Christian Leftist

Our President-Elect has decided to try to appease the Religious Right (an impossible task for someone who is pro-choice, as most experienced politicians will tell you) by inviting the bigot Rick Warren to speak the invocation at his presidential inauguration ceremony.

So, so Not Cool.

The media really has done a bang-up job on making Rick Warren seem more moderate than he really is, or at least they did until he openly supported Proposition 8, that horrible and unconstitutional referendum in California that made equality marriage illegal.

GBLT groups and gay right advocates and allies are furious about Obama’s conscious decision to hurt GBLT people by selecting a man who has equated them with child abusers, incestuous couples and pedophiles for wanting to marry and have the same rights as the rest of us. He falsely claimed that religious officials would be prosecuted for hate speech if Prop. 8 was defeated, even though no one was seeking to prosecute religious officials for saying that homosexuality is a sin while 20,000 GBLT couples married in California before the ban.

Among the other choice beliefs that Rick Warren will be representing by his presence at the Inauguration — and that, by extension, P-E Barack Obama will be condoning — are, in no particular order:

· Women do not have the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. Instead, men in religious robes and in courts and legislatures will choose what health care is ‘moral’ or ‘immoral.’
· The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should be assassinated.
· Embryonic stem-cell research, even research done on embryos that would otherwise be destroyed, is evil and wrong and should be banned, no matter how many lives it might save.

To be sure, Mr. Warren has done much for the causes of poverty in Africa, AIDS prevention, and environmental protection within the evangelical community. That is commendable. His good deeds, however, do not erase the harms he has done in the name of God against people who only want to live their lives in peace and comfort.

Obama contends that he is merely returning the favor that Warren paid him when he invited Obama to speak at his Global AIDS Initiative Conference.

But Obama is not inviting Warren to be a guest speaker at his church. He is not extending an invitation for tea at his Chicago home. He is picking someone who fundamentally believes that one in ten people on the planet (and all of the non-evangelical people besides those) have flaws that make them inferior to him, a lower class of species, second-class citizens, and inviting him to be the representative of all people of faith during one of the most profound events in modern history.

There are plenty of pastors who do not believe all of the prejudice crap Rick Warren does who are ready, willing and able to speak instead of him. Obam chose Warren, knowing full well that it would be the second in a series of slaps in the faces of gay people that they’ve had to and are going to face this year from Washington, D.C.

How are we supposed to believe that intersectionality, this promise to address all areas of inequality, if progressives are marginalized? This is not a ’social issue.’ This is a HUMAN RIGHTS issue.

Remember that if interracial marriage had been put to a vote in the sixties when the Supreme Court ruled on the Loving case, California would have banned interracial marriage, too. What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular.

Old (Bible) verse, same as the first.

From the NYT article on the abuse of national security letters:

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target was in contact with. The bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said.

What this means is whatever or whoever the F.B.I. determines to be ‘relevant’ or within a suspect’s “community of interest” is fair game. Say someone named Margie Johnson shares a name with a suspected terrorist sympathizer in Scotland. That name comes up on the T.S.A.’s No-Fly list when she goes to an airport. Now, assuming that the two Margie Johnsons are one and the same (and that’s a big if, but the T.S.A. screw-ups are a beef for another barbecue), the F.B.I. would keep track of her calls and any meetings, activities, etc. that they deem suspicious.

It turns out Margie attends a local genealogy group meeting every Saturday at the local library. She also checks out a few books afterwards and usually returns those books in a few days. Since the feds tend to assume everyone is guilty until proven innocent, maybe they think these group meetings are suspicious and that she’s passing secret messages in the library books or learning how to build bombs.

Too bad you joined that group two weeks ago. The national security letter that went out? It covers everyone involved in the group. You thought you were just trying to find your lost great uncle from Romania!

It also covers anyone who was in the library and checked out or turned in a book in the time frames when Margie was present in the library. The library has to send their records of electronic checkouts and drop-offs and give the F.B.I. the names of all of those people. Now they’ll follow you and everyone else the sweep turns up. It’s already established that the F.B.I. has used its terrorist surveillance field agents and local law enforcement to monitor anti-war activists and others critical of the Bush administration.

In 2005, the Bureau instructed a telecommunications company to provide “a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.”

There are a lot of ways in which the vague language applied in many cases could be interpreted.

Hypothetically speaking, of course. But “relative” is a ‘relative’ term nowadays.

This little gem of an article has been going around Digg.com for the past few days, and I think every single person who thinks post-Reagan conservatives aren’t evil should read it.

What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren’t Listening

[P.S. -- Sorry for the long absence. Family medical emergencies.]

The AP reports that Radio Caracas Television, Venezuela’s most popular channel, will be forced off the air at midnight tomorrow because Hugo Chavez’s government has decided not to renew its broadcasting license. Miguel Angel Rodriguez was a talk-show host on Radio Caracas TV until his final segment on Friday, where he vowed, “There is no goodbye. It’s ’see you later.’” Rodriguez had been an active critic of Chavez on the air, and no doubt ol’ Hugo saw the media as a threat to his establishment and changed the laws to suit his own political agenda. Both sides plan street protests over the shutdown during the weekend.

The problem with being either too far to the left or too far to the right is that you end up in essentially the same place – a land of silence. When in college a couple of years ago, I found myself arguing with a real, dyed-in-the-wool Communist about the importance of civil liberties. He shared many social and political ideals with me, yet I argued with him more often and more passionately than I did with pro-war conservatives. He believed ( and probably still does) that freedom of speech is overrated; the first thing he would do if he was in power would be to drag all of the right-wing crazies out into the streets and have them shot. He was only half-joking. His justification for doing so was that allowing the right win a pulpit from which to preach hatred was a threat to the security of the country, and that when you know you’re right, there’s no point in allowing others to create constant turmoil in the political spectrum. I have heard the same type of arguments before; this time only the players and causes were different. My friend’s arguments were decidedly more eloquent than what I have just stated; this is merely my interpretation of his words.

I pointed out that one who is certain s/he is right should embrace criticism, not quash it, and that people have a funny habit of changing their minds, especially when one martyrs the leaders of a cause through persecution. or worse. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. He said the extreme right was no different than he; if Bush and Cheney had anything to do with it, they would probably have locked many of us anti-war activists up long ago. “The reason you are still free,” he said, “is because you are not a significant threat to their power.” It was an astute, if fallible, analysis of majority rule.

[As it turns out, the protests of eleven million people on February 15th, 2003 did not discourage Bush from going to war because, as we now know, Bush and Cheney live in a bubble floating towards the South Pole, last seen heading southeast somewhere over Texas. However, they did convince the rest of the world that if the earth were to take a vote on Iraq, our soldiers never would have left Fort Dix. Despite the unlikelihood of an incumbent 'president's loss in a second-term election, we were enough of a threat that members of the Republican National Committee rented out a comfy ex-bus terminal on Pier 57 to accommodate us during the 2004 Convention sans habeas corpus. The public did not start a revolution upon Bush's re-'election,' either, as I had predicted to my friend. But I digress.]

Only the weak and insecure must fear the birth of conflicting ideas. The more desperate one becomes, the more one tends to suppress one’s opponents by any means necessary, including the hammer of the iron fist. Putin is just as dangerous to the cause of human rights as most neo-cons; he has a nation of citizens who still remember Lenin instead of Stalin, and he has no pesky historical Bill of Rights to stand in the way of his internecine methods of culling his critics from the flocks.

That’s why I’m so pissed off at Danny Glover for actively supporting the Venezuelan president’s cause. Chavez and Bush are two sides of the same coin. All the socialist medicine in the world cannot make up for the loss of basic human freedoms. Bush may be an evil moron, but he is not nearly as adept or as capable at silencing his political foes as others are.

Yet.

I love Pennsylvania these days. We seem to be the testing ground or battleground for a number of fascinating ventures: grassroots activism (of the kind that kicked Rick Santorum out of office), illegal immigration (Hazelton, PA), intelligent design (Dover, PA), the Allegheny County smoking ban (which the Commonwealth Court just overturned on the basis that the county had no authority to enforce an ordinance on large restaurants), and Rep. Darryl Metcalfe’s nationwide campaign to pass state laws cracking down on illegal immigrants. It was only a matter of time before the ire over judicial decisions evolved into a new form of political theatre: a world in which judicial candidates can and will speak their personal opinions on legislation that might come before them in the future.

Last Monday, a federal judge in Philadelphia said that the Judicial Conduct Board cannot enforce a section of the Judicial Code of Conduct that stops candidates from voicing their positions on present or future disputed legal or political issues. The article that discusses this decision in detail is from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Why is this such a big deal? Because it is an unwritten rule within the American Bar Association that politics are best left out of judicial appointments. I know that sounds strange, but in essence, this means that the ABA wants judges appointed who are the most qualified for the bench (or maybe the prettiest). Remember when Samuel Alito refused to answer any questions on abortion during his confirmation hearings? Although the Supreme Court seems to be the lone exception when it comes to mud slinging at candidates, Alito still maintained that it would not be ethical for him to predict his decisions on cases that might come before him on the Supreme Court.

The current model is to cite experience on past cases and let voters decide how they think a candidate might vote on a subject based on past decisions. Whether or not the threat of punishment by the JCB stifles the free speech of potential judges is a murky question. The violation of the “appears to commit” clause, a section of Pennsylvania law appended after a Supreme Court decision in 2002 (in which statements that show a candidate’s likelihood to have pre-formed opinions on a subject and therefore a lack of impartiality in new cases were allowed to be expressed) is the snowball that set this recent Pennsylvania case in motion. If I am interpreting the news article correctly, the Philadelphia decision has taken the U.S. Supreme Court decision, called Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, one step further: it has concluded that the state’s amended “appears to commit” clause is illegal or unconstitutional.

Whether or not the case will survive an appeal is unclear. What is perfectly clear is the potential damage the cloud of negative campaigns that disgrace the typical political campaign would have on the justice system if state and local judges had to agree with the majority views on social issues in order to gain or keep their jobs. Instead of leaving their personal partisan opinions at the door when they don the robes, judges would carry the weight of thousands of small-minded, geographically-based, socio-economic views into the courtroom with them. You could have identical criminal cases two towns apart where the legal precedent for a minimum sentence was clear, yet one judge imposes a fine and the other imposes a 15-year sentence. The potential implications of all nationwide judicial appointments “going negative” is enormous.

Is free speech absolute in this country? No. You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded cinema or make threats to kill people. Those examples represent forms of speech that could potentially endanger lives. The political opinions of judges may indirectly threaten the lives of innocent people, but I doubt that anyone could prove it to the point that it becomes constitutionally infallible. Something to think about.

After all, that judge you’ll be standing across from for speeding shouldn’t be somebody who has promised to lock up all reckless drivers under 35.

Or should he?