Cindy Sheehan & Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Two of a kind

Our editor sent Loose Canon and me a note last Thursday, asking us to write for posting on February 6--that's today--about Cindy Sheehan's arrest at the State of the Union Speech and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born a century ago today. A clever connection, as a lot of research came to reveal--and as I shall soon share with you.

LC couldn't wait to be done with the assignment. She posted that very day. This gave me not only the last word, but time to ruminate. I would say this is an unfair advantage, but hey--LC, for whatever reason, decided to hand it to me. Anyway, I'm quite sure LC couldn't care what I think. (If she does, she can always call someone at Homeland Security and have me investigated for...oh, I don't know....is "independent thought" a crime yet?)

Let me summarize LC's points:

l) Cindy Sheehan's arrest: "Cindy Sheehan, arrested for wearing what was clearly a protest T-shirt." And: "Although the Capitol police have dropped charges against Ms. Sheehan and said the arrest was a mistake, I'm not convinced. Why on earth wasn't it correct for the Capitol police to arrest her?" And: "Common sense told the officers that Sheehan was a protester." And: "The Capitol cops were right to arrest her."

2) Sheehan's arrest (and harsh treatment) compared with the near-simultaneous removal of the wife of a Republican Congressman (who was wearing a t-shirt that said: "support the troops"): "The arrest is being compared to the detaining of the wife of a Republican legislator who wore a shirt supporting the troops to the SOTU. The two are not equivalent."

3) Cindy Sheehan in general: "It is sad that she dishonors her soldier son's death, the death of a hero who chose to be part of a volunteer army in a just war, with such cheap, tawdry, publicity-seeking antics."

4) Bonhoeffer: "Somebody mentioned to me that we celebrate the life and witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the centenary of his birthday (Feb. 4) with the implicit comparison of Sheehan and Bonhoeffer. But Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis for his witness. Ms. Sheehan gets tons of admiring publicity."

Let's take LC's points, such as they are, in order.

First: Is wearing a T-shirt with a slogan in the House of Representatives breaking the law? No. The law could not be clearer: In 1971, the Supreme Court (I know, those activist judges, even then) said it was unconstitutional to arrest a man who wore an anti-draft T-shirt into a courthouse. The decision is known as Cohen v. California:

Appellant was convicted of violating that part of Cal. Penal Code § 415 which prohibits "maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person . . . by . . . offensive conduct," for wearing a jacket bearing the words "Fuck the Draft" in a corridor of the Los Angeles Courthouse. The Court of Appeal held that "offensive conduct" means "behavior which has a tendency to provoke others to acts of violence or to in turn disturb the peace," and affirmed the conviction. Held: Absent a more particularized and compelling reason for its actions, the State may not, consistently with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, make the simple public display of this single four-letter expletive a criminal offense. Pp. 22-26.

Translation: A shirt with writing, however offensive, is not protest. It is free speech. For those who are foggy about this--and who can blame them?--here's a reminder:

U.S. Constitution: First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Capitol police belatedly acknowledged that "we screwed up." From MSNBC:

The officers made a good faith, but mistaken effort to enforce an old unwritten interpretation of the prohibitions about demonstrating in the Capitol,” Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said in a statement late Wednesday. “The policy and procedures were too vague,” he added. “The failure to adequately prepare the officers is mine.”

Got that? Sheehan (and Rep. Bill Young's wife) broke an "unwritten" law. (Unlike the President, who prefers to break real laws.) So one might ask LC: Do you support the enforcement of unwritten laws? If so, which other ones do you endorse? Or maybe this: Have we reached a point in our history where legality is of no real interest to people who feel as LC does and all power should reside in the President or his minions? Or is this one of those childish pouts people fall into when it's clear they can't have their way--like Scarlett O'Hara stamping her feet in "Gone with the Wind"?

2) Sheehan and the congressman's wife: From the constitutional, legal perspective, the cases are exactly the same. As Beverly Young noted:

“They said I was protesting,” Young told the St. Petersburg Times. “I said, ‘Read my shirt, it is not a protest.’ They said, ‘We consider that a protest.’ I said, ‘Then you are an idiot.”

3) Sheehan's son and the "just" war: LC is entitled to her opinion about Cindy Sheehan. (For the record, I find Sheehan annoying and some of her appearances--as with Venezuela's president Chavez--ill-advised. But then, I've never lost a child, especially in a war built on lies.) As for the facts, however, LC's opinion is shocking.

Why so? Because LC is a Catholic. And as such, she most certainly knows the position of her Church on this war. From a Catholic journal:

John Paul II stated before the 2003 war that this war would be a defeat for humanity which could not be morally or legally justified....

John Paul II sent his personal representative, Cardinal Pio Laghi, a friend of the Bush family, to remonstrate with the U.S. President before the war began. Pio Laghi said such a war would be illegal and unjust. The message was clear: God is not on your side if you invade Iraq....

The election of Benedict XVI as pope brings hope for the continuation of peacemaking as central to the papacy. Just as John Paul II cried out again and again to the world, "War never again!" the new pope has taken the name of the one who first made that cry, Benedict XV, commonly known as "the peace pope."

The name is no coincidence. In fact, Cardinal Justin Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia said Tuesday that the new pope told the cardinals he was selecting Benedict because "he is desirous to continue the efforts of Benedict XV on behalf of peace ... throughout the world."

As a Cardinal, the new pope was a staunch critic of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. On one occasion before the war, he was asked whether it would be just. "Certainly not," he said, and explained that the situation led him to conclude that "the damage would be greater than the values one hopes to save."

"Just war" theory is a religious formulation, not a political assessment. Perhaps LC could explain the hierarchy of her church. Is she...above the Pope? It would seem so. If so, damn nice of her to give her time to such small-potatoes enterprises as a blog on Beliefnet.

I'm a sporting guy, with nothing to bet on until the Oscars. Maybe we can do something good for humanity here. I'll give $1,000 to a charity of LC's choice if she can produce a reputable source (that leaves out everyone on her blogroll) affirming two things: l) Pope Benedict has condemned the position he and John Paul had about the Iraq war and 2) Pope Benedict enthusiastically praises Bush's efforts in Iraq. On the flip side, if LC can't find a law under which Cindy Sheehan could be legitimately charged at the State of the Union speech, she ponies up $1,000 to a charity of my choice. Whadya say, LC.? Let's lively up these debates with some real skin in the game.

4) Bonhoeffer and Sheehan. Too bad LC hates Sheehan so much. There are interesting parallels. From an online profile:

A group called the Deutsche Christen ("German Christians") became the voice of Nazi ideology within the Evangelical Church, even advocating the removal of the Old Testament from the Bible. In the summer of 1933, citing the state Aryan laws that barred all "non-Aryans" from the civil service, the Deutsche Christen proposed a church "Aryan paragraph" to prevent "non-Aryans" from becoming ministers or religious teachers.

Bonhoeffer bitterly opposed the Aryan paragraph, arguing that its ratification surrendered Christian precepts to political ideology. If "non-Aryans" were banned from the ministry, he argued, then their colleagues should resign in solidarity, even if this meant the establishment of a new church—a "confessing" church that would remain free of Nazi influence. This was a minority view; most German bishops wanted to avoid antagonizing the Nazi regime and to keep their regional churches together.

Bonhoeffer was explicit about the church's obligations to fight political injustice. The church, he wrote, must fight evil in three stages: The first was to question state injustice and call the state to responsibility; the second was to help the victims of injustice, whether they were church members or not. Ultimately, however, the church might find itself called "not only to help the victims who have fallen under the wheel, but to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself" in order to halt the machinery of injustice.

Readers with memories of recent unjust wars will be thrilled by these words. They take the church out of the business of sticking its head in the sand in times of national crisis. And not only do they call for activism--they call for absolute moral activism, giving no compromise. Compare Bonhoeffer to one of the heroes of the anti-war movement. Here's Mario Savio's greatest speech, at Berkeley, in 1964:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

See? Same idea. Now...this is very inconvenient stuff. It forces you to declare your loyalties. Are you on the side of secret spying, and torture, and "collateral damage" in the service of "liberating" a country that only seems to want us to leave? Then stand over there. Do you believe in the Constitution and due process and a government not entirely operated for the benefit of evangelical Christians and major corporations? Then stand over here. But no more equivocating, no more middle ground, no more pretending that the folks on the "right" side are like us, just with strange opinions. Because it's getting very very late....

Cindy Sheehan is guilty of having a lousy personality. Her tactics sometimes make me uncomfortable. But I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be happy to sit next to her at dinner. I think he would look at what is going on in Washington and understand her sense of urgency--her sense of emergency. I'll go further: I think he would absolutely adore Cindy Sheehan. From another online bio:

Declaring that it was impossible to know the objective truth about Christ's real nature and essence, Bonhoeffer proclaimed that God was dead. Moreover, Bonhoeffer believed that the true Christian was the confessing believer who totally immersed his life in the secular world, becoming a secular Christian. Rejecting the objective unalterable moral standards of the Bible, Bonhoeffer proclaimed a situational ethics--that right and wrong are determined solely by the "loving obligations of the moment."

Sorry, LC, but the "loving obligation" of this moment is a T-shirt with the ever-growing number of our war dead on it. And I'm just so so sorry Cindy almost ruined the President's night. But you know--it's about time someone did.