Sheila – Page 1019 – Sheila Kennedy

Cookies and Savvy Politics

Many years ago, when I first became what we now call a “straight ally,” working for equal rights for gays and lesbians, the only members of the community who were politically visible tended to be “in your face” activists. These were not people who appreciated nuance. Of course, this has been true of every political movement, from civil rights to women’s rights; they were started by the more passionate—okay, the more strident—members of the group suffering discrimination. As cultural attitudes changed and the mainstream became more receptive to the message, the movements themselves became more strategic. The movement for gay equality has been no different.

Case in point: a recent episode in Indianapolis, Indiana, involving—of all things—cookies.

The controversy occurred when “Just Cookies,” a bakery with a lease in the Indianapolis City Market, refused to fill an order for cookies with rainbow sprinkles. The order was placed by the local university’s gay rights organization, to celebrate Coming-Out Day. (The owner—clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer—said he had two young daughters and couldn’t fill the order because he needed to model “morality” for them. I’m not sure what is immoral about rainbow sprinkles, and the daughters turned out to be college-aged, which certainly didn’t help, but bigotry is seldom logical.)

The City of Indianapolis has a human rights ordinance, passed relatively recently, that prohibits discrimination based upon sexual orientation, and there was an immediate hue and cry, accompanied by lots of publicity featuring individuals leveling accusations of discrimination. The Mayor’s office promised to investigate whether the Ordinance had been violated. That in turn animated the usual suspects—the local unit of the American Family Association among them—to leap to the defense of the owner and his right to his religious beliefs. It seemed likely that the controversy would devolve into the usual name-calling and righteous indignation, allowing the right-wing to generate anti-gay hostility and ramp up their fundraising.

But then, the gay community and its allies did something politically brilliant.

The sponsors of the Human Rights Ordinance and the presidents of two major gay rights organizations wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper. That letter made several points:

The Ordinance prohibits discrimination—for example, a refusal to sell cookies to gay groups or individuals.
The Ordinance does not—and constitutionally could not—require a business owner or individual to support a political cause with which he disagrees.
Just Cookies had never (to the authors knowledge) refused to sell cookies to gay people or groups; it had, however clumsily, declined to endorse a political position.
The authors strongly disagreed with the political position of the owner, but—echoing Voltaire—defended his right to hold that position. (To which they added the hope that those who disagreed with their advocacy of equality would be equally supportive of their rights.)

The letter was both legally correct and politically brilliant. The Indianapolis Star—never noted for a pro-gay-rights bias—ran a favorable front-page story and an editorial, the latter commending the gay community for its “graciousness.” Both the story and the editorial made the bigots look small and extreme. The electronic media followed suit. Rather than the typical “fringe vs. fringe” coverage such conflicts tend to generate, the gay community came out looking mainstream and reasonable, and the anti-gay activists were deprived of a favored tactic: accusing those of us who are pro-gay-rights of “religious bigotry.”

And at the end of the day, thanks to the amount and kind of publicity generated, a lot of people will demonstrate their disagreement with the owner’s political position—which he has every right to hold—by buying their cookies elsewhere. Which they have every right to do.

A consequence sweeter than cookies.

Recycled Politics

Indiana citizens aren’t making much progress recycling paper and plastic, but we seem to be leading in the reuse of old politicians. Evan Bayh is apparently preparing to run for Governor again, and in the race to replace him, Republicans want us to send Dan Coats back to Washington—a city he is intimately familiar with, having been there as a Representative, Senator, Ambassador and lobbyist.

I don’t know which is worse, listening to Bayh piously declare that he left the Senate because his sensibilities were offended by partisan sniping, or listening to Coats engage in it.

This is the point in the political cycle where it is nearly impossible to avoid 30-second spots in which Candidate A explains that Candidate B is unfit for public office, because—unlike Candidate A—Candidate B lacks “Hoosier Values.” Plenty of politicians employ these tactics and the empty phrases that invariably accompany them, and it may be unfair to pick on Dan Coats, but his ads are especially vacuous.

Here is a man who certainly should know something about policy. He’s been part of the legislature; a member of George W. Bush’s inner circle (he was even tapped by Bush to shepherd a Supreme Court nominee through the confirmation process) and most recently, a high-priced lobbyist. Yet his political ads are absolutely devoid of content; they consist entirely of labeling and name-calling.

The wisdom and adequacy of the new healthcare law is an entirely appropriate issue for debate and discussion. Coats clearly disapproves of the law, but he doesn’t tell us why. He just calls it “Obamacare” and “a bad idea.” What parts of it does he disagree with? Does it go too far? Not far enough?

In one ad, Coats says that support for the economic stimulus was a “vote against Indiana.” There is an overwhelming consensus among economists—conservative and liberal alike—that the economy would be immeasurably worse without that stimulus. If Coats disagrees, he doesn’t tell us why. We are supposed to know the stimulus was “bad” because it is associated with “Pelosi, Reid and Obama.” Should voters ask Coats how he reconciles his claim to fiscal conservatism with his support for the profligate Bush administration? These are not arguments; they are guilt-by-association smears.

As long as we’re recycling, I’ll resurrect the famous Wendy’s commercial question: where’s the beef?

The truth is that there isn’t any “beef.” Coats—and Bayh, if he really does run again for Governor—are useful to their respective parties because they have money and name recognition, not because they bring energy or new ideas to the table. They have name recognition because they’ve been around for a long time—and have thus been part of the problem. They have money because they are old Washington insiders who’ve demonstrated an ability to play nicely with the vested interests. We can assume they have no new ideas, because they aren’t offering any.

I’ll recycle paper and plastic, but I draw the line at recycling old politicians.

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The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Dickens’ classic “A Tale of Two Cities” begins with the sentence, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” That’s a pretty apt description of the world the gay community inhabits right now.

Two national polls in as many months have found, for the first time, narrow majorities of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage. A judge recently struck down “don’t ask, don’t tell” and a Congressional vote that would repeal it is pending as I write this. In California, Proposition 8 has been found unconstitutional, and neither the Governor nor the Attorney General has proposed to appeal that ruling.

Signs of favorable cultural change are everywhere; the New York Times runs same-sex wedding announcements, House and Garden television routinely showcases renovations of homes owned by gay couples. (Even in the Indianapolis Star, the real estate story last week pictured the home of a gay couple with children, with no commentary whatsoever.) Poll after poll documents the overwhelmingly accepting attitudes of people under 35.

The best of times.

And then there are the dark clouds.

It is a truism that economic uncertainty generates intergroup tensions. Prejudice against Jews, Catholics, Muslims, immigrants and gays spikes in times of economic distress, and this is one of those times.

If it were only the economy, that would be troubling enough. But as I wrote last month, we seem to be in the throes of a massive cultural backlash. Older white, Protestant, heterosexual males are not going to relinquish their previously privileged status in our society without a fight. What makes it worse is that most of them cannot articulate what it is that makes them so furious—probably because they really don’t know themselves. They just know that the world they were born into (or think they were born into—that “leave it to Beaver” world that existed, if at all, for a very few families) has changed.

If you listen to the Tea Party activists for even a few minutes, you cannot help but be struck by the fact that they cannot tell you what they are for. They can rant on and on about what they are against—much like a cranky two-year-old, or that character from “Broadcast News” who was “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”

So far, that rage has not had much effect upon the fight for gay equality. We have some crazy candidates like the woman who won the GOP primary in Delaware, who—among other things–wants to outlaw gays and masturbation (good luck with that, honey), or the Montana Republican platform provision advocating the re-criminalization of homosexuality, but those are embarrassments even to the three sane people left in the GOP.

The balance of power, however, can change pretty quickly. We are less than two months away from an election where the crazy folks are energized and the rational folks are dispirited. If, as many of our pundits predict, the Republicans recapture Congress, it won’t be the party of Reagan and Bush that gains power. Difficult as it may be to believe, the current crop of candidates is far to the right of either of those very right-wing Republican leaders. Even the few centrist Republicans who remain—and they truly are few, and highly endangered—have no choice but to pander to the zealots who have for all intents and purposes taken control of one of America’s major political parties. As someone who worked hard for the GOP for over 35 years, it breaks my heart to see what has become of the party.

There’s another quote that seems apt right now: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. If good people don’t vote in large numbers, and the haters and know-nothings take the reins of power, “the best of times” will be a fleeting memory.

Park It

Mayor Ballard’s proposal to privatize the city’s parking continues to spark bipartisan concern. Last week, the Sunday Star ran a “point-counterpoint” between Deputy Mayor Michael Huber, the proposal’s architect, and Aaron Renn, a respected urban affairs expert who has criticized it. Star editor Dennis Ryerson noted that many open questions should be answered before the City-County Council makes a final decision.

What are those questions?

Why would any city turn over an important part of its infrastructure to any private company for fifty years? Even if the deal were less one-sided fiscally, decisions about where to place meters, how to price them, what lengths of time to allow and so on have an enormous impact on local businesses and residential neighborhoods. They are decisions requiring flexibility in the face of changing circumstances; they are most definitely not decisions that should be held hostage to contracting provisions aimed at protecting a vendor’s profits.

Why would we enter into a contract that will add significantly to the costs of downtown development? Indianapolis has worked hard to encourage construction of hotels, retail establishments and residential units in our urban core. Often, that construction interrupts adjacent parking. Now, the city can choose to ignore that loss of parking revenue, or to charge the developer, based upon the City’s best interests. This contract requires that ACS be paid whenever such interruptions occur. It has been estimated that such a provision would have added over two million dollars to the cost of the current legs of the Cultural Trail.

Why ACS? Much has been written about the problems with Chicago’s parking privatization, but far less about ACS’ track record in places like Washington, D.C., where an audit documented mismanagement, overcharging, over-counting of meters, and the issuance of bogus tickets (ACS gets all the revenue for tickets). Washington lost $8,823,447 in revenue and experienced a twenty-fold increase in complaints from the public. And it wasn’t just D.C. Police officers in Edmonton, Canada, were tried for accepting bribes from ACS, and a few years ago, the company’s CEO and CFO stepped down after admitting to $51 million in stock fraud. Why enter into such a disadvantageous deal for so long a term with a company having so troubling a track record?

One of the problems with privatization in general, as we learned during the Goldsmith administration, is that it leads to speculation about cronyism and political back-scratching. In this case, the Mayor’s personal advisor is a registered lobbyist for ACS through Barnes and Thornburg, the same law firm that employs the President of the City-County Council. Whatever the facts of the situation, those relationships raise an appearance of impropriety.

Finally, why not simply retain control of our infrastructure, and issue revenue bonds for the necessary improvements? Interest rates are at a historic low, making it an excellent time to do so. If this administration simply can’t manage parking, create a Municipal Parking Authority, as Councilor Jackie Nytes has suggested.

However we proceed, we should park this proposal. Permanently.

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Woe is Mayor

These are rough days to be a mayor. If you don’t believe me, look at just two of the issues bedeviling Mayor Ballard right now: police and parking.

In both cases, the Mayor has correctly identified a problem. But in both cases, there are substantial questions about his chosen solutions.

Managing the police is a perennial problem for mayors. Controlling crime and keeping citizens safe is an essential foundation for all the other things a mayor must do. It is no exaggeration to suggest that economic development, service delivery and a city’s quality of life all depend upon the safety of its citizens.

Given the importance of public safety, it’s understandable that Ballard wanted to control IMPD. When he assumed office and wrested control from Sheriff Frank Anderson, he made clear his belief that the Mayor should be the one held accountable for the department’s performance.

Those of us who disagreed pointed out that, in Indiana, the Sheriff is a constitutional office. Unlike the Director of Public Safety, he is elected by and answerable to the voters. Unlike mayors, who have multiple responsibilities, a Sheriffs’ duties and focus all involve law enforcement. If the Sheriff has responsibility for police behavior and public safety, and scandals erupt, voters can express their disapproval quite clearly at the ballot box. If the Mayor controls IMPD, voters must balance approval or disapproval of his public safety performance against their approval or disapproval of other initiatives, sending an inevitably mixed signal.

The Mayor’s current policing woes stem from that decision to seize control early in his term. Both that decision and his current proposal to privatize parking enforcement will hamstring future mayors as well.

Once again, the Mayor has identified a legitimate issue. Our parking meters are old and outdated; our parking fees have not been raised in many years. It is time to take a holistic look at all aspects of downtown parking—revenue to the city, the effect on downtown businesses, the placement of meters and so on. None of the solutions identified for existing problems, however, requires the City to give a private company control of our parking decisions—and a significant portion of our parking revenues—for fifty years.

As several people have pointed out, had a contract of this sort been in effect a few years ago, the City would not have been able to give permission to build the Cultural Trail.

The Mayor’s office defends the proposed privatization by pointing to the large capital outlay needed for new equipment, but the City could easily issue a twenty-year revenue bond for that purpose, and keep both control and all revenues in excess of those needed for bond repayment.

One of the most significant leadership challenges mayors face is deciding when to keep control of a public service and when to vest that control elsewhere. These are structural decisions, and they are especially consequential because they tie the hands of future administrations.

They are ultimately the decisions that determine a Mayor’s legacy.