LET THERE BE LIFE

        My wife Brigitte and I participated in the recent March on Washington for sensible gun control.  As we assembled on the Mall, virtually in the shadow of the Capitol, there were signs for D.C., Virginia, and Maryland to indicate where residents of those jurisdictions could gather.   There also was a section for church parishes.  So, out of curiosity, Brigitte and I gravitated toward that area.  We found a visible presence for Methodists, Unitarians, Baptists, Jews, and Presbyterians.  But no Catholics.  At least no visible presence representing the Catholic Church that said:  The Catholic Church formally supports sensible gun control.

          At the Washington Monument, where the march for gun control ended and the rally began, the program included speakers from Congress, the Administration, the local theater world, and various Christian denominations, including Baptist and Methodists.  But, no Catholic bishops or priests or laypeople formally representing the Catholic Church.

          Yet, just the day before, at the anti-abortion rally on the Mall on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, there was a highly visible presence of the Catholic Church promoting its pro-life position.  As a pro-choice Catholic, I have no problem with that.  Abortion is a very difficult and troubling moral issue and people of good faith come down on opposite sides of that issue.  To this day, I have never met anyone who is pro-abortion.  So, the real issue is not who is for abortion and who is against it.  It’s what do we do about it, and the best approach, to my mind, is what the Clinton Administration proposed: Making it safe, legal, and rare.

          But, that aside, if the Church has a consistent pro-life position that includes supporting life outside the womb, wouldn’t you think it could send a representative to speak or at least be visibly present at the gun control rally?  After all, in light of the horrific number of gun-related deaths in this country, it seems to me that gun control is clearly a sensible, pro-life measure.

          So what’s sensible?  It seems to me the President’s proposals are sensible, even more lenient than I expected.  What right minded, sensible person would object to background checks, re-imposing a ban on military style assault weapons, or limiting the current size of high capacity gun magazines, among the President’s other gun control proposals?

          To be fair to responsible gun owners, many of them  are afraid of the “slippery slope,” seeing this so-called sensible approach as the first step in taking away their guns altogether.  That’s why they’re flocking to gun stores now buying guns that they worry will not be available when the government cracks down on the sale of all guns.  Paranoia?  Sure, but don’t forget, gun ownership and the fear of government disarming its citizens is rooted deep in our history and part of our DNA as Americans.

          Still, despite this, I am hopeful that sensible gun control measures can be enacted despite the NRA and the continuing opposition in Congress and in our communities.  It may take another election cycle, although I hope not.  Look what is happening to immigration reform.  Prior to the 2012 election, not many betting people would have given this issue much of a chance for Congressional action.  Now politicians, once stalwart opponents of the Dream Act and any other conciliatory gesture toward immigrants, have seen the light and are bumping into another to get on board.  It was not a spiritual awakening or change of heart that prompted the change, you can be sure.  It was the jolt of political reality provided by the demographics of the 2012 election results showing that Hispanic voters were a major factor in the Democratic victory.

          It may take the same political jolt to get sensible gun control enacted, and “we the people” are the key.  Politicians will see the light and come to their senses when people like you and me make our voices heard in overwhelming numbers by writing and calling our elected representatives now and making our voices and their ballots heard in the 2014 elections.  It’s a fight that’s ours – we the people -- to win or lose. I am hoping as well that the Catholic Church will pick up its battle standard and lend its considerable weight to this critical fight for life and common sense.

Jerry

Heather Annastasia's Blog: "Never Talk Politics or Religion": How Wall Street is Killing Our Economy

Heather Annastasia's Blog: "Never Talk Politics or Religion": How Wall Street is Killing Our Economy

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A WORD MAKES

To many of us, the President’s second inaugural speech on Monday was a magnificent restatement of bedrock American values.

Yet, to others, it was nothing but a call for unbridled liberalism and a sharp stick in the eye of conservatives.   House Speaker John Boehner even went so far as to say that the President, with his naked appeal for a liberal agenda, was trying to relegate the Republican Party to the dustbin of history.  I would suggest that the Republican Party is doing a good enough job on its own in that regard, without the President’s help, but that’s another matter.

The word “liberal” is key to this basic disagreement, of course, and what a difference a word makes.  In its classic political sense, liberalism is a movement that supports such ideas such as free and fair elections, civil rights, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free trade, and private property.

         But, about 40-50 years ago, that term was hijacked and became alternately synonymous with godless, pot-smoking peaceniks, free-love advocates, dropouts, welfare addicts, and, in general, people who had no respect for basic American values such as God, the American flag, and fiscal responsibility.  The transformation was breathtaking in its swiftness.

         I’ll never forget the comment a colleague made to me, probably 30 years ago, if not longer.  We were talking politics when he looked at me quizzically and said:  “I don’t get it.  You’re a family man who goes to church regularly, and yet you call yourself a liberal.  How can that be?”  I looked at him just as quizzically and realized that the liberalism which I cherished and honored as the soul of the Democratic Party was in for tough sledding ahead.

         And, indeed, it has been a tough time.  To the point that when the President gives an inaugural address, highlighting core values anchored in the U.S. Constitution and in our Judeo-Christian heritage, they are dismissed by conservatives as just another attempt by big-spending liberals to foist its bloated agenda on responsible Americans.

         Yet, in the area of government spending where Democrats are accused of being “big spenders” and fiscally irresponsible, it’s interesting to note that when Democratic President Bill Clinton left office in 2001, he bequeathed to the country a fiscal surplus.  And, under this Democratic President, Barack Obama, the increase in spending has grown more slowly than under any president since President Eisenhower.

         Conservative vs. Liberal?   The true record, versus the campaign rhetoric, makes a mockery of our political labels.

         It seems to me that if conservatism stands for preserving the best in our tradition, as the word indicates, it should stand primarily for American values as old as the Scriptures and as venerable as the Constitution.  Values such as equal opportunity, equal pay for equal work, taking care of the poor and most vulnerable in our society.  If it stands only for a Darwinian, free enterprise system where the rich get rich and the poor get poorer, and people in between are barely making it, it makes you wonder what fundamental, enduring values the GOP is trying to preserve except for its own continued existence.

         Jerry

Washington as High School

         This morning, after finishing the Washington Post and the New York Times, I sat at the breakfast table staring out the window, nursing a third cup of coffee, ruminating over what I had just read.  It was all so dispiriting, and the gray, overcast skies didn’t help.  The front sections were filled with news about the President’s gun proposal and the predictable, mindless pushback from NRA and other gun advocates.  Even the sports pages, normally an oasis for a sports junkie, featured Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace.

          Later, while going about my daily chores still thinking about the gun debate, it hit me.  High school!  It’s all about high school!!!!

          Okay, before you call the men in the white coats, let me explain:  The late Meg Greenfield, for many years Editorial Page Editor for the Washington Post, wrote a wonderfully insightful book, published in 2001, about the culture of Washington, including the people who come here to serve in Congress, in the Executive Branch, or as reporters and pundits.  The book is simply called WASHINGTON.  And, no, I won’t loan it to you, for fear of not getting it back.  It’s that good.  Besides, I have had it for years, consulted it often, and it’s all marked up, making it annoying for anyone else to read.

          In searching for an analogy to capture the Washington culture, Greenfield writes: “The analogy I favor is high school…. And why shouldn’t high school be such a place?  These are the years in which young people first encounter a make-or-break, peer-enforced social code that calculates worth as popularity and popularity as a capacity to please and be associated with the right people (no matter how undeserving they may be), as well as to impress and be admired by the vast, undifferentiated rest…. So far as I have been able to discover,” she concludes, “nobody, regardless of station, gets over high school – ever.”

          It’s brilliant, really, when you think about it.  For me, it helps explains why members of Congress ignore common sense, even public opinion polls, and the huge advantage a recently-elected President enjoys in favorability ratings.  So long as they continue to please the constituency that elected them in the first place as well as their financial backers -- no matter how undeserving both followers and financial backers may be in our eyes -- they don’t pay much to general opinion polls, even ones that put the favorability rating of Congress in single digits. 

          You might think that veteran Congressmen from safe districts might depart from tribal thinking and consider the larger common good from time to time.  Some do, of course, but their numbers are shrinking.  Greenfield writes that Larry O’Brien, former aide to President Kennedy, once told her that in his experience every member of Congress, no matter how safe his or her seat, is perennially nervous and worried about getting re-elected.  Once they get ensconced in this culture, they have a difficult time doing without it.  So, they will do virtually anything not to endanger their position by rocking the boat or moving away from the herd.

          So much for the Congress, but there’s a lesson from high school here for the President, too, I would submit.  I don’t glean this lesson from Meg Greenfield’s book, but from my own high-school teaching experience in the mid-60s.  But, more importantly and more immediately from the experience of my wife Brigitte, who has taught high-school here in Fairfax County for going on 39 years, virtually all of that time on a full-time basis and for the past year as a substitute.  (Did I mention that she was Fairfax County Teacher of the Year for 2009-2010?)

          One of the first thing you learn as a teacher – and hopefully before that as a parent  – is that you don’t keep telling students or your children how stupid or misguided they are, even if they are at the time.  All you do is breed resentment and resistance and get more of the status quo, in spades.  Instead, you try to treat them as if they were already where you and they, in their deeper selves, want them to be.  More often than not, they respond positively.  It’s not a sure-fire step to success, to be sure, but the opposite, the constant hectoring and belittlement is certainly a sure-fire formula for failure, I have found.

          What made think of this was the President’s press conference this week.  For more than an hour, he lectured and hectored and whined about Congress’s failure to meet its obligations.   On the facts, he’s absolutely right, of course.  It’s scandalous, if not seditious, now badly the members of Congress have performed as a body.  But, as a teacher and leader, the approach the President is taking strikes me as counterproductive.  It won’t help us get beyond the gridlock we’ve had for the past four years.  Somehow, the President, brilliant and cerebral as he is – and, ironically, contemptuous of the normal political give-and-take -- must get off his high horse, quit talking down to these people, suck it up, and find some place besides the Oval Office to sit down and schmooze with these fools – er, people.

          The President really needs to take a lesson from his Vice President and not just send the Vice President off to do the dirty work he doesn’t want to do himself.  You may remember Biden’s story he told about himself when he first came to Congress.  After listening to Senator Strom Thurmond, or one of the other long-term Senators, bloviate on the floor of the Senate, Biden turned to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and said something like:  How do you put up with fools like that?  Mansfield turned to him and said sharply:  Son, that Senator was elected to this body, just like you, and you have to figure out why and deal with it.  It’s a lesson he never forgot, Biden said.

          As a staunch supporter of the President, I love his intellect, his character, his family value, his life story, and so much more.  But, I fear he puts too much stock in logic and common sense.  Politics is a smarmy business, and its most adept practitioners know how to do it for the greater good without unduly sullying their basic values and integrity, as the movie “Lincoln” brilliantly illustrates.  So does Jon Meacham’s excellent new biography THOMAS JEFFERSON: The Art of Power.

            In so many spheres of life, appealing to logic and common sense gets us only part way there.  Let’s face it:  If common sense were all that common, we would have solved many, if not most, of these problems decades ago.

Jerry

           

 A CREED OUTWORN

"…Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." – Thomas Jefferson

This is an inscription on one of the panels at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.  Someone recently posted it on Facebook and it immediately snapped into focus a notion that has been rattling around in my head for some time now.  

Perhaps Jefferson’s insight has never been as immediately relevant today as 2^nd Amendment zealots thunder on about their right to own and use even semi-automatic assault weapons – despite what happened at Newton, Aurora, and Blacksburg, and countless other places.   

But slavish adherence to the past – including centuries old amendments, rules, and customs -- is not just the province of gun-rights advocates.  Look at what clinging to ancient rules and customs had done in the name of religion.  It would be easy to point fingers at the Middle East where Muslims are killing fellow Muslims in the name of doctrinal purity and orthodoxy.  But, Christians should not cut ourselves too much slack.  We have our own sad history and we don’t have to go back that far to see evidence of it.  

Even now when we are no longer beheading or burning our errant Christian co-religionists in the name of doctrinal orthodoxy, as we did in times past, the pernicious effects of rigid fundamentalism still play out regularly in local and national politics.  Opponents of gays and lesbians, for example -- using the Bible as a grab-bag -- can find Scriptural references supposedly showing God’s condemnation and rejection of such people.   Or why women should play a subservient role in society or in the Church.  Look at the stunning displays of such thinking we saw on parade in some of the campaigns for the House and the Senate this past year.  Or as we still see, for example, in the Vatican’s rigid opposition to allowing women full participation in the Catholic Church.

It is so deeply ironic that many of us “Christians” can cite the Scripture to dismiss or marginalize whole segments of society.  All this, of course, in the name of its Founder whose only commandment was for us to love and forgive one another.   Not just fellow Christians, He told us, but everyone regardless of who they are.   He called for a Big Tent where everyone was welcome and we gave Him rigid stone churches with big walls to keep people out.    

How did we get it so wrong?   For one thing, by adhering slavishly to the past and to a rigid literalism. By not understanding the cultural and literary context in which the various, often contradictory books of the Bible, were written.  And by whom they were written.  And when they were written.  The Bible is an important part of Judeo-Christian life and worship, to be sure.  But, what makes us think that God’s revelation stopped stone cold 2000-6000 years ago?  My late sister Mary – a Sister of Mercy for almost 60 years – used to ask:  Who is writing the Scripture of our time? 

           We are, of course, and we are writing it – not on scrolls or papyrus – but in the form of public policy, civil as well as ecclesiastical. Otherwise, we deserve what we get and render ourselves irrelevant, leaving our country and our churches at the mercy of the past and those current ecclesiastical and civil leaders who didn’t learn from its mistakes.

Jerry

                                         GUNS, TAXES, AND WOMEN

            Many of you have read Jared Diamond’s GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL of a few years back which won the Pulitzer Prize.  As you may recall, the author attempted to identify crucial factors that help explain why history progressed differently for peoples from various geographical regions.

 

For some reason, this title came to mind as I was sifting through prominent politically contentious issues that have dominated our public life over the past few months.  These include the fierce gun debate following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, taxes that were at the core of the political fight to avert the “fiscal cliff,” and the role that women’s rights played in the recent presidential campaign. 

I would argue that strong biases – for or against guns, taxes, and women – are rooted deep in our culture and history and help explain why our country has developed the way it has.  It also helps explain why we are still stuck politically, struggling with issues that common sense would argue we should have put to rest a long time ago. 

First, let’s turn to taxes and guns.  Just think of our American Revolution to help bring those two issues into sharper focus.  In 1773, we dumped tea into the Boston Harbor as a political protest against the “tax” policy of the British government and the East India Company that controlled all the tea imported into the colonies.  Then, when the British tried to quell this impertinent uprising, we “took up arms” and declared our independence. 

So resistance to taxes and reliance on the right to own guns are deeply imbedded in our history and culture from their very beginning.   Fast forward, raising income taxes, for example, didn’t take effect until the 16^th amendment was passed in 1913, just a hundred years ago.  And, with respect to guns and the right to bear arms which was enshrined in the 2^nd Amendment, the conservative Supreme Court in 1998 sunk those roots even deeper in our history when it ruled that the 2^nd Amendment applies to individual as well as state militias.  And now, course, we have gun advocates, supported by the NRA, one of the most influential and most well-financed lobbying groups in the country, arguing that even semi-automatic weapons fall under that right to bear arms and should not be outlawed. 

Now let’s turn to the women’s rights issue.   The front page of today’s Washington Post features a group photo of the 61 female members of the Democratic Caucus in the House of Representatives with an article titled “113th Congress Displays Its Diversity.”   Yet, the New York Times reports that the total number of female lawmakers in the new 113th Congress still only numbers “101 across both chambers, counting three nonvoting members.”   That comes to 20 in the 100-member Senate and 81 in the 535-member House of Representatives. 

Clearly, women’s representation in this new Congress is better than it was, but is it anything to celebrate?  Do the math:  With women constituting 51 percent of the population, does less than one-sixth of their representation in the Congress strike anyone as being fair and equitable?   

But, when you consider the historical prejudice against women’s rights and equality throughout the world – in civil and religious life going all the way back to Adam and Eve – it puts things in a different perspective.   Let’s not forget that women didn’t get the right to vote until 1918 and we had to amend the Constitution to make that possible.  And, despite gains in the public and private sectors, women still have glass ceilings to break through to achieve parity with men.  We have not achieved equality in the workplace, by any stretch of the imagination, despite high-profile appointments and promotions of women to high positions in the last few years. 

So, is there any hope in bringing common sense to issues so deeply entrenched in our history and culture?   Like so many national and international issues, there are no silver bullets, of course.  Otherwise, we might have solved the issues decades ago.  But, ironically, I think the beginning of an answer lies with the seemingly most intractable issue of the three:  increasing the rights and representation of women in our society, both in our churches and in our political life. 

I am not suggesting that women are THE answer to these problems, but I think they are an important and now missing part of the answer.  Let’s be honest: They bring special qualities to the table that we men simply do not possess.   I have no doubt, for example, that dealing with the gun problem would be further along if we had more women representatives in our national and state legislatures.  Nor do I doubt that we would have better, fairer tax laws if women had more of a say in crafting tax legislation.  

Pie in the sky, you might argue.  Maybe so.  But, I am not expecting this to happen any time soon and you shouldn’t hold your breath either.   Still, hope springs eternal.  It’s the only way to live.  As Emily Dickinson wrote: “Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul,/and sings the tune--without the words, /and never stops at all.”

 Happy New Year,

Jerry