Sunday, January 21, 2018

Burkini bans, religion and public policy

See the interview with Noam Chomsky here. Excerpt:

One striking example is what happened in Latin America after Vatican II in 1962, called at the initiative of Pope John XXIII. The proceedings took significant steps toward restoring the radical pacifist message of the Gospels that had been largely abandoned when the Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, adopted Christianity as the official doctrine of the Roman empire -- turning the church of the persecuted into the church of the persecutors, as historian of Christianity Hans Küng described the transformation. The message of Vatican II was taken up in Latin America by bishops, priests, lay persons who devoted themselves to helping poor and bitterly oppressed people to organize to gain and defend their rights -- what came to be called "liberation theology."
There were, of course, earlier roots and counterparts in many Protestant denominations, including evangelical Christians. These groups formed a core part of a remarkable development in the United States in the 1980s when, for the first time ever to my knowledge, a great many people not only protested the terrible crimes that their government was committing but went to join and help the victims to survive the onslaught.

The US launched a virtual war against the Church, most dramatically in Central America in the 1980s. The decade was framed by two crucial events in El Salvador: the assassination in 1980 of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the "voice for the voiceless," and the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in 1989. Romero was assassinated a few days after he sent an eloquent letter to President Carter pleading with him not to send aid to the murderous military junta, who [would] use it "to destroy the people's organizations fighting to defend their fundamental human rights," in Romero's words. So the security forces did in the US-dominated states of the region, leaving many religious martyrs along with tens of thousands of the usual victims: poor peasants, human rights activists, and others seeking "to defend their fundamental human rights."

The US military takes pride in helping to destroy the dangerous heresy that adopted "the preferential option for the poor," the message of the Gospels. The School of the Americas (renamed "The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"), famous for training of Latin American killers, announces proudly that liberation theology was "defeated with the assistance of the US army."

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