dialogue but rather is brave enough to admit each other’s vulnerability, and demands the possibility of change even if in the distant future, let us simply disagree with one another and allow the conversation to persist.

Don’t you agree?

We Need to Teach Our White Kids about White Supremacy

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We do not accept Jews, because they reject Christ, and through machinations of their International Banking Cartel, are at the root center of what we call “communism” today.

We do not accept Papists, because they bow to a Roman dictator, in direct violation of the First Commandment and the true American Spirit of Responsible, Individual, Liberty.

We do not accept Turks, Mongols, Tarters, Orientals, Negroes, nor any other person whose native background of culture is foreign to the Anglo-Saxon system of government by responsible FREE, Individual citizens.

If you are a Christian, American Anglo-Saxon who can understand the simple truth of this Philosophy, you belong in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Get your Bible out and pray!

1964 Recruiting leaflet for the Ku Klux Klan

I can remember learning about the plight of black Americans as told by the approved histories written by well-meaning white people. Back in junior high we learned how bad slavery was, that black Americans were forced to use separate (but equal) public facilities, and could not vote after the terms of their theft and purchase were lifted. I remember Rosa Parks on the bus and how horribly she was treated for simply sitting down after a hard day of work. Then came Martin Luther King, Jr. and “I Have a Dream” which was quickly followed by laws written by white people to right the wrongs of their parents who had created and enforced Jim Crow laws and whose grandparents may have even owned a slave or two. The message was pretty clear: white people treated black people badly, but they fixed it! Good white people joined forces with good black people and solved racism. Malcolm X was militant, the Black Panthers were terrorists, and MLK was a “good” black guy who loved Jesus and nonviolence. We’d remember this sanitized history every winter for Black History Month, feel content about fixing the problem, and move forward with our lives as the good guys. In the midst of this self-congratulatory posture we never detected the virus of white supremacy that was still very much alive in our systems.

We would have conversations wondering why there was no White History Month and would question the fairness of policies like “affirmative action.” We had just learned that racism was one race unfairly favoring itself over another race and that our white parents had fixed the racist policies of their parents, so why are black people allowed to unfairly favor their race? To thousands of “well-meaning” and “nice” suburban white kids in the 80s, from what we had just learned from our nice white teachers reading from texts written by nice white scholars, it seemed that angry black people were re-litigating a problem other nice white people fixed and were now being racist themselves. We saw emerge a new fascination with Malcolm X, a romanticization of Africa, and a new holiday called Kwanzaa. None of this made sense with what we had just been taught. Racism was fixed and we were all supposed to be homogeneous and nice Americans. It seemed that racism was being brought back not by white people, but ironically by black people. As Morgan Freeman would later say in a comment that got plenty of traction in white supremacist circles, “Stop talking about it.” Why do we have to relive something that no longer exists? The nice white people heard MLK’s dream and made it happen!

In junior high school, I learned the mechanisms of white supremacy as an aspiring friend of white power skinhead ideology. I was a scared, lonely kid from a dysfunctional home and desperately in need of purpose and meaning. Friends were hard to come by as introverted and different I felt. I found a small group of fellow misfits who listened to heavy music and rooted their identity in the idea that white America fixed racism, built a great society, and the genetically inferior black people, immigrants, and Jews were here to take that from us. My soundtrack became the words of Skrewdriver singing “White power for Britain, before it gets too late” and S.O.D. singing “Speak English or Die.” The natural consequences for failing to assimilate into our nice, white nation were permanent separation. “Find a new place to live” was the mantra. If you can’t assimilate, feel free to carve out a little place of your own to be savages who can’t accept this white, “Judeo-Christian” nation. The USA was meant to be a white, ethno state and others were welcome here as long as they submitted to white authority. The black cities were violent hellscapes for the same reason. They needed to fix their problems and it was time to stop asking white people to bail them out. Maybe Plessy v. Ferguson was right all along. Those black people and savage immigrants who fail to assimilate and submit to civilized, nice white people should find a place to live apart from us.

As a kid in search of identity and meaning I had truly found a place I could live. I learned the intimate and violent mechanisms of white supremacy not in a classroom, but from peers who had caught the disease and were sharing it like junkies with a needle. People and races were categorized by genetics and intelligence. Evolution seemed to show that the darker the skin, the more savage the creature. There were a few, rare exceptions of black people who sounded “white” and there was a rational separation between a black person and a “n***er” rooted in how “white” that person seemed to speak and behave. Like any animal, they could be tamed. Those that were tamed, civilized, and fully assimilated to the white way of life should be grateful that they were a genetic anomaly which escaped the clutches of savagery. Inside this white supremacist bubble, black people only contributed to society what white people had given them and Hitler had the right idea about cleansing the bloodlines even if he was a little crazy in his audacity to commit genocide. I would later come to understand that this was a complex system of purity that separated matter into distinct categories and there was a rationale for disposing of that material which was dirty and infected. Whiteness was the only cure and assimilation through submission was the delivery mechanism.

In the late 1980s when black people through their music and art told a counter-narrative that the “Dream” had been deferred and white America had become complacent if not violently oppressive, it sounded like militants who were causing the problem. Insistent in reclaiming their African ethnicity, it felt like they didn’t appreciate what good white people had done for them and they now wanted to unfairly tip the beautifully balanced scales in their favor. What they called injustice was the real inequality. Maybe it was time for all the white people who at this point had all fixed slavery and racism to reassert their niceness by reminding black people racism was over. They shouldn’t mess it up by asserting un-American, un-Christian ideas. After all, “we” begrudgingly gave them an entire month to celebrate nonviolence and their marches.

It’s easy to see how the narrative of civil rights as it was taught became a carrier of white supremacy. We of the white suburbs never learned its mechanisms and philosophies further than a few simple ideas: Plessy v. Ferguson wasn’t all that great, slavery was really bad, something about the KKK and lynch mobs, and to be grateful all of this stuff had been eradicated from our now unified and content nation. White Generation X grew up with these beliefs and had a childhood shaped by them. White kids became “nice” adults who didn’t recognize white supremacy because they weren’t aware of what it was so they got infected by it in subtle ways. Our schools didn’t vaccinate them out of fear that teaching the subtle mechanisms of white supremacy would somehow transmit the virus. Like any vaccine, you need a little bit of the virus so the body can learn to defend itself against infection. Instead our schools, armed with the history that nice white people ended racism towards nice black people, transmitted the disease itself.

Those nice white kids became carriers of the virus and just needed the right environment to activate it. They needed a tiny stimulus to get these ideas to replicate and spread. Without understanding its symptoms, white kids became white adults who carried and spread the virus to their family, friends, and their own kids. White kids today learn that same history of nice white people and other nice people who live in suburbs and rural places and can’t understand why cities are so violent and so black.

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Sally Struthers for Christian Children’s Fund

A cornerstone of white supremacy is a belief that the genetic composition of white people is fundamentally superior. Those genes made them smarter and more civilized. I grew up with that philosophy. When Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder talked about the superiority of the black athlete, it triggered the idea that their physical prowess is why they were such capable slaves. There was something alluring and romantic in white supremacy about the idea that slavery became a means to rescue black people from their unintelligently designed African governments that could only be characterized as savage. Live Aid and USA for Africa were sufficient evidence to see how horrible that place was. Even Little Steven’s protest of Sun City seemed to reflect the horrors of these savages. Apartheid was the symptom of an untamed continent that just needed more nice, civilized white people of superior, European genes who could fix the problems like they did in America. Africa was an untamed land of lions, hyenas, and genetically-deficient people who weren’t smart enough to fix their own problems. The idea that white America and white Europe would have to fix that too, even at the expense of their own wealth, created a narrative of resentment and hostility. But white kids didn’t understand that this same narrative was the scaffolding of white supremacy because they never learned it. It was up to them to tame the wild world they saw on their televisions that beamed images of poor, emaciated, and bloated Ethiopian kids and a tearful Sally Struthers begging for white money to feed them. “Happy birthday,” she said. White suburban kids made jokes about it. It was funny how and sad how African kids didn’t have supermarkets and didn’t have bread or a nice President like Mr. Reagan. Being poor and black was stupid and white America shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Eventually I literally found Jesus and a new group identity in the church leaving behind the strange white fantasies as juvenile relics. I had thought it was just a bunch of dumb kids doing dumb things and seeking out dumb beliefs in a thwarted effort to look cool to peers. That was true, at least for me. The Rodney King verdict, the words from Public Enemy, and the music of Fishbone ended any latent racism that may have lingered in my brain. I joined a gospel choir in college and got intimate with the black church. I invested myself over the following years to listening to and spending time with the people I had at one time absurdly believed to be inferior in every way except for what Jimmy the Greek told me. I was making amends. Those racist ideas seemed to be anachronistic yearnings of an immature and insecure kid that had since been relegated to racist and homophobic messages trapped in men’s bathroom stalls. I would see swastikas and racist epithets scratched above toilet paper dispensers in gas stations as messages some teenaged white boy was sending me from my past hidden behind a curtain of anonymity.

In 2008, when I saw an older white man holding up a Curious George monkey he called “Little Hussein” at a rally for Sarah Palin, I was disgusted. The monkey was there to see “real Americans” as he put it. In one instant, those anonymous messages from bathroom stalls were activated on a public platform that would only get amplified throughout the Obama years finding an apex in Trump. From the language of the “forgotten” people of America, to the “very fine people” who must be among white supremacist Charlottesville protesters, to Steve King’s (Rep, I) questioning of the contributions others have made to the world outside of “Western” people, to the idea that immigrants coming from Mexico are riddled with disease, all are part of a complex of white supremacist language its advocates have used for decades, often in quiet forums no one knew existed or cared about until now. The very notion of a giant wall to keep people out is a staple of the so-called white “ethnonationalist” state. These ideas and the people who spread them have all been given permission to be out in the open like an airborne disease.

Like viruses we thought were long gone until the anti-vax movement gained momentum, this philosophy has been activated as a failure of our education system and of “nice” white people everywhere. It’s not like “just a little bit of smallpox” won’t hurt anyone. Of course it would. It is the same when we repeat racist language and pass it off as meaningless or irrelevant. Couched in the persistent lie that racism was solved, this might make sense. But that narrative is a lie. It’s toxic, dangerous, and has infected our public discourse and behavior to its worst degree perhaps since the 1960’s. Alongside teaching civil rights, we avoid teaching white supremacy, what it is, what it looks like, and how to inoculate ourselves against its spread. Until white people recognize the hot zone of white supremacy in their ranks and teach its features to their children, it will continue to infect the world. Our kids need to be exposed to white supremacy just enough that they can build their own antibodies and join the fight against it. This is how we can help stop its spread.

Caught Between Should and Am: Fixing My Writing Problem

/ Andrew Tatusko / 3 Comments

shoes beside word lux

Running and light

Ever since I finished my dissertation, almost 5 years ago, I have been caught in a weird head space where I haven’t figured out my identity as an academic, a professional, and even as a person. I’ve had a few starts on blogging that usually stops after a couple of months. I get distracted by something else and totally lose interest. Why?

At first I thought it had to do with marathon training. Doing this is so time consuming and tiring that I would usually post about starting the process and then do nothing until the result. The fiction that I convinced myself was true is that I can’t write and train at the same time. If I am going to perform at my job, maintain my relationships, and be mentally healthy, I can either run, or write. I have told myself this even though I knew it was total bullshit. Great writers all have parallel obsessive habits from drinking and smoking to running. Telling myself lies to avoid doing something is a deep-seated character flaw. I’ve learned much about how this mechanism works, but this time it had me caught. The real question is not why I stopped writing, but what I was avoiding.

It was last night when I was catching up on Supergirl that a little sisterly advice hit me that freshly out of the closet Alex Danvers gave her sister Kara (Supergirl):

Look… sometimes, you know, in our life, when one part is really confusing, we will pour way more attention than necessary into another.

I started running for very good reasons that still hold. It was to improve mental and physical health. It is still the single best tool I have in my toolkit to maintain mental and physical health and stability and I can’t ever see myself stopping. However, I have poured a lot into it. Challenges are really effective to have in front of you to stay motivated. But at what point do you become obsessed with it to the point that you are avoiding something else? I went from at most running one marathon a year, and last year that was enough. This year I am not only running two marathons, but running 2017 miles which is about 700 more than the previous year, and I want to train to get a Boston Qualifying time which would shave about 5% off of my finishing time this past May. Have I crossed the tipping point where running has gone from healthy activity to obsession I am using to avoid something? I might be there.

I have struggled with my identity as an academic and as a professional since finishing my dissertation in 2013. For a very long time, my religious identity as a person of faith was my central obsession academically, emotionally, and socially. At the time I gave that up, a story I have not yet fully told, running filled the void. I traded one preoccupation with another. But my life as an academic sat hollow. If faith is no longer what I want to be doing, what should I be doing?

I have this theory that confidence in what we do is not something we are born with, but something we learn over time. As we become more competent in something we become more confident in our abilities and that alone builds our desire and drive to do it more. So, if I could just find out what I should be doing and become more competent in it, then I would resolve my confusion.

Well, it didn’t work. The experiment failed because my fundamentals beliefs were wrong. I believed I needed to become competent in what I believed others wanted to read. I focused on what others might find helpful like focusing on life hacks and self-help that I think works. How about something in my professional field that others find interesting? What about lessons I have learned in life that others might find useful? After a few tries, I got bored and stopped. None of that was very fulfilling. That material is all out there written by people who are singularly passionate about it. I am not one of those people. The entire theory of becoming competent got derailed by the one thing that all of these ideas has in common: doing what I think I should do based on what I believe others want. It’s like all that advice from successful writers went right through my head – do what inspires you, not what you think will inspire others.

If I should’t do what I believe I should do, what is it that inspires me or consistently interests me? That’s the real question. My answer has been that no one is interested in any of the stuff that interests me, so who cares? Another lie. Keep running. Today I’d rather run on truth than the bullshit I tell myself. Walking the dog last night, after that little moment from a cheesy TV show that struck me, I found an answer. The question was how these things were related. And they absolutely are.

My academic interests have always been first, in how to teach the whole human subject based on an understanding that it is the relationship between teacher and student that is the most revolutionary and fundamental aspect of human learning and progress. The second is related to it. My dissertation focused on secularization and higher education which is tied to patterns of belief in American society, the policies that both respond to and shape those patterns, and how historians tell that story. Both of these are looking at the dynamic relationship between faith, belief, and knowledge in society and in the student.

My professional interests are about how we can help college and university teachers be better teachers. What habits, programs, and behaviors can we improve as teachers to help students learn more effectively? Right now this is about designing a program of teacher formation through critical reflection to find areas of improvement and to experiment with different online classroom behaviors to help students learn more effectively.

My personal interests have to do with the connection between physical and mental health and supporting pragmatic behaviors that help improve health with scientific evidence. I have many friends who have been in long term recovery from addiction who have thrown themselves into physical activity as an integral part of how they manage their sobriety. I know of runners and other athletes who have traded their obsession for drugs, sex, and body dysmorphia for clean living, even without the aid of prescription drugs.

How are these tied together? Anyone can look at these three areas and find things in common: human progress, the nature of belief, evidence-based living, etc. But those aren’t what hit me as interesting. Instead, it’s this idea:

I am fundamentally interested in how groups of people form relationships that support and cultivate healthy patterns of belief, knowing, and action, and in relationships and ideas that do exactly the opposite.

So… that’s what really interests me and the three ways I look at it. With that, it’s time to stop thinking about what I should write for an imagined group of others out there, and just do what I find interesting. Someone out there has to be interested in this stuff too, right?

Protesting Trump’s Back Door to White Power

/ Andrew Tatusko / 1 Comment

racistMatthewHeimbach

Racist Matthew Heimbach shoves a black woman.

A recent video shows what we now know are members of a white supremacist “white nationalist” group called the Traditionalist Workers Party physically shoving a young African American protester. They are not simply shoving her out of the arena, they are seen giving her extra shots even as others in the mob audience join in. That should evoke our collective ire and disgust. When any man lays his hands on a woman, we should take notice and interrogate what is happening. When it is white men laying hands on a black woman, we need to look closer and demand answers. When it is white supremacists shoving a young black woman, we should demand justice without question. There is no space in a civil society to accept this kind of behavior or to offer any platform in which such beliefs are legitimate.

But this is not how all of the many incidents of people being escorted out of Trump rallies have worked. While some cases looked like this, it is not actually what was happening. The moment Donald Trump got a Secret Service detail as a candidate, his role within our population changed. Where he goes becomes federally restricted ground and that means different rules apply.

Some of the footage of protestors being escorted out is not about about race, but about what happens on “federal restricted buildings or grounds.” According to the H.R. 347, disrupting an event like this can carry fines and/or jail time of up to 10 years. This was a rewrite of a 1971 trespass law in order to give Secret Service a little more freedom to determine what constitutes a trespass. There are a few criteria for those who can be penalized under the law. For example, it is one who:

knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions;

Certainly, we can argue how effective this law is and how well these trespass laws are applied. This includes people who were allowed to protest Barack Obama, the President of the United States, while brandishing weapons. Nonetheless, it means that what we see in a 15 second clip of someone being escorted out of a Trump event by an official, especially the Secret Service, should be measured by what authorities are doing when they are escorting people out of the room. People have been arrested for protesting in these very conditions for decades. Not everyone has an unfettered right to any protected speech at a Trump event, or a Clinton event, or a Sanders event. This is the same when the President is in a designated area or other officials who are federally protected.

I am far less concerned about what Trump has to say on the stage. He is a showman telling people what he believes they want to hear. He says these things to get media coverage, to stay fresh in the news cycle he has mastered over the years, and to convert that spin into votes. His business acumen is up for debate, but his marketing talent is second to none. He is a master of that craft.

My concern is that he does not care who he is fueling with his rhetoric. At this point his failure to immediately disavow any legitimacy towards the support of KKK or David Duke and the significant presence and support he has gathered from the underbelly of American society in its white supremacist and neo-fascist organizations is disturbing. He knows that those votes matter to his campaign. He speaks to angry white men who fear that the minorities and the people of color will steal their property and their power for which there is a significant overlap with white supremacist organizations. Their sole purpose is to reclaim absolute power for the white race and reestablish white power to rule the USA as it did effectively up until 1964. Trump’s protectionism and isolationism support those goals like no other candidate does and as no other candidate has for a long time. When Trump declares “Make America Great Again” they are hearing “Make America White Again.” To give him power gives them power and that is the most dangerous open door to terrorism that might face us if he is in the Oval Office.

Sickness and the School

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I set out to write a post every day this year. Then I got a nasty flu bug. For a couple of weeks I have been foggy, tired, and unwilling to probe my mind for an idea worth writing about. That’s because whatever resources I might normally use to think and write have been sucked up by resting and exhaustion. As a result, I’ve missed a few weeks already.

If there is one theme on my mind these days it is what it looks like if I understand the primary function of my body and brain as survival. How I learn, love, and relate to others is rooted in my primary instinct to survive in this world. If sickness does anything, it sends one’s focus inward. I become less observant and less aware of the things around me. This is partially out of a conscious choice. I need to do things like rest to get my body well. But I also think it is more of an automatic defense mechanism that sets in motion. When I’m sick, I’m less aware of the world outside of my body.

The self as an idea our brains create as part of the most complex set of mechanisms that work for the survival of an animal species becomes most clear when the human system is in danger. Whether it’s a flu, a home invader, losing a job, or breaking up with a lover, the shift of focus inward is both automatic and sudden. Maslow understood this in his famous hierarchy of needs.

If we are considering learning, until we meet the basic survival needs of a student, we cannot expect much in the way of mastery of much of anything. The same goes for the general health and progress of a society. We cannot expect hungry and insecure people to make much progress because all of their resources are being used to see that they will simply stay alive. If we are to make progress as a society, we must feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and heal the sick. To expect more out of people such as these is to demand that they go against their nature which is an affordance the privileged never have to imagine in their lives.

Religion Needs the Poor

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A new study by the Pew Research Center predicts that the global percentage of those who are religiously unaffiliated will decline in the next coming decades. It is a prediction that seems on face value to go against trends of an increase in those who are ostensibly less religious than in previous decades – especially in Western nations.

One theory is that existential security is inversely proportional to religious commitment. Put simply, “existential security” is the level at which I feel my life is at risk. It’s a good measure of happiness as well.

So if I live in a society where healthcare is universal, for example, and quality of life is stronger and more secure, my religious commitment will likely decline. I will also have more access to birth control and engage in less risky behaviors. These are the pockets where religion has less a hold on the community. When we take away those social securities, behaviors are more risky, people are less healthy, poorer, and more desperate. Existential crises are petri dishes for religious experimentation, for religion to be a social carrier, and the psychological desire or assumed need for a God or salvation. A less economically advantaged nation will naturally have a higher probability of existential insecurity.

(S)ocial vulnerability and lack of human development drive both religiosity and population growth. This means that the total number of religious people continues to expand around the globe, even while secularization is also taking place in the more affluent nations (Norris & Inglehart, 2006, p. 64).

The happiest nations are by far not the most religious. These trends are deep in the sociology of religion literature. However, one variable to bear in mind is the way that different religions carry societies. In previous centuries, Christianity carried both wealth and social mobility in the West. It is not an effective carrier in these societies as it once was. Islam and its network of banks and other social mechanisms designed to institute and maintain existential security are creating different patterns of religious behavior and may actually aid in its expansion.

Some social theorists have suggested that as countries develop economically, more of their residents will move away from religious affiliation, as has been seen in Europe. But there is little evidence of such a phenomenon in Muslim-majority countries. Moreover, in Hindu-majority India, religious affiliation is still nearly universal despite rapid economic and social change.

It will be interesting to see if Islam follows a similar pattern. As it carries people into a more existentially secure state of mind, will it continue to have the same sway over belief?

Even with this variable accounted for, the relationship between having one’s life at risk and becoming more religious seems to be continually supported in what we are finding out about patterns in religion worldwide.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, indeed.

It’s About Personhood Not Sexuality, Indiana

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The fundamental problem behind the “religious freedom” laws of Indiana and Arkansas isn’t sex. The problem is that non-heteronormative people are simply not full persons. They are not given the same rights and are not afforded the same protections as other classes of human beings under the law.

The root is buried deep in the theologically informed notion that non-heteronormative people are defective. They are impure and unclean. Allowing something that is unclean or impure in your presence is something that puts your own purity in danger. This is old school Jewish purity law which the Christian right just loves to cite ad nauseum (and likely incorrectly). As being gay is fundamentally a defect in what constitutes a full human being, it is not in the state’s interest to protect that part of the person. And so, this “religious freedom” law is not actually discrimination, but civil rights for those persons who do not accept any behaviors that are “defective.”

This reasoning includes a specific reading of the bible that colors what “America” means and who its citizens are. America has rather high, although often arbitrary purity codes about what makes someone a full person.

This is where the state needs to step in and protect all classes of citizens. Right now the state has no compelling interest in any non-heteronormative person. None. Equality in marriage fixes a symptom but not does not get at the root of the problem: the religious force of these laws from the religious mission of these lawmakers is telling them that a homosexual is not a full person. It is a religious mission as such a discriminating set of criteria of what makes someone a full person otherwise would not fall under the umbrella of a specific kind of religious protection.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not give any direct help to a non-heteronormative person, “Title VII doesn’t forbid discrimination or harassment because of sexual orientation.” It explicitly protects religious affiliation and belief. The current action is to protect a group that is already a protected class under federal law making it even easier to discriminate against a non-protected group under that same law. That sounds really messed up.

Indiana is now trying to clarify the law by saying that the law is not discriminatory. However the fundamental nature of the law is to protect people in their discriminatory behaviors if those behaviors are motivated by religious need. It is a law that opens the door to other sorts of religiously based discrimination just as long as the state does not have a compelling interest in those that the law discriminates against. It will devolve into absurd proportions and it should. When lawmakers are this near-nearsighted, the laws need to be tested by those who carefully walk on its very edge so we can all see where it goes. Case-in-point: The First Church of Cannabis, Inc.

The church’s founder Bill Levin said he filed paperwork in direct response to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Mike Pence last Thursday. Secretary of State Connie Lawson approved the church as a religious corporation with the stated intent “to start a church based on love and understanding with compassion for all.”

Where they will test the law is if they light up a joint or get baked in church. On face value, this would get them arrested under the ruling of Employment Division v. Smith where it was ruled smoking peyote for sacramental purposes was not protected and Smith was not entitled to his unemployment. Indiana has not legalized pot for medicinal or recreational purposes. So we’ll wait and see.

We need to question our values. Is it right, under any circumstances, or under any set of observable behaviors, to classify any human being as less than a full person and so not recognized as such by the state?We did this with women by denying them the vote as well as to African-Americans by denying them any basic civil rights which for a long time was legal because they had no personhood. We also do this with criminals.

Discrimination is the actual force of the law for non-heteronormative people, as a minority group of citizens that is not a protected legal class. The politicians can talk about “intent” all day long, but when they back-pedal on the actual effect of the law as written, they not only must think we are stupid; but they are lying to us.

Jets for Jesus! (Or How Not to Help the Poor)

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I have to hand it to Creflo Dollar. There are cases upon cases of preachers and televangelists who have manipulated desperate people by promised physical healing, debt relief, safety from the devil, and so on only to pocket the money for big houses and prostitutes. But Creflo Dollar is an honest preacher.

He just flat-out asked for $60 million for a new jet. Plus his name is Dollar.

He calls it “our” jet so that he can spread his gospel of wealth to unfortunate and desperate people all over the world only as a representative of Jesus and his own flock of the deluded. But I’ll give him that pronoun because his audacity is just awesome.

His current plane is 30 years old. Some flights were not as smooth as planned.

Dollar said that after those incidents, he “knew that it was time to begin to believe God for a new airplane.”

Hallelujah! The Lord spake thusly indeed. Glad you landed safely, minister Dollar.

I want to know when he hits that $60 million dollar mark. He could do a lot with that money instead of the G650. $60 million could:

That’s right, Creflo could literally transform huge segments of the population with that money in ways his preaching will never even come close to doing.

All he has to do is fly coach.

So rather than give your $300 to this guy, why not click on a link and give it to one of those groups. I’m sure they would be grateful for your contribution.

Then we can just let Floyd Mayweather keep the private jet.

Torture is Never Justified

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

Abu Ghraib interrogation

Abu Ghraib

I lived in a place close to “the pile” and saw hundreds of pictures posted all over of missing people. I was angry and wanted to bomb the entire Middle East. But that was raw emotion.

There comes a time when law is necessary even in war. How we handled alleged terrorists in this situation follows the legacy of Truman’s internment camps which are a stain on our country that we just don’t talk about enough. So the law:

The Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (GPW) 6 Article 17, paragraph 4 provides the general rule for interrogation of prisoners of war:

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

These were not isolated incidents as we once thought, just covertly handled. It was mismanaged and the information extracted is highly suspect as to its utility.

Unless it’s acceptable for our troops to short-chained to the floor in awkward positions, forced to mimic sexual acts, have food shoved up their asses, stuffed into hot boxes, and water-boarded, then we just can’t justify the same treatment of our prisoners.

More here: http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs5978/

Don’t Pray for Healing

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

Michael Brown - Dead on the street

“It is time to heal.”

“May we begin the healing process.”

“Prayers for healing.”

The white refrain for healing has begun. I have heard many times before.

I despise racism. I also want our society to heal from its persistent violence.

Racism is painful and appalling. There is no comfort or serenity in a cycle of violence that does not seem to be going away any time soon. Racial violence is just as it was in the 60’s and well before the Civil Rights Movement just as terrorism existed well before 9/11. These things have not gone away, they have only been pushed around. Ferguson in Missouri and ISIS in Iraq are two acute events in a chronic and persistent set of problems that will repeat.

They will repeat because we will work on only the symptoms long enough for the problem to “go away.” That’s what “healing” really means in the end. We want to have the illusion that racism, injustice, torture, inequality, abuse, and so on can be healed with the wave of a magic wand (or prayer). Saying “Prayers ascending” on a Facebook post, liking someone’s passive aggressive link to an article, retweeting someone else’s thoughts on an issue, and the white conscience is once again free to do as it would without hindrance.

The prayer for healing is too often the white cry of the annoyed and bothered.

This wound is too bloody and too gaping for healing yet. This body is way too riddled with bullets to be sewn up. Let’s continue to examine the dead body of Michael Brown and to pull the bullets out before we pray for healing. We need to be disturbed by it. This is grotesque stuff that messes up all boundaries and we need to be uncomfortable. I need to be uncomfortable.

This is still trauma and we haven’t the right to push Michael Brown’s body in the recovery room where we think someone else will deal with it. In recovery is the only place where we can start talking about healing. Who among us believes that we are there just yet?