Religious Chutzpah

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that–ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs—I’ve been harping on the evisceration of a doctrine called “Substantive Due Process,” also known as the right to privacy. Without going back through the jurisprudence that established that doctrine, let me just paraphrase it: government must respect citizens’ right to make our own decisions about how to live our lives, so long as  those decisions aren’t harming others.

Decisions about procreation are hardly the only areas protected from government overreach by the Bill of Rights. Your choice of religious conviction and my choice not to be a believer are both protected–mostly by the religion clauses of the First Amendment, but also by a right to privacy that keeps government from dictating so personal a choice. Religious liberty is based upon that same respect for the integrity of the individual conscience.

However, the current Court seems intent upon elevating the rights of believers over the rights of the rest of us.

Just this last term, the Justices permitted a theatrically pious coach to pray on his school’s fifty yard line, and ruled in favor of a Christian group wanting to raise its flag at Boston’s City Hall.

The Hill has reported on a pending lawsuit  encouraged by earlier Roberts Court cases that weakened the wall between church and state.

A Texas lawsuit that hopes to eliminate mandated health insurance coverage of birth control, HIV medication, sexually transmitted disease (STD) testing and more has quietly been pushing forward through the court system and could eventually end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the case of Kelley v. Becerra, two plaintiffs from Texas argue that the current structure of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandates health insurance providers to cover certain preventative care they argue they do not need and that conflict with their religious beliefs — specifically, contraceptive coverage, STD testing and HIV medications Truvada or PrEP.

One of the lawsuit’s arguments leans on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which states governments should not substantially burden religious exercise without a compelling justification. Plaintiffs argue this right has been violated as both are Christian and unwilling to buy health insurance that subsidizes, “abortifacient contraception or PrEP drugs that encourage homosexual behavior and intravenous drug use.”

The lawsuit also takes issue with how the ACA defines preventative care, a decision-making process that has been assigned to various groups, including the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the Preventative Services Task Force and the Health Resources and Services Administration.

If these religious zealots prevail–and they probably will at the District Court level, since they’ve filed the case in the courtroom of the radical Texas judge who previously ruled that the ACA was unconstitutional–health insurers would no longer be required to cover preventive care with no copay. They could either opt out of offering those services altogether, or begin charging for them.

Currently,most health insurance plans include coverage of preventative care like birth control and HIV medicines. Plaintiffs complain that their options for plans without those elements are few and far between, denying them freedom to exercise their religious beliefs.

Health care providers have raised alarm bells over Kelley v. Becerra, like the American Medical Association (AMA), alongside 20 other medical trade groups, which stressed how popular the preventative care measure of the ACA has been — with an estimated 151.6 million people receiving free preventative care in 2020 alone.

An adverse ruling would mean millions of Americans would lose access to “vital preventive health care services, such as screening for breast cancer, colorectal cancer, cervical cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, preeclampsia, and hearing, as well as well child visits and access to immunizations critical to maintaining a healthy population,” wrote the AMA.

A coalition of 20 attorneys general has also filed an amicus brief in Kelley v. Becerra arguing–among other things– that public health outcomes have significantly improved since the ACA’s preventative services provision was implemented.

Let’s give the plaintiffs the benefit of the doubt, and accept that these provisions–provisions that have improved the health of millions of Americans– are contrary to their “sincerely held” religious beliefs. Do they not have options other than denying critical health care to Americans who are currently benefitting from access to preventative care? Couldn’t they establish a “faith-based” insurance company that would cater to their needs? (Such a company would have a strong argument for being exempted from the federal requirements they insist are inconsistent with their religious doctrines.) Or they could opt to self-insure.

Instead, they argue that their religious “rights” trump the health of millions of Americans  who currently have free access to cancer screenings, birth control and childhood vaccinations. (Google chutzpah.)

If they prevail, thank the current “Christians” on the Supreme Court.

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Meanwhile…

On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert has a recurring comedy bit he calls “Meanwhile.” Not part of the opening monologue, it’s a collection of brief–usually weird or ironic– items culled from the news of the day.

But “meanwhile” also has application to those of us who are fixated on contemporary threats to America’s Constitution and democratic norms. While we worry about the increasingly bizarre behavior of our fellow-Americans who live in a fact-free reality of their own devising, we ignore or just miss the daily challenges posed by technology–everything from the way social media is altering attention spans, to the mounting inability of the nation’s utilities to cope with the damage being done by climate change, to the rush to turn our highways over to self-driving vehicles.

That last item–the (debated) imminence of self-driving cars– is just one element of another under-appreciated threat: the loss of millions of jobs, and the issue of how we will handle the transition to a world where most labor (not just manual labor) is performed by machines. An enormous amount of research suggests that, sooner or later, AI–artificial intelligence–will replace a significant percentage of tasks that now require human performance.

It is easy to “pooh-pooh” those predictions, and to dismiss the likelihood of significant social disruption, by pointing out that someone will have to produce and program those machines, and noting that past technological progress has created as well as destroyed jobs. The cheery optimists insist that nothing is certain, so why worry? (Tell that to the estimated five million people who make their livings driving…)

The Brookings Institution has weighted in. In a paper aptly  titled “Preparing for the (non-existent) future of work,” the researchers write,

We analyze how to set up institutions that future-proof our society for a scenario of ever-more-intelligent autonomous machines that substitute for human labor and drive down wages. We lay out three concerns arising from such a scenario, culminating in the economic redundancy of labor, and evaluate recent predictions and objections to these concerns. Then we analyze how to allocate work and income if these concerns start to materialize. As the income produced by autonomous machines rises and the value of labor declines, we find that it is optimal to phase out work, beginning with workers who have low labor productivity and job satisfaction, since they have comparative advantage in enjoying leisure. This is in stark contrast to welfare systems that force individuals with low labor productivity to work. If there are significant wage declines, avoiding mass misery will require other ways of distributing income than labor markets, whether via sufficiently well-distributed capital ownership or via benefits. Recipients could still engage in work for its own sake if they enjoy work amenities such as structure, purpose, and meaning. If work gives rise to positive externalities such as social connections or political stability, or if individuals undervalue the benefits of work because of internalities, then there is a role for public policy to encourage work. However, we conjecture that in the long run, it would be more desirable for society to develop alternative ways of providing these benefits.

You can download the entire paper at the link.

The likelihood that much of world’s work will eventually be done by machines that don’t get sick, don’t need benefits, and can work 24/7 is part of what leads me to support a Universal Basic Income– an “alternative way” of providing a social infrastructure.

Analyzing America’s current polarization provides another argument for a UBI.   As political rhetoric makes clear, policies intended to help less fortunate citizens can be delivered in ways that stoke resentments, or in ways that encourage national cohesion.  Currently, we’re stoking resentments. (Consider public attitudes toward welfare programs aimed at impoverished communities, and contrast those attitudes with the overwhelming majorities that approve of Social Security and Medicare–universal programs to which virtually everyone contributes and from which virtually everyone who lives long enough  benefits.)

I’ve previously observed that we don’t hear angry accusations that “those people” are driving on roads paid for by my taxes.  Beneficiaries of programs that include everyone (or almost everyone) are much more likely to escape stigma. If work disappears for a significant percentage of our population, an approach that doesn’t require lawmakers to pick and choose who deserves help would be far less likely to tear the country further apart.

Of course, the armed and dangerous Americans who currently live in crazy-town may make attention to these “meanwhile” matters irrelevant. They involve questions of governance that they disdain, because they involve how best to achieve the common good, and they have absolutely no interest in helping anyone but themselves.

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Affording To Live…

GOP lawmakers–including, of course, Indiana’s two Senators–recently blocked a Biden Administration effort to cap the price of insulin for Americans with private health insurance. (Americans on Medicare will see their out-of-pocket costs decline, thanks to other provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.)

GOP opposition to the measure, which I can’t help thinking of as a manifestation of the Republican “Let them eat cake” approach to policymaking, reminded me of a recent discussion with my sister. Her doctor had rordered some medical tests, and when she  was scheduling them, she was told that one of them–a test for cancer!–wasn’t covered either by Medicare or by her private insurance. The test was $300, and she told me that her first thought was “I can afford this, but what about all the people who can’t? What about  people who don’t have an extra $300 but do have cancer?”(Fortunately, she didn’t.)

This conversation, rather obviously, wouldn’t have occurred in most Western democracies, because in those countries, health care isn’t just for people who can afford it.

When it comes to capping the price of insulin, the influence of Big Pharma–particularly Indiana’s own Eli Lilly–was front and center with the GOP.

Lilly’s enormous profits owe a lot to the high price of insulin. That’s especially ironic, given the generosity of those who first held the patent.

Before the 1920’s, a diabetes diagnosis meant a death sentence for people all over the world. The main treatment was starvation diets to prolong the inevitable.

In 1920, a Canadian physician and scientist named Frederick Banting began working on an idea to isolate and extract insulin. He worked in the laboratories of J.R.R. McLeod, a professor of physiology at the University of Toronto. The medical student Charles Best aided him in his work to test out insulin on dogs. Chemist James Collip worked with Banting and Best to purify and refine insulin for clinical trials in humans.

On January 23rd, 1923 Banting, Best, and Collip were awarded the American patents for insulin. They sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1 each. Banting notably said: “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.” His desire was for everyone who needed access to it to have it.

In order to make insulin widely available, Eli Lilly, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk were given the right to produce it, and they’ve turned it into a massive profit generator. As the linked article reports, “by 1923, insulin was the highest-selling product in Eli Lilly’s history, and profits from it accounted for over half of the company’s revenue.”

And that brings us to the recent refusal of Indiana’s Senators and other GOP recipients of Lilly largesse to ensure insulin’s affordability.

As The Intercept reports, Lilly Endowment–ostensibly separate and independent from the company–is not neutral when it comes to funding entities opposed to controlling the price of medications. The Endowment,”led in part by former Eli Lilly executives and still financed by corporate stock options” funds think tanks that “work to shield corporations from taxation or government regulation,” and has given millions of dollars to libertarian groups that lobby against price controls on insulin, categorizing those recipients as “community development organizations.” (The Endowment is also the largest shareholder of Eli Lilly, Inc., holding 104,161,053 shares worth approximately $31 billion.)

The Federalist Society, for example, has received over $1.5 million from the charitable arm over the last decade and is listed under “community development” grantees of the Lilly Endowment. The Washington, D.C.-based group is a professional society for conservative attorneys, with an eye toward pro-business ideological positions.

The Federalist Society funds included a $150,000 grant last year, at the same time that the group was sharply criticizing a new Minnesota law that forces manufacturers to provide free or affordable insulin to low-income residents. The law “[inflicts] an injustice upon companies that are regularly demonized in the media,” an attorney for the Goldwater Institute writes on the Federalist Society’s website.

Last year, Eli Lilly collected over $2.4 billion in revenue from its insulin products, including the brand Humalog, with roughly $1.3 billion of that from U.S.-based sales.

“One vial of Humalog (insulin lispro), which used to cost $21 in 1999, cost $332 in 2019, reflecting a price increase of more than 1,000%. In contrast, insulin prices in other developed countries, including neighboring Canada, have stayed the same,” wrote S. Vincent Rajkumar in the journal of the Mayo Clinic in 2020.

There’s much more detail in the linked article, and I encourage you to click through and read it. That said, the real issue is the one my sister identified: if government is supposed to provide a physical and social infrastructure within which citizens can flourish, isn’t access to health care and lifesaving medication as essential a part of that infrastructure as police, firefighters, roads and bridges?

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Taking Us Back…

I’ve been working with a friend –a former academic colleague–on a book about the causes and consequences of what Americans call the women’s movement. He’s a quantitative guy (I think he sleeps in a bed of data…) while I am rather clearly not, but we are both interested in the history of women’s emancipation–not just questions like “To what extent did the invention and widespread use of the birth control pill allow women to enter the workforce?” or “How did the change from jobs requiring brute strength to those requiring skill benefit women?” but also things like “what changes in social and cultural attitudes were triggered by women’s suffrage, political activity and workforce participation?”

We most definitely aren’t planning an academic/scholarly book. Instead, we hope to provide a journey of sorts, an accessible trip through the last hundred years or so, focusing on the causes and consequences of American women’s change of legal and social status.

The incredibly important question we will not be able to answer is “Is that progress–and we do see it as progress–reversible?”

There are movements in today’s America absolutely committed to that reversal, and the current “abortion wars” are only one aspect of their agenda, which involves a wholesale retreat from numerous aspects of contemporary American life, not just the emergence of us “uppity” women.

Common Dreams recently had an essay by Mike Lofgren, describing the merger of some of the most retrograde of those movements and reporting on the danger posed by the recent “teaming up” of religious extremists with far-right fascist groups.

Here’s his lede:

The Supreme Court’s disastrous rulings on prayer on public school property and abortion rights have finally focused proper attention on the role of religious extremism in undermining democratic self-rule. For decades, not only has it been underestimated, most of the media has misunderstood Christian fundamentalism’s goals.

Make no mistake: the well-funded, well-armed alliance of motivated extremists that I have described constitutes the greatest domestic danger this nation has faced since the Civil War.

Katherine Stewart, who has written on the religious right for many years, has redressed this misunderstanding in a New York Times piece. She straightforwardly says that Christian fundamentalism’s goal is “breaking American democracy,” and that this is not an unintended byproduct of fundamentalism’s political activity. No, it “is the point of the project.”

You might think that church-going Christians, no matter how fundamentalist, have little in common with organizations like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, or with neo-Nazi groups like Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute, or the Aryan Nation. Yet Lofgren points out that there is substantial overlap in the membership of those groups. He says they “bury their extreme theological differences to ally against their common enemy: the Enlightenment, a tolerant society, and equal justice under law.”

Among their other motivating issues, these movements share a commitment to misogyny and to a cult of masculine toughness. (Paging Josh Hawley ...)

This is obvious among fundamentalists and white nationalists alike: Southern Baptists and other evangelical sects preach “submission” of women, and every nationalist movement of the past century has diminished women’s rights.

Lofgren notes that Peter Thiel, a billionaire funder of the movement, has expressed his belief that it is was a mistake to “give” women the vote…

Fundamentalists want a universally Christian America that

they insist existed at the time of the nation’s founding, objections from Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Mark Twain, or Ambrose Bierce notwithstanding. White nationalists pine for a traditional white America, regardless of the presence from the beginning of racial differences and tensions.

Lofgren quotes Umberto Eco, who described what he termed “ur-fascist” tendencies: a faux-populism coupled with a railing against “elite” straw men; the habit of using a vocabulary similar to Newspeak in that it obscures rather than reveals meaning; contempt for the weak; and more. And he focuses upon the recent Supreme Court decisions undermining the right to personal autonomy and the separation of church and state.

Now that the Supreme Court has seen fit to read theocracy into the Constitution, Americans have begun to wake up to the political threat to their liberties and their way of life. But few have noticed how synergistic the rest of its rulings are with a religious-right campaign to wreck the constitutional order. Past campaign finance and congressional redistricting decisions have been a gift to a party that has given up on competitive electoral democracy in favor of Russian-style elections and public religion enforced by state diktat.

Obviously, women aren’t the only people threatened by this movement. Everyone whose fundamental right to self-determination has led them to live a life disapproved of by White Christian Nationalists is at risk.

Just think of us women as the canaries in the coal mine….

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The Library And The Culture War

Over the years, I have come to admire two professions above most others: social workers and librarians. The social workers I’ve come to know are simply wonderful human beings–compassionate, caring and non-judgmental. (If we admire traits we personally lack, that would explain my awe about that “non-judgmental” thing…) The librarians I know are dedicated protectors of the First Amendment, and absolutely fearless defenders of our right as individuals to access whatever information interests us.

The traits of both professions are obviously anathema to the White Christian Nationalists who control today’s GOP . Those culture warriors are especially intent upon controlling what other people can read, and that single-minded devotion to cultural control brings them into fairly regular conflict with librarians and the mission of the nation’s libraries, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked by a recent headline from The Guardian: US library defunded after refusing to censor LGBTQ authors: ‘We will not ban the books.’

A small-town library is at risk of shutting down after residents of Jamestown, Michigan, voted to defund it rather than tolerate certain LGBTQ+-themed books.

Residents voted on Tuesday to block a renewal of funds tied to property taxes, Bridge Michigan reported.

 The vote leaves the library with funds through the first quarter of next year. Once a reserve fund is used up, it would be forced to close, Larry Walton, the library board’s president, told Bridge Michigan – harming not just readers but the community at large. Beyond books, residents visit the library for its wifi, he said, and it houses the very room where the vote took place.

“Our libraries are places to read, places to gather, places to socialize, places to study, places to learn. I mean, they’re the heart of every community,” Deborah Mikula, executive director of the Michigan Library Association, told the Guardian. “So how can you lose that?”

What was the library’s sin? It refused to remove materials about sexual orientation from its shelves–materials that the residents asserted were “grooming” children to adopt a “gay lifestyle.”

The controversy in Jamestown began with a complaint about a memoir by a nonbinary writer, but it soon spiraled into a campaign against Patmos Library itself. After a parent complained about Gender Queer: a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel about the author’s experience coming out as nonbinary, dozens showed up at library board meetings, demanding the institution drop the book. (The book, which includes depictions of sex, was in the adult section of the library.) Complaints began to target other books with LGBTQ+ themes.

One library director resigned, telling Bridge she had been harassed and accused of indoctrinating kids; her successor, Matt Lawrence, also left the job. Though the library put Kobabe’s book behind the counter rather than on the shelves, the volumes remained available.

“We, the board, will not ban the books,” Walton told Associated Press on Thursday….

The library’s refusal to submit to the demands led to a campaign urging residents to vote against renewed funding for the library. A group calling itself Jamestown Conservatives handed out flyers condemning Gender Queer for showing “extremely graphic sexual illustrations of two people of the same gender”, criticizing a library director who “promoted the LGBTQ ideology” and calling for making the library “a safe and neutral place for our kids”. On Facebook, the group says it exists to “keep our children safe, and protect their purity, as well as to keep the nuclear family intact as God designed”.

I’m sure the person who wrote that had spoken to God personally about the threat. (That’s sarcasm. I admitted I’m judgmental…)

Apparently, libraries across the country are facing a surge in similar demands to ban books. The American Library Association has identified 729 challenges to “library, school and university materials and services” just in the last year–and an estimated 1,600 challenges or removals of individual books. That figure was up from 273 books the year before.

“We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books dealing with LGBTQIA themes and books dealing with racism,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, head of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom, told the Guardian last year.

There is certainly “grooming” going on, but those responsible aren’t trying to sell small children on the glories of homosexuality, or destroy what’s left of the nuclear family. The real “grooming” has been done by hate-mongers like Alex Jones, the late and non-lamented Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson and his fellow-travelers on Fox News–aided and abetted by fundamentalist churches and  various Rightwing organizations.

The GOP’s groomers play to the racism, misogyny and homophobia of their White Christian Nationalist base, encouraging them to direct their hysterical fear of cultural change at the nation’s libraries.

In this fight, my money is on the librarians.

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