Soapbox: Freedom and equality are more than fireworks and lipservice

Tom Loret | Twentynine Palms | Hi-Desert Star opinion page | Posted: Saturday, July 4, 2012

This year, my Fourth of July spirit was lifted by the sweeping joy, vivacity and unadulterated moral intelligence of Sister Simone Campbell, who I watched interviewed by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert.

She is the spokeswoman for a nine-city Nuns on a Bus tour that protests Rep. Paul Ryan’s, R-Wisconsin, budget and its supporters who wish to dramatically cut food stamps and Medicaid for children, the elderly and disabled. It would also roll back and eliminate critically needed housing, nutritional and educational programs while granting ever more tax give-aways to the super-rich and corporations.

She explained that they are often misrepresented and even called derogatory names such as “socialists.” Undaunted, she insists they are not socialists but simply Catholic sisters who experience Christianity in terms of social justice and spiritual community. Colbert then put her on the spot and asked if they were “radical feminist nuns or not?”

Sister Campbell, also a retired human and civil rights attorney, smiled and replied, “We’re certainly oriented toward the needs of women and responding to their needs. If that’s radical, I guess we are. We’re faithful to the Gospel. We work every day to live as Jesus did in a relationship with people at the margins of society. That’s all we do.”

My concern is not with church matters, but why “socialism” and “feminism” would be used to tease or disparage the credibility of a person whose credentials and reputation are as sterling as they are formidable.

For example, the top dozen or more countries that are ranked for quality of life and economic development by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), World Values Survey, International Monetary Fund and CIA World Factbooks, are all classified as hybrids of a socialist democracy.

Even more, these same top performers have all adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Development and Peace (1995) that calls for effective and measurable gender mainstreaming, or gender equity throughout all aspects of a nation’s civil administration, workforce, health, educational, corporate and business enterprises.

In compliance, countries such as Sweden went from 7 percent female legislative representation to nearly 50 percent. The other blue-ribbon nations all enjoy a minimum of 30 percent gender balance in governance and boardrooms while the USA ranks 82nd.

They also have the highest percentage of union membership, provide universal health care, debt-free education, and tower above the USA in gross domestic product per capita, or, money-in-their-pocket. They have the most extensive family leave programs and paid vacations, work fewer hours and have the most generous unemployment and welfare systems.

In social terms, they are more literate, in better health, live longer, have less crime, less poverty and less divorce than any country below established gender minimums.

For more cause to re-examine many of our own assumptions, these same “loose-and-liberal” nations have the lowest abortion rates, the most lax abortion laws, the highest percentage of educated women in the workforce and rank last in church attendance.

By contrast, America is the world’s leader in prisoners per capita and second, behind Russia, in abortions. However, in the developed world, we remain number one in childhood poverty, teenage pregnancy, unemployment, failed medical delivery, illiteracy and divorce, but tops in church attendance.

So, for me, this Fourth of July has called into question the nature of our new American man, one who would enrich himself and his friends at the expense of deserving women, children, elderly and the disabled in need. If that, to them, is either manhood, freedom, or American, then count me a radical feminist socialist every time.