Sung-ok Lee is the Assistant General Secretary of the Section of Christian Social Action, Women's Division of the United Methodist Women.

For many in government and industry circles, the discussion around the topic of climate change crisis focuses on energy efficiency, cap and trades and adjusting environmental policy to meet financial and economic ends.  For people all over the world, it's a very real crisis, the effects of which they are already witnessing.  But for many people of faith, including me, climate change is a primary moral challenge of our time, and the upcoming United Nations Summit on Climate Change gives us a unique opportunity to call attention to the need to reverse this dangerous trend.

As believers, we see the need to tackle climate change as a matter of social justice. Yes, it's true that we cherish and want to preserve Creation, but we are also keenly aware that while the poorest 1 billion people on the planet are responsible for only 3 percent of total emissions, they disproportionately bear the brunt of the devastating effects of climate change as their homelands suffer exacerbated droughts and floods, unpredictable rain patterns and crop failures. By contrast, the U.S. and other wealthy nations have benefited greatly from growth and prosperity fueled by carbon-based economies. Although our nation comprises only about 4-5% of the world's population, we are responsible for about 25% of historical emissions. 

I am also concerned about the effects of climate change on women and girls the world over.  This week, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) released a report called State of World Population 2009.  What it reveals in terms of the impact of global warming on women and girls around the world is startling.  The report points out that the female half of the world's population is indeed disproportionately more affected by the effects of climate change. 

While it's true that all around the planet people are feeling the effects of global warming, women in developing countries are among the most vulnerable because they tend to make up a larger share of the agricultural workforce and typically don't have access to income-generating opportunities.  Because they are in charge of households and family care, women are limited in their mobility, so that when tragedy strikes in the form of weather-related natural disasters, they are highly susceptible to the loss of livelihood, home, loved ones or event their own lives.

UNFPA's report highlights how girls often drop out of school to help their mothers secure food, water and energy.  As climate affects their livelihoods, women often bear the increased financial burden by taking on extra jobs to support their families.  Of greater consequence is that while stuck in this cycle of deprivation, poverty and inequality, these women and girls are unable to build the necessary social capital - like education, political power, and influence in their communities - to effectively take on climate change.

As global leaders gather in Copenhagen next month for the UN Summit on Climate Change, a four-person delegation of United Methodist Women committed to social justice will travel to Denmark to lend their voices to the women and the many others who are not able to attend and speak for themselves.  The team hopes to meet fellow advocates and learn what other organizations and governments the world over are doing to combat climate change.  The delegation will not only to press for strong, binding and fair greenhouse gas emissions targets, but will also demand that the U.S. join other nations to provide adaptation aid to the most vulnerable communities.

It is crucial that the governments of the U.S. and other industrialized nations responsible for greenhouse gas emissions implement effective and comprehensive, science-based approaches to reversing global warming.  As women of faith and advocates for social justice, we see it as our duty to hold global leaders accountable and ask that they assist developing nations to adapt to climate change, address energy poverty, and grow in ways that reduce poverty while protecting the environment.

In her new book Sarah Palin writes that one summer at Bible Camp she "put my life in my creator's hands and trust Him as I sought my life's path." For Palin, this grand divine plan was "a natural progression." She writes. And later, "I don't believe in coincidences."

Which leads me to ask:

What does she believe is God's plan for her? Does she have any free will or is everything preordained. Can she see something coming and change her mind despite God's plans for her?

Did God plan for her to become Governor of Alaska. If so, did God plan for her to step down. Did God plan for her to run for Vice President? If so why did she and McCain lose?

Did God plan for her to have a child with Down's Syndrome? If so why did she consider an abortion? Did God plan for her to have a huge wardrobe? Then why did she apologize for it?

Did God plan for her to do the Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson interviews and be humiliated by them. Did God plan for her to allow herself to be forced, against her will to do those interviews? If so then why complain?
Did God plan for her daughter Bristol to get pregnant while she was a teenager? Why was she then not thrilled. Did God plan for Bristol to get engaged and then break up, only to be left a single mother, dropping out of school?

Did God plan for Levi Johnson to be the father of her grandchild? Did God plan for Levi Johnson, who she now calls Ricky Hollywood, to pose nude for Playgirl and go into "porn" as she told Oprah. If so, why does she find it heartbreaking?

I find it all very confusing. 

Certainly Palin could say that God planned for her to publish a book that would be a huge, bestseller, go on Oprah, and make an enormous amount of money. Why would God choose her? Why would God look at the suffering around the world of so many millions and say, Sarah, I'm going to give you all of this. 

Perhaps God wants more out of Sarah Palin.
You would think that God would ask of her to live her life as an example to others of a compassionate loving, caring person. One of the most powerful examples of God's love in the Bible is that of forgiveness. Turning the other cheek. 

But Palin's book is a screed against everyone who ever done her wrong.
She is angry at the campaign staffer for "forcing her to do things she didn't want to do", she is angry at the media for asking her questions she couldn't answer. She is angry at the father of her grandson for being a foolish teenager. She has used this book and all of her Christian charity to do nothing but settle scores. She names names and calls 'em like she see 'em. And she doesn't see 'em the way God might. They are all of his children.

During the last few days, Psalm 109:8, a Bible verse in the form of a "prayer for Obama," has topped the Google trends chart:  "May his days be few; may another take his office."  Evidently, a bumper sticker emblazoned with this verse has popped up in various parts of the country.  It is a sort of right-wing Christian equivalent to the old "01.20.09" stickers looking forward to the end of the Bush era.

It was, most likely, intended as a joke.  But it isn't really very funny.  Especially since the next verse reads, "May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow."  The passage goes on the same way--asking God to pulverize this poor fellow--that he lose all his worldly goods, that his orphans be abandoned, that his father be remembered as a sinner, and finally, that "his memory be cut off from the earth."

Thus, the "Prayer for Obama," does more than anticipate that he leaves office; it entreats God to destroy the president.

Psalm 109 belongs to a special category of the psalms known as "imprecatory" prayers--it is a lament in the form of petition to destroy one's enemies.  It is the personal prayer of an individual, someone who has been dealt an injustice by another--and usually more powerful--person.  The words of Psalm 109 are those of deep agony, the longings of a victim for retribution and justice.  This psalm is considered one of the most difficult of all the psalms--full of violent images of vengeance and death.   Many a biblical critic has struggled with its words--and not a few--including Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians--recommend that it not be used in public worship, much less as a bumper-sticker political slogan.

In his marvelous book, Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis observed:

In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth.  In others the same spirit ceases to be frightful only by becoming (to a modern mind) almost comic in its naivety.  Examples can be found all over the Psalter, but perhaps the worst is in 109 (p. 20).

Lewis suspects that it may be best to leave such psalms alone.  But then he says that we must face "facts squarely." 

The hatred is there--festering, gloating, undisguised--and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves (p. 22).

Lewis refers to these psalms as horrible, devilish, cruel, hateful, and evil.  He believes that Psalm 109--and the poetry of its kind in the psalter--should point us back to the evil we carry within and teach us each how to behave with goodness, humility, and love. 

According then, to the venerable C.S. Lewis, a "Prayer for Obama" is really a prayer for ourselves to go beyond "festering, gloating, undisguised" hatred.  "If the Divine does not call to make us better, it will make us very much worse," he reminded his readers,  "Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst."

This morning's Washington Post made me choke on my coffee:  "Catholic Church Gives D.C. Ultimatum."  The Catholic Archdiocese is playing political hardball by threatening to cut off social services to the city's poor--including the homeless, the hungry, the sick, and children--if D.C. expands gay and lesbian civil rights and recognizes same-sex marriage.

That's right.  The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is holding poor people hostage in order to keep gay and lesbian persons from getting married.  They are willing to trade the indigent for getting their theological way.  

I don't like to criticize other people's religious faiths or churches.  There's plenty enough to criticize in my own Protestant tradition.  In the last year, however, we have witnessed a new authoritarian activism on the part of the Roman Church hierarchy that has an impact well beyond the Catholic Church.  This new coercive Catholicism is akin to the development of the Christian Right in evangelical churches in the early 1980s--a religious-political movement that reshaped American culture.  This is everybody's business.

In the last year, new Catholic politics emerged in the Prop 8 campaign in California where the church invested vast resources of money and leadership to overturn gay marriage; and then did the same in Maine.  Last week, in a political maneuver worthy of Tom DeLay, authoritarian Catholic bishops forced a Democratic Congress to adopt the Stupak Amendment undermining the legal right to choice by threatening to torpedo health reform.  Now they threaten the D.C. City Council?  Using the lives of poor people as a political tool?

I don't want to be alarmist about this.  Nor, in this ecumenical age, do I wish to be seen as a nativist calling for a new anti-Catholic crusade.  That would be a terrible misrepresentation of these concerns.  Nor do I want to offend Catholic friends and family.  But it is profoundly disturbing that the Roman Catholic Church appears to be using threats and fear to manipulate a democratic political process to enforce Catholic doctrine regarding abortion and human sexuality.  There seems to be a political pattern developing that should cause broad-minded citizens--Catholics included--to ask some serious questions regarding what is happening within the Catholic hierarchy.

Recently, Congressman Patrick Kennedy did just that.  In an argument with his own bishop about health care, Kennedy reminded the Bishop of Rhode Island that American Catholics have a long history of diversity and dissent regarding formal Catholic teaching.  Disagreement with the Catholic Church was, Kennedy argued, part of the dynamic of being Catholic in a democratic society.  Here's the bishop's answer:

"The fact that I disagree with the hierarchy on some issues does not make me any less of a Catholic." Well, in fact, Congressman, in a way it does. Although I wouldn't choose those particular words, when someone rejects the teachings of the Church, especially on a grave matter, a life-and-death issue like abortion, it certainly does diminish their ecclesial communion, their unity with the Church. This principle is based on the Sacred Scripture and Tradition of the Church and is made more explicit in recent documents.

For example, the "Code of Canon Law" says, "Lay persons are bound by an obligation and possess the right to acquire a knowledge of Christian doctrine adapted to their capacity and condition so that they can live in accord with that doctrine." (Canon 229, #1)

The "Catechism of the Catholic Church" says this: "Mindful of Christ's words to his apostles, 'He who hears you, hears me,' the faithful receive with docility the teaching and directives that their pastors give them in different forms." (#87)

It is worrisome that a Roman Catholic bishop would remind a member of the Kennedy political family that "docility" is the primary calling of faithful Catholic laity.  What about courage, compassion, and creativity?  

Oddly enough, Roman Catholic leaders have adopted a strategy of authoritarian engagement with the body politic at the very moment at which their church is declining. One in ten Americans is now an ex-Roman Catholic, with numbers dwindling, churches closing, a decline in the number of priests and religious, and with only immigration holding the number of communicants steady. With the church clearly in crisis, the bishops apparently have chosen to use the sick, poor, homeless, children, the faithful laity, and marginal as tools to increase their public power and influence by coercing public policy to fit their theology.  You'd think that they would be looking inward to see what is eroding Catholic congregations instead of lobbying Congress and threatening politicians. 

This is not what John F. Kennedy would have imagined for his beloved church when he so courageously broke through the boundaries of anti-Catholic prejudice to become the nation's first Catholic president.  The eternal flame at his grave in Arlington witnesses to the ancient Catholic vision of universal peace, justice, and love. The new authoritarian Catholicism is not only playing politics but it is replacing a more generous vision of historic Catholic faith--the traditional one that sides with the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast--with a vision of political power.  For that, I am deeply sad.  Coercive religion should have no place in a church or a pluralistic, democratic nation--much less in City Hall or the halls of the United States Congress.