Thursday, February 14, 2013
Gods, Gays and Scouts
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.
— Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead
It was a teachable moment-the young children holding up signs in Irving Texas outside the meeting place of the National Executive Board of the Boy Scouts of America. It was also a surprise moment.
On Wednesday February 6, 2012 the Executive Board decided to defer until May a decision on whether or not gay boys had the proper moral qualifications to become members of the BSA. It was a surprise because the week before the meeting took place there had been much speculation that the organization’s ban on the presence of gays in the organization was about to come to an end.
Since their beginning the BSA have refused to admit boys who are gay and boys who do not believe in God. (With respect to believing in God, there is some flexibility. A significant percentage of Boy Scout troops in the United States are sponsored by religious organizations ranging from Mormons to Romans to Islam, and many religions in between. Those denominations would agree on nothing theological but since they believe in some kind of a God (or in the case of Muslims, Allah) it’s good enough for the scouts. )
If the National Executive Board of the organization had voted to end the ban on gay boys becoming members of the organization, it would have been following the lead of the Girl Scouts of America which in 1991 issued a statement saying: “As a private organization, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. respects the values and beliefs of each of its members and does not intrude into personal matters. Therefore, there are no membership policies on sexual preference.”
At the February 2013 BSA board meeting the ban was not lifted. The board deferred the decision until its May meeting. The delay was occasioned by the same kind of pressure to which congress is subject when it tries to decide what to do about guns. The debate about guns leads to discussions about constitutional issues. The debate about gays leads to discussions about moral issues.
The prospect that the BSA would abandon their historical stance opposing membership for gays was especially timely because on December 26, 2012 the Los Angeles Times released about 1,200 unpublished files that the BSA kept on employees and volunteers forced to leave the organization because of suspected sexual abuse. The paper also reported that an additional 3200 files dealing with the same issues had not been released publicly. The report pointed out that the organization had been slow to act on the accusations and that its “inaction or delayed response to allegations at times allowed alleged molesters to continue sexually abusing children. (In that respect the report was reminiscent of the late January news that Jose Gomez, the Los Angeles Archbishop, had barred his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, from performing public duties in the Los Angeles archdiocese. The ban was imposed because of the way Cardinal Mahony handled clergy pedophile cases by priests under his supervision. He kept some of the priestly perpetrators from harm’s way by sending them out of California so they would not be subject to criminal prosecution for their acts of pedophilia. Although barred from public duties in Los Angeles Cardinal Mahony will go to Rome to join fellow Cardinals in selecting a new pope. ) The prospect of the change in the BSA’s position with respect to gay boys was a teachable moment as well.
Demonstrations were held in Irving, Texas, where the board meeting was held. The teaching moment proved to be the opportunity to teach children to hate. Pictures of the demonstrations outside the meeting site showed children dressed in their uniforms holding up signs with messages such as “keep scouts morally straight,” “stand strong” and “Save our boys from homosexual acts.” Some of the boys holding these signs appeared to be less than 10 years of age. These youngsters may well have been unaware of exactly what it was they were protesting but they were being taught the message of hate, not the kind of teaching moment one would expect from the scouts. The message of hate was reinforced by The Family Research Council and 41 other groups that ran an ad in USA Today urging the Boy Scouts to “stay true to their timeless values and not surrender to financial or political pressures by corporate elites on the issue of homosexuality.” Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary did not want to be left out of the hate campaign. He said admitting gays to the BSA would be “disastrous” for the organization.
The mission statement of the Boy Scouts is to “prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law. The oath says the scout will, among other things, do his best to do his duty “to God” and to keep himself “morally straight. God would probably be as surprised as anyone to learn that in the eyes of the BSA, some of the boys He created are unworthy of service in an organization the rules of which require its members to believe in Him.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Men and Women
Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Letter to Susan B. Anthony, [June 14, 1860]
It was wonderful news for women when the French arrived in late January to drive out the Islamists who had been imposing Sharia law on the residents of Timbuktu, Mali. Rukmini Callimachi of the Associated Press described the elation of Hawi Traore, a 12-year old girl. When the Islamists left her hometown she “folded up her veil and tied on a vibrantly colored wraparound dress. The next day she wore heels. The day after she got her hair braided and slipped on sparkly earrings.” Those were all things that had been banned by the extreme Islamists who took over the city a year earlier. Twelve-year old Hawi still has a scar on her arm where she had been whipped by the Islamic police for not properly covering herself. A leaflet found in the dirt in front of the building that had been the Islamic Tribunal’s headquarters described the rules drafted by the men that told women how they should wear the prescribed veil. Among other things it said the entire body had to be covered, the veil could not be transparent and it had to be colorless. The rules were drafted by men who alone can interpret for women how the deity, to whom they all owe allegiance, believes women should behave. It is further useful since these men know that women being women cannot decide those things for themselves.
Hawi’s story was especially noteworthy because it was told the same week that the Obama administration proposed a new set of rules dealing with the health care law. The new rules that were proposed were to address the fact that under Obama care insurance coverage for contraception is required to be provided by health insurance plans. The Roman Catholic Church, an organization ruled exclusively by men, believes that women should not use contraception and, therefore, does not want that coverage to be included in insurance plans for which they pay. That coverage would have the undesirable result of giving their female employees affordable and ready access to contraception.
It is not only the Catholics who object to providing contraceptive coverage for women. Certain other religious institutions, as well as employers who are not religious institutions but personally do not favor contraception, want to exercise control over the lives of the women who work for them by denying them contraceptive coverage in the government mandated insurance plans required to be carried by those employers. In an effort to meet those concerns the Obama administration has twice before issued regulations to address those who believe that for religious reasons (like the Islamists) they should be permitted to impose their view on women who work for them or belong to their churches. Those regulations did not satisfy those wishing to control women’s access to contraception.
In announcing the third set of regulations, Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said the new proposal would insure that women could have free birth control while “respecting religious concerns.” Commenting on the new proposal, Kyle Duncan, a man and the general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, said the new rule “does nothing to protect the religious freedom of millions of Americans.” The religious freedom to which he refers does not include the freedom for women to obtain comprehensive health care coverage. A woman who is denied access to contraception for whatever reason must be very careful when having sex, avoid the act altogether or face the risk that she will conceive and give birth to a child she did not want nor plan to have. That is not the same as being whipped for not properly wearing a veil.
Of course men ruling women is not restricted to health care coverage when it comes to the Vatican. Reports early this year disclosed that the Vatican had begun a crackdown on uppity women in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization for nuns that represents about 80 per cent of the 57,000 nuns in the United States. The Vatican’s “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (CDF), a group comprising only men, concluded, after a two year investigation, that the nuns “focused their efforts on serving the poor and disenfranchised, while remaining virtually silent on issues the church [men] considers great societal evils: abortion and same-sex marriage.” According to the CDF the nuns also never revoked a 1977 position statement that questioned the male-only priesthood. (A BBC report in 2007 said that in Morocco women preachers known as The Mourchidat are now permitted to perform the functions of male Imams except for leading prayers. The Pope would not approve.) In order to help the women correct their transgressions the Vatican has appointed a group of men who will review the women’s transgressions and will revise the statutes governing their organization and vet the speakers and publications put out by the women. The women could probably do it by themselves except for the fact that they are women.
Hawi was thrilled when she could fold up her veil and tie on a colored wraparound dress. If men would quit telling women in the United States what they can do in their personal lives they would be as excited as Hawi-for good reason.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Motorcycles and Cremations
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights
But the queerest they ever did see,
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
— Robert William Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee
A recent ad in the local newspaper by a Denver mortuary and cemetery called Olinger Highland together with another company’s offer of a freebie that arrived in the mail, makes the whole post mortem thing enticing.
The newspaper ad begins by declaring that “People are fascinating” and then says that funerals “should be designed around their unique personalities.” In recognition of this, the ad says that members of a group known as the Dignity Memorial network offer something called “certified Celibrants. ” In further explanation the ad says that: “Our Celebrants can create and officiate a final tribute that defines your loved one.” This is probably especially important in the case of someone whose life was unremarkable and, therefore, needed a bit of post death defining. That is probably better than the obituary written by family members that inflate the accomplishments of the decedent.
In addition to the helpful text, the ad features a picture of three motorcycle riders driving down a street and, in large letters, a statement that “Every part of a funeral can be unique. . . even the procession.” Attached to one of the three brightly colored motorcycles is a sidecar containing either an urn, a corpse, or both although the picture is a bit fuzzy and one can’t be sure. The ad says that the mortuary will “help you create the event of a lifetime.” Since the decedent is either in an urn or riding in the side card, it is hard to understand how this is an event of a lifetime as far as the decedent is concerned but it may simply be that I do not fully appreciate the lure of what is probably the decedent’s last motorcycle outing unless the family intends to keep the urn and its contents and permit them to accompany the family on pleasant summer motorcycle rides.
If the object in the picture is indeed an urn it is possible that the person whom it contains received the mailing that appeared in my mailbox on the same day the ad for the motorcycle ride appeared. It was clearly meant for me specifically since the envelope was addressed to me personally rather than to “occupant.” It came from the “Neptune Society, America’s Cremation Specialists.” On the outside of the envelope was a statement that the envelope’s contents pertained to a “Free Pre-Paid Cremation! Details inside.” As is often the case with such things, the contents of the envelope, although enticing, were not quite as represented. The first thing to emerge from the envelope was a letter describing the virtues of cremations including the fact that the process has less of an effect on the environment than the alternatives, a feature the Neptune Society knew would appeal to a Boulder Colorado resident, we being very sensitive to such things. The letter also pointed out that cremation makes sense since we are an increasingly mobile society and putting someone in a local cemetery when there is a good possibility that family members will move to a different community makes cremation preferable. Presumably that is because one can, when moving, be accompanied by the ashes if one has not chosen to distribute them. The letter contains other helpful information such as letting the recipient know that by signing up now one locks in the price and avoids something known as “upselling” which does not gain you a better seat in the hereafter but apparently is something that is done to get you to pay more for the arrangements at the decedent’s death because the family is not in a good emotional place for bargaining. The letter has a footnote asking the recipient to “accept our apologies if this letter has reached you at a time of serious illness or death in your family.” That seems a bit odd since would seem to be the very time that such offer would be most valuable.
The other enclosure is a card that advises the recipient that the free cremation offered on the outside of the envelope is in fact only an opportunity to participate in what is known as a “Cremation Sweepstakes.” That is not a race to see who is the first to qualify for a cremation. It is a drawing from all the cards that are returned and the card drawn qualifies the winner for a free cremation. Often such offers are accompanied by a time limit within which the winner must collect the benefits he or she has won. In this kind of event it might be by a fixed date or during a month when cremations are low. In this particular case, however, there is no suggestion that for the winner to collect, there is any time limit. The winner can collect his or her winnings at leisure.
I’ve not yet decided whether to succumb to the lure of the ad or the offer of cremation. Perhaps I’ll do both. Each is tempting in its own way if the time is right.