ReligionDispatches.org

As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. You can only read it and weep. Today’s Los Angeles Times includes a front-page piece by Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger on an itty-bitty provision in one Senate health care bill that would require insurers to cover Christian Science “prayer treatments” as medical expenses.

Hamburger and Geiger write that the measure, introduced by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, would put prayer treatments “on the same footing” as clinical medicine and would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual health care.”

Oh, my. It doesn’t matter to me—and I hope it won’t matter to you—that the sums of money that might be paid to spiritual healers are relatively small. It matters hugely to me—and I hope it will matter to you—that a spokesperson for the Christian Science Church could tell Times reporters with a straight face that public funding of prayer treatment is part of “finding effective health care.” It matters greatly that this appalling provision, if enacted into law, will undoubtedly invite other faiths to get into the healing business in order to compete with Christian Science for those subsidized insurance payments.

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This morning I heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling the BBC World Service that the reason she’s pushing Pakistan so hard on cleaning out Taliban areas is that the Taliban continue to be in league with al-Qaeda—that they form “a syndicate of terror.”

Factually, this is wrong, of course, and is even uncomfortably reminiscent of George W. Bush’s groundless linking of Saddamism to al-Qaeda. But religiously it is even wrong-er. Because what the Secretary does not see at all, apparently, is what all Pakistanis see as we up the ante and use ever-more-lethal drone attacks to “take out” alleged bad guys. What they see is that we constitute our very own syndicate of terror within their national borders. In her brilliant reporting for the New Yorker, Jane Mayer continues to document why everyday Pakistanis and Afghanis would see it this way. They don’t see us rescuing them; they see us ruining them, both through our slaughter of so many innocents and also through our utter obliviousness to their folkways and traditions.

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As much as I admire and enjoy his wit, I have been having big Barney Frank problems this week. Yes, at his town hall meeting this past summer Frank famously challenged a wacko tea partier to identify the planet she lives on, and that was really great. But here’s the deal: Barney himself lives on the (former?) planet Pluto. Pluto as in plutocracy. It’s a chilly and ruthless place, where cold cash plays for keeps.

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Religious progressives who understand their task as continuing to cheerlead uncritically for Obama’s “plan” (as against no reform) have been insisting that the cardinal principle is to get everyone covered—and that every other issue pales in relation to that overriding moral imperative.

Treating the matter this simplistically means choosing to ignore some really ugly truths.

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Today’s New York Times contains a little sleeper piece that almost escapes notice beneath the bigger headline about vote fraud in Afghanistan. In it Jim Glanz points out that Pentagon-employed contractors not only outnumber uniformed U.S. troops in Afghanistan but also that the ratio of contractors to military personnel there is the highest of any war in U.S. history. In a new study, the Congressional Research Service reports that contractors make up 65% of the Pentagon’s overall forces in Afghanistan over the past two years. And this is just for the Pentagon: the new CRS report does not address contractors working for the State Department or CIA in Afghanistan.

Part of what this means, Glanz notes, is that ordinary Afghans are likely to see a lot of well-paid folks (mainly Yankees but also other Afghans) “wearing the scruffy cargo pants, polo shirts, baseball caps, and other casual accouterments favored by overseas contractors rather than the fatigues and flight suits of the military.” Sounds kind of cool. Except that these casually dressed folks have the power to wield lethal force with almost no accountability. Nothing like dropping in a lot of trigger-happy hired guns to win hearts and minds, right?

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“Making Home Affordable” is the name of the Obama Administration program to help underwater and delinquent homeowners avoid foreclosure. The government offers financial incentives to loan servicers that will cut deals with borrowers to reduce monthly payments. Recently the terms of the program were liberalized to allow more borrowers to qualify, and this week the White House made a big show of questioning mortgage company execs about the extremely small number of loans that have actually been modified to date.

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Although it is far from over, it does look as though some kind of plan for universal coverage will emerge from the Democratic Congress this Fall. What is also clear is that the package will be far from ideal. I expect the public plan or public option to be so weak as to be ineffective and thus ripe for elimination in the next round; I also expect any new taxes that are levied to pay for expanded coverage to be regressive—e.g. a tax on workers’ existing benefits rather than a tax on rich people’s surplus wealth. It is even possible that Medicare for the elderly and disabled will be significantly compromised—and Medicaid for the poor cut still further—as the price of some kind of health care “victory” for the new administration.

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As Julia Preston reported in the New York Times a week ago, the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, has set off a huge and mainly behind-the-scenes panic among certain religious supporters of so-called comprehensive immigration reform. Bishop John Wester, who heads the Catholic bishops’ Committee on Migration, wrote to the Congressional committee chairs who are beginning to work on immigration that Leahy’s Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) would “erode the institution of marriage and family.”

The bishops’ staff director for immigration policy added that “the last thing the national immigration debate needs is another politically divisive issue added to the mix.”

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The California Supremes have now spoken and have backed completely away from the spirit of their decision of one year ago—the decision arguing persuasively that the principle of equal rights under law applies to gay people, too.

Now these same justices say that the people of California have a perfect right to decide core constitutional issues via plebiscite. In oral arguments earlier this year, Chief Justice Ronald George—the principal author of the first opinion affirming marriage equality—even said that Californians would have the presumptive right to abolish free speech rights, should that question be put before voters on a statewide ballot.

What happened to send the justices into full retreat from their sound constitutional reasoning of May 2008?

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As Simon Johnson said on CNN this morning, all that today’s big show in Washington will demonstrate is the Obama Administration’s tender solicitude for the banking sector. It won’t say a thing about the actual condition of the 19 banks whose “results” will be released this afternoon. And that’s because this is a “test” that the bankers themselves helped create, supplying the “data” from which government examiners will give out results. As many observers point out, it’s as though some overweight slobs were put on the treadmill, asked to take a few strides, and then say how they feel—without ever even attaching electrodes to their bloated bodies.

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OK, so now there’s a kind of polite but increasingly intense conversation between the progressives who want Obama to pull on his Che Guevara T-shirt and actually wage class warfare (I’m one), and the other progressives who say, nope, he can’t do everything at once and dontcha know this guy is a pragmatist, not a revolutionary.

I think Bill Greider got it right in his Nation piece yesterday—“Obama and the Big Dogs”—in calling this moment a pivotal one for testing Obama’s commitment to public morality:

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Today’s staged tea parties strongly suggest that the Right Wing Noise Machine has hardly been put to rest. The most worrisome part is the way in which everyday nonpartisan folks, incensed by government-subsidized executive bonuses in the finance sector, are joining in the fray.

As I write, President Obama is on the airwaves being his usual rational self (which is good) and talking about how his budget and tax plans actually include relief for middle-income payers, not to mention how his stimulus package is already improving economic prospects on Main Street.

I wish, however, that he would beard the no-tax monsters (Club for Growth, Cato, Limbaugh, Fox News, etc.) in their various dens in a much more frontal and devastating way. He could point out, for example:

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The eye believes and its communion takes.
- Wallace Stevens, “Excerpts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas”

My bad! The main spiritual event for me yesterday—Easter Sunday—didn’t happen inside a church but in the great outdoors. I went hiking.

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I was waiting last Thursday for somebody in the corporate media to point out the sweet irony in two simultaneous announcements: 1. The stated commitment of the G-20 countries to a regime of greater regulation of private financial colossi, and 2. The news out of Washington that same day that our own Financial Accounting Standards Board will now deregulate by abandoning the “mark to market” rule that currently requires our big banks to be honest about their bad assets.

Think about it for a minute: all the reports noted that the FASB changed the rule under pressure from Congress—i.e., under pressure from the same solons who denounce irresponsible bankers for the cameras but who still take the bankers’ money and accept the bank lobbyists’ talking points about the intolerable burden of having to tell the truth on their balance sheets.

Then Saturday came the news, also greeted by a chorus of yawns, that:

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When the managing editor of this fine journal asked yesterday whether any of his Christian blogheads had anything at all to say about Jon Meacham’s Newsweek piece on the fairly sharp fall-off in the number of Americans self-identifying as Christian (in the newly-released ARIS survey), this bloghead initially demurred.

I mean, the amiable and well-informed Meacham said what I would have said: on balance, it’s a good thing that the various and dangerous forms of grievance associated with “Christian nation” thinking should now recede. It’s a good thing that more have come to appreciate the wisdom of separating church and state.

And yet I’m not sure the road ahead is completely sunny. This morning I awoke with two thoughts in relation to Meacham’s piece:

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My calloused heart went out to our young chief today upon reading Laurie Goodstein’s front page piece in the Times on what a pastorless President has to go though to get spiritual nurture.

Like a lot of other people, I had kind of been waiting for the First Family to pick a DC-area congregation and do the usual thing: show up there often enough to create the appearance of belonging. And, one had hoped for the girls, something more than the appearance: another tiny slice of real community secured in the decisive way that only youngsters seem to be able to secure it.

But Goodstein reminded us of “the logistical challenges in finding a church that can accommodate the kind of crowd the Obamas would attract.” Stupid me, I hadn’t really thought of this at all. Sunday morning paparazzi and the damage done to any worshipping community that would try to bear with it: the security issue, the resentment of the gawkers when the Firsts don’t show up, the sheer impossibility of their even attempting to have a regular worship life.

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For an excellent backgrounder on the EFCA, see Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act -- ed.

So with some major s**t about to hit the fan (and with Warren Buffett, America’s Mr. Capitalism himself, already flatly declaring himself against the Employee Free Choice Act), you would think that pro-labor Democrats in Washington would turn for help to faith leaders who actually have a record of identifying with workplace justice.

After all, there is no shortage of such leaders in the various labor-religion coalitions that exist all over the country and in the national clearinghouse for such coalitions, a Chicago-based umbrella group called Interfaith Worker Justice.

But no. Yet again it’s Jim Wallis who is speaking for all the faithful in testimony today before Tom Harkin’s Senate committee.

I am reluctant to pre-judge Wallis, but I will be surprised if he makes these essential points in a forceful way:

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One asks only because one hears almost no religious voices weighing in on the bank nationalization question. When the managing editor of this esteemed journal asked me why this might be the case, my off-the-top-of-my-very-bald-head answer was that American religious leaders are confounded by the reckless and/or sloppy language surrounding the nationalization debate.

“Nationalization”: how state-socialistic (and hence un-American) is that, anyway?

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It’s not clear when again, if ever, a presidential address to both houses of Congress and the beginning of the Christian sacred season known as Lent will coincide during a time of economic collapse. As a Christian and as someone whose hope for this President and this country still burns bright, I want to make the most of the unusual convergence.

The grey dawn that follows every Fat Tuesday blowout leaves no doubt that the party is over. But we know that. The issue is always what we will choose to make of it.

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The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.—Abraham Lincoln, 1862

If you find it surprising that the Obamans have the time, let alone the patience, to spend today in a fiscal responsibility loya jirga with the likes of Nixon Commerce Secretary and Wall Street billionaire Peter G. “Pete” Peterson, you have every right to be surprised and a little bit shocked.

You’ve seen the iceberg ads, right? Peterson’s well-heeled foundation has been running these full-pagers everywhere, at God knows what cost, to scare the bejeezus out of us and make us think that unless we slash Social Security and Medicare now, our children and grandchildren will be reduced to foraging nuts and berries in a deficit-cratered landscape.

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So now he’s gone, but let’s not forget how it played—how they all rallied around him yesterday: his former colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee (just 15 minutes in private did the trick), the President, and the sympathetic DC-based media. Even ailing Ted Kennedy made some calls. Sure, the New York Times called for him to step aside—but everyone knows what bluenoses those Sulzbergers are. The main thing, according to his many supporters/enablers, is that Tom Daschle was the right guy for the job. Let go of the little things, they told us: everyone makes mistakes.

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