Reflections on "Paul"

The only recognizably Roman Catholic member of the clergy I could identify was a nun sitting in the front row. We (and a capacity audience) were watching the North American Premier of Howard Brenton’s “Paul” at the Gamm Theatre. When the play was over, she was the first person to stand and applaud. I turned to my wife, tapped her on the shoulder, pointed to the nun with my chin and asked “Did she see the same play we did?” It’s hard to imagine.

Some background: According to “The Acts of the Apostles” the fifth book of the New Testament, those who knew and followed Jesus were still Jews, but Jews who thought the Messiah had come in the person of Yeshua (Aramaic for Joshua). They still obeyed the old laws but because they shunned rabbinic authority and were baptized, they were shunned and persecuted. The principal persecutor was Saul of Tarsus who, hearing that there were Jewish followers of Yeshua in Damascus determined to go there to stamp out the community. On the way, he was blinded by a light and heard a voice saying “Why do you persecute me?” and realizing that only the voice of Yeshua would say such a thing—though he was dead—he converted to the new faith. And to him it was a new faith. Unlike Jesus’ old colleagues who thought of themselves as Jews, Paul (the name he adopted upon having his miraculous experience on the road to Damascus) creates a new religion, one where circumcision is not required, nor eating of kosher meat etc., the better to attract gentiles (Greeks) to the new faith.

Now, all of that is a given. The play, though, assumes facts not generally found in the Christian texts—that Jesus and Mary Magdelna, a prostitute, were married, that Jesus did not die on the cross, so was not resurrected but kept in hiding by Peter and James (Jesus’ brother—another thing not generally accepted by Christians) that Joseph and Mary were wealthy purveyors of religious objects in Nazareth, that Peter and James sent Paul out to convert the gentiles assuming that he’d be ignored—or stoned, that they brought Yeshua with them to Saul’s encampment and had him talk to Saul, a well meaning hoax that Saul believed in its entirety. The depiction of Nero is so off the wall that I won’t even mention it other than to say that if you missed Kelby T. Akin as the despotic emperor you missed something rare.

So, we are there the night before Paul’s execution is scheduled. He’s chained, chanting almost as if in a self-induced trance “Christ is risen” over and over and over again. He is a man of faith. But then Peter (played by Gamm veteran Jim O'Brien) is brought into the prison and as the play unfolds he reveals to Paul all the deceptions. Jesus was not God, but an inspiring man. This Paul the believer refuses to believe, that he has been deceived, that his life’s work is based on someone else’s artifice. Peter, who knows the truth ultimately joins in with him intoning, imploring, Jesus the risen God, to help them. If he’s going to die, he may as well die for a cause—whether he believes it or not.

So, why was that nun applauding? I don’t know, but I suppose she does.

A good piece of theater ought to leave us with questions—all the best literature does. Here the question is not so much was Jesus God (the answer is “No”) but the epistemological question, how do we know that the things we know (and are the things we know truly true)?

And we Jews? We enter the Passover season in a couple of days. Our tables will groan under the weight of food, we’ll be a little drunk after four cups of wine, we’ll open the door to allow Elijah the prophet to come join us (he hasn’t yet, but maybe this year) we sing songs and prayers, we ask questions to which we already know the answers, but do we? Were our ancestors slaves in Egypt, rescued by God through his servant Moses? Were there all those plagues? Or miracles? It hardly matters. If one wants to believe, there’s no harm; if one sees the story simply as a metaphor for the potential of the oppressed to rise and liberate themselves, so be it. To my uncertain knowledge there is no historical evidence that the story of the Exodus is true, but it’s a wonderful story nevertheless. If nothing else it gives us the opportunity to clean behind those corners we never normally get to, to be with friends and family to sing and rejoice. Dayenu.

What's a Jewish Subject?

A recent letter complains that the Voice & Herald is becoming a platform for the Democratic Party with a leftist agenda that alienates conservatives and uses me and my last column as his prime example. I admit to being an economic liberal. In fact, I’m proud of it. I think that taxing the wealthy to support public programs such as bridge repair, heath insurance, medical research etc. is all to the good. I think that President George W. Bush was right on target when the announced that his form of conservatism was “Compassionate Conservatism” suggesting that the other kind, the usual kind, the Reagan kind, is not. It’s too bad that his words were lip service only. In his 1988 acceptance speech when nominated by the Republicans to run for President George H. W. Bush talked of making America a kinder gentler nation which upset Reagan acolytes, but he too was on to something. Do liberals have all the answers? No. Do I disagree with some liberal positions? Yes. As to being called a liberal or a conservative, I think the terms have lost their meanings. Given the choice I’ll define myself as a “Humanist” by which I mean someone in the tradition of Cicero, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, someone who believes that if an action liberates humanity it is positive; if it retards it, if it enslaves, it is to be opposed. If humanist is too vague, just call me Jewish.

So, in my last column I started out by discussing union-busting in Wisconsin and elsewhere and then segued to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Where’s the Jewish content? My critic wants “to hear about Jewish news and interests in the paper.” In the Forward (a Jewish newspaper) Leonard Fein (a Jew) writes in his March 2 column about “Sam Gompers, David Dubinsky, …Albert Shanker, to say nothing of … Andy Stern, Randi Weingarten and a host of others who have played — and still play — central roles in America’s labor history…[Labor] is… a Jewish issue because justice is everywhere and always a Jewish issue.” Who can disagree? You don’t have to be a Marxist to know that the ruthless exploitation of the worker is not only immoral but economically counter-productive—just read Adam Smith’s “On the Wealth of Nations,” that primer of capitalism and you’ll find the same thing. Is Smith not Jewish enough? “Justice, Justice thou shall pursue,” is or ought to be a familiar quotation. It’s from an old book my critic might once have read. Each Yom Kippur we chant from Isaiah on treating our workers fairly and find nothing with which Governor Walker and his ilk would agree. Jeremiah’s explanation for the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was that masters were enslaving their workers. Micah (another Jew) asks “what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Does this include depriving people of their rights so that the wealthy can become wealthier? Is Moses Jewish enough? Read what he has to say about Egyptian labor practices and about how Jews in their own land should treat gleaners.

Too old fashioned? There’s Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who along with James Cheney were lynched, two Jews and a black man murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi because they tried to register Negroes to vote. Not by liberals. When Ronald Regan, that demigod of the modern conservative movement began his quest for the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1980 he went first to Philadelphia, Mississippi of all places, and proclaimed that he believed in states’ rights, a code word in those days (and maybe in ours) for segregation. He was a conservative; I’m not, I’m a Jewish humanist, and if being a humanist offends those who are not, such is life.

If there are conservative Jews who in the modern context place the greed of the land owner above the rights of the gleaner, who do not walk humbly with their God, who do not place Justice before all other considerations, are they living up to the standards set before them by generations of greatness? Or have they succumbed to Mammon like the Jewish owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, Max Blanck an Isaac Harris, union-busters who locked poor immigrant girls into their factory and escaped while 146 of them died within a few minutes, jumping out of the building, crushed against the bolted doors, of burns and smoke inhalation. Blanck and Harris were found not guilty of manslaughter by a jury of their peers, other people who as Abraham Cahan (another Jew) reminds uswere businessmen, salesmen, rent-collectors, not poor Jewish women denied the rights of collective bargaining.

Modern Day Pharoahs

If turn around is fair play, if the majority cannot simply clobber the minority into submission in the land of the free and the home of the brave, let’s pass a law that calls for annual election of governors of Wisconsin and not have their salaries automatically deposited. Let’s pass a law that for every dollar a billionaire donates to one party he has to donate 50¢ to the other. Free speech isn’t free, after all. Soon enough it will be Passover and we will be reminded again about Pharaoh’s unfair labor practices. At our table I think we’ll contrapuntally read excerpts of the conversations between Governor Walker and the man he thought was David Koch. (If that fundraiser from NPR resigned after he was caught in a sting; if the woman who was NPR’s CEO resigned after her subordinate was caught in a sting, doesn’t fair play suggest that Walker resign too? When kosher pigs fly. Maybe.)

I’ve been thinking about union busting a lot lately. You can’t avoid it; it’s everywhere: Wisconsin, Ohio, Providence. The old manufacturing unions are pretty well pre-busted. Not because American workers abandoned them but because capitalists decided to close shop up north and move south only later to discover that they could make even more money off the backs of cheaper labor in Asia so they hightailed it across the Pacific. Conservatives and “Right to Work” advocates (= right not to have any say in working conditions or salary) now are after the public unions recruiting the jealous, the ones who used to have a good job but whose livelihood has been snatched away by the recession brought about by the economic activities of the very people now giving themselves huge bonuses and buying politicians, having managed to defeat campaign finance reform. These unfortunates are willing to say, “If I can’t have a pension, why should they?” as if the public employees’ pensions are taking food out of their mouths, as if the suffering should be shared only by all poor people while the wealthiest get tax breaks. But the public workers of Wisconsin were willing to take lower salaries and contribute more to their benefit packages. Their line in the sand was collective bargaining.

Next week we mark the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster. Many of us remember the Station Nightclub fire that cost this community 100 lives. If there was anything good to come of that tragedy it was a series of laws to tighten fire codes (I suppose we are still paying fire marshals even though they are public employees). Back on March 25, 1911 600 workers, the vast majority immigrant girls, mostly Jewish, were working on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the ironically named Asch Building. A match carelessly dropped onto some fabric cuttings set the conflagration going. The fire hose was rotted and fell apart as men tried to extinguish the fire which quickly spread among the materials and cleaning chemicals. Some of the women managed to get to the roof and from there escape to other buildings; a brave passerby manned the elevators until the shaft was engulfed in flame. To prevent pilfering the owners of the business had the doors barred shut. In only 18 minutes a hundred and forty six women were killed, either from burns, from suffocation or from smashing into the pavement as they jumped in their desperate attempt to survive. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, managed to escape the conflagration, thank goodness, and later they managed to escape prosecution. Let us all praise devious lawyers. (The owners subsequently lost a civil suit and were required to pay $75 per victim which they could well afford as their insurance company paid them $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty. In 1913, Blanck was once again arrested for locking the door in his factory during working hours and fined $20.)

Did any good come of the fire? Well, there were new safety regulations, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, formed in 1900 was greatly enhanced and served for decades to protect workers against the Max Blancks and Isaac Harrises of the world, men who put the bottom line before the lives of the people who made their profit possible. But I forget; we are all anti-union nowadays; we see the unions as self-serving and out of touch with the real working people of America—the ones without jobs.

A Modern Purim Story

Paul Krugman stole my Nobel Prize. I don’t hold it against him, but I think the guy should at least publicly acknowledge the debt. As many of you know we were roommates in college (Yale ’74) who’ve maintained our friendship over the decades meeting each year on Boxing Day to exchange gifts and get hammered (he’s a Jameson’s man, I go for Glenlivet French Oak 15 year old). It was my idea that resulted in the paper that he was cited for in his Nobel ceremony; he just did the statistical analysis. He doesn’t exactly deny this, but he claims that anything written down on a sleazy bar’s coaster dated December 26 any year, doesn’t count as co-authorship. “Nonsense,” I counter, but he rejoins with “Ha!” and shows me his medallion.

But now his guilt feelings have paid big dividends as he’s shared with me in strictest confidence an explosive WikiLeaks revelation that he’s planning to release in his column on March 20, “Just in time for Purim,” he tells me. He thinks I’m going to sit on this, that I’m not going to scoop him, not beat him to the publication punch, that the promise I made last December 26 to keep his confidences holds the same weight as if spoken when sober? He thinks the Nobel is his exclusively? Ha! Read on.

Not content to embarrass American diplomats, the WikiLeaks people have tapped into the (formally) private correspondence of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Walker is nervous that a Cairo-like rebellion is in the making, that public employees, who are rallying at the State House in Madison demanding that he reverse course on his attempt to abolish their collective bargaining rights might soon demand his recall. He’s even sought advice secretly from Hosni Mubark who faced a similar crisis last month. That correspondence is part of the WikiLeaks revelations as are Walker’s concerns that the Book of Esther he’s been reading on the advice of a local rabbi describes a situation uncomfortably like his own, for just as Haman wanted to kill Jews because Mordechai refused to bow to him, Walker is trying to kill public employee unions which did not support him in his election bid. Just as Hosni called in his thugs to beat up the Tahrir Square protestors, Walker has called in the Tea Party to out-shout the Public Employees. Walker knows it didn’t work for his pal Hosni, but is trying it anyway; he also knows what happened to Haman, and he looks with fright at all those three-corned hats the cheeseheads wear to Packers games. The internal memos reveal that he thinks they are mockingly reminding him of Haman’s fate.

In another WikiLeaks revelation there is correspondence between Walker and his former top aid who has the euphonious name of Ima Goodheart. Goodheart, in E-mail correspondence with Walker, points out that “public workers essentially make a deal to get paid less now and collect pensions upon retirement. So we can’t renege on good-faith contractual agreements.” Thus Goodheart is described as a “former aid.”

In public Walker claims there is no other solution to Wisconsin’s debt crises. In private he thinks the solution is two-fold. “First,” as he puts in the WikiLeaks’ revelations, “we kill the unions and then we give big tax cuts to the wealthy.” When Walker sent an E-mail to George H.W. Bush asking what he thought about this, the former president tweeted: “LOL, Voodoo economics in the land of pasteurization. Will you never learn?”

Walker has also been corresponding with other Republican governors. WikiLeaks revealed that he congratulated Governor Rick Scott of Florida for rejecting $2.4 billion in federal money to build a high speed rail connecting Tampa and Orlando which would have created 24,000 new jobs at a cost to Floridians of only $1.25 million. As Scott wrote to Scott “Well, done Scott! Together we can deny public services to all!”

Can the Scotts be stopped, or do we all have to start drinking Scotch to forget some Scotts Welsh on obligations. After all, on Purim, which rapidly approaches, we are enjoined to get so drunk that we can’t tell an Aleph from a Beth. On Purim we tell stories that are not necessarily true in all details, like this one you’ve been reading—actually none of them are—but we tell the essential truth that arrogance in high places has its comeuppance if, like the protesters in Madison and in Cairo, like Mordechai and Esther, we stand up to manipulative oppressors. It’s happened before, Scotts; it can happen again.

Happy Purim.

Europe and the Jews

Have you subscribed to “Habitus: A Diaspora Journal” yet? Twice yearly Josh Ellison (originally of Providence where his parents still reside) and his staff bring forth a journal of essays, fiction, poetry, photographs with a focus on a city in which Jews have or are still playing a major cultural role. Number 7, just out, features Berlin, one of those cities where Jews no longer reside in large number, but you cannot think of the Jews of Europe without also thinking of Germany and its capital. The events of 1933-1945 still resonate. The cancer of anti-Semitism, exploited by the Nazis who found it waiting for their use continues. It’s still part of the “What is a Jew,” or rather, “What is a European” question.

The Jews of Germany had been living their since ca. 1000 CE., a generally impoverished and persecuted minority. But with the coming of the Enlightenment, Jews (some Jews, I have in mind as exemplar Moses Mendelssohn--1729–1786) discovered the beauties of western culture and Germans (some Germans) realized that Jews were people with intelligence who ought to be welcomed into society—either as Jews or as converts. For their part Jews were willing to modify their religion so as better to fit in, to assimilate—the Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox movements have their origins in 19th century Germany. The point is that Jews made a successful transition from pariah to bulwarks of culture, industry and finance. In the end, that’s part of what did them in. How could such a small population rise to control the stock market, the theater, be so prominent in law, science and medicine? It must be that they are using unscrupulous methods. The Jew was seen as an outsider who only pretended to be German!

So under Hitler Germany became judenrein, Jew-free. Most Jews in modern Germany are from the former Soviet Union, their predecessors having escaped before the War or killed during it. There they live with government subsidies, a kind of reparations.

Today in Germany there is a new outsider, principally Muslim, often Turkish. They are not re-living the Jewish experience in that they are new to the country, new to the continent unlike the Jews who resided as a subject race within Germany for centuries and who knew western culture if only by observation. But these new Germans, living in the land for a generation or more can identify with the older group. Jews were rejected; Turks are being rejected.

Zafer Şenocak is a Turko-German. He was born in Istanbul and with his parents moved to Germany when he was child. His native tongue is Turkish, but he writes in German when his themes demand it. In an interview with “Habitus” he concludes, “It is very strange: anti-Semitism describes Jews as less than human. Then you have this anti-anti-Semitism, describing the Jew as something unreachable: good at everything, knowing everything. Jews are just people. They kill and are killed like every other people. In Europe there is no balance on this issue—you move from one extreme to the other. This is the problem with idealization—it’s a broken image. There is no real discourse with the Jewish people. There is no direct contact. Everything has to be deflected. Europe still can’t look the Jews directly in the face.”

It was that last line, “Europe still can’t look the Jews directly in the face” that sent chills down my spine. We are the overachievers who hold the broken distorted mirror in the face of Europeans who killed us, reminding them of what they did. Few are left who organized the slaughter, manned the gas chambers, found and destroyed hiding places. But Europe knows what it’s done, Şenocak reminds.

In Europe, some of us were socialists, others capitalists, some were intellectuals others shop keepers, the gamut of intellectual and economic behavior. All were destroyed, except those few who managed to survive. Here in America, we are in a similar circumstance. We came to a country not our own, a country where Christians were the dominant element bringing with us our strange ways. Many of us have subsequently modified, but we are still strangers in a strange land. When “Americans” are of the left or right they are still Americans. Jews though are Jews of the left or right. And we are caught in the middle between those who have become anti-Semitic through being philo-Palestinian on the left and the gun-totting yahoos on the right, neither of which represents us, both of which might be very happy if we left.

From J'Accuse to Indignez-Vous

How do you argue with a man who helped author the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a resistance fighter who managed to escape death at Nazi hands at least twice, a man who in February 2008 denounced the French government’s failure to make funds available to provide housing for the homeless, who frequently uses his prominence to urge younger generations to live by the legacy of the resistance including its ideals of economic, social and cultural democracy, a man who received the UNESCO/Bilbao Prize for the Promotion of a Culture of Human Rights? Here is a man who has dedicated his life to the well-being of his countrymen and to people around the world, particularly in Africa where a foundation he established has sent more than 20,000 hospital beds.

Stéphane Hessel (father Jewish, mother Protestant, refugees to France from the Nazis) has recently published an essay Indignez-vous! (“Be Indignant,” or “Get Angry!”). By year’s end 600,000 copies had sold; 1,000,000 is anticipated. As he has before he argues that the people of France need to get outraged, as when under German occupation. The new enemy is blasé acceptance; me firstism; materialism. He includes in his indictment the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, France’s treatment of its illegal immigrants, the need to re-establish a free press, the need to protect the environment, the plight of Palestinians, and the importance of protecting the French welfare system.

Whoops.

How did calls to reform France get to include advocacy of Palestinians? Well, this is not Hessel’s first venture into those waters. In August 2006 he made an appeal against the Israeli air-strikes in Lebanon—but the key here is in who sponsored the call—it was published in French newspapers on behalf of the French Jewish Union for Peace.

Two years ago, in January 2009, Hessel decried Israeli military operations in the Gaza strip: “In fact, the word that applies - that should be applied - is ‘war-crime’ and even ‘crime against humanity’”

We’ll pause here for a moment for a necessary headcount. All those in favor of condemning Palestinians to being perpetual victims of Israeli ruthlessness, please raise your hands. Seeing none, I’ll proceed.

The problem with arguing with Hessel is less that he ignores the Arab slaughter of Jews; that he seems not to understand that the Palestinian problem could have been resolved decades ago the same way the Jewish problem in Yemen and Iraq was, but that he brings to the discussion the perspective of a man whose genuine love of humanity, whose attitudes of social reform, of resistance to oppression are unimpeachable. He is not an anti-Semite; he is not pro-terrorist. And in at least one way he is not terribly off the Franco-Jewish mainstream. French Jews have historically never been ardently pro-Zionist. Initial reactions to the movement in the 19th century were that it was a German-Jewish idea, not a French one. Yes, there was the Dreyfus Affair, but on the whole the Jews of France lived a good life with no need to emigrate. (At least one French Jew rejected Zionism wondering what would happen to the native Arabs.) Even after the holocaust there was no mass migration of French Jews to Palestine/ Israel. What anti-Semitism in France is violent is from Arab immigrants, not from traditional Frenchmen. I don’t know how typical of French Jewish feeling it is but Joel Schalit in his blog “the-arty-Semite” reports on the conflict within the French Jewish community. “Coming on the heels of the formation of JCall (the French equivalent of the American JStreet) and the conversion of such figures as JCall founder Bernard-Henri Lévy to routine criticism of Israeli policy, in all likelihood more French Jews find themselves receptive to Hessel’s words than not.” Sigh.

This is Israel’s new burden. Add it to the list—the failure of Labor to keep the promises of the original leaders for an economically just society; the pressure to create a potentially hostile Palestinian state which would surround it; the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb aimed at Tel Aviv; Hezbollah in charge in Lebanon; Hamas in Gaza; Jews, some honorable such as Hessel, others whose motives are more obscure, ignore all the above and condemn Israel. I can only tell the Israelis what Moses told my namesake. Be strong and resolute.

On Misreading the Constitution?

Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn (about the original intent of the founders). They lived in their time, we live in ours and the times they have a changed. They established a government, they did not write Holy Scripture.

In fact, I’m convinced that there is no original intent. If by the founders we mean those bewigged eighteenth century gentlemen in short pants and high stockings who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, let’s face it, the former also gave us the Articles of Confederation which was a compact of thirteen sovereign states (as in State of Israel, an independent nation) unified in fighting Britain but in hardly anything else, and then when that wasn’t working too well, some of them met in secret session to create the Constitution. So what was the original intent of that group? Hard to say. Some left mid-session in anger at what was going on; some refused to sign the Constitution because it didn’t say what they thought it should; others agreed with Ben Franklin who said, in effect, well, it’s not what anybody wants, but it’s the best we can do, so let’s sign the thing, hope for the best, and go home.

Immediately it was realized that the Constitution even with all its compromises wasn’t quite right so amendments were proposed by James Madison, ten of which were ratified very quickly, and then an eleventh and then a twelfth to resolve problems that none of the founders in their infinite wisdom had anticipated.

And yet, there are some today who seem to think that they know the Original Intent and that it is good.

Which brings me to Thomas J. Tobin, the Roman Catholic bishop of Rhode Island. Writing in The Providence Journal on January 12 he throws down the gauntlet to Governor Chafee who didn’t have a prayer service before his inauguration and who had the temerity to declare that Rhode Island was a secular state. “By now,” the bishop writes, “you should be aware that the exact phrase ‘separation of church and state’ isn’t found anywhere in our nation’s Constitution but rather was a principle that evolved later on…to protect religion from the interference of the state. It was never intended to remove every spiritual aspiration, prayerful utterance or reference to God from public life.” He then backs this up by quoting a Catholic archbishop, a pope, and quotations from Madison and Washington.

As to no mention of separation of church and state in the Constitution, the bishop is correct. There is also no mention of toleration of slavery (or even the word “slavery”) but there was slavery. There is no mention of judicial review, but there is judicial review. There is no mention of the air force, and yet the President is commander-in-chief of that as well as the army and navy which are mentioned. If we only look at what the founders said we’d only count three of every five black people every census. The Constitution was not written by divinely inspired men but by politicians. I’ll spare the bishop Thomas Jefferson’s vituperative remarks about Christianity and priests but will recommend that he look at Brooke Allen’s “Moral Minority” which demonstrates with ease that the founders were anything but religious folk and that they wanted as little to do with religion as possible.

The bishop also contends, rightly, that religious leaders have “every right, indeed the duty, to speak out on public issues. If we fail to do so, we’re neglecting our role as teachers, preachers and prophets.” Prophets? The age of prophesy is still with us? OK, let’s just chalk that off to hyperbole and agree that yes, religious leaders as citizens have a right to express their views. But do they have the right to threaten legislators with excommunication or denial of the sacraments to those of their faith who disagree with the hierarchy’s views? Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis publicly stated that he would deny John Kerry communion because of his views on abortion and Archbishop Sean O’Malley of Boston, told Catholic elected officials who are pro-abortion that they should not be receiving communion and that they should refrain from taking part in the Christian sacrament on their own. This goes beyond writing a letter to the paper or seeking an interview to express differing views. Closer to home Bishop Tobin forbade Patrick Kennedy from receiving communion because of his advocacy of abortion rights. That’s what the founders had in mind? I’m thinking not. And if it is, I refer you to my first sentence.