I’m Conflicted

A recent decision by the Illinois Attorney General has thrown me into one of those “On this hand…but on the other hand..” internal conflicts.

The Attorney General and another Illinois prosecutor have announced that they will not defend that state’s ban on same-sex marriage against a challenge being brought by couples whose application for marriage licenses were denied. Their reasoning was that they believe the ban to be unconstitutional under the equal protection clauses of both the state and federal constitutions.

I agree with that conclusion, but that doesn’t resolve the conflict.

The duty of an Attorney General is to defend the laws of his jurisdiction. It’s the duty of the judiciary to decide whether those laws are proper. Separation of powers is one of the most fundamental elements of American government, and our courts depend on the adversarial system to sharpen clarify the questions presented. And even criminals and legislators (whose ranks are not always as distinguishable as we might wish) deserve representation. It is the job of Attorneys General to defend laws whether they personally believe those laws are fair or prudent.

On the other hand, criminal prosecutors who proceed with cases against people they know to be innocent violate their oaths of office, and their duty to justice, and we rightly condemn them. They aren’t duty bound to prosecute everyone initially charged with a crime; we expect them to apply their best judgment and to proceed only when there is a substantial likelihood of guilt.

Our elected officials are sworn to uphold the Constitution. When they are convinced that a particular enactment cannot survive constitutional scrutiny, must they spend time and resources defending it? What is the weight of evidence required before such a decision is appropriate?

There are also questions of credibility: wouldn’t the people of Illinois be more likely to accept a decision by a court than one by the state’s chief lawyer?

I agree with the Illinois AG about the ban’s unconstitutionality. I’m not entirely sure I agree with her decision to forgo its defense.

Comments

It All Depends on Your Definition of a Tax….

There was another item in the news this morning about Congressional Republicans’ efforts to “trim” food stamps. The stated reason is to reduce government expenditures without raising taxes.

My husband noted that calling something a “reduction in benefits” doesn’t change the fact that the target of the measure has less money to spend at the grocery. Substantively, the food stamp recipient has been taxed.

This willingness to “reduce benefits” to avoid calling something a tax raises an inconvenient question. Oil companies–which have been massively profitable of late–enjoy generous federal subsidies. If the GOP doesn’t want to tax those they have labeled “job creators,” why not simply reduce their benefits?

Evidently, in the reality occupied by these Congressmen, reducing corporate welfare for big oil is a “tax” to be avoided at all costs, but reducing social welfare for poor children is just budgetary prudence.

I guess it all depends on what your definition of a “tax” is.

Comments

Letters, They Get Letters…

Sometimes, the Letters to the Editor are just jaw-dropping excursions into the depths of illogic. This morning’s entrant into the “it ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so” sweepstakes is a prime example.

The writer says there is no “war on women,” rather, it is a war for “immorality, secularism and the destruction of Christianity.” And what is the weapon being deployed in this war? The requirement that health insurance include coverage for birth control.

Where to begin?

Perhaps we might question the writer’s assumption that use of birth control equates to “immorality.”  (“Procreation is a gift from God. It is not a form of recreation.”) Evidently, only participants in “recreational” sex use birth control. We probably should tell that to the doctors who prescribe contraceptives to treat a variety of medical conditions, including but not limited to menorrhagia.

We might also note that the writer’s defense of  this position by Catholics who believe in the “sanctity of life” conveniently ignores the lack of Church outrage over the use of its tax dollars to fund capital punishment and war.

Finally, we might gently note that the First Amendment religion clauses are not violated when taxes paid by “Christians and people of faith”  are spent for purposes of which they disapprove. If that were the case, every dollar spent on war and weaponry would violate the religious liberty of Quakers. Money spent to enforce “blue laws” would violate the rights of Jews and Seventh Day Adventists. Taxes supporting high schools would violate the religious liberty of the Amish. In a religiously diverse nation, there are hundreds of other examples.

Religious liberty does not mean government must impose your religious beliefs on your neighbors. Catholics, who not so long ago struggled against state imposition of Protestant norms, should be particularly sensitive to that bit of legal revisionism.

That, of course, would require the use of logic.

Comments

Father’s Day

In about an hour, my husband and I will start getting dressed for a Father’s Day brunch with four of our five children–number five, who lives in Manhattan, will be missing in person but with us in spirit.

There are many things one can say about the role of fathers or stepfathers in the lives of their children, and we will hear many of them today, if for no other reason than the fact the media will bombard us with Father’s Day sentiments. But I was struck this morning reading remarks made by Newark Mayor Cory Booker to the graduating class at Bard College. Booker–who is one of the truly impressive public servants of our time–shared a contemplation on the wisdom of his father, and I think it is well worth sharing.

“My dad would always tease me: ‘Boy, don’t you walk around here like you hit a triple. You were born on third base, boy.’ ..I drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that I did not dig. I eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for me by my ancestors. I sit under the shadow of trees that were planted and cultivated and cared for by those who I will never know.”

The really good fathers, the ones who make a lasting difference, are the good citizens who–without celebrity or fanfare–protect our liberties, participate in building our communities, and plant trees under which they will never sit, trees that will shadow their children and grandchildren. Those really good fathers raise children who acknowledge their debt to those who have plowed the ground they plant, and accept their own obligation to “pay it forward.”

Our children have been blessed to have a father/stepfather like that.

Have a great Father’s Day.

Comments

Politics and Pathology

There is a spectrum we all recognize in political debate: first is fact—verifiable, objective reality. Then there is spin—a partisan interpretation of that reality. And then there’s propaganda—flat out lying.

All politicians engage in spin that sometimes crosses the line into propaganda. The Romney campaign, however, seems constantly to operate in “propaganda” mode.

What are the differences?

Under “spin,” we might list things like Romney’s constant complaint that Obama hasn’t negotiated a “single trade agreement.” The President has revived agreements with Colombia, South Korea and Panama that had been stalled in Congress, but these aren’t technically new agreements. Romney promises to see the Keystone XL Pipeline built and implies that its construction would mean more oil for America, although pipeline owners have been clear that the oil is meant for Asian markets. Accusing the President of “apologizing for America” requires taking a lot of words out of context, but even this stretch probably falls within the typical political spin cycle.

Other pronouncements, however, are categorically, demonstrably untrue.

Perhaps the most egregious lie is that Obama has been a big spender—that under his administration, spending is “out of control.” Actually, as Rex Nutting reported in MarketWatch (a web site affiliated with that known liberal outfit The Wall Street Journal), you’d have to go back to the Eisenhower Administration to find a rate of federal spending growth lower than that of the Obama Administration. That conclusion holds even if you include the stimulus, which was passed by Bush but spent during Obama’s first year in office.

Romney repeatedly says the President “promised to bring unemployment below 8%,” but reporters have been unable to find a single instance of Obama making such a statement. He insists that repealing Obamacare will reduce the deficit, in the face of widely accepted Congressional Budget Office calculations demonstrating that repeal would vastly increase the deficit. Romney’s claims about job creation at Bain were so outsized he has had to walk them back.

There’s Romney’s widely criticized campaign ad featuring a recording of President Obama’s voice making a boneheaded remark about the economic meltdown—a recording conveniently “clipped” to remove the lead-in phrase: “Mr. McCain even said….” When confronted with this clear distortion, Romney admitted the President was quoting McCain, and laughed it off; worse,  he has continued to run the blatantly misleading spot.

More recently, Romney “quoted” The Escape Artist, a book about the Obama Administration, for assertions the book never made—the author has been making the rounds of political television rebutting Romney’s “quotes” (and happily suggesting that people buy the book to see for themselves).

There are plenty of other examples of persistent mendacity; so many, in fact, that there are a couple of websites cataloguing them. But the lies that mystify me are not those obviously motivated by political ambition and/or a calculation that a weakened media won’t notice. What mystifies me are the unforced, totally gratuitous lies.

Remember when Romney said he’d been a hunter in his youth? And then had to walk that assertion back when reporters could find no record of the permit he claimed to have held? Or his insistence that his father, George Romney (whom I greatly admired) had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King? His “memory” of that event was only corrected when photos surfaced placing the elder Romney somewhere else on the date of the supposed march.

Romney’s habitual, almost compulsive make-believe is provoking considerable comment. Time Magazine recently ran a pop-psychology article titled “The Root of Mitt Romney’s Comfort with Lying.”

Lying of this magnitude, I submit, is not political. It’s pathological.

Comments