Fr. Michael Rodriguez, formerly of El Paso, is seen outside the door to Sta. Teresa Catholic Church in Presidio where he recently has been transferred. The controversial priest got involved in a local political contest publically criticizing gay and homosexual lifestyles in El Paso. (Photo courtesy of The International Presidio Paper)
By A. Daniel Bodine
EL PASO, TX--Calling it a bit queer as a standup for morality is no play on words, folks. For the events in a religious group’s recall election petition drive here (involving an extension of city employee health benefits to “domestic spouses,” a drive hell-bent to oust this city’s popular mayor and two other representatives from office for their support of it), indeed, is more than a little strange.
Mayor John Cook has tangled the web with a suit seeking an injunction against the group, claiming the corporate-owned church’s leader who organized the drive both bullied from his pulpit and used his ministry’s website to help gather petition signatures. That’s a state felony crime in violation of a tax-exempt separation status.
Cook, losing both in lower and in appellant courts, wants to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary to challenge corporate-church political financing exemptions. Whoo! Hello, Personhood Revisited maybe?
Too, already as early fallout, a Catholic priest who got involved supporting the drive with a series of ¼ -page newspaper ads, has been transferred to the remotest parish in the diocese, reportedly as the bishop’s way of advising him to keep his mouth shut in contentious political issues. How much plainer can that message be?
So, is this a morality play of biblical proportions? Or a simple turning of the ol’ political progress screw against the concept of old, entrenched sinning in the South, a concept noted historically for its backwardness? My guess is, it’s both. So let’s strike up the band and celebrate our differences! Maybe in good cheer we can find cause to merge a few thoughts along with a few beers together, per the way of President Obama our civil leader.
The conservative religious group El Pasoans for Traditional Family Values--led by members of the Word of Life Church and organized by feisty Pastor Tom Brown, who even performs exocists--brought a ballot initiative in 2010 against a city council decision effective at the start of that year granting health benefits to unwed but legal “domestic spouses.” Only 19 of 6,200 employees chose to claim the benefit. (Here’s link to the El Paso Times’ excellent coverage.)
Voters generally yawned at the special election measure when it appeared on last November’s ballots (only 15 percent of the eligible voters voted in it), and sure enough with strong church participation supporters against the benefits won by a 55-45 percent margin. Case closed, supposedly.
A ballot initiative, to be clear, is a process allowing local registered voters to propose legislation for a binding election of the general populace, targeting specific local laws or a law of a political entity; and to enact or reject the law(s) at the polls, independent of the lawmaking power of that duly elected governing body. Some call it populism squared, as of the exponent two. It’s a core Constitutional part of democracy’s checks and balances system, however.
But then Cook played another card in the Spring of this year. Claiming that voters would be more supportive once they were more cognizant of the background, he ordered a reworded version of the benefits law be presented to the council again for approval.
The church group’s ballot initiative, unintentionally, it turned out, also cut off health benefits to some of the city’s retired families, too. There’d been anger expressed.
Too, although I can’t find any background research to clarify it, I remember distinctly at this controversial June meeting one of the speakers identified himself as “the one who brought you into court” earlier, while urging council to pass the new revision. (Perhaps one of the readers can help with background on this.) He made the remark in the tone implying “and I’ll do it again, too,” if this new law reinstating the “domestic spouses” benefits wasn’t approved. Thus, the meeting was tense with inglorious diatribes, yes.
At one point Brown even led a hallway prayer group just outside the council chambers beseeching God in his infinite wisdom to intervene against a permissive vote. But that wouldn’t be the case. Council members split 4-4 and Cook cast the decisive vote to approve it. Brown said I’ll be back, and sure enough his group was--this time with the recall petition. And over 9,500 signatures.
Meanwhile, Father Michael Rodriguez has settled comfortably into the old parish in Presidio, and commented to the media in a press release about his reassignment thusly: “Obedience to my bishop is essential to the priesthood,” according to the website Big Bend Now. “My bishop has transferred me to another assignment, and I intend to be obedient. The priesthood is my greatest joy. In the present circumstances, I intend to try even harder to be a good, holy priest.”
Presidio is a couple hundred miles downstream from El Paso on the Rio Grande, at the confluence of the Rio Conchos flowing northward from the eastern slopes of Mexico’s Sierra Madres--La Junta de los Rios, the historic crossing called by Indians thousands of years ago. Tucked deep in the Big Bend, its remoteness has been both a blessing and a curse over the years. But Fr. Rodriguez says he comfortable in his profession. And his new location.
The unspoken message in all the stories arising from the recall issue, however, may be the greatest--the historical one. One of the most noteworthy researchers on the South’s religious belligerence arising in the aftermath of the Civil War, toward anything smacking of sin, is Charles Reagan Wilson, history professor at ’Ol Miss and director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is the author of Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause.
One reviewer of the book--noting how all things sinful along with such institutions as the Klu Klux Klan, etc.--could become such symbols for the southern states, said Wilson sought “to explain historically (in the book) why ideas such as these came to be in the first place.
“His answer is that the ‘Religion of the Lost Cause‘--all of the myths, rituals, holy days and the homogeneous conservative Civil Religion of the American South after the Civil War--was an attempt by the defeated southerners to deal with their loss and to assert their distinctive religious identity against the looming North.”-- E.g., to cope, when swamped with seemingly overwhelming uncertainty, one leans hard on a crutch, real or imagined.
So, is this moral outrage in El Paso against extending employee health benefits to “domestic (gay or homosexual) spouses” all a lot to do about nothing? Just El Paso folks eking out progress “as the world turns?” Or is it out with the current regime in favor of a more strident drum beat?
The voters will decide, possibly in an election as early as May 2012.
Expect a larger than 15 percent turnout.
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