One-Handed Lawyers

You’ve probably heard the old joke about the one-armed man who couldn’t be a lawyer, because lawyers all have to say “on one hand….but on the other hand…”

What made me think of it was an excellent post by Doug Masson this morning, which I encourage everyone to read. Doug was commenting on the unseemly effort by local media outlets and others to find someone–anyone–to blame for the tragedy at the State Fair. (Okay, anyone with money.) Now, perhaps when all the facts come out, there will be evidence that the stage collapse was the result of negligence, but given what is now known, it is more likely that this should be filed under “shit happens.” It’s probably human nature to want someone to blame when bad things happen, but sometimes an accident is simply an accident.

On the other hand (you knew this was coming, right?) some lawsuits that seem frivolous aren’t just examples of our amply documented American litigiousness. One example is the widely mocked and misunderstood “McDonald’s coffee” case. An elderly woman spilled her coffee on her lap, and was so severely burned she had to be hospitalized. When a jury awarded her several hundred thousand dollars,  the “tort reform” chorus took to the airwaves to demand limits on lawsuits, and the case became a rallying point for those who want to make it more difficult for injured people to sue.

What most of the media didn’t report was that McDonalds had been sued numerous times before over injuries caused by their practice of brewing unreasonably hot coffee (apparently, you get more coffee from the same amount of beans if it is really, really hot).  In this case, the elderly woman’s suit initially asked only for payment of her hospital bills, and McDonalds had refused to pay anything.  It’s likely that the size of the verdict was a product of jury outrage, in the nature of punitive damages.

Not long after I was married, I went with my husband to a convention of architects. When one of the other attendees found out that I was a lawyer, he cornered me and lectured on the evils of frivolous litigation. I finally asked him what he would suggest as a remedy. “Why, just outlaw frivolous lawsuits!” he responded, with an inflection suggesting that only an idiot would ask such a question. He didn’t take it kindly when I pointed out that you can’t identify “frivolous” cases until they’ve been litigated.

On one hand, I’d love to be able to weed out suits brought by the greedy and unscrupulous, or just by people looking for a scapegoat.

On the other hand, justice isn’t served by rules that make it difficult or impossible to litigate legitimate grievances.

Comments

Progress is Hard Work

How does change happen?

Too often, we think of broad cultural changes as part of an inevitable sweep of history,  sort of like the process of maturation we go through as individuals: as we grow up, we understand more. This analogy conveniently overlooks the people who grow older but do not grow up. And it overlooks the role that parents, peers and educational institutions play in molding individuals.

Cultural change does not come about accidently either. A lot of blood was spilled in the fight for legal equality for African-Americans—and by forcing legal change, the civil rights movement began the lengthy process of changing attitudes. The evolution from “a woman’s place is in the home” to a society in which working women are a commonplace didn’t begin with bloodshed, but it did begin with suffragette marches and continued with the establishment of feminist organizations like NOW and NARAL. Similarly, the growing acceptance of gays and lesbians has been the product of hard work by gay civil rights organizations.

I mention that because, in my city, it is the time of year for Lambda Legal’s big fundraising dinner. On September 16th, members, supporters and supportive public officials will gather in downtown Indianapolis to hear Zach Wahls, a remarkable young man whose speech to the Iowa legislature went viral a few months ago. At 19, he is representative of a generation that symbolizes the changes in attitudes about gay families—changes that have occurred largely because of the work done by organizations like Lambda.

No organization of which I am aware has been more important than Lambda, although there are certainly many organizations doing great work on behalf of the LGBT community.

The reason I raise the importance of civil rights organizations is that there tends to be a “trajectory” of support for any cause. Early in the movement for equality—whether for African-Americans, women or gays—there is generally a dedicated, even enthusiastic, core group that supports and funds the organizations that have been formed. As those organizations experience successes, as they see progress, and as time passes, the early support dwindles and the enthusiasm flags. (Most recently, you could see this in the fight against AIDS; as new medications were developed and discrimination lessened, so did awareness. The sense of urgency abated.)

It’s well to remind ourselves that winning any battle, let alone the battle for equality, requires persistence above all.

It can be difficult to constantly pump ourselves up, to attend yet another fundraiser, yet another rally. We all get tired of emailing and calling our elected representatives, writing yet another letter to the editor. That’s why organizations are so important—they do the day to day work that absolutely has to be done if a movement is to be successful. Through our donations, we are paying others to be persistent for us. Writing a check is a lot easier for most people than doing the necessary nitty-gritty work.

Writing that check is the least we can do.

Tea and Very Little Sympathy

Ever since the emergence of the Tea Party–with its intransigence, ideological rigidity and hostility–there has been a robust debate about who they are, what they want, and whether they are a genuine grass-roots movement or the product of some canny (and wealthy) Republican operatives. Other than poll results, however, there has been very little empirical research informing that debate.

That has changed. In a recent issue of “Perspectives on Politics,” a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Political Science Association, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol and John Coggin published “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” I don’t know Williamson or Coggin, but Theda Skocpol is a widely-respected Harvard Professor who–among other things–has served as the President of the American Political Science Association.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some highlights:

  • The Tea Party is a new incarnation of “long-standing strands” in American conservatism.
  • Tea Party opposition to the Affordable Care Act is not a manifestation of hostility to social programs per se; the opposition is based upon resentment of “perceived government handouts to “undeserving” people. (Tea partiers see themselves as entitled to Social Security and Medicare.) Their definition of “undeserving” “seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes.”
  • The Tea Party owes its emergence not only to the Republican elites that initially bankrolled it, but to Fox News. The authors believe that “the best way to understand Fox News’ role is as a national advocacy organization actively fostering a social protest identity.” (63% of Tea Party members watch Fox, as opposed to 11% of the general population.)
  • Tea Party members are a very small minority of Americans. Only one in five of those who claim to be members have actually attended an event or donated money. Members are older, white and middle-class, and a majority are men. The vast majority are conservative Republicans.

There is much more, but the central finding (in my opinion, at least) was that at the grassroots level, Tea Partiers judge social programs “not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” It will not come as a shock to most of us that deservingness is “an implicit cultural category.” Hence the hysteria over immigration (the study finds–surprise!–that “fears of immigration are closely linked to the ethnic identity of the immigrants in question”). Support for the Tea Party “remains a valid predictor of racial resentment” even after controlling for ideology and partisanship, and this finding goes a long way toward explaining what seems to most of us as an irrational hatred of Obama. As the authors put it, “At a fundamental level, Obama’s policies and his person are not within the Tea Party conception of America, so his election seems like a threat to what they understand as their country.”

And they want “their” country back.

Comments

Tales of the Times

When I settled down this morning with the Sunday New York Times, I couldn’t help but be struck by two totally unrelated stories that seemed–at least to me–to summarize the choice we face as a nation. These stories weren’t momentous public events by any means; they were more like indicator lights on your car’s dashboard.

The first was the front-page coverage of the (non-binding) Iowa straw vote. Michelle Bachmann (anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-evolution, anti-environment) came in first, with Ron Paul (“we don’t need no stinkin’ government”) a close second.

The second story was from “Vows,” the Times’ weekly wedding feature. It focused upon a wedding conducted just a few days after same-sex unions became legal in New York. In the large photo accompanying the story, two elderly men in wheelchairs are holding hands; the accompanying text explains that the two had been admitted to the hospital together–one with leukemia and the other with advanced Parkinson’s. “Faced with the prospect of their own mortality and separation after 39 years together, they asked the doctors to postpone Mr. Beaumont’s chemotherapy until–in a last grand gesture–they could get married.” The hospital staff provided white smocks, an Episcopal Priest performed the ceremony, the hospital’s chef baked a cake. Friends sang love songs.  I’ll admit it–the story brought tears to my eyes.

So–here are two vignettes of our  possible futures. We can express our fears and frustrations by flocking to the banner of people who deny complexity, reality and humanity, or we can act on our better natures, recognizing that the human family–just like our own families–is composed of many different kinds of people, all of whom are entitled to respect and affection.

We can live by slogans and ideologies, or we can try to understand the world we occupy. We can reject reality, wrap ourselves in self-righteousness and insist that others live by the rules of our particular gods, or we can admit (to ourselves as well as others) that we don’t have all the answers, that our common life is messy and times are tough, and that the only certainty is that human compassion and kindness will serve us better than denial and intolerance.

Yesterday, in Indianapolis, there was a terrible accident at a State Fair concert. A stage collapsed, pinning the front rows of the crowd under massive girders and equipment. Out of all the coverage, perhaps the most poignant picture was one showing how many of the other people in attendance rushed to help–a picture of dozens of hands trying to lift the debris so that the injured could be rescued. No one stopped to ask the politics, religion, race or sexual orientation of those who were pinned beneath the rubble. No one stopped to ask whether they “deserved” assistance. They were fellow humans who needed help.

What I want is a future and a country that nurtures that instinct.

Comments

Climate and the Culture War

A recent profile of Michelle Bachmann included several past statements in which she explicitly rejects the Enlightenment, which explains a lot.

The Enlightenment (dubbed the “new learning” in the colonies) ushered in a new sensibility, a new way of seeing the world–it substituted empirical observation for biblical “truth,” and thus made science possible. I’ve often thought that what today’s culture warriors really want is to reverse the Enlightenment; if that’s true, it’s ironic, in view of their constant references to the Constitution, because the Constitution was a direct outgrowth of Enlightenment philosophy. (Think John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Voltaire, and–above all–John Locke.)

As historians explain the paradigm shift that accompanied the new way of understanding our world, before the Enlightenment, you began with biblical “truth” as that had been interpreted by religious leaders, and education was the process of fitting what you saw into that pre-existing framework. If something didn’t fit, you ignored it. After the Enlightenment, you began by observing your surroundings, and when you had sufficient data, you formulated a theory to explain it. If subsequent observations called elements of that theory into question, you modified the theory. Today, we call that the scientific method. (It is in this scientific sense that evolution is a theory–not in the sense the term is often used in casual conversation–i.e., a guess.)

As Edward McMahon, Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute, has recently written,

“Despite overwhelming scientific consensus and mounting evidence all around us, why are so many elected officials unwilling to accept that climate change is a serious threat that demands immediate attention? One theory is that climate change is now “part and parcel” of America’s “culture wars”. Similar to abortion, gay rights, school prayer and other social issues, climate change has become a partisan political issue.

This might explain why earlier this summer, House Republicans pushed legislation to overturn a 2007 law, signed by President George W. Bush, that would gradually phase out old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs in favor of new energy efficient bulbs. “Having to buy energy efficient bulbs is an affront to personal freedom”, they said; never mind the fact that the average homeowner would save almost $90 a year by switching to the energy saving bulbs, and also never mind that the law, once fully implemented, would eliminate the need for 33 large power plants, according to one estimate.

A Gallup Poll conducted earlier this year found that a majority of Americans support the energy efficiency bulb law and that most Americans have already switched to more energy efficient bulbs. So what else explains why some politicians’ views on climate change are so out of sync with our scientific community — or for that matter, with the rest of the world? A cynic might say that fossil fuel interests, like coal companies, have used the tobacco industry’s playbook: disinformation, high priced lobbyists and their own so-called “experts” to confuse the public and delay action. However a new study published in the Spring 2011 issue of Sociological Quarterly suggests another reason. It finds that “conservatives’ failure to acknowledge the real threat of climate change, has more to do with its implications rather than skepticism of scientific facts.”

Conservatives believe in small government, reduced spending, and a go-it-alone foreign policy. But solving climate change will undoubtly require robust government, increased expenditures, and a great degree of international cooperation. People will go to great lengths to rationalize their deeply held beliefs. Science and logic are a lost cause in the face of ideological rigidity. To accept climate change is to question the wisdom of some people’s core beliefs.”

Questioning and testing the wisdom of our core beliefs was what the Enlightenment was all about. It was what the American Experiment was all about. And at the end of the day, that’s what our culture war is all about. Will we return to a time when the answers are handed down by a deity (and if so, whose?), or will we continue to question, learn and grow?