Civil Commotion

Feel-the-love department

The Muslims get even for their massacre by Christians in January.

The killers showed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, “Jesus said I am the way to heaven.” As the grave filled, the grieving crowd sang: “Jesus, show me the way.”

At least 200 people, most of them Christians, were slaughtered …

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The horrific violence comes after sectarian killings in this region in January left more than 300 dead, most of them Muslim. Some victims were shoved into sewer pits and communal wells.

Seriously, the only route to peace is laughing in the Holy Mens’ faces.

An Eisenhower for our time

Here in what Gore Vidal once so aptly called the United States of Amnesia, we tend to forget who it was that shaped the last half of the American Century: Dwight David Eisenhower.

He is the general who smashed nazism in the ’40s, then came home and, as president …

• Launched the interstate highway system, emulating the autobahn he so admired as a young infantry officer in World War I. A transformed, mobile, more vigorous and vastly wealthier country was the result.

• Recalling the crude computers of Bletchley Park and their heroic contributions to cracking the German Enigma cipher, he insisted upon funding the research that laid the groundwork for America’s preeminence in computers and software.

• He started our space program and, to his immeasurable credit and against immense political pressure in a time when the very impetus for the space program was fear of the Soviets, insisted it be placed under civilian control.

I remark all that because, slightly more than one year into the Obama presidency, a year marked by all-out foaming-at-the-mouth dementia on the part of a so-called conservative party that is in fact radical in its prescriptions and in many respects intensely hostile to American ideals, Obama seems to me like nothing so much as an Eisenhower Republican.

The details are different, but the likenesses cannot be denied.

For starters, Obama is as cold-blooded about hunting down and killing our enemies as any president in memory. At the rate that Taliban are being killed, and al Qaeda leadership being killed, you’d think Uncle Sam was paying a bounty for scalps. He is condemned for seeking accommodation with the Muslim world wherever possible; Eisenhower smacked-down the French and British plan to seize the Suez Canal and got nothing but grief from his right.

Second, he displays the same sort of forward-looking realism that distinguished Eisenhower. Health-care and insurance reform are not, as the oddities now known as ‘conservatives’ like to insist, the Utopian fantasy of America-hating Marxists and anarchists with sticks of dynamite tucked in their coat pockets; they are, to the contrary, an indispensable component of protecting this nation’s future. There is no possible end but national bankruptcy if we won’t prepare for the huge slug of retirees about to begin showing-up in hospital emergency rooms with chest pains and worse.

The curtain is going down on the carbon era and, as Eisenhower did in computers and space, Obama is looking for ways to reposition the nation for the world that is going to be here a decade from now, and 25-years from now. He is right to do that; it’s what a national, genuine-article leader ought to be doing.

Millions of discharged servicemen came home to an economy lopsidedly devoted to war production and abruptly idled by the end of hostilities. The retrenchment of America’s manufacturing base needed years and Eisenhower entered office with a transforming and uncertain economy still finding its feet and re-creating itself to meet the needs of rapidly expanding global trade.

The demagogue Joe McCarthy found followers unable to cope with a transforming world and looking for somebody to blame for their discomfort, hemming Eisenhower on his right and forcing him, of political necessity, to stand idle as they savaged George Marshall and yammered about “losing China.” Today we have known idiots Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin playing the same shabby game and at the same ruinous cost.

Obama has refused to be distracted and kept his eye on the ball the whole while. If what passes for a conservative today had any brains, or memory longer than a puppy’s, they’d rejoice to see a near clone of one of their party’s best presidents back in the White House.

The Inerrant Devotional

HATRED TO KINDRED ENJOINED.

If any man come unto me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brother, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26.)

HATRED TO KINDRED CONDEMNED.

Honor thy father and mother. (Eph. 6:2.)

Husbands love your wives. . . . For no man ever yet hated his own flesh. (Eph. 5:25, 29.)

Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. (1 John 3:15.)

William Henry Burr, Self-Contradictions of the Bible

Gays, church, sex

Michael-in-Norfolk points today toward a piece written for the Washington Post by an unusually thoughtful evangelical pastor struggling to reconcile the traditional Christian teachings about homosexuality with the evidence of his own eyes. Read Michael’s piece, and the column he’s taking off from; both are worthwhile.

Here’s a particularly striking note in Michael’s commentary:

Gays are defined solely by how and with whom we have sex. Emotional bonds, common hopes and aspirations – indeed love – are all utterly removed from the equation. Why?

This time last year I was reading my way through John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and I was dumbfounded by some of what I found there. Calvin was very definite and no-nonsense on the matter of sex and marriage: The conjugal relationship is a cosmic accommodation so that those not blessed with the gift of celibacy don’t do something worse.

The charm of reading John Calvin is that he utterly lacks common sense and ordinary decency, so he will say frankly what most, more prudent contemporary preachers try to steer you toward but won’t say explicitly. In Christian teaching, marriage is not about mutual loyalty and shared goals and building satisfying lives together; it’s about sex.

As the law under which man was created was not to lead a life of solitude, but enjoy a help-meet for him — and ever since he fell under the curse the necessity for this mode of life is increased — the Lord made the requisite provision for us in this respect by the institution of marriage, which, entered into under his authority, he has also sanctified with his blessing. Hence, it is evident, that any mode of cohabitation different from marriage is cursed in his sight, and the conjugal relation was ordained as a necessary means of preventing us from giving way to unbridled lust.

For people raised to take their piety seriously, marriage is sex. Period. They will not, cannot, recognize “emotional bonds, common hopes and aspirations” in gay relationships because they are scarcely capable of acknowledging them in their own relationships. Marriage is cosmic permission for sexual intercourse, and that’s it.

It is not mutual loyalty. No. Only God gets your loyalty. It is not shared ambitions. No. God tells you what are your ambitions, according to the role assigned you in his oh-so-mysterious plan.

We are all of us familiar with the clerically-mandated hierarchy of properly ordered values:

• God
• Family
• Country

The implicit, never-stated corollary is this: Putting family first threatens your salvation.

And just in case some folk don’t pick-up on that, there is the relentless reminder that Abraham is amongst the greatest men to ever live because he betrayed his family on command.

At the bottom of all this, of course, there is no more than Bishop John Spong’s observation: “Religion is in the control business” — and healthy marriages, their mutual loyalty and shared ambitions, are a threat to clerical control. It really is as simple and cynical as that, and no coincidence that evangelicals, raised from infancy to be suspicious of corporeal entanglements, have the highest divorce rate in the country.

Morons on Parade, 2010-Mar-03

• Marissa Ann Putignano-Keene apparently decided that the perfect way to cap the nuptials was to run-down one of her brand-new husband’s ex-girlfriends.
  

  Then they split a bottle of champagne to celebrate. They were driving around town when the newly minted Mrs. Keane spotted a woman who had previous relations with her new hubby.

  ​The woman was walking in a parking lot with her son, so Putignano-Keene decided it would be a good idea to roll down her window and cuss at the pair, complete with sexually loaded insults. After all, you can never be too classy on your wedding day.

  But the bride wasn’t content to just hurl slurs. After the car passed, the woman heard an engine roar. She turned to find Mrs. Keane driving toward her and her son, trying to run them down. They jumped out of the way before they were hit.

  But as the bride tried to back away, she rammed into a fence.

• Anybody who thinks I’m overstating the case when I warn that the loonies are going to turn violent as they’re pushed to the margins of public life ought to go take a look at this site: Repent Amarillo! Notice, especially, the Warfare Map, the list of places that the Pious need to put out of business. Scroll around: The list includes more than a dozen ‘heretical’ Christian churches and centers utilized by other faiths. The notation accompanying the Hindu Temple of Amarillo is typical:
  

  Hindus can’t make up their minds what is and is not god so they worship 2.5 million false ones.

  They’re demented, mentally ill freaks, of course — but that’s the problem and no help to nice folk who just want to peaceably go about their business at the Hindu Temple.

  And we will see more of it.