"Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity I am become as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal." - St. Paul
Time Magazine in its Evangelical Issue (2-7-05) describes Dr. James Dobson as The Culture Warrior. "The founder of the Focus on Family wants everyone to know that his sprawling campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is devoted to his radio program, publishing empire and maintaining his 2.5 million-strong e-mail list of supporters. While it may be true that only a sliver of the activities there are political, Dobson stepped down as president of the organization in May 2003 so that he could become involved in politics. Now he's not only advocating policies calling for a ban on gay marriage and restraint of the judiciary but also threatening to target democratic Senators at the polls if they don't vote the way he likes on President Bush's judicial nominations.
Maureen Dowd continues the Dobson biography in the Sunday New York Times (1-23-05) "It took James Dobson, the conservative Christian leader and gay marriage opponent, who claims the president's re-election was more a mandate on his ideas than George W. Bush's, to point out the insidious underside of the popular cartoon character Sponge Bob Square Pants.
"Holy Abe! Dr. Dobson outed Sponge Bob at a black tie inaugural fete last week for members of congress and political allies. He said that a 'pro-homosexual video'-- starring Sponge Bob, Barney, Jimmy Neutron, Winnie the Pooh, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy-was set to go to elementary schools to promote a 'tolerance pledge,' including tolerance of 'Sexual Identity.'
"What in the name of Davy Jones's locker would a sponge be doing holding hands with a starfish or donning purple and hot-pink garb if it weren't a perverted invertebrate?"
To further refine Dr. Dobson's biography, Miss Dowd recounted an interview of the "Good Doctor" by George Stephanopoulas in a column entitled "Slapping the Other Cheek"(11-14-04).
"Mr. Stephanopoulas asked Dr. Dobson about his comment to The Daily Oklahoman that 'Patrick Leahy is a 'God's people hater.' 'I don't know if he hates God, but he hates God's people,' noting that it was not a particularly Christian thing to say about the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. (Especially after that vulgar, un-Christian thing Dick Cheney spat at Mr. Leahy last summer.) 'George', Mr. Dobson haughtily snapped back, 'do you think you ought to lecture me on what a Christian is all about?' Why not? The TV host is the son of a Greek Orthodox priest."
"The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, 'God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust adulterers, or even as this Publican.'"
Ward Harkavy penned an article for www.westword.com in 1997 which dealt with a book written by an ex-Dobsonite, and former aide named Gil Alexander-Moegerle. Alexander-Moegerle produced Dr. Dobson's radio show and was his first "on-air side-kick" for a decade, as well as a board member and chief aide."
"One particular incident in November 1986 stands out to the ex-Dobsonite. It occurred during a discussion of pornography. Dobson was bemoaning the lack of hard evidence that pornography was dangerous. He reasoned that such research could be done but that most research scientists weren't interested. And this wasn't the only instance of liberal bias among scientists, he told his executives. Weren't black Americans the descendants of slaves, who were bred for physical strength? And didn't it make sense that blacks, while becoming physically superior, had become intellectually inferior? Research to prove that, he lamented, wouldn't be done because it smacked of racism. Just then Focus executive Rolf Zettersten told a joke about a black child who was asked to use the word "before" in a sentence and who responded, "Two plus two be-Fo!" Dobson and everybody howled with laughter, says Alexander-Moegerle.
"Toward women, Dobson had a similarly patronizing view, privately regarding himself as a protector of the naturally weaker sex and publicly declaring that feminism was the bane of Western civilization." Such sentiments put Dr. Dobson very much in league with other well known purveyors of Christian Charity as the Reverends Falwell and Robertson evidenced by the pair's notorious comments on 9-13-01:
"I really believe," said Falwell and seconded by Robertson, "that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way-all of them who have tried to secularize America-I point the finger in their face and say you helped to make this (9/11) happen."
I, on the other hand, can only paraphrase Miss Maudie Atkinson, Atticus Finch's erstwhile neighbor in "To Kill A Mockingbird" who opined that
The Bible in the hands of some men is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another. Somebody say, Amen!)
But wait! Just when it seemed that fraudulent fundamentalism would swamp us all, a voice of reason, elegant in its simplicity, truthfulness and strength emerges out of all places, Oklahoma City and the Mayflower Congregational Church. It is the voice of the Reverend Doctor Robin Meyers as he addressed the Oklahoma University Peace Rally on November 14, 2004.
"I am a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about what exactly constitutes a moral value. I mean what are we talking about? Because we don't get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are a people of faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and what is wrong, and moral is as moral does. Let me give you a few reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their side: When you start a war on false pretenses, and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God's will and that your critics are either unpatriotic of lacking in faith, there are some of us who have given our lives to teaching and preaching the faith who believe that this is not only not moral but immoral.
"When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to count them, you are doing something immoral. When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the gospel, which says that the way the strong treat the weak is the ultimate ethical test, by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us so the strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker, you are doing something immoral.
When you wink at the torture of prisoners and deprive enemy combatants of the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which your own country helped to establish and insist that other countries follow, you are doing something immoral.
"When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam, and then question the patriotism of someone who volunteered to fight, and came home a hero you are doing something immoral.
"When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out record numbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral. When you favor the death penalty, and yet claim to be a follower of Jesus, who said an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way of the kingdom, you are doing something immoral. When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect the earth which is God's gift to us all, so that the corporation that bought you and paid for your favors will make higher profits while our children breathe dirty air and live in a toxic world, you have done something immoral. The earth belongs to the Lord, not Halliburton."
The Reverend Peter Gomes, a professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University, provides a fitting coda to this essay: "History indicts those who in time of trouble and transition choose the past over the future."
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak approves elections with an actual opponent, claiming that a little more democracy would be good for his country.
Popular uprisings in Lebanon cause the fall of a pro-Syrian government, and the United States and France join in calling for an immediate withdrawal of all Syrian military and intelligence forces from Lebanon.
Palestinians are criticizing their own, denouncing bombings that have erupted since the election of the new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon has shown patience over those same incidents while continuing to press for elimination of settlements in the face of what could be bloody resistance by right-wing settlers.
Even the longtime anti-American Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt declared that the Iraq election Jan. 30 signaled “the start of a new Arab world. The Berlin Wall has fallen.”
Past weeks would suggest that President Bush and his advisers rolled the dice on the game board of the Middle East and came up winners. The language of freedom and democracy is on the table.
This is the Middle East, however, and as we all know one good week does not a road map or a treaty or a democracy make.
In Iraq, those opposing the U.S. presence and the results of the elections continue to display an uncanny ability to disrupt any progress toward a reliable security infrastructure.
That the insurgency can find groups of volunteers in one place at various stages of applying for or engaging in security training suggests several distressing realities. First, the insurgency is informed, able to assemble massive car bombs and determined to disrupt progress; and second, the economic situation in Iraq is desperate enough that young recruits are willing to place their lives in jeopardy.
However, beyond the quickly evident factors that mitigate against a cry of victory, there are other more significant questions that continue to loom over both the Iraq misadventure and the U.S. war against terrorism.
For unless we are willing to concede that any means justify what we perceive to be good ends, then we have to recognize that we are going through a period of history that endangers the nation’s soul.
The United States walked away from the rest of the world and fabricated reasons for invading a sovereign country.
The United States embraced a doctrine of preemptive strike that sets a new precedent for going to war.
The United States permitted torture in the prison at Guantánamo, and our civilian and military officials took months to react to reports of torture at Abu Ghraib and then only acted after photos became public.
The United States exported prisoners to countries where it was known torture is a common technique used by interrogators.
Inside the White House, a man who would eventually become the country’s chief lawmaker found justification for defying the Geneva Conventions.
In the atmosphere of legal permissiveness that has attended the ill-defined war on terror, the United States has allowed the CIA to confine people in secret prisons around the globe and at home maintains the right to hold prisoners without charges, without trial, and without resort to counsel.
Those who herald two weeks of hopeful news in the Middle East as vindication of policies that attack the very essence of America’s existence are shortsighted at best.
Robert Bolt, in his play A Man for All Seasons, has a highly indignant and moralistic son-in-law Roper challenging Thomas More to ignore the law to get at a higher principle.
“What would you do?” asks More. “Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
“I’d cut down every law in England to do that!” answers young Roper.
“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”
We’ve taken out a great deal of regal old growth in our legal forest to get at the devil in Baghdad. What takes his place, elections aside, is still anyone’s guess. It remains anyone’s guess, too, on where we’ll find protection amid the laws flattened in pursuit of intemperate ambitions and short-term gain.
(COMTEX) B: Prisoners' Group Gives Teen Scholarship ( AP Online )
GREENSBORO, N.C., Jun 07, 2005 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- A college student whose younger sister was murdered more than a decade ago was presented Tuesday with a scholarship from an unlikely source - death row inmates from around the country.
Zach Osborne was only 6 years old, and his sister, Natalie, was 4 when she was raped and murdered in 1992. Their mother's boyfriend, Jeff Kandies, is on North Carolina's death row for the crime.
On Tuesday, Osborne, 19, received a $5,000 college scholarship from the group of inmates who solicited money through their bimonthly publication "Compassion." Including Osborne's grant, they have given out seven scholarships worth about $27,000.
"We would like to support him in realizing his dream of becoming an officer of the law and finding a way to prevent future violence," wrote Dennis Skillicorn, a death row inmate in Missouri who is the newsletter's editor, in the May issue. "Our intent is genuine."
Osborne is studying at East Carolina University, where he will be a sophomore this fall. His father and grandparents attended Tuesday's scholarship ceremony along with a half brother and half sister who are the children of Kandies and Osborne's mother, who did not attend. The family would not identify the children but said they remain close to Osborne's family.
Stephen Dear, executive director of the Carrboro-based People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, presented the scholarship. The death of his sister will help Osborne empathize with crime victims, Dear said.
"He has a wisdom beyond his years, gained the hardest way - a wisdom that victims need healing and that victims can come to forgive even those who have caused the greatest pain," Dear said before the ceremony. "For a police officer to have that kind of view is a great gift to the community and to the police force."
Osborne agreed that the memory of the murder will make him a better officer, saying it will "motivate me more to solve cases or to put more effort in them. It will motivate me to try to prevent events like what happened to my family from happening to others."
Death row prisoners contribute artwork, essays and poetry to "Compassion," a project of the Roman Catholic Church's peace and justice committee. It carries no accounts on individual cases or complaints about prison life, focusing instead on what it calls the "positive contributions of death row inmates."
Money from subscriptions pay for publishing and funds the scholarships. To win his, Osborne wrote an essay about the crime and the effect it had on him and his family.
"Natalie's death has haunted my family since the day she was found," he wrote. "After many long years of wasted fury, I have finally been able to forgive Jeff for his crime against my family."
Among the others who have received a scholarship is Brandon Biggs, whose father was hit by a car in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2001. His father was stuck in the windshield, and left to die despite his pleas for help.
Kandies is moving closer to an execution date, said Matt Stiegler, an attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham. He has no more legal challenges in state court and one pending with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Osborne said that even though he's forgiven Kandies, execution is only fair.
"Justice has to be served," he said. "He's committed a crime, and that was decided to be the sentence."
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