Love and Fred Phelps

In his new book, The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back From The Religious Right, Michael Lerner argues that people take two different two approaches to both life and politics.

One approach is based on hope and love and seeks to heal the world. The other is based on fear and seeks to dominate all who disagree with the fearful. People who operate out of fear believe they have to dominate others because they believe those other people are trying to dominate them, Lerner writes.

I'm still reading Lerner's book, so I can't tell you yet, if I agree with everything he says. However, if he does nothing more then describe the politics based on hope vs. the politics based on fear, then Lerner will have made an important contribution to public debate. I suspect that Lerner's paradigm isn't new or even unique to him. However, I've never seen its political ramifications discussed as clearly and in as much detail as Lerner does.

This week we witnessed an interesting example of that paradigm at work on In This Moment.

I blogged in Yet Another Fred Phelps Commentary about the need for all of us -- myself and my political allies included -- to admit that there are times when we should let go of politics and be silent. The topic was the Phelps family's new hobby of picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. I noted that I thought that such picketing was a bad idea and should end.

A member of the Phelps family hopped over (electronically speaking) and posted a series of furious comments, designed to insult me and anyone who agreed with me. In often incoherent and increasingly lengthy lists of Bible quotes, he also appeared to be trying terrify me with thoughts that I was going to be horribly punished by a vicious God.

My crime? I am a woman who is in love with another woman. I suspect I may also be doomed to burn, in his mind, for disagreeing with him about the law and the First Amendment.

What I find most fascinating about this person's response to my blog is that he missed the point. Yes, I was arguing that his family should stop picketing funerals, but I was also arguing that everyone deserves to be treated with love and decency -- even families who work so hard to hurt others. I don’t mean this as a put down. I am not saying this in a kind of sneer, declaring that even those people deserve love. I mean this sincerely.

What I said is that all mourners should be treated with compassion. No one's funeral -- not even the funeral of Fred Phelps when his time comes -- should be picketed.

However, the Phelps family emissary missed the point. The fact that I think his family should be treated with compassion, apparently, was of no interest to him. In reading his responses, I got the feeling that he may not even have been able to see that I was offering him compassion.

"You cannot understand the love of God until you understand His hate," this fellow wrote.

I disagree.

I believe that you cannot understand God at all, or even understand the secular universe, without first understanding love. And you can't do that until you are able to see when love is being offered to you.

Peace to you all this weekend.
--------------------------------

Mike Hendricks at the Kansas City Star had an interesting take on the Phelps family.

Meanwhile, the Kansas Senate unanimously passed a bill Thursday limiting picketing at funerals. "We want people to be able to bury their dead in peace," Sen. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, said.

Bush thanks Kansas by chopping $3 billion out of funding for the state

I planned to work on a newspaper column and ignore my blog, but today I happened upon a new, rather terrifying, report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If the Center’s estimates and my math and understanding of the report are correct, President Bush has proposed slashing about $3 billion out of federal funding for the state of Kansas over the next five years. The Bush plan would cut $183 billion out of federal funding for education and social services for the entire country, the report says.

Those apparent cuts would suck federal money from children, the elderly and the needy in a state that has always voted to support Bush. If approved by Congress, the Bush cuts, among many other things, would apparently include:

* $78.1 million from K-12 schools
* $69.7 million from vocational and adult education
* $18.1 million from the Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children
* $41 million from the Community Development Block Grant program
* $16.3 million for Low Income Home Energy Assistance

Among the center’s other estimates are that from 800 to 1,100 Head Start slots would be taken away from Kansas. An estimated 5,100 elderly Kansans would be losing food assistance from one program, according to the report.

Where did this information come from? The center reports:

This analysis uses Administration materials that were not widely distributed — including a key Office of Management and Budget (OMB) computer run that apparently was released inadvertently — to show the multi-year impact of the proposed cuts on a number of important domestic discretionary programs.

I call on my fellow bloggers and former colleagues in the mainstream media: Check this out. Am I missing something, or is this Bush’s version of a “thank you” to the people who have supported him for so long?

Nancy Jane takes on Phelps & we learn more about theology

Nancy Jane is mixing it up more with Isaiah Phelps-Roper here as she explains how her, and my ideas, do not undermine the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, Phelps-Roper cuts to the core of the Phelps theology with this comment:

You cannot understand the love of God until you understand His hate. You must understand that certain (most people) people will be cast into Hell, and some (a very small remnant) will be saved.

In other words, this is a theology based on fear and the idea that "God" is a short-sighteded, nasty individual who will hurt people simply because they don't agree with him, or perhaps, don't understand. If you don't bow down to this horrible being, he will hurt you. If you follow every little rule and toe the line, you'll be OK.

This doesn't sound like God as much as it sounds like an angry, abusive human being who is looking for excuses to hurt people.

Meanwhile, the Phelps are driving new people to this blog every day to hear the opinions of a lesbian.

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Your summary of the religious right's god is absolutely correct.
Their god is a god of hate. They do not understand that Jesus did not die to redeem the sin of sex but to reddem the sin of hate. Every quote from the hate monger was from the Old Testament. He does not understand that Jesus came to earth to help people know that God was a God of love, not hate.
Keep blogging. Get the message out!

4:43 PM

Not helpless anymore

E.J. Graff has two interesting items up on the Internet today. The first at TPM Café is called Whither Same-Sex Marriage? It points to her second article Marital Blitz in the American Prospect.

The American Prospect piece is especially interesting.

Graff writes:

Here’s the good news. First, 2004’s DOMA and SuperDOMA amendments were misread. They did not represent an anti-gay backlash; in fact, public opinion toward
lesbians and gay men is warming more every day. Second, the “gay agenda” now has a new plan for winning over the long haul. For years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) legal groups have been the most successful branches of what’s loosely called the gay movement. As a result, there’s been a winning air war -- but too few ground troops to solidify some of those wins. Now the political groups are catching up. LGBT organizations have developed a strategic plan to win marriage equality -- and along the way, anti-discrimination laws, zero-tolerance for school gay-bashing, and more.

Here in Kansas we’re still struggling for our most basic rights, but the passage of the anti-marriage amendment last April, bad as it was, did us a favor. That attack by the Religious Right forced us to work together, and it opened up the eyes of many moderates and straight allies.

We realized that in Kansas we have “too few ground troops” to win, and now we’re determined to change that. That realization and the anger and frustration we felt when the ban on marriage and civil unions passed led directly to the formation of the Kansas Equality Coalition.

We never intend to be that helpless again.

I have arrived: The Phelps family takes notice

I do believe I have arrived in the world. A member of the Phelps family has posted a long, and not surprisingly, nasty comment on a post of mine. You can find it here.

Responses to the Rev. Fred Phelps and the hate and anger that he and his family spew forth can take several forms.

You can throw the same kind of fury back at them and try to inflict as much pain on them as they dump onto the world.

You can ignore them.

You can pray for them.

I wish I could say that I was strong enough to pray for them. I just can’t bring myself to do that, at least not right now. However, I do want to argue for another response, and that is to counter their invocation of hatred with an invocation of love.

If my sin is homosexuality, then all I can say is that I am so proud that I have the courage to sin in such a way. Loving is a hard thing to do. It involves taking the risk to open your heart to another person. It involves leaving yourself vulnerable to someone else. To truly love means that you can’t hide behind a wall of anger or judgment.

I have been blessed in my life to have deeply loved two women and been loved in return. One died of breast cancer, and the other is still very much alive and in my life. How wonderful it has been to have known them.

I cannot see that even one instant of our lives has harmed anyone else. All I know is that they have given me strength and courage to help others and brought joy into my life.

I doubt very much if God has been offended or wronged by the fact that we have found each other and loved fiercely. I attend church every Sunday. The God I have found in my church doesn’t hate any single soul, let alone people who have the courage to live authentic lives and to love each other.

I do want to comment on one of Isaiah Phelps-Roper’s points. He attacked my support of laws limiting protests at funerals. Such a law would effect the demonstrations the Phelps family have been mounting at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.

Phelps-Roper wrote:

What you mean to say is that you want to stop our funeral protests because you disagree with our beliefs. That's in violation of the First Amendment. That is really what it all boils down to.

Obviously, I do disagree with the Phelps’ beliefs, but that’s not why I’m arguing to limit picketing at funerals. I believe that no one should be allowed to picket anyone’s funeral, whether that is the funeral of gays, soldiers or even someday, the funeral of Fred Phelps. Does not basic human decency require that we set aside certain times when such speech is simply not appropriate?

I doubt if there is any legal support for my stand. However, any morality based on love and compassion would have to declare that there are times when we should all be quiet and leave people alone to grieve in peace.

The other way to deal with the Phelps clan, of course, is to appreciate the sweet irony they bring to any situation. Their web site is doing a great job of driving people to my blog. Many thanks!

Can a middle-aged woman succeed as a blogger? Not if everyone keeps insisting she doesn't exist.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear the crash, did it really fall?

If a middle-aged woman blogs and everyone claims she can’t possibly be doing such a thing, will anyone hear what she’s saying?

Both questions have to do with the issue of perception vs. reality. The question about the tree may only be of interest to freshmen in college philosophy classes (and perhaps the tree). However, the question about the blogger is important to you, me and, believe it or not, even to the rest of the country.

That second question centers on the thorny issue of whether media -- big or small, traditional or new -- give us an accurate picture of the world. As of this moment, I respectfully submit that they don’t. (I know that’s not exactly a shock, but read on.)

Case in point: My apparent non-existence as a blogger. Not only does the greater Internet sometimes tend to ignore my modest blog, but now I’m getting edited out of newspaper stories. Witness today’s article on the state’s tiny political blogosphere in my old newspaper, The Wichita Eagle.

I had a great interview with reporter Alan Bjerga, yet when the article appeared, I was conspicuously absent.

After the article was published, I was curious about what had happened and e-mailed Bjerga. He replied that I was quoted in the original version of the story. However, he said, when the story was finally published my quote(s) vanished, apparently deleted by an editor. “I'm thinking this is a space issue,” Bjerga wrote. (He also forwarded my e-mail on to the editor. When I receive a reply, I’ll post it here.)

At 53 years of age, I can happily report that I’m a big kid now. Although I was a tad irritated this morning, my feelings weren’t hurt by the fact that I wasn’t in the story.

I worked for The Eagle from 1985 to 1990. I covered the Legislature, state government and a variety of things that blew up, beat up and washed out northeastern Kansas. I know how journalism works.

“Space issues” often cut great material out of stories. Decisions also have to be made quickly, and it’s only later that you realize you made a mistake. Of course, the good folks at The Eagle may not feel like editing me out was a mistake. When I was a mainstream journalist, though, I remember many times when I felt like my rush to meet the deadline had led me to goof.

The Eagle very kindly included a link to my blog with their list of Kansas political blogs. I sincerely appreciate that. So far, though, my traffic logs show that only two people have clicked on that rather buried link. Meanwhile, 22-year-old Nate Thames, whose Anti-Sam Brownback blog was the lead of the story, has reported receiving many new readers because of the story.

Please note that this post is not meant to bash The Eagle, the reporter or the editor. I mean that sincerely.

I wouldn’t even blog on this topic if it weren’t for the fact that the mainstream media and blogosphere continually argue that only men blog. That idea has recently morphed into the theory that only men are in the top tier of bloggers The full stereotype is that only twentysomething men blog successfully.

Many theories have been put forth to explain the supposed lack of women bloggers. It’s said we’re wimps and too afraid to get into the political fray. It’s claimed that we don’t write as well as the men, and so don’t draw readers. And of course, there’s the ever-popular idea that the topics we write about just aren’t of interest to general readers.

A variety of other theories have also been suggested. Chris Nolan has a great run-down of these theories in Ten Reasons For Too Few Women Bloggers.

I would like to humbly suggest that women bloggers are out there in the wilds of the Internet. We may well exist in great numbers. We may write just as well as the men, if not better. I suspect that our perspective would be a good one for people to read.

Yet people don’t visit us. Why?

Because they don’t see us. Why?

Because they don’t expect to see us. Why?

Because we’re seldom talked about or quoted. Why?

Well, you see, there was this space issue.

Three bloggers were quoted in the Wichita Eagle story. All are male. The oldest is 27.

Other women bloggers left out of the story included Just Cara and Revka, who received a link.

The twentysomething male I am closest to in the world is my son. He loves the Internet, he loves technology, yet he would never think of blogging.

His middle-aged mother, though, with her glasses, her plump figure and her sore feet loves to blog.

If a woman writes in the cyber-wilderness, will anyone see that she’s there?

Yet another Fred Phelps commentary - or - Aren't there times when we should all be quiet?

As a long-time writer, newbie blogger and committed political activist, I have a very personal relationship with the First Amendment.

Without a fiercely protected freedom to speak, I doubt if I could write a word in this blog, let alone string together even one of my favorite subversive sentences attacking our very own King George.

Yet, aren’t there times when all of us should be willing to just shut up?

There’s the famous example of the importance of silence cited by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in 1919. He noted that it isn’t permissible to cause a panic by “shouting fire in a crowded theater.” Abridging free speech was appropriate in a case like that, he said, because it presented a “clear and present danger”

That decision was later overturned in a case where the Supreme Court said speech could only be banned when it was directed to particular people and likely to incite imminent lawless action.

All of which brings us, of course, to the Rev. Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church and their obsession with picketing funerals. Years ago few folks noticed when Phelps confined the attacks of his kin – and his church of 75 is made up largely of relatives -- to picketing the funerals of the victims of gay bashings and AIDS. A few laws, such as one in Kansas, were passed to put minimal limits on such actions.

Now, though, Phelps has moved on to picket the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. The “rationale,” such as it is, argues that the United States coddles its lesbian and gay citizens and is, therefore, being punished by an angry God.

As one of the allegedly coddled lesbians, I could argue at length about how living in a country in which my family doesn’t have a single legal right isn’t terribly comfy. But that’s a topic for another time.

What’s important now is this question: As a society, what do we do about people so lacking in common decency that they seek to inflict the maximum amount of pain on the most vulnerable people?

Fourteen states, including Kansas, are considering laws to either limit picketing at funerals for the first time, or to impose additional limits.

Today word came from the Kansas Statehouse that one current bill, which would create a buffer zone around a funeral, may not stand up to a Supreme Court challenge. Stephen McAllister, a professor of constitutional law and former dean of the University of Kansas School of Law, told a legislative committee that "the court is very wary" of buffer zones.

I don’t claim to be a legal expert. Despite my constant blathering in this blog, I can’t even say for certain what’s best for the United States. But can’t there be a point where we can simply say “enough is enough?”

I have lost someone I loved dearly. I can report that to simply survive the funeral, to even remain standing in such circumstances, is a supreme act of will. I can’t imagine what it would have cost me, or my son who was only 7 then, to bury my spouse in front of a background of taunting chants and obscene signs.

Can we not decide that there are moments when we should all be quiet?

Phelps is not a young man. There will soon come a time when he leaves this Earth just like all of us will. I have to admit that in contemplating his demise I had a brief thought that, perhaps, it would be poetic justice for all the people he’s picketed to converge on his funeral.

But I don’t even want to argue for that. Because all of us, even people like Phelps and his family, deserve to be treated decently. Even for him there are times when we should all be quiet.

[revised slightly from original post on Feb. 15, 2006]

Yet another Fred Phelps commentary -- or --Aren't there times when we should all be quiet?

[bump]

As a long-time writer, newbie blogger and committed political activist, I have a very personal relationship with the First Amendment.

Without a fiercely protected freedom to speak, I doubt if I could write a word in this blog, let alone string together even one of my favorite subversive sentences attacking our very own King George.

Yet, aren’t there times when all of us should be willing to just shut up?

There’s the famous example of the importance of silence cited by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in 1919. He noted that it isn’t permissible to cause a panic by “shouting fire in a crowded theater.” Abridging free speech was appropriate in a case like that, he said, because it presented a “clear and present danger”

That decision was later overturned in a case where the Supreme Court said speech could only be banned when it was directed to particular people and likely to incite imminent lawless action.

All of which brings us, of course, to the Rev. Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church and their obsession with picketing funerals. Years ago few folks noticed when Phelps confined the attacks of his kin – and his church of 75 is made up largely of relatives -- to picketing the funerals of the victims of gay bashings and AIDS. A few laws, such as one in Kansas, were passed to put minimal limits on such actions.

Now, though, Phelps has moved on to picket the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. The “rationale,” such as it is, argues that the United States coddles its lesbian and gay citizens and is, therefore, being punished by an angry God.

As one of the allegedly coddled lesbians, I could argue at length about how living in a country in which my family doesn’t have a single legal right isn’t terribly comfy. But that’s a topic for another time.

What’s important now is this question: As a society, what do we do about people so lacking in common decency that they seek to inflict the maximum amount of pain on the most vulnerable people?

Fourteen states, including Kansas, are considering laws to either limit picketing at funerals for the first time, or to impose additional limits.

Today word came from the Kansas Statehouse that one current bill, which would create a buffer zone around a funeral, may not stand up to a Supreme Court challenge. Stephen McAllister, a professor of constitutional law and former dean of the University of Kansas School of Law, told a legislative committee that "the court is very wary" of buffer zones.

I don’t claim to be a legal expert. Despite my constant blathering in this blog, I can’t even say for certain what’s best for the United States. But can’t there be a point where we can simply say “enough is enough?”

I have lost someone I loved dearly. I can report that to simply survive the funeral, to even remain standing in such circumstances, is a supreme act of will. I can’t imagine what it would have cost me, or my son who was only 7 then, to bury my spouse in front of a background of taunting chants and obscene signs.

Can we not decide that there are moments when we should all be quiet?

Phelps is not a young man. There will soon come a time when he leaves this Earth just like all of us will. I have to admit that in contemplating his demise I had a brief thought that, perhaps, it would be poetic justice for all the people he’s picketed to converge on his funeral.

But I don’t even want to argue for that. Because all of us, even people like Phelps and his family, deserve to be treated decently. Even for him there are times when we should all be quiet.

[revised slightly from original post on Feb. 15, 2006]