IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

While folks elsewhere, such as at Big Brass Blog, are discussing the 13 year old girl in Florida who is being forced to bear a child she does not want to have–a girl who asks the judge why she can’t make her own decision and when he says he doesn’t know she has the endearing, gutsy, intelligent, courageous audacity to respond, You don’t know? Aren’t you the judge?–I will continue skewering the religious right.

In a moment I will continue to skewer the religious right. Or right now since Right to Life is all over LG’s sad case. Such as this insanity offered by a Florida Right to Life spokesman on the case.

A spokesman for Florida Right to Life said: ‘There is a rush to abort. To get rid of the evidence. Who impregnated her? You do not consent to sex at the age of 13.’

Who was this disingenous, opportunistic spokesman offering this oh-so-sage advice in the supposed interests of “LG”? What is this spokesman’s name? LG’s name is protected, her right to privacy essential, but this quote needs to branded to this Florida Right to Lifer’s name. He should be required to wear a placard bearing this aburd rationale that a 13 year old is not old enough to consent to sex and therefore is not old enough to make a decision on abortion and must carry her pregnancy full term.

Randall Terry, President of the Society for Truth and Justice, writes the following to Florida’s Governor Jeb Bush:

Governor Bush, under no circumstances should LG’s baby be killed by abortion. I am begging you to not allow a repeat of the Terry Schindler fiasco, which results in the death of another innocent person.

Please Mr. Governor, use every means at your disposal to ensure that this innocent unborn child is brought to full-term, and delivered alive. Pro-abortion zealots at the ACLU and pro-abortion judges must not be allowed to snuff out the life of this unique human being.

Moreover, it is clear that LG is a deeply troubled young woman. God knows that she is probably the victim of multiple sexual crimes against her. If she is not already there, she is certainly on track for a long list of self-abusive and self-destructive behaviors which could (God forbid) bring her life to a tragic and premature end.

Having already been examined by a court psychologist and found to have a mild “mood disorder”, but that her psychological state didn’t interfere with rational decision making , of course, LG’s supposed saviors are doing what they can to make her appear to be mentally unbalanced.

The Sun-Sentinel reports:

Rep. Jeffrey Kottkamp, a Cape Coral Republican sponsoring the parental notification legislation, said the case begs the question: “Does this minor have a legal capacity to understand all the consequences?”

“If she’s not old enough yet to decide if she should have a tattoo, or drive, or vote, how in the world is she old enough to make such an important decision on her own?” Kottkamp said.

Well, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere on this blog, a similar question begs to be asked of the preparedness of 17 and 18 year-olds for going out and killing people and risking being killed in military service, yet are not considered to have the maturity to drink alcohol. Something I don’t notice Right to Lifers having a problem with, war and its “collateral damage” of women and children.

As Morons.org points out,

Apparantly in Florida you can be both mature enough to carry a child to term and too immature to decide to terminate a pregnancy. If you’re attempting to bend your brain around that, stop trying. You’ll just hurt yourself.

While the logical failings of that position are bad enough, it just so happens that this decision is in flagrant contradiction of Florida law. Florida Statute 743.065 specifically entitles minors to make medical decisions regarding their own pregnancies as though they had achieved their majority. This means that any child, and in particular our little 13-year-old, gets to decide for herself whether or not she wishes to carry a child to term. NOT the courts and certainly not the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Never mind that, as testified by Dr. Ethelene Jones, a girl of 13 having an abortion is definitely safer than bearing a child.

What is going on in Judge Alvarez’ mind? This is the same judge who overturned the “Woman’s Right to Know Act” (right to know, more disingenuous language) on the basis that it was “constitutionally impermissible” because it infringes on a woman’s ability “to receive her physician’s opinion as to what is best for her considering her particular circumstances.”

Ah, but this is also the judge who on June 24 1993 denied a motion for a temporary injunction to reverse Florida’s refusal to fund abortion services for two adolescent women, one of whom was a rape survivor.

The Department of Children and Family Services, which obtained the injunction against LG’s abortion, did not even inform the police that LG, who had been in their care for four years, had run away (during which time she became pregnant). The safety and secuirty of a 13 year old foster child is just not that criticial. They can’t account for hundreds of children for which they are responsible and in 2002 made news with 5 year old Rilya Wilson who wasn’t reported missing for 16 months. Who had been murdered.

Update: This was several days ago and I didn’t blog as I wondered if it was still up in the air but the Judge ok’d her making her own decision then the DCF did an appeal but looks like the State backed up.

It was starry, slurry neo-coy politicos coking and fillying about me DC Prezie Roast, you could tell them and me from the designer whore trappings and threaded-up jowlies, had been rehearsing their toasty-roasty designer whore speech joculars ha-ha like. The whore maids among them had these very lively bazookas and wide big rot mouths, very red, showing a lot of capped designer teeth, and feasting and roasting away we was not caring about the wicked world one whit. And then the fair DC Prezie’s lively-wifey, with big smiling red rot, up she was for the roasting me on Arnold Schwarzie’s speech pervert’s humors, Landon Parvin, ok’d it was, all official, joking how nine o’cokck her hubby-wubby nation’s jokey-wokey is passed out snoring she said so she desperado steals out to ogle fabulous Chippies without me, ha-ha, had RUms in hysterics. Ah, but she was enjoying it, she was, and smilining all evil-like getting to the telling of hubby-wubby nation’s jokey-wokey being such a sorry ranch dude that he milked a horse. “What’s worse, it was a male horse,” she whored on. Oh me brothers as I sat and dagger-watched it was like some great harpy bird had flown into the roast and I felt all the little hairs on my neck standing ends up and shivers crawled gecko slow all over back and arms at her sloppy slur vulgarities plocked on my plate. I felt all of a fever and like drowining in red hot blood, slooshying and vidying the fair DC matey’s secret snipe and I thought, “Whore, filthy, drooling whore” and would have fisted her in the rot but the press was all about and she’s tougher than me and would have had me on the floor in two bits with her spikey heel scoring the nation’s precious jewels.

Story at BBC, First Lady puts the joke on Bush.

Plutonium Page posts at DKos the UN nuclear arms conference began on Monday. The countdown to midnight has been moved forward again to 7 minutes to midnight, the same setting as when the clock debuted 55 years ago.

Source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/trinity/articles/part1.html
Hanford B reactor, source of the plutonium for Fatman

In 1960 I was three years old and we lived on a street called Blue in a government housing development that was a different kind of government housing development than what will immediately spring to most people’s minds. It was in the middle of an American desert that at that time not many Americans knew existed.

The Japanese transistor-culture had moved in and along with the portable pocket radios came western lamps and furnishings with pseudo-Japanese aesthetic. On the living room wall above the black and white tweed sofa was a print of a painting of Mt. Fuji framed in ebony and gold, gray volcano rising out of a wash of pink cloud and mist, a scene which to me complemented the lampshades of the slim black lamps on the paired white and ebony sofa endtables. The lampshades were double-tier and gave the appearance of parchment decorated with hills of seeming spare black and white brushstrokes converging and were probably not intended to be evocative of Asian art, but when I looked at them I saw Japan.

We moved to Seattle for about two and a half years and then back to Richland. I remember standing in the desert, some mornings when I was seven, at our place on Everest Street, looking over at the distant white cap of another volcano. Mt. Rainier. My second grade teacher’s name was also Rainier.

We still had the picture of Mt. Fuji only now it was hung above a Russian vase my mother had picked up in British Columbia. My teacher in kindergarden had been Russian.

By now I also had a little geisha doll in a glass case my father had bought as a souvenir for me at conference he’d attended in Japan to do with radiation issues. He had also returned with a kimono for my mother, hapi coats for us kids, and a picture book on Japan which I spent many hours perusing. The images were by Takeji Iwamiya and the book was published, I believe, by Bayer as a gift for conference attendees. At least that’s what it reads. Prepared and presented by Bayer.

Many years later, in the 1980s, my father went to Russia, with my mother and a sister of mine, as part of a conference for International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

He also visited China, invited to give a talk in Bejing by an international organization referred to then mainly as People to People.

I love that picture and want to do a painting of it.

I have now two nieces adopted from China, and more recent pictures of family standing atop the Great Wall.

In the 2005 news was an AP-IPSOS poll that appears to show most Americans don’t believe any country, including the U.S., should have nuclear weapons. The first paragraph concluded, “That sentiment is at odds with current efforts by some nations that are trying to develop the weapons and by terrorists seeking to add them to their arsenal.”

The article then revealed how older Americans are more likely to approve of the use of The Bomb against Japan at the end of WWII. It talked about the problems of Korea and nukes and old nuclear material scattered across the countries of the old USSR and the worry of terrorists using a nuke of some type but that most people aren’t losing any sleep over the issue. It’s not a nail-biter for most.

It said,

The Bush administration repeatedly warns about nuclear weapons and is using diplomacy - and force - to try to limit the threat.

I thought it interesting what wasn’t mentioned in the article.

The article said nothing about the funding the Bush administration is seeking for their “Bunker Buster”, a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) that the White House hopes to start field testing next year.

The Union of Concerned Scientists reported in 2002,

A US decision to develop new nuclear earth-penetrating weapons would have several negative political implications internationally. First, such weapons are explicitly designed to be more “usable” and to be used in what would otherwise be a non-nuclear conflict. As a result, they blur the line between conventional and nuclear weapons and lower the threshold for nuclear use. Second, by contravening US pledges under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) not to target non-nuclear weapon states with nuclear weapons, such weapons undermine the non-proliferation regime.

In the meanwhile, a $9 million project is underway involving a redesign of new nuclear warheads.

The Arms Control Association states,

The existing stockpile is safe and reliable by all standards, so to design a new warhead that is even more robust is a redundant activity that could be a pretext for designing a weapon that has a new military mission.”
This is the crux of the matter – that the Bush administration seems to have found a way of circumventing Congress’s decision to cut funding for what were clearly intended to be major new nuclear weapons programmes.

But back to idyllic childhood kingdom.

Beyond the neatly plotted streets of “Our Town” was easily spied the sheep ranching and farming heritage of the area that, in 1942, after review of various locations with requisite hydroelectric power, isolation and long construction season, was elected by the Masters of the Manhattan Project for what would become the Hanford Engineer Works. Code name, Site W.

Even when I was a child, the sense of secrecy persisted. My father…

…a radiation research scientist whose field was bioengineering, went out every morning to catch the bus that delivered him to Hanford and in the evening returned him to our peculiar neighborhood which existed only because of Fat Man and Little Boy. During WWII all the employees at Hanford had fake job titles, secret agent time, if a stranger sat beside them on the bus and asked what their work was they each had pre-determined occupations to give, shoe repairman etc. At least, so I heard. In the late 50s througoh late 60s we were well past that stage but I have read that for up to 50 years after Fat Man, people didn’t begin to speak about their roles at Hanford. One didn’t feel comfortable asking what the parents of others did for a living. At least I didn’t. There was no question of dropping by to see where dad worked. I would spend my days thinking when the bomb drops my dad will be at Hanford and I will be at school and my mother and siblings will be at home and who would survive in what fallout shelter. I remember one time driving through the Hanford Reservation and past the reactors. Finally, there they were, the source of so much fear in my life. They seemed a strange, alien grafting into the vast, surrounding desert. Fascinating and horrible. Terrifying.

The desert wanted nothing to do with them.

Where Hanford was located were sites which had been traditionally used for spirit quests among the American Indian Nations of the area. It was at Rattlesnake Mountain that Smohalla received his vision of Washani practices. With the instutition of the Hanford Project, the area of course was closed off entirely to Indian access.

These are the Horse Heaven Hills where large bands of wild horses once roamed. When I was a child, playing daily in the desert with the hills and Rattlesnake Mountain on the near horizon, they exerted a powerful influence. I had the idea that it was at Horse Heaven Hills and Rattlesnake Mountain that the spirits of the area resided. I envisioned the Hills in the morning covered with ghostly horses which disappeared into the mist as soon as Anglo-European civilization came into sight at dawn. I imagined skeletal remains of horses here and there on the Hills as being the only clue to their sacredness during the daylight hours. I imagined over the Horse Heaven Hills and Rattlesnake Mountain the Ancient Spirits of the area still watched. And yet we never discussed the are in our household. I recall drawing once a picture of it all after I woke up from a dream in which I had seen them all on the Hills, had seen them disappear at dawn. The area had been covered with desert flowers.

Temporary quarters for more than 45,000 construction workers had to be established at Hanford and “down the road in Richland” permanent facilites for other personnel “safely removed from the production and separation plants”. By the summer of 1944, Hanford’s population was 50,000.

All the private property in Richland was acquired through condemnation.

I read the suburban ideal of Richland, its plotting and architecture, had its roots in Ebenzer Howards’ late 19th century Garden City concepts and the “communitarian” experiments of the 1930s. I can say that in its early post WWII days, the haste and extra-social/class manner in which the Village was erected could still be felt throughout. The initial plan was for 6500 residents which was intended to expand to 12,000, then ended up being 16,000. The architect had to provide the plans and specifications for the intial duplex type design of houseing in one week. The remainder was to be supplied within two and a half months. Construction began in April of 1943. The architect was Swedish-born Gustave Albin Pehrson.

The reason for the location of the site was not divulged, although the specifications precluded the possibility of locating the work near any existing town of a size sufficient to accommodate the people required…the planners could not weigh any of the sociological or ecological factors involved. Under the circumstances, they were without information as to the anticipated future use, ownership, administration, economic or industrial base of the village, or the probable population shifts after the war. In the actual laying out of the site, therefore, many important decisions were deferred to those with more thorough understanding of the scope and objectives of the project.

This is the reason, I imagine, for there being so little in Richland, in the 60s, which was a clear demarcation of social class.

In addition to these factors, G.A. Pehrson was simultaneously pressured by DuPont to provide good quality housing for their employees and by the military for an economical approach that would provide only the most basic and minimal forms of housing. Debates ensued regarding the inclusion and utility of basements, fireplaces and enclosed porches and brought about frustration and ultimately compromise for both Pehrson as well as DuPont officials.

In other words, the barest minimum. What resulted was comfortable but was also small, boxy, entirely utilitarian with almost no ornamental detailing. The layout of the village endeavored some harmony with the terrain to the extent that they attempted to follow existing land contours and to preserve the few existing shade trees and orchards. There were many open spaces and common areas. The streets were oriented on a curvilinear system and designed to accommodate the Hanford buses and the commercial areas of the village. The commercial and residential areas were separated and because Richland was a small as it was it worked, for foot and bicycle traffic was easy and the streets were lined with spacious sidewalks. In a short ten minutes or so, as a child, I could bicycle anywhere.

There were initially 8 basic housing types, all wood frame. First there were duplexes and then single family homes. “The intent was to achieve a mixture of income levels in each of the neighborhood districts. Despite these intentions, specifications called for higher cost houses to be given more favorable locations, concentrated in the district nearest the Columbia River. Indeed, the majority of the duplexes were concentrated in the western portion of the town, with a greater number of single family homes located east of the old County Road (now George Washington Way), and nearer to the river.”

Which is true. Those with more money lived near the Columbia River. But Perhson’s following ideal was clearly evident in the village and I suppose is a reason why the places we moved to subsequent Richland were all strange to me with their clear social/class distinctions evident in neighborhood location, materials and ornamental accoutrements.

G.A. Perhson stated: “High morale cannot be achieved by crowding skilled and veteran workers into inadequate dwellings. Neither can it be predicated upon salary, position or caste distinction. No village can eliminate such distinctions entirely for it is the .American tradition to aspire to executive status and where such men locate will undoubtedly be considered favored territory; but in so far as the planners could arrange these matters, all types of houses were scattered throughout the project.”

The creation of the Village had been one of the largest undertakings of its kind and, after the war, its sale was reported as the largest single-package real estate transaction in US history.

Fat Man and Little Boy

The plutonium used for the Fat Man bomb was produced at Hanford. Its testing was code named Trinity, at Alamogordo Bombing Range south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the test that ushered in the nuclear age. 16 July 1945.

Trinity. Image from the web

Fat Man destroyed Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 . it is said that 22,000 died the first day and another 17,000 in the following four months.

The Nagasaki cloud. Image from the web

In 1953, a report by the US Strategic Bombing Survey put the number of deaths at 35,000, wounded at 60,000 and 5,000 missing. In 1960, the Japanese put the number of dead at Nagasaki at 20,000 and the number of wounded at 50,000. Later, the Nagasaki Prefectural Office put the figure for deaths alone at 87,000 with 70% of the city’s industrial zone destroyed.

Source: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nagasaki.htm

Nagasaki several days before. Image from the web.

Nagasaki several days after. Image from the web.

This is the Avalon Project’s report on Nagasaki. The report breaks it down into the number of deaths per square mile, from 25,000 per square mile within the first 1640 feet of the blast to 20 per square mile at 6550 to 9850 feet.

This is Nagasaki Journey. The photographs of Yosuke Yamahata.

Here is the Safeway which I passed daily on my walk to school down George Washington Road in Richland.

This is, I believe, the old movie house where I saw “The Sound of Music”.

This is the Catholic Church we attended.

Some great photos of the Richland area are here, including a link to a marvelous panoramic shot.

When I was eight years of age scientists rolled their white trailers onto our schoolyard. We were sent home with a white sheet on which we were to list certain area foods that we consumed and how much. They were primarily interested in dairy products, though also produce consumed which was from the area. At the end of that period, classroom by classroom, child by child, we were each taken to one of the trailers and placed on the flatbed of the device that would measure the amount of radiation our bodies may have absorbed from area products.

It was a slow process. The trailers sat in the schoolyard for weeks, maybe several months We played around them. Lying on the flatbed and moving through the great body of the machine was eerie.

From the “Bomber Memories” forum

L —– ——-(77)
Like J—- H— (77), I recall the “Whole Body Counter” trailer. Does anyone remember keeping track of our diets for a week or two prior to the test in 4th or 5th grade at Jason Lee? I do wonder about the results of the study, since a few of the original elementary school group were recalled later at Chief Jo and RHS. I seem to remember D— G—- and I being pulled out of Mrs. Bishop’s algebra class in 7th grade at Chief Jo and perhaps again in my sophomore year at RHS. I do remember going through the tube really slowly and there were lots of little clicking noises. In junior high and high school, I don’t remember any advance notice, explanation or consent forms. The whole thing was strange… I explained it to some friends at a dinner party once and was accused of telling a story.

M —– ——– (77)
To JH (77) Not only do I remember the whole body counter that came to school - I still have the “Certificate of Appreciation” that they gave me afterwards. I just dug it out of my old scrapbook, and it states: “Battelle Northwest expresses appreciation to Marjorie ——– for contributing to the study of influence of diet on radioactivity in people.” It is dated October 4, 1966 (which was second grade for us), and has a sketch of the “mobile laboratory” on it. As I recall, I didn’t have a clue as to what it was all about at the time, but I was certainly impressed by the certificate!

P—- R—- (71)
My dad, Bill R—-, is the one who “invented” the Whole Body Counter. I remember, early on, that my mother and sisters (Carol ‘68, Judy ‘75) and I were “guinea pigs” as it was being built. At first, it was the size of a small room. By the time I was in high school (’71), it fit in the back of a semi. The purpose of the WBC was to measure the kinds and amounts of radiation emitted by the body, both natural and from contamination. It was used in Alaska, found the trace amounts of radiation that found their way through the food chain into the
Eskimo bellies.

Source: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Oaks/7824/memories62.html

I forget how long it took for us each to be run through the counters but it seemed a long while.

I had the same experience as one of the above individuals as far as telling people about the whole body counter and having them look at me like I was making it up. It would create a queer hostile vibe when I’d talk about Hanford, especially around conservatives, people with great faith in government. I’d have the feeling I could give shown them wall-size pictures and they would still decide I had to be lying.

In 1990 a group working against The Bomb and reactors came knocking on my door building public awareness and wanting support. The two men started their spiel. They mentioned Hanford. When I told them I knew a bit about these things, that I was from Hanford/Richland and my father had been a scientist at Hanford, they said they were sorry and backed off my porch in a way that made me feel as uncomfortable with their reaction as I was with the reaction from conservatives. I was telling them that I was interested in what they were doing and they were all eager to give me more information, then I told them about being from Hanford and the next second they were backing off from me like I’d just popped up out of a coffin, shaking their heads, saying they were sorry to hear I was from the area, and then they were gone. It was a very short conversation. Maybe it spooked them that my father had worked at Hanford.

Whole Body Counter - The basis of the design was the research of Palmer and Roesch at the Hanford Laboratories
Source: http://www.canberra.com/products/624.asp

My father was researching the effect of low level radiation on miniature livestock at Hanford but didn’t know about this test. Years later, when I described the machines to him, he conceded yes that would have been what they were testing for as he was also involved in early construction design of these devices, which can only use steel minted before WWII as after WWII all such metal is contaminated with radiation that throws off the readings. So these machines were often times made of metal used for WWII ships.

Daily, at school, I would stare out the window and wait for the flash of light that would mean the bomb had arrived. We monthly had drills. The sirens in the town would go off. We filed out into the school’s main hallway and lay down on the floor, hands over our heads, and the great metal doors would slowly, automatically slide shut leaving us in absolute dark. When I moved down south to the nation’s other plutonium reactor, at the Savannah River Plant near Augusta, and our bomb drill consisted of us getting under our desks, I laughed so hard I thought I’d be sick. “You idiots,” I thought. “You total, backwards, government-believing-trusting, foolish, outrageous, asinine idiots.”

I didn’t endear myself to teachers or classmates.

So many people are worried about what other countries can do to us. I have always been worried about what we have done to ourselves. Studies now report radioactive bioaccumulation in clams along the Hanford beach. Radioactive tumbleweeds blow around Hanford. There is increasing radioactivity under the Hanford Reach, vital salmon spawning grounds in nature.

Like milk?

You may have been exposed to radiation released from Hanford if you lived in certain areas of Washington, Oregon or Idaho between 1944 and 1972. This does not mean that radiation harmed the health of everyone living in these areas. It does mean that you may be more at risk for health problems related to radiation than people who did not live in these areas…According to HEDR, the main way people were exposed to radiation released to the air was through drinking contaminated milk.The map also includes counties along the Columbia River downstream from Hanford. People were exposed to radioactive material through use of the river or from consuming contaminated food from the river and adjacent Pacific coastal areas.

When we lived on Everest Street in Richland, milk was still delivered in glass bottles by the milkman. In the winter the glass bottles would be freezing cold when you went to get them. As children, we drank a lot of milk. Good for you. And ours perhaps was as it was not milk from “downwind”.

1986. After almost 40 years of cover-ups, the U.S. Government released 19,000 pages of previously classified documents which revealed that the Hanford Engineer Works was responsible for the release of significant amounts of radioactive materials into the atmosphere and the adjacent Columbia River. Between 1944 and 1966, the eight reactors, a source of plutonium production for atomic weapons, discharged billions of gallons of liquids and billions of cubic meters of gases containing plutonium and other radioactive contaminants into the Columbia River, and the soil and air of the Columbia Basin. Although detrimental effects were noticed as early as 1948, all reports critical of the facilities remained classified. By the summer of 1987, the cost of cleaning up Hanford was estimated to be $48.5 billion. The Technical Steering Panel of the government-sponsored Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project released the following statistics in July 1990: Of the 270,000 people living in the affected area, most received low doses of radiation from Iodine, but about 13,500 received a total dose some 1,300 times the annual amount of airborne radiation considered safe for civilians by the Department of Energy. Approximately 1,200 children received doses far in excess of this number, and many more received additional doses from contaminants other than Iodine.

Source: http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html

The Savannah River Plant had its own cover-ups.

1988. The National Research Council panel released a report listing 30 “significant unreported incidents” at the Savannah River production plants over the previous 30 years. As at Hanford (see 1986), ground water contamination resulted from pushing production of radioactive materials past safe limits at this weapons complex. In January 1989, scientists discovered a fault running under the entire site through which contaminants reached the underground aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the southeast. Turtles in nearby ponds were found to contain radioactive strontium of up to 1,000 times the normal background level.

Some while back I drove through Richland with my husband. I went to the graveyard to look for the graves of the twin brothers that my mother lost in Richland, when I was about 18 months old, during a period of time when there was a reported rise of miscarriages and infant mortality in the area.

The Bellingham Herald
May 11, 1997 pg. B 1
3 new Hanford studies started

RICHLAND-Three new studies of the health effects of radiation releases from Hanford nuclear reservation—including a look at the deaths of 4,000 babies and fetuses—have been authorized by the federal government.

The studies stem from radiation releases from Hanford between 1944 and the early 1970s, the major years of plutonium production there.

The Hanford Health Effects Subcommittee, a group of state, Indian and public interests, was briefed about the studies last week.

Scientists have said children were at special risk of radiation exposure because they drank a lot of milk from cows that fed on contaminated grass.

The new studies are separate from a continuing study of 3,200 down-wind residents to see if exposure to the Iodine-131 can be linked to thyroid cancer.

Source

A lot had changed and not much at all had changed. The desert was more pristine when I was a child. A lot of the open areas in the town had been built up it seemed or hemmed in and belabored with fences and trash. The sense of space was gone. When I had been a child the desert was my backyard. Daily, for hours and hours, I would roam in it. A huge meditation garden. With snakes. But I was careful. Every so often a rattler would wander into the street and be run over by a car.

It would get so hot in the summer that the tar on the streets would melt and spray your legs as you rode your bike.

I had been hoping my husband might witness a good sandstorm, but the weather was clear, sunny, many people jogging. Then when we stopped at the Columbia River Park and I stood looking out over the broad river, the weather began to change. The winds gathered force. The temperature plummeted. The sandstorm came rolling in as we drove out of town. Which is the way of sandstorms. One moment the weather is brilliant and the next it is rolling dark and you fight to stay on your feet, pummeled with stinging grit seeking out mouth and eyes and nose.

As I mentioned earlier, when I was seven my father went to a conference to do with radiation in Japan and returned with a small glass-case enclosed geisha doll for me, which of course didn’t survive childhood and younger siblings, but I have kept to this day the book he brought back. I used to try to study Japanese, hoping I’d one day go to Japan, and consumed a great deal of Japanese literature. I have long since dropped attempting to learn the language and retain no knowledge of it.

I love the desert and sometimes think I would like to live in it again. I try to imagine the west as it was before the arrival of the tumbleweed, native to the Ural Mountains, which was first reported in the US in 1877 in South Dakota, carried in perhaps with flax seed imported by Ukrainian farmers. It took less than twenty-five years to reach the Pacific Coast.

Via Mirele’s Miscellany came upon the US commission report on the Sgrena/Calipari “incident”, which was 1/3 censored, and how the censored version became available to the public by copying the hidden text from the PDF and pasting into a word processor. For those who have a clue about reading Italian, see the article at Corriere della Sera.

The report was available for download in Word so I did up a PDF and converted also the PDF to HTML and both are available below.

PDF version of the uncensored U.S. report

HTML version of the uncensored U.S. report

Memoryblog has a PDF of the report with the removeable redaction.

Nur al-Cubicle continues to have news on Italian response and analysis.

Heretik yesterday remembers the tragedy of Kent State in a highly personal way, and points also to Bushmerika as a place of information for those who weren’t here yet or too young to remember or who want memories refreshed or who don’t know the surrounding details.

Check the page out. There are photos. Faces.

The photos mean something. They have identity. They are the record of the moment. History is engraved in them.

Several weeks ago I began a posting on how with Afghanistan and Iraq, the practice of concealing from the public the faces of prisoners became common. A legion of the faceless destined for Guantanamo Bay or housed in Iraqi prisons, one of the excuses was protection of the identity of the individual.

This WWII poster by Ben Sahn (1942, NARA Still Picture Branch, NWDNS-44-PA-245)referenced Lidice, a Czech mining village obliterated by the Nazis in 1942 in retaliation for the shooting of a Nazi official by two Czechs. The men were killed during a 10 hour massacre and the women and children sent to concentration camps. But, in a sense, that is the small print, which it literally is on the poster. The bigger picture is the hood and the handcuffs. The hood imparts more than a simple concealment of identity. It rightly associates with it the obliteration of the individual.

I look at it and reminded of what such a hood meant to me in my youth. One thought of the firing squad. Execution. The story one usually read was that the hood was to make the execution somehow easier for the one to be executed, as if not having to face that bullet. Another version was that the hood eased the pains of execution for the executioner, not having to see the face, shooting a target rather than a human. This was communicated as act of sympathy for the executioner.

Pictures of death row prisoners being executed often showed the individual wearing a hood.

173 males are given as executed at Lidice. This is a small number compared to other atrocities, so it is an event that became symbolic of the atrocities.

The message of the WWII poster is that reprisal which takes the lives of innocent civilians is not acceptable.

On Feb 13 1991 an unknown number of Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children, were killed with an Allied attack on an air raid shelter. The bunker was said to be able to hold up to 155. Perhaps 700 were killed.

In Oct of 2004 a Johns Hopkins study reported that in excess of 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died.

Findings indicated 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected to die, with 84% of the deaths caused by coalition forces, and 95% of the deaths due to air strikes and artillery. These figures do not include information from the city of Falluja. The researchers felt the totals would be distorted if the Falluja deaths were included in the total…

The report is indicating an estimated total of 100,000 deaths in Iraq, that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred, mostly women and children, but does not include the number of wounded Iraqi civilians.

The U.S. Department of Defense is listing 1,107 Americans as being killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom with 8,150 Americans wounded, a ratio of roughly 7:1. For every one soldier killed, another 7 are wounded. Note: The eight Americans killed, and nine wounded in Anbar province, on October 30, are not included in the above totals.

Using the same 7:1 ratio for civilians in Iraq could indicate a minimum of 700,000 wounded, mostly women and children.

Source: 100,000 Civilian Women And Children Killed In Iraq By Coalition Forces, at Scoop

Also to be considered are the deaths that occurred during the time of UN sanctions.

Next you will discover that there were UN sanctions on Iraq, at US urging, from August 1990 until May 2003, during which time Iraq could not import or export anything without our approval. For a period during 2001 the Bush administration even embargoed infant vaccines and medical equipment from being sent to Iraq.

UNICEF estimated that the sanctions against Iraq resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5. In May 1996 “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the UN: “We have heard that half a million children have died [as a result of sanctions]. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright responded: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

Subsequent estimates have reduced the number of child deaths to between 227,000 and 350,000. The sanctions interfered with food and medical supplies, and were modified with an “oil-for-food” program. On September 30, 1998, the BBC reported that Denis Halliday, coordinator of the program, resigned in disgust (after 30 years as an UN employee). The sanctions, he said, were killing 4,000–5,000 children a month. Halliday said the sanctions were strengthening Saddam Hussein by damaging “the innocent people of the country.”

Paul Craig Roberts, A Country Destroyed

When I began this posting a month or so ago, maybe longer, I was thinking of the identity-removing features of hooding, of the nameless. I was thinking of Lidice and the message of the WWII poster being that reprisal which takes the lives of innocent civilians is not acceptable. I was thinking of how the WWII poster itself was a condemnation of hooding, that it condemned as heinous the severing of identity from the individual. That is what I was thinking of then.

It has been a couple of weeks since the Pentagon released photos of “The Return of the Fallen” in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Professor Ralph Begleiter of the University of Delaware, and a lawsuit. The Pentagon officially refers to them as “images of the memorial and arrival ceremonies for deceased military personnel arriving from overseas.”

A lot has been written on the photos.

Begleiter and Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, note that in consequence of the dispute the Pentagon seems to have ceased maintaining a photo record at all now, the released images that contain date information all appearing to have been taken prior to June 2004. And indeed military officials tell Begleiter and the news photos that since the FOIA request in April 2004, photos have ceased to be taken.

The images are censored. The Pentagon calls it “redaction”, as in making ready by editing etc. for publication. Faces and insignia are blacked out.

The intentional unknown soldier carried by intentional unknown soldiers.

The intentional unknown soldier carried by intentional unknown soldiers.

The conveyor belt of unknown soldiers.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was intended as a communal expression of grief and respect. It admits an essential human need to account for all Fallen.

The identities of the soldiers in the caskets are known to the Pentagon. Still, the photos are antithetical the humanity expressed in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It may sound harsh, but not a one of those flag-draped boxes honors a fallen individual. Identity has been stripped. Context is removed. Humanity is eviscerated. Emotion is banned. Knowledge is banned. All that remains are symbols of Nationalism.

The “War on Terrorism”, or whatever one wants to call it, demands nothing less than dehumanization with the advancement of the National Machine. It admits no error. Evidence is as much a casualty as individuals. Accountability and reason is shuffled off to be the responsibility of future historians who will have to sort and weigh the scripted facts against the casualty of evidence.

Deceased are property of the State ID’d with a flag, the only ID necessary in the language of Nationalism, and quietly communicated home to be interred and forgotten.

Confronting again the photos of Kent State, these many years distant, one is forced to be reacquainted with the grief and rage of the time, the story behind each and every photo.

The photos of those stripped of humanity, identifiable then as only a part of the machine, seek to allow only the rote response scripted by the machine. If grief or anger are experienced, they belong not to the particular but to National Identity.

The rage of the WWII poster understood this. The image of the victim, stripped of humanity, was used to insist, “This murder of the individual is not acceptable!” Yes, it was propaganda. And the US denied its own propaganda with its own slaying of thousands and thousands of innocent civilians. But there is still truth in that image, in that poster. The hooded individual struggling under a dark and distant sky, shackled, bricked-in, confined.

Faceless, nameless.

“Images of the memorial and arrival ceremonies for deceased military personnel arriving from overseas.”

The shadow of this brand of cynical vagueness which demands no substantiation, are stories which can never be substantiated as they are entirely fabricated. They walk hand-in-hand with such policy makers.

The theater of war, politics and national policy, in which the media is made a player, permits no witness, is a state-approved, national entertainment.

Kansas, Kansas. Why Kansas, I ask? I was born in Kansas. Lawrence. They have a University in Kansas. More than one! They have a really big one. KU! Home of the Jayhawks. Beat poets read there. You didn’t get Beat poets reading at Bible Belt southern universities in the 50s and 60s. But they were at KU. They have science at KU. Really, they do. They had science there in the 50s.

The last home of William Burroughs was Lawrence, Kansas. Beat poet Michael McClure, born in Kansas, wrote “The Mad Club”, which chronicled the Beat scene in Wichita, though the novel was set in Tulsa (I’ve not read it). Many in the Wichita scene met through a youth group at the UU church and were involved in segregation protests. LRY? Liberal Religious Youth? I was in LRY LSD (Lower Southern District) when I was 16 to 17 years of age, in Augusta. It had a knack for attracting uhm some different kinds of people. I had nothing to do with UU’s. I think it was about the last day of my junior year in high school someone said, “Hey, I bet you’d like LRY.” LRY? Liberal Religious Youth??? I was leary because of the Christian “Young Life”. But “Young Life” and LRY were nothing at all alike. Too bad that in 1974-1975 we were kind of left holding an empty bag, or so it seemed to a fringe person such as myself, which is what I was, one of the tassels. Plus too much tragedy. There was a lot of tragedy in the group. Way too many ghosts to leave much room for anything but mourning. Yet it was the one unique spot in Augusta at that time for teens of a certain mindset to gather together. It attracted artists and poets. Attracted, LRY as a whole, eventually too much controversy which is why it was, as an organization, ultimately dissolved and a new youth group instituted.

Ginsberg wrote the “Wichita Vortex Sutra” after a visit to Wichita in 1966. Of course, the Wichita Vortex idea, begun by the Beats when they were pre-Beat teens, was they were outlaws from Mars being held prisoner in Wichita, that at the time of the WU Homecoming game they were endowed with fabricated memories, and that nothing existed outside of Wichita which wasn’t an illusion of the Vortex. So, no, Kansas wasn’t exactly a friendly place. I’m not saying it was. But the Beat scene thrived there. Got some room there. Was at work there.

Why Kansas?

Maybe Kansas just wants a circus and the best one for the dollar is the one courtesy of the Institute for Intelligent Design, arguing Darwin in Kansas.

In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.’s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science’s explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design, which posits that life’s complexity cannot be explained without a supernatural creator.

…If the board adopts the new standards, as expected, in June, Kansas would join Ohio, which took a similar step in 2002, in mandating students be taught that there is controversy over evolution. Legislators in Alabama and Georgia have introduced bills this season to allow teachers to challenge Darwin in class, and the battle over evolution is simmering on the local level in 20 states.

The reason for all this? Make no mistake. It’s to make science=atheism=antiChristian or nonChristian which=enemies of a nation founded on Christian principles=liberals=Not a Member of God’s Kingdom.

“These people are going to obfuscate about these definitions,” complained Jack Krebs, vice president of the pro-evolution Kansas Citizens for Science, whose members filled many of the 180 auditorium seats not taken by journalists, who came from as far away as France. “They have created a straw man. They are trying to make science stand for atheism, so they can fight atheism.”

Why Kansas?

What’s the matter with Kansas?

The same thing that’s been the matter with America for so many years: the culture wars. The cloud of inexhaustible right-wing outrage that hovers over so much of the country. Kansas, like many places in America, once had a tradition of progressivism and outright radicalism. Today, though, like many other places, the state’s political center just seems to move farther to the right in response to events. During the Nineties the state erupted in a sort of right-wing populist revolt, tossing out its old-school pragmatic leaders and replacing them with the most conservative Republicans available. It made national headlines when anti-abortion activists descended in massive numbers on Wichita in 1991, and it made world headlines when its State Board of Education took up the battle against evolution in 1999. Today Kansas is the sort of place where the angry, suspicious worldview typified by Fox News or the books of Ann Coulter is a common part of everyday life. So I went there to study the indignant conservative mindset up close.

The reason I say there’s something “the matter” with all this is that, in becoming more and more conservative, Kansas is voting against its own economic interests. Large parts of the state are in deep economic crisis—in many cases a crisis either brought on or worsened by the free-market policies of the Republican party—and yet the state’s voters insist on re-electing the very people who are screwing them, running up colossal majorities for George Bush, lowering taxes and privatizing and deregulating, even when these things are manifestly unhealthy for the state.

Source: Questions and Answers with Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas”

Thomas Frank, who was a Reagan youth, calls it “The Great Backlash”:

By “backlash” I mean populist conservatism of the kind pioneered in the Sixties by George Wallace and Richard Nixon, perfected by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and crafted into an entertainment form by Fox News. Instead of selling conservative politics on economic grounds, it imagines conservatism as a revolt of the little people against a high and mighty liberal elite. Its object is to fight back against artists who dip crosses in urine, Hollywood stars who wear outrageous clothes, Ivy League journalists who slant the news, and snob judges who remove Ten Commandments monuments from the parks, and so on. The “Great Backlash” refers to the long ascendancy of this style of conservatism, ever since 1968. The “backlash mentality” refers to the culture of the movement, to the way its members view the world we live in.

Yeah, well, ok, maybe, and so Kansas hates the pre-Beat, Beat and post-Beat Generation. Ok. Big gripes there I imagine.

Great Backlash, certainly.

Bless her itsy-bitsy-teeny-tiny heart, Phyllis Schaffly wrote back in 2001,

Liberals have long realized that, if they can win the battle over what is taught in schools, they will win elections. While they claim to believe in free speech, they often have little tolerance for alternate points of view in the schools. In 1999, a popularly elected Kansas Board of Education changed its science teaching standards to allow students to make factual scientific criticisms of evolution. This created a national uproar in intellectual circles and the media and, last November, the pro-evolution forces elected their allies to the state School Board…If you are baffled as to why the liberals pursue the dogmatic teaching of evolution, a clue might be found in the recent election. Of the 13 states that allow dissent over evolution, George W. Bush won all but one and, of the 10 states that impose the strictest pro-evolution requirements, Gore won all but three.

The Kansas Board of Education battleground.

Still? Why Kansas? I keep thinking back earlier. Maybe rightly or wrongly. Maybe totally wrongly. But I do. As in maybe too it’s some weird “battleground” legacy, as in Kansas, Bloody Kansas. The state that got away from the pro-slavers and went free. Who knows? Sure, John Brown, pro-abolition, gave the state its Bloody nick-name, executing five men at Pottawatomie Creek in retaliation for the pro-slavers’ raid on Lawrence Kansas; you hear a lot about John Brown but there was the Maria des Cygne Massacre as well, when pro-slavers from Missouri went over, took 11 free state Kansans, lined them up by a ditch and shot them down, including two brothers, one of whom survived and married one of my ancestor’s sisters.

Kansas is soldily Red. Still, it’s a battleground state. It was pre Civil War and I wonder if part of the problem with Kansas is that bloody battleground itch.

The Institute for Intelligent Design of Shawnee Mission, Kansas says they’re fighting for nothing less than free speech. Y’know, that’s because Christians have been beaten down hard. Forced into hiding in the sewers of Topeka.

Now, let me ask you? What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of…a bird? Y’know, what’s the beauty of a bird? When you see a bird, what do you, as a creature of intelligent design want to go out and do, guided, in a sense, by the intelligent design of birds?

I posted before on the “Institute for Intelligent Design”. I even read through part of one of their Intelligent Design plays. I couldn’t read the whole thing. Maybe I should have. But the writings was oh so bad.

I went back today to take another look at the Institute for Intelligent Design website. And this time for some reason I took note of the illustrator they highlight on their links page, whose “art provides a conceptual illustration of a design inference based on her Maching-Living System Analogy.”

Here’s what Jody sees in the Intelligent Design of birds:

When I look around at the amazing world of birds and animals that God has created I see the creatures that have inspired many of man’s greatest achievements. The relationship between creature (life) and machine (non-life) holds many interesting similarities and differences, and much of my inspiration has come from this study. Throughout my life I have been fascinated with flight, so my works of art are an expression of the wonder and curiosity I have for both the birds and the flying machines.”

Ok, for Jody, bird beauty has inspired what great achievements worth illustrating?

The raven becomes a black avian knight, SR-71! “No more perfect partners could be found for this vision of art. From the winged creature put here by God to the miracle plane of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Metamorphosis VI: Blackbird pays tribute to two big, black, highly intelligent birds.”

The Bald Eagle becomes an F-15!, Jody says, ” For example, my artwork here shows a symbolic relationship between the F-15 fighter jet and a bald eagle. There is no question that the F-15 was designed. To suggest that an infinitely more complex living system like the bald eagle was not designed, but was the product of undirected random processes, is to suggest that those processes had more sophisticated design capabilities than did the engineers at McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation.”

A flacon becomes a Falconfyre!. “‘Falconfyre’ expresses that irresistible association between a flying creature and a flying machine, suggesting what is logically obvious to all: they are both the products of intelligence and design.”

And finally, a good Crusade!

Metamorphosis II: A Mighty Fortress Cold War meets George Washington’s “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace,” meets the B52 as a mighty Medieval fortress of the sky, referring to “times when kings ruled and knights defended the liberties of their kingdom.”

The Crusades! What did the Crusaders do? Right. Wahoo, and now the knights are back defending the liberties of their kingdom first in Afghanistan and then Iraq! And no doubt the same association is made with fighting the Good Fight here at home.

Which brings me back down to this. When I started writing I was thinking mainly of Jody and how Jody delights in those things of the kingdom which she sees as associated with, well, war. Undeniably, war. No pigeon-feet Orville Wright airplanes. It’s war for Jody. And then as I began writing I thought about the Beat Generation and Kansas.

There’s a very interesting paragraph at “Against the Grain”. Jody is not from Kansas. Her bio for the US Air Force Art Collection gives her as born in Ohio and places her at no time in Kansas. Still, the quote from David Quick on Wichita and the Beat Movement is an interesting one and kind of says something about the difference between Intelligent Design booster Jody, and the Beats.

David Quick, a photographer, filmmaker and WSU lecturer, stresses, “The fact that one of Wichita’s primary industries, aviation, was related to death wasn’t lost on at least some of the city’s youth. They knew they were living, symbolically, in a pit of death…Against that backdrop, McClure met another eighth-grader, Lee Streiff, at Robinson Junior High. It was Streiff who passed on the science-fiction tale of The Epic of the Martian Empire, written circa 1937 by his older brother, James. No one knew it yet, but within the epic’s cycle of stories was the germ of the Wichita Vortex, a concept that would shift shape and meaning and grow into, as Johnson puts it, ‘the story that became both a description of dire circumstances and the name of a place.’”

Evolution? Yeah, right. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about war. The big C Crusade. The Rapturous battle. It’s about “times when kings ruled and knights defended the liberties of their kingdom”.

When you look at birds and grease spots and see everything in the language of war, and it’s a happy, positive thing, then I think you’re kind of forcing the issue there, but then that’s what it’s about. Forcing the issue.

War. That’s the bottom line. Damn war.

I search for the language
that is also yours –
almost all our language has been taxed by war

Allen Ginsberg, Wichita Vortex Sutra

I’ve mentioned this before. When I was ten we moved down to Augusta, Georgia. Bible Belt. I had never heard the words “Bible Belt”. It would have been unheard of to read scripture in class or pray in class where I came from (the Greater Hanford Area Radioactive Dump, which of course had its own problems). My father’s mother knew what I was headed into and she told me, “When in Rome, behave as the Romans do.” Of course, when she said this, I thought, “Like hell.”‘ I had been thus apprised that I was heading into culturally decadent backwaters (as far as I was concerned) and if someone said I needed to behave as the locals, to stay out of trouble, then that meant I should do as much as possible to separate myself from them so as not to become infected and to let them know that I had no intention of becoming one of them.

Prayer and scripture readings in school were illegal, had been illegal since 1962, but the Confederacy was of a mind that they weren’t included. Each morning was begun with a scripture reading, and prayer. The teacher said a prayer and then we all recited the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t recollect much about 5th grade but in 6th grade I well recollect my (continued) horror of it all. I had mentioned early to a teacher this hadn’t been done where I came from, that it was illegal, and she said they did things their own way. When I was in 6th grade there was a boy who I recollect saying he had his parents’ permission to not participate as it was illegal. (I immediately fell in love with him when I’d not paid him any notice beforehand.) He and his family were promptly denounced as atheists and he was ushered from class. This was not long before he left the school, as a matter of fact just a few days beforehand (he was moving out of the area) which may be why he finally made the announcement; he knew he wasn’t going to be around to suffer the heat afterwards. Which means my heart was broken. Love found and lost in a matter of only a few days.

For a while my rebellion consisted of simply reciting the “Lord’s Prayer” in its RC version, which was not to include the Protestant ending. I knew, for all intents and purposes, we were (my family) no longer RC. During the move to Augusta I’d gone for several months without attending church or confession, staying with my father’s parents, and they certainly weren’t going to take me to church and were staunchly against church unofficially, and did not attend. So by the time I got down to Augusta I’d been many months without being to confession, which wasn’t done. My parents did at first take us to the Roman Catholic church there, which I thought was a hideous affair, barren of nice decoration (I liked looking at the art, and as the church didn’t have art it didn’t qualify as a place to sit out your Sunday morning). This lasted one week with me as I was sent to CCD (catechism class) and there in catechism class, the monseigneur in his long black robe fatefully entered on that day, my very first day returning to the RC fold, and asked everyone to say when they had last been to confession.

I suspected it was best to lie. Everyone was saying one week. He liked that answer, I could tell. Then a boy said it had been one month. He was picked up by his ear, literally (he cried at the injury), profoundly scolded, and ushered out of class for a conference and a promised whipping.

Now, you’re talking about confession, where you go to divulge your sins. So when they got to me I lied and said it had been two weeks. For some reason I thought well, I won’t say one week, but I will say two, reasoning I would probably get a scolding but wouldn’t be whipped. And this was enough to get me a profound scolding, but I did escape being dragged out of my desk by my ear.

I determined it was wisest not to ever go back, because I was certainly not going to go to confession after that. Besides, I hated the place. I told my parents about the event. I don’t believe they were particularly attached to that church anyway. At least not my mother, who had been the one interested in Roman Catholicism. And I ended up not going back. We ceased attending the church.

So, I knew that I was for all intents and purposes not Roman Catholic (I did one of those online tests once that tells you what faith you follow most and I came up 4 percent Catholic and 100 percent neo-pagan, a catch all for heathens I guess as I’m not Wiccan). Still, because the South, at that time, had as much use for Roman Catholics as it did for Jews, and because really about as close to pagan as you could get was to be an idol-worshipping Roman Catholic who prayed to statues (it was believed Roman Catholics prayed to statues), in school I expressed myself as a pagan Roman Catholic by refusing to say the Protestant ending to the Lord’s prayer. In my mind this meant they understood me to be a heathen.

Then some time during the 6th grade I stopped saying the Lord’s Prayer altogether and ended up going to stand in the hall. (I’m able to fix this on 6th grade because I remember I used to have a 6th grade school picture in which was said Beloved Anti-prayer in Class Guy.) You were finally given the option, if you didn’t want to participate in the prayer, of going to stand in the hall. If you went to stand in the hall you knew that would make you a social outcast. I did it. Accompanying a Jewish friend of mine. I don’t recollect if this began before or after Beloved Anti-prayer In Class Guy left. Finally, at some point during that year I believe, they stopped with the devotionals and class prayer.

Yesterday was the National Day of Prayer. Shirley Dobson, wife of dog-beating enthusiast, Focus on the Family’s, James Dobson, is the National Day of Prayer Org. chairman. She’s also a member of the Board of Directors for Focus on the Family. Max Lucado, minister to Oak Hills Church of Christ in San Antonio, Texas, is the 2005 Honorary Chairman. Vice Chairman is Jim Weidmann, also a Focus on the Family Executive Cabinet member.

Just in case you thought “prayer” might be something covering a broad range of faiths, and just in case you thought it was just about prayer and didn’t have an agenda, the “National Day of Prayer Coordinators’ School Prayer Event Guide” begins with a prayer that says, in part,

Dearest Heavenly Father, We thank you for Your gift of Prayer…With this National Day of Prayer School Prayer Guide, we humbly ask you Lord to help us reclaim American Schools and all schools throughout the world for You…In your Glorious Name Jesus…we pray

Next comes the dedication made by Susan Turner a volunteer.

This School Prayer Guide is dedicated to all the children who in the Fall of 1962, returned to their classrooms, and were told that there would no longer be a time of prayer before classes began so that they would have more time in the day to do their classroom activities. I was one of those children…

In 1975 when I was in high school, in response to Christian students being permitted to hold prayer meetings before classes, I and some other students organized a pagan-heathen group to test if we would be afforded the same privilege. It was such a low-key, unspectacular thing that memory we’d even done it vanished quickly even though I was a key instigator. We had around five participants show up, if memory serves. We were pretty certain that we would only last one meeting and our goal was just to show that equality in use of classrooms, separate from school, by students for prayer/meeting purposes, was not equal and that this was just another way of honoring the Christian=American agenda. Though we assumed that we wouldn’t last, we also hoped that we would, that the school would show a different stripe than what we expected. Anyway, we held one meeting, and that was that, it was realized what we were up to and we were shown the door. The principal was actually sympathetic. Others were not. I was surprised that word on it got around as quickly as it did for I was told parents were calling to complain. We’d been fairly quiet about the whole thing, just testing school policy, and it threw me a bit off guard that parents were immediately phoning in their discontent. I asked who and they said they couldn’t say.

Section two of the National Day of Prayer School Event begins with, “Yes you can hold a National Day of Prayer School Event! The words ‘Separation of Church and State’ do not appear anywhere in the Constitution of the United States.” They say the misconception is in the 1st Amendment of the Constitution which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

It goes on to educate that you can hold Prayer events before and after school, the only stipulation being that they must be student led and student initiated. They say the best way then is to organize a Bible Club or Fellowship of Christian Athletes Chapter. The Equal Access Act of 1984 governs the establishment and conduct of student religious groups on public secondary-school campuses and requires that public secondary schools permit student religious groups to meet on the same basis as other non-curricular student groups. They must not be sponsored by the school, must not have agents of the school present in any but in a nonparticipatory capacity, must not interfere with the school day, and non-school persons “May not direct, conduct, control or regularly attend activities of student groups”.

Education then continues on how you can locate students to start a Bible Club at the local school.

One is also educated on how to avoid special stipulations. The person recounts how a group she “supervised” invited a local pastor to speak about abortion from a “Christian perspective.” They were told they would need to present both sides of the issue.

…I confronted the assistant principal and told her that the group would gladly present both sides if other groups did the same. I wanted the homosexual group to feature those who’d gone straight, and the drug-and alcohol-abuse group to feature people who enjoyed their lifestyle. Faced with this obvious discrepancy, the assistant principal withdrew the requirement.

Huh? What discrepancy? Correct me if I’m wrong here. A homosexual group is for homosexuals and maybe friends and support people, not for people who want to be straight. A drug and alcohol abuse group is for people who are recovering. A christian group is for christians. There is no set “christian perspective” on abortion. Abortion is nowhere mentioned in the bible. Christian is being narrowed down here to mean anti-abortion and no doubt anti-homosexuality and thus, by and large, anti-politicians who don’t hold specific views, which is how Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina ended up excommunicating 9 members from their fellowship for not repenting for being Democrat. Hoffmania has a link to the news video documenting.

Whoo! Go get ‘em Rev’d. Chan Chandler!

Geez.

(Update and clarification: The 9 members were voted out, but it seems have not yet been “disfellowshipped”. Through Dkos, at Dembloggers is a video of an interview with a pro-Bush member of the church who is against the happenings. By the way, the pastor, Chan Chandler, 31 years of age, is insisting that his actions were not politically motivated. Huh???)

Anyway, the “Historical Narrative” provided on the National Day of Prayer states that since the removal of prayer from the schools (how has it been removed if you can pray on school grounds?) the nation has experienced an erosion of love and devotion to the Heavenly Founding Father, and a decline in school academics and environment, and increases in family breakups and violent crime, etcetera, etcetera. It states that the nation has been in a “desert wasteland” for 40 years and now it is time to enter into the “Blessed Promised Land” with the growing movement to bring prayer back into the nation’s schools.

Just in case you thought there wasn’t an agenda and prayer was for people of different religions, not just Christianity, this is to let you know yo’re sooooooo wrong.

You must be a specific brand of Christian to participate. In 2004 the annual address by George W. Bush marking the National Day of Prayer prompted protest from several religious groups and the Americans United for Separation of Church and State “which suggested that the non-profit evangelical organization that sponsors the concert and related events was improperly advertising for Bush’s re-election. Some religious figures also accused the organizers of the broadcast and the White House of using prayer for political purposes.”

The National Day of Prayer Task Force “requires its event coordinators to subscribe to a Christian confession of faith that, among other things, affirms biblical inerrancy.”

I’m going to post here the entirety of Tom Delay’s 2005 “National Prayer Day” address Thursday at Washington DC. He was introduced by James Dobson. Other than the speech being confused in that it makes mention of the inclusion of people of all faiths, yet references the second creation story in Genesis as if it belongs to everyone and is a true account of the birth of humankind (though it’s allowed the garden may have been a parcel of land or the whole world), it is just plain schizophrenic. Above, it’s already been noted what the agenda of National Prayer Day is, a day endorced by the President and by state Governors, sponsored by an organization which admits only Christian volunteers who admit biblical inerrancy. The resolve is to not only “reclaim” American schools for this Christian god but to take this to schools “worldwide”. They are not simply interested in the ability to pray on school grounds because that is already secured. They may have bible/prayer meetings on school grounds the same as any other club. But what that means is that only those students who are interested show up for these meetings. That’s not enough. The group wants all students to be subject to Christian prayer.

It makes no sense at all that Tom Delay, in his National Prayer Day Speech, would say, “And I I just want to thank — Bright and and uh Shirley Dobson for a most successful National Day of Prayer. Uhm. This is so important to all of us and so important to our nation. Uh, You know, Looking around at so many friends and brothers and sisters, people of all religions in here, uhm, it got me to thinking that that this is probably the greatest aggregation of faith and grace, in this room, since my wife Christine was here alone uhm.” It makes no sense as the National Day of Prayer is not for people of all faiths. There’s no question about this.

Now, Tom Delay’s speech, in which he waxes on at length about humility and public service, which I transcribed from the C-Span video, and supply random paragraph breaks just for ease of reading:

Humility is what I’m going to talk about today so therefore don’t believe half of what he said. Uhm. And I I just want to thank [unintelligible] Bright and and uh Shirley Dobson for a most successful National Day of Prayer. Uhm. This is so important to all of us and so important to our nation. Uh, You know, Looking around at so many friends and brothers and sisters, people of all religions in here, uhm, it got me to thinking that that this is probably the greatest aggregation of faith and grace, in this room, since my wife Christine was here alone uhm.

I-I’ve been asked to speak to you for just a few minutes about the role of prayer in a political in in political life and to highlight the needs of those of us in the legislative branch, that our countrymen might pray for them on our behalf. But of but of course, the needs of a congressman are the same as the needs of a prince or a president or for that matter a doctor or a lawyer or a homemaker. We all need wisdom, we all need strength, we all need greater clarity to see god’s will for us and greater courage to live our lives according to that will. We all need both to be loved and to love. Uhm. We need to be more trusting, more trustworthy, more hopeful and less cynical. It sounds like a lot to ask for and in a theological sense I suppose it is. But in reality, the thing congress needs today is the same thing congress needed two hundred years ago. And the same thing it will need two hundred years from now. And that thing is humility. For it is on the virtue of humility that all other virtues are preconditioned.

No man or woman, or any faith, or of no faith, can truly love, truly serve, truly persevere, truly dare mighty deeds, truly hope for the future, or truly honor the past without a humble heart. We are lucky in the United States in that this notion, the notion that good is the fruit of humility is a sense written in our national identity. Into our national identity. The founding fathers, after all, built the new American Nation on the proposition that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. That is, government should exist by, of and for the people. That political power is, by definition, public service. In Democracy therefore, as in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and all the world’s great faiths, strength is always born of humility. So it is humility then, that on behalf of the legislative branch, both houses, both parties, that I ask for your prayers today. Because the only way we can serve well is to serve humbly. As servants both to god and to our nation.

When considering the notion of both humility and service we would do well to remember the second story of Creation in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 15. Where it says “The lord god then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to tend and to keep it.” The second verb there, “to keep”, is translated from the Hebrew word shamar, which means, to guard and to protect. Thus God’s plan for mankind, from the very first moment of our creation, was to protect the garden. Whether we read the garden as a special parcel of land Adam inhabited, the whole world, the whole world at the time, the point remains, uhm, that mankind’s mission is to protect God’s creation, the good, the beautiful and the true. It was this commandment, to keep the garden, that Adam defied when he stood silent with the serpe-serpent, when the serpent tempted his wife. Whatever the reason for his silence–cowardice, curiosity or sheer lust for the god-like powers the serpent promised, Adam ultimately failed by his pride. By his failure to subjugate himself to god and his neighbor. In this case his only neighbor was Eve.

And so, and so on, throughout human history, all evil, all sin, and indeed all suffering is ultimately a product of human pride. Of self-conceit. And at the same time all heroism, all virtue, all true progress, is ultimately a product of humility, of self-sacrifice. From the obedience of Abraham and Moses, to the courage of Jesus and the cross. To the perseverance of generations of Afghanis and Iraqis, now reaping the fruits of freedom.

For all the troubles in our world today, ladies and gentlemen, we can never forget that humanity has never before possessed a greater capacity for virtue than at this moment. With a, with a richer, healthier, more populace planet than at any time in history, mankind has never been blessed with a greater garden, nor with a greater means of protecting it. And while all these gifts carry with them unprecedented temptations toward pride, so do they carry unprecedented opportunities for humble service. Here in Congress, across America, and around the world in the hearts of people of all faiths. Here in Washington, in the seat of the most powerful nation in in the history of mankind, these days pose unique challenges and offer unique opportunities, for however dangerous these days that we live are they are the envy of all times and all men.

Think, just think of what we could accomplish if we checked our pride at the door. If collectively we spent less time taking credit and more time deserving it. If we spent less time ducking responsibility and more time welcoming it. If we spent less time on our soapboses and more time on our knees. For in god all things are possible, ladies and gentlemen, and even greatness from holy sinners like you and me. Especially me. It is only by god’s grace that mankind has come as far as it, as he has. And it only in humility that god’s grace is available to us.

That’s why on this National Day of Prayer, so proclaimed in this 5th of May in the year of our Lord 2005, and of the independence of the United States, the two hundred and twenty-ninth, I ask you all as your servant and your brother for your prayers for the virtue of humility. No matter what your faith, no matter what your political persuasion, your prayers for our increased humility for our ever humbler service to god and neighbor are needed and they’re desperately wanted. We need you. We need you. Too much depends on our success, iwar, in peace, at home and abroad, for us to go it alone. Spiritually, at least, as much as politically, ladies and gentlemen, we would be nowhere without you. So pray for us. Pray for us that we may be made worthy of the honor of our office, that we might all be blessed with the humble courage to keep the garden. God bless you and god continue to bless the United States, thank you very much.

I suppose that the Delay’s address was also a nod to the proponents of Intelligent Design, referencing Genesis and the Christian account of the creation of Adam and Eve.

So, horror of horrors, I had just finished doing the “Hell, located, described and measured according to Dominionist Policitical Science” cartoon, and I go in to be with H.o.p. and there he has on the television, gasp, Trinity Broadcasting Network and he is watching because it’s “Mr. Henry’s Wild and Wacky World” and Mr. Henry has puppets. H.o.p. loves puppets. We go to see almost all the shows at the Center for Puppetry Arts. He has fabricated puppets for years. Friday night we played quite some time with a spider shadow puppet he’d made once.

He had never seen TBN before.

He doesn’t watch commercial television, the violence being too much for him, so does not “surf”, but he had been flipping through the channels looking for a Saturday morning cartoon he’d like to watch and saw the puppets and that was that.

“Wow, a new children’s show!” H.o.p. said. He was so excited.

Trinity Broadcasting Network, TBN, is the world’s largest Christian television network according to Wikipedia. It was founded in 1973 by Paul and Jan Crouch (both Assemblies of God). It now owns 23 full power television stations in the US and 252 low-power rural stations, is carried on over 6000 television stations and has a viewership of 5,000,000 households per week in the U.S. Then there’s cable. It’s carried on thousands of cable stations in 75 countries. TBN keeps growing though as it now gives itself as carried on over 5000 television stations, 33 satellites and thousands of cable systems around the world.

The programming is given as ecumenical, with the main program being “Praise the Lord”. It generates $170,000,000 annually, 2/3s of which is from contributions. It has posted an average annual surplus of $60,000,00 each year since 1997. As of 2002 it had $583,000,000 in assets, including $238,000,000 in government-backed securities and $31,000,000 in cash. Among its assets are a $7.2 million Canadair Turbojet and 30 houses sprinkled nationwide with values ranging up to $8,000,000 (I read on the Illuminations blog that instead they have 100 houses, including two mansions).

The network has attracted criticism for its continuous fundraising activites, including a “prosperity gospel”, an offshoot of the Word of faith doctrine that appears to promise donors, including impecunious ones, that God will make them rich as long as they have faith and give to TBN. Paul Crouch has made statements to his viewers such as, “Have you got something that you have been praying about ten, fifteen, twenty years? You have been praying for it and haven’t gotten it…It could be that you haven’t gotten it because you are a tightwad and you haven’t given your ten percent [referring to ten-percent tithing].” During a 1997 program, he conversely said, “If you have been healed or saved or blessed through TBN and have not contributed…you are robbing God and will lose your reward in heaven.” The network reports that seventy percent of its donations are in amounts under fifty dollars. Some viewers consider the Crouch’s prosperity as a positive demonstration of the success of their prosperity gospel message.

Somehow this all manages to be tax exempt.

TBN’s declared mission as a tax-exempt Christian charity is to produce and broadcast television shows and movies “for the purpose of spreading the Gospel to the world.” …

Crouch was led to the satellite ministry by god.

One evening in 1975, he was inspired to embrace a new technology. Crouch wrote that he was sitting in the den of his Newport Beach home when God projected a map of the U.S. on the ceiling. Beams of light struck major population centers, then spread throughout the country.

“I sat there transfixed by what I was seeing as I cried out to God to show me what all this meant,” Crouch wrote. “As I waited upon the Lord, He spoke a ringing, resounding word to my spirit — ‘Satellite!’ ”

Paul Crouch is into cursing people. In 1997 he said:

God, we proclaim death to anything or anyone that will lift a hand against this network and this ministry that belongs to You, God. It is Your work, it is Your idea, it is Your property, it is Your airwaves, it is Your world, and we proclaim death to anything that would stand in the way of God’s great voice of proclamation to the whole world. In the Name of Jesus, and all the people said Amen!

The following paragraph (well, almost following) would not be news if Paul Crouch wasn’t anti-gay. New Wine E-Church website supplies the following fairly usual kind of diatribe by Rod Parsley which Paul hosted on TBN. It’s Rod Parsley speaking, Paul enthusiastically endorsing:

You foul spirit of homosexuality and lesbianism, right now, get ready, get ready, get ready, get ready, get ready, get ready. [Founder of the TBN Network Paul Crouch is now standing to his feet repeatedly raising both arms in the air with clenched fist "in agreement" with Parsley.] I - Paul - I’m about to do it, I’m about to do it. Listen - [Parsley walks over to Paul Crouch founder of TBN who is now standing in agreement with Parsley.] Dr. Crouch listen. Before Brother Sumrall went to heaven, he pulled me up to him [Parsley now grabbing the lapel of Crouch's white suit.] and he said, ‘I’m releasing an anointing -’ I’ve never told this publicly not even in my church. He said, ‘I’m releasing an anointing into you right now that you will give one command [Parsley starts poking Crouch's chest with his index finger.] over television and 10,000 homosexual spirits will be broken.’ I’ve never shared that. I feel that anointing right now. I feel that anointing right now. I feel that anointing right now. Somebody go to your phone. If God’s telling yeh to go to your phone and your not going - that breaks the agreement. Do you understand that? That breaks the agreement. Go to your phone. DO SOME THING. I’m tellin yeh, there’s an anointing right now on $1,000. 1,000 dollars - make my - make my check out for $1,000…your about to get a promotion, your about to get a raise…[etc.]…[Parsley now prays.] Father…[etc.]… I come in agreement right now with the anointing passed down through my spiritual heritage. From Smith Wigglesworth…to Lester Sumrall…I call on that anointing…my dear friend, my dear friend bond by the spirit of homosexuality and lesbianism. I tell’in yeh right now, lesbians are drinking in the bed with lesbians right now - and when I pray this prayer, your coming out - yeh getting yeh things - yeh going home - yeh coming back to God. Right now, in the name of Jesus, we bind the homosexual spirit, we bind the lesbian spirit [Camera now shows a Butch looking woman in the audience and is quickly focused back on Parsley.] - for the express reason of setting God’s people free - NOW - in the name of Jesus - come out of them and - SET - THEM - FREE. Now everybody in agreement praise God for 15 seconds. [Praise is made through out the TBN studios, including by the LIVE TV audience.] Go to your phone, go to your phone, go to your phone, go to your phone, go to your phone, go to your phone…

Who’s Rod Parsley, who began as an Assemblies of God minister? In April, Alan Keyes and Ann Coulter and Rod Parsley spoke at Parsley’s World Harvest Church in Ohio at what was essentially a Republican rally, which has to do with Dominionists in Ohio “nmounting a campaign to win control of local government posts and Republican organizations, starting with the 2006 governor’s race.”

The book and the rally speakers, including conservative activist Alan Keyes and author Ann Coulter, argued that the notion of separation of church and state is a lie — and that it’s time for conservative Christians and “values voters” to be more involved in the political process.

“The church is still that sleeping giant that has the ability and the power from God almighty to transform our nation from the heart and from the inside out,” Parsley said in a booming voice that drew shouts of “Amen!” and “Go, Pastor!” in the nearly filled church, which he founded.

“We are the largest special-interest group in America, and the world and the nation are about to find out that we have a voice.”

Parsley founded the Center for Moral Clarity last July to promote Christian values that he says are under attack by popular culture. It actively supported ballot issues in Ohio and other states last fall to ban gay marriage, issues that attracted voters credited with helping re-elect President Bush.

Besides yesterday’s rally, Christian groups plan a series of events in Ohio in the coming weeks to train conservative activists, register 300,000 new voters for the 2006 statewide elections and promote what Parsley has called “policies that prioritize life, faith and issues of the family.”

Ok. That’s the flavor of it all.

The kicker (getting back to Paul Crouch).

A September 2004 story in the LA Times gives Paul Crouch as having had an affair with a male employee who subsequently extorted money and then was paid $425,000 by Crouch in 1997 in an out of court settlement after the by then ex-employee accused TBN of wrongful termination. Jim Bakker ( Assemblies of God, who was at TBN from 1972 to 1974, along with Tammy, and now runs a television ministry out of Ozark Countryville, Branson, Missouri) also had some problems with condemning homosexuality and then being exposed as having a relationship with a male employee.

So, it really felt odd explaining to my son that he could watch the show if he wanted to, I understood his liking the puppets, but I wanted him to know these were people who wouldn’t like the politics or beliefs of his mom or dad, and wouldn’t like his uncle who is gay. Considering Paul Crouch’s history this seemed an odd thing to tell him.

Paul Crouch recently threatened to sue the reality TV show “Lie Detector” if they aired an episode featuring the individual who states he was Crouch’s lover. NBC backed off.

TBN has a “Statement of Faith” which reveals they believe in the Bible as infallible, of course, Jan and Paul Crouch being Assemblies of God.

This is the Assemblies of God official standing on homosexuality. They don’t like.

Anyway, there was my son watching Mr. Henry, hosted by Frank Peretti (his father was an Assemblies of God minister and he too is an Assemblies of God minister), a children’s show done by a Christian horror writer. Pharyngula notes Frank teaches his anti-evolution stance through his horror,

“My goal is to make them think about evolution,” he said. “Evolution as a philosophy makes monsters out of all us. It removes all that makes us human - morals, virtue, love, honor, self-sacrifice. All those become illusory. I’m trying to raise some questions. Who is the real monster here? I do it through a monster story.”

His Mr. Henry show however has him as an inventor and gives the impression of him being a scientist teaching moral tales. Very soon we were watching a cartoon of Cain and Abel. It began with Abel telling Cain that god didn’t like his sacrifice. That he wasn’t supposed to sacrifice moldy strawberries, he was supposed to sacrifice his best animals. I sat and watched with some anxiety as H.o.p. doesn’t like certain subjects and it occurred to me they were going to run into some problems with first depicting sacrifice (the selected sheep gives a cartoonish “yipes” expression and starts backing off screen) and the murder of Abel (Abel goes off screen, lots of nonsense commotion against a red background ensues). The story is that Abel, now cursed, will die before he gets to eat any of his tomatoes.

Seems to me a fair amount of the time that the worse you do, the more massive the scale, the easier you get off.

Thankfully most of the show ended up being about respecting others, not bullying them, even exploring the notion that sometimes people who hurt others had been deeply hurt themselves. It sounded intimately acquainted enough that I wondered if Mr. Henry had some major problems with being bullied as a child and a glance around the internet shows that he was bullied as a child.

There were parts where I had the eerie sense I’d been popped back to the 60s and 70s when that Country variety show ruled the airwaves in the south, and I was also somehow back in the Ozarks, though I never was in the Ozarks (except for drives through Branson), but my father’s parents lived in southwestern Missouri (the drives through Branson) and indeed I felt like I was somehow back in their living room watching television though they never watched Country. Plus a dollop of early 80s “New Wave” televison culture thrown in with the choices of what was viewed as eccentric and offbeat wrung through a conservative Christian filter. Reinforced when a band appeared out of the wall and Mr. Henry picked up a banjo and started strumming bluegrass (turns out he’s also a musician and it was his band).

Eventually Mr. Henry said something that had me burying my face in a pillow and when I came up for air that’s when I said to H.o.p., see that little icon down on the side of the television screen? That icon means you’re watching a station called Trinity Broadcasting Network. The people there believe in things mom and dad don’t believe in. I know you like the puppets, H.o.p., but I want you to know these people wouldn’t like your mom or dad or a lot of the people we know. On these shows they preach religion and things mom and dad don’t believe in and they would say your mom and dad and their friends and your uncle were bad people.

It’s difficult, because H.o.p. doesn’t believe in anything yet except drawing and Godzilla and puppets and cartoon characters, which is the problem, I don’t want him suckered by child-friendly puppets. But I don’t want to be caustic either. So I figure the best way to handle it is a basic truth, that these people wouldn’t like mommy and daddy and friends.

Which feels uncomfortable telling him when his father’s parents are Southern Baptist (his grandfather a Southern Baptist Minister) and his father’s mother’s family was and is Assemblies of God and her brother a long time president of an Assemblies of God college. Not that H.o.p. even knows his grandmother has a brother as he doesn’t, he’s never met him, neither have I, it has never been encouraged that we meet.

“What’s row-ligion?” H.o.p. asked.

He’s seven. There are some things we obviously don’t talk about around here. Not long ago someone told him he was bad because he didn’t go to church. He didn’t even begin to get it.

“It’s religion. Religion teaches people a particular way of seeing the world and thinking about and behaving toward others. People who share the same beliefs in how to see the world sometimes belong to a religion that teaches those things.”

“They wouldn’t like you? But Mr. Henry’s nice and has nice puppets.”

Sure, Mr. Henry acts nice and I was inclined to want to like Mr. Henry because H.o.p. liked the puppets and and all the activity and kid’s stuff, but Mr. Henry is Assemblies of God and Assemblies of God thinks H.o.p.’s mom and dad are sinners destined for hell, so, uhm, it’s kind of hard to get around that big difference of opinion there.

“H.o.p., they would think mommy and daddy are bad people.” I didn’t mention hell. H.o.p. has never heard about hell. “They wouldn’t like mommy’s art or writing. They wouldn’t like the stories we tell you. We live very different lives. They think a lot of people are bad who we don’t think are bad.”

Never mind the whole idea of loving the sinner but hating the sin. I wasn’t going to get into that. H.o.p. is not ready to hear that.

The programming switched to another children’s show. H.o.p. wasn’t interested in that one but he left the station on as we went about the apartment doing other things. I didn’t ask him to turn it off. If he was still interested in watching, he could watch. Then another children’s show came on and he called me to the room and pointed to the TBN icon and I said yes, it was the TBN station and so this was another TBN show.

He pointed at the person on the screen and asked, “What’s that?”

As best as I could tell it was a person done up in yellow make-up who was supposed to be something like an evil spirit influencing children. I said, “That’s supposed to be what they think of as a demon.”

“What’s a demon?”

“An evil spirit.”

“What’s an evil spirit? What’s he doing?”

“He’s supposedly talking to the children and telling them to do bad things.”

“Why would he do that?”

“The television show wants you to think he wants the children to be bad too.”

“Why?”

“I guess that’s what they believe.”

“Why is he yellow?”

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