The Ten Commandments

 A  Judge recently struck down a Texas law, modeled after one in Oklahoma that was also ruled unconstitutional, requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

This effort surfaces every few years, as Christian Nationalists try to use government buildings to send a message that only certain people are “real Americans.” Given the periodic eruption of this effort, I thought I’d just share what I’ve previously posted about these efforts–and why they are blatantly inconsistent with the Bill of Rights.

Way back in 1997, I wrote:

If I believed passionately that everyone would be better off for reading the Ten Commandments, what would I do? 

I would probably start by distributing leaflets containing the Ten Commandments everywhere I could–on street corners, at the grocery store, at sports and entertainment events. I might ask local churches and individuals to erect replicas of the Ten Commandments on their lawns or porches.

I would ask local newspapers to reproduce them; if the papers would not do so as a contribution, I would try to raise the money to buy a paid advertisement, which would stress the importance of the Commandments to the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I would use the Internet to find others who agreed with me on the importance of widespread distribution, and would engage them in my project. Or I might sell tee shirts printed with the Commandments if I could afford that or could raise the money. 

I would find a group of young people to form a Ten Commandments Club, to spread the word. Or I might hold a rally, and bring in people to speak about the importance of the Ten Commandments in their lives.

And of course, I would do my very best to live up to the principles of the Commandments and other great religious precepts.  (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” comes to mind; there are many others.)

Every single one of these methods for promoting the Ten Commandments and righteous behavior is protected by the Free Exercise Clause.

If, however, all I really want is for my government to send a message that my particular beliefs are the proper ones, I won’t bother with any of these time-consuming activities. I will petition my local county officials to post the Commandments so that everyone visiting a public building will know who really belongs in this country and who doesn’t. It will be important that my document appear on government-owned buildings, so it will be very clear what my government approves–and by implication, what (and who) it doesn’t.

Unfortunately for those who wish to be more equal than others, the First Amendment forbids government from issuing such endorsements, just as it would forbid the passage of laws requiring the posting of the Bill of Rights in all churches. The First Amendment protects our right to advocate in the public square, but it forbids us to enlist the help of the 800 pound gorilla– the public sector.

And about that “sacred” text? In 2024, I wrote,

Most of us have seen the news that Louisiana now requires posting the Ten Commandments in that state’s schoolrooms. What I hadn’t seen reported–until I read a fascinating article from Salon–is that the version to be posted comes not from the Bible, but from Hollywood. Rather than go to any of the biblical texts, Louisiana opted for Cecil B. DeMille’s, taking the version to be posted from “The Ten Commandments.”

Well, Christian Nationalists aren’t known for consulting original texts. Or for honesty.

The cited article quoted a scholar who pointed out that The Ten Commandments recounted in Exodus 34 are nothing like the list with which most people are familiar. It starts off: “Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you.”

As he noted, the version passed by the State Senate doesn’t appear in any Bible. It is a “highly Christianized version” with “Judaic elements removed.”

As I concluded in that post, Christian Nationalism has two goals: to signal to the MAGA base that they are culture warriors fighting “leftism, Marxism, woke-ism, state-sponsored atheism or whatever else scares conservative white Americans;” and as a distraction from Republican policy failures. It’s notable that US News recently ranked Louisiana dead last among all 50 states, and 47th in education.

The Christian Nationalist’s Ten Commandments agenda stands for the proposition that America is a Christian nation, and Christians (of the right variety) should control every facet of it.

It’s hard to get more unAmerican than that.

Comments

Follow The Money–Hulk Hogan Version

Regular readers of this blog know that I focus a lot on what I call the “information environment,” and its immense effect on our politics and government. I particularly worry about the increasingly fragmented nature of that environment, and the ability the Internet offers to occupy a “reality” of our individual choosing.

It isn’t only the proliferation of what we might call “alternative fact” sources, and the ease of accessing them. The so-called “legacy media” hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory. Respectable outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times have–for one reason or another (Jeff Bezos or ??) normalized the distinctly abnormal demented and deteriorating President. The recent rise of alternative sources like Substack has included some excellent truth-tellers, but most Americans lack the time, interest or background information needed to seek them out.

To call the present overall media environment unsatisfactory–to point out that the absence of truth-telling journalism endangers democratic decision-making–does not seem an overstatement.

Given the reality of all this, I was intrigued by a recent essay by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo (which is one of the reliable and perceptive alternative sources available.) That essay attributed much of the currently unsatisfactory nature of our media to Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, which the essay called “a seminal event prefiguring and laying the groundwork for much of what has happened in the last decade.”

The facts are simple. Hogan was a tabloid celebrity. Gawker published a tape of him having sex with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Hogan sued Gawker for invasion of privacy. At the time, as Marshall wrote, “It was hard to take seriously that this was a righteous fight for the First Amendment…. publishing someone’s sex tape struck me as reckless, difficult to justify in journalistic terms and frankly hard to defend.”

Hogan got a $140 million judgement…. Without $140 million, Gawker couldn’t appeal. The company and its owner, Denton, were forced into bankruptcy. And that was the end of Gawker and its stable of sites. Some of those — Jezebel, Gizmodo, Deadspin, even the Gawker site proper (Gawker Inc. was the company that owned all these sites) have had post-bankruptcy zombie existences. But basically that was it.

That lawsuit was a critical event of our time, and Gawker’s destruction was a body blow to the First Amendment. Hogan’s lawyer, Charles Harder, wasn’t just any libel lawyer. He had whole new ways of going about it. After Harder’s victory for Hogan, his new approaches to attacking media companies were quickly folded into the Trump political movement, not just the strategies but Harder’s firm itself. You see them again and again in numerous Trump and MAGA world lawsuits.

It turned out that Hogan himself was the cat’s paw of Peter Thiel who funded the entire litigation. Hogan himself must have been a wealthy man but the bills of a major libel suit is a very iffy investment. Denton had suspected that someone was footing the bill behind the scenes — perhaps even Thiel. Money seemed like no object in how the lawsuit proceeded. Thiel took all those worries and risks away. Thiel held a grudge over Gawker’s past negative coverage of him and had been plotting its destruction behind the scenes. Thiel’s use of Hogan presaged the current world of billionaire lawsuits in which limitless money can overcome the weakness of meritless litigation. (See the recent Times story on how Elon Musk and MAGA attorneys general have brought Media Matters to its knees.) The rich have always put their wealth on the scales of justice. But Thiel’s actions opened new terrain, as did the explosion of billionaire wealth taking shape at the same time…

Gawker wasn’t damaged. It was destroyed. It ceased to exist. For what was essentially pocket change, Thiel got his revenge. In that one suit, you can see the evil vapors of Trumpism and its oligarchic billionaire milieu congealing into solid matter for everything that was to come. In so doing, Harder and Thiel radically raised the stakes for all journalism in the United States. The combination of billionaire money, novel legal theories, venue shopping and quirks of civil litigation at the state level (the fact that Gawker was prevented from appealing a judgement that never would have survived appeal) changed everything that goes through a publisher’s mind when they click the publish button.

It’s the new Golden Rule: he who has the gold, rules…and sets the narrative…

Comments

For When This Dark Time Is Over

NPR recently reported on a fascinating project in Kenya.

The project was one of a number of pilots around the world in which citizens were given no-strings cash. In this case, an unanticipated result was that infants born to people who received the payments were nearly half as likely to die as infants born to people who got no cash. The payments cut mortality in children under 5 by about 45%, on par with interventions like vaccines and anti-malarials.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I support replacing our fragmented and inadequate social safety net with a Universal Basic Income (UBI). It won’t happen in my lifetime, if ever, but it’s on my list of “when this MAGA nightmare is over…'”

As I’ve previously argued, policies to help less fortunate citizens can be delivered in ways that stoke resentments, or in ways that encourage national cohesion.  Consider public attitudes toward means tested welfare programs, and contrast those attitudes with the overwhelming majorities that approve of Social Security and Medicare–universal programs. 

What if the United States embraced a new social contract, beginning with the premise that all citizens are valued members of the American polity, and that membership has its privileges?

In my imagined “Brave New World,” government would create an environment within which humans could flourish, an environment within which members would be guaranteed a basic livelihood, a substantive, excellent education, and an equal place at the civic table. In return, members (aka citizens) would pay their “dues:” taxes, a stint of public/civic service, and the consistent discharge of civic duties like voting and jury service.

A UBI would require significant changes to the deep-seated cultural assumptions on which our current economy rests, but if the various pilot projects have demonstrated anything, it is that a UBI and a single-payer health program would ease economic insecurities, reduce the gap between rich and poor, restore workers’ bargaining power and (not so incidentally) rescue market capitalism from its descent into corporatism and plutocracy. 

 America currently has a patchwork of state and federal programs, with bureaucratic barriers and means tests that are expensive to administer and that operate to exclude most of the working poor. Those who do get welfare are routinely stigmatized by moralizing lawmakers pursuing punitive measures aimed at imagined “takers” and “Welfare Queens.” Current anti-poverty policies have not made an appreciable impact on poverty, but they have grown the bureaucracy and contributed significantly to stereotyping and socio-economic polarization.

As Andy Stern, former President of the Service Employee’s International Union has argued,

“A basic income is simple to administer, treats all people equally, rewards hard work and entrepreneurship, and trusts the poor to make their own decisions about what to do with their money. Because it only offers a floor, people are encouraged to make additional income through their own efforts… Welfare, on the other hand, discourages people from working because, if your income increases, you lose benefits,”

With a UBI, in contrast to welfare, there’s no phase-out, no marriage penalties, no people falsifying information–and no costly bureaucracy.

Support for the concept isn’t limited to liberals. Milton Friedman famously proposed a “negative income tax,” and F.A. Hayek, the libertarian economist, wrote “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all, protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income, or a floor below which nobody need descend.” In 2016, Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center, noted the “ideal” features of a UBI: its unconditional structure avoids creating poverty traps; it sets a minimum income floor, raising worker bargaining power without wage or price controls; it decouples benefits from a particular workplace or jurisdiction; since it’s cash, it respects a diversity of needs and values; and it simplifies and streamlines a complex web of bureaucracy, eliminating rent seeking and other sources of inefficiency.

Hammond’s point about worker bargaining power is especially important. In today’s work environment, characterized by dramatically-diminished unions and the growth of the “gig economy,” wages  have been effectively stagnant for years, despite significant growth in productivity. With a UBI and single payer health coverage, workers would have the freedom to leave abusive employers, unsafe work conditions, and uncompetitive pay scales. A UBI wouldn’t level the playing field, but it would dramatically reduce the tilt. And if the robots do come—if the predictions of jobs that will be lost to AI and automation are even close to accurate—a UBI could act as a national safety-net, helping the country avoid massive civil turmoil.

There have been several pilot projects to assess the pros and cons of UBIs, and the results have been uniformly positive. Counter-intuitive as it seems, a significant body of research supports the importance of a robust social safety net to market economies. As Will Wilkinson of the libertarian Niskanen Center, has written:

“A sound and generous system of social insurance offers a certain peace of mind that makes the very real risks of increased economic dynamism seem tolerable to the democratic public, opening up the political possibility of stabilizing a big-government welfare state with growth-promoting economic liberalization.”

As Wilkinson has convincingly argued, today’s left fails to appreciate the role of capitalism and markets in producing abundance, and the right refuses to acknowledge the indispensable role safety nets play in placating the human, deeply-seated distaste for feelings of uncertainty and insecurity.

If we were a country that truly valued all citizens, these would be compelling arguments. It’s on my list for “after,” assuming we make it through these depressing times…

Comments

MAGA’s Road To Gilead

Given the Trump administration’s daily effort to elevate White “Christians” over people of color, it can be easy to overlook its equally rabid effort to return women to third or fourth-class citizenship–to return us to powerless and submissive possessions of our fathers and husbands.

Suddenly, opinions that once would not have been uttered publicly–opinions that would have marked their holders as deeply unwell residents of the modern world–are spewing forth from the mouths of people who have been allowed to occupy some of the highest positions in American government.

A recent newsletter from Lincoln Square focused on the effort to strip the nation’s women of our rights as citizens, in the name of a perverted “Christianity.” It reported on a recent endorsement by Pete Hegseth, the inept drunkard who currently heads the Department of Defense, of his pastor Doug Wilson’s belief that women should not have the right to vote.

As the author of the essay wrote,

In a way, Hegseth performed a public service by bringing to wider attention the “Christian nationalist” movement that is gaining strength and has much support in the Trump Cult. As the title of the CNN report indicates, it seeks “Christian” domination of America. All of us need to know what they mean by that. Pastor Wilson is a flat-out nutter who envisions an America that is a “Christian nation” the way Saudi Arabia is an “Islamic nation.” The ultimate goal is replacing secular democracy with a government ruled by “Christ the King.” Jesus presumably being unavailable for such a role that rejects his most important teachings, it would mean “Donald the King” or perhaps “Doug the King.

This movement is all about reverting women to what was for thousands of years considered to be their proper place of inferiority and submission. Indeed, as I explain in the book manuscript on which I am currently working, An Agreed-Upon Fiction: The Creation of the ‘Inferior’ Sex — How It Misshaped History and the Present, the whole authoritarian enterprise is based on a Foundational Lie that arose more than five thousand years ago. I call it Male Monocreationism: the assertion that men have all reproductive power and women merely provide a place in which men’s creations grow. “Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson said in the CNN interview.

The article quoted Wilson’s book, in which he wrote “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission.”

I’m sure that there has always been some number of men who find this “philosophy” comforting–some subset of men who have found themselves unable to operate in a world that doesn’t afford the males of the species automatic dominance. (There are the Incels, for example–men who can’t get dates, let along amorous partners.) These are not healthy humans; they are clearly threatened by the realities of a modern world in which intellect rather than brute strength gives entree to civic and economic equality.

It’s one thing to recognize that society has always harbored such men; it is far more troubling when they feel able to announce their beliefs publicly, and frankly terrifying when people in positions of power publicly embrace them.

MAGA isn’t just waging war on democracy and the Constitution. At its core, it’s an effort to destroy modernity, to return us to a time of superstition and ignorance in which its members felt more comfortable. MAGA’s Christian Nationalists want to return us to a past in which women, LGBTQ+ folks, non-Whites and non-faux-Christians were all subservient to straight White “Christian” males.

And they’re through pretending otherwise.

Comments

There Really Is A Difference

When I was much younger, it was common to hear people say that there was no real difference between the political parties. That put-down–while never really accurate– was recognition of the then considerable overlap between the two parties. There were once conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans; that, of course, was before the GOP turned into today’s proto-fascist MAGA.

Today, the put-down is different, along the lines of “a plague on both your houses.” Every day, pundits and pollsters tell us that Americans hate the GOP and disdain the Democrats. I’m not sure where that leaves us ordinary voters, but I am sure it ignores the very real policy differences between the parties.

Those differences become far clearer when you contrast life in Red and Blue states. it turns out that, when Americans elect Democrats to manage their states, the people who live in those states do better.

Some examples:

Democratic states like California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington have raised their minimum wages to $15/hour or higher.

Blue states take measures to protect people’s health coverage (Washington State even created a public health insurance option—the only one in the country to the best of my knowledge) and pass laws requiring paid family and medical leave.

Blue states—including Oregon, California, Washington, Colorado and New York—make it easier to vote, expanding early voting and passing election reforms like automatic voter registration and same day registration.

Blue states support public education, and Blue states like New York, California and Oregon even offer tuition-free college programs.

Indiana’s next-door neighbor, Illinois, is an example of the difference between Democrats who govern for We the People and Republicans who govern for the donor class. This July, Governor Pritzker signed the state’s Prescription Drug Affordability Act, limiting unfair pricing practices and supporting independent pharmacies, along with four bills to help high school students afford to pay for college. In January, Pritzker signed a bill forbidding payment of less than minimum wage to disabled workers.

And the Red states, like Indiana?

Well, we’ve kept the minimum wage at 7.25 since 2009, and only raised it then because of a requirement to match the federal rate. Our Republican overlords are busy throwing people off Medicaid with stricter eligibility checks, work requirements, and enrollment caps–any mechanism to hurt the most vulnerable populations.

Red States like ours have worked hard to make it more difficult to vote; they’ve cut early voting, required specific government-issued IDs, and thrown out ballots with minor errors. Polls in Red Indiana and Kentucky close at 6– earlier than any other state—making it harder for working people to cast ballots.

From education to gun safety, from climate and the environment, from education to worker protection, Democratic lawmakers have, on balance, worked to make citizens’ lives better and fairer. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to wage war against women, gays and non-Christians, while making it harder for working-class Americans to earn a decent living.

Democrats are far from perfect, but the contrast is certainly illuminating.

Which approach really makes America great?

Comments