I’ve had zero time to blog recently, but came across a well-written comment on the passing of Prop 8 in California and want to quickly second it. Although a significant mental disconnect exists in embracing the intelligent musings of one whom I’ve come to unconsciously view as the horny and hapless Charlie Runkle, I have to admit that Evan Handler is spot on with the sentiment

“[T]he passage of Proposition 8 in California is an embarrassment to, and an indictment of, all Americans.”

He also noted that although the gay community is vocally protesting the measure, the straight community has been shamefully quiet. He’s right, and it’s another reason I’m taking a few minutes to write this tonight.

Handler continues

Denying any Americans any rights that other Americans hold is discrimination. Period. It doesn’t matter whether the discrimination is motivated by morality, or religious beliefs, or a Ouija board, it’s still discrimination. And that makes it illegal. (And that comes after the fact that it’s wrong.) It should be clear to everyone (or made clear to them) that it puts us all in danger of the same kind of discrimination being pointed our way the moment someone decides we’re on the wrong side of their moral or religious measurements.

He suggests supporting those businesses who openly opposed the proposition – notably Google and Apple, each of whom formally denounced Prop 8 – and denying business to those who supported it. This is my favorite way to protest, capitalism at its very best – hit ‘em in the pocketbook!

Already the struggle has begun to overturn Prop 8 in court. You can sign a petition to Gov. Schwarzenegger or donate to the Invalidate Prop 8 campaign at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center. All donations are made in the name of the Thomas Monson, head of the Mormon Church, which spent $15 million on a PR campaign to convince people gay marriage would corrupt and defile their children. Many more suggestions are available on the What Do We Do Now? page at ProudParenting.com.

Thanks to Ann at Feministing, here are the outcomes of other Nov 4th ballot measures affecting LGBT rights:

Amendment 2 in Florida: Passed. Yet another gay marriage ban.

Proposition 102 in Arizona: Passed. As Dana noted previously, “Arizona became the first state in the nation to reject an anti-gay marriage amendment in 2006, but they’re likely to pass the measure this year, now that it has been stripped of language that also denied domestic partnership benefits to hetero couples.” Looks like that was the magic change to make bigotry palatable to Arizona voters.

Act 1 in Arkansas: Passed. Now gay couples are unable to adopt or foster-parent children. This from a state with 3700 children in the foster-care system, and only 1000 foster homes. Disgusting.

Question 1 in Connecticut: Failed! Lindsay at Female Impersonator explained earlier that this initiative would have allowed the state constitution to be changed — essentially clearing the way for anti-gay and anti-choice amendments to be tacked onto it. Glad it didn’t pass.

Last November CBS News ran a story on the epidemic of veteran suicides. Noting that the current administration has glaringly neglected to tally a nationwide rate, correspondent Armen Keteyian led an independent investigation that, based on information from 45 states, revealed 6,256 vet suicides in 2005 alone – a rate double that of the general population.

Yet Dr. Ira Katz, head of mental health for the Department of Veterans Affairs, was outraged by the story. He insisted the number was much smaller and that the rates fell within normal limits. “There is no epidemic,” he said. The VA then provided CBS with data that indicated a total of 790 vets committed suicide while under VA treatment in 2007.

However an internal email surfaced last week, written by Katz in December. It tells a different story.

Subject: Not for the CBS News interview request

Shh!

Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address … before someone stumbles on it?

Ira R. Katz MD, PhD Deputy Chief Patient Care Services Office for Mental Health

Publicly the VA claims 790 per year, while internally it admits a prevalence over 15 times higher:12,000 per year. Even more staggering is that the actual number is even higher. The figure of 1,000 per month includes only those vets in treatment with the VA at the time of their deaths. A recent study by the Rand Corporation shows that although one in five vets experience symptoms of mental impairment, such as PTSD or severe depression, nearly half neglect to seek treatment. One barrier is the fact that military medical records are public and the move could negatively affect a vet’s career.

Additionally Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America reports a bureaucratic chaos that has left 1.8 million discharged vets without health insurance, and an overwhelmed system where 400,000 disability claims are currently pending, nearly 20% of which are over six months old. According to IAVA, at least one inside official admits that the VA’s inability to deal with the influx of wounded vets, most especially those with brain injury and mental health issues, has made care “virtually inaccessible” at some clinics.

Another factor is the troubling intentional misdiagnosis of “personality disorders” on men and women who actually suffer from PTSD or traumatic brain injury.

More on this in the next post…

New York archbishop Cardinal Edward Egan criticized former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani for taking communion during the Pope’s visit to the city because of Guiliani’s support of legalized abortion. Earlier this year St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke vowed to deny Giuliani communion should the Presidential candidate approach him, and has further asserted that, “that anyone administering Communion is morally obligated to deny it to Catholic politicians who support an abortion-rights position contrary to church teaching.”

Other Catholics have criticized Giuliani’s recent partaking of the sacrament on the grounds of his divorces.

This denial of select religious paticipation is artibtrary and difficult to understand. If Giuliani’s not worthy to receive communion, is he worthy to be a member of the church? If he has defied the church laws to such an extent, shouldn’t he be excommunicated?

Then again, if the church excommunicated every pro-choice parishioner, every woman who had an abortion, or every man who condoned a female’s right to choose whether or not to abort, it would end up with a severely diminished congregation.

What about parishioners who vote for a pro-choice candidate becasue he or she offers affordable health care for their children, or becasue the candidate vows to end a senseless war? Still no communion?

And what about the pro-life politicians who, almost without exception, rigorously endorse the death penalty, another “mortal sin”? Or those who advocate torturing suspected enemies?

And why communion? What about the other sacraments? Should Giuliani be denied last rites, too? Or the sacrament of confession? Should he be denied the sacrament that would give him the opportunity to unburden his soul?

Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan was a Catholic, and his vote helped decide Roe v Wade in 1973. Pope Paul VI had nothing to say about him, as far as I could dig up, nor did D.C. Archbishop Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle. Brennan retained his right to take communion, and presumably also last rites since in 1997 his funeral mass was held at St. Mathew’s Cathedral in Washington D.C.

And what about those who have sex before marriage or use contraception? Pope John Paul II deemed both acts “intrinsically evil“, and Pope Benedict XVI has since conceded the teaching to be “unchangeable.”

Those lines could become pretty short at communion time.

Yet Pope Benedict didn’t refuse to serve communion to Giuliani. How could he? Although Giuliani took communion at St. Patricks, during a mass attended primarily by clergy, the following day the Pope held mass for 60,000 at Yankee Stadium. Should everyone have been asked their stance on abortion before the Eucharist was lifted to their mouths?

If believing in the legality of abortion for people of all religions is such a deal-breaker, again – why not excommunicate?

Because to consistently excommunicate based on this criteria would decimate the church. Its prevalence and power would shrink. And that, above all else, cannot be allowed.

So it’s a mortal sin. Just like contraception. So much so that we will block reproductive health measures to fight AIDS in Africa in order to prevent the use of life-saving contraception. However, it’s not so much of an issue that we will risk losing much of our flock over it.

Then again, why should someone be turned away from a religion for sinning? Isn’t that the whole point? If someone, especially someone engaged in what your religion considers to be sinful life choices, wants to be an active member of your church, to listen to your clergy’s sermons, to worship with you, shouldn’t that be a good thing? If you really want to change someone’s mind or behavior, keeping that person in the fold should be the best way to do so. Wasn’t that what Jesus was all about, embracing the sinner?

Or maybe it’s not about casting out the mortal sinners, maybe it’s the public chastising that’s important. The standing on a chair in a dunce hat humiliation – satisfaction for those who are morally superior, those who truly deserve communion to witness others denied it.

After all, how many behaviors can be criteria for removal from the church without disseminating the church itself?

And if you want to talk about human acts that would deign one unworthy of partaking in something holy…well, the Pope himself is hardly exculpable.

Catholics for Free Choice, a self described “independent not-for-profit organization engaged in research, policy analysis, education, and advocacy on issues of gender equality and reproductive health,” conducted a poll during the 2004 US presidential election and found that 53% of Catholics identified themselves as pro-choice and 61% believed abortion should be legal.

The organization’s splinter group, Catholics in Political Life: Challenges to Faith in Democracy uses the church’s own teachings to open the debate about abortion and gender issues:

1. Catholic teaching regards the well-formed conscience, not catechism or statements by bishops, as the final arbiter in moral decision making.

2. Recent teachings of the church acknowledge that it does not know when a fetus becomes a person so it cannot state explicitly that abortion is murder. However, there is no doubt about the personhood of a pregnant woman, and the protections that the hierarchy would grant to fetal life should be extended to include women facing difficult or unsupportable pregnancies. Not only that, but for those who do think that abortion is killing, the church does permit killing in certain instances, some military conflicts being a prime example.

3. The church has not made its teachings on abortion infallible. As recently as 1995, in Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II and his advisers considered and rejected the inclusion of the adjective “infallible” to describe its teaching on abortion.

4. The Catholic system of probabilism supports Catholics’ right to dissent from church teachings if there is a solid probability that the teaching is wrong and that this belief is supported by theologians or that the dissent is informed by prayerful and thoughtful discovery.

Read the rest here.

Go into any mass on any Sunday morning across the US, and you’ll see a group of flawed individuals, most of whom haven’t been cleansed by confession in a long time, step forward and take “the body of Christ.”

If Cardinal Egan really wanted to reduce the number of abortions, even without advocating contraception use or extramarital sex, there are plenty of ways he could have used his tenure as NYC Archbishop to do so. As it is, he will likely retire within the year, having submitted his resignation to the Pope, as required, upon his 75th birthday.

His legacy is marked by improving the archdiocese’s financial standing by closing 15 schools and 21 parishes, having an imperious demeanor, and weathering a nasty 2006 lawsuit alleging sex abuse cover-up and a closeted (sexually active) Egan.

According to Rocco Palmo, an American-based writer for The Tablet, the international Catholic weekly published in London, priests under Egan had serious problems with his leadership:

Long-simmering tensions among a broad cross-section of the archdiocese’s priests broke into the open today with the circulation of an anonymous letter under the authorship of a group calling itself “A Committee of Concerned Clergy for the Archdiocese of New York.” Saying that, “At no time has the relationship between the Ordinary and the priests of the Archdiocese been so fractured and seemingly hopeless as it is now,” the authors have urged their confreres to lodge “a formal vote of ‘NO Confidence‘” (emphases original) in Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who became archbishop in 2000. Using strong language throughout the 950-word missive, the authors allege a widespread finding that Egan’s relationship with his priests has been “defined by dishonesty, deception, disinterest and disregard.”

Running his mouth about which Catholic is worthy of communion does little for his supposed cause and, in my opinion, nothing for to rectify his reputation or improve the good he might leave behind him.

Women in the People’s Democratic of Congo have been enduring barbaric sexual atrocities during the country’s violent civil unrest for more than a decade. Yet the western world seems to hardly have noticed. This is the first in an ongoing series documenting the situation in a country where women and children are inhumanly brutalized, where even the most unimaginable forms of rape have become common weapons of war.

Many are questioning how this level of sexual violence grew to such dramatic proportions. Although atrocities and rape in wartime are common, U.N. leaders consider the intensity and prevalence of horrors in the Congo to be “the worst in the world.”

It’s interesting to note that, according to a recent NY Times article

Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society. “If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago,” said Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu.

Contrarily, an Amnesty International report asserts that it is precisely women’s lower societal status that allows for this type of targeting in wartime.

“When you lift the stone of sexual violence, you will find another stone of the treatment of women more generally, which is effectively slavery. Women do everything: they walk miles for food or water, they care for the children, they cook, they clean, they cultivate the land and they earn the family income… That is the female condition in the Congo. “

– Expatriate woman psychologist working in DRC, interviewed by AI

In the very least, Congolese law leaves nowhere for these women to turn as crimes of rape, torture, mutilation, kidnapping, and sexual slavery are committed with nearly 100% impunity.

A 2002 HRW report summarizes women’s status in Congolese society.

Even before the war in Congo, women and girls were second class citizens. The law as well as social norms defined the role of women and girls as subordinate to men. Although women are often a major-if not the major-source of support for the family, the Congolese Family Code requires them to obey their husbands who are recognized as the head of the household.

Women and girls are also subordinate by custom and practice. A woman’s status depends on being married and girls tend to marry at a young age. It is generally considered more important to educate boys than girls[...] Literacy statistics for Congo (also) show gender-specific discrimination.

Male household heads often settle violent crimes against women and girls outside the courts. Some have “resolved” rape cases by accepting a money payment from the perpetrator or his family or by arranging to have the perpetrator marry the victim. [...]

Women and girls who are raped suffer significant loss of social status[...] In cases of the death of women and girls by murder or negligence, the family of the victim sometimes agrees to accept the equivalent of a woman’s bride price as compensation and does not pursue the case further.

Congolese views about women and the issue of sexual violence were clearly demonstrated in 2005 when UNICEF spearheaded the first march against sexual violence in the boarder city of Goma. Hundreds of brutalized women donned black head scarves and nervously took to the streets. In a PBS interview, American filmmaker Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt describes the event:

…the march ended up being more chaotic than we imagined because every one of the bystanders, male or female, heckled the women marching. Their position was, “Why are you doing this? This is stupid. What is sexual violence?” On an official level, there aren’t any adequate laws against rape, and no one has been convicted of rape in 40 years, other than three or four people who were not soldiers.

Let’s take a quick look at how the climate in the Congo escalated to create an atmosphere conducive to these horrors.

Rwandan Atrocities Bleed Across Boarders

The Democratic Republic of Congo has been torn by conflict almost since its origins. Although women have long suffered pervasive injustice in this climate, sexual violence crescendoed to horrific levels and epidemic proportions in the wake of civil violence that was instigated by the atrocities in neighboring Rwanda.

(If you need a refresher on the Rwandan genocide, go here, here, or here. Read this. Watch this.)

For three months in the spring and summer of 1994, a rush of Rwandan Tutsi refugees fled to Zaire to escape mass genocide at the hands of the Rwandan Hutus. Under government directive the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) slaughtered over 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children before being overthrown by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPP). By 1996, a large number of RPF members, (known also as Interahamwe) fled the new government and crossed the boarder as well. Human Rights Watch summarizes:

The government responsible for the genocide then led more than a million Hutu into exile in Congo, then Zaire, where civilian refugees and the military together established themselves in camps along the border. Under the direction of the defeated political and military leaders, soldiers and militia reorganized and rearmed within the refugee population, preparing for new attacks on Rwanda.

In late 1996 the Rwandan government sent its troops into the Congo, asserting the need to impede preparations for attacks on Rwanda as well as any obligation to protect the Banyamulenge, Congolese of the Tutsi ethnic group, who were being threatened by local and national Congolese political authorities.

The Rwandan soldiers together with combatants of the Allied Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo…a hastily organized coalition of Congolese forces, attacked the camps and killed tens of thousands of Rwandans, many of them unarmed civilian refugees. Hundreds of thousands of refugees then returned to Rwanda, some of them voluntarily, some of them forced to do so by Rwandan government troops. Some two hundred thousand Rwandans fled westward through the forests.

Many of the civilians were massacred in the following months by RPA or AFDL troops but several thousand ex-FAR and militia members regrouped to resume fighting the Rwandan government forces in Congo and later in Rwanda.

During this time, the Zairian government was toppled by a rebellion and a man named Kabila came to power and reinstated the country’s former name – the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the instability following the coup, Kabila began to lose favor and troops from neighboring Zimbabwe, Angola, Chad, and the Sudan quickly became involved in an effort to encourage stability.

As of 2004 nearly four million people perished in the conflict and a 2006 Economist article considers this period to be “the bloodiest since World War II.”

In 2001 Kabila was assassinated and replaced in power by his son. Since then there have been two rounds of general elections, but little has been done to stabilize the country’s rampant and savage violence. Varying factions fight each other and the government, and ethnic contentions conflate the violence.

Congolese citizens are left trying to survive amid a state of near constant destruction and uncertainty. Rebels take control of villages, or simply destroy them by killing the men, raping or kidnapping the women, and burning the village to the ground.

Over one million Congolese are displaced, especially in the eastern part of the country where the Interahamwe militant faction “Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda” is particularly active. Starvation and disease are rampant.

In this environment of political and economic struggle, racial hatred, and lawlessness, one across-the-board “enemy” stands above them all – women.

Next: Rape as a Weapon of War in the Congo [Part 2 - The Savagery]