I know, I know—“nut job” is not a civil salutation. Intellectually, I know that the use of such phrases is neither nice nor likely to be very productive. But cut me some slack, and I’ll explain.
Every time I write a column for the Indianapolis Star discussing equal rights for GLBT persons, I can count on receiving a letter from the same long-time “fan” (who is a fan only in the sense that he obviously reads my columns. Otherwise, as Jon Stewart might say, not so much). The essential message is always the same, faux-solicitous one: I am doing a terrible disservice to my gay son by not providing him with the “treatments” that are available to make him “normal,” by which Mr. Nut Job means straight. These treatments, he unfailingly informs me, have been “proven” by extensive scientific research, with which I need to familiarize myself.
The letters often include Xeroxed copies of this so-called research, inevitably the sort of stuff endlessly churned out by right-wing “scientists”—guys hired by the same fine people who first alerted us to the homosexual agenda being pushed by Sponge-Bob Squarepants and Tinky-Winky.
Having learned long ago that the very worst thing you can do when you attract this particular type of pen-pal is to respond, I routinely route the correspondence to the circular file and go about my business. But I’ve been brooding over the last letter, and instead of continuing to mutter under my breath, I decided I’d use this column to vent, and to write the response I’d send if I thought the person at the receiving end possessed anything akin to an ability to process logic.
So—here’s my open letter to nut job:
Dear Mr. Right-Wing Obsessive,
Thank you for your twenty-third letter, explaining why I should run, not walk, to the nearest reparative therapy practitioner with my “abnormal” “sick” “disabled” son. I will give serious consideration to your suggestions once you respond to a few questions.
First, I’d like you to calm my concerns about the therapy itself. (Since you claim there are great amounts of credible scientific data available, I’m sure these questions will be easy for you to field.)
How will this therapy affect my son’s non-gay behaviors? You know, the personality traits that dictate what sort of human being he is when he isn’t in bed? My son, for example, is extremely popular with all kinds of people (even with lots of people that you might consider “normal.”) He has tons of friends, gay and straight. Everyone in his family adores him—his brothers, his stepfather, his stepsisters, his nieces and nephews. Will this therapy make him even more gregarious and lovable?
My son is both book-smart and street-smart, and he has always earned good money and been self-supporting. He pays his taxes without whining about it (do you?) and he is generous to charities and to his family and friends. He’s also a very good citizen; he votes, he recycles, he helps those who are less fortunate. Will this therapy further enhance his common sense, his IQ or his compassion?
Assuming you can assure me that I won’t change this wonderful human being by destroying a relatively small but nonetheless essential part of who he is, I also have some questions about the reason for your extreme interest—dare I say obsession?—with my child’s sexuality.
Will your life improve if my son is no longer gay? If so, how? Will America be safer? Will global warming abate? Will we find new sources of energy? Will Christians all begin acting like Christians? What, exactly, will change? What accounts for your insistence that my son—whom you do not know, whom you have never met—must change his very identity, a very important part of who he is? And what accounts for your evident eagerness to tell other people how they should live?
For that matter, how many wonderful friends do you have? How close is your family? How many kindnesses do you extend to those you live and work with?
In short, what makes you think you are even one-tenth the person my son is? And where the hell do you get off telling me that he is “sick”?
When you can give me satisfactory answers to all these questions, maybe I’ll take you more seriously. (But I get to determine what constitutes a “satisfactory” answer.)Yours Truly, a mother who is immensely proud of her son just the way he is.
Thanks for letting me vent. I feel much better now.
Of Guns and Guantanamo
Last month, the Supreme Court was an equal-opportunity disappointer, handing down one decision that enraged conservatives and one that outraged liberals. Permit me to make myself even more unpopular than usual (no mean feat) by suggesting that both decisions were correct.
The first ruling came in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the Court upheld the right of detainees at Guantanamo to file habeas corpus petitions. Any competent lawyer could have predicted the result; the most worrisome feature of the ruling (to me) was that it was a 5-4 decision. The theatrics from predictable sources may have obscured what the ruling did and didn’t do. It didn’t order Guantanamo closed. It didn’t require that the detainees be freed. It didn’t even require that they be given full trials.
The right of habeas corpus guarantees prisoners only the most bare-bones fundamental fairness; it allows people who have been imprisoned to challenge government’s right to hold them. It allows them to demonstrate that they are being held in error—that they aren’t who the government says they are, or that they were not involved in the actions for which they are being held. Allowing someone to say, “hey—you’ve got the wrong guy” hardly endangers America.
Nor will the ruling unleash the routinely predicted “floods of litigation.” Every one of the 2.2 million prisoners currently held in the U.S. criminal justice system can file a habeas petition. Letting 335 Guantanamo detainees do so as well is hardly going to overwhelm the system.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Court struck down the nation’s most restrictive gun law, and finally settled the question whether the Second Amendment protects a personal or collective right—that is, whether the Amendment’s authors were referring only to militias, or whether they were also protecting an individual right to gun ownership. The screaming this time came from liberals, but it was no less over-the-top.
First of all, the Court did not invalidate all efforts to regulate firearms. The ruling simply said that a personal right exists, and government therefore has the burden of justifying regulations that propose to restrict or infringe that right, just as we insist that government must justify other efforts at regulation that may restrict personal liberty. The Court said the ordinance in question—which required, among other things, that a handgun kept in the home be disassembled—went too far.
Both sides have substantially inflated the likely effect of Heller. Purists who believe the Second Amendment protects their right to build small nuclear devices in their back yards are gleefully planning challenges to far more reasonable regulations that are quite likely to pass constitutional muster. For their part, doom-and-gloom gun control advocates have conveniently overlooked the fact that a majority of state constitutions explicitly protect a personal right to gun ownership. (While states cannot restrict rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, they are free to offer their citizens more extensive protections.)
You can quibble with the details, but the Court got these right.
Vicious Circle
“Corrected” property tax bills have been mailed, and welcome as the effort to equalize assessments is, values overall continue to increase.
The problem is that, while assessed values are increasing, actual home values are declining. There are both short-term and longer-term reasons for that decline: rising gas prices will inevitably affect the price of homes that do not have access to public transportation. (In Indianapolis, unfortunately, that pretty much describes the whole city.) The slowing economy reduces both the number of buyers, and the prices the remaining buyers are willing to pay.
Then there’s the ballooning mortgage foreclosure rate. It is tempting for those of us not caught up in that crisis personally to be sympathetic, but detached. Sure, we say, it’s a shame that some (other) homeowners find themselves embroiled in the foreclosure process. Of course, some of them weren’t as prudent as they should have been. But that really isn’t our problem.
Except that it is.
Recently, IUPUI’s Center for Urban Policy and the Environment used a statistical modeling process to estimate the effect of foreclosures on housing values in Marion County. The study was limited to foreclosures during 2004. (There is always a lag in the availability of data for this kind of analysis.) The researchers found that the properties that had been foreclosed sold for 26 to 29 percent less than comparable non-foreclosed properties. Even more troubling, in neighborhoods with a number of foreclosures, those “fire sales” get used as comparable transactions for purposes of establishing housing values and sales prices for the other homes in the area. That limits what banks and mortgage companies are willing to lend against those properties. This so-called “foreclosure discount” can thus have a significantly negative impact on the value of other homes in the area.
In 2004, the total decline in housing values across Marion County due to foreclosures was an estimated 9 percent.
Protestors complain that higher property taxes also drive down the market prices of residential real estate. True enough. But lower housing values will in turn drive down tax receipts, giving local government even less money to spend on the public services that—as we sometimes forget—add to the market value of our properties. The quality of our parks, schools, public transportation, police and fire protection all factor into the price a prospective buyer is willing to pay for a home.
There is no easy “fix” apparent. From all accounts, we have yet to see the worst of the housing crisis. The federal government has led by bad example, running up its own unaffordable mortgage—our gargantuan national debt. That bill is coming due, and further straining our ability to tackle our economic problems. Gas prices may level off, but they are unlikely to decline, and energy costs drive up the cost of everything else.
We have been living on our national credit card, unwilling to control the wheeler-dealers or invest in our communities. Now the bill is coming due.
It’s going to get ugly.
Same-Sex Reruns
The California Supreme Court has struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriage. And we all know what that means: the forces of self-righteous indignation are gearing up for the mother of summer reruns. Wait for these oldies but goodies:
Judges have no business making such decisions. Um, sorry, but that’s their job. Judges are supposed to decide the cases before them, and some require deciding whether a particular law is consistent with the state or federal constitution. Judges don’t just wake up in the morning and say, gee, I feel like overturning some legislation today.
Judges should not overturn the will of the people. Failed government class, did you? In a constitutional republic, fundamental rights are not subject to majority vote. The Bill of Rights is a list of things the government cannot do even when popular majorities approve. In this case, moreover, that argument is unavailable; the California legislature—the “voice” of the people—passed same-sex marriage legislation not once, but twice, only to have Governor Schwarzenegger veto it both times. (It’s also worth noting that those on the Right who scream most loudly about respecting “the will of the people” didn’t hesitate to ask the courts to overturn the will of the people in Oregon who passed a referendum legalizing assisted suicide, or the will of the people in California who endorsed medical marijuana. Can we spell hypocrite?)
We need to elect Republicans who will put “strict constructionists” on the bench. Well, let’s see. It’s certainly true that contemporary Republicans are determined to put ideologically driven judges on the bench. And they have had some measure of success. But judges who are even minimally qualified are more likely to rule based upon controlling statutes and precedents than on their personal preferences. The California Supreme Court is a case in point: of the seven sitting judges, six were appointed by Republican governors.
And then there’s the old standard: Throughout human history, marriage has always been between one man and one woman. Well, no. In early Israel, a man could have several wives and concubines. (People who’ve actually read the bible, rather than merely thumping it, might recall the story of Jacob, who married two sisters, Leah and Rachel. Or Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines.) In America, in 1848, the Oneida community practiced “complex marriage” where every woman was married to every man in the community, and there was a so-called “Christian polygamy movement,” as late as 1994. Although Mormons have (formally) renounced it, polygamy persists in many parts of the Middle East to this day—among President Bush’s princely pals in Saudi Arabia, for example, and in Senegal, where an estimated 47% of marriages are “plural” or polygamous. There is even some evidence—admittedly disputed—that the medieval Church blessed same-sex unions.
What with Iraq, the recession, climate change, natural disasters, food shortages and gas prices, do we really have to replay these tired arguments about allowing Adam and Steve to file joint tax returns?
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Our Votes Will Count
For once, Indiana voters will actually have a say in who gets a major party’s nomination—and a reasonably important say, at that. As a result, many of us are pondering issues we often don’t consider until fall. What are the factors that should—and should not—drive our choice of a President?
I can’t speak for others, but my vote will depend upon the answers to two sets of questions: whose positions do I find most convincing (recognizing that there is no candidate I will always agree with)? And who has the character, judgment and management skills to get those positions adopted?
Whatever John McCain’s merits, his fervent embrace of virtually all the worst policies of the Bush Administration means I won’t be rejoining the GOP this year. That narrows my choices to Clinton and Obama. And because there are few policy differences between them, my choice is based upon my analysis of their respective abilities to do the job.
What are those abilities?
Most Americans desperately want a President with intellect and a real grasp of policy, someone who lives in what a Bush operative once dismissed as the “reality-based community.” But much as we like to think of the President as the sole “decider,” we know that he or she will choose a team to actually manage the government. The ability to choose highly competent people, and to manage them effectively, is critical. Evidence of character—truthfulness, honorable behavior, integrity—is equally important. Good judgment is key.
Barack Obama passes those tests. Hillary Clinton fails them.
The best available evidence of a candidate’s management skills is the ability to run a large, sophisticated Presidential campaign. Obama has chosen talented, highly effective people who are still with him, while Clinton’s campaign has been an ongoing soap opera. Her first campaign manager was fired for mismanagement. The current one is stiffing small businesspeople by not paying their bills. Mark Penn’s tirades and conflicts of interest have been the subject of ongoing leaks from dismayed campaign operatives. Bill Clinton has been a loose cannon. Clinton was so sure she’d be the presumptive nominee on Super Tuesday that she had no Plan B (a la Bush’s lack of an Iraq “exit strategy.”) These problems are uncomfortable reminders of Clinton’s mismanagement of the health policy effort—her one truly substantive assignment as First Lady.
Judgment? Clinton voted for the Iraq War, and still refuses to admit it was a mistake. Obama spoke out against it when it was politically damaging to do so.
Character? Ignore the obvious sense of entitlement. Forget the repeated “mis-statements” about being under fire in Tusla. Look instead at her campaign’s willingness to play the race card and identity politics, to go back on her prior commitment not to count Florida and Michigan, to throw the “kitchen sink” at the all-but-certain nominee no matter how much ammunition that might provide to Republicans.
Ultimately, Clinton’s campaign has been all about her, while Obama’s has been all about us.
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