Culturally complicated story

Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Kenneth E. Bailey is an introduction to applying cultural, linguistic, and what I'd call historical, anthropology to the Bible. It's full of insight for anyone interested in making sense of what our culture's ancestral text meant in its own time -- and even what it might mean in our time to people whose societies are not "Western" -- I think we can substitute "European" for that label. Richards, a professor of Biblical Studies at a Baptist university, had his understanding of the Bible blown up while serving as a missionary in Indonesia. Bailey, a Presbyterian theologian, contributes much linguist insight.

They explain what they are doing this way:

You are probably familiar with the language of worldview.

Many people talk about the differences between a Christian and a secular worldview. The matter is actually more complicated than that. Worldview, which includes cultural values and other things we assume are true, can be visualized as an iceberg. The majority of our worldview, like the majority of an iceberg, is below the water line. The part we notice -- what we wear, eat, say and consciously believe -- is really only the visible tip. The majority of these powerful, shaping influences lurks [sic] below the surface, out of plain sight.

More significantly, the massive underwater water section is the part that sinks ships! Another way to say this is that the most powerful cultural values are those that go without being said. It is very hard to know what goes without being said in another culture. But often we are not even aware of what goes without being said in our own culture. This is why misunderstanding and misinterpretation happen.

They apply this perspective to a broad range of Biblical subjects. Some of this seems obvious: our social customs are not those of the people in Biblical stories nor do we operate with the same understanding of "racial" and ethnic categories. (Think Cushites or Galileans...)

Some of their topics require understanding of far more difficult cultural differences. We are individualistic; unless we are consciously working on a wider view, we think what matters supremely is each of us. The Biblical societies were collective/communal. (As well as patriarchal and sometimes tribally exclusive.) Their chapter on the value structure of honor/shame societies brought me closer to understanding this widespread way that humans have organized ourselves than anything I have ever read. (You don't have to read the Bible to run into this incomprehensible-to-us value system: the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset won a Noble prize in literature in 1928 for the novel Kristin Lavransdatter, which turns on these values.)

Misreading encourages an open mind, openness to different translations, and discussion with others to help modern students move toward a more culturally complex understanding of the Bible. I found their study suggestions worth thinking about and the whole worth reading. ***That said, I found this book itself a cross-cultural experience. Richard and Bailey write for Biblical literalists, if not quite what I'd call fundamentalists. They expect their readers to be trying to take in and make moral and practical sense of every line in the Good Book.

That's not how I read the Bible. For me, the Bible is potent story, a sweeping collection of narratives, metaphors, and images that uncover something about reality, wisdom, and humanity. I encounter the book within a community-prescribed lectionary cycle. I'm sure I hear it within "western" preconceptions, but perhaps not quite the same ones as those to which these authors are writing. That only adds a layer to why I found Misreading interesting.

Swearing off the Donald for a season

On Sunday, the season of Spring arrived with the vernal equinox. Sunday also marked the beginning of the Christian Holy Week, the annual commemoration of Jesus' provocative parade into Jerusalem led by palm waving enthusiasts, his last admonitions and meal with his friends, his trial for insubordination by local and imperial authorities, his gruesome execution and burial, and then, the empty tomb. For liturgical Christians, there is no more awesome season of the year. (Yes, Easter is way bigger than Christmas!)

I love the seasonality of liturgical Christianity -- the annual repetition of the stories through which we encounter mystery and our fraught humanity.

In celebration of this year's Holy Week, I'm declaring this blog a Donald Trump-free zone at least until after next Sunday, until after Easter. It is certainly not that I think politics can somehow be divorced from our enduring stories. Politics is a vital and honorable aspect of how we live out our humanity. But I don't want this year's electoral horror show to become a devouring obsession. We'll repudiate this racist demagoguery in our own good time. Meanwhile, I'll relish a week with other concerns.***
We sang this poetic rendering of the Jesus story in church yesterday. Audio version here. The author was an English clergyman, Samuel Crossman, writing in 1664. Those 17th century (male?) writers were uninhibited about expressing emotion to a degree that shocks in our anxious and ironic time. I delight that this is preserved among us.

Vocation interrupted

Among the varieties of physicians -- internists, anesthesiologists, dermatologists, etc. -- surgeons have the reputation for being a bit brutish. After all, for all the high tech wizardry of modern medicine, their craft includes cutting into human bodies, drilling holes in skulls, setting screws into bones and so on. That work does not seem to commonly induce empathy. So one does not expect to encounter a surgeon, even one who works on brains, writing reflections like this:

I don't think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life -- and not merely life but another's identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another's soul -- was obvious in its sacredness.

Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what make his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible; in taking up another's cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.

Dr. Paul Kalanithi was a 36 year old neurosurgeon who was just graduating from ten years of medical and specialist training and residencies when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. He didn't have the option of learning gradually what that meant; he knew immediately his chances of survival were very poor. One day he was on the threshold of a brilliant and absorbing vocation; the next he was a patient, dependent on what others could do for him as he struggled for life and purpose.

When Breath Becomes Air is his memoir of a youth in the desert in Kingman, Arizona; of sampling literature and neurobiology at Stanford; and of his choice to leave the study of literature and philosophic abstraction:

Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.

Kalanithi died in March 2015. During his two years fighting the cancer, he finished his neurosurgery residency, fathered a daughter, strengthened his family ties, and wrote this book. His life had been about trying to figure out what it all meant; so is his account of his own road to death.

This is a beautiful little book, full of gems, of lapidary descriptions of moments of experience. I read it first by ear, but ended up buying a hard copy: I needed to be able to lend it to friends. I don't do that often.

A "marriage" of Bayview and the Mission

Supporters of the three recent victims of San Francisco's trigger-happy killer cops came together on City Hall steps on Friday in a display of Black-Brown unity they called something like a "marriage" of just causes.

Minister Christopher Muhammad from the Nation of Islam in the Bayview warned city leaders that the communities will hold them accountable, flanked by the parents of Alex Nieto from the Bernal Hill area of the Mission District.

Felicia Jones from Local 1021 SEIU led chants calling for firing Police Chief Greg Suhr and other officers who threaten and disrespect people in the communities.

Fr. Richard Smith spoke for the coalition seeking justice and compensation for the parents of undocumented worker Amilcar Perez Lopez shot in the back in the Mission.

There's deep determination in this city to carry this fight forward -- diverse communities united in seeking justice.

Justice 4 Mario Woods Coalition
Justice 4 Alex Nieto
Justice 4 Amilcar Perez-Lopez

Here's an appointment for June 26

Guess I'll have to go. Not my favorite event, but I like this better than 50 corporate floats ...

Full story from Colorlines.

Friday cat blogging

Back by popular demand, here's Morty surveying his domain.

We cannot sanitize this!

This is what happens when we continue to believe we need a death penalty.

Ohio Supreme Court says state can try to execute an inmate again after failed attempt

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the state could try to execute an inmate who authorities tried to execute in 2009, only for the execution attempt to fail.

... “When the execution team was unable to establish IV lines, the attempt to execute [Romell] Broom was halted,” Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger wrote in an opinion joined by three other justices. “Because the lethal-injection drugs were never introduced into the IV lines, the execution was never commenced.”

... “I believe as a moral and constitutional matter that subjecting Broom to a second execution attempt after even one extremely painful and unsuccessful attempt is precisely the sort of ‘lingering death’ that the United States Supreme Court recognized as cruel within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment 125 years ago,” [Justice William M.] O’Neill wrote [in a dissent].

...During his scheduled lethal injection on Sept. 15, 2009, prison officials authorities spent two hours trying and failing to find a usable vein, making at least 10 attempts to insert the IV and causing Broom to repeatedly grimace in pain, witnesses said. ...

Californians will have another opportunity to end the risk that we'll be complicit in this sort of barbarism through an initiative on the November election ballot.

Senate up for grabs: here's the list

For shits, giggles, my own edification and convenience, I decided to spend a primary evening assembling a list of what we know about the November races that matter almost as much as the presidential contest. These Senate races that will determine which party controls the chamber and hence nominations of Supreme Court justices. At present, the Republicans have a 54-46 margin there. Democrats need at least four pickups (and a Dem vice president to break ties) for a winning margin.

This is possible, though not easy. There is considerable electoral history which suggests that Senate races, though they take place in very different states, tend to break similarly across the country in any particular year. (The only time I worked in a Senate race, Vermont 1970, we got swept up in such a debacle and lost anti-Vietnam war Democratic senators across the country.) This could be a promising year for a very strong Democratic showing depending how much of an additional mess the GOP makes of its presidential race

There are a few places where Democrats have to hold on to contested seats in contests that could make winning a majority harder.

• Nevada: That unpopular political wizard Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is retiring. He looks to have cleared the field for a former state attorney general, Catherine Cortez Masto. The state has been voting Democratic in presidential elections, but also currently has elected a Republican governor, so it could swing either way. This one is no shoo-in.

• Colorado: Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet could be endangered if this battleground state went to the Republican presidential nominee -- but it probably won't.

Then there are several states where Democrats have a good chance to pick up a seat.

• Wisconsin: This state voted by 53% for Obama in 2012, elected a lesbian Democratic senator the same year -- and keeps returning Mr. Union Buster Republican Scott Walker as governor in off years. Go figure. Former Democratic Senator Russ Feingold who lost his 2010 re-election bid is trying to take the seat back this year and has consistently led the Republican opponent in early polling. This one looks good unless Wisconsin swings away from the Dems in the presidential.

• Florida: Republican Senator Marco Rubio rolled the dice on winning the presidential nomination and announced he would not run for re-election. We will now see whether he keeps that promise as the filing deadline is not until early May. He seems pretty damaged goods. Two major Democratic candidates are fighting for that nomination in a late August primary: Congressman Patrick Murphy has the support of the Democratic establishment. Congressman Alan Grayson is running an anti-establishment campaign. During the Obamacare debate, he thrilled many of us by baldly pointing out that the Republican healthcare plan could be summarized as "Die Quickly." His Cayman Islands hedge funds have damped some of that enthusiasm. The Republican field is huge and split, also facing an August 30 primary. Florida will be a presidential battleground state; Obama won it twice, very narrowly. This one is genuinely unpredictable.

• Illinois: Republican Senator Mark Kirk currently holds the seat that once was Obama's. Congresswoman and Iraq vet Tammy Duckworth won her primary yesterday and she aims to win it back. Her chances look good.

Three Republican seats are in play that might be out of reach in a non-presidential year.

• New Hampshire: Popular Democratic governor Maggie Hassan aims to unseat Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte. Obama won this state twice, but it is swingy down-ballot.

• Ohio: Former Democratic governor Ted Strickland won his primary yesterday. Obama won this state too, but again it is swingy down-ballot. Strickland faces Republican incumbent Rob Portman.

• Pennsylvania: Another state that usually votes Democratic for president, it nonetheless sometimes elects Republican senators. The incumbent, Pat Toomey, is no eastern moderate, but a former president of the big business lobby Club for Growth. The Democratic candidate will be decided in an April 26 primary between Joe Sestak who lost to Toomey in 2010 and a candidate from the state Democratic leadership, Katie McGinty.

Unexpected events could put additional Republican-held senate seats in play in North Carolina, Arizona, Indiana and Missouri, but that would take an exceptionally good showing from Democrats.

Winning a Democratic majority in the Senate looks to be a tough project. Most of us who don't live in these battlegrounds are reduced to serving as, at best, small donors, and mostly just as onlookers. The shape of the next few years depends almost as much on these contests as on the Presidential race.

White Christians, "nones," and voting

When thinking about religious support for candidates and issues, we tend to think first of denominational (and/or perhaps ideological) subsets: evangelical, Catholic, mainline Protestant, the "nones," other faiths, ad infinituum. Ain't our religious diversity grand?

But Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute makes a point that this habitual way of thinking misses. If you focus on all types of white Christians, their predominance in the nation ended during the last decade.

Just as Barack Obama was being elected in 2008, 54 percent of the country was white and Christian, so if you took all Christian groups together that were white, they still made up a majority. By the time Obama’s term is over, our last data is showing that number is now 45 percent of the country.

We know that the country is browning, that demographers say that by 2040 no racial group will make up an absolute majority. When you think about this, it become obvious that, just as in all other ways of looking at the nation, eventually Christians who are white would cease to be an absolute majority. Well this has happened.

Jones thinks this fact provides a useful insight into Donald Trump's support among white Christians who might be expected to be repelled by his boorish behavior and slippery personal morals. He calls Trump's white crowds mostly "nostalgia" voters, make it great "AGAIN" voters -- people who are living amid rapid change that they find inexplicable and who respond with fear and a fervent (even sometimes violent) desire to turn back the clock. This overrides whatever their ostensible religious affiliation might suggest about what they would want in a candidate.

Jones made another observation on religious voting behavior. Though more and more people describe their religious affiliation as "none," the nones have not made their presence felt in elections in proportion to their growing numbers.

... today if we do the typical social science division of religious groups in the country, today the largest religious group in the country is religiously unaffiliated Americans. They make up 23 percent of the country today. ... So they’re larger than evangelicals, they’re larger than Catholics. And they keep growing. It’s largely fueled by younger people among whom more than a third are religiously unaffiliated. The challenge here is even though they keep growing as a proportion of the population, they tend to turn out at much lower levels in both midterm elections and presidential elections. So for the last three — two presidential cycles and a midterm election cycle — even though they’ve been 20 percent or more of the population, they’ve only been 12 percent of voters. And so there’s an untapped potential here of these religiously unaffiliated voters.

Is this relative abstention because "nones" are disproportionately young or does absence of religious affiliation equate with lower civic participation?

I have my suspicions that the latter may play a role. Our electoral campaigns can be tedious, noisy, and only occasionally meaningful; they are too often unedifying and corrupt. Ballots are long and full. In addition to the major offices we hear so much about, we are supposed to vote on hundreds of other positions about which normal citizens know nothing such as tax assessors and county clerks. Responsible citizenship demands hard work, yet the whole thrust of our efforts to increase voting has been to make the process more convenient and individual. Mail-in ballots (and internet voting if we ever get there) replicate the habits of our individualistic consumer society. We're able to vote from home, alone, and never have the sense of doing something important with everyone else.

People who join and work together in churches at least have regular experience of collective activity that claims a purpose. Aside perhaps from amateur sports teams, it is hard to think of other loci of day-to-day experience of groups of people pulling together for a goal. Yet citizenship -- civic participation in the current jargon -- arises from a sense of the individual embedded within the group. Religiously affiliated people may have a leg up on desiring collective action and consequently may vote more. Just a thought.

We certainly don't want to make voting harder, but we probably do want to make it more something that we do alongside others. Anyone up for planing parades to the polling stations?

Thanks to Erudite Partner for the rudimentary chart, using PRRI and Pew data. Robert P. Jones has a book, The End of White Christian America, due out in July.

A slightly longer view on the election circus

When the horrors of this election cycle get me down -- and even if you're delighted to see your friends shut down the Donald, horror is appropriate -- I check in at Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium. PEC is the opposite of click bait: serious, modulated and thoughtful. And every day it automatically updates a number that probably gives as good an idea as any indicator whether we'll come out of this with some Democrat (either Democrat) as the next president.

There's considerable data to suggest that presidential elections can be predicted on the basis of what people think of the previous incumbent in the year leading up to the vote. Here's a slightly dated Nate Cohn discussion of this from last year.

The balance of evidence suggests that the break-even point for the presidential party’s odds of victory is at or nearly 50 percent approval.

And here's the PEC's current chart of the history of the ratio between President Obama's approval and disapproval:

Something's happening here. Obama is clearly on the rise, entering heights of approval he hasn't seen in a year.

Gallup's daily job approval numbers show a similar trend. The Prez is climbing.

Why is hard to know. The economy isn't making most of us feel safe and prosperous, but objectively it is as good as at any time in this presidency.

And the guy is stepping out on a lot of fronts in his last year, from trying to curb greenhouse gases by executive action, to protecting natural areas by declaring National Monuments, to trolling Donald Trump while having a drink with the Canadian Prime Minister.

This may seem a low bar to jump, but we don't have to be ashamed of how Obama represents the country to the rest of the world. Even those of us who think he's been complicit in the war crimes initiated by his predecessors can't deny that he's been a relatively restrained captain of the imperial colossus. (Do take the time to read The Obama Doctrine at the Atlantic.) We're not going to see his like again.

And our relative satisfaction suggests we'll elect a Democrat in November. We can't be complacent; state by state, there will be much work to do. But we can live in rational hope through the next nine moments of noise, anxiety, and general bullshit.

Where did white Americans come from?

The only book I can think of that so thoroughly and elegantly deconstructed what I thought I knew as Nell Irwin Painter's The History of White People is Edward Said's Orientalism. Just as I would feel completely inadequate to describe how Said's textured and wise work of literary criticism made its argument, so I feel utterly unable to summarize what Painter has done in her 2010 cultural history.

Fortunately I don't feel I have to, as she summarized her themes in a New York Times oped written in response to the Charleston massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

We don’t know the history of whiteness, and therefore are ignorant of the many ways it has changed over the years. If you investigate that history, you’ll see that white identity has been no more stable than black identity. While we recognize the evolution of “negro” to “colored” to “Negro” to “Afro-American” to “African-American,” we draw a blank when it comes to whiteness. To the contrary, whiteness has a history of multiplicity.

... In the mid- to late-19th century, the existence of several white races was widely assumed: notably, the superior Saxons and the inferior Celts. Each race — and they were called races — had its characteristic racial temperament. “Temperament” has been and still is a crucial facet of racial classification since its 18th-century Linnaean origins. Color has always been only one part of it ....

In the 19th century, the Saxon race was said to be intelligent, energetic, sober, Protestant and beautiful. Celts, in contrast, were said to be stupid, impulsive, drunken, Catholic and ugly.

... By the 1940s anthropologists announced that they had a new classification: white, Asian and black were the only real races. Each was unitary — no sub-races existed within each group. There was one Negroid race, one Mongoloid race, one Caucasoid race. Everyone considered white was the same as everyone else considered white. No Saxons. No Celts. No Southern Italians. No Eastern European Hebrews. This classification — however tattered — lives on, with mild alterations, even today.

For a glimpse of Ms. Painter's thought, read the oped or, much better, the book.***Of particular interest to me in Painter's History was her short, but acerbic, description of the contributions to racial nativism in the 1920s of the Saturday Evening Post writer and historical novelist Kenneth Roberts. Roberts was some sort of collateral relative of my family; I was raised to applaud his portrayal of American revolutionary war events and people, though I don't think I ever ready any of his novels. Apparently he was one of the leading popular promoters of immigration restrictions (which were passed in 1924) on "hereditarian" grounds. Why, if the pure, "white" United States let those southern Europeans and Catholics and Jews come in to do factory work, they would breed with us! This would become a mongrel society! My older relatives had some of these "hereditarian" prejudices, though they were moderated by having lived through the war against Nazism.***After reading Painter's History I asked around, not very exhaustively, among my academic friends: is this book being taught to college students? Apparently not, or not much. This is unfortunate. The book should be canonical, an element in the knowledge base of educated people. I wonder, is Orientalism canonical?

Saturday scene: the city of St. Francis, 2016

The poster shows the face of Mario Woods, a city resident who was killed in December by what amounted to a San Francisco Police Department firing squad. The other person here seemed to be seeking shelter from the rain. Whether that person had a more conventional home to go to, I don't know.

After the Alex Nieto verdict ...

After a federal jury yesterday found it was legal for the San Francisco Police Department to shoot a nonthreatening homey on Bernal Hill, friends, family and supporters gathered at Mission Cultural Center.

That's the hill where Alex Nieto was shot in the background.

As Tim Redmond explained when the trial began, the jury didn't look much like the people of the Mission District.

Since it’s a federal case, the jury pool was chosen from all over the Bay Area, and there were no African Americans among the 30 potential jurors. Only two were Latino, and neither was chosen for the panel.

The final jury has five Caucasian women, all from the suburbs, two men of color, one Asian and one Indian, and one woman of color.

None of them are from San Francisco.

Nieto's parents put on brave faces, as they have for nearly two years.

One more altar was assembled.

On March 21 it will have been two years since Alex Nieto was gunned down. There will certainly be some people with something to say. Stay tuned.

Apparently this was not to be ...

Jury decides San Francisco police can shoot brown men eating burritos on Bernal Hill without penalty. For shame!

A campaign against accidental nuclear war

xkcd.com

This seems a no-brainer, doesn't it? No sane human wants a nuclear war for any reason. Yet, the US and Russia still keep about 1800 targeted nuclear missiles on standby, 900 of them ready to launch in a matter of minutes.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is campaigning to encourage President Obama to take these missiles off "hair trigger alert" status. He wouldn't need Congressional approval or to do anything expensive or difficult: he could just order the "safety switches" in all the missile silos turned to "off", an intervention that would take only a couple of days according to generals who have commanded the system.

Who knew, David Wright of UCS asks?

... today, around the clock, 90 U.S. launch control officers sit in pairs at 45 hardened, underground missile launch centers, ready to launch 450 land-based nuclear missiles at a moment’s notice. At the same time, launch crews are on duty—also 24/7—on strategic submarines roaming the oceans, ready to launch missiles with hundreds of nuclear weapons if called to.

Russia does something similar.

I can see why people are surprised to learn this. It’s been nearly a quarter century since the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union ended in late 1991. Most people don’t think or hear much about nuclear weapons. But unfortunately, they remain a real and present danger.

So okay -- this is a completely necessary, probably winnable campaign. I mean hey, do you really think this President won't act to reduce the chance of nuclear war if he had citizen back up? Actually, he promised to do just this in 2008.

So what does UCS ask us to do to advance this campaign? Why spread a video about the subject on social media, of course. It's a pretty good video. But communicating with our political leaders solely by raising the profile of an issue through whatever metrics they record about social media seems a little indirect. Deep in the USC site, I did find a page facilitating letter writing. That's good.

But I worry when I see "campaigns" from non-profit advocacy outfits that don't provide any easy ways for people who care to make their opinions effective. It feels like going through the motions which isn't enough when it comes to nukes! (Or many other things, not to pick solely on UCS!)

Message for 2016: "your vote does make a difference ..."

Congratulations to Bernie Sanders (and his hard working campaigners) on his unexpected win in the Michigan Democratic primary yesterday! In a two candidate race, polls are usually pretty accurate; Sanders beat the polls by 20 points. Something happening here ...

Browsing through returns, I remembered that Dearborn, MI, a city of 90,000 in the Detroit metro area, is home to the most concentrated Arab-American population in the country. Arabic-speaking immigrants first came from Lebanon; these pioneers were largely Christians. More recent arrivals have been Muslims from Yemen, Palestine and Iraq.

In the era of Donald Trump, the Muslims live in fear according to interviews in the Daily Beast.

Among the halal restaurants, the meat markets, and the hookah bars of this working-class Detroit suburb, the topic of Donald Trump is terrorizing the local population.

The businessman and Republican presidential frontrunner is the foremost topic of conversation in Dearborn, a town with one of the highest concentration of Muslims in America and that boasts the country’s largest mosque. Its inhabitants can’t stop talking about the real-estate mogul, who has proposed a ban on Muslims entering the country and normalized extreme rhetoric against the religious group.

... “A lot of people are terrified, if you want the truth. One of his main campaign points is targeting Muslims. And already we feel like we’re targeted, even with a Democratic president for eight years,” said Muna Jondy, an immigration lawyer in Michigan. “American Muslims think there is a possibility of Trump starting internment camps. I am personally not afraid, but I know there is that sentiment in our community. It is a reflection and indictment of our nation.”

Whether justified or not, the fact that American Muslims take seriously the concept of internment camps is a signal that reflects their real concern about their place. ...

And so, the Arab and Muslim population of the area are doing what newcomer communities have always tried to do: getting involved in the political process for self-defense. I wrote yesterday about Roman Catholic efforts to spur naturalization and registration among Latino immigrants. In the Detroit area, sermons in Islamic institutions are pushing the same imperative. This was preached at the Az-Zahraa Islamic Center in Detroit last Friday.

Muslims need to participate heavily in the election. For those citizens who have not registered so far, they need to register so they can be eligible for voting. ... we also have to participate in the primaries. ... and I say, we should not underestimate our vote... your vote does make a difference; always it does make a difference. ... who to vote for? I don't need to tell you ... you are smart, you are intelligent, you know who to vote for ...

Video of this English language appeal is here.

Bernie Sanders campaigned in Dearborn on Monday alongside Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, himself a Muslim. Enthusiastic Bernie supporters appealed to voters outside polling places according to a Detroit Free Press account. They stressed Bernie's call for free college tuition as well as his repudiation of bigotry. Though Clinton has spoken out against Islamophobia, some Arab-Americans are not ready to forget that she voted to invade Iraq in 2002.

So how did Dearborn vote? The Arab capital of the United States opted for the elderly Jew! Turnout was nearly 35 percent (not bad for a primary). Among Democrats, Bernie won nearly 60 percent, 20 points ahead of Clinton. Something happening here ...

Some people are ready to step up and be counted against hate

This weekend at a social gathering, a young woman of South Asian origin who has been in this country for most of her adult life and is married to a U.S. citizen told us she was finally taking the plunge. She's begun the process to become a U.S. citizen. Why? So she can vote against Donald Trump.

She's not the only one. Four years ago when I was working for a ballot measure to end the death penalty, I had the opportunity to see how effectively Catholic organizations were bringing eligible voters into the political system. We received page after page of signed initiative petitions filled with Spanish surnames from churches in California's Central Valley. Obviously these parishes had helped these people get through the paper work.

Catholic organizations are working doubly hard this year, according to the National Catholic Reporter.

Against a backdrop of polarizing political rhetoric and stalled federal immigration legislation, Catholic parishes from Los Angeles to San Diego -- the most immigrant-rich part of the most immigrant-populated American state -- are heeding Pope Francis' call to treat migrants with "charity and cooperation" and make their lives "more humane."

"People are likely to trust their local church, so we want to capitalize on that trust to do something to everyone's benefit," said Msgr. Richard Martini, pastor at St. Joseph Church in Carpinteria. The 2,000-family parish, like many in Southern California, will host a training in March to recruit churchgoers to reach out via friends and family to immigrants who hold green cards.

"We're trying to put people in a position where they can have a voice and count. One of the advantages of gaining citizenship is that you are able to vote," said Martini, who added that the effort includes voter registration. ...

... California isn't the only place where the church's role in promoting naturalization is ramping up. Dioceses from Galveston-Houston to Miami have teamed with legal groups in recent years for citizenship drives. In Texas, Houston-area Catholics regularly host citizenship workshops through Catholic Charities, similar to courses Catholic Charities offers in dioceses across the country.

In the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area -- home to 240,000 permanent residents who are eligible for citizenship -- the archdiocese teamed with local nonprofits in February to launch Citizen 1-2-3, an outreach program that includes online and text-message guides, a phone hotline, and lawyers who are available to talk applicants through the naturalization process. ...

It is easy to imagine the demagogic Trump asking (as Stalin was said to), "how many divisions does the pope have?" Pope Francis might turn out to mobilize more voices than he expected.

Yesterday the New York Times described a Colorado citizenship drive where people knew exactly why they wanted to vote.

At the Denver workshop, many aspiring voters agreed on why they are naturalizing this year.

“Donald Trump never! Never!” said Minerva Guerrero Salazar, 40, who has been working for a uniform rental company since moving here from Mexico in 2002. “He has no conscience when he speaks of Latinos. And he is so rude. I don’t know what kind of education his mother gave him.”

For practical purposes, new citizens need to get their papers in by May 1 to be assured they make it through processing in time for the November election. A piece of good news is that the government now takes credit card payments for the $680 fee.

The answer to the Donald

The Republican frontrunner warrants an appearance from Mr. Dickhead. He says so himself.

In every crisis, there is also opportunity. Or so always says some annoying Pollyanna. Here's one such from Philadelphia:

This fall, if Trump indeed grabs the GOP nomination, Americans have the chance of a lifetime to stand up and be counted against racism, xenophobia, and hatred. It means turning the defeat of Donald Trump into a crusade, even more so than electing whomever his opponent turns out to be. That means talking to your family members, your friends or even going door-to-door on weekends in your neighborhood to make sure that America smashes its record for voter turnout on Nov. 8.

It's the 60 Percent Solution. It's the only way to stop Donald Trump. Not by rolling over his supporters, but by going around them at the ballot box -- a fitting reaffirmation of democracy. ...

Defeating Trump at the ballot box is just the beginning of the work. The 45th president is going to have to address some of the conditions that helped make Trump possible, the job losses and income inequality that have shrunk and squeezed the middle class. If not, we could find ourselves going through this nightmare all over again, and once in a lifetime seems plenty.

Will Bunch, Attytood

Bunch is right, of course.

An unsympathetic moral exemplar

I cannot help but look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life with admiration. Who knows what choices any of us would have made in his circumstances? Within the limits of his class and culture, this German theologian chose to resist Hitler, collaborating with a coup attempt, in order to follow his evolving apprehension of God present in the human world; he paid with his life.

But what an unappealing character he seems to have been! Charles Marsh's Strange Glory is a thorough biography which hides none of the man's quirks which were many and largely unattractive, as was the German Evangelical Church (Lutheran), a state institution, in which he was formed.

• Born into the professional bourgeoisie of imperial (pre-World War I) Germany, he announced at 13 he would become a theologian.

• Throughout his stellar university career and first pastorates, Marsh describes the man as more concerned with his clothes than just about anything else. Off to Barcelona for an assistant pastorate,

  ... Bonhoeffer asked advice on assembling his new wardrobe. He'd heard the weather in Barcelona could be fickle. He was particularly keen to know what style and weight of suiting [his new boss] Olbricht recommended ... And would he need special athletic wear at the club ? ...

  These sartorial concerns seem never to have left Bonhoeffer. In a Nazi prison, just before his execution, he wrote a detailed message disposing of his clothes.

• Nothing in Marsh's telling suggests that he had given any thought to the implications of the collapsing German democratic order (which his class despised) or to the desperation of most Germans as the Depression ground on. His Church (the Lutheran state church) preached German nationalism and submission to authority -- "blood, soil, and fatherland" -- and not much more. No wonder most of its leadership rapidly succumbed to the Nazis. They had paid no attention during the tumultuous moments when Nazi ascendancy might have been stopped and then rolled over once Hitler won state power.

• The Confessing Protestant (anti-Nazi) church which Bonhoeffer sought to build balked at being required by the Nazis to exclude baptized Jewish Christians -- but displayed no particular sense of responsibility for other, unconverted, German Jews. It did however preach an absolute pacifism, a conviction for which some members died when they refused military service.

• Marsh portrays Bonhoeffer as obsessed with a long homoerotic relationship with another pastor, Eberhard Bethge, who worked with him in the Confessing Church. It's unfair to project backward today's understanding of healthy homosexual relationships onto this pair; they certainly had no option but concealment, even in some ways from themselves. When Bethge broke away from Bonhoeffer and married a woman, the theologian rebounded into a quick engagement of his own. He had given Maria von Wedemeyer religious instruction as an eleven year old.

  At thirty-six, he was closer in age to Maria's mother, Ruth von Wedemeyer, than to Maria [by then 17]. ... Maria's mother imposed a one-year moratorium on the relationship, ... as must have been a common remedy to protect girls not yet finished with their schooling. Though Bonhoeffer might be an eminent theologian and esteemed pastor ..., the age difference and the peculiar cast of the courtship made Ruth von Wedemeyer uneasy. As it happened, Maria seems to have been perfectly "relieved and happy" about the delay.

  When the delay expired, Bonhoeffer continued to treat her as an unformed child. She called him "Pastor Bonhoeffer." If Bonhoeffer had survived the Nazi defeat (this could have happened in the chaos of the war's end), one can imagine that the marriage might have been extremely hard on both parties. It is hard to imagine Maria having much of a life with this man.

And yet, and yet, Bonhoeffer almost alone among German Christians of his class, moved beyond horror at Hitler's barbarism to action. Though a faithful pacifist, he became convinced that the evil before him required an active response, even if thereby he participated in its violence and took on his own guilty participation in violence. He turned to Luther's teaching:

One came to Christ as a sinner in the best case. One could at least sin for the sake of righteousness. Bonhoeffer did not try to resolve the paradox by assuming moral innocence but accepted the paradox by incurring the guilt born out of responsible action.

The choices available to Bonhoeffer are certainly something all of us can pray -- and work -- to be spared.

"If I was doing this somewhere else, it would be less urgent ..."

Our friend Diego Rodriguez-Warner was born in Managua, Nicaragua in 1986. In 2008, he studied under the Cuban Minister for Fine Arts, Lesbia Vent Dumois, in Havana, and later graduated from Hampshire College and the Rhode Island School of Design. Here he reflects on making art.

Diego Rodriguez-Warner from TheArtTrade on Vimeo.

[In Cuba] they really take you seriously as a social contributor ... the work is like really meticulous messes ..that's what we have in this country ... we have an apparatus to keep us separated from each other, to keep us fighting each other, to keep us not certain what's going on. We take in these things because they are presented to us every day...

The goal of art is to learn. Every painting that I finish seems to get closer and I've been saying that for years ...

And he's just getting started. You can find more of Diego's work here. The web format makes the prints the easiest to take in.

Somebody thought this interview needed that awful music behind it -- it didn't. Enjoy anyway.

And then, not everyone died ...

For a long time, my San Francisco gay male friends thought everyone they knew would die of AIDS. Hundreds did. Young medical workers in training at San Francisco General sometimes lamented they would never treat anything except complications of AIDS, fruitlessly. And then, suddenly, the "triple cocktail" started saving lives and gradually additional medicines were invented. And for some, AIDS became a condition to live with, not a death sentence.

Last Men Standing Trailer from San Francisco Chronicle on Vimeo.

This is about the survivors, whether living with the disease or living with the ghosts of those who died, or both. It is beautiful. Many of the scenes were filmed in our church which once performed scores of funerals for those who didn't make it.***But some people do still contract AIDS ... and not all get the life saving treatments. At the end of last month, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report on the enduring plague.

If you’re a white American woman, your risk of being diagnosed with HIV is pretty small, lower than the odds of dying in a car crash. If you’re a gay black man, the chances of getting an HIV diagnosis are closer to a coin flip.

Bloomberg

The virus forges on ... enabled as it always has been by poverty, racisms, ignorance and human desperation.

"HI BABE I"M HOME"

Why this sign on San Jose Ave which usually says something like "ROAD WORK AHEAD" was flashing this personal message, I don't know. Perhaps the gent examining it was trying to find out as well.

Multiple evolutions for an awful season

It should be a happy day when someone you don't like does something good.

I've never been a fan of Jim Wallis. Years back I heard this "liberal" Christian activist equivocate about recognizing the full humanity of gay people and I've never quite got over it. I think it is fair to say he has been slow to "evolve" when it comes to me and mine.

But today he is putting out a response to this wretched political season that might serve as a standard that I hope other religious leaders could "evolve" toward:

It’s time to put the moral crisis over the political one. Donald Trump’s potential nomination by the Republican Party is not just a crisis for that party and for election politics in general, it is a moral crisis for the country, for democracy itself, and for the state of faith in the nation.

The media can act shocked about Trump failing to quickly and very clearly denounce David Duke and the KKK and their support for him, but they didn’t seriously ask the more important question: Why do the advocates of white supremacy like and advocate for Donald Trump?

Here’s why: When a person fears death to his way of life on the horizon, he fights like hell to cling onto it. And that’s what is happening now.

If what you, as a white person, are most worried about is how the demographics of your country are changing to make it more diverse, what you really need is a strong white man who will block, obstruct, deny, or delay that demographic from changing the country further. And that’s what Donald Trump promises to be for them — an authoritarian in his leadership style with the message of a bigot. ...

This is no equivocating attempt to rescue the Republican party from itself -- I'm talking about you, Mitt Romney. Wallis has called out the moral content of the moment.

Amid Wallis' denunciation, I noticed a citation to an August poll which found that only 2 percent of Trump supporters were under 30. The Donald may have picked up a few more young people since, but that is telling. If we can manage not to completely blow it during the next decade, there should be real hope for the country to evolve away from white supremacy and our brutal systemic economic inequity.

Graphic stolen from Kevin Drum.

Friday cat blogging

Occasionally Morty observes us when we come home. More often, he ignores our comings and goings.

In Utah??

Very rarely, encountering an unexpected headline feels like bouncing off an unexpected wall. In this instance the sensation is welcome, but utterly unanticipated.

Utah Senate narrowly votes to abolish death penalty
A year ago, Utah lawmakers were expanding the ways the state could execute inmates condemned to death. This week, the state took a major step toward possibly abolishing the death penalty entirely.

The Utah state Senate narrowly voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that scraps the death penalty, with 15 state senators — the minimum number needed for passage — voting to send it to the state’s House of Representatives.

Washington Post

This doesn't mean the struggle is over in Utah; more likely it is just starting. But a good start.

We've got quite enough killing in this country. Anything that moves the state out of the execution business is simply right.

Mental health break

Let's move beyond doom, gloom and awful prognostications.

She flies through the air ...
She's just another hard working world class athlete from rural Vermont doing her stuff in Kazakhstan -- and one of my favorite people. The World Cup series is over for this year, but she improved on her previous standings and she'll be back.

Gretchen Reynolds says taking up a new sport is good for our brains. Any suggestions for a fit but usually solitary 68 year old?

Where were these GOPers in 1994?

Republican bigwigs are distressed by their Nominee-Presumptive. This is quite a statement:

By late morning, Stuart Stevens, who was a top adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, had heard enough. “It’s becoming obvious that supporting or not supporting [Trump] isn’t a political choice,” he tweeted. “It’s a moral choice. The man is evil.”

“To support Trump is to support the hate and racism he embodies. That is simply an intolerable moral position for any political party,” Stevens elaborated Monday in the Daily Beast. “If Trump wins the nomination, politicians who support him will be acquiescing to, if not actively aiding, his hate.”

The Republican strategist said that losing the presidential election wouldn’t be as bad as “the shame of pretending that an evil man was not evil and a hater really didn’t mean what he said. We hold elections every two years, and there is always the chance to regain lost offices. But there is no mechanism to regain one’s dignity and sense of decency once squandered. That defeat is permanent. To support Trump is to support a bigot. It’s really that simple.”

via Washington Post

But seriously, is Donald Trump any more of a hater than California Governor Pete Wilson was in 1994 when he surged to re-election behind Prop. 187? That initiative to denied health care, education and social services to undocumented children and adults. For months Wilson's TV ads blanketed the state featuring a voice intoning "they keep on coming" while shadowy figures ran across roads and scrambled over fences.

Wilson's great success at mobilizing resentment made him a potential Republican presidential nominee in 1996 before he faded. Backlash among California's Latinos also reduced the California Republican Party to a feeble facsimile of a functioning organization within a decade. But hey, Wilson won his race and we didn't hear Republicans complaining about "evil" and decency squandered.

Trump is only voicing what has long been there.

A police killing goes to court ...

The trial of the wrongful death and civil rights violation civil suit brought by Alex Nieto's parents, Refugio and Elvira Nieto v. SFPD and the City and County of San Francisco, began today at the old San Francisco federal building. Alex Nieto was shot on Bernal Hill by police officers on March 21, 2014. The cops say Nieto threatened them with a taser he carried legally for his job as a security guard. An eyewitness says the young man was ambling along with his hands in his pockets looking like who he was: a working-class Latino from the neighborhood. Everyone agrees he sat eating a burrito on the hill before he was cut down by 48 shots.

Friends and supporters rallied outside the courthouse. It was a classic old Mission (before the current moneyed invasion) event: Native American dance and invocation ...

... a gay neighborhood priest, Fr. Richard Smith from St. John the Evangelist, offering blessing ...

... a spirited rendition of "Amor for Alex" to the tune of the United Farmworker anthem De Colores ...

... and later several hundred young people -- Black, Brown, Asian and whatever -- marched in from City College. After all, they too know they are under the gun.

As Tim Redmond wrote at 48 Hills, it's hard to fathom how this ugly tale could be going to court.

The last thing the city typically wants is to see the whole disaster played out again in public, with the policies, procedures, and actions of the Police Department examined in the harsh light of open court.

Usually cities settle; the unwavering determination of Alex Nieto's parents to see truth told before a court means this time the SFPD will not be able to hide some officers' disregard for some human lives. Alex's friends will be posting updates at this trial page and at Justice4Alex.

The secret ballot once served to disenfranchise "those people"

In honor of today's Super Tuesday primaries -- or maybe we should call it the SEC primary since so many of the contests are in the South -- here's some history of voting and suppression of voting that I didn't know about until listening a recent Fresh Air interview that host Terry Gross did with historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore.

Of course I support any measures that increase civic participation: democracy dies if it is only a passive spectator sport. And for that reason, I'm suspicious of voting by mail which makes casting a ballot such a solitary experience. This country experienced its highest percentage turnout of the potential electorate in the last decade of the 19th century. Those elections were rowdy civic festivities.

But Lepore pointed out that these hurly-burly contests were probably not something we would applaud today.

In fact, the secret ballot is a latecomer in American political culture. It isn't really adopted - the first presidential election where the secret ballot is the preponderant mode of voting is 1896, which is also the first presidential election where some is not killed on Election Day.

... So the whole idea of being a good citizen requires publicly exercising your franchise ... the government didn't supply a ballot. ... You'd basically [act] like a caucus. You'd go to the polling place and ... if you are voting for Smith, [you would] stand over here against the butcher's. And if you're in favor of Jones, stand over there down by the library. And that's how the votes were made. And the polls would be counted. ...poll means the top of your head, so people would count the tops of people's heads, and that's why it was called the polls.

So the call to reform public voting, or what was known as open voting, was super controversial ... Massachusetts was the first to do it. And they had this idea that the government would supply these envelopes... the party system got really strong, and newspapers were partisan, [so] the Republicans would print a ballot - like, a whole party ticket. It would be, like, we'll say it's red. And the democratic newspaper would print a blue party ticket. And so you'd go to the town hall - this is when oral voting had kind of been replaced by paper voting because people were literate. ... you'd have this giant, long sheet, like a railway ticket, like two-foot long. It would be brightly colored. And so people would try to prevent you from getting to the ballot box and casting your vote. The parties would hire these thugs to go down there. ... but people would die.

... [The secret ballot] was first passed in Massachusetts and New York in the 1880s. But then for years, the only other places that adopted the secret ballot - which is a written ballot supplied by the government to each voter - was the South after Reconstruction because it was a way to disenfranchise newly-enfranchised black men ... none of them knew how to read. I mean, they'd been, you know, raised in slavery, lived their entire lives as slaves on plantations. And so ... the real success of the secret ballot as a national political institution had to do with the disenfranchisement of black men.

If you could cut your ballot out of the newspaper, and you're going to vote a party ticket, and knew you wanted to vote Republican, and that ticket was going to be red, you didn't have to know how to read to vote. Immigrants could vote. Newly-enfranchised black men in the South could vote.

...But people in the North were like, hey, we don't really like when all those immigrants vote. And people in the South were like, we really don't want these black guys to vote... [S]o they ... colluded ... very much motivated by making it harder for people who were illiterate to vote. It's essentially a de facto literacy test. ... there [were] some counties in Virginia, I think it is, that in the 1890s they printed some regular ballots. But then they printed ballots in Gothic type - like, deep medieval Gothic type. And they give all those ballots to the black men. ...

You can read more about this history in Lepore's 2008 New Yorker article, Rock, Paper Scissors: How we used to vote.