"Nel silenzio di quei raccoglimenti"

The scene between the Princess and the young nun, Angelica, is one of the greatest presentations of religious fanaticism ever set to music. Chilling! - The Princess's "mystical vision" (rather nightmare of religious condemnation) begins in the video at 6:20.


Fedora Barbieri and Victoria de los Angeles sing Suor Angelica by Giacomo Puccini, Orchestra del Teatro dell`Opera di Roma, Tullio Serafin, conductor

THE PRINCESS
Often, on an evening,
there in our chapel I pray.
In the silence of those prayers
my spirit seems to leave me
and join your mother's
in secret, ethereal communion!
How painful, how painful it is to hear
the dead mourn and weep!
When the mystical trance passes,
I have only one word to say to you:
Atone! Atone!
I offer my justice
to the Blessed Virgin!

[Nel silenzio di quei raccoglimenti,
il mio spirito par che s'allontani
e s'incontri con quel di vostra madre
in colloqui eterei, arcani!
Come è penoso, come è penoso
udire i morti dolorare e piangere!
Quando l'estasi mistica scompare
per voi serbata ho una parola sola:
Espiare! Espiare!
Offritela alla Vergine
la mia giustizia!]
English/Italian link

Lawsuits to Challenge Reactionary Proposition 8

While Barack Obama was elected to the White House with a large convincing majority, signaling the end of the Bush neo-con era in U.S. politics, and symbolically helping heal the wounds of post-slavery racial discrimination, referendums effecting discriminatory laws against homosexuals were successful in various places around the country.

The biggest victory for the reactionaries and religious forces that brain trusted and bankrolled the anti-gay marriage campaign was for California's Proposition 8. The measure, which aimed to change the state's constitution to ban gay marriage appeared to have won. According to SF Gate:

With 96 percent of the vote counted, Prop. 8 was winning by a decisive 400,000-vote margin, 52.2 percent to 47.8 percent. It piled up huge margins in the Central Valley and carried some Democratic strongholds such as Los Angeles County. The measure lost in every Bay Area county but Solano.

Similar bans against gay marriage passed in Arizona and Florida.

Meanwhile, several civil liberties and rights groups moved to file legal challenges to Proposition 8. What follows is the text from the ACLU press release on the matter:

Legal Papers Claim Initiative Procedure Cannot Be Used To Undermine the Constitution's Core Commitment To Equality For Everyone

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: media@aclu.org

SAN FRANCISCO – The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed a writ petition before the California Supreme Court today urging the court to invalidate Proposition 8 if it passes. The petition charges that Proposition 8 is invalid because the initiative process was improperly used in an attempt to undo the constitution's core commitment to equality for everyone by eliminating a fundamental right from just one group – lesbian and gay Californians. Proposition 8 also improperly attempts to prevent the courts from exercising their essential constitutional role of protecting the equal protection rights of minorities. According to the California Constitution, such radical changes to the organizing principles of state government cannot be made by simple majority vote through the initiative process, but instead must, at a minimum, go through the state legislature first.

The California Constitution itself sets out two ways to alter the document that sets the most basic rules about how state government works. Through the initiative process, voters can make relatively small changes to the constitution. But any measure that would change the underlying principles of the constitution must first be approved by the legislature before being submitted to the voters. That didn't happen with Proposition 8, and that's why it's invalid.

"If the voters approved an initiative that took the right to free speech away from women, but not from men, everyone would agree that such a measure conflicts with the basic ideals of equality enshrined in our constitution. Proposition 8 suffers from the same flaw – it removes a protected constitutional right – here, the right to marry – not from all Californians, but just from one group of us," said Jenny Pizer, a staff attorney with Lambda Legal. "That's too big a change in the principles of our constitution to be made just by a bare majority of voters."

"A major purpose of the constitution is to protect minorities from majorities. Because changing that principle is a fundamental change to the organizing principles of the constitution itself, only the legislature can initiate such revisions to the constitution," added Elizabeth Gill, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.

The groups filed the lawsuit today in the California Supreme Court on behalf of Equality California and 6 same-sex couples who did not marry before Tuesday's election but would like to be able to marry now.

The groups filed a writ petition in the California Supreme Court before the elections presenting similar arguments because they believed the initiative should not have appeared on the ballot, but the court dismissed that petition without addressing its merits. That earlier order is not precedent here.

"Historically, courts are reluctant to get involved in disputes if they can avoid doing so," said Shannon Minter, Legal Director of NCLR. "It is not uncommon for the court to wait to see what happens at the polls before considering these legal arguments. However, now that Proposition 8 may pass, the courts will have to weigh in and we believe they will agree that Proposition 8 should never have been on the ballot in the first place."

This would not be the first time the court has struck down an improper voter initiative. In 1990, the court stuck down an initiative that would have added a provision to the California Constitution stating that the "Constitution shall not be construed by the courts to afford greater rights to criminal defendants than those afforded by the Constitution of the United States." That measure was invalid because it improperly attempted to strip California's courts of their role as independent interpreters of the state's constitution.

In a statement issued earlier today, the groups stated their conviction, which is shared by the California Attorney General, that the state must continue to honor the marriages of the 18,000 lesbian and gay couples who have already married in California.

A copy of the statement is available at: www.aclu.org/lgbt/relationships/37701prs20081105.html.

A copy of the writ petition filed today is available at: www.aclu.org/lgbt/relationships/37709lgl20081105.html.

In addition to the ACLU, Lambda Legal and NCLR, the legal team bringing the writ also includes the Law Office of David C. Codell; Munger Tolles & Olson, LLP; and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP.

I suppose one can take some umbrage in the fact that close to 50 percent voted against the discriminatory ban. But if it's your life that's affected, if you are the one who is treated as a second-class citizen, and it's your relationship that is labeled illegal and immoral, then I imagine that nothing would be truly satisfactory short of full civil rights -- and that's how it should be.

To love someone and to make your life with someone, while getting the sanction of the society to do so, is a fundamental right of every human being in this country. It is a matter of elementary decency that every person oppose these attacks on our gay brothers and sisters, and support the campaigns to rollback reactionary attacks such as Proposition 8. Kudos to ACLU, Lambda Legal, NCLR, and the various law firms offering their services. You can offer your support, too, by financially donating to one of the groups named.

Hell, or As You Like It

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as Young Man

Upon Matters Both Faithful and Worldly

What a mess the world is in! There are times when I consider it apposite to retreat back into the bunker and lose myself in the private library I have accumulated over the last forty years. There among the moldy smells and dusty bookcovers I only the other day rediscovered a book purchased in a different era of my life.

What might this book tell me about the nature of humanity, of its self-governance, of its quest to understand the infinite? What can it tell us, from the ancient past, of our own day?

The book purports to be a journal of travels by a ship's surgeon of the eighteenth century. That he visited some fairly exotic lands can be adduced from the very first paragraph quoted below, as the literate of the strange, remote nation he visited had a very different orthography than any previously known. The other facts noted down, too, were strange to my way of thinking, and redolent of issues that still haunt our minds in 2008.

From the book (or facsimile of an old ship's log, as you will), the author launches in media res into a description of the inhabitants of an odd and probably now extinct place:

I shall say but little at present of their learning, which, for many ages, has flourished in all its branches among them: but their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England.

They bury their dead with their heads directly downward, because they hold an opinion, that in eleven thousand moons they are all to rise again; in which period the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their feet. The learned among them confess the absurdity of this doctrine; but the practice still continues, in compliance to the vulgar.

In choosing persons for all employments, they have more regard to good morals than to great abilities; for, since government is necessary to mankind, they believe, that the common size of human understanding is fitted to some station or other; and that Providence never intended to make the management of public affairs a mystery to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime genius, of which there seldom are three born in an age: but they suppose truth, justice, temperance, and the like, to be in every man’s power; the practice of which virtues, assisted by experience and a good intention, would qualify any man for the service of his country, except where a course of study is required. But they thought the want of moral virtues was so far from being supplied by superior endowments of the mind, that employments could never be put into such dangerous hands as those of persons so qualified; and, at least, that the mistakes committed by ignorance, in a virtuous disposition, would never be of such fatal consequence to the public weal, as the practices of a man, whose inclinations led him to be corrupt, and who had great abilities to manage, to multiply, and defend his corruptions.

In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man incapable of holding any public station; for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence, the Lilliputians think nothing can be more absurd than for a prince to employ such men as disown the authority under which he acts.

In relating these and the following laws, I would only be understood to mean the original institutions, and not the most scandalous corruptions, into which these people are fallen by the degenerate nature of man.

Pentagon Endorses Christian Apocalyptic Video Games for Troops

Max Blumenthal has an article up at The Nation's blog, The Notion, entitled "Kill or Convert, Brought to You by the Pentagon". It describes how an evangelical Christian group, Operation Straight Up (OSU), has received Pentagon permission to send a controversial video game entitled "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" in their "Freedom Packages" to U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Like much of politics today, the entire story has an air of unreality about it, the kind of unreality that one feels after awaking from a particularly disturbing and frightening nightmare.

From Blumenthal's article:

The game is inspired by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' bestselling pulp fiction series about a blood-soaked Battle of Armageddon pitting born-again Christians against anybody who does not adhere to their particular theology. In LaHaye's and Jenkins' books [which have sold 65 million copies and are second only to the Bible in sales of Christian books], the non-believers are ultimately condemned to "everlasting punishment" while the evangelicals are "raptured" up to heaven.

The Left Behind videogame is a real-time strategy game that makes players commanders of a virtual evangelical army in a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks strikingly like New York City after 9/11. With tanks, helicopters and a fearsome arsenal of automatic weapons at their disposal, Left Behind players wage a violent war against United Nations-like peacekeepers who, according to LaHaye's interpretation of Revelation, represent the armies of the Antichrist. Each time a Left Behind player kills a UN soldier, their virtual character exclaims, "Praise the Lord!" To win the game, players must kill or convert all the non-believers left behind after the rapture. They also have the option of reversing roles and commanding the forces of the Antichrist. (Video preview here).

According to some accounts, the video game makers hope to distribute a million copies of this game to churches throughout the U.S., so soldiers will not be alone in getting their chance to fantasize being a soldier of God who gets to kill (or convert -- does one get more points for one over the other?) infidel Jews, Muslims, Hindus, athiests, Wiccans, etc. This should go over big in neighborhoods from Fallujah to Karachi! One wonders how many pimply-faced church goers or bored and terrified soldiers will choose to play the game with the reverse option, as a general serving Antichrist.

More seriously, how many U.S. soldiers will now die because of inflamed passions against this neo-Crusader propaganda?

One of OSU's biggest names is Stephen Baldwin, the actor, whose craft is protected by the same first amendment which, by his organizational affiliations, he desecrates along with unknown Pentagon officials allied with OSU. But then, this is a secular desecration, isn't it?

I'm reminded of a passage by Milton, someone who knew Satan intimately, and Jesus, too.

For neither man nor angel can discern / Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible...

Ah, Milton, not invisible anymore, but manipulated by joysticks, right-wing generals, pulp fiction zealots, and oblivious politicians.

Blog Against Theocracy: Remember Chevalier de La Barre

A blogswarm entitled "Blog Against Theocracy" is running over the net from July 1 through July 4 this year. For my contribution, I'd like to bring up a very old, but once famous case. It provides the reductio ad absurdum of church-state theocratic criminality. This 18th century case was so infamous, it drew the attention of the famous French writer Francois Marie Arouet, also known as Voltaire, by then 75 years old.

In July 1766, Jean Francois Le Febvre, chevalier de La Barre, was tried and executed in Abbeville, in the French province of Normandy. His crimes? La Barre was accused of singing anti-religious songs, being disrespectful to a religious procession, and harming a crucifix.

Wikipeda has a short entry on Monsieur La Barre:

On August 9, 1765, the wooden crucifix on a bridge in Abbeville was vandalized. Catholicism was then the state religion of France and the religion of the vast majority of the French public. The bishop of Amiens roused the furor of the faithful and asked churchgoers to reveal all they could about the case to the civilian judges, under pain of excommunication. Nobody actually revealed anything about the vandalizing itself, but some accused three young men... of not having removed their hats when a procession had passed. La Barre's bedroom was searched and three prohibited books, including Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, were found.

La Barre was tortured into confessing his alleged crimes. He was then sentenced by the Paris parlement (high court) to be tortured again, beheaded and then have his body thrown into the flames along with his copy of [Voltaire's] Philosophical Dictionary. Voltaire attempted to have his conviction reversed to no avail. It was reversed by the National Convention during the French Revolution in 1794.

Ian Davidson's book, Voltaire in Exile, fleshes out much more of the story. For instance, the other men accused with La Barre came from prominent families, including the mayor and chief investigating magistrate. These well-connected families were able to whisk their sons away to safety, leaving La Barre, an orphan, to stand trial. La Barre had been brought up by his aunt, Anne-Marguerite Feydeau, the abbess of the Villancourt convent. Some have said that the prosecuting magistrate had been spurned by Mlle. Feydeau, and that he therefore held a grudge against the young (probably around 20 years old) La Barre.

As Davidson describes it, like other notable cases of the same period, e.g. the Calas case, the campaign against La Barre

...had been based on a highly charged alliance between the bigoted Church-State machine and the superstitious local Catholic population. The evidence against La Barre was fragmentary, rumor-based, unreliable, and wholly insufficient. The legal basis for the charges of blasphemy and sacrilege was questionable... the charges of themselves were manifestly out of proportion to the offenses alleged.... Worst of all, the case against the accused had been deliberately whipped on by a local magistrate for reasons of personal grudge.... (pg. 171)

La Barre's Torture and Execution

Davidson also is less queasy in reporting the torture done to La Barre to get him to "confess". The sentence of the Abbeville court had to be confirmed by the Parlement in Paris. On June 4, 1766, by a vote of 15-10, La Barre's conviction was upheld. Before his execution, he was tortured to obtain confession. The young man's legs were enclosed between wooden planks, and wooden wedges hammered between the planks and legs. No confession was forthcoming. He was dragged to his beheading wearing a sign: "Impious, sacrilegious and hateful blasphemer."

Voltaire reported that in the shadow of the executioner's ax, La Barre's last words were:

"I did not believe that they could make a gentleman die for such a small thing." (Davidson, pg. 168)

As a final last mercy, the authorities did not tear out La Barre's tongue, as had been the sentence of the Abbeville court. Voltaire took up a campaign for La Barre's rehabilitation, which would not come until the French Revolutionary government reversed the decision posthumously in 1794, or 28 years later. In any case, and in part because of the publicity campaign of Voltaire, who wrote a pamphlet entitled Relation de la Mort du Chevalier de La Barre, Jean Francois Le Febvre would be the last person executed in France for "blasphemy". For a time, though, Voltaire was frightened by his being implicated by the religious authorities, who burned his famous dictionary with the body of La Barre at the stake, he thought seriously of emigrating from France.

A few weeks after the execution, Voltaire wrote to his friend, Jean le Rond d'Alembert:

I cannot understand how thinking beings can remain in a country of monkeys, which so often become tigers. As for me, I am ashamed even to be on the frontier. In truth, now is the time to break the connection.... Even the Inquisition would not have dared do what these Jansenist judges have carried out." (Davidson, pg. 173)

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

Just the other day, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the suppression of free speech in the case of Joseph Frederick, a high school student whose banner "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" was confiscated by the school, even though it was held aloft away from school property. While all Frederick may have lost was his banner, the country lost a battle in the fight against religious intolerance, and the inroads the latter is making in the courts and legislatures of this country.

Too bad, Juneau, Alaska school principal Deborah Morse doesn't have the powers the Catholic hierarchy and church-infested courts of La Barre's day had over "disrespectful" speech. But she has the hateful 5-4 decision of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, we have the first amendment and a number of organizations trying to protect us against the trend to turn this country into a Christian theocracy.

Go to the website of First Freedom First, and sign their petition to safeguard separation of church and state and protect religious liberty in this country.