anarchival

Tennessee Senate Bill 3100 was unanimiously approved by the Judiciary Committee yesterday afternoon. The Bill was proposed by Senator Marrero in order to raise the fine for violating a protection order from $50 to $500. My first impression on reading this Bill was shock and anger that the fine for such violations is really that low and gratitude towards Senator Marrero for taking steps to remedy the situation. Protection orders are issued by judges often in divorce cases or other situations where the plaintiff has been or is justifiably afraid of becoming the victim of domestic abuse, stalking, or sexual assault. If the order is violated, the defendant can be held in civil or criminal contempt of court. The fine is an additional penalty to punish the particularly egregious nature of the offense, beyond just the usual punishment for violating a court order. The money collected for such fines is deposited in the domestic violence community education fund which the Department of Health uses to help fund the Tennessee Task Force Against Domestic Violence.

There was interesting discussion before the approval of the Bill, including testimony that raising the amount of this fine is projected to reduce the number of violations by 25%. Considering there are at least 1,480 such violations across the state each year, that’s a significant number of individuals and families who will be protected from their attackers by this measure. And yet still, my concern is this: why so little? Why not eliminate the possibility that even more families will be terrorized by making the fine even higher? Senator Bunch was quick to amend the Bill to make the $500 fine an optional maximum, because he believes that many protection orders are probably frivolous and their violations not serious enough to warrant that amount. Senator Jackson agreed that judges would be less likely to punish offenders if they had to levy a fine of such a large amount. I found this very interesting considering Senator Bunch has a Bill on the same Judiciary calendar to establish a $5,000 fine for assaulting a school sports official. Evidently he thinks the possibility of a teenager witnessing his Dad get into fisticuffs with the high school football coach is far more traumatizing than a six year old watching her father beat her mother bloody, and should therefore be punished with a fine of at least ten times as much. Senator Bunch isn’t the only member of the Committee whose vote in favor of SB 3100 was an exercise in hypocrisy, however. Senator Beavers has filed two Bills this Session to make life easier for those accused or convicted of domestic violence. SB 1602 will enable those guilty of misdemeanor domestic violence to have their citizenship rights restored, and SB 1618 would give the alleged perpetuator of domestic violence the right to a court hearing to determine if they can get their weapons back before the disposition of the case, if they’re a member of law enforcement or have a hunting or a fishing license or a gun permit.

Before I go on with analyzing this, I need to own up to something. I was very young when my parents divorced. My father was an alcoholic with a violent, unpredictable temper. Most of my earliest childhood memories are sitting in my room listening to my parents yelling, my father crashing through the house, and my mother screaming. After we got out, my father got in the habit of parking his truck in front of whatever place we were living. He always had his rifle with him in the truck, and usually a stack of beer. He would threaten to kill us if we tried to leave the house or if we came home and he was there. My mother tried to call the police for help, of course, but most of the time she was ignored and the police never came. I’m not sure if protection orders even existed yet, but I doubt it. Once when the police did show up, we peeked out the window to watch them take him away. They took some of his beer, talked a little while, then drove off and left him in our driveway. One day not long after that, we didn’t realize he was out there, and I stepped outside the door to go play. He opened fire at me. Thankfully, he was drunk enough to miss me on the first shot, and I jumped back inside. The door took the second shot, right where I’d been standing.

I can’t analyze domestic violence objectively. In law school we’re taught to set aside our emotions and weigh such issues dispassionately, and sometimes I’m successful at it, but I’d be lying if I said I can read a Bill like SB 1618 and not see my father sitting with his rifle in our driveway. He had a permit. He had enough money to hire lawyers to plead a convincing case in court. We did not. The idea that Senator Beavers could even consider risking the lives of innocent women and children (and probably even some men) for the mere sake of gun rights sickens me. A full quarter of the Bills she’s filed this Session pertain to the expansion of gun rights in Tennessee, and I’m not necessarily against them. Even on a personal level, I support the ownership of guns and the right to self-defense. When my father tried to shoot me, my mother was of course hysterical and terrified. Luckily, so were the neighbors. Since they’d heard the gunshots too, there were enough calls to get the police to respond that time. The officer listened to our story, saw the damage to the door, and took pity on us. He took my mother out the next day to buy a rifle and taught her how to shoot it. The next time my father visited, it was my mother standing up to him with a loaded gun that made the terrorism stop. I still own that rifle, as well as a few other firearms. To paraphrase the old saying, God made man and woman, but Sam Colt made ‘em equal. I still can’t help but think, though, that she wouldn’t have even had to do that – and I wouldn’t have been placed in the danger of being caught in the crossfire – if my father had never been allowed to have his guns in the first place.

This legislative session has been characterized by some truly time-wasting legislation. Fish tanks in barber’s offices? Girls Gone Wild being taken off the air? Off-ramps for the fiancées of representatives? Sure, you kids on the Hill go ahead and have some fun. While you’re at it, though, could you manage to not vote for any more Bills that might put people’s lives in danger, and perhaps work a little harder at making initiatives like SB 3100 do even more good than the token response you just gave it? Raising the (optional) fine from $50 to $500 isn’t good work. It’s the bare minimum you should be doing as decent human beings.

I’ve been asking myself lately, what is the purpose of using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter? I’m not talking about The Purpose. A Social Media Expert I might be (I’ve got certs and everything! no, not really), but I don’t actually spend my free time thinking about how it fits into the grand scheme of things. Too tiny a portion of the most privileged people on the planet even use it, and bloody Iranian revolutions aside, if it disappeared tomorrow we would all go on communicating because there’s always a new way of doing that. No, I’ve been thinking about it on a personal level. I spend a lot of time and energy using social media, probably a little more than I should sometimes. I take breaks occasionally, particularly from Twitter, to get a sense of whether it’s actually adding value to my life or if it’s just become an addiction and/or distraction. To tell the truth, I don’t really miss it when it’s gone. Neil Postman once famously warned that we should be adults who “use technology rather than being used by it.” I use social media primarily to communicate with those I care about, and to stay informed about the world around me. I discuss the virtues of the former at some length below; the latter I’m beginning to doubt is really all that useful.

Postman also warned that, “When we begin relying on the Internet for all of our news and information we will turn into a nation of zombies.” ZOMG, ZOMBIES!1!! Ahem. Whenever The Tennessean calls to offer me a subscription (which I wouldn’t spend money on even if it were only in print), I tell them I get all my news for free online. All the major media outlets have websites and RSS and even Twitter feeds now, and most of them are not yet behind pay walls. If you want the sub-par reporting you get from print or television, you can also get it online, and often cheaper. Granted, you could also criticize the mainstream media for not taking full advantage of the technology or simultaneously resenting their use of it, but that’s already been discussed to death by people who are much more knowledgeable about journalism than I am. Then, there are the bloggers (who are also now the tweeters). They supposedly supplant the mainstream media in their alternative, often hyper-local “reporting,” or at least give a different perspective from the homogenized conglomerates who are (thanks to Fox News) getting more and more stupid and more and more hysterical. Sometimes, the blogs are really worth reading, particularly when you have a special interest you want to follow, but in terms of quality I don’t know that their coverage is any better. Particularly on Twitter, bloggers seem just as caught up in ephemera as anyone on cable news. Typically, the comments from readers that were originally supposed to be the democratized, value-added feature in online journalism, makes you want to weep for the damnation of humanity instead.

So, if we don’t want to succumb to zombiefication, and if television, radio, and print news is now dominated by Rupert Murdoch and his scores of demonic minions, how do we become informed? Or more importantly (according to Postman), how do we stop amusing ourselves to death with “issues” that don’t matter, with a constant stream of data (not to be confused with information) and nonsense and ballyhoo, that in the end eliminates any chance we might have to actually focus on something of substance? I don’t believe the answer is to switch off completely. I’m not a Luddite and neither is Postman. I think the answer is to be ruthless in who or what we allow into our sphere of attention. Now, this is dangerous territory in the sense that the key to a lifelong education is to constantly challenge our minds with opposing ideas. Settling into a particular ideological framework, no matter how well informed, will inevitably lead to stagnation and ignorance. Frequently, in fact, we justify the preservation of our belief systems by exposing ourselves to the “other side,” but only the worst of what the other side has to offer. Zombies cry out for brains, because in our current proliferation of data, there are so few minds to turn that data into real information. Those are the individuals we must seek out. Sometimes, we’ll find them in social media. Sometimes, we’ll find them in other places. We might even have to leave the house to do it.

This is me turning my filters on. Particularly over the past year, I’ve been experimenting with a more expansive attitude where I take it all in to see what I like about it. I guess it’s natural for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction now. This isn’t just happening on an intellectual level, but a personal one, which is really what social media is about for most people. We use it as a means to connect with one another, and as I’ve pointed out in a prior post on “Netiquette,” the exchange of opinions is often pretty low on the list of priorities when it comes to establishing lasting relationships. So what follows are my opinions on that.

1) Keep in touch with people I already know (who I would not otherwise come in frequent contact with)

This is why I originally started using social media, and it’s proven to be its most satisfying purpose. I have family and old friends scattered around the country who I would normally only communicate with maybe once or twice a year if it wasn’t for MySpace (back in the olden days…) or Facebook. These tools help us shorten space and time and share our lives with more frequency. Most of these relationships have benefited from the additional closeness. When I think about giving up social media or paring down my friends/followers, this is the reason I don’t swear it off completely.

Of course, this is often where social media gets the most sticky, too. All of us have heard stories about some family member or significant other or coworker or stalker discovering information over Facebook that ended up seriously jeopardizing relationships in real life. There are two ways you can manage this. Either exercise enough self-control and data hygiene that these types of incidents do not occur, or limit the people you allow into your online social circle to those you don’t communicate with on a frequent basis already. For example, I am in near constant contact with my mother and grandmother. When I’m not physically with them, I can get them on the phone within seconds. Would adding them to my Facebook friends really help me communicate with them more efficiently? Probably not. Might it cause some friction as they’re able to scrutinize my interactions with other friends and family members? Almost certainly. Furthermore, once you open that channel, there’s an expectation that you’ll use it. Many people get their feelings hurt when you don’t respond to them online, just like they would if you didn’t return their phone calls. If you’re already trying to minimize the number of distractions in your life, sticking to the channels that already work for your closet relationships might be wise.

2) Make new contacts

I’ve been online for twenty years, and frankly I’ve always struggled with this. I am free in my opinions, but I am not free in my associations. I like solitude. I like being at home. I like being left alone by people for the most part, because generally speaking I’ve found I don’t like or trust them very much even when I find them interesting. Until very recently, online relationships also came with a certain degree of anonymity, which was nice if you wanted to keep your privacy, but bad if you wanted to establish trust. For the first time last year, I ventured out and met some people in real life that I’d only known in a virtual way up to that point. I did it mostly because I felt it was time to step out of my shell a bit. Every now and then it’s important to do something new, particularly something that scares you, and the circumstances were suitable enough to give it a try. The results were mixed. I made a lot of interesting new acquaintances but not any real friends. In retrospect, I’m not sure that taking things from the virtual world to the real world made those acquaintances any better. In some cases, it made them worse, or at least regrettable.

So as you might have guessed from that preamble, I’m not interested in collecting people on my friends list in order to run up the proverbial scoreboard. I don’t really care if a person is famous or “important”; I follow a few of those on Twitter because they’re good at adding to my experience there, but I’ve also stopped following countless others that I am a fan of in real life because they’re boring online. I don’t make friends with people in real life based on fortune or fame, and I haven’t learned to do it online yet either. Obviously, this is a much different strategy than many people use, and if social media is a game, I’m probably losing at it by those standards. If I have someone on my friends list who is not a member of Group #1, it’s because they are an acquaintance I enjoy communicating with online, or they use social media in such a way that it adds value to my own experience. Frankly, it still makes me nervous. Since my primary purpose in using social media has always been to communicate with Group #1, welcoming people from Group #2 into this circle of trust has always meant exposing myself a little bit to people who are essentially strangers. I suppose my attitude towards this has become: no pain, no gain. Once I become a hermit even in the virtual world, I should probably start worrying about my own mental state more than that of others.

In the late 17th century, my ancestor Ann Butler left Ireland for America as an indentured servant to Samuel Hersey in Maryland. On January 15, 1690 she appeared before the Somerset County Court after a grand jury indicted her because she “most wickedly and Shamefully comitted fornication, and brought forth a Molotta: Bastard. Child to the great dishonour of Almighty God, Scandall and evill Example to all the good people of this Province, and glorying in the fact, doth villifie the good Laws and Institutions of this Province.” Ann confessed that the father of her bastard child was “Emanuel Negro,” the slave of William Coulborne, who lived nearby. She was sentenced to 35 lashes and ordered to pay Hersey 1,200 pounds of tobacco in restitution for the child’s support and the lost working hours she spent nursing the child. It is unclear from the record whether Ann ever received her lashes, though, because Emanuel had also been indicted for “most wickedly, malitiously and felloniously steal kill and carry away one hogg of the value of two hundred pounds of tobacco,” and the Court offered to waive her punishment if she testified against him. The record shows that Emanuel pled not guilty and demanded a jury trial, who of course convicted him. Ann was listed as a witness. Emanuel was sentenced to twenty-five lashes, and later that year Hersey obtained a Court Order that Ann’s child would also be his servant. Neither Ann nor Emanuel appear to have learned their lesson, though, because they went on to have other children together who mysteriously do not appear on the bastardy bonds. Years later, Ann’s descendant Elizabeth (a “free mulatto female”) became the common law wife of Arthur Williams, a member of the North Carolina General Assembly, and from thence the family born out of “dishonour, scandal and evil,” was considered both landed and fully white.

I tell this story partly to illustrate that the criminalization of childbearing has deep roots in American jurisprudence. “Bastardy bonds” were as common in prior centuries as child support hearings are today, and served much the same purpose in protecting the county or parish from the expense of raising a child. When the pregnancy of a woman or birth of a child was brought to the attention of the court, a grand jury would indict her, a warrant was issued, and the woman was brought into Court. She was examined under oath and asked to declare the name of the child’s father. The alleged father was then served a warrant and required to post bond. If the woman refused to name the father she or some other interested party would post the bond. If the woman refused to post bond or declare the father’s identity, she was often sent to jail. In Ann’s case, Hersey posted her bond because he didn’t want his servant sitting in jail when she could be working, although the costs of the bond and providing for the child would be added to what she owed him. The threat of a jail sentence was true even in cases where race was not involved; the reason for Ann’s more serious sentence to 35 lashes was because her child wasn’t white. Bastardy bonds, and particularly that of Ann’s, fascinate me primarily because they illustrate the criminalization of pregnancy itself. In many if not most cases, the bond was posted, and there was no serious danger the county would suffer financially from the birth. Even if there were such a danger, I think most Americans would take offense to the idea that the government has a right to criminally punish a person for their choice to have a child.

Pregnancy and the birth of a child are not always welcome events from a personal or a societal standpoint. More than half the births in this country are the result of unplanned pregnancies, despite abstinence education, the availability of birth control, and legal abortions. It is still far too common for girls as young as twelve and thirteen to become mothers. Setting aside for a moment the fact that those pregnancies can’t possibly be consensual (though they’re usually treated like it), not only does giving birth to unwanted children typically afflict their own lives, it also endangers the life of the child who may not be properly provided for even with the best efforts of the mother. These children often present a burden on society as we attempt to provide for their welfare. The children may receive the care they need and grow up to be productive members of society, but more than likely their lives will end early after being a drain on the system and doing some harm along the way. Fathers may or may not be held responsible for their share in raising the child, and doing so costs the State an enormous amount of time and resources. This is the rationale the Courts used to justify the criminalization of childbearing under the bastardy bonds, and it’s the same rationale people today use to justify everything from more serious limitations on welfare programs to forced sterilization. The idea is that these women are unjustly benefiting from giving birth to children, or are too ignorant to know better, and that if we only punish them for it we’ll scare them straight. Thinking along these lines, Tennessee prosecutors have recently mounted a campaign across the state to lecture school kids on the criminal dangers of teen pregnancy.

Assuming for a moment you believe the State has the authority to decide who is allowed to have children (particularly when the parents are minors), do you really think that lecturing people about the consequences of their actions or punishing them after the fact is going to prevent pregnancies? This “daddy knows best” mentality might make us feel like we’ve done our paternalistic due diligence in disciplining these “bad girls,” but in reality it’s not even remotely constructive, particularly in preventing teen pregnancies. Did your parents telling you sex was bad or grounding you for being out too late ever stop you from having sex? No? Well, you’re not alone. This is why areas with abstinence-only education have a far higher teen pregnancy rate than areas that teach about condoms and birth control. People will have sex, you can rely on that. God hard-wired us to do it even before he told us not to. Indeed, “be fruitful and multiply” was the very first commandment. If you want people to stop getting pregnant or having babies, you’re going to need to present them with practical remedies and teach them to use those remedies responsibly. The data says this actually works, so it’s not just my idea. Furthermore, it follows the traditional American notion that we are all sovereign individuals who are ultimately responsible for our own actions. We are not subject to the government telling us what we can do and when we can do it and how. We invest that power in the government only insofar as it serves our common interest to prevent one individual asserting unjust power over other individuals.

This leads us to the flip-side of the paternalistic coin, where women aren’t just told they shouldn’t have babies, but are required to have them against their own interests. Abortion rights are weighed on a scale of the right of the fetus to exist versus the right of the woman to control her own body (or “privacy”). It’s a difficult area of law not only because it involves the continuation of human life (and thus strong emotions), but also because the life of the fetus is entirely dependent on the life of the mother. There aren’t any other common circumstances under the law where an individual is required to wholly give of themselves in support of another human being. To completely nullify the personhood of women by legally requiring them to give up their most fundamental right to control their own body would therefore seem unjust. In most pregnancies, the mother is glad to give her body to support the life of her child, and might even be willing to give up her own life if necessary to bring her fetus to term. It seems unnatural then to pit these two interests against each other, but inevitably there are circumstances when the continued existence of the fetus does indeed present a threat to the mother, and we are then forced to evaluate whose rights are supreme.

This leads to some fairly absurd logic, of course. Since pregnant women are already fully human persons with all its attendant legal rights, a great deal of the abortion debate has centered around the personhood of the fetus, or when precisely its human rights become equal to that of the mother. As long as the personhood of the mother outweighs that of the fetus, the fetus will always be at a legal disadvantage. Historically, personhood fully attached at birth, or when the baby took its first breath, since that was the point at which the life was fully viable on its own. Of course, with advances in technology, it’s no longer necessary to carry a fetus to full term for it to be viable outside of the womb, and many people believe that human life begins before the fetus is even biologically viable. Critics of late-term and partial-birth abortion point out that many of the fetuses aborted would have been viable, and sometimes the medical procedure in doing so nearly constitutes a birth.

Placing the personhood of the fetus on a sliding scale like this creates all sorts of legal problems, however. For instance, when we start measuring life by its potentiality, we end up in a place where any woman who refuses sexual intercourse is committing murder. The definition of human life is left at the mercy of technology. Either the “quickening” of human life occurs at some definite point (like birth, or less usefully, conception) from which we can measure the rights of the fetus against the rights of the mother, or it does not, and we must arbitrarily choose to always favor the fetus or always favor the mother. In the case of a recent Utah law, another potentiality question is raised that has long been a matter of litigation in civil courts: at what point does harming the fetus become an assault against its life? For instance, when a pregnant woman suffers harm that also harms her fetus, the woman (and/or her family members, depending on the jurisdiction) can sue the negligent party for damages to the fetus. This area of law is actually far more complicated than I want to cover here, but the underlying logic in these laws is that the woman has a property interest in the fetus she has invested in forming, and will of course suffer damages if the child is born with some defect due to another’s negligence, and is therefore entitled to compensation.

The specific problem with the Utah bill is, in cases where a woman has sought a non-medical abortion, she will be charged with a criminal offense for harming her own fetus. The criminal offense can arise out of mere “reckless conduct” (which was raised from a much lower standard of “negligence” in the original Bill), so that if, for instance, a pregnant woman were to drive too fast and get into a car crash that causes a miscarriage, she could go to jail for harming her own fetus. This takes the property interest for the fetus away from the mother, the father, or any other interested individual, and places it squarely in the hands of the State. We are no longer honoring the potential life of a fetus in order to provide restitution to the mother and her family when it is harmed; we are now punishing women who are fully human, for the sake of a fetus who is not. This Bill is a direct assault on the basis for legal abortions under the guise of attacking non-legal ones.

No one likes abortions, least of all the unfortunate women who find themselves in need of one. It is, however, a necessary evil for far too many people. Even if it were not a necessary evil, taking abortion rights away from women has catastrophic consequences for their status as human beings qualified for full protection under the law. It places their bodies firmly in the service of their children and the men who would require them to bear those children, regardless of whether they actually choose to do so, and that is nothing short of the definition of slavery. This is why abortion is and must remain legal, even if it means the continued sacrifice of so much human potential. Women are individuals endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, not broodmares little better than chattel. The nature of pregnancy not only presents us with the challenge of weighing the rights of the fetus against the rights of the mother, it also demands that we exercise particular compassion towards women who are put into the unique situation of making that choice.

Recently there was a Bill introduced in the Tennessee Legislature, and at least one other state, proposing a ban on the implantation of microchips in humans by any entity (government, corporation, etc.) without full disclosure and written consent, as well as provisions against discrimination for refusing to receive such an implant. The Bill is born out of a Christian belief in apocalpytic prophesy, which some believe predicts a Mark of the Beast being placed on the hand or forehead of all members of society, under the direction of the anti-Christ, in an effort to exert total control over the economy (and probably by extension, every other aspect of our lives).

Naturally, much pointing and laughing ensued. The pointing and laughing centered on two key points: 1) those crazy, crazy Christians!, and 2) Come on, we’re not seriously in danger of all being chipped! Don’t we have better things to do with the Legislature’s time? We still haven’t memorialized Michael Jackson, after all, and there are honky tonks to shut down and Girls Gone Wild to throw a sheet over. I happen to agree with the first point. I think this eschatology is a little nuts, and insofar as I am a Christian, I don’t follow it. However, the second point is worth some discussion. This is not simply some fundamentalist Christians getting together and trying to make a law against the figments of their imaginations. Human chipping does currently exist. In fact, it was already being used as a replacement for identification and currency in other countries years ago.

So let’s set the prophesy aside and look at this a little more objectively. If the technology exists, and could conceivably be built out to monitor large populations in the foreseeable future, is it really a bad thing? The argument is definitely two-sided. We’ve already become used to identification numbers and cards as a means of accessing the economy, and in many ways they’ve made our lives more convenient. They’ve also made it more difficult for marginalized populations such as the poor, the homeless, and undocumented workers to access that same economy. Anyone with a GPS-enabled smart phone is already familiar with the joys and sorrows of always being found. On one hand, having a location device with you at all times makes it easier to interface with the world around you. On the other hand, it’s a stalker’s paradise, and it’s easy to envision that if services like foursquare were made “always on” and “mandatory,” your ability to get lost and be alone from employers, marketers, the government, etc. would disappear.

Before the general public gets to enjoy their shiny new implants, however, it’s safe to assume more vulnerable populations will receive them first. VeriChip has already begun chipping Alzheimer’s patients. It’s natural to suppose prisoners and parolees will soon replace their wrist and ankle bracelets in the same way. Already, a President has suggested that such technology could be used to monitor the movement and employment of illegal immigrants. Perhaps like pet owners microchip their pets to make identification and tracking easier, we will start chipping our children to protect against kidnapping and runaways. Will the chips later be taken out? Probably not. Once we’re comfortable enough with adopting these kinds of implants for these purposes, they’ll soon be accepted generally and used in a variety of other ways.

Each of these examples is couched in its own policy issues, and deserves a debate in its own right. The problems involved often boil down to a single issue: when does public safety outweigh the right to privacy? In the case of Alzheimer’s patients, the likelihood of their recovering from their condition is slim to none (unlike children, who will grow up and not need to be tracked by parents one day), and there exists a strong safety concern that likely outweighs their right to privacy. The worst danger is to themselves, after all, so it could be argued, of all vulnerable populations, they stand to benefit the most from such an implant. Prisoners, parolees, and illegal immigrants are another problem altogether. They are by the nature of their class not willing participants. Real consent in such situations would be impossible. In most cases, they will not always be a member of the class, either. Will the implants be removable in those cases, or will statutory schemes be put in place to determine when an offender is bad enough to be permanently chipped? If the chips are not removable, will they be editable to account for changes in circumstance or correction of errors? Nobody wants to end up being called “Not Sure” for the rest of their lives. If they can be edited, how are they more secure than the identification and tracking technology we already use?

The most interesting thing to me about the above examples, is that with each of these populations that are regularly cited as good reasons for RFID chipping, the chipping is paternalistic and/or punitive. There is a fundamental assumption that the chip is needed by government and corporate entities to monitor and control individuals. What happens when insurance companies require an implant for your medical records, or even a biorythmic monitoring device, as a prerequisite for coverage? Do you think insurance companies should have automatic access to that depth of information? Do you not envision ways that might be seriously abused? Would the benefits to individuals actually outweigh the risks, or would this system be primarily for the good of the corporations? What if employers start requiring similar implants in employees for identification and security access? Do you want the company you work for to have the ability to know where you are at all times? Do you think such knowledge might present opportunities for discrimination? It is exactly this type of monitoring and control by the government that nearly half the Bill of Rights is designed to protect us against. One could make an argument that corporations hold just as much power over individuals as the government does, in many cases more so. Perhaps we ought to make sure that we do not lose our basic rights to them, either.

There will be people who think the benefits of using an implant for these purposes outweighs the risks, and who will consent to using them. In fact, they’re already doing it. This Bill continues to allow them to enjoy this new technology as much as they please. What it forbids is people being chipped against their consent, and discrimination against those individuals for not doing so. I think we can all agree that as human beings we have a perfect right to choose what devices we implant in our bodies and which devices we do not implant in our bodies. We also have a perfect right to not be discriminated against because we choose to maintain our privacy rights. Indeed, the issue of what populations can be required by the State to possess a photo ID is still being debated in this country. If we do not want to require photo identification of all individuals for fear of fascist oversight, why would we oppose a Bill that would grant the same protection against chip implants? The same dangers of requiring a voter to possess photo identification could potentially apply tenfold to this. Do not let the crazy company fool you. This is a serious issue, and one that will need to be addressed in both ethical and legal ways in the future.

Last night, Governor Bredesen revealed his final budget proposal, which includes additional layoffs of 1,363 people in addition to the elimination of 456 unfilled positions. This follows the elimination of over 2,000 State jobs in last year’s budget proposal, even though while some State workers were losing their jobs, others were getting pay raises. The State payroll amounts to only 1% to 9% of the total State budget (depending on who you talk to), and The Tennessee State Employees Association has rightfully pointed out that there are several things the government could do to preserve those jobs while still cutting expenses.

Laying off State employees has nothing to do with reducing spending and everything to do with the appearance of reducing spending. It’s a political ploy to look as though the government is being fiscally responsible, while they’re actually increasing spending and often cutting the things that would benefit their constituents the most. Voters crying out for “smaller government,” inevitably paid for like this in the life blood of actual jobs, are just as much to blame for these measures as the leaders who respond to their demands in such a counter-productive way. Where government gives back to taxpayers with jobs and services, they are doing good work. Making the government smaller by making it less of a service organization to its people only makes its existence more tyrannical.

So what are we to do in a bad budget year? In 2008, the Executive branch spent as much on copy paper (around $2.6 million) as it did to feed every inmate in Tennessee prisons (around $2.7 million), or approximately 1/5 of the Department of Health’s pharmaceutical spending (approximately $11 million). Was that really necessary? Could we save a few more jobs by saving some paper? Measures like that may seem insignificant in terms of a $400 million budget cut, but every person who has ever budgeted a household can tell you that small efficiencies eventually add up to great surpluses, and it’s certainly not insignificant to the flesh and blood individuals who would get to keep their jobs because of it.

Laying off State employees reduces the services ever more needy Tennesseans will be able to receive, drains the State of skilled workers who know how their programs operate (knowledge we may never get back after they are gone, thus making government even more inefficient in the long term), and creates even more unemployment in a State that is already acutely in need of more jobs. Every State worker spends their paycheck here, giving back their salaries in terms of goods, services, and tax revenues.The state government, in fact, is the largest employer in Tennessee. It does not set a good example for other entities doing business here when the government pursues more and more layoffs instead of making the sacrifices necessary to preserve jobs for Tennesseans. By creating more unemployment, the State is merely feeding the economic fire that got us here in the first place.

There’s been a lot of demand for a kerfuffle recipe lately on Twitter, but none have surfaced, so I thought I should share mine with you. It’s been passed down through my family since we were but poor Scots living on the lowland coast near Dumfries, but is nonetheless quite delicious.

There’s also been a lot of misunderstanding about how this desert got its name. Some people suppose (like these poor, misguided souls here: http://www.fudgeheaven.co.uk/) that “fuffle” is a description of the taste of the dish, being a combination of a fudge and a truffle, but of course they’re dropping the first part of the word and ignoring its ancient roots as a Scottish cuisine. In order to maintain the proud Scots tradition of the kerfuffle (because aren’t all Scots traditions proud?), I’ve been instructed by my forebears that when I pass on the recipe, I must educate the new cook as to the real meaning and history behind it. I beg you, if you should ever pass on this recipe, to please do the same.

Hundreds of years ago, poor Scots would build piles of stones called “carns” on the burial sites of the dearly departed as grave markers. As they mourned, they would dirty and dishevel their clothing. The word for this practice in Gaelic was “fuffle.” Once the mourning was over, the Scots would return to the home of the departed to partake in good food and drink, and singing and reminiscing, in the proper fashion of a wake. The ritual taken as a whole was soon called a “carn-fuffle,” although gradually over time the word’s spelling was altered and its meaning transformed to refer to only two things: 1) a raucous affair surrounding a regrettable public event, and 2) the most popular desert traditionally served at a “kerfuffle.”

So with all that out of the way, here is the recipe:

Prep Time:
10 Min

Cook Time:
10 Min

Ready In:
1 Hr 20 Min

Ingredients

* 3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
* 1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
* 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* salt to taste
* 1/4 cup heavy cream
* 1/4 cup raspberry flavored liqueur (can substitute an equal amount of other flavored liqueur to suit the particular kerfuffle, for example, Bailey’s Irish Cream if the person is not a Scot)
* 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

1. Spray a 9×9 inch pan with non-stick cooking spray, and line with wax paper.
2. In a microwave-safe bowl, combine 3 cups chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk. Heat in microwave until chocolate melts, stirring occasionally. Be careful not to let it scorch. Stir in the vanilla and salt. Spread into pan, and cool to room temperature.
3. In a microwave-safe bowl, combine cream, liqueur, and 2 cups chocolate chips. Heat in microwave until the chocolate melts; stir until smooth. Cool to lukewarm, then pour over the fudge layer. Refrigerate until both layers are completely set, about 1 hour. Cut into 1 inch pieces.

P.S. I really got it here: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Raspberry-Truffle-Fudge/Detail.aspx

My life is one giant statistical anomaly. I try to draw inspiration from that fact, but mostly it scares me. What if I wake up one day and realize that I didn’t get to where I am by defying the odds through intelligence and hard work, but through sheer dumb luck? What if the luck runs out? The math says I shouldn’t even be here in the first place, so what’s to say I can keep going? What if everyone realizes (as I’m usually convinced they already have), that I don’t really belong, that I am, essentially, pretending to be one of them? The higher I reach, the worse the fear. Usually I cope by taking a few steps forward, then retreating into my comfort zone long enough to recover, and then taking a few more steps forward, but the going is slow and I know I’d be more productive if I could just let go of the fear.

Most of what I’ve experienced in life has taught me that achievement is not tied to predictable causation. You work hard, you sacrifice, you’re honest and trustworthy, and life just beats you down harder, while the wicked or clueless still go on prospering. My religion and politics largely stems from my dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and my desire to change it if we possibly can. This philosophy doesn’t give you confidence no matter how much you achieve, however; in fact it makes you want to check out of life unless you’re one of the lucky few who end up being dealt a good hand anyway (and you don’t think about it too much). I made the choice ten years ago to keep fighting even if I didn’t get anything out of it in the end. It was a crazy decision, but I believe a little insanity is needed to continue living in the face of reality, so I chose to go out with the proverbial guns blazing. So far it’s worked out for me, but I still know in my gut that could change at any moment.

There are strengths and weaknesses to living life without serious regard to consequences. I’ve found a good rule of thumb given any situation is to ask myself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” If I can live with that outcome, then I might as well proceed. It’s not that I don’t believe in cause and effect. Obviously, some consequences are easily predictable, or should at least be expected, but ultimately life is a random mess and we no more earn what we get than we deserve it. Real morality doesn’t happen in the realm of cause and effect, it takes place in the borderlands where rewards and punishments no longer demonstrate a direct relationship to good and bad behavior. Morality is what you do, even when it doesn’t benefit you. It’s also what you don’t do, even if it would.

On the one hand, this equips an individual to respond to setbacks without being overwhelmed by personal failure. It’s an outlook for those at the bottom, who are most often and most deeply subject to the vagaries of existence. On the other hand, it isn’t very encouraging of serious investments and it can lead to a lack of personal responsibility. Americans in particular are in love with the Horatio Alger mythos, of the superman who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps and has total control over his own fate if he but believes and works hard enough. Sometimes, this mythos proves out. I’ve often read stories of immigrants who rose out of the worst sort of violence, persecution, and poverty, made incredible journeys across deserts and oceans, and ultimately realized the American dream, and I marvel that opportunity can build us up just as quickly as it can cast us down. Certainly the stars aligned for these individuals in ways they did not for others, and certainly if they had not invested their own faith and effort they would not have achieved what they did.

The only remedy I’ve discovered for such despair is to actively choose the alternative in the face of it. Faith in this sense is not an idea or a belief, it’s something you must do. One of my favorite quotes is from a Scots author named William Paton Ker, who was quoted at length by Tolkien in his essay on Beowulf. He once wrote, “The Northern gods…are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason; but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.” Dumbledore made a similar point when he exhorted Harry Potter on the difference between doing what is easy, and doing what is right. It’s easy to give in, to check out, to join the forces of evil if necessary in order to live a comfortable life, but what is right is to choose to create a world worth living in even in the face of your own defeat. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a happy ending. If you’re not – like the majority of the humans on this planet – well, at least you’ve lived life on the side of the gods.

I’ve been subject to a good deal of religious training over my twenty-eight years. My great-grandfather was a founding Elder of West Nashville Heights Church of Christ. My uncles and cousins were deacons and elders there. I went to their pre-school, and then attended services with my family every Sunday and some Wednesdays until just before my seventh birthday, when my mother and I converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our family told my mother she was taking me to hell in a handbasket. I remember sitting on the couch between my two great-aunts, and one of them asking me, “Why do you want to go to that church with your mother, Amber? Don’t you love Jesus anymore?” To which the six year old replied, “Of course I love Jesus! I’m joining his Church.” They disowned us.

I was a faithful Mormon for the next twelve years. My religion was the most important thing in the world to me. My relationships with Heavenly Father and Jesus were the one thing that really gave me comfort and peace. I took joy in reading the scriptures, in going to meetings, even in keeping the moral standards. I earned awards in Seminary. I wrote talks for the high priests. I did genealogy and went to the temple whenever possible. I received my patriarchal blessing. I also went to Catholic school.

I started out looking forward to the experience – some of my extended family was Catholic, and it’s the largest Christian denomination in the world, so naturally I had some curiosity. Joseph Smith had an ecumenical bent, even if the LDS Church never acquired it, and I took his teachings over theirs even then. I enjoyed religion class and Sodality and the retreats at the St. Cecilia Mother House. Mass was a welcome respite during the week. When I returned to public school in college, I felt the lack of a chapel on campus. It had always been a refuge for me to go in there to pray. Unfortunately, the Sisters didn’t always appreciate my fervor. In fact, the more I expressed my agreement with them, the more agitated they seemed to become. I tried taking different tacks with them, but none of them were successful. Soon, my Mormonism again became a problem. I wasn’t entirely surprised at it by then, but it was still a disappointment.

After high school my faith changed drastically. As you might expect, I’d been a strict conservative up to that point. Unfortunately, my life experiences didn’t exactly fit within a conservative paradigm, and I was growing up. I was beginning to see the disconnect between what I thought and what I believed to be true. It took a number of years before the disillusionment was complete, but eventually I left the LDS Church. Ironically, it was not for the same reasons my family thought I should do it. I still shake my head sometimes when I think of my first step-mother, who also went to Church of Christ, showing me “The Godmakers” when I was nine years old. I would sit there and refute the entire thing point by point with her. If only she had taken the time to actually get to know the religion (and open herself up to a little liberalism), she probably would have gotten a lot further along with my deprogramming.

After I left the LDS Church, I joined a feminist Seminary. Part of my motivation was to study religion from a different viewpoint for a change, and another part of my motivation was to seek a new community where I didn’t feel I had to check my evolving faith at the door. After about three years, I earned a doctorate in theology and accepted ordination as an interfaith minister, and eventually the Director put me on the Board. Not long afterwards, she invited me to join her family in polygamy. I decided I didn’t want anything else to do with cults after that.

That was a little over a year and a half ago. It’s felt like a lifetime. I’ve been reading a lot of books on atheism and staying as far away as possible from anything having to do with religion or spirituality. In a way, it’s been good for me. One of the major problems with the previous 26 years was that I didn’t practice nearly enough skepticism, and ended up with some really kooky beliefs in the process. Relativism didn’t help at all. I needed to take a break and a fast to figure out where I actually stood. Recently, the fast has come to an end. It had to. It was driving me into some very dark places.

I am, evidently, the type of person who needs faith in her life. I will be the first to admit that it’s a drug, but it’s a drug that keeps me sane, so I’m not going to refuse it. My belief system has been subject to a major overhaul about once every seven years, and I just turned twenty-eight. I’ve decided that it’s time to determine exactly what I want to keep, and what isn’t worth having. The past seven years of searching have given me a pretty good idea of what’s available, and the fourteen years before that have taught me exactly what doesn’t interest me. I plan to whittle down and smooth away until I have a faith that I can truly live.

The most important thing I’ve found in my faith is healing. Religion is nothing if it does not transform us moment by moment into our better selves. Religion is nothing if it does not give us the power and the right focus to make our world whole. This is at the heart of every religion, really, but the problem is that so much of the rest of it is taken up with the theology and rituals meant to open us up to that idea in the first place. When we idolize those things instead of seeing them as the means to an end, we miss the point of religion entirely.

A friend of mine once observed that it’s impossible to have more than one lifestyle. You can be a Democrat, or a Christian, or a soccer player, or a vegan, or a Renfaire re-enactor, but it’s difficult to be more than one of those things at any given time. Personally, I thought his statement was bullshit, but then I’ve never been very good at fitting in with a group, and I stopped identifying myself under any particular social label(s) a long time ago.

The consequence of being curious about everything is that I’ve sampled nearly every subculture this country (and a few others) has to offer, and I’ve taken a little (and sometimes a lot) from nearly every one of them. I’ve learned in the process that I can enjoy a lot of different activities, a lot of different ideas, and a lot of different people, without dedicating the rest of my life to any them. The result is that I’m undisciplined and virtually incapable of commitment, but it has also provided the advantages of adaptability and versatility. I can’t help it – I am a liberal by nature. It’s vital to my happiness that I embrace this fact instead of fighting against it.

Ironically, my tastes still tend towards the traditional. I love family, I just don’t define it under the terms of 1950s sitcom comedies. I love being at home. I enjoying gardening and crocheting, reading and writing, making and listening to music. My vision of bliss is a farm on a lake. I believe in giving service, in healing, in prayer. I think that education, freedom, and conscientious capitalism, can take us further along the evolutionary road than anything else we’ve come up with as a species.

The Five Rules of the Good Steward

1. Your money is power. Is this purchase the most beneficial use for it?

This is probably the most complicated rule, but it’s also the most important. The reason it’s complicated is that the results are never the same for any two people, or even any one person from moment to moment. The reason it’s important is that it rules out most purchases before their ethics even becomes a problem. Do I really need to spend that $50 at the bookstore? Would the money be better saved, or donated to charity, or applied within my budget, or spent on a better value somewhere else? This test isn’t meant to rule out every single purchase we make for fun or pleasure, since of course there will always be something else we “should” be doing instead of those things, but it’s meant to put those purchases into their proper context, especially if you’re in the habit of spending outside of your priorities. Pleasure should always be one of your priorities, since humans can’t experience happiness without it, but in order to really enjoy it you don’t want to sacrifice something else that’s actually more important to you.

2. The first value of humanity is life. Is this purchase sustainable?

Eco-friendly is the new black, so this is getting less and less difficult to live by. This isn’t just about being “green,” although that’s a significant part of it. It wasn’t very long ago when our ancestors understood exactly where and how every item they owned was made. Of course, their markets were much smaller then, and it made their lives shorter and more difficult in many ways. We are blessed to live in a world that offers so much bounty. However, like all material goods, that bounty comes at a price. Unfortunately, the modern economy has drastically undervalued its goods in the interests of making quick profits, and the end result is that we will all suffer even greater consequences than our ancestors did if we do not balance the scales. The only way we can make this change in our culture is to demand it as consumers. It might be more expensive to purchase sustainable products in the short-term, yes, but the point here is that we pay the fair price now, so that we don’t have to pay for it with interest later.

3. The second value of humanity is freedom. Does this purchase do any harm?

The dictates of conscientious capitalism belong here. Is the product the result of slave labor? Were animals tortured to make it? Am I financing terrorism by purchasing it? Adversely, was it produced by a person or organization that works in opposition to these evils? It’s probably safe to say that most of the time we don’t even know the answers to these questions, unless we happen to feel so passionately about these causes that we do a lot of homework beforehand. If we as Americans are willing to believe that capitalism is not only the expression of freedom, however, but that capitalism is the precursor of freedom, we should be careful to put our money where our mouth. Butter, not bombs.

4. The third value of humanity is community. Is it local?

Put simply, don’t shit where you eat. The majority of the food we eat nowadays is anything but locally-produced. That salad you bought at the grocery down the street is the product of thousands of miles of transportation and refrigeration costs, and the result of a massive industrialized agricultural industry that all too often makes us sick instead of feeding us. Do you like your neighborhood? Would you like it to be better? In the event there is some sort of disruption to our national and international supply chains, would you like to maintain your quality of life? Then buy locally. Frequent locally-owned stores and purchase locally-made products. The circle of life flows much more smoothly when it begins and ends in the same place.

5. To give is to receive. Receiving is pretty swell, too.

Don’t hold anything back, and you will have everything you ever need. It’s not that material possessions are bad, or that God wants us all to take a vow of poverty. It’s the prioritization of those things over the things that truly matter which creates problems for humanity. We should be just as willing to give it all up as we are to welcome it all in. Then, happiness becomes inevitable.

Luke the Apostle relates a story in his Gospel where Jesus is asked by a certain ruler what he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies by asking him if he knows the commandments: do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, and honor your father and your mother. The ruler replies that he has kept all of these commandments from his youth. Jesus sees where the man’s heart really is, though. He gives the ruler a challenge. In order to inherit eternal life, he needs to do just one more thing – sell all he has, distribute it to the poor, and come be one of his disciples.

Of course, Jesus was homeless at the time, and being a disciple meant you’d have a rock for your pillow, too. The ruler declares this to be impossible. He asks Jesus if we are all supposed to become ascetics, or lose any hope of salvation. Jesus responds that as long as a person cares more about monetary wealth than spiritual wealth, the kingdom of heaven will be impossible for them to enter.

In Leviticus 19: 9-10, when the Lord teaches Moses the commandments he is to deliver to the Israelites, he places giving a portion of one’s wealth to the poor in importance right after avoiding idolatry, keeping the Sabbath holy, and honoring one’s parents. In Malachi, the Lord compares the failure to pay tithes into the storehouse for the support of the poor to literally robbing God. Several thousand years later, the Lord instructs another prophet with the words, “if though lovest me thou shalt serve me and keep all my commandments. And behold, thou wilt remember the poor, and consecrate of thy properties for their support that which thou hast to impart unto them, with a covenant and a deed which cannot be broken.”

The Book of Mosiah records one of the greatest sermons ever delivered on the importance of giving.

“For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for the riches which we have of every kind?
“And now, if God, who has created you, on whom you are dependent for your lives and for all that ye have and are, doth grant unto you whatsoever ye ask that is right, in faith, believing that ye shall receive, O then, how ye ought to impart of the substance that ye have one with another.
“And if ye judge the man who putteth up his petition to you for your substance that he perish not, and condemn him, how much more just will be your condemnation for withholding your substance, which doth not belong to you but to God, to whom also your life belongeth; and yet ye put up no petition, nor repent of the thing which thou hast done.
“I say unto you, wo be unto that man, for his substance shall perish with him; and now, I say these things unto those who are rich as pertaining to the things of this world.
“And again, I say unto the poor, ye who have not and yet have sufficient, that ye remain from day to day; I mean all you who deny the beggar, because you have not; I would that ye say in your hearts that: I give not because I have not, but if I had I would give.
“And now, if ye say this in your hearts ye remain guiltless, otherwise ye are condemned; and your condemnation is just for ye covet that which ye have not received.
“And behold, I say these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God.”

Giving is not just a Christian idea. Like the Golden Rule, it is an imperative of every religion, everywhere. It is a part of nearly every moral or ethical system on Earth, even the ones that do not profess a belief in God. It is rooted in the communal, tribal way of life that human civilization springs from. Although some of us might be tempted from time to time into a greedy sense of callous superiority, just like the one warned against in Mosiah, for the most part human beings are a giving people who find charity both natural and rewarding.

Giving isn’t even a wholly selfless act. Often people who are habitually charitable describe how much more they get back in return, and it’s difficult to ignore the positive changes that charity can create for the communities we live in. The scriptures teach us that when we give, we are not only obeying a commandment, but we are opening our lives up to be filled with so much wealth, “that there shall not be room enough to receive it” (Malachi 3: 10).

My mother always paid her tithing, and I started tithing at an early age, primarily because we attended a church where tithing was taught as an important principle and where certain benefits of membership would not be available to us if we did not tithe. At first I would tithe out of the money my family gave me, or what I had earned from babysitting, but it became a steady 10% of my earnings once I started working regularly.

I learned from experience – including quite a few minor miracles over the years – that tithing was a good investment. As my mother used to say, “You can’t afford not to tithe.” God has given us quite a few commandments, and obeying most of them is a good idea even if you don’t believe in heaven or hell, but there is always a covenant relationship involved on some level that promises something rewarding in return for your obedience. God might rather us obey for the sake of doing God’s will, but when the negative reinforcement of eternal damnation doesn’t have any effect, he’s not above bribery to inspire us to do what is right. In my experience, some of these covenant relationships pay off better than others. Tithing is one of the winners.

My testimony aside, however, eventually I stopped attending church, and then of course I stopped paying my tithing. As Melissa Scott likes to put it, “you pay where you eat.” Tithing is meant to be paid into the Lord’s storehouse, and traditionally that means giving it to the temple or church to be distributed to the needy by the clergy. There are problems with this model, which is part of why I stopped participating in it.

It’s not that the money wasn’t being given to the poor. The LDS Church has some outstanding welfare programs, better even than most religious organizations. The problem was just as much my own extremism as their failures. I cannot justify spending millions upon millions of dollars to build temples, when there are still homeless families in our communities who need affordable housing. How could we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on printed Sunday School materials, when there are people who are going hungry?

It’s not that temples and lesson manuals are bad investments. They can enrich our spiritual lives. However, I’m not really sure that we need them to draw closer to God, the way other people need a roof over their head and food in their belly. I’ve found that the less we rely on physical means to draw closer to divinity, the easier it is for us to find that source. We often talked in the church about how strong the faith of our forebears was compared to our own. Perhaps that strength had something to do with the fact that they had to work for it. Volunteering to help those in need of help has probably done more for the salvation of my soul than all the hours I spent in the temple, and I enjoyed attending the temple a lot.

Some Christians will disagree with me, but I’ve read the Bible more than a few times, and the message I’ve gotten from Jesus is that he’d rather have us working to help the poor than sitting in a pew at church. We are called to be the “salt of the Earth,” but the salt doesn’t spread very much flavor when it stays in the shaker on the table. Churches were initially organized in the Roman Empire to give catechumens the opportunity to learn the basic teachings and practices of their faith in a safe environment. After this initial training, they were baptized, and unless they continued to be involved in the training of new believers, they went out into the world and busied themselves with living a Christian life. It was only after Christianity became both legal (and thus, fashionable) that it was desirable to be seen at church all that often.

In the words of Susan Ertz, “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” The issue is a question of priorities. There is nothing wrong with worship, as long as you get some measure of spiritual nourishment out of it. However, is that what you’re really doing? Would your time and effort be better spent elsewhere? It’s probably better to go to church than spend your Sabbath in front of the television, but it’s certainly not better than volunteering at a shelter, or teaching a child to read, or cleaning up a park.

These are minor concerns in contrast with the real abuses, though. Americans live in a capitalist society, and Mormonism in particular is an American religion. Channeling the tithing through the church, and then to the poor, opens up the church to a serious temptation to be a “respecter of persons.” We tend to value people in this country depending upon the financial wealth they’ve accumulated, which is in direct opposition to the values of the Gospel. Priesthood callings are frequently given to the wealthiest men in the congregation. Having experienced the abuses of at least one of these Bishops for myself, I have trouble believing that their appointment was really the will of God so much as it was a guarantee for the church of greater access to their bank accounts.

Because the LDS Church has such effective welfare programs, many people join the church in order to receive its financial help. I find nothing really wrong with this, not just because I have no idea how sincere their testimony might actually be, but primarily because I’ve known so many Mormons who are members of the church for other, less than faithful reasons, such as the fact that they were born into it, and although they might not really believe much of it anymore it would be too socially difficult to be honest about it and leave. If I’m going to take their membership seriously, I’m certainly going to respect the membership of the poor who came to the church for help and were grateful to receive it.

Unfortunately, most welfare recipients aren’t greeted in this fashion by other members. During my membership, I was the daughter of a single mother, and we weren’t wealthy. There were many times when we could have gone to the church and asked for financial help and received it. Once, when it was a question of actually becoming homeless, we did receive some help for a couple months. For all the other years we were members, we paid our tithing and did not take from the storehouse, and yet I lost track of the number of times members of the priesthood and their wives outright stated or implied that we were attending the church only to live off *their* tithing donations. It was a ready way to dismiss our presence, and even our testimonies.

The final reason I decided to leave the LDS Church was another tithing issue, at least in part. The Mormons recently spent over $25 million dollars in California to prevent gay marriage from being legalized. Setting aside the hypocrisy of an organization that once protested over the government’s lack of authority to regulate marriage when it was their right to marry on the line, that was $25 million dollars that could have been spent on any number of problems of much more importance in light of the commandments given to us by Jesus Christ. How many starving children would that have fed, and for how long? How much medicine could it have distributed to the sick, or to prevent the spread of illness? How many slaves could it have freed? I have a hard time imagining that is where Jesus would have directed that money if he’d been the one writing the checks.

Last Christmas, I spent some time meditating, and I came to the realization that I still needed to tithe, even if I wasn’t tithing to a particular religious organization. The rationale Christ gave is still an issue for us – there are still needy people in the world, and I still have the means to help minimize their suffering. It would be morally wrong for me to do nothing under those circumstances. Besides, I grew up on cartoons, which means I’ve always wanted to save the world. Who really needs convincing once that kind of power is put into their hands?

The problem at that point was not whether to tithe, but how to tithe. I had to find a new storehouse. In the spirit of “pay where you eat,” I decided to start locally. I’d been hearing a lot about Charlie Strobel and the Campus for Human Development at that time, particularly Room in the Inn. Metro had recently passed the anti-panhandling laws downtown, and working there and riding the bus at night through Vine Hill on the way to law school had given me some opportunity to observe the homelessness problem in Nashville firsthand.

The Nashville Scene ran an article on the panhandling laws that quoted a common reaction by people who didn’t want to give to beggars because, “there’s plenty of legitimate places they can get help.” Father Strobel’s response was that the demand for services to the homeless in Nashville far exceeded the charities’ capacity to provide them, and that they haven’t received any increase in donations from people saying, “I’m giving to you instead of giving to the panhandlers.” I thanked him for the call to repentance, and wrote him a check.

Once I started looking, I found storehouses everywhere. I eventually decided to balance out my local focus with some global charities as well, primarily for practical reasons. Since I had taken on the responsibility of essentially being the Lord’s financial manager, and since I was going to be receiving such high dividends back in return, I wanted to make sure the investment was put in a place where it would earn the highest payoff.

Fifty dollars in Afghanistan or the Congo changes a lot more lives than it does in Tennessee. You’ve watched Charlie Wilson’s War. How would our lives be different today if we’d just built a couple schools? Heifer International was already one of my favorite charities, so I started including them in my monthly tithe. More recently, I decided I was ready for a more personal commitment, so I became a sponsor through Women for Women International.

Muhammad Yusuf, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on “social business,” once called charity the “trickle-down” method of solving social problems. Giving money here and there might make us feel good, and it might even help, especially in immediate, short-term emergencies, but it doesn’t really help anyone in the long run. Furthermore, it disassociates the giver from the receiver.

This not only cheats you out of some of the value of this kind of exchange, but it doesn’t exactly follow the teachings of Christ. Jesus had a habit of “dining with sinners.” His tale of the Good Samaritan is a hands-on way of helping. It is meant to teach us that simply giving cash every now and then isn’t the point of giving. The idea is to tear down the boundaries that separate us and inspire us to engage in thoughts of superiority. He taught us principles of compassion and community, of truly loving one’s neighbor, at least enough to get out there and help them with your heart and your hands as well as your wallet.

This Christmas, I’ve decided I need to take this kind of tithing more seriously. The definition is ten percent of your income or increase. In our society, this usually comes in the form of currency, and so we give our cash. I’ve been wondering lately, though, what would happen if everyone started tithing their time instead, or at least including their time as a portion of their giving? What if I dedicated ten percent of my working hours every month to helping others? How might that change the world? How would I change from the experience?