Fairness - The Commentary

The human race has a long history of guilt and shaming. People and institutions have become experts at spreading guilt. It’s been a successful tool for getting people to do what the powerful want, maybe even as successful as fear. And what makes it so easy is that people can be made to feel guilty in very passive-aggressive ways. Think of those old bumper stickers that bragged: “I break for animals.” The implication for those following that car was: “What’s wrong with you that you don’t, and that you don’t have the moral righteousness to display the same bumper sticker?” Or take that fish symbol brandied about on the back of vehicles testifying: “I’m a Christian.” Ironically, the original fish symbol was meant as secret insider code in times of Roman persecution to disguise that a location was a place where Christians meant. Whether wielded passively or self-righteously, guilt is seldom purely a moral idea. It’s mixed with the power plays of people and...

The whole discussion these days of the need to return to civility in political discourse is a nice idea. Civility is better than incivility – going high when they go low is a really, really, really nice thought. And it’s a discussion tied to privilege. The meanness of the Trump cult and the Republican politicians who can’t quit the guy demeans, damages, and destroys those without the privilege of the “civil” talking people, and the open, disgusting talk and actions of those right-wingers who prefer to win economically and socially means nothing is off their table. From the top down, racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, able-bodyism are public. From tee shirts to TV, it’s all there in the open, displayed shamelessly as if proud of ones bigotry and meanness. Certainly, I’d rather have nice. I’d pick nice people as friends any day. But media and popular expectations, sadly, have changed. The right wing itself has seen to that. The words “civility” and ...

The recent release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report chronicling child sexual abuse by more than 300 Roman Catholic priests over a period of seventy years with over 1,000 identifiable victims is only a surprise to people who've been in denial about the millennia-long history of the relationship of religions to sexual obsession. “The report” also “said that there are likely thousands more victims whose records were lost or were too afraid to come forward.” The real history of religions throughout the world shows how religious leaders and institutions have been concerned with controlling human sexuality through almost any means, especially when controlling that sexuality supports the culture's political and economic powers. And, at the same time, it’s replete with sexual harassment and abuse. Obsession with sexual control is due to religions having been useful to kings, emperors, and nations to promote their power – kings, emperors, and politicia...