Some Thoughts On The Second Day

Every time I hear a newscaster say "President Obama," I experience cognitive dissonance. After eight years I am conditioned to expect "Bush" after "President."

This evening while walking I had a realization after hearing President Obama mentioned on the radio. Not only have we never had an African-American President before, I don't think we've had a President who wasn't of Northern European extraction. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Tyler, Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Hoover, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton... None of Italian ancestry, none of Polish, none of Slavic, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, let alone Native American... No Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon Presidents either, and only one Roman Catholic.

So much for the melting pot image our nation had of itself well into the last century.

It also intrigues me to read/hear the comparisons of President Obama to President Franklin Roosevelt. While I see similarities in what they've been dealt, we really can't compare their presidencies until President Obama has completed his term of office. And I'm still waiting for the comparisons of President George W. Bush to President Hoover.

Peace,
Jeff

Two Thoughts On Yesterday

No, I am not ignoring yesterday's historic events. However, many folks have written more eloquently about it than I possibly could. I do want to leave you with two thoughts.

Yesterday we witnessed the world changing.

Six months from now let us remember how we all felt yesterday during the Inauguration of President Obama.

Peace,
Jeff

Election Humor

These three pictures have been circulating around the Internet over the last week, and probably longer. The bottom one I saw for the first time last night. I'm surprised someone didn't forward it to me earlier, knowing my interest in all things Oz...

Peace,

Jeff

A Picture Is Worth $700 Billion

One of the blogs I read regularly is Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin (aka Digital Roam). Dan recently published a book by the same name that everyone who uses PowerPoint ought to read before doing their next presentation!

Today I happened to page down and rediscover his post of September 15 titled "Careful, Senator, your politics are showing." He talks about a workshop he recently did for the heads of staff for the Democratic Senators.

Whenever I give a workshop, I ask in advance for a sample problem relevant to my audience, so that I can demonstrate the power of pictures in a context drawn from their real-world experience.

In this case, Doug supplied me with a thick set of economic data comparing eight years of the Clinton Administration with eight years of the George W. Bush administration.

Once drawn out, the results are shocking.

Go take a look for yourself.

And if anyone tells you that Bush had to deal with a Congress controlled by the Democrats for a good part of his term, remember that the Republicans controlled Congress for most of Clinton's term.

Peace,
Jeffri

Apathy

I haven't paid too much attention to the presidential election of late. I watched a couple of the early debates and basically saw "politics as usual" being played out. The one Democratic candidate I felt most strongly about, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, and he was indeed knocked out early in the primaries. The remainder of the Democratic primary turned into a prolonged slug fest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Republican primary was an interesting dance amongst the religious candidates and "war hero" John McCain.

For the remainder of the primaries what little news allowed through my filters was heard while reading, watching, or listening to media regarding news about other issues. The only information of passing interest was that the Democratic party would be making history no matter which front runner won. We would have the nation's first person of color or first woman as the presidential candidate for a major party. Other than that, I did not, and still do not, hold out much hope that things will change very much no matter who occupies the White House for the next four years.

Last night, mostly out of curiosity, I turned on the television to watch Obama's acceptance speech. At first I was surprisingly impressed. Then I realized that his speech was nothing more than a series of sound bytes strung together for maximum effect.

Blah blah blah, we need change. Yada yada yada, we don't need four more years of Bush/McCain. Blah blah blah, the economy is a big issue. Yada yada yada, Roosevelt and Kennedy. Blah blah blah, I have a dream.

I expect we'll hear much the same, cast in Republican terms, from McCain in a few days.

For the first time in my life, I am seriously tempted not to vote for President.

Peace,
Jeffri

The Tide Has Turned

Within minutes the news hit the online news sites and the blogosphere. The California Supreme Court, in a 4-3, 172-page decision, overturned the state's ban on what is commonly termed gay marriage. Reactions from groups on all sides of the issue were both swift and predictable. For a summary of news stories, take a look at Susan Russell's An Inch At A Time. For comments from the liberal/progressive wing of the church, go to Father Jake's.







And from the conservative/regressive wing Stand Firm.






Since the ruling concerns the state constitution, it cannot be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Conservative forces in California already had a petition for a November ballot initiative underway. The initiative would amend the California constitution to include the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Governor Schwarzenegger has said in the past, and said again today, that he would oppose any effort to overturn the court's decision. That from a fairly conservative Republican. Not to mention that six of the seven justices are Republicans as well.

Even if the ballot initiative succeeds, it is clear that the tide has turned. Courts across the country look closely at rulings by the California Supreme Court and quite frequently follow them in their own rulings. More than that, our society is changing. It is always changing. The push for marriage rights by a segment of the lbgt communities has caused us to look more closely at marriage and what it is. Churches will have to accept the fact that the trend is to look at marriage more in line with it's original form as a civil contract rather than the religious meaning it acquired after the twelfth century.

Churches need to get out of the civil aspect of marriage. Clergy should NOT be agents of the state and should not perform the civil, legal, contractual piece. Churches should bless the marriage (heaven knows they bless everything else on earth!), not enact it. In some ways, that would make it much easier for those congregations and denominations that do not want to deal with gay marriages in their churches.

The tide has turned. You'd better learn to swim, or you'll be swept away.

Peace,
Jeffri

Facts? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Facts!

I'm having a "the media is screwed up beyond belief" day. It actually started a couple of days ago with the rumors that former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey would be entering General Theological Seminary in the fall. First it surfaced on one of my email lists, and then commentary and comments began piling up throughout the blogosphere. Nowhere could I find confirmation or the original source of the rumor, but it kept flying around the internet until yesterday afternoon when it was publicly confirmed by several reliable sources. This morning the story was plastered across the front pages of many New York metropolitan area newspapers.

Let's start with the newspapers. Most of them ran headlines that implied that McGreevey would be ordained as soon as he finished seminary. Few of the stories bothered to dig deep enough to report that he was actually starting seminary BEFORE completing the diocesan discernment process. That is not unheard of, but it is not a particularly "politic" path to ordination, since it flies in the face of the guidelines for discernment and ordination in most Episcopal dioceses. Facts went out the window in order to create a sensational headline.

Then there were the bloggers and the commenters. Conservative Episcopal and Anglican bloggers started highlighting McGreevey's past behavior and linking his entering the ordination process with what they see as the moral decline of the Episcopal Church. For the most part, these commentaries were fairly reasonable from the conservative point of view. However, rather than double checking sources and facts, the majority of them went ahead and made assumptions because the story provided them with an ideal opportunity to bolster their argument about the state of the church. The comments on these blogs were even worse. Many of them were attacks on the Presiding Bishop and the staff at the Episcopal Church Center, often in very nasty language. It got even worse after confirmation of the story.

The other story, which quickly became lost in all the McGreevey ordination hype, was the release of his ex-wife Dina's book and her very difficult story. Is it a coincidence that the story about the ex-Governor leaked into the public sphere at the same time? Dina Matos McGreevey's story is an important one, and it needs--and deserves--to be told. Instead, it has been buried in the sensationalist headlines of her ex-husband's supposed new vocation.

With all of this swirling around, I encountered still more media...abuse? overkill? stupidity? sensationalism?...on my way home this evening. I picked up a copy of the current Newsweek because the cover story on military chaplains caught my eye. Before I got to that article, I read the "Periscope" section, which had a story about a fax sent by one of Barack Obama's assistants who is employed by both his Senate office and his presidential campaign staff. The fax, sent from a machine in Obama's Senate office, violated the understandably strict rules about the separation of government business and campaign work. An anonymous person slipped a copy of the faxed memo under the hotel room door of a Newsweek staffer. While I believe the ethics issue of the fax is important to report, Newsweek also reported some of the contents of the memo. Was that really necessary? Did notes regarding his campaign strategy have any bearing on the report of the ethics violation? The report did make a guess as to one of the ways someone other than the recipient of the fax might have had access to it, but it did not question the anonymous informant's ethics. That does not make as good a story as one that seeks to pull down a public figure that the media has been building up for months.

Sensationalism over facts...

Not feeling particularly peaceful this evening,
Jeffri