slacktivist

Sub-subminimal

Every job comes with a set of minimum standards. An entry-level volunteer firefighter, for example, must meet a basic standard of physical fitness as well as be able to demonstrate a basic capacity for learning the craft of firefighting and a basic commitment to keeping the community safe.

Every once in a while, though, someone slips through the screening process and reminds us that every job also comes with a set of sub-minimal requirements. A volunteer firefighter, for example, shouldn't also be an arsonist on the side.

We tend to think of such subminimal requirements as things that go without saying, and thus we rarely state them explicitly. The recruiting materials for volunteer fire companies will mention the minimal requirements of time and physical capability, but they won't usually spell out the subminimal requirements. They won't say, in large block letters at the top of the page: "Firebugs need not apply."

Perhaps they should. Because again every once in a while some person comes along who meets the minimum requirements but turns out not to meet the subminimal ones and we are forced to rethink what we have previously allowed to go without saying. We start to think that maybe we should have stated explicitly that candidates shouldn't expect to spend all day in their cubicles surfing cyberporn, or that they will be expected to refrain from embezzling, or not to fabricate articles or plagiarize.

Or not to set fire to the fire station itself.

But of course we could never keep up. Subminimal requirements, it turns out, not only go unspoken but unimagined. It simply wouldn't be possible to list all of them, or even for most of us to conceive of what they might be until we actually witness some sub-subminimal employee who demonstrates for us some new and startling way to delve beneath simple incompetence into the astonishing realm of the sub-subminimal.

The firebug firefighter may be one exception -- an example of a subminimal standard that does need to be stated explicitly. Arsonists -- the sort who set fires for thrills, not for insurance fraud -- tend to seek work with fire departments and volunteer companies. Most squads, therefore, have learned to carefully screen against this, incorporating this one particular subminimal standard into their hiring process.

The closest parallel to the fire departments' problem is an equally common affliction bedeviling school boards and state boards of education. As with fire companies, the vast majority of candidates for these positions are responsible people committed to public service, the common good and quality education. But just like the fire departments, school boards seem to attract a significant unhinged minority of firebugs -- people who just want to destroy public education and laugh while it burns.

The latest of these is Cynthia Dunbar of Texas, whom I learned about thanks to an e-mail from Matt D.

Gov. Rick Perry is reportedly considering appointing the chair of that state's school board. Dunbar wants to destroy public schools, which she regards as "tyrannical" and a "tool of perversion."

Let me repeat that: Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to put in charge of his state's public schools a woman who wants to destroy those schools.

Perry doesn't just want to hire the giggling firebug, he wants to make her the fire chief. This makes Gov. Perry the second craziest person in this story.

The craziest, of course, is Cynthia Dunbar who is -- even by Texas Republican standards -- barking mad.

In a book published last year, Dunbar argued the country’s founding fathers created “an emphatically Christian government” and that government should be guided by a “biblical litmus test.” She endorses a belief system that requires “any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”

Dunbar -- who is, astonishingly, an attorney -- takes as her first principle of government an illegal and flagrantly unconstitutional religious test. "Unconstitutional" isn't strong enough a description of Dunbar's views on this point, actually, she's anti-constitutional. Her idea of "an emphatically Christian government" ruled by a "biblical litmus test" douses the Constitution in kerosene and sets it ablaze, then pisses on its ashes.

If Dunbar is really an attorney, then the views in her book make a good case for her being disbarred. Maybe even deported.

It doesn't help that Dunbar is also a staggeringly unoriginal whackjob. Her book is titled, One Nation Under God.

That's the same title as dozens of previously published theocratic "next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth" books. This hackneyed title comes, of course, from the Pledge of Allegiance -- an incantation from which Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has been working hard of late to remove the word "indivisible."

Also in the book, she calls public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.”

The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even “tyrannical,” she wrote, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.

Dunbar home-schooled her own children.

The Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg provides some additional background on Cynthia Dunbar:

If the chatter from some board members proves correct, and Gov. Rick Perry is indeed considering appointing member Cynthia Dunbar as the board’s new leader, we may find ourselves reminiscing fondly about the good ol’ days when Chairman McLeroy simply disregarded experts, sidelined teachers and insisted on inserting his religious beliefs into public policy-making.

Dunbar’s shortcomings go far beyond ideology and poor leadership skills to beliefs promoting paranoia and bigotry.

This is the same Richmond Republican who penned an online essay shortly before the presidential election warning Barack Obama was plotting with terrorists to attack Americans. She refused to retract her claim, even under pressure from Republicans.

There are 4.7 million children in Texas' public schools. There are children in those buildings that Gov. Perry is willing to watch Cynthia Dunbar set on fire. Somewhere there's a line between simple incompetence and outright, deliberate, predatory evil. Dunbar and Perry have crossed it.

Some subminimal standards are worth stating explicitly. Fire companies mustn't hire firebugs. School boards mustn't hire insane home-schooling zealots who want to destroy public schools. Cynthia Dunbar is sub-subminimal.

Tony Perkins' genital politics

So back on Wednesday the House of Representatives passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, approving funding for the State Department and the Peace Corps for another two years. The official summary for H.R. 2410 reads:

To authorize appropriations for the Department of State and the Peace Corps for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, to modernize the Foreign Service, to authorize democratic, economic, and social development assistance for Pakistan, to authorize security assistance for Pakistan, and for other purposes.

"Other purposes" you say? Ah, Tony Perkins smells a fundraising opportunity. Those "other purposes" may provide the fodder for something he can use to terrify the members of his Family Research Council, and if he can keep them scared, he can keep them writing checks. So Perkins sifted through the 342 pages of this appropriations bill and found there a couple of items that might loosen the sphincters and purse strings of his eager-to-be-frightened followers.

If you're familiar with Perkins' career, you won't be surprised to learn that these two things are the same two things he's always shrieking about: Abortion and homosexuality. When you've had as much practice as Perkins has, it's not hard to sniff out traces of these in every omnibus appropriations bill and then to elevate them to its primary themes so that you can pretend that a bill "to authorize appropriations for the Department of State and the Peace Corps for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, to modernize the Foreign Service, to authorize democratic, economic, and social development assistance for Pakistan, to authorize security assistance for Pakistan, and for other purposes" is nothing more than a Yes/No vote on abortion and gays.

This is, after all, how Perkins reads the Gospels. None of those books contains even a hint of anything that can be wrestled into a statement on abortion and gays, but he treats them all as treatises defending his peculiarly obsessive strain of genital politics.

Perkins' "Eeek! Gays!" response to H.R. 2410 is at least somewhat explainable. What has his panties in a twist is this section, 140 pages in:

Sec. 333. DISCRIMINATION RELATED TO SEXUAL ORIENTATION

(a) TRACKING VIOLENCE OR CRIMINALIZATION RELATED TO SEXUAL ORIENTATION. -- The Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor shall designate a Bureau-based officer or officers who shall be responsible for tracking violence, criminalization, and restrictions on the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms, consistent with United States law, in foreign countries based on actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity.

(b) INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS TO REVISE LAWS CRIMINALIZING HOMOSEXUALITY. -- In keeping with the Administration’s endorsement of efforts by the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality in member states, the Secretary of State shall work though appropriate United States Government employees at United States diplomatic and consular missions to encourage the governments of other countries to reform or repeal laws of such countries criminalizing homosexuality or consensual homosexual conduct, or restricting the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms, consistent with United States law, by homosexual individuals or organizations.

Sec. 333 also contains a provision stating that reports tracking systematic and legal discrimination in other countries will now keep track of discrimination based on "actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity" as well as the religious and ethnic discrimination they previously tracked. Perkins is happy that these reports keep track of systematic and legal discrimination against Christians in countries in which they are a religious minority, but he's appalled at the notion that the State Department would also be concerned by the exact same kinds of bias and oppression when it is exercised against "actual or perceived" sex or gender minorities.

Rights for me but not for thee is the opposite of the rule of law. It's also the opposite of the Golden Rule. Opposing this section of this bill is impossible to reconcile with the Family Research Council's claim to "hate the sin but love the sinner." Perkins & Co. believe that homosexual sex is a sin, and that GLBT people need to pray away the gay -- to get saved and let Jesus straighten them out. I understand that view, but I don't follow the leap from such a belief to the idea that we must ignore and implicitly condone the imprisonment or disenfranchisement of GLBT in other nations.

Perkins says that Sec. 333 above constitutes a "radical agenda" that would mean "one of the State Department's biggest priorities would be pressuring other countries to overturn laws that restrict homosexual and transsexual behavior."

Perkins isn't just exaggerating by saying this would become "one of the State Department's biggest priorities," he's lying. It is not possible that he believes his own hyperbole here or his own deliberate distortion. The language of the bill is timid and requires no measurable outcomes. It says that the secretary of state "shall work ... to encourage" the "reform or repeal" of laws criminalizing homosexuality. Just imagine if the bill directed the secretary "to encourage the reform" of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, would Perkins then accept the claim that this was "one of the State Department's biggest priorities"? Of course not.

Note also the liar Tony Perkins' blanket approval of "laws that restrict homosexual and transsexual behavior." He thinks it is wrong to encourage the reform of laws "criminalizing homosexuality or consensual homosexual conduct." He approves of such laws. And more than that, he approves of laws "restricting the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms ... by homosexual individuals." He wants to outlaw gayness and gay sex and he favors laws denying GLBT people the rights of free speech, free assembly, free exercise of their religion, the right to bear arms, to own property, to vote, etc. He favors such laws abroad and he favors such laws here at home.

So for Tony Perkins, restricting fundamental human rights is OK provided it's only for an unpopular minority. That argument always works out so well. ...

It takes a bit more imagination for Perkins to characterize H.R. 2410 as an abortion bill, but the man has no shortage of imagination when it comes to injecting abortion politics anywhere and everywhere that he possibly can. Here is how Perkins introduces his diatribe against this bill for the funding of the State Department and the Peace Corps:

While the Obama Administration has made the claim that they want to reduce abortions in America, they've made no such claims abroad. On the contrary, the current administration is already planning the groundbreaking ceremony for an Office of Global Women's Issues, which is certain to become an international abortion headquarters. ...

I'm not quite sure what "an international abortion headquarters" is supposed to describe, but it's hard to see how the Office of Global Women's Issues, as described in the legislation, would be anything of the sort. See if you can figure out what Perkins is talking about from the text of the bill:

SEC. 334. OFFICE FOR GLOBAL WOMEN’S ISSUES.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT. — There is established an Office for Global Women’s Issues (in this section referred to as the ‘‘Office’’) in the Office of the Secretary of State in the Department of State. The Office shall be headed by the Ambassador-at-Large (in this section referred to as the ‘‘Ambassador’’), who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Ambassador shall report directly to the Secretary of State.

(b) PURPOSE.—The Office shall coordinate efforts of the United States Government regarding gender integration and women’s empowerment in United States foreign policy.

(c) DUTIES.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—The Ambassador shall —

(A) coordinate and advise on activities, policies, programs, and funding relating to gender integration and women’s empowerment internationally for all bureaus and offices of the Department of State and in the international programs of other United States Government departments and agencies;

(B) design, support, and as appropriate, implement, limited projects regarding women’s empowerment internationally;

(C) actively promote and advance the full integration of gender analysis into the programs, structures, processes, and capacities of all bureaus and offices of the Department of State and in the international programs of other United States Government departments and agencies; and

(D) direct, as appropriate, United States Government resources to respond to needs for gender integration and women’s empowerment in United States Government foreign policies and international programs.

(2) COORDINATING ROLE.—The Ambassador shall coordinate with the United States Agency for International Development and the Millennium Challenge Corporation on all policies, programs, and funding of such agencies relating to gender integration and women’s empowerment.

(3) DIPLOMATIC REPRESENTATION.—Subject to the direction of the President and the Secretary of State, the Ambassador is authorized to represent the United States in matters relevant to the status of women internationally.

(d) REPORTING.—The heads of all bureaus and offices of the Department of State, as appropriate, shall evaluate and monitor all women’s empowerment programs administered by such bureaus and offices and annually submit to the Ambassador a report on such programs and on policies and practices to integrate gender.

Note that nothing in the above mentions abortion or reproductive health at all. Perkins is certain, though, that everything listed there as the agenda of the Office for Global Women’s Issues means one and only one thing: abortion. All that talk about integrating women and empowering them to become full and equal members of society is, to Perkins, nothing more than code words for abortion, abortion, abortion. And therefore, since Perkins is opposed to abortion, he concludes that he must oppose the empowerment of women and any effort to integrate them as full and equal members of male society.

That "therefore" in the preceding sentence is where so much of the anti-abortion movement either goes off the rails or shows itself to never have been on the rails in the first place. That "therefore" does not follow.

Tony Perkins is not a good person nor an honest broker, so let's set him aside for the moment to consider how a different person -- someone truthful and arguing in good faith -- might approach something like this Office for Global Women's Issues.

I used to work on anti-Apartheid stuff with a woman named Leah who was a devout Catholic who believed in the full humanity of the unborn from the moment of conception. Because of that premise, she argued that the unborn had a "right to life" which, in the case of abortion, she believed should outweigh the competing rights of the mother. She did not deny the existence or the validity or the importance of those competing rights, but simply argued that in this one circumstance, the unborn person's rights trumped them. Given her premise, that's a reasonable conclusion. It parallels the logic of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation that your right to extend your arm ends where my nose begins.

But I'm afraid that people like Leah have not become the leading voices of the anti-abortion movement in this country. The leading voices belong to those who do not simply argue that one set of competing rights ought to outweigh the other, but who argue that only one set of competing rights is legitimate. Because my nose exists, they argue, you have no right, ever, to extend your arm. This is the sweeping non-sequitur we hear all the time from people like Perkins. He isn't satisfied to argue that a "right to life" for the unborn deserves to be weighed against the competing rights of the mother or of all women, but instead he races beyond anywhere his premise suggests or allows to insist that no such rights of the mother or of all women even exist.

We saw this absurdity on display here in Pennsylvania when it got our former junior senator, Rick Santorum, laughed out of office. Roe v. Wade was decided, in part, on the recognition of the fundamental right to privacy. Santorum's purported belief in the full humanity of the unborn ought therefore to have led him to argue that the right to privacy was, in the case of abortion, outweighed by the competing rights of the unborn, but Santorum wasn't satisfied to make that claim. Instead, he went mad. Santorum declared that the right to privacy does not exist, that any claim to such a right was a "myth," and that all that is not expressly permitted is forbidden. He thus became an advocate not merely of "big government," but of boundless government. He was thus invited, by a huge bipartisan majority, to return to the, um, private sector.

Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council are here following Santorum off the same cliff, repeating his lunacy as it applies to "gender integration and women’s empowerment." Perkins goes far, far beyond what logically flows from or is required by his premise of a commitment to a "right to life" for the unborn, choosing instead to deny, denounce and reject the very existence of any rights that might possibly compete with it.

As evidence that gender integration and the empowerment of women are simply code words for "unlimited abortion," (meaning only and exclusively that), Perkins quotes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "We are now an administration that will protect the rights of women, including their rights to reproductive health care." If reproductive health care might be construed to include legal abortion, then Perkins concludes that women must be denied reproductive health care. And if "protecting the rights of women" necessarily entails reproductive health care, then Perkins concludes that he must oppose rights for women -- all rights for women. Thus he arrives at this astonishing place of fierce opposition to the integration and empowerment of women anywhere on earth.

Again, Perkins' position does not logically flow from his alleged premise of rights for the unborn. That premise does not and cannot carry him to the place at which he has arrived. So how did he get there?

I think it's safe to assume that this is where he has arrived because this is where he always intended to go. Tony Perkins opposes gender integration and women's empowerment. He opposes protecting the rights of women and he opposes women having any right to reproductive health care. He claims that he opposes all of these things based on his opposition to abortion, but that train won't get him there. He got there all on his own. Concern for the rights of the unborn had nothing to do with it.

Killing in the name of

It would be hard to overstate the significance of the late Francis Schaeffer when it comes to the shape, tone, agenda and influence of evangelical Christianity in America.

In 1970, the Rev. Billy Graham was the face of American evangelicalism. He was a preacher and an evangelist. Graham served as a kind of unofficial -- and nonpartisan -- chaplain to the powerful, but he was largely non-political. When Billy came to town it wasn't for a partisan political event, but for one of his unfortunately named "crusades" -- huge mass-revival meetings in stadiums that drew support from a broad spectrum of Christian churches, including mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. His message was upbeat, hopeful, inclusive and inspirational. (Plus he had really good music -- Johnny and June and Ethel Waters.)

But by the 1980s, Graham had been eclipsed by new faces and very different voices with a very different agenda -- men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Evangelicalism had become fiercely partisan, polarized and polarizing. It had become more a political movement than a religious one and the dominant issue -- the only shibboleth or litmus test that seemed to matter -- was opposition to legal abortion.

The founding myth of this new, stridently political faith says that this politicizing arose in reaction to the Roe v. Wade decision acknowledging the legal right to abortion. After "activist" judges "legislated" from the bench, evangelicals recoiled in horror and rose up, in Falwell's phrase, to "take back America."

But that's not what happened. Evangelicals did not recoil in horror from Roe v. Wade. There was no outcry, scarcely any reaction at all. Randall Balmer discusses this in his book Thy Kingdom Come (see a longer excerpt here):

In the 1980s, in order to solidify their shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and "secular humanists," who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court's misguided Roe decision.

It's a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn't true.

Although various Roman Catholic groups denounced the ruling, and Christianity Today complained that the Roe decision "runs counter to the moral teachings of Christianity through the ages but also to the moral sense of the American people," the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about it; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision. W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote, "Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision." Indeed, even before the Roe decision, the messengers (delegates) to the 1971 Southern Baptist Convention gathering in St. Louis, Missouri, adopted a resolution that stated, "we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." W.A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, expressed his satisfaction with the Roe v. Wade ruling. "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," the redoubtable fundamentalist declared, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed."

In 1973, most evangelicals regarded opposition to abortion as a Catholic Thing -- and therefore vaguely suspect, as though it might lead to praying to Mary or something. But throughout the 1970s and into the '80s, that changed. The person most responsible for that change was Francis Schaeffer. He persuaded evangelicals to adopt this issue and to get so angry about it that it would come to replace even evangelism as their hallmark concern and their pre-eminent defining characteristic. The language, the rhetoric and arguments, the moral reasoning, political tactics and activist strategies of the anti-abortion movement over the last 30 years all originate with Francis Schaeffer.

This is why, out of all the voices condemning and grappling with the meaning of the murder Sunday of Dr. George Tiller, none is more significant that that of Frank Schaeffer, Francis' son. Without his father, there would be no Scott Roeder.

Here is Frank Schaeffer last night on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show, following up on his commentary from the Huffington Post:

Here's a bit from that HuffPo essay:

Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad's or my words we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen.

In fact that very thing has happened before. In 1994, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Paul Hill, a former minister, was convicted of the killings and executed in 2003. Paul Hill was an avid follower of my father's.

In 1994, as now, the mainstream evangelical groups responded to the slayings in Pensacola by saying all the right things -- offering a raft of statements unambiguously denouncing the violence and condemning Paul Hill's actions.

I remember those statements very well because I wrote one of them. In the '90s, I was the staff writer for an evangelical -- and, therefore, anti-abortion -- nonprofit, and so it fell to me to write the first draft of a statement after Paul Hill's killing spree.

The statement we wrote was consistent with what our group had been saying all along. My boss, in whose name this statement was released, was a lifelong pacifist, a devout Mennonite who has, for decades, unfailingly opposed all forms of violence. And as a good Mennonite, his rhetoric too was always studiously nonviolent -- peaceable to the point of blandness, actually.

But at the same time we were drafting and issuing this statement, I was reading dozens of similar statements from other evangelical groups whose rhetoric had never been marked by anything like my boss's Mennonite pacifism. These were groups that routinely spoke of abortion as "murder" or "mass-murder," and that routinely spoke of legalized abortion as an "American Holocaust." They had, for years, been using precisely the same rhetoric and making exactly the same arguments that Paul Hill was now using to attempt to justify his double homicide.

Those groups' condemnations of Paul Hill then -- like their condemnations of Scott Roeder now -- ring hollow. Such condemnations seem to be self-refuting. How can they condemn men like Hill or Roeder just for taking their own arguments seriously?

Paul Hill argued that abortion was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust -- just like the National Right to Life Committee, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and dozens of other evangelical groups said it was. If that's true, Hill said, then he wasn't merely justified, but obligated to take up arms against abortionists. If you're confronted with an evil equal in magnitude to that of Adolf Hitler -- as all these groups insisted was the case -- then surely one is obliged to do more than vote Republican every four years in the hopes of one day appointing enough judges to change the law of the land. Confronted with what all of these groups assured him was the Holocaust, he decided to become Claus von Stauffenberg.

Yet when Hill repeated their own argument and their own rhetoric back to them, these groups all recoiled. They all claimed to share Hill's premise, but not to share his conclusion. That won't work. Hill's violent conclusion arose logically from that shared premise. If he was a madman to be condemned -- as all those groups suddenly insisted he was -- it was because of the madness of that premise. So how was it possible they could repudiate him without also repudiating that rhetoric that compelled him to act?

What I realized then, in 1994, as I watched these groups line up to condemn violence against "mass-murderers" and to renounce armed opposition to "the Holocaust," was that these folks didn't really mean any of it. They were horrified by the spectacle of someone taking their own rhetoric and arguments seriously. "We don't really mean anything we say," these groups rushed to announce. "We don't really believe any of that."

And since they no longer bothered to claim they believed it, I stopped trying to believe it too.

Now here we are again, 15 years later, as the arguments of the anti-abortion movement are again being proved disingenuous by their own self-refuting statements condemning the latest lethal fruit of their rhetoric of "mass-murder" and "Holocaust." Once again some sad, disturbed man has committed the error of taking their rhetoric more seriously than it was ever meant by the people who supposedly believed it to be true.

Didn't Scott Roeder realize that it was all just a game? Didn't he appreciate that all this talk of Holocaust was just a gimmick to get his fellow Kansans to support a repeal of the estate tax? Didn't he understand the difference between really believing that abortion is "mass-murder" and just indulging in the smug posturing of self-righteousness that makes the members of the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition feel a little better about themselves?

No, apparently, he didn't. Apparently he was just crazy enough to believe that these people meant what they said, crazy enough to believe that they believed their own words and that he should believe them too.

To believe these people -- to believe that their words matter or that their words are truthful or that their arguments are made in good faith -- is madness indeed.

The Sick Bastard Rate

Here's a depressing bit of polling data.

• 62 percent of white evangelical Protestants said torture of a suspect could be often or sometimes justified.
• 51 percent of white, non-Hispanic Catholics said torture could be justified.
• 46 percent of white mainline Protestants were willing to justify torture.
• 40 percent of the religiously unaffiliated chimed in to agree to justify torture.

This poll is particularly dismaying for those of us in that category of white evangelical Protestants. It's not like Catholics are going to be proud of these findings either -- nearly half of us disapprove of atrocities! Nor is the three-fifths disapproval of violations of human rights among the religiously unaffiliated anything to brag about.

But, jeez, "62 percent of white evangelical Protestants said torture ... could be often or sometimes justified." That's colossal failure and shame No. 1.

Colossal failure and shame No. 2 is that this is significantly higher than the Sick Bastard Rate of any other religious group.

And even worse:

Those who attend religious services at least once a week were more likely than those who rarely or never attend to say torture is sometimes or often justified.

The implication here is clear: Being a white evangelical Protestant who regularly attends religious services will likely make you a much worse person than you otherwise would be. It makes you more comfortable with gross immorality.

To use good evangelical language: Devout evangelicals who attend church regularly view sin as justifiable much more often than religiously unaffiliated people who never attend religious services.

Something has gone very, very wrong here.

Consider for a moment who it is that these torture-approving evangelicals claim to follow and remember how he died. The empire had him tortured and then tortured to death. The instrument of that torture has become a symbol that hangs in the sanctuary of every evangelical church. It decorates the pulpits from which their sermons are preached. It hangs from the necks of many of those 62 percent who say that torture is just fine if it makes them feel safer.

What the hell is going on?

The Associated Press article linked above notes that these poll results may simply reflect evangelicals' disproportionately partisan political views:

Did evangelicals reach their conclusions because of their religious beliefs, or their politics or ideological leanings? How do you untangle those factors from each other?

There's no need to "untangle those factors." Whether we ask "Why does evangelical church attendance increase the likelihood of support for torture?" or we ask "Why does evangelical church attendance increase the likelihood of the uncritical embrace of a political ideology that supports torture?" the underlying question is the same.

Something deeply wrong -- something evil, malignant and malevolent -- is being taught or learned in evangelical churches. This wrong thing contradicts the central symbol of their purported faith, contradicts the teachings of the central figure of that faith, contradicts the sacred text that they say is their only basis for understanding that symbol and that figure.

So, again, what the hell is going on?

I have some theories -- some ideas about a differential diagnosis and the corresponding prescriptions, and we'll get to those in a bit (for a particularly odious display of the disease I suspect, see ChristianShirts.net, from which the above image was borrowed).

For right now, though, I can't decide whether I need sackcloth and ashes or a whip of cords. Or both.

The burkha-logic of NOM

In his New York Times column, Frank Rich calls that NOM ad (see the previous post) a "camp classic," which it is, and sees it as "the bigots' last hurrah," which I'm afraid it isn't.

The ad alludes to several cases of Christian chauvinists "suffering for their faith" because they ran afoul of anti-discrimination laws. None of those cases has anything at all to do with same-sex marriage, mind you, and none of them is really explained in the ad. Big thanks to konrad for supplying the link to this remarkably patient and sensible video, which explains not just the particulars of each of these cases, but also the strategy of turning each of them into an urban legend. (I liked that video so much that I've added the Waking Up blog to the too-long list there to the right. Do check it out.) 

There are a host of other things we could discuss about that fascinatingly awful ad. The difficulty of casting, for example. Or the question of whether its "gathering storm" motif is intended as a Nazi reference (maybe, but allusions to Churchill might be a stretch for these folks).

What I find most striking in this ad, though, is how explicitly it demonstrates the phenomenon of what we've referred to here as the persecuted hegemon.

It's not unusual to encounter American evangelicals who simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs about their faith and its relationship to the larger American culture. These beliefs are opposite and incompatible, yet both are, equally, essential to these evangelicals' sense of identity. They are beliefs not just about the larger culture, but about who they consider themselves to be.

Belief A: America is a Christian nation, the majority of which is composed of godly, Christian people. Christians therefore ought to be allowed to express this majority faith both officially and unofficially -- with Christian prayers in public schools, Ten Commandments (Protestant formulation) placards on courthouse walls, and pervasively sectarian Christmas greetings on the lips of every store clerk -- and religious minorities will just have to deal with the fact that they're outnumbered.

Belief Not-A: Christians are a persecuted minority, the righteous remnant in the Sodom and Gomorrah of 21st-century America, a nation so sinful and decadent that it deserved the attacks of 9/11 and the devastation of Katrina (God has bad aim). Public expressions of faith by Christians are always retaliated against, yet brave Christians demonstrate their courage in the face of adversity by continuing to thank their creator at awards shows and sporting events, to invoke his blessings at election rallies, and even to take the radically counter-cultural step of sending greeting cards on Christian holidays.

Skim through the literature or the Web sites of religious right groups such as, for example, the Family Research Council, and you'll see them switching back and forth between assertions about Belief A and Belief Not-A, sometimes in the same paragraph. It's kind of like watching Faye Dunaway at the end of Chinatown -- "My sister! My daughter! My sister! My daughter!"

Yet while these folks may be two-faced, in a way, they're not duplicitous -- they really, sincerely believe both things. They believe that their sect has -- and ought to have -- hegemony in their culture. And they believe that they are "persecuted."

The scare quotes there are necessary, since this use of the term persecution wouldn't be recognizable to first-century Christians, or to 17th-century Anabaptists, or contemporary Chinese Christians or Falun Gong adherents or Tibetan Buddhists. But set that aside.

I suspect that American evangelicals' persecution complex is an inevitable side effect of sectarian hegemony. Once you believe that your faith requires cultural dominance, and that it deserves it, then any threat to that dominance -- even just the unwelcome reminder of the existence of alternative points of view -- is perceived as a threat, as a kind of persecution. Thus, for example, Hannukah is perceived as a threat to, and an attack on, Christmas.

The persecuted hegemon is thus an oxymoronic creature driven by an oxymoronic principle: non-reciprocal justice. For these folks, turnabout is never fair play, turnabout is merely backwards. Thus when others respond to them in kind, or even simply remind them of the Golden Rule, they take offense, as though this constitutes an injustice toward them.

We've seen how this plays out on the national scene two, three times a month. Some pious dignitary remarks that homosexuality is just like pedophilia or bestiality -- a statement regarded within the hegemony of the sect as wholly innocent and inoffensive. Someone outside the sect will reply, accurately, that this is an offensive lie, a vicious slander. That response will be perceived, within the sect, as "religious persecution." The response -- any response other than "thank you, sir, may I have another?" -- implicitly rejects the legitimacy of the hegemony and rebels against the privilege enjoyed by the sect. (A big part of that privilege, it turns out, is the expectation that one can say offensive things without others taking or expressing offense. This has become far more important as a hallmark of American evangelicalism than, say, Sabbath-keeping.)

This points to the key confusion of the persecuted hegemons. They are unable to distinguish between challenges to their hegemony -- to their privilege -- and threats to their faith itself. This is a spiritually perilous confusion, particularly so for Christians who claim to follow a crucified outcast.

The word I'm stretching for here, Stanley Hauerwas would say, is "constantinianism" -- the inversion and perversion of Christianity that occurred when a religion of slaves and women and the poor became a religion of emperors and empires. Constantinian faith requires and assumes the establishment of an official, privileged religion. It comes to believe, in the language of the First Amendment, that its own free exercise depends on such an establishment -- that its free exercise is incompatible with the free exercise of any other religion (or of no religion at all).

We've illustrated this before with the religious practice of wearing burkhas -- or, more accurately, the religious practice of requiring the women one controls to wear burkhas. That practice is intrinsically hegemonic, intrinsically constantinian. It cannot be left as a matter of individual freedom or conscience. It's not sufficient for those who believe in that practice for only the women of their household or congregation or sect to be clad in burkhas. That still leaves open the possibility that one might be exposed to the immodest displays of the wrists and ankles of other women in the market or the public square. The logic of the burkha requires that all women -- every woman that every man might see -- is fully sheathed so as not to assault the eyes of the faithful.

We see this same burkha-logic at work in that "gathering storm" ad produced by the National Organization for [Our Kind and Only Our Kind of] Marriage.

"Some who advocate for same-sex marriage," the intern says, "have taken the issue far beyond same-sex couples."

"They want to bring the issue into my life," says the closeted actor (subversively playing up a bit of a lisp) who can't believe he's doing this for a paycheck.

"My freedom will be taken away," emotes the young woman.

The script for this ad purportedly has no grievance with others living however they want to live -- but only insofar as their freedom doesn't impinge upon our right to live in a world where we never have to see them, or to acknowledge their existence. That "takes away" our freedom to live as privileged hegemons. And since we can no longer distinguish between our faith itself and the privileged status of that faith, we perceive this as religious persecution -- as an injustice against us.

Your freedom threatens my freedom to live in a world in which people like you are not free to do the sorts of things you might do with your freedom. "And I am afraid."

That's burkha-logic in a nutshell.

One cheer for Fred Phelps

By now I'm sure you've seen this ad, from the National Organization for Marriage:

We could go through a point-by-point refutation of the ad's innuendo about the Big Gay Stormtroopers menacing California doctors, Massachusetts parents and tax-free beach-front property managers in New Jersey, but it would be wrong to dignify such brazen BS by pretending that anyone shoveling this crap might even slightly believe it to be true.

So instead we'll just stick with the two-word rebuttal of everything this ad darkly hints will come to pass down the slippery slope of equality: Fred Phelps.

Yes, that Fred Phelps. The military-funeral crashing leader of the inbred Westboro Baptist Church. You know, the "God Hates Fags" and "God Hates America" guy.

Or, more to the point here, the anti-gay bigot whose church's freedom to preach his gospel of hate has never been threatened, circumscribed or interfered with despite the vicious and despicable things he's made it his life's work to go around saying at the worst possible times in the worst possible places.

So it turns out that the litigious old bastard has at least one useful social purpose. The unimpeded, undiminished work of his infamously evil  anti-gay "ministry" emphatically disproves every Scary Story promoted by anti-gay religious groups who claim that recognizing marriage equality or including sexual orientation in existing hate-crime or anti-discrimination legislation will lead to Christian ministers being thrown in jail for saying they believe homosexuality is a sin.

"My freedom will be taken away," says one woman in the NOM ad.

How so? She doesn't say. But Fred Phelps' freedom hasn't been taken away, so we have to assume that this otherwise pleasant-seeming woman must be referring to her "freedom" to harass, slander and berate with greater intensity than anything Phelps has done.

It's hard to imagine just what it is that would entail. Phelps shows up at military funerals and celebrates the death of soldiers for defending America as a "fag-enabling" country. Perhaps this young lady wants to do the same, but also, I don't know, to fling feces at the honor guard.

And she's afraid that marriage equality might threaten her freedom to do that.

But the point here is that Fred Phelps is a free man. His only legal troubles stem from instances of direct physical assault -- not from the hateful content of his beliefs. So when the folks at NOM insist that their opposition to same-sex marriage is a matter of "religious liberty," the liberty they're talking about has to be the liberty to exceed the Fred Phelps standard -- the liberty not just to restrict membership on religious grounds, or just to preach against homosexuality as a sin, or to condemn and denounce homosexuals as people hated by God, but the liberty, apparently, to go beyond all that, beyond anything even Fred Phelps has imagined.

Fred Phelps is a free man, so if you think your freedom is going to be restricted, you must be planning to outdo Fred Phelps.

So there's the two-word answer for every Tony Perkins or James Dobson or Damon Owens who makes up some dubious claim about being persecuted or punished or threatened or jailed or whatever for their anti-gay beliefs.

"I'm a California doct-- " Fred Phelps! He's a free man. Are you worse than him? No? Then shut up, 'kay?

"I'm part of a church group in ..." Fred  frikkin' Phelps, buddy. I don't wanna hear it.

"I'm a Massachu ..." Phellllps! Fred Phelps. No one is persecuting you, but your whining is giving me a headache so please just go away now, thanks.

Fox News poisons Rick Warren

Strange but true. And on Easter Sunday no less.

Warren canceled a scheduled appearance Sunday morning on ABC News' "This Week," saying he was "sick from exhaustion." Exhaustion seemed like a reasonable explanation -- the guy preached six Easter sermons, after all, at the end of the holiest, and therefore busiest, week of the Christian calendar. He'd been scheduled to preach 12 sermons, plus the appearance on ABC, which seems to me a bit too much for anyone to take on.

But apparently it wasn't so much the hectic schedule as it was the varnish. Christianity Today confirms this account from MSNBC:

The megapastor was not only too exhausted ... he was also a little nauseous.

That's because Fox News Channel, which carried a couple of Warren's Easter services, insisted that his Saddleback Church apply a fresh coat of varnish to the pulpit lectern before broadcast. The varnish was still drying when it was time for Warren to preach his next service, and the fumes got to him.

I can't help but wonder if Fox News uses the same varnish on all of its anchor desks. That could explain a lot.

And but so anyway the answer to Amy Sherman's question -- "Is Rick Warren Scared of George Stephanopoulos?" -- turns out to be No.

I'm not sure it's possible for anyone to be scared of George Stephanopoulos. But Sherman's point, really, was that Warren seemed like he was uncharacteristically avoiding the media spotlight due to the controversy following his April 6 appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live." In that interview, Warren seemed desperate to convince Larry and the rest of America that he is not an anti-gay bigot, or that he doesn't consider himself an anti-gay bigot, or that his advocating the denial of civil rights to one class of people doesn't mean he wouldn't be happy to share a friendly meal with such people and therefore it's OK. Or something like that.

That interview drew fire from all sides for Warren. First and loudest from his right, from those evangelical leaders who do think of themselves, proudly and super-righteously, as anti-gay bigots. They don't trust Warren because he prayed at Obama's inaugural and because his church is bigger than theirs are and because, above all, he has never exhibited sufficient enthusiasm for the central tenets of their faith: condemning women who have sex and condemning homosexuals for existing. Sure, when pressed, Warren will eventually agree with them on those issues, but he doesn't share their glee in doing so. Most of the time it seems he'd rather talk about anything else than those two things which are, for these evangelicals, the most important things ever.

So immediately following Warren's Larry King interview, the e-mails started flying from religious right groups claiming new evidence that Warren was "soft" on homosexuality.

But at the same time, of course, Warren was also taking fire from those of us on the other side of this issue who were busy pointing out that Warren really did say all those things he told Larry King he never said, and that he said them, more than once, on video. And so, Warren's critics pointed out, he was denying having said something he did say. What's that called again, when you deny something that you know is actually true? Ah, yes, that's the word.

I kind of feel bad for the guy. His instinct is to try to make everyone happy, or at least to try to avoid making anyone angry. Thus when faced with the choice of contradicting himself or contradicting whoever it is he happens to be talking to, he'll usually opt for contradicting himself. And then he'll get caught contradicting himself, and then everyone winds up angry with him and no one is happy.

You may remember this as the plot of every single episode of Three's Company.

Sherman offers an excellent description and summary of Rick Warren's Jack Tripper problem:

Warren's other habit is to do his best to agree with whomever he's speaking to. I suspect it comes partly from his pastoral experience, but even more from a desire to prove that he's not one of "those" evangelicals. He wears Hawaiian shirts. He has an easy laugh. He hugs people. A lot. ...

When it comes to gay marriage, Warren dearly wants to be a Southern Baptist who believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman -- but also a man whose gay friends understand he's not intolerant. He appears to have missed the fact that the gap between those two impulses is what the debate over gay marriage is all about. ...

Proposition 8 is just the most visible and recent example of Warren trying to have things both ways.

Beliefnet's Steven Waldman offers a similar description of Joel Osteen who is, like Warren, a rising star of the younger generation of evangelical leaders and who is also, like Warren, desperate to be perceived as more inclusive, less negative and less hyper-partisan than the older generation of Dobsons and Falwells.

When Waldman asks Osteen about gay marriage and homosexuality more generally, Osteen begins to squirm. He doesn't want to talk about it. He wants to be Mr. Inclusive, but he knows that his answers to these questions will be anything but. Osteen is almost apologetic when, pressed by Waldman, he concedes that he is opposed to gay marriage and that he is amenable to the idea of "reparative therapy."

Waldman summarizes their discussion this way:

Osteen literally didn't mention gay marriage in either of his books. He seems to take a traditional position when confronted but tries to avoid the topic.

Somewhere between the conservative Christians fighting against gay marriage and the progressive Christians fighting for it, are folks like Joel Osteen who have a traditional view but want to move it waaaay to the bottom of the agenda -- a formula that might be called, "Don't Ask. Don't Preach."

Rick Warren is right there straddling the same fence as Joel Osteen. And it's a picket fence.

Their position, in other words, is neither comfortable nor sustainable. Eventually, they're going to need to come down on one side or the other.

I fully suspect that they'll come down, finally, the way they always do when pressed on the point. They'll come down on the side of the safe, required, mandatory response that won't jeopardize their standing or their funding in the evangelical subculture. But there's something -- empathy? conscience? a sense of fairness? the Holy Spirit? -- that makes men like Warren and Osteen reluctant to make that leap to safety until they absolutely have to. Wouldn't it be something if one day one of them stopped quenching that spirit and took the leap to a position that was inclusive in fact rather than just "inclusive" in posture and temperament?

Nuts

This time it's pistachios.

Federal food officials are warning people not to eat any food containing pistachios because of possible contamination by salmonella, in another food scare sure to rattle consumers already upset by the contamination of peanuts with the same bacteria.

The Food and Drug Administration said central California-based Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella Inc., the nation's second-largest pistachio processor, was voluntarily recalling more than 2 million pounds of its roasted nuts shipped since last fall.

Following so soon after the massive peanut-product recall and a salmonella outbreak, this latest food scare is again producing calls for a revamping of the federal food safety and inspection system. That makes sense. The current system isn't so much something that was designed as something that agglomerated in bits and pieces over time. It's a patchwork of different federal and state agencies, most of which -- like the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration -- already have full plates and other urgent institutional priorities.

Reforming the food safety system, then, would seem like a common-sense, good-government effort. It would improve public safety and confidence while at the same time making government more efficient and thus, possibly, less expensive.  It's such an obvious, noncontroversial, nonpartisan effort that even corporate leaders are getting behind it.

So here's an idea that has the support of food producers, food consumers (a large voting bloc, last I checked), good-government liberals, small-government conservatives, corporate leaders, safety advocates, parents, children and even the Keebler elves. That ought to be do-able, right?

Not so fast. It turns out there's a significant faction of Republican supporters who don't like the idea and who insist that it should be the focus of a partisan fight. That would be the barking mad religious lunatic faction.

Our friends in the Christian Worldview Network asylum have been sending e-mail alerts warning against what they call the "Coming government takeover of food." CWN's Roger Hedgecock* says he's not against food safety per se -- he's just opposed to any food safety agency having access to food production facilities for inspections or the power to fine violators of food safety rules. Hedgecock, in other words, wants food safety officials to be just like his talk radio audience -- toothless and ignorant.

This be madness, yet there is method in't. To understand where Hedgecock and all of these Christian Worldview Network folks are coming from, you have to understand what it is they're afraid of -- which is also what they're expecting and, indeed, hoping for. They're afraid of the One World Government of the Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia.

That fear shapes their every political position. No matter the topic, they approach any political issue asking this one question: Does this bring us closer to the OWG of the Antichrist? Thus to them, a renewed commitment to food safety can only mean we're moving one step closer to the Mark of the Beast. It may start with the promise of salmonella-free peanut butter, but they know it will inevitably end with Chloe Steele getting guillotined by the Global Community One World Unity Army.

So saith their scripture and so must it come to pass.

The Christian Worldview Network people are not mainstream. Most American evangelicals rightly regard them as fringe nutjobs -- like the crazy uncle the family doesn't like to talk about. But while they may be way, way out there and really far gone, they also seem to represent a significant number of people.

How many, exactly, is hard to say. The 2006 Baylor Religion Survey found that 19 percent of all Americans had read one of the Left Behind novels, which is something like 60 million people. That's a remarkable level of cultural saturation, but it doesn't tell us anything about how many of those 60 million Americans subsequently elevated the convoluted scheme of those novels to the level of holy scripture and then reshaped their entire political philosophy on the basis of such a scenario. A fourth of them? That'd be 15 million people. A tenth? That's still 6 million people.

However many it is, their influence is multiplied due to their zeal and due, in part, to their gullible stupidity. Their zeal makes them attractive to demagogues looking for foot soldiers. And their gullibility makes them easy to recruit and enlist. Toss in the right loaded code words and they'll be convinced that you believe what they believe, and therefore they'll do whatever you tell them. Leading Republican voices like Rush Limbaugh, Tony Perkins, John Boehner and -- particularly during last year's campaign -- John McCain routinely toss in rhetoric designed to appeal to the OWG obsession of the CWN crowd and the rest of the Left Behind literalists.

None of those mainstream Republican leaders is crazy enough or dim enough to regard the Left Behind series as a prophetic predictor of future events, but none of them is willing to risk offending the potentially millions of followers who sincerely do believe this loony nonsense. So they make elliptical references to fears of an Antichrist's One World Government and they make sure that they never explicitly deny such fears as the nonsense they know them to be.

And the longer this goes on, the more legitimate and the more mainstream this full-gonzo insanity comes to seem.

Hence the career of Rep. Michelle Bachmann. She's not a demagogue trying to manipulate the rubes on the barking mad religious lunatic fringe. She is herself one of them. She's a true believer. Bachmann is both a member of Congress and, in her mind, a member of the Tribulation Force.

This explains Bachmann's current obsession: stopping the attempt to create a one-world global currency. Matthew Yglesias links to Bachmann's discussion of this one-currency conspiracy with talk-show host Glenn Beck, pointing out that the effort Bachmann opposes is both imaginary and impossible.

Matt's bewilderment here is understandable. His problem here, though, is that he's restricting his discussion to reality and that's not where Bachmann is coming from. She talks about Russia and China, but that's not who she's really worried about. She's worried about Jonathan Stonagal and Joshua Todd-Cothran. The fact that these are fictional characters in a horribly written novel whose conspiracy never even makes sense in that context hasn't prevented Bachmann from introducing legislation to foil their nefarious scheme.

When you're that kind of crazy -- Bachmann-Hedgecock-LaHaye-crazy -- then a little bit of salmonella doesn't seem as urgent as the more dire phantoms that threaten us. After all, the possibility, or even the probability, of serving your own children tainted food still belongs to the realm of the merely potential. But Carpathia and his minions and the execution of their evil plans -- that's not just potential, that's real.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* I don't know what his middle name is, but I'm really hoping it's a third off-color verb.

** The above chart is from Jerry Z. Park and Joseph Baker's article, "What Would Jesus Buy: American Consumption of Religious and Spiritual Material Goods," in the Journal for The Scientific Study of Religion. Published online Dec. 7, 2007.

Family matters

We've all heard the story a thousand times. It's the plot of avant garde theater productions and of made-for-TV BOATS movies on the Lifetime channel.

Father of the Year. Great guy. Warm, caring, giving and a loving dad to his four adoring children.

But wait, why are there five kids in this picture? What happened to this one? What about the member of the family that nobody talks about, the one everybody's pretending doesn't even exist?

Once you learn that kid's story -- gay, kicked out of the house, disowned, Dad won't take his calls -- you're forced to re-evaluate everything you'd learned earlier about what a warm, caring, giving guy the Father of the Year really is.

Like I said, we've all heard the story a thousand times.

The previous post was my attempt to look at the full family photo of Saddleback Church's 23,000 members and to ask, "But wait, what about this one?"

Your comments to that post have rather quickly persuaded me that I'm being a bit too optimistic -- that I'm watching a tragedy but misinterpreting it as a comedy in which the disowned and unacknowledged children will one day be fully embraced and the father figure who rejected them will redeem himself in the end.

I love stories like that, but it seems this probably isn't one of them.

Anyway, I'm especially grateful for the comments from those of you who are actually living this story at, or away from, Saddleback -- from those of you who needed to flee that church family, and from the very defensive current member who seems glad you did (this latter comment was dismaying, but informative). The happiest note in all of this, I suppose, is that some of you found a new and loving church family among the Episcopalians. God bless the Episcopalians.

Without being too optimistic, though, I'm still hoping in the very long run for a happy ending for our Father of the Year. Those of us watching this story unfold have had to re-evaluate what we've learned about his love for his family. Now if we could just get him to re-evaluate it as well. ...

Andy & Rick

Before belatedly getting into the other aspects of the hubbub over the Rev. Rick Warren and his invitation, by then President-elect Barack Obama, to provide the invocation at the inauguration, I want to mention this: Andy Warhol was a devout Catholic who attended Mass nearly every day.

I point this out because whatever else Rick Warren may be -- an evangelical leader, a political figure, a best-selling author -- he is, first and foremost, a pastor. He is pastor of Saddleback Church, the largest congregation in California, where more than 23,000 people attend worship each week.

That astonishing attendance figure suggests that Warren is probably a pretty good pastor, but it also suggests something else: Rick Warren's congregation at Saddleback Church almost certainly includes dozens, probably even hundreds, of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered believers.

I'm not just talking about deeply closeted folks who have internalized everything they may have been taught about the inherent wickedness of homosexuals and who stagger through their lives in the heartbreaking existence of full-on Ted-Haggard mode. I'm sadly sure there are plenty of those folks at Saddleback too. But I'm talking about evangelical Christian believers who also happen to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Or, if you prefer, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons who also happen to be evangelical Christian believers. The two categories do overlap.

Saddleback Church is organized as a community of communities. Its thousands of members aren't just isolated individuals drifting in the sea of its huge congregation, they also belong to small groups within the larger church. That's where the mutual support of real fellowship happens for these believers. And that's where, I would guess, the not officially sanctioned sexuality of many of Saddleback's members is a shared secret. It's in those dozens of small cell groups that the GLBT members of Saddleback are fully known, fully loved and fully welcomed, just as Andy Warhol was fully known, fully loved and fully welcomed at St. Vincent's.

I wonder if Rick Warren realizes this. Or, if he does, if he's ready to understand what it means for him as a pastor -- as their pastor.

I doubt he is, yet. But I think he may be more ready now that he was four months ago, before he was placed in a national spotlight by Barack Obama's invitation to pray in Washington. That's one reason I think that whole brouhaha -- both his invitation and the resulting protest, taken together -- may turn out to have been, on balance, a Good Thing, both for Pastor Warren and for his 23,000 parishioners and perhaps for the rest of us too.