You thought the swine flu was bad before. According to the BBC, it’s mutated:
There has been a small outbreak of “zombism” in London due to mutation of the H1N1 virus into new strain: H1Z1.
Similar to a scare originally found in Cambodia back in 2005, victims of a new strain of the swine flu virus H1N1 have been reported in London.
After death, this virus is able to restart the heart of it’s victim for up to two hours after the initial demise of the person where the individual behaves in extremely violent ways from what is believe to be a combination of brain damage and a chemical released into blood during “resurrection.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) has raised the alert to phase six, its highest level, and advised governments to activate pandemic contingency plans.
In Mexico, the epicentre of the outbreak, President Felipe Calderon urged people to stay at home over the next five days.
The World Health Organization has also made clear that there is no reason to panic over this new outbreak, since they have looked carefully at the source. So should you.
(Hat tip: Elliott Scott.)
I was not going to wade into the debate over torture presently going on at the “On Faith” column at the Washington Post, especially since there is so much dishonesty in the way this issue is argued. The definition of torture is assumed, and the practice then condemned without ever spelling out what one means by it. I heard recently that an al-Qaeda prisoner (who happened to be afraid of bugs) was recently subjected to having a caterpillar put in his cell as a way to get him to talk. I’m sorry, but I don’t think the Geneva Convention was written with that kind of silly stuff in mind.
Anyway, I was going to pass this by, but then my friend Hampton pointed me to the column by the ever-egregious Susan Thistlethwaite that is simply begging for a response. Thistlethwaite, who has never met an issue that wasn’t an excuse to slander Christian conservatives, doesn’t fail to meet expectations:
The more often you go to church, the more you approve of torture. This is a troubling finding of a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Shouldn’t it be the opposite? After all, who would Jesus torture? Since Jesus wouldn’t even let Peter use a sword and defend him from arrest, it would seem that those who follow Jesus would strenuously oppose the violence of torture. But, not so in America today.
Instead, more than half of people who attend worship at least once a week, or 54%, said that using torture on suspected terrorists was “often” or “sometimes” justified. White evangelical Protestants were the church-going group most likely to approve of torture. By contrast, those who are unaffiliated with a religious organization and didn’t attend worship were most opposed to torture — only 42% of those people approved of using torture.
I’m not sure whether Thistlethwaite’s problem is math, reading comprehension, or writing. But when I look at the same information she does, I get a different answer.
Thistlethwaite, for some strange reason, brackets out the “rarely justified” answer, presumably so she can make regular worshipers look bad. If you include the rarely column, what you get is that there is no statistically significant difference between those who attend worship regularly, periodically, and seldom or never (73%-74%-69%, with Pew indicating that the poll had a 4% margin of error). The differeces between the “often, ” sometimes,” and “rarely” categories are statistically significant, but that significance is undercut by the lack of a definition in the terms, which has to be filled in by the respondent. In addition, the word “torture” is also not defined in the question, meaning the respondent could hear the question as asking about anything from bamboo shoots under the fingernails and electric shock to the genitals to bright lights in the eyes and caterpillars in the cell. Given the way the public debate over the subject has gone, I would have to say that such an amorphous survey is of little use in actually understanding attitudes toward torture. (I should also mention the question while I’m at it: “Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?”)
Misreading a survey is one thing. Thistlethwaite takes this a lot further, however:
But I think it is possible, even likely, that this finding has a theological root. The UN Convention Against Torture defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person…” White Evangelical theology bases its view of Christian salvation on the severe pain and suffering undergone by Jesus in his flogging and crucifixion by the Romans. This is called the “penal theory of the atonement”–that is, the way Jesus paid for our sins is by this extreme torture inflicted on him.
For Christian conservatives, severe pain and suffering are central to their theology. This is very clear in the 2002 Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ. Evangelical Christians flocked to this movie, promoted it and still show it in their churches, despite the fact that it is R-rated for the extraordinary amount of violence in the film. It is, in fact, the highest grossing R-rated movie in the history of film. The flogging of Jesus by the Romans goes on for fully 40 minutes. It is truly the most violent film I have ever seen.
The message of the movie, and a message of a lot of conservative Christian theology, is that severe pain and suffering are not foreign to Christian faith, but central.
See where this is going? Evangelicals (apparently not Catholics or mainline Protestants who still take the confessions of their churches seriously, however) believe in the substitutionary atonement, which was achieved by Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. Evangelicals, thus, must approve of torture when it was inflicted on Christ. Therefore, evangelicals approve of waterboarding Khalil Sheik Mohammad. Maybe that’s the kind of leap in logic that Thistlethwaite makes in her own life, but most evangelicals are unlikely to see the connection.
Thistlethwaite seems to be under the impression that evangelicals went to The Passion of the Christ and cheered on the Romans. In fact, every reaction I’ve ever heard from a Christian of whatever persuasion was one of intense shock, grief, and guilt for the fact that Christ underwent that in our place, that such was what we deserved, but that out of an almost incomprehensible depth of love He took our place. The fact that Gibson’s rendering of the flogging of Jesus is not gratuitous, but historically accurate, just deepens the reaction to it. Given that Thistlethwaite has repeatedly demonstrated in her “On Faith” columns that she doesn’t actually know any evangelicals, and has no comprehension whatsoever of how we think, it isn’t really surprising that she doesn’t get this.
Frank Lockwood of Arkansas Online has done yeoman’s work in covering the consent process for the Buddhapalian bishop-elect Kevin Thew Forrester of the Episcopal Church’s Northern Michigan district. Lockwood has another piece out today that starts off with some striking quotes from both proponents (who are vague and rely on assertions about Thew Forrester’s state of mind) and opponents (who are specific about what they consider problematic). The end of the article offers a retired bishop’s perspective, one that says a lot about why the Episcopal Church has become such a laughingstock:
[R]etired Bishop of Eastern Oregon Rustin Kimsey says the church is diminished if it rejects nonconformist thinkers, including Thew Forrester, the late-Bishop of California James A. Pike and retired Bishop of Newark John Shelby Spong.
Spong is known for denying the divinity, virgin birth, bodily resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.
“I mean there are a lot of things that Jack Spong has said that I don’t agree with. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be a bishop, for heaven’s sake,” Kimsey said.
“I’m very dismayed by this [opposition] because I think it undercuts the basic genius of the Episcopal Church: to be bigger than we’re behaving right now, to be more buoyant and more understanding of other viewpoints and welcome them,” Kimsey said.
Spong rejects every historic Christian belief, but “that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be a bishop.” Presumably that means that if Thew Forrester also rejects those beliefs, or so completely reinterprets them that they no longer bear any relationship to what the church believes and teaches, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be a bishop, either. Hey, maybe the Episcopal Church should just go the whole hog and elect Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens a bishop. I mean, why should the church discriminate against potential leaders just because they happen to be atheists? Presumably it would also be in accord with what Kimsey thinks is the “basic genius” of the denomination, which is apparently to stand for absolutely nothing.
It looks at this point like Thew Forrester will not get the consents he needs to be seated in Northern Michigan. But the fact that he gets anyone to vote for him at all (at the moment, the bishops of Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Vermont, Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Western Michigan, Southwest Virginia, and San Joaquin are on record as having voted for him) says a lot about the mess that is the Episcopal Church today.
Michael Kessler of Georgetown University, writing in the “On Faith” column at the Washington Post, throws down a challenge to churches and other religious organizations that are seeking an exemption from the wave of same-sex marriage laws (and judicial decrees) that are coming down. He claims that no one has satisfactorily answered his concern, and so it seems only right that yours truly give it a shot. Kessler writes:
These religious exemptions are probably a good compromise position for the inevitable conflict between the basic moral goods of free exercise of religion and equal protection/access of the law. Persons like Miss [USA pageant contestant from California, Carrie] Prejean who do not want to provide flowers or psalms at a gay wedding would be able to privately bow out. Gay couples could still seek the protections of legal union. Whether that should be called “marriage” I am not advocating for or against.
However, the arguments for religious exemptions do seem to encounter one hurdle that I have yet to see surmounted. There are significant parallels between the movement for denying same sex unions under law, and laws that promoted and perpetuated racial discrimination. Just like some churches of today who preach about God’s will and the abomination of gay marriage, so too did some churches of yesterday discern God’s intention for separating the races and keeping the “inferior races” at bay.
That there are churches that supported racial separation, and opposed interracial marriage, is true enough, and entirely to their shame. That there are “significant parallels” between the two is another story.
The history of racism in America, and the support churches gave to it, is the story of a fall from grace. The racial categories that American Christians used to justify Jim Crow have little basis in reality, and were frequently based on pseudo-scientific theories (much like the eugenics that people like Margaret Sanger supported). Historically, the tradition of the church didn’t support the kind of racial separation, much less discrimination, that was advocated by many American Christians, and in fact the universal practice of the early church rejected efforts to separate people according to non-religious criteria. Peter’s vision (Acts 10) continued the process begun by Jesus of knocking down barriers between racial and ethnic groups, and that process was speeded by Paul in passages such as Ephesians 2:19-23 (where he proclaims the fall of the “middle wall of separation” between Jews and Gentiles) and Galatians 3:28 (where he declares that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek). Churches that supported racial discrimination did so in violation, not continuation, of their spiritual heritage, whereas the opposition to same sex marriage is predicated on opposition to homosexual behavior, opposition to which is unanimous in Scripture whenever the subject comes up, and which continued to be the universal position of the entire Christian church (Catholic, Orthodox, and all Protestant denominations) until the early 1970s.
And it is an obvious problem if you watch the National Organization for Marriage‘s new ad campaign. The much-parodied spot is called “A Gathering Storm.” It has an earnest if gloomy tone, and its aesthetic, as Stephen Colbert described it, is “like watching the 700 Club and the Weather Channel at the same time.”
According to the ad, a “rainbow coalition . . . coming together in love” is concerned that they are being required to accept gay marriage in their workplace, schools, and their daily public life. They do not want to be forced to accept something against their religious convictions. “Keep your gay unions away from me and my kids” is the gist of the ad. My guess is NOM would rather not have gay marriage at all, rather than accept it with the provision for religious exemptions.
Watch the advertisement and substitute the words “racial integration” in for “gay marriage” or “same sex marriage.” This exposes the thorny issue for religious exemptions.
The ad is, shall we say, a bit over the top in its staging, but the concern it voices is real and undisputed by Kessler. He is quite right that NOM would rather not have gay marriage at all, but it is also the case that if it becomes the law of the land, NOM (and, if I were guessing, a majority of Christians, orthodox Jews, and Muslims) would want there to be protections to prevent religious groups from having to go against conscience.
But here’s the real point: simply substituting the words “racial integration” for “gay marriage” makes no more sense in drawing a parallel than substituting “working women” or “equal pay for equal work” or “praying to Barack Obama.” You can substitute any words on any issue, and it tells you nothing about the stance of the people behind the ad or those who agree with it.
There are certainly some differences between judging people based on race, and judging people based on their sexual identity. However, in this instance, I am not convinced that those who call for religious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws have differentiated themselves from the parallels to racial discrimination. I would like to see advocates make that distinction more clear.
This is intellectual dishonesty at its most insidious. Kessler is essentially advancing the “when did you stop beating your wife?” argument, demanding that anti-gay marriage groups address a parallel that they would no doubt unanimously reject. Kessler has no evidence that any of the individuals or groups involved in opposing gay marriage ever supported Jim Crow, racial segregation, or interracial marriage laws (I know I didn’t–for pity’s sake, I’m in an interracial marriage); he simply asserts the parallel, and says that those who are opposed to the one have to answer for those who opposed the other. And as long as opponents of gay marriage have to keep saying, “I don’t think there’s any connection to interracial marriage, and I don’t oppose that,” people will be wondering why they keep bringing it up–maybe they really do oppose interracial marriage and are trying to throw us off the track?
Miss Prejean has every right to her convictions–and I applaud her for stating them. Going further and denying other people access to enjoyment of their fundamental privileges and immunities of citizenship because of her convictions is inappropriate.
Actually, it isn’t, and it happens all the time. For example, neither the First nor the Fourteenth Amendment mentions any restrictions whatsoever on freedom of speech. Yet that freedom is restricted in a number of ways that most of us would agree make sense in an ordered society (you can’t yell “fire!” in a crowded theater just for the fun of it, you can’t make, sell or possess child pornography, you can’t lie under oath in a court proceeding, etc.). For another, polygamy is prohibited, despite the religious sanction it receives in Islam and some forms of Mormonism. For yet another, people who are 17 years old on Election Day are denied the right to vote, even if they turn 18 the next day. The point is that there are restrictions on many of the “fundamental privileges and immunities of citizenship,” and the restriction of marriage to one man and one woman is one of them. You can certainly make a case for marriage to be extended to gays, but to suggest that opposition to doing so is nothing more than prejudice in action without constitutional basis ignores moral, philosophical, sociological, and historical arguments that may or may not be persuasive, but which certainly cannot be dismissed with proper refutation.
At the same time, those like Miss Prejean who do not want to participate in what they find repulsive because of their religious convictions should be able to enjoy the protection of that religious liberty.
Kessler had previously made reference to the KKK [sic--I think he was referring to Nazis] marching in heavily Jewish Skokie, Illinois as an example of protecting the rights even of people he finds reprehensible. It would seem that the majority of Americans who still oppose gay marriage fall in the same category.
