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We know this now more than ever. We live not in isolated pockets of prejudice, but with a collection of privileges that depend on each other for their persistence and resonance. — from The Conversation

After Charleston, I found myself unable to write. It hurts me to the heart that I still have to write this. And write about it and write about it. Some days it feels as though there aren’t enough letters on a page to cut through the dark matter that is trying hard to make its way back to the forefront of our national consciousness. But it’s here again.

White American racism is quite real, alive and well. It is not an antiquated concept we can dust off carefully with the brushes used in archeological digs, as if carefully tending to a past culture making its way into a museum of history.

This racism has been closely held, like a family secret. It is real, alive and in the moment. It is not in every white person in this country, but in enough people to make its presence all too clear; to make it clear that we need to dig deep to rid ourselves of it.

It is in the minds and hearts of the family and community that created and nurtured a Dylann Roof. It is in South Carolina’s laws prohibiting the desecration of the Confederate flag. That flag still flies proudly at the top of South Carolina’s capitol building flagpole, padlocked to prevent its removal, even as the state and American flags fly at half-mast commemorating the nine killed at Emanuel AME Church.

It is in the minds of Republican leadership in Congress, with Nixon’s Southern Strategy so far up their ass that they are animated by it, mouthing its words and writing its principles into policy like useful hand puppets. It is a guiding principle of FOX News.

It is in the split screen of a policeman holding a young black teenage girl prone on a lawn in McKinley, Texas, contrasted with Dylann Roof led to the police station wearing a bullet-proof vest. It is in the the inequality of choices and life chances based along racial and economic lines, triggering situations such as this.

It is a national crisis. It flares up during times of economic distress — lack of jobs, sluggish economies — that lead exactly to this moment in time. African Americans, immigrants, Muslims — already demonized — are further targeted by frustrated lower-class and socially impotent whites, ‘necessary’ victims upon whom to vent frustration with far too much aggression. It is in the isolation where Dylann Roof was allowed time to let his rage fester and take hold, creating his manifesto made up of lies — and there was no one there to check him on his tragically myopic, racist and ignorant beliefs about his fellow human beings.

But it isn’t just Dylann. It’s in the entire road this country has been on from family, to community, to the top echelons of power, including and especially the corporate masters who have purchased government. Each and every one let Dylann Roof go unchecked in thought and deed. He was sanctioned.

As if, as Rick Perry suggested, it was an isolated incident by an apparently disturbed young man who was probably on some kind of pharmaceutical drug that drove him to it. As if, as Rick Santorum said, this was an attack on Christianity because it happened in a church. These are delusions that only prolonged states of denial can produce.

Inch by inch, denial by denial, we have been traveling to that day in Charleston for a long time. It’s been a slow-moving train engineered by people in leadership, none of whom even bothered to remember that there was a Civil Rights Movement in this country 50 years ago, but word for dog-whistle word, dropped all civil discourse when we elected our country’s first black President. They declared racism over when clearly it is not.

Tickets to this ride we’re on have been sold by the entire FOX News network, The Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, Stormfront, and all the members of the extreme right-wing conservative media that allow these thoughts and feelings by people like Roof to find a home and flourish.

They make fortunes triggering white rage against the Other. They continue re-creation of white Christians as victims, besieged by the swirling hordes of dark barbarians at their gates, ready to take their jobs, rape their women, allow sex education in the schools and threaten the sanctity of their heterosexual marriages. It would be marvelous satire if it wasn’t for the ignorance that spawned these ideas.

It seems, at least in the news that no one sees or wants to acknowledge, to be their role in the history leading up to the tragedy at Emanuel AME Church. The deflection — stating anything that does not own up to the infrastructure of racism that runs deep in this country — is saying, “anyone but me had a hand in this.” But they all did. Anyone refusing to acknowledge racism in the media gave Dylann Roof the room to enter long before he walked into the church, with the National Rifle Association giving him a gun to enter with.

Yet this is where the deep work has to begin, and not just at meeting halls and Facebook or Twitter feeds, but at the dinner table, the PTA, and soccer games as well as in the halls of power. Though we may not believe ourselves racist, we may know others who are. We may harbor unkind and untrue thoughts about each other. What else can we do to get us past this darkness?

When South Carolina first raised the Confederate flag in 2000, world-renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones joined the NAACP’s protest, boycotting the Spoleto festival there, canceling his company’s two-day schedule of performances. Perhaps a state economic boycott is in order, only this time, we don’t boycott the opposition to gay wedding cakes but instead actively protest against a symbol that represents so much death and oppression for millions of Americans for over four centuries.

In response to the shootings, President Obama said the Confederate flag flying over South Carolina’s state capitol building should be placed in a museum. I disagree. Before that flag — a symbol of a time we should be long past — is commemorated in a museum where school children are brought to learn about their nation’s history, we need to give that part of our history and its symbolism its due.

South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham says of the Confederate flag that, “It’s who we are.”  If that’s the case, we need to discourage anyone who dares use it to hurt, terrorize and dehumanize our brothers and sisters from ever using it again. It’s a symbol of our history we should remember as a stain that we need to take responsibility for here and now. We need to provide that flag — the one Dylann Roof clung to in his Facebook page — a resting place in a physical state to remain in forever: Burned to ashes and stored carefully in a plexiglass box.

Meet you down below in the comments.

There’s a profound level of relief I feel writing these words: I was wrong. Following Pope Benedict’s resignation in February 2013, the Papacy was an easy target. I was wrong when, in the aftermath of Pope Francis’ election as Pope, I came down hard on both the Church and its Papacy.

Scandal swirled in a constant news feed on the decades-long Vatican involvement protecting priests who had sexually abused children. The lawsuits are still ongoing diocese to diocese, and these charges come from across the globe. I came down hard on the new Pope for not only the Catholic Church’s criminal complicity of silence on the acts of its priests, but the Church’s centuries-long role in the oppression of women — from denying them priesthood to its current, rigid stand on female reproductive freedom.

But with over two years under his Papal chasuble, Pope Francis the First is forcing me to re-think and refine my hard line against the Vatican.

Like the American Presidency, the Papacy carries with it the weight of history’s bloodiest baggage. These powerful offices have networks so vast and capable of such great cruelty that they far exceed the individual goodness of the men who hold the position. And these institutions are both hard, if not impossible, to change overnight.

Pope Francis’ Papacy is attempting to gain footing in a fast-changing world, while managing a vast group of Catholics, from the most radical to the most staunchly conservative in his flock. There is still much work for the Church to get the hell out of the culture wars plaguing us, including birth control, in which the Church still plays antagonist. But even early on Francis’ Papacy, the signs have been encouraging that it’s coming to grips with the real issues, as described in this Huffington Post article from 2014:

Still, the idea that the Vatican in some forum, even an advisory one, is pondering the question of planetary limits is, to put it mildly, encouraging. If the Catholic Church, under the leadership of Pope Francis, takes the view that we are stewards of God’s earth and that we have a responsibility to maintain this planet for future generations, it is not a big leap to conclude that couples should consider having smaller families. And from there it is not a huge leap to conclude that women should have access to modern methods of birth control in planning their families.

Pope Francis is facing the world, embracing his role as a moral compass and peacemaker. A good priest in the role of lightening rod, he’s had a good start: speaking critically on global income inequality; and brokering the conversations that led to the warming of U.S.-Cuba relations. The Pope’s position on climate change is having an impact on American politics.

Using his pulpit to stand for people in nations most vulnerable to the drastic climate changes experienced this last decade, he gives moral weight to the argument that has, up to now, only been the realm of scientists and skeptics. The Pope will address the United Nations later this year on the subject. That alone is causing agita amongst conservative Catholics and their banner man, the anti-gay, pro-life Republican Rick Santorum — who is running for President in 2016.

If an international majority of scientists and their solid evidence cannot penetrate the boneheaded anti-science stupidity of people trying to re-write laws and gut environmental protection for profit, perhaps a man of God in one of the most visible offices in the world pleading for the sake of humanity could.

The Papacy is the pulpit Francis uses as the iconic standard for Christian morality. That makes his positions on income inequality and climate change all the more difficult and dangerous for those who have the most to gain from both. I credit this to the Pope’s Sagittarian nature and years of practice in liberation theology in Latin America, a continent that has had more than its share of greedy despots and tyrants, most of whom were put into position by the U.S.

Even as the U.S. is struggling to maintain a secular government in the face of its Christian conservative majority in Congress, and although the Pope may not be in the best position yet to influence U.S. politicians and the money behind them, his reach is far deeper than our politics. He hits home with the millions of Catholics around the world.

That is why, at this moment in time, and borrowing from the title of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Pope Francis is a most inconvenient man. The opinions expressed by God’s priest on earth are dangerous to the status quo killing the planet.

So if I judged Pope Francis I too harshly, I take it back. For as much as I have to argue with the Church on their various stands in the culture wars that divide us, I feel good saying I was wrong in doubting this man’s largeness of thought. It seems to be having an effect. His words and his actions are not inconvenient. They are coming at just the right time.

We’ve all been experiencing one hell of a Mercury retrograde. As Mercury approaches station Thursday and lurches into forward movement later on this week, it seems as though even an international multimillion-dollar sports league — Federation Internationale de Football Association (or FIFA, for short) — is not big enough to be immune to this retrograde.

This week’s scandale du jour isn’t the familial pedophilia of the Duggars or the skeleton in the closet of former US House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Fourteen of FIFA’s top officials were arrested on charges of corruption by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

RICO is a federal law designed specifically to target organized crime, allowing leaders of a syndicate to be tried for crimes they ordered others to do, or assisted others in doing. Originally designed to prosecute the Mafia, the laws have expanded to include others involved in continual patterns of criminal activity and corruption.

The charges against FIFA are vast. For years, 14 of FIFA’s high-ranking officials pocketed over $150 million in bribes and kickbacks through every phase of the organization’s activities: vote-getting for the cities vying for the right to host the World Cup; exclusive media and marketing rights for the games; development and infrastructure planning of stadiums; even the actual games themselves. Unfortunately, the damage doesn’t end there.

The host countries, particularly in parts of the developing world, sacrificed public dollars they couldn’t afford to build stadiums that are unsustainable economically and environmentally. Jeremy Stahl, soccer blogger for Slate wrote:

In South Africa, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on white elephant stadiums that have rarely been used following the 2010 World Cup in a country where more than half of its children were living in poverty as of 2012. Multiple local officials in that country were reported to have been murdered, allegedly for whistle-blowing or other involvement in stadium fraud.

In Brazil, a $300 million, 40,000-plus seat stadium was built in the middle of the Amazon rainforest where potential post-Cup audiences of that size just don’t exist. That’s probably one reason why a majority of Brazilians opposed hosting this World Cup, saying the more than $11 billion price tag could be better spent on public services.

In Qatar, (the site of the 2022 World Cup) meanwhile, on top of the bribery claims, hundreds of migrant workers have died working on infrastructure and constructions projects since the country was awarded the tournament and 4,000 (or nearly 600 workers per year) are projected to die by 2022 at the current rate.

Sports journalists and broadcasters have been joking about FIFA’s under-reported corruption for years. FIFA corruption was an insider’s joke until one reporter unearthed FIFA’s secrets in an expose published in 2006; that started the Justice Department’s investigation.

Re-elected to his fifth term as FIFA’s President just days after the mass arrest of FIFA’s 14, Sepp Blatter resigned to ease the organization’s “transition” during the US DOJ’s investigation. He currently does not face any charges, even though the man closest to Blatter was arrested. The bets are on whether Blatter will do a perp walk at all.

My hunch is that the 14 are taking the fall. At least for now. I speculate that there is a push to buy time as Blatter puts up enough of a legal wall to protect himself and others — perhaps even higher up than FIFA’s officials, who took part in FIFA’s global scams.

In the United States, our primary religion is NFL football. For the rest of the world, soccer is “the real football.” Like our football, it is a religion ingrained from childhood. Like any religion, soccer glorifies a powerful mix of sacraments: nationalism, machismo, grace, speed, skill and competition. Watching both the sport and the players, I can see why people call it “the beautiful game.”

FIFA is, as John Oliver says in his hilarious rant from 2014, a business that exploits a religion — the worship of soccer. FIFA’s infamous “14” took advantage of soccer’s globally fervent following to profit from the proceeds at almost every level, as if these cardinals of the beautiful game were untouchable because the sport is holy.

With these arrests, FIFA now joins distinguished ranks of other famous RICO collars: the Hell’s Angels, the Catholic dioceses for their part in the sex abuse cover up, and insider trader Michael Milken. From the look of things — the global scale of their activities, the costs in lives for countries that FIFA’s officials exploited, and the arrogance of it’s leadership — FIFA seems to be in well-deserved company. And for the millions across the world who still love this game, that should come as no surprise. Goooooooooooal!!

This Mercury retrograde has yielded yet another scandal. The Washington Post reports that a federal grand jury has indicted former House Speaker Dennis Hastert on charges of breaking banking laws in a bid to pay $3.5 million in hush money to a young male student that he sexually molested while he worked as a wrestling coach at an Illinois high school.

From 2010 to 2014 Hastert, a highly paid and successful lobbyist for foreign countries at the lobbying firm of Dickson Shapiro, had made over 100 bank withdrawals of a little less than $10,000 each for a total of $950,000 paid to his victim.

Federal banking rules require you file a Currency Transaction Report for any withdrawal transaction over $10,000. This is a way to monitor criminal activity against your bank account. Hastert tried skirting around this requirement by breaking up his withdrawals into amounts that didn’t require reporting. This is known in the trade as “structured” transactions and is illegal. He subsequently went on to lie about it to the FBI when one of Hastert’s banks asked authorities to investigate his frequent withdrawals.

The timing of this news could not have been more poignant or compelling astrologically, coming in on the heels of Josh Duggar’s child sexual abuse scandal. Our current Mercury retrograde seems intent on digging up ghosts.

Neither Hastert’s money scandal or the sex scandal is new. But I can’t imagine what terrible weight it must have been holding onto this dark secret. Especially while leading a Republican congressional majority rising to power on Bill Clinton’s impeachment for lying about his sexual impropriety to Congress.

By holding onto the secret in his past, Hastert inadvertently brought down his own career as Speaker of the House, as well as the Republican stranglehold in Congress. Hastert — once thought to have the cleanest record, at least relatively, amongst party leadership — failed to act aggressively in the matter of Rep. Tom Foley of Florida. Foley was the congressman who attempted to molest and sexually harass young male pages working at the House of Representatives in 2005.

Recalling Hastert’s actions as Speaker during the time, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo speculates: “Set aside whether this past had any role in Hastert’s office’s laggard response to warnings about Foley. Hastert was hiding an explosive secret. He must have been terrified of exposure. A thundering denunciation of Foley would seem like the kind of move which almost would have invited a past victim to step forward. Perhaps that explains his reticence. At this point there’s no way to know.”

Dennis Hastert will be arraigned in court soon. As a wealthy lobbyist with connections and influence in Washington, he has strings to pull to help him out of this. Though I think with this retrograde, things will get sticky for him for awhile. But this and the Duggars’ scandal last week makes me wonder what people are thinking when they can run for public office. Or for that matter what they’re thinking when offered their own television show on a cable network.

Old sins come back to bite. We know power and money still corrupt and continue to hold sway in politics and in life. We know that ghosts come back to haunt, like chickens come back home to roost. There is often a price to pay when a person, family or political party claiming moral superiority falls from grace. Here, today, is yet another story.

Last week 27-year-old Josh Duggar, reality TV star of The Learning Channel’s “19 Kids and Counting,” resigned from his position in the Family Resource Council (FRC) — the top conservative Christian lobbying group in Washington DC — on the heels of a scandal.

It was revealed in a news story from InTouch magazine that in 2002 Josh, then 14 years old, sexually abused a number of young girls including his younger sisters. His parents did not report it to the authorities for over a year.

What followed shortly after the revelation and resignation was a public free-fall. With outcry mounting to cancel the show altogether, The Learning Channel has pulled “19 Kids and Counting” from its lineup. Up until that time, the network was playing re-runs of past episodes. The show has had eight seasons and the network and was preparing for its ninth.

For those of us unfamiliar with the Duggars, the TV show’s title says it all. It’s about an American family complete with a devoted husband, his wife and their 19 children. Josh’s parents Jim Bob and Michelle are devout evangelical Christians who obviously practice no family planning of any type, counting each pregnancy as God’s will. The Duggars take part in what is called the Quiverfull Movement.

Aside from a “Trust the Lord” methodology of family planning — equating birth control drugs and devices to abortion — Quiverfull values include patriarchy, courtship and betrothal as opposed to dating. Quiverfull advocates sheltering children from outside influences such as peers or public school. It promotes biblical manhood and womanhood, being debt-free and independent of government support, home church, and modesty for girls and women lest they become temptation for men.

Evangelical Christians aren’t the only ones taking part in the movement. Many fundamentalist religious groups who practice some form of home-schooling adhere to the Quiverfull movement’s values. The more years of acceptance and adherence to the values espoused by the Quiverfull movement, the more a normal family becomes a patriarchal cult of true believers.

The news story and Josh’s admission has done more than get his family’s TV show removed from cable television, at least for now. There are questions about Josh, the Duggars and the religious network of support that protected him and them. Why did Jim Bob and Michelle keep things under wraps for so long? Why wasn’t there effective psychological counseling when Josh’s behavior was first discovered? Why hadn’t we heard of the matter from Josh’s sisters?

The answers lie in the culture that the Duggars live in, which approves a conspiracy of silence. At the time of the incident, the Duggars sought private help for Josh, sending him to the Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP), which advocates Bible-based teachings to help families and individuals in crisis. According to the IBLP’s doctrine, the young women who Josh Duggar abused may have acted “immodestly,” tempting him away from his purity, and are thus partly responsible for his groping them. The Institute’s faith-based methodology counsels forgiveness of the abuser by the victims. According to the ideology of the IBLP, there are no victims in matters of abuse of any kind. It counsels that there should be no bitterness (therefore no recrimination or reporting) against the abuser.

With this type of perspective ingrained in the institute’s teaching, as well as in his own family’s values, it’s no wonder Josh Duggar does not see himself as having committed a crime, which is what sexually assaulting a minor is.

If it seems that I am only rehashing tabloid news you are free to stop reading right here. But the Family Research Council, of which the Duggars play a part, write the agenda for many members of Congress who make policies that control our lives and our choices. The purity culture promoted by the FRC, the IBLP and the Duggars’ reality show creates a culture of rape for women — who are, in their worldview, responsible for the violence perpetrated against them.

The saving grace of Josh Duggar’s public free-fall for the rest of us is that we get a glimpse into the mind of the American Taliban. Even though I find myself refraining from judging Josh for what he did in the past and even the society in which he was raised, that subculture has no compunction against continuing to judge and trying to control the rest of us.

They will not hesitate to impose their world view and morality onto the rest of us. In fact, they continue to do so each day through the utterances of politicians who use their words and ideas to forward laws governing what women can do with our bodies and who can marry. The very definition of Taliban is: “a fundamentalist (Islamic) militia in Afghanistan.” Change the religion and the country, and in modern-day America, it looks like the shoe fits.