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Happy Memorial MLK Birthday Day. Have you wondered what Dr. King would think of the presidential candidates if he were alive?

Barack Obama gave a speech took the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – the same church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped rev up the civil rights movement.

“If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community. “The divisions, the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the ease with which we blame the plight of ourselves on others, all of that distracts us from the common challenges we face: war and poverty; inequality and injustice,” Obama said.

But he added that “we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean,” citing homophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant bias in the black community

“I wasn’t born into money or great wealth, but I had hope!” he declared, bringing the congregation to its feet, cheering and clapping. “I needed some hope to get here. My daddy left me when I was little, but I had hope! I was raised by a single mother, but I had hope! I was given love, an education, and some hope!”

Very inspiring, but some are still wary of the rhetoric if it doesn’t deliver on substance.

blackagendareport.com – Give the Candidates the MLK Test

Dr. King said the “triple evils” of his day were militarism, racism, and economic exploitation. … In addition, Dr. King said he was “compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor” in the U.S. … Senators Obama and Clinton fail the Martin Luther King Test, miserably. Obama wants to add 100,000 troops to the U.S. Armed Forces, at a cost of over $100 billion – even as he proposes partial withdrawals from Iraq. Clinton seeks 80,000 new soldiers and Marines. As sure as the sun rises, a bigger U.S. military means more wars, and no money for domestic “change.”

The only candidate who would pass the Martin Luther King Test is Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whose platform for peace, truly universal health care, a living wage, and an end to corporate domination of American life harkens back to that “shining moment” in the Sixties that King mentioned, when there were “hopes” and “new beginnings.”

While I agree that Obama and Clinton are not as good as Kucinich on some of the transcendent issues that concerned MLK, I see no mention here of John Edwards. Comments?

Ok, Don Imus was in the wrong, like Limbaugh with his feminazis, and Ann Coulter with whatever s/he has said this week, and all the other blowhards who are regularly hateful – and with more ooomph behind it.

Actually I think the guy was trying to be “cool” and he was the wrong guy, talking about the wrong women, at the exact wrong time. Of course, he has said a lot of nasty things in the past, and had even vowed to stop, so both public opinion and the voice of the marketplace have now spoken.

(By the by, let’s not pretend those young men at Duke are pillars of society, even if the charges have been dropped. It was a pretty unsavory scene – and a common one for the college sports community.)

Imus does do some good work in service to others, though, and that should be factored into moral judgments as well – as it seems to do rather easily for Sharpton and Jackson. Although they have been leading the attack (on the basis of race), they both have histories of inappropriate remarks of their own. For them to lead the moral outrage response on this is about as hypocritical as Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr attacking Clinton on grounds of sexual morality.

I’m always interested in what motivates someone to throw the first stone.

Here’s what is continuing to bother me about the coverage.

Everybody’s talking about race – what about gender? The sexism across all our communities – black, white, everybody – seems (pretty much) to go unquestioned.

Imus’s remarks were not only about a heavily racially-coded form of hairstyle with a cultural history. They were also sexist – a form of prejudice, contempt, and domination against women.

He called them whores! – or “ho’s” – and yet the pundits make no room for a feminist to speak on that issue.

The coach and the women on the team made the point, but who in the media will pick it up? Is it ok to call accomplished young women whores, but just not to do so in a racially-tinged way? Is that the message?

According to the Christian Newswire, Human Life International has opened up a new website that claims to expose the “Real Source of Violence” in the abortion debate. Guess who they claim is responsible for the violence?

“This website exposes the pro-choice movement as the most violent political movement in United States history. In fact, we have documented over 7,000 acts of violence and illegal activities by those who support or practice abortion,” stated Brian Clowes, Ph. D., senior analyst for HLI. “We have launched this site to expose this troubling truth and to draw attention to the fact that this violence is escalating at a very disturbing rate. Since 2000, there have been an astonishing 269 homicides and other killings committed by the pro-abortion movement.”

They include a lot under the “pro-abortion” movement. You’d have to read through the stories yourself to get a sense of some of the problems with the methods and logic. There are probably a few genuine cases of fringe pro-choicers in there – there are always a few at the edge of every line of thought. However, they are trying to conflate the pro-choice idea with an organized violence. Perhaps I’ll tackle the details on another day, but I’m kind of hoping that someone else will do it, someone who actually makes a salary as a researcher, and I can give you a link.

While there seems to be a spectrum among its members, HLI itself looks like a far-right activist Catholic organization. In as neutral a tone as they can manage, they’re calling their new site an “informational resource.” Go to the Newswire link to get the address – there’s no way I’m linking to it on this blog.

One of the things that struck me right away in the news release was their claim that pro-choicers are racists. Wow. That’s really counter-intuitive to my sense of things, so I had a “stop the train” moment. They mention an example of a Maine couple who had abducted their 19-year old daughter, “bound her hands and feet and were transporting her to New York for a late-term abortion simply because the child’s father was black.”

If this story is true, then it seems to me that abduction, kidnapping, and an attempt at an unwanted abortion upon a woman of 19 are crimes in themselves. The racism and criminal behavior, not to mention the lack of care for their daughter implied by this, cannot be generalized onto anyone who is pro-choice. That’s absurd. But this is what they do, all the while complaining at their site that they feel that prochoicers and the media “stereotype” anyone who is against abortion.

— An aside- I’m wondering who wrote this press release. This group has been around since the early 80’s, and it’s pretty big. Perhaps it’s a bias of mine, but I think of Catholics as pro-education (except for sex education, of course). It may be because of my deep admiration for some of the Catholic theologians and scholars I have read, heard, or met. My own experiences have been rather positive. There was a shrine in my hometown, and they had some beautiful christmas lights. I think of retreat, study, monastic life. I was a research assistant for a Catholic bio-ethicist in graduate school. He was a clear, calm, well-educated and kind man, bearing nothing at all like the tone expressed here. Like I say, it could be my blinders, but it doesn’t even sound Catholic to me. Usually, interactions between Catholic groups and the media are, well, better than this. Could this group be on the outs? Just wondering. It reads more like a diatribe from political Protestants, Christian dominionists in particular. I could be wrong.

In their news release, they claim that that Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wanted the KKK’s slogan to be “to breed a race of thoroughbreds.” Well, here’s another viewpoint on the question of her supposed racism. Dr. Edward A. Kempf was the one who actually said this, and of course it has been taken out of context and with distorted meaning (again).

Sanger’s books were among the very first burned by the Nazis in their campaign against family planning, and of her, Martin Luther King Jr. said:

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts. . . . Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.

HLI doesn’t mention some of their own fringe leadership, like their key man in Europe, Siegfried Ernt M.D., who has said some pretty wild things, including this comment about the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s: “Why is there this attitude of degenerated masochism which makes us destroy systematically our own breed and race and which makes us passively watch how our own mental, moral, and biological inheritance is getting wasted and ruined?” (Ernst is also a close friend of the German Neo-Nazi leader Manfred Roeder, founder of several radical right groups. One would have to consider Roeder, who has stated that violence is the best cure for Germany’s ills, to be a kind of terrorist. He served over 9 years of prison time for charges related to the bombing of refugee hostels in 1980.)

It used to be weird for me to see these odd projections and reversals. It has become commonplace under the rise of the reich right. HLI is a tax exempt organization, a non-profit charity – it’s considered a “pro-life missionary group.” And what a stange mix of doctrine and politics it is! HLI is against family planning, contraception, voluntary sterilization, and medically accurate sexuality education – so they actually encourage more unwanted pregnancies, promoting and depending on unrealistic abstinence-only programs. They oppose Planned Parenthood, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). To aid in their work in 39 countries, they have conferences, publish books, issue newsletters and maintain several websites. “Outreach” programs include Next Generation (for youth), Pierre Toussaint Project (for African-Americans) and Latinos for Life (for Latinos). Its Population Research Institute argues against the notion that human overpopulation is occurring and fights UN efforts to control population growth. Their methods include or have included boycotts, clinic blockades, harassment and intimidation of clinic clients and employees, leafleting students with misinformation and other anti-choice propaganda, and misinformation campaigns featuring films such as the discredited The Silent Scream. Among their false claims are that contraception causes abortions and infertility, and that abortions cause breast cancer and severe psychological trauma.

I’m looking at this one group today because I got an email about the obnoxious press release (thanks Karyn!). I don’t mean to pick on them, not exclusively (grin). Hey, they’re only one of many. That’s one of the reasons it interests me.

You see, what you get – effectively speaking – when you spread the “evil birth control” and “evil abortion” memes is more babies born for your “team”! It’s an evolutionary meme – a contagious set of ideas, spread via evangelical marketing, that changes the views of segments of society. Of course, some will grow up and “rebel” – and some will speak differently from their actions – but what you get, generally speaking, are more of whoever supports the meme. More babies, more meme-bots.

As Monty Python’s song “Every Sperm is Sacred” from The Meaning of Life puts it, “You’re A Catholic the moment Dad came.”

Could it be that in some sense it really is about producing more babies for the church, for the fatherland or motherland or homeland, for the cause, for the power, for God – whatever your claim to authority might be for more people remarkably like yourself in some significant way? Don’t study evolution, just BE evolution – is that it?

That’s one disadvantage of higher education (and thus, deferred family-making) and serious family planning – fewer babies for that “team.” Of course, given our global conditions, fewer babies might be better for everybody. Unfortunately, I think that part will be taken care of by scarcity of resources, poverty, war, the effects of pollution and the like.

While I think the matter of abortion (especially late-term abortion) is genuinely difficult and controversial, it’s difficult to see what biblical authority anyone could claim for being against medical education and knowledge, birth control, some measure of planning when (and if) to have children – and yes, perhaps even abortion. Neither birth control measures nor abortion are prohibited in the bible. What is prohibited is the sacrifice of babies upon the alters of false gods. You may recall that other kinds of sacrifice were quite common – you may remember that Christianity itself is based on the the sacrifice of the Christ – God’s son.

To blame all those who are pro-choice for the violence associated with the abortion debate is flagrantly dishonest. Of course, it would also be dishonest to blame all of those who would never have an abortion under any circumstances (even those who believe that it is the government’s job to prohibit others from doing so) for the pro-death violence sometimes enacted under the banner “pro-life.” But not quite as dishonest, because many of the followers of “pro-life” are encouraged to condone and participate in violence for the cause. Yes, that should sound a bit familiar. I have yet to see the pro-choice terrorist. What – “honor a woman’s right to choose, or I’ll choose to blow up my body right here?” Not likely.

Oh, and if somehow, someway, you didn’t happen yet to notice, opposing birth control and abortion activated two other agendas as well as more babies for the team:

• Stuff right-wing voters “in the booth”
• Stuff women back “in the box”

These are two things – for sure – that America doesn’t need.

We are an optimistic nation, a hopeful nation. Whatever our politics, we hope that our political and corporate leaders value our lives. This is a wonderful thing about America. But it does leave us somewhat open to manipulation, deceit, and betrayal. I think this Administration is disastrous to us in ways that are have been sufficiently transparent for some time but that many people don’t want to see or believe.

Fellow Americans, I do believe that more of us are beginning to understand. More information will only show how deep the damage goes.

Read, please. Read more. Ask questions. Find out. Pick an issue and find out everything you can about it – from different points of view. Put together your own ethical judgment – whatever it is. Become truly informed to your very best ability. Only in this way can we have a functioning democracy again.

Here are a few links to articles that I think are worth reading.

• Top ten power brokers of the American theocracy machine. View income, players, goals.
• George Lakoff on the meaning of freedom (progressives vs conservatives)
• Fifteen Things to Remember about Ken Lay and Enron- Joseph Palermo
• Garrison Keillor on Ralph Reed – still running for office in Georgia
• Bush Thinks he Can Rule by Fiat (Helen Thomas)
• Victory for Mexican President Blank-o (Greg Palast) – Election brought to you by ChoicePoint Inc. and the American Republican Party
• How America Lost its Way (Noam Chomsky) – Defining traits of a failed state: inability to protect its citizens, belief that it is above the law, lack of democracy.
• Who Owns What? – Columbia Journalism Review’s online guide to what major media companies own
• Infiltration of the Military by Hate Groups – We’re training and arming our own terrorists…
  

  Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman’s war, he wrote. It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and ‘cleansed.’

  As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood.

I don’t think I had ever seen South Dakota’s State Senator Bill Napoli speak before tonight. He was commenting on the abortion ban there that would close down – gulp – the only operating clinic that’s left in the entire state (this one clinic has to fly in medical volunteers from out-of-state). Guess there wasn’t really much left to do.

Online NewsHour: South Dakota Bans Most Types Of Abortion — March 3, 2006

BILL NAPOLI: When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn’t allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: You really do?

BILL NAPOLI: Yes, I do. I don’t think we’re so far beyond that, that we can’t go back to that.

Sounds almost sweet, huh? Like the "wild west" reference, which frames the whole thing. In the actual "wild west," women didn’t do very well… Of course, the west wasn’t "wild" when this guy was growing up.

Under what circumstances would Mr. Napoli concede that a woman (or her community) might be allowed to consider abortion? Rape or incest? um… well…. actually….even those cases would have to come under "danger to life of the mother."

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

The case he allowed that might actually "endanger the woman’s life" would be if she were a religious virgin saving herself for marriage" and she was not only brutally raped but also sodomized (because she was sodomized? Does he need some basic sex ed on how pregnancy occurs?). Note that just being a virgin isn’t enough, and that he assumes virginity isn’t actually a choice made in full knowledge and self-value, but only in "religious" conviction (or more likely, quasi-religious pressure).

Note also that the ideal situation is where the community makes the decision for the people involved – both that the woman will carry to term and that the two will marry. What a great basis for commitment – an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy. Maybe we should hear some autobiographies from people who had marriages with that auspicious beginning. I can’t think of many men who would welcome a return of the shotgun wedding either. Oh, and should uncle or brother daddy marry the one they "savage"?

His delivery was shocking. It was almost as if the thought of the brutalization of the woman – oh wait, he said "girl" – was a turn-on for him. The last sentence was a bit of an afterthought. Here is a man who clearly views women as property to be controlled and dominated (and even protected – as property). How is he that much different than the rapist he cites?

In any case, "danger to the life of the mother" is usually interpreted in quite narrow terms – that carrying to term might well result in the literal death of the mother – such as with an ectopic pregnancy or other medical conditions.

Is it virgin sodomy that makes all the difference for him? Is a woman who isn’t a virgin less traumatized by rape or incest? Is it all about the qualities of the rapist – the brutalizing, sodomizing defiler of religious virgins? Is it enough to be an anal virgin? (Actually, anal and oral intercourse are on the rise among the "no-sex" pledgers. Hope they don’t catch a disease while they’re trying not to get pregnant without birth control.)

Watch for other moves back to the "good old days" too. For people who are so against abortion, they are oddly and ferociously opposed to the proven factors of reducing the number of abortions: birth control, sex education, women’s education and training, equality, and freedom of opportunity. What next? Barring women from the vote or from owning property? Will American women be disallowed from wearing miniskirts, working outside the home, going to college, driving a car?

Fundamentalist sexism and domination of women looks very similar to me across religions. It’s about the same thing as rape – it’s about power, it’s about controlling and dominating women into a semi-subhuman status. Watch what happens to those women in those communities when they don’t have the abortion. See how friendly their neighbors are to a single woman with a child, or to a struggling family with five. Shall we bring back the good old witchcraft charges too?

In a way, I understand. Some people don’t want to have to face reality. There is so much change, and they don’t know where or how they will fit. It’s clear that many of us will be sacrificed to the Mammon, the "god of money." There is meth addiction, there is crime, there is disrespect to "elders" – surely it feels like apocalypse approacheth. It’s strange that they refuse to look at economic factors – but it’s clear that our children and grandchildren will live in a very different world. My generation is the first that has not (on the whole) done as well as our parents did. So some of us can’t actually face the world we live in – we’ve had it relatively easy and some have an irrational assumption that the world owes us something whether or not we’ve earned it or deserve it (shall we call it the W syndrome?). We pretend that there is no poverty while it’s actually increasing, that all parents must by definition be wonderful people, that kin don’t rape or otherwise hurt one another, that everyone who is the least bit different from our comfort group must be evil, that people who do their own thinking and make their own ethical choices are a threat to those who simply submit to authority (hoping they will be spared?). Some people can’t even really understand that there are other countries or people different than the "folks" on our street – most Americans only speak one language. Of course our own "group" has its problems as well, but if we are not directly affected we tend to ignore that as much as possible. We want to protect our kith and kin and we like to hide in the safe comfort of our folk mythologies.

But these are childish reactions, and they bring out very bad things in us. They bring out the very things that every prophet warns against. America is living in a very thin veil of self-induced hallucinations. Part of the "good old days" mythology has to do with dominating women – oh, and killing Indians in the "Wild West." Violence against immigrants, especially Mexicans, is on the rise.

A religious response would have to listen compassionately to narratives of actual, truthful experience (as you would have your God hear you) before proposing solutions or making judgments. These politicians don’t do that very much – and neither do many of their constituents. Listen to the stories of the women who are desperate enough to abort their pregnancies that they travel hundreds of miles to the only clinic in the state to get it done. Listen to the circumstances by which a woman decides to end a pregnancy – it is no easy thing to decide. The stories are often heartbreaking. There are women who have had abortions and regretted it deeply – this is true. There are women who have not, and paid dearly.

This issue is a handy tool to drive people apart because abortion is a very controversial and difficult topic. Ultimately, though, it is not the job of the government to mandate a woman’s reproductive life. Such decisions have to reside with the woman, with her God (if she is a believer) and in consultation with her doctor.

Maybe that’s the beef – that finally there is a matter in which a woman has the final say-so. How threatening to the fragile male ego.

Roe v. Wade was the compromise. If your daughter or your sister or your mother or your friend were in a position where abortion had to be contemplated, you might think differently. Or maybe not – maybe you’re in that group who wants to turn America into a theocracy – complete with stoning?

Added March 4th: Mark Morford’s reaction to all this is much more strident – and witty. Read "S. Dakota Slaps Up Its Women: Another state you should never visit passes an appalling abortion ban, because they hate you"