Buddhism - the dirty secret of the McCain campaign

Because I am a journalist and my contact information is splashed across news media directories worldwide, I get a lot of crackpot kind of emails. The latest comes from a man who’s appalled that John McCain recently met with the Dalai Lama and addressed him as “your Holiness.” “With his right hand,” declared the email writer, “John McCain confessed his Buddhist faith.” From his letter, you’d think Buddhism to be a four-letter word.

Yeah… crackpot emails generally don’t work, but they are even less effective when you send them to a reporter who’s also one of those Buddhists.

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Just call me Reverend Rachel Richardson

So, I checked out the church through which Kathy Griffin was ordained and applied for ordination myself. Here’s the response I got back:

This is to confirm that Rachel Richardson has been ordained as a minister of the Universal Life Church, Modesto, California.

Date of Ordination: 3/10/2008
by Kevin Andrews, Pastor
www.ulc.net

The Universal Life Church is a “regularly established church or congregation” and all ordinations are done as the deliberate, thoughtful, and responsible act of a human being, not by a computer. The church holds regular meetings every Sunday morning in Modesto, and has congregations in all 50 states of the USA as well as countries throughout the world.

As a minister, you are authorized by the church to perform all peaceful rites and ceremonies of the church, including weddings, funerals, baptisms, blessings, and to preach, teach and hold meetings. You are entitled to all privileges and courtesies normally offered to members of the clergy.

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I now pronounce you… a minister

After Brandon proposed, we initially planned to have a ceremony here in Cincinnati, where I had already lined up a local Buddhist woman to officiate. Then we decided to elope on Mackinac Island, Mich. where ministers, let alone lesbian Buddhist ministers, are a relative scarcity. Overall, we were really pleased with the minister we chose, who agreed to do a lovely non-religious ceremony in which we read our own vows. The minister was really just a formality, so it didn’t even bother me when he flubbed and accidentally inserted the whole “What god has put together…” line we had agreed beforehand to omit.

But if I had our wedding to do all over again, I’d totally ask Kathy Griffin to officiate.

The often provocative comedian - who raised some Christian groups’ hackles by joking about Jesus while accepting an Emmy Award last September - became ordained through an online church to officiate Saturday at the New York wedding of two fans, Brian Anstey and Elka Shapiro.

Griffin said she was ordained online by the Universal Life Church and completed additional paperwork to meet New York State requirements. But she insisted her role in the wedding was a one-night-only performance.

Maybe a renewal of our wedding vows is in order.

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More peace and democracy in Iraq

President George Bush justifies the entire illegal invasion of Iraq with the tired line that it will bring peace and democracy to the Middle East, and liberate Iraqis from repression.

But these claims to be fighting a war to establish a democracy in Iraq are belied by the fact that Iraq is more theocracy than it is democracy, where the “peaceful” laws of Islam trump universal civil rights.

I have no love for Saddam’s brutal and sinister regime, but at least under Saddam, Iraq was a secular nation, one in which Iraqi women enjoyed freedoms unheard of in the rest of the middle east. But along with the death, mayhem and economic depression wrought by the U.S. invasion, women’s rights are experiencing a slow, agonizing demise.

The International Campaign Against Honour Killings recently reported on the beating and stoning to death of 17-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad, in northern Iraq. While law enforcement officials turned a blind eye, a mob of frenzied men murdered the young girl to death. Neighbors watched, recording the crime on cell phones.

What was Aswad’s crime? She fell in love with someone of a different religious sect her family did not approve of.

In the U.S., most people think this kind of brutality is exactly the kind of thing that U.S. democratization will stop,” says Yifat Susskind, communications director of MADRE, an international human rights organization. But, they’d be wrong.

“In fact, the opposite is true,” Susskind writes on the ICAHK blog. “Since the US invasion, “honor killings” have been on the rise across Iraq, due in large part to measures enacted by the US.”

CNN released video footage of the attack, and it’s been widely circulated on internet sites.

After destroying the Iraqi state, religious powers amenable to the United States quickly filled the legislative and political voids. Although the U.S. is responsible for the protection of all Iraqi’s human rights, honor killings are still rarely prosecuted and if they are, only carry a sentence as little as six months in jail, versus life in prison for murder.

These same religious leaders who operate with the blessing of the U.S. promote honor killing as a religious duty. Women are killed to protect the “honor” of their families, even if they are raped. In October 2004, Iraq’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs revealed that more than half of the 400 rapes reported since the US invasion resulted in the murder of rape survivors by their families.

The next time you hear Bush praising the new democratic system in place in Iraq, think of the Du’a Khalil Aswads in Iraq, whose murders are a direct result of American empire-building.

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