Ring! Salt Lake Speaking….

Well, you’ll be happy to know that I’m definitely having a better Monday morning than are 12 old men in—presumably—Utah*.

These guys have a problem: the world they knew went away somewhere and came back entirely different. Because, in the past, it was easy: you kept everybody busy and isolated. So if you were in small towns in the American west, you devoted forty to sixty hours to making the desert bloom—which they did—and twenty or thirty hours going to church. That didn’t leave too much time for anything else but sleep. Oh, and since everybody else around you was doing the same thing, there was no possibility of dissent.

So that meant that all of the rest of us could—in spare moments—chuckle snidely at the more preposterous claims. Who can forget Mark Twain, one of the earliest and certainly one of the best critics, on the Book of Mormon?

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason. 

So all of us could sit around and snigger when every other institution in the States had to confront its own racism throughout the sixties and seventies, but the Mormons? Still barring blacks from the priesthood, which is generally given to every male child at age 12, until 1978. And then, as Wikipedia tells us, there came a little problem named Brazil, since it was no problem telling the women from the men. But the blacks from the whites? Right—so Spencer W. Kimball, the leader of the church, went off to his study, and guess what! There God was—in all his white maleness—dishing up a revelation! Wow—all in a day’s work!

But the 70s must seem like the most halcyon of days, since the most potent threat were quaint little things like newspapers and magazines, as well as books, of course. But all of that was easy enough, since it was easy to brand any criticism as that ol’ debil, the Eastern liberal intelligentsia. Oh, and do you think a librarian in Provo, Utah, is going to be putting seditious books on her shelves? Not likely.

So change, when it came, arrived as the gentlest of mists, not as a gale. And then?

Someone invented the Internet.

Which one person described as the gateway drug out of Mormonism, ‘cause how are you going to keep them down on the farm, once they’ve clicked on Google? And there’s another problem: since all the rest of us can fritter away the time with vices like drinking and smoking, the Mormons? They’re grimly, and soberly, sitting in front of their computers, writing blogs.

Yes—it seems that the Mormons are writing blogs to such an extent that a term had to be invented: the bloggernacle. Right, my computer doesn’t know it—nor will I teach it—but Wikipedia does:

The Mormon blogosphere (often referred to as the Bloggernacle) is a segment of the blogosphere focused on Mormon issues.[1] The term "Bloggernacle" was coined by individuals within the LDS blogging community as a play on the name of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; however, not all LDS-themed bloggers like or use the name Bloggernacle, or even consider their blog to be part of it. Furthermore, not all bloggers within the Mormon blogosphere are Mormons themselves.

So on 17 March 2013, Kate Kelly, a lawyer and devout Mormon—she did her year of missionary service in Barcelona, and why does that feel ever so slightly bogus?—created a website, ordainwomen.org.

Hmmm—let’s see: who was it that said there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come?

Answer—Victor Hugo….

Astonishing, really, how all the world’s media has followed this blog’s lead in championing this story! Not just people like me, but little guys like The New York Times, and Yahoo, and even way down south in Australia—anywhere, in fact, where they have Mormons (everywhere) and women (also everywhere). So yesterday, we were all sitting around scratching the collective head: some of us at home, but 200 people or so with Kelly in a vigil in Salt Lake City. Oh, and there were vigils in seventeen other countries—eighteen, if we count little Marc down here in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And why were we all vigiling?

OK—return to your seats, fasten your seat belts and lock your tray tables onto the seat in front of you: it turns out that ordainwomen.org advocates for the—deep breath, here—ordination of women! And that, to the twelve “apostles” of the Mormon Church, is apostasy, another word for which is heresy. So Kelly’s local leaders called her in for a trial yesterday.

Except not—since Kelly is now living in Utah, and had requested that the church transfer her records there.  Here’s what Kelly wrote in the first paragraph of her letter:

I beg of you not to impose any form of discipline during the trial you will hold on Sunday. I also request that you do the right thing and revoke the “informal probation” that was placed upon me and remove the “move restriction” placed on my records so that I can participate in the ward where I currently reside. Please reconsider this punitive process and allow me to continue to worship in peace.

In theory—and Salt Lake is playing this trumpet as loud as Gabriel ever did—discipline is entirely in local hands, and the central hands have nothing, nothing, to do with it.  But it is interesting that the big boys from Salt Lake had visited Kelly’s stake—the words blogging teaches you!—and then, boom! Oh, and the same thing happened to another blogger, John Dehlin. Stay tuned—his trial is next Sunday….

Well, if the French word for a bluffer is bluffeur, am I—on this issue—a scoffeur?  Because of course I know what has to be done. Tom Monson, the current president, needs to be sent to his room, in order to be served up God’s most recent revelation: the Internet, and especially Google, is the work of Satan himself, sent to snare the faithful and lead them to perdition!

Easy for me to laugh—but in one sentence, which of course I can’t find now, Kelly pleads not to be excommunicated and deprived of spending the rest of eternity without her family. Because that, you see, is what she / they / if-not-I believe. When she dies, she will—if in good standing with the church—spend all eternity with her loved ones. If not, not.

The church asked her to take down the site and sit down and be a good girl, and in her letter she makes it clear: no dice. So the trial was yesterday, and then the three judges announced—they were stumped! So they fired off an email—guys, is an electronic transmission an appropriate media to announce loss of eternal life? Shouldn’t the local bishop drop by to break the bad news? Right—the judges announced that they would sleep prayerfully on the matter, and let Kelly know in a day or two.

Why do I think there are a lot of calls to and from Salt Lake this morning?

---------------------------------

*Ever faithful to my bloggerly vocation, I calculated the total years of the twelve, and guess what? It’s 940, or almost halfway back to Jesus himself! Oh, and the average age is 78.3….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_of_the_Twelve_Apostles_%28LDS_Church%29

Two Bloggers and Twelve Old Men

OK—here’s what I hadn’t considered. First of all, the people are really nice: friendly, cheerful, and definitely hard working. Second of all, the church keeps you busy, going from meeting to prayer groups to God-knows-what-all. Remember that they had organized everybody so much that they had to declare a special night for everyone just to stay home? Also, the church takes over the smallest details of your life—even down to that famous underwear….

You’ll know by now that I’m talking about the Mormon Church, which fought like Tasmanian devils against marriage equality in California, then backed off and pretended to get more inclusive when Mitt Romney was running for president, and which now is accusing two of its members of—ah, the horror of it all!—apostasy.

Well, it’s a highly charged word in Mormon circles, since the Mormons, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, believe in the Great Apostasy. You’ll want to know: it’s the belief that everybody and every religion was wrong from the death of Jesus to the birth of their own church.

So what have the two Mormons done to get this label thrust on them? Well, John Dehlin advocates for the rights of LGBT people within the church. Kate Kelly set up a group that advocates for the ordination of women, as well as for increasing the role of women in the church.

Both have gotten letters from their local bishops, advising them that they will be tried and face either disfellowship or excommunication. Disfellowship may take various forms, but excommunication is dire indeed: you are erased from the church as if you had never existed. And though the church doesn’t officially practice shunning, your social calendar will definitely be much lighter. Oh, and all those business contacts? You might be leaving a lot of voice mails, and getting fewer returned calls.

And so for these two, excommunication is a major, and perhaps terrifying, possibility. Consider what one writer had to say:

Mormonism is an "all or nothing" commitment, Rosen explains. "If Pandora's box is opened regarding questioning one policy or mandate, it leads to more, because it's all connected. It's not like other religions, where you can accept some parts and reject other parts. You have to accept the whole kit and caboodle. You have to accept every [church-mandated] 'calling.' You have to go to every three-hour church meeting. If I didn't go [to synagogue] for six months, the rabbi would be like, 'I am so happy to see you.' You can't do that as a Mormon."

Ready for the next paragraph?

Utah has the highest rate of clinical depression out of any state in the country, and the seventh highest suicide rate, according to a report by Thomson Healthcare. Rosen believes the LDS stance on homosexuality contributes to these statistics. One third of her patients are homosexuals who grew up LDS, and many of them were kicked out of their homes.

Well, it’s not surprising that Utah has the highest rate of depression, since wouldn’t you be depressed, attending up to thirty hours of church activities weekly, and having to smile all the time?

Right—that’s unfair, and especially wrong since Dehlin, who is straight, has taken a big risk for those of us who are LGBT. Besides his website Mormon Stories, he also has another site advocating gay marriage. And he’s finishing up his doctorate in counseling at Utah State University—not a particularly easy time to be butting the twelve elderly white male heads that run the church. But you have to admire a guy who can write, as he did in his website:

I believe in many of the central, non-distinctive moral teachings within Mormonism (e.g., love, kindness, charity, forgiveness, faith, hope), but either have serious doubts about, or no longer believe many of the fundamental LDS church truth claims (e.g., anthropomorphic God, “one true church with exclusive authority,” that the current LDS church prophet receives privileged communications from God, that The Book of Mormon and The Book of Abraham are translations, polygamy, racist teachings in the Book of Mormon, that ordinances are required for salvation, proxy work for the dead).

So on 7 June 2014, Dehlin got the letter that he must have been dreading. And the following day, Kelly got the letter as well. In her case, the trial will be this Sunday. In Dehlin’s case, it will be 29 June 14.

And while neither one could be criticized for losing some sleep over the matter, Kelly’s case seems to be particularly acute. Consider, for example, that she got a whole group of women together and tried to enter a male-only meeting on the priesthood at the tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Here are her heartbreaking words:

I suppose I didn’t realize until I was at the door and physically barred from entering the Tabernacle just how hopeful I was that we would indeed get in. I told the man who blocked us from entering, “I understand that all men, even men who are not members of the church and have no investment in Mormonism are permitted to attend. I am a returned missionary and a faithful Mormon woman and I would like to listen to the prophet in person.”

He simply said, “this session is actually for men only.”

And as difficult it is to read, it’s infinitely more painful to see the clip below.

I’ll never know—which would have been better, to be (as I am) a non-believer, or to grow up in some faith, have it enrich my life, rage against it when I came out, and then, perhaps, make my peace with it? What I do know is that believing in the church, wanting to be in the church, and then being expelled would be infinitely painful, especially in Utah.

And while I very much hope that these two courageous souls can prevail…

…I’m not putting money on it.

Doña Georgina Bids Farewell

Right, so I had some really important things to say about the situation in the Muslim world, since I had spent the weekend busily figuring out what was wrong with the 1.2 or 1.4—don’t remember and don’t care—billion people who practice the religion.

And what’s wrong, you ask? Well, according to the Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji, the problem with Islam is the Muslims, who…

…but wait, let Manji speak for herself, since—as someone once said of Rachel Maddow—she couldn’t look stupid if she spend a month trying. Click on the clip below. Oh, and by the way, better have the fire extinguisher handy, ‘cause those sparks really fly….

Right, then I had to worry about “Islam—A Religion of Peace or Violence?.” So there Christopher Hitchens was—do I have to tell what side he was taking?—butting heads with Tariq Ramadan at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. The problem? Hitchens I understood completely, but Ramadan? Well, I guess you gotta be religious to get it….

So that meant that I had to watch a documentary about Islam, during which I learned that the only reason we have this thing is that Mohammed spent 22 years going into trances, much of the time alone in a cave. He then came down and dictated the whole thing to his buddies, all illiterate, so what did they do? They memorized it, and then, a couple decades after the death of Mohammed, the third Caliph—or somebody or other—decided it should be written down. So there was a great to-do, and versions were checked against each other, and there had to be two eyewitnesses, and now we have the Koran, WHICH IS THE ABSOLUTE AND FINAL WORD OF GOD. See?

In fact, so immersed was I in the Muslim world that I had gone into the website of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), since Manji had mentioned that the imams, contrary to what one sheik averred, had not been quick to denounce the September 11 attacks: they had to be pressured into it. And since the sheik, Ibrahim Mogra, was connected to the MCB, it was definitely time to look into that. Oh, and the MCB describes itself thus, on its website:

The Muslim Council of Britain is one of the UK's largest and most diverse Muslim umbrella organisation with over 500 affiliated national, regional and local organisations, mosques, charities and schools.   

There is, of course, nothing about the Nigerian group Boko Haram, which abducted close to three hundred schoolgirls over a month ago. But I did find this ringing denunciation, which all of you out there should take to heart:

The Muslim Council of Britain condemns in the strongest terms the act of violating a place of worship by the recently formed extreme far right, anti-Muslim group, Britain First. The most recent incident occurred at midday yesterday, where the emboldened action by three middle aged men and woman entered one of the largest Islamic institutions in the country, wearing their shoes and trampling on prayer surfaces to carry out their misguided propaganda. This has left many members of the community angered and disappointed with the inability of the government and the authorities to curtail this type of thuggish behaviour.

Guys? You really shouldn’t make it so easy….

OK—it’s clear, I realized, that these girls are never going to see their families again, and why not? Because the Muslim world either doesn’t want to or is too craven to speak up.

OK—so what about men? What would happen if all of the world’s men—except for the 1.2-billion-divided-by-two Muslims—stood up and said that real men didn’t do this to their daughters, their wives, or their mothers.

Well, when the going gets tough, Marc makes a tee shirt, so here it is:

Pretty cool, hunh? Wow, that would put the fear of Allah into those bastards!

So I was scratching a hole quite deeply into my head thinking about all this, when Mr. Fernández called, proposing a trip to the beach. And I realized: a trip to the beach would do more for me than I could do for the 300 schoolgirls, or even the 1.2 billion Muslims. So off we went.

And I’ve woken up, today, to the startling news that our local power company didn’t have the money, last Friday, to buy fuel to make electricity? Why? Because the Justice Department raided the purchasing department on Friday, seizing records and looking for irregularities. And then the banks got nervous and revoked the line of credit. So that meant that they had to scamper around and transfer 60 million bucks to pay off the debt. Oh, and here’s more interesting news:

“Claro que no les podemos pagar a los suplidores, si entre el gobierno y las corporaciones públicas nos debe casi $300 millones”, manifestó el ambientalista. “La misma gente que anda criticando la Autoridad es la que la ha llevado a la quiebra”.

(“Of course we can’t pay our suppliers, when the government and the public corporations owe us almost $300 million,” stated the environmentalist. “The same people who are running around criticizing the Authority are those who have brought it to bankruptcy.”)

‘It’s too much,’ I think. ‘I absolutely cannot be responsible for 1.2 billion people who are driving all the rest of us crazy because they believe something dreamed up in a cave in Saudi Arabia, and I can’t be responsible for the power company, which didn’t have the money to buy fuel, despite the fact that the electric bill comes in at 400$ a month, and anyway, it’s the start of the week, and if I’m feeling this way today, how am I going to be on Friday?’

So I turn the page and get this:

Yup, Puerto Rico strikes again! Because one of our zany habits, much beloved by some, sniffed at by the humorless, is to have wakes—called in Spanish velorios—with the dead displayed in various and characteristic positions. And this charming lady—who had wanted to be waked wearing skates, but settled for her wedding dress instead—is doña Georgina Chevroni Lloren; the funeral was yesterday,

It all started with El Para’o, or the standing one, who had bragged to his enemies that they would never see him lying down. So what did he do—OK, what did he instruct be done—after he got eleven bullets shot into him? Take a look!

This image, by the way, I lifted from an article called “Dead Men Standing….”

That’s when it hit me, since we had joked about all this in those days when I was pretending to teach English at Wal-Mart.

“Yes, I intend to be waked in this very room,” I would assure the students, “in fact, in this very chair!”

“You do, Marc?” The students would lean in and peer into my eyes.

“Absolutely, I intend to die with my boots still firmly planted in the fertile fields of Wal-Mart! Others may retire, but mine is a passion, not merely a career. I may very well die in this room, but if not, I’ll certainly be waked in this room! And one day, however many decades it will be, you’ll walk in and see me….”

Here I would raise my hand with my index finger pointed to the board, and then…

…freeze!

Ahh, readers, life had other plans—it so often does. So what to do?

I run over to the other shop, where Lady is busy blow-drying a casita, and sit patiently, thinking, as I wait—shouldn’t I be doing something serious? Doesn’t the Great American Novel still wait to be born? Would Hemingway or Tolstoy have wasted his time this way?

At last the house is dry, packed, and given to the tourists—it’s time to show Lady the print edition of El Nuevo Día.

“Just in the event, “ I start, and Lady gets it immediately. She begins slapping my knees with the paper, and then puts it over her head as she roars with laughter.

“It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in Puerto Rico,” I tell Lady, who has just told me that Georgina has gone viral; she’s sitting all over the web.

“You think it’s true that García Márquez said ‘they didn’t believe me when I wrote about Macondo, so they really wouldn’t believe me if I wrote about Puerto Rico?’” I ask Lady. I’ve looked it up a thousand times….

Lady pauses, and then comes up the answer…

“…well, it’s either true or it should be true….”

Good enough for me!  

Jus' Misbehavin'

It was another day in the café, and this time’s annoyance, for Lady,—owner and house painter—were the religious people.

“Can you believe it? They wanted me to customize a house, by putting this piece of scripture around the door. So I had to figure out—how to place the words for maximum effect, visually, but also for the meaning of the text. And it took me an hour or so, and I finally got what was the best design. So now they just called me, and they don’t like it; they say it looks too crowded. Oh, and guess what? It’s too crowded, but they want me to ADD more text! Can you believe that?”

“Working with the public...” I say, “It ain’t easy….”

“Right, and now they’re over at the other store, and there’s poor David, who’s half-atheist, and they’re grilling him about what church he goes to. So he tells them—he doesn’t go to church, which did to them what the red cape does to the bull. So they’re telling him there’s only one path to salvation, and David has to start stuffing his face with food, even though he’s not hungry, so as not to be able to talk. So now I have to go rescue David, and deal with the religious people, and change their little house, by adding more text which will make it—somehow—less crowded.”

“Ouch,” I said.

Lady brightened.

“Hey, why don’t you come with me? You could give me cover!”

“I’d probably misbehave,” I said. “With few exceptions, I can’t deal with heavily religious people. I make the Jehovah Witnesses crazy every time I pass them on the street—which is about seven times daily, they’re everywhere—by shouting my heartiest ¡Buenos días! followed by soy ateo. It makes them crazy….”

Soy ateo—I’m an atheist.

“Right,” said Lady, “OK, it would probably be a violation of fire code, or something, to have you guys together in the store. Pity, though….”

Well, I had been occupying myself with Jessye Norman for most of the morning, and was ready to take a break. First, though, it was time to check in on Naïa, to find what she had gotten up to.

“What is this, a siege mentality?,” I asked, since Naïa was sitting on a couch surrounded by six plastic chairs placed in a semicircle.

‘I don’t know what that is,” said Naïa.

I keep forgetting she’s twelve.

Well, I guessed right, because in fact Naïa was fortifying herself—and her dragon—from an imminent attack from her archenemy—for the purpose of this game—Alexia, also equipped with a dragon.

“Excellent idea,” I tell Naïa, “and putting the red pillows on the seats of the chairs will make, as you rightly pointed out, a standing-on-the-chairs attack less likely to succeed. But I can identify six gaping areas of vulnerability….”

“Don’t tell her,” said Naïa.

“I already knew,” said Alexia, who obviously didn’t.

An hour later, I came back to discover an additional six chairs, which had been placed on their backs, with the seats covering the space between the legs of the chairs in front of them.

Then I went to the grocery store, and, while waiting in line, thought, ‘well, why not?’ 

So I headed off to the other store, and gave Lady no chance to greet me.

“Excuse me, is your name Lady?”

“Last time I checked!”

“You don’t know me,” I said, “but they told me at the café that I could find you here. And that’s…”

I glance down at the casita, the little plaster house that Lady has painted, complete with the offending scripture.

“WOW, is that beautiful,” I exclaim. “That’s LOVELY! Did you do that? That’s incredible. And what’s the verse around the door?”

“Luke 17:4,” or some such thing, says Lady, who begins to rattle it off to me.

I’m nodding my head all the time.

“I know it well,” I breathe, my voice sopping with earnestness. “Ah, that verse has been with me in my darkest hours! How often, in moments of spiritual desolation, in the very darkest night of the soul, in those moments of spiritual anguish, when I most questioned the path that I had taken, that very verse accompanied me—nay, rescued me—from spiritual oblivion.”    

I pause to take a breath….

“It’s a masterpiece,” I tell Lady. “An unbelievable piece of work. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have seen it.”

Lady has recovered.

“Thanks,” she says, “I like it myself….”

Right, so I dash off, after fictitiously getting permission to play my cello at the café—“would it be ok…..?”—and having glanced at a very confused, as well as religious, woman.

An hour later, I’m playing Bach, after first noting that the siege has been lifted, or maybe the dragons have been banished—anyway, the forts are gone and the chairs are back to being chairs. So I work my way through G Major, get through d Minor, and then am in the prelude of the C Major when it happens.

A two-year old toddles in, looking intently at me, her round face framed by blonde curls. The Gerber people completely screwed up when they passed over this kid for the one on their bottles, and a note to any Renaissance painters out there…

…you’re seriously going to have to reconsider how you’re painting your cherubim.

So she watches me, intently, and that’s permitted, since part of what I do, pretentiously speaking, is audience building. And who doesn’t like little girls? So, she stares, and then begins to…

…pee.

All right, that’s a first, so what to do? Well, I take my cello to the bathroom—another first—and grab some paper towels. Then I go back to the little girl, who has taken off her little panties and is trying to mop the floor with them.

“No te preocupes”, I tell the little girl. “Pero ¿dónde está tu mamá?”

Don’t worry, but where’s your mom?

A woman appears, and says something I don’t get. Then Gaby, from the café, appears with some little red flip-flops. Next, Elizabeth appears, and she gets the mop. At this point, the girl has vanished.

“That lady shouldn’t have that child,” says Elizabeth. “She can’t take care of her, she’s retarded or crazy or something.”

“Some asshole got that poor girl pregnant,” says the normally pacific Jorge; it’s the first time I’ve heard him swear. “I see her pushing her daughter in the stroller down the middle of the street, right in front of the Hacienda building. And the traffic is totally backed up behind her….”

“That’s horrible,” I said, “shouldn’t we report?”

“Don’t know,” said Jorge. “They’ll come and take the child away, but where will they put her?”

“You know what she did when I told her ‘no?’ She was about to sweep some ceramic houses off the counter, so I bent down and told her ‘no’—firmly but gently. And then guess what?”

Elizabeth puts down the mop and begins slapping both sides of her face with both hands, saying ‘NO’ with each blow.

“That’s what her mother is doing to her,” say Raf, when I tell him hours later.

‘Life is so damned unfair,’ I think. ‘There’s Naïa, whose one worry is of a dragon snatching, and then there’s this little girl, and can you imagine—if she’s pissing on the floor in a café—what her house looks and smells like? And there are two people—Edwin and the woman I don’t like—who are homeless, and sleeping in the most comfortable corners of the café they can find, probably because they’re up all night. And then there’s Elizabeth, who hasn’t gotten child support for months, and who decided it was too much trouble….’

‘And the worst of it? It’s all around us, and we go blind to it. Remember that study of people walking past their closest relatives, who were dressed up as street people? There’s so much out there that we’ve trained ourselves not to see, and everyone knows this woman can’t take care of her child, but we all do nothing, which is the most heartbreaking thing of all.’

‘It’s some screwy world,’ I think, ‘Raf and I can’t even get married in Puerto Rico, much less have a child, but this woman? Not a problem—she can have as many children as she wants. So it’s a question: a cherub walks into my life, pisses on the floor, and what to do—report it to the Departamento de la Familia or not?’

I learned a long time ago: I have more questions than answers, and that’s the way it should be.

But I wish I had the answer to this question….

On Faith

I shudder to go here, because there’s no help for it—I am as unable to experience God in any of his / her various guises as a rock. And that means that I’m one of just 5% of the American population who are atheist.

Which is why I found myself watching Richard Dawkins yesterday, as I munched on a tuna fish sandwich in the café. Granted, Dawkins goes after the most extreme of the religious nuts—he tracks down Ted Haggard in Colorado, and yes, I can now tell you: it’s quite likely that the reverend was doing cocaine and call boys. Haggard, perhaps annoyed by Dawkins’s pristine Queen’s English, accuses Dawkins of intellectual arrogance.

Well, Dawkins gets around—from Colorado to the Middle East, where he interviews a Jew turned Muslim from New York. The Muslim angrily accuses Dawkins of dressing women as whores; Dawkins retorts hotly that he doesn’t dress women, they dress themselves. Not good enough for the Muslim—by allowing women to dress as whores, it’s as good as dressing them. Short version: women are chattel, to be dressed according to male dictates.

Every bush has a nut hiding underneath it, and Dawkins beats every bush. There’s the Reverend Keenan Roberts, who hit on the wonderful idea of the Hell House—a dramatic working-out of the post-life experience throughout all time of those who don’t personally accept Christ. Here’s the clip:

Oh, and here’s the description, as provided in YouTube:

Check out this "movie trailer" promo for the upcoming 2013 FIRE & THE FLAME theatrical outreach, presented by New Destiny Christian Center of Thornton, CO. This heaven and hell drama wowed audiences last year, and the spiritual impact was incredible! This year's production will feature 4 new scenes. Performances will be: Saturday, March 23 at 6pm, Sunday March 24 at 6pm, Saturday March 30 at 6pm, and Easter Sunday March 31 at 8:30am and 11am. All performances are free. A love offering will be received. Nursery available for children through 3 years of age. For more info visit www.Godestiny.org or call 303.289.1547. Senior Pastor: Keenan Roberts.   

In fact, this clip is substantially tamer than what Dawkins filmed—and Dawkins got right into it with the pastor. How old, he asks, should a child be before he is allowed to see the play—which features leaping flames and gay people groaning in agony and the devil leaping around tormenting people? And the reverend has the answer—twelve would be a good age. Dawkins protests—wouldn’t that be somewhat searing for a child’s mind? Better that, says Roberts, than growing up godless and falling into perdition.

Well, Dawkins goes through every lunatic religion and denomination—though curiously, he missed the Mormons—until at the very end, he found himself a good English Anglican, whose moderate views fell like manna in the desert.

Today, I started out watching Dawkins on the third of his series on The Age of Reason; today’s topic being the growth of “alternative medicine.” And I had just gotten to the wonderful picture of Dawkins sitting bemused and very much open-eyed as all the others in the room visualized a pearl, into which they were invited to step, and there they would find…

…their real selves!

Well, Dawkins has to find out about that, so he goes off to interview the healer, who claims to be able to alter DNA and who also informs him that most people have a double strand of DNA.

Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, in evolutionary biology.

He was, then, very much interested in the topic—were there people who had more or less than a double strand of DNA?

The healer doesn’t miss a beat.

“The people of Atlantis had 12 strands of DNA,” she explains.

Predictably, Dawkins goes nuts.

Dawkins thinks that reason and science are under attack, and is out to challenge all religions—on the grounds that they promote irrational thought as well as divisions.

I’m both more extreme and less extreme. Though I cannot feel God, there are people who can, and who struggle as hard as they can to live up to beliefs that are truly admirable. And these people, acting together as a community, can accomplish what I—a solitary atheist—cannot. And these people adopt a theology that is both liberating and challenging—one that could help the world, if it ever got adopted.

My friend Susan, in fact, is one such person, and sent me a clip of another such person: John Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop. Right—if I could hear God, I would hang with Spong, and his flock. Check out a clip of a remarkable man:



I said that I was both less and more extreme than Dawkins. Why? Because for every man like Spong, there are men like Scott Lively, the evangelical who has exported homophobia to Uganda and Russia. This is a level of hypocrisy and hatred that even Dawkins doesn’t contemplate. And according to Wikipedia, Evangelical Protestants make up 19% of the American population. The mainstream protestants? 15%.

So I’m on the fence. In general, I cannot enter churches, and the smell of burnt-out candles is particularly upsetting to me—I associate the smell with the end of services at Christ Presbyterian Church. I dislike seeing crosses anywhere, and especially around people’s necks. And nuns—of which we have a full convent in Old San Juan? Don’t ask….

But before I throw out the bathwater, I’d like to see if somehow, somewhere, there might be a baby….

Good Old American Hate

I have a theory—if they can live it, I can watch it. So I didn’t back off, when I saw the hour-long documentary from the BBC titled “The World’s Worst Place to be Gay.” I stayed true to my principles, but never has my right index finger more itched to click a mouse.

So I spent some 57 minutes watching a very cute, engaging British guy talking with Ugandans. That was the redeeming feature. What made the video almost unbearable was seeing the Ugandans, often very charming, but almost consistently filled with hate.

Our hate—if, like me, you are from the United States. Because up until a decade or so, most people in Uganda were not terribly accepting of LGBT folk, but they also weren’t filled with hate towards them.

All that changed when a guy named Scott Lively, the pastor of the Abiding Truth Ministries, located in Springfield, Massachusetts. Lively makes it his chief business to go after gay people; and to say that he’s virulent is to speak mildly. Think I’m exaggerating? Well, check out the clip below.

As you could see, that was from the 2009 visit to Uganda, and Lively lived up to his name. Here’s the Boston Magazine on the subject:

The evening of his arrival, he says, he met with more than 50 members of Parliament. He also claims to have spoken privately for 30 minutes with the country’s minister of ethics and integrity. In all, he estimates, he directly addressed about 10,000 people. And then there’s the much wider audience he reached with his media appearances. He was particularly proud of what he’d managed to accomplish at the Hotel Triangle conference. On March 17, while still in Uganda, he boasted online that someone in Kampala had told him that his campaign there had been “like a nuclear bomb against the ‘gay’ agenda,” and he went on to say that he prayed that this was true.

The effect? Homophobia exploded across Uganda, and culminated in what has been called the “Kill the Gays Bill.” And no, this is not hyperbole, here is one LGBT activist, Frank Mugisha, on the bill:

It introduces the death penalty for any homosexual person living with HIV/AIDS, so if someone is born with HIV and they come out gay, they should be killed. It has aggravated homosexuality — any kind of male rape, they should be killed, and if any person has sex with anyone below the age of 18, that’s death penalty. If any person engages in same-sex acts with someone who is disabled, that is also death penalty. Or if any person engages in same-sex acts with someone who they are in authority of. So, for example, if I have sex with my boss, my boss can go for the death penalty because they are in authority over me. There’s death penalty for serial offenders, so if you break the law many times, then you can also be killed.

OK—now what about heterosexuals? Here’s Mugisha again:

The bill has a clause that says you should report any person who is known or perceived as a homosexual to the authorities, so that means families have to report their own children, doctors have to report their clients, priests have to report people who come to confess about anything that is related to homosexuality. If they don’t (report), they become criminals. The bill also requires Uganda to withdraw from all international treaties that are in favour of sexual orientation and gender identity, and (it) requires all NGOs working in Uganda — if they are receiving funding from any organization affiliated with an organization that works on sexual orientation or gender identity — (to be) deregistered in Uganda.

Mugisha is the director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SM-UG), and a total hero. Actually, anyone who is openly gay in Uganda at the moment is a hero. And so it’s not surprising that he has done the right thing: taken Scott Lively to court.

SM-UG is hardly a major force—it’s an umbrella organization of 8 groups, each with about 30 people; we’re talking, then, about 240 people in a country of 33 million. So SM-UG partnered with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to bring Lively into court for violating the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreigners whose human rights have been violated to file suit in US courts.

Right—so what kind of abuse are we talking about? Beatings, murder, stoning of houses, and one particular abuse—newspapers printing photos and addresses of gay and lesbians. Oh, and one newspaper does it with the headline, “Hang them!”

Gay people, then, are frequently hounded out of their neighborhoods, and live, as you can see in the video below, in the worst possible conditions.

There are two important facts: the CCR states that Lively has traveled to over 40 countries, and that he is, in the words of the Public Research Associates, “globalizing the U.S. culture wars.”   And lastly, consider these words, when the Ottawa Citizen asked Mubisha what activists outside of Uganda could do to help:

Activists? I think that would have been the frustrating question, that the LGBT community has not helped us, has not stood by us. Because, like you said, people have gotten their rights here, they feel there is no need to get engaged in the other global civil rights for LGBT people, so the LGBT people have sort of taken a step back, they don’t really care. People in Uganda think we receive tons and tons of support from gay groups in the U.S. and Europe. Not at all. It is mostly human rights organizations that are not entirely focused on LGBT issues that work in supporting us.

Ouch. OK, guys—here’s what the CCR says we can do.

Get Involved

⇒       Share this factsheet and information about the case via social media and blogs.

⇒       Sign up on CCR’s website for email alerts so you can take action as needed.

⇒       Write a letter to the editor of your local paper about the role U.S. evangelicals are playing in spreading hate in Uganda and elsewhere.

For More Information:

www.ccrjustice.org/LGBTuganda

I’d add two more things. Check out the website for Sexual Minorities Uganda: http://www.smug.4t.com/index.html And then consider making a donation and following some of the suggestions in the website for International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Campaign: https://www.iglhrc.org/content/support-our-work

People started taking gay people seriously when they saw us pushing baby carts and changing diapers. We fought hard and—most of us, most of the time—we won. Now it’s time to look around at the rest of the world.