Kansas Again

I need to reread “What’s the Matter with Kansas.”

University regents in that state have passed a policy giving university presidents authority to discipline employees, up to termination, for “improper use of social media.”

The action–characterized by an AAUP blogger as “a freakout”–came in the wake of an ill-considered tweet by a tenured Journalism professor. David Guth posted the tweet after September shootings killed 13 people in Washington, D.C. It said, “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.”

In a later tweet, he apologized by saying “Some interpreted my tweet differently than it was intended,” Guth wrote. “I don’t want anyone’s children hurt. The fact my words were misconstrued is my fault.” Guth said that he was a professional communicator but hadn’t done a good job of explaining his position.

Conservative legislators threatened to vote against university funding if Guth remained on the faculty. Rather than defending the principle of academic freedom, the President responded by relieving Guth of his classroom duties, and the regents responded by issuing the new social media policy.

 “Social media” was defined as including but not being limited to blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. “Improper use” was defined as “indirectly inciting violence or immediate breach of peace; being contrary to the best interests of the university; disclosing without authority any confidential student information, protected health care information, personnel records, personal financial information or confidential research data; or impairing discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers, having a detrimental impact on close working relationships for which personal loyalty and confidence are necessary, impeding the performance of the speaker’s official duties, interfering with the regular operation of the university, or otherwise adversely affecting the university’s ability to efficiently provide services.”

“Contrary to the best interests of the University”? “Impairing harmony?” In whose opinion? Can we spell “vague and overbroad”?

A group of University Distinguished Professors from Kansas State has called for the immediate repeal of the amendment, pointing out that social media have become valued venues for the dissemination of research, and reminding the regents that  “The free and open exchange of ideas is essential to fulfilling the mission of any university.”

Let’s de-construct this sorry episode, shall we?

The whole purpose of a university is to encourage the search for truth. That search requires the broadest possible exploration and exchange of competing ideas–a mission that cannot be achieved if professors can be sanctioned for the expression of unpopular or offensive ideas. The purpose of tenure is not–as too many in and out of the academy seem to think– to provide faculty with job security; it was intended to prevent precisely the sort of retribution for unpopular expression that the Kansas legislature demanded and the University obediently imposed.

Intemperate and ill-conceived expression is the price we pay for protecting freedom of speech and scholarly inquiry from government interference.

We’ve become used to legislative bodies demonstrating a lack of acquaintance with basic American principles, but we might have expected better of the regents.

Of course, it is Kansas…

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Denial Isn’t Just a River in Egypt….

A friend has shared the most recent Newsletter from Micah Clark’s Indiana Family Institute, and the hysteria is getting palpable. An (annotated) excerpt follows.

The 2014 Indiana General Assembly begins next week.   The issue of marriage protection will likely dominate much of the session, as the media seems to want to cover some sort of angle on the issue almost daily. (That pesky media…why would it be covering a major public policy issue? And why is the coverage so sympathetic to the gays?)

Yesterday, I received calls from two legislators from opposite ends of the state. They confirmed for me that the opposition to the marriage amendment is very subjective.  (“Subjective” opposition is clearly illogical and unbiblical.  “Objective” support comes from people who agree with me.)

It is true that liberal activists have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent a vote on the amendment. They have hired 11 lobbyists from large Indianapolis law firms and have 91 field directors in place working up opposition to the amendment and creating the perception that Hoosiers now believe moms and dads are irrelevant, that gender is interchangeable, and marriage can be whatever anyone wants to make it. (Marriage has always been between one man and one woman! Not like in the bible or in all the countries that still recognize plural marriage…)

However, it was this legislator’s belief that this wave of opposition to natural marriage is entirely manufactured and distorted. (There’s a factory out there somewhere, with an assembly line turning out opponents to “natural” marriage!)  He said that he announced early on, months ago, that he would vote for the Amendment again in order to preserve marriage and to allow the people to decide this, not the activists, unelected judges or Hollywood.

I’m not quite sure where Hollywood comes into the Hoosier picture, but let’s ignore that. Let’s also ignore interesting locutions like “natural” marriage. (Hate to point this out, Micah, but no civil marriage is “natural”–the decision of government to acknowledge partnerships for the purpose of allocating legal rights and responsibilities is pretty much a man-made phenomenon.)

The inconvenient truth of the matter is that the “manufactured and distorted” opposition to constitutionalizing second-class citizenship for GLBT folks is neither manufactured nor distorted: it is the very genuine position of capitalists who want to keep Indiana open for business and citizens who believe that it isn’t government’s job to enforce religious doctrine.

Here’s the thing: you keep insisting that “the people should decide.” Actually, the entire premise of the Bill of Rights is that We the People don’t get to vote on other people’s fundamental rights–that’s why the Bill of Rights is called a “counter-majoritarian” document. We don’t get to vote on who is entitled to free speech or freedom of religion or the equal protection of the laws. No one voted on my marriage, or yours.

No one got to vote on whether Adam should have married Eve, and no one should get to vote on whether Adam gets to marry Steve.

But let’s be honest, Micah. What really has your panties in a bunch is your (well-founded) suspicion that even if HJR6 passes the legislature and goes on the ballot, you won’t win. Your time has passed. Deny it as vehemently as you like–sputter about “nature” and “children” and “interchangeable genders” (whatever that means) and “biblical truth” all you want.

You and your theocrats have lost this one.

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No Free Burgers…

If there’s one thing that conservative and liberal economists agree about, it’s that old bromide about there being no free lunch.

That widget you are manufacturing contains raw materials, its construction takes labor, and its distribution and marketing must be paid for. Your facility and utilities cost money.  Those costs–plus some profit–have to be reflected in the price, or you’ll go broke.

You may be able to gain a market advantage by shifting some of your costs to others–we all know of cases where pollution created during production is discharged into the air or water to be paid for by the community at large, rather than by being properly disposed of and the cost of that disposal factored into the product’s sales price–but if it’s a cost of doing business, someone has to pay it.

Market theory assumes that the widget manufacturer will pay all the costs of production,  and then pass those costs on to the ultimate consumer, as part of the price.

Increasingly, however, taxpayers are assuming those costs.

Case in point: we are subsidizing the wages of a quarter of the people who have jobs today. A recent study from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois found that fully 52% of fast-food workers receive public assistance–mostly Medicaid and food stamps–to the tune of $7 billion dollars a year. (McDonald’s workers alone got $1.2 billion of that.) One Wisconsin Wal-Mart costs taxpayers over a million dollars a year.

The United States now has the highest proportion of low-wage workers in the developed world. And as the report noted, every dollar taxpayers spend subsidizing corporations so they can continue paying their workers poverty wages is a dollar not spent on early childhood programs, or schools, or roads, or any other social good.

We need to have a national conversation about who is paying for that burger.

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Timely Reminder

I see where some of our none-too-subtle citizens have created a “Lynch Obama” website. Remind me again how criticism of this President is all about public policy…

As appalling as this most recent evidence of racial animus is, we would do well to consider an important point made by Martin Longmont at Political Animal last week– a reminder that sometimes escapes those of us disheartened by the outsize role overt racism plays in criticism of this President.

After reminding readers of the more outrageous accusations thrown at Bill Clinton, he writes

First, the country could elect Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia president and the Republicans would treat the Democrats’ most conservative senator as though he were advocating a communist revolution. This seems to be an essential tool in the GOP’s political tool-kit and it will be used completely irrespectively of how the Democrat actually behaves.

Second, that people blame the president when there is gridlock much more than they blame the people who won’t compromise. This is because most people do not properly understand the limitations on the office of the president’s power. And, so, you will get even somewhat savvy political commentators saying stupid things like the president could get more cooperation if he just invited more of his opponents over for dinner.

Truer words were never written.

As he acknowledges, the election of Obama unleashed a disheartening amount of racism. But the precise amount has to be calculated by subtracting out the usual lunacy and seeing how much unhinged animus remains.

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Republican Evolution

Dana Milbank has an explanation for that recent Pew poll showing a sharp decline in the number of Republicans who accept evolution. Ironically, he suggests that the Grand Old Party is continuing to…well, evolve…into an ever more conservative and religious party.

A survey out this week shows just how far and how fast the GOP has gone toward becoming a collection of older, white, evangelical Christians defined as much by religion as by politics. …..Forget climate-change skepticism: Republicans have turned, suddenly and sharply, against Darwin.

How to explain this most unexpected mutation? Given the stability of views on evolution (Gallup polling has found responses essentially the same over the past quarter-century), it’s unlikely that large numbers of Republicans actually changed their beliefs. More likely is that the type of people willing to identify themselves as Republicans increasingly tend to be a narrow group of conservatives who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible — or partisans who regard evolution as a political question rather than one of science.

Milbank mines the data to describe the current GOP:   86 percent white, and growing steadily older (the number of self-described Republicans ages 50 to 64 and 65 and older climbed seven points and two points, respectively).  The ideological gap between the parties has grown, but–despite the GOP’s desperate efforts to paint all Democrats as leftists moving toward socialism–the data shows that the widening gap is instead a product of Republican movement to the right.

The Republican Party is achieving the seemingly impossible feat of becoming even more theological. Democrats and independents haven’t moved much in their views, while Republicans took a sharp turn toward fundamentalism.

How much farther right can the GOP go? When I left what was then still a reasonably sane albeit ideologically transformed party in 2000, I was convinced that–as the song says–they’d gone about as far as they could go. I was clearly wrong.

The question now is, ironically, Darwinian. As Milbank notes:

As a matter of political Darwinism, the Republicans’ mutation is not likely to help the GOP’s survival. As the country overall becomes more racially diverse and more secular, Republicans are resolutely white and increasingly devout. If current trends persist, it will be only a couple of decades before they join the dodo and the saber-toothed tiger.

The disappearance of what used to be a major political party composed mostly of grown-ups has already occurred, and the country is the worse for it.  We need two sensible political parties. Watching whatever it is that the GOP has become self-destruct may make some partisan Democrats happy, but most Americans recognize it for the sad and dangerous state of affairs that it is.

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