Author Archives: Sheila

Pride Month Musings

June is Pride Month. It wasn’t so long ago that today’s widespread recognition of–and support for– Pride would have been unthinkable. In my adult lifetime, there have been few changes in social attitudes as swift or as welcome as the legal and social acceptance of LGBTQ Americans.

That said, progress inevitably invites blowback. We are particularly seeing it in punitive legislation directed at transgender Americans. But we are also seeing continued opposition to gay equality from the same Christian Nationalists and religious fundamentalists who are determined to ignore America’s history of racism and other bigotries.

The good news is that anti-gay attitudes are far less pervasive among young Americans; in fact, sociologists and scholars of religion attribute much of the exodus by young people from fundamentalist congregations to distaste for their theological homophobia. Among older, conservative, religious Americans, however, LGBTQ citizens still encounter considerable bias–and when sexual orientation is coupled with HIV, no matter how well controlled, considerable stigma.

It’s tempting, during Pride month and especially during the local celebrations and parades, to focus on the considerable progress made by the gay community, and that progress is well worth celebrating. But it’s important to couple the celebration with recognition of remaining challenges.

For that matter, the contemporary lessons to be drawn aren’t  limited to LGBTQ issues.

Over the years, Black Americans, gay Americans, Jewish and Muslim Americans and other minorities have achieved significant legal protections: civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, and (in the case of LGBTQ folks) recognition of same-sex marriage have all gone a long way to level the legal playing field.

Hearts and minds have proved to be a harder nut to crack.

Too many Americans approach issues of inclusion and equality from a “zero-sum” perspective. The fear of “replacement” (more on that in upcoming posts) is an example. The evident calculation is that If “those people” get rights, my rights have been correspondingly diminished. The history of the gay rights struggle provides an excellent example; remember the hue and cry over “special rights”? The argument was that laws requiring equal legal treatment of gay men and lesbians were really an award of “special rights,” and the implication was that straight people didn’t have those “special rights.” 

When the Founders hammered out the U.S. Constitution, one of its most significant breaks with the past was the establishment of a legal system that would evaluate citizens based upon behavior, not social status or identity. Even when America hasn’t lived up to the principles set out in our constituent documents—and we frequently haven’t—the  official American vision has been one of a society in which group identity is legally irrelevant, a society where an individual’s conduct is the only proper concern of government.

In other words, in America, individuals are supposed to be rewarded or punished based upon what they do, not who they are. Race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and similar markers of group affiliation are supposed to be irrelevant to our legal status. No matter how meaningful those affiliations may be to us personally, the government may not award or restrict our rights based upon them.

Although they seem unable to understand or accept it, that basic element of America’s rule of law protects Christian Nationalists as well as members of minority populations.

The larger challenge we face is how to internalize that legal premise. How do we socialize our children into a worldview that sees other human beings as other human beings, and accepts or dismisses them individually, based upon their actions and behaviors–evidence of the content of their characters–not on their skin color, their sexual orientation or their theological preferences.

We have a way to go…

Happy Pride Month.

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How Do You Spell Despicable?

One of the most telling accusations against self-proclaimed “pro life” activists is that they aren’t really pro life, they are pro birth. If they were really concerned about protecting life, they would support feeding hungry children, and oppose everything from dangerous pollution to gun violence to the death penalty. Instead, their concerns magically vanish once the fetus emerges from the womb.

A report from the Guardian underscores that observation.

At least 10 US states have siphoned millions of dollars from federal block grants, meant to provide aid to their neediest families, to pay for the operations of ideological anti-abortion clinics.

These overwhelmingly Republican-led states used money from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (Tanf), better known as welfare or direct cash aid, to fund the activities of anti-abortion clinics associated with the evangelical right. The clinics work to dissuade women from obtaining abortions.

In all cases, the states used these funds even as Covid-19 caused the worst economic upheaval in nearly a century, left one in four families without enough to eat, and resulted in mass layoffs that had a disproportionate effect on low-income and racial minority Americans.

Among the states that have diverted dollars from feeding hungry children in order to line “pro life” pockets are Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Despicable is too nice a word.

These 10 states funneled the money through “Alternatives to Abortion” programs, part of state budgets established by conservative legislatures and often run through state health departments. They not only send millions in federal welfare funds, but also state taxpayer dollars to such centers.

The article details other measures imposed by the states that effectively prevent TANF and other social welfare funds from reaching their intended beneficiaries. A number of those measures are demonstrably racist, but they all begin with the assumption that poverty is evidence of moral failure; the resulting legislation is thus punitive, rather than ameliorative.

Back in 2017, I reported on a survey that found religion to be a significant predictor of how Americans perceive poverty. Christians, especially white evangelical Christians, are much more likely than non-Christians to view poverty as the result of individual moral deficit.

The article cites Missouri as an example of the results of that view:

“We’ve created a new class of Missourians,” Glenn Koenen, a hunger adviser with the left-leaning group Empower Missouri, said at the time the reforms were passed. “We now have legislated that some of our neighbors are too poor to get help from anti-poverty programs.”

Between 1 January 2016, when the reform went into effect, and April 2021, more than 71% of beneficiaries dropped off Missouri’s program. That included 28,643 children and 16,942 families.

Missouri then spent funds not paid to families on other programs, among them the Alternatives to Abortion program. Since 2017, it has sent $26m to anti-abortion clinics, according to state budgets. The average monthly benefit for a Missouri family is $256.

Evidently, the Missouri legislature was perfectly okay with punishing 28,643 children for their parents’ perceived moral deficiencies.

The article proceeds to document the medically-inaccurate “facts” and outright lies routinely told by these “Crisis pregnancy” centers to the women who visit them, and it reports on the religious indoctrination to which they must submit in order to get the minimal help–diapers and milk, for instance–that the centers offer. It also points out that nationally there are far more such centers than there are abortion providers– more than 2,500 ideologically focused, anti-abortion clinics, compared with just 800 abortion providers.

There are a lot of adjectives we might use to describe a refusal to feed and clothe living children in order to force women to give birth. Pro-life is definitely not one of them.

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Twenty Percent Scary

I recently came across an article reporting that twenty percent of Americans are Christian Nationalists. I have no way of evaluating the accuracy of the survey research that led to that number, but even ten percent would be an absolutely chilling number.

Attention to the phenomenon and the threat it poses has spiked recently, thanks to the central role played by Christian Nationalists in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. A Google search for the term returns a large number of articles, academic analyses,  and opinion pieces, most of them highly critical. Thomas Edsall rounded up a subset of the academic articles in a recent column for the New York Times opining that it would be impossible to understand January 6th without investigating the movement’s role in the uprising.

Edsall quoted from a book by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry,“Taking America Back for God,” which described Christian Nationalism as a stew of “nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.” Christian Nationalism, as they analyzed it, is ethnic and political as much–or more–than religious.

Understood in this light, Christian nationalism contends that America has been and should always be distinctively ‘Christian’ from top to bottom — in its self-identity, interpretations of its own history, sacred symbols, cherished values and public policies — and it aims to keep it this way.

Edsall quotes a similar sentiment from the author of another recent book, “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,”

It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power. It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy, but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity, answering to what some adherents call a ‘biblical worldview’ that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders.

Perry addressed the role of Christian Nationalism on January 6th, noting the use of religious symbols during the insurrection such as the cross, Christian flag, Jesus saves sign, etc.

But also the language of the prayers offered by the insurrectionists both outside and within the Capitol indicates the views of white Americans who obviously thought Jesus not only wanted them to violently storm the Capitol in order to take it back from the socialists, globalists, etc., but also believed God empowered their efforts, giving them victory.

There’s much, much more. It’s important to recognize that Christian Nationalists aren’t going to be defeated by secular bloggers, critical “elitist” columnists, or worried academics. The movement can only be effectively countered by those I think of as actual Christians, and fortunately, some have risen to the challenge.Their organizational statement begins by describing their concern with “a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy — Christian nationalism.”

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

Instead, these Christians believe that:

People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square.

Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.

One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community.

Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.

Religious instruction is best left to our houses of worship, other religious institutions and families.

America’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions.

Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.

We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship—against religious communities at home and abroad.

Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution. As Christians, we must speak in one voice condemning Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy.

I can only hope (and pray!) that these Christians number more than twenty percent…

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Taxes And Growth

One of the most reliable laments I post to this blog is the absolute refusal of many policymakers  to base their decisions on evidence. We live in a time when experience and reality are no match for the preferred ideologies of our lawmakers. (In all fairness, that phenomenon is probably not new, but it has certainly become more obvious.)

Marketwatch is a business publication that focused upon that disconnect in an article from early May. The title was”Texas, California and Indiana offer surprising lessons about low taxes and economic growth” and the subtitle–which trumpeted the basic conclusion–was “Indiana slashed taxes. Yet wages have fallen even further behind the national average.”

If the subtitle was insufficiently clear, the introductory paragraphs left no doubt:

Among the most common claims of state economic development officials is that higher taxes drive down growth and cause businesses and people to relocate to low-tax states. If you listen to cable news, you are likely to hear dire stories of people fleeing high-tax states in droves.

Yet the high-tax parts of both California and Texas are growing faster than the low-tax parts of both states. And growth in Indiana, which has cut corporate and personal income taxes in the past decade as well as put a cap on property taxes, is dismal.

I tend to foam at the mouth whenever I encounter a reference to Indiana’s property tax cap–not only is the cap bad policy, not only does it disproportionately strangle urban areas in our rural-privileged state, but in an unconscionable move to elevate political game playing over responsible governance, former Governor Daniels constitutionalized the cap–ensuring that, even if subsequent evidence of its counter-productivity emerged, the measure would be virtually impossible to reverse.

The article wasn’t aimed at the multiple flaws of the tax cap, however, so I will leave my extended diatribe for another day.

Why is it that prescriptions for lower taxes, like other seemingly obvious economic “cause and effect” formulations, turns out to be contradicted by real-world evidence?

Modern economic research consistently reports that lower taxes tend to promote growth and migration, but only when all other factors are held constant.

Here’s the rub: It is straightforward to create a model holding all these other factors constant, but in the real world, they never are constant. So the role of taxes has to be weighed against the value of what tax dollars provide.

It took me a long time to recognize the importance of that insight. I used to think it was obvious that a higher minimum wage would depress job creation–until I realized that such a result required all things being equal–and all things are rarely, if ever, equal. The “obvious” result ignored–among other things–the effects of low-wage workers’ increased buying power. We now have real-world evidence from jurisdictions that raised the minimum wage that the “obvious” result isn’t necessarily the actual result.

In the case of economic growth, the article looks at the rivalry between Texas and California, and finds (surprise!) that the popular rhetoric doesn’t reflect reality.

Stories about people “fleeing” California for Texas are common, and Elon Musk’s high-profile announcement that he was moving to Texas fuels the anecdote-driven news cycle. Taxes per capita are higher in California than in Texas, giving weight to the story that low taxes are driving this migration.

In fact, in the last year for which we have data, two out of every 1,000 Californians departed for Texas, while 1.2 of every 1,000 Texans moved to California. This is hardly a notable exodus, and it hardly explains why a rational Texan would head to California. Something else has to be going on.

Furthermore, as the article notes, people are more likely to move from city to city within a state than they are to move out of state, and tax rates vary far more between local governments than between states.

In California, the total state and local taxes in the highest-taxed place were more than three times that of the low-tax county. In Texas, the difference is three times as large as in California.

Further contradicting the preferred story, it turns out that population growth in both California and in Texas is concentrated in the higher-tax places. That’s because–as city planners have long insisted–what matters most isn’t the tax rate (although it certainly factors in) but the quality of life. It’s value for the dollar.

 Taxes represent one price for living in a particular city or town, but value — not price — is the key decision variable.

For the average family, value comes from tangible amenities like safe, livable neighborhoods, high-quality schools and great parks and trails. They go far beyond natural amenities such as beaches and mountains.

That’s a lesson I doubt Indiana’s gerrymandered legislators will ever learn.

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True…And Very Sad.

Rick Wilson is one of the disillusioned Republicans who founded the Lincoln Project, and he recently opined about the devolution of the Grand Old Party. The Lincoln Project, as most of you are aware, was created by a group of long-time, well-respected strategists and operatives who had repeatedly been tapped for significant roles in high-profile Republican campaigns. The Project wasn’t composed of ordinary Republican voters who’d become disillusioned; it was the product of respected and savvy political professionals.

Wilson describes himself as an American political strategist, media consultant, and author. He’s produced televised political commercials for governors, U.S. Senate candidates, Super PACs, and corporations. (He’s also the author of the book Everything Trump Touches Dies.)

Wilson’s basic point in the rant that follows was that the GOP–far from being the party of Lincoln–is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Green, she of the “California fires were started by Jewish space lasers” and more recently “Being made to wear masks to battle the pandemic is just like what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust.”

Wilson’s takedown was heated and comprehensive, and I decided it was worth sharing in its entirety– so with apologies for the length of the quotation, here it is:

This woman is not an outlier. She is the core of the Republican Party. She is the heart and soul of the Republican Party. She is more important in the Republican Party ecosystem than Kevin McCarthy. He issued a pusillanimous, limp-dicked statement today about her finally after getting beat up for hours and hours on end, and I gotta tell you something: He does that because he wants to stay [minority leader]. And he knows that she is the future of the GOP. She is the core, the heart, the soul of what the Republican Party now stands for. It is idiotic, it is violently stupid. It hates experts, it hates authority, it hates science, it hates culture. It hates everything except their reflexive trolling of the rest of the country. She is a monstrous person. She is a person who I would not piss on her if she was on fire. She is a person who deserves all the public … shame you could possibly imagine. But here’s the thing: Kevin McCarthy will not take a single step to expel her from Congress. She is the heart and soul of the Republican Party today. She is exactly the center of it, she is what they have become, and everybody in the Republican Party who goes, ‘Oh, no, that’s not me,’ they only do it quietly. They won’t go out in her face and say, ‘Shut the hell up.’ They won’t go in her face and say, ‘You are a crude, anti-Semite clown.’ They won’t do that because they understand she is their future. She is the party as it is written today, she is the party as it is comprised today. I find her so repulsive and so disgusting that it is all I can do not to get myself thrown off social media by saying what I really feel about her.

Before you dismiss this diatribe as an overheated and exaggerated description of Greene’s influence, let me tell you about a recent incident in Nashvillle, Tennessee.

Hatwrks, a hat shop in Nashville, advertised an anti-vaccine yellow star patterned after those forced on Jews by Nazi Germany. Needless to say, that product has been met with considerable backlash; as a local rabbi told Nashville TV station WSMV, “Using the yellow star, or any holocaust imagery for anything, is a disservice to the memory of the six million Jews who were systematically murdered during the Holocaust.”

It boggles the mind that proprietors of any retail establishment would hear the ludicrous anti-Semitic ramblings of someone like Greene, and then produce a product endorsing her odious comparison. But then, it boggles the mind that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans believe Donald Trump won an election that he lost decisively.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is obviously mentally ill, and she’s far from the only elected Republican to routinely manifest delusions and mental disorders. What is truly terrifying, however, is not the presence of a few mental cases–it is the accuracy of Rick Wilson’s accusation, and the fact that clinical insanity is arguably the central characteristic of a once-respectable political party.

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