Revisiting “Religious Freedom”–Again

When Indiana went through the “great RFRA battle,” the focus of the arguments pro and con centered on the law’s impact on LGBTQ citizens .The measure was seen as an effort to legitimize discrimination against the gay community (and as a defiant response to the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision), since that was transparently the intent of its supporters.

But the law was not limited to matters of sexuality.

A more recent assertion of religious liberty–and the question of the degree to which RFRA protects that liberty over and above the requirements of the Free Exercise Clause–illustrates the more fundamental and wide-ranging conflict between the rights of individuals who are acting on the basis of their religious beliefs, and the duty of government to act on behalf of the public good.

An Indianapolis woman who severely beat her seven-year-old son with a coat hanger is defending her actions as “biblical.”

30-year old Kin Park Thaing is a good Christian woman who feared for her son’s salvation when the 7-year old allegedly engaged in what she says was dangerous behavior that would have harmed his 3-year old sister. So she beat him with a plastic coat hanger to save his soul and teach him how Jesus wants him to behave. She is fully within her right to do so, based on her deeply held religious beliefs, under Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), her attorney is arguing in Marion Superior Court before Judge Kurt Eisgruber.

“I was worried for my son’s salvation with God after he dies,” Thaing, a Burmese refugee here under political asylum, says in court documents, according to the Indianapolis Star. “I decided to punish my son to prevent him from hurting my daughter and to help him learn how to behave as God would want him to.”

Unfortunately, we live in an era that doesn’t “do” nuance, doesn’t recognize complexity and rarely engages with the genuinely difficult questions that arise in diverse societies when government tries to respect everyone’s individual rights–the right of religious people to live in accordance with their sincerely held beliefs, and the right of others not to be victimized by those beliefs. So we are unlikely to engage the really hard questions.

When does protection of religious liberty function to privilege certain people and their beliefs to the detriment of those with different (or no) faith commitments? What sorts of harms may government forbid, even when those harms are inflicted by sincerely religious people?

If the welts and bruises inflicted by this mother had been the result of a temper tantrum or a drunken rage, she would clearly be guilty of child abuse. Does her religious motivation insulate her from legal sanction? If so, who protects that child from further, possibly more serious harm?

The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause protects the rights of Americans to believe anything, but it has never been interpreted to allow citizens to act on the basis of those beliefs if such action would violate otherwise valid laws of general application.

If your assertion of religious liberty requires harming someone else, or denying them rights  or protections to which they are otherwise entitled, surely RFRA doesn’t prevent government from intervening.

But that, evidently, is the argument. [To be continued…]

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Getting From Here to There

MIBOR and the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce sent out a media release announcing the results of recent polling on Indianapolis’ upcoming transit referendum.

Poll results released today shows broad-based support across Marion County registered voters for this fall’s ballot initiative to improve mass transit in Indianapolis. Following last week’s public rollout of the grassroots initiative, Transit Drives Indy, there is clear momentum and public support for the Marion County Transit Plan.

As American Strategies reported, “Fully 61 percent support the referendum, which will appear on the ballot this November, with just 33 percent opposed. The measure attracts bipartisan support and majority backing in each region of the county.”

Support was broad-based. According to the self-identification of respondents, 74% of Democrats, 55% of Independents, and 47% of Republicans support the effort to expand transit and intend to vote for the tax necessary to support it.

 Across the region, support was strongest in the northern (66%) and central (62%) parts of the county, though support was strong across the entire county.

“We are pleased with the broad support among Marion County residents who recognize the value that improved transit service will bring to our neighborhoods, our business community and our city—jobs, quality of life, and greater independence,” said Mark Fisher, vice president of government relations and policy development of the Indy Chamber. “The Marion County Transit Plan will better connect job seekers and employers while ensuring Indianapolis remains competitive for talent.”

MIBOR (Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors) president Roger Lundy pointed out that all of central Indiana will benefit from improved mass transit. Transit is key to connecting neighborhoods, to providing access to housing opportunities, and enabling independence for vulnerable populations–the disabled, and especially the aging population that is growing dramatically as residents of central Indiana live longer.

It isn’t just older Hoosiers who want the ability to move about the city without a car. Downtown Indianapolis is in the midst of a housing boom, and despite the whopping number of new units being built, and the premium rents being charged, occupancy rates have remained well over 90%. Many of the people moving into the center city are millennials, and of that age cohort, some 10% do not own–or want–a car.

What they and their grandparents do want is what so many cities have: reliable, frequent, modern mass transit options that enhance the quality of community life. Convenient, cost-saving and environmentally friendly transportation options.

We’ve waited a long time to join the ranks of cities that actually work.

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Voting My Conscience

Okay–I have to get this off my chest.

Dana Milbank said it best, in a recent column in the Washington Post:

Moderates and reasonable Republicans who are considering voting for Trump portray it as a choice between two unpalatable options. But it isn’t. It’s a choice between one unpalatable option and one demagogue who operates outside of our democratic traditions, promoting racism, condoning violence and moving paranoia into the mainstream. This presidential election, unlike the six others I have covered, is not about party or ideology. It’s about Trump’s threat to our tradition of self-government.

More recently, Thomas Friedman made a similar point in a column for the New York Times.

Anyone who says it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins this election needs their head examined. The damage that Trump could do to our nation with his blend of intellectual laziness, towering policy ignorance and reckless impulsiveness is in a league of its own. Hillary has some real personal ethics issues she needs to confront, but she’s got the chops to be president.

These and a number of similar opinion pieces are efforts to get through to people who dislike both major-party candidates and insist that they intend to “vote their consciences” and avoid “dirtying” themselves, by opting for a third-party candidate.

Let’s “get real,” as the kids might say. No third-party candidate has even the remotest chance of winning. (And if, by some unimaginable chance, one did, they couldn’t govern from outside America’s a two-party system; like it or not, that’s the reality within which we operate.) Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

Here’s my message to those who are planning to “vote their consciences.”

You may think that casting a “wasted” vote makes you virtuous, but the reality is that every non-Clinton vote cast in November helps Donald Trump.

I realize that many people detest Hillary Clinton. I am not one of the Clinton haters, and I have my own opinions about the source of the intense animus people feel for her, but I am not going to waste blog space arguing about “Hillary hate.” I am going to argue that those who hate her should hold their noses and vote for her anyway.

Even if most of the accusations thrown at Hillary Clinton were true, that would mean she’s not much different from other, similarly flawed politicians–several of whom have occupied the Oval Office. As libertarian P.J. O’Rourke put it when he declared he’d be voting for Clinton, “she’s wrong, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, really does represent an existential threat, not just to American values, the Constitution and the rule of law, but to the world. The thought of someone as ignorant, venal, thin-skinned and volatile having his finger on the nuclear button should be enough to make sane people shudder. (It has certainly had that effect on virtually every living high-ranking member of the defense community, both Republican and Democratic.)

The identity of Trump’s core supporters–the racists, misogynysts, anti-Semites and xenophobes who have crawled out from under their rocks to cheer him on–should give pause to anyone willing to narrow the margin by which America rejects him.

In 1991, Trump supporter and Klansman David Duke ran for Governor of Louisiana against Edwin Edwards, who had faced two racketeering trials before being acquitted in 1986. Edwards won, after a campaign featuring a popular and memorable bumper sticker reading “Vote for the Crook. It’s important.”

I don’t believe that Hillary Clinton is a crook, or anything close to it. But even if you do believe that, you should vote for her.

It’s important.

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Another Troubling Data Point

The Kinder Institute at Rice University recently completed a study of mayoral elections in Indiana. (The reason for the focus on the Hoosier State was the partisan nature of our mayoral elections; elsewhere, evidently, elections for municipal offices tend to be nonpartisan.)

The report, Mayoral Elections in Indiana 2003-2015 examined a variety of facets of mayoral elections in the Hoosier State, analyzing mayoral races in 474 general elections and 706 primary elections in more than 120 Indiana cities. (To be candid, I didn’t think Indiana had 120 cities….)

The Institute documented a swing toward the GOP over the time period studied. That didn’t come as a big surprise; the small cities and towns that dot the Hoosier state tend to be more rural in nature, and to reflect the more conservative politics of rural Indiana.

What did surprise (and depress) me was the following “data point”:

In addition to the partisan shift, the report also found that more than 20 percent of all mayoral elections in Indiana go uncontested. This issue is especially acute in the state’s smallest cities. For example, in cities with less than 5,000 residents, nearly 29 percent of mayoral elections were uncontested, compared with 13 percent in the state’s largest cities.

Evidently, citizens in Indiana–and especially in our state’s smaller communities– are uninterested in the management of those communities. That seems counter-intuitive for a whole lot of reasons.

It’s understandable that the prospect of a partisan rough-and-tumble would turn off potential candidates for office, especially in this age of nasty politicking. But the hardball politics of larger communities are rarely on exhibit in small towns where everyone knows everyone else.

Furthermore, the public management issues in small towns tend to be very practical: policing and fire protection (the latter often handled by a volunteer brigade), collecting trash, paving streets, retaining the merchants on Main Street. These are issues far removed from the ideological wars that characterize campaigns for state and federal offices, but their proper oversight directly and substantially affects community residents.

Tending one’s own garden only takes you so far. Like it or not, we live with other people, and the rules and processes we put in place to regulate our interactions with our fellow-citizens affect our daily lives.

So why is it that, in one-fifth of Indiana’s cities and towns, no one cares enough to take on the responsibility for managing those processes and providing essential services? And why is the problem more acute in the smaller communities that we think of as more “neighborly” and interdependent?

Any theories?

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The Anti-Science Ticket

There are so many reasons to vote against the Trump-Pence ticket, it almost seems like piling on to point out that a vote for Trump-Pence is a vote against science and empirical evidence. As a recent article in the New Yorker pointed out:

In May, for instance, while speaking to an audience of West Virginia coal miners, Trump complained that regulations designed to protect the ozone layer had compromised the quality of his hair spray. Those regulations, he continued, were misguided, because hair spray is used mainly indoors, and so can have no effect on the atmosphere outside. No wonder Hillary Clinton felt the need to include, in her nomination speech, the phrase “I believe in science.”

Often, Trump is simply wrong about science, even though he should know better. Just as he was a persistent “birther” even after the evidence convincingly showed that President Obama was born in the United States, Trump now continues to propagate the notion that vaccines cause autism in spite of convincing and widely cited evidence to the contrary. (As he put it during a Republican debate, last September, “We’ve had so many instances. . . . A child went to have the vaccine, got very, very sick, and now is autistic.”) In other cases, Trump treats scientific facts the way he treats other facts—he ignores or distorts them whenever it’s convenient. He has denied that climate change is real, calling it pseudoscience and advancing a conspiracy theory that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.”

Scientific American calls Trump’s lack of respect for science “alarming,” and worries that the U.S. presidential election “shows how far the political conversation has degenerated from the nation’s founding principles of truth and evidence.”

A respect for evidence is not just a part of the national character. It goes to the heart of the country’s particular brand of democratic government. When the founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, scientist and inventor, wrote arguably the most important line in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident”—they were asserting the fledgling nation’s grounding in the primacy of reason based on evidence.

Lest Trump’s bizarre approach to what constitutes “fact” and “evidence” crowd out recognition of his running-mate’s preference for biblical, rather than scientific, explanations of the world, Slate has an article reminding us of Pence’s dismissal of “theories” like evolution and climate change.

You know anyone picked by Trump to be his running mate almost certainly will have a problem with established science, of course, but it turns out Pence is also a young Earth creationist. And one with a lot of conviction about it, too. In 2002, while a congressman from Indiana, he gave a short speech on the floor of Congress denying evolution, and used quite a few misleading, if not outright false, claims.

The Slate article has a video of Pence’s speech, and (assuming you can stomach it) it highlights–among other things– his misunderstanding of what constitutes a scientific theory.

Nonscientists use the word theory to mean speculation, or guess—“I have a theory about that.” Scientific illiterates like Pence fail to distinguish between that casual use of the term and its very different scientific meaning.

Development of a scientific theory is a part of the scientific method. It involves summarizing a group of hypotheses that have been successfully and repeatedly tested. Once enough evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, a theory is developed, and that theory becomes accepted as a valid explanation of a particular phenomenon. Scientific theories are based on careful examination of facts.

Pence’s preference for biblical explanations of the world comes as no surprise to Hoosiers, who have watched him fund parochial schools with public dollars, shift funding from science-based medical services like Planned Parenthood to religiously-based anti-abortion organizations, and enact measures like RFRA to protect those engaging in religiously-based discrimination.

Media outlets tend to portray Pence as less deranged than Trump. It’s a low bar.

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