In Defense of Apostasy

A good friend of mine, one of those thoughtful Republicans from a former era, has decided–after internal struggle–that he will cast his vote for Richard Mourdock–despite his obvious distaste for the man and his positions. His justification is that Mourdock will cast his first vote for leadership of the Senate. My friend, a long-time Republican who has held elective office, is a “team player.” He cites the old adage: “he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”

I understand the reasoning. If you truly believe that your “team” has better ideas, will do better by the country, you can justify swallowing hard and supporting dubious team members.

But what if your whole team is playing dirty? What if the mean-spirited and intellectually limited guy you are holding your nose and voting for is more typical than you want to admit? What if your team has abandoned the ideas and positions that drew you to join in the first place? Where should your loyalties lie–to the team, or the sport? To your party, or the country?

People join political parties for many reasons. Mom and Dad were Democrats or Republicans. You want to get ahead, and you live in one of the increasingly common areas where one party dominates. You identify as union, or management, and that identification trumps other concerns. Or you develop a political philosophy and choose the party with the platform that is most consistent with that ideology. Whatever the reason for that original choice, political scientists tell us that few of us rethink it. Instead, we continue to root for our first “team,” much as sports fans do.

In my own case (being a teenager who read a lot and didn’t date much), I became a Republican because I had formed pretty firm political positions; I was a social liberal and a fiscal conservative (still am), and in the early 1960s, the Democrats were much farther to the left than I was (or than Democrats are today). I was drawn to the libertarian wing of the Republican party, which came closest to my own beliefs. In the years since, both the Democrats and GOP have moved further and further to the right, and I became less and less comfortable with my “team.” George W. Bush was the final straw, and I left the party. I became an apostate. Many of my former political friends understood; others became very chilly, and some very critical opinions of my apostasy have gotten back to me. Fair enough.

But here’s the thing. Politics isn’t football, where who wins and loses doesn’t ultimately make a difference in the lives of real people. Many of my Republican friends from the “old days” recognize how much the party has changed, but they can’t bring themselves to sever the bond. They tell themselves that the Mourdocks and the Pences and Akins and Wests and Bachmanns and Brouns and so many others are just outliers, that the Democrats also have whack jobs (true enough, just not nearly as many and not currently in control of the party). So they justify continuing to support the very people who are destroying the once-respectable Republican brand.

No intellectually honest person will agree with any political party 100% of the time–or even 90%. We all fit imperfectly into those political boxes. But when the party you vote for holds positions you know to be deeply damaging to the body politic, when too many of the people you are nominating are uninformed bloviators and  worse, it’s time to consider apostasy.

If we all became “swing voters,” willing to abandon either party when it loses its way–if neither party could depend upon a base of knee-jerk support from people who are cheering for a team rather than voting their policy preferences–I think we’d get better parties.

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Coming Out

Coming Out Day is today, October 11th.

These days—four states are preparing to vote on same-sex marriage, with victory likely in at least one, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell headed for the dustbin of history, and progress being made on a wide variety of civil rights issues affecting lesbians and gay men—the incredible importance of coming out to the struggle for gay civil rights sometimes escapes notice.

I thought about this last weekend, when I spoke at a conference sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry. The Center for Inquiry is a national secularist organization, promoting (gasp!) science and reason over supernaturalism. There were four speakers at the all-day conference, and we all took different topics. Not surprisingly, my own presentation focused upon the lack of understanding of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, and the ways in which Americans’ abysmal lack of civic literacy fostered misconceptions, and enabled revisionists determined to rewrite the country’s history.

The last speaker of the day was a lawyer from Los Angeles named Edward Tabash, and it was his talk that made me sit up and take notice.

Tabash’s talk was titled “Taking Atheism to the General Public,” and his message was simple: “We need to emulate the gay community. We need to Come Out.” As he noted, atheists and gays are two communities targeted primarily by religion. Not all religions, certainly—to suggest otherwise would be to engage in the same sort of stereotyping that we decry—but a fundamentalist, literalist “brand” of belief. Tabash urged secularists to emulate the political activism tactics of GLBT folks; as he pointed out, those tactics have resulted in impressive gains, and those gains all began with the deceptively simple act of coming out.

Last Tuesday, I had the honor of emceeing (is that a word?) IUPUI’s third annual Harvey Milk dinner. The dinner draws the campus GLBT faculty and staff and allies, and it has grown steadily since the first dinner. Two hundred and twenty people attended this year’s event; they filled a sizeable space in the Campus Center. An event like that—with that sort of attendance in that sort of venue—would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. It was possible because people took deep breaths, risked families and friendships and livlihoods, and demanded social recognition. They came out.

They took those risks in order to honor their deepest natures, in order to live honestly.

It took guts.

The local CFI has lots of members, but a significant number of them are “lurkers,” on the organization’s website, but unwilling to be identified. Many of them live in small Indiana communities, and rightly fear the reaction of their employers and neighbors. Still, as Tabash noted, the prejudice against secularists won’t change until more of us come out.

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Sometimes, It Comes Back to Bite You in the You-Know-What

It’s no secret that Arizona’s mean-spirited Immigration law was prompted primarily by animus against brown folks. The state that nurtured racist sheriff Joe Arpaio saw much of the law struck down by the Supreme Court last term (oh, that pesky 4th Amendment!), but not after beginning to see what policy wonks like to call–delicately–negative unintended consequences.

Now the libertarian Cato Institute has issued an analysis of Arizona’s SB 1070, titled “The Economic Case against Arizona’s Immigration Laws.” The upshot: the laws did–and continue to do–grave damage to the state’s economy. According to Cato, the 2012 “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” joined with the (less Soviet-sounding) earlier “Legal Arizona Workers Act” to raise the costs of hiring all employees and create what Cato calls “regulatory uncertainty for employers,” driving many out of the states. Cato’s findings are consistent with headlines a couple of months back pointing to the problem faced by state farmers who could not find laborers willing to pick their crops; a significant amount of produce ended up rotting on the ground.

According to the Cato report,

“SB 1070’s enforcement policies outside the workplace drove many unauthorized immigrants from the state, lowered the state’s population, hobbled the labor market, accelerated residential property price declines, and exacerbated the Great Recession in Arizona.”

Ain’t karma a bitch?

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Time for Tough Love

The folks who live in Indianapolis’ suburbs are a lot like the kid who moved back into his parents’ basement after college, and despite having a job, doesn’t pay rent or contribute to the grocery money, so he has money to spend on a snazzy new car and vacations.

More than 180,000 suburban residents drive into Indy to work every day. Approximately 50,000 drive out to jobs located in the suburbs. That means we have a 130,000 net influx of people who regularly drive on streets paid for by Indianapolis taxpayers, rely on police protection furnished by Indianapolis taxpayers, flush toilets into sewers paid for by Indianapolis ratepayers…all without paying a penny for those services.

It isn’t just the people who drive into the city to work. Residents of the collar counties have easy access to Indy’s arts, sporting and cultural events and other urban amenities that improve their quality of life without affecting their property taxes. At least in those cases, nonresidents are patronizing important activities–and when they eat a meal in a downtown restaurant, they do pay a small surtax. Commuting contributes nothing.

Indianapolis business and political leaders have talked about imposing a commuter tax for at least thirty years. We discussed it when I was in City Hall. It hasn’t happened–hasn’t even been seriously pursued, to the best of my knowledge. The politically cynical and criminally shortsighted decision to include property tax caps in the state constitution may change that.

Local governments are starved for revenue. We don’t have the money to hire enough police, to maintain public parks, to pave streets and build sidewalks. Important public amenities like the canal are being allowed to deteriorate. The Mayor is trying to cope by selling off public assets–a “penny-wise, pound-foolish” effort that trades up-front money for long-term income streams and shortchanges our childrens’ futures.

Indiana does not have real home rule. Indianapolis lacks the legal authority to raise property taxes. We have to look elsewhere if we are to invest in our public infrastructure and keep our city from going the way of Detroit. We are rapidly running out of public assets to sell off. The logical thing to do is to levy a commuter tax–to insist that the people using our public services pay something toward their maintenance.

Mayor Hudnut used to warn against allowing the city to become a “doughnut” with a hole in the middle. Civic health, he insisted, required patterning ourselves after a “cookie,” solid clear through. Without sufficient revenue, all those suburban residents who depend upon Indianapolis for their employment and quality of life will find their property values diminished along with their job prospects.

It’s time to charge that kid in the basement some rent.

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The Ultimate Entanglement

Over at Political Animal, in an explanation of his prediction that a Republican defeat in the upcoming election will not trigger a reconsideration of the rightward march of the party, Ed Kilgore makes an important and often overlooked point.

“In case folks haven’t noticed, the import of the advent of “constitutional conservatism” and its continued ascendency is that the Right and the GOP are in the process of chaining themselves to a permanent, immutable vision of governance that for many adherents is quite literally a divine gift to the Founders and the entire purpose of America. You don’t “rethink” this birthright, or debate it. And the usual search of political parties for “new ideas” is a bit irrelevant.”

This is a reference to a transfiguration that has been lost on most of us unreconstructed rationalists, but is evident to anyone who follows the fevered pronouncements of the Michelle Bachmann wing of the party, or the wildly ahistorical inventions of David Barton and his ilk.

We react with shock and bemusement when Republican members of Congress–including several members of the Science and Technology Committee–emphatically reject science, evolution, global warming and pretty much the entire intellectual structure of modern life, but we think of these as isolated instances. We don’t see those regressive opinions for what they are: part and parcel of a coherent, if frightening, worldview that has gradually become the worldview of the base of the Republican Party.

The “true believers” have always lurked on the fringes of the party, but gradually they have prevailed; they have entwined “biblical” Christianity and radically reactionary political positions in a new version of Constitutional Christianity. In this reading, the Constitution (as they read and interpret it) was a gift from God. it isn’t the product of a group of gifted men, a brilliant document that nevertheless requires inclusion of new populations and application to new realities; it is inspired by the God of fundamentalist Christianity, and must be approached with that understanding. Deviate from their literal beliefs–about the bible OR the Constitution–and it’s not a different point of view, it’s blasphemy.

The sane and moderate folks who used to make up the vast majority of the GOP have either left the party or failed to recognize how completely the crazies have assumed control. With the exception of a few people–David Frum, Bruce Bartlett and Norman Ornstein come to mind–they’ve kept quiet.

It has become a truism that demographics bode ill for the GOP’s future. It is increasingly, as many have noted, a party of old white men; furthermore, the party’s increasingly wild-eyed conspiracy theories and religious extremism are wearing very thin with the general public. Those trends bode well for Democrats, but not for the country, which needs two sane, responsible political parties.