Rick Warren, finally

By now you’ve all heard about the heinous Ugandan bill that would lead to the imprisonment of homosexuals and the execution of any with AIDS, and you’ve probably also heard that it was promoted by American right-wingers. There’s a curious phenomenon going on right now: people are trying to stir up some principled opposition to the bill, and the religious right is dragging their heels. It’s strange because once they’ve been cornered, wrestled to the ground, and forced to face a camera, they all quickly repudiate the bill — unless you’re Fred Phelps, it’s pretty much impossible to support it, it is so barbaric — but you can also tell they aren’t happy about having to make a public denial. Weasely ol’ Rick Warren has finally spoken out against it, but as archy analyzes Warren’s statement, it’s not very impressive:

By my count, about twenty percent of his message is a direct condemnation or call to opposition to the bill. About thirty percent of the message is self-promotion or promotion of his groups. The other half of the message is his greeting to the pastors and a Christmas message. The latter part should have been sent as a separate message an waters down the most important part of his message, but that’s quibble on my part.

This stuff isn’t hard. When someone announces that they want a legalized hunting season on gay people, you reject it, plainly, clearly, and loudly. It’s revealing when it takes you this much time to decide it’s a bad idea.

Keep the godless out of office

Cecil Bothwell was elected to the city council of Asheville, NC. Cecil Bothwell is an atheist. Now some kooks want to deny Cecil Bothwell his seat on the council because the North Carolina constitution forbids atheists from taking public office.

Amazing. I know that several states have these laws on their books, but I thought they all avoided enforcing them, since they’re clearly unconstitutional. In this case, it’s one crazy right-winger, H.K. Edgerton, who wants to impose the law to selectively block someone he doesn’t seem to like. We know he’s crazy because he’s threatening the city and…well, see for yourself.

“If they go ahead, then the city of Asheville and the board of elections could be liable for a lawsuit,” said Edgerton, who is known for promoting “Southern heritage” by standing on streets decked out in a Confederate soldier’s uniform and holding a Confederate flag.

Oh. One of those guys.

I’m already sick of her

This is going to go on for years and years, isn’t it? Sarah Palin is going to keep on saying stupid things to keep herself in the news.

No one person has all the right answers. It takes a united nation, and it does take godly counsel, and it takes prayer and answers to prayer – and a collective humble heart of a nation seeking God’s hand of protection and his blessings of prosperity.

I think if we can get back to that, our country will be a safer, more prosperous and healthier nation.

No, it won’t. God does not provide, OK?

More Obama bashing

Michael Moore wrote a friendly letter to Obama before his announcement to expand the war in Afghanistan. It’s worth reading.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

It’s Wednesday morning. I don’t see his corporate backers fleeing him just yet, but the people who voted for him are turning away in disappointment.

Obama regret

I had my reservations before the election, but I voted for Obama as the better choice (and I have not changed my opinion on that at all). I had hopes that he’d get in office and stand up for some principles…but no such luck. There are several reasons for my dissatisfaction.

Looking at his record (which isn’t just his problem: the Democratic Party has failed to promote a Democratic agenda), I see the real problem. Despite all the screamers on the right accusing him of being a socialist, what actually happened here is that we elected another Republican to office. A moderate Republican, to be sure, but not someone who has the kinds of priorities I want in my president.

We’re going to be marking time until the 2012 campaign starts up. I’m hoping their will be some viable, liberal alternative to our crappy incumbent, because I really don’t want to have to choose between Republican Lite and Republican Lunatic in the next election.

Mike Huckabee killed Maurice Clemmons

Clemmons was the Jesus-loving lunatic who murdered four police officers in Tacoma, and was shot and killed by the police. He was also the recipient of a pardon from Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas, egotistical god-walloping incompetent.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m all for mercy, I reject the abuse of our penal system as a vehicle for vengeance, and I oppose the death penalty without reservation. A governor’s clemency can be a good thing, as when it should be used to correct miscarriages of justice (isn’t it odd, though, how the most Christian of governors avoid using it for that purpose?). But there are also cases where justice and mercy are best served by incarceration or mental care, not by turning killers and dangerous psychos loose on the streets.

Clemmons was a monster. He murdered people and he raped children. He was insane. He believed he was Jesus Christ. Yet Mike Huckabee pardoned him. Why? Because Huckabee did not care about the evidence. What he thought was sufficient was a profession of piety and the testimonials of religious men. Clemmons played him.

No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee’s tendency to believe such pious testimonials. “I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak,” he explained in his clemency application in 2000. “I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family’s name … I have never done anything good for God, but I’ve prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I’m humbly appealing to you for a brand new start.”

Mercy is not a wicked thing, and there are good people in prison who could turn their lives around if given an opportunity. There are also evil, damaged people in prison who would use freedom as an opportunity to do harm. What is necessary is the rational analysis of evidence to determine who deserves freedom in those cases, and Huckabee does not and cannot do that; his religiosity short-circuits his capacity for critical evaluation, and his ego makes the pardon a tool for feeding his own delusions of christ-hood. Tristero has an excellent summary.

First of all, it is Huckabee’s delusion that he is Jesus Christ, not genuine compassion, that spins the Clemmons case as a miscarriage of justice against a hapless juvenile. It is clear from the record that Clemmons was then, and continued to be, an extremely troubled person with a propensity for extreme violence. Huckabee ignored this, focusing – Christ-like – on an opportunity to show mercy towards a young sinner who showed what Huckabee misapprehended as signs of redemption. The issue is Huckabee’s lack of judgment.

If you argue that it is unfair to sentence a juvenile to life in prison for an armed robbery committed when he was 16, I won’t disagree with you. But that is not the issue here. The issue is Huckabee’s spectacularly bad judgment and his failure to take responsibilty for his behavior. The justice system, for all its incredible faults, has numerous mechanisms, including but not limited to commuting a sentence, for dealing with mitigating circumstances, like the age of an offender, signs of redemption, and an unfairly long sentence. Flawed they surely are, imperfect and inadequate no doubt, but they exist. Huckabee, imitating Christ, chose to deal with the Clemmons case in a very particular way, showing not mercy, but simply awful judgment that set into motion further tragedy.

The incredibly cruel, incredibly unjust way that juvenile offenders are treated in the United States has nothing to do with the fact that Huckabee behaved the way he did. It simply gave him an excuse to exercise his egomania, his delusions of grandeur, and his incompetence. As a result, innocent people died.

Huckabee wants to be our president. I wouldn’t trust him to be my dishwasher.

Republicans want to purify their lunacy yet further

Hang on here—the same wingnuts who are up in arms about the University of Minnesota proposing to screen out bigots from teaching are proposing an ideological litmus test for their own party?

Ten members of the Republican National Committee are proposing a resolution demanding candidates embrace at least eight of 10 conservative principles if they hope to receive financial support and an official endorsement from the RNC. The “Proposed RNC Resolution on Reagan’s Unity Principle for Support of Candidates,” is designed to force candidates to prove that they support “conservative principles” while opposing “Obama’s socialist agenda,” according to The New York Times’ Caucus blog. The proposal highlights the ongoing tug-of-war for the ideological soul of the Republican party, and has been met with skepticism both inside and outside of the party.

While I’m sympathetic to the idea that a political party should have some principles, the ones they are pushing seem ideal for marginalizing Republicans even further as the party of kooks. Case in point: anyone who talks about “Obama’s socialist agenda” cannot be taken seriously. Obama is a moderate-to-conservative centrist! Does no one know anything of Eugene Debs? There was a socialist American.

The University of Minnesota has failed to enshrine racism in its policies!

Katherine Kersten is Minnesota’s own version of Glenn Beck. She’s a ‘columnist’ (literally true, since she is given a regular column to fill with right-wing nonsense) for the Star Tribune, and is a regular embarrassment. She recently aimed her smear-gun at the University of Minnesota, in a deranged tirade that has been picked up by Wing Nut Daily and Hot Air (read the comments at that site for a glimpse of how insane the right wing has become).

What made her so angry? The UM has a program in the college of education called the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, or TERI. It’s a reasonably routine effort; the college is reevaluating their program, trying to set up appropriate priorities for teacher education, and is churning out documents as various groups wrestle with decisions about what’s important in their programs. Like I say, it’s routine — I’ve had to read lots of this kind of thing as part of the general output of a university bureaucracy — and it’s also a good thing, that university divisions exhibit at least a little introspection and flexibility.

Kersten does not think this is a good thing. She has her own strange view of what the effort is all about.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.

Except…the report says nothing of the kind. You can read it yourself, if you want, although you probably don’t — it’s written in lumbering, repetitive, earnest Academese, which is a dialect of Bureaucratese, and it isn’t pretty. I get this stuff in my mailbox and it makes me want to claw my eyes out, so it took some masochistic discipline to dig into it voluntarily, but Kersten misrepresents the thing from top to bottom.

There is a grain of truth to what she says: the report does say that we need more emphasis on recognizing and appreciating diversity, and that we need more equitable representation of American culture in the teacher workforce. It does not say that America is an “oppressive hellhole”; that’s her own weird interpretation. She should have looked deeper. Doesn’t the fact that we’re training teachers at all imply that America must be a pit of ignorance and stupidity that needs correcting?

She’s basically taking the blinkered and customary wingnut position that any discussion of how we can improve the country implies that we are currently in a less than sublime state of perfection, which makes any constructive suggestion an unpatriotic act of treason.

This has set the wingnuts on fire. They are complaining bitterly about the goals of the UM college of education.

In an October 28, 2009, proposal to the Minnesota-based Bush Foundation, the college promises that it will revise its curriculum toward the “development of cultural competence.” The college’s full articulation of this vague concept at present is just what the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group has determined it to be.

Not only that, however, the college in its proposal promises to start screening its applicants to make sure they have the proper “commitments” and “dispositions”:

Develop admission procedures to assess professional commitments.

We recognize that both academic preparation and particular dispositions or professional commitments are needed for effective teaching. [Emphasis in original.]

The college promises that it will begin using “predictive criteria” to make sure that future teachers will be able to develop an acceptable level of “cultural competence”-apparently, those who do not pass the political litmus test and seem too set in their beliefs will never get admitted. This is far worse than what Columbia Teachers College does with its own “dispositions” requirement, and far in excess of what the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has ever mandated.

Never trust a kook to quote anything. When you see one line extracted from a document, and then spun out into a fable of planned oppression of a political point of view, you know there’s got to be something more that they’re leaving out. In fact, in this case you might be wondering what political views this ‘litmus test’ is intended to exclude…like, no Republicans will ever be allowed to teach again?

Nope. Here’s what they mean by ‘dispositions and commitments’.

Develop admission procedures to assess professional commitments.

We recognize that both academic preparation and particular dispositions or professional commitments are needed for effective teaching. Our school-based partners have told us that they would like to hire beginning teachers who demonstrate the commitment to focus relentlessly on student learning and take responsibility for the learning of all students without seeking excuses in the community, family, and culture of the students. They want teachers who can communicate and collaborate with each other and with the families and communities of their students. In response to our school partners, we will develop admission procedures that identify candidates with the potential to demonstrate these commitments as teachers.

Note the part I put in boldface. That’s what has Kersten incensed, and that is fueling the fear of right-wing reactionaries. They’re saying they want teachers who want to teach, and who do not sit around blaming the failure of students on their race or ethnicity. That’s it. It isn’t a political litmus test at all — it’s saying that bigots who won’t try to teach all of their students equally do not make good teachers.

That’s the sentiment that Kersten, Hot Air, and the Wing Nut Daily find horribly objectionable.

Fundamentally, it’s yet another admission that that (R) after politician’s name has become shorthand for (Racist). Conservative politics has become so tainted with lunatic anti-immigrant, anti-diversity, anti-human policies that a college can’t even say that tolerance and encouragement of the non-white portion of our populations is a good goal to work towards without being accused of being unpatriotic.

It’s not surprising. These are the same people who think Lou Dobbs would make a good president, and who dream of a Beck/Palin candidacy in 2012.