Category: Politics

blog

New Look, Errata, and a Policy Statement

I’ve seen some blogs that change their look every month. Frankly, it’s too much bother, but once in a while…

So, here’s a new look.  I’ve noted a few comments about the difficulty of reading white-on-black (or pale blue-on-dark blue, etc), so I found one that reverses that and reads pretty well.  I’ve also found one that allows me to put my own images in the header, and that I may change more regularly, but for the foreseeable future, this is what the Muse is going to look like.

I suppose I should make a few other comments to go along with that.

I promised a post on the content of the Moyers-Haidt video and that’s still coming.  I’ve been working steadily on finishing a novel and I’m within striking distance of the complete first draft.  Oculus is the sequel to Orleans, which is currently in the hands of my estimably cool agent, Jen Udden.  Once I finish this, I will hand it to my wonderful partner and first-reader, Donna, who will take a red pen and scrawl viciously all over it so that I may take the shredded remains and build from them a better book.  While she’s doing that, I will be doing a number of things, among which include cleaning my office (which is a shattered and broken No Man’s Land, unfit for human habitation), doing some more work for Left Bank Books (link on the sidebar, go visit), working on more writing (surprise!) and penning more annoying commentary to post here on matters political, philosophical, personal…

Speaking of which, I recently endured one of the pitfalls of having strong opinions and the ability to voice them that, when it involves relative strangers, usually scrapes no skin off any body parts.  I hope I’m wrong, but I seem to have lost a friend as a consequence of one such post.  Politically, we were quite far apart, but managed what I thought was a fairly solid relationship—based on music, good food, good wine, things like that.  After a few political conversations, we had, I thought, opted for detente and simply didn’t discuss it.  But when you have a public face, that becomes a bit difficult to manage.  What do you say to people?  Don’t read this if you know we disagree fundamentally?

My attitude is caveat emptor.  You come into my online home, feel free to froth and fret or even agree wholeheartedly.  Feel free to take umbrage, throw money, tell me I’m wonderful or the scum of the earth.  It is a public forum.  I won’t back down from my principles or beliefs.  If such offend to the extent that you feel compelled to collect your marbles and never visit again, so be it.

I will say this, regarding the broader arena of public discourse: I can become furious over a stated position and manage to regard someone as a friend.  I’m willing to talk about anything, with just about anyone, as long as the dialogue is honest and honestly engaged.  I may go away wondering how such opinions over this or that can possibly be held by a thinking human being, but I promptly caution myself that I am no judge of absolute right or wrong and no doubt some react the way to me.  But I will ask that my writings be read completely and taken for what they say and judged according to their content.  Factual mis-statements, hyperbolic distortions, and hissy fits do nothing to further anything and I will call anyone on them.

As I would expect them to call me on the same.

So.  If you know in advance that your sensibilities may get rubbed raw by what you may find here, and you come anyway, react as you will, but know it’s on you.  There are plenty other places on the intraweebs to go visit, many of which may offer solace rather than sandpaper.

That said, all are welcome.  I have a FaceBook page with over four thousand “friends,” many of whom I doubtless disagree with on some topic.  I do not unfriend anyone who disagrees with me.  That’s childish.  I believe we should engage other viewpoints.  The polemical in-group isolation that has arisen from the self-selection of media has caused enormous damage to our public discourse.  It has become far too easy to avoid opinions and beliefs and even facts that make us uncomfortable or that we wish were not true.  I try not to do that.  It is limiting and potentially destructive.  What we are doing thereby is creating entirely separate languages.  Words that mean one thing to one group mean something entirely different to another and because they no longer converse with each other on any regular basis, such meanings concretize and become barriers.

Anyway, I hope you all like the new look.  The mission, however, remains the same.

culture

Moyers & Haidt On Moral Psychology

I have a lot of things to say about what is discussed in this video, but first I’d like people to give a listen.

Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

As a teaser, let me say that what Jonathan Haidt has to say needs to be heard by both sides of current political divide in this country before we completely screw ourselves out of a functioning community. More to follow.

culture

Where The Rubber Meets The Road (Womb)

Congress is holdings hearings on President Obama’s mandate that insurance companies cover contraception for employees of religious institutions. His earlier initiative, that such institutions pay for it themselves through their employee insurance plans, was met with outrage over a presumed infringement of religious liberty. He made what I, at least, consider an admirable compromise, sidestepping the primary complaint by mandating that the insurance companies pick up the costs. However, that didn’t satisfy congressional Republicans and religious conservatives.

Hearings were held.

Representative Issa of California held a panel to discuss the issue comprised entirely of men. All his witnesses were men. When challenged about why there were no women testifying, the reply was that the issue was not about contraception but about federal infringement of religion.

Women don’t have an opinion on that?

This is simple: the hullabaloo is over contraception coverage. The counterargument is that forcing religious institutions to provide for it, even by association, is a violation of their First Amendment rights, that if something violates religious conscience that religion has the right to refuse to participate.

I could concoct any number of scenarios in which that position is questionable at best. But for our Congress then to accept not only that proposition but to accept the further condition that even discussion of the fulcrum issue is out of order is absurd and not what we’re paying them for.

It is about birth control. State supercession over religious privileges happens all the time. Santeria animal sacrifice practices are regulated and in many areas prohibited because they violate secular health laws. Christian Scientists may not deny their children medical care unto death. Peyote use among certain Native American tribes is proscribed, regardless of the ceremonial claims and religious liberty arguments. And here’s the thing—outside of the group affected these are not controversial. So it must be asked, what is it about this that makes it different?

Contraception. Religious conservatives claim Obama is waging war on religion. As John Stewart has pointed out, “don’t confuse war with not getting everything you want.”

What is clear is that religious conservatives are conducting an extreme campaign to roll back contraceptive liberties, which ought to have no religious test. This is very much about women and civil liberties and health care costs and the sensitivities of groups who hold archaic views of “a woman’s place” and traditional values. For Congress to hold hearings that tacitly ignore this aspect is politically irresponsible at best, campaign year posturing at a minimum, and socially negligent at worst.

But the most aggravating aspect is the pretense that they aren’t talking about birth control. Of course they are. The religious position is that birth control violates religious conscience. Since when do we let religious conscience that does not reflect the views of even a majority of adherents to those institutions dictate secular policy? This is a breech of the wall of separation in the other direction. If I go to work for a Catholic hospital, I do not take that job to support Catholicism but to support myself and my family. If they’re going to offer me health coverage, then they should offer it in parity with what any other comparable facility offers, because as my employer they do not represent my convictions and have no right to dictate conscience to me through essentially punitive economic policies. (I shouldn’t even have to say that in this employment environment, to tell me that if I don’t like it I should get another job would border on criminal. What other job?)

I will be tremendously disappointed if Obama backs down from this. I am tired to having my conscience violated simply because I have no religion. I do not wish to live in a country run according to theocratic principles.

Yes. It is about birth control. Also about control. Period.

culture

Trust In Your Message?

There’s an aspect of this flap over Obama’s insistence that health care policies offered by institutions with religious affiliation cover birth control that I don’t see many people discussing.  All the posturing over how this is anti-religious and a blatant slap at religious freedom, blah blah, is both predictable and irrelevant.  For one, it’s not.  For one thing, it doesn’t even approach the kind of infringement of a basic freedom that Bush’s infamous “gag rule” on abortion information represented, which Obama overturned.

But there is a common link between both that Bush-era ruling and the current stance taken by the Catholic bishops.  Namely, a complete lack of confidence in their message.  What it comes down to is a denial that people have not only the right but the ability to make decisions for themselves based on good information.

It’s simple.  The Gag Rule assumed that if people never found out about certain options, then they wouldn’t use those options, but that if they did learn about them, they would.  It represented a complete lack of confidence that people could both hear all the options and then make decisions in their own best interest, some of which would be consistent with the policy Bush’s administration was backing.  Likewise here.  Just because birth control is covered by an insurance policy purchased for the benefit of employees does not automatically mean that all these people will start using birth control.  If the Catholic message is sound, if it has merit, that option will never be exercised.

But no.  Safer, they must think, to restrict access, to keep it off the table, to ban the pamphlet, and remove the service than to trust that people will do what the Catholic Church wants them to do.

For all the posturing about what is or is not “American,” this is as unAmerican as it gets.  Honored more in rhetoric than practice, the right of the individual to decide for him or herself is supposed to be at the heart of what makes us who we are.  So how does barring choice square with that?

Granted, we do it all the time.  We do it in drug use, we have age-specific restrictions dealing with movies, bars, driving, we have all manner of qualifying rules and regulations that keep people away from certain options, and a lot of it makes perfect sense.

But this is not one of them.  If we were going to ban coverage of birth control from all insurance policies, then there would be no controversy over religious issues.  It would be controversial for a different reason, but since the ban would be universal it would not be liable to the kind of ideological argumentation we’re now seeing.  But if you’re going to offer it to some and not others based on where they work, then you have a basic civil rights question.

Look, this isn’t even about making churches provide birth control.  It’s about church-affiliated institutions with large employee payrolls that are not denomination-exclusive—like universities and hospitals—being required to serve that employee base in accord with the standards every other employer must meet.  Despite the association with a religious institution, what we’re talking about is workplace rules where the institution and the community interface on the level of employment.

But that argument will be made in court, no doubt. What strikes me about this is the so far unremarked tendency in this country to not trust in our own messages.  We do this all the time, suppressing certain ideas, barring certain speakers from addressing certain audiences, criticizing open discourse over things which we fear—it’s arguable that most Americans had no idea what communism actual was back during the Cold War, debatable whether we do now, but we so feared it that we wouldn’t even talk about it—and frankly that’s not us.  It’s not who we claim to be, not who we’d like to be, but there it is.

Of course, in this instance the Catholic bishops have a real concern.  According to studies, 98% of Catholic women use or have used birth control.  Obviously, the message the Church wants delivered doesn’t have as much traction as they’d like.  By that token, taking a stand on this is clearly in response to evident failure.

But it’s still a matter of personal choice, something the Catholic Church—or, for that matter, any church—has never been comfortable with.  Trusting an individual to make a decision like this for herself has always been fraught with the likelihood that they will make the right choice—but not the one desired.

This is vestigial moralizing.  If we accept as a concept that all people should be considered equal, then it follows that the opportunities and privileges available to everyone should be equal.  At one time, that equality was meted out based on the notion of a family unit.  The family, represented by the man, enjoyed the rights and privileges of the community.  With changes in technology and the economy, the focus has shifted more narrowly on the individual, which has eroded the primacy of the male as women have become more and more able to act independently*.  If we are serious about equality, then it should come as no surprise that we have to make adjustments for those things that enable the expression of equality.  That is the American message and all this political posturing over birth control is exactly apposite that message.

In the wake of the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood kerfluffle, it seems finally enough people are waking up to the fact that if we do not assert the primacy of that message, we could lose what equality we’ve gained since—

Well, since the 1920s when you could receive a prison sentence for distributing pamphlets about birth control.  Or since the 1940s when women were forced out of jobs they had held all during WWII and were told they were incapable of doing those jobs by virtue of their sex.  Or since 1965, when finally the Supreme Court declared that couples had a basic right to contraception.  Or—

The Catholic Church obvious doesn’t trust its people to heed its message.  It may be that the message is flawed.  Or maybe Americans are beginning to trust their own message.

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*I am talking here about the way society was structured, not the right or wrong of the distribution of rights and privileges.  It is an unfortunate fact that the basic biological reality concerning reproduction has placed women in a vulnerable position in regards to power relations.  My belief is that there has never been a excuse for the disenfranchisement of women, but until effective birth control and the subsequent changes in economic life that resulted, the initiative has been with men to set the rules.  Even so, it took a long time for men as a group to accept equality as a reality, never mind as a principle, and I do not for a minute believe that the majority of men who now take it as given are of sufficient numbers to guarantee we would never return to a culture of female subjugation.  The attack on reproductive rights strikes at the main foundation of contemporary political freedoms for women.

culture

Let Us Not Snicker In Complacency

Rick Santorum won the three primary-type elections yesterday.  Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado.  A sweep.  But really, I should put that Won in quotes.  He “won” by virtue of garnering more votes than the others, which I admit is the traditional way in which winning is established.

But, really, did he?  The largest voter turn-out was Missouri, with 6% of eligible, registered voters going to the polls.  Out of that he took somewhere around 40%, which means he got less than 3% of Missouri’s potential vote.  It was worse in the other two states, Minnesota with 1% and Colorado with 2%.

And yes, these are caucuses, nonbinding, no delegates are assigned based on these, it was more a moral support effort.

But still.  In the past, it has been the Republican base that has been the most energized in these things, and this time their showing was pathetic. Less than.

So, what exactly did Santorum win?

Not much, but please, let us not make assumptions.  It’s a long way to August, much less November, and all kinds of bizarreness can happen before then.  The idea that Rick Santorum could be the GOP nominee for president fills me with both glee and trepidation.  Glee because the only candidate the GOP has fielded that has a chance of challenging Obama is Romney, no matter what the Party faithful might wish to believe.  Trepidation because I tend to hedge my mental bets these days concerning the political landscape and the thought that Santorum might actually unseat Obama scares the bejeezus out of me.  In his own way, he is as polarizing as George Wallace in 1968.  (Gingrich less so, for two reasons—he is inconsistent in his message and he is far too intellectual.  He’s the closest thing the GOP has right now to an Egghead, something they have tended to vote against for a very long time due to a nebulous perception that “average” Americans won’t vote for someone who is too smart.)  The positions he has taken on privacy issues troubles me no end.  Even if he couldn’t get his program through Congress on these matters, the fact that enough of my fellow citizens would put him in office would frighten me.  It wouldn’t be Santorum who would concern me so much as my next door neighbor.

Hence, my admonition that we should not feel smug, we who would rather see Obama get a second term than any Republican who has the remotest chance of winning.  National politics is a fey and fickle creature and has surprised people before.

But more than that, if I read this correctly, we are seeing the self-dismantling of a major political party.  For the first time in decades, the Democrats are showing more solidarity and cohesion than the Republicans, and may end up being the remaining “super power” when this is over, the GOP having splintered into factions that will eventually recombine into something else.

There is a danger here that comes with all such victories, that of self-satisfied, uncritical assumption of Being Right.

Being Right is the disease to which the Republicans are succumbing.  Not that they have been—right, that is—but that they have built their entire strategy on the assumption that (a) this is what people vote for and (b) that they in fact are right.  It has led to a number of unfortunate distortions of the political process in the name of saving the country that, I think, have also led to their current malaise.  It has pushed the Republicans into more and more strident and restricted positions from which they have become ineffective in the actual job they’ve been hired to do—namely, govern the country.  (I mean, seriously—who gives a damn about who is or is not allowed to get married when there are 58 million adults without jobs?  And given the ranking of American schools in math, science, history, and reading, does anyone think allowing prayer in the class—which as a silent practice is not now prohibited—is really the issue we need to focus on?)

Americans as individuals can make the call as to what is right.  That’s not what we send representatives to Washington do establish.  We send them there to conduct the people’s business, a phrase I haven’t seen in general use for a very long time.  Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about that, but this is a tactical question.  I do not look to Washington to tell me what my morals should be.  Nor do I want Washington telling my neighbor why I am not to be trusted because I have ideas that might run counter to the current rhetorical postures on offer.

Democrats have no better claim than Republicans on that.  While much lip service is given to America’s pluralism, at the end of the day, when the campaign ads run, and the blood flows in the primaries, both parties indulge in the politics of false unity.  They both paint Americans as this or that and our differences are minimized to the point that if someone actual has a distinct need or identity, we either ignore it or try to force him or her into a mold that conforms to current prejudice.

A political party that feels it has a mandate as representing True Americans is a dangerous thing, because it can forget to represent All Americans.  Cycles of rapid turn-over in congressional seats are indicative of the kind of blunt messaging an ill-served electorate sends when they elect someone who then goes to Washington and doesn’t do what they were sent to do, but instead takes winning that seat as a ticket to try to make the government conform to his or her vision of True America.  (I sent you there to rein in spending, not gut the SEC.  I sent you there to fix Social Security, not blame the Democrats for pursuing socialism.  I sent you there to do something about education, not shoehorn in your pet projects.)

The Democratic Party has its share of blindnesses and prejudices and we should all be wary of seeing them burgeon into the kind of bombastic over-confidence that the Republicans are now paying for in their own party.  Since the Depression, the Democrats have more and more become the party of the One Solution To Fix It All, blithely ignoring local conditions and the very uniquenesses both parties like to brag about but neither really knows how to deal with.  If there is a problem, a federal agency must be created to fix it, and while that has certainly been effective in some things, in other matters it has been an irritant if not downright destructive.

(The model for federal agencies, it seems to me, should be NASA.  No, seriously.  When you look at NASA and how it is structured and what it is actually supposed to do, it’s a terrific idea.  It hasn’t, of course, stuck to its original concept, but close enough for an example.  NASA is publicly seen as a government space program that is supposed to do all of our off-earth exploring and so forth.  This is a mischaracterization.  NASA was established as a federally-funded research-and-development organ that would create the technology to be used in space exploration, with the idea that, once developed and tested, this technology would be available to the private sector or to universities to do with as they will.  NASA was supposed to continually develop solutions that we could then take off the shelf and use.  It was never intended to set priorities and dictate the direction we would take, although by default it has done so.  This would be an effective model if deployed more as it was intended.  Other agencies do exhibit these protocols—OSHA, for example—but many are imperial, dictating rather than assisting.  This is a product of the kind of arrogance we have yet to figure out how to be rid of in government.)

Starting now, with what is so evidently happening to the Republican Party, all of us should be more aware of what the Democrats do.  I shy away from predictions with too much specificity—the more detailed you get the farther off target you fall—but if not this year then by the next election cycle I would not be surprised to see the rise of an effective third party and the eventual obliteration of the Republican Party as we have known it.  I don’t think this would in itself be a bad thing—in 1976 they courted and in 1980 brought in an infection that has transformed it into something its own leadership is uncomfortable with and cannot effectively control—but I don’t think it would be automatically a good thing, either.   We have seen what happens in countries with only one political party and we should fear it.

 

culture

Stepping Up

I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the Susan G. Komen fiasco.  Not for fear of invoking controversy, but because things started unraveling so fast it was difficult to know when it would play out.  Here is a handy overview of the series of events.  The position taken by the Komen charity group shifted, mutated, and reeled in the sudden upwelling of negative response, that on any given day whatever I might have said would be irrelevant the next morning.

One aspect, however, strikes me as significant.  That response.  It came swiftly and it came from all quarters and it came with cash.  I cannot recall a similar response happening so swiftly and so decisively in this ongoing struggle over abortion rights.  One of the most annoying things about being progressive and/or liberal is the tepidity with which we meet challenges.  It would appear that all of us who espouse a progressive view, when it gets down to the nitty gritty of political position-taking and infighting, have feet not even of clay but of silly putty.  It is actually heartening to see an abrupt and united response that is categorically decisive for once.

It would be even better if this were the harbinger of the rediscovery of our collective spine.  The Religious Right has been canvassing, politicking, and buying politicians for a long time now, absolutely dedicated to their position, over which it has been clear for over three decades that what they want is not negotiable.  What hasn’t been so clear till the last few years has been the full extent of what they want and finally—finally—progressives are beginning to understand that this is not a disagreement but a war.

Thanks to people like Rick Santorum the full program of the antichoice movement is impossible to ignore.  If they were interested in eliminating abortion only, there would have been several points along the way over this long and acrimonious struggle where common cause could have been made.  But the fact is they wish to eliminate what they see as inexcusable permissiveness, sexual license, and immorality, and they would do this by eliminating access to all forms of birth control.  What they doubtless assume is that if pregnancy once more regained its power to scare women into celibacy then the United States would become the country they prefer to live in and their version of morality would hold sway.  They have a number of reasons for pursuing this, some less plausible than others, but at the end of the day they very much want people to stop having safe sex.

Safe, that is, in terms of pregnancy.

Rick Santorum has gone on record believing that even within marriage sex for pleasure is a no-no.  Probably most people think that’s just an eccentricity of his and that he would be unable to actually turn the clock back to try to make such a condition a general reality.  More and more people, I think, are beginning to realize that there is a rather large and loud segment of the population that would support him in this.  Not a majority, not by any means a majority, but the political Right acts like it speaks for the majority all the time, so it might be understandable if people in general had the idea that the majority of their fellow citizens were like this.

They also don’t realize, probably, that the foundational Supreme Court case establishing a right to contraception—Griswold v. Connecticut—was over a married couple’s right to control their reproductive life.

I also don’t think a lot of people, especially young women, have given much thought to the kinds of opportunities that would close up in their faces in such a regime.  They do in some states.  Whether or not abortion is  legal and a right nationally, there are some states where the anti-choice movement has made it so difficult for clinics to remain open—often using extra-legal means—that this is a right in name only.

I’ve been wondering how much more would have to happen before the actual majority finally said enough and acted.  Planned Parenthood lost a grant of roughly $640,000 from Komen.  They’ve received over three million as replacement.  The outcry of protest has been loud enough that Komen is trying to backtrack.  They’ve made noises about reinstating the grant, but it remains to be seen if they actually will.

In the meantime I have had some exchanges with people who think what Komen did was absolutely correct and a moral victory and the troubling thing about these was the mendacity attached to the arguments.  One response to me was that only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget went to non-abortion services, while in fact the reverse is true.  As argument continued, I responded with actual numbers.  Planned Parenthood performed around 325,ooo abortions last year.  They provided contraceptive services to nearly five million women.  And contraceptive services do not account for even half of what they do.  The rest are services for STDs, counseling, and related health services.  The counterargument ended there.

These are publicly available figures and the number of abortions is a mandated report.

Komen handled this badly.  They have suffered resignations within their own organization over it.  Brinker herself tends to the Right politically, but she hired a vice president who is on record as having run on an anti-abortion, anti-choice platform—unsuccessfully—and from appearances seems to have used her position to strike a blow against Planned Parenthood.

Again, what I found most encouraging in all this was the sudden and clear reaction on the part of people who may finally be reaching their limit over the hypocrisy of this conflict.

Hypocrisy?  One of the more interesting facts about the whole anti-choice movement has been the numbers of women who end up in the very clinics they have been protesting when they come up pregnant.  Some even sit in the waiting room preaching at the others there how they will all go to hell for killing their babies, and then go in and have a D and C to rid themselves of their own “inconvenience.”  I’m not particularly surprised or shocked by this.  People compartmentalize.  What seems to be the case here is a desire for the law to change to prevent them from doing what they know they’ll do if something they detest is legal.  They can’t face up to their own responsibilities so they want the rest of society to make them do it.  But for that to happen, everyone else has to be under the same restrictions.  “Somebody stop me!”

What may finally be changing is the forebearance of all the other people whose lives would be negatively affected by the changes being demanded.  We can tolerate easily the hypocrisy in our neighbor—until such hypocrisy becomes a national movement and threatens our freedoms.

I know there is a genuine disagreement over the basic question here—not so much when does life begin but when is such life Human?  If you believe that it is from the moment sperm fertilizes egg, well and good.  But if, like me, you believe “human” is more than a biological definition and requires a personality, then we’re talking about a progression from nonhuman to human that takes nine months and then some.

That leaves the decision up to each individual, though, and I can even understand the argument that collectively we cannot endorse murder.  And yet we have numerous legal distinctions to qualify the taking of life that is not murder.  We all understand what constitutes murder and we all understand what constitutes self defense and all the shades in between.  As a practical matter, to me, abortion is self defense.  In very real terms, an unwanted pregnancy is a life-threatening condition.  Perhaps the mother will not die from it, but that does not mean her life will not be threatened with profound and in many instances unwanted and detrimental change.  In the case of the poor, this is a materially significant fact.  If you can’t feed yourself, how to you feed another that you didn’t even invite into your home?

And the Komen decision to end that grant went straight to poor women, because that’s who received the benefit of that money.

Let’s be clear—abortion has always been available to people with means.  It did not become an issue until the poor came into the equation.  And if it is once more rendered illegal, women with money will still have access.  Only the poor will suffer.  This is reality.

In combination with Occupy Wall Street, there is a groundswell of populist anger directed toward the basic inequities in our society.  We will never be rid of certain inequities—that is human nature, and let’s face it, our success, at least economically, is based on such inequities and the promise of “rising above”—but we should at least strive to eliminate the grosser aspects that serve only to rub the less fortunate’s collective face in the mud of failure.  People do not have to be rich in order to be safe and comfortable and feel secure and invested in their society.  They only have to feel that in certain fundamental ways they are treated fairly and have the same rights as any one else, rights that are not exclusive to the wealthy, the privileged, or the hypocritical.

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As a coda to all this, here is a report on one of the items offered as part of Komen’s awareness outreach.  In conjunction with a weapons distributor, a pink Walther P-22 is available for purchase to support Komen’s program.

It has always struck me how often the aggressive advocacy of 2nd Amendment rights, support of the death penalty, and a kind of libertarian default to the power of the gun seem to be expressed by the very same people most vocal about the “immorality” of abortion.  The horror, it sometimes seems, of  taking human life is very categorical.  The apparent contradiction evaporates when seen from a religious viewpoint that centers on spiritual concepts of innocence and an oft unspoken assumption that this is a determining factor in deciding the appropriateness of killing.  Adults are not innocent by definition and fall automatically into a different category than a fetus which has never had a chance to “sin.”

Even so, the apparent hypocrisy is even less difficult to understand when seen from the viewpoint of people determined that their ideas of public morality should trump all personal rights that fall outside of a tightly-defined range of so-called “decency”—a view advanced and backed up by the implicit threat of violence demonstrated by a political posture that sees no contradiction between a “right to life” stance on the one hand and a willingness to mete out death to the deserving on the other.

 

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One more addendum in a story that I am sure will continue to repercuss for months if not years to come, the person at the center of the policy flap at Susan G. Komen has resigned.   Of course she is trying to spin the situation, but where there is smoke, as the saying goes.  I suspect at the core of this was a ploy of some orchestration between Ms. Handel and certain politicians—enactment of the “policy” then the move to investigate Planned Parenthood—or maybe not.  Maybe this was all just a confluence of unlikely coincidence and no one had an ulterior motive.  What’s that about pigs and air travel?

culture

Equality Means Just That

Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark. I’ve seen him on other occasions and he is articulate and, from what I’ve seen, fearless, a rare combination today in politics. In this excerpt he’s talking about gay marriage.

No, that’s not right. He’s talking about equality. And that’s what is at the heart of so much today. Listen:

He says what I believe. Being an American, to me, means something very basic and unequivocal. Equality is not a commodity, available for a price, which some folks can afford more of than others. it comes with the territory and the idea that we still, after all this time, have to have special legislation to defend various aspects of what should be presumed without question irritates me.

His remark about the utility of popular votes is also spot on. We like to assume democracy is applicable in all cases, but it is not. This is one reason we have a republic rather than a full-blown democracy. A democratically empowered republic, yes, but in a republic the passions of the moment do not hold sway, or should not. Lest anyone thinks otherwise, for a vast portion of this country slavery existed by dint of popular mandate. So did the chattel condition of women. While it may be true that these things would have (and did) erode in time, that is not the same as saying democracy worked. Other factors were involved, but in the case of slavery a war had to be fought in order to enforce what ought to have been recognized as a fundamental right.

Americans are no different in many ways than any other person on the planet. We have our foibles, our prejudices, our blindnesses. Many of us really don’t think through the meaning of our convictions and in some uncomfortable areas we would rather the issue never come up than have to deal with it. And doubtless a great many of us want to feel special if not superior in relation to others. We have many euphemisms for those with whom we wish to have no association, and most of them are class-based, some are race-based, others are behavior-based. None of them should be permitted to dictate legal status.

Equal means equal. Until we internalize that, breathe it like the very air we take for granted, we will continue to suffer the kind of strife that often renders our politics abusive and fruitless.

Just sayin’.

blog

Just So You Know…

Recently I’ve received a spate of those nasty politically-naive, rather insipid yet clever emails that go round and round, forwarded from one to another to hundreds, spouting off about the woes of the country, the supposed sins of the Left, and all containing a germ of truth wrapped in misinformation, outrights lies, and substanceless assertion.  Mostly I delete them without a second thought.  They are noise, distraction, mud thrown into the waters of discourse where above all clarity should be our goal.

All of them have to do with what liberalism has done to our country.  All of them are concerned with telling anyone who will listen what the Right is trying to “save us” from.  And all of them are pretty thoughtless.  It would be funny if there wasn’t so much at stake.

Below is a post from Lawrence O’Donnell, a newscaster and polemicist who I have listened to occasionally.  I don’t follow such people, on either side.  From time to time I listen to someone from both camps.  I’ve found Mr. O’Donnell more reasonable than most.  But I thought he really captured something with this, so I’m borrowing it to express my own views.

 

 

 

For the record, I am very tired of the attempt to make me feel guilty for the progress I support.  The only charge I ever heard that had any traction with me about the problems with liberals was the “tax-and-spend” one, but that doesn’t even hold water anymore with me.  Conservatism these days seems—may I stress seems—to be all about preventing people from doing things, about taking rights away from those deemed undeserving.  Liberalism has always, even traditional free market liberalism (which, yes, free market enterprise is a liberal  invention), been about letting people do more, have more rights.  I don’t see much wrong with that as a fundamental principle.

So, just to let anyone interested know…

culture

What Is Wrong With Conservatives?

I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains.

Romney has won the New Hampshire primary.  All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.”  There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination.  And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative.

I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic.  Stodgy, stuffy, proper.  But mainly pennypinching.  A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing.

I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important.  I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait.

That doesn’t square with the recent past.  The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance.  Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses.  But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were.  (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations.  Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget.  You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.)

What they seem adamantly opposed to is spending on people.  By that I mean, social spending.  Welfare, MedicAid, unemployment relief, housing subsidies, minimum wage supports, education, and so forth.  With a few exceptions, we have seen conservatism take on the mantle of Scrooge and move to cut people off.  This has been in the name of States Rights as often as not or welfare reform, but in the last ten years it has come out from its various nom de guerre’s and stood on its own as an attack on Entitlements.

When you look at all the things, say, Ron Paul wants to eliminate from government, you can’t help but thinking that he believes government should do nothing for anyone.  If the factory up the road dumps toxic waste that gets into the water table and poisons your farmland, government should have no brief to take that factory to task and see to it you’re made whole again.  I assume the thinking is, well, you can take the factory to court, just like anyone else.  By “anyone” I take it they mean anyone with the means to mount a protracted legal battle.  Why isn’t it better to enforce laws to prevent the pollution in the first place?  If your boss pays you less for the same or more work based on your gender, according to this thinking there would be no governmental recourse to making your boss either explain the situation or do anything to rectify it.  Likewise, I suppose, in matters of race.  The assumption, I suppose, is that if you feel unfairly treated in one job, you have the right to go get another one.  This ignores the possibility (indeed, the fact) that this situation is systemic.  That’s something no one in the GOP seems to want to address—systemic dysfunction—unless of course they’re talking about all the aspects of government of which they disapprove.

Of course, this is not just Ron Paul.  Most of them, with the notable exception of the two candidates who haven’t a chance in hell of the nomination, seem to have some variation of the “smaller government” mantra as part of their platform.  Taken with the chart linked above, you have to wonder what they mean by “smaller” when it seems they spend as much if not more than the Democrats.  Obviously, Republican administrations have never cost us less money—it’s just that the money gets spent in ways that make it appear they’re focusing their attention on what is “important.”

Debating what is or is not important is certainly legitimate and we’ve been doing that for over two centuries.  And certainly intractability has never been absent from our political discourse—such intransigence led, most famously, to the Civil War.  But we have also grown accustomed to such stances being in the distant past, not part of our present reality.  Meanness in politics has always been around, but it seems the GOP has, at least in some of its members, embraced it in particularly pernicious ways.  The gridlock of the last couple of decades is indicative of the quasi-religious fervor with which members of a major political party have adopted as a tactic.

Newt Gingrich oversaw a government shut-down by instigating an intransigent position.  It can only be seen in hindsight as a power play, since the fiscal policies of the Clinton Administration saw one of the last periods of general economic well-being that reached a majority of citizens.  We wonder now what that was all about.  Gingrich’s “contract with America” was billed as a way to return control and prosperity to the average American, but that happened to a large degree without the hyperbolic posturing he indulged, so it’s a question now what happened.

I’m not going to review the politics of the time here, only point out that what was on the GOP’s collective conscience then and continued to be was their goal to disassemble the apparatus of government that militated against vast accumulations of wealth.  Again, in hindsight it is obvious, and Clinton himself was seduced into the program by signing the repeal of Glass-Steagal, which has led directly to the current economic situation.

Now here lies the peculiarity of our modern times.  You can lay out the causal chain of Republican collusion with the economic catastrophes of the last three decades and find general agreement, even among Republicans.  But when asked if they will continue to vote Republican, well, of course.

Why?

Anyone with a smidgen of historical memory cannot but see Obama as a right center president.  He has done virtually nothing that Reagan would not have been proud of (with the single exception of the Affordable Health Care Act).  Yet you would think he is the devil incarnate if you listen to the Right.  Hatred of Obama has grown to phobic proportions, coupled with more and more strident positions among the suite of Republican contenders for some kind of new rapprochement with Americans to establish—

What?  I’m not altogether sure they understand the kind of country they’re advocating.

Now John Huntsman has bowed out of the race, throwing his support behind Mitt Romney, who is still being viewed with suspicion by the far right of the party—hence the conference in Texas mentioned above.  Not that Huntsman would have had a chance with the evangelicals.  Not only was he reasonable about many issues, he was two things the Right cannot abide: one, he is an advocate for science, supporting both climate change science and evolution, and two, he actually worked for Obama as ambassador to China.  He is, therefore, tainted.

From the few things he has said about them, Romney is fuzzy on climate change and evolution.  One suspects he tends to accept the science but he’s been careful not to come right out and say it, which is tiresome.  But the fact that he has felt it necessary to soft-pedal his positions on these is a telling clue as to what the Right wants.

What they want, briefly, is an America as they always thought it should be.  The strongest, the richest, the least controversial, the purist, and able to do what it has always done in order to stay that way.

If this sounds like a fantasy, well, it is.  It’s Camelot, the City on the Hill, the New York That Never Was.  It is greatness without cost, freedom without dissent, progress without change.

It is also elitism without earning it.

Just as one example, the continued harangue for deregulation.  The case is made—or, rather, asserted—that growth, including jobs, depend on less regulation, that regaining our standard of living and reinvigorating American enterprise requires less government oversight.  How this can be said with a straight face after three decades of deregulation have brought commensurate declines in all those factors, leading finally to near-Depression level unemployment, astounds.  This is surely a sign of psychosis.  From 1981 on there has been a constant move to deregulate and in its wake we have seen devastation.  The airlines were deregulated and within less than two decades most of them had been through bankruptcy, many of them no longer exist (TWA, Pan Am?), and service has suffered.  Oil was deregulated with the promise of holding prices and increasing production, but we have had regular if staggered rises in price, chokes in supply, and an environmentally worse record of accidents.  The savings and loan industry was deregulated which resulted in a major default and rampant fraud, the loss of billions of depositors money and a housing crisis, and we then watched the same thing happen with the deregulation of banking.  How much more evidence is required before that mantra of “deregulation will lead to more jobs and better service” be seen for what it is—a lie.

The Far Right of the GOP is living in a fantasy.  The problem with that is they have a profound influence on the Party mainstream, which is exactly why reasonable candidates like Huntsman and Johnson have no chance of garnering Party support and people like Romney have to waffle on positions in order to woo the tail that is trying to wag the dog.

What I do not understand is how those who make up the mainstream of the Party can continue to support policies that make no sense.  Momentum is one thing, but this has gone on far too long to be attributed to that.

I do not here claim that the Democrats have legitimate and sensible alternatives.  They have their own set of problems.  But Democrats have generally been willing to abandon a policy that is shown not to be effective.  Right now that says a lot.  It’s not much of  a choice, but frankly it is more in line with the country I grew up understanding us to live in.

 

 

 

 

Absurdity

President Santorum

I’ve always wondered about people in Iowa.  Only a little less than those in Idaho, specifically the northern part.  Why, I wonder, should this state be our early warning system, our barometer of coming political shitstorms?

Just as a historical note, the caucus is concerned mainly with choosing state electoral delegates.  In 1972, it was altered slightly to become a bellwether process in early presidential showings. Altered by the Democrats, who sponsored the first early January caucus there.  By 1976, the Republicans opted for the same model, and it’s been rumbling along that way ever since.

Interestingly, though both parties participate, national attention is almost entirely on the Republicans.

This year’s caucus may tell us why.

I admit, before today I knew very little about Rick Santorum’s stands on issues unrelated to sex.  So I Googled him.  There’s a link to Where I Stand/Rick Santorum.  When you click it, you are taken immediately to a donation page.  Right up front, before you find out one more thing about him, his hand is out.  I suppose this is all right, since I frankly can’t imagine anyone but those who have already decided that he’s the one will go there, so why not get the business out of the way first?

Click the next link and you get to his main campaign page and then you can click on the Where I Stand button.  Here’s the page.   As you go down this list, you find almost nothing overtly related to the topic that has become the chief identifier for Santorum since he was thrown out of his Pennsylvania senate seat, namely his attitude toward sex.  Instead we find a list that could be found on almost any mainstream politician’s roster of important talking points.

At the bottom, though, is a final section, 10 Steps to Promote Our Interests Around the World.  Here it gets interesting.  The first two are typically Republican—a call for broader “free markets” and the promotion of religious liberty.  That one is worth quoting:  “… religious pluralism where people of faith have the right to pursue their beliefs and not be abused by either their government or a majority. This is the only ground upon which we can truly live in peace with our differences and also advance the moral teachings which are essential for freedom to thrive.”

This sounds almost mainstream, doesn’t it?  Nowhere on his site does he expound upon the basis of such religious egalitarianism, but he does advocate the traditional conservative backing of Israel (even though he states in another section that “housing” issues there should be on equal footing between Israel and Hammas.  Not sure what that means).  But you must also keep in mind that christian conservatives have for years been claiming that they are “under assault” by a godless government and majority, and that this is Santorum’s constituency.

You have to go to his public speeches to realize that his moral universe is driven by an almost Old Testament view of morality, which requires the rolling back of personal liberties that do not fit within such a framework.  He’s a vocal opponent not just of abortion but of birth control and on more than one occasion he has claimed that he opposes birth control because it promotes multi-partner sex, which is a guaranteed path to horrible diseases.  He is a forceful opponent of gay marriage, something that has already become a fact in this country, though not federally.  So right there he has stated his moral position, which will require him to strip rights from people.

As you continue down his list of proposals, his focus is clearly on the Middle East and a little bit on China.  There’s a strong whiff of the Cold War in his specifics—missile bases, increased intelligence operations, and a pronounced suspicion of Iran.

In short, most of this is mainstream Republican.  He’s opposed to Obamacare, but that’s no distinction, they all are—even though as the law works its way into practice it is becoming increasingly clear that much of it will be popular, and possibly even radical enough to work to the nation’s benefit.

There is something that bothers me, but it bothers me about all of them, not just Santorum.  One of his proposals states:  “…we need to change our information operations abroad to promote our core values of freedom, equality, and democracy — just as we did with the Soviet Empire in the 1980s.”

That in itself doesn’t trouble me so much—it’s a debatable bit of propaganda, since we always maintained as part of our efforts against communism an information component—but when combined with this:

  1. Finally, we need to have a national effort to restore the teaching of American history in our nation’s schools. It is our children’s worst subject — they simply do not know their own story and thus when they are told ours is a history of aggression and immorality, they have no counter-narrative to refute it. It is worth remembering that Ronald Reagan’s final wish in his farewell address was to ask America to instill in our youth a renewed “informed patriotism.” Unfortunately, we ignored this lesson, and we are reaping the consequences.

If you are going to advocate a deeper understanding of our history as a core principle, then you should also present that history accurately throughout your platform.  The implication of the information quote is that it was our strong advocacy of core ideas that brought the Soviet Union down, and this is simply not true.  Reagan did not crush them by showing them the error of their ideas.  The United States spent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and it collapsed under its own unsustainability.

Of course, that’s not sexy.  But it’s true and consistent with historical accuracy.

But this is a charge that can be leveled equally at all presidential candidates of either party.

On the face of it, Rick Santorum’s proposed policies are not that different from any other candidate currently making a viable bid for the Republican nomination.  Ron Paul is distinct on his foreign policy positions and his economic ideas, but not so much on anything else.  It appears that Rick Perry is about to go back to Texas to lick his wounds and Michele Bachman has finally become the mediocrity she has always been.  (She’s been one of the worst offenders of historical accuracy in this campaign.)  John Huntsman is about to become a footnote.  (Which is a shame, as he seemed to have been the only one of the bunch who had the most traditional conservative viewpoint.)

What is there to say about Newt Gingrich?  He will still run, but he will talk his way out of more and more victories.

So we have Romney, Santorum, and Paul going into New Hampshire.  You could probably mix and match among them and come up with one pretty good candidate, but—

Santorum has made his reputation as an advocate for marriage, absolute monogamy, and a repudiation of homosexuality as a legitimate state of being.  He has made a political fetish out of sex and abortion.  And his pronouncement upon the results of the Iowa Caucus that the cohesion of the family is the source of economic progress is a pompous oversimplification and distraction about the nature of economies and the variety of human experience and potential.  He makes a big deal about supporting religious pluralism, but has been clear about his aversion to human pluralism.

Why am I harping on this?  Is it just about the sex?

Well, no.  But the sex is a marker for the problem.  It’s about freedom of association.

The personal liberty movements of the 20th Century—civil rights, racial equality, gender equality, gay rights—all share one common feature: they are all concerned with the freedom of association.  With whom may we associate…and how?

To say to people that their choices concerning with whom and in what way they will spend their lives must be limited by a particular social convention is perhaps an underappreciated cost of this conservative war on gays and women.  It is in a very real sense telling people that they may have only certain kinds of conversations with only certain kinds of people.

Santorum might be very surprised by this notion.  In his view, and the view of the GOP lo these last few decades, barring gays from marriage and women from full equality is supposed to free people from being forced to make choices they don’t wish to make.  I’ve never understood how that works—by expanding rights, how is it that we therefore limit them?—but it really was never about controlling one’s own life, but about controlling the choices of others.  If people are kept in neat, distinct boxes—husband, wife, toddler, preteen, teen, and young adult, christian, working-middle-upper middle class—business can operate more confidently, predict trends, guarantee profits.  If everyone is running around messing with the categories, who knows what the future will bring?

(You think I jest?  Expanded freedoms bring expanded expectations, which takes control from one group and gives it to another.  Why do you think business is so keen on busting unions and shipping jobs overseas?)

I didn’t see anything on Santorum’s site about energy policy or, beyond his pledge to end Obamacare, anything about public health—except a safe commitment to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and a concern for fraud in MediCare.  I didn’t see anything there about his commitment to science, but given the distortions he has indulged in his war on abortion I doubt he has much use for it—that and his vocal advocacy of a religious temperament.

I would like to know how any of these people think they can enlarge and advance the cause of freedom by taking it away from groups they don’t like.

It’s no secret that I won’t be voting for any of these people next November.  I rather doubt that, in the unlikely event that he somehow snags the nomination, I’d vote for John Huntsman.  The problem is not so much them as candidates as the fact that they are tied to a political party that has gone completely off the rails in my view.  Since 2010 the GOP in congress has managed to be on the wrong side of almost every issue, simply in their blind hatred of Obama.  They have repudiated programs that originated with them simply because Obama advocated support for them.  I haven’t respected their social agenda for decades and now their unwavering and idiotic support of tax cuts and regulation rollbacks in the face of one of the worst failures of laissez-faire policy since 1929 doesn’t show so much their love of the rich as it does their complete lack of common sense.

But I had to go look, since the good Republicans of Iowa have elevated Mr. Santorum up to the status of a real contender, because I really didn’t know.  His reputation has been so colored by his pathological obsession with other people’s sex lives that I knew nothing about his other positions.  Now I do.

I think I can confidently predict that Obama will be reelected.  I don’t say that’s a good thing.  But the thought of Rick Santorum in the White House is a very sobering thought.