The Christian Humanist Newspaper websites frequently allow comments on news articles and I comment frequently on both national and local websites to try to get a voice of reason and compassion into conversations that are most often illiterate and hate-filled tirades, usually by Christian fundamentalists, who seem to rant without reason and blame it on their Christian outlook. A recent news article announced that a particular Lutheran denomination planned to remove a restriction against ordaining gay clergy, and that of course got homophobic Christians to make their usual ill-considered and mean-spirited comments.
One writer, a small town politician and outspoken layman in a “Bible church” attacked my comments about the unchristian and uncivil nature of the attacks on the Lutherans, by questioning my “right” to speak on the subject of religious values and for my “foolishness” in trying to defend a church that “sinned” by allowing homosexuals to be “preachers” – So, I decided to take him on with the following comment of my own.
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Mr. Barber said: “It never ceases to amaze me how atheist, agnostics, secular humanist and the lot of you are such experts on religion.”
I am surprised at your statement for two reasons: first, because so far as I understand you are not an expert in religion, having no particular background or training; and second, because a number of people who regularly comment on this website do have a background in religion and philosophy far exceeding yours. In your list above you forgot to include “Christian humanist” but it is obvious that you intended to include me because you mentioned a particular phrase I used.
So I guess I should let you know that I have a background in religion, with advanced degrees in theology and philosophy and I am an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. So do you think maybe I am qualified to comment? [If you want details of my background you can check my website at http://www.christianhumanist.net ].
You said: “Where the strife lies is when you all try to dictate the mind of God in each of our lives.”
I don’t think any of us knows “the mind of god” assuming there is such a thing, but it is not clear to me where you are going with that thought. Whatever is in the mind of god, it is unlikely to be hateful. You believe that god is homophobic, like you. It seems to me that I have been arguing that it is not up to you, or those who think like you, to try to tell homosexual Lutheran ministers that their sexual orientation is “sinful” – if you believe that it is sinful for you, abstain from what you believe is sinful behavior, but have the grace and the humility not to try to push your views on others. It is pretty clear that most Christians believe that homosexuality is an ingrained biological sexual orientation to which moral judgments do not apply. That is certainly true of many Christian denominations, including the Lutherans that are the subject of this article.
Mr. Barber had quoted a biblical verse as justification for his anti-gay views. I had countered with a verse from the same chapter that spoke about sharing your bounty with those in need, and observed that he objected to helping those in need so why was he concerned about the anti-gay passage? He responded: “[When the bible] speaks of sharing your bounty [it] means “your bounty” not the collective government’s bounty.”
I have to disagree with you, at least in part. The “you” here is the collective “you” that was addressed to Israel by its god. It was intended to apply to the whole people collectively and has always been interpreted that way. Of course it was not addressed to Americans, but by analogy it simply makes sense to say that god intends for our society (just as for Israelite society) to take care of its poor. If you believe some portions of the bible apply to our society today, then you cannot arbitrarily say this directive does not apply to our society. To come to that interpretation you have to be reading scripture through Republican-tinted glasses, and conforming your biblical interpretation to your political philosophy.
“As each of us grows in the Lord things such as homosexuality will eventually be placed in prospective to our growth spiritually.”
[I think he meant that if I were a real Christian growing in the Lord I would understand that god rejects homosexual behavior, but I intentionally misread him, and commented…] So, if that is true, and since you believe that god made us the way he wanted us to be, because he made some people biologically homosexual [either he intended it, or it was an accident], don’t you believe that as you grow in perspective and in grace and love that your sin of homophobia should give way to acceptance and affirmation?
Usually there is not much point in responding with logic to people who have ingrained emotional attitudes that affect their beliefs that are probably not subject to change, but sometimes I do it anyway, and I think it is because I like to mess with their heads by approaching them in terms of their own belief system, no matter how naïve, simplistic and ignorant it is. It frustrates them, and it amuses me. I’m a really bad person at heart.
The Christian Humanist Angry attacks against the health care reform bill that just passed Congress and signed into law by President Obama are being fed by wildly-untrue statements by the leadership of the Republican Party and their Tea Party allies, the ignorant buffoons on talk radio and the pundits on Fox News. Among the charges heard time and again are claims that the health care reform bill will (in the words of a letter to the editor published this week) “convert our republic into a socialist, communist or dictatorial nation ….” Wow, that’s scary, I had no idea that one bill could do all that.
But shouldn’t people who make public statements or write public letters have some working knowledge of the subject they write about? People who make such foolish statements as the letter writer demonstrate their ignorance when they obviously do not know the basic facts of political theory or government and, unfortunately, they do not know that they do not know what they are talking about.
Socialism is a theoretical economic structure in which the government owns all business entities (“means of production”). Socialism does not exist anywhere in the world.
Communism is a form of government structure in which all political power is vested in local political committees (communes). It also involves an economic theory that everyone should contribute to society to the extent able, and should receive from society according to need. Unfortunately it is too idealistic and as a practical matter it has failed, primarily because it fails to deal with motivation and self-interest.
A dictatorship is a political structure in which all power resides in one person (or a tightly controlled group). Anyone who thinks that Obama is a dictator or could become a dictator in our dysfunctional government is appallingly ignorant of the realities in the seat of our government—no one is in control in Washington, no person, no party. Just watching the news illustrates that fact.
All Western economies today [U.S., Canada, countries of Europe] are “mixed” economies, with elements of socialism intermingled with primary capitalism. Pure capitalism does not and cannot work as an economic system any more than pure socialism can work, for reasons too complicated to explain in a short essay. Think about the political realities of the economics of nations as a line with capitalism at one end of the line and socialism at the other. All countries are somewhere along that line between the two extremes, some leaning to the left of center, some to the right of center.
The economic issue to sort out in the United States is the proper balance between the two polar extremes and that is what the current dispute is about, although from listening to the angry rhetoric it would be hard to determine that. The discussion about something so essential as health care reform is being held in a very hostile political environment that has been so poisoned by angry partisanship that rational discussion has now become impossible. It is difficult to carry on an intelligent conversation with people who do not understand the issues in health care reform and yet engage in verbal combat with criticisms of the bill that are not accurate.
Most of the right wing protesters who are so against “socialism” as a concept seem quite happy with the reality when they profit from it. For instance, small business owners like the Small Business Administration, because it invests government money in their businesses. Business owners and homeowners like FEMA because it socializes their business and property losses. Republican governors complain but hold out their hands for stimulus funds to generate new employment and to subsidize their shrinking budgets and unemployment reserves. Republican mayors look for pork projects in their districts, including funds for private athletic stadiums. Republican city councilors in my town are quite happy operating a for-profit power plant competing with free enterprise that subsidizes local taxpayers with funds generated with profits earned from non-residents, as well as operating a profitable marina and several golf courses—all socialist enterprises that compete with free enterprise. Republican bankers and financial institution managers, heads of corporations including GM and AIG, want/need public money to save them from collapse but otherwise believe in free enterprise and want government to leave them alone to do as they please without regulation or interference.
The real objection to government policy under the Obama Administration is not that it is socialist, but rather that it advocates “social programs”—help for the economically disadvantaged, tax relief for the working poor including the “unearned income credit,” unemployment compensation payments, food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance and other social welfare programs. Their objection is that people should not get something for nothing, that there are jobs for all who want them and those that do not have jobs are too lazy to work at menial jobs or to get an education so they could be employed, services go to illegal immigrants who want benefits they have not earned including free health care, that those who cannot carry their own weight in society should not be allowed to take from the “hard working Americans who have jobs and have to pay taxes to support benefits for others.” Social welfare programs may be a prominent characteristic of socialist states, but there is a big difference between social welfare benefits and socialism as government policy, and these critics do not understand the difference.
They also reject the premise that members of a society have a duty to the less fortunate among them—the social contract theory of economic and community organization. Somehow in kindergarten they did not learn sharing and playing nice with others.
The point is obvious so we offer this advice to the right: don’t make ignorant statements that government programs you don’t like—including health care reform—are “socialist” while enjoying the benefits of “socialist” programs from which you benefit. It makes you look ignorant and foolish.
The Christian Humanist The abortion debate can and should be held without reference to Christian belief [which I think humanists would prefer] but it rarely is because most of the anti-abortion advocates base their argument in religion. So I will comment from the Christian Humanist perspective by reminding readers that not all religions or even all Christian churches and denominations are part of the anti-abortion movement. The religion-based anti-abortion crowd is pretty much limited to the Roman Catholic Church and various evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant groups that make common cause with them.
Among the various Christian denominations, churches and advocacy groups there are three fundamentally different approaches to the controversial issue of abortion and abortion right.
The anti-abortion Christians largely consist of the Roman Catholic Church and the extreme right of Protestant Christianity (the fundamentalists and the evangelicals), including Southern Baptists.
The middle group consists of some denominations that take a “nuanced” stance, neither supporting nor opposing abortion but stressing the duty of Christians to recognize that there are valid arguments on both sides of the issue and that each Christian must make his own decision on the specific facts and circumstances and in the light of his or her faith conviction. This middle group includes most Lutheran denominations, the American Baptist Association, and southern Presbyterians.
The third group supports abortion rights. This latter group consists of the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Lutheran Women’s Caucus.
A check with the web sites of these various denominations and groups will provide the specifics of each group’s position. However, individual Christians within each of these denominations often differ from their denomination’s position. For example, there are groups of pro-choice Catholics and anti-abortion Lutherans.
When I was a student in theological school in the late 1950s abortion was not an issue. Curiously until 1980 the Southern Baptists, a conservative evangelical denomination with a history of supporting individual rights, took the position that the right to abortion was a matter of individual freedom. Everything changed with the culture wars that began in the 1980s when the Republicans wanted a foothold among southern conservative Democrats and allied themselves with religious conservatives, using abortion as a wedge issue. It worked. The South is now largely Republican and anti-abortion rights.
The majority of Protestants do not accept the argument of the anti-abortion religionists that a fetus is a human being, or an “unborn baby.” A fetus is not a child. Some Christians (including your non-theistic writer!) hold that a human life comes into being at birth when the “breath of life” enters the child and it begins breathing. Traditionally it has been understood that a human being becomes such at birth when it is independent of the mother and breathing on its own and is then considered a child or a baby. Prior to birth it is a fetus, not a child. Consider that a fertilized egg is not a chicken, and we could extend that analogy to note that tadpoles are not frogs, larvae are not grasshoppers, and pine cones are not pine trees.
Anti-abortionists have been trying to argue the point (unsuccessfully I think) that terminating a fetus is the same thing as killing a child. We beg to differ on that point for a number of common sense reasons and, for those whose beliefs are presumed to be Christian, for theological reasons as well.
The reason that traditionally a human being becomes recognized as such at birth goes back to the Genesis birth stories and is an element of Christian theology. In the Genesis story a human being was born when god breathed the “spirit of life” or “breath” into the new human being. Traditionally this is the point in theology that the “soul” (which is another name for the spirit of life, or ruach in Hebrew) enters the body and a new human living human being is born. The issue of when a new human being comes into existence becomes complicated to the point of absurdity by the theological issue of the “soul” and whether the soul comes into being at the birth of a human child, or whether it is pre-existing and enters the body at birth, and how the “soul” relates to the fetus.
I do not understand why fundamentalist Christians, who say they believe quite literally in the Bible, seem to be unaware of this concept, which is a very traditional part of Christian theology. [This is not my belief, but is noted for those who hold that belief. I am a humanist, who happens to believe that the teachings of Jesus are worth taking seriously as an ethical guide, thus a Christian Humanist.]
Anti-abortion supporters have a right to their views, to abstain from abortion if they believe it is morally wrong, and to try to persuade others of the legitimacy of their position. They do not have a right to force their beliefs on the rest of us, to compel others to act or not act in accordance with their values, or to deprive the rest of us of our right to act in accordance with our beliefs. In a pluralistic society it has to be that way. Both the pro-choice and the anti-abortion positions are religious interpretations that have support from Christian believers, but they are religious beliefs and the secular laws of the land should not interfere with the religious rights of either side.
Those who believe that abortion is wrong and wish to abstain from abortion are free to refrain, and those who believe differently should also be able to act on their beliefs without interference from the law. We live in a secular democracy. We do not believe, as do the Taliban whose views we are fighting, that religious views of one group should be written into law.
We should make the point here that because we support the right of women to have an abortion if their personal circumstances make that decision desirable or necessary, that does not mean we are “pro abortion” any more than we are “pro appendectomy” or “pro heart surgery.” Abortion is a medical procedure. Sometimes it is advisable. It needs to be available, as any other medical procedure is available.
The Christian Humanist When I was a kid I liked my old Uncle Samuel. He wasn’t actually my uncle, he was an old family friend, an old boy friend of my old maid aunt Irene, my father’s sister. But, as they say, that’s another story.
As I started to say, when I was a young boy my Uncle Samuel was someone you liked to have around. He was a relaxed, easy-going guy, living a comfortable suburban life in a town about 25 miles from where we lived. He came to lots of family picnics at 4th of July celebrations and George Washington’s birthday. He was liked and respected—even loved. He was a pillar of his community, a man who worked hard, earned a good living with a comfortable surplus in the bank, paid his bills on time, was interested in education and supported the arts and cultural events, cared about the less fortunate, volunteered at soup kitchens and homeless shelters, was civil in his politics and friendly with his neighbors.
Sometime over the years he changed. The change was gradual at first, but he became noticeably worse when he began to hang around with a new gang of friends. He began to act and think like them. That’s when he began to go wrong. It’s a truly sad story.
He started going to a new church. On the surface it sounded pretty much like the same traditional Christian church he had grown up with. But as he got into it more he learned that there were some differences and he bought into those differences. Samuel used to be humble, and he believed that humility was a virtue, but in his new church he learned that humility was for weaklings and he was taught the arrogance of power, that might makes right, that political power is necessary to bring about rule by those who believed as he did, and that with the exercise of power he could dominate others and change the laws to support his religious beliefs and values, and that with perpetual power and control he could destroy all political opposition—he could perpetually dominate others and control their lives. He could tell them what to believe, and what TV programs to watch to get the “right” views. He learned that religion was a tool to be used to obtain and hold on to power and to control the lives of others.
At one time he was compassionate, but his new friends convinced him that compassion was wasted on the poor, that God made the rich and the poor and that he rewards all according to what they deserve—so that the rich are sharing God’s blessing and the poor are such because they have not exerted the energy to lift themselves out of poverty and so they deserve their condition. In God’s wisdom he has made the strong and the weak, and the strong are destined to rule over the weak. That is God’s will. That is God’s way.
He began to work against the institutions of our society that feed the hungry, and shelter the homeless, and clothe the poor, and he did all this in the name of his new religion that taught there was no legitimate place in our society for common community effort in support of the weak and powerless in our society because such efforts would place an unfair burden upon the rich, who were ordained in their status and must not be compelled to share their bounty with those who had less.
I remember Sam in the old days before he was converted to the new state religion, when he valued education and supported science and the arts. But his new friends convinced him that education was dangerous unless it was under control of those who believed as he did and that education needed to be managed so that dangerous ideas did not undermine the values of the new religion. So he worked to undermine education, particularly in science. He weakened science programs by requiring mythology to be taught along with evolutionary science, as if they were somehow equals, the mythology masquerading as another version of science. He fought against sex education with the odd argument that knowledge would encourage immoral behavior. He fought against academic programs for the gifted on the grounds that such programs were elitist and he worked to require endless testing of trivia in the schools so that schools did not have the time or the energy to devote to academic performance or to encourage the best students with rigorous work. He fought against programs to educate the best and brightest to the level they could attain and he encouraged mediocrity and teaching to the bottom of the class so that no one would feel left out or left behind and all could be equally mediocre.
Uncle Samuel’s previously gentle nature disappeared and his strangest behavior began when he started to play video games regularly. Quickly he acquired a taste for violent war games. He could not get enough of them. He played them night and day to the exclusion of most everything else in his life. Playing war games made him feel big and powerful and patriotic. To feed his passion for war games he bought bigger and more expensive equipment on which to play his games, and because the games were expensive he borrowed heavily to fund his passion. He used up his line of credit on several credit cards and then he mortgaged his house to fund his games. His friends noticed that he became increasingly irrational. He became unreasonable and crotchety when anyone questioned his passion and his involvement. He got his friends involved in the games, sometimes reluctantly, but he pressured them into playing the games with him. When his friends indicated lack of interest, he became angry and abusive and cut off his contact and his friendship.
He picked fights with his neighbors, even with those with whom he had natural interests that would seem to require him to get along with them.. His neighbors began to dislike, disrespect, fear and avoid him. In the annual neighborhood association meetings they no longer listened to him or took him seriously.
He was deeply in debt and the financial mess he had created for himself led to his eventual bankruptcy. He lost his house. He lost his friends. He lost his respect.
The story of my Uncle Samuel is truly a sad story. We miss the uncle he used to be.
The Christian Humanist Three friends are in a bar in Miami one evening last October having a beer after a soccer game. They are in a devilish mood and decide to play a practical joke on their friend Danny, who had driven his girl friend home after the game and was planning on joining them later. They create a fictitious black assailant whom they will say had accosted and threatened them on their way into the bar and when they escaped into the bar had yelled that he would be waiting outside the bar when they left. When Danny gets to the bar they will tell him about the fictitious threat and will attempt to get Danny to go outside, meet the fictitious man and beat him up.
When Danny arrives at the bar, the friends tell him the story and convince him that since he would be unknown to the black man lurking outside that he would be the best one to go outside and get the jump on the assailant and beat him up. A policeman at the next table overheard the conversation, followed Danny outside and arrested him as he left the bar, charging Danny with attempted assault. The friends had followed Danny outside, planning to laugh at Danny, but now were in the position of saying to the cop that this was all a joke, that there was no person outside, they had made it up. The policeman argued that Danny had thought that there was a person outside and he “attempted” to assault the unknown black man.
The preceding story is fiction. Come with me now to explore the legal and ethical implications of an actual sting operation conducted by the FBI. CNet, a technology service, reports that the FBI set up a website at one of its offices that had a fake link to troll for persons interested in downloading child pornography. The description of the link was for a video of minors having sex. When someone clicked on the link their IP address was recorded and the FBI then issued subpoenas for the owner of that IP address, conducted armed early morning raids on homes in several states, and arrested the owners of the computers whose IP addresses had been recorded.
CNet reports: “Roderick Vosburgh, a doctoral student at Temple University who also taught history at La Salle University, was raided at home in February 2007 after he allegedly clicked on the FBI’s hyperlink. Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him. Vosburgh was charged with violating federal law, which criminalizes “attempts” to download child pornography with up to 10 years in prison. Last November, a jury found Vosburgh guilty on that count, and a sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 22, at which point Vosburgh could face three to four years in prison.”
The Courts have said the procedures used were legal. However there are several issues that raise difficult legal and ethical questions.
There was no illegal child pornography. Can you justly convict someone of attempting to download pornography if there was in fact nothing illegal to download?
They did not determine who was operating the computer in question. They identified the owners of computers through their IP address. I discovered that I can access the internet through my neighbor’s wireless network, so if I attempted to download fake porn using my neighbor’s internet connection, should he be convicted of a crime? Is this procedure not fatally flawed because there is not a reasonable basis for the search warrant initially?
The typical standard is “possessing” child porn on the hard drive of a computer, but to obtain a conviction in the case at hand it is not necessary that porn actually be downloaded. He downloaded what proved to be gibberish. Can you justly convict someone of “attempted download of porn” if in fact there is no porn?
If this procedure were used to identify possible possessors of child pornography and then search warrants were issued for perpetrator’s computers and charges issued on the basis of actual porn in the subject’s computers rather than fictitious porn, I think many of the objections to this procedure would be resolved.
If, as the CNet article suggested, Federal agents can arrest people and charge them with attempted crimes by using fake websites or fake emails, what is to keep them for trolling for potential purchasers of marijuana or any number of other possible crimes, including political acts? Is this the sort of government action we are willing to tolerate?
There is always danger when police, whether Federal or local, go on fishing expeditions and attempt entrapment to charge people with crimes. It is a danger that can easily become more troublesome than the crimes it purports to curtail.
The Christian Humanist
The Christian Humanist The sexual abuse scandals of Europe put Germany center stage last week as several incidents came to light that involve many years of physical and sexual abuse at a boy choir school in Germany operated by the Pope’s brother, who said he had no knowledge of the abuse in the years before he was director, as well as another incident in Germany involving reassigning a molester priest to another parish (where he again molested a child) during the period in which the Pope had been the Archbishop of the diocese.
Neither the Pope nor his brother are directly involved in the scandal and both claim they had no knowledge of the molesting and abuse, which of course might be true, but which is troublesome because it implies a “see no evil, hear no evil” attitude, which has been precisely the problem the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has with respect to rampant sexual abuse problems which have gone on for decades. When I was a young adult (some 50 years ago) I was aware that there was a hidden sexual abuse problem in the Church in Western New York where I lived at the time (it was quite openly discussed), and I find it incredible that the Catholic hierarchy insists it did not have know what was going on throughout the Church when the rumors were so widespread and that once claims were made against the Church it tried so hard to conceal what was obviously a large and ever increasing problem.
These incidents follow the scandalous story widely-reported ten days ago that a high Vatican official was involved in a prostitution ring that procured young male prostitutes for Church dignitaries.
The Associated Press carried the story this morning that the Vatican hierarchy was trying to squelch discussion that the church’s celibacy rule had anything to do with sexual abuse, after “one of the pope’s closest advisers, Vienna archbishop Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn …. called for an honest examination of issues like celibacy and priestly education to root out the origins of sex abuse.” The article reported that leading prelates at the Vatican were strongly denying that celibacy had anything to do with sexual abuse.
Well, I guess we can agree with the prelates that celibacy does not “cause” pedophilia or ephebephilia or homosexuality. Of course that is not the issue here. Celibacy is not a natural or healthy state and if that is a requirement for entering the priesthood it is obvious that the priesthood and orders will have a large contingent of men with unhealthy sexual needs and behaviors—including homosexuality. Social scientists tell us that homosexuality and pedophilia are not related. Pedophilia occurs with both women and men, gay and straight, but there is a higher reported incidence of pedophilia with men than with women, possibly because men may be more inclined to act on their sexual inclinations than women.
That said, to say that there is no relationship between the celibacy rule and the frequency of aberrant sexual behavior among priests is just not credible.
Some have commented that the way for the frequency of sexual abuse by priests to be reduced is to increase the monitoring of priests and to have a zero tolerance policy by the Church hierarchy, but I doubt that will happen and I think it is naïve to suspect that anything will change given the fact that the hierarchy consists of the same sexually repressed males in which this culture of acceptance and cover up has been the model for generations.
Whatever the reason for having a celibate priesthood in the past, it appears that the Church may need to face up to the fact that celibacy may be the least of the difficulties for Catholics. As for any theological reason to maintain celibacy, that seems strained at best. Women played a significant leadership role in the early church but that role was dismissed as irrelevant by those who at a much later time in church history advocated for celibacy. The point is that there is no theological or practical reason to continue the outmoded and unnecessary practice of celibacy in the Church.
The Rev. Arthur G Broadhurst
The Christian Humanist My wife is a news junkie. She follows stories carefully and is good at research. She alerted me to a TV news story endlessly repeated on CNN in which the reporter said “some people say…” and then proceeded to make a comment about the person who was the subject of the news story that sounded more like gossip than news. There is an old journalism convention—not much observed these days—that a news story had to have two credible sources willing to vouch for the validity of any purported fact and that those sources were disclosed in the story. There were of course exceptions where for good reason a source had to be kept confidential, but in those instances an editor had to personally verify that the source existed and that the source was credible. We relied on the integrity of the paper and its editors to get the story right.
Apparently that distinction between news and gossip does not apply to some television news channels, including and specifically CNN and Fox News, where opinions and attitudes of the announcer du jour are mixed in with reported events, the announcers seemingly oblivious of the fact that their political bias—or even hostility—can be read loudly and clearly in their reports, to my considerable annoyance.
The phrase “some people say” sounds innocuous enough until you think about what it implies, which is that unsubstantiated gossip without the credibility of a verified source is being spliced into a news story and therefore becomes “news” reported as fact and picked up by other news organizations and reported second hand as “today CNN reported that….” So gossip becomes “fact” and is reported as such from a presumably reliable news source.
However, it gets worse than that. Fox News is known for sloppy journalism, careless reporting and unethical practices both in its news and in its commentary shows. Fox uses the “some people say” ploy regularly to try to tarnish the reputation of public officials, politicians, progressives, and Democrats without having to stand behind their statements or verify false charges because they are “reporting” what was said by others.
What makes this practice particularly reprehensible is that sometimes the “some people” are their own bloggers on Fox websites and other times they just make up facts and stories and report them as “some people” “said” or “believe” or “reported” a particular story, and they don’t feel they have to support whatever lie or half-truth they are reporting by naming a source or revealing where that alleged information originated. Sometimes reporters or interviewers use the made up “facts” to try to provoke a response to a question that otherwise would not get a response. An example: Bill O’reilly on the Factor: “some people say he is not running for Congress because of rumors about his connection to [a particular scandal], what say you?” All the time O’reilly knows that the alleged connection to a particular scandal is specious, but it gives him a chance to report rumor and inuendo as if it were fact. In other words he can tarnish a reputation without taking responsibility for spreading malicious, unsubstantiated and false statements. He has no scruples or integrity.
Here is a link to a YouTube story on Fox’s use of the “some people say” ploy that my wife and erstwhile research assistant found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYA9ufivbDw
Of course these practices are unacceptable for anyone purporting to report news, whether in print or on cable news. This is not journalism. It is not ethical. It is not responsible. Sources need to be named and information verified before it is reported. But the practice of blending news with gossip is spreading from the slimy policies of Fox to reporters at CNN and by political pundits on talk shows of other networks.
I am not willing to accept this lowering of journalistic standards. Whenever the practice is used, the reporter using it needs to be held to account. Most reporters and their editors can be contacted through their news website. This is a despicable practice and it must end.
The Christian Humanist Vice President Joe Biden met with top Israeli leaders today to convey the U.S. Government’s positions: the U.S. remains a close ally of Israel and will support Israel if it takes risks for peace; the U.S. does not want Israel to attack Iran over its nuclear program; and Israeli settlements must cease in order to make it possible for peace negotiations to resume.
The Vice President got an immediate and unexpected response from Mr. Netanyahu and his government—the finger! Israel delivered it publicly, without even waiting for him to get out of town, in what has to be one of the worst instances of trying to humiliate a public figure.
In an unbelievable intentional affront to Mr. Biden and the United States government, and knowing full well that the U.S. position was that all settlement activity had to be ended by Israel in the interest of peace and pending negotiations, Mr. Netanyahu’s government announced approval for 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem. Israeli Interior Ministry spokeswoman Efrat Orbach said the new homes would be built in Ramat Shlomo, an existing neighborhood for ultra-Orthodox Jews. Israel captured that area in the 1967 war. It annexed East Jerusalem and despite its Palestinian residents, considers it to be part of its undivided capital. The annexation is not internationally recognized and its several neighborhoods are recognized as settlements by the United States and other countries than Israel.
So the Israelis made their point. They took Jerusalem by force. They are going to keep it regardless of the United States, regardless of the Palestinians, regardless of peace. If they occupy East Jerusalem it will be impossible to give it up in any peace agreement. They are going to drive any remaining Palestinians out of Israel and out of territory they control despite international law. They will occupy it despite any reasonable sense of what is right in a situation where the Palestinians were uprooted from their lands to salve the conscience of Europe after World War 2 and give Jews a homeland. It was a bad decision at the time, although understandable, but through the years we have come to see how bad a decision it really was. It has created an insoluble problem and we are stuck with it.
On the one hand we have a displaced Palestinian people who want at least some of their lands back in a two-state solution to the crisis. On the other we have an intractable Israel that is not content with the land it was given but is intent on taking whatever else it wants because it believes that Jews are the people of god and are entitled to the ancient land of Palestine regardless of anyone else.
Netanyahu is an evil man. He represents a political party of extremists. It was obvious when he was elected that there would be trouble ahead for any possibility of peace, and he has demonstrated that our judgment was right—he does not want peace except on his terms, and he does not want a two-state solution. He wants the Palestinians subjugated and under Israeli control.
I have said previously and I repeat here that there is a very great danger in allying U.S. interests so closely with a nation whose national interests and priorities are increasingly divergent from our own.
We give billions of dollars to Israel each year, thanks to the Jewish lobby and those dual US-Israeli citizens who serve in our government and compromise US interests in favor of Israel’s unreasonable and irrational policies. Israel is a largely socialist state with health care for all, free public education including university education for all, subsidized housing, and it is paid for by the U.S., which won’t provide the same for our citizens because we can’t afford to provide for our citizens what we provide to a foreign nation.
Our troublesome welfare client needs to change its ways.
The Christian Humanist I had the most disconcerting experience today.
I live in a Florida city that like most of Florida is filled with grumpy retirees, many early retired from corporations, with large savings accounts, ample pensions and generous medical insurance plans, as well as others retired from blue collar factory jobs from the mid-west and northeast, so it is possible to walk around many neighborhoods in the afternoon without missing a line from Rush Limbaugh on talk radio. Needless to say, it is a rabid right wing climate with plenty of Tea Partiers, all of whom have plenty of time on their hands so they keep busy on the comment page of the local newspaper bashing liberals, socialists, commies, and the various loonies in the Federal government whose goal is to turn the United States into a third-world socialist nation by bankrupting the country with an unnecessary healthcare program and giveaways to the corporations.
The two things that really set them off are taxes—they are too high—and socialist welfare programs for the poor, the unemployed, the lazy—all those scabs on the backs of true blue-blooded hard working Americans who have to work hard just to have their hard earned money stolen from them and given to those who don’t deserve it. Every news article, editorial, or letter to the editor becomes an occasion for these extremists to vent their increasing anger and frustration at society.
A letter in the morning paper bemoaned the fact that the Obama administration is doing nothing to help business (apparently forgetting that most complaints lately have been that Obama is doing too much for the banks, for GM, for AIG, and is turning the US into a socialist country). The writer argued that the government needs to provide business with incentives to reopen factories and bring back jobs and to supplement wages paid by business with stimulus funds to provide American workers with a living wage. That sounds a bit socialist to me, but I was surprised that so many of the right wing were agreeing with the letter that the government needed to stimulate business with tax dollars.
So, thinking I was very clever, I wrote a satirical commentary that caricatured the letter writer’s suggestions and intentionally made obvious parallels with the right wing’s objections to socialist welfare programs. I figured a few people might not get it, and there would probably be a lot of hostility engendered along the lines that helping good business was just not a fair comparison to helping the lazy people who won’t get a job.
I was very wrong. The right wing comments expressed their approval and did not see the satire, see the inconsistency or get the comparison. One writer, a very bright and well-educated conservative with whom I have sparred a lot in the last few months, not only did not get the satire but criticized my failure to see a few points that needed some touching up so they would be more effective in stimulating business.
Here is what I said:
On the surface giving stimulus funds to business as incentives for them to bring back jobs to America might seem to make sense until you think about it. Here are the problems with what the letter writer proposes:
According to the political right, the only incentive that should be available under a free enterprise system is profits and if the labor costs are cheaper outside the US, the political right believes that is where manufacturing and technical jobs should go and we should not attempt to bring them back.
The political right opposes granting incentives to American businesses to subsidize wages because they believe that such incentives ultimately weaken the moral character and strength of business and lead to business people becoming dependent on handouts and less likely to work hard. We do not want to do anything that would undermine the moral character of business men by giving them something that they have not earned.
Any business that wants to succeed can find a way. It is just laziness and unwillingness to work hard that is causing businesses to fail. There is simply no excuse for any business to fail except for the sheer unwillingness of its owners to work hard and be productive.
If you provide business with subsidies to help them get through hard times they will never learn to stand on their own and will be perpetually looking for more handouts from tax payers.
The Small Business Administration should be abolished because it represents welfare for business.
Smart businesses and corporations are taking their jobs overseas so they can make more profits. Americans have to get used to the fact that the political right supports the wisdom and strategy of business to move overseas where taxes may be higher but where labor costs of foreign workers can replace American workers to increase profits, which is the only thing that matters. Business complains about high tax rates in the US, but because of exemptions and loopholes most American corporations pay no or little tax.
So here is the bottom line—so long as profits are made by business the blue collar worker in the US is not important and does not matter; there is no corporate duty to country or workers, the only duty is to the owners, managers and stockholders. God bless the capitalist system, where the rich can get richer and the poor—well, you guys are scr**wd!
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The right complains when public money is used to support the unemployed, the poor, the disadvantaged. They call that socialist and morally wrong. Then they ask for public money to subsidize business, a subsidy that is a bit farther down the socialist track, but they do not see the inconsistency of their views, even when their views are mocked by sarcasm or satire.
The Christian Humanist Three friends are in a bar in Miami one evening last October having a beer after a soccer game. They are in a devilish mood and decide to play a practical joke on their friend Danny, who had driven his girl friend home after the game and was planning on joining them later. They create a fictitious black assailant whom they will say had accosted and threatened them on their way into the bar and when they escaped into the bar had yelled that he would be waiting outside the bar when they left. When Danny gets to the bar they will tell him about the fictitious threat and will attempt to get Danny to go outside, meet the fictitious man and beat him up.
When Danny arrives at the bar, the friends tell him the story and convince him that since he would be unknown to the black man lurking outside that he would be the best one to go outside and get the jump on the assailant and beat him up. A policeman at the next table overheard the conversation, followed Danny outside and arrested him as he left the bar, charging Danny with attempted assault. The friends had followed Danny outside, planning to laugh at Danny, but now were in the position of saying to the cop that this was all a joke, that there was no person outside, they had made it up. The policeman argued that Danny had thought that there was a person outside and he “attempted” to assault the unknown black man.
The preceding story is fiction. Come with me now to explore the legal and ethical implications of an actual sting operation conducted by the FBI. CNet, a technology service, reports that the FBI set up a website at one of its offices that had a fake link to troll for persons interested in downloading child pornography. The description of the link was for a video of minors having sex. When someone clicked on the link their IP address was recorded and the FBI then issued subpoenas for the owner of that IP address, conducted armed early morning raids on homes in several states, and arrested the owners of the computers whose IP addresses had been recorded.
CNet reports: “Roderick Vosburgh, a doctoral student at Temple University who also taught history at La Salle University, was raided at home in February 2007 after he allegedly clicked on the FBI’s hyperlink. Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him. Vosburgh was charged with violating federal law, which criminalizes “attempts” to download child pornography with up to 10 years in prison. Last November, a jury found Vosburgh guilty on that count, and a sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 22, at which point Vosburgh could face three to four years in prison.”
The Courts have said the procedures used were legal. However there are several issues that raise difficult legal and ethical questions.
- There was no illegal child pornography. Can you justly convict someone of attempting to download pornography if there was in fact nothing illegal to download?
- They did not determine who was operating the computer in question. They identified the owners of computers through their IP address. I discovered that I can access the internet through my neighbor’s wireless network, so if I attempted to download fake porn using my neighbor’s internet connection, should he be convicted of a crime? Is this procedure not fatally flawed because there is not a reasonable basis for the search warrant initially?
- The typical standard is “possessing” child porn on the hard drive of a computer, but to obtain a conviction in the case at hand it is not necessary that porn actually be downloaded. He downloaded what proved to be gibberish. Can you justly convict someone of “attempted download of porn” if in fact there is no porn?
- If this procedure were used to identify possible possessors of child pornography and then search warrants were issued for perpetrator’s computers and charges issued on the basis of actual porn in the subject’s computers rather than fictitious porn, I think many of the objections to this procedure would be resolved.
- If, as the CNet article suggested, Federal agents can arrest people and charge them with attempted crimes by using fake websites or fake emails, what is to keep them for trolling for potential purchasers of marijuana or any number of other possible crimes, including political acts? Is this the sort of government action we are willing to tolerate?
There is always danger when police, whether Federal or local, go on fishing expeditions and attempt entrapment to charge people with crimes. It is a danger that can easily become more troublesome than the crimes it purports to curtail.
The Christian Humanist
