A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
Each morning, when I sit down to write my blog post, I begin with a survey of the various news sources–newspapers and blogs. This morning, when I read Eugene Robinson’s column, I realized there was no way I could improve on his explanation of our latest culture war.
Enjoy. In a manner of speaking.
A friend recently sent me a copy of a Court Order approving a settlement in a hotly contested case from a small town in Texas. The Plaintiffs had complained that the school corporation engaged in pervasive and unconstitutional religious activities over a period of years–prayers over the loudspeakers, constant religious references by the Principal, prayers at athletic contests and graduation ceremonies and more. Students who complained were disciplined.
The judge’s opinion–especially the unusual “Personal Note” that he added–are worth reading in their entirety; the Personal Note appears below. His Appendix–which is not reproduced, but is also accessible on line–is a first-rate history of church/state relations through American history. I particularly appreciated the opening section of the Opinion, “What this case was NOT about,” in which he made a point not sufficiently emphasized: any child can pray in school at any time. The issue is whether public school officials–arms of the government–can promote or require that prayer.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State issued a press release detailing the major elements of the settlement:
* School district personnel will not display crosses, religious images, religious quotations, Bibles or religious texts, or other religious icons or artifacts on the walls, hallways, and other areas at the school.
* The district will not invite speakers, including government officials or community leaders, whom it has reason to believe will proselytize or promote religion during their remarks.
* The Medina Valley High School student handbook will contain a section on students’ rights to religious freedom, including the importance of respect for and tolerance of students from all backgrounds and the specific procedures for registering a complaint with district personnel about violations.
* The district will provide annual training to all district personnel who interact with students or parents or who supervise those who interact with students or parents. The training will cover a variety of topics related to students’ rights and church-state separation.
The release clarifies the terms of the agreement, but it’s only when you read the brief “Personal Statement” the Judge appended that you really appreciate the nastiness of the controversy, and the tenor of the “debate” conducted by the “religious” folk involved.
“A PERSONAL STATEMENT
During the course of this litigation,many have played a part:
To the United States Marshal Service and local police who have provided heightened security: Thank you.
To those Christians who have venomously and vomitously cursed the Court family and threatened bodily harm and assassination:In His name,I forgive you.
To those who have prayed for my death: Your prayers will some day be answered,as inevitability trumps probability.
To those in the executive and legislative branches of government who have demagogued this case for their own political goals:You should be ashamed of yourselves.
To the lawyers who have advocated professionally and respectfully for their clients’ respective positions:Bless you.”
Yesterday, the New Jersey Senate voted to recognize same-sex marriage. Indications are that the Assembly (the lower house) will do likewise. Meanwhile, an equal-protection lawsuit is working its way through the New Jersey courts; it would be mooted by this legislation.
Governor Christie has vowed to veto the measure–no surprise. But his professed reason means he is either dishonest or constitutionally ignorant.
Christie says he’ll veto the bill because so important a matter should be subjected to popular vote.
In the United States, we don’t get to vote on other people’s rights. The whole reason for the Bill of Rights was to protect minorities–not just members of different races or religions but people with unpopular ideas or different ‘lifestyles’–from unequal treatment by the government even when a majority of citizens wanted government to treat those minorities unequally. The Bill of Rights is what we call a “counter-majoritarian” instrument; it protects our individual rights against the passions and prejudices of the majority.
Perhaps Governor Christie should consult the famous explanation by Justice Jackson in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnett.
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
(Of course, in a consistent world, this principle would also apply to state legislatures. No one would get to vote on whether another citizen was entitled to equal rights. But in case it has escaped notice, this is not a consistent world. In any event, as my mother used to say, two wrongs don’t make a right.)
I don’t get to vote on the Governor’s rights, and he doesn’t get to vote on mine. If the legislature doesn’t override his threatened veto, the courts eventually will. That’s not “judicial activism.” It’s application of a bedrock constitutional principle.
CommentsAmazing—and embarrassing—as it may seem, the American Taliban is once again waging battle against sex. This time, their target is contraception.
Their fig leaf is a definition of “religious liberty” that neither the nation’s Founders nor the courts would recognize—the same definition that they employ in their ongoing war against civil rights for gays and lesbians. Short form: giving rights to women and gays would violate their religious liberties.
A brief recap: When the Obama administration issued regulations for employer-provided health insurance, the regulations required that such coverage include birth control. Churches were exempt from the requirement (an exemption that is required by the First Amendment), but religiously-affiliated institutions like hospitals and universities were not. More than half of the states already had such a requirement, and those employers had been complying for years without any discernable fuss or claim that these rules somehow represented a “war on religion.”
Enter the forces for “religious liberty” aka the Catholic Bishops and the GOP. Their argument was that making religious employers pay for insurance that included birth control was a violation of their freedom of conscience. Under years of Supreme Court precedent, it wasn’t, but the Administration moved to accommodate their sensibilities by requiring the insurance companies to offer the coverage at no cost directly to women, removing the employer from the equation.
As I write this, the Bishops and the (ascendant) Santorum wing of the Republican Party are not mollified, despite the fact that Catholic nuns and a significant majority of American Catholics are fine with it. According to their arguments, simply making birth control available to employees of religiously affiliated employers is itself a violation of their religious liberties.
I know I harp on the public’s lack of civic and constitutional literacy, but this is another perfect example.
When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, they wanted the “liberty” to impose the correct religion on their neighbors. The idea that Church and State could be separated was unknown to the Puritans who first settled in the new country; the freedom they wanted was the freedom to “establish” the True Religion, and form a government that would require their neighbors to live in accordance with that religion.
A hundred and fifty years later, however, the men who crafted the Constitution for the new nation were products of a dramatically different worldview. The philosophical movement we call the Enlightenment had given birth to science, privileged reason over superstition, and reconsidered the proper role of government. Liberty—religious or otherwise—had come to mean the right of individuals to live their lives in accordance with their own consciences, free of the coercion of the state and free of what the founders called “the passions of the majority.”
Our Constitution may have been a product of the Enlightenment, but we still have a significant number of Puritans in America, and what we sometimes call the “culture wars” are yet another conflict between those two very different visions of liberty.
The Rick Santorums of the world aren’t just against equal rights for gays and lesbians, they aren’t just anti-abortion and anti-birth control (Santorum himself has gone on record saying that birth control should not be available because it allows people to engage in “wrong” sexual behavior). They are deeply Puritan: anti-science, anti-reason, anti-diversity. That they are absolutely convinced of their own possession of the Truth is less disconcerting than their even stronger conviction that “liberty” means they should have the right to make everyone else live by their Truth.
These are the same irony-challenged theocrats who are running around proposing legislation to prevent imposition of “Sharia law.”
I’d guess they don’t have mirrors. Or a capacity for self-reflection.
CommentsI have this mantra that I am sure annoys the hell out of the students in my policy class: “It’s more complicated than that.” It is part of my effort to explain that policy decisions frequently have consequences beyond those that we can easily identify–beyond the superficial issues that pundits exploit for ratings and politicians employ to agitate their bases.
The auto bailout was a perfect example, and in his column today, Brian Howey does a great job of explaining why the policy choice was not the simple matter of “bailing out losers” that Tea Party activists and libertarians evidently believe it was.
As Howey writes
“In December 2008, I attended a hearing in Indianapolis where economists from the Brookings Institute predicted that a collapse of GM and Chrysler could cost the state 150,000 jobs — not just at GM and Chrysler but also at companies like Cummins and hundreds of auto supplier companies scattered in small towns and large across the state.
The multiplier impact from such a collapse could have been devastating. Not only would toolmakers, engineers, assemblers and molders be jobless, but thousands of restaurants and service businesses would have been devastated. Even foreign automakers in the state such as Honda, Toyota and Subaru would have been negatively impacted, because they draw on the same suppliers as GM, Ford and Chrysler. While Indiana has a troublesome and persistent 9 percent jobless rate today, a collapse of GM and Chrysler would have brought a second Great Depression to Indiana. We easily could have seen the jobless rate double or more.
Indiana Republicans were conspicuous in their indifference. Gov. Mitch Daniels warned of the U.S. government throwing “good money after bad” and said the domestics should emulate the Japanese companies. He later castigated the U.S. Supreme Court for the way it acted on Obama’s forced expedited bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler. Treasurer Richard Mourdock, with Daniels cheering him on, tried to thwart the Chrysler merger with Fiat. Republican candidates up and down the food chain derided the Bush bailout.”
Howey’s larger point was political: that the success of the bailout puts Indiana “in play” this November. (I’d add to that the recent passage of Right to Work legislation, which certainly has energized the Democratic base.) But whether Obama wins or loses the state, Howey’s description provides a “teachable” moment for those open to such lessons.
Modern industrialized societies are complex mechanisms. Very few things are as simple as they may once have been (or seemed). A dim recognition of that reality–and the increasingly obvious cultural changes generated by our growing diversity and rapid technological advances–are a not insignificant reason for the national hissy fit being thrown by folks who don’t want to be confused by the damn facts.
Ideologies of all sorts are increasingly incompatible with evidence and complicated realities. If ideologies win out–and it doesn’t much matter which ones–we’re all going to be in a world of hurt.
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