Bloody Foundation for U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Garry Leech is editor of Colombia Journal, author of Crude Interventions and Killing Peace, and coauthor of The People Behind Colombian Coal. A lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Cape Breton University, Leech lives in Nova Scotia. His account of being held captive by guerrillas, Beyond Bogotá, Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia, will be published by Beacon Press this fall.

There has been an ongoing debate in Washington about a potential free trade agreement with Colombia. The failure to implement a hemisphere-wide agreement—the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)—led President George W. Bush to push for a bilateral pact with his ideologically-aligned ally in Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe. The Bush administration signed a free trade pact with Colombia in November 2006, but congressional Democrats have stalled its ratification due to ongoing human rights abuses in Colombia, particularly against unionists.

The Bush administration repeatedly points to a recent reduction in the number of Colombian labor leaders killed as justification for the free trade agreement. In October 2007, U.S. State Department spokesperson, R. Nicholas Burns, declared, "Homicides of trade unionists have shown a steep decline…. Rather than condemning as insufficient the considerable progress already made by the Colombian people, we should help them consolidate that progress through expanded trade."

In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 Colombian unionists have been assassinated. In 2007, Colombia remained the most dangerous country in the world for unionists with thirty-nine labor leaders killed; a number significantly lower than the 197 assassinated in 2001—the year before President Uribe assumed office. Consequently, the Bush administration is clearly correct when it points out that there has been a marked decrease in the number of unionists killed under the Uribe administration.

Monday Link Roundup: Bill Ayers and Stanley Fish, SCOTUS, YouTube

We recently posted about Beacon Press author Bill Ayers and his connection to Barack Obama. Stanley Fish posted about the controversy on his blog at the New York Times, and "confesses" his own association with Bill Ayers:

Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his evasion (for a time) of justice? Not likely, given that at the time of the events that brought Ayers and Dohrn to public attention, I was a supporter of the Vietnam War. I haven’t asked him to absolve me of that sin (of which I have since repented), and he hasn’t asked me to forgive him for his (if he has any).

It goes without saying that Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright, who was on Bill Moyers Journal this past weekend and spoke at the NAACP's Freedom Fund dinner yesterday, has also given the presidential candidate some trouble in the mainstream media. While the blogosphere is still debating the impact of Wright's appearances, the radical image he and his church have been given in the media does not match the experience of Suzanne Shea, who visited the church he led for over thirty years.

Over at Slate last week, Dahlia Lithwick got some conversation going about the incoming New York Times SCOTUS beat reporter, Adam Liptak. Mark Tushnet, author of the forthcoming I Dissent, was one of many readers to comment on how Liptak might rethink the task of reporting on the highest court in the land.

Read an excerpt of Nan Mooney's Not Keeping Up With Our Parents over at Utne.com.

And David Gessner, who posted here last week about the problems of environmental writing, is back on YouTube with a very funny approach to keeping students engaged in a lecture. You can find the video on Beacon Broadside's YouTube video log. While you're over there (and before you get distracted by cats playing piano), check out an older video of David skiing the beach.
 

Happy Birthday, Justice Stevens

Today's post is from Frederick Lane, author of The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right's Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court. Lane is an expert witness, lecturer, and author who has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the BBC, and MSNBC. His next book will be People in Glass Houses: American Law, Technology, and the Right to Privacy (Beacon 2009). For additional information, please visit www.FrederickLane.com.

This past Sunday, April 20, was the 88th birthday of Justice John Paul Stevens, the oldest member of the United States Supreme Court. Stevens, who was appointed in 1975 by President Gerald Ford (on the recommendation, incidentally, of Ford's chief of staff, Dick Cheney), has become one of the stalwarts of the Court's liberal wing. At the time of his appointment, a number of Senators expressed concern about his health—just a few years before his nomination, Stevens had open-heart surgery. But only one justice has served at an older age than Stevens—the "Yankee from Olympus," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who retired not long after turning 90.

It is disconcerting to note that every one of the Court's more liberal members is eligible for Social Security: Stevens (88), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (75), Anthony M. Kennedy (72), and David Souter (68). Only one conservative justice, Antonin Scalia (72), and the more moderate Stephen Breyer (70) are in the same club. Chief Justice Roberts (51) and Justices Clarence Thomas (60) and Samuel Alito (58) are all significantly younger.

The unusually strong correlation between age and ideology on the Supreme Court has gotten remarkably little attention, particularly in the increasingly-vapid presidential debates. It is a sad commentary that the mainstream media is increasingly comic, and our comedians are increasingly the primary source of serious news.

Media and Links

Faith in Public Life are hosting the Compassion Forum this Sunday, April 13th. The discussion of "wide-ranging and probing discussions of policies related to pressing moral issues that are bridging ideological divides now more than ever, including poverty, global AIDS, climate change and human rights," as well as the crisis in Darfur, will include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (but not John McCain, who declined his invitation). The event will air on CNN at 8pm. Among the members of Faith in Public Life who will be asking questions at the event is Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith and director of the Interfaith Youth Core.

Of interest on other blogs:

Nancy Polikoff explains that the tax advantages of marriage aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, has been documenting the green overhaul of their store on their blog.

Patricia E. Bauer posts a memorial to Melissa Riggio, the daughter of Barnes & Nobel CEO Steve Riggio. who died of leukemia recently at the age of 20. "Ms. Riggio, who had Down syndrome, was the inspiration for Barnes & Noble’s creation of a special section of books about children with special needs."

Wendy Kaminer on the lawsuit pending in Indiana that requires bookstores that sell "sexuality explicit material" to register with the state.

Harlyn Aizley agonizes over what to do with her poem-a-day emails.

Dictionary-phile Ammon Shea on how dictionaries ruined his Scrabble game.

Link Roundup

I was on a semi-vacation last week, so this week's link roundup is a bit larger than normal. Enjoy!

Howard Zinn is adding to his People's History of the United States with a new graphic novel, A People's History of the American Empire. Read about it at Tom Dispatch, and check out this Viggo Mortensen-narrated clip featuring Mike Konopacki's artwork and Zinn's words. 

Fantastic review of Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith at Beliefnet. And don't miss Patel's excellent post on pluralism vs. diversity over at OnFaith.

...[I]t’s not about whether diversity is good or bad. Diversity is a fact, and in America it's not going away. The question is how to best engage the fact of diversity in a way that builds social capital and increases civic engagement. And when the pluralists don't engage diversity by building positive social bonds, then we leave a vacuum that is often filled by extremists or bigots.

In light of the recent Obama/Wright controversy (read Chris Bracey's take at BlackProf), Terri Gross talked with James Cone, author of Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968-1998, about Black Liberation Theology. Also listen to the other interview from that show, with Rev. Dwight Hopkins, for a better understanding of the context Rev. Wright's comments were ripped from.

Kai Wright is in the American Prospect on starting over in AIDS research and in the Dallas Morning News about the danger of the high rate of teen STDs.

Penny Coleman attended the Winter Soldiers' conference, and her thoughtful analysis is appearing on Alternet. Be sure to check out her article about Stop/Loss: "Pentagon Holds Thousands of Americans 'Prisoners of War'."

Rabbi Arthur Waskow urges Jews and others to observe a green Passover.

Kevin Jennings, author of Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, is a hockey fan. And he doesn't appreciate the homophobic atmosphere at Rangers games.

 

American Dreamers: Analyzing Dreams of Hillary and Barack

by Kelly Bulkeley

As of today a total of 116 dream reports about Barack Obama and 104 about Hillary Clinton have been posted on the metaphysicalpoll.com website. Here are some of the questions I've heard people asking about these intriguing political fables from the nocturnal imagination.

Can we accept these as real dreams? Cautiously, yes. Some of the reports could easily be fake, but most sound genuine to me. (For more on the limitations of this kind of anecdotal data, see my posting of March 19.)

Why are so many people having dreams of Hillary and Barack? It's turning into a perfect storm of political dreaming. First, the core supporters of both candidates (older white women for Hillary, multicultural youth for Barack) tend to be especially active dreamers--they are exactly the kinds of people who show up most often in dream classes and workshops, and I think it's natural their political hopes and fears would find expression in their dreams.  Second, many Democrats are genuinely torn in both directions, and one thing we know from modern dream research is that people often experience an upsurge of dreaming during times of uncertainty and indecision. And third, the feverish campaign coverage by the 24-hour news media has prompted unusually intense feelings of familiarity and intimacy with the candidates' personal lives, to the point where we hear and think and talk about them almost non-stop. In this kind of cultural environment, it would be surprising if we did not find at least some people dreaming about these omnipresent figures in the public eye.

The Danger of Water Wars

Fred Pearce is the author of When the Rivers Run Dry: Water the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century, March 22nd is World Water Day, an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro.

by Fred Pearce

Water consumption has tripled in the past 30 years and there's a growing danger that disputes over the most necessary of resources could erupt into violence

Water is rapidly becoming one of the defining crises of the 21st century. Climate change is making its availability increasingly uncertain. And we are using ever more of the stuff. In the past three decades the human population has doubled but human use of water has tripled -- largely because, ton-for-ton, modern 'high-yielding' crop varieties often need more water than the old crops.

A typical Westerner consumes, directly and through thirsty products like food, about a hundred times their own weight in water every day. That is why some of the great rivers of the world, such as the Nile, Indus, Yellow River and Colorado, no longer reach the sea in any appreciable volume. All their water is taken.

Many parts of the world, notably the Middle East, are running out of water to feed themselves. In response, a vast global trade is emerging. Not in water itself, but in thirsty crops like grains and sugar and cotton. Europe is a major importer of thirsty crops. Meanwhile the US, along with a handful of other countries, like Australia, Argentina, Thailand and Canada, are major exporters.

Economists call this the 'virtual water trade.' Many countries would starve without it. But as more and more countries run short of water, the trade will be disrupted. And the threat of wars over water will grow.

Dreaming of Barack and Hillary (and John)

by Kelly Bulkeley

At the conclusion of a recent New Yorker story about her new website posting people's dreams of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Toronto novelist Sheila Heti said, "I sort of hope that the campaign managers will change the way candidates give speeches as a result of people's dream lives. It must be telling them something."

These dreams do have the potential to reveal meaningful facets of people's political beliefs. The frequency and intensity of a politician's appearance in people's dreams can be taken as an accurate index of his or her personal charisma. The more people dream of a politician, the more likely that politician has made a deep emotional impact on them (both positively and negatively--Heti's website has instances of both).

In 1992, when I first studied dreams of politicians during that year's Presidential election, I heard numerous dreams of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, and almost none of George H.W. Bush--no doubt where the charisma lay in that contest! As of March 18th, Heti's website contains 73 dreams of Obama, 67 of Hillary, and four of John McCain (to be fair, the space for McCain dreams was just created on March 10th). Now, as then, the dreams offer a mix of the bizarre and the trivial, the profound and the absurd, the personally idiosyncratic and the socially relevant. From a research perspective, the value of Heti's website is that it provides further evidence that people dream not only about their private lives but also about public affairs like political contests. Dreaming is not purely inward-looking; it also has the capacity to look outwards and express our feelings about the major concerns, conflicts, and challenges of our communities.

The Psychological Trauma of War

by Margot Adler

It's not something you read in a newspaper or hear on an ordinary news show; it's only on the comedy shows like Real Time with Bill Maher where you hear it whispered: the idea that John McCain has PTSD, and that it would be scary to have his finger on the button. Whether or not this is the same kind of slur we hear from those who say Barak Obama was schooled in a madrassa, it seems perfectly reasonable to wonder if anyone who spent five years in a tiger cage might have some remnants of PTSD - even decades later.

So when I heard it on Bill Maher the other night, it reminded me that we are living in a society where thousands of young men and women, our very future, are returning home every day scarred from battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of those scars are painfully visible; many others are not. Few people are really looking deeply at what this means for families and relationships, even what it means for our daily lives as Americans. Only one person that I know of in the mainstream media has delved deeply and movingly into this issue. For more than a year, in a series of searing pieces, Daniel Zwerdling at NPR has chronicled the plight of military personnel to get the mental health care they need. In many cases, veterans with PTSD have been kicked out of the military for bad behavior and are unable to access mental health services.

Ten years ago, I wrote a book called Heretic's Heart about my own life during the 1960's. Several chapters of that book were letters between me, as a twenty-year-old University of California - Berkeley student and activist, and Marc Anderson, a soldier fighting in Vietnam whom I met through the mail after he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper that could only be described as a cry from the abyss.

Link Roundup: Margaret Seltzer a sociopath? The Sexing of Science. Lowlights of the Presidential Race.

Is Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, aka the latest memoirist to be exposed as a fraud, a sociopath who skillfully manipulated her benefactors in the publishing industry? Amy Alexander, co-author of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans, ponders the question of blame in the Nation:

Could it be as simple as a case of innocent victims--the editor, the agent, the writing teacher--being duped by one sociopathic young lady?

Maybe. But it also may also be true that when it comes to a hard-luck gang story, McGrath, Bender and others involved in the publication of Love and Consequences were more inclined to err on the side of sensationalism and exploitation over the hard work of grooming an author who might give readers genuine authenticity. And it is more than a bit ironic that their apparent quest for vividly told ghetto authenticity led them to nurture and promote a white woman writer whose story, even if it were true, represented only a one-dimensional version of the Authentic Black Experience.

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The Nantucket Independent highlights the life of native daughter Maria Mitchell, whose life in science is explored in the forthcoming Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science by Renée Bergland.

Throughout the book, Bergland examines Mitchell's rise from 1847, when she witnessed the flash of a comet... to becoming the "computer of Venus" employed by the Nautical Almanac to calculate by math the orbit of that planet; to her hiring as the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College for women; and to the close of the 1800s when women's roles in the sciences were discouraged and Mitchell lamented that she might be the last of the nation's female scientists.

Bergland notes that while the word "scientist" had no masculine association at the start of the 19th century, by 1873 a male Harvard Medical School faculty member posited that women were physiologically unable to study science and that those who pursued the subject with vigor risked becoming "thoroughly masculine in nature or hermaphroditic in mind."

As of 1875, 10 years after Mitchell was appointed to her professorship, the move toward a male scientific role model had gained societal dominance.

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The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy compiles the worst moments in the race for "Pastor-in-Chief." Watch them on YouTube, where the video has been added to the Beacon Broadside favorites. Mitt Romney's speech on faith in America didn't even make Gaddy's top ten.

The Presidential Nomination Process: Time for Reform

by Jane Eisner

MEADVILLE, Pa. - In this pretty, snowy college town deep in Pennsylvania's north country, enterprising college students are mapping out how to fix the way we nominate presidential candidates. Their ideas are too good to ignore.

The Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College is embarking on a two-year Nomination Reform Initiative, and its inaugural event yesterday (Feb. 13th) was inspiring, indeed. Representatives from 15 regional colleges studied the nomination process through an on-line course provided by the New York Times Knowledge Network. They learned the intricacies of the primary process, enumerated its benefits (some) and its flaws (many), examined proposals for reform, and then came up with their own ideas.

While there were unique and intriguing features in some of the reform ideas - I'll get to my favorites in a moment - there were also unmistakable common threads. The students uniformly agreed that the system now on display in 2008 is too long, too messy, too confusing, and just plain unfair. Interestingly, many of the students wanted to retain a central feature of the current primary calendar - that is, the opening roles played by small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. The opportunity for retail politics, to share conversation with a potential president while sipping coffee at a diner, still holds tremendous appeal even to young Americans groomed in cyberspace.

They do, indeed, want to be able to reach out and touch their candidates. They just don't want to relocate to Iowa or New Hampshire for the privilege.

Obama's Mixed Heritage: A Mother's Perspective

by Barbara Katz Rothman

It's an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child, as another white mother's Black child is running for president of the United States. Who'd have thought?

I too am a white mother of a Black child. When my Black child, Victoria, was in kindergarten or maybe first grade, sitting around the morning meeting at her politically progressive Quaker school, they were talking about how there'd never been a woman president, or a Black president, or a Jewish president. Victoria   piped up: "I could do it; I could be the first of all of them!" Now that she's older, I think a presidential career is pretty well out for Victoria--the first multi-pierced, Mohawk-wearing, tattooed, electric-bass player president? Probably not. But back when she was in kindergarten, I'd have thought the chances of someone with Obama's family background becoming president were unimaginably slim.

In case you've not seen a news report this year: Obama had an African father and a white American mother-from Kansas, no less, though ultimately her son was raised mostly in Hawaii. Too bad that his mother isn't here to see this; she died, too young, of ovarian cancer. She did live long enough to see him in the Senate, miracle enough that was! If she was here now, I wonder how she'd be responding to the inevitable media attention: people are blogging about why we're calling him "Black" rather than "mixed race,"about his "white heritage,"wondering if he is "Black enough," thinking about his thoroughly unusual and so thoroughly American story.

All's Not Fair in Class Warfare

by Victor Tan Chen

If there's a lesson from the recent debacle over an economic stimulus package, it's this: Republicans need to stop engaging in class warfare.

Class warfare, as the Republicans have pointed out time and time again, is when public policy is unduly influenced by the interests of one group at the expense of everyone else.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership has been guilty of such hypocrisy in its negotiations over individual tax rebates in the economic stimulus package, which the Senate approved last Thursday. First there was talk of making any legislation contingent on extending President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. Then the Republicans sought to kill proposals to extend government checks to the poor, while demanding tax rebates for wealthy Americans. And they stamped out an effort by Senate Democrats to lengthen unemployment benefits.

So, how is this class warfare? An effective stimulus package, according to economists ranging from Ben Bernanke to Martin Feldstein to Lawrence Summers, should be timely, temporary, and targeted. Targeting the stimulus means putting money in the hands of poor and middle-income households. They're more likely to use that money to buy things rather than saving it or using it to pay down debt. (See these articles by economists Paul Krugman and Mark Zandi for more on this point. For some contrarian views, see this summary of recent research on tax rebates -- though it's axiomatic in social science that you shouldn’t put too much faith in surveys of what people say they will do in the future.)

The legislation that both houses of Congress approved will give some benefits to the poor -- a $300 tax rebate check to individuals with at least $3,000 in income -- but many will not receive the $600 maximum rebate for individuals or $1,200 maximum for couples, plus $300 per child, because they do not pay enough income tax. (This is also true for certain segments of the near poor, the group that Katherine Newman and I study in our book The Missing Class.) In passing their own version of the legislation yesterday, the Senate also extended tax rebates to Social Security retirees and veterans with disabilities, though, as for the poor, the benefit will be just $300.

The People Speak: Performances from Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States

by Allison Trzop

Several weeks ago, a couple of folks from Beacon -- including Director Helene Atwan -- had the pleasure and the privilege of attending several readings and tapings for a miniseries being shot over at Emerson College’s Cutler Majestic Theatre here in Boston.

Hosted by Executive Producer Howard Zinn -- not only a wildly influential historian and one of the most inspirational activists of modern times, but also one of the most imminently likable people alive --"The People Speak" featured an all-star line-up performing excerpts primarily taken from Zinn’s book Voices of A People’s History of the United States. The four performances, broken into segments titled "Class," "Women," "Race," and "War," were the culmination of tremendous work by Zinn, Anthony Arnove, and Chris Moore of "Project Greenlight," as well as actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

While every last one of the actors who participated should be loudly applauded (yet again!), standout performances included John Legend pouring his heart and soul into Nina Simone’s "Mississippi Goddamn"; Marisa Tomei reading the words of Cindy Sheehan; David Strathairn standing in for a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which for those of us who loved Good Night, and Good Luck was hilarious; Josh Brolin doing more for Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun than any high school lit class ever could; and every last time Staceyann Chin walked onstage.

Did you ever expect to hear Viggo Mortensen sing Bob Dylan?

For those who couldn’t make it into the filled-to-capacity Cutler Majestic, you can read more about it over at Alternet,  watch some more clips on YouTube, and, with any luck, the producers will find a home for the miniseries.

Allison Trzop is an assistant editor at Beacon Press.

Going To the Territory: The Black Conservative Tradition in American Politics

by Christopher Alan Bracey

During a recent promotional event for my book, Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, From Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice, a middle-aged African American woman asked me a question that I’ve been hearing a lot these days. Although she agreed with much of what conservatives past and present had to say about issues affecting the black community, she refused to think of herself as a conservative because, in her mind, conservatives (echoing Kanye West’s criticism of the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina) “don’t really care about black people.”

The problem, she elaborated, was one of tone. Black conservatives, in her mind, were unduly hostile in their criticisms of the blacks in general, and poor and urban blacks in particular. She simply couldn’t bear to align herself – at least publicly – with these hostile voices. She was, in her own mind, a black conservative masquerading as liberal – and suffering within a deep political crisis as a consequence.

As the 2008 Presidential Campaign lurches forward, Americans of all stripes will be called upon to contemplate and vote their politics. For many African Americans, Barack Obama’s pursuit of the Democratic nomination has, in some ways, reanimated a conversation that has taken place quietly within the black community over the past decade – a conversation about the increasingly conservative nature of black politics.

To be sure, blacks are overwhelmingly registered Democrats. But are blacks overwhelmingly liberal? In a season in which the dominant rhetoric on both sides of the political aisle is one of “change,” what sort of change is needed to best empower the African American community?

Condoleeza Rice

As I detail in the book, there is a growing perception that conservatism within black America is gaining momentum. In 1972, fewer than ten percent of blacks identified as conservative. Today, nearly thirty percent, or 11.2 Million, African Americans do. Fifty-six percent of black voters supported Virginia’s 2006 ban on same-sex marriage. Other polling data reveal that the majority of blacks support other conservative policies, such as privatization of social security, school vouchers.

Do everyday blacks, who believe a more conservative pathway is most attractive, dare to state these views publicly, particularly when the Democratic nomination is at stake? More importantly, if, in the spirit of public discourse, certain blacks declared themselves to be conservative, what exactly does that mean? Is there a black conservative tradition, or multiple traditions? And what obligation, if any, do liberals and progressives have to engage this conservative tradition in a serious way?

Manipulating the Metaphors: the Bush Record on Education

by William Ayers

In his State of the Union address on January 28, President Bush, our self-styled “education president,” urged Congress to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind Act, calling it a “good law” and claiming that because of this legislation student learning is improving and “minority students are closing the achievement gap.”  In reality, student learning is not improving under NCLB, and the so-called racial achievement gap is a fraud.  But through a combination of sleight-of-hand, cooking the numbers, and manipulating the metaphors George Bush could make those claims with a smile. 

The education revolution that Bush touts is the result of decades of “school reform” spearheaded by business and powered by ideologues.  “Global competitiveness” is the preoccupation, “accountability” and “standards” the watch-words, and all of it results in a ramped-up obsession with standardized testing and an emphasis on minimal competencies along a narrow band of cognition and skills.  The business metaphor dominates the discourse: inputs in relation to outputs, discipline and punishment, incentives and competitiveness.

It’s worth asking ourselves what makes education in a democracy distinct.  Of course we want children to study hard, to be responsible, to stay away from drugs, and to be prepared for work.  But those are goals we share with totalitarian regimes, monarchies, dictators and kings.  So what is uniquely characteristic of democratic education?

Sundays in America: Barack Obama's church

by Suzanne Strempek Shea

The woman in the post office doesn't like Hillary, but tells me she's not about to vote for Barack.

"He's Muslim," she leans in to whisper.

I lean in closer and reply "He's not."

Barack Obama is a Christian. But he's also one from a varied cultural and religious family, the specifics of which are spawning all sorts of misinformation as the Illinois senator campaigns for nomination as the Democratic party’s presidential candidate.

The facts: Obama had a black African father who hailed from a Christian/Muslim family; a white Kansan mother who balked at organized religion but stocked the home bookshelves with the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, as well as collections of mythology from the world over; a lukewarm Indonesian Muslim stepfather; and non-practicing Baptist and Methodist grandparents. By age ten, Obama had attended both a Catholic and a Muslim public school in Indonesia, then, upon moving to his grandparents' home in his birthplace of Hawaii, was enrolled in a Christian prep school. The salad bar of experiences served up appreciation of other faiths but didn't inspire the self described "reluctant skeptic" to quickly pick a favorite, even when affiliation might have benefited his early political career.

Seventeen years ago, Obama made his choice: the United Church of Christ, created in this country in 1957 via the union of the Evangelical and Reformed Churches with most of the Congregational Christian Churches. The UCC is known for the independence of its 5,633 congregations, spiritual home to 1.2 million. It's also known for the non-traditional ways it can present the Protestant experience, including through its recent TV ads that show congregants being plucked from the pews of an anonymous church due to factors including race and gender, the message being that at UCC, all are welcome.

Losing Sleep

by Kelly Bulkeley

Last night the students in my "Psychology of Dreaming" course at John F. Kennedy University turned in their first assignment of the quarter: a personal sleep history from childhood to the present. I like to begin my dream classes with a focus on sleep because it's a great way to jar people into taking a fresh look at the nocturnal dimension of their lives. Most people have never reflected on their sleep patterns or thought about sleep in relation to their life's development and growth over time. When they're encouraged to do so, the results are often startling. As soon as I opened the discussion in class last night, one of the students quickly raised her hand. I called on her, and with no further ado she declared:

"I'm 45 years old, and I just realized I've been sleep deprived for the last 40 years!"

Several other students followed with their own tales of sleepless woe, just like I've found every time I give this assignment in a class and just like I found in the research for American Dreamers. The conclusion is hard to avoid: We are becoming a chronically sleep-deprived nation. Problems with sleep afflict a surprisingly large number of people in contemporary American society, and we don’t really know how widespread these problems are or how they impact people’s long term health and well-being.

Florida Fairytale or Tale of Terror?

by Patricia A. Gozemba

Draft a constitutional amendment that is divisive and sweeping in its possibilities for endangering committed and established relationships of all Floridians, straight and gay, and call it the "Florida Marriage Protection Amendment." Make sure that it’s ambiguous enough to ultimately be able to do away with domestic partnerships that are recognized in a number of Florida municipalities. Use seemingly transparent language, "Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized." Consider the legal arguments that can be hung on "substantial equivalent."

Just pretend that the amendment is aimed only at preventing the marriage equality of same-sex couples and that it is vitally needed. Posture that the 1997 Florida Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) statute is not solid enough to prevent "activist" judges from undoing it. Keep up the pretense for four years as you gather the requisite 611,009 signatures to place the amendment on the November 2008 ballot. When you get 612,192 signatures by late December 2007, weeks before the February 1, 2008 deadline, hold a press conference in Orlando and announce it with fanfare.

Start preparing to host Marriage Sundays and Citizenship Sundays in churches throughout 2008 in the run up to the November 4 election. Matt Staver, chairman and founder of Liberty Counsel based in Orlando, advises church leaders that this is all legal. He also counsels them on where to set up tables, what to preach about, how to conduct seminars and conferences to support the so-called marriage amendment. He’s available to help in any way. Liberty Counsel has been fighting marriage equality nationwide for years.

Depending on one’s commitment to equality this scenario sounds like a Disney fairytale or a tale of terror emanating from Orlando. Besides the Liberty Counsel and Disney World, Orlando also happens to be the home base for Florida4Marriage and its chair John Stemberger, who is also the President and General Counsel of Florida Family Policy Council. Behind Stemberger and Staver are the other national stars for inequality, in particular Focus on the Family leader James Dobson along with its policy analyst Glenn Stanton who is still pushing his skewed research about same-sex parenting that is not recognized by any respectable academic or professional body.

The fairytale that Florida would become the 28th state to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage came up against reality on January 10th. Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning announced that signatures from Miami-Dade County had been double counted in a computer error and Florida4Marriage needed 22,000 more signatures by the Feb. 1 deadline to get their amendment on the ballot.

The Republican Candidates’ Abortion Problem: It's not Just about Abortion Anymore

by Carole Joffe

"I haven’t sorted out the penalties...of course there’s got to be some penalties to enforce the law, whatever they may be." So spoke George H.W. Bush, in one of the major gaffes of his first presidential run in 1988, during a debate with his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Bush, who had only recently begun to trumpet his antiabortion sentiments to dubious Republican social conservatives, was responding to a question about appropriate punishment for women who would obtain illegal abortions should Roe v Wade be overturned. The next morning, after frantic late night discussions, Bush’s handlers called the press for a "clarification." Bush meant to say doctors who performed abortions, not women who received them, should be jailed in such a situation.

Twenty years later, Mike Huckabee, running for the Republican nomination, makes no such missteps. With none of the discomfort that Bush I showed, Huckabee at his rallies gets the party line of the antiabortion movement right: if Roe is overturned, doctors who perform abortions should be punished, while the recipients of such abortions must be seen as "victims."

But Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher and the candidate of choice of evangelicals, is an exception in the clarity and consistency of his position on abortion. There is a long history of "evolution" on abortion from politicians in both parties. For example, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, both from Southern states, had mixed records of support for abortion early in their careers before they each went on to become staunch allies of the abortion rights movement. But in the campaign of 2008, it is mainly the Republican candidates who are squirming.