A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
Yesterday, in the process of outlining an academic paper, I came across a brief essay I wrote a couple of years ago for the Journal of Religion and American Culture, exploring the religious roots of the dramatically different realities Americans’ inhabit.
With the Republican Convention currently on television, the incompatibility of those realities is hard to miss. And that old essay seems more accurate than ever.
Every day, a new headline paints a picture of today’s Republican Party. It’s a party the Republicans of my era wouldn’t recognize.
First we had Senate candidate Todd Akin asserting that victims of “legitimate” rape don’t get pregnant. (We have “lady parts” that “shut stuff down”…).
Then we had the GOP Rep. from Tennessee who explained that AIDS can’t be transmitted through heterosexual sex. (Tell that to the folks in Africa…)
This morning, Arizona newspapers announced that infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio would be speaking at the Republican Convention.
Arpaio, who is under investigation by various law-enforcement agencies including the Department of Justice, is best known for his anti-illegal immigration fervor, which tends to extend to the harassment of perfectly legal citizens who have the misfortune of looking Latino. He is also known for maintaining horrific jail conditions, including the erection of a “tent city” that has been compared to a concentration camp, in which he held people pending trial. (Not convicted felons, just people accused of something.) He has also reintroduced chain gangs, pressured inmates to donate organs….Not to belabor this, but he isn’t exactly a poster boy for enlightened criminal justice policies. Most recently, he has become the face of the “birthers,” insisting that President Obama was born in Kenya.
Arpaio’s racism and brutality aren’t exactly a secret. And while he is popular with others of his ilk, his approval rating in Arizona is around 37%–higher than we might wish, but hardly at a level to explain the decision to give him a role at the Republican Convention.
Republican officeholders have tried to distance themselves from Akin, but they undermined that effort with a platform plank confirming their agreement with his position. (That plank: adamant opposition to abortion, with no exception for rape or incest.) I haven’t heard of any efforts to push back against homophobia, or the profound ignorance most recently expressed by the Representative from Tennessee. And now, they extend an invitation to speak at the Convention to a man who is utterly loathed (and with good reason) by every Latino who has ever heard of him.
Add to all of this the Romney campaign’s decision to double-down on a welfare ad that every credible news source agrees is flatly untrue–an ad that is basically a very loud “dog whistle” to racism–and the picture that emerges is pretty ugly.
Some strategist in the GOP has evidently concluded that Romney’s only path to victory is through the mobilization of the old, angry white guys who “want their country back” from the rest of us.
CommentsHot enough for you this summer? Because it’s going to get hotter, and I’m not referring to our increasingly debased electoral rhetoric.
As a post to Science Matters emphasizes, climate change is not a prediction. It’s here. Even scientists who were previously skeptical (and there weren’t many) are now convinced that the earth is warming even more rapidly than previously expected, and that human activity is a large generator of that warming.
Let’s ignore every other issue dividing Americans–what to do about the economy, about Syria and Iran, about the various “wars”–on women, on the GLBT community, on drugs…you name it. In a very real sense, arguments over those issues are equivalent to arguments about how to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. If there is one issue of global life-and-death importance, it’s climate change.
And on that issue, the parties could not be further apart.
The science–and the scientific consensus–is overwhelming; we face a truly unprecedented global threat. The Democrats haven’t exactly covered themselves with glory, but they have acknowledged the threat and the urgency of addressing it. Most Republicans, on the other hand, continue to deny the science and reject the reality of climate change. (I suppose that shouldn’t surprise us; they also reject evolution.) Mitt Romney is now parroting the GOP’s standard climate change denial, and Paul Ryan, his running mate, is a climate-change-denying conspiracy theorist.
I’m not a believer in single-issue voting, but I’m not a big fan of committing slow suicide, either. If there was ever a single issue worth embracing, this is it.
CommentsThis morning’s Star reports that Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller has conceded the unconstitutionality of the anti-immigration bill sponsored by Rep. Mike Delph and passed by the General Assembly.
For those of you who do not follow such things, Indiana had passed its own version of Arizona’s mean-spirited and deeply flawed immigration law; a couple of months ago, the Supreme Court found virtually all of the Arizona law unconstitutional. That decision operated to doom most of the Indiana statute as well. And rather than use the Court’s decision as an occasion for grandstanding or ideological posturing, Zoeller did what a good lawyer in that office should do–he agreed that Indiana should follow the law.
The article also quotes an observation by former Marion County GOP Chair Mike Murphy to the effect that much of the current anti-immigration fervor on display is a response to tough economic times; in such times, he points out, people look for someone to blame.
An elected official doing his job properly, and a political operative conceding to the nature of reality might not seem newsworthy, but it is a small, heartening reminder of the GOP to which I used to belong–the party that produced Bill Hudnut , Dick Lugar and John Mutz.
Now we have Mike Delph, Mike Pence and Richard Mourdock. It’s enough to make you cry.
CommentsI have been bemused–and occasionally amused–by all the posturing over the provision in the Affordable Care Act requiring people to purchase health insurance.
How dare they!!
If you listen to the right-wing blogs and talking heads, you’ll come away believing that such a mandate is unprecedented. The government has never required us to do something, or penalized us for failing to do something.It’s unAmerican to penalize inaction. That evil Obama is introducing an entirely foreign element into American law. (The fact that Romney did exactly the same thing in Massachusetts is obviously different….)
Of course, this line of attack is entirely fanciful.
As a legal scholar recently noted, the very same week it upheld the ACA, the Supreme Court affirmed a law requiring sex offenders to register their whereabouts, employment and appearance with local authorities. If they fail to do so, the law in question imposes a penalty of ten years in prison–a bit more draconian than the ACA’s fine. The Court made it clear that this mandatory registration was not punishment for a crime –the individuals subject to the requirement have already paid their debt to society for those transgressions (a contrary construction would run afoul of the Ex Post Facto prohibition).
Courts upholding this particular type of mandate–and there have been several–have explicitly said that the only conduct being punished was the “inactivity” of failing to register.
There are many other examples–so many that a Professor at John Marshall Law School has actually written an essay on “The Incredible Ordinariness of Federal Penalties for Inactivity.”
As I have repeatedly noted, there is nothing wrong with faulting provisions of this particular approach to healthcare reform. What I find absolutely astonishing, however, are the logical contortions opponents will go through in order to attack the legitimacy of any attempt to extend access to healthcare. I have been absolutely stunned by opponents’ self-righteous denunciations of such efforts, and by their evident willingness to simply let the uninsured suffer and die.
A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association is worth quoting.
That editorial began “Physicians and hospitals have a moral duty to provide acute care and emergency care to those who need it.” Proceeding from that expressly moral premise, the editorial concluded that individuals “have an enforceable moral duty to buy sufficient health insurance to cover the costs of acute and emergency care…requiring individuals to buy health insurance is consistent with respect for individual liberty because individuals have a duty to mitigate the burdens they impose on others.”
We don’t talk much about the morality of policy. We should.
Yesterday, every single House Republican voted to take away health coverage for young adults staying on their family plans, raise prescription drug prices for seniors, end protections for those with pre-existing conditions, reinstate lifetime insurance caps, scrap tax breaks for small businesses, raise the deficit, and take benefits away from 30 million Americans. Pundits reporting the vote generally noted that it was one of a series of such votes, and that it stood no chance of ultimate passage. They spent a lot of time analyzing the politics of the GOPs message and speculating on its electoral effect.
To the best of my knowledge, none of them pointed out how utterly immoral it was.
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