Fair Play for the Girl Scouts!

May 17, 2012 By Max Lindenman 7 Comments

A friend of mine, actually one of my old parish’s most accomplished busybodies, once talked her way into the hotel room of a 1950′s rock guitarist when he was performing in the Phoenix area. Her goal — her sole goal — was to get the legend’s autograph for a friend of hers.

After sizing my friend up, the man smiled. Cocking his head toward another man, who was holding a camera, he asked her, “Do you object to pictures?” When my friend looked puzzled, he asked again, “Do you object to pictures?” Finally, it dawned on her that he was really asking, “Is it okay with you if my friend here photographs us while we’re having sex?”

My friend bridled, took umbrage, flew into a state of the highest dudgeon imaginable. With finger wagging, she addressed the aging satyr: “Mister _____, I’ll have you know I was a Girl Scout. I’m no groupie! All I want is for you to put your signature on this piece of paper, for my friend, who idolizes you, though I can’t imagine why. He saw you play at _______.” She named a ballroom in Connecticut.

By this point in his career, this performer had made the transition to nostalgia act without downsizing his headliner’s ego. Even Keith Richards, who considered himself deep in the man’s artistic debt (and who had managed to get along, more or less, with Mick Jagger for over two decades) found him hard to take. He had also been convicted of a sex crime. But something about my friend’s straight-backed rebuke brought out the rake’s gallant side. Picking up her reference, he asked, “That place is closed now, right?” My friend nodded, and the two fell into a pleasant conversation. After about half an hour, he signed her paper, and she left triumphant.

Extracting the Girl Scout training from this friend of mine would have been impossible. Easier to deprogram a Moonie. In tandem with the Catholic Church, the GSUSA had poured the concrete that held her value structure together. “Always leave a place looking better than when you found it,” she’d lecture me, and had no sympathy for my argument that cigarette butts add reverse chic to picnic spots. Once, while catering a retreat — one of her chief charismata — she discovered she’d overestimated the amount of milk required by half. Me? I’d have yelled, “MILK FIGHT!” and it would have been on. This goody-goody-friend of mine insisted on hauling the overage down to Maggie’s Place, a local house of hospitality for expectant mothers.

Not only did this woman follow a neurotic compulsion to do the right thing, she insisted on doing it for the right reasons. If I rouse myself to throw someone’s discarded Coke bottle into the recycle bin, I expect to be inducted into the Orde Pour le Mérite. My friend, on the other hand, would warn, “Don’t do anything for the badges,” meaning merit badges. In her book, virtue rewarded hardly counted as virtue at all.

As grating as I often found this just-canonize-me-now attitude, I hope the bishops find generous traces of it as their Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth investigates GSUSA materials it fears are “problematic.” Exactly what sort of heterodoxy the committee expects to find is unclear; in his announcement, committee chairman Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Ft. Wayne, Indiana doesn’t say. But among culture warriors nationwide, the buzz against Girl Scouts has been building to a roar for some time.

The Huffington Post reports that a Colorado troop became a target for critics by accepting a biological boy who considered himself transgendered. Just this past February, GSUSA spokeswoman Michelle Tompkins issued a letter refuting what she says were false allegations broadcast via EWTN, in a program titled Women of Grace. According to Tompkins, GSUSA has no relationship with Planned Parenthood, and no plans for creating one. Neither did it have any hand in distributing a Planned Parenthood brochure that turned up at a United Nations event. The HuffPo identifies the brochure as “Happy, Healthy and Hot,” and says its purpose is advising HIV-positive young people “how to safely lead active sex lives.”

But for the Girl Scouts’ ciritcs, it may not be necessary that, in Girl Scout usage, the “head” in “head/shoulders/knees and toes/(knees and toes)” refer to the head of Baphomet, once venerated by Templars. The real problem may lie in a general orientation. Mary Rice Hasson, a visiting fellow in Catholic studies at the think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center, calls the GSUSA leadership “reflexively liberal.” Dismissing the generally positive review given the Girl Scouts by National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry executive director Bob McCarty as “whitewashing,” she predicts that the Girl Scouts and the Church are on a “collision course.”

I find myself hoping that this collision will not end too bloodily. It’s true, when it comes to ideology, the Girl Scouts are not the Boy Scouts. The GSUSA may not order its members to become atheists or homosexuals, but unlike the Boy Scouts, they leave room in the ranks for both types. If GSUSA has no formal relationship with Planned Parenthood, it does belong to the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, whose spokespeople have called for “an environment where [girls] can freely and openly discuss issues of sex and sexuality.” It would be very hard for a Catholic Girl Scout to avoid concluding that people who contest Church teachings are worthy objects of fellowship.

That conclusion seems like nothing more than common sense. It’s the opposite conclusion — that one rejected doctrine anathematizes an organization the way one drop of African blood was once thought to make a person black — that looks persnickety. If the Bishops’ Conference wants to cut its own ties to organizations like the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights, which supports same-sex marriage and abortion, that’s one thing. If it wants to prohibit Catholic universities from honoring public figures who buck the Church’s line, it’s at least operating within its jurisdiction. But to reach outside of its own organizational limits to make demands of institutions that include Catholics, but which never claimed to be Catholic, is to reach into strong-arm territory. If this is evangelization, it’s not a style of evangelization I see winning many converts.

Indeed, that may not even be the bishops’ goal. Implicit in their latest move seems to be a fear that no young person could remain an orthodox Catholic if exposed to any opposing point of view — roughly, “How are you’re going to keem ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree”? If I were a young Catholic, I’m sure I’d find that inference unflattering, to say the least. Lately it’s become fashionable among Catholics to claim persecution, Cardinal George’s prediction that his successor would die in jail being only the most melodramatic example. But I cannot find an instance where the GSUSA, acting in odium fidei, shunned, harrassed, or even denied preferment to a Catholic. If the barbarians won’t come to the gates, then, it seems, we’ll drag the gates out to the barbarians.

Among their merit badges, the Girl Scouts offer one called “My Promise, My Faith.” According to the GSUSA home page, “A girl earns the My Promise, My Faith pin by carefully examining the Girl Scout Law and directly tying it to tenets of her faith.” It represents a lesson on living in a pluralistic society; only though a complementary badge with a name like “You Heretic Knuckleheads Are My Cross” could that lesson be more thorough.

Cervantes — whom I’m quoting via Florence King — once defined a lady as someone so determined to be respected that she could make herself so even in an army of soldiers. Change “army of soldiers” to “horny rock has-been,” and you’ll have a fair picture of my Girl Scout friend. Throw in stewardship and (occcasionally) a sanctimoniousness that made me want to garrotte her with her own kerchief, and you’ll have your case that Catholicism and the Girl Scout Promise can go together like milk and Peanut Butter Tagalongs.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , 7 Comments

M.I.A. and Randall Terry: Co-Victors

February 7, 2012 By Max Lindenman 2 Comments

There’s a strange symmetry between British singer M.I.A. and pro-life activist Randall Terry. Both have dedicated their careers, to one degree or another, to raising awareness of genocide. In her songs and videos, M.I.A. (born Maya Arulpragasam) refers to the repression of her people, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, at the hands of the nation’s Sinhalese majority. Terry might qualify as America’s most fervent and ubiquitous pro-life activist. After years of perfecting their respective brands of guerila chic, both struck Sunday at the Super Bowl — M.I.A. by offering her middle finger to the audience, Terry by airing a particularly graphic TV spot.

Each can claim a partial victory.

First, the lady and her finger. M.I.A. did not, as it turns out, violate any well-defined FCC regulations in flipping audiences the bird while sharing the stage with Madonna during the halftime show. Broadcast lawyer Harry Cole tells Hollywood Reporter that the agency would be more likely to come after M.I.A. for appearing to use the word shit.

Even that might not hold up. In 2010, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a strict 2001 FCC policy forbidding even “fleeting” and “non-literal” uses of profane language. Because the guidelines were “unconstitutionally vague,” they would likely have a “chilling effect” on free speech as broadcasters tried, uneasily, to interpret them, knowing that a misinterpretation could mean a hefty fine. Soon, the Supreme Court will rule on a larger question: Does its own justification for holding FCC rules to a relatively low level of scrutiny — that television is uniquely “pervasive” and accessible to children — still make sense, given the pervasiveness of cable TV and the Internet? The Court heard oral arguments from both sides this past January.

Next, the man and his video. Terry produced 30-second spots showing aborted fetuses along with the voiced-over comments: “The innocent blood of over 50 million babies cries out to God from our sewers and landfills” and “Christians who vote for Obama, knowing he promotes murder have blood on their hands.” Knowing that FCC rules entitled qualified presidential candidates “reasonable access” to the airwaves, Terry declared he was running for president as a write-in candidate. He introduced himself and his ads to TV-station managers with a letter that threatened: “If you deny me my rights as a federal candidate, you will be committing a willful violation of FCC law, and subject to FCC sanctions.”

When WMAQ, a Chicago station, rejected the ads, the FCC decided that Terry had campaigned too little in Illinois to invoke “reasonable access” rules. But television stations in four states did agree to air Terry’s ads — some during the game, some before it. Since the videos look to have been produced on someone’s laptop, Terry can’t help but realize an enormous return on his investment. Come 2016, Terry will be able to carpet-bomb America with his ads, provided he makes sure to get on the ballot in time.

It’s easy to see M.I.A. and Terry as representing opposite sides in the culture war. One affects a style described by the New York Times as “tomboy-meets-ghetto-fabulous-meets-exotic-princess”; the other compares himself to Churchill and Reagan. Be that as it may, the battle of the Super Bowl looks like a tie. Not only has NBC apologized for M.I.A., an unnamed source close to the singer has sworn she had succumbed to “an attack of adrenaline,” was “caught up in the moment” and is “terribly sorry.” Meanwhile, Terry continues to plug his videos, now armed with greater notoriety than before.

Popular music and politics have always shown a vulgar streak. (In the “Bully Song,” copyrighted in 1896, a white singer named May Irwin sang about a fatal razor fight in what would now be called Ebonics, anticipating Eminem by more than a century.) If it turns out that the FCC can no longer protect viewers from the vulgarest of each — well, we’ll just have to get used to it. For better or worse, we’ll end up developing a tune-out mechanism. Mine is already pretty robust: when I finally saw the Terry videos, long after I’d heard about them, my thought was, “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said about Obama all week.” M.I.A.’s middle finger did nothing to shock me, nor — in FCC-friendly terms — to make me give much more of a (expletive) about the Tamils than I’d given to begin with.

At this point, it’d be silly to ask, “Which would you rather see?” American Super Bowl viewers in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Tulsa and Oklahoma City, among other markets, got see both. This modest sampler platter of jarring images may become a fixture of that most American of institutions. Call it the price of freedom.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lesson from Obama’s HHS: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

November 2, 2011 By Max Lindenman 8 Comments

St. Teresa of Avila is reported to have snapped at God: “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few.”

This is a point the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops could, with some justification, toss in the teeth of the Obama administration, now that the body has been denied federal money that it seems to have earned fair and square.

The money in question amounts to $4.5 million, in the form of a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. It is intended to fund assistance to victims of human trafficking — essentially, foreigners recruited to work in the United States for next to nothing and held against their will. The Department of Health and Human Services had originally awarded the grant to the Bishops’ Conference’s Migration and Refugee Services in 2006; the grant expired this past October 10th. It has not been renewed.

The award attracted controversy from the beginning. In 2009, the ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court, claiming that, since many victims of human trafficking are raped by employers, they deserve access to reproductive services, including abortion and contraception. This past spring, according to the Washington Post, HHS officials rewrote the guidelines for grant applications to include a “strong preference” for agencies that provide the “full range” of gynecological and obstetrical care.”

It may be a little early to complain that the government is acting from some broad anti-Catholic bias. HHS officials point out that, since the grant to Migration and Refugee Services expired, their department has awarded $19 million to Catholic agencies that assist to foreign refugees — apparently an area in which reproductive issues rarely arise.

But HHS’s own metrics still support the bishops. The Post’s Jerry Markon reports that two of the four groups awarded the grant money in preference to Migration and Refugee Services “scored significantly below the bishops’ application.”

The HHS is awarding priority to reproductive concerns over all others; it’s choosing ideological consistency over effectiveness. Even if it’s not indulging in anti-Catholicism per se, it’s certainly surrendering to tunnel vision.

There’s no denying the Bishops Conference has shown its own pickiness when it comes to choosing partners in social advocacy. Last year, the USCCB withdrew from the Leadership Council for Human Rights, an umbrella group that includes the American Association for People with Disabilities and the American Council of the Blind. The bishops’ objection: the council supports abortion and same-sex marriage. It could be argued that Catholic identity on the cheap is no identity at all.

Yet despite President Obama’s pro-choice views, it has refrained from waging all-out war against him. Archbishop Gregory of Atlanta called his election “a step forward for humanity.” More recently, the Bishops Conference decided, despite pressure from pro-life conservatives, to re-issue the 2007 Guide to Faithful Citizenship, which affords voters considerable latitude. By not absolutely insisting that Catholics become one-issue voters — the one issue being abortion — the USCCB is showing a good deal more flexibility, not to mention, common sense, than HHS has seen fit to do.

Last week, Time Magazine ran an article on “Catholic conservatives,” who make up “about a quarter of the GOP primary electorate.” Obama needn’t worry about these people; he couldn’t win their vote if the only other candidates in the race were Ralph Nader and Lyndon LaRouche. But if the Bishops’ Conference continues thumping the tub — as it does here, through Sister Mary Ann Walsh’s pointed blog — Obama might have to worry about Catholic swing voters and moderates.

Surely these people are already disappointed by his job performance, especially where job creation is concerned. The idea that his appointees are going out of their way to cut their Church out of social services could be the final straw. These people wouldn’t vote for Herman Cain (though they could conceivably vote for Mitt Romney), but they might sit out the election altogether. A dud might be worth voting for; a dud who permits the Church to be needlessly marginalized, not so much.

The Obama administration would do well to remember who its friends are — or at any rate, who they could be, given some restraint and ball-playing. I’ve read conflicting accounts of the circumstances that inspired Teresa of Avila to rant so quotably — some sources say she‘d been bucked off a horse; others, a mule. I’m going to make it a donkey just so I can claim grounds to point out that, unlike her, Catholics these days don’t have to rely on jackasses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , 8 Comments
« Older Posts