Libertarian/Civil Libertarian

Later today, I’ll be speaking to the state Libertarian convention about the ACLU. Here’s the speech I plan to deliver–another longer-than-average read, tendered with my apologies! (After this, I fully expect to return to my much shorter “regularly scheduled broadcasting”…)

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I think that one of the reasons I was asked to speak today is that—at one time or another—I have been a member of all three political parties: Republican, Libertarian and now Democratic. It really isn’t because I can’t make up my mind. I like to think it’s because I reject an approach to political identity that seems all too common among political partisans: pick a team (sort of like a sports team) and stay loyal to that team no matter what. Get your news exclusively from Fox or MSNBC, read only the blogs that pander to your “team,” ignore information that doesn’t fit nicely with your chosen identity, and of course, vote accordingly.

My changing affiliations do reflect some changes in my personal understanding of policy issues, but they are much more the result of dramatic changes in my original party—the Republican party—over my adult life. As I like to say, I didn’t leave the GOP—the party left me.

That said, no matter what my partisan affiliation, I have always been a civil libertarian—a card-carrying member of the ACLU—and I have always been an advocate of fiscally responsible government. Those positions used to be consistent with Republican philosophy and that was why I originally joined the GOP. I would argue that Republicans can no longer credibly argue that they stand for the principle of limited government.

In 1980, when I left my position as Corporation Counsel in the Hudnut Administration to run for Congress against Andy Jacobs, Jr., I was pro-choice and pro-gay rights (at least, as gay rights were understood back then), and I won a five-way Republican primary. When I lost the general election, most local pundits said I lost because I was much too conservative.

Think about that for a minute.

By 1992, when I became Executive Director of the Indiana  affiliate of the ACLU, the GOP had already undergone considerable change. That was the year that Bill Hudnut was booed on the floor of the Republican National Convention because he was prochoice—the same year Pat Buchanan made a convention speech that people quipped sounded better in the original German.

When the ACLU announced that it had hired me, NUVO, Indianapolis’ alternative newspaper, ran a huge red headline proclaiming “ICLU taken over by card-carrying Republican!” One member resigned: he said my political affiliation was inconsistent with civil liberties and the Board was insane to hire me.

I had been a “card-carrying” member of the ACLU since 1967 and a politically active Republican since 1964, and up to that point, I’d considered the two affiliations entirely consistent. In fact, I finally wrote a book because I got tired of people asking me “What’s a Republican doing at the ACLU?” It’s still in print, but today the title seems quaint: “What’s a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing at the ACLU?”

Now, I should clarify that I was a Goldwater Republican.  Back then, Goldwater Republicans believed that government power is easily misused, and thus must be carefully monitored and limited. They weren’t anarchists; they recognized that government is a necessary mechanism through which citizens establish order and provide for the common welfare. But it was a recognition that concentrated power, even in the hands of the most benign and well-meaning functionaries (maybe especially in such hands) is a potential threat to individual freedom.

If liberty is something we actually value—rather than something to which we pay dutiful lip-service—prudence requires that we limit the ability of the state to interfere with our personal or economic behaviors—that we limit laws to those that are truly necessary.  People of good will can argue about what is necessary, where to impose those limits and where to draw those lines, but restraining the power of government to invade either one’s boardroom or bedroom used to be the Republican message.

Exactly the same logic impelled my membership in the ACLU. If free markets are good for our economic health, surely markets for ideas are equally desirable. Furthermore, liberty isn’t divisible—a government that can dictate my reading material or religious beliefs or my associations can just as easily deprive me of the use of my property, and vice versa. How secure are any of our rights—political or economic—against a government that can decide who gets rights and who doesn’t?’ The issue is the same: the power of the state.

I spent a substantial portion of my tenure at the ACLU explaining the organization to people who had a very distorted image of who we were, people who simply didn’t understand what we did.  In the process, I discovered that very few people–even politically active, aware people–know what civil liberties are. Fewer have read the Bill of Rights, let alone the Federalist and anti-Federalist arguments that accompanied its adoption. American ignorance of our own history and legal system is one of the unremarked scandals of our educational system, and it’s the reason I have recently established the Center for Civic Literacy at IUPUI.

During my six years at the ACLU, I found that there are three major misconceptions about the organization. The first involves what I call “endorsement confusion.” For some reason, people have a real problem separating the defense of someone’s rights from an endorsement of the way he or she is exercising those rights. So if we say the KKK has a right to use the public streets just like everyone else, we are accused of agreeing with the KKK.

That’s nuts. The ACLU can defend your right to choose the books you read without approving of the books you choose, or oppose police brutality without being pro-criminal.

The issue for civil libertarians is who decides? Not what decision is made, but who has the power to make it. In a free country, people will make lots of decisions I don’t like. Some of those decisions will be harmful, or even dangerous. But the alternative is to allow government to make them—which can be a far more dangerous proposition.

The second misunderstanding comes from those who believe that the Bill of Rights is some sort of free-floating protection against all unfairness in society. They don’t understand that the Bill of Rights restrains only government, and that no matter how obnoxious or evil Walmart or Chik-Fil-A may get, they aren’t violating your civil liberties. Only the government can do that.

The most troubling misunderstanding is also the most fundamental: people really do believe that the United States is a majoritarian democracy. When I spoke to high school classes, I would typically begin by saying “This is America, so the majority rules, right?” And virtually every time, all the hands would shoot up and all the heads would nod. Then I would ask  “So you can vote to make me an Episcopalian, right?” That would generate confusion; they knew enough to know that they couldn’t vote to make me join a particular church, but they really didn’t know why. The “why,” of course, is the Bill of Rights, which limits what government can do even if a majority authorizes it.  So we don’t take votes to decide what prayer you can say, what book you can read, what groups you will associate with.

The entire purpose of the Bill of Rights was to remove certain matters from the reach of popular opinion—what the founders called the “tyranny of the majority.” Of course, the majority generally doesn’t deny rights to attractive and popular people, so the ACLU ends up representing some fairly unpleasant people.

Contrary to popular opinion, very few ACLU staff are politically active Democrats. Virtually all of them celebrate the non-partisan nature of the organization. Most of them agree with the director of a western affiliate who began all his speeches by asserting that the ACLU is a conservative organization because its mission is to conserve the values of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

When I joined the GOP, back in the Ice Age, and for the 35 years I actively worked for the party, traditional Republicans (and I stress traditional) and core civil libertarians really agreed on most such issues, although neither seemed to recognize that.

Both believed in limiting the power that the state may exercise over the individual. Both supported the concept that majority rule must be subject to the restraints of law; that certain rights are too fundamental to be subject to the whims of voters, or to popular passions. And both believed that rights are individual; that is, that government has the obligation to treat each of us as an individual and not as a member of a group.

Over the years, the GOP abandoned those principles in favor of a majoritarian culture war, and I left the GOP. I made a brief stop with the Libertarian Party before deciding that I support a more robust role for government than you do.

When I was Executive Director of the Indiana ACLU, I often made a point that libertarians frequently make: the political spectrum is not a straight line, with “liberals” on the left and “conservatives” on the right. It’s a circle, where the far left and far right touch.  And the only thing extremists on both ends are arguing about is whose agenda government should impose on the rest of us.

We live in a complex and interdependent world, and I have come to understand that there often is no reasonable substitute for collective action. (My libertarianism has much more in common with Friedrich Hayek than it does with Ayn Rand.) Markets are wonderful, but there are areas in which markets do not and cannot work. There are things governments simply have to do.

But Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians should all be civil libertarians. Whatever one’s position about government’s role in the economy, whatever tax or economic policies you support, we should all agree about the importance of defending individual liberties. We should all resist government’s efforts to prescribe our beliefs, censor our speech or surveill our behaviors without probable cause.

We should all be card-carrying members of the ACLU.

Thank you.

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Not Entirely Unfair…

Ms. Betty Bowers–my favorite Christian–takes a look at the Civil War, and especially Lincoln’s determination not to allow the South to secede, and wonders whether he made the right choice.

Betty paints with a pretty broad brush, but it’s hard to argue with her characterizations of North versus South….

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And Now, the Rest of the Story

Yesterday, I posted the text of a speech I delivered at Monday to Greenwood Rotary. Today, I’ll share the rest of the story.

Let me set the stage, however, by being fair and pointing out that (1) the subject of the speech–the importance of science and what it tells us–was the choice of the Chapter President; (2) the program chair, with whom I chatted during the (dreadful) lunch, was not only receptive, but warned me that “a lot” of the members were “really conservative–you should have heard them during the debate over HJR3!” and (3) the average age in the room made me feel young by comparison.

The very first “question”(okay, rebuttal) was from a gentleman who rather patronizingly asked me if I understood the difference between “observational” and historical science. Actually, I do–or at least, I know people who promote that misleading distinction. (One of the most prominent is a website called “Answers in Genesis.”) As one science blog has explained,

AIG is arguing that only scientific results that can be replicated in the lab are “observational science.” Or to put it another way, only those results that we can experience – that impinge on our senses – are scientific results.

By implication, only these verifiable results are “true” science that produces true, certain knowledge. Any other form of scientific reasoning is “historical science,” which is not certain and thus, by implication, crap. At least, it’s crap whenever AIG finds that it doesn’t square with their creationism.

This is weird…. After all, the claims of Christian tradition, including creationism, are not verifiable in the lab.

This “question” put me in something of a bind; I didn’t want to say what I thought, which was essentially “Oh, I see you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid,” so I mumbled my way through a marginally nicer response and moved on to the next questioner, who suggested that science was just as “faith-based” as religion. I begged to differ, refrained from beating my head against the podium, and again moved on.

The entire question and answer period was like that.

The final question was “Even if climate change is real, maybe it’s good. What do you think?” I’d been on my best behavior up to that point, but I sort of snapped. I told him–sweetly–that whether it was good or bad depended on what you thought about Florida being underwater; it is, after all, a state that has caused the country considerable problems. Perhaps losing it would be a good thing.

When the question and answer period was over, a couple of elderly gentlemen did come up to whisper that they agreed with me. But another cornered me, insisting that I needed to review a “fantastic” website that demonstrated clearly just how scientists had sold the “scam” of evolution.

As I was making my break for the door, I smiled weakly at the program director and said “At least I wasn’t tarred and feathered!”

He smiled back and said, “You aren’t out the door yet.”

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A Tale of Two Worldviews…In Two Installments

On Monday, I spoke to the Greenwood Rotary. Unlike my usual topics, I’d been asked to expand on the theme of a recent IBJ column I’d written, on the costs of rejecting science. In today’s post, I’m sharing the talk (apologies for the length). Tomorrow, I’ll share reactions. (Hint: Earth is doomed.)

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Recently, I devoted my IBJ column to the assault on science, and the costs—both financial and social—of ignoring what science tells us. Most people who deny or reject science are people who feel threatened when empirical evidence conflicts with their particular prejudices or worldviews. Rather than modify their worldview, they reject the evidence.

What has been called the War on Science is one of the few bipartisan assaults of an unbelievably partisan age—it is being waged by people who have very little else in common, either politically or philosophically. There are business interests, like tobacco companies and Big Oil, who see a particular scientific consensus as a threat to their bottom line; there are “back to nature” liberal activists who are suspicious of GMO foods; there are some religious folks—certainly not all—who see science as incompatible with belief in their particular version of God; and there are conspiracy theorists who are sure that vaccinating their children is part of some nefarious government plot with which medical scientists are colluding…presumably to enrich pharmaceutical companies.

Let me be clear: These sorts of assaults on the scientific enterprise itself are very different from ongoing debates within the scientific community about methodology, or arguments about the conclusions that can legitimately be drawn from any particular data. Those latter debates both advance our understanding of the world we inhabit, and remind us that all human knowledge is tentative—in scientific jargon, falsifiable.

Falsifiability is what distinguishes science from other kinds of inquiry—it’s what makes science, science. Falsifiability means that a hypothesis can be tested by empirical experiment.  Just because something is “falsifiable” does not mean it is false; it means that if it is false, then testing, observation or experiment will at some point demonstrate that it is false. All kinds of things can be true without being falsifiable. A woman or a sunset may be beautiful, people may be happy or sad or in love and those statements can absolutely be true. They just aren’t science, because they cannot be empirically proved nor disproved. Similarly, God cannot be dragged into a laboratory and His existence tested. You either believe or you don’t. That’s why religious belief is called faith.

Thorny policy problems arise when we fail to distinguish between science and faith, or science and ideology. Let me just give a few examples:

  • Recently, Bill Nye—the “Science Guy”—debated Ken Ham, a prominent creationist, at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Ham used Genesis and the bible as his sole “evidence” for his rejection of evolution and his belief that the universe is only seven thousand years old. Nye explained that scientific propositions must be “testable” and falsifiable–that reliance on the literal accuracy of scripture is simply not science. That’s the reason that the courts have unanimously ruled that creationism cannot legally be taught in public school science classes. It can be taught in classes on comparative religion, or philosophy, or classes on the history of science, but it can’t be taught as science. As a practical matter, when school boards insert “creation science” in science curricula, they end up spending lots of tax dollars defending and losing the inevitable lawsuit.
  • Religious beliefs aren’t the only motivation for ignoring science—not even close. In my IBJ column, I referenced the debate over the medical and recreational use of marijuana as another example of the way ideology distorts rational policymaking and ignores relevant scientific evidence. Drug warriors insist that marijuana is a “gateway” drug and the cause of multiple health problems, but these are just a different kind of “faith-based” beliefs. Science tells us that dangerous or fatal outcomes from marijuana use are virtually nonexistent. As one scientist wrote: “Two recent reviews examine results from approximately one hundred randomized placebo-controlled trials involving over 6,100 patients with a variety of medical conditions. The results show that marijuana is useful in treating anorexia, nausea and vomiting, glaucoma, irritable bowed disease, muscle spasticity, multiple sclerosis, symptoms of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and Tourette’s syndrome. It is also useful in providing modest relief of pain. In this latter regard, it seems to reduce chronic pain by about 30 percent, a benefit achieved with fewer serious side effects than encountered with commonly used opiates (codeine, morphine, etc). Thus there is ample evidence to support the legalization of marijuana for medicinal purposes.”

Estimates put the annual cost of the Drug War at something north of sixty billion dollars a year, much of which is spent on marijuana prohibition. Drug warriors continue to reject the science that distinguishes between marijuana—which is less harmful than tobacco or alcohol—and more dangerous drugs.

  •  Drug warriors tend to come from the political Right. From the political left, there is the growing movement against GMOs–Genetically Modified foods. This is an issue that drives my cousin, a cardiologist and scientist, up the wall. He has written extensively on the subject, pointing out–among other things–that foods made with GMO crops have been consumed by hundreds of millions of people around the world for more than 15 years with no discernible ill effects; that virtually all processed foods sold in the U.S. contain GMO ingredients; that genetic engineering simply “speeds up” the conventional cross-breeding and hybridization that we humans have done for thousands of years. He also points out that genetic manipulation allows us to produce plants more resistant to insects and disease–which in turn allows us to reduce the use of pesticides and herbicides that really are harmful. He also points to the promise of better nutrition for people in third-world countries. The scientific community is solidly in my cousin’s corner on the issue, but that hasn’t slowed down the opposition.
  • Policies built on bad science or rejection of science are often costly, and often create problems, but the consequences of most bad policy decisions pale in comparison to the costs of climate change denial. There are multiple motives driving denialism, and we can talk more about climate change during Q and A, but I just want to make two points: first, there is no real scientific controversy. Something like 99% of the scientific community agrees that climate change is real, that it is occurring, and that human activity is contributing to it. There may be quibbles about the extent to which climate change is anthropogenic—the extent to which our human activities are causing and/or accelerating it—but on the basic premise, scientists are all on the same page. Second, let’s look at the logic. If all of these scientists are right, we clearly have to address the problem, and do so aggressively. But even if they are all wrong, and we attack carbon emissions, provide incentives for clean energy,  promote conservation and take similar steps, the worst case scenario is that we will have cleaned up our air, reduced our reliance on foreign oil, and conserved resources that everyone understands are finite.  Given the stakes, this seems a no-brainer to me.

There are obviously plenty of other examples, but the real question is: What is driving the rejection of science and empirical evidence?

Some is intentional. There was a fascinating article in the LA Times last month titled “The cultural production of ignorance.” It talked about the tobacco industry’s effort to erode public acceptance of the science that showed a link between smoking and various diseases. The chosen tactic wasn’t to “debunk” the science; it was to create doubt by insisting that there was a “controversy” and both sides needed to be heard. That’s same tactic has subsequently been employed by the anti-vaccine folks, the anti-evolution folks and the climate-change deniers. As the article noted, once misinformation—or disinformation—takes root, it becomes very difficult to dislodge. There’s also a growing body of research showing that people who are invested in a particular belief often react to information contrary to the belief by clinging to it more strongly than before, which is a pretty depressing finding.

So, how did we get here? Americans used to have a love affair with science—what happened?

Media bears considerable responsibility. Ironically, in the “information society” we inhabit, it has become easier to propagate ignorance. As issues become more complicated, they also become easier to confuse. And in the place of accuracy–what used to be called “the journalism of verification”–today’s media has substituted “balance.” Rather than objectivity, we get “both” sides of issues that may actually have six “sides” or only one. In place of real reporting, we get stenography–”he said, she said.” As I tell my students, America has a bipolar culture—we frame issues as right or wrong, good or evil. Increasingly, things aren’t so clear-cut. And the fact that so many policies are complicated makes it easier to manufacture controversies and complexities and to muddy the waters.

The biggest culprit may be something I call our civic deficit. Americans as a whole are shockingly ignorant of basic constitutional, economic and scientific principles and definitions.

Let me share an anecdote that illustrates why I am concerned.

When I teach Law and Public Affairs, I begin with the way our particular legal framework limits our policy options, and how “original intent” should be understood to guide our application of Constitutional principles to current conflicts. I usually ask students something like “What do you suppose James Madison thought about porn on the Internet?” Usually, they’ll laugh and then we discuss how Madison’s beliefs about freedom of expression should guide courts faced with contemporary efforts to censor the Internet. But a couple of years ago, when I asked a young woman—a junior in college—that question, she looked at me blankly and asked “Who’s James Madison?”

Let me share with you just a tiny fraction of the available research. Only 36 percent of Americans can correctly name the three branches of government. Fewer than half of 12th grade students can describe the meaning of federalism. Only 35% of teenagers can correctly identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. Anecdotal surveys such as these, as well as the few formal studies that have been completed on civics, point to what has been called a “civics recession”. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 2006 report on civics competencies indicated that barely a quarter of the nation’s 4th, 8th and 12th graders are proficient in civics, with only five percent of seniors able to identify and explain checks on presidential power.  Only 43% of high school seniors could name the two major political parties; only 11% knew the length of a Senator’s term; and only 23% could name the first President of the United States. I could go on and on. Other research has shown equally depressing results for basic economic and scientific knowledge. One scholar reacted to the 2010 NAEP results by worrying that the amount of civic knowledge in this country may be “too low to sustain democratic governance.”

A little over a year ago, I secured a grant and established the Center for Civic Literacy at IUPUI. My colleagues and I represent different disciplines—law, business, social work, science, religious studies, political science, bioethics and education—because we are painfully aware that all of our disciplines are adversely affected by low civic literacy. Although deficits in civic literacy are widely understood to be corrosive to democratic institutions, scholars have increasingly recognized that such deficits have damaging consequences for fields as diverse as business, science, religion, and public education, as well as for the personal empowerment and agency of individuals.

The Center has a website, an online clearinghouse for research, and in July, we will publish the first issue of a peer-reviewed journal, focused on the causes and consequences of our civic deficit. We are also conducting original research on a large number of questions: we want to identify programs and curricula that have demonstrated effectiveness in producing civically-literate students; we want to know why previous efforts at reform have lacked staying power.  We want to investigate the theorized consequences of civic ignorance. And we want to develop a set of recommendations for basic civic education that can be both implemented and sustained.

Here’s the thing: At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if I think the Establishment Clause requires a certain result and you think it requires a different one. What matters is that we both know what the Establishment Clause is, and what value it was meant to protect.

It doesn’t matter whether I think Freedom of the Press extends to bloggers and you disagree. It matters a lot that we both know what Freedom of the Press means, and why it was considered essential to the maintenance of trustworthy government.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican and I’m a Democrat, but it matters a lot that we both know what Nazis and Socialists are, and why the President can’t be both at the same time.

It doesn’t matter if I think the scientific evidence for the safety of GMOs is persuasive and you don’t, but it matters a lot that we both understand what science is and isn’t, and the difference between a scientific theory and our casual use of the term “theory” to mean “best guess.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. If I think this is a table and you think it’s a chair, we aren’t going to have a very productive discussion about its use. We don’t need citizens who all agree about the implications of our founding decisions, or who even agree with the decisions themselves. But we desperately need citizens who share an understanding of what those decisions were. We don’t need citizens who agree about economic policies, but we desperately need citizens who understand basic economic principles.

And we desperately need citizens who understand what science is and isn’t.

Thank you.

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Back Home in Whose Indiana?

Two articles have come across my laptop screen in the past week that reminded me of the old observation that what you see depends on where you sit.

Morton Marcus’ “Eye on the Pie” column stuck basically to statistics, sharing data that suggests our state is not faring well economically. Private sector jobs remain stubbornly below pre-recession levels, despite growth in population; and although wages are up, they aren’t up enough to have kept pace with inflation, so real wages (buying power) actually declined in all but five metropolitan areas.

The result is that the average Hoosier has $30 less a week than she had six years ago.

The job picture is similarly uneven.  Elkhart-Goshen has lost 8.8% or 10,600 jobs; Michigan City-LaPorte is off 4,400 jobs, or 11.2%.

In the Northwest Indiana Times, Rick James focused on the contrast between Indiana lawmakers’ solicitude for business and our abysmal social safety record.  Indiana is 45th among the states in infant mortality–more babies die here before their first birthday than in 44 other states. Public school teachers have been under relentless attack for deficiencies in our education system, despite the fact that our problems are systemic, complex and frequently exacerbated by clueless ideologues at the statehouse.

As James notes,

“Pence can boast about the business climate. He can also talk about the $2 billion the state has in the bank while babies are dying, roads are crumbling and schools are cutting staff and programs because of lack of funding. That, my friends, is Honest to Goodness Indiana.”

The evidence demonstrates rather forcefully that being a low-tax, “right to work” state has failed to create jobs or contribute to prosperity. To the contrary, our obsession with tax-cutting has degraded the quality of life that–according to research–is what actually attracts new businesses and residents.

Meanwhile, our political spin-doctors continue their “happy talk.”

I don’t know what state the administration flacks who issue those glowing media releases live in, but the rest of us would sure appreciate getting directions to that Indiana.

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