God Does Not Care Where We Go Potty

Most every week, I check the messages on the answering machine at my little church.  It's not the best way to be in touch with us, honestly, but it'd be hard to have a church without a phone.  Usually, it's just folks trying to sell us things, and I'll hit delete. Sometimes--rarely, now--it's folks looking for information on the church.  Them I call back.  Then there was the message I listened to today, which I'd somehow missed last week.

It was a recorded message from Maryland Delegate Neil Parrish, or Kneel Parrot, or something like that.  Sound fidelity isn't always that great on our low-budget answering machine.   The message, which I don't doubt was being blasted out to every church in Maryland, had to do with something he was calling "The Bathroom Bill."  He sounded very earnest, as he told me that this bill was just like one they passed in California.  He went on, and I'll quote verbatim:

It would allow men to use the women's bathroom and women to use the men's bathroom based on what sex they happened to feel like at the moment.

Unless the Lord intervenes, he continued, this bill will pass. Pray!

Huh.  I looked it up, and discovered that there had in fact been a bill that cleared the State Senate to protect transgendered folks from discrimination in the state of Maryland this month.  Being a Virginian, I'd not much been paying attention.  Among some circles, it's called "The Bathroom Bill," because among other things it would allow individuals who are genetically male but surgically modified to use the women's room, and vice versa.

Not that the robocall said this.  It also didn't represent what it is to be transgender in anything but the crudest and most insulting of ways.  Neither did it deal with issues of potential misrepresentation in locker rooms, or issues of potential abuse of any legal protections by predators.  Strangely enough for propaganda, it didn't try to push those stranger-danger buttons.

As the bill was described, it was just about where we go wee wee.  Because you know, we Christians are such simple folk.

I had two reactions to the call.  First, well, I was a little put out, and personally offended.  Here, I have a confession to make about myself, one that might come as a shock:

I have--on more than one occasion-- used the women's room.

It doesn't happen often.  But sometimes, the only men's room is occupied for waaay longer than it should be.  Or there's significant urgency, like on a road trip when you pull into a Chipotle with your bladder about to explode, and just as you get to the bathroom a dad and his two toddler sons wander in.   In those times of biological krisis, signage means nothing.  Decisions must be made. What do I "happen to feel like at the moment?"  I happen to feel like I need to go to the bathroom. That's just a guy in a kilt on that sign, as far as I'm concerned.

More often, I've seen that happen for women at sporting events or concerts, as a bold sister in need will just line up with the always-faster-moving man-line. I do not, at such moments, mutter the word "abomination" under my breath. A stall is a stall is a stall, and if you've got the ovaries to buck convention, more power to you.

So that bugged the libertarian part of me that prefers pragmatism to social niceties.

But second, and more significantly:  You think I'm going to take this to the Creator of the Universe in prayer?

I have a strong sense of the reality of my Maker, one that has involved potent and life-transforming moments of presence.  We're talking the I Am That I Am here, the God who is a Consuming Fire, the source and ground of all being, the Numinous One who rides the whirlwind and stands above all time and space.

Human beings out there are suffering and starving, oppressed and struggling, hopeless and alone.

And I'm supposed to pray to my Awesome God about where people go to the bathroom?

Lord have mercy.

Maryland and the Death Penalty

It's a funny thing, living in Virginia and working in Maryland.  The two states are like yin and yang, swirling around the "center" that is the Nation's Capital.  One Democrat, one Republican.  One liberal, one conservative.

I live in Ol' Virginny, the Land o' Cotton Where What Once Was Is Not Forgotten.   But I work in the People's Republic of Maryland.

To get to work, I cross the Potomac river.   There's one working ferry still crossing the Potomac, and given a recent decision by the Maryland State Legislature, I find myself wondering if the next time I ride that ferry back to Virginia I'll find Charon taking my cash.

According to the Virginia Department of Tourism, we're the second killingest state in the Union when it comes to executing prisoners, though Texas wins that honor by a country mile.   But Maryland, well, Maryland is different.  After hemming and hawing, the Maryland State Legislature recently banned the death penalty.

Being of a progressive bent myself, my position on this topic shouldn't be hard to figure out.   I've been pretty much set against it since I was old enough to form coherent thoughts.  None of the arguments advocating the death penalty ever made much sense.

Deterrence?  It is useless as a deterrent.  How do we know this?  How about taking a look at the entirety of recorded human history.  How many drawings-and-quarterings, stonings, hangings, lynchings, burnings, beheadings, electrocutions, and crucifixions have there been over the course of human history?  While you count those up, I'll ask: Do people still commit crimes?  Sure do.  Makes not a whit of difference.

Justice?  The death penalty has nothing to do with justice.  Why not?  Take that horrible BTK serial killer case from a few years back as an example.  That warped soul was named Dennis Rader, and he was a monster.  Here is a human being who murdered at least 10 people, who strangled parents to death in front of their children before killing the children.  How would killing him right that wrong?  Because we can kill him just once.  Even if you went all medieval on the cruel and unusual punishment thing--which in his case would have been tempting--there's just no way that balances out what he did to his innocent victims.  Justice...understood as a restoration of the balances...cannot be served by such a penalty.

Prevention?   Sure, execution prevents future crimes by that person, but that's nothing that a lifetime in a maximum security facility can't accomplish.  And sure, that costs something.  But when the price of something is our primary decision point for an ethical action, what does that say about us as a culture? 

What it boils down to is revenge.  And even there, the death penalty doesn't come close to cutting it.  If someone were to harm my wife, or my boys, my desire for revenge would be visceral.  I would want to destroy them, to tear out their throat with my teeth.  But if I did, that wouldn't ease the loss.  Not at all.  Revenge is a hunger that cannot be sated.

Beyond not getting it on those levels, the death penalty has never worked for me theologically, either.  I can understand using lethal force to stop an act of violence in progress against an innocent.  In that, I'm very Augustinian.  Once that immediate threat has passed, however, things get a little dicier.

 Killing a helpless individual, even if that individual has committed monstrous crimes, well, that just hasn't ever held any appeal from a Jesus-Is-My-Lord perspective.  As my theology has evolved over the past few years, that sense of the wrongness of it has gone even deeper.

If ethics are not about absolutes, but are about establishing or delimiting probabilities of suffering or joy, what does the death penalty do?

What the death penalty does is eliminate both the probability of grace and the possibility of repentance. That's a non-trivial decision on our part, because it flies in the face of what is most central to the message of the Gospel.  The death penalty says, you are done here.  No grace can enter you.  No sense of the actuality of what you've done to another can ever penetrate your darkness.

That may in many cases be true.  Sociopathy is notoriously deeply woven into damaged souls.

I simply cannot see that as a viable way to approach other beings, and nothing could be further from what Jesus taught.