Patriots or Traitors?

Patriots or Traitors?      January 31, 2021   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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I would like to take as our wisdom lesson today, a quote from Father Philip Berrigan, but, for those of you who are not in my generation or older, let me tell you who he was. Philip and his brother, Daniel, were both Catholic priests and ardent anti-war protestors during the Vietnam War. 

Philip eventually married a former nun, Elizabeth McAlister, and the Catholic Church rewarded them by excommunicating both of them. Philip and Elizabeth were married for nearly 30 years, but they spent 11 of those years apart as one or both of them were in prison for various protests. They were friends with the other famous Catholic war protestors of that era, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day, and if it is permissible for a Protestant to comment on such things, I miss the days of Catholic activist, scholars, monks and priests. I pray that we live to see a new generation of their ilk in the Catholic Church.

So, I hope the background adds some weight to this single sentence that I am sharing with you as our wisdom lesson. He said, “The poor tell us who we are, the prophets tell us who we could be, so we hide the poor, and kill the prophets.”

 

The poor show us who we are because the poor are powerless. And so, the poor are a barometer of the character of a society. The degree to which we are willing to subject them to suffering is an undeniable tell of just who we really are. The prophets are those who are willing to speak truth to power, to amplify, as I have said, the voice of the poor, so that the powerful have to take notice. But, as Philip said, we hide the poor in economic ghettos and we marginalize the prophets, sometimes by killing them but more often, finding a way to put them in prison.

The Berrigans were regularly in prison. As was Dorothy Day. And even though they were eventually assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, both spent many months in jail during their protests before they were murdered. Before we named streets, hospitals, and schools for them, we put them in jail and tried to ruin their reputations. We shouldn’t gloat over that too much. Hindsight, as they say, can be 20-20. In the given moment, it is not always easy to tell a heretic from a saint because both are rejecting what is normal. It takes discernment to be able to tell if they are on the side of good or evil.

 

The same is true in the political sphere. Who is a true patriot, a hero, and who is a traitor? I am very fond of the quote from Malcom X, from this same time period as the aforementioned moral leaders of the last century:

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

As a current illustration of this, I suspect that most of you who follow the news will know that while the United States has inoculated about 4% of our population against Covid-19, Israel is being lauded in the media for having given the vaccine to nearly 100% of their population. You have heard that in the news, right? But have you heard that Israel is not sharing any of that vaccine supply with Palestine, 

which they politically control? 

Palestinians are not expected to get vaccines until next year. Because if you just read the newspapers, or even listen to MSNBC and CNN, they will have you hating the people who are oppressed and admiring the people who are doing the oppressing. We tend to trust the more liberal media to be more honest than the right-wing media but there are times when the left wing and the right wing are just parts of the same bird. It is very difficult to find broadcast media that is ever critical of Israel, and, . . . spoiler alert, there are many good reasons to be critical of Israel. 

 

Think of some of the history changing moments in our own history:

You know that the Japanese bombed Perl Harbor in 1941. Do you know why?

You know that the Iranians took our embassy staff hostage in 1980, but do you know why? You know that Al Qaeda attacked us in 2001, within the memory of all of us, but do you know why?

 

Did they tell you in history class that the United States had put an iron and steel embargo on Japan to prevent their industrial and military buildup? Did you know that our CIA had led an insurgency in Iran to install an American puppet as head of state? Did you know that after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 that we left a military presence in Saudi Arabia, near the holy sites visited by all Muslims, the world over? 

 

There is a difference between reasons and causes. We did not make Japan bomb Perl Harbor, we did not make Iranians take our Embassy personnel hostage, and we did not force the hand of Al Qaeda to attack us on 9-11; we didn’t cause these events but there were reasons. It is important to understand the difference. 

 

I have been criticized lately for talking about so many current events with such certainty, without the nuance of self-doubt. And, in many instances, that is a fair criticism. Frankly, for the past several years, it has seemed to me that very many of the social justice issues that are of primary concern to this church, have been pretty well cast in black and white, not right or left, but right or wrong. In that sense, most of what I have talked about for the past several years have just has not been in a gray area at all, for me, at least, they were not controversial issues, no matter how many people may have taken the more immoral side.

 

What really makes a topic controversial is when you can build a credible argument on both sides of the issue. My daughter thinks that I should shave my beard. My girlfriend prefers that I keep it. There is no way to split that baby.

Let me ask you, are these people patriots or traitors?  Julian Assange, the 50 year old Australian journalist has made a career for the past 30 years of publishing state secrets on the site he founded, Wikileaks. No one has been safe from his efforts at digging up things that governments didn’t want the public to know. He has been in our news for exposing American secrets, but he has also exposed things that governments in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe have very much wanted to keep secret.

It can be said that no government could long survive without secrets. We want our undercover agents in the CIA to be able to sniff out terrorist plots before they happen. We want our FBI to be able to infiltrate domestic terrorist groups so that we have some intelligence about what these dangerous armed militias might be up to. Exposing Iran for secretly preparing to make a nuclear weapon would be something we would applaud Assange for doing, but when he exposes assets and methods of our intelligence agencies that we depend upon to keep us safe, then he is a villain, right?

 

But then there are those in between issues, like when Bradly Manning, now Chelsea Manning, leaked military information about war crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraqi. The crimes were gruesome. It involved a helicopter firing on civilians, then two journalists, and then first responders, and after they had killed several people, a military vehicle came and ran over the bodies repeatedly to destroy evidence and to further desecrate the bodies of recently murdered innocent victims. Manning had reported the information about these crimes to his commanding officers. They chose to do nothing; Manning chose to expose them. He did go outside of the chain of command, something no soldier is ever supposed to do. He leaked information about these indisputable war crimes through Wikileaks. 

 

Chelsea Manning was put in prison for seven years, two years of which she was in solitary confinement, often kept in freezing conditions and subjected to various forms of what any of us would call torture. 

What happened to the soldiers who murdered and then desecrated the bodies of their victims? Nothing, nothing at all. Not a reprimand, not a demotion, nothing. Manning was tortured and imprisoned for seven years for telling the world about the crimes and the military cover up and he has since been back in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury seeking extradition of Julian Assange. All of this was during the Obama administration, a president whom we like to enjoy remembering as an admirable character. I’m not so sure in this case. 

 

As you know, Assange spent years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London avoiding arrest and extradition to the United States. After seeing what we had done to Manning in prison, can anyone blame him? That is not to say that Assange is saint. He is anything but, in fact, some of his closest friends will tell you that he is a jerk and the people who worked in the Ecuadorian embassy said that he was a slob with an entitlement problem. But the only reason that Great Britain has not released him into US custody is because there is credible reason to fear that the United States government would execute him, and Great Britain does not support the death penalty. 

 

Assange’s track record gets a bit more murky when it comes to the leaks he received from Edward Snowden. Again, during the Obama administration, when Obama had repeatedly assured the American people that Homeland Security was not spying on American citizens, listening to phone calls, harvesting emails, or otherwise intruding on the privacy of citizens that is clearly protected by five of the 10 amendments that make up our bill of rights in the constitution. 

Snowden was in a position to see that Obama was lying and that, in fact, tremendous amounts of personal data was being collected and stored. He leaked a huge trove of data through Wikileaks to prove that our government was, in fact, spying on us. He did so as he fled first to China and finally to Russia where he hoped to avoid being taken into custody in the USA and subjected to the torture that was being inflicted on Chelsea Manning. Snowden and Assange both hoped to receive pardons from Trump as he prepared to leave office, but they were disappointed to not be on Trump’s list . . . even though Trump had repeatedly said during the 2016 election that he absolutely loved Wikileaks. He just didn’t love Snowden and Assange enough to pardon them. 

 

Many comparisons have been made to Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, which were also classified documents when Ellsberg released them. Richard Nixon tried to stop their publication and failing in that had Ellsberg charged with espionage. The Pentagon Papers revealed that President Johnson had lied, both to the media and the Congress, about the extent of the war in Vietnam and the general conclusion that it was a hopeless quagmire that could not be won militarily. Charges were eventually dropped against Ellsberg under first amendment, freedom of the press arguments. Which, though he had stolen classified documents, it wasn’t like he had bombed Cambodia and Laos . . . like Johnson had, or murdered civilians, journalists, and medics the way our military did in Iraq. 

 

So, you have to decide, were the Berrigan brothers wrong to break into a draft board office and burn their records or was the United States wrong to draft young men to drop napalm on civilians in Vietnam? Was Ellsberg wrong to reveal the lies and war crimes committed under the Johnson and Nixon administrations?

 

Was it wrong for Manning and Snowden to leak classified documents, with Assange’s help, to reveal war crimes and illegal domestic surveillance in the early 21^st century? That’s the paradox of journalism, and sometimes of preaching, or, in a more somber sense, of being a prophet. Still, in the eyes of the American government, Assange and Snowden are the criminals and they want to get their hands on them and, probably, do worse to them than they have already done to Manning. You can no more expect a fair trial for them than they would receive in a Alice in Wonderland reenactment with the Queen of Hearts insisting that the sentence must come before the jury’s verdict. 

In philosophy we have something that we call an ad homonym fallacy, that is, arguing against a claim because you can find fault with the person presenting the argument. Snowden broke the law. Manning broke the law. I’m not sure that Assange did, an Australian citizen publishing leaked American documents… I’m not a lawyer but I’m not sure what the jurisdiction is there, but assuming that it was illegal, we can say that Assange broke the law, but they all broke laws to reveal absolutely horrible crimes that were being hidden by our government. 

 

All of the stuff about the Nixon administration’s break-ins of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office were an attempt to find things they could use to destroy Ellsberg’s reputation. Instead, it led to the resignation of Richard Nixon just ahead of an impeachment. When you cannot assail the argument itself, you can commit an ad homonym fallacy by just attacking the character of the speaker. It can work on a simple minded audience, but it shouldn’t fool anyone who is paying attention.

 

In this case, even the 90 year old Daniel Ellsberg has come out of retirement to publicly advocate for dismissal of all charges against Assange, Manning, and Snowden. Even Ellsberg thinks that what they did was basically the same thing that he did fifty years ago.

 

 Who is a patriot and who is a traitor? Who is a necessary truth teller and who is a criminal hiding behind a false shield of patriotism? In Germany, where they know a lot about having remorse for being silent in the face of war crimes, in Berlin, they have erected three statues to these three whistleblowers: an Australian and two Americans. The statues are standing on chairs and the artist put a fourth chair beside them for anyone to stand on and say whatever they feel needs to be said. 

I would call it “the prophet’s chair.” Who will stand up and speak? 

 

The poor show us who we are . . . the innocent victims of war, the minorities shut out of voting, jobs, home ownership, or even safety from violence. The prophets tell us who we could be. So, we torture and imprison one, exile another to Russia, keep another bottled up in a dirty little room in the Ecuadorian embassy . . . maybe I’m wrong about this. 

I invite you to join me on zoom this evening at 4 p.m. Central and I’ll let you convince me. Write to me for the zoom link or look for it on my FaceBook page, The Emerging Church.

Of Unicorns and Alternative Facts

Of Unicorns and Alternative Facts       January 24, 2021      Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Like many of you, I have a brother with whom I have found it nearly impossible to talk for the past several years. We were once close, though I have always been a liberal and he has always been a conservative, but until a few years ago, we always found a way to communicate in spite of our differences. 

 

My brother and I visited with one another across the 500 miles that have separated us for the past 30 years many times, during Democratic presidential administrations as well as Republican. We disagreed politely about our nation’s responses to 9-11, and, without rancor, discussed our differing views on things, even as important as the invasion of Iraq . . . which he thought was necessary and I was convinced with illegal and based on falsified evidence. I, of course, was right about that war, but it didn’t keep us from having Thanksgiving together or visiting regularly. 

 

What was different about the 2016 election was that the choice to support Donald Trump was not merely political. I would never stop talking to my brother because of political differences. It wasn’t politics, it was ethics. And, frankly, very personal ethics. Trump’s spying on underaged beauty contestants as they changed clothes, his unwanted sexual advances to dozens of women and even bragging about being able to grab them by the genitals, just made this father of a young daughter’s blood boil. And, more than that, my daughter is brown, and my daughter is an immigrant, none of which could have been lost on my brother who has known her since she was 4 months old. 

So, what Trump had to say about people of color, and immigrants, is not a matter of politics. It was a matter of ethics . . . and more precisely, it was a matter of a lack of ethics. For years, when I have been traveling through my brother’s hometown, Birmingham, AL, I have stayed with lesbian friends of mine there and brought them with me to meet my brother for breakfast, and so, Trump’s ardent anti-gay rhetoric wasn’t political for me either…. It was personal, and he knew that too. The last time I was in Birmingham, I stayed with black friends and I didn’t let my brother know that I was in town because I knew how he would feel about that… again, not a matter of politics, a matter of ugly, indefensible, racism. 

 

We agreed to try to start talking again. The Trump era is either over or it is ending and it is time to try to rebuild bridges to the more than one-third of America, including our own family members, who, even if they don’t want to wear the label of being racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, or Islamophobic, they certainly were not enough bothered by those things to refrain from voting for someone who was, indisputably all of those things. 

 

So, where do we begin to start a conversation that has been stalled for years? At least for my brother and me, we talked about where our kids are, he has grandchildren, we have cousins, some of whom have died since we last spoke. We talked about weather, gardening, retirement, and our shared niece and nephews. We avoided the known triggers, though we will have to get back to those if we are to make serious progress.

 

You could almost feel the whole world heave a sigh of relief when, on Wednesday, Donald Trump left the White House, stripped of his ability to Tweet, to fly off to Florida and await the inevitable indictments that will be coming his way. 

Most of us shed tears on Wednesday during the inauguration of Biden and Harris. I loved everything that was said, sung, and read that day but what I loved most of all is what did not happen. Of course, there were 25,000 National Guard soldiers there to make sure nothing untoward happened, but since the brazen and treasonous insurrection of two Wednesdays ago, we’ve been sitting on the edge of our seats, hoping that the right-wing militias would not show up to disrupt the inauguration. 

 

President Biden especially said the right things, and again, more than what he said, I am grateful for what he didn’t say. He didn’t mention Trump by name. He didn’t mention the ongoing impeachment. And he didn’t mention the names of senators and members of congress who spun up the insurrection or continued to feed lies to the insurrectionists after their attack on the Capitol. And that is the right thing for President Biden to do. It is right for him to talk about, advocate for, and pray for unity. But it is the job of the Justice department to pursue justice, and for the media and our nation’s pulpits, to demand ethics. 

 

I believe that it is vitally important for our country to become united again. I believe it is important for families, neighborhoods, and workplaces to become united again. And I believe that Biden is playing the role that was handed to him, but the role for the rest of us, I believe, has two vital elements:

A renewed commitment to what is true.

And sincere contrition on the part of those who have actively or passively attempted to replace democracy with fascism. 

 

Over the past two generations, shameless lying has become an almost acceptable political technique. 

Trump has been so dishonest for so long that when he has announced for the past three years that he was going to be releasing his healthcare plan in the next week or two, everyone knew that he didn’t have a healthcare plan and had no intentions of preparing one. He was all in to defend insurance company profits, no matter how many Americans died. And when he promised a middle-class tax cut would be passed before the election in November, when congress was not even in session and no such legislation had even been drafted, everyone knew that he was lying because he is a liar and that’s just who he is. 

 

We have grown accustomed to constant lying, and a host of criminal financial dealings and election manipulation through foreign powers but the big lie, the lie that the election was stolen from him, that he had won by a landslide. . . the lie he used to give his supporters the courage to literally launch an insurrection against the legislative branch of government to overthrow the election and seize power, even by hanging the Vice-President on the Capitol lawn, and probably killing other legislative leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, that demands . . . that attempted coup, demands retribution. 

 

What I have found especially disturbing, is that after this failed coup, in the wee hours of the morning, some of the Senators who caused the insurrection, came to the floor of the Senate and doubled down on the big lie. Our own jr. senator, Josh Hawley, a Yale Law School graduate and former Supreme Court law clerk, repeated the big lie, not because he is stupid, but because he believes that he can manipulate stupid people with lies. Hours after rioters had been removed from the Senate chambers, Josh Hawley stood at the lectern, grinning, and lying, as if he had no concept of moral responsibility for the danger he had brought on our nation.

 

And this week, after President Biden signed several executive orders trying to bring the United States back into the community of western democracies, Senator Cruz took exception to President Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, Tweeting that President Biden was showing more deference towards the opinions of people who live in Paris than he was to protecting jobs in Pittsburgh. Again, trying to act like the Paris Accord was something cooked up in coffee shops in Paris. 

 

Thankfully, AOC called him on it with a follow-up Tweet, asking:

…do you believe the Geneva Convention was about the views of the citizens of Geneva?

 

Adding, “Asking for everyone who believes  US Senators should be competent and not undermine our elections to incite insurrection against the United States.”

Again, Ted Cruz is not stupid. He is a Harvard Law School grad who also clerked in the Supreme Court. He is just a liar who thinks that he can manipulate stupid people with obvious lies. 

Ted Cruz knows that the Paris Accord was written by the 190 nations that originally signed it. And, if you haven’t checked lately, there are only 197 countries in the world. So, we were not a part of it during Trump’s Administration, and we were joined by Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Turkey, the Sudan, and Eritrea.  

There are perfectly good reasons not to be excited about the Paris Accord. When it was first signed in 2015, I published an article calling it what Confucius had described as putting plaster on a dung wall. It was far too little to solve our very real problems. But Cruz was attempting to manipulate his followers by suggesting that joining the accord was basically bowing to the whims of the French, something his South Texas constituents wouldn’t like. 

 

I think that it should be illegal for elected officials to lie to the public about things over which they have some governance. It should be illegal, for example, to tell people to drink bleach to cure a Covid-19 infection, or to insist that hydroxy-Chloroquine was a legitimate treatment when medical science said the opposite. 

 

And, it seems that both FaceBook and Twitter are going to have to take some larger responsibility for their role in repeating conspiracy theories, lies, and even foreign propaganda. Former Trump spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, famously coined the term “alternative facts,” but that paradoxical phrase was just a modern take on what the Reagan administration used to call Reagan’s egregious lies, his spokespersons would say that the president had “mis-spoke.” In fact, you could almost say that Reagan was the “king of mis-spoke” because he forced the FCC to back off of their requirements that news agencies either report only objective facts or at least give both sides of an issue fair enough exposure to let the people decide for themselves what they believe.

 

Reagan vetoed the Fairness Doctrine, because, he said in 1987, that it inhibited “free speech.” 

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-21-mn-8908-story.html

Protecting lies and propaganda as “free speech” paved the way for the creation of conspiracy theory spreading organizations like Fox News as well as a whole universe of talk radio shows that turned paranoia, prejudice, and hatred into forms of entertainment. . . which is damaging enough to our society, but we have lately seen that it also becomes a way of influencing the outcome of national elections and may even pave the way for fascists to take over our government. 

 

After years of opposing anything good that Obama tried to do for our country and then protecting Trump from the consequence of every crime he committed against our country, finally, even Mitch McConnell came to the floor of the Senate and said that the January 6^th insurrection had happened because President Trump and other “powerful people” had fed the public a steady diet of lies. I recognize that McConnell never speaks or acts on principle and so I am sure that his real motivation is to separate the Republican Party from Trump’s influence, but still, he finally said something that was both true and relevant, and even though he did not name Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley as being the powerful people who were also directly responsible for the insurrection, we all, including, Hawley and Cruz, knew who he meant. 

 

It took seeing thousands of misinformed, insurrectionists who had been fed lies for months coming to kill members of the congress, the senate and even the vice-president for Mitch to realize that it was time to tell the truth . . . 

 

We have reached an unsustainable situation in our public dialogue where the difference between hard facts and totally senseless opinions are treated as if they have the same value. As if the difference between watching Fox or watching CNN was simply a matter of personal preference, as if alternative facts were just as good as actual facts. 

 

Freedom of speech never included yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. What we have learned in the past few years that allowing Russian disinformation farms to post lies and conspiracy theories on Face Book and Twitter, allowing a president or a senator, to Tweet about election fraud and stolen elections, can be worse than yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Five people died in the Capitol insurrection on January 6^th but it easily could have been 5000 and if those heavily armed hillbillies had been able to start a civil war over racism and tribal paranoia, it could have become 5 million. 

 

My first point is that we need a new and powerful devotion to the truth. Hate speech is not entertainment. Lies are not a good source for thrill seeking around the TV in the nursing home. We need a new Fairness Doctrine that makes the media reliable brokers of the truth again, and elected officials who intentionally deceive the public should face more than expulsion from office, there needs to be jail time associated with these kinds of lies . . . as there already is in most western democracies. There is no real lasting freedom in the absence of responsibility.

 

For way too long, churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques have been allowed to peddle fairytales as facts. Folks, the pulpit should be held to the same standard as journalists, if not higher. Why do we allow the clergy to lie when they are supposed to be setting the standard of character, trustworthiness, and reliability? Please, there may be a wall that separates the church from the state but there should not be a smoke screen that separates the pulpit from reality. 

 

My second point, and I will try to make this brief since I know that I am out of time, but join me this evening on our zoom discussion of the sermon and let’s talk more about this: I believe that if we are a nation of laws, we have to stop making exceptions for the rich and powerful. I am sympathetic with President Biden wanting to look ahead and not back. I understand why we don’t prosecute presidents for things they did wrong while in office for the sake of not using the justice department to persecute political rivals. And I get that people in government often make policy decisions that have questionable aspects to them depending upon what you value.

 

In 2017, Trump gave permission to the Dakota Access Pipeline to finish construction. Now, in 2021, Biden has reversed that decision. One president favored business and profit and the other is deciding in favor of clean water and protecting Native American Tribal lands. You know where I come down on that issue but that doesn’t mean that Trump should go to prison for the decision he made . . . about the pipeline. But must we view his months of telling his deranged and gullible followers that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, and that they should march down to the Capitol building by the thousands and disrupt democracy and overthrown the election as being like an executive order giving permission to build a pipeline through the Missouri River? One decision is dangerous and reckless, the other, is sedition, treason, and, realistically, murder. 

 

You don’t prosecute differences in political decisions but was separating children from their parents at the border and then losing the children, there may have been a political goal behind those decisions but if your process involves traumatizing children, then that isn’t politics, is it? Isn’t that child abuse? 

Are we the kind of people who will shrug our shoulders at child abuse? Does a President, an Attorney General, a State Department get to just walk away from that? In my mind, no amount of “whataboutism” or playing all butt-hurt about being a victim can shout down the call for justice. 

 

Look, Colorado’s new member of Congress, Lauren Boebert, is a QAnon conspiracy theory believer, and a woman who thinks that she has a right to wear a weapon everywhere she goes, including in Congress. But she is so mired in her sense of personal privilege and her sense that liberals are evil that during the January 6^th insurrection, she was tweeting the location of the speaker of the house, literally helping the insurrectionists to find and kill Nancy Pelosi. She has been credibly accused of giving tours of the Capitol building to insurrectionists in the days leading up to the riots on January 6^th. And Lauren Boebert is still walking freely and attending sessions of Congress rather than waiting in jail for a trial she has so richly earned.

 

Colorado should be ashamed of having elected a high school dropout who wants to eliminate the education department. But that is politics, and it is up to the voters to choose. But sedition, being a coconspirator in insurrection and attempted murder, voters don’t get to make that decision. 

 

At 4 p.m. this evening, I’ll give you a chance on Zoom to convince me that I am wrong but until then, I’m saying that people who assisted in, facilitated, provoked, or participated in the insurrection on January 6^th need to spend many years in prison and never serve in elected office ever again. 

 

The crimes that have been committed in recent American history are not matters of either politics or opinion, they are matters of law and they threated to rob this great nation of international credibility and they may become a boilerplate for a successful coup next time if they are not visibly and meticulously punished. 

 

We were relieved on Wednesday that the 25,000 National Guard soldier managed to convince the insurrectionists to stay home. I believe that the gracious demeanor of President Biden and Vice President Harris were perfect for the day. But, of course, second only to images of Bernie Sanders huddled against the cold in overcoat and mittens made from old wool sweaters, was the reading by Amanda Gorman, the 22 year old Harvard grad, of her poem: “The Hill We Climb.” In part, she said:

 

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. 
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. 
This effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, 
it can never be permanently defeated. 
In this truth, in this faith, we trust,
for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. 
This is the era of just redemption. 
We feared it at its inception. 
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, 
but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So while once we asked, ‘How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?’ now we assert, ‘How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?’

 

We have survived a nightmare in America. It seemed as if we had lost our way and almost lost our democracy but now is a time of renewal, rebuilding, and restoration of dignity and character. We have some stuff to fix, but I believe that we can and that we will do it. This is our calling, this is our time to shine.

 

“Everyone Counts” (Except in Southern Elections)

“Everyone Counts” (Except in Southern Elections)   Jan. 17, 2021    Dr. Roger Ray

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I grew up in a very middle-class home. For me, things like country clubs and private dinner clubs were things that I had heard about, but I frankly had no idea what happened there or why being a member seemed to be so important to so many people. But when I became a minister, the social invitations did involve trips to country clubs and other even more exclusive clubs. 

I was still in my 20’s when an elderly gentleman in the church asked me to join him for lunch at a gentleman’s club. I still have the souvenir shot glass from that visit. It was not a “gentleman’s club” in the sense that term is used around here. There were no naked women dancing on poles, it really was supposed to be a club exclusively for gentlemen and though it was very nicely appointed with big leather recliners, a library, a cigar room, a billiards room…. Still, it was, in many ways more obscene than the kind of men’s clubs that are the more sexy kind. 

 

It wasn’t simply that you had to be a man to be a member, but more specifically you had to be a white man, and more specifically still, you had to be a white man who was not Jewish. The waiters were all black men, neatly dressed in uniforms that were reminiscent of Pullman Porters. I was horrified and couldn’t wait to get out of there but my hosts, two active members of my Louisville church, obviously didn’t see this very expensive place as being the racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic institution that it undeniably was. In fact, were they still alive, they would probably be shocked that I thought that the Pendennis Club was a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic place . . . they thought of it as a place where a man could enjoy a nice bourbon, a hand rolled cigar, and not be bothered with the conversation of either women or Jews. 

 

And, I don’t want you to think that my hosts were moral monsters. They were not. They were kind, generous, friendly guys who were totally blind to the humiliation their black waiters were being subjected to, and what it meant that women and Jews were not allowed in the building. Such prejudices, until they are challenged, are almost always invisible. You grow up with these social barriers and you are blind to them until you are forced to see them, and, hopefully, once you see it, you will never tolerate it again. 

 

I was only 11 years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a man in Memphis, TN. Unfortunately, I share a last name with the assassin, which earned me some unsolicited attention in my school in rural Kentucky, where my history teacher literally congratulated me in front of our entire class which had only been integrated a few months earlier. 

 

I am certain, because I grew up with these people, that my history teacher would have been deeply offended if anyone had suggested that he was a racist. He would have said that he did not dislike black people but Martin Luther King, Jr. was disturbing the social order. In those days, white people didn’t think that they were being oppressive or discriminatory, they just thought that white people had one place in society and black people had another. You could say that what King was doing, in the 1960’s, was making the invisible visible, and white people didn’t like what they were seeing. 

 

Of course, when our nation was founded, slavery was the majority of the labor market. Many of our founding fathers were ideologically opposed to slavery, except for when it came to their own slaves. Several generously made provisions for their slaves to be freed upon their deaths, but not before.

 

In fact, Thomas Jefferson, who is credited with being the author of our Declaration of Independence, owned more slaves than any other of our “founders,” with more than 600. And yet he wrote, in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” 

 

Everyone is equal and government is instituted in order to protect and secure everyone’s basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, at the time that our government was established, only about 6% of those governed were allowed to vote. Only white men who owned property were allowed, through the ballot, to give their consent to be governed. Thomas Jefferson, intellectually acknowledged that we are all equal but his singular vote spoke for more than 600 people who were not consulted. 

 

There were writers and social philosophers around before the founding of the nation who advocated for equality among men and women, blacks, whites, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Asians, but, for the most part, they were ignored. It wasn’t until the middle of the 19^th century that freed slaves and women realized that they were both fighting for the rights of full citizens and, for a whole, they tried to work together to gain their human rights.

 

As we expanded and took over more territory from Mexico, the people who were there when we stole their land, were not allowed to vote. After the Civil War, black men were recognized as citizens although their real access to voting was very limited. In 1876, and this will give you a headache from sheer paradox, the Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans were not citizens of the USA and therefore couldn’t vote. A few years later, Congress declared that people of Asian ancestry could not be citizens. 

 

Desperate for soldiers, Native Americans were granted citizenship if they served in the military during WWI. Women fought for and gained the right to vote just one hundred years ago, in 1920, but it was not until the 1950’s for Native Americans, Latinos and Asians to gain full citizenship and still, voting suppression came in many forms such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and threats of violence. 

When James Madison sat down to pen the first draft of our constitution, he begins with the soaring language, the first three words, “We the people,” no, kings, no monarchy, no feudal incest of power between church and state, no, “We the people,” but Madison was not thinking of the more than 100 slaves back on his Virginia plantation. And it would be nearly 200 more years before “We the people” would include women, blacks, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans.

 

The peculiar genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was his awareness that the rights of black people in America was a nearly invisible issue to white people. By the mid 1960’s, most people had a television in their homes, and news stations had cameras that they could send with reporters to show the world, in real time, what their plight really was. 

 

King and other civil rights leaders had met with President Kennedy and President Johnson. Black men had been legally allowed to vote since 1870 but most southern states made it nearly impossible to register or to actually vote. King realized that by staging demonstrations in which participants had pledged to suffer being beaten by police clubs, bitten by police dogs, and trampled by police horses, without fighting back, if they could get the white police on camera abusing black people who were only trying to register to vote, that he could put President Johnson in a position where he could not fail to pass a Voters’ Rights bill.  

 

The march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama was in March of 1965. The TV cameras were there. That was when the late John Lewis literally had his skull broken by a police club, but the events of Bloody Sunday were broadcast into the living rooms of white America and they couldn’t stand what they saw. 

 

It didn’t end racism in the south. It didn’t end voter suppression. But, five months later, King witnessed Lyndon Johnson signing the Voters’ Rights Act on August 6, 1965. It wasn’t the end of segregation and racism in America but it was a step in the direction of progress that can hardly have been equaled since the Emancipation Proclamation.

And it happened because white America had, for a moment, been shown what they otherwise tried hard not to see. 

 

Let me show you something:

This is a wooden bell from Haiti. Making a bell out of wood doesn’t make much sense. It can’t make as much noise as a human voice. You couldn’t call the kids in for dinner with a bell like this. But this bell was made to illustrate an old proverb from Haiti: It says, “No one listens to the cry of the poor or the sound of a wooden bell.” 

 

I suspect that it was a proverb that evolved out of resignation and desperation. The poor and oppressed of every nation become invisible. They live in neighborhoods where there are no nice stores, restaurants, or bars. There are no lovely streets with carefully manicured lawns. So, people who are not poor don’t go there. They don’t know anyone who lives there. Frankly, they don’t feel safe there. 

 

Did you know that poverty causes crime? When salaries and employment go up, crime goes down. It isn’t magic, it is just what happens. I have tried for years to point out to anti-abortion advocates that what causes America’s abortion rate is not the Row v Wade decision, it is poverty. During the “dot-com” bubble in the 1990’s, the abortion rate when down by more than 50%. Poverty causes crime and abortions. And what is more, the violence and stress of poverty creates drug and alcohol abuse, which often causes domestic violence, all of which makes poor neighbor hoods feel unsafe, right? The stress of poverty causes mental health issues:  depression, despondence, dependence on substances and charity.

 

When you hear people talking about defunding the police, most of us have no desire to do away with police entirely . . . some do, but most of us want to reallocate the majority of the budget to raise the standard of living of the poor, because if you take poverty out of the equation, you don’t have as much crime, addiction, violence, or mental health issues. 

 

Look, Joe Biden announced his list of things he wants to get passed to help America to get past this pandemic and on his wish-list is raising the minimum wage, coast to coast, to $15/hour. Let me make a prediction right now, and please watch and hold me to it. If he gets that through the Senate, six months after salaries have been raised to $15/hour, you will see a dramatic reduction in crime, in arrests, in the number of people in jail, in the demand for addiction treatment, and mental health services, and, in fact, the abortion rate will go down. And those figures will continue to go down if we reallocate police funding to things like safe housing, social workers, addiction treatment, and vocational training. Check me, please, because I already know that I’m right about this . . . I just want to hear you say it. 

It’s the little things that make life worth living.

 

 

Yes, I am certain that it was resignation that inspired the saying, “No one listens to the cry of the poor, or the sound of a wooden bell.” But I want you to hear it as a challenge. It may be a statement of fact, but it doesn’t have to be the last word.

 

 

We remember Martin Luther King, Jr. this weekend, but please, do not let this holiday become a history lesson. Don’t just memorize the wonderful things that he said, the great things that he did, the purpose of this holiday is for you to find the inspiration to do what he did. In the 1960’s he amplified the cry of the poor so that we all had to hear it. He got the plight of black American’s on TV and made us see what happens in the places where we do not normally go.

 

In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voters’ Rights Act, saying that it had accomplished its mission. “It worked,” Justice Roberts argued, “so we don’t need it anymore.” A stunning 5-4 decision that will haunt Justice Roberts legacy. But, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted, within 24 hours of this tragic decision, southern states started to take action to suppress black voters. The next day, Texas led the charge in changes to voter ID’s…. classic for Texas; your conceal and carry ID will get you into a voting booth, but not a student ID . . . because Texas Republicans know that gun owners will typically vote for their candidates and college students usually won’t. 

 

For 50 years, the redrawing of voting districts in these southern states had to be approved, changes to rules, and eligibility all had to be approved, but as soon as they were out from under federal management, Texas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, started to shamelessly reconfigure their laws and districts to minimize the minority vote. 

 

Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, has lately been in the news because he refused to throw out the results of Georgia’s November election and give Donald Trump a win in that state. 

Trump was beside himself with rage because, even though they recounted the votes so many times, Biden might actually now be our 48^th president rather than the 46^th, but Kemp wouldn’t steal the election for Trump. But, if you look back to 2018, when Kemp was Secretary of State in Georgia while he ran for governor against Stacy Abrams, a really shameless situation in which he was in charge of an election in which he was a candidate . . . a white man running against an amazing black women, so Kemp purged 53,000 voters from the roles because their signatures didn’t match. They closed voter locations in minority neighborhoods. They shortened early voting periods. And for a host of other reasons, by the time the vote was taken in November of 2018, Kemp had purged more than 1.4 million voters, mostly from minority neighborhoods. 

 

Kemp won by about 50,000 votes. So why wouldn’t Trump think that Kemp could steal the 2020 election for Trump? Kemp had stolen the 2018 election for himself! That may seem like an impudent thing for a corpulent cleric to say, but if you had been listening to the cry of the poor in Georgia in 2018, you would know that I am right. 

 

147 Republican members of Congress and the Senate voted against confirming the results of the 2020 election. What they specifically were wanting to do was to discard the votes from majority black cities, like Atlanta and Detroit. Many of the people in the January 6^th riot in the Capitol really believed that Trump won the election but underlying that was a belief that black people shouldn’t be voting, or their votes shouldn’t count. I know that is strong, but why do you think they were carrying the battle flag of the Confederacy through the Capitol building? Race is at the root of Trump’s complaint, race is at the heart of pro-Trump terrorists, and race is at the root of voter suppression. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. found a way to amplify the voices of the poor in 1965. In 2021, we don’t need or organize another march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but if you want to honor Martin Luther King’s memory, the way to do that is to amplify the voice of the poor today, so that the white people in Georgia will know that Stacy Abrams really should be their governor, and them have some important changes to make before they vote again in 2022. 

 

This is what it means to be a prophetic witness in 2021. This is what it means to be a progressive Christian, a progressive Jew, a progressive Muslim, or Buddhist in 2021. It is up to us to help the world see the poor, to hear their cry, and to make sure that no matter how tricky or slick racism becomes in the 21^st century, we have to keep shining the light on it. . . because speaking truth to power is the primary reason we exist. If you are not doing that, well, enjoy your bake sale.