Arkansas Blog

Why oh why can't all of us 'average' people get it through our Democracy addled brains that the Big Decisions belong to the Big Boys at the top of our respective heaps. Republican Bigwigs got with Methodist Bigwigs and worked out a deal that'll benefit Those who count. You'd think that President Shit for Brains' reign would've dispelled all those illusions about people without money/power actually having an opinion worth considering. If God had wanted poor people's opinions to matter he would've given them money to go along with it.

I'm pretty disgusted that MY Methodist church is partnering up with Bush for the library too. I say it's time to cut SMU loose. Rename it after Bush and drop the Methodist affiliation. The powers there proved their disdain for anything but money back when they cheated their way through the SWC. Typical Texans.

Can you blame a thinking Methodist for being upset that a monument to the worst President in history is going to grace their flagship school? What if we found out a giant memorial to Ted Bundy or Linda Tripp was going to be built up on the hill at Fayetteville? I'd be plunkin my cell phone at someone's head!

When I was young a lot of the big money, not very religious, beautiful Methodist girls left Fort Baptist for SMU. It was a very high hat thing to do in those days. SMU was a showplace and a fine home for our finest Grizzly Girls, they of the fur coats and big hair and rich rich daddies. How sad to think that their legacy will be besmirched by big-ass tribute to a war criminal. SMU's founder, John Wesley Harden, must be spinning in his grave!

SMU is too close to Fort Baptist for me to feel comfortable about a tribute to a bad man being located there. I suggest the George W. Bush Presidential Library be built by Halliburton IN Dubai. Or why not save some bucks and turn San Quentin into the Bush Library and make sure Bush has to live there for the rest of his life. The anti-Bush Methodists should team up with the good residents of Brattleboro, VT who will soon vote on a town proclamation saying that Bush & Cheney will be arrested as war criminals if they ever set foot in the Brattleboro city limits. Now that's the spirit!

Question; how many copies of MY PET GOAT will it hold????

I suggest the George W. Bush Presidential Library be built by Halliburton IN Dubai.<<

I love it and second the motion. Other than sending him over to hold hands and kiss the House
of Saud (you wonder who is really gay?) I suggest his tribute building be situated next to the
famous prison where Pig Bush had hundreds executed.

Gosh, what will be inscribed over the door of the library, I wonder? Open hearts, open minds, open doors? With a smiling face of W right in the middle?

And will this have underneath it a quote from the UMC Social Principles, say, for instance, the following:

"We support the basic rights of all persons to equal access to housing, education, communication, employment, medical care, legal redress for grievances, and physical protection. We deplore acts of hate or violence against groups or persons based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or economic status."

If so, I feel sure there'd be a lot of documentation in the library to show how W honored his church's Social Principles, and how the church and its members held him accountable for fidelity to those principles.

As we know all UMC institutions do--that is, hold their members and employees accountable for creating an environment in which one can work in security and with welcome, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

Hang on, though. Doesn't the church itself disemploy openly gay ministers? And do UMC institutions have policies preventing discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation? For that matter, when an employee in one of their institutions gets booted for being openly gay or in a relationship he/she won't deny, do UMC bishops and pastors on boards governing those institutions investigate the betrayal of their Social Principles, in how the employee has been treated?

Open hearts, open minds, open doors. I don't think so. It's so much easier to say it, than it is to practice it. Though I come from a long, long line of Methodist ministers, some of whom manumitted their slaves and bought slaves to be freed, it doesn't surprise me at all, given my experience as a gay employee of UMC institutions, to see SMU sponsoring the Shrub's library.

Of all the problems in the world, why does the gay pastor issue constantly occupy the Methodist church? We're supposed to be about expanding the kingdom of God -- that is, the world outside the church, rather than the employees. There are people starving in the US. There are people dying from lack of health care. We're slaughtering thousands of people in Iraq. But what are we focused on? Damn internal politics. This navel-gazing is why the Methodist church is shrinking. It's all committees and conferences and rules and policies.

Jacob, some answers to your question that I find enlightening in Peter J. Gomes's book "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus":

"This irrational fear of the sexual other is all the more dangerous because it conceals itself within the sanctions of religion. Homophobia is the most current example of how good people can end up doing and believing bad things" (p. 106).

"If there remains one area in which our parochial obduracy continues to obtain, it is in the church's treatment of its homosexual brothers and sisters; if there is an area in which we are to be weighed and found wanting, this is it. It is not out of ignorance alone that we behave as we do toward sexual minorities; it is out of ignorance, fear, and, in certain cases, malice....Two generations of biblical scholarship have shown that the scriptures cannot be used as a basis for our discrimination on the subject of homosexuality, so why are our churches as divided on this subject today as they were a generation ago on the subject of women, or a century ago on the the subject of slavery?" (p. 199).

And, of course, as with so many other things, in both the world and the church (but perhaps even more in the church), it all comes down to money: to the fear of craven church leaders that they will lose monied members if they take a stand on this issue.

And when the minority on whom you keep dumping IS a minority, without much power to change things, and when the media relegates analysis of the abuse of GLBT persons to the gay press, people remained uninformed and comfortable in assuming that any report they hear of such abuse is simply agenda-driven. In other words, they remain capable of viewing GLBT persons as less human than they themselves are.

The churches should be challenging such malicious ignorance. Instead, they are a major part of the problem.