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Moore 0, Kony 10. Today a special ethics panel fired Alabama's Chief Justice Roy Moore for refusing to remove his 2.6-tone granite monument of the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the state judicial building. After the verdict to remove him from office, the unrepentant Moore, who was brought to court for six ethics violations, told a crowd of noisy supporters outside the courthouse: "The battle to acknowledge God is about to rage across the country." Moore continued to insist that his oath of office required him to "acknowledge God" and apparently to do that via the granite monument—although in doing so he "placed himself above the law," said the head of the ethics panel that ousted Moore. [New York Times, November 14, 2003]

While Roy Moore vows to continue his idolatrous battle to acknowledge God with a Ten Commandments promontory, Joseph Kony's violent monument to the Ten Commandments continues to spread brutal terror in the African nation of Uganda. A moral outrage worse than Iraq—that's what UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland said about the civil war still going on in Uganda, where the psychotic Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have led a brutal civil war in which children are routinely abducted and either killed, mutilated, or made to serve in the LRA itself. Children are mutilated by having their lips, nose, ears, hands, or feet hacked off. Cannibalism and beheadings have also been reported. The LRA says it wants to rule Uganda according to the Biblical Ten Commandments. According to humanitarian organizations, the LRA has abducted over 20,000 children during the past 5 years alone. Many of these are taken to Sudan for training as child soldiers; the young girls are turned into sex slaves. In northern Uganda, thousands of children sleep together in the wild rather than risk abduction in their homes. "I cannot find any other part of the world that is having an emergency on the scale of Uganda, that is getting such little international attention," Egeland said in a BBC interview. [See BBC News, November 10, 2003; Washington Times, November 11, 2003]

Marginalized? Hey, just widen the margins.  Every teacher knows the trick. You assign your students a 3-page paper on some arcane subject and the students just can't seem to find enough information to produce sufficient text—so they resort to tricks to squeeze it to the limit. The first is padding, using awkward construction and useless verbiage just to get more mileage out of a sentence. The second, which is always obvious and usually proscribed in the assignment, is the use of a bigger font. (Once I actually got a student paper with 16-point font. I had to tape it on the wall like an eye-chart in order to read it.) Still a third is to sneak in wider margins. I think something like this is going on in diversity issues today.

In the UK, the Rt Rev Dr Peter Forster, Bishop of Chester, was questioned by police after a newspaper reported a speech he made encouraging homosexuals to consider as an option reorienting themselves with the help of a psychiatrist. Now, everyone knows that it is current pop-scientific dogma that homosexuality is an "orientation," not an illness that can be cured, so it is not surprising that the Rev Richard Kirker, General Secretary of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, condemned the bishop's remarks, calling them "inflammatory and offensive." [See Washington Post, November 10, 2003; archived at Religion News Blog]

Back in the US. In Denver, CO, Dr. Cheryl Clark is involved in a custody battle with a former partner in a lesbian relationship. Clark left the relationship 3 years ago after converting to Christianity and is seeking sole custody of the daughter she adopted during that relationship. That's not the problem. The problem is that her former companion was awarded joint custody of the child, now 8 years old, and a Denver judge is forbidding Clark from exposing her to daughter to anything "that can be considered homophobic" in the child's "religious upbringing or teaching," which would include Biblical passages, sermons, Bible study, or what prompted the ruling in the first place: pamphlets by Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family. [Source: Washington Times, November 9, 2003]

In New Hampshire on Sunday, the Rt Rev V. Gene Robinson gave his first sermon as the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop coadjutor and said that his ministry is to bring the message of God's love to "those on the margins." He called on the church to be active in issues of social justice, such as access to health care. "It's up to the church to lead on some of these moral issues," Robinson said?suggesting that social issues are now moral issues as he squeezes the church between the wider margins of apparent inclusivity. [See Washington Post, November 10, 2003]

The mark of Soros.  I've said it before, but we may soon be witnesses to the unique American way of deciding presidential candidates—who has amassed the most money in campaign contributions. Yesterday, financier and philanthropist George Soros gave $5 million to MoveOn.org in part, he said, because "America, under Bush, is a danger to the world." A native of Budapest, Hungary, but now a resident of Westchester, NY, Soros also raised $115,000 for Howard Dean's candidacy. Unseating Bush is "the central focus of my life," Soros said, likening the White House's "supremacist ideology" to his experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule. [Source: Washington Post, November 11, 2003]

Shop subversively at Christmas.  I just finished a thoughtful essay in Christian Reflection, the quarterly published at the Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University. F. Matthew Schobert, Jr. has convinced me that Christians can indeed do something to take back the season.

In his essay "Beyond Candy Cane Lane," Schobert gives a taut history of Christmas as a holiday—from the fourth-century church's simple naming of December 25 as Christ's birth date (thereby "Christianizing" pagan religious feasts of the winter solstice) to the modern American holiday's transformation by New York elites into a domestic gift-giving. I'm cutting out the many evolutionary news bits, but even from the historical perspective it's a difficult choice: Christmas as a time of aggressive revelry, not unlike Mardi Gras, as it was in early urban America, or Christmas as the consumer frenzy it is today. The historical point, I think, is that the church never made much of Christmas as a festival until capitalism took it over and secularized it. By placing it back in the context of the church's calendar, "following the penitential season of Advent and before the redemptive events of Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost" (p. 80), we can look at Christmas through "Easter eyes" and begin the process of transforming the season into a worship period within the year-long cycle of Christian hope and expectation. That's the first tactic.

The second tactic is really subversive. For all American Christians still trapped in group hysteria within capitalism's broken version of the Christmas celebration, Schobert recommends reshaping the season's frenzied purchasing options by buying only "fair-trade" gifts. Fair trade, in existence for over 50 years, is a trading partnership aimed at creating opportunities for the world's producers who have been economically disadvantaged or marginalized by conventional trading systems. The fair-trade system is guided by 7 practice principles that together guarantee economic and environmental sustainability, worker respect, and public accountability. For more information about fair-trade practices and purchase sites, see:

• Co-op America

• Equal Exchange

• Fair Trade Federation

• Fair Trade Resource Network

• International Federation of Alternative Trade

• SERRV International

• Ten Thousand Villages

• Transfair USA

Again, even this strategy will only be truly subversive if we stop looking at Christmas as capitalists and instead look at it as part of the year-long worship season. Christmas is not a birthday party. There was a divine purpose in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and it means nothing to celebrate his birth apart from an incorporating remembrance of that purpose.