MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE, DON WOOD, IS MY PHOTOGRAPH FOR THE DAY. He had nothing to do with my BLOG writing. As a matter of fact, when he called and asked if I could meet him for coffee, I knew a good conversation with one of the best teachers I have ever known was just the tonic I needed to get rid of the gloom I had injected into my day by thinking and writing about what Pat Robertson had to say about the earthquake disaster in Haiti...

THE WRITING:

Here’s the situation:

The average annual cost of keeping an inmate incarcerated in a California State Prison has risen to more than $50,000. The cost of providing health care to inmates in California prisons is more than $2 billion dollars a year. In California, where a majority of voting citizens continue to insist that the state keep the death penalty, the annual cost of keeping an inmate on death row is $90,000. The average inmate stay on death row is 25 years.

I WANT TO KNOW! How are the people of California better served by paying more for the incarceration of one of their criminals for a year by a factor of ten to one than what it costs to educate one of their children for one year? What sense does it make to decline to provide health care for ordinary, law-abiding citizens when we provide complete health care for people in prison? What sense does it make to continue the travesty of serving justice by sentencing people to die... and then keeping them in the most expensive prison situation for up to a quarter of a century... before they are killed?

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Here’s another situation:

Eleven thousand gay married couples live legally in the State of California. Gay couples are no longer allowed to marry, but those who married in the four-month window when it was legal in California to do so may stay legally married. California’s population is just under thirty-seven million people. The divorce rate in the state is high, some statistics show that as many as half of all marriages end in divorce in the state. There were no legal gay marriages before 2009.

I WANT TO KNOW! With no evidence whatsoever that the presence of 11,000 gay married couples living among heterosexual marriages has adversely affected any heterosexual marriages, why are so many people still worked up about the issue. What’s the problem?

One of the arguments being presented in the San Francisco court hearing a case that seeks to overturn Proposition 8 attempts to show that since gay couples have been allowed to marry in the Netherlands, the number of heterosexual marriages has declined. Many Americans, like our former President George W. Bush who had never been to Europe before he became president, don’t have a clue what life is like in Europe nor why it is as it is, and they mostly don't care... and I suspect that most of those who say the institution of marriage in Holland has suffered because there are legally married gays living among them don’t know that in the Netherlands NOBODY who gets married can be legally married unless he/she, he/he, she/she participates also in a civil ceremony. The problems with comparing marriage in California with marriage in the Netherlands is that in order to be fully recognized as married under Dutch law, EVERYONE must have a civil marriage ceremony (at a courthouse or a city hall). You cannot get married in The Netherlands by participating solely in a religious ceremony in a church or synagogue or mosque... Even the crown-prince and princess had two ceremonies, one at Amsterdam City Hall and the other in a protestant church.

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Here’s another situation:

The earth shook in Haiti and it is estimated that two hundred thousand people were killed and thousands more were left in more pain and misery than I have ever experienced in my life. We now know that plate tectonics as the cause of earthquakes is no longer just a theory. We know for sure that an outer layer of the Earth, the lithosphere, is cool enough to behave most of the time like a rigid shell; but there are cracks, and the pieces separated by the cracks are known as plates. The boundaries between the plates grind against each other, producing most earthquakes. It is very clear that something like that happened to cause the earthquake in Haiti.

I WANT TO KNOW! Why would Pat Robertson say, and I quote, “They (the Haitians) were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal [...] ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.” ...the gospel according to Pat Robertson.

How could anyone actually believe this televangelist has anything useful to say about anything going on anywhere in the world... but then why should we be surprised?

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Here’s the situation:

A Christian Education program (with “complete” elementary, middle, and secondary school programs) advertises itself as being “rooted in the historic Christian tenants: that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, that God exists in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that personal salvation is dependent upon personal acceptance, through faith, of Jesus Christ as Savior... We believe in the existence of a personal, malignant being called Satan who acts as a tempter and accuser, for whom the place of eternal punishment was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.”

WHAT I WANT TO KNOW! Where does the God who is Love fit into the picture? The Calvary Academy takes little kids into it’s spiritual bosom at age five and keeps them there, if their parents pay the tuition, until they are finished with their junior college program. Why would people want to scare the hell of little kids (and big kids, for that matter) by asking them to believe a personal, malignant tempter called Satan is loose in the world, and presumably doing what the Reverend Pat Robertson says he has just done to Haiti... Oh, wait a minute... was it the loving God pissed over the deal with the Satan who did it to Haiti? I guess I just don't understand. Isn't it enough already that they’ve got things like earthquakes and hurricanes to worry about. I also want to know what kinds of adults these children grow up to be.

Oh, yeah. I think I know. They become the folks who hold the line and insist that gay people shouldn’t have the same rights and privileges of citizenship that “straight” citizens enjoy. Never mind that many gay people say they are Christians. Maybe some gays even believe in the personal, malignant tempter called Satan and the “place of eternal punishment, prepared for all who die outside of Christ, confined in conscious, (don’t overlook the emphasis on the word conscious...) torment for eternity. The god the Calvary folks want their children to “accept” apparently doesn’t want the outsiders, "whose who die outside," to escape even into sleep during their confinement in hell for eternity. Oh, yeah. It really doesn’t matter if gays believe any of the other stuff. If they’re gay and have the audacity to love somebody who is also gay and want to marry and settle with them into something called a shared home, Pat Robertson and his group believe they’re out of luck. It wouldn’t solve the “conscious torment for eternity” problem, but I guess they could always move to Amsterdam... Is that spelled “Amsterdamn”?