Category Archives: Articles

Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See

March 26, 2012 – 1:38 pm

I tend to filter out crime stories, because so often they get more coverage than they deserve, like O. J. Simpson. So I’ve been slow to catch on to the significance of the Trayvon Martin story. But lately this has turned into a meta-story: reactions to the killing say even more about our country than the killing itself did.

The basic facts are simple: A white-Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer (George Zimmerman) got suspicious of a 140-pound black teen-ager (Trayvon Martin) for no apparent reason. He called 911, and the dispatcher told him not to follow the kid. Zimmerman followed anyway. Some kind of confrontation ensued and he shot Martin dead. Martin was unarmed and had nothing easily mistaken for a weapon, but the police accepted Zimmerman’s self-defense claim (in spite of at least one witness who denied it) and let him walk away. That all happened back on February 26, there’s still been no arrest, and the local African-American community is getting pretty upset about it.

The story points out the continuing presence of racism in America. To some segment of the population, being black raises suspicion all by itself. Probably Zimmerman is not the kind of racist who would go out hunting black teens at random. Probably he really believed that Martin was planning some kind of mischief, and that Martin must be armed, so that he had to shoot first once the confrontation started. But why did he think that? Why did he frame the situation in such a way that shoot-to-kill seemed sensible?

And why did the police find his story credible and his actions excusable? You’re an armed white adult chasing an unarmed black teen-ager you outweigh by about 100 pounds. Naturally, you would feel threatened.

That’s the kind of racism that is still endemic in every nook and cranny of America. We’re almost entirely past the “I don’t hire niggers” phase, but still in a phase of “he just doesn’t look trustworthy to me”. What would look like a well-deserved break for a white employee is goofing off when a black does it. An ordinary mental glitch becomes evidence of low intelligence, and so on.

Being black is no longer three strikes against you, but it’s still one or two.

By and large, White America doesn’t want to believe that. Last year a poll found that 51% of whites (also 60% of Republicans and 68% of people who name Fox as their most trusted news source) say that reverse discrimination against whites is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

You can see just how badly White America doesn’t want to believe in its continuing racism by how it has reacted to the Martin story. Fox News did its best to ignore the whole thing. ThinkProgress totaled up how much attention each cable news network gave the Martin story during its first three weeks:

Compare this to Fox’s obsessive coverage of a series of scary-black-people stories. For example, it devoted 95 segments totaling 8 hours of air time to the trumped-up voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

Or check out how the Glenn-Beck-founded blog The Blaze has covered Martin’s death. Searching on the word “Trayvon” got me 15 stories, five of which were about the scary ways black people are reacting to the incident — the New Black Panther Party (of course), Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and the New Black Liberation Militia. The Sharpton post ends by raising more suspicion about Martin. (He was on a 10-day suspension from school, and “Sources sympathetic to Martin say he was suspended for ‘excessive tardiness’.” But the Blaze makes sure we know all the more serious stuff that a 10-day suspension could be about.)

A sixth Blaze post quotes Beck himself, who is worried not about white vigilantes, but about black extremists “winding everybody up”:

“We have this extremist African-American militia group that says they’re just going to come in and handle it. You’re got Al Sharpton winding everybody up. You’ve got Color For Change winding everybody up.” … Beck ceded that the man who shot Trayvon could indeed be a racist, but that many of his detractors are driven by a racial agenda too, and thus are everything they claim to stand against.

Got that? You should focus not on what actually happened to an innocent black teen, but on what “extremist” black groups might do. Zimmerman could be a racist, but blacks and liberals upset by the Martin story are racists.

So the beat goes on: For the part of the media that panders to I-am-not-a-racist whites, the Martin story is just one more example of racism against whites and one more reason for white people to be afraid of black people.

Among the presidential candidates, only Newt Gingrich directly pandered to white racists by turning the incident into a reverse-racism story. President Obama had reached out to Martin’s parents, saying “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Gingrich’s response:

Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. … When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.

Gingrich glossed over the whole walking-while-black angle that makes the story important: If Trayvon Martin had been white, he might not have been shot at all. George Zimmerman “turned it into a racial issue”, not President Obama.

While researching this case, I learned something interesting about the law: Self defense falls into a class known as affirmative defenses. In other words, at your trial you’re not just looking at the state and saying “Prove I did it”, you’re making assertions about facts that are supposed to exonerate you. When you do that, part of the burden of proof shifts to you.

So the state does not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense. In making a self-defense plea, Zimmerman would be conceding that he killed Martin, and he would then need to convince the jury of his self-defense claim by a preponderance of evidence (not beyond reasonable doubt).

Want some background music to read this piece by? Try Eminem’s “White America“:

Look at these eyes:
Baby blue, baby, just like yaself.
If they were brown, Shady lose,
Shady sits on the shelf.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , | Comments (28)

The Tragedy of Mitt Romney

March 19, 2012 – 12:25 pm

The most frustrating Republican candidate for me to watch this year is Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum is who he is: a small-minded theocrat. Ron Paul is the same old coot with funny ideas that he’s been for years. Newt Gingrich (like Herman Cain and Sarah Palin before him) is a huckster who wants to sell books and get on TV. If those jokers want to run for president and Republicans want to vote for them, that’s their problem.

But here’s the thing about Mitt Romney: At one time, there was a good argument for electing him president. Then he lost faith in himself or in the American people or both. So rather than take his legitimate case to the voters and try to convince them to do the right thing, he decided to pander to the crazies.

I think that mistake is tragic, in the original Sophocles/Shakespeare sense of the word.

President Romney? Seriously? Most Sift readers are liberals, so I imagine you are asking “A good argument for making Romney president? What?”

Here’s the argument: The #1 problem in America today — worse than income inequality or unemployment or racism or the deficit or climate change — is our inability to marshall our forces and even attempt to solve those problems.

That’s why “Yes We Can” was such an appealing slogan four years ago. At some visceral level, voters didn’t even care what the new president was going to do. We just wanted to believe that he would do something. We wanted to believe that we didn’t have to sit here and watch the oceans rise, soldiers die in pointless wars, college become an unaffordable luxury, debts of all kinds skyrocket, and jobs run away to China.

We were sick of arguing about which party got us lost in this wilderness. Just lead us in some direction that has a chance of getting us home. We’ll follow. That’s all we want.

That’s still what we want, because we haven’t gotten it yet. That’s why President Obama is vulnerable. He accomplished a few noteworthy things during the half-year when he had 60 senators (from the delayed swearing-in of Al Franken in July, 2009 to the out-of-cycle election of Scott Brown in January, 2010), but anybody who was starting to regain faith in the American government lost it again during the debt-limit fiasco last summer.

You can argue (as I often have) that the problem is the intransigence of the Republicans in Congress. But you can’t argue that government is working.

If I were a Romney speechwriter. Mitt could have laid it out to the voters like this:

When I became governor of Massachusetts, I took on the toughest problem the state had: health care. I didn’t hide behind the excuse that the other party controlled the legislature. I started with the best ideas of the conservative Heritage Foundation, I listened to smart people of all political persuasions, and I appealed to both parties’ desire to make life better for the people of our state.

And we did. Today, Massachusetts leads the nation in access to health care. That system is not perfect, but it is working and it is popular. Today, neither party can win a statewide election by opposing it.

Our plan’s success gave the current administration the courage and the model to attack the healthcare problem nationwide. That system also is not perfect and I have many ideas for improving it. But again, it got passed and is being implemented. The framework is there to fix and upgrade.

In areas where the Obama administration did not have a Romney example to build on, they have spun their wheels. The economy continues to sputter. Debts continue to rise. The environment continues to degrade. We are no closer to solving our immigration problem. Our educational system falls further and further behind our competitors in other countries. Every day, it gets more and more difficult for young Americans to start at the bottom and rise to the top.

These are not Democratic issues or Republican issues. They are not problems for the government to solve by decree, or for the market to solve without government, or for individuals to solve without any help at all. These are American challenges, challenges that we must meet together, using every tool at our command.

Government, business, private charities and foundations, parents, teachers, farmers, scientists, factory workers, inventors, consumers, religious leaders, students, entrepreneurs — we all have a role to play. We all have to step up and take action if America is going to continue to lead the world.

What kind of president does America need at this crucial point in its history? Not an inspiring orator, not a mere cheerleader or a symbol or a figurehead. America needs a problem-solver, someone who can engage people of all philosophies, all religions, and all walks of life in the project of making our country great for generations to come.

America needs a president who takes pride in tackling the hard problems and finding real solutions — as I did in government in Massachusetts, in business at Bain Capital, and in the non-profit sector when I organized the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

I’m pretty liberal, so I’m not saying I definitely would have voted for that Mitt Romney. (The Bain Capital part would have been particularly hard for me to swallow.) But I would have had to think hard about it. A lot of people, even a lot of Democrats, would have had to think hard about it. Romney might have become another Eisenhower, blandly pulling together coalitions to do big things like build the interstate highway system.

But Mitt Romney turned his back on that guy. He turned his back on himself and his record. Instead of running as a leader who will listen to anybody, he has become a panderer who will say anything.

What else could he do? I understand why he did it: The Tea Party wave of 2010 should have thrown a scare into any reality-based politician, especially one hoping to win Republican primaries. But there’s more than one way to handle that situation.

  • You can fight it. Say in no uncertain terms that facts are facts, science is science, and economics is economics. You can finesse the social issues. (Traditionally in this country they have been state issues; defend each state’s right to handle marriage and guns and abortion as it sees fit.) But on health care, the economy, and the environment, stand up tall and try to hold your head above the rising tide. Call out bizarre lies like Birtherism and Obama’s Muslimhood. Stand up to the Rush Limbaughs when they become inexcusable. Even if you don’t win, you’ll become the-guy-we-should-have-listened-to. In 2016, you’ll be 69 — still young enough.
  • You can wait it out. That’s what Nixon did during the Goldwater disaster of 1964 and Jeb Bush is doing now. Express your Republican loyalty in vague terms, but don’t let the Party’s descent into the pit get you dirty. Again: 69 is not that old these days. Hillary Clinton is the same age you are — think she’s giving up?
  • You can do something else with your life. Lots of people don’t get to be president. Enjoy your quarter-billion and your beautiful family. Be Commerce Secretary in some future administration, find another Olympics to save, or chair a bipartisan commission to chart Medicare’s future. Herbert Hoover continued a respectable career of public service to age 80. You could too.

Instead, Mitt sold out to the insanity. You can tell he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, and so can the crazies. That’s how a nobody like Santorum can get so many votes, even though he and Romney are running on almost identical platforms.

The result. Not only will Mitt Romney lose this year, either at a brokered convention in the summer or to Obama in the fall, but he has trashed his brand. No one — not even most of the people voting for him — believes or trusts Romney any more. In fact, his general-election strategy depends on voters doubting his honesty: Come fall, he’ll need to convince independents that he didn’t mean any of the stuff he’s saying now.

Mitt Romney is a man of considerable ability. He could have served this country well — possibly as president or possibly some other way. Now he never will, because he wanted to be president more than he wanted to serve his country, and he tried to take a short cut to the White House rather than walk the long and winding road this era laid out for him.

Great promise undone by a single character flaw — that’s the stuff tragedy is made of.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Where Are We on Citizens United?

March 12, 2012 – 12:26 pm

So far, the 2012 election cycle has been everything the critics of the Citizens United decision expected. Mitt Romney is leading the race for the Republican nomination not because voters like him or his vision for the country, but because limitless quantities of money are available to tear down any serious rival. Newt Gingrich is able to stay in the race because one tycoon has decided that’s a good idea, and Rick Santorum has a super-rich sugar daddy as well. (Even so, a Romney-supporting hedge fund billionaire thinks the ultra-wealthy have “insufficient influence” on politics. I have a hard time picturing what would please him.)

Meanwhile, it’s been reported that the Koch brothers have pledged $60 million to defeat President Obama in the fall, and other plutocrats allied to them have offered $40 million more. Karl Rove’s Crossroads SuperPACs are planning to raise and spend $240 million, and there are many, many other such groups. That’s all in addition to whatever the Republican Party and its candidate spend.

So despite being opposed to SuperPACs in theory, President Obama has come to the conclusion that going into an election without one would be like playing in the American League without a designated hitter or refusing to take 3-point shots in the NBA; whether you think a rule is good for the game or not, you don’t have the option of moving to a fantasy world where the rule doesn’t exist.

There’s an argument about whether this is hypocrisy on Obama’s part. I agree with Kevin Drum that it isn’t. One of Drum’s examples applies to me: I claim income-tax deductions that I would do away with if I had the power. Playing by the rules and wanting to change the rules are two different things.

More money, more mud. Money equals speech, says the Supreme Court, and more speech means better democracy. But in practice, more money means more negative misleading speech.

With a little bit of money a candidate can get a positive message out and present an attractive image. But before long everyone has seen the beautiful family and its adorable dog. Everyone has heard that you want to turn Washington around and make America great again. Repeating those ads 24/7 doesn’t help you.

But carpet-bombing a state with charges that your opponent wants to strangle grandmothers, sell little girls to the Chinese, and raise taxes to subsidize terrorist training camps — that works. (It works even better if the charges come not from Candidate Smith, but from some untraceable Coalition to Save America From Everyone But Smith.) The more repetition the better. So the more SuperPAC money, the more negative the campaign.

What to do? This is the world wrought by Citizens United. Even Republicans don’t like it.

According to a new poll by pollposition.com … 68% of registered Republicans want money out of the Super PACs and only 21% said they were fine with it.

Democrats and Independents oppose this new unlimited-money politics by even larger margins. Wouldn’t it be great if we had the kind of political system where large majorities could change things?

Imagine that we do. What then? We could pass legislation to mitigate the worst effects of Citizens United. Or we could pass a constitutional amendment that undoes it completely. Or we could elect people who would appoint justices who would reverse the decision. Failing at that, we could craft legal cases carefully and hope to get the Court to change its mind.

People are trying to do all those things.

Legislation. Judge Kennedy’s decision in Citizens United imagined transparency rules that would allow intelligent voters to know where campaign money was coming from. The DISCLOSE Act would have implemented some minimal transparency rules, but Republicans filibustered it in the Senate. Democrats plan to reintroduce it in 2012.

I’ve googled “Republican alternative to DISCLOSE Act” and so far found nothing. GOP.gov says:

The proposed legislation is a punitive measure for associations of persons who choose to exercise their right to free political speech as guaranteed by the Constitution, and affirmed in the Citizens United v. FEC case.

which isn’t the kind of position that leads to compromise.

The Sunlight Foundation keeps track of this stuff. They’re also pushing the SUPERPAC (Stop Undisclosed Payments in Elections from Ruining Public Accountability in Campaigns) Act.

Constitutional Amendments. Senator Sanders of Vermont introduced the Saving American Democracy Amendment. It targets corporate personhood in general:

SECTION 1. The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability companies, or other private entities established for business purposes or to promote business interests under the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

It prohibits corporate campaign contributions also allows Congress to pass laws limiting campaign spending in general.

Move to Amend has a similar proposal, which goes on to say:

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

Such amendments are drawing grass-root support. Several dozen Vermont town meetings passed resolutions of support earlier this month.

Vermonters are not the first Americans to urge that the Constitution be amended to renew the century-old principle that citizens have a right to prevent corporations from buying elections. Referendums have already passed in Boulder, Colorado and Madison, Wisconsin. Cities across the country, including Los Angeles, have urged Congress to begin the amendment process. State legislatures in Hawaii and New Mexico have done the same.

Lawrence Lessig points out the Citizens United is not literally a corporate-personhood decision, but instead interprets the First Amendment to protect (in Justice Scalia’s words) “speech, not speakers”. So it’s not that Exxon has a right to speak, but that Congress has no power to limit the spread of Exxon’s message. Lessig’s proposed amendment is simpler:

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power to limit, though not to ban, campaign expenditures of non-citizens of the United States during the last 60 days before an election.

Non-citizens in this case means both corporations and foreign individuals.

Lessig finds it hard to imagine that any such amendment will get the 2/3 majority it needs in Congress, given that infinite corporate money will rally to defeat representatives who support it. (Several elections would go by before the amendment could be ratified.) That’s why he favors a constitutional convention.

Congress hasn’t voted on any of these yet. Any amendment faces a long, slow road. But both Left (Equal Rights Amendment) and Right (Human Life Amendment) have shown that an amendment is a good long-term goal to build a movement around, even if it doesn’t get adopted.

Judicial remedies. Russ Feingold thinks Citizens United was just a mistake, and the Court needs to undo it. “The best thing to do is to get new justices, different justices, who will do the right thing.”

But the traditions of the Court itself work against such a plan. The doctrine of stare decisis requires the Court to respect the decisions of past courts unless and until they prove unworkable. “I wouldn’t have done that” is not a good enough reason to reverse a decision. That’s why major reversals (like Brown v Board of Education) are rare, and usually come after a long process of trying and failing to make the original decision work (as David Strauss explained in The Living Constitution).

The Montana Supreme Court has attempted an interesting end run around Citizens United. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United said:

We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

Five Montana justices said, more-or-less, “Given Montana’s unique history of corruption, things are different here.” That case has been appealed to the Supremes, and it will be interesting to see what they say. Probably they’ll overturn Montana’s decision and reaffirm Citizens United, but Justice Ginsburg might use the occasion to put the Court’s conservative majority on the spot and hold its ridiculous and unpopular reasoning up to ridicule.

Summary. At the moment, we have no immediate prospect of reversing Citizens United. But when you don’t have a bill, you have an issue. Democrats need to pound on this in 2012, because Republicans in Congress are taking positions that are out of step even with rank-and-file Republicans.

A good test case will be Scott Brown. He comes up for re-election this year, and claims to be an “Independent Voice for Massachusetts” rather than a right-wing extremist. He cited a number of reasons for voting against the DISCLOSE Act, including wanting to make it apply to unions as well as corporations, but he never put forward an alternative that he would support. (Republican moderates did the same thing on health care. Snowe, Collins, etc. — they seemed to be considering the ACA and came up with many minor objections to it, but they never said “Add this amendment and I will vote for it.”)

In the old days, the role of the moderates in each party was to craft pragmatic solutions and provide the swing votes to pass them. If they’re not doing that any more — if, instead, they’re just wringing their hands and making excuses for supporting the partisan agenda of their extremist colleagues — then there’s no reason to elect moderates.

The ball’s in your court, Scott. Do you want to do something specific about Citizens United, or are you OK with the system the way it is?

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (2)

The Republic of Babel

March 5, 2012 – 1:36 pm

I owe a debt to this year’s crop of presidential candidates. Time and again, one of them says something so outrageous that it brings my thoughts into focus.

First it was Herman Cain saying, “If you’re not rich, blame yourself!” Until that moment, I had vaguely wondered about the role of shame in keeping the 99% down, but it took Herman to crystalize it for me.

More recently, Rick Santorum has been my teacher:

When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left? The French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.

Yep. Secular government inevitably leads to the Reign of Terror. (If you don’t believe it, go visit some secular hellhole like … just about anyplace in Europe, where mobs roam the streets beheading people at will.) Blue Texan has already exposed Santorum’s ignorance of the actual French Revolution, but I want to go somewhere else with the quote: What the heck is Santorum talking about? What could be burning so brightly in his mind that he needs this mangled French Revolution analogy to express it?

I think Santorum has mushed two ideas together: One is an important insight that I wish everyone would think about, and the other is totally wrong. Here’s how I pull it apart:

  • Important insight: American democracy is losing its language of discourse.
  • Wrong: Until recently, conservative Christianity provided that language.

Put them together and you get Santorum’s point: Unless we get back to God, our democracy is going to fall apart.

But let’s not put them together. Let’s discuss the insightful part first, and then step around the Evangelical rabbit hole Santorum has fallen down.

Language in the broad sense. By “losing our language” I don’t mean English. I’m thinking about all the social and intellectual infrastructure that allows us to talk through our differences: taken-for-granted assumptions, shared frames, common concepts, a portfolio of shared heroes to emulate, and so on.

Sharing a language of discourse with somebody doesn’t mean that you necessarily agree. But it does mean that you can explain your problems to each other and empathize with each other’s difficulties. It means that you have some basis on which you can construct a compromise.

Dictatorships can get along without that kind of language. A master-slave relationship functions just fine with grunts and gestures and maybe a few words of pidgin-speak. Common understanding? Just show the slave what to do and beat him until he does it.

But democracies need to be able to talk. I have to know more than just what you want to do or want me to do. I need to understand why you want what you want, and I need to be able to explain why I want something different. We have to be able to discuss the nuances of our hopes and fears and plans — what’s absolutely essential and what isn’t — so that we can cobble together a solution that we can all live with.

A democracy that can’t do that devolves into mob rule or military coup or Potemkin elections that rubber-stamp decisions already made by a governing elite. That’s when the French Revolution analogy starts to make sense: Without a language of discourse, you can have Robespierre or you can have Napoleon, but you can’t really achieve Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Consensus and compromise. The Bible doesn’t tell us what kind of government developed in post-Tower Babel. But we can be pretty sure it wasn’t a democracy.

As I’ve described in more detail elsewhere, democracy only works when the issues worth killing and dying for — genocide, slavery, the legitimacy of the property system, and a few others — have already been decided by consensus. Otherwise you’ll have civil war, because the 49% will not march meekly to their fate.

In that essay, though, I treated consensus as a static thing — as it is in the short term. But any lasting democracy has to be able to evolve consensus on new issues as they come up. That can happen if you have a language of discourse. You can make temporary compromises and tinker with them over time until they acquire the prestige of tradition.

Think about pacifism, which is as stark a moral issue as any: To one side, war is humankind’s greatest evil. To the other, it’s essential to defending our way of life. What room is there for compromise?

And yet, we have compromised: The nation continues to defend itself, but pacifists who don’t interfere with the military aren’t jailed or considered traitors. They’re allowed to claim conscientious objector status in a draft, but their taxes support the military just like everyone else’s.

No simple principle would lay down that boundary, but each part of it has become time-honored.

Now think about abortion, where the argument has not really changed since Roe vs. Wade. Either you want to kill babies or you want to subjugate women. It’s been that way for 40 years.

What the Culture War is about. When you grasp the Babel problem, you see the Culture War in a whole new light. What we’re fighting about isn’t abortion or homosexuality or traditional values or even religion. We’re fighting about what the language of American democracy is going to be. What worldview is going to frame the issues that we will then debate and vote on?

One candidate is a secular worldview of reason and science. Another is the worldview of conservative Christianity.

Either one could work, up to a point, if we could reach consensus on it. And neither would require that everyone convert to that worldview completely, only that everyone learn to speak that language in the public square.

Other religious worldviews could work as well as Christianity. There’s no inherent reason we couldn’t have an Islamic Republic or a Jewish Republic or a Hindu Republic, if that’s what we decided we wanted.

But what we can’t have is a Republic of Babel. Not for long.

The Language of the Founders. You know whose language of discourse really worked? The Founders.

The Constitution is a masterwork of compromise. Effective government vs. individual rights; state power vs. federal power; the mob vs. the propertied elite — they worked out a series of good-enough solutions that let the country move forward. Only slavery was too much for them, and even then their band-aids held things together for most of a century, giving their children and grandchildren a chance to avert disaster.

You think abortion or same-sex marriage would have stumped the Founders? No way.

That’s why there’s so much Founder-nostalgia today. At the Constitutional Convention, problems didn’t just sit there, and factions didn’t move further and further apart forever. Whatever came up, they figured out how to keep the process moving.

One frustrating part of Founder-nostalgia is the unending clash of examples “proving” that they were either for or against religion: Franklin calling for prayer at the Constitutional Convention (and invoking the threat of Babel), or Adams signing the Treaty of Tripoli declaring that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”.

It goes round and round. If you’re selective, you can quote Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin on either side. Washington was a lifelong Anglican, but he didn’t take communion. No one knows why.

The reason we keep arguing about this is that we’re asking the wrong question. It doesn’t really matter what theology the Founders believed in their private hearts. What matters is how religion influenced their public language of discourse.

God in the Declaration. The most quoted phrase of the Declaration of Independence is

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights

This mention of “the Creator” is supposed to back up the claim that the Founders’ worldview was fundamentally religious, and to counter the observation that God was completely left out of the Constitution.

God is mentioned exactly two other times in the Declaration: “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the first paragraph and “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” in the last.

Interestingly, these phrases were altered from Jefferson’s original draft. The edits cut both ways. “Self-evident” (an Enlightenment philosophical term) was originally “sacred and undeniable” (a religious term). Rights originally came “from that equal creation” with no personification of the Creator. And “Divine Providence” did not appear at all.

Notice what you don’t find in any version of the Declaration: Jesus Christ, the God of Abraham, or any other sectarian name of God. God is given purely functional names that any monotheistic religion would recognize. (Even a polytheistic Hindu would understand: “Creator” means Brahma, and “Divine Providence” refers to Vishnu the Preserver.) The Declaration finds God in the Laws of Nature, but it makes no no reference to any sect’s scripture.

Now think about the era: 18th-century science provided no well-founded theories of origin — no big bang, no primordial soup in which proteins could randomly develop, no evolution by natural selection. If you talked about origins and foundations at all, you ended up talking in religious terms, because there was nothing else. (David Hume was as close to an atheist as the 18th century allowed. The participants in his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” eventually converge on a theory of intelligent design.)

So here’s what you (and Rick Santorum) should notice about the Founders’ most important products: The Declaration and the Constitution were written in the most secular language that existed in that era.

But weren’t the Founders religious? Individually, yes. But they didn’t all have the same religion, and they knew it. Patrick Henry would fit right in at a fundamentalist megachurch in Virginia today. If he brought Franklin along, old Ben would probably keep his objections to himself and leave everyone charmed. But Jefferson and Madison would get themselves ejected in short order, and an outspoken New England Universalist like Ethan Allen would be completely beyond the pale.

What’s more, the Founders could see the bad example of England, where Anglicans, Catholics, and Puritans had been hanging each other since Henry VIII. That, they knew, is where sectarian government leads.

But unlike the worst excesses of the later French Revolution, the Founders didn’t attempt to eliminate religion or create a new one. Instead, their public gatherings worked in secular language, because that was a language that everyone could understand. If you needed sectarian language to justify what you wanted to do, they figured, the government probably shouldn’t be doing it.

The Secular Tribe. Something important has changed between the 18th century and today: Secularism has developed into a more complete worldview. It has a theory of origins, a psychology, and humanistic ethics. 18th-century secularism did not threaten sectarian worldviews any more than medieval Latin threatened vernacular French or Spanish. One was a rich, earthly language of everyday life and the other a more philosophically subtle language for widespread professional communities.

In the 18th century, essentially no one spoke Secular at home, so it was not involved in the tribal rivalries of the individual sects. But today, many people do speak Secular at home. And so, while I think it’s a mistake to talk about Secularism as if it were a rival religion, it is a rival tribe. Today, secularism is part of many people’s individual identity. And so, demanding that other people express themselves in secular terms in public can mean that I want them to adopt my tribal identity and abandon their own.

More and more, then, the sects are digging in their heels against this threat to their identity. They are building their own parallel institutions and becoming separatist. As they do this, they are developing their own set of acceptable “facts” and establishing defenses against any non-sectarian evidence or logic. (The idea that the Founders established a Christian Republic is one those false “facts” they are rallying around.)

If that trend continues, it will kill democracy. Elections will give one side or the other a temporary advantage, but will solve nothing for the long term. When the options on the ballot are Kill Babies and Subjugate Women, the losing side just reloads and tries again.

How do we save democracy? First, we have to realize what we’re doing. Whether you speak Secular or Evangelical or something else entirely at home, you need to stop trying to use the public square to validate your identity. That’s not what the public square is for.

Second, all sides need to examine themselves for tribalism — secularists most of all, perhaps, because many of us are unaware of the possibility of secular tribalism. We may need to construct a meta-secular language that purges the tribalism out of secularism. Religious people need to keep asking what is really essential to their religion and what is simply a tradition that has become a comfortable habit and a source of tribal identity.

Third, we all need to understand that a compromise that allows us to live together is an achievement and not a corruption.

Finally, we all need to stretch our understanding and strain to hear each other’s deepest meanings rather than react reflexively against whatever we can perceive as an insult. The Republic of Babel cannot last, but it can move in either direction: towards the war of all against all, or towards the struggle of all to understand all.

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When the Priests’ Scandal Becomes Relevant

February 20, 2012 – 10:06 am

In previous posts about the Catholic hierarchy’s War on Obama, I have restrained myself from bringing up the Church’s sexual-abuse scandal. A lot of people do, and most of the time I wince, because it’s a cheap shot.

But there is one situation in which it’s not a cheap shot, and that’s when the clergy is striking poses of great moral courage in face of this “War on Religion” that they’ve made up. (Is the War on Christmas over yet? Who won?) As a Catholic priest said during Sean Hannity’s “Faith in America” segment:

If I’m asked to do something that goes against my conscience, I’d better be willing to die for that.

Brave words. I’m hearing a lot of brave words from priests these days. But it’s easy to be brave during a completely fabricated metaphorical “war”.

Think it through: When in course of the current healthcare proposals will a Catholic priest have to take some specific action that will go against his conscience? Or look at it from the other side: What can he refuse to do that will get him arrested — or punished in any way — for his a Gandhi-style resistance?

Nothing.

Churches were always exempt from the rule that they must provide contraception in their healthcare plans. And under the administration’s new compromise proposal, Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities don’t have to cover contraception either; their insurance carriers have to provide a separate policy for free — which they can do without any subsidy from the premiums paid by the institutions, because contraception saves them money. Matt Yglesias explains:

The point here is simple. While birth control costs more than nothing, it costs less than an abortion and much less than having a baby. From a social point of view, unless we’re not going to subsidize consumption of health care services at all (which would be a really drastic change from the status quo) then it makes a ton of sense to heavily subsidize contraceptives.

The absence of any place to take a stand becomes obvious if you read the lawsuit Belmont Abbey College has filed against the contraception mandate. It is full of vague assertions that the College is being coerced to “violate its deeply-held religious beliefs”, but does not specify any particular belief-violating act that it or its employees will be forced to perform. As the suit progresses towards trial, the College will have a hard time proving that it has standing to sue.

In short, unlike Gandhi or Martin Luther King, priests and bishops can strike heroic poses anywhere they want, and police will never feel obligated to haul them away. The system is already set up to walk around them.

That raises this question: How believable are those poses of great moral courage? And then this one: Didn’t the Catholic clergy just face a moral crisis? How much courage did they display then?

OK, most priests didn’t sexually abuse children or anybody else. But how many knew about some particular sexual abuse and did nothing? How many knew their diocese was just shuffling abusive priests around and letting them rape children somewhere else — and did nothing? How many suspected something and decided they didn’t want to know?

A priest with moral courage would have investigated his suspicions, then gone to his superiors and said, “I’m not going to let you do this. Do the right thing or I’m blowing the whistle.”

That would have been courageous.

How many priests did anything remotely similar? Anybody? That situation wasn’t metaphoric. It was a real moral crisis that required real moral courage.

If you didn’t have it then, don’t posture to me now about how brave you are.

Like the congressional hearing on this issue, Sean Hannity’s panel was all men. Jon Stewart had something to say about about “the world’s holiest sausage-fest”.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

(If you’re not hearing any sound, click on the video box and check that it’s not muted.)

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What Abortion Means to Me

February 13, 2012 – 12:52 pm

I’m a guy. So I’ve never been pregnant, never worried about being pregnant, and never had to decide whether I should have an abortion.

But I’ve also been married for … it’ll be 28 years next month. So it annoys me when reproductive rights gets consigned (along with breast cancer, day care, and equal pay) to the special ghetto of “women’s issues”. If you take marriage seriously, you live in the same ghetto your wife does — especially when it comes to reproduction. Because if your wife has a child, you have a child. That’s how it works.

Here’s how it worked for us: In the early years of our marriage, we figured we would become parents eventually, but not yet. In the short run, we wanted to focus on establishing ourselves in the world, so that later, as more mature parents, we could give our children a better life.

Later, as we began to wonder whether eventually would ever be now, we went through a more focused decision process: Were we going to have children or not?

We decided not. (Being a writer, I described that process here and revisited it here when our friends’ kids started graduating from high school.) Children are wonderful and we were glad that so many of our friends were having them, but we liked the lives we were living. We still do.

Even if we had chosen to have a child, we’d have faced another decision about having a second one, or a third, because each child is a new roll of the dice. You can’t predict who this little person is going to turn out to be or how s/he will change your household. (If you think your brilliant parenting will determine the matter, you’re kidding yourself.)

Children arrive with no warranty and no return policy. Downs syndrome is on my wife’s family tree, and autism is something you always have to think about. One of the bridesmaids at our wedding had a perfectly healthy child, who was then killed by a drunk driver. My parents lived next to a family whose teen-age son suffered a brain-damaging accident. They will have to care for him for the rest of their lives, and what happens if he outlives them is unclear.

In short, having a child means risking whatever you thought you were going to do with your life. And each additional child risks not just your own life, but the life you can provide for your other children. That’s why any responsible couple — no matter how satisfying they find parenthood to be — is eventually going to say, “No. It’s time to quit while we’re ahead.”

[I suppose I need to address the people who “trust in the Lord” to decide how many children they will raise. To me, that makes as much sense as snake-handling or strolling through a lion’s den because Daniel got away with it. Look around: People who trust in the Lord get slammed by disaster at the same rate as anybody else who takes similar risks. So I’ll repeat: Any responsible couple …]

Those two reasons — wanting to delay having children until you can provide a better life for them, and wanting to protect the life you have already made — are why almost every couple practices birth control at some point in their marriage. (The only people who can’t see the logic here are priests who can’t get married. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.)

Once you’ve made that decision, you quickly realize that no form of birth control is foolproof. Surgery isn’t an option if you just want to delay parenthood, and is a gamble in general, because your circumstances may change. Even celibacy fails, because you can’t rule out rape.

So we came to this strategy: We practiced birth control faithfully, and planned to get an abortion if it failed. As it happened, we lucked out and never had to get that abortion.

Would we have followed through? I don’t know. I think that’s a situation you can’t fully imagine until you get there. But in any case, the decision would have been ours to make, and not the government’s to make for us. If we had changed our minds and decided to have the baby, our decision would have transformed an “accident” into a wanted child. Having chosen to raise him or her, I believe we would have been better, more loving parents than if we had felt trapped.

Are there moral consequences to choosing abortion? Yes, I believe there are. But I imagine them differently than anti-abortion extremists do. I hold a newly fertilized ovum in very light regard (as Nature — which spontaneously aborts so many of them — seems to). I believe that a fetus’ moral value grows with time, which gives a couple a responsibility to decide about abortion promptly, and steadily raises the decision bar as the pregnancy continues. Eventually, as birth approaches, only the life of the mother is a good enough reason to abort.

These are my own moral intuitions (which my wife largely shares) and yours may be different. But if we had taken action based on them, I would have expected everyone else to mind their own business. I see no justification for any outsider’s morality to have trumped ours.

So that’s what abortion has meant to me as a married man. My wife and I took responsibility for our childbearing. Without the possibility of abortion, we could not have done so.

We are now past the childbearing age. But I hope that those couples who are fertile today will also take responsibility for their childbearing. I believe that collectively they will raise saner, healthier children if they do, and that our society will be better for it. I also want today’s couples to have at least as much control over their lives as we had. And so, for both social and personal reasons, I want abortion to remain legal.

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Religious Corporate Personhood

February 13, 2012 – 12:44 pm

Cable-news shows the last two weeks (especially on Fox) have been dominated by the Catholic bishops’ objection to including contraception in the minimum healthcare plan employers must provide under the Affordable Care Act, and the compromise the Obama administration offered.

In brief: Churches could already claim an exemption to the rule, so the issue centered on other church-run institutions like hospitals or universities. By making a Catholic institution provide contraception to its employees, despite the fact that Catholic doctrine objects to contraception, “the Obama administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty” — according to one version of the letter which the bishops had read in every Catholic church.

The administration compromised: Church-run institutions also would not have to offer contraception in their healthcare plans, but if they didn’t, the insurance companies providing the plans must offer individual employees a separate, no-fee, no-co-payment contraception policy. (This works financially, because contraception doesn’t cost the insurance company money, it saves money by preventing pregnancies. So the employer is not subsidizing contraception, even indirectly.) But the bishops announced that they would not be satisfied until contraception was withdrawn from the minimum healthcare plan for everyone.

Most of the problems with the bishops’ claims have been dealt with in detail elsewhere:

But one point is not getting nearly the attention it deserves: The bishops are not defending the religious liberty of individual Catholics (who remain free not to use contraceptives). They are claiming “religious liberty” as an institutional right of the Catholic Church.

It’s corporate personhood all over again.

The Founders must be spinning in their graves. The whole point of separating church from state is that we should not have to run our laws past a council of unelected bishops.

The United States has a long history of making room for individual conscience, most notably in allowing conscientious exemption to a military draft. But recognizing the institutional conscience of a church would be something new and strange.

In the American legal tradition, a church’s rights are derived from the right of its members to believe as they will, to worship as they will, and to freely assemble. Any “institutional right” that can’t be so derived is alien to us.

I found this spelled out quite clearly in the 1949 book Cornerstones of Religious Freedom in America by Joseph Blau (which also provided this week’s Sift quote):

Much as business corporations in the United States have battened on their fictitious legal status as corporate persons entitled to individual rights under the “due process” clause, churches — religious corporations — are able to grow overweening and oppressive if their claim to legal status as corporate persons under the First Amendment is granted. “Due process” for corporate persons has produced the legal anomaly of violation of the rights of the very individuals whom the due process clause was intended to protect. Religious freedom for religious corporations, if it is allowed, will end in the trampling of the religious freedom of the individual under the marching feet of a remorseless and self-aggrandizing hierarchy.

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Appeals Court: Prop 8 is Still Irrational

February 13, 2012 – 12:36 pm

If you’ve read any of my posts on previous same-sex marriage decisions — going all the way back to the 2003 ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Court — you know the basic legal landscape. All same-sex marriage decisions revolve around two questions: How fundamental a right is a same-sex couple’s right to marry? And how much reason does the state have to deny that right?

Most pro-SSM decisions emphasize the second question, claiming that bans on SSM are not rationally related to any legitimate government purpose. And so, implicitly, the court is saying that SSM bans come from the majority acting out its spite against an unpopular minority.

A federal appeals court took that course Tuesday in upholding a lower court’s decision to strike down California’s Proposition 8. By 2-1, the judges said that Prop 8 fails the rational-basis test, the lowest legal standard.

The ruling rips one-by-one through the rationales given for taking away same-sex couples’ right to marry and finds them without any support in fact or logic: Prop 8 can’t be about the state’s interest in providing the best setting for child-raising, because it doesn’t change any of California’s rules about child-raising. Plus

It is implausible to think that denying two men or two women the right to call themselves married could somehow bolster the stability of families headed by one man and one woman.

It can’t arise out of a general prudence in deciding the definition of marriage, because it locks in a definition without further study.

Such a permanent ban cannot be rationally related to an interest in proceeding with caution.

It can’t be about protecting religious institutions from anti-discrimination laws, because Prop 8 doesn’t change those laws.

To the extent that California’s anti-discrimination laws apply to various activities of religious organizations, their protections apply in the same way as before.

It can’t be justified by what children will be taught about homosexuality in public schools, because that also didn’t change, other than the usual way that instruction changes as the world changes.

To protest the teaching of these facts is little different from protesting their very existence. … The prospect of children learning about the laws of the State and society’s assessment of the legal rights of its members does not provide an independent reason for stripping members of a disfavored group of rights they presently enjoy.

With all proposed rationales dismissed, the remaining conclusion is:

Proposition 8 is a classification of gays and lesbians undertaken for its own sake. … Proposition 8 operates with no apparent purpose but to impose on gays and lesbians, through the public law, a majority’s private disapproval of them and their relationships by taking away from them the official designation of “marriage” with its societally recognized status.

The opinion of the dissenting judge, N. R. Smith, is in some ways more damaging to Prop 8 than the court’s majority opinion, because it shows just how far you have to go to find some rational basis for the law. Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen summarizes:

Thus, as his language grew more specious and abstract, the “rational basis” test became the “rational relation to some legitimate end” test, which became the “reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis” test, which became the “have arguable assumptions underlying its plausible rationales” test.

This damning-with-faint-praise opinion leaves the impression that Prop 8’s rationales were not crappy enough to throw out, but just barely. Dahlia Lithwick calls Judge Smith’s dissent: “the death rattle of a movement that has no legal argument or empirical evidence.”

From here the case probably goes to the Supreme Court, where eight votes seem locked in. Justice Kennedy will make the decision.

In general, given the perspective of more than eight years, the comment that ended my analysis of the 2003 Massachusetts case is holding up pretty well:

Personally, I expect the same-sex marriage issue to follow the same course as interracial marriage. After a few years of Chicken-Little panic, the vast majority of Americans will recognize that the sky has not fallen, and that the new rights of homosexuals have come at the expense of no one.

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Five Take-Aways From the Komen Fiasco

February 6, 2012 – 12:53 pm

Now that the dust from the Susan Komen/Planned Parenthood mess is starting to settle, it’s time to ask: What should we learn from all this?

Background. I’m sure many of you have already heard more about this story than you wanted to know, but it came out in (sometimes deceptive) dribs and drabs. So before we start drawing conclusions, let’s get our facts straight. (Feel free to skip ahead.)

The context for this week’s events is a long-term campaign to annihilate Planned Parenthood that has been fought at the federal and state government level, as well as in the board rooms of private organizations like Komen. (If you want an even longer context, the attack on Planned Parenthood is part of a defund-the-Left campaign that has already taken down ACORN and is working on the public employees unions and NPR.)

The Susan Komen for the Cure Foundation has been under pressure from anti-abortion* groups for years now, and it began crumbling well before this week. Last April, Komen hired Karen Handel as their VP for Public Policy. Handel was a Sarah-Palin-endorsed candidate for Governor of Georgia who pledged to defund Planned Parenthood if elected. Jezebel comments:

How curious! A person with what looks like a personal vendetta against Planned Parenthood joins the ranks of an organization that provides funding to Planned Parenthood, and soon, that organization “defunds” Planned Parenthood.

LifeNews.com claimed that Komen had also given in on another abortion-related issue: embryonic stem cells. But the press release they link to has since vanished from the Komen site and nobody is sure what’s going on.

Tuesday, Planned Parenthood announced that Komen had told it that it would not be eligible for future grants because a new rule prevented grants to organizations that are under local, state, or federal investigation. Planned Parenthood is being investigated by Rep. Cliff Stearns, but a congressional investigation doesn’t have to be based on anything more than a committee chair’s whim, and this one seems not to be.

Critics have since pointed to Komen’s continuing relationships with other investigated organizations, like Penn State, so this all has the appearance of an elaborate rationalization. Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported:

three sources with direct knowledge of the Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off Planned Parenthood.

The public backlash started immediately, and everyone agrees that Komen handled it badly. (I’m guessing they expected Planned Parenthood to slink away quietly rather than take the dispute public.) A communications specialist for nonprofits summed up: Komen had “accidentally rebranded” itself.

Komen for the Cure, it seems, is no longer a breast cancer charity, but a pro-life breast cancer charity.

Komen didn’t start getting its message out until late Wednesday, and it was garbled. Jay Rosen described Komen CEO and Founder Nancy Brinker’s interview with Andrea Mitchell on Thursday as “a train wreck”. Brinker didn’t say anything about investigations, but tried to turn attention to other policy changes that, once again, seemed to apply to no one other than Planned Parenthood.

Friday Brinker issued an apology to the public for “recent decisions” and said that “disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political”. Most people are taking that as capitulation. But it may not be. Maybe when new Planned Parenthood grant proposals come in, Komen will find new excuses to reject them. Handel is still on the job, after all.

OK, now some observations.

1. Be hopeful but not cocky. Twice in the last few weeks we’ve seen an outrageous attack get beaten back by public outrage. The corporatists had to retreat on SOPA and the theocrats on Planned Parenthood. Events like these are energizing, and it’s tempting to think that right-wing forces are on the run.

They’re not. The big media companies already have a new plan to control the Internet, and the campaign against Planned Parenthood will continue as well. When these forces operate in full public view and underestimate their opposition, they get beat. That’s encouraging, but you have to figure they’ll learn to be more careful.

2. The Christian Right continues to move towards apartheid. The whole premise of Komen is that “cure breast cancer” is such a simple and obviously good goal that we should all be able to unite around it, despite our other differences. The Christian Right is saying no to this. If Komen won’t define itself as an anti-abortion breast cancer charity, they won’t support it.

(Somebody is bound to comment that the Left is doing the same thing if Komen won’t fund Planned Parenthood. Not at all. If Komen had identified somebody else who would provide the same services better — no problem. Instead, Komen made a political decision to appease right-wingers and gave a series of bogus after-the-fact rationalizations. That’s what was outrageous.)

You can see the same thing happening all around us. At my local baseball stadium I have heard between-innings announcements for a Christian taxi service. God forbid a Muslim or an atheist should drive me somewhere.

3. There are other reasons not to like Komen. Komen had managed to identify itself as THE anti-breast-cancer charity, and no one wants to be pro-breast-cancer. So lots of people had been sitting on their criticism.

The Planned Parenthood mess gave them permission to come out of the closet and gave the general public permission to listen. These are the main points.

  • Less than half of Komen’s budget is spent on research, screening, or treatment. Overhead and marketing take up 22%, and education 36%. Of the education chunk, much is worthwhile, but a certain amount of marketing and overhead seems hidden there as well.
  • Komen is litigious. Komen spends almost $1 million a year making sure that no other anti-cancer charity uses its trademarked “for the cure” phrase. I don’t think anyone has totalled up what these suits cost the small charities Komen sues.
  • Corporations get a big marketing bang for a small charitable buck. Think Before You Pink asks some skeptical questions about those pink-ribbon products. BTW, the pink handgun looks like a hoax. But the KFC pink bucket is real.
  • Pinkwashing. Corporations whose products increase breast cancer risk can hide behind a pink ribbon. (BTW, anti-abortion groups try to turn this around by saying that abortion causes breast cancer. This is long-debunked nonsense repeated only by anti-science types like Rick Santorum.) Komen gets so much corporate cooperation precisely because it soft-pedals environmental causes and regulatory solutions, and instead focuses breast-cancer awareness on individual actions like mammograms and treatment. There’s a subtle victim-blaming vibe there. Pay no attention to that corporate carcinogen behind the curtain.

4. Charity has its limits. A common conservative/libertarian fantasy is that private charity can replace the functions of government. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all that good-deed-doing stuff could happen through voluntary generosity, with no taxes or audits or anything?

When you look at the big McCharities like United Way and a handful of others — a stratosphere Komen has recently entered — you see what’s wrong with that idea. All of them end up doing an enormous amount of marketing, image-building, and other rah-rah stuff to keep both themselves and their issues from slipping people’s minds. (My wife, a 15-year breast cancer survivor, hit her limit when football teams started wearing pink accessories that clash with their uniforms.)

The amount that shows up as overhead on a McCharity’s annual report is just a fraction of the true overhead. How much time and effort do participating corporations put into their United Way drives? How much money do individuals waste buying merchandise they don’t need and wouldn’t have bought without the charity tie-in? If you total up not just what the McCharity takes in, but what the donors and volunteers actually put out, you see that the true overhead is astronomical.

Mass-market private charity is a really, really inefficient way to do just about anything.

Like cure breast cancer. Almost every woman is at risk to some degree. Almost every man has a mother, wife, sister, daughter, or friend at risk. So curing breast cancer is in the general interest.

And breast cancer is not going away this year or next, and maybe not for a long time. So we may be facing decades of wide receivers wearing pink gloves just to keep our interest and awareness sufficiently high.

Imagine: Wouldn’t it be great if there were some way to decide once and for all that we as a people want to beat breast cancer? We wouldn’t have to stay perpetually amped-up about it, we could just commit to finding a cure and get on with our lives.

Amazingly, there is a way! We could elect representatives who could all meet somewhere and decide what each person’s fair share is. Then we could have that amount deducted from our paychecks automatically, without all the hoopla and overhead and waste.

Government — that’s what it’s called. Whenever we want to do something in the general interest and to keep doing it year after year, the right tool for the job is government.

5. Supporters of abortion rights need to take the initiative. All we accomplished with Komen this week was to preserve the status quo. The other side continues to pick the battlefields and hammer away. Sometimes we stop them and sometimes we don’t. That’s not recipe for victory.

Daily Kos’ Meteor Blades says “So, clearly, self-defense is crucial. But we need offense as well.” He then outlines steps to advance the family-planning* cause, including the repeal of TRAP laws, opening new women’s-health clinics, and ending government funding of abstinence-only sex education “which amounts, in many cases, to no education at all.”

Blades doesn’t go far enough. We also need to take the intellectual, moral, and religious initiative.

Here’s a place to start: The  anti-abortion movement’s most extreme positions (opposition to embryonic stem cell research and to post-conception forms of birth control like IUDs and the morning-after pill) follow from the belief that a one-celled organism, the newly fertilized ovum, has the full moral value of an infant.

Anti-abortion advocates usually get away with presenting this as a principled religious conviction, part of that old-time religion.

We need to point out loudly and often that in fact this is a nutty idea that has no historical, traditional, or scriptural basis. People don’t oppose abortion because they believe on religious principle that a zygote has the moral value of a child. Quite the opposite: This an ad hoc belief invented for the purpose of opposing abortion, and the faithful simply ignore many of its inconvenient consequences.

The Wikipedia article on ensoulment is worth reading in this regard. Aristotle, the Talmud, and all early Christian sources agreed that the soul entered the body well after conception — 40 days at the earliest. Nobody dreamed up ensoulment-at-conception until the Middle Ages, and even then the infallible popes went back and forth about it for centuries.

The very idea of a “moment” of ensoulment is one of those theological contrivances rejected by every folk culture that has ever existed, including ours. Intuitively, we all understand that the moral value of the fetus (like everything else about it) develops gradually, beginning somewhere around zero at conception and becoming immeasurable by the time of birth. In actual practice everyone — even a conservative Christian who “believes” in ensoulment-at-conception — understands that late miscarriages are more tragic than early miscarriages, and that the death of an infant is more tragic yet.

Consider, for example, that the majority of fertilized ova fail to implant in the uterus and abort spontaneously without the woman even being aware of her pregnancy. Anyone who honestly believed these were full-fledged human souls would regard failure-to-implant as the greatest health problem and greatest human tragedy of all time. But where is the religious monument to these billions of souls? Where is the big research program to do something about this holocaust?

Nowhere, because deep down no one really believes that a fertilized ovum has the moral value of a baby. The whole idea has been trumped up to justify opposition to abortion. It does not deserve the respect it is typically granted.

*I am sick of the jockeying over labels on both sides. Pro-life and pro-choice both sound good to focus groups, but they are neither precise nor accurate. So I’ll call you “pro-life” only if you have an across-the-board life agenda: not just anti-abortion, but anti-death-penalty, anti-war, pro-universal-healthcare, and maybe even vegetarian. If you’re just against abortion, I’ll call you “anti-abortion” or maybe “pro-fetus-rights”.

Similarly, I could imagine an across-the-board pro-choice agenda — not just abortion rights but drug legalization, anti-gun-control, right to die, open borders, and so on — but I don’t see many people pushing that either. So if you’re just in favor of a woman’s right to choose an abortion, I’ll describe your position as “abortion rights” or “pro-family-planning”.

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Where the Jobs Are and Why

January 30, 2012 – 1:41 pm

In the State of the Union, President Obama emphasized manufacturing, committing his administration to “bring jobs back home”. Perhaps coincidentally, the last two weeks have given us an amazing run of revealing articles about manufacturing: what gets made where and why, who gets a job making it, and how they are treated.

The New York Times focused two articles (Wednesday and January 21) on Apple’s manufacturing in China. This American Life centered an episode on Mike Daisey, whose recently-opened one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” includes much material from his interviews with the iPhone assembly workers in Shenzhen. The current issue of Atlantic includes “Making it in America“, an article that starts with two South Carolina factory workers and goes all the way up the chain to the global pressures on their CEO.

These articles became the raw material for insightful comment from Paul Krugman, the New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, Slate’s Matt Yglesias, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Alternet’s Robert Cruickshank, Foreign Policy’s Clyde Prestowitz,  and many others.

Background. Instead of trying to reproduce all those ideas, I’m going to assume that you’ve either picked up the buzz or are willing to chase some of the links I’ve provided. Doubtlessly you know the general picture: While America continues to create market-dominating companies like Apple or Google, the number of American jobs they provide doesn’t compare with market-dominating American companies of the past like General Electric or Ford.

The reason why is simple: While much of the design and management happens in America, most of the physical products are manufactured in low-wage economies like China. Those factories that remain in America are highly automated, so that our manufacturing employment plummets even as our manufacturing output continues to rise. America still makes a lot of stuff, it’s just not made by people.

The following graphs come by way of the bonddad blog:

Why? The most interesting fact to glean from the articles is that it’s not just the wages. Yes, workers in Shenzhen are cheap, but two other factors are also important.

First, what the NYT article calls “flexibility”. That’s a euphemism for domination. Chinese workers are completely under the thumb of employers like Foxconn, which assembles products for Apple and most of Apple’s competitors.

Almost every commenting article repeated the story of Foxconn workers being rousted out of their dorms in the middle of the night to make a last-minute change to the iPhone. Try to imagine doing that in an American factory.

“Flexibility” also isn’t inhibited by worker safety. If the factory managers come up with a new process, nobody has to analyze it or approve it. They just do it. If it later turns out that workers have been inhaling disabling neurotoxins — one of Mike Daisey’s examples — that’s a shame.

Second,

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

The overall result is that Apple gets exactly the product it wants faster — not just cheaper — than if it manufactured in America.

Everything we’ve been told is wrong. Again and again, I’ve read about “the death of distance”. It’s not supposed to matter where things are done now. But in fact it does. Once industries get clustered in a particular place, it’s not easy to move them.

And once they’ve moved away, it’s not easy to move them back. It’s not just the supply chain. Worker skill is a chicken-and-egg problem. No company is going to open a factory someplace where they can’t find the skilled workers they need, but no worker is going to get training on the off-chance that a factory will open someplace that doesn’t have any working factories now.

Free-market economists have encouraged us to look at every job in every factory as an individual issue. If Mexicans or Indonesians can do a job cheaper, move it there. We weren’t supposed to ask what all those individual decisions added up to. That would be “industrial policy“, which was supposed to be bad, because government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.

But the Chinese did worry about the big picture, and now they have all the manufacturing jobs. Prestowitz says:

Asia didn’t always have these supply chains. They were initially all in the United States. Asia got them because its governments and corporations worked hand in glove to get them. There is no reason why the United States government can’t work hand in glove with corporations to get at least some of them back. It’s not rocket science.

Ignorance is Bliss. Bliss has market value. The NYT and Mike Daisey have done a great job cataloging worker abuses in the Foxconn plants in Shenzhen. It’s obvious how to fix this: Consumers put pressure on Apple (and its rivals, who are no better); Apple puts pressure on Foxconn; and Foxconn changes how it treats its workers.

Why doesn’t that happen? Again, it’s not because there’s not enough money. The NYT says:

various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

Cruickshank (a self-confessed Apple fan) comments, “I would personally pay $65 more per iPhone if I knew it was going to American workers.”

Lots of people would, I imagine. But picture how that would work: Apple offers an alternative all-American iPhone or even a no-workers-abused Chinese iPhone, and sells it right next to the current iPhone for a bit more money.

Now everyone who buys the original feels like a scumbag. Worse, as you stand there dithering about whether workers’ rights or American jobs are worth $65 to you, you’re not having the retail experience the Apple Store is trying to create. The whole joy of Apple products is that they are magic. Picturing the real process that creates them breaks the spell.

Up and down the supply chain, everyone is happier not knowing the extent to which they benefit from the mistreatment of Chinese workers. The market — which just wants to make consumers happy — has been very efficient at providing that ignorance.

“Until now,” you might be thinking. Yes, the recent publicity has brought attention back to the responsibility we shoulder when we buy things: Everyone in the supply chain justifies their actions by claiming that they just want to please the consumer. So when you plunk down your Visa, you’re signing your name to the whole process. If enough of us now decide we want to deal with that responsibility, surely the market will provide some way for us to do it. Won’t it?

Here’s the problem: The market responds to consumers’ true desires, the ones that motivate our purchases, not the desires we claim to have or wish we had. And in our heart-of-hearts, don’t we really just want this responsibility to go away? Don’t we want the Apple Store to go back to being a high-tech Eden, where everything appears by magic?

If that’s what we really want, that’s what the market will provide. Some tiny improvements will happen in the factories, and each link of the chain will exaggerate that change, until the nerd at the Genius Bar can swear up-and-down that it’s all fine now. The workers in Shenzhen are all happy little Oompa-Loompas.

The mechanisms are already in place. Apple already has a shiny code of conduct for its suppliers. Foxconn already has a statement of workers’ rights that satisfies Apple. Supervisors on the factory floor already claim they adhere to that statement. And still workers are maimed or die or commit suicide. The NYT covers it:

“We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR — also known as Business for Social Responsibility — which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”

And like all global manufacturers, Apple is constantly squeezing its suppliers’ profit margins.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

How exactly is that going to stop?

Degrees of moral separation. Atlantic’s Making It In America by Adam Davidson starts by comparing Maddy and Luke, two workers making fuel injectors in a Standard Motor Parts factory in South Carolina. Both are dedicated and hard-working, but Luke is skilled and Maddy is not.

Luke’s job, the article claims, is relatively secure, but Maddy will be let go as soon as machinery costs drop far enough to make replacing her worthwhile. In the meantime, machine costs put a lid on her wages, and she has nowhere to go.

A decade ago, a smart, hard-working Level 1 might have persuaded management to provide on-the-job training in Level-2 skills. But these days, the gap between a Level 1 and a 2 is so wide that it doesn’t make financial sense for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a competing factory.

But Standard is profitable, so Davidson raises the same question Apple faces: Why couldn’t the company charge a little more or make a little less money and show some loyalty to its people and to America?

(NYT quotes an Apple executive saying: “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.” To which Foreign Policy’s Clyde Prestowitz replies: “Apple’s products still have a large U.S. government R&D content and I’ll bet that the guy who says Apple has no obligation to help Uncle Sam does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use supply chains that stretch through a number of countries such as China and Japan between which there are long standing and bitter animosities.”)

So Davidson talks to the guy he thinks could make that decision: Standard’s CEO Larry Sills, grandson of the founder.

It turns out that Sills doesn’t believe he has the power to do Maddy any favors. Sills sees himself as the slave of two masters: the consumer, who looks for price and quality, but doesn’t seem to know or care how the auto parts are made; and the stockholder, who likewise just wants earnings to rise and doesn’t seem to care how it happens.

Once again, we’re seeing one of the major structural problems of the modern economy: We all live many degrees of separation away from the moral consequences of our decisions.

If you had to go down to a Shenzhen-style sweatshop to buy your iPhone, or if owning mutual fund shares meant that you occasionally had to fire somebody like Maddy face-to-face, you might think twice about it. But instead you are wowed at the Apple Store and every month you get a nice clean IRA statement in the mail.

You’re happier that way, and the Powers That Be are happier. And that’s why nothing changes.

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