An Open Letter to Dr. Obery M Hendricks, in response to his article in the Huffington Post on Racism in the Book of Mormon

by Sidney Carton

Dear Dr. Hendricks,

I write this letter to you in the spirit of supreme annoyance sir, for your recent comments in the Religion section of the Huffington Post have driven me to take actions I find personally revolting:  Come to the defense of Mitt Romney.  You see Mr. Hendricks, unlike Governor Romney, I am both a liberal and a Democrat, who would like nothing better to see President Obama be reelected this year.  That said, Brother Romney and I have one thing in common, that I cannot, under any circumstances, overlook:  We are both committed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a religion whose beliefs you have attacked in your article.  Thus your actions have put me in a most distasteful position.

You open your piece with a statement that, when read in light of the article of the rest of the article, is most disingenuous.  You state “I’m pretty much a live-and-let-live guy.  In fact, I don’t believe in religious litmus tests of any kind.  Frankly I think they are self-righteous and insulting.”  Such statements are ironic in the extreme as you follow this up with an assessment of my faith that could not be characterized as anything but self-righteous and insulting.

For the sake of brevity I will limit my criticisms to your attacks on our book of scripture, the Book of Mormon.  Utilizing a method of scriptural interpretation that I believe is called “cherry picking”  you pull out four verses from a book that is over 500 pages in length (in English) as indisputable proof that the core doctrine of Mormonism asserts that dark-skinned people are stupid, lazy, ugly and evil.  Of all of these verses, I find your utilization of Jacob 3:8 to be the most contextually egregious.  Taken out of context, as you did, the scripture reads as follows:

“O my brethren, I fear that unless ye shall repent of your sins that their skins will be ^awhiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God.”(Jacob 3:8)

From a casual reading of this scripture in isolation, one could be drawn to the conclusion that the Book of Mormon teaches that dark skin is a punishment for sin, and that therefore, non-whites are inherently sinful.  But if we place this scripture into context, a very different picture appears.  In this chapter, the Prophet Jacob was calling the lighter-skinned Nephites to repentance, for a number of sins, particularly adultery, using the fidelity of the darker-skinned Lamanites as an example:

“5 Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate because of their filthiness and the cursing which hath come upon their skins, are more righteous than you; for they have not ^aforgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our father—that they should have save it were ^bone wife, and ^cconcubines they should have none, and there should not be ^dwhoredoms committed among them.

6 And now, this commandment they observe to keep; wherefore, because of this observance, in keeping this commandment, the Lord God will not destroy them, but will be ^amerciful unto them; and one day they shall ^bbecome a blessed people.

7 Behold, their ^ahusbands ^blove their ^cwives, and their wives love their husbands; and their husbands and their wives love their children; and their ^dunbelief and their hatred towards you is because of the iniquity of their fathers; wherefore, how much better are you than they, in the sight of your great Creator?

8 O my brethren, I fear that unless ye shall repent of your sins that their skins will be ^awhiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God.

9 Wherefore, a commandment I give unto you, which is the word of God, that ye ^arevile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins; neither shall ye revile against them because of their filthiness; but ye shall remember your own filthiness, and remember that their filthiness came because of their fathers.”(Jacob 3:5-9)

What a difference a little context makes.  I would draw your attention in particular to the beginning of verse 9 where Jacob issues the commandment “… that ye revile no more against them [the Lamanites] because of the darkness of their skins; neither shall ye revile against them because of their filthiness;”  in essence, Jacob has just issued a commandment against racial prejudice, a commandment far more direct, I might add, than any you would find in either the Old or the New Testaments.  Beyond that, the Book of Mormon is replete with tales of righteous Lamanites contrasted with wicked Nephites.  Off the top of my head I could mention the examples of the Anti-Nephi Lehites, (See Alma Chapters 17-27) the 2,000 Stripling Warriors (See Alma Chapters 57 and 58) and Samuel the Lamanite, a dark-skinned prophet who alone revealed the sign of Christ’s birth to the peoples of Ancient America (See Helaman Chapters 13-15).  Hence, if the Book of Mormon is holds its fair share of uncomfortable passages, it’s hardly the Mein Kampf you’re making it out to be.

Which brings me to my major issue with your article, after a lengthy, if somewhat cynical interpretation of my faith’s admittedly checkered history on race relations, you close your supposedly “not a “gotcha” political ploy” of an article with the following demand:

“That is why, Mr. Romney, as an American citizen whose president you seek to become, I must insist that you honestly and forthrightly attest to me and all Americans of goodwill that you can be my president, too, fully and completely.  You can accomplish this by publicly disavowing the portions of your holy book that so sorely denigrate the humanity of me, my loved ones and all people of black African descent.” (emphasis mine)

So to be clear, while you find religious litmus tests self-righteous and insulting in general, in this particular case you feel you can demand one, requiring a public disavowal of those scriptures that you find personally unacceptable.  I might ask you, Dr. Hendricks, how much of the Bible would you feel comfortable, as a Christian, publicly disavowing in order to be an acceptable president for an Atheist?  Or how much of the Qur’an ought Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MI) have to publicly repudiate in order to placate the religious right?  Or how much of the Torah should Senator Lieberman disavow in order to make himself acceptable in a majority Christian nation?  Clearly you see the problem here, right?

Having been born after the 1978 revelation on the Priesthood Dr. Hendricks, I can attest to you that I grew up in a very different church than the one you refer to in your article.  I served my mission in central Brazil, serving with, and under the direction of members of African-descent and baptizing them too.  The regions of greatest and fastest growth for my faith are in Brazil and Sub-Saharan Africa, among the very ethnic groups once discriminated against by us.  While our views on African-Americans were once prejudiced and backward, they have grown and evolved.  As your Brother in Christ, and a fellow child of an all-loving God, who is no respecter of persons, nations, creeds or colors, I would invite you to allow your views of us to similarly evolve.

In disagreement,

Sidney Carton

All-American Bigotry: Hating Muslims for Fun and Profit

by Sidney Carton

In New York Harbor there stands the statue of a lady, whose name is Liberty, and within her base lies an inscription that, depending on how you look at it, is either one of the most inspiring expositions of American idealism, or one of the greatest pieces of unintentional irony ever carved in stone.  The statement, by Emma Lazarus, is as follows:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Considering the current atmosphere of anti-immigrant hysteria, in light of our nation’s history of less-than-welcoming behavior toward the newly arrived other (No Irish Need Apply, anyone?) I wonder some times if Ms. Lazarus penned these words to shame us collectively into better behavior, as if we might compare our personal pettiness with the ideals outlined in those words and find ourselves wanting.  If so, I fear the lesson remains lost on us over a century after the fact, a fear sadly illustrated by the recent scandal regarding the TLC reality show “All-American Muslim.”

The show, which purports to follow the daily life of 5 Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan is an attempt to show American Muslims in a somewhat different light than viewers of American television may be used to:  As relatively normal, mainstream people, working out a life for themselves and their families.  No car bombings, no jihad, no burning of American flags, just football, weddings, and humdrum suburban life.

Such a depiction, according to the Florida Family Association (FFA), is absolutely horrifying.  Finding nothing in this program that reduces American Muslims to their stereotypical vision of homicidal hordes of fanatics determined to destroy all we hold dear, they have done the only thing any rational individual could be expected to do, realize their preconceptions of Islam to be incorrect and reconsider their intolerant and hateful views…

Just kidding.  No, faced with a reality that conflicted directly with their vision of an imminent existential threat from mobs of hijab-wearing, bomb-throwing, sharia-advocating fanatics, they immediately declared the show to be a work of propaganda, stating that the show is:  ”…clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law.”  Mobilizing their legions of dedicated followers with this new source of outrage and hysteria, the FFA set them loose on the show’s advertisers, a number of which promptly withdrew their funding, most notably Lowe’s hardware.

While I have no doubt that a number of individuals in the FFA actually believe the paranoid pap that is daily churned out from an infinite number of sources both online and on the air, which would have them believe that there are jihadis under every rock and behind every tree, the truth behind this outburst is far more sinister.  Islamophobia after all is an excellent tool for mobilization and fundraising and with the ongoing and ever-increasing union of politics and religion in this country, fearing and hating Muslims has made a lot of money for a select group of people, and kept a lot of people in political power.

Alas, fear and hatred are high maintenance tools, particularly when the group you have chosen to fear suddenly have faces, names, and friday night football games.  How much harder is it to hate your Muslim neighbors when you see that, much like you, they spend their evenings watching the same moronic TV shows, that, instead of spending time brainwashing their children into becoming suicide bombers, they love them, play catch, or hide and seek with them and basically are nothing like the monsters you have been led to believe…  and if you don’t believe that any more, why would you donate money to the people who led you to believe your neighbors were monsters, or vote for the politicians who claimed to be protecting you from them?

And thus the whole mess becomes clear, despite the FFA’s protestations of its role in protecting the traditional family and biblical values, it’s all about money and power.  It’s all about whipping people into a froth so that they’ll open their wallets, and vote for the “right people” who will, (surprise, surprise) advocate policies in the legislatures and statehouses that allow groups like the FFA to make even more money.  Hence the need for monsters among us.  Hence the lingering stereotypes, the crazed, sinister militant, Muslim waiting to plunge you into Sharia-based dhimmihood; the depraved, quasi-pedophiliac homosexual seeking to convert your children, the dangerous, vicious, immigrant, creeping across the border to drop their “anchor babies” and undermine our way of life.  It’s all a lie.  A lie designed to keep you afraid, to keep you paying, voting, and acting in such a way to let them keep feeding at the trough, because they know the moment you stop being afraid, they lose their meal ticket.

My name is Sidney Carton, and I am a member of the 99%

by Sidney Carton

My name is Sidney Carton.

I am a Library Assistant with the University of California.

I have worked without a contract for the past three years.

When upper level UC administrators were getting raises for “taking on the responsibilities of 2 or 3 administrators” I got a 4% pay cut to help cover our budget cuts.

I have worked full-time while holding down at least 6 (and often as much as 14) credits a quarter/semester, since 2006.

Due to the ever-rising costs of higher education, I currently carry enough student debt to buy two new cars.

The newest vehicle I own is 11 years old, and has over 180,000 miles on it.

If I’m lucky, I might afford to put a down payment on a home by the time I’m 40.

Were it not for “Obamacare” my wife would, due to pre-existing conditions, not be able to get health coverage on her own.

I have two children, pay my taxes, obey the laws and do my bit for the country that my forefathers bled to defend.

I don’t want the wealth of others, their money doesn’t interest me, their houses are too big and their stuff is ultimately just stuff.  All I want is a fair shake, for my voice and my vote to matter as much in the halls of my so-called “representatives” as the millionaires and billionaires whose interests they currently defend.

I’m not a Marxist, Socialist, Communist, Fascist, or any other kind of -ist, thank you very much.  (If anything, my current political position is cynicism.)  But I’ve read enough history to know that when the privileged few reap obscene benefit from the misery of the many while turning a deaf ear to their cries, catastrophe results, and everyone ultimately suffers.  What you are hearing from Zuccotti Park, from the streets of every major American city, and from the multitude of digital soap boxes across the internet are those very cries.  They are harbingers of troubles to come.

As a father and husband, who sees the fate of those I hold most dear caught up in an uncertain future, I urge those who stand in the positions to shape policy at this time, to give heed, and not merely lip service to these cries and to act accordingly.  For just a moment, lay aside the campaign rhetoric and bickering and do what we have sent you to our various capitals to do:  Govern this land.  If you will not do this, then you will answer for the neglect of your collective stewardship, and history will hold you responsible for our nation’s unhappy fate.

My name is Sidney Carton and I am a part of the 99%.  Join us and we will move forward together.

 

The Ruined Field : A Somewhat Belabored Parable

by Sidney Carton

For the record, this post deals with issues of a religious nature.  As such, it may be considered trite, and/or treacly in nature.  If such material offends, annoys or bothers you, the author highly encourages you to seek out more edifying reading.  You have been warned.

There are days in which I look up from the still-smoking ruins of the latest drama to unfold in my insignificant life and stare into the heavens to interrogate the God in whom I claim to believe.  I look up to him and ask him a question that is all-too-familiar in both its bitter disappointment and momentary despair:

“Why Lord?  Why did you have me clear this piece of ground?  Why did you have me dig out the brush and break the soil?  Why did you have me plant the precious seeds of hope and expectation into this ground, dig the canals to irrigate the field, weed it, dung it, worry over it during the day and pray for it during the night?  Why did you have me go to all that work, and learn to love that which I labored over, if you knew that, despite my best efforts, the Adversary was going to overrun the whole of my works, burn my crops and seed my field with salt?  If it was all for naught Lord, why did you have me do it in the first place?”

Now in reality I am not a farmer.  Indeed, if the strawberry bushes and pepper plant in my backyard are any indication, my family will have much to fear for should their ability to eat ever be solely dependent on my agricultural skills.  I do labor in a vineyard, but one that is metaphysical in nature.  Instead of plants I help care for those of the Lord’s children that he places under my stewardship.  Sometimes the field is fruitful and flourishes with little effort on my part, sometimes great effort is required to help encourage even the slightest growth.  And sometimes, for all the best intentions, efforts and desires, the field is trampled under the iron heels of the Adversary, whose only delight is in laying waste the hopes and faith of men and women so that they “may be miserable, even as he is” (2 Nephi 2:27).

It is on those terrible days, in the aftermath of lost faith, ruined hopes and fresh despair that the sadly familiar “why” issues forth from the bile in my lacerated soul.  Why is it that the things we put the greatest effort into seem, inevitably, to be the things that are destroyed with the greatest nonchalance by the Adversary?  How does he know what will hurt the most?  How does a loving God allow this to happen and not become a callous monster?  And finally, why, after we have mourned our mourning and shed our tears, will we gather up the spent embers, clear away the debris, and start again?

I am not as naive as I might seem and my questions are rhetorical.  Yet the pain evinced in them is quite real.  In my three short decades of life I have seen many wonderful, blessed souls (a great number of whom are personally dear to me) who have been degraded, despised and even destroyed by the spiritual abattoir we refer to as life.  While I bear my own spiritual scars, they are nothing in comparison to the maiming I have seen dealt out to others, often the tenderest and fairest among us.  And for no other reason than that it pleased the depraved author of our sorrows to see them suffer.

Do I blame God for this?  No.  I know that many would say that I ought to.  That the presence of such blatant injustice and viciousness among his creations stand as stark testimony against his supposed justice and mercy.  Yet I cannot fully agree with such an assertion.  For while spiritual shrapnel has left me bleeding from a thousand gaping wounds, I am reminded that I understand (at least in the academic sense) that “it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2: 11).  Or, rendered more simply, that without adversity, life has no meaning whatsoever.  I may have a cursory understanding of the doctrine of moral agency, but I doubt I’ll learn to love it on this side of the veil.

In the end I know why we were asked to (metaphorically) plant the field.  It is in the experience of the planting and the nourishing and the laboring and the striving that we grow and are enriched.  Even the experience of loss, of seeing our works laid waste, is ultimately to our benefit.  In losing that which we labored so dearly for, we gain the slightest understanding of our Father in Heaven’s sorrow at the loss of his own wayward children.  Finally, in taking up the debris of past failures, we are both enriched, as our new attempt will benefit from all that we learned in our prior plantings and we are strengthened as we assert through our persistence a faith that the work going on in our fields is eternal in nature and will eventually outlast those who periodically lay them waste.

So in a moment I will take up my shovel again.  I will clear the smoking embers from my fields and start again, come what may.  But give me a short moment, just a moment, to mourn the young plants trampled down before their harvest time.

Remembering 9/11: Beyond Empty Commemoration

by Sidney Carton

Ten years ago, on the morning of Tuesday, September 11^th,  I was driving to work in the San Bernardino Mountains.  It was one of those exceptionally beautiful mornings that those mountains are famous for.  The sun was just cresting the ridges around Big Bear, and the sky was a shade of blue that painters spend their lives striving to duplicate without success.  However, as I drove through this incomparable beauty, my mind was focused on my radio, where a description of incomprehensible carnage was unfolding before me.  This was my introduction to the so-called “post 9/11 world.”  I have few clear memories of that day.  In so many ways it was exactly like the one before and the one after, I worked 10 hours that day as a carpenter, the sun was still hot and the wood was still heavy.  And yet one image remains seared into my mind from that awful morning a decade ago.  No, not an image of falling bodies, or the smoking gash in the North Tower, but an image of that lovely dawn, and the sense of terrible perversity that an act of such evil could occur on such a beautiful day.

 

That is as far as I will indulge myself, or afflict you, dear readers, with my personal reminiscences of September 11^th, 2001.  In comparison to the experiences of so many others, they were irrelevant and ultimately inconsequential.  I lost no loved ones that day, but like so many others I felt the awful sense of hurt and horror that washed over us and hung like the acrid pall that covered New York during the days to come.  I recognize the need we feel as a nation to share “our stories” from that terrible day.  Much like Southern Californians in the aftermath of an earthquake suddenly have a common event on which we can all relate 9/11 is an awful touchstone of experience for every American old enough to remember it.  This year in particular, we seem to have remembered it to excess.

 

It was bound to happen, I admit it.  This was the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, providing us with an opportunity to look back, to take stock of losses, to measure progress, to “see how far we have come.”  In a more cynical sense, it has provided the purveyors of the 24-hour news cycle with almost endless content , which they have run in an almost continuous loop for the past month.  Yet, while I will admit that this whole spectacle was probably inescapable, it all seems sadly hollow to me.  We will have the processions, the somber speeches, the presentations of wreathes, the readings of names and the obligatory vows never to forget, which frankly put are lies, for we’ve long since forgotten many of the key lessons of that day.  A forgetfulness that is all-too cruelly illustrated by the many souls who rushed to the pile on those first awful days and now languish with insufficient healthcare from the illnesses brought on by their selfless acts of sacrifice amidst the poisonous ruins.

 

We are a forgetful nation.  We are forgetful of those who selflessly gave themselves for their fellowmen in an hour of terror.  We forget the sentiments of duty and love of fellow man that drove the men of the FDNY and NYPD into those burning buildings when every impulse of human nature would have had them turn in the other direction.  Instead of emulating those sacrifices, we have, in our political and social discourses, spent the better part of the last few years declaring who was “undeserving” in these difficult times.  I wonder whether the firefighters who charged up those stairwells even as the towers were coming down around them stopped to ask themselves if the people they were trying to help deserved it.  Some how, I doubt the thought ever crossed their minds.  Could the same be said of us today?  Shame on us.

 

The attacks of September 11^th, 2001 were born of hatred and were intended as a monument to death.  If we truly want to hold the victims of that terrible day in remembrance we must live our lives in defiance of those values.  We must live every day, seeking to love one another and take care of one another.  We must embrace the devotion to our fellow men that drove those firefighters and policemen into those burning buildings “that others might live.”  We must remember, in the words of one of our many national mottoes: E pluribus Unum, that while we are indeed many, we will only be great when we are one. It is only when we bear the burdens of the future together, instead of pointing fingers at one another with accusations of shirking, only when we can look across the ideological divide and see brothers and sisters instead of heretics and monsters, only when we can stand together in the face of adversity instead of disputing who should take its brunt alone, that we will be able to truly say that we remember 9/11.  Until then, we deceive ourselves and mock the dead with our hollow tributes.

So tomorrow, amidst the grandiosity and spectacle of official “remembrance,” go out of your way to be kind to your neighbor, whoever they may be.  In doing so you will do more to serve the legacy of those who gave their lives ten long years ago than all the monuments we could possibly hope to build.