Midlife Meditation

Neither of these men belongs in public office. Of all the candidates Republican presidents have nominated to the Supreme Court in my lifetime, Brett Kavanaugh is the least qualified. That list includes both Robert Bork, whose nomination was withdrawn once his then-too-extreme opinions became known, and Clarence Thomas, whose more-extreme-than-Bork views were nothing next to the extent of his inappropriate behavior around women. The extent of Kavanaugh's own history of sexual assault and alcohol abuse may never be known, unless the House of Representatives goes Democratic, and a genuinely thorough investigation is launched; but even without a full reckoning of his youthful history of beer-drenched recklessness and aggression, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee should have demonstrated, to any rational, principled legislator, that he has no business joining the court. Faced with credible accusations of both sexual and alcohol abuse, a qualified candidate w...

Brett Kavanaugh and Lindsay Graham are angry about the same thing: a woman has challenged their entitlement. I love being a music teacher. It's physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging--by the time I leave school, my Apple watch tells me I've completed all my exercise goals for the day, and at the end of my commute, I frequently take a nap in the driveway before leaving my car--but it's the best work I've ever done, and it saddens me to imagine not doing it when I retire in a few years. The previous paragraph is actually a slight exaggeration: I'm rounding up from 96%. That's the percentage of children I typically see who, despite their many problems--and this includes homesick kindergartners crying for mommy, emotionally disabled kids hitting each other (or me!), hyper kids that literally can't stop wiggling, impulsive kids who can't keep themselves from touching and playing instruments without permission, anxious kids who hide in th...

I rarely post memes, but this one grabbed me, and went straight to my Facebook feed: The issue addressed by the meme is a case before the Supreme Court: Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker and owner of Masterpiece Cakes, refused to bake a custom wedding cake for two men on the grounds that he was religiously opposed to gay marriage. Colorado has a non-discrimination law that applies to businesses, and the couple complained to the state's Civil Rights Division, which found Phillips to be in violation of the statute. Phillips has now appealed that decision to the highest level, and sometime in the next year, we will learn whether public businesses can discriminate against protected minorities by appealing to the First Amendment. The case is complicated by many factors, including the conflict it presents between the freedoms of expression and religion, and the right of state governments to offer a higher standard of protection to historically victimized minorities than that provid...

No, these are not actually the colors of their robes. Except for the black ones; those are real. The sad part of the decision is that it was so close. This one should have been a no-brainer. The vote was 5-4, a complete liberal-conservative split, with Justice Kennedy, author of the two previous decisions expanding basic rights to include gay and lesbian people, being the swing, deciding, vote, as well as author of this decision. All three decisions arrived on June 26, and human dignity was the common theme in each. The opposing justices were nearly apoplectic in their dissents, stooping in Scalia's case to critiquing Kennedy's prose, while Roberts fretted that marriage equality opens the door to the normalization of polygamy, and Thomas grumbled that dignity is not something that can be either granted or taken away by a government, citing slavery and internment camps as cases of human beings remaining dignified even as they were legally treated as subhuman by the United...

In the wake of the Hobby Lobby ruling, which permits corporations to deny health benefits to employees if providing those benefits conflicts with the religious beliefs of the owners, "religious exemption" has become the strategie du jour of the radical right to justify bad behaviors for which American society no longer has patience. While the wedge issue is health care, specifically contraception, it's easy to see why LGBTQ activists are nervous about the ruling. Don't want gay people working for you? Claim religious exemption from non-discrimination laws. Don't want to sell your services or rent an apartment to gay people? Religious exemption to the rescue! Want to keep gay people from visiting their partners in the hospital, or having a say in their care? Again, religious exemption. These two words put at risk every gain in civil rights that sexual minorities have eked out of a cluelessly bigoted culture over the last half century. The US Constitution prov...

The setup: the small town of Greece, New York, has for many years opened its council meetings with prayers led by local clergy. Clergy invited to lead prayers were selected from a list of local religious institutions, so there was considerable variety in the content of prayers--up to a point. The list, you see, contained only Christian faith communities. For ten years, every single invocation was Christian. This led to complaints by a Jew and an atheist attending a meeting. The council responded by looking farther afield and intentionally inviting clergy who were Wiccan, Baha'i, and Muslim, but by now it was too late: the situation became a court case, which was ultimately settled last week by the Supreme Court--in favor of the town of Greece. It is now Constitutional, according to this 5-4 decision, to open any public gathering at which attendance is not mandatory with not just a prayer, but an explicitly sectarian prayer. Further, it is Constitutional if the people leading t...

 I don't remember his name, but for reasons which will soon become apparent, I'll call him Adam. It was twenty years ago next month that I stepped off a plane in Washington, DC, and took the Metro to George Washington University, there to attend the National Convocation of Reconciling Congregations. I was pastor of one of those congregations, the Estacada United Methodist Church. Estacada is a small former logging town in rural Clackamas county, an unlikely place for a church to proclaim itself Reconciling, the word Methodists use to mean gay-friendly. But the small size of the church made it much easier to reach the decision. All it took was remembering that Marvin, who had grown up in the church, was openly gay. Knowing and caring for a gay man broke through all the barriers of ignorance and bigotry that kept most Christians in that time, and many even now, from opening their hearts to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons. The vote went through in no time, ...