The Commentariat -- June 28, 2015
Judge Richard Posner in Slate: "John Stuart Mill in On Liberty drew an important distinction between what he called 'self-regarding acts' and 'other-regarding acts.' The former involves doing things to yourself that don't harm other people, though they may be self-destructive. The latter involves doing things that do harm other people. He thought that government had no business with the former.... Unless it can be shown that same-sex marriage harms people who are not gay (or who are gay but don't want to marry), there is no compelling reason for state intervention, and specifically for banning same-sex marriage. The dissenters in Obergefell missed this rather obvious point." CW: As Akhilleus would tell us, Posner's thesis has a long history, beginning with the Greeks, & expressed more recently in Isaiah Berlin's positive & negative liberties. Viewed in this light, marriage equality is mighty conservative. See also freeeedom.
Sally Kohn of the Daily Beast: "... the fight over gay marriage is far from over. Now we enter the Republican temper tantrum phase.... Even before the Supreme Court's ruling, several prominent Republicans had pledged to disobey any high court ruling in favor of marriage equality -- and had called on their fellow Republican leaders to do the same. For instance, Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have both signed a pledge that reads, 'We will not honor any decision by the Supreme Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.'... Here we have Republicans ... actually pledging to violate their duties and break the law.... The modern Republican Party is operating less like a responsible partner in governance and more and more like an underground crime network -- continually abusing and threatening the otherwise democratic process if it doesn't get its way." ...
... Tim Egan: The Republican party is a "refuge for racists." ...
... Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: Some GOP strategists are urging candidates to get over that & other winger 'tudes; the candidates are struggling, at best. ...
... Philip Rucker & Robert Costa of the Washington Post write on the same theme. ...
... CW: I'm afraid stories like these may fool liberals into thinking that the majority of Americans are suddenly turning left. I don't believe it. Even out-and-out racists watch their tongues in public. That's what dog whistles are all about. From Lee Atwater to Rick Santorum to Paul Krugman, people who understand what Republican "small government" policies are about understand that they are based in, or at least sold as, economic & social racism. So-called conservatives may cite philosophical sources, but their appeal is to the baser instincts of human nature.
I don't believe for a minute the polling that shows a majority of the country favors marriage equality. Why is ObamaCare less "popular" than marriage rights? Because racists can get away with pretending they're against ACA policy, when they're really against anything that disproportionately helps "those people" & was the product, at least in part, of the black guy in the White House. Sam Alito was onto something when he wrote in his dissent to the Obergefell opinion, "I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers and schools. By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas." He's not just talking about himself -- though that, too -- he's talking about how bigots are going to have to invent & adhere to a new set of dog whistles & keep their gay jokes & hatred in "quiet places." Officials & ordinary people have already learned to couch their bigotry against both women & gays in terms of "religious freedom," a safe, Constitutionally-protected advocacy with which liberals cannot disagree. Ditto Second Amendment freeeedom. The right to bear arms was born of racism -- a guarantee that Southerners could protect themselves against slave rebellions -- and it has once again been repurposed as a means of protecting whites against "lawless" blacks. Meanwhile, if the confederates must abandon their flag, they will wave the U.S. flag with even greater fervor. The symbol of our nation has been for a long time a dog whistle for the right; it's about to become an outright embarrassment. ...
... Paul Rosenberg, in Salon, on the false equivalency South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley applied to feelings about the confederate flag. Rosenberg contrasts Haley's speech with the remarks of Paul Thurmond, son of Strom, who completely rejected the flag & the white supremacy it represents. Rosenberg delves into how supremacists rework their magic to fit time & circumstance.
Jenny Kutner of Salon sees a nugget of hope for reproductive rights in Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion on marriage equality. From the opinion:
A first premise of the Court's relevant precedents is that the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.... Like choices concerning contraception, family relationships, procreation, and childrearing, all of which are protected by the Constitution, decisions concerning marriage are among the most intimate that an individual can make.
... CW: Kutner doesn't say so, but it's useful to remember that Kennedy joined the plurality decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), a decision that upheld, but modified, Roe v. Wade. The decision acknowledged the state's interest in the life of the fetus & changed the definition of fetus viability, both of which have been the bases of anti-abortion legislation.
David Atkins in the Washington Monthly: "Ted Cruz' solution to 'judicial tyranny'? Direct election of SCOTUS judges.... Making judges fearful of the public whim negates much of the entire purpose of having a judicial branch to check the legislative. But even from a purely conservative utilitarian standpoint, that strategy tends to work best in more conservative states and where judges are elected in non-presidential cycles. Also, much has changed in the last decade in terms of popular opinion.... There's no evidence that a serious public opinion backlash will arise against the Court over marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act.... Indeed, by far the most unpopular of the SCOTUS' recent decisions was its stand on Citizens United.... All of which is to say, Ted Cruz should probably be careful what he wishes for."
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Willa Paskin of Slate: Fox "News" personalities could not figure out how to deal with the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision. "As if today hasn't already proved how far gay rights has come, know, also, that no one on Fox News wants to be seen as anti-gay anymore either."
Presidential Race
The Trouble with Being Bush (or Why One Candidate Calls Himself Jeb!) Eli Stokols of Policito: "With conservatives up in arms over [Chief Justice John] Roberts' role in preserving Obamacare, Jeb Bush suddenly finds himself called to answer for the chief justice appointed by his brother, George W. Bush. And not just Roberts -- Jeb is also taking flak for David Souter, the liberal justice appointed by his father, George H.W. Bush." CW: Yo, Eli, Souter is not a liberal. He's an old-fashioned New England Republican. If you'd ever read one of his opinions, you'd get that. P.S. Roberts' opinion on the ACA isn't even close to liberal; in fact, there's a good change he was one of the justices who agreed to hear the King case, albeit he may have decided from the get-go to use the case as a warning to ideological litigants on both sides: don't clutter up my courts with attempts to nix legislation on frivolous grounds.
News Ledes
New York Times: "Iran's top nuclear negotiator was heading back to Tehran on Sunday to consult with his nation's leadership, as negotiators remained divided over how to limit and monitor Tehran's nuclear program and even on how to interpret the preliminary agreement they reached two months ago. With all sides now acknowledging that the talks would need to continue beyond Tuesday, once considered the absolute deadline for a final deal, officials from several nations said some of the politically difficult questions ... are still just as vexing as they were when the 18-month negotiation odyssey began."
New York Times: "David Sweat, the remaining prison escapee on the run in northern New York for three weeks, was shot by a state trooper on Sunday, according to the authorities. Mr. Sweat, 35, was shot twice in the torso and was taken to Alice Hyde Medical Center in Malone, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Sunday night at a news conference here. Mr. Sweat was in stable condition. 'The nightmare is finally over,' Mr. Cuomo said. The shooting occurred about 3:20 p.m. after Sgt. Jay Cook saw a suspicious man walking down a roadway in the Town of Constable, according to the state police. The sergeant ordered Mr. Sweat to stop, but he broke into a run and the sergeant, a firearms instructor, opened fire...." ...
... AP: Sweat "has been transported to an Albany hospital, where he is listed in critical condition."
Washington Post: "An unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket bound for the International Space Station exploded a couple of minutes after liftoff Sunday morning. It was the third cargo mission to the space station to be lost in recent months."
Guardian: "A solar plane took off for what could be the longest solo flight in history on Monday, with its Swiss pilot confronting the 'moment of truth' of a journey around the Pacific Ocean and around the world. The Solar Impulse 2 set off about 3am from Nagoya, Japan, en route to Hawaii, a trip expected to take five days and nights of continuous flight."
New York Times: "Greece will keep its banks closed on Monday and place restrictions on the withdrawal and transfer of money, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in a televised address on Sunday night, as Athens tries to avert a financial collapse."
AP: Law enforcement officials are confident they are closing in on New York state prison escapee David Sweat.
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Reader Comments (9)
Good Morning Marie and all,
Of course you're right. Nothing that happened last week is likely to alter anyone's core attitudes and beliefs one iota. About the only thing that ever does is personal experience, often traumatic, and the change is not always for the better.
Old cliche: A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
Flip side: A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
Overlaying all is the greatest failing of the human psyche: confirmation bias. That is hard wired in all of us, that is what is in our DNA. To overcome it requires rigorous self discipline and, above all, self skepticism. These are rare qualities that vanish altogether when people feel threatened or frightened.
Several years ago, one of my student interns, a young black woman, asked: "Why do some white people hate us? Shouldn't it be the other way around? We are the injured party after all. We were enslaved and discriminated against, not them."
People hate those they have wronged because the alternative is to hate what they themselves have done -- to face the evil within themselves. Many will fight to the death to avoid doing that. This is the courage of the confederacy that it's apologists celebrate and honor. Perhaps the only way to change them is to shame them into finding some real courage -- make them face the facts.
"Respect for the truth is the basis of all morality."
~ From 'Dune', a novel by Frank Herbert
I don't have to listen for those dog whistles when it comes to a member of my own family, that brother in Wisconsin, (great lover of dogs) who is a prime example of a white racist homophobe. Last week he sent me his town's Republican Party flier for a meet and greet gala event. I replied:
Received the invitation to the Lincoln Day Lunch. To begin with–– the idea that the Republicans today connect themselves with the party of Lincoln is laughable; their party is as far away from Lincoln as lions are to monkeys. Too bad I can’t crash this gala event and ask exactly how they intend to “rescue our country from the destructive and disastrous policies of the last eight years” and ask how exactly our "freedoms are hanging in the balance" when it has been the Republicans who have made this Congress one of the worst in history plus looks to me Wisconsin is being run by someone whose tail is tied pretty tightly to the Kochs and is not concerned about the environment, education, unions, women’s rights, and people of slender means. If I still lived in that state I’d be embarrassed and furious.
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Not to be undone by his snotty sister, he then sent me a slanderous "Obama is the pits" kind of thing––refers to Obama as a B.O. "mulatto" who is "biggest ass mistake" and "hasn't worked a day in his life." We go a few more rounds and when I bring up the Scotus decisions he tells me it makes him puke to see two men kissing ––"one of the guys says, 'come on honey, let's go home so I can stick my peter in...'" I reply:
I am at a loss to know how to respond to you. I am sad that you harbor such disgust and hatred for homosexuals and have such low esteem for our President who, by the way, has worked a damn sight harder than you have ever worked. You, I’m afraid, are not on the side of history, and given your mindset, I can understand why. But let me show you an ad[that wonderful Tylenol family one] that IS getting where the country is evolving on these issues (the ones that give you the hibbie-jibbies). I read somewhere to keep an eye on corporate ads to get a sense of where a country is going[thanks Marie]. Also keep in mind when you and I were growing up millions of black children and their families were living in the Jim Crow South. The Civil Rights along with the Voting rights changed that to a great degree, but as you can see by the conversations lately about race in America after the shooting in S.C. we still have a long way to go. When you and I were growing up homosexuals were targeted, even killed, many hiding their sexuality for fear of exposure. We have moved forward––some of us have embraced these changes and applaud them, see them for the humanity and dignity they extoll. Some, however, are still stuck and will remain so.
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I cannot begin to tell you how this hurts me––it's one thing to make fun, get furious, go on a rant about a Huckabee or a Trump, but when it's in your own backyard, when it's your own kin, then...
Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have both signed a pledge that reads, 'We will not honor any decision by the Supreme Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.'...
Rick and Mike, this ruling won't force you to marry each other. So what's the problem?
Off to Spokane (and off the net) for a few days but first:
Yes, it must be very hard, P.D, especially when it's in the family. Unfortunately I have more sympathy than understanding to offer. My own family (now that our parents are dead) is unrelievedly liberal, which does make things far easier and more pleasant for us than it must be for you. Makes me think again of the question I raised the other day (about Dylan Roof) that I still have no certain answer to; that is, how do we to be who we are? Within a family whose children would seem to have shared both parents and environment, the question is even more intractable. What influences could possibly move one family member in one direction, while the second or third goes another way?
The local paper, kind enough to print my own occasional screeds, also hosts a bevy of Christian conservatives. This morning one of the regulars said the same things about Obama we've heard hundreds of times in the last eight years: The evil man is successfully imposing his atheistic-liberal views on this once great Christian country.
Not successfully enough was my first thought.
But just below the surface of the letter's pre-packaged fulminations in which specific instances of these awful changes to which the writer objects are most notable by their absence was the equally standard theme: The times they are a changin,' and I don't like it. I liked it the way it was, when everyone around me was like myself, law-abiding, white, hard-working, church-going unimaginative plodders whose world was no wider than a county or state's boundaries and therefore there was nothing to fear.
Seems to me that mindset is the basis of today's conservatism. It has many faces, cropping up issue by issue, but all conservatism shares the same psychological roots: a sense of (most often born-to, unearned) entitlement, as in I'm special because I am me, and fear that someone does not recognize and acknowledge how special I am, or even worse is going to take that status away from me. In the words of some psychologists whose name I have long forgotten, these people are not self-actualized (I do remember Maslow), certainly not integrated.
I suspect I could lever most the easy-virture, we're so moral, conservative movements, like the anti-abortion crowd, into that same box had I the time....
Know none of this helps P.D. but you will be on my mind as I drive.
Thanks for sharing.
And as you are driving, Ken, I want to thank you for your comments. I do have, luckily, my children and their families who cotton to the left side of the road, but, you are right: none of this helps. It's just something–-that big divide––that I just have to recognize (and marvel how we can be so different) and deal with.
Jeffrey Rosen writes an interesting take on "John Roberts–-the Umpire in Chief."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/john-roberts-the-umpire-in-chief.html?ref=todayspaper
In the linked WaPo Rucker & Costa article about GOP struggles, Huckabee is quoted as saying that distorting the laws of nature is akin to playing the piano without a tuning fork. He was illustrating that the Bible is the standard of all truth. (But ... he could have said you can't inflate a tire without air compression, with equal relevance to the Bible.) I think his idea of natural laws had something to do with sexual preference.
Talk about 100% wrong. You can't even use a tuning fork with my piano -- no strings, it's all electronic. But you can select from among dozens of different types of piano sounds, and other instruments, if you don't want the classical grand piano sound for whatever piece you are playing. Variety, choice, etc.
Earlier this year WaPo had a local interest piece on the closing of a local music institution that sold used pianos among other instruments. The market for at-home heavy, expensive traditional pianos (which require tuning) has been almost completely taken over by keyboards. They can't even give the old ones away.
Also, in talking about the laws of nature, I would agree with Huck if he's talking about physics, where the laws are self-enforcing. But he's conflating law with preferences. And if the Bible is the standard of truth, we're screwed facially, as the lawyers say. I like the Bible, and find it to be great literature and inspiration ... but it contains fatal contradictions that make it useless as a how-to manual.
I think Huckabee is giving Trump a serious run for the title of head clown.
@If the Bible is the source for all truth, including laws of marriage, then I guess Huck supports polygamy big-time, because the Old Testament repeatedly supports polygamy & the New Testament says nothing against it. Also, too, apparently the Earth is the center of the universe & you get to heaven via a ladder through a hole in the clouds or on a winged chariot. That's only if you're a special person, of course; the Jews believed heaven was reserved for God, the angels & the prophets & a few extraordinary people like Abraham. Ordinary mortals were stuck in a kind of unpleasant limbo called Sheol. Also, no crawfish, Huck.
Marie
More time on my hands this morning than I thought...so a followup to my earlier psychologizing.
Liberal as I am, I must be even-handed here. It's not just conservatives, more prone as they certainly are to the siren call of easy distinction, who go to extremes to make themselves more special than they are.
Rick Perlstein's NATION review of Bryan Burroughs's DAYS OF RAGE, his history of the Weathermen and other violent lefties from the 60's and 70's, should caution me and all who would paint with too wide a brush.
http://www.thenation.com/article/210161/ignorant-good-will
Though the mayhem both wreak may be identical, I still see a difference between the violent Lefties and the Righties in their motivation. Not just in the Lefty urge to make things better (leveling before progress) rather than Righty's to keep them the same, but a base of blind idealism on the one hand and of fear on the other.
Idealism and fear can be equally deadly, and both kill thought first.
I asked my friend who is a firm supporter of traditional biblical marriage what the going rate is for goats/sheep per virgin. He had no idea, which is odd. I would think that would be very important to know if you believe in it. Maybe I should email Huckster, surely he would know.