My thoughts on Ferguson.
Posted on November 24, 2014 Leave a Comment
So many feel the need to weigh in on the grand jury verdict in Ferguson. I got this email from the Southern Poverty Law Center that expresses right where I am.
Dear Brian,
Should a state grand jury have indicted Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9? What’s publicly known, of course, suggests that there was probable cause to believe that a crime occurred. But we’re in no position to second-guess a group of citizens who have had access to much more information than we have had.
What we can say, however, is that the events in Ferguson have made vivid just how wide the gulf is between the police and those who are policed in so many communities in our country. It’s a gulf that’s been formed by the history of discrimination in our country, a gulf that has been deepened by the systemic biases in our current criminal justice system. It’s a gulf that breeds suspicion and mistrust, a gulf that undermines the very legitimacy of our system of justice.
A federal grand jury may yet indict Officer Wilson. Further, the Department of Justice may file a “pattern or practice” lawsuit against the Ferguson Police Department. But until we reform the criminal justice system in our country and heal the racial wounds of the past, there will be more Fergusons.
In the coming days, we hope that everyone listens to the plea of Michael Brown’s father for cooler heads to prevail.
Sincerely,
Richard Cohen Signature
Richard Cohen
President, Southern Poverty Law Center
Why Hocus Pocus 2 would be a great idea.
Posted on November 16, 2014 Leave a Comment
Bette Midler did a Reddit Ask Me Anything interview on November 6, 2014, and many of the questions focused on her 1993 movie Hocus Pocus. Will there be a sequel? Kathy Najimy was quick to chime in that she was up for it and SJP tweeted a few days later that she was in. (SJP is Sarah Jessica Parker). Now it’s just up to all of us to pressure the Walt Disney Company to get someone to write a script and make the movie! In researching for this blog, I found 13 fun facts about the movie and my favorite was that none other than Leonardo DiCaprio was asked to play the role of Max Dennison.
Here’s my imaging of the sequel. Hocus Pocus 2 – The Musical.
Kenny Ortega, the original director and the director of High School Musical, directs and choreographs the numbers. All original casting except Leonardo DiCaprio plays Max Dennison and Mena Suvari plays Allison, Max’s love interest. She took the role because she had so much fun upstaging Thora Birch in American Beauty.
After finishing high school in Salem, Max moved back to Los Angeles to attend UCLA film school. He graduates but fails to make anything of himself. We get cameos from both Penny and Garry Marshall rejecting his scripts and telling him he has no career. Max sings a sad ballad because he’s still a virgin and about to turn 40. He realizes that the only real time he ever had a chance with a girl was when the Sanderson sisters were terrorizing Salem. Max and his best friend, the trusty Zippo lighter that he talks to (like Tom Hanks in Castaway) head back to Salem.
Max’s mother (Jenny) still lives in Salem. (We are never told what happened to his father.) Because of residual effects from the witches’ spell at the Halloween dance, Jenny continues to believe that she is Madonna. She now operates Salem’s only combination Kabbalah/yoga studio and imports South American boys to sleep with her. Through a montage of Madonna songs, Jenny sings about the candle she found one day. Even though she has never been able to light it, she believes that it has mystical powers to keep her young and beautiful,
Max arrives home for the first time in years and is surprised to find that his mother thinks that she is still young and beautiful when in reality, she looks like chicken jerky. Max tracks down his former flame, Allison. She has married Jay, the floppy-haired blond bully. Jay is bald. Allison is fat. And their three kids are brats. Max and Allison sing a duet about how things might have been. At the end, Allison agrees to help Max find the black flame candle so that she can once again be young and beautiful.
Max had buried the book of spells in the hole they had dug in the cemetery and surrounded with Morton salt. Max and Allison dig up several bodies in trying to find the book, and when they eventually find it, the bodies they’ve uncovered do a rendition of Thriller because the Michael Jackson Estate will pimp out poor Michael’s songs at any opportunity.
Max and Allison take the book back up to Max’s bedroom in the attic. They open the book, and it tells them that the candle is also in the house. The book and candle are united, and because Disney is planning a limited Blu-Ray release of this animated classic, a Beauty & the Beast dance number ensues. Max lights the candle, and the Sanderson sisters are reconstituted from the dust.
The Sanderson sisters are no longer stuck in a world where they care about being young and beautiful. They only care about being rich. They immediately fly on Dyson vacuum cleaners to Germany and start a pharmaceutical company. Bette Midler gets to reprise my favorite song from Beaches, “Oh Industry”. Their goal is to use the spell book to cause worldwide pandemics that can only be cured with lifelong drug cocktails that their company manufactures.
Because Allison has a fear of flying, she and Max have to take a cruise ship across the Atlantic to get to Germany to fight the witches’ evil plan of world domination. On the bow of the ship, Max and Allison sing, “My Heart Will Go On,” causing half of the people on the ship to jump overboard to avoid having to hear that song one more time. This causes the ship to veer off course where it hits an iceberg. To flee the freezing water, Allison gets on the lifeboat with the other women and children, allowing Max to survive because he is able to find a floating piece of wood that he can climb onto.
After Max and Allison have been rescued, they reunite and continue in their plan to stop the witches. The Sanderson sisters, however, have split up.
The Witch Sarah (played by SJP) has fallen in love with an artist and moved to Paris. Max and Allison track down Sarah and and rescue her from an abusive relationship before vanquishing her to TBS where she will live day after day in reruns.
The Witch Mary (played by Kathy Najimy) has moved to a rural town in Texas where she is a substitute Spanish teacher. Avoiding another disaster at sea, Max calls his sister Dani (played by Thora Birch) and convinces Dani to go after Witch Mary. Dani recruits her friend Whoopi Goldberg, and they dress up as nuns to surprise Witch Mary. They take a couple of popular hits and make them about the Lord and Witch Mary eventually denounces the ways of Satan and they all end up joining a convent.
Max and Allison can finally go after Winifred (played by Bette Midler). They track her down at her luxury penthouse in Berlin, but when they arrive, they discover a hundred Bette Midler impersonators. The real Winifred escapes and sings a new song that Bette Midler has written just for the movie so that she can finally win an Oscar.
THE END
Thanks to Apple Board of Directors! Tim Cook is now “Proud to Be Gay”
Posted on October 30, 2014 Leave a Comment
Apple CEO, Tim Cook
In an essay that appeared in today’s Business Week, the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, declared that he is proud to be gay. I applaud his courage in coming out, but at first I considered jumping on the bandwagon of criticizing him for taking so long to do it. His explanation for why he delayed stuck in my craw. In his essay, he said that he comes from “humble roots” and doesn’t “like to draw attention” to himself. That seems too self-serving.
I think that he delayed because he has competing demands. First and foremost, he is CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world. In my view, Cook has an obligation to Apple that overrides his right to an unfettered personal life. He’s not a civil rights leader. He’s the CEO of a company and has a duty to the Apple shareholders to protect their investments. I work in a corporate environment, and I understand the challenges of being who you are when your performance is measured by stock price. If he thought that coming out as gay would affect Apple and its operations, then he is justified in keeping his personal life private. I’m sure that this decision to come out was vetted and approved by the Board of Directors of Apple so I’d like to say thank you to the Apple Board of Directors.
The Apple Board of Directors must have realized that in this day and age, people won’t care whether the CEO is gay so long as he performs. I guess it’s easy to tell the market you’re gay if your latest iPhone release sold more phones than any other in history.
There’s a view among many that we all just need to come out, consequences be damned. But I take a different tack and agree with Cook. I don’t think that my being gay is the sole characteristic that defines me. I’m a lawyer, a husband, a dog lover, an uncle, a son of the South, a writer, and many other things. I don’t have to come out to everyone. BUT. If I do. If I give people the opportunity to accept me for who I am, they just might surprise me.
I think the last two sentences of his essay will become of the most famous quotes of all times: “We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.” Tim Cooke October 30, 2014.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-30/tim-cook-im-proud-to-be-gay
I’ve got some catching up to do.
Posted on October 28, 2014 Leave a Comment
Alexander Stubb, Prime Minister of Finland
I think 44 is the worst age. You still want to be young and tell people you’re 35, but you know that you’re about to crest the hill towards 50. And although I firmly believe that 50 is the new 40, my body definitely tells me otherwise. When was the last time someone in his 30s talked about foot pain. Now, I’m faced with mounting evidence that I haven’t accomplished enough in my life. I attended Furman “It’s a beautiful campus!” University, in Greenville, South Carolina, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the South. In 1992, I was awarded the Bradshaw-Feaster Medal for General Excellence as the top male student in the graduating class. The guy that won the year after me is now the Prime Minister of Finland. Time to shift into high gear.
http://edge.furman.edu/alexander-stubb-set-to-become-finlands-next-prime-minister.html
La Jolla Writer’s Conference
Posted on October 26, 2014 Leave a Comment
I had the privilege of attending the La Jolla Writer’s Conference this weekend. It was one of the most rewarding and exhausting weekends of my life. I became friends with some great writers (Lissa Price and Patti Callahan Henry) and reconnected with some old friends from my writing group. November is gonna be a hectic time for writing. Lots of interest in The Wisdom of Stones!!!! Am going to start working with a PR company this week to get my platform expanded.
“I’m not Afraid of New Things,” God tells Pope, but “We’re not Ready,” Catholic Bishops tell God
Posted on October 20, 2014 Leave a Comment
As someone who grew up Southern Baptist and was taught that Catholics were not really Christian because they worshipped Mary instead of Jesus and drank actual wine during communion, I find myself about to confess something I never thought possible.
I love the Pope.
With his message of love, peace and compassion, he is an example of a Christian leader that is truly Christ-like.
He has called on the church to adapt to the “changing conditions of society,” and today in his beatification sermon, he followed up a two-week Vatican conference, or synod, of bishops he challenged the Catholic Church with the proclamation, “God is not afraid of new things.”
Over the past two weeks, one hundred ninety-one Catholics bishops assembled at the Vatican over the past two weeks to discuss the role of the Roman Catholic Church and the modern family. At the beginning of the synod, Pope Francis told them, “Speak clearly. No one must say, ‘This can’t be said.’”
In calling for this open dialogue Pope Francis set the stage for a more progressive attitude towards non-traditional families. An early report from the synod adopted a welcoming approach towards gays and lesbians, even going as far as realizing that same-sex unions could provide “previous support in the life of the partners”.
This preliminary draft or “relatio” stated that the LGBT community has “gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community” and that they should be welcomed into the church.
But conservatives in the Church rallied and railed. Cardinal George Pell, an Australian archbishop now serving in the Vatican told the Catholic News Service, “We’re not giving in to the secular agenda. We’re not collapsing in a heap.”
Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier of South Africa criticized the initial draft because it presented “homosexual unions as if they were a very positive thing.”
American Catholic bishops tinkered with the translation in the relatio so that Italian word meaning “welcoming” got translated into the more clinical “providing for.” Instead of welcoming gays into the church, American bishops are prepared to treat them. And that’s not surprising because the Catholic Church’s official stance is that “Homosexuals are intrinsically disordered.”
At the end of the synod, the language in the final draft of the “gay provision” fell far short of a full welcome, instead saying that gays and lesbians should be met with respect and delicacy/sensitivity.
For progressives at the synod, this draft was insufficient, and enough of them opposed the measure so that it fell just short of the two-thirds needed to pass (118 in favor; 62 opposed).
Disappointed at the direction taken by the synod, German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, (one of the leaders of the progressive movement) said that “the church should stress inclusiveness, understanding and mercy. Doctrine should be responsive to new developments and information. [Church teaching] obviously can change. The history of the church is 2,000 years old. Doctrine doesn’t change, but it is understood in a deeper manner.”
Many conservative Catholics criticized the media for their reporting of the synod, but Pope Francis sent a clear message as the synod wrapped up when he approached a group of journalists waiting outside the synod hall. “Thanks to you and your colleagues for the work you have done,” he said. “Grazie tante.”
This was an “Oh snap!” to his critiques and is just one more reason to love him.
Amendment XVIII to the US Constitution
Posted on October 12, 2014 Leave a Comment
Earlier this week, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) tweeted, “The Supreme Court’s decision to let rulings by lower court judges stand that redefine marriage is both tragic and indefensible. . . Traditional marriage is an institution whose integrity and vitality are critical to the health of any society. We should remain faithful to our moral heritage and never hesitate to defend it.”
Senator Cruz has promised to introduce a constitutional amendment to prevent the federal government from striking down state marriage laws.
Senator Cruz is so busy running for President in 2016 that I decided to help him out with the Constitutional Amendment. Here’s what Amendment XXVIII would need to look like:
Section 1. Certain provisions of the United States Constitution are hereby modified to the extent inconsistent with the provisions of this article: the First Amendment prohibition on making any law respecting an establishment of religion; Article IV, Section 1 requiring States to give full faith and credit to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other State; and the Fourteenth Amendment regarding a citizen’s rights to equal protection under the laws.
Section 2. Each State shall have the right to define marriage in accordance with Judeo-Christian values as determined by that State’s legislature or citizenry from time to time.
Section 3. No State shall be required to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another State.
Section 4. This Article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by convention in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
Ted Cruz talks about “moral heritage”. Our nation has a spotty moral heritage, unfortunately, so I would ask Sen. Cruz the point in time that he wants to pick as the correct one where he’s proud of this nation’s collective morality.
Let’s run through some possible dates.
1789 – The Constitution is adopted; however, slavery is widespread and blacks are considered three-fifths of a person. Probably not a highlight in our “moral heritage.”
1868 – 14th Amendment is adopted because following the Civil War, the South did not provide freed slaves the same protections as other citizens. It took another 100 years and the passage of the Civil Rights Act before this Amendment really had any impact on racial disparity in this country. Also, women could not vote at this time. It would be hard to say this was the peak of US morality.
1942 – The US government orders the internment of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent living on the West Coast. Rounding up US citizens and putting them in concentration camps? Even President Reagan recognized that this was a major uh-oh so we probably can’t pick this time period.
1964 – At the insistence of another famous Texas Senator (then-president Lyndon Johnson), Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. This might be a bright spot in our “moral heritage” except that most states still prohibited interracial marriage.
1967 – The US Supreme Court invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. OK. Maybe we’re getting closer.
1973 – The US Supreme Court upholds a woman’s right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. According to any social conservative, this decision was wrong and has led to the moral decay of our country. As a result, 1973 has to be the end point of our analysis.
CONCLUSION: Sometime between 1967 and 1973, the US hit its “moral” peak. We can be proud of ourselves during this brief six-year period in our nation’s two hundred thirty-eight year existence.
I’ve written your Amendment for you, Senator Cruz. Now, you tell me the date that you want to take our values back to.
Biblical Marriage
Posted on October 11, 2014 Leave a Comment
Here’s what marriage looked like in the Bible.
E-OT
Posted on October 9, 2014 Leave a Comment
So I decided today that I’d pursue a dream that seems impossible but if you don’t dream big, then why dream at all. I wanna E-OT. Win an Emmy, Oscar and Tony. I recently started work on a One Act Play that I’ll be submitting to a theatre company in Tennessee looking for LGBT-themed work focused on the South, religion and family. Right in my wheelhouse. I’m adapting the short story that I had published in the San Diego Writers Ink anthology in 2011. It’s very different writing a play than a novel, but I’m enjoying the process. If my play is selected, then it will be performed in the Spring. Stay tuned. Why are the Blinds Closed? may be coming to a theatre near you.
Brian Peyton Joyner 