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Last updated on: March 25, 2008 at 3:19 pm by Fred Clark

More boxes 2008-03-25T15:19:45-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I’m at the awkward stage of moving where nearly everything is sealed in boxes. The first dozen or so boxes were neatly sorted and labeled. The last dozen are unlabelable, although I suppose I could write “Stuff that didn’t fit in the other boxes.”

I’ve got to make one more run to Goodwill and probably one more run to the liquor store (for more boxes — the place looks like I’m running some kind of black market bootleg and office-supply operation). A younger me once said that if you need to hire movers then you’ve either got too much stuff or too few friends. Or both. I’ve hired movers, but I’m starting to think the younger me was right.

Moving: Not fun.

All of which is a partial explanation/apology for the more-sporadic-than-usual blogging here, and for why I didn’t get around to posting the following until after the news spotlight had moved on to other things …

* * *

In the wake of Elliott Spitzer’s implosion, Amanda Marcotte explored the idea of legalizing prostitution and finds it wanting:

Prostitution is a unique labor market. Most labor markets, the value of the labor can be separated in some sense from the mistreatment of the workers. … But when degradation and harm are the work itself, struggling over labor standards becomes confusing.

She commends this Nicholas Kristof column in which he writes favorably about Sweden’s approach:

Sweden experimented in 1999 with a radically different approach that many now regard as much more successful: it decriminalized the sale of sex but made it a crime to buy sex. In effect, the policy was to arrest customers, but not the prostitutes. … No approach is going to work perfectly. But the Swedish model seems to have worked better than any other.

Let me suggest, for what it’s worth, that this Swedish model might also be, well, biblical.*

For a class back in seminary, my friend Dwight Ozard conducted a long study of prostitution in the Bible. Take away the prostitution-as-metaphor stuff, he said, in which those unfaithful to God were condemned for acting like spiritual prostitutes, and the Bible was remarkably consistent on the topic. The johns — the customers, the men — were uniformly condemned as sinners. The prostitutes themselves never were.

I can’t say that I’ve retraced all of Dwight’s scholarship on the point, but ever since then I’ve been on the lookout for counter-examples. I haven’t found any.

That makes sense in light of the central theme, the broad stream running throughout the scripture, of condemning oppressors but not the oppressed, condemning the exploiters but not the exploited. That seems to me to be a wise and useful principle completely apart from any sectarian basis for it. Whether you’re an ancient biblical prophet or a contemporary, secular lawmaker, punishing the exploited is unjust and does little to reduce exploitation.

* * *

So a week ago Sunday the paper ran a “Five years after the invasion” story on the front page. That story, the first story on Iraq on A1 in a long time, pondered why it might be that the occupation of Iraq seems to have receded from the forefront of public concerns.

Yes, that’s right, after burying every story about Iraq for the past year, we went out front with a feature package musing on the lack of attention that the public seems to be giving to the story we’re not paying any attention to.

This swallowing of one’s own tail is what passes for introspection in American journalism. It reminds me of the way all those stories about Britney Spears were followed by all those stories about all those stories. When you end up covering your own coverage, you might as well just run a headline that reads, “Sorry folks, we couldn’t come up with a legitimate angle.”

I’d like to see just how high we can stack this Jenga tower. For the next layer we could do a round of double-meta stories examining whether there have been too many stories about there being too many stories about Britney. And maybe another layer of stories musing why readers don’t seem emotionally connected to our stories about their lack of an emotional connection to the occupation of Iraq.

On top of those we could add yet another layer — although describing what that level of perverse abstraction would look like would require too many prepositional phrases strung together for me to keep track of.

Anyway, I’ve decided to interpret all this navel-gazing as instructions to begin posting wire stories on Iraq along with all the locally produced stories I post each night to the paper’s Web site. That kind of goes against the chain’s “ultra-local” mantra du jour, but I’ve never really understood the logic of this latest interpretation of “local” news. They take this to mean news that is exclusively local. A house fire in your town is considered a local story. A Vogon spaceship heading toward Earth and about to destroy the entire planet, including your town, would not be, according to this model, of local interest.

I don’t get that approach. I tend to think the occupation of Iraq, not to mention the $3,000+ per second it costs taxpayers, is an immensely important story for every locality. The blowback and repercussions from it will likely make headlines for decades to come.

* * *

Last week was also “Sunshine Week” in the Ga … er, Grommett newspaper chain.

When I attended Eastern College, we had an annual tradition called “Spiritual Emphasis Week.” Tony Campolo, our semi-famous sociology professor, called it “Be Kind to God Week,” and compared it to the annual ritual of making, and breaking, New Year’s resolutions.

That’s kind of like what “Sunshine Week” is for the chain. We take a week to congratulate ourselves on our fervent devotion to the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights and Open Government. Then we go back to ignoring Guantanamo and refusing to question the Bush administration’s preposterous rationales for the institutionalization of torture, warrantless wiretapping, executive “signing statements” and making habeas corpus an optional privilege rather than a right.

One week of sunshine, 51 weeks of clouds and fog. It’s like Seattle.

– – –

* Standard, redundant disclaimer: I suppose I need here to remark yet again, for the umpteenth time, that saying that an idea or policy is supported by biblical values does not, in itself, mean that such an idea would be good, or sound, or acceptable, as public policy. Sectarian arguments need to be translated into nonsectarian arguments. Those that cannot be don’t need to be considered by anyone outside of the sect.

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