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This is a link to David Pomeranz’s beautiful song, “It’s in everyone of us.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79GD—xXc4

President Obama inherited not only the wars of George Bush, but also his lies. After elected, the new president was quick to affirm that the Iraq War had been fought to bring democracy to that nation, and that the war in Afghanistan was fought to capture and kill Osama bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda leaders, even thought our leaders knew early on that bin Laden was actually in Pakistan. I was stunned to hear my liberal friends who had marched against Bush, defend the same policies as soon as they came through the lips of our hero.

Once we realize that all governments propagandize, and that all major media outlets are owned by the powers that be, it is very understandable for people to lose hope of ever finding out what is really happening in our world. Fortunately, we are still free enough as a nation to be able to hear from people the world over. That allows us to listen to enough sources, each of them with their own bias, to get an idea of the bigger picture might be. What follows is a list of sources to information coming from foreign news sources and Freedom of Information requests to peak outside the silo of US media outlets

For access to foreign presses:

http://www.world-newspapers.com/

For Wikileaks and Openleaks, probably the two best known examples of sites designed to release classified materials:

http://Wikileaks.org/

http://openleaks.org

“Public Intelligence” is a site that allows people from all over the world to release documents they claim to be classified. Obviously, such claims are difficult or impossible to test, but they open up truth claims to explore:

http://publicintelligence.net/

The CIA has its own site of declassified documents:

http://www.foia.cia.gov/

For “Government Attic” which has tons of declassified documents:

http://governmentattic.org/

For “Open Secrets” which helps trace the influence of money in politics:

http://www.opensecrets.org/

For the “National Security Archives” which are located at George Washington University, this site has thousands of government documents obtained by the Freedom of Information Act:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

Regardless of where we are born, we have a duty to our human family not to fall asleep into the lies of our group. We more fully love our group when we love it within the context of all humankind.

It can be argued that liberals hated Bush because he said what they really thought, but do not want to hear spoken out loud. So when many of the same crude policies of Bush were carried over into the Obama administration, but wrapped in cellophane of self-serving poetry, liberals defended governmental secrecy as fully as any neo-con had defended it under Bush (“The President knows things we do not, etc.)

So Bradley Manning will spend this day in prison for the crime of showing Americans our true face. The rest of us must decide whether we will spend this day sleeping in the warm quilt of our national lies, or if we will find the courage to live this day with eyes wide open.

Men have nothing to fear from feminism. The nuns who travel this land seeking a gender reformation in the church are not seeking to replace men in the power heirarchy, but to eliminate such systems of domination altogether. They do not seek to replace men in the pecking order but to eliminate such inhumane scratching and pecking altogether. After feminism frees women, men are the next beneficiaries. After all, we men are patriarchy’s most pathetic victims. As in any system of oppression, the slaves may retain the roots of their own humanity but the masters, never. Patriarchy is evil if for no other reason than the damage it does to women, but it is also insanity because it requires of men the sacrifice of our own living hearts.

Sometimes words fail. Like this story of a woman and two fetuses died who died at a Catholic Hospital after a doctor didn’t answer a page and the hospital defends itself from a malpractice lawsuit by appealing to a state law ruling that fetuses are not persons.

Yes, the same Catholic Church that commands women to risk their own lives rather than get an abortion. The same Catholic church which damns women to poverty all over the world instead of using birth control. The church is willing to pay any cost for its principles as long as that cost is paid by women, but when a lawsuit would cost the church millions of its own money, it is willing to face what we all know

the When its the life of a woman on the line, the church is willing to pay that cost for its principles

Turns out, when a man sues a Catholic hospital for malpractice because his wife and the twins she was carrying inside her died when she turned up in the emergency room and her doctor never bothered to answer a page—well, things get a little tricky. Yes, the Catholic hospital adheres to the strict Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church, as set forth by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And yes, those directives include the claim that “[t]he Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn” and a mandate to uphold “the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death.'” But come  on. That obviously does not apply when Catholic Health Initiatives, the Church-affiliated organization that runs the Church-affiliated St. Thomas More Hospital where a young woman and her two unborn fetuses died, is  the lead defendant in a lawsuit:

Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that  those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.

As Jason Langley, an attorney with Denver-based Kennedy Childs, argued in one of the briefs he filed for the defense, the court “should not overturn the long-standing rule in Colorado that the term ‘person,’ as is used in the Wrongful Death Act, encompasses only individuals born alive. Colorado state courts define ‘person’ under the Act to include only those born alive. Therefore Plaintiffs cannot maintain wrongful death claims based on two unborn fetuses.”

Thank you, counselor, for totally undermining everything the Catholic Church has ever said about women and health care and fetuses and the “sanctity of life,” just to save a buck, thereby confirming how very empty and meaningless all that rhetoric really is. Praise the Lord.

There is an article in the NY Times about the French humanist Diderot. He was a great champion of free thought and a great critic of the church.

If I taught at a seminary I would have a entire semester dedicated to thinkers who were enemies of Christianity, but also great friends to humankind. Respectfully reading people like Voltaire and Diderot are like radiation treatments for the cancer of bad religion. For example, Diderot is often quoted as having said, although its source is open to question:

“Humankind will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

While I, as a preacher, have no wish to be strangled with a politician’s small intestines, I can hear the frustration born of a love of humanity behind these words. I obviously disagree with Diderot, or whoever said this, that religion is always unhealthy, but the saying is absolutely correct in one sense. The twin bullies of church and state have caused untold suffering to humankind. If I go into politics or the clergy, I must do so to serve not to tell people what to think or do.

I would not hold to a faith that hides from its critics, but have much trust in a faith which is eager to pass through their purifying fire. True faith feels no need to refute its critics, only to learn from and transcend them. It is not true faith if it cannot bath like a dragon in the harshest acids of truth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/opinion/diderot-an-american-exemplar-bien-sur.html?_r=0

Becoming a citizen of the whole

Article 5.

•No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

After World War 2 our nation, shocked by the atrocities committed by Japan and Germany, played a key role in writing United Nation’s documents establishing humane treatment for all prisoners of war. The US spoke loud and clear saying that no prisoner should be tortured or humiliated while in captivity.

Unfortunately, those painful memories began to fade and were replaced by the painful memories of 9-11. Those universal standards became more and more inconvenient as we tried to get information from the people accused of being terrorists. Our nation, long convinced that we are the exception to every rule, began to chafe under article 5 of the Declaration of Universal Human Rights. We began to reject its prohibition of torture as long as Americans were the ones administering the treatment in question. To be succinct, we determined that no action could be called “torture” if we ourselves had perpetrated it.

So now the image of America in many minds around the world is not the lofty behavior we espoused after WW2, but the hooded figure of an Iraqi man with electric wires connected to his extended arms.

Burger King has announced it will stop buying meat from the supplier accused of mixing horse meat in with its beef.

The scandal is reminiscent of when Jack in the Box was caught serving horse meat some years back, which is actually good news for the Burger King Corporation. America briefly stopped eating at Jack in the Box when it found it had been tricked into eating horse, but was lured back by the new character “Jack.” The corporation still contracted out for its meat, but a new smiling character made America forget all about the horse meat scandal.

We have no reason to think fast food restaurants will raise their standards in food quality or safety, but we can all look forward to the new Burger King characters who will help distract us as we eat their tainted products.

4    No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

America likes to tell its own story as if slavery were an incidental mistake. Most in the US do not make the link between emancipation and increased prison populations, and in people moving from direct slavery to a kind of wage slavery where the person works all week long and still remains poor. We also do not count sweatshop laborers as our slaves, although they most certainly are.

The fourth paragraph of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if taken seriously, would lead to the end not only of human trafficking, but of all disguised forms of slavery such as prison labor, sweatshops and exploitative business practices that amount to slavery with nominal compensation.

(I spoke yesterday at a pro-choice rally at the capitol. These aren’t the exact words as I left my script early in the talk. But this was what I can remember.)

We’ve had so many pro-choice rallies here at the capital. I’m having a flashback to 1989 when we had a crowd of people that went back onto Congress Avenue as far as the eye could see. I remember sitting by Ann Richards on the stage and thinking that we were on the verge of winning reproductive rights once and for all. But here we are again…

And I was thinking how hysterical men get when anyone tries to put the slightest constraint on weapons in this country. I don’t think our work will be done, until America feels as strongly about protecting a woman’s body against intrusion as it does about protecting a man’s rifle.

But I also understand the prolife attitude because I was raised to have a reverence for life. And, at the same time, I was raised to have patriarchal attitudes toward women’s issues in general. So it was easy for me to leave women’s lives out of the equation and to imagine that pregnancies were happening in a petri dish.

It was only when I began to work as a volunteer at the local Rape Crisis Center that I actually began to listen to women’s stories and to realize that my simplistic view was not only wrong but arrogant, and was a part of the oppression that women faced every day of their lives. I finally realized I could not say I was serious about stopping abuse against women until I was willing to say that a woman’s body belongs to her. She is not common property of men for us to discuss the morality of her most personal decisions.

I will never forget the jolt I felt the first time I looked at a prolife poster and realized that the red “wall” behind the fetus was not a curtain, but the uterus of the woman I was leaving out of the equations.

I still believe there are two lives at stake in a pregnancy, but there is only one person. The woman affected is the only person on heaven or earth who can really say what that pregnancy means. The woman is the context of pregnancy. The pregnancy is not the context of the woman.

I began to notice little things, like the fact that every religious denomination that opposes abortion also believes that women should not be ordained. I began to realize that all the violence surrounding this issue is coming from the prolife side. The only people being bombed and assassinated are pro-choice people, and the violence is being perpetrated in the name of “life.”

Today, I realize that the issue of abortion is complicated and often heartbreaking, but I no longer have any question when it comes to asking who should make the decision. Pregnancy entails two lives, but only one person. That pregnant person not only has the right, but also has the responsibility, to make the decisions that affect the rest of her life and her relationships.

For a woman to decide whether or when to bring another person into the world, is not only right, but a responsibility.

For a woman to refuse to be defined by patriarchy as breeding stock for men, is not only a right but a responsibility.

For women and men to refuse to allow our daughters to be thrust back into the bloody days before abortion was legal and safe, is not only a right, by God, it is a responsibility.

Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 3 reads much like the Declaration of Independence and, if taken seriously, would draw much US foreign policy into question. The article implies that a nation in pursuit of “militants” cannot simply deem bystanders “collateral damage,” nor can it detain them without due process. The article is saying that all persons on earth, not just Americans, have a right to live out their days in freedom and in safety.