Fairness - The Commentary

“I just figure that when I’m that age Social Security and Medicare will be gone.” That’s what one of my students said to me after a class lecture on early Chinese religious thinkers and their views on human nature and government’s role in people’s lives. “Why doesn’t that get you so angry?” I asked. “My generation is having the party, and yours is getting stuck with our bill.” “If I thought that, I’d burn down every radio station that played Oldies,” I joked to lighten the mood with hyperbole. I certainly understood why this 20-year-old had given up. Most of the messages around inspire a hopelessness and helplessness. There’s the “all politicians are crooked (or no good, or just out for themselves)." There are the constant media attempts to claim a false equivalency between “both sides.” There are the messages that voting doesn’t matter in the midst of Republican moves to suppress voting and corporate PACS like ALEC investing millions in their candidates because they know voting ...

There are couples, relatives, and friends who’ve gotten along well when they disagree about politics. They’ve often just agreed to do their best to keep such discussions out of their relationship. These last political seasons, however, have even strained some of those relationships. It has become common particularly for those in the MAGA crowd to seem not to be able to go very long without a remark about liberals, the current president, gender, or any of the pet complaints they have. Again and again we hear how arguments over the presidential candidates in both the primaries and the general election campaigns have actually destroyed friendships and driven couples into silence when it comes to discussing how they’re voting just among themselves. But there are also arguments about vaccines, immigration, LGBTQI people, gender, how the government should help people, and on and on. Whether or not a relationship can survive political disagreements depends upon what isn’t actually the politic...

Watching Missouri Senator Josh Hawley skedaddle as fast as he could out of the US Capitol as the insurrectionists he had previously inspired with his famous raised fist (displayed while safe behind the lines of protection that Capital police provided him) began destroying anyone and anything in their way, was to witness an iconic moment. It surely represented all those radical right-wing politicians who regularly send others into battles but as so-called “Chicken Hawks” are the first to flee any chance of personal or career harm by claiming, let’s say, “bone spurs.”   But it also symbolized the type of heroes that the current radical right-wing listens to in their renewed call to return to a hyper-masculinity, a toxic patriarchal mix that they’ve latched onto again as the crucial cause of everything that’s wrong with our planet. Refusing to admit that their own policies are the root of the problem, they’ve calculated that preaching everywhere they can that masculinity itself is und...

Recent Supreme Court decisions and state legislative actions have brought to the fore the tried and true idea that the variety of oppressions are all related. The forcing of women to give birth, the threats made by Supreme Court justices to end marriage equality and the right to contraception, the numerous red-state laws from “Don’t Say Gay” to transphobic discrimination, the orders by governors to have family services investigate parents of trans youth or parents who take their own children to an event hosted by someone in drag, the attempts to suppress the votes of those who disagree with them, the calls for “Christianizing” the laws and the country itself, the worship of megalomaniacs, and the violence inspired by all this that’s acted out on anyone not them, are all signs that a bigoted minority is willing to do anything it takes to protect their identities. If you’re following the news, the list is depressing. It's all become blatant because the last president modeled hate spe...

The recent release of that 300-page report of widespread sexual abuse and its cover-up by leaders and ministers in the Southern Baptist Convention (America’s largest Protestant denomination) is only a surprise to people who’ve been in denial about the millennia-long history of the relationship of religions to sexual obsession.  Allegations of sexual abuse and this denomination’s handling of them in particular have been news for decades . Of course, the anti-Catholic stand of these Baptists and most Evangelicals has kept them condemning the same thing in Roman Catholicism for a century . And widespread sexual abuse is a factor in Evangelicalism beyond this denomination . But this is not about hypocrisy, which is actually not considered such a bad thing in right-wing religion. It’s about something inherent in its doctrinal structure.   As I wrote in the chapter “Not So Strange Bedfellows: Sexual Addiction* and Religious Addiction:” “The existence of widespread sexual abuse by...