A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
Paul Krugman’s column on The Dog Whistle deserves to be read by anyone and everyone who professes bafflement over today’s incoherent politics.
The only thing he omits is a discussion of the degree to which anti-Obama fervor is motivated by the color of this President’s skin. But then, that phenomenon is hard to miss for anyone who isn’t willfully ignoring it.
I can’t add anything to Krugman’s dead-on analysis. Go read it.
CommentsA couple of days ago, the Indianapolis Star reported that a lawsuit had been filed by same-sex couples seeking to have Indiana recognize their marriages.
The usual suspects said the usual things.
“For years we have warned legislators and policy leaders that homosexual activists were seeking to force a new definition of marriage upon every church, school and business in Indiana,” Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana said in a statement.
“Today, a lawsuit has been filed in the Southern federal court district of Indiana to overturn our laws that recognize marriage as not just any relationship, but as the special union of a man and a woman which benefits children and society like no other. We knew this would happen when the legislature sent the signal that it would not protect our laws with the final passage of the Marriage Protection Amendment this year. This issue now rests in the hands of unelected judges, just as a majority of our legislators wanted, rather than letting the people of Indiana decide the future of marriage.”
State Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, a staunch supporter of Indiana’s same-sex marriage ban, immediately took to Twitter to criticize the lawsuit.
“We knew this day was coming,” he said. “Our federal court system has evolved into the forum of choice for liberal activism.”
Curt Smith of the Indiana Family Institute, another supporter of the constitutional amendment, said lawmakers have “denied the people of Indiana the right to preserve marriage and handed an invitation to our opponents to go ahead and knock marriage out before Hoosiers can vote on it in 2016.”
Same old, same old.
My question is: where the hell was the reporter? By acting simply as a transcriber—by simply quoting the hysterics of these reliable homophobes without question or comment—the reporter left readers who don’t know better (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of them!) with the distinct impression that passage of HJR 3 would have averted this lawsuit and/or its outcome.
Not so.
Let’s try this one more time: the federal constitution (you know, the one these guys all claim to revere) trumps state law. Even state constitutional law. If and when the courts decide that the U.S. Constitution requires recognition of same-sex marriages, a contrary provision in the Indiana Constitution will be rendered null and void. Hoosiers can vote until the cows come home—if same-sex marriage is entitled to Equal Protection of the Laws, their votes can’t change that. The Bill of Rights is a counter-majoritarian document; it protects fundamental rights against efforts by majorities to deny those rights to unpopular or disfavored individuals or minorities.
Indiana citizens can’t vote on my reading materials. They don’t get to choose my religion, my friends or my politics. They can’t vote to deprive me of the right to a jury trial if I’m arrested, and they don’t get to vote to allow police to stop and search me without probable cause. Since 1967 (when those “activist” judges recognized that citizens of all colors came within the Bill of Rights’ protection) popular majorities haven’t been able to vote on whether a white person can marry a black one.
Micah Clark, Curt Smith and their ilk may be too blinded by their animus to GLBT folks to understand this basic element of our constitutional jurisprudence, but there is no excuse for the Star reporter.
CommentsI’m continuing my read of Somin’s book on ignorance and democracy, and getting increasingly depressed, as he methodically marshals research demonstrating both the depths of our ignorance and the inadequacy of the so-called “shortcuts” we use (reliance on our everyday experience, political parties, etc.) to improve the bases on which we make our political choices.
Somin talks a lot about the very human tendency to “cherry pick,” to focus on information that supports our preconceptions and preferred beliefs. (As the old Simon and Garfunkel lyric goes: man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest…) I am going to prove the point by sharing research that supports one of my preconceptions: studies indicating that highly informed voters are disproportionately socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and supportive of higher taxes.
Now, without going back to the cited research and examining its definition of these terms, we can’t know for sure what is meant by “socially liberal”—although we can reasonably assume that it means what it does in everyday parlance– pro-choice, pro-gay rights, “live and let live” folks.
Fiscal conservatism is a more ambiguous descriptor. For me, at a minimum it means paying as we go: if you invade a country, you pay for it. Then and there, not three generations hence. It doesn’t mean government emulating business, but it does mean that government operates in a businesslike fashion. For some self-described “fiscal conservatives,” of course, it means cutting social programs (but generally not business subsidies, or favored tax treatment for farmers and oil interests). I would hope that all people who consider themselves fiscally conservative would endorse lots of transparency, so that (the few) voters who follow such things could know what is on or off the books (and increasingly, who’s cooking them).
Likewise, “supportive of higher taxes” raises the reasonable question: higher than what? For what?
That caveat aside, a willingness to support “higher taxes” is often shorthand for a willingness to pay for the common good.
Evidently, it’s also a shorthand for understanding the way things work—and the fact that we get what we pay for.
CommentsTikkun Daily recently published an article by one David Harris-Gershon (aka “the Troubadour”) that began as follows:
One might think, given the record number of anti-gay bills being proposed across the United States, that the religious right’s legislative influence – and cultural entrenchment – is growing. In fact, they are evidence that the exact opposite is the case.
What we are seeing right now are the last gasps of religious fundamentalism and its normative influence on the national stage. Just as an individual on his deathbed experiences a momentary flurry of energy and clarity before descending into his final end, we are witnessing the religious right’s final flailing on the national stage. To understand this, one doesn’t need to examine Pew studies on changing attitudes, nor the consolidation of religious fundamentalism into pockets of the Southeast and the West.
All one needs to do is look at legislation being offered right now, and the mainstream ridicule such legislation is garnering.
As my grandmother might have said, from your mouth to God’s ears, Mr. Troubadour!
CommentsI guess one person’s discrimination is another’s religious liberty.
The most contentious provisions of George W. Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiative” were those that proposed to allow organizations doing business with government to discriminate on the basis of religion. The Initiative has largely faded away, but the debate –as we saw yesterday in the Indiana General Assembly–keeps popping up.
Here’s a scenario that may help illuminate the issue: Church X feeds the hungry in a soup kitchen in its basement. If local government pays for both the soup and an employee hired to ladle the soup, can Church X refuse to hire a soup ladler who does not live in accordance with Church X’s beliefs? i.e., an unwed mother, a GLBT person, a Jew?
If Church X were using its own money to run the soup kitchen, it could hire who it wants. It could even require the hungry to pray over their soup. The Free Exercise Clause protects churches from anti-discrimination laws inconsistent with their teachings (it would be ludicrous to insist that Baptists consider hiring an atheist Sunday School teacher). Free Exercise protects Eric Miller’s pastors no matter how extreme their anti-gay rhetoric.
But (you knew there was a “but,” didn’t you?) that’s when they are using their own money.
When a religious organization has a contract with government–when it accepts tax dollars to provide a secular service–citizens have the right to expect that the service will be provided in a non-discriminatory way. We have a right to insist that people whose salaries we are paying with our tax dollars be protected against discrimination–including discrimination based upon religious dogma.
Most states agree, and most have laws providing that when governments contract with private or nonprofit organizations–including religious organizations–the contractor must agree to abide by the state’s civil rights laws.
Yesterday, Eric Turner tried to change that longstanding practice. Perhaps he was “getting even” for losing the second sentence of HJR 3. Perhaps–as one reporter suggested–he was trying to rescue Indiana Wesleyan University‘s workforce training contract. (Turner filed the measure shortly after the state rejected a longstanding workforce training contract with Wesleyan. The attorney general’s office determined language allowing the Christian university to hire in part based on religion violated state law.)
Whatever his motive, Turner proposed amending Indiana’s civil rights law to allow religious institutions doing business with the state to hire and fire employees for religious reasons.
The measure narrowly passed the House Ways and Means Committee, but Speaker Brian Bosma killed the measure shortly after it sparked a heated debate on Twitter. (His experience with HJR 3 may have dampened his enthusiasm for culture war politics.)
Look, if despising GLBT people, or Jews or Muslims or whoever, is really, really important to your religious organization, go for it! Hire people based upon religious criteria, provide services only to people who agree with you, preach your dogma to whoever will listen. No problem.
Just don’t demand tax dollars to subsidize those activities.
No one is interfering with your freedom to discriminate. We’re simply declining to finance it.