Drawing the Wrong Conclusions

Curt Smith and Micah Clark have been quoted extensively in the wake of Tuesday’s primary, celebrating the social conservatives–especially “defenders of marriage”–who won their races. According to Micah, this proves that Indiana voters are “pro-life and pro-traditional marriage.” (Translation: anti-woman, anti-gay.)

Micah Clark began his post-primary newsletter with that message.

Yesterday’s primary election was as close to an across the board sweep as you will ever see in politics.   Republican voters finally got their chance in a few state legislative districts to express their anger over the failure of the GOP dominated statehouse to pass a marriage protection amendment.  If only there had been more conservative challengers in legislative races where establishment Republicans had voted for the unraveling of marriage.

In addition, incumbents targeted for their defense of social conservatism won as well.   You may recall when Rep. Bob Morris stood alone under immense criticism for pointing out that the Girl Scouts of America’s national organization had grown closer and closer to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.    The establishment loathes conservatives whom they cannot control and Bob is one of those.  In spite of a misguided high-profile pro-life endorsement of his pro-homosexual marriage opponent, Bob won the primary re-election yesterday.

Actually, as I recall, Morris made the bizarre claim that the Girl Scouts promoted abortion and turned girls lesbian….but I digress.

The newsletter went on (and on) in that celebratory vein. Micah went so far as to suggest that Eric Turner’s recent ethics problems were the result of leaks by “pro-homosexual” lawmakers. (Because Jesus would have been A-OK with his behind the scenes arm-twisting to protect his own pocketbook….)

So, are Micah and Curt right? Do the primary results vindicate their views? This is Indiana, after all.

Unfortunately for that conservative thesis, it ignores two very inconvenient facts: turnout was unusually low, even for a primary; and the social conservatives who won were Republicans running against other very conservative Republicans.

Reported statewide turnout for both parties was around 10% (in Marion County, it was a pathetic 7.9%) and a number of races on both sides were uncontested. Furthermore, primary voters in both parties are notoriously more ideological–the right wing of the GOP and the left wing of the Democratic party are the reliable primary base.

What the results do unequivocally tell us is that the Republican party is moving farther and farther to the right. Clearly, supporters of candidates running against the Very Most Rabid Righteous did not come out to vote on Tuesday. The primary left Indiana’s GOP ever more firmly in the hands of its radical fringe.

Today’s GOP is the party of Richard Mourdock, Curt Smith and Micah Clark.  The party of Richard Lugar and Bill Hudnut is long gone.

The question is: will Indiana Democrats (or Libertarians) mount respectable challenges to these candidates in November? Will voters have a reason to come to the polls, and an actual choice when they get there?

If that happens–if there is decent turnout and reasonable opposition–and the Christianist Caucus prevails in November, Curt and Micah will have a legitimate victory to celebrate.

Tuesday’s results, however, just reminded me of the old Bob Newhart line: What is the sound of one hand clapping?

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It’s All Their Fault….

David Barton (the fake historian who says there’s no such thing as Separation of Church and State in the Constitution ) thinks it was a mistake to give women the vote. Because, you know, the husband’s vote is really the vote of the “family.”

“So family government precedes civil government and you watch that as colonists came to America, they voted by families. And you have to remember back then, husband and wife, I mean the two were considered one. That is the biblical precept… That is a family, that is voting. And so the head of the family is traditionally considered to be the husband and even biblically still continues to be so.”

I guess unmarried women are just out of luck, since he’s made it clear that he attributes many of the nation’s problems to the fact that humans with vaginas were given the right to vote.

Then there’s William G. (Jerry) Boykin–remember him? He was the Army General who explained his unit’s victory in a battle in Iraq by saying “My God was bigger than their God.” He now works for the Family Research Council, and he’s still doing his paleolithic version of “God work.” He recently explained that Jews are responsible for all the problems in the world. (We’ve been really busy–there aren’t all that many of us, you know. No wonder I’m tired.)

Then there’s “I ranch on taxpayers’ property” Cliven Bundy. He and the Tea Party blame most problems on the feds. (And, of course, “The Negro.”)

Closer to home, Micah Clark and his merry band of culture warriors are positive that it’s  “the gays” fault that society isn’t moving in their preferred direction. Homosexuals are destroying the traditional family, what with their “gay agenda” and all.

I wish I had a dollar for every blogger, pundit and troll who blames academic “elitists” for the nation’s ills. (My favorite headline, from something called “The Clothesline”: Can America Survive the Arrogant Elitist Imbeciles of Academia?)

And everyone from Rush Limbaugh to your crazy Uncle Ed just knows it’s those scary black folks and their President that have taken a country that was perfect in every way and turned it into some wimpy, pseudo-European shadow of its former greatness.

I wonder what would happen if we all stopped pointing our fingers at “the other” and tried to work together to make this country what it should be–that place of Truth, Justice and the American Way that existed only in Superman comics and the rosy memories of people who weren’t paying attention.

What if we actually tried to live up to our ideals?

What if we took e pluribus unum seriously?

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Don’t Drink the Water

Welcome to Indiana, where taxes are low and regulations are lax. Just don’t get sick unless your employer provides health coverage, because we aren’t about to extend Medicaid, and by the way, you might want to boil your water before you actually drink it.

I’d been hearing concerns about Indianapolis Power and Light’s Harding Street plant for quite a while, so I finally investigated. What I found was disconcerting, to say the least. That plant is the biggest polluter in Marion County.

IPL burns coal in order to generate electricity, and it dumps the residue– toxic coal ash–  into unlined ponds next to the Harding Street plant. The plant is close to White River, and sits on an aquifer that serves a number of south side neighborhoods.

It won’t surprise anyone who has lived in the Hoosier state to discover that Indiana’s environmental regulations are among the weakest anywhere, and that the state does absolutely nothing about this–or about the other plants that produce coal ash. And we evidently have a lot of them; we rank second in the nation in the amount of coal ash we generate and we have more ponds than any other state.

We don’t inspect the dams and embankments that keep Indiana’s coal ash ponds from spilling. We don’t even require operators like IPL to monitor their own ponds and report what they find.

Meanwhile, the coal ash contaminates the groundwater we drink. A geologist hired by the Hoosier Environmental Council found concentrations of arsenic at twice the EPA standard for drinking water and mercury levels at 20 times the standard. Boron results were three times what the EPA says is safe for children.

Evidently, keeping business taxes low and regulations minimal–getting government “out of the way,” as the saying goes– is a much higher priority than clean drinking water.

“Let them eat cake” is so last century.

Let them buy Evian.

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It’s Out!!

EXPLORE THIS TITLE

Description

 cover art

June 2014
Talking Politics?
What You Need to Know before Opening Your Mouth
Sheila Suess Kennedy
Honest, objective, and informed political debates are all too rare in today’s polarized and partisan climate. Public policy is increasingly driven by ideology while political spin, distortions, and even demonizing opponents by disseminating outright lies are routine practice from Washington to the local city council. Super-heated and hyper-partisan rhetoric, increasingly homogeneous political and ideological communities, and the public’s spotty knowledge about our political system all undermine informed and considered responses to policy debates.

This digital short identifies common areas of confusion or misunderstanding about our political system—clarifying many distortions of accepted history, constitutional law, economics, and science—to help readers distinguish documented facts from the different conclusions and interpretations that may be drawn from those facts. Sheila Suess Kennedy aims to create a more informed electorate and to better ground debates in fact, from Capitol Hill to the family dinner table. Talking Politics? What You Need to Know before Opening Your Mouth provides a solid starting point from which Americans can build more persuasive arguments for their preferred policies, whatever they may be, and will interest students of political science, civics, and history, from high school to undergraduates, and the general public interested in politics and informed discussion.

Sheila Suess Kennedy is a professor of law and public policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and director of the Center for Civic Literacy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). She is the author of several books, including American Public Service: Constitutional and Ethical Foundations and Distrust American Style.

– See more at: http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/talking-politics#sthash.3mni0sXL.dpuf

Religious Privilege

Yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court in Town of Greece was predictable, given this particular Court’s history. That doesn’t make it any less unfortunate. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, upheld the town’s practice of opening town council meetings with a (very Christian) prayer.

It is ironic that all five Justices in the majority are Catholic; it wasn’t all that long ago (at least in legal time) that Catholic children attending the country’s public schools were required to participate in decidedly Protestant bible readings. The Protestant majority saw no reason to accommodate Catholics (or Jews or Freethinkers or anyone else), and the Catholics found that exercise of majoritarian privilege so offensive to their beliefs that large numbers of them left the public system. That was the genesis of the parochial schools with which we are familiar.

How soon they forget….

Don Knebel has an excellent post about Town of Greece over at the Center for Civic Literacy’s website. As he notes,

Under the Court’s decision, that practice [inviting only Christian pastors to deliver the prayer] can continue so long as there are no non-Christian congregations in the town.  And, if say a Hindu temple comes to Greece, the town will still have no obligation to include prayers acceptable to Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and all the other traditions that its residents may follow.  There is something unsettling about that.  Meetings of the town council should not be places for the dominant religion to trumpet that dominance.  As Justice Kagan noted:  “[T]he [challenged] prayers betray no understanding that the American community is today, as it long has been, a rich mosaic of religious faiths.”

Does this decision threaten religious liberty? Not much. It’s just another “f**k you, you don’t count” to people who don’t genuflect to the gods of the majority. Just another reminder that the pious hypocrites demanding that government privilege their beliefs–by allowing them to deny contraception coverage to their employees, for example–are totally unwilling to respect the equally sincere beliefs of others.

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