Letters, They Get Letters…

Sometimes, the Letters to the Editor are just jaw-dropping excursions into the depths of illogic. This morning’s entrant into the “it ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so” sweepstakes is a prime example.

The writer says there is no “war on women,” rather, it is a war for “immorality, secularism and the destruction of Christianity.” And what is the weapon being deployed in this war? The requirement that health insurance include coverage for birth control.

Where to begin?

Perhaps we might question the writer’s assumption that use of birth control equates to “immorality.”  (“Procreation is a gift from God. It is not a form of recreation.”) Evidently, only participants in “recreational” sex use birth control. We probably should tell that to the doctors who prescribe contraceptives to treat a variety of medical conditions, including but not limited to menorrhagia.

We might also note that the writer’s defense of  this position by Catholics who believe in the “sanctity of life” conveniently ignores the lack of Church outrage over the use of its tax dollars to fund capital punishment and war.

Finally, we might gently note that the First Amendment religion clauses are not violated when taxes paid by “Christians and people of faith”  are spent for purposes of which they disapprove. If that were the case, every dollar spent on war and weaponry would violate the religious liberty of Quakers. Money spent to enforce “blue laws” would violate the rights of Jews and Seventh Day Adventists. Taxes supporting high schools would violate the religious liberty of the Amish. In a religiously diverse nation, there are hundreds of other examples.

Religious liberty does not mean government must impose your religious beliefs on your neighbors. Catholics, who not so long ago struggled against state imposition of Protestant norms, should be particularly sensitive to that bit of legal revisionism.

That, of course, would require the use of logic.

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Father’s Day

In about an hour, my husband and I will start getting dressed for a Father’s Day brunch with four of our five children–number five, who lives in Manhattan, will be missing in person but with us in spirit.

There are many things one can say about the role of fathers or stepfathers in the lives of their children, and we will hear many of them today, if for no other reason than the fact the media will bombard us with Father’s Day sentiments. But I was struck this morning reading remarks made by Newark Mayor Cory Booker to the graduating class at Bard College. Booker–who is one of the truly impressive public servants of our time–shared a contemplation on the wisdom of his father, and I think it is well worth sharing.

“My dad would always tease me: ‘Boy, don’t you walk around here like you hit a triple. You were born on third base, boy.’ ..I drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that I did not dig. I eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for me by my ancestors. I sit under the shadow of trees that were planted and cultivated and cared for by those who I will never know.”

The really good fathers, the ones who make a lasting difference, are the good citizens who–without celebrity or fanfare–protect our liberties, participate in building our communities, and plant trees under which they will never sit, trees that will shadow their children and grandchildren. Those really good fathers raise children who acknowledge their debt to those who have plowed the ground they plant, and accept their own obligation to “pay it forward.”

Our children have been blessed to have a father/stepfather like that.

Have a great Father’s Day.

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Politics and Pathology

There is a spectrum we all recognize in political debate: first is fact—verifiable, objective reality. Then there is spin—a partisan interpretation of that reality. And then there’s propaganda—flat out lying.

All politicians engage in spin that sometimes crosses the line into propaganda. The Romney campaign, however, seems constantly to operate in “propaganda” mode.

What are the differences?

Under “spin,” we might list things like Romney’s constant complaint that Obama hasn’t negotiated a “single trade agreement.” The President has revived agreements with Colombia, South Korea and Panama that had been stalled in Congress, but these aren’t technically new agreements. Romney promises to see the Keystone XL Pipeline built and implies that its construction would mean more oil for America, although pipeline owners have been clear that the oil is meant for Asian markets. Accusing the President of “apologizing for America” requires taking a lot of words out of context, but even this stretch probably falls within the typical political spin cycle.

Other pronouncements, however, are categorically, demonstrably untrue.

Perhaps the most egregious lie is that Obama has been a big spender—that under his administration, spending is “out of control.” Actually, as Rex Nutting reported in MarketWatch (a web site affiliated with that known liberal outfit The Wall Street Journal), you’d have to go back to the Eisenhower Administration to find a rate of federal spending growth lower than that of the Obama Administration. That conclusion holds even if you include the stimulus, which was passed by Bush but spent during Obama’s first year in office.

Romney repeatedly says the President “promised to bring unemployment below 8%,” but reporters have been unable to find a single instance of Obama making such a statement. He insists that repealing Obamacare will reduce the deficit, in the face of widely accepted Congressional Budget Office calculations demonstrating that repeal would vastly increase the deficit. Romney’s claims about job creation at Bain were so outsized he has had to walk them back.

There’s Romney’s widely criticized campaign ad featuring a recording of President Obama’s voice making a boneheaded remark about the economic meltdown—a recording conveniently “clipped” to remove the lead-in phrase: “Mr. McCain even said….” When confronted with this clear distortion, Romney admitted the President was quoting McCain, and laughed it off; worse,  he has continued to run the blatantly misleading spot.

More recently, Romney “quoted” The Escape Artist, a book about the Obama Administration, for assertions the book never made—the author has been making the rounds of political television rebutting Romney’s “quotes” (and happily suggesting that people buy the book to see for themselves).

There are plenty of other examples of persistent mendacity; so many, in fact, that there are a couple of websites cataloguing them. But the lies that mystify me are not those obviously motivated by political ambition and/or a calculation that a weakened media won’t notice. What mystifies me are the unforced, totally gratuitous lies.

Remember when Romney said he’d been a hunter in his youth? And then had to walk that assertion back when reporters could find no record of the permit he claimed to have held? Or his insistence that his father, George Romney (whom I greatly admired) had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King? His “memory” of that event was only corrected when photos surfaced placing the elder Romney somewhere else on the date of the supposed march.

Romney’s habitual, almost compulsive make-believe is provoking considerable comment. Time Magazine recently ran a pop-psychology article titled “The Root of Mitt Romney’s Comfort with Lying.”

Lying of this magnitude, I submit, is not political. It’s pathological.

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What If? What Then?

Let me start this post with a caveat: I am not an economist. I don’t play one on TV. At most, I’m a reasonably well-informed consumer of economic news.

That news, however, is troubling. Following the various indicators could give you whiplash–housing may be recovering, but unemployment claims are up. No, unemployment claims are down, job creation’s up, but retail is down. No, retail is up this month, but…Well, you get the point.  If the economy were a car, it would be stuck in low gear.

There are as many theories about what ails the American economy as there are pundits and candidates for office. It’s too much government spending or not enough stimulus or the meltdown in the EU or GOP efforts to win the Presidency by delaying the recovery. And all of these  analyses clearly point to contributing factors.

But what if what we are seeing is the start of a long-predicted “structural change” brought about by technology? What if Europe calms down and we get past November only to discover that employment still doesn’t return to previous levels? And since I’m playing “what if” here, what if instead of the toxic political finger-pointing and infantile blaming that characterizes our current politics, we had a serious discussion about the appropriate response to that structural change?

Persistent high unemployment would present a huge challenge to social stability and economic health. Fewer people with money to spend would depress markets; more people needing social welfare support would stress the federal budget and make it more difficult to reduce the deficit. The existence of a persistent underclass would generate resentments and social unrest at a level that would dwarf today’s Occupy movement.

It seems to me–again, an admitted economic amateur–that such a scenario would require government to become an employer of last resort. Surely, hiring people to mow parks, clean streets, assist in classrooms and do similar jobs would be preferable to welfare, both for those being employed and society at large. The tasks being performed would improve the quality of life in our cities and towns, and productive employment would provide people with both self-respect and money to spend in the market.

Right now, of course, the rhetoric is all about heading in the opposite direction: laying off even badly needed government workers and pooh-poohing their value. If we are seeing the start of structural change, it’s going to be awfully hard to turn that tanker around.

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Deja Vu All Over Again

Later today, I am participating in a discussion at the Indianapolis Interfaith Center on Shari’a Law. Given the current hostility to Islam, and its usefulness for some as a wedge issue, the presentations should be interesting.

When I first became aware of the passage of state laws prohibiting courts from applying Sharia law, my first reaction was “it’s déjà vu all over again.”  I grew up Jewish in Anderson, Indiana. There were a total of 30 Jewish families in Anderson, and growing up I fielded questions like “do Jews have tails?” and “do Jews live in houses like ‘real’ people?” Less naïve—and nastier—comments assumed Jews’ dual loyalty—and implicitly, that our commitment to Israel would trump our allegiance to the United States. Essentially, these folks were sure Jews constituted a disloyal “fifth column,” not to be trusted.

It hasn’t only been Jews who were subject to these suspicions. I was in college during JFK’s campaign for President, and several people explained to me that if he won, the Pope would rule America, that Catholicism was incompatible with Americanism, and that Catholics were amassing weapons in church basements. (They never said whether those weapons would be used if Kennedy won or lost…)

More recently, we’ve all heard the anti-immigrant rhetoric about Latinos. “They” won’t learn our language, “they” will change America’s culture. (No one seems all that angry about Canadians).

It’s probably human nature to fear and demonize the “other.” My son-in-law’s mother, who lives in northern England, has a friend who doesn’t trust “those people” from outside Yorkshire. When my husband’s pocket was picked in Spain, a nice man from Barcelona explained that it was undoubtedly the work of the Moroccans. But whatever evolutionary benefits such instincts conferred on us humans in the past, these fears of people who don’t look or act or believe like us have really become counter-productive.

My own history with this constant suspicion of “otherness” informs the perspective I bring to the silly anti-Sharia laws popping up around the country. Those laws typically prohibit the use of Sharia (or often simply “foreign”) law in our courts. I am firmly convinced that, in addition to the obvious bigotry/jingoism, widespread civic illiteracy goes a long way toward explaining passage of these measures.

If there is one thing I have learned after 14 years of teaching law and policy, it is that this country faces a frightening deficit of knowledge about our governing institutions. This is another example. The people agitating for these laws and the legislators who pass them have no idea what courts do, or how law works.

If I die leaving instructions to divide my estate in accordance with Islamic law, are the Courts forbidden to enforce my will? If I enter into a contract with someone from France and we both agree that French law will govern any disputes that arise, must American courts ignore our agreement? If orthodox Jews voluntarily take a dispute to the Beth Din–a Jewish arbitration tribunal–shouldn’t American courts enforce that tribunal’s decision in the same way that they routinely enforce the increasing numbers of business arbitrations?

The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause requires American courts to abstain from deciding purely religious disputes; they will not take jurisdiction over arguments growing out of religious doctrine, for example. And religious belief cannot successfully be used as a defense in cases where American laws have been broken. “God wanted me to blow up that building” doesn’t cut it in a court of law, no matter whose God we’re talking about.

The passage of legislation to prevent the “imposition” of Sharia law rests on profound misunderstanding of the operation of law and the role of the courts.

Of course, these measures are also a great example of the “elephant” story we’ve all heard: a man is sitting in his living room making weird circles in the air. Someone asks him what he’s doing. “Keeping the elephants away.” The questioner protests, “But there are no elephants”–to which the man responds triumphantly, “See. It works!”

During my own lifetime, I’ve seen American society get over its fear of Jews and Catholics and various “others,” and I have some confidence that we’ll live through the hysteria over Muslims aka “Islamic terrorists.” But a little civic literacy and common sense–and a little less “deja vu”– would be very welcome right now.

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