Monthly Archives: March 2004

Some Maroon and Gold Pride

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TwinCities.Com: The magical Gophers make the Final Four — and team history — after a colossal upset of top-ranked Duke.

The screaming was audible all over Minnesota last night when the Gophers beat Duke. It’s not quite the fanaticism I saw in Ohio with OSU football, but I think I kind of like this better. (Sorry Dawn.) This was definitely an interesting victory given Lindsay Whalen’s injury mid-season and Janel McCarville’s mom undergoing chemo but still making it to Norfolk to see her daughter play. If they win the championship, this will be big news for women’s sports here in Minnesota.

I have quite a few girls who play basketball in Jon’s congregations and quite a few who head to Gopher games whenever they can get tickets. Maybe I’ll see a few of them out there some day?

Troll-Beating

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Someone went to this post and left the following comment:

All this is opinion none of it was backed up biblically and you’re completely attacking the writer who you are opposeing. If you really want to make a difference pray and take your own advice.

To that person, get a flipping life and learn some basic grammar and punctuation. Before you post some stupid drivel, actually read the post. And for the love of Cora, don’t ream me on a post that’s 10 months old — it shows utter stupidity since most people don’t look for new comments on their archives. (I have comment notification.)

The jerk who left that comment has been I.P. banned and I’ve sent a message to their administrator explaining that someone at said I.P. was engaging in spam. So for all you trolls, don’t mess with me. I will make your life miserable.

9/11 Commission and Its Theoretical Prevention

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Every time I’ve posted on 9/11 and Bush and anything complaining about the executive branch, Mike leaves me a comment alleging that Clinton did squat to protect against Al Qaeda or that we couldn’t have guarded against what happened on 9/11. Well Mike… I guess you weren’t in a position to be reading a lot on all this stuff for the last 5 years because you’ve missed the boat on this. Here are the answers to the many comments you’ve left me. 🙂 Oh yes, if you want sources, do a search at your local library on Muslim terrorists, Al Qaeda, bin Laden, and anti-U.S. propaganda. Much of this prior to December 2000 was in my Sociology 188 reader which I shredded when I graduated. (My professor was a jerk and I didn’t want anything having to do with him. They were all TIME, Newsweek, and U.S. News articles.) The rest were on CNN.Com and various other news sources that I kept tabs on for my Modern Middle East class.

What Clinton Did
-Bomb Afghanistan and Sudan after the attacks on the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya to try and root out bin Laden and destroy his weapons-making capabilities. (Republicans criticized him saying that he went too far. Now who’s laughing?)
-Developed ties with countries where a lot of chatter related to Al Qaeda had been picked up. (Example: Jordan, the Phillipines, Indonesia)
-Attempted to expand authority of the intelligence agencies’ wiretap authority. (Republicans shot him down on that.)
-Created a national stockpile of drugs and vaccines in case of a biological attack.
-Fought to get more counterterrorism funding. (Again, Republicans shot him down.)
-Issued a directive to have Osama bin Laden assassinated. (Unfortunately, it was limited by Reagan’s Executive Order 12333.)
-Developed strategic plan and position paper on how to destroy Al Qaeda. (Too bad he was a lame duck president at the time.)

What We Knew That Could Have Been Useful in Preventing 9/11
-Al Qaeda had plans to blow up planes over the Pacific as early as 1995. (In other words, airplanes were a viable weapon.)
-Security at airports was more lax than it was in Europe. (Gore tried upping it but got shot down.)
-There was an elevated level of chatter that nobody bothered decoding.
-The FBI in Minneapolis knew of some suspicious circumstances at flight schools. (That agent was punished for whistleblowing. Ironic, no?)
-Bush and Co. dragged their heels on meeting to discuss all of Clinton’s plans to destroy Al Qaeda until September 4th. (He had ranch duties to attend to.)
-There were people on a watch list in the country and the proper agency did not bother notifying anyone about it.
-There was a report on August 6th that bin Laden was planning a strike on the U.S.

In other words, this could have been prevented if the various agencies had actually been talking and if Bush and Co. had actually met to discuss the Clinton plans in February as had first been planned. You’d think that our government could have seen this coming if a 21 year old Religious Studies student could figure out that something was going down in August from the news stories she was reading. I even remarked to my parents while walking through San Jose International in June 2001 that it was ironic that they let me take my pocket knife on the plane with me — I cut part of my knuckle off with that sucker and it could be used as a weapon.

It’s also been pointed out by many people that Bush had been focused on Iraq since the campaign trail and that was what he focused on instead of Al Qaeda. Guess what? Saddam wasn’t the one sending those planes and none of the hijackers were Iraqi. In other words, Bush screwed up.

We can’t take back everything that happened on 9/11 — it’s in the past and all we can do is learn from the mistakes that were made. The reason I want Condi (and would prefer that Dubya and Cheney went in front of the panel as none of what they would say would impair any current stings or hunts for terrorists) in front of the panel is that someone needs to admit to dropping the ball and I know that it wasn’t Clarke. This guy was with Clinton when all this was drafted — he KNEW there was a problem and tried to do something about it.

And for the record Mike, I wouldn’t have been opposed to the U.S. going in and removing Saddam if we had been able to prove the WMD existence post-1998. We could have easily gone in for human rights reasons (and I would have backed that 100%) but I guess that wasn’t important enough to justify going in for. And for the record, the Iraqi response was basically “you got rid of our leader — booyah! Now go away!”

Worshipping at the Church of the Holy Comforter and Eating Klub

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After Jon left yesterday morning, I tuned into MPR and fell asleep listening to it. I did some devo time before I fell asleep and for the first time in years, I actually wasn’t sorry to be missing church. I was just so tired because it seems like life is non-stop for us and we’re always doing something religious or church-related. I woke up when Jon called to tell me that he was coming home and could he stop and pick anything up for me at the store?

When Jon got home, we got Dairy Queen for me (we were down to eating random combinations of things in the pantry) and headed to the laundromat to wash the comforter. It took three cycles to get everything out and after it was dry, we tossed it in the car, ran home, I tossed some khakis on, and headed to church for the klub supper. (Klub is a potato dumpling with ham in it. It’s a member of the “Scandinavian-foods-that-haven’t-been-eaten-in-Scandinavia-in-100-years-because-these-foods-were-eaten-by-dirt-poor-peasants-that-immigrated-to-America” family. )

We were assigned to be greeters for three hours but we really only needed Jon and I was trying to find something else to do. I took people to tables at first but the busy time came and I saw that we needed people to bus tables instead. I think the organizers were surprised to see me doing it in my nice khakis and everything but nobody complained and I actually had more fun doing that than greeting. I finally got to sit down and eat around 7 and everyone was watching me to see how I’d like the klub. The verdict: it’s bland (as most Scandinavian food is) but not bad with some sour cream, pepper, and salt. There was also ham, carrots, coleslaw, and various desserts. I’ve now been initiated into the cult of Scandinavian food and people are making plans for the lutefisk festival in town this summer — something I’m going to skip because lutefisk is against my religion and my dietary practices. (I try to avoid things that contain ingredients that the EPA has banned the usage of because they are corrosive and pollute large bodies of water — like Puget Sound.)

My “Sabbath” Thus Far

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I didn’t actually get to sleep last night. I had too much caffeine and I finally started drifting to sleep around 4:30 or 5 when I was awakened by a warm and wet feeling. Cullen had left me a present and I was covered with cat excrement (both kinds). I screamed for Jon and attempted to figure out exactly how I was going to deal with this given that I had to get the comforter and sheets off the bed, get some pet stain stuff on the mattress before it dried, get me cleaned up, and get the room deodorized. The comforter is sitting in a garbage bag and will be washed excessively when Jon gets home from church. The sheets went into the washer on “hot” — something I regretted when I tried to take a shower and got cold water. (There is almost nothing worse than an ice cold shower when you’re already shivering.) I did manage to get showered with a fair amount of whining and screaming (as I’m not a very sweet person on no sleep) and Jon offered to let me stay home and sleep this morning. Given that I was at the point of ripping the throat out of the first person to ask me how I was, I thought that might be a good thing (I’m sweeter now but not wanting to deal with people in any way/shape/form) and I got stuff prepped for Jon to take to church (tithe, receipts for mileage, a to-do list of what I need from my confirmands). I’m currently blogging until Jon is out of the shower and I can put the sheets through again on “hot” and curl up on the futon to go to sleep.

A Letter to Dr. Michael Newdow

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I wrote this as a sermonette for blogs4God. (It will be posted tomorrow morning.) For those of you who aren’t members of the portal or read the site frequently, feel free to let me know your thoughts here.

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Dr. Newdow:

I have read your website, heard all your arguments, and read quite a bit on your drive to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. Having grown up as a northern Californian in an atmosphere that was much more progressive than other parts of the country, I knew from an early age that I had the right not to recite the pledge — I could even name the Supreme Court ruling that gave me that right. I knew that I had the right to not say the words “under God” if I didn’t happen to believe it; but that didn’t stop me from saying it, even in the days before I actually believed in God. Even as an elementary school student, I understood that my saying of the words “under God” was not a tacit endorsement for any specific deity or even that one existed. Becoming a Christian in my teen years did not add or subtract from any feeling I had about those words in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was something con safos that we just didn’t question because we knew that we could just not say it if we had a problem with it.

As I learned more about my First Amendment right to freedom of religion, I started seeing why a lot of Christians were up in arms with the ACLU. Other faiths had the right to practice and have their symbols displayed, but my Christian holidays and symbols were banned. Prayer was not allowed in school because it might offend someone (something I did understand because I had friends of different faiths) but most people who prayer was supposed to offend were very gracious about those times when it did exist because they understood that it really meant something to some of us. I had teachers who decried the teaching of creationism in school and voraciously pursued the teaching of the theory of evolution instead. They still respected my right to believe in Genesis as long as I could understand their viewpoint and repeat it back to them on a test. In my government class, I sought to understand how the Bill of Rights affected me and how it could be used in legal decisions. I pondered a career in law but decided in favor of medicine with another switch to religious studies two years later. In Religious Studies, I looked at how religion is something that is intertwined in every aspect of our lives from our language to the way we interpret the world. One cannot merely separate themselves from religion — it is a part of our every day lives.

Having studied religion as it relates to politics and ideology, I cringed when I heard about the lunacy of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals when they sided 2-1 in your favor. It wasn’t surprising that they decided in your favor — they are overturned more frequently than any appeals court in the nation, but the decision sparked a debate over the place of those words in the Pledge of Allegiance. Democrats and Republicans were tripping over themselves to be the first to denounce the decision in a show of unity only seen before after the 9/11 attacks. That alone should have shown you the power of the change you wanted to make. Most thought that your case wouldn’t make it to the Supreme Court and would simply be overturned. I guess we underestimated your tenacity.

You have stated that “[you] have the right to be able to have my child in public school without her being indoctrinated with religious belief” and “this is supposed to be a public school and supposed to be religion-free.” I ask you then how you will handle your daughter reading the following works in her English classes:

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
The Chronicles of Narina by C.S. Lewis (the series)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Lord Alfred Tennyson
the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson

All of the above works of literature contain allusions to religion in some way/shape/form.

How will you handle your daughter’s world history classes as they discuss medieval Europe, a period heavily influenced by Catholicism? What about any Asian history which would cover Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese religions? Are you going to request that she be excused from class as they discuss the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment? What about her government class as they discuss the bases for our laws: the Ten Commandments, Englightenment and Deist principles (as these Framers you so adore quoting were Deists)?

You seem to be fond of science. What do you plan to do when discussing the origins of the world and she asks what came before the Big Bang (if you subscribe to the theory)? How will you handle it when she asks about the naming of the planets and moons as those come from various ancient mythologies? As I stated earlier, religion is entwined in everything we do. The words “good bye” are an abbreviated form of “God be with you”. Our days of the week are named for Norse gods. There is nothing you can do to escape mention of religion or some type of deity.

Another issue that has arisen from your lawsuit is the demand that “[you] want [your] belief system to be given the same weight” as other belief systems that profess faith in a deity. Did you ever consider that doing so would limit the belief systems of others? I’m not going to claim that atheism isn’t a belief system because it is: you have to be resolute in the belief that there is no deity and no higher power, making it a religion of sorts. You believe that all references to God should be removed because you do not happen to believe in one. What about the other 265 million of us who do? Do we not have a right to include words regarding our deity in our public expressions of patriotism? You can exercise your freedom of religion by not saying the Pledge and by not participating in civic events where prayers are said. You have filed lawsuits alleging that the government will not hire atheist chaplains, but you have not managed to prove that such people could exist, let alone serve the needs of the other 90% of our population who are not atheists like yourself.

You have stated with a smug and arrogant certainty that this will be a 8-0 decision in your favor. Given the statements of the judges regarding the frivolty of your claim, I wouldn’t put money on you having a victory in this case. You might think the Bill of Rights grants you freedom from religion, but you obviously mixed up your prepositions there because your freedom of religion is guaranteed for all of us.

Above all Mr. Newdow, you have failed to see that our government’s non-endorsement of a religion is the only reason you can practice yours. If we had a state church as some would like, you would likely not be allowed to profess your atheist beliefs and would likely be required to say the Pledge of Allegiance with the added words. If you want to keep your right to your beliefs, please refrain from abusing the legal system to infringe on my right to my beliefs.

C/S