January 23, 2012

Gingrich earned a decisive win in the South Carolina primary, so now the Republican presidential nomination race has three different winners in three different states. Host Michel Martin explores what this means going into the Florida primary, and previews the State of the Union speech. She hears from journalists Mary Kate Cary and Cynthia Tucker.  http://www.npr.org/2012/01/23/145642198/how-newt-gingrich-changes-gop-race-with-s-c-win

NEWT ON THE ROAD TO DEMASCUS

"The joyful and radiating presence of the Holy Father was a moment of confirmation of the many things I had been thinking and experiencing over the last several years," Gingrich said at a Catholic prayer breakfast this year. http://www.npr.org/2011/12/22/144080998/gingrichs-catholic-journey-began-with-third-wife

January 23, 2012

The individuals who participated in the first Inquisition 800 years ago kept detailed records of their activities. Vast archival collections at the Vatican, in France and in Spain contain accounts of torture victims' cries, descriptions of funeral pyres and even meticulous financial records about the price of torture equipment.

"[There are] expense accounts [for things] like how much did the rope cost to tie the hands of the person you burnt at the stake," says writer Cullen Murphy. "The people who were doing interrogations were meticulous."   

Cullen Murphy is the editor-at-large for Vanity Fair and previously served as managing editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

Interview Highlights

On accounts of torturers from the first Inquisition

"The idea that the pope would authorize the use of something as heinous as torture by priests or people working for priests is a pretty astonishing development. Ultimately, the justification that it invokes is the same one anyone uses when they're using torture for reasons that are not sadistic and that is, in essence: 'The moral cause that we're engaged in is too important to settle for half-measures.' ... When you read accounts of torture, you get the unmistakable impression that the people doing the torture or conducting the torture — somewhere inside them, they think they are saving souls."

On the state-run Spanish Inquisition

"The reason for it was that Jews who had converted to Christianity were reverting to Judaism. That was the charge. And the degree to which it was or wasn't true is one of those things historians debate to this day. These charges were leveled at a time when anti-Semitism in Spain was on the increase. There had been terrible pogroms beginning in the 14th century, forced conversions, continual rounding up of Jews into ghettos. The situation was terrible even before the Inquisition began, and once the Inquisition began, it became worse."

"The pope had control over the Medieval Inquisition and over the Inquisition that came later, but the pope had no control over the Spanish Inquisition. As a result, you had the government — the monarchs — presented with this extraordinary tool that they could use for a variety of purposes. ... The Spanish government did not have the welfare of victims in mind. What it did have was the uses it could put prisoners to. And one of the things the monarchy needed was galley slaves [to row ships]. It's probably the worst punishment that can ever be meted out. Your life expectancy was not more than a couple years."

On waterboarding

"Many people in the Bush administration were insisting [it] was not torture at all. The Inquisition was actually very clear on the matter. It obviously was torture. That's why they were using it."

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/23/145512271/the-inquisition-a-model-for-modern-interrogators

A MODEST AFRICAN AMERICAN PROPOSAL

Since both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich claim to be devoted Catholics who have license to make broad assumptions about African Americans, I would like to make a modest proposal about Catholics, especially the newly initiated, and particularly about Historian Newt Gingrich, who began studying the history of the Catholic Church and its influence on Western civilization.  All Catholics are pedophiles.

 

John Cornwell

John Cornwell in The Pontiff In Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II (2004) writes priestly pedophile practice is not new in the long-term past of the Catholic Church.  In the year 1050, a future saint, Peter Damian, addressed a report to Pope Leo IX on the widespread practice of clerical pedophilia, excoriating not only those who perpetrated such deeds but the “do nothing superiors” who were “partners in the guilt of others.”  Back in the eleventh century, the Pope and Rome bridled at the forthright criticism.

If clerical sexual abuse comes in waves, the Vatican had early warning of what was in store when a case in Lafayette, Louisiana, was reported to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy (responsible for, among other things, the discipline of the clergy) as far back as September 1982.  A father Gilbert Gauthe had been indicted by a grand jury on thirty-four counts of sexual abuse involving nine boys; one charge included rape, which carries the death sentence in that state.

There were some aggravating details, to be sure: It was Good Friday, and the seminarian had softened up his victim by plying him with liquor.  But what was unusual, in fact alarming, about the Gauthe litigation was the appearance of Pope John Paul II’s name on the list of defendants as one relived of liability for damages.  It turns out that this was a slip me canonical than Freudian.  The Pop’s name was speedily dropped.  But the question remained, in principle if not in law:  To what extent did John Paul II take a measure of responsibility?

Cornwell states that the full sordid picture in the United Sates was not to emerge until February 2004, when a wide-ranging investigation was published by the College of Criminal Justice at John Jay University in New York.  In the meantime, the Holy See tended to dismiss or to minimize the crisis.  In 2002, while serial atrocities were being exposed in Boston, Cardinal Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI], who discussed the problems of the Church in the world every Friday with John Paul, confidently averred that less than 1 percent of priests had been the targets of complaints (his use of the word “targets” in no way acknowledged actual guilt in that estimate).  The true count was that during the lifetime of a fifty-two-year-old individual born in 1950, some 4,400 Catholic priests in the United States had been credibly accused of sexually attacking some 11,000 minors.  That represents virtually half of the period of John Paul II’s papal watch. (226)

Pope John Paul II Weakens Local Church Control

The bishops knew full well the growing extent of the abuse problem; they had grown so used to waiting for Rome to act on local crises that they failed to take the initiative.  John Paul’s pontificate weakened the status, the authority, and the role of the bishops rather than confirmed them as the local teachers, governors and sanctifiers.

Cornwell writes that the bishops have acted in precisely the way disempowered employees behave.  They did their best to keep the problem out of the media; they covered up, moving erring priests from place to place (where they invariably offended again); they failed to address the impact on the victims; they failed to reform the clerical caste, the regimes in their seminaries, and their methods of recruiting priests.  They did not act decisively, by laicizing erring priests and turning them over to the civil authorities, because they did not believe that they had the authority to do so.

Bishops did not fail because they were weak and venal men; they failed because of generations of increasing enfeeblement of their office by Rome, further undermined by a Pope who acted as both universal and local pastor.  Treat bishops like branch managers of a multinational company and they will act like them.  They did not fail to act simply because they were craven but because they did not believe that they had the power to act.

Even after the worst of scandals had come to light and the bishops had determined on rigorous action, John Paul and the Vatican undermined the autonomy of the American bishops. (236)

A final and terrible irony of the priestly abuse crisis, and its corresponding crisis among the bishops, is the catastrophic undermining of diocesan authority as a result of bankruptcy law in the United States.  This means, however, that the local bishop surrenders his independence and authority in all manner of Church business to a local circuit judge.  There has been nothing quite like this capitulation of a diocese to secular authority in the modern period outside China and the Iron Curtin countries.  Other dioceses in America are contemplating the same route out of bankruptcy. (237)

Church Scandals Outside of America

Cornwell writes that the American situation has tended to overshadow other scandals throughout the world.  In Austria, the Church has been in a state of upheaval as a result of the behavior of Bishop Kurt Krenn, who has sought to make light of a sex scandal in his seminary.  In July 2004, some 40,000 pornographic images were found on the seminarians’ computers.  There were instant calls from both faithful and his brother bishops for Krenn to resign, but the Vatican insisted that only the Pope had the power to withdraw him, and the Pope vacillated.

Krenn was a deeply conservative bishop who had been nominated by John Paul in 1985 despite widespread objections.  He is known to be a supporter of the Neo-Nazi Austrian politician Jorg Haider, and more recently refused to adhere to the guidelines on abuse of minors proposed by his brother bishops.  When four of his colleague bishops denounced the sexual abuse perpetrated by the late Archbishop of Vienna, Hans Groer, Krenn reportedly went on television to say that they would “roast in hell.”

Boldly Cornwell declares that inevitably, the history of this period will note that the crisis erupted during John Paul’s watch, a period in which he presided over an increase in Rome’s authority and a decrease in diocesan authority.  He should not escape censure for his failure to see the early signs of the crisis and to act appropriately.  This past quarter century, the period of his pontificate, will be remembered above all for the priestly sexual abuse scandal and its far-reaching consequences.

PLACING THE BLAME

 

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick,[1] commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests that impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. [2] This satirical hyperbole mocks heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as Irish policy in general.

In English writing, the phrase "a modest proposal" is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.

As with the original Modest Proposal, my proposal is aiming to support African American against racist attacks from Right-wing Republican racist.  These brave Americans running for the Office of the President feel that the Negro, unlike the Jew, is still helpless therefore a ripe target.  However, African Americans have a political history of their own.

DAVID WALKER’S APPEAL TO THE COLORED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD

 

Walker has generally not been recognized in primary and secondary textbooks for his contribution to ending chattel slavery in the United States, yet many historians and liberation theologians cite Walker’s Appeal as an influential political and social document of the 19th century.^[2] They credit Walker for exerting a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and beyond. He has inspired many generations of black leaders and activists of all backgrounds.

Walker's Appeal (1829)

Walker intentionally structured his Appeal in the style of the United States Constitution. For Walker, black Americans were more American than Africans, having forged the country with their blood and toil.^[5] Walker addressed his audience of Americans as two entities—one black and one white—and placed the enslavement of Africans in the United States in historical context. He argued that American slavery, in its brutality and its denial of the basic humanity of those enslaved, eclipsed the brutality of all other slave regimes.

As in his public speeches, Walker in his Appeal challenged the racism evident at the time in “reforms” such as the rainbow color scheme by the American Colonization Society to deport all free and freed Blacks from the United States.^[6] He specifically targeted the public assertions of black inferiority by Thomas Jefferson, who died three years before the publication of his pamphlet. Walker recognized that a cohering racist ideology, articulated and encouraged by a man of Jefferson’s stature, posed a powerful long-term threat to the black community and to the promise of real democracy. As he explained, “I say that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.”^[7]

Walker posited that Blacks had to assume responsibility not only for themselves but for one other. Those who were educated were urged to read the pamphlet to those who did not want to.^[8] The Appeal aroused fears among white leaders, especially Southern slave owners. Various government bodies immediately labeled it seditious.^[9]

David Walker wrote of his disdain for the Catholic religion as a warning from history.  He posited that the whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of them will curse the day they ever saw us.  As true as the sun ever shown in its meridian splendor, my color will root some of them out of the very face of the earth.  They shall have enough of making slaves of, and butchering, and murdering us in the manner which they have.  No doubt some may say that I write with a bad spirit, and that I being a black, wish these things to occur.  Whether I write with a bad or a good spirit, I say if these things do not occur in their proper time, it is because the world in which we live does not exist, and we are deceived with regard to its existence.—It is immaterial however to me, who believed, or who refuse—though I should like to see the whites repent peradventure God may have mercy on them, some however, have gone so far that their cup must be filled.

But what need have I to refer to antiquity, when Haiti [Haiti], the glory of the blacks and terror of tyrants, is enough to convince the most avaricious and stupid of wretches—which is at this time, and I am sorry to say it, plagued with that scourge of nations, the Catholic religion; but I hope and pray God that she may yet rid herself of it, and adopt in its steady the Protestant faith; also, I hope that she may keep peace within her borders and be united, keeping a strict look out for tyrants, for if they get the least chance to injure her, they will avail themselves of it, as true as the Lord lives in heaven.  But one thing which gives me joy is that they are men who would be cut off to a man, before they would yield to the combined forces of the whole world—in fact, if the whole world was combined against them, it could not do anything with them, unless the Lord delivers them up. (Article II, (Hinks) 22-23)

 

 

A PUBLIC COMMENT

ON POINT RADIO

JANUARY 23, 2012

 

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/01/23/dems-on-2012

Monday, January 23, 2012 at 10:00 AM EST

The Democratic Take On the 2012 Race

South Carolina speaks. We go to big Democratic party thinkers for their take on how the 2012 race is shaping up.

 

Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich listens to staff during visit to Children's Hospital, Friday, Jan. 20, 2012, in Charleston, S.C. (AP)

We’ve had seventeen Republican primary debates now. Votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. Santorum’s squeaker. Romney’s win. The Newt Gingrich Carolina surprise. It’s been wild, feisty, in Barack Obama’s face, and all over the media, whatever Newt’s loud protestations.

So, what are Democrats thinking about the GOP field as it narrows? About the lines of attack? About the way this fall’s contest for the presidency is shaping up? This hour, we’ll ask.

This hour, On Point: big Democrats on the Republican campaign and President Obama’s position for November.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests

William Galston, senior fellow on governance at the Brookings Institution. Served as a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton on domestic policy and worked on Clinton’s 1992 campaign.

Robert Shrum, senior fellow at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. Senior advisor to the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004, and to the Gore 2000 presidential campaign.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.

From Tom’s Reading List

Newsweek “The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he’s a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all. ”

The Week “If Mitt Romney wins South Carolina after Monday’s debate performance, then he really is unstoppable. And that’s the probable outcome unless, after Rick Perry’s departure from the race Thursday, there’s an unlikely last-days coalescence of the religious right around the pyrotechnic Newt Gingrich, who as a nominee would prove to be a pyromaniac, reducing the GOP’s White House hopes — and perhaps its House majority — to a handful of ashes. ”

The New Republic “Unless something dramatic happens—fast—the general election will soon be upon us, with Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, and President Obama fighting for a second term. ”

 

Article. I. US CONSTITUTION

Section  1. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section. 2. Clause 1: The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

House GOP's 2012 Mission: Unity Against Obama