Akin Reveals Himself

No matter how much Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee from Missouri, tries to fix what he said on Sunday, it is not going to work.

He came out with one of the most outrageous, insensitive and, frankly, ignorant comments this writer has ever heard, saying that in cases of “legitimate rape,” pregnancy is rare – that “the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down.”

My first thought, when I read it, was, “what is ‘legitimate’ rape? And my second question was, “the female body has a way of shutting what “whole thing” down? The movement of a sperm to an egg? What?

I was astounded; in fact, I still don’t know what to think, the comment was so outrageous. It was so sexist, so insanely sexist and ignorant, that words almost cannot suffice.

Now, the good Congressman from Missouri is trying to clean his statement up. He has said he “misspoke.”

OK. Another question. What does it mean to “misspeak?” The American Heritage Dictionary says that it’s to “pronounce or speak incorrectly.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says it’s to express oneself incorrectly or imperfectly. Akin would probably refer to the latter definition.

But it is doubtful that he “misspoke.” Akin, resting in the ignorance and arrogance that so often accompanies patriarchal thinking, most likely said what he has been thinking and saying in private along with his “good ol’ boys” for some time. Riding on a Tea Party security blanket, it feels like Akin got a little too comfortable, and let some really twisted beliefs out of the chicken coop.

What bothers me most in what he said is the “legitimate rape” comment. For the life of me, I cannot understand what he means. WHEN, exactly, is a rape legitimate? Was he referring to cases where rape can be proven? In legal history, isn’t one of the reasons so few rape accusations were brought to trial, or have been brought to trial, because rape could not be proven…that the victim was often blamed for her own rape?

And, even in cases where rape has not been “proven” in court, hasn’t it been the case, over and over, that a rape had occurred, but the legal system was ill-equipped, or maybe unwilling, to treat rape as a “legitimate” crime?

Hasn’t it been the case that women have been second class citizens for far too long, and have been viewed as objects for the pleasure of men? So, if that is the case, what, pray tell, is a legitimate rape?

And in terms of the female body being able to “shut that whole thing down,” I am beyond perplexed. Anatomically and physiologically, what knowledge does Akin have that I am missing? I was never taught that I should worry about getting pregnant if I were ever raped, because my body would somehow know the difference between a “legitimate” rape and a rape not so legitimate …or, for that matter, a night of consensual sex.

Is Akin’s line of thinking one of the underlying reasons rape has had such difficulty being considered a “legitimate” crime? Should we applaud Akin for bringing out some of the thought-patterns of people in positions of power who help make policy?

Whatever we are to think, this is one thing I do not think – and that is that Akin “misspoke.” That’s like making a racial slur and then saying it’s a joke. Nope, Mr. Akin. You have egg on your face and you just need to own it, disgusting as what you said was.

A candid observation …

A Nation in Denial Exceptional?

I keep thinking about the concept of “American exceptionalism” and the reality of the rampant bigotry, hatred and violence in this nation, and how a nation cannot be “exceptional” if such violence is part of the thumbprint of its existence.

Somewhere, in spite of this nation being “the most religious” of all nations ( I read that somewhere), something has been lost – and that is the Christian and indeed, religious concept that believing in God means that people love each other.

It is just amazing that so much violence is carried out by religious people. Pat Robertson made the claim that recent shooting in Wisconsin at the Sikh Temple there happened because “atheists hate God.” He was making an assumption that the accused shooter, Wade Michael Page, was atheist.

There was no evidence of Page being an atheist as of this writing. In fact, it’s been reported that he was part of a white supremacist group and had predicted a racial war. White supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, have a history of being religious, Christian, to be exact. So Robertsons’s claim seems a bit off…

But here we are again, a white male gone mad, using a gun to express his anger and shooting people at random, in spite of God. Page used a 9 mm gun and was able to purchase ammunition, in spite of having been under observation by the Feds since 2000.

While the tragic shooting in Aurora did not seem to be based on hatred or bigotry, the Sikh Temple shooting seemed to be a part of the tradition of American violence based on bigotry. Page apparently did not like people of the Sikh community, so, he aimed to destroy at least some of them.

American exceptionalism, right?

Stephen Prothero, a professor of history and scholar, wrote an engaging piece on CNN.com about the American propensity for violence based on bigotry. (http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/07/an-american-tradition-of-bigotry/?hpt=hp_t2). The article says it all…

It says it all except my point that a nation cannot be exceptional, if exceptional means that that nation is better than others, if it has such a deep culture of bigotry, and a culture that stubbornly refuses to at least tighten up gun laws so that people who are prone to violence because of their bigotry cannot destroy scores of people at will.

We already imprison more people than any other civilized nation. In an article which appeared in The New Yorker in January of this year, author Adam Gopnik wrote: The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.” ( http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz22tcoTEO)

That our high incarceration rate is based largely on the “war on drugs” according to Michelle Alexander in her book, The New Jim Crow,’ and that many of those incarcerated are African-American men says something about the yet-to-be-healed bigotry against black people in America.

And that these mass murders keep happening, carried out too many times by angry white men, says something about our culture which has seen the problem over and over, but has refused to really deal with it in any meaningful way. We seem more interested in protecting the right of people to own guns than we are interested in finding out why “angry white men” is such a reality in America.

I am afraid that, though I love America, I cannot buy into the “American exceptionalism” mantra. We seem rather to be a culture of denial, and that reality is really eroding at the possibility of us being exceptional at all.

A candid observation …

The Boy Whose Father Never Came

There is an image I cannot get out of my mind.

It is that of a little boy, about 9 years old, sitting outside, waiting for his father. This little boy was a part of a summer program, and the kids were going on a field trip; the boy’s father had promised he would chaperone.

At first, the little boy, who was no angel, was his normal, precocious self, bothering other kids, taxing teachers and denying any wrongdoing if a classmate accused him of some infraction.

But after a while, he slipped outside the school and sat on a rock, alone. I kept my eye on him; he sat there for some time, looking, straining, really, as he looked down the street.

Finally, I went to him and asked him why he was outside. Ignoring my question, he said, “Could I use your phone so I could call my father? He’s supposed to be here. He said he was going with us.”

I called his father’s number …but nobody answered. I told the little boy and he persisted. “Well, call my mother. She’ll be able to call him.” I followed directions and called his mother and gave him the phone. He asked, pleaded, for his mother to call his father, and I guess his mother said that his father wasn’t available.

Big tears welled up in his eyes…he hung his head, and said, before he hung up, “OK. I love you.” I assume his mother said for him to be good…or some such.

There was a quiet moment, and then it was like I could see fire well up in his eyes, with a heat so hot it melted his capacity to feel. The teary eyes were now angry and hurt. This, I could see, had happened before, and not a few times. Part of the reason for his unruly behavior was now apparent to me.

Those who want to have children ought to wait until they are ready to have children before they bring new lives into the world. As I sat and watched that little boy, I thought of how angry children grow up to be angry adults; depressed children grow up to be angry adults. Kids who live with disappointment, persistent and regular disappointment, learn not to hope, not to dream, not to care.

Every child needs love and nurturing. Parents who promise their children anything …and then simply don’t do it…are messing with the lives of innocent souls. Children don’t know how to verbalize their disappointment; more often than not, when a parent is unavailable, either physically, emotionally, or both, are doing damage to little people who just don’t have the wherewithal to cope with what they are left feeling.

Contrast what a child who has love and support can and will do with one like the little boy I’ve described here. Gabby Douglas, who wowed the world with her gymnastic skills, had not only a mother and family that loved and supported her, but had a surrogate family as well, who loved her.

Maybe…no, I am sure, this little boy has something significant that he’s supposed to share with the world as well; perhaps he was born to be yet another Olympics hero…but I doubt we will ever know it, because disappointed, angry children get stuck, first in their own disappointment, and later in a justice system that is often not so just.

Too many children are born and dumped. The men who produced the sperm that fertilized the egg that produced too many children make babies without even thinking about taking care of those babies, and the women who lie down with a man, any man, for sex that produces children are likewise, many of them, not interested in being a parent.

I sometimes wonder if pro-life advocates think about that. There is so much push to protect fetuses and not nearly enough attention paid to the children who are actually born…and dumped.

I don’t mean to be unusually harsh on the parents of these children. It’s likely that the parents are giving what they received, and withholding what they don’t even know exists. They parent as they do because they never experienced love and support and therefore, they cannot conceive giving it…but that doesn’t make what they do fair to the children they produce.

Who knows what the little boy whose father never came has inside him? What gifts that might enhance this world will be squandered and lost because this little boy feels detached and neglected and ignored by his father? Who knows that that’s the reason, or at least part of the reason, that there is so much crime, so many gangs? Little children grow into young people looking for ways to fill the gaps…and sometimes, that never happens.

I think I’ll follow-up with this little boy. I think I’ll try to show him that he is a child special to God, special to the world…and worthy of love. The fact that I cannot get him out of my mind must mean that my seeing him sit on that rock, alone and forlorn, looking for the father who never came, was not a mistake.

A candid observation …

Racism: Ingrained Ignorance

Cover of "War Against the Weak: Eugenics ... — Cover via Amazon

You’d think after a while that disparaging things said about people of African descent, will let up, but it never ends.

At what should have been the pinnacle of her career, Greek triple jumper Voula Papachristou was banished from the Olympic Games on Wednesday after making racist comments and expressing right-wing sentiments on Twitter.

“With so many Africans in Greece, at least the West Nile mosquitoes will have homemade food,” she wrote. (http://sports.yahoo.com/news/olympics–greek-triple-jumper-removed-from-olympic-team-after-making-racist-comments-on-twitter.html)

And, interestingly, even with all of the “marriage is between one man and one woman” drivel, a white church in Mississippi refused to allow a marriage between an African-American couple – one man and one woman – to be performed in the church, a church which, by the way, the couple had been attending for some time, but had not joined.

The unfortunate couple was informed the day before their wedding was to take place that it would not and could not happen, and the pastor of the church, also white, was warned that if he performed the ceremony in the church he would be fired. (http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t2#/video/us/2012/07/27/church-bans-black-couple-wedding.wlbt)
I sometimes wonder what God was thinking when He was creating people. Actually, I wonder what brain patterns God created that makes and has historically made people think and believe that only people of either Nordic or Germanic descent are “worthy” races.

It’s like racism is part of the DNA of some people. In his book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to Create a Master Race,” author Edwin Black describes how the “science” of eugenics was brought to life not by a redneck hillbilly, but by Harvard and Ivy League-bred intellectuals, including Charles Davenport, and was supported by some of the most prestigious names in American history, including Andrew Carnegie.

Interestingly, according to the work funded by the Carnegie Institute, not even the Greek athlete would have been considered a person of “worthy” race; people from the Mediterranean region, from Asia as well as from Africa were considered inferior.

Early proponents of a “master race” theory were adamant about the “taint” being in the blood of non-white, non-Germanic people. Robert Fletcher, who was the president of the Anthropological Society of Washington wrote in 1891 that “germ plasm” ruled, that one criminal would breed another, that the “taint was in the blood,” and that the only way to handle the problem of inferior races amongst the superior was to quarantine them.

American eugenicists hoped to craft a super race, a master race, and so known and respected that, Black writes, Hitler and the Nazis referred to the work of the Americans in their quest to exterminate Jews.

The question that comes to me, over and over again, is “did the tendency of people all over the world to put down, to denigrate, people of African descent originate with American racism and its theories of white supremacy? Would not only America but the world be less racist had not America taken the reins of racism and pushed a theory of the validity of white supremacy?

Because the roots of racism are so deep, it is not surprising that the negative remarks, the negative opinions and misconceptions, and the outright racist slurs that people so blithely utter and throw around is not surprising, but it sure gets boring and bothersome to keep on having to face that kind of music, just because of where one’s ancestors came from.

I am not sorry Voula Papachristou doesn’t get to compete in the games she worked to get to her whole life. Her skin color did not give her license to write such an insensitive thing on Twitter. Some will scoff and say, “get over it. It was a joke.”

To her, maybe, and her friends. But the people who make disparaging comments about people of African descent, who draw lewd cartoons and write and disseminate crude racially charged emails are not comedians. They are victims of a sick way of thinking…spawned, perhaps, by ancestors who were determined to create a master race.

Those same ancestors spawned people who will say that marriage is between one man and one woman, with a “gentleman’s agreement” that that holds ONLY if the man and woman are white. Their being the progeny of brain sick ancestors, fused with religious dribble, makes them think the way they think is the way God thinks.

Isn’t that …interesting? They are not harbingers of truth or of exciting scientific discovery.

They are the victims of ingrained ignorance.

A candid observation …

Sometimes, Prayer is Not Enough

I am a pastor. I believe in God with all my heart. But sometimes, prayer is not enough.

It COULD be enough, I think, if people were fervent prayers as a matter of course. But we are not. We as a people are more “situational” prayers, or we pray in times of crisis. That kind of prayer is helpful, but not effective when a task of mammoth proportions, perhaps Biblical proportions, lurks before us.

This latest tragedy – the shooting and killing of innocent people who were at a movie – lifts up at least two issues that politicians will more likely fight over than treat as life-changing issues, which, ignored, are contributing angst and danger to our country.

Those two issues are gun control and mental health. With both issues, there is a Goliath which require prayers first, certainly, and then, action, and to most people, those two issues are too big, will take too much energy, to fight. Goliath is just too big.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg hit at Goliath yesterday when he said that politicians, first and foremost at this point, President Obama and the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, ought to speak out for gun control. Nearly everyone is enraged that the suspect in the Colorado theater incident, James Holmes, was able to buy so many guns and nearly 6000 rounds of ammunition legally.

I am reminded that not everything that legal is right. Everything the Nazis did to the Jews, including murdering them, was legal…but it was not right.

Certainly, our politicians cannot keep quiet on the fact that the obsession by some to protect Second Amendment rights at the expense of the lives of innocent American citizens. Opponents of gun control say that guns are not bad; people are. I counter that and say that of course, guns are not bad, but not everyone who buys guns, or does bad things with guns, are not bad. Many, many times, they are sick.

But to come out for gun control in this presidential election year would be like facing Goliath. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is one of the most powerful lobby groups in this country. If the NRA is not already pouring money into either camp, to speak out for tougher gun control would be like committing political suicide.

But sometimes, politicians ought to show America that they are more interested in pushing for the rights and protection of the American people than in being elected. Sometimes, we ought to see that they are willing to put politics down, pick up a stone, and confront a cowering, arrogant Goliath.

The second Goliath which this incident brings to the surface is mental illness. Nobody wants to talk about it or deal with it. I am convinced that the shooter in yesterday’s incident is not bad, but he is certainly sick – and I am sure he has been sick for a long time.

To lift up the fact that funds need to be spent on researching and treating mental illness will bring out cries of “no more spending!” I guess spending on mental health would be spending on yet another “entitlement,” and that is not something the President wants to get his opponents using against him. I don’t think Mitt Romney would dare bring the subject up.

And yet, in the masses of American people that both candidates are appealing to for votes, there are scores of people who are mentally ill. Much mental illness begins in childhood; in urban schools, I am convinced that many children labeled as “bad” are in fact mentally ill, and mentally ill children, whether they are from the ghetto or the suburbs, grow up to be mentally ill adults. There needs to be regular screening – and treatment – for mental illness. AND, we as a nation ought to stop being so ashamed of it. Mental illness is as prevalent as is diabetes or hypertension. Why are we so afraid of it?

What we have in the Aurora, Colorado incident, I think, a mentally ill or emotionally troubled young man who was free to buy all the guns and ammunition he wanted, legally. He knew what he was going to do, but that does not preclude that his connection to reality is off-balance.

What does all this say about evil? Well of course there is evil in the world, and prayers ought to name the evil or evils in earnest. But after the praying, those who prayed are really mandated to get off their knees and confront the Goliath, away from the comfort and security of a sanctuary or a private prayer space. We are called to pick up our stones, and walk toward the Goliath that laughs at the very thought of being confronted.

Sometimes, prayer is not enough, like now. Sometimes, prayer needs to be followed by a team of people moved to action by their prayers, including and led by politicians who are seeking election or re-election. Who will be the David in this situation, a little boy in the Bible who declared that God had protected him when a lion or bear came to carry off sheep he was tending. Little David said, “I went after it… Your servant went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine. (1 Sam. 21: 34-37)

If we pray, we have to confess our faith in God. We pray not only for comfort, but for the strength to confront the Goliaths all around us.

At least 12 people in Colorado who were alive on Thursday and who are now gone, need that from us.

A candid observation …