Weekly Roundup: White Discomfort is a Powerful Weapon
Brad and Dan discuss American values in relation to the ongoing debates among Democrats about the Biden administration's infrastructure bill. They discuss why Joe Manchin has been willing to vote for 9 trillion in military spending over the last decade, but doesn't want to invest in education, fighting climate change, or American families.
The bulk of the episode focuses on how White Christians use the feeling of discomfort as a justification for their exclusionary politics. Dan walks us through a fight in TN that wants to ban books that discuss race and segregation. The justification from parents is that such discussions make their children uncomfortable.
Brad then analyzes a recent piece from the Catholic League on how advances in LGBT rights = the diminishment of Christian rights.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm faculty at the University of San Francisco and our social partner with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, associate professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
It's good to see you, Brad.
As always, we come together with topics that are not maybe the most uplifting, but at least it gives us a chance to chat and catch up a little bit.
Yes, it does.
I think we're both tired.
I know for me, you know, I'm learning with a newborn how to manage, you know, sleep deprivation and changing schedules with work.
And I'm not even, you know, fully back at work right now.
So anyway, shout out to all the parents out there who have done this and including you, Dan, who have done it and are balancing work and school and kids and life and everything else.
We're going to talk today, Dan, briefly about infrastructure and Manchema, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and their opposition to the Democrats' reconciliation infrastructure bill.
We're then going to get into some things I think folks will not hear anywhere else and really are at the center of our show, and that is some fights in Tennessee in school districts about certain books that are taught that make white people uncomfortable, and that is a direct result of all of the critical race theory discussion, quote-unquote, from this summer.
We'll talk a little bit, too, about some recent work at the Catholic League, which is a kind of conservative outlet and civil rights quote-unquote organization that is claiming that the expansion of LGBT rights is what is causing persecution and bias towards Christians.
So, talk about all that today.
Let's start with things that are basically grabbing the headlines.
Folks, I know you're going to hear this in other places you get news, right?
CNN, MSNBC, whatever you're reading online.
But I just want to comment on it briefly, Dan, before we Jump into those other topics.
So let me just start, uh, in a weird way by talking about gardens.
All right, Dan.
So Dan, are you a gardener?
I don't even, we've been friends so long.
I don't, and I don't know this.
Are you a gardener?
I'm like the opposite of a gardener.
I'm like a walking, a walking black thumb.
Yeah.
So, uh, okay.
I do appreciate gardeners and my daughter has a greenhouse and all this other stuff, but.
Okay.
So daughter has a greenhouse.
So you're around the gardening, right.
And your garden adjacent.
Um, all right.
So, there's this famous quote.
Now, I don't actually know if Audrey Hepburn said this, right?
But Audrey Hepburn supposedly said, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow, right?
And I want to run with that, because a lot of you out there listening will be familiar with the most famous garden of them all, and that is the Garden of Eden.
I mean, Garden of Eden is supposed to be this idyllic place that doesn't change, where Adam and Eve roamed freely, naked, satisfied, without a care in the world.
And everything was perfect and changeless and timeless and so on.
And Dan, you're garden adjacent at least.
Anyone out there who's done gardening, especially in a climate like the Northeast, like I used to live in the Northeast, knows it is anything but changeless or timeless or idyllic.
It involves constant planning.
Constant decisions about what to do next, how to day-to-day manage your stuff.
It involves thinking about what it is you're going to plant, what space you have, how you want to manage that space, your resources, what to include in your garden, how to protect your garden from, you know, like my father-in-law has a huge garden in Massachusetts and he's always complaining that like rabbits and other things are getting in there and eating his stuff and blah blah blah.
So, How do you protect the garden?
What do you plant?
How do you cultivate it?
And then how do you deal with changing circumstances, right?
Weather and so on and so forth.
The reason I bring that up is I think that the garden is a good way for us to think about, on a very abstract and general level, about what it's like to live in a human community.
It's not idyllic.
It's not changeless.
It's not timeless.
It requires planning.
It requires vision.
And yes, there's a matter of efficiency, right, Dan?
Like, my wife has an app that tells her when to water our houseplants, okay?
So there's a matter of, like, efficiency, planning, you know, science, logistics, that's all there, okay?
But at some point, it comes down, I think, to values.
At some point, you and whoever you're in a community with, whether that's a nation, a state, a group, a tribe, whatever, you look at each other and you say, what's important?
For us.
Like, what's important to us in terms of what to plant, to grow, to cultivate, to invest our time in?
What's important to us in terms of who gets access to this garden and who gets to take part in it?
What's important to us in terms of how we break up the different roles in the garden and how we're going to demarcate our garden from whatever's outside of it, right?
At some point it becomes about values.
The reason I bring this up is because we have a situation right now where there is a potentially generational bill on the table in the Senate.
3.5 trillion dollars that would invest in things like climate change, fighting climate change, right?
And making it easier for parents to have child care.
For universal, right?
You know, pre-k for kids.
For tuition.
To community college for all Americans, right?
There's ways that this bill would invest in Americans and American lives, okay?
Now, as you can tell, I'm pretty for it.
I mean, there's obviously things to quibble with, but I think this is a good idea.
What I'm getting at is, I think when it comes to our values, I think it's a pretty good idea to invest in the people that are part of the community in order to cultivate a healthy garden, right?
If a garden is to believe in tomorrow, as Audrey Hepburn supposedly said, Then the tomorrow I want to believe in is one where we take care of our kids, where we help people get an education and not bar them because of financial difficulties, where we fight climate change.
Because out here in California, I feel it every day, right?
I want to plant a garden for tomorrow that looks something like human flourishing.
I bring this up, Dan, because, you know, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are the two senators, Democratic senators, who are standing in the way of this getting passed.
And I'll be brief about this.
I just think there's so many things that are problematic about this.
One of them, though, is Joe Manchin has voted for every single one of the military budgets over the last decade, right?
From 2011 all the way till 2020, okay?
That's $9.1 trillion.
Now, he's complained a little bit here and there.
He's asked for a review.
He wants to see what the Pentagon's doing.
Never enough, Dan, for him to stand on his yacht.
You know, he has a yacht in D.C.
Stand on his yacht with his arms crossed and say, I'm not voting for this.
It's not responsible.
I can't do that.
Joe Manchin never stood up and said, you know, when it comes to the American garden and planting something for tomorrow, spending trillions of dollars on military spending and funding and security, jets and missiles and all kinds of things?
Nah, I can't do that.
It's not responsible, right?
And I guess to me, the question comes down to values.
What is it we value when we plant our garden?
Dan, I was going back to my German study.
I haven't done German in a long time, but I've done and I'm not great at it.
If you want to write me an email in German, I'll do my best, but it's not going to go well for me.
But the German word, right, for value is wert.
W-E-R-T.
And when you look at it, like in English, you just look at it, it looks like the word worth, right?
So when I think of values, Dan, what I'm asking Joe Manchin is, what's worth it?
What's worth our money?
I get it.
We have a deficit.
I get it.
Spending money hurts.
I get it.
Right?
Spending trillions of dollars seems like a lot.
In my relationship, in my household, I'm the one who's like, I don't know.
I'm worried about spending, you know, I'm the guy who's like, I don't want to pay three bucks for parking.
I'm going to like drive around the block six times.
And my partner's like, just park the damn car, please.
Can you please park the damn car?
It's $3, right?
I get it, Joe Manchin.
Here's my question.
What's worth it?
Is education and child care?
Is fighting climate change?
Or is investing in American human beings worth it?
Or do we want to spend all of our money?
Is our value on the military?
on this mythical American empire protection agency that needs to dominate the world.
All right, Dan, I'm on a rant.
If you've been in my classes, you all know that this is the cadence I use when I can go on for half an hour and I got to stop myself.
So I'm going to throw it to you.
Any thoughts on this?
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