One thing about this country of ours, is that *so far* religious freedom is still one of those First Amendment rights. Religious belief (and practice) is protected fully, for anyone anywhere in this enormous country. Furthermore the First Amendment "prohibits the federal legislature from making laws that establish a state religion or prefer a certain religion" (found in Wiki, and I'll stand by it.)

So, here's what nudged me right over the edge:

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

http://www.peer.org/news/news...

"Faith-Based Parks?

http://tinyurl.com/y76dw9 (sign a petition to protest this federal Parks action)

National Park Service employees from across the country who are concerned that Bush political appointees are taking our national parks in a new, dangerous direction have contacted PEER to ask for our assistance.

In a series of recent decisions, the National Park Service has approved the display of religious symbols and Bible verses, as well as the sale of creationist books giving a biblical explanation for the Grand Canyon and other natural wonders.

These moves all emanate from top Park Service political appointees over the objections of park superintendents, agency lawyers and scientists. A number of fundamentalist Christian and socially conservative groups are claiming credit for these actions and touting their new direct and personal access to Bush Administration officials."

----- LET IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS BEGIN ALREADY!!

Today the New York Times Health section seems to be republishing an article by Paul von Zielbauer, "Report Says Many Inmates In Isolation Are Mentally Ill." http://tinyurl.com/yzn75e

Our nation's prisons being chockablock with mentally ill and mentally retarded folks, who in a just society would be receiving treatment inpatient, outpatient and otherwise, is one of my favorite rants to nursing students.

In another NYT article (November 15, 2006 - "Officials Clash Over Mentally Ill in Florida Jails" http://tinyurl.com/ycggvo) Abby Goodnough shouts to the rafters:

"A Justice Department study released in September found that 64 percent of inmates in county jails around the nation reported mental health problems within the last year. Many are arrested for petty crimes, advocates say, yet remain in jail an inordinately long time because there is nowhere else for them to go.

Only 40,000 beds remain in state psychiatric hospitals around the nation, down from 69,000 in 1995. Advocates for the mentally ill say that community-based treatment programs, which were supposed to replace psychiatric hospitals after the deinstitutionalization movement of the ’60s and ’70s, have not begun to make up for the loss."

Perhaps I'm ever the ranting fanatic and knee-jerk liberal for the rights of the downtrodden. But, life in these United States never ceases to astound me with its combined capacity for meting out justice, and impulse to heap deprivation upon the disadvantaged in this world. All this while thumping the collective chest and declaring "we're the best ..." If "the best" is *greedy* well, I guess so. More of the ol' letting them eat cake.

Oh, and thank you Ronald Reagan, champion of a launched reduction of corporate income tax and frontal assault on the so-called welfare state. Then enter two decades later, Grover Norquist with his disgusting metaphors involving drowning federal government in a bathtub. This puppy is truly nearly drowned - and mental illness prevails in full-blossoming vigor. We're all choking on whatever this is, they keep calling "cake."

Oh, I know many are certain that this is an expression of justice served.

Who though, can claim the breadth, depth and extent of knowledge and understanding necessary to have the first clue about what Justice-Served even looks like?

More than once I've evoked Tolkien's poignant statement to Frodo who wished Bilbo had killed a beast when he had the opportunity:

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

- J.R.R. Tolkien "The Fellowship of the Ring"

Socrates and Galileo, John Brown, Thoreau, Christ, and Debbs

Heard the night cry down with traitors, and the dawn shout "Up the reds!"

Nothing ever seems to bust them. Gallows, crosses, prison bars.

Though they tried to readjust them there they are among the stone.

Why do great men all remind us we can write our names on high

and be pardoned leave behind us some prince in the FBI?'

- E.Y. "Yip" Harburg

Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart.

Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow.

Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so.

One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return.

- Mary Jean Iron

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off, you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence, you dark net threading through us,

on the day you made us you created yourself, and we grew sturdy in your sunlight;

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you."

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Turns out, and I've known this for a couple years now since his life's been featured on Democracy Now! before, "Yip" (short for the yiddish, "Yipsel" which means "squirrel") Harburg was blacklisted along with so many of our national treasures during the McCarthy era. Did you know that Joseph McCarthy is one of Ann Coulter's heroes?? (Perhaps, being herself media-hound, she indicates as much to keep propelling herself into public attention. But if it's so, she's as despicably twisted as was McCarthy himself.)

Anyway, to explore Goodman's tribute to the remarkable Yip Harburg, check him out at http://www.democracynow.org/a... and rediscover the symbolism of the characters of scarecrow, tin man and cowardly lion in Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz." It's so cool to unearth features of American culture that express depths far beneath the surface of who we are as a people.

Viewing the whole program at that website, is well worth the time spent, but the transcript's there in total.

- HH The Dalai Lama, from "The Good Heart"

He has "introduced legislation that would treat blogs like Internet service providers and hold them responsible for all activity in the comments sections and user profiles."

Further personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2006...

It sparked my long-held fascination with a gentleman I once saw on the tellie, by the name of Alonzo Clemons. I'd love it if some of you folks out there would visit http://tinyurl.com/vyxr9 to check him out. Be sure to view the video by the Discovery Channel, about midway on the page.

This is an *amazing* artist, who suffered brain injury early in life, and survived with an astounding talent for sculpting animal figures in the briefest possible time. Aside from the cherubic sweetness of this man, I'm inspired by the likely notion that we are all potentially so-gifted, were we only able to access these parts of the brain that we simply haven't been able to activate *yet*.

Now, #two is this: this morning, I was visited by a squirrel who entered the screened porch, presumably through the pet-door. I've meant to share with my blog that nary more than a couple weeks ago, John was visited on the screened porch (through the pet-door?) by a *grouse*!! This is *three* wildlife visits into the house (our porch is generally attached to our kitchen area by a usually open door, weather-permitting.)

Three such visits is a record for us. The animals are starting to crowd us a bit!

Merry Christmas, and Goodbye to a jewel in the crown of Radford University.

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Christian Messiah. Since He was born into poverty, it makes sense that Christians are ever concerned with relieving poverty. The culture has had a tough row to hoe on this, since combining capitalism with charity tends too often to favor the interests of money over the poor. Our Christmas tradition of buying "generously" for family and friends, as if to constitute charitable giving, risks a studious cultivation of greed: lusting for more stuff, for the mighty first-person plural. And toward the poor we've all adopted to some extent, the royal attitude of "*let them eat cake*."

This year, we celebrate. Generosity is a lifelong lesson for all who share the tradition. In this "little town" of Radford the season's particularly poignant, since many involved with the Radford University Family Health Clinics have been weeping. We cry because the new University administration has, with seeming inscrutable stealth, elected to summarily close the RU Clinics. The abruptness of the action has left nursing staff and doctors unable to give ethically adequate notice to patients (much less guidance for finding new providers.) These patients become for me the focus of this year's Christmas story.

There's a governing strain over the last decade, reminiscent of something Grover Norquist once said, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, ... to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub (Dreyfuss, The Nation, May 2001.)" Hmmm, yes that sounds familiar, that's what we do with unwanted puppies, isn't it? When it's done with finesse, our kids needn't be troubled by the harsh reality of inadequate resources - far too little to share with yet another litter of puppies.

Teaching at Radford's School of Nursing, it feels sharply to me as if our nurse-run Clinics have just been swiftly spirited to some bathtub for the cleanest possible demise. Secrecy weighs heavily even now, and coherency seems ever more elusive. This by the way, launches for me the latter part of the Christian Messiah tradition, His last days, and especially the mystery of the cenacle (or the last supper in the upper room.)

During the Messiah's last meeting with disciples, (and after the drinking of much wine for the Passover meal,) He intimated foreknowledge of his imminent execution by the state. Perplexing His by then inebriated company, His words served only to confuse them, until tragedy had already occurred. Members of the gathered were described by Him as: traitors, faithless and otherwise stupidly violent - illustrated by Judas, Peter and Simon the Zealot (a terrorist against Rome.) *All* His disciples cowardly fled, once confronted by the authorities of State.

From my own tradition, it's been ponderous to realize, that we are every one of us, "in the upper room," where faithful resistance to injustice and serving the powerless poor are concerned. Very few of us would have the courage to lay down our lives and resources for an insecure future, in the name of our highest, moral values.

Should I, for example, stay my pen here, imagining that my employment will as a result of this writing be jeopardized? How much do I believe that the interests of the poor, underserved and uninsured in the southwest region of Virginia, are more important than my own job-security? Just how Quixotic - how much of a Christian, am I?

This moment I wonder weak-kneed, how do we stand ethically and with integrity on behalf of our patients, wherever we find them in our Nursing practices? During this Christmas season, I prefer reflection on altruism over a spending frenzy at the mall. The spectral ritual harvest of capitalist plunder from beneath some livingroom's pretty tree leaves me cold. That Upper Room mystery too, haunts me with the human reality that rarely can we find anything like the moral strength to cleanly defend the interests of justice and charity.

http://www.soulforce.org/arti...


June 5, 1999

"Dear Jerry,

I've been reading your autobiography again. It still moves me. And I'm not just saying that because I wrote it. Strength for the Journey inspires and informs readers because you talk about your failures and not just your success.

I'm especially moved by those twenty short pages in Chapter Eleven that describe your transformation from 1964, when you were a staunch segregationist, to 1968, when you baptized the first black member of Thomas Road Baptist Church.

When I asked you what happened in four short years to change your mind about segregation, you told me stories about the African-Americans you had known and loved from childhood.

"It wasn't the Congress, the courts, or the demonstrators," you assured me. "It was Lewis, the shoeshine man, and Lump Jones, the mechanic, and David Brown, the sensitive, loving black man without a wife or family who lived for most of his adult life in the backroom of our large family home in Lynchburg."

It was obvious that you really cared about those black men, especially David Brown. "He was a good man," you told me. "He helped my mother with the cooking and cleaning. He cared for me and my brother Gene when we were children. He bathed and fed us both. He was like a member of our family."

Then, one day, you and Gene found David Brown lying unconscious and unattended in the lobby of Lynchburg's General Hospital. One portion of his head and face had been crushed from a severe blow with a dull pipe or the barrel of a pistol. He suffered cuts and bruises over his entire body; yet because he was black, he lay dying in that waiting room for forty-eight hours without medical help. You and your brother intervened but your friend was permanently damaged by the racist thugs who left him for dead and by the racist hospital policies that denied him treatment in time.

Do you remember how your eyes filled with tears when you told me, "I am sorry that I did not take a stand on behalf of the civil rights of David Brown and my other black friends and acquaintances during those early years."

I knew from the sound of your voice, Jerry, that you are still sorry that you did not take a stand for equality in those early years of ministry. Nevertheless, after condemning President Johnson's Civil Rights legislation as an act of "Civil wrong" and after preaching fervently against integration, you had the courage to acknowledge your sinfulness and to end your racist ways.

"In all those years," you told me, "it didn't cross my mind that segregation and its consequences for the human family were evil. I was blind to that reality. I didn't realize it then, but if the church had done its job from the beginning of this nation's history, there would have been no need for the civil rights movement."

Well said, friend. But now I have to ask you one more time. Has it ever crossed your mind that you might be just as wrong about homosexuality as you were about segregation? Could it be that you are blind to a tragic new reality, that the consequences of your anti-homosexual rhetoric are as evil for the human family as were your sermons against integration? Have you even thought about the possibility that you are ruining lives, destroying families, and causing endless suffering with your false claims that we are "sick and sinful," that we "abuse and recruit children," that we "undermine family values."

In the 1950s and 60s, you misused the Bible to support segregation. In the 1990s you are misusing it again, this time to caricature and condemn God's gay and lesbian children. Once you denied black Christians the rights (and the rites) of church membership. Now it's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Christians you reject.

For ten years we've been collecting samples of your dangerous and misleading rhetoric against homosexuals. We have file drawers filled with your antigay mass-mailings to raise funds and mobilize volunteers. We have audio and video collections of your antigay sermons and your antigay radio and television broadcasts. Coupled with your regular appearances on Nightline, Geraldo, and Larry King Live, and your ability to attract media attention (as you did with Tinky Winky) you have become one of the nation's primary sources of misinformation about homosexuality and homosexuals. You are saying things about us that are NOT true, terrible things with tragic consequences in our lives and in the lives of those we love.

Please, Jerry, hear your own words about segregation and apply them to my homosexual sisters and brothers. "I can see from the earliest days of my new faith in Christ," you told me, "that God had tried to get me to understand and to acknowledge my own racial sinfulness. In Bible College, the Scriptures had been perfectly clear about the equality of all men and women, about loving all people equally, about fighting injustice, and about obeying God and standing against the immoral and dehumanizing traditions of man."

The Scriptures are still clear about the equality of all men and women. The Scriptures are still clear about loving all people equally. The Scriptures are still clear about fighting injustice and standing against the immoral and dehumanizing traditions of man. Why can't you apply THOSE Scriptures to us instead of the six verses you misuse over and over again to clobber and condemn GLBT people?

For years you supported the "immoral and dehumanizing traditions" used to persecute people of color. Then, finally, the Spirit of Truth set you free. Now, you are a supporter of "immoral and dehumanizing traditions" used to persecute homosexuals. Please, Jerry, let the Spirit of Truth set you free again.

Thank you for meeting with me last year to hear the evidence that we are God's children, too, but it was obvious during our meeting (and in your avalanche of antigay rhetoric that followed) that you were not taking that evidence seriously.

Today, I begin a series of open letters to you reviewing the evidence one more time. Where I am wrong, correct me and I will confess my error. I hope you will do the same. Let this be a genuine public dialogue. I'm hoping that TOGETHER we can negotiate an end to your tragic misinformation campaign against us. If you refuse to hear the evidence again, if you insist on continuing your false and inflammatory rhetoric, then we will have no other option but to mobilize people of faith across this nation to conduct a serious nonviolent direct action against your Untruths in the spirit of Gandhi and King.

In this series of open letters, I'm going to do my best to summarize the psychological, psychiatric, scientific, medical, historical, personal and biblical evidence that demonstrates clearly that homosexuality is neither a sickness nor a sin. I'm putting all this material together one more time in the hopes that God will change your mind and heart about us. In the meantime, you learned that it wasn't data that changed your mind about segregation. It was knowing its victims and sharing their suffering.

How many lesbian or gay people do you know, Jerry? Have you invited closeted gay or lesbian members of your staff and congregation to tell you what it feels like to be ridiculed and condemned endlessly by their pastor? Have you invited closeted gay or lesbian students at Liberty or Liberty graduates to share the pain your endless attacks have caused them? We know at least one gay student who killed himself after being expelled from your university because of his sexual orientation. Your eyes filled with tears when you thought of a black man lying unattended in a Lynchburg hospital. How will you feel when you finally realize that you have been the source of even worse suffering in the lives of those you love and serve.

Please, Jerry, read Chapter Eleven of your autobiography once again. After years of blindly and enthusiastically supporting segregation, you heard God's voice, admitted your error, and changed your ways. Now, after years of blindly and enthusiastically supporting anti-homosexual ignorance and bigotry, will you stop long enough to hear God's voice again?

Sincerely,

[Mel White] "

-----

ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN

(a guide for Global Leadership)

http://www.peace.ca/kindergar...

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:

- Share everything.

- Play fair.

- Don't hit people.

- Put things back where you found them.

- Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours.

- Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

- Wash your hands before you eat.

- Flush.

- Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

- Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

- Take a nap every afternoon.

- When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.

- Be aware of wonder.

- Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

- Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.

- And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

[Source: "ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN" by Robert Fulghum. See his web site at http://www.robertfulghum.com/... ]

It occurs to me, I wouldn't know where to find a structured list of American Martyrs. Here are some that come to mind for me:

- Malachi Ritscher - 52 yrs old, depressed activist against the Iraq War (self-immolates as public protest, Nov 3, 2006)

- Rachel Corrie - 24 yrs old, peace activist in Palestine (stood between Israeli tank and the home of a Palestinian family, crushed to death, March 16, 2003)

- Mitch Snyder - 44 yrs old, 1990, depressed activist for the homeless in Washington DC (hung himself after multiple fasts, and life on the streets and in shelfters advocating housing for everyone - catalytic leader for the Community for Creative Nonviolence) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

- Sen. Robert F. Kennedy - assassinated while campaigning for his presidential bid at 43 yrs of age, 1968

- Rev. Dr. ML King, Jr - assassinated at 39 yrs of age, 1968

- Minister Malcolm X - assassinated at 39 yrs of age, 1965

- President John F. Kennedy - assassinated at 46 yrs of age, 1963

- Harry T. Moore, 46 yrs of age, NAACP organizer (Killed at Mims, Florida, on Christmas night, 1951) http://www.nbbd.com/godo/moor...

- Joe Hill, folk musician and I.W.W. leader (executed by firing squad 1915, after being framed for a murder) "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

- President Abraham Lincoln

- Rev. John Brown, abolitionist - executed by hanging, Charles Town W.Va, for his attack on the Harpers Ferry Armory (Frederick Douglass wrote, "Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...(abolitionist)

- Nat Turner, leader of slave rebellion in Virginia, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1831. "His body was then flayed, beheaded and quartered, and various body parts were kept by whites as souvenirs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...