[Dialogue] Spong Speaks to power, and the people say---Amen

[KroegerD at aol.com]

June 21, 2006 
Mr. Bush: A Public  Embarrassment 

I find myself deeply embarrassed today by the President of the United  
States. It is a new feeling. I do not pretend to be a Bush fan. I have many  
disagreements with him on many issues. I do not share or appreciate his  political 
philosophy. I count myself as part of the loyal opposition, and  believe that 
this country is always at its best where there is rigorous public  debate. Mr. 
Bush ran as a “conservative” and he has governed as a conservative.  That is a 
legitimate position even if it is not my position. In other periods of  
history, such as 1932-1952 liberals have won and have governed from a liberal  
perspective with conservatives in the opposition. That is not the cause of my  
present embarrassment.  
It is also not the first time that I have been embarrassed by my president. I 
 had similar feelings when I had to observe the tawdry behavior of President  
Clinton misusing the Oval Office with his compliant intern, Monica Lewinsky. 
I  expect better behavior than that from the one into whose hands we, the 
voters,  place the destiny of our nation.  
Mr. Bush is now the recipient of that sense of embarrassment that almost  
reaches the level of being sickening. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Bush has  
been guilty of some similar sexual indiscretion. Non-sexual behavior, 
however,  can be equally embarrassing and in most cases far more destructive. I now 
recoil  at this president’s blatant and overt act of seeking to rally his 
political base  by turning the wrath of prejudice and fear, always latent in the 
human psyche,  toward a designated victim, in this case the gay and lesbian 
population of the  country.  
His motivation is overt and obvious. His ratings in the polls have plummeted  
to the lowest point of a president in decades. The war in Iraq is going 
poorly.  The casualties continue to mount. The attempt to form a government made up 
of  those who will cooperate with the American military presence is 
delusional since  every poll shows that a vast majority of Iraqis want the Americans 
out. His  words, “mission accomplished,” spoken on the aircraft carrier only a 
few months  after the successful sweep into Baghdad in 2003, have proved to be 
disastrously  empty. His claim to be strong on national security went down 
the drain when this  administration proved to be woefully unprepared to deal 
with a natural disaster  called Hurricane Katrina about which there had been 
weeks of warning as that  storm journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean and into the 
Caribbean. When an  administration is that inept in dealing with a natural 
disaster, its claim to be  ready to deal with another terrorist attack, for which 
there will be no warning,  sounds empty. Again the words of an administration 
badly out of touch with  reality haunt this president: “You did a helluva job, 
Brownie.”  
Next there was the sudden passion to fix the long-term immigration problem  
ignored by this administration for six full years. Mr. Bush’s reluctance to  
address this issue came because it is splitting his party in two. His southern  
right wing religious base is made up of the old George Wallace vote where 
tribal  feelings and racial prejudices run deep. They see a tide of brown-skinned  
Mexicans threatening their economic security and they respond viscerally. 
They  want a fence built along the line between the United States and Mexico. 
They  perfume their racism by saying that this is a ‘national security issue.’ 
It is  noteworthy, however, that no one is proposing a fence across the United 
States  border with Canada, despite the fact that it was that border through 
which some  of the terrorists came who destroyed the World Trade Center and the 
Pentagon.  The other side of the Republican Party is made up of American 
business  corporations who have long encouraged the illegal hiring of thousands of 
 undocumented laborers, who work for low wages and receive no benefits. These 
 businesses do not want this source of cheap labor either publicized or 
stopped.  It is a battle between prejudice and greed. This administration is now 
caught in  a lose-lose situation and its wiggle room has been greatly 
diminished.  
The combination of these political realities in conjunction with the  
approaching mid-term elections in November in which control of both the House of  
Representatives and the Senate will be at stake panicked this administration.  
Republican strategists began to try to rouse their base by saying publicly that  
control of the Congress by Democrats might result in the “impeachment of the  
president.” That is hardly a positive campaign theme. Next, Mr. Bush and his  
strategists, decided to act in a way that is simply without character. A  
campaign of victimization is now being orchestrated and in the process this  
noble office is being brought to a new low.  
It is a well-known political tactic to divert attention from all political  
problems by playing to the base instincts of the voters. It is an easy tactic 
to  adopt. First, identify a popular enemy whom it is easy to hate. Second, 
build  your following by attacking that enemy. The hope is that by playing to 
people’s  emotional fears, the voters will forget all other issues. George 
Wallace  employed this tactic with blacks as his victims in the 50’s and 60’s 
before the  Voter Rights Law of 1965 had enrolled masses of black voters in the 
political  process. He had little to lose with these prejudiced attacks. Hitler 
did it to  the Jews in the 1930’s. There were less than 10 million Jews among 
Germany’s 70  million citizens. A history of anti-Semitic rhetoric and 
persecution lay in the  background. Almost every nation in Europe had at one time 
expelled its Jewish  citizens. Those who had not expelled them ghettoized them. 
Jews were an easy  target and so Hitler blamed “the International Zionist 
Conspiracy” for the  economic depression in Germany. The German people, with their 
base emotions  raised to a fever pitch of hatred for Jews, proved pliable 
enough to accept  dictatorship as the price for ridding the nation of those deemed 
to be  unacceptable. The Christian Church of Europe, fed for centuries on the  
anti-Semitism of Christian leaders from Polycarp and Jerome to Martin Luther 
and  Pius XII, offered no resistance.  
President Bush’s victims in this cheap and dangerous political game are the  
homosexuals of America, a group numbering perhaps 5-10% of the population, who 
 have perennially been feared and hated because they were different and 
thought  to be “unnatural, deviant and immoral.” Around homosexual persons, the 
president  and his chief political policy advisor, Karl Rove, could weave the 
subliminal  fears of the sexually insecure. The campaign was on.  
The desire of homosexual people to be accorded the same legal rights as their 
 heterosexual counterparts was said by this president to be “a threat to the  
institution of marriage.” That in itself is irrational, emotionally charged  
hype. How is it possible that people who are struggling to be allowed to enter 
 the status of marriage, and are thus seeking to uphold its sacredness, are a 
 threat to marriage? Adultery is a threat to marriage. Spousal abuse is a 
threat  to marriage. Divorce is a threat to marriage. Gay and lesbian people who 
desire  to secure legal and religious sanctions for their sacred commitments 
seem to be  far from constituting a threat to this institution. They actually 
are bearing  witness to its importance and its desirability.  
The next red flag that this president waved before his emotional followers  
was the presence on the benches of our courts of “activist judges.” That was  
also a well-known code word and a subliminal appeal to the racism of his  
supporters. It was “activist judges legislating from the bench,” who struck down  
segregation in schools, declared poll taxes and other tactics of voter  
discrimination to be illegal and opened public accommodations to all citizens.  “
Activist judges” are those who force the population to change, to obey the law,  
to abandon prejudice and illegal discrimination. Attacking “activist judges,”
  who are unnamed and unidentified resonates well in prejudiced America. One 
has  to wonder who these activist judges are. Are they the seven out of nine 
members  of the Supreme Court who have been appointed by conservative 
Republican  presidents? Are they the conservative Republican-appointed judges who 
refused to  let Tom Delay and Bill Frist keep Terri Schiavo alive long after her 
brain was  clinically destroyed? Are they the ones who in a religiously 
pluralistic  society, decided that the religious symbols from one faith tradition 
should not  be imposed on all others in the public schools that are financed by 
the taxes of  all?  
The final blatant appeal by this president to the meanness of the mass spirit 
 was to say these issues should be decided not by the courts, but by the  
legislative process where the will of people can be heard. President Bush and  
his aides act as if they do not understand the basic lesson of American history. 
 The difference between a democracy and a ‘mobocracy’ is that in a democracy 
the  rights of the minority are protected by the courts and the constitution. 
Those  basic human rights are not voted on by the legislative process. Only 
in a  ‘mobocracy’ does one allow the rights of a citizen to be destroyed by 
the  tyranny of the masses expressed through the vote of the people. Perhaps a  
rereading of the Federalist Papers might refresh their memory. The appeal of  
this president was to those who would prevent the courts from deciding on 
basic  human rights by subjecting those rights to a popular referendum. To attempt 
to  amend the constitution of the United States so that it strips away 
forever from  some of our citizens’ the rights guaranteed to others would be nothing 
less than  the beginning of the end of this noble experiment called the 
United States of  America.  
When I add to this list of presidential statements the known political fact  
that a bill to amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, which requires 
a  two-thirds vote in the senate where it was introduced, had absolutely no 
chance  of winning, my embarrassment became acute. This is little more than an 
empty  political gesture, red meat for the prejudiced foot soldiers of the 
religious  right. It is an attempt to manipulate emotions and passions with false 
hope. The  price of this cheap trick has been to unleash more hatred and 
homophobia into  the bloodstream of America and to victimize yet again those 
people whose only  “sin” is that they were born with a minority orientation. This 
blatant political  exercise is without character. It is indeed evil. Mr. Bush 
should be ashamed of  himself. I am deeply embarrassed to have this kind of 
behavior present in the  highest elective office of this land.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
John Ruddick from North Sydney, Australia, writes:  
Is it possible that Jesus was inferring that some people were born gay in  
Matthew 19:12? It reads, “For there are different reasons why men cannot marry:  
some because they are born that way, others, because men made them that way 
and  others do not marry for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.”  
Dear John,  
It is very difficult for anyone living in 2006 to say what Jesus meant in the 
 early years of the first century of this Common Era.  
First, to the best of my knowledge, Jesus left no written records and there  
were no tape recorders to record his words for future use. Our best estimates  
are that the earthly life of Jesus was lived between 4 B.C.E. and 30 C.E. He  
spoke Aramaic.  
Matthew, who is the only gospel writer to record the text you cite, wrote  
between 80 and 90 C.E. or 50 to 60 years after the life of Jesus. He wrote in  
Greek not Aramaic. So, if Jesus actually spoke these words that Matthew  
attributes to him, someone had to remember them and pass them on by word of  mouth 
for 50-60 years, translate them from Aramaic into Greek and finally to the  
English words that you quote. If that process can be navigated successfully and  
literally, we might begin to answer your question.  
The next thing we need to raise is the issue to which Matthew is speaking  
when he had Jesus utter these words. The truth is that some people are born gay  
and others are born straight. Some have powerful libidos and some weak. Some 
are  male and some female. Some are born with an xxy gene and others with only 
xx or  xy. Some are castrated by religious zeal. Some are rendered impotent 
by sickness  and others by surgery.  
I find those who think that a particular text in the Bible addresses a  
specific issue today are operating out of a very superstitious view of the  Bible. 
It is only when the weight of the Bible is employed in a particular human  
arena that I think it can be legitimately used. By this shall people know that  
you are my disciples, that you love one another. If you say that you love God  
and hate your neighbor, you are a liar. Love your neighbor as yourself. 
Welcome  the stranger, care for the weak, embrace the outcast. Jesus is even made to 
 state his purpose in the Fourth Gospel as “I have come that they might have 
life  and have it more abundantly.” These are some of the biblical texts that 
have  cumulative power, that build a consensus and that counter the limited,  
mean-spirited prejudices that we human beings have used so often in the name 
of  religion to violate the humanity of another child of God.  
I know you probably wanted a yes or no answer. Unfortunately, the Bible does  
not lend itself to that kind of response.  
John Shelby Spong        
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