Tag Archives: government

Things I’ll Never Understand…

Yesterday’s New York Times had an editorial that began

Over the last several years, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has shown utter contempt for the State Supreme Court’s three-decades-old ruling in the Mount Laurel housing case, which bars wealthy towns from excluding affordable housing and requires them to write zoning laws that permit a reasonable amount of such housing to be built.

The editorial went on to describe Christie’s persistent refusal to comply with the court’s orders. It’s hard to believe that Christie was once a lawyer–a profession rooted in respect for the rule of law.

Of course, even ignoring “Bridgegate,” this is hardly the first time Christie has privileged his personal political interests over the common good. When he was first elected, he killed a much-needed, long-planned tunnel into Manhattan. As a New Jersey paper recently noted,

The ARC tunnel would have doubled cross-Hudson rail capacity – helping commuters get to high-paying Manhattan jobs and increasing property values back home in New Jersey. When Christie killed the plan – he didn’t have a Plan B. Instead, Christie grabbed the billions of dollars set aside by Gov. Jon Corzine and spent it on in-state transportation projects – which allowed him to pay for road and bridge repairs without raising the gas tax.  By pulling out of the ARC tunnel and spending the money, Christie left billions in federal dollars on the table and has nothing left to contribute to a new tunnel project – rail capacity that is still desperately needed.

Christie justified that decision by saying that the project faced cost overruns; the General Accounting Office said otherwise.

I wish Christie were an anomaly, but he isn’t. In fact, Christie’s is the face of far too much of today’s politics: officeholders who are contemptuous of the government that pays them and the interests of the voters who elect them, power-hungry, self-absorbed lackeys of special interests willing to do whatever it takes to stay in the good graces of their patrons, no matter who gets hurt in the process.

What I don’t get is why these people–who appear to have no concept at all of the common good, or respect for the purpose of government–choose political life in the first place. Surely in a capitalist economy there are more appropriate venues for their narrowly-focused ambitions.

Might it be that these pompous preachers of the virtues of the market lack the ability to succeed in the real-life marketplace? Why else go into a line of work for which they are so clearly unsuited?

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Why We Need More “Out” Secularists

Politics is largely a power struggle, and when any one group or constituency amasses disproportionate power, democracy and liberty suffer. We tend to see the disproportion most clearly when money is involved–hence the current focus on the 1%–but checkbooks aren’t  the only way special interests gain control.

When I was growing up, unions were powerful (yes, I’m old). In my house, they were feared and despised. Union “thugs”were a periodic feature of the landscape in Anderson, Indiana, where Delco Remy, Guide Lamp and other large automotive manufacturers were the source of most employment, and where folks who lived in our little “suburb” of Edgewood tended to come from management.

One of the reasons unions lost power was that some of them abused their (short-lived) dominance. But–surprise!–by emasculating unions, rather than simply constraining them, we enabled equivalent abuses by management. The lesson was–and is–that a balance of power is what’s important. When power is concentrated, abuses are inevitable.

So what does any of this have to do with secularism?

I spent the last weekend with a coalition of secularist groups: humanists, atheists, defenders of science and reason, among others. Their common mission is to restore the necessary balance between secular and religious-right Americans.

Here’s the take-away: in a country founded on the premise that authentic belief must be personal and freely chosen, a country where freedom of conscience includes not only the right to worship but the right to question and/or reject religion, it is unhealthy–indeed, it is positively dangerous–when the balance of political power favors biblical literalists and would-be theocrats.

Don’t get me wrong: those who want to revise history to make ours a “Christian” nation are entitled to their beliefs. They are entitled to bring those beliefs into the public square and to argue for their adoption. But they are not entitled to use the power of the state to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, or to marginalize and demean those who do not share them, or to demand that American policies reflect them.

When the voices of self-righteous literalists threaten to drown out the voices of other citizens–be they Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, secularists or Rastifarians–America has a problem. When religion is used as a weapon against science, the whole world has a problem.

In the United States, the past decades have seen a rising dominance of those I can only call Christian thugs. Much like the union thugs of my youth, these folks are flexing their political muscles. They have completely taken over one of America’s two political parties, and they have twisted and distorted the meaning of religious liberty: suddenly, “liberty” is the right of an employer to dictate the reproductive choices of his female employees, the right of a merchant to discriminate against GLBT customers, the right of governing bodies to begin public meetings with exclusionary prayers, and the right of churches to ignore laws the rest of us must follow.

These folks absolutely have a right to a place at the civic table. But so do the rest of us.

Reasonable religious folks and secularists alike, all of us who understand that government must remain a secular institution, need to emulate the gay community.

We need to come out and demand our place at the civic table.

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Logical Consequences

For the past quarter-century, Americans have been bashing government–not just this or that administration or political party or elected official, but the enterprise of governing.

Want a laugh? Say “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” Want to indulge a conspiracy theory? The government’s giving the Alamo to the UN! Obama plans to impose Sharia law!..  Got a grudge against your state lawmakers? Push for your area’s counties to secede. Hate the feds? Put on a tricorn hat, misspell a placard and hold a rally.

The problem is, there are consequences to this constant and indiscriminate hostility to government authority, and those consequences aren’t pretty.

Example: Yesterday, to its credit and my surprise, The Indianapolis Star ran two actual news stories: one about legislative conflicts of interest and corrupt behavior, and another about inadequate regulation of child care providers.  Stories about the inept rollout of the Affordable Care Act, and other tales of poor management, are everywhere.

Guess what? When we devalue government, we shouldn’t be surprised when government isn’t done very well. When we spend our time and energy arguing whether major elements of government infrastructure should even exist, we don’t have much time or energy left over to insure that all parts of government are operating properly–that public servants are competently performing those tasks that most reasonable people believe government should do.

I will be the first to acknowledge that we have public officials who deserve our scorn, policies that are–at best–counterproductive and need to be changed, and antiquated or corrupted structures that need to be revisited. The difference is, those are criticisms of how well our government is doing–not attacks on the legitimacy of government itself.

Are some regulations unnecessary? Undoubtedly. But supervising people who care for defenseless infants and children certainly seems an appropriate function of government. Most Americans would also agree that we need laws sanctioning officials who abuse their positions for personal gain.

Americans’ attitudes toward government are a lot like their attitudes toward Congress: we famously despise Congress, but approve of our own Representative. We hate government, but not the programs that benefit us, or veterans, or grandma.

Much as we may not want to admit it, we live in a complex modern world where there are   tasks that only government can effectively perform–from FAA supervision of air travel, to FDA oversight of food and drug safety, to regulations preventing banks from ripping off unwary customers…..on and on. When the agencies charged with these tasks fail to do their jobs properly, real people get hurt–planes crash, people get sick and die, and–as we’ve seen– economies fall into recession or worse.

We need to stop bashing government’s legitimacy, and instead turn our attention to how government is doing its job. We need to put down the ax and pick up the scalpel–to stop characterizing government as some sort of enemy,  and begin focusing on making it better.

When we insist that “public service” is an oxymoron, we shouldn’t be surprised when we don’t get decent public service.

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Houston, We Have A Problem

I remember having a conversation about some intellectually limited legislators with a friend a few years ago; she said (somewhat bitterly) “the problem with the legislature is that it’s representative.” Her point was that we elect people who represent all of us–informed and not-so-informed, bright and not-so-bright.

If things were bad when legislative bodies were representative, they’re appalling when only some of us are being represented.

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Why I’m Losing Faith in the Human Race

The Guardian recently reported on a speech in which a senior Iranian cleric blamed “women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously” for earthquakes.

If that sort of crazy were a feature only of theocratic or third-world countries, we might chuckle and ignore it. Unfortunately, however, the amount of lunacy right here at home suggests a wider problem.

A few examples:

A conspiracy theorist named Larry Klaymon insists that the fertilizer factory explosion in West, Texas, was an act of Islamic terrorism, and that the government under Obama (“the Other”) is engaged in a wide-ranging cover-up.

Speaking of Obama, in the wake of his re-election, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel explained that that the election result was a “communist takeover” of the United States, and that the IRS will start throwing pastors in jail, invading churches and shooting parishioners.

Then there was the Republican candidate for the Arkansas legislature who wrote a book about the proper biblical approach to child-rearing. And I quote:

“The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:
…

This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure in order to have the death penalty executed against their children.”

Well, yes, I think procedural safeguards before killing one’s children as God decreed are probably appropriate…

Just this month, in the year 2013, the Missouri legislature voted to ban a sustainability program because sustainability is part of the nefarious plot that is Agenda 21!

The Missouri House of Representatives on Monday passed a ban on the United Nations sustainability plan Agenda 21 after a spirited discussion of space aliens and how Walmart could avoid zoning laws to build more stores.

The Republican-controlled House voted 110-40 to ban local governments from adopting the Agenda 21, a broad outline of planning goals and sustainability targets. Agenda 21 was passed by the U.N. in 1992, but has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate and does not contain the force of law in the U.S.

…

Agenda 21 opponents argue the U.N. document would seize private property and force people to live in walkable communities with a potential end to golf and scuba diving.

Your elected representatives at work, protecting your nine-iron….

I assume psychiatrists have theories to explain what seems to be a vastly increased prevalence of paranoia, hysteria and irrationality. Or perhaps there has always been a significant percentage of lunatics in our population, and the Internet has simply brought them to our attention–although I don’t recall a time when we have had so many elected officials who either inhabit an alternate reality or keep going off their meds.

How do you talk to someone who thinks short skirts cause earthquakes? How do you get lawmakers who actually believe that President Obama is a covert Muslim Communist and the Anti-Christ to focus on solving the nation’s problems? How do you get people who think Adam and Eve saddled up dinosaurs to understand climate change? How do you get lawmakers who think women’s bodies can “shut down” rapist sperm to respect women’s right to equality and autonomy?

More important: how do we get the sane folks who have thrown up their hands and withdrawn from the political process to wake up and reclaim the country?

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