Civic Incompetence and Its Consequences

A college in Canada—Lakehead University—is running a rather audacious recruitment campaign: an internet advertisement with George W. Bush’s face and the message “Yale, Shmale. Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart. If you agree, click here.” When you click on the link, you get a pitch for Lakehead.

Just another bit of evidence—as if evidence were needed—of the low esteem in which the current American President is held.

If his usefulness to Canadian ad men and late-night comics were the only consequences of Bush’s incompetence, that would be an embarrassing, but short-lived, problem. Unfortunately, having a chief executive who doesn’t recognize basic constitutional principles or comprehend important distinctions has created domestic and international disaster. 

Let’s just connect the dots by way of one example. Bush has constantly talked about the importance of bringing “democracy” and “freedom” to the Middle East. He clearly believes the terms are interchangable. They aren’t. Democracy is the practice of popular election; liberty, as the western world has come to understand that term, requires the rule of law. The rule of law protects our freedom to live our lives as we see fit, without government interference so long as we aren’t harming someone else. Liberty thus includes freedom of speech and religion, a right to due process and equal protection, the right to privacy, and so forth.

In the Middle East, for example, Hamas—the Palestinian terrorist organization—was democratically elected (and Hezbollah enjoys majority support in much of Lebanon). It is quite likely that Iraq, which used to be the most secular Arab state, will eventually elect a theocratic government—assuming Iraq survives its current civil war intact. In short, a country can be both “democratic” and repressive. 

Why is any of this important—or relevant—to the gay community? 

The central concern of civil liberties and the rule of law is to trump what James Madison called “the passions of the majority.” The ACLU is never called upon to defend people everyone agrees with; the First Amendment was intended to protect, as Justice Holmes once put it “the idea we hate,” not the popular, widely-accepted idea. The gay community’s ability to make progress toward acceptance and equal rights depends upon America’s commitment to liberty, not its practice of democracy. In 2004, we saw what happens when citizens get to vote on the rights of their gay neighbors. The principle that matters is equal protection of the laws, not fidelity to majority passions.

This is not to suggest that democracy is unimportant, only that it is insufficient. Majority vote unconstrained by the rule of law and respect for equal rights can be every bit as tyrranical and despotic as the rule of a dictator.

An example: when I was the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, we represented the KKK in a suit against the state. The then-governor, Evan Bayh, had refused to allow a Klan rally on the steps of the Indiana Statehouse. The steps were routinely used by other groups—prochoice and prolife, major and minor political parties, all manner of issue advocacy organizations—but the Klan was (for good and obvious reasons)massively unpopular. Those of us defending the right of these despicable people to be treated like everyone else included me (Jewish), a co-operating attorney (gay), and a paralegal (African-American). We’d have been the first people killed if the Klan ever came to power.

In a very real sense, however, we weren’t representing the Klan—we were defending the rule of law. We knew that our own rights depended upon fidelity to the principle of equal protection—that if the most despised citizens don’t have rights, no one really has rights—they just have privileges that government can revoke when majority opinion makes it politically convenient to do so. 

Too bad our President doesn’t understand that.

 

 

 

 

Comments

Adults and Children

Here’s a short quiz.

 

    Who is the better parent, the dad who lovingly but firmly corrects his child when he believes the youngster has done something wrong and needs to learn a lesson, or the dad who reflexively defends Junior, no matter what—the one who goes to school and argues when the teacher disciplines his child?

    

Most of us would choose the parent who cares enough to teach his child to distinguish between right and wrong, between unacceptable behavior and behavior that is true to the child’s best nature. Most of us also recognize that the parent who constantly shields his children from the consequences of their bad choices is not living up to the responsibilities of parenthood.

    

Would we accuse the first parent of not loving his child? Or would we say his willingness to do the unpleasant work—the willingness to suffer through the tantrums of the two-year-old told no, the pouting of the preteen denied a pair of too-expensive jeans, and the complaints of a grounded teenager—makes him the better, more loving parent? One is  mature love; the other is a self-centered  "he’s my kid, so he’s automatically right" attitude that is anything but.

     

Think about this example the next time someone in the Bush Administration suggests that any criticism of the Iraq war or American foreign policy is “siding with the terrorists.” Think about it when shrill pundits accuse those who disagree with Administration policies of “hating America” or being “covert enemies” who secretly want the United States to fail.

    

Midterm elections are fast approaching, and the nasty rhetoric on all sides is ratcheting up accordingly. That’s a shame—because if there is anything America needs right now, it is an adult conversation about our policy priorities, and about the qualifications of those we elect to set those priorities and implement them. That conversation won’t occur if necessary participants in the debate take the position that disagreement equals hatred and shouldn’t be tolerated. 

 

    Mature people who genuinely love this country will worry when they believe it is going astray. They will do the hard work of citizenship: they will inform themselves of the facts and make an effort to help correct perceived missteps. They won’t always be right, any more than a parent is always right—but therein lies the difference between patriotism and jingoism.

    

Let’s set some ground rules. Let’s acknowledge that people can love their country deeply, and yet have very different ideas about what is in the national best interest. We can respect the good will of those with whom we disagree, and listen to their arguments, rather than applying labels in order to dismiss them. We may leave the conversation without reaching agreement—indeed, such a result is highly likely, given human nature and the different worldviews we bring to the discussion—but actually listening to each other can be a very enlightening experience.

 

     Good parents don’t condone name-calling when their children do it.  Good citizens don’t resort to it either.

 

 

Comments

Fear of Fucking

This morning, the Indianapolis Star ran an article suggesting that the FDA might retreat from its insistence that access to “Plan B”—the morning-after pill—be only by prescription. The agency “might” allow women over 18 to purchase it over the counter, despite deep concerns that its ready availability might “encourage promiscuity.”

 

And I thought the Food and Drug Administration was supposed to decide whether food and drugs were safe—not whether their use was moral.  Silly me!

 

A feminist blogger I often read says it’s a mistake to look at the right-wing “family values” attacks on gays, abortion, “pornography,” “non-traditional” families and the like as separate issues; at base, she says, what these people are against is sex, sexuality, and anything that smacks of acceptance of the role sex plays in human existence. The fight over Plan B would sure seem to support that analysis.

 

The blogger’s explanation for this war on sex (she calls it a War on Fucking)  is that those waging it are people who have terrible difficulty controlling their own urges, and so they assume that everyone else is having an equally difficult time controlling theirs.  (As I’ve noted elsewhere, this theory may or may not be true, but it sure would help to explain all those child molesting cases involving pastors and choir directors…….). As a result, they live in a state of fear, and they cling tightly to the “eternal verities” provided by highly restrictive religious doctrines and punitive laws, which they see as the only alternative to social disintegration.

 

This is the real root of support for “abstinence education” rather than accurate and effective sex education, of the campaign against Plan B, and more recently (and incredibly) the opposition to inoculation against cervical cancer. In case you haven’t read about this latter controversy, medical scientists have developed a highly effective immunization against cervical cancer. But it must be given to girls before puberty. As the Washington Post recently reported:

 

“A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teenagers could encourage sexual activity…

 

Groups working to reduce the toll of the cancer are eagerly awaiting the vaccine and want it to become part of the standard roster of shots that children, especially girls, receive just before puberty. But because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many conservatives oppose making it mandatory, citing fears that it could send a subtle message condoning sexual activity before marriage.”

 

This “fear of fucking,” is the larger context within which we must understand the ferocious resistance to "legitimizing" gay relationships by allowing same-sex adoptions, marriage or civil unions, even laws protecting gays against discrimination.

 

To the folks on the far Right, moral issues are always sexual issues; political honesty, business ethics, charitable works and the like aren’t what they mean when they talk about “morality.” To them, “morality” means proper sexual behavior (and “proper” sexual behavior usually means no sexual behavior.)  Because of their single-minded preoccupation with sex, social conservatives don’t see the full scope of a human relationship; instead they equate any legal recognition of gays, or any approval of next-day contraception or prepubescent vaccination, with an endorsement of sex for pleasure, rather than for procreation–an endorsement that threatens their most fundamental beliefs. (Pun unintended, but appropriate.) 

 

An official recognition that people have sex—just because they like it—would be terrifying.

 

 

 

 

Comments

Evidence and Ideology

Americans are absolutely smitten with detective shows where justice triumphs after a painstaking collection and analysis of all available evidence. The popularity of these shows reflects—accurately, I think—America’s pragmatic culture, our desire to “get to the bottom of things” and to base decisions on hard evidence.

 

So how do we explain an American policy process that increasingly displays a positive contempt for evidence?

 

There are all sorts of examples: twenty-five years of research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the drug war is a costly and counterproductive fiasco. Legislators have responded by waging our war on drugs more enthusiastically. We have scientific unanimity on the reality of global warming. Our elected officials “pooh-pooh” climate change. On July 19, the New York Times reported yet another case of the Administration’s “don’t confuse me with the facts” approach to federal legislation. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings joined several Congressional Republicans announcing a proposal to spend $100 million dollars on a school voucher “pilot project.”

 

Education vouchers are a policy near and dear to the hearts of the political right, albeit for different reasons: the Christian right wants tax dollars to support religious schools; libertarians see education as a consumer good to be provided by the market; and a sizable number of ordinary folks who have never been happy about junior sitting next to a black classmate see vouchers as a way to re-segregrate.

 

Except for those who are ideologically committed to them, vouchers don’t generate much political support among people satisfied with public school performance. However, it is undeniable that students at many public schools are not performing well. Voucher proponents thus argue that fairness requires sending children from failing public schools to private ones that are “better.”

 

The problem is, there is no evidence that private schools do a better job of educating the children who attend “failing” public schools. (Comparing kids whose parents are willing to spend the money to send them to private schools to kids whose parents often don’t even make the effort to see that they get to public school is not comparing apples to apples.) Most poorly-performing public schools have large populations of children who do not come prepared to learn: they are disproportionately poor, disproportionately from broken homes, often come to school hungry, and so forth. Before they can learn, these barriers must be addressed.  

 

The Department of Education decided to do what good detectives do: look at the evidence. The Department studied 725,000 children in public and private schools, controlling for student background, and discovered that—with the exception of a small difference in 8th grade reading scores—public school students did as well or better than those in private schools. Secretary Spelling later said she didn’t know about the study her own department had conducted, and a Department underling dismissed it as “a technical analysis.”

 

On TV, when the DNA evidence exonerates our suspect, we look for the guy who really committed the crime. In Washington, when evidence undermines our ideology, we ignore it.

Tea Leaves & Bumper Stickers

I think I just took a poll.

 

It wasn’t scientific—in fact, it could more aptly be characterized as a series of anecdotes. But interesting, for what it may be worth, and what it may suggest about changing political passions in these polarized times.

 

As most of my friends and acquaintences know, I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads simply “Ex Republican.” It is the only message on my car, and something of a departure from my usual disinclination to use my transportation as a billboard for my politics, my religion or my philosophy. I put it there three years ago, and I tend to forget it’s there, but the last couple of weeks have provided me with pretty constant reminders.

 

For one week every summer for a number of years, my husband and I have taken assorted kids—and more recently, grandkids—to a beach in South Carolina. This year, he and I took an extra week and drove down the

Blue Ridge Parkway

. (For those who have never done so, I commend the experience; the National Park Service has done a magnificent job maintaining this spectacular route through the mountains. It would be nice if more of our federal budget went to such endeavors, and less to blowing people up in Iraq—but I digress.)

 

On a country road in Virginia, a woman driving a pickup truck honked at us and motioned for my husband to roll down his window. Mystified, he did so. She gave us a “thumbs up,” and when we still looked puzzled, yelled “I love your bumper sticker! Me too!”

 

When we stopped at a hotel, the bellman smiled broadly and told us he loved our bumper sticker. When we pulled over at one of the scenic overlooks along the

Blue Ridge Parkway

, a man driving out of the same overlook in a car with a faded Bush/Cheney sticker leaned out his window and told us he sure did agree with our bumper sticker. The most enthusiastic response came from the owner of an Inn in Blowing Rock, North Carolina; he took one look, started to laugh, and said “That bumper sticker just earned you a discount on your room!” He was as good as his word—we got 30% off the listed rate!

 

I must admit to being floored by these and a number of similar reactions. We were driving through the south, after all—through very red states. And we undoubtedly passed plenty of people who muttered uncomplimentary things under their breath, or at least disagreed with the sentiment plastered on our car. But I also don’t think these reactions were meaningless, or that they should be discounted. I think they reflect a growing national mood, made up of equal parts disgust with Congressional corruption, and the belated realization that a President who understands the importance of national parks and global realities (among other things) might be a better choice than one we’d like to have a beer with.

 

 

Comments