America the Not So Beautiful

For the second time since I've gone back to Mass, my parish closed the service yesterday with the church vocalist (our version of a cantor) lead the congregants in a singalong of "America the Beautiful."

This time I could not stand idly by.  I refused to take part in the singing or even stand, as one is expected to do for the recessional hymn.  At first I just remained seated when I turned to the hymn numbered on the wooden placard in the front of the church and saw what it was.  But then I asked myself a question . . . what would Colin Kaepernick do?

I took a knee.

I got out of the pew and genuflected with my left foot and my right knee on the floor as the congregants sang "America the Beautiful."  Anyone could see that I was emulating Colin Kaepernick.  Surprisingly, I was not accosted outside on my way to my car.

So what's wrong with U.S. Catholics singing "America the Beautiful" in church?  Quite a few things, actually, and excuse me if I repeat myself here and there from a previous post.  First of all, it's an act of nationalism in what is supposed to be a universal church - the very word "catholic" means "universal."  Catholics in Ireland or Poland would not sing "America the Beautiful" - or any of their own patriotic songs, for that matter - in church any more than American Episcopalians, as part of the Anglican Communion, would sing "God Save the King" at one of their services.  Second of all, America is not a beautiful country.  Donald Trump and his greedy band of wealthy supporters cannot sing "America the Beautiful" while they pollute our skies with smoke, poison our waters, fell our forests, and develop our farmland into tract houses, shopping centers, office parks, and now data centers.  And neither can we.  And, Trump apparently wants to sell Yosemite National Park.

Third, it's a bad look for Catholics to sing patriotic songs when so many Opus Dei members seem to be running our archdioceses and our federal judiciary.  Why do progressives love to go after the Church for being patriarchal and misogynistic when those same adjectives can be appended to a faith they increasingly defend, Islam?  Because no one outside of MAGA has ever accused American Muslims of promoting Sharia law in this country, though Opus Dei had a hand in overturning Roe v. Wade.

But fourth - and this is a personal reason - it goes against my own beliefs.  Back when Trump got voted back into power by MAGA supporters - many of them Catholics, some of those Catholics white and Hispanic working-class males with a machismo complex - I decided that I was through with this country and wanted to, but could not, leave it.  As I have said many times, I had decided that I didn't need to leave America because America had left me.  And almost immediately after Trump moved back in to the White House (and before he began remodeling it), I became a secessionist, convinced that the United States could not longer go on as a country and that its constituent states of the Union should break up in at least ten separate countries, twelve at the most.  I can't sing a patriotic song about a country I hope goes the way of Czechoslovakia.  I cannot ignore my sentiments and sing "America the Beautiful" in honor of a country I want to see come to an end.  I felt very much the same way that I did back in May, when the pastor extolled the virtues of being an American in his homily (and when I heard "America the Beautiful" sung in church for the first time). 

So, this time, I took a knee on the edge of the pew.  And trust me, I did not want to do that.  Especially on a hardwood floor, which made it painful.  But the pain I felt pressing my knee against the floor was a small price to pay for keeping my integrity. 

Contraceptive Confoundment

President Obama is suddenly getting applauded by Catholic Democrats and some independent Catholics who supported him in 2008 for his announcement earlier today that he would continue the policy of guaranteeing contraceptive and birth control supplies to women who work in Catholic schools or hospitals (the same guarantee to female employees in other institutions), but with the proviso that health insurance companies must provide coverage when Catholic institutions refuse to do so out of conscience. People are already talking about how he defused a political issue with this move especially by showing respect for matters of faith, but I'm not sure about that. First of all, he galvanized the right. Second of all, he made himself look foolish by doing now what he should have done a few weeks ago. And third of all, while some Catholic clergypersons such as Sister Carol Keehan, the nun who runs Catholic Health Association, is pleased with this, the bishopric is reserving judgment pending further review. And Obama's change of course may have opened a new can of worms. He's essentially telling insurance companies to issue certain policies, playing into the hands of accusations of a "government takeover of health care."

Still, this is a good plan.  Obama did the right thing by women and he did the right thing by himself; he owed up to a mistake, corrected the mistake, and now he seeks to move on. But - do you think reactionaries in the Republican party will let him? He may have lit the match, but Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are going to fan the flame into a firestorm. in fact, at the annual Nuremberg rally - uh, Conservative Political Action Conference meeting, they're already at it. And (picking up on where I left off yesterday), while a majority of American Catholics support and use birth control, the fact that Obama had already issued a directive to put the onus on birth control coverage on the Church may have left a bad taste in people's mouths.

I hope I'm wrong about all this, and that this is the end of the issue for awhile with Obama having the advantage. But the righties going to exploit this issue for as long as they can. The Republicans were never going to support the revised version of this policy anyway. But they now have all of the media attention on the issue to milk it for all it's worth.

The Land Ain't Got No Culture

Oh, Christ, are the culture wars starting up again?

The Obama administration has issued a directive stating that Catholic schools and hospitals have to provide coverage for contraceptives and birth control pills without co-pays in an effort to broaden health access for women. Republicans have jumped on this issue like vultures on a carcass signifying their opposition to force Catholic institutions to pay for medical practices they're philosophically opposed to, calling it an affront to religious freedom and an attack on the Catholic Church. Noted Republican Catholic lawmakers such as House Speaker John Boehner and U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Marco Rubio of Florida vow to support legislation to overturn Obama's directive. Meanwhile, noted Democratic lawmakers such U.S. Senators Charles Schumer of New York Barbara Boxer of California and Illinois congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, along with Judith Waxman and Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center, praised the administration's efforts for expanding coverage for women.

By the way, while there are many Gentiles who back the President as well, I narrowed my examples of individuals supporting this new policy to Jews for a reason. I have long suspected that contraception opponents are as anti-Semitic as they are misogynistic, because many women's health advocates tend to be Jewish.  And, whenever Catholics and evangelicals complain about assaults on their religious liberties and their anti-contraception, pro-life beliefs by the liberal elites, it's a slippery slope to blaming the "New York" or "Hollywood" elites, which are both code phrases to refer to Jews. Catholics and evangelicals say they're defending themselves against what they call the "secular Jewish assault" on their faith, without stopping to think how a people who spend a day in early autumn atoning for their sins are a secular people.

Whether or not conservative Christians see any stand in favor of reproductive rights as being redolent of Jewishness, their stand on denying women their right to control their own bias reeks of being elitist itself - a mostly male elite telling women of different religious and economic backgrounds how to run their lives, including the non-Catholic female employees of Catholic universities and hospitals who need this coverage. Republicans think they may have found the issue to swing enough votes - Catholic votes - their way to unseat Obama in November. It's all good and fine to say that many Catholics use birth control and don't automatically subscribe to church dogma, but there are many more Catholics disgusted enough by how the GOP has framed this issue - and by the way, 335,000 houses of worship have been exempted from this directive - to desert Obama and Democratic congressional candidates at the polls. Obama can count on the support of every critical thinker in America who recognizes the value of his decision. But as Adlai Stevenson II would have said, he needs a majority to get re-elected.

And even though a poll found that a majority of Catholics support contraception coverage, many of them may be uncomfortable with the government ordering Catholic institutions to provide it. More on that later.

Activists for women's health rights, though, are on a roll. They successfully forced the Susan G. Komen Race For the Cure foundation, a leading breast cancer awareness group, to reverse its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood due to a congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood's alleged use of taxpayer funding for abortions, and Karen Handel, a senior Komen vice president and a failed Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, was forced to resign. Although Planned Parenthood has been assured continued funding to help poor women get breast examinations they can't get anywhere else, many women's health advocates are going to have a hard time trusting the Komen foundation again. But Komen's 180 is still a victory.

And, as all this was going on, the Washington state legislature just passed a bill legalizing gay marriage, which Governor Christine Gregoire supports, even as California's anti-gay marriage law has been struck down by federal appeals court - a decision that will soon be reviewed ultimately by the Supreme Court. The trend in favor of gay marriage has pleased at least one conservative - Rick Santorum, who now has a lot of momentum from anti-gay activists to propel his presidential campaign.

With Obama trying to defuse a politically charged health issue, and a new battle over gay rights having been joined, the culture wars are on again, and Americans are fighting over how this nation's culture should be defined. The joke's on them; we Americans have no culture to fight over. The closest we come to showing any culture is that annual ritual that takes place every February, where overpaid contestants battle it out in a public arena for supremacy and glory, where the winners are lauded and the losers are ridiculed, and with a hideous musical number midway through the show - for all the world to see on television. I am, of course, talking about the Oscars. :-D