by Bob Kinsey
The prosecutor of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 summed up,
“They said they came in peace, , but they couldn’t spread their message without wrecking stuff. He noted the base has an area off-site designated for protests, but forcing employees to come to work where the sidewalk has been painted with messages of love and peace— “that’s not a pleasant sight to come upon.”
The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 compared their “wrecking stuff” to Jesus overturning the trading tables in the Temple. To Jesus those tables were “not a pleasant sight” because they symbolically and actually undermined the message of God’s free Grace–not for sale or profit. How do weapons of mass destruction–used in spite of the laws of war against targeting civilians–and threatening now the whole of life on our planet, a channeling of our wealth to their production and deployment become a “pleasant site” –and participation in their existence (jobs, national “security”) something the law should protect?
We need to look at how this transformation — whereby employees working on weapons of mass destruction — must not be made to feel unpleasant — is illegal. For it is those weapons that they create and deploy that are illegal in international law and fly in the face of the teachings of all religions. How can any rational person state with a straight face that the US is a Christian country with its Constitution and laws grounded in God’s, when this is so, –when juries can rule it so, when its citizens can feel pleasant working on nuclear weapons and paying for them instead of working and spending to address climate change, environmental pollution, hunger and poverty?
Look back!
In 1945 former President Herbert Hoover said, “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”
David Lawrence, conservative owner and editor of the US News and World Report, said in 1945, “Military necessity will be our constant cry in answer to criticism, but it will never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations, though hesitating to use poison gas, did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.”
In March 1946 the Commission on the Relation of the Church to the War in the Light of the Christian Faith, Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America said, “”The surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible…Both Bombings, moreover, must be judged to have been unnecessary for the winning of the war…As the power that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan.”
And in 1982 George Kennen, a life long US diplomat, said, “The readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings–against people whom we do not know, whom we have never seen, and for whose guilt or innocence it is not for us to establish–and in doing so, to place in jeopardy the natural structure upon which all civilization rests, as though the safety and perceived interests of our own generation are more important than everything that has ever taken place or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a presumption, a blasphemy, and indignity–an indignity of monstrous dimensions –offered to God!”
The Plowshares 7 should be given a Freedom medal and not more time in jail–they already spent, unconvicted, over a year in jail. Where was their right to a speedy trial? Just sayin’.
