Mandela’s Memorial Was All About Us

How do you pitch a foreign funeral to a nation of Homer Simpsons?
Manufacture America-centered controversy.

Nelson Mandela’s public memorial service was held Tuesday in a vast stadium in Johannesburg. Leaders from all over the globe attended, and several of them spoke about Mandela, his significance in history, and how his life inspired people around the world.

The mood was generally upbeat, more like a New Orleans jazz funeral or an Irish wake than the somber kind of remembrance. But still you can imagine Homer Simpson pointing his remote at the TV and announcing his judgment: “BOR-ing.” A day devoted to some dead guy on the other side of the world and the stuff he did in some other century? Where’s the drama?

Khrushchev and Kennedy

So instead American news networks made the story all about us: The big news out of Johannesburg wasn’t anything about Mandela, it was President Obama shaking hands with Raul Castro.

To me, it looked like one of those awkward running-into-your-ex’s-new-boyfriend moments you might have at a wedding reception, and Obama handled it graciously. He’s shaking hands as he makes his way to the podium and suddenly there’s Castro, so Obama just keeps shaking hands like it’s no big deal.

Nice save, Mr. O.

Except — OMG!!!! — he’s shaking hands with Raul Castro! Rev up the outrage machine. It’s, like, Chamberlain shaking hands with Hitler or something!

Mao and Nixon

For the everything-Obama-does-is-an-outrage crowd, two bizarre ideas are at work: First, that Cuba’s government is something special among dictatorships, and second, that until now American presidents have maintained a hands-that-hold-whips-shall-never-hold-mine purity standard when it comes to tyrants.

The first point is best left to comedians like Jon Stewart:

[singing] Raul Castro is not Adolf Hitler. [/singing] … Raul Castro is not even Fidel. He’s like Cuba’s Jim Belusi. … And by the way, Cuba’s not the only country with a spotty record of imprisoning people in Cuba.

Second, not only is there a long history of American leaders meeting and greeting Communist dictators — Nixon and Mao, Kennedy and Khrushchev, and Nixon even gave Brezhnev a Lincoln Town Car — but we also have a long history of supporting some of the world’s most brutal dictators: Stalin was our ally in World War II, and who can forget such friends-of-America as the Shah of Iran, the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, General Pinochet in Chile, Saddam Hussein, or even the current regime in Turkmenistan?

So the only thing outrageous here is the outrage. When it comes to tyrants, America’s hands haven’t been clean for at least a century.

The other Obama-outrage from the funeral was this picture:

So here’s Obama and British Prime Minister Cameron taking a selfie with some red-hot blonde described by The Daily Mail as “flirty” and by the New York Post as a “Danish tart”. Fox News couldn’t stop chortling. The Post decided Obama-and-the-white-chick was a front-page scandal.

Who’s the mystery vixen? Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark, a country where neither blondes nor powerful women are so rare as to make headlines. The selfie is of three world leaders, not Obama and some blonde.

I’m not sure what’s worse: The racist where-the-white-women-at angle or the sexist who’s-that-slut angle. What’s a girl gotta do to get some respect?

On Michelle’s apparently disapproving expression, Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta offered a more mundane explanation:

[It’s] the look of a person with jetlag who flew halfway around the world overnight, spent four hours at a hotel early in the morning, and then had to go to a memorial service.”

Maybe that explains Laura Bush’s similarly sour expression when her man had a similarly animated conversation with an attractive female world leader, Jordan’s Queen Rania. (Oddly, that triangle drew virtually no international media attention.)

Salon’s Roxane Gay finds a race/gender issue in the media’s focus on and interpretation of that one image of Michelle (as opposed to others where she seems to be having a good time):

More than anything, the response to these latest images of Michelle Obama speaks volumes about the expectations placed on black women in the public eye and how a black women’s default emotional state is perceived as angry. The black woman is ever at the ready to aggressively defend her territory. She is making her disapproval known. She never gets to simply be.

Ted Cruz walked a fine line in Johannesburg. On the one hand, he wanted to appear statesmanlike on the world stage. But earlier in the week he got stung by his supporters when he tried to be gracious to Mandela on his Facebook page. So Cruz made his own Cuba moment Tuesday by walking out during Castro’s speech. Because that’s what the memorial services of great peacemakers are for: expressing your disapproval of the other mourners.

PolicyMic points out how differently the memorial might have been covered, even if you wanted an America-centric angle. The Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas all traveled together on Air Force One. Pictures suggest they got along and were even chummy. But again, where’s the drama in that? BOR-ing.

December 16, 2013 – 10:02 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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White Santa, White Jesus, White Christmas

Santa’s not alienating, but white supremacy is.

It all started Tuesday, when Slate’s Aisha Harris suggested replacing the fat-old-white-man version of Santa Claus with a penguin.

Why? Well, she found it confusing to grow up with a black Santa at home and a white Santa everywhere else. Her Dad’s ingenious explanation (that Santa magically changes race to match each household he visits) sounded phony.

I didn’t buy it. I remember feeling slightly ashamed that our black Santa wasn’t the “real thing.” … That this genial, jolly man can only be seen as white—and consequently, that a Santa of any other hue is merely a “joke” or a chance to trudge out racist stereotypes—helps perpetuate the whole “white-as-default” notion endemic to American culture

But since Santa is a cultural invention anyway

we can certainly change him however we’d like—and we have, many times over. … Isn’t it time that our image of Santa better serve all the children he delights each Christmas?

You may be charmed by this idea or just find it harmlessly goofy — unless you watch  a lot of Fox News. Then you’d realize that this change-Santa nonsense is a symptom of the political correctness and everything-is-up-for-grabs attitude that’s ruining America. Megyn Kelly laid it out:

For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.

And then she very sympathetically gave black people the bad news.

Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too. … He was a historical figure. That was a verifiable fact.

Forensic reconstruction of Saint Nicholas

These things are facts, people. In Fox Nation, they’re not up for discussion.

Historical Saint Nicholas. Monica Crowley, a member of Kelly’s all-white panel, elaborated:

Santa Claus is based on Saint Nicholas, who was an actual person, a Greek bishop, and was a white man. … You can’t take facts and then try to change them to try to fit some sort of a political agenda or a sensitivity agenda.

But on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, Harris pushed back:

Santa now looks nothing like that Santa [i.e. the historical Saint Nicholas]

So how white was Saint Nicholas, anyway? Kathleen Manning blogged for U.S. Catholic:

15th-century Saint Nicholas icon

In 2008, British anthropologists did a facial reconstruction of Saint Nicholas of Myra, based on his remains. The fourth-century Turkish bishop who signed the Nicene Creed looks less like Clement Clarke Moore’s description and more like the cabbie who drove you to the airport to catch your Christmas flight home.

And unlike Coca-Cola ads, religious icons often portray Saint Nicholas as a dark-skinned man whose race is hard to determine. He’s also skinny. And as I study those smaller panels on the pictured icon, I can’t find reindeer anywhere.

So if we want to stick to the historical facts, rather than “change them to try to fit some sort of a political agenda”, that’s what we get: a skinny, racially ambiguous Santa whose Turkish workshop is far from the land of reindeer.

If not reindeer …

Maybe he could drive a wagon instead of a sleigh, and borrow Thor’s flying goats to pull it.

Yeah, but Jesus was white. Wasn’t he? It depends on your definition of white. Jesus was a first-century Middle Eastern Jew. How white were they?

Probably not very. Religion News Service’s Jeffrey Weiss suggests Yasser Arafat or Osama bin Laden as comparable. Atlantic’s Jonathan Merritt says: “If he were taking the red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York today, Jesus might be profiled for additional security screening by TSA.”

Maybe. As a brownish, outspoken social activist from the Middle East with a Jerusalem police record of assault against money-lenders, I think he’d go straight to the no-fly list.

Would you sit next to this guy on an airplane?

What is “white” anyway? It’s easy to poke fun at people who believe their cultural happenstance represents eternal truth, the kind who will tell you “Where I come from people don’t have an accent.” But Chris Hayes got to the deeper issue:

Jesus wasn’t white because the category white didn’t exist when Jesus was around in the Roman Empire. That is a construction that was made later on for very intense social reasons.

The Romans had a word for white, albus, but it was a color, not a race. The same was probably true in Aramaic. First-century folks were Jews, Romans, Gauls, Egyptians, and so forth. Gauls tended towards blonde and some Egyptians could be very dark. But I believe first-century rabbis would have been quite perplexed by the idea that they belonged to a “white race”. True, a sub-Saharan African would have seemed like someone from another world, but so would a Pict from north of (what would soon become) Hadrian’s wall, and what the rabbis might have made of the central-Asian ancestors of the Rus is anybody’s guess.

Much later, Shakespeare pictured dark-skinned Othello as an outsider in Venice society, but no more so than the Jewish Shylock.

In Learning to be White, Thandeka traces the beginnings of the white-race concept to the late 1600s, when the founders of Virginia’s plantation system needed to discourage their English and Irish indentured servants from making common cause with their African and Native American slaves, as happened during Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. So they divided the underclass by giving a few small rights and privileges to the European servants.

A new multiclass “white race” would emerge from the Virginia laws as one not biologically engineered but socially constructed. … The laws and the racial contempt they generated would sever ties of previous mutual interest and goodwill between European and African servants and workers, provide the ruling elite with a “buffer” of poor whites between themselves and the slaves to keep blacks down, and prevent either group from separately challenging the class interests of the elite.

In the North in the 1800s, the construction of the “white race” became the key to socializing America’s non-English-speaking European immigrants. They arrived identifying themselves as Polish, Russian, Irish, Italian, or some other ethnicity with its own distinctive language, history, and practices. In America they were homogenized as “whites” and their native xenophobia channeled against Africans and other people of color.

So Hayes is absolutely correct. Jesus would have been puzzled by any Roman who welcomed him as a member of the gens alba. He was a Jew, not a Roman, and being “white” didn’t mean anything at all until many centuries later.

Who’s a racist? In a follow-up segment, Megyn Kelly realized she needed a black on the panel, so she invited frequent Fox News contributor Zerlina Maxwell. Maxwell more-or-less agreed with Harris, which led Kelly to challenge her:

Why is white skin alienating? And why is that not racist?

This is the color-blind, flat-playing-field view of race currently popular among white conservatives: Since white supremacy is built into the cultural infrastructure, I (as a white) can live without thinking about race. If non-whites try to make me think about race, well then, that’s them being racist.

I mean, Santa and Jesus and Batman and all the other cultural icons just are white, so I don’t have to think about their race at all. When I look at pictures of Santa, I don’t see white Santa, I just see Santa. If it bothers you that all the cultural icons are white … whatta you, racist or something? What’s wrong with being white?

It comes down to two very different views of what American culture is. Is it the culture of all the people who live here? Or is it a historically white culture that some non-whites have been allowed to join, on the condition that they accept it the way it is and change themselves rather than seek to change the culture? Post-Martin-Luther-King, the public position of white conservatives (never mind what they say behind closed doors) is to treat people of all races as honorary whites. Isn’t that good enough? Or are you saying there’s something wrong with being white?

So Megyn Kelly is perfectly content to let your black children imagine that her white Santa is bringing presents to your black home. Isn’t that good enough? Or are you hostile to Santa because he’s white? “And why is that not racist?”

Untwisting Kelly’s pretzel takes more time than TV’s sound-bite culture allows, so Maxwell just had to dodge the reverse-racism charge. You can’t have a discussion about the particulars until you challenge several background assumptions.

First, there is no flat playing field. The privilege of ignoring race in America belongs to whites. Non-whites are confronted with race every day, no matter how much they might want to ignore it. The let’s-just-ignore-race notion really means: Let’s ignore the white supremacy built into everything.

Second, focusing on the whiteness of just Santa (or any other individual icon) misses the point. Because there is nothing wrong with Santa being white in isolation. By changing Santa, Harris was addressing her sense of encirclement, of growing up in a culture where all the major icons are white, and blackness seems like an aberration, even when you see it in the mirror.

To make a gender analogy: There’s nothing wrong with Barack Obama being a man. What’s wrong is that the 44 presidents have all been men. If a girl examines that line of portraits and feels alienated from the presidency, she’s not being sexist; she’s recognizing her country’s built-in male supremacy.

Life in the Garden of Sweden

And finally, Santa and Jesus and all the other icons aren’t white because of historical facts. They became white through a long social process. Coca-Cola’s Santa is considerably whiter than Saint Nicholas. The portrait of Jesus on the wall of my Lutheran grade school was much whiter than any first-century Palestinian Jew. In White Like Me, Tim Wise recalls growing up with picture-books — I had them too — that presented a white Adam and Eve, who frolicked in what Wise now calls “the Garden of Sweden”.

To say that this process is now at an end, that whiteness is now baked into our cultural icons and can’t be changed, is to say that white supremacy is baked into American culture and can’t be changed.

That’s what’s alienating, Megyn Kelly. And no, feeling alienated by white supremacy is not racist.

December 16, 2013 – 8:55 am Categories: Articles | Comments (6)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I try not to write about the same hot-button issues everyone else does, but this week I couldn’t help myself. The whole Santa-and-Jesus-are-white thing was … well, I just couldn’t lay off of it. This week’s first featured article “White Santa, White Jesus, White Christmas” should be out shortly. I’ll try to cover the issue a little better than everyone else has.

The second featured article will be “Mandela’s Memorial Service Was All About Us”. American news outlets just couldn’t face a whole day of talking about some dead guy from the other side of the world, so instead they obsessed over the Obama-Castro handshake and a manufactured mini-drama in which the Obamas’ marriage was threatened by the prime minister of Denmark. That story would have been funny in The Onion, but not on the front page of The New York Post.

The rest of the week left the weekly summary a lot to talk about. I was debating how the Sift should mark the anniversary of Sandy Hook when somebody else made the decision for me: Let’s have another school shooting! A novelist couldn’t have written a more appropriate conclusion to a year that started with the country determined to do something about guns, and ended with more laws loosened than tightened.

The other stories of the week: The debate over whether Pope Francis or Edward Snowden should have been Time’s Person of the Year; the House came to a bipartisan budget deal that is not doomed in the Senate (with Republicans saying lots of juicy, nasty things about each other); Oklahoma learned the downside of allowing religious monuments at the state capitol; and NBC News bemoaned an international study that ranked American teens “21th” in science. (If not for the fact that we were also 26th in math, somebody at NBC might have known how ordinal numbers work.)

And we’ll end with a video you may have seen already, in which WestJet made a Christmas miracle for the passengers of one lucky flight.

December 16, 2013 – 7:35 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Basic Rights

Everyone has the right to have access to ­health care services, including reproductive health care.

— the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of South Africa

This week’s featured posts: “Rooting for Your Country to Fail is Unpatriotic” and “The Procrustean Sainthood of Nelson Mandela“.

This week everybody was talking about Nelson Mandela

Mandela died Thursday at the age of 95.

I discuss our tendency to let our pre-conceptions about sainthood overwhelm the actual lives of the people we want to canonize in “The Procrustean Sainthood of Nelson Mandela“.

and improvements in Healthcare.gov

29,000 people signed up for ObamaCare last Sunday and Monday, the first two days after the administration’s self-imposed deadline for getting the web site fixed. That’s more than signed up during the entire month of October. The best evidence we have about how well the ObamaCare web site is performing now is that Republicans are shifting to other attacks.

The latest lie about ObamaCare is that 80-100 million people who get their insurance through their jobs will have their plans “cancelled”. Ezra Klein points out that this is only true if you stretch “cancelled” to mean “changed in any way at all”, including the ways your plan already changes from year to year without you noticing.

Another new lie is that ObamaCare has expanded access to abortion coverage for Congress and its staff. ThinkProgress explains.

CNN explains what most news stories about Medicaid expansion miss: States (like mine) that refuse the expansion aren’t just opting for the pre-ObamaCare status quo. The Affordable Care Act lowered the federal subsidy to hospitals that treat uninsured people who can’t pay, because there weren’t supposed to be so many uninsured people who can’t pay. But conservatives on the Supreme Court allowed conservatives in state government to opt out of Medicaid expansion. And the result is that hospitals are closing.

You could imagine a sane Congress working some kind of a fix to keep those hospitals afloat. That would benefit red states, so it could be lumped together with some fixes that Democrats want, and everybody would be better off. But the Republican majority in the House refuses any fixes that improve ObamaCare. They’ll only back poison pills that sabotage the system or outright repeals. Improvements? No. Erick Erickson says it outright:

The website they can fix. We must deny them the opportunity to fix the law itself. Let the American people see big government in all its glory. Then offer a repeal.

This kind of sabotage is what I’m talking about in “Rooting for Your Country to Fail is Unpatriotic“.

and inequality

President Obama gave a speech on “economic mobility” Wednesday. In general it was good a good diagnosis: Over the last several decades, economic inequality is up, economic mobility is down, and this not only makes our individual households insecure, it makes our economy more vulnerable to recessions.

I wish he would say more about one structural cause of the problem: lax enforcement of antitrust laws and the resulting monopolistic bottlenecks in the economy, which I talked about here.

and the War of Christmas

Every year, the Christmas Empire expands. The once-independent celebration of Thanksgiving has become Christmas’ puppet holiday, Black Friday Eve. Only the popular Halloween prevents Christmas from rolling all the way to the Fourth of July. (Columbus Day? Labor Day? They’ll fall like dominoes if the Halloween Line is ever breached.)

And yet somehow, the Christmas propaganda machine always manages to portray the aggressor as the victim. There is a War ON Christmas. Christmas was just standing there minding its own business when people attacked it for no reason with their battle cry of “Happy Holidays”. Without constant vigilance, Santa and his mighty elves will be stabbed in the back by Jews and atheists, and Christmas will be lost.

Jon Stewart calls out this year’s propaganda: “How can I enjoy my Christmas, when I know that somewhere a little Jewish boy isn’t being forced to sing ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’?”

and bringing automation to your doorstep

Amazon says it’s working on drone delivery copters. (And Rock City Times, “Arkansas’ 2nd most unreliable news source”, claims Walmart is installing surface-to-air missiles at its stores.) Google might “have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package”.

I am reminded of a possibly apocryphal conversation between Henry Ford II and union president Walter Reuther as they toured a new Ford factory with advanced-for-the-times automation. “How are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?” Ford gibed. And Reuther parried: “How are you going to get them to buy your cars?”

Maybe Amazon and Google should start working on an automated consumer.

and you also might be interested in …

It’s time for your annual dose of intellectual humility: The New York Times has put out its “100 Notable Books of 2013” list. I confess to having read exactly zero of them, though one is sitting on my bookshelf and I was already thinking about reading a handful of the others. (A few will have to wait: The publication of Thomas Pynchon’s The Bleeding Edge reminded me that I still haven’t finished Mason and Dixon. And Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep is a sequel to The Shining, which maybe I really should look at.)

Slate’s “The Overlooked Books of 2013” list — another zero for me — is somewhat less intimidating, both because it’s shorter and because the title suggests that other intelligent people might have missed these books too.

I just want to say that I am creeped out by how popular the Confederate cause still is in parts of the South. In Florida, there’s currently a push to put up a monument to the Union soldiers who died at the Battle of Olustee, partially balancing the three existing monuments to the Confederate soldiers. You might think this would be uncontroversial, but no, it is.

So the soldiers at Olustee who died fighting for the United States of America and against slavery should go unremembered. That’s seriously the position people are taking.

The NYT reports that big oil companies are starting to plan around the assumption that at some point there will be a price on carbon, either through a direct carbon tax or some kind of cap-and-trade system. Exxon-Mobil, for example, is shifting to be more a natural-gas company. (They’ve also stopped being the deep pockets behind climate-change denying pseudo-science. These days the Koch brothers fill that role.)

This follows reports that insurance companies are adjusting their risk models to allow for the effects of global warming. As one industry think-tank put it:

In the non-stationary environment caused by ocean warming, traditional approaches, which are solely based on analyzing historical data, increasingly fail to estimate today’s hazard probabilities. A paradigm shift from historic to predictive risk assessment methods is necessary.

The NYT comments:

Both supporters and opponents of action to fight global warming say the development is significant because businesses that chart a financial course to make money in a carbon-constrained future could be more inclined to support policies that address climate change.

Or at least they might be less inclined to throw their considerable weight behind political monkey-wrenching.

Andy Borowitz reports that the Hubble telescope has stopped looking out into space and is instead taking selfies to post on Instagram.

A mis-worded Republican tweet about Rosa Parks “role in ending racism” led to the hashtag #RacismEndedWhen. Some of the more amusing tweets are “#RacismEndedWhen The Jeffersons moved on up.” and “#racismendedwhen the iphone was available in both black and white.”

and for Advent, let’s end with a nativity scene

How minimal can you go and still have a nativity? This color nativity might be the limit. (Hat tip to whyismarko’s “the 50 worst and weirdest nativity sets“.)

December 9, 2013 – 1:19 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Rooting for Your Country to Fail is Unpatriotic

America has decided to implement ObamaCare. Are you with your country or against it?

In America, we argue about everything. Just because the Leader proposes something, we don’t all have to get in line behind it.

We argue about whether to go to war in places like Syria, Libya, or Iraq. We argue about taxes. We argue about how much money our government should spend and what it should be spent on. We argue about which drugs and medical procedures should be legal.

We argue; it’s what we do. If you didn’t argue for your beliefs, if you just knuckled under as soon as the Powers That Be made their will known, you wouldn’t be a real American.

But we also come to decisions. We have a Congress that is empowered to pass laws. We have a president who is obliged to either veto those laws or enforce them. We have courts you can appeal to if you think those laws exceed the powers the Constitution delegates to the federal government.

In short, there are lots and lots of ways you can register your objection to a proposed public policy. Our Constitution creates many pressure points where the flow of an idea into law can be blocked.

But we do eventually make decisions.

Even after a decision is made, you can still argue that it was wrong. You can argue that we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq. You can argue that we shouldn’t have bailed out General Motors or Bank of America. You can argue that the CIA shouldn’t be launching drone attacks into countries we aren’t at war with or that the NSA shouldn’t be tracking your cell phone.

That’s not just a technicality of freedom of speech. You can make those arguments as a patriotic American, because the country has a process for reversing course. If you can convince enough people agree with you, maybe the power of public opinion will change the minds of our office-holders. And if not, elections can turn those offices over to new office-holders who can make new policies and pass new laws.

That’s not working against America, it’s part of how America works.

But there’s a line between legitimate partisanship and lack of patriotism, and this is where it runs: After a decision is made, after it is upheld as constitutional, after America has decided to do something, you don’t root for your country to fail — and you certainly don’t take action to make your country fail.

That’s unpatriotic.

Democrats respected that line when a Republican administration did something we thought was wrong: invading Iraq. We never stopped arguing against it. We never stopped trying to elect people who would get us out Iraq. And eventually we succeeded. The fighting in Iraq continues, but American troops are out of it.

You know what we didn’t do? We didn’t try to sabotage the war effort. Democratic leaders weren’t out there publicly rooting for failure. We didn’t aid the Iraqi resistance or gloat over defeats. And we certainly didn’t cheer when American troops came home in body bags. If a stray voice on a blog or in a public forum started rooting for defeat or gloating over American corpses, we jumped all over him. No external force had to police us on that; we policed ourselves.

We were Americans. We opposed what our government was doing in Iraq, but we stayed patriotic.

But on ObamaCare, Republicans have crossed that line between patriotic and unpatriotic. Let’s review a few of the ways.

McConnell and the NFL. In June, Republican Senate Leaders Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn sent a letter to the National Football League, warning it not to cooperate in efforts to publicize the law and tell the public how to get the benefits it offers. (They were successful; the NFL did not cooperate.)

This is unprecedented. Private organizations, including sports leagues, frequently take part in public information programs. When Massachusetts passed RomneyCare, the Boston Red Sox helped publicize it. Private companies like CVS, Shaw’s supermarkets, and H&R Block pitched in. This wasn’t controversial, because it wasn’t taking a position on a proposal, it was educating the public about the law.

The Bush administration organized a similar public-information campaign to introduce the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Democrats had opposed the bill in Congress (because it was written to benefit drug companies more than seniors), and we objected to the tactics used to pass the bill. But Democrats did not interfere with educating the public about how to get the new law’s benefits.

McConnell’s logic is revealing. The NFL should refuse to participate because ObamaCare “is one of the most divisive and polarizing political issues of the day.” Actually, no, it had been a political issue, but it was now a law. McConnell admitted as much, but discounted that fact because “this law was enacted … on a strictly partisan basis”. In other words, the constitutional process is insufficient as long as Republicans disapprove.

The Koch Brothers’ creepy Uncle Sam. The Koch brothers have funneled millions of dollars into ads that aim to sabotage ObamaCare by getting young people not to sign up. Not only are these ads misleading — amounting to an anti-public-education campaign against the law — they also turn a symbol of America, Uncle Sam, into something sinister and threatening.

This is well within the Kochs’ legal freedom of speech — just as it would have been within the freedom of speech of anti–Iraq-War billionaires to run creepy and misleading ads telling young Americans not to sign up for the military. (No such ads ran.) But it is similarly unpatriotic.

The fake Cover California web site. Republicans around the country crowed over the problems of the HealthCare.gov web site. Crowing over your country’s failures is unseemly enough, but California Republicans took it one step further: They set up a fake web site to actively confuse Californians looking for health insurance.

California is one of the states that set up its own ObamaCare exchange with its own web site, Covered California. The state web site was working much better than the national one, so naturally something had to be done to monkey-wrench it. Republicans put up their own fake site, Covering Health Care California, where you can’t sign up for health insurance, but you can access anti-ObamaCare propaganda and misinformation. Republican state representatives then distributed a mailer publicizing the bogus web site.

This is not normal. You want to argue that ObamaCare is a mistake and should be repealed? Fine. You want to run on a repeal platform? Fine.

But America has made a decision to do something about its 50 million uninsured. That decision, made through our constitutional process, is to implement ObamaCare. When you take action to screw that implementation up, you are working against your country.

It’s that simple.

December 9, 2013 – 11:13 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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The Procrustean Sainthood of Nelson Mandela

A strange thing happens when a political leader ascends to secular sainthood, as Nelson Mandela did in his old age and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy did after their assassinations: The popular notion of sainthood starts to overwhelm their personal reputations. Whatever they stood for in their active careers, as saints they represent whatever saints represent. Saints speak divine truth; so whatever you think the divine truth is, that’s what you’ll imagine the saint said.

So, for example, one the most widely recognized Mandela quotes — “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” — is something he didn’t say at all. But it sounds very generically saintlike, doesn’t it? That’s the kind of thing God should be trying to tell us, so it just stands to reason He would have said it through Nelson Mandela.

Except He didn’t.

Partisanship. The archetypal Saint is not divisive or partisan, so anything a particular saint stood for that isn’t universally accepted needs to be swept under the rug. So Martin Luther King is remembered for 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 not for the more radical statements he made with some regularity, like:

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.

and:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

and especially not something really divisive, like:

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

Quotes like that put King on one side and not the other. If we remembered King that way, only liberals could invoke his name, and conservatives would be stuck with the view of King they held when he was alive: that he was a dangerous left-wing radical. What kind of saint is that?

Ditto JFK. Because the memory of his real life has been overwhelmed by his post-assassination sainthood, he can be claimed by conservatives. Forget that the Great Society programs conservatives love to hate were proposals Kennedy couldn’t get Congress to pass (but that LBJ could after Kennedy’s death). He’s a saint, so he has to belong to everybody, no matter what he actually stood for.

Mandela’s real claim to sainthood. Nelson Mandela deserves our admiration for three simple reasons:

  • He was on the right side of history. In retrospect, it is clear to almost everyone that apartheid was wrong, just as it is clear that slavery was wrong and Jim Crow was wrong. (In their day, though, all these points were hotly debated. Those American conservatives who didn’t actively support apartheid usually held that it wasn’t our problem and viewed the South African government as our ally in the Cold War.) Mandela is the historical symbol of the battle against apartheid. No doubt various people did brave and noble things for apartheid at one time or another, but those people were on the wrong side of history so they will never be saints, just as Jefferson Davis is not seen as the equal of Abraham Lincoln.
  • He didn’t give up, no matter what they did to him. He approached his trial with an attitude he later described like this: “I felt we were likely to hang no matter what we said, so we might as well say what we truly believed.” Fearing Mandela’s martyrdom, the South African government did not hang him, but 27 years in prison didn’t break him. When the government gave in to the pressure to release him, he went back to leading the same movement he’d led when they arrested him.
  • When the pendulum swung his way, he used his power to seek peace rather than vengeance. One of the saintlike things Mandela really did say was: “Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.” Post-apartheid South Africa opted for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission focused on finding and documenting the truth about the abuses of the apartheid government, rather than a set of show trials to settle scores.

So my point isn’t that he doesn’t deserve that level of admiration he is receiving. Rather, he deserves to be admired as the person he really was, not as some generic nice guy who was really brave and stuff.

The conservative attempt to claim Mandela. Basically, the logic goes like this: Mandela fought for freedom for his people. We have definitions of the words freedom and people that makes us freedom-fighters too. (We mean the people who own stuff, and their freedom to keep it, no matter how many hungry people have their noses pressed against the window. This definition may not look terribly different from the kind of freedom the apartheid regime recognized, but let’s not sweat the details.) So Mandela is one of us.

The dumbest and most outrageous invocation of Mandela this week came from Rick Santorum:

Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that’s the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed…and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that.

So let’s completely forget Mandela’s real beliefs about health care, as expressed in section 27.1.a of the Bill of Rights in the South African constitution he campaigned for:

Everyone has the right to have access to ­health care services, including reproductive health care

In other words: Mandela’s beliefs about health care were the exact opposite of the position Santorum is invoking Mandela’s name to support.

What Mandela was. Nelson Mandela was a democratic socialist. In other words, he believed in the right of the people, through democratic elections and representative government, to correct the injustices of the existing property system and to regulate the workings of the market to achieve a more equitable outcome. At his trial, he said:

I am an admirer of such a [parliamentary] system. … [I]n my search for a political formula, I should be absolutely impartial and objective. I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than that of socialism.

When governments thwart lawful democratic methods for achieving justice, Mandela believed in breaking the law, even violently if necessary. At his trial he said:

We felt that without sabotage there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the Government. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and when the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

He also was against racism, whether it was white-over-black or black-over-white.

[W]e want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy. But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. Political division, based on color, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one color group by another.

There’s a lot to admire here, but it is a particular point of view. It doesn’t capture all the wisdom and virtue that is contained in any point of view.

Mourning admirable people you disagree with. Death is a time to let by-gones be by-gones. The deceased can’t hurt you any more, so there’s no need to tear him down. His allies and admirers are sad, so it’s gracious not to salt their wounds*

But while there’s no need to dwell on past disagreements or re-fight old battles, it’s also gracious to let the deceased be the person he was, and let his reputation accrue to the side that he actually belonged to.

Nelson Mandela was a real person who lived and has now died. He did some admirable things and (in regard to the main issue of his career, the fight against apartheid) came out on the right side of the history. He had particular opinions and said some wise things.

But there is no need to recast him a generic saint who was all things to all people and a source of all wisdom. We respect him best by letting him be in death what he was in life.

*Ted Cruz, to his credit, took the high road in a Facebook post that praised Mandela without claiming him for the Tea Party. (Cruz’s followers were incensed.)

December 9, 2013 – 9:08 am Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s Sift will have two featured articles. The first one, “The Procrustean Sainthood of Nelson Mandela”, should be ready to post within the next hour or so. In that article, I use Mandela as an example of a phenomenon you can also see in Martin Luther King: We talk about great leaders “ascending” to a kind of secular sainthood. But often what happens is that the Saint archetype descends and wipes out any part of the a person’s reputation that doesn’t fit. In the public mind, the new saint becomes a generic wise man and nice guy, whose mantle can be claimed by anyone, including the people who fought against him in life. I argue instead for admiring Mandela as the person he was, rather than using his name to cover whatever each of us happens to think is good.

The second I hope to post around 10 or 11 Eastern time. It will be called “Rooting for Your Country to Fail is Unpatriotic”. In it, I call out the unpatriotic tactics conservatives are using to sabotage ObamaCare. There’s nothing wrong with opposing something the president and his party wants to do, and even trying to get it repealed via the usual legislative process. (I, for example, opposed the Iraq War and consistently voted for candidates who promised to end it.) But it’s a different thing entirely to work against a project that your country has taken on and try to make it fail. (I did not help the Iraqi resistance, interfere with the American war effort, or crow over the corpses of our troops. That would have been unpatriotic.)

The efforts Republicans are making to prevent Americans from learning about their rights under the law and to actively confuse Americans that the law could help have crossed that line. They aren’t just partisan, they’re unpatriotic. That needs to be said.

In the weekly summary, I’ll also discuss the improvements in HealthCare.gov, President Obama’s inequality speech, Christmas’ war of aggression against our other holidays, and a few other things, ending with the most minimal nativity scene ever.

December 9, 2013 – 8:02 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Rulers and Servants

Money must serve, not rule!

— Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013)

The Distress of the Privileged got its 300,000th page view on Saturday. If you liked that post, check out my recent article “Political Empathy” in UU World. It isn’t exactly a sequel, but builds on some of the same ideas.

This week everybody was talking about Pope Francis

which I discuss in detail in “What to Make of Pope Francis?”

and neocons were wailing about not going to war with Iran

For about a decade, it’s been an article of faith among neocons that war with Iran is inevitable: The Iranian leadership is insane, you can’t negotiate with them, all they understand is force, and so on. Sooner or later they’re going to build an atomic bomb, so we’d better attack sooner rather than later. As recently as a week ago, John Bolton told us, “an Israeli military strike is the only way to avoid Tehran’s otherwise inevitable march to nuclear weapons.”

By and large, the people saying this are the same ones who sold us the Iraq War — Saddam was likewise insane and building nuclear weapons, we’d be welcomed as liberators and all that. So it’s a continuing mystery why they get major-media platforms from which to make “expert” predictions that never pan out in reality.

The recent interim nuclear deal President Obama worked out with Iran creates a real possibility that sane Americans might get what we want — Iran without nuclear weapons well into the future — without blowing up anything or killing anybody. This comes on the heels of a deal to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons, again without firing a shot. (Neocon Brett Stephens described this as “the administration … worming its way out of its own threat to use force to punish Syria’s Bashar Assad.”)

If that possibility becomes real, then the whole neocon worldview collapses, as it should have years ago, when it became clear that everything they had predicted about the Iraq War was false.

The result has been a lot of, well, squealing like stuck pigs. Neocons used their inexplicable media power not to dissect the agreement and find its flaws, but to shout “Munich!” and “Worse than Munich!” at the top of their lungs. I agree with Daniel Drezner’s assessment:

the Munich analogy has been degraded to the point where #worsethanMunich deserves it’s own Alanis Morisette song that permanently devalues the term.

Reading these articles will teach you virtually nothing about the content of the agreement or how it might yet go wrong. Instead, you’ll get a lot of polemic, a lot of bad historical analogies, and more in the endless neocon series of scary-but-divorced-from-reality predictions.

and everybody wondered whether healthcare.gov is fixed yet

The White House says it will work for more than 80% of users, that it can handle 800,000 users a day, and that it will continue to improve.

The important thing, though, is the back end: Does the data you enter get delivered accurately to the appropriate insurance company, who can then cover you? It’s going to be a while before we can assess that. Ezra Klein (who has been following this more closely than just about anybody) comments:

So there remain reason for concern. But here’s what’s indisputable: HealthCare.gov is improving, and fast. Or, to put it differently, HealthCare.gov will be fixed. In fact, for most people, it is probably fixed now, or will be fixed quite soon.

And if you’re wondering how the government is going to convince 20-somethings to sign up for ObamaCare, it isn’t. Their moms are going to do it.

and “abolition porn”

It’s tough to get people’s attention when, like John Derbyshire, you’ve been booted out of the gated community of respectable right-wing commentators for being too racist. Yeah, you can still write for Taki’s Magazine or VDare, but who reads those anyway?

Never fear, the true scum can always rise to the top: Derbyshire started his November 20 column talking about “12 Years a Slave” (which he admits he hasn’t seen), labeling it “abolition porn” and going on to argue that slavery wasn’t really as bad as all that.

Bang! He’s back on the national radar. ThinkProgress, Alternet, Rightwing Watch … nobody on the Left could resist such artful trolling. Congratulations, John. You made us look.

and you also might be interested in …

Salon’s Sean McElwee summarizes the reasons to believe that growing inequality comes from changes in political power, not changes in technology.

OK, it’s the holidays. You eat, you get depressed about gaining weight and sitting in front of the TV, so rather than go jogging you think: Why bother? I can’t possibly run far enough to burn off that second piece of pecan pie.

New research explains why you should bother. Exercise doesn’t just burn calories, it changes the way your body operates. A mere seven-day experiment showed a significant difference between over-eating-and-sedentary young men who did short-but-vigorous daily exercise and those who didn’t.

the volunteers who had exercised once a day, despite comparable energy surpluses, were not similarly afflicted. Their blood sugar control remained robust, and their fat cells exhibited far fewer of the potentially undesirable alterations in gene expression than among the sedentary men.

As the Hobby Lobby case moves to the Supreme Court, I appreciate Annalee Flower Horne‘s Quaker perspective on giving people “conscience exemptions” from following the laws that apply to everyone else.

Many Quakers are pacifists, so they object to being drafted into combat roles or even (for a smaller number of them) paying taxes that fund wars. They deal with this moral conflict by agreeing to alternative non-combat service or “by making sure they don’t make enough money to incur tax liability.” In other words, they recognize that conscience has a price, and they willing pay that price.

Now along comes Hobby Lobby, demanding a consequence-free exemption to paying for birth control on the grounds that it violates their conscience. …

If the Green family’s conscience really forbids them from meeting their legal obligations under the Affordable Care Act, then they have the option to arrange their lives so as not to incur those obligations. They can choose not to run a two billion dollar corporation.

But if they’re not willing to make those sacrifices–if their ‘conscience’ only compels them so far as they can follow it for free–then they are not conscientious objectors.

And they and their fake conscience objection can get the hell off my lawn.

I gave my opinion on this subject in July: “Religious Freedom” means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination.

One more Annalee line worth quoting:

I won’t even ask which version of the bible they’re reading where Matthew 25.36 reads “I was sick and you sued not to cover my medical care.”

Polling three years before a presidential election is mostly about name recognition. So sure, VP Biden is the Democratic front-runner if Hillary Clinton decides not to run.

The most sinister aspect of NSA spying isn’t the crimes they might find, it’s the legal-but-embarrassing stuff that they can use to intimidate or discredit people they don’t like.

December 2, 2013 – 1:08 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

What to Make of Pope Francis?

Is Pope Francis’ denunciation of “unfettered capitalism” new? or long-standing Catholic doctrine most Americans have ignored and forgotten? Either way, does it matter?

The Catholic Church has always been torn: Is it the church of Jesus, who told a rich man, “Go, sell all that you own and give to the poor”? Or is it the church of the Emperor Constantine, who put the Rome in Roman Catholicism? Is it the church of Saint Francis or of the Borgia popes? Of liberation theology or of Franco’s fascist collaborators?

The church in recent American politics. In recent years the public face of the American church has been turned primarily towards sexual issues: abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. And so the bishops have become allies of the Republican Party; the American politician most publicly identified as Catholic has been Rick Santorum. American cardinals have denied communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians like John Kerry and Kathleen Sebelius, but when a Catholic conservative like Paul Ryan proposes slashing programs that help the poor, a letter of protest is deemed sufficient. (Cardinal Dolan, then president of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, subsequently described Ryan as “a great public servant”.)

On ObamaCare, the American bishops have manufactured great outrage against the fairly minor point* of the contraception mandate, while saying relatively little about Medicaid expansion, which will provide health insurance to millions of the working poor.

Liberal Catholic tradition. Unknown to much of the American public, though, the Catholic Church has a long history of liberal economic positions, going back at least to the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII.

I encountered this tradition myself in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II, when I went back and read his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens. In that encyclical, the Pope re-examined the relationship between capital and labor, and rejected a point of view he called economism (that workers are just another factor of production, like tools or raw materials, rather than divinely created beings with souls), which he saw underlying both capitalism and communism. He also assigned a secondary and functional role to the institution of private property: If a system of private property leads to a better society, fine, but it’s not an end in itself.

So (unlike Rush Limbaugh) I was not shocked this week when I read headlines like Pope Francis attacks ‘tyranny’ of unfettered capitalism, ‘idolatory of money’. Is this actually something new, I wondered, or does it just look new from within the sex-obsessed bubble constructed by the American bishops and their Republican allies?

Symbols and gestures. Pope Francis made a strong first impression on the world when he rejected many of the regal trappings of the papacy and chose the name Francis, which harkens back to the voluntary poverty and simplicity of Saint Francis of Assisi.

He then made a series of conciliatory statements. About gays:

When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized. The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem … they’re our brothers.

And atheists:

We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

Where Pope Benedict had enraged Muslims, Francis reached out them, sending a personal message to a leading imam in Cairo, calling for “understanding among Christians and Muslims in the world, to build peace and justice.”

And running through all of his statements was an awareness of the poor, those who have been cut off from the abundant produce of the planet God created to sustain all people.

So far, so good. But would he actually change anything?

Evangelii Gaudium. A week ago yesterday, the Vatican published an “apostolic exhortation” from Pope Francis. Apostolic exhortations are what the name implies: They’re meant to nudge people into action, not announce new doctrine.

Evangelii Gaudium (“the joy of the gospel”) is no different. Its purpose is to “encourage and guide the whole Church in a new phase of evangelization, one marked by enthusiasm and vitality”. Most of the text has nothing to do with politics or economics; it ranges through subjects as diverse as how the faithful should motivate themselves and advice to priests on preparing good homilies.

[In a couple of subjects — abortion and women priests — he announces that there will be no new doctrine, though he does make this interesting and enigmatic statement:

The reservation of the priesthood to males … is not a question open to discussion, but it can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general.

Time will tell whether that is a fig leaf for continued patriarchy or an indication that women could come to have more power in the Church, even if they aren’t serving mass.]

But a document encouraging Catholics to make their faith felt in the world has to say something about what, specifically, the world should be made to feel. And here he did not focus on sexual issues, but on economic ones.

Each individual Christian and every community is called to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully a part of society.

Each individual and every community. Not “the poor — that’s somebody else’s gig — I’m fighting against same-sex marriage”.

Catholic economics. Consistently through the years, Catholic economics has revolved around two ideas:

  • God created the world for everybody. Pope Francis is not staking out any new territory when he writes: “we must never forget that the planet belongs to all mankind and is meant for all mankind; the mere fact that some people are born in places with fewer resources or less development does not justify the fact that they are living with less dignity.”
  • God did not institute any particular economic system. Economic systems are human constructions, so they are not proper objects of veneration. God is not a capitalist, a communist, or anything else. So economic arrangements have to be justified in practical terms, by their results.

So even something as basic as private property or the freedom to buy and sell has only a functional justification. Protecting property or upholding economic freedom has no value in itself. Rather

The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good. … Sadly, even human rights can be used as a justification for an inordinate defense of individual rights or the rights of the richer peoples.

This position puts the Church fundamentally at odds with Rand-style (or Ryan-style) libertarianism, in which property rights and economic freedom are moral values, not just useful tricks for increasing production. In Randism, the produce of the world rightfully belongs to the people who own the world; if those who own nothing are to survive, they must appeal to the charity of the owners. The owners are the Makers, the poor are the Takers.

Francis observes this position with horror:

We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

He calls on Catholics not just to give alms, but

to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor … We are not simply talking about ensuring nourishment or a “dignified sustenance” for all people, but also their “general temporal welfare and prosperity”. This means education, access to health care, and above all employment, for it is through free, creative, participatory and mutually supportive labour that human beings express and enhance the dignity of their lives. A just wage enables them to have adequate access to all the other goods which are destined for our common use. [quotes from Pope John XXIII]

This can’t happen without political action that leads to structural change. The market won’t do it.

We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.

A mind that worships the Market can only see God as dangerous.

[E]thics leads to a God who calls for a committed response which is outside of the categories of the marketplace. When these latter are absolutized, God can only be seen as uncontrollable, unmanageable, even dangerous, since he calls human beings to their full realization and to freedom from all forms of enslavement.

And a society that writes off the poor can never know peace or be safe from revolution.

Peace in society cannot be understood as pacification or the mere absence of violence resulting from the domination of one part of society over others. … When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear.

Is this new? No, this is Catholic economics as it has stood for more than a century, with roots going back even further. What’s new is a pope who seems willing to make this the center of his papacy. He has not changed any doctrine — at least not yet — but he has announced a new emphasis away from sex and towards economic justice. As he said in an interview shortly after taking office:

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. … The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

But the Pope’s re-prioritization of doctrine is going to be a problem for a lot of American bishops. As Jesuit Priest Thomas Reese wrote:

the bishops as a conference have been embarrassingly silent on economic justice during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. … Many bishops fear that speaking loudly about economic issues would help Democrats and undermine their alliance with the Republican Party on issues like gay marriage, abortion, and religious liberty. Some even think that the conference’s earlier letters, “Economic Justice for All” and “The Challenge of Peace,” were mistakes because they hurt their friends.

Conservative Catholic response. I recommend reading a thoughtful article by the conservative Catholic NYT columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat observes that the shoe is now on the other foot: For years liberal Catholics have had a yes-but relationship with the Vatican, remaining faithful by their own lights while refusing to get in line with official pronouncements on sexual issues. Now it’s conservatives who want to pick and choose which doctrines they support:

for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions.

He attempts to do so, resting his case primarily on the practical effects of capitalism’s increased production, but then concludes:

This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.

Let me state that conclusion more boldly: If capitalism is going to be justified by its practical ability to create prosperity even for the underclass, then that’s how it must be judged. You can’t talk about the wonders of increasing GDP in the abstract and then ignore the suffering of real people, or worse, blame them for their own suffering and label them as “takers” for wanting to share in the productivity of the planet God made for everyone.

Are you listening, Paul Ryan?

* They’ve been so successful at voicing their manufactured outrage that I need to explain this: Catholic institutions are not required to buy contraceptives for their employees or promote their use. The institutions in question are just required to provide health insurance (or pay a fine). Employees can use their health insurance for contraception if they decide to, just as they can use their wages to buy all sorts of things the Catholic Church disapproves of. The moral onus of choosing contraception (or not) falls on the employee, as it should.

As I have said at length elsewhere, construing this situation as some kind of moral issue for the employer is just passive aggression. They are hyper-extending the sensitivity of their consciences in order to control other people.

December 2, 2013 – 10:41 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The Sift comes to you this week from Santa Fe rather than New Hampshire, which means everything will appear around two hours later than usual.

The featured article this week is about Pope Francis. I’ve been curious about Francis ever since his election, when he was saying all the right things about poverty and making symbolic gestures of humility. I am, in general, skeptical of such first impressions; I well remember the 1980s, when each new leader of the Soviet Union was rumored to have been a secret liberal for many years, and then turned out to be just another Brezhnev. But eventually Gorbachev really was different than the others, so maybe Francis could be different too.

On November 24, the Vatican published Francis’ first major work, Evangelii Gaudium, which caused Rush Limbaugh to denounce the “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope.” So I decided to see what the fuss was about.

In this week’s summary post, the neocons are lamenting how President Obama is screwing up their marvelous plans for a war with Iran; everybody else is talking about whether HealthCare.gov is finally fixed; John Derbyshire manages to create a furor by explaining why slavery wasn’t really that bad; and a Quaker explains the difference between conscientious objection to the draft and the “conscience exemption” Hobby Lobby wants from ObamaCare.

December 2, 2013 – 7:46 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment