The following words were delivered last night by Sen. Gordon Smith (a Republican from Oregon), a 10-year veteran of the Senate: I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way,…
According to the AP Conservative leaders voiced dismay Wednesday at news that Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Dick Cheney, is pregnant, while a gay-rights group said the vice president faces "a lifetime of sleepless nights" for serving in an administration that has opposed recognition of same-sex couples. How bad is…
Take a look at the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can see the photo of an Iraqi man grieving over the body of his three-year-old daughter outside of the Baghdad hospital. According to the paper, “the girl was killed and three other family members injured when they were caught in crossfire as clashes erupted between gunmen and US forces.”
The lead story starts with this assertion:
The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.
This story line and this photograph clearly impugn the integrity of the United States. Publishing such information is unpatriotic. Or, at least, those are the sorts of things we’ve been told, until recently.
It was always OK to publish pictures of our proud soldiers and our high-tech missiles taking off, of course. It was up to Al Jazeera and the Europeans to publish pictures of what happened when those missiles exploded on the ground, however. And when those non-American media sources published those photos of Iraqi civilian carnage, it infuriated “America.” It’s not that American soldiers weren’t also credible witnesses to the civilian killings on the ground. The evidence was there to be published, if anyone cared to know.
For most of the past 3 1/2 years, the Post-Dispatch (along with most mainstream newspapers across the United States) did not publish pictures like this, certainly not in prominent places. It simply wasn’t deemed news …
Here's the story. But, of course, it is more important to get rid of gay military translators than to communicate with residents of Iraq.
A couple of summers ago, my husband and I attended a wedding that took place just outside Missoula, Montana, where one of our sons lives. The groom is an incredibly nice man whose family is from India. He and his family are Christian, not Hindu. His uncle, who participated in the wedding ceremony, is a minister in the Pentecostal Church.
During the ceremony, it became obvious there is a philosophical and theological divide in the groom’s family. His generation, born in the United States, has rejected the values and beliefs, though not the religion, of the older generation. The women of the older generation are diffident, speaking only when spoken to, wearing only traditional Indian dress. The women of the younger generation are liberated American females. The “best man” at the wedding, in fact, was actually the groom’s sister. There were covert smiles passed amongst the younger generation, males and females, at the words of their uncle, who preached subservience and obedience for the bride, dominence for the groom. It was clear, while the younger generation respects its elders in that family and holds very closely to its Christian beliefs, it does not accept its old, rigid patriarchal mores.
It wasn’t clear to me until after the wedding just how rigid those patriarchal mores are. Because my father was a pastor in South Africa, and because the Indian preacher had also been a pastor in South Africa, I thought it quite appropriate to talk to him about our connection, but, …