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  • Water-Gun Rights at Healthcare Reform Rally

    I'm Ready to Water the Tree of Liberty with Healthcare Reform Now.
    "I'm Ready to Water the Tree of Liberty with Healthcare Reform Now."

    I decided to take a comic approach to the pro-healthcare rally held today on Capitol Hill. Since my brothers across the nation (as exemplified by Mr. New Hampshire above) were sporting their hardware at the healthcare reform town hall meetings, I thought I’d do the same.

    At Target I found a “Rocket Blaster” for $4.99. It comes with one foam blaster and 4 foam rockets. I cut a hole in the top and filled it with water and daisies. I strapped the whole thing on my thigh with black duct tape as my hoster and took my stand for liberty at the healthcare rally today outside the Democratic National Committee building. President Obama was giving a speech there at 3 p.m. this afternoon. My little sign read: “I’m ready to water the Tree of Liberty with Healthcare Reform Now!” (You can see more photos here.)

    There were about 500 pro-healthcare reform supporters out on the street. I didn’t see any anti-healthcare people.

    My “revealed” weapon did draw the attention of the U.S. Capitol police. The officer called over his sergeant to identify my gun. I volunteered to them that it was a foam water gun and invited them to check it. They said they’d have someone come over and examine it. (See photos here.)

    A few minutes later a Secret Service agent came to check it out. He asked me to take it out of the holster.

    He said, “It’s just a water gun with daisies in it, ma’am?”

    I answered, “Yes, sir.”

    He replied, “Well, I’d rather see one of those than the other kind. ”

    “I know you would,” I said. “So would I.”

    He smiled and waved me on.

    I also had a video interview with Voice of America. My talking points were as follows:

    I’m taking a comic approach to a very serious issue. This country needs health-care reform now. It must have 1) a public option, 2) it must provide accessible and affordable insurance for everyone who is uninsured or under-insured, and 3) it should contain clear ‘conscience clauses’ around the issues that are morally sensitive. We need health-care reform now.

    For a good article on the use of language in the health-care debate, see the article posted by George Lakoff today: The Policy-Speak Disaster.

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  • Save A Nun: Cokie Roberts’ Keynote Address to Leadership Conference of Women Religious

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    New Orleans native and NPR’s senior news analyst Cokie Roberts gave the keynote address at the recent gathering of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in New Orleans. LCWR represents 95% of  U.S. Catholic religious women and is under investigation by the Vatican. (See my earlier posts LCWR Calls For Transparency and Vatican Investigation.)

    Roberts gives an excellent overview of the historical role of Catholic women in America – especially in New Orleans. When she veers toward the current Vatican investigation, she frames it in a way that brings out some of the essential tensions: The true nature of the American experiment is still not understood by Rome. Here’s an excerpt:

    This country remains a puzzlement to our ancestors in Europe and their modern day descendants. After all we are very young—it’s not even 300 years since the Ursulines arrived here and that was almost 50 years before independence. I understand why the Europeans continue to see this as some sort of upstart nation. They often see only the chaos without witnessing the creation. And they don’t appreciate the fact that we have traditions that are different from those of the old world, traditions that have to do with service both inside and outside of religious life. So–at the same time that the Ursulines were here creating schools and hospitals and orphanages, and Elizabeth Seton was doing that on the East Coast–women of every religion and color were creating similar institutions–whether it was Isabella Graham the Scotswoman who worked with Elizabeth Seton to create the Widows Society and many other social service agencies, or Rebecca Gratz–a Jewish woman in Philadelphia who worked with other women in the community to create orphanages and other societies for the poor and then established a parallel set up for Jewish children who were being taught Christian doctrine in those other institutions. Or Catherine Ferguson, a former slave, who started the Sunday School movement in America. Or first lady Dolley Madison who worked with the local women of Washington to set up an orphanage after the British invasion of 1814. These women of course couldn’t vote and married women could not own property. They were the property of their husbands. But with great difficulty and determination they lobbied the legislatures, solicited funds from the public, petitioned the Congress, organized rallies, performed highly political acts in order to create the safety net for the poor in a time of exciting unbridled capitalism. And that tradition of service continues.

    Read Cokie Roberts’ whole address.

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  • Save A Nun: LCWR Calls For Transparency in Vatican Investigation

    Threat to Vatican?
    Threat to Vatican?

    Earlier this month, I posted on the Vatican investigation into Catholic women’s religious orders. I noted the Vatican opening a parallel investigation into the largest umbrella leadership organization of the U.S. women religious, the Leadership Council of Women Religious.

    LCWR had its national meeting in New Orleans from August 11-14, and the Vatican investigation was leading topic. Rachel Zoll’s article Catholic Sisters Under Vatican Review Want Answers is the most recent follow up. Here’s an excerpt:

    An association of U.S. Roman Catholic sisters raised questions Monday about why they are the target of, and who is paying for, a Vatican investigation that is shaping up to be a tough review of whether sisters have strayed from church teaching.

    The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing about 800 heads of religious orders, said there was a “lack of full disclosure about the motivation and funding sources” for the inquiry. The group also said it objects to the Vatican plan to keep private the reports that will be submitted to the Holy See.

    “There’s no transparency there,” said Sister Annmarie Sanders, a conference spokeswoman.

    The investigation, announced earlier this year, will examine the practices of the roughly 59,000 Catholic sisters working in the United States. Some sisters have privately expressed anger over the assessment, which they say unfairly questions their commitment to church teaching. However, in public they have remained largely circumspect in their comments.

    LCWR posted their official response on their Web site. Here’s a bit of it:

    The assembly body also discussed the Vatican study, as well as a separate inquiry being conducted by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the position of LCWR in matters pertaining to Catholic Church doctrine. Following analysis of the experience of these studies thus far, the leaders noted that while their orders have always been fully accountable to the church and plan to collaborate with the Vatican in these studies, they request that those conducting the inquiries alter some of the methods being employed. Among the expressed concerns are a lack of full disclosure about the motivation and funding sources for the studies. The leaders also object to the fact that their orders will not be permitted to see the investigative reports about them that are being submitted directly to the Vatican.

    Throughout the assembly, the leaders emphasized that their orders have remained faithful to the reform and renewal of their communities called for by the Second Vatican Council that urged women and men religious to adapt their lives, prayer and work so they may most effectively fulfill their mission. They reclaimed their commitment to what they believe is the unique and needed role of religious life which includes serving at and speaking from the margins of the Catholic Church.

    LCWR represents roughly 95% of U.S. Catholic sisters. I’m intrigued that NPR’s Cokie Roberts gave the key note at the LCWR assemly. I’ll try to get hold of her talk.

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  • Chittister: ‘Call on God, but Row Away From the Rocks’

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    Joan Chittister is a Benedictine sister, author, excellent lecturer, and leading champion for women around the world. I like the way Chittister and her community ground themselves in daily prayer and take a very realistic view of the world – a view that is shot through with a sense of humor.

    Here’s an excerpt from her book The Breath of the Soul: Reflections on Prayer:

    “Call on God but row away from the rocks.”–Indian Proverb

    Healthy prayer and neurotic prayer are two different things. Neurotic prayer denies reality. Healthy prayer grows both spiritually and psychologically as a result of it.

    When we fail to accept the fact that some things just are: that rain rains and sickness comes and the unexpected is commonplace—when we fail to realize that life is life, all of it meant to teach us something, to give new opportunities to be better, stronger people—we miss both the meaning of life and the real role of prayer in it.

    The spiritually mature person does not rely on God for miracles. They rely on God for strength and courage, for insight and hope, for vision and endurance. They know that God is with them; they do not believe that God is an instrument for the comfort of human beings.

    They do know that one of the purposes of prayer is to give them the courage it takes to do what we are each meant to do in the world that is ours. They do not forgive themselves the responsibility for changing their own little piece of the world on the grounds that if they pray hard enough God will change the world for them. They know that, without doubt, it is their responsibility to change the world.

    The mystic Catherine of Siena, whose relationship with God was legendary, changed her part of the world by chiding popes and feeding the poor.

    The mystic Ignatius of Loyola, whose life of prayer is exactly what took him and his men to the streets of Europe, changed the world by defending the faith and re-catechizing a generation gone dry.

    The contemplative Thomas Merton, whose life in a cloistered religious community made prayer the context of his very life, changed the world by speaking out from the cloister to lead an anti-war movement intent on stopping the illegal war in Vietnam.

    The laywoman Dorothy Day, whose life of prayer followed a tumultuous life, changed the world by modeling the care of the poor on the streets of New York City.

    None of the great spiritual personalities of the Church have ever made prayer a substitute for justice and mercy, for peace and equality, for honesty and courage.

    They “rowed the world away from the rocks,” made the miracles the world needed—and so must we.–Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB

    An excerpt from The Breath of the Soul: Reflections on Prayer by Joan Chittister (Twenty-Third Publications)

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  • Remember Way Back When the Republicans Supported “Death Panels”?

    bio-amy-sullivan

    Since this craziness is all over the news, I thought I’d publish Amy Sullivan’s nice little piece of research here. Amy’s life-long dream has been to be a political pundit — and she’s GOOD at it! Check out her original.

    Oh, Those Death Panels
    by Amy Sullivan

    You would think that if Republicans wanted to totally mischaracterize a health care provision and demagogue it like nobody’s business, they would at least pick something that the vast majority of them hadn’t already voted for just a few years earlier. Because that’s not just shameless, it’s stupid.

    Yes, that’s right. Remember the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, the one that passed with the votes of 204 GOP House members and 42 GOP Senators? Anyone want to guess what it provided funding for? Did you say counseling for end-of-life issues and care? Ding ding ding!!

    Let’s go to the bill text, shall we? “The covered services are: evaluating the beneficiary’s need for pain and symptom management, including the individual’s need for hospice care; counseling the beneficiary with respect to end-of-life issues and care options, and advising the beneficiary regarding advanced care planning.” The only difference between the 2003 provision and the infamous Section 1233 that threatens the very future and moral sanctity of the Republic is that the first applied only to terminally ill patients. Section 1233 would expand funding so that people could voluntarily receive counseling before they become terminally ill.

    So either Republicans were for death panels in 2003 before turning against them now–or they’re lying about end-of-life counseling in order to frighten the bejeezus out of their fellow citizens and defeat health reform by any means necessary. Which is it, Mr. Grassley (“Yea,” 2003)?

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  • Religion, Workers, and the Economy

    youngstown-steelI really appreciate the class analysis from the folks over at Working-Class Perspectives, a blog from the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. They are doing contextual analysis – and sometimes, contextual theology – from the heart of the Rust Belt.

    Here’s an excerpt from Religion, Workers, and the Economy by Brian R. Corbin, looking at the Pope’s new encyclical Charity in Truth. Brian is director of Catholic Charities in Youngstown and blogs at brianrcorbin.com.

    Since the publication of Rerum Novarum in 1891, Catholic social teachings have provided moral and ethical guideposts for economic behavior.  Of particular importance, have been the Papal Encyclicals on the economy that have sought to protect the working class and their institutions in the face of unfettered capitalism.   In Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, the Church goes a step further by providing a critical analysis of neoliberal economic thought and the problems of globalization while reiterating the need for basic protections for workers and unions.

    The pope writes explicitly that justice abhors great disparities in wealth and that societies need “to prioritize the goal of access to steady employment for everyone.”  Employment, however, needs to be “decent work.”  Benedict writes that  such work  “expresses the essential dignity of every man and woman; work that is freely chosen, effectively associating workers, both men and women, with the development of their community; work that enables the worker to be respected and free from any form of discrimination; work that makes it possible for families to meet their needs and provide schooling for their children, without the children themselves being forced into labour; work that permits the workers to organize themselves freely, and to make their voices heard; work that leaves enough room for rediscovering one’s roots at a personal, familial and spiritual level; work that guarantees those who have retired a decent standard of living.”

    To read my column on the encyclical, see A Love Letter From the Pope.

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  • A Love Letter From the Pope

    charity-in-truthIn July, Pope Benedict wrote you a love letter. Like all love letters, it’s worth savoring.

    I say he wrote it to you because Charity in Truth, his third encyclical, isn’t just for Catholics. It’s addressed to “all people of good will.”

    I call it a love letter because the opening word is caritas—love. And because any social change worth its salt must spring from love and pursue love as its ultimate goal.

    The media says this encyclical is about globalization, international development, transnational governance, and the financial crisis. It’s about all those things. It’s also about fostering sensitivity to life, healthy sexuality, human ecology, and the way technology reveals our human aspirations. But its bookends are love.

    If you’ve watched your 401(k) plummet in the last two years or sweated to make your mortgage payment, then there is something in Charity in Truth for you. If you wonder what good it does to dump billions of dollars in aid money to developing countries while we’ve got 9.7 percent unemployment at home, there’s something for you. If you want to know why labor unions are important and why they have to change, or why families are the building blocks of society, or why happiness is sometimes confused with material prosperity, pick it up. The pope is writing you a love letter because his heart breaks at the burdens you carry. He wants your life and struggles to have meaning.

    Charity in Truth is about the relationship of economies to human dignity. “Grave imbalances are produced,” the pope writes, “when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.” The marketplace, he says, cannot become a sphere where the strong subdue the weak. In fact, it must be a yeasty mix of the fair exchange of goods and services, judicious redistribution of wealth in service of social justice, and an unexpected dash of profligate generosity. In this kind of economy, businesses that are solely responsible to their investors have limited social value and should be in the minority.

    You’ll find mention of the fair trade movement, microfinance and microcredit, the sins of predatory lending and speculative finance, the temptation of aid agencies toward poverty pimping (my language, not his), the “grammar of nature” that teaches us how not to exploit our environment, and a proposal for a “worldwide redistribution of energy resources.”

    Some commentators wrongly portray the pope as promoting “one world government.” Don’t be fooled. Christian Zionists have been raising this specter for years as a way to demonize Catholics and Jews. I clarify this to keep focused on the actual point: Trickle-down economics within nation-states is dead. If we are going to direct capital markets toward a global common good, then reform of international financial institutions is mandatory.

    You don’t have to agree with what the pope writes. There are sections that will genuinely irk political conservatives and liberals. But Charity in Truth prompts the right questions and opens up a conversation that American Christians, in particular, need to have. We’ve been deadlocked so long in a Religious Right-Secular Left battle that it has warped our brains. This fight has deprived us of a culture that fosters self-knowledge, teaches ethics and values as tools for making personal, professional, and political decisions, and nurtures interiority, soul-making, and reflection.

    Charity in Truth is a love letter reminding us that openness to God opens us to one another. Our lives are made for joy and our work for fulfillment and shared satisfaction.

    Rose Marie Berger, a Sojourners associate editor, is a Catholic peace activist and poet. This column first appeared in the Sept-Oct 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.

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  • Meg Cox: What Strange Justice

    cynicism-and-hope1I want to give a shout-out and thanks to Meg Cox over at Cynicism and Hope for mentioning my blog post on who’s behind the “populists” against health-care reform. It’s a good reminder of how these tactics follow a similar pattern. See Meg’s post below. Also check out her newest book Cynicism and Hope: Reclaiming Discipleship in a Post-Democratic Society.

    When I read Rose Marie Berger’s blog post Who Lit the Fire Under the Right-Wing ‘Populists’ Against Healthcare Reform? I had a flashback to the discomfort that made me stop reading the book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, some years ago.

    Strange Justice infuriated me, but not because of the sexual harassment alleged by Anita Hill. That was bad, but I kept reading through that part. I became angry enough to put the book down when I read that leaders of a Christian organization were busing people in from out of town to attend rallies in support of Thomas—specifically to create the illusion that there was local support for his nomination. I believe the organizer behind these events was Ralph Reed. (If someone has a copy of the book, I’d be glad if they could check me on these details.)

    If a cause is right, truth should be the means of persuasion.

  • The Act of Solitude

    I like how Catholic monk and author Thomas merton-jean-jacketMerton describes “solitude” as a verb – an active verb – that one engages in, rather than stumbles over. I need more of it. How about you?

    Solitude as act: the reason no one understands solitude, or bothers to try to understand it, is that it appears to be nothing but a condition. Something one elects to undergo, like standing under a cold shower. Actually, solitude is a realization, an actualization, even a kind of creation, as well as a liberation of active forces within us, forces that are more than our own, and yet more ours that what appears to be “ours”.

    As a mere condition, solitude can be passive, inert and basically unreal: a kind of permanent coma. One has to work at it to keep out of this condition. One has to work actively at solitude, not by putting fences around oneself but by destroying all the fences and throwing away all the disguises and getting down to the naked root of one’s inmost desire, which is the desire of liberty-reality. To be free from the illusion that reality creates when one is out of right relation to it, and to be real in the freedom which reality gives when one is rightly related to it.–Thomas Merton

    Learning to Love, Journals Volume 6, edited by Christine M. Bochen (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997, pp 320-321)

  • Who Lit The Fire Under the Right-Wing ‘Populists’ Against Healthcare Reform?

    obamacareBy now, we’ve all seen the angry “regular Americans” who are rising up to resist health-care reform. They are demonstrating loudly at town hall meetings. They are holding rallies. They are e-mailing all their friends and family about the absolute horrors that will accompany any gov’t run program of Obama-Care.

    Who are these people? Where did they come from? Is this really how Americans feel about healthcare reform?

    I started digging a little into organizing strategy behind this “grassroots” movement and found … wait for it … Ralph Reed!

    You remember Ralph from the Christian Coalition, right? He was the political strategist for the far-right Republican wing and handed the political far-Right a “faith-based” cover for their political agenda. More recently, he ran for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia in 2006 but lost due his involvement in the Abramoff Indian gaming and Congressional bribery scandal. In 1997, Ralph started Century Strategies, a political consulting firm for Republican candidates and causes. His clients have included Enron, online gambling companies, Indian gambling firms, and the cable industry to fight decency standards proposed in Congress.

    So, when far-right political operatives and insurance industry giants wanted to defeat major health-care reform, who did they call? Their old buddy Ralph Reed.

    Ralph’s friend, and former Century Strategies’ business exec, Tim Phillips, was tasked to head up Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing PR firm funded primarily by Koch Industries (global energy firm that runs coal plants, agribusiness, major oil refineries, etc. Papa Koch was a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society, according to BusinessWeek). AFP is part of a handful of corporate industry front-groups that are leading the propoganda campaign against health-care reform. AFP’s health-care targeted subsidiary is called Patients First. PF is launching bus tours against health-care reform right now. It’s AFP who brought you “Joe the Plumber,” the “Drill, Baby, Drill” rallies, the “tea-bagging parties” (ahem), and most recently the “Survivor” TV ad with the Canadian woman who had to sneak into the US to get her cancer treated, because “in Canada, treatment is delayed or denied.” Wrong.

    Here are a few of the groups: Club for Growth is a right-wing lobbying organization that represents the Wall Street elite.  RecessRally.com is the network getting people out to the townhall meetings. It’s a subsidiary of the American Liberty Alliance, whose excutive director is Eric Odom, a far-right media strategist and president of Strategic Activism, his online political strategizing company. RecessRally is networked with American Majority, a right-wing non-profit that is staffed primarily with conservative Christians who came out of the Bush administration and the Generation Joshua project (a Christian youth league training students in conservative activism).

    So, that’s a rough roundup of who’s leading the so-called “populist uprising.” As Rachel Maddow said in her excellent expose, “Corporate interests do this ‘fake grassroots’ movement as an industry. This is a professional PR campaign to line their own pockets. It is professional, corporate-funded Republican PR  and should be named and reported as such.”

    I recommend reading Lee Fang’s article Tim Phillips, The Man Behind The “Americans For Prosperity” Corporate Front Group Factory. And, in the interest of full disclosure, Fang works for the Center for American Progress, a think-tank full of operatives for the Dems. But Lee is a really good researcher. Here’s a bit of his article:

    The rate at which the Koch Industries funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) churns out front groups to promote its right-wing corporate agenda sets the organization out among similar conservative “think tanks.” This week, AFP created their latest front group called “Patients United Now,” an entity set up to defeat health care reform. Patients United follows a familiar pattern AFP has used for their other front groups: create a new stand alone website, fill it with lines like “We are people just like you” to give the site a grassroots feel, and then use the new group to recruit supporters and run deceptive advertisements attacking reform.

    Access to adequate health care is a human right. Human rights generally are antagonistic to corporate interests. As people of faith we are called to stand up for human dignity and human rights. Now would be a good time to go ahead and shine the Light on these corporate con artists, especially the one’s masquerading as Christians.


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