American Madrassas

In reading through the transcript of Barack Obama’s speech on race this week I was struck by what he didn’t say. He didn’t say that we have an opportunity to improve race relations in this country and we could start by toning down the rhetoric. He didn’t say that it’s time to rethink the Black Liberation Theology developed forty years ago to provide a moral basis for the black power movement. Maybe I’m the only one but I see parallels with the hate speech being spewed from so many Muslim pulpits around the world, and in the attitudes of American Muslims toward that speech. Ok, blacks haven’t made a habit of going around blowing things up, at least not lately, but that is how the movement got started. If we’re not careful that’s where it could go again. Liberation Theology in all its forms has tended to do just that. Obama has said before that he didn’t see anything particularly controversial about his church. I think that’s probably true. Liberation Theology is main stream in black circles. Its two most distinguished academics teach at very well known divinity schools, Dwight Hopkins at the University of Chicago, and James Cone at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. Most Christians might have a hard time reconciling the Beatitudes with the fiery sermons of Jeremiah Wright but many blacks hear it every Sunday. It has become part of the culture. We get intemperate remarks from the Christian right too, but I don’t hear it in my church. We’ll all be better off when Barack Obama’s daughters stop hearing it in theirs. It will be a better world when blacks, whites, Muslims, Christians, Jews and everybody else learn to keep the discourse civil, in public and in private. Senator Obama attempts to explain the attitudes of many black people in the context of a familiar litany of racial injustice. But those attitudes are shaped too by growing up with an unceasing drumbeat of oratory blaming all social ills on a bigoted society, just as many Muslim attitudes are shaped by a never ending tirade against the Great Satan. It doesn’t help black people get along better with whites any more than it helps Muslims get along with their neighbors. Obama has learned better than most how to speak in polite society. But as long as he and others tolerate and explain away hate speech from the broader black community the underlying attitudes won’t change and will be an obstacle to real progress. They don’t even understand how offensive it is. American Muslims have a similar problem. Many of them don’t see much wrong with the rhetoric of their co-religionists, or see it as understandable in context, or don’t think it has any bearing on them. They are wrong. It taints them all I am irreconcilably opposed to abortion but when someone vandalizes an abortion clinic I must speak out against it if I am to support a rule of law. When a Christian denounces Islam I cannot expect Muslims to distinguish the speaker from me. When a white supremist burns a cross in a black churchyard I can’t simply look the other way, not if I expect the black community to have a high opinion of me. And when Barack Obama’s pastor makes unpatriotic remarks Obama can’t just say he wasn’t at church that Sunday. Don’t tell me the comment was taken out of context. What context am I to put it in? Don’t tell me I can’t judge Jeremiah Wright by a single sound bite. I don’t. I looked at his church’s web site. It is not the web site of a patriot, of a peace maker, or of any Christianity that I recognize. It is the web site of a Black Liberationist. It is separatist, designed for the consumption of blacks who see themselves as a community apart. It is not what I would expect to see from the church of a serious presidential candidate.

Obama and Liberation Theology

I don’t think the controversy is going away over unorthodox doctrine at TUCC, Barack Obama’s church. There is too much there and it evokes too many images of the days when black activism erupted into violence. Yesterday ABC News reported that it had purchased and reviewed copies of past sermons from the pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. They found some pretty intemperate remarks, the most scandalous being that blacks should not sing God Bless America but “God Damn America.” A close second was his contention that the US was responsible for 9/11. Fox News thinks Rev. Wright’s political endorsement from the pulpit may violate tax laws. Obama has been defending himself with Jewish voters but Rev. Wright also has close ties to Louis Farrakhan who is openly racist and famously anti-Semitic. You are known by your friends and some of Obama’s friends are not people a serious presidential candidate should be close to. Rev. Wright’s comments and associations are entirely consistent with his status as a prominent black liberationist. Black Liberation Theology is central to the TUCC vision. I think it might be helpful to recount a little history. Liberation Theology became popular among Catholic Priests in Latin America shortly after Vatican II. They wanted to be social justice activists. Tactics often turned to violence and they became associated with revolutionary movements, some of which ended up oppressing those it was supposed to champion. In 1984 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a classic polemic on the subject, concluding among other things “it constitutes a fundamental threat to the faith of the Church.” It is at root Marxist: everything is expressed in terms of class struggle. Sin and redemption are replaced with oppression and liberation. All reality is political. Any personal relationship with God is secondary. Vatican opposition tended to dampen but not extinguish Catholic enthusiasm. By the time Ratzinger wrote the basic ideas had spread around the world. In the US two Jesuit priests, brothers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, had become famous for civil disobedience, spending time in and out of jail for petty acts of trespass and vandalism, something the church had never seen before. Ratzinger pointed out that “no error could persist unless it contained an element of truth” and the strident rhetoric of the liberationists was and is certainly persistent. His issue was not with the causes the protestors espoused. It was in the absence of introspection, the imputation onto God of the political goals and prejudices being advanced, and the abandonment of traditional church teaching and authority, something dear to the heart of Catholic Bishops. Black Liberation Theology as it is known in the US was founded by James Cone, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Cone’s theology is designed to appeal specifically to blacks. He developed his work in the context of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s as promoted by Stokely Carmichael and others. The rhetoric remains consistently strident, revolutionary, anti-American and racist. Dr. Wright has been preaching it as pastor at TUCC since 1972 with phenomenal success. His congregation has grown from fewer than 100 to more than 10000. He hasn’t mellowed. Which brings me back to Sen. Obama. I don’t see how he distances himself from this. He’s been going to this church for decades. He describes Rev. Wright as his spiritual mentor. He doesn’t see his church as particularly controversial, but his message is one of hope and national reconciliation. This message is one of divisiveness and confrontation. I’m no political analyst but I see a problem here for Democrats.

Recrudescence

I know. I had to look it up too. The word means to break out afresh or into renewed activity. I came across it yesterday in an op-ed piece claiming the surge has failed in Iraq and the war is still lost. The piece is loaded with sarcasm. That’s usually enough to make me stop reading but it’s been a while since I saw a piece quite that cynical so I read on. The writer cites several incidents over the past week as evidence that Iraq has again collapsed into chaos and the situation is hopeless. The point was so at odds with my own perception that I decided to look a little further. It’s easy to do. The pentagon is required by law to send quarterly reports to congress on Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq. The latest one is just out covering December through February. It is dry reading with no sarcasm but it is a methodical assessment of what’s happened lately on political reconciliation, infrastructure (water, power, etc.) the economy, level of violence, and so on. It’s a good source for anyone who wants a feel for the situation beyond what can be gotten from the nightly news. Iraq is still a violent place, a lot less so than at this time last year but a long way from an attractive vacation spot. They can’t keep the lights on 24 hours a day across most of the country and it will be years before they can. The economy is growing but from a dismal base. They desperately need foreign investment in the oil fields but no business man in his right mind would risk that kind on money until things get a lot more stable. Health care is in crisis in part because half the country’s doctors have left. Iran has promised to stop training and arming militants but they keep on doing just that. The government has made some progress on critical legislation but not nearly enough. The process is stalled on several fronts. What gains have been made are fragile and could be lost in a flash. There is a great deal more work to be done before anybody declares victory. That’s all there in the report. They aren’t painting a rosy picture. The picture isn’t all that bleak though. Conditions are difficult, not impossible, and far from the mayhem so many pundits describe. The surge was designed to allow coalition and Iraqi troops and police to establish a joint presence among the people and provide security and that is working. The Awakening that began last year in Anbar province has spread, now numbering 91000. Renamed Sons of Iraq it has been a big help despite realistic concerns about what happens next with all those volunteers. Children are in school. Politicians are slowly sorting through their differences. Government ministries are becoming more competent, less corrupt. Al Qaeda in Iraq is still active but under serious pressure with severely restricted capability. The Iraqi army is growing stronger and so are the police. The improvements we’ve seen since last summer may be fragile but they are real and they are progressing. General Petraeus is expected to recommend a moratorium on troop withdrawals once they reach the level they were at before the surge began. That’s probably best. The last thing we should want is to pull out so quickly Iraq collapses into the sort of chaos that brought the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. That’s looking less and less likely to happen. Even if Barack Obama becomes president and orders a mad rush for the exits, by that time internal Iraqi security forces may be strong enough to maintain order on their own. Frankly I doubt he’d really do it. A scene reminiscent of the Saigon embassy evacuation would be an enormous boost for Muslim extremists around the world and probably make him a one term president. He wouldn’t want that.

Humpty Dumpty Elections

We don’t do this in general elections for a reason. Some mistakes can’t be undone. In the 2000 presidential election most media outlets declared a winner in Florida with polls still open in panhandle counties. They were wrong, heaven knows how many panhandle voters stayed home thinking their votes wouldn’t count, and the country was thrown into a constitutional crisis. Nobody suggested reopening the affected polls. A vote is a vote, even a decision not to cast one. Now people are suggesting new primaries in Florida and Michigan because of the Democratic National Committee’s blunder in disenfranchising those voters in a dispute over election dates. It’s too late. The votes have been cast. Candidates made their beds when they decided whether to campaign or not. It may turn out to be the best thing that has happened to our nominating process in the past half century. If the party begins its convention with neither candidate having enough committed delegates to win on the first ballot they could begin the rough and tumble of negotiation and compromise that representative democracy is supposed to be all about. It would be the first time since most of us can remember that every state in the union got its fair say. It wouldn’t be pretty. It never was, but it served us well for most of our history. It’s how presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Dwight Eisenhower won their party’s nominations. The system we’ve been using in recent decades can hardly be described as democratic. This is the first time Texas and most other states have had any say in either party’s choice of nominees since the 1960s when we adopted this system of staggered state primaries. It’s no way to run a democracy. The only way to do this fairly is with a single national primary date. There is no other way to ensure every vote counts. With any luck multiple candidates will win enough delegates to either force a runoff or send it to the convention depending on party choice. My preference would be the latter. We can send a delegation to represent our interests, just like we send one to congress. If our first choice is also the front runner after the first ballot they can try to convince other delegations to switch. If not they will be in a strong negotiating position. More than one favorite son has used influence for a state’s benefit. We haven’t had a dark horse since Wendell Willkie lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 but at least four became president, including Lincoln. I’m dating myself by even using those terms in this context but there is nothing undemocratic about either one. It’s how representative democracy works, and among the reasons reason why it works. Direct popular election isn’t always the best solution. Sometimes it malfunctions. I would submit that our current system is not one of popular election. Nor does it necessarily have to be. We don’t elect our congressional leadership directly. We don’t elect federal judges at all. I don’t think we ought to be electing state judges. It’s too late to salvage this year’s process but maybe the mess democrats have made for themselves has a silver lining. Maybe we will finally reconsider a really bad idea after all these years. You can’t blame Florida or Michigan for wanting a voice. We can question how the nation’s interest is best served by having the same handful of states make the critical decision every four years, leaving the rest of us to pick from the only two options they leave us. We can certainly argue that it’s not in Texas’ best interest. When our delegations get to their respective conventions we should expect them to say so, loudly and clearly. If they don’t we ought to remember that in the next party caucus.

Vaccines, Autism and Common Sense

For years now parents of children with autism have been pleading with the medical community to reconsider its approach to the childhood immunization program. That community has steadfastly refused even to be careful. Pregnant women who wouldn’t dream of having a glass of wine or eating certain kinds of fish are routinely given flu vaccines, often containing mercury preservatives. Tiny babies are vaccinated before they even go home from the nursery ward. Multiple simultaneous vaccinations are the norm. The Center for Disease Control recommends a total of sixteen between ages 6 and 18 months Doctors insist there is no evidence they do any harm but there is ample evidence there for anyone who cares to look. Starting about twenty years ago the number of recommended vaccines increased dramatically right along with a corresponding increase in reported incidence of autism. Many, maybe most, children with autism also have immune system issues. It’s not proof positive. Nobody really knows whether there is a causal relationship but if this were a murder case a smart prosecutor could probably get the death penalty on less evidence. Silicon breast implants were banned on less. Why can’t we at least take a serious look at the vaccines, and be a little more measured in our use of them until we know more about any possible link with autism? Last week the news was of federal officials conceding for the first time that vaccines may indeed have contributed to one little girl’s autism. Courts have ordered compensation in a few past cases but this is apparently the first time responsible officials have acknowledged even a possible link. A spokesperson for the CDC says it’s an isolated case with no implications for the vast majority of children. My youngest grandchild has autism and I can tell you his parents are not reassured. We think we probably have some sort of family genetic vulnerability that one or more of Weston’s vaccinations may have triggered or aggravated, not unlike circumstances in the case now in the news. It would sure be nice to know. Every year or so the CDC raises its estimate of the number of children affected. It’s now at about 1 in 150. That’s a lot of autism. Most of us don’t advocate a halt to immunizations. We just want the medical and scientific communities to take our concerns seriously, and to take a few common sense precautions. Something is causing this and we’d like to know what it is. We know the vaccines are important for public health but doctors are taking a cavalier attitude toward an obvious risk. There are several things they could do that would make me feel better starting with a serious investigation. Don’t tell me all the studies point to no link. I’ve looked. There haven’t been any serious studies. Most of the research goes into genetics and ignores any possible environmental factor, especially vaccines. We could also be a little more sparing in our use of vaccines. Space them out. Sixteen in one year is too many. More than one at a time is too many. Give their little immune systems a chance to recover. Don’t immunize children who aren’t at risk for the targeted disease. There is no reason to vaccinate every child for diseases they are very unlikely to be exposed to. And for heavens sake stop injecting these little bodies with mercury. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. We’ve known for years now that we have a problem, and that much of the available evidence points to the vaccines. It’s gotten a lot of publicity but the response from the people responsible has been mostly foot dragging and denial. Maybe we ought to put somebody else in charge.