Too Funny

This morning's Washington Post has this great Tom Toles cartoon.

Sunday Morning: Spying on the People

After 9/11 our country became crazy. Before that, you know the story, the intelligence community knew that al Qaeda was going to attack us but there was nothing more than a big yawn from the country's leaders. "Terrorism" was a word, maybe, in a foreign language, it was something that happened somewhere else. Then we watched our televisions that day in 2001, we saw the flailing bodies leaping from buildings on fire, the people running from storm-clouds of debris, the flames, gigantic buildings collapsing into themselves, and it was just like it happened right here. You would have thought Rockville and Olney and Germantown had come under attack, it was like it could happen, some vague Arab underground had organized and plotted against each one of us. We all took it personally, our own town was in danger, they hated each of us, individually, and our unique "way of life." And they were everywhere, terrorists plotting horrible things, and we had to do anything we could to stop them. Somebody taking a picture, somebody looking at a building, somebody mumbling, all had to be investigated.

For some reason, our little state took it more seriously than most. Little old ladies walking with umbrellas on a sunny day, people listening to incongruous radio stations, men who shaved their beards off, became objects of suspicion. Last year the news media got wind of the extent of the surveillance, today there is more. At first we thought it was just people against the war and people opposed to the death penalty. The Washington Post:

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.

One of the possible "crimes" in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: "civil rights."

According to hundreds of pages of newly obtained police documents, the groups were swept into a broad surveillance operation that started in 2005 with routine preparations for the scheduled executions of two men on death row.

The operation has been called a "waste of resources" by the current police superintendent and "undemocratic" by the governor. More Groups Than Thought Monitored in Police Spying

The previous governor would have said that it was "unrepublican," except ... this was extremely Republican behavior by the police state, conducted under a Republican governor.

I'm not usually like this, but I'll tell you a secret, when this article came out I scanned it for the text string "teach the facts." We seem to fit the profile, people who care what happens enough to get involved.

Police have acknowledged that the monitoring, which took place during the administration of then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), spiraled out of control, with an undercover trooper spending 14 months infiltrating peaceful protest groups. Troopers have said they inappropriately labeled 53 individuals as terrorists in their database, information that was shared with federal authorities. But the new documents reveal a far more expansive set of police targets and indicate that police did not close some files until late 2007.

The surveillance ended with no arrests and no evidence of violent sedition. Instead, troopers are preparing to purge files and say they are expecting lawsuits.

The effort, made public in July, confirmed the fears of civil liberties groups that have warned about domestic spying since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Interviews, e-mails, public records and an independent state review reveal that police in Maryland were motivated by something far narrower: a query about death penalty activism directed to a police antiterrorism unit that was searching for a mission.

But some observers say Sept. 11 opened the door. "No one was thinking this was al-Qaeda," said Stephen H. Sachs, a former U.S. attorney and state attorney general appointed by Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) to review the case. "But 9/11 created an atmosphere where cutting corners was easier."

So when cutting corners is easier, the thing they want to do is spy on us.

There is something you hear, people shrug and say, "I got nothin' to hide." I am always a little bit sorry for people whose lives are so boring that there would be no surprises if you found out what they were really up to. It doesn't mean everybody is planning to crash airplanes into big buildings, but people do have private lives, and there's a reason that's important. People have secret thoughts and secret desires, and sometimes they share their secrets with someone else in a private setting and that's just the way people are. The government has no business hanging a microphone boom over their conversation, sometimes people need to speculate, blow off some steam, sometimes people need to act to take something that some powerful group has taken away from them. Sometimes people need more from life than playing by the rules will give them. That's just how it is. You can't stop that. People are alive, people need privacy.

Skipping down, here's how it works.

After trawling the Internet, an analyst reported a "potential for disruption" at both executions. Mazzella dispatched a corporal who needed experience in undercover work to the Electrik Maid community center in Takoma Park, where death penalty foes were organizing rallies.

At a rally to save Vernon Evans Jr. outside the Supermax prison in Baltimore a few weeks later, the woman who said her name was Lucy McDonald asked veteran activist Max Obuszewski how she could learn more about passive resistance and civil disobedience.

The activists recall that she had a genial disposition and refreshing curiosity, and she quickly became a fixture at meetings and rallies of death penalty opponents and antiwar activists. She used a laptop computer at meetings, but the activists say no one was alarmed. "Maybe I wondered what she was typing," said Mike Stark of Takoma Park. "But you always check yourself. In our movement it's very important to be outward and not paranoid."

The trooper provided weekly reports to her bosses, logging at least 288 hours of investigative time. She did not return phone calls seeking comment, and The Post is not identifying her because of concerns about compromising her cover in other possible operations.

The logs described silent vigils outside the prison and a ceremony of poetry and songs to commemorate the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. The activists pledged nonviolence. Yet she closed several entries this way: "Due to the above facts, I request that this case remain open and updated as events warrant."

The woman's bosses considered her surveillance a low-risk training exercise; it quickly expanded to the antiwar movement as she met activists whose causes overlapped, police said.

To the average person sitting at home with the TV on, this story is going to be nothing. You don't do anything to call attention to yourself, you keep your mouth shut, nothing will happen to you. Make yourself interesting at all and suddenly you are a test of freedom. Will the secret police come to your door? It seems to me America should be different from that, we are a country based on an incredible combination of cynicism and trust, we are cynical about the intentions of the powerful and trusting in the goodwill of the ordinary citizen and that's how it should be. Our state, our country, somehow got it turned around when we the people were looking somewhere else.

There's a lot more to that story, if you are active in your community at all you ought to follow the link and see the rest.

There was one other little paragraph on the front page of The Post that seemed too important not to mention. Let me just copy and paste this one little thing.

Over the past 15 years, during which a large majority of current lawmakers were first elected to Congress, partisan feuding has reduced Congress's output to a bare minimum of must-pass measures. Party-line voting peaked during the Bush presidency, while productivity slumped. In 2008, the Senate voted the lowest number of times since 1951, according to a Congressional Quarterly survey. Tone May Be Key to Obama's Agenda

That's how this happened. There are people who say government is bad, they are anarchists but white-collar anarchists so they talk about stuff like "free enterprise" and "capitalism," they are anarchists because they don't want any government to be examining their books and making them play fair. They dress their anarchy up -- "Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem" is nothing more than an anarchistic slogan -- and people like you and me might think it sounds pretty good, but it's not about us, it's about the rich getting richer. Our nation's legislative body has been locked up for fifteen years, eight of which they had the compliance of the Executive Branch, and the Judiciary leans their way more with each new appointment. The white-collar anarchists' idea was to drown government in a bathtub, and they almost succeeded at that. But government exists to take care of the citizens, it's protection for you and me, you don't want it drowned in a bathtub, you want the government to make big decisions and do jobs that are bigger than what you can do, thankless jobs that don't necessarily make a profit. Somehow Americans let government turn into a bad thing, and not surprisingly it became an arm of the powerful, it got to the point where they spied on you if you were opposed to the death penalty, if you were a softy for animals -- if you wanted bike lanes, for crying out loud.

I am hopeful that all this will change.

There is a nice light jazz guitar on WPFW this morning, the drummer is playing with brushes. It's cold outside and they're saying it might even snow on Tuesday. I slept in today, we are trying to buy a new car and last night we sat up playing with numbers, one point nine percent for sixty months, how much is that a month? Our old car is a disaster, it has a blown head gasket and it looks like we won't get anything for it as a trade-in. Don't you hate that? Twenty thousand dollars for a car, it's got like fifty-five thousand miles on it, it's junk. A 2002 Suzuki, even if it was in good shape we'd only get a few thousand trade-in on it. Well, the holidays are over, tomorrow is going to be a real work day. I imagine we'll slide back into it slowly, don't you figure? Enjoy your Sunday.

Krugman on the Historic Collapse of the GOP

This has been bubbling under the surface for a long time, the latest "Magic Negro" incident coming from the highest levels of the GOP has brought the party's inherent racism out into the open. Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, has nailed it.

As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.

Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well? Bigger Than Bush

This is not a partisan blog. We have our principles, and those principles are best represented, in general, by Democratic politicians, but they're no angels. For instance, if the Democrats in the Maryland legislature had any backbone our state would have marriage equality now... don't get me started.

I don't care one way or the other about any political party, but the principles that the Republicans have embroidered on their flag are the exact opposite of what I believe. It didn't have to be that way, you can stand for free enterprise and self-reliance and even straight-and-narrow moral principles and if you make a good case, then fine, there's a lot to talk about there. But instead they have come to stand for underhandedness, for divisiveness, for bullying, they have become the anti-intellectual party. They are not a party that disagrees with the other side's beliefs, it is a party that doesn't like the other side, personally, that thinks the other side is made up of bad people.

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.

So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.

That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation.

It is interesting to analyze the party's platform as an expression that emanates from a nucleus of racist feeling. They maintain a social dichotomy based on disgust for the other, it's always us against them, we're good and they're bad -- ask a pro-lifer what kind of person gets an abortion, and see how long it is before they use the word "welfare." And just what would a woman on welfare look like? Just a guess: they will have darker skin than the average Republican. That Atwater quote really says a lot.

I've copied and pasted almost all of this column here, I might as well finish the job.

The reality of this strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Thus, some commentators warning President-elect Barack Obama against bold action have held up Bill Clinton’s political failures in his first two years as a cautionary tale.

But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.

Every once in a while a newspaper columnist gets it just right. This is one of those times.

Happy New Year

Here it is, 2009, we've got a chilly one. No snow, there's clear sunshine and a little wind, but nothing like yesterday. We lost our recycle container yesterday, it just flew away. Same thing with a tarp on the deck the other day. We had bought The Boy a bumper for his car for Christmas, and hid it in plain sight - well, where do you hide something that big? The box was almost as big as a refrigerator, so we set it on the deck with a tarp on it, and one of those windy days before Christmas there was a gust of wind that felt like a little tornado, everything was banging around and later when I went out the tarp was just gone. Maybe one of the neighbors ended up with it, I don't know, there is simply no sign of it. And then yesterday -- on the news they said there were gusts up around sixty miles an hour near here. That blue recycle container disappeared, we'd left it out at the curb in the morning and when we came home in the evening it had blown away.

We watched Dick Clark last night, and I guess the "world's oldest teenager" label doesn't apply any more. He looks good, but he's had a stroke and it's affected his speech. Still, it's cool to see him looking better each year. I noticed something interesting, the younger world's oldest teenagers who had microphones and introduced the pop stars had a certain tone. They all said things like, 2008 was a hard one, but I have the feeling things are going to get better. I heard one guy talking about how there was hope and change in 2009.

America is experiencing a sigh-of-relief moment.

I remember after the 2004 elections, my office was like a mausoleum. People walked down the street with their shoulders slumped, Metro cars were silent, it was pitiful to see that our nation had chosen -- chosen! -- a dangerous ignoramus to lead our country, to represent us to the world and make important decisions. All my life I have felt good about my people, I could go into a store or a bar or a bus stop or whatever and strike up a conversation, but I began thinking, is this somebody who voted for that guy? Nobody I knew would have, but millions of Americans voted to support the destruction of Iraq, torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and who knows where else, warrantless wiretapping, corporate greed, destruction of the environment, millions of Americans chose to believe that we were in constant danger of being attacked by swarthy foreigners who hate our way of life, and that the response to that was raw blustering ignorance. It was heartbreaking.

Okay, that's ended. In a few weeks the core of our urban center will be repopulated. The faith-and-greed crowd will be moving out, the hope-and-change crowd is moving in. According to the polls there are still some people who are sorry to see the current administration go, like maybe a quarter of Americans, well it just goes to show you. Three-fourths of us are breathing a sigh of relief.

Here's where I hope we're going. I think I spelled this out back in 2005, but I will reiterate here. There is room in America for liberal and conservative people. I have taken a position regarding the Rick Warren prayer, I think it's okay to acknowledge that there are conservative people in our country, we might think they're wrong or stupid or even hateful but they're Americans and we're all in this together. We can't do anything without them. I think it's fine if there are people who disagree with me, I will take it as a challenge to persuade them to change their minds but I do not consider mere disagreement to be a crisis. We can argue, make our points as forcefully as we can, go home to our families and come out tomorrow and do it again, that's wonderful, that's how it works.

But we have seen the emergence of a group that wants to shut down the dialogue. We saw it at the national level, there were years where you would be unpatriotic if you asked why we were attacking a country like Iraq that hadn't done anything to us. And they tried to impose silence at the local level, too, they tried to remove any mention of sexual minorities from the Montgomery County Public Schools' sex-ed curriculum. It wasn't just that they wanted a more conservative curriculum, they wanted the discussion to stop, where we needed to talk they reduced the discussion to name-calling, misconstrual, lies, and you ended up having to argue about the lies rather than discuss the details of the curriculum. We claim success, but the curriculum is still ridiculously conservative, kids don't really learn anything about sex. We claim success but we didn't really win. It's not much more than we got from Mr. Holland the shop teacher in the sixties. Big controversial breakthrough: if a student asks, the teacher is permitted to tell the class that homosexuality is not a disease. In the twenty-first century, is that enough? Is that where we stop? No, now we need to start talking about it, in 2009.

This is a time for hope and change, no doubt, the November election was a gigantic weight off our back. Not only does the New Guy make sense, but he can fight a tough fight. He is putting his foot down and making it clear that he really does intend to include everybody in the discussion, not just people who agree with him. Our side is going to have to relax a little, there isn't going to be any "mandate" this time around, we won't automatically get our way on everything, but we will be at the table when the discussion is held. And that has to be the goal. You may have an opinion about any of a hundred things, and you can't expect the government to do everything you like, but now you can expect that they'll talk about it, they'll consider your side. It just might be that the leadership decides to go with the conservative idea sometimes, and we'll have to live with that, at least the logjam is broken.

I know how I feel about things, and I've known a lot of people in my many years and have some idea how ordinary people feel about things. American people are not hateful, they're just people, and they can be manipulated by propaganda, they'll take the easy solution if you can frame it in a way that makes it sound obvious and sensible. They're just people. If we can get to a point where the knee-jerk response is labeled for what it is, where we can consider all sides of a situation and choose the best one, then I'm good with that. We don't have to choose my favorite idea, though I'll argue as hard as I can for it. Mainly I just want to see the dialogue opened up again.

I think that's what 2009 will be for America. It is a year for change and hope. We'll win some, lose some, but people are crawling out from under their rock, we are ending the reign of fear, terrorists won't decide what we can and cannot say any more. We have real problems and need to figure out real solutions to them, we've had enough slogans, it's time to get together and use our brains.

I'm feeling good about this two thousand nine thing. Happy New Year to everyone!

The Year-End Zune Catastrophe

I didn't really know what a "Zune" was until a couple of weeks ago, when one of my kids got one for a birthday present. Well, I'm an old guy, why would I know what a Zune is? In my mind, knowing what a Zune is is about the same as quoting Snoop Dogg songs in conversations. Uh, wait, do you call those "songs?" What is the word for them? Well, never mind. Turns out a Zune is like an iPod, except where Apple makes iPod, Microsoft makes Zune. And I do know what an iPod is, I don't have one but I am a hep cat who knows what they are.

It may be that Zunes are wonderful, but my initial impression was ... negative. First of all, Microsoft is evil. We have several computers in the house with Windows 2000 on them, they work fine, software runs on them, they serve us well, but Microsoft put something into the Zune software that tells it not to work on Windows 2000. I know that the guts of Win2k are the same as XP, and the Zune software will work with XP -- this is something they did intentionally. And of course you know why. They did it because they want to sell operating systems. It's not that XP and Vista are better than Windows 2000, they're just different, at least from the consumer's point of view, but Microsoft wants to sell you a new one for the simple reason that they want the money. I guarantee they could have made this thing compatible with Windows 2000. So the kid has music on the family computer, but can't listen to it on the Zune.

Oh, and it's also incompatible with the Macbook, which both of my kids have. Most software comes out in both versions, Mac and Windows, but not this. Microsoft is thinking about its own profits, they don't want to make a product that will run on the competition's machines. You might think that's good business, I think it's petty and insulting. This kind of thing pushes me closer to Linux.

Today the news came out that every Zune in the world crashed. No, really. They froze up and all you can do is let the battery run down. The latest word is that maybe it was only the 2006 Zunes, but still. Turns out there was a bug in the code having to do with leap years, which 2008 is (or was, depending on when you read this), and it didn't know what to do with the 366th day of the year. The experts are saying that tomorrow they ought to work again, but you have to re-synch blah blah blah.

Okay, everybody have a happy new year celebration. I have the feeling 2009 is going to bring good things.

Surprise: Abstinence Pledges Do Not Result in Abstinence

From this morning's Post:

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking." Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds

Okay, I'll admit, there's something going on here that I don't get. I think a lot of people like me were kind of surprised to see the reaction that Sarah Palin's pregnant teenage daughter got. Conservatives, the religious right, the puritans -- they loved it. They were overjoyed that that child had gotten knocked up, and I don't get that.

So here we learn that abstinence pledges don't ... I was going to say "don't work," but I might be missing something. Maybe they do work. Maybe it is a smashing success when teenagers have unprotected sex and make wonderful babies. Maybe that's the point. Some of us on the liberal side think that a person should reach a certain stage of maturity before they become a parent, maybe it's a good idea to marry first. Weird thought, I know.

Does anybody really think that you can get teenagers to put off having sex by getting them to promise not to do it?

The study is the latest in a series that have raised questions about programs that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins. The new analysis, however, goes beyond earlier analyses by focusing on teens who had similar values about sex and other issues before they took a virginity pledge.

"Previous studies would compare a mixture of apples and oranges," Rosenbaum said. "I tried to pull out the apples and compare only the apples to other apples."

The findings are reigniting the debate about the effectiveness of abstinence-focused sexual education just as Congress and the new Obama administration are about to reconsider the more than $176 million in annual funding for such programs.

"This study again raises the issue of why the federal government is continuing to invest in abstinence-only programs," said Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "What have we gained if we only encourage young people to delay sex until they are older, but then when they do become sexually active -- and most do well before marriage -- they don't protect themselves or their partners?"

James Wagoner of the advocacy group Advocates for Youth agreed: "The Democratic Congress needs to get its head out of the sand and get real about sex education in America."

I'll bet he didn't really say "head out of the sand." The fact that our federal government puts money into these programs is just insane. Teenagers -- more than ever now, with the Internet streaming sexual fantasies at them -- need to get accurate information about sex.

This is one thing that I really hope turns sharply around after January 20th.

Proponents of such programs, however, dismissed the study as flawed and argued that programs that focus on abstinence go much further than simply asking youths to make a one-time promise to remain virgins.

"It is remarkable that an author who employs rigorous research methodology would then compromise those standards by making wild, ideologically tainted and inaccurate analysis regarding the content of abstinence education programs," said Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association.

Woo hoo, them's some strong words, lady! "Wild, ideologically tainted and inaccurate--" oh, never mind.

Rosenbaum analyzed data collected by the federal government's National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which gathered detailed information from a representative sample of about 11,000 students in grades seven through 12 in 1995, 1996 and 2001.

Although researchers have analyzed data from that survey before to examine abstinence education programs, the new study is the first to use a more stringent method to account for other factors that could influence the teens' behavior, such as their attitudes about sex before they took the pledge.

Rosenbaum focused on about 3,400 students who had not had sex or taken a virginity pledge in 1995. She compared 289 students who were 17 years old on average in 1996, when they took a virginity pledge, with 645 who did not take a pledge but were otherwise similar. She based that judgment on about 100 variables, including their attitudes and their parents' attitudes about sex and their perception of their friends' attitudes about sex and birth control.

"This study came about because somebody who decides to take a virginity pledge tends to be different from the average American teenager. The pledgers tend to be more religious. They tend to be more conservative. They tend to be less positive about sex. There are some striking differences," Rosenbaum said. "So comparing pledgers to all non-pledgers doesn't make a lot of sense."

What would you do if you were fifteen or sixteen years old and they came around trying to get you to sign some kind of thing like this? Yes, I would say the pledgers are different from other kids.

By 2001, Rosenbaum found, 82 percent of those who had taken a pledge had retracted their promises, and there was no significant difference in the proportion of students in both groups who had engaged in any type of sexual activity, including giving or receiving oral sex, vaginal intercourse, the age at which they first had sex, or their number of sexual partners. More than half of both groups had engaged in various types of sexual activity, had an average of about three sexual partners and had had sex for the first time by age 21 even if they were unmarried.

"It seems that pledgers aren't really internalizing the pledge," Rosenbaum said. "Participating in a program doesn't appear to be motivating them to change their behavior. It seems like abstinence has to come from an individual conviction rather than participating in a program."

Our county's schools are well on the way toward a comprehensive sex-ed curriculum. Students learn a lot in middle and high school about sex and the risks involved. But it's all such a political game.

I remember when the MCPS citizens advisory committee, which I am a member of, was discussing a new curriculum. Somebody said, shouldn't there be something in here about what to do if you get pregnant? Really, there are three choices: abort, put the baby up for adoption, or raise the child. I think that just about sums it up, three choices, with legal systems to support them and the support of society. You could feel a chill in the room as we discussed this, knowing full well our county's schools would never be allowed to address such an obvious topic.

And here's something else you might discuss among yourselves, another politically charged topic. Do you think our county's sex-ed classes teach about the clitoris? It appears on some illustrations of the female reproductive system, I know, but do you think any teacher tells students what the clitoris is for? And why do you think that is?

As long as we're on the topic, look at this. Another article in The Post this morning talks about the clitoris and won't even say the word. Speaking of a little Kurdish girl named Sheelan, they say "part of Sheelan's genitals." Maybe somebody can tell me, what's the big secret? It's an anatomical structure, a body part with a proper medical name, how is it that one of the nation's leading newspapers can't even say the word? This whole article is about the way the clitoris is treated in Kurdish society, and they cannot bring themselves to tell the reader what it is they're talking about. In Kurdistan they cut it off, in America we just pretend it doesn't exist.

Okay, back to the related subject of abstinence pledges.

While there was no difference in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases in the two groups, the percentage of students who reported condom use was about 10 points lower for those who had taken the pledge, and they were about 6 percentage points less likely to use any form of contraception. For example, about 24 percent of those who had taken a pledge said they always used a condom, compared with about 34 percent of those who had not.

Rosenbaum attributed the difference to what youths learn about condoms in abstinence-focused programs.

"There's been a lot of work that has found that teenagers who take part in abstinence-only education have more negative views about condoms," she said. "They tend not to give accurate information about condoms and birth control."

But Huber disputed that charge.

"Abstinence education programs provide accurate information on the level of protection offered through the typical use of condoms and contraception," she said. "Students understand that while condoms may reduce the risk of infection and/or pregnancy, they do not remove the risk."

It is time for the government to stop supporting these stupid abstinence programs. I know there are people who think it's important to preserve ignorance but if there is any lesson we have learned over the last eight years it is this: don't let those people make decisions that affect the rest of us. They may be nice folks, their intentions might be good, but we don't want them running things. Let's use our educational system to educate.

Republican Shocked

No comment is necessary here.

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Republican National Committee said Saturday he was "shocked and appalled" that one of his potential successors had sent committee members a CD this Christmas featuring a 2007 parody song called "Barack the Magic Negro."

In spite of RNC Chairman Robert M. "Mike" Duncan's sharply negative reaction, former Tennessee GOP leader Chip Saltsman said that party leaders should stand up to criticism over distributing a CD with the song. He earlier defended the tune as one of several "lighthearted political parodies" that have aired on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. GOP chairman 'shocked' that Obama parody sent out

I really do think that the ability to identify irony is what distinguishes the left and right in our country. This article has the term "conservative comedian" in it. Can you imagine what that is?

Rather Suing

I didn't realize any of this was going on, did you? News and analysis from the UK:

As George W Bush prepares to leave the White House, at least one unpleasant episode from his unpopular presidency is threatening to follow him into retirement.

A $70m lawsuit filed by Dan Rather, the veteran former newsreader for CBS Evening News, against his old network is reopening the debate over alleged favourable treatment that Bush received when he served in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war. Bush had hoped that this controversy had been dealt with once and for all during the 2004 election.

Eight weeks before the 2004 presidential poll, Rather broadcast a story based on newly discovered documents which appeared to show that Bush, whose service in the Texas Air National Guard ensured that he did not have to fight in Vietnam, had barely turned up even for basic duty. After an outcry from the White House and conservative bloggers who claimed that the report had been based on falsified documents, CBS retracted the story, saying that the documents' authenticity could not be verified. Rather, who had been with CBS for decades and was one of the most familiar faces in American journalism, was fired by the network the day after the 2004 election. CBS newsman's $70m lawsuit likely to deal Bush legacy a new blow

Let's not forget how absolutely the media were in the pockets of the Republicans in those years. The newspapers -- from the New York Times and Washington Post on down -- spewed nothing but propaganda, basically reprinting White House press releases verbatim, weapons of mass destruction, Iraq able to attack us in forty five minutes, Kerry a fake, Bush a war hero. Dan Rather had documents proving that President Bush had gone AWOL from his military duty, but CBS, as a propaganda outlet, did not want him to broadcast it. He did anyway, and they fired him after twenty years with the network.

And we bought it. Who reading this protested the firing of Dan Rather? Did you send a letter to the editor? Complain to a friend over coffee? No, we accepted these things because there were so many of them, every day something different, by the end of 2004 people were just worn out by it all.

You couldn't complain about our sainted President. The United States of America was experiencing an intellectual blackout. It would have been unpatriotic to question whether Our President served honorably.

He claims breach of contract against CBS. He has already spent $2m on his case, which is likely to go to court early next year. Rather contends not only that his report was true - "What the documents stated has never been denied, by the president or anyone around him," he says - but that CBS succumbed to political pressure from conservatives to get the report discredited and to have him fired. He also claims that a panel set up by CBS to investigate the story was packed with conservatives in an effort to placate the White House. Part of the reason for that, he suggests, was that Viacom, a sister company of CBS, knew that it would have important broadcasting regulatory issues to deal with during Bush's second term.

Among those CBS considered for the panel to investigate Rather's report were far-right broadcasters Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

Oh, that would have been quite the panel, wouldn't it? Things are a little better now, you saw the poll that said seventy five percent of Americans are glad Bush is leaving, a couple of years ago you couldn't say anything negative about the guy. Those were dark times, and some people got thrown to the wolves, Dan Rather being one.

Skipping a little...

Rather's lawsuit makes other serious allegations about CBS succumbing to political pressure in an attempt to suppress important news stories. In particular, he says that his bosses at CBS tried to stop him reporting evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. According to Rather's lawsuit, "for weeks they refused to grant permission to air the story" and "continued to raise the goalposts, insisting on additional substantiation". Rather also claims that General Richard Meyers, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military official in the US, called him at home and asked him not to broadcast the story, saying that it would "endanger national security".

I have often said here that when the history books get written, this era will be noted for the influence of the media. George Bush is just a pitiful little frat-boy, in over his head, he's done everything wrong and the people should have understood from Day One. But the corporate media played along to keep the citizens ignorant.

There is a sense where you see the junk on TV and think, well, I guess that's what the people want. You are assuming a free market when the developers of a product simply provide what the consumers will pay for. This wasn't that.

"CBS broke with long-standing tradition at CBS News and elsewhere of standing up to political pressure," says Rather. "And, there's no joy in saying it, they caved ... in an effort to placate their regulators in Washington."

You don't like to think of America as a dictatorship, but you can see how easily it can happen. It's up to us, the people, to protect our own freedom, through constant vigilance. If we can't stop the authoritarians at the federal/corporate level, at least we can fight them in our own neighborhoods.

UN Vote on the Right to Food

From the United Nations:

By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food, by which the Assembly would “consider it intolerable” that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world’s present population. (See Annex III.)

By the terms of the text, the Assembly would express concern that, in many countries, girls were twice as likely as boys to die from malnutrition and childhood diseases and that twice as many women as men were estimated to suffer from malnutrition. Accordingly, it would have the Assembly encourage all States to take action to address gender inequality and discrimination against women, including through measures to ensure that women had equal access to resources, including income, land and water, so as to enable them to feed themselves and their families. By further terms of the draft, the Assembly would urge Member States to promote and protect the rights of indigenous people, who have expressed in different forums their deep concerns over the obstacles and challenges faced in the full enjoyment of the right to food.

After the vote, the representative of the United States said he was unable to support the text because he believed the attainment of the right to adequate food was a goal that should be realized progressively. In his view, the draft contained inaccurate textual descriptions of underlying rights.

How the countries voted:

In favor: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia (Federated States of), Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Against: United States.

Hold on, all this will change.

Merry Christmas To All

Christmas is probably the least "Christian" holiday of the year. Jesus almost certainly was not born in the winter, and there is nothing anywhere in scripture about reindeer, white-bearded fat guys in sleighs, wreaths, elves, evergreens, holly, mistletoe, lights, caroling ... none of it. It is an amalgam of ancient winter-solstice customs overlaid with the story of the birth of Christ. I love Christmas and love to see people, Christians and non-Christians alike, celebrating this season.

I imagine a small extended-family tribe in the time of the dawning of human awareness. Every day through the autumn and early winter they witness the weakening of the sun, they see days become shorter and colder, vegetation loses its foliage, animals disappear, hibernating and hiding. If you didn't know what was going on, you'd think the world was coming to an end, running out of energy, you would feel doomed. Ah, but you did know! Some of the tribe's old-timers conveyed hope, telling the young ones, I have seen this before, our friend the sun is weakened now but soon he will be resurrected. It is possible the tribe had some rituals to ensure this, some sacrifices to encourage the gods to bring light and warmth back to the earth, that being the eternal way of magic. The hope would sustain them through the cold period, and soon, a miracle! The sun was born again! The foliage returned. The animals came out of hiding, with young. Evil was defeated and joy was returned to the world.

It is a phenomenon well worthy of celebration, and our celebration of this time of the year, the winter solstice, when the sun is at its weakest, is very primitive and fundamental to all civilizations that emerged in temperate climates. You don't have to be a Christian to celebrate Christmas. Christians have adapted the scenario to their story (or rather, adapted their story from the scenario), and it seems to me that the story of the birth of a man-god out of innocence, his salvation of the world, the eventual sacrifice of his life, and his resurrection make up a very good story, but it is not a story that is owned by any particular group. This story is seen in some form in Hercules, in Samson, it is a ubiquitous story and the sun's weakness at the end of the year is key to it.

Believe it or not, I went to work yesterday. Well, once again my family was scattered all over the country -- we're back together today, but the house was empty yesterday, so I went to work. There were only a very few of us in my office, and I was talking with a lady who immigrated here from Russia. She told me she had lost a twenty dollar bill. She didn't know what had happened, but she'd been out walking in the wind, and figured it had blown out of her pocket. She showed me how her pocket was designed, and it did seem possible that something could blow out of it.

She told me about when she and her husband first moved here, and they were so poor they didn't have money to take the bus. They lived in Germantown, and they were walking down Georgia Avenue to get to DC. She didn't say how they got there, but I assumed she and her husband had walked 355 to Veirs Mill, which is a lot of miles, never mind getting all the way down to Georgia. She told me how sad she was, walking, her legs were aching tired, she had just moved to this new country and they didn't have any money and life was hard. And then she said, "A twenty dollar bill just fell to us." She fluttered her hand to illustrate, and said it fell from the sky like a leaf falling off a tree. "So today," she said, "Maybe my twenty dollar bill will fall to someone who needs it."

I was looking at the blog statistics the other day. This year so far we have had more than 108,500 unique visitors to this site. Last year we had 80,369, in 2006 we had 54,452, and our first year, 2005, we had 42,252 unique site visitors. That's pretty good for a little group of activists involved in local issues. I'd like to thank each reader and participant in our community for checking in and helping us out, this has really been an amazing experience. Something that I am proud of is that this is the one place where both sides of our county's little culture war talk to one another. Actually, it might be the only place. The discussion gets heated at times but I rarely have to delete a comment; we have an incredible cast of characters here, intelligent, articulate, funny, knowledgeable, it is something else to watch the debates unfold.

This is a time of year when even the most cold-hearted of us feels the generosity in the air, our deepest human instincts draw us together in the spirit of love and desire for peace. I am hoping that our country will be resurrected after its long historical winter, and that peace and prosperity can be returned to the land -- it will take all of us working together to accomplish that. Blessed be all of our readers and all the members of TeachTheFacts.org, whatever your religious or philosophical beliefs, I hope you are able to be with family during this season. Merry Christmas, everybody.

The Notorious Rick Warren Video Transcribed

I read a lot of stuff today about the new video that Rick Warren issued through Saddleback Church, accusing bloggers of hate speech and so on. Unfortunately I couldn't get the video to work until this evening. I wanted to see for myself what he actually said. How inflammatory was he? Reading bits and pieces, I was ready to say, okay, I'm changing my mind, I am opposed to including this guy in the inauguration.

TTF treasurer Christine transcribed a bunch of the video, and I did more. I skipped a couple of irrelevant parts, in brackets. And listen, I have to run, I have a band rehearsal in a few minutes, so I will probably leave in some mistakes, misspellings, etc. I'll try to fix them later.

See what you think, this is just for the record. The video is HERE. [NOTE: As promised, the transcript was edited a few hours after it was posted, I corrected numerous spelling errors.]

[Introduction ...]

You know, I have traveled around the world a lot and you know I've learned several things about the media in the last few years. One of them is that the media never gets it one hundred percent correct. I've never seen an in-print article that has everything right, there's always something that's wrong -- why? Because we're humans. And so, you know, if you believe everything you read or hear, or see, there's a word for that: foolish. Because the media never gets it always correct. Second thing I've learned is that the media lives for conflict. Conflict is the essence of a good story. Every good movie, every good novel, is built on some kind of tension and conflict. And if you don't have conflict you don't have a story, and what I've learned is that if there's no conflict then somebody's gonna create it. The media loves to create conflict.

The problem with that is that it's creating a more and more polarized nation, and that polarization is causing people to be ruder and ruder and more and more inflamed, and I blame that on two groups. One is all the talk radio and other programs where the goal is simply to get people to yell at each other. And the other is bloggers who really need to get a life. A lot of people think that because they can sit in the quietness of their own home and hide behind the screen they can hurl all kinds of bombs at people, and get away with it. Well, no, they're just being rude.

Now what I thought I'd do in this weeks News and Views, to the members of Saddleback Church, is to talk to you about some of the questions that came in this week. And of course the first one that came up is Rick, what do you really believe about gay marriage? Cause it's been all over the map. Well, let me just lay it out for you our members, cause you know, my views have not changed in thirty years, you've heard me talk about this over and over and over.

I have been accused of equating gay partnerships with incest and pedophilia. Now of course as members of Saddleback Church you know I believe no such thing, I never have. You've never once heard me in 30 years heard me talk that way about that. Now while you know I believe the Bible teaches that God created sex exclusively for marriage between a man and a woman, that means I don't believe in premarital sex, I don't believe in adultery, I believe that man, God created sex exclusively to be a marriage connection between a man and a woman. But I've in no way ever taught that homosexuality is the same thing as a forced relationship between an adult and a child or you know between siblings, things like that. I've just never taught that in 30 years. However I understand how some people think that because of a recent BeliefNet interview. In that interview I was trying to point out that uh I don't just, I'm not opposed to gays having their partnerships, I'm opposed to gays using the term marriage for their relationships and I'm opposed to any redefinition of the definition of marriage. The marriage, the definition of marriage that has been universally accepted since the beginning of man. The definition of marriage that every religion, whether it's Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or Jew or Christian has said it's between a man and a woman.

Now in that interview I named several other relationships, in fact I've done it several times, I've named other relationships such as living together, uh or a man with multiple wives or brother sister relationship or adults with children or common law partnerships or all kinds of other relationships. I don't think any of them should be called marriage. Now I was not saying that those relationships were the same thing because I happen to not believe that and I've never taught it. I was just pointing out that I believe the definition of marriage should only be included one definition, a man and a woman for life. It's not an anti-gay view. In fact it's the view of the vast majority of the world and the vast majority of religions.

Now gay partnerships are typically between consenting adults. And while I believe that the gay view of sexuality is contrary to God's word, I do believe that God gives us a free choice, and he gives us a choice to obey his word or to disobey it. And you know what, God has given me that choice. He's given me the free will that I can choose to follow Him and His ways and His rules and His precepts or I can, I'm free to not follow them. And because of that, I believe I must give everybody else that same freedom of choice. And I am opposed to forcing people to act the way I believe that I ought to act. That's not what's its about, it's what I believe God wants me to act and it's the way I believe God wants other people to act, but God has given me the choice, and there's been times that I didn't act the way God wanted me to act. Now I believe God says I must love everybody.

You've heard me say that 1,000 times, I have to love everybody, regardless of the choice they make. In fact I am never, ever free to hate any person. In fact the Bible says love your neighbor, love your enemies, love everyone over and over and over, it's all about love. So we love everybody. Those who disagree with us, those who hate us, those who despise us, those who attack us. You know what? We love 'em. Not only God but America gives us this great freedom to make choices, and so I simply believe that while we're all free to make choices, I think gays should use another term for their consenting adult relationships and partnerships. I oppose the redefinition of the meaning of marriage. I hope that's clear.

[civil rights: no American should ever be discriminated against because of their beliefs... no church should ever be discriminated against, either ... ]

Now some people believe today that if you disagree with them, then that's hate speech, if you disagree with them you either hate 'em or you're afraid of 'em. I am neither afraid of gays, nor do I hate gays, in fact I love them. But I do disagree with some of their beliefs, and I have that constitutional right just as I would fight for their constitutional right, too. Free speech is for everybody. Now let me say that I favor anybody being able to make anybody else the beneficiary of their health or life insurance coverage. I don't see a problem with that, I mean, I think if I'm willing to pay for it, I should be able to put my mother, my father, my friend, a relative, or a total stranger on my coverage. I don't see a problem with that. If I'm willing to pay for it I should be able to put anyone on my coverage.

I also believe that nobody should ever be turned away from seeing a friend in the hospital. But I want to make a point here. Visiting rights in a hospital are a non-issue in California. I mean since 1999 California has had the strongest domestic partnership law in America. I think that's true. That grants gay couple visiting rights and all other rights, too, and you know, I probably have visited more people in the hospital than most, having been a pastor for thirty years, and I have never in my lifetime ever seen one person turned away from visiting somebody else, a friend visiting a friend. So I don't understand that one.

What I really want to talk about in this issue to you, our members, is this issue of how we must champion civility even when people are mean-spirited to us. Even when they're hateful to us, even when they disagree, but not just disagree, they slander us, they lie about us. One of my three life goals is to restore civility to civilization. You've heard me talk about this many times. Our nation is becoming more and more rude. And so as Christians, we have to stand up for two things, the good news and the common good. I'm for both of these -- I'm for the good news, I believe Jesus Christ is the answer to every one of human beings' deepest needs. I make no apology for that. He's changed my life and millions and literally billions of other people. That's the good news.

But I also believe in the common good, and I believe in America that we have democracy. I oppose theocracy, and I think that faith works best when we are in a free market society, and may the best ideas win. Today our nation is being destroyed by the demonization of differences. Just because somebody is different doesn't mean they're a demon. And as I said, I think one of the groups to blame for this most is the fact that the media often fans controversy and conflict to create a story. And we've started yelling at each other so much, nobody listens to each other any more. I disagree with a lot of people, but I don't have a right to turn them into a caricature of what they are. You know, during the political campaigns of 2008, I knew almost every one of the candidates, there were a couple that I didn't know personally. And you know what, it struck me that on both sides, both the Democrats and the Republicans sides, that the way they were being caricatured in the media and by people on either extreme were in no way representative of how those people really were. Whether it was Hillary Clinton, or whether it was Sarah Palin, neither of those women were exactly the way the caricaturization of them were. They just were not accurate. Or whether it was Barack Obama or John McCain, friends of mine, both of them, I grieved at the fact that people did not listen to the truth, they listened to characterizations.

[why did I accept Obama's invitation ... I don't agree with everything he espouses ... or McCain ...]

But the media is totally missing the story here, the story of the president-elect's selection of me. You know, the fact that an evangelical pastor believes in keeping the historic definition of marriage, that's not news. I mean, that's been not-news for hundreds of years. It's a non-story, nothing new. And the fact that the gay community would disagree with me, that's not news either. What's the real story?

The story is that a couple of different American leaders have chosen to model civility for the rest of the nation, and that Barack Obama and Rick Warren have decided to try to create a new politic that says we can disagree without being disagreeable. We can walk hand in hand without seeing eye to eye. We can have unity in our nation without uniformity. And we can have collaboration for the best of America.

Let me give you the history behind this decision. Three years ago I took a big risk for civility's sake by inviting Barack Obama to Saddleback to speak at our AIDS conference. Now I didn't invite him because of his views on abortion or his views on anything else, I invited him because he cares about helping people with HIV-AIDS. And he was willing to take a public AIDS test. As you know, I invited him to take one in public with me in front of all the national media, to show that it's no big deal, that everybody needs to be tested for AIDS, just to know your status. Studies show that when people know their status they actually tend to live safer lives. Now when that happened, I was criticized incessantly from the right, in fact it's never stopped. And they've just criticized me and criticized me for inviting, as if having him here said that I agreed with everything he agrees with. And one person said, he had Barack Obama preach in his pulpit. Well, no I didn't, first we never had a pulpit on stage, second it wasn't a worship service, wasn't a church service, it was a conference where we had invited world authorities on AIDS and doctors and specialists on the disease from around the world. But that is still going on, in fact one conservative writer who hates me for agreeing to pray for the invocation wrote me just recently, he said, you know, Rick, if you pray at the inauguration you are sticking a fork in the head of every aborted baby. No, come on, I'm doing this because I love America and it's a historic opportunity and it's an honor to be part of any inauguration of any president, and I love our country.

Now the president-elect has taken a big risk for civility's sake by inviting me to pray at his inauguration, knowing that he'd take flak from people who would disagree with me. But you know what, we're both willing to be criticized in order to try to bring America into a new day of civil discourse, and to create a new model that says you don't have to agree only with your side on everything. You reach out in the middle and try to figure out to have a way that we can make America a better place without having to agree on everything. You see, that's the story that the media is missing, it's the story of risk-taking. Not that people on both sides of the opposite poles are angry at me, or are angry at president-elect Obama, that we're friends and we admire each other even though we disagree on some things. It's the missing element of civility.

Another question that you wrote me this week, that I want to respond to in this Saddleback News and Views is you say, Rick, what about these hateful attacks? You know, when you refuse to side with either extreme, you're gonna get attacked. And the only way to not be attacked is to do nothing and say nothing and be nothing. And a lot of you have written to me this week and said, Rick, how you gonna respond to all these false accusations and attacks, outright lies and hateful slander, and really a lot of hate speech. It's what I would call "Christ-o-phobia," people who are afraid of any Christian. Well, you know how I'm gonna respond, you already know the answer. Cause we're gonna respond the same way that we have responded to every single unfair attack over thirty years. We have no intention of changing. And that is, we return good for evil. We return love for hate. We overcome evil with good. And how will we respond to these people who attack me or Saddleback, or anybody else? We will love and we will love and we will love and we will pray and we will care. And you know we're going to keep on assisting the poor, keep on caring for the sick, and keep on educating the next generation, we're going to do the peace plan, promote reconciliation, to equip [unclear] leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation. We're not going to allow people to distract us from the main thing, we keep the main thing the main thing. And that is, God has never made a person he didn't love, God has never made a person Jesus didn't die for. God has never made a person that God doesn't want to know him in a personal way. And God has never made a person that he doesn't want him serving Christ and serving the Lord by meeting the needs, the practical needs of those around us.

Now I know this has been a long News and Views, so let me wrap this up by first sayinig a couple of things. I want you to know how proud I am of you. There is no church like Saddleback anywhere else in America. No church has sent more people overseas to help the poor and the sick, ever, in the history of America, than Saddleback Church. We sent over 8,000 of our members overseas in the peace plan, to 68 countries, in just the last four years.

[ ... more about Saddleback ... baptize more ... most generous ... bring a friend to Christmas services ... will release new network to help you grow spiritually, using high-tech etc. ... new magazine ... ]

This is not what I thought I was going to hear, after reading the summaries by progressive bloggers. I am curious to hear how the TTF community feels about the controversy and Rick Warren's statements, transcribed here.

Saddleback Takes Down Their Anti-Gay Statement

I am fascinated by the Rick Warren controversy. President-elect Barack Obama invited a preacher to say a prayer at his inauguration, a very conservative evangelical preacher. This preacher, like most evangelical preachers, does not accept homosexuality and does not believe gay people should be allowed to marry. He seems to support the legal rights that can be granted by a civil union but defines marriage in a narrow way that does not include same-sex couples and other variations on the theme. To him, marriage is one thing, it's one man and one woman. I am pretty sure that Rick Warren and I would disagree on every topic under the sun, but I am not going to judge whether he is a hater or not. Really, I don't know, I never heard of him before last week and neither did you, we just don't know anything about him. He is a powerful American, a preacher with a huge church, this reminds me of when presidents used to have Billy Graham say prayers at public ceremonies. I'll bet you'd find out ole Billy didn't care much for gay people either.

We are just emerging from eight years of polarization, with the Republican administration doing all it could to drive wedges between groups of Americans. The new president wants to close the gap, he wants to bring people together, and he has invited this preacher as a gesture toward that. At the same time, several states just passed anti-gay referendums of one sort or another, and Rick Warren was part of the effort in California. So while the new president is promising to implement policies that make life better for LGBT people, he is inviting an anti-gay leader to speak at his inauguration. Obviously, a lot of gay people and people who care about the issues are offended, and it's not hard to see why.

This is a classic framing problem, how you react depends on what viewpoint you decide to adopt in defining it. You can look at this in light of lesbian and gay issues, or you can look at it in terms of polarization in our nation. The Rick Warren benediction is a perfect microcosm, here we see why there is a problem and why it is hard to solve it. If we are going to bridge the gap, then people with different beliefs will have to show respect for one another. Rick Warren has shown a disgraceful lack of respect for LGBT people, yet to unite Americans one side or the other is going to have to extend an open hand. You can see the Obama's invitation to Rick Warren to say a prayer as surrender and failure to uphold his stated principles, or you can see it as magnanimity that will lead toward healing. It's both, and it's neither.

I don't care if you agree with me or not but I will say what I think so we can talk about it. I think if we resolve the polarization, the other issues will resolve themselves. I think we need to make an effort to reach out to the other side, to win them over with warmth -- you are not going to beat the puritans in an argument, because they aren't using facts and reasoning, they rely on authority, faith, intuition. I think Obama did the right thing, of course I can't stand people like Rick Warren but there are a lot of Americans like him, and if we are going to unify we need to behave respectfully toward those people, just by definition. It's just a prayer, this preacher is not going to be on a panel that sets policy. Obama's policies will be progressive and good, he's just invited a conservative preacher to come to the inauguration and ask God to bless the country.

Something interesting happened.

Warren's Saddleback Church had a web site that said:

Because membership in a church is an outgrowth of accepting the Lordship and leadership of Jesus in one's own life, someone unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted at [sic] a member at Saddleback Church. That does not mean they cannot attend church -- we hope they do! God's Word has the power to change our lives.

It's sad to think of a gigantic church full of people believing that Jesus would not save the soul of a gay person, but there you are. You know it's out there, they just said it out loud.

Thanks to AmericaBlog for noting that Saddleback Church has deleted this anti-gay wording suddenly. It's just gone. Disappeared yesterday, apparently, or the day before.

AmericaBlog's John Aravosis comments this way:

So does Rick Warren now welcome gays, all gays, as members of his church? Or is he simply embarrassed of his views - embarrassed of God's views, per Warren's own admission? And if Warren is embarrassed of God's views, then what is he doing as a public spokesman on religion?

Look, this is like if in the sixties a restaurant owner took the "whites only" signs down. It appears that Saddleback Church has re-thought its policy and dropped the rule that gay people can't be members. And what's wrong with that? Why is Aravosis still complaining? Of course, you know as well as I do that the Saddleback guys don't like gay people, but who cares? I'm sure there was a lot of pressure with the controversy and everything, and that statement was a little bit blunt, it was the 2008 version of the "whites only" sign. And they took it down.

If under Obama we can establish a dialogue between left and right, between gays and Christians, if Americans can start talking to one another, I think you'll find that a lot of our other problems will go away. For our side to be adamant about this is exactly like George Bush refusing to negotiate with some "Axis of Evil" country, it's exactly the same thing. No, you're not going to agree with somebody like Rick Warren, but nothing can get better if we can't show some respect for one another. Saddleback took down their anti-gay statement, and that's progress. Our side needs to show a little love, too.

Court Opinion Issued

Back in September, the Maryland Court of Appeals decided to block a referendum promoted by the Citizens for a Responsible Whatever, to relegalize discrimination on the basis of gender identity. At the time, all they did was issue a statement saying who won. You didn't know how the court voted, what their reasoning was, or anything.

This week they issued their opinion document, fifty-three pages of hard reading explaining why they decided the way they did. It was a four to three decision, so the document includes the minority's dissenting opinion. You can read it HERE.

There were a few issues. For one, a lower court had determined that the referendum should go forward because complaints were filed too late, and it was not clear at all how the deadline was determined. There was another issue altogether, having to do with the number of petition signatures -- the county Board of Elections told the bad guys they needed so-many signatures, but they had figured wrong. So it looked like they got the number they were told to get, but when you did the math you saw they needed more than that. They needed five percent of registered voters in the county to sign their petitions, and they didn't have it, but they had the number they thought they were supposed to have, after the board had validated signatures. Finally, there was an issue about the signatures themselves. If you are registered to vote as Dudley Dooright, RCMP, you can't sign the petition as "Dud D." Well, you can, but it won't count, the law says you have to use the name you used when you registered to vote. Actually, if your name ends with RCMP you might not qualify as a resident of Montgomery County, Maryland.

First of all, the court blew off the argument about not meeting the deadline. This gets too complicated, you have ten days to file a complaint but nobody was sure when the ten days started. The first judge ruled that the complaint came too late, but the appeals court decided the complaint was filed in time. I'll tell you, this goes on for page after page, it wasn't easy for these judges to figure it out and I won't explain to you the subtleties of a "determination" and how you know when a person is aggrieved, who gets to have judicial review and who gets declaratory relief. Hey! Open those eyes. In the end, the appeals court decided the good guys' complain was filed in time, that's all that matters. Once they've determined that, then they could look at the content of the complaint, and that's where it gets interesting.

There was a tough question involved in this case. The Board of Elections told the CRW the wrong number, but nobody realized that until the case had already gone to court. The board only included "active" voters in their numbers when they meant "registered," but in fact there are a lot of voters who are inactive for various reasons, but are still registered. So the question is, what number is five percent of registered voters? And the board gave them the wrong number. So the CRW got the number of signatures they were told to get, but they didn't get five percent of registered voters. Our side, the good guys, said the referendum should be thrown out because it didn't meet the standard encoded in the law, and the bad guys said it met the standard they were given by the county government.

This is where I'm glad I'm not a judge.

The legal question had to do with adding this point to the complaint after the deadline had passed. And man, there is a lot of precedent here, they cite a lot of cases where courts have considered these kinds of things. It looks like the big case they go back to was from 1903, it has to do with adding "theories" or reasons to your complaint after the complaint has been filed. It comes down to this: "The statement of the cause of action was different, but the cause of action itself was identical." They decided, on the basis of previous decisions, that amending the complaint was okay.

Having decided that, the question of the number of signatures required became quite a bit easier. The law is clear, you need five percent of the number of registered voters. Based on the case of Maryland Green Party v. Maryland Board of Elections, the court says:

To the extent that this statute, however, permits the maintenance of two lists to determine an individual’s registration status in order to exclude “inactive” voters from the list of registered voters, it is unconstitutional for the reasons stated in our decision in Green Party. We emphasize that there is no room, after our decision in Green Party, for the maintenance of an “inactive” list to define registration status, because both “active” and “inactive” voters are registered voters. The Legislature has “no authority to decree that an ‘inactive’ voter is not a ‘registered voter’ with all the rights of a registered voter.

Here's the money quote:

In the present case Montgomery County’s 52,269 “inactive” voters were excluded from the total number of registered voters, thus greatly diminishing the number of voters necessary to achieve the requisite 5% of registered voters. Had the County Board used all 552,281 registered voters, which includes both “active” and “inactive” voters, as opposed to only the 500,012 “active” voters, it would have determined that 27,615 petition signatures, not 25,001, were needed to achieve the 5% benchmark. Even were we to agree with the Circuit Court that only 26,813 signatures are valid, which we do not, the petition would fail to meet the requisite 27,615 signatures necessary to meet the 5% requirement.

Our county's Board of Elections is a sorry lot. You wouldn't think it would be so hard, especially in this day of computers and databases, to say how many voters you've got. But they couldn't do it, they couldn't put in a simple query to the database that says "Give me the number of registered voters."

Next the court goes through a lot of discussion about the words "shall" and "requirement," and what those mean, how they have interpreted them in the past, and whether somebody signing a petition needs to give their exact name as they have it in their voter registration. The lower court had said it didn't matter if you left out a middle initial, or if a Charles signed as Chuck, even though the law is very specific in saying they have to match up. This made a gigantic difference in the number of valid signatures -- the lower court threw out a few, but kept thousands of contested signatures, saying that the intent of the law was to validate the names, and that could be done even if they didn't match up exactly. Like I say, I'm just glad I'm not a judge.

The important point is here:

Finding none of the County Board’s arguments persuasive, we decline the invitation to reverse our past holding that a signer is required to comply with the signature requirements govern petitions for referendum. Such a holding is in accord with our view that signature requirements "provide additional means by which fraudulent or otherwise improper signatures upon a referendum petition may be detected" ...

Because we hold that Jane Doe’s judicial review action was not time-barred, that "inactive" voters should have been included in the total number of registered voters and finally that the 10,876 challenged signatures were invalid as a matter of law, the reversal of summary judgment entered on behalf of the County Board and entry of summary judgment on behalf of Jane Doe was mandated by this Court on September 9, 2008.

So, not only was the complaint filed on time, not only did the CRW not meet the five percent -- they didn't meet it by a lot, they didn't even meet the easier number that the Board of Elections gave them. This court threw out another ten thousand signatures, which sinks that ship entirely.