Categories: Religion, Islam, Reinhold Niebuhr, religion, Rick Warren, Rita Nakeshima Brock, Spirituality, Unitarian Universalist

Some very foolish things have been said about the proposed Cordoba Muslim Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan, the majority of them, it seems to me by people who wouldn’t know how to find the site if they were dropped off at the closest subway stop.

While it’s predictable that Republicans and Tea Party adherents would take a stance against anything that might involve a lot of dark-skinned men milling around, I am just as offended by comments like those made by Senator Harry Reid and New York Governor David Paterson, and hinted at by President Obama, that while Muslims have a right to build a place of worship and education, they should refrain from doing so in close proximity to the site that was devastated by terrorists who claimed to be Muslim in September 2001 because it demonstrates a lack of sensitivity to the families of those who lost their lives there.

Not surprisingly, the loudest voices have not been those of the survivors but people with tenuous ties to the events who crave media attention.

I call their attention to a speech made some years ago by a Republican president at the site of an even larger loss of American lives. The Civil War was not yet over in November 1863 when Abraham Lincoln dedicated the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Three thousand one hundred fifty-five Union soldiers and 4,408 Confederate soldiers breathed their last breaths in that place. Although the cemetery was intended as a memorial to the Union dead, Confederate bodies were not shipped back to their states for seven years.

When Lincoln penned his brief remarks, it was scarcely four months since the battle ended. Yet Lincoln did not berate or demonize the enemy. In a manner not unlike that with which many people view the attacks of 9/11, Lincoln saw the war as a test of whether a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…can long endure.”

But Lincoln didn’t overvalue the efforts to create a shrine; in his eyes, that had already been done: “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract,” he said.

All the bellowing and snide remarks about the proposed institution do nothing to honor our own dead. In a sense they still walk among us as we go about our lives.

When Lincoln said, “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced,” I don’t think he imagined some of the hideous events that followed the discontinuation of Reconstruction. I think he envisioned a nation whole and free. Sadly, in an attempt to appease the Southern white establishment, we compromised that vision, and the vitriol lives on.

It is not enough for the President to invoke the Constitution. Instead, he needs to remind us that we are all a part of one nation, and Muslims have been part of it since the outset. We conveniently forget that many of the Africans who were enslaved on these shores were in fact Muslim; that many of them converted to Christianity does nothing to diminish that.

All of us might recommit ourselves to Lincoln’s closing words:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us –

“that from these honored dead we take increased devotion

“to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion –

“that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,

“that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom,

“and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

On September 12, 2001, we had the sympathies of most people on the planet. How many more do we want to alienate?

It may have seemed at first like a publicity stunt or a gift from above, but last year Coloradans at Vail and Beaver Creek mountains saw pink snow.

“When you skied a run, you turned and your tracks were pink,” Melissa Macdonald, executive director of the Eagle River Watershed, told the Vail Daily. It wasn’t to be confused with the ever-popular watermelon snow which is colored by algae and even tastes like the fruit; the pink in this snow came from red dust on the Colorado Plateau and blew in from southwestern Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

The dust kicks up when the soil in the plateau is disturbed. Once on the snow, it absorbs sunlight and causes the snow to melt sooner than it normally would. Chris Landry, executive director of the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, says the melt can be as many as 50 days early. This, of course, is not good for the ski industry. If snow melts too fast, it also threatens the water supply of the towns it rushes by.

“Who’s to blame for all of this dust?” Landry wants to know. “”Is it oil and gas? Is it grazing? (Open ranges for cattle, sheep and goats abound in the area.) Motorized recreation?.” The center is investigating.

The Obama Administration has so far left in place the destructive Bush/Cheney No New Wilderness policy of opening wilderness-quality lands to mining, drilling and off-road vehicles. No one expects these activities to be terminated, only regulated, but now any place is vulnerable.

Sad to say, if the commissioners of San Juan County, Utah, have their way, the snow in Colorado is going to get a lot pinker. In an attempt to pass legislation before the recently defeated Republican Senator Bob Bennett leaves Washington, county commissioners are rushing to cook up a “preservation” bill that would give off-road vehicles (the aforementioned motorized recreation mode) wide access to fragile back country which contains some of the world’s most spectacular rock art and Puebloan ruins not to mention natural formations like Cedar Mesa, Comb Ridge and the Goosenecks of the San Juan River.

San Juan County is larger than Connecticut. People have lived there for thousands of years, but today the population is sparse—about two people per square mile. If , like me, you’ve spent most of your adult life in cities, it’s easy to be blown away by the enormity of the spaces, the dramatic rock formations, and the spectacular colors created by the play of light on the red rocks.

Not only do off-road vehicles disturb the thin desert crust and the desert “varnish” created by microorganisms, there’s the noise that disturbs listening humans and stresses wildlife. Off-road vehicles often bring riders who yield to the temptation to add their own marks to those created by ancient people. Last summer San Juan County’s largest town, Blanding, was full of federal agents who conducted arrests of prominent local citizens who trafficked illegally in Puebloan artifacts.

There has always been tension between preservationists and the politically conservative population of these states, especially in Utah. Many people feel that public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management rightfully belong in private hands. To some, any restrictions are an attempt to deny them a good time and the opportunity to profit from abundant mineral resources. San Juan County is not only home to the Valley of the Gods, a smaller, quieter version of Monument Valley, it has the nation’s only uranium processing plant and numerous oil fields.

“All politics are local,” once Speaker of the US House of Representatives Tip O’Neill was fond of saying. Sometimes, though, local politics have resonance across the nation, and the preservation of Utah’s Red Rock country is one of those. No fewer than 165 Representatives and 22 Senators have signed on to designate as wilderness this vast spectacular parcel of land, which includes much of San Juan County. Not surprisingly, perhaps, none of the sponsors are from Utah, although former Governor John Huntsman had supported it and it had looked as though environmentalists might be making headway with Bennett before his defeat.

It’s also worth noting that representatives of a broad spectrum of religious groups have urged the Utah legislature to advocate for the state’s wild lands as “places of profound spiritual importance to people of many faith traditions.” The group included Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, United Church of Christ members and, perhaps most significantly, Latter-day Saints (Mormons.)

The national bill, America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, deserves a fair and measured hearing, not a hastily drawn up license for exploitation. Conservationists still rue the day that the Corps of Engineers managed to dam the spectacular Glen Canyon, part of which is in San Juan County. There again, the argument was made that the newly created Lake Powell would be a source of recreation, water and electricity that outweighed the destruction of great natural beauty and the remains of long-ago settlements.

More information can be found on the website of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and I urge you to write to Nancy Sutley, Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, 722 Jackson Place, NW, Washington, DC 20510 or email her at chair@ceq.eop.gov Please urge her to put a stop to this madness.

Democrat Representative Bart Stupak’s end run around the leadership during the House vote on health care reform stunned me, but it shouldn’t have.

All week long I’d been getting emails from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) that access to abortion was threatened, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi was and is a supporter of reproductive freedom, and it never occurred to me that she’d have to choose between passing health care reform and compromising women’s right to decide what to about unplanned pregnancy.

Read more »

I haven’t yet heard President Obama’s address to the Muslim world from start to finish. Instead, I caught sound bites and longer passages on the radio of a car I was driving yesterday across mountainous terrain. What I pieced together from three different public radio stations was refreshingly candid and at the same time sensitive to all.

As with his earlier address on race in America while still a candidate for election, the president treads where no other U.S. politician has dared to go. Unlike other presidents, Obama can speak of Islam from the familiarity of having lived in the world’s largest Muslim nation (Indonesia) and his paternal connections to the religion in Kenya.

Read more »

I hadn’t meant to write anything about Rick Warren. Really, what’s to say other than it’s depressing to have a homophobe on the national stage at the inauguration of a candidate who has brought hope to so many? Hope to the homophobic was not what all those gay and lesbian Obama volunteers had in mind, I’m sure.

Barack Obama may be a master politician, but he’s shown himself a bit greener when it comes to religion, that dangerous third rail of modern political life. Oddly, his secular humanist mother who married two Muslims taught him a lot about what I think of as Christian values. He turns the other cheek. He refuses to lie about his enemies. He cares for the poor. He embraces strangers.

But here’s the point I think he doesn’t get: in religion, unlike politics, you can’t just slice it down the middle and find consensus.

Read more »