How can a pro-life person vote for Barack Obama?

I have had lengthy e-mail exchanges with two persons, one my Evangelical Christian niece, the other a Roman Catholic acquaintance, who are concerned that they can't vote for Obama in the US election because he is pro-choice. Because it's an important issue, I thought I'd share a slightly altered version of the letter I sent to my Roman Catholic friend. (Perhaps I'll share my notes to my niece too, in due course. We'll see.)

Before I do that, however, I'll mention an article by Connie Brook in THE NEW YORKER (November 3rd) called "Odd Man Out", about Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who is described as "a graduate of a Catholic high school, who is pro-life and supports school prayer". Brook quotes Hagel (who enjoys a good relationship with Obama and has indicated that he would serve in his cabinet if asked) thus: “There was a political party in this country called the Know-Nothings. And we’re getting on the fringe of that, with these one-issue voters—pro-choice or pro-life. Important issue, I know that. But, my goodness. The world is blowing up everywhere, and I just don’t think that is a responsible way to see the world, on that one issue." I'd like to emphasize that the 'blowing up' to which Senator Hagel refers entails loss of life as well.

Thus spake a pro-life Republican.

Here now is my [amended] response to Jennifer, whose letter to me had cited Christifideles Laici, Pope John Paul II's 1988 "Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation," as well as observations made by Mother Theresa.

Dear Jennifer:

Neither the Pope nor Mother Theresa has had a child, or lost a child, or had to face the cruel choice of terminating an ectopic pregnancy, or had a child who has been raped and is pregnant come to them, devastated. I respectfully submit that we who bear and have borne and raised children have something to say on these matters.

I don’t believe in abortion. I do believe that those who don’t "play the game” ought to be a little less arrogant, a little more respectful, a little more like Jesus when they spout the rules.

These are important issues, complex ones, that we need to talk more, and more intelligently, and more honestly, about. Take ectopic pregnancies. Up until roughly the middle of the last century, the Catholic Church forbad the termination of these pregnancies, never mind that the foetus was unquestionably doomed. Then in the 1940s the Church reinterpreted the teaching to allow the foetus to be aborted. (One wonders how many women died carrying those doomed babies before that reinterpretation?) I think the principle applied here is called the principle of double effect, according to which, in order to save the mother's life, the taking of the life of a foetus that without question will not survive is permitted. The decision admits a value that seems not to have been recognized before, which is that the mother's life is a life that counts as well.

Here's something else that is pertinent: we don’t know when conception occurs. We do know about some things that bear on the matter. We know that the zygote that forms identical twins often doesn’t split till days after the egg is fertilized. Does that mean that one human being exists when the sperm enters the ovum and that that single human person splits into two people when the fertilized egg splits at three or four or five days old? These things have ethical implications. The Catholic Church is aware of them; I certainly didn’t dream them up – it’s the rumination of (at least some) Catholic thinkers, scientists and ethicists, that I’m repeating here.

We also need to remember that if a woman does not feel that she has done wrong in having a pregnancy terminated, she has done no wrong. Sin is in the will: it occurs when a person commits an act that is evil, in the full knowledge that it is gravely wrong. It is therefore true that many of those who abort babies are not guilty of any sin. Nor are these babies shut out of heaven – also a teaching of the Catholic Church, albeit, if I'm not mistaken, a recent one.

I believe that we arrive at wisdom and discernment in our decisions by prayer, meditation, contemplation of the Word of God, and fasting, in deep humility and with a great reluctance to judge. That is what I, at any rate, feel that I am called to – a journey far more difficult than mere observation of The Law. That Old Law is, after all, fulfilled in a New One, and according to that New Law – "Thou shalt love the Lord the God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind and all thy strength; and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself..." – I am very hard put to see Sarah Palin and John McCain as loving their neighbours.

And I know there’s no guarantee that what they say they will do about Roe vs Wade, they will in fact do, or be able to do. Nor is there any guarantee that, the law having been changed, women will keep their babies. People know how to get abortions, and doctors will always be found to perform them.

One needs to decide, then, what one wishes: the ‘righteous’ satisfaction of having a law enacted, or the real triumph of building a society in which men and women revere sex for the happy gift it is and have babies that they want and keep.

So I would rather pray for courage on the part of women who carry babies in these last days. I would rather pray for a media that stops reducing the relationships of men and women to mere rutting, a mating that is without context or grandeur or grace. I would rather pray for an America that does not exploit parents who wish homes of their own in which to raise their children, an America that works to supply jobs that can support families, an America that provides parents and children with adequate medical care, and the opportunity for a sound education.

I would prefer to pray for an America that doesn’t incarcerate young black men in disproportionate numbers, depriving so many children of their fathers.

And I remember Jesus who knew when he was here that invoking laws never drew anyone to holiness. He rarely threatened people with the law – most markedly the merchants in the temple and the Pharisees. He told stories instead, and called people that way to the great challenges of virtue.

Prayerfully and pro-Obama,

Pam

If you don’t laugh you will cry: two 'jokes' about the upcoming American election

In a comment on my last post, “Why imagination is necessary for governance,” jdid said, referring to the recent Canadian election: “lol, all I can do is laugh.” When I remarked that he must be “a man of extraordinary courage for [he was] clearly… laughing in the face of enormous adversity…” his response was “Clarabella, if I don’t laugh I would cry.” I owe him an apology. I should have recognized the backdrop of sobriety, the typical Caribbean modus operandi of “taking serious ting make joke”. I should have twigged to it because it’s the MO I employ in my own writing, whether prose or poetry. I've more than once explained that it’s not just possible but necessary for me to infuse humour into serious subjects because this is what we do in the Caribbean. “If we doan laff, we haffi bawl!” Since Whappy was a bwoy, laughter has been our strategy of survival in the midst of grief, pain, devastation, ruin.

That brings me to two ‘jokes’. I owe the first to fsjl, who passed it on:

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the nigger!" Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the nigger."

I can’t remember where I saw the second, and so reproduce it from memory.

Obama is at the pearly gates, and St Peter says to him, “What makes you think you deserve to enter here? What did you do on earth to distinguish yourself?” Obama replies: “Well, I was the first black President of the United States.” “Oh!” replies St Peter. “And when did this take place?” Obama replies, “About twenty minutes ago.”

I have to admit that these are ‘jokes’ in the tradition of – what? Black humour? Dark comedy? (The ironies here are so numerous that I’m finding it hard to breathe.) “Black humour” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “often uses farce and low comedy to make clear that individuals are helpless victims of fate and character.” [In the case of joke number one, character, and joke number two, fate?] We should remember that it was traditionally the clown in the king’s court, the one playing the ‘fool’, whose job it was to “speak truth to power,” as the popular lingo now puts it, and that clowns and their comedian progeny have always been serious folk, tellers of unpalatable truths – witness, in modern times, Pryor, Gregory, Goldberg, Carlin, among many others.

The Democratic presidential candidate and those who surround and advise him, and see to his security, are obviously well aware of these truths.

Consider the second matter first. Senator Obama was given a heavy security detail very early in the campaign and Christian prayer warriors – another kind of security detail, if you will – ‘cover him with the blood of Jesus,’ both groups acting out of the recognition that what he is doing is something that puts his person at risk. Coming to terms with this must require a deep, continued and abiding courage on the part of himself and his family, knowing as they do that throughout American history, harbingers of change, both white and black, have paid the ultimate price.

And consider the first tale, a slice of life so convincing, I think it’s precious – a promise of willy-nilly perception so madly possible, it’s exhilarating! If those who conceive of black people as niggers will nevertheless vote for a nigger as president, then there must be a means by which understanding can well up in people, never mind that their attitudes are confused and conflicted and wrong-headed and deeply offensive. Believers would say it’s the Spirit Wind, blowing “where it listeth.”

So I do not find either 'joke' offensive. They present boldly and baldly contemporary realities that the American public ignores at their peril. By having them presented as jokes, people are jolted into facing what is, terrible as that prospect may be. And Americans, many of them, perhaps most of them, either won’t be able to laugh, or won’t be able to stop laughing, for fear of being overwhelmed by tears that leave them beyond being comforted.

Why imagination is necessary for governance

It seems that disenchanted Canadian voters could not even bother to go to the polls on Tuesday. A mere 59.1 percent of voters cast their votes – the smallest number of electors to vote in any election in Canada, ever. (There is a letter from someone who did not go to the polls in today's Toronto Star. It explains that, in the absence of any clearly articulated platform for which to vote – as distinct from a host of reasons as to why an opponent did not deserve to be elected – the writer's abstaining was a deliberate, considered choice.) Of the people who went to the polls, only 37.63% voted for Stephen Harper's Conservative Party. Using the figures on the net, that means that just over five million out of almost twenty-three million voters elected the Conservatives – in other words, not even a quarter of eligible Canadian voters. Thus Mr Harper broke his own fixed-date-for-voting legislation and spent some $300 million dollars of taxpayers' money on an election that has left us, effectively (never mind the Conservative 'gains') exactly where we were in the first place, with a minority government with which, according to the Prime Minister, it is impossible to run the country. It ought to keep the Conservatives humble. We'll see. The good news is that many first time voters turned up at the polls! Good for you, first time voters! You will have a vested interest in the country for longer than any of the rest of us, so BIG UPS for turning up to have your say! As I contemplate the distressing fact that our system of (mis)representation makes it possible for a government to take office when so few of those who voted actually chose it, it occurs to me that a little Bible might not be amiss. According to Proverbs 29:18, "Without vision, the people perish." In this context, "vision" probably refers to the gift of prophecy, at least according to the notes in my copy of The Jerusalem Bible – for information (especially fsjl's), a text in large part translated from the original Hebrew and Greek. We'll come back some other time to the matter of just what prophecy is. Suffice it to say that it is part of Jewish, Islamic and Christian traditions. Let's for the moment agree that a country (read 'people' in the phrase from Proverbs) needs wise leadership ('vision'). Despite a lot of recent talk about leadership based on experience, the truth is, in this highly complex, swift-moving modern world, no politician can have all the experience necessary to deal with the social, political, economic, industrial, agricultural, environmental, fiscal, health, educational, immigration, security, defense, etc., etc., issues. And in the absence of experience, one faculty and only one will serve, and it's the faculty of imagination, the seat of understandings based on empathy, analogy, the ability to conjure the evidence of "things not seen," to quote some more scripture. It is for this reason that I shudder at our prospects under the Conservatives, a party who have by their actions demonstrated that they are against the arts, against the life of the imagination. In that respect I would have been glad to have Stéphane Dion as head of the ship of state, or Bloc Québécois leader, Gilles Duceppe, or Elizabeth May. (I am not so sure of Jack Layton in his new Car Salesman guise.) They strike me as people who can envision things. Perhaps they will see the virtue of imagining the rapid downfall of this new minority Conservative government and of engineering an election that will address the real issues – and they are many, and formidable.

More notes on spin...

It’s said that there are youngsters who think that you can shoot somebody dead and the person will be able to get up and walk away. This apparently explains some incidents of shooting by kids. They don't really understand what guns do. If, after all, a movie star dies in a movie, and is very much alive on TV or in the newspapers the next day or the next week, then obviously shooting doesn't make the person dead. Alarming, to say the least!

We really do not know enough (never mind that there have been so many studies) about what TV, movies and electronic media do to the way people perceive, to how they mediate what they see and hear on film and television. (Might this explain why people in Jamaica, despite being constantly warned, still drive their vehicles into overflowing gullies and get swept away and drowned?) Nevertheless, what we do know makes it clear that the combination of images and the spoken word has an enormous and immediate effect on people and certainly provides a sufficient basis for the spin doctors to spin things very effectively, so that, as jdid says, “…it’s not even about the real message anymore; its about who spins it better.” When jdid expresses concern about people still being convinced that Barack Obama is a Muslim despite the brouhaha about his going to the church pastored by Rev Jeremiah Wright, a Christian minister of religion, he's pointing to an example of how people can – what? Uncomprehend? Perskewceive?

The first 'academic' article I ever published discussed strategies for English teachers who were trying to teach students to mediate TV and film. (It's less of a problem with radio, since images, which are very powerful things, aren't part of the message there.) This discernment skill has to be taught, especially as media become more and more pervasive. Determining bias in written material is hard enough! Never mind how bright we are, we will have difficulty construing what's in the newspapers, what's on TV, what's on the net, what's in the movies, unless we have somehow learned how to deconstruct these things. And I don't mean that word in any highfalutin sense. I mean literally pull these things apart so that we can see how they are made, and so understand how they work.

Stephen Harper's baby blue sweater may have persuaded many people that he is a warm family man. However, many others have been made aware – by all the talk about the blue sweater and what it was intended to do – of how images are used in the attempt to sway their opinions. Two days ago, Mr Harper (having finally, one week before the election, deigned to present the Conservative platform) suggested that the devastated stock markets were an opportunity for people to snap up good investments! So much for the warm fuzzy family man!

So it’s a problem that’s serious and needs to be addressed. I suspect that there hasn't been enough of an attempt at teaching these – as Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner called them – 'crap detection' skills to students in junior and high schools. Because that's where it has to begin – indeed, starting earlier wouldn't be a bad idea. So, yes, fsjl, Caribou Barbie and her "Hiya solja!" and "Drill, baby, drill!" acts represent a real threat. God bless us with a spirit of discernment – in Canada over the next week, in the US over the next month!

PINK ICING on amazon.ca's list of 100 top African-American titles!

Just thought I'd share some news with you. My first book of short fiction, Pink Icing: stories (see ad on this page) published by Insomniac Press in 2006, was enthusiastically reviewed in US journals like Callaloo and The Literary Review, in the Caribbean Review of Books, as well as in newspapers like the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Observer and the Jamaica Gleaner. Reviews don't necessarily translate into sales, so it's with much delight that I discovered today that it's on amazon.ca's list of the top 100 titles in the category "African-American Studies"! (It may well not stay there, but it is there as of now!) I'm hoping that means it's got onto courses in high school, college, and university. That's not just because it will mean improved book sales, though I won't deny this is important since I earn my living exclusively from writing. It's because I think it's a book anyone can enjoy, in particular anyone from the Caribbean. It's a book of simple (deceptively simple, some reviews said) stories about old people and youngsters and all the ages in between. One of the most satisfying reports about it came from an alumna of my high school, a Chinese Jamaican who told me how much her mother, who was ill, and so in bed, was enjoying having it keep her company. That was a review that pleased me for true.

Is the Pope Catholic? Some notes on 'spin'

You know that joke, "Is the Pope Catholic?" It's a phrase used to archly refer to something that's self-evident. Except that what's self-evident to me, is often not self-evident to the next person. I'd have thought, for example, that there was no question about whether a Catholic is a Christian. Catholics, after all, think that they are members of the "one true" Church: they believe that the heads (those same popes) of that Church descend in a straight line from Saint Peter. However, fsjl informs me that, for black folk where he lives, a Christian is a Baptist or an Evangelical, and most certainly not a Catholic. (I hope I'm not misrepresenting what you said, fragano!) I don't know what that makes of all the churches, other than the Baptists and Evangelicals, that believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Redeemer of humankind, but there you have it. In Jamaica, it was once held by some that a woman who was a Christian would not straighten her hair – another, and very interesting, definition of 'Christian'! This isn't really a post about religion. It's a post about packaging, propaganda – what's nowadays called 'spin'. 'Spin' is by its nature invidious, that is, meant to cause resentment and hatred. It’s a good word for the activity it describes. It means that admen, political handlers, biased journalists and packagers turn us round and round so fast with their false or carefully slanted information and carefully concocted images that we believe what they say because we’re so dizzy with being turned round and round! As they do their jobs, spinners are having a laugh at those for whose consumption they are 'spinning' things. They know that the purpose of spin is to set us at one another's throats, Democrats against Republicans, blues against reds, Left against Right, meat eaters against vegetarians, creationists against evolutionists, free marketers against regulators, capitalists against – well, once it was communists, but that one has kind of broken down, hasn't it? We really should not allow our intelligences to be violated in this way. Here’s an example: the admen for the Conservatives in Canada put Stephen Harper in a blue sweater and film him sitting comfortably in a homey place and the public for whom he is being 'spun' are supposed to think he is a warm and fuzzy family man. Well, he may well be, but I, for one, am insulted to think that I could be persuaded to this point of view by a picture of him in a baby blue sweater! Stéphane Dion, the Liberal leader, is less easily spun. I don't know if he is a hockey player, but that picture of him wouldn't convince me about anything other than what I already believe: that he's a decent man who likes kids and with whom I'd leave mine, confident that they'd be safe. Spin isn't anything new either. Down through history, it's been used, perhaps most devastatingly in the arena of religion, to whip up one set of human beings so they'd go out and do injury, sometimes mortal injury, to others: crusaders against infidels, Jews against Christians, Muslims against Christians, Catholics against Protestants, Muslims against Hindus, and so on, and so on. Nowadays, we're packaging war in much the same way: "Support our troops!" doesn't mean that we should be anxious that the men and women injured in war should have adequate care for their bodies and their minds. It doesn't mean that we should agitate for veterans to get education and other benefits. It doesn't mean that we should be concerned that armored carriers for the troops are the safest they can be, nor about the psychological health of pilots who are fed uppers and downers so that they can fly as many missions as required and as often as the army requires them. It doesn't mean that we should take any interest in their welfare at all. What it means is, "Don't you dare suggest that these brave young men and women aren't fighting for God and their country!" What it means is, "Don't you dare protest against the battles they are sent into in defense of freedom and democracy!" And what do the words 'freedom' and 'democracy' mean? They are probably the words that have been spun to humankind's greatest detriment. I've already gone on too long, and so cannot tackle that ‘spin’ now. Suffice it to say that if we are free in the supposed “First World," then some are clearly much more free than others, as the present fiscal crisis in the US so amply demonstrates. Some people were 'free' to manage other people's money, were 'free' to do so without regulations or controls, and so were ‘free' to plunge an entire country's economy into ruin. We need to get out from under the spin and start to examine what words, images, information really mean – that is if we are to preserve what really is ‘democracy' and ‘freedom’.

http://www.voteforenvironment.ca/ A pro-environment website to help Canadians make their votes count...

People have to make choices, and making good choices takes courage – sometimes a lot of courage. There's an argument being pushed by Conservatives in North America that we can't afford to go green, subscribe to Kyoto, etc., because it would upset the economy, deprive people of jobs, alter our quality of life, etc. etc.. (I'm tempted to go into the implications of the current economic situation in the US for that argument, but I won't right now.) In Canada, Stéphane Dion has tried hard to reassure people that this is a false argument, that there are thousands of jobs to be created if we do go green, and that the economy will benefit when we change our dependence on increasingly expensive fossil fuels. What we need to understand, however, is that this isn't a Liberal Party matter. It has to do with all of us, every Canadian who wants Canada to be a healthy place for its citizens – now, and for the next generation, and the one after that. The great news is that there's a website where people who care about the environment can make their votes count, whether they vote Liberal, Green Party or NDP. The url: http://www.voteforenvironment.ca/ I won't try to explain how it works here, but the idea is to garner votes to defeat Conservative candidates in close ridings and at the same time enable NDP, Liberal and Green candidates to vote their party by arranging a switching of votes. A note for Bible believers like myself. There's a lot of talk about the don't care attitude of Evangelical Christians who believe these are the last days. I think the Bible makes it clear that Christians continue to have a responsibility to take care of the Earth, right up until Jesus comes, whenever that is. The New Testament is full of parables that talk about good stewardship. I don't see anywhere that we're excused from doing this. It bothers me that Stephen Harper can claim to espouse family values and not see that if he loves his children, he needs to choose well for them. That sacrifice may have to include having less now so that they can have much more later, like clean water and clean air, and food that they can safely eat when they are grown up and when they have children themselves. I've been saying again and again that it's important for voters here and in the US to make their votes count. Here's a really good way to do it. Go to http://www.voteforenvironment.ca/ Tell your friends about it. Vote for your children and your grandchildren. Vote wisely. Above all, vote! Selah.