RevCyn

My dear colleague (and formerly my minister) Lynn Ungar has written a thoughtful piece about the Brock Tuner rape case on Patheos.  I appreciate her deep thinking and opportunity to look at the situation differently, but I have to respectfully disagree with her conclusions. First, like Lynn Ungar, I want to see large changes in our prison industrial system.  I believe too many nonviolent offenders are given long sentences and this is to the detriment of our society.  I want to see people getting rehab, not jail time, for drug use.  But there are a few groups of people I'm willing to see get long prison sentences.  And one of those groups is rapists.  There are cases where I feel bad for a criminal who will have the rest of their life affected.  Brock Turner isn't one of them.  I'm not a survivor of rape, but I've lived with the aftermath.  In 1995-6 as a graduate student at the University of Georgia, I lived with two other female studen...

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep I had a dream -- that sort of dream where you're not really completely asleep, but you're not driving the dream with your conscious mind anymore.  I dreamed I swallowed a whistle.  I jerked myself back to full consciousness, and tried falling asleep again, and it happened again.  I swallowed a whistle.  For a few minutes I couldn't shake my brain from bringing this whistle image to me again and again. How strange as a dream it seemed, but I knew right away what it meant.  I knew, with the first dreaming moment, this wasn't just any whistle that was getting stuck in my craw.  This was a rape whistle.  And it wasn't just any rape whistle.  It was the one given to me when I went to seminary.  That was part of the introduction to Chicago, as I remember it, at Meadville Lombard: Welcome to Chicago.  You're in an area that may be more dangerous than you're used to.  Don't walk alone at night....

This blogger has been suffering from writer's block.  The problem is, when I think about opening up a page and writing, there's one thing that's been on my mind to write about.  And when I think about that one thing, I've been so boggled and amazed by what's going on that I can't find a way to write coherently. So, about this war on women... Now, I can appreciate and respect a pro-life position.  It's theologically consistent, and has a clear and hard line: life begins at conception, and so abortion is murder.  Unless the life of the woman is at stake, so that it's one life vs. another, or unless the fetus is not viable, murder cannot be justified.  That makes sense to me as a stance to take.  I don't agree, but I respect it.  I understand that what the Republicans are trying to express is, in part, the perspective that while rape is horrible and wrong, it doesn't change that abortion is horrible and wrong.  But there are whole other level...