Civil Discourse

      How should Americans talk about really divisive issues? It is hard enough to draw a line between passionate advocacy and discourse that is over the line. The problem becomes infinitely harder when the stakes are higher.

      With the benefit of hindsight, we fault the “good Germans” who were temperate after Kristalnacht. But every excess is not Kristalnacht. So how do we decide when a contemporary policy is so dangerous, so wrong, that moral people simply cannot smile nicely, pour tea and politely disagree with it? Ironically, this dilemma is one of the most troubling consequences of engaging routinely in intemperate political language; as I said in a recent column, when every tax increase is met with hysteria about creeping socialism, and every over-reaction by a police officer is evidence of fascism, what language is left for serious threats? It’s the boy who cried wolf syndrome.

      I’ll be the first to admit that I lost it when Congress passed the so-called “detainee” act a few weeks ago. When this bill passed, I thought—and I still think—that words like “totalitarian” were factually descriptive, rather than rhetorically excessive. But if it is okay for me to cry “fascist” about this bill, what about the people who believe abortion is genocide, or that progressive taxation is theft? When we use such terminology, we are not communicating with anyone, or changing anyone’s mind.

      Let me specify my problems with the detainee bill, and why I see it as a dangerous break with time-honored American legal and policy traditions. I wasn’t the only one, by the way—diplomats and military officials sent statements strongly objecting to this legislation, and warning that it would actually encourage terrorism while making our soldiers less safe. This measure:

·        Suspends Habeas Corpus, a protection we’ve enjoyed for 700 years.

·        Allows use of illegally-obtained evidence against suspects—in violation of the 4th Amendment.

·        Protects torture: first, by giving the President the right to define what torture is and isn’t, and second by shielding those who have tortured during the past several years from prosecution.

·        Allows the administration to designate someone as an enemy combatant—and gives the individual so designated absolutely no way to challenge that designation. Think about it: the President can say that you are someone who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” To begin with, that’s a pretty subjective standard. But what’s worse, let’s say you are a citizen, or someone else who shouldn’t even be subject to this law—there is no way for you to appeal, no way to show that you are entitled to a trial, no way to demonstrate that you are the wrong person.

·        As Senator Feingold testified, “this legislation would permit an individual to be convicted on the basis of coerced testimony and hearsay, would not allow full judicial review of the conviction, and yet would allow someone convicted under these rules to be put to death.”

·        What is truly perverse, once the government actually has enough evidence to charge a detainee with a crime, then and only then do the few due process protections left under the act apply. Before that, they don’t—and prisoners can simply be indefinitely detained. No trial, no hearing, no nothing. The result, as Senator Obama has noted, is that the less evidence the government has, the fewer rights the detainee has. When you realize that out of the 700 people held at Guantanamo, only ten had been charged with any crime as of a couple of months ago, the enormity of that really hits you.

So–how do we talk about this? How do we impress on our fellow citizens the magnitude of what this law does? how do you say “such measures are beneath us, inconsistent with what it means to be an American?”

      Just yesterday, a student sent me a partial answer to that question, a link to You Tube with a speech made by Senator Barack Obama during the floor fight in the Senate. Obama was fighting for an amendment to curtail some of the most extreme features of this legislation. He began by acknowledging that the threat posed by terrorism was real, and that it needed to be dealt with. He also said “if we are properly agressive in addressing the threat, it is inevitable that mistakes will be made, that we will occasionally cast too broad a net. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that—so long as we retain the means to correct those mistakes.” He went on to list the troublesome elements in the bill, to offer very specific evidence of the harms done by each, and to suggest with a good deal of precision what corrective language or policy he would propose. And he concluded with a statement that went to the heart of his objections: “We don’t have to imprison innocent people to win the war on terror.”

      Obama was polite, but not weak. He respected his opponents without conceding to their arguments. That’s terribly difficult—especially if you tend to be a bit emotional, like me—but I don’t see any feasible alternative. At some point, we all have to trust in the good-will and good sense of other Americans. We have to trust that in the marketplace of ideas, truth will ultimately prevail. That doesn’t mean we should work less diligently or passionately to get American values back; it means we have to offer arguments and evidence that will persuade our fellow citizens, we have to object to the use of dishonest arguments, and we have to safeguard the mechanisms of constitutional government to ensure that all arguments will be heard and all relevant evidence considered.

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Traditional Families

    It’s “that time of year.”

 

   No—I’m not talking about Halloween, or even Thanksgiving, Chanukah and Christmas. For the eleventh year in a row, from November 3d through the 19th, approximately 100 organizational partners will invite us to the civic conversation known as the annual Spirit and Place Festival. The festival revolves around a different theme each year; this year, it is “Tradition and Innovation.”

   

One of the most timely programs is being co-sponsored by PFLAG, the acronym for “Parents, Friends and Families of Lesbians and Gays,” although I’m quite certain the co-sponsors had no idea when they planned their program just how newsworthy their subject-matter—“Traditional Families, Fact or Fiction?—would be.

    When the news broke about creepy Congressman Mark Foley, gay-bashers resorted to one of the oldest fictions—suggesting that all gays are pedophiles. As Frank Rich noted dryly in a New York Times article, saying all gay men are like Mark Foley is like saying all heterosexual men are like Joey Buttofucco.

    There are plenty of “fictions” about human sexual identity at any time, of course. I recently was mailed a book as a “gift” from a gentleman who described himself as a reader of my columns. The book (written by an “eminent scholar” who is neither eminent nor a scholar, according to colleagues in the fields of psychiatry and genetics)  purported to “prove” that sexual orientation is just a choice we make. (As I told my husband, I sure don’t remember “choosing” mine!)

    Rich’s column was actually a reflection on a somewhat different tradition—the ritual use of gay-bashing as a political tool by the GOP (or “Gay Old Party,” as Rich described it) while employing numerous self-identified, out-of-the-closet gays in major staff and administration positions.  Rich focuses on the political hypocrisy involved, and doesn’t speculate about the psychology of those gay individuals who work for publicly homophobic office-holders. It’s hard not to see such people as either self-loathing or opportunistic—or both—but such behaviors are not uncommon among members of socially marginalized groups.

    Ultimately, it is precisely that social marginalization that is the target of the Spirit and Place program, to be held on Saturday, November 18th at the Unitarian Universalist Church on

West 43d Street

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    The description of the event begins with a question: “What defines a family in 2006?” It’s a good question, and a timely one: just in the last couple of weeks, a census report showed that married couples currently represent slightly fewer than half of American households. Both same-sex and opposite-sex couples are increasingly living together without getting married—some by choice, some because it is an avenue legally foreclosed to them.

    We need to understand the reasons for—and consequences of—these changes in social norms. How do they affect children? The elderly? What are the implications for public policies? Who are the real people who make these choices, and how does the disapproval of others affect them and their families?

    Which “traditions” are worth saving—and which aren’t?

 

 

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Newspeak

    It is difficult—if not impossible—to discuss important disagreements when language no longer has meaning. When every tax is socialism, and every abuse of police power is fascism, we’ve lost the tools to adequately describe genuine threats to our political system. We can no longer discriminate between the merely troublesome and the genuinely threatening.

    This isn’t a new phenomenon. During the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote that “to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant one was totally unfitted for action.” Many years later, George Orwell would portray corruption of language as an essential tool of the authoritarian state.

   

So what can we say about the recent Military Commissions Act, passed at the end of September? In seemingly innocuous language, the United States Senate gave the President unchecked authority to use “interrogation techniques” on “detainees.” The Act doesn’t say “unbridled discretion to torture prisoners;” indeed, it says torture remains illegal. It just lets the President define what torture is—and isn’t—and lets him keep the definition secret.

   

The “detainees” (almost sounds like guests, really) are people who have been designated “unlawful combatants.” And if the Pentagon—using whatever criteria it chooses—says you are an unlawful combatant, then you are. Period. Of course, once you’ve been labeled an “unlawful combatant” you can no longer use habeas corpus to protest your innocence, or to show that there has been some mistake, like with that German businessman the CIA picked up and tortured, who turned out to have the same name as the guy we were really looking for.

    Oops.

    In the world of Orwellian language, this legislation protects our rights. In the real world, however, where there is no remedy, there is no right. When there is absolutely nothing you can do once you are wrongly accused—when a law permits summary arrest and indefinite detention on the say-so of those in power, with no hope of appeal, talk of “rights” is surreal. When there is no punishment provided for violating a rule, it isn’t a rule—it’s a suggestion. 

   

In the real world, members of the United States Senate spent barely two days discussing a bill to gut time-honored constitutional guarantees that generations of American soldiers have fought and died for. Senators didn’t agonize over this drastic change. They didn’t listen to the decorated military officers who argued that its passage would endanger our troops.

    In a recent column, Garrison Keillor said it best: no one who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States of America. 

   

And we no longer have the words to describe what we are becoming.

 

 

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Following the Money

     I used to shrug off as cynical the recurring accusations about the influence of money in politics. Now I don’t.

     I am not referring to the corrupting influence of campaign contributions, of which the recent (and growing) Abramoff scandal is the most recent example. I’m talking about more subtle forms of dishonesty, prompted by lawmakers’ desire to be re-elected and enabled by voters’ belief that we can—and should—get something for nothing.

     Recently, the Indianapolis City-County Council authorized borrowing up to $35 million dollars against anticipated County Option Income Tax (COIT) revenues to help “fill the gap” in the 2007 city budget. The funds are presumably to be repaid in 2008 from reserves that the state has withheld. (The state says the withholding is intended to guard against “swings” in COIT collections; local officials say the real reason is so that the state will get the interest earned on those funds in the interim.) 

     Indianapolis isn’t the only municipality borrowing to meet current obligations. Cook County recently borrowed $200 million dollars to meet operating expenses. The 18-month line of credit carries an above-market interest rate of 10%. 

     Evidently, lawmakers would rather pay millions in interest later than face the need to cut services or raise taxes now.

     Government borrowing is not the problem—the problem is government borrowing to meet current operating expenses. Well-managed businesses will often borrow in order to invest in capital improvements—to amortize the costs of new facilities or to upgrade manufacturing equipment. Borrowing to make payroll, or to pay the rent, is a far dicier proposition.

     You can reasonably argue that government should borrow in appropriate circumstances. The question is: what circumstances are appropriate? 

    Unfortunately, political game-playing frequently trumps good public policy. Much has been written about Governor Daniel’s seventy-five year lease of the Indiana Toll Road. Whatever the merits of that decision, it was clearly prompted by the unwillingness of members of the Indiana General Assembly to raise tolls. After all, the State could have issued bonds to be repaid from future tolls, retained control of the asset, and realized more money than a lessee—who needs to make a profit—could pay. But then it would be obvious who raised the tolls, and some lawmakers might suffer at the polls. The Governor and General Assembly essentially “outsourced” authority to levy taxes (which is what tolls are), hoping they would thereby escape responsibility. 

    We see this privatization of taxing authority in other contexts. Homeowners’ associations are given responsibility for local streets, garbage collection and other services that were once public responsibility. The homeowner pays for those services through fees collected by the association, allowing the local government to claim it didn’t “raise taxes.”

    Ultimately, We the People are responsible for all these evasions of responsibility. Until we are willing to pay for the services we receive, until we stop thinking we can get something for nothing, we are just electing people to lie to us. And we are paying extra for the delusions.

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Dual Loyalty

 

    When I was a young girl growing up in the not-so-metropolitan town of Anderson, Indiana, the few Jewish families living in the area were acutely aware of their minority status. One of the most feared accusations Jews faced back then was that of “dual loyalty”—the suspicion that our support for the new state of Israel might be as strong or stronger than our loyalty to America and American values. 

    I hadn’t thought about dual loyalty accusations in a long time, although there were certainly echoes of it in the hostility with which Latino demonstrations over immigration reform were received. Displays of the Mexican flag, especially, seemed to engender resentment from people who proudly characterized themselves in letters to the editor and similar forums as “real Americans.”

    In my experience, Americans have historically tended to be pretty insular, even jingoist, likely to think of themselves as “real Americans” and “Americans First.” So I was really unprepared for the recent Pew Research poll showing that forty-two percent of Americans consider themselves Christian first, and American second. According to Pew, 

          “The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Poll finds American adults are closely split between those   who see themselves as Christians first (42%) and those who see themselves as Americans first (48%); an additional 7% say they see themselves as both equally. By contrast, only a third of German Christians (33%) and fewer than a quarter of British, French and Spanish Christians self-identify primarily with their religion. In this regard, the views of Americans closely parallel those of French Muslims, 46% of whom think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality.”

      Pew doesn’t tell us, of course, what kind of Christian these folks are, so we can take some solace from even more recently released research from Baylor University that debunks the notion that the more devout the Christian, the more conservative the politics. According to Baylor, equal numbers of political liberals and political conservatives are comitted churchgoers.Nevertheless, there is something disquieting about these numbers. My own worry is that the people most likely to respond that they are “Christian first” are also most likely to believe that their theological beliefs should trump America’s constitutional values.

Case in point: Recently, I got a call at the office from an elderly-sounding man who wanted my mailing address. He said he read my columns in the Star, and wanted to send me something. “How nice!” I said—to which he responded, “You may not think so when you get it.” He was right; he sent me a book by a self-professed Christian “psychologist” that explained why homosexuality is an immoral choice, and how gays can “choose” not to be gay. An accompanying note suggested that I share it with my misguided son. It was a good example of someone whose “Christian” values conflict rather sharply with American values of civic equality, not to mention the quintessentially American “live and let live” ethic. 

Don’t get me wrong: just as Christians in Germany who placed religious and moral teachings above the Fatherland were right, Americans absolutely must bring moral precepts—grounded for the most part in religious belief—to questions of officially condoning torture, the conduct of war and the erosion of civil liberties. “My country right or wrong” is wrong. For that matter, many of us who support gay civil rights do so because we believe our religion or morality requires it. But in these situations, most of us would not see our religious or ethical beliefs at odds with American values. Rather, we see our ethical or religious beliefs requiring us to work for an America that lives up to its own constitutional and civic values.

Maybe that’s all the Pew poll signifies. Maybe my own history as a member of a minority religion has made me too sensitive, has caused me to over-react to these numbers. But I can’t shake the feeling that these self-professed “Christian first” folks are really the fundamentalists who have done so much to divide Americans, and set us against each other. I can’t avoid the nagging suspicion that what these folks are saying is “My kind of Christian first.”

I sure hope I’m wrong.

  

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