Critical Thinking

The IBJ reports that Indiana’s ISTEP test will be revised to include a new emphasis on critical thinking.

I hate to be snarky, but have they considered giving that portion of the test to our state legislators? Or perhaps to Romney advisor Ed Gillespie, who appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, and “explained” Governor Romney’s position on Planned Parenthood.

When asked if Romney really meant it when he said he’d get rid of Planned Parenthood, Gillepsie said of course, but “getting rid of Planned Parenthood” wasn’t really “getting rid of it.” Because “defunding” isn’t the same as “not having funding.”

Well, Ed, let me try to explain this to you.

When the vast majority of the money you need in order to provide services comes from government, and government stops giving you that money, the result is that you don’t have the funds necessary to survive. That’s called “getting rid of it.” And if Governor Romney is elected and follows through–if he does “get rid of it”–thousands of poor women will lose access to basic healthcare, the provision of which–crazy rightwing rhetoric to the contrary–is the vast majority of what Planned Parenthood does.

Darn! Where’s that “critical thinking” thing when you really need it?

 

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Lessons from My Uncle Harold

There’s nothing like a funeral to focus your mind on what’s really important.

Sunday, I attended the funeral of my uncle Harold–actually, he was my first cousin once removed in the arcane language of family trees, but he was my mother’s age, so my sister and I grew up calling him “uncle.”

Harold would have been 93 next month, so it was rather remarkable to see 250+ people of all ages, genders and races crammed into the funeral home. As Rabbi Sasso noted at the beginning of the service, Harold led a full, rewarding life. The eulogies from his children and grandchildren were clearly heartfelt, full of genuine love and affection, and that affection was shared by the many nieces, nephews, cousins and other family members in the crowded room (too many of whom, I regret to say, I see only at weddings and funerals these days). Even though he was 93, his death was a shock; he had always been healthy, and he’d been out and about until just weeks before he died.

During the service, I considered what Uncle Harold had taught our large, quirky family.

Everyone who spoke reiterated a central theme: here was a man who never said an unkind word about anyone, who looked at the world through rose-colored glasses and saw the positive side of every situation. He was absolutely devoted to his family. He made everyone he came in contact with feel important. He had a great sense of humor, and was the MC of choice at family gatherings.

But perhaps the most accurate description came from his nephew, my cousin, who described him as a man of fundamental decency.

Uncle Harold loved sports, especially basketball and golf. In the 1950s, his favorite basketball team was Crispus Attucks. At a time when segregation was strictly enforced in Indianapolis, Harold, his young son, and my cousin would be the only whites sitting in the stands behind the team, cheering them on.

Harold had become close friends with the legendary coach, Ray Crowe, when he financed the coach’s first car; his finance company was one of the very few that made no-down-payment auto loans–or any loans–to blacks in those days.

When Crispus Attucks won the championship in 1955, blacks couldn’t even hold a celebration on Monument Circle. The team members–even its star, Oscar Robertson–were unwelcome in most of the city’s restaurants and bars, so Uncle Harold took the whole team to Broadmoor Country Club for steak dinners. He also found summer jobs for several of the players, and forced restaurants owned by friends to serve them. To my knowledge, he never talked about any of this; I came across the information in a book about Hoosier basketball.

There is a Yiddish word for people like my uncle Harold: mentch. The best translation is “a real human being.”

As one of his sons said during the service, Harold died a wealthy man. Not because he was financially comfortable, although he was. His was real wealth–the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who adored their “peepaw,” the genuine affection of many good friends, the ability to enjoy–and be grateful for–the gifts life gave him, and something money and power can’t buy: a good name.

A life well lived. And a hard act to follow.

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NOW I Understand!

A few days ago, in a post about N.J. Governor Christie’s decision to abort a badly needed tunnel linking New Jersey and New York, and his multiple lies about his reasons for doing so, I admitted that I was baffled: there was no scenario I could come up with that made the decision explicable.

Now, Paul Krugman has supplied the answer that eluded me.

I started to quote an excerpt, but his column needs to be read in its entirety. Click through and read it. And ponder.

The degree to which contemporary politicians have substituted delusional ideology and naked self-interest for any lingering allegiance to  the public good is breathtaking. And so very, very depressing.

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Chickens and Eggs

Chris Mooney has written several books about science–or more accurately, the rejection of science by conservative Republicans. His most recent book is The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality.

While Mooney has an obvious political perspective, his analysis of the role of media–and specifically, Fox News, is interesting.

Mooney reviews a number of peer-reviewed studies looking at the connection between political misinformation and media preferences–public information surveys that ask citizens about their beliefs on factual issues and their media habits. It won’t come as a revelation that people who depend exclusively or primarily on Fox News are far and away the most misinformed. The more interesting question, however, is whether Fox creates a particular mind-set, or whether people with that mind-set seek out Fox and similar sources.

Is Fox the chicken or the egg?

Mooney cites a 1957 seminal book by Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. That book predicted that people who are highly committed to a belief would try to avoid encountering claims that challenge that belief. Rather, they would seek out “information” that confirmed their preconceptions.

This was well before the internet facilitated the construction of such information “bubbles.”

Festinger called his prediction theory “selective exposure.” Today, we more often refer to it as “self-selection.”

A recent meta-analysis of 67 studies by a University of Alabama psychologist found that people overall were nearly twice as likely to “consume ideologically congenial information than to consume ideologically inconvenient information”–and that the most “highly committed” people were far more likely to do so.

According to the research, people most likely to be among this “highly committed” category are right-wing authoritarian personalities.

So while we do have examples that Fox News “makes shit up”–a practice that distinguishes the network from networks like MSNBC that “spin” facts to favor a political perspective but generally refrain from manufacturing them–the chicken and egg question remains.

Are people who get all their information from Fox being indoctrinated, or do they watch Fox because they are looking for confirmation of their pre-existing ideological commitments?

Of course, no matter what the answer to that question, there’s another: if Fox–and Rush, and Drudge, etc.–didn’t exist, would America still be so polarized? Or did our polarization lead to the creation of Fox, Drudge, et al?

Chicken? Egg? I report–you decide! (Sorry–couldn’t resist!)

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Deconstructing “Special Rights”

I heard someone make the claim again yesterday: gays want “special rights.”

So let me understand this argument:  If government respects the civil rights of Christians—and if Human Rights agencies protect those Christians from being picked on because of their beliefs—that’s simply government protecting equal rights.

But if government treats LGBT folks just like it treats everyone else—if it empowers those same Human Rights agencies to protect gay folks from being picked on because of their sexual orientation—that’s “special rights.”

When laws protect Christians, that isn’t a violation of the religious liberty of Jews, Muslims or atheists—it is a simple recognition that all religious people are entitled to hold their beliefs freely, without fear of discrimination. But if laws protect gays and lesbians, that’s an impermissible endorsement of the “gay lifestyle” and a violation of the religious liberty of those Christians who condemn homosexuality.

Got it.

I routinely encounter people who hold these logically incompatible beliefs, and to be honest, I’m getting pissed off. One of these days, I’m going to get in the face of one of these “Christian Nation” folks and demand to know just how they manage to twist the definition of “liberty” to mean their  right to impose their beliefs on those who don’t share them.

We’ve had the “special rights” accusation—lame as it is—for quite some time. But the charge that requiring businesses to treat people fairly violates “religious liberty” is a relatively new wrinkle on that argument—and it is driving me up the wall.

I posted recently about a hearing at which the South Bend, Indiana, Common Council was considering the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to the categories covered by the city’s Human Rights ordinance. The measure passed handily, but not before a number of people asserted that forcing them to hire or retain qualified GLBT workers, or rent to same-sex couples, would violate their religious freedom.

Very similar claims were made when the Obama Administration ruled that employer-provided health insurance had to cover birth control for female employees who wanted it.

The argument seems to be that “religious freedom” means government can never interfere with me if I am acting on the basis of a genuine religious belief. That, needless to say, is not and never has been the law—I may sincerely believe that I should sacrifice my first born, or deny my child medical treatment, or smoke peyote during a religious ceremony, but the law doesn’t allow me to do any of those things, or hundreds of others, merely because I claim a genuine belief that God wants me to.

One reason that isn’t the law should be fairly obvious, at least to rational people. How on earth would we know that an employer was denying women workers birth control because he believed its use to be sinful, and not just because he wanted to save a few bucks? How would we know whether a landlord’s refusal to rent an apartment to a gay single or a same-sex couple was motivated by theology rather than by garden-variety homophobia?

This is the same problem prosecutors now face in the Trayvon Martin shooting, under the ridiculous “Stand Your Ground” law. Self-defense has always been a defense to a charge of murder—but only as part of a trial, after an initial arrest. Stand Your Ground laws are self-defense on steroids; they allow anyone to make a subjective claim that the government must initially treat as objectively true. Such a practice is simply contrary to the rule of law.

Religious liberty means that each of us has the right to believe what we wish, to follow the dictates of our consciences and theologies, and to observe the tenets of our faiths so long as we do not thereby infringe the equal rights of others or violate laws of general application (i.e., we can’t “kill a commie for Christ” as the 50s joke went). Religious liberty is not a “get out of jail free” card allowing us to deny an equal right to liberty to people we don’t like.

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