May you and yours have a blessed Easter.

Remember when candidate George Bush appeared at Bob Jones University – whose namesake has all sorts of wacky ideas about all sorts of PC subjects?

Or when John McCain appeared with Rev. Hagee, the anti-Catholic firebrand? 

A certain segment of America’s media and punditry jumped up and down like poo-flinging monkeys.  “Polarizing!”, they cried. 

So I wonder what they’ll say about this?:

Obama has written and spoken about being inspired by the preaching of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and his calls to “spur social change.” The title of Obama’s second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” which essentially launched his presidential bid, was taken from a sermon by Wright.

Baptized in Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama has been an active member for two decades, regularly attending services with his family under Wright’s spiritual mentorship.

Some of Wright’s sermons, which often address themes of white supremacy and black repression, have come under scrutiny by those who interpret them as racially divisive. Such preaching, they believe, polarizes Americans rather than unites them.

“Wright’s preaching does promote a sort of racial exclusivity,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

“Statements that suggest you cannot truly understand God unless you are black or poor are exclusive.”

Remarks attributed to Wright that were posted on audio files on the Internet and cited in press accounts earlier this year may have prompted the criticism.

“Fact number one: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college.

“Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.

“We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional killers. … We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. … We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. … We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means.

“And … And … And! God! Has got! To be sick! Of this s***!”

But here’s the big question:  does he hate gays?

UPDATE:  Well, Obama doesn’t, anyway.

Humans have a deep-seated need to belong to something bigger.

And I’m not just talking about the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, here. Bear with me – Ed and I were talking about this on the show on Saturday, and I’ve got this urge to elaborate. And we know how ugly that can get…

———-

For most of history, that “something bigger” has meant “higher powers” and “eternity” – the afterlife, Heaven and Hell, Valhalla, Nirvana, whatever. Organized religion, for much of human history, has focused (or, depending on the religion and your point of view, exploited) that human need, for good (hope, charity, Haendel and Bach) or ill. Religion is a hot topic, one way or another, for most of the organized world’s people.

And part of being “part of something bigger” also means “being against something bigger and badder and on the other side”; to Christians, it’s evil in its many forms, from Satan to temptation to what-have-you.

After the left claimed God was Dead in the late 19th century, that human impetus didn’t go away, of course. People have exploited that human desire even as they denied the Higher Power that had been its focus.

Marxism replaced God with ineluctible forces of history. Lenin turned that academic notion into a pseud-messianic crusade, an overarching “something bigger” that subsumed all of Russian (and, to his warped little mind, world) society. Stalin, a former Orthodox seminarian with a keen understanding of how people work, expanded his cult of personality to Messianic proportions – lessons the likes of Mao, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, Idi Amin and Pol Pot (himself a former Buddhist monk) exploited. And of course, they replaced Evil with a variety of enemies – class enemies, countries, anti-cults, whomever.
Hitler learned from Lenin’s mistakes, and did him one better; rather than banning God and the thousands of years of communal tradition His worship brings along, he co-opted it. An atheist, he wrapped himself and his party in the traditions of German Lutheranism and the mythology of German Catholicism, and – more importantly – the overarching German notion of Volk. This concept is a hard one to explain to Americans – I minored in German, and I’m only familiar with its outer edges – but it’s an idea at the nexus of the German land, language and history; Blut und Boden (“Blood and Territory”) is a phrase as familiar to students of Volk as “Domini et filii et spiritus sanctus is to Catholics, something with a meaning far beyond the literal to the adherent. Volk goes well beyond folklore and tradition, and was a sort of meta-religious link to Germany’s pagan past, underpinning German life and faith and culture the way paganism is just behind the surface of Latin, African and Caribbean Catholicism.

And so rather than having to spend time and energy vanquishing thousands of years of folk tradition and religious teaching, all Hitler had to do was take advantage of it.

Volk aided Hitler in putting a Big Evil – Judaism – in front of the people, as well; the Volk tradition viewed life on the land as inherently more noble and valuable than life in the towns; it viewed town and city life as corrupt and ignoble. And it associated Jews with city life, and at its extremes blamed them for its ills and corruption. The Lutheran Church in Germany drew heavily on Volk tradition and mythology, while the Catholic Church of the day added its own level of anti-Semitism which, again, was ripe for Hitler’s picking in Germany and especially Poland.

But in all cases, in the USSR and Red China and Nazi Germany and to similar extents in fascist countries everywhere, there were Big Enemies to replace the ones they’d abolished.

———-

Ed and I talked about Michelle Obama’s “Save the Nation’s Soul” speech on the Northern Alliance show last weekend (the podcast should be up soon). We called out this statement of Mrs. Obama’s:

And things have gotten progressively worse throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations, it hasn’t gotten better for regular folks. ….

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

Ed’s response on the show was similar to what he wrote on his blog:

But it’s the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn’t exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. If I feel my soul needs saving, the very last place I’d look (in the US) for a savior would be Washington DC or Capitol Hill. I’ll trust God and Jesus Christ with my soul, and I’m not going to mistake Barack Obama for either one.

And my first reaction was similar; “Step off, ‘Chel.  My soul is between Christ and I”.

But it’s really a lot worse than rude presumption.  It’s not just that government is a lousy place to go for moral repair.  It’s that when govenrment tries to serve as a national soul, things break and people get hurt.
Fortunately, Jonah Goldberg just wrote an entire book on the subject, and the reaction to the book sparked a really great blog,  on which he writes;

Many of the tropes of a political religion/liberal fascism are evident. He exalts unity as it’s own reward. His talk of starting new and starting over often sounds like more than merely “turning the page” on the Bush-Clinton years. It sounds a bit like starting at Year Zero.

Which was the hallmark of Lenin and Mao; the past had to be wiped away (and its practitioners, real or imagined, sent to gulags) before the future could really get underway.

But what I find most intriguing is his rhetoric of destiny and “choseness.” He often makes it sound like he has been selected by forces of providence or God or simply history for this moment. He is, in Oprah’s words, “The One.” But even more interesting, he tells voters they are the ones. “This is it,” Obama proclaimed on Super Tuesday. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.” That’s pretty oracular stuff.

And…:

Such a vision is comforting because it plays upon man’s inherent desire to belong, to be protected by his fellow man and his community. “Strength in numbers” is the narcotic of all populists, the logic of all “people powered movements” as leftwing bloggers like to say (though for reasons that defy easy analysis, the left has mastered the art of casting itself as the voice of the dissidents against the oppressive, stultifying “herd mentality” even as it places the group at the top of its hierarchy of political aesthetics). This is the motivating passion behind the fascist quest for order.

Sometimes it sounds like Obama wants to talk about God’s plan when he’s talking about his own campaign for a New Order. But most times, you can see that he wants to stay on the secular side of the divide — where his white base resides — but without giving up the prophetic vision. He wants to persuade his followers, and perhaps himself, that he is elect, but he cannot do so without religious language.

There’s much more, and you should just go read it.

I get leery of the likes of Mike Huckabee (note: not “Huckajesus”.  Just…no.  Don’t) and his rhetoric – but invoking ones’ personal, transparently-visible, well-known faith (anyone who thinks Christianity has a secret agenda has been sleeping for the past 2000 years) into the White House is both limted by the Constitution and mediated by the fact that it is completely open and transparent.  Most importantly, it’s a very different thing than turning the state into its own pseudo-religion.

Two Iranian sisters face death by stoning after a Sharia conviction for adultery.

The two were found guilty of adultery — a capital crime in Islamic Iran — after the husband of one sister presented video evidence showing them in the company of other men while he was away.

“Branch 23 of the supreme court has confirmed the stoning sentence,” said their lawyer, Jabbar Solati.

The penal court of Tehran province had already sentenced the sisters identified only as Zohreh, 27, and Azar (no age given) to stoning, the daily said.

Solati explained that the two sisters had initially been tried for “illegal relations” and received 99 lashes. However in a second trial they were convicted of “adultery.”

No word yet if Minneapolis Community Technical College will carry the stoning live on a jumbotron.

Never let it be said that I’m not a big-tent kind of person.  Indeed, the GOP – as an amalgam of fiscal, social, legal and cultural conservatives, any individual of whom might fit one through four of those four adjectives – needs to some extent to be flexible on its bedrock principles, especially since they are so relatively complex.

Indeed, that’s one of the things that separates conservatism from liberalism; you can teach any child to be a liberal (indeed, that’s what many of our schools do); it’s a short leap from “share and share alike” to “what is yours belongs to everyone; from “don’t run with scissors” to “the Second Amendment is a collective right”; from “mind your own bees-wax” to “keep your laws off my body”.   It’s not for nothing that Churchill said a man has no heart if he’s not a liberal at 20 and no brain if he’s not a conservative by 40; liberalism and adolescence are both prone to callow, facile sloganeering.  Conservatism is, if you were raised liberal (and to some extent in western culture we all are), somewhat counterintuitive.

So to be a conservative (at least a multi-issue conservative) requires a certain amount of thought – and any group of three individuals who thinks about any set of issues is going to come up with at least four solutions. So running a “conservative” party necessarily needs accomodating a wide range of points of view (to say nothing of the more-rigid, more sloganistic views of the single-issue crowd who, I should observe, often don’t understand conservatism outside the bounds of their main issue – although they can be, and have been, taught).

And that is as it should be.  It makes election time a contentious scrum (as we see in the GOP Presidential race right now), but there’s really no other way. 

That being said, “big tent” or no, there are some “Republicans” we’re better off without. 

The Star-Tribune seems to have a boundless stockpile of these people.  They show up on cue in columns by Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow; people who mewl about feeling “cut off from the current state of the party”, who pine for the days when the GOP, especially in Minnesota, was pro-choice and anti-gun and took a soft line on crime and foreign policy.  In other words, when the GOP (nationally and especially in Minnesota) was basically Tics in better suits.

Two of these popped up in the Strib yesterday, in an op-ed by Liz McCloskey and Peter Leibold entitled “To value life — in all regards — is to be politically adrift”.  The duo – described as “…a doctoral candidate at the Catholic University of America” and a “former general counsel of the Catholic Health Association”, respectively, describe a journey that’s not all that terribly different than my own (if you substitute “Protestant” for “Catholic”), in some ways:

When we were born in the early 1960s, it was possible to be both a Democrat and a Catholic without any agonizing pangs of conscience. John F. Kennedy was president; John Courtney Murray was a public theologian; Pope John XXIII was opening a window to the world at the Second Vatican Council. But as we came of age politically, we felt orphaned by the Democratic Party, whose prolife positions on war, poverty and the environment did not extend to the lives of the most weak and vulnerable, those not yet born.

In other words, they are liberals, except for that whole “infanticide” thing.  Now, I’ve confessed in the past – abortion, like gay marriage, isn’t my hottest-button issue.  I’m pro-life, but it’s somewhere down my list of “gotta haves”.  As it was for Ronald Reagan, as it happens.

While the moderate wing of the Republican Party provided us a foster home when we worked on the Senate staff of John Danforth, R-Mo., with the likes of former Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., and others, the Grand Old Party’s move to the right, including its hardening, dominant positions on the Iraq war, access to guns and the death penalty, among other issues, have made it an inhospitable place for us to dwell permanently. 

Let’s stop right there.

I’m not one to speak for the GOP as a whole – far from it.  But if Ms. McCloskey and Mr. Leibold can’t tell the difference between the life of a fetus – a human-under-construction, utterly innocent of any wrongdoing, exactly as the Catholic Church teaches – on the one hand, and convicted murderers, especially child-murderers, murderers who rape and then kill, mass-murderers and spree-killers on the other, perhaps it’s not their politics that are adrift.  If they compare abortion on the one hand with the right of the law-abiding citizen to defend themselves from criminals on the other, perhaps it’s not the GOP’s politics that have deserted reason and rationality.

During many elections we find ourselves facing the same dilemma: Which of our values must take a back seat when we go to the voting booth? Do we let our moral concern for peaceful resolutions of conflict, the environment, addressing poverty and aggressive enforcement of civil rights guide our choices? Or do we stand firm on another important issue of conscience and signal our hope for an end to abortion? Often, both choices leave a bad taste in our mouths.

Welcome to real life, kids!

But the fact that you – a “pro-life” voter – get a “bad taste” in your mouth because I have the right to protect my and my family’s lives through the grace of the Second Amendment as an individual right, then perhaps your notion of “life” is what’s adrift.

Tuesday’s March for Life in Washington brought home this problem. The assumption of abortion opponents is that anyone serious about his or her desire to see an end to abortion will vote for the “prolife” candidate. Yet there is rarely a candidate, and certainly not a political party, that embodies the consistent ethic of life that would make casting a truly prolife vote a simple or straightforward choice.

May I suggest that y’all – and the organizations you represent – are the ones with the inconsistent “ethic of life”.  To fail to differentiate between innocent life and life that is itself anti-life – murderers, and those whose actions are lethal enough to be covered by laws governing legal self-defense – is inconsistent to the point of meaningless.  And I say this as a conservative who opposes the death penalty. 

If the Democratic Party could adopt a much less disdainful, more welcoming, perhaps even “prochoice” stance toward those under its tent who have conscientious objections to abortion, we would be much less squeamish about supporting its candidates, and we know that we are not alone in that conviction.

As the 2008 campaign unfolds, we will look for a candidate who will not use rhetoric or a tone seemingly designed to alienate those of us who simply cannot cheer for speeches celebrating the availability of abortion….

…A party and a candidate that truly respect this viewpoint are ones that can adopt these two political orphans.

I can’t speak for the notion of “respect” – but if my party were to follow your viewpoint, that the life of a murderer or of someone who wishes to kill my family and I are of no less value than an an innocent human-under-construction – then I’d choose “orphan”. 

It’s a view of “life” that doesn’t even rise to the level of “illogical”. 

While I think the Huckabee train may have left the station for now, the frighteningly prolific Miss O’Hara sums up something I’ve been pondering for quite a while:

Christians of varying stripes support [Governor Huckabee] for no other reason than “he’s one of us”, an intellectually and spiritually neglectful position to take. Don’t tell me this isn’t happening; I’ve heard talk show caller after caller and read person after person saying, “We’re supporting the Christian!” Whoop-dee-doo. Thompson and Hunter are believers as well. So is Ron Paul. Mitt Romney may be Mormon and Rudy Giuliani may be Catholic, but I dare say they believe in Jesus too. I believe in Him. So do satan and his minions. Care to use Huckabee’s evangelicalism as your route to logic again?

Make no mistake about it; I’m a Christian.  So is most of this nation.  It stands to reason that I’d And I believe that being of faith is an important thing in a person; all other things being equal, I’d vote for a person of faith over an atheist. 

Of course, all other things are rarely equal.  Would I vote for a pro-growth, low-taxes, strict-constructionist, pro-defense Moslem over, say, Jimmy Carter?   Well, let’s burn that bridge when we come to it, shall we?

Too many believers are not thoughtful as the Bible admonishes us to be, but buy into anything proclaiming itself as faith-friendly hook, line, and sinker without ever stopping to consider what it is we’re aligning ourselves with.

Which is, unfortunately, what I see from a lot of “people of faith”.

Every once in a while, I like to ponder the big mysteries.  Where did we come from?  Can the City Pages write so much stuff about Diablo Cody that even G-d can’t read it all?

And, speaking of which, what about God?

But Emily Condon apparently has all the answers.  In the City Pages’ Artistes of the Year edition, she reviews Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, and, by way of lauding the pseudo-atheist thesis, notes (emphasis added):

Far from the vitriolic diatribe of a God-hating misanthrope like Richard Dawkins, Hitchens’s work is both appropriately respectful and right.

Hm.

The City Pages is the source of all knowledge, apparently.

Who knew?

(more…)

From the 2,000 year old blogger Luke:

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.

An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.

Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ^[a] the Lord.

This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

A correspondent and Shot In The Dark reader writes from Kabul, Afghanistan with comments on my post on the pork-averse WalMart checkout girl (link fixed – thanks, Flash):

I’m an aid worker in Kabul, where I’ve been based for the past [nunber of] years. I’m writing to comment on your post about the Muslim woman who didn’t want to touch the pork at the supermarket. I thought that you might be interested to know that here in Afghanistan, one of the most fundamentalist of all Islamic countries, you can quite easily buy pork products in what is affectionately known by the locals as the “Bush Bazaar”, where all sorts of imported goods (often obtained through mysterious means from the US base at Bagram) are available. The Afghan shopkeepers have no qualms about keeping it in their shops or handing it to you if you wish to purchase it. If you’re happy to buy it they’re happy to sell it. I’ve seen both pork and alchohol openly for sale in a number of countries in the part of the world. Based on my fairly extensive experience in the Muslim world the controversy in MN seems to be to be entirely contrived.

That, of course, is the part that puzzles me, and bumfuzzles some friends of mine who either are, or are familiar with, moderate Islam; the puritanism about pork, alcohol and seeing-eye dogs is the result of decrees from a small number of fundie Somali imams in the Twin Cities.

Thanks for running Shot in the Dark; I enjoy it very much. I’m from [someplace in the upper midwest] so it is a pleasure to be able to read about life at home, even if the [liberals] irritate me even all the way out here.

I pondered writing a piece about Barack Obama’s thunderous evangelism over the weekend. 

I really couldn’t come up with anything much more profound than “So all of you people who dinged on Bush for “violating the separation of church and state” – here y’go!  Prove you’re not a bunch of callow hypocrites!”.

Nah.  It feels like running up the same stairs, over and over, after a while, trying to write about the hypocrisy of the leftymedia.  And there are better people to tackle that sort of argument.

Like Kouba:

I say good for [Obama and his faith]. But it wasn’t more than a nanosecond or two before I thought back to Michele Bachmann’s appearance at the Living Word church a year ago. Her remarks kicked up a cloud of dust as her opponents howled about the separation of church and state, and the dangers of Theocracy.

In their endorsement of Patty Wetterling, the Star Tribune said this:

Bachmann has campaigned on broad strokes of low taxes and patriotic ideals. But her career in the Minnesota Senate was built on the narrowest of agendas, chiefly injecting her religious values into the public sphere. Her recent testimony to a Brooklyn Park congregation that God called her to run for Congress — and win — is an embarrassment, and despite her polish, she is surprisingly shallow on national issues.

An embarrassment. Uh-huh. Well, I now sit back and await a Strib editorial decrying Obama’s remarks this weekend as an embarrassment.

Waiting, waiting…. still waiting…

Bring a sleeping bag. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for people being open – indeed, enthusiastic – about their faith. 

I’d just like all the Obama supporters (and Hillary! supporters) who dinged Bush, Bachmann and any other conservative for exactly the same things that Obama said to take a step forward and ‘splain themselves.

Saint Thomas University continues its tradition of gutless disengagement.

The Saint Paul-based Catholic university has disinvited Bishop Desmond Tutu, one of the anti-apartheid movement’s household names, because of remarks he’s made that might be “hurtful” to Jews.

Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations at St. Thomas, said the Rev. Dennis Dease, St. Thomas’ president, made the final decision not to invite Tutu after consulting with his staff.

“He [Tutu] has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he’s said,” Hennes said.

A leader of the international group that was to sponsor Tutu’s visit blasted the university’s decision.

“This is a tragedy for the entire community of Minneapolis-St. Paul and indeed for the entire state of Minnesota,” said Ivan Suvanjieff, president and co-founder of PeaceJam, based in Colorado. “Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a towering moral arbiter of our day. He has worked tirelessly on a global basis in the name of human rights and all that is decent.”

PeaceJam has 10 affiliates across the United States and often invites Nobel laureates to meet with young people for a weekend of discussion.

We’ll come back to “PeaceJam” in a minute.
I don’t doubt for a moment that Tutu made the comments – comparing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Hitler’s Holocaust.   And since Saint Thomas is a private institution, they can make or rescind any invitation they want to.

But mightn’t it have been better for everyone had Saint Thomas kept the invitation, and the Jewish groups swarmed the campus with protesters, to ensure that everyone knew Tutu’s past sentiments?  Or – perhaps – to get Tutu to admit he was wrong?
This continues the Saint Thomas tradition of gutless disengagement and blowing with the prevailing PC winds.  The college’s president, Father Dennis “Havana Denny” Dease, got the epic vapors over Ann Coulter’s appearance at St. Thomas, and reacted like a banana republic dictator when a Cuban baseball player, Mario Chaoui, in town to play St. Thomas’ team, defected at the Twin Cities Airport.  Dease barred St. Thomas students from helping Chaoui, committing the University to finding and returning the player to Cuba and certain persecution (which Chaoui thankfully evaded).

Saint Thomas:  A feather before the moral wind.

UPDATE, 6/28/2021:   Imagine my shocki, seeing this (checks revision record) 14 year old piece that has, for some reason gotten more visits than any other post on this blog since I’ve been keeping records.

Like, by a 7:1 ratio.

If you’re visiting, please leave a comment as to what brought you here.

The curiosity is overwhelming.

Thanks in advance.

I’ve always admired brain surgeons and constitutional lawyers.

So over the weekend, at a ceremony attended by friends and loved ones, I had both the Medical Doctor and Doctor of Laws degrees bestowed on me. 

My parents were so proud; at last, I can start making something of myself. 

But the celebration was short-lived.  There is so much work to do; cranial aneurisms to heal; rights to defend. 

As if that weren’t enough, I grabbed a Ph. D in psychology – because I figure I can help people solve their lifes’ issues much more effectively if I’m properly credentialed.  And my certification as a Mechanical Engineer also came through; what with all the bridges and stuff to rebuild, I figure I got some more time to set aside on my calendar.

Whew!

———-

Oh, you’re probably wondering about all those fuddy-duddy “licensing bodies”, and whether or not they’d actually grant (or allow the granting of) the degrees to someone who took one semester of college biology, has never taken a law class, whose entire background in psychology is watching two episodes of “Doctor Phil”, and who hated math class with a purple passion?

Licensing, scheissensing.  I am a brain surgeon/lawyer/psychologist/mechanical engineer.

I have willed it to be so.

———-

While I am all of those things, one thing I’m not is Catholic.  Nothing against Catholicism, of course; I believe Pope John Paul II agreed with the German Lutherans, finally, that the road to salvation as a Christian can be made clear to people through Catholic, Protestant, or heck, even Orthodox teachings.  I mean, for crying out loud, we’re all on the same team – right?

I’m a Presbyterian.  I don’t always agree with the Presbyterian Church in the USA’s governing General Assembly’s decisions, but the General Assembly doesn’t claim (in Presbyterian governance, indeed, can’t claim) to have authority over what the Bible – the revealed word of God – really means, either, so I can ignore them at my eternal leisure.  Nothing the GA decides or believes has anything to do with my eternal life; they move the money around, install or remove people, and set larger, temporal goals for the church – as an administrative and governing, rather than theological body.

And as I’ve noted in this space in the past, a number of Presbyterian ministers have been very important figures in my life; Revs. Bill King, Mick Burns and Jim Jacobson stand out, of course, as people who had an immense, permanent affect on how I lived my life, but there have been many others.  All of them married, some of them women.  Which is, of course, no-go among Catholics. 

Ordaining women – or gays, or gay women for that matter – is neither a positive nor a negative, in my book.  I do understand Catholics’ theological injunction against it (as well as the history of exceptions to that injunction).  But – and here’s a rather important caveat – it’s their church! The Vatican sets the rules, whether they’re right or wrong.  Just like those paternalistic blowhards at the State Medical and psychological licensing authorities, or at the Bar Association, or the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, they decide what the standards are for inclusion.

And, rightly or wrongly (in that great sense that none of us will really discover the answers for until we’ve finally gotten into the afterlife), the Vatican says “nyet” to women behind the altar.

I might disagree.  I might even make a case for why women should be ordained.

But while I might declare myself, or some woman, to be a Roman Catholic Priest, the people who actually get to decide who is or is not a Roman Catholic Priest might take umbrage – as, in theory, the Minnesota Bar, Medical and Psych Licensing boards and the ASME might do as well. 

“So what?”

———-

Well, the Minnesota Monitor’s coverage of the recent “ordination” of a couple of female “priests” approaches the issue with about the same gravity as I do being a Doctor, Lawyer, Psychogist or Engineer.

And there are really two ways to approach this story – via the “Mitch Is An Engineer”-like triteness that’d allow people to make such a unilateral declaration, and via the “coverage” it’s gotten from the local Sorosphere. 

Let’s look at Andy Birkey’s story in the MinMon:

Two women were ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church at an event in Minneapolis last weekend. The ordination of Judith McKloskey and Alice Marie Iaquinta marked their addition to the approximately 60 other women who have been ordained nationwide. The Vatican, the Catholic Church’s highest authority, does not recognize the ordination of women into the priesthood, and in Iaquinta’s case, the ordination could result in excommunication.

The West Bend, Wis., woman’s ordination has raised the ire of the Catholic Church in that region. Archdiocese of Milwaukee Communications Director Kathleen Hohl told WTMJ, an NBC affiliate in Milwaukee that they will turn Iaquinta’s information over to the Vatican.

“It is our duty and obligation to forward this information to the Vatican for consideration,” said Hohl.

First with the trite.  While I’m not unsympathetic with the notion of female clergy, I’m also not a Catholic, much less one of the Bishops, Cardinals or Popes that makes these sorts of decisions for the Catholic Church.  They make the rules (in the Catholic Church, at any rate).  So – if the church’s rules say “guys only”, and your drive to see women (or gays, or married people or whatever) ordained is more important than your membership in that church, why be a Catholic at all?  There are many Protestant denominations that will welcome one.  Or why not be intellectually honest and cast your lot with a secessionist American Catholic movement, and show the Vatican who’s really boss?

And saying “women used to be priests” is hardly a convincing argument.  Appealing to what is, after all, ancient history (and disputed history at that) is a dumb justification; things change.  “It used to be legal” could be used to justify polygamy, slavery, burning at the stake, infanticide, suttee, honor killing…and while ordaining women is nothing like any of those horrors, it’s also – ahem – not the way the body that governs that church does things anymore. 

Now let’s turn to Birkey’s article.  I obviously disagree with him on most every political issue, but he’s not a bad writer. 

But this article?  The women weren’t “ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church”, as Birkey claimed in his lede.  They may have consecrated themselves to serve God in the way they felt called upon to do so.  They may have even been ordained into some ideo-theological construct that may eventually morph into the long-promised American Catholic Church (“All of the contraception, none of the guilt!  Now with female priests”).  They may even legitimately be considered “protesters” against the Catholic injunction against female priests. 

But, unless the Vatican rammed through a rule change when I wasn’t looking (which I rarely am, but on the other hand the Vatican rarely “rams” anything through), they are most assurely not “ordained catholic priests”.

Now, as I said, Andy’s not a bad writer.  But this piece showcases the perils of viewing “news” and “journalism” through an entirely partisan lens.  Birkey’s main issue is gay rights.  The Catholic Church is a lightning rod for gay activism, as it is the mainstream church that has moved the least toward accomodation (barring many American evangelical denominations – but gay activists don’t seem to be trying to win over the Southern Baptists all that hard, either).  The Catholics draw, as a result, all sorts of protests, both crude (paintings of the Virgin Mary done in dung) and fairly sophisticated (activists like McKloskey and Iaquinta and their attempt to co-opt and/or skirt the church’s rules).  And Birkey’s story plays into that, in ways obvious enough to cause one to smack one’s head.  Classic example – for Andy Birkey to say they were “ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church” can be seen as either “wishful thinking” or “serving as the womens’ PR agent”.  McKloskey and Iaquinta were no more “ordained into the Roman Catholic Church” than I was “admitted to the bar” for claiming that I was a lawyer. 

So Birkey’s story turned, in its lede, served as a vehicle for McKloskey and Iaquinta’s wishes – we could call it “propaganda”, in the strictest and least-prejudicial sense of the term. 

Which is his right as a partisan activist writer, to be sure, but it is to “journalism” as I am to brain surgery, engineering, psychology and the law, and as Judith McKloskey and Alice Marie Iaquinta are to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Atheists can’t be trusted with political power.  Indeed, they must be suppressed because they are intellectual descendants of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot – atheists who murdered among them at least 55,000,000 people.  It is by these people and their legacies that atheism must be judged, and judged without mercy.

Thus, atheism must be excised from public life.  It should be regarded as the sick aberration it is.  The souls of 55,000,000 dead demand it.

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Kerry from Smoothing Plane has the same reaction to the term “closure” that I do; it’s terribly overused, and totally wrong.

Especially as the last bodies are recovered from the Mississippi:

“Families will get closure…”, “Closure…”, “Another body pulled….closure”. Will billboards be pulled onto the roofs of buildings, “Got closure?”…? Relatives and families of the dead will not get closure; they will learn what happened to their missing father, son, mother or daughter. The palpable empty nothing of not knowing will untangle into dense, light cannot escape its gravity grief…All language less than rituals of grief for the dead shame and banish grief, as if it were some drooling cripple, muttering shattered curses, from whom we look away, masquerading the stone in the stomach.

I don’t know what kind of traffic Kerry Hogan gets, but he should get more. 

UPDATE:  The last body was found just after I wrote this.  May God – or the Great Spirit or Karma or random physiology or whatever you choose to believe in – bring peace to the families. 

Nihilist:

…if Don Shelby is all seeing, all knowing and all powerful and all good (as he insinuates), why does he allow bad things like this to occur?

I cried out “why”?  Don answered “Why Not?”

Please direct whatever form of prayer, imprecation or wish your worldview recognizes to the victims, their families, the survivors…

…and today, all the Fire, Police, Sheriff’s Department, hospital workers who will be untangling this mess looking for victims and (God willing) more survivors.

To everyone who called last night; I was no where near the bridge.  But thanks for thinking about me.

More on that later.

In North Dakota, the Missouri River is sort of the eastern edge of the zone of heavy Mormon settlement.  As you go west from Bismark, you start to meet Mormons, and then see tabernacles, and then as you get into southern Idaho and southwestern Montana  you start to see big tabernacles…at any rate, I grew up around more than a few Mormons. 

One of my best friends in college was, as it happens, a pretty devout Mormon, the oldest of 12 children, plus four adoptees.  And they found room to take in an exchange student and the occasional foster kid.  They were great people, who lived by a code that, in some ways, I find admirable; their goal of self-sufficiency, especially in emergencies, I find in particular laudable and worthy of emulating.  But while my friendship (with my pal from college among others) and my admiration for certain aspects of Mormon secular practice are very genuine, so were my doubts (to put it mildly) about the Mormon faith. 

That being said, I never said anything.  Tact is a good thing.  My pal was a great person (still is), and he never tried to convert me (fat chance!), and the overriding fact was that he was a good guy and a good friend.  

On Tuesday, Chad the Elder quoted Richard John Neuhaus on the subject of the faith-based reasons to look closely at Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith.

For millions of other Americans, the [question of Romney’s Mormonism does] not matter. And for those for whom they do matter, they are not the only questions that matter. Mr. Romney is a very attractive candidate in both substance and style. As in most decisions, and not least of all in voting, the question comes down to what or who is the alternative. We will not have an answer to that question for some months. But I can now register a respectful disagreement with John Fund when he writes, “We will be a better country if even people who don’t support Mr. Romney for president come to recognize that our country is better off if his candidacy rises or falls on factors that have nothing to do with his faith.” On the contrary, we are a better country because many Americans do take their faith, and the faith of others, very seriously indeed. Also when it comes to voting.

Neuhaus swerves into, through and past a good point; we are a stronger country because of the pervasiveness of faith and its presence in the national dialogue.  Faith counts in this country, thank goodness.

But Fr. Neuhaus then tries to have his communion wafer and eat it too:

Does this line of argument mean that anti-Catholicism should have prevented the election of JFK? No. Anti-Catholicism is, in my judgment, an unreasonable prejudice.

Well, I tend to agree.  However, that agreement would get tossed out the window (or smothered) if we were to elect a Catholic president who used his office as a bully pulpit to proselytize Roman Catholic doctrine worldwide and expand Vatican power.  Wouldn’t it?

An absurd example, right?  

Sure.  Because although that was what the anti-Catholic meme of the day purported to fear (and it was a meme that helped scupper Al Smith’s presidential bid in 1928), JFK governed not as a Catholic President, but as a President who happened to be Catholic.  Just as Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson governed as Presidents who were Presbyterian, and didn’t spend their terms spreading Knoxian doctine via their office (as much as this country could use it).

Which is how a President, whatever his/her faith, is supposed to act in office.  One wouldn’t think twice about a mainstream Christian candidate’s faith (lefty paranoia about conservative Christianity aside) because of worries about their intentions to use their position to benefit the faith, whether they were Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, or Presbyterian.  Beyond that, I recall no worries about Joe Lierberman’s hidden effort to Judaify America. 

So Romney is different how?

Others, of course, will disagree, but not enough others to prevent the election of a Catholic president. Anxiety about the strengthening of Mormonism by virtue of there being a Mormon president is not unreasonable. One may or may not share that anxiety, but it is not unreasonable.

But how – Neuhaus’ statement aside – is it any less reasonable than that same fear, held by many Americans before we took the great leap into the theological unknown in 1960? 

What evidence is there that a Romney presidency would benefit Mormonism any more than Kennedy’s benefitted Catholicism – or that either of those were a bad thing?

For the millions of citizens who do take religion so very seriously, the fact that Mr. Romney is a Mormon may not be the determinative factor, but it will be a factor, and, for many, an important factor.Well, he’s got that part right. 

Will it be an important factor for the right reasons?

Chad the Elder picks up the narrative

Neuhaus articulates (much better than I ever could) a view that I share on this matter. The notion that voters should never take a candidate’s religious faith into account when deciding how they’re going to pull the lever is unrealistic and smacks of the sort of relativism that has tried to convince us that all cultures are equally valid and that it’s not possible to judge them on their individual merits.

Except that that’s an unrealistically (to me) absolutist view of the question.  Of course a candidate’s religious faith is an important factor in  my vote. Most important, to me, is that they are a person of faith – which one is secondary – whose faith forms and informs them as people, and helps guide their actions. 

If you can’t take Romney’s Mormonism into consideration, then what happens when a Scientologist runs for office? How about a Wiccan? I’m not trying to make a direct comparison between the LDS and either of them, but the idea that we can’t use a candidate’s religion–no matter what it is–as a basis for evaluating whether they are the best choice for office will lead you right down that path to religious relativism.

So here’s a question:  what if, in 2008, the race ends up being one between the Mormon Romney and, say, Hillary Clinton, who’d seem to be as dilatory a Methodist/Southern Baptist has we’ve seen?  What would Neuhaus suggest; vote for the good of the nation at the expense (whatever that means to you) of hypothetically building a stronger Mormon church?  Or dooming this nation but keeping Rome Salt Lake City at bay?

Further out:  Let’s say in 2012 the race is between a Wiccan, moderate Moslem or even an atheist with impeccable conservative credentials and a strong record of personal integrity, and a pro-death, pro-surrender, pro-tax, pro-Castro, pro-weasel Catholic (who doesn’t happen to be John Kerry, althought he’d fit the bill)?  What then?

Faith?  Or politics?

One of my peeviest peeves is the reliance of too many churches on “contemporary” Christian music.  While one may worship God with guitars or bongos or kazoos for all I care, there is something about the sound of a huge pipe organ that is the sound of worship, of faith, of the glory of the whole thing.  Combine this with the genius of the great sacred song writers – Bach, Brahms, Handel, and so on – and then compare it with the wobbly, puerile, pale bilge that passes for “contemporary worship music” these days, and you can see why so many churches are in freefall. 

So I’m gratified to see that the traditional pipe organ is coming back:

Even as many churches ..are opting for contemporary guitars and bongo drums for their worship services, they’re also investing in one of the world’s oldest instruments. The resurgence has convinced national organ expert Michael Barone that “a new golden age for the organ” is here.

Augustana Lutheran Church in West St. Paul and Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis are among some nearby parishes to purchase new organs. And across the country, churches are installing some of the most impressive organs, which could be compared to the majestic instruments of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, Barone said.

Spiritual aspects aside, it’s fun to see this purely as a music geek.  I got to poke around in the works of a classic old pipe organ in college (as part of a keyboard tuning and repair class I took [*], and they are just fun: 

A Fritts organ built for St. Joseph Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio, fits that bill, said Barone, host of the nationally syndicated public radio show “Pipedreams.”

“The quality of the building, certainly here in the U.S., is as good as it has ever been,” Barone said. “A lot of research has gone into how the old guys were able to create the magic they did in pre-industrial times.”

Nativity’s organ, made by Cassavant Freres in Quebec, might be more modest but is nonetheless an incredible gift for the church. It cost more than $1 million to purchase and install the instrument. Parishioners Eugene and Faye Sitzmann, of St. Paul, funded the project in late 2004.

So cool.

Huge news from the Strib, as it finally endorses the rights of fathers – even unmarried fathers – to access to the children they help raise!

For children, it is hard enough when their parents break up. If both adults are engaged with their kids, the situation should not be made worse by shutting one parent out.Last week, the Minnesota Supreme Court reaffirmed the importance of continued parent-child ties. Justices ruled that the former boyfriend of an adoptive mother deserved visitation with daughters he had helped raise.

This is great news!

It’s also baloney.  I changed a few words.  The actual graf in the paper read:

Last week, the Minnesota Supreme Court reaffirmed the importance of continued parent-child ties. Justices ruled that the former lesbian partner of an adoptive mother deserved visitation with daughters she had helped raise.

This issue of parents interfering with their childrens’ other parents’ access to their children – whether as fallout from a divorce or in the aftermath or an out-of-wedlock childbirth – has been an epidemic in our society for over thirty years. 

Don’t get me wrong – if it takes a fashionably-oppressed minority to bring the issue to the editorial page, it’s great news.  It’s just that for every adoptive lesbian co-parent whose parental (or step-parental) rights are being trampled, there are hundreds or thousands of fathers who’ve been dealing with it for generations, now, with fallout that impacts all of society.

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m a critic of your institution’s idea to evaluate installing – at taxpayer’s expense – a foot bath for Moslem students.

But here’s a question that might sway me.  Since washing feet – the feet of others, in this case – has a tradition in Christianity that was practiced by Christ himself, I’m wondering; would I, a Christian, be able to wash feet in this foot bath (following Christ’s example, I’d be washing the feet of others rather than my own – a typically-Christian model of self-abnegation, if you know what I mean [1])?

Of course, since the Constitution (as interpreted by the same people who require government workers to remove Christian holiday ornaments from their work spaces) forbids any taxpayer support of faith, I suppose we’re still out of luck, right?

Anyway – please get back to me on this.

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What approach to take to the leftysphere’s latest bit of navel-gazing self-absorption, “Blogs Against Theocracy?”

Detailed, logical destruction of the premise?

it is painful, frustrating, and annoying to read such ignorant drivel. In the past I’ve written numerous posts on the “theocracy canard” in a futile attempt to address this misconception. But for the radical fringe of the secular left–the Chomskyites, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Rosie O’Donnell–reason and logic are like kryptonite. Because they live on emotion what they feel is what is true, regardless of facts and reality.

The theophobes, however, are a bit unique in that they embrace an infantile brand of libertarian socialism.* Like other leftists, they tend to advocate for collectivist government solutions. But their support ends when government interferes with their “rights” to do as they please. This is why they hate–and hate is not too strong a word–people who refuse to keep their religious beliefs in the closet. Christians, in particular, are considered a group that is always trying to impose their bourgeois standard of morality on society despite how it makes some people feel.

Or satirical, comic mockery of the premise?

I Blog Against Theocracy because I am not afraid to proclaim to all who hear it “I do not believe in Al Gore!” I Blog Against Theocracy because I refuse to accept prophecies of drowning polar bears simply because Al Gore featured an animated dramatization of one in some stupid movie. I Blog Against Theocracy because they label me “sinner” for refusing to drive a speck car and running the air conditioning on 90 degree days while demurring to purchase salvation through “offsets” and “carbon credits”. I Blog Against Theocracy because I am free and I have the innate ability to think critically!

I Blog Against Theocracy because Al Gore and his robotic acolytes have caused more misery to those with common sense than all the wars in history combined.

Logic or mockery? Mockery? Logic?

Oh, mockery it is!

Do we want to live in a world where two plus two equals six? Where a total may not only be less than the sum of its parts, but that can be declared a Good Thing? Where reason itself is cast adrift in the name of faith in untested, untestable, unempirical, “faith”-based solutions to life’s problems?

Not for me! No way, Johann!

And I’m sure you all feel the same. But that’s not why I’m blogging against Theocracy today. I’m blogging because of all the morons who Don’t Think It Can Happen Here.

It can! It can can canny can can can!

Minnesota is being led by a cabal of theosophists, who, in the absence of proof, are demanding that we adopt a faith-based approach to governing our state! Even though there’s never been any empirical proof that you can “pay for a better Minnesota”, even though there’s no evidence that a shortage of money is causing the state’s education system to fail, that single-payer healthcare is anything but a bureaucratic power grab, you – we – are being asked to suspend logic and dig into our wallets – upon threat of government sanction – to pay for it!

And if you don’t go along with their faith-based beliefs, they become abusive – they attack your character, they accuse you of hating children and promoting mediocrity!

Even though there’s no evidence whatsoever that giving them twice as much money as they already have will do a damn bit of good!

I blog against theocracy because it is worse than genocide!

Easter is, always, my favorite time of the year. Much as I love Christmas and Thanksgiving (and I do – for very different reasons), and as hard as it is to resist the temptation to yell “Hey, Atheists – eat flaming hot redemption!, Easter is still the place to which all spiritual and emotional roads lead.

So may God bless you and your families this Easter.

Katherine Kersten writes re the Somali booze/pork flap:

Will America do better than Europe at assimilating Muslims? The jury is still out. But recent local events – Somali taxi-drivers refusing to carry passengers with alcohol, Target cashiers refusing to handle pork, the flying imams incident — signal that difficulties lie ahead.

Perhaps, but I’m not sure for whom.

Where are these problems in other cities? Detroit, which has the largest Moslem population in the nation per-capita, doesn’t seem to have these issues (or maybe Detroit’s other issues overshadow them); If the scruples of Moslem cabbies and checkouts were causing trouble in New York or LA, you wouldn’t think the selectively-righteous indignation of a few cabbies and clerks in the Twin Cities would make the news, would you?

These “problems” just don’t seem to exist elsewhere.

Submitted for your approval; the “problem” arises from…:

1. …the presence of a relatively huge Somali community, brought to the Twin Cities during the Clinton Administration (with major help from our local DFL representatives, who realize that poor, welfare-bound immigrants make reliable DFL supporters),
2. a number of imams serving that community that preach a strain of Islam that’d seem to be more fundamentalist than the Quran itself, and
3. a local media that will serve as the chuzzlewitted, unpaid sock puppet of any special interest that can chant “Bush Sucks” in any language.

How will it resolve? Well, that’s the interesting question. Will the new DFL majority, to be sensitive to the new immigrants’ mores, ban pork and alcohol? Will local Somalis tire of the ostracism their excessively fastidious and publicity-hungry coreligionists will continue bringing them?

Or will this be for a group of publicity-hungry imams what Tawanna Brawley was for Al Sharpton?

One of the interesting things, to me, about the whole Marcotte kerfuffle was that you actually saw a bit if integrity on the part of many leftybloggers. While many among the thin film of left-leaning Christian bloggers were quite rightly offended by Marcotte’s raw bigotry (and John Edwards’ slimy cynicism), the interesting thing to me was that you didn’t see all that many bloggers on the infidel left complaining that Marcotte was much of an aberration. Oh, you saw the usual complaints of “she’s being taken out of context” (which pretty well deflated when one saw the context) – but I don’t think anyone ever tried the “most leftbloggers tolerate religion just fine” response.,

Which is good, because the tradition of bashing faith (or at least Christianity; Islam and non-observant, Israel-phobic Judaism are not quite so feared) is wide and deep on the left. Especially locally.

Not that finding it is especially interesting. PZ Meiers’ rote phumphering is sort of like Joan Jett playing “I Love Rock And Roll”; you know it’s coming, it’s always the same, whooeee.
And you read stuff from Mark Gisleson…:

I am certain that each and every day for centuries now somewhere in the world a Catholic nun or priest has done something extraordinarily good. I’m also sure most martyrs died nobly and were pure in their beliefs. And I’m even more sure that not once in the history of the Roman Catholic church has the hierarchy ever done the right thing, instead siding, consistently, with the monied and privileged.

…and wonder if he just didn’t get enough attention out of farting in church as a kid.

At any rate, the big, sweeping hatreds like Marcotte’s and Meiers’ don’t bother me as much as the casual bigotry that seeps into the daily exhortations of the “regular” leftybloggers (and the petty left in general). It’s there that the heart of the left lies.

Jeff Fecke – local rent-a-blogger who writes for Minnesota Monitor, an organization paid for by an organization that shares space with George Soros’ “Media Matters for America” (but which to the best of my knowledge has never revealed the source of its funding) but who sniffs and calls Michael Brodkob a paid republican operative, has apparently discovered a “talent” for Photoshop, linking to a piece in MinnMon about an incident in Sioux Center, Iowa, involving a group of gay activists’ vans being apparently vandalized with anti-gay graffiti.

Fecke’s headline:

Your Moment of Zen (or, that Vaunted Christian Tolerance)

Ah. So without knowing who were the suspects, Fecke blames the incident (assuming it was legitimate vandalism – and some interesting questions were raised in the MNMon comment section, which you should read) on Christians? And, more directly (given the wording and tone of his headline) a trait of people who call themselves Christian?

For starters, if we assume the incident was legitimate (and when it comes to local leftists’ stories of faith-based hate crimes, “trust but verify” is my philosophy – face it, local lefties, too many of your fellows have abused the media in the past), it most likely has much more to do with anti-gay sentiment that is still a deeply-ingrained part of much of rural America. Imagine if you will a bus full of Israelis at Berkeley or a van full of Young Republicans at Macalester, if you need help picturing the sort of provincial hatred that sort of exercise would conjure forth.

The whole exercise of the “Soul Force Equality Ride” – vans full of gay guys from Minneapolis driving through small towns – seems entirely designed to publicize the heretofore-unknown concept that there are anti-gay bigots in small towns. “Expect more events like these as Soulforce and the Equality Ride directly confront the institutions that produce this type of hatred”, MinnMon writer Andy Birkey breathlessly intones in the piece Fecke links; one wonders (“trust but verify”) if Birkey has seen an itinerary.

If the incident was legit, then it’d seem they got exactly what the wanted; bigotry’s been exposed! Mission accomplished! (Unless they left a group of missionaries in Sioux Center to try to perform outreach and change the local hearts and minds. I mean – what other purpose was there besides driving in, confronting, taking pictures and leaving? I’d invite any “SoulForce Rider” to comment and discuss this).

But what has this incident to do with Christianity?

Other than as a breathless frame-up (presuming legitimacy) of small-town redneck bigots? Not a whole lot.

Fecke’s broad brush is a sweeping indictment of Christian bigotry in the civil arena. And aside from providing the intellectual and moral framework for the renaissance and liberal democracy itself, inciting and focusing anti-slavery sentiment in the United States and Europe, driving the entire notion of social welfare for most of American history, and providing the moral background for the entire civil rights movement (led by white as much as black churches), I guess you could say Christians sure are bigots.

But only if your brush is broad enough to avoid things like “facts” and “details”.

CORRECTION:  Andy Birkey, not Matt.  Not sure where that came from.

Join Chad in ponying up to help the Misericordia Orphanage in Chihuahua, Mexico.