Category Archives: Articles

MLK: Sanitized for Their Protection

September 2, 2013 – 8:36 am

Mug shot from the Montgomery bus protest, 1956.

One of the best ways to silence a dead revolutionary is to venerate him.

It’s a story as old as Jesus. If you say “Jesus is Lord” loud enough and often enough, you can march your armies into battle behind the symbol of the cross, ignoring all that nonsense like “resist not evil” and “turn the other cheek” and “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” You can forget everything he said about rich men and beggars (or camels), and explain away all that stuff about selling everything and giving the money to the poor. Instead, you can claim he really meant to preach a prosperity gospel, and then practice what you preach by living in a $10 million mansion. As Mark Twain wrote in his parody Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As Christ died to make us holy, let men die to make us rich.”

In my lifetime, something similar has been happening to Martin Luther King. We celebrate his birthday and make anniversaries of noteworthy events in his life, but by their very veneration the Powers That Be have sanitized Dr. King’s memory, removing everything they find threatening.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m happy that King has his own holiday and I believe the March on Washington and the “Dream” speech King gave there totally deserve the attention their 50th anniversary got this week. Much of what has been said and written about him this week (and is written every year in January) has been excellent. But in spite of those efforts, every year the real Martin Luther King — the “dangerous Negro” feared by the FBI — recedes further and further into the misty past. In his place, we are to often offered a dumbed-down King whose message can be claimed and co-opted by everyone this side of the KKK.

The co-opting of his character. In the public mind, Martin Luther King has been reduced to one sentence:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

And the meaning of that quote has been reduced to advocating a color-blind society. Worse, it has been reduced to advocating a consciously and legally color-blind society. (If your unconscious racism causes you to believe and repeat absurd allegations about a black president or a dead black teen, no problem. If the law does not mention race, but prosecutors and juries apply the law differently to whites and blacks, no problem.)

And so, conservatives  often invoke Dr. King’s dream as an argument against color-aware policies like affirmative action — ignoring what King actually said in Why We Can’t Wait:

Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.

or in an interview with Alex Haley for Playboy:

All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.

They accuse President Obama of betraying King’s dream when he appoints blacks like Eric Holder or Hispanics like Sonia Sotomayor to positions of power. Even just by talking about race Obama “divides America“. That’s the “real” race problem — that we talk so much about race. Governor Jindal equates MLK’s dream with the “melting pot” image of America and then says

we still place far too much emphasis on our “separateness,” our heritage, ethnic background, skin color, etc. We live in the age of hyphenated Americans: Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Indian-Americans, and Native Americans, to name just a few.

Here’s an idea: How about just “Americans”? That has a nice ring to it, if you ask me. Placing undue emphasis on our “separateness” is a step backward. Bring back the melting pot.

Last Monday, Bill O’Reilly invoked Dr. King’s “content of their character” quote (and nothing else King ever said) and then proceeded to put his own views in Dr. King’s mouth, repeating against today’s black community and black leaders many of the same charges that were made against King and his followers 50 years ago: blaming racial inequality entirely on black failures, accusing black leaders of just being in it for the money (Haley raised that issue in the Playboy interview: “Many Southern whites have accused you of being among those who exploit the race problem for private gain. You are widely believed throughout the South, in fact, to have amassed a vast personal fortune in the course of your civil rights activities.”), and refusing to even recognize white racism as a problem. (O’Reilly’s objection to unions providing funding for the 50th anniversary celebration was particularly clueless, given that union support was central to the original March on Washington. Dr. King had a career-long relationship with the union movement. When he was killed in Memphis, he was in town to support a strike by local sanitation workers.)

Wednesday, talk radio’s Joe Walsh (the white ex-congressman) announced “My Own Dream for America“, which is basically that black people will finally straighten up and fly right (unlike Walsh himself, whose divorce featured an ugly legal battle over child support). It concludes:

I have a dream that one day black America will cease their dependency on the government plantation, which has enslaved them to lives of poverty, and instead depend on themselves, their families, their churches, and their communities.

So what was Martin Luther King really about? As I read him, two things:

  • the goal of a world where all people have an opportunity to make something of their lives
  • achieving that goal through nonviolent activism.

He was suspicious of capitalism, because its values are materialistic rather than humanistic.

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. [“Beyond Vietnam“, 1967]

He was suspicious of a world order dependent on American economic and military power, because it continued many of the patterns of European colonialism.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions. [“Beyond Vietnam“, 1967]

His compassion extended to all oppressed peoples, not just his own race.

Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of India, and of every other nation. I started thinking about the millions of dollars we spend each day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children in Asia, in Africa, in South America, and in our own nation who go to bed hungry. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

His nonviolence was not passive. He sought to confront issues rather than avoid them.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. [“Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, 1963]

All through his career he rejected calls for patience.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” [“Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, 1963]

He warned against listening to premature claims that the goal had been reached.

A second myth that we must deal with is that of exaggerated progress. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

He rejected the idea that peaceful ends could be achieved through violent means.

There are still those who sincerely believe that the end justifies the means, no matter what the means happen to be. No matter how violent or how deceptive or anything else they are. Non-violence at its best would break with the system that argues that. Non-violence would say that the morality of the ends is implicit in the means, and that in the long-run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

What I don’t believe he ever said. I’m not an MLK scholar and my reading is far from complete, but I have never run across an example of Dr. King airing the dirty laundry of the black community in front of whites. So if he were to give another Dream speech today, I very much doubt he’d finger-wag about the black illegitimacy rate or denounce hip-hop culture, as white conservatives fantasize he would. I don’t know whether he would raise those topics while preaching in a black church or in private discussions among blacks, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t do it for a national audience.

I also have not found any quote where he says it’s OK to mistreat people if they’re not perfect, or that massive and growing inequality is OK if the underclass deserves it. When he was part of the overclass — say, as an American talking to other Americans about Vietnam or India  — he didn’t give his own group a pass and focus on the failings of Asian culture. So I’m pretty sure that a 2013 Dream speech would not tell whites to just sit back and criticize while waiting for the black community to fix itself.

Color-blindness revisited. In Dr. King’s day, segregation was a primary instrument of injustice, a way of keeping whites on top. He opposed it on those terms. But he attended the historically black Morehouse College, and I haven’t found any record of him urging his alma mater to achieve a more representational racial balance by recruiting whites. That’s only hypocrisy if you imagine that racial balance is supposed to be an end in itself and not a means to the end of justice. Morehouse had a mission that was not being served by the white universities, and the cause of justice would not have been advanced by abandoning it.

Dr. King often talked about his dreams, visions, and goals — most clearly in his final Mountaintop speech, where he said “I’ve seen the Promised Land.” But he never said that we should just sit down where we are and pretend we’re in the Promised Land now. Someday the lion will lie down with the lamb, but no shepherd should try to implement that arrangement now. In the world where we live today, race matters — just like gender matters and class matters. It would be foolish to pretend that they don’t and blind ourselves to the problems that need to be solved.

The 2013 Dream. What would Martin Luther King say in a Dream speech today? We should all be humble about putting words in his mouth that he didn’t say in his lifetime. But looking at the words he did say, I think it’s not too big a stretch to imagine that he would still be talking about the same themes. Because while we’ve fixed some of the specific injustices he campaigned against — like blacks being forced to the back of the bus — the larger issues are still the same: We live with massive inequality. The poor both here and in other countries often have few prospects for improving their lot. The overclass continues to be disproportionately white and the underclass disproportionately non-white. Systemic inequality is enforced by systemic violence and threats of violence, and more violence is unlikely to lead to justice.

So I think Dr. King would still be telling us about injustice and urging us to meet that injustice with the moral force of active nonviolence. In the short run that strategy always looks like a loser, because violent people hit you and you don’t hit back. That’s why the nonviolent activist needs a longer vision of a universe whose arc bends towards justice, and of a Promised Land worth the arduous journey.

That’s why the activist needs a dream — not to live in, but to keep striving towards.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (18)

How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation

August 26, 2013 – 8:15 am

The conservative base wants to see a Charge of the Light Brigade against ObamaCare. Their congressmen are trying to distract them with less dangerous crazy talk.

Congress went into its summer recess with everything up in the air. None of the major appropriation bills to fund the government in fiscal 2014 (which starts October 1) are passed yet, and the House and Senate versions of them are still far apart. Even if compromises could be reached in time, the far right wants to shut down the government until President Obama agrees to delay implementing ObamaCare. Or, if they can’t block the FY 2014 appropriations, they want Congress to default on the spending it just approved by not raising the debt limit.

Other big policy decisions are also pending: The Senate overwhelmingly passed an immigration reform bill, but the House leadership has neither brought that bill to a vote nor offered an alternative. Proposals to fix the Voting Rights Act (which the Supreme Court gutted in June) are stuck in committee.

What to do?

The sticking point in all these negotiations is the Republican caucus in the House, and in particular its Tea Party faction. It represents only about a third of the Republicans, but that’s enough to prevent Speaker Boehner from passing anything without Democratic votes. And its red-meat rhetoric is popular enough with the grass roots to threaten a primary challenge against any Republican who compromises with the Democrats over its objections. So Tea Partiers feel they are in a position to call the tune for the Republican caucus, which calls the tune for the House, which in turn should call the tune for the country in spite of a Democratic Senate and President.

That minority-rule plan is symptomatic of what’s wrong with the Republican Party in general. Republicans tell each other that the majority of the country is conservative, so the more conservative the Party gets the better it represents the People. But leaders like Boehner and Mitch McConnell know that’s not true: If Republicans close Yellowstone and delay processing Grandma’s Social Security application in a quixotic attempt to repeal the law that allows Cousin-Bob-with-diabetes to get healthcare, they’re going to lose big in 2014.

[A poll done for Republican members of Congress showed that self-described “very conservative” Republicans (9% of the electorate) support a government shutdown 63%-27%, while the next most conservative 10%, the “somewhat conservative” Republicans, oppose it 62%-31%.]

So that set up the drama of the August recess: Republican congressmen would go home and meet with their constituents — typically not a representative sample, but invited groups of Republican supporters (“We’re actually talking to the choir,” Senator Coburn admitted to a meeting promoted by the Glenn-Beck-inspired Tulsa 912 Project) — who presumably would tell them to get in line behind the far right. They, on the other hand, would be trying to talk softly while slowly backing out of the padded cell — not directly confronting their base’s delusions, but also not promising to jump off any cliffs to prove their faith in the protective angels of the hidden conservative majority. (I wrote that padded-cell metaphor before seeing the following cartoon.)

For the most part, the congressmen preserved their conservative bona fides by pandering in areas that didn’t demand an immediate on-the-record vote, like doubting Obama’s birth certificate or fantasizing about impeachment.

ObamaCare. For the most part, far-right groups like Heritage Action and FreedomWorks succeeded in delivering rooms full of people so opposed to ObamaCare that they support a government shutdown, and most of the politicians succeeded in sticking to their I-agree-with-you-but response. (Senator Coburn, for example, kicked the can down the road from October 1, saying the debt-ceiling confrontation would be a better opportunity to defund ObamaCare. He cited the danger a government shutdown would pose to the economy, while conveniently ignoring the larger threat of casting doubt on the government’s willingness to pay its debts.)

Occasionally, though, reality seeped into even the most conservative townhall meetings. In Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and elsewhere Republicans had to face real people (middle-aged white people that they couldn’t instantly write off) with pre-existing conditions whose only shot at health insurance goes away if ObamaCare is repealed.

The disconnect here is that the provisions of ObamaCare are popular, even in states where the name “ObamaCare” is unpopular. That’s why Jim DeMint describes this fall as “the last off-ramp for us to stop Obamacare”, because after it gets implemented people will be dealing with the real thing rather than DeMint’s death-panel horror stories.

What makes facing ObamaCare’s real beneficiaries so tough for Republicans is that after four years of attempting to repeal the law, Republicans still have offered no alternative. So their basic message to the uninsured is: Rejoice in your “freedom” and pray you don’t get sick. (Their underlying problem is that ObamaCare is the Republican alternative to HillaryCare that the Heritage Foundation promoted in the 1990s and Mitt Romney signed as governor of Massachusetts in 2006. Republicans have no healthcare plan because Obama stole their old one — which they then felt they had to denounce as “socialism”.)

Immigration. Atlantic’s Molly Ball notes the dog that hasn’t barked: Opponents of immigration reform tried to pressure Congress with big rallies, but people just didn’t show up. We’ll see if that frees House Republicans to compromise with the Senate.

So far, it doesn’t sound that way. Immigration reform has to go through the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, told a townhall meeting last Monday that the House should be “setting forward the right way to do things” … “even if it doesn’t go all the way through to be signed by this president”.

Impeachment. The weirdest thing to come out of the August recess was the talk about impeaching President Obama. None of Rep. Bentivolio of Michigan, Rep. Farenthold of Texas, or Senator Coburn of Oklahoma had the courage to tell their townhall questioners what they didn’t want to hear: that constitutionally President Obama can only be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” and so far Republicans have uncovered not a shred of evidence to support such a charge.

Bentivolio said it would be a “dream come true” to submit an impeachment bill, but his good intentions get frustrated by lawyers who ask “What evidence do you have?” and by a press that would “make a laughingstock” out of anybody who tried to impeach Obama without evidence. (The press, he adds, is “the most corrupt thing in Washington”.) But for those interfering lawyers and reporters, though, he’d be all over it even without evidence.

Coburn (in response to the meeting’s last question, beginning at about the 1:04 mark in the video) does say that impeachment “is not something you take lightly”, but dodges the question of whether impeachment is appropriate now, passing the buck to the House (where impeachment proceedings would have to start). “I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to high crimes and misdemeanor but I think they’re getting perilously close.” (The meaning of “that” and “they” is never spelled out.)

Farenthold regrets that an earlier House didn’t look into “the whole birth certificate issue” and then passes the buck to the Senate:

if we were to impeach the President tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it. But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted. … I think there’s some potential damage to society that would be done with a failed attempt at impeachment.

At least when Democrats talked about impeaching President Bush, we had enough respect for the process to point to specific crimes. You define the crime first, then you collect evidence to prove it, and then you talk about impeachment. You don’t just say “I want to impeach this guy” and hope you can find evidence that he did something wrong.

Now what? During the August recess, the far-right base made it clear they want to see a last-ditch charge against ObamaCare, while polls show the American people in general don’t want a government shutdown. In general, I think the electorate wants to see more solutions and less drama, while the far-right base won’t be satisfied until it gets the apocalyptic battle it keeps fantasizing about. Nothing less will cause God’s hand to reach out of the clouds and give their Gideon-like band the victory.

I believe the stage is set for an epic conservative defeat. The only question is how much damage it will do to the country. We can only hope Tea Partiers keep identifying with Gideon, and not Samson pulling the Philistine temple down on himself.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

“Acting White” isn’t really a racial issue

August 12, 2013 – 8:44 am

If you want to blame a downtrodden group for their own disadvantages, here’s a handy trick: Take a broad social problem, see how it intersects with that group, and then talk about that intersection as if it were a unique problem located in that group.

Tricks like this are easier to spot in retrospect. So, for example, years ago when the gay-rights discussion was about whether public schools should allow gay teachers — already in 2004 that issue was an embarrassment to Jim DeMint and has since been removed even from far-right documents like the South Carolina Republican Platform — we used to hear a lot about gay teachers having sex with their students, as if this were some special gay problem totally unrelated to straight teachers having sex with their students. (Something similar is still going on in the Catholic priest scandal; rather than talk about the larger problem of the clergy sexual abuse that occurs in all denominations and victimizes both genders, some people want the issue to be about gay priests.)

Muslim terrorism and Islamic extremism are good present-day examples, because they’re usually discussed as if they had no similarity to Christian terrorism or extremism.

This trick is easy to fall for. I used to think that every incompetent black or female I ran into was an indictment of affirmative action, until somebody asked me: “How many incompetent white men do you know?”

Never mind.

Anyway, we’re supposedly having a national conversation on race. So far, the conservative half of that has largely been an indictment of black culture: Since racism is mythical and the ladder to success climbed by white ethnic groups — Irish, Italians, Poles — is still there, all blacks would have to do is clean up their act, get educated, and work hard. They’d all be CEOs in no time.

What supposedly stops this from happening is the unique inferiority of black culture. They take drugs, commit crimes, have illegitimate children — nobody forces them to do this stuff, Bill O’Reilly reminds us, “That’s a personal decision.”

And they’re actively hostile to education. “young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs”. Bill came back to that point in a later broadcast:

Even if there were plenty of jobs, most employers are not going to hire people who can’t read well and speak proper English. Right now the unemployment rate among black males age 16 to 19, 57 percent; 57 percent. It’s 25 percent for white males that age. Overall, black unemployment, 14 percent; white unemployment, 6.6 percent. The reason, in many poor neighborhoods there’s chaos, violence and little discipline in the public schools. Kids aren’t learning.

CNN’s Don Lemon said O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough” and told his fellow blacks:

Want to break the cycle of poverty? Stop telling kids they’re acting white because they go to school or they speak proper English.

Even President Obama has hit that theme, most notably in the 2004 Democratic Convention speech that launched him onto the national stage:

children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.

Telling kids who succeed in school that they’re “acting white” — for an educated white audience, that’s just beyond the pale. It’s a conscious rebellion against knowledge. What more proof do you need that black culture is horribly sick?

You know where else you see that phenomenon? Working class whites. In Reading Classes, Barbara Jensen writes both about her own white-working-class childhood and her adult experience as a counselor to working class white students.

She describes school as an extension of professional-class culture. Kids who grow up in the professional class live at home with the same communication patterns they’ll meet at school, while kids growing up in the working class have to learn special ways to act and talk in the classroom. (Simple example: Adults quizzing kids by asking questions they already know the answer to. It’s an obvious school thing, and professional-class parents do it all the time, beginning at a very early age. “What’s the cow say?” When parents question kids in a working-class household, it’s more like, “Who knocked that glass of water over?” So when those kids arrive at school and the teacher starts asking them questions, their instinctive reaction is that they’re being accused of something. And if you can’t see where a line of questioning is going, the safest thing is just to dummy up.)

Once working-class kids get past the basic foreignness of the school environment, they are taught that the way they speak at home is wrong. (I grew up putting an r-sound into the name of our nation’s capital — Worshington — and taking one out of the second month — Febuary. School taught me that was wrong.) Jensen has no problem with teaching Standard English, but …

How kids should be taught these skills is my concern. Is it really necessary to learn that everything a child knew before school about language is nothing more than bad English and ignorance?

Little by little, what you do at school starts to seem disloyal to your home life, because you’re being taught to look down on where you come from. It gets worse in middle school, where even professional-class kids have issues with peer pressure versus submission to authority. In the early grades, the clash was mainly between the influence of the parents and the influence of the teacher. But middle school is likely to be a larger school of mixed social classes. In addition to the teachers wanting to civilize you, you have to deal with the born-civilized professional-class kids and the teachers’ implicit why-can’t-you-be-more-like-them. Result? a culture of resistance that punishes collaborators.

Working class kids who are into academics get shunned and teased by other kids because they care about impressing their teachers. … My friends and I came to excel at rebelling — not as solitary rebels, like actor James Dean in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, but as a community of resistance to the authority of school.

This is a white author talking about white kids. She tells a sad story about quitting choir — even though she loved it — because she was too embarrassed to be up on stage with all the goody-goody professional-class kids in front of her working-class friends. (Jensen herself eventually got a Ph.D., but not until after a long strange trip that had little to do with her early schooling.)

So in short, I’m not claiming that “acting white” isn’t a problem, or that it doesn’t get in the way of black kids making a better life for themselves. I’m just saying it’s not a racial problem. It’s a thing that happens when the culture of school is alien to the culture of a neighborhood, and it happens to whites as well as blacks.

Because of their place in society, blacks are more likely to be in the path of this storm than whites, just as more blacks than whites were left behind in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. But just as we don’t have a “black hurricane problem”, we don’t have a black resistance-to-education problem.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (11)

Chaos in Congress

August 5, 2013 – 10:34 am

Since the Republicans regained a majority in the House in 2010, we’ve gotten used to seeing everything come down to the last minute. Congress and the White House can’t agree on the basic bills that have to pass to keep the government running — to put Social Security checks in the mail and keep the national parks open — so again and again high-stakes negotiations between Speaker Boehner and President Obama have been necessary to craft a last-minute compromise that nobody likes. That was the story of the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequester, and so on.

So talk about another showdown when the new fiscal year starts in October may seem like same-old same-old: Everyone will posture, doomsday clocks will tick towards zero, and chaos will loom, but eventually Obama and Boehner will go into a room and come out with something that keeps the worst from happening. Both sides will rail about how unacceptable this agreement is, but ultimately majorities in Congress will accept it and life will go on.

This time might be different. Boehner will likely end up playing Chicken again, but this time it’s not clear he even has brakes or a steering wheel. It’s not his driving I question, it’s his vehicle.

Increasingly, the House Republican majority is losing the cohesion necessary to be part of the governing structure. Congressional Republicans can come together to block what President Obama wants, but they can’t come together on a program of their own. In September, Speaker Boehner will likely go into that room with no position to negotiate from and no ability to pass a compromise without relying mainly on Democratic votes — and the prospect of losing his speakership if he does.

To understand what’s happening, you need to appreciate things on two levels: the mechanics of the appropriations process (where things are starting to fall apart) and the underlying illusions in the minds of the conservative rank-and-file.

Legislative failure I: the farm bill. In the last few months we’ve seen some spectacular legislative failures in the House. First when the farm bill failed in June. The farm bill is a compromise that goes back to the 70s: Democrats get money for food stamps and Republicans get money for farm subsidies. Poor people going hungry and small farmers losing their land are two images that raise a lot of public sympathy, so for decades neither party has wanted to scuttle the deal.

Until June. The Senate passed a traditional compromise farm bill (with some moderate cuts on both sides) 66-27. But the House bill included $20 billion in cuts to Food Stamps over ten years — too much for Democrats but not enough for the most conservative Republicans. So it lost 234-195. Subsequently, the House passed a farm-subsidies-only bill and is drafting a separate bill with $40 billion in Food Stamp cuts. The usual practice would be for a joint House/Senate conference committee to iron out differences in their respective bills, but so far the House is refusing to appoint its conferees.

At the moment, nobody sees a clear path to a bill that can be passed by both houses and signed by the president before all authority for food stamps and farm subsidies vanishes on October 1.

Legislative failure II: T/HUD. This week both houses went home for the summer recess after failing even to vote on the appropriations bill that funds the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development.

T/HUD is another one of those bipartisan bills that — after some tussle and a few close votes on amendments — usually passes by wide margins, because it includes some of the most visible, most popular spending the government does. It rebuilds bridges, widens highways, and opens new parks.

The Senate could have passed a bill had one come to a vote, but Mitch McConnell led yet another filibuster. In the House, the T/HUD bill was pulled from the calendar when the leadership realized they couldn’t pass it.

Why? Because the House Republican version of T/HUD slashes a lot of popular local programs, and not even Republicans are prepared to face the voters having cut stuff their districts want and need. So why put those cuts in the bill to begin with? Well, that’s where the story gets interesting. TPM’s Brian Beutler explains:

In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.

But this year the House passed the Ryan budget and the Senate passed something much closer to what we’ve been doing. Senate Republicans have blocked the Senate from appointing conferees to work out the differences.

OK, so what? Well, a budget is just a list of numbers; it doesn’t specify exactly what does and doesn’t get paid for. (It’s like when a husband and wife agree to reduce their annual food budget, but leave for later whether they’re going to cut back on steak or quiche.) The nitty-gritty happens in the appropriations process, in bills like T/HUD and the farm bill.

Because the budget process failed, the House is proceeding with appropriations under the Ryan budget. This is the first time anybody has tried to spell out Ryan’s cuts. Beutler narrates:

But they can’t do it. It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House. Slash community development block grants by 50 percent, and you don’t just lose the Democrats, you lose a lot of Republicans who care about their districts. Combine that with nihilist defectors who won’t vote for any appropriations unless they force the President to sign an Obamacare repeal bill at a bonfire ceremony on the House floor, and suddenly you’re nowhere near 218 [votes in the House, i.e., a majority].

That’s not just a problem with T/HUD. It’s a problem for all the appropriations bills that need to pass by October 1. The Ryan budget never worked, except as a promised land that the evil Obama and nasty Senate Democrats kept Republicans from reaching. But now they’ve blundered into a position where they have to produce photos of their promised land.

And their voters are not going to understand why they can’t do it.

ObamaCare and Immigration. If it’s that hard to keep funding popular programs that specifically help your district, what about controversial stuff like ObamaCare and immigration reform?

There’s no ticking clock on immigration reform, so needless to say the House hasn’t gone anywhere with the bill that passed the Senate with 68 votes. Instead of one bill that embraces compromises, Eric Cantor told Chris Wallace:

We will have a vote on a series of bills at some point, Chris. It will deal with a variety of issues.

In other words, the farm bill is the model. The House will divide the Senate bill up, pass the parts that please conservatives and not pass the parts that please liberals. The bills they pass will all die in the Senate, where they need some Democratic votes.

But at least that won’t shut the government down, it will just kick the can to a future Congress. On ObamaCare, the Tea Party folks in Congress are pushing an Alamo-like stand, where Republicans will shut down the government until Democrats agree to defund implementation. Karl Rove and Tom Coburn think this is madness, but it’s a crowd-pleaser if you’re only worried about winning a Republican primary.

Political fantasy meets reality. Poll after poll shows the same thing: Ask Americans if they want the government to spend less, and they say yes. Ask them specifically whether the government should spend less on the things the government spends almost all its money on — healthcare, Social Security, defense, homeland security, roads, schools, air traffic control, food safety, disease control, disaster relief, … — and they say no.

The difference is fantasy spending: Bridges to Nowhere, foreign aid to countries that hate us, welfare fraud, and a bunch of other “government waste” that serves no legitimate purpose and could be slashed to zero without hurting anybody. Ask people — especially conservatives — how much of the federal budget is spent on such stuff, and you’ll hear ridiculous answers like half or more, rather than the actual drop-in-a-huge-bucket.

So the ideal political position to run on (if your opponent will let you get away with it) is that you’re going to make vast unspecified budget cuts that won’t actually hurt anybody. It’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense people will believe — until you have to make good on the details.

Conservative politicians and media personalities have been feeding this fantasy in the rank-and-file for decades, and now they can’t control it. Republicans know that it is death to go into a primary battle with a Tea Party challenger and try to make conservative voters deal with reality. But now the leaders themselves have to deal with reality as legislators, and their primary voters are watching.

What to do?

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (9)

Voting Rights one month after Shelby

August 5, 2013 – 8:10 am

A little over a month ago, the Supreme Court threw out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. That was the part that forced the former Jim Crow states to clear with the federal government any changes in voting rules. Now that those states were off the federal leash, no one knew exactly what would happen next. But there were several possibilities:

The Jim Crow states could have proved Chief Justice Roberts right. “Nearly fifty years [after the original Voting Rights Act was passed],” the Chief Justice wrote, “things have changed dramatically.” In this scenario it would become clear that the South no longer needed federal oversight. States would adjust their voting practices occasionally as circumstances demanded, but not renew the effort to disenfranchise nonwhites.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ginsburg disagreed.

Jurisdictions covered by the preclearance requirement continued to submit, in large numbers, proposed changes to voting laws that the Attorney General declined to ap­prove, auguring that barriers to minority voting would quickly resurface were the preclearance remedy elimi­nated.

Score one for Ginsburg. As soon as the VRA decision rolled out of the printers, states started whittling away at voting rights. The current champion is North Carolina, which on July 25 passed an omnibus voter suppression law that the governor has pledged to sign soon, despite seeming to know little about it. Salon sums up:

They have, in essence, included in this bill every conceivable voter suppression tactic that has ever been dreamed up over the past decade by the Republican Party — and then some.

Raleigh’s WRAL has a detailed list, but every way you can imagine to restrict voting (short of just suspending elections entirely) is there: photo ID (not accepting student IDs, because students trend Democratic), less early voting, shorter polling hours, no provisional ballots, no same-day registration, restrictions on registration drives …

As in other Republican-dominated states that have passed such measures (but usually piecemeal), there is no evidence at all of voter impersonation — the only kind of fraud photo IDs hinder — in North Carolina. (Last month I described how an extensive South Carolina investigation of in-person voter fraud failed to find any.) NC has some history of absentee-ballot fraud, which this law does not address. (Why discourage absentee voting when it trends Republican?)

Photo-ID requirements essentially target voters who don’t drive — mainly the poor, the disabled, and big-city singles, all of whom trend Democratic. Democracy North Carolina estimates that blacks are 23% of the state’s registered voters, but 34% of the registered voters without acceptable photo IDs. (Slicing those numbers a different way: 3.8% of registered white voters lack an ID, while 7.4% of registered blacks do.)

Reduced early voting and short polling hours target people who have a hard time getting off work or making transportation connections — mainly the working poor and (again) non-drivers. Black voters make up 29% of early voters and 34% of those who register on election day.

Congress could update Section 4 of the VRA to meet the Court’s guidelines. This option was always going to be tricky, because Justice Roberts didn’t really say what would make him happy. (That was my main complaint in This Court Sucks.) But still, the 2006 re-authorization of the VRA passed the Senate 98-0 and the House 390-33, and a lot of those people are still around. So you’d think Congress would be motivated to make the law work again.

No luck there either. The House subcommittee holding hearings on the VRA is chaired by Trent Franks, who was one of the 33 voting against renewing the VRA in 2006. The witnesses the subcommittee’s Republican majority called had a unified message: Don’t bother; there’s no problem that needs fixing.

When you consider that the states covered by Section 4 are overwhelmingly represented by Republicans (strange coincidence there, don’t you think?) and Republicans control the House, the prospects for a reasonable revision seem remote.

The Justice Department could get a federal court to re-instate preclearance on specific states for specific reasons. OK, Section 4 is most likely gone for good, so Section 5 (preclearance) doesn’t function automatically. But there’s still Section 3c, containing what for some reason is called the “pocket trigger”. Translating from the legalese: If the Attorney General wins a voting-rights case in federal court against some state, the court can do more than just reverse whatever discriminatory practice the state had instituted; it can also “retain jurisdiction” over that state’s voting laws “for such period as it may deem appropriate”.

In short, what the Jim Crow states were doing fifty years ago can no longer justify preclearance. But if a court finds a state is doing something bad right now, and if it believes that new bad things are likely to keep happening in that state, it can re-institute preclearance for that state.

On July 25, Attorney General Holder announced he would take this path, and his test case is Texas, where there is an ongoing lawsuit about redistricting and alleged attempts to gerrymander Hispanics out of their fair representation in the legislature. Holder also plans to challenge the Texas photo-ID law, which the Justice Department had blocked under the now-inapplicable Section 5. (Texas’ photo-ID law is particularly insidious. Yes, you can get a free state ID card if you don’t already have a drivers’ license; but in the heavily-Hispanic parts of the state, you might have to get somebody to drive you 100 miles to the nearest office that can issue such an ID. The Justice Department charges that 1.5 million eligible Texas voters lack photo IDs, while Texas counters that “only” 795,000 do. And a gun permit is considered adequate ID for voting, but a University of Texas student ID isn’t.)

Eventually, one such case is going to get back to the Supreme Court, and then we’ll find out something about our five conservative justices: Do they just dislike Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act? Or do they dislike the voting rights Section 4 protected?

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Sadly, the national conversation on race has to start here

July 29, 2013 – 9:37 am

a liberal attempt to meet conservatives where they are

This week a number of conservative opinion-leaders took up President Obama’s challenge to have a national conversation on race. “You want a conversation, you got it,” Bill O’Reilly retorted combatively, denouncing “race hustlers and the grievance industry” and arguing that President Obama “has no clue at all about how to solve problems within the black community.”

That may not have been the response liberals were hoping for, but it’s the one we got. So OK, let’s start there: not just with O’Reilly, but also Rush Limbaugh, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, and the National Review’s Victor Hanson. Together, those four represent a significant and diverse audience on the Right, not just one guy popping off.

And they paint a unified picture, which I will call the Response. I suspect most of my liberal readers won’t get far into those links before tripping some rhetorical land mine that makes it impossible to keep paying attention calmly, so let me abstract the Response’s main points:

  • Slavery ended a century and a half ago. Back in the 1960s, we got rid of Jim Crow, and made explicit discrimination against blacks illegal. So that’s all ancient history and isn’t relevant to today’s problems. O’Reilly: “you cannot … design effective public policy that solves present problems by dwelling on the sins of the past.” Rubin: We should “not be held prisoners forever in a past that most Americans have never personally experienced.”
  • The ongoing problems of the black community are its own fault and can only be solved by blacks making better individual choices: getting off drugs, renouncing violence, and forming traditional families that take responsibility for their children. O’Reilly: “The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family. Right now about 73 percent of all black babies are born out of wedlock. … White people don’t force black people to have babies out of wedlock. That’s a personal decision; a decision that has devastated millions of children and led to disaster both socially and economically. So raised without much structure, young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that; again, it is a personal decision.”
  • Young black men are racially profiled by police and private citizens like George Zimmerman, not because of racism, but because they commit more crimes. Hanson: “The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime.”
  • Blacks would rather blame whites for their problems than accept their own responsibility. Liberal politicians and black community leaders pander to this denial and stir up black anger against whites to further their own careers. Rubin: “I think it is time to stop using this both as a crutch and as a method for stirring up [Obama’s] base. … I thought we had gotten to the point where whites, blacks, Republicans, Democrats realized that there are certain problems in the African-American community that need to be addressed, but that at this point — however we got here — we’re here and we should start working on them: start having policies that are family-friendly, start having policies that if not reward at least encourage young men to take responsibility for the children they create. And instead, no, he’s there telling them it’s slavery or Jim Crow or something else. It’s really a horrible message.” O’Reilly: “Race hustlers and the grievance industry have intimidated the so-called ‘conversation’, turning any valid criticism of African-American culture into charges of racial bias. … It is now time for the African-American leadership, including President Obama to stop the nonsense. Walk away from the world of victimization and grievance and lead the way out of this mess.”
  • The same politicians and leaders show no interest in the victims (even black victims) of crimes committed by blacks. Hanson: “The world will long remember Trayvon Martin, but few people — and certainly not Barack Obama or Eric Holder, who have a bad habit, in an increasingly multiracial country, of claiming solidarity on the basis of race — will care that Khin Min and Lina Lim were torn to pieces by bullets and a knife. Few will care that they died in a vicious assault that had nothing to do with stereotyping, Stand Your Ground self-defense, weak gun laws, insufficient federal civil-rights legislation, or any of the other causes of interracial violence falsely advanced by the attorney general — but quite a lot to do with an urban culture that for unspoken reasons has spawned an epidemic of disproportionate violent crime on the part of young African-American males.”
  • Liberals want whites to feel guilty about racism, but the vast majority of today’s whites have nothing to feel guilty about. Limbaugh: “It’s time for all this white guilt to end. … White guilt is doing nothing for anybody, and white guilt is not solving anything. And besides that, a little history lesson for you: If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians.”

I’ve done my best to make a fair summary; if you hear something else in those links, think I have taken the quotes out of context, or believe I’ve constructed straw men that don’t really represent what conservatives think, please comment.

How to answer? First, let me say that I’m not surprised that a number of liberals reacted with anger. As I said, the four pieces (and many others) are filled with barbs that seem designed to shut down the conversation rather than move it forward. The in-your-face tone is most obvious if you watch O’Reilly; the topic seems to call for sorrow, but by the end of the segment he has worked himself up into a rage.

One advantage I get from being white is that it’s easier not to take those barbs or that anger personally. If my everyday experience included racial slights that sometimes progressed into unforgettably ugly incidents, I probably couldn’t listen as sympathetically to the conservative view.

But I’ve chosen not to return insult for insult and anger for anger because I’m not focusing on O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Rubin, and Hanson themselves, but on the audience of more-or-less well-meaning whites — some of whom I grew up with — who hear the Response and think: “That makes a lot of sense.” Angry blasts from the Left, I know, just harden them in that point of view.

First reply: Who are you arguing with? It’s tempting to jump into details of the Response and start disputing facts. But the most poisonous parts of the Response are the unstated assumptions behind it, not the particular details. If I argue facts and leave those assumptions unchallenged, new facts can be found (or stretched) to fill the gap.

What assumptions? Well, listening to the Response, you get the impression that someone — maybe Obama or “race hustlers” like Jesse Jackson — is arguing the opposite side: Someone is telling blacks to blame whites for all their problems, look to the government for salvation, and not accept any responsibility themselves.

That’s just not true. In reality, no one is making that case.

That may be hard to believe if you’re a white conservative who only sees black activists in the clips Fox News decides to air. But last summer, for example, Jesse Jackson said this:

Each year … about 7,000 African Americans are murdered, more than nine times out of 10 by other African Americans. … If a foreign foe took these lives, we would mobilize armies and armadas to stop them. But here, because much of this violence is contained in racially concentrated neighborhoods, there is too much resignation and too little outrage.

It wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark. Jackson was announcing marches in 20 cities to draw attention to the violence problem. After the Justice-for-Trayvon marches conservatives asked: Why don’t black leaders organize marches against black-on-black violence? Well, they do. Fox just doesn’t cover it.

And did you know that Barack Obama said this?

You and I know … that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

That was in 2008 when he was a candidate. He has stuck with that message as president. In a commencement address to all-male, historically black Morehouse College this May, Obama again pushed graduates to take personal responsibility rather than use racism as an excuse:

We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.

When they address black audiences, the President and the First Lady have held so steady on that personal-responsibility theme that other blacks sometimes criticize their “finger-wagging tone“.

So if you’re white and get your racial information from conservative sources — especially if you live in a suburb or rural area far removed from the inner city — let me (and Tim Wise) suggest that you are being fooled. Black leaders who speak out against racism are not making the whitey-caused-all-our-problems argument.

It’s not an either/or. Believing that white racism is still a problem doesn’t mean that you think blacks are helpless victims who can only plead for whites to change or wait for the government to save them.

In short, there is no “grievance industry”.

Does the Response have any constructive point? My fellow white liberal Tim Wise calls the Response “white deflection”, because it doesn’t lead to any positive action. White opinion-leaders telling their white audiences that blacks are to blame for their own problems — that’s an excuse for turning the whole discussion off rather than solving anything.

Republicans control one house of Congress and the entire governments of the states that contain Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, and Milwaukee. If they are in fact deeply concerned about the disintegration of the black family or inner city unemployment or black-on-black violence — if those issues are more than just excuses for whites to ignore racism — what constructive proposals have they put forward?

Bill O’Reilly is the exception that proves the rule: He followed up the piece I quoted with his plan for solving inner-city violence: “the feds should criminalize all gun crimes and impose strict mandatory sentences upon conviction” — as if this punish-them-harder idea is brand new and not what we’ve been doing for decades.

OK, maybe conservative office-holders aren’t proposing anything because they don’t believe in government solutions. Fine, but what about private efforts to discourage violence or promote education or help families in poor urban neighborhoods? Conservative media voices could be telling you which ones work and where you could effectively volunteer or send money. But they seldom do, because they are just raising these issues to shut off an uncomfortable conversation, not turn it in a more constructive direction. Conservative pundits will stop talking about black problems as soon as the Trayvon Martin controversy fades, because all they really want is for the topic to go away.

Black-on-nonblack crime. In the Asian-American murders Hanson discusses, he knows the perpetrator was black because the man was caught and charged without any public outcry. No one needed to march or protest, because the system was working fine.

To make Hanson’s case similar to Zimmerman/Martin, you’d have to assume that police found an armed black man standing next to the bodies, believed his story, didn’t immediately secure the area as a crime scene or canvass for witnesses, and let the man go until protests and bad publicity forced them to arrest him.

But of course that didn’t happen. It never would.

White-on-white? Yes, 93% of ten murdered blacks are killed by other blacks. But the same Justice Department report says (on page 13) 84% of murdered whites are killed by whites. This is why The Guardian’s style guide bans the term black-on-black violence:

imagine the police saying they were “investigating an incident of white-on-white violence”.

Again, that would never happen.

Racism in the justice system is real. Once you get past all the distracting noise, you’re left to deal with the facts of racism in the justice system. And I’m not just talking about the fact that blacks are more likely than whites to be in prison. (Those statistics cut both ways; they can be used to claim that blacks commit more crimes than whites.)

No, I’m talking about facts that are much harder to explain away:

  • Black murderers are more likely to be executed than white murderers. A report by the Death Penalty Information Center said: “The researchers found that, even after controlling for case differences, blacks in Philadelphia were substantially more likely to get the death penalty than other defendants who committed similar murders. Black defendants faced odds of receiving a death sentence that were 3.9 times higher than other similarly situated defendants.”
  • Juries are less likely to believe black self-defense claims. Anecdotally, many are contrasting George Zimmerman’s successful self-defense plea with John White’s unsuccessful plea in a black-on-white killing and Marissa Alexander’s unsuccessful stand-your-ground claim in a black-on-black case. Statistics tell the same story: Juries are most likely to accept self-defense claims when whites kill blacks, least likely when blacks kill whites.
  • Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates, but blacks are four times more likely to be arrested for it. And communities that decriminalize marijuana tend to have small black populations; apparently, smoking pot is less serious when whites do it.
  • Crimes mostly committed by blacks are likely to carry far higher punishments than similar crimes mostly committed by whites. The most famous example is crack cocaine (popular among blacks) vs powder cocaine (popular among whites). For years, getting caught with 99 grams of powder would get you a lower sentence than 1 gram of crack. In 2011, the 100-to-1 ratio was reduced to 18-to-1.

That final point can be pushed a lot further if you’re willing to look at crimes that are harder to compare: Street crime carries far higher penalties than white-collar crime. A black pickpocket who steals your wallet is a lot more likely to go to jail than a white banker who illegally forecloses on your house. In fact, the number of crimes committed by corporations and the over-representation of whites in corporate management casts doubt on the claim that blacks commit more (or more serious) crimes than whites.

Group guilt. I still haven’t touched Limbaugh’s comments on white guilt. Actually (ignoring his trolling about slavery) I agree with a big chunk of what he said: Whites sitting around feeling guilty doesn’t help anybody.

But who’s asking us to? If you think the point of the Martin protests is for you to feel guilty for something your ancestors — or maybe just people who superficially resemble you — did a long time ago, I don’t think you’re getting an accurate account.

Here’s the actual point the Martin case has raised: Blacks still suffer unfairly from racial stereotypes. Those stereotypes have deep roots in slavery and Jim Crow, but the damage is here and now. Because of those stereotypes, whites are way too quick to assume that blacks are up to no good, that blacks deserve any misfortune they get, and that the best way to deal with black people’s problems is to punish them harder. Whites are too slow to consider a black person’s point of view and too slow to take seriously any problem that mainly affects blacks.

Here’s what you’re being asked to do about it: Personally, introspect to see how those stereotypes live and function in your own mind. (Here’s a place I notice it: When some jerk cuts me off in traffic, I get a bigger surge of anger if it’s a black jerk, like that’s some separate category entirely.) When you have to make a decision about a black person — whether you’re on a jury or a hiring committee — notice your tendency to jump to unfair race-based conclusions and try to resist it.

Politically, join the fight for justice. Help us roll back unfair laws and change processes that produce unfairly skewed results. Help us create the equality of opportunity that American ideals demand. And if you think an underlying obstacle to opportunity is drugs or bad parenting or whatever, find some constructive way to work on that, rather than use it as an excuse to do nothing.

And finally, if it makes you mad that someone might hold you responsible for things other white people did, use that resentment to understand how blacks feel when they are racially profiled. Unlike the largely imaginary white guilt, profiling has real effects. As you read these words, innocent young blacks are being stopped and frisked for weapons by New York police, not on suspicion of any specific crime, but because people who superficially resemble them have done bad things in the past.

You reject racial guilt in your own life. Take a principled stand and help other people fight it too.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (36)

Keeping the Con in Conservatism

July 22, 2013 – 11:43 am

This week RedState.com founder and Fox News pundit Erick Erickson had an embarrassing plagiarism scandal. No, he didn’t steal somebody else’s attack on ObamaCare or their analysis of immigration reform. On Tuesday Erickson emailed his subscribers a 600-word endorsement of an investment newsletter. He didn’t just forward a link, he wrote in the first person with feeling, and signed his name:

[Mark Skousen] is the most brilliant and accomplished financial advisor I know. … Let’s face it: Making money in Obama’s America is tough — and keeping it, harder still. So we can all use as much trustworthy financial advice as we can get. The best investment advice I know of, bar none, can be found in Mark Skousen’s Forecasts & Strategies — and I urge you to give it a try.

Such sincerity. Clearly, if you trust Erickson’s view of the political world, you should trust Skousen’s view of the financial world.

It sounded just as sincere in 2009 when Ann Coulter sent a virtually identical email out to her subscribers.

Ericson’s defense is also striking: He denies he made money. He’s just “happy to support a friend”. Alex Parene points out the problem here:

If, as Erickson claims, he did not get paid for this endorsement (or, rather, if he wasn’t paid to have his name affixed to this boilerplate get-rich-quick scam email), then his claim to moral purity is that he sold out his readers for free.

If you follow the links, you wind up listening to a video explaining “the elite SS-4 income stream” that “can make you America’s next millionaire” which you’ll learn more about if you subscribe for a mere $99 for the first year.  (BTW, Mark is a nephew of Glenn Beck’s hero W. Cleon Skousen.)

There are, of course, people whose business it is to track the recommendations of investment newsletters and rate how they do. That opinion on Skousen is far less glowing. But what do those people know with their “facts” and “data”? Those are the same kind of people who couldn’t see how the polls were skewed to favor Obama, when actually Mitt Romney was cruising to a win — which he totally would have had if not for voter fraud (that nobody can find any evidence of other than the fact that Romney lost).

The dirty secret of the conservative movement is that this stuff happens all the time, as Chris Hayes pointed out in this tweet:

Now why would he say something so rude? Maybe he remembers Glenn Beck pushing his viewers to buy gold while not mentioning that he was a paid pitchman for Goldline, a less-than-upright gold-selling company. Or that Freedom Works paid Beck and Rush Limbaugh to say nice things about them. And Americans for Prosperity paid talk-radio host Mark Levin. Politico writes:

The increased willingness of non-profits to write big checks for such radio endorsements – which appears to have started in 2008, when Heritage paid $1.2 million to sponsor the talk shows hosted by Hannity and Laura Ingraham – seems to be a primarily, if not entirely, a conservative phenomenon.

Former Fox News pundit Dick Morris came up with a great money-making idea. He sent out fund-raising emails for SuperPAC for America, which spent a pile of that money renting Morris’ email list. So money Morris’ followers sent in “for America” just cycled back into Morris’ pocket. (Similarly, Sarah Palin spent PAC money to promote her book, and even to buy copies of it to give away.) Republican candidates also spent money renting Morris’ list, and (totally coincidentally), Morris praised them on Fox.

And then there was the time the Malaysian government paid American conservative bloggers under-the-table to trash the democratic opposition.

You just don’t see this kind of stuff on the Left, where the standards are simply higher. For example, Fox News host Sean Hannity regularly speaks at fundraisers for Republican organizations and Republican candidates, but MSNBC suspended Keith Olbermann just for writing a check to Democratic candidates. In 2010, Fox News was a nice place for Republican politicians to draw a paycheck while they decided whether to run for president. I will be truly shocked if Hillary Clinton or any other Democratic hopeful gets hired by MSNBC. (Eliot Spitzer is the exception that proves this rule. When MSNBC hired him, who imagined he could ever again have a political career?)

So why is this? Rick Perlstein got into the issue a little deeper a few months ago in a Baffler article The Long Con. He signed up for the email lists of conservative sites like Townhall and NewsMax, and started getting a completely different kind of spam: Not just appeals for candidates and charities, which liberals get too, but get-rich-quick schemes and miracle cures. (He quotes Ann Coulter’s Skousen endorsement, not realizing we hadn’t seen the last of it.)

What Perlstein noticed is that the right/left difference isn’t just in conflict-of-interest standards at the top. It’s a cultural difference that goes all the way down. Conservatism is built out of subcultures like multi-level marketing (i.e. Amway), pyramid schemes, televangelist networks, conspiracy-theory groups (i.e., the John Birch Society), and so forth. (The self-promoting conflict-of-interest stuff goes way back too: The one thing I remember from reading the classic None Dare Call It Conspiracy in high school is that the solution is to expose the conspiracy by buying a bunch of copies of None Dare Call It Conspiracy and giving them to your friends.)

The subject matter may be different, but the thought-patterns are the same. If you believe that evolution is a conspiracy of atheist biologists, then why wouldn’t you believe that global warming is a conspiracy of socialist climatologists? And if a secret cabal can launch a decades-long plan like faking Barack Obama’s birth annoucements and grooming him for the presidency, of course those people would have secret investment strategies that keep them rich without effort. If Cleon Skousen can show you the hidden patterns of history, why couldn’t Mark Skousen reveal the hidden patterns of finance?

Across the board, there is a resentment-of-expertise theme, combined with the myth of the Turncoat Expert, who can let you see behind the facade … for a small fee, of course.

[Little did I know when I started writing this that Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald was coming out with something on the same topic the same day.]

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

To Succeed, Fail Boldly

July 15, 2013 – 12:25 pm

Five doomed proposals for changing the national conversation

From one point of view, it all came to nothing.

Two weeks ago, liberals around the country thrilled to the story of Wendy Davis’ filibuster. With a few minutes of help from a raucous gallery of protesters, Texas State Senator Davis’ 11-hour speech ran out the clock on the special session of the legislature that Governor Rick Perry had called to pass a draconian anti-abortion bill.

Victory!

For two weeks, anyway. But Perry was still governor, so he called yet another special session. And the Republicans still had majorities in the legislature, so Friday the same bill passed the Senate and was on its way to Perry’s desk. In spite of massive protests, in spite of a viral video that made another new heroine out of Sarah Slamen, the legislative result is the same as if everyone had just stayed home.

Soon we’ll probably be able say the same thing about Moral Mondays in North Carolina. The Republicans have a supermajority in the legislature and they’re not afraid to use it, so they’re going to pass whatever they want, no matter how many religious leaders protest, no matter how many Carolinians they have to arrest.

So it’s pointless, right?

In the long term, no, it’s not pointless. This is the only way things change.

Losing my shrug. Let’s start with the obvious, even if it doesn’t seem all that consequential. A few months ago I’d have shrugged if you told me Texas and North Carolina were about to pass a series of laws that would impose real hardships on women and the poor. “The South,” I’d probably have said, “what can you expect?”

Well, Wendy Davis and William Barber have taken away my shrug. Like lots of other blue-state folks, I have been reminded not to write off Texas and North Carolina. Red states are not monolithic blocks of small-minded people. Progressive forces may be losing there right now, but they’re fighting. And people who keep fighting just might win someday.

If you don’t believe that, recall how the Religious Right and the Tea Party got where they are today. For decades, right-wing extremists rallied for proposals they couldn’t hope to pass into law, and mostly still haven’t: human life amendments, balanced budget amendments, the gold standard, defunding the U.N., and so forth. They failed and they failed again. And sometimes they succeeded when no one had given them a chance. (When the Equal Rights Amendment passed the Senate 84-8 in 1972, its ratification seemed a foregone conclusion.) But today their point of view has to be dealt with, and in some states is dominant.

Before you can win, you have to change the conversation. And the only way to do that is to fight battles the conventional wisdom says you can’t win. You’ll lose most of them. For a while you’ll lose all of them, because the conventional wisdom isn’t stupid. But that’s how things change.

The only way to change the direction of the wind is to keep spitting into it.

How conventional wisdom shifts. I have written in more detail elsewhere about how conservatives manipulate the supposedly liberal media. Journalism is not a conspiracy, but there is an unconscious group process that decides what news is, what can be stated as a simple fact, and what has be covered as controversial. Partisan groups can pressure that process and get their desired response, independent of whether most individual journalists agree or disagree with their views.

In that article I focused on how outside pressure can make known facts seem controversial. So, for example, global warming is almost always covered as if it were in dispute, when in a scientific sense it is well established. But powerful voices will argue with journalists who say global warming is a fact, so instead they write he-said/she-said articles, or leave the global-warming angle out of a story entirely.

Today I want to focus on the opposite side of that same unconscious media groupthink: Anything that is stated forcefully by one side and not contested by the other will be covered as if it were a fact.

So: Texans are all conservatives. Only people on the right care about “morality” or “the family”. “Moral issues” are the ones about sex — abortion, contraception, homosexuality — and the moral position is the conservative position. Feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, making sure workers get a fair wage — all that sermon-on-the-mount stuff — those aren’t “moral” issues.

If you don’t regularly and loudly contest those notions, they’ll get reported as facts. They’ll provide the background assumptions that frame the coverage of everything else.

Wolf Blitzer’s evangelism. The clearest recent example of this principle was Wolf Blitzer’s embarrassing interview with an atheist mother after the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma in May. Blitzer badgered the woman to “thank the Lord” for her and her child’s survival until she finally had to confess her atheism.

So is Blitzer is an evangelical Christian trying to push his religion on CNN? Nope. Wikipedia says Blitzer is a Jew, the son of Holocaust survivors. I can’t say from that precisely what he believes about God, but he was almost certainly not pressuring this woman to proclaim her Judaism.

Instead, Blitzer was applying two seldom-contested stereotypes:

  • Oklahoma is in the so-called Bible Belt, so everybody must be some kind of conservative Christian.
  • There are no atheists in the foxholes. When life and death hang in the balance, everybody becomes religious.

Probably Wolf had been hearing loud proclamations of Christian faith all day, and no voices on the other side. (This is another kind of groupthink. It’s not considered rude to thank Jesus in these circumstances — even in the presence of people whose loved ones Jesus apparently chose not to save. But conservative Christians would take offense if you said, “Stuff like this just shows that everything’s random and you can’t take it personally.”) So it became a background “fact” of his reporting that the people of Moore were having an evangelical Christian response to their survival.

Candle-lighting vs. darkness-cursing. We can wish for harder-working more-objective journalists who will seek out the truth and cover it fairly, regardless of the power dynamics. But in the meantime journalism is what it is, and we’re just being stupid if we let conservatives manipulate it and don’t fight back.

The facts on the ground today are that the media will challenge a pro-choice Catholic to reconcile the contradiction between his politics and his faith, but not an Evangelical who votes to cut Food Stamps or reject Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. (Matthew 25:35-36: “For I was hungry and you fed me. … I was sick and you cared for me.”) Want to change that? Join the Moral Mondays protests in Raleigh, or start something similar in your own state capital.

In the short term, you may not change any votes in the legislature. But if enough people contest the previously uncontested “facts”, those “facts” leave (what Jay Rosen and Daniel Hallin call) “the Sphere of Consensus” and enter “the Sphere of Legitimate Controversy”. The conventional wisdom changes.

From defense to offense. So far the big progressive protests have been efforts to resist conservative aggression: rollbacks of women’s rights in Texas, unemployment insurance in North Carolina, workers’ rights in Michigan and Ohio.

It’s time to go on offense. In addition to resisting the regressive agenda of the right and timidly putting forward small proposals like universal background checks for gun buyers, progressives need a blue-sky positive agenda that we keep making people notice. Just because we can’t pass it in this term of Congress doesn’t make it impractical. (When have conservatives ever been constrained by that?) You have to keep proposing it until people get used to hearing it; only then will they look at it seriously.

So here are five bold proposals that are “doomed” according to the conventional wisdom. Their complete impracticality is a “fact” and will continue to be so until loud voices move them into the Sphere of Controversy, from which they can get serious consideraton.

  • The Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA passed Congress in 1972 and fell three states short of ratification when the ratification deadline passed in 1982. Supporters of the three-state strategy claim the deadline doesn’t count and in 2011 got ratification through one house of the Virginia legislature. But the ERA gets re-introduced in every session of Congress, most recently in March. Only the fact that the conventional wisdom says it can’t pass, protects politicians from explaining why they disagree with “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
  • Single-payer health care. Of all the existing plans to help the 50 million Americans who lack health insurance, Obamacare is the most conservative. (It’s Romneycare, after all.) Conservatives opposing Obamacare have offered no plan to fulfill the “replace” part of their “repeal and replace” slogan. And yet, if you watch Sunday morning political shows on TV, Obamacare is the “liberal” position. It’s better than the status quo, and I support it on those terms. But single-payer is what gives Europe, Japan, and the industrialized parts of the British Commonwealth lower costs and higher life expectancies than we currently have. It would do the same for the United States.
  • End corporate personhood. Few actual humans defend the idea that corporations should be people with full constitutional rights. A variety of constitutional amendments have been proposed to reverse this piece of conservative judicial activism (which in particular has no basis whatsoever in the originalist constitutional interpretation conservatives claim to favor). Bernie Sanders’ Saving American Democracy Amendment says: “The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations.” Everybody who runs for office should be challenged to state a position on that.
  • A federal Reproductive Rights Act. The current reproductive-rights situation in states like Texas resembles Jim Crow: Women’s constitutional rights are not repealed directly, but are made impractical by a series of restrictions transparently introduced for that purpose. In the same way that the Voting Rights Act protected minorities’ right to vote (until recently), a federal Reproductive Rights Act should impose federal oversight on states that have a history of infringing women’s rights.
  • Replace the Second Amendment. The overall situation of weapons and society has changed so much since 1787 that it’s hard to attach any meaning at all to the full text of the Second Amendment. I don’t have a revised text in mind yet, but I think the amendment should defend the right of individuals to procure appropriate tools to defend their homes, while giving Congress the power to control military hardware.
By weeklysift | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

The Myth of the Zombie Voter

July 15, 2013 – 9:09 am

If you ever argue with conservative friends about voter-ID laws, invariably they will bring up the threat of “zombie voters” — fraudulent votes cast in the name of people who were already dead on election day.

In truth, zombie voters are as much of a myth as zombies in general. But you’ll never convince your friends of that, because they’ve seen countless segments on Fox News in which some Republican official announces — in terms that seem too specific to be made up — that dead people have voted. It’s a very convincing technique that goes back to Joe McCarthy’s list of 205 known Communists in the State Department in 1950. (If he’d just said generally that there were some Communists in the State Department, people might have thought he was exaggerating for effect. But a list of 205 of them! He couldn’t make that up, could he?)

The story always goes like this: A computer search produces a list of possible zombie voters, and the right-wing media goes wild with calls for voter ID laws (always conveniently designed to make voting harder for Democratic-leaning blocs of marginal voters like college students, the disabled, and the urban poor). If anybody investigates further, though, a few months later they’ll have discovered that none of the cases pan out. No actual zombies are found. But because that outcome is boring, nobody covers it — least of all Fox.

The most recent example of this pattern comes from South Carolina. In January of 2012, SC Attorney General Alan Wilson was making the tour of conservative media outlets, saying stuff like this:

we found out that there were over 900 people who died and then subsequently voted. That number could be even higher than that, Bill. So this is just an example.

and this:

We know for a fact that there are deceased people whose identities are being used in elections in South Carolina.

More specifically, the state DMV had compared its death data against the voting records for the previous six years and found “953 ballots cast by voters listed as dead“!

At least that was the story until they started showing those 953 names to people who actually know something about elections. Testifying to the legislature, State Elections Commissioner Marci Andino explained the six names she had seen from one county:

one had cast an absentee ballot before dying; another was the result of a poll worker mistakenly marking the voter as his deceased father; two were clerical errors resulting from stray marks on voter registration lists detected by a scanner; and two others resulted from poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter above or below on the list.

This kind of stuff happens all the time — poll workers are mostly volunteers, after all — and explains why the zombie-voter story is itself impossible to kill: You could do a similar records search after any election anywhere, and come up with a similar list of possible zombie voters. The existence of such a list sounds horrifying, but it says nothing about the integrity of the election.

So OK, 953 is an exaggeration. But if you went through all the names, you’d find some zombie voters, right? By April, the State Election Commission had gone through all 207 cases from the 2010 election and had explained all but 10 of them, with no clear zombie-voter evidence even in those 10. State police later whittled those 10 down to 3, and recommended no further investigation.

I expect we’ll wait a long time for Fox to bring Alan Wilson back to comment on this, but fortunately Columbia, S.C.’s weekly Free Times stuck with the story and made an open-records request to get the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division’s final 500-page report on the 953 zombie voters. On July 3, FT reported:

a state police investigation found no indication that anyone purposefully cast a ballot using the name of a dead person in South Carolina. … SLED found no indication of voter fraud.

That result probably didn’t surprise election expert Richard Hasan, who told Bill Moyers last September:

It’s no surprise that the numbers [of prosecutions] are so low, because voter impersonation fraud is an exceedingly dumb way to try to steal an election.

Why is it dumb? You have to steal votes one-by-one, in a time-consuming way, and you face the constant possibility that you might be caught by a poll worker who knew the person you’re claiming to be, or saw the obituary in the local newspaper. To swing an election that way, you’d need a large conspiracy. Somebody would get caught, and somebody would talk. It’s not worth the risk.

So has anybody ever successfully voted more than once by impersonating a dead person? Maybe, somewhere. It’s not impossible. But does anyone organize such efforts to produce enough zombie votes to sway an election (even a very close election)? Pretty conclusively, the answer is no.

Just look at South Carolina in 2010. Around 1.3 million votes were cast in a moderately close governor’s race that year, which Nikki Haley won by 60,000. How many of those votes came from dead-person impersonators? Possibly zero, but after extensive investigation we can be sure that there were no more than 3.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (21)

“Religious Freedom” means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination

July 8, 2013 – 11:37 am

In an Orwellian inversion, “freedom” is now a tool for controlling others.

It’s over. Try something else.

For many anti-gay activists, the recent Supreme Court decisions on DOMA and Proposition 8 were the handwriting on the wall.

It wasn’t just that they didn’t get the result they wanted, but that in DOMA the Court’s majority simply didn’t buy the argument that homosexuality represents a threat to society. Neither does the general public, which supports that decision 56%-41%. (The margin under age 40 is 67%-30%, with 48% approving strongly.) The big post-DOMA public demonstrations expressed joy, not anger.

Just a few years ago anti-marriage-equality referendums were winning in states all over the country, but in 2012 one failed in Minnesota, while referendums legalizing same-sex marriage won at in Washington, Maryland, and Maine. Ten years ago, the first legislatures to make same-sex marriage legal were dragged by their state courts, but this year Delaware, Rhode Island, and Minnesota went there voluntarily, bringing the number of states where same-sex marriage is legal (as of August 1) to 13, plus the District of Columbia. (I’ll guess Oregon and Illinois will go next.)

It’s even clear why this is happening: Because gay millennials are not in the closet, everybody under 30 has gay and lesbian friends who dream about meeting their soulmates just like straight people do. To young Americans, laws blocking that worthy aspiration are pointlessly cruel and ultimately will not stand — not in Alabama, not in Utah, not anywhere.

So the generational tides run against the bigots of the Religious Right. Some still aren’t admitting it, but wiser heads are recognizing that it’s time to switch to Plan B.

The new face of bigotry: “freedom”. Fortunately for them, there’s a well-worked-out back-up plan: religious “freedom”.

Accept the inevitability of gay rights, advises Ross Douthat, but “build in as many protections for religious liberty as possible along the way.” Here’s the idea: If your disapproval of certain kinds of people can be rooted in church doctrine or a handful Biblical proof-texts, then forbidding you to mistreat those people violates the “free exercise” of religion you are promised by the First Amendment.

To make this work, conservative Christians need to divert attention from the people they are mistreating by portraying themselves as the victims. And that requires cultivating a hyper-sensitivity to any form of involvement in activities they disapprove of. So rather than sympathize with the lesbian couple who gets the bakery door slammed in their faces, the public should instead sympathize with the poor wedding-cake baker whose moral purity is besmirched when the labor of his hands is used in a celebration of immorality and perversion.

There’s a name for this tactic: passive aggression. It’s like on Sanford & Son when Fred would clutch his heart and start talking to his dead wife because Lamont planned to do something he disapproved of. Passive aggression is the last resort of people who have neither the power to get their way nor any reasonable argument why they should.

In fact the baker will be fine, as Willamette Week demonstrated by calling two such religious-liberty-defending bakeries and ordering cakes to celebrate a variety of other events conservative Christians disapprove of: a child born out of wedlock, a divorce party, a pagan solstice ritual. The bakers did not object, because their hyper-sensitive moral purity is an invention, a convenient excuse for treating same-sex couples badly.

But Jim DeMint insists that

A photographer in New Mexico, a florist in Washington, and a baker in Colorado have already been victims of such intolerant coercion.

And Matthew Franck is horrified that religious universities will have to provide same-sex married-student housing; religious “schools, universities, hospitals, hospices, and clinics; social service agencies, retirement homes, eldercare and childcare facilities, food pantries, and soup kitchens” who employ “teachers, doctors, nurses, psychologists, counselors and clinicians, caregivers, food-service workers, housekeeping and grounds staff, even pool lifeguards” won’t be able to refuse employment to people with same-sex spouses. Adoption services, marriage counselors, divorce lawyers, artificial insemination clinics etc. will have to deal with gay and lesbian couples … as if they were real human beings or something.

The race parallel. We worked this stuff out during the civil rights movement, because all the same ideas show up with regard to race.

Plenty of people claim a sincere religious belief in white supremacy, and root it in Biblical texts like the Curse of Ham. (This goes way back: American slave-owners found Biblical license for keeping their “property”.) But the law does not honor these claims, and somehow religion in America survives.

Here’s the principle that has served us well: In private life, you can associate with anybody you like and avoid anybody you don’t like. But if you offer goods or services for sale to the public, you don’t get to define who “the public” is. So when you’re making lunch at your house, you can invite anybody you like and snub anybody you don’t like, but if you run a lunch counter you have to serve blacks.

We’ve been living with principle for decades, and (other than Rand Paul) no one worries much about the racists’ loss of freedom.

That should apply to same-sex couples now: If your chapel is reserved for members of your congregation, fine. But if you rent it to the public for wedding ceremonies, same-sex couples are part of the public just like interracial couples are. You don’t get to define them away.

If that makes you reconsider whether you want to be open to the public, well, that’s your decision.

The sky will not fall. We just went through this with the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, which supposedly would violate the religious “freedom” of evangelical military chaplains (who apparently had never before needed interact respectfully with people they believed were sinners). The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins predicted:

You have over 200 sponsoring organizations that may be prevented from sponsoring chaplains because they hold orthodox Christian views that will be in conflict with what the military says is stated policy.

That stated policy was: “All service members will continue to serve with others who may hold different views and beliefs, and they will be expected to treat everyone with respect.”

AP went looking for chaplains who couldn’t live with that and found “perhaps two or three departures of active-duty chaplains linked to the repeal.” A Catholic priest overseeing 50 other chaplains reported “I’ve received no complaints from chaplains raising concerns that their ministries were in any way conflicted or constrained.”

If any of Perkins’ 200 religious organizations has stopped sponsoring chaplains because DADT is gone, I haven’t heard about it. The chaplains’ hyper-sensitivity to openly gay soldiers was imaginary, and went away when the government refused to take it seriously.

The abortion parallels. The reason the Religious Right believes their passive-aggressive “religious freedom” approach will work on same-sex marriage is that the same approach is already working on reproductive rights.

It all started with a reasonable compromise: After the Religious Right lost the battle to keep abortion illegal, laws guaranteed that doctors who believe abortion is murder can’t be forced to perform one. This is similar to letting pacifists be conscientious objectors in war, and I completely support it.

But from there, Religious Right “freedom” has become a weapon to beat down the rights of everyone else. Since 1976, Medicaid has not paid for abortions — at a considerable cost to the government, since birth and child support are far more expensive — because pro-life taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund something they think is immoral. There’s no parallel to this anywhere else: The taxes of pacifist Quakers pay for weapons; the taxes of Jews and Muslims pay the salaries of federal pork inspectors.

Conservatives like to accuse gays and blacks of claiming “special rights”, well this is a special right: The conservative conscience gets considerations that nobody else’s conscience gets.

And conservative special rights keep growing. The argument for defunding Planned Parenthood is that public money not only shouldn’t pay for abortions, it shouldn’t even mix with money that pays for abortions. (“Giving taxpayer funds to abortion businesses that also provide non-abortion services subsidizes abortion,” says one petition.) I had a hard time imagining a parallel, but I finally came up with one: What if Jews were so sensitive to violations of the kosher rules that Food Stamps couldn’t be used (by anyone, for anything) in groceries that sold pork?

That would be absurd, wouldn’t it?

In some states, medical “conscience” laws now protect anyone in the medical system who wants to express their moral condemnation: If the pharmacist disapproves of your contraceptives, he doesn’t have to fill your prescription. One of the examples cited by the model conscience law of Americans United for Life as something that needs to be fixed is “an ambulance driver in Illinois being fired for refusing to take a woman to an abortion clinic”.

Clearly that ambulance driver’s immortal soul was at risk. The hyper-sensitive pro-life conscience needs to be protected from any contact with women making use of their constitutional rights.

Religious “freedom” and contraception. The other front in the religious “freedom” battle is contraception.

The Obama administration has had a lot of trouble finding the proper religious exemption to the contraception provisions of the Affordable Care Act. That’s because it’s hard to find the “right” version of something that shouldn’t exist at all. Contraception coverage does not violate any legitimate notion of religious freedom for any religious organizations, religious affiliated organizations, or religious individual employers. Their claims should be rejected without compromise.

The principle here ought to be simple: The employer isn’t paying for contraception or any other medical procedure; the employer is paying for health insurance. Health insurance is part of a worker’s earnings, just like a paycheck. And just like a paycheck, what the employee chooses to do with that health insurance is none of the employer’s business. If I’m the secretary of an orthodox rabbi, his religious freedom isn’t violated when I cash my paycheck and buy a ham sandwich. Ditto for contraceptives, health insurance, and the secretary of the Archbishop of Boston.

Religious organizations’ hyper-sensitive consciences are pure passive aggression. The classic example here is Wheaton College, which couldn’t join other religious organizations in their suit against the ACA because it discovered that it had inadvertently already covered the contraceptives that the tyrannical ACA was going to force it to cover. This was such a huge moral issue for the college that nobody there had noticed.

Worst of all is the Hobby Lobby lawsuit, which got a favorable ruling on an injunction recently. The Hobby Lobby case is the mating of two bad ideas — corporate personhood and employers’ right to control the medical choices of their employees — to produce something truly monstrous. HL’s case hangs on its claim that it is a “person” with regard to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, and so its corporate “religious freedom” allows it to restrict its employees’ access to contraception.

Persecution or Privilege? Here are the kinds of sacrifices I make for my readers: I listened to the full half-hour of James Dobson’s post-DOMA radio show, where Dobson, Perkins, and Bill Becker threw around phrases like “the collapse of Western civilization in one day” and “the whole superstructure … can come down”. They described Christians as “an oppressed minority” and agreed that “persecution is likely in the days to come”.

But what is “persecution” exactly?

Tony Perkins expresses the challenge like this:

Do you believe God’s word is true and therefore you’re going to live your life based upon that truth, or are you going to shrink back in the fear of man and of them calling you bigots.

Whenever Christians discuss their “oppression”, fear of being called bigots plays a central role. According to CNN’s Belief Blog,

[Peter] Sprigg and other evangelicals say changing attitudes toward homosexuality have created a new victim: closeted Christians who believe the Bible condemns homosexuality but will not say so publicly for fear of being labeled a hateful bigot.

In other words: Christians are oppressed unless they can express their moral condemnation of others without being subject to moral condemnation themselves.

Why would anyone imagine the existence of such a one-sided right? Simple: In practical terms, that’s a right they have had until recent years. Not so long ago, the James Dobson types were so intimidating that they could preach any kind of vicious nonsense about gays and face no response.

So what they are experiencing now isn’t persecution, it’s privileged distress, the anxiety a privileged class feels as its privileges fade and it slides towards equality with others. And rather than try to get over their distress and soothe their anxiety, they are intentionally pumping it up in a passive-aggressive attempt to claim victimhood and control the rest of us.

That bubble needs to be popped.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , , | Comments (67)