Michigan Laws and the Less-Discussed Sins of Sodom

by Nomad

Despite a host of serious problems in the state, the minds of the Republicans in the Michigan Senate were focused on passing a dubious anti-sodomy law. But what is the truth behind the Biblical story of Sodom? Who are the real Sodomites?

Michigan and SB219

With so many things going wrong in that state, you'd think Michigan legislators would have their hands full. You'd think they would have no problem finding serious issues to tackle. 

However, you'd be wildly incorrect.  

Last week, legislators decided that it was much more concerned with the sex practices of its citizens than with those boring issues. The state Senate passed SB 219 that, as one critic says, "effectively reaffirms the state's unconstitutional law making sodomy a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison."
If the person is already a sex offender, violations are punishable by life in prison. 

Michigan is one of more than a dozen states that still have sodomy bans on the books, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas declaring them unconstitutional.

The Court's decision in the Texas case ruled that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the 14th Amendment. As Wikipedia explains: 

Lawrence invalidated similar laws throughout the United States that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private, whatever the sex of the participants.

Nobody told the Michigan legislators, it seems.  

While most people see this as primarily directed at gay couples, the laws criminalizing oral and anal sex can apply to both same-sex or different-sex couples. 

   

This law was deceptively attached to laws protecting animals from abuse. It should be mentioned that one progressive blog, Eclectablog, claims that this isn't an anti-sodomy law at all but a law designed to "prohibit convicted animal abusers from adopting another animal for five years." In that case, it is merely a badly-written law. Here's the sentence that has raised objections:

A person who commits the abominable and detestable crime against nature either with mankind or with any animal IS guilty of a felony, punishable by imprisonment for. not more than 15 years

The rather old-fashioned phrase, "the abominable and detestable crime against nature" in this context would certainly be a sexual crime presumably with an animal. In short, the crime of bestiality.

However, lawmakers inexplicably added the phrase "either with mankind or animal" which then changes the meaning to unnatural sexual acts, the classic definition of sodomy. If the state had repealed its old sodomy laws, it would be much easier to dismiss this as just a poorly-written law.

Since 2014, the Republicans in Michigan have held a strong majority in the State House and Senate. They can do whatever they want without much opposition.
Pandering to the Christian Right has now, critics say, devolved into enforcing baby-making sexual practices at a state level. Strictly speaking, every other form of sex could be considered "unnatural." (Even sex using contraceptive is technically unnatural.)

But if sodomy is the thing that really captures the imagination of the Michigan Republicans, then perhaps they should delve a little deeper in the story of the Sodomites and why, according to the Bible, God decided to destroy them.  

Forgotten Memorials: The Conscience of Viola Liuzzo and the "Heroism" of the KKK

by Nomad

One state representative in Georgia has drafted legislation calling for the eternal preservation of Confederate monuments, as a testimony to those who "suffered and died for the cause."
Who we select to honor and who becomes our source of pride says so much about who we are as a people.

Cultural Terrorism

The other day I was struck to read about Georgia State Rep. Tommy Benton's proposed amendments to the Georgia Constitution. One of the two amendment aims at protecting the Confederate monuments at Stone Mountain.  The bill salutes the heroes of the Confederacy like Lee and Davis. Monuments dedicated to such heroes of the South, the bill demands, shall never be 

"altered, removed, concealed or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause.”

What cause is he talking about? Nothing less than the overthrow of the federal government.

Republican Benton has called the movement to remove Confederate symbols in the South a form of "cultural terrorism."
Our source tells us:

“That’s no better than what ISIS is doing, destroying museums and monuments,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). “I feel very strongly about this. I think it has gone far enough. There is some idea out there that certain parts of history out there don’t matter anymore and that’s a bunch of bunk.”

It is a big deal in the South and remembering the Confederate past and the fallen warriors is considered part of the South's cultural heritage. It was literally all the South had left after the crushing defeat.

The problem is, contrary to what Benton says, many in the South would prefer to remember a warped version of their history. A history without shame or misjudgment and effectively free of facts. 

(And not just the long past history, but, as we shall see, the more recent times too.)
For a person that talks about remembering history, Benton seems to forget that it was foolishness of the proud and rather stupid politicians in Georgia and the other rebelling states that kicked off America's greatest and most pointless war. 

Horny Moses: Why Biblical Literalists Really Have Some Explaining to Do

by Nomad

When people say they believe every word of the Bible, they may not know very much about the history of the sacred text they claim as the direct word of God. 

As Moses climbed down from the mountaintop with his ten commandments, the amazed Israelites noticed a great change in his appearance. The question is: did Moses have newly white hair? Or did he had a pair of horns on his forehead?

The answer to that depended on which period of history you lived in. For most of us, it's not a subject we would normally dwell on. But those who claim the Bible is the infallible Word of God, the question presents some thorny problems.

Moses with Horns

Above is a detail photo of a statue from the end of the Middle Ages. This statue of Moses was sculpted by Michelangelo between the years 1513–1515. Today, it sits in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.

You might see something a bit peculiar if you study the photo closely. Along with his flowing beard and tablets in his arms, the Prophet Moses has a pair of goatish horns on his head.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Michelangelo was shooting at a statue of Lucifer.
But no, that's the Hebrew lawgiver Michelangelo carved.

With One United Voice: The First Stirrings of the Women's Rights Movement in 1850

by Nomad

When the Founding Fathers declared that a government earns its true legitimacy from the consent of the governed, they hadn't counted on women taking it to the next logical step.

The 1850 Women's Rights Convention

Recently I uncovered this interesting quote by an early American reformer/activist named Francis Dana Gage.  The name isn't as familiar to the general public as it should be. Even by modern feminists, she is largely forgotten. 

That's a pity.

The Year Emma Morano was Born

by Nomad

When Emma Morano was born, Queen Victoria, now weary with age, was still on the throne and William McKinley was president. 

The other players were rehearsing in the wings.
The youthful Albert Einstein had just entered university and, Morano's fellow countryman, Guillermo Marconi was still working out the details of his wireless communication device. The Wright brothers were flying kites in Dayton, Ohio.
Mohandas Gandhi was a just young lawyer in South Africa. Adolf Hilter and Benito Mussolini were just a pair angry teenagers and Franklin Roosevelt was a sheltered young man of Hyde Park privilege, preparing to go to Harvard.

In the year of her Morano's birth, Henry Ford had a falling out with Thomas Edison and started his own enterprise. He called it "The Detroit Automobile Company." The term, "automobile," had only been coined earlier that year in an editorial in The New York Times. A year later, after only twenty vehicles had been built, the company went bust.

In 1899, visionary inventor Nikola Tesla in his laboratory in Colorado Springs told an interviewer:

Life is a rhythm that must be comprehended....Everything that lives is related to a deep and wonderful relationship: man and the stars, amoebas’ and the sun, the heart and the circulation of an infinite number of worlds. These ties are unbreakable, but they can be tamed ..to propitiate and begin to create new and different relationships in the world, and that does not violate the old.

Telsa looked deep into the future and saw a fantastic era in human history about to begin. It was a time of profound optimism. It was impossible not to feel that every problem could be solved and things from here on out would steadily improve. 

Nevertheless, when Morano entered into this world, there were no televisions, no radios, and the motion picture industry was in its infancy. There were no airplanes in the sky and no highways crisscrossing the land and lassoing cities. 

The average life expectancy in Italy- Emma's home- was only 44 years. For an Italian woman today, that figure has nearly doubled to 85.2.

7:50 am. July 14, 1939, Oklahoma City

by Nomad

All photographs were taken by Russell Lee as part of the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic documentation project of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

Echo from the Suffrage: Twelve Reasons Why Women Should Vote

by Nomad

Here's an public ad for universal suffrage from the 1920s.

This list makes so much sense and yet, even today so many women voters stay at home.
  

1. Because those who obey the laws should help to choose those who make the laws.
2. Because laws affect women as much as men.
3. Because laws which affect women are now passed without consulting them. 
4. Because  laws affecting Children should include the woman's point of view as well as the man's.
5. Because laws affecting the home are voted on in every session of the legislature.
6. Because women have experience which would be helpful to legislation.
7. Because to deprive women of the vote is to lower their position in the common estimation. 
8. Because having the vote would increase the sense of responsibility among women toward questions of public importance.
9. Because public spirited mothers make public spirited sons.
10. Because about 8,000,000 women in the United States are wage workers, and the conditions under which they work are controlled by the law. 
11. Because the objections against their having the vote are based on prejudice, not on reason.
12. Because to sum up all reasons in one-- it is for the common good of all. 

Plantation Politics: How Some in the Old South Continue to Deny the Evils of Slavery

by Nomad

Can racism ever be extinguished in the USA when there are still some people who wish to ignore the inhumanity of slavery and to absolve the slave-owners of all responsibility?

Recently, I saw this article the other day and thought it was worth sharing.
Margaret Biser, a tour operator for a Southern plantation,  reveals that so many of her visitors seemed determined to ignore (or at least, minimize) the human costs of slavery. 

Admittedly some of this is based on a profound but genuine ignorance about history. Blame our education system or home schooling?
However, in other cases, the problem went much deeper.
In a word, denial of the history of an enslaved race's degradation and misery.

What can one make of people who want to tour a historical plantation but who refuse to acknowledge that all the wealth and grandeur on display was based on the sweat and toil of an army of bought and sold slaves? 

Rebellion, Retrospect,and Regret: The 50th Anniversary of a Vietnam Peace March

by Nomad

Fifty years ago on this date, April 17, 1965, Washington saw one of the first and largest peace marches in its history. It was to become the first of many anti-war marches and demonstrations across the country.
Here's the story behind that history.

The planning for the anti-war march had been in the works since December 1964. Demonstrations against racial injustice had been remarkably successful in waking up the country and its leaders. Activists for peace were determined to inert similar pressures on Washington.
Up to that time, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a little known student activist organization. However, as the America's involvement in the Vietnam War steadily grew, students and others in that age group suddenly faced the reality of the draft.
This was real and it was a matter of life and death.
As one source explains:

Even before they shipped out, those who were drafted had begun to see the horrors of the war, most notably on television. The growing presence of television in nearly every American household thus exacerbated divisions over the conflict and helped fuel the antiwar movement. What Americans watched on television each night shaped their perceptions of the Vietnam War, which came to be known as the “living room war.” For some young Americans, called on to fight but unable to vote until the age of 21, the situation was unacceptable.

The anti-war message was easy enough for a child to understand. America had no reason to be in Southeast Asia and the reason were equally simple: the war hurts the Vietnamese people, the war hurts the American people and the SDS was concerned for both Vietnamese and American people. Anybody who agreed with those three points was invited to join in on the march on Washington.
The book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage explains:

The official call, hoping to appeal to a broad opposition, maintained that the war was fundamentally a "civil war" as well as "losing," "self-defeating," "dangerous" "never declared by Congress" and "hideously immoral."

These objections, the establishment press immediately labeled "pro-Communist," unpatriotic and at the very best, misguided and naive.

Conscience and Scripture: How the Abolition of Slavery and the Fight for Marriage Equality are Inseparable 1/2

by Nomad

A schism within the Presbyterian Church on its views regarding same-sex marriage made a bit of news recently. 

We look at the historical reasons why any literal interpretation of Scripture for an African American Church presents some particular problems. 

It hasn't been the first time the Presbyterians have followed their conscience on matters of equality and social justice.

The NBCI Decision and the Fragile Unity

Recently. the National Black Church Initiative (NBCI) made an interesting and somewhat disappointing announcement. This faith-based coalition of some 34, 000 churches made up of about 15 denominations with 15.7 million African-Americans declare that it had broken its fellowship the American branch of the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA).

The NBCI decision came about as a result of a recent vote by the Presbyterian Church to approve same-sex marriage.

Last June, The Presbyterian General Assembly, the top legislative body of the PCUSA voted to revise the constitutional language defining marriage. This decision granted  pastors discretion in determining whether or not to conduct same-gender marriages in civil jurisdictions where such marriages are legal.

According to the text of the assembly ruling, the elders of the Church decided that it was up to the pastors were allowed the freedom of conscience and their own interpretation of Scripture. They were free "to participate in any such marriage they believe the Holy Spirit calls them to perform."

On the Passing of Albert Maysles

by Nomad

Filmmaker Albert Maysles died the other day at the age of 88. You may not have heard of him. I know I hadn't until- thanks to the Internet- I finally stumbled across one of his films.

Albert and his brother, David, became famous in the art house circles for making slightly unconventional (at that time) documentaries.

The jarring film, Gimme Shelter (1970) was one of their most famous films.The subject was the final leg of t The Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour and culminated in the disastrous Altamont Free Concert, in which a member of the audience was murdered. Although the film has been deemed "the greatest rock film ever made," some also have seen the film as an indictment of the hippie culture and the chaos of a world without rules or, as one reviewer said,  a snapshot of a "counterculture experience in its decline."

Segregation and Dot Counts: What History Tells Us about Resistance to Progress

by Nomad

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the story behind this photograph? The young woman's name is Dorothy Counts.

We tend to think of the 1960s as the Era of the Social Movement but in fact, the great sweeps of reform began a decade earlier. The movement. it's true, reached its zenith during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. However, the impetus for social change began as a result of a constitutional challenge mostly that eventually made its way to the high court. 

It was the culmination of a campaign by The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its legal offspring, the Legal Defense and Educational Fund, against the doctrine of “separate but equal.” 

American Enough: The Surprising Genealogical Trail of President Barack Obama

 by Nomad

Looking into the President's family history is like looking at a snapshot of American history, as far back as the first decades of its colonial period when the disgraceful practice of slavery was being rationalized and legalized.

Back in 2012, several news outlets, including the New York Times, mentioned one interesting side-note about the Barack Obama story. Since his father was Kenyan and his mother was white, it had been long assumed that Obama had, unlike most African Americans no connection to the dark history of slavery. Apparently, this was not the case. 

At least not, however, on his father's side, but on his mother's, it's another story.

This Day in History: When Bankers and Big Business Betrayed a Nation

 by Nomad

When we look back at this date- February 20- we see it was a critical day in modern history. Eighty-two years ago today,  Hitler made his pitch for campaign financing to the leaders of banking and industry. It turned out to be a smashing success.

On this day in 1933, the Nazi party arranged a secret meeting between Adolf Hitler and 20 to 25 industrialists at the official residence of Hermann Wilhelm Göring, the minister of the interior in Hitler's government, 

The aim of this secret meeting was to allocate campaign financing for the Nazi party in the crucial upcoming elections. 

A German economist, banker, liberal politician Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht acted as a liaison/host for the event. As a fierce critic of his country's post-World War I reparation obligations, Schacht became a supporter of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. He served in Hitler's government as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. 

Until his fall from grace in 1937, Schacht proved to be a useful tool for the regime and its rise to absolute power.

John Adams vs. America's Encroaching Oligarchy

 by Nomad

John Adams, second president of the United States, well understood the dangers of people like the Koch Brothers and the judges. legislators, educators, and members of Congress that worship at their feet.

Destiny in the Making: President Obama Made History 25 years Ago Today

by Nomad

A quarter of a century ago, one soft-spoken student with a sense of destiny took his first steps into the public spotlight. His name was Barack Obama. 

Twenty five years ago, Barack Obama was elected the Harvard Law Review's first black president. Here is the New York Times announcement.

(Hat-tip to my long lost cousin, Angel.)

Teddy Roosevelt and the Death Knell of the Republic

by Nomad

It often surprises me how clear-sighted so many of our leaders of the past seemed compared to the muddled-headed ideas of the present day. The fight against oligarchy and corporate-rigging of our political system did not begin with this generation. We have walked this way about a century ago. However, because of the general ignorance of our own history, we have been deprived of the wisdom and support of our elders. 

Bust: How Republicans Lost the War on Drugs 3/5

by Nomad

In past installments in this series on America's war on drugs, we examined Nixon and Ford. Now we turn to the Democratic president Jimmy Carter.
Deeply entrenched distrust for the president within the CIA would prove to be an insurmountable obstacle.

Part 3. Where the Rational Met Reality

Carter's Way

The 70s were a time of reformation after the hectic and often frightening social shakeups of the 60s. Watergate and the subsequent Church Senate Committee Investigations had opened up the heart of the political system and most Americans were appalled at the grimy business of running the country and managing the world.

What was needed was a complete overhaul starting at the top. Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, peanut farmer with the down-home Georgian accent seemed to be the style of leadership the country demanded.
And so in 1976, against all expectations, The Waltons moved into the White House.

The white middle class conservative values of "dominant social order" were being re-evaluated, questioned and challenged in a variety of ways.

The extreme conservative opinion, typified by white frustration, tainted with bigotry and, simplistic, backward views of the world,  was being mocked weekly on television shows like All in the Family and other programs. It is no surprise then that the failed drug policy should once again come under greater scrutiny.

In some ways, President Carter did, in fact, pick up where President Ford had left off. And as we mentioned in the previous post, that new direction had already been sabotaged. While marijuana was now being considered harmless and non-addictive, cocaine was added to the same category. (We should take a closer look at the possible reason for this.) In any case, this coupling, for whatever reasons, proved to be a major blunder.

Both, under President Ford's directive, were now to receive far less attention from law enforcement. Meanwhile the focus was concentrated on the heroin trade. 

Progress combating the illegal import of heroin too was hampered. That had much to do with the CIA and its antagonism toward Carter and all he represented. 

It was common knowledge that high level intelligence officials in the agency had no great love for Carter. Perhaps it was to be expected since President Carter had campaigned as an outsider who was coming to Washington to clean the mess that the Church Committee had revealed.

Johnson Unzipped: Listening to LBJ Ordering Trousers Will Have You in Stitches

by Nomad

Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, had a reputation as being a little uncivilized at times. Here's slightly graphic telephone conversations between the president and his tailors.

Let's go back to August 1964 to listen to President Johnson unplugged. This slightly vulgar- or at least, vividly described- excerpt provides us with a snapshot of the man who ran things in the 1960s.

Compared to the elegance and sophistication of the Kennedy era, Lyndon Johnson ushered in a bit of a cultural shock for many in Washington. Insider tales of the president's vulgarity and a bit too plain speaking were gossiped about.

In fairness, Johnson was not the only president known for his vulgar language in private. Truman and Nixon both had such reputations. In Johnson's case, there was a naturalness which is a little shocking but funny too.  (I was also a little surprised that Johnson carried a knife with him.)

George Frisbie Hoar, Dick Cheney and the Lessons of Unlearned History

by Nomad

Few Americans have heard of George Frisbie Hoar. This is the story of a man who, after seeing most of his country's history first-hand, had the courage to denounce its imperial aspirations. He represents, in other words, the opposite of another familiar politician of our time.

Remembering The Words, the Things He Did

On the summery Friday afternoon of June 26th, 1908, crowds gathered together in front of Worcester City Hall. Massachusetts. As if to remind everyone there that an era was passing, only a few days, the former president Grover Cleveland had died. Thoughts were therefore already on the mortality of famous men and their memorials.

The attendees had come to dedicate a statute in honor of a locally-beloved political figure who had died four years earlier. The man's name was George Frisbie Hoar, a man who had been called a "crusader for  the rescue of free thought in a free land."

The dedication ceremony commenced with a prayer by the Unitarian minister, Edward Everett Hale. The crowds fell into a respectful silence. "Father of life, Father of love" Hale said, "we thank Thee for him. We thank Thee for his life."  

Father, we renew our vows and promises and hopes and petitions, that we may repeat his life, in remembering the words that he taught us — in remembering the things that he did. We cannot thank Thee in words for what he did for his State and for his Country.

It was, sadly, a promise not kept and outside of that memorial, few people today have ever heard of this Republican New Englander. Admittedly, it's not a name most people today would recognize. For that reason, that memorial statute may seem as remote and as mysterious as Stonehenge.
Sad because this is a man with so much to tell us now.

His most famous speech was a condemnation of the imperialist approach to and the subjugation of the Philippines Islands. To understand that speech's importance to our time, it's essential to understand the parallels of two eras separated by a century.