Hate Laws within the web of Man's Laws

Hate Laws within the web of Man’s Laws

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Their names have been repeated. They were Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Abu-Salha, and her sister Razan Abu-Salha. So far officials are describing the murders as related to a parking dispute. It is probably the first time people were murdered in their own home, each being shot in the head, over a parking dispute. The following photograph has been viewed around the world showing the three victims.

Deah Barakat, wife Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha

            Despite being young, the three were known for their works of charity and their desire to use their education to help those in need. A moving tribute was expressed in this article by a friend of Yusor Abu-Salha.

            A couple of days after their murders I saw someone post their opinion that hate laws were unneeded and only added confusion to the legal system. The writer pointed out that murder is by definition a hate law. I am not writing to condemn the person who posted the perspective, for I would have expressed the same Conservative perspective a couple of years ago. I want simply to give some food for thought about hate crimes and how the classification seems to me an important classification for our American legal context.

            There is an idea that legal systems should be simple. Perhaps they should be simple. But the reality is that legal systems are made complex because the purity of perfection has been exchanged for the complexity of sin. Consider the Old Testament, which is viewed by most of my Conservative Christian friends as part of God’s Word. Yet Jesus acknowledged a complexity about the Law of God if we were to properly understand and seek justice. Some religious leaders asked Jesus what he thought about divorce. He told the leaders that simply because the Old Testament provided for divorce did not mean that God gave his approval of divorce. It was added because of the hardness of men’s hearts. Evidently divorce is symptomatic of something not right, but because of human hardness sometimes a divorce is better to allow a person an opportunity to live a full life than forcing someone to be confined in an abusive relationship where one member of the marriage may be unfaithful to their pledge in connection to their marital union. The reason for the complexity of the added on provision which muddied the waters defining God’s will was the hardness of our sinful hearts. Legal complexity has its source in human sin.

            Conservatives often oppose hate crime legislation based on the subjective nature of hate crime legislation. But the reality is that all law, including Biblical law has a component of evaluating circumstances, motives, and states of mind as can be deduced beyond a reasonable doubt. In the Old Testament there were guidelines issued differentiating between manslaughter and murder. In our legal system we have followed that example to distinguish an act of malice from a sudden explosion of temper from a purely accidental act which led to someone’s death. There are different degrees of culpability. The search for justice requires us to seek to determine motive as much as that is possible.

            There are times when additional laws are created to speak to a particular abuse of law in accord with the tendencies of a particular culture. I believe we find that sort of law being enacted in the Book of Esther. Haman, the bad guy in the Purim story has gotten an edict made into law that slipped by the king because it was ostensibly made to honor the king; and by honoring the king to honor the great nation of Persia. But Haman’s intent covered his hate for Mordecai, a Jew. His hate for the Jews who would not show the sort of honor he was demanding because of the demands of their faith made the law as a way to attack Jews. Esther, therefore willingly broke protocol at the King’s court in order to speak of the plot against her people. The Persian custom did not allow the king to repeal a law he had created. He had created it under Haman’s advice. He did the next best thing. He made a law saying that the Jews could defend themselves against anyone trying to enforce the previous law against them. The tide turned and the Jews won a great victory over their enemies. The edict inspired by Esther’s brave intervention, in essence sought to correct a wrong that had entered the Persian practice of law enforcement.

From 2006 movie “One Night with the King”

            It is clear that America’s “hate crime laws” have been legislated to address well-known failures in America’s law enforcement history. There has been a repeated problem with minority treatment in America. No modern American history would attempt to wash away the historical failures of our growing nation’s tendency to mistreat and take advantage of the Native American population during our era of westward expansion. American slavery can only be treated as almost universally a race based disenfranchisement and enslavement of a people of color different from the privileged white European community in the United States. Hate laws have been enacted precisely because our history is full of examples where minorities were harassed, abused, and mistreated in a variety of ways in which the minority group was treated as less than equal with the dominant race, ethnicity, or faith.

            We do not have hate crime legislation in order to add confusion to our American legal system. We have hate crime legislation because treating people as less than equal on the basis of race, color, creed, ethnicity, and faith has for a long time added to the confusion between American ideals and American reality. As a culture and as a society we have seen the need to highlight the problem of bias and hate in our culture with hate crime legislation. Perhaps there has been headway made, but there are reminders that perhaps we haven’t yet finished the course of a society where such hate crimes are no more a problem.

            It is ironic that Yusor Abu-Salha, as an American daughter of immigrants loved how in the United States there were people of many faiths and ethnicities living together within one culture. She speaks joyfully of this American reality in this podcast a few months before her death.

There is a temptation in dealing with laws to believe that justice is always served best by simplifying our legal system. I believe that hate crime legislation can likely be abused, but I also believe it stands out as a highlight against activities we need in our nation to be standing against. I suspect that the message from the following classic one-minute movie clip  taken from the movie “A Man for all Seasons” serves us well in this discussion. I choose the clip because one wonders if we strip the law of all its excess edicts will there be any edicts to hide us from the storm that will then turn on us?

St. Paul had it so easy

St. Paul had it so easy

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            In American Christianity we have it so much harder than the Apostle Paul had it. We have the burden of living in a land where Christianity depends on the Gospel and the right amount of presidential understanding. We have a much more difficult journey to navigate than the Apostle Paul did. We have to figure out when the message of the Gospel is not sufficient and when we have to trust that our political leaders will use the right mixture of Gospel and military. We can't even simplify things to the just war theory. We are expected to figure out when preemptive war is needed, when and how much torture to apply, how to starve out people with sanctions, and how to reward people showing some humility to our nation without letting them think we Christians are soft. That is part of being Christian in America's modern world. St. Paul, on the other hand, had it so easy.

            St. Paul had this strange idea that if he lived by grace he should be gracious to people no matter their religion, economic class, ethnicity, nationality, or gender. He thought he was indebted to all people because he was indebted to God who had granted him grace and forgiveness. I guess he didn’t understand the Gospel, as well as we understand it. He had this notion that if God forgave him his sins, then he should love God with all heart, soul, mind and strength. He then didn’t think it was enough simply to have a personal relationship with God through the Gospel. He believed if God called him to love God with all heart, soul, mind and strength; then God wanted him to love those made in God’s image. So he started thinking he should love his neighbor as himself and that he should even love those were his enemies.

He believed that God made him a debtor to all of humanity created in God's image. He said “I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians, both to the wise and the unwise.” He seemed intent on seeking to fulfill this debt to the grace of God by showing to all of humanity the love of God in Jesus Christ. He lacked common sense. He spoke of God’s love to people who didn’t want to hear it and to people that no one else thought wanted what he then offered to them. The word got out about Paul and those like him. He got himself arrested and one judge told another how he wanted to see this Paul because he had heard how these people were turning the world upside down with a message about a guy who had been dead that they now claimed was alive. When the judge came down to meet him, Paul explained to him that he hoped one day the judge would be just like him, “well except for these chains.” Poor Paul didn’t have a plan B. He had this message that he admitted seemed like weakness to some people, and foolishness to others; but he saw it as the grace of God. He had no plan B. We evidently have a big advantage over Paul. If we can’t convince by the message about this guy who was dead and is now alive; we can call in the Air Force. We don't have to risk getting caught without a potential military intervention. Paul never figured out his need for a plan B.

Can you imagine if Paul was alive today and was walking around Chapel Hill in North Carolina, like he did another hill back when he was alive? He would tell the people gathered to hear him, whether they were Christian, atheist, or Muslim about a God who raises people from the dead because he raised Jesus from the dead. Maybe not everyone would believe his message. But his message would unfold in a different way for everyone there. The Christian hearing him might become ashamed of how he had put so much trust in the nations that were as drops in a bucket and failed to see that what mattered, and all that mattered was that Jesus who had died had also risen from the dead conquering sin and death. An atheist who may have done some evil thing would hear a Gospel of grace from one who could relate to him as the chief of sinners. A grieving family from a different religion would hear of God's mercy. I think he would relate to them how God will and has remembered the kindnesses of men and women from the nations who sought to do good such as these three who sought to study so as to give themselves to doing works of charity. He would tell them of the God who raises people from the dead even as he raised Christ from the dead. He would speak to them not as enemies but respectfully as human beings. Each one hearing such a message would have every reason to believe that this Paul who spoke to them spoke with genuine kindness to them. Some would believe and some would doubt, and some would want to hear more about this on another day. Paul would speak to them as if he was a debtor to them because he was a debtor to the grace of the God in whose image they had been created.

St. Paul had it so easy. He was a debtor to God’s grace and therefore a debtor to all humanity created in God’s image. He had it so easy.

What I am reading or about to read

What I am reading or about to read

February 2015

By Dan McDonald

 

            When it comes to reading I am a plodder at best and often inconsistent. I live alone, am often guilty of living an unbalanced life, and probably spend some time dealing with depression and discouragement. So reading, like so much is something I do in fits and jerks. This month I finished reading two books.

            One of them is a book of photographs. I am going to count it as a full-fledged book. Vivienne Gucwa’s beautiful book New York through the Lens brings together her photographs of New York City with her inspirational story of how she began taking long walks with a camera to relieve herself of stress in a difficult patch of her life. Six years later the photograph hobby that began during that season of stress has turned into a best-selling book. She is as good of a writer as she is a photographer and she expresses her story and presents her work in such genuine humanity that you can only be happy to feel in some way connected to her success. One of the things I like is that there is a second book of photographs in the works for later this year. To that I say a resounding YES!!!

            I also have just finished Timothy Keller’s book; Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. My background in the Christian faith is Evangelical. Keller is an Evangelical. Sometimes you read a work that is sound and seeks to present a full and fair treatment of a subject, and it leaves you flat. But I enjoyed this book because it has the feel of a pastor who seeks to understand truth and wisdom so that he might stand under the people to whom he ministers in their seasons of suffering. That is one of those clichés that has real meaning. He seeks to understand so that he may stand under those to whom he ministers. I definitely express my appreciation for this book.

            I am trying to read a diverse group of books as I move into my next group of books to be read. I cannot speak of what I have discovered in them as much as why I want to read them. Little by little I will tell you later what I discover as I read these books.

            First I have started and never finished Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island. I have always found starting the book to be a wonderful experience. I need to start it and dedicate myself to finishing it. My beginning and never finishing this book says something about me I suppose. I am drawn to the devotional life. I am drawn to the contemplative. But I also often lack discipline so as much as I am attracted to the contemplative I also am prone to wander from it before its work in me is set and established. But perhaps this is the perfect time to take up Merton once more as recently we celebrated Merton’s 100^th birthday.

            February is black history month. My soul was moved last year as the events around Ferguson grabbed our attention. I believe that for my part I need to listen more closely to the voices of African-Americans and people of color. I am sure that healing between races and ethnicities in our land will require a lot of careful listening to people whose backgrounds are different from our own backgrounds. Last year I bought and this month I hope to begin reading Maya Angelou’s classic I Know why the Caged Bird Sings.

            I want eventually to read Professor Christena Cleveland’s Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces That Keep us Apart. The reality, in regards to the divisions of race, is that while things have improved in recent decades there can still be no denying that American life’s most segregated day of the week is Sunday.  The impression I have, from what I have learned about Professor Cleveland, is that her treatment of things will be fair, compassionate but also passionate, illuminating and constructive.

            There is a novel I will likely read between Angelou’s book and Cleveland’s work. In the last year I took on a renewed interest in the Middle East. This time I have tried to understand the perspective of the people that few in my quarters seek to understand. But more and more I believe the call to follow Christ involves us to be called to seek to make humanity the interest of our lives. I look at how Jesus spoke of a good Samaritan to the religious people of his day, and am persuaded that if he spoke in our context he might well speak to us of the Good Palestinian. When he spoke of the good Samaritan he reminded his hearers, whether the religious leaders who opposed him or the disciples who followed him that the people they tended to despise as a lesser people and race were in God’s eyes fully human as much as the people with whom we were more comfortable. I am convinced that we must have a shift in how we think of Middle Eastern people. We must have our mindsets troubled as much by our tendencies to imagine ourselves superior as we should feel ashamed of our tendencies to imagine the men and women of the Middle East as humanly inferior to us. To that end I wish to read Susan Abulhawa’s critically acclaimed novel, Mornings in Jenin. She is an offspring of Palestinians who lived in the Jenin refugee camp. I suspect I will learn to more deeply appreciate a people who struggle with being pushed out of their lands and properties that many of them had tended for forty generations. After following a handful of Palestinians on Twitter I have learned to think of them first and foremost as human beings. The Christian call is not to close our ears and hearts to the sufferings of these people but to have a perception of mercy and justice big enough to be inclusive of Jew and Gentile, Israeli and Palestinian. It is not our place to yearn for one people’s blessing at the expense of another, but to desire the blessing of all people. The peacemaker who will be counted blessed will be one whose love for those opposed to one another will be filled with anguish until adversaries become companions. For it is truly true that the opposite of war is not peace, but creation. War is destruction and killing, peace is often only an interlude between wars, but creation is when those who had been accustomed to killing and destroying choose instead to build, to cultivate, to share, and to turn swords into ploughshares. As long as we imagine a world where we get to choose winners and losers, the blessed and the cursed; then we can never be peacemakers.

Singleness and Bearing the Image of God

Singleness and

Bearing the Image of the God who is love

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I spend too much time on Twitter. But can you blame me? It is where I have found people who don’t have the same perspectives as I. My life has largely been one where in my mind I was pursuing theological wisdom. I often saw people who disagreed with my understanding of truth to be distractions from the search for truth. Being on Twitter has challenged conclusions I have assumed over a lifetime. I have gradually realized that all God-given theology is given for the purpose of shaping us into people who love God with all heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. This means contrary to how I had understood life as a search for truth and those opposed to truth as distractions; that instead the search for truth is a search for understanding how to love, and that those who I thought were distractions were actually a part of the focus for which I had been called to seek truth.

            My particular focus in writing this blog is to address people who are single and would really like to be married. It is for those who are in this situation and for those who know such persons in this situation. I write not only for those who are single and have never been married but also for the wounded that have been married and now are single. Some have lost a spouse to death. Some were married and no longer are. Many of you were either wounded by betrayal or battle with a feeling of failure, and often you struggle with both. I am writing this for those of you who are single and for those of you who know such people. I was moved to write this blog in response to some quotes that I will summarize to protect anonymity. One of the quotes had to do with someone finding that she often wished for a husband because she thought life would be easier in many ways. At the same time she also realized she was an adult and didn’t she have the wherewithal to make simple decisions. In other words she wanted to beat herself over the head for yearning to be married, for understanding that some things would be easier if she were married, and for letting that hold her back from doing what she could do now. I think a lot of us as singles can relate the sort of painful self-analysis that says we are misfits living outside the norms of life, and we are misfits because we fail to make our misfit situations work. In such a state it is easy to imagine ourselves as hopeless persons imprisoned in our cells outside of ordinary life without reprieve. It is easy for a destructive self-condemnation cycle to take hold that will paralyze our lives to some degree.

            I do not feel particularly gifted to write to singles about the many nuances of singleness. I have been single all of my life and I am nearly sixty years old. But for the most part, all I know about singleness is from my own experience which is limited. I would recommend Sarah Thebarge’s blog spot as a good place to read some great articles on singleness. You can read her blogs at http://sarahthebarge.com/blog/  I especially loved this http://sarahthebarge.com/2015/01/if-singleness-is-necessity/. While you’re into reading stuff by Sarah, I still believe the most important book, (for me) that I read in 2014 was her book The Invisible Girls. It told of how she went to Portland, Oregon because it was about as far as she could go from what she had been dealing with on the east coast. She had felt invisible while suffering through cancer which was joined to being abandoned by a fiancé. Then in Portland while on a bus she met a family of invisible girls; a family with great needs who seemed invisible to those around them. Sarah Thebarge's helped me to begin to see that all around me are invisible people with invisible needs. Sometimes the greatest need is as simple as the need for someone to stand beside them with empathy and compassion.

            The only thing I offer to singles and those who know singles is a reminder of what it means for us to be human beings meant to bear the image of God. First, God created us in his image. Secondly, as St. John wrote “God is love.” This means that we were created in God’s image that we might love. This is agreeable to Christ’s teaching who summarized the giving of the law as the commands to love God with all heart, soul, mind and strength; and to love our neighbors as ourselves. So as you or someone you know struggles with singleness let this one truth sink deeply into your soul – You were made that you might love.

            This means that you should respect your desire to want to be married, to spend a lifetime loving someone, to beginning a family where you will bring new life into the world, to love and care for and seek to ready for a life of love to God and neighbor. Don’t belittle such a desire because you have responsibilities that somehow you feel you aren’t doing well so why should you have such dreams of marrying someone. Separate your abilities to do your responsibilities in your single life with your desire to marry. Accept that if you were married there would be some things easier and some things more difficult. But accept it as a given that because you were made in God’s image you were made to be one who loves.

            Let this thought be a pathway to your future. Love is a many-splendored thing. Love is faithful service to God. Love is the desire to do good to and for a neighbor. Love is the turning of a mundane task into a way of happily serving God and providing for the needs of others. Love is the appreciation of a beautiful sunrise so as to give God thanks for the sight, and to share it in a photograph on Facebook so others can share in the beauty you saw. Love is the remembrance that enemies are humans made in God’s image to be loved. Love is the remembrance of people who are despised for racial or ethnic reasons are just as much human beings as the people with whom we identify. We singles often face a certain kind of temptation. We feel imprisoned in a space of confinement looking through barred windows into what we imagine is ordinary lives, like the life lived by the people we imagine have what we desire to have; a nice residence, a nice spouse, handsome lively little children. We imagine that we are living in prisons we do not understand kept out of the life of love for which we yearn. But we are missing one form of love while many forms of love are yet available to us. Sometimes for those of us who are single, we can spend more time in some of these forms of love than any married person with children can spend. So learn to view singleness not only through what you haven’t been given, but by looking through the gates of opportunity to those forms of love which we can enter in these moments of our singlehood. The mistake we can so easily make is to imagine that life begins for us when we get at long last to fall in love and marry that special significant other.  But life does not begin at marriage. It began for us in the womb. Ever since then we have been participating in a journey. It has been a journey in which we were called to bear the image of the God who is love, by our learning to love. Life does not begin at marriage. Life has begun long ago and it is a journey of learning to love, and it is for love that you have been created. Look through the gate to the opportunities of life and you will see a multitude of forms of love that you can choose to give yourself to. You might remain single but if you give yourself to a journey of growing in love it will never be empty. Maybe one day you will marry or maybe you will never marry. If you do someday marry, I will happily throw rice. But if you never marry, you’re still meant to be someone who truly lives and surely loves.

 

Why was Dr. King opposed?

Why was Martin Luther King Jr. so opposed?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

Photo from Seattle Times website honoring Dr. King http://seattletimes.com/special/mlk/

 

            Fifty years have passed since the Selma to Montgomery march. The movie “Selma” about those events is drawing appreciative audiences of both whites and blacks. Fifty years ago Dr. King’s leadership of the civil rights movement was controversial. He won some allies and faced many opponents. A friend and I conversed recently about what caused Dr. King’s appeals for racial equality to be met with such hardened resistance. While racism was an obvious reason, I found that I suspected a second culprit was involved in the resistance to his calls for equality under the law. It is a factor that I have often feared has especially clung to conservatism, to which I have been attached in greater and lesser degrees most all of my life.

            Conservatives could admire Ronald Reagan standing in Berlin and saying at the Berlin Wall, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” But many Conservatives were reluctant to support Dr. King’s calls for America to tear down its walls that prevented a people from enjoying the fullness of their human rights as enshrined in the guarantees of our American Constitution.

            Racism was certainly involved in the opposition to the civil rights movement. But perhaps a more potent enemy of reform existed alongside racism, one too seldom recognized. A theological issue existed in a society that seeks to separate the theological from the political. The America, of the fifties and sixties was, especially for the white majority, proud of itself. We had won two world wars and in the process had become entitled to describe our nation as “the arsenal of democracy”. The mission to stand against an atheistic brand of Communism had led us to add the words “under God” to our pledge of allegiance. We seemed to be the nation called to lead other nations to a better world. We had come to think of our nation as that nation which was different from all other nations. The idea of exceptional-ism is so close to a form of idolatry that perhaps we could not think of ourselves as the nation without beginning to think of our nation as God’s one superior nation. Idolatry proves itself easily enjoyed, powerfully addictive, and cruel as it commands opposition to anything threatening its command over our lives.

            There are two kinds of patriotism possible in our world. The word patriotism is formed from the Latin root word “patri” which means father. Patriotism is that national recognition that we are people who have inherited a legacy from our ancestors, both fathers and mothers. A positive patriotism embraces the concept of each generation gratefully receiving a legacy from former generations and yearning to pass a built upon legacy to future generations.

            But a different kind of patriotism instills in a people a narcissistic illusion demanding superiority over other nationalities and ethnicities. It is a patriotism rooted in madness. It is the sort of patriotism in which a nation imagines it is no longer one of the nations. It breeds a belief that we have received a special charter so we are no longer bound to the normal boundaries. When others make war, or use terror, or inflict torture it is evil, but with us we are the nation that is called to a special mission that justifies all things. To doubt this calling is to attack the very identity we have as this uniquely empowered nation that is like no other nation. We may prove in our actions to be demons and devils but we are God’s demons and devils. We are God’s nation on earth.

            This idolatry was something Christians should not have easily accepted. But it slid in under the radar and we enjoyed feeling a sense of superiority. It felt nice as we moved from being aliens and strangers seeking a city and country whose builder was God, to feeling like we were already in that country. It was an intoxicating illusion. Idolatry is so often an intoxicating addictive narcotic.

            When a nation begins to believe that it is a superior nation to those outside its borders, it will surely regard with suspicion any people within the border who call that superiority into question. The idolatry of a nationalism bound in the trappings of Exceptional-ism will have contempt for anyone who attempts to disfigure and dismantle the bright shiny golden calf of our idolatrous worship.

Dr. King made us Americans aware of racism. Racism was something so obviously contrary to our illusions of our superiority we would have to either dismiss our idolatry or include our superiority over a lesser people demanding equality. Dr. King’s charge of racism came too close to our dear sin of idolatry. We were named as racists but it was the closeness to having our idol dismantled that sent us into a rage. Our golden calf was threatened.

 

 

Downloaded from Shutterstock.com photo by Diez Artwork

 

            If during Dr. King’s life, there had been no golden calf to be defended, the issue of racism would have been easier to handle. We were like other nations, all nations have flaws. Let’s acknowledge this flaw and move on. But our exceptional-ism was at stake and to admit such a glaring oversight of justice would demand us to abandon our belief in our nation’s superiority. Confession is not an easy thing for people convinced they are the better and superior people in the world. We will turn the water cannons, bring out the weapons of brutality, and instruments of torture before we will give up our illusion of superiority.

            If in 2014 we began to question once more how much racism was still obstructing America’s pursuit of equal justice, then in 2015 perhaps we may begin to consider if connected to our faults is the strange madness of idolatry that somehow puts a glittering layer of gold over our faults and induces us to imagine that even our faults show our superiority over the lesser peoples of mankind.

            At times I have loved my nation with an idolatrous affection. At times I have wanted to hate it with an equal idolatry placed in myself. But gradually I have come to love my nation as a nation like all the nations with its possibilities, accomplishments, needs, and its failures. But I can love it and work for its best, from my Christian perspective only as I realize I love it while an alien and stranger seeking a city and country made without hands, whose builder is God. I waken on this Martin Luther King holiday with the freshness of the possibilities before me. His work so many years ago was all part of helping me discover this hope with the freshness I feel this morning.