American Farmland Trust

Wade Dill does not figure into the toll of war dead. An exterminator, Dill took a job in Iraq for a company contracted to do pest control on military bases. There, he found himself killing disease-carrying flies and rabid dogs, dodging mortars and huddling in bomb shelters.

Dill, a Marine Corps veteran, was a different man when he came back for visits here, his family said: moody, isolated, morose. He screamed at his wife and daughter. His weight dropped. Dark circles haunted his dark brown eyes.

Three weeks after he returned home for good, Dill booked a room in an anonymous three-story motel alongside Interstate 5. There, on July 16, 2006, he shot himself in the head with a 9 mm handgun. He left a suicide note for his wife and a picture for his daughter, then 16. The caption read: “I did exist and I loved you.”

We need to estimate the true cost of this war. This is getting ridiculous. Our society is dying, and we are putting all of our resources in making our pain, and the pain of others even worse. God help us.

Leaders of the Mormon Church “failed to timely report making late non-monetary contributions” to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign, an amount totaling $36,928, according to the June 10, 2010 finding by California’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC), announced at the commission’s meeting Wednesday in Sacramento.  The commission’s enforcement included levying a 15% punitive fine against the LDS organization, totaling $5,539 dollars.

No surprise here.

Olson’s closing will go down in history as a brilliant defence of same-sex marriage. I would post quotes, but I’m still reading through it myself and don’t want to lose my spot. This is a must-read for all who care about human rights and marriage equality.

On another note, there is a debate among some GLBT activists about the merits of fighting for marriage equality. Many criticize marriage-rights activists as fighting for the wrong cause, as fighting for entrance into an essentially corrupt and sexist institution. I understand where they are coming from. For most of human history, marriage was a sexist institution: daughters were sold into marriage, women were seen as property, and there was a duty to child-bearing and family. It was a business contract. In the past couple centuries, however, there have been radical changes (I need to read some history here for official changes and such). From the establishment of women’s rights in marriage, to breaking down race barriers in marriage. Marriage has evolved into an entirely different institution, involving the cultural values we share in this society (love, sharing, kindness, intimacy, honor, among others). I would add that by allowing gays and lesbians to marry, the last vestiges of sexism in marriage are in fact torn asunder. By saying that gender has nothing to do with marriage, by saying it’s about equality and love (and to a large degree finances), you are affirming the dignity and equality of the sexes. I would say, gay marriage might be the best thing that happened to marriage in a long time. We’ll see what the Court thinks.

The case is in the court of appeals right now, but will go to the Supreme Court of the United States regardless of this outcome. Will keep this updated.

A kite is a victim you are sure of.

You love it because it pulls

gentle enough to call you master,

strong enough to call you fool;

because it lives

like a desperate trained falcon

in the high sweet air,

and you can always haul it down

to tame it in your drawer.

A kite is a fish you have already caught

in a pool where no fish come,

so you play him carefully and long,

and hope he won’t give up,

or the wind die down.

A kite is the last poem you’ve written,

so you give it to the wind,

but you don’t let it go

until someone finds you

something else to do.

A kite is a contract of glory

that must be made with the sun,

so you make friends with the field

the river and the wind,

then you pray the whole cold night before,

under the travelling cordless moon,

to make you worthy and lyric and pure.

The Spirit does seem to be saying to many within The Episcopal Church that gay and lesbian persons are God’s good creation, that an aspect of good creation is the possibility of lifelong, faithful partnership, and that such persons may indeed be good and healthy exemplars of gifted leadership within the Church, as baptized leaders and ordained ones. The Spirit also seems to be saying the same thing in other parts of the Anglican Communion, and among some of our Christian partners, including Lutheran churches in North America and Europe, the Old Catholic churches of Europe, and a number of others.

That growing awareness does not deny the reality that many Anglicans and not a few Episcopalians still fervently hold traditional views about human sexuality. This Episcopal Church is a broad and inclusive enough tent to hold that variety. The willingness to live in tension is a hallmark of Anglicanism, beginning from its roots in Celtic Christianity pushing up against Roman Christianity in the centuries of the first millennium. That diversity in community was solidified in the Elizabethan Settlement, which really marks the beginning of Anglican Christianity as a distinct movement. Above all, it recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree. It also recognizes what Jesus says about the Spirit to his followers, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 16:12-13).

Click on the link for more. God bless ++ Katharine

What if Local Food Isnt Actually Best? – Food – The Atlantic.

It has all but become an article of faith that sourcing food locally is the most sustainable alternative to our current global food production system. But there is a growing body of evidence that local may be only part of the answer.

Speaking at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Cooking for Solutions event last week, Richard Pirog, the associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, said larger regional food economies might be the solution. “We’re finding that you get some of the benefits of local systems and some of the efficiencies of the broader national system,” he said. “They’re the best of both worlds.”

History, the novelist Milan Kundera wrote, is but a thin thread stretched across the ocean of what is forgotten. This may explain why the further back you go into American history, the more consensus there tends to be about our presidents. If you wanted to come up with a revisionist view of George Washington, it would require a lot of work, since what most of us have at hand are a few images — the first president at Valley Forge, crossing the Delaware, nobly stepping down for the good of the country.

But one of the many advantages of the modern age is the ready availability of the raw materials out of which we can construct our own convincing version of contemporary political reality. Pour a foundation out of imaginary concrete, erect joists and beams of speculation, place a thousand bricks of tendentious conclusions, and before you know it, the structure is impervious to any assault by facts. You will have made your own imagined Barack Obama, in whatever shape you like.