Random Thoughts on Equality

Yesterday’s Supreme Court rulings on DOMA and Proposition 8 prompted a rush of reactions in me that were not necessarily coherent or connected. So in no particular order….

1) About that “other planet” that several of the Justices seem to occupy: I was astonished to read, in Roberts’ DOMA dissent, words to the effect that it would be “unfair to tar Congress with the brush of bigotry” when analyzing the motives for DOMA’s original passage. Earth to Roberts–it is unnecessary to speculate about the motives for DOMA. Read the frigging legislative history. No one was hiding those motives. And they weren’t pretty.

2)  It is an axiom of genuinely conservative jurisprudence that judges should not strike down laws simply because they find those laws flawed or stupid. To put it another way, it is a central principle of constitutional review that the Court should not substitute its judgment for that of a legislative body absent a constitutional violation. Doing so is the definition of “activism.” Yet,  just the day before yesterday, Roberts and the other “conservatives” were perfectly willing to do just that–to strike down Congressional reauthorization of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act because they didn’t agree with Congress’ analysis of the evidence about which states to include. Yesterday, presumably with straight faces, they wanted to defer to the Congressional decision to ban recognition of same-sex marriages in DOMA. There’s a Yiddish word for this sort of blatant hypocrisy: chutzpah. (I mean, shit, they could at least have waited a week before executing a jurisprudential U-turn….)

3) I see that Indiana’s embarrassing excuse for a Governor is urging the General Assembly to go forward with efforts to place a same-sex marriage ban in the state’s constitution, and Brian Bosma was quick to agree. I find two things in particular infuriating about their smarmy pronouncements: their assumption that other people’s fundamental rights should be subject to majority vote, and the absolute ignorance they display about the nature and purpose of constitutions. Who voted to recognize your marriage, Governor Pence? More to the point, it is totally inappropriate to insert extraneous provisions–be they property tax caps or rules affecting marriage–into a state constitution. It betrays a breathtaking ignorance about the very different legal functions of constitutions and statutes.

4) Speaking of ignorance, in the aftermath of the marriage decisions, we’ve been treated to hysterical rants from both Michelle Bachmann and Rand Paul. As Nancy Pelosi eloquently said when asked about Bachmann’s screed, “who cares?” Rand Paul–who actually expects his Presidential ambitions to be taken seriously–predicted that we’d soon see people marrying their dogs. Um–Rand, that “oldie but goodie” went out of fashion twenty years ago. Fortunately, the constituency that Bachmann, Rand and the Governor are pandering to is dwindling rapidly.

5) Today’s decisions were what I had expected. Marriage equality still has a way to go, and in Indiana, we still have to fight the dark side. That said, even the most conservative court in my lifetime was compelled by precedent and a huge shift in popular opinion to do the right thing. In the aftermath of today’s rulings, some 40% of the US population will live in marriage equality states. Businesses in non-equality states will have increasing difficulties recruiting talented workers, and in luring new employers. (If you were a business choosing a new location, why in the world would you pick Alabama or Mississippi? Or Indiana? You’d go where education was good, talent was available, and you could be competitive for the best workforce.)

6) What happens now? What does the legal landscape look like in the wake of these decisions?  My friend Steve Sanders has a great post at Scotusblog.

So–a good week for gay rights. Not a good week for African-American or Hispanic voters. A draw for Affirmative Action.

At least they’re going home now.

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What Planet Do They Live On?

Yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court effectively eviscerated the Voting Rights Act.

Without bothering to identify precisely what part of the constitution it violated, the Court invalidated Congress’ most recent identification, in Section 4, of the states subject to the operation of Section 5. Section 5 requires that the states so identified obtain prior approval of changes to their voting laws.

According to the majority decision, efforts to suppress minority voting are no longer a problem in the states subject to the act.  The current coverage system, according to Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”

Evidently,  the newspapers on whatever planet Roberts lives on haven’t covered the persistent and concerted efforts at vote suppression that have characterized the last two election cycles.

As the New York Times noted,

The decision will have immediate practical consequences. Texas announced shortly after the decision that a voter identification law that had been blocked would go into effect immediately, and that redistricting maps there would no longer need federal approval. Changes in voting procedures in the places that had been covered by the law, including ones concerning restrictions on early voting, will now be subject only to after-the-fact litigation.

In a saner age, the opinion would not be so devastating; it explicitly allows Congress to “update” the list of states subject to Section Five.

If we had a Congress rather than a partisan zoo, that might actually happen. As it is, however, remedial action is unlikely. When an aide to a Republican House member was asked when Congress might revisit the matter, he responded “Sometime after the Rapture.”

It’s going to get very ugly.

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Food Fights

Deconstructing the escalating battles over food is anything but simple.

We have critics and foodies like Michael Pollan counseling us to avoid eating anything our grandmothers wouldn’t have recognized as food. We have “food activists” insisting on labeling foods containing any ingredient that has been genetically modified. And we have Oscar-nominated films like “Food Inc.,” focusing upon the practices of the huge corporate farmers who have largely displaced the romanticized family farm. Those who have paid attention to the “natural food” movement (a cohort that would not include Paula Deen aficionados, or those cheering the return of the Twinkie) hardly know what they can safely eat.

I often quote my cousin the cardiologist, whose scientific expertise I respect. When Whole Foods announced that the company would be labeling genetically modified foods, he sent me an extensive tract, arguing that fear of GMs was ill-founded and the labeling movement dangerous. (You can read the whole thing here.)

As he pointed out, “genetic modifications” used to be called hybrids. Humans engaged in growing foods have spent generations selecting for desirable traits, and combining and propagating them. Historically, this has been a lengthy process. In many cases, genetic manipulation simply accelerates that process. (In other cases, however, the modifications may include the introduction of genes not native to that plant.)

He also points out that genetically modified plants promise to correct nutritional deficits in developing countries where the population depends primarily on a single foodstuff, like rice. Furthermore, the greater yields of modified crops keep many people in those countries from starvation. And it is true, as he notes, that foods derived from genetically modified crops have been consumed by hundreds of millions of people across the world for more than 15 years with no reported ill effects.

Or at least, ill effects that can be reliably connected to such crops.

It is probably obvious that I am less sanguine than my cousin; although I agree that most GM crops are no different from the hybrids farmers have long produced, I harbor some concerns–for which I admittedly have absolutely no evidence–about the long-term effects of those modifications that involve the introduction of “new” genes to a plant’s DNA. (Somehow, I don’t get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I hear that Montsano has modified seeds to withstand its pesticides….)

That said, I think the uproar about GMs distracts us from far more concrete dangers posed by factory farming.

For example, most of the beef produced in the United States has been fattened on corn, because corn is cheap, abundant, and allows cattle to come to the market in 12-14 months. In order for cattle to be raised on corn instead of grass, however,  the cows have to be given antibiotics in feed, feminizing hormones, and often protein that comes from other animal parts. Even if you overlook the inhumane conditions that have been amply documented, the large-scale production of chickens and pigs involve similarly unnatural processes. Unlike the situation with GMs, there is substantial evidence that these practices pose health risks for consumers.

Another legitimate cause for concern is the increased and often indiscriminate use of pesticides that linger in our food, and that run off into our water supplies.

Unfortunately, the “food fights” we are engaged in tend to conflate these different issues, confusing consumers and policymakers alike.

What is “natural”? Breeding crops to be disease-resistant, or more nutritious, allows us to meet human needs. We’ve done that for generations, and so long as we don’t get carried away–so long as we don’t create new and strange “Frankenfoods,” we probably don’t have much to worry about. Medicating livestock with hormones and antibiotics so that they can be fed foods they did not evolve to eat, in order to fatten them more and more quickly, is much more troubling.

As with so many of the issues people fight about these days, it’s complex, and most of us lack the scientific knowledge to make sound judgments.We used to trust the FDA to ensure food safety, but thanks to over a quarter-century of being told that government can’t do anything right, we no longer trust anybody.

Welcome to the food fight!

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Defining Our Terms

These days, you can’t engage in cocktail party chatter or turn to a “serious” television program without finding yourself in a conversation about education reform. Everyone has a theory, and almost everyone has a culprit–the sad state of education is due to (choose one or more) teachers’ unions, poor parenting, bloated administrations, corporate privatizers, or the ACLU and its pesky insistence on fidelity to the Establishment Clause.

I’m still waiting for one of those conversations to turn to a pretty basic question: just how are we defining education?

Make no mistake: in most of these conversations, we are talking past each other. There is a huge disconnect in what people mean when they criticize education or advocate for changes in education policy. All too often, parents view education as a consumer good–skills they want their children to learn so that they can compete successfully in the American economy. That parental concern is far more understandable than the obliviousness of legislators and educators who want to assess the adequacy of high schools and colleges by looking at how many graduates land jobs.

Let me be clear. There is nothing wrong with job training. But job training is not the same thing as an education. 

An op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times–The Decline and Fall of the English Major–detailed “a new and narrowing vocational emphasis in the way students and their parents think about what to study in college. As the American Academy report notes, this is the consequence of a number of things, including an overall decline in the experience of literacy, the kind of thing you absorbed, for instance, if your parents read aloud to you as a child. The result is that the number of students graduating in the humanities has fallen sharply.”

 What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.

Maybe it takes some living to find out this truth. Whenever I teach older students, whether they’re undergraduates, graduate students or junior faculty, I find a vivid, pressing sense of how much they need the skill they didn’t acquire earlier in life. They don’t call that skill the humanities. They don’t call it literature. They call it writing — the ability to distribute their thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit, even a literary merit, of their own.

As a college professor, I can confirm the abysmal writing skills of most undergraduates. And as a former high-school English teacher, I can also confirm that an inability to express a thought clearly is usually a good indicator of an inability to think clearly. (When a student says “I know what I mean, I just can’t say it,” it’s a safe bet that student does not know what he means.)

People learn to communicate clearly from reading widely. Reading widely introduces students to the human condition, to different ways of understanding, to the importance of literature and history and science, to the meaning of citizenship, to the difference between fact and opinion. Such people–educated people–are also more likely to succeed at whatever they choose to do. But that greater likelihood of success is a byproduct of genuine education, not its end.

Unless the conversation about education reform begins with a discussion of what we mean by “education,” unless we can agree on our goals for our schools, we will be unable to measure our progress.

We will keep talking past each other, and looking for someone to blame.

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Litmus Test

It has been instructive watching the various reactions to the Paula Deen tragicomedy.

On one hand are the folks–including a number of “known liberals”– who see the Food Network’s decision not to renew her show as an excess of “political correctness.” Others, of course, have been far more judgmental.

Most people have reacted without bothering to go beyond the superficial. Had Deen only admitted to using the “N” word a couple of times in the past, it might be legitimate to find the response disproportionate. However, the admission came in the context of a number of other behaviors; the lawsuit in which she gave the deposition alleges long-standing workplace bigotry, including requiring black and white workers in one of her restaurants to use separate restrooms. A story in the New York Times quotes Deen herself about taping a TV show in which she was going to make a hamburger she called a “Sambo” sandwich, but was overruled by the producer. She was also quoted justifying other behaviors by “explaining” that “most jokes” are about Jews, black and gays. (If the lawsuit allegations are accurate, all of these groups were objects of her workplace behaviors.)

Some people who defend Deen are simply unaware of this backstory. But for others, that defense clearly has a personal element. Many of the comments on Facebook and emails sent to Food Network display the very ugly and persistent underside of our multi-cultural society.

We have a very long way to go when it comes to race. And the election of an African-American President has just exacerbated that very jagged social wound.

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