Good News, Bad News

It should have been a moment of joy, not of calculation. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and however much I do for her, she does as much or more for me.

So OF COURSE when she asked me to marry her the other night, I said yes.

That’s the good news: Lynne and I are engaged. Despite her Huntington’s Disease (she is about to enter her twelfth year of living with it since diagnosis) and our being both women, marriage is a real option in her mind.

But maybe, for me, not so much.

Not that I hesitate in making her my life partner, calling her “wife” to my “wife,” “spouse” to my “spouse.” For years now, I’ve been fantasizing more about what she would wear to our wedding than what I would wear. Would she put aside her deep aversion to jewelry and wear a ring that tells the world she’s mine? It’s almost as if I quit wearing any of my own rings until the day she puts one on my hand.

But, alas, financially, I can only do a non-legal blessing ceremony. Not because we’re both women, but because at low incomes, marriage gets heavily penalized.

I don’t often encourage UUs to study information from Sam Brownback, the socially conservative governor of Kansas, but he’s got my back on this one.  That was in 2008; the update on Obamacare is just as bleak. Small wonder that David Blankenhorn, long a pro-family activist, has abandoned the fight against marriage for same-sex couples like Lynne and me and begun asking how to support any couple, straight or gay, who wants to be married and poor.

Even the laughably left-wing state of Vermont, which is perfectly happy to let us get married with full equal rights, would then turn around and cut off the pay I get for staying home to take care of Lynne. What started out as equal rights has suddenly made me aware there are equal penalties.

These same penalties apply in Social Security and numerous other low-income supports. The Earned Income Tax Credit, the single largest redistributor of income into working poor households, is one of the worst offenders. If you thought America had long since accepted life without The Donna Reed Show, you haven’t been paying attention to these injustices, not based on gender, but on class.

So yes, do congratulate us, and celebrate our good fortune in so many ways. But if you really want to do something useful, to make this about more than just two women in a struggling once-middle-class household, put these injustices up next to your concerns about DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and devote yourself to any couple, straight or gay, who wants to get married — and simply can’t afford to.

Where Did Catholic Nuns Come From?

Many of us are watching with high emotion as the Leadership Conference of Roman Catholic nuns does battle with the Roman Catholic bishops. I happened to run across a description of where Roman Catholic nuns came from while reading Norman Cantor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages, and it wasn’t what I thought. It’s probably not what anyone thought, so here we go…

I thought, probably not unlike many others, that individual women of privilege took up the veil in order to avoid marriages or other patriarchal impositions. I thought that other women — probably with personal gumption but probably without social connections pressing down on them — joined in. I saw it as personal decisions by individual women standing up against their culture.

Cantor agrees that Benedictine convents were founded by women of privilege trying to escape marriages they didn’t want. But here’s the trick: their culture was all in favor of it. Their culture was not Roman-heritage Italian, but Franco-Germanic, that is, the invaders who took over as the Roman Empire crumbled. Germanic society was organized on a more collegial and ad-hoc basis, with electoral offices even for kings, and smaller groups entering and leaving confederations according to what worked. In these societies, women had much more individual stature. Unlike the Roman imperial culture to their west, these Ostrogoths held to Arian rather than Constantinian Christianity.

The Ostrogoths made confederations with Romans along the imperial border, by which they increased their wealth through trade and a few new industrial skills. These relatively peaceful strategies generated enough largesse to pass among their own allies further to the east, from whom, in return the border Ostrogoths collected certain taxes. As the Roman state collapsed, the Ostrogoths took over northern Italy — Milan, Ravenna, Venice. As with today’s liberals,  these “conquerors” (not to be confused with a later group, the Vandals, who were not Arian and not nice) declined to impose their culture on the Roman aristocracy (which was neo-Platonic pagan), refused to confiscate enough of the old estates to cripple their power — and thereby were themselves quickly overrun by the much more numerous Franks from their immediate north.

Ah, the French… well, not quite yet. These Franks were a Germanic heritage tribe whose primary distinction was a desire to colonize (take over land for themselves and their families), but whose political culture was still Germanic. (Come to think of it, France still has a pretty strong emphasis on regional pride and powerful women…)

But there still were Italians in Italy, so the Franks needed a strategy to pacify them. The Italians, however, had given up on secular government (apparently still do) and cast their lot with the rapidly-bureaucratizing Roman Catholic Church.  This worked pretty well for Frankish men, who could easily get baptized and go to mass. For free-minded Frankish women, however, the Church was a problem.  As it built itself according to the dictates of Pope Leo I and Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, theological consolidation rejected any gnostic or heretical sect which accepted the stature of women as equally worthy of bearing God’s message to humanity.  There were men as well as women who believed in human spiritual equality, and I doubt all their conversions were joyous occasions.

And what about their womenfolk?

Here’s where I nearly shot out of my chair: Cantor says Frankish families of wealth worked as one — women and the men who loved them — to set up convent culture.  The men wanted their women to have the choice of female-led, service-focused lives.  It was not a rebellion by individual women against their fathers, uncles and brothers, but by well-beloved women enjoying support from their fathers, uncles and brothers. The Frankish men freely funded the work for which we love these women still: housing the homeless, sheltering the friendless, feeding the hungry, nursing the sick, educating children, teaching and modeling a covenant of community care for everyone.

So when we, today, admire Roman Catholic women standing up against the bishops, we join their long-ago families and friends in a well-documented cultural practice. Conversely, when the bishops attempt to shut these women down, they are also perpetuating only one side in a long-standing war theological war. Leo, Ambrose and Gregory, along with their successors, call out one interpretation of the long-ago controversial scripture (“This is Peter”); Roman Catholic women — proto-Protestants in this case — for just about as long, have been reading the Bible differently.

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since the 5th and 6th centuries of the Common Era, but some of it, apparently, still tastes of its original springs.

Nice to be corrected

The World Turned Upside Down

Reblogged from Politywonk:

At first, the Boston Marathon bombings seemed small to me. Compared to 9-11, to deaths in wars we don't even bother to look at on television anymore, even to industrial murders resulting from deliberately unsafe management decisions -- compared to all this, a lot of people went home in one piece. Had homes to go home to.

That night I went to hear Medea Benjamin speaking on the outrage of US drone policy.

Read more… 741 more words

The World Turned Upside Down

At first, the Boston Marathon bombings seemed small to me. Compared to 9-11, to deaths in wars we don’t even bother to look at on television anymore, even to industrial murders resulting from deliberately unsafe management decisions — compared to all this, a lot of people went home in one piece. Had homes to go home to.

That night I went to hear Medea Benjamin speaking on the outrage of US drone policy. As a former political-military analyst of Pakistani affairs, back in another time and place, I actively despise the drones as bad policy. They are another Vietnam — which is to say, a bombing of innocent people who didn’t really care about us but wake up the next day full of hatred. On such occasions, my mind wanders idly to the question of whether our stated policy on use for drones would be different if another country — say, Russia — used the same words to justify attacks launched into US neighborhoods, in search of their own terrorists, say, Chechnyans separatists.

History teaches that the Russians have plenty of reason to use something as lethal as drones against Chechnyan separatists — even as the Chechnyan separatists have legitimate grievances against the Russians. It’s a civil war, fought out by other means, and sometimes in other places.

So, as I say, the Russians would have as much reason to launch a drone into Watertown or any other US neighborhood with a strong eastern European presence as we have to launch our drones into some of the Pakistani and Yemeni neighborhoods we attack. Signature attacks, after all, depend on nothing more than a belief that this is the kind of neighborhood where terrorism finds a foothold. Takes root. Organizes and then exports the means to attack innocents abroad.  At this moment, I trust, there are legal scholars in the Pentagon and CIA poring over every word Obama has uttered on this subject, frantically seeking the ones that might be launched back into our own faces.

But drones are not only something to fear, they are also something to understand. The reason we use drones against suspected terrorists is because those malefactors inhabit places we mock as “failed states.”  In explaining the appellation, experts do not deny that good people live there. States do not fail because they have no rich people. they do not lack for healthy religious communities, most of which are the single healthy social institution protecting their members. Failed states have arts and literature, museums and ways for people to trade and travel.

What failed states don’t have is a government with the power, the will, and the resources to control people who do not wish to live by the laws.  Patriots Day was an ironic moment for God to show the full dimensions of how much that applies to us. Worried about personal violence: the US Senate voted to let gun owners be gun owners — no matter why they want those guns — and to have all the bullets and gunpowder they want.  nervous about your jobsite and missing OSHA? An industrial chemical plant exploded next to two schools and a nursing home, all snuggled close to each other in a jurisdiction that has no safety standards nor routine surprise inspections.  Or maybe you dread the ecological apocalypse? In that case, you’re agitated that flooding has shut down a major metropolitan area and raised fears that its failed sewage exclusion system has allowed an imported predator species of fish to enter the huge, interlocked Great Lakes water system.

And in Boston, on Patriots Day, two brothers and unknown others took the step that lead to official designation as a failed state: they planned, supplied, and launched an act of violence against a public event.  It probably took someone from someplace like Chechnya to hold up the final mirror. Fugitives from failed states know immediately when they’ve landed in another one.  Maybe now, when the Pakistanis, the Yemenis, the Afghans wail that the drones kill good people with the bad, the people of Watertown, Cambridge, and Arlington — many of whom are my personal dear friends — will lead American voices insisting we take them more seriously.

Wisdom is for another day. Right now, I’m still reeling from the numerous naked emperors running wild on my cable television: a town blown off the map in Texas, my own friends locked in their home, losing income and serenity in Greater Boston, and Asian jumping carp chomping their way into Lake Michigan from the DesPlaines and Chicago Rivers.

God has called our bluff. Pride goes before a fall.  Monday night, I mused with disinterest how useful it would be for the Russians to launch a drone against the US, using our own legal language to justify a simply decision to protect their own people against terrorism.  Today — Friday — I just pray they don’t.

How to Get Out of the Woods

I came into this association in 1969 full of social justice passion. Opposition to the war in Vietnam, admiration for the established commitment to racial justice through leadership participation in the Civil Rights movement. Instantly I had a community of like-minded individuals. If those who disagreed with us departed, well, so much the better for our effectiveness. Either they’d see the light and come back, or they’d wallow in some wilderness of their own making.

In those first years everything we seemed to do was about social justice. Hunger feasts for La Raza, pastoral and liturgical support for the first feminists and gay rights activists. And always, opposition to violence. My LRY met in a room displaying the name of Mahatma Gandhi, and we were quick to respond to accusations of excessive force by the police, let alone the military. Don’t even mention ROTC chapters: these we considered little better than indoctrinators of evil.

That’s what happens when you enter a passionate relationship: you can’t wait to get into the weeds. Upstream you plunge, hacking at low-hanging branches, wallowing in sudden clearings, wiggling your toes in clear water when mud starts to ooze into your shoes. New plants and animals fascinate you. Your hiking buddies support you. As teamwork builds, you sense a collective power to lay a path.

But weeds have a price. You get too far away from other folks finding the same joy on other paths. Your jubilant blossoms are weeds to them. The branches you hack away were brush from which they build enduring structures. If by chance your paths cross, these discrepancies make it impossible to converse, to rejoice together. Far from settling in on common ground, you turn away, back to the path whose flora and fauna, practices and pitfalls you know best.

But if you stay on this hike long enough, and your paths cross with different journeyers often enough, the team which once felt so strong will start to weaken. One by one—or even in small groups – folks will find other descriptions of this environment intriguing. Maybe even more persuasive.

You worry for them, but instinct means you’ll fight even harder for yourself. This is the path you have followed, these are the details you know. Here in the thickest woods, you cling to what you know, treasure the details by which you hope to free yourself. Louder and more stridently other hikers strive to shake your confidence. They call for a general redefinition. They hold out the hopefulness of recreating, reframing.

If dialogue fails, they feel no other choice but to remove. If they can’t remove you and your details, they’ll remove themselves from you.

The first great removal of UUs came as early as 1970, removing UUs who supported the war in Vietnam, or at least the government’s right to make such decisions. Many, I’m sure, left because that era refused to affirm the rights and dignity of those who wound up fighting, either through the draft or – shudder—voluntarily.

Other social forces thinned our ranks as well, in particular the lessening of social pressures to espouse formal religious membership as part of the corporate career path. Theological issues complicated life among those who chose to stay. Which plants were the good ones to eat? God or not God? Weekly worship or outside spiritual self-expression? But these are old questions, and they didn’t hurt us more than they hurt other religions.

In the deepest woods, we started to listen to those who wanted to redefine. We lightened up on theological language issues, even agreed on a symbol for our faith community. Our best thinkers and listeners, ordained or non-ordained, helped us set up processes for clarifying what we truly believed, hacking off the weed-making process of distilled collective liturgy. For if ethics can be summarized simply, God, or whatever you experience as the ultimate, can never be nailed down. (Yes, that’s a deliberate pun: I’m a Christian UU preparing for Holy Week.)

Guns in Vermont

It was not my intention to write on this topic, but we’ve been reeling these last two weeks about the shame at the heart of our little paradise in America’s gun crisis. Here we sit, snug in our mountains, happy in the snow, if a bit cold, congratulating ourselves that our gun crime rate is so low that we don’t need any gun laws. Sure, we have friends and neighbors who hunt or own guns, but hey, they’re responsible, they’re careful. And they’re just hunters, eh?

And then here’s our weekly alternative newspaper reporting on what that means for the rest of the country. According to Ken Picard, an excellent reporter who once stepped in as an emergency reader for a wedding I was doing, one of the healthiest businesses in our area is an anonymous-looking building that provides those anonymous guns.

Since his report came out, there’s been much more discussion about it, and the business involved cheekily placed a “We’re Hiring” ad in Seven Days the following week. before this article came out, our City Council here in Burlington and our Senate President down in Montpelier got ridiculed — including by me — for trying to propose bans on assault weapons. Our governor flatly stated that he was looking for “a fifty state solution,” with an implication that this was no place for wasting political capital.

But I seem not to be the only Vermonter that’s been thinking it over. It tore my heart to read an article about how our guns are killing people in Massachusetts, and the illustration was a street sign was from my old Meetinghouse Hill neighborhood. And it turns out that last year we had the smallest total number of hunting licenses ever. People aren’t coming here to hunt — which hurts our economy — and locals don’t hunt as much as they used to. And my late friend, Alice, who lived to the age of 93, never fully got over the death of her oldest son, Jimmy, who at the age of 12 was accidentally shot by a friend who was showing off his father’s gun after school.

I’ve watched tons of PBS coverage this week on all aspects of “Guns in America,” and lots of C-Span with various expert and local panels. Apparently, so have a lot of other Vermonters, because here’s how we poll now on this issue, in marked contrast to any other time in our history. Here are the policy measures I support, for my state and for my nation:

1) Universal registration of all gun sales and transfers, and public access to lists of registered gun owners.

2) Prosecution of all straw purchasers as full accessories to any crime committed by a gun bought with their signature.

3) A ban on all ammunition systems and weapons that deliver more than six bullets without reloading.

4) A ban on repairing any 7+ weapon when it breaks down. You can own it until it dies, but that’s it, then you’re done. Anyone repairing a 7+ gun for another person, whether or not for money, is committing a crime, to which shall be added an accessory count for any crime in which the weapon is involved.

And what about the Second Amendment? The best presentation on that came from Dave Wheeler, whose son Benjamin, died at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Better than I can say it, he urged us to remember that it is the “second” amendment, and its rights come second to his son’s rights, to all children’s rights, to grow up, to enjoy their lives, to live. And the Founding Fathers, he opined, knew what they were doing when they made this right second and not first.

I would argue t…

I would argue that almost all of the internal developments within UUism, both in local congregations and as a larger institution are the expression of differing strategies for surviving the political and cultural wilderness.

I am writing this on the day of Barack Obama’s second Inauguration. His election confirms my suspicion that 2008 marked the end of the cultural hegemony of conservatism in the politics and culture of the US. Our wilderness days may be coming to an end.

It is time to consider new possibilities.”

Tom Schade in “The Lively Tradition.”

At The Lively Tradition, Tom Schade has been rocking the question of what lies ahead for Unitarian Universalism, if we have, in many ways, won some significant victories in making our vision more widespread and even incarnate in the world we inhabit and our offspring will inherit.

On his particular points, I have posted several comments, along with other valuable thinkers. My function here is to raise the question to which this blog is dedicated: “What is the best polity for us to achieve our fullest potential?” For if Tom is right, and our fullest potential has expanded so very much — a suspicion born out by all the talk about Free Range UUs and lapsed UUs, etc — then the question is not 9to use my old language as a military analyst)  ”what are we here to deliver?” but “what is the best system or structure to deliver the payload we have chosen?”

I have come to believe that antiquated polity is the greatest danger to ourselves and to what we care about. Nor am I alone: the denomination is regionalizing, the Society for Community Ministers and UU Ministers Association have held talks about how to expand our vision and missions for ministry, and ministers with parishes are displaying websites that offer independent consulting or other services. Some folks conduct their ministries completely on line, and others are still making do with old-fashioned word-of-mouth connections and anchoring services such as books, classes, chaplaincies.

I believe we have a fundamental stumbling block, with an history of deliberate origins and therefore, an option for us to choose differently. I’ve been doing lots of scribbling at home to figure out how to talk about it.  There’s a role for history, there’s a role for debate. But Tom has achieved the fundamental first step: he has pointed out we stand at a moment of existential crisis, and asked us where we want to go from here.