Tag Archives: culture wars

Gays Need Not Apply

May 7, 2012 – 11:41 am

Richard Grenell is gay. Here’s the signal his appointment as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman was supposed to send:

When Grenell’s appointment was announced last month, most observers took it as a sign that Romney was starting to move to the center to win moderate and independent voters in November, a welcome change after a Republican primary process often dominated by religious-right candidates such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.

Foreign-policy-wise, Grenell is a Bush-administration guy with impeccable neo-conservative credentials. So if anything, his appointment made the substance of the Romney campaign even more conservative.

But Grenell is gay. (Did I mention that already?) So he symbolized that Romney isn’t totally under the thumb of the Religious Right.

But then the Religious Right looked under its thumb and said, “Where’s Mitt?”

The reaction of the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is worth watching, because if I just describe it you’ll think I’m exaggerating.

Fischer says this very slowly, so his radio listeners can appreciate just how beyond the pale the situation is:

Richard Grenell is an out, loud, and proud homosexual. And he is now the face of the Romney campaign on national security and foreign policy.

Horrors! Fischer begins by discussing Grenell’s advocacy of same-sex marriage in New York state (which I suppose could become a foreign policy issue if New York secedes from the Union) and then goes off on how homosexuals want to change the marriage laws, but

they don’t actually care about getting married … because they are not about commitment. Homosexuals are about short-lived relationships and frequent anonymous sexual encounters. … Now whether Grenell indulges in that, I don’t know.

Ignorance is never a reason to stay silent, though, so Fischer launches into a minute-long rant about gay promiscuity in general. You know: up to 1000 sexual partners, men having sex in public parks and restrooms, and so on. And then suddenly we’re talking about Grenell again. The segue goes like this:

This is endemic in the homosexual community: these random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters. And that becomes a serious issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.

Finely honed logic like that may be why Fischer’s lead was followed by other theocrats like Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer. And then not-specifically-religious voices like National Review and Daily Caller weighed in against Grenell.

For two weeks — even when the issue-of-the-day was a national security thing like the killing of Osama bin Laden —  Romney kept Grenell in the closet (which kind of nullifies the whole “spokesman” thing) and waited for the storm to blow over. The campaign claims they wanted him to stay, but when Grenell was instructed not to speak during a national-security conference call he had organized, it was too much. He resigned.

Fischer was triumphant:

This is a huge win…. I will flat-out guarantee you [Romney] is not going to make this mistake again. There is no way in the world that Mitt Romney is going to put a homosexual activist in any position of importance in his campaign.

He’s probably right. Mitt learned his lesson — and so should moderate swing voters.

The key to the art of flip-flopping is convincing people that you were lying to the other guy; your true heart is in what you’re saying now. As he heads towards the general election, Romney needs to be retiring severely conservative Mitt and taking Massachusetts moderate Mitt out of mothballs. Because … you know (shrug, wink), you have to say a bunch of crazy shit to get nominated. That was then; this is now.

The theocrats aren’t going to go along with that. And it doesn’t matter which version of Romney holds his true heart, as long as he wears a dog collar and the likes of Bryan Fischer hold a very short leash.

If that’s the case in a general election campaign, when swing voters have the most leverage, won’t it be even more true after Inauguration Day?

And finally, Romney’s willingness to be dominated raises an authentic foreign policy question that even the theocrats should be asking. Bring it home, Bryan Fischer:

if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership.

At last, Bryan, you and I can agree on something.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

The Sifted Bookshelf: “Delirium” by Nancy Cohen

April 16, 2012 – 11:42 am

What if all the conventional wisdom about culture-war politics is wrong? You know the stuff I’m talking about:

  • The social issues favor Republicans. Coastal elites may have progressive attitudes towards female equality, reproductive rights, guns, gay rights, and so on. But the broad mass of ordinary Americans is deeply conservative.
  • Clinton and Carter proved that Democrats have to court the Bubba vote. The angry-white-male “Reagan Democrats” are the key to winning national elections.
  • The public doesn’t trust the moral values of liberals. McGovern and Mondale went down because they were too far left, Gore was tarred by Clinton’s sins, and so on.
  • Abortion caused the Religious Right to rise up. The preachers saw Roe v Wade and knew they had to take action to defend their long-held moral values.

In Delirium: How the sexual counterrevolution is polarizing America, historian Nancy Cohen looks back over the politics of the last half-century and concludes that it didn’t happen like that. This is a rich book, full of forgotten detail, but one over-arching story comes through: It’s the Religious Right that’s unpopular with the larger electorate. When “values voters” win, they win by stealth and re-interpret the results afterward.

The clearest examples are the Republican mid-term victories in 1994 and 2010. In both cases, overall turnout was low, Religious-Right turnout was high, and the public campaigns focused on other issues. Both the 1994 Contract With America and the 2010 Tea Party stayed away from culture-war issues in public, while assuring Religious-Right leaders behind the scenes that they would act on culture-war issues once they got elected (which they have). Candidates who missed the memo on stealth — Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Joe Miller — went down to defeat.

The conservative formula for success is simple: You want the invisible Religious Right networks of viral email and church study groups behind you, and you want evangelicals ringing doorbells and making phone calls for you, but your public campaign should have as little to do with them and their issues as possible. In 2000, all the fundamentalists knew that George W. Bush was their man, but he won with a moderate image as a “uniter” and a “compassionate conservative”.

Conversely, Bill Clinton may speak with a Bubba accent, but he won in 1992 while publicly reaching out to both feminists and gays to a greater extent than any previous major-party candidate. And the more that Republicans tried to make Clinton’s personal sex life an issue, the more popular he got. Clinton left office with a higher approval rating than Ronald Reagan. Al Gore’s biggest mistake was to distance himself from the popular Clinton in an effort to placate the evangelicals who voted for Bush anyway.

The other striking theme from Delirium is that abortion is an issue-of-opportunity for the Right. The original issues are gender equality and sex. To hear them tell it now, the Religious Right was always against abortion because the Bible is against it. When Roe v Wade made abortion legal, leaders like Jerry Falwell knew they had to get involved in politics.

In fact, the causality worked in the other direction. The Bible says next to nothing about abortion, and gives no support to the bizarre idea of ensoulment-at-conception. (As best I can determine, no one held this belief until recent centuries, and Protestants didn’t pick it up in any numbers until the late 1970s, when their politics demanded a clearer theological reason to condemn abortion.) When Roe v Wade was decided in 1972, many conservative religious leaders supported abortion rights or had no opinion on the issue.

The Religious Right actually began when conservative Christian women began organizing against the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. Abortion was not their major issue. Only after Lottie Beth Hobbs had established the grass-roots potential of an anti-feminist religious movement and drew its battle lines did the male preachers join in. Jerry Falwell didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978.

By weeklysift | Posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Also tagged | Comments (2)

Girls Heart Republicans and other short notes

April 16, 2012 – 11:25 am

In case you were having trouble figuring it out, Herman Cain explained the Obama/Romney gender gap to the Fox News audience:

Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies — which is what most people disagree with — it’s a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people.

Which leads Digby to ask: “Who are those ‘other people’ (besides men) you speak of?”

You know, Digby: Girls. Those darling little ladies who swoon at pictures of Obama’s cute kids and don’t worry their pretty little heads about manly subjects like health care or the trade deficit. They say all kinds of silly things to pollsters, but come November their menfolk will set them straight and they’ll vote for Romney. (They’ll probably pout about it for a week or two afterwards — and their heads-of-household might want to be careful about eating the meatloaf on Inauguration Day — but they’ll do what they’re told.)

I’m glad Cain explained it so clearly. Otherwise, I’d have no idea why girls might not like Republicans. Well, there’s the whole we-want-you-to-carry-a-dead-fetus-to-term thing. But that’s yucky. I’m sure girls don’t think about stuff like that.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is another Republican girls ought to love. He dismissed the whole war-on-women theme by pointing to female Republican senators who agree with him:

There is no issue. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine I think would be the first to say — and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska — ‘we don’t see any evidence of this.’

Except … well, they actually say the exact opposite. ThinkProgress observes:

Three of the four women McConnell names have already come out against the GOP’s war on women — Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). In fact, Murkowski specifically pushed back on claims like McConnell’s, saying, “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

Doesn’t that make you want to elect some more Republican senators so that McConnell can be majority leader?

You might think that a Republican woman who gets herself elected senator (like Murkowski or Snowe or Hutchison) might finally get some respect, that the men might listen to her (on women’s issues, at the very least) and not just use her as cover in a some-of-my-best-friends-are-dames way.

Think again.

A new study links conservatism to “low-effort thought”.

when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

It makes a certain amount of sense. In situations where you don’t have two brain cells to rub together, you default to stereotypes and justifying the status quo.

If I’m stressed or tired, it’s much harder to think compassionately or generously. Much easier to think like this: Is there a problem? Somebody ought to find out whose fault it is and kick their butts.

As ego-boosting as this study is for liberals, there might be more to learn than that: When somebody who ordinarily seems to be a good person repeats some ridiculous conservative talking point, maybe the right response is just to say: “Seriously?” Don’t slap them down, just encourage them to think a little harder.

Jim Robinson, founder of the conservative community blog Free Republic, announces an anti-Romney revolt.

I’ve stated many times since Romney started running for the presidency way back when that I’d never vote for him and I will not. … There will be no campaign for this Massachusetts liberal liar on FR!!

Uh, Jim, why?

Romney is a pathological compulsive liar. Lie after lie papered over with more lies. Doesn’t even flinch when caught in bald faced lies, simply tells another big whopper to cover up or dodge the issue. Funny thing, the man actually seems to believe his own latest lies and simply ignores the glaring record of his past actions/lies.

Check out the comments Robinson gets: overwhelmingly positive, with only the occasional “Are you nuts?” thrown in.

That “liar” meme is catching on. Steve Benen is up to #13 in his ongoing series Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity. Most of it isn’t spin or shading; it’s real that-never-happened stuff.

Crazy Congresspeople #1: Missouri’s Todd Akin explains to a constituent why his fellow Republicans in Congress hasn’t impeached President Obama yet:

I can’t speak for the other 400 and some congressmen, but I believe when they take a look at impeachment the question is do you have the votes to do it?

You don’t need, like, grounds to impeach a Democratic president, just (as Hunter at Daily Kos summarizes): “You know, stuff.”

Crazy Congresspeople #2: Florida’s Rep. Alan West knows how many “card-carrying Marxists” are in Congress: 78 to 81. He later clarified that he was referring to every member of the Progressive Caucus.

Hey, Alan: They did away with cards years ago. It’s all biometrics now. And sub-dermal computer chips. Have you checked for those? Communists have their alien allies insert them into your body while you’re asleep.

Crazy Congresspeople #3: North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who has

very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.

She knows there’s no reason for it because she and her husband graduated with almost no debt back in the 60s, when states gave more support to schools like her alma mater UNC and tuition was much lower. (I’ve already told you what I think about student debt.)

Let’s add a crazy state legislator to the list: Iowa’s Mark Chelgren proposed that child-support-paying Dads should be able to demand that their ex-wives take a drug test. (No War on Women here.)

You know who’s not conservative enough now? Orrin Hatch. Not so long ago he held down the far-right end of the Senate, but the Tea Party has moved past him. “I despise these people,” he says.

Teen pregnancy is down, but it’s still highest in the states that encourage abstinence-only sex education.

A 72-year-old grandmother tells the story of her abortion in 1978 in No One Called Me a Slut. It was a difficult decision, but she was treated with respect and she hasn’t regretted what she did.

I have five grandsons and three granddaughters, and I passionately want each one of them to be responsible and have the same legal right to choose that I had.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

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 | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments (28)

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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Rush’s Apology and other short notes

March 5, 2012 – 1:03 pm

You already know the basic story: Republicans didn’t let Georgetown student Sandra Fluke testify at their committee hearing on religious liberty vs. reproductive rights, resulting in that famous all-men-at-the-table photo.

So Democrats held their own hearing where Fluke did testify. Rush Limbaugh responded by attacking her for several days as a “slut” and a “prostitute” and suggesting that she post sex videos on the Internet.

She’s having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth-control pills that she needs. That’s what she’s saying.

Other members of the conservative media defended Rush against the backlash. Mona Charen, for example wrote:

When the producer asked: “What do you make of Rush Limbaugh’s comments?” I said that his choice of words was crude but that I certainly understood and sympathized with the point he was making.

Mitt Romney missed his chance to have a Sister Souljah moment. “It’s not the language I would have used,” he said. To which Maureen Dowd replied: “Is there a right way to call a woman a slut?”

Eventually, Rush started losing advertisers. Money talks, so Rush issued an apology of sorts:

I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

So Rush and everybody else on the Right agrees that “slut” is an over-reaction to Fluke’s testimony, but they stand by “the point he was making”.

You’ve probably heard all that. But this point isn’t getting nearly enough attention: Rush’s attack on Fluke was fundamentally false from end to end. She was not talking about her sex life. She was not asking for a government subsidy. (Georgetown’s health plan is paid for by the students.) She was exposing the negative impact of Georgetown’s policy on the health of its female students.

This controversy isn’t about using bad words, it’s about telling vicious lies to silence an opponent’s legitimate point. Rush has not apologized for that or even admitted doing it. That’s what the conservative media is defending and Republican politicians won’t denounce.

Watch Fluke’s opening statement and see if you can find any connection between what she said and what Limbaugh said about her.

Rick Santorum’s recent attack on JFK was not only inaccurate and politically odd (how does dissing the first Catholic president rally the Catholic votes Santorum needs?), it was yet another example of the fuzzy thinking that surrounds the corporate personhood issue. Santorum seems unable to distinguish religious institutions from religious people.

Here’s what Kennedy said in his famous 1960 campaign speech to a conference of Baptist ministers:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote

In other words, the Church and the State are separate institutions. Having authority in one does not give you authority in the other.

But this is how Santorum explained why reading Kennedy’s speech makes him “want to throw up”:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes you throw up.  What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

In other words, he interprets Kennedy’s words to mean that the Church and the State must consist of different people; if you’re active in the Church you must be passive in the State, and vice versa.

But the conflict that nauseates Santorum goes away once you understand that institutions are not people. Individuals can be active in both religion and in politics, and we can still maintain Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between the institution of the Church and the institution of the State.

The Santorums reinforce all the worst stereotypes about homeschooling parents. But they aren’t all like that, as this first-person account by Stumblegoat makes clear.

Things everybody should understand about the price of gas:

  • America may have plenty of untapped natural gas and coal, but that’s not going to do you any good if your car runs on gasoline.
  • The price of gasoline depends on the price of oil.
  • Oil is a world market.
  • Gas prices were low when Obama became president because a worldwide recession had depressed demand.
  • New oil production in America will change the world price of oil exactly as much (or as little) as new production in Nigeria or Kuwait or anyplace else.
  • American oil production has gone up since Obama took office, reversing a long-term downward trend.
  • No conceivable increase in American oil production will make a sizable dent in the world market.
  • Anything that took Iran’s oil off the market (like a war) would make oil prices skyrocket.

Therefore: “Drill, baby, drill” is not an answer to the high price of gas, but reaching some kind of peaceful settlement with Iran would help.

The global-warming deniers who published a letter in the WSJ made their argument look serious by quoting the research of Yale economist William Nordhaus. Now Nordhaus explains why they’re wrong.

Last week the NYT talked about why young mothers aren’t married. This week the Atlantic examines why young adults aren’t buying houses.

Derek Thompson reviews a lot of reasons, but finally comes around to the one that makes sense to me: We don’t live in a long-term-planning world any more. The whole idea of a 30-year mortgage sounds absurd in an era where nobody has the faintest idea what their life will be like in ten years.

Kevin Drum has an interesting graph. If you break the federal budget up into Medicare, Social Security, and Everything Else, then graph it as a percentage of GDP, Everything Else is lower than it was 50 years ago and is still decreasing. Remember that the next time somebody starts talking about “out-of-control government spending”.

We don’t have a generalized spending problem. We’ve got an aging population and healthcare costs that are increasing too fast. Solve that and everything else falls into place.

The traditional theory said that the poor were less ethical than the rich. In “My Fair Lady“, Pickering asks Eliza’s father “Have you no morals, man?” and Mr. Doolittle replies: “No, no, I can’t afford ’em, gov’ner. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”

But a new study indicates the exact opposite:

“Occupying privileged positions in society has this natural psychological effect of insulating you from others,” said psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley. “You’re less likely to perceive the impact your behavior has on others. As a result, at least in this paper, you’re more likely to break the rules.”

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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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