Anonymity has a lot of different effects, and most of it depends on where you’re standing.

For Delgado Cero, it’s lifeblood. I don’t think anyone could doubt that the continued existence of EZLN and their struggle depends on a carefully guarded and secretive leader.

But that same concern of “privacy” looks a whole lot different when it’s Bushies claiming that they have the right to operate the goverance of a democracy without any fucking oversight.

That’s why I posted “docs.” Sure enough, as i guessed, anonymous delivered.

Sarah Palin, taking a page out of the Rovian handbook, decided to use Yahoo to conduct the business of the state of Alaska. For Bush and Cheney, the appeal of such moves (they at least had the brains to use RNC servers which are slightly more secure) is to hide their actions from any potential review. It makes the use and abuse of power easier, since you know your communication can’t be reviewed.

Oddly enough, in order to gain this “privacy” to use the power of the government as she personally saw fit, she put valuable information within the reach of those who are, shall we say….chaotic neutral.

We have a choice. We can insist transparency, that the secrets of the government are best protected by archived servers that will allow for total accountability…

Or we can allow our leaders to continue to rely on obscurity for security and do things like use yahoo for government business, exposing their machinations not to the people at large, but a select few that dare to break in and get them.

Whether she knew it or not, Palin did something incredibly reckless and dumb.

My hope is that something exposed in this leak helps bury her rise to power, and the idea that archived government email isn’t a requirement of a truly free state.

After all we know, do we really believe that we can allow any government to operate without total review of what they’re doing? We need to turn the surveillance state back on itself.

-sly

So, it turns out that Palin uses yahoo email to conduct the business of the state of Alaska.

Just sayin.

-sly

I keep hoping that I’ll shake free of the writer’s block that keeps gripping me. it doesn’t happen.

Since i left academia, i feel like the ideas are drying up even more that i could have guessed they would. which is honestly more disturbing that just being writer’s block. i’d hate to think i was dependent on that kind of thing for my ideas.

part of it is the sense of reaction, that i was constantly being expected to respond to nearly everything that came across my path. at a certain point, though, it started to feel awfully rote. I was writing stuff that would have been really good, if it was the first time that i’d written it. But instead, it was in perpetual rehash, a stuck note in my understanding.

another part is that i’m getting shy again. i’m not sure that it comes across in my online persona much, but in person, i am painfully shy, but trapped with the social needs of an extrovert.

i recall staying the night at a friend’s house once…because i’d had too much to drive home. she went off with her boy after they walked me to her place and i woke up the next morning, and for a moment, i felt amazing. the rain was coming down, i was in a good friend’s bed. i felt the cool air around me, the smell of the rain, and the indescribable joy of simply having the hospitality of amazing person i really admired.

it didn’t take long for the anxiety to kick in. that strange grace of knowing that i was a trusted and appricated friend vanished into a baseless paralysis. i stayed, trapped in her room, not making a sound because i couldn’t imagine actually talking to her house mates as i left…even though i knew both of them.

i ended up leaving the keys on the counter after waiting for 4 hours for them to leave…and locking the door. Yeah. So caught up in avoiding human contact that i’d completely forgotten that i was locking my friend out of her own house. when she called to pick up her keys, she was….surprised…to hear that i’d managed to do this. to this day, i’m not quite sure what she made of it.

it’s strange living like this…and i’m incredibly grateful for the friends who humor my oddities.

it’s just been making it very hard to write lately…but i am trying. i can’t tell if my academic ennui is real, if i truly am writing the same things over and over again…but i sure am paranoid that’s what’s happening.

i need to find something very different to write about for a change. ideas, anyone?

-sly

Just wanted to write on this one real quick…a rumor that blackwater was operating in saint paul for the RNC.

I won’t say for sure that they weren’t, but i strongly, strongly doubt it.

Yes, the number only riot gear cops are intimidating, but let’s face it. They have ID numbers on their helmets. That’s #7 on the top ten list of things Blackwater would never do. It’s a pale and empty nod to the St. Paul policy of handing out ID cards that have names and badge numbers to any citizen who complains.

Also true, that in the afternoons and evenings, there were spotters on the bridges leading into town from both north and south. I’m not sure who’s they were…my best info says they were Ramsey Cty Sheriffs. Fletcher, the idiot in charge of them, is dangerous in his own right…but is more penny-ante dictator than true fascist. Ham handed voter suppression and money laundering is actually more his style.

What happened over the last few days was in many ways wrong, and we’re going to be working for a long time to right things.

But i think it’s important to keep some perspective on what did and did not happen.

Blackwater is an unlikely story.

The truth was bad enough.

-b

ps: photo credit to nezua

The Church in Saint Paul by The House of Mercy Band

Last Sunday was the last service of the House of Mercy in the historic First Baptist Church…a place that I had found as a home. It was a heavily emotional service, a farewell that I was simply not ready to bid. The change of homes reflects a change in denominations, throwing a serious wrench into my potential plans to be ordained. It’ll be Mister Civilian for some time, it looks like.

As usual, scribbled on the program with notes for sermons I wish I had the time to finish, and thought about what God is calling me to do in response to the grace I have known.

As we left, we brought our hymnals out to the moving van, and the police state came riding by, a troop of cops on bikes, apparently making their heavy presence known in advance. It felt profane.

I mutter under my breath…

“Render unto Caesar…”

And I realized that I probably had. If you give them your trust, you owe them your obedience.

-sly

Yes, i’m neglectful. I will return to this blog on day…but i’m still waiting for the inspiration to strike me.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this headdesker.

While looking for jobs, I found an “opportunity” with a major community health initiative as a recruiter/organizer. Looked promising, until the two following details emerged.

1. The pay was under 15 an hour. This alone is not fatal.
2. Health benefits did not start for a half year. This is.

Tell me how a community health initiative gets away without insuring it’s own workers? Working poverty is wrong, period. This nation won’t be right until there’s universal health care and a living wage.

When i was working on a paper on mental health and theology, i had some questions about how churches have dealt with suicides in the past. i asked around a little, and started to expect a fairly disappointing answer. I read stories about refusals to inter bodies or even conduct the most basic of services.

A true moment of light was when Fr. Pat Malone talked to me about the options that a priest has when facing that decision. As of now, the preference is to bury and to give rites. But even prior to those reforms, a priest always had a choice to declare the matter private, of the internal forum. What amazed me was the strength of belief in a system of resolution beyond that of hierarchy. Not exactly my pre-conceived notion of Catholicism.

Simply, as I understand it from his explanations, there are matters of faith and personal life that cannot be expected to be resolved by church courts or strict adherence to teaching. Like Christ, the church too must be merciful and responsive to the individual soul.* The most common use of internal forum today is to allow Catholics to return to the sacraments after getting divorced. As long as they come to understand through prayer a reconciliation of their actions and their faith to God. It might be repentance of sin or it might be the finding of a clear conscience, doing what was truly best.

This simple notion has come to underscore my entire theology of queerness and the church. Queer issues are primarily pastoral, not theological to me. There is nothing about the character of God or the scriptures that are at stake for me. I know God to be loving, and I understand the witness of the Bible as reflective of that love.

The question is not transcendent. It is entirely immediate. What are we doing, pastorally, to care for those who are in pain?

This is where Father Pat comes in. When a family is in pain because of suicide, a sudden and traumatic loss occurs, he tells me that the clear choice is to move matters out of dispute and into the care of the church. To address the human need to know that God is with them in their pain, the priest has a wide authority to do what they need. Most often, it came in the form of burying the deceased and offering blessings and prayers that gave the family hope. Despite a ostensibly clear teaching that suicides were damned, the reality of the church has been a steady move towards a more humane approach. Many times, this was done quietly. Other times, it came in the form of a public burial that served to reconcile the deceased, the family, and the community.**

So what do we do in the face of queer issues in the church today? Protect people, care for the hurt, and do what we can in a broken world.

The time to break with tradition is when the application thereof leads to more pain, not the grace of the Kingdom. And even if we cannot, as a whole Body come to an agreement, individual pastors still have an obligation to provide care in the interim.

If that means blessing a marriage so that couples have a greater chance of being able to see each other in the hospital….then that’s what we do.

If that means publicly fighting transphobia to try to stop the violence…then we have an obligation to do so.

If it means trying to address the concerns of those who are leaving the church because they are conservative…then, as church leaders, we do that too.

Grander theological concerns notwithstanding, a clear pattern emerges. The conduct of the church on the local level can have real effects of the quality of people’s lives. Do they feel as if God loves them? Can they be protected by the social privilege given to the church?

Even when Christendom as a whole fights over what to do, these remain pastoral issues. This is not revolutionary, this is a move to compassionately meet people where their lives are. That’s gospel, right there.

This post is dedicated to a wonderful ally in the Lutheran Church who has given me much to think about.

-sly

*Mark 2:27
**The teachings and law on internal forum are varied on this point. Many authorities point to the need for the resolution obtained in internal forum not to damage the rest of the faithful. This might outlaw any public recognition of variances, but that hinges on the definition of damage. I, for one, think there is plenty of theological room for seeing the pastoral needs of the harmed and the dishonored coming before the strong. 1 Corinthians offers an extended vision of what it means that God has sought out what has been despised, to show the full breadth of grace and reconciliation made known in Christ Jesus.

Well, probably more than one. But it’s hard to put these kinds of losses to numbers.

The PM of Canada, Stephen Harper, is scheduled to make a formal apology for the residential schools in which first nations children were taken away from families, subject to abuse and neglect, and robbed of their culture.

Lest you mistake this for worthy progress, the churches who ran these schools began closing schools and making formal apologies about 30 years ago.

-sly

Katie Cannon once wrote that one of the major problems with being radical is that moral values that do not center the status quo are not disputed, but simply not recognized as such.

There is no such thing, in the American imagination, as a leftist morality. By definition, we are amoral. We can talk all day long about the value of inclusion, for instance, but Ricky Santorum can still get cultural traction for discussing man on dog sex.

Values which oppose the mainstream are not values, they are lawlessness.

Which is the only way i could possibly explain the following quote.

“Fashion statements may seem insignificant, but when they lead to the mainstreaming of violence - unintentionally or not - they matter,” Ms Malkin has written.

Intention doesn’t matter. She’s right on that. But how else can one read that line from the author of In Defense of Interment?

Her words, intentionally or not, have helped mainstream violence against Arab Americans. And, for that matter, against Palestinians, Iraqis, Afganis, and may God forbid it from coming to pass…Iranians.

Values not supportive of the ancien regime are not simply rejected.

-sly

Vanessa points me to some fauxgressive posturing, and the question of “who pays for” the children of the poor.

Last time I checked, working poverty is an externality. The true cost of the labor and life of these workers is not reflected in their pay. We all pay the difference. The worker pays most directly, with loss of opportunities and recompense. Probably at the expense of their health as well.

The state, and the rest of us, pay in a variety of ways. Perhaps direct assistance, food stamps, etc. More likely we pay in lost payroll taxes, healthcare costs shifted to the state, and unrealized economic gains related to working class spending…a primary driver of local economies.

All so that the company who hires such a person can do so below the cost of what it really costs to have that work done. A profit, which isn’t even a zero-sum gain. For every dollar the company pockets, we don’t just lose that dollar. We lose all the productivity, labor, and gain that might have come if the worker had been paid fairly, been able to spend those wages, or invest them.

Who do we expect pays for this?

The worker. Us.

It’s that simple, really. Poverty wages are a neat way of saying “theft.”

-sly