As I sit here thinking about tonight’s debate between the two Presidential candidates and about their respective campaigns to be elected to office, I find myself distracted by thoughts of one of the vice presidential candidates, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and his visit, together with his wife and children, to a soup kitchen for homeless and hungry people in Youngstown, OH yesterday. In case you didn’t see it on the news last night or this morning, the congressman apparently arrived quite late at the St. Vincent de Paul hunger shelter — after the shelter’s clients had already had their meals and left, in fact, and the dishes had been washed and kitchen cleaned up. But Mr. Ryan made a pretense of “volunteering” anyway by putting aprons on everybody and re-washing and re-drying a few pots and pans, all for the sake  of the photographers and television cameras. Gaaaak!!!

And this afternoon I find myself obsessing on it when I’d far rather be thinking about tonight’s debate between President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney, which is a matter of far greater importance, for Heaven’s sake. And I find myself getting madder and madder at Paul Ryan and his handlers. So I want to talk about it…with you. Hope you don’t mind.

My anger, I think, has three components. Let me list and briefly describe them:

First, I’m pissed that Mr. Ryan would do what he did in a place and among people who I care about, people in Youngstown, which is the neighborhood where I grew up and is where people who I care a lot about still live. Some of them would be among the 30% of Americans that Mr. Ryan has described as “takers” and among the 47% of Americans that Ryan’s running mate, Mr. Romney, has described as “paying no taxes” and “not taking responsibility for their lives” because they are supported by federal or state “entitlement” programs. They’re talking about a dear 91-year-old aunt in Youngstown who, I presume, receives Social Security pension checks, as I  now do because I have worked hard and paid plenty over the years to earn them, just as she and her late husband, Uncle Chuck, did. She is one of the most “responsible” people I have ever known.

Messrs. Ryan and Romney are also talking about a cousin, Donna, who is a cancer survivor but nevertheless constantly battles cancer or cancer treatment-related illnesses and is currently hospitalized and on life-support. Because of the cancer, Donna hasn’t worked in recent years, and, I suppose, may well have had to rely on “entitlement program” benefits in order to live. So I’m pissed that Paul Ryan would dare to come in to Youngstown  to pretend to be individually compassionate. Maybe he is; but I’d far prefer that he do his pretending in  Janesville (Wisconsin).

Second, I think my anger has something to do with his having used a food kitchen that serves predominantly homeless persons to do his pretending. I suspect he thinks, as Mr. Romney seems to think, that homeless persons wouldn’t be that way if they just chose to take responsibility for their own lives. If that’s so, then he has another thought coming. The fact of the matter is that a great preponderance of the “homeless” persons in this country aren’t that way because they’ve made bad choices or refuse to “take responsibility.” Rather, they’re in the situation they’re in because they suffer from mental illness. Neither Mr. Romney nor Mr. Ryan seem to understand  that or acknowledge it. But it’s a fact, one of the many facts both men seem to ignore. Pretending to volunteer in a soup kitchen won’t help. But accepting the facts and then using their power and intellects to build a proper response to mental illness and homelessness would, it seems to me.

Third, it steams me to think that Paul Ryan would use his own children in yesterday’s sham compassion performance. Mrs. Ryan, I can understand. She’s an adult, after all, and could have said no. (Wouldn’t that have been wonderful.) Of course, she didn’t. But the kids? Well, that’s a different matter altogether. What kind of object lesson were the elder Ryan’s teaching their children? That, in politics, all is fair? That any means, even pretending to be or do something you aren’t or didn’t do, is justified by the end, i.e., getting elected? I hope not. Because even kids are smart enough to ask why would you then change afterward.

Thanks for listening. I’d love to know what you think.

It occurs to me this morning as I watch and read reports of the latest incident of perhaps stop-able (or at least “slow-down-able”) gun violence, the shooting at the Sikh temple in Milwaukee yesterday morning, that among the reasons we Americans are so reluctant to make automatic weapons — guns that aren’t necessary for hunting and self-protection purposes, for example — harder to get is that, like the Bible, we tend to think about the Constitution and its second amendment as having the same meaning or purpose now as when they were composed.

But they don’t, at least not in many of their narrower contextual respects. Biblical writers, scribes, and editors as they did their work, for instance, had no idea of the true causes (God’s causes) of hair color, racial differences, sexual identity, gender, or sexual preference and orientation. They only observed that the majority of people had certain of these things and certain strength levels, and they concluded these must be the good things, therefore. And the other things, the fewer things and the people who had them (like gays and women of lesser “strength” than men) must be less good or just plain evil. So they were written about and talked about, then, as evil. The story-tellers, writers, editors, and scribes simply didn’t know any better. How could they have, inspired even as they may have been by the Holy Spirit?

Likewise, how could the framers of the Constitution, and the Congress that adopted the Bill of Rights and its second amendment, and the state legislatures that ratified it all have known what the circumstances of human progress and American society would be 230 or so years later? The answer is, I think, they didn’t. They couldn’t have. Nor, I suspect, did they think they could or should have, in spite of what appear to have been their incredibly big egos in some instances. Just as those who gave us the Hebrew bible, St. Paul, the Gospel writers — and perhaps even Jesus himself if in fact he was truly fully human — had no knowledge of the real causes of gender, sexual orientation, and gender preference, i.e. that they are genetic or scripted early on in origin, likewise our American patriarchs, bright as they were and deserving of our gratitude and honor, had no clue about what arms would become, how they would proliferate, and how dangerous things would finally become in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, our political forbears were mostly concerned about people protecting themselves from despotic government and rulers. It was then important to certify and solidify the right to raise militias and provide them with the arms necessary to do the job (which, in my view, is mostly what the second amendment is about rather than protecting an individual’s right to bear arms; though the Roberts Supreme Court has recently ruled otherwise, I realize). It’s still just as important. I’m a big fan of the second amendment…in its fullest meaning.

Sadly, though, in our fear, which is encouraged by the great communications media we have available to us and their tendency to spin and exaggerate and also by powerful people with great self-interest like the National Rifle Association and the politicians who fear the NRA (including, apparently, both Presidential candidates), we continue in our reluctance to make unnecessary guns as illegal and difficult to get as possible.

Don’t get me wrong. My son and grandson and many dear friends are hunters, and I was a hunter as a kid (and may become one again in retirement; wild turkeys are plentiful in North Carolina, they tell me). But I don’t think I’ll need an AK-47 or a repeating 9mm handgun such as the shooter in Wisconsin used yesterday, apparently, to do that. Nor do I think anybody needs such things to hunt or to protect oneself or one’s family or property. I mean if these things are available, why not nuclear bombs or missiles?

There simply has to be limits on what we can do or own. Sure, it may not stop the crazy people. But it’s quite likely to slow them down or make the damage they do less frequent and less extensive. It’s just common sense. And I don’t fear that any God-given or Constitutionally given right will be taken away.

Thanks again for listening. I’ll be interested in your opinions.

— Bernie

P.S. I’ve been helped in my recent thinking about God, guns, and the Constitution by a new book by Jim Atwood, a former pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arlington, VA, where Alice and I served as interim co-pastors several years ago. The title is America and Its Guns: A Theological Exposé, and there’s a foreword by Walter Brueggemann. Both the paperback and Kindle versions are available at Amazon.com.