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blaming the victim?

blaming the victim?

I am reprinting in its entirety a response to a Facebook message posted a week ago by Franklin Graham. The open letter has thirty-two original signatories, including members of the Sojourners community, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Christian educators, and community activists.

Here is Franklin Graham’s post:

Listen up–Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and everybody else. Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience. If a police officer tells you to stop, you stop. If a police officer tells you to put your hands in the air, you put your hands in the air. If a police officer tells you to lay down face first with your hands behind your back, you lay down face first with your hands behind your back. It’s as simple as that. Even if you think the police officer is wrong—YOU OBEY. Parents, teach your children to respect and obey those in authority. Mr. President, this is a message our nation needs to hear, and they need to hear it from you. Some of the unnecessary shootings we have seen recently might have been avoided. The Bible says to submit to your leaders and those in authority “because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account.”

And here is the response:

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an extremely regressive tax

an extremely regressive tax

The latest issue of Sojourners Magazine includes an opinion piece by Phil Blackwell, entitled Not Worth the Gamble, a response to the recent ruling by the US Justice Department to permit states to sell lottery tickets online.

I have always had a problem with lotteries, with citizen governments in the business of promoting gambling. What disturbs me most is not so much the questionable morality of gambling itself or even the social ills it may exacerbate, rather the failure of state government to do its job. A state lottery is no more than an extremely regressive tax, exacting an increasingly larger share of needed revenues from those on the bottom end of the economic spectrum. As Blackwell notes:

When we follow the advertising money, we discover that the lottery has been sold primarily to the poor and those on fixed incomes: The billboards are in the inner city, not the upscale suburbs. The lottery is promoted in such places with the deceitful promise that a buyer has a good chance to win security for a lifetime.

He argues “the state government’s dependence on lottery sales is cowardly …” — and lazy! —

… a way for legislators to avoid honestly calculating the real costs of education, public services, and infrastructure repairs and then calling on citizens to be responsible through a fair tax structure.

The job of government is to ensure fairness, to encourage healthy and productive lifestyles, and to nurture opportunities for its citizens to engage in meaningful and economically viable work. Lotteries undermine every one of these purposes.

seeing gray

seeing gray

Writing in Sojouorners magazine (In the prison-industrial complex, is there hope for redemption?), Nancy Hastings Sehested, a Baptist minister and prison chaplain, describes a North Carolina maximum-security prison this way:

Colorful flowers mark the path to the gatehouse. Then the stripping away begins in earnest. It is a gray day every day in this prison. Gray walls, gray floors, and gray ceilings. The gray uniforms worn by the men can fade their faces into obscurity. The blue uniforms of the staff can create the same effect. Holding a gaze is crucial in seeing the person beyond the clothing. A simple “hello” can seem like a subversive act in a place where everyone is defined by role.

Now I know that prisons are not meant to be “cushy” places, and that justice — at least in part — is about punishment and the deserved forfeiture of rights and privileges. Nevertheless, after reading Sehested’s description, I found myself wondering what gray on gray on gray does to the human soul?

In creating a lifeless and colorless and despair-inducing environment, what do we hope to accomplish? It seems to me that such an environment would readily foster nihilistic thoughts and desperate acts and a soul-killing sense of resignation, hopelessness, and resentment.

I know what the colors and scents of a garden can do for my soul. I know how stepping outside and watching the ebb and flow of tree limbs in the wind or hearing the chatter of birds or taking my dog for a walk in the early morning sunlight can lift my spirits.

Justice — at least in part — is also about rehabilitation and restoration, and it seems to me that those things that can lift spirits and renew a love for life and restore a sense of beauty could provide invaluable aid in turning inmates lives around. I am no corrections expert, but I don’t see how we make a man or woman more human or more hospitable by sequestering them in an inhuman and inhospitable environment.

Within those prison walls, we literally have a captive audience. What a teaching opportunity! What an opportunity — not to confirm the fatalistic notion that the spoils go to the strongest and the “baddest” — but to show another way to measure value, another way to enjoy beauty, another way to satisfy the longings of the human soul. Only God can finally satisfy those longing, but it is the colors and scents and textures and vistas of all of creation that point us to God.

Maybe colorful flowers should mark the paths inside the prison walls, too …

a cure worse than the disease

a cure worse than the disease

Chaplains have been systematically removing a wide range of religious books and tapes from the libraries of federal prisons under a directive issued by the Bureau of Prisons. The aim is to prevent federal prisons from becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The banned materials include books by eminent protestant theologians (Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth) and contemporary evangelical leaders (Robert Schuller, Rick Warren).

Once more, our frantic response to a real, but elusive and unpredictable, terrorist threat has done more harm to human liberty and quality of life than any terrorist could. We are denying religious freedom, breeding bewilderment and resentment among the prison population, and cutting inmates off from resources that could aid in rehabilitation and positive spiritual development.

Sojourners is sponsoring a letter writing campaign to end the censorship. You may sign on at: Stop Censoring Prison Libraries.