Religious Liberty?

Remember when Hillary Clinton outraged the Chattering Classes with statements like  “basket of deplorables,” and accusations of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

According to Wikipedia, the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” preceded Clinton’s 1998 use. It was listed as a conspiracy theory in a 1995 memo by political opposition researchers. Wild conspiracy theories are everywhere you look these days–mostly but not exclusively  on the political Right (are Jewish Space lasers the grandchildren of the Elders of Zion?). When Clinton leveled the accusation, the blowback was both overwhelming and understandable.

But a recent data breach at the shadowy Liberty Counsel suggests she may have been on to something.

LIBERTY COUNSEL, an evangelical Christian nonprofit that provided a brief cited by the Supreme Court in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, has been hacked, revealing a 25-gigabyte internal database that contains nearly seven years’ worth of donor records. The hacker, who identifies with the Anonymous movement, released the data on the hacktivist site Enlace Hacktivista, and the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets is providing it to journalists who request access.

“Noticing a worrying trend of far-right and anti-abortion activists aligning themselves with the evangelical Christian movement, hiding their funding sources behind laws that allow church ministries to keep their donations secret,” the hacker wrote in a press release, “we decided to bring about some much-needed radical transparency.”

In addition to fighting abortion, Liberty Counsel — a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group — has focused its legal efforts on challenging LGBTQ+ rights and vaccine mandates in the name of religious freedom. Because it is registered with the IRS as an “association of churches,” Liberty Counsel is not required to file a public tax return, meaning that its finances are largely shielded from the scrutiny applied to other tax-exempt organizations.

The disclosures showed that “nonprofit organizations” controlled by Liberty Counsel not only encouraged supporters to vote for Trump –in violation of IRS rules that prohibit such endorsements– they also documented the ways in which Liberty Counsel has deployed  disinformation about election integrity and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Are you wondering why I titled this blog post  “Religious Liberty”? As the linked Intercept article goes on to explain, the legal privileging of (some) religion has not only facilitated the lack of transparency illustrated by the breach, but has served to conceal a theocratic political movement within a cloak of faux piety.

Liberty Counsel’s virulently anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and efforts to legalize discrimination in the name of religious freedom led the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate it as a hate group. “The organizations on our hate group list vilify others because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity — this includes Liberty Counsel and their vilification of LGBTQ+ people,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim deputy director of research for the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

Some examples: Liberty Counsel represented Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue a marriage license to a gay couple. The day after the January 6th insurrection, its president sent an email to supporters stating that “our research and legal staff have been deeply engaged in stopping the steal of our 2020 elections.” (The email and a later blog post insisted that Trump could remain in power if God intervened: “We know God can intervene and turn what looks like a hopeless cause into a miraculous victory!” (Evidently, God was uninterested…)

During the pandemic, Liberty Counsel successfully sued  LSU’s School of Dentistry and Loyola University, requiring them to abandon their vaccine mandates on religious freedom grounds. The organization is currently suing the U.S. government over the military’s vaccine mandate. (God evidently wants people infected..)

If these activities were limited to a single organization, it would be troubling enough, but the breach disclosed a network of similarly fanatic entities, and campaigns that stretched the definition of “religion” to the breaking point.

While Liberty Counsel is best known for legal battles over abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, the hacked data shows more than $1.6 million in donations resulting from petition and fax campaigns built around dubious claims about the pandemic and election integrity…

The largest petition included in the data set, launched on the eve of Biden’s inauguration, makes no mention of religion: It warns of “giant pharmaceutical companies in partnership with government officials sweeping harmful and even deadly COVID-19 vaccine reactions under the rug” and demands that politicians oppose unspecified efforts “to make COVID shots mandatory, to require a Vaccine Passport or to electronically track and trace my movements.”

I don’t know how “vast” Liberty Council’s conspiratorial network is, but I do know the  Religion Clauses of the First Amendment weren’t intended to shield partisan political activity from legal scrutiny.

We can protect genuine religious liberty without enabling political fundraising  by hate groups.

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Watch This!

A friend sent me a link to a short–only ten minute–TedTalk by Al Gore. (If only the Supreme Court hadn’t given us George W…)

This is so powerful, I’m using it for today’s post.Be sure to watch all the way to the end.

Watch this!

I’ll be back with one of my usual diatribes tomorrow. And don’t forget to register for Women4Change’s inaugural Civic Education Conference on October 6, 2022, in the Clowes Auditorium of the Indianapolis Public Library, 40 East St. Clair Street, Indianapolis, Indiana.

You can learn more about it and register here.

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We Need A New Version Of The GI Bill

Among the multiple newsletters I receive is one called The Signal. It recently had a thought-provoking report on a growing gender divide among young Americans.

Apparently, over the past few years, young women have become more liberal than young men. Forty-four percent of women aged 18 to 29 consider themselves “liberal,” compared to only 25 percent of men in the same age range—a major change from 30 percent of young women and 27 percent of young men considering themselves liberal a decade earlier.

The article attributed the increase in progressive politics to a series of trends: fewer women in that age bracket are married than was previously the case;  more are educated and religiously unaffiliated, and they “spent formative adult years during the presidency of Donald Trump, whom a strikingly high ratio of them disliked.”

The bulk of the article was an interview with the researcher, and his observations (and their implications) were all interesting, but what struck me was the following.

Politically, climate change is important to Get Z. Gun policy is important. LGBTQ issues are important. I expect abortion to become tremendously important. Yet there isn’t one preeminent, animating political issue for this generation. What’s happened instead is that political identity has become increasingly central to people in defining who they are. It’s become a stand-in for character or even personality. That’s unfortunate in some ways. It leads Americans to be more politically segregated and to shut down political conversations based on the belief that knowing someone’s politics means you know what you need to about their whole life story and whether they’re part of your good tribe or not. We’re on track to become even more politically segregated—more politically polarized—and I believe the decline of institutions and the unraveling of our civic life are playing important roles in that process.

That analysis leads to the question “What can we do to ameliorate this political segregation?”

How about a requirement for national service, an updated version of the wildly successful GI Bill?

Here’s my proposal: upon graduation from high school, students would enroll in a one or two-year program of civic service. Upon satisfactory completion of that service, the government would pay for two years of college at a state university or trade school. The program would be open to everyone, but marketed heavily to the poor and disadvantaged.

Civic service would require young people from disparate walks of life and different political “bubbles” to work together. Service performed for local government and vetted nonprofit organizations would also focus their attention on the common good–a concept missing from the worldviews of far too many Americans, young and old.

We have massive amounts of research confirming that most Americans—rich or poor—know embarrassingly little about the economic and governmental structures within which they live. This civics deficit is more pronounced in poor communities, where civics instruction (as with other educational resources) is scarce. Because civic knowledge is a predictor of civic participation, one result is that poor folks don’t vote in percentages equal to those of middle-class and wealthy Americans. That disparity is especially pronounced among the young.

Poverty is a reliable predictor of low political participation and efficacy. Giving students from disadvantaged backgrounds an affordable opportunity to go to college or trade school—an opportunity they may not have otherwise—and conditioning that opportunity on a year or two of civic service—would do three extremely important things: it would give those students the civic skills they need in order to have a meaningful voice in the democratic process; it would reduce the nation’s currently unconscionable level of student loan debt; and it would cut across the “political segregation” that is turning Americans who disagree with each other into enemies who cannot communicate with each other.

As we’ve seen in the current discussion of Biden’s debt forgiveness program, the need to borrow money in order to afford college keeps many young people from getting the education they need. It keeps others from taking lower-paying jobs with nonprofits and humanitarian organizations after they graduate. The massive level of student loan debt is also a substantial drag on the economy, because payment on those loans prevents large numbers of  graduates from setting up households, buying homes and appliances and even starting families–all activities that keep the economy humming.

As with so many other aspects of contemporary American life, the burdens fall most heavily on those who can least afford them.

A new version of the GI Bill along these lines would require young Americans to meet and work alongside people from outside their “bubbles;” enable informed civic participation, and begin the task of permanently reducing our horrific levels of student loan debt.

It would be a win-win-win…..

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Are Hoosier Democrats Catching On?

My recurring answer to the question “what can we do about [fill in the blank]”has been “we have to get out the vote.” (In a recent Substack letter, Robert Hubbell pointed to an organization he believes is effective in doing just that: Focus For Democracy,. I know nothing about it, but I’m transmitting his recommendation.)

 We all know that GOTV will be immensely important at the federal level, but we also need to recognize that down ballot races are equally critical–especially in Indiana, where the state lags in so many crucial areas thanks to the state’s Neanderthal Super-Majority. I’ve written before about the importance of the Secretary of State race, and I keep hearing that   the candidates on the Democratic statewide ticket are unusually impressive. 

Hoosier Democrats may finally have figured out that you can’t beat something with nothing.  This year, the party has recruited some truly first-class candidates to run in districts they  have historically written off.

And that brings me to Joey Mayer, who is running in House District #24. Her website is here.

Mayer is a high-quality candidate. She describes herself as “a life-long Hoosier, a mother, a wife, a small-business owner, a community organizer, a rescue dog mom and proud Democrat,” and in our discussions, she has come across as knowledgable, grounded and hard-working. She has knocked on more doors than any other candidate for Indiana’s statehouse, and she has a good grasp of policy–especially the policies that prompted her to run.

Her opponent is Donna Schaibley, an incumbent whose voting record places her firmly  within the extremism  of today’s GOP. Schaibley was one of the Republican lawmakers who sent a  letter to the governor demanding a special session to ban abortion, and (of course) she voted in favor of the ban.   She also voted against House Amendment #43, which would have put a non-binding question (shall abortion remain legal in Indiana?)  on the November ballot.  (Evidently, she was uninterested in finding out what Hoosiers actually wanted…)

Schaibley supported HB 1134–the House version of the Senate bill that, had it passed, would have dictated what Indiana’s public school teachers can and cannot teach (the embarrassing “be fair to Nazis” bill  about which I previously posted.) And–predictably–she voted for permit-less carry, despite warnings about its dangers from multiple police and public safety officials .

Joey is pro-choice, pro-teacher, and pro-public education (as she says, public education works best when provided by professionals rather than politicians). She supports reasonable gun safety regulations. She has laid out her policies on her website, and I encourage you to click through and read them.

When I first went to that website and looked at the boundaries of District 24, I figured hers was a hopeless task. Much of the district is rural, and regular readers of this blog know I consider rural Indiana unreachably Red. But Joey has had some surprising experiences at those doors she’s been knocking on: she failed to anticipate the number of people who’ve told her “I thought I was the only Democrat in Hamilton County,” and the equally-unanticpated  number of self-identified Republican women who  begin by saying they’d never have an abortion themselves but go on to criticize Indiana’s ban as a huge and dangerous government overreach.

Several Democratic strategists who previously “wrote off” the district have moderated their initial skepticism. (As one told me, “It’s uphill, but it could happen.”)

There is a lesson here–a lesson that ought to be obvious: political parties that want to win elections don’t ignore difficult districts. They challenge them –and they do it by recruiting the highest-quality, hardest-working, most attractive candidates they can find. 

In District 24, the Democrats have such a candidate. She is working hard, and she is challenging an extremist–a Republican forced-birth advocate who, despite claiming to be “pro-life,” supports measures that feed America’s deadly gun violence, and who also wants to micro-manage the teachers in Indiana’s public-school classrooms. The contrast could not be greater.

If a Democrat is ever going to flip this seat, this is the year it will happen.

But no matter the outcome, running an exceptionally good  Democratic candidate deprives this member of the GOP cult of the opportunity to hide her extremist positions. If survey research is to be believed, only a minority of Hoosiers–even in rural Indiana– agree with those positions.

I’m going to throw a few dollars into this race, and I encourage those of you who can to do likewise. If any of you live in District 24, I hope you’ll volunteer and work to get out the vote.

Good candidates deserve all the help we can provide. And for once, Indiana Democrats have a lot of very good candidates!

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America’s Trolley Problem

There’s a famous “what if?” used in classes teaching ethics: it’s called the Trolley Problem, and it poses a terrible dilemma. A trolley is bearing down on a group of five people, who are (unaccountably) unaware of its path. You are standing near a switch that can divert it–but if you do, it will kill a single person who would then be in its path.

What do you do? Do you resist taking an action that would make you, in effect, the person who murders that single unfortunate (and presumably innocent) bystander? Or do you shrug and let the trolley kill the five (presumably equally innocent) original targets, excusing your non-interference with the fact that your actions were not responsible for their demise? (Accidents happen…)

There’s no comforting solution to that dilemma, just as there is no “perfect” answer to most of the questions we wrestle with almost daily on this site and elsewhere.

I am one of the many former Republicans who is horrified by what that party has become, and I have been adamant about the importance of voting Blue in November. That advice has been criticized–on this site and elsewhere–by those who find both parties unworthy of their support. Democrats are far from perfect, they point out, so–as  advocates of moral purity–they refuse to draw any distinction between a fascist cult and an admittedly flawed political party.

Talk about making the perfect the enemy of the good!

May I suggest that the Jews living in Nazi Germany would have been grateful for a corrupt or inept or otherwise “imperfect” alternative to Hitler? (I don’t think that example is as far-fetched as it would have been in times past.)

We American voters are standing at that switch. We are watching the trolley come down the track.

Not unlike certain commenters to this blog, some number of progressive American voters entertain a firm belief in their own superior moral purity. Those voters exhibit disdain for the very idea of casting a vote in support of a political party that doesn’t meet their rigid and impossibly high ethical standards. They harp on the multiple failings of the political party that is–at this moment in history–the clearly preferable alternative.

That posture is particularly appealing to  American voters who are White, male and middle-class, and thus unlikely to be an early target of the Christian Nationalist cult that has taken over the once-respectable GOP.

The rest of us–women, people of color, non-Christians, immigrants, and others who don’t meet the Christian Nationalist definition of “real American”–are more likely to agree with President Biden about what is at stake this November.

Americans unwilling to make the perfect the enemy of the good will go to the polls and vote Blue No Matter Who because we care about reproductive choice, about protecting every citizen’s right to vote, about public education, about the economic well-being of working class Americans, about sensible gun laws, about genuine religious liberty (as opposed to the privileging of Christian religious doctrine), and about limiting the authority of government over our most intimate decisions.

Those of us who understand the choice before us aren’t blind– we understand that we won’t all agree about the policies that will be necessary or desirable to achieve our goals, or even, in some cases, the goals themselves. We are perfectly well aware that the Democratic Party includes plenty of lawmakers with whom we disagree, and some number whose behaviors are suspect and/or whose motives are impure.

It doesn’t matter.We can address those deficiencies once we save America’s admittedly imperfect democracy. Because–hysterical and overblown as it sounds–that actually is what is at stake. Moral purity from either the Right or Left is a pose and a fiction. Making the perfect (however one defines it) the enemy of the good is a cop-out–a defense for doing nothing.

November is America’s Trolley Problem.

No one wants to throw the switch that kills the single human on the alternate track, but refusing to do so will doom five equally innocent beings. The people refusing  to throw the ballot-box switch may not have been responsible for the trolley’s original path, but that fact doesn’t excuse their “pox on both your houses” refusal to distinguish between levels of harm.

Or perhaps, like the “Good Germans, they simply refuse to see the trolley…

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