Gazza and the Dakota Sioux

 

Whenever anyone asks me my opinion on Gazza, Israel or the Middle East, I say I don't know. I have no opinion.

Then, if they allow it, I ask what their opinion is.

And if they have one, I ask them how they know what they know.

Me, I've never been there, either literally or figuratively.

Just no feel for the history of the place. Never been there.

What I do know is that it's best not to form an opinion from superficial bits of information; you'd best ask, "what else?"

Just to take the most obvious example:  Abraham Lincoln has been denigrated as a phony great liberator, as a man who was, at heart a racist. One of the most shocking bits of evidence for this is the fact he signed the death warrants for the largest mass execution in American history, and none of those who were hanged were White Confederates; they were Indians, 38 of them, all hanged on a single day in Minnesota. Ipso facto: Lincoln was an Indian hater and for Lincoln the only good Indian was a dead Indian. (That was actually said by one of Lincoln's most important generals, Phil Sheridan.)

But, if you ask more questions, you discover that act, of condemning 39 men to death may not mean what it sounds like it means. 

It turns out, Lincoln was presented with something of a Sophie's choice: The local militia and the federal army had captured 2,000 Sioux and were determined to execute  303 of them and they said if Lincoln did nothing, they would kill them all.  Lincoln said he wanted nothing to do with this. It was August, 1862 and he had a little more on his mind, namely the Civil War, and he hated killing people who weren't actively trying to kill him or his troops.

Fine then, we'll execute all 300. 

Oh, all right, send me the files on the trials of these men, all 300 files. 

After sifting through this load, he came up with 39, thereby sparing 264, actually, as it worked out, 265. 

So, the moral of the story is just knowing the action does not inform, unless you know the back story.

And actually, the back story here is oddly interesting when thinking about Gazza, the Palestinians and Hamas.

In 1859, the US government persuaded the Dakota Sioux to stop hunting buffalo and leading a nomadic existence and to move into a small reservation and raise crops, but in 1862 with a drought the crops failed and the Sioux were literally starving and they were forbidden to hunt and having been displaced by these European descendants and pushed off their land, and confined to small strip of land, they erupted and in August, attacked a government station and settlers and raped and murdered hundreds of white American settlers.

A local militia was formed, and the army, being busy trying to put down the Southern insurrection, was delayed in arriving in Minnesota and by the time they did, there were hundreds of dead women, children, raped women and the Indians had taken hostages. The settlers wanted revenge and blood, and they were barely restrained and the 2,000 Indians, were women, children and some warriors. 

Sound familiar?

I've read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and a host of other books about the Trail of Tears and the depredations visited upon the Indians as the continent was cleared, farmed, crisscrossed with railroads, bridges, steamboats and all the infrastructure of a modern 19th century nation. I wish I had been the benign dictator back then, who could have helped the Indians more and spared them the horrors visited upon them, as men like Sheridan and Buffalo Bill slaughtered their buffalo herds, in an effort to drive the buffalo to extinction and thus drive the Indians to extinction, or at the very least, to reservations.

And looking at those vast, unoccupied parts of our continent, it seems to me there may have been better options for the Indians.

But, you know, I can say without apology, I'm not sorry "we," as in the European descendants, took control of the continent, and replaced a nomadic, superstitious civilization with an industrial, scientific civilization. The role the United States of America has played over the ensuing 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries could never have happened if "we" hadn't displaced those Indians.

The same may be true of Palestine and the Palestinians.

Or, maybe not. I just don't know.

I don't know if the Palestinians were just goat herders who got shoved out of some homes when a more technologically advanced civilization arrived and made the desert bloom.  Or maybe, they had homes and communities which were ruthlessly stolen from them and they responded violently, as the Dakota Sioux did.

All I know, is I don't know.

I do know, however, there are some times you don't need to know the whole back story:  When they opened those cattle cars at the concentration camps across Germany and Poland, and all those shattered, dead and dying Holocaust victims were discovered, you don't need any more background or context.

Then you get into the problem of who actually should get punished. We can be sorry for those children at Hiroshima, who may have known nothing of what their parents and countrymen did to Nanking and the rest of Asia. We can be horrified at the immolation of women and children at Dresden, who were, after all, possibly unaware of Auschwitz. 

When big, nasty atrocities are committed, the people who get mauled in the retribution are often "innocents." So it is with the people of Gaza. They may not have launched the rockets into Israel; they may not have dug the tunnels, or dug command centers underneath hospitals.  But some of them at least voted for Hamas as opposed to the Palestinian authority. 

Civilian populations may know only the joy of unity with a cause, but they may not have the foresight to see where that cause is leading. 

But, about Palestine, I'm willing to reserve judgment, for now.

Verbal People

Now there is a term, "mentor," which means someone who is usually older than you who knows stuff you do not know, and guides you to discover new knowledge, without necessarily spoon feeding or "teaching" you anything.

Aaron Sorkin, Verbal Person

So, I had a mentor, who I'll call Andrew, during the last phase of my training, who for some reason liked me, although he thought of me as a "verbal" person, which was, in his world, not at all a complement. Now, this was a man who loved Shakespeare and would drive us 90 minutes down to Stratford, Connecticut for their Shakespeare festival, and who was verbal enough to learn Spanish at the age of 32, so he could give a lecture about a new hormone he had identified to an audience in Spain.

Christopher Hitchens, Verbal Person

But, it was very apparent what he meant, when we'd be talking about a colleague in our Endocrinology department, a department devoted to laboratory work, hard science, numbers, graphs, studies, biochemistry, test tubes and lab rats, and he would say of someone who had not published work which seemed sufficiency trenchant, but who, nevertheless seemed to be moving up in the career track, toward tenure, and Andrew would say of him, with a conspiratorial smile, "Well, he's okay. He's verbal, though, you know?" 

Which was to imply there is something somehow shady, phony, not quite honest about a person whose success derives not from his graphs and papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, but through conversations, verbal agility and expressiveness.

Something about being "verbal" in Andrew's world was suspicious, not quite honest.

I liked Andrew, but I could not agree at all about this.

People with a facility for language, whether they were only good in one language, or good at learning languages seemed to me to be often the most interesting people.

Andrew valued engineers, and I could definitely appreciate the creativity and perceptual agility which made engineers so wonderful, but verbal people had their moments.

My college roommate, Nick, was one of those people who seemed to be able to acquire a new language on the way in from the airport by chatting with the taxi driver. He spoke French, Italian, Spanish, and those were just the languages I knew about, but he seemed to chat in just about anything, Swahili, for all I knew,  and he spent all his waking hours in the "reading room" lounge of the Rockefeller library, and I don't know how he ever graduated because I cannot recall ever seeing him type a paper or spend any time studying. 

Wm. F. Buckley, Jr, Verbal Person

The reading room lounge was made for Nick. I've little doubt it was the reason he chose our college. On his college tour, he must have seen the students gathered on the couches and plush chairs, in the large "lounge" room which was separated from the actual reading room.

The actual reading room was where students sat at long wooden library desks reading assigned material which various professors had put on hold, and that's where you signed out the book and read it and returned it so other classmates could come in and read it. This, obviously, was before computers and the internet--the mid 1960's--and when I tell my kids or grandkids about this, they always say, "You had only one book? And everyone had to share it?" And, when they say that, I realize I really did grow up in the stone age.

Verbal Person

But back to Nick. He sat there on the lounge side of the glass wall, on his couch. The glass wall was sufficient to completely insulate the reading room, where the real business of completing assignments from professors took place, from the noise of the lounge, which could only leak through when someone passed through the glass door in the glass wall. The lounge was a very lively pub scene without the alcohol. There were bathrooms at the back wall of the lounge, so any coed who had to use the bathroom, had to leave the reading room and make it past Nick and his merry band of talkers to get to the bathroom. 

Every evening after dinner until 9 or 10 pm, Nick held court, chatting up the various co-eds who loved to be part of his own version of Dorothy Parker's Algonquin round table, and they talked and talked. 

They talked in French about Camus who, Nick asserted, could not hold a candle to Sartre, when it came to philosophy, although he did have an attractive writing style. Or he'd launch into one of his tours of local Rhode Island accents, and when he did Cranston and then Woonsocket and then the haughty aristocrats of Newport, you could really hear the difference as you never could before. He was a latter day Henry Higgins, who could identify your place of birth by listening to you speak, and Nick could do that, if that place of birth was anywhere from Presque Isle, Maine to Darien, Connecticut. 

I was born in Washington, D.C. and Nick would dismiss that as "vanilla America dialect." He felt sorry for me, as I was speaking a language you could have got by listening to the evening news on TV.

Does Not Need to Be Verbal

And now, living in New Hampshire, I strain to catch distinguishing inflections in accents, but I cannot. People here could have grown up in Bethesda, Maryland for all I can tell from listening to them.

But their styles of speech, their individual cadences and fluency are as different as fingerprints.

My best friend, locally--I'll call her Maureen--is like listening to, or more accurately, becoming swept into a Robert Altman movie. You know, "Nashville," where there are several conversations going on at once in every scene, and so many digressions, you wonder if there is actually a story line developing, but there is, of course-- you just have to allow it to all coalesce and congeal, and meanwhile you are treated to such a wealth of color and detail you feel as if, just by watching and listening, you have developed an entire new world of friends. 

Maureen introduces you to cousins, uncles, friends of cousins, parents of children her kids went to school with, friends who got divorced who are still sparing with their ex'es, local officials, local lunatics who stand on street corners shouting into bullhorns, demented neighbors, neighbors who shoot rifles in their backyards for no apparent reason, not to mention the hawks who congregate for hawk meetings on her back porch, hummingbirds, the stray coyote, raccoons, turkeys who rise like Lancaster bombing groups and head right for her upstairs bedroom window, only to lift just enough to clear  the roof and head off to wherever turkeys head off to in November, not too far, as Maureen's cousin, Siobhan, has seen them on her walks in the Exeter woods, so you know they stay in town or nearby in the winter.

So, that's Maureen. Mesmerizing, immersive, fascinating and very, very verbal. Not an engineer.

Then there's another verbal person, who, like me, and unlike Maureen, is a fairly recent transplant to Hampton, New Hampshire, which is to say, she did not get born here or arrive in time to have gone to the Academy or Winnacunnet High School, but she's pushing 20 years in town. We'll call her Rachel. 

Whereas with Maureen, you would know it's Maureen simply by reading a transcript, for Rachel, you'd need face time, because with Rachel, half the conversation takes place in her face, mostly around her lips, before she says anything.  With Rachel, there's always a pause before she allows any declarative sentence to unfold, and you can see the beginnings of a little smile working at the edges of her lips as she edits, suppresses, processes and then delivers.

I heard about a Rachel  conversation and I did not have to be there to see her face as she delivered; I know exactly what it looked like. 

She is in court, suing her neighbor who has released his goats and pigs and sheep in a backyard expanse of land shared by about ten neighbors, which is locally referred to as the sheep meadow. The meadow is actually owned by a ninety year old man who no longer lives in his house with its backyard the sheep meadow, but is now in a nursing home on the dementia ward. The neighbor with the goats and pigs and sheep has exploited the absence of the owner of the sheep meadow by allowing his animals to maraud through the meadow and through all the backyards which blend into the meadow, and the goats in particular have demolished and eaten thousands of dollars of landscaping, shrubs, trees, flower beds.

So, Rachel is on the stand, and the defendant's lawyer asks why she hasn't sued the man who owns the sheep meadow. Why has she picked on the goat owner? whose only offense has been to allow his goats into the meadow, which is okay with the owner of the meadow, as far as anyone knows.

And here I can see the corners of Rachel's mouth flickering, as she tries mightily to not break into a beam to beam grin, as she struggles to say, keeping her voice register low, like Kathleen Turner's Jessica Rabbit, and says, "Let me understand your question here. You are asking me why I'm not suing a ninety year old demented man?"

The judge swings in his chair, and according to the transcript admonishes Rachel, "That's not how we do things here. You answer the question asked. You do not get to editorialize about the question."

He did not have to add, "You're a lawyer. You ought to know better."

Everybody knows Erica is a lawyer. She grew up in Maine and went to college there and then she applied to law schools where the winters would not require her to follow a snow plow to class. She got into Duke, but Vanderbilt offered her more money, so she went to Nashville and lived in a part of town which met her budget, but she felt she needed to buy a gun to stand a reasonable chance of survival in that neighborhood, and coming from Maine, owning a gun did not seem like a bad thing. But if she ever had to use it, you know she'd be suppressing that smile at the corners of her mouth.

Rachel replies to the judge, "Thank you, your honor. I understand your point entirely."

But of course, everyone in the courtroom has understood Rachel's point entirely.

Verbal people.

Gotta love 'em.

David Sedaris

The Sociopathic Streak in American Life

The Lord above made man to help his neighbor
No matter where, on land, or sea, or foam
The Lord above made man to help his neighbor but
With a little bit of luck
With a little bit of luck
When he comes around you won't be home

--With A Little Bit of Luck

My Fair Lady

Of course, democracy has always lived on the razor's edge of the divide between regard for the individual, his choices and prerogatives, and the community, its needs and demands.

Without government, it's every man for himself, but with communism, there is no individual, and we are all simply a flock of birds or a school of fish turning and twisting and darting as one, as a single organism.

This divide is contained in the very first amendment of Bill of Rights which says that government shall not establish any one church so the community organ, Congress, is forbidden to act to create a community church and then it says that government shall not interfere with an individual's practice of whatever religion he chooses. Both clauses (the establishment clause and the free exercise clause) guarantee the individual protection from the community.  But the current Supreme Court has turned all this on its head by using the free exercise  clause to insure that the establishment clause is eviscerated, when it ruled that the State of Maine had to pay religious schools to educate Maine students when the only school available to students living in remote areas is a religious school. Thus, the Court ensured that the state must establish religion under certain circumstances. Justice Sotomayor has said ironically, but seriously, this decision made separation of church and state unconstitutional.

So now, the Court forces on the State a religion, even when the state, as in New Hampshire, in its state constitution forbids requiring citizens' taxes from supporting any church. The Court forces individuals into supporting a church when the citizens explicitly refuse to do this.

Of course, there is nothing less rugged individualistic than membership in and loyalty to a church.  Once you join a church you may find that your own ideas are over ruled by a supreme leader, whether a Pope or an Iman, and if you are a person of faith, your own ideas are quashed by dogma.

On occasion, this adherence to doctrine can make a person anti social--as when the faithful fly an airplane into a building or strap on a suicide vest.  As Christopher Hitchens has observed: You can't get a person with a normal sense of decency to do either of these things; you need religion to do that.

There is that old image of the real American as the lone cowboy, the Marlboro man, riding the range alone, living in isolation, off the grid, dependent on no man. The rugged individual who is driving the herd of longhorns toward railheads, where the cattle will be loaded onto trains and shipped to the stockyards of Chicago, where they will enter the great maw of American capitalism and wind up, after many levels of social organization, from slaughterhouses, to local butchers, to restaurants, on the plates of American consumers as steaks or hamburgers.

 But, oh, the cowboy, he exists alone, just him and his campfire, slave to no man, lord of the saddle, driving his herd across the plains. A man of the earth and sky.

The only human beings who ever lived more off the grid than the American cowboy, you will be told, were the Plains Indians. But, course, the  Indians would be the first to tell you their life depended on a community. 

Never mind that. We are talking about life in the saddle here.

 The American cowboy needs no community, no one else. He lives off the grid, in his own bubble separated from others. That he is just one cog in a great machine of delivering hamburger meat to McDonalds in the inner city is something he never sees, never has to think about.

And if a farmer, living in glorious independence on his farm raises a herd of cattle infected with Mad Cow Disease, and the only thing standing between his 300 head of mad cows and the 20,000 people who will eat that mad cow meat and then 15 years later wind up drooling and shaking in their beds with the human version of mad cow (Creutzfield-Jacob disease) is the federal government's Food and Drug Administration and the US Dept of Agriculture's dedicated employees, well, that farmer and the cowboy and the live free and die crowd don't want to hear about it.

There was that wonderful scene in the Daniel Day Lewis film, "Last of the Mohicans" where Hawkeye, played by Lewis  is asked by Cora Munro, daughter of the British army commander,  about the slaughtered family she finds. Their bodies were strewn among the splinters and embers of the wreckage of their cabin, isolated on the frontier, the victims of a Huron war party. 

"What were they doing out here, all alone?" Cora asks. "Unprotected, exposed!"

"They could live out here by their own will, owing no tithe or tax to any king or any man. Here they could be free," Hawkeye tells her.

And there is the choice in starkest relief:  You can live free, off the grid, but then when the inevitable predator appears, you are free to die.

Small wonder, the appeal to the commonfolk of a king and his castle and army to protect them. They were happy enough to pay for protection with taxes.

Americans, we are told, preferred the frontier, preferred self reliance.

But more recently, we have that updated version of the cowboy, the Hell's Angel motorcycle man, who roars around the countryside, not exactly free from the gasoline pump, but, nevertheless, pumped up and when asked what he has to rebel against, he says, "Whaddaya got?"

The world of the pioneer, the homesteader, the cowboy, the self reliant farmer was hard and most people left it as soon as jobs and places in the cities became available. That America, mostly rural, mostly not electrified, where people got up and milked the cows no matter what was a world of individual responsibility and there was often nobody to help you. 

But that was a different America, not the industrialized, internet connected America which thrives on world trade, where Amazon delivery trucks drop off shirts and linens and tableware and tools and guns at your door with just a click of the keyboard key.

The man who chants, "Make America Great Again" and appeals to all those who feel they have lost out in the great pulsating interconnected world which has become their nation.

They want to deny any dependence on anyone else. Community is that middle school which told you you were not college material, that factory that told you you no longer had a job or a paycheck, that policeman who pulled you over for doing 90 mph in a 65 mph zone or 50 mph in a 30 mph zone. Community is that family that fell apart and shipped you out to your grandmother to be raised. Community is that jailhouse where you got incarcerated for beating up your girlfriend. Or that trailer park where your neighbors stole your clothes out of the on site laundromat.  Or that clinic where you got your very first dose of Oxycontin. 

So the guy who wants to blow it all up, drain the swamp, destroy the government, he's singing your sociopathic song. He knows where you are coming from and going to.

He's your soulmate, your good buddy, and when he gathers a huge crowd around him and gets everyone chanting "Sieg! Heil!" you thrill to all that. 

You owe nothing to anyone but that one charismatic guy up on the stage.  Soldiers do not pledge to defend the Constitution. They have no conscience to trouble them. They pledge only one thing: To obey and defend the Fuhrer. 

It's great to be an American again!

The Deep Talons of History and Hate

 

"Well, surely nobody will be so callous as to say that there is less despair among Palestinians today--especially since the terrible events in the Gaza Strip and the return to power of the Israeli right wing as well as the expansion of Jewish-zealot settler activity."

"There were also young women, some of whom, it seems, would otherwise have been killed for 'honor' reasons and who were offered the relatively painless alternative of a martyr's fate. Nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions, were making decision and deciding the days and the hours of death. And the hysterical ululating street celebrations when such a mission was successful did not signify despair at all but a creepy form of religious exaltation in which relatives were encouraged to make a feast out of the death of their own children as well as those of other people...Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Koran."

--Christopher Hitchens

Slate, July 13, 2009

The striking thing about this essay is the year it was written: 14 years ago!

He was speaking about the decline in the number of suicide bombers in Palestine at the time which had people wondering if the Palestinian complaint was cooling off, even subsiding.

Hitchens noted elsewhere, when asked about the Palestinian "cause," their displacement from land they occupied by a European immigration to the Middle East, (sometimes referred to without a shred of irony as "The Holy Land," a land of peace and love, to be sure,) but what Hitchens said was the origin story of some, if not most, nations has been one of a great crime, or, at least of injustice. 

He did not have to say specifically he was thinking of, and he may have been thinking beyond the history of Europeans displacing Indians from the East Coast of America, and from the Great Plains, until they were all rounded up and contained, and then, in many cases, slaughtered in small "reservations" or death camps.

What he was saying was that this is the plain, lamentable history of the human race, likely as far back as the displacement of the Neanderthals by the Cro Magnon homo sapiens,  but what we have to deal with in the case of Palestine, is that this is another example, and we have to deal with the reality of newcomers displacing former wardens of the land. 

The story is so old and so consistent in its fastidious replications, that we can almost substitute the proper nouns for one another. 

"Settlers" move in and are, at first, massacred by "natives" who express their displeasure by savage offenses, whether by scalping, beheading, dismembering, burning or other more imaginative forms of torture, and these horrors  are then invoked by the offended settler group as reason to regard the natives as subhuman, beastial, barbarians and any reprisal, then, is justified.

Some of the tactics have been refined over the years to accommodate the power of mass communications which the Indians of America did not have at their disposal:  the Palestinian insurgents, hiding behind the skirts of the downtrodden group, hold up their dead women and children and appeal to the conscience of those powers who may work in concert with their oppressors. And the dead women and children are victims, innocent in the sense they never threw a bomb themselves. They are victims as the children of Hiroshima and Dresden were innocent.  

Of course, in the cases of Hiroshima and Dresden, we had those counter images of the raped victims of Nanking and the children of the concentration camps, and it was widely understood the bombings were to correct those wrongs. Never mind, the children of Hiroshima and Dresden knew nothing of these offenses.

The idea of a moral force behind such atrocities has been entertained at least as far back as Lincoln, who, wondering why such horror and devastation had been visited upon his nation, asked if a righteous God had demanded that for every drop of blood drawn by the bondsman's lash had to be repaid by one drawn by the sword.

Today, the Israelis say they will not stop until they have extirpated their Hamas tormenters. They speak, without appearing to notice the problem with the word, of "extermination," of Hamas, as if you could exterminate a movement. The Israelis, of course, need no lectures about extermination.

A people, of course, can be exterminated. Nobody knows that better than the European Jews. 

But you cannot kill an idea, especially one sauteed in hate.

Boston Globe Goes Down the Rabbit Hole with Grace Rubenstein

 

Did you know that the fact that men cannot have babies, as least with current technology is a prime case of "the highly inequitable realm of reproduction"?

I had never actually thought of it this way, but it is just so unfair and inequitable that when it comes to getting pregnant and having a baby, people who happen to have been dealt the biological deal of having an XY chromosome complement are just, well, you know, screwed.

But, there is hope on the (likely distant) horizon because "emerging technologies could increase equity for anyone trying to build a biological family missing a component, be that an egg, a sperm or a uterus." 

Grace Rubenstein

I learned all this from Grace Rubenstein, who, I learned from Linked in holds a BA in psychology from Williams College and is a "podcast coach"  not to mention a journalist and editor, and who wrote the story on the front page of The Boston Globe's Ideas section about the possibility that stem cells may someday allow male homosexuals to produce egg cells with their very own DNA, and those could be used to produced a baby with the sperm of their male partners. 

Now THAT would be EQUITY!

And all this may be possible because a brilliant scientist at the Branch Lab at Harvard, Christian Kramme, who has spun off a private start up company called Gameto (from the word, gamete, get it?) is working on something called an "ovaroid" and, he says, "we're trying to even out the burden" so it's not all on the woman with XX chromosomes to bear the burden of IVF which causes "bloating, headaches, mood disruptions and painful ovarian swelling" and "costs tens of thousands of dollars. And it's a process that the female partner may suffer through even when a couple's infertility problems are caused by the male partner."

Which really was news to me, because I thought IVF was basically a way to use male sperm to inseminate female eggs in a petri dish and if the male sperm is immotile or diminished, having an egg awaiting it in a petri dish is not likely to help much.

But that's just me. Maybe some IVF clinics will try anything, if you pay them.

And, oh, about paying, Dr. Kramme says that his work is likely to succeed eventually, given enough money.  Which is to say if you give him enough money and Gameto succeeds, then, as the CEO of Gameto says, women can have the same flexibility about when they get pregnant as men have when it comes to becoming a parent. Of course, the way I heard Dr. Kramme is: "Give me money." Ms. Rubenstein seems to have missed this aspect of Dr. Kramme's "passion" for his work. It's all about equity for Dr. Kramme, making child bearing as available to men as to women--as if men would really want that. What kind of market research has he done? But, nothing as crass as simply making money could possibly motivate Gameto.

It's always a clue when a professor at Harvard spins off his work to off campus and establishes a company, which apparently doesn't bother Harvard much.

Of course, they seem to have forgotten about the part where you have to carry the pregnancy for nine months at age 44, or whenever you are ready. But wait! They are even working on stem cell uteruses which can incubate the baby outside the body making surrogate parents obsolete.

Vardit Ravitsky

And don't worry about bioethics: Vardit Ravitsky, who is president of the bioethics research institute, the Hastings Center of the University of Montreal, says, "Any technology that allows us to do things we couldn't do before, my impulse says, if we manage to do this responsibly and wisely, who gets to join the party of reproduction?"

This should comfort Hei Juankui, the Chinese scientist who produced a gene edited baby and raised the specter of "designer babies," and was sent to prison for that particular reproductive party.

It is just so unjust that women cannot have babies after menopause, that men cannot make eggs, that transexual females (i.e. those who started life out as males) cannot have babies, and oh, the INEQUITY!

Of course, every year we are told about stem cells.  Folks with diabetes type 1, who cannot make a single hormone, insulin, could theoretically be cured if only we could implant into them stem cells which had been turned into insulin producing cells pumping out insulin. And every year for the past 30 years, we have been told that stem cells which can do this are only 10 years away. That cell has been 10 years away for 30 years. 

I won't hold my breath until that stem cell miracle occurs. 

But that won't stop Gameto from raising venture capital, and it won't stop Grace Rubenstein from dreaming of that last frontier of inequity, that only women can get pregnant and it won't stop Vardit Ravitsky from celebrating the idea that anything we haven't been able to do before must be something we should do now, especially if it allows more people to join the reproductive party.

But what I'm really wondering is: Have the lay offs at the Boston Globe meant that they have fired all the editors?

I mean, doesn't anybody over there even read these stories before they are published?

Freedom From to Freedom to Government Control of Religion in Hampton, NH

 Remarks on the Warrant Article

(Again)

February, 2024

Well, here we are again.

For me, it's the third time.

Looking about this room, watching people file in, I'm guessing we have about 300 people here tonight, about 200 of whom are congregants, or friends, of the Church of the Miraculous Medal. A priest in his collar is here, and I'm betting he is connected to that congregation.

And all these folks have come to vote to in favor of recommending this warrant article which allows taxpayer funds to pay for invoices from the Church of the Miraculous Medal, Sacred Heart school: invoices for paper crowns which may used for religious pageants, or computers for streaming religious services.  At our last meeting, a year ago the Treasurer who writes the checks, Ms. Curtis, admitted she had no idea how those specific items were used, for religious ceremonies or not.

The members of the School Board have voted to endorse the warrant article, although last year they declined to answer my question about whether using taxpayer money for religious purposes bothered them. Their answer was in their votes.

Or, actually, what some of the School Board members said, by implication, is we are not sure if taxpayer dollars fund these religious icons, but we really don't care if they do. Qui Tacit Consentit--silence implies consent.

Of course, I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind tonight. What I hope is that once you have cast your ballot to invalidate the First amendment of the Bill of Rights, you might reflect on what John F. Kennedy said about not allowing trying to be a good Catholic get in the way of being a good American.

This is what John F. Kennedy had to say on this subject:

"Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured—perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again—not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me—but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish—where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."

For some years, and even now, it is possible to believe we have swung in exactly the direction JFK had hoped we would: President Biden, it turns out, is a devout Catholic and yet you almost never hear a word said about that. He is attacked for being many other things--a senile old man, a Communist, a crook, but never "a Catholic."

Nobody here tonight will argue that Sacred Heart School is not worthy of support. I myself have supported it using my own private checking account. I have no objection to supporting Sacred Heart School. I encourage others to do it. But I object to using taxpayer funds to do it.

Some have said this is all a tempest in a teapot: The amount of money whether it is $65,000 or $55,000 in a given year is a pittance compared to the overall town budget. I can only say that  single dollar of taxpayer funds is too much.

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Is this warrant article unconstitutional?  

Of course, it is, unless you subscribe to the cynical belief that what is unconstitutional or constitutional is whatever the current presiding Supreme Court says it is. 

Justice Sotomayor has said that the current Supreme Court has said that separation of church and state is unconstitutional. She places those 5 justices in the same boat as Representative Lauren Boebert who has declared separation of church and state is nowhere in the Constitution--her own willful blindness--and she has said furthermore that if it were there, it shouldn't be, because the United States is a Christian nation and always should be. And they call her Representative Boebert for a reason: she does represent her constituents. But I hope she could never represent constituents in New Hampshire.

It's a source of sadness, to see Hampton cling to this practice of sending taxpayer monies to a church which many people in Hampton love, to a school of that church which I've heard such good things about, I was moved to dip into my own bank account for that school. 

But, I have to admit, in the end, this insistence by some members of that church, which has enriched so many lives, seems to me somehow unworthy of that church, and is profoundly disappointing.