Everything is breaking right for Mitt Romney this year, as his opponents do their best to imitate Joe Louis’ old “Bum of the Month Club.” Unless the same strategy that’s failed to revive our economy over the past three years suddenly starts working, it looks like America is about to have its first Mormon president.

Which is perfectly ok. Mormonism is no more bizarre than Christianity, Islam, or Judaism – it’s just newer. I wouldn’t disqualify Romney based on his supernatural beliefs – even though his bigotry would disqualify me. “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” he proclaimed in 2007. “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” He went on to condemn humanists in bitter terms:

It’s as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong. … We are a nation ‘under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust. We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history.

That’s still not a disqualifier; humanists get the same middle finger from Obama, who insists that religious faith is “fundamental to human progress.”

There is one big Romney religious scandal that really ought to be a disqualifier, though – unless he’s big enough to issue an apology.

Mitt Romney volunteered to serve as a Mormon missionary in France from 1969 to 1971. He excelled at the work, becoming a zone leader in Bordeaux, then assistant to the mission president in Paris, the highest position for any missionary. Hundreds of French were baptized into the Mormon faith during his tenure. He has never claimed to have preached and disseminated anything other than standard Mormon doctrine during this period.

During Romney’s missionary period, standard Mormon doctrine concerning race was exemplified by the Juvenile Instructor, a publication for Mormon children: “We will first inquire into the results of the approbation or displeasure of God upon a people, starting with the belief that a black skin is a mark of the curse of heaven placed upon some portions of mankind. . . We understand that when God made man in his own image and pronounced him very good, that he made him white.”

Mormonism teaches that souls exist long before the humans with which they are associated are born into the world. The official Mormon doctrine was that souls who had sinned against God before physical birth were punished by being born with dark skin. Mormon President Joseph Fielding Smith described this in 1935:

Millions of souls have come into this world cursed with a black skin and have been denied the privilege of priesthood and the fullness of the blessings of the Gospel. These are the descendants of Cain. Moreover, they have been made to feel their inferiority and have been separated from the rest of mankind from the beginning.

Bruce McConkie, the leading modern-day Mormon theologian, wrote in 1958 that “The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. Along with all races and peoples he is receiving here what he merits as a result of the long pre-mortal probation in the presence of the Lord.”

When the Supreme Court began ending school segregation in 1954, the Mormon church was appalled. Apostle Mark Petersen stated that:

I think the Lord segregated the Negro, and who is man to change that segregation? It reminds me of the scripture on marriage, ‘what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.’ Only here we have the reverse of the thing – what God hath separated, let not man bring together again.

Mormon-sponsored Boy Scout troops even discriminated against black Boy Scouts, because they had to hold church positions in order to become patrol leaders, and they could not do so.

Mormon doctrine was especially vehement on the evils of miscegenation. Brigham Young, the Mormon leader after Joseph Smith:

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.

Won’t it be juicy to watch Romney run against the world’s most famous miscegenation product?

The relative darkness of the skin of American Indians, at least in comparison with that of the Mormons, was also related to their sins, according to the Book of Mormon that Romney tried to plaster all over France. “And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.” [I Nephi 12:23].

There was hope for the coloring of Indians who converted to the true faith, though. Spencer W. Kimball noted in 1960 that:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today . . . they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people. . . . For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. . . . The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl – sixteen – sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. . . These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness.

Kimball was rewarded for his powers of observation by becoming the 12^th LDS president in 1973, five years after Romney returned from France. Not until five years later did another LDS president have a “revelation” to allow black males into its priesthood, without officially changing Mormon teaching on the “pre-birth” evil of black souls.

Mitt Romney was 19 years old when he left for France, six years after Kimball spoke, and nearly 22 when he returned. He was old enough to think, to vote, to fight, and to supervise 175 missionary subordinates. Instead of saying “I am not going to try to promote any organization with teachings that obscene or that preposterous,” he did everything in his considerable power to try to extend the reach of that organization as much as he possibly could. Not only has he never apologized for any of this, he is still bursting with pride over the entire missionary episode.

People make mistakes, especially young people who have been brainwashed by elders claiming to speak for God. Mistakes can be forgiven, but only for people who acknowledge that what they did was wrong and resolve not to do it again. So is Mitt Romney ever going to apologize, not for being Mormon, but for spreading vicious and disgusting teachings on race? Unlike Joseph Smith, I don’t claim to be able to predict the future. I do know, though, that the title of the campaign book Romney published earlier this year is No Apology.

Luis Granados

(Guest post by George Erickson)

Morning. The sun, shuttered by clouds that brush my Ely Lake treetops, is just a feeble glow. Were it not for the intervening Norway pines, I could see the Eveleth/Virginia airport, and a mile beyond that, my gaze would stop at a roadside memorial to a caring, progressive, Minnesota activist who ranked among the best.

On a day like this, when Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and his wife Sheila were en route to the funeral of a friend in a chartered Beechcraft King Air, their lives took a tragic turn. Descending too low, and more than a mile off course, the Beech struck the trees, and we suddenly had a vastly different funeral to consider—a service to honor Senator Wellstone, his wife, and child plus several coworkers and two instrument-rated pilots who died in that inexplicable crash.

I retrieve a book from the table beside my deck chair, and as the wind sighs I turn the first page of a book that every American should read: Wellstone’s The Consience of the Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda.

The title says it all, for Wellstone was a truly compassionate man: “How can we live in the richest, most privileged country in the world… and still hear from Republicans and too many Democrats that we cannot afford to provide a good education for every child, that we cannot afford to provide health security for all our citizens?”

He was always that way. As a fledgling Carleton college professor who was determined to organize the poor, Wellstone was warned by the college trustees that he’d be fired if he continued his activist ways. He persisted—and was fired.

Fortunately, 1600 of the college’s 1700 students rose to Wellstone’s defense. Reinstated, he became the Carlton’s youngest tenured professor, and soon turned to politics as a way to improve the lives of John and Jane Doe. “Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives,” he said, “lessening human suffering, advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and in the world.” Thomas Paine, the first great American humanist comes to mind.

With his green bus, he traveled aroung Minnesota, won the Democratic nomination, and campaigned against wealthy Rudy Boschwitz, the incumbent senator who eventually sunk his faltering campaign with a desperate, bigoted charge that Wellstone was insufficiently Jewish because he’d married a Christian.

During his years in the U.S. Senate, Wellstone, who came to be known as “the conscience of the Senate,” championed women’s rights, promoted single-payer healthcare, and campaign finance reform. He was re-elected despite a vicious campaign that relied on a Newt Gingrich strategy to always use derogatory adjectives when speaking of your opponent. Thus, Paul faced ads that said “Wellstone is a lying, hypocritical whiner” but rarely addressed the issues. He was labeled “Senator Welfare,” and was charged with wanting to take everyone’s guns away, and with supporting abortion at nine months for the purpose of sex selection. In an attempt to make liberalism sound like a crime, he was called “embarrassingly liberal.” (Nevermind that liberalism is defined as “favorable to progress or reform, favorable to freedom of action and thought, free from prejudice, open to tolerance and generosity.”)

Despite frequent death threats, Wellstone persevered, serving the ordinary man and woman—not the corporations and not the rich and famous. He had been targeted by Republicans as the # 1 person to be removed from the Senate. Undeterred he soldiered on, and on October 25, 2002, just two weeks after he voted against George W. Bush’s fraudulent war in Iraq, his Beechcraft fell from the skies.

Though just five foot five inches tall, Paul Wellstone took on bigger, more powerful, and often unprincipled foes, winning some battles and losing others, but in eschewing power, fame, and profit, and in representing John and Jane Doe so faithfully, Paul Wellstone repeatedly proved that he was the a superb human being.

Anyone who counted out the influence and power of the National Organization for Marriage should think again. On Tuesday, three state Supreme Court justices in Iowa found themselves out of jobs after voters opted not to send them back to Des Moines for another term. This is the first time in Iowa history that voters have fired justices from the Supreme Court.

And what was their crime? Voting with the unanimous majority in Varnum v. Brien to uphold a lower court’s ruling that the state’s limitation of marriage to only between a man and a woman violated the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution. This ruling instituted marriage equality in Iowa in 2009, making the state one of only five states in the nation (plus the District of Columbia) that allow for full marriage rights for all couples. As reported in the New York Times, this vote was intended to send a message nationwide:

Leaders of the recall campaign said the results should be a warning to judges elsewhere.

“I think it will send a message across the country that the power resides with the people,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor who led the campaign. “It’s we the people, not we the courts.”

The campaign to remove the three justices at the ballot box was heavily supported by the National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association. The Des Moines Register reports that over $650,000 from these and other groups was spent on the campaign to remove the three justices.

As for the justices themselves, they saw something nefarious afoot. From the Times:

The judges declined requests for interviews but released a statement that decried what they called “an unprecedented attack by out-of-state special interest groups.” The statement defended the system for selecting judges but offered what a veiled warning about populist impulses to remake the judiciary: “Ultimately, however, the preservation of our state’s fair and impartial courts will require more than the integrity and fortitude of individual judges, it will require the steadfast support of the people.”

Judicial retention elections are meant to serve as a democratic stamp of approval on the work of judges. For example, in Iowa the justices do not run contested campaigns; voters are merely asked on election day if they approve of retaining the justices in question, and more than fifty percent must vote yes for the judge to be retained. Justices usually do not campaign to retain their own seats, and receiving less than half the vote is rare. By the very nature of the judicial system, justices are likely to rule on controversial issues; with retention elections there is a great deal of risk that the work of the justices will be politicized. This fear was expressed by Joseph R. Grodin, a law professor and former California Supreme Court justice who was voted out in 1986 after a campaign asserting that he was soft on the death penalty. He told the New York Times:

Obviously it has an impact on the independence of judges and how they think of their role — I think that’s demonstrable…But more than that…I think the damage is not on judges, but that courts will come to be seen and judges will come to be seen as simply legislators with robes.

And if you look at the National Organization for Marriage’s victory statement about the Iowa elections, released yesterday, it is clear that they do desire to politicize the work of the bench. From the statement:

“The victories we have achieved this election are truly historic and stunning,” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). “First and foremost, we wanted to defeat the judges in Iowa who had usurped the will of the people and imposed gay marriage in that state. The three judges were overwhelmingly rejected, sending a powerful message to any judge who thinks they can impose gay marriage by judicial fiat against the wishes of the people. We thank Iowa for Freedom, the American Family Association, and the Campaign for Working Families for working together to hold these judges accountable.”

If Iowa judges are limited to making rulings that are only supported by the majority of Iowans, then obviously the power of the judiciary in Iowa to defend the State Constitution would be completely neutralized. Why bother having a judicial branch with the power of examining constitutional questions at all? Of course, I strongly suspect that the language of direct democracy is merely what the NOM finds convenient in making its argument against marriage equality. As the struggle to defend marriage equality continues, arguments against it will evolve, especially in light of the fact that support for marriage equality continues to increase across the United States.

In the meantime, expelling the justices from Des Moines does not change the fact that marriage equality remains in effect in Iowa. But it could send a chilling national message that the Religious Right will pour resources into campaigns around the nation opposing other justices who make rulings perceived to be too friendly to LGBT rights, therefore staying the gavel of justices who want to side with, well, justice. This is the most pernicious effect of Tuesday’s judicial retention election in Iowa, and it could have national consequences. But the lesson is learned: in future elections of this nature, outside organizations on the side of marriage equality will have to get down in the mud a little bit too, spend some money, and work to defend the judges who rule in favor of equal rights under the law for all.

Yesterday both opponents and supporters of the Park51 Islamic community center project in lower Manhattan gathered for competing rallies. The New York Times was there and reported on some ugliness that took place:

Around noon on Sunday, Michael Rose, a medical student from Brooklyn, approached some of the hundreds of protesters who had gathered near ground zero to rally against a mosque and Islamic center planned for the neighborhood.

Mr. Rose, 27, carried a handwritten sign in favor of the mosque — “Religious tolerance is what makes America great,” it read — and his presence caused a stir. An argument broke out, punctuated by angry fingers pointed in the student’s face.

The police eventually removed Mr. Rose for his own safety.

Salon.com commentator Glenn Greenwald points to a video of another confrontation that took place at the same anti-Park51 rally. An African-American man wearing a cap that fit tightly over his head walked through, and members of the crowd quickly decided that he must be a Muslim and started shouting anti-Islamic slogans at him. If you watch the video at YouTube (warning: strong language, poor sound quality), you can see the hostile tone of the demonstration. The man who is singled out seems to be simultaneously angry and baffled. For what it’s worth, he denies he’s even a Muslim, but also expresses bewilderment that the crowd singled him out without knowing his opinion on the subject. But his very presence activates the deep hostility of the crowd in a way that looks downright frightening in the video.

In light of all this ugliness, it disappoints me to see that Mother Jones is reporting this morning that several commissioners from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom have come out strongly against the Park51 project. The USCIRF is federally funded and was created by Congress in 1998 to monitor religious freedom around the world and advise the president on the issue. But apparently many of its commissioners lose sight of this mission when it comes to addressing religious freedom at home. According to the Mother Jones report:

In a recent piece for National Review Online, Nina Shea, one of USCIRF’s nine commissioners (who are selected by the president and congressional leaders), wrote that instead of “a cultural center for all New Yorkers,” the “mosque” project could be “a potential tool for Islamists”—suggesting it would be a hotbed of jihadism that, among other things, spreads the literature and ideas of Islamic extremism. She compared the leaders of the Cordoba House project to convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman (the “blind Sheikh”) and accused Fort Hood and Christmas Day bombing coordinator Anwar al-Awlaki. (Shea’s piece, as of Monday, was no longer showing up on the NRO site.)

Mother Jones goes on to point out that at least two of the other eight commissioners also have spoken out against the project, including Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who compared the project to a hypothetical Shinto Shrine at Pearl Harbor and believes it should be moved several more blocks away from Ground Zero.

Never mind that Imam Rauf, the religious leader behind the project, indubitably holds moderate religious and political views. Never mind that the First Amendment to the Constitution is not conditional based on which religion is asking for free exercise. Never mind that one of the lead opponents to Park51 has unabashedly and repeatedly lied about the project. Nina Shea and Richard Land are here to tell you that religious freedom doesn’t exist in lower Manhattan…or that it shouldn’t.

But while many opponents of the Park51 project claim it’s a matter of the land around Ground Zero being somehow sacred, it is nevertheless evident that—as one of the project backers, Daisy Khan, stated yesterday—the opposition has to do with hatred of Muslims more than anything else. As the Washington Post reported today, Mosque construction is facing tough opposition all over the nation, including in Murfreesboro, TN, where opponents to a local Islamic center’s expansion plans carried signs that said “Keep Tennessee Terror Free.”

It is the height of bigotry to blame an entire population for the actions of a few. Mosque opponents are acting as though Islam itself (and therefore all Muslims) attacked America on 9/11, rather than a small band of violent and hateful fanatics. When they say that building the Park51 project is “insensitive” to the 9/11 victim’s families, they are acting as though the very existence of Muslims is what’s offensive.

The conflict over Park51 points to a larger battle over our country’s future. Will the USA be a nation that respects the First Amendment, that is tolerant (and even accepting) of religious minorities, that truly practices the ideal that people should be free to practice their respective religions without interference? Or will xenophobia triumph, fanned by the flames of polarizing political and media figures, leaving the nation as a sort of exclusive zone for the one chosen Christian religion?

It’s a battle we cannot afford to lose. The Park51 project must be allowed to proceed, unhindered. Now is the time for concerned citizens to speak out in favor of the universal principle of religious freedom, which benefits all of us, no matter how we may individually feel about different organized religions. Or will secular humanists one day be saying our own version of Pastor Niemöller’s famous statement? They came first for the Muslims…

The reaction of the Catholic Church to last week’s court decision striking down California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 was swift and to the point. Speaking for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George mourned that “It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage.” On the Protestant side, Focus on the Family chimed in that “Judge Walker’s ruling raises a shocking notion that a single federal judge can nullify the votes of more than 7 million California voters.”

This sudden Christian solicitude for the will of the people should make anyone familiar with the history of Christianity gag.

Democracy was invented by the Pagan Greeks; there is some reason to believe that Pagan Germanic tribes practiced a rough form of democracy as well. It certainly isn’t found anywhere in the Bible; when 250 “men of renown” complained to Moses that he was being overly autocratic, God obligingly opened a pit in the earth to swallow them up.

After Christianity seized control of the Roman Empire, democracy vanished from Europe altogether; Middle Ages society was founded on Augustine’s iron notion of rule by God, not by man. The Middle Ages Church did all it could (and that was quite a bit) to snuff out any glimmer of democracy before it could take hold. When the Emperor Frederick II published his “Constitution of Melfi” in 1231, it provided among other things for a representative assembly, with each town sending two delegates to inform the Emperor about local needs. A livid Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick and called him the Antichrist. That should not have been surprising, for only a few years earlier Pope Innocent III had declared England’s Magna Carta, the first written expression of the English people’s rights, null and void because it purported to rein in the power of a divinely ordained monarch and vassal of the Pope.

The Protestant Reformation did nothing to advance the cause of democracy; neither Luther nor Calvin had the slightest intention of giving the common people any more power than the Pope had. By the 1640s, when the English Civil War broke out, the rebels were a curious mix of proto-democrats, heavily influenced by John Lilburne, and radical Calvinists, led by Oliver Cromwell. Lilburne’s goal was simple: he wanted all adult males to be able to elect Parliament, rather than just a small handful of the propertied class. Cromwell’s goal was equally simple: rule by the God experts, to impose morality on a sinful island. Cooperation between the two camps was easy when both were simply warring against the status quo, but once the king was defeated the incompatibility of their goals quickly surfaced. Cromwell ordered Lilburne’s arrest for treason, but after a dramatic trial before a jury Lilburne was acquitted. Didn’t matter; Cromwell threw him back in jail anyway, without bothering to file charges. Cromwell proceeded to expel the elected members of Parliament who voted against him – so much for democracy. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

We just passed the 175^th anniversary of an episode, inconsequential in itself, that kicked off a fascinating chain of events that may well have an impact on the 2012 election.

On June 30, 1835, a traveling showman named William Chandler rolled into the little town of Kirtland, Ohio. Chandler had purchased from the estate of a French adventurer named Antonio Lebolo a collection of genuine Egyptian mummies and hieroglyphic writings on papyrus, that Lebolo had stolen during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt. Chandler’s investment was profitable, as Americans were willing to pay good money to gawk at such exotic artifacts. The problem with the hieroglyphics, though, was that no one knew what they meant. Except for one man: Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism, who claimed to have a divine gift for translating “Reformed Egyptian.” So Chandler made his way to Kirtland, where Smith was then operating, to see if Smith had any interest in his collection.

Chandler hit a gusher. Smith instantly pronounced the writings to be the work of the biblical prophet Abraham himself, written in his own hand, and yes indeed he could translate them if given a little time. Shrewd businessman Chandler wanted cash; Smith raised the then-staggering sum of $2,400 from his congregation to buy the entire collection, including the mummies.

It took Smith several years to complete the translation, during which time he was occupied with other matters such as establishing a fraudulent bank, marrying dozens of wives, and touching off a minor civil war in Missouri. But when it finally was published in 1842, The Book of Abraham had a huge impact on Mormon theology. Among other things, it firmly established Mormon teaching on race.
Read the rest of this entry &raquo

On May 4, 1970, several thousand students gathered at midday at Kent State University in Ohio to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the presence of National Guard troops on campus. The demonstration followed several days of tension and violence on campus and in downtown Kent following President Nixon’s April 30th announcement of a major incursion into Cambodia by American and South Vietnamese troops. In the days leading up to May 4, riot police used tear gas to disperse demonstrating students, the ROTC building was burned down, and the governor of Ohio ordered Kent State to be occupied by Ohio National Guard troops.

By noon the National Guard commander had issued an order for the demonstration to disperse, and guardsmen began to use tear gas to break up the demonstrators (some of whom had been throwing stones or throwing the tear gas canisters back). Oddly, by the time the actual killings took place, many of the students thought that the main action of the afternoon was over and had started to walk to class. But about a dozen members of Troop G of the National Guard suddenly turned and fired into the crowd of student demonstrators. Many bullets met their mark; four students lost their lives, and nine more were wounded. The guardsmen later asserted that they felt threatened by a mass of protesters, and no one was ever punished or held accountable for the killing of the four unarmed students, all of whom were several hundred feet away from the guardsmen who fired.

The killings at Kent State galvanized a national student protest movement, with demonstrations and student strikes on hundreds of college campuses across the nation in the following days. And over time the public support for the war in Vietnam and Cambodia crumbled.

Today Kent State University is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the attacks. A New York Times reporter spoke to freshmen on campus, and found that many of them don’t feel a strong historical connection with what happened at their university forty years ago.

Fourteen of 15 freshmen interviewed on the campus said they did not feel any connection with the lives of the students who were protesting the United States’ invasion of Cambodia at the time.

The university requires first-year students to watch a historical video of what happened that day and the events leading to it: the violent confrontation between protesters and local police and the burning of the R.O.T.C. building near the Commons.

Freshmen attribute their lack of interest to the time span.

“Our generation doesn’t necessarily really care because it happened so long ago none of us were alive,” said Ethan Moore, a freshman majoring in nursing. “Though it definitely shouldn’t be forgotten because they were people, too.”

Of course, the opinion he expressed was not universal; another student that the reporter spoke to said that had she been there forty years ago, she would have been out there with the Kent State demonstrators. Nevertheless, I wonder if freshmen at Kent State (or at any university) can truly conceive of what it must have felt like to students and antiwar demonstrators all over the United States to know that soldiers had used live ammunition on their fellow Americans, leaving four unarmed people dead. The division between state and civil society must have felt complete and irreconcilable—at least, that’s what I always thought Neil Young meant when he sang “We’re finally on our own” in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song “Ohio.”

Forty years have passed since the day the National Guard gunned down the students at Kent State. And yet, eerie parallels exist between 2010 and 1970. Today the United States is engaged in two intractable and long-asting wars on the Asian continent. But where is the anti-war movement? While there was a mass uprising in 2003 against the war, it climaxed during the February 15, 2003, pre-war demonstrations. Ever since then, the anti-war movement has gradually but surely diminished.

Why has this happened? Journalist Chris Hedges, who recently participated in an anti-war teach-in in Washington, DC, at the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill (an event that was co-sponsored by the Humanist magazine), believes that not enough anti-war liberals in the United States are actually affected by the wars. He writes:

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military.

In contrast to 1970, when young men were being drafted to serve in the front lines of Southeast Asia, today a very small number of Americans are being called upon to actually bear the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as Hedges points out, many of those who do serve in the military come from the economic class that has less access to power, less visibility in the media, and less access to the institutions that can be used as a springboard into wider action against the war, such as universities. The result is a diminished anti-war movement.

I would suggest, too, that fatigue and confusion have both taken their toll. By fatigue, I mean that the war in Afghanistan has lasted nearly a decade, and the war in Iraq has lasted more than twice as long as American involvement in World War II. It is difficult to keep up the energy and momentum that the anti-war movement built up in its initial days for all of those years. And by confusion, I mean that the election of President Barack Obama has engendered a lot of bewilderment on the part of those who took strong stands against the wars over the last decade. After all, President Obama spoke out forcefully against the war in Iraq when he was a state senator in Illinois and the war was just on the horizon. He received the vast majority of the anti-war vote, and he promised to bring a more peaceful presidency. Yet even as we’re told that the war in Iraq is winding down, President Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan (an action that was also, contradictorily, part of his platform as a candidate). So the anti-war movement is left with a president who does not galvanize them like President Bush did, even as he takes actions that many still consider to be belligerent.

The anti-war movement today may be smaller, but that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. For just one example of what we could be doing, right now, to make a difference, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), an outspoken anti-war member of Congress, made the call at the Capitol Hill event for a new series of teach-ins across the country to educate people about the wars and the need for peace.

Will we heed Rep. Kucinich’s call to challenge “the deficient orthodoxy that war is inevitable”? Let us rededicate ourselves to the idea that those four students gave their lives forty years ago today for a worthy cause, the cause of peace in this world, and honor their legacy by living our lives for peace.

Today the Los Angeles Times contained an opinion piece by Neal Gabler, a biographer of Ted Kennedy, titled “Politics as religion in America.” In the piece Gabler argues that segments of the right have become dogmatic and zealous in their political beliefs.

According to Gabler,

For centuries, American democracy as a process of conflict resolution has been based on give-and-take; negotiation; compromise; the acceptance of the fact that the majority rules, with respect for minority rights; and, above all, on an agreement to abide by the results of a majority vote. It takes compromise, even defeat, in stride because it is a fluid system. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once put it, the beauty of a democracy is that the minority always has the possibility of becoming the majority.

Religious fundamentalism, on the other hand, rests on immutable truths that cannot be negotiated, compromised or changed. In this, it is diametrically opposed to liberal democracy as we have practiced it in America. Democrats of every political stripe may defend democracy to the death, but very few would defend individual policies to the death. You don’t wage bloody crusades for banking regulation or the minimum wage or even healthcare reform. When politics becomes religion, however, policy too becomes a matter of life and death.

Gabler concludes by opining that “for the political fundamentalists, this isn’t political jousting, this is Armageddon. With stakes like that, they will not lose, and there is nothing democrats — small ‘d’ and capital “D” — can do about it.”

Drivel. Gabler’s argument rests on two assumptions that are simply without merit. First, he assumes that the right is unique in this “political fundamentalism”; he is wrong. Second, he believes that “political fundamentalism” is something new; it’s not.

“Political Fundamentalism” is a vague term. For Gabler it seems to refer to political beliefs that are held with religious fervor. Insofar as one truly holds a religious belief—so let’s exclude many people of faith who are, for lack of a better description, hypocritical—it inherently taints one’s political beliefs. Take Christianity as an example. The Gospels (in the broad sense of the term, the Good News) are political in nature. Jesus walked with lepers, prostitutes, and other outcasts. But most importantly, to me at least, he taught that “the poor would be poor no more” (this is a line I heard Sister Helen Prejean say at a book talk and have never forgotten). These are political messages, challenging the castes of the age and promising a better world for the downtrodden. While this isn’t directly related to health care (although he did heal), taxation (although tithes are still compulsory in countries with state-supported churches), or the place of the state (although the Romans did adopt Christianity and states made war in the name of it), Jesus was reshaping the polity; and it is undeniable that he was successful in that endeavor, even if the results were arguably malign.

While I interpret Christianity, as do many, as requiring certain benevolent political viewpoints, I realize Gabler’s issue is not with the religious, but with those for whom politics becomes like faith. But Gabler never defines how large this group is, names a single member, or anything else; we just know that they are the fringe right. But is there not a fringe left as well? Good luck convincing a Wobblie that capitalism is anything but an evil that must be opposed even at the cost of life. Has the Animal Liberation Front not violently destroyed property and life in the name of animal rights? No matter how reasonable one argues, you will never convince half of Hollywood that the Republican Party is anything but a blight to be fought with all one’s resources.

Furthermore, such virulent political stances are as old as the United States itself. America is born out of the Sons of Liberty, and the Declaration of Independence was signed despite the fact that Britain had shown a willingness to compromise and backed down on many of the taxes. Lincoln was shot over politics, as was Alexander Hamilton. You couldn’t compromise with McCarthy, Malcolm X, or Ross Perot. Martin Luther King held his political beliefs so zealously he even had the gumption to attribute them to God.

No, Mr. Gabler, you have provided no insight into the current political discourse. What we have seen in the last decade was the over-reach stage of conservatism. Liberalism had its stage too, think of the 1968 protests in Chicago. Many of the hardcore and uncompromising members of Congress have lost their seats, Gingrich is gone, and 2006 was a “thumpin’” for republicans.  Relax Neal, it’s just politics.

Monday’s LATimes contained an interesting piece on the Bald Eagle. In essence, many Indian tribes have religious practices, such as the Sun Dance, that require Bald Eagle… ahem…parts. The Bald Eagle is a protected species—even more so than other listed species due to a special act of Congress—and so an obvious tension emerges; how can the federal government protect the animal while simultaneously protecting the religious rights of native Americans?

Currently, the federal government runs a depository of dead birds and has a licensing program. The licensing program has been plagued with problems—many people are apparently unaware of it—and the depository has a long waiting list for many Eagle parts. To avoid long waits, some Indians occasionally shoot birds without a license and find themselves fugitives as result of their religious beliefs.

Larger than the Indian issue, this does raise some moral and political questions for those of us who avow a separation and church and state. I think many people would agree the Indians have a right to these birds; Indians have been hunting and shooting the birds since before the Europeans arrived. Simultaneously, government has an interest in protecting all endangered species. How do we rectify these conflicting priorities?

We could make like the soviets and just outlaw religion. Problem solved. But, of course, that’s absurd. On the opposite end of the spectrum we could say any religious belief is a right, but that’s a slippery slope. The government would then be in the business of defining what is and isn’t a religion (granted they already do this for tax purposes but look at the fight it causes over things like Scientology). Also, someone could have some insane beliefs that direct them, for example, to extinguish a species that is the devil incarnate or to practice human sacrifice. Do we really want to play an even worse version of the snake-handler game?

Obviously, then, the answer lies somewhere between these two extremes. At some degree between zero and 180 is where we have been situated throughout history. The attempt to move the needle slightly one way is why groups like that AHA exist. Even though we claim to be proponents of religious liberty we cannot sit here and seriously say all peoples with a religious need have a right to shoot Bald Eagles at will. Defining that need is the purpose of the licensing program. To eliminate that is to open a can of worms so messy as to all but sign an extinction warrant for the Bald Eagle.

The current Bald Eagle services provided to the Indians by the federal government are pretty reasonable; they are by no means perfect, but the only other option I can see is to farm raise the birds. We do it with fish, why not birds? Is it even feasible, or will it devolve into the shame that is poultry production? Does a farm-raised bird even have the same essence as a wild one? Is that better, is that worse?

The current Utne Reader (their 25th Anniversary issue) features an article by Tom Jacobs called “Liberals Aren’t Un-American. Conservatives Aren’t Ignorant” (excerpted from the magazine Miller-McCune), which highlights the theories of Jonathan Haidt. Haidt, a University of Virginia Psychology Professor, believes both conservatives and liberals skew the moral argument and demonize each other even though they are interdependent. Haidt believes, perhaps correctly, that conservatives strive to uphold authority while liberals challenge it. He believes that if conservatives ran the world we would resemble North Korea and if liberals ran the world it would be chaos.

Haidt believes that morality is built on “five foundational moral impulses.” These impulses are

• Harm/Care: It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
• Fairness/ Reciprocity: Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
• In-Group Loyalty: People should be true to their group and wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty, and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
• Authority/ Respect: People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.
• Purity/ Sanctity:The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination, and associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

In the broadest sense, a moral entity would be one that contains all the above categories to some extent. According to Haidt, liberals are focused on the first two while conservatives are focused on the last three. He may be onto something; his website, YourMorals.org, allows you to take a quiz and see the results for not just yourself but also other self-identified liberals and conservatives. According to his results, in the aggregate liberals do emphasize the first two and conservatives the last three.

I’ve heard conservative/liberal morality arguments before; George Lakoff’s Moral Politics comes to mind. I’ll say exactly what I said in my review of that book in college, it’s all bunk. Haidt’s questions are so devoid of context and so complex as to be stupid. Here are a few examples:

• Respect for authority is something all children need to learn
• People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed
• People should be loyal to their family members, even when family members have done something wrong
• If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because it was my duty

After each of these questions, and more, you are given the choice to strongly, moderately, or slightly agree or disagree. These are complicated questions, how on earth are you supposed to answer with a bubble sheet?

Children do need to learn to respect authority but they should also learn to challenge authority and call a teacher out when they say something wrong. Where on the agree/ disagree scale is that choice?

Should people do disgusting things? Who is going to answer that people should? And individuals might disagree, for example, on just how disgusting it would be to defecate in the woods out of necessity.

Should people be loyal to their family? What exactly does this mean, do I not turn my sister into the cops for a triple homicide, or do I act civilly the day after we have a fight? These are very different things with different answers and you cannot express it on the agree/disagree scale.

Would you follow orders if you were a soldier? Yes and no. If my commanding officer told me to hook electrodes to a guy’s testicles for fun I would have him court marshaled. If he decided to enter a town from the south as opposed to the north I would shut my mouth and do it. It depends on the context, it depends on the order, and it depends on your relationship with that officer.

All of these questions have a lot of context and complicated answers that this test does not allow for. All Haidt is really measuring is responses to key words that appear throughout the questions: authority, harm, loyal, duty, and more. So self-identified conservatives react more favorably to the word loyal, I fail to see what that has to do with morality or politics.

Politics is a complicated area. It does derive from people’s morality, I don’t deny that. But it is so much more complicated than Heidt’s test allows; there is the cult of personality, self interest, and parental party affiliation all playing into how people vote. Politics is much more about who gets what, when then it is about legislating morality. Haidt’s research is interesting, I give him that, he has shown that self-identified conservatives and liberals react differently to loaded words, but it is a mistake to believe that anyone’s politics, much less their morality, can be measured.