A Note to the Democrats

I'm volunteering for the democrats this season, and they asked us to "share our personal story," explaining why we make the phone calls and pound the pavement.

What inspired you to get involved:

 There are giant inequities in our country. They come in many flavors: gender, racial, urban, rural, economic. I am involved because I can’t stand the inequities.

What issue is most important to you and why:

Equity is most important to me, equity in school, equity in jobs, equity in politics, equity in the market place, equity in the community. I’m not religious and I don’t go to church anymore, but I do value the precept, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s simply a decent way to live.

I am a proud Democrat because:

I’m not. I’m really not a proud Democrat. I’m a reluctant Democrat. The democrats are almost as complicit as the republicans in allowing our economic dichotomy to grow and fester. But democracy is all about compromise. Once I didn’t compromise. Instead I voted for Ralph Nader. That was an insane vote. If Ralph Nader had not run in 2000, it’s as certain as hypotheticals can be that Al Gore would have been our 43^rd President, and it’s again as certain as hypotheticals can be that we would never have had an Iraq War. Imagine, no Iraq War. Wow.

But even without the Iraq War, the inequities that are tearing us apart would be here. I’m a reluctant Democrat because today there are only two viable parties, the democrats and the republicans, and the democrats far more than the republicans believe government is not “the problem,” as a very white and privileged candidate once quipped, but rather democrats believe government should be a powerful, necessary, critically urgent solution to the multitude of inequities that come with capitalism and democracy.

Your Holiness, Act Like Jesus

Your Holiness,
The Church is consumed with reports of the sexual abuse of children by priests. The children were mostly boys, and the priests were certainly all men. As bad as the abuse was, what has galvanized the world's attention is the cover up of the abuse. Lately, even you have been accused of being part of the cover up.

Would you like the easy remedy? Apologize for the cover-up. Fire everybody guilty of cover-ups, stop condoning them, and apologize for coming to your senses so late.

Would you like to take this opportunity to make a real difference? Would you like to emulate Christ? Apologize for stigmatizing gays, lesbians, transgenders, bisexuals, and queers. LGTBQ people are as special and beautiful and human as heterosexual people. Any child can understand that differences are the very essence of life. There is no more reasonable explanation for devaluing someone based on sexual preference than there is based on hair color, leg length, skin color, or intellectual acuity.

The Church has sinned against gay people for millennia. It is no small irony that the Church has a much higher percentage of gay people in its family than exists in society as a whole. It's a bitter shame that these numbers translate to a large number of pedophiles in the Church.

It's ironic that you and your cardinals and priests, whose primary mission in life is to forgive us our sins, must figure out how to forgive your peers who are abusing children, while at the same time admonish and restrain them so the behavior stops.

That is not an easy task, but it can certainly be managed by a decent, upright man.

The hard task, the task that takes real balls, is to stop blaming LGTBQ people for the shameful behavior of some of our priests.

Your Holiness, don't act like just an honorable man, act like Jesus. Throw out the abuse, as He overturned the money tables, but love this world's rainbow of people, as He most assuredly does.