This is a fews days old, but it is a gem from
William Greider, who puts it all in perspective on the life-death politics still wafting through the air:
The life-or-death issue goes deeper than the obvious hypocrisy of certain politicians. It leads us into intriguing, disturbing questions about what "moral people" believe in this very moralistic country. Shouldn't we have a fuller discussion about who is pro-life, who is pro-death?
More Greider and more pundits below, including:
- Krugman on why there are so few conservatives in academia
- Richard Cohen and E.J. Dionne look beyond JPII's celebrity
- Chuck Sigars on hearing "Shut Up!"
- The Daily Cartoon
Greider deconstructs the facile "pro-life" politics of the day:
The Bible says simply, Thou Shalt Not Kill, but various codicils have been added over the millennia by religious thinkers. It's OK to kill people in war--lots of people--if the circumstances meet the theological test for a "just war." Pope John Paul II opposed the US invasion of Iraq, called it a "crime against peace" and a conflict that "threatens the fate of humanity."
American bishops warned that Bush's war did not meet "the strict conditions in Catholic teaching." We should return to examine their position more closely, because the killing continues in Iraq, including death by torture. If you think about it, Washington's overwhelming power in the world is founded on death, the awesome arsenal for killing people.
Most people would not regard ecology as a life-or-death issue, but some conservative Christians are beginning to espouse that moral position. The relentless march of industrial despoliation--destroying ecosystems and thousands of species--is the ultimate offense against life since all life forms, including humans, are sustained by nature.
Scientists have described these times as an epoch of massive extinction attributable to human activity. Can a moral people do this? Would church leaders explain the mass destruction of God's creatures as Providence, part of God's plan? Pro-lifers are, meanwhile, trying to stamp out contraception and stem-cell research.
Greider then speaks out forcefully against the merger of GOP and religious fundamentalist power:
The country has just witnessed an interlude of religious hysteria, encouraged and exploited by political quackery.
The political cynicism of Republicans shocked the nation. But even more alarming is the enthusiasm of self-described "pro-life" forces for using the power of the state to impose their obtuse moral distinctions on the rest of us.
The Catholic Church and many Protestant evangelicals are acting as partisan political players in a very dangerous manner. Once they have mobilized zealots to their moral causes, they can expect others to fight back in the same blind, intolerant manner.
The Republican right's religious agenda is no secret. Both the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical churches want to win taxpayer financing for their private schools. The Republican Party supports them. The school-voucher issue has been sold as help for poor children trapped in failing public schools, but the long-term objective is to secure government money to pay the tuition of all students in parochial and private religious schools.
Given the strong emotions of recent events, the pro-lifers are advancing an explosive agenda--forcing other Americans (whom they regard as infidels) to pay for the propagation of their "one, true faith."
A bit scattered, but also on the mark. Old School conservatives ought to wake up, smell the American Taliban they've bargained with and join progressives in drowning it--SOON.
Why so few conservatives in academia?
Paul Krugman answers the question, Why so few conservatives in university faculties? In doing so, he takes on the Talibanesque bill in Florida's legislature that would enable a conservative student to sue professors who don't "respect" the student's views:
Consider the statements of Dennis Baxley, a Florida legislator who has sponsored a bill that - like similar bills introduced in almost a dozen states - would give students who think that their conservative views aren't respected the right to sue their professors. Mr. Baxley says that he is taking on "leftists" struggling against "mainstream society," professors who act as "dictators" and turn the classroom into a "totalitarian niche." His prime example of academic totalitarianism? When professors say that evolution is a fact.
Here we go again. By pandering to the religious right to build an electoral advantage, Republicans have found themselves at the mercy of a vocal fringe that isn't conservative at all; they have no compunction about government intruding into doctors' offices, bedrooms, and now, college classrooms:
Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.
And it wouldn't just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America, or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes. Soon, biology professors who don't give creationism equal time with evolution and geology professors who dismiss the view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old might face lawsuits.
If it got that far, universities would probably find ways to cope - by, say, requiring that all entering students sign waivers. But political pressure will nonetheless have a chilling effect on scholarship. And that, of course, is its purpose.
A deeper look at John Paul II
There are countless musings today on John Paul II's passing, but WaPo's Richard Cohen strips away much of the eulogizing to take a balanced look at the impact of JPII's leadership:
[It] does John Paul II neither justice nor respect to treat him as nothing but a celebrity. He was that, of course, and he cultivated the image because he was, at heart, an evangelical. But he was also the author of 14 encyclicals and numerous rulings whose net effect was to make the church stubbornly conservative on issues that matter to us all.
I am not referring now to his adamant opposition to the ordination of women or married men or even his ban, reiterated in his last encyclical, on divorced Catholics receiving Communion. These are matters for Catholics to decide among themselves.
There are other areas, though, where John Paul II's teachings affected non-Catholics. I am referring now to his implacable opposition to birth control -- not just abortion, mind you, but the mere use of condoms.
In January, for instance, a spokesman for Spain's Catholic bishops, Juan Antonio Martinez Camino, said in Madrid that "the time has come for a joint strategy in the prevention of such a tragic pandemic as AIDS, and contraception has a place" in that fight. The next day the church said the spokesman had misspoken. "It is impossible to advise the use of condoms," the bishops said in a statement.
E.J. Dionne makes an another astute commentary on JPII, honing in on the tension between the master of modern methods and the enforcer of "a traditionalist theology and preserving an all-male celibate priesthood." :
If John Paul stood for one large thing, it was primacy of the spiritual over the material. He used thoroughly modern methods, but his teachings were in tension with modernity. Almost everyone has thus found something to praise and something to criticize about this man, because all of us embrace some aspects of the modern world while also worrying about modernity's spiritual black holes. We all agreed with John Paul some of the time.
Battle over bumper stickers
The Seattle Times' Chuck Sigars bemoans the growing intolerance of dissent, characterized by a battle over bumper stickers close to home: his daughter, a student at Univ of North Texas, had four tires deflated due to a generous plastering of anti-Bush bumper stickers:
Dissent is alive and well, of course, as is (last time I checked) Michael Moore, probably busy counting his money. There are still marches and protests and boycotts and angry letters, not to mention a visible opposition presence at Bush's second inauguration. It's still legal, in other words, and practiced, and apparently in no danger of being stifled.
But we don't have to like it. And more and more, it seems, we don't.
We don't like people with different opinions, and we don't want to hear them. If you voted for Bush, then you're an idiot, a moron, and maybe I'll just take my ball and move to Canada. If you oppose the war in Iraq or messing with Social Security, then you're a traitor, an America hater. And we don't want to listen, God forbid we might actually find common ground, so the Vietnam-era slogan, "America: Love it or Leave it," has morphed into a simpler one: "America: Just Shut Up."
Yup, the Bill O'Reillification of America.
Today's cartoon: