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May 29, 2002
Bill Christison
Disastrous US Foreign Policy:
Part 2, Globalization
May 28, 2002
Michael Leon
Lincoln
Brigades Memorial
Scott Lucas
Christopher Hitchens:
No Longer an Authentic
Voice of Dissent
Nelson P. Valdes
Castro,
Bioterrorism and
the State Department
Harvey Wasserman
What Does the White House Know
About Atomic Terror?
Norman Madarasz
France,
Brazil, the Politics
of the World Cup
May 27, 2002
Dave Marsh
Why I Voted for Nader:
Ticketmaster's Stranglehold
on Music and Politics
Robert Fisk
The Coming
Firestorm:
Bush's Crazed Remarks
May 26, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Diary of a Northwest Trip:
Why Reds Live Longer
May 25, 2002
Chris Floyd
General
Principles:
Unmasking Colin Powell
Gavin Keeney
All Politics is Local? The Unbearable
Lightness of NGO's
Jeffrey St. Clair
A Hero
of Our Time:
Stephen Jay Gould
May 24, 2002
Edward Hammond
Documents Prove Pentagon Violated
Bioweapons Act
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
Beginning of the End?
Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
CIA Analyst:
Big Changes Needed in
US Intelligence Agencies
May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
The Real Bush is Back
Susan Abulhawa
Israel
and South Africa:
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
of a Middle Eastern Migrant: Accosted at the Border
May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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May
30, 2002
Sex Among the Sacred
by Tom Turnipseed
An evolving sex scandal involving dozens of Roman
Catholic priests and their often young parishioners has the media
focusing on sexual predators concealed for decades within religious
institutions. Complete with cover-ups by higher-ups, the disturbing
stories of sex among the sacred has gained a life of its own
in the mainstream media.
Over the past weekend, retiring Roman
Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee "apologized"
for having his archdiocese pay $450,000 to a 54-year-old man
who said he had been sexually assaulted by the archbishop 22
years ago. On May 28, 2002 while visiting with the Pope in Rome,
President George W. Bush said , "I am concerned about the
Catholic Church in America." Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer
said the sex scandal was mentioned in the context of how it is
damaging the influence of the Catholic Church in U.S. society.
On May 28, 2002, Dateline NBC 's lead
story dealt with allegations of widespread child molestation
within the Jehovah's Witnesses religious organization that has
been kept secret. Former Church elder Bill Bowen called the Jehovah's
Witnesses a "pedophile's paradise." Mr. Bowen maintains
a web site that documents the shocking abuse: http://www.silentlambs.org/.
Here in Columbia, South Carolina on May
26, 2002, The State newspaper revealed that the 5,500 member
First Baptist Church is facing a lawsuit alleging a church deacon
working as a youth volunteer raped a 12 year-old girl he knew
through the church. The suit also alleges that the church's pastor
failed to check the deacon's past criminal record of such abuse
and ignored parent's complaints about him.
What's new? Remember Sinclair Lewis'
"Elmer Gantry", a 1927 novel and 1960 movie that satirized
the life of a slick and sleazy preacher who used and abused his
congregants as prey for sex, money and power. Gantry, the ever-upwardly-mobile
evangelist employed sex to save-the-souls of his young female
believers. Throughout human history, religious dogma has distorted
the beauty and reality of human sexuality into an ugly aberration
of guilt and repression.
When those "closest to God"
in the priesthood and higher echelons of the Roman Catholic Church
take the vows of celibacy, they purposefully turn away from the
"aims and desires of the world." Turning away from
the "aims and desires of the world" is a most unnatural
course for those who are the ultimate purveyors of spiritual
advice on human sexuality to all the Roman Catholics in the world.
Antiquated and unrealistic doctrines about sex like celibacy
and chastity were not of the Hebrew tradition. The first words
God utters to Adam and Eve are found in Genesis 1:28: "Be
fruitful and multiply." The Christian Church has used a
presumption that Jesus never married or engaged in sexual activity,
but no biblical or authoritative sources in the early Christian
communities affirm his celibacy.
Some contemporary Catholic theologians
suggest that behind the image of Jesus-the-celibate-male lies
an imbedded sexism that seeks to support a social system affording
men dominance and privilege. The thought of a non-celibate Jesus
was an anathema to the Church Fathers of the first centuries
who established the connection between sex and sin. St. Ambrose
wrote that, "The ministerial office must be kept pure and
unspoiled and must not be defiled by coitus." St. Augustine
(354-430) became the Church's greatest advocate for celibacy.
He felt sex was always tainted and the "original sin"
of Adam could only be passed on by intercourse and conception.
Remarkably, St. Augustine said he considered an erect penis a
visible sign of man's inner revolt against God.
Celibacy was used to expand the political
power of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. It was used
to separate every priest from the economic and political ties
of family inheritance and local politics and bring them into
a powerful international bureaucracy centered in Rome. The Church's
economic power was further enhanced as celibacy was used to discontinue
the inheritance of real estate from priest to son. The Church
became the owner as celibacy made Rome a power broker in real
estate.
Meanwhile, monastic orders gained great
power from mandatory celibacy in the 11th and 12th centuries.
Catholic scholars describe the phenomena of monastic homosexual
activity as reaching proportions that the Church had never known
previously. The celibacy-centered monastic movement and its asceticism
also found a powerful ally in St. Thomas Aquinas who taught that
women were inferior beings whose bodies cause their emotions
to rule over reason. Celibacy's sordid history is based on the
pursuit of power. The issues of birth control and women in the
clergy lurk behind the ugly revelations of sexual improprieties
among the men in the clergy.
Religion's reactionary role in defining
human sexuality from the denial of birth control to the doctrine
of celibacy in the priest hood is shameful. President George
W. Bush's order to cut off U.S. financial support for global
population control efforts was political pandering to right-wing
religious zealots. Using religion to gain a big turnout of your
"base" vote by engaging in a political act that allows
millions of unwanted and uncared for babies to be born in poor
countries is disgraceful. It is wrong to debase your vow as a
cleric by having sex with a young parishioner. It is also evil
to use narrow, irrational, religious dogma for political purposes.
Tom Turnipseed
is an attorney, writer, and civil rights activist in Columbia,
South Carolina. http://www.turnipseed.net
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