Those Commie Girl Scouts…

Yesterday, the media was filled with reports about Indiana Representative Bob Morris, who refused to sign a legislative resolution recognizing the 100th anniversary of the founding of Girl Scouts of America.

In case you missed it, the Associated Press report read in part as follows:

“… Morris said he found online allegations that the Girl Scouts are a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood, encourage sex and allow transgender females to join. He also wrote that the fact that first lady Michelle Obama is honorary president should give lawmakers pause before they endorse the Girl Scouts.”

Morris went on to say that Girl Scouts were being taught to be “feminists, lesbians and Communists.”

I’m going to resist the temptation to deconstruct this, or to note that using the terms feminist and lesbian to mean undesirable or unAmerican is itself unAmerican.

Instead, I want to talk about mental illness–as in genuine psychoses, not as in a snarky label to be thrown at someone with whom we disagree.

I know that we Americans have been going through some rough times. We’ve been involved in two unsettling, seemingly endless wars. The economy tanked, and people get more than a little destabilized in times of economic stress. There are unpredictable terrorist attacks around the world, and unthinkable as it is, some of those are right here in the USA. The pace of social and sexual and technological change continues to accelerate. If you are an older white guy (and this does seem to be the cohort most affected although it certainly isn’t the only one), you are trying to make sense of a world in which your wife is no longer submissive and dependent. Your unmarried daughter may be living with some guy–or worse (at least in your worldview) with another woman. There’s a black guy in the White House and a neighbor speaking Spanish. Your television showcases very different “lifestyles” from those you approve. Your grandchildren are playing with strange handheld devices, listening to rap music on their IPods, and texting their friends. It goes on and on.

It’s understandable that people who lack adequate resources to cope with stress and dramatic social change would be confused and even angry at finding themselves in such a strange new world. But a not-insignificant number of them have gone well beyond resentment and anger; they have responded by literally disconnecting from reality. And on Fox News, or the brave new world of the internet, it’s easy to find validation from someone who shares their worst fears and fantasies.

So Rep. Morris burrows into his conspiracy theories about Girl Scouts. Rick Santorum accuses Protestants who fail to share his religious zealotry of “leaving Christianity” and criticizes President Obama not for specific policies but for following a “false theology.” Republican Senators–men in powerful positions–find themselves pandering to a political base that rejects science and reason, demonizes the U.S. President and First Lady, and is terrified of the “socialists” who are conspiring to destroy the country by providing universal access to health care and raising the top marginal tax rate.

There are all sorts of websites and organizations trying to counter some of the more outrageous fantasies with logic and facts. The problem is, as a friend used to say, you can’t reason someone out of a position he didn’t reason himself into. Someone who believes that Adam saddled up his trusty dinosaur will not be amenable to learning about the science of global climate change. Someone who believes that God doesn’t want women to control their own bodies–who believes, like Rick Santorum, that contraception is morally wrong because it divorces sexuality from procreation, and allows people to do “wrong things”–is unlikely to read the research about the benefits of birth control or the dangers of overpopulation. Someone who believes that marriage has “always” been between one man and one woman, despite ample evidence to the contrary  (plural marriage, for example, remains legal in 50 countries right now) is simply not going to look at the evidence and support same-sex unions.

Withdrawal from reality–an insistent belief in things that are demonstrably untrue (think “death panels” and United Nations black helicopters and “Agenda 21”) is a sign of paranoia. I don’t know what psychiatrists call an irrational antipathy to people who are in some way different–gay people, immigrants, etc.–but as my mother would have put it, “a wellness it isn’t.”

The Girl Scouts aren’t learning to be lesbian communists. Sane people know that.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim Socialist who was born in Kenya. Sane people know that.

Teenagers will not become gay because the Indiana Youth Group gets to put a message on Indiana license plates. Sane people know that.

The Earth is more than 6000 years old and climate change is a fact. Sane people know that.

We need to do something about the not-sane people. But I don’t know what.

Comments

Translating Anecdote into Data

There’s an old academic adage that reminds researchers “the plural of anecdote is not data.” It’s a worthwhile caution against drawing too broad a conclusion from one or two examples.

This caution came to mind last night at my grandson’s tenth birthday party . (This was the one for family–I am very grateful that my son and daughter-in-law separate the wild kid’s celebration from the more staid event for grandparents and aunts and uncles.) My brother-in-law said something about “those Republicans” in a way that made it clear he did not consider himself to be one of them. This from the person who is easily the most conservative member of our family.

Nor is ours a family that was considered “liberal” until relatively recently. My husband and I met when we served in a Republican Administration; my sister and brother-in-law were active Republicans (my sister was one of those good citizens who polled her neighborhood for the precinct committee person). Our daughter used to work for a group called Republicans for Choice (yes, Virginia, there really were pro-choice Republicans once upon a time); she now works for a group called Democrats for Education Reform.

Little by little, as the GOP became more and more extreme, more inhospitable to science, diversity and modernity, we left.

This is one family, one anecdote.

I wonder how widespread our experience is, and whether there’s any data to confirm a wider exodus.

Anyone know?

Comments

The Problem with “Principle”

Principles are necessary “rules of the road” for human and social conduct. We consult our guiding principles when we encounter real-world problems, in an effort to craft solutions that will be both practical and just.

When principles lose their connection to the real world, however, they lose their ability to guide us to good decisions.

There are a couple of ways principles get divorced from reality. One example was the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. The Court applied an important abstract principle—upholding the widest possible marketplace of ideas—without a proper appreciation of the messy realities of money and American politics.

Isolation from the nitty-gritty of politics goes a long way to explain the Court’s disconnect from the likely real-world consequences of decisions like Citizens United. A different kind of isolation from reality can be seen in the ferocious attack by Republicans on the very idea of universal healthcare–what they contemptuously call “Obamacare.” It’s what happens when principles harden into rigid ideologies, and defending those ideologies becomes more important than solving real problems.

Recently, a friend emailed me to ask a question about the Komen/Planned Parenthood controversy. Her interest was more than casual: she has breast cancer. And as she explained,

“My husband and I are on the mend now but found ourselves in a terrifying situation. I was diagnosed in June, had my lumpectomy and chemo, radiation.  In the middle of all of this Tom had chest pains. He was in heart failure and could have died.  He had emergency open-heart surgery to correct a birth defect he had no idea he had.   The doctor replaced his aortic valve because it had 2 flaps instead of three. No blockages fortunately.

I am ashamed to admit this but we have no health insurance. This is because we are both self-employed, not part of a group, so our premiums increased yearly until we could no longer afford the $1700 per month premiums.

We thought we might even have to divorce to protect our home from creditors due to medical bills. We both have always worked hard and paid our bills but this was beyond our control.

 Through the Little Red Door we found Indianapolis Medical Society Project Health. They helped us both financially. Without them I do not know what we would have done.”

 According to the Medical Society’s website, Project Health is a community partnership to improve access to health care for low-income, uninsured residents of Indianapolis. It combines donated physician care, hospital services, medication assistance, and case management in order to wring the most out of existing community resources and service providers so that patients can receive timely and appropriate care.

Project Health and other nonprofit organizations make a valiant effort to help the uninsured, but in the real world, there is simply no way the nonprofit sector can address the needs of the estimated 45 million Americans who have no health insurance.

I have my own “principled” critique of the Affordable Care Act. It’s far from perfect. But it is an effort to help real people with real problems in the real world.

What I’d like to say to the (well-insured) politicians intent on mischaracterizing, savaging and repealing “Obamacare,” is this: It is entirely appropriate to suggest alternatives, to offer proposals that would improve coverage and efficiency. It is entirely appropriate to acknowledge that regulations accompanying universal coverage will generate conflicts of the sort we’ve seen with the recent flap over contraception, and to try to minimize those.

What is neither appropriate nor humane is your insistence that people continue to suffer and die for your political “principles.”

Whose “Conscience”?

Several Facebook friends recently posted the same cartoon: a pregnant woman lying on an examination table getting a sonogram is looking at the machine’s screen as her doctor moves the sensor over her belly. She asks “What’s that other thing in my uterus?”  The doctor replies “The State of Texas.”

The reference is to one of the latest assaults on women, legislation that would require any woman wanting an abortion to undergo a medically unnecessary sonogram. Since the vast majority of abortions occur within the first trimester, when a fetus is difficult to detect, this procedure requires the insertion of a sensor into the uterus through the vagina. In other words, it requires that the woman be penetrated.

In Virginia, proponents of this requirement defeated an amendment that would have required the woman to consent to that penetration.

Words fail.

Let me try to understand where we are, in the brave new 21st Century. It is a violation of religious liberty to require health insurers to offer birth control coverage to women who want it. It’s a violation of conscience to require a pharmacist to dispense birth control to a willing buyer if his religion disapproves of its use. But it isn’t a violation of personal and religious liberty to compel a woman to be penetrated by a device during a medically-unnecessary procedure before she can exercise a constitutionally-protected right to terminate a pregnancy.

We’re lucky women still have the right to vote.

And speaking of voting–the phrase “use it or lose it” has never seemed more apt.

Comments

Irony-Challenged Santorum

In the dust-up over contraceptive coverage, Rick Santorum–along with a number of other GOP (male) elected officials–has condemned the Obama administration’s “assault” on “religious liberty.” This charge has produced some truly ludicrous moments; yesterday, for example, the news was filled with photos depicting the witnesses at a trumped-up congressional hearing into the pernicious effects on religious liberty of the requirement that health insurers cover contraception. The witnesses were all male.

But Santorum easily wins my vote for the most audaciously irony-challenged of these protectors of religious liberty.

Santorum is one of those Christian Nation folks who believes that his religious beliefs should dictate public policy; in his 15th-Century view, violations of religious liberty occur when the law fails to follow his version of God’s plan. Santorum’s God doesn’t like gay people, so Santorum believes the law should deny GLBT folks basic civil liberties, let alone the right to marry. Santorum’s God doesn’t believe in abortion, so no one else should be able to have one, no matter how dire the circumstances or how different that woman’s own belief system.

And with respect to contraception, as a fellow Catholic recently wrote:

“This confluence of politics and religion brings me right to Santorum’s public policy opposition to contraception. In his public (and apparently private) life, Santorum has, in effect, hewed to the Vatican line that so-called “artificial” contraception constitutes an “unnatural” frustration of the natural end of the sex act. But, like most good politicos Santorum hides his Catholic animus to contraceptive rights. Notably, he takes cover in legalisms. He opposed Griswold v. Connecticut—the judgment guaranteeing contraceptive right to married couples—because he disagreed with the Court that right of privacy exists in the Constitution. Beyond its cramped legalism, I find this maneuver devious. Santorum dare not say what truly moves him in this debate—namely his unswerving loyalty to the Vatican’s proscription of “artificial” methods of birth control and family planning as against nature.”

During his tenure in the U.S. Senate, Santorum consistently voted to impose his own religious views on others, and he is admirably forthright about his intentions to “Christianize” America should he be elected President. He is breathtakingly oblivious to the true meaning of religious liberty. (Hint, Rick: religious liberty means that you are entitled to live in accordance with your beliefs, but others are equally entitled to live by theirs.)

I am rooting for a Santorum Presidential candidacy. He is the perfect embodiment of today’s GOP base. If Romney is the nominee, and gets crushed, the Republican base will simply conclude he wasn’t conservative enough. A Santorum-Obama contest would allow the general public to send a decisive and needed wake-up message to the culture warriors who have captured one of America’s major political parties.

Comments