Category Archives: Praying

Happy Loving Day!

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Today marks the 45th anniversary of the day the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Virginia’s law prohibiting interracial marriage.

Virginia, like many of the southern states, prohibited people of different races from marrying. In 1958, Richard Loving (who was white) wished to marry Mildred Jeter (who was black). They lived in Richmond and couldn’t marry there; they traveled to Washington D.C. and married. They then went back to their home in Caroline County. They were arrested in October, plead guilty, and were sentenced to 1 year in jail. Section 258 of the Virginia code stated this:

If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in ยง 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage.

The judge suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia for a period of 25 years and said this:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The couple moved to Washington D.C. and Mr. Loving filed suit (ironically making this the case of Loving v. Virginia). The case was argued before the Supreme Court on April 10, 1967 and the Court unanimously struck down the Virginia law 45 years ago.

I can’t resist, but the hot marriage issue of this decade is gay marriage. Opponents of gay marriage argue that marriage has always been heterosexual (much like it used to be between people of the same race), it is the will of God, and that the federal government has no right to determine how states decide marriage. Loving v. Virginia shows that the classic definition is always under review.

Happy Loving Day everyone!

The Latest Catholic Assault on Its Faithful

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Last month Loetta Johnson died and her funeral was scheduled for February 25th at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She had been a lifelong faithful Catholic and her funeral mass went as expected until her daughter Barbara went to receive Communion. The priest, Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, put his hand over the communion plate and told her (and everyone else) that he was denying her Communion because she is a lesbian and the Catholic Church does not support her lifestyle.

Like many Catholics this story enraged me and I’m completely supportive of the decision of the Archdiocese of Washington to remove Fr. Guarnizo from his post.

Here are the facts of the case (most of the information here is from the Washington Post article this morning): Before the mass, Fr. Guarnizo met with Ms. Johnson and her partner. He asked Ms. Johnson who the other woman was, and Ms. Johnson identified her as her partner (in Fr. Guarnizo’s account Ms. Johnson made unsolicited announcement that the other woman was her partner, or lover, depending on the account). When Ms. Johnson came for Communion, Fr. Guarnizo refused. He also did not preside at the graveside service; Fr. Guarnizo claims he was suffering from a migrane.

In fairness, after being refused Communion, another Eucharistic Minister (who is not a priest) gave her Communion, and another priest stepped forward and presided at the graveside service. I’m grateful for that.

Longterm readers of this blog know that I was a seminarian with the Stigmatine Fathers and Brothers from 1980 to 1985, a seminarian with the Paulist Fathers from 1989 to 1994 and a Paulist Priest from 1994 to 1997. All Eucharistic Ministers (priests, deacons, and laypersons) know that there may be a point where you have to make a split second choice. The person in front of you may be married outside the church, a thief, scoundrel, pedophile, or (God forbid) a non Catholic. In that situation most of us choose to not make a public spectacle and hope that God will sort it out.

That’s what happened to me. I was ordained at St. Paul’s in New York on May 14, 1994. Minutes after I was ordained I was giving Communion and I was presented with the mother of my sister’s husband. I knew she wasn’t Catholic and technically shouldn’t be able to receive Communion. I decided to be generous with the Sacrament and let God sweat the details.

Fr. Guanizo should have done the same. I don’t know if Barbara Johnson thinks of herself as Catholic or was in church only for her mother’s funeral. But then again, I don’t know that she and her partner are sexually active (and are therefore living a lifestyle Fr. Guarnizo finds offensive). I don’t know where she is in her faith journey. I’m grateful that she has found someone to share her life with (and I pray she is as happy in her relationship as I am in my marriage).

I also know that whatever the circumstances, if Fr. Guanzino had given her Communion, it would have given her a generous view of the Catholic Church. I always believed that weddings and funerals were opportunities to present ourselves to people of other faiths, or people who had left us, in our best light. He presented us in our worst light.

I also believe that someday I may need to account to God for my actions. On that day I would rather explain that I was too generous with Communion than too stingy.

Ms. Johnson, please do not let this one priest give you your only face of the Catholic Church. We have many other faces.

Now COPD is personal

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As I write this my father is in Fairfax Hospital and I’m asking for prayers from everyone who reads this.

He’s been feeling badly for the last few weeks; he’s been diagnosed with COPD. This isn’t much of a surprise as he smoked a pack and half of cigarettes for about 40 years and the cough he developed earlier this month was thought to be a common cold.

Having a cough is more an irritant than anything else but he also developed swelling (edema) in his abdomen and left leg. The good news is that a doppler test (developed by my friend Lori’s father George Leopold) ruled out a blot clot.

The bad news is that he was having a hard time speaking and we didn’t know why. The hospital called at 3AM and told him to go to the Emergency Room. His sodium level was low (111) and we think it’s a bad combination of his hypertension medication Linisopril and Hydrochlorothiazide. That explained why he was so sluggish. The Lisinopril is a good idea but having Hydrochlorothiazide wasn’t. It’s a diuretic which is normally a good idea for hypertension but it lowers both potassium and sodium which messes with heartbeat. The doctors have changed the medication to stop the diuretic and we all hope it’s the beginning of good news.

I pray it is. My father is a good man, but he doesn’t enjoy being a patient; it’s hard for him to ask for help or be the center of attention. It will be good news for everyone when he gets to go home and I pray and hope he comes home soon to my mother (who he has been married to for nearly 54 years). They belong together.

I love them more than I can say.

Reflections on The Day, 10 Years Later

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Like Pearl Harbor and President Kennedy’s assassination, my generation will ask: “Where were you on 9/11?” I’ve been thinking about that day, and the last 10 years, for some time now.

The morning of the attack Nancy and I were getting ready for work. My parents were visiting from Virginia, and they were staying with us at the house we had purchased 5 months earlier. They were scheduled to fly home on September 12th. Needless to say they didn’t get home until that following Sunday.

I was still working for Vitas Hospice and that Tuesday morning I had to go into the office for a meeting. During the meeting (on the 9th floor of a building in Mission Valley) I noticed that one of my co workers kept steeling glances out the window. I guess we were all wondering if the attacks were really over.

I found many of my patients wanted to talk about Pearl Harbor because they were feeling many of the same things: what does this mean? What will happen next? What do we do now? In both cases we knew that this was the beginning of a long conflict, but in 1941 we at least knew who we were fighting against. When Franklin Roosevelt spoke to Congress the next day, it was clear: we were attacked by the nation of Japan and President Roosevelt asked for (and received) a declaration of war, in accordance of Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

On 9/11 we knew pretty quickly that we were attacked not by a nation but by a terrorist organization (Al Qaeda) under the leadership of one person (Osama bin Laden). We were also learning that Al Qaeda was located primarily in Afghanistan under the protection of a group called the Taliban. Afghanistan was in the middle of a civil war, but the Taliban controlled most of the country by 2001. We had known about all these groups going back to the Clinton administration. The Taliban were known as an Islamic organization that read the Qu’ran (Koran) in such a way as to subjugate and virtually enslave women. Worldwide human rights organizations had been publicizing these events for a while, but while they were committing these crimes in Afghanistan, they posed no immediate harm to the United States.

The Bush administration had a fundamental choice to make: do we treat this as an act of war and ask for a declaration of war against Afghanistan, or do we treat this like a crime and seek out and arrest those individuals responsible for this act. At the time I believed there was a good case to be made for a declaration of war. Our government demanded that the nation of Afghanistan immediate hand over Osama bin Laden and anyone else associated with the attacks, and they refused. I believed then, and believe now, that we could have reasonably declared war on Afghanistan.

But I also believed (and believe more strongly now) that this was better pursued as a criminal case. This is grist for another day, but our intelligence services had mounds of information on Al Qaeda and bin Laden, but they didn’t share this information with each other and there was nobody to put together the pieces to have prevented this. As a matter of fact, the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing predicted the attacks.

Given the intelligence we already had, I believe we could have found and prosecuted bin Laden within the next few months. But I believe the Bush administration committed a series of errors that historians of the next generations will find hard to imagine.

First, to the question of which direction, they choose neither. A declaration of war meant that anyone captured had to be classified as a prisoner of war and have the protections of the Geneva Convention. A criminal case meant that anyone arrested would have the protection of civil law.

Clearly the Bush administration did not want to be constrained by either and so they invented their own path. This allowed them to come up with terms such as “enemy combatant” and “extraordinary rendition.” It also allowed us to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, take him to Guantanamo, Cuba and hold him there indefinitely with no access to justice. At least at the beginning they were held with no access to council, their own government, or any idea what would happen to them. Many of them are still there.

Unlike President Bush, I have enough faith in our justice system to believe that we could have brought them to trial here. My best example of this is the case of Timothy McVeigh. I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that he didn’t have a spirited defense, or that justice was not served.

Now, 10 years later, I will give credit: Al Qaeda is greatly reduced and isn’t the threat it was. Osama bin Laden is dead, and most of its leadership is captured and unable to cause any more terror.

But we are still at war in two different countries: Iraq and Afghanistan. Again this is grist for another article, but I believe another mistake of the Bush administration is to focus not on Afghanistan, but on Iraq. Nobody seriously believes that Saddam Huessin had anything to do with 9/11, yet we invaded his country in 2003, dismantled the government, destroyed much of the infrastructure, killed thousands of civilians, and are still trying to get out.

And perhaps most troubling to me is the damage done to our reputation, and to our Constitution. President Bush claimed that they attacked us because we love freedom (they actually attacked us because of the presence of our troops in Arab countries and our support of Israel, but let’s not quibble). But what does this say about freedom when we hold people indefinitely and make up terms like “enemy combatant” for the express purpose of not having to deal reasonably with them?

I’m not sure if I’ll write on the 20th anniversary, but I hope we’ve restored much of what we’ve lost.

Waiting in the Dark with Steve Lopez's Dad

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Steve Lopez is a columnist with the Los Angeles Times and I often find his columns thought provoking. This past Sunday he wrote a column on his father who is in declining health. I strongly encourage you to read it.

Steve speaks in strong and stirring words about how his 83 year old father has been a man of great strength and pride, and now at 83 years old is reduced to a man who fell one night on his way to the bathroom. Neither he nor his wife were able to get him back on his feet and the result was they spent the night on the floor before they got medical help. Steve wonders if our current health care system will care for his father in a way that honors the man that he is.

I’m afraid it won’t. We have Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor) that is frankly, the socialized medicine we have been warned about. Health care in our sunset years is good at keeping our hearts beating and our lungs inflating, but not good at asking the larger questions. Questions like: “When it is enough? When it is time to recognize that nobody lives forever and we need to change the equation to recognize this.” Questions like: “When are we done keeping you alive at all costs and should instead start thinking about giving you a good death?”

In my experience we’re a long way from that. While we all know in our heads that we will die one day, many of us live as if we were going to be healthy forever and have a right to whatever health care will provide that. At the end of our lives we are the primary drivers of what we want. Assuming we have health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance), we can instruct our health care providers to do whatever we want, even to the point of keeping us alive on a respirator/ventilator. This is a machine that will keep pumping air into our lungs even when every other organ in our bodies has stopped. Most of us won’t choose this if given proper information, but if we can’t communicate and there is nobody to legally advocate for us, most health care providers will assume we want it all, and will keep us alive at any cost.

What’s wrong here? Well, several things. First, I believe that we need to stop thinking of ourselves as immortal. That means that when we are young and healthy we need to start talking with our family members about what we want at the end of our life. If we don’t want to be kept alive on a respirator, or a feeding tube, or by having a paramedic restart our heart, we need to say so and write it down. There are many ways to do this; my favorite is a POLST form. If nothing else, talking with your loved ones about what you want is a good place to start. If things go south in our lives in a hurry, our next of kin is our best ally if we can’t speak for ourselves.

Second, we need to have a national dialogue about how we allocate health care resources. Again, some scream that this will “ration” health care. Let’s face facts: we already ration health care, only we do it now by health care coverage. If you’re 95 years old on Medicare with pancreatic cancer you can get all the chemo, surgery, and radiation that’s available. On the other hand, if you’re 25 years old and work for an employer who doesn’t offer health care, and you have early onset breast cancer, you’re out of luck. It doesn’t matter that your early onset breast cancer is way more curable than pancreatic cancer. It also doesn’t matter that a 25 year old with curable cancer has a much better long term prognosis than a 95 year old with incurable cancer. It only matters on who will pay for this.

To be fair there are doctors and other heath care providers who are heroically telling elderly and terminal patients that they aren’t candidates for aggressive treatments. For their efforts they are sometimes screamed at and threatened by well meaning patients and families who accuse them of being uncaring or greedy when the opposite is true. When President Obama attempted to make this easier by reimbursing doctors for these meetings, Sarah Palin and others called these “death panels.”

As my fellow Baby Boomers are beginning to age into the Medicare problem our numbers are straining the system and at some point we will need to reform it. My prayer is that we come to an understanding of what health care can and cannot do. Providing someone with a good death, free of pain, with the people we love around us, is the last best thing our medical community can do for us.

Is There Anyone Not Running For President?

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In my last post I talked about listing the people running for President in 2012. Running for President is fairly easy: you just need to have been born in the United States (which includes our territories) and be 35 years old. There are, currently, two major parties: the Democrats and the Republicans. It’s a virtually certainty that the winner of the 2012 election will be from one of those two parties. Furthermore, I expect I join most Democrats in believing that President Obama will be the Democratic nominee. The Republican nominee is a wide open field.

Nevertheless, I’ve chosen to add other candidates to my list. Some are challengers to major party candidates; others are members of minor parties; finally, others are people who belong to no party and run as independents. I don’t expect any of them to move into the White House on January 20, 2013, but I’m including them to show that there is no reason they can’t.

Frankly, the job of looking at their web pages has been a painful job. I find most of them delusional and think our Founding Fathers would be holding their noses too. Most of them are running on a platform of “the past years/decades/centuries have shown that our forefathers would be horrified at seeing what the government is doing. I’ve arrived just in time to save us. Vote for me.” On the whole they believe that government is too intrusive and that we would do better if nobody told us what to do.

I’m American enough to not like to be told what to do but I also believe that most of us like what the government does when we need something. I like the idea that my local government will send someone to my house of I (or someone else in my family) have a heart attack or if my house catches on fire. I like having a public library system even if I don’t use it very often. I like the idea of having a good school system even if I don’t have children who attend (because, let’s face it, the students in those schools are the people I’m counting on to contribute to social security when we’re retired).

I’m not impressed by all the people who claim to “recapture” the values of the founders of our country and have no intention of voting for them, but I’m American enough to give them a voice. I’m encouraged by the belief that our next President is chosen not by those who chose to run, but by those who choose to vote.

Choose to vote.

Sesquicentennial of our Darkest Hour

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Today marks the 150th Anniversary (Sesquicentennial) of the Civil War (or War Between the States, or War of Northern Aggression). No event in our history as a nation says more about who we are than this: the time between April 12, 1861 (the attack of Ft. Sumter) and April 9, 1965 (the surrender at Appomattox) we were a country at war with ourselves. By the time it ended 625,000 of us would be dead (more than died in World War I and II combined).

There are probably more books written about these four years than any other time in our history. Here are suggestions from books I’ve read:

Growing up in Northern Virginia (and as an adult living in the city of Manassas) I was struck by how the war continued to live in people who were born 100 years later. I was aware that the war itself was called by different names (Civil War, War Between the States, etc.) and I learned that even the battles had different names: Bull Run vs. Manassas, Chancellorsville vs. Wilderness, and others.

I also learned that the reasons for the war were not in agreement. In the north it was viewed as a war about whether or not slavery would exist, and in the south it was about whether states (who voluntarily joined the union) could leave the union. The more I read the more I’m convinced that slavery is the reality that cannot be ignored.

The roots of the Civil War can (and must be) traced back to the writing of our Constitution. The framers who drafted the Constitution in 1787 faced a dilemma when it came to slaves: how can we say all men are created equal when clearly some are the property of others. Several of framers were slave owners themselves, and while they may have found the institution of slavery distasteful, they participated in it. They also believed that the new nation would not survive if they tried to outlaw slavery. Essentially they punted, and hoped the issue would be resolved in future generations. It is interesting to note one compromise in the 1st Article of the Constitution: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years [ie, not slaves, but indentured servants], and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.” In other words, if you owned 5 slaves they were counted as 3 persons in the census.

By the time of the Civil War, some 80 years later, slavery had become an institution in the South and most Northerners either had no opinion or found it distasteful but not serious enough to end. It was also a time of Westward expansion into new territories like Missouri and Kansas. Many people in the North, including Abraham Lincoln, wanted to stop slavery where it is and not allow it to move west. Southern slave owners were outraged and believed this discriminated against them. They felt so alienated that they came to the decision that since they voluntarily joined the United States in 1789 they could just as voluntarily pull out and form their own nation. Those in the North disagreed and believed that joining together in 1789 was an irreconcilable covenant that can’t be broken. The war officially started on April 12, 1861 when Southern forces (or members of the newly formed Confederate States of America) began shelling the garrison at Ft. Sumner, South Carolina.

It’s my belief that the South never really believed the North would fight all that hard, and it is generally believed that the South expected a victory in a few weeks or months. It didn’t happen that way. President Lincoln was adamant that the Union be preserved and came only later to the belief that the post war Union would prohibit slavery. By the time the war ended the South was in shambles and the next 12 years would be called “Reconstruction.” In some ways this was as bad a time for the South as the war itself. After President Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865 he was replaced by Andrew Johnson a Southerner who remained in the Senate from Tennessee even after his state seceded. He was a weak man and Radical Republicans made life very difficult in the South. Out of this came a South that wanted to see pre-Civil War days as much better than they were. They saw it as a time when ladies and gentlemen were safe while they cared for slaves who were content with their lives. They denied that the war was about slavery or its westward expansion and that freeing slaves made them into dangerous men roaming the countryside looking for opportunities to harm or kill white people. The 1915 movie Birth of a Nation makes this point and claims the Ku Klux Klan formed as a way of protecting white people from former slaves.

Even today the Confederate Battle Flag draws controversy as some see it as a symbol of slavery while others see it as Southern heritage and tradition.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: 100 Years Later

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Exactly 100 years ago today there was a fire on 29 Washington Place in New York City. The fire was important for a few reasons: the top three floors of the building housed a factory where immigrant women worked 52 hours per week sewing women’s blouses (called shirtwaists); the women had little or no protection for their safety; when a lit cigarette started a fire they were trapped since the doors were locked to prevent theft or the workers from going to the bathroom. There were also no fire alarms; for many of the workers, their first indication of trouble was the fire itself.

By the time the fire was extinguished 146 people were dead; they were either incinerated by the fire or died by jumping to their deaths to escape the flames.

In the aftermath the factory closed. This did not lead owners and managers of factories to institute reforms. It did, however, give unions (particularly the International Ladies Garment Workers Union) and the state legislators the moral authority to institute reforms to protect workers. Among people who belong to unions, this is an important anniversary.

Unfortunately 100 years after the deaths of these 129 women and 17 men, the union cause is again under attack. Union membership continues to decline and unions continue to be seen as impediments to progress. They are not, however, impediments to safety. This anniversary should remind us that union membership has given all of us many of the things we take for granted: the five day work week, the 8 hour day, and basic safeguards against danger.

Let us all pray for the 146 Americans who died 100 years ago today, and thank them for the awareness they gave us. And think about them whenever you see a fire escape.

The Justice Chronicles Volume 6: The Supreme Court rules on Snyder v. Phelps. Unfortunate But Necessary

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I’ve reported on this case before, and on March 2nd the Supreme Court ruled on the case. By a vote of 8-1 the Court upheld the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest at funerals. They have protested at several funerals of young men and women killed in uniform who died in service to our country, including the funeral of Matthew Snyder. The members of the church (who are mainly members of the family of pastor, Fred Phelps) carry signs that say: “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11” or “God Hates Fags.”

The Court ruled that while this speech is clearly offensive and painful, it’s protected by the First Amendment. At the end of the day, I’m afraid I have to say that I agree.

As a Christian I hate the fact that Fred Phelps claims to worship the same God as me. And while I pray for his conversion from a life of hate to a life of love, as an American citizen I believe he has a right to his hate. He has a right to offend me, and large segments of the population.

The final good news here is that all of us also have the right to offend him. Since this case has made national news, several organizations have promised to show up at these same funerals to shout down Phelps, et. al. They also have First Amendment protection.

What If I'm a Christian and There's No Parable For This?

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If you survey Christians and ask how we decide between right and wrong, many of us will point to our faith. I’m happy about that, but what do we do when people of the same faith come to different views of the same issue and both claim to be right?

It’s happening in many places with many issues, but a story in the Los Angeles Times on Friday struck my interest. The story is about immigration, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), Stephen Sandstrom and Tony Yapias.

Both live in Utah, both are Mormon, both look to their faith to decide moral issues, and they disagree on immigration. Mr. Sandstrom was born in Orem, Utah (and is a citizen by birth). He believes that being a Christian means following the rules and obeying the laws. Someone who enters this country outside of the law violates this and should be deported. As a state legislator he introduced a bill, patterned after a similar bill in Arizona, which requires the police to determine the immigration status of people they stop and suspect may be undocumented. He is quoted in the LA Times story: “This country is the greatest nation on Earth because God had a hand in its formation. A lot of that is because . . . we obey the rule of law. Turning a blind eye to illegal immigration jeopardizes the rule of law.”

Tony Yapias was born in Peru and when he was a child his father came to the U.S. to forge a better life for his family. Tony and the rest of his family were able to join his father when Tony was 14 but the strain of the separation was too much for his parents’ marriage. As an adult Tony joined the LDS church in part because of their emphasis on family.

Which one is right? The issue of immigration has divided many groups, but most Christian groups support immigrants and oppose laws like the one Mr. Sandstrom advances. But most Christian groups aren’t like the Mormons. They are hesitant to view any law as wrong. In the LA Times article it talks about how they are Pro-Life, but discourage anything that protests legal abortions. They counsel their people who live in Communist countries to obey the laws, even the ones they disagree with.

This is one reason I’m not a Mormon. I don’t see God’s hand in many of our laws. I don’t think God is present in Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson and I think there is a strong case to be made that our government continues to need the voices of our prophets. I believe the prophets answered Dred Scott with the 14th Amendment and Plessy v. Ferguson with Brown v. Board of Education. If you’ve read a previous post you know where I stand on homophobia.

I believe it’s more important to be faithful than obedient, and I believe it’s more important to follow my conscience than my intellect. I am many things: I am a married man, I am an American, I am an inhabitant of Earth, and I am a Child of God. The fact that I’m bound by God matters more to me than my connection to the United States (whose 14th Amendment tells me we who were born here are all citizens). If someone born 40 miles south of where I live wants to make a better life for his children, I get it. My grandparents moved south (from Canada to Massachusetts) to make a better life and I benefit from that. If they cleaned hotel rooms and carried luggage so I can be who I am, I am grateful.

And I refuse to deny that to the next generation from now. The next man, woman, or child I meet may well have a hard time speaking to me in English. That’s OK because my grandparents had a hard time with English too. If that person is cleaning my house, mowing my lawn, or waiting for work outside a hardware store, I admire hm (her) for making a better life for his/her children. And I pray that his/her descendants are grateful.

And with respect to Mr. Stanstrom, I think he’s wrong.