A Christian about Social Justice and Historic Guilt

I have been away over the weekend and a considerable work backlog, so all I do for now is retrieving this noteworthy commentary by Bruce Church from the blog bilges.

You said "America isn't doing too badly in balancing...personal freedom" and "social justice." I can tell you don't live here. It's disgusting. Here's what my commute is like. I drive home from work and see in the exurbs and countryside many McMansions and super-sized houses that must cost a fortune to heat, and then I pass the outskirts of a rundown neighborhood, and a fire station that has a sign saying there's a benefit for some family that has a child with cancer. In other words, the family already burned through its health insurance coverage fighting the cancer, and the family is bankrupt, and is in need of a donations from the community so they don't get evicted from their lowly home.

When Reagan was president, the top tax rate was lowered from 40% to 28%, and now it might be back up to 36%. What happened is many people got rich since the 1980s, but the poor remained poor. Women getting educated and entering the workforce didn't help the situation as one might suspect it would have, since the high earners tended to marry the high earners, making the couple twice as rich, thereby serving to increase the gap between rich and poor.

Because of this, the income inequity has increased in the US as measured by the Gini Index, so now the US ranks along with South American countries that have long been notorious for their poor/rich divide and lack of social mobility. This leads to a lot of crime since the poor on one continent sell drugs to the rich on another continent.

For the poor in the US, it's increasingly hard to get higher education and to break out of the generational poverty cycle.

The latest health care debate has exposed just how many people have vested interests in the status quo, and exactly how callous they are toward the poor.

Another area I've seen where the callousness is apparent is critics of aid programs don't like it that if the poor get extra money, they spend it on "sugary drinks." So they'd even begrudge the poor the simple luxury of Kool-Aid! See the links at the bottom of this post for more on that.

I seems to be bothered by the inequities of life more than other people, perhaps because I read my Bible and see that God's takes notice of, say, evicting a widow from her house in order to join houses together, the ancient version of todays McMansions that dot the American exurbs and countryside. I don't think God cares about how such deeds are laundered and impersonally done through financial "vehicles," and made to look extra-legal because the local sheriff is the one doing the evicting.

In the same way, I'm bothered when I read about Germans having great health care and spa treatments while Holocaust survivors are picking through garbage cans in Israel to get enough to eat. Also, the Germans and other European nations leave it up to America to defend the world while knowing America can only afford to do so at the expense of its poor.

One reason the US hasn't had nationalized health care is the people who would otherwise advocate on behalf of the poor already have excellent coverage via their union, or their state or church employers. Thus, pastors, union leaders and politicians actually come out against nationalized health care because they want to preserve their topnotch health care packages. For example, Mayor Rudy Giuliani of NY came out against nationalized health care because the US had slightly better prostrate cancer survival rates than the UK. What he didn't say was he survived his prostrate cancer thanks to being covered by NY City's health care package, something the average person in the US doesn't have access to. Another example is union leaders held up "Obama-Care" for months because they didn't want their "Cadillac" health care plans taxed, meaning their $25,000+ per year health care plans would be subject to a luxury tax. The compromise that got the unions' reluctant support is Cadillac plans won't have a luxury tax slapped on them until 2018. I've heard pastors say that Obama-Care will make US health care like Cuba's because more people will have access to good health care, yet the number of doctors and nurses will not increase for some years, and so the resources will be spread thin.

I don't believe in any racial component to guilt, however, there is a national and religious component to collective guilt. Also, I don't believe in trying to correct history and ruining the economy in order to make reparations, but I am for making amends where possible, and being sensitive about past historical wrongs.

I think that members of Lutheran and Catholic churches especially must admit that there is a long history of antisemitism in those churches, and that not only was this a factor in the Holocaust coming about, but it turned many people who could have stopped the evil into bystanders and even abettors. Also, in the Eastern Churches there was much Antisemitism, so in Ukraine and other places, no one put a stop to the mass killing of Jews, not even warning Jews to arm themselves or flee.

Members of nations and churches need to assume their share of the collective guilt associated with their respective church or nation, whether he/she, or his/her relatives, immigrated to a nation after the fact, or even a hundred years after the fact.

Immigrants should not be like many Muslim immigrants who, for example, move to Germany or Australia, and then disavow any connection to the dishonorable chapters of that nation's history, and have an attitude of moral superiority over the natives of their host nations. They also deny that by becoming a member of a host nation, they are in any way unfairly advantaged by past historical wrongs of that nation, and deny that they should make any personal sacrifice to make amends with the disadvantaged or victimized groups. (In the case of Australia, I'm talking about their former Aborigine policy).

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Links:

People would begrudge poor even "sugary drinks":

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22sugary+drinks%22+%22deserving+poor%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://jezebel.com/5341698/are-women-the-new-deserving-poor

They add that the world's poorest families spend ten times as much on "alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts" as they do on education, and that "if poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries."
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Reference Giuliani's cancer:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/spotlighthealth/2002-10-14-giuliani_x.htm
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Gini Index:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Gini_since_WWII.svg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.png

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908770.html

Thank you, Bruce, for this. I'll be back later.

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Foo Foo and Miss Piggy Go Islam Critics

Pamela Geller ("Fearless, intelligent, beautiful -- Pamela Geller wears her Supergirl costume well ... is a dynamo of energy and a paragon of courage and fearlessness." Spencer about Geller) and Robert Spencer ("Robert Spencer is the leading voice of scholarship and reason in a world gone mad. If the West is to be saved, we will owe Robert Spencer an incalculable debt." Geller about Spencer) -- Yes, we cackled too! -- are showing backbone again. Their self-effacement and humility is legendary:

A Statement from Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer of the Freedom Defense Initiative

It has come to our attention today that Martin Mawyer, who had been scheduled to appear with us at the premiere of Mawyer's film [I guess that is Wilder's film] Islam Rising in Los Angeles on May 1, has had attributed to him a series of offensive anti-gay statements made in 1997. While we don't expect to agree on all issues with those with whom we collaborate on anti-jihad efforts, we do not wish to give the impression that we endorse, agree with, or approve of in any way the statements attributed to Mr. Mawyer. Nor do we wish to give the impression that Geert Wilders or the Freedom Defense Initiative approves of such statements.

The Freedom Defense Initiative, like Geert Wilders, stands for the human rights of people of all creeds, colors, and sexual orientations against the global jihad, which works daily to impose the discriminatory and brutal strictures of Sharia upon free people. Sharia denies basic rights to women, non-Muslims, and gays, and exalts its brutal and inhumane system as divine law. In standing for human rights in this way, we consider it of utmost importance that our message not be clouded by other agendas, as we labor to build a broad coalition of free people who hold a wide variety of perspectives on other issues, united against the slavery of Islamic law.

In order, then, to avoid creating any false impressions about our agenda and goals, or those of Geert Wilders, we have decided to cancel the event in Los Angeles on May 1.

Well, what can one say? First, that this is so embarrassingly pompous, blantantly self-serving, mind-bogglingly dumb, and flatulently bumptious that it merits a full re-print here.

Second, it is interesting to notice that the Innocents Abroad, who had had no compunctions about rubbing shoulders with European fringe-Nazis, are getting their underwear in a knot about a homophobic slur. What did Mawyer say exactly? A Google search containing "Martin Mawyer anti-gay statement 1997" leads to this:

In 1997, after Ellen Degeneres came out as a lesbian on her TV sitcom, Mawyer accused her of "DUMPING HER FILTHY LESBIAN LIFESTYLE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF YOUR LIVING ROOM!! ... If we allow the tidal wave of gay and lesbian smut to continue to pour into our homes, it will utterly consume us in no time at all!"

Mawyer had been unknown to me so far, which makes it easier for me to reduce my statement to what he said. Every word is true and amply proven over the thirteen years since Mawyer spoke them out, which leads to point three and the question in which world Geller and Spencer are living. Have Tweedledum and Tweedledee never twigged that there is a world of difference between not stringing homosexuals to cranes on one hand and letting them corrupt and insult our values, tastes and sensibilities by the swinish, aggressive public displays of their sexuality on the other?

Those ostentations are not "vibrant", "colourful" or the expression of an "alternative lifestyle", they are debased, rotten to the core, degenerated and shameless and a culture that tolerates, even lauds, something like that as an expression of progress deserves to vanish from the face of the earth.

Have Tweety and Sylvester never sensed a whiff of how purpose- and successfully the "gay" lobby seeks to abuse the repressive powers of the state to silence all expressions of opposition to their agenda? How every concession is met with new complaints and demands? That "equal rights" are the last thing they want? How an unremarkable majority silently endorses an aggressive political leadership? How frighteningly similar that strategy is to the way Muslims reach their goals?

Fourth, something fishy may be going on there. Even Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels can't really be QUITE that dumb and dumber and believe that their Freedom Defense Initiative will have the slightest influence of the Dutch elections and that anybody will notice favourably that they threw for Wilders' sake an obscure American right-wing Christian conservative under the bus. So Martin Mawyer made 13 years ago some pretty outspoken anti-"gay" statements. He should have made quite a few since, or at least that is the impression I got from my brief acquaintance with that man. Why the 1997 quote? Why side with him in the first place? His general views are well known or so it seems.

But then, maybe it is really just another sort of arse-and-elbow-confusing gaffe, like the Pro-Köln one, when Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders' great confidante, must have failed to ask him why HE did NOT attend the rally. Possibly, she finally and too late, namely after she had consented to attend, had a word with him and that made her and Spencer cancel their attendance, and not the fear of dreadful Charles Johnson of LGF-infame. Somehow, things like this tend to end in some sort of terrible stupidity-induced cataleptic ennui.

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The pictures above are from "Love Parades" and "Gay Pride" events all over the world.

I recommend the following reading from this blog for some background information:

About the 2009 "Pro Köln" dustup:

• 02/17: What Americans don't twig
• 04/26: Innocents Abroad
• 04/30: The Unembarrassables
• 05/10: Loose Apes with Razors
• 05/10: Shameless Cologne
• 05/13: The "Fission Fungus"
• 05/15: Rent-A-Nazi
• 10/02: German Patriot now Muslim

About a crucial American fallacy:

Dear American conservative! Did you know that there is a 99,9% probability that somebody you call appreciatively a German (or Austrian, for that) patriot will hate your guts?


"Gay" politicking:

• Islam's Intolerance Is the Fault of the West
• Volker explains what makes the world go round
• All Rights for Everybody
• Importance they don't possess and attention they don't deserve

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You Go Geert!

Today, elections for the town- and city councils are held in Holland.

The politically correct hyaenae are all in a flutter.

This is the result of a Google News search for "Wilders Rechtspopulist". Rechtspopulist can be translated as "right wing populist", but I have a hunch that the latter has in English more the ring of "popular", "common touch" or "grassroots". In German, it's exclusively used to describe a demagogue.

Which is, of course, fatuous, because a demagogue tells people what they WANT TO hear, whereas Wilders tells people what they DO NOT want to hear.

You will recognise some terms, I think. "Rechts" is the ever-recurring "right wing". Germans won't recognise a liberal because they don't understand the concept. They long to be anally penetrated by totalitarism, and, after Nazism and Communism, Islam is just the option. 20 years of a totalitarism-free Germany is more than enough! In that spirit the term "Islamhasser" ought to be seen, which means, not too surprisingly, "Islam hater", and that is about the worst thing one can call a politician here.

Which tells, of course, nothing about Wilders but all about the German mainstream.

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