I came to my computer keyboard this morning prepared to rant about the ever-growing dismissal of facts in favor of more useful spin–and increasingly, out-and-out lies. I was still annoyed by an email forwarded by a friend of mine, who sent it not because he agreed with it, but in order to demonstrate “what’s out there.” This particular message was full of anti-immigrant sentiment, and “facts” about how much undocumented immigrants supposedly cost the American taxpayers.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on the economics of immigration, but I do know enough to recognize inaccurate propaganda, and the email was filled with it.
Before I began my post, however, I read this one at Daily Kos, and it made my point better than I could have. It’s a bit on the long side, but I hope you’ll read it to the end, because no matter what your politics, the extent to which we are ignoring reality and rewriting history in service of ideologies, left and right, is far and away the most dangerous threat we face.
According to a March, 2011 survey from Pew, 58% of Americans believe that homosexuality should be accepted, while 33% believe it should not be. Leaving aside what the individuals surveyed thought constituted “acceptance,” this is yet another indicator that the cultural tide is flowing in the right direction; indeed, when the survey responses were broken down by age, gender and such, the results confirmed numerous prior studies showing that younger cohorts are massively more supportive of equality—including same-sex marriage—than are their elders.
In the face of this rapid and positive social change, the Right is becoming increasingly hysterical.
A couple of days before this year’s Pride celebration, a friend forwarded a “Special Prayer Request” from the AFA of Indiana that illustrates how ugly that hysteria gets, and how intellectually dishonest these radical right organizations really are. It began with an admonition that the photos appended to the email were not intended to “offend” anyone. (Those photos were the usual, carefully selected “shockers” from previous Pride parades. I’ve gone to Pride events for the past twenty years, and these days, they generally include large numbers of parents with strollers, real estate and other sales booths, and a whole host of elected officials. Strangely enough, those elements of the crowd weren’t pictured.)
The email then listed “some of the vendors registered with Indy Pride” for this year, leading off with the Great Lakes Leather Bondage and S&M Society” (a new one for me), and including the Indiana Socialist Party. (Indiana has a Socialist Party??), “various apostate churches and fringe religious entities” (by their definition, I assume Episcopalians and Presbyterians are part of that apostate fringe), and others with “gender identity disorders” or who are characterized as “left-wing” and “pro-abortion.”
Micah Clark, the author of the email, makes the assertion—which he underlines—that “homosexuals are less than 3% of the population,” and he accuses the Pride organization (and, presumably, the photographers and reporters who cover Pride events) of exaggerating attendance numbers. Although reputable scholars suggest that considerably more than 3% of the population is gay, let’s just accept that number—and recognize the real argument being made here: that we shouldn’t have to treat such a small number of people fairly. Presumably, minorities don’t deserve equal treatment under the law. Aside from the Un-American nature of that assertion, I can only wonder what he thinks the cut-off percentage is? Since extremist rightwing Christians are also a minority, albeit a minority larger than 3%, does their percentage of the population cross the magic boundary that permits them to assert constitutional rights?)
What seems to really outrage Micah Clark is that this year, the Indianapolis Police Department officially participated for the first time.
After engaging in some two and a half pages of twisted, dishonest rhetoric (including an astonishing assertion that the nation’s founders were “deeply troubled” by “this kind of thing”), Clark ends with a request that recipients pray for “those trapped by sexual brokenness and even those who oppose us.”
How ironically gracious of him!
Painting minority groups as irretrievably “other” is a time-dishonored tactic of bigots. It is one of the many ways in which the gay community has been marginalized and discriminated against over the years. And it’s not working any more.
President Obama’s favorite Martin Luther King quote is that “the arc of history bends toward justice.” That arc is by no means smooth, but we’re getting there.
Republicans these days seem to be having an awful lot of trouble with timelines.
Example #1: David Barton–Michele Bachmann’s very favorite constitutional “expert,” recently argued that the nation’s Founders “had already had the creationism-evolution debate.” Now I knew the Founders were brilliant men; what I didn’t know is that they had debated the theory of evolution a full century before Darwin published “Origin of Species” in 1859. Imagine that!
Example #2: Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty recently delivered a speech advocating huge tax cuts, insisting that “we know” tax cuts lead to economic growth. Unfortunately, in one of those danged timeframe inversions, the periods of economic growth he cited came after tax increases. The weakest economic performance followed Bush’s tax cuts. (Well, that was inconvenient…)
Example #3: In yet another display of her “intellectual” skills, Sarah Palin–speaking after visiting Boston’s historic sites–insisted that Paul Revere rode to warn the British, and to uphold Americans’ right to bear arms. (She also said he rang bells and fired shots….news to numerous American historians.) It is difficult to understand how Revere’s ride could have been to protect the right to gun ownership, since that right was secured by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791. Revere’s ride–and the date it occurred–was immortalized by Longfellow. .
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
Sarah obviouly doesn’t remember that “famous” day and year, either.
The news yesterday that former Indiana Senator Evan Bayh would be working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce–along with former Bush Chief of Staff Andy Card–reminded me that Bayh is a man without any evident political philosophy other than self-interest.
A number of years ago, when Andy Jacobs retired from Congress, I participated in a “Retirement Roast,” sponsored by the Marion County Democratic Party. (Bill Hudnut and I were the two Republicans among the roasters.) I used my five minutes to apologize to Andy for having called him a name during my unsuccessful campaign to unseat him–I had called him a Democrat. As I explained then, “I was young and naive. I didn’t understand that Indiana doesn’t HAVE Democrats–we just have our Republicans and your Republicans. Like Evan Bayh.”
I don’t think any line I have ever delivered has gotten a bigger laugh. The Democrats in the room clearly agreed with my assessment of Evan Bayh (who was sitting near the front of the room).
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with being a more conservative Democrat–a Blue Dog. But even then, it was apparent to many that Bayh carefully constructed his political persona to meet the preferences of Indiana voters. During his terms in the Governor’s office, politics–defined as what would be good for Evan Bayh–regularly trumped policy. I remember a story told by a friend of mine who ran the HIV division of the State Health Department: the federal government offered to pay the salaries and overhead for two additional employees working on AIDS issues. My friend desperately needed the extra help, and was delighted, because the addition of these two positions would impose zero cost on the state. Bayh refused to allow him to accept the offer, because he was preparing to run for the Senate, and didn’t want anyone to be able to accuse him of adding public employees–even employees who would help Hoosiers and wouldn’t cost the state a cent.
Bayh’s retirement from the Senate was accompanied by lots of sanctimony, and his typical disregard for other Democrats–his timing made it virtually impossible for the party that had supported him to retain the seat, and he subsequently did very little to help Brad Ellsworth. He joined a law firm (to lobby), and became a contributor to Fox “News,” lending that propaganda mill a veneer of bipartisanship.
Now, he’s signed on with the U.S. Chamber, which (unlike our local chamber) has been controlled by the extreme right for the past several years. He will be helping the Chamber maintain the fiction that its vendetta against even the most reasonable regulations is somehow a “bipartisan” effort.
This morning, the Star quoted Bayh’s denial that his Chamber job involves lobbying, because he won’t be personally calling his former Democratic Senate colleagues–a curiously narrow definition of lobbying.
My guess is that most Democratic Senators would be unlikely to take calls from Mr. It’s All About Me, Me, Me in any event.
A paper delivered at the Law and Society conference I attended raised some interesting points about the Citizens United decision that I haven’t seen elsewhere. While there has been a lot of criticism of the Court’s classification of corporations as people, this presentation asked a more basic (albeit related) question: what was the “speech” that the First Amendment protected?
The author argued pretty persuasively that what the founders intended was protection of an individual right of free expression. Later courts extended that to “expressive association”–meaning the right of individuals to associate with those who share their opinions and values. Thus Political Action committees should have the right to free speech, since the very act of banding together for a political purpose is in furtherance of individual expression.
By extending expressive freedom to corporations and unions formed for very different purposes–where the individuals involved arguably had very different political views–the Court arguably was disrespecting the very individual rights the First Amendment was protecting in favor of a newly created group right. Our system, however, has explicitly rejected recognition of “group rights.” For good or ill, in the United States, only individuals, singly or in expressive association, are “rights-bearing.” Citizens United thus represents a movement toward group rights at odds with the premises of our constitution.
