On Mothers Peace Day: cut the garbage

 

Don't give me any garbage about Mother's Day--flowers, breakfast in bed, saccharine cards.

It's Mothers Peace Day, set up by Julia Ward Howe and other activist women after the Civil War to stop the killing of our children in wars.  She wrote her Mothers Peace Proclamation in 1870, and the first demonstration was held in 1872 in New York City.

The Mother’s Day Proclamation was partly a lament for the useless deaths and partly a call to action to stop future wars. The call was directed, not to men, many of whom may have felt proud for their “service,” but to women, who often have proved more thoughtful and humane about issues of human suffering.

Mother’s Day Vigil for Peace by Voice of Women (VOW) at the Royal Ontario Museum on May 11, 1963. Photo B. Palmer Ward, Toronto Telegram.

Then, on June 2, 1872, in New York City, Julia Ward Howe held the first “Mother’s Day” as an anti-war observance, a practice Howe continued in Boston for the next decade before it died out.  (from website above)

Now on the streets of American cities in this godless, gun-filled culture we inhabit, those who birth and those who don't all demand an end to killing. 

Stop lynchings by cops.  Stop executions.  Pull American troops out of Afghanistan and every other country where we are waging active wars.  Use diplomacy, not weapons.  

Abolish the police, or at least take their guns away.  Let them keep the peace with tasers and billy clubs, or get rid of them.  Let 911 calls lead to trained de-escalation teams.  

I go into hiding 2-3 days before the onslaught of every grocery store clerk and every television newscaster wishing me a Happy-Sappy Mother's Day.  

I never go to church on this profaned holiday.  It's not safe from saccharine.  Today I will give my new church by Zoom, HerChurch in San Francisco, a chance.  At the first drop of syrup, I will pull the plug.

My kids can do an action for peace on this day.  Or they can clean all the bathrooms in the house if they want to make me happy.

When they were 9, 6, and 4 years old, I took them to a Mothers Peace Day event in Orange CA sponsored by Medea Benjamin, who in 2002 co-founded the antiwar group called Code Pink.  She went on to co-found the human rights group Global Exchange.

Now my daughters Roz, Ellen, and Marie call or visit saying "Happy Peace Day, Mom,"  and usually make a donation to a feminist peace organization.  I trained them well.   

By the way, attending HerChurch turned out to be a safe choice today.  May 8 is the feast day honoring Julian of Norwich (1343-1416 or so), and Pastor Stacy Boorn centered our worship on Julian's famous words, "As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother."  

See more about Jesus as our Holy Mother in this post by Kittredge Cherry on the blog QSpirit: "Julian of Norwich: Celebrating Mother Jesus."

In the "Prayers of the People" portion of today's worship, Jennifer Mantle led us with these petitions and others:

Please pray for the mothering spirit in each of us, however it expresses itself.

Pray for those who wish to become mothers but have not been able to realize this desire.

Pray for those who have troubling relationships with their children...

Pray for mothers who have lost children...

Pray for us as we mother ourselves...

Pray for our first trans bishop, the Reverend Dr. Megan Rohrer (elected bishop yesterday in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).   

Bill Barr & his Department of Injustice

President Biden has been doing such a great job that I thought I could relax and not follow the news 4-5 hours per day.

That trust lasted about a week, from the day Biden gave his speech to Congress until this week.

Yesterday on the car radio I heard that a federal judge, Amy Berman Jackson, had looked at the memo written by the Department of Justice for then-Attorney General William Barr to support his claim that there was nothing worth charging Trump with in the Mueller report.

Judge Jackson looked at the memo supporting Barr's claim that he and the DOJ lawyers had studied the report and concluded that Mueller had produced no evidence of federal crimes done by Trump--no obstruction of justice during his campaign for president or after he was elected.

She realized that the memo was a mishmash designed to come up with a predetermined conclusion: "Nothing worth bringing Trump to court."

Back in March 2019 when we read the Mueller Report and its carefully documented 11 conclusions, and then we heard Barr's conclusion of "Nothing here," many of us said "Wha-a-a-at?"

Barr insisted that the DOJ memo supporting his claim could not be released publicly. Too special for anyone to read. But Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued for release of the memo.

This past week, or earlier, Judge Jackson got her hands on it.

She released her assessment of the report yesterday, saying that Barr was being "disingenuous" when he claimed he and the DOJ had studied and concluded that Trump could not be charged. That 5-syllable word is a polite way of saying Barr lied.

He had demanded that his underlings at the DOJ come up with some kind of reasoning to excuse Trump and keep him from being tried in court. The conclusion came before the studying of the Mueller Report, she determined.

See Spencer S. Hsu's analysis in the Washington Post today.

Judge Jackson went on to order public release of the #doj Legal Counsel memo excusing the former guy from prosecution.

I'm feeling resigned now that I need to continue to watch politics in Washington like a hawk.

I'm grateful, however, to all the voters in Georgia who helped to elect President Biden and then elected Senator Raphael Warnock and Senator Jon Ossoff, giving Democrats 50 votes in the Senate and enabling them to take control away from Mitch McConnell and the GOP.

Because of these Georgia voters and all the rest of us who voted for Biden in November 2020, we have a new attorney general: Merrick Garland. He is pursuing justice in the Department of Justice.

The former guy may now actually face criminal charges and be tried.

Let's lock him up, and Bill Barr too. Both of them. No one is above the law.

If you do not obey the law, you will be prosecuted.

The US has two choices: clean house and restore democracy--or face more criminal presidents in the future, men who want to be tyrants and don't mind asking Vladimir Putin for help in getting to power and staying there, even if they lose an election.

Listen to this MSNBC report:

https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/judge-slams-former-ag-barr-s-disingenuous-spin-of-mueller-probe-111368773875