Civil Unions Are A First Amendment Issue

I have written about gay marriage before. Today I will write about Civil Unions because yesterday the Colorado Senate passed a bill allowing Civil Unions.

As usual, there seem to be a large number of Christians (fundamentalists) who say they are against this. In fact, these "Christianists" as I am going to call them from now on, are boo-hooing that their First Amendment rights are being trampled on. These Christianists argue that the state is making a law which is against their religion and that because of this, the law is illegal.

But this is a perverted twisting of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment disallows any federal law which is made IN FAVOR of a religion because otherwise that religion would become favored in the eyes of the law.

The Christianists make it seem as if anyone who is in favor of Gay Marriage or Civil Unions is doing so based on their own interpretation of religious law--that in effect the federal government is favoring the "Gay Religious Movement" over the Christian Religious movement.

This is not what is happening.

Allowing Civil Unions and Gay Marriage is not an attempt to impress one religious view over another. Rather, by allowing Civil Unions and Gay Marriage we are breaking the bonds that religion holds over our society.

This is a wonderful thing.

Breaking the bonds that religion holds over our society means that religion will now be about GOD and not about CONTROL.

What a wonderful thing to do--both for our society and for religion.

And those people who still want their religion to be about control?

They can still be religious in that way. Go ahead. You're free to do it. You just can't use your religion to control other people.

Way to go Civil Unions!

Constitutional Rights Are For All Americans

Once again I am returning from a trip to the rec center and I find I must write a blog post. I was listening to Fox News while I was riding a bicycle. I wanted to sit where I could watch a different channel but there were no machines available, so I was stuck.

Fox News was talking about President Obama and Guns Rights. They had some people on who were very upset because they believed "this president" was trying to redistribute wealth--taking wealth from the "middle class, upper middle class and upper class" and letting the poor people have it.

At the same time they were talking about how wrong it was for President Obama to redistribute wealth, they were talking about constitutional rights. Specifically they were very concerned because they saw President Obama as restricting their "constitutional rights" regarding the 2nd Amendment.

Let's get this straight. The Constitution of the United States is for all Americans. It is not just for "middle class, upper middle class and upper class" citizens. Where citizens of other, lesser economic classes do not have complete access to public institutions we must expand access to everyone.

People who are economically disadvantaged do not have the same access to public institutions that other citizens do. I am talking access to jobs. I am talking access to public health care. I am talking access to adequate housing. There is one other big area I am talking about, and for that I will need the preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

There is a group of people within the United States who are being denied access to domestic Tranquility and general Welfare.

Who are these people? They are the people who live in the inner city--specifically they are communities made of up of largely African Americans and Hispanics.

This is where the conversation turns to guns--specifically to gun violence.

The Far Right and the Republican party want to argue that guns are about defense. These groups are saying that they have a right to defend themselves. But the Constitution does not give anyone right to defend themselves from other Americans. Rather, the Constitution provides for defense against other countries and it provides for defense against the government. There is no RIGHT to defend yourself against other Americans.

If you need to defend yourself against "the bad people" this is a matter of Justice, not defense.

So when white people are talking about gun rights, they are really saying they want to defend themselves. They are saying they want to defend themselves against the large numbers of bad Black people and bad Hispanic people.

Guns are a big problem in the inner city, it is true. But guns are a big problem in the inner city not because the inner city is filled with lots of bad people. Guns are a problem in the inner city because we have lax gun laws and because access to public institutions has largely been cut off.

This is what happened last night in my neighborhood (9NEWS). Well, not exactly my neighborhood. It happened across the park, across the expanse of prairie dogs. It happened in the horrible and awful place that is Aurora, Colorado. Here is a picture of the crime scene--from my neighborhood.

You can see that the "illustrious"neighborhood of Stapleton is separated from the "horrible" neighborhood of Aurora by only a few rodents. The shooting that was reported on 9NEWS last night took place near the red building on the right side of the photograph.

I woke up last night around 2:00 in the morning. I heard a steady drum beat of loud shots--boom, boom, boom. I didn't count the shots but there had to be at least 20 shots. It was enough that I incorporated the shots into my dream and then I woke up and realized that I wasn't dreaming. The shots were real and they were VERY CLOSE.

Here's the thing:
There was no way to protect anyone from these shots. They occurred in the middle of the night. I could hear the shots, but I couldn't really tell what direction they were coming from.

The news only talked about the shooting at 11:00 that night--we couldn't find anything about the shots at 2:00 in the morning. This is also another problem. We rarely hear about what is really going on. But that's another issue. For this blog post--I want to say that there is NO WAY to protect yourself from this type of gun violence. No Way.

We do not need guns. We do not need guns. We do not need guns. We do not need guns.

Guns are destroying us. And listening to White people talk about how they want to protect themselves from the awful Black and Hispanic people is really, really horrible.

We are all Americans. Our society needs to be for all people. Where someone is restricted in their access to our society we need to take steps to allow their participation. This is the meaning of the Constitution of the United States. Anything less is simply blah, blah, blah.

Religious Right is Wrong When it Comes to Guns

I have written before about the large numbers of Bible-believing Christians who are advocating against any governmental control (link here) of guns. Anyone standing outside the walls of the fundamentalist community might find it strange that people who strongly profess to have a loving God (Jesus) would also strongly profess their governmental right to kill people with very powerful weapons.

I have watched this debate with some interest—scanning the talking heads out there for any evidence that SOMEONE in the Bible-believing community finds the whole gun rights argument to be outside the purview of religion. I have not yet found anyone, although I am sure that they exist. However, I did hear of a Christian pastor who gave a reason why the fundamentalist community is so strongly in favor of killing people with very strong weapons.

This pastor said, “The biblical basis for this is the Golden Rule.” He then continued; “Do unto other what you would have done unto you.”

I was momentarily taken aback. I do not want someone to murder me, how could I then go out and murder someone? Surely this was not what that pastor meant.

That pastor was talking about protecting other people. The fundamentalist Christian community uses The Golden Rule as their reason for being “The Great Protector.” They want the right to carry powerful weapons because they feel that no one else is going to protect them.

This may be a philosophy, but it’s not a good religious philosophy. In fact, using the Golden Rule as the basis for killing people with very powerful weapons is the ANTITHESIS of good religious philosophy. Let me state this more clearly.

One of the passages in the Hebrew Bible which gives Christians the foundation for their Golden Rule is Leviticus 19:18—“…thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Do unto others is related to loving other people as yourself. This makes sense. But there is nothing in Leviticus 19:18 about using powerful weapons to kill people. Nothing.

Leviticus 19:18 has a sentence before "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. This sentence is even more strongly against using powerful weapons to protect oneself. The first part of the verse in Leviticus 19:18 is as follows: “Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people.” The verse also has a stunning ending: “I am the L-RD.” Thus, Leviticus 19:18 isn’t just any verse for a Bible-believing Christian. Leviticus 19:18 is a verse in which we listen to the word of G-d. This makes Leviticus 19:18 a very important verse for the Bible-believing Christian community.

Here it is in its entirety:

Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the L-rd.

***

This brings us to a very big difference between The Golden Rule and Leviticus 19:18. One uses the word "other" while the latter uses the word "neighbor."

Is there a meaning of the word “other” which would lend credence to the Christian perspective of using powerful weapons to kill an “other?”

The word in Hebrew which is commonly translated as neighbor is "rei-acha." Not surprisingly, the meaning of the word "rei-acha" is not the word you would use to refer to your neighbors in Modern Hebrew. It is a word which you might use to refer to "the children of your people." 

In a society like ours, who are the children of our people? Who are the people about whom we should concern ourselves?

Do we consider all Americans to be “our people?”

or

Do we only consider people of similar religious backgrounds to be “our people?”

This is important because we must ask the Christian fundamentalist community exactly who they are protecting themselves from?

I have heard more than one gun enthusiast say they are protecting themselves against “the bad people.”

This to me seems to be the “NEW” meaning for the Golden Rule. In other words, the fundamentalist Christian community is protecting themselves from “OTHERS.”

Let’s read the Golden Rule one more time:

Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

And here's the Golden Rule as it is interpreted by the Fundamentalist Christian community:

Kill others as you would have wanted to be protected.

This doesn’t sound like good religious philosophy to me. It sounds like a bunch of really scared people who are taking the law into their own hands. It seems they are terrified that our violent culture will come for them next—that we will reap as we have sown.

But saying that G-d is on your side does not make it so.

And making our culture more violent doesn’t solve anything.

So we must work together to get rid of the guns and to search out the sources of violence in our society. We are all in this together.

The Way We Speak About the 2nd Amendment Matters

I grew up in a home where my dad went hunting every year. I remember the elks hanging from the ceiling in our garage and I remember the freezer full of elk meat every winter. I understand the need to hunt.

I don't understand the huge need for guns that our society seems to have developed. Everywhere I read some guy is apoplectic because "his guns are being taken from him." I read about the CEO who talks about guns as his birthright. This is nonsense. Something else is going on, but the conversation has become so convoluted that almost nobody can figure it out.

Let's get this straight. Guns are not a birthright. As it stands, our conversation should be about the 2nd Amendment. But gun rights advocates are taking the argument to a whole new level. In effect, they are saying it is their right to murder people.

This is nonsense. There is no"birthright" to kill or murder people. It really is that simple.

We need to talk about whether we need the 2nd Amendment.

We also need to stop talking about the 2nd Amendment as if it only applies to White people. When I hear people talking about the "Right" to defend themselves I hear White people saying they need to defend themselves from all of the people of color who are ruining our country. This is a conversation that needs to be changed. We do not need to allow the Constitution of the United States to protect racist ideologies.

One more thing. There may be a need for people to hunt and they may need to use guns in order to hunt, but the 2nd Amendment does not deal with the right to hunt in any way, shape or form. The 2nd Amendment talks about militias. The only way to solve this huge issue is for us to talk about guns and our supposed need for guns in a very clear manner. Ideology will not get us anywhere.

Keep Guns Out Of Schools

I just got home from the rec center because my daughter and I recently started an exercise program. While riding the bike in the weight room I found myself listening to the Ed Schultz show on the television. His guest was an elementary school teacher in Utah who wants to get a concealed gun permit so she can carry a gun in her classroom.

This teacher said that she had a big emotional reaction to the Newtown shooting and wanted "options" for what she could do as a teacher to protect her students. She then said that didn't want armed guards in schools, but felt that concealed gun permits were the best option. According to this teacher, for the past 12 years Utah state law has allowed teachers to carry guns in Utah schools.

The teacher being interviewed by Ed Schultz used typical Republican terminology to refer to people who use guns to kill others. She said the shooters are the "bad guys." This of course means that she is implying that teachers are "the good guys." But this isn't always true, and things that happen at school are not always so clearly defined as this teacher seems to think.

What about all of the teachers who have sexually assaulted students over the years?

What about if an elementary school student brings a knife to school?

I can think of many concerns I have about teachers carrying guns. In one school I taught in, there was a teacher who was a little odd (my opinion). One day, the students came into my class telling me that this teacher had just become so mad at them she slammed the classroom door on them. The students said she slammed the classroom door so hard that the door's handle fell off. Days later, the students came in telling me that they had found a "huge 6 inch hunting knife" in her closet. The students said that she had told them the knife "was for cutting watermelon." Neither the students nor I were convinced that she needed a knife like that to cut watermelon and neither did the principal once she found out. The teacher was gone that day, never to be seen again in that school.

In another school, we used to have a problem with high school students circling in cars. They would do this just as school was letting out and the middle school kids were getting onto the bus. Occasionally we teachers on bus duty would see one of the high school student brandishing a gun as they drove by. Teachers are not trained in how to handle this type of violence. Teachers are trained in teaching and this is how it should stay. Asking teachers to carry guns in school is asking our society to mask a very serious problem.

It does not surprise me that we are asking schools to treat our very serious gun violence with band aids.

This is what we have been doing for years in the inner city, where gun violence has been wreaking havoc with our youth for decades.

I saw guns at almost every school I taught at. First there were the gang bangers, who would drive around at lunch time, brandishing their guns from their cars. Then there were the repeated fire drills one year. Dutifully the school would file outside and we would watch as the gang bangers drove around looking for some particular kid. The school district took care of that particular problem by changing the alarms--no longer could anybody simply pull the alarm. This stopped the fire drills but it didn't stop the violence.

Another time, there was a group of ROTC students standing in the hallway outside my classroom. They were banging their wooden rifles (fake) up and down in the hallway, making a great deal of noise. I stepped into the hallway to ask them to move away from the classroom and one of the students came at me with one of the rifles.

In this same school there was an attempted murder one day. One student, (she happened to be one of my students) beat up another student at lunch time. Reports from people in the lunch room that day said that my student threw the other student to the ground. She then held the girl's head and bashed it over and over into the ground. The girl who was beaten up ended up in a coma. I'm not sure that she ever returned to school.

Inner city violence has historically been dealt with by dress codes. Back in the early 90s (and maybe earlier) schools began issuing edicts which stated what a student could and could not wear. Sagging pants, head gear, including hats and bandanas and certain colors were prohibited as were all professional sports wear. The use of dress policies did not solve the problem of inner city violence--it simply drove it outside the school walls.

Now we are watching the white, middle class community as they are forced to look at our problem with violence. The mass shootings we have seen are committed largely by white people against mostly white people. But instead of dealing with the issue, we are once again wanting to keep it at bay. This policy is short sighted and will only lead to more violence.

Gun violence is destroying us.

Gun violence has been taking the lives of huge numbers of Black and Hispanic young men for years and now it is taking the lives of of little school children.

We should have been doing something when it was our inner city youth who were being killed--but now that the violence has spread, we must take action. We must get rid of guns. We don't need them.

We don't need to kill other human beings.

It really is that simple.