Martha y Maria: Women's Lives, Women's Rights

2011-12-09T08:31:00.001-08:00

Today a friend is coping with a son who threatens both suicide and violence to others.

Yesterday I learned that a friend of one of my daughters had died of a heroin overdose on Thanksgiving Day.

The day before I was walking my dog at 4:30 pm when I saw a helicopter hovering in a fixed position a few blocks away. It turned out that a student had been shot multiple times in the torso at 3:30 pm near the high school.

I recall the words of Mark Doty in his memoir Dog Years, "Getting a dog is a contract with grief." He explained that when you get a dog, you know it has a life span of 15 or 16 years at the most, but you still throw your heart into the relationship, eventually facing loss.

Children are like dogs in that respect. You don't generally outlive them, but you set out on a unknown path with a being you love, not knowing where it will lead.

Choosing to bear or adopt a child is an act of courage. It certainly entails pain as well as joy. Hooray for all of us who do it and try so hard.

If one could distill "humanity at its best," the suffering of parents would be in that pure drop.

Sadness in Santa Monica

2011-12-08T13:03:00.000-08:00

A student was shot after school on Tuesday near Santa Monica High School, about eight blocks from my home..

http://www.smdp.com/Articles-local-news-c-2011-12-07-73086.113116-Teen-shooting-victim-speaks-to-investigators.html

We haven't had a shooting for over a year here... the victim is now in stable condition, but he had multiple wounds to the torso with a handgun.

The attack looked like the work of a gang: a van pulls over, someone shoots, van leaves.

And more sadness: a Samohi grad in 2007 died of a heroin overdose on Thanksgiving Day. Bailey Ford had been an outstanding student and attended UC Santa Barbara.

This news came from neighbors this morning whose kids were friends with Bailey. Jessie Clemens, a friend of Marie, sang at the memorial service held at the Agape Center, a local interdenominational church.

Steering kids through high school and into early adulthood is so difficult these days... the dangers are so many.

Princessing: A Tough Job

2011-12-05T14:17:00.000-08:00

What a thoughtful article by Naomi Wolf about the "I want to be a princess" phenomenon among our little girls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/opinion/magazine-global-agenda-mommy-i-want-to-be-a-princess.html?ref=women

Wolf tells feminist mothers not to worry: this desire to be a princess can reflect a desire for more power and authority, not just pretty dresses.

Discussing Kate Middleton, Wolf says "Princessing is good, hard work these days."

I admit to a less enlightened attitude as my daughters chose princess costumes on Halloween after Halloween...

Hey Roz, Ellen, and Marie: I'm now on board with the princess thing.

Thank you to Laila Ayoub in my RS 304 class at CSU Northridge for pointing this article out to me.

Gimmicks for God

2011-11-21T15:07:00.000-08:00

Valerie Prado, a student in my class this fall (RS 304 Women & the Bible), sent me the link to an NPR report last September about a woman's experiment with trying to live strictly by the various statements about women in the Bible.

I'd heard the report then but let the woman's antics slip by without any comment. They do, however, deserve a rebuttal because she is turning them into a book that claims to be about "biblical womanhood."

Taking statements out of context without any consideration of the purpose for which each one was written, Rachel Held Evans lived for a year by passages ranging from Proverbs 31 to Ephesians 5:22.

Because Proverbs 31:23 says, "Her husband is known in the city gates," she stood at the "Welcome to Dayton" (Ohio) sign and held a poster saying "Dan is awesome."

Doing that and other things like letting her husband choose which Netflix movie they would watch clearly had nothing to do with what God wants from us humans. It was just a publicity stunt for her book.

Rachel chose to ignore Ephesians 5:20, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ," so she could act out the next verse, "wives to your husbands as to the Lord." She also chose to ignore the last 37 years of biblical scholarship by women who care about this issue, starting with All We're Meant To Be by Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty in 1974.

But hey, maybe her gimmicks and her book will cause people to think about what "biblical womanhood" really is... to move beyond the simple imitation of various random references to good/bad women and reflect on how the genders should relate and what it means to be a person who serves and praises God.

Micah 6:8 clearly answers the second question for both genders:
"What does YHWH require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/25/140761994/biblical-womanhood-a-year-of-living-by-the-book

Abuse upon Abuse

2011-11-19T17:25:00.000-08:00

Ten years old and giving birth by Caesarean section... being cut open. Better than being ripped open by the head of a baby.

The girl checked into a hospital in Puebla near Mexico City "because she was suffering from seizures and other potentially fatal complications."

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/11/11/girl-10-gives-birth-in-mexico/

"The birth has been reported to the state's Attorney General Office and is under investigation as to whether the girl was raped, and if so, by whom."

Whether the girl was raped? She had a choice over whether to have sexual intercourse? Does a 9 or 10-year-old even know where babies come from and what the consequences of a "choice" might be?

The article then reports on an 11-year-old girl in Northeast Mexico who was also gave birth.

Finally Fox informs us, "State laws in Mexico prohibit abortions for young mothers unless there is proof that they were victims of sexual assault. The legal age of consent in Mexico is 12 years old."

So 12 year-olds and older can say yes and it's not rape.

For girls 10 and 11, any sexual intercourse that occurs is rape, duh.

Final insult: the 10-year-old, after seizures and surgery, is being told to breastfeed this infant.

Thank you to Guadalupe Ruiz for alerting me to this story.

Anita Caspary, Feminist Nun

2011-10-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

What an unlikely life: born in rural South Dakota in 1915, she earned a doctorate in English at Stanford University in 1948 and went on to lead her order, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to sever ties with the Vatican.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-anita-caspary-20111016,0,4520954.story

Her rebellion started with obedience to the mandate of Vatican II for all Catholic religious to match their ministry to the needs of the modern world.

She and the IHMs came to the conclusion that they needed to stop wearing the habit and to leave any teaching jobs where they had 60 to 80 students in a classroom. They decided a teachable limit was 40 students. They also decided their nuns should be allowed to complete their BA degrees before starting to teach.

Cardinal McIntyre, archbishop of the Los Angeles diocese, was furious about these uppity nuns.

By that time, Anita had become president of Immaculate Heart College in LA and then Superior of her order, which stood up to pressure from him to keep teaching for low pay and heavy work loads.

In retaliation, McIntyre made sure that wealthy Catholic donors withdrew their support from the order's college. It closed in 1980.

The sisters formed a new order, the Immaculate Heart Community, which includes both Protestants and men among its 160 members today.

Anita wrote her story in 2003, Witness to Integrity: The Crisis of the Immaculate Heart Community of California (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press). I treasure my signed copy.

When I met her, she was a fiery 85, still giving lectures and speaking out for women in the Roman Catholic Church. In recent years she attended the annual IHM lectures in a wheelchair, still gracious and highly respected.

My father too was born in South Dakota, in Trent in 1914. about 130 miles from Herrick, where Anita was born in 1915.

His ambitions were waylaid by the Depression and alcoholism. Hers were fulfilled by her faith and determination.

Sex in the Church

2011-10-15T22:22:00.000-07:00

Sexuality has never been an easy topic within Christianity. It's hard to balance spirit and body.

The Feminist Agenda Network (F.A.N.) in the Synod of Southern California and Hawaii tackled this subject Oct. 14-15 at Claremont Presbyterian Church an hour east of Los Angeles.

"Building for the Future: Institutions, Sexuality, and Justice" in the Presbyterian Church USA was the title of F.A.N.'s working retreat.

Around thirty women got together for a retreat led by Kate Ott, associate professor of Christian Social Ethics at Drew Theological University in New Jersey.

The approval last May of a vote in Minneapolis in 2010 set in motion big changes in the PCUSA: persons who have life partners of the same gender can now be ordained pastors. And persons who are pastors can now be open about having a same-sex committed relationship.

It's not going to be easy to understand and implement this new policy. Actually, it asks every church member to rethink her/his views on sexuality.

Kate started us out with the question, "What is 'Christian' sexuality?"

We looked at a sheet defining "holistic sexuality" as including sensuality, intimacy, sexual identity, sexual health & reproduction, and sexualization. From birth to death, sexuality is present in all our interactions, Kate said.

That reminded me of Carolyn Heilbrun writing that there is a sexual energy "between any friends who share a passion for their work and for a body of political ideas" (Writing a Woman's Life, p. 108).

Ott asked us what a sexually health church would be like in terms of its staff and volunteers, its care and healing ministry, its Christian education, and its policies.

She told us to go back to our churches and ask, "Do we have a safe church policy?"

The June isue of Colloquy will include an article on sexually healthy seminaries.

Kate chose the encounter between Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman begging for help for her sick daughter (Mark 5 1-20 and Matthew 15) as important for our attention.

Jesus rebuffs her twice, but she persists. He has interacted with women, with Gentiles, and with foreigners before, but in this case the woman is three times removed from him--by gender, by ethnicity, and by religious differences. His limited time is for the House of Israel, not for everyone who crowds around him.

Nevertheless, she persists and in doing so teaches Jesus that the limits raised by his ministry caused injustice.

"God changed--he grew a little bit," Kate said, asking us to think how we sometimes behave the way Jesus did on this occasion.

"We parcel out our resources," she said. "Monetary resources, our time and our energy..."

Like him, we need to change. "Our preferencing of whom we represent" is not good.

Women's goals or sexual identity can't be our only justice-seeking goal. We need to work holistically--not be closed to environmental issues and racial issues, for example.

Jerri Rodewald explained that the synod used to have a Women's Advocacy group; that was followed by the White Glove Mafea, a forerunner of F.A.N. The goal of all three organizations was to address women's concerns within the Presbyterian Church.

I was delighted to meet these women from Ventura County, Los Angeles and Orange Counties, and as far north as San Rafael. Good music, good food, and lots of laughter.

Many are retired, but Kate quoted theologian Letty Russell as saying, "No one really retires; they rewire."

See photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/102150538747404124091/FANOctober2011?authkey=Gv1sRgCP_N--qb_cmU9wE#

Eleven plus Three

2011-10-07T14:16:00.000-07:00

The three women awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace today bring the total number of women winners of this prize to 14 since the beginning in 1901.

They are:

Baroness Bertha von Suttner, Germany, 1905, peace activist.

Jane Addams, US, 1931, for leadership of the International Congress of Women in 1915, an effort to end World War I.

Emily Green Balch, 1946, for her work through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to stop World War I.

Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, 1976, for their work to end violence between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.

Mother Theresa, 1979, for her charity work. She was born of Albanian parents.

Alva Myrdal, Mexico, 1982, for her work on nuclear disarmament.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, 1991, for her nonviolent work against the brutal government of Myanmar. She is the first Buddhist woman to win the prize.

Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Guatamala, 1992, for her work for social justice and respect for the rights of indigenous people.

Jody Williams, US, 1997, for her work to ban landmines.

Shirin Ebadi, Iran, 2003, for her courage in working as a lawyer for human rights in Iran. She was the first Muslim woman to win a Nobel prize.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee (both of Liberia), and Tawakul Karman, Yemen, 2011, for their "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."

Consider the dates of these prizes: the first three were awarded in 1905, 1931, and 1946 for work toward peace during the period of women's push for the right to vote in the US and Britain.

Those first awards came in 1905, at the height of the suffrage struggle; in 1931, when women's new right to vote caused notice of women, and in 1946, when women had just made major contributions toward fighting and ending World War II.

In each case, an award came when women were noisy in the public sphere.

No prizes came for another 30 years until 1976, when women's demands for full participation in society and government were again very loud.

Challenge to readers: Which women would have won the prize in earlier centuries, if there had been a Nobel Peace Prize?

Post your answers.

Three for Peace

2011-10-07T13:40:00.000-07:00

Hooray for the Nobel Committee in awarding this year's peace prize to three women working for human rights!

Congratulations to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia; Leymah Gbowee, Liberian peace activist, and Tawakul Karman, currently part of the protest occupation in Yemen's capital Sanaa calling for a change of leadership.

The decision honors the peace and democracy in Liberia after civil war and speaks of hope that its larger neighbors, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, will also be able to institute and sustain democracy.

The committee cited Ellen, Leymah, and Tawakul for their "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."

This is the first time that work for women's rights has been honored with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Thank you for this bold statement that the struggle for women's right to be safe and to work for political change is a contribution to peace.

It reminds the world that human rights include women's rights... that women are human.

To hold us back is to hobble all humanity.

Rainbow for the Truce

2011-08-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

It was almost sunset in the Rocky Mountains when news of the truce in Washington DC reached us.

The heavens smiled with relief after two stormy days: this rainbow appeared.

The budget deal is not perfect, as Nancy Pelosi and others say.

But promises are being kept to those on Social Security and Medicare and to those who have loaned money to the USA.

If only this rainbow could promise us "never again," like the covenant between God and all living things after the flood in Noah's time.

If only the leaders of this nation could agree to work for peace and justice....

Amy: No, No, No

2011-07-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

The news of Amy Winehouse's death reaches even into this remote valley at 10,000 ft. in the Rocky Mountains and touches my heart.

I think especially of her mother... I came close to getting the same news in 2006.

Ellen is just a year younger than Amy. I can so vividly imagine Amy's birth, the toddler years, the terrific ten-year-old days, the worries... and now this.

Roz sent me this link to Russell Brand's reflections on Amy and the disease of addiction.

http://www.russellbrand.tv/2011/07/for-amy/

KOTO in Telluride has been playing Amy's music all weekend.

I remember listening to her song "Don't wanna go to rehab, no, no no..." in 2007 and smiling.

Now it has additional levels of meaning and sadness.

To the Layman: Lay It Down

2011-05-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

Occupying half of page five in the newspaper on my breakfast table this morning: an advertisement headlined "Presbyterian? What can you do?"

This ad comes courtesy of The Presbyterian Layman, a right-wing rag that my father used to read back in the 1970s.

My father, mind you, was not a churchgoer or Christian, but he had migrated toward the right politically during the Vietnam War protests. My mother attended church, and he loved to get The Layman.

Two weeks ago the 173 local branches of the Presbyterian Church USA voted to allow each local branch to determine whether to ordain openly gay or lesbian pastors, elders, and deacons in the churches under its jurisdiction.

See this commentary by a pastor in West Virginia:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-tremba-presbyterians-20110515,0,4233480.story

What a tolerant solution to the debate that has lasted years--let each local area make up its own mind.

But that's not good enough for the folks at The Presbyterian Layman.

No, they need to invade my breakfast table with a call to "stand up and be counted" against this tolerant compromise. They want me to order their book, donate to their cause, and launch an inquisition against my local church.

No, thank you, laymen.

Your book shows a cute little steepled church perched on a slim pyramid of stones, the rest of the soil presumably eroded away. Its title is Can Two Faiths Embrace One Future?

Excuse me, but the last time I checked we both held the same faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour. We just read the Bible differently.

I'm not going to scan your QR code to get a free copy or donate any money to you.

In fact, I'm going to write a check for $100 today to my local congregation, Brentwood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, to thank them for their continued support of tolerance, human rights, and the Presbyterian Church USA.

Dissing Islam

2011-05-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

So apparently the US has "buried Osama bin Laden at sea."

We aren't big enough to return the body to his family?

We fear a funeral that becomes a demonstration or a resting place that becomes a shrine?

On Sunday evening there were promises that the body was being handled with respect for Muslim tradition--but being dumped in the ocean is surely alien to Islam, even if it was done with prayers.

What an insult: an Arab's body given to the sea, not the sand.

Why not just put his head on a post or do a dance around the body?

The macabre joy of our nation reminds me of scenes from Beowulf--warriors displaying the torn off arm of Grendel.

Can't we do any better than this? We could have turned over the body to the Saudis and let them make the decision on where to send it from that point.

Instead we offend Muslim standards of decency.

I think also of the Roman guards posted at the tomb of Jesus in an effort to make sure the body was not stolen for false claims of resurrection.

If bin Laden is going to be a hero to some, we can't stop that.

The more human stance would have been to return the body to his family and hope that other warriors will show like respect for Americans who die at their hands.

The Woman Who Was Used as a Shield

2011-05-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

Prayers tonight for peace and quiet reflection--not jingoistic celebration.

At this moment--11 pm on the West coast--people are still cheering in Times Square and in the park in front of the White House.

Yes, it is good that the terrorist, Osama bin Laden, is dead. But let us light candles and pray.

It's not a football game, not a time to yell and cheer. We should be on our knees thanking God that this particular terrorist can plan no longer, that no US military were killed in the operation, and that very few others were killed.

I pray especially for "the woman who was used as a shield" and lost her life.

Was she a fanatic supporter of Osama and Al Qaeda? Or was she sold into this life through an arranged marriage?

In any case, one of these supposedly brave warriors used her in an attempt to save his own life. She became an object--not a sex object but an object to place between him and a bullet.

Human bodies are too soft and permeable to function well as shields, so it was probably her gender alone that he thought would defend him. Men who are fighting might be reluctant to shoot a woman placed between them.

Standard gender ideology requires a man to defend a woman--to risk his life to protect her. Apparently that can be thrown out the window when a man's own life is in danger. Grab her--use her as a shield.

Why does this situation feel so familiar to me?

Women are so often used as shields. We stand out in front of men who are in conflict. Our honor is a banner for our men's honor, our family honor. Our shame unleashes male wrath to kill and replace us.

Our hijab is a flag flying the Muslim colors. Our unplanned but completed pregnancy flies the Roman Catholic colors. Our silence proclaims the fundamentalist church's loyalty to Jesus.

We are all women used as a shield. We shield our men from child care and housework, from hunger and from wilting self-esteem.

Let us pray for this woman who died in her home in Abbotabad today, and for the men who died with her. Requiem eternam dona eis.

Let us pray for a world in which victors do not rejoice over their enemy's death but soberly, quietly turn to God, asking only:

Kyrie eleison.
Christe eleison.
Allah eleison.

A Feminist Warning from Chaucer

2011-04-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire,” wrote Catherine of Siena.

Bishop Richard Chartres spoke her words as the first line of his homily at the royal wedding today of Prince William Arthur Phillip etc. and Katherine Elizabeth Middleton.

Later he quoted Chaucer:

Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye.
Whan maistrye comth, the God of Love anon
Beteth his wynges, and farewel, he is gon!

Chaucer's Franklin speaks these words at the beginning of his tale in The Canterbury Tales (FT 764-66).

I accidentally stayed up late trying to untangle a huge mess of yarn caused by our puppy running around the house with a ball of yarn unsupervised. It looked like a massive spider web around the chairs and tables.

Talking and untangling at almost 3 am, my daughter and I realized the wedding was about to begin and decided to watch it.

How exciting that Catherine of Siena's words began the homily, and what a priceless admonition! I had just been telling my students about her earlier in the day (I teach Women & Religion).

She was born the 25th of 26 children in 1347. She died at age 33 from illness contracted by caring for the sick and needy.

In between she had visions, experienced a mystical wedding to Jesus, became a Third Order Dominican, traveled, preached, and wielded tremendous influence in church politics. It was the century of the papal schism, and she convinced Pope Gregory IX to move back to Rome from the luxury of Avignon, France.

An uppity young woman, for sure!

The bishop's next genius move was to speak against male domination in marriage, using the humorous words of Chaucer (buried nearby in Westminster Abbey).

Of course, the sad marriage of Prince Charles and Diana hovered in the background of this wedding day thirty years later.

There was "maistrye" (domination, oppression) in that marriage for sure.

Did Cupid beat his wings and fly away? Yes, indeed.

Given that history, does William need to be reminded not to lord it over Kate?

Yes, it is well for that warning from the 14th century to hover over this day.

After all, kings have nearly always exercised the unspoken royal right of sexual access to whomever they might choose--though their wives have to remain chaste in order to insure proper paternity of continuing royal line.

If William can manage faithfulness in marriage and also strive for relative equality in the relationship, as in Paul's words "submit yourselves one to another" (Eph. 5:21), the story that begins today may have a happier ending than that of his parents.

Requiem Eternam

2011-04-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

A friend at work, James D. Findlay, is tutoring me in biblical Hebrew. He used to write and edit for The Other Side magazine.

When I told him about Nancy Hardesty's death, he said he would add her to his prayer list.

"But why?" I asked him. "She's with God now. She's no longer in pain."

He explained that he still prays for people he loves who have departed; in his morning prayers with his wife, they mention names of specific persons, living and dead.

"I can see that praying to them, asking their support, would be good for us," I answered. "But do you think it benefits them in some way? How can that be?"

After a bit of arguing, I conceded that connecting to them in prayer each morning might have some benefit to them as well as to us, but I wasn't convinced.

On Palm Sunday, however, at the end of the service, the choir sang a piece from Mozart's Requiem:

Re-e-quiem eternam dona eis. (Give them eternal rest).

I thought of Nancy, of course. The music was so beautiful with the tender emphasis on the first syllable of requiem. I could hear one human longing for, turning to God in trust for, the peaceful rest of the other after suffering, whether a painful illness or a sudden death.

I felt that longing, that deep stirring of prayer for Nancy. Asking God to give her eternal rest felt completely appropriate.

After all, I said to myself, those words have been sung in the church for centuries. Persons wise than I must have had their reasons.

And besides, I realized, praying for requiem eternam for another expresses my own deep desire to rest in the full presence of God.

We lead such turbulent lives, but we have moments of rest and occasions of reflection that cause us to seek God's presence.

Nancy Hardesty 1941-2011

2011-04-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

EEWC--Christian Feminism Today has released the obituary below for co-founder Dr. Nancy A. Hardesty, 1941-2011.

See also Nancy's reflections, "Some Thoughts on Living and Dying," published in the last issue of Christian Feminism Today and now available on the EEWC website at

http://www.eewc.com/CFT/v34n4a2.htm

To learn what Nancy and her co-author Letha Scanzoni were up against in 1968, see Letha's 6-part backstory to All We're Meant To Be: A Biblical Approach to Feminism in Letha's blog at

http://www.lethadawsonscanzoni.com/blog/

Dr. Nancy A. Hardesty, one of the earliest voices in evangelical Christian feminism, died in Atlanta on April 8 after two years of treatment for pancreatic cancer. She was 69 years old.

In 1974 she co-authored All We’re Meant To Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation with Letha Dawson Scanzoni. Presenting a new reading of Bible passages traditionally used to limit women’s roles in the church, home, and society, this book was a major factor in launching the biblical feminist movement in the 1970s.

Christianity Today magazine called All We’re Meant to Be one of the “landmark titles that changed the way we think, talk, witness, worship, and live,” ranking it 23^rd among the top fifty books published from 1956 to 2006.

“For better or for worse, no evangelical marriage or institution has been able to ignore the ideas in this book,” noted the editors. Originally published by Word Books, it stayed in print with revised editions from Abingdon and Eerdmans.

A professor of religion at Clemson University in South Carolina, Hardesty had also taught at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, and Emory University in Atlanta. She held a doctorate in the history of Christianity from the University of Chicago and a Master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Earlier she worked as an editor for both The Christian Century and Eternity magazines, coming into contact with Scanzoni in 1968 through an article submitted to Eternity.

Hardesty’s other books include Women Called to Witness (Abingdon Press, 1984), Great Women of Faith (Baker, 1980), Inclusive Language in the Church (John Knox, 1987), 'Your Daughters Shall Prophesy': Revivalism and Feminism in the Age of Finney (Carlson, 1991, and the University of Tennessee, 1999), and Faith Cure: Divine Healing in the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements (Hendrickson, 2003).

She also helped found Daughters of Sarah, a Christian feminist magazine published in Chicago from 1974 to1995. Born in 1941 in Lima, Ohio, she was raised in the Christian and Missionary Alliance and graduated from Wheaton College in 1963.

Private family services are planned, and a memorial celebration of her life will be held at the 2012 conference of the Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, the organization founded by Hardesty, Scanzoni, and others in 1974.

“Some Thoughts on Living and Dying,” her reflection published three months ago in EEWC’s quarterly journal, Christian Feminism Today, may be found at

http://www.eewc.com/CFT/v34n4a2.htm.

Gifts in her memory may be sent to EEWC—Christian Feminism Today, P.O. Box 78171, Indianapolis, IN 46278-0171.

For more information, contact Linda Bieze, EEWC-CFT coordinator:

(616) 780-1217 coordinator @eewc .com

EEWC—CFT, P.O. Box 78171, Indianapolis IN 46278-0171

office@eewc.com www.eewc.com

Nancy Hardesty & Eternity

2011-04-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

Like the last two notes of Pachelbel's ''Canon," Nancy today stepped off the edge of the world into eternity.

We in EEWC had been tiptoeing through this sacred week as she slowly but gracefully walked toward standing only a breath away from that fuller presence of God.

She died in Atlanta as one of her close friends held her hand. I last saw her in Indianapolis at the EEWC gathering there in June, 2010. She knew then that it would be her last conference--the pancreatic cancer discovered and treated a year earlier had somehow metastasized--but she did not tell us, except for Letha. I saw only a luminous presence, an extra warmth and graciousness.

Nancy's reflections on this final journey appeared in Christian Feminism Today: "Some Thoughts on Living and Dying" (vol. 34, winter 2011) and can be found on the EEWC-CFT website, www.eewc.com.

We got the call just after noon today as Letha and I returned from walking to brunch at a nearby bakery. We prayed and gave thanks for Nancy's life. The rest of the day went to phone calls and emails with our families and the EEWC community.

Nancy and Letha came into contact in 1968 when Letha wrote a piece on women for Eternity magazine. The story of how they came to write All We're Meant To Be: A Biblical Approach to Women's Liberation (Word Press, 1974) is found in Letha's blog, http://www.lethadawsonscanzoni.com/2011/01/part-1-coauthoring-all-were-meant-to-be-the-beginning/

I wrote to them when their book came out and at their invitation did something I had never done before: fly across the country for a conference.

At that meeting of Evangelicals for Social Action in Chicago, women who were present met and shared and decided to meet again, inviting others. The group grew into an organization. Excitement, joy, hope for change--I was swept into it.

Since that day in November, 1974, so much has happened: getting the structure for a national organization, founding local chapters, holding biennial conferences, facing shoestring budgets, starting a quarterly publication and later a website.

Nancy attended every conference, starting with our first in 1975. She took part in the initial planning committee of five people and served many terms on EEWC's Council over the years, currently as secretary.

I looked through my autograph album last week and was moved by words she wrote many years ago, taken from calligraphy by Sr. Corita Kent with the words of Ugo Betti:

To believe in God is to know that all the rules will be fair and that there will be wonderful surprises.

She's joyful now, laughing with surprise at wonders beyond our imagining.

Virginia at Cedar Crest

2011-04-05T23:53:00.000-07:00

Today I had the pleasure of visiting Virginia Ramey Mollenkott and Suzannah Tilton in their new home at Cedar Crest in Pompton Plains, New Jersey.

Their windows look out on a pond with trees and bushes--and also spring peepers, tiny frogs who pipe a noisy mating chorus at this time of year.

We shared morning devotions and sang in a round, "For health and love and daily bread, we give thee thanks, O God."

Nancy Hardesty was on our minds because of Letha Dawson Scanzoni's report on her status as she undergoes the sacred process of rejoining her Maker and returning to dust. She's dying of pancreatic cancer in Atlanta, Georgia, attended by her partner, Evelyn.

We looked at Desperate for Authenticity, a book on Virginia's theology written by Patricia Hawley of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (2011) and heard the story of Virginia's loving ministry to this woman when she sent Virginia a transcript of it.

We looked at Jesus and the Feminists by Margaret Kostenberger (2008) and wondered why she had simple factual errors, such as saying that Virginia had taught at Patterson College for 44 years. And why did she put Virginia in the same category as two feminists known for rejecting their Christian faith, Mary Daly and Daphne Hampson?

We watched the documentary The Bible Tells Me So with Senator Dick Gephardt and other parents of gay or lesbian children.

I dined with Virginia and Suzannah in one of the three restaurants available at Cedar Crest, a community of 2,000 residents who form caring relationships together in these last years of their lives.

I heard about Emily Aumiller (a friend of Virginia and also of Phyllis Trible since their undergraduate days at Meredith College), who died suddenly on February 26. Her husband Richard continues to be a dear friend. Making friends and losing them is a part of life here, Virginia and Suzannah report.

Every Monday evening they dine with their friends Ruben and Bobbie, and I was impressed with their caring for these two, neither of whom has a faith perspective.

Ruben founded a successful business, RC Fine Foods; the lanyard around his neck says www.rcfinefoods.com.

Bobbie, a widow, worked as a secretary all her life and did not go to college, but she reads the New York Times completely every day and is well informed on all things from international affairs to the arts. With her coiffed hair, make-up, and two strands of pearls, she looks like an unlikely friend for Virginia and Suzannah, but Virginia likes her intelligence and hopes to raise Bobbie's view of herself and her spiritual potential.

In short, Virginia is still evangelical to the core, and Cedar Crest is her new mission field.

These words we recited together from A Course in Miracles capture her ministry there and everywhere:

I am here only to be truly helpful.
I am here to represent Christ, who sent me.
I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do because the One who sent me will direct me.
I am content to be wherever She wishes, knowing She goes there with me.
I will be healed as I let her teach me to heal.

Phyllis and the Whales

2011-04-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

Phyllis Trible lives in a sea of whales.

Since writing a dissertation on Jonah in 1963, and publishing Rhetorical Criticism: Method, Context, and the Book of Jonah (Fortress Press, 1994), she has somehow acquired dozens of whales in wood, stone, glass, ceramics, etc.

The entire pod swims on the top floor of a 21-story building in the Morningside Gardens residences across the street from Jewish Theological Seminary, a few blocks down Broadway from Columbia University.

I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with her and the whales, enjoying views of the Hudson River, trains far below on the street, and bridges visible beyond rooftops.

Perched on stools at a sunny window with this view extending beneath us, we ate lentil soup with a salad of avocado, pears, apples, and walnuts.

We talked of:

* definitions of feminism... including Rosemary Ruether's "the belief that women are fully human."

* books exploring the process of translating the "authorized version" of the Bible in 1611 (in contrast to previous versions for which writers had been in danger of burning) and the 400th anniversary of the King James Version.

* lectures last month at Wake Forest University in her honor... "The Greening of Feminism"

* the tenth anniversary of these lectures next year with the theme "Feminist Biblical Scholars and Theologians from across the Globe Explore Feminist Biblical Interpretation," March 6-7, 2012

* her recent trip to Austin, Texas, to speak at the Seminary of the Southwest (Episcopal)

*Anna Quindlen's talk last week at Barnard College about feminism in 2011...

* six-year-old Stella from down the hall who comes to visit, playing with the stuffed whales on a small rug and climbing on a stool to find cookies in a cupboard.

Pilgrimage

2011-04-03T22:49:00.000-07:00

Follow your dreams, they say. This week is my spring break, and I flew to the East coast to visit my mother-in-law and several friends.

Monday -- Phyllis Trible in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan near Columbia University.

Tuesday -- Virginia Ramey Mollenkott and Suzannah Tilton in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, near Patterson.

Wednesday -- Letha Dawson Scanzoni in Norfolk, Virginia.

Meanwhile, all our thoughts are with Nancy Hardesty, who is dying of pancreatic cancer in Atlanta, Georgia.

If you search these names--Phyllis, Virginia, Letha, Nancy--you will find lists of the wonderful biblical feminist books they have written.

See also Evangelical & Ecumenical Women's Caucus--Christian Feminism at www.eewc.com.

Schlafly still cranking along

2011-03-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

Oh, shit! Phyllis Schlafly is still alive and still cranking along...

I can't believe it. This nemesis of my youth, the heady 1970s when we were trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, is still fighting feminism.

And she has a niece who is carrying on the family tradition in a Gen-X way.

The good news is that Meghan Daum has inteviewed the niece and provides some key information to deflate the myths Schlafly has perpetuated.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-daum-column-schlafly-20110331,0,2982491.column

Joyce Rupp

2011-03-27T22:45:00.000-07:00

Today I listened to Joyce Rupp (author of May I Have This Dance?) speaking at my church in Los Angeles.

See www.joycerupp.com

She spoke on compassion--"the DNA of the gospels"--quoting many authors from Henri Nouwen to Pema Chodron.

Change in the Church

2011-03-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

Rosemary Radford Ruether and others spoke on a panel titled "Feminist Paradigms for Change in the Church" at Whittier College, one of several panels on Women & Religion at the American Academy of Religion/West Coast, meeting at Whittier College.

For more information, go to www.wecsor.org

Ruether Defining Feminism

2011-03-27T21:57:00.000-07:00

What is your definition of feminism and how is it relevant to young women today?

Scholars including Rosemary Radford Ruether and Sheila Briggs answered this question to begin an intergenerational dialogue and luncheon session at a gathering of WECSOR, the West coast division of AAR, on the Whittier College campus near Los Angeles on March 27, 2011.

“My mother and all her friends were feminists,” said Rosemary. “They went to college in 1915,” a time when first-wave feminism was close to winning suffrage for women. Thus Rosemary, born in 1936, inherited her passion for gender equality directly from that first wave.

“What is feminism? The affirmation of the full humanity of women,” she stated.

“Feminism is relevant today because all cultures presently existing have been shaped by patriarchy,” she continued, arguing that we must work cross-culturally. “Feminism must take many forms; we must not negate each other but accept our diversity, as articulated in many locations. We’ve only barely begun. Patriarchy is deeply entrenched and has ways of reasserting itself.”

In Pakistan, we see acid thrown on girls attending school; in the West, women are seduced to reflect and accept male power. We also observe the attempt to make feminist accomplishments seem ephemeral.

“Feminism has to be reinvented,” she concluded, “until each generation of girl children, born with the instinct of their full humanity, grows up affirmed.” We now live in a system that distorts both men and women.

“Is feminism still relevant? To ask this question reflects ignorance, as if the successes of a few privileged groups have somehow carried over to all.”

Karen Kidd, a historian at CSU Fullerton, explained the historical development of the word feminism, which entered English from French in about 1912.

“Cutting-edge American suffragists, convinced by that time that winning the vote was inevitable, saw the need for a new term to describe the wider agenda of gender-justice that the vote would enable us to pursue, and began to call themselves ‘feminists.’” After the vote was won in 1920, these women began to address a wide range of social problems rooted in patriarchal traditions, and the wider culture began to express its doubts about this new feminism.

Sheila Briggs, professor in both the School of Religion and the Gender Studies program at USC, described “how feminism defined me as a student in Yorkshire, England, in the 1970s.” At that time in Europe, feminism was a movement of the Left, associated with socialist and Marxist traditions, she explained.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” she recalled, quoting Wordsworth and remembering the first conference on feminist theology in 1975.

Tammy Schneiders, a Hebrew scholar at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Religion, contrasted feminist studies of the Hebrew Bible (“often sidelined”) and “masculinist studies,” which sometimes veer into bad scholarship.

Anne Eggebroten, a lecturer in women and religion at CSU Northridge, argued that feminism should not be so misunderstood and difficult to define; any dictionary gives a simple definition—“the principle that women should have political, economic, and social rights equal to those of men.”

She cited ten examples of the need for feminism today, ranging from the lack of a female US president and female Pope to the need for literacy and birth control to be

available to all women in the world.

A lively discussion among scholars of all ages followed the panel presentation. Subjects included the “matriarchal studies movement,” feminism and pop culture, Bitch magazine, and kids’ clothes.

Tammy Schneiders, mother of a pre-teen, described fashions for little girls as “Prostitutes R Us.”

Fleeing from Women Priests

2011-03-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

Some Anglicans just can't deal with women bishops.

They put up with a few women priests for a while, but when the Roman Catholic Church invited them to return to the fold in order to avoid women priests and bishops, some are accepting that invitation.

See this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110309/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_anglicans;_ylt=AhMDQw3q20vrlvzxdMBleus7Xs8F;_ylu=X3oDMTJyN2hrcDMzBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMzA5L2V1X2JyaXRhaW5fYW5nbGljYW5zBHBvcwMzMgRzZWMDeW5fcGFnaW5hdGVfc3VtbWFyeV9saXN0BHNsawNodW5kcmVkc29mYW4-

Irony and Iron

2011-01-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

While a CSU professor read a paper on "Intellectual Spanish Women Sent to German Concentration Camps..." at MLA, the Modern Language Association for English/French/Spanish teachers etc, meeting this weekend in Los Angeles, a brilliant Tucson woman serving in Congress was shot along with 19 others.

Gun control, anyone? Without it, the words of extremists become bullets.

In Memoriam: Tucson

2011-01-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

There's no violence on Venus,
nor on Jupiter or Mars.
Only Earth is stained with blood,
the filthiness of wars.

From her heart we break her iron;
we fire it 'til it runs.
We pound it and oppress it
and manufacture guns.

Christmas card 2010

2010-12-25T21:00:00.000-08:00

A very doggy Christmas to you...

We had mostly peace on earth at our house this year (well, a fair bit of chaos too).

Click on our chihuahua in her Christmas dress (designed and created by Roz) to see more photos.

Roll Call on Dream Act

2010-12-19T00:42:00.000-08:00

Here's the link to find out who voted for and against the DREAM Act.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/18/AR2010121804202_pf.html

3 Republicans who voted YES--thank you!

Bob Bennett, Utah
Richard Lugar, Indiana
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska (who was a write-in, defeating the Tea Party candidate who got the Republican nomination)

Independent and YES:
Joe Lieberman, Connecticut (a sponsor of the bill)
Bernie Sanders, Vermont

5 Democrats who voted NO:
Hagan, North Carolina
Pryor, Arkansas
Nelson, Nebraska
Baucus, Montana
Tester, Montana

Okay, folks: let's bombard them with letters and emails. And let's make sure they don't get re-elected.

One from the South, two from the Midwest, and two from Montana! I guess the Montanans just don't have much understanding or sympathy for Mexicans and other immigrants. Perhaps the economy threatening jobs causes Democrats from North Carolina, Nebraska, and Arkansas to vote against the young immigrants.

Anyway, hooray for Bob Bennett of Utah and for the senators from New Mexico, who voted yes, and the two from Colorado, who voted yes.

And the two New York senators.

The two women from Maine voted no--I guess they had to vote with the Republicans on something because they were about to vote to go against their party in repealing DADT.

It's fascinating to see how the senators voted today on each of these important issues.

Dianne Feinstein's speech on the Senate floor was so moving and contained great statistics, including the $ 1 billion or more that could be saved by passing the DREAM Act.

Charles Schumer vowed to work for the DREAM Act in the next Congress... He said there's hope for two reasons:
1) The justice of the issue.
2) The voting power of Latinos. He noted that in three states (CA, CO, NV), the Latino vote went to the Democrats by a higher margin in 2010 than in 2008, even though Democrats suffered overall. Republicans will need to work for immigration reform if they want to get elected.

All in all, an amazing Saturday, Dec. 18.

The Senate was working hard and produced a big Christmas present for GLBT citizens.

Only the threat of filibuster prevented the Senate from helping young immigrant students. There were enough votes--55--to pass the bill, but 60 votes were needed to prevent debate from being halted by a filibuster.

As it turned out, 5 Democrats and 36 Republicans voted not to let young people raised in the US, graduates of our high schools and colleges, enter a path toward citizenship.

That's a crime.

One Small Step for Justice

2010-12-18T23:54:00.000-08:00

What a powerful, moving day.

I watched C-SPAN most of the day while doing dishes, cooking, wrapping gifts.

First it was the votes on the DREAM Act and repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, along with the debate on the Senate floor. Then it was the press conferences given by senators afterward.

I'm so proud of all those who worked for repeal of DADT and for passage of the DREAM Act. I feel as if I got to know many of these senators today--they changed from names to faces I can recognize, persons with stories they shared.

My heroes and sheroes:
Senator Harry Reid for managing the technical details of cloture, tabling etc. so well and for talking with those who became swing votes.

Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snow, sponsors of the repeal legislation (I think).

The eight Republicans including Snow who voted to repeal:
Susan Collins, Maine;
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska (elected by a hairsbreadth--the write-in candidate);
Scott Brown, Massachusetts;
Mark Kirk, Illinois;
George Voinovich, Ohio;
John Ensign, Nevada, and
Richard Burr, North Carolina.

And the three Republicans who voted yes for moving to a vote on the DREAM Act, making the total 55 to 41:
Bob Bennett, Utah;
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska;
Richard Lugar, Indiana.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-dont-ask-20101219,0,2953777.story

Hooray for all these leaders.

Fates of Millions Decided Today

2010-12-18T09:01:00.000-08:00

It's a grey, gloomy morning in Los Angeles. Steady rain is falling.

The US Senate just voted not to bring the DREAM Act to a vote, 55 in favor, 41 against it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-pn-1218-senate-dadt-dream-20101219,0,5635931.story

Many of them had previously favored the Dream Act, but in the economic downturn anti-immigrant sentiment has increased.

Students I know will remain in limbo, required to go to Mexico for ten years and then apply to immigrate to the US.

Some of them were brought to the US as infants. They have no idea how to make a life in Mexico. They have degrees from US colleges, honors from US high schools.

I and thousands of others will write/email/call each one of the Senators who voted no. They will be held accountable.

At least the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell will probably pass. The Senate just voted to bring it to a vote, so within hours or days, one of the last legal forms of discrimination in the US will be history--not present reality.

Of course, the Equal Rights Amendment--the ERA--still has not been ratified. US legislators still fear to add that key sentence to the Constitution: "P.S. All of the above applies to women."

Marijuana and Bipolar, Schizophrenia

2010-12-16T12:08:00.000-08:00

Devastating news: smoking marijuana can unlock latent mental illnesses such as bipolar I & II and schizophrenia in young brains.

Not news, really. I've suspected it since hearing the bipolar diagnosis from doctors in regard to some of my kids.

On the Airtalk show on KPCC today, Larry Mantle interviewed Gil Kerlikowske, the "drug czar" of this administration, as well as interviewing a researcher and a psychiatrist specializing in addiction.

Listen to it at: http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2010/12/16/teens-smoking-more-pot/

Other facts from the study just released by the National Institute on Drug Abuse:
Use of marijuana on a daily basis causes cognitive loss, especially in the ability to memorize and learn.
9% of marijuana users become addicted.
When it becomes a gateway drug, the most common drugs chosen are cocaine and methamphetamine--because they increase attention and focus.

Larry recommends seeing the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Next to Normal, which shows two teens, one who can use mj recreationally without too many side effects and his girlfriend, for whom mj immediately becomes addicting and destructive to her life.

In Tribute to Holbrooke

2010-12-14T11:29:00.000-08:00

CSPAN played a half-hour video of Richard Holbrooke being interviewed by Christiane Amanpour this morning.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Holbr

What a dueling of great minds! No better way to learn about the situation in Afghanistan, and so moving to see what a great man he was... while watching Christiane arm-wrestle him to get him to say more than he wants to.

Watch this... make time for it!

Left Out

2010-12-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

Even as we celebrate the passing of a version of the Dream Act in the House of Representatives and work/pray/hope for it to pass in the Senate, some are left out.

The version of the bill passed by the House changes the upper age limit of those to whom it would apply from 35 years to 29 years.

That means there are thousands of people aged 30-35 who are left out. Some of them have been working for this bill since it was conceived seven years ago--but if it is approved by both houses of Congress only for this more restricted age group, these people brought to the US by their parents at a young age will be excluded.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1209-dream-act-reax-20101209,0,566750.story

Exile in Mexico

2010-12-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

What happens when an American citizen wants to marry a person living in the US without proper papers?

Maybe they get a good lawyer and try to do whatever is required to attain legal residency.

But that process is risky, and one possible outcome is that the "alien" (who may have been living in the US since infancy) may be deported and required to spend ten years in a country he or she doesn't really know before then applying to emigrate to the US.

In some cases, the American goes with his/her fiance to live abroad until the would-be spouse can legally enter the US and they can legally marry (which then can lead to the spouse gaining citizenship).

One woman who knows this scenario intimately is Giselle Stern Hernandez. Look at her website and learn about her story.

http://www.gsternhernandez.com/1.html

Hooray for Harry!

2010-12-09T12:11:00.000-08:00

Thank you to Harry Reid and the US senators who voted to table the Dream Act today rather than kill it.

http://www.micevhill.com/home_december_2010.php#senate_dream_act_cloture_vote_vitiated

Now we have a week to contact all the 43 senators who want to kill it and the one who didn't vote.

Start your phone calls, emails, tweets, personal conversations, etc. with senators and their staffs !

Four Old Men

2010-12-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

Hooray for the House of Representatives, voting tonight to approve the Dream Act 216 to 198.

The Senate is expected to vote 56 in favor, 44 against--but 60 votes are needed to win approval.

Can four old men deny a path to citizenship to thousands of young people brought to the US as infants or children without proper immigration papers? Yes, that's what may happen.

Email or call your senator and all those who may vote against it.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/12/dream-act.html

Good-bye, Elizabeth

2010-12-07T22:52:00.000-08:00

I feel relieved that Elizabeth Edwards has died, as if her suffering weighed me down too. (I read her book Resilience.)

She has endured so much pain--losing her 16-yr-old, facing JE's flagrant infidelity, saying goodbye to this world at age 61, and realizing that she would leave behind a 10- and 12-yr-old.

I'm one year older than she--what she has had to bear would sink my ship.

She has a Facebook page, and she had a life before all that pain. The MSN link below calls her "a shrewd lawyer."

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40537053/ns/today-today_people/?GT1=43001

Good-bye, "God be with ye", Elizabeth. You took the cards you were dealt and lived with courage. You even wrote about your life, twice, with ruthless honesty.

May each of us follow your example.

Remembering Violence against Women

2010-12-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

The Gender and Women's Studies Dept. at CSU Northridge sent out the announcement below for today.

Today, December 6, is National Day of Remembrance & Action on Violence Against Women in Canada.

Established in 1991 by the Parliament of Canada, this day marks the anniversary of the murders in 1989 of 14 young women at l'École Polytechnique de Montréal. They died because they were women attending a university; a mentally ill man perceived them as potential feminists and a threat.

As well as commemorating the 14 young women whose lives ended in an act of gender-based violence that shocked the nation, December 6 represents an opportunity for Canadians (and women around the world) to reflect on the phenomenon of violence against women in our society. It is also an opportunity to consider the women and girls for whom violence is a daily reality, and to remember those who have died as a result of gender-based violence. And finally, it is a day on which communities can consider concrete actions to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls.

We must never forget...
GENEVIÈVE BERGEON , 21 years
HÉLÈNE COLGAN, 23 years
NATHALIE CROTEAU, 23 years
BARBARA DAIGNEAULT, 22 years
ANNE-MARIE EDWARD, 21 years
MAUD HAVIERNICK, 29 years
BARBARA MARIA KLUCZNIK, 31 years
MARYSE LAGANIÈRE, 25 years
MARYSE LECLAIR, 23 years
ANNE-MARIE LEMAY, 27 years
SONIA PELLETIER, 28 years
MICHÈLE RICHARD, 21 years
ANNIE ST-ARNEAULT, 23 years
ANNIE TURCOTTE, 21 years

Louise Malette writes in The Montreal Massacred (gynergy, 1991):

"I can't help but think about the morning of Wednesday, December 6, 1989: young women getting out of bed as if it were any other day, appearing mildly distracted at breakfast, their heads full of details for the next exam, or vacation plans for Christmas. Dreaming. Thinking about life. At that very moment, elsewhere in the city, someone who probably hasn't slept all night is writing his hate letter, preparing his weapon and his ammunition, going over each step leading him to his death mission. He's found scapegoats for his failures: women, who deny the existence of the old father who commands, gives orders, excludes, dominates, punishes, beats, who holds the right to life or death over women and their children. The killer-to-be knows that the Almighty father can never exist again, and he would do anything rather than accept the challenge his own life represents: to deserve, not overpower, the love which is no longer his privilege simply because he was born male. His reasoning is superficial, one-dimensional: women today are out of line; all feminists want to be like men, so there's only one solution, to put them in their place before it's too late, before women become human beings like everybody else. No more, no less."(excerpt from "A Matter of Life or Death: Second Installment" by Élaine Audet, The Montreal Massacre (gynergy books 1991)"When I think of that poor young girl who, lying on her stretcher, said that she wasn't even a feminist, I feel like crying. When I think of that girl in the classroom, the only one who tried to reason with the killer, crying out: "We're not feminists. We're only women who want an education,"I feel like screaming."

(excerpt from "Letter to the Media" by Louise Malette, The Montreal Massacred (gynergy books 1991).*

More information about local events and the University of Toronto December 6th candlelight vigil (Philosopher's Walk) http://status-women.utoronto.ca/16dayscalendar07.html**On" target=_blank>http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=rro4vodab&et=1104032466566&s=84&e=001cm610dD_Ie6QFx0IXephrBFpB0B-cp0LFyiMnb_yp0jedM6tANIi6LnaJw0oBdd5mKQIPDFkbRVXX5fZ9M_pb1mg5qzL1KAm2sCC0XoV5wFwZAUCzvrevoaeYQw3x13Ed2MlsCw12XamtJNtYMguTQ==>**On

December 6th and every day please take some time to remember....

Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI)140 Holland St. West, PO Box 13022Bradford, ON, L3Z 2Y5http://www.motherhoodinitiative.org

Christmas Greetings

2010-12-04T13:10:00.000-08:00

In today's Wall Street Journal, there's a story about a 14-yr-old boy employed by a Mexican drug cartel to kill and even behead people.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989004575653031565874598.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

We need Emanuel ("God with us") so much in our world today.

Therefore, I send you peace as we commemorate the birth that brought and still brings change to our world.

I also offer you the link below. It will take you to a few ads but maybe also to a few photos to bring a smile to your face.

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=9AZMmbJkzcMoe

"Culture of Deceit"

2010-11-13T23:49:00.000-08:00

It was devastating to watch Fair Game, the film about Valerie Plame & Joe Wilson and how she was outed by the Bush administration.

Nuns vs. Rome

2010-11-13T12:23:00.000-08:00

Sr. Sandra Schneider will speak in Los Angeles this afternoon to a packed room of nuns and other Catholics and feminists. Tickets are sold out, and I didn't plan ahead to get one.

Her passionate words against Rome's current investigation of American nuns appeared in the National Catholic Reporter last August.

http://ncronline.org/news/women/why-they-stayed

"The current 'Apostolic Visitatino' is not a normal dialogue between religious and church authorities," which occurs annually in Rome, she explains. "It is the ecclesiastic analogue of a grand jury indictment, set in motion when there is a reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or a prima facie case of serious abuse or wrong-doing of some kind."

One might expect that the recent child sexual abuse scandal or its cover-up by bishops would have set in motion a visitation--but no. It's the nuns that Rome is worried about.

The elderly nuns who have worked 40 to 60 years without sex scandals and almost without pay are getting investigated.

This "visitation" could light the slow-burning fuse that will result in an explosion of changes in the church of Rome--including women priests, married priests, and a structural shift away from the top-down rule of the Pope.

Veterans Day & PTSD

2010-11-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

A sign of progress: on this Veterans Day the US is not fighting a war in Iraq. We are just assisting the Iraqi government now. There are no crosses placed on the Santa Monica beach to represent American lives lost there.

Our focus has shifted to Afghanistan--and President Obama is considering whether to bomb Yemen for the packages sent from there with bombs intended for a synagogue in Chicago.

Reuters reports, however, that the war in Iraq is "far from over":

George W Bush talked this week about the decisions he made in Iraq as if they were history, the insurgency had been defeated and the conflict, bar a few loose ends, over. Wrong on all counts. If American troops are not being attacked on a daily basis, Iraqis certainly are. Iraq Body Count says that an average of seven people die a day from suicide and bomb attacks, and that there are three deaths from gunfire or executions. Two months after Barack Obama hailed the end of US combat operations in Iraq, the conflict itself is far from over.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/12/iraq-unfinished-business-editorial

The most egregious attack was on a Christian church in Baghdad, killing 58 people attending worship on Sunday, Nov. 1. It was the worst attack on Christians in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003, which triggered killings of Christians.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101101/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq

The war is also far from over for those US veterans who returned with PTSD, some 30% according to a general interviewed in the new documentary Wartorn, released on HBO today. It tells the personal stories of soldiers from the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, and the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/wartorn-1861-2010/index.html

I watched this documentary yesterday. A young man goes off to the Civil War "to fight for the stars and stripes." He's discharged two years later with severe PTSD and ends up shooting himself.

Jason Scheuerman, a soldier serving in Iraq, tries to get help for feeling suicidal. He's told that he's faking it: "Just be a man and go back to your unit." He's assigned to clean his weapon, and his buddies are told to stay away from him. He shoots himself. His father, a vet, lost his job training medics because of his recurring dream of working on a severely wounded soldier who turns out to be his son asking, "Why can't you help me?"

Nathan Damigo of San Jose is serving six years in jail for attacking a Middle Eastern taxi driver amidst a flashback of being at a checkpoint in Iraq--but what he thought was a drunken dream turned out to be real.

We watch another soldier trying to get through a trip to Walmart with his wife and daughter. He's confused, scared. "I've done some terrible things," he says, fighting off the sense that he deserves to die.

Not an easy film to watch. Here's a review from the Canadian Press:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5iTR8LuXsz3p7GysU9klsSE8zneUQ?docId=5079319

Each year over 6,000 veterans take their own lives, about 18 per day, according to a Department of Defense report last January. That's 20% of the 30,000 suicides in the US per year.

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=58879

Here's a report from CBS news in 2007:

Vietnam veteran advocates have estimated that suicide ultimately killed more of the soldiers who fought in that conflict than the actual war itself. The same trend is now surfacing among the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main3496471.shtml

Here are the total deaths not counting suicide:

Number of Americans killed in Iraq: 4,745

http://icasualties.org/

Estimated number of Iraqis killed: 107,707 as of November 10, 2010

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

Number of Americans killed in Afghanistan so far: 2,204.

It is fitting that we pause to remember everyone who fought in US wars--from Americans who died to Iraqis and Vietnamese who died, from those killed by roadside bombs to those struggling with PTSD today--especially the 18 who will take their own lives today.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Note: Veterans Day started out as Armistice Day, a commemoration of the end of World War I, "the war to end all wars." It became a national holiday in 1938.

After World War II, in 1954, the name was changed to Veterans Day. Unlike Memorial Day, it celebrates all veterans whether alive, dead, or missing.

In Britain, France, Australia, and Canada, it is observed as Remembrance Day.

Lil Wayne's Defense

2010-11-08T22:07:00.000-08:00

Roz says Drake did not write those offensive lyrics I mentioned in yesterday's blog entry.

But he does sing them, I say.

Roz says rappers add a line or two of their own to another rapper's piece and often get their start that way.

Okay, cool.

Roz says many fans think Lil Wayne is gay, though he has several kids by different women. The line "I want to fuck every bitch in the world" is his uber-macho attempt to declare his heterosexuality. Fans forgive him because they understand it comes from his insecurity.

So it's okay to put down women and align yourself with rape, sexual slavery, and other forms of sexual oppression in order to defend yourself?

Is being thought to be gay so terrible that it justifies all this?

Sorry, but I don't buy this defense.

"Kiss Your Mother"

2010-11-07T09:05:00.000-08:00

"Who's Lil Wayne?" I asked about half-way through my 5-hr crash course in Drake while driving from LA to Las Vegas with Roz.

I already knew who Drake was--the rapper we were driving to Vegas to hear. On her Ipod she was playing Drake, Shakira, and Taylor Swift, trying to explain these icons of pop culture to me. (I was the recipient of her extra ticket because her sisters had declined this pilgrimage and some of her other friends would get drunk and be hard to handle.)

"Lil Wayne's voice is really different from Drake's," I said.

A few hours later we were standing on the ground floor of The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel being pounded by the music with some 4500 other fans.

We walked into the crowded chaos late. When one young guy and girl smiled and cheered me, I realized I was probably the only grey-haired white woman there. If only I had long hair dyed pink or a frizzy Afro or something. I just grinned.

Loud doesn't begin to describe this scene. I realized my lungs were pounding with the beat as if I were coughing. At some points I had to put my fingers in my ears (veterans bring earplugs, Roz said).

Next difficulty: when Drake talked with the crowd between songs, every other adjective was "motherfuckin'." Yet this Canadian 23-yr-old is well-educated and grew up as a cast member of a tv show, Degrassis High School. Does he talk this way to relate to his audience? What has the world come to?

I was okay until he did the piece I really object to: "I want to fuck every bitch in the world."

My options: Run out. Shout back with a few obscenities of my own. Try to understand gender politics in the hip-hop scene. Lecture him on how he's connecting to the five-thousand-year-old oppression of women in this world, including human trafficking, sexual slavery, gang rape of women in war, and other horrors happening in the world today.

But the next thing I knew Roz was giving me a big kiss and hug and saying something. The shred of her voice that made it into my ears sounded warped and fast-forwarded, completely unintelligible, but she later explained that the lyrics included "kiss your mother." Wha-a-at? Along with all this mf stuff?

Then I recognized Lil Wayne's voice and wondered why Drake would sing along with a recording while doing a live performance.

Suddenly, however, a small wiry bare-chested man with dreadlocks bouncing to his waist ran onto the stage holding a microphone. As the crowd roared, even I knew it must be Lil Wayne, aka Weezie. Roz had explained that he got out of prison two days ago after serving an eight-month sentence and might make a surprise appearance tonight.

She said he was in jail because a gun had been found in his tour bus in New York City; it was licensed in Georgia or somewhere but not in NYC.

Well, this experience was totally beyond my comfort zone, about as challenging as my climb up the steep wall of Governor's Basin last summer near Telluride.

In both cases there came a moment when I was thinking, "Help! Airlift me out of here--I'm way out of my league."

But I like adventure, and Eleanor Roosevelt said, "You must do the thing you cannot do."

At least I can be one small voice against the oppression of women in rap.

IWMF Women of Courage

2010-10-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

BBC reporter Vicky Ntetema exposed the murder and mutilation of albino people in Tanzania at the command of witch doctors. For this, her life is now in danger.

Claudia Julieta Duque was kidnapped for investigating the murder of journalist Jaime Garzon in Colombia. The Colombian secret police threaten death, rape, and torture against her and her 13-yr-old daughter, so she lives in exile.

Tsering Woeser was taken from Tibet and placed under house arrest in Beijing for writing a book and blog about China's persecution of Tibetans resisting Chinese rule. She continues to put human rights violations on her blog, and 13 of her friends and informers have been jailed.

Alma Guillermoprieto reports on drug wars, civil wars, politics, and culture in Latin America. In 1981 she and another reporter risked their lives to report on the massacre of 1,000 villagers in El Mozote, El Salvador, by elite US-trained forces. The Reagan administration claimed her reports were not true and called her a leftist, but ten years later the mass graves were uncovered and officials were forced to admit to the slaughter. She received the IWMF Lifetime Achievement Award.

These four women were honored at banquets in New York on Oct. 19 and in Los Angeles on Oct. 21 at the Beverly Hotel. The acceptance speeches of Duque, Ntetema, and Guillermoprieto were very moving. Woeser, however, was not allowed to leave China to accept her award.

See more on these women at http://www.iwmf.org/archive/articletype/articleview/articleid/1272/claudia-julieta-duque-has-the-courage-to-speak.aspx

Blind-sided

2010-07-08T23:09:00.000-07:00

Be wise as serpents, Jesus said.

But we weren't.

When Ron Kernaghan, my friend from back in our undergraduate days, asked me to edit a document for the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy of the Presbyterian Church USA, I first declined and recommended a couple of other friends, not Presbyterians.

But within a day I felt God's call to take on this task and emailed my change of heart.

I read through over one hundred pages of digressive jargon about "middle axioms," "ultimate warrants," and Calvin's concept of "third use of the law."

I trimmed this down to 20 pages that were somewhat clear and readable, given what I started with.

Ron, Gloria Albrecht, David Cortes-Fuentes and other readers on and off the committee each read and edited further until the ACSWP was satisfied with the product, an update of the 1981 Nature and Value of Human Life policy of the southern branch of the Presbyterian Church, before the reunification in the late 1980s.

Ron expected this updated text to pass easily in committee and in the voting of the General Assembly's plenary sessions. After all, it wasn't controversial compared to some of the ACSWP's other policy statements on same-sex marriage, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and immigration laws in the US.

All it said was;
* Being made in God's image with "dominion" defines both the nature and value of human beings (Genesis, chapter 1).
* We are blessed by God with life on this earth, and that blessing gives us certain responsibilities.
* We are again blessed by God's coming to earth in human form and "reconciling the world to himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19)--aka dying for our sins.
* This redemption gives us more responsibilities--to follow Jesus and bring good news of God's reign to others.

Pretty simple, really. Beautiful.

But during the last two years, all through the meetings of the ACSWP, Carmen Fowler (editor of the Presbyterian Layman) sat at a computer recording every word.

On Sunday when Committee 11 of the General Assembly in Minneapolis began meeting, two observers (not commissioners) presented a series of objections to item #7, now called On Living a Human Life Before God. These two were Justin Marple of Niagara Falls, NY, who later admitted to being on the board of Presbyterians Pro-Life, and a younger friend of his, also with PPL.

On Monday Commissioner Jon Ashley of de Christo Presbytery in southern Arizona and New Mexico presented to the committee's parliamentarian a motion to disapprove the whole document with a two-sentence comment that it was not needed. The 1981 statement by the southern Presbyterians and item #6 on gun violence were enough to fill the request of the GA in 2000.

On Tuesday when the committee got to this item #7 on its agenda, a commissioner moved to endorse it, and it looked as if 11.07 would be sent to plenary with the committee's approval.

But then Ashley stood up and spoke against it. He didn't like the idea that Jews and Muslims as well as Christians trust in the early covenants. He wanted case studies on euthansia, abortion, etc., not just this shorter text. He felt it should not be a completely reconceived paper but a slight revision following the southern Presbyterian 1981 text. He wanted footnotes and the full 100-plus pages of the earlier draft. He didn't like the definition of "reformed." Etc.

Then he charged that 11.07 omitted the idea of being created in God's image. It didn't emphasize Jesus being sent to us and dying for us. And why wasn't prayer mentioned as a key part of moral discourse?

Suddenly, however, someone called the question, and a vote was taken on whether to approve 11.07. Approval went down with 41 opposed, 1 in favor, 10 abstaining.

That left Ashley's motion to disapprove the document. During a ten-minute break, I pointed out to him that B covers being in God's image and that C is all about Jesus' incarnation and dying for us.

"Prayer is in there," I said. "It's in this part about "Being open to God's Holy Spirit."

"No," he said. "It doesn't say 'in prayer.'"

When Committee 11 came back to order, the vote to disapprove 11.07 and attach Ashley's paragraph of comment was 25 to 15 with 10 abstaining.

On Wednesday Ron and the ACSWP planned ways to resuscitate 11.07 when it got to the floor of the whole plenary. We hoped that a few strong speakers in favor of it, such as James Hudnut-Beumler, Dean of the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, would show the assembled commissioners that this document was highly respected and needed.

But by 5:30 Thursday afternoon the commissioners were tired. They had slogged through debate over a new form of government and added a new confession (from South Africa) to their set of creeds.

Maybe few were listening when Hudnut-Beumler spoke and presented a substitute motion to receive 11.07 as a study paper to be distributed electronically at no cost.

Marie Bowen, president of Presbyterians Pro-Life, came to a microphone and charged that 11.07 was "not well-written, rambling, and does not have a main point."

"It presents a process of moral discourse that we need to have before us in a culture where we just shout labels at each other," argued another commissioner, Jay Wilkins.

But then the new PCUSA moderator, Cynthia Bolbach, saw only 1-2 people at microphones waiting to speak and said "I think we're ready to vote." The substitute motion was defeated 56% to 42%.

Most of the commissioners weren't in the mood to re-examine what Committee 11 had done. After all, the next item was a call to boycott Arizona for its handling of immigration problems, and in the evening same-sex marriage would have to be debated and voted on.

A man with white hair spoke vehemently against 11.07, and Dee Cooper was standing at a mike hoping to speak in favor when Bolbach again cut things off with a vote.

Disapproval (with the same comment presented by Ashley on Monday) passed with 538 in favor, 119 against, and 10 abstaining.

Ashley, Bowen, and a few others with strong ties to Presbyterians Pro-Life killed this harmless affirmation of humans being blessed by God and called to responsibility. 11.07's guidelines for moral discourse will not go out to all the Presbyterian churches in the country.

It looks as if moral discourse is so difficult that we can't even get as far as passing thoughtful guidelines on how to do it.

In fact, highly organized efforts of the Christian right had carefully targeted and defeated this little document--from Carmen Fowler's sitting in on ACSWP meetings to Marple, Ashley, and Bowen saying things about 11.07 that were not true.

Meanwhile, those of us who spent many hours working on this document still thought that reasonable discussion and debate were possible.

We were blind-sided.

Photos: 1) Commissioners pray at 4 pm before voting on a proposed change to ordination standards that removes seuxal criteria, 2) Catherine Snyder, chaplain of Virginia Tech, talks with Justin Marple of Niagara Falls, NY.

Finding Relief at GA 2010

2010-07-05T22:46:00.000-07:00

Being a Commissioner at the Presbyterian Church USA biennial meeting, this year in Minneapolis, is hard work.

There are hours and hours of committee meetings. At some points it's boring; at others it's extremely painful--the initiative you care about has been voted down, or something you really disagree with has passed.

The solution of the Reverend Ron Roberts, representing the Presbytery of Missouri Union, was to seek solace in Solitaire, as item #19.03 was being discussed in committee.

Titled "On Making a Statement Regarding Violence Against Pregnant Women," 19.03 turned out to be a anti-abortion wolf in sheep's clothing. Maybe Roberts knew this all along--anyway, he tuned out.

In another case, immediately after 11.07 "On Living a Human Life Before God" was voted down in Committee 11, Social Justice Issues B, I walked over to Bible scholar David Fuentes-Cortes to commiserate--but I found him deeply engrossed in Sudoko.

We had both put hours into 11.07--but he is a theologian and is part of the Advisory Committee for Social Witness Policy, which had worked for ten years to craft this statement.

He cared a lot--he had to retreat from the present moment into a game.

Elena Kagan: Yes!

2010-05-11T00:09:00.000-07:00

An exciting day with another woman nominated to the Supreme Court. Maybe soon the court will be half men and half women.

Already I've received an email from a friend, Nathalie Hoffman, soliciting signatures to support Elena Kagan's nomination. Here's her pitch and the site:

President Obama has named Elena Kagan, the current Solicitor General, as his nominee for U.S. Supreme Court.

I just added my name to the growing list of Americans in support of her nomination. Will you join me?

http://my.barackobama.com/kaganforjustice-share

I'm 100% in favor of her nomination. Go, Elena!

Men Battle over the Burqa

2010-05-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchins in a column today argues that France and other countries should outlaw the burqa--full head to toe covering for women--partly for women's sake.

http://www.slate.com/id/2253493

Wrong, Christopher. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Let's see, who was the last prominent American male to try to "rescue" poor, oppressed Muslim women?

Right, President George Bush. He started a war on Afghanistan that he justified in part by his noble desire to free Afghani women from Taliban control. Actually, he was just using women as a way of getting more support for his desire to capture and punish Al Qaeda.

The result has been much combat and death, including the accidental bombing of innocents--men, women, and children.

I posted the following comments under Hitchins' blog on slate.com:

Neither France nor the US nor any other country should legislate that women do not have the right to wear the burqa or the hijab.

Women's bodies and clothing have become a location on which men wage their political arguments--you must wear the burqa or you must not wear it. You must wear the hijab (headscarf) or you must not wear it.

Non-Muslims should stay out of this conversation. That way the clothing of Muslim women could become de-politicized, no longer part of a political argument between West and East. If their clothing were no longer part of a big political battle, men and women within Islam could discuss the clothing issue more rationally.

Even the Shi'ites could admit that the Qur'an requires neither the hijab nor the burqa. It speaks only of modesty for women, and it notes that Mohammad's wives needed to stay "behind a wall" to guard their privacy and social status. The "wall" became a veil when outside the home, and later other women imitated this elite practice in the way women today imitate the clothing of Hollywood stars.

If you really want to help Muslim women to gain equality, Christopher, you would best stay out of the conversation so Muslim men and women could work out these issues without Western pressure and politics.

Note: I teach Women and Religion at California State University, Northridge.

This land is neither yours nor mine

2010-05-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

My daughter Ellen marched for immigration rights in downtown Los Angeles on May 1.

I was out of town but cheering for the 100,000 who marched here and elsewhere.

Good news: The Arizona Republic devoted its entire front page today to an editorial saying its US senators and other leaders have failed the people of Arizona in not working for a solution to the problems of illegal immigration.

http://www.dailynews.com/ci_15003400?IADID=Search-www.dailynews.com-www.dailynews.com

The world population is now 6.5 billion.

By 2030 it will be 8.3 billion at current growth rates.

You can't expect all those people to stay out of the US just because we have "sovereign boundaries." It's like pouring water into two connected tanks and expecting the water in one to stay lower than the other.

The Earth belongs to herself and her Maker, as do we. The lines we draw across her surface may serve a purpose for a while, but they do not really indicate ownership.

We are all in this together.

Professor of Sex Tourism

2010-04-23T18:31:00.000-07:00

A lame brain teaching economics at California State University in Northridge has been forced to dismantle his website, a how-to guide for men thinking about going to Thailand on a sex tour.

http://www.dailynews.com/ci_14907199?source=most_viewed

A cautiously worded notice from the campus provost popped up in my email this afternoon. We believe in "open debate," Provost Harry Hellenbrand says. Though we care about gender equity, "our commitment to [free] expression urges us to tolerate words and pictures we find intolerant."

Hey Harry, I don't give a damn about tolerating the words and pictures Kenneth Ng is spewing into the ether. Just kick him out of this place.

The question is: can he be fired? Has he broken any laws? It's clear that he has been involved in promoting sex tourism, closely linked to human trafficking. Is it legal to advise men on where and how to engage in an illegal activity?

He's like someone on the periphery of a drug trafficking ring. If he has profited financially, perhaps he can be arrested. At least he could be trailed for month or two in Los Angeles and arrested as a john.

As a professor on this campus teaching RS 304, Women and Religion, I object to Kenneth Ng's continued employment at CSUN.

His promotion of sex tourism renders his expertise in economics useless in the classroom. How can his class be a learning environment when students will now know him as Big Baby Kenny? He has chosen to become a joke.

Like Bill Clinton and John Edwards, he has rendered himself unable to be an effective leader. Unlike them, he has chosen to participate in and advertise two illegal activities, sex tourism and human trafficking.

For CSUN to ignore this conflict of interest and continue to give him a platform and a paycheck is a violation of our students' right to a peaceful learning environment, particularly that of female students. Sex tourism--sexual exploitation of women--would be the undercurrent to every conversation. If I were a colleague or office worker in his department, I don't see how I could interact with him. If he even smiled at me, I would feel sexual harrassment.

The provost noted that Ng's website has had a "deleterious effect" on CSUN's reputation--but in fact Ng's lingering presence in our classrooms continues to have a harmful effect. Can he still conduct a meaningful class, without silent snickers? Kick him out.

What does it mean to be a professor? Exactly what does Kenneth Ng profess?

How ironic that the owners of a bar in Thailand have been contacting CSUN since June 2009 to rein in this guy--but the university stayed focused on academic freedom and Ng's right to free speech. Reminds me of another organization in Rome that has been more focused on protecting predators than on protecting young victims.

Anyway, a big THANK YOU to the 200 members of Change.org who signed a petition to CSUN's president, Jolene Koester, asking that Ng be forced to take down his website.

Noonan Calls for Women Priests

2010-04-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

Peggy Noonan writes about "How to Save the Catholic Church" in her column today in the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304510004575186451300061536-lMyQjAxMTAwMDIwMzEyNDMyWj.html

Over the years she has been a fairly conservative voice in the Roman Catholic Church, but today she comes out for ordaining women as priests.

"The old Vatican needs new blood," she says today. "They need to let younger generations of priests and nuns rise to positions of authority within a new church. Most especially and most immediately, they need to elevate women. As a nun said to me this week, if a woman had been sitting beside a bishop transferring a priest with a history of abuse, she would have said: 'Hey, wait a minute!'"

Noonan reviews a column she wrote eight years ago in response to sexual abuse by priests in Boston, in which she called for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law, who attempted to hide the crimes.

She took a lot of criticism for that column. A year later the Cardinal, after being moved to a high-ranking post in Rome, told her: "We don't need friends of the church turning on the church at such a difficult time. We need loyalty...."

Yeah right, she says now.

You need reform. You need a younger generation of priests and nuns in "positions of authority."

I don't see how women would have authority without being at least priests if not bishops, archbishops, and cardinals--so I take it Noonan is in her traditionally mild voice calling for women's ordination.

You go, girl.

Why the Volcano Blew Its Top

2010-04-21T23:06:00.000-07:00

"The volcano DEFINITELY erupted because Iceland's prime minister is a lesbian." --a joke circulating on Tweet.

"Many women who do not dress modestly... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes." --Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran, Iraq, speaking in a prayer sermon on April 16. (Thanks to my daughter Marie for alerting me to this one.)

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5inJDPJiXU9k0tYQetNGUhTCNqAcgD9F698N00

In response to passage of the US health care bill: "I think the earth has opened up. God may have replied." --Rush Limbaugh. (Thanks to Juanita Wright Potter.)

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/17/limbaugh-volcano/

Rush, don't you think Mt. Shasta or Mt. Rainier would have been a better choice of volcano if God were speaking to the US?

Hojatoleslam, you mean the volcano is shouting with Helen Reddy, "I am woman--hear me roar" ?

Anonymous Tweeter, I'm with you. That volcanic crater may be speaking a kind of vagina monologue.

In medieval times there was a gynophobic legend of the devouring vagina, lined with teeth. I guess certain men today are still afraid of woman power.

RCC's Persecution Complex

2010-04-03T16:37:00.000-07:00

The best explanation I've seen of the Roman Catholic Church's defensiveness and inability to face the current sexual crisis is in this article by Frank Bruni in the New York Times, 3/28/10:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/weekinreview/28bruni.html?scp=2&sq=frank%20bruni&st=cse

Starting with the execution of Jesus and continuing with persecution in the first few formative centuries, the church believes that secular forces against it are always negative.

In this case, however, as Peggy Noonan points out in today's Wall Street Journal, the church should thank the press for calling them to clean up their act and do justice.

Wrong as wrong can be...

2010-04-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

Compare press reports of child sexual abuse to the Holocaust???

Yes, a high-ranking priest at the Vatican made this comparison in a sermon on Good Friday with the Pope in the audience. The Pope did not walk out or raise his hand or voice in disagreement.

See today's New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/world/europe/03church.html?hpw.

David Clohessy is quoted in the same article as saying, "Men who deliberately and consistently hide child sex crimes are in no way victims. And to conflate public scrutiny with horrific violence is about as wrong as wrong can be."

"Thank the media"-- Peggy Noonan

2010-04-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

Peggy Noonan in today's Wall Street Journal, "The Catholic Church's Catastrophe," says:

"The church shouldn't be saying j'accuse but thank you" to the press, which only in 2003 started to investigate child abuse in Boston after years of ignoring and shying away from the story.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303960604575158310656792820.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_opinion

She says there are three groups of victims: the abused, the good priests and nuns, and the Catholics in the pews.

But Catholics should leave the pews and boycott the collection baskets until their leaders take decisive action, including instituting a canon law that abuse must be reported to local civil authorities.

The Pope and Cardinals must also rethink the 11th C. onward insistence on clerical celibacy and their even earlier ban on women priests. These make no sense in the context of widespread abuse under the celibate-men-only policy.

Hans Kung on the Crisis

2010-04-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

Hans Kung commented on the crisis in the Catholic church on March 18 in the National Catholic Reporter.

http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/sex-abuse-requires-rethinking-mandatory-celibacy

He says the current mess is another sign that church's policy requiring celibacy for priests is harmful.

Meanwhile, a colleague of mine commented that he saw only one problem with my commentary on Religion Dispatches this week: instead of concluding "The house of cards will fall," I should have written "is falling."

"My sense is that this may play out farther, deeper, and faster than any of us might have imagined in the past," he wrote in an email.

Farther and deeper and faster... oh my!

More of the Same

2010-04-01T01:03:00.000-07:00

On ABC's Nightline, March 31:

Report by Brian Ross on struggle inside the Vatican from 1997 onward over how to respond to reports of child sexual abuse by Macial Marciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

Abuse was further documented in "Vows of Silence" by Jason Berry.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/28/pope-paedophile-priests-italy

Ratzinger finally went against Pope JP2 and Sodano to order an investigation but then didn't do enough after receiving the conclusions.

Also a report from The Guardian, March 28, "Pope faces fresh wave of child abuse scandals in Italy":

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/28/pope-paedophile-priests-italy

Hundreds are expected to come forward.
Benedict is under pressure 
to call for an emergency meeting
of bishops from around the world.

Funny quote by cardinal to Napolean...

2010-03-31T16:10:00.000-07:00

In a column by Ross Douthat in the New York Times, March 29, there's a great anecdote on the failures of the Roman Catholic clergy.

See it at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/opinion/29douthat.html?scp=3&sq=ross%20douthat&st=cse

Napolean threatens to destroy the church.

The cardinal responds, "Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you."

Maureen Dowd and Sinead O'Connor on the Pope

2010-03-31T13:08:00.000-07:00

"Holy Thursday and Good Friday are now becoming Cover-Up Thursday and Blame-Others Friday," writes Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/opinion/31dowd.html

She notes the ad in the Times on Monday by the Catholic League calling the situation not a pedophilia crisis but a "homosexual crisis" because some of the victims were 12 or 13 and had reached puberty.

Right, if the kid has reached puberty, he and the priest are just homosexuals, not predator and victim.

Sinead O'Connor also made this point last night on CNN's Larry King Show, challenging a defender of the Pope to define the word "post-pubescent" in the ad.

Her compassion and willingness to listen to the Pope's defenders was remarkable. She quoted President Obama's speech in Cairo last year, saying, "We'll give you our hand if you'll unclench your fist."

See the Larry King Show website: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/larry.king.live/

She takes her faith very seriously and was ordained a priest in the late 1990s by Bishop Michael Cox of an independent branch of Catholicism, the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church.

On Sunday she published an account in the Washington Post discussing the Pope's stance on child abuse in Ireland.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/25/AR2010032502363.html?loc=interstitialskip

She challenged Benedict XVI to order any cleric who committed pedophilia and any who knew about such a crime and covered it up (was an accessory) to "go to police tomorrow and turn himself in."

Holy Week is the time for repentance, she and Maureen Dowd noted.

Tim Rutten on hypocrisy in the Catholic Church

2010-03-31T12:43:00.000-07:00

Tim Rutten, my favorite columnist in the LA Times, speaks today on hypocrisy among conservative Catholics, especially the Legionaries of Christ, who concealed the pedophilia of their founder Marcial Maciel for years.

"...a list of Maciel's most vociferous defenders reads like a who's who of the conservative Catholic intellectuals who, in recent years, have insisted that Catholicism and membership in the Democratic Party are all but incompatible," he writes.

And of course, the Democratic Party's greatest sins in their eyes are supporting legal abortion, sex education, and access to contraception.

The furor in the Roman Catholic Church this week really comes down to gender politics: the hypocrisy of limiting reproductive choice and forbidding women priests while enabling and concealing pedophiles and other sexual sins through the old boys' network.

An Unholy Holy Week

2010-03-30T00:49:00.000-07:00

Go to www.ReligionDispatches.org to see my commentary on the crisis over child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church. Or click on the title above, "An Unholy Holy Week."

It begins:

This week is unprecedented in the two-thousand-year history of the Christian church: instead of focusing on the last week of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, Christians are listening to horrific accounts of priestly sexual abuse of children and wondering whether Pope Benedict XVI will take decisive action to cleanse the church.

Probably he will not. After 83 years of living and working in an all-male club, he just doesn’t get it. His focus has been purity of doctrine, not the purity of those who say Mass and administer the church....

Maureen Dowd: "A Nun for Pope"

2010-03-27T21:35:00.000-07:00

We need a nun for Pope, writes Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28dowd.html

She targets the hypocrisy of not allowing women to be priests and forbidding priests to marry, thus prolonging "the sordid culture of men protecting men who attack children."

"The nuns have historically cleaned up the messes of priests," she says. "And this is a historic mess."

How the Bill Was Won

2010-03-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

The bill was passed because of this Executive Order...

http://www.baynews9.com/content/9/2010/3/21/597948.html?title=Obama%20order%20on%20abortion%20locks%20in%20health%20care%20votes

Let's be grateful--not vindictive like those who opposed health care reform.

N.O.W. Is Nuts

2010-03-22T18:52:00.001-07:00

National Organization for Women declares it's "incensed"
by Obama decision to issue an executive order upholding
no federal funding for abortion.

NOW says Obama campaigned as "pro-choice,"
but his actions today "suggest his commitment
...is shaky at best."

Give me a break! 

President Obama and Nancy Pelosi just knocked
themselves out to open health care to 32 million
Americans, and NOW is complaining about an executive
order that doesn't change anything?

Without the votes of Stupak and his buddies,
the health care bill wouldn't have passed.

I support abortion rights as much as the next person--
I took the time to gather women's abortion stories for a
book supporting the pro-choice position.

It's childish to be incensed about the executive order. 

The President's commitment has not wavered one bit. 

Both he and Pelosi are experienced in the art of
horse trading to get legislation passed. 

They sold Stupak on the opportunity to buy a horse
he already owned.

Through this deal, Stupak saved face.

Go the the Planned Parenthood website to see a more
mature perspective on the Executive Order.

www.ppaction.org/

Hooray for Health Care!

2010-03-22T11:42:00.000-07:00

It takes a nation! From Nancy Pelosi to President Obama to Bart Stupak and everyone else who sent an email or made a phone call, we did it!

The health care bill passed yesterday by the House of Representatives is "the Civil Rights Act of the 21st century," said Majority Whip James Clyburn.

It has been a wild ride in the last six months as hope flared and ebbed. I felt so helpless last week when it was clear that I could do nothing. I had to place my trust in Nancy Pelosi and President Obama to make it happen--and they did!

I'm also grateful to Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan and his allies for making a last-minute compromise, after working the situation to shine the spotlight on their anti-abortion cause.

"Babykiller!" a fellow representative shouted at Rep. Stupak as he spoke before the House explaining his change of position to vote yes.

How precarious the position of everyone who claims to be "pro-life"! One minute you can be a hero, but the next, if you move one-eightieth of an inch toward compromise, you can be vilified as the worst of the worst, one who wants to "kill babies."

Never mind how many babies' lives will be saved by access to medical care as infants and toddlers--and how many adults' lives will be eased and saved by preventive care instead of emergency room care.

Never mind how many mothers' and babies' lives will be saved by good access to prenatal care.

Never mind how many pregnancies will be prevented by access to contraceptive resources--thus preventing thousands of abortions.

The only thing that matters to these extremists is that some girl who was raped or sexually abused by a family member or whose life is endangered by carrying a baby to full term--some girl may now have access to medical care and end a pregnancy.

Or some woman who wants full reproductive care may write her separate check for this service with money that she wouldn't have had if this bill had not passed.

For these reasons, they now regard Rep. Stupak as a babykiller. He will have to work hard to regain their respect, if that is even possible.

But he has gained my respect.

Pink Glove Dancers

2010-03-03T12:38:00.000-08:00

Thank you to Sharon Billings for sending me the link to this You Tube video... all the employees of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland dancing to raise awareness of breast cancer.

Sharon's friend Bev works at the hospital.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEdVfyt-mLw

Hilarious and uplifting!

Avatar

2010-03-02T01:16:00.000-08:00

We saw Avatar tonight because NPR said it's a cultural event that people will look back on in the development of film.

Yes, a thought-provoking experience.

It was as if one introduced Fantasia, Alice in Wonderland, Thumbelina, Pocahontas, and Little Mermaid to transformer toys, 2001, Dances With Wolves, Beowulf and the Iraq war.

Or perhaps put them all in a test tube and shook.

I liked the "Great Mother" spirituality. Her name was EHWA, which is like Yahweh. Also cool is that the name was just four letters, like YHWH.

The decision on whether to return to human life was interesting, like the Little Mermaid wanting to join the human race. Of course, one wanted Jake Sully to go native, but the reality of Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves was more likely.

I was challenged because I see few science fiction films and few war films. As I watched, I didn't know what genre this film would turn out to be: fantasy or grim reality? Happy ending or cynicism?

The views of moons circling a large planet like Jupiter gave me the pleasure of suspending disbelief and imagining life elsewhere. But each form of life was patterned on something on earth: horses, dogs, humans, pterodactyls, etc.--that was a bit tiresome. The flying dragons were great.

One sad reference to earth: "There's no green on their planet. They killed it."

All in all, yes, probably something to watch, despite the cliches. For example, how could the script writers allow the phrase "shock and awe"?

Because of its clear references to the war in Iraq and to Wall Street investors as the ones who call for exploitation of the environment and native peoples, it's a film that screams, "Made in 2009."

Krista Tippet & Einstein

2010-03-01T11:10:00.000-08:00

What wonderful work Krista Tippet is doing!

Speaking of Faith showcased her forthcoming book, Einstein's God this weekend.

Listen to the NPR show at http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/einsteins-god/

Somewhere in the bits of truth found in physics, mathematics, astronomy, Judaism, Christianity, and ecumenical thought, there is a larger truth emerging today.

And Einstein was ahead of his time, of course.

Woman to Watch

2010-01-25T11:25:00.000-08:00

Carmen Fowler is a rising leader in the Presbyterian Church USA, and a woman to watch.

Like many women before her, she's against "radical" feminists, but her life as a powerful woman in the church marks a path for others to follow. To read her life story, see:

http://www.layman.org/News.aspx?article=25752

She was one of many interesting people I met this past weekend while attending a meeting of the PCUSA's Advisory Committee for Social Witness Policy (ACSWP). I didn't notice her much, actually, because she was in the background--one of two women reporting on the meeting for conservative sub-groups within the spectrum of Presbyterian churches.

President of the Presbyterian Lay Committee and executive editor of its publications (primarily the Presbyterian Layman) since March, 2009, she attended the meeting to monitor decisions of the ACSWP, as did Marie Bowen of Presbyterians Pro-Life.

I was attending the meeting because last September a friend from college days had asked me to edit 100-page document down to 20 pages for the committee, and then to hear further requests and critiques at the meeting in order to do a final edit.

When I got back to California, I looked Carmen up online and was fascinated by what I read.

She got a BA in business at the University of Florida but "never met a radical feminist" until she attended Princeton Seminary in 1993, her biography reports.

The feminists she met there made "efforts to recruit her," arguing that "she couldn't expect to be in leadership in church unless she joined their ranks," the bio continues.

She proved them wrong, shooting to the top of leadership in the evangelical movement against gay and lesbian ordination in the PCUSA.

I like her, just as I liked Sarah Palin and was thrilled that she was chosen to run for the Vice-Presidency with John McCain.

Carmen got her start as a Christian in Young Life in high school, just as I did. At the time she was in the Methodist church.

I love the description of her closing sermon at Providence Presbyterian Church on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, before moving to the Layman.

She said, "You are not your own...Remember, you can do all things through Christ.... You are not alone.... You have not been given a spirit of timidity or fear."

Powerful words... I shout "Amen, sister!"

Her closing prayer on that occasion began, "Holy God, hear now the prayers of the faithful offered to You."

Not "Father God, we just ask you...."

Not "Heavenly Father...."

Not "Almighty King, we come before you...."

I call myself a "somewhat radical feminist," but I'm also an evangelical, and I see much room for dialogue with Carmen Fowler.

As for the boring statement I was asked to edit, it probably disappointed Carmen and Marie in that it had no references to abortion or to gay/lesbian issues.

It probably won't have a lot of readers, so I am delighted that they took time to read it and to attend the meeting this past weekend.

Metric tons-0-meter

2010-01-08T03:16:00.000-08:00

Chilling in the freezing wind at the taxi stand outside Penn Station, I noticed a huge electronic billboard I'd never seen before:

CLIMATE CHANGE
3,650, 090, 820, 007 metric trillion
Greenhouse Gases in Our Atmosphere

The bright red numbers were constantly changing.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/another-reminder-of-our-pending-doom/

The billboard was installed last June to alert people to the global warming crisis.

Meanwhile, at 44th and Avenue of the Americas, another glaring electronic sign calculates the national debt.

Very scary!

Hooray for Harry Reid!

2009-12-24T23:17:00.000-08:00

It's a hair-raising story: how Senate majority leader Harry Reid steered the ship of state through squalls and around rocks to cross the finish line with a health plan before Christmas.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-health-ticktock24-2009dec24,0,2438755.story

When others gave up, he continued to talk to both sides and work for some kind of compromise.

After reading this LA Times article, I'm very impressed with him--not a flashy Ted Kennedy but an unsung hero.

This story teaches me that no one is my enemy--everyone is a potential ally.

Even those whom I most disagree with will at some point hold a key that can open doors for me. I need to make sure that they are still my friends, no matter how much we disagree on some things.

Likewise, I may find myself in agreement with them on some things and eager or at least willing to work for one of their goals.

Maybe love makes the world go 'round, but tolerant good will has something to do with it too.

All I Want for Christmas...

2009-12-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

Not my two front teeth--a health care plan.

Even if it limits abortion and lacks a public option (enriching the insurance companies), I'll take whatever we can get for two reasons:

1) to do justice (see Micah 6:8)

2) to make sure my own twenty-something kids can get health care.

They're out of school and no longer covered by our insurance, so if COBRA runs out before they all have jobs with benefits, we will be as desperate as the family described in this article in today's LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-health-insurance23-2009dec23,0,757817.story

Neda and Ramin

2009-12-23T10:32:00.000-08:00

Ben Bernanke made some key moves in 2009, but my vote for persons of the year goes to Neda Agha Soltan and Ramin Pourandarjani.

Neda--the young woman who was shot during demonstrations against last June's fraudulent election in Iran (and someone took and circulated a cell-phone video immediately afterward).

Ramin--the young doctor who refused to falsify the cause of death of three students beaten to death in prison in July in Tehran (see my comments on him yesterday).

These two for me symbolize the ongoing struggle between democracy and totalitarian rule in 2009.

Peace and justice--they stood for both, risking their lives, unwilling martyrs.

If the conflict between fundamental Islam and Western imperialism is the story of the decade, these two call us to the path of peaceful protest.

Peace and justice--they stood for both, risking their lives, unwilling martyrs.

Both Neda and Ramin were in their twenties, hoping for long life under a just government in Iran.

Instead their names are now torches lighting the way toward that goal.

As a mother, I grieve with their families and with the Grieving Mothers who now march each Sunday in Tehran, carrying photos of their murdered children, like the mothers still marching in Argentina.

The Amazing History of "Ms."

2009-12-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

The title "Ms." was suggested in 1901 in a short article in The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Thank you to NYT Magazine's Ben Zimmer, who searched out the amazing history of "Ms." and reported it in his column, "On Language" (Oct. 25, 2009).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/25FOB-onlanguage-t.html?scp=1&sq=ben%20zimmer%20ms&st=cse

"There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill," the anonymous writer began.

The proposal got some attention in 1901 and the term popped up in 1932 and was mentioned in 1949 in The Story of Language by Mario Pei, who attributed it to feminists.

"Simple etiquette and expediency" was the goal of the original writer in 1901, notes Zimmer.

The term was recommended in Practicial Business Writing (Fraily and Schnell, 1952) and Business Executive's Handbook (Doris, 1954).

Sheila Michaels, a civil rights activist, found it in 1961 and campaigned for it, but it wasn't until the feminist movement got started that she was able to get publicity and interest in the term.

Hooray for Anonymous, Mario Pei, Fraily and Schnell, Doris, Sheila Michaels, and Gloria Steinem!

They gave me "Ms.", Ben Zimmer gave me this amazing history, and my spouse left the October 25 NYT Magazine on the dining room table last night.

Note: German and other languages are making changes like this as well.

"Our Ramin is not dead"

2009-12-21T09:52:00.000-08:00

He was only 26 years old--a year younger than my oldest daughter.

Take time to read his story in the Wall Street Journal, written by Farnaz Fassihi:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126118381849697953.html

Born in 1983 in Tabriz, Iran, to a schoolteacher and a merchant in a traditional bazaar.

Named for a legendary hero who fights against unjust rulers.

Reading and writing by age 3.

Entering a school for gifted and talented children at age 11.

Winner of a national poetry contest at age 13.

Starting at Tabriz Medical University at 18 in 2001.

Graduating at the top of his class as a doctor in 2008.

Delivering the valedictory address and quoting a poem:

The person whose heart is filled with love will never die.
Our perseverance is recorded in the book of time.

Assigned to a clinic in Tehran responsible for a rundown detention center (work that would count as military service).

Tending the 140 students detained there on July 9 after a large demonstration protesting the rigged election in June--students raped and beaten in the prison.

Asked to sign death certificates saying that three of them had died of meningitis.

Recording the true cause: "Physical stress, multiple blows to the head and chest, severe injuries."

Ordered to revise the cause of death to "Meningitis."

Testifying to the parliamentary committee assigned to investigate.

Being arrested, warned, and threatened.

Released on bail, making plans to study abroad in April, 2010, when his military service ended.

Telling his parents he feared for his life because he refused to cover up the murders.

Going to Iran's Parliament to ask for help.

Poisoned by a meal at his clinic.

Honored by hundreds at the memorial service on the fortieth day after his death.

Revered alongside Neda Agha Soltan as another martyr, courageously standing up for truth.

The crowds shout:
Our Neda is not dead.
Our Ramin is not dead.
It's the Supreme Leader who is dead.

Postscript:
The Iranian government has admitted the violent deaths of three students.
The committee that covered up the cause of Ramin's death is being forced to look into his murder and that of others.
Huge demonstrations took place today at the funeral of elderly Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who had been denouncing the violence at Kahrizak prison as well as the fraudulent election last June.

See also these reports:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126129141238099009.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/world/middleeast/20iran.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/world/middleeast/22cleric.html?_r=1&ref=world

30 Years of Refusing Equality

2009-12-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

CEDAW turned 30 years old today--and the US still refuses to ratify the UN treaty.

Thank you to Linda Tarr-Whelan and Women's eNews for pointing out this anniversary.

http://www.womensenews.org/story/commentary/091217/time-us-senate-act-un-womens-treaty

You wouldn't think that approving a Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women would be so hard for the US House and Senate to pass.

Ukraine, Nepal, and Thailand have all passed it and found it useful to reduce sex-trafficking, Tarr-Whelan reports.

Only Sudan, Iran, Somalia, and a few small island nations are holding out, along with the USA.

"This international agreement was Eleanor Roosevelt's dream and is one of the pillars of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," she reports, noting the rush of nations to sign the CEDAW in 1979.

"In those heady days, I was deputy assistant to President Jimmy Carter for women's concerns. We expected speedy action after he sent the treaty to the Senate," she reveals.

We were so hopeful in1979, also still expecting 38 states to approve the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.

Instead, we continue to live in disillusionment and accommodation.

Here's what Langston Hughes said about a dream deferred:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Guilt-tripping of raped women

2009-12-18T12:23:00.000-08:00

Thank you to Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Feministing.com, a young women's online feminist community, for alerting me to this report on the Reproductive Health Reality Check website.

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/12/17/raped%C2%A0human-life-alliance-says-birthing-your-attackers-child-only-way-heal.

In a nutshell, the "Human Life" (sic) Alliance is saying that women who are raped, whether by strangers, acquaintances, or family members/incest, should not choose abortion. It will only "make matters worse."

Sheesh! Please let us each retain the right to decide if carrying a rapist's baby to term will make things better or worse--as US law now allows us to do.

Don't decide for us.

And don't tell us we are murderers if we don't want to take a year out of our lives to bear a child that we then either have to raise or place up for adoption, hoping it will find a good home.

Note: take time to join the RH Reality Check website. If it had 310 million members, maybe this anti-choice nonsense would go away.

Death Threats to Obama

2009-12-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

"Appalling"--that was the only comment of Ginny Hearn, who forwarded to me this commentary by Cathleen Falsani, written as a "special to USA Today."

I can't find it on the USA Today website, nor on Falsani's, so I will just reprint it here without a link.

Psalm 109:8 bumper stickers -- a wrong-hearted prayer for President Obama?

10:35 AM

"Pray for Obama."

A kind and generous statement.

Or is it?

President Barack Obama

CAPTION

By Pool, Getty Images

A crop of bumper stickers and T-shirts emblazoned with that call to prayer for the president have appeared for sale recently online through make-it-yourself outlets such as Zazzle.com and CafePress.com. And most of the "Pray for Obama" slogans are accompanied by a scripture reference: "Psalm 109:8."

In the New International Version translations, that verse reads;

May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership.

So, they're praying for Obama's tenure to be a short one. Fair enough. But what does that really mean?

A clue may be in the verses of the 109^th Psalm that follow verse 8:

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.

May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

May his descendants be cut off, their names blotted out from the next generation.

May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the Lord; may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.

May their sins always remain before the Lord, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

In that context, are these folks actually urging us to pray for Obama's death?

(The crashing sound you just heard may have been Jesus hurling his stapler across the office in frustration.)

However, . . .

There are "Pray for Obama" slogan products that bear an alternative scripture reference: 1 Timothy 2:1-2, which reads in the NIV:

I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone

For kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.

Do you pray for Obama? If so, what do you pray, and how?

-- By Cathleen Falsani, Special for USA TODAY

Another blogger on the death threats:

http://gawker.com/5407568/christian-conservatives-praying-for-god-to-kill-obama

Just War?

2009-12-18T11:32:00.000-08:00

Thank you to T. Christian Miller, Propublica, and the LA Times for this eye-opening report on wounded and killed translators in Iraq and Iran:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-interpreters18-2009dec18,0,1870828.story

Last week I listened to President Obama's speech to the Nobel Committee arguing that US fighting in Afghanistan should be considered a just war.

Here's my question after reading this article:

Is a just war still just if the interpreters and others hired to fight it are treated unjustly?

I include our own soldiers in the category of those hired to fight, as well as all contracted workers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Along the lines of How much wood... :

Is a just war just
if the those paid to help
are just not treated justly?

To the men I love...

2009-12-14T15:12:00.000-08:00

My kids say, "Mom hates men."

The marriage therapist, Dr. Richard Friedman, asks, "Do you have a problem with men?"

My answer: No.

I have a keen appreciation of the effects of men's control of human government and institutions over the past several millennia.

I have a radar that alerts me to patriarchal males on my horizon. That is, I notice statements and behaviors that indicate a man wants to control women or does not consider them his equal.

Finally, I have an inclination to speak and act on what I notice. With the authority of 61 years on the face of this earth, I am no longer intimidated by propriety.

"Life doesn't frighten me at all," as Maya Angelou says in her poem.

For Maryam and Fateme

2009-12-11T10:29:00.000-08:00

Every time we think of Mary, mother of Jesus, this holiday season, we should also remember Maryam Sabri and Fateme Faneian.

They are among the refugees from Iran who are currently living in Turkey while awaiting processing by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to be placed permanently in another country.

Today's Wall Street Journal reports on them and others: "Thousands Flee Iran As Noose Tightens."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126049484505086861.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

Maryam is a 21-year-old artist who was imprisoned in Tehran in August while protesting the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan. In prison, Maryam was repeatedly raped and told that she would be killed if she did not stop working for opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Fateme and her husband also demonstrated against the handling of last June's election in Iran. During one protest, a police officer kicked her in the stomach, causing her to miscarry, she reports.

We celebrate the joy of Jesus' birth, but Fateme's arms are empty and Maryam's body and spirit were violated.

Come, come, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Bring peace on earth.

"War is peace..."

2009-12-10T10:03:00.000-08:00

I applauded when President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009, but today when he accepted the prize with a speech justifying his recent decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, I could not applaud.

I feel uneasy.

Some wars are necessary to keep the peace, he explained, sounding very much like the demagogues in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four.

But the Roman Empire waged wars to preserve the pax romana. Even Hitler felt his motives for killing were impeccable.

Perhaps the Nobel Committee should think twice before awarding a Peace Prize to a sitting president. They say power corrupts, and who in the world is more powerful than a US president?

Well, I hope my Republican friends are happy. Their candidate didn't win, but their pressure is pushing President Obama into decisions John McCain would approve.

My only hope is that Obama is giving the Right more troops and time in Afghanistan in order to win a few more friends and votes for healthcare reform.

Healthcare: Hopeful?

2009-12-09T10:10:00.000-08:00

The good news: compromises are being made to get some kind of healthcare bill passed before Christmas.

The bad news: compromises are being made.

The "public" option has been bargained into an option run by a private nonprofit insurer? That's what today's LA Times says:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-health-senate9-2009dec09,0,7688557.story

Kaiser-Permanente is a nonprofit insurer--would this option look somewhat like that?

I'm confused but hopeful about these developments. The expansion of Medicare to people between 55 and 64 years old sounds good to me--fiscal conservatives don't seem to argue against Medicare any more.

A word of comfort from an advisor to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid: "No one believes this is going to be the last word."

Ted Haggard Preaching Again

2009-12-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

How interesting that Ted Haggard is preaching again in Colorado Springs.

According to DeeDee Correll of the LA Times, he began in November and uses a barn on his property to seat about 75 people on folding chairs.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-ted-haggard7-2009dec07,0,2372048.story

His marriage is under repair, and he regards his sexual relationship with a male sex worker as a sin. Yes, it was adultery.

What's unclear is how Haggard now publicly regards faithful same-sex unions.

He speaks at churches around the country--does anyone know what his views on gays and lesbians are these days?

Ita, Maura, Jean & Dorothy

2009-12-06T12:34:00.000-08:00

Today we shared a "Liturgy for Four Women Martyrs" prepared by Joann Lamb for our Advent gathering of Women-Church in Claremont.

More than twenty of us gathered to listen to these women's words and to pray for a rebirth of justice in our world.

Pat Hynds spoke about knowing Maura Clark and Jean Donovan in 1980 when she was in training with Maryknoll before going to serve in Nicaragua (after raising four children).

She was at Maryknoll on December 3 when there were rumors that some women were missing in El Salvador, last seen Dec. 2 while driving to the airport.

The women had been raped and murdered by National Guardsmen, their bodies left on the side of the road. Nearby peasants were told to bury the remains, but one also told his priest.

A few days later the bodies were exhumed and identified.

"Carter was president," Pat said. "Right away he cut off aid to the Salvadoran government, but pressure was put on him and the US aid started again."

US Ambassador to the UN Jean Kirkpatrick said the victims were "not just nuns but activists," implying that their activism had caused their deaths, Pat said.

In 1981 Secretary of State Alexander Haig said that the nuns were not murdered but "caught in crossfire." Thus the US covered up the horror of the attack and any responsibility for it.

Five lower-ranking National Guardsmen were convicted and punished for the crimes. The higher-up men who ordered it were never held accountable.

"This was my baptism of fire into US foreign policy," Pat explained. "The beginning of my coming to terms with what US foreign policy is capable of doing and denying... and so many of these things haven't changed today."

We remembered in prayer:
Ita, Maura, Jean, and Dorothy
Sr. Dorothy Stain, who died in Brazil
the women of Juarez, Mexico
the women of the Congo
the women of Afghanistan
all women priests
women of the US Congress who can work to change US foreign policy.

Welcome, Bishop Mary

2009-12-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

"Bishop Mary"--I like the ring of that.

Thank you to the Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles for a special gift this Christmas: the election of two women to serve as suffragan bishops under Bishop Jon Bruno.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/12/episcopal-diocese-la.html

Diane M. Jardine Bruce is married and rector of a church in San Clemente.

Mary D. Glasspool has been in a committed relationship with another woman since 1988 and currently works for the Diocese of Maryland.

How many Protestant pastors today can say they have been faithful for 21 years? How many Roman Catholic priests have honored their celibacy that long?

With a life of quiet, humble service, this Mary is indeed a blessing to the church, a reason to diminish our fears of approving pastors who are in same-sex unions.

Our "Homeland" ?

2009-12-02T09:28:00.000-08:00

I was with you, Mr. President, almost all the way through your speech, until you spoke those words: "...defend our homeland."

Don't you know that the word homeland comes straight out of Nazi Germany? Die Heimat.

I never heard the US described as "our homeland" until after September 11, 2001. No presidents used the term, as far as I can remember.

But in the patriotic frenzy after attacks on Wall Street and the Pentagon, suddenly that word appeared. Bush even invented a "Department of Homeland Security."

I'm extremely skeptical of this plan to send 30,000 more young men and women to Afghanistan to "stabilize" the country and try to knock down Al Qaeda, but I trust your judgment.

At least you promised to begin withdrawing troops in July 2011, though commentators noticed vagueness in many areas of the speech. There's no date given for complete withdrawal.

I wonder if this new "surge" is offered as a bone to pacify the right-wing and win a few more votes for passage of a national health care plan that includes a significant public option.

If so, I'll support your plan, Mr. President. Anything to get health care passed--I'm even willing to accept the Stupak amendment defunding legal abortion.

I also trust the analysis of Doyle McManus, LA Times Washington correspondent, who describes sitting in a quiet room with President Obama and a few other reporters hours before the speech at West Point. His analysis is worth reading:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-obama-analysis2-2009dec02,0,591124.story

Doyle notes, "Obama never wanted to be a war president. His speech at West Point was more dutiful than eloquent, with little of the passion that fueled his presidential campaign, or even his Sept. 9 address to Congress calling for a healthcare reform bill." He's concerned that the cost of the war could limit his domestic agenda.

A friend invited me to join her in protesting the build-up of the war in Afghanistan today at the Federal Building on Wilshire in Westwood. During the lead-up to the bombing of Baghdad in March 2003, we protested against attacking Iraq.

But I'm so grateful that Barack Obama was elected president--I'm not yet ready to go into the streets against his policies.

Nevertheless, that word homeland disturbs me. My president is using a demagogue's word to win support for sending our children half-way around the world to kill Muslims who want to regain a totalitarian state.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai is ceding more ground to the Taliban. He's weak and he stole the election held last August. Why should we support his government? And why militarily, with the loss of more Afghan and American lives?

I admit that I'm pacifist to the core and a card-carrying liberal--but even my military brother says we should get out of Afghanistan. He served in the Army for twenty years and still works as a surgeon at Fort Lewis, the US Army post south of Tacoma, Washington.

We can't win, he says. We should leave.

Members of Military Families Speak Out are also opposed to Obama's Afghan surge.

LA Times reporter Louis Sahagun watched Obama's speech with them last night, and he quotes one young vet as saying, "In World War II, the average combat time was 60 days. Now it's 280 days of people taking pot shots at you."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-families-speech2-2009dec02,0,6128336.story

These people oppose continued fighting in Afghanistan because it's their kids who are being sent there.

"We're also going to keep a candle lit in front of our homes until every troop comes home," one mother, Pat Alviso, told Sahagun. Her son, a Marine, has served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan so far.

Let's support them by lighting candles in front of our homes, too.

For the full text of Obama's speech, see:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/12/obama-speech-text-afghanistan.html

Of Minarets and Danger

2009-12-01T12:35:00.000-08:00

How can a building be banned?

Yes, local ordinances often define height and other limits on design, but to ban the distinctive symbol of one religion in the 21st century is incredibly backward.

See the NY Times discussion of the recent public referendum in Switzerland:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/world/europe/30swiss.html?_r=1&scp=6&sq=minarets%20switzerland&st=cse

Looks like I'll have to avoid visiting Switzerland.

Precious 2--or 2,000?

2009-11-29T13:19:00.000-08:00

The film Precious reappears in the form of an investigative report in today's Los Angeles Times.

Thank you to Hector Becerra for his interviews and excellent writing in the series titled "Innocents Betrayed."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-child-death29-2009nov29,0,7023900.story

Johnetta Harrison is the abused fourteen-year-old who cares for her alcoholic mother and five younger siblings in Compton, south of Los Angeles.

Majella Maas is the kind preschool teacher who tries to intervene and get help for little Dae'von Bailey--like the school counselor played by Mariah Carey in Precious.

But in this case Dae'von is beaten to death by the man in whose home he is placed, and afterward Johnetta is taken to live with a kind relative in Hesperia, north of Los Angles County.

As we enter Advent, remembering the birth of a baby who came to bring love and to face down evil, let us also remember the precious children around us endangered every day.

Help for Military Families

2009-11-28T15:08:00.000-08:00

Suicides are rising not just among those who have served or are serving in the military but among their families.

See this interview on National Public Radio with Kristina Kaufmann, an advocate for military families:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120909112

To see what you can do to help, go to the website for Blue Star Families:

http://bluestarfam.org/drupal/

From Gentle Man to Killer

2009-11-28T13:40:00.000-08:00

Jessie Bratcher was found "guilty except insane" for killing the man who fathered a child with his girl friend while Bratcher served in Iraq.

See the moving story by Kim Murphy in today's Los Angeles Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-soldier28-2009nov28,0,6298478.story

As a child, Bratcher had gone hunting with his grandfather but never wanted to do the killing. "He just didn't want to see anything die," recalls the grandfather.

As a new infantryman in Iraq, "he refused to open fire on what he believed an an inknown target in the village of Tarjil," reports Murphy.

Later when an investigation was launched into killing in Tarjil that day, he was seen as a "snitch."

Then he watched a close friend crushed to death in a Humvee accident--and stopped caring.

According to Murphy's article, on later patrols in Iraq he'd say "I'll shoot 'em. I'll kill 'em."

Bratcher came home to Oregon, had problems, and was finally declared 100% disabled with PTSD.

When he found out his girlfriend's pregnancy was not his own child, he immediately found and shot Jose Ceja Medina, the child's father.

From his jail cell, he blamed his military training.

First they work to dehumanize you, he said.

"Then... they want to dehumanize the people you're fighting, the enemy.... they've pretty much altered your value of human life. And then you come back home."

In Memoriam: Mike Penner

2009-11-27T14:24:00.000-08:00

It's not easy to be a sexual being. We are pushed and pulled by desires, responsibilities, boundaries.

It's even harder to live between the two ends of the gender continuum, as Mike Penner did.

A sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he announced his gender change to become Christine Daniels two years ago but returned to his birth name in recent columns.

"The hardest thing he had ever done" the AP reports him saying.

Apparently, he took his own life today, one of the first casualties of this year's holiday season.

See this AP news report posted on NPR.com:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120915407

We are all asked or asking, "How was your Thanksgiving?"

Our hopes for acceptance and love in family holiday gatherings are high--but we face intense interactions with parents, siblings, children, and others who may lack empathy and betray us for their own reasons.

Let us give thanks for Mike's honesty and his 52 years of courage.

Martha: A Miracle

2009-11-21T22:28:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 13, just before 5 pm, my cousin Martha suddenly felt a splitting headache. She knew the pain was completely different from anything she'd ever felt before.

"Worse than childbirth?" I asked her today.

"Oh, yes," she said.

"I didn't know it was possible to go past that kind of pain," I said, unable to imagine it.

Soon she was in an ambulance, in the hospital, in a helicopter to Denver, and the next day in surgery for a small aneurysm in her anterior communicating artery. A team of seven opened her skull and put a clamp on the "berry" type of bulge in a Y-shaped place where the artery branches into two.

"There are two types of aneurysm," her daughter Sarah explained to me today. "She had a 'slow bleed'--not a burst artery. But during surgery the berry did break and bleed. The doctors cleaned up the blood after clamping it."

Martha explained that aneurysms are a type of stroke--a bleeding stroke. I knew only about clotting strokes. Both types can deprive part of the brain of oxygen.

A month later, Martha is home, walking and talking--a glowing, healthy miracle. We went out to lunch at Shuga, the cafe where her son is the chef.

She has headaches some days--like today--and she's taking medicine to reduce the blood clot in her lower right leg. She tires easily--not yet ready to return to work.

But she's very thankful as Turkey Day approaches.

From her smile and from talking about all this with her daughters, I learned so much about thanksgiving.

A Serious Man

2009-11-08T12:37:00.000-08:00

A film that starts with a quotation from Rashi (medieval Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki) written across the screen?

Receive with simplicity everything that comes to you.
--Rashi

Then there's a short puzzling story about the apparent visit of a dybbuk to a family in Poland in 1890 or so.

Finally we move to Minnesota, 1967, and watch Larry Gopnik (a Job-like figure) face a ludricous series of betrayals and demands by everyone in his family, workplace, synagogue, and community.

I was completely taken with this Coen brothers film.
http://www.filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/film/a_serious_man/

It's very funny--a "black comedy" one website calls it--but also profound. After all, these things happen in life. We live surrounded by assholes and narcissistic people who place impossible, contradictory demands on us. We are wounded.

Receive with simplicity? That sounds dangerously close to "Be a doormat."

Nevertheless, I think there's a way to face these people without fighting back in a way that harms them. Larry's moves may be seen as too passive for some people--but at least he doesn't choose verbal or physical abuse. I admired him.

He's like Gimpel the Fool in Isaac Beshevis Singer's story by that name. People trick him and take advantage of him, but he turns the other cheek.

Perhaps I liked it because in the hour before the film started, I had faced three family crises. One daughter hyperventilated and had to breathe into a paper bag. Another who was getting the flu (and feared swine flu) called in tears. And my husband just wanted to get to the theater on time, demanding my full attention: "You put her ahead of me!"

What a relief to relax into this hilariously dark comedy about the same sorts of crazy demands.

Receive with simplicity everything that comes to you.

Hallelujah for the House 220 !

2009-11-08T01:05:00.000-08:00

Hallelujah! Praise to the God of mercy!

The House passed the healthcare reform bill tonight, 220 in favor to 215 against.

What a gift to each of us, just before Thanksgiving Day. In so many homes as the prayers of thanks are made, this new opportunity to have health care will be first on the list.

Many compromises were made to gain these 220 votes. The single-payer proposal was given up months ago, and an amendment was passed today prohibiting federally subsidized insurance plans from providing legal abortions.

I care about access to abortion, but I care even more about access to health care period.

I listened to the debate on CSPAN as opponents of reform tried to use the abortion issue and the immigration issue to sink this bill. Giving up ground on these issues was a painful but necessary strategy for now. Perhaps the Senate version of the bill and the final bill that arrives on President Obama's desk will restore some of this lost ground.

With this historic decision by the House of Representatives, pressure is now on the Senate to meet the challenge and approve health care reform.

Will the Republicans and a few blue-dog Democrats succeed in stopping progress?

I pray that won't happen--but after the defeat of the ERA in 1982, I realize that votes in favor of equality and opportunity are not guaranteed.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/healthcare/

Sadness for 13 Lives

2009-11-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

Thirteen people lost their lives. Thirty were wounded.

1. Michael Grant Cahill, 62, of Cameron, Texas

2. Libardo Eduardo Caraveo, 52, of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a Ph.D. in psychology.

3. Justin M. Decrow, 32, of Evans, Georgia.

4. John Gaffaney, 56, of San Diego.

5. Frederick Greene, 29, of Mountain City, Tennessee.

6. Jason Dean Hunt, 22, of Frederick, Ohio--newly wed.

7. Amy Krueger, 29, of Kiel, Wisconsin.

8. Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19, of West Jordan, Utah.

9. Michael Pearson, 21, of Bolinbrook, Ill.

10. Russell Seager, 51, of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.

11. Francheska Velez, 21, of Chicago--pregnant and recently returned from Iraq.

12. Juanita Warman, 55, of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

13. Kham Xiong, 23, of St. Paul, Minnesota.

See detailed biographies at www.latimes.com/forthood.

Thank you to the brave woman who stopped the killer: Sgt. Kimberly Munley.

I oppose all killing of one human by another--as Albert Einstein did--but I do support using a gun to stop a killer while trying not to kill him.

"My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred." — Albert Einstein

Why He Killed

2009-11-06T22:08:00.000-08:00

Profound evil is ultimately a mystery.

Nevertheless, as news coverage burgeons around Nidal Malik Hasan, some causes emerge.

1) He was a troubled man, lonely and crazy.

2) A Muslim whose parents had emigrated from Palestine, he was deeply affected by the horrors of his era: the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the US bombing of Iraq and invasion of Afghanistan, the soldiers' trauma he listened to in his work as a psychiatrist, and the harassment he and other Muslims face in the US.

"Fellow soldiers once handed him a diaper and told him to wear it around his head, the uncle said; another time they sketched a camel on a piece of paper and left it on his car with a note that said, 'Here's your ride.' " http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-fort-hood-suspect-uncle8-2009nov08,0,1886826.story

3) Against his will, this vulnerable man was being deployed to Afghanistan, the churning core of the maelstrom. His request to leave military service was denied.

Those three factors alone would not have caused this tragedy.

The final push apparently came from radical Muslims who found a floundering man and used him for their jihad. He learned from them that honor and service lay in becoming a suicide shooter.

"We're commanded to terrorize unbelievers," explained Younes Abdullas Mohammad on The Anderson Cooper Show, Nov. 6. "The Qur'an says very clearly, 'Kor hibuna'--'Terrorize them.'"

A man in Muslim dress visited Hasan the day before the killings, and he is reported to have shouted "Allahu akbar"--God is great--as he began shooting.

For a moment, let's imagine (with John Lennon):

* a world in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had been resolved;
* a nation that had followed up the 9/11 attacks by increased vigilance at ports and airports--but not by bombing Iraq and Afghanistan;
* a military in which a soldier's request to leave active duty for personal reasons was granted.
* an educational system that stressed learning other languages and respecting other cultures.

Instead, we have a world filled with the oppression of one religious group by another, a nation bent on vengeance, a military that trains young people to kill, and schools that largely ignore the cultures beyond US borders.

The question should not be, "Why did he kill?" but "How many deaths will it take 'til we know that too many people have died?"

"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
--Albert Einstein www.heartquotes.net