I sometimes wonder if this blog has any use, much less any readers. I don’t write here regularly, and tend not to keep resolutions to change for the better. Yesterday, though, I had a note in the mail from a chance reader in Germany inquiring about the inspiration for my poem “Flatbush Waltz.” I was flattered and answered quickly. I wrote the poem because I had fallen in love with Itzhak Perlman’s recording of that Andy Statmen tune. You can hear it here on YouTube.

Writing that poem also gave me occasion to search out a copy of a book I loved back in the 1970s, Thad Stem’s First Reader. Thad was one of a group of writers I knew in North Carolina in those years, who practiced their craft in the state’s network of newspapers, many of them small weeklies, an informal fraternity that that included Sam Ragan, Cliff Blue and others. The Late Tom Wicker got his start among them, writing for The Sandhill Citizen.

Over spring break, my beloved and I made a fast trip to Texas. On our way home we stopped off in Marshall for a few hours. Marshall is in Harrison County; my mother’s people settled there in 1834, hoping, I think, to escape the abolition of slavery in the United States by migrating to the fledgling Republic of Texas. They claimed large tracts of land adjoining Caddo Lake and eventually named the place Scottsville.

We found a few remnants of Scottsville on our visit: a cemetery dedicated to the memory of the Confederacy, and the Scott house, where My Grandfather was born in 1879. The old dwelling was originally built by W. T. Scott in 1840, according to a pamphlet kindly provided to us by Beverly Smith, whom we met at the Scott cemetery chapel. I grew up with a wealth of stories about the Scotts, some of them lurid; and I told a few of those stories in a piece I published back in 1992. I am thinking of telling them again, more thoroughly and at greater length.

This is another post in a series that honors my long ago major professor’s habit of coming into the classroom some Fridays and saying “Let’s talk about snakes,” which meant we would spend the class talking about whatever was on our minds.

Ashes-to-go: My church is in the news today because we, along with partners in Isaiah 58 Ministries, offered ashes-to-go at the corner of Grand and Arsenal as we have for the past good many years. This year’s program made the front page of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and was featured in The Washington Post in a piece that circulated widely crediting our Pastor, The Rev. Teresa K. M. Danieley, with the original idea. Apparently the idea was not Pastor Teresa’s but originated in a Bible study group of which she was part. Pastor Teresa has asked the Post to publish a correction and has published a disclaimer at Facebook. But that hasn’t prevented a person from California, who claims to have originated the program, himself, from writing flaming posts on Pastor Teresa’s Facebook page. Perhaps he should write to God.

Planned parenthood: Two days ago in The Washington Post Melinda Henneberger opined that the birth control controversy is playing out to benefit Democrats. Says Henneberger:

The beauty of the current birth-control conversation for Democrats is that they not only have public opinion on their side but have cannily managed to make contraception a front-burner election-year campaign issue — by complaining that Republicans are making it front-burner election-year campaign issue.

I couldn’t be happier, and I’m happier still if Andrew Sullivan is right in a piece to which Henneberger refers, in claiming that President Obama lured Republicans into the birth-control swamp by design.

Cardinal Dolan: Timothy Dolan is back in this country, where he celebrated Mass for Ash Wednesday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and distributed some ceremonial bags of food to the hungry. Though he wore Lenten purple and affected to care little for the trappings of his new status as Cardinal, saying “The fact that I’m wearing red amounts to a hill of beans,” his vestments were still pretty grand and he wore a red zucchetto. Much is being made of Dolan’s new status in St. Louis, where he is regarded almost as a native son. But the writer of one letter to the editor in today’s paper isn’t entirely thrilled:

It is impressive indeed to see St. Louis proud of Ballwin native Timothy Dolan, who was “elevated” to the status of “prince” of the church and member of the “club” of cardinals who are charged with electing the pope’s successor (“He’s got a million of ‘em,” Feb. 18). His humor, wit and understanding of the people are rare and often unseen qualities in much of the existing male hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

As a Catholic, however, I continue to be mystified by the lack of understanding by the hierarchy of the humble servant mentality of Jesus Christ. Magnificent jeweled pectoral crosses, gold rings, flamboyant tailor-made vestments, days of celebration and dining out do not seem to fit in with the simplicity and humility of Jesus, the carpenter who washed the feet of His disciples. Nor does (sic) the terms “elevated” or “prince” describe Jesus, who came to serve and not to be served.

It will be interesting to see what Dolan does with his newly expanded superstardom. I am inclined to agree with Andrew Sullivan who has written, in a piece to which I have already referred, that Dolan and other American Bishops have staked out positions on social issues that do not reflect “Christian engagement with a changing world” but rather presage a retreat into fundamentalism; but I think it would be more accurate to characterize the Bishops’ retreat from social justice as a retreat into majesterium; though a few bags of food doled out to presumably hungry folk makes a good photo op, I’ll admit.

Whether or not the recent unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was just (I do not think it was), it’s clear that Cheryl Perich was not fired for religious reasons or indeed for any secularly legitimate reason.¹ Her firing would have been illegal had it been carried out by a secular organization. Shortly after the verdict was announced, The New York Times spoke out against it in a fairly sharp editorial. After reviewing the facts of the case and the court’s reasoning, the Times argued as follows:

The court’s conception of the ministerial role is more encompassing than it has been defined by state and federal appellate courts. Its sweeping deference to churches does not serve them or society wisely.

Recent legal decisions have so enlarged the scope of clerical benefit where it can be argued to pertain to religious establishjments and not to individuals as to constitute an establishment of religion (or so it seems to me) in clear violation of both the spirit and the letter of the first amendment. We’re now seeing this establishment flex its new muscles in ongoing disputes regarding the availability of health insurance coverage for contraception and abortion under the new federal health care law, in which Catholics and Evangelicals seem to be forming a political alliance that is going so far as to claim that its opposition to contraceptive coverage is based upon respect for the individual conscience and to demand a broad conscientious exemption that would include “employers with religious people running them or other people of conviction who are running them.”

If we follow the reasoning of the Supreme Court and the allied Bishops and Evangelicals we are not permitted to judge the morality of their position on the basis of it’s social consequences or it’s consequences to individuals who will be denied access to legal redress and necessary health protective services. This is a position that I believe can only be maintained by trivialization of the persons affected and the importance of the health care issues involved, more or less on the order of Foster Friess’s comments about birth control this past week; or as Melissa Moschella writes in the National Review Online:

Forcing employers or insurers to fund an activity that they believe to be gravely wrong is a denial of individual conscience rights. Is free access to contraceptives an equally fundamental moral right to be protected even at the cost of others’ conscience rights? Is it a prerequisite for a free and ordered society? Anyone inclined to say yes should consider the following question: Would it be worth risking one’s life or livelihood, emigrating to an unknown land, or fighting a revolution to secure all-expenses-paid access to contraceptive services? Only for those who have made sexual expression their religion.

It is in the nature of the sort of casuistry being used by the “religious” with respect to this issue to set up and attack straw persons and to pretend that wolves are sheep. The Catholic bishops’ design to impose Catholic teaching upon Catholics and non-Catholics alike is patently obvious.² It is laughable for Timothy Dolan to present himself and his fellow princes of the church as victims of presidential overreach. Indeed, according to a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter,

Perhaps Obama saw, as many of us do, the bishops’ actions as an attempt to legislate beliefs that they cannot get their own people to obey. . . . The sad truth is, if the numbers of Catholics leaving the church are any indication, most Catholics in the United States probably see the hierarchy more as victimizers than victimized.

Here’s some more casuistry. I’ve just received an email from Senator Roy Blunt in answer to a call I made last week to Senator McCaskill’s office urging her to oppose Blunt’s amendment to a transportation bill that would have attempted to repeal the contraception mandate. It reads in part:

In August 2011, the Administration announced its decision to mandate that all insurance companies and employers cover contraception and sterilizations with no copay. This unprecedented decision is an affront to the deeply held convictions of millions of Americans, which is why I introduced legislation to repeal the mandate. . . . The government should not force doctors to perform procedures or employers to provide coverage for services they view as immoral any more than the government should force treatments on Americans. The federal government has no business in a doctor’s examining room and the Administration’s actions have put our nation’s deep commitment to religious freedom in jeopardy.

But the controversy isn’t about anybody’s conscience.³ It’s about power, or more precisely it’s about the ability of the Catholic hierarchy and allied Evangelical groups to to command the power of the state to manage the lives and welfare of those millions of Americans Mr. Blunt pretends to represent. And of course Mr. Blunt and the Republicans don’t want to keep the government out of doctors’ examing rooms in states requiring that women seeking abortions undergo ultrasound examination. In Texas and Oklahoma the government requires doctors to force women to view the procedure, and in some other states the government forces doctors to perform invasive vaginal ultrasound examinations when that is required in order to perform the procedure during the first trimester of pregnancy.

Catholic and other religious organizations receive huge infusions of public monies from federal, state, and local sources, and for these purposes claim to be secular institutions, as I have pointed out in a previous post. One would think that such institutions would not then be able to claim (or be so mendacious as to claim) benefit of clergy. But consistency and common sense don’t matter in contests like this one. And now the legislature of my enlightened state is taking up the issue. As Planned Parenthood reports today:

SB749 sponsored by Senator John Lamping of St. Louis and HCR 41 from Representative Paul Curtman of Pacific seek to undo the new federal rule and allow any employer to deny birth control coverage to their employees simply because they have a “moral” objection to birth control.

Of course, using public money to fund access to contraception has been part of federal law since 1970, when the idea was introduced by a Representative from Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush.⁴ The enabling legislation passed the house by a majority of 298 to 32 and passed the Senate unanimously. It was signed into law by Richard Nixon. But the religious right aren’t going after Nixon or Bush the first. Their target is the current president.

More later—

Notes

¹Reviews of the case may be found here and here.
²As is the fact that Catholic teaching forbids most forms of contraception. In a related matter, Reed Abelson reports in today’s New York Times that Catholic hospitals are expanding by buying other hospitals and changing their character. See “Catholic Hospitals Expand, Religious Strings Attached.” In both cases the church’s practice is not persuasive but coercive.
³Ellis West, a constitutional scholar, has reviewed the issue of conscientious objection in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Among many enlightened things he writes is this: “At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, both its proponents and opponents agreed that the national government should have no jurisdiction over religion, i.e., should pass no laws dealing primarily or directly with religious beliefs and practices, and the religion clauses were added to the Constitution to make that clear. No one suggested then that they were also intended to prevent laws that the government could pass from being applied to persons or groups who did not want to obey them for reasons of conscience.” See “Catholic claims stretch the first amendment.”
⁴See Ann Gerhart’s piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, “Birth control as election issue? Why?“