The UCC ad shows what must not be shown. Muscular Christianity. Those who dominate. The strong who take the weak. The men who are uncivil to men who love men in the lighted places, and uncivil to boys in the unlighted places.
In Canada it still takes armed police to compel the production of witnesses and documents, social workers to interview and organize the first-hand accounts of victims, attorneys to present legal claims of wrongs, experts to construct forensic interpretations of medical records, witnesses to offer under oath recitals of facts, juries to hear testimonies given under oath, and judges, all the way up to iitssikohkitsimio'pistsi -- the Crown Courts -- to get an acknowledgement from either the Prots or the Romans that children were systematically abused in the residential school system Canada and its Churches imposed on Indian children.
Just a "Yes. It happened." was unutterable until the latent violence of the state was directed at the past violence and ongoing suppression of victims of the state churches, and the utterance forced by the threat of force.
In the United States the situation is worse. The cases haven't made it to court, the dance of denial hasn't even begun yet for Indian children. The Churches are just dodging the briefs brought by non-Indian children. Here in Portland we have a non-prosecution and the customary dance of denial by a religious institution serving the children of the local elite. It is the same elsewhere.
The 30 second UCC spot isn't "controversial" because it promotes an intra-Church competitive message -- bingo night at the UCC has bigger payouts, the UCC hires musicologists and has better music, the liturgy is CoE-lite but hymnals are still KJV ... and bachelors and spinsters may attend services and socials without any special licenses. That isn't "controversial". What is "controversial" is that entry into "holy ground" constitutes consent to search, or whatever else the money men have scripted for their bully boys.
In 1978 Akwesasne Notes published three works prepared the previous year for the Non-governmental Organizations meeting of the United Nations. These texts were not new or original in any important sense, they were simply the republishings of texts that have existed since Contact, but have not been part of Euro-American political consciousness for the better part of two centuries. The Akwesasne collective wrote of the cultural development of the human isolate population in the domesticant-rich Old World.
In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics.
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Herding and breeding of animals signaled a basic alteration in the relationship of humans to other life forms. It set into motion one of the true revolutions in human history. Until herding, humans depended on nature for the reproductive powers of the animal world. With the advent of herding, humans assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of the animals. Sometime after this happened, history records the first appearance of the social organization known as "patriarchy."
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Within these [Indo-European and Semitic] cultures, stratified hierarchical social organization crystallized.
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They [] developed the idea of monotheism to serve as a spiritual model for their material and political organization.
The herders are visible in the UCC ad. That is the objectionable content. American Christianity is simply a Pre-Contact Old World monotheism, a stratified hierarchical social super-organization composed of a myriad of smaller replicants. An artifact of domestication as an acquisition to the cultural toolkit of an isolate population. An abstract dual-host -- human-domesticant virus. The momentary messaging on homophobia and "values" is the replicating the herder. Humans were part of the inventory of Old World domesticants, but to show that is ... controversial.
The particular conditions for entry into ... heaven -- after all, it could be mandatory homosexuality with ritual reproductive heterosexuality just as easily as mandatory reproductive heterosexuality with ritual homosexuality -- is so trivial compared to the colossus -- the acceptance of, the hunger to bare the neck to the crook or knife of the herder.
I've posted this before, but it won't hurt to repeat it. Zitkala-Sa's 1902 piece Why I Am a Pagan is two pages and to the point. I've never found it necessary to go more modern than the Wars of Religion, beyond social acceptance of the hoodooed Praying Indians, and the nuances of indigenous Catholicism. I've never before encountered persons for whom commercialism was truly the highest form of spiritualism. Now I have. For those of you forced to confront the unexpected by the UCC ad, you have my sympathy, and my suggestion that you try to make out what is real.
This piece was motivated by MB's piece, It's not about "gay marriage"...
Posted by EBW at December 4, 2004 01:35 PM | TrackBack