Stand Your Ground – Sheila Kennedy

Politics And Perception

Every so often, there will be a vigorous debate on social media that hinges on perception–is this dress blue or gold? What color are these shoes? The arguments can get pretty heated, with viewers insisting that those who see a different color must be defective in some way.

There are scientific efforts to explain these opposing views.(Apparently, when context/background varies, so will people’s visual perception.)

Context and background probably explain other differences in perception–for example, the prevalence of criminal activity.

The linked article from the Washington Post was prompted by the recent spate of irrational shootings–a teenager sent to collect his younger brothers, who rang the doorbell at the wrong house; a woman driver who pulled into the “wrong” driveway; cheerleaders who approached the “wrong” car in a parking lot.

Across the country this month, at least four men have opened fire on someone who’d stumbled upon their space, resulting in one death, two injuries and a car pocked with bullet holes. The apparent acts of snap-aggression have reinvigorated the debate around the prevalence of “stand your ground” laws in the United States and a pressing question: Why are people so quick to pull the trigger on strangers?…

Experts blame a cocktail of factors: the easy availability of guns, misconceptions around stand-your-ground laws, the marketing of firearms for self-defense — and a growing sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that safety in their backyard is deteriorating. (emphasis mine)

Survey research confirms that fear of the “other”–and a growing belief that pretty much anyone could be a dangerous “other”–is more widespread among Republicans, who are also more likely to own guns. The gap is significant.

Since 2020, the share of Republicans who said that crime is rising in their community has jumped from 38 percent to 73 percent, according to the latest Gallup numbers from last fall. Among Democrats, that same concern climbed only 5 percentage points to 42 percent, marking the widest partisan perception gap since the polling firm first asked the question a half-century ago.

There is a reason Republicans are convinced that crime is growing: GOP strategists have encouraged Republican candidates to dwell on fear of crime and to level accusations that “woke” Democrats are insufficiently supportive of police and too protective of “those people.” (Here in Indianapolis, that strategy was employed by a Republican candidate in the recent primary, who won that primary largely by running repeated, offensive ads describing a violent hell-hole of a city most of its residents didn’t recognize.)

Not surprisingly, Rightwing media is culpable for spreading misinformation about crime.

The perception that life is getting more dangerous has spread on the right as GOP leaders and pundits repeatedly argued, without evidence, that immigrants and protesters are jeopardizing American peace. Conservative news channels have devoted more airtime to violence than their center- and left-leaning competitors: Over the past three years, for instance, Fox News anchors and guests spotlighted crime 79 percent more often than those on MSNBC and twice as much as voices on CNN, according to a Washington Post analysis of closed captioning…

So–what does accurate data tell us? (What color is that dress, really…)

A Washington Post crime analysis of 80 major police departments’ records found that reported violence across the country in 2022 was lower than the five-year average.

And over the longer term, the National Criminal Victimization Survey showed the number of people reporting sexual assault, robbery and other physical attacks is overall much lower now than in the 1990s and has not increased in recent years.

Homicides and thefts did rise during the pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data —but even then, that rise did not reach the levels of the 1990s. (It is worth noting that when it came to homicides, states with stand-your-ground laws had a 55 percent higher homicide-by-firearm rate in the past two years than the states that didn’t have such laws.)

The 28-year-old grandson of the 84-year-old White man who shot Black teenager Ralph Yarl, told officers that his grandfather was perpetually “scared to death. It’s the paranoia and fear…. It was the 24-hour news cycle — Fox News, OAN, all that stuff — pushing the civil division. Everybody is just so scared all the time.”

Context and background.

It’s one thing when you see a gold dress and I see a blue one. It’s something else entirely when I see a neighbor looking for directions and you see one of “those people” looking to rob or otherwise harm you–someone posing a threat that requires you to get your (always handy) gun and “stand your ground.”

The politicians and media outlets inculcating paranoia in their drive for power and profit are every bit as guilty as the armed and terrified citizens they’ve encouraged to pull the triggers.

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Deconstructing “Special Rights”

I heard someone make the claim again yesterday: gays want “special rights.”

So let me understand this argument: If government respects the civil rights of Christians—and if Human Rights agencies protect those Christians from being picked on because of their beliefs—that’s simply government protecting equal rights.

But if government treats LGBT folks just like it treats everyone else—if it empowers those same Human Rights agencies to protect gay folks from being picked on because of their sexual orientation—that’s “special rights.”

When laws protect Christians, that isn’t a violation of the religious liberty of Jews, Muslims or atheists—it is a simple recognition that all religious people are entitled to hold their beliefs freely, without fear of discrimination. But if laws protect gays and lesbians, that’s an impermissible endorsement of the “gay lifestyle” and a violation of the religious liberty of those Christians who condemn homosexuality.

Got it.

I routinely encounter people who hold these logically incompatible beliefs, and to be honest, I’m getting pissed off. One of these days, I’m going to get in the face of one of these “Christian Nation” folks and demand to know just how they manage to twist the definition of “liberty” to mean their right to impose their beliefs on those who don’t share them.

We’ve had the “special rights” accusation—lame as it is—for quite some time. But the charge that requiring businesses to treat people fairly violates “religious liberty” is a relatively new wrinkle on that argument—and it is driving me up the wall.

I posted recently about a hearing at which the South Bend, Indiana, Common Council was considering the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to the categories covered by the city’s Human Rights ordinance. The measure passed handily, but not before a number of people asserted that forcing them to hire or retain qualified GLBT workers, or rent to same-sex couples, would violate their religious freedom.

Very similar claims were made when the Obama Administration ruled that employer-provided health insurance had to cover birth control for female employees who wanted it.

The argument seems to be that “religious freedom” means government can never interfere with me if I am acting on the basis of a genuine religious belief. That, needless to say, is not and never has been the law—I may sincerely believe that I should sacrifice my first born, or deny my child medical treatment, or smoke peyote during a religious ceremony, but the law doesn’t allow me to do any of those things, or hundreds of others, merely because I claim a genuine belief that God wants me to.

One reason that isn’t the law should be fairly obvious, at least to rational people. How on earth would we know that an employer was denying women workers birth control because he believed its use to be sinful, and not just because he wanted to save a few bucks? How would we know whether a landlord’s refusal to rent an apartment to a gay single or a same-sex couple was motivated by theology rather than by garden-variety homophobia?

This is the same problem prosecutors now face in the Trayvon Martin shooting, under the ridiculous “Stand Your Ground” law. Self-defense has always been a defense to a charge of murder—but only as part of a trial, after an initial arrest. Stand Your Ground laws are self-defense on steroids; they allow anyone to make a subjective claim that the government must initially treat as objectively true. Such a practice is simply contrary to the rule of law.

Religious liberty means that each of us has the right to believe what we wish, to follow the dictates of our consciences and theologies, and to observe the tenets of our faiths so long as we do not thereby infringe the equal rights of others or violate laws of general application (i.e., we can’t “kill a commie for Christ” as the 50s joke went). Religious liberty is not a “get out of jail free” card allowing us to deny an equal right to liberty to people we don’t like.

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Cowboys and Enablers

I haven’t posted about the Trayvon Martin tragedy because, really, what could I say that hasn’t already been said?

In my opinion, whatever happened between George Zimmerman and Trayvon immediately before Zimmerman shot him–whether there was an altercation or not– is legally and morally irrelevant to the question of guilt; when Zimmerman intentionally ignored the police dispatcher’s order not to follow Martin, he became responsible for what happened next.

As evidence has emerged, the one thing that seems indisputable is that George Zimmerman is a cowboy–one of those all-too-common sheriff/policeman wannabes with short fuses and delusions of righteousness. It is the role of public safety and public policy to reign in such people–indeed, protecting citizens from those who would harm them is the most basic function of government.

The passage of “Stand Your Ground” laws has enabled, rather than impeded, the cowboys. In 2010, a survey by the Tampa Bay Times found that Florida’s rates of “justifiable homicide” had tripled since the law’s passage. Kendall Coffee, former U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida, has condemned the law as “a license to kill.”

“Stand Your Ground” laws are part and parcel of what seems to be an effort to recreate the “justice system” of the wild West–at the same time we are choking off resources for law enforcement, we’re passing laws that protect vigilantes.

And young men like Trayvon Martin pay the price.

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