Civil Disobedience

Dear Sons:

If you are ever arrested, it damn well better be for something like this:

90-year-old, Two Pastors Arrested For Feeding Homeless

What I've Been Reading This Week

This is a long, careful, and necessary article, written for those of us struggling to make sense of the life and writings of John Howard Yoder.  His description of Christian non-violence is as compelling and beautiful as his history of coercion and harassment of female students is horrifying.

One of the things that particularly strikes me about this is the way our language about such interactions frustrates the victims of them.  One woman, for example, told of receiving a letter from Yoder that described her body in wildly invasive personal and sexual detail--so much so that the only language she could conjure to describe the experience of reading such a letter was one of sexual violation.  "I felt as if I'd been raped."

I myself am struggling to find words to describe her experience--at second-hand, obviously, and therefore inadequately, but without reference to violent sexual assault.  She wasn't touched, she wasn't penetrated, her body wasn't forced to do anything against her will.  And yet something dreadfully wrong was done to her, something that women experience far too often at the hands of men, and something that men don't tend to go through life experiencing or fearing.  The legal language of harassment wasn't necessarily available during the earliest years of Yoder's career, but even today that language seems insufficient.

But using the language of actual sexual violence is problematic for at least two reasons.  First, it does, I think, some injustice to women who have experienced sexual assault, the way it does injustice to survivors of the Holocaust to have non-genocidal situations described as holocausts.  And second, it lets men give themselves permission to dismiss women's accounts of such experiences: "Seriously?  You got an explicit letter and you felt raped?  Gosh, you women sure take these things way too seriously!"

Still, somewhere between "he sent an inappropriately explicit letter to me" and "I felt like I'd been raped," there is a great yawning void in our language, and women are continually struggling against it.  The absence of language to describe what sexual harassment does to its victims (and even the word "harassment" has proven wildly inadequate to the job) only helps those who commit it.

By happy coincidence, I read the above article along with this one, about male privilege in the church.  The writer does an admirable job trying to put words to those experiences that do not rise to the legal definition of harassment and yet constantly hound women in the workforce.  While it would have been nice to have a #11 (You will go through most of your days neither fearing nor actually experiencing inappropriate sexual or personal barrages passed off as "jokes," constant references to your sexual availability, or having a colleague "accidentally" play porn at you when you walk into his office for a meeting), it is, I hope, helpful for men to think about what it would be like to have their work constantly qualified with reference to their gender.  No one ever says, "He's the best male theologian we have on staff," or "you're a really good theologian, for a man."

On the other hand, I have to say that very, very few of my experiences of being at a real disadvantage because of my sex have taken place in an ecclesial context.  I felt far more vulnerable to men's beliefs and behaviors the few times I've worked in entirely non-religious, male-dominated contexts than I have in the church or in church-affiliated schools.

The Poor You Will Always Have With You. (Just not at your doorstep . . .)

Well, that's one way to respond to the Lazarus at your gates (doors).

When we lived in Paris, there were three or four homeless hangouts in our area (the second-chic-est area in the city). During the summer, the police would come around to all of them every day and shoo away anybody that was sitting panhandling.

But during the winter, one person took up residence in each of the areas, complete with sleeping bag and a few small possessions, and the police came around every day and said hi, and sometimes brought coffee.

One of them was right in front of a music school, even.

I hope the fact that the Brits thought of it first will keep Paris from ever doing anything like this. I hold out no hope for the US.

How Many Clueless Men Does It Take To Host A Radio Show?

I'm so glad so very many other people are commenting on the sheer stupidity evidenced by these two children masquerading as men.

It saves me the trouble.

Well, since it's not out of my way, I'll go ahead and state the obvious:

Sure, dudes, let's go ahead and make women responsible for cutting open their own bodies to avoid you missing a baseball game.

I'm sure your children, too, (will) appreciate hearing that you think they should schedule their neediness around your professional lives.  Being born surely takes a back seat to 1/162ndth of a single baseball season.  Thanks, Dad, for putting that into perspective!  I'll mark you down as a "no," then, for high school and college graduation, shall I?  And I won't dare to plan a summer wedding, don't you worry!

You know, now that you put it this way, I'm sure all parents will be nodding in agreement, that parenting is exactly just like that--you can arrange every detail of a child's life, from conception onward, to suit yourself.

Also, no one can respect a man that stops doing a life-or-death activity--you know, playing baseball--to do something stupid like hold his wife's hand after she, you know, does nothing of any importance whatsoever.  Real masculinity requires, positively obliges, men to be ready to dismiss at a moment's notice and for any reason, anything done, or valued, or said by people with ovaries.

And it's totally true that biology teaches us something important about ethics: men don't have boobs, so they're pretty much useless after they donate their sperm.  They can get on with more important things, like playing baseball.  Sure thing.

Yes, you're the one "putting food on the table" with your Really Important Work.  The fact that I can produce food with my very body--not important.  At all.  You're feeding us.  It's all you.

Also, the thing where you endanger women by casually tossing around your disgusting opinions about their bodies and their medical care so that you can have a cute little reputation as a "controversial" commentator--totally okay.  With all of us.

I'm definitely pointing you out to my sons as role models to follow.

Oops.  I think I may have gotten a little sarcastic there.

Despite the above sarcastiplosion, the idiocy, the ignorance, the appallingly willful and unabashed misogyny evidenced by these two men is not really the thing that troubles me about this video.

What troubles me more is the possibility that this will shift the conversation about child-bearing and -rearing toward the collectively-bargained rights enjoyed by a few privileged men and away from the lived experience of women who still cannot afford to exercise what few and inadequate protections they have.

Working mothers will hear every one of Esiason's and Carton's contemptuous dismissals of their needs as mothers, every one of their contemptuous rejections of a father's role in nurturing children, and gnash their teeth at being told by one more pair of assholes that it's their job to breastfeed the babies, alone, while their husbands go off and do "real" things, things that matter, things that put food on the table.

But they will also hear, in the background, everything contemptuous thing their co-workers and bosses say about "breeders," about women who take maternity leave at "inconvenient" times for the company, about women who "owe the profession" a single-minded dedication that leaves no room for child-bearing at all (much less child-rearing).

(I'm not making this up.  I've actually been told that it's my job as a woman in academia to delay childbearing until I have tenure, or forgo it entirely.  I've been told that it's what I owe the profession, and especially other women in the profession.  I mean "been told" literally, here.  Like, by a person, speaking to me.  In those exact words.)

They'll read all the articles cheering Daniel Murphy for doing such a "sweet" and "important" thing as showing up for his child's first week of life, and they'll remember all the times they, as working women, were criticized for doing the same thing, or for their failure to do so.

Women are criticized by traditionalists for failing to handle all the nurturing on their own, and they're criticized by supposed progressives for failing to protect The Company from the inconvenience of their functional reproductive system.  (I guess they're supposed to be grateful for the sort of "progress" that allows them to work for pay at all, and not pay attention to such things as maternity leave, lactation accommodation, and health insurance for dependents.) 

I was extremely grateful to my colleague at [my former college] for covering my classes for me the first two weeks of the spring semester after the birth of my third son, because it allowed me to have a full month's maternity leave.

But the insanity--the stark, raving insanity--that Amos's birth will forever in my mind be linked with all of the professional obligations he didn't interfere with (fall semester exams, grades due, seven Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services)!  I swear, I am not making this up: I have never once spoken of Amos's birth without joking about him "helpfully" waiting until the day after Christmas to be born "because of all of our pastoral responsibilities."

And the insanity--the stark, raving insanity--that I've met actual, real, live, educated, professional women who have told me that they went back to work within a week of giving birth because they "couldn't afford" to take maternity leave!

Please hear me: I am among the privileged few in the world, even if you can't tell it from my bank account.  My colleagues are other privileged women--women with terminal degrees in their field, with professional clout, with publications and numerous speaking invitations per year, women who've been on NPR, even.

If my colleagues and I have to worry about this . . . what on earth is going on in the rest of the world?

No.  I don't get worked up by the fact that a pair of idiotic men said some idiotic things about men taking paternity leave.

But I am worried that a bunch of men will use this as an excuse to spend their time wagging their tongues what wealthy men do with their legal rights and collectively-bargained contract protections, and ignore--once again, still, always--the needs and rights and near-constant vulnerability of women and children.

Penalizing the Wrong Thing

It seems that the only people still struggling with institutional expressions of moral courage are the Catholics.

This tends to cause kerfuffles, because moral courage always involves sacrifice and risk. Pissing people off is not a certain sign of being right, but it is a not-uncommon result of the exercise of moral discipline (self-discipline or imposed discipline).

One recent kerfuffle was caused by a Montana Catholic school's decision to fire an unmarried teacher who became pregnant.  The evidence of her having violated their moral turpitude clause was plain for all to see, and so they acted on it.

The temptation, of course, is to say that the school was in the wrong because they were being mean, judgy McJudgersons.  This is a response that implicitly condemns any exercise of institutional moral discernment, that makes all moral decisions not immediately and forensically related to work performance private, individual ones.  This is the default practice of virtually every institution in the country, even those that are explicitly religiously affiliated.  (The UMC has a hard time firing pastors for moral turpitude, much less secretaries or daycare workers, and churches whose well-liked pastors have been terminated for having multiple affairs with many different congregants bear resentment against the mean, judgy denomination for decades.  Firing pastors for incompetence is a near impossibility, but that's another story.)

I honestly don't think that argument is a helpful one, even if I am sympathetic with the underlying concern--that firing this woman is the wrong response.

Cathleen Kaveny has written this lovely and careful piece responding to the issue and has offered a better line of thought.

In it, she highlights a crucial problem with the exercise of moral turpitude clauses: only women can be found guilty.

This isn't really true, and Kaveny doesn't make the mistake of putting it that way.

It is functionally true, however.   The Catholic church--themselves almost the last remaining institution with a moral backbone--have retreated from virtually every issue but that which makes them the most unpopular: sexuality.  And in that realm, since the beginning of time, there has only been one gender whose very body bears the incontrovertible evidence of sexual sin.

Only women can get pregnant.

And pregnancy is the only "proof" that cannot be hidden or ignored.  Men can be forced to take paternity tests, of course, though few institutions have gotten around to remembering that and fewer still manage to overcome their general reluctance to give a man a reason to file a lawsuit.  (Do women file fewer lawsuits?  Probably.  There is certainly less institutional fear of those who might.)

But a big, fat belly thrusts itself into our communal consciousness just as surely as it thrusts itself into a room before its duck-waddling bearer can catch up with it.  Institutions can no more forgo institutional responses to the inconvenient facts of women's reproduction than seventy-year-old men and women can forgo rubbing pregnant women's distended bellies.

So sweet Miss Susie walks into school one September with a big, big belly, and the school cannot ignore that problem, the way they can ignore the Lamborghini Mr. Michael very sensibly keeps at home or the bruises Mr. John's wife is careful to hide or the income Miss Janie doesn't report and tithe or whatever else violates their moral convictions.

And, of course, Miss Susie's paramour suffers nothing, unless they were caught, as Dr. Kaveny puts it, canoodling in the broom closet at school.

So the burden of these punishments are shared unfairly, and the community learns the wrong thing: it is pregnancy that is punished, not extra-marital sexuality as such.  Getting caught--and only women can get caught--is the problem.  Pregnancy is the problem.

This ought not be.  Pregnancy is not a problem.  It's not evidence of sin.  It's evidence of life.  It's evidence that God continues to give the gift of children to us, even in the midst of--even by means of!--our sinful condition.

This is exactly the mistake that Isaac's school's Health program makes, and it suffers from the same pedagogical idiocy: it teaches that pregnancy is the problem to be avoided.

One exercise in particular jerked my chain.

Isaac was required to calculate the financial burden a child imposes its first two years of life.

I thought we were having a great moment of communication, until I realized what was going on.

"Hey, Mom, how much do Amos's diapers cost?"
"Well, we use some cloth, so it's hard to say exactly, but it's about $35 a month for the disposables."
"When did he switch to regular milk?  And is formula more expensive than milk?"
"Oh, yes, formula is, like, twenty-five dollars a week, if you're formula-feeding full time, and that's if you're lucky enough not to need the special needs stuff.  You switch to milk at one year, but the amount they still need isn't exactly trivial."
"What are other things babies need?"
"Um . . . wait a minute . . . why are you asking?  Is there an urgent need here that I should be aware of?"
"Health class."
"Oh.  Oh.  Mmm."

The assignment was designed to discourage teen childbearing, but it did so by presenting a baby as a costly, burdensome thing.  It was one of the few assignments that spoke a language teens can understand, and it was all oriented toward making a baby seem like a bad thing.

Isaac didn't understand why I started throwing a temper tantrum at the end of his assignment.

"Okay, son, what's the total cost you've come up with?"
"$13, 850.  But the website says that I didn't include living quarters or travel expenses, which I would need because I'd be on my own."
"What?"
"I'd need to get my own place."
"ARE YOU FARGLING KIDDING ME?!?!"
"I mean, you know, some parents would . . ."
:hostile stare:
"So, uh, that's, uh, why I didn't even think to include the cost of the apartment, because, uh, I knew you and Dad would . . . uh . . . be . . . so, $13K.  Pretty pricey."
"Okay.  So.  You're in your car.  You're on a date.  Your girlfriend is with you.  It's dark out, and the windows in the back seat are tinted."
"Um, Mom, I don't like where this is going. . ."
"Do you really think to yourself, 'Gosh, I'd like to, but this could cost me $13K'?  Is that really going to stop you?"
"Well . . . it . . . maybe . . ."
"No.  It won't.  The only time you're going to think about $13K is when the little test strip comes back with two pink lines on it, and you think, 'Gosh, I could spend $300 now, or $13K later.'"
"I would never!"
"Well, you might now.  Now that they've frakking given you a reason to!!!!!"

It focused on disincentivizing child-bearing (or, really, child-rearing), not teen sexuality.  Having a baby is costly.  Having sex isn't.

And, as if to drive the point home, there was no corresponding financial activity related to STDs.  No calculating how much getting HPV or HIV or gonorrhea or chlamydia costs you.  Oh, they mention STDs.  The medical aspects.  But not the financial costs.

The part that is simply and entirely costly and painful and burdensome is noted, but the burden is not demonstrated in the terms teens understand.  (They understand money, because they all want iPhones and candy bars and cars with full gas tanks.  That's why the price-out-a-baby exercise works.  They do not understand sickness and death.  They think only old people get sick and die.  "You can get this disease, and it's really bad, so use a condom.")

But the child that might result is reduced to a single, uncomplicated, and entirely negative quality--its costliness.

And so they teach my son that getting pregnant is a bad thing and worth avoiding and preventing and "fixing" if you get unlucky.  They don't teach him that teen sexuality is a dubious pleasure at best and worth forgoing.

They also didn't bother to teach him that his parents are actually good people to consult when he is confronted with such issues, but I suppose that cannot be remedied.

Let this serve as your notice, though: Parents whose children must take school-based health classes, do not neglect to correct all the misapprehensions your children will pick up in those classes, but especially, most especially, the one that you are not going to be on their side if they "get caught."

Let them know that getting pregnant is not the bad thing, the thing to be avoided, the thing worth punishing.

Let them know that there's a difference between a serious thing--which having a child most assuredly is--and a bad thing--which having a child most assuredly is not.

Let them know you love them.  And that they will screw up.  And that you will still love them.

Imagination

I've been Netflixing some over the break.

That's a verb now.  (I've declared it to be so.)

Netflixing describes that sort of watching that has been enabled--or, rather, encouraged--by the patterns of availability of online streaming of television shows.  (I've been doing it over Amazon Prime, just as much as over Netflix, but we'll give the tip o' the hat to Netflix.)

One can't watch the current season of one's favorite shows on Netflix, so one dredges the catalog of available shows and wonders what calculus of licensing fees, popular demand, and bandwidth capacity led to, for example, the choice of only seasons four and five of Inspector Lewis being available, while the entire run of Midsomer Murders is on tap; Psych but not The Mentalist; or only two or three Jane Austen adaptations at a time (and never the best ones).

Still, one finds a series and watches it from beginning to end--in binges, if it catches one's eye or if one has some obligation to avoid, over a more prudent time span if it is merely enjoyable.

One could do this in the olden days, too, back when DVDs still existed.  But everything old is made new, and we'll let the young'uns believe that they invented glut-viewing.

I've been watching British mysteries, because I've already watched the entire run of West Wing (twice) and Firefly (seven times), and because when a nation decides it would rather have four well-written episodes per year than twenty-two episodes of, well, Castle, they do tend to crank out some decent stuff.

Also, the cliches of a different culture are always new to you, for at least the first several seasons, and even cliched and hackneyed dialogue sounds very fine in at least three-fourths of the different British accents I can more or less identify now.

In any case, once I started to get a feel for British cliches, I noticed one standout among some of the older shows.  They almost never end in armed confrontations, and even when they do, the arms rarely get used.

It's a very interesting contrast to American cop shows, which may, for the first season or two, play with different ways of creating tension and resolving the final show-down.  But if a show survives into the third season, you'll find the number and intensity of shoot-outs increasing dramatically as the series wears on.  (They run out of more interesting things to do, I guess.)

But Inspector Lewis, Inspector Barnaby, Inspector Lynley--they don't carry guns.  So they can't wrap up a case with a nice, satisfying shoot-out.  Oh, there's the odd villain threateningly waving around a weapon, the occasional deranged mass murderer whom the plucky detectives must confront without recourse to anything but their wits and their words.

Interestingly enough, British TV writers can come up with words for that sort of moment.  (The few times the writers of Castle have tried have been painfully cliched and strained the limits of suspended disbelief.)  Perhaps constraint--not being able to write in a shoot-out--is a goad to creativity rather than a limit to it.

Perhaps if writers of American crime shows set themselves a constraining goal--"Hey, let's write five episodes this season where the cops don't draw their weapons!"--they might come up with something better than "She wouldn't have wanted you to do this, would she?" at the pivotal moment.

Whether artistic creativity might be a goad to other sorts of creativity--the moral and intellectual resources to do something other than kill threatening individuals when they come our way--is another question entirely.

Or perhaps not.

Trinitarian Theology for Third Graders

Mimi: "Okay, wait, so they don't have different functions?"

Sarah: "No. That's Modalism.  The only thing you can say about the Father that you can't say about the Son and the Spirit is that he is the Father.  But they're all the Creator, they're all the Savior.  All those things that they do, they all do."

M: "Okay.  Okay, I think I'm getting this.  So when it says that Jesus was the only one to die on the cross . . ."

S: "That's right.  That's the only exception, because only the Son took on a human body that could die.  So only Jesus died on the cross."

M: "Okay.  So only Jesus died on the cross, but Jesus and the Father and the Spirit were all creators together--"

S: "The Son, not Jesus.  Jesus hadn't been born yet.  You can't call him Jesus before then.  There's no Jesus in the Old Testament."

M: "Well, the Son was around, but he hadn't been revealed until the birth of Jesus."

Theo: "Mimi, you've got to get it right.  They talked about the Messiah in the Old Testament, but Messiah didn't appear until God sent him to Mary, and she named him Jesus because that's what the Angel Gabriel told her to name him.  So there's no Jesus in the Old Testament."

S: "Gosh, Theo, that's very accurate."

T: "It's because I have a third-grade Bible.  That's why I can know so much."

Third-grade Bibles for everyone, then, shall we?

On Reading Hard Things

I've mentioned my friend's blog here before.

I've recommended it because it's a good read, but it's a hard read.

But perhaps that "but" is out of place.  It's a hard read.  And that's part of why it's a good read.

Not all hard reads are good reads.  Heidegger was a hard read, but I never really broke past the "hard" to any sort of "good."  Nietzsche was a hard read, but I'm pretty sure Augustine already said it all, and better.  Derrida was a hard read, but I'm very sure my time was better spent reading Sarah Coakley.  I remember picking up some book at the library--I can't remember the title or author--that was hard because it was the memoir of an adult survivor of childhood abuse.  I think it was meant to break on through to "good," because the woman did survive.  But she was still so profoundly broken that I was left with nothing to do but weep for her.  Her very survival was nihilistic, dead.

But some hard reads are good reads.  Thomas is a hard read, until you read him enough that he's all of a sudden wonderful and not hard at all (until you read some Thomists, who manage to make Thomas almost impossible to read).  David Bentley Hart is a hard read if you don't have your unabridged OED handy, but if you persevere, you learn something, and it's nice to be able actually to feel your brain cells growing.

I don't think I've done nearly enough hard reading lately.

Except for my friend's blog.  My friend's blog is a hard read, because honesty is hard.  It's a hard read because suffering--real suffering, the kind you don't normally want to blog about--is hard.  It's a hard read because living in a world where babies don't always outlive their mamas is hard.

Many of the things I read that talk about hard things don't talk about them in the way that hard things deserve.

They move too quickly to a moral, to advice, to victim-blaming or -shaming of the sort that is meant to make us readers feel good about ourselves, to feel confident in our ability to avoid that sort of trouble, to write our internal story so that we are all always the hero who lives happily ever after, to assert our intellectual dominance over whatever biological or historical or theological reality may hold sway over us.

They give us the option of continuing on in our daily lives without really having to confront life.  The opiate of the masses is dispensed in blog entries and hip "news" outlets, from popular pulpits and the lecterns of elite universities, through moralizing television and patronizing cinema, and it consists in the experience of playing around with the idea of death just long enough to titillate us (whether with our fear of it, like a roller coaster, or with our lust to control it, like porn).  And then we are herded off to the moral, to the political platform, or to the smug contemplation of our superiority over those backwards folks who need the comfort of a moral or a political platform--children, all of us, doing our assigned worksheets after the teacher's lesson, busywork to keep us from the dread moment of contemplation.

There is nothing titillating about my friend's blog.  There's no playing around there.  Honesty like that does not allow for busywork after.

Active (Shooter) Response

One of the faculty workshops I attended this week--the last week before classes begin--was called Active Shooter Response Training.

I will admit that I did not quite appreciate either how forward-thinking and proactive my college was being in offering this training or what I might learn from it.

I did, by the end of the talk, come away with a renewed appreciation for the all-but-impossible task our law enforcement and public safety officers face and a feeling that I would not be entirely bereft of hope should the unthinkable occur.

I would encourage anyone to take advantage of such training, if the opportunity presents itself.

One tiny little niggling doubt, however, remains in my mind after the event.

One thing the presenter did over and over and over was to downplay, even ridicule, the possibility that someone who was engaged in or about to start a Columbine-type assault could be talked out of his or her plan.

I found it providential that this occurred the exact same day of our training:

Gunman Talked Into Surrendering By His Hostage

I understand how unlikely this sounds, and I appreciate that the probabilities are with the gentleman that did our training.  People who become sufficiently unhinged to plan and execute large-scale assaults like this are not usually open to rational argument or pleas for mercy.

But perhaps they are still open to love.  Perhaps they can still be reached by prayer.

Perhaps a people that still remembers to pray for the violent, the criminally insane, the sinner, the abuser--perhaps that people can still reach the violent, the insane, etc., when no one else can.  Perhaps a people that prays not, "God, please don't let me die," but "God, please help me to help him," perhaps that people has more resources to hand than those who are merely trained how to survive an assault.

Whose Will Be Done?

"Mommy, can you set the timer for one minute?"

"Well, sure, dear.  What for?"

"I asked God for a Creature Power Suit with Creature Power Discs, and I told him that one minute from now in the mailbox would be a good time."

"I have no idea what you just said."

"Creature POWER Suits, Mommy, like from Wild Kratts."

"I . . . don't . . . these are . . . can you just explain a little . . ."

"MOM.  I asked GOD . . . for some CREATURE. . . POWER. . . SUITS. . . like in the P . . . B. . . S . . . SHOW.  Where they rescue animals with their CREATURE P - O - W - E - R - S."

"Ohhhhhhh.  Well.  I . . . um . . . Okay.  Well, let me know what happens when the minute is up."

[three minutes later]

"So, Theo, anything in the mailbox?"

"No, just mail.  But I told God that while you were making lunch was an okay time, too.  So maybe it'll come later."

"Okay.  So, what are you going to do if God doesn't give you this Creature . . . thing?"

"Mom.  It says in the Bible that God will give you whatever you ask for."

"Yes, it does.  But it also says that you should ask according to what God wants, not just what you want.  You have to ask in the right way, with the right heart, not just tell God to give you stuff."

"I said please.  I was very polite."

"Oh.  Well, uh, carry on, then.  Let me know what happens."