To Mr. Shea, author and director of The Training Institute for Suicidal Assessment, the single obstacle that stands between humans and sustainable happiness is knowledge of the “human matrix.”

In his book entitled Happiness Is. Unexpected Answers to Practical Questions in Curious Times, Mr. Shea conceptualizes happiness as a balancing act: our biologies, perspectives, relationships, environments, and spiritual quests are interacting processes, which, when healthily balanced, provide solutions for realizing ongoing happiness.  

Said the author: “I believe that the human matrix model opens a world of possibilities for transforming pain — from the pain of everyday frustration to the vastly intense angst of  darkenss — into an enduring sense of happiness.  Within its intracies, compassion, laughter and imagination are forever wed.”

Toyin

If you have chosen to read this article, then you find yourself in a privileged position because here, at InTheFray, I have decided to announce my introduction to the team by coming out.

I hope that by coming out I will gain respect. I hope that people will listen to my voice and interact creatively without stereotyping me and
labeling me.

By coming out in such a forum as this, I hope to appeal to your sense of fairness. I know that there are people like me on TV and in the theater. We have our own radio stations and magazines. Some of us wear peculiar clothing, but most of us are regular people who live regular lives.

You see what I am trying to say is this: I want to, erm, well, admit publicly to the fact that I’m…

OK, I will try and get to the point. It’s not easy because once I make my announcement and put it out there in public, then I’m afraid you will judge me and color my views with your own perceptions of my “type.”

Ok, here we go. I want to tell the world that I am — a Baptist pastor!

Now I wonder if it would have helped my cause if I was announcing that I was gay? But I’m not. The fact is that I am an ordained Baptist pastor in Australia.

You may wonder why I was so apprehensive in alerting you to my status. From my vantage point as an Englishman now residing in Australia, I have been able to witness the rise of conservative evangelicals in the U.S. and it scares me.

I follow my vocation because I believe that the Bible is still relevant for today; not my own particular spin on the Bible; not my political ideology glossed over by putting the label “Christian” on it, but simply the words of the Bible considered and lived out.

I joined the team at ITF because I want to add my voice to the growing realm of writers and thinkers on the Internet. I am left-wing in my politics, and I believe that socialism still has a powerful message if only the left could agree on core fundamentals.

I do not want you to label me and box me in. If you stridently disagree with anything that I may say over the coming weeks, then please respond freely. I will not ignore anyone, no matter what your viewpoint. All I ask is that I receive the same respect in return. For too long, the American conservative wing of the church, often personified in the Moral Majority, have dictated how Christianity is perceived and, in particular, how a Christian political viewpoint is perceived. I am here to take small steps to change that.

I do not claim to have easy answers, but I am prepared to ask questions and to attempt to mold answers through dialogue. I am not liberal either, in case you were wondering. What am I? Who am I? Well, let’s see if we can explore those questions together. Why not look upon this as a journey. I will consider current affairs, indigenous issues in Australia, the relationship between Britain, Australia, and the U.S. I am also happy to talk about life in Australia, and I am MORE than happy to talk about soccer, which is my consuming passion.

Life is not meant to be easy, but it is meant to be lived. In living together, we may begin to see beyond the externals and discover that we each have treasures within that will enrich all of us as we get closer in dialogue.

Please feel free to email me with suggestions for content that you may wish to see explored from a British, Australian or Christian perspective.

Until next week,
Rev. Les

Michaele Shapiro’s article brought to light the clash between a post-modern, liberal tolerance and the  seemingly narrow-minded, blinkered view of the conservative religious right.

What I want to do firstly, as a Baptist pastor, is to bring to the table the concept that not all Christians operate in such a fixed world, nor do all Christians respond with such rapid knee-jerk reactions.

What bothers me is that there are key words that will automatically provoke a vehement response from the religious right. With the media access granted to this bloc in the U.S., their views are much more clearly propagated than they are in Australia.

In an Australian context, I have to work to get a Christian voice heard and so I consider other people’s points of view; I listen; I dialogue; I seek to understand; I seek to persuade and I seek to build relationships and bridges. Does this mean that I compromise my worldview? By no means! Does it make me a liberal? I sincerly hope not. What it does mean is that I work hard to understand my own thinking and engage it with that of others.

It seems that in the U.S., the religious right, in particular, has a ready made populace who want to hear these views expounded and so they have become lazy in their thinking and rhetoric. It is particularly sad that they have missed the point in the SpongeBob SquarePants debacle and have opened themselves up to ridicule.

I find it irresponsible when Christians leap in with slogans and heated views and, then, when they are attacked, they file it away as “persecution.” The Christian worldview may be unfairly critqued at times, but often it has more to do with half-baked thinking than it has to do with any sense of attack.

Please understand that there is a core of Christianity that wants to engage at a deeper level. I am part of InTheFray to make my voice known and to learn from others. I believe, from my vantage point in Australia, that Americans need to be exposed to a broader range of media that doesn’t just reflect insular views dictated to by a culture that is still largely dominated by right-wing Christianity.

Alessandra Stanley’s piece today in the International Herald Tribune is a reassuring reminder that no matter how domesticated the Academy Awards may have appeared Sunday night, plenty of inquisitive minds are still alive and well. An inexhaustible fuel sustains such dissenters, their sharpest tool a keen sense of humor.

Stanley makes a reference to the five-second delay, which serves as a cushion for network self-censorship should any unacceptable spontaneity occur during the live awards ceremony. However, other forms of “editing” take place behind the scenes at the Oscars, as was the case with presenter and comedian Robin Williams.

Williams made his entrance with a piece of tape covering his mouth, which he ripped off in order to present the award. Stanley reports that a song Williams had prepared to sing at the Oscars had been censored by ABC executives as well as producer Gil Cates:

Williams called upon composer Marc Shaiman and writer Scott Wittman for material. The first draft included the lines:

When Cates advised Shaiman to make the song “less political,” Shaiman directed the lyrics away from politics and toward gossip:

Shaiman’s efforts weren’t enough. Last Thursday ABC’s broadcast standards and practices officials objected to the “sexual tone,” potential offensive remarks toward minorities, and suggestions of the “glorification of drug use” in the revised lyrics, as in the line “the Road Runner’s hooked on speed.”

Rather than cutting 11 of the song’s 36 lines, Williams, Shaiman and Wittman decided not to present the song at all. Williams remarked at an interview on Saturday,

It turns out that the perfect accessory to an Academy Awards tuxedo is white tape.

Forced to stand trial without his lawyer and behind closed doors, Arash Cigarchi was recently sentenced to 14 years in jail in Iran for the commentary he published in his blog; he was officially charged, among other crimes, with “aiding and abating hostile governments and opposition groups.” Bizarrely, Cigarchi himself may not even have been present at his trial, which Human Rights Watch has condemned as a “sham” that “violated international standards for fair trials.”

Widney Brown, deputy program director of Human Rights Watch, stated that the “Iranian government is sending a message to its critics: keep silent or face years in prison.”

Other bloggers in Iran, including Mojtaba Lotfi and Mojtaba Saminezhad, have been thrown into jail as a result of the political commentary they published in their blogs.

Mimi Hanaoka

The most remarkable thing about Rwanda’s Parliament is not the war-damaged building that houses it … It is inside the hilltop structure, from the spectator seats of the lower house, that one sees a most unusual sight for this part of the world: mixed in with all the dark-suited male legislators are many, many women.”

— Marc Lacey, The New York Times

Marc Lacy reports that Rwandan women have claimed a victory few would have imagined possible ten years ago: they now comprise up to 48.8 percent of Rwandan parliament seats— a figure that surpasses most nations’ statistics on female political inclusion.  

“Before the genocide, women always figured their husbands would take care of them,” said Aurea Kayiganwa, the director of a national organization representing Rwanda’s many war widows. “But the genocide changed all that. It forced women to get active, to take care of themselves. So many of the men were gone.”

These milestones, however, do not reflect an equalization of gender roles in Rwanda. Patriarchal traditions still uphold male leadership as a dominant normative standard.

But women like Ms. Odette Nyiramirimo, coordinator of the Senate social affairs and human rights committee, have taken it up as a challenge:

“Men are watching us,” Ms. Nyiramirimo said. “They wonder if we’ll rise up to a higher level. We’re learning fast, because we have to. We say to each other that we can’t be as good as the men – we have to be better.”

Toyin

“While Europeans are willing to merge their currencies in the euro and concede other sovereign powers to Brussels, they are not willing to give up their language,” Graham Bowley reports today in an article for the International Herald Tribune. Recent attempts made by the European Union to downsize the number of “working” languages at official conferences to three (English, French, and German) have resulted in threats of revolt by Italian and Spanish governments. Apparently, language is more fundamental to the identity of a nation and its people than the big boys had anticipated.

Italian and Spanish are two of the languages which the European Commission recently dropped from use at multilingual news conferences for reasons of “efficiency” as well as a “lack of translation resources.”  Bowley notes that “speeches often have to be repeated two or three times, press releases are issued in triplicate and earphones are a necessary accessory in meetings and conferences.”

The absence of their national language at multinational conferences reflects a concern on the part of smaller countries that they may be “losing out” to the dominant nations of the European Union: Britain, Germany and France. The recent inclusion of German as an official “working” language at these conferences may have been the catalyst for action. As Enrico Brivio, correspondent for Il Sole 24 Ore, explained:

Fraoise Le Bail, spokesman for current president of the European Commission Jo Manuel Barroso, stated, in an attempt to pacify the angered parties:

While diversity may complicate conferences, life is rarely simple or efficient. Barroso’s intent to resolve the issue is an admirable one. It suggests aims of a new Europe which attempts to match ideals of unity and diversity with both an acknowledgment of social and political realities, and a wisdom which prioritizes communication over offense and misunderstanding. The results of communication and understanding may be complex, but they’re worth it.

To the editor:

Kai Ma’s article on the prostitution debate was interesting, but has massive gaps in its research. I’ve dedicated most of my life to this issue for over 13 months, often feeling frozen in time. But having
been a massage therapist since I was 19 years old, in 1989, it’s a small price to pay. I wonder where this all leads? Kudos to your publication and to the article’s author, Kai Ma, for writing about prostitution.

I might add, I didn’t even know this until last night, that while San Francisco’s tweaking of it’s massage laws in order to legalize prostitution has been totally shunned by so many, the opposition to Mayor Gavin Newsom quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle in terms of gay marriage is the Traditional Values Coalition. “No protesters attended the event, but, when contacted by the Chronicle, Benjamin Lopez, a lobbyist for the conservative group Traditional Values Coalition, slammed it from afar,” says article author Rona Marech.

The Traditional Values Coalition published a paper on San Francisco’s massage laws legalizing prositution in July 2004. Most media, such as the San Francisco Chronicle have pretended this wasn’t an issue for over thirteen months now, despite having had email exchanges with both Andy Ross and Henry Lee of the Chronicle about it.

Offhand, it’s gossip I wouldn’t put up on my website, but you have to wonder if this is one of the issues relating to Newsom’s recent divorce. Newsom is a Roman Catholic. When Executive Director of Treasure Island Tony Hall did an interview with San Francisco Catholic newspaper in October, Newsom announced his divorce within eight weeks. This is a real newspaper, sometimes read in the California State Capitol and quoted by other newspapers, such as the Sacramento Bee.

Kai Ma’s article fails to mention that San Francisco legalized indoor prostitution and pimping in massage parlors, creating multiple loopholes for sex traffickers in 2003 and 2004.

Meanwhile, last week, Oakland passed an ordinance calling for a moratorium on massage parlors.

Robyn Few, Carol Leigh, Ron Weitzer, and Janice Raymond all know about San Francisco’s massage law. Leigh was on the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, which published it’s recommendations to legalize prostitution by using massage parlors as fronts, on City stationary, under the leadership of then-Supervisor Terence Hallinan in 1996.

The article fails to mention that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave $750 to Hallinan on July 17, 2004, while Hallinan was fundraising for Proposition Q. So while Pelosi did not give directly to the Proposition Q campaign, and instead funneled through Hallinan, I think it’s obvious she adores Hallinan and everything for which he stands.

The article also fails to mention that former California State Senate President John Burton also supported Proposition Q when he was in office.

Newsom, Daly, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, D-California, Woolsey, and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California, have all refused to honestly comment on San Francisco’s massage law, or any related issues.

All this is even more complicated when one observes that Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Gloria Molina has posted in her biography that she opposes the use of massage clinics as fronts for prostitution.

—Brian Goodwin
San Rafael, California
(Home of Boxer and also home to at least seven brothels posing as massage therapy clinics)
www.massagewell.com

In The Fray Contributor