United We Stand. . . .

Thoughts on watching the PBS-American Experience documentary, Soundtrack for a Revolution (2009):

Once there was a link between the civil rights movement and the union movement.  It's seems so long ago that people made the connections that mattered in a stable, middle class community.  They knew when  you denied one person a decent job, you could anyone a job. When you denied someone the right to vote, you could deny anyone the right to vote. When you denied someone a basic education, you denied everyone the right to hear their voice as an equal.

Nixon came along and made a deal with the devil.  In exchange for political power his partisans drove a wedge between young people and unions and black Americans and unions. The GOP made us believe the pie wasn't big enough for everyone . . .  that we had to fight over one cookie, while their friends and donors hogged the other 11 (see below).

Wisconsin gives me hope that those days of community may be coming back.  Union members are sticking together on this one.  Perhaps they remember that if you can privatize public education, you can create a world where the powerful take even more and productive workers have no hope of a better life for their children. . . where we all become second class citizens unless we're among the lucky 1 percent who grab a third of the income each year.  There are greedy people in the world – and greedy people are trying to take everything from people who have almost nothing left.

Jobs – job security, safe jobs, well-paying jobs with good benefits – these are still possible for this country to provide.  As long as the greedy don't get a free ride and are required to pay for the services this country provides them – safe neighborhoods, trained workers, stable infrastructure (power grids, highways, bridges, etc.)  These things are not free and those who benefit most from them have an obligation to pay their fair share.

In the early days of our Republic, we understood the importance of standing together.  We took on many symbols of earlier attempts at self-governance and union.  On the wall behind the Speaker's podium in the US House of Representatives is a pair of fasces – bundles of sticks which represent the power found in unity.  If one loosened the bundle, each twig could easily be snapped and discarded.  Bound together, they become unbreakable. 

 


 That is what our nation once represented – unity out of diversity; community over greed.

Photo Information:

Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C., Leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963.

In the front row, from left are: Whitney M. Young, Jr., Executive Director of the National Urban League; Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, American Federation of Labor (AFL), and a former vice president of the AFL-CIO; Walter P. Reuther, President, United Auto Workers Union; and Arnold Aronson, Secretary of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.  (National Archives; ARC Identifier: 542010)

US House Chamber

From left: Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-PA., Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood applaud as President Barack Obama enters the House Chamber to deliver his State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Jan. 25, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Fasces:  The bronze fasces, representing a classical Roman symbol of civic authority, are located on both sides of the U.S. Flag.  (Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives)

Battle of the Wilderness

…Belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: "It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians."

~ James W. Loewen, Five Myths about why the South seceded 

This year we mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War.  I have been reminded of the last major round of observances fifty years ago.  In 1961, the civil rights movement was still fairly new in the national psyche.  As a child in the North, I did not yet connect the events I witnessed on the evening news with those hallowed battles of long ago.  In school, as part of the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, we studied Presidents and strategies and generals.  We did not discuss the causes of the war as in any way related to what was happening in our country now.    

Perhaps this is the proper approach for initiating children to this complex time in our history.  Perhaps it was a recognition that the Detroit suburbs were heavily populated with families who had migrated from the South in search of jobs -- as if silence was the best way to let the children of opposing sides get along in the classroom.

However, I think that something important was missing from our education.  We didn't learn to face the dark realities behind either of the historic struggles – the civil war of long ago or the fight for human rights happening in our streets and neighborhoods.  We were not encouraged to look into our own souls to find the fears and anxieties we might still carry with us. 

Now we are the adults and I look around and see the angry faces of Little Rock and Selma again.  This time they carry posters with distorted images of our first African-American president and argue for states' rights and secession and nullification.  I wonder if these adults had the same edited education I had.  And I wonder how many of those who find joy in these images and these slogans consider themselves good Christians.

Image Information:  Battle of the Wilderness | Desperate fight on the Orange C.H. Plank Road, near Todd's Tavern, May 6th, 1864 (Kurz & Allison, Art Publishers, Chicago, U.S.A, 1887)

Huckabee – Three Strikes??

All this time I thought former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was a fairly level-headed guy – for a Fox News host. But over the period of a few days, he got caught up in the idea that he had to "make news" on his book tour and he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. 

Strike 1, February 28, 2011, Huckabee said the following in response to a question about President Obama's birth certificate:

I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough.. . .

If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Anyone who has read Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, knows this is false.  Obama was born in Hawaii; his father left when he was two years old and his parents divorced.  He grew up with his mother and her parents – without his father (although Obama Senior did make one visit around the holidays in 1971.)  Later, his mother remarried and he spent some time in Indonesia with his step father's family. He eventually returned to Hawaii and lived with his mother's Kansan parents.  He did not learn about Kenya or the British imperialists or the Mau Mau Revolution at his Kenyan grandfather's knee. The only grandfather Obama ever knew is the one who appears on the cover of Obama's book.

Huckabee compounded this misrepresentation by saying he "misspoke" – he meant Indonesia, not Kenya.  Of course, he didn't address how Obama's grandfather and the Mau Mau's made it all that way from Africa to Indonesia.  Instead Huckabee blamed the New York Times for sensationalizing the story.

Strike 2, March 2nd, while on another radio talk show, Huckabee engaged in this exchange:

Fischer: "You seem to think that there is some validity to the fact that there may be some fundamental anti-Americanism in this president."

Huckabee: "Well, that's exactly the point that I make in the book. And I don't know why these reporters -- maybe they can't read... And I have said many times publicly, that I do think [Obama] has a different worldview and I think it's, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas."

This statement is so-o-o-o loaded.  Not only does it imply that Obama has fundamentalist Muslim connections.  It implies that neither Hawaii nor Indonesia has Boy Scouts – or Rotary Clubs.  As of December, 2010, Indonesia has 17.1 million Boy Scouts (7.2% of the nation's population) and the USA has 3.97 million (1.3% of estimated population.)  The Rotary Youth Exchange is one of the primary sponsors of foreign exchange students in the world. Rotary International has chapters in Indonesia and Malaysia, both Muslim nations.  So it's quite likely, whether he spent time in Hawaii or Indonesia, that Obama was exposed to Scouting as well as Rotary International.

Strike 3, February 28th (again), in another radio exchange – this time about the Oscars (which had taken place the night before):

Medved: . . .However, there was - there was one moment where a very brilliant and admirable actress named Natalie Portman won Best Actress. . . But in any event, she got up, she was very visibly pregnant, and it's really it's a problem because she's about seven months pregnant, it's her first pregnancy, and she and the baby's father aren't married, and before two billion people, Natalie Portman says, 'Oh I want to thank my love and he's given me the most wonderful gift.' He didn't give her the most wonderful gift, which would be a wedding ring! [Huckabee chuckles] And it just seems to me that sending that kind of message is problematic.

Huckabee:  You know Michael, one of the things that's troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, 'Hey look, you know, we're having children, we're not married, but we're having these children, and they're doing just fine.' But there aren't really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image that yes, not everybody hires nannies, and caretakers, and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that's the story that we're not seeing, and it's unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock [sic].

You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock. 61 percent of Hispanic kids -- across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering.

Shades of Dan Quayle and "Murphy Brown" with a little tinge of racism thrown in for good measure.  What Huckabee doesn't mention in his discussion of the birth demographics is the finding that over two thirds (67.7%) of births to single mothers are white.  

Or that "Hispanic" is an imprecise number, because there are Hispanic mothers in both the Black and White data.  For example, 35.7% of white births are to single white mothers. If you back out the mothers who are white Hispanics, this rate drops to 28.7%.  The reverse is true for black births (71.8% of all live black births are to single mothers; it's 72.3% for non-Hispanic black births.)  My calculations show that 52.6% of Hispanic live births are to single mothers.  American Indian/Native Alaskan births to single mothers account for 65.8% of that group's newborns; while Asian/Pacific Islanders are only 16.9%. 

Or that if you consider the actual birth rate – births per 1,000 – rather than raw number of births, one finds the number dropping significantly for all groups (14% overall since 1989; 28% among black births) except Cuban/Hispanics (rose about 2%).

Something is going on.  In general, the number of births among single mothers is rising.  But the assumption that this is occurring only for poor, uneducated women surviving on government assistance is a Reagan-era stereotype that doesn't necessarily match the data.  Since none of the many data tables on this topic identify maternal income or education levels, I can only surmise that someone's biases are showing in Huckabee's comments.  "Ain't it awful" is not an intelligent or effective policy statement – unless the policy is to sell books to true believers.

Book Cover Information:
Pictured in left-hand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in right-hand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

Peter J. Gomes



Peter J. Gomes
1942 - 2011



I would love to see the day when we would be prepared to try living out what we know to be our better nature, what we understand in our hearts to be our ideal image as created in God's image. I know we want to be better than we are. I know we want a world better than the one we have. I know we want to do better things than the things we seem trapped into doing. If we only had the courage to try that, it would be an amazing phenomenon.

I remain hopeful that there are enough people who will look at themselves in the mirror and say, "I do not want to be this person. I want to become somebody else. I want to be the person God meant me." As long as there are people who think that way, I remain hopeful. I remain hopeful because I'm that way. I look at myself and I say, "Gomes, I want to be what God meant me to be."

I've done some interesting things and they've been fun and sometimes even productive, but I believe my best days are ahead of me. I believe that God is not finished with me. Extraordinary things to happen, and I can't wait to find out what they're going to be.

– December 14, 2007, in an interview conducted by Tavis Smiley

The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes was Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Every year, his sermons greeted the new freshmen and launched the graduating seniors.  A prominent conservative Republican, he gave the benediction at President Reagan’s second inauguration and delivered the National Cathedral sermon for George H. W. Bush's inauguration four years later.  In 1991, in response to anti-gay commentary in a campus magazine, he shared that he was homosexual.  Subsequently, he used his considerable theological and rhetorical skills to present the case for religious tolerance of diversity.  In 2006, the Baptist minister switched political parties and supported Deval Patrick, the Democrat, for governor of Massachusetts.

He passed away on February 28, 2011.  He had planned to retire in 2012, after more than 40 years at Harvard.

Sample sermons can be found at the Memorial Church web site.  Gomes was also the author of several best-selling books.  He will be missed by those he touched.