[Dialogue] Spong on the Bush Administration

[KroegerD at aol.com]

    Thursday August 14, 2008    Religion and a Crisis in Confidence at the  
Justice Department  Perhaps I am too idealistic, but I am still  shocked and 
disillusioned when I discover that those who are overtly and  publicly religious 
also lie, cheat, dissemble and act as if their  religious certainty should 
justify whatever illegal tactics they adopt.  
The latest illustration fitting this pattern involves yet another  episode in 
the strange marriage between the Bush administration and the  voting bloc in 
America known as the "Religious Right." The center for this  episode was the 
Justice Department and involved a recent report by the  nation's Inspector 
General accusing former Attorney General Alberto  Gonzales and one of his top 
aides, Monica Goodling, with unethical  behavior. Both of these people identify 
themselves quite publicly with the  values of the religious right.  
Prior to being forced to resign from that position, Alberto Gonzales  
revealed in his performance as Attorney General that he was barely  competent for his 
job, which of course causes one to wonder why he was  ever chosen to be the 
chief law enforcement officer of this nation. When  we look at the history of 
this administration's appointees, however, we  discover that, with the rare 
recent exceptions of Robert Gates at Defense  and Henry Paulson at Treasury, the 
criteria for appointment seem to be  cronyism and ideological compatibility 
rather than competence.  
Gonzales certainly qualified only on those two bases. He was, first of  all, 
a friend of the President, having worked closely with him as counsel  when 
Bush served as governor of Texas. They had a comfortable  relationship. His 
primary skill, however, was not in either knowing or  interpreting the law, but in 
his ability to provide cover for anything the  President wanted to do, from 
illegally wire tapping the telephones of  United States citizens to sheltering 
the CIA from charges of torture in  violation of the Geneva Convention.  
The second thing that qualified Gonzales was that he, like another  crony, 
White House Counsel Harriet Miers, shared something else with the  President. 
Both of them were evangelical, born again Christians. When Ms.  Miers, whom the 
President actually nominated to the Supreme Court, was  judged even by the 
Republicans in the Senate to be unqualified and ill  prepared for that position, 
Bush defended her on the basis of her  religious convictions, as if to say 
that religious convictions are a  proper substitute for competence. Gonzales fit 
the same pattern.  Identifying his ideological bias with the three "G" words, 
God, Guns and  Gays, he was a religious right enthusiast. The proper position 
was to be  in favor of God and guns and to be opposed to gays. While serving 
as  Attorney General he attended Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax County,  
Virginia, an ultra conservative, gay hating, charismatic congregation.  That 
church is today seeking to withdraw from the Episcopal Church to  align itself 
with the Anglican Church of Nigeria whose Archbishop, Peter  Akinola, is so 
distorted that to curb homosexuality he has suggested that  laws be passed in 
Nigeria making it illegal for two men or two women to  have lunch together in a 
public place. Other African countries from which  this church seeks shelter still 
make it a capital crime to be a  homosexual. It is no wonder that an African 
bishop once told me that there  were "no homosexuals in Africa." If one is 
subject to execution for being  gay, closets are very deep and well hidden. I 
find it incredible that  anyone in the educated world of either church or 
politics would want to  identify with these attitudes, take them seriously or seek to 
accommodate  them in any way as if they were acceptable.  
I have no objections to Mr. Gonzales' private religious preference,  though I 
certainly do not share it. I have long become used to the fact  that people 
do dreadful things in the name of God. That is embarrassing,  but appears not 
to be preventable. That, however, is not the issue. Mr.  Gonzales felt a 
missionary imperative to use his office to impose his  religious views on the entire 
United States. I do object to that kind of  religious imperialism from any 
source and particularly from one in an  appointed position of authority. When he 
later proceeded to justify his  public role in legalizing torture and in the 
firing of the United States  Attorneys on the basis of the values of his 
religion, then I find his  behavior totally inappropriate. Finally, when under 
cross examination from  the Senate, his memory became so fuzzy that he could 
recall nothing about  these matters, he stands revealed as little more than an 
incompetent  ideologue, who is using religion to provide him with an air of  
respectability. The very fabric of the nation hangs on the trust people  have in 
the integrity of the law. Alberto Gonzales compromised that  integrity and then 
justified it in the name of his religious ideology.  Recall that it was this 
Justice Department that was given the  responsibility for investigating voter 
fraud in Florida in 2000 and in  Ohio in 2004. Bush's two appointees to the 
office of Attorney General,  John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, are already 
regarded as the two worst  Attorneys General in America's history.  
Monica Goodling, the second person charged in the Inspector General's  report 
with illegal and unethical behavior in the Justice Department, was  Gonzales' 
top aide. She has clearly learned from the example of the  Attorney General 
himself. Ms. Goodling is a recent graduate of Evangelist  Pat Robertson's 
Regency Law School in Norfolk, which has been judged to be  third rate at best. It 
was, however, both ideologically and religiously  right down Gonzales' alley 
and became a happy hunting ground where  Gonzales hired well over 100 of its 
graduates for positions either in the  White House or in the Justice Department. 
Ms. Goodling was Exhibit "A" of  these recruits. Despite her youth, lack of 
experience and thin résumé, she  qualified on ideological and religious grounds 
and rose very rapidly until  she was Gonzales' top aide. Under her guidance 
Internet searches were  begun into the backgrounds of those seeking civil 
service positions that  are by law declared to be non-political. These searches 
were programmed  with the code words abortion, homosexuality, gun support and  
Florida recount. Prospective employees for civil service jobs in  the Justice 
Department under Ms. Goodling's style of interviewing had to  have a right wing 
understanding of God that meant being anti-abortion and  identifying with 
either a conservative Catholic church or a fundamentalist  Protestant church. 
"Florida recount" separated Republicans from Democrats  quickly and probably 
carried with it support for the Iraqi war. The  category of homosexuality required 
her to single out homosexual people and  to use them as scapegoats to keep the 
less educated and emotionally  unstable religious voters sufficiently 
frightened of a "gay takeover" that  they would be willing to abandon their economic 
vested interests in favor  of their deep seated prejudices. This familiar 
tactic was not new. It has  been employed frequently by "Bible Belt" politicians 
in the South, who  constantly used the fear of blacks to keep poor whites 
voting with the  ruling classes. Religious people seem to think that anything that 
pushes  their religious agenda is by definition both legal and moral, which 
then  suggests that anything that opposes their religious agenda is illegal and  
immoral.  
We have seen that mentality operating time and again in church life.  The 
laws of this country were both ignored and flouted by the hierarchy of  the Roman 
Catholic Church when they were confronted with massive sexual  abuse of 
children and young people on the part of their priests. Instead  of cooperating 
with the legal investigations, they blocked them in any way  they could. Someone 
like Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, obviously guilty  of being an accomplice 
in criminal acts by protecting and sheltering  guilty priests, was not, as the 
law requires, arrested, charged, tried,  convicted and jailed. He was rather 
promoted to a Vatican position in  Rome, where, by virtue of being out of the 
country, he would never be  required to testify under oath. At the same time, 
a Catholic Bishop in  Sydney, Geoffrey Robinson, who had investigated this 
same scandal in  Australia in such a complete and thorough way, discovered that 
he was held  in contempt by his church's hierarchy, which not only passed over 
him for  the position of Archbishop of Sydney, but also pushed him into early  
retirement by appointing to that position one whom his investigation found  
unworthy to head the Roman Catholic Church in Australia and to whom he  could 
not in conscience be either loyal or supportive as bishops take vows  to do.  
In evangelical circles, a similar dishonesty occurs so often I've come  to 
expect it. Evangelicals defend their religious traditions not by  addressing the 
questions people raise, but by lying, misleading and  assassinating the 
character of their critics. I have chronicled examples  of that so often in the 
past that I will not repeat them here, but I do  not trust evangelicals to be 
honest when their beliefs are at risk, nor do  I expect them to act in 
Christ-like ways.  
When I look further at Christian history I become more and more  
disillusioned with the public face of religion. That history reveals the  persecution of 
pagans by Christians as soon as they gained power in the  Roman Empire in the 
4th century; the Crusades against the Islamic world in  the 11th, 12th and 13th 
centuries; the Inquisition in the 14th century;  the religious wars of the 
16th and 17th centuries; and the constant  anti-Semitism throughout Christian 
history. That anti-Semitism stretches  from the church fathers, to blaming the 
Jews for the Bubonic Plague, to  Martin Luther, to the Holocaust that few 
people in the Christian world  from Pope Pius XII on seemed willing to condemn. 
Today rampant homophobia  lives primarily inside the Christian Church, having 
largely died in  secular society. If the public face of religion is now defined 
by the  unholy alliance of right wing religion with right wing politics then I  
want no part of it.  
I look forward to the presidential election in November. No matter who  is 
elected my sense is that on January 20, 2009, the happiest person in  American 
history will be Warren G. Harding who will finally escape his  well earned 
reputation as the worst president in American history.  President Harding on that 
day will be promoted to the position of second  worst.  
John Shelby Spong
 
____________________________________
Question and Answer 
With John  Shelby Spong   
Doris Christoph, via the Internet, writes: Having read two  of your books, I 
finally have answers to several questions that have  troubled me for years. 
But now I have some new ones, two of them are of  immediate importance.  
1. My very fundamental Seventh Day Adventist Church. How do I fit in  when I 
no longer fit in?
2. Prayer: How do I now pray? To whom? About  what? For what? How do I 
express my gratitude, my sorrows, my joys?  
Though I feel that a great burden has left me now that I feel you have  given 
me permission to understand God and Jesus in the light that I have  seen in 
the distance for a long time but was too afraid to reach for, I  also feel very 
much an outsider and alone. How do I deal with  this?   
Dear Doris, 
Thank you for your letter. I assure you that in the Christian life  there is 
no such thing as a time when questions will cease and you will  arrive at 
answers that will endure forever. Christianity is a journey, not  a religious 
system into which all truth can be fitted.  
To your questions, only you can decide whether you can continue your  
pilgrimage inside the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Normally I encourage  people to 
remain in their households of faith as change agents. However,  that is based 
on the assumption that a particular household of faith is  open to change. 
Churches are frequently security systems and change will  destroy them, not 
transform them. This is particularly true for those  parts of the Christian Church 
that are built around a single issue or a  single ethnic group. Such churches 
are themselves not likely to survive.  
In terms of prayer, this format is not nearly large enough to address  those 
concerns. First you need to develop an understanding of God other  than the 
supernatural parent figure who lives above the sky and is waiting  to come to 
your aid. Christian prayer is not an adult letter to Santa  Claus. Second, you 
need to understand the nature of the world in which you  and I are living. It 
is not a world of miracle, magic and divine  intervention, but a world of 
order, natural law and precise mathematical  formulas that enables us to predict 
with total accuracy the tides, the  time of sunrise and sunset and even eclipses 
of the sun and moon. We can  send spacecraft to the moon and to the planets 
as far out as Jupiter  because we know the laws by which such things as motion 
and gravity  operate. Prayer must take place in that kind of world.  
There are many books that might help you in this phase of your journey.  I 
have written on this subject twice, once in a book entitled _Honest  Prayer_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Honest-Prayer-John-Shelby-Spong/dp/1878282182)  that has 
recently been republished by St. Johann Press (315  Schraalenburgh Road, 
Haworth, NJ 07641) and the second is _A  New Christianity for a New World_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060670630/002-6901244-3376019) , 
published by Harper-Collins.  Maybe one or both of them would help.  
Enjoy your quest for truth.  
John Shelby  Spong




**************Looking for a car that's sporty, fun and fits in your budget? 
Read reviews on AOL Autos.      
(http://autos.aol.com/cars-BMW-128-2008/expert-review?ncid=aolaut00050000000017 )
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20080814/b52d10ad/attachment-0001.html