Archive for January, 2004

Bush’s base is not gruntled

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 16, 2004
in Money, People and Politics
. Closed

The Flying Monkey gets the hat tip for this story, in the (Moonie-run) Washington Times, indicating that Bush’s stance on immigration is hurting him among staunch conservatives on the fundraising trail:

Phil Kent, a member of the host committee for a Bush fund-raiser in Atlanta yesterday, said he was told by several would-be donors that they would not attend the $2,000-per-person event because of the president’s announcement last week on immigration reform.
“I was soliciting checks right after the announcement, and I lost two checks from people who had wanted to come, but wouldn’t,” Mr. Kent said. “They specifically said this is just rewarding lawbreakers.
“That was the constant theme,” he added. “And even among some people who wrote the checks, there’s grumbling.”

Goody!

Instincts

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 16, 2004
in Faith, Music and Stuff
. 5 Comments

So, I read a LOT of blogs (only a few have been added to my little blogroll), and something I read just grabbed me. This week, Ginger at Candied Ginger made a brave move to commit to buying her house with her boyfriend. (Read her whole entry, it’s candid and moving). Several of us commented in the comments section beneath the post, and this comment by Tiffany struck me:

I’m sure you are doing the right thing if you go by your gut–instincts don’t lie.

And I have been thinking about that all morning. I was thinking about how often I hear people in our society say exactly what Tiffany said, and how secular society — and many believers — make the assumption that our “gut” is alway right, and our “instincts” never lie. I honor the fact that many people believe in these assumptions, but like many folks who have been a bit battle-scarred from marriages, divorces, and other poor decisions, I have learned one thing: my instincts frequently lie to me. Now, this just may be me, but I have been “surer than sure” about so many things in my 36 years, only to find out that I was “wronger than wrong.” The fact that instincts frequently lie does not mean they do not also sometimes tell the truth; I believe passionately that the instincts that brought my current gal and me together were the right ones — and time (above all else) is proving that true.

Along the lines of this discussion, one obscure Christian rock group I like is the Paul Colman Trio (PC3 to their fans); one of their songs, “Run”, has this short line that always sticks in my head:

They say just follow your heart/
but what if it lies?

You would never hear a secular Top 40 singer sing THAT. Our popular culture is deeply invested in the notion that our desires are invariably good and right. In my favorite novel of the last half-decade, J.M. Coetzee’s Booker-Prize winning “Disgrace”, his protagonist (a literature prof who has affairs with his much-younger female students) says defiantly: “I rest my case on the gods of desire”. And though Coetzee is wise enough to expose how bankrupt and appalling that worldview is, our culture itself invariably touts the infallibility of the “gods of desire” (whose internalized Mt. Olympus, depending upon whom you are talking to, is to be found in the heart, the gut, or lower still).

So I am happy for Ginger. Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think Tiffany is wrong. And I do know that sometimes, even my tired heart is right, that even my gut is trustworthy. But I also know too damned well that I need more than my heart and more than my gut to guide me…

Bush disappoints the base again…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 15, 2004
in Christianity, GLBTQ, Marriage, People and Politics
. 1 Comment

Thanks to the splendid blog The Right Christians, I found this New York Times story that I had missed: “Bush’s Push for Marriage Falls Short for Conservatives”.

I liked this bit:

Some major conservative Christian groups said yesterday that they were pleased but not satisfied by a new White House initiative to promote marriage, and they stepped up pressure on President Bush to champion a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage in his State of the Union speech next week.

“This is like lobbing a snowball at a forest fire,” said Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women of America, one of the largest conservative Christian advocacy groups. “This administration is dancing dangerously around the issue of homosexual marriage.”

Thanks, Sandy. Now I have a great mental image of W riskily prancing close to a raging inferno, merrily lobbing snowballs into the flames…

But the article gets more interesting. Grover Norquist, the infamous conservative strategist, suggests that gays are too important a Bush constituency for the president to consider supporting an anti-same-sex marriage amendment:

There are also gay Republicans to consider. About a million of them, or a quarter of the 4 percent of voters who identify themselves as gay, turned out for President Bush in the last election, Mr. Norquist said, citing polls of those who had cast votes.

I have a gay activist friend who calls gay Republicans “walking oxymorons,no better than Jewish Nazis.” If Norquist is right, the fact that so many gay men and lesbians are Bush voters may be a key tool in the fight for marriage equality for all.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 15, 2004
in Links, People and Politics
. Closed

nose2nose.jpg

Yes, this is from the Kucinich website. And yes, I am voting for him.

Madness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 15, 2004
in Abortion, Addiction and mental illness, Aggression and violence, Blogging, Capital punishment, Feminism and Money
. Closed

In an unusually cruel and heart-rending fashion, Ohio executed a mentally retarded inmate named Lewis Williams yesterday morning, in front of his sobbing mother. The appalling and upsetting CNN story is here.

In related news, my beloved Feminists for Life has revamped their website. As part of that revamping, they have removed any mention of their historic anti-capital punishment position. While the original FFLA was part of a consistent-life, seamless garment approach to violence and killing, it has begun to focus exclusively on abortion. Though I understand why, I always grieve when the “life” issue is framed so narrowly. I may pull my financial support (I am a monthly donor), and give it instead to an organization that does not prioritize its opposition to the taking of human life, such as the small but fine Consistent Life Network or Common Ground for Life.

Salad days for church lawyers

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 14, 2004
in Christianity, GLBTQ, Marriage, Relationships and Sexuality
. 2 Comments

The Episcopal Church USA moves one step closer to open schism, reports the Washington Post today. This part caught my eye:

(For conservatives troubled by the consecration of Gene Robinson), the “ultimate goal.. is a replacement jurisdiction . . . closely aligned with the majority of world Anglicanism.” A spokesperson for conservative Episcopalians said that means traditionalists hope their network of parishes will supplant the Episcopal Church USA as the recognized Anglican offshoot in the United States.

Sigh.

And on a closely related subject, here is a letter from Rev. William J. Fleener, an Episcopal priest for almost half a century, written to conservative theologian and blogger Kendall Harmon. It’s a terrific meditation on marriage, gender, and sexuality, and I agree with almost everything Fleener says. Here are a couple of gems:

I don’t think any Christian theologian invented the phrase, “and they both lived happily ever after.” At least I hope not. That phrase is a lie now. Maybe when marriages were entered into with few expectations, most marriage relationships looked about the same after 22 years as they had looked after 22 days. Maybe for some that worked. The history of concubinage and adultery tells me that for many that didn’t work. For that I now thank God! No, I don’t laud concubinage and adultery, but I see in those processes a deep reality that I believe to be the will of God.

Human relationships cannot be “stable” - a word that used to be one of the highest compliments that could be used to describe a marriage. I know what a stable smells like! Stables smell that way because there is decay going on there. Human relationships that are not growing are already in decay. They may not be giving off noticeable odors yet, but they are in decay.

Good stuff! And then this:

Our “theology” (if it deserves that word!) of homosexuality has been “traditionally” based on a set of stereotypes. We have assumed that one of the members of the gay or lesbian couple took the male-dominant-initiating role and the other took the female-subservient-receiving role.

Those of us who have observed healthy gay and lesbian relationships know the stereotypes are no more true there than in healthy, growing heterosexual relationships. A deep complementarity is present in wholesome same-sex and in wholesome opposite-sex relationships, and the very health of the relationships is found in the processes by which each party learns from the other’s strengths and deepens personal growth in those complementary areas of life, not in a “stability,” whereby either party stays the half-developed person he or she was on entry into the relationship.

Look, I’ve been divorced more than once. I’ve long since “given up my seat in judgment city”, as they say. But Fleener — who has been married to the same woman for 43 years — really, really, really gets it.

San Francisco leads the way

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 14, 2004
in Money and Politics
. Closed

Mark Leno, San Francisco assemblyman, proposes an SF-only reinstatement of the California vehicle license fee cut by Gov. Schwarzenegger. The article is in the Chronicle, and Leno makes good sense:

As Leno sees it, the rollback — which was cheered from Encino to Eureka — has left the city with a $100 million hole in its budget for parks, clean streets, libraries and health programs that San Franciscans are so fond of.

“Look, we paid the fee — which is 2 percent of the value of the car — from 1948 to 1998 without a word of debate or contention,” said Leno, D-San Francisco. He pointed out that the rollback was meant to last only as long as the state enjoyed good times.

Actually, I would like to see an optional box on the DMV registration form to allow those of us who would like to pay the full 2% to do so (and, of course, write it off on our income taxes). The extra money collected would stay in the county in which the contributor lived, which would give folks more of an incentive, knowing that the money they gave would stay local. I would be the first to give the full amount, and have already committed my anticipated refund to local charities.

Where is Timmy?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 13, 2004
in Blogging, Links and Politics
. Closed

Bob at The Corner, whose site inspired me to move to Typepad, has this bit of political humor with which I finish the blogging day..

More Immigration

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 13, 2004
in Money, Politics and Working
. 1 Comment

One of the better conservative Christian magazines is World, edited by the formidable Marvin Olasky. Here’s a post from the magazine’s blog on undocumented aliens, and it seems to indicate that at least some Christian conservatives are open to a moderate stance on immigration:

Readers in Des Moines may not be faced with illegal immigrants every day, but the fact is, no matter where you live, your life is somehow improved by the 7 to 10 million foreigners working here illegally: Your strawberries were picked by Mexicans, your Starbucks was built by Nicaraguans, your shirt was starched by Chinese. Those are jobs Americans, by and large, don’t want because they’re too menial or low-paying. Unemployment benefits and welfare programs afford us the luxury of being picky (some would say lazy). So, when President Bush proposes to grant three-year temporary work visas to illegal immigrants already in this country, isn’t he merely recognizing an economic reality that many would rather ignore? No, we don’t want to encourage more illegal immigration, but we can’t realistically expect to deport millions of illegals already here, already contributing to our quality of life.
It seems to me the right response would be to apply Jesus’s words to the woman taken in adultery: “Go, and sin no more.” Bush’s immigration plan would say to illegal aliens, “Go on with the jobs you’re doing. But register with us instead of trying to hide. Pay your taxes instead of working for cash. Get your license instead of driving illegally.”

There’s an interesting debate going on below the post as well.

The problem with fees

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 13, 2004
in Class, Money, Politics and Teaching
. 5 Comments

While Schwarzenegger’s actual budget for California Community Colleges is not bad, his plan to raise fees 40% (from $18 to $26 per unit) strikes me as nothing more than a regressive tax on a particularly vulnerable group. I had several students drop my class last semester, unable to pay last year’s increase in fees from $11 to $18 per unit. For those of us in the comfortable middle-class, these numbers seem so small — for my students, these numbers are the difference between success and despair.

The Times this morning reports that John Burton called Arnold’s budget plan “unworthy”:

Burton emphasized that a higher income tax paid by wealthy Californians would be a logical place to raise new revenue to stave off some of the proposed cuts. An increase in the income tax on top earners is one that has been put in place temporarily by Republican governors in the past.

“We have people making half a million a year after deductions, taxable income,” Burton said. “That’s a fair amount of money. If you have to come up with another two, three, four hundred dollars, you can afford it. Basically what people would be paying for is a just society.”

As Christians of all political stripes are fond of saying, budgets are moral documents.

Starting over

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 13, 2004
in Blogging
. Closed

Well folks, I’ve left Blogspot for my new home here at Typepad. The old site will stay up for archived purposes indefinitely.