Sunday (Constitutional) Sermon

A couple of days ago, the Indianapolis Star reported that a lawsuit had been filed by same-sex couples seeking to have Indiana recognize their marriages.

The usual suspects said the usual things.

 “For years we have warned legislators and policy leaders that homosexual activists were seeking to force a new definition of marriage upon every church, school and business in Indiana,” Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana said in a statement.

“Today, a lawsuit has been filed in the Southern federal court district of Indiana to overturn our laws that recognize marriage as not just any relationship, but as the special union of a man and a woman which benefits children and society like no other. We knew this would happen when the legislature sent the signal that it would not protect our laws with the final passage of the Marriage Protection Amendment this year. This issue now rests in the hands of unelected judges, just as a majority of our legislators wanted, rather than letting the people of Indiana decide the future of marriage.”

State Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, a staunch supporter of Indiana’s same-sex marriage ban, immediately took to Twitter to criticize the lawsuit.

“We knew this day was coming,” he said. “Our federal court system has evolved into the forum of choice for liberal activism.”

Curt Smith of the Indiana Family Institute, another supporter of the constitutional amendment, said lawmakers have “denied the people of Indiana the right to preserve marriage and handed an invitation to our opponents to go ahead and knock marriage out before Hoosiers can vote on it in 2016.”

Same old, same old.

My question is: where the hell was the reporter? By acting simply as a transcriber—by simply quoting the hysterics of these reliable homophobes without question or comment—the reporter left readers who don’t know better (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of them!) with the distinct impression that passage of HJR 3 would have averted this lawsuit and/or its outcome.

Not so.

Let’s try this one more time: the federal constitution (you know, the one these guys all claim to revere) trumps state law. Even state constitutional law. If and when the courts decide that the U.S. Constitution requires recognition of same-sex marriages, a contrary provision in the Indiana Constitution will be rendered null and void. Hoosiers can vote until the cows come home—if same-sex marriage is entitled to Equal Protection of the Laws, their votes can’t change that. The Bill of Rights is a counter-majoritarian document; it protects fundamental rights against efforts by majorities to deny those rights to unpopular or disfavored individuals or minorities.

Indiana citizens can’t vote on my reading materials. They don’t get to choose my religion, my friends or my politics. They can’t vote to deprive me of the right to a jury trial if I’m arrested, and they don’t get to vote to allow police to stop and search me without probable cause. Since 1967 (when those “activist” judges recognized that citizens of all colors came within the Bill of Rights’ protection) popular majorities haven’t been able to vote on whether a white person can marry a black one.

Micah Clark, Curt Smith and their ilk may be too blinded by their animus to GLBT folks to understand this basic element of our constitutional jurisprudence, but there is no excuse for the Star reporter.

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Confirmation Bias

I’m continuing my read of Somin’s book on ignorance and democracy, and getting increasingly depressed, as he methodically marshals research demonstrating both the depths of our ignorance and the inadequacy of the so-called “shortcuts” we use (reliance on our everyday experience, political parties, etc.) to improve the bases on which we make our political choices.

Somin talks a lot about the very human tendency to “cherry pick,” to focus on information that supports our preconceptions and preferred beliefs. (As the old Simon and Garfunkel lyric goes: man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest…) I am going to prove the point by sharing research that supports one of my preconceptions: studies indicating that highly informed voters are disproportionately socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and supportive of higher taxes.

Now, without going back to the cited research and examining its definition of these terms, we can’t know for sure what is meant by “socially liberal”—although we can reasonably assume that it means what it does in everyday parlance– pro-choice, pro-gay rights, “live and let live” folks.

Fiscal conservatism is a more ambiguous descriptor. For me, at a minimum it means paying as we go: if you invade a country, you pay for it. Then and there, not three generations hence. It doesn’t mean government emulating business, but it does mean that government operates in a businesslike fashion. For some self-described “fiscal conservatives,” of course, it means cutting social programs (but generally not business subsidies, or favored tax treatment for farmers and oil interests). I would hope that all people who consider themselves fiscally conservative would endorse lots of transparency, so that (the few) voters who follow such things could know what is on or off the books (and increasingly, who’s cooking them).

Likewise, “supportive of higher taxes” raises the reasonable question: higher than what? For what?

That caveat aside, a willingness to support “higher taxes” is often shorthand for a willingness to pay for the common good.

Evidently, it’s also a shorthand for understanding the way things work—and the fact that we get what we pay for.

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Business Now and Then

There’s an interesting story making the (internet) rounds about Apple Corporation’s recent shareholder meeting.

Evidently, some Apple shares had been purchased by an organization devoted to climate-change denial. At the meeting, the group’s representative challenged Apple’s Chairman over the company’s considerable and laudable efforts to minimize its carbon footprint (including the hiring of a former EPA Secretary to oversee Apple’s environmental practices). He objected to the company’s environmental efforts, because they cost money without enhancing the return on investment, and were thus not in the best interests of shareholders.

Apple Chairman Tim Cook basically told the guy to stick it where the sun didn’t shine– that if he didn’t want a socially responsible company, he shouldn’t own the stock.

As gratifying as that response was, the exchange highlighted a major problem with the way far too many businesses operate today.

Most companies aren’t in Apple’s enviable cash and market position. The focus for most publicly traded companies these days is “shareholder value”—as defined by the next quarterly report.

It was not always thus. When most companies were still controlled by those that founded them, when they were operated and managed by people who owned them rather than by hired guns with golden parachutes, having a reputation as a good corporate citizen was a point of pride. Decisions took account of the long-term interests of the enterprise—and long-term was not the next quarterly report. There was recognition of the relationship between the health of the community and the prospects of one’s business.

If you look around Indianapolis today, you can see the difference between businesses run by their owners and those run by professional “managers” who all too often have no connections to the city and are marking time until they are “promoted” elsewhere.

Our civic life is poorer for the loss of people whose own prospects rose and fell with those of their companies and their communities—and who understood that responsible citizenship is good business.

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Throwing in the Towel?

Oh, drat.

I’ve been reading a recent book by Ilya Somin, a well-known and respected constitutional scholar, called Democracy and Political Ignorance.

 He begins by reciting several aspects of public ignorance with which readers of this blog are also distressingly familiar. And he argues that certain aspects of that ignorance are particularly troubling:

many voters are ignorant not just about specific policy issues but about the basic structure of government and how it operates….such basic aspects of the U.S. political system as who has the power to declare war, the respective functions of the three branches of government, and who controls monetary policy.

 This makes it difficult to assign credit and blame for policy outcomes; it also means that many voters have a very inaccurate picture of “the scope of elected officials’ powers.”

No kidding.

How many times have I heard liberal voters express disappointment that Obama didn’t “do” this or that? How many times have I heard conservative critics charge the President with “dictatorial” powers when he has (1) done something routine, something all Presidents have done; or (2) when Congress has either enacted a policy they disliked or defeated one they liked (so they attributed the result to a President they dislike)?

Somin notes that the level of political knowledge has barely increased since the 1930s—as he says, this is a “stable level of ignorance” that has persisted even in the face of massive increases in educational achievement and “an unprecedented expansion in the quantity and quality of information available to the general public at little cost.” Television and the internet seem not to have increased political knowledge, with the exception of those who were already well-informed. Somin suggests these media may actually have diverted attention away from politics by providing alternate sources of entertainment.

In the introductory chapter of the book, Somin provides reams of evidence—as if we needed to be further depressed—in support of his contention that the public cannot make fact-based decisions about policies or the merits of public officials when they know virtually nothing of the political world they inhabit. With all of the screaming about Obama’s stimulus bill, for example, 57% of the public didn’t know that a quarter of the stimulus came in the form of tax cuts. Only 34% of the public knew that TARP was enacted by President Bush. Only 39% is aware that defense spending is a larger percentage of the federal budget than education, Medicare and interest on the national debt.

We know that people who are unaware of facts are more easily manipulated.

The question—as always—is “what do we do about this state of affairs?” Somin is convinced that “rational ignorance”—the recognition that one vote is unlikely to matter much in the democratic scheme of things—will prevent us from raising the level of civic knowledge.

His conclusion? We need to change our form of government. I haven’t yet finished the book, or read his recommendations, so I will withhold comment.

Talk amongst yourselves….

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I Devoutly Hope So! (Pun Intended)

Tikkun Daily recently published an article by one David Harris-Gershon (aka “the Troubadour”) that began as follows:

One might think, given the record number of anti-gay bills being proposed across the United States, that the religious right’s legislative influence – and cultural entrenchment – is growing. In fact, they are evidence that the exact opposite is the case.

 What we are seeing right now are the last gasps of religious fundamentalism and its normative influence on the national stage. Just as an individual on his deathbed experiences a momentary flurry of energy and clarity before descending into his final end, we are witnessing the religious right’s final flailing on the national stage. To understand this, one doesn’t need to examine Pew studies on changing attitudes, nor the consolidation of religious fundamentalism into pockets of the Southeast and the West.

All one needs to do is look at legislation being offered right now, and the mainstream ridicule such legislation is garnering.

 As my grandmother might have said, from your mouth to God’s ears, Mr. Troubadour!

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