This is an indirectly political post. We're all modern progressives here, and if we're progressives, we're for social justice. If we're for social justice, then we're for freedom from poverty and the damaging effects of poverty. While we're working on that on the big scale, on a smaller(but I think, equally important) scale, look here on the last Sunday of the month for featured resources to help you or someone you know find assistance or stretch a buck. The following are also local organizations of integrity to which you can pledge financial support or volunteer hours.
JULY 2010 This month: UTILITY ASSISTANCE
HEAT & ELECTRIC:
MN Dept of Energy/Office of Energy Security Energy Assistance Program (EAP)
EAP PHONE: 1-800-657-3710
WEB: http://www.state.mn.us/portal/...
The Energy Assistance Program (EAP) helps pay home energy costs. Households with the lowest incomes and highest energy costs receive the greatest benefit. EAP is Federally funded through the U.S. Department of Human Services, and funds are available for renters or homeowners EAP programs advocate with energy suppliers and human service providers on behalf of consumers, provide crisis help for utility disconnections or necessary fuel deliveries, and emergency heating system repair or replacement (Note: Also available is a Low Income Senior Discount The low-income discount entitles low-income residential electric/gas customers who are 62 years of age or older and/or disabled to a 50 percent discount on their monthly electric consumption up to 300 kwhs per billing period. Call 1-800-895-4999).
As a person of Christian faith, I know the Bible teaches that even angry and violently hateful thoughts against another is a commission of sin. Well, thanks, Glenn Beck, for once again helping to nudge me out of a state of grace with your ridiculous anti-social-justice and (flawed) political theology of hate.
Last night Beck took yet another potshot at social justice and progressive Christians via attacks on liberation theology (smearing Jews, African-Americans and other historically oppressed groups along the way).
"With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different--and vastly counterproductive." Senator Jim Webb
To put it into global perspective, we now incarcerate more of our citizenry than every other industrialized nation on earth. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, the crime rate in the U.S. in the first decade of the 21st century is approximately the same as it was in 1970. One might assume that the incarceration rate over the same time period would be consistent with the reported crime rate. This is not the case. Until about 1970 the rate of incarceration in the United States held steady at about one in one thousand adults. However, at present one in a hundred adults is incarcerated, representing a a ten-fold increase over the past thirty to forty years.
In fact, the U.S. now accounts for approximately 5% of the world's population but 25% of its prisoners, more than 2,300,000 people in 2008. If you include those on probation and parole, one in thirty one American adults is under some form of correctional control. The dramatic rise in our prison population is attributable to two significant factors: the increase in incarceration rates for drug offenders and a significant shift from a rehabilitative to a punitive emphasis, the "tough on crime" posture.
Racial disparities in the justice system have increased even more dramatically over the same time period. Communities of color in general and African Americans most specifically, have borne the burden for the failed policies of the 80s and 90s. At present, Black men are imprisoned at an 8:1 ratio as compared with white men, more than doubling the disparity rate during the Jim Crow era.
This incarceration data is not anomalous. People of color, and most egregiously Black men, are disproportionately represented at every point of contact in the criminal justice system. In his book, Punishment and Inequality in America, Harvard sociologist Bruce Western concludes that mass imprisonment has erased many of the gains to African American citizenship hard won by the Civil Rights Movement.
Faith, Politics and Social Justice:
A conversation with
Dr. Martin E. Marty & Senator John Marty
Fox News host Glenn Beck recently declared on his radio and television program that the term 'social justice' was a code word for communism and Nazism:
"I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"
In light of Glenn Beck's comments, the father-son team of Rev. Dr. Martin E. Marty, a noted theologian and author, and Senator John Marty, a current gubernatorial candidate, will discuss social justice and the intersection of faith and politics.
This event will take place on Saturday, March 27th from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.
Location: Holy Trinity Lutheran Church
Found at: 2730 E. 31st Street
Minneapolis, MN
This should be an excellent event, so come and invite others.
Once again politically-progressive people of religious faith come under fire as a suspect class. This week Glenn Beck upped the ante on his persecutory stance toward churches that support a progressive socio-political agenda when he told his Fox News listeners
"I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, the idea, hang on, am I advising people to leave their church... yes!... If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish."
Beck, in his inflammatory rhetorical style, went on to compare folks pursuing social and economic justice not only to communists (the old familiar meme), but also to Nazis.
Now, I am not a Mormon, but I know a few, and I have read their bible. And I do know a central theological tenet to the faith for both Christians and Mormons is faith in Jesus Christ and his Great Command to love and serve God while loving and serving your neighbor as yourself. Social equality, social justice, economic justice, selfless giving: all pretty much main points of instruction in Jesus' teachings and ministry. Care for the less fortunate, the sick, the fatherless: very much God's thing. But don't trust me, take a look at some of the more than 300 verses which riddle the Bible with what Beck would consider dangerous pinko ideas:
Deut. 15:7. If there is a poor man among you, one of your brothers, in any of the towns of the land which the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand to your poor brother; but you shall freely open your hand to him, and generously lend him sufficient for his need in whatever he lacks
Lev. 19:19. Now when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. Nor shall you glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the needy and for the stranger. I am the LORD your God.
Prov. 31:8. [Commandment to kings.] Open your mouth for the dumb, for the rights of all the unfortunate. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.
Luke 12:33. "Sell your possessions and give to charity; make yourselves purses which do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near, nor moth destroys."
Luke 3:11. And [John the Baptist] would answer and say to them, "Let the man with two tunics share with him who has none, and let him who has food do likewise."
Mt. 5:42. Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you.
I could go on and on, but you don't need a sermon and can read for yourself.
(I recruited this story because I think this is one of the not-told important stories. - promoted by Grace Kelly)
Based on the civil rights "sit in" for blacks at lunch counters, what would I sit in for? I take the question seriously and literally. According to a report published by The Pew Center on the States, we imprison 1 in 9 Black men between the ages of 20 and 34. The United States incarcerates a larger portion of its population than any nation on earth. And for what? 75% are convicted for crimes of poverty and addiction. We squander limited financial resources, destroy lives and whole communities in the process, and we are no safer for the wasteful, cruel policies and practices that disproportionately target people of color and the poor.
Our punitive system of incarceration is the direct legacy of slavery and segregation, the mantle for which was transferred from a system of private ownership to institutionalized networks of state and federally operated prisons. But don't take my word for this assessment. Read for yourself the two sentences that comprise the XIII Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and find the word abolition or its synonym: 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
What would I sit in for? At the risk of sounding absurd, I have to say that I would sit in for the abolition of 21st Century slavery, abolition in the shape of sweeping reform at every point of contact in our criminal justice system. Looks like there are plenty of open seats at the counter.
(BCD actually should have been upgraded to a frontpager already -- welcome to the team! - promoted by Joe Bodell)
For Christians who consider themselves political progressives, the expression "damned if you do, damned if you don't" is starting to hit a little too close to home. Attacked by the conservative Religious Right as socialists and baby-killers, we seem more and more to also to draw slings and arrows from many on the ultra-liberal left. The debate over healthcare reform in the current administartion continues to be just one area where the those on the religious left are attacked coming and going.
A recent example is the response to progressive christian leader Rev. Jim Wallis' Faith Decalaration for Health Care Reform . Wallis, a member of President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships wrote in the Huffington Post Wednesday...
(Politics has much more diversity than the "left/right" line view of politics. This article is important to read to understand that even within defined groups like the GLBT community, different political goals exist. - promoted by Grace Kelly)
Those words carry different meanings to different people. Depending on our economic or social backgrounds, "radical activism" can be a threat or a salvation. I have been on both sides of this issue. Always a fierce defender of those oppressed, I never took the step from dialogue to action. As an "armchair activist", I was always more concerned with my own safety. Educating myself on grassroots radical movements and organizations really widened my perspective on what was possible within myself. It took years to realize that I had been put in my place by fear.
