NY Archbishop’s Veiled Threat: Gay Marriage Equals Church-State Conflict

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Jacob Flores

New York Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan, in a letter sent to the Obama Administration on Friday, threatens that if Obama continues to withhold support for DOMA or a federal ban on gay marriage that it could “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.”

The Archbishop’s veiled threat intrigues me.

The Swiss Guard, wielding their pikes, are ready for war

Is there some underground movement in the works, stockpiling ammunition and awaiting word from the Archbishop or his General, Pope Benedict? At this moment, are priests and nuns engaged in pike-wielding combat training, supervised by the brightly colored Swiss Guard? Are altar boys and girls being used to courier messages from the pulpit to the budding revolutionaries sitting in the pews every Sunday morning? Are Roman Catholics, and those who have thrown support behind their crusade, merely waiting for the opportune moment to usher in a new holy war?

Archbishop Dolan’s strongly worded letter to Obama definitely indicates that plans are being set in motion to deal with Obama and his future Administration decisions. Most likely, the Catholic Church will simply throw its considerable weight and perhaps even resources behind a Republican presidential nominee who is more amenable to conservative Catholic views.

But what if that’s not the case? What if the Archbishop spilled beans not yet meant to be spilt? What if his slip of the tongue revealed a hidden Catholic agenda? What if right now the nation stands at a precipice of war?

It’s not like the Catholic Church hasn’t declared war before or done some pretty vile things to guarantee the spread of the one true religion. Remember the Crusades? The Spanish Inquisition? (“what a thrill!”)

Whose to say Pope Benedict isn’t sitting on his golden throne, kicking back in his Prada shoes, and plotting the demise of American liberalism? Popes (and those who serve them) have done worse things throughout history, such as commit murder, desecrate the graves of former popes, and engage in acts of simony, licentiousness, and violence.

Nuns with guns and ready to kick @$$

Still, the image of nuns advancing down streets in their wimples and habits carrying weapons or squads of gun-toting priests and bishops battling the scourge of the “gay agenda” is far too comical to believe. It’s just as ridiculous to imagine as the prospect of gay marriage, which is all about allowing two consenting adults to live in love together, as being the single event that sparked a “conflict between church and state of enormous proportions,” according to Dolan.

Religious people who claim marriage is a religious sacrament only fail to understand that marriage is also a civil right.

Our nation, any nation, has the right, through laws passed by the consent of the majority, to define what the word is, just as they have defined criminal activity, discrimination, and slavery. No one is asking the Catholic Church or any church to change what they believe marriage or anything else to be. Their rituals are theirs alone! We are simply asking that their religious definitions not be applied to those who don’t support them. There is a separation of Church and State for a reason. (Just dig through the history books and look at our humble beginnings if you need to remember why.)

I would like to ask Archbishop Dolan to be just as respectful of what I believe as he wants me, and others, to be respectful of his. Threats, veiled or otherwise, seem counterproductive and a bit childish.

Instead of clinging to anger and hate, I prefer to embrace what Jesus asked me to embrace–faith, hope, and love. I have faith that God’s message will one day be made clear to all of us by God himself. I have hope that a better future will be fashioned by our children, who prove to be far more tolerant and accepting than the generations that preceded them, and I’m confident that in the end, love will be all that matters.

DADT Repealed 9/20/2011

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Jacob Flores

Finally, after too many years of hiding and living in secret, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is over. A letter distributed to troops today made the repeal official to soldiers on American soil and abroad. (click here to read the letter as reported in The Washington Post).

The letter, signed by Raymond T. Odiemo, General of the United States Army; Raymond F. Chandler III, Sergeant Major of the Army; and Jeff M. McHugh, Secretary of the Army, states that “The law is repealed” and “from this day forward, gay and lesbian Soldiers may serve in our Army with the dignity and respect they deserve.”

It’s about time! Dignity and respect have long been denied to our gay brothers and sisters in the military. They have proudly served their country, fulfilling integral, and sometimes dangerous, roles that have kept our country safe from those who would do us harm. And at the end of the day, when their bodies were tired, bruised, and/or battered, they were denied a basic comfort most everyone else, including me, takes for granted.

They couldn’t really go home. Not to the home that we think about, where our spouse waits to make the horrors of the day better with a kind word or a soothing touch. Their homes were a charade they created to keep their military careers safe, so they could return to the front lines and bleed for us again while we slept safely next to our significant other.

That will no longer be the case.

Now, they can truly go home after an awful day and receive the love and support we all take for granted because their homes will no longer be shrouded in secrecy or fear.

That will, no doubt, be one of the greatest gifts they ever received.

Sally Kern: Gays Still A Bigger Threat than Terrorists

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Jacob Flores

Yesterday, I posted about how we as a country need to move past traditions of hate and violence. Today, I read a post from Queerty, which exemplifies the type of vitriol we as a country and as members of the human race need to steer clear of.

Sally Kern, the Oklahoma State Senator who is infamous for stating that “[homosexuality is] the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam,” attempted (rather miserably) to clarify her statement that garnered her much criticism. In an interview with Peter LaBarbera, president of an anti-LGBT organization called the Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (obviously a fun and lively group), Kern continued to spew inflammatory statements that did nothing to support her claim that her words were “taken out of context” or “distorted.”

Here are Kern’s words “proving” she was the victim of misrepresentation:

“You know if you just look at it in practical terms, which has destroyed and ended the life of more people? Terrorism attack here in America or HIV/AIDS? In the last twenty years, fifteen to twenty years, we’ve had maybe three terrorist attacks on our soil with a little over 5,000 people regrettably losing their lives. In the same time frame, there have been hundreds of thousands who have died because of having AIDS. So which one’s the biggest threat? And you know, every day our young people, adults too, but especially our young people, are bombarded at school, in movies, in music, on TV, in the mall, in magazines, they’re bombarded with ‘homosexuality is normal and natural.’ It’s something they have to deal with every day. Fortunately we don’t have to deal with a terrorist attack every day, and that’s what I mean.

. . .

[Homosexuality is] more dangerous, . . . because it will tear down the moral fiber of this nation. We were founded as a nation upon the principles of religion and morality, if we take those out from under our society we will lose what has made us a great nation, we will no longer be a virtuous people, which we see happening already. And without virtue this nation will not survive.”

Obviously, Senator Kern was misquoted but only if she lived in Bizarro World, where everything is backward. But she doesn’t live on Bizarro World, and neither do we. If she lived on Bizarro World, then her hate speech would be filled with love and acceptance and her snarling face wouldn’t frighten young children either. On this world, her words are filled with venom and her face, well, I’ll be polite and let you draw your own conclusion.

What Senator Kern fails to see is that there are other factors in the world far deadlier than HIV/AIDS or even terrorists. Alcohol is responsible for more than 75,000 deaths a year. Should we return to Prohibition and eliminate this threat because it is far deadlier than either homosexuals and terrorists according to Kern’s reasoning? Additionally, an average of 195,000 people die each year from in hospital deaths that could have been prevented. Should hospitals and health care professionals who spend their lives helping people be treated as criminals worse than terrorists? If we follow Kern’s thoughts, then yes!

Obviously, the only reason Kern speaks such poison about homosexuals is simply because she hates them. Not because they are more dangerous than terrorism. She isn’t really concerned about keeping Americans safe if the only group she regularly attacks is a group of already prejudiced people, who are not solely responsible for spreading HIV/AIDS.

Additionally, Kern also doesn’t understand the driving force behind the founding fathers of this nation. They were not Christians as we know them today. They were religious men (for the most part), but they were Deists. Deism was the belief that God existed but that God didn’t involve himself with the day-to-day lives of humans. The Deists moved away from organized religion and lived according to principles of morality that included acceptance of others, even those that were different from them. Washington accepted the Freemasons while others did not. Adams declared the accomplishments of Jewish people as far surpassing those who persecuted them. Thomas Jefferson thought very little of clergy and organized religion because he felt abuse of power was common among those of faith who wielded absolute control over their flock.

These men, these Founding Fathers, created this country not to exclude but to accept all. After all, the country was made of immigrants who were considered distasteful in the countries they fled.

So to those like Kern who ask us to follow the nation those Founding Fathers envisioned when they drafted the Constitution and created the laws that governed this nation, they were looking to creating a haven for everyone, not a select few.

One day, I hope Sally Kern finally gets it right.

Lessons Learned from 9/11 and Jackson’s “The Lottery”

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Jacob Flores

As the day concludes on this ten-year anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, I find myself at an unusual loss for words. The magnitude of the events on that day still baffle my mind, and the pain that continues to reverberate through the nation remains strong, rippling outward and touching us all. It makes me wonder if the nation will ever truly recover and if we won’t constantly keep one eye on the sky, waiting for the next terrorist attack.

Still to this day, we ask how such a thing could have happened. We contemplate what could have been done to prevent it. We hunted those down responsible, and we have tried to make them pay. But will any of those things help the victims (we as the nation are those victims) still traumatized by the crime? For the criminal we truly seek isn’t a single person, or a group of revolutionaries, or a country. The true criminal is a tradition of hate and violence.

That is what we have to change.

When I think of the tradition of destruction this world and its nations have so far emblazoned on the skin of our planet, I am reminded of a short story called “The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson and published in the late 1940’s. In this story, for those of you unfamiliar with its plot, an unassuming town in Somewhere, USA holds its annual lottery. Slips of paper from an old black box, which is battered and contains remnants of the original box used in the town’s first lottery, are drawn. The family that plucks the slip of paper with the black dot will produce the winner. When The Hutchinson family unfolds their paper and see the black dot, additional slips of paper are added to the box, one for each member of the family. Each family member must then draw from the box, and the one who drew the paper slip with the black dot is the winner. When the mother of the family, Tessie Hutchinson sees the black dot on her slip of paper, she begins screaming “It isn’t fair!” The town then converges on her and stones her to death.

Why did this happen? For the simple reason Jackson gave us in the story: “lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.” The town’s lottery is a sacrifice to the fertility gods, and the purpose of the lottery is to guarantee a bountiful harvest for the upcoming season. As then and still to this day, readers wonder why would Jackson write this story? What was her point?

For me, the point is quite simple. Jackson is comparing the barbaric tradition of stoning someone for the sake of a good harvest to traditions themselves that are hurtful and destructive. According to Jackson, such beliefs shouldn’t be allowed to exist. They should be changed. If not, then someday we will become the victim of hateful and destructive tradition. We march through life hurting others, through our actions and/or thoughts, and rarely give them a second thought. It’s time we all start thinking and start changing how we live and how we treat others in our family, in our neighborhoods to the cities and states and countries beyond our own personal spheres.

If we can do this as inhabitants of this planet, not just this country, then further hate and destruction like 9/11, the Nazi Concentration Camps, or the Spanish Inquisition, to name a few will never happen again.

We have all been given this same planet by God, or fate, or providence, or natural evolution (whichever you believe for it doesn’t really matter), and we need to treat each other with only love and nurturing if we intend to survive as a species.

Sometimes it takes a disaster like 9/11 to realize the true power of hate, which only begets more hate. While it may sound cliche and/or simplistic, the only thing that truly heals is love and hope for a better tomorrow.

9/11 Never Forget