alias Bruce.

So How Are Your Holidays?

What I love about holidays is that they can be rituals for celebrating the things that really matter to us. The rituals can be handed down or they can be ours to make, and of course they can celebrate anything: birth, religion, kin, love, sacrifice, the life of someone who has died, giving gifts, paying tribute, the fiery rush of igniting starry little flash-rockets in your back yard in July.

What I don't love about holidays is what I think a lot of us could do without: the pressure to feel good and to act happy when we are not, and when in fact holidays can bring up the very stuff about which we are saddest. And then there is the hard fact of the way some holidays plaster smiles and giddy anthems over human outrages: brutal conquest, land grabs, genocide, bloody crusades for assorted Gods, broken treaties, store stampedes in pursuit of plastic junk.

But to me that is no excuse for Grinchdom. For me, part of a soul's job is to rip the wrapping from a gift to receive core truths -- instead of allowing someone else's packaging to rule what you receive and what you do with it. Even though I do not believe Jesus was the son of God, I celebrate the qualities of Christmas that have to do with generosity and family and love. Even though I will fight all of my life against the legacy of the theft and ruin of this land by lying, genocidal self-deluders, I celebrate the aspects of Thanksgiving that provide a ritual in my extended family for our feasting on shared ancestry and crazy fun and caring toward others and lots and lots of corn pudding. I recently traded emails with a friend who has seen some well-meaning people strip their lives of most holidays for the sake of alleged political beliefs, and we both agreed that such single-minded excavation strikes us as fruitless and joyless.

So I hope that this season, whatever it means for you, brings you baskets of fruit and big handfuls of joy alongside whatever honest sadness comes up. And I hope that the holidays help to fire you up for making the world better -- by warming the parts of you that feel what is good and right.

The Thrill of Diversity.

In the "change is good" department, here is a story a white friend of mine recently told me.

Her adolescent daughter had gone, with a black friend, to a service at a big, venerable black church led by a well-known pastor. My friend, comparing this with her own childhood, envied her daughter's having this kind of experience at a young age -- being likely the only white person in a large, impassioned black congregation at a historic church -- and when her daughter came home Mom sought out her reaction. How did her daughter like the service, she wanted to know? To quote my friend, her daughter's answers went like this:

"It was really boring," she said. "The pastor kept saying the same thing over and over. But the ladies had great hats."

"Were you the only white kid there?"

"Yep."

"What was that like?"

"It was OK."

"Was it more boring or less boring than Maura's Bat Mitzvah?"

"About the same. But it was shorter, so that was better."

Concluded her Mom to me: "I guess I wanted more. And then I thought better of it. It was just an ordinary Sunday. And then she went off and did her homework."

Ordinary. That can be a good thing.

The Arizona Sweat Lodge.

The three deaths and many injuries from the October 8 sweat lodge at a $9,000-per-head Arizona spiritual retreat are tragic evidence (as if we needed more) that misusing a tradition this powerful is a terrible and dangerous game.

I'll leave it to people who know more to say more. There are many who feel that the sweat lodge ceremony, which goes back thousands of years on this continent and others, should never be in the hands of cultural middlemen in the first place. On the other hand, if we forbade an  American Indian from becoming a Catholic priest and taking confession from Native American parishioners, what would that say? It is, of course, not a level playing field: on the cultural theft scoreboard, the numbers are something like American Settlers 200, Native Americans 2. All I'll say is that I have been in many a sweat lodge, all led with sufficient respect and grounding in the tradition to be carried out reverently and safely. This ceremony, and what happens to body and spirit in the searing steam and pitch blackness of the lodge ritual, is nothing to mess with.

If a survivor's account of the fateful Arizona lodge is true, and self-help icon and lodge leader James Arthur Ray put more than 50 modern consumers through eight 15-to-20-minute sweat rounds covering a total of two hours -- all after five days of fasting and sleep deprivation -- Ray needs to be held accountable for negligent homicide. That kind of package-tour contempt for the tradition and for his paying customers is so reckless as to take the breath away.

In the wake of the tragedy, CNN posted an excellent background piece about the history, meaning, and methods of sweat lodge ceremonies -- and they didn't just quote white people. Read it if you'd like more of a sense of what this ancient ritual is for, how it is intended to function, and the huge burden of responsibility on the ceremony leader to care for those who enter the lodge.

Clearly, Ray didn't get the part about respect and care. It's looking as if he had no business even being in a position to.

Argue No More?

A friend told me a couple of days ago that she avoids political blogs because most of them are less about dialogue than about spitfire opinion. She is right, of course; most political blogs are online opinion columns. Of those I read (the "Blogs and Friends" roster at left will give you an idea), my favorites are those where the writers think hard about issues and where readers and commenters do as well, whether there is agreement or not.

I think my own trajectory about discourse has moved, over the past 10 years or so, more and more toward trying to muster the energy of people of good will toward the pursuit of progressive (generally leftward) social change and away from the notion of more purely even-handed exchange, which is where I think I was when my first book, the original Race Manners, came out in 1999. I guess, like a lot of civil rights and racial justice advocates, I reached a point where I felt my energy was better used in service of those ready to carry out actual social change than in trying to pull in those who are invested in resisting it. To be blunt about it, I think history gives us pretty vivid evidence (abolitionism, women's suffrage, black and gay civil rights) that there is generally a majority that stands around watching while a committed minority doggedly pursues change until it is achieved.

Anyway, just after I had this conversation about blogs and discourse, I received an email from my friend Rob Levy pointing me toward an October 15 manifesto by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a fiercely liberal church reformer and author of, among other works, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Spong's new manifesto, "The Time Has Come!", is a scathing critique of Christian homophopia, and it basically argues that the time has passed for debating, engaging or even responding to the Christian Right on issues of gay rights, because those rights are on an inevitable path toward victory and there is no longer any moral, religious or political argument to be had.

Spong declares, in part, that:

 "...it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. "Don't ask, don't tell" will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women?"

And he goes on to say:

"The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. ...I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the "Flat Earth Society" either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union."

I challenge the idea that the battle is won, but I also get it that Spong is speaking of the engine of spirit more than the machinery of politics. I suspect he knows very well that there are many more lawsuits yet to be filed, more gay family tragedies and triumphs to be played out, more wicked voter propositions to be fought, more insults and awful injuries to be endured. But at the heart of it, Spong is telling advocates of gay rights that it is now time to act victorious and to stop stooping to bicker with bigots who have already lost to the inertia of spiritual advancement. History has already spoken on this issue, Spong is saying, and it is time for progressives to act like it.

We could apply this idea to other fronts on which it has become an article of faith for progressives to exhaustively rebut the hard right: abortion rights, the socially supportive role of government, racial justice. What if we were to confidently wield the moral triumph of these ideas instead of yelling about them on Hardball or Crossfire? What would the progressive movement look like if we steadily affirmed the inevitability of meaningful reform of health care and campaign financing? How much time did the black civil rights movement spend debating with the sworn enemies of human rights? How much of their energy did Cuban visionaries of economic equality devote to shouting matches with the Batista regime and United Fruit Company?

I'm simply asking questions here. But I think Spong is trying to tell us something. Maybe argument isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Hello from St. Augustine.

Hello from St. Augustine, Florida, where I am giving two talks at St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, which is determinedly rebuilding itself. More about that in a minute.

St. Augustine is the oldest European-settled city in the United States, and it burned its way into the national civil rights movement in 1964 when nonviolent anti-discrimination protests led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. met violent and inflammatory responses. King and a body of black and white organizers and protesters joined existing anti-discrimination efforts in St. Augustine, which had gained steam in 1963. In the summer of 1964 the lid blew off. When nonviolent black demonstrators trying to desegregate beaches were attacked by white mobs, white police unenergetically moved to intervene. When demonstrators jumped into the pool of the segregated Monson Motor Lodge to protest its no-blacks policy, Monson manager James Brock poured gallons of highly corrosive muriatic acid into the pool to try to force them out (photo above). Police then forcibly removed and arrested the protesters. When marchers led by then-King-lieutenant Andrew Young attempted to cross downtown King Street (the name is no relation to Rev. King, for whom the city's Martin Luther King Avenue was later named, which ironically intersects King Street), Young was savagely beaten by white toughs at each successive attempt to cross the street until his will overcame theirs and they finally backed out of his way.

The brutal scenes from St. Augustine, especially the photos of Brock pouring acid into a pool filled with protesters, shook the world. Events there so mortified President Lyndon B. Johnson (on a telephone tape he can be heard worrying that the St. Augustine debacle might completely derail the policy credibility of his Administration) that it is broadly believed to have helped pass the LBJ-supported Civil Rights Act of 1964. For more about this story, including vivid footage of the events I have described, see the documentary film Dare Not Walk Alone.

St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, for its part, was founded in the 1890s as a place of worship for blacks who were barred from white Episcopalian churches. It is the oldest surviving church building in St. Augustine's Lincolnville neighborhood, an old and traditionally black section in this still-segregated city. Recently, the bulk of the St. Cyprian's congregation left to join a non-Episcopalian church as a protest against Episcopalianism's increasing embrace of gay rights. (You read correctly: most of a predominantly-black congregation picked up their marbles and left rather than acknowledge the rights of another historically oppressed minority, gays. Bigotry comes in all colors.) The souls who stayed on, led by new St. Cyprian's vicar Ted Voorhees, are building a congregation open to all. I came here to speak, at their invitation, in support of their inclusiveness; I have written before about the need for black progressives to speak out against black anti-gay bigotry, and I also support St. Cyprian's entire mission of community service. What better place to be on a weekend when we celebrate King's birthday and we prepare to inaugurate the nation's first black president? It was at another church led by Ted Voorhees, in fact, St. Mark's Episcopal in Toledo, Ohio, that I spoke on behalf of racial truth and fairness in 2003. Ted took over as vicar at St. Cyprian's only two months ago, so recently, in fact, that the church's website does not yet reflect the change. He and his wife, writer Caren Goldman, are the kinds of leaders that modern organized religion needs more of.

150 Palin Comments Later...

As I said in my comment a few hours after my post: Looks as if I've struck a nerve.

The Palin debacle is a political issue because the hard-right "Christian" agenda has made it so: through its decades-long campaign to legislate reproductive behavior (e.g., barring a women's right to choose whether to bear a child, limiting teenagers' access to factual sexual information, pushing abstinence-only education, withholding information about condoms and safe sex, etc.). When a candidate makes personal reproductive behavior a public political issue to further their own ambitions, they make themselves vulnerable to the weapon of their own politics. This is what is so sad about the Palin situation. Not only has Sarah Palin hoisted herself on her own petard -- she has hoisted her daughter.

I'd be happy as a lark if the Republican Party (and the long line of GOP opportunists, leading up to McCain and Palin, who have noisily horned in on Americans' personal sexual rights as a way of hiding their party's destructive corporate agenda and their own threadbare qualifications for office) would truly keep their noses out of voters' bedrooms and out of women's reproductive choices. I surely do wish the Republicans would let these issues remain private.

Maybe someday they will.

Palin: The Pregnancy.

Bristol Palin (far right), the 17-year-old daughter of proudly fundamentalist McCain vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin, is pregnant.

Yes, the irony is poetic, and the GOP -- and the goose-stepping hard-right "Christian" contingent with whom an anchorless McCain campaign is lately currying favor -- deserve every bit of the crusted egg they are now scraping from their faces. Puritan-based moral fascism ("Thou shalt fear and forbid natural human pleasures") has never worked as a godly path for grownups, and it sure as hell doesn't work in raising kids. On a purely political level, watching the McCain Straight Talk Express lurch into the ditch on this one is flat-out comeuppance. As is watching the McCain campaign twist its tongue into a public explanation of why this privileged pregnant Alaska white girl and her family deserve our compassionate support (which they surely do) while a single knocked-up West Baltimore black girl and her kin remain, presumably, wanton and morally dysfunctional.

But it is Bristol and her child who will pay the price for these GOP moral gymnastics. Being a hormonally-active 17-year-old raised with a sexually neurotic version of "Christianity" that nurtures an outsized craving for forbidden bodily pleasures is bad enough. But getting pregnant at that age in the fishbowl of an evangelically "Christian" political family image, wherein the typical Washington solution of a quiet abortion is impossible, is a trap bordering on the Kafkaesque. This 17-year-old girl, who the McCain campaign confidently informs us will marry the father (doesn't that make you feel better?), has been effectively triangulated into bearing a child too early, and marrying far too soon, by her family's chosen political ambitions and their accompanying moral hypocrisies. According to CNN, the campaign was forced to announce the pregnancy because of rumors that mom Sarah Palin's recently-born child was secretly Bristol's baby. Sure, Bristol and her child will have every advantage that the Baltimore black girl and her baby won't. But the statistics on marrying with child at age 17 aren't pretty. This a girl's life, in fact two children's lives when you include the baby, that we're talking about here.

Chalk up another moral accomplishment for the fundamentalist right.

Sarah Palin?

Give John McCain points, at least, for one of Barack Obama's vaunted qualities -- audacity -- in his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his VP running mate, even if McCain's version of audacity inspires more of a blinking "huh?" than a clear-eyed vision of hope.

There is such an air of dopiness -- on both the Republican and Democratic sides -- with this Palin business that it seems to me the thing to do right now is to simply tick off the things we know:

- The Palin gambit is a transparent McCain grab at Hillary Clinton's disillusioned women Democrats and the "Christian" far right's pissed-off Jesus Taliban fundamentalists. McCain's people are hoping that Clinton's most embittered supporters will allow their rage at the DNC to trump their actual politics, and that recently-neglected hard-right evangelicals will (as they did with W) betray their own political and economic interests in favor of their vengeful and bigoted impulses about faith, abortion, and gays. I have to say, with no malice meant, that if Hillary supporters and "Christian" righties fall for this stunt and help to elect a McCain Administration that will steamroll women's reproductive rights and working people's power and influence, they will deserve exactly what they get.

- Palin's beauty-queen history and good looks are irrelevant. Plenty is being derisively made of this former Miss Alaska contestant's babe-ishness. The left should resist taking this tack, both because it's unfair and because it's a loser. Whatever we think of the meat-rack beauty pageant mentality and of white-haired presidential candidates who dump their wives for younger blondes and later allegedly cheat with even younger ones, being a former beauty queen does not disqualify Palin from either intelligence (she appears to have plenty) or the ability to serve in high public office. (Did self-indulgent good looks compromise JFK's leadership ability, or would they compromise Jane Fonda's should she choose to run?) Mocking Palin for looking good in paparazzi shots puts the left exactly where the right wants us to be: in the role of harrumphing prudes whose biases insult women's identities and choices.

- The sorry quality of Palin's political experience and performance IS relevant. C'mon, people: being a grassroots community organizer, political actor, and new United States senator from Chicago is levels of magnitude above being two-term mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population: 9,000) and governor of a state with one-fourth the population of Brooklyn. Moreover, Palin is no "reformer," despite the RNC's attempted spin. She is as fervent as any oil lobbyist in her crowing for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (a cause heretofore abandoned by even most Republicans) as well as in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. She sued the Bush Administration to weaken protection of polar bears in order to assist oil drilling. She thinks humans have not caused global warming. She favors teaching creationism in public schools. She wants to outlaw a woman's legal right to choose whether to have an abortion. Her closest act to public-interest advocacy has been twisting the arm of Alaska's oil industry to cough up higher taxes in exchange for the favor of her oil-friendly policies. I have been to Alaska three times, and trust me when I tell you that this state's political leadership has a long tradition of whoring itself out for oil money, some of it, unbelievably, paid in the form of checks made out individually to the state's citizens. Palin is true to this crooked tradition.

- McCain is gambling big on Palin because he is running out of chips. He is essentially bankrupt on the big issues. Even Republican strategists admit that on the central issues of this election -- the economy, Iraq, health care -- McCain is out of sync with most voters. Two remaining cards he can play -- both risky -- are 1.) trying to sucker Clinton's female backers into signing on with a woman salesperson for regressive GOP policies and 2.) sucking up to the hard right, whose anger he has been ducking throughout the campaign. The former gambit is so transparently phony as to risk being laughed out of the voting booth; the latter carries the risk of alienating the majority of voters who have not surrendered their brains and their morals to some charlatan's pulp-fiction version of Jesus.

But if you're on the wrong side of the popular issues and you've got a dormant cadre of right-wingers dying to leap at any raw meat you toss them, whatareyougonnado?

Keep the Faith.

ROCHESTER, NY - Here in my chilly hometown (temperature: 8 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday morning), I gave three sermons at Spiritus Christi Catholic Church on January 19 and 20, the weekend of Rev. Martin Luther King's Birthday. I am not Catholic or even a Christian, although I was raised Protestant. But Spiritus Christi, with a congregation of well over 1,000, is a church that makes the word "faith" a call to arms for everything a person of progressive conscience wishes organized religion to be.

For the entire astonishing story of how Spiritus Christi's pastors and parishioners chose the legacy of a man named Jesus over the regressive dogma (my words, not the church's) of the Diocesan and Vatican leadership, read the Wikipedia writeup. But the gist of it is that this church, despite excommunication by both the local Diocese and Rome, embraced moral principle instead of political expediency and opened its altar to women, gave blessing to gay unions, and generally moved the faith toward the democratic serving of souls and away from the autocracy of the White Catholic (publicly) Heterosexual Men's Club. Led by longtime pastor Father Jim Callan, who led Spiritus Christi's very public breakaway from Corpus Christi Church 10 years ago, the church has since ordained two women priests, in violation of paleolithic church policy that forbids women a prominent place at the altar. Rev. Mary Ramerman (pictured above) and Rev. Denise Donato now co-lead Spiritus Christi with Callan. The whole saga drives some old-school Catholics out of their skulls. It also provides dramatic proof that in the Catholic church, as in any historically oppressive institution, the hope for enlightened growth resides in the convictions of parishioners and pastors and not in the moribund ways of the robed rulers at the top.

As for my giving the three homilies -- a "homily" is a Catholic sermon -- that weekend, I suppose I have now joined a burgeoning list of official heretics, since the Vatican forbids the delivery of homilies by laity and I was only the first of a number of lay speakers who will ascend Spiritus Christi's altar this year. I spoke on themes of being doggedly true to Jesus' legacy of social justice, and what I see as the need for parishioners of conscience to loudly and publicly reclaim the meaning of faith from the clutches of the barking fundamentalist mobs who have succeeded in passing off their bigoted drivel as "Christianity" in the public mind.

The Pope has not yet called me to complain. But I still hold out hope.

Meanwhile, Spiritus Christi goes about its daily good works: running a mental health center and a prison outreach program, pushing social and economic issues, supporting the rights of gays, women, and all others, and generally acting in a godly manner.

Whether you are Christian or not, I'd say your visiting their web site and sending them a check or moral support will earn you, at the very least, a smile from upstairs.

The Spirit of the Season.

"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
                                                                                         Mahatma Gandhi