Christian groups seek to keep National Day of Prayer despite having, oh, every other day

Argument over the federally-declared National Day of Prayer has only intensified as the date–tomorrow, May 6–draws ever nearer. On April 15, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb of Wisconsin ruled that the National Day of Prayer, created by a 1952 law, is unconstitutional. According to a post on the In Queen Anne blog hosted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,

U.S. must fight proposed Ugandan anti-LGBT law

Originally published December 3, 2009.

AIDS Awareness Month began with World AIDS Day on Tuesday. The color red was everywhere, and discussion ensued on promises and goals for the year to come.

But in the HIV/AIDS conversation, no topic has been hotter in the last few weeks than Uganda. A country hit hard by HIV/AIDS, Uganda has benefited from U.S. funding in its struggle against the disease since President Bush set up the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2003. Ugandan Christian ministries have also increasingly received financial contributions from conservative American anti-LGBT figures like Pastor Rick Warren.

The relationships of people like Warren, Scott Lively, and Don Schmierer with Ugandan churches aren’t the only cause of extreme homophobia in the country. But their influence, coupled with continued U.S. financial support to combat HIV/AIDS, has enabled and encouraged Ugandan leaders to target LGBT individuals as scapegoats.

Ugandan law already criminalizes same-sex sexual activity. But as far back as mid-October, Ugandan legislators have been considering a law that would make “repeat offenses” and sexual interaction with HIV-positive individuals punishable by death.

Somehow, it’s taken until the end of November for most people in the U.S. to even begin talking about this despicable legislation. More importantly, the person who should be talking about it—Rick Warren, someone with undeniable financial and ideological involvement in the development of the law—refuses to “take sides” in any discussion of the issue. Even Lively, author of The Pink Swastika (which likens being gay or lesbian to Nazism) has suggested that this new law is a bit extreme.

In addition to being a flagrant violation of human rights and essentially legalizing genocide, Uganda’s proposed law reinforces attitudes that impede the ability to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS. It mistakenly singles out the LGBT community as a huge cause of HIV/AIDS. It also prevents any LGBT individuals from seeking information about safe sex in a same-sex context and from seeking treatment if HIV-positive.

In addition, the law would attempt to force others to inform on people they believe to be gay or lesbian within 24 hours of suspected same-sex sexual interaction. If they don’t, they could face up to three years in jail. If this doesn’t sound like a witch hunt, I don’t know what does.

In this particular circumstance, though, something can still be done.

First, Rick Warren needs to come clean. At the moment, his money speaks for him.

His current choice to keep mum about the subject demonstrates quite clearly that he supports legalized genocide in Uganda because he can’t openly fund its promotion in the United States. If this isn’t the case, then he needs to stand up and say it. Otherwise, he might as well be as ragingly bigoted as Fred Phelps instead of hiding behind his false “respectful evangelical” demeanor.

Second, the United States needs to step up to the plate and engage with the Ugandan government about this appalling proposal. We cannot continue to fund efforts to treat and stop HIV/AIDS in a country which dumps undue blame on a group of people and hopes to wipe them out. It must be communicated that we will not fund fatal prejudice.

Anyone’s individual feelings about the LGBT community aside, it is imperative to protect their rights as human beings. While we argue about LGBT individuals’ rights as American citizens to marry, to live free from discrimination, and whether it’s okay for Adam Lambert to kiss another man on television, the developing situation in Uganda is a question of life or death.

In making commitments for the coming year to do more in the fight against HIV/AIDS, I cannot imagine anything greater than dedication to the protection of the lives of those being unduly persecuted for the existence of a disease that does not discriminate in its choice of victims. We need to take responsibility for a problem aggravated to this point by our own countrymen.

Chelsea is a senior in LAS.

U.S. shouldn’t nationalize Christmas

Originally published December 4, 2008.

During the days leading up to Thanksgiving (or up to Halloween), it was difficult not to notice the Christmas music playing in stores, decorations for sale and advertisements for Black Friday. In some places, you’re fortunate enough to find items for Chanukah, sometimes Kwanzaa. But even when retailers set up a generic “holiday” section within, items like colored string lights, fake holly and mistletoe, and pine trees are all associated with Christmas.

Despite the fact that Christmas is based in Christian beliefs and the better portion of the U.S. population identifies as some form of Christian, many seem wholly uninterested in the traditional background from which the holiday itself has sprung. Yes, there are plenty of Christians here who celebrate with church services and the well-known story of the birth of Jesus Christ.

But for each of them, there seems to be a growing number of people, Christian and otherwise, who view Christmas without the context of religion. It’s easy to “get into the Christmas spirit” with December decorations that, in the minds of many Americans, have little to do with baby Jesus chilling out in a manger, trees decked out in tinsel, lights, and ornaments that may have personal significance, bows and wreaths on front doors, light-up reindeer, candy canes, penguins and snowmen covering the front yard.

Regardless of the roots of such traditions, their function in the present resonates with Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. Many of these images have moved beyond their original Christian symbolism to stand simply as coverups for what they once represented, if not as purely independent images themselves, free of any relation to Christian concepts.

Despite the thrill that comes from seeing lights outside through the haze of your own breath condensing in the cold, we should consider the cultural backlash of holiday sentiment. Some might suggest that the explanation of the secularization of Christmas is rampant materialism and consumerism proponed by big business. This rings especially true this year, when retailers began advertising their Black Friday deals earlier than ever before in an effort to encourage enough spending to jolt the economy a little.

Christmas, for many, deals primarily with spending money on plane tickets and hotel rooms, on multitudes of expensive gifts and on large quantities of food. Americans are encouraged to celebrate the holiday in the interest of the U.S. economy.

The other reason for a secularization of Christmas lies in the cultural significance we place on its celebration in the United States. It has become a big American holiday from a big Christian one, and people who are neither Christian nor American face the potential scorn of their peers for forgoing Christmas, as if doing so is somehow “un-American.” Americans view even other Christmas celebrations in the context of their own, dominated by a fat, jolly guy leaping down chimneys with toys and a kid who just wants a Red Ryder BB gun without being told he’ll shoot his eye out.

People who explain that they aren’t Christian are still faced with questions like, “But you really don’t celebrate Christmas?” and “Diwali/Chanukah, is that like your Christmas?” Any holiday that deals with the potential giving of gifts becomes synonymous with Christmas.

In secularizing the holiday, it seems we’ve made the mistake of channeling its religious significance into nationalism – dangerous territory which no silly, contrived celebration like “Chrismahanukwanzakah” will bring us out from. We don’t question people who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving because we understand how strained family relationships can be. But Christmas is bigger than that because of its Christian majority roots. The fervor for the holiday has been channeled into a display of American support over the course of long years that drives even people who celebrate secularly to take offense when they hear “Happy Holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas!”

Between those songs on the radio, decorations outside stores and houses, and the temporal placement of “winter break,” it’s difficult to opt out of Christmas festivities and not feel alienated in your own home. There’s nothing wrong with spending time with loved ones and exchanging meaningful presents, or feeling grateful for what you have. But in these postmodern times, we need to consider what nationalism obscures – the appreciation of all our little differences, and more importantly, the ability to live and let live.

Chelsea is a senior in English and creative writing and has recently found herself addicted to NPR.

Playboy, Penthouse…Gospel Today?

Originally published September 25, 2008.

Women receive a lot of mixed messages from society. These days, we encourage women to see themselves as a variety of things that were once discouraged: businesspeople, politicians, astronauts, soldiers, breadwinners and independents. We then appallingly show more of women’s bodies in advertisements, television shows, films and music videos than we ever have.

We tell women they can reach for whatever they want to be in life, and that they can literally bare almost all for the world around them. It’s OK to be the first female president, we say, and it’s OK for your body to be exploited for entertainment. It’s even OK for us to be offended by your nakedness after we’ve used you for it.

But according to the Southern Baptist Convention, fully clothed women can be just as offensive – particularly when they are pastors.

The SBC owns and operates Lifeway Christian Stores, which sell a number of books and periodical publications related to Christianity. Gospel Today resides among that number, and when the most recent issue of Gospel Today hit Lifeway shelves, the SBC wasn’t having any of it.

They pulled the issue of Gospel Today from the shelves and relegated it to sale from behind the counter, analogous to purchasing the current copy of Playboy at your non-Christian bookstore of choice. Why?

Because, as the Southern Baptist Convention’s Web site explicitly states, “pastoral leadership is assigned to men.”

That’s right. Gospel Today’s cover for their September/October issue features five smiling, immaculately dressed (gotcha!) female pastors. The piece within relates their experiences while trying to “break the stained-glass ceiling,” as the Atlanta Journal Constitution stated appropriately in an article on Sept. 18.

Some of you might be thinking, “You’re an atheist, why do you care?” Well, here’s the straightforward answer: We’re allowing people to condone sexism because of the use of religious justification.

Here’s the quote I used earlier from the Southern Baptist Convention’s Web site in its entirety: “While Scripture teaches that a woman’s role is not identical to that of a man in every respect, and that pastoral leadership is assigned to men, it also teaches that women are equal in value to men.”

What the SBC tells us, then, is that Scripture can be manipulated to keep women out of pastoral leadership roles. Conveniently, no specific reason is supplied as to why women are inadequate, which means men can supply reasons until the Second Coming – and they’ve already been doing that for quite some time. We’ve heard all the things that we are, apparently, according to supporters of the status quo: overly emotional, lascivious sex fiends, intellectually inferior; you name it; we’ve been called it. None of these description makes women sound as though we are of equal value.

But let’s go with it for a minute. Let’s say that women’s social roles are not entirely identical to those of men. We imply a degree of difference, or a separation, between men’s roles and women’s roles. Does anyone remember another time in which we decided that separate did not constitute equal? It’s impossible to assert that women and men are of equal value when even a partial separation in social roles exists.

Women’s inability to serve as pastors in the eyes of the SBC may seem like a small and specific insult, but it is only the tip of the inequality iceberg touched upon in the Convention’s statement on gender roles. And certainly the SBC is not the only propagator of such deeply rooted gender discrimination when it comes to religion (not just Christianity, by any means). We need reformation.

When I say “we,” I mean it – atheists like myself included. Just because I’m not personally religious doesn’t mean I condone the “scriptural” justification of any faith to diminish the value of women by rendering them unequal (and that is exactly what separating men’s and women’s roles does). If a woman feels called upon by God to lead a congregation, I support her right to do it. Solidarity extends past religious boundaries.

To these five women on the cover of Gospel Today, I offer only half-congratulations.

While I’m excited to see only a few of the faces of the growing number of female pastors, I also feel that congratulations are unnecessary, because they belong in the public sphere.

They belong in the mainstream. Most of all, they belong on bookstore shelves in full view, not behind the counter or shamefully tucked away in a brown paper bag.

Chelsea is a senior in English and music and has got to get this bookshelf sanded.