Don't Hate Unions (please)

Culture and Economic War by the white 1% on Minorities (a rising future middle class) Continues.

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Catholic Cultural War Against the Vagina – 40 Years Later

(GOP towing the Catholic Party Line - September 28, 1969, was declared Cardinal Karol Wojtyla Day in Pennsylvania at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown.  Left to Right, Cardinal Krol of Phila., Karol Wojtyla, Gov. Ray Shafer (R) of Pennsylvania.)

The  Catholic Culture  War Against the Vagina Continues – Forty Years Later

I sat through a few minutes of the CSPAN-2 the other day with speeches from the floor of the United States Senate delivering the same crap I heard in the Catholic church in the late sixties about Birth Control that drove me forever from that church.  That Senators Roy Blunt and Kelly Ayotte sounded today like the cookie cutter no thought priests of that faith forty years ago.

Here is a repeat of my previous blog:

Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet. 

I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.

I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again. 

All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two.  

The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.  

On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers.  

Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes. 

I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare. 

In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly. 

Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools. 

In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline. 

I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King. 

I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?

It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc. 

(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.) 

Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature. 

Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control.

Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control. Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)

The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bringPennsylvania under the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 

PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family in Toledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites. 
Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice.  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/07/historic-beginnings-of-american-culture.html

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The Real Housewives of Vatican County – USCCB

Archbishop Dolan’s New Committee of Religious Safety is starting to take shape.


Catholic Bishops Target Obama on Religious Freedom in the US

“…US Catholic bishops recently formed an ad hoc committee specifically aimed at addressing religious freedom in the U.S. The decision to challenge the president this way is a historic one, as this is the first time bishops in America have formed such a widespread group to address religious freedom in the country.

Among the religious liberty issues the group is unhappy with the Obama administration include: county clerks facing legal action for refusing to participate in same-sex unions; the administration's attack on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA); and the attack on the “ministerial exception,” which protects the right of religious institutions to choose their own spiritual leaders and teachers regardless of anti-discrimination laws.

He writes: “We are now committed regarding the urgent need we face to safeguard religious liberty inherent in the dignity of the human person.”

“I wrote to President Obama to object to the continuing threats to religious liberty in the context of the effort to redefine legal marriage promoted by his Administration. 

…If we do not act now, the consequences will be grave.”…

Bishop William Lori, who was selected to chair the new committee, says the bishops are serious about the new campaign and will seek the help of lawyers, added staff, lobbyist and experts in the area of religious freedom. …” 


The Archbishop of NYC in his role with the USCCB is determined along with his rich fat cronies to protect the rights of the Religious running the scam to continue to do so in an unheeded and entitled form forever.  A new instant Sacred Tradition, American style?

We need new laws to protect the sacredness of religion. Yeah, right.

In other words, in an ideal future, if you accuse bishops of protecting pedophiles, and it is printed in the New York Times, the NYT can be shut down or penalized to the point where nobody will talk about Church subjects in the press anymore ever again.  Great deal.

It would appear to me or my Cultural Christian sense of the decent that this Bill Donahoe PR style campaign to suppress all negative news about religion in America is not unlike the Blasphemy Laws that the Muslims keep trying to get the United Nations to adopt to suppress all criticism of Islam worldwide.

While Americans object to Muslim Sharia Law being brought to this country from a foreign source, they have little idea about how catholic or Christian Sharia from overseas is constantly being pushed incrementally in this country through the GOP/FOX NEWS culture wars agenda to make the secular state and human rights and democracy obsolete for the sake a few entitled church monarchists and GOP oligarchs.

“Modo Verum” (only truth) Laws – the new catholic sharia law coming our way in the next decade of the ongoing culture wars to reduce America to a pale version of the ideal catholic state – Franco’s Spain. (bow your head)

And brought to you by the Real Housewives of the Vatican, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.  If ever there was a more useless bunch of hypocrites on the planet, it is they.

What!?  If Christ is the groom and the Church is the bride, surely the bishops are the housewives of God.  And then there is the unimportant etcetera, the children, the rest of us???

Timothy Dolan has passed the bottle torch onto the infamous Bishop/Inquisitor Bill Lori of Bridgeport Connecticut to head this Religious Safety Committee to protect and force respect for sacred truth.  If anybody can whip the media into shape to bow down and worship the pope, it is he.

He and his four man committee came up with the PR gem “Zero Tolerance” to clergy abuse policy embraced by Big Daddy - Joe the Pope.  It has been a PR success.  Clergy abuse has ended.  Right?

Anyway, Bill Lori gets his Robespierre like reputation from dealing with some flaming liberal Catholics down in Washington DC on his way to his kiss ass promotion in Connecticut. His infamous three day Inquisition with a tape recorder running in 1997 is well documented.

  

Holy Trinity Parish – Washington DC

“…Last night, William Lori, auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Washington, Bernard Gerhardt, chancellor of the archdiocese, and another diocesan priest conducted the first of a series of interviews with committee chairpersons and parish staff. They are investigating alleged "liturgical abuses" at the parish. The "visitation" was supposedly occasioned by an incident that occurred during the Octave of Christian Unity when an Episcopal priest and a Presbyterian (I think) [editor's note: actually, she was a Lutheran] minister, both women, preached at a liturgy at Trinity and were later invited (it isn't clear by whom) to distribute communion.

With this opening, the archdiocese has begun a comprehensive review of the parish's liturgical practices and has forbidden the use of the Canadian bishops' lectionary and other inclusive language text, and the practice of allowing lay people to preach at non-Eucharistic liturgies such as vespers and reconciliation ceremonies. (A practice I believe is explicitly okay by canon law.)

… She requested that the pastor of the parish, Father Larry Madden, be allowed to attend the interview with her. This request was denied. She requested that, since the archdiocese was tape-recording the interview, she be allowed to have a tape recorder in the room as well. This request was denied. When the proceedings began, she was required to take an oath.

I think all of this is a lengthy pretext for firing a few Trinity staff people whom conservatives in the archdiocese have been gunning for some time…

…As you know, the battle at Holy Trinity described on my web site has heated up with Bishop Lori's three days stay there last week heading a "canonical visitation" team gathering evidence of God knows what all. The liberals are in an uproar, seeing the Inquisition lurking everywhere. The HT web site has a discussion group that is most interesting (but, of course, for I have several postings on it).

I, along with about 30 others, was summoned to be interrogated by the Bishop, the Chancellor of the Archdiocese, and by a young priest (there just so they'd have their needed third witness should any grounds (euphemism for dirt) sufficient for excommunication spill out). I am furious with their process…”

Timmy, good luck with your new Real Housewives’ committee on PR improvement, changing the subject on the sex abuse stuff etc.? (wink, nod)

How is your BFF Jameson doing these days?

Jesus Unfriended by his Brother James on Facebook

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Ran into some Cristian blog all big and slick.


They had some big article about this Norweigen Timothy McVeigh type, cannot pronounce and will not write his evil name here. In all charity, he is probably mentally ill and plugged into too much modern technology – and definitely into the inhumanity sound bite hubris of poison dwarf Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdock’s antichrist Fox News.


Does Fox News broadcast in Norway in Norwegian? I have to wonder.


Well anyway, like the reverse against human logic that goes on over at Fox, this Cristian blog site was dissing me indirectly.  Somebody was quoting from the Arian manifesto that Norwegian Crazy-O had supposedly written.


Then here comes the kicker to me.  Something, logic(?), like if the Norwegian Crazy-O had been a “religious Christian” instead of a “cultural Christian”, Crazy-O would not, could not have murdered so many innocent people. 


Bullshit!  Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.


MY CRAZY CHRISTIAN GOD IS BETTER THAN YOUR CRAZY CHRISTIAN GOD etc. 


Some born again moron just unfriended me and my Cultural Christian label.


Hey if you don’t like me, tough shit a-hole. I am a better Christian than you and I can prove it.  I won’t nuke you to prove it.  Which seems to reflect the attitudes and lack of civility that is the undercurrent culture of the High Technology Idol of this new virtual, cold, bloodless, humanless age. 


And without trying to identify myself with any Jesus type, I am like totally far from it - that is what I feel has been going on from the beginning of time with the elevation of tribal gods to the supreme farce of Yahweh, Jesus/god, and Allah -


A lot of bickering over the value of nothing - the so called value of God - the absolute zero (for want, lack of a true number) of all things as we humans try to perceive the universe and our place in it. 


The true value in life is friendship and tolerance.  Instead of talking quietly and friendly over the back fence with our neighbors, many of us are screaming into our cell/mobile phones leaving nasty messages and do not even know the names of our brothers and sisters who literally live right next door to us.


I cannot talk for the people in Norway, but I do know what destroyed the town square of my youth in Philadelphia. It was scared white people running away from black people.  And when sex starved catholic priests should have been preaching love and tolerance and brotherhood and humanity, they were screaming about abortion, starting a jihad, a culture war as an agenda ploy of the Pollack cardinal ’s supreme ambition to be pope.  Oh well, spilled milk.


It has taken me twenty four hours to calm down and realize that the “Christian brand” in America since the seventies is part of some right wing conspiracy, real or imagined, to turn charity and brotherhood back into profit and slavery. Whatever.


James, the supposed brother of Jesus, is mentioned by the Roman/Jewish historian Josephus.  The whole thing of James briefly mentioned in the gospels and or Acts is retrofitted cut and paste to make up a resume for the late great Jesus, whoever and whatever he was.  Too bad the people around him did not bother to pay much attention to him while he was here.


I do believe him great and he lived by the Golden Rule.


I wish some of us could do the same and on a global scale here and now.


Instead of what passes for humanity and or the piles and piles and piles of religion these days:


Dogma, dogma, dogma. 
Godma, godma, godma. 
Blahma. Blahma. Blahma. 
Blah. Blah. Blah. 
(chorus)


Enjoy the day God gave you and me. 


This in spite of all the crazies out there all my dear brothers and sisters in Jesus’ name everywhere.  

Pray for the people of Norway and their tragic loss. 
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Global Culture War Continues

In my search and sometime mediocre comments on what might be an emerging global culture I am many times distracted or distraught and have to reconcile myself to the fact that the rest of the world does not see things the same way that I see things.

What might be a global culture war is going on all around us. The west, America and Europe, may have reached a brave new secular world supported by technology and science and the east may be lagging behind and or not want to join the dance with the west.

In retrospect, as the Internet and other communications become reality within reach anywhere on this planet and within seconds, maybe too much view and too much analysis does not increase the quality of life locally or globally.

I have to wonder how the young will have to deal with this not so brave new world but rather a cold push button reality.

One case in point, the war in Asia is spreading to Pakistan. It is not so much that one or several branches of local Fundamentalist Islam aka the Taliban are any real immediate danger to the United States so much as their control of Pakistan and control of a dozen odd nuclear weapons would, could radically change the face of global politics.

The US turned a blind eye and or may have added some help when Pakistan started its nuclear program while the Soviet Union was the current next door world power stuck in the quagmire of Afghanistan in the early eighties.

Now a few or even one nuke could destroy a city somewhere in the west. That Pakistan with nukes as a deterrent to the Soviet threat or India (not in our camp back then) was a temporary, now permanent, foreign policy mistake of administrations back when.

Now the CIA and the US Air Force can target any “raghead” in sight in our Asia land war run amuck.

No-name terrorists now CIA dron etargets

Once upon a time, the CIA had to know a militant's name before putting him up for a robotic targeted killing. Now, if the guy acts like a guerrilla, it's enough to call in a drone strike.

It's another sign of that a once-limited, once-covert program to off senior terrorist leaders has morphed into a full-scale -- if undeclared -- war in Pakistan. And in a war, you don't need to know the name of someone on the other side before you take a shot….

In Pakistan, however, the opposite has happened. Starting in the latter days of the Bush administration, and accelerating under the Obama presidency, drone pilots have become more and more free to launch their weapons.

The situation in Pakistan is more on a macro level. On a micro level is how a Pakistani who spent ten years in our country repaid our cultural hospitality and education with a failed attempt to bomb and kill tourists in Times Square. I should add that killing anybody in Times Square, crossroads of the world, would be an attack on the United Nations considering the variety of tourists and foreign nationals as tourists on that particular piece of Manhattan turf 24/7.

I was rather taken aback when I saw the article below. While the government is trying to look for terrorist training camps to drone out and are looking for a money man behind the attempted Times Square attack - the bottom line is that Faisal Shahzad, would be Times Square Bomber, spent about $7000 on rent, a used car and gasoline, fertilizer and firecrackers in his failed attempt.

And that in all probability, this creep was self financed by a home equity loan of $65,000 he received on his house in 2009 from Wachovia Bank.

Bizarre. Bizarre. Bizarre.

Times Square plot may have cost as little as $7K

Until that departure, there was no trail of lawsuits or missed payments indicating he was in trouble. In fact, his financial history was clean enough that Wachovia Bank gave him a $65,000 home equity line in January 2009.

I wonder why banks are still making home equity loans. I wonder why the money is not invested better elsewhere in the economy. I think that Big Banks are only an ATM or Internet push mutton robot to disperse wealth to anyone. We need small local banks to administer and make loans and mortgages. There is no local humans left in the US in the banking equation. Your local bankers used to know who you were. You were not anonymous in terms of using the banks’ local depositors' money.

That and I have to wonder why Faisal Shahzad, even if he was witness to "man’s inhumanity to man" in Pakistan, why does he see justification in trying to kill his local neighbors in Connecticut/New York in the scheme of things.

Perhaps while the global statement to “Love your Neighbor” sounds good in theory but may only work locally at best. My global vision is a farce I fear and perhaps an impossible dream as well.