Time to repent, Antonio, or pay the reaper

My former colleague Beth Barrett broke the news today that LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's divorce was in fact caused by a little -- OK, a lot -- of extramarital activity. Now Chris Weinkopf, the LA Daily News' editorial page editor, calls on his fellow Catholic to end the affair and repent.

Please. Look, I make no judgment on their souls -- Lord knows, we all have our sins, and we all need mercy -- but I'm not afraid to cast judgment on these "lovers'" actions. They are a despicable travesty that are causing great pain to Villaraigosa's family, a pain that will endure for decades. I refuse to play the game of pretending that this "romance" is cute or healthy, or that it is a "private matter."

Marriage is, by definition, a public matter. That's why we hold weddings in public, and get the government to sanction them. Indeed, marriage is the foundational institution of our society. The violation of one's wedding vows is much more than a private betrayal; its repercussions extend far beyond the couple. No, it's not our business to monitor what goes on in the Villaraigosas' home, but it is our duty not to condone adultery, and to support the aggrieved.

Adultery is not a new thing for Villaraigosa, as Connie Bruck wrote in The New Yorker in May.

Jews look back through haze to summer of hope

Since shortly after the counter-cultural days of the Summer of Love, Jews have been at the forefront of the medical marijuana movement. What's more, the spirit of the '60s had a lot in common with Jewish values, according to a piece in this week's j., the SF Jewish weekly.

It was a dream that took shape in Haight-Ashbury, where everyone wore flowers in their hair. It was a dream that burst into psychedelic glory in Golden Gate Park, where thousands gathered in the summer of 1967.

With the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, Jewish veterans of the long strange trip can’t help but look back. Though the pan-spirituality of the times allowed no room for traditional religion, Jews who were there agree Jewish values informed much of the hippie worldview.

Chabad of S.F. Rabbi Yosef Langer, at the time a San Jose State University student, today sees beyond the peace signs and roach clips. He perceives something more significant coming out of the Summer of Love.

“The yearning for utopia, in spiritual terminology the promise of the Prophets, is what this generation was all about: Everyone is looking for the time when we will live in peace and harmony. That’s what happened with the busting out of the hippie and political revolution.”

It was indeed a revolution.

Consider the confluence of social upheavals: The civil rights movement, anti-war activism and the popularity of mind-altering drugs. All of that swirled around baby boomers with the revelatory power of a burning bush.

And for young seekers, the Promised Land was the city by the bay.

“The counterculture project as it emerged from 1965 to 1967 was not ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out,’” Michael Rossman told the j. “It was to make a more authentic life between people generally. A large part of it was Jewish — Red-diaper babies who wanted to repair the world.”

Mosque gets restraining order against 'crazy' convert

Craig Monteilh showed up at the Islamic Center of Irvine in September wanting to convert. But quickly he began talking about jihad and a "9/11-type operation" against U.S. military targets, so the mosque asked him to leave and Friday won a restraining order, according to the LA Times.

Many were offended and some Muslims left the mosque because of Monteilh, who changed his first name to Farouk (not to be confused with Farfur). Affad Shaikh, civil rights coordinator for CAIR's LA-area chapter, compared the shock of "crazy lunatics" like Monteilh joining the mosque to a Catholic discovering their priest had been molesting children. He writes at This American Muslim:

I don't know what to do about a person who hijacks my religion and talks about "jihad" and "violent actions against American military" targets!!! This guy should be behind bars, he must be flight risk, HE MUST KNOW OF OTHERS or at least the FBI should be working on figuring this out.

Hamas depicts Israelis killing 'Mickey Mouse'

In May, I wrote about Farfur, the Hamas propagandist in the mold of Mickey Mouse. A video had turned up on YouTube in which Farfur teaches a program for Islamic world leadership and "liberate the Muslim countries invaded by murderers."

Now this video on YouTube shows Farfur being martyred by an Israeli agent after refusing to give the Palestinian land to "terrorists" (Israelis).



(Hat-tip: DMN religion blog)

Religions: Different paths to the same point?

They are not, according to an article in the current Newsweek by religious scholar Stephen Prothero that asks whether the major religions are all alike. But "since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful—and all are true."

According to this multicultural form of wisdom, the world's religions are merely different paths up the same mountain. But are they? Religious people do agree that there is something wrong with this world. But they disagree as soon as they start to diagnose the problem, and diverge even more when it comes to prescriptions for the cure. Christians see sin as the human problem and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in this tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem and liberation from suffering (nirvana) as the goal. If practitioners of the world's religions are all climbing a mountain, then they are ascending very different peaks and using very different tools.

You would think that multiculturalists would warm to this fact. But instead they try to flatten out diversity by pretending that the differences between, say, Judaism and Taoism are more apparent than real. How fulsome is religious diversity if all the religions are essentially the same, and a little interfaith dialogue can talk it all away?