“Totally Implausible”

After last week’s oral arguments in the Seventh Circuit, yesterday’s unanimous opinion striking down Indiana’s ban on same-sex marriage was hardly unexpected. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t sweet.

Some of my favorite language from the opinion, written by (conservative) Judge Posner:

Our pair of cases is rich in detail but ultimately straightforward to decide. The challenged laws discriminate against a minority defined by an immutable characteristic, and the only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction–that same sex couples and their children don’t need marriage because same-sex couples can’t produce children, intended or unintended–is so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously.
…..

The state elaborates its argument from the wonders of tradition by asserting, again in its opening brief, that “thousands of years of collective experience has [sic] established traditional marriage, between one man and one woman, as optimal for the family, society, and civilization.” No evidence in support of the claim of optimality is offered, and there is no acknowledgment that a number of countries permit polygamy—Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, and Algeria—and that it flourishes in many African countries that do not actually authorize it, as well as in parts of Utah. (Indeed it’s been said that “polygyny, where-by a man can have multiple wives, is the marriage form found in more places and at more times than any other.” Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage 10 (2006).) But suppose the assertion is correct. How does that bear on same-sex marriage? Does Wisconsin want to push homosexuals to marry persons of the opposite sex because opposite-sex marriage is “optimal”? Does it think that allowing same-sex marriage will cause heterosexuals to convert to homosexuality? Efforts to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality have been a bust; is the opposite conversion more feasible?

….

To return to where we started in this opinion, more than unsupported conjecture that same-sex marriage will harm heterosexual marriage or children or any other valid and important interest of a state is necessary to justify discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. As we have been at pains to explain, the grounds advanced by Indiana and Wisconsin for their discriminatory policies are not only conjectural; they are totally implausible.

Indeed.

This isn’t the end of the road, but Indiana is closer to joining the 21st Century–and closer to becoming a state able to attract people of good will, gay or straight.

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Good Question

Over at Balkinization, political scientist professor Mark Graber asks a reasonable question.

My down and dirty research indicates that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled while President Obama has been in office.  The Dow began the day at 17,044.  When Obama took office, the Dow was at 7,949. The result is unprecedented gains for anyone slightly above middle-class or better.  Is there any reason why no one refers to the remarkable returns on investments (include 401(k)’s) as “the Obama Market?”

I think we all have our theories…..

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A Task for Indy’s Next Mayor

So, yesterday, Joe Hogsett opened his campaign office, joining fellow Democrats Ed Delaney and Frank Short who previously announced they’d be opposing Greg Ballard. Early as it is, it would seem that the mayoral race is officially on.

Whoever wins that election will have his job cut out for him. (And yes, “him” is the proper pronoun. So far, Indy hasn’t exactly embraced female candidates for mayor, and this time around we don’t have any.) To suggest that our city faces multiple challenges would be a real understatement–from transit (rather, the lack thereof), to crime, to poorly maintained parks, to battles over the Mayor’s role in decisions about how to fix our schools, to debates over municipal funds for fancy sporting venues, the list is long–and resources to deal with the problems are getting ever more scarce.

You can add to the list of obvious issues a less recognized one: our unenviable status as the U.S. city with the fastest-growing inequality. According to the Institute for Working Families’ Derek Thomas,

This week, the Indy Star reported on the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ ‘Income and Wage Gaps Across the U.S.’ report. The story presented the group’s finding that “wage inequality grew twice as rapidly in the Indianapolis metro area as in the rest of the nation since the recession.”

The consequences of that inequality can be seen everywhere: in taxes we don’t collect, in hopelessness that leads to all manner of social dysfunction, in crime, in economic development that isn’t sustainable….

The candidates contending for our votes need to demonstrate that they understand the ways in which these problems are interrelated–and they need to tell us how they plan to address them.

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What’s with the Right and Vladimir Putin?

Over at Political Animal, Martin Longman notes something that has bothered me as well.

I voted against George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, and I spent most of his presidency actively working against his administration with every tool at my disposal, but I never said or wrote that I would prefer that the country be led by a foreigner or a foreign leader. Not so, for many pundits on the right. Ann Coulter wants Benjamin Netanyahu to be our president, Erick Erickson wants David Cameron to be our president, and Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle would be okay with either Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin being our president.

Someone needs to explain the right’s adoration for Vladimir Putin because it’s creeping me out.

This desire for a strongman to tell us all what to think and do–and take us into glorious battle a la “Braveheart” or whatever–is creepy. But it’s also a characteristic of people frightened by complexity and ambiguity, people who want bright lines distinguishing good ‘us’ from evil ‘them,’  who conflate strength with certitude.

People who don’t want to have to think too much.

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In the Land of the Blind…..

Yesterday’s New York Times had a story about efforts to register voters in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the tragic shooting of Michael Brown. This paragraph absolutely floored me:

“A lot of people just didn’t realize that the people who impact their lives every day are directly elected.” Said Shiron Hagens, 41, of St. Louis, who is not part of any formal group but has spent several days registering voters in Ferbuson with her mother and has pledged to come back here each Saturday. “The prosecutor—he’s elected. People didn’t know that. The City Council—they’re elected. These are the sorts of people who make decisions about hiring police chiefs. People didn’t know.”

The story also repeated the statistics we’ve seen before about Ferguson: a town that is two-thirds African-American with a virtually all-white power structure and a twelve percent voter turnout in the last municipal election. (And that was overall—black turnout was even lower.)

A few pages on, the Times had a report about the growing influence of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ vast organization. Taken together, these articles are a dramatic picture of what is wrong with our political system.

I know I sound like a broken record on the issue of civic knowledge. I quote the studies (only 36% of Americans can name the three branches of government! People who are civically ignorant rarely vote!). I insist that our civic deficit is far more worrisome than our fiscal one.

These articles explain why it matters. Vividly.

We The People need to understand something about the disproportionate influence of money in politics: it requires civic ignorance. Whether it is intentionally misleading political messages or well-meaning but wrongheaded appeals to voters, these tactics are effective only when the people on the receiving end of the message don’t know any better.

The most basic civil right we Americans enjoy is the franchise. It would be great if we could reverse Citizens United and the other cases that have enabled the wealthy to buy our political system, but we actually have the power to neuter these people now.

The antidote to money in politics, ultimately, is an informed electorate.

In this day and age, it is absolutely unforgivable that American citizens don’t know who they elect—not that they don’t know the names of officeholders, but that they don’t know what offices they can vote to fill. This phenomenon is not limited to impoverished residents of Ferguson, Missouri; I regularly encounter middle-class college students who cannot define government, have no idea what a Constitution is or how it differs from a statute, and have only the haziest notion of what “rights” are.

Money is a huge advantage, and I am not minimizing its power. But the people who are all-too-often exercising undue influence in America are those who’ve figured out how to benefit from widespread civic ignorance.

What’s the old saying? In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

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