Centrist Pundits

The powerful earthquake in Haiti was nothing but a tragedy.  Everyone knows this.  A fault runs directly beneath a large city that is built out of the most flimsy materials available, and it is an unmitigated disaster.  There is a very good list of links to how to help at the Washington Post here.

As I said, everyone seems to get the utterly catastrophic scale of the disaster.  And yet we act shocked that some people are taking advantage of the disaster to make their own twisted points.  People who’ve done so repeatedly in the past.  For example, Pat Robertson, who has in the past talked about drowning New Orleans for its sin, has said that Haiti is cursed to disasters because of a deal with the devil for its freedom.

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.” True story. And so the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.  But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other…

Leaving aside the asinine nature of making the claim, the weak theology backing it up, the fact that Haiti is overwhelmingly Christian – 96% are Roman Catholics or Protestants, and the fact that a man of God should be spreading comfort, not trouble, in such times, we all need to remember one thing: he wants this attention.  He needs it.  He craves it.

People are calling Robertson a crazy old man.  Sometimes, alternatively, its that he’s an uncaring old man.  Neither are remotely true – in my opinion, its that he’s a self-serving attention whore who’s spent his life trying to be the center of attention, and uses statements like his ones about Haiti, his ones about Katrina, to keep the focus on him.  He’s not crazy – crazy people can’t plan statement to draw maximum attention this way.  And he’s not uncaring.  He cares… about how he can use these events for himself.

Rush Limbaugh, same thing.  Rush is smart.  Really, he is.  He knows that most of what he says is extreme to a point of absurdity, and he says it anyway because its gets people paying attention to him and his show, his ratings, and increases his bottom line.

Take a lesson from your childhood, folks.  While it may never really work because of their built in audiences, try ignoring them and see if it goes away – at least in how it impacts your life.  Or take your advice from the internet, if you’d rather, and don’t feed the trolls.

JC Foreign Relations, Personalities, Religion

Was hearing this on both Conservative and Liberal talk radio last night… may have even been the same caller for all I know.

Does anyone out there, of my readers, really have a concern that Sotomayor would be yet another Catholic on the bench?  (apparently, the 6th)

If so, what’s the concern?  That the Vatican will set U.S. legal policy?  That Catholics “think different” than other Americans?

I’m not sure I get it.

JC Religion, Supreme Court Catholics, Sotomayor, Supreme Court

Marriage is in the news today.  Maine’s Governor signed a bill allowing homosexuals to get married to each other.  At the other end of the spectrum, Elizabeth Edwards, on a book tour, is taking questions about the problems in her marriage (namely, her husband’s career-ending infidelity). 

The part I find interesting is actually the Elizabeth Edwards part of it.  I don’t know, exactly, if she’s exploiting her heartache, but let’s assume for a moment she isn’t, and they she’s just answering the questions because the questions are being asked.  She stated that she only asked John Edwards for one thing when they got married, that he be faithful.  Okay, fair enough.

That sounds like a fairly stinging indictment of John Edwards’s foolishness.  Your wife asked you to stay faithful, and you didn’t.  But more to the point, outside of an agreed upon open marriage, why wouldn’t you have an expectation you need to stay faithful?  Isn’t that one of the very reasons to get married, that you’ve agreed to be faithful to the person you are marrying (again, unless both partners have a different understanding, which is an entirely different issue).  What is mind boggling is not that John Edwards couldn’t keep the one promise his wife asked of him but that she needed to bother to ask at all.

Marriage is a fairly complicated social creation.  Marriage has religious meanings and legal meanings, and the two get intertwined and create all sorts of complications.  But it also boils down to an agreement between two people for certain things.  That agreement can change a bit from couple to couple, but all in all, there’s no secret as to what being married means.

Marriage is a great thing, for some people.  Others probably shouldn’t ever bother with it.  Marriage has also changed and evolved over time.  Each change brings about people who don’t think those changes should come.  Right now, the big battle is gay marriage, and people are fighting that.  But only a few years ago, the big issue with marriage was how easy divorce was becoming, and people fought that.  In my parent’s life time, the battle has been between differing races, and differing religions.  Other cultures are still fighting a battle over whether marriage is about two people loving each other and agreeing to stay together, or about two families creating a business arrangement.  We can talk about the ancient traditions of marriage all we like, but marriage is pretty much a phenomenon that exists in any given moment.

But in the end, what marriage really needs to be defended against is only one thing: human nature.  But of course, there’s really no defense against that.

JC Religion, Society, State Politics culture, marriage

Political talk radio is not the best place to keep your calm about you.  And I mean that on both sides of the aisle.  Rush Limbaugh is a gigantic blowhard these days (he was actually funny once upon a time, at the very beginning) and Randi Rhodes is no better on the liberal side of things.  Both of them make hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

Still, I enjoy one show that happens to coincide with my morning commute, and that is Stephanie Miller.  She’s very liberal, so it won’t appeal to all of you, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously, makes fun of celebrities in addition to politicians, and throws in the occasional fart joke so its okay.

Today, she had a caller in to her show.  The caller was fairly adamant that the current economic crisis is the fault of “The Gays” and also, to a lesser degree, “The Jews”.  How?  Well, I didn’t hear the whole thing so I’m not sure about the Jews, but the Gays are apparently at fault because God is so angry about a couple of states recognizing gay marriage that he retaliated by crashing the economy.

Now, I’m a Christian.  I’m not as devout as some, I’m more devout than others.  I was raised fairly religiously neutral, having parents of differing religions.  I was uncomfortable for a long time with my own doubts about God, and came to an understanding of my own beliefs from, of all things, the Left Behind series (itself probably far more religious-politically right than I am, but it made me think about and confront and accept my own beliefs).  I’m still, as a friend’s internet icon declares, a proud member of the religious Left, while at the same time knowing that neither party is a religious party, even as both try to lay claim to religious callings and religious trappings.

The person who was best man at my wedding is a pastor, and while we don’t discuss religion often, he and his wife do keep me informed in a general sense as to religious take on our national politics.  One of my best friends is a weird combination of Buddhist and Wiccan and who-knows-what, and he offers up some differing opinions, unsurprisingly.  I have lots of other friends of varying religious backgrounds and depth, and so I think I keep my ear to the ground about religion, at least how it relates to politics.

And I can’t think of a single sane, rational, religious person (yes, there are plenty who are all three) who thinks that the economy is God’s retribution on America over “the Gays” or anything else.  Could God ruin our economy?  Sure.  He’s God!  Would he?  Doubtful.  Something as clumsy as our economy is surely the work of man’s unskilled hands.  And even if He did ruin our economy, the chances of our knowing why are minimal.  Interpreting the will and actions of God is not an easy task for a simple human, nor should it be.

I know it will never happen, but we need to put a moratorium on trying to do so.  God sent a hurricane to New Orleans?  Does he also hate the Midwest as he rains down tornadoes then?  God is ruining our economy because of acceptance of homosexuals?  Then was our economy good under Clinton because God likes infidelity?  The world, and the way God runs it, is much more complex than that.

JC Economy, Religion, Society culture, homosexuality, Religion