Monthly Archives: June 2013

I Should Probably Stick to the Comics….

I love leisurely Sunday mornings. I still get the newspapers (Star and New York Times) on paper, and while I have long since gone to electronic receipt of the “funnies,” I will never be as comfortable with online formats as I am with old-fashioned newsprint.

That said, it’s impossible to read the news without being forcibly reminded how quickly and dramatically the world is changing, how complicated our reality is, and how difficult it is for many of us to accept those changes or deal with them.

Three totally different articles from today’s Star underscored the pace of change, the resistance to it, and not incidentally, our need to be sure we are asking the right questions in order to deal with it.

Least important, but telling, was the Varvel cartoon portraying the upcoming arguments over same-sex marriage in the Indiana General Assembly by drawing a castle with a moat around it. I’m not entirely sure what he thought he was saying with this image–presumably that our legislature is impervious to outside opinions–but it inadvertently (and accurately) portrayed our lawmakers as residents of the 17th Century.

The question is, how do legislatures or citizens who are firmly ensconced in the past deal with things like bitcoins?  The business section had a fairly lengthy article about this new currency, composed of nothing more than computer code, and not backed by the “full faith and credit” of any government. This is one of many spontaneous new ways of doing business via the internet, a method that allows for anonymity and avoids the problems of foreign exchange. Its value is entirely determined by market forces (and that value has been extremely volatile). I have no idea whether bitcoins are a harbinger of our future, or an experiment that will fizzle–but the very concept has to be unsettling to the “gold standard” folks who populate talk radio and TV and are currently encouraging everyone to buy gold or trade in their paper money for silver coins. If they still don’t understand that money gets its value from people’s willingness to accept it, they are going to have a lot of trouble dealing with bitcoin and its progeny.

Less arcane, perhaps, was the article about rapidly changing attitudes toward marijuana. I’ve written before about the insanity of our drug war, and evidently, a lot of people have come to realize how self-defeating our approach to drug use has been. The problem is, as the article demonstrated, we are still asking the wrong questions–still in thrall to an approach that fails to distinguish between use and abuse.

Both sides of this debate are drawing wrong conclusions from wrong questions. The reason attitudes about pot are changing is that so many people have used marijuana occasionally, much as they have a drink or two occasionally, with no deleterious effect. That leads them to believe pot is harmless and should be legalized. Opponents of legalization point to the (relatively few) addicts, and see danger.

This focus on the substance being abused misses the point. People with addictive personalities can abuse anything–alcohol, tobacco, freon from the air conditioner, grandpa’s heart medicine, inhalents…It is literally impossible to ban everything someone might abuse. With alcohol and tobacco–thanks less to common sense and more to corporate lobbyists–we’ve found a workable middle ground: we regulate, tax and inform. And it works; in most places, it is much easier for teens to get drugs than it is for them to buy alcohol. (As one drug war critic noted, when was the last time you saw the owner of the local liquor store hanging around the schoolyard saying “Psst, kids. We got a new shipment of Stoly in today”?)

The world isn’t only changing. Thanks in no small part to science and technology, it’s getting more complicated.

If we stay in that 17th-Century castle protected from reality by a moat of our own construction, we’re not going to be able to deal with 21st Century challenges.

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Theology and Human Nature

This morning’s New York Times has an article about Paula Deen  and the black church’s tradition of forgiveness. (Hate the racism, love the racist.)

The article itself is less than newsworthy–it uses the current flap over Deen’s cluelessness as a “hook” for a general discussion of the black church and the theology of forgiveness–but it reminded me of an important difference between Christian and Jewish teachings that I have often pondered. Christians are told to love their neighbors; Jews are taught to “do justice.” In other words, we don’t have to love anyone, but we must treat everyone as we would want to be treated.

No offense to my Christian friends, but doing justice has always seemed a lot easier.

It’s sort of like the First Amendment. I don’t have to like what you have to say, but I do have to let you say it. I don’t have to agree with your ideas, but I do have to agree that you have as much right to express them as I have to express mine. If current behaviors are any indication, it’s hard enough to get people to respect each others’ rights. Love seems to be pushing it.

I mean, let’s be honest. There is no way I’m going to love Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann, and if they knew me, they’d be equally hard-pressed to love me. I realize that, unlike politics, theology isn’t “the art of the possible,” but I’m glad my tradition only requires me to be fair and just. Loving these people is probably beyond me.

I wonder how Christians manage it.

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Is Intellectual Honesty Too Much to Expect?

Okay, that’s a rhetorical question.

After Governor Pence responded to the decision striking down DOMA, citizens who disagreed with him flooded his Facebook page. Their comments were removed; when asked about that, Pence said the comments had been “uncivil” and profane. As the media has reported, screenshots proved otherwise. Evidently, our governor is too thin-skinned to engage in good faith with those holding opinions different from his own, so his staff simply erased them.

That’s a relatively minor–and all too predictable– example, however. What really caught my eye was an Op-Ed penned by Curt Smith in yesterday’s Star–a counter to the Star’s surprisingly excellent editorial.

Curt Smith, for those who are unfamiliar with his background, is a longtime local culture warrior. I first met him when I was the ‘token heterosexual’ in a group that visited the offices of Senator Dan Coats to express concerns about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” This was during Coats’ first term, and Smith was his AA. Smith met with the group–Coats did not–and spent most of the uncomfortable half-hour telling us that God disapproved of homosexuality.

Let’s just stipulate that it wasn’t a productive meeting.

My other illuminating Curt Smith story occurred when the Jewish Community Relations Council convened a community-wide meeting at the Jewish Community Center, to determine whether the organization should take a formal position on the effort to place a ban on same-sex marriage in the Indiana Constitution. The session began with a panel discussion; David Orentleicher and I argued that a position opposing the Amendment and supporting same-sex marriage was consistent with Jewish values. Curt Smith and someone I don’t recall spoke in opposition. During the lively question and answer period that followed, Rabbi Dennis Sasso spoke eloquently about the importance of separation of church and state, and made several biblical references to justice and equality. Curt Smith responded by telling Rabbi Sasso that he had misunderstood the biblical text, and he offered to send the Rabbi “biblical scholarship” that would straighten him out.

I’ve never forgotten that exchange. It was one of the most arrogant and offensive things I’ve ever seen.

Arrogance is one thing, however, and dishonesty is another. In his column yesterday, Smith wrote the following:

A 2012 study published in a well-known academic journal, Social Science Research, showed children raised by lesbian or gay parents fared worse than children of straight parents when it came to education, mental health, criminal history and other measures. The study looked at a large, random sample of young adults over age 18.

Well, not exactly. If you consult the actual publication, you get a significantly different, and far more nuanced, set of conclusions. The study did find slight advantages enjoyed by children of  non-divorced heterosexual families over those of non-separated homosexual parents. However, this result was qualified because the researcher did not have a sufficient number of children from the latter group to allow her to draw statistically-significant conclusions.  She also did not control for adoption. (A number of studies find that adopted children and biological children have different experiences and thus outcomes that are statistically different.) Furthermore, several scholars commented with concerns about aspects of the study’s statistical methods, and the author readily conceded the legitimacy of those methodological concerns. The study’s basic conclusion? “This probability study suggests considerable diversity among same-sex parents.”
Well, yes.
Most research has found little or no difference between the children of gay and straight parents. Perhaps those studies are wrong. On the other hand, as more states recognize same-sex marriages, and those families have the same social supports that heterosexuals enjoy, such differences as exist may well disappear. I don’t know, and neither does Curt Smith.
But whatever the evidence ultimately shows, honest people will deal with it. Dishonest ideologues will lie about it.
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Random Thoughts on Equality

Yesterday’s Supreme Court rulings on DOMA and Proposition 8 prompted a rush of reactions in me that were not necessarily coherent or connected. So in no particular order….

1) About that “other planet” that several of the Justices seem to occupy: I was astonished to read, in Roberts’ DOMA dissent, words to the effect that it would be “unfair to tar Congress with the brush of bigotry” when analyzing the motives for DOMA’s original passage. Earth to Roberts–it is unnecessary to speculate about the motives for DOMA. Read the frigging legislative history. No one was hiding those motives. And they weren’t pretty.

2)  It is an axiom of genuinely conservative jurisprudence that judges should not strike down laws simply because they find those laws flawed or stupid. To put it another way, it is a central principle of constitutional review that the Court should not substitute its judgment for that of a legislative body absent a constitutional violation. Doing so is the definition of “activism.” Yet,  just the day before yesterday, Roberts and the other “conservatives” were perfectly willing to do just that–to strike down Congressional reauthorization of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act because they didn’t agree with Congress’ analysis of the evidence about which states to include. Yesterday, presumably with straight faces, they wanted to defer to the Congressional decision to ban recognition of same-sex marriages in DOMA. There’s a Yiddish word for this sort of blatant hypocrisy: chutzpah. (I mean, shit, they could at least have waited a week before executing a jurisprudential U-turn….)

3) I see that Indiana’s embarrassing excuse for a Governor is urging the General Assembly to go forward with efforts to place a same-sex marriage ban in the state’s constitution, and Brian Bosma was quick to agree. I find two things in particular infuriating about their smarmy pronouncements: their assumption that other people’s fundamental rights should be subject to majority vote, and the absolute ignorance they display about the nature and purpose of constitutions. Who voted to recognize your marriage, Governor Pence? More to the point, it is totally inappropriate to insert extraneous provisions–be they property tax caps or rules affecting marriage–into a state constitution. It betrays a breathtaking ignorance about the very different legal functions of constitutions and statutes.

4) Speaking of ignorance, in the aftermath of the marriage decisions, we’ve been treated to hysterical rants from both Michelle Bachmann and Rand Paul. As Nancy Pelosi eloquently said when asked about Bachmann’s screed, “who cares?” Rand Paul–who actually expects his Presidential ambitions to be taken seriously–predicted that we’d soon see people marrying their dogs. Um–Rand, that “oldie but goodie” went out of fashion twenty years ago. Fortunately, the constituency that Bachmann, Rand and the Governor are pandering to is dwindling rapidly.

5) Today’s decisions were what I had expected. Marriage equality still has a way to go, and in Indiana, we still have to fight the dark side. That said, even the most conservative court in my lifetime was compelled by precedent and a huge shift in popular opinion to do the right thing. In the aftermath of today’s rulings, some 40% of the US population will live in marriage equality states. Businesses in non-equality states will have increasing difficulties recruiting talented workers, and in luring new employers. (If you were a business choosing a new location, why in the world would you pick Alabama or Mississippi? Or Indiana? You’d go where education was good, talent was available, and you could be competitive for the best workforce.)

6) What happens now? What does the legal landscape look like in the wake of these decisions?  My friend Steve Sanders has a great post at Scotusblog.

So–a good week for gay rights. Not a good week for African-American or Hispanic voters. A draw for Affirmative Action.

At least they’re going home now.

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What Planet Do They Live On?

Yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court effectively eviscerated the Voting Rights Act.

Without bothering to identify precisely what part of the constitution it violated, the Court invalidated Congress’ most recent identification, in Section 4, of the states subject to the operation of Section 5. Section 5 requires that the states so identified obtain prior approval of changes to their voting laws.

According to the majority decision, efforts to suppress minority voting are no longer a problem in the states subject to the act.  The current coverage system, according to Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”

Evidently,  the newspapers on whatever planet Roberts lives on haven’t covered the persistent and concerted efforts at vote suppression that have characterized the last two election cycles.

As the New York Times noted,

The decision will have immediate practical consequences. Texas announced shortly after the decision that a voter identification law that had been blocked would go into effect immediately, and that redistricting maps there would no longer need federal approval. Changes in voting procedures in the places that had been covered by the law, including ones concerning restrictions on early voting, will now be subject only to after-the-fact litigation.

In a saner age, the opinion would not be so devastating; it explicitly allows Congress to “update” the list of states subject to Section Five.

If we had a Congress rather than a partisan zoo, that might actually happen. As it is, however, remedial action is unlikely. When an aide to a Republican House member was asked when Congress might revisit the matter, he responded “Sometime after the Rapture.”

It’s going to get very ugly.

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