“Against Giving Up”

“Against Giving Up”   June 30, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray                     

click here to see the video

Paraphrase of Talmudic teaching of Rabbi Tarfon, late 1^stcentury

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

But neither are you free to abandon it.

In this Orwellian time in history, it seems that the remarkable events of our lives have taken over the pulpit and my only real task is to interpret these events in ways that continue to offer an orientation to reality and a bulwark against despair. Ron Paul thought he was quoting Orwell when he said that “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” Which sounds like something Orwell might have said but, alas, he didn’t.

But we know what it means. Our current president tells lies so often that now, for example, when even our intelligence agencies try to tell the world that Iran set two tankers on fire in the Gulf of Oman, no one believes them. Japan and Norway replied that they would need more evidence and the tankers that were set on fire were from Japan and Norway! So, preaching, for me, has become an exercise of trying to tell the truth in what has become an empire of lies. 

But before I fall headlong into current events, I would like to invite you to remember with me a fictional novel from the 16^thcentury, Don Quixote. The actual novel, in two parts, is impossibly long and complicated but the central themes were pulled out about 50 years ago and turned into a musical. 

In both the play and the movie, the character of Don Quixote is a middle-aged man who becomes inspired by old novels about the days of knights who chivalrously fought the villains of the world to bring honor and justice to their victims. He is indisputably mad, in a schizophrenic sort of way, imagining a windmill to be a four-armed giant against whom he sets out to do battle. The character is simultaneously sad and comedic. After the attack on the windmill goes badly, he retreats to a local tavern that he imagines to be a castle. 

There is a barmaid there, Aldonza, which, for 16^thcentury Spain, means that she was both a servant girl and, to put it bluntly, a village prostitute. Men abuse her, make sport of her, and treat her horribly. In the play, men even sing songs to taunt her and make her miserable. But Quixote walks in and sees Aldonza and imagines her to be a princess, Dulcinea. When he tries to treat her as a noble object of his loyal adoration, she is enraged. Abused people often assume that even kindness is somehow mocking. 

But his persistent respect begins to inspire her to think differently of herself. In the end, the men of the tavern attack her brutally because the world, once it has a victim, is loath to see that person, or those people, as anything but victims. The play does not have a happy ending so far as most people in the audience would see it, but Aldonza forcers her way into Quixote’s home as he laid dying because his adoration for her had made it impossible for her to think of herself as anything but Dulcinea. In fact, in the closing scene, Sancho calls her Aldonza and she corrects him, “My name is Dulcinea.” And she announces, though Quixote is dead, his spirit lives on.

The five-hundred-year-old novel leaves its footprints in our language. We will describe a foolish objective or quest to be Quixotic. We will say that someone who strives to fight for justice in meaningless ways is “tilting at windmills.” Quixote is the quintessential madman, but in the end, recognizing that it is fiction, was the women he adored Aldonza or Dulcinea?

The men in the tavern looked on her as a thing to be used. Quixote, in his madness, saw her as a woman to be adored. 

Surely you must know where I am going with this. The men of the tavern may have been technically correct… she was a servant girl, a maid, a slave of sorts, more or less, a sex slave. That may have been factually true, but the madman saw her as something of inestimable value and simply by being seen that way, her reality was changed. 

I do not mean to be cruel or manipulative. I would bring this up in a more gentle way if I knew how. But when you look at these children who have walked or been carried through a thousand miles of poverty, danger, civil war, sometimes sexual assault, to show up on our border asking for refuge. When you look at these little brown children, sleeping on a concrete floor, covered by an aluminum blanket, left undernourished, dirty, and often sick and infected with lice. 

When you look at them, what do you see? Illegal immigrants? Children who do not deserve decent treatment because they should not have been brought here in the first place? Do you see Aldonza? 

Trump said that the whole family separation policy was started under Obama and that he was trying to reunite families. When confronted by the squalid conditions in which children are being housed in concentration camps on the border, Trump blamed the Democrats who would not give them enough funds to be able to provide blankets, soap, and toothbrushes. 

Caliburn International Corpis one of many military for-profit corporations operating the concentration camps where asylum seeking families and children are being detained. There are more than 15,000 children in US detention centers. Caliburn International and their ilk are charging tax payers $750 per day, per child. Trump administration spokespersons told the media that they cannot afford to give proper bedding, clean clothes, soap, and toothbrushes to these children because Democrats in congress will not provide sufficient funding. 

Hilton Garden Inn, when I put Bishop Spong up when he and Christine are in town, costs $110 a night, or $55 per person for the two of them. But we are not talking about 3-star hotels, are we? Do you know what a foster parent in Missouri is paid to care for a child? Caliburn is billing $750 a day and is not obligated to provide a bed, clean clothes, decent food, or even soap and a toothbrush. $11 a day for a small child. $12.40 for a teenager. 

Can you imagine getting $750 a day for taking care of a kid? That trust fund baby would want for nothing . . . if you saw them as a kid, and not just an opportunity to get rich. Mind you, all of this is going on while conservatives are trying to scare tax-paying citizens about the socialism of universal healthcare and tuition-free higher education. What I wish that I could say to every unemployed or underpaid American is this: Immigrants are not the reason why you are poor. Corporate Socialism is what is making you poor. It is the Corporate Socialism that lets Amazon make $12 billion in profits last year and yet paid no taxes. 

It is the Corporate Socialism that allows military industrial corporations to bill tax payers $750 a day for caging children rather than providing healthcare, education, and a living wage to citizens. And, come on, 15,000 children? What is going on with that?

President Obama was often criticized for his aggressive deportation policy. He was called by many Latinos, “The Deporter in Chief.” Obama’s administration deported over 400,000 people. The problem here is not so much the deportations under Trump. The problem for me, right now, is these 15,000 kids he is holding onto. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants . . . some of whom are currently changing the bedding and mopping the floors at Mar-a-Lago. It hasn’t happened. He is not engaging in mass deportation but is, instead, turning these children into semi-permanent prisoners he can use as profit centers for his political cronies. For him, all of these children are Aldonza. I am just asking if anyone else can see Dulcinea among them?

When my daughter was little, she went through some tough attachment issues. She would sometimes scream inconsolably when I had to leave for work. This went on for some time but eventually she came to accept that I would always come back. It was traumatic for her because I was her primary care giver and, for a very young toddler, survival depends on that attachment.

Imagine being a toddler who traveled hundreds of miles, facing exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, and then, finally surviving to cross the border and then to be taken from the father or mother who had held your hand, walked with you, carried you, protected you. You are taken away, put in a dog kennel, separated from anyone you have ever known. And the mom or the dad just doesn’t come back at the end of the day, or at night, and not next week, or next month. Can you imagine the trauma? The screams . . . the tears . . . and what may be worse, when the screams and tears are replaced with a blank stare, a void, empty, hopelss little heart.

There was a large study done on several thousand people called the “Adverse Childhood Experiences Study” (ACE) What the Kaiser Permanente institute discovered was that if you had a childhood trauma you were predictably more likely to have a major episode of depression as an adult. The more trauma you experience, the more likely you were to have a problem with depression. If a child had six traumatic experiences, they were five times more likely to have depression as an adult. But here, when I think about these kids in cages, daily subjected to the trauma of separation, of cold, of hunger, illness, filthy, isolation . . . the study showed that if a child had seven categories of traumatic events they were more than 300 times more likely to commit suicide as an adult. 

At noon on Tuesday, protestors are gathering outside the local offices of members of congress to protest this state sponsored child abuse that every day is traumatizing 15,000 innocent children. I will be outside the office of Billy Long at noon on Tuesday. I hope that our listeners will find the congressional office near you. Congress will be on its 4^thof July recess so if Billy Long is not playing poker in Las Vegas, he may actually be here in his office. 

As bad as the trauma is, some people don’t even survive the process. Our news moves so quickly that we hear of one case at a time, but, in the past two years, 24 people have died in ICE custody. Some from such basic causes as thirst, and many from very treatable illnesses. 

When this gruesome image of a father and infant daughter who drowned while, in desperation, tried to swim across the Rio Grande because the bridge has been closed by the Trump administration hit the media, it revived media interest in the whole border crisis. But as horrifying as this image is, this is not an isolated incident. About 300 immigrants are believed to die along the Mexican/US border every year as they try to enter America. Some drown, some die of thirst in the desert. 

The skeletal remains of immigrants are often found in the Arizona desert. There is no way to accurately count the death toll. Some local residents have formed a group called “No More Deaths.” They strategically place water and food in the common trails the immigrants use. 

Scott Warren, an Arizona teacher, was recently arrested for the crime of giving water to a dying immigrant. He was put on trial with the treat of being imprisoned for 20 years. 

His trial ended a couple of weeks ago with a hung jury. At least some of the jurors simply could not send this guy to prison for the crime of treating people like they were people. But, evidently, there were ICE agents, prosecutors, and a judicial system that was more than willing to arrest him, charge him, try him, and attempt to send him to prison . . . they just didn’t get away with it, this time. 

I don’t mean to make this such a hard sermon. I accept that preaching is a matter of speaking truth to power, and now it is a matter of treason . . . speaking truth in an empire of lies. But you are not all called to be preachers, or prophets, or journalists, or even protestors. But you are called to give a cup of cold water to someone in dire thirst. You can choose to see the refuse of society, the ones no one wants, the ones Trump wants to build a wall against or at least to lock into a $750 a day cage, and you can choose to see them as the princes and princesses of Central America. There is no Aldonza among them. They are all Dulcinea.

I will end where we began this morning with this paraphrased first century bit of the Jewish Talmud: Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

But neither are you free to abandon it.

Join me, please, in being so crazy, that we see illegal immigrants as people.            

“Moderate Radicals”

“Moderate Radicals”            June 23, 2019          Dr. Roger Ray

Walt Whitman "Be radical - be radical - be not too damned radical!"

click here to see the video

This will be a big week for those of us who are political junkies. 20 of the 22 declared candidates for the Democratic nomination for president will be on a debate stage, divided into two groups on Wednesday and Thursday night where they will be given five to seven minutes to distinguish themselves from the pack. All of the talk in the news is about how the frontrunners will be positioned on stage and how they will try to outshine those next to them. 

Will Biden make one of the verbal slips he is so famous for? Will Sanders stop his slide in the polls? Will Warren manage to sustain her rise in the polls without being seen on stage between Biden and Sanders? 

This is familiar language to me.  I grew up in Kentucky and there was a time when I was a regular at Churchill Downs, studying the racing forms to consider a horse’s poll position, jockey, trainers, pedigree, and when all else fails, what colors the jockey and horse were sporting. And the time frame is about right . . . the horses get about two minutes to show which one of them will win. 

I understand why commentators turn it into a horse race or a beauty contest. They want to make it a contest of people when we, the voters, the citizens of this huge democracy, are much more impacted by policies and ideas. But those tend to get tossed off pejoratively with all of the depth of name calling on a school playground.

Not to put you on the spot, but, to honestly put you on the spot, how many of you know who this man is?  He is one of the least known Democratic candidates and, in any rational analysis, he has absolutely no chance of winning. However, he represents one of the single most important issues facing America’s future. Andrew Yang is an advocate for the Universal Basic Income. As an entrepreneur and philanthropist, he has read the tea leaves of the future of capitalism and has recognized that automation will increasingly reduce the need for labor, especially unskilled labor, and that we will very soon have a lot more people than we will have jobs. Under our current economic system, the way we distribute wealth, will continue to transfer more and more wealth to the top and a jobless economy on the bottom will lead to social collapse. 

Yang is a capitalist who wants to make capitalism more humane. His campaign slogan is “Make America Think Harder.” In the beauty contest that is our primary process, he has little to no chance of being noticed, but his signature policy is vital to saving America’s economy and, sadly, it is not even being publicly discussed.

Another candidate who receives almost no attention is this fellow . . . anybody care to hazard a guess? This is the candidate who asked that there be one Democratic debate devoted solely to discussing climate issues because we are now in the 6^thmajor extinction and we are deteriorating the environment of this planet in such a way that we are placing the ability of humans to survive here at risk. The issue is huge, vital, and given only a fraction of the attention that it deserves. Still, realistically, Gov. Jay Inslee, of Washington, has almost no chance of being a viable candidate. 

Two of the other important issues that we talk about in our hopefully soon to be released book about creating a great society, has to do with unnecessary wars and the absurd failure of our country to enact sensible gun laws to stem the more than 30,000 annual deaths from guns in America. There is a candidate who has spoken powerfully and meaningfully and knowledgably about these two issues. Could you hazard a guess as to which candidate that might be?

 Though David Ketchum might tell you that I only refer to Iraq war veteran and Hawaiian congress member, Tulsi Gabbard, for her exotic Polynesian beauty, she has actually been a very controversial opponent of America’s unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an opponent of regime change in Syria. She has also been a noted advocate for sensible gun laws that have been proven to work in other countries. She said some really stupid things about LGBT rights when she was in her early 20’s but has since made a 180 degree, and I would argue, plausible change of views. In spite of her military service on the battlefield, and her experience in elected office, she is receiving almost no serious consideration.

And while our nation continues to be the only developed nation in the world that does not have universal healthcare coverage, even though the majority of Americans want Medicare for all, and more than 80% of Democrats want Medicare for all, the party and the press keep telling us that the only candidates we can have are the ones who don’t favor Medicare for all. 

And what really frosts me on this issue is that the real winners in this race are people you not only don’t know but you will never know them. They are the lobbyists who are privately, secretly, recruiting candidates who will oppose any plan that will end the strangle hold that private insurance companies have on the bazillion dollar healthcare cash cow that they love so much.

I hope that you understand that I am not saying this to promote the candidacy of Yang, Inslee, or Gabbard or anyone else. What I am struggling to point out is that the media and the Democratic party would always want to guide voters to the safest possible choice. The choice that will not change anything very much. In politics, the status quo is always king. 

When I think about our economy, gun laws, healthcare, environment, military, and even civil rights, this image of Thelma and Louise sailing off the cliff describes our current political situation. And yet, the DOC and the media want us to choose a candidate whose best plan is for us to buy a newer model car to drive off the cliff.

I love Walt Whitman, but honestly, I don’t know if he was being serious or if he was making fun of Americans when he said, “Be radical – be radical – be not too damned radical.” Maybe it has to do with our sheer size, the economic weight of our institutions, but when radical measures are needed to make a course correction in America to keep from driving off the cliff, we never seem to be able to do it.

Just for example, in 2008, when large banks created investment tools that put high risk loans into commonly traded commodities, bringing about a global recession and housing crisis, in America, we gave huge bailouts to the banks that were “too big to fail” so that the people who caused the crisis were able to award themselves billions of dollars in bonuses out of the pockets of the very people who had suffered having their homes repossessed and the businesses go bankrupt.

In Iceland, key banking offenders were criminally charged, tried, and collectively sentenced to nearly 100 years in prison. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t look all that radical to me. It just seems to make sense. 

Don’t reward pharmaceutical companies that have raised the price of life saving insulin by 1000% in the past decade. Put them out of business and provide insulin to people who need it at cost. Why should diabetes be a profit center?

Is that such a radical idea? Am I the crazy one who sees illness as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to get rich by exploiting the desperation of people who are ill?

Most of you have never had to see me in full armored clergy “mad as hell” but, it happens from time to time. For 25 years I have been writing, demonstrating, and lobbying for a redress of the predatory lending in Missouri by Payday and Car Title loan companies. I was back before our city council on Monday night, passionately imploring the council to take decisive action on the matter, as I have in the past with Gov. Jay Nixon, and several members of our legislature. I made no more progress on Monday night than I have at any other time when I have mounted my steed and charged this Quixotic windmill. 

This usury is an easily solvable problem. For goodness sakes, Arkansas just outlawed them. Period. Full stop. End of story. All I have ever gotten from the governor, the legislature, or our city council, is excuses. Well, councilman Mike Schilling listened to my narrative about how this industry steals millions of dollars from the most desperately poor of our state and then tried to make fun of me personally. My sense is, however, that the only real joke in the room might not have been me. 

You may detect that I am more than a little angry about the indifference and inaction of our city government, our state government, and our national government on many issues that have to do with honestly life and death matters. 

What we get from almost all politicians is excuses and policy offerings that amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. At a recent fund raiser, current leader in the polls, Joe Biden, told a group of wealthy donors, “I need you very badly." Then he said, "No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change." As they said on The Young Turks, That could be his campaign slogan. Do people still not understand why progressives have no interest in voting for him?

 I am going to pay attention to the primary process. I will vote for the candidate that is willing to make the most radical statements about substantive change on the topics that matter the most. But what I am sure of is that we will never vote our way into the great society that long for. Our savior will not hold elected office. 

I am always grateful for the meaningful work that Sean does with our music program but this week I am especially impressed with this Billy Brag song he found that was inspired by this moment in 2017 when a woman of color stepped into a neo-nazi demonstration in England to defend a woman who had become the target of racist abuse. Saffiyah Khan stepped up nose-to-nose with this racist demonstrator and smiled. And that courageous act, that non-threatening yet radical act, defused the potentially violent situation and revealed neo-nazi racism for what it truly is. . . an impish, immature, form of frightened racism. 

May I ask you to read the banner behind me in unison:  Thou shalt not stand idly by. 

Please, my friends, think past identity politics. Don’t focus on the candidates you like, think about the issues that face the world. The environment isn’t Republican or Democrat. The economy isn’t male or female. Racism, sexism, fascism, and xenophobia are not young or old, black, brown, or white. The stakes are very high and we need more than a beauty contest or a horse race.

I implore you to be radical, not to be iconoclastic, not to encourage any kind of childish anarchy, but be radical enough to make real changes in the arenas where the world is accelerating towards the cliff. Be radical – be radical – be sure that you are radical enough to get the job done.             

“State Mandated Sexual Assault”

“State Mandated Sexual Assault”      June 16, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”  Margaret Sanger

There are things you talk about in public. There are things you talk about among close friends. And, there are things you just don’t talk about. . . and the latter is what I need your permission to talk about this morning. I don’t expect any part of this to be comfortable for any one of us. However, our governor started it.

I have had the good fortune for many years of having a physician who was a personal friend. Which is great when you need some medical attention in off hours or with some immediacy. However, once a year, there is an uncommonly uncomfortable moment when the ultimate “exit only” orifice of a man’s body calls for what the medical profession calls a “digital exam.” Now, “digital” typically means electronic and on a small screen but in this case, it involves my friend’s index finger, which can make eye contact rather difficult on the way out of the office. 

It is not like the pelvic exam that women have to endure in the process of a physical. Similar, in terms of vulnerability and awkwardness but, in any reasonable analysis, a more brief and slightly less personal interaction. The only thing that makes a man drop his drawers and bend over is that it is a necessary medical exam that might be a matter of life or death. However, if my physician or anyone else should propose such an exam for any other reason, it would be the height of inappropriate. 

Imagine, gentlemen, that your dentist proposes including this procedure in your semi-annual checkup. Or if your pharmacist suggests that this is a part of standard procedure for getting your prescriptions filled. There is no point in a man’s life in which we are asking for one kind of medical service and, in order to obtain it, we are asked to, for no medical reason whatsoever, to drop our drawers, bend over, and allow ourselves to be violated. 

Can you imagine the litigation and controversy that would be created if anyone ever tried that?

So, imagine my surprise, when I was sitting in John and Di Churcher’s living room watching the BBC last week, which was, I don’t mind saying, tirelessly covering the visit of our president to the UK, and painstakingly pointing out in fine detail what an immoral and mentally deficient person that he undeniably is, but, as if bearing that burden of my uniquely American shame in London was not enough, the BBC presenters turned their sights on Missouri.

In the race to moral bottom among red states trying to legislate away a woman right to elect to terminate a pregnancy, Missouri pulled into the definitive lead. The state government has been trying to find a way to close down the last remaining abortion provider in the state, so that Missouri would become the only state in the union with no legal and safe providers anywhere, but our governor and his public health official, Dr. Randall Williams, announced that any woman seeking an abortion had to submit to a medical pelvic exam . . . no, wait a minute, not one pelvic exam, they have to submit to two pelvic exams. 

The first one, maybe, has some medical plausibility. The second one adds expense, time, and, well, humiliation. This is an attempt at increasing the cost of obtaining an abortion to put up a barrier to low income women, but making it an invasive vaginal exam is intended to scare off others who are unwilling to endure what can only be called a state mandated sexual assault. If you insist that women must have instruments and a stranger’s fingers inserted into their vagina for no medical reason in order to exercise their constitutional rights to not be forced into motherhood then, that is, in anyone’s universe, sexual assault. 

I have asked Dr. Gil Mobley to be our liturgist today because Gil actually has some professional history with Dr. Williams and it will be very interesting to hear what Gil has to say about him, which will not be all bad, by the way. Williams has done some laudable work in the past. However, what Rachel Maddow made internationally known about his past is that in 2016 the state of North Carolina hired him to be their public health officer so that he would reverse a warning against consuming water contaminated with the coal ash. 

This byproduct of coal mining contains mercury, arsenic and other toxins which were found to be at levels threating to human life. Williams, however, was willing to assure the public that their drinking water was safe, when it clearly was not. So, Dr. Gil, I’m sure he has done some good work but you can also put lipstick on a pig and I’m pretty sure it is still bacon on the cloven hoof. 

What we see in Dr. Williams is a glaring example of someone who is willing to set aside what he knows about medicine, and even to set aside what he knows about truth, integrity, honestly, and decency in order to bow to the throne of power. We see this all of the time in national politics. One of the most disappointing examples is Senator Lindsey Graham who, very honestly, called Trump a “kook who is unfit to be president” during the 2016 primaries, but almost as soon as Trump was inaugurated, he changed his tune in a total reversal, deriding the media to insinuating that Trump is a kook who is unfit to be president. As a church, we try to be and to do a lot of things to make the world a better place but the single most important thing that we do is to speak truth to power. Elected officials often do, what Lindsey Graham confessed to in a recent interview . . . they say and they do what they need to do to be re-elected. People like Dr. Williams say and do what they have to do to obtain and keep a government appointed job. I get it, almost every priest and pastor in this country is stuck in the same spot, either have the integrity to tell the truth, or tell enough lies to keep your job. You have to think that being forced to tell obvious lies is why people like Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee didn’t last very long as White House press secretaries. 

So, Williams, who is evidently not an untalented physician, is willing to do monstrous things in order to hold onto a place in government. I couldn’t do it. I trust that you couldn’t do it. We exist to try to bolster people’s awareness and commitment to not doing this kind of thing, but this sort of hypocrisy is as common as dirt in our chapter of history. It is disgusting but it is a fact.

So that is who we are dealing with, and just to help to put this into perspective, let me take a moment to mention Dr. Larry Nassar of Michigan State fame.

I am not going to show you a picture of Dr. Larry Nassar, but rather I want to show you a group photo of some of his victims – 80 are here gathered at one time to testify against him for his crimes of sexually assaulting them when they were young athletes sent to him for medical treatments. 

Without being too graphic about it, what Larry Nassar did to these young women is essentially what Governor Parson and Dr. Williams have mandated for women seeking an abortion… pretending to conduct a medical exam while actually just invading a woman’s vagina for no medical reason. And as shocking as it is to see these 80 women in this group photo, and mind you, Nassar was sentenced to 175 years in prison for what he did . . . but there are about 3000 abortions in Missouri every year . . . Nassar sexually assaulted a hundred young women, Williams and Parson are mandating assaulting 3000  women this year . . . so, tell me if I am wrong about this, but shouldn’t they each get a prison cell next to Nassar? And, check my math on this, but that would be for about 500 years, right?

Maybe it is not my place to judge, but if Gov. Parson or Dr. Williams are in any way morally different from Dr. Larry Nassar then I am going to have to have someone explain to me why that would be so. To be clear, I am not talking about the clinic doctors who don’t want to perform this unnecessary exam. They apologize to the patients and, in most cases, the patients apologize to the doctors for being forced to do something that is unnecessary, unprofessional, and could end up getting them into trouble with the AMA because, everybody knows, they shouldn’t be doing it . . . they are putting their careers at stake to help women who are being abused by the state.

Now, maybe I have taken too much time to make this point quite so clearly but let me sum it up for you: The state of Missouri, in order to create greater barriers for women seeking an abortion, have mandated an invasive pelvic exam to be repeated twice, adding expense, humiliation, and trauma and what could easily be understood to be one of the hardest days of any woman’s life and it is being done with the tacit approval of our legislature. 

However, if the Gov. and Dr. Williams were to mandate, for example, a digital prostate exam for men who were seeking a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication, an entirely unnecessary but precisely similar requirement, then the male dominated legislature of this state would, no doubt, begin impeachment procedures immediately. Men will not tolerate state mandated sexual assault against themselves. What I am asking you to consider is, why would we not tolerate it for men but we do tolerate it for women? 

I am sorry that our internet audience couldn’t be here to hear Aiyana Williams sing our anthem which is a rather baudy English melody written more than 300 years ago in which a young woman euphemistically speaks of how many men have tried to seduce her but she insists that “her thing is her own,” and it very cleverly goes through many verses asserting that women are in charge of their own bodies and that men need to keep their hands off of their private parts. Of course, it has a lot of verses, most of which neither Sean nor I were brave enough to ask Aiyana to sing in church but those here got to hear enough to image what the more explicit verses might have said. I find it fascinating that this awareness of women’s empowerment was being so cleverly made popular in England in the early 1700’s. Patriarchy, it seems, is not an easy thing to kill off, even when it has been identified, labeled, and condemned.

But it was more than 100 years ago that Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in New York, for which she was promptly arrested. However, let me end where we began today with her famous quote: No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

I get that a lot of people, and not just Catholics and Evangelicals, but just a lot of people have very passionate feelings about abortion. I am a father only because abortion was not legal in South Korea in 1988 when my daughter’s birth mother decided to put her newborn up for adoption. For that matter, I am alive at all because abortion was not legal in the USA in 1956 when I was the last and most unintended child born to my parents. I get that there is an argument to be made against abortion but what we are trying to say here, in the midst of this horribly controversial and complicated matter, that in a free nation the choice belongs to the woman who is pregnant, not to Missouri’s governor, not to the health department administrator, not to Catholic priests or evangelical ministers, not even to the parents or lovers of the pregnant woman. Her thing is her own and our agreement or consent is not relevant. And, if I may call upon my 18^thcentury English vocabulary, a pox on anyone who says otherwise.

“When AIDS Was Funny”

June 2, 2019         “When AIDS Was Funny”    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

Using never-before-heard audio tapes from three separate press conferences, in 1982, 1983, and 1984, When AIDS Was Funny illustrates how the reporter Lester Kinsolving, a conservative (and not at all gay-friendly) fixture in the White House press corps, was consistently scoffed at when he posed urgent questions about the AIDS epidemic. With snickering, homophobic jokes and a disturbing air of uninterest, Speakes dismisses Kinsolving’s concerns about the escalating problem. “Lester was known as somewhat of a kook and a crank (many people still feel the same way),” says Calonico. “But, at the time, he was just a journalist asking questions only to be mocked by both the White House and his peers.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/reagan-administration-response-to-aids-crisis?fbclid=IwAR33gu3XlV9_dHdClTlKuVzpMfK7OXK99fY6gq-5StypzGIy5CfSw8ZoghM

Yes, it was 1981 when the White House spokesperson, Larry Speakes, made fun of the first reporter who asked about the Regan Administration’s response to the AIDS crisis. Speakes continued for more than a year to make gay taunting jokes, aimed at the reporter, Lester Kinsolving, whenever the topic was brought up. 

Now, Ronald Regan is remembered as a hero of Republican politics and even though we might say a lot about how his tax policies is that destroyed the middle class and killed off the American dream, I want to drill down today on this specific issue of the early federal response to the discovery of AIDS.

You can say this recording we played was from 1981, nearly two generations ago. Times were different and people were not nearly as woke as we would expect a national politician to be today. But like most of you, I remember 1981. I was in my second year of grad school at Vanderbilt, still plagued by the curse of my hillbilly upbringing that did not prepare me either in spelling or grammar, to write papers for my Vanderbilt professors. I apologize for the redaction…. In those days they put our Social Security Number on the front of our university IDs.

My rural Kentucky education left me in a position of deficit in many areas of cultural awareness, but I can tell you this, even at the age of 25, emerging from a cesspool of Appalachian prejudices, I knew better than to make fun of someone for being gay, or to imply that being gay was a bad thing.

This is not scientific research in any way, it is a purely anecdotal reflection, but I am just saying that even though it was 40 years ago, a barely out of the woods Kentucky hillbilly knew that the AIDS crisis was serious and anything but a laughing matter, but someone who had been the governor of California and was then the President of the United States, did not know:  and that is a sobering contrast.  

More than 600,000 Americans have died from AIDS since 1981. Millions more are HIV+. It is difficult to tell how a quick and decisive response to AIDS when it was first identified might have changed the course of history but we might assume that as many as a half a million people have died due to the derisive and irresponsible policies of the Regan administration, and tens of millions are living with the HIV virus who might have been spared this serious health challenge if they had cared about the lives of gay people in a humane manner. 

Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said (and maybe he did, but if he did, he was loosely quoting a German writer), “The death of one person is tragic. The death of two million is a statistic.”

No matter who said it first, it is an observation worth thinking about.  Our friend, Dan Goodwin, has talked about his time in management in Walmart when, if an employee shoplifted a candy bar on their way to the breakroom, they could be arrested and handcuffed and escorted off of the property. 

Again, shop lifting at Walmart earns you a criminal record, willfully and negligently ignoring the rise and spread of AIDS such that more than 600,000 mostly gay Americans die . . . and you get federal buildings, highways, and schools named after you and two generations of politicians want to claim to be the inheritors of your legacy. One person shop-lifting at Walmart is a tragedy, 600,000 dead homosexuals is a statistic, and one that fans of Regan will become indignant about if you remind them of it! 

And here is the rub for me, and I hope for all of you: it is up to the church, specifically the progressive church, to be prophetic truth tellers. Not to hate dead presidents but to adamantly assert that we will not stand idly by when minorities are oppressed, when the plight of the poor is ignored, or when governments, our own or any other, start wars under unjust circumstances.

Again, in 2001 when the Bush administration first beat the drums of war against Afghanistan and then Iraq, I was railing against the wars from the elevated pulpit in a local denominational church and one of the sweetest little old ladies in the world called me and said through her thick Southern accent, “Now Roger, you know that I love you and that I think you are just about the smartest man I have ever known. But do you really believe that you know more than our president about whether or not we should go to war?”

And I get it . . . I was just a preacher in southern Missouri who evidently had not learned that you don’t wear a short-sleeved shirt with a tie and, God forbid, matching suspenders. George H. W. Bush was a national executive with the wisdom of the CIA and the FBI and advisors from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines . . . who was I to second guess him? With some real trepidation, I replied, “Yes, Mrs. Ann Routt, I do believe that in this case, I know better than the president of the United States.” Not that I had information that Bush didn’t have, but . . . well, you know the ancient proverb that may go all of the way back to Erasmus: in the land of the blind, the one 

eyed man is king. I promise not to make a habit of using myself as the historical yardstick of life but, at 62, I’ve been around for almost as much history as Forest Gump. 

Bush certainly had more information than I had but, as seems unavoidable at this point, he was willing to ignore facts, manufacture propaganda, and orchestrate or at least bless wars that have killed more than a quarter of a million innocent citizens.

Yes, the 3000 Americans killed on 9-11 were innocent and in no way deserved the fate that befell them. But then, do you think that peasant farmers in Afghanistan, children playing the in streets of Bagdad, university students in Iraq are any less innocent than the people who had gone to work on the wrong day in September of 2001? Yes, like anyone, I was and am horrified by the murderous terrorism committed against the United States on that day…. But our military response to people who had nothing to do with it has killed very nearly a hundred times as many innocent people and we seem to be somehow inured to that fact.

One American death is a tragedy but a quarter of a million deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, . . . well, is it even a statistic if no one ever mentions it?

Look, people, I take no pleasure in saying this but please indulge me. Before 9-11, Vice President Dick Cheney was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq. George Bush, for reasons that defy rational explanation, went along with a case for war based on cooked intelligence married to pure and obviously false propaganda. And then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, took that fake propaganda to the United Nations and sold this war to the world.

Again, I am not trying to be pedantic here: shoplift at Walmart, taken away in handcuffs . . . commit war crimes that kill hundreds of thousands of people, cost the American tax payer more than $2 trillion, and you get to go on lecture tours being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per appearance. 

I went to hear Colin Powell speak at MSU, right here in town, just a few years ago. I fully expected to hear him show serious remorse for his own role in lying to the world to start an illegal war but what I heard was a man who nearly broke his own arm patting himself on the back for his role in history. 

And, you know I am not exaggerating, his narcissistic diatribe was regularly interrupted by thunderous applause, cheers and a standing ovation. 2014, a decade after his malevolent and disastrous performance at the United Nations, and no mention was made of his heinous war crimes and he was greeted at our state university as a hero and held up as a role model. For obvious reasons, there were no live questions taken from the audience, just pre-prepared, fawning, sycophant, soft-ball questions on note cards. . . which is to say, they didn’t read my questions.

All of this is obviously relevant to our situation today. Though we have obviously taken great strides from the time when the Regan administration thought that AIDS was funny, but please don’t think that the battle is over. During the Obama administration, it became legal for gay people to get married and for members of the armed forces to come out of the closet. In the past two years, the Trump administration has done what they can to roll back progress in these areas. Trans members of the armed forces have suffered a reversal of policies in the military, under the excuse that gender reassignment surgery provided by the military was too expensive, ignoring the fact that the military spends ten times as much on erectile dysfunction prescription meds for men in the military as they spend on transgender healthcare.

And, if you are the kind of person who keeps track of such things; Trump’s golf trips have cost tax payers ten times as much as both the military expenditures on ED pills and transgender soldiers’ healthcare. . . . more than $3 million per weekend golf outing, most of which is being paid to resorts that he owns. I have never been terribly interested in learning how to play golf, but if I could pocket a couple of million dollars every time I went out on the links, I might develop an interest.  

But, if I may return for a moment to my conversation with Mrs. Ann Routt, some 16 years ago. She was, in the most polite and loving way possible, not really challenging my facts in stating that the president was lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or some squirrelly connection between Saddam Hussein and nuclear material and Al Qaida, she was simply asking me to stay in my lane. I could talk about the Bible all I wanted. I could even talk about sin. I could talk about addiction, divorce, infidelity, and shop-lifting at Walmart, I just wasn’t supposed to talk about the murder of 600,000 innocent civilians. That is out of my jurisdiction. 

And here is both my summation of what is wrong with almost every church in America . . . the thing that I implore you never to do. While Erasmus was essentially right, the one-eyed person in the land of the blind might well be the king. But the blind might really prefer that the one-eyed person would just shut up.

Or as the modern take on the proverb goes: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will poke out his eye to fit in.

It was not politically expedient for the media to press the Regan administration about the fact that they were ignoring the spread of AIDS when they could have stopped it. 

It was not politically expedient for the media to call “BS” on Cheney, Bush, and Powell in the lead up to our nation’s two insane wars. It is not currently politically expedient to talk about the fact that Russia seriously hacked our 2016 presidential election, very probably with the help of the Trump campaign. It is not politically expedient to talk about Trump’s involvement in money laundering for the Russian mafia, about illegal emoluments in the form of loans, and real estate deals with Saudi Arabia and Russia. It is not even politically expedient to ask Bob Mueller why, even if he felt that he could not indict a sitting president, why we was willing to indict 32 people, including George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, Richard Pinedo, Alex Van der Zwaan, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone, but never even call in to be interviewed such obviously involved up to their necks characters like:

Don Trump, Jr., Jarrod Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. 

All I’m saying is that politically expedience has nothing to do with who we are. In fact, if you do fit in, in a society as saturated in lies and corruption as ours is, then I would suggest that is proof that there is something wrong. . . something spiritually and morally wrong. 

Thomas Paine wrote on the steps of the great American Revolution that “These are the times that try men’s souls.” That is, this sort of crisis reveals who we really are.  When we started this church, we wanted to be a prophetic voice for social justice expressed in an honest and academic theology. We had no idea what would happen to our country in our first decade of existence. Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “History has found us.” The eight years of the Obama administration, when we were just getting our legs under us, were scandal free halcyon days compared to the present. 

We didn’t predict how history would unfold. We didn’t accurately envision what our role in it would be, but these are the times that try the souls of women and men. We didn’t go looking for this fight but, history has found us. 

The media is hardly proven themselves to be reliable. Even the much lauded, Bob Mueller, has shown himself to have some real feet of clay, and a Congress that has sworn to uphold the constitution that is the basis of our democracy, seems not to know what it says, or at least they are unwilling to follow its dictates into the inconvenience of a politically fraught battle. Into this vacuum of leadership, honesty, integrity, and courage we really must go. Without the prophetic voice of communities of faith, there really isn’t much hope. History has found us, and we must stand up and meet this moment.