Krugman was deconstructing some recent research showing what he described as a “big band of credit-score calamity that stretches across the American South.” The research confirmed that, in virtually every part of the South and across all demographic groups– every race, every income bracket — credit score are low.
Low credit scores penalize people in a number of ways. As Krugman notes,
The region’s poor credit means Southerners are paying more to borrow money, assuming they can qualify for loans at all. That sets them back in everything from car and home purchases to credit card rewards.
But why the South?
Many of us would suggest the influence of racism. But that turns out not to explain the phenomenon.
Our first guess about what might be happening here involves race. Almost 3 out of every 5 Black Americans live in the South, and they make up almost 20 percent of the region’s population. Centuries of slavery, sharecropping, apartheid and exclusion from many elite educational institutions left some Southern Black folks with little credit and even less collateral.
When researchers ran the numbers, the Blackest parts of the South had roughly the same credit scores as the least-Black areas. And their scores were far lower than places with similar Black populations outside the South. So while race may play a role, it’s clearly not a defining factor.
Well, what about poverty? The South has the highest poverty, lowest income and lowest education rates of any region in the U.S., and counties with lower income and lower college graduation rates are likely to have lower credit scores.
Nope.
Even some of the South’s biggest, most dynamic cities — think Atlanta or Dallas — have the same below-average credit scores as their more rural Southern neighbors. Within every income bracket, the typical Southerner has a lower credit score than someone who lives in the Northeast, Midwest or West.
So–if it isn’t racism and it isn’t poverty, what explains this phenomenon?
The answer, it turns out, is America’s refusal to follow virtually every other modern nation and offer national health care. Medical debt is the reason credit scores are so low in the South.
It turns out the South has the highest levels of medical debt in the country.
Of the 100 counties with the highest share of adults struggling to pay their medical debt, 92 are in the South, and the other eight are in neighboring Oklahoma and Missouri, according to credit data from the Urban Institute. (On the other side, 82 of the 100 counties with the least pervasive medical-debt problems are in the Midwest, with 45 in Minnesota alone.)
And sure enough, when you look at areas across the nation where adults are struggling to pay down medical debt, they have similar credit scores.
This raises an obvious question: why is this problem concentrated in the South?
One answer is that the South is simply less healthy than any other region. Data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows that among Medicare recipients, the population for which we have the best data, those in the South are substantially more likely to suffer from four or more chronic conditions. And poor health tends to go hand in hand with people having overdue medical debt and poor credit scores.
Poor health isn’t the only factor–Red State policy choices are a huge contributor.A recent analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that medical debt “became more concentrated in lower-income communities in states that did not expand Medicaid. The share of residents with overdue medical debt is more strongly linked to a county’s credit score than any other factor– including debt related to car loans, credit cards and student loans.
Last year, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a scathing report finding that medical debt is “an unexpected, unwanted, and financially devastating expense” that is “far less reliable and predictive of people’s ability to pay their bills” than other kinds of borrowing.
The lack of national health insurance–or even Medicaid availability–means that folks in the South pay higher rates on mortgages and car loans, and have more trouble getting credit.
But there are social as well as individual costs involved.
Insecurity fosters anti-social behaviors. When a serious illness means you might lose your house or go bankrupt—you tend to take those worries out on others. Research shows that countries with better social safety nets are more tolerant of differences in race, religion and sexual orientation, and some studies have suggested that Canada’s lower rate of gun violence can be attributed to their stronger social safety net.
But national health insurance would be “socialist” and Southerners wouldn’t want that…
A recent essay from the Brookings Institution began with a point about the current attacks on education that should be obvious–but clearly isn’t.
What is missing from the larger discussion on systems transformation is an intentional and candid dialogue on how societies and institutions are defining the purpose of education. When the topic is discussed, it often misses the mark or proposes an intervention that takes for granted that there is a shared purpose among policymakers, educators, families, students, and other actors.
Eleanor Roosevelt argued for education that builds “good citizenship.” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that education transmits “not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living..” E.D. Hirsch added cultural literacy– knowledge of a given culture’s signs and symbols, as well as its language, allows culturally-literate people to communicate with each other.
Privatizers ignore any emphasis on these civic and social benefits; they define education solely as a consumer good– the transmittal of skills individuals need to operate successfully in the marketplace. I have previously argued two things: that education is an essential element of democracy via the creation of an informed and engaged citizenry–and that a broad liberal arts education enables human flourishing.
Beliefs about the purposes of education will rather obviously inform approaches to education policy.
If, as the privatizers and voucher advocates insist, education is simply the transmittal of skills that will allow individuals to succeed in the economy, there’s no particular reason to give government the job. (On the other hand, you might think evidence that private schools don’t transmit those skills as well as public schools would lead to some re-thinking, but evidently not.)
If you are Ron DeSantis, Florida’s “anti-woke” Governor, and you see education as indoctrination, your primary goal will be to substitute yourself as the indoctrinator–to control the educational institutions in your state in order to protect your ideological and/or religious beliefs from examination and the possibility that they–and you–will be discarded.
If you are a college like Marymount, and education is just a product you are offering, you move to eliminate undergraduate majors in English, history, philosophy and other subjects when your analysis suggests they are less profitable than the job training subjects on offer.
Even the major in theology and religious studies — a staple at many colleges but especially those with Catholic affiliation — would be cut. The plan, which has spurred fierce faculty protest, represents a pivotal moment for a 3,700-student institution in Arlington that describes itself as a “comprehensive Catholic university.”
Marymount President Irma Becerra endorsed the cuts in a Feb. 15 letter to the university’s Faculty Council. In all, the plan calls for phasing out nine bachelor’s degree programs. Among other majors that would be eliminated: art, mathematics, secondary education and sociology. For economics, the Bachelor of Arts would be cut, but the Bachelor of Science would remain. Also proposed to be cut: a master’s program in English and humanities.
Marymount points to the small number of students majoring in these subjects as justification for eliminating them. Opponents of the plan point out that those courses continue to draw substantial enrollment from students majoring in other disciplines.
Among the university’s larger programs are nursing, business administration and information technology. As one faculty member accurately noted, “What it looks like we’re going to be doing is focusing on majors that are training you for a very specific job. That’s a real change from the mission and identity of the university.”
Marymount and similar institutions are substituting a focus on the bottom line for fidelity to an educational mission.
Meanwhile, lawmakers’ widespread disrespect for education has led a significant number of K-12 teachers to leave the profession. In Indiana, nearly 95% of Indiana school superintendents say they are contending with a shortage of qualified candidates for teacher openings. Districts are responding to the shortage by issuing emergency permits and using teachers outside their licensed areas, among other stop-gap measures.
A number of those “emergency” permits are going to people who could not qualify under existing state standards–a situation that members of the World’s Worst Legislature consider irrelevant.After all, if education is just job training, anyone who can impart a set of limited skills can teach.
Who cares if the science instructor has ever read Shakespeare–or anything else? So what if the math teacher is ignorant of history and civics? For that matter, do the schools really need to teach science? A number of the voucher schools don’t–they teach creationism instead, and they still “qualify” as educational institutions entitled to receive our tax dollars.
Bottom line, baby!
It is past time for America to have a conversation about the purpose–for that matter, the definition– of education.
As regular readers of this blog know, I read (or at least scan) reports from a lot of different media. In the process, I increasingly find myself muttering things like “these people are insane!”
Take a look at any rundown of the “news of the day,” and you will find conspiracy theories and behaviors bizarre enough to make Marjorie Taylor Greene look rational. (And that is saying something.)
I recently saw that the GOP in a Florida county passed a resolution “banning the. jab,.” They want to ban the COVID-19 vaccine in the state of Florida. Lest we conclude that the insanity is limited to the Sunshine State, however, U.S. News disabuses us of that comforting conclusion. Arkansas, Montana and South Carolina are the latest states to advance bills or enact laws that ban requirements based on vaccine status.
The war on vaccination joins the war on “wokeness”–and science, and health, and common sense.
The Indiana legislature is a never-never land where logic goes to die. Is the state having difficulty finding qualified teachers? Indiana’s Senate just passed a bill (patterned after Florida’s), that will allow teachers to be charged with a felony for allowing students to check out books some parents don’t want their kids to read.
Indiana sure isn’t recruiting teachers with that message…
The same lawmakers who defend that measure by chanting “parental rights” are busy passing bills divesting parents of trans kids of their right to determine their children’s medical care. (Indiana’s legislature hasn’t improved much since it passed a law changing the value of pi.)
And then–brace yourself for this one.The MAGA folks have discovered that there is no war in Ukraine. It’s all a “false flag” operation! Shades of Alex Jones!
As Josh Marshall recently reported
Since I spend time, for better or worse, swimming in the swill of right wing influencers and Trumpists, I’m often able to see things before they go fully mainstream — or rather before their existence gets picked up in mainstream media. Just over the last few days there’s been a burst of claims that something is not quite right about the Ukaine War, that the whole thing might be made up. Perhaps it’s a potemkin war. Maybe the Ukrainians are just crisis actors, as we sometimes hear claimed about the victims of mass shootings in the United States. The “questions” are characteristically vague and open-ended, designed to sow doubt without stipulating to any clearly disprovable claim.
The particular claim or question is, where are the pictures? Why isn’t there more war reporting as we’ve seen with every other war. How is it world leader after world leader is able to visit Kyiv in relative safety?
Marshall shared a post to Twitter from someone named Becker, who evidently started at Fox News and found it too mainstream. He decamped to The Blaze, TimCast, and the Rubin Report– “more explicitly white nationalist and fascist news organizations. Now he is the “Becker News CEO.” Here’s the post.
I am sick and tired of the lack of footage of the Ukraine war. I worked in cable news. I am initiated. If it bleeds, it leads. Where is the war footage? Where are the Pulitzer Prize winning photos? This smacks of a scam and the American people are fed up.
Produce the documentary evidence or STFU already. We’re not sending our sons and daughters to die over a corrupt undemocratic country’s politics without documentary evidence. We don’t give a crap about your Russian bogeymen. This is not a matter of US national security. So, put up or shut up.
Pick your chin up off the floor! As Marshall notes, in the real world where most of us live, the war in Ukraine is more than well-documented. The pictures–even the sounds–are on television, on social media, on the front pages of America’s remaining newspapers. Everywhere.
Volume doesn’t equate to quality or insight. But quite apart from the nonsense we’re discussing here, there is an avalanche of video, photography and satellite record of this conflict that really has no equal in history. Like so much else, a lot stems from the existence of the smart phone: most of the civilians and the combatants have smart phones which allow them to create high quality records of events in real time. These circulate on social networks and encrypted distribution networks like Telegram. Drones also play a role. They’re all generating video coverage whether they are surveillance drones or simply recording the final moments before they crash or detonate themselves.
Every reader of this blog can add to these examples. We’re seeing the steady growth of what the Trump Administration dubbed “alternate facts,” and you can’t reason with inhabitants of alternate realities.
“It” of course, refers to the revelations that Fox “News” knowingly and intentionally lied to its audience, in order to keep the sheep from abandoning Fox for outlets willing to feed them their desired conspiracy theories.
The Dominion lawsuit has done America a huge service. Lawyers for the company have amassed an absolutely astounding amount of evidence supporting Dominion’s allegations of willful prevarication by a company pretending to be engaged in journalism. I titled this post “Capitalism and the News” because Rupert Murdoch admitted that the decision to promote what everyone at Fox knew to be a Big Lie wasn’t prompted by “red or blue. It was about the green.”
Fox was protecting its bottom line. If facts threatened that bottom line, then facts had to go. (Cozying up to the Trumps was part of that effort: Murdoch also admitted giving Jared Kushner access to Biden campaign ads before they aired.)
Sane folks have long known that Fox was a propaganda arm of the GOP, not a legitimate news organization, and real journalists and pundits have pounced on the evidence.. One of the more thoughtful responses came from David French.
To understand the Fox News phenomenon, one has to understand the place it occupies in Red America. It’s no mere source of news. It’s the place where Red America goes to feel seen and heard. If there’s an important good news story in Red America, the first call is to Fox. If conservative Christians face a threat to their civil liberties, the first call is to Fox. If you’re a conservative celebrity and you need to sell a book, the first call is to Fox.
And Fox takes those calls. In the time before Donald Trump, I spent my share of moments in Fox green rooms and pitching stories to Fox producers. I knew they were more interested in stories about, say, religious liberty than most mainstream media outlets were. I knew they loved human-interest stories about virtuous veterans and cops. Sometimes this was good — we need more coverage of religion in America, for example — but over time Fox morphed into something well beyond a news network.
As French noted, the Fox propaganda-as-business model has made it immensely popular on the Right, where it commands significant loyalty.
But that kind of loyalty is built around a social compact, the profound and powerful sense in Red America that Fox is for us. It’s our megaphone to the culture. Yet when Fox created this compact, it placed the audience in charge of its content…
As the Trump years wore on, the prime-time messaging became more blatant. Supporting Trump became a marker not just of patriotism but also of courage. And what of conservatives, like me, who opposed Trump? We were “cowards” or “grifters” who sold our souls for 30 pieces of silver and airtime on MSNBC.
Our disagreement was cast as an act of outright betrayal. People like me had allegedly turned our backs on our own community. We had failed in our obligation to be their voice…
In the emails and texts highlighted in the Dominion filing, you see Fox News figures, including Sean Hannity and Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, referring to the need to “respect” the audience. To be clear, by “respect” they didn’t mean “tell the truth” — an act of genuine respect. Instead they meant “represent.”
That sort of “representation,” of course, is not journalism. (Although French doesn’t use the term, the word “prostitution” comes to mind…)
French says that Fox embodies the “possibly apocryphal remark of the French revolutionary Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: ‘There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.'”
In a recent podcast, John Stewart made a different comparison: Fox is the “old dope peddler,” and it knows that failure to supply its addicts’ need will cause the loss of its customers.
Conservatives like French have already dissociated themselves from today’s GOP, so the question really is whether any intellectually honest people remain. How will the crazies spin the internal communications and testimonies of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and even Rupert Murdoch, proving beyond a doubt that they all knowingly promoted a lie because they knew their audience wanted that lie–and that failure to provide it would hurt their ratings and bottom line.
The American descent towards authoritarianism, minority rule, and insurrection doesn’t happen without Fox News. It doesn’t happen only because of Fox News, but it’s been a critical ingredient in the toxic stew of misinformation, grievance, and division.
These stunning revelations ought to spell the end of Fox. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Addicts need their fix, and Fox is a willing supplier….
According to the New York Times, Eric Adams, current Mayor of New York City, opened a recent talk with an old chestnut:“When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools.” Not only is that presumed cause-and-effect demonstrably false, Adam’s speech–in which he dismissed separation of church and state–betrayed an appalling lack of constitutional knowledge (and provoked enormous criticism).
Back in 2004, I posted “Why Separation is Good for Church and Necessary for State.” It seems appropriate to repeat that explanation, and remind ourselves that religious “culture war” issues were already hot some twenty years ago. (Warning: this was originally a speech, so it’s longer than my usual daily post.)
________
I’ll start with James Madison, my favorite Founder and the one whose views on religious liberty dominated the Constitutional Convention. Madison based his understanding of natural rights and the role of the state on Locke’s social compact. As one scholar has noted, because the exercise of religion requires that each person follow his own conscience, it is a particular kind of natural right, an inalienable natural right. Since opinions and beliefs can be shaped only by individual consideration of evidence that that particular individual finds persuasive, no one can really impose opinions on any one else. Unlike property, or even speech, religious liberty cannot be sold, or alienated, so it does not become part of the social compact. The state must remain noncognizant of its citizens’ religions–meaning that it simply has no jurisdiction over religion. A just state must be blind to religion. It can’t use religion to classify citizens, and it can neither privilege nor penalize citizens on account of religion.
If you listen to the rhetoric around church-state issues today, you would never know that the “wall of separation” contemplated by Jefferson and Madison was seen as an important protection for both religion and government. But it was—and for some very sound reasons.
This view of Madison’s is a far cry from the interpretation favored by some of our current Justices—an interpretation sometimes called “nonpreferentialism.”
Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island, is most often cited for the religious view of the importance of separation; he was the originator of the phrase “a wall of separation”—a full 150 years before Thomas Jefferson used it. Historians sometimes overlook the importance 18th and 19th century Christians placed upon the doctrine of liberty of conscience—what they called “soul freedom.” Such views were most strongly held by Mennonites, Quakers and Baptists, but they were also part of the beliefs of colonial era Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians.
John Leland was a traveling evangelical Baptist with a strong view of the individual’s relationship to God, the inviolability of the individual conscience, and the limited nature of human knowledge. He wrote, “religion is a matter between God and individuals; religious opinions of men not being the objects of civil government, nor in any way under its control.” He also wrote that “the state has no right or leave to concern itself with the beliefs of an individual or that individual’s right to expound those beliefs…The state is to maintain order, not to judge right and wrong.” And here’s my favorite Leland quote: “The very tendency of religious establishments by human law is to make some hypocrites and the rest fools; they are calculated to destroy those very virtues that religion is designed to build up…Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics.”
Were there people who lived at the same time as Madison and Leland who felt otherwise? Of course. But it was the position of Madison and Leland that prevailed; it was their view of the proper relationship (which might more accurately be described as the proper lack of a relationship) between church and state that became part of our constitutional structure.
Today, in addition to rampant historical revisionism, there are two common justifications for allowing government to take cognizance of religion—arguments that are mutually exclusive, although often offered by the same people. They are sometimes called the instrumental argument, and the ceremonial justification.
You are all familiar with the instrumental argument; it is best summarized by a bumper sticker that was popular a few years ago: something along the lines of “When prayer was removed from the classroom, guns and teenage pregnancy came in.” A good example of the instrumental approach was offered by Tom Delay, right after the Columbine school shootings. DeLay said “I got an email this morning that said it all. A student writes, ‘Dear God, why didn’t you stop the shootings at Columbine?’ and God writes back ‘Dear student: I would have, but I wasn’t allowed in.’”
This naive belief that exposure to a denatured and generic religion in the classroom will make students behave is exactly the same justification given for current efforts to post the Ten Commandments—if people see “Thou shalt not kill” on the wall of a public building, well, they won’t kill. (For complex theological reasons I do not understand, this evidently doesn’t work if the building is privately owned.) Unfortunately, available evidence does not support this belief in the magical powers of religious iconography. The United States is by far the most religious of all the western industrialized nations—and we are also the most violent. There are few—if any—atheists in our prisons. Folks in the Bible Belt pray more—and kill more. And as Stephen Chapman noted in a column following DeLay’s comments, school shootings have not occurred in hotbeds of secularism like Berkeley or Cambridge or New York City, but in towns where Norman Rockwell and James Dobson would feel right at home: Paducah, KY, Jonesboro, ARK, and Littleton, CO.
The reason these proponents of government-sponsored prayer want government to make us pray is because they are convinced that in the absence of state coercion, we won’t. That’s why they object to non-mandatory, private baccalaureate services in lieu of prayer at high school graduations. Such baccalaureate services, which used to be the norm, permit meaningful prayer for those who wish to participate. So what’s the objection? Tellingly, it is that such services are voluntary—that those who “need” to prayer won’t come. The folks making this argument know what prayer is good for you and me, and are willing to use the power of the state to make us participate in a ceremony that includes that prayer.
The instrumental argument for supporting public religion and prayer is basically “religion is good for people, so the state should impose it.” The ceremonial defense of public religion is that it has no effect at all–that it’s meaningless. This is the argument that prayers at graduations and similar venues are merely “traditional” and “ceremonial.” People of faith—quite justifiably—find such characterizations deeply offensive. As a minister friend of mine used to say, he doen’t pray “to whom it may concern.” No religion I know of sanctions the notion that prayer is merely ceremonial, void of particularistic significance and useful only as an archaic (albeit charming) tradition.
The Founders of this nation believed that government neutrality in matters of religious belief—Madison’s noncognizance—was essential if government was to be seen as legitimate. They also believed that state neutrality was necessary if genuine religious sentiment was to flourish. You only need look at nations without a First Amendment to see how right they were; countries like England have seen state-sponsored religions degenerate into pleasant rituals without vitality; on the other end of the spectrum, nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran have employed the force of the state in the service of religious conformity. Both alternatives are instructive.
Let me just conclude these remarks by commenting on a couple of current manifestations of America’s religious culture wars: the President’s Faith-Based Initiative, and efforts to pass state and federal constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage.
As many of you know, I recently completed a 3 year study of “faith-based” contracting— I think the questions raised by the President’s Initiative point to the wisdom of Madison’s insistence upon government noncognizance of religion, and to the accuracy of Leland’s observations.
Charitable Choice and the President’s Faith-Based Initiative are efforts to increase the numbers of “faith-based” social service providers contracting with the state. In order to accomplish that, government agencies must first define religion, or “faith.” (We all saw how well that worked with conscientious objectors.) I should note here, by the way, that the term “faith-based” is itself illustrative of the problem. I’m sure the phrase was intended to be more inclusive (and perhaps less alarming ) than the word “religion,” but it betrays an unconscious, and rather telling, bias. “Faith based” is a very Protestant religious concept. Catholicism and Judaism, among others, are “works based” religions.
Of course, government has contracted with religious organizations ever since it has provided social services, so the first question that arises is: How do the faith organizations the President proposes to recruit differ from Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, the Salvation Army, and government’s many other long-time religious partners?
A much more troubling question comes next: Since the effort to recruit new faith partners has not been accompanied by additional funding for social services, it is hard not to see Charitable Choice as an effort to shift funds from one set of religious providers to another –presumably, from government’s traditional religious partners (who generally operate in accordance with applicable professional and constitutional norms) to more evangelical providers focused upon “personal transformation” of clients. If new FBOs do bid for contracts in any significant numbers, the competition for limited dollars will create precisely the sort of conflict among religious groups that the First Amendment was intended to avoid.
The First Amendment does not prevent government from doing business with faith organizations, but that doesn’t mean that any program run by a religious provider will pass constitutional muster. There is a constitutionally significant distinction between programs that are offered by a religious provider or in a religious setting, and programs in which religious observance or dogma are integral to service delivery. Failure to understand that distinction invites the very mischief that so worried Madison and Leland.
Despite the rhetoric emanating from the White House, the question is not whether government should partner with religious organizations to provide social services. It always has, and undoubtedly always will. The question is “when are such partnerships appropriate and how should they be structured and monitored?” Similarly, the question is not whether religious or secular organizations are better; it is “what organizational characteristics are most likely to predict successful program delivery?” If there is one truism our study confirmed, it is that simpleminded confidence in the power of undefined “faith” is misplaced. No armies of compassion are rushing in to relieve government of its responsibilities for social welfare, and faith has not provided a short-cut to self-sufficiency. As the head of one faith-based agency puts it, “Most poor people have all the religion in the world. What they don’t have is job skills.” To which observation both Madison and Leland might have added: and government’s responsibility is limited to providing them with the job skills.
If the effort to portray “faith” as an important element in service delivery is misplaced, the war being waged against gays and lesbians is a frontal attack on two of the most fundamental principles of our constitutional system, equal protection of the laws and separation of church and state.
With all of the rhetoric about government needing to “protect” marriage, we sometimes forget that government cannot and does not sanctify marital relationships. Churches, Mosques and synagogues join people in religious unions; the state merely confirms those relationships for purposes of securing the legal incidents of that partnership status. If you are married in a civil ceremony, you have a civil marriage—meaning that the state recognizes your legal partnership for purposes of enforcing the obligations you have assumed. Prohibiting state recognition of same-sex partnerships—many of which have, in fact, been blessed by a church or synagogue—denies gay couples access to 1008 legal rights that heterosexual citizens enjoy. Those include the right to be appointed as a guardian of an ailing or injured partner, the right to take family leave, the right to legally parent a non-biological child, and the right to half of the partnership’s accumulated property if the relationship dissolves. Same sex couples pay more taxes than married couples, because they aren’t entitled to spousal gift and estate tax exemptions and deductions. They can’t seek damages for a partner’s wrongful death. There are hundreds more—legal and civil rights enjoyed by any heterosexual married for two days or two months, but denied to gays who have been partners for 30 or 50 years.
The justifications for imposing these legal disabilities are virtually all religious, and rooted in the doctrines of some, but certainly not all, conservative denominations. Despite efforts to pretend there are secular policy concerns at stake, all one need do is look at the justifications offered to see their true nature:
We are told that gays should not be allowed to marry because homosexuality is immoral. But all religions teach that rape and murder are immoral—and Indiana allows rapists and murderers to marry. We are told that marriage and sex are for procreation. So where are the bills prohibiting marriages between old people and sterile people? We are told that gay parenting is harmful to children, but there is absolutely no credible research confirming that harm. We are told that recognition of gay unions will undermine the institution of marriage. But we are not told why that is so, and we were told the same thing about interracial marriage, and about allowing women to own property and vote.
At the recent rally in Indianapolis, the crowd was told that marriage is for biological parents and their natural-born children. Those of us with stepchildren we love every bit as much as we love our biological children, those who have adopted children they adore, found that characterization both inaccurate and offensive.
We all understand that these measures are not efforts to protect families—they are efforts to privilege some families at the expense of others. They aren’t even about religion and morality—they are about whose religion, whose morality. That is why the issue is so important to so many of us who are not gay. It is because we know that when government gets the right to decide whose beliefs are acceptable, no one’s beliefs are safe.
What happens when government imposes the religious views of some Americans on the rest of us?
First of all, government itself loses legitimacy, because it is acting contrary to the rule of law and norms of neutrality and equality. The rule of law requires that we constrain and limit the discretion of government officials. Every time we give those officials added discretion—to choose this religious service provider over that one, to send this welfare recipient to that religious program rather than this secular one—we increase the opportunity for abuse of discretion. We move further from the rule of law, and closer to the arbitrary exercise of power by man. Furthermore, political conflict intensifies, making it more difficult for government to do the jobs it is supposed to do. If you doubt the accuracy of that observation, a quick look at Congress and the Indiana General Assembly should confirm the point.
Second, religious liberty is compromised, and with it, religion itself. Beliefs not freely chosen are by definition not authentic. The imposition of religious observances, or the passage of laws privileging religious beliefs, tends to increase the public’s skepticism about all religion.
Finally, society itself loses. Religious disputes are among the most bitter and divisive of conflicts. The current, highly contested political debate about “values” has been terribly corrosive of our national identity, and harmful to our sense of national purpose. We need to minimize the culture wars, not add fuel to the fire. The way to minimize conflict is to listen to the logic of James Madison and John Leland. The way to add fuel to the fire is to let the State make the religious beliefs of some Americans the law of the land.
