The Politics of Morality

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of our current political leaders is their willingness to lecture the rest of us on the importance of morality. Whether it is a self-righteous diatribe about a “culture of life” or an insistence on “abstinence-based” sex education, this fixation on our personal behaviors evidently consumes far more of their time and energy than trying to making health care affordable, or balancing the budget.

 

We’re beginning to see just how “moral” these people who’ve cornered the market on virtue really are.

 

I’m not talking about the morality of things like the war in Iraq, or efforts to deport all illegal aliens, or tax policies that line the pockets of campaign contributors at the expense of the most vulnerable, although those are undoubtedly appropriate topics of discussion. No, I’m talking about the garden-variety, “don’t lie, don’t steal” kinds of morality. How are the guys in charge doing on those homelier virtues?

 

In Congress, the Jack Abramoff scandal has put Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham in prison, and has led to the indictment of so-much-holier-than-thou Tom Delay. As many as twenty more lawmakers may be implicated before it’s all over. Bill (“Terri Schaivo looks fine”) Frist is under investigation for securities fraud.

 

In the Administration of our current moralist-in-chief, we have a bonanza: Scooter Libby has been indicted for felony obstruction of justice (and Karl Rove is still under investigation) in the Valerie Plame “outing.” Domestic policy advisor and self-proclaimed Christian conservative Claude Allen has been arrested for felony shoplifting. White House procurement officer David Safarian has been arrested for corruption. At Homeland Security, the agency created by the President to protect us all from the bad guys, not one but two high-ranking officials have been arrested—one for kiddie porn, and the other for trying to have sex with a 14-year-old he “met” over the internet.

 

These are the guys who have been lecturing us about godliness and morality!

 

Maybe these are just examples of age-old “do as I say not as I do” moral smugness. Or maybe these politicians are using religion and religious folks for cynical political advantage. (A recent study called “False Promises” accuses the GOP of deliberately using homophobia to win support from African-Americans; others have suggested that immigration fears are being used in 2006 in much the same way gays were used to mobilize the Republican base in 2004.) Whatever the explanation, the consequences for the country are nothing short of appalling.

 

These Republican leaders have used the language of morality to set American against American. The older rhetoric of “we the people” has been eclipsed by dark references to “them” and “us.” Now, as these favorites of the Religious Right turn out to be considerably less than godly, Americans are reacting by becoming more cynical. As GOP apologists claim “everybody does it,” many citizens assume that’s true. It isn’t—but the perception is profoundly corrosive of trust, and without trust, democratic government cannot endure.

 

It’s enough to give morality a bad name.

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And I Always Thought “Rapture” Meant Happiness…

If I were one of those Christians who believed in the Rapture, I have to admit it would be looking pretty imminent.

 Every time I think things can’t get any grimmer, they seem to: we’ve got global warming (yes, Mr. President, whether you think so or not—one aspect of that inconvenient thing called reality) melting the polar icecaps and threatening to inundate the coasts; more and more people are dying in Iraq, while the Iraqi “government of national unity” shows none of the characteristics of government or unity; the deficit is so big even my great-grandchildren won’t be able to pay it at this rate; Congress wants to round up all the immigrants (except for their grandparents, of course) and expel them; our shortsighted energy policies are getting ready to bite us in the you-know-where…and of course, all of these problems, and any others you can think of, are clearly the fault of the powerful, rich ho-mo-sexual (drool and sneer when you say that) lobby. (We’ve gotta do something about them queers, you know.)

 Sometimes, it really doesn’t seem worth getting out of bed in the mornings.

 I do try to look on the bright side. Honest. Okay, so the sea waters rise three feet—I always wanted to live by the ocean, and pretty soon, Indiana will have a beach! No oil? I always worry when my kids and grandkids drive, and pretty soon, they won’t be able to. What a relief! I don’t have to worry about war with China, because China obviously decided some time back to just buy America instead…..and now that they own all our debt, there’s no reason to invade. And the President assures us that things in Iraq are really just peachy—if the liberal media would just concentrate on covering school openings instead of suicide bombings, we’d all feel better.

 Okay—so I’m not too good at looking on the bright side.

 I would really love to live in the alternate universe that so many of our fellow-citizens evidently inhabit, but I can’t seem to summon up the will power to do that. I keep bumping into hard-working immigrants who just want a chance to make a better life for their kids, or gay neighbors who just want the same rights everyone else has, or people who just want the environment to be clean for their children to grow up in.  I keep encountering reality.

 A lawyer I worked with early in my career used to say that at the end of the day, everything boils down to one question: What should we do? I think that may be the question for our time.

 If you live in what some of us have taken to calling “the reality-based community,” what should you be doing? (Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you have decided against just drinking yourself into a stupor, screwing yourself to death, or finding a deserted tropical island somewhere.) What are the options available?

 I think we have to send a message to the people who are running things. That’s not just the people who hold political office; it’s also the people who pay the lobbyists who bribe the people who work for the people in office. I think we send our message two ways: first, by refusing to spend our dollars—to the extent possible—with those who support the current regime; and second, by working as hard as we can to vote out the current crop of officeholders.

 Is Company A refusing to fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill? Okay—but I don’t have to shop at Company A. Is Company B supporting homophobic candidates, advertising on Pat Robertson’s television network, or otherwise enabling the dark side? Fine, but they’ll do it without my patronage.

 Is the Republican leadership in Congress intent upon dictating my religion, my sex life, my procreation and the way I express my patriotism? Are they supporting a President who routinely and brazenly breaks America’s laws? Are they contemptuous of the very people they are pandering to? Then let’s do our damnedest to throw them out—so we can start cleaning up the mess they’ve made.

 Now that would cheer me up!

 

 

 

  

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Going Beyond the B.S. (Bumper Stickers)

It’s primary election time. Soon, the 2006 political season will descend on us—and with it, the inevitable assortment of exaggerated claims, pious moral pronouncements and impractical, unconstitutional and ludicrous policy proposals. Since hiding in a cave somewhere until it’s all over is generally not an option, when Congressional candidate A unveils his “Major Initiative to Solve the Boll Weevil Problem,” I am offering the following four easy questions to help you evaluate the candidates and their proposals:

 Question One: Is there general agreement that Boll Weevils are a problem?

Many of our fellow citizens believe that “dirty” books, gay parenting or retailers who substitute “Seasons Greetings” for “Merry Christmas” are among our most pressing social problems. Many of the rest of us don’t—in fact, some of us think our biggest problem is the jerks who insist on screaming about these “threats to morality and American culture.” Maybe some farmers welcome Boll Weevils.

 Question Two: Is there agreement on how to solve that problem?

Assuming that there is some level of agreement that a particular element of our common lives presents us with challenges—immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs come to mind; there are many others—is there any consensus on how that particular problem should be solved? (If Tom Friedman is right and the world is really “flat,” the measures we employ to deal with outsourcing probably ought to take its inevitability into account.) What does the evidence tell us about the Boll Weevils?

 Question Three: Is this a problem only government can solve?

Just because Uncle Beauregard was injured when he fell out of his golf cart, does it really make sense to pass a law requiring all golf cart manufacturers to install seat belts? Aren’t some problems best left to individuals, parents, or nonprofit organizations? Or—in the case of Boll Weevils—to farmers?

Question Four: Does the proposed solution pass the ‘smell test’?

 Does our earnest candidate demonstrate knowledge of available evidence on this issue? There are, for example, numerous studies showing that children raised by gay parents do just as well as those raised by straight ones—is Moral Paragon Candidate X aware of that research?  Is Fearless Candidate Y using “wedge issues” to appeal to a particular constituency—say the Wingnut Right—at the expense of other citizens? Is she simplifying complex issues? Substituting slogans for proposals, and labels for analysis? Is willingness to get serious about Boll Weevils really an indicator of her opponent’s fidelity to American Values?

 Can we really solve the nation’s problems with bumper sticker policies? Can we reduce criminal justice to Officer Friendly, Dirty Harry and Smoky the Bear? Or save American values by censoring Hollywood, outlawing abortion and disenfranchising gays?    

Or will 2006 be the year America comes to its senses?

 

 

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Suing City Hall

John Hostettler, the always entertaining Congressman from Indiana’s Eighth District, is again promoting legislation to repeal what he calls a “loophole” in the law. That “loophole” allows recovery of reasonable legal fees by people who successfully sue government for violating their religious liberties. Hostettler calls his bill “anti-ACLU” legislation—as though the First Amendment and the ACLU would both disappear if fees weren’t available.

 Using the language of victimization that Christians on the far right are increasingly employing, the bill’s supporters describe the measure as necessary to “protect religious liberty.”

 Hostettler and his cohorts conveniently ignore a few not-so-minor points. The omissions strongly suggest that what they really want is a country where the government gets to decide whose religion is acceptable. (They seem to take for granted that government will choose theirs.)  After all, the fees they want to eliminate are only awarded to “prevailing parties,” that is, to people who have won their lawsuits by proving in court that the government broke its own rules, overstepped its bounds and violated their rights.

 There are several reasons for the laws that allow citizens to recover their attorney fees when they successfully sue the government for civil rights violations. A civil rights action is different from an action between private parties. In a private lawsuit, if you win, you can make the other guy compensate you for whatever damage he caused. In a civil rights suit, a plaintiff who wins doesn’t necessarily even get compensated for whatever harm he has suffered. Sometimes, he doesn’t get anything but a promise by the government agency to stop doing something illegal. But his willingness to hold government responsible is an important tool of public accountability.

 If citizens have no real remedy when government misbehaves, government will misbehave. The Bill of Rights and other civil rights laws aren’t self-enforcing. They are worthless on a dusty shelf in someone’s law library—it takes legal action to make the Establishment Clause or Free Exercise Clause real. And the people who need protection from government are rarely the rich; they are often people who could never afford an attorney on their own.

 It’s hard enough to find a lawyer willing to fight city hall “on contingency” when there is the hope of being paid if they win. Ironically, if fee recovery were eliminated, the only lawyers who would ever bring these cases—other than those hired by the wealthy—would be public interest law firms like the ACLU, which gets most of its support from private donations, or groups like the American Center for Law and Justice, affiliated with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition.

 Fee reimbursement laws weren’t passed to benefit lawyers, or the ACLU or the ACLJ—they were passed to help their clients. Congress recognized that government is more likely to run roughshod over the rights of the “little guy,” than it is to mess around with the well-to-do and privileged. The fee statutes level the playing field by allowing us all to keep government in line.

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War and Peace

We have just “celebrated” the third anniversary of our invasion of Iraq.

 

Some wars, regrettably, are necessary. Iraq was not such a war. It was a war of choice, impelled by ideology and sold to Americans (wittingly or unwittingly) under false pretenses. Worse yet, it was justified by appealing to our fears—fears of “the other,” fears of terrorism, fears of impotence.

 

The choice to send our young people into combat in an unnecessary war of choice was reprehensible. But the incompetence with which the conflict was planned and executed was even more reprehensible.

 

Expert advice was disregarded. It’s obvious that none of the decision-makers in the Administration had bothered to learn what the region’s history had to teach. We sent courageous and patriotic young Americans into a quagmire that was eminently foreseeable to anyone who was not willfully blind—and thanks to criminally misplaced priorities, we sent them there without proper equipment and supplies. There has been plenty of money for Halliburton and other contractors, but not enough for bullet-proof vests or Hummer armor.

 

After each setback, the Administration and its apologists have said “no one could have known.” No one anticipated the looting that occurred in the wake of our initial attack; no one anticipated the insurgency; no one anticipated the civil war that rages there now. But people did anticipate every one of these things. They wrote articles and editorials warning about every one of them. I wrote some of them myself. Government experts wrote memos that warned about these dangers and many others in great detail. The Administration was warned about precisely what has happened—just as it was warned that Hurricane Katrina could cause the dykes to fail.

 

In his pursuit of some grandiose “crusade,” Bush has mortgaged our future, and diverted national resources that were desperately needed here at home. Our crumbling roads, our impoverished urban school systems, our embarrassing national health care system, and our neglected national parks all could have benefited from the nearly one trillion dollars his foolhardy, unnecessary and arrogant unilateralism has cost us. 

 

What do we have to show for the young lives and money he has squandered?

 

We are less safe than we were; Iraq was not a sanctuary for terrorists before the war, but it is now. Our standing in the world community has never been lower. Our citizens are angrier and more polarized than ever. And worst of all, our belief in our own inherent goodness—the belief that America is not an aggressor nation—has been profoundly shaken.

 

I don’t know what we do now. Colin Powell was right when he warned about “the Pottery Barn rule.” We broke it, and we have a moral obligation to help fix it. Whether that is best done by leaving immediately or staying longer, I simply don’t know. What I do know is that this “adventure”—undertaken by a fatally incompetent and uncomprehending President—has damaged our country profoundly, and it will take a long time to recover.

 

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