David Harris recently had a thought-provoking article on Huffington Post (link), entitled "It's not about Israel." I received a copy by mail and then checked the site to be sure that what I received had not been selectively edited. It had not.

Before I go further, let me say that I hold no animosity toward Arabs as a whole, nor toward the Islam religion. One of my sons is hosting a Moslem girl from Indonesia as an exchange student for a year. She's a delightful person who has sung in church choirs and plans soon to participate in a Jewish Passover seder. When I lived in Toledo I had many contacts with business owners who were Arabic immigrants; on average they were more fair and conscientious in their dealings than the majority of entrepreneurs.

Looking back 500 years, it was Moslems who preserved ancient writings and employed medical knowledge handed down from the Greek and Roman empires. Continue...

Anyone who's studied the neurological effects of marijuana, including the long-term and sometimes irreversible effects, knows that it's not a harmless high. In some ways, I think it's the most dangerous recreational drug in our society, just because it seems so benign. You know that an overdose of heroin or cocaine can kill you instantly, you see hardcore alcoholics stumbling around on the street trying to bum enough money for another bottle of whatever. But you often can't tell a daily pot smoker from someone who's never touched a joint in his or her life.

Unless the individual has been a daily user for a number of years, and you've just given him or her a short-term memory test. Or it's someone who just happened to have some innate paranoid or sociopathic tendencies that got magnified many times by the cannabinol collecting in the cerebral cortex. Or a long-term user who's hard to motivate to do much of anything. Or someone who's high at the moment and carrying on what he or she thinks is a profound conversation, that runs something like "I'm just like, wow, you know, 'cause it's like, there for me, and, you gotta be there to understand..." Continue...

Here I was, walking across beautiful downtown Chicago in a charming drizzle, with gentle 30 mph breezes, the temperature a balmy 43 degree fahrenheit. (I love Chicago, even when it's being a beast, just like my wife.) Just to make everything perfect, I was dangerously hungry. No, I'm not diabetic or hypoglycemic; I mean dangerous to pigeons and small children and anything else edible that came within grabbing distance. Too hungry for whatever I could have grabbed at a Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts, and too busy to squeeze into a serious sitdown restaurant. Suddenly I realized one of the ways New York City has it all over Chicago: In midtown Manhattan at least, there is a Korean deli on every block. I think it's a city ordinance. There must be sidewalks and streetlights and Korean delis.

In my visits there, I've relied on the abundance of Korean delis to protect me from starvation and charges of cannibalism. Maybe others have had different experiences, but I always found a healthy variety of ready-to-eat foods, without having to wait a long time, and courteous service, and usually some modest sit-and-eat accomodation. Major convenience. And I never needed a stomach pump or antibiotics as a result of eating at one of these establishments.

Later, when I'd had a meal and my usual self-indulgent beverage, my thoughts drifted from Korean delis to Koreans in general, of whom I've never met any I disliked, to Asians in general, and immigrants in general. From there I thought that we tend to underestimate enormously what immigrants do for us, and we tend to overestimate enormously the problems they cause.

In my opinion, one of the faults of our culture is that we tend to like simple solutions, to deny that there's any such thing as a complex problem. Our patriotism also tends to be overly simplistic. In fact, in many Americans, it's jingoist and belligerent. Some think that the measure of how good an American you are is dependent on how well you speak English. Excuse me for bragging, but I know more about English grammar than the vast majority of those people, and some of those who get their noses most out of joint about the horrors of multilingualism don't know a nominative from an accusative and couldn't conjugate most verbs properly if their lives depended on it.

This isn't a profound statement, and virtually everyone has heard it: At any time, immigrants of the most recent wave have been a favored object of discrimination. I have thoughts about why blacks, regardless of how long their ancestors have been here, are perenially lumped treated as such a group, but that's a subject for a separate article.

So historically, many native-born Americans have tended to blame the "micks" and "chinks" and "krauts" and "spicks," but that's mostly our less cultured brethren. The more polite tend to say things like "the reason there's less alcoholism and crime in ______ is because it's a more homogeneous society." Which essentially means the same thing.

Ironically, we sort of know that this is wrong, so we make it politically incorrect to make any reference to ethnicity. In so doing, I think we miss the opportunity -- the obligation -- to recognize what immigrants do for us. Even those illegal immigrants from Latin America.

There. I said it. At some time in the near future I'll go into that further, but if I've annoyed you enough with that blasphemy, or by claiming that we Americans are not absolutely perfect, don't let it eat on you. Hit the comment button and tell me what you think. That's what I've just done.

Meanwhile, to any Koreans who happen to be reading this, please consider coming to America, settling in Chicago, and opening a deli in the Loop. If you have trouble getting a permit, talk to Mayor Daley and tell him you've always wanted to live where there were so many Irish-Americans.

To many Americans, the Second Amendment is the most important part of the constitution. In fact, many have said that the right to bear arms is the right that guarantees all the rest. It’s a controversial subject, and almost anything I say about it is going to make a lot of people angry, but it’s a topic we can’t afford to ignore, a topic we need to think very seriously about.

I’m a gun owner. Living in the country, I believe there are legitimate reasons. It took some extra pains on my part to become eligible to buy a firearm legally. If you don’t know why, please check out my other website sometime: going-straight.com.

Now supposedly I also have the right to free speech. Maybe my interpretation is that I can stand on a street corner and yell "Congressman Loudmouth is a blithering idiot!" Suppose a squad car stops and a couple of policemen tell me to shut up or get arrested. Does my right to bear arms mean that I can come back the next day, with a couple of other people who share my view, armed with assault rifles and 9 mm automatics with 40-round clips, plus a couple of bullhorns? Some crackpot at a place called Ruby Ridge thought that being required to pay taxes amounted to unlawful search and seizure, and that his right to bear arms gave him the moral right to stage a holdout with federal agents; you probably know the tragic results of that.

Need I go on? The idea that you could possibly defend yourself, or would ever need to defend yourself, against your own government with your own rifles and shotguns and pistols is nothing short of preposterous. Meanwhile, the costs of our juvenile fixation on guns is staggering. Firearms are involved in 68% of homicides, 52% of suicides, 43% of robberies, and 21% of aggravated assaults. It’s not gangs that make tough neighborhoods unlivable, it’s gangs with guns. Children don’t get killed in their own living rooms in a drive-by stabbing or strangling; it’s a drive-by shooting.

You’ve heard that cliche "When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns." Poppycock. First of all, no one is trying to "outlaw" guns. There have been efforts to impose better gun controls. Second, if guns were less plentiful, it would be harder for those outlaws to get guns. Third, no one whose intentions are at all legitimate needs to be able to buy one gun a day. Anyone who wants to do that is either a little deranged, in my professional opinion, or may be hoping to start an armed revolution.

My wife and I own three motor vehicles. Each one has a license plate. If I commit a vehicular homicide and anyone gets my license number, the police know whom to ask about it. That’s only right. Now suppose a bullet from a gun that I own winds up in the body of a dead police officer. I see no reason that the ballistics of my weapon should not be on file with the FBI, just like fingerprints, so that the police would, in that case also, have a prime suspect from the start. Just as it’s a federal crime to convert a semi-automatic to a machine gun, or to use a silencer, if we had a national ballistics registration, as I think we should, it could be a federal crime to knowingly alter the ballistics.

Shotguns are a little more complicated. I don’t have an easy answer, but would be interested in knowing what suggestions you might have.

At present, the most alarming development in our world-famous right to bear arms obsession is people strutting around public meetings armed to the teeth. So far, I believe, they are believed to be those who sympathize with far-right views. But let’s remember that in the 60s and 70s it was some on the far left who were resorting to bombs and guns to get their point across. Are we headed for the point when we’ll have opposing political "militias," as has happened in many other countries?

How far down that road are we willing to go? If we go too much further, I’m afraid we can kiss democracy as we know it goodbye for at least a generation.

Is it time to go back to the interpretation of a "well regulated militia" as the constitution described it, instead of everybody who can get a gun, as decided recently by the supreme court?

If you can discuss the subject in a civil manner, I definitely want to know your views on this.

Sex is a powerful drive, and humans are the most sexually driven species on earth. Although we could now argue that humans are the most successful species on earth, we can just as believably argue that we are the most fragile, and as recently as early biblical times, our very survival was tenuous. With a gestation period of nine months, a typical litter size of one, and a high infant mortality rate, it was that constant urge to "get it on" that assured a birth rate that at least matched the death rate. Can you imagine a real Wilma Flintstone telling Fred "We really need to start to work on another human being. I won’t be as much help for a while, and the business of popping him out will be a bitch, and it just might kill me, and he’ll probably be dead before he’s old enough to be very useful and meanwhile we’ll have to work even harder with our hunting and gathering. But someday, Fred, they’ll honor us for helping our species survive and people will make funny cartoons about us."

More likely it was something like "I’m still hungry and this cave is never warm enough. How about we do that thing again where you [well, we can omit the details, right? and I’m not sure exactly how cave people did it anyway] and we won’t feel cold and hungry for a while."

To which Fred probably said "I’m ready, Wilma. You are just soooo cute in those woolly mammoth-ear slippers. Hey, did you know that guy who rubs sticks together says that babies come from [don’t worry, I’m not going to describe it]."

"Those damned scientists. Next thing they’ll be telling us that it’s tiny bugs that make us sick."

Or if you prefer the Adam and Eve story, well, OK, you can imagine a comparable version, with the first two humans glumly leaving the Garden of Eden with the sex manual that God thoughtfully provided, trying to figure out what the reference to "children" meant.

Anything as universally powerful as sex is going to be subject to rules and regulations. Whether you like it or not, that’s the way it is. People don’t always agree on them. That’s another fact of life we have to live with. In the Judeo-Christian world, a guy named the Apostle Paul (who didn’t care much for women, according to most exegetes) decided that sex between unmarried people was a terrible sin, equal in gravity to adultery. That was new, and Jesus is never quoted as having objected to sex outside of marriage, but most branches of Christianity have run with it, and extreme Islam has treated it as a death penalty offense.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, that urge is strong as ever, but childbirth isn’t as much of a horror as it used to be, at least in places where women are treated as human beings and allowed adequate medical care. In advanced nations the majority of infants do survive to adulthood, and our species is, if anything, in danger of overpopulating our planet, rather than dying out because of insufficient replacement.

Recreational sex has never been as rare as many people think. It’s been relatively commonplace throughout history, as have various forms of contraception and abortion. In modern society, though, sexuality is more supercharged than ever. The onset of puberty is coming earlier and earlier, yet the age at which a young person can be truly self sufficient comes later and later.

It is now possible, and increasingly commonplace, for children of ten or eleven, or even younger, to procreate. It’s also possible with contraceptives for equally young children to be vigorously active sexually, with highly reduced chance of pregnancy resulting. When the contraceptives fail, as contraceptives do, where it is legal abortion is safer than ever. Please note that I am NOT saying that this is good; only that it is true.

When pre-pubertal children played doctor and nurse, the worst that was likely to occur was horrified parents and, sadly, sometimes bestially cruel punishment. When pubescent children experiment, however young they may be, biology may lead to very different results. I.e., pregnancy.

I personally cannot equate a fertilized egg with a human being, and certainly cannot fathom the belief that a fertilized egg has the same rights as a nine or ten year old child, or any living human being, for that matter. If you believe otherwise, that is your right, so long as you do not force it on me or anyone else. I know this will make some parents furious, but honestly, I do not think you have the right to force that belief on your pregnant daughter. At the same time, I cannot in good conscience say that a child who is too young to sign a legal contract should be able to demand a serious surgical procedure such as abortion as easily as buying a package of bubble gum. Our concepts of when adult responsibility begins are always troubled. They vary from time to time and place to place. Early in the 20^{th century, laws were passed in some American cities making it illegal to prostitute a child younger than nine! The age of consent in Michigan is sixteen, but if you show a pornographic picture to the 16-year-old you’re having sex with, you’re committing a felony. Children in their early teens can be tried as adults, but can’t buy alcohol legally. In fact, young Americans can be sent to die defending their nation when we’re under attack (or at the whim of a delusional president) as much as four years before they can legally buy a can of beer.}

Wouldn’t this curdle your blood, if it were true: "I do further promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth. And that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poniard, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity or authority of the persons ... at any time I may be directed to do so by the agents of the Pope. . . ."

That supposedly was from the oath of the Knights of Columbus. Neither it nor anything vaguely similar was ever used by the K of C, but it was believed by many to be the real thing. I remember being exposed to it at least three times, always by Protestant Evangelicals. Sadly, tragically, we’ve learned over the last few decades of sexual abuse in some monasteries and nunneries and other Catholic institutions, including local parishes, but a few decades ago many Bible-thumping preachers denounced everything Catholic constantly. Every priest was a sex fiend, and every Catholic Church’s foundation walls hid the bones of human sacrifice. According to some, young nuns were routinely raped by priests, impregnated, and their babies baptized then murdered. Of course, the Pope’s secret armies were ready to declare holy wars around the world at a moment’s notice.

Around that same time, while the Catholic Church may have been ignoring and even covering up some corruption in its ranks, it wasn’t waging the same level of War of Words against Protestantism. Admittedly, the Ku Klux Klan targeted Catholics along with blacks and Jews, but the Church didn’t accuse all of "them," i.e., Protestants, with planning the violent destruction of Catholicism. The more-or-less official attitude toward Protestantism was that it simply was invalid. It was better, a well-informed Catholic told me, not to let "them" think that they could possibly have any religious view or opinion of any value. God spoke through His Church, not through anyone else. If any subset of Protestants had any truth whatever, it was what they had accidentally retained from Catholicism.

Enter the abortion issue. With the new doctrine that the Virgin Mary was conceived without sin, the Catholic Church had redefined life as starting at conception. A fertilized egg is a human being, period. So abortion, at any stage of pregnancy, is murder, period. Evangelical Christians, many of whom formerly viewed anything Catholic as a creation of Satan, heartily embraced that definition, sometimes with kukluxian fervor and lawlessness. Meanwhile Catholics, who had often been a hated minority in our nation and so had chosen not to make waves unnecessarily, adopted evangelical revivalist militancy against what it had now defined as mass murder.

Strange bedfellows indeed. Ironic, and sad, because in our troubled times, religion has been a source of comfort and hope for so many of us. We don’t need to divert its power into fake holy wars, bloody or bloodless.

As I’ve admitted previously, I’m no theologian, but it seems obvious to me that the "Old Testament," which both Catholics and Protestants embrace, in Exodus 21:22-25, spells out that causing the death of a fetus is a property crime, not murder. Also, if murder is the taking of a human being’s life, and a human being is a living organism, then abortion cannot be murder because the fetus is not an independent organism. It is POTENTIAL human life because it has the POTENTIAL to become an independent organism.

I do not believe it rational to propose that abortion should be taken lightly. It’s a very serious decision, whether to bring a new person into the world or not. However, I also do not think it is rational to leave that decision to any level of government. It is the decision of the human being most affected, the mother, in consultation with her physician, and hopefully with her family and the male who contributed the sperm.

Certainly it should NEVER be left up to crackpots with guns and bombs.

This still leaves the question of parental notification unanswered. I’ve heard only two answers to the question, and in my opinion, both of them fall short. Very soon, I’ll give you what I believe is a sensible alternative.

The stories are so frequent that we’ve become desensitized: Someone is freed after spending a major part of life behind bars, sometimes thirty years or more, because DNA evidence has proven the person innocent.

This phenomenon calls for some courageous new thinking about the supposed infallibility of eyewitness testimony, about our trial procedures in general, and about how much coercion and trickery police should be allowed to obtain a so-called confession. But it virtually SCREAMS for a rethinking of the death penalty. That’s because many of these exonerated parties had spent time on death row, sometimes just days away from execution.

There are many reasons to question the appropriateness of the death penalty. The most obvious is the fact that it is permanent, irreversible, and no amount of compensation by a court or legislature can even begin to right the wrong of an innocent person being killed by society.* There are many more, however:

Threat of the death penalty can frighten an innocent person into signing a false confession. I can’t count how many defendants have told me that interrogating officers said something like "If you don’t admit you did it, you’ll get a lethal injection." Can you imagine how effective that is with a detainee, frightened out of his/her wits, who has been questioned around the clock?

Similarly, fear of the death penalty may push an innocent defendant to accept a plea bargain.

The death penalty is NOT cost effective. The expense of numerous appeals and the cost of keeping prisoners on death row for years is greater than the typical cost of keeping a convicted murderer in prison for fifty years. (We could change that by executing a convicted killer with a bullet to the head an hour after the trial, and making his or her family pay for the bullet, but we are not, thank God, that kind of society.)

Ours is the only leading western nation that still uses the death penalty. This doesn’t help our image in the rest of the world, and makes other nations reluctant to extradite suspects to the United States.

In blunt terms, the death penalty doesn’t serve as a deterrent. Our murder rate is higher than that of any of those other leading western nations, and 3.5 times higher than Italy, the holder of the second-place title on that list. Among states of the U.S. that still have the death penalty, the murder rate per 100,000 people is 5.3, and among non-death penalty states the rate is 2.8, just over half as much.

No doubt some avid death penalty advocates will contact me, quoting Genesis 9:6: "Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed..." I’m not here to promote or dispute anyone’s religion, nor is it my business to debate how the Bible came to be. There are three other points, however, that I believe shouldn’t be ignored: In that same book of the Bible, death at the hands of humanity was not imposed on Cain for killing Abel, and was, in fact, forbidden; a life sentence to prison wasn’t a viable option back then, and; under rules for imposition of the death penalty in Biblical times, it was almost never applied.

It’s long past time to kill the death penalty forever in our nation.

*In a case where the death penalty was imposed on an innocent party because a police officer knowingly coerced a false confession, or a prosecutor knowingly repressed exculpatory evidence, isn’t it logical that the officer or the prosecutor should be charged with attempted murder? If the wrongful conviction is revealed after the innocent party has been put to death, would a charge of murder be inappropriate? If that happened, I wonder how favorably the officer or prosecutor would think of the death penalty.

I frequently get emails reporting, often erroneously and always
histrionically, about all the evils of the French and British and
essentially demonizing everyone who isn't wrapped in an American flag.

In this news report, the anti-Israeli fulminations of the Iranian
president were met by a walkout of western diplomats, most notably
British and French.

So far I haven't received any commentary about this from that other 
group, who are, I believe, basically good people, even if they don't 
know the difference between belligerence and patriotism. I've never 
thought that their messages said very much about the British or French 
or Germans or whomever they were hating at any particular moment. But 
I've often thought they said a lot about why so many people,  even 
among our allies, detest Americans.

Welcome to ThusSayethMe.com. As signs at construction sites often say, please excuse our mess. This site is, in fact, under construction, so right now it lacks eye appeal and any semblance of pzazz. It’s coming.

But there are no walls to be put up here. Our purpose here is rather to take down some of the walls that separate Americans from each other and, to a disturbing and increasing degree, from the rest of the world. Walls that fence us in as a society. Walls we hide behind instead of facing painful realities. The artificial wall between science and religion. The walls of slogans and platitudes that we often erect because that’s more convenient than honest, productive debate.

Sometime very soon some posts we consider worthwhile and relevant will be appearing here. We’ll have a log-in set up for those who want to reply.

You know all the disclaimers: Any post or reply here represents the opinions of its author only, we reserve the right to delete or edit as we deem appropriate, we intend the content to be factual and honest but cannot guarantee its accuracy.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: ThusSayethMe.com is dedicated to promoting dialogue and reducing polarization. Posts and replies that resort to name-calling and labeling are discouraged, and are likely to be deleted. Was it Abraham Lincoln who said mud thrown is ground lost? There may be an exception to that truth when a society deteriorates into one giant mud wrestling match, in which, ultimately, everyone eats mud and no one gets to stand on firm ground. America has come too close to that already.

Paul Karsten Fauteck, Psy.D.