Doctors Against Prop 8

The California chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics is opposing Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that seeks to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. Here's their reasoning:

The physical growth, development, social and mental well-being of all children is supported by allowing parents a full range of parental legal rights, such as Social Security survivor benefits, health benefits for dependent children, and legally recognized consent for education and medical decisions. In order to protect and promote the best interests of the child, the AAP-CA supports equal access for all California children to the legal, financial and emotional protections of civil marriage for their parents, without discrimination based on family structure.

So much for the Yes on 8 campaign's "do it for the kids" argument.

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Eating Their Own Tail

Jeffrey Feldman said today that the scores of clips from McCain and Palin rallies in which supporters hurl racist epithets have become the dominant images of the campaign. While the post is given to some hyperbole, Feldman is hitting on what I think is the story as the race draws to a close: John McCain's campaign is dying a self-inflicted death, as the worst tendencies and instincts of white conservatives have taken center stage.

Beginning with the Palin pick, McCain ceded his message to the practitioners of divisive identity politics. It bore immediate fruit, as Republicans who had theretofore been cool on the Arizona Senator immediately got on board. You could feel it in Palin's early speeches, and especially during the convention: conservatives passionately embraced the McCain campaign as something that looked and sounded like them.

If it had stopped there, things might be different. But, beginning with Guiliani's and Palin's jabs at community organizers from the convention podium, the Republican campaign's message turned to the "difference" of his opponent, employing terminolgy about his "secrets" and asking "Who is Barack Obama?" In doing this, McCain began allowing unqualified and unaccountable people to say things on his behalf that made mainstream Americans a little sick to their stomachs. Thus, the people introducing him at rallies started referring regularly to Barack "Hussein" Obama. When McCain failed to put a stop to it, the wheels began to fall off.

Yes, Palin's interview with Katie Couric hurt. Yes, the financial crisis and McCain's faux campaign suspension amplified the problems. And no, SNL's parodies didn't do the camp any favors. But the legacy of McCain's failed campaign will be the scenes from these rallies. It will be supporters in Pennsylvania and Ohio making shooting gestures with their hands and disavowing the prospect of a black president. In the face of this ugliness, all McCain could do was double down on his bet with the devil and praise his supporters.

Joe the Plumber's campaign appearance today and the ignorance it put on display is merely postscript. Because from right wing shock jocks to an inexperienced and unknown VP pick and finally to an obscure right wing hothead, John McCain has repeatedly allowed the wrong people to do his talking for him. His wager has been that enough Americans will see themselves in such unrefined and unprofessional personalities. If the polls are to be believed, it's a wager he's about to lose in embarrasing fashion.

All Obama has to do is wait for the desperate and undisciplined mouths of McCain's surrogates to swallow the rest of the campaign's body.

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It's Over

I've voted, cast my absentee ballot in the largest voting district in the country, done all the research and filled in all the circles, sealed it, signed it, and sent it in.

I've only posted one item about this state's Proposition 8. I've known for some time how I would probably vote on it, but I remained open to wisdom and direction until Saturday, when I'd heard enough. The argument about the need for legal, social, and biological protections engendered in traditional marriage to be preserved hovered at the back of my mind for days.

On Saturday the wife was phoned by a Yes on 8 volunteer who warned that failure of the proposition would result in lawsuits against churches refusing to marry same-gender couples and in a mandate for public schools to promote those marriages. Neither of those claims are true (are synagogues sued that refuse to marry non-Jews? Catholic churches that won't marry divorced people? And the California Teachers' Association is forcefully opposing the measure), and yet this well-intentioned volunteer was spending her morning stating that they were, motivated largely, she professed, by her religious convictions.

After weeks of editorials, calls from Focus on the Family, yard signs, and newspaper ads, this call cemented what had been my pervasive leaning all along. What it made clear was that advocates of the measure are passionately concerned to defend an institution, marriage, that they believe has been instituted by God. The subject of Proposition 8 is, after all, marriage: who can participate in it and who cannot.

I too believe that marriage is a God-given institution, and yet I lack the zeal for protecting or preserving or defending it evidenced by Proposition 8's supporters. I've made my peace with the competing claim in all of this, that who and who is not admitted into a people's institutions is a matter of civil rights and that to deny access to an institution's legal and social benefits and responsibilities to a group of people based on an inherent characteristic of those people is wrong. It's a moral problem. God doesn't like it. It's wrong when it pertains to race. It's wrong when it pertains to gender. It's wrong when it pertains to sexual orientation.

Ultimately, I'm not persuaded that an institution ordained by God needs such vehement human policing. For one, proponents of "traditional" marriage have a tendency to amplify the importance of family in the Biblical narratives, overlooking the ways in which the God of the Bible repeatedly sends people out, away from the family as a traditional institution (Jesus is a pretty good example). But more to the point, such frenzied patrolling of marriage as a tradition belies a lack of belief in that very tradition. To truly believe in something is to trust that it does not depend upon your effort for its survival.

Praising the no-frills naturalistic painting style employed by his father, Thomas Merton says, ". . . a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself." I read that sentence, tucked neatly into the opening paragraphs of Merton's memoir The Seven Storey Mountain, on Saturday afternoon.

Then I put down the book and voted.

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What's on Your Ballot II

Proposition 8 is the most notorious of the 12 ballot propositions Californians will vote on in just over a week. It's a measure to "eliminate the right" of same sex couples to marry, a right that was granted by the California Supreme Court on May 15th (this blogger's birthday).

You're for this or you're not; there's very little grey. Among those for are the LDS church, Focus on The Family, and the Knights of Columbus. The opposed include the California Teachers' Association, Pacific Gas & Energy, and Brad Pitt.

This week saw the release of threatening letters sent by the "Yes on 8" campaign to entities that have given money to defeat it. They are clear in their message: withdraw your support from the opposition, give us money, or else. Read one such letter here. Money quote:

"Were you to elect to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. You would leave us no other reasonable assumption. The names of any companies or organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to Protectmarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published. It is only fair for Proposition 8 supporters to know which companies and organizations oppose traditional marriage.

Classy.

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Accused

I received an email today from a member of the congregation that heard me preach last Sunday, expressing distress that I had "brought politics into" the sermon and that I did so "in a manner that was disparaging of others."

I promptly responded with thanks to the congregant (preachers really do appreciate negative feedback. Really). I told the person that I was going to look at my manuscript again to see exactly where that charge arises from, but that I don't like the notion that anything I might have said was disparaging. "I don't believe a sermon should ever do that," I said, "and if mine did on Sunday then I will chalk it up to less-than-careful thought about the subject beforehand and resolve to not make the same mistake again."

Here's what the manuscript says:

"The question about paying taxes [the text was Matthew 22's story where the Pharisees and Herodians plot to entrap Jesus with a question about paying taxes to the emperor] is a slippery political football having next-to-nothing to do with money. Witness our newest American everyman celebrity, Joe the Plumber. For Joe, the question is hardly about tax codes and income brackets and W-4's. Rather, if you've seen his exchange with the candidate caught on tape, you know that it's about him. 'I'm a hard working guy,' he says. 'I've worked hard all my life.' For Joe (and, I imagine, all of us), it becomes about our hard work, the things we've sweated and toiled to achieve for ourselves and our families. It becomes about us, who we perceive ourselves to be, who we aspire to be, and who we allow a say in those aspirations.

It is when we're dealing with those aspirations and high ideals, though, that we are most likely to contradict ourselves. It didn't take reporters very long to discover that Joe the Plumber hasn't paid his income taxes in quite some time. Our most lofty convictions are undermined by our most routine habits. We can be, I'm afraid, the worst enemy of our most cherished causes. Like the vocal supporter of 'tough on crime' legislation with his own criminal record or the 'protect marriage' advocate who hasn't said 'I love you' to her spouse in weeks, we can betray our aspirations without even knowing it. And it's never worse than when it has to do with money."

The verdict I have to reach when I read that back is that both charges (bringing politics into the sermon and disparaging people) are true. The latter bothers me. The former doesn't. That a preacher would bring politics into any given sermon is right and good, especially when it serves to put politics into conversation with the gospel. Preachers ought not be partisans in the pulpit, mind, but ought to afford congregants an opportunity to see the political in the routine and the petty in the political. Preaching itself is a political act.

To disparage, though, seems somehow un-Godly. The mistake in the text quoted above lies not in the mentioning of political situations like campaigns, crime legislation, and the fight over marriage, bur rather a one-sided use of those situations to illustrate a larger point. Surely an illustration could have been drawn from, say, and environmental advocate who contradicts his lofty cause in his routine habits. Taken separately, the illustrations about the tough on crime proponent and the defend marriage advocate are not disparaging; collectively they are.

And the point about Joe the Plumber's income taxes kind of fails, in retrospect, to illustrate the point it's supposed to illustrate. That's sloppiness, which, to my mind, is a less pardonable homiletical offense.

Talking money and politics in church is dangerous business. The good news here, I believe, is that when we make a misstep the worst thing that comes is an email. And the chance to reexamine your work, which never hurts.

I plead guilty.

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What the Wasilla?!

Thank goodness for Comedy Central:

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McCain's New Speechwriter: Studs Terkel

The Arizona Senator seems to have channeled the spirit of that great American essayist and chronicler of working people from Detroit to Duluth. In college I had a bit part in the musical "Working," an adaptation of Terkel's book with the same name. The musical features songs with titles like, "Millwork," "Just a Housewife," "The Mason," "Brother Trucker," and "Cleanin' Women." Check out this video of Patti LaBelle in the film adaptation:



I make this comparison after reading a story on The LA Times' website about McCain's efforts to win Missouri. After exposing Joe the Plumber to the country in last week's debate, he's now throwing out references to workers of every stripe at a Terkel-esque speed:

McCain portrays Joe Wurzelbacher as a symbol for all Americans struggling to get by. Among them, to hear McCain tell it, are Phil the Bricklayer, Wendy the Waitress and Rose the Teacher. On Monday, he added Ed the Dairyman.

Seriously. Who writes this stuff?

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