Tag Archives: Rick Santorum

Religious Liberty, Contraception and Gay Rights

Amazing—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.

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Fear Factor?

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has Cassius deliver the immortal line  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars..”

But what if our faults are “in our stars”? What if the age-old debate about how much of who we are is determined by nature, and how much by nurture, is gradually being decided, and the answer is nature? I, for one, don’t find it particularly appealing to think that the person I am was genetically determined, but there seems to be more and more evidence suggesting that who we are is less a matter of human will and reason than we may be comfortable with.

Sometimes, of course, recognition of the role of biology can be liberating. The discovery that genetics–not bad parenting or “perverse choices”–largely determines sexual orientation falls in that category. But what if it isn’t only being gay that is biologically determined? What if being a Rick Santorum is equally the result of a genetic roll of the dice?

A recent article in Psychology Today reports on a study from University College London that found self-described conservatives have larger amygdala than self-described liberals, and that the liberals had more gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that helps people deal with complexity. (The results are consistent with some other recent studies; just a year ago, researchers at Harvard and UCLU reported finding a “liberal gene,” although its reported effects were limited.) The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that is active when a person is anxious or fearful.

In other words, people who are more likely to be anxious and fearful, and less able to deal with complexity, are most likely to be politically conservative–assuming we define “conservative” as a person opposed to social and political change. Social conservatives would fit this definition; fiscal conservatives probably wouldn’t.

In one sense, such a conclusion would be consistent with what we see around us. The hysteria that Obama’s election evoked in a significant number of people is often attributed to racism (and that certainly explains a lot of it), but it is equally likely that it wasn’t the President’s race per se, but the fact that the election of a black man was unavoidable evidence of dreaded social change. As I have noted before, many of the people who seem most irrational–who think the President is a Muslim Socialist, that gays and lesbians have a diabolical “agenda,” that all Muslims are terrorists–are clearly terrified of a world they don’t understand. In the words of social historian Stephanie Coontz, they’re nostalgic for “the way we never were.”

Of course, one study doesn’t settle the nature-nurture battle, and even if these results are replicated, they don’t answer the causation question: are some people born with a larger amygdala, or did it grow larger as a result of frightening childhood experiences or authoritarian parenting? (We Moms are never wholly in the clear…)

But it does suggest that we should have some compassion for folks like Santorum. Maybe he was born that way.

Of course, if he were to become President, my amygdala would grow.

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“Those” People

Republicans in the House of Representatives send an “up yours” message to the middle class, while explaining that “job creators” must be protected.

Rick Santorum is quoted as saying that today’s massive inequality is a reflection of the fact that some people work harder than others.

These are just a couple of the the more recent expressions of a persistent sub-text in American life, a perversion of early Calvinism that leads people to justify privilege by diminishing the value of those who have less. The poor, they believe, are poor because they are somehow morally flawed. They don’t put it quite that way, of course–instead, there is talk of “work ethic” and “middle class values” that “those people” lack.

I am a believer in the market. If everyone is playing by the rules, some people will do better than others. Society will value the contribution of some people over others. When markets are properly regulated–when no one can game the system–we all benefit from the efforts of the guy who invents a better widget, the artist whose work adds beauty to our lives, even (she says through gritted teeth) the athlete whose prowess we admire.

When the system is broken, when rewards are distributed on the basis of cronyism and influence-peddling, when those rewards are wildly disproportionate to the social or other value of the work involved (to investment bankers who invent credit default swaps, for example), I suppose it is understandable that the recipients would want to justify their good fortune by claiming that they really have earned their millions. When that self-justification takes the form of dismissing the value of those who’ve been less fortunate, however, is when it becomes truly obscene.

I’ve been haunted by a segment that aired on 60 Minutes last Sunday. The report focused upon the foreclosure crisis, and in particular, on the 11+ million homeowners who–despite being “underwater” on their mortgages–stubbornly continue to make their payments. There were people who had lost jobs, people living paycheck to paycheck, who refused to walk away from mortgages on which they owed twice what their homes are currently worth. In one interview, a woman who was barely eking out a living was asked why she continued to pay when others were abandoning their properties. Her response? “I signed the contract.  I’m not the sort of person who fails to live up to my obligations.”

It may come as a shock to the bankers and assorted plutocrats whose gated communities and social circles protect them from interaction with the American middle and lower classes, but most people–including poor people–work forty or more hours a week.(That’s why we call them the working poor.) They try to pay their bills, help their neighbors, and educate their children. A thousand dollars doesn’t represent a really fancy meal; it makes an enormous difference in their lives.

It’s bad enough when elected officials pursue policies that protect their cronies and contributors at the expense of their constituents. It’s unforgivable when they dismiss those constituents as unworthy of their concern.

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