“…shifting the focus of our marriage laws away from the interests of children and society as a whole, and onto the desires of the adults involved in a same-sex relationship will result in the most profound long-term consequences. Such a paradigm shift says to children that mothers and fathers don’t matter (especially fathers) – any two “parents” will do. It proclaims the false notion that a man can be a mother and a woman can be a father – that men and women are exactly the same in rearing children.

“We will have an inevitable increase in children born out of wedlock, an increase in fatherlessness, a resulting increase if female and child poverty, and a higher incidence of all the documented social ills associated with children being raised in a home without their married biological parents.

“Ultimately, we as a society all suffer when we fail to nourish a true, thriving marriage culture founded on the truth experienced by virtually every civilization in every nation since the dawn of time – marriage is the union of one man and one woman.” — Archbishop John Nienstedt

Welcome to the early argument(s) issued by the St. Paul Chancery and the pen of the prelate of this archdiocese, Archbishop John Nienstedt, repeated in many Catholic pulpits around the state that all Catholics support the proposed state constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between one man and one woman. The ballot measure, passed and placed before the electorate by the Minnesota Legislature this past session will be voted on in November (the Governor has no say in the passage or placement of  constitutional amendments).

The formal Church hierarchy has been pushing for amendments out of fear that statutes already on the books that already define marriage as such could be overturned either by a court or a new Legislature friendlier to gay marriage, thus abhorrent. Yet another, longer letter, went out over Nienstedt’s hand August 30, pushing ever harder on parishioners and believers to vote YES.

But, as Beth Hawkins has reported in MinnPost.com, not every parish under that umbrella has followed suit, to the great consternation and admonition of John Nienstedt. Priests and/or pastors daring to buck the boss have been taken to the woodshed. But the critics continue to flourish within the flock. Well over 100 former priests, some once-powerful clerics, and their disenchanted brethren have formed a group of Resigned Priests for Marriage Equality. And a practicing monk from St. John’s Abbey (outside Nienstedt’s jurisdiction) in Collegeville, Father Bob Pierson, gave an impassioned speech supporting Catholics’ right to vote NO.

Catholic churches are not the only communities of faith backing the Marriage Amendment, but the vigor with which the Church has funded (to the tune of $1 million-plus) and lobbied for the measure over the last several years is one of the most blatantly political incursions we’ve ever witnessed at this level.

This Church’s views are most important to many because its very existence is rooted in the core belief that Jesus Christ himself was its founder (“Thou art Peter, and, upon this rock, I will build my Church.”) Thus is it true that Catholics of every stripe accept that as doctrine. Where many part company with Church hierarchy is in the relationships the Church has defined as dogma: only single, celibate men may be ordained, making women subordinate; marriage is the only state in which sexual intercourse is allowed because procreation is only reason humans were endowed with the sexual function; nothing must interfere with the natural conception of life in the sex act; abortion is murder; and homosexuality is disordered.

That is not to say that gays and lesbians should be driven from the Church. No, they deserve our compassion and prayers, but they must not engage in sexual activity for all those reasons stated above. And they surely must never be allowed to marry. Marriage must never be defined as anything other than as between one man and one woman.

Courtesy Steve Sack and Star Tribune

Such dogma and its resistors within the Church, including former priests, existing priests and monks (some of them openly gay), and a significant number of current practitioners of the Catholic faith are pushing back on this archbishop and what appears to be an anti-gay crusade of puzzling dimensions – ask the parishioners at St. Joan of Arc and St. Stephens and others – who argue that none of this homophobia is parallel with Christ’s teachings or embedded in scripture.

This is why TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI are talking about this particular aspect of the Marriage Amendment argument this week and featuring spokespeople from a few walks of Catholic life to explain why they are voting NO on this ballot issue November 6^th.

GUESTS:

ROSE MCMURRAY – Mother of a gay son and parishioner at Church of the Risen Savior, Burnsville

ED FLAHAVAN – A Leader of Former Priests Against Marriage Amendment; Archdiocesan priest for 48 years; Head of the Archdiocese’s social-justice agency, the Urban Affairs Commission (UAC); and a member of former Gov. Rudy Perpich’s Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Minnesotans. Married for seven years.

MICHAEL BAYLY – Executive Coordinator, Catholics for Marriage Equality, an initiative of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities (CPCSM); Editor of The Progressive Catholic Voice and co-chair of the Minnesota-based Catholic Coalition for Church Reform.

VIDEO VERSIONS: PART ONE and PART TWO

OTHER RESOURCES:

Archbishop Nienstedt's latest marriage-amendment letter adds to Catholic turmoil – MinnPost.com

The Thoughtful Voter’s Guide to Same-Sex Marriage by David Morris of the Institute on Local Self-Reliance

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TruthToTell ENCORE, Monday OCT 29-9AM: PART TWO: VOTER PHOTO ID: Who Shouldn't Vote?  - ORIGINAL AUDIO HERE

 

With respect to the VOTER ID Amendment:

Pro-amendment forces, primarily Republicans who pushed this onto this year’s November election ballot – and even many Democrats who see little harm in such a requirement – claim that such a mandate will prevent voter fraud in a state with no substantial record of it.

Anti-voter ID amendment forces are as adamant about defeating this measure as many have been about the marriage amendment, that it is a costly and disenfranchising move, not just for the usual suspects, but for the fully one-third of Minnesotans who must use Election-Day Registration when voting.

Ultimately, this is about who should get to decide who runs this country, this state, these cities and so on. This is about power – and how you secure it for the future - - like gerrymandering in redistricting – preventing the other party from gaining any kind of foothold or holding a majority or running the government. Voting is just another frontier, is it not, in the acquisition and retention of power and control. The more citizens you can keep from voting, especially those likely to vote for the other guy, you’ll do it, right? 

Recent polls have both constitutional amendment evenly split.

As information trickles into the mainstream media about the effects Voter ID would have on the entire election system in Minnesota – as well as every other state where its appeared – powerful political forces are stepping up and denouncing it as much as those who proposed it in the first.

TTT's ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI try to sort out the pros and cons of passing or rejecting this proposed amendment to the State Constitution.

GUESTS:

GOVERNOR ARNE CARLSON – former Minnesota Governor - OPPONENT of VoterID Amendment

REV. PAUL SLACK – President, ISAIAH - Twin Cities/Minnesota Faith-Based Community Coalition OPPOSED to VoterID; Pastor, New Creation Church, Minneapolis.

 

 

 

 

DAN McGRATH - Executive Director, Minnesota Majority – PRO-VoterID campaign leaders

DAN McGRATH - Executive Director, TakeAction-Minnesota - ANTI-VoterID campaign leaders

 

 

 

 

SAVE THE DATE: Sept. 20th. Become a Friend of TruthToTell and let us put you on RADIO! Come to TTT’s 5^thAnniversary Bash and help keep our weekly shows exploring and examining the issue that matter most – and expand our reach into other corners of the community and Greater Minnesota! And we'll record your voice and ideas on mic! DETAILS HERE! PLEASE JOIN US!

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“…shifting the focus of our marriage laws away from the interests of children and society as a whole, and onto the desires of the adults involved in a same-sex relationship will result in the most profound long-term consequences. Such a paradigm shift says to children that mothers and fathers don’t matter (especially fathers) – any two “parents” will do. It proclaims the false notion that a man can be a mother and a woman can be a father – that men and women are exactly the same in rearing children.

“We will have an inevitable increase in children born out of wedlock, an increase in fatherlessness, a resulting increase if female and child poverty, and a higher incidence of all the documented social ills associated with children being raised in a home without their married biological parents.

“Ultimately, we as a society all suffer when we fail to nourish a true, thriving marriage culture founded on the truth experienced by virtually every civilization in every nation since the dawn of time – marriage is the union of one man and one woman.” — Archbishop John Nienstedt

Welcome to the early argument(s) issued by the St. Paul Chancery and the pen of the prelate of this archdiocese, Archbishop John Nienstedt, repeated in many Catholic pulpits around the state that all Catholics support the proposed state constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between one man and one woman. The ballot measure, passed and placed before the electorate by the Minnesota Legislature this past session will be voted on in November (the Governor has no say in the passage or placement of  constitutional amendments).

The formal Church hierarchy has been pushing for amendments out of fear that statutes already on the books that already define marriage as such could be overturned either by a court or a new Legislature friendlier to gay marriage, thus abhorrent. Yet another, longer letter, went out over Nienstedt’s hand August 30, pushing ever harder on parishioners and believers to vote YES.

But, as Beth Hawkins has reported in MinnPost.com, not every parish under that umbrella has followed suit, to the great consternation and admonition of John Nienstedt. Priests and/or pastors daring to buck the boss have been taken to the woodshed. But the critics continue to flourish within the flock. Well over 100 former priests, some once-powerful clerics, and their disenchanted brethren have formed a group of Resigned Priests for Marriage Equality. And a practicing monk from St. John’s Abbey (outside Nienstedt’s jurisdiction) in Collegeville, Father Bob Pierson, gave an impassioned speech supporting Catholics’ right to vote NO.

Catholic churches are not the only communities of faith backing the Marriage Amendment, but the vigor with which the Church has funded (to the tune of $1 million-plus) and lobbied for the measure over the last several years is one of the most blatantly political incursions we’ve ever witnessed at this level.

This Church’s views are most important to many because its very existence is rooted in the core belief that Jesus Christ himself was its founder (“Thou art Peter, and, upon this rock, I will build my Church.”) Thus is it true that Catholics of every stripe accept that as doctrine. Where many part company with Church hierarchy is in the relationships the Church has defined as dogma: only single, celibate men may be ordained, making women subordinate; marriage is the only state in which sexual intercourse is allowed because procreation is only reason humans were endowed with the sexual function; nothing must interfere with the natural conception of life in the sex act; abortion is murder; and homosexuality is disordered.

That is not to say that gays and lesbians should be driven from the Church. No, they deserve our compassion and prayers, but they must not engage in sexual activity for all those reasons stated above. And they surely must never be allowed to marry. Marriage must never be defined as anything other than as between one man and one woman.

Courtesy Steve Sack and Star Tribune

Such dogma and its resistors within the Church, including former priests, existing priests and monks (some of them openly gay), and a significant number of current practitioners of the Catholic faith are pushing back on this archbishop and what appears to be an anti-gay crusade of puzzling dimensions – ask the parishioners at St. Joan of Arc and St. Stephens and others – who argue that none of this homophobia is parallel with Christ’s teachings or embedded in scripture.

This is why TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI are talking about this particular aspect of the Marriage Amendment argument this week and featuring spokespeople from a few walks of Catholic life to explain why they are voting NO on this ballot issue November 6^th.

GUESTS:

ROSE MCMURRAY – Mother of a gay son and parishioner at Church of the Risen Savior, Burnsville

ED FLAHAVAN – A Leader of Former Priests Against Marriage Amendment; Archdiocesan priest for 48 years; Head of the Archdiocese’s social-justice agency, the Urban Affairs Commission (UAC); and a member of former Gov. Rudy Perpich’s Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Minnesotans. Married for seven years.

MICHAEL BAYLY – Executive Coordinator, Catholics for Marriage Equality, an initiative of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities (CPCSM); Editor of The Progressive Catholic Voice and co-chair of the Minnesota-based Catholic Coalition for Church Reform.

VIDEO VERSIONS: PART ONE and PART TWO

OTHER RESOURCES:

Archbishop Nienstedt's latest marriage-amendment letter adds to Catholic turmoil – MinnPost.com

The Thoughtful Voter’s Guide to Same-Sex Marriage by David Morris of the Institute on Local Self-Reliance

SAVE THE DATE: Sept. 20th. Become a Friend of TruthToTell and let us put you on RADIO! Come to TTT’s 5^thAnniversary Bash and help keep our weekly shows exploring and examining the issue that matter most – and expand our reach into other corners of the community and Greater Minnesota! And we'll record your voice and ideas on mic! DETAILS HERE!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Remember – call and join the conversation – 612-341-0980 – or Tweet us @TTTAndyDriscoll or post on TruthToTell’s Facebook page!

It’s the been the talk of demographers and advocates for many years: Boomers are aging, becoming part of the dominant demographic of our time while the economy continues to tank and conservative political pressures seem hell-bent on keeping it that way – as long as the 1% gets theirs.

Even as the economics of aging are playing against self-sufficiency, especially in a job market committed to younger, if less stable, workers, life expectancy expands for various reasons. It grows more difficult for aging Minnesotans to find work, retain jobs and contribute to the economy well beyond that very arbitrary retirement deadline set by science society a very long time ago – and long since rendered by nature as generally too young to wrap up one’s working life – with the exception of those rare birds who can both afford and wish to live another thirty to fifty years in the lap of luxury and/or leisure.

If 60 if the new 50 and 70 is the new 55, what the hell are all these people going to do for the rest of their much longer lives? While the gap separating men and women’s life expectancy has narrowed, women are still many years longer the men on average.

And what about women, in particular, who remain too far behind men in the wages and salaries earned, but who are and always have lived up to 20% longer than men, in general, and are thus needing even more opportunity for taking home enough money to stay alive, live independently in their own homes or apartments? Women are struggling mightily against economic pressures that multiply as they age.

We have a strange norm at work here. Because age 65 has been for the longest time a benchmark for retirement, Social Security and Medicare, we have developed a society that labels its citizens 65 and over as all but senile when well more than half of us are perfectly suited to productive work. And we vote. And we remember. Why, even 3M – the granddaddy of Minnesota’s largest corporations – still forces its chief executive out at age 65.

Judges must retire by age 70. Some do so earlier, but with the exponential rise in caseloads for every level of the courts, instead of raising the mandatory retirement age to more like 75 or 80 (with caveats for some of the exigencies of aging as a militating factor), they turn most retired judges into “senior judges.” Senior status keeps these men and women on the bench long after officially retiring.

These are just examples. And some of the other issues confronting seniors in direct relation to their aging are the costs of prescription drugs. Part D Medicare still requires that the so-called Medicare gap be filled with out-of-pocket burdens that can break the bank for the next few years - although the Affordable Healthcare Act appears to eliminate the gap and provide continuous drug coverage starting a couple of years from now.

Still, the cost of these drugs, especially some brand name pharmaceuticals not yet lapsing into generics and often suffered by the chronically ill. For example: there is NO generic substitute for the very effective AdVair asthma steroidal inhaler – so, without insurance coverage, the total cost per month can exceed $200 for each diskus. Its worse for the most effective inhalant for chronic pulmonary patients – those with emphysema and other breathing disorders – where, without insurance, the monthly cost is almost $300. There are worse examples, but if a doctor were to say to a patient with COPD that he or she should use both drugs, that’s a $500 bill for just two of the drugs that may be keeping some patients alive and independent.

That’s why US drug companies hate the Canadian connection where the same – and generic – version (tiotropium) – IS available for about $22 per month through RxRights.org. Even the brand, Spiriva, costs less than $68 a month..

Employment and economic security for seniors and, especially women, but for all of our aging population as well as the costs associated with maintaining good health under the United States medical system fairly scream for reform – reform resisted by those who work on behalf corporate interests of one kind or another – are this week’s topics of discussion with advocates from ElderNomics and Mature Voices/RxRights.org.

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI carry on this conversation with ourguests:

BONNIE WATKINS, Executive Director, Eldernomics Minnesota; former Executive Director, Minnesota Women’s Consortium

LEE GRACZYK, Executive Director, Mature Voices Minnesota and RxRights.org