I’m really not a joiner, to begin with. Plus, with my paltry disposable income there aren’t too many organizations that I’m unequivocally willing to support. The very short list includes the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and Americans United.

The imprecatory prayer story has gotten a lot of play in the past week, but in actuality it’s been months — since last August — since this Wiley Drake character first started beseeching his holy hitman to rub out AU staffers. Hmmm… How’s that working out for you, Wiley?

From the AU press release:

IRS Target Wiley Drake Asks Followers To Engage In Imprecatory Prayers Against Americans United Staff Members

Controversial Southern Baptist Pastor Wiley Drake has again urged his followers to pray for the deaths of staff members at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Last August, Americans United filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service about Drake’s use of church letterhead and a church-based radio program to endorse presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Federal tax law forbids tax-exempt groups from endorsing or opposing candidates for public office.

In a Feb. 5 letter, the IRS notified Drake that his First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park is being investigated.

In response, Drake issued a Feb. 14 e-mail appeal to followers to engage in “imprecatory prayers” (curses) against Americans United and three of its staff members.

Said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, “We deplore Pastor Drake’s reckless and repugnant antics. Introducing this kind of religious extremism into American life is reprehensible.

“We have asked the IRS to investigate what we believe to be Drake’s violation of federal tax law,” Lynn continued. “If Drake thinks he is innocent, he has more than adequate legal representation, and there is ample opportunity to make his case.

“Trying to turn God into some sort of heavenly hit man is repugnant,” Lynn concluded. “There is more than a whiff of the Taliban in this action”

Wrote Drake, “In light of the recent attack from the enemies of God I ask the children of God to go into action with Imprecatory Prayer. Especially against Americans United for Separation of Church and State…. Specifically target Joe Conn or Jeremy Learing [sic] and their leader Rev. Barry Lynn. They are those who lead the attack.”

Drake directed his followers to Psalms 109 (as well as Psalms 55, 58, 68, 69 and 83) for examples of imprecatory prayers.

Verses from those texts ask God to bring death and destruction to those targeted.

“Let his days be few; and let another take his office,” says one passage. “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg.”

Another passage says, “Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell.”

Drake waged a similar campaign last year after Americans United filed its complaint against him with the IRS. Religious leaders from a wide variety of faiths repudiated the pastor’s tactic.

Drake is a prominent pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. He recently completed a term as second vice president of the group, its third highest post. He currently is running for president of the denomination, which became increasingly political after a fundamentalist takeover in the 1980s.

~~~

Oh, and about that graphic… A mashup of Michelangelo and some video game; thanks for asking.

~

Posted: February 19th, 2008 under Religious Right, Separation of Church and State.
Comments: none

Tild sez:   Hey, wait a minute — Don’t start thinking that this is some kind of homage to local hysteric Mitch Berg and those excruciatingly tedious (so I hear, I’ve never read any of them)  ‘It Was Twenty Years Ago Today’ posts he’s so fond of doing.  No. I’m pretty sure the only similarity between this post and one of Mitch’s is in the title. 

About an hour ago I remembered that today is the anniversary of my mother’s death. 
Twenty years ago.    I can’t believe I’ve lived twenty years without my mother.  Without my father too, for even longer — he died 9 years before my mom did.  
It took me a long time to get used to being the oldest living generation in my immediate family. I finally got the knack of it, but after all these years do you know what I still miss?  Feeling like a daughter.       

Anyway, to mark the occasion here’s an excerpt from  “Grace”,  a post I wrote about my mother a couple of Mother’s Days ago…

~~~

Grace was a 5′6″, bubbly, strawberry blonde Betty Grable look-alike. She was warm and funny and talked a blue streak and drew people to her like moths to flame; like bees to honey; like whatever to whatever [insert favorite simile of your choice here].  At 5′11″ I felt like King Kong standing next to her, and whenever possible preferred to step back into the shadows and let my mother shine. I don’t remember ever begrudging her that. It’s possible I did at the time, but I don’t remember it now.

Mom had been a widow for 5 years when this photo was taken in 1984. She was 61 years old. My dad, Gunnar, died in 1979 at the age of 54. He died of congestive heart failure complicated by scar tissue on his aorta and an enlarged ‘athlete’s heart’, both consequences of having rheumatic fever when he was a child.

Grace continued to get out and about a good deal of the time, as she and Dad had always done.  I often told her that she had a social life I’d kill for.
She did volunteer work at the Shriners’ Hospital; went out to dinner with her Eastern Star chapter, and her garden club, and her 500 club, and “the St. Mary’s gang”, all the gals she’d roomed with at a boarding house downtown near the Basilica during WWII, when they were all flighty young singles working at Honeywell, assembling steering controls for bombers by day, and dancing the night away every night. She always said that in those days she wore out a pair of shoes a week, from all the dancing.

This is Grace on Christmas Eve 1987. She looks tired, as well she might, considering she’d had a mastectomy three months before, and was undergoing a 6-month course of chemotherapy at this time. Her doctors were fairly confident they’d gotten all the cancer, so they said the chemo was really just a precaution, to make sure the cancer hadn’t metastasized into the lymph nodes. Grace was tolerating the chemo well, altho the steroids made her face look kind of puffy and she also said the steroids gave her manic bursts of energy when she couldn’t sit still or stop talking. Everybody who knew her wondered how she could tell the difference.

This turned out to be the last photo ever taken of my mother.

Less than two months later, on the morning of February 12, 1988, Grace called my sister and brother in law at 4:45 AM. She’d been out dancing until past 1 AM, then had come home and settled into bed but suddenly felt “kind of funny”. It was strange, she said; like she couldn’t catch her breath. My brother in law told her to hang up and call 911 right away. Grace lived only a few blocks away from Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, and the paramedics could reach her within minutes if necessary. She agreed to call 911, and hung up. My sister and her husband waited for a minute or two, then called 911 to confirm that Grace had called. Yes, the dispatcher said, and the paramedics were already on their way.

BIL then jumped in the car and headed for Grace’s house, about 15 miles away. When he got there he saw a policeman standing at the front door, which was all splintered and off its hinges. The paramedics had arrived within 3 minutes of receiving Grace’s call, yet she was already unable to get to the door, so the paramedics had to use a crowbar to break the door down. The policeman said that Grace had had a heart attack; she was alive but it was “very serious”. The EMTs had taken her to nearby Fairview Southdale, all the while frantically working to revive her.

My sister called at about 5:30 AM and told us what was happening. We then picked her up and drove to the hospital together. I was seven months pregnant with my first child at the time.
We arrived at the hospital within 20 minutes of getting the call. My BIL George met us at the entrance and said: “I don’t know how to say this, but Grace has passed away.”

The cause of death was found to be pulmonary embolism: a large blood clot had formed somewhere in her lower extremities and had travelled upwards through her system to ultimately become lodged in a spot near the juncture of her heart and lungs. Death came very quickly; within minutes.
Grace was 64 years old.

It’s been a long time now; 17 years; so the pain has had time to get dull and familiar and I don’t feel it as sharply as I did then. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss her and wish she could see my kids as they’re growing up. Well, maybe she is seeing the kids somehow; I hope so. I guess what I want is to be able to see her seeing the kids.

And these days I’ve started thinking of how she died as being rather a good way to go, since we’re all gonna go sometime, some way. Think about it: Grace lived her life fully and actively and joyously right up to the very last moment. No drawn out withering away for her. No watching her slowly become unrecognizable as disease consumed her.

She went to a party on that last night. She went out dancing til past 1 in the morning. She went dancing.

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under Chez Tild, Loco Parent, Personal History.
Comments: 2

Tild sez: First we go for months without posting a word from the good bishop, and now we have two Spong posts in the span of a couple of weeks. Go figure. Anyway, this Q&A showed up in my email a few days ago, and even tho it’s brief, in it JSS makes a particularly important statement. Enjoy.

Spong Q & A about the public face of Christianity in America

Paul Kennedy from Honolulu, Hawaii writes:

Have you read Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris? If so, I think many of us would like to learn what you think of his seemingly well thought out arguments in condemnation of religion.

Dear Paul,

I think Sam Harris has a great deal to say to America and I am pleased that he is writing. People need to hear the criticism of an honest atheist who is not afraid to speak his mind about what Christianity has come to mean to him. The public face of Christianity in America is already something with which I do not want to be identified. So many people who call themselves Christians are aggressive, hostile, closed minded and insensitive to anyone with whom they disagree. The public face of the Christian Church today is still both anti-female and anti-homosexual. Yesterday the public face of Christianity where I grew up was pro-segregation and anti-black. I reject the Christianity that Sam Harris rejects. The big difference is that I am aware of another and quite different Christianity. Sam Harris does not appear to be so. When I wrote A New Christianity for a New World, I tried to spell out what that different Christianity might look like. I believe it makes for a far greater and richer dialogue to engage the criticism of Sam Harris than to do what so many Christians seem to me to do, namely to search the Scriptures to find a way to give biblical authority to their latest prejudice.

- John Shelby Spong

~

Posted: February 10th, 2008 under Godlessness, John Shelby Spong.
Comments: none

At left is a photo I took last night with my phone at approximately 7:45 pm, showing the view forward from my seat on a shuttle bus to the Eden Prairie caucuses. Half an hour previously I had finally battled my way through the traffic jam to reach EPHS, where I dropped off my two sons and then couldn’t find parking anywhere in the demolition derbies lots that adjoin the school and the EP community center.

The best I could do was park in a church lot about 6 blocks away and wait for a shuttle. When one finally materialized, just after 7:30, the crowd of about 50 of us waiting in front of the church let out a cheer — our shuttle was a schoolbus painted green, its interior illuminated entirely by bright green rope lights. Several whoops and hollers of “Allright! We got the Wellstone bus!” as we climbed aboard.

It was a happy, talkative crowd on that bus. I saw friends and lots of neighbors that I haven’t seen in years, and ended up sitting next to one of my son’s friends…

[she immediately texts Dave: "Dude! I'm sitting next to your mom on the shuttle!" Dave replies in what seems like only 3 seconds: "Cool! Meet us in East commons. After you vote go look at the GOP rooms. Nobody there! Hilarious." ]

Everyone was chatty and laughing and a little giddy with the knowledge that we were participating in an historic event, a caucuses turnout of historic proportions. Same as pretty much everywhere else in the metro, traffic had been backed up for hours in every direction from EPHS, and even at 7:45, with only 15 minutes left before the close of voting, traffic was as congested and slow-moving as it had been hours earlier.

Someone said something about: We’ll never make it in time to vote! and somebody else said: No, I know the bus driver, he has superior bus-fu and we’ll make it in time, don’t worry. [everybody laughs]

I sit, grinning from ear to ear as I remember something I heard Obama say when he was at the Target Center on Saturday:

“When I first got to the US Senate, I opened up the drawer of the desk where I was assigned. And it has the names of some of the great senators who have served. They carve their names in their own hand into the desk drawer, and one of those names was somebody who shared with me this belief that change doesn’t happen from the top down. A guy named Paul Wellstone…”

I asked Dave’s friend for help in figuring out how to take a picture with my newly-upgraded cell phone, and here, (again) is the picture I finally managed to take:

The line of green lights (which kind of looks like a big green checkmark on a ballot) are the ropelights that lined the bus interior. The faint red and yellow lights you can see above and below are the taillights of all the cars ahead of us . The looming black darkness to the left of the green line is actually people, all standing in the aisle on our jam-packed shuttle bus. We got to EPHS at 7:55 — just in time to run in, find our precincts and vote. I knew we’d make it in time. We were on the magic bus.

The results?

Dems:
Eden Prairie, with 100% of precincts reporting, went : 1924 for Obama, 68%; 882 for Clinton, 31%

Repubs:
Eden Prairie, with 100% of precincts reporting, went: 225 for mcCain, 26%; 438 for Romney, 50%; 88 for Huckabee, 10%, and 116 for Paul, 13%.
That makes 3673 total (Republican and Democrat) votes cast at the EP caucuses. Compare and contrast: In 2004, the total was about 800.

Results by city for Hennepin County

~

Posted: February 6th, 2008 under 2008 Presidential campaigns, Barack Obama, Minnesota, Politics.
Comments: 1

Tild sez:  This was in my inbox this morning…

Dear Friends:

As women who have fought to advance women’s health and reproductive freedom in Minnesota we are tremendously impressed with Senator Barack Obama’s sterling legislative record in improving the health of women, children and their families.

We are proud to support Barack Obama for President of the United States–and we ask you to join us.

Senator Obama has shown leadership on reproductive health and freedom throughout his career.  He has a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.  He worked with Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) on a bill that would make birth control more affordable for low-income and college-age women.  And when Congress failed to require insurance plans to cover FDA-approved contraceptives, Senator Obama made sure those contraceptives were covered in Illinois.

Sadly, we have seen attempts to distort Senator Obama’s clear record of progressive leadership, and we want to arm you with the facts so that you can deflect these attacks, if necessary.

In New Hampshire, a last minute mail piece claimed that “present” votes which Senator Obama cast in the Illinois State Senate meant he was “unwilling to take a stand on choice.”  This is absolutely untrue, and advocates for women’s health in Minnesota and across the country have been willing to stand up and say so.

Pam Sutherland, President and CEO of Illinois Planned Parenthood Council said “the ‘present’ votes Obama took at that time…were ‘no’ votes to bad bills…We asked Senator Obama and other strong supporters of choice to make the right choice by voting ‘present’…Obama showed leadership, compassion, and a true commitment to reproductive health care.”

Lorna Brett, former president of Chicago NOW, said “the ‘present’ votes he cast were part of a legislative strategy that we designed specifically to protect abortion rights.”  As a result of the attacks in New Hampshire Brett switched from being a Clinton supporter to an Obama supporter.  (See her YouTube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVuMYKs8iJs).  “There was no bigger champion in Illinois on our issues,” Brett said.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who served with Obama in the Illinois State Senate, has also said, “It’s just plain wrong to imply that voting ‘present’ reflected a lack of leadership…it was the exact opposite.”

 

Here in Minnesota and all across the country people are voting for change.  They are turning the page on the divisive politics of fear, and choosing optimism and hope for a better future for our children and ourselves.  They know we can do better, and so do we.
We are proud to stand in support of Barack Obama and we urge you to join us in caucusing for Barack Obama on February 5th.

Signed:

Betty McCollum
Member of Congress, 4th Congressional District

Rebecca Otto
Minnesota State Auditor

Arvonne Fraser
Founder and Director, International Women’s Rights Action Watch

Tina Flint Smith
Former Board Chair, Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota

Susan Lenfestey
Founder, WATCH

Karin Birkeland
Former Board Member, Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota

Megan O’Hara
Pro-choice Democrat

Betsy Hannaford
Former Board Member, Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota

~

 

Posted: February 4th, 2008 under 2008 Presidential campaigns, Barack Obama, Reproductive Rights.
Comments: none