Lessons from Florida v. George Zimmerman
Much has already been said and written in numerous venues about the killing of Trayvon Martin, the seventeen year-old unarmed black Florida youth by George Zimmerman and Zimmerman's recent acquittal of all charges (second-degree murder and manslaughter) by a six-person jury in Sanford, Florida. As someone who has been involved with law and cultural competency for many years, I've been interested in what has not been said, what was not done, and what the trial of Florida v. Zimmerman indicates about the extent to which the legal profession remains unskilled in addressing cross-cultural realities in litigation.
One wonders how, in 2013, a six-person jury was selected that included no African-Americans in Seminole County, Florida. One wonders how and why the prosecution team did not address the reality of racial profiling, racial prejudice, and racial stereotypes during jury selection in order to be able to intelligently decide whether to challenge prospective jurors for cause on account of racial prejudice, or to exercise peremptory challenges for prospective jurors considered unacceptable. One wonders whether the prosecution team included anyone skilled in cultural competency and inclusion.
We may never know the true answers to these questions. Whatever the answers may be, they cannot change the trial outcome. The time for those questions to have been considered and answered was at the outset of the prosecution. The Trayvon Martin homicide case involved cross-cultural issues at every turn. It appears that the prosecution team resorted to the age-old mistake many lawyers continue to make of thinking that law is color-blind and that such color-blindness is an asset to achieving just outcomes in legal disputes.
However, law is not color-blind. Law, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, is about experience. Culturally competent law practice requires that one understand societal realities and experiences and the legal implications they evoke. To do otherwise is to engage in wishful thinking at best. At worse, taking a "color-blind" approach to law in a legal dispute with cross-cultural issues amounts to cultural incompetence, however skilled the lawyer might otherwise be viewed.
Cultural competence, like competence in any other field, involves two essential components: knowledge and skill. Blindness is a disability, not a skill. Unfortunately, American law schools do not teach courses in cultural competence and the law. Lawyers are intentionally sent into a multi-cultural society that has a long and complex history of cross-cultural disputes without receiving any education on cultural competence and without being required to study and demonstrate any ability to handle cross-cultural issues as lawyers. Thus, lawyers who become judges lack cultural competence.
When uninformed and unskilled people engage in conduct that requires the exercise of knowledge and skill it is almost inevitable that mistakes will happen. As I mention in presentations to lawyers and judges about cultural competence and inclusion, "Oops is not a skill!" The legal profession should have known that truth long before Trayvon Martin was killed. The prosecutors in State of Florida v. George Zimmerman should have known it before charges were filed against Zimmerman. Had they been culturally competent concerning what the prosecution involved, perhaps they would have prepared and conducted the trial differently.
Trayvon Martin's death should have been investigated and prosecuted by lawyers who were culturally competent. The shameful truth is that it wasn't. The more painful truth is that this is the level of legal work communities of color, women, people who are gay, lesbian, trans-gender, and bi-sexual, immigrants, and other marginalized persons have come to recognize as business as usual from the professionals licensed by society to handle and decide disputes about justice.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Truth and Consequences: Implications of Disobeying the Prophetic Ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr.
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
Implications on Disregarding the Prophetic Ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr.
©Wendell Griffen, 2012
Across the United States people are gathering to celebrate the birth and reflect on the ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Excerpts will be played and recited from his "I Have A Dream" speech. Politicians will position themselves to gain favor with constituents at such gatherings. Proclamations and pronouncements will be issued and uttered. Choirs will sing. People will gather, present, and perform.
I do not condemn or disparage these exercises. But we should also ponder the tragic reality that our society and its civic, social, commercial, and religious leadership have not been faithful to Dr. King's ministry.
Martin King was the Jeremiah Wright of his time. He was murdered in 1968 a year to the day after he publicly called on the United States to end its military involvement in Southeast Asia. King was the Nobel laureate who confronted the Johnson administration and our nation about the tragic irony of sending black and white men to die together in Vietnam while refusing to help them live together at home. Yet the U.S. is as addicted to war-making in 2012 as it was in 1968.
King was the Baptist preacher who dared to confront clergy in Birmingham, Alabama about their willful tolerance of racist and violent conduct of Eugene "Bull" Connor and Birmingham police toward peaceful civil rights protestors. In 2012, the governor of Alabama is a man with racist and xenophobic policies about immigrants that are morally reprehensible.
King was the civil rights leader who hoped to lead 100,000 poor people to march on Washington, DC to confront national leaders about economic injustice and poverty. Economic injustice is what the Occupy movement is about. Economic injustice is what ACORN was about. Now, just as when King lived and preached, local, state, and national civic, business, and religious leaders continue to favor the wealthy and privileged while ignoring the needy and vulnerable.
King was the moral theologian who openly called on a society addicted to military adventurism, crass materialism, and racism to undertake a radical revolution of values. We remember the "I Have A Dream" speech of August 1963. But we have disregarded and disobeyed what he said on April 3, 1967 during his sermon titled "A Time To Break Silence" at Riverside Baptist Church in New York .
"Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profits motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men [and women] home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."
More than four decades have passed since Dr. King was taken from us. Sadly, we are reaping the consequences of disobeying his prophetic ministry.
Militarism has increased. Most people pay little attention to the suffering of military personnel and their families. News reports about our war-making are now hidden inside newspapers. Politicians won't talk about how much money this nation has spent over the past ten years on the fabricated war in Iraq and the poorly managed war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, we seem to have not noticed that the war atrocities of My Lai in Vietnam morphed into those in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, others in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and the festering daily travesty we perpetrate and try to ignore of Guantanimo in Cuba. When the Obama administration defended the CIA for killing U.S. citizens who sympathized with Al Qaeda in Sudan last fall the public didn't complain. When President Obama signed a bill on New Year's Eve that authorizes him and any other president to detain and indefinitely hold U.S. citizens without trial the public didn't complain. We've become the land of the un-free and the home of the scared.
Materialism has worsened. The gap between those who have much and those who struggle to survive in this society and our world is more proof that we have disobeyed Dr. King's ministry. We have sunk so morally low that presidential candidates are praised as followers of Jesus even when they publicly oppose providing universal health care regardless of income or employment status.
Racism remains a virulent cancer in our society. When terrorists from Ireland hid in the United States and Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City national leaders didn't call for a PATRIOT Act. But today Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents and state and local law enforcement officers target Latinos who are doing honest work to provide for their families. Local police continue to harass and racially profile black and brown people. We have a mass incarceration situation that is so large that Michelle Alexander has accurately called it "the New Jim Crow."[1] If you haven't read her book, I urge you to do so.
Our society is paying a terrible price for disobeying Dr. King's prophetic ministry. Yet we seem unable or unwilling to confess our transgressions and turn to the values he preached. Have we reached the spiritual death Dr. King feared?
I do not know when we will heed King's warnings and "undergo a radical revolution of values." But we can no longer ignore the consequences of having refused to do so.
· There are too many casualties from our military adventures to ignore. The costs of war-making have grown so high politicians hide them from us.
· Economic injustice now threatens entire cities, states, and regions across the nation. Birmingham, Alabama and Flint, Michigan are broke. Gated communities and Chamber of Commerce receptions, dinners, and slick ad campaigns can't cover up the damning results of favoring the privileged few over the needy many for decades.
· New laws requiring voter identification have been enacted in some states that will operate to stifle people of color, poor people, and formerly incarcerated persons who have paid their debt to society.
Dr. King foresaw the plight we now live. And with a prophet's heart and voice he left an encouraging word to guide us onward and upward. Obery Hendricks, Jr. shares King's words at the start of his latest book titled The Universe Bends Toward Justice.[2]
"When our days become dreary with low-hanging clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Dr. King was a prophet for our time. Prophets show us the way to live. Prophets challenge our wrong-headed decisions and wrong-hearted values. Prophets call on us to change. But prophets cannot make us want to change. They can hope for us, pray for us, plead with us, and pronounce moral judgments about us. But when all is said and done, whether we change is up to each of us.
The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. Will we cooperate with it or be condemned by it? The answer, as Michael Jackson sang, it's up to "the man in the mirror." So I leave you with this question.
What's happening in your mirror?
[1] Alexander has detailed the situation in her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness.
[2] Obery Hendricks, Jr., a former Wall Street executive and former seminary president, is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary and a Visiting Scholar in Religion and African American Studies at Columbia University. He is also author of The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. I am grateful to Dr. J. Alfred Smith, Sr. for introducing me to Hendricks and his prophetic work.
Implications on Disregarding the Prophetic Ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr.
©Wendell Griffen, 2012
Across the United States people are gathering to celebrate the birth and reflect on the ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Excerpts will be played and recited from his "I Have A Dream" speech. Politicians will position themselves to gain favor with constituents at such gatherings. Proclamations and pronouncements will be issued and uttered. Choirs will sing. People will gather, present, and perform.
I do not condemn or disparage these exercises. But we should also ponder the tragic reality that our society and its civic, social, commercial, and religious leadership have not been faithful to Dr. King's ministry.
Martin King was the Jeremiah Wright of his time. He was murdered in 1968 a year to the day after he publicly called on the United States to end its military involvement in Southeast Asia. King was the Nobel laureate who confronted the Johnson administration and our nation about the tragic irony of sending black and white men to die together in Vietnam while refusing to help them live together at home. Yet the U.S. is as addicted to war-making in 2012 as it was in 1968.
King was the Baptist preacher who dared to confront clergy in Birmingham, Alabama about their willful tolerance of racist and violent conduct of Eugene "Bull" Connor and Birmingham police toward peaceful civil rights protestors. In 2012, the governor of Alabama is a man with racist and xenophobic policies about immigrants that are morally reprehensible.
King was the civil rights leader who hoped to lead 100,000 poor people to march on Washington, DC to confront national leaders about economic injustice and poverty. Economic injustice is what the Occupy movement is about. Economic injustice is what ACORN was about. Now, just as when King lived and preached, local, state, and national civic, business, and religious leaders continue to favor the wealthy and privileged while ignoring the needy and vulnerable.
King was the moral theologian who openly called on a society addicted to military adventurism, crass materialism, and racism to undertake a radical revolution of values. We remember the "I Have A Dream" speech of August 1963. But we have disregarded and disobeyed what he said on April 3, 1967 during his sermon titled "A Time To Break Silence" at Riverside Baptist Church in New York .
"Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profits motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men [and women] home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."
More than four decades have passed since Dr. King was taken from us. Sadly, we are reaping the consequences of disobeying his prophetic ministry.
Militarism has increased. Most people pay little attention to the suffering of military personnel and their families. News reports about our war-making are now hidden inside newspapers. Politicians won't talk about how much money this nation has spent over the past ten years on the fabricated war in Iraq and the poorly managed war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, we seem to have not noticed that the war atrocities of My Lai in Vietnam morphed into those in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, others in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and the festering daily travesty we perpetrate and try to ignore of Guantanimo in Cuba. When the Obama administration defended the CIA for killing U.S. citizens who sympathized with Al Qaeda in Sudan last fall the public didn't complain. When President Obama signed a bill on New Year's Eve that authorizes him and any other president to detain and indefinitely hold U.S. citizens without trial the public didn't complain. We've become the land of the un-free and the home of the scared.
Materialism has worsened. The gap between those who have much and those who struggle to survive in this society and our world is more proof that we have disobeyed Dr. King's ministry. We have sunk so morally low that presidential candidates are praised as followers of Jesus even when they publicly oppose providing universal health care regardless of income or employment status.
Racism remains a virulent cancer in our society. When terrorists from Ireland hid in the United States and Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City national leaders didn't call for a PATRIOT Act. But today Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents and state and local law enforcement officers target Latinos who are doing honest work to provide for their families. Local police continue to harass and racially profile black and brown people. We have a mass incarceration situation that is so large that Michelle Alexander has accurately called it "the New Jim Crow."[1] If you haven't read her book, I urge you to do so.
Our society is paying a terrible price for disobeying Dr. King's prophetic ministry. Yet we seem unable or unwilling to confess our transgressions and turn to the values he preached. Have we reached the spiritual death Dr. King feared?
I do not know when we will heed King's warnings and "undergo a radical revolution of values." But we can no longer ignore the consequences of having refused to do so.
· There are too many casualties from our military adventures to ignore. The costs of war-making have grown so high politicians hide them from us.
· Economic injustice now threatens entire cities, states, and regions across the nation. Birmingham, Alabama and Flint, Michigan are broke. Gated communities and Chamber of Commerce receptions, dinners, and slick ad campaigns can't cover up the damning results of favoring the privileged few over the needy many for decades.
· New laws requiring voter identification have been enacted in some states that will operate to stifle people of color, poor people, and formerly incarcerated persons who have paid their debt to society.
Dr. King foresaw the plight we now live. And with a prophet's heart and voice he left an encouraging word to guide us onward and upward. Obery Hendricks, Jr. shares King's words at the start of his latest book titled The Universe Bends Toward Justice.[2]
"When our days become dreary with low-hanging clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Dr. King was a prophet for our time. Prophets show us the way to live. Prophets challenge our wrong-headed decisions and wrong-hearted values. Prophets call on us to change. But prophets cannot make us want to change. They can hope for us, pray for us, plead with us, and pronounce moral judgments about us. But when all is said and done, whether we change is up to each of us.
The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. Will we cooperate with it or be condemned by it? The answer, as Michael Jackson sang, it's up to "the man in the mirror." So I leave you with this question.
What's happening in your mirror?
[1] Alexander has detailed the situation in her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness.
[2] Obery Hendricks, Jr., a former Wall Street executive and former seminary president, is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary and a Visiting Scholar in Religion and African American Studies at Columbia University. He is also author of The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. I am grateful to Dr. J. Alfred Smith, Sr. for introducing me to Hendricks and his prophetic work.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Night You Became Indefinitely Detainable
THE NIGHT YOU BECAME INDEFINITELY DETAINABLE
©Wendell Griffen, 2012
On New Year's Eve 2011, while you and I were anticipating the end of the year President Barack Obama signed a law that makes U.S. citizens subject to indefinite detention by military authorities on suspicion of being terrorists.
The National Defense Authorization Act principally deals with funding the Defense Department. But the measure enacted by Congress and submitted to Obama contains provisions that allow the executive branch (meaning the President) to determine whether to order a U.S. citizen detained indefinitely by military authorities on suspicion of being a terrorist.
If you think that smacks of tyranny, you're right.
If you hoped Obama would demonstrate the fortitude to carry out his publicized threat to veto the legislation if this offensive provision wasn't removed, you're badly disappointed.
Count me among the badly disappointed people who know tyranny when we see it. Count me among the people who take no consolation in Obama's signing statement that his administration won't use the power he signed into law.
This is the kind of foolishness that produced the 1944 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States that upheld the forced detention of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry based on xenophobic and racist hysteria after Pearl Harbor.
The Korematsu decision is generally considered one of the low points of Supreme Court jurisprudence. It ranks alongside the decisions in Dred Scott v. Sandford (deciding in 1856 that black people had no legal rights white people were obliged to respect) and Plessy v. Ferguson (the 1896 decision that upheld Jim Crow seating on rail transportation that validated racial segregation for the next half century until it was overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education).
I hoped that Barack Obama, a former constitutional law professor, wouldn't align his administration with the forces of tyranny. I hoped he would understand the obvious danger to freedom posed by legalizing indefinite detention of any person based on mere suspicion. I hoped that he would resist the temptation to snatch people from their homes, families, jobs, and communities and deny them access to the civil courts.
And I hoped that he was principled enough to admit that the issue isn't whether his administration would ever sink to such a deplorable state as to resort to such conduct.
Despite Obama's claim that his administration won't use the power he signed into law, no president deserves the power to snatch people out of our society at will. No president should be allowed to order citizens or anyone else held indefinitely without an independent and objective judicial finding that they've done something unlawful.
Obama's action takes on more significance when considered from the perspective of the upcoming holiday honoring the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the direction of J. Edgar Hoover based on Hoover's suspicion that King was a Communist.
The law Obama signed on New Year's Eve now allows dissident voices such as Dr. King to be indefinitely detained on suspicion of terrorism.
Several years ago while visiting the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum in Alabama I found a poster of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. I admired the photograph of that man who escaped slavery, became literate, eventually purchased his mother's freedom, and stirred the fires of freedom by his great intellect and persuasive oratorical powers.
But I purchased the poster because it bears the following Douglass quotation: "There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own constitution."
Now it remains to be seen whether you and I have it.
Will goodwill followers of Jesus find a way to challenge the oppressive new powers that Obama claims he never wanted and won't ever exercise but signed into law? Will pastors find enough loyalty to righteousness and justice in our spirits to denounce this oppression in the spirit of Amos, Micah, Hosea, Frederick Douglass, Martin King, and Jesus?
Or will we imitate the priest and Levite in the Good Samaritan lesson and Barack Obama and look the other way?
God, help us recognize "a good fight," and then strengthen us to fight well.
| The Night You Became Indefinitely Detainable Posted: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 6:31 am Section: EthicsDaily.com's Latest Articles |  Email Print |  | ||||
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| The Night You Became Indefinitely Detainable Posted: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 6:31 am Section: EthicsDaily.com's Latest Articles | Email Print | | ||||
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Tuesday, December 7, 2010
A Time of Shame
President Obama and Republicans in Congress appear willing to continue the national pastime of pandering to the wealthy at the expense of the needy. According to news reports, Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate are willing to support legislation to extend unemployment benefits for workers that are to expire on December 31, 2010 if President Obama and Democrats will support extending the "temporary" tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush for all taxpayers, including individuals earning $200,000 or more and couples earning $250,000, that are also scheduled to expire December 31, 2010.
Such a deal should offend anyone who cares about justice. People making $200,000 a year don't need a tax break nearly as badly as people who've been out of work for months need unemployment benefits. President Obama surely knows this. So why would he agree to such a deal? And why, to add further insult to injury, would his administration agree to exempt estates valued at $5,000,000 from taxation? Why agree to add $900 billion—almost a trillion dollars—more to the federal deficit by giving tax breaks to the rich?
The political answer is that some lawmakers won't agree to extend the benefits for unemployed workers unless people with jobs and high incomes get tax breaks. Tax breaks for the wealthy is the price Republican and some Democratic lawmakers are demanding and Obama seems willing to pay so unemployed workers can buy food, provide shelter, and otherwise care for their families. This situation is happening during Advent season when Christian congregations are joyfully singing and preaching about a time when the Messiah will rule the world "in truth and grace."
We are warned at Psalm 146:3 to not place ultimate trust in rulers—no matter what their political party or philosophy may be—but in God. The drama being played out in Washington over extending unemployment benefits for laid-off workers shows that politicians are dealmakers. Their primary concern is not justice for the poor, weak, and vulnerable, but the campaign contributions and support they can garner from the wealthy and powerful.
So why aren't religious leaders talking about this issue? Could it be that we, like the politicians, are more concerned about money, church pledges to capital campaigns, and budgets than to how our vulnerable neighbors are treated? Are religious leaders and congregations becoming like the politicians the Psalmist warned against trusting? Are we so much "at ease in Zion" that we're more interested in charity for the affluent than justice for the vulnerable?
I don't expect politicians to think and act like prophets. But it isn't asking too much of preachers and congregations who claim to be God's servants to demand that politicians use public money so unemployed people can have food and shelter. It isn't asking too much of preachers and congregations to challenge and criticize politicians who would rather create more public debt to give tax breaks to wealthy people than protect people oppressed by unemployment. And it isn't asking too much of preachers and congregations to challenge ourselves about how much we cater to wealthy people.
The Biblical prophets had a sensitivity about and compassion for suffering people that inspired them to hold rulers accountable for the plight of poor people, immigrants, children, and others who were vulnerable. They called on rulers to relieve suffering, not exempt the powerful and affluent from the duty to help care for the less fortunate. When rulers ignored the divine mandate of justice for the poor, weak, immigrant, and outcast in their societies, prophets challenged them, criticized them, and condemned them. And when priests sided with insensitive and oppressive rulers, prophets condemned the priests along with the rulers.
Have the preachers and members of congregations supposedly devoted to God and divine justice forgotten this biblical history and forsaken our calling? Sadly, we seem so addicted to materialism and popularity that we can't and won't condemn policies and politicians that violate the biblical imperative to care for vulnerable people.
Shame on us for thinking we glorify God while ignoring how rulers treat people Jesus called "the least of these"! Shame on us for honoring the wealthy and disregarding the needy! Shame on us!
Such a deal should offend anyone who cares about justice. People making $200,000 a year don't need a tax break nearly as badly as people who've been out of work for months need unemployment benefits. President Obama surely knows this. So why would he agree to such a deal? And why, to add further insult to injury, would his administration agree to exempt estates valued at $5,000,000 from taxation? Why agree to add $900 billion—almost a trillion dollars—more to the federal deficit by giving tax breaks to the rich?
The political answer is that some lawmakers won't agree to extend the benefits for unemployed workers unless people with jobs and high incomes get tax breaks. Tax breaks for the wealthy is the price Republican and some Democratic lawmakers are demanding and Obama seems willing to pay so unemployed workers can buy food, provide shelter, and otherwise care for their families. This situation is happening during Advent season when Christian congregations are joyfully singing and preaching about a time when the Messiah will rule the world "in truth and grace."
We are warned at Psalm 146:3 to not place ultimate trust in rulers—no matter what their political party or philosophy may be—but in God. The drama being played out in Washington over extending unemployment benefits for laid-off workers shows that politicians are dealmakers. Their primary concern is not justice for the poor, weak, and vulnerable, but the campaign contributions and support they can garner from the wealthy and powerful.
So why aren't religious leaders talking about this issue? Could it be that we, like the politicians, are more concerned about money, church pledges to capital campaigns, and budgets than to how our vulnerable neighbors are treated? Are religious leaders and congregations becoming like the politicians the Psalmist warned against trusting? Are we so much "at ease in Zion" that we're more interested in charity for the affluent than justice for the vulnerable?
I don't expect politicians to think and act like prophets. But it isn't asking too much of preachers and congregations who claim to be God's servants to demand that politicians use public money so unemployed people can have food and shelter. It isn't asking too much of preachers and congregations to challenge and criticize politicians who would rather create more public debt to give tax breaks to wealthy people than protect people oppressed by unemployment. And it isn't asking too much of preachers and congregations to challenge ourselves about how much we cater to wealthy people.
The Biblical prophets had a sensitivity about and compassion for suffering people that inspired them to hold rulers accountable for the plight of poor people, immigrants, children, and others who were vulnerable. They called on rulers to relieve suffering, not exempt the powerful and affluent from the duty to help care for the less fortunate. When rulers ignored the divine mandate of justice for the poor, weak, immigrant, and outcast in their societies, prophets challenged them, criticized them, and condemned them. And when priests sided with insensitive and oppressive rulers, prophets condemned the priests along with the rulers.
Have the preachers and members of congregations supposedly devoted to God and divine justice forgotten this biblical history and forsaken our calling? Sadly, we seem so addicted to materialism and popularity that we can't and won't condemn policies and politicians that violate the biblical imperative to care for vulnerable people.
Shame on us for thinking we glorify God while ignoring how rulers treat people Jesus called "the least of these"! Shame on us for honoring the wealthy and disregarding the needy! Shame on us!
Friday, December 3, 2010
Airport Screening and Howard Thurman's Hounds of Hell
©Wendell Griffen, 2010
What if you were required to pass through a scanning device any time you drive on a public highway? Would you consider that requirement intrusive? Would you object to being scanned and insist that government agents have some specific factual basis indicating that you pose a risk of harm to others before they interfere with your travel and scan your body and effects?
Would you object less if required to permit government agents to frisk you and rummage through your belongings before you can travel? Are body and container scans and frisks justifiable because people use the highways to commit crimes?
If you value your freedom to travel without mindless suspicion and your right to privacy, you should find this hypothetical disturbing. Yet this process happens every day to every person engaged in commercial air travel in the United States. All persons who board a commercial airplane must first submit to body scanning. The latest body scanners provide images in graphic anatomical detail that are viewed by a TSA employee. Some frequent air travelers are concerned about the health risks associated with undergoing routine body scans.
Persons unable or unwilling to submit to the full body scanners must submit to pat-down frisking similar to that performed by law enforcement agents on suspected criminals. Many persons, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have expressed objections to the pat-down searches.
However, there has been no reported outcry about the requirement that every person seeking to board a commercial airplane be scanned. TSA personnel needn't have a reason to scan or frisk other than the fact that a person is travelling by commercial airliner. Persons traveling from private airports are not required to be scanned, frisked, or otherwise detained for surveillance and search before they board aircraft.
When a government requires people to be searched without any objective indication that they pose a danger to others, one usually associates that activity with a "police state." If freedom and personal dignity mean anything, people have the right to be left alone by others (including the government) unless there is a specific reason to interfere with that right.
Yes, we live in a world where people carry dangerous objects onto airplanes, including box cutters in their carry-on items and explosives in their shoes and underwear. We can't ignore that some people want to hurt others.
But is it fair and right to conduct surveillance, scan, and search every airline traveler like a potential terrorist? If so, what is left of the Fourth Amendment guarantee that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated?
Searches that lack an objective basis for suspecting the persons searched to be dangerous may be thorough and efficient. Such searches may cause public officials and travelers to feel "safe." However, the searches are not based on reasons to suspect that a traveler is dangerous. Governmental efficiency and irrational fear of strangers do not constitute legally valid reasons to treat people as criminals or enemies.
The airport screening issue involves the fundamental moral concern of whether we'll treat people we don't know as neighbors or enemies. Is the woman ahead of me my neighbor or my potential murderer? What reason do I have to suspect her as a murderer?
Am I justified to consider her more dangerous than myself because I don't know her? Is my suspicion because her clothing, language, ethnicity, or some other obvious feature differs from mine?
Would I be offended if she accused me of being a criminal and insisted that I be searched merely because she doesn't know me? And if I deserve to be treated as a neighbor unless there are objective reasons for suspecting me to be an enemy, shouldn't she and anyone else be entitled to the same neighborly treatment?
In his classic work, Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman named fear, hate, and hypocrisy (deception) "hounds of hell" that prevent people from creating community. And Fred Craddock reminds us that how we treat strangers is a question on life's final exam (Matthew 25:31-46). Judging from the TSA airport screening process, we're not creating community and we're flunking the final.
Religious leaders and congregations haven't addressed the moral implications surrounding airport screening. Terrorist attacks and threats don't trump justice for strangers. 9-11 didn't change the final exam.
What if you were required to pass through a scanning device any time you drive on a public highway? Would you consider that requirement intrusive? Would you object to being scanned and insist that government agents have some specific factual basis indicating that you pose a risk of harm to others before they interfere with your travel and scan your body and effects?
Would you object less if required to permit government agents to frisk you and rummage through your belongings before you can travel? Are body and container scans and frisks justifiable because people use the highways to commit crimes?
If you value your freedom to travel without mindless suspicion and your right to privacy, you should find this hypothetical disturbing. Yet this process happens every day to every person engaged in commercial air travel in the United States. All persons who board a commercial airplane must first submit to body scanning. The latest body scanners provide images in graphic anatomical detail that are viewed by a TSA employee. Some frequent air travelers are concerned about the health risks associated with undergoing routine body scans.
Persons unable or unwilling to submit to the full body scanners must submit to pat-down frisking similar to that performed by law enforcement agents on suspected criminals. Many persons, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have expressed objections to the pat-down searches.
However, there has been no reported outcry about the requirement that every person seeking to board a commercial airplane be scanned. TSA personnel needn't have a reason to scan or frisk other than the fact that a person is travelling by commercial airliner. Persons traveling from private airports are not required to be scanned, frisked, or otherwise detained for surveillance and search before they board aircraft.
When a government requires people to be searched without any objective indication that they pose a danger to others, one usually associates that activity with a "police state." If freedom and personal dignity mean anything, people have the right to be left alone by others (including the government) unless there is a specific reason to interfere with that right.
Yes, we live in a world where people carry dangerous objects onto airplanes, including box cutters in their carry-on items and explosives in their shoes and underwear. We can't ignore that some people want to hurt others.
But is it fair and right to conduct surveillance, scan, and search every airline traveler like a potential terrorist? If so, what is left of the Fourth Amendment guarantee that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated?
Searches that lack an objective basis for suspecting the persons searched to be dangerous may be thorough and efficient. Such searches may cause public officials and travelers to feel "safe." However, the searches are not based on reasons to suspect that a traveler is dangerous. Governmental efficiency and irrational fear of strangers do not constitute legally valid reasons to treat people as criminals or enemies.
The airport screening issue involves the fundamental moral concern of whether we'll treat people we don't know as neighbors or enemies. Is the woman ahead of me my neighbor or my potential murderer? What reason do I have to suspect her as a murderer?
Am I justified to consider her more dangerous than myself because I don't know her? Is my suspicion because her clothing, language, ethnicity, or some other obvious feature differs from mine?
Would I be offended if she accused me of being a criminal and insisted that I be searched merely because she doesn't know me? And if I deserve to be treated as a neighbor unless there are objective reasons for suspecting me to be an enemy, shouldn't she and anyone else be entitled to the same neighborly treatment?
In his classic work, Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman named fear, hate, and hypocrisy (deception) "hounds of hell" that prevent people from creating community. And Fred Craddock reminds us that how we treat strangers is a question on life's final exam (Matthew 25:31-46). Judging from the TSA airport screening process, we're not creating community and we're flunking the final.
Religious leaders and congregations haven't addressed the moral implications surrounding airport screening. Terrorist attacks and threats don't trump justice for strangers. 9-11 didn't change the final exam.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Clint McCance, Tea Party Bigotry, and the Religion of Jesus
©Wendell Griffen, 2010
Little Rock, Arkansas
I may be the only person in the world who senses a connection between Clint McCance, Tea Party nationalism, and neo-fundamentalist notions about Christianity. Mr. McCance is the Vice-Chair of the Midland School Board in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas who posted hateful comments about gay youth on his personal Facebook page. His were uttered in reaction to people wearing purple in support of recent gay victims who committed suicide after they suffered bullying.
Among other things, McCance stated, “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers killed themselves. The only way I’m wearin [sic] it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant [sic] believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves [sic] because of their sin.”
Since the time those and other hurtful statements were circulated over the Internet and drawn intense reactions ranging from a planned peaceful protest at a local school in his community to a public rebuke by the Arkansas Commissioner of Education, McCance has retreated into a reclusive silence.
I see a similarity between McCance and Tea Party nationalism. Like McCance, Tea Party activists have demonstrated intolerance and hostility. Although they deny being motivated by racial animosity toward President Obama and profess that they are displeased by his policies, many Tea Party activists have publicly challenged his citizenship, his religious faith, and his patriotism in ways that are hateful and racially-biased.
McCance and Tea Party nationalists appear to share one other feature—a neo-fundamentalist notion of Christianity that strikes out against people because they are considered "strangers," meaning different. In McCance's case, the "strangers" are gay people, particularly gay youth. For the Tea Party, President Obama is the "stranger." Ever since Obama won the Democratic Party nomination during the 2008 presidential campaign, people have been showing up at public events bearing signs and wearing clothing depicting him as a Nazi, socialist, witch doctor, and threat to the United States. Some have even worn T-shirts with Biblical references calling for his death.
Somehow McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamental Christians (who in many instances self-identify as "Christian conservatives") have come to believe that people who are different are dangerous. They reject the idea that human diversity is valid. For McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamentalists Christians, safety, security, and salvation require sameness.
This mindset is fundamentally wrong-headed. Reasonably intelligent people understand that human diversity is a fact to be accepted as part of a healthy world, not a harmful condition from which people and a society can or should be cured. A worldview that defines difference as threatening contradicts reality. After all, we are constantly learning about new species of plants and animals. Variety in people is no more ominous than it is in anything else in nature.
McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamental Christians embrace an arrogant and self-glorifying anti-intellectualism. I doubt I am the only person who detects irony in the fact that McCance, a leader (Vice-Chair) of his local public school board, was so arrogant as to demonstrate his incompetence with English grammar and spelling in his Facebook utterances that have prompted such an outcry. McCance brings Sarah Palin (former Alaska governor, 2008 Republican Party nominee for Vice President of the United States, and now leading promoter of Tea Party ideology) to mind. Palin's anti-intellectualism has become her calling card. We should not be surprised that American children are falling behind children in other societies when we deliberately elevate and celebrate people such as McCance and Palin as the exemplary leaders.
McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamentalist Christians aren't merely wrong-headed about human diversity. They're wrong-headed and wrong-hearted about the religion of Jesus. The Gospels present Jesus as someone who embraced people, especially people who were otherwise shunned because they were lepers, women, children, religious, political, and social outcasts, and sick. The Christ of the Gospels did not inspire the "Christianity" proclaimed and lived by McCance, Tea Party nationalists like Sarah Palin, and other neo-fundamentalist Christians who condemn people because of their sexual orientation, religion, language, and ethnicity.
There is as much difference between the religion of Jesus and McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamentalist Christians as there is between noon and midnight. As a follower of Jesus, I intend to show McCance, Palin, and the people they mistreat as "strangers" that I know that difference and am determined to live it.
Little Rock, Arkansas
I may be the only person in the world who senses a connection between Clint McCance, Tea Party nationalism, and neo-fundamentalist notions about Christianity. Mr. McCance is the Vice-Chair of the Midland School Board in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas who posted hateful comments about gay youth on his personal Facebook page. His were uttered in reaction to people wearing purple in support of recent gay victims who committed suicide after they suffered bullying.
Among other things, McCance stated, “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers killed themselves. The only way I’m wearin [sic] it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant [sic] believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves [sic] because of their sin.”
Since the time those and other hurtful statements were circulated over the Internet and drawn intense reactions ranging from a planned peaceful protest at a local school in his community to a public rebuke by the Arkansas Commissioner of Education, McCance has retreated into a reclusive silence.
I see a similarity between McCance and Tea Party nationalism. Like McCance, Tea Party activists have demonstrated intolerance and hostility. Although they deny being motivated by racial animosity toward President Obama and profess that they are displeased by his policies, many Tea Party activists have publicly challenged his citizenship, his religious faith, and his patriotism in ways that are hateful and racially-biased.
McCance and Tea Party nationalists appear to share one other feature—a neo-fundamentalist notion of Christianity that strikes out against people because they are considered "strangers," meaning different. In McCance's case, the "strangers" are gay people, particularly gay youth. For the Tea Party, President Obama is the "stranger." Ever since Obama won the Democratic Party nomination during the 2008 presidential campaign, people have been showing up at public events bearing signs and wearing clothing depicting him as a Nazi, socialist, witch doctor, and threat to the United States. Some have even worn T-shirts with Biblical references calling for his death.
Somehow McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamental Christians (who in many instances self-identify as "Christian conservatives") have come to believe that people who are different are dangerous. They reject the idea that human diversity is valid. For McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamentalists Christians, safety, security, and salvation require sameness.
This mindset is fundamentally wrong-headed. Reasonably intelligent people understand that human diversity is a fact to be accepted as part of a healthy world, not a harmful condition from which people and a society can or should be cured. A worldview that defines difference as threatening contradicts reality. After all, we are constantly learning about new species of plants and animals. Variety in people is no more ominous than it is in anything else in nature.
McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamental Christians embrace an arrogant and self-glorifying anti-intellectualism. I doubt I am the only person who detects irony in the fact that McCance, a leader (Vice-Chair) of his local public school board, was so arrogant as to demonstrate his incompetence with English grammar and spelling in his Facebook utterances that have prompted such an outcry. McCance brings Sarah Palin (former Alaska governor, 2008 Republican Party nominee for Vice President of the United States, and now leading promoter of Tea Party ideology) to mind. Palin's anti-intellectualism has become her calling card. We should not be surprised that American children are falling behind children in other societies when we deliberately elevate and celebrate people such as McCance and Palin as the exemplary leaders.
McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamentalist Christians aren't merely wrong-headed about human diversity. They're wrong-headed and wrong-hearted about the religion of Jesus. The Gospels present Jesus as someone who embraced people, especially people who were otherwise shunned because they were lepers, women, children, religious, political, and social outcasts, and sick. The Christ of the Gospels did not inspire the "Christianity" proclaimed and lived by McCance, Tea Party nationalists like Sarah Palin, and other neo-fundamentalist Christians who condemn people because of their sexual orientation, religion, language, and ethnicity.
There is as much difference between the religion of Jesus and McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamentalist Christians as there is between noon and midnight. As a follower of Jesus, I intend to show McCance, Palin, and the people they mistreat as "strangers" that I know that difference and am determined to live it.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Calling Out the Hypocrisy of "Fiscal Conservatism" in Current U.S. Political Discourse
Media commentators and U.S. elected officials at the highest levels of government are expressing concern ranging from apprehension to alarm about the federal deficit. Several members of Congress and people who share the Tea Party ideas about government are complaining about federal spending.This concern supposedly was why Congress allowed unemployment benefits for people who had been unemployed for six months or more to expire on June 2.
If the Tea Party, Blue Dogs, and other so-called "fiscal conservatives" such as Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Steve Forbes, and others are truly concerned about integrity—fiscal or otherwise—they should be complaining about the billions of dollars spent to wage war in Iraq. According to the National Priorities Project (www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home), the United States allocated $747.3 billion—almost 3/4 of a trillion dollars—for the war in Iraq since 2003. Here is what the same amount of money could have done for Arkansas, my home state:
- 2,080,756 people—more than the entire population of Arkansas—could have been provided low-income healthcare for one year; or
- 155,419 police or sheriff's patrol officers could have been employed for one year; or
- 166,758 firefighters could have been employed for a year; or
- Scholarships for 1,083,707 university students could have been provided for one year; or
- 1,261,201 students could have received Pell Grants of $5550 each to attend college; or
- Head Start could have been funded to cover 1,103,815 children for a year.
Mind you, the $747.3 billion allocated to wage war in Iraq does not include any money that must be spent to treat thousands of wounded and disabled service members. If the Department of Defense website is accurate, 13,982 service members were wounded in action and not returned to duty and 17,915 others were wounded and returned to duty. The Iraq war cost tally also does not include what the nation owes to survivors of the 4417 military and Defense Department civilians killed in Iraq as of August 2, 2010, 10 a.m., EDT (see www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf). We should have long ago confronted the hypocrisy of people who profess to cherish human life but never challenge a war that has claimed almost 4500 American lives, perhaps hundreds of thousands more in Iraq, and permanently scarred countless others.
Long before now, ethically sound people should have dismissed the hypocrisy of people who opposed spending money to help unemployed working people survive the current recession but who have never opposed the seven-year-old war in Iraq. And we should have dismissed as moral cowards or moral frauds those who said "I want my country back" when the nation debated enacting national healthcare insurance reform, but who never thought the country was at risk morally, intellectually, socially, militarily, and geo-politically because of the quagmire called Operation Iraqi Freedom.
When almost ten billion dollars of the money allocated for the war in Iraq cannot be accounted for, people who understand the difference between integrity and hypocrisy owe God and each other much more than hand-wringing and head-shaking about the nation's budgetary woes. We should be outraged about the hypocritical conduct and conversation surrounding it.
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