Category Archives: Uncategorized

Not Exactly Bragging Rights

A recent analysis by the Bloomberg Administration found that New York’s poverty rate held steady since 2000. That makes the Big Apple the only large U.S. city not to see a spike in that rate.

New York’s Center for Economic Opportunity released the survey last Thursday. It used U.S. Census Bureau data from 2000 and 2012, and determined that the nation’s largest city had maintained a 21.2 percent poverty rate during the intervening 12 years.

It also found that poverty rates in the country’s 19 other largest cities increased, on average, by 36 percent. That’s just an average, however. Rates of increase ranged from 3 percent in El Paso, Tex., to 88 percent in Indianapolis.

That’s right: while we’ve been focusing on bright shiny objects like cricket fields and Super Bowls, we’ve had an 88 percent increase in poverty.

If Mayor Ballard has addressed this issue, I haven’t heard about it.

As a friend of mine recently pointed out, Ballard rarely bothers to visit the Statehouse. He was willing to lobby  for elimination of the at-large council seats, a partisan move that increased his political power, but he’s been conspicuously absent on a whole range of issues having a direct impact on the economic well-being of Marion County residents. His support for public transportation was both tepid and a long time coming, despite the fact that–among other things–transportation is desperately needed to improve poor folks’  access to employment opportunities. He’s said nothing about the importance of expanding Medicaid. Yet lack of access to medical insurance is a major cause of poverty, and the recent hospital layoffs that increase local unemployment are a direct result of Pence’s unconscionable  refusal to expand Indiana’s Medicaid program.

Ballard has also said nothing about the recent, draconian cuts to the Food Stamp program despite the fact that the economic impact of Food Stamp dollars flowing to Marion County is equivalent to holding a Super Bowl every four months.

I guess we know where his priorities lie.

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In Praise of (Certain) Republicans

If there is hope for the re-emergence of the Republican Party to which I gave a significant chunk of my adult life, it lies in the actions of seven GOP members of the Indianapolis City-County Council on Monday night.

Republicans Will Gooden, Ben Hunter, Robert Lutz, Janice McHenry, Michael McQuillen, Jeff Miller and Jefferson Shreve joined all of the Democratic council members in support of a resolution urging the Indiana General Assembly to reject HJR6. (For anyone who has spent the last couple of years on Mars, HJR6 would place Indiana’s current statutory ban on same-sex marriage in the state’s constitution, and would add gratuitous language outlawing civil unions and official recognition of anything else creative minds might consider “equivalent” to marriage.)

Six Republicans voted against the resolution, but the future of the GOP–if it has one–lies with the seven who refused to be bullied by activists from the far right fringes.

The capture of one of America’s major political parties by extremists has made governing–and civil discourse– virtually impossible.  It has already made GOP candidates unelectable in urban areas, and caused wholesale defections elsewhere.

Those seven Republicans understand something that too many of those remaining in the Grand Old Party seem to have forgotten: politics isn’t–or shouldn’t be–religion. When every vote becomes a test of moral purity, when every issue is a contest between Good and Evil, when any deviation from Approved Doctrine is blasphemy and anything less than ardent affirmation is evidence that the errant member has gone over to the dark side, what you have isn’t a political party.

It’s a cult.

Kudos to the seven who refused to drink the Kool-aid. May their numbers increase.

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The Times They are A’Changing

Last weekend, my husband and I attended the wedding of City-County Counselor Zach Adamson to his longtime partner Christian Mosberg.

The couple had been married legally the week before, in Washington, D.C., since Indiana does not recognize same-sex marriages, but a second celebration was conducted back home in Indiana. There was a religious ceremony, involving clergy from several faith traditions, and a reception at Talbott Street that doubled as a fundraiser for Freedom, Indiana–the organization formed to fight HJR6.

Indiana culture warriors Micah Clark and Eric Miller would have been in despair; indicators of social and cultural change were everywhere, and it went well beyond the enthusiastic participation of clergy.

The ceremony wasn’t just attended by friends and families, although there were lots of both. The sanctuary was crowded with local politicians from both political parties. The Republican Mayor was there, as were several Democratic and Republican members of the City-County Council. A number of them also came to the reception, where they mingled with the kind of large and diverse group of friends that is one of the great benefits of urban living.

I couldn’t help thinking about the first time I’d been to Talbott Street, back when it was a truly transgressive venue featuring female impersonators and frequented by patrons who were mostly still closeted. My husband and I were both in City Hall at the time, part of the Hudnut Administration, and we’d come to see a friend perform. We were enjoying the show, when I was approached by a young man I recognized as a city employee. He was absolutely ashen-faced. “Please, please,” he said, “don’t tell anyone you saw me here.”

That was approximately 35 years ago–a long time in my life (although the years certainly seem to have sped by) but a ridiculously brief period as social movements go.

It’s no wonder the pronouncements from the “Christian” Right have taken on a shrill and frantic quality. In what seems like the blink of an eye, GLBT folks have gone from a frightened, despised minority to a group of friends and neighbors with whom we are happy to celebrate life’s rites of passage.

Think I’m exaggerating the degree to which attitudes have changed? Yesterday, notoriously timid Indiana University announced it was joining Freedom Indiana.

Indiana’s legislators may be the last to get the memo, but homophobia is so last century!

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One Thing We Can Do

There isn’t much that rational Republicans and Democrats can do about today’s zealots. John Boehner has obviously lost control of both the “suicide caucus’ and his mind. But we can—and should—avoid repeats of this hostage situation created by extremists who owe their elections not to fair elections but to gerrymandering.

In Indiana, the League of Women Voters and Common Cause have launched “Rethinking Redistricting: Drawing a Line for Democracy,” a project designed to ensure that “voters choose their legislators instead of legislators choosing their voters.” They hope to generate a popular movement to amend the Indiana Constitution and require an independent redistricting commission.

A small but important step on the long road back to sanity.

Reform will be difficult. Both parties are invested in the current system. The only way change will occur is in response to a true grass-roots movement, and in order to generate that movement, ordinary citizens will need to understand how the practice of partisan redistricting undermines democratic accountability.

In order to increase public understanding of the problems, “Rethinking Redistricting” plans to conduct a broad educational campaign via “conversation circles,” a time-honored approach to retail politics. Attendees will discuss the most harmful effects of our current system, which virtually ensures that few districts will actually be competitive. (In 2012, only two of Indiana’s Congressional districts were considered competitive.)

When a result is predetermined—when a citizen’s vote is unlikely to affect the outcome—citizens don’t vote. And in Indiana, they don’t. The 2011 Civic Health Index ranked Indiana 48th in the nation for voter turnout.

Worse, with lack of competition comes polarization. Republicans don’t fear Democratic opposition, they fear primary challenges from the Right; Democrats don’t worry about Republicans; they worry about attacks from the Left. The current system thus destroys incentives to work across the aisle, to be reasonable, to negotiate and find acceptable compromises.

The current system has given us the Tea Party debacle we are currently seeing. Thanks to gerrymandering, despite the fact that Democratic candidates for Congress got a million more votes than Republicans in the last election, Republicans retained control of the House. The cost was high: election of 80 Representatives from deep Red districts, drawn to be impervious to competition and thoroughly unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, that comprise what has been dubbed “the suicide caucus.”

Even within today’s radical GOP, they represent a minority view.

According to the Cook Political Report, Representatives in the suicide caucus were elected with fourteen and a half million votes, or twelve percent of the votes cast in the 2012 elections. They represent fifty-eight million constituents—eighteen percent of the population. Seventy-six of them are male, seventy-nine white.

None of them represent the sane American middle.

Call your local League of Women Voters rep, or Julia Vaughn at Common Cause. Host a conversation, call your State Senator and Representative. Let’s do something really radical, and let Indiana voters choose their representatives rather than the other way around.

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Creating a Public

One of the reasons many of us believe so passionately in public education is that it is–in the words of political scientist Benjamin Barber–“constitutive of a public.” In other words, in addition to teaching children English, math, science, history and other subjects, public schools are intended to create a generation of citizens. 

Of course, if the sole purpose of schooling is to arm children with the skills needed to obtain employment and be knowledgable consumers–as many people evidently think–there’s no reason education need be public.

We need to recognize the profound difference between these views of schooling  as we debate various reform measures. And let’s be honest: reform is badly needed. No honest person, looking at the sad state of schools in urban and rural areas alike, can defend the status quo. But all reforms–and all reformers–are not equal.

A great fear of those of us who see schools as more than job training venues is that rather than focusing our efforts on fixing our broken public systems, we will follow those who want to privatize and abandon them. It is important to note here that there is a huge difference between charter schools–which are public schools–and voucher programs that divert public resources to support private and religious schools. (It is probably also important to note that–at least thus far–neither category has been shown to be reliably better academically than our beleaguered public schools. If there’s a magic bullet, no one has yet found it. )

What is the civic function we expect public schools to play? What does it mean to “create citizens”? Civic knowledge is certainly an important element; so is civic participation.

A colleague brought an intriguing recent study to my attention that sheds some light on the latter criterion; it was done by the Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College, a religiously-affiliated institution.

The researchers found that Protestant religious schools produced students who volunteered as young adults, that Catholic schools had a more modest effect on later volunteerism, and that home-schooled students and those who attended private, non-religious schools were the least likely to volunteer as adults. (Evidently, no Jewish or Muslim schools were included in the study.)

Of course, volunteerism, while highly desirable, is not equivalent to involved citizenship. One of the thorniest problems we currently face is that many  young people want to make a difference, but are repelled by activities they deem to be “political.” Rather than involve themselves in citizenship activities, they channel their contributions to their communities through nonprofits and other voluntary associations. And like philanthropy, a significant amount of such volunteer activity is religious: support for one’s church,  religious missions and the like.

The study didn’t report the nature of the volunteer activities they found. But while Protestant religious schools evidently inculcated a degree of what we might call public-spiritedness, it is telling that home-schooled and private schooled students were unlikely to participate in any volunteer activities, civic or religious, even after controlling for such things as educational attainment, parental income, religious identity and similar characteristics.

Assuming the study was sound, the results are evidence of something our common sense tells us: that the nature and focus of the school a student attends matter.

If some religious schools have figured out how to inculcate socially responsible behaviors, public schools should be able to figure out how to produce civically-responsible graduates. As we wage “reform wars” over Common Core and high-stakes testing and all the other “fixes” being proposed, we need to keep our eye on the goal: academically excellent public schools that educate engaged and knowledgable citizens.

Schools that create a public, in the best sense of that word.

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