call to arms

Latest Bite (And An Important Message)

November 25

This entry will be my last on this page for a while. I'm revamping the site. I'm adding comments, some new artwork, and in general making it more 2005 and less 1999. I'm also doing all that holiday/presents/end of year stuff, so it will take a while to get it all together.

Meanwhile, I don't want to lose touch with those strange people who enjoy my ranting. So I am going to keep updating via my notify list--and only via my notify list--until the site is renovated.

Notify list? Oh yeah..that's the thing at left here, with the little form for your email. Fill it out, and I will personally email you with whatever strangeness I happen to write over the next two months. Don't fill it out, you get bupkis. Nada. Zilch.

Right now, there's only a few people on my notify list, but I know I have more readers than that. So sign up, dangit. Don't be afraid. I won't send your email to Spammy McSpammer. I understand your reluctance, really. I hardly ever fill out online forms myself. But this one is super easy. It doesn't ask your age, or religious affiliation, or credit card number, or anything. Just an email address. So show me your love. And have a happy holidays.

November 15

It's been a month since I've written here. A hell of a month, to be exact. So yeah. How about that election?

It's a strange thing to live in times that you know, many years from now, will be seen as dark and oppressive to those fortunate enough to be born after they're over. I am still enough of an optimist to believe in that future, that things will, after a lot of struggle and fighting from people like me, eventually get better. I had hoped that this election would be the first step in turning this country towards a more progressive, enlightened path. But it's not to be. For a lot of reasons, which other people have been better at articulating than me.

So, we mourn, we rage, we take another route. What we don't do is give up. Hear me, red America? We don't give up. It took decades for women to get the vote. It took even longer to stamp out slavery, and to begin to stamp out racism. Before that, it took thousands of years for the idea and practice of democracy to gain any permanent hold in the world. Greedy, cynical people have always manipulated money, religion, public opinion, and government to enrich themselves and oppress others, with frequently dismaying success. But it is possible to defeat them. And our job--my job--is to do just that. Not to run away, not to become cynical and disaffected, but to resist. To fight. To call them on their lies, and on their heartless and destructive policies. To not back down, even when family members get sucked into the rhetoric and spout their talking points.

Because you see, I know who I am and what I am. I am a smart, stubborn, American woman who believes that what consenting adults do with each other is no one's business. That it is senseless and cruel to tell single mothers to work or starve when they have no way to pay for daycare. That the environment is a gift from God, and that despoiling it for profit is spitting in his face and taking something precious from our grandchildren. That Jesus spent no time at all talking about gay marriage and a great deal of time talking about compassion for the poor--and that any Christian who votes Republican should ask him or herself if Jesus' views are really welcome in a party that seeks to take away every single program that helps the poor climb out of poverty, and prevents the old and sick from becoming destitute.

I ask you, Christian Bush voters, if Christ appeared before you right now and asked what you had done for the poorest and most needy, what you would say? Could you justify your vote? Could you look him in the face? Do you think voting against gay marriage is an excuse for voting for more oppression and poverty? Because if you do, I would like to remind you of Matthew, 25:41-45

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did [it] not to one of the least of these, ye did [it] not to me.

Here's the deal. Christian voters in this country have been seduced into the Republican party by promises of power. It is the same seduction that gripped the Catholic church and led to indulgences and Inquisitions and crusades. It is a hard seduction to fight, because it comes clothed in such pretty words: holiness and purity and sacrifice, to name a few. The founders of this country, who came from a Europe gripped by horrible violence and bloodshed done in the name of God, knew what they were doing when they sought to keep church and government separate. They did this not to get rid of religion, but to preserve it. A church that is so corrupted that it condones torture, flaying people alive, and burning them to death in God's name cannot, with any honesty, call itself God's representative on earth, can it? The sad truth is that once a church is given the power of government, it becomes just another tool of oppression in the hands of evil, manipulative people. It happened in the very recent history of Christianity; it's happening now in fundamentalist Muslim countries.

The right to worship is integral to a strong democracy. So is the right not to worship, or to worship some way that many disapprove of. If that freedom is not preserved for all, then we will go back to a Dark Ages where it is preserved for none. We here in the 21st century are no less prone to this error than our ancestors, and to act as though "it couldn't happen here" is to stick our heads in the sand.

Look, Germany before World War II was not backwards or savage. It had a large, influential intellectual class--so much so that we had to recruit many of them to fight the Nazis. But what happened there was complete, savage, barbarity. America at the same time was a fairly enlightened place, but we still interred thousands of innocent Japanese Americans and took away their property without just cause. We still made black people drink at separate water fountains and made it nearly impossible for them to exercise their legal right to vote, and allowed lynchings to occur. We were then and are now an educated country which claims to believe in freedom and justice---but that doesn't mean we can't be led into doing the opposite, by people who play on our fears and hatreds to stay in power.

Ask yourself, Christian Bush supporters, if you haven't been like Esau and traded your heritage for a mess of pottage. If you haven't let your fears and hatreds of gays blind you to the larger game being played, where the very rich and powerful seek to stay that way forever, and to make it impossible for the poor to ever rise out of their poverty. Would Jesus be more troubled by civil unions than by the poor single mother, about to become homeless because she doesn't want to leave her four year old alone while she works? More troubled by gay marriage than by the 19 year old soldier, afraid and far from home, ordered to risk his life every day for a war that benefits no one but a bunch of oil brokers who happen to be friends of the President? More troubled by two people of the same gender living together than by the millions of Americans whose air and water is slowly becoming dirtier and more poisonous so that the President's contributors don't have to pay to upgrade their polluting factories? I don't think so, and if you're being honest with yourself, you don't either.

The rightness or wrongness of homosexuality is, and always has been, between the people in question and God. It does not make straight marriages meaningless--how could that possibly happen? It does not require the church to recognize gay marriages, much as the Catholic church is not obliged to recognize marriages after a divorce. It does not threaten the social order--on the contrary, married people of whatever orientation tend to be more law-abiding and settled than unmarried ones. And most importantly, there is no justification, in a democratic society, for discriminating against people based on something as personal as orientation. There just isn't. What God thinks of a gay couple's marriage or of yours or of mine is simply not the government's concern. Period.

It is time for Christians to stop being seduced by those who tempt them with visions of making America a theocracy. It's time they understood that the separation of church and state allows things they like as well as things they disapprove of. Yes, it means gay couples may gain the equal right to marry. It also means that the state cannot require you to go to the church of its choosing or face jail time. It means no more Inquisitions. Freedom for you means freedom for the people you despise. Giving up your own freedom just to take a swipe at those you hate is cutting off your nose to spite your face, as the saying goes.

In many ways, I'm not a conventional Christian anymore, I admit. But I do believe in the things that Christ spoke of--justice, compassion, honesty, and courage. I won't abandon this fight, because there's still so much that needs to be done, and because I love my country, and I want it to be the best it can be.