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
.
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?
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 habeascorpus 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.
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.
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.”
Ever wonder why freedom of the press was singled out for specific protection in the First Amendment? After all, the Free Speech clause obviously protected the press as well as other citizens. Why include a specific provision about freedom of the press?
The answer is that the architects of our constitution believed that self-government requires the free and uninhibited flow of information. They wanted to be extra-certain the government kept its hands off that information. So while the First Amendment protects all expression, the free press provision emphasizes the importance of protecting the specific kind of expression we call “journalism.”
Note that the constitution doesn’t protect persons called “journalists.” It protects the act of journalism. (It’s a distinction contemporary media mavens don’t seem to recognize—but that’s a subject for a different talk.) The activity of “journalism” ensures the availability of information that is in the public interest. Anyone who provides that kind of information, that kind of reporting—whether for newspapers, magazines, radio, television or blogs—deserves to be protected against government supression, intimidation or reprisal. People engaged in the act of journalism are entitled to that protection whether the news is being delivered with a quill pen or a computer.
The Founders were anything but naïve. They recognized that what they called the press and we call the media got it wrong a lot of the time. The newspapers of their own time, called the “penny press” were partisan rags that make Fox News and Air America look positively statesmanlike by comparison. But the founders also knew that only from the freest, most robust exchange of argument, information and gossip would truth ultimately emerge. They were comitted to free markets for goods and services, and they believed that only an equally free marketplace of ideas could ultimately protect individual liberties.
Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press don’t rest on the notion that ideas are unimportant, that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words won’t hurt me.” The Founders knew that ideas can be both powerful and dangerous. But they believed that giving the government power to determine which ideas may be transmitted or expressed was infinitely more dangerous.
The Founders were could hardly have forseen the evolution of the press and the contours of our contemporary media landscape. Today, threats to the free exchange of information are very different than they were in Revolutionary times. And the greatest threats, ironically, grow out of the expansion and changing nature of the marketplace itself.
The availability of hundreds of cable channels and a vastly expanded “newshole” has led to intense competition for readers and viewers. That competition has encouraged news coverage that is more properly labelled “infotainment”—a new twist on the old newspaper adage “if it bleeds, it leads.” Today, sensationalism rules: we get endless coverage of missing blonds in Aruba, Brangelina and Tom Cruise; we get panels of so-called “commentators” screaming at each other, and pundits who sell their books by saying outrageous and self-evidently ridiculous things in an accelerating effort to grab headlines and increase sales. “Faux news” doesn’t just describe the Daily Show—which is often a lot less “faux” than some of the supposedly straight news programs.
Far more insidious is the fact that ownership of all our media—newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations—has become concentrated. Five international mega-corporations now control most of the American media—most of what we read, hear and see. The government doesn’t control the news—Rudolph Murdoch, Viacom and Disney do. The concerns this raises for accurate public information can be seen in the recent airing of a “docu-drama” by ABC—owned by Disney—that had been condemned as totally fabricated by Republicans and Democrats alike, despite protests and petitions to correct what appeared to be a politically motivated effort to revise the history of 9-ll.
The medium with the most obvious ability to counter these trends is the internet—it gives each of us access to mountains of uncensored, uncontrolled, unfiltered information. The internet carries its own set of challenges: credibility of sources, sheer volume of information available, the further enabling of our ability to tailor the information we receive to our political preconceptions—but its utility and promise far outstrip those challenges. The Net lowers barriers to participation in public discussion. Talk about “power to the people”—the internet is an unbelievably powerful threat to concentrated power, whether that power is being exercised by the government, as the founders feared, or by private monopolies.
That promise is why, right now, I think the biggest threat to our constitutionally protected right to receive and disseminate information is contained in a Senate Telecommunications bill sponsored by Alaska Senator Ted Stevens—he of “bridge to nowhere” fame. Buried in the technical jargon of that bill is a provision that would have profound effects on all of us who participate in the marketplace of ideas, but especially on the less powerful—and members of more marginalized communities.
Currently, most web sites are able to be accessed at a fairly fast speed. Any person can create a blog or web site, and it will be just as available to people all over the world as the sites of the largest companies. The large cable and telephone companies are proposing regulations that would change that. This proposal would let Internet providers charge content providers money for faster access. Corporations or wealthier individuals could pay to have their web sites load faster. (One person I know calls this “protection money,” because the telecom giants currently have a monopoly on the telephone and cable lines that the Internet runs through. It would be like someone owning the streets, and letting Hummers use them for free, while charging Yugos to drive on them.)
The bottom line is that some web sites would become Yugos on that road we call the World Wide Web–relegated to the Internet’s bike lane if the companies that own the road are successful in getting this measure passed. The proposal would let ISPs and other web businesses pay extra to receive preferential treatment for their data packets carrying everything from video to music to text over the Internet. Such “packet prioritization” would deliver a more responsive Web to visitors to those sites–an especially valuable perk for high-bandwidth services like streaming video, but important to others as well.
Think about it—how patient are you with slow-loading sites? I’m not. If something is taking too long to load, unless it’s something I really, really want, I don’t wait. I go elsewhere. It’s not a phenomenon limited to the web—how often do you return to restaurants or retail stores with poor service?
Until now, one of the great benefits of the internet has been its equal accessibility. Before the internet, the costs of being heard—the “entry costs” of having a meaningful voice in public debate—were prohibitive. Want to start a newspaper? It’ll cost you millions. What to get a book published? Not easy—as I can attest from experience. But want to start a web site? All you need is a computer, web access and time. Your only limit your persuasiveness, whether you have a message that others want to hear.
The Web is the ideal “marketplace of ideas,” where those expressing ideas that may not be “mainstream” or “popular” or sufficiently in line with majority beliefs can compete on an equal footing. The web has been an enormous boon to minority opinions and voices.
That’s what “net neutrality” is: equal access to the marketplace of ideas. An ability to penetrate the official “echo chamber.” And that’s what is under assault.
If you care about equality, about journalism, about the First Amendment, you should care about preserving net neutrality.
