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May 30, 2005
Cheap trick -- cross-burning
A few days ago I got my first request as a blogger to comment on a specific issue. In Durham, North Carolina, last Wednesday, three crosses were set afire in churches across this city of about 100,000.
But to tell the truth, it's hard to know what to think or say. It's unclear who lit the match. And it's also unclear whether the cross-burnings were a teenaged prank, or the work of a hate group like the Ku Klux Klan.
A cross-burning in some respects is a cheap trick. You don't have to stand by your work. You get your thrill the same way a peeping-tom gets his.
You can deny to yourself that anyone gets hurt, per se, by your hateful act.
You don't even have to hit your target very precisely. A large lawn or a field will do.
Cross-burners are cowards. They don't even have the courage of their convictions. They don't even really have a conviction. Just an emotion: hatred.
A cheap trick.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 03:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 26, 2005
What's the range of a taser?
I usually commute home just as the rush hour is ending. It's not a bad drive -- usually about 12 minutes. But yesterday, I had to get home a little earlier than usual and, boy, did I get cranky. It seemed like every car that I got behind was driving at least 10 miles an hour below the speed limit. A couple other cars ventured into my lane, oblivious that they were sharing the road with fellow travelers.
One guy just sat there as the traffic light turned green. When I finally was able to get around him, he was gabbing happily on his wireless phone.
At this one intersection near my home, where I have to turn left at a stop sign, the guy in front of me just sat there when he had the chance to turn. I knew it would be minutes before another opportunity came. I'd had it. I lay down on the horn. If the driver heard me, he didn't respond.
All these drivers had one thing in common: they were gabbing on their wireless phones. Every single one.
Maybe they were checking in on their way home. Maybe adding to the grocery list. Trying to find out where to pick up Junior. But the disregard for other cars on the road was maddeningly rude.
I am not for the government stepping in and telling me when I can and cannot use a wireless phone, even in the car. My complaint is more about the lack of common courtesy or awareness that anyone else in the world exists except for them and the people they're talking to.
What's the range of a taser?
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:28 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 23, 2005
In the beginning...were the Democratic talking points
Sunday news and talk shows were dominated by stories of how religion is playing an increasingly central role in American life. A front-page story in the New York Times on Sunday reported how evangelicals now are in the mainstream economically, where 25 years ago they were distinctively of a lower class.
On ABC News This Week, there was debate over President Bush's threatened veto of a bill to expand stem-cell research. And there was a New York Times magazine profile of Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, whose Catholic dogma is expressed in increasingly effective right-wing politics.
Mainstream media invariably ascribe Republican political views to these evangelicals, largely because there's a vacuum of genuine discussion about the role of faith on the Democratic side. Oh, some Democratic consultants have issued talking points. But talking points don't equate to the operating system imbedded in the Ten Commandments, much less the radical dogma of the Sermon on the Mount.
Democratic protestents understandably get nervous talking about Jesus because the economic system he preached sounds suspiciously socialist, a tag that Democrats have worked like the devil to avoid.
But Democrats can talk about poverty as immoral, and incarceration rates of young black men as morally unacceptable. Until they tackle the tough issues, they will not provide the salient spiritual alternative to the clear but misguided values politics of the right-wing Republicans.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:41 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 16, 2005
A rueful day for America
Republicans control the U.S. House of Representatives and it looks as if they'll do so until at least the next redistricting in 2010.
Republicans control the U.S. Senate by a large margin. If anything, they'll increase that margin in 2006, when more vulnerable Democratic senators face reelection than Republicans.
Republicans control the White House until at least early 2009.
And Republicans control the U.S. Supreme Court. If you don't believe it, simply recall Bush v. Gore in 2001, when the Supremes ruled it would be unconstitutional merely to COUNT ALL THE VOTES in Florida.
It might seem as if Republicans dominate America. But they don't. If all of Florida's votes had been counted or recounted, George Bush never would have been elected.
If only 65,000 votes in Ohio had gone the other way in 2004, John Kerry would have been elected instead of George Bush.
Public opinion polls are clear: Americans have major doubts about President Bush on the war in Iraq and Social Security reform.
We are a closely divided nation.
NEVERTHELESS, George Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist talk as though there is only one political party in America.
For Pete's sake, it may seem that way. The Senate has confirmed 210 of Bush's 218 judicial nominees.
Are Bush and Frist really saying that the Senate should confirm EVERY nominee submitted by the president? If that were the case, why should the Senate have any voice at all. If the Senate were expected to be a lapdog for the president, why go through the meaningless exercise of confirmation?
Maybe it's because years ago wiser heads envisioned that we need consensus, not a small majority, to do certain things, like appoint judges for a lifetime.
It is such a sad day for America.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 11, 2005
Oh, boy, Mayor West
Well, well, well. The conservative mayor of Spokane, Washington, has been forced to admit that he's been intimate with other men. Mayor James E. West, who championed anti-gay legislation as a state senator, was caught in a sting operation orchestrated by the local Spokane newspaper, The Spokesman-Review.
The paper hired a computer expert to pose as a 17-year-old boy in an online exchange, and the good mayor solicited him for a rendezvous.
"Guys like you don't come along every often and I want it to last" the mayor wrote. "Am I crazy here?"
Not crazy, mayor, just a profoundly toubled hypocrite. You're the same politician who recently thretened to veto a Spokane City Council measure to give benefits to domestic partners. And you introduced a bill when you were a state senator to outlaw teenage sex. Now it appears that that's one of your indulgences, and has been since you were a Boy Scout leader 25 years ago.
Oh, boy.
For the record, you've denied having sex with boys. But let's just understand that a parade of witnesses is going to come forward with creepy details of how you helped them earn their merit badges.
It will not be pretty. You will resign tearfully. Who knows if there will be enough evidence to convict you and send you to prison for most of the rest of your life.
Let's be clear: it's not a crime to be gay. No thanks to your work in the Washington state Senate. But it's not. It is a crime to molest boys.
Trying to capitalize at the expense of homosexual people, as you've done as a politician, well, that just exceeds my analytical capabilities. In other words, it just boggles my mind. But mayor, I'm pretty clear that your brand of hypocrisy ought to be a crime.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 09, 2005
Purity? Putrid.
Two news items over the weekend caught my attention.
The first, from Waynesville, North Carolina, where a dozen or so members of a Southern Baptist church there were voted out of the congregation when they declined to support the right-wing political views of the pastor.
This is astonishing. Until hucksters like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson came along, Baptist churches were famously nonpartisan. With the right-wing hypocrites like Robertson and Falwell on TV every day, that changed.
So now, this pastor in western North Carolina says that church members must go along with his views against pro-choice candidates, or hit the road. The Internal Revenue Service TODAY should revoke the church's tax-exempt status.
The second news item was the ouster of the Reverend Thomas Reese, a Catholic priest, as editor of the U.S. Catholic magazine "America." The order came from the Vatican. Reese's misdeed? Too many times, he gave both sides of an issue. And the Vatican does not allow both sides to be debated. No sir. We don't need to know both sides of gay people in the church, or the role of women in Catholicism. No, that certainly would be dangerous.
I don't know, maybe I just don't qualify for these clubs. Jesus, who sat down to eat with sinners. Jesus, who offered whatever he had even to the tax collectors and people who were different. Where is the shred of evidence that Jesus, the central figure of Christianity, is in that Baptist church in Waynesville?
And the Catholic church thought police is just too byzantine for a southern protestant like me to understand. Except that I know that choking off debate, trying to maintain purity of doctine, is not what gives vibrancy to any living thing. It will not serve the church well. When Christ freed sinners, he meant them to be free.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 04, 2005
Sweet land of hypocrisy, of thee I sing....
In my home state, North Carolina, some well-meaning legislators introduced a bill to allow certain undocumented immigrants to attend the state university system as in-state students. That means they pay tution that's, say, $3,000 a year versus more than $10,000 if they pay the out-of-state rate. There are 16 University of North Carolina campuses, and tuition varies by campus.
The legislators put conditions on the offer of in-state tuition: the undocumented immigrants had to have attended N.C. high schools for four years. They had to agree to begin the process of becoming legal immigrants. And, of course, they had to qualify for admission in every way that natives must qualify. No special favors. It would affect perhaps a thousand students.
The reaction from the right-wing has been characterized by ignorance, bigotry and fear. I won't amplify their hateful message here.
But so far, there has not been enough backbone from the moderate middle in the legislature to give the bill much of a chance of becoming law.
What a pity. Think about it, and put yourself in the place of an 18-year-old Hispanic boy or girl. Your parents have left a country where there was not much economic hope. They've moved you to a new country where you have to meet new friends, learn a new language, go into a new school system that's completely foreign to you.
Despite the obstacles, you work hard. You do well. You are admitted to a state university. And then they tell you that you have to come up with $12,0000 a year for tuition. The door of opportunity effectively slams in your face.
Is that what we're willing to say to young people whose parents brought them here and raised them here with the hope of a better future? That we welcome them as the people who serve us ice water in restaurants, build our houses, trim our grass and clean our offices, but we're not willing to give them the opportunity to become a teacher, a nurse or a software developer?
The same politicians who oppose the tuition bill are the same ones who want things to be as they were in the 1950s, before women could choose to work outside the home in a decent job and, if the tragic circumstances led to it, have a legal abortion. Those days are gone. We can't turn back the clock. And the influx of undocumented immigrants is not likely to abate any time soon. So, how will we address this issue responsibly?
A couple weeks ago, the local newspaper carried a long article about a team at the Duke University Medical Center racing to find a cure for a crippling, fatal disease. The lead researcher on the team had an Anglo-European name. Every other team member had a name that would not have been in the Raleigh, North Carolina, phone book 25 years ago.
All of us, after all, are immigrants. Even those wild-eyed citizens who foam at the mouth while calling into right-wing talk radio.
Let's rely on our hope for the future, and not our fears.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack