I’ll Walk/Ride With You….

I probably wouldn’t have followed the hostage-taking incident in Sydney, Australia so closely, but my middle son is currently visiting the city. (Knowing his mother–and being a good son–he called even before I’d heard the  news reports, telling me “don’t freak out, I’m nowhere near where this is occurring.”)

We now know that this horrific episode, which cost two innocent people their lives, was not a terrorist act, at least in the political sense; it was a solitary crime comitted  by a mentally-deranged individual. Still, as Reuters reported, the perpetrator’s move to force hostages to display an Islamic flag ” immediately raised hackles in some quarters.”

A man shouting anti-Islamic abuse near the cafe during the standoff was moved on by police, while Muslim community leaders reported women wearing the hijab had been spat on.

Then something heartwarming happened:

Inspired by the Twitter hashtag “I’ll ride with you”, some commuters heading into the city for work on Tuesday gave their support to Muslims who might feel vulnerable amid concerns about a blowback after the hostage drama.

The hashtag was trending around the world, popping up across Asia, Europe, Africa and North America as it featured in more than 300,000 tweets. Actor Russell Crowe, who grew up in Sydney and keeps a home here, added his star power to the campaign.

Sydney is home to around half of Australia’s 500,000 Muslims.

The hashtag began trending on Twitter ahead of the evening commute on Monday, sparked by a Facebook post by Sydney woman Rachael Jacobs who described her encounter with a Muslim woman who took off her head covering: “I ran after her at the train station. I said ‘put it back on. I’ll walk with you’.”

That prompted other Sydneysiders to take to Twitter, detailing their bus and train routes home and offering to ride with anybody who felt uncomfortable, using the hashtag “Illwalkwithyou”.

On Tuesday morning, Jacobs said she was overwhelmed with the campaign she had inadvertently started: “Mine was a small gesture because of sadness that someone would ever feel unwelcome because of beliefs.”

I’d like to believe that something similarly spontaneous and reassuring could happen in the United States–that enough of us would put aside the stereotyping and suspicion of people with whom we don’t share beliefs or skin color or other tribal markers, to see each other simply as humans to whom we should offer reassurance and support.

I’d like to believe that, but given the animus permeating today’s environment, I’m not sure I do.

Comments

No Doubt

Yesterday’s post dealt with the issue of arrogance, and the difference between religious faith—which requires a certain suspension of doubt–and the sort of unquestioning certainty that leads to all manner of horrific acts in the name of religion.

Which leads us to a consideration of Dick Cheney.

Not that Cheney’s views appear to be founded in religion; from all appearances, the only person he worships–or respects– is the man he sees in the mirror (and I rather suspect that the man in that mirror is not the one most of us see).

Ever since the Senate released its report on torture, Cheney has been everywhere, defending the indefensible. It’s important to note that, while he has characterized the report as “crap,” he has not suggested that its descriptions of “enhanced interrogation” are inaccurate. He has not denied that 26 innocent people were falsely arrested. He has not denied that one of those innocent people died.

Instead, Cheney defends it all. He has expressed absolutely no remorse for any of it–not even the death of the innocent man. He insists he would “do it again.” Against the evidence of experienced interrogators, he insists that the tactics worked. Against the testimony of men who were themselves tortured, this man who never wore his country’s uniform insists he knows best how to conduct warfare. Against the consensus of the world community, he justifies the use of tactics America has historically condemned.

Because he’s right, and the rest of the world is wrong.

Cheney is a stark reminder of what evil really is–not a Satanic figure intentionally setting out to do harm, but power allied with un-self-aware moral arrogance.

Comments

Arrogant Virtue

Andrew Sullivan recently shared the following quote from Reinhold Niebuhr’s postwar book, The Irony of History.

“We … as all ‘God-fearing’ men of all ages, are never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire. …There is…the necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities…

.. if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.”

Among other things, the excerpt reminded me of Learned Hand’s famous observation that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit that’s not too certain it’s right.”

In God and Country, I noted that America remains deeply divided between contemporary descendants of the early Puritans, on the one hand, and those I call Modernists, whose worldviews are rooted in the Enlightenment, on the other. Puritans define liberty as freedom to do the “right” thing, the thing that God wants. And what God wants (as Niebuhr noted) is–coincidentally–exactly what those self-same “God-fearing men” want.

Puritans believe that government has an obligation to enforce “God’s commands,” which they alone understand.

The American legal structure, however, is not a product of the Puritans who came to these shores for the “liberty” to worship the “right” God and the “liberty” to punish or expel those who differed. Established some 150 years after the Puritans first landed, our government began with a very different definition of liberty: freedom to live your own life as you see fit, free of government interference, so long as you don’t thereby harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as you are willing to grant an equal liberty to others. Consistent with these caveats, the Bill of Rights ultimately boils down to “live and let live.”

These very different worldviews divide us still.

In the kneejerk reactions to LGBT progress—especially the rush to legislate “religious liberty” exemptions from civil rights laws—we see the Puritans, furiously fighting back against modern life.

In Michigan, a bill recently passed by their House of Representatives would “limit governmental action that substantially burdens a person’s exercise of religion,” by allowing or disallowing “an act or refusal to act, that is substantially motivated by a sincerely held religious belief, whether or not compelled by or central to a system of religious belief.”

In other words, if you are a pharmacist who doesn’t want to fill prescriptions for birth control or antiretrovirals, if you own a bakery and don’t want to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, or if you are an EMT reluctant to treat gay patients, you can cite your “sincerely held religious belief” (no matter how idiosyncratic) to justify noncompliance with legal and/or professional obligations.

I think these laws are what Nieburh meant by “blindness induced by hatred and vainglory.”

The zealots who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center were undoubtedly motivated by “sincere” religious beliefs. The homegrown terrorists who gun down abortion doctors are motivated by “sincere” religious beliefs.

In a society where my (arrogantly held) sincere belief is different from your (equally arrogant) equally “sincere” belief, government cannot and should not privilege either of us.

Comments

Speaking of Sexism..

Yesterday, I took Senator Lindsay Graham to task for his sexist response to a speech by Elizabeth Warren. Whether you agree with her positions or not, Sen. Warren is indisputably one of the most thoughtful and informed members of Congress.

But then there are people like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. If those are the sorts of women with whom Senator Graham regularly interacts and upon whom he bases his judgments, perhaps I was too hard on him.

Let me share a portion of Bachmann’s  “farewell” speech (a farewell for which all sentient beings are profoundly grateful).

“And as I look about this chamber, we are ringed with the silhouettes of lawgivers throughout history,”

“And yet only one lawgiver has the distinction of not having a silhouette, but having the full face be revealed by the artist. That lawgiver is Moses. Moses is directly above the double doors that lead into the centermost part of this chamber, and in the face of Moses, his eyes look straight upon not only our nation’s motto, ‘In God We Trust,’ but Moses’ face looks full on into the face of the Speaker of the House. Daily, the Speaker of the House as he stands up in his authority and in his podium recognizes that he is a man under authority, just as Moses was a man under authority.”

“Because you see, Mr. Speaker, Moses is given for the full honor of the greatest lawgiver in this chamber, because he was chosen by the God that we trust to be entrusted with the basis of all law. The ‘basis of all law’ as was written by Blackstone, the famous English jurist, was the Ten Commandments, that were given by none other than the God we trust on Mount Sinai,”

“We know those laws, those laws are the fundamental laws of mankind, and here in the United States, the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses is the very foundation of the law that has given happiness and the rise of the greatest prosperity that any nation has known before.”

“Mr. Speaker, it could be no coincidence that this nation, knowing and enjoying the heights of such great happiness and such great prosperity, that it could be built upon that foundation of the Ten Commandments and of the law given by the God in whom we trust.”

Bachmann never did understand the difference between the Bill of Rights and (her version of) the Ten Commandments. Science and medicine–not to mention logic– likewise eluded her.

Defeating sexism clearly requires more than the elevation of more women into positions of authority. It isn’t a numbers game; quality counts. That said, no one suggests that Louie Gohmert is a representative example of all men….

Comments

No, We Aren’t There Yet

It has been abundantly clear for a long time now (and painfully obvious since Barack Obama’s election) that we still have a huge racism problem in this country. My friends in the LGBT community can attest that–despite enormous progress on gay rights–they still face plenty of homophobia. What has been less remarked–but is no less true–is that we women haven’t exactly “overcome,” either.

Juanita Jean–proprietor of the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Shop–got right to the point, after Senator Lindsay Graham dismissed Elizabeth Warren’s objections to the omnibus funding bill by saying

“You’re tired, you’re frustrated, you’re upset about a provision in the bill you don’t like…..”

You’re tired and upset? Oh yeah, that’s the only reason we women fight for anything – we’re tired and upset. The only thing he forgot is that it must be that time of the month.

Oh, but he wasn’t finished.

“If you follow the lead of the senator of Massachusetts and bring this bill down … people are not going to believe you are mature enough to run the place,” Graham said on the Senate floor. “Don’t follow her lead. She’s the problem.”

The only thing absent from this offensively patronizing putdown is any response to her substantive arguments. Because, evidently, when a “girl” has objections to the content of a piece of legislation, the only rebuttal needed is a none-too-subtle reminder of her gender.

If Warren’s objections were wrongheaded, if there were sound responses available to those objections, surely a critique that included those responses would have been appropriate.

Evidently, however, arguments made by women don’t merit serious consideration. After all, how could we girls match the great job that’s being done by all those straight white men?

Comments